Well, I meant to spend a bunch of my free time last weekend getting through as much of Dragon Age: Origins as I could, since that is my book club assignment for the month of August (we’ve had to shuffle some things around a bit due to us both being busy). Instead of doing any amount of that, though, I wound up getting back into Palia again. Super heavily. Hours upon hours, most of which was spent blasting through quests, digging back into building and decorating my house, investigating all the fun new features that have been introduced since I last played in April, and spending some real-world money on the game so I could experience a little bit of video game-based gender euphoria (or at least as close as I can get to that, given to my general lack of feelings on the matter). It was a bit more than I probably should have spent, but I decided to just use my July video game budget and take the rest out of my “fun big purchase” account (which is slowly beginning to recover from buying my new gaming PC). Also, I played it for the first time on maximum settings and the game looks so much better when everything is dialed all the way up. It’s a really fun, gorgeous little game. Well, little for now. It has grown a lot in the year since I started playing and all signs point toward it continuing to grow. I’m not sure how fast that growth will happen given that my current sense of it is skewed by being away for four months, but it feels like it has been pretty fast.
Continue readingMMO
Getting Lost In Warframe With My Friends
I started playing Warframe pretty recently. Well, sort of. I started playing Warframe past the introduction recently. I started playing it years and years ago, because one of my friends was really into the game, but I was getting into it as he was falling off it and I didn’t really have it in me to stay focused on the game by myself back then. I still don’t these days, but I’ve got a pair of friends (the same pair who got me into Palia and most other new games I’ve tried over the last year) who have been investing their time in the game recently and, since I’m more interested in doing fun stuff with my friends than the specifics of most games, I decided to launch myself back into it. Plus, this game gets around most of my aversion to guns in games since the enemies in this one are rarely human, melee attacks are my preferred mode of combat, and I can actually not use any guns at all if that’s what I want–for instance, I’m doing a Bow, Shuriken, Hammer thing right now and having a blast. I don’t really understand more than the very basics of whatever plotlines exist in the game since my friends have been powering me through the various advancement-critical missions so they can open up the world for me, reveal something they’ve been trying to keep a secret (which is working really well, aided in part by the fact that I genuinely don’t know enough to spot whatever stuff they might be trying to hide), and get me all of the cool abilities that usually take a long time to unlock. So I’m having fun but I’m also confused to the point of just sort of sliding through the missions without them leaving any kind of lasting impression on me.
Continue readingCome To Palia For The Chill Farming MMO And Stay For The Intricate NPCs
Last September, I wrote about the end of a tabletop gaming group and, in the last paragraph, mentioned that I regretfully couldn’t get into a game, Palia, as much as my two friends were. Oh, how the times have changed. Mostly for me, since my two friends are just as into Palia as ever, but I’ve been getting into it more and more over the past month and finally hit the point where I was playing it by myself, even when they weren’t online, which is the sign that I’ve stopped playing a game because my friends are playing (which is a perfectly fine reason to play any number of games and the main reason I’ve played pretty much every single massive multiplayer online game I’ve ever played) and started playing it because I enjoy it. Not much of the game itself has changed, aside from various quality-of-life improvements, additional story elements, and some expansions to the core aspects of the game (it is still in pre-release development), but I’m currently enjoying it more than I have before. It took me a couple weeks to figure out why, but as I finally locked into the gameplay loop over the past few days, I was able to figure out what about this game has caught me this time around.
Continue readingWorld of Warcraft: WoW, There’s a Lot to Catch up on!
My roommate convinced me to start playing World of Warcraft several months ago. After a one-month subscription and about thirty levels of playing, I set it aside and never really planned to play again. Recently, as he was preparing for the Expansion that just came out, he discovered that a few of our friends also played and so used my main weakness against me. I’ve got up to four other people who will play with me, now, so there’s not reason for me to worry about letting my money go to waste. Seeing that he was correct and that the new expansion looked like fun, I decided to follow most of my friends from our other online games to WoW.
My initial reactions, this time around, were about the same as last time. The game seems pretty interesting, but it feels way more invested in giving older players something to do than in bringing new players to the game in a way that is easy to learn. If, like me, you wind up purchasing an expansion and using the level-up on a character so you can actually participate when the new content comes out, you better hope you can learn things quickly because you’re otherwise going to drown in the mechanics of target managements, cooldown abilities (powerful abilities that can only be used once every so often, as determined by the ability itself and possibly some of your stats), and casted abilities (can be instantaneous, but often require your character to spend time preparing to use the ability before it goes off), movement in combat, how everything works, and what the hell is going on while you’re trying to remember which button you bound your fireball spell to after you finally bought a mouse with extra buttons that you can barely reach because people apparently don’t believe that MMO players might have large hands. I’m definitely not still annoyed about that last one. Not at all.
That being said, once I was finished having my mind exploded by all the stuff I had to track, found a key-binding I could work with, and started getting to the point where I could watch the battle instead of staring at my abilities constantly, it was actually a lot of fun. The quests are a little hard to follow and there’s so much going on in the world at large that it feels almost pointless to really dig into any of them, so I am pretty much only playing as a social video game. Which is a lot like social drinking. You’d never have more than maybe a beer on your own (do a daily quest) but you’ve got no problem cracking open a few cold ones when you’re with your friends or attending an event (doing quest lines and raiding dungeons). For WoW, that’s what I’d call myself: a social gamer. I don’t think I’ll ever play it by myself and not just because I’m worried I’ll get addicted. I just have other stuff I’d rather do with personal time than play WoW since I can do that with social time.
As far as I can tell, the game is basically a giant grinding machine with little bits of story thrown in every year or so in order to confuse new players who just want to understand what’s going on in the world when their friends pull them into it. That being said, WoW has a wide range of lore for people to peruse. There are books, comics, promotional videos, in-game cinematics, the dialogue from the quests you do, and then history brought in from other games. Most of the big, named characters have long, complex backstories that add nuance to their actions that isn’t really something you can do in a game that doesn’t have the actual history that WoW does. Because we know who everyone is and how they’ve acted in the past, we can generally see how they’ll react to something going on in the current story. One of the most popular parts of the pre-release for a new WoW expansion is going on message boards and theorizing about the plot or who is going to do what based on whatever little tidbit has been recently released to the public. I don’t really have the patience for it, but I’m still pretty new to the world. I have literally done the same stuff about the Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss (which are amazing books you should read), so I wouldn’t dream of judging or looking down on anyone who enjoys postulating theories for WoW. It just feels like so much more work to get caught up to speed because the Kingkiller Chronicles is two books and WoW is a bunch of games, books, comics, etc that need to be analyzed if I’m going to participate in dissecting nuance.
As far as my current experience? Well, I’ll admit I’m a little frustrated by the number of high-level Alliance players corpse-camping in the lower-level Horde area and the fact that apparently none of the powerful Horde NPCs will lift a finger to attack Alliance players that are camping out in our base. It was funny to get absolutely wrecked by two people–killed so quickly and effectively that I didn’t have the chance to do anything in response to their attacks–the first couple times, it has since gotten rather frustrating since I can’t kill them (or even effectively fight back) and they’re preventing me from completing quests. A bunch of Horde players showed up to clear them out at one point, but they apparently got bored and decided to leave the area to the Alliance players once again. So that, plus constantly getting spammed with invitations to join guilds, requests to party up with random strangers, and some dude trying to sell some dumb looking mount for three million gold, means I’m pretty ready to just turn off all public chat and interaction with unknown players. I dislike the spam and I don’t want to make friends with random people who just want me for my DPS.
Thankfully, I’m getting better at the game. I’m not always so stunned by it, and I’m starting to remember to use my abilities in the correct order and at the correct times. The only mistakes I made today are a result of not looking at my keyboard instead of the fight like I used to. If I can mark the keys a bit or get a new keyboard (it’s about that time, since my mouse already died last week) that has some sort of tactile feedback for each key, I will be in really good shape. I didn’t see myself getting into this game as much as I have and I definitely struggled at first, but I feel like I’m finally starting to get a handle on it.
A Date with Destiny
After several months of delays, flaking, and people doing that thing were they commit to something but understandably have to bail when their mental health, physical health, or life gets in way, I am finally set up to do the raid on Destiny 2. I’ve literally been waiting to do it with this group of people because this group of six is my clan, they’re the people I want to play this game with. I’m not a hardcore gamer, I don’t really care about having a top-tier character or the best loot, and I don’t really enjoy grinding away (repetitively repeating tasks in order to reap the completion rewards as much as possible) in most games, so I was never going to do this with a group of strangers. I like to play video games with my friends, so I’m fine waiting until they’re all ready. Usually. The past 8 months of waiting have been a bit much, though.
It isn’t only Destiny, either. I’m having trouble getting friends together for almost any of the “old” online games. I used to play Overwatch a minimum of twice a week, but now it’s getting rare for me to play it at all during any given week. People have moved on to other games. Heck, I have as well. I spend more time playing Switch games than I do on playing computer games. I had a brief affair with Borderlands 2 again, and I even got to play it with a few of my friends, but that first week of playing it was all we had. We’re back to doing our own things for now.
Most of the time, that’s okay. It’s perfectly natural to go through cycles of spending more time with friends and then less time with friends. The same of true of bigger games without any real end, like Overwatch and Destiny 2. Something will prompt you to return to a game like that and then you’ll play a lot of it until something else captures your attention. If that was all of it, I wouldn’t mind it that much. I’d be quietly waiting for the cycle to come around again with some other game and then I’d dive right back into it with my friends. For the Destiny raid, though, it’s different.
My roommate, the head of our little clan and the center point for the entire group (since I only know half the guys in the group because of him), has been actively trying to organize a raid for months. Our clan has changed members and he’s even gone so far as to get a new person into the game and leveled all the way up JUST so we have a sixth person to do the raid with. And, you know, cause he’s a really nice dude who wants to share his interests with his friends, but also because of the raid thing. He’s found strategy videos for use to watch, shared diagrams and charts on how to navigate the read, done extensive research into the tricks of the raid, helped everyone optimize their characters, come up with a list of the best gear for each class, helped us all get the gear we want to use, and even managed to make the raid sound like a lot of fun despite the amount of work it sounds like from his pile of diagrams, videos, and charts.
And yet here we are, 6 months after the closest we ever came to doing the raid (we had four people online for it and the remaining two flaked last-minute). We’ve got a time set, we’ve got gear picked, we’ve got characters optimized, we’ve got teams picked, and people have actually started watching the guide videos. But only four of us are firm commitments. One has left some wiggle room in his commitment for last minute cancellation and another has committed, but he’ll be coming back from dog-sitting for his girlfriend and, as often happens when people encounter their significant others, he is liable to be distracted. I wouldn’t hold it against either one if they wound up bailing on us in order to go on a date/prepare food for the week or because they wanted to spend some time with their loved one, but I can see my roommate getting more and more frustrated.
Not only have people been flaking out or ignore his attempts to organize raids in the past, but they start asking if we’re ever going to do a raid after all of the dates my roommate set in the survey has passed by with only him and I responding. Neither of us can nag any of the people into responding to the surveys or queries, and no amount of enthusiasm on our parts has been enough to get four other people to commit to a date and time for a raid. It is incredibly frustrating to try to get people organized, have them ignore us, and then have them start complaining that we’ve never done a raid. I can only imagine how much worse it is for my roommate since he actually wants to have a fully optimized character and all the best loot (which is only possible if you grind through the raid at least once a week).
I mean, if I was in his shoes, I’d have lost my temper with this group and just done it on my own, with a bunch of strangers. There’s even a feature in the game for finding a group willing to random players join them for stuff like the raid, so it’d be easy to do, if somewhat time-consuming. He knows I don’t really care and the only other friend who cares would just do it on his own as well, so the only reason he’s still trying to organize us is because we’re his friends and he wants to play with us.
So I’ve cleared my night. I’ve had a couple of quiet conversations about the importance of honoring commitments. I’ve watched the videos and will do so again before the raid. I’ve responded to the messages and reviewed the charts and pictures. I’m ready enough to back up my roommate and be the second leader he’ll need to make sure everyone stays focused, on-task, and working as a team. I’ll be taking an hour or two before our scheduled time to get ready, including making sure my outfit and accessories are appropriate. Honestly, it feels a lot like preparing for a date that’s been a long time coming, minus the emotional turbulence and anxiety since I don’t need to worry about someone liking me.
I don’t think I want to pursue that metaphor too far. I don’t think I’m ready to make any kind of commitment, not while I’m still hung up on Breath of the Wild… And I know Destiny 2 isn’t the kind of game that will settle for an occasional fling. They’d be fun, but we’d both know that I’m mostly wasting both our times if I don’t make a serious commitment. For now, I’m just going to focus on the raid and we’ll see how it goes from there.