Roundup
42 entries. 21,278 words.
2018-01
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MMO News Roundup.
2018-01-19.
I’m trying an experiment here: A list of MMO news that I found noteworthy during the week. I’m trying this slightly retro blogging format because, to be brutally honest, for most MMO topics, I have a lot of trouble summoning up more than a few sentences of commentary, which results in a glut of unfinished blog drafts and a paucity of published posts (ha!). The challenge here will be finding a picture to use.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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MMO News Roundup 2.
2018-01-26.
I found this Moonshade Highlands library in Rift for, I think, the very first time this week. Weirdly I got to it from Sanctum. I have no idea what it's for, except to give me a little bit more experience as I level up. Final Fantasy XIV 4.2 releases January 30. Yay! The nostalgia part of this patch means nothing to me, as I’ve never played any other Final Fantasy game.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
2018-02
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MMO News Reactions 3.
2018-02-02.
Gloamwood. I played a new character through the first two zones in Rift to imagine what Rift Prime might be like. _A series of short reactions to the week’s MMORPG stories, otherwise known as “just about giving up on blogging” because I can’t be bothered to write long posts lately.
_
Sea of Thieves was in closed beta. This is a game on my radar, but the more I see, the less I’m interested.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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MMO News Reactions 4.
2018-02-09.
_A series of short reactions to the week’s MMORPG stories, otherwise known as “just about giving up on blogging” because I can’t be bothered to write long posts lately.
_
Nexon laid off some people. I don’t think I play any Nexon games.
Forbes interview on WoW Classic. I don’t think I mentioned this at the time, but while Blizzcon made it sound like WoW Classic was right around the corner, I secretly thought it sounded like they hadn’t even started on it yet.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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MMO News Reactions 5.
2018-02-16.
A series of short reactions to the week’s MMORPG stories, otherwise known as “just about giving up on blogging” because I can’t be bothered to write long posts lately.
Sorry about last week’s post. I was scrolling through Twitter last Friday and much to my own surprise I found that I’d posted something to my blog without even looking at it or setting a header image or anything. This time I will refrain from scheduling this to post right after creating the draft!
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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Kitchen Sink Post #6.
2018-02-23.
_I’m still tinkering with the formula for this weekly “bullet post” thing. Now I feel like I should include news items and any interesting progress I’ve made on games I’m playing.
_
ESO… always seems better in screenshots. I started the week playing some FFXIV, trying to work on improving my gear with Rabanastre runs and Omega 4.0 runs.
Then I started playing ESO, trying to find what it was that everyone keeps saying that they love about that game.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
2018-03
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MMO Roundup #7.
2018-03-02.
Not only am I still trying to find a formula for this weekly bullet post, but I am also still trying to find the right formula for the post’s title.
A hilariously anachronistic priest in a supposedly historical game. I have played nothing at all this week except Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and am now over 60 hours. I almost rage quit when I met the first boss and died a hundred times, but after I eventually beat him mostly through luck and potions, I realized it was actually really easy and there was no need to quit.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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MMO Roundup #8.
2018-03-09.
Now I’m trying to work out why WordPress keeps using old images when it posts these things to Twitter. I think it’s because I was using a “Clone Post” plugin to make these posts. So I’m making this one from scratch.
Seeing as how there is a game-breaking bug that prevents me from continuing to play it, I’ve abandoned Kingdom Come: Deliverance until whichever decade Warhorse decides to release the 1.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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MMO Roundup #9.
2018-03-16.
A weekly diary of MMO news and observations.
The Bane Bard 330 outfit, mostly. The boots don't match! It’s been a very unusual multi-game bonanza lately. Normally I stick with one game at a time, but I’ve been all over the place. This is not a good thing. It means that none of the games I’m currently playing are all that interesting to me, and I’m in that mood where I’m searching for The Next Big Thing.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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MMO Roundup #10.
2018-03-23.
A weekly diary of MMO news and observations.
Secret World Legends, the League of Monster Slayers tree house In my last roundup I said that Secret World Legends wasn’t The Next Big Thing. This week I made a new Templar Sword/Elementalist and now suddenly the game looks fresh and interesting and exciting again. It just goes to show how much a tiny change in play style can make a huge difference in one’s perception of a game.
- Administration
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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MMO Roundup #11.
2018-03-30.
_These post titles are killing me. I hate titles that don’t mean anything. I don’t know about anyone else, but I almost never click through to read an article if the title doesn’t interest me (my feed reader also shows the first sentence, so that is also a factor). I assume everyone else is the same. But here I am, doing the exact thing I hate. “Generic Post #11.” I might as well call it, “Don’t bother reading this one.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
2018-04
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Weeklies – Haven Week.
2018-04-06.
New title! “Weeklies?” Get it? Like Dailies, but Weeklies! I was actually planning to stop doing these but then Bhagpuss had to go and say that he enjoyed them. :)
I’ve been very distracted this week by re-watching the complete Haven series, because @MissByx reminded me that I had not yet seen past season 4, so I started it again from the beginning. I could write volumes about this show but I will try to refrain.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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Weeklies – SWL, Anti-PAX, Batteries.
2018-04-13.
It’s been a slow week.
City of the Sun God, near the Houy Sentinel. My primary game is still Secret World Legends though I didn’t play as much this week. Now that the Morninglight content is already out, I don’t feel any more pressure to “hurry up.” Also, Egypt is a bit dull, particularly the City of the Sun God, which is just a long series of tasks that don’t seem to have much story relevance.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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Weeklies – ESO, SWL.
2018-04-20.
Yikes, April is almost over already.
I finished Secret World Legends’ Red Sun, Black Sand and left Egypt behind. I’m taking a break for a while.
This past weekend I decided to try to play through the Morrowind content in ESO. It took four tries, but I finally got past the first meeting with Vivec and into the rest of the story. (I had a hard time finding a character I wanted to play.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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Weeklies – Oligarchgate (The One About Daybreak).
2018-04-27.
Not much gaming to report this week. I’m on a Secret World Legends break. I’ve mainly been dabbling in Elder Scrolls Online (trying to record the Orsinium storyline; much like with Morrowind, I messed up and have to restart it).
Since @Sypster has been talking up Dungeons & Dragons Online for a while, I thought I would check it out again myself. I’ve played DDO before, and enjoyed it, but I haven’t had it installed in years (computer forensic evidence suggests since 2015).
- MMORPG
- Roundup
2018-05
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Monthly Recap – April 2018.
2018-05-02.
_I’m altering the format for this post a bit. Previously I just recorded the games I’d been playing, for no discernible reason. Now I’m going to add in a bunch of cross-media promotion so people have an even bigger reason to skip it.
_
My ESO Nightblade in Glenumbra - another example of how screenshots look awful during most games' night cycle. Games Played Elder Scrolls Online, 24 hours. The surprise winner this month.
- MMORPG
- Podcast
- Roundup
- Videos
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Week End – EQ Royale, New World.
2018-05-05.
I’m moving this post to Saturday so I can mention stuff that happens on Friday, which previously fell through the cracks. (Of course nothing happened on Friday this week.) The MMO news and blogging world dries up completely on weekends so it’s a better time for recaps anyway.
My Week It’s been a slow gaming week for me. I played a little bit of ESO, a little bit of DDO, and, for the first time, a little bit of a Steam sale game I bought in December 2015 called Ryse: Son of Rome.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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Week End – Conan Exiles, Wild West Online.
2018-05-12.
My Week Last weekend I tried Fortnite Battle Royale for a second time and I haven’t played much else this week. It was a brand new gaming experience for me and that pretty much trumps everything else when I’m in the doldrums of “every game I own is boring” that dominates roughly 50% of any given year. And hey, it’s free!
Admittedly, I had more fun spectating and making videos than I did actually playing the game.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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Week End – Albion, Phoebes.
2018-05-19.
A summary of news and observations from this past week.
My Week The ring and middle fingers of my left hand have been sore so I’ve been trying to lay off of mouse-and-keyboard gaming for a bit. (It helps that none of my current games are speaking to me right now.) I installed Bioshock Remastered and have been casually playing through it again on Easy mode with a controller. I also played a bit of The Forest on a controller, which I discovered had finally launched for reals (it’s a great game, and still has one of my favorite building systems).
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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Week End – Summerset, FFXIV 4.3.
2018-05-26.
News and observations from the past week.
Fort Frolic from BioShock Remastered. In The News Steam is (allegedly) cracking down on sexytime cartoon games. I say “allegedly” only because I personally couldn’t confirm any official communications from Valve, I only read the second-hand reports from potentially affected developers. This caused a bit of an uproar in the Twitterverse. My only two cents is that this is an example of one of the many universal truths in life: You can choose to make an artistic statement or you can choose to make money, but very rarely can you choose both.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
2018-06
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Week End – Fallout 76, Because SEO.
2018-06-02.
A summary of news and observations from the week.
I loaded Dauntless (and FRAPS) a second time just to take a screenshot for this post. In The News It’s been an incredibly bleak week for news, to my eye. Maybe everyone took the whole week off, because Monday was a holiday here in the US.
Bethesda teased us with an announcement of a new game called Fallout 76. It’s debatable whether this deserves to be mentioned on an MMO-themed blog, but see above about bleak news.
- MMO
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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Monthly Recap – May 2018.
2018-06-04.
The obligatory screenshot from the beginning of BioShock. Games Played It’s been a really slow month for gaming.
BioShock Remastered, 13 hours. Haven’t quite reached the end yet as my attention got diverted elsewhere. Fortnite, 10 hours. I enjoyed it but it doesn’t suit my non-competitive lifestyle. Ryse: Son of Rome, 7 hours. Quick and satisfying. Dungeons and Dragons Online, 7 hours. Great for vegging out, but like most older games, terrible if you want to read any of the text on the screen.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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Week End – Wall-to-Wall E3.
2018-06-16.
In The News I have to retract last week’s applause for Valve’s Libertarian stance on content. I started to write a blog post about this, but Wilhelm said everything I was going to say. They completely and comically reversed their “no filters” stance and replaced it with “we’ll take down whatever we personally don’t like and call it trolling.” It’s the right move from a business and PR perspective, probably, but whatever respect I had for what I interpreted as a principled we-trust-the-customers-to-decide stand last week is now completely gone.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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Week End – WHO Pitch Forks.
2018-06-23.
Weekly summary of news and observations. I should really copy and paste a standard template for this opening because I have to type it from memory every time and I think it subtly changes every week.
In The News There’s been some hubbub about the World Health Organization’s gaming disorder classification. The WHO added “gaming disorder” to the “International Classification of Diseases,” and every gamer who has been on the defensive about that kind of thing since the 90s got out their pitch forks and torches.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
2018-07
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Week End – Defiance 2050 I guess?.
2018-07-07.
In The News Of course the big controversy of the week was that whole thing with ArenaNet and the influencer and the two writers, which I won’t rehash here. I kind of wish I hadn’t said anything yesterday, because it was “too soon.” I only meant to say I felt kind of guilty about having just written a scathing post about the game. Maybe I’ll revisit it in a few weeks, because I do think there are a lot of different lessons to be learned from the entire catastrophe.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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Week End – A Pretty Boring Week.
2018-07-14.
News and observations from the week.
In The News It’s been another dead week, as far as I can tell. One of these days I’d love to do a statistical analysis to see just what percentage of news articles are about games still in development. I bet it would approach 50%.
Last weekend, Tennocon, the Warframe fan conference, happened. The biggest news I remember hearing was Warframe coming to the Switch.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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Week End – Thorny Battle.
2018-07-28.
In The News Nobody is talking about anything except World of Warcraft’s “War of Thorns” event. It’s either the greatest thing ever, or the worst thing ever, or some variation in between, depending on where you look.
However, some people are talking about the newest update to No Man’s Sky. I’ve been tempted to get this game forever, but I’m really hesitant to get a game so dependent on procedurally-generated worlds, even at a discounted Steam price of $30.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
2018-08
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Monthly Recap – July 2018.
2018-08-03.
If you’re just joining us, I use the free version of a program called ManicTime to track all the games I play every month. I’ve found it to be a lot more accurate than Steam, especially for the games that I don’t run through Steam. I’m not sure I can really explain why I track this information, though. I guess so I have a record of what I’m playing, in case I ever want to look back and see.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
2018-10
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Games Played – September 2018.
2018-10-01.
Even with a week and a half of down time from cataract surgery, I still managed to play a few games this past month.
The Witcher (Enhanced Edition), 39 hours. This is what I spent most of my gaming time doing after World of Warcraft and before surgery, and a little bit afterward to finish up the story. This is the first time I’ve finished the whole game. It got kind of weird at the end.
- Consoles
- Progression Report
- Roundup
- RPG
2018-12
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Games Played – November 2018.
2018-12-01.
This should be a hoot. Because I didn’t play any games in November. As I mentioned last time, I spent November recovering from back pain and avoided the PC computer chair like the plague while I worked on rebuilding my upper back muscles with torturous stretches and exercises.
Lord of the Rings Online, 1 hour. I played my level 62 hobbit Hunter in Mines of Moria for an hour. I did not advance any levels in the allegedly super fast leveling curve that everyone says LotRO has.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
2019-01
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Games Played – 2018.
2019-01-01.
Every screenshot of RimWorld kind of looks the same unfortunately.
First, just the month of December, though I hardly need ManicTime to tell me this:
RimWorld, 142 hours. The final tally changed right up to the end of the final day. Incidentally, as I look at the blah screenshot of RimWorld up there, I should say that I never found the game the slightest bit interesting from looking at other people’s screenshots or descriptions.
- Roundup
- Single-Player
2019-02
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Games Played – January 2019.
2019-02-01.
January has been a PC simulation game month, continuing from December.
The big oval room is a bustling tavern in my most-recent fortress, Amostitdun.
Dwarf Fortress, 69 hours. Yeah, I kinda still play Dwarf Fortress. It’s really not that bad once you learn it. No, really! I mean, if you’re a programmer, that is, who’s spent decades using programming text editors, moving cursors around and learning keyboard shortcuts. And also someone who’s played a month and a half of RimWorld beforehand to get the hang of this specific kind of game.
- Roundup
2019-03
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Games Played – February 2019.
2019-03-08.
Oops it’s over a week into March and this post is still sitting here waiting for me to attach a picture to it.
Hey guess what? I played Dwarf Fortress.
Dwarf Fortress, 118 hours. ANTHEM Open Demo, 1 hour. I don’t think I turned on my PS4 at any point either. Why did I buy that contraption again? Well, there was a sale. And it’s the only way to play Bloodborne.
- Roundup
2019-04
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Games Played – March 2019.
2019-04-01.
March was a veritable explosion of gaming variety for me. I dropped Dwarf Fortress like a hot potato (just when people were starting to like my videos, oops) and picked up Souls again in anticipation of Sekiro. Not that there’s anything wrong with Dwarf Fortress, but nothing compete when the From Software fever hits.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, 16 hours. The new game from From Software. I just love writing “from From Software” and do it every chance I can.
- Roundup
2019-05
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Games Played – April 2019.
2019-05-01.
It’s been another odd gaming month. I thought I would be playing a lot of Sekiro, but it turns out I’m just not in the mood for it, or any games really. I’ve gotten much more enjoyment from consuming plain old non-interactive video content in my free time (ie. mostly Critical Role).
Sekiro, 28 hours. I am currently on the “Guardian Ape” boss and not terribly interested in putting in the repetitive practice needed to get past it.
- Roundup
2019-06
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Games Played – May 2019.
2019-06-03.
This should be a pretty short list.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, 53 hours. I finished my first playthrough and started NG+. I got bored about halfway through NG+ though. 7 Days To Die, 2 hours. I don’t remember why I played this. I think I might have been playing it while listening to Critical Role early in the month. I have thoughts about the newest version but I can’t remember what they are at the moment.
- Consoles
- Roundup
2019-07
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Games Played – June 2019.
2019-07-01.
Another super easy month to figure out. It was Bloodborne on the PS4. I basically only play one game at a time anymore, and have little interest in anything else until I finish with it.
Bloodborne (PS4), ~50-60 hours. Time estimated by looking at how long I ran OBS Studio on my PC, which was 50 hours. However when I finished the game and entered New Game+ last night, the total save game time was 68 hours, but that extends a little bit into May as well.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
- RPG
2019-08
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Games Played – July 2019.
2019-08-01.
Ran out of steam on Bloodborne and Demon’s Souls and went back to PC games in July.
PC Games Elder Scrolls Online, 7 hours. Wow, whodathunkkit. I found myself intrigued by the Zone Story in Rivenspire enough to keep logging in to go through it. Still haven’t finished it yet though. Now I’m distracted by the Steam backlog. Lords of the Fallen, 2 hours. This was my alternate game when my hands hurt from using the controller too much.
- Roundup
2020-01
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Endgame Viable Awards 2019.
2020-01-04.
It’s time once against for the prestigious Endgame Viable Awards for 2019.
2018 Awards 2017 Awards 2016 Awards 2015 Awards 2014 Review 2013 Review This year, I’m going to shrink the size of this post considerably. I didn’t buy or play very many games this year, so there’s not much point in making a huge affair out of it. I’m going to list all the games I bought this year, then I’m going to pick the ones I liked best, and that’s it.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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On The Radar For 2020.
2020-01-05.
Here’s my annual summary of PC MMORPGs that are on my radar for the new year 2020. (Here is 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014). I’ll warn you up front it’s bleak, just like last year.
I am only considering “traditional” style MMORPGs in this list, not things like MOBAs or brawlers or Diablo-clones or whatever else people call MMOs these days. Actually, since I find out about these from MMO sites, and most MMO sites now cover things that aren’t traditional MMORPGs, some of these might in fact not be traditional MMORPGs.
- Roundup
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Game Planning For 2020.
2020-01-14.
I don’t really plan my gaming very much, I tend to just play whatever I feel like playing on any given day. But I decided to make a list of the games that are currently on my highest priority “to play” list at the start of 2020, along with a rough estimate of how long they’ll take to play, according to HowLongToBeat.
The obligatory blog post picture requirement that vaguely relates to the text.
- Musings
- Roundup
2021-01
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Endgame Viable 2020 Awards.
2021-01-11.
I only bought one new game in 2020 so it will be very easy to pick my own personal Game of the Year for 2020. But I also talk about a few other noteworthy games I played during the year.
- Consoles
- Roundup
- Steam