I didn’t think I had a post for today and then suddenly I did. Today is the day that Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem leaves Steam Early Access and officially releases. This has been a day that I have been waiting for and quite honestly it snuck up on me. I’ve talked about Wolcen before, but for the uninitiated it is an ARPG in the style of Diablo 3 from the eponymous Wolcen Studio from Nice, France. It began its life as a Kickstarter for a game called Umbra, which shifted into the game that has been available on Steam in Early Access for the last few years. In the time it has been on my radar it has changed significantly and morphed into a really enjoyable gameplay experience. It is a game where you more or less “build your own class”, and the initial decision that you make on character creation can be undone and changed at pretty much any point during the process.
Your character is effectively made of up three components, the first being the gear that you wear. This gear gives you specific stats that will ultimately dictate whether or not you can equip specific abilities. Through gearing you can choose to go all in on a more melee tanky warrior build like I have, or split down the middle and maybe focus on Strength and Agility both to do more of a tricksy light fighter with some ranged abilities. The third component is a complicated sphere grid style talent tree which allows you to rotate sections of it to match up what is your ideal build. I would say it is less complicated than Path of Exile, but definitely less straight forward than Diablo 3 skills.
The biggest change since I first started playing back in February of 2018, is that the game has a proper story line with what appears to be a rich and interesting world. I admit to date I have purposefully limited my play time with the thought of wanting to be able to experience the game proper once it finally and officially releases. At first glance though the storyline has deep undercurrents of feeling similar to that of Tyranny, which ranks among my favorite RPGs. You start out potentially not one of the good guys, and through actions completely out of your control are branded a pariah by your own people. You travel your path with two companions and I am curious to see how the intertwining story arcs play out in the end.
Since release appears to have come with a character wipe, I plan on playing around tonight and restarting the mostly tanky character that I had been playing previously. This means likely my adventures in Star Wars Galaxies and my play through of Mars: War Logs will be put on hold for a bit. In my experience in playing a lot of the games waiting in the wings all vying for the Diablo crown, this is the one that was the most promising. Others like Last Epoch are on fundamentally flawed ground and still more like Torchlight III formerly Frontiers are still gestating. For the time being however this is probably the best new Diablo game we are going to get at least until the release of Diablo 4. I know Grace has access to Wolcen as well and I am hoping to see how good or bad the group play is at some point once she finally gets internet again.
Yesterday a brand new trailer arrived in honor of the release day and it hints at some of the story elements. The game itself is roughly $30 on Steam and in my humble opinion well worth picking up if you like Action Role-playing Games.
I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out what to write today and quite frankly I have nothing much to say about anything. I played some SWG Legends last night and turned in a bunch of fractaline in Destiny 2, but past that I didn’t do anything of significance to talk about. I also find that I have no real inspiration as far as topics to branch out into. The last few days have been a struggle to get through and as such you are getting a picture of Josie fighting with a box to tide you over until actual content arrives. Hell maybe the content is hiding in the box that she is fighting with.
I'm having one of those spells where my brain is trying to convince me that no one actually likes me and at best barely tollerates me and any evidence to the contrary must be wrong
Late Monday night I tweeted a thing out, and I am still more or less in this mental space which is making it super hard to be creative or thoughtful about anything. I appreciate the support that folks have shown me, but like… I am in a place where that almost makes it worse? I had an interesting talk with my friend Lyle aka @x1101 that put it into perspective as he struggles with it as well. I’ve known for awhile that I battle with impostor syndrome at work, because on some level I expect to be unmasked as a fraud and failure at every turn. He said that this whole feeling that I am having… is basically impostor syndrome but for friendships. That in the same way that I don’t think I have skills, I also don’t think I am worthy of friendship.
When I have these doubts I don’t share them because I want positive reinforcement, because really that doesn’t work in the way that you would think it works. I share them largely because I want the other people out there who are struggling with their own mental and emotional prisons to know that they are not alone. I’ve been told that I am someone that people entering the blogging community find intimidating. Like I am someone who has their shit together and such and seemingly is not easy to approach with comments or ideas. While I do not at all get this, because in my head I am nothing… I have heard it enough times to know that it is apparently a thing.
So my hope is that when I share my doubts with you my readers and my own challenges, that maybe it makes your challenges feel a little more normal. I have a few friends that suffer from some of the same issues that I have, and have built a sort of virtual family of folks who understand me at a deeper level than I am worth understanding. It feels good to not be alone and to have friend who get at a fundamental level when I have to bail on some activity because I just can’t handle human interaction right now. My hope is by dredging up these demons and putting them out on display that maybe it helps someone out there too.
… in a Galaxy Far Far Away there was a game that was beloved by a group of players for the sort of things that it allowed them to do. I was not one of those players. While I beta tested Star Wars Galaxies, I somehow missed actually playing the game when it was in its heyday. At the time it came out I was somewhere between my pre-World of Warcraft scrawl of games which were Dark Age of Camelot, Horizon: Empire if Istaria, and City of Heroes. The return to what seemed like a more Everquest experience and combat system did not seem at all interesting to me, and I was buffered by the fact that none of my active gaming group at the time were playing it either. However in the years since I feel like I missed a pivotal gaming experience.
Some years back I heard about an emulator server called SWG Legends, but at the time it was a less than retail experience and one largely that required you to know what you were doing before really being able to mess with it properly. Seeing as I never played retail I was completely unaware of how best to get in and experience the game, so as a result I bounced pretty heavily off of it. However in the several years that have passed SWG Legends has turned into what appears to be a full retail experience, even including in game events like Life Day. Recently my friend Tam went on a journey back into this game, and last night for some reason I decided to follow in his footsteps and give it a proper try.
The first challenge is getting Star Wars Galaxies up and running because it has not been online or available for purchase for quite some time. Essentially you have a few options in front of you, the option that the server operators would like you to take is to go onto ebay and purchase a set of the original discs. I did this years ago and picked up a set for $5, but the popularity of this emulator server has seemingly driven the price up to somewhere in the $50-$150 price range. The SWG Reddit has some links in the sidebar to a few options which will allow you to download the three isos directly. After acquiring and installing the original Client, you will have to grab the SWG Legends Launcher pictured above which will patch your client up to the correct version as well as allow you to patch in some upgraded assets. Your first step however should probably be going onto the SWG Legends forums and signing up for an account, because there will be some lead time before one of the volunteer admins authorizes your account which allows you to log in and play the game.
What follows is a fairly modern tutorial driven experience walking you through the first ten levels of your character while exploring a space station. The interface took some getting used to, namely the swapping in and out of mouse-look mode while hitting the alt key. I did some research looking into the combat class that was the easiest to solo, and most of the sources lead me towards a Commando, and as such Belghast Dorgastu the Mon Calamari Commando was born. I am not entirely certain how to play the game to be honest, but left click fires my primary attack and right click fires a charged bolt and with those two things I managed to limp my way to level 10 while following the quest chain and get off of the station.
The piece that was not down my alley at all however was space flight, and as such I plan on taking shuttles wherever I need to go even though the tutorial gave me a perfectly reasonable ship. The end result is more flight sim than I care to experience, so if you have long played that style of game then it might be your jam. Tamrielo grew up playing flight sims so it was absolutely his style, whereas for me anything more realistic than Star Fox is not going to be for me when it comes to space combat. Realistically you need some sort of a controller because the keyboard controls were nonsense trying to do the dog fighting quest against the black sun pirates.
I’ve now allowed myself to get mixed up with the Hutt Cartel and am aligned to the rebels which I am assuming is following a different path than had I chosen to work with the Empire. The first planet is Tatooine and Han Solo unceremoniously deposited me there. I have a speeder though which is cool and am tooling around the dunes completing objectives. All in all it is a pretty fun experience and it is very interesting to see the missing link between what SOE was doing with Everquest and the decisions they ultimately made with Everquest 2. The only bad bits are that the game is native 4:3 resolution and as a result wants to run at 1024×768. I will have to do some research to see if there are ways to mod that up to something more modern. My evening exploring Star Wars Galaxies Legends server was most definitely time well wasted.
… in a Galaxy Far Far Away there was a game that was beloved by a group of players for the sort of things that it allowed them to do. I was not one of those players. While I beta tested Star Wars Galaxies, I somehow missed actually playing the game when it was in its heyday. At the time it came out I was somewhere between my pre-World of Warcraft scrawl of games which were Dark Age of Camelot, Horizon: Empire if Istaria, and City of Heroes. The return to what seemed like a more Everquest experience and combat system did not seem at all interesting to me, and I was buffered by the fact that none of my active gaming group at the time were playing it either. However in the years since I feel like I missed a pivotal gaming experience.
Some years back I heard about an emulator server called SWG Legends, but at the time it was a less than retail experience and one largely that required you to know what you were doing before really being able to mess with it properly. Seeing as I never played retail I was completely unaware of how best to get in and experience the game, so as a result I bounced pretty heavily off of it. However in the several years that have passed SWG Legends has turned into what appears to be a full retail experience, even including in game events like Life Day. Recently my friend Tam went on a journey back into this game, and last night for some reason I decided to follow in his footsteps and give it a proper try.
The first challenge is getting Star Wars Galaxies up and running because it has not been online or available for purchase for quite some time. Essentially you have a few options in front of you, the option that the server operators would like you to take is to go onto ebay and purchase a set of the original discs. I did this years ago and picked up a set for $5, but the popularity of this emulator server has seemingly driven the price up to somewhere in the $50-$150 price range. The SWG Reddit has some links in the sidebar to a few options which will allow you to download the three isos directly. After acquiring and installing the original Client, you will have to grab the SWG Legends Launcher pictured above which will patch your client up to the correct version as well as allow you to patch in some upgraded assets. Your first step however should probably be going onto the SWG Legends forums and signing up for an account, because there will be some lead time before one of the volunteer admins authorizes your account which allows you to log in and play the game.
What follows is a fairly modern tutorial driven experience walking you through the first ten levels of your character while exploring a space station. The interface took some getting used to, namely the swapping in and out of mouse-look mode while hitting the alt key. I did some research looking into the combat class that was the easiest to solo, and most of the sources lead me towards a Commando, and as such Belghast Dorgastu the Mon Calamari Commando was born. I am not entirely certain how to play the game to be honest, but left click fires my primary attack and right click fires a charged bolt and with those two things I managed to limp my way to level 10 while following the quest chain and get off of the station.
The piece that was not down my alley at all however was space flight, and as such I plan on taking shuttles wherever I need to go even though the tutorial gave me a perfectly reasonable ship. The end result is more flight sim than I care to experience, so if you have long played that style of game then it might be your jam. Tamrielo grew up playing flight sims so it was absolutely his style, whereas for me anything more realistic than Star Fox is not going to be for me when it comes to space combat. Realistically you need some sort of a controller because the keyboard controls were nonsense trying to do the dog fighting quest against the black sun pirates.
I’ve now allowed myself to get mixed up with the Hutt Cartel and am aligned to the rebels which I am assuming is following a different path than had I chosen to work with the Empire. The first planet is Tatooine and Han Solo unceremoniously deposited me there. I have a speeder though which is cool and am tooling around the dunes completing objectives. All in all it is a pretty fun experience and it is very interesting to see the missing link between what SOE was doing with Everquest and the decisions they ultimately made with Everquest 2. The only bad bits are that the game is native 4:3 resolution and as a result wants to run at 1024×768. I will have to do some research to see if there are ways to mod that up to something more modern. My evening exploring Star Wars Galaxies Legends server was most definitely time well wasted.
on ol Menawi Carants
(@belghast) February 11, 2020
