Just a quickie. I caught this video about what’s upcoming for Xbox Game Pass for PC users. I can’t find a text version because we as a society are too lazy to read I guess (or I’m too lazy to Google…maybe both) but the gist is that Microsoft is going to add mod support to games installed via the Xbox app.
It’s not clear to me if the same mods that work on other versions (Steam or Epic or whatever) will work, but I’d expect so. But what do I know about game programming and modding?
I do know that currently it’s a real pain in the ass to even find your Xbox app games, let alone try to mod them, so I expect this will be welcome news to PC Game Pass people.
If you’re an Insider I think you can start testing this now, or at least very soon. Maybe I’ll sign up to be an Insider…
[A little bit later…]
Well I guess it works. Now I just need a Skyrim mod to try out. Are there any of those? (That’s a joke.)
You have to enable modes via the … menu, then you can open the game folder, as I have done here. The explorer window that opened is behind the Xbox app in this image:
My Xbox Series X has a lot of storage devices. There’s the 1 TB internal storage built in, and I invested in the Seagate 1 TB pseudo-internal storage module. So I have 2 TB just for Series X games, minus whatever the operating system chews up. For last gen games I have a 1 TB external SSD, and an 8 TB external traditional HDD drive. It’s a stupidly large amount of storage, and the 8 TB drive is pretty noisy and seems to spin up randomly even if I’m watching TV or something. I’m looking to remove it, but in order to do that I need to jettison some games.
All of which is how I came to be playing Final Fantasy XV. I sorted my last-gen games by size and FFXV was one of the biggest at about 100 GB with all the expansions installed. I have no recollection of buying the version of FFXV with all the DLC. Maybe it was a freebie at some point or it was on a super sale and to cheap to pass up? Who knows?
I did recall that I had started the game a couple times in the past but never made it very far. When I fired it up on the Xbox I had some save files with about 7 hours of playtime, last saved in 2017. I opted to start over, honestly assuming I’d bounce off it AGAIN and feel OK about just deleting it from the drive.
Two weeks later I’m still playing and I’ve got around 30 hours into it. I’m not sure why; I wouldn’t call it a great game. It is almost great, but has just enough annoying systems in it to keep it from getting there. Still, I’ve become invested in seeing it through.
I did almost bounce though, after about 3 hours. Then my buddy Irata reminded me that there’s both a movie (Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV – available on Netflix) and a short anime series (Brotherhood Final Fantasy XV – available on YouTube), both of which help set the mood for the show, and make the characters (for me anyway) a little less annoying.
In FFXV you play as Prince Noctis and you travel the world with your 3 male pals. All of you dress in black with lots of buckles and such; you kind of look like some sort of emo boy band. I found the characters pretty unappealing until after I watched the shows above, and particularly Brotherhood. When you know their backstory you start to understand them a bit more.
You can eventually change the gang’s attire but that changes their stats too and at 30 hours in I don’t have anything with better stats than what they were ‘born’ in. So I put up with the all-black look.
Anyway, getting ahead of myself.
At the start of the game your party of four are on a road trip. Prince Noctis is off to meet up with his bride-to-be, the oracle Lunafreya. They don’t get very far before all hell breaks loose and suddenly they’re refugees.
From that point on you travel the countryside in your car, the Regalia, fighting anything that moves, doing fetch quests, earning money for food, camping and slowly pushing the story forward.
Combat is almost really fun. In fact it IS fun in the rare moments when you’re fighting alone or with 1 other party member because you can follow the action. Most of the time you’re controlling one of four black-clad individuals fighting enemies that generally come in groups. Trying to pick Noctis out from his three companions and 10 enemy soldiers is a real challenge for me. I often have to run from the battle, then come back at it once I have the space to see what is happening.
Fortunately Noctis has a warp attack that lets him return to the battle quickly and with a big hit on an enemy. When you feel in control, the combat is awesome. It’s just that all too often you’re just trying to parse out everything that is happening in a fight. I mean I guess in a way that’s realistic, right? Battle is chaos. But in a game, to me it’s kind of frustrating.
There’s a “Wait Mode” for combat but I don’t like it much either. Using this mode nothing moves until you move, as best I can figure. If I could quickly toggle “Wait Mode” on & off it would help a lot but to change it I have to pause, access the options menu, find the battle style toggle and turn Wait on or off. It’s too cumbersome to do it very often.
The other big frustration is traveling around, particularly early in the game. The team generally travels via their car, and until Chapter 3 you can’t actually drive it; one of the other team members does. Getting from Point A to Point B can take anywhere from 1 to 8 or 9 minutes, real time, during which you, the player, has nothing to do other than go get a sandwich or something. I think the developers imagined us putting ourselves in the car with our ‘brothers’ and bopping along to the radio while watching the world go by, but that certainly didn’t work for me.
Eventually you start unlocking fast travel points and you get the ability to drive the car yourself, and in the edition of the game I’m playing you can convert the car to an off-road model and start cutting across the wastelands. Travel becomes much less of an issue at that point. Things get even better when you get to start riding Chocobos, complete with their jaunty theme song. That’s always fun (of course… I mean who doesn’t love Chocobos!?).
There’s a day/night cycle and (at least in the early chapters) you do most of your adventuring during the day. At night the bigger, badder enemies come out and your team members will resist you if you try to head out into the dark. For instance Ignis, who drives most of the time, will refuse to do so at night until you reach a certain point in the game.
The idea is that when darkness falls you need to find a place to spend the night. This can be a motel, a caravan (a trailer) or a camp site. Couple twists here. First as you fight enemies and do quests you gain experience, but it is held in a kind of reserve until you spend the night somewhere. While you sleep you level up. Staying at an expensive hotel can mean getting bonus experience. Staying at camp means no extra experience, but camping offers the opportunity to cook a meal for free. Meals give your team buffs that last a good long time. So there’s a balance there: do you want to spend $$ to get extra exp, or do you want to save $$ but get some nice buffs?
There’s also the convenience factor, of course. If you’re adventuring and it gets dark, it’s a lot more convenient to find a campsite nearby rather than spending the time to head back to town to a hotel.
Anyway I could go on and on; it’s a big game with a lot of systems. But it’s also an old game, and not an old game I’d give a blanket recommendation to. But y’know, the blog needs fodder so I figured I ought to at least report in about what I’ve been doing with my free time. Maybe I’ll come back and talk about the GOOD parts of the game at some point!! 🙂
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.
Well I finally got around to finishing the main story of Far Cry New Dawn. I’ve been picking and poking at this game for months, if not years, but with Far Cry 6 out I figured it was time to finish New Dawn. Not that there’s any continuity between major Far Cry installments; I did it mostly so I could say I did and it always feels better finishing an old game before I buy a new game.
Overall I felt like Far Cry New Dawn was OK. Like a 3 out of 5 game. Glad I finished, won’t stick around to farm achievements. That kind of game.
So what was wrong with it? The pacing felt odd. There was so much random stuff happening that when you wanted to do a specific quest it could be hard to do so since random encounters would keep popping up which would in turn lead you to use up all your ammo before you got to the location of the quest. It was also the kind of game that is like 90% about shooting stuff but they add a melee system and a driving system into it, then they make main story quests that force you to do melee and driving. But to be fair that’s typical Far Cry stuff. Lastly for some reason whenever you opened a crafting station or a store there was a long load screen where it felt like the game was phoning home for some reason; probably something to do with microtransactions. That got old real fast and remained a major headache throughout the game.
Those are pretty minor gripes, really, but the problem is with my “what’s good about it” list. There’s really nothing on it. It was fine. The story wasn’t super compelling, the characters were mostly tropes. Joseph Seed returns and he is as delightfully wacko as he was in Far Cry 5, but beyond him… meh. A lot of the ‘guns for hire’ (NPC sidekicks) were annoying and at least one was really very offensive. Fortunately there are a few animal companions who of course don’t talk and I mostly stuck with them. The shooting was fine but nothing remarkable. Further on into the game you get some quasi-magical powers and they felt super clumsy to me; I barely used them.
I finished with 29/50 Achievements (with a couple more very close to popping). My overall settlement level was maxed out (at 3) but of the various settlement facilities you can improve, only the weapon bench was maxed, and I created exactly 1 top-tier weapon before I beat the game. The image at the top of the post shows the final gear I beat the last couple bosses with (the top weapon, with the golden crown logo, is essentially level IV, the max level), and the image to the right shows my facility levels.
I guess there is overhead here (in terms of unlocks) for folks who play on harder difficulty levels. I could of course keep playing but I don’t see much reason to do so. There aren’t any interesting side quests left over, or even many places to explore. And there are so many games waiting to be played.
Overall, I’d say if you skip Far Cry New Dawn, you won’t be missing much. On the other hand if someone gifts you a copy or something, you’ll probably have some fun with it for a bit. There is no big amazing story hook at the end to make it worth continuing to play once you get bored with it, though.
As I’m sure I’ve said many times on this blog, I have primarily been a console gamer for a number of years. That changed a bit lately with the launch of Amazon’s New World and my out-of-the-blue obsession with Black Desert Online (which I STILL haven’t blogged about, have I?) Suddenly I was back to sitting hunched over a desk, my face awash in the blue glow of a monitor, merrily pounding keys.
Was back. Now I’m not sure. I’m actually finding PC gaming difficult. In fact for the past few nights I’ve sat down to boot one of my two current obsessions, stared at the monitor, squirmed in my chair a bit, then I’ve gotten up and went to the couch and watched TV. I didn’t want to disrupt my gaming focus by starting a console game, but I just didn’t want to sit in that chair for another minute, either. It just made me feel mentally exhausted to be sitting there, plus there’s the little nagging tickle in my brain that maybe I should be doing some work instead, just to make the day job a little less stressful.
This is exactly how I got into console gaming in the first place. Once I started working from home full time I found that 8-9 hours at a PC was plenty and I didn’t really want to sit there for another few hours at night even if it was to play games. It’s weird because the same was true when I was going into the office, but somehow the change of location made it feel different. Plus I didn’t have all my work crap on my gaming PC. I don’t now either but I DO have Parsec and can connect to the work machine in an instant.
There’s a physical toll as well. I guess I really hyper-focus while at a PC and after a couple hours playing an MMO, when I finally get up there are so many pops and cracks in my back and neck that I sound like a string of firecrackers going off. My neck and shoulders get sore, though usually everything loosens up after a bit. No lasting damage done.
So I dunno what to do. All day while I’m working I think about how I want to play New World and BDO, but then when I CAN play I just want to be somewhere else. BDO is actually available on console but it seems to lag behind the PC version in a lot of ways, and of course New World is PC only. (Isn’t it strange that we can’t play New World via Amazon Luna?)
Maybe I just need to reserve PC gaming for the weekends, and stick to consoles games during the week. Not sure. Also not sure the point of this post but it’s been a week since my last post so figured I’d better find SOMETHING to talk about!
I’ve had a rough time with New World. Not the actual playing of the game, but the issues that orbit the core gameplay.
First it was the queues. On Day 1 I created a character on Minda to play with Belghast’s Greysky Expeditions Company. And, being me, I created a 2nd character on a different server because I know there WILL be times when I want to play in absolute solitude on a server where no one knows me.
The launch week queues on Minda & character #2’s server (not being coy, I literally forget what server it was) broke me though. I couldn’t take waiting hours to play any more.
Solution #1 was to create a character on NA West just to spend time with. So that was my 3rd character. Didn’t last very long since the lag difference was appreciable. Felt like dodging was a lot more iffy. That character still exists, gathering dust.
Solution #2: By the time I got to Solution #2 Amazon had rolled out a bunch of new servers on NA East that were empty(ish). I deleted my Minda character, created a new one (character #4) with the same name and look on a low pop server, and re-started. The idea was to level up on the new server until Amazon gave us server transfers, which they’d promised. Then I’d rejoin Bel & gang.
This new server never had a queue and at first I was having a great time. But then the community started getting super toxic. At least the Syndicate faction was super toxic and the worst players also ‘ruled’ the faction by dint of holding land. I mean there was other faction/Company drama (super high taxes set by bitter Governors) but the end result was I kept ‘moving’ towns to try to avoid the idiots. Eventually it started bothering me just to log in. But I still wanted to play.
I fired up character #2 and for some reason, just wasn’t feeling her. I often play female characters in MMOs but for some reason that felt off for me in New World. I think it was because I figured I might start actually interacting with others and didn’t want to deal with any confusion. That’s probably a really out-of-date attitude given I know many, many people who play a gender other than what they present in real life, but whatever. In the end I deleted her and started character #5 on yet another new, empty(ish) server.
And, though I’m worried I’m going to jinx it, I think I am FINALLY comfortable with queues, community and my character. Most of the big Companies on this server have non-offensive names and faction chat (I went Marauder this time) has been mostly inoffensive. I’m still sorting this character; I started him as a full dex built, using Spear and Rapier & wearing light armor. Not sure that is going to stick but since he is only level 14 I can respec for free.
My Minda-replacement character is still on the toxic server, waiting to be able to move. He is Hatchet/Hammer and with this new character I’m trying to resist replicating him but it’s hard. Hatchet is super fun.
But anyway the point is I now log in, putter around at my own pace, don’t get my blood pressure way up due to being around a bunch of asshats, and I’m finally really enjoying the whole vibe. But damn it took a while to get here!
Of course thanks to Stargrace’s posts about Black Desert Online, I am now torn between 2 MMOs, New World and BDO. When it rains, it pours! 2016’s Black Desert Online is now becoming a new obsession, but that story is for another post.
Last night, it being the start of a weekend, I did something drastic. I deleted my New World character that was on Minda where my friends were all trying to play. I just didn’t want to spend my weekend trying to manage a queue around chores and dog walking and such. Since Amazon has promised free server transfers, I’m gambling that I can play on another server for now, then transfer to Minda later.
[Since New World only allows one character per server I had to delete my existing character to free up room for my eventual transfer, plus I wanted the same name.]
In the course of one evening I almost caught up to the progress I’d made in the 3 prior evenings of combatting the queue in order to squeeze in an hour of playing before bedtime. So that’s the good news.
When looking for a new server to roll on, I sorted by queue size to find one with no queue, then I chose a server with Low population. Randomly picked Nolandia (NA East) and off I went. Overall the new server is pretty chill. I even have all the chats on because it is all relatively civil (there’s always the odd troll). Gameplay also felt more responsive but I’d had to reboot my machine earlier in the day so maybe that was just local. But suddenly I had no issues dodging out of the path of attacks and such; prior to last night it felt like my dodges didn’t register quickly enough to be super effective unless a mob had a slow tell, like gearing up for a charge attack (boars).
But there is always a downside. On this world NO territory has been taken by any of the factions. At first I didn’t care because that just felt like balance to me. But then I realized that, at least as far as I know, there’s no way to level up crafting stations unless a faction controls a town. So the entire world is stuck at level 2 crafting stations; we’re stuck in the iron age, literally.
Nolandia was add on Sept 29th and Amazon added even more servers to NA East on Friday which is puzzling. Why keep adding new servers if some of the servers you have are empty? Maybe they’re gearing up for server transfers. Or maybe it’s a publicity stunt to show they’re reacting while they figure out a real solution.
Anyway I’m interested to see what happens on Nolandia. When I was on last night there was no company with more than 5 members online. [I am a boob, I was looking at “# of Claims” not number of members.] There was some discussion in Faction chat of dissolving some of the companies and everyone joining into one large company so they can take a town. I don’t really understand how taking a town works, beyond being able to out and out buy one for I think 100,000 gold. I wonder if an alliance of several small companies could do it.
I’m not too concerned since I’m not thinking of this as my permanent home, but if you ARE looking for a server to call home for the long run, maybe look for one with Medium population. Too high and you’ll spend your gaming time waiting in a queue. Too low and there’s not enough warm bodies to support all the game’s systems, apparently.
[The image at the top of the post comes from New World Status. I don’t honestly know how accurate the site is (it isn’t affiliated with Amazon), but it is reporting that there are a total of 163 players on Nolandia! (Granted, it is early on a Saturday morning.)]
News Flash: New World launched! It has queues! You heard it here first!
What do you mean, you already knew that? Dammit now what can I say about this game…
I waffled on New World. I had a pre-order from years ago. I’d played in a few test phases, though only lightly. I liked it well enough but I was unsure about the emphasis on PvP and such. What finally decided me was hearing that a bunch of friends were joining a Company (what New World calls guilds) together. For once, I decided, let me be a joiner. I kept the pre-order, I joined the Discord, requested to be on the roster and started, in my glacially slow way, to get to know the members of this guild.
Well that crashed and burned. The leader of the company, who had been MIA when I first joined, turned out to be a raging asshole who encouraged toxic conversation in the Discord. I’m told that compared to, say, a WoW Raid Guild, it was very mild stuff, but compared to a baseline of human decency it was vile. So I quit before the game even launched. The irony is that, even though the company had their roster all set up, once launch came they threw that all away and folks who didn’t have the luxury of taking launch day off to play were told “Sorry, not sorry, no room for you.” [I still had eyes inside at this point.] So I wouldn’t have gotten in anyway. At least I had the satisfaction of saying “I QUIT!” and slamming the door.
I’m still super pissed at the way the leadership of this Company treated people, if you can’t tell. Anyway, moving on… [Until I started writing this post I didn’t realize how much anger I was still holding onto about this…I hate seeing people treat other people like shit.]
In the end, good old Belghast created a Company and welcomed all and that has worked out as well as can be hoped given technical issues. While the roster is full of names I know and folks I follow on Twitter, actually getting people in-game at the same time is a challenge given the queues I mentioned. I have to start trying to sign in before dinner if I want to play at 10, which doesn’t leave a lot of time before bed. Most everyone else in the Company is in the same boat: we are people with day jobs.
Again, you’ve heard all about the queues. People have started referring to the game as Queue World instead of New World. Clever. Accurate. Next week Amazon is supposed to start offering free server transfers which might help. There are plenty of servers, (added after launch day), that don’t have queues now. I finally rolled an alt on one just so I can get my New World fix when I don’t have a few hours to wait before I start playing.
Did I say “my New World fix”? Yeah I did. Thing is, when I do manage to get in-game I’m having a great time for reasons I find hard to quantify. I spend time gathering materials, processing them, then shoving ’em into my Storage Chest. I don’t know why this is fun; maybe because it makes numbers go up? Sometimes I fight things, and I really like the action-y combat system, though I think they are missing an opportunity by not having Perfect Block and Perfect Dodge buffs. I read every note and scrap of paper I find because I’m enjoying piecing together the mysteries of this island. I really dig the setting.
Scraps of lore are everywhere
My progress is slow… so slow. I just run around having fun. I open the “Faction” chat and listen to the PVPers plan their attacks and I find myself tempted to join them, not that I am high enough level for that.
Just writing about what I enjoy about New World is even putting ME to sleep. It doesn’t sound like much. Maybe it is a scarcity thing. I wonder, when we get to the point that I can just log in, will it still be fun? Or am I enjoying it because it feels almost like a privilege just to get in-game?
So, let’s talk about the cons beyond the queue thing.
Con #1: You can only have one character per server, and only 2 characters per data center. People will tell you “You don’t need alts because one character can do everything.” I’m not sure that is really true. If I put all my attribute points into Strength so I can tank, how am I going to be a good healer, too? To be good with a Life Staff you have to put your points into a different attribute. (Wisdom or something, I haven’t been paying attention.) Plus I am a weirdo who kind of role-plays and I like to have different characters with different attitudes.
Con #2: The world seems pretty small. Maybe I’m missing something but at level 12 I’ve explored, I’d guess, about 20% of the land mass (a BIG chunk of the landmass is listed as levels 1-25). It also feels pretty crowded, tho that may ease as people spread out in levels. Right now the population of a server is capped at 2000 players which seems really small (again I refer you to Belghast for his thoughts on this) but at the same time, the world feels kind of over-crowded to me. There’s a lot of competition for certain resources; basically anything other than wood. I’ve killed stuff with a ranged weapon and had people run up to skin it for its hide before I can get to it. Bastards!
So we’ll see. This is a beginning and I expect the game to grow/improve over time. I probably won’t play it for months and months, but given there is no subscription I can certainly envision revisiting the game frequently to see how things change. It seems like a game that’ll be easy to revisit since you don’t have 40 skills that you will have forgotten (you can have 3 skills per weapon slotted).
I’m glad I took the plunge and I’m interested to see where Amazon takes it from here.
Despite appearances, I have NOT thrown in the towel on blogging. I just have had a load of work-shaped and work-adjacent-shaped bricks fall on my head lately.
I have a bunch of work projects heating up which have had me working in the evenings, and I have agreed to join another developer in building out a portfolio site we can both use, and that is eating even more time. End result, very little free time for gaming or blogging.
Last Sunday I broke down and bought Tales of Arise for the PS5 which seems like it will be very good if I ever find time to play it. It certainly is a pretty game. New World is launching Tuesday (I think) and I have it pre-ordered though, again, not sure when I will play it. I did spend an hour on Thursday downloading EVE Online to play through their new New Player Experience which wound up being fairly underwhelming. This morning I played come Control on the PS5 before I nodded off on the couch because I haven’t been sleeping much.
There ya go, one paragraph to describe a week’s worth of gaming. 🙁
But I’m not dead yet, and neither is the blog. So this is just a heartbeat post!
Star Trek is to me what Star Wars is to a lot of the folks in my social-media circles: I grew up with Star Trek the way folks 10+ years younger than me grew up with Star Wars. In other words, there’s a special place in my heart for the IP. (Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Star Wars too!)
Star Trek is enjoying a resurgence of interest lately with new shows like Discovery, Picard, The Lower Decks and soon, Star Trek: Prodigy and Strange New Worlds. While all this is going on @partpurple and I have been been doing a re-watch of Next Generation. So I’ve had a lot of Star Trek in my brain lately but somehow I’d all but forgotten about Star Trek Online.
I’ve played STO in the past of course. I’ve found it a bit of a challenging game to love. I really enjoy the ship-to-ship combat, but the ground combat has always felt clunky to me. Staying with that theme, I find the ship models quite nice while the character models feel pretty dated. Then there are the free-to-play MMO trappings which means all kinds of esoteric systems designed around getting players to stick around and grind for items and hopefully spend some $$ in the cash shop. And of course, worst of all: other players. 🙂
But today Roger Edwards published a post on Playing the Story Arcs In Order and he got me intrigued. Before I knew it STO was installed and patched up and I was creating a new character.
Meet Cadet Jhemen, an Andorian from the 25th Century. During my last few tilts at STO I’ve created Original Series era characters but Roger’s post focuses on 25th Century characters so I went with that time period.
I chose not to skip the “tutorial” and I’m glad I did. I put tutorial in quotes because the tutorial these days is like a mini campaign. I don’t know how new this is but it is different from what I remember. This tutorial-campaign takes you from your graduation day at Star Fleet Academy right through a point where you’re commanding your own ship and along the way you pick up three Bridge Officers, upgrades for most of your ship’s systems and have the main gameplay systems explained to you. It took me over an hour to play through it and it was thoroughly enjoyable. (Story wise you do battle with two different enemy factions, both in space and on foot. The ground combat seems a little better than it used to be, but it still isn’t great IMO.) If I never launch the game again it was already worth the trouble of re-installing it.
Jhemen is a tactical officer. I don’t know if that matters but the 3 bridge officers that were assigned to her during the tutorial work well together. One has a skill that depletes enemy shields, another has a skill that enhances photon torpedoes. I quickly got into the habit of tearing down an enemy’s shields then launching a salvo of torpedoes. The third bridge officer can reinforce our shields, and Jhemen herself has Evasive Maneuvers which is a defense buff.
Now I’m ready to start the Klingon War story arc. My plan is to basically treat STO as a single player game. I set the chat to only show NPC dialog. I need to find a way to auto-deny Fleet (Guild) requests because I was getting spammed with those. My plan is to ignore the Duty Officer system, which I hate so much that every time in the past I’ve gotten to that point I’ve quit playing. (It just feels like a chore to constantly tend to them.) I’m hoping it can be safely ignored. I’m also going to ignore crafting which I’m only vaguely aware of in STO. I’m just there for the story this time, at least to get started. At this point in STO’s life there seems to be a LOT of story to experience.
I will have to figure out how to get better ships and remember how to level up Bridge Officers and stuff, but generally as much as possible I just want to fly around and pew-pew and experience the stories.
It’s nice to find a “new” game after bouncing off FFXIV. We’ll see if I stick to this one or now.
