MMORPGs and a Polar Vortex - January 2026 Part 2

31 January, 2026. 4,188 words.

This time I started the blog draft document early, so there’s lots of rambling.

Gaming

Guild Wars Reforged

I don’t have anything to say about it, just that everybody seems to be playing and talking about it. I personally never “got” Guild Wars, so I don’t feel much interest in replaying it, though I have hovered over the buy button a couple of times.

I made an effort with Guild Wars 1 somewhere around 2017 or 2018, made some videos about it, realized that it was way, way too hard to consistently make edited videos like a YouTuber (which is why literally every YouTuber hires an editor first thing), and that was the last time I ever thought about Guild Wars. (1 or 2, honestly.)

Project: Gorgon 1.0

I’ve seen a few obligatory sentences here and there about Project Gorgon launching a 1.0 version, so I guess I’ll mention it too.

However, I’m not going to pretend I’m going to play that game again because the last time I tried to play it, there was a bug with mouse turning that was so bad I literally couldn’t play it, and it went on for months, and I have no understanding of how they couldn’t notice or fix it. It seemed like a searing indictment of their software engineering experience at the time.

Anyway, it’s still out there I guess if you want to play it. I think I bought an Early Access edition on Steam some years back. I remember it being a very niche game, though, unlikely to have any mainstream appeal.

Me being the cynical type, I imagine the 1.0 release is probably a last-ditch effort to make some money to keep the project running a little longer before the inevitable collapse, as these 1.0 releases of early access projects so often are. (*cough* Crowfall *cough*.)

Speaking of last ditch efforts, I also haven’t touched Ashes of Creation or Stars Reach in a while.

Final Fantasy XIV

I’m continuing to play Final Fantasy XIV, though not as much as before. I had a minor slowdown because I may or may not have picked up a minor cold–because it was slightly worse than the “normal” congestion I get the weekend after a chemo infusion, but then it was also unusually frigid, so who knows–which gave me a scratchy throat and made it difficult to record dialog. Especially when the story happens to be focused on super high-voiced Loporitts at the time.

In the Endwalker story, I just got back from the moon. I’m guessing it’s near the halfway point? Because of the extra XP I’m getting from the Preferred World+ status, I’m almost level 90 already, while the quests are still level 84.

I had to go through the first trial of Endwalker, The Dark Inside, which was the first time I’d had to venture back into the world of the Duty Finder in four years. I’m sure they’ve given explanations about why they can’t do the 8-man trials with the Duty Support system, but I can’t think of any technical reasons they couldn’t extend the work they did for 4-man dungeons to 8-man trials.

It took about three days to summon up the ambition to wait in the queue, and on the third day, after waiting two hours, a really fun aspect of MMORPGs that really makes the game fun and I’m so glad I got to experience the fun of sitting around waiting for two hours in a queue because that’s the real fun of MMORPGs, right? I’m so glad they preserve that essential MMORPG player experience by not letting you do 8-man trials instantly with the Duty Support system. Anyway I finally got to do the trial.

I had looked up some info on the basic mechanics, but there’s no substitute for being there. Everything happened way faster than I expected, the second phase was on us in the blink of an eye, the platform was rotating and the stars were raining AoEs, and I was a little rusty after four years of not doing any of that, you know? So I died a couple times. Luckily some others messed it up, too, and it wasn’t just me.

Anyway we wiped on the first try, but got through it on the second try after one of the healers put a mark on his head so we could follow him, which was a huge help. On the second try I only died once right at the end when I happened to be standing a step too close to the tank buster. As always with FFXIV, it’s kind of fun when you know what to do and get all the dance steps right, but I’m not waiting in a queue for two hours to do it again.

Endwalker Story So Far

To summarize the story since last time, we arrived in the shattered remains of Garlemald* to help, only to get a mixed reaction from the locals.

In the end, all the tempered in Garlemald–basically zombies who were made into slaves by Fandaniel’s towers–were de-zombified when all the towers fell, leaving the entire Garlemald region teetering on the brink of self-destruction, as half the people are starving to death, while the other half are recovering from zombification. The Allies decided to step in to help, and I’m sure there won’t be any political ramifications for that later on.

* Garlemald is FFXIV’s version of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, for the uninitiated–up to now, the Unambiguous Evil Empire.

Meanwhile, Fandaniel and Zenos set big bad primal dude Zodiark free on the moon, then I took care of it (in the aforementioned trial), and that somehow triggered the Final Days and the beginning of the end of all life as we know it.

Fortunately the moon is actually a big spaceship so everyone back home can ride to safety in a massive moon evacuation, run by industrious rabbit-like lalafells called loporitts. No, really, that’s what’s going on.

Returning from the moon, me and the Scions vow to stop the Final Days, however, so the moon evacuation plan won’t be necessary.

Also G’raha Tia keeps throwing himself semi-romantically at my character in cut scenes, like he did in Shadowbringers. Every time I’m told to rest, somebody knocks on my door and interrupts my night off with a cut scene.

It wasn’t at all clear to me why Fandaniel needed to erect towers all over the world and temper all of Garlemald, by the way. In the end, Fandaniel and Zenos just teleported to the moon and knocked down the last ward imprisoning Zodiark with a single blow. Why didn’t they just teleport up there and knock down all the wards that way? I’m sure there’s a deeply complex fan lore explanation, but it wasn’t very obvious on the surface.

Also, why was only Garlemald tempered, when those towers are everywhere? Is it because they were … offscreen? But that doesn’t explain why all of the elephant people in Thavnair weren’t tempered.

Eh, this is why you can’t look too closely at the story.

World of Warcraft

I saw something about a Pre-Patch Something Or Other for World of Warcraft, which sounded like there was an imminent expansion that I hadn’t heard of.

It reminded me that I hadn’t played WoW since before the big level squish thing, and WoW is the other one in the Top 2 of dependable MMORPGs, and wouldn’t it be cool to play a WoW Expansion at launch time, one of the two universal shared experiences in MMORPG gaming left in the world (the other being a FFXIV expansion launch, which I’m guessing might be coming later this year sometime?).

I know, I know, there are other MMORPGs with expansions all the time, but let’s be real here… every other one is a niche experience for superfans only, and you’re not likely to ever hear about them unless you’re tuned into MMORPG news sources. (I honestly hadn’t even heard of the last two WoW expansions.)

Anyway, when I logged in, my “main” WoW solo character, a Night Elf Hunter dating back to c. 2006, whose never been in a guild, the only character that’s been through every expansion (kind of), was level 50. I don’t remember what it was before. A hundred something? 120 maybe? I’ve somehow managed to lose every single video I’ve ever recorded of WoW so I have no way to check. (The last time I mentioned playing World of Warcraft was after Battle for Azeroth.)

There was something called a “Catch-up Experience,” which I’d never heard of. I also had four level 70 boosts available.

I think the new Midnight expansion starts at level 80, because it comes with a level 80 booster. I just went ahead and pre-ordered it, which presumably will give me access to all the previous expansions I missed, too. My general plan is to level my Hunter so it’s ready for Midnight.

Battle for Azeroth was the last one I played when it launched. According to Wikipedia, there’s been Shadowlands, Dragonflight, and The War Within since Battle for Azeroth. I remember skipping Shadowlands, but this is the first time I’ve heard of Dragonflight or The War Within.

I played the Catch Up Experience for my level 50 Hunter, which puts you into an instance of The Arathi Highlands where Jaina and Thrall give you a handful of kill 10 rats quests with 50,000 other people competing for the same mobs, and you get a full set of item level 50 gear, and in my case gain a level. I don’t know when you’re supposed to get item level 50 gear, but it said my previous pre-squish gear was around item level 17 or something like that.

During the Catch-Up Experience, I learned there’s a whole new mode of flying that seems considerably worse than it used to be. Now your mount has its own action bar and it will fall out of the sky if you don’t keep hitting the spacebar now and then.

Immediately after leaving the Catch Up Experience and plopping me into Stormwind Keep, I was funnelled into some NPCs to tell me about a Trading Post and Trader’s Tender, which sounded like something made for people who think games are only vessels for trading collectibles. I can’t see myself ever interacting with that system again.

Then I stumbled around Stormwind Keep for a while trying to avoid getting forced to the Dragon Isles (which seems to be the new defacto starting point for everyone and everything), until I finally found the guy who takes you to the Shadowlands expansion content.

I’ve praised WoW for many years for their ability to keep their game technologically up-to-date, in terms of graphics and game engine stuff. But man, their media transitions are still firmly rooted in 2000s-era jankiness. The screen blinks weirdly, bits of dialog get cut off, things are out of sync, odd delays, crazy resolution shifts between pre-rendered cut scenes and in-game cut scenes. It looks and feels absolutely awful, and it’s such a horrible first impression for a new expansion. FFXIV is a vastly superior multimedia experience.

Also, and I’m sure I’ve said this many times before, but I find WoW’s story almost entirely opaque. I chatted with ChatGPT about this: I asked it to summarize the main story of WoW expansion by expansion, and almost none of it looked familiar to me, despite having played every expansion up to and including Battle for Azeroth.

I asked ChatGPT why I didn’t remember the story, and it explained that’s because the “main story” is mostly revealed in raids, and that’s it. If you just run around doing quests, you apparently never see the main story, which matches my personal experience of the game.

World of Warcraft tells its story like a TV series where the finale is paywalled, the middle seasons were optional, and the recap episode never aired. -ChatGPT, either making up something funny, or citing something funny, who can say.

Which is weird. Another reason I think FFXIV is number 1 of the Top 2 remaining mainstream MMORPGs. The main story of FFXIV, like it or not, is impossible to miss.

After playing about an hour of Shadowlands quests in The Maw, my Hunter is already level 54 in the first zone. I’m just assuming there’s supposed to be 10 levels of Shadowlands content, then 10 levels of Dragonwhatever content, then 10 levels of War Whatever content.

The point is, I seem to be leveling rather quickly, and it feels like I’ll be able to skip past Shadowlands after maybe two zones (I think there’s five zones in Shadowlands?).

The combat is stupefyingly easy, too, after getting that item level 50 gear from the Catch Up Experience. (And after finally remembering how to summon my Hunter pet, and after adding that single-button damage rotation action to my bar.)

By the way, I was forced to look at the new housing system, even though I have no interest in it. It looks exactly like what you’d expect WoW to do with housing… it doesn’t really fit, and all the good spots are already taken anyway.

I mentioned somewhere previously that I hated skill trees and I wished there was a button I could click to just pick the best skills. Well, it turns out there is such a thing in WoW, and I could not have been more delighted to find it. No more randomly picking things from a skill tree I can’t be bothered to study!

Anyway, as of this posting, I’ve reached level 58 in the first couple zones of Shadowlands. There’s lots of extra XP stuff active, not to mention all the Mysterious Satchels raining from the sky with extra catch-up gear so you can out-level whatever content you’re doing in mere hours.

Pre-Patch Twilight Stuff

On a different character, a level 45 Mage, I tried out the Pre-Patch stuff, which takes you to a place called Twilight Highlands, which I have no memory of and my character has never been before.

You get a handful of quests dealing with and infiltrating a Twilight Cult, which, again I’ve never heard of before. Or at least I don’t remember hearing before. Then you’re turned loose and expected to run around the zone doing world events, or whatever they’re called in WoW, popping up around the map. You get some kind of currency with which you can buy exclusive gear and pets and whatnot.

I haven’t seen the events yet, but it reminds me of the Pre-Legion Invasion stuff, which was honestly one of the most fun experiences I can ever remember having in World of Warcraft.

You guessed it, the Twilight Stuff also drops tons of XP so my level 45 Mage turned into a level 49 Mage in almost no time. It’s nowhere near as fun as the Pre-Legion Invasions, though. Nobody has beaten the Rift-style gaming experience from Rift, and yet for some reason nobody ever does it anymore. Too much fun, I guess. Gaming is supposed to be a chore in the modern era.

Home Life

Brrrrrrr. It was an unusually cold December here, but the latter part of January is cold, what with the much-villified “polar vortex” hanging out here. It started with the first big snow of the year on the weekend. If you get your weather from commercial sources or social media, I imagine it would have been the most frightening impending natural disaster you’ve probably ever experienced.

The grocery store was certainly in full apocalypse mode, with the shelves completely barren of milk and bread and meats. But since I just go to plain old no-advertisements weather.gov, it was just like any other winter of my entire life where there’s a potential for snow and ice, and I simply prepared for a few days of inconvenience, rather than the end of days.

I got maybe 2-3 inches of fine powdery snow Saturday night, then all day of sleet on Sunday, then freezing rain on top of that Sunday night. At the end of it, there was a solid block of ice on my (brick) back steps, that persists to this day.

I got through the weekend without losing power, so I thought I was out of the woods, but then I looked at the week’s forecast and every day the high temperature is below freezing and every night the low is down into single digits. Yikes. A full week of that is highly unusual for my area, and it’s way too cold for my heating systems to keep up, so I’m going to be extra grumpy this week.

When I finally ventured out to the store on the fourth day following the snow/sleet/ice storm, the ice was still so thick around my house that the SUV did not even break through the surface as I drove over the white sheet where my driveway was. The neighborhood road was a solid chunk of about an inch of rugged ice. (Outside the neighborhood, the roads were completely fine.)

And there’s supposed to be some snow again this coming weekend. Grocery store apocalypse!

In other news, I had a rare fox sighting the morning after the storm. At least one fox lives somewhere near my house, presumably in the woods, and I only know this because they go skittering through my back yard about once a year. This time they scampered across the snow-and-ice-covered yard in the morning so it was very easy to see. Naturally I didn’t have a camera handy, and you only have about 5 seconds to find one before they’re gone. They don’t hang around.

Cancer Corner

I had another brain MRI recently, and the results showed “stability.” Which means that I continue to have a hole where they surgically removed one tumor, and two 5mm spots that are “stable”, which is what’s expected. (A stable metastasis is one that isn’t growing, but they can’t really tell if it’s still cancer cells or just scar tissue.) I’ll continue to get brain MRIs periodically because lung cancer really likes to spread to the brain.

As far as I can tell, I have no cognitive issues from these invasive tumors. Though every time I misread a word or mispronounce a word while recording a video game, I wonder if it’s brain damage.

This is my third or fourth brain MRI I’ve had, and they keep noting an area of “encephalomalacia” in my right posterior cerebellum, which I think means an old scar. I wonder if that’s from the time I whacked my head on a steel beam as a kid.

World Context

So I haven’t mentioned the world in a while, and I feel like I need to resume meeting the bare minimum of what I can do as a citizen by talking about what’s going on in hopefully a reasonably sane way.

Hoo boy has it been a roller coaster. The kind of roller coaster that hurtles into a hellish abyss that burns all of its occupants alive.

I’ve never felt so much like my federal government is completely out of control and rampant with incompetency. I’ve never seen a national party so intent on destroying the reputation and credibility and value and power of America on the world stage. While ruining as many Americans’ lives as they can on the way. To be so oblivious to history and all that the United States has built around the world (arguably) since the beginning of the last century, to be so deeply buried in their own social media bubble, and to be so transparently adamant on chucking it all away for a quick buck, is both difficult to comprehend and simultaneously exactly what you’d expect a modern voting population to produce. I’ve never been so glad that there are state and local governments between me and that insanity.

Here’s just a handful of recent events. This all happened within the last month.

The U.S. kidnapped the leader of a sovereign nation for … reasons? I’ve never once felt threatened by Venezuela, but apparently we need to bring the full force of the U.S. military to handle a few boats and mean tweets. Forget all the countries out there literally chanting “Death to America,” or the ones with indicted war criminals invading their neighbors, let’s get the one with, you know, some drug boats.

And then there was Greenland. I thought it was a joke. One of those things Trump throws out to distract from his more serious mafia shakedowns. But no, he really means to take Greenland. To be fair, I’m not against the idea of the U.S. owning Greenland. (Or is it Iceland?) I do see it as a strategic resource worth having. But the current U.S. strategy is absolutely pathetic. And the president’s rambling dementia speech at Davos was equally pathetic. When are people going to start throwing shoes at him in these world events?

That’s already old news, though. Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota is the hot topic now. There have been not one but two state-sponsored executions of U.S. citizens by ICE (or DHS?) agents in Islamist terrorist masks. Normally I’m relatively pro-law enforcement, but not so much when they’re getting their uniforms and tactics from Al-Qaeda.

Normally I’d be talking about waiting for an investigation to run its course. But there’s not going to be any investigations because the feds put their laughably made-up investigation results out in public within minutes, smeared the victims, covered up and buried the evidence (except, you know, all the video), and no doubt have their autopens ready to sign blanket pardons for any agents involved. And–I’m speculating here–I can only assume they’ve given the assassins a big pay bonus. It’s hysterically, ludicrously, over-the-top corrupt, anti-democratic, and anti-Constitutional.

I haven’t even mentioned the “Board of Peace,” which could not possibly sound more like a criminal Legion of Doom if they tried. I mean, they extended an invitation to the aforementioned indicted war criminal invading its neighbor.

And I don’t even want to think about what ol’ Dementia Donny might be scripting for the Iran chapter of his ongoing reality show, what with all the U.S. military assets steaming for the Arabian Sea. I’m sure that’s waiting on standby to blow up the news cycle if things get too sticky in Minnesota.

Anyway. I’d love to look at the Republican viewpoint and consider it with reasonable reflection. I honestly tried to find some independently verifiable official evidence (i.e. not a tweet or a TikTok)–anything that would sway a reasonable person–that Operation Metro Surge had done anything positive in Minnesota, but it’s really hard to find.

But in the interest of fairness, I will report that I found a DHS press release from December 4, 2025 that identified twelve “criminal illegal aliens” arrested in Operation Metro Surge after four days. One of whom was “driving under the influence.” Worst of the worst, yo. (To be fair, most cited more serious crimes.)

And here’s another press release from December 5, 2025 listing seven more arrests. And from December 12, 2025, ten more. (Renee Goode was executed on January 7, then DHS went into press release overdrive. Perhaps they thought that murdering U.S. citizens wasn’t the lasting legacy of Operation Metro Surge they wanted to leave, a crime so heinous that one might possibly consider labeling such things the “worst of the worst.”) January 8, 2026, 13 more. January 12, 2026, 10 more. January 13, 2026, 6 more. January 14, 2026, 6 more. January 15, 2026, 5 more. January 16, 2026, 12 more. January 19, 2026, 13 more. January 20, 2026, 10 more. January 22, 2026, 10 more. January 23, 2026, 8 more.

To be clear, I’m not sad to deport most of those folks. That would be my preference, all things being equal. Especially if they’re already in jail… I can’t see the logic of a state refusing to turn over the people already in jail, but I also don’t know all the facts of that because everything is so distorted right now.

But I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine if any of those press releases are true and verifiable. Given the pack of lies this administration normally spews on a daily basis, it’s impossible to believe anything they report anymore. (I will leave unsaid my vague suspicions that I saw the same mug shot photo more than once in those press releases, probably due to mistakes from this mistake-prone administration.)

I’ll also leave it to the reader to decide if deporting those so-called “worst of the worst” (those damn drunk drivers!) is worth the cost of tearing up communities, trampling our Constitutional rights, and murdering activists with impunity.

There is some reporting that the administration is unhappy with the PR of their agents carrying out mafia-style executions of U.S. citizens on the streets, and they may be changing course in Minnesota, so that’s some good news I guess.

And that’s how we’re ending this blog post. Have a great day!