Somehow another week has slipped past without a blog post. Time flies, except when it doesn’t. Every work day seems to take an age to pass, but then suddenly it is Monday again. Next Monday is November 1st!
In days of yore this time of year would be the height of new game mania for me, but this year I’m not feeling it very much. Oh I’ll play Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite since they’re both on Game Pass but when it comes to shelling out cash I’ve become quite conservative. I have SO many games I haven’t played that it seems crazy to buy new ones.
Or at least that’s how I was feeling until Dungeon Encounters appeared out of nowhere and I had to buy it. In my defense, it was less than $25 and it was just so different from anything else I owned. Anything else remotely modern, anyway. It’s been a while since I played a game where I needed to take notes in order to remember where things are! I’ve been enjoying it. Maybe not as much as Tipa has (she’s already finished it!) but enough that it has pulled me away from most other games.
One thing holding me back is, well, my back. I’ve been having some terrible spasms in my back and it has made sitting in one place for a long time quite painful. So I tend to move from place to place. Gaming is particularly bad because once I get immersed in a game I start to slouch and that really aggravates my back. So I’ve been spending a lot of time watching TV while perched very upright on the front edge of the couch.
Alternatively I sit at my PC, where sadly I have a pretty shit chair, but it is so shit that it requires me to stay more or less upright, lest it (and me) topple to the ground. On the PC I’ve finally gone back to Star Trek Online. That only took a month to get around to. In September I shared a post from Roger Edwards about playing the STO story arcs in order. I’ve learned that Cryptic has put some obstacles up to prevent us from doing that. Some of the “Side Quests” that Roger suggests we play are now locked behind a level gate which is FAR above my level (I’m 10 and you have to be 55 or 65 to do these quests, according to reddit.)
Despite that snafu I’m enjoying STO quite a bit. We’re in the thick of a surge in Star Trek fandom here at Chez Dragonchasers. We’ve been re-watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’ve been re-watching TOS, and soon the new animated YA show starts up (with Lower Decks just recently ending for the season). So STO slots in very nicely, and the episodic nature means I can log in, play through an episode and then log out to give my back a rest.
I still mean to/want to play both New World and Black Desert Online, I just keep running out of time in the day before I get to them. I think for New World I have the opposite of FOMO. So many of the people who were hyped about it now seem disappointed in it so I wonder what’s the point of dumping a bunch of hours into it just so I can reach their level of disappointment. May as well take it slow and easy and see what new features/changes Amazon makes to bring folks back.
Meanwhile over in BDO I think I need to create a non-Seasonal alt. My seasonal character levels so fast that all the content she has to do is trivial (in terms of her main questline) and I think I’d rather level at a slower pace and have more time to absorb all the skills and systems. There’s absolutely nothing preventing me from rolling an alt other than choice paralysis because so many of the classes seem really interesting. I just need to set aside some time to do it. I think the Season system is awesome for established players but for this particular first-timer, slower might be better.
I keep wanting to get back into STO, but it’s, again, a MMO I hate playing alone. I tend not to play an MMO unless I know I have people to group with. Playing solo gives me no incentive to log in, and so I don’t.
I hate playing anything with other people. I just want to play through the episodes of STO once to get the stories then I’ll be done!
The main (huge) problem I see with the reaction to New World, which applies to some extent to all mmorpgs nowadays, is that people seem to want to treat them as though they were standalone games you play for no longer than, at most, a month before you’ve maxed out everything, finished the story and beaten the game. I can’t really wrap my head around how this has happened. New World has been out for a month. WoW is, what, seventeen years old this year. EverQuest is 22. Even Guild Wars 2 is coming up on a decade old now.
I find it hard to see how any new mmorpg is going gain acceptance if the benchmark is how good it is in the first month – let alone the first week. The problems with servers and server transfers, for example, are the kind of thing most mmorpgs take six months to sort out but apparently Amazon are bad because they sisn;t do it in six days. Or six hours. My expectation is that the game we’ll be playing a year from now will bear quite a small ressemblance to the one we’re playing now and the game we’ll play in five years, if we’re lucky enough to be around by then, will be all but unrecognizeable. I really don’t think this is the time to be worrying about how “finished” it is. It’s an mmorpg – it will never be finished.
I’ve read a lot about New World, but I don’t remember any instance of anyone talking about playing in a group. Is group play supported? Does any content require a group? Maybe that’s why people treat it as a single player game.
Yeah there is dungeon content that requires groups; I think the first one is around level 25? And of course all the PvP stuff is, if not group oriented, crowd oriented.
I mean that’s kind of my point. Everyone has been playing super-actively and trying to level as fast as they can and now they’ve exhausted what is there (for now). To me it makes more sense to just keep puttering along at a casual pace and give the devs time to build out more things.