Endgame Viable

Some random news bits. I pre-ordered WildStar, which now allows me to finally play in the beta. By the way I did sign up for the beta many, many long months ago, but they never invited me. They thought they could keep me out, but who’s laughing now? Trion is apparently hoping to get ArcheAge out this year (2014). That would be super. I hope it’s after summer, though, so that I can be sufficiently bored with WildStar before it comes out. http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/03/16/trion-cm-confirms-f2p-archeage-says-earned-and-crafted-items-a/ (162 words.)

I am the world’s worst blogger when it comes to dealing with comments. Partly it’s because I’m not nearly as good at “real-time” communication as writing things in advance, but mostly it’s because it’s technologically much more difficult for me to post comments at the present time. Most of my posts are written in a plain text editor and posted via. WordPress’s post-by-email feature, because I don’t have access to my site during the times when it’s most convenient for me to write. That’s why my posts rarely have pictures in them. And why the links are usually screwed up. Once I’ve emailed them in I touch up the post dates and scheduling with the WordPress Android app. (308 words.)

I feel like I’m at a crossroads with FFXIV. I’m teetering on that line between “it’s fun to play” and “it’s work to play.” If I try to push myself much more I’m almost certainly going to burn out. Right now, when I log in each night after work, I have a to-do list of things I want to accomplish: I want to level at least one gathering class. I want to level one crafting class (I often skip that in favor of gathering right now). I want to do a Low-Level Duty Roulette for my Dragoon class. And then I want to do one or more instances of Crystal Tower with my White Mage class to collect WHM gear and mythology tokens. (I know it’s not the most efficient way to get myth tokens, but it’s the easiest if you are lazy like I am.) If I don’t accomplish all of those things, I feel like I’m “falling behind.” (300 words.)

I decided to learn to play without the Invert Mouse option. I’ve considered doing this for a long time, but the final straw was wanting to continue checking out ArcheAge without getting a headache. But you know if you’ve ever tried to change this setting that you need to turn it off for every game at the same time. It’s not something you can turn off in one game but leave on in another game. Once you begin the re-conditioning process, you can’t go back, or you will perpetually remain confused. (358 words.)

Note: Apparently you’re not supposed to be able to play ArcheAge RU from the U.S. anymore, but for some reason I’m still able to. ArcheAge is growing on me. I feel like I was too harsh on it in my first report. The graphics actually aren’t bad at all, and better than Fallen Earth, at least color-wise. (The first time, I had played AA after FFXIV, which has drop-dead gorgeous graphics, so my perception was probably skewed. This time, I did not.) (971 words.)

Everybody’s giving their impressions of WildStar now that the NDA is down, but honestly I saw enough in the hours and hours and hours of livestreams that were going on way back in December to decide that I was probably going to get it. Even if it wasn’t a game that looked fun, I’d still want to at least see what everyone was talking about, and I expect it to be the MMO everyone will be playing in the second half of 2014, with a brief distraction for the new WoW Expansion. (263 words.)

I’ve been dipping into Trove a bit more lately, because it’s become quite stable. I don’t know how to say this politely, but it’s a much better game than Landmark. :) Trove plays a bit like what we’ve been told Landmark will be. That is, you can explore, fight monsters, level up, find resources, craft stuff, and build stuff. The thing about Trove is that after about three months of alpha, all of those things work. In Landmark, after a bit more than a month of alpha, most of those things don’t work, we haven’t seen many changes at all, and we only have promises of future deliveries. (364 words.)

When last I was playing Rift a lot, somewhere around 2.3 I guess (just before and after the F2P transition), I was super excited to hear they were going to (evenutally) add new souls so that every class could play every role. The idea of a tanking mage was too awesome for words. Even from the very beginning of Rift 1.0, I thought it would be really cool if you could tank dungeons with an Elementalist pet. (328 words.)

In a burst of ambition, I installed and played the Russian version of ArcheAge for a little while. You have to sign up for a Mail.ru account (which I guess is the Russian version of Google Mail) and then you can download it. At least you could over the weekend, I don’t know if it still works. I used these handy instructions: http://www.mmocast.com/featured/archeage-ru-account-registration-guide-english-patch/ Not being able to read or speak Russian hampers the experience a bit, but not as much as you might think. If you’re an MMO veteran you should be able to figure out which buttons to press. The only thing I wasn’t able to find was an invert mouse feature, which served to remind me again that I should strongly consider re-training myself not to need it. I play shooters and MMOs a whole lot more than I ever play flight simulators. (690 words.)

FYI, I completed a 1000-word summary of Sovereignty, but I won’t post it here because it’s filled with spoilers, just in case it turns into a real book some day. It’s now abundantly clear that there is no place for my original story in the book. Not even as a side plot. One of the original driving forces for this book was: What if there was a culture of people who bred servants in the same way that we breed pets? The original main character was going to be one of those servants. (460 words.)