Endgame Viable

It was a big weekend for me in FFXIV, as I managed to finish up the Heavensward Main Scenario Quest, so I stand ready to begin Stormblood this week (just in time for everyone else to be finishing it :). However, since there is usually a two or three day lag between my gaming events and posts about them, let’s continue with last week’s adventures… Normally I try to stay semi-focused on meaningful progress when I’m in an MMORPG, but I had a bit of time to kill Thursday so I started wondering if I could pick up two more points of item level so I could check out Dun Scaith, the final alliance raid in Heavensward. It would do little or nothing for me at this point, but I had a couple of quests in my journal that required it, and I just wanted to see it. Kitty saves the day! (799 words.)

Still bumping around doing miscellaneous tasks of little import in Stormblood. But lately I’ve been thinking about Heavensward, the previous FFXIV expansion. I pre-ordered it early and was in there on early access launch day, but looking back on it two years later, I didn’t play it very much at all. (Yet for some weird reason, I remained subscribed the whole time.) In FFXIV ARR (2.x), I leveled all of the following jobs to 50: Bard, White Mage, Dragoon, Black Mage, Miner, Botanist, Carpenter, Weaver, Alchemist, and Leatherworker. I had no jobs below level 15, and most jobs at least 25. Heavensward provided plenty of great screenshots, if nothing else. (687 words.)

I was dragging most of the day Tuesday so when I got home I stuck to simple, low energy tasks on Stormblood’s official launch day. Being launch day, I first had to enter a code on my account page to activate the game again. Square Enix somehow continues to have one of the worst systems for activating your game account in the history of the universe. You have to enter a code to get into the early access (two of them, in fact), then you have to enter another code to get in on launch day. It’s craziness. It’s hard to believe that average game consumers put up with it. It’s a process that takes a relatively high degree of technical saaviness to get through. (Maybe this is why people play it on console instead of PC.) (1104 words.)

I started Monday evening with what I thought would be a quick trip through the level 54 job duty for the Samurai. I failed it three times. Apparently I haven’t learned nearly as much about playing the Samurai as I thought I had. The instance first has you fighting a lot of opponents simultaneously. They hit you for a lot of damage, too. Of course our fearless samurai trainer from the East just stands there and watches while you struggle. Somebody threw a regeneration heal on me, though, because I noticed my health going up occasionally. (Maybe that was the “Echo” bonus you get for subsequent tries.) (1540 words.)

Sunday afternoon I finally completed something I’ve been putting off for about six months now: The Antitower. I wasn’t planning to, it just sort of happened. I had just gotten back from the grocery store Sunday afternoon. I sat down to figure out what to do for the rest of the day. My mood was better than usual for the waning hours of a weekend, and I was wondering if instances were still broken (I had heard they weren’t but I suspected they might go bad again as server congestion ramped up), so as an experiment I queued up for my nemesis The Antitower. The stuff of nightmares. This … thing … was waiting at the end of The Antitower. (1802 words.)

You’ve probably heard that there were one or two significant technical issues with FFXIV’s Stormblood early access over the weekend. Aywren summed it up pretty well. Even outside of the Stormblood content gate where I am, most times I tried to venture into an instance of any kind (dungeon, job duty, anything except PotD for some reason), I was disconnected from the server and couldn’t log back in with that character for up to an hour because of the dreaded Error 90002. This happened to me three times I think. (1322 words.)

Glad I got the memo about the dress code here. It’s here! Well, if you pre-ordered. Upon first logging into Stormblood, I was greeted by this very prominent window explaining the new Song Gauge for the Bard job. “Here we go,” I thought, sighing heavily. This was exactly what I was afraid of: Huge changes to my class that will require mental energy and work to learn. The FFXIV equivalent of a talent point respec. I skimmed the window but didn’t really absorb any of it, so I took a screenshot, closed it, and hoped that, by ignoring it completely, it would magically go away. That didn’t work, so a bit later I decided to bite the bullet, picked a spot in the world, picked some random mobs, and started attacking them. (1207 words.)

Blatantly stolen from fracturedmmo.com In addition to the bizarre announcement of an MMORPG based on Magic: The Gathering, last Wednesday we saw our first news about another new MMORPG called Fractured. (Not to be confused with The Repopulation’s survival spinoff of the same name. Seriously, do people never even look at the names of other games anymore?) Once again, it’s way too early to say anything good, bad, or indifferent about Fractured. It’s going to be a sandbox. But better than any other sandbox. For reasons. Reasons that will certainly work out exactly the way they are planning them, because games never change in response to early player feedback. (358 words.)

Literally a screen capture of the web page, since there’s nothing else to look at. Last Wednesday, Cryptic announced they are making an MMORPG based on Magic: The Gathering with help from Wizards of the Coast. As yet it apparently doesn’t have a title. That’s basically where my interest ended but in the name of thoroughly documenting the event and making a more appropriately-sized blog post, I’ll add some more thoughts. (443 words.)

I bought Prince of Thorns back when it was relatively new on the market (a few years ago?). I read the first chapter, didn’t particularly care for it, put it away, and moved on to something else. Recently I found it again in my Kindle library after I wrote that bit about the grimdark genre, remembered that I’d only read a single chapter, and decided maybe I didn’t give it a fair shot. It’s at least popular enough to have spawned two sequels, so somebody must like it. (853 words.)