Holy smokes, time flies. I can’t believe it’s been over 2 weeks since I posted. I haven’t really been doing too much worth talking about I guess, but just so Google doesn’t decide the site is dead again, here’s a recap of recent gaming.

My last post was about being conflicted over Star Wars: Battlefront. Well OF COURSE I bought it, because when in doubt I always take the road of retail therapy I guess. The good news is that I’m glad I did. It is exactly the gaming experience (for me) that I expected it to be. I play a few matches a few times a week. It’s kind of my “side game” and it is perfect for me as a side game. I stick almost exclusively to Walker Assault, one of the 20 v 20 modes, and I tend to wind up somewhere in the middle of the rankings. At a guess I’d say that 11th is my sweet spot, though I have been as high as 5th and as low ~blush~ as 19th. I’ve dabbled with a few of the other modes and they’re more fun than I expected them to be, but Walker Assault always calls to me and after 3 or 4 matches of that I’m ready to play something else.

The game is getting a lot of hate but that’s EA’s problem, not mine. I’m enjoying my time playing and I’m glad I made the purchase. It IS too expensive for what you get but for me it was worth paying full price in order to be able to play while the servers are still nice and full. It takes seconds to get into a match right now and that is worth something to me, being as impatient as I am. There’s a lot of complaints about things relating to playing with your friends but since I don’t play with anyone else that stuff isn’t relevant to my enjoyment of the game. I guess what I’m saying is that while I’m enjoying myself, don’t take that as a recommendation; I’m kind of a weirdo in what I like and don’t like.

I was really enjoying Fallout 4 and I need to make sure it doesn’t drift off the homescreen of my PS4 but for the past couple of weeks it has been pushed to the side. My plan is to play Fallout 4 on and off for about a year 🙂 so I’m not in any great hurry.

I strongly believe in voting with my wallet when a company does something I’m enthusiastic about. When Zenimax released the Imperial City expansion for The Elder Scrolls Online it seemed to me like it was dedicated to the PvPers and instanced dungeoneers so I ignored it. But then they brought Orsinium to the consoles, and that expansion had a lot of stuff for solo/open world PvE players so I wanted to support it. I bought the big bundle of crowns and spent most of them on the Deluxe Edition of Orsinium (because, duh, it came with a mount and pet and how could I resist them). I wound up buying Imperial City too just for the sake of completeness. Then during the Black Friday insanity the big pack of crowns was almost 50% off so I bought ANOTHER one, and those will sit in my wallet until another expansion comes along (I know they’re working on at least one more, the Thieves Guild expansion).

So suddenly I’ve been playing Elder Scrolls Online again. This time out I am completely ignoring the instanced content; no grouping for me. I started to research builds and that wasn’t fun so I said “screw it” and came up with my own builds. The whole beauty of TESO is that you’re supposed to play however you want, and that’s what I’m doing, and it’s working during the leveling part of the game. If I get serious about it I can always re-spec after doing research. I’m not even playing to level, really. I’m just playing to explore. I’m jumping between 3 (sometimes 4) characters leveling them as a dysfunctional ‘family’ since they’re spread all around the world. I probably spend more time crafting than I do fighting, and that includes shuffling materials between characters with is time consuming but kind of soothing.

Basically Bhagpuss is my spirit animal for this Elder Scrolls Online outing. I’m focused on solo exploring and just kind of enjoying the world. I spend a lot of time reading books I find, or trying to get to places that I think I maybe shouldn’t be (yet). With 3 starting zones, a couple of which I’ve barely touched, there’s a lot to do that is more interesting to me than following instructions on a website to build a character that is uber-powerful and completely boring to play.

On Friday I’ll have a new game to play. Xenoblade Chronicles X comes out for the Wii U. I got a Wii U shortly after launch (through kind of a fluke, my boss ended up with two so he sold me his extra) and I bought two games for it: Zombie U for me and Scribblenauts for Angela. And those are the last two games I bought for it until this month, when I’m grabbing Xenoblade for me and there’s an Animal Crossing game that Angela wanted, though I suspect she was more interested in the Amiibos that came with it than the game itself. Zombie U was pretty meh but Xenoblade is getting lots of praise so I’m hoping that I’ll FINALLY get some use out of the Wii U.