Okay folks, this is Topic Brainstorming week for Blapril 2020, and I thought I would use that as an opportunity to talk about one of the things that I have traditionally done where I update you all on what I have been regularly playing. I use this opportunity as a time to update the sidebar of the blog and talk about my feelings about some of the games that are in heavy rotation. I have been exceptionally bad at keeping this updated over the last few months, but that isn’t really a new thing either because I have gone through serious lapses before. The idea is that you have a dialog with your readers and talk about what has been going on in your gaming life. This topic could be adopted to pretty much any subject, talk about movies you have been watching, music you have been listening to or any number of other hobbies.
Since this is mostly a gaming blog I have simply chosen to call that aspect of my life out, and as such I talk about the games that are new to the list, the games that are still in regular rotation and the games that are departing the list. Last edition of this feature I also included the “ships passing in the night” feature where I talk about games that I have been enjoying but that won’t really have much staying power.
To Those Remaining
Destiny 2 – PC
Destiny sweet Destiny… I am not sure what is going on between us. You right now are hanging by a thread and are just barely making the list. I am not sure what it is about the seasonal format but it actually disincentives me from playing, because deep down I know I won’t have the staying power to unlock everything and squeeze every last drop of good from the season before it expires. I think mostly I just have a problem with expiring content. If the seasonal content allowed me toe work through it at my own pace like something along the lines of Elder Scrolls Online, I would feel significantly better about playing Destiny on a regular basis because it doesn’t feel quite so much like wasted effort. I hope they re-evaluate the seasonal formula and make the additions to the game stick around a little longer. If they maybe give you three seasons to complete the content before it expires that might go a long way towards making this feel like a better experience.
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch
I had an awful lot of fun at the beginning of the season hanging out with Grace and Byx and have since then sorta faded away. Diablo 3 is never really far from my mind however and I am sure at some point I will finish building a reasonable set and push toward the end goal. I did at least get the 4 chapters of the seasonal journey knocked out, but Set Dungeon Mastery right now is what is holding me up because it is the one step I hate doing each season. I end up delaying it until I finally can’t anymore and now it is holding up two separate seasons journey ranks. I just really don’t like being on a timer when I am gaming.
To The New and Returning
Animal Crossing New Horizons – Switch
This is effectively my very first Animal Crossing game, and as a result there has been a mountain of knowledge that I needed to climb in very short order in order to figure out what the hell was going on behind the various mechanics. This is a game that is exceptionally bad at explaining itself, and really this should have been their “Monster Hunter World” moment, because given that the Switch is an extremely popular console makes it attractive to a whole new generation of players. This should have been the title that they added a bit more scaffolding to the game in order to hand hold you through the process of engagement. There are so many things that I have had to take to external sources to figure out, and I feel like maybe some hand holding would have been nice at least to have an option to say “Hey I am a First Timer, Explain to me like I am 5 Years Old”. All of that said it is adorable and while I am not playing with the length I was in those first few days I am at least logging in each day to move the bar forward a bit.
Atom RPG – PC
This one is making this part of the list because I feel like there is a lot more here to explore. I have not finished the game, and I want to spend time once other things calm down a bit getting back in and roaming around. Essentially this poorly named game is “What if Fallout 1 and 2 were Russian themed and came out recently”. It is a re-imagining of the Fallout genre and plays like you remember those games playing, which is to say it plays much better than they do if you were to buy a copy from GOG and play it today. It can be brutally hard, and I seem to have more issue with ammunition than I remember having back in the day, but it did serve for several fun nights of gaming and I want to return to it.
Wolcen – PC
While I have not been playing this a lot recently, there is still a lot of meat on these bones and I want to return to it. Wolcen has released a bunch of patches and tweaks since I last played and it will be interesting to see if my tanky spin to win build is still functional. Wolcen is the best Diablo game we have gotten in recent memory and does a great job of sorta cherry picking the best features of both Diablo 3 and Path of Exile… in a formula that feels closer to D3. Essentially it is a recipe for what I like in an ARPG, but I realize for the folks that hold Diablo 2 up in high esteem it might not be their jam. I wish this was available on the Switch because as much as I like playing D3 from the bedroom… if this supported cross save and allowed me to progress my character while chilling out horizontally… this would become my new sleepy time jam.
Ships Passing in the Night
Star Wars Galaxies – Legends Server – PC
In the months since January I have been on a bit of a MMORPG Emulator server binge. The first of these was Star Wars Galaxies because my good friend Tam got into the game heavily, as it was one of his nostalgia jams from the past. For him this was a great experience about space combat in the Star Wars universe. Since I do not really like flight simulators, it was less enjoyable, but I did greatly appreciate the first few levels that felt similar to a WoW or an Everquest 2. Unfortunately once you have finished the first ten levels and the game opens up… this helpful scaffolding falls away and the “real” game was far less enjoyable for me. What was there instead was slow progression and the unpredictable difficulty curves that I remember from Everquest. I was happy that Tam was having so much fun, but I was a bit saddened that I really was not.
City of Heroes – Homecoming Server – PC
This lead me down a path towards one of my nostalgic remembrances… and the game I was likely playing while Tam was playing SWG… City of Heroes. I had so much fun with this game and for the full nostalgia trip, I opted to play a Katana/Regeneration Scrapper. The game itself was way different than I remember it being, but not in a bad way. The homecoming server effectively is picking up where the game left off when it was shuttered, meaning it is several years worth of patches past the point at which I actually left off playing. For the most part the game holds up well unlike SWG or Everquest, and I could see myself maybe returning to it at some point in the future when I am not deluged with other games I want to be playing.
Everquest – EZ Server – PC
Eventually this path of madness lead me back to the progenitor of MMORPG gaming (for me at least), Everquest. I tried a few different server options and eventually landed on EZ Server, which is a super fast progression and super low difficulty Everquest experience that lets me play tourist and revisit areas I loved in the game without having to deal with finding a group. I realize this largely defeats the purpose of Everquest, but I also don’t have the time or patience that I did when I first played this game, and as a result I am down for cheat mode. It was a lot of fun for about a week and then I wandered away like a bored toddler. I might return the next time I get nostalgic about Norrath, given how hard I have found it to ease back into Everquest II.
Mars: War Logs – PC
This is the third game by Spiders that I have played and it suffers from a lot of the same problems. However still like Greedfall and Technomancer there is something about the gameplay that I find compelling. They all sorta play like low rent Bioware titles, but they are doing a thing that Bioware no longer seems to be doing which makes me interested in them nonetheless. Mars: War Logs was the first game in a series that continued with Technomancer, and I could definitely see some merit in playing this game first because it does introduce parts of the Mars setting that never get explored fully in the sequel. That said it is a much more primitive gaming experience, and while I enjoyed it I could see a lot of the awkwardness turning others off. If you want to experience a spiders game and have never done so… probably start with Greedfall and see if it leaves you wanting more before diving in deeper.
The Touryst – Switch
This game was in heavy rotation for me for about a week and then once again as is my usual I wandered away like a bored toddler. It is really charming and interesting, and I liked the pace of feeling like I accomplished something each day. What I did not love about it were how many precision jumps that were required to complete some of the puzzles. The basics of the game is that you are visiting an archipelago and each island has a different them, as well as a central puzzle to solve in how to unlock its shrine. There is no real combat, and if you fail something you start over immediately at the beginning of the room that you are in so it allows you to fail fast and rapidly iterate through ideas. The voxel theme is a lot of what makes the game charming, and the engine that is running it is among the more impressive ones available on the switch. The lighting, the animations, the subtle details all add to the feel of it being a living and breathing world.
Doom (2016) – PC
It only took me four years… but I finally buckled down and finished my play through of Doom 2016 in anticipation of the release of Doom Eternal. It was a fun if nonsensical ride through a world of exploding demon corpses. I had an awful lot of fun pushing through the final bits of the game and would definitely suggest it to anyone who loved the earlier era and arcade shooters. I’ve not really had a chance to dig into Doom Eternal but it also seems to be a similar style of enjoyment. Right now I am buried under a bunch of games and I need to dig out before I really tackle anything else.
World of Warcraft – Retail – PC
During the crisis we currently find ourselves in… I’ve struggled to allow myself to sink into the warm embrace of a video game. I’ve had trouble disconnecting mentally enough to really allow myself to engage fully with another universe. As a result I have been in desperate need of something that I could more or less play while at the same time shutting off my brain and just giving it time to rest. World of Warcraft fits that bill perfectly because all of the patterns of engagement are more or less muscle memory at this point. I’ve been taking advantage of the experience bonus currently going on in game and the speed of leveling is pure nonsense. I took my Horde Paladin from 110-120 in a few days and hit 118 before I had finished the first zone I chose to go through, Zuldazar. Now that I have that character at 120 I am swapping over to pushing up my Warlock, while at the same time dipping my head in periodically to gobble up any upgrades from World Quests. I’ve also leveled my Paladin on Alliance side as well, since it was the closest to the level cap… and am in the process of working my way towards unlocking the allied races.
Summary
When I allow myself to go more than one month without an update it ends up being this mammoth post as I have a bunch of things that I feel like I need to talk about. My hope is that I can get back in the swing of doing these early in each month. I find it helpful to sorta clear the slate each month and talk about what is and is not seeing play time. There are a lot of games that I might play, but ultimately don’t feel like dedicating one of my daily posts to, and this gives me the space to address those.
I’ve been continuing down a particular path to madness, and yesterday instead of pushing the cleric I opted to get some other characters started. The idea being that maybe at some point soon I can link them all up and run around together. I’ve never played a Berzerker in Everquest 1 in spite of it seeming like a class right down my alley. I did for a bit play one in EQ2 and it was a fairly enjoyable heavily AOE focused melee class. I opted to go with a Vahshir, though in truth I probably should have gone for Dwarf with the idea of making it smallish for when I am running around with a pack of characters following behind me. I knew I absolutely had no interest in having my line of sight blocked by a Troll, Barbarian or Ogre.
Once again I did the same general treatment for leveling. I focused on killing Giant Skeletons from 1-10 while attempting to complete most of a set of the “noobie” armor. After that I transitioned to fungoids in Paladul caverns where I completed a full set of the “Wrath” armor which is the Kunark armor set for the class. When I transitioned to Castle Mistmoore however it also appears to be dropping Wrath, so maybe there was not a Berzerker set for the Velious factions that ever went into the game? From what I can tell the drops are something like this on average:
Field of Bone Giant Skeletons – Noobie Armor Set
Paladul Caverns Fungoids/Oasis of Marr Orcs and Crocs – Kunark Armor Set
Castle Mistmoore – Kael Drakkal Faction Armor Set
Dulak’s Harbor – Planes of Power Armor Set
I am hoping that once I push up into Dulak’s harbor that a new armor set appears for Berzerkers since there seems to not be one for the Velious chunk of the push. I have no clue why I obsess over collecting a full set before moving on, because the second I get the new set I am tossing out most of the pieces of the old set. I am keeping a handful of the items that have interesting clicky spells on them, even though I probably won’t even need them on a server that isn’t balanced around traditional play of the game.
For the next member of my team I went ahead and stubbed out a Gnome Rogue, thinking that is probably the most innocuous character to be following me around. Rogues do a lot of damage and I think the roombas can be controlled to always stay in the back arc of the target doing that sweet sweet backstab damage. I am mostly focusing on melee damage and at some point I might swap the cleric out for a Paladin, because I hear that for the most part high level Paladins do enough AOE healing to the group to more or less ignore the need of traditional healer role. The funny thing about this is that it feels like I am building a Final Fantasy V party.
Right now I am thinking the group comp is going to look a little something like this:
Iksar Shadowknight – Main Tank (active character)
Dwarf Cleric or Paladin – Main Healer/Splash Healer
Vahshir Berzerker – Melee Dps
Gnome Rogue – Melee Dps
Halfling Ranger – Melee Dps and buffs
High Elf Enchanter – Buffs and High End Pet Damage
The ranged dps classes feel like they would be just too fiddly when controlling them through scripts. Melee on the other hand tends to be “hug the butt” of the monster and spam melee attacks, which seems like a much more viable option. The enchanter supposedly does massive amounts of damage from their pets at high end and there is also haste buffs that are worth having. I probably want to run that up with some other character though because I imagine enchanter is going to be even more annoying to level than the cleric has been so far. The traditional call for tank would have been a Warrior, but quite frankly I enjoy playing a Shadowknight more than a Warrior in Everquest.
It is election day for me as my state is part of Super Tuesday, and as a result this post is going to be fairly short and to the point. Last night I did a thing, and that thing was deciding to roll a healer on a new account so that I could at some day sort out how to do the MQ2 thing and have a tiny healing roomba following me. I took a real trip down memory lane and decided to skew the naming convention of “BELG” something and instead recreated my original main from Everquest. Exeteroth the Dwarven Cleric. During the early days of the internet my OG handle was Exeter, and I don’t have a glorious reason for it other than the fact that it would fit into a name slot on the NES version of Ultima.
In D&D I always liked playing Clerics because they seemed self sufficient. You could turn one into a decent melee character, they could wear decent armor, and they had access to spells that could heal themselves in a pinch. My jam was always rolling a Cleric of Tyr because that gave me access to Bastard Swords. So when I ventured forth into Everquest and saw that Clerics could wear plate armor and use two handed maces… I thought hey… I will be able to relive this battle-priest fantasy. Only to find out that the life of a cleric is living in a party and casting the same spell over and over from the moment you get it at 39. The alternative was to find an area where you could control your surroundings and root/nuke until something fell over and repeat this with breaks in between to regenerate your mana.
The EZ Server experience thankfully is way more reasonable than that as they seem to have scaled up combat on all of the epic weapons even the “support” ones. I am effectively just running around and meleeing things down and the noobie item is keeping me alive during the process. Last night I made it to level 10 and started in on Paladul Caverns, which is the alternate zone to Oasis of Marr in their leveling curve. This is a significantly better choice as all of the fungoids can drop the Kunark armor sets as opposed to the Orcs and Crocs of which there are WAY fewer spawns. Additionally by the time Luclin came around, Sony got way better at building hunting camps as opposed to a bunch of randomly roaming monsters.
One thing I an consistently impressed by is just how damned good we had it with it came to third party map support for Everquest. Even though I have map files in game, I still find myself referring back to EQ Atlas and the old grid paper and color pencil maps. I chose to include Butcherblock Mountains given that it is my old stomping ground as a Dwarf Cleric and it also is a fairly square map which would show up here when embedded in a reasonable manner. The map for Paladul Caverns where I was actually hunting last night is a long mess of a thing, which would just translate to a blog post weirdly. I remember having bunch of these printed out and in a binder so I could check them while I was furiously running across a dangerous zone.
The thing is… while I have nostalgia about being weak and small in a large and dangerous world… I don’t find that I actually want to return to it. I like knowing that I am more or less safe to walk away from the keyboard at any point and if I die there will be absolutely nothing lost other than a run back to wherever I happened to be hunting. I like being able to go off and do whatever the hell suits my fancy without needing to somehow convince five to six other people to want to do the same thing. I also don’t miss sitting around and doing nothing because we either didn’t have enough people on or nobody would take the initiative and decide what was going to happen that evening. While I loved Everquest for what it is… what I want now is a modern game set in this rich universe. I also love Everquest II, but it has a myriad of its own problems. Norrath however is too rich of a setting to let it wither away and not take advantage of the IP with fresh new games.
First off sorry for missing a post on Friday. If you don’t follow me on twitter you likely missed my announcement that one was not going to happen. Essentially I have been fighting some nasty flu-like crud and wound up staying home from work both Thursday and Friday. Were I not under the gun for several deliverable I might also stay home today because while I am feeling significantly better I am in no way 100% and it is the stupid stuff like the long walk into the building that I am dreading. This unnamed crud came with a general sense of weakness and an ability to make pretty much all food sound nasty and unappealing. I am hoping that I am back on the mend and can start to get on with life, but at least for a bit I will be moving a little slower and wearing out a little faster.
To go with this need for something slower paced I found it extremely hard to stay alive while playing Wolcen due to my sluggish reflexes and I wound up venturing back into the Everquest Emulator and landing on another server that one of my coworkers had talked about. “EZ Server” seemed like a neon sign calling out to me in a foggy night, and I proceeded to make an Iksar Shadowknight and had a glorious time wandering around the area surrounding Cabalis and leveling normally. It was only when I created a second character, a Halfling Ranger that I realized I was completely missing part of the experience. Instead of Riverdale I arrived in Surefall Glade that was set up completely as a newbie town with a greatly condensed set of vendors and npcs and the ability to port from there to anywhere else in the game.
So I proceeded to set forth about fixing this and ran from Cabalis to Warslicks Woods to The Overthere which apparently is a full pvp zone on the server and flagged me as soon as I entered. From there I took the Plane of Knowledge book and transitioned to North Qeynos and then Qeynos Hills eventually running all of the way to Surefall Glade. This was a run I was fairly unfamiliar with because I was a Freeport kid and had never started anything on the Qeynos side of the pond. Thankfully Allakhazam has a page of directions on how to get between a bunch of locations which came in handy. It was shortly after arriving at town that I decided to start goggling the server to find more information, and trying to determine why it had kept telling me that I really should be using the Underfoot or Rain of Fear 2 client and not Titanium.
During the googling I also found these charming and quirky server tutorials. Essentially EZ Server is exactly the opposite of Project 1999. While 99 wants a pure original game experience and takes actions to stop anyone from being able to run more than one character at a time… EZ Server goes to the other extreme and has added a bunch of new content that effectively requires you to be botting to be able to get through. I am not sure yet if I will be playing long enough to go down that rabbit hole but they support some software called MacroQuest 2 which effectively allows you to remotely control your “roombas” as the server guides refer to your bot accounts. For now I am just enjoying poking around in zones that I remember while being powerful enough to pretty much solo them. It was a trip roaming around Castle Mistmore and soloing my way through it.
They have also done some nonsense of editing zone drops and offer up a specific set of level range bounded quests to lead you to these specific zones. For example the Field of Bone Giant Skeletons for some reason drop a full set of newbie armor, that is way higher statted than anything else you could possibly hope to get at that range and a quest sends you there to kill ten of them. From there they loaded up the Orcs and Crocs in Oasis of Marr with the Kurns Castle era armor set…. and the orcs tend to drop 4 pieces at a time but you are still battling RNG to try and sort out a full set. The chain goes form there to Castle Mistmore where everything is dropping the Kael Drakkal faction armor sets and I managed to hang out there and collect most of a full set of Malevolent gear. Now I am in Dulak’s Harbor and the gear dropping appears to be from the Plane of Tranquility quests from the Planes of Power expansion and I am currently missing only a few slots for a full set of that.
Prior to me figuring out what I was missing from the experience, I spent an awful lot of time roaming around Kunark and a good deal of that killing Forest Giants in Warslicks Woods. There is just something enjoyable about killing Giants in Everquest… and I have been contemplating taking a trip over to Kael Drakkal and seeing if I can hunt there yet. Some of my fondest memories involve hanging out in that zone for hours hunting giants and collecting gear for the Thurgadin armor quests. As a cleric at the time… that meant a lot of me casting the same spell over and over but hanging out and chatting was enjoyable enough. I am trying to decide if I want to create my first “roomba” as a cleric to roam around with and heal me, or if I would rather have something like a druid. In Everquest II my power combo is my Iksar Shadowknight and my Wood Elf Warden, which has allowed me to solo a bunch of just slightly below my level content.
No trip down Kunark’s memory lane would be complete without a trip into Dalnir, to visit the angriest of sperm. I did fairly well in here until I got swarmed by frickin gnomes and died. The joy of playing on EZ Server is that death is effectively meaningless. You port back to your bind point, which is now in Surefall Glade in the Newbie town and don’t have to care about doing a corpse run. The newbie vendor in town sells things like Gate Potions for no cost allowing you to pretty much “hearth” at any time you like. This weekend I found the experience of roaming around and chasing armor sets to be extremely enjoyable, but I have a feeling that once I am no longer quite this sick the pace will feel way too slow for me and I will move on once again. It is making me want to patch up Everquest II and poke my head back in there again however.
