Endgame Viable

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.)

Breaking News! (Not.) SOE is turning into Daybreak. I don’t read as much doom and gloom into this news as SynCaine does, but if Daybreak intends to take a more cross-platform stance, it could mean EverQuest Next will end up a lot more controller-friendly than we PC MMORPG gamers might like. You can already sense it with Landmark actually. You’ve got a left button ability and a right button ability and that’s about it. (565 words.)

I knew they’d be back. :) The web site isn’t live yet but it’s going in my feed reader the second it does. I was really honored to see my page mentioned on the last Massively post. Thanks guys! Reading over all of the finale posts on Massively this past week reminded me of something I forgot to mention in my earlier post, which was that all of the contributors are really top-notch writers, too. (143 words.)

ESO* is going Buy-to-Play. Yay! I’m looking forward to playing it again. (Holy jeez those guys make awesome cinematics. I wonder how much of a AAA studio’s game development budget goes into those.) But philosophically speaking, I wonder what the Buy-to-Play model says about an MMO. After having experienced it in GW2, B2P seems to imply something that’s not a very good thing. The game company seems to be saying, “Here’s our persistent world game, but there’s really only about a month or two of fresh gameplay for you to look at, and we’re probably not going to update it very much, so don’t make any long-term plans to stay in our game.” (499 words.)

So yeah, there was a post recently in the MMO blogosphere that basically trashed Massively. I guess they’re entitled to their opinion, but it didn’t make any sense to me. I liked Massively for the exact reason that this other blog trashed them: They didn’t take themselves too seriously. I always felt like there were human beings behind their articles and podcasts. Real people doing the best they could with clearly limited resources in a super fast-paced environment. (1149 words.)

This is unrelated to MMOs (sort of ), but I’ve been on a Quake CTF nostalgia trip for a while, so I went looking for a modern AAA shooter that would provide the same sort of team-based competitive spirit. I don’t know if such a game still exists, but my first candidate for testing was Planetside 2, a game which I haven’t played before. (Well, that’s not entirely true-I installed it sometime around when it first came out, played it for about 30 seconds-enough to see myself airdropped into a chaotic mess-and then decided it wasn’t for me. I don’t remember it launching with the tutorial it has now and I had no clue how to play it.) I suppose technically PS2 is an MMO, but I think of it as a shooter because there is no PvE element. (2053 words.)