I’m sort of trying to merge this and my horribly neglected writing blog together. Maybe. I don’t know. My “branding” is all messed up right now. Also I haven’t written much lately. Anyway, one of the things I tried to do on the writing blog every now and then was talk about books I’d read lately and what I learned about writing from them. So that’s what this post is. (1338 words.)

I finally figured out why I couldn’t log into WildStar. This little saga has been taking place over the weeks and months since the game went free. Originally there was the fact that I’d completely forgotten that I’d setup the Google authenticator, so it kept rejecting me for leaving out that code. That took a while to figure out. (Admittedly I wasn’t looking very hard for the solution.) Next I had to reset my password, because I’d forgotten it. Possibly I’d reset it somewhere during the time I was figuring out the authenticator problem. Of course it wouldn’t let me set it to the password I wanted to use because it doesn’t let you use any of your previous passwords, so I had to make up a new one. This time I made a pretty long one and typed it into the web page and everything was fine. (335 words.)

I’m having a hard time getting back into some MMORPGs I used to play. FFXIV. First of course is FFXIV, the game that I have an active subscription for that’s draining my money while I avoid logging in. Every time I try to get back into it, I keep running into this roadblock-Heavensward is hard. Well, maybe hard isn’t the right word. More like tedious. I’m mired at level 53 in the Dravanian Forelands where it takes an hour to run from one side to the other for quests since I don’t have flying unlocked there yet. (423 words.)

Roughly four years after I started playing Star Wars: The Old Republic right at launch, I finally hit level 50, what once was the level cap. I hit 50 somewhere in Corellia. Just two and a half years after the release of Rise of the Hutt Cartel, I rolled into Makeb to face the Regulators. Or Hutts. Or whatever. I’m not following the story super closely. SWTOR is the MMORPG that I find most comfortable right now. I really don’t have to think very much when I’m playing it. Especially since they made the change to allow any companion to play any role-I set Kira to heal and blow through everybody without stopping to rest, watching the pretty lights and sound effects as my guy whips his lightsaber around. That’s about the complexity of gameplay that I want in my MMORPG right now. (164 words.)

Here’s a video I recorded in October of the first hour of a game called Betrayer. It’s a first-person exploration/mystery sort of game set in the time period of Jamestown. It’s a neat-looking game, and I liked the idea of it, but I never finished it because I thought the pacing was a bit too slow. (56 words.)

I finished the main story in Fallout 4 (I think) and I don’t see myself going back very much any more. I reached a point where I almost decided to quit the game. Like a lot of people, and like the game almost forces you to do from the beginning, I kept trying to maintain my Minuteman settlements. I was under the illusion that it was a side quest chain that would eventually end, at which point I would resume the main story. Well at some point it dawned on me that I was on an endless treadmill. I’d go out and rescue a hostage or help a settlement or build a radio beacon, then come back to Preston Garvey only to discover another settlement in trouble. It became pretty obvious that the cycle would never end and they were random quests intended to keep me busy forever. When I started having to clear out the same places over and over again, I got fed up with it. (629 words.)

To follow up a bit on Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns, I played it a lot right up until the day that Fallout 4 came out, and I haven’t logged in a single time since. Which suggests that I was deluding myself for those few weeks I was playing it and having fun. Okay, that’s not true. I got my money’s worth. It felt like the good old days after GW2 launched when it seemed like this game had re-invented MMORPGs and changed everything. I really enjoyed leveling a Revenent from 1 to 80 (well, 30 to 80). The Revenent is fun to play. I liked playing through the old zones again. I liked the smaller-scale dynamic events and hanging out at the huge 500-man circular-firing squads where it took seconds to down the world bosses. (324 words.)

Normally I would write about a new game I tried, but since I never have the time or energy to write anymore, I thought it might be fun to record my first hour of play instead. (Fun for me, at least.) This time I tried out Bound By Flame, an action RPG I got for around $5 in the recent Steam sale. In short, it’s pretty average. (67 words.)

I must confess that I did not like Fallout 3 and New Vegas as much as everyone else did. To me, Fallout 3 was exactly the same game as Oblivion, which I had already played enough to be tired of it. So after I finished the main Fallout 3 story, I was done with it. (Steam reports that I played some crazy number of hours, but that was only because I left it running 24/7 on a secondary PC.) (467 words.)

Here’s my advice: Do not buy ARK right now. At least, don’t buy it with any expectation of actually playing it. Because on my 12GB system it runs out of memory and crashes. If you run the “low memory” 4GB version it doesn’t crash, but it runs horribly slow. There is a good two minutes of loading screen to wait through before geting into the game (literally-I timed it). Then in order to get it to run at an acceptable frame rate (which to me is a rock-solid 60 fps, but I suppose in a pinch 30-40 fps will do) you have to disable almost every graphical setting, and then the game is painful to look at. (529 words.)