In January, I went through a phase where I wanted to play some survival-type games. The first game I pulled out was State of Decay, which I already had on Steam. I’m probably the last person to discover this, but State of Decay is pretty cool. I had played it before, somewhere back when it first came to the PC I think, but it didn’t really “click” with me the first time. This time, I got into it and spent some 40+ hours playing it. I kept thinking it would make a great MMORPG (minus the permadeath). If H1Z1 turns out to be anything like a multiplayer State of Decay, then that would be very cool. (From what I’ve seen, though, it doesn’t look like it’s going that way.) (282 words.)

Dear MMO Developers: Sometimes I want to take screenshots. Almost all of you are really great at providing a “take screenshot” key. Most of you even put it in the proper place, which is the “Print Screen” key if you don’t know. (Why some of you still insist on forcing us to use F12 or F9 or F10 or even F11 still boggles my mind, but I can let that slide. And there are even a few of you who think that saving your screenshots in a format other than JPEG is okay, but I won’t name names here.) (455 words.)

I wanted to believe SOE being bought out might be-well, if not good news, then at least not bad news. But now I guess it’s okay to officially start with the doom and gloom over Daybreak. I hope everyone affected by these layoffs finds another place soon. (I’m going through my own job placement stress right now so I feel for anyone with any uncertainty about their job.) While this news doesn’t affect me personally the way it does others-I don’t have the nostalgia for EverQuest that most people do (I was an Asheron’s Call guy and hardly ever played EQ)-based on the dour mood around the blogosphere it’s easy to see that this is a tremendous blow to the spirit of the genre. Besides that it just generally sucks to see people losing their jobs for no apparent reason. (329 words.)

In January, I went through a phase where I wanted to play some survival-type games. I’ve been intrigued by The Forest ever since I first saw it show up on Steam, but I generally try to resist buying Early Access games, particularly from unknown sources. Until one day when I was bored out of my mind with my current games and wanted to look at something new. And hey, it was only $15. (756 words.)

Bio Break had a great post a while back: Six ways that MMOs can get me to spend money on them. Being the shameless copycat that I am, here are some things I will happily buy in an MMO, roughly in order of priority. More Inventory Space. Shuffling my inventory slots around is not a fun gameplay element for me, so buying inventory and/or bank slots is usually one of the first things I buy. This is probably where I spend a good 75% of my money in free-to-play games. (490 words.)

In January, I went through a phase where I wanted to play some survival-type games. Perhaps I was inspired by the news that H1Z1 rushed itself out the door too soon came to Steam Early Access. I already had TUG and Don’t Starve, but they never really grabbed me. (I keep hoping TUG will improve.) I have a bunch of these kinds of games on my Steam wishlist, but as I’m sure you know, 99% of them are still Early Access (including TUG), so I tried to find something else. (671 words.)

I’ve been interested in the dribble of Crowfall information that has been coming out over the last weeks. I liked the art style, and the initial bits on character creation looked interesting. That is until they started in with The Hunger Week. Now it’s starting to lose me. I’m on board with the idea of a periodic “reset.” I actually like the idea of starting over now and then, but then I’m sort of an altoholic, so it fits my playing style. I realize that not everybody would like that though. (437 words.)

Just boosting the signal. Massively Overpowered Kickstarter Page{.green-dark} I feel like I’m sounding like a total fanboy but I think they’re doing this exactly right. Ie. Kickstarter for initial funding followed by Patreon for ongoing funding. (I mean, short of going to another corporate sponsor, that is.) They clearly aren’t joking around here. Although I do kind of wish they would use some of that Kickstarter money to hire another logo artist… (72 words.)

Perhaps if I update my blog more often, it will inspire me to do more writing, so that I’ll have more to talk about in my blog. So… As February begins, I’m still working on my post-apocalyptic novel that I started in NaNoWriMo 2014. I’m up to about 70,000 words, so you can probably figure out that I’m not writing very fast-typically I only put down about 500 words a night, somewhere around four a five nights out of a week. (I went from 50,000 words in one month to 20,000 words in three two months.) (372 words.)

I’m pretty sure I will buy the GW2 expansion Heart of Thorns, however I’m not sure it will hold my attention for very long since it appears there is not going to be anything new to do for existing endgame characters except collect more achievements. Masteries. “We’re reimagining progression with our new Mastery system.” I’ll need to see this before I can make a final judgment on it, but initially it sounds like more grinding, to be honest. Hang gliders are a cool concept (I loved them in ArcheAge) but if I have to grind before I can get one, that’s a lot less cool. (608 words.)