72 entries. 51,670 words.

2016-01

  • ARK – Another Chance In The New Year. 2016-01-04. With the start of the new year, I decided to give ARK: Survival Evolved another chance. So many people rave about this game, in streams, podcasts, and blogs. I had a lot of bad feelings to overcome, but I figured it was possible that I was the one who was wrong about it. So on January 1st, I fired up a single player game, determined to play until I “got it.
    • Gaming
    • Reviews
    • Survival
    807 words
  • 2015 Winter Steam Sale List. 2016-01-22. This was a post I intended to publish somewhere near the beginning of January. I bought a lot of things in the 2015 Steam Winter sale, but I kept all of my purchases to 7.99 or less, so I consider that a relative success. I even installed some of them. :) Undertale. 7.99. It didn’t look like my kind of game, but I’ve heard a lot of good things about it.
    • Musings
    • Steam
    692 words
  • Looking At Unity 5 and Unreal 4. 2016-01-23. (I totally stole this image from depaul.edu.) One weekend I got the idea that it would be simple for me to write a hit video game, make tons of money, and leave my day job*. I’ve dabbled at writing games now and then since I first learned programming back in the 80s, so this is nothing new (I have yet to actually complete a game, though). Anyway, I started reading up on popular 3D game engines.
    • Development
    • Reviews
    817 words
  • ARK – So Good Yet So Bad. 2016-01-25. If anyone looks at my YouTube channel*, you can tell I’m still playing a fair amount of ARK. I’m in a very “I want to be by myself” gaming mood right now and toodling around by myself on a giant island of dinosaurs is a good fix. Thanks to a suggestion from Aywren I’ve customized my server settings to make the game a little more palatable. I haven’t altered it much, just a few tweaks to GameUserSettings.
    • Musings
    • Survival
    1,537 words
  • Star Wars and X-Files (Spoilers). 2016-01-28. Star Wars: The Force Awakens Apparently the moratorium on spoilers for Star Wars is over, although personally I don’t think it should end until a film is released to streaming or rentals. The theater experience is not as good as my house, even though I don’t have an especially great television or sound system like I used to. Movies in theaters are generally awful experiences. There are very few movies that would get me to go to a theater anymore.
    • Media
    • Musings
    1,435 words

2016-02

  • Don’t Feel Bad About Getting Bored. 2016-02-03. I recently saw a farewell post on My Life in Azeroth. I’m sorry to see anyone stop blogging, and I hope they resume someday, but the tone of the post got me thinking. It seems like a lot of WoW players sound apologetic or guilty when they discuss leaving that game, like they are somehow letting Blizzard or the community down. I’ve seen it in blog posts, and I’ve seen it on Twitter.
    • Advice
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    • Responses
    307 words
  • Punishing PvP Activity In PvP Games. 2016-02-05. I was reading the Albion Online State of the Game and came across this part: Red zones will be full loot PvP zones that do not contain any claimable territories. Red zones will be subject to a crime and reputation system that makes sure that killing peaceful players - in particular, if they are zerged down - has more consequences for the attackers. No part of that makes me more interested in Albion Online.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    • Responses
    263 words
  • Snap Judgment – The Division Open Beta. 2016-02-21. The Division isn’t for me. It’s a very beautiful-looking game. The graphics are fantastic, and the urban environments are very realistic and detailed. Unfortunately I didn’t see anything new or innovative in the gameplay. The whole time I was playing, I kept thinking, “This plays just like Defiance, and Defiance is free.” The only thing The Division has is the cover mechanic. And the fantastic graphics, of course. I also couldn’t help but notice that there were very few other people around in this alleged MMO game.
    • Pre-Release
    • Shooter
    • Snap Judgment
    • Videos
    115 words

2016-03

  • Black Desert In Tweets. 2016-03-07. Since I am too lazy/don’t have time to write a coherent post about Black Desert I thought I would take the very simple route of pasting a bunch of my tweets about it into a post. Boy was that a mistake. It turned that it wasn’t easy at all, and this post took far longer to create than I wanted it to. This is a big problem because I just got the “Learning Higher Processing Skills” quest from Ficy in Heidel, which opens up the “Pure Water for an Experiment” quest from Flaviano, which then allows you (I think) to heat Melted Copper Shards into Copper Ingots, a task I’ve been wanting to do for some twenty or thirty hours of game time now.
    • Blog
    127 words
  • Black Desert Cash Shop. 2016-03-10. On the subject of the Black Desert cash shop, I agree that it’s a little steep. Or perhaps I should say that you don’t get enough in-game value for the money you spend. I’ll get to the specifics later. First I want to highlight something I think is good about the BDO cash shop: They don’t shove it in your face in every window that comes up. There’s no popup window when you login that shows you all the sales and exhorts you to “Go buy stuff now!
    • MMORPG
    • Responses
    1,136 words
  • Black Desert Online. 2016-03-11. TLDR; I’m enjoying Black Desert Online, and I think it’s worth $30. If you like crafting, it’s well worth $30. It’s not your grandfather’s MMORPG, though, and it takes some time to get used to it. I mentioned on Twitter that I didn’t understand why people were drawn to The Division, and it occurred to me that I should explain why I’m drawn to Black Desert Online, in case anyone is looking at the BDO hype and scratching their heads.
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    1,190 words
  • Goodbye EverQuest Next. 2016-03-13. I don’t have much to add to the EverQuest Next wake that hasn’t already been said, except for this possibly controversial thought: I’m kind of glad they cancelled it. Wait, wait, let me explain. We’ve known all along that Landmark was the prototype for EverQuest Next. I don’t know about anyone else, but I was dreading the day that they released Landmark with Norrath assets and called it EQN, because Landmark is not a very good game.
    • MMORPG
    • Opinion
    • Responses
    125 words
  • Finally, The Debate Is Settled. 2016-03-17. I’m so glad this debate is finally settled, so we won’t need to go over it again in any future MMORPGs.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    21 words
  • WildStar’s Doom. 2016-03-17. At the risk of sounding pessamistic, WildStar’s probably going to close soon. I’m not sure whether to jump in and play as much as I can before it closes, or just let it go quietly into the night and remember fondly that one month I played. Okay, let’s be real, it’s going to be the latter, because I’m playing Black Desert now and Dark Souls III hits Steam on April 11, and that will be that.
    • MMORPG
    • Responses
    359 words
  • Is Black Desert Online Alt-Friendly?. 2016-03-22. I’ve been thinking about alts in BDO. I saw a lot of comments early on about how alt-friendly it is, but I disagree. When I think of an alt-friendly game, I think of a game where each alt has a different gameplay experience. So that if you get tired of playing with one character, you can log in with another to see or do something completely different. The most famous example of that is, of course, WoW, where every race has a different starting zone and their own storyline for 20 levels or so.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    338 words
  • The Weight of Black Desert Online. 2016-03-23. I’ve really enjoyed reading everyone’s accounts of their adventures in Black Desert Online, mainly because I feel like I haven’t done much “adventuring” in the game yet (by which I mean exploration). I’ve spent most of my time with my head down, running and riding back and forth between NPCs to finish “Life” quests. It’s a bottomless pit if you follow that route. I don’t think the quests ever end. And they are all essentially tutorial quests, teaching you how to make more and more stuff.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    437 words

2016-04

  • Low Energy Gaming Week in Review. 2016-04-09. The past couple of weeks have been really trying at work. I’m in the process of training other developers, writing documentation, and frantically trying to tie up loose ends before moving to another project in May. It involves spending pretty much all day every day doing things that I’m not particularly good at, i.e. interacting with people, leading, making decisions, and generally trying to be a role model for everyone who stares at me with big round eyes wondering what to do after I’m gone.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    • Steam
    611 words
  • Dark Souls III. 2016-04-12. Fantastic game and a worthy sequel. Nothing new or radically different, mind you (except a mana bar), just more of the same, excellent quality gameplay in different yet somehow familiar settings. Visually it resembles the first game more than the second one, in my opinion, but at the same time it’s got its own bleached-film style. My only complaints so far are that I seem to get stuck on terrain a lot and sometimes the camera is more wonky than I’d like.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    257 words

2016-05

  • Dark Souls III First Playthrough Complete. 2016-05-10. I finished my first playthrough of Dark Souls III Sunday morning. I think it took around 84 hours and 87 levels, using a Knight build based mainly around strength and vitality. All bosses defeated solo, although I almost cracked and summoned help on the Twin Princes. (After the rather dismal experience I had with the Dancer of Boreal Valley, and when it looked like I might be heading in the same direction with the Twin Princes, I did summon help twice, but both times I died very quickly, which I took as a sign that I should stick with my original plan to get all the bosses solo on the first playthrough.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    496 words
  • New. 2016-05-16. I am writing this post on my phone while I sit in my new cubicle at my new job, which is not so much new as it is different, in that I have only moved about 15 yards away from my old cubicle which I left Friday. I moved from an old and dying project where I constantly had to deal with the world collapsing around me to an equally old but at least stable, funded project where I will only be responsible for a straightforward set of requirements.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    • Single-Player
    • Status
    584 words
  • Overwatch Snap Judgments. 2016-05-17. I finally have a chance to talk a bit about Overwatch, which I played for roughly an hour or two during the open beta. My first impression was horrible, because I played it on a Sunday night, which is usually my least favorite time of the week, considering that it’s the time when I’m forced to face the reality of going back to work the next day. Last week was a particularly onerous week because it was my last one on the dying project, so I was anticipating a horrendous week of panic and anxiety from me and everyone else who would be left behind after I’m gone.
    • Pre-Release
    • Shooter
    • Snap Judgment
    1,207 words

2016-06

  • NBI 2016 – Thoughts On Blogging. 2016-06-02. The first rule of blogging is not to blog about blogging. However, June is the Newbie Blogger Initiative here in the game blogging community, so this is the month where we throw out all the rules, talk about the craft of blogging, and try to recruit and encourage new bloggers. I technically started blogging in 1998, when I put some random notes up on my first ever web site, unless you count some Quake match updates I posted on the clan’s page in 1997.
    • Advice
    • Community
    • Writing
    1,099 words
  • NBI 2016 – Kill Hippy GIFs With Fire. 2016-06-07. The topic of animated GIFs came up in the NBI Discord this morning so I thought I’d write a little bit about it. I hate animated GIFs. That is all. No, really, I hate them. I lived through the 1990s World Wide Web, so I have vivid memories of the days when every advertiser put obnoxious blinking animated GIFs in every web ad, making every web page into some crazy dystopian night-time Las Vegas scene with blinking neon signs in every direction.
    • Blog
    • Musings
    • Opinion
    514 words

2016-07

  • A Post-by-Email Test. 2016-07-05. Today I am trying to enable posting by email on my blog again.
    • Blog
    13 words
  • Egad Turbine. 2016-07-08. Turbine is refocusing on free-to-play mobile games?? For the last couple of months I’ve been trying to force myself (unsuccessfully) to play LotRO with the sole intention of leveling my 51 Hobbit Hunter (my only character over level 20-something) through Mines of Moria and the rest of the story content I keep hearing so much about. I’ve been trying to do this because I-like I’m sure a lot of other LotRO players-worry that Turbine isn’t going to renew their Tolkien license in 2017 and the game is going to shutter.
    • MMORPG
    250 words
  • Snap Judgment – Riders of Icarus. 2016-07-11. Welcome to another installment of Snap Judgment, where I fully evaluate every nuance of a game after playing it for less than an hour. I downloaded and installed the latest malware … I mean, Asian import MMORPG … Riders of Icarus. I kid, I kid. But it asked me to reboot to finish the installation, which makes me wonder just what kind of rootkit it put on my system. Not to mention the extremely suspicious Nexon anti-cheat monitoring software that runs in the background.
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    • Snap Judgment
    254 words
  • Unscheduled Move and Stranger Things. 2016-07-26. I don’t remember if I’ve written about this before, so here’s a quick backstory: The lease expires for the house I’m renting at the end of August, so I bought a new house. The closing for the new house was in June, which was about two months earlier than I planned for, so I’m currently living in a stressful chaotic limbo between two houses. I had planned to put off moving until closer to the end of my lease expiration, but when quite a few consecutive days of 95+ degree heat rolled through my un-air-conditioned rental house, complete with 219% humidity that felt like wearing clothes made out of a boiling wet sponge, my dog and I bailed out early and moved to the new place for good on Monday.
    • Status
    763 words
  • Moving Old PC, Building New PC. 2016-07-29. I drove back to the old house after work Wednesday to pick up some things to improve my camping experience in the new house, and while I was there I unplugged my PC and a monitor and threw it into the car. (Not literally. But close, because it’s still frickin’ hot as hell, and after less than a half hour of moving around in the old house, sweat was pouring off of me in rivers and I felt like I could barely stand up from the weight of all the humidity pressing down on me.
    • Status
    639 words

2016-08

  • Dipping Back Into LotRO. 2016-08-01. Between trips to the old house and trying to figure out what kind of blinds to put in the windows of the new house, I finally sat down (ie. collapsed in a blob) and spent a few hours playing LotRO over the weekend. I’m continuing my overall quest to see all of the game before LotRO closes down*. The character I’ve chosen for this task is my Hobbit Hunter, my highest level character at level 52.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    767 words
  • That New Jersey Guy Suing Niantic. 2016-08-03. I wrote the following on July 20: With all of the talk about Pokemon Go, I started to wonder: Do I own the virtual space on my private property? I just bought a house on 3 acres of land. I have legal ownership of that physical space (at least until the government decides to take it for whatever reason). But if Niantic goes and puts a Pokewhatsis on my map coordinates, shouldn’t I own that too?
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    504 words
  • Firefall's In Trouble?. 2016-08-05. Imagine my surprise one morning when I was listening to the MassivelyOP podcast on the way to work and heard Justin and Bree mention that Red 5 had laid off their whole studio (or something like that). I completely missed this news. That’s the Firefall guys! Wait, I’ve played Firefall! I like Firefall! There are basically three MMORPG-style shooters that I play, and they are Defiance, Planetside 2, and Firefall. I don’t play them often mind you, just like, once every couple of months.
    • MMORPG
    370 words
  • LotRO – Back to Angmar and Evendim. 2016-08-10. In my continuing quest to see all of LotRO before it (possibly) shuts down, my Hunter reached level 53 over the weekend. You wouldn’t think gaining a single level would be cause for celebration, but in LotRO it kind of is. I don’t know if I’ve ever written this, but I feel like LotRO is one of the last of the “old school” generation of MMORPGs. By which I mean the generation of MMORPGs where the world is actually massive (ie.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    826 words
  • Doom Impressions. 2016-08-12. I bought Doom when it was half off on Steam a while back and have been playing it here and there. I’m not quite sure what to make of it. On the positive side, it’s a beautiful game, and it runs beautifully on my new gaming PC. It’s suitably fast and violent and hard on Ultra Violence. The chainsaw had me giggling like a kid when I found it. (Remember how the world thought the original Doom was over-the-top gruesome?
    • Reviews
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    311 words
  • Legion Pre-Expansion Invasions Are Fun. 2016-08-15. I had fun with the WoW Zone Events aka. Invasions over the weekend. But first, the biggest news from my weekend was that I finally moved all my furniture from the old rental house into my new house. I achieved my goal of picking the hottest day of the entire year to move. I believe it was upwards of 95 degrees Farenheit with a heat index of 105. (Google tells me that’s 35 and 40.
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    • Status
    845 words
  • Legion Ordered. 2016-08-17. I went ahead and ordered Legion. Why not? I had fun with the last expansion. For a little while, at least. And a level 100 boost is worth a fair chunk of change to me, considering it normally takes me years to get to the level cap in WoW. (Although I confess I have yet to use the level 90 boost I got in the last expansion.) My second-highest level character in WoW is a Gnome Mage at, now, level 77, thanks to a handful of Invasions.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    571 words
  • LotRO Volume I, Book 10, or A Lot Of Running. 2016-08-19. I’m continuing to make slow progress on seeing the rest of LotRO*. Since I was on a roll, I’m continuing with the Volume I Book 10 epic story over in Evendim (rather than returning to Moria). I’m glad that I went and subscribed to the game, because I noticed that I was missing out on rest experience. Hopefully that will speed up the leveling curve a little bit. (But I still finished all of Book 10 without reaching level 54.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    653 words
  • WoW Invasion Level Tally. 2016-08-22. WoW leveling tallies from the Invasion events so far: Mage from 73 to 87. Warlock from 50 to 60. Priest from 34 to 52. Druid from 23 to 32. My goal is to get the Priest and Druid to 60 before the end of the event. That will give me three choices from which to pick my two level boosts (one to 90 and one to 100). (My understanding is that if you boost from 60 it will also boost your professions too.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    636 words
  • Dark Souls Character Loss. 2016-08-24. You might be wondering why I’ve been playing WoW and/or LotRO instead of continuing my re-plays and re-re-plays and re-re-re-plays of Dark Souls 1, 2, and 3, the greatest three games in the history of the universe. (Not to be hyperbolic or anything.) It’s because I setup and moved to a new gaming PC. Guess what? You can’t move your characters from one installation to another with the PC version of Dark Souls 2 and 3.
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    204 words
  • Melee Classes in WoW. 2016-08-26. While leveling my alts in WoW, it occurred to me that I don’t ever play any melee characters. I have a Warrior-two of them in fact-but I just don’t like Warriors in WoW. My very first character in 2006 was a Warrior, who I leveled to about 20-something and gave up on because I kept getting killed by those stupid Defias (or whatever they’re called) guys in Westfall. (Back in those days if you ever got jumped by 2 mobs you were basically dead-at least I was-hence my switch to a Hunter.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    807 words
  • ShareX For Uploading Screenshots. 2016-08-29. A while back I asked on Twitter if there was a way to automatically upload screenshots taken from games to some kind of online repository: Is there a tool/app/process that makes it easy (ie. automatic) to upload my game screenshots to some cloud repository? — Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) August 24, 2016 It turns out that ShareX has this capability. You can’t actually take the screenshots using ShareX, because it doesn’t support full screen applications, but it has a feature where it will watch certain folders and upload any new files to wherever you want.
    • Advice
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    215 words
  • LotRO Volume 1, Book 11: The Search for Narchuil. 2016-08-31. For the one or two folks out there looking for non-Legion posts, over the weekend I completed another book in LotRO: Volume 1, Book 11. (Spoilers ahead if for some reason I’m not the last person in the world to do these quests from c. 2007.) LotRO is a great game to play in the morning with your coffee when you don’t have anything pressing to do for a few hours.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    • Stories
    848 words
  • Early Legion Impressions. 2016-08-31. So far Legion is … well, just like playing WoW. On your mark, get set, … I only played for about an hour and a half last night. I stopped right after I got my Mage Artifact staff Ebonchill. Obviously I haven’t seen all there is to see in Legion, but it starts out with … quests. Just like you’ve done in WoW for the last 50 bazillion years. As yet there is no emergent new gameplay to be seen, which makes it a bit less interesting for me than the pre-expansion Invasions.
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    801 words

2016-09

  • Why I Can’t Follow WoW’s Story. 2016-09-02. I hadn’t had a chance to play much WoW since Tuesday, so I logged in Thursday night to continue my adventures with my Mage and his new Ebonchill gizmo. I hadn’t done much of anything since he obtained his Artifact. When I logged in, I had a quest to turn into the Great Alakazam, or whatever his name is. (I can’t quite make it out in the picture below.) I clicked him and turned in the quest, not really paying attention to what it was.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    1,012 words
  • WoW Legion Status: Almost Done. 2016-09-08. Since my last WoW post, I’ve finished the first four zones, and leveled my Mage to 106 and my Hunter to 110. Total WoW time played since August 30, according to ManicTime, has been 55 hours. (It was a holiday weekend.) So yes, basically I’ve been playing nothing but WoW. I intended to play my Mage all the way to the end, and started out going through Azsuna, then Stormheim, ending up at level 106.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    892 words
  • WoW Legion, Last Impressions. 2016-09-12. In this post I will share my thoughts on the new features found in Legion. This will probably be the last time I talk about WoW since, barring a last minute change of heart, I’m planning to let my subscription end today, the 12th. A brief character status update: In case you’re wondering, the brick wall hits in Suramar, the fifth zone. That’s where the grind begins and you’ll start wondering why you ever came back to WoW.
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    • Status
    2,200 words
  • FFXIV – Importing Settings From Another Computer. 2016-09-13. Documenting this with better search keywords so it’s easier for me to find next time. I re-installed FFXIV on my new PC and of course all of my settings were gone. I dimly remembered running into this before, but it took a while to dig it up. To copy your FFXIV settings from one machine to another, copy Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn to the other machine. I left out the “screenshots” and “downloads” folders.
    • Advice
    • MMORPG
    78 words
  • FFXIV – Sohm Al Completed At Last. 2016-09-14. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss Legion already. There is something very comforting and familiar about playing WoW, even though I don’t have any of the nostalgia that most people have. You run around colorful scenery, click on things, and watch impressive numbers fly around the screen. It’s almost hypnotic. To head off the withdrawal symptoms, I thought I’d try to get back into FFXIV and get something going there.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    593 words
  • Bonding With Characters. 2016-09-15. It’s only been two days and I already regret changing my main FFXIV character’s gender. Who is this total stranger running around in Eozera now? What happened to the free-spirited girl who rode to Gridania in search of fame and fortune, and ended up conquering titans and dragons? This new guy is an imposter. He hasn’t earned the right to be there. Imposter! You don’t deserve to be in that grand company!
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    381 words
  • FFXIV – New Abilities and The Aery. 2016-09-21. I switched Tya back to her true form, and changed her hair again. She looks a little older and wiser now, maybe even a bit world-weary after all of her trials and tribulations. I changed her voice too, but the new “hiyah” when she’s firing arrows isn’t much better than the old one. (It would be nice if you could preview that when you’re selecting the voices.) Halfway through level 54, it finally dawned on me that I was due for a new Bard ability, so I went searching for the Bard quest giver.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    856 words
  • The Vault, The Whale, and Some GW2. 2016-09-28. I’ve slowed down a bit, but I’m still making progress in Heavensward. I made it to level 57 and got through The Vault after putting it off for half a week. The last boss with all the chess pieces (or robot horse-men as I call them) was actually kind of fun. The post-dungeon cut scenes were less fun. Sad kitty is sad. After The Vault I was sent back to another part of the Sea of Clouds, and shortly thereafter I was asked to fight a big whale in The Limitless Blue.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    508 words
  • Three Albums. 2016-09-29. I saw Liore’s post on #3AlbumsThatChangedMyLife, and I started to think back on my own impressionable youth and the albums that affected me. I was raised in a somewhat musical family, but I didn’t become “interested” in music until let’s say my mid-to-late teenage years. Prior to that most pop songs went in one ear and out the other and I never owned any albums. (Okay I did buy a single of M-M-M-My Sharona, a song that was entirely inappropriate for my then-age.
    • Musings
    • Responses
    1,227 words
  • Amazon’s New World Reveal. 2016-09-30. The following is a very cycnical screed about Amazon’s New World, fueled mostly by yet another rainy day and the constant barrage of Internet commenters acting shallow and uneducated about the election. And I have a headache. Please look away if you’re excited about this game. I am reacting only to the one paragraph of information shown in MOP’s reveal article, which is the same information shown on the Amazon page.
    • MMORPG
    482 words

2016-10

  • FFXIV – Palace of the Dead Discovered. 2016-10-03. Most of my gaming over the weekend was preempted by other media consumption. First it was Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, which I could not put down between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon, until I reached the third part of the book and had to have a break. (It’s a convenient stopping point, the reasons for which should be fairly obvious upon reading the table of contents.) And then Sunday night I noticed that Deadpool was on HBO prior to Westworld, which I hadn’t yet seen.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    577 words
  • Doom’s Problems. 2016-10-13. I haven’t played very much lately. Over the last few weeks I’ve been putting time into reading up on World War I (research for what I hope will be a historical fiction story for NaNoWriMo), reading Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, listening to Stephen King’s 11.22.63 audiobook, and even playing with composing some music in Renoise. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say the frenzy over the 2016 election has turned into a really entertaining Jerry Springer episode.
    • Shooter
    • Status
    438 words
  • Hopes and Predictions for New World. 2016-10-14. Based on the video, this poor fellow is apparently the only person working on New World artwork. :) Since Amazon was kind enough to tell us they were working on an MMORPG without telling us anything about it, I thought it might be fun to throw out a wish list for it, and also try to predict what they’ll actually do.* Check back in two or three or four years to see how well I did!
    • MMORPG
    1,906 words
  • Audiobooks, NaNoWriMo, and other Miscellany. 2016-10-18. This is one of those rambling posts about everything and nothing, because I don’t have much to say. Just writing for the sake of writing because I was bored at work. I’ve been listening to audiobooks again, trying to use up my credits. I recently finished Stephen King’s 11.22.63, which was beautifully read by Craig Wasson. He’s the actor who played the lead in that weird 80s movie Body Double. Now I’m listening to Stephen King’s End of Watch, which is beautifully read by Will Patton.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    800 words
  • Battlefield 1 and (not) Civilization 6. 2016-10-21. Fridays are the worst days of the week for me, in terms of being bored. Usually half of the workforce is gone on Fridays, so it’s abnormally quiet and I have to spend eight solid hours trying to entertain myself in library-like silence. Using only my phone, mind you, because god forbid we have access to anything “fun” or “entertaining” on our work computers. The most interesting thing I can manage on my work computer is reading Wikipedia articles.
    • Single-Player
    • Status
    506 words

2016-11

  • Starting Ashes of Ariandel DLC. 2016-11-01. Over the weekend I tapered off of Civ 6 to push through to the end of my umpteenth Dark Souls 3 playthrough so I would finally have a character ready for the Ashes of Ariandel DLC. It took a total of about 18 hours to go through all the bosses and all the areas (over the course of a couple weeks, not two days :). I had to make a new character because, if you didn’t know, you can’t transfer DS2 or DS3 characters from one PC to another.
    • Single-Player
    • Writing
    368 words
  • IntPiPoMo: Friede and Bugs. 2016-11-02. I thought I would try IntPiPoMo this year, because NaNoWriMo didn’t seem like enough to do in November! Since I’m currently playing Dark Souls 3’s Ashes of Ariandel, most of the screenshots for now are probably going to be from there. That is Friede on the right. She seems nice, right? It’s just a room with blood and corpses and giant flying insects.
    • Single-Player
    63 words
  • An Election Day Tale. 2016-11-09. This is a long tale of my voting experience this morning. I tried to keep it entirely non-partisan and focus on what I saw, heard, and felt, but if you don’t want to risk it, feel free to skip. (But in return, you have to read every other one of my posts for the rest of time! Just kidding.) I wrote this fairly quickly by my standards, and normally I would spend about four years editing something this long, but I wanted to post it before the results started coming in.
    • Politics
    • Stories
    • Writing
    5,364 words
  • Snap Judgment – Novus Inceptio. 2016-11-18. I should be really excited to play Rift: Starfall Prophecy but to be honest I couldn’t care less about any MMORPG right now. I’m just in one of those moods. Instead I installed one of the many games on my Steam list that I’ve never tried so that I could bring you another (cue huge reverb and echo) … Snap Judgment! .. judgment .. ment .. nt. Novus Inceptio is yet another Early Access survival sandbox game.
    • Pre-Release
    • Single-Player
    • Snap Judgment
    • Steam
    249 words
  • Starting Rift’s Starfall Prophecy. 2016-11-22. I grudgingly embarked into Rift’s Starfall Prophecy over the weekend. I wasn’t excited about it, but I needed an excuse to postpone writing for NaNoWriMo. I’m trying to catch up from a huge deficit, so it’s important to put things off as long as possible. Anyway I pre-ordered Starfall Prophecy, so I figured I might as well play it. The dreaded Tuathe’de, who don’t ever turn around I was very thankful to see that you still get tokens for logging in.
    • MMORPG
    1,605 words
  • Devil Daggers. 2016-11-24. I saw Devil Daggers on Steam when it first came out and thought, “What an odd-sounding game.” I saw the “Too long, didn’t play” guy on Gamers With Jobs call it “punishingly hard,” and use it as the benchmark for measuring hard games ever since. I put it on my wish list. I laugh at hard games! Ha! Recently it went on sale and I bought it for $2.99, along with some other stuff I might play some day (including another one of the Batman games-I have them all now but haven’t played any of them yet).
    • Single-Player
    • Snap Judgment
    • Steam
    417 words
  • Rift – This Thing Is Hard Yo. 2016-11-28. I broke down and bought 15 days of Patron status in Rift. The amount of extra XP gain is very large and noticeable and I would say almost mandatory, at least if you want to keep your sanity while leveling. Before continuing with my Mage, in a fit of rage over being so under-powered in the new zones, I got out my Primalist and started leveling him. I made a Primalist back when they first came out but only got to level 9.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    919 words

2016-12

  • NaNoWriMo 2016 Post-Mortem. 2016-12-01. I like to write up a post-mortem about my writing projects after I’m done with them, so here are my thoughts on my NaNoWriMo 2016 draft. For reference, it’s an untitled historical fiction set in Belgium at the beginning of World War I. It’s about, you know, people, who like, do stuff. The hook might still need some work. I validated my (exactly, as it turned out) 50,000 words about 8 PM on November 30th.
    • Advice
    • Writing
    1,571 words
  • Xarth and The Post-NaNo Blues. 2016-12-02. Last night I welcomed on old friend back into my life: The post-NaNoWriMo blues. I’ve written about this before. Here’s me from December 2011: “The act of creation is so thrilling and stimulating and awesome that when it’s over, there’s nothing left inside but a black empty void of nothingness. For me, it generally manifests as a fervent desire to stare at the walls and feel useless all day.” I remember writing much more colorful language about it, though.
    • MMORPG
    • Writing
    511 words
  • Not Much To Get Excited About. 2016-12-14. I sort of lost interest in Rift when I got to level 68. Xarth Mire is not very pleasant to run around in, what with the lack of safe roads, the rather high mob density, and the frog tongues that constantly pull you to them no matter how much you want to run away from them. But mainly I drifted away from Rift because I started playing Fallout: New Vegas. I played it for about 8 hours last year, then put it away when Fallout 4 came out.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    300 words
  • Morrowinding. 2016-12-20. I was sick a lot last week, so I’ve spent a lot of time in the world of Bethesda games lately. First it was New Vegas, but I got a little burned out on it so I turned to Morrowind and now I’m totally into that. Morrowind is enormous. I thought Oblivion and Skyrim were pretty big, but Morrowind seems to dwarf them. (Admittedly part of that could be because the movement speed is so slow it just feels bigger.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    484 words
  • LotRO, DDO, Turbine, Standing Stone Games. 2016-12-20. Did I get all the keywords in there? Random LotRO image from my hard drive I’m sure you’ve heard that LotRO and DDO will be leaving Turbine for a studio called Standing Stone Games. The fate of Asheron’s Call is uncertain, but I tend to agree with Wilhelm that we won’t be seeing it much longer, which is a major bummer to me personally since it was the first MMORPG to make a real impact on me, and I think its character development system (skill-based) has yet to be matched.
    • MMORPG
    401 words
  • The Prestigious Endgame Viable Awards 2016. 2016-12-22. It occurred to me that the end of the year is approaching, and it’s time to do one of those year-end posts that bloggers love to do. Unfortunately I kind of hate doing them. It’s a lot of work. You have to actually look things up and think and count and multiply and divide and things like that. That goes against my normal principal of blogging by “just typing words into a text editor.
    • MMORPG
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    690 words
  • Most Played Games In 2016. 2016-12-29. It took a little more effort to calculate my most-played games in 2016, because I changed PCs in the middle of the year. But the results are now in, and the number one positions were just what I guessed they would be. (This data was gathered on December 24, 2016. I’ve pretty much only played Morrowind since then, although I played a couple hours of Elder Scrolls Online as well.)
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    363 words

2017-01

  • Returning to Elder Scrolls Online. 2017-01-01. I’ve been dabbling in The Elder Scrolls Online again. Last time I played it for any length of time was in the two months after it launched, April 2014. It’s one of the better MMORPGs if you didn’t know, undoubtedly in the Top Five. (Obligatory warning that it does not in any way resemble the single-player Elder Scrolls games.) Visually, I would probably rank it second behind Black Desert Online for the best-looking MMORPG out there.
    • MMORPG
    1,158 words