Endgame Viable

I found out from all the gaming blogs that WarHammer Online is shutting down in December. WAR ran for five years, which seems like a pretty decent run for any game. I was there at launch, struggling through the bugs and lack of content with everyone else. The biggest problem I remember was not being able to play for several days because my pre-ordered copy of the game was late and I couldn’t put in my game code. Other than that, I thought it was a pretty good MMO, but it was heavily focused on PvP, and that’s not really my thing, so I drifted away from it. (429 words.)

I usually stick to one MMORPG at a time, play it until I get bored, then move to the next one. This week though I’ve been firing up a different one every night. The latest one was Guild Wars 2. I got sucked into this session right away. I had last logged out in Sparkfly Fen on the beach where Tequatl attacks. I went there to see the new-and-improved Tequatl event I keep hearing so much about, but it wasn’t running when I got there, so I just logged out. Well it was running this time, and damn. (309 words.)

I had to stick a link to this movie in my blog. I think it’s the best opening sequence for an MMORPG I can recall seeing, and also a really fantastic computer-generated short film in its own right. Even if you have no clue what an MMORPG is, you might like this. Updated the link. (55 words.)

I read on Inventory Full (still an awesome blog name) about this thing coming out called EQLandmark. I do not know what it is, but it sounds like some kind of new game in the EQ universe. Bhagpuss then mentioned something about making a Heroic character in EQ2, and I got sidetracked. Because I have some EQ2 characters too, and I figured I’d better log in and make my own Heroic characters, too. Because everyone’s doing it apparently. Well, one person is. I don’t know why I needed one, because I haven’t played EQ2 in years, and found it only a fair game while playing it, and I don’t even know what a Heroic character even is, but if somebody else is doing something in an MMO, obviously there must be something cool going on there that needs to be checked out. MMO players have a herd mentality, and they are perpetually looking for “the next new thing.” (707 words.)

I have my story idea for NaNoWriMo this year. I’m kind of excited about it. At least I was when I thought of it. It’s a bit of a meta-story, a pure fantasy that could not in any way happen in real life, or even alternate world life, and I would be lying if I said it did not in some way resemble John Scalzi’s inexplicably-Hugo-award-winning Redshirts­. I would say it has some elements of Redshirts and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One mixed up together. Possibly with a dash of Disney’s Tron. (178 words.)

TAGN wrote* that the Happy Time for Rift is over. Meaning that its resurgence in popularity after it went F2P is over, and now it has nowhere to go but down. It’s hard to disagree since when I last logged into Hailol up in the Dendrome, it was a ghost town. He also had a fair number of negative things to say about Rift going F2P, saying that he immediately unsubscribed when he heard about it. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I think it’s pretty naive to think that AAA MMOs aren’t going to have cash shops from now on. Anyway, I hadn’t been playing Rift for a while, so it was nice to have an excuse to get back into it. At the time, I remember a lot of people were offended that every vendor suddenly had a huge interface window and direct access to the cash shop. I just shrugged and said, “Whatever.” I can’t remember ever being in an MMO and thinking, “Gosh, I really love this vendor window, I hope it never changes.” Honestly most of the time I think, “This vendor window sucks, can’t anyone ever spend some development time to make buying and selling a pleasant experience?” (They did not in FFXIV btw, the vendor interface sucks, as usual.) (637 words.)

Since Breaking Bad is gone, I guess The Walking Dead moves up to become the best drama on television, now starting its fourth season. This is traditionally the point in a show’s lifecycle when it starts to die out. Maybe not in TWD’s case, though, because the show didn’t really get going (imo) until its third season. The first episode of Season 4 didn’t do much but set the stage for what’s to come in the rest of the season. Apparently, we are going to see a lot of: Muddy ground, bleak skies, bleak conditions, bleak people, and zombies. (508 words.)

I stumbled onto this thing called the Newbie Blogger Initiative (NBI). I found it by reading a post on a blog called Inventory Full, which is an awesome blog name, by the way. That post, which referenced a bunch of other blogs, got me thinking that I didn’t have enough MMORPG gaming blogs in my feed reader, so I went and added a bunch. Then, when I looked over the recent posts on all of those different blogs, they all had one thing in common (besides MMORPGs): The Newbie Blogger Initiative. (508 words.)

I’ve played quite a few MMOs in my time, including a few that I thought were sort of JRPG-ish in nature (Aion and Tera come to mind), but I have to say, FFXIV in some ways is a brand new world to me. It is freakishly weird how quiet the general chat is in this game. I can’t recall the last time I played in an MMO where the general chat wasn’t filled with a constant stream of random subhuman noise. Even paid subscription games. One time (only once!) I saw someone trolling general chat by posting something like, “Obamacare is great isn’t it?” In a typical game, that would result in two solid hours of rapid-scrolling yelling back-and-forth in general chat. In FFXIV, it was met only with silence. The only explanation I have is that a lot of FFXIV players are on the PS3, which suggests a significant number of people are playing the game without a keyboard. (1621 words.)

So I’ve been sucked into Final Fantasy XIV. It’s all the fault of Gamers With Jobs, just so you know. They generally liked it, and I usually like things that they like, so I had to try it. Especially since it was only $30 for the first month. They’ve stolen one idea from me. In the MMO that I want to design and write but of course I never will, you could advance in three different areas: PvE, PvP, and crafting. So you don’t have one level, you have three different levels. FFXIV stole this idea and took it a bit farther: You can level up any of a bunch of adventuring, gathering, and/or crafting classes. It basically means you only need to create one character and eventually you will be able to do everything (I think). Once you get to around level 15, you can unlock everything and essentially change classes on the fly, by simply changing your equipped weapon. The possibilities are endless. (There is a significant delay before you can use your abilities after you switch, though, so don’t be thinking you can switch fifty times in the middle of a battle.) (592 words.)