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. It feels a bit like acting in a play. (611 words.)

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. Don’t know what this is but it doesn’t matter because I need ash tree sap and pig’s blood. (437 words.)

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. SWTOR might be an even better example, since those class stories go all the way up to level 50 I think. Rift is very alt-friendly to me because of the wide variety of playstyles you can put together with the soul system. (338 words.)

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. I suppose it’s possible WildStar could survive another year in maintenance mode, but knowing NCSoft I kind of doubt it. (359 words.)

I’m so glad this debate is finally settled, so we won’t need to go over it again in any future MMORPGs. (21 words.)

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. There’s no doubt in my mind that EQ1 and EQ2 fans would have hated it. (125 words.)

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. (1190 words.)

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!” If I didn’t know there was a cash shop, I might have totally overlooked that Pearl Store button in settings. That alone is worth the $30 admission. (1136 words.)

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. (127 words.)

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. Perhaps that’s why they keep talking up the Dark Zone-because that’s the only place that has any people in it? (115 words.)