Endgame Viable

You play Marius, a Roman soldier with a gruff Sean Bean-style accent. The main reason to play Ryse: Son of Rome is because you bought it for $7 in a Steam sale three years ago, and you’re bored of everything else and desperate for something-anything-new and interesting to play. (Without the bother and expense of spending $60+ on actual new games.) That being said, it’s actually not a bad game. (1244 words.)

My Week Last weekend I tried Fortnite Battle Royale for a second time and I haven’t played much else this week. It was a brand new gaming experience for me and that pretty much trumps everything else when I’m in the doldrums of “every game I own is boring” that dominates roughly 50% of any given year. And hey, it’s free! Admittedly, I had more fun spectating and making videos than I did actually playing the game. Also, I kind of stopped playing already, since, being an adult, I (and my sore finger joints) can’t commit to the mandatory 500 minimum hours of practice time required to keep up. And once the thrill of discovery is over, there is not much fun in playing battle royale without the mindset of playing to win. (997 words.)

After writing my last post on Fortnite, I played over a dozen more games and now I have a somewhat more nuanced opinion about it. To respond a little bit to Jeromai’s comment, I think I get it now. Kind of. At least I have some understanding of the appeal of the battle royale genre in general and Fortnite in particular. Two major things clicked into place, which I’ll detail below. Being a jaded old bitter gamer, though, I had to power through three to five “meh whatever” games before I started to feel any compulsion to play more. Being a plain old old gamer with no desire to spend 24/7 practicing, I’m also pretty sure I’ve already plateaued after less than a week, and now I have nowhere to go but into frustrated, “I’m just not good enough to play this” territory. (2426 words.)

Fortnite was in the news last week. The real news, that is, not just the MMO news. Both The New York Times and The Guardian mentioned it. But I’m not here to talk about those articles. They just reminded me of those heady days when I played Fortnite Battle Royale myself. Heady day, I mean. Because I only played for one day. One match, in fact, on that one day.* It didn’t click with me. (1846 words.)

I’m moving this post to Saturday so I can mention stuff that happens on Friday, which previously fell through the cracks. (Of course nothing happened on Friday this week.) The MMO news and blogging world dries up completely on weekends so it’s a better time for recaps anyway. My Week It’s been a slow gaming week for me. I played a little bit of ESO, a little bit of DDO, and, for the first time, a little bit of a Steam sale game I bought in December 2015 called Ryse: Son of Rome. It’s a bombastic third-person action RPG that so far I would characterize as “okay.” (490 words.)

_I’m altering the format for this post a bit. Previously I just recorded the games I’d been playing, for no discernible reason. Now I’m going to add in a bunch of cross-media promotion so people have an even bigger reason to skip it. _ My ESO Nightblade in Glenumbra - another example of how screenshots look awful during most games’ night cycle. (658 words.)

Not much gaming to report this week. I’m on a Secret World Legends break. I’ve mainly been dabbling in Elder Scrolls Online (trying to record the Orsinium storyline; much like with Morrowind, I messed up and have to restart it). Since @Sypster has been talking up Dungeons & Dragons Online for a while, I thought I would check it out again myself. I’ve played DDO before, and enjoyed it, but I haven’t had it installed in years (computer forensic evidence suggests since 2015). So I downloaded it and tried to login. It won’t let me play using the SSG account I use for LotRO. It tells me I need a subscription. It’s a free-to-play game. DDO isn’t listed on my SSG account and I can’t find any way to add it. I had to create a new SSG account to play DDO, which apparently is what they recommend now. That is dumb. My characters weren’t very high level and I can’t even remember what classes they were, but I didn’t think they deserved to be erased completely. Anyway I ended up playing for about 20 minutes and, while I remembered why I enjoyed it, there are plenty of other enjoyable games for me to play right now. (861 words.)

I finished up the Morrowind storyline in Elder Scrolls Online last week. I liked it. With the usual ESO caveats. Because even living gods who can levitate moonlets need someone to run errands now and then. I’m not entirely sure what to call Morrowind. Is it DLC? Is it an Expansion? It’s not big enough to deserve the title “Expansion” if that’s what they are calling it, but it’s also a distinctly different entity from the DLC that is normally in the Crown Store, because you had to buy it separately. Oh, here it is: They call them “Chapters.” (1841 words.)

I finally finished Guild Wars 2’s Living World Season 4, Episode 2, “A Bug In The System” on Friday night. So here’s the quarterly post where I yell at Guild Wars 2 again for making me incredibly angry when I play it. This scenic overview looked better in the game than in this screenshot. It was the most disjointed episode I can remember, but I’ll concede it was probably because of the way I played it. The episode consists of five “chapters.” I played the first three chapters all in a row (because you have to, grumble, grumble) back in March. I started into the fourth “chapter,” the one where you have to wander all over the new Sandswept Isles map and destroy shield generators, but I stopped in frustrated disgust (because I really did not care for the maze-like, mob-packed map or the lack of clear directions about where to go) and left the game for a month. Then I went back into the game and finished the shield generator bit over several non-contiguous days last week, and played the final chapter on Friday night. (1365 words.)

Yikes, April is almost over already. I finished Secret World Legends’ Red Sun, Black Sand and left Egypt behind. I’m taking a break for a while. This past weekend I decided to try to play through the Morrowind content in ESO. It took four tries, but I finally got past the first meeting with Vivec and into the rest of the story. (I had a hard time finding a character I wanted to play.) I knew reports had indicated it was short, but I was still a bit surprised to finish the entire Morrowind expansion story in 5 1/2 hours*. As per usual, I recorded everything and it will probably end up on my YouTube channel. I’m also working on a post about it. (302 words.)