Endgame Viable

I think I’ll make this a “thing” and do a monthly progress report of all the MMOs I’m playing. I started running a time tracking program* called ManicTime so I can actually record precisely how much I’ve played every game now. FFXIV (22 hrs)**. I unlocked most of the new 2.5 dungeons and World of Darkness, however I haven’t actually gone into any of them yet. (To this day I’ve only done one level 50 dungeon-Amdapor Keep for the Relic quest.) In other news I leveled my Rogue class from-you might want to sit down for this epic achievement-10 to 15. (1168 words.)

A number of people are questioning whether Crowfall is asking for enough money to make their game. I don’t really care about that. (But I think they know what they’re doing.) My main worry is that they’re making an MMO that I won’t like. And they know it. I suspect that’s why they are crowdfunding like this: Real investors wouldn’t support making a game intentionally targeted at a small niche market that doesn’t include mostly-casual PvE players. (845 words.)

More alarming news about SOE/Daybreak/EQNext. Speaking as a gamer, even if EQNext had launched with the Storybricks AI (and I use the term “AI” loosely) included, it almost certainly wouldn’t have been as impressive as it sounded (see this demo), and it probably would have ended up being a non-factor in the game like that UO “artificial life” thingy. I’ve been very skeptical of SOE’s claims of “emergent behavior” ever since they first started talking about it. (231 words.)

There have been three controversies in the blogosphere lately that I haven’t had a chance to comment on. (Well, three that I know of, at least-I’m sure there are more floating around.) I don’t particularly like to be controversial on this blog but I did want to at least voice my opinions. Twitter and MMO Gypsy made me aware of a Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview with Peter Molyneux that made the rounds of the blogosphere. Regardless of what I think of Molyneux and Godus, I personally found it an appalling example of tabloid journalism if not an outright abuse of press credentials. Hard questions do not need to be openly belligerent. I really hope that’s not the direction that games journalism is heading. (Interestingly, or perhaps shockingly, that style of interview turns out to be fairly normal overseas.) I wrote a big long post about this but honestly I don’t want to dwell on it that much. (370 words.)

I started this post in November 2014, and TAGN’s recent post on addons reminded me that it was still sitting in Drafts. So I thought I would finally post it. Addons are a fact of life when you play World of Warcraft. You can play without them (I’ve done it), and most of the gameplay basics are there, but Blizzard has consistently refused to put in any of the quality-of-life enhancements that we are all used to from every single other MMO released in the past ten years. (I’m thinking of Rift in particular here, which put in just about every quality-of-life improvement you could have ever wanted in an MMO UI.) Thus you’ll probably want some addons for WoW. Here are my favorites, not so much to recommend them but more as a handy index for later when I inevitably lose them all after a reformat. (909 words.)

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.)