Crowfall
Regularly Playing: June 2019 Edition
To Those Remaining
I continue to truck along happily in Dragalia Lost and especially now that I have my Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 there is rarely a night that goes by that I don’t at a minimum play through my dailies. I’ve said this before but there is a release cadence of content that keeps me engaged and the fact that another character summon is just around the corner. The whole summoning process feels much better than that Wyrmprints have been completely removed from the mix. After playing effectively the entire time I have gathered up a good stable of five star characters that I have not even bothered leveling yet. I still sorta wish there was a switch version. If you have read the blog over the last few days you will know that I am fully engaged with Diablo 3 right now. Last night I attempted to farm some more chests but sleep claimed me. I am however on a mission to get the Avarice Conquest and will get there sooner or later. I love Diablo 3 so much and while I fade in and out of its focus… I will always sooner or later return to it. While I am not playing a ton of it… I am still very much engaged with Final Fantasy XIV and am looking forward to the upcoming head start on June 28th for Shadowbringers the next expansion. Pretty excited especially considering the drastic class changes that I think will lead to a more accessible environment. Right now the plan is to level the Samurai through the story quests and then level Warrior with Dungeon Finder given that Tank queues are a breeze. I’ve always done it the other way around and I think a lot of what leads to my burn out is trying to claw my way up to level as a DPS when I could simply go the easy route and level through the story. While I am not playing it a ton I am still fairly engaged with Magic the Gathering Arena and the War of the Spark expansion seems to be pretty interesting. We talked a bit about this on the podcast but I am really wishing they would make it so that constructed is a format that is always available for play, given that is probably my favorite of the “event” types. It also serves as an amazing way to obtain cards from a specific set.To The New and Returning
I did a lengthy post about this the other day but I am starting to play Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night which is as close as we will probably ever get to a proper Symphony of the Night sequel. While I only have the E3 demo version right now, I will be getting access to the full thing on my birthday… June 18th and plan on picking it up for pretty much every console that it will be available for. It is likely going to be a toss up between Switch and PC as to which version I actually play the most. With the Season of Opulence starting I believe today… I’ve been poking my head back into Destiny 2 of late to try and reacquaint myself with the way that the game as a whole feels. I completely missed the Season of the Drifter because I was off doing other things, and the start of a new Season seems to be a good time to get engaged again. I still very much love the game but at this point am so far behind that I am not exactly sure what the most ideal catch up mechanic would be. This is the problem with Destiny as a whole is that there isn’t a painfully obvious way to gain a ton of light levels quickly. I’ve also of late been spending a significant amount of time playing Elder Scrolls Online. A new expansion released and it has made me want to start playing again… in spite of not actually being willing to start the new content. Instead I am working my way through Vvardenfell… aka two expansions ago? The game is pretty great and ends up filling the same niche that Star Wars the Old Republic does… in that I mostly want to come in and gobble up a bunch of story content and then wander off.To Those Departing
Grim Dawn
I know I will revisit this game again, but for now I am not playing it and it leaves the list. Based on screenshot evidence I seem to have stopped playing sometime mid April. Still a really great game and I expect to get the itch at some point in the near future… but being engaged with Diablo 3 again mostly pushed it off the table.Marvel Future Fight
I played this a significant amount of time for a short period of time… and now find it really hard to get back into it. I feel like I hit the free to play wall where I have done as much of the content as I want to do before needing to spend a significant chunk of money. The grind set in and all of the things that would offer advancement require either a lot of money or a lot of time.Mortal Kombat 11
Going forward I am going to try to filter titles like this off the list in part because there are a lot of things that I play furiously for a weekend and then never play again. Mortal Kombat 11 was one of these and while I fully expect to return to it periodically it isn’t really worthy of the moniker of “regularly playing”. Its still a really cool game and you should check it out especially when it goes on sale.Outward
This again is another example of a game that probably shouldn’t have made it onto the list since I played it obsessively for a few nights and then never again. I’m going to start an honorable mentions section below for some of the games where I play in this manner because I have a few of them this month as well.Star Wars the Old Republic
I came in… I gobbled up the entire Eternal Throne storyline and then wandered off once I started the content immediately following that. I have no clue why I suddenly stopped playing but I did. I expect honestly at some point soon to add this back to the list especially with a new full expansion on the way. I still really like this game and am happy it found its feet post launch. I would love more of the content along the lines of Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne because both were phenomenal.Honorable Mentions
Again for those who didn’t read all of the blurbs above, this is a section I am adding in part because every month there are a handful of titles that I play furiously for a few days and then wander away from. They don’t really deserve the title of “regularly playing” but they are also worth noting. While there is actually a game here I am not entirely certain if it is a game I want to play. This is something I have been poking my head in to check on since the backer alpha began. I had a few fun nights with it but more or less have consigned it to hibernation once again. I have no clue how much of this I will be playing. I randomly installed it and started playing a few weekends back after watching a series of videos on it by Gaijin Hunter. It is a really cool game and I think it might be something that I could settle into as a bizarre “what if capcom had made skyrim” experience. Not quite ready to add it to the regularly playing list, will see if it returns by the end of the month. I had a lot of fun with this game right around the time of launch and then I wandered away… and am not exactly sure why? I really need to get back to playing it and at least make my way through the main story. I get easily distracted when it comes to gaming and I am guessing me getting into World of Warcraft Classic beta was the shiny object that caused this one. And… last but definitely not least… we have World of Warcraft Classic the aforementioned shiny object. This is coming in as an honorable mention and not a regularly playing in part because I have forcefully pulled myself away from it. This game launches officially in August and given the amount of time you need to spend leveling in this game… I don’t see a point in burning myself out before that point. We are completely nonsense and are going to be making an attempt at 40 player raiding again. I will give more information about this as time gets closer. However for now it claims a spot on the Honorable Mentions.AggroChat #253 – Thiamine and Riboflavin
Featuring: Â Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
So just a heads up we had some technical difficulty while recording the show. Â Apparently the server that we use to record on was slowly dying throughout the night and culminated in a grand crescendo at the end with us all getting disconnected. Â As a result we cut off abruptly. In between these issues however we talk about Final Fantasy XIV Live Letter and the upcoming class changes. Bel talks about how Crowfall is turning into a game and feels like less of a tech demo than it did. Â Tam talks about Total War Three Kingdoms. We discuss the madness that happened after last weeks show and lots more people signing on to the World of Warcraft Classic madness. We wrap up with a topic about some of the cool stuff Games Workshop is doing.
Topics Discussed:
- …. Pation
- Final Fantasy XIV Live Letter
- Class Changes
- Benchmark
- Crowfall is Actually A Game
- Nostalgia for Corpse Runs
- Eve Offline Skill Progression
- Thalen Wants a Survival Game that Cares about Correct Nutrition
- Total War: Three Kingdoms
- Another Romance of the Kingdoms
- World of Warcraft Classic
- More of AggroChat joins this madness
- Games Workshop Continues to be Decent
- Awesome new shading paint
- Contrast Paint
- Abrupt Cut Off
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Falling Crows and Ghost Moose
This weekend I largely set out to do one sequence of things… but instead of actually accomplishes it I spend a good chunk of the weekend piddling around in the Palace of the Dead. Â For those keeping score at home I am on a mission to get all of my classes to 50. Â Last week I pushed Summoner/Scholar and Black Mage and as a result this weekend I started in on my Dark Knight in an attempt to shift things up a bit. Â Originally I was not super keep in Dark Knight as a tanking class, but I have to say after having played a lot of it during this grind it is definitely growing on me. Â Last night while watching Talking Dead I managed to hit level 46 which means I have roughly 8 more runs of floors 51-60 before pushing this class to 50 as well. Â Up until around 42 I seemed to still be getting most of a level every single trip into the dungeon, but at that point it shifted to getting roughly half of a level so I guess that is something to note as you push your own characters. Â After the Dark Knight I am more than likely going to start up with the Ninja given that it is my next highest class sitting at 38. Â That will leave Monk, Astrologian and Machinist… Â the later two I still have yet to even accept the introductory quests. Â In part I am focused on the goal of 50, because up until that point the levels in PotD seem completely reasonable. Â The 50-60 grind however seems to take almost as much time as the 1-50 does, so in theory… Â when I actually pick up doing that side of the equation I will begin with my Bard who is already sitting at level 55.
In other weird weekend news… I apparently am now in the Crowfall pre-alpha?  I talked a bit about it on AggroChat this week, if you are interested in more of my thoughts.  Normally I would be posting a “Crowfall Impressions” post, because that seems to be the sort of thing I do when I get my hands on a new game.  Unfortunately I am not really sure if I have a full post worth of feelings about the game.  It is very alpha for start, so it feels like it isn’t exactly fair to really give the game anything resembling a review.  That said… they are doing an alpha with zero NDA so I feel completely free to at least talk a little about the game.  As I described it to my friends…  Crowfall is in fact a piece of software that I installed and that offers the ability to launch when I click in the patcher.  Past that I am not exactly sure what is going on in the game, and I am not really sure that I felt anything close to fun during the hour and a half that I spent grinding away to make a basic set of armor and weapons.  It doesn’t really feel like there is much game yet, and maybe the murder box that is the PVP servers are more enjoyable.  However based on the apparently cross shard server chat, it sounds like there is just a lot of spawn camping and ganking going on there.  The big challenge I had was that there was simply not much to actually fight in the PVE server, and when I did find a boar or a bizarre crystalline cat my hud would lock up on loot allowing other players to come swoop in and harvest the leather and meat on the thing I just killed.  Right now the game feels less fleshed out than Landmark did when it opened its doors to early access.  It feels like it is trying to do a lot of things but I am not entirely certain if those things blend all that well.
Now in the “I want my Sunday back” territory… Â I logged in yesterday morning to work on my Archaeology questline in World of Warcraft. Â Of note… it has been 181 days since the launch of Legion according to the handy google “days since” query ability. Â The last two weeks have been the very first occasion to actually complete the Laying to Rest archaeology quest that rewards the Spirit of Echero mount. Â The last thing I really wanted to do was go grind arch nodes until I collected 600 moose bones… Â but then again I thought to myself if I ever wanted this mount I should probably do it now, since who the hell knows when it will be available again. Â I am not really sure how long it took in minutes… but I started watching Sword Art Online again somewhere during the first 100 bones… and I was able to watch three episodes in their entirety and started the fourth before I collected number 600. Â It was a slog of a grind, and while I am happy it is done… Â it feels like maybe a waste of time given that I am never likely going to ride the mount anyways. Â I chock this one up to simple and honest fear of missing out… because if I didn’t get it there might be a version of myself someday that wishes I had. Â Regardless it is done, but the second I turned in the quest I stuck around long enough to take the above screenshot and then bolted quickly from the game. Â In other happenings at some point during the grind I hit 800 Archaeology so that was at least something cool that happened as well as finishing up the Handle With Care achievement.