Endgame Viable

Remember the good old days when you could buy tons of awesome AAA games from Steam for ridiculously low prices? Yeah, I think those days are over. I was pretty disappointed in the Fall and Winter Steam Sales this time around. Almost all of the AAA games I saw on deep discount sales ($10 or less) were ones that I had already bought in earlier sales. (I still haven’t played 90% of them.) Most of the “new” sales were on indie or half-finished games, and only about 1 in 100 of those looks interesting to me. (Another 8-bit platformer? Really?) Not to mention the fact that I’ve already bought most of the indie games that interest me because they’re pretty cheap even when they aren’t on sale. (287 words.)

I’ve been “into” Massively.com a lot lately, listening to their podcasts and watching their streams, and one thing I’ve noticed is that some of them have a total love affair with Star Wars: Galaxies. They talk about SWG like most other people talk about Everquest 1: They diefy it like it’s the greatest thing there ever was or ever will be. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that not only did I never play or even see it, I never even knew it was an MMORPG. (279 words.)

I recently reformatted my PC and reinstalled Windows 7, so of course I had to re-install all my games. But instead of re-installing the seemingly hundreds of MMOs I previously had, I decided to limit the number of MMOs installed so I could try to cut down on this MMO ADD I’ve been experiencing. So far I’ve installed WoW, FFXIV, LotRO, SWTOR, EVE, and Mortal Online. (Well, and Steam, obviously.) By sheer coincidence, I happened to have active subscriptions for those games as well (except MO). I typically buy 3-month blocks of sub time and then cancel; the order that the subscriptions will expire over the next 3 months is: FFXIV, LotRO, EVE, SWTOR, then WoW. (213 words.)

Continuing my adventures in finding an MMO to get hooked on before the new ones come out in 2014, I turned to venerable EVE, the best-or at least the most popular-game I’ve never paid for. With reckless abandon, I bought 3 months of time and downloaded the client. I haven’t played EVE in five years, when I played for a week or so during a free trial. Surprisingly, my character from the free trial was still there. I have no idea what “level” he is or if EVE even has a measurement for that. I didn’t get very far past mining with him. (763 words.)

The first week after NaNoWriMo I had to force myself not to write a new story draft because it had become such a habit. The second week it was kind of a relief not to have to write anything, and that terrible story had finally left my brain. In the third week I was anxious to get back to planning or writing something, lest I fall into a not-writing habit. Then came the holidays and the end of the year, and I predictably fell out of the writing habit. (507 words.)

After reading over this article on Massively by Anatoli Ingram, I am stunned that the author can even remember the names of those four GW2 Living Story characters, let alone come up with a thousand words of an article analyzing their personalities and backstories. My experience of the last year of Living Story was something like this: Oh there’s this cool new Living Story! Oh there’s nothing to actually do, but I got some achievements. Oh now there’s another patch, and now there’s this guy, and he helps with this instance, and he’s Eir’s son, and I got an achievement. Oh there’s this Charr, and she’s an outcast, and she helps with the other instance, and I got another achievement. Oh there’s some time where I didn’t play and missed some stuff. Oh now there’s a ditzy blonde porn star and another woman standing on a hill investigating a Tower in Kessex Hills for some reason, and I’m tired of doing this stuff just for achievements. Oh I missed most of the Tower story, but now I need to help the porn star and the other woman inject a thing into another thing so the thing blows up and I can get back to Kessex Hills. Oh now the Tower’s gone and it’s Wintersday so I’m going to Lion’s Arch to get some more achievements. (455 words.)

I hate year-end posts, so here I am writing another one to talk about MMOs I’m looking forward to in 2014. Rift 3.0. I haven’t seen a release date, but they’re talking about releasing it in stages anyway, so I expect we’ll see the bulk of it in 2014. I hope to get a month of entertainment from the new stuff, maybe not contiguously though. WildStar. I’m planning to pre-order and play at launch, because I suspect everyone and their mother will be playing it and I don’t want to miss out. :) I anticipate at least a month of entertainment from it, and hopefully more. (482 words.)

I hate these year-in-review kinds of posts. So what do I do? Write one, of course. Because everyone’s doing it. This is my review of 2013. 2013 began with GW2 fizzling out because of its lack of endgame progression. I still popped in now and then throughout the year to look at the Living Story but it’s just an occasional diversion. I played in one of the last betas of Defiance before it came out in April. I wanted to like it, but I wasn’t hooked. I’m generally not a fan of shooter MMOs. (Late in the year, however, I bought the game and played a little bit more.) (407 words.)

I didn’t understand much of anything that happened in the Christmas Special The Time of the Doctor, Matt Smith’s final episode as Dr. Who. I didn’t understand the story, I didn’t understand why he was carrying around a Cyberman head, I didn’t understand why the crack was back, I didn’t understand why there was a town called Christmas or why The Doctor was stuck there, I didn’t understand where the Church of the Holy Whatever with the soldiers came from, nothing, zip, zilch. It seemed like a completely random jumble of people, places, and concepts. Was any of that in the last half-season anywhere? I sure don’t remember it. I guess I wasn’t paying nearly enough attention. (341 words.)

I’ve been hearing more and more about people’s WildStar beta experiences lately. Apparently they lifted some of the NDAs. They pretty much gushed about it on MMO Reporter Episode 152, and what they described sounded like a solid themepark MMO with action-oriented combat, and how can anyone not like that? No word on the endgame yet, though. I like The MMO Reporter podcast, by the way. It’s one of the best ones if you like a more “casual” style of podcast. This was the funniest part: At 19:30, when Harry was complaining about WildStar controls: “If you have your right hand on the mouse and you have your left hand on the WASD and you have to keep moving to avoid enemy telegraphs, try to hit the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 buttons at the same time.” (211 words.)