Paragon City
Everquest
Mixed Gaming Weekend
Everquest is a game known in part for it’s interesting factions and your ability to not only completely wreck them… but in some cases improve ones that started out bad in the first place. My High Elf Ranger for example was friendly with Paineel, and my friend had an Iksar Monk that was completely at home in Rivervale thanks to hours and hours of clearing Runnyeye. The factions have interesting names too like “HighHold Citizens” or the “Deepwater Knights” and are fairly granular in that you might be perfectly fine in most of a zone but one specific area will attack you on sight because you wrecked your faction. I had a weird dream last night that there was a law firm that acted as a mediator to help you repair your damaged factions. I don’t remember exactly I was there or what faction it was that I had offended, but I remember being across a giant board room from some NPCs that just kept chanting “You’ve ruined your own lands, you’ll not ruin mine!”. I eventually was able to appease them slightly with an assortment of bear pelts, slashed deathfist belts and bone chips… which only makes sense in Everquest.
The primary thing that I played this weekend was our April AggroChat game of the month… Night in the Woods. I don’t want to talk too much about this other than it being really good and I highly suggest playing it yourself. That said the suggestion is with a tiny bit of reservation because I found it a deeply emotional experience. There are things in the game that pattern my own choices in life and others that were the road not taken. I am mostly saving the ammunition for the podcast next week, but I have some feels about this game and its characters and small town life in general.
I also played a bit of Defiance 2050 this weekend… and I have to say I am deeply confused by this title. Maybe I completely misunderstood what this game was supposed to be. I had gotten the impression that it would be a game where a bunch of time had passed since the original game and that the world had drastically changed. So as a result I was deeply confused when I followed a sequence of events in Mount Tam that if I am not completely mistaken are pretty much exactly what happens in the base game. So I am not exactly sure what is up with this one, because it seems like the same game with no changes that I could see? I did not play for terribly long but was extremely confused the entire time because I kept expecting something new. Yes I realized that I just used confused three times in rapid succession… but I am trying to drive that emotion home here.
The other bits of my weekend that I did not specifically call out here were spent in Monster Hunter World working on the weekly objectives… namely hunting Black Diablos and doing 9 Star missions. Here you can see me hanging out with T’Challa who I did not realize was into Monster Hunter World… after taking down Xeno’jiiva. Things I learned this weekend… my fear of Diablos is largely unwarranted because waiting this late into the game to really start farming it… means it is way easier than my memory would tell me. The last time I had fought a Diablos was the one needed to clear the main story step. I have avoided these like the plague because that fight… was pure hell at the time. Now I seem to be able to take them down pretty easily and I did four of the weekly event quest involving taking down both a normal Diablos and a Black Diablos. As far as the 9 Star quests… I SOS Rouletted them which involved two Xeno’jiiva fights, a double tempered bazel fight, and a tempered rathalos/hard tobi fight.
I did also spend a few attempts on Kulve Taroth and figured out that you can filter your session by folks doing the encounter. I’ve been kicked a few times… the first because I am guessing they wanted a fixed party comp and I snagged the last slot they were saving for someone else. The group disbanded and was locked when it was reposted. The other time I am guessing that it was for simply being a longsword player because that seems to be the weapon type that everyone bags on as this games “Dragoon”. I mean it isn’t wrong… I take a lot of damage and do plenty of stupid things but more often than not I also break big parts off things with spirit helm breaker. Other than that I wound up getting into a few really good and chill groups and got more weapons… sadly no more oranges but I did get a couple of decent purples. I have this interesting collection of death shots and in this one I think I died to a magma splash, either that or someone else fainted and this was my final action shot. I have a few really good ones from my many attempts at Nergigante as well because the scene at the end of the encounter always seems really interesting to me… so more often than not I take a quick snap. All in all it was a pretty good weekend and I am really looking forward to next weeks AggroChat so I can get all of these thoughts related to Night in the Woods out of my head.
Unintended Night
What I was supposed to be playing last night is World of Warcraft as Wednesday is our normal mythical nonsense night. Unfortunately we were down two people already and I myself wasn’t really in the mood to do it either. I’ve been dealing with some stuff and yesterday was a bit of a bad mental health day. When those situations happen I tend to turtle up somewhere quiet and hang out by myself until whatever it is has passed. World of Warcraft is such an inherently social game that even the act of logging in ends up prompting a bunch of people to poke me and say hello… and it feels bad to ignore them when I need to ignore them.
Sure there is now “Appear Offline” mode but even then that is not a perfect scenario. For me at least there are a handful of people that I am generally okay with interacting with, because they know the drill. They understand deeply because they go through their own periods of turtle time, and as a result there is no need to attempt to keep up appearances as it were. However if you are in Offline mode and you reach out to one of those people who are on the closest rings of your monkeysphere… they cannot respond. You will be able to send them messages all day long but they will always get the offline message when attempting to respond back to you. As a result when I am feeling like this I just avoid WoW like the plague because it isn’t worth the hassle.
What I wanted to be doing was to sit on the couch and play some Everquest while watching some more Mighty Boosh streamed through the television. Unfortunately they seem to have had a rather traumatic maintenance yesterday. The servers went down at 5:00 am EDT on the 18th and did not come back apparently until 2:30 am EDT on the 19th. I have no clue at all what was going on… but I kept trying to fire up the launcher and getting the maintenance message. I have been enjoying myself a shocking amount in Everquest, but I realize that I am riding the drug that is nostalgia. I am not sure how long that drug will last but for the moment I am riding its high.
What I did instead was play a lot of MTG Arena as I got it set up on my laptop. Yesterday Scopique wrote an interesting response to my post about Arena… or at least one that mentioned it because it wasn’t exactly a direct response. The funny thing is I wouldn’t necessarily call myself much of a competitive gamer. I traditionally shy away from player versus player situations, but games like MTG Arena or the Crucible in Destiny don’t seem to bother me that much and I am not entirely certain why. I stumbled across a post from Tobold who very much did not enjoy his time with Arena, but for the moment I don’t mind at all that it is largely just a stripped down 1v1 client. I think ultimately if you are going into Arena expecting Duels of the Planeswalkers or MTG Duels either one… you are going to be sorely disappointed.
Arena is simply a Magic the Gathering Online that isn’t horrible. Sure MTGO is serviceable but nothing about it is really intuitive and it feels like you are jumping through a lot of hoops to make anything work. MTGO was absolutely less cludgy than the days of trying to arrange a game on IRC and then getting both parties to fire up and connect to each other through the Apprentice application. However card gaming on a PC has changed drastically since then and Hearthstone more or less has led that charge. Arena is that Hearthstone-esc interface for the far more seasons and complicated game of Magic the Gathering, and the thing is… it works amazingly well.
There have been a few times I have been bit by the game trying to move forward without me… but in the grand scheme of things it seems to do 99.9% of the right things at the right time. The other moments don’t bother me too much because I am not placing a lot of my personal ego into whether or not I am winning. I am simply enjoying playing cards and occasionally I do really well. I do feel like Tobold’s comment of not feeling like he could be competitive with the decks presented was a bit nonsense given that I have been entirely playing the stock Golgari Exploration deck. I felt like I was able to pick it up and start winning matches almost immediately… and sure as my rank has risen I am winning less matches but even that doesn’t bother me much. I am still winning more than enough to complete daily quests getting me packs and gold… to buy more packs. All in all I feel like Arena is going to shape up to be a very solid version of Magic the Gathering Online… but we need to stop the comparisons there for our own sanity.
Unintended Night
What I was supposed to be playing last night is World of Warcraft as Wednesday is our normal mythical nonsense night. Unfortunately we were down two people already and I myself wasn’t really in the mood to do it either. I’ve been dealing with some stuff and yesterday was a bit of a bad mental health day. When those situations happen I tend to turtle up somewhere quiet and hang out by myself until whatever it is has passed. World of Warcraft is such an inherently social game that even the act of logging in ends up prompting a bunch of people to poke me and say hello… and it feels bad to ignore them when I need to ignore them.
Sure there is now “Appear Offline” mode but even then that is not a perfect scenario. For me at least there are a handful of people that I am generally okay with interacting with, because they know the drill. They understand deeply because they go through their own periods of turtle time, and as a result there is no need to attempt to keep up appearances as it were. However if you are in Offline mode and you reach out to one of those people who are on the closest rings of your monkeysphere… they cannot respond. You will be able to send them messages all day long but they will always get the offline message when attempting to respond back to you. As a result when I am feeling like this I just avoid WoW like the plague because it isn’t worth the hassle.
What I wanted to be doing was to sit on the couch and play some Everquest while watching some more Mighty Boosh streamed through the television. Unfortunately they seem to have had a rather traumatic maintenance yesterday. The servers went down at 5:00 am EDT on the 18th and did not come back apparently until 2:30 am EDT on the 19th. I have no clue at all what was going on… but I kept trying to fire up the launcher and getting the maintenance message. I have been enjoying myself a shocking amount in Everquest, but I realize that I am riding the drug that is nostalgia. I am not sure how long that drug will last but for the moment I am riding its high.
What I did instead was play a lot of MTG Arena as I got it set up on my laptop. Yesterday Scopique wrote an interesting response to my post about Arena… or at least one that mentioned it because it wasn’t exactly a direct response. The funny thing is I wouldn’t necessarily call myself much of a competitive gamer. I traditionally shy away from player versus player situations, but games like MTG Arena or the Crucible in Destiny don’t seem to bother me that much and I am not entirely certain why. I stumbled across a post from Tobold who very much did not enjoy his time with Arena, but for the moment I don’t mind at all that it is largely just a stripped down 1v1 client. I think ultimately if you are going into Arena expecting Duels of the Planeswalkers or MTG Duels either one… you are going to be sorely disappointed.
Arena is simply a Magic the Gathering Online that isn’t horrible. Sure MTGO is serviceable but nothing about it is really intuitive and it feels like you are jumping through a lot of hoops to make anything work. MTGO was absolutely less cludgy than the days of trying to arrange a game on IRC and then getting both parties to fire up and connect to each other through the Apprentice application. However card gaming on a PC has changed drastically since then and Hearthstone more or less has led that charge. Arena is that Hearthstone-esc interface for the far more seasons and complicated game of Magic the Gathering, and the thing is… it works amazingly well.
There have been a few times I have been bit by the game trying to move forward without me… but in the grand scheme of things it seems to do 99.9% of the right things at the right time. The other moments don’t bother me too much because I am not placing a lot of my personal ego into whether or not I am winning. I am simply enjoying playing cards and occasionally I do really well. I do feel like Tobold’s comment of not feeling like he could be competitive with the decks presented was a bit nonsense given that I have been entirely playing the stock Golgari Exploration deck. I felt like I was able to pick it up and start winning matches almost immediately… and sure as my rank has risen I am winning less matches but even that doesn’t bother me much. I am still winning more than enough to complete daily quests getting me packs and gold… to buy more packs. All in all I feel like Arena is going to shape up to be a very solid version of Magic the Gathering Online… but we need to stop the comparisons there for our own sanity.