Author: Nimgimli

August 2024

Posted on by Nimgimli

It seems a little odd to do a monthly recap this month. Traditionally I’ve been doing those mostly as a reminder to future me as to what I was playing when. This month it’s all there in the posts I’ve already written. Also, ironically enough, I didn’t do as much gaming as I generally do because I spent so much time writing posts! I’m a pretty quick ‘rough draft’ writer but I make a ton of typos and errors and tend to spend a lot of time re-reading & re-writing, plus cropping and resizing screenshots, doing the SEO work and all that. And I STILL always find several mistakes after posting!!

So having blogged every day this month, will I continue? No, not daily. It’s just a bit too much for me. But my “whenever I feel like it” approach isn’t working either. I have gotten faster over the course of the month and the amount of mental effort it takes to write a post is much lower now than it was on August 1st, just demonstrating once again that the brain is a muscle. Writing a lot makes writing faster and easier…what a revelation! 🙂 I think I want to commit to a minimum of two posts a week and kind of hope for at least 3. But two seems like an easily achievable goal that won’t stress me out.

The reason I did Naaagust rather than Blaugust is because I generally HATE commitments. The running joke that I wasn’t in fact doing Blaugust but just happened to be posting every day gave me a mental escape hatch where I could stop any time I wanted to without feeling like I’d failed. Yes my brain is easily tricked, even when it is me doing the tricking.

Anyway, on to the traditional recap.

Playing

Fallout 76 — I’ve once again ‘broken’ a game for myself and this time it is Fallout 76. I so hyper-focused on advancing the Seasons that it became one more chore to do every day, like feeding the dog. I did it, but I did it as quickly as possible then shut the game down. I dabbled a bit with playing on PC which was fun for a few nights but then I started to think about duplicating the hundreds (over 500 in fact) of hours I’d devoted to the Xbox version and decided that life is too short to do all that over again. So Fallout 76 is kind of in a holding pattern until then next update drops (and the next season starts) in a few days. Sadly the big new feature for this update is delayed a bit, but we’ll get the new Legendary Crafting system which should be interesting. Just a matter of if it is “good interesting” or “bad interesting.” 🙂 I SHOULD hit level 200 in the current season before it ends, but I will NOT be stressing over the seasons stuff the next time around. I want the game to be fun again!

Oh I almost forgot, just this past Thursday I encountered a Legendary Treasure Hunter; a mob I’ve never seen before. I guess it must be from some event. It was on my private server so wasn’t something triggered by another player. I’ll have to do some research. [Fallout 76 is just not a game that screenshots well, sorry!]

In game snapshot of a Legendary Treasure Hunter in Fallout 76. I'd never encountered one of these before!
These mole-miner Legendary Treasure Hunter was a new find for me this past week.

Diablo IV — This is a weird one. Every time I play my seasonal character I enjoy myself, and on the new PC I’m pretty dumbfounded by the spectacle of it all, particularly when I’m wearing headphones and it is at night and dark and no one else is around. It’s great! But… I just don’t boot it up very often and I am not sure why. Maybe it is as simple as having too many different gaming irons in the playtime fire and preferring to play games that friends are playing. I don’t play WITH friends but just talking on the socials about playing the same game as them is enjoyable.

Guild Wars 2 — This journey has been pretty well-documented this month, and I don’t plan to stop any time soon. This is probably the most fun I’ve ever had playing Guild Wars 2. I don’t think it is that the game has changed so much as that I have changed. I don’t question it too much, I just enjoy the ride.

Guild Wars 2 character showing off her green cloak with a dragon on it
Been taking my first steps into the Guild Wars 2 fashion scene, which of course is the true endgame! 🙂

World of Warcraft — I STILL can’t believe I’m back in WoW, but so far, at least, I’m having fun, but I’m not like ‘over the moon’ having fun. It helps that I skipped so many expansions so that in a lot of ways it feels like a new game. I think I need to stop doing every quest I see and get the story moving. My new character is something like level 21 now. We’ll see if it still gets listed in the September recap!

I guess that’s it then. You know me, always playing the newest games! LOL

Watching

Time Bandits (Apple TV) — We thought this was really cute. I guess folks were mad because it wasn’t a sequel to the original movie or something? I wasn’t really paying attention when it came out. But THIS Time Bandits is about a little kid, Kevin, who is a complete history nerd that falls in with a group of misfits who call themselves bandits but rarely manage to steal anything. Wherever in time they go, Kevin tends to be the smartest one in the room but he manages NOT to be obnoxious. We thought it was often funny and often sweet.

A Discovery of Witches (Netflix) — This is an urban fantasy series in the ‘sexy vampires’ genre. PartPurple loves this stuff and I usually only tolerate it, but for some reason this one is grabbing me. Maybe I’m just getting sappy in my old age. I’m not sure I would actually recommend it, though. This time out we have witches, vampires and demons living among us and they all hate each other. But our beautiful young witch main character falls in love with a 1500 year old vampire, upsetting all the other various creatures. We’re not too far into it but it’s OK so far. This one originally aired on AMC in the US.

Rent-A-Girlfriend (Crunchyroll) — I reviewed this one. Spoiler: I really enjoyed it!

Recovery of an MMO Junkie (Crunchyroll) — I reviewed this one too! Spoiler again: I really enjoyed it, too. Enough so that I’ve watched it twice now.

I KNOW we watched some other stuff but whatever it was left such a light impression on my brain that I’ve forgotten what it was!

Reading

Still nothing, really. Every so often I pick up The Tower of Swallows, book 4 in The Witcher series but you know, I’ve resisted admitting this to myself but I’m just not actually liking these books that much. I enjoy The Witcher games and The Witcher Netflix series but something about the pacing or the manner of storytelling in the novels isn’t super satisfying to me. There’s just one more after this so I’ll probably push through, but these are books that I WANT to like more than I ACTUALLY like. So make of that what you will.

And that’s Naaagust in the can! One more month of hellish summer and then maybe things will start to cool a bit. We did have a freakishly cool week this month which was just enough to get us all hopefully, then the brutal heat rolled back in. That’s just life in eastern North Carolina, I guess.

Now let’s see if I can post at least twice a week during the next month!

Update On My New Logitech Peripherals

Posted on by Nimgimli

A few weeks ago I posted about buying a new set of Logitech peripherals. Now that I’ve been using them all for a while, I wanted to follow up with my thoughts on each one.

First up and the one I have the most issues with, the keyboard.

Logitech G915 TKL Wireless Tactile Version

I love the feel of this keyboard, which is obviously the most important aspect of a keyboard. It is mechanical but isn’t super loud and the keys are fairly low profile. They make various versions of this keyboard so this being the “Tactile” version is important to note. You can customize the F keys but I haven’t messed with that at all. In fact there appears to be a way to set up 3 versions of the F keys (and you can set up different profiles for different apps/games). The RGB lighting can be handled by the Ghub software or it can be connected to Windows 11’s Dynamic Lighting. I’ve done the latter just cuz, but honestly I didn’t notice this doing much. I eventually switched back to the Ghub system using a theme that marks the last key you hit in a different color. Why? I dunno, it just seemed interesting!

One nice perk for some is a “Game Mode” where you can disable certain keys, like the Windows key. I don’t use that since I use the XBox Game Bar for captures and such and it requires the Windows key, but I bet a lot of folks would appreciate this feature.

Now the downsides. The secondary functions of keys, like the $%^& symbols, do not light up and in a dark room you really can’t see them. It’s OK if your fingers are already in position since you probably know where these are, but if you’re just reaching over to hit the ^ key or something, if you’re like me you might not remember that’s on the 6 key. So that’s my first issue. My second is that when the lighting goes out, which it does pretty soon after you stop typing, the letters are really hard to see in a dark room. I generally have to tap a key to kick the lights on, then I can place my hands in the proper position. Ideally the lights would stay on a little longer and/or using the mouse would keep the keyboard lights on. Or, y’know, maybe have lettering that is readable even with the backlight off.

Of course you have to charge the keyboard (which is maybe why the lights go off so quickly) which isn’t a huge deal except the charging port is a micro-usb port and I’m surrounded by USB-C cables at this point. I bought a little micro-usb to usb-c adapter so I can just unplug my game controller and plug that cable into the keyboard to charge it, but a built in USB-C charging port would be welcome.

So that’s a lot of words about downsides but the important thing is I LOVE the feel of the keyboard so I’m still pretty happy with it. And even though I got the Wireless version just because it was what was available and I was too impatient to wait for the wired one to ship in a week, I’m pretty happy I did since it is nice to easily move the keyboard around without a cable knocking things over and such.

Logitech G502 X Wired Gaming Mouse

Very happy with this mouse. It has that asymmetric design where there is a kind of shelf for your thumb to rest on, and the mouse is very light. I keep it at 1600 dpi by default but it can go all the way up to 25,600 DPI. I set it that high once and that is just crazy and unusably fast, but it’s there if you’re The Flash or someone. The scroll wheel has both smooth and ‘ratchet’ scrolling with a button below the wheel to toggle between the two. You can save multiple profiles and there’s a second button to toggle through those. The scroll wheel pushes in and also clicks horizontally left and right. Next to the main left button are 2 extra buttons you can hit with your index finger pretty easily (by default they toggle DPI up/down) and on the side are three more that you can hit with your thumb. All of these can be customized per game and the Ghub software even offers Commands for a bunch of games. Like pick the Once Human profile and there’s a Summon Motorcycle command that is really just rebinding “G” but you don’t have to remember that the default key for Summon Motorcycle is apparently G.

I don’t have any downsides beyond I am still working on developing the muscle memory to hit all these buttons. I’m slowly adding custom button presses for the games I’ve been playing. Overall, super happy with the mouse and glad I got the wired version just because I have to assume a wireless version would be heavier due to the battery inside.

Logitech G Pro X SE Wired Gaming Headset

Really over the moon happy with this headset, but I do want to stress that I am not a true audiophile and a certain amount of hearing loss runs in my family as we age, and I am definitely experiencing that, along with a lot of tinnitus. So keeping all that in mind, the headset is super comfortable and really blocks out the world to where I have to tell PartPurple I’m putting them on so if she calls me and I ignore her, it isn’t that I’m being rude, I just can’t hear her. Music sounds really good, games sound great. The surround sound works really well, the mike SEEMS to work really well in testing though I still haven’t actually spoken to anyone using it. The Ghub software lets you set equalizer profiles, which I did, but once I found something I liked I just left it. As with the other peripherals you can set up custom profiles depending on app/game but I haven’t bothered so far.

Again, really no downsides. I maaaaybe should’ve gone with a wireless set, but since these are dedicated to using on the PC there’s something to be said for never having to worry about if they’re charged and what not. But having the cable dangling around is a bit of a hassle, particularly since Lola somehow always winds up with it wrapped around her paws (one of her MANY beds is right next to my gaming station).

So in conclusion, I guess this was a really boring post because basically I love all this gear. I won’t get any clicks for this! I should chosen something I hate as my topic for today.

But yeah, I’m just in this honeymoon PC gaming period. I LOVE my new PC, I love these peripherals, there are SO many games I want to play. All I need now is to win the lottery so I can quick my day job and just hang around playing all day!

Recovery of an MMO Junkie

Posted on by Nimgimli

Having finished Rent-A-Girlfriend I was back to trolling through the far end of my watch list looking for something with the same kind of vibe, and I spotted Recovery of an MMO Junkie. This is one I’d watched before, but it’s quite short so I decided why not treat myself to a re-watch.

I think this one might resonate well with some of my readers. While it is not an isekai (a show about someone transported or trapped in another world, frequently a gaming world) it is, I guess, isekai-adjacent. The story is about Morioka Moriko, a 30 year old office worker who decides to quit her job, become a NEET and focus on playing MMOs. In simpler terms, she just stays in and games. She has fond memories of the last MMO she played, which she could only play on weekends, but it has shut down so she starts a new one, and decides to play as a guy named Hayashi.

She quickly meets Lily, a more advanced player who takes Hayashi under her wing, and from there winds up making a group of friends. She is very content with her online life (it is never really explained how she supports herself) but her IRL life mostly consists of putting on sweats and heading to the convenience store for food. The show bounces back and forth between in-game life and out-of-game life.

As things progress she and Lily grow closer and closer and Moriko struggles with this since Lily doesn’t know her real gender. Then one day she (literally) runs into a guy on the street and is impressed with how kind he is. This begins her slow journey back into the real world.

You can probably guess where this is going, but I don’t want to spoil anything. I will say events will really strain your sense of credulity.

In spite of that, I love this show. There’re no bad guys and nothing terrible happens. It’s just a real feel good show; very cozy. No screaming, no explosions. Even the enemies in-game are kind of cute. And if you’ve ever playing an MMO in a guild that grows into a kind of family, lots of what happens in the in-game scenes will feel pleasantly familiar.

It’s also fairly short (11 or 12 episodes) and the manga it is based on was put on hiatus when the creator got ill. As far as I know it never came back, and Recovery is from 2017 so I think it’s safe to say this is a 1 season and done show. If you’ve been away from anime for a while, this might be a good way to dip your toes back in.

Why I Don’t (Usually) Watch Twitch Streams

Posted on by Nimgimli

I was kind of struggling to find ONE LAST topic for #naaagust earlier this week (I don’t always post things in the order I write them) when another round of Twitch drops came along and Tipa wrote a post about how odd the whole concept is. I commented there that I don’t often actively watch Twitch but I will open a stream and mute the tab just to get the drops. As I’m writing this I have the stream of an acquaintance from Mastodon in a muted tab. Not for drops but just to ‘help’ their channel. I think it helps?

But in case any streamers read this and are curious as to WHY I don’t watch Twitch, I figured I’d share in case it is helpful for them as a way to expand their audience. I mean I am not conceited enough to believe that I am some unique individual so if I think this way, there are probably others who think the same way.

I do want to stress, in the strongest terms possible, that I am NOT telling anyone what to do! I don’t know the business of streaming and if streaming is just a hobby for you then obviously you should do what brings you joy. I’m just sharing why I, personally, don’t often watch streams.

Why I Don’t Watch

First off, length. These streams tend to be LONG. I get that you’re probably supposed to dip in, stay a while, and go on about your business but I’m a bit OCD and am a start-to-finish person. It feels vaguely unsettling to leave something in progress. And I don’t really multitask, at least when there is sound involved. There’s no way I could watch a stream while I’m working because the streamer’s voice would break my concentration. When I’m not working, the 3 hours I could spend watching you stream is 3 hours I could spend playing a game myself which, sorry, I’d generally rather do! I don’t know how to ‘fix’ this, though. I assume you need to stream for a long time just because if you say you’re going to stream from 5pm to 6pm the chance of people working their schedules around that specific time slot is very slim.

I DO watch gaming content but it is generally on YouTube where it has been edited down to under 20 minutes and available on-demand. Anything longer than that takes a real commitment for me to start watching, and even then I probably won’t watch it all in one sitting. And just to be an even bigger pain in your behind, I won’t watch a VOD of your Twitch stream because when you’re talking to people in the chat I am only ‘hearing’ half the conversation, which I find annoying. I watch most content on a YouTube app on my TV so don’t ever read chat.

The second, and bigger, reason I don’t watch Twitch streams is spoilers. If you’re playing a game I want to play, I won’t watch because I want to discover what is in the game for myself. If you’re playing a game I don’t want to play, I’m PROBABLY not going to watch because I’m just not interested in that game.

Last is the little things, and these are SUPER subjective, but things that tend to make me turn off a stream: excessive shouting, and excessive cursing. And OF COURSE racism, misogyny and all that stuff but I think that goes without saying. But I personally am not a fan of that 14 year old boy energy that I encounter a lot on random streams. Fart jokes and things like that. A nice soothing voice helps, but I mean, your voice is your voice, right?

Why I Might Watch

So that’s kind of a dilemma, right? So what WILL I watch?

The few times I have gotten interested in watching a streamer it was some kind of ‘evergreen’ game that didn’t really have a set narrative. A good example, back when Mixer was a thing, was a guy who streamed Farming Simulator on a persistent, multiplayer farm. Farming Simulator is a game I’m kind of curious about but always get bored of playing, but since this person was working with others it was more interesting. Like one guy would be driving the machine that cuts the hay and another would be driving the truck that catches the hay bails and they’d have to stay coordinated (but often mayhem would ensue) They’d have daily chores to do like check on the apiaries or whatever. It was also a heavily modded version of the game so they had stuff to do that wasn’t in my version of Farming Simulator. There was also really no ‘start’ or ‘finish’ to the game so you could just drop in whenever and see what was going on. Maybe stay until the end of one set of chores or something.

So this channel was compelling because there was no set storyline to spoil, and since it was a group of players it was something I couldn’t do, in a game that I was actually interested in.

That, I guess, is my stream viewing sweet spot. Find a game that doesn’t have a narrative to be spoiled and play it in such a way that I can’t, or won’t, play myself. I’ve dabbled in watching e-sports a time or two as well. Match-based games. I don’t do PvP so I wouldn’t actually play these games, but watching skilled players can be interesting.

If I could find a group of likable friends that stream, it might be compelling. I tend to live my life with just 1 other person to talk to, so being exposed to a group of people chatting and having fun is intriguing to me. And probably not just to me. As evidence I point to Critical Role and generally the many D&D streams that are now popular. I mean MAYBE people watch for the role play but I suspect they watch just as much for the fun people are having together. (Note I don’t watch Critical Role because episodes are so danged long. One upon a time Deborah Ann Woll did a series called Relics & Rarities which was a role play series where each episode was an hour long, and that was something we loved.) I’d probably enjoy being a fly on the wall and watching you and a few friends have fun playing a game together. Probably a co-op game since there’s usually more friendly banter and less stress about winning or losing.

So in summary, maybe this is helpful or food for thought. Maybe it is just coming across as me being selfish and expecting the world to deliver exactly what I want it to! But I just wanted to give a glimpse into the mind of a non-viewer in case it is of any help to anyone. If anyone knows of streams that I might enjoy, giving all the above, please leave a comment!

The “Back to WoW 2024 Journal” Part 1

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you asked me a few weeks ago if I was thinking of trying World of Warcraft again I would’ve told you a very firm “NOPE” but here I am.

Just to recap the journey up to now. First played WoW in the Friends & Family Beta when the only race you could play were the Undead. Or Forsaken? I can’t even remember the race name. The skeleton characters. Played at launch heavily up to the release of the Burning Crusades then quit. For a while I’d go back to try new expansions, and whichever one the Blood Elves were in was the last time I spent any amount of time at all playing.

At some point post-Cataclysm I tried again but, not knowing any better, I treated it like “Classic WoW” and just went to Northshire Abbey then Goldshire then Westfall just like I’d always done. I leveled so fast and gameplay was so easy I didn’t stay long. Maybe tried the same thing for Night Elves? Then I tried Classic but that was too far the other way, if you know what I mean. I’d done those first zones so often they just felt tedious and THAT leveling was too slow! All this stopped quite a few years ago. 3? 4? 5 maybe? A long while ago.

OK that brings us up to now, and if you’re playing WoW this will all be stuff you already know. I’m writing this more for friends who, like me, haven’t played in a long time.

I rolled a new character (because of course I did) and ran through the new starter zone called Exiles Reach. (You do have a choice of starting in your racial staring zone). I liked Exiles Reach because there was a nice group of characters from various races there which was a good reminder to me that this was “New WoW”. If doesn’t take too long to run through even doing everything (I think I did everything) and when you get out you’ll be about level 10 and you get ported to your race’s main city, in my case Stormwind. Good old Stormwind. It was kind of nice to learn I still knew my way around it without much trouble, aside from that new-fangled Harbor zone. When did Stormwind get a harbor?

Then I had a few choices. The game nudged me towards two, one of which was Dragonflight, the last expansion (this was before The War Within had launched) and the other was, I THINK, the ‘pre-patch’ zone that I’ve heard friends talking about and which didn’t look super interesting from what I’d seen. Seemed just a place to grind up levels, but I could be wrong and maybe that wasn’t even what choice #2 was. They don’t make it very clear (though once you decide on a ‘campaign’ they make it pretty hard to get lost). And if I didn’t want to do either of those I could’ve headed down to Elwynn Forest or something, but I knew I didn’t want to do that, at least not right away. There are also ways to go back and play earlier expansions but I think you need at least one high level character before you can access that system. I’m not sure how interested I am in that, anyway.

Quest panel from World of Warcraft
It’d be pretty hard to get lost in the campaign. If you forget to accept a quest the game will remind you, and while it is hard to see here, there’s an icon on the map showing exactly where you need to go

In the end I went with Dragonflight, a zone I’d never been to in a game that was both familiar and very alien. I feel like the narrative is much heavier than it used to be, which I’m enjoying. Not only do we get some cut scenes but also there are NPCs with conversation bubbles over their head. When you interact with these it kicks off a discussion between a few NPCs that you just eavesdrop on. I’m eating that stuff up.

There’s now a metric sh*t ton of stuff to collect and a lot of it is account-wide. I was over the moon when I checked the Mount collection and my Nightsaber mounts that my old main used to ride were in there. And you can ride immediately. [That’s Petra riding a Frostmane at the top of the post, though next to Cadet Sendrax both she and the cat look tiny!] Remember when you had to hit level 40 before you could even use a mount? There’s a ton of systems I know nothing about, but I could still take skinning so I can skin my kills and sell the leather, so that felt really familiar!

There’s now the Warband stuff where all your characters across all servers are part of an extended family. Aside from showing a group of them on the login screen I’m not sure what real impact that has. There is a shared bank vault for anyone in your Warband but it costs 1,000 gold which seemed crazy until I saw how fast gold accumulates in “new WoW”. So that’s something fun to work towards. I guess in the newer zones you can set things so that quests that you’ve already done on other characters are hidden which will be handy if I start running alts.

Toy Box interface from WOW
Like collecting things? There’s 48 pages worth of “Toy Box” items to collect.

Appearance item collection from WoW
And 42 pages of appearance items!

As for the actual minute-to-minute gameplay, that still feels like good old WoW to me. I’m playing a Paladin which I’ve played before. There’s now a specialization system (3 per class I guess) and you get skill points to spend as you level up. I honestly cannot recall if that was in vanilla WoW or not but it seems like another alt-friendly system. I THINK you can switch specializations at will, but I’m not sure.

I’m playing on a low-population server and noticed a lot of other characters had an * after their name. According to Google this means they’re from a different server. I’m not sure exactly how that works…did they choose to come play on Kirin Tor or does the game just magically move them to balance things out. Not sure. To be fair I’ve not interacted with anyone anyway. Even chat is quiet, to the point where I wondered if some channels defaulted to off but it didn’t seem that way. There’s a lot of odd things that don’t unlock until you get a few levels (like area looting unlocked at level 8 or something) so maybe the game is protecting me from “Barrens Chat” as we used to call it.

So yeah, having fun so far. Love learning about these dragon-people, which I didn’t know existed. New cultures with new lore is always fun. The old routine of grabbing 1 ‘big’ quest and then 2 or 3 ‘kill ten rats’ quests that happen in the same spot is both familiar and still enjoyable. Nothing like running back and handing in 3 or 4 quests all at the same time and watching the experience bar move! As I mentioned I’m really digging the heavier story telling.

So that’s where I’ll leave things for now but as I learn and experience more stuff I may be back with more WoW Journal Entries. While everyone else is talking about The War Within you can listen to me yammer on about Dragonflight!

Fascinated by my return to WoW? You may enjoy the rest of this series:
The “Back to WoW 2024 Journal” Part 2
The “Back to WoW 2024 Journal” Part 3

Guild Wars 2 Update for Late August, 2024

Posted on by Nimgimli

The last time I talked about Guild Wars 2 I was in a bit of a slump after being my own worst enemy and basically turning the game into a chore to get through rather than a journey of pleasure. I took a few days more or less off which helped to clear my mental palate, and over the weekend jumped back in.

This time I went back to playing the way I favor which is, yes, to follow the “My Story” quests but to travel from one to the next on foot, allowing myself to be constantly distracted by events and vistas and whatever else pops up as I slowly uncover parts of the map. I really enjoy this style of play and I am not looking forward to having the whole map revealed, but I guess I have a ways to go before that is a problem.

Guild Wars 2 image showing my character's latest armor skins
Found an anniversary chest in my bank vault and got these cosmetic skins from it so Petra is no longer a pirate. Also note to self: Turn off my own name in the UI!
So far I had one fight that was really tough (one fight that I should have been able to do on my own, I mean…clearly there are PLENTY of group fights that kick my butt) and for that one I needed to sleep on the fight, think of new ideas (and the game gave me hints along those lines, I just wasn’t listening) and then try them. Doing that I beat the fight the next day and it was really satisfying. So more of that, please.

If I AM going to have a real issue with Guild Wars 2, it might be due to what many people see as the game’s strength: the horizontal progression aspect. Right now my character is level 80 but her gear is not. Some of it is. Some of it is lower level than that. Then there’s the question of tier quality. The game pushes you towards having Exotic gear in each slot and I’m not there yet. The top 3 gear tiers are Exotic, Ascended and then Legendary but everyone says Legendary offers quality of life improvements but not better stats. So level 80 Ascended gear has the best stats in the game. And I’m already being urged to equip level 80 Exotic, which is just 1 tier down.

Thing is, I actually like the gear grind and farming for better gear and making my character more powerful. I have a ways to go before I have all level 80 Ascended gear, unless I watch one of the many “How to gear up fast” videos and follow along. But I DON’T want to go the trading post and just buy gear that some other player has crafted or found; where’s the enjoyment in that? Getting your gear is half the fun of MMOs for me!

So I was kind of in a dilemma and then Stargrace shared a game-changing tip with me. (PixelOne had told me about this earlier but it went right over my head because stuff goes in one ear and out the other with me.) There’s an item in the shop called the World Boss Portal Device. It costs 400 Gems ($5 US assuming you buy them for cash) but OMG it is awesome. You use it and it tells you what world bosses are close to spawning and it will portal you to their location. And just to make it even greater, you can set it up so it notifies you in text chat 10 minutes before a boss spawns, too.

For guildless, friendless players like me, this is a game changer. I used it to do two boss fights in a row and my only “gripe” is then I had to spend a bunch of time sorting through all the loot that I got from doing them! Most of it was salvage or trading post fodder but I did get a couple of upgrades from it, and that was from just 2 bosses and maybe an hour of playing. So now I know that whenever I want to change things up and work on getting some good gear “drops”, I can use this device to jump in a zerg attack on a world boss. Super fun stuff! Oh and it just so happened one of the bosses was Tequatl again, and this time I was actually contributing thanks to having a rifle in my bag.

Guild Wars 2 screenshot showing my bags full after fighting world bosses
The only “downside” to chasing world bosses is inventory management!

I still worry a bit about what will keep me engaged once I DO get all my gear, but that’s really just borrowing trouble because it’s a long way off and I do still have a bevy of alts to level up and gear up. I feel like I’m happiest in Guild Wars 2 when I just do my thing and don’t worry about the future, though that can be tough for me. I’m a born worrier.

So yeah, still enjoying myself now that I stopped fixating on getting through the content as quickly and efficiently as possible. We’ll see how long I can balance Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft but honestly if I AM going to play 2 MMOs at once, this feels like a good pair since they scratch different itches. Guild Wars 2 with its more action-y combat and vast world that is about ‘go do whatever, whenever’ and WOW with its tab target combat and strong quest lines to follow along (and yes, it’s lovely gear treadmill).

I tell you what, there are worse problems than having TWO games you’re currently enjoying!

A Lazy Sunday Gamescom-Adjacent Post

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Here we are, the last Sunday of this month in which I completely arbitrarily decided to try to see if I could blog every day, and it certainly had nothing to do with any kind of event organized around BLogging in AUGUST. It’s hard to imagine: only 6 more posts to go, and I have 2 in the can in case of emergencies and then there’s my usual monthly recap (mostly redundant this month but I still plan to do one). So I only need three more ideas and I’ll have made it! Yay go me!

But anyway, once again I’m going to call out a few games I’ve seen while watching Gamescom and Gamescom-adjacent coverage (which I am STILL doing, by the way…there’s SO much. Currently watching the Future Games Show coverage which I think just ‘happened’ to come out during Gamescom though I’m not 100% sure). I don’t bother talking about games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle or Star Wars Outlaws since I figure we all know about those. I like to share somewhat lesser-known games that just caught my eye for some reason (or in some cases, no particular reason!)

Redacted is a rogue-lite with what appears to be a lot of permanent upgrades you can purchase between runs. I can’t really do TRUE rogue-likes where you completely start from scratch every run. I just don’t have the patience. I need something to make me feel like I’ve made some kind of progression each run. Redacted is by the same team that did The Callisto Project but has a VERY different aesthetic. Bright and colorful and low on the gore. The premise is that you’re a guard in a prison on Callisto and the prison is overrun by beasties. There’s one escape pod left and you have to get to it before one of the prisoners (of which only a few are left) do. So you’re fighting monsters, you’re fighting these prisoners, and if you find the corpse you left from your last run, you can fight that. It’ll be as powerful as you were last time you died, so there’s a lot of risk there, but if you beat it you get back an upgrade that you had on that run. Big risk. big reward. Anyway here’s the trailer

Staying in the world of rogue-lites is 33 Immortals. This isn’t a new announcement but I’m mentioning it because there’s a beta running on Game Pass this weekend and I’ve tried it. I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to say about it, but suffice to say that assuming it ships in good shape and isn’t full of bugs, I’ll be picking it up. The premise here is that you join 32 other players on a map chock-full of baddies. If you wander off on your own you’ll probably die, but herding 32 strangers is hard, right? And there are these mini-dungeon areas you’ll find that have even tougher enemies but again, going in alone is almost certain death so you have to kind of organically join a crowd and hope everyone goes in there. As with Redacted there are permanent upgrades you can purchase between runs so you’re always getting a little stronger. And once again, bright and colorful graphics. Here’s a 9 minute segment from the Xbox Gamescom coverage about the game:

Eternal Strands is not a rogue-lite! It’s fantasy game featuring mostly magical, physics-based combat, from what I can see. It’s from Yellow Brick Games, one member of whom is Mike Laidlaw who used to be with Bioware. I don’t actually know a lot about this one other than what is in the trailer, but I just got a good vibe from it. Maybe it’s because I followed Laidlaw back on ‘good’ Twitter so I feel that weird artificial connection to him that you get when you 1-way follow someone on social media. Ha!

Now if you know me, you know I love nautical themed games and I love pirates, even though, yeah I know REAL pirates weren’t, and are not, nice people. Just let me have this, OK? Rogue Waters is a pirating tactics game. It has both ship-to-ship and cutlass-to-cutlass combat, and just to be clear these are Saturday matinee pirates, get me, matey? It is not 100% clear how the ship-to-ship fights play out but once you’re on the enemy deck it appears to be pure tactics gameplay. Guess we’ll see when it comes out at the end of September.

Last up is Lost Skies which just caught my attention because grappling hooks and gliding. I love flying in games almost as much as I love captaining a pirate ship. This is another game I know almost nothing about but the very short trailer enchanted me, even if I can’t quite articulate why.

Oh, one last bonus game that doesn’t quite fit in the ‘you might not know about this one’ bucket, and that is Warhammer 40K Space Marines II. I’m sharing this just because I thought this was going to be another horde-mode co-op game like Vermintide but it is not. It’s got a proper single player campaign… two of them in fact. You CAN play these co-op but you don’t have to. And there’s PvP too if that is your thing. Here’s a 10 minute segment from the Xbox Gamescom show:

Man there’s a lot of games coming out, aren’t there? We all need more free hours in our days. We need a device that lets you step out of the time flow to a pocket dimension where you can play as much as you want, then step back into real time refreshed and ready for life’s annoying responsibilities. Someone invent that, please. I realize while you’re inventing it you probably won’t have any time for gaming, but y’know, just take one for the team, OK?

A Noob in WoW

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Well I did it. I subscribed to World of Warcraft for the first time in I don’t know how many years. And my first hour or so was just WEIRD.

First strange thing is, just a few weeks ago I started a new character using the “Free until level 20” system and I played him for maybe 10 minutes before thinking “Nope, this isn’t for me.” This time I once again started a new character and enjoyed it. What changed? I guess my mood, or maybe it was because that first character was an ugly human male and this time I made a more attractive human female. Maybe I really AM that shallow!

Although Krikket had kindly invited me to join her on her server, I ended up rolling on good old Kirin Tor which is an RP server. I take it that what server you are on doesn’t really matter these days and I doubt anyone still role-plays but JUST in case, I wanted to play on an RP server. Not that I RP much but back in ye olden days I used to enjoy watching role play while acting almost like an ‘extra’ in whatever drama was going down.

Then finally I started playing and there were a lot of things I’d forgotten. Little stuff like, to open your inventory you don’t hit I, you hit B, for Bags. When you loot a corpse I’m not seeing a “Take all” option but I figure it has to be in there somewhere; maybe I need to check the options or something. With stuff like this, I don’t know if things have changed or if back in the day I had keys rebound or mods to help. But it felt slightly awkward and I was happy to be playing a new character, who is in a zone I’ve never been in before which sorta helps my brain process changes better. If I was at the Northshire Abbey I’d be hella confused.

There’s a lot of other little things I don’t understand, like some characters have an * after their name. Some NPCs have 3 dots over there head. I THINK that means they’re waiting for you but I’m not sure. There’s now a Newcomer Chat channel and folks were actually being helpful in it! Stranger still, I had questions!

There’s now the Warband stuff that gathers all (??) of your characters under one umbrella. For me it’s a little odd since I’ve used the same name over and over on different servers so I had several characters with the same name appearing on my login screen. Finally figured that one out: the characters you have tagged as “Favorites” show up on that screen so I shuffled some low level alts up there for the screenshot at the top of this post.

I had a moment of panic when I couldn’t find my old “Main” character from Vanilla WoW, but then I remembered the “level smush” they did a few years back. I’d heard about it but never experienced it. Turns out that very handsome level 25 hunter named Meglivorn on the left in the screenshot up there is my vanilla WoW level 60 hunter. I have several Meglivorn characters which is why I didn’t put it together right away, then I noticed his Warg Companion and blank tabard and realized THAT was him. I’ll have to wake him up eventually.

[Vanilla WOW trivia: Back when I was in a guild Meg the Hunter would be who pulled the boss in several dungeons. Imagine if a DPS pulled today! But he’d pull the boss and kite him for as long and as far as possible while the rest of the group burned down any sub-bosses or other riff-raff, then they’d give me the word and I’d have Meg Feign Death to drop the aggro. The boss would then turn and walk back to his starting point where the rest of the party was all set to pound him.]

In for a penny, in for a pound. I signed up for a 3-month subscription just to try to incentivize myself to stick with it, AND I pre-ordered The War Within. So we’ll see how this goes. I only stopped playing last night because it was getting late, so that’s a good sign, I guess! As to the cost, it struck me that with virtually EVERYTHING going up in price these days, a WoW sub costs the same as it ever has, which makes it feel like more of a bargain than it used to. That 3-month sub cost me about the same as what we spend on a fast food dinner for 2 and a movie rental on a Saturday night, and it’s for 3 months. So not so bad, really. Maybe I’m just justifying… 🙂

Screenshot from the early moments of a new WoW character
The default positioning of UI elements on a widescreen seems a little inefficient since I have to look back and forth so much

Next step is to ask around to see what mods are hot these days because of course even if I could remember the UI mods I used to use, that doesn’t mean they are still supported. I also may need some tips on the best/most efficient way to play on a widescreen. I feel like some important data is now out of my central viewing area, if that makes sense (see screenshot). And I need to read up on what exactly this Warband stuff is for. I do know that some quests told me that another member of my warband had already completed it (presumably the other alt I’d rolled up a couple weeks back). And I think I’ll go through and delete some of these alts because I have a ridiculous number and many of them are VERY low level (like under 5). So there’s some tidying to be done.

And here is where I was going to share the “Warcraft Story” for one of my old mains, but none of them seem to be findable, probably because they haven’t been logged in for years and I’m not really ready to deal with logging them in yet since I know a cascade of random pop-ups will happen when I do. My new character, Petrarav (did you know WoW doesn’t allow spaces in names? Her name SHOULD be Petra Rav, which is the name of my Guild Wars 2 character, Petra being a character in both Destiny 2 and Horizon Forbidden West, and Rav being a shortened version of Ravach, a name I often use for male characters — particular those that lean toward barbarian or boisterous cultures.) doesn’t have a story yet either, presumably because she was just born.

So that’s my WoW story for now. With trying to play Guild Wars 2 and Diablo IV and World of Warcraft AND Fallout 76…well obviously either something has to give or I just won’t make any progress anywhere, but as I said the other day, I’m just feeling rather self-indulgent right now, and I’m gonna play what I want, when I want, at least while this PC gaming honeymoon period is on-going. I’m not in any guilds anywhere or anything so if I just vanish from some of these games, no one but me will notice.

WoW Now, Holy Cow!

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The best part about writing about World of Warcraft is coming up with silly post titles.

As I am sure you are aware, World of Warcraft has a new expansion, The War Within, that is in the midst of rolling out. Early access has started and full launch is, I believe, Monday. Normally a WoW expansion wouldn’t interest me at all. The last time I seriously played WoW was before the Burning Crusade expansion. Mind you I was big into what we now call vanilla WoW. I happened to be playing when I was laid off from a job at the start of one summer and decided to just chill out and look for more work in the autumn, and I spent that summer just LIVING in World Of Warcraft. Joined a guild, made friends, chatted with them constantly. The classic MMO experience. It was a really nice time. Then it was back to real life and full-time work and for whatever reason Burning Crusade didn’t hit me right so I left.

I’ve jumped back in many times since but it has never really stuck. And now it is time to jump back in again. And honestly it probably won’t stick but as long as I have fun for a while, does it really matter?

So why now? Two main reasons and I’m going to be honest. Mostly it is due to game developer, influencer and all-around great guy, Dusty Monk. If you don’t know Dusty, he’s one of the nicest people I’ve met online and I think you should subscribe to his relatively new YouTube vlog, I’m Still Playing. (He is just starting out with this project and having more subscribers will help get his channel pushed to more people via the YouTube algorithm, so even if you’re not normally a YT viewer subscribing would still help him out.) I’ve had the pleasure to know Dusty for a number of years and I know that he and I have similar tastes in games. If he likes something I probably will too. He is pretty psyched for The War Within and he’s been getting me psyched too. Here’s the post, from earlier this week, that pushed me over the top:

And if you read the comments you’ll see:

Me: Dammit Dusty, stop tempting me!
Dusty: Brutha I had you in mind when I made this video cause I know you’re like me! C’mon check it out!

I mean how can I resist that? I can’t! I just can’t!

I do tend to play MMOs solo and I do tend to drift away when I run out of content that is solo-able. In some games I can join in with other people to do un-organized group events and I enjoy those, but the idea of waiting around to Form A Group at this point in my life isn’t very appealing. I am just past the point where I can sit down and know I have 2-3 straight hours to play, and like Dusty mentions in that video, you don’t want to finally get in a group then say “Sorry, gotta go.” I am just not that kind of person.

And this solo-friendly aspect of The War Within isn’t just something that Dusty has imagined. At Gamescom, Tina Fong, Associate Art Director on The War Within, when talking about the new Delves feature, said “something that is a priority to us for delves is that it really caters to a group of our audience that historically has been a little underserved by the end game progression loop that we have..” and she goes on to talk about “overworld” players, as she calls us soloists, while Game Director Ion Hazzikostas spelled it out, saying they are “making sure there is a deep solo experience“. In addition to Delves there’s now something like Final Fantasy XIV‘s trust system where you can do at least the main quest dungeons in the expansion with a group of NPCs. No more waiting for a group to take your DPS character through a dungeon so you can continue with the story. Dusty does a great job of going over all the solo-friendly aspects of this new expansion in the video above.

And if you want to watch The War Within segment from the Gamescom 2024 Xbox show (where the Fong and Hazzikostas quotes come from), here it is all queued up for you.

And in addition to that, just on the off chance WoW does ‘stick’ this time (there’s probably a dozen or more “Back to WoW” posts on this blog from throughout the years… probably some are showing in Related Posts down below this post), the start of an expansion which in itself is the start of a new storyline seems like an excellent time to dive back in. It’ll presumably be 4 years (the story is supposed to stretch over 3 expansions and I’m assuming one per year) before that happens again.

So yup, I’m going to do it. Of course I’m still playing, or trying to play, Guild Wars 2 (between overtime at work, following Gamescom and writing a post every day I’ve had little time to actually play this week), and I doubt I can do justice to two MMOs at the same time, but y’know, I’m not getting any younger. I’m going to play what I feel like playing when I feel like playing it and stop agonizing over my choices. It’s just games, right? There’s like a 98% chance that by mid-September I’m playing something other than Guild Wars 2 OR World of Warcraft. That’s just me, chaotic good. Ok maybe chaotic neutral. 🙂

Gamescom 2024 Day 1, Xbox Version

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There is a LOT of Gamescom footage flowing into YouTube and I, dear reader, are burdened with the need to spend my days working, so I didn’t get time to watch much of it. I wound up picking the Xbox feed since I’m pretty pro-Xbox in general. From that 2.5 hours of footage I’ve plucked two very different games that caught my interest.

The first is kind of a cute skiing game called Lonely Mountain: Snow Riders. This team’s first (?) game was Lonely Mountain: Downhill and it was about riding a bike down a mountain. I played it and it was OK but it happened to come out somewhere around the time Descenders came out, which was also about riding a bike down a hill. Riding a bike down a hill is a bouncy frantic activity though and neither game really grabbed me. (Those are all Steam links since I know most of my readers are Steam users rather than Xbox users.)

But I always enjoy chill skiing games like Ubisoft’s Steep. Snow Riders didn’t get much more than a gameplay trailer with commentary but I kind of fell in love with it:

It just looks so mellow and relaxing, doesn’t it?

Switching gears in a pretty radical way, the other game that really caught my eye is Atomfall. (I think this might have been on Opening Night Live but until I saw a longer look at it, it didn’t make too much of an impression.) This is a kind of sci-fi/folk horror game that is trying to capture the vibe of British sci-fi from the 1950s and 1960 like Quatermass and early Doctor Who. In it, a region in northern England is quarantined after a nuclear power plant catches fire. Five years later the region is still quarantined and no one really knows why, but the folks living there are really having to scrape by. Who YOU are is a mystery that you’re trying to solve. You play in first person and the game gives you no clues as to who you might be. It seems a bit rpg, a bit action-adventure. Combat is a mix of melee and guns, though ammo is very rare. There’s a lot of scrounging for materials for crafting, but it seemed more like The Last of Us crafting (ie making molotov cocktails and other smaller items) than say Fallout crafting where you’re making entire guns and armor and so forth. In addition to combat there seems to be a significant amount of puzzling and mystery solving.

Anyway here’s the trailer:

And here’s yesterday’s Xbox Gamescom stream all queued up to the Atomfall segment, it’s about 20 minutes long:

That’s not all that looked interesting, of course, but these were both new to me and each caught my interest in a different way. There was also a lot of content about Diablo IV, Starfield and some new games as well. And while I admit I fast forwarded through it, they devoted a good chunk of time to new accessibility peripherals. Not a bad first day for Xbox, but like I said, there’s a lot of other content from the show to be found if search YouTube for Gamescom.

Not sure I’ll do this kind of post every night of Gamescom… I’m really starting to run low on spoons this week. But we’ll see; tomorrow Xbox is talking about Fallout 76 (and of course lots more).