Endgame Viable

Rift completed server merges. I didn’t notice any change, personally. I logged in for a few minutes, decided I still had no interest in the Fae Autumn Festival thingy, then logged out again. It kind of sucks that nobody is playing it anymore. Where did everyone go? FFXIV, the newest shiney? Or back to some other game? (57 words.)

Can we talk about the tab targeting in FFXIV? And when I say “talk” I mean “rant” and when I say “we” I mean “me.” The tab targeting in FFXIV is the worst I have ever seen. It makes absolutely no sense. When I hit tab to switch to the next target, I expect the “next” target to be somewhere in the same vicinity as the first target. But for some reason, when you hit tab, suddenly you’re targeting some monster a mile away from everyone else who isn’t even attacking. Then you have to hit tab fifty more times to get to the mob you want to hit, and you usually overshoot it because you’re tapping the tab key really fast because you’re in a hurry, and then the whole thing starts over again. By then you’ve usually pulled fifty new mobs into the fight by accident. This is especially annoying in FATEs where you have monsters attacking in packs. (240 words.)

Perhaps as a result of a post on Inventory Full and a post on Herding Cats, I found myself playing WoW over the weekend. It was not one of my better weekends in terms of getting productive things done in my life, but I choose to think of that as the cause of playing WoW, rather than the effect. Anyway, I made a number of observations about WoW as compared to more modern MMOs. (657 words.)

From what I can tell, the two most anticipated MMOs “coming soon” are WildStar and Elder Scrolls Online. WildStar I can only assume because it’s made by some former WoW developers, and ESO because, well, it’s Elder Scrolls, man, come on. Anyway, a video was recently posted showing ESO character creation options, and wow, it looks pretty awesome. I’m not sure why I thought this but I figured ESO would be a lot more graphically simplified than Skyrim, but it actually looks pretty similar. It does appear that there are fewer customization options than Skyrim, which to me is actually a bit of a relief. I’m not fond of fiddling with hundreds of sliders to get cheekbones exactly right. I’m fine with broader adjustments. (124 words.)

I found out from all the gaming blogs that WarHammer Online is shutting down in December. WAR ran for five years, which seems like a pretty decent run for any game. I was there at launch, struggling through the bugs and lack of content with everyone else. The biggest problem I remember was not being able to play for several days because my pre-ordered copy of the game was late and I couldn’t put in my game code. Other than that, I thought it was a pretty good MMO, but it was heavily focused on PvP, and that’s not really my thing, so I drifted away from it. (429 words.)

I usually stick to one MMORPG at a time, play it until I get bored, then move to the next one. This week though I’ve been firing up a different one every night. The latest one was Guild Wars 2. I got sucked into this session right away. I had last logged out in Sparkfly Fen on the beach where Tequatl attacks. I went there to see the new-and-improved Tequatl event I keep hearing so much about, but it wasn’t running when I got there, so I just logged out. Well it was running this time, and damn. (309 words.)

I had to stick a link to this movie in my blog. I think it’s the best opening sequence for an MMORPG I can recall seeing, and also a really fantastic computer-generated short film in its own right. Even if you have no clue what an MMORPG is, you might like this. Updated the link. (55 words.)

I read on Inventory Full (still an awesome blog name) about this thing coming out called EQLandmark. I do not know what it is, but it sounds like some kind of new game in the EQ universe. Bhagpuss then mentioned something about making a Heroic character in EQ2, and I got sidetracked. Because I have some EQ2 characters too, and I figured I’d better log in and make my own Heroic characters, too. Because everyone’s doing it apparently. Well, one person is. I don’t know why I needed one, because I haven’t played EQ2 in years, and found it only a fair game while playing it, and I don’t even know what a Heroic character even is, but if somebody else is doing something in an MMO, obviously there must be something cool going on there that needs to be checked out. MMO players have a herd mentality, and they are perpetually looking for “the next new thing.” (707 words.)

I have my story idea for NaNoWriMo this year. I’m kind of excited about it. At least I was when I thought of it. It’s a bit of a meta-story, a pure fantasy that could not in any way happen in real life, or even alternate world life, and I would be lying if I said it did not in some way resemble John Scalzi’s inexplicably-Hugo-award-winning Redshirts­. I would say it has some elements of Redshirts and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One mixed up together. Possibly with a dash of Disney’s Tron. (178 words.)

TAGN wrote* that the Happy Time for Rift is over. Meaning that its resurgence in popularity after it went F2P is over, and now it has nowhere to go but down. It’s hard to disagree since when I last logged into Hailol up in the Dendrome, it was a ghost town. He also had a fair number of negative things to say about Rift going F2P, saying that he immediately unsubscribed when he heard about it. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I think it’s pretty naive to think that AAA MMOs aren’t going to have cash shops from now on. Anyway, I hadn’t been playing Rift for a while, so it was nice to have an excuse to get back into it. At the time, I remember a lot of people were offended that every vendor suddenly had a huge interface window and direct access to the cash shop. I just shrugged and said, “Whatever.” I can’t remember ever being in an MMO and thinking, “Gosh, I really love this vendor window, I hope it never changes.” Honestly most of the time I think, “This vendor window sucks, can’t anyone ever spend some development time to make buying and selling a pleasant experience?” (They did not in FFXIV btw, the vendor interface sucks, as usual.) (637 words.)