It is finally here! Xcloud, Microsoft’s cloud gaming system for Xbox Game Pass, has been available on mobile devices and computers for a while now, but inexplicably not on the consoles themselves. Today it has arrived.
Of course HOW to access it isn’t particularly clear.
Step one: Update your console. It’ll update automatically probably tonight but if you want to jump in now go to settings->system and choose updates.
Step two: Wait impatiently for update to complete
Step three: When the console restarts you’ll probably see all kinds of promotions for this new feature, but barring that, open the Game Pass app, open a game page, and from there you’ll see a “Play” button with a little cloud icon next to it. (See image at the top of this post.) You’ll also see the cloud icon on the game ’tiles’ in the game pass app.
I can’t take screenshots of the dashboard, so please forgive the photo of a TV. 🙂
Xbox One owners get this too, and can play Xbox Series X titles via Xcloud, though to the best of my knowledge there are no exclusive Series X|S games that are cloud-enabled yet. Flight Simulator is coming, though.
Whenever I finish a game I feel a bit adrift for a while as I attempt to latch onto something new to occupy my time. Sometimes I can do that almost immediately and sometimes it can take weeks.
With Final Fantasy XV completed and off the Xbox external drive, I started looking for the next thing to ‘clean off’ the Xbox. (What brought me to FFXV initially was that it was a large game and I was trying to free up space on an external drive.) I was thinking Red Dead Redemption 2 has to be pretty big and I never finished that so I went to check and…it wasn’t even downloaded. I guess it was on the Internal drive of the old Xbox so didn’t make the generational hop. So of course I installed it and it is even bigger than FFXV.
So I’ve accomplished having even less free space.
I was all set to start playing RDR2 but…it felt intimidating. It was another long game; I’ve started it twice but never come close to finishing it, and I figured I’d want to start fresh this time, too. Plus I keep thinking Rockstar will release a native Xbox Series X|S/Playstation 5 version.
Then I thought “Hey I have a Playstation 5, maybe I should play something over there!” My PS5 has a 4 GB external drive for old gen games, and of course the internal space for new gen games. Unlike the drive on the Xbox, the PS5 external is quiet so I’m not really driven to get rid of it. In the PS5 ecosystem it’s the internal storage that is really limiting; there’s less than 700 GB of usable space on the PS5. You can now add a second internal SSD but sadly I don’t have a couple hundred bucks laying around to devote to gaming right now. Anyway, it seemed to make the most sense to complete and remove a native PS5 game.
A while back the ‘next gen’ version of Control was a Playstation Plus freebie. I’d played through a part of it before drifting away. One thing I’ve learned about myself is that I don’t like games with confusing maps, and Control has a pretty confusing map. (Poster child for this dislike of mine: Star Wars Fallen Order…I bounced off that game mostly because the map was so infuriating.) But I also know Control isn’t a super long game, so I decided to re-learn how to play it. I didn’t even start over! *pats himself on the back*
It is going slowly as I re-learn all the skills my character has and, yes, refamiliarize myself with the layout of game’s world. I’ve been spending lots of time reading the collectibles and stuff, which have a wonderful vibe and are really entertaining. I’m also only playing it late at night after @partpurple goes upstairs so I can put on the headphones because there’re so many creepy whispers and sounds in this game; headphones really improve the experience. (Rule of thumb around our house: the chance of her needing to tell me something spikes the moment I put on headphones! 🙂 )
But wait, that’s not a character from Control at the top of this post? Who is she?
Honestly I don’t remember her name, but she’s from Final Fantasy XIII, one of the more maligned FF games. Turns out I still have Final Fantasy stuck in my craw. FF XIII came out on the Xbox 360 but is covered in Microsoft’s backwards compatibility program. AND it just got the new “FPS boost” treatment where old games get their framerates improved on the Xbox Series consoles. Plus auto-HDR. In all, some Xbox 360 games look really good on the Xbox Series X. I booted up FF XIII and turns out it is definitely one of those games. The next thing I knew, I was playing it.
I have an old save with 30 hours of playtime on it, and one of the things no one likes about FFXIII is how linear it is for the first big chunk of the game (kind of the inverse of FFXV’s problems). Because of this I didn’t want to cast those 30 hours aside. Instead I started a new game with the intent of playing until I’m reacquainted with the characters and the systems, then I’ll jump to my 30 hour save and the open world portion of the game. I’m thinking 5-10 hours on the new save, then we jump ahead to the 30 hour mark.
I wasn’t really planning any of this so I have no screenshots other than…that girl, who I snagged a screenie of just because I couldn’t believe how good an Xbox 360 game was looking. I know my brain knows her name; she’s one of the main characters. I just can’t surface it. All I can remember is Lightning (that’s not Lightning) and Snow.
Anyway so that’s the plan. Double dipping, playing FF XIII in the early evenings, and Control later at night. I’m sure eventually one or the other will grab my complete attention but at least for now I’m keeping myself entertained.
(I also bought the Final Fantasy I Pixel-Remaster on Steam and have been dabbling with that, but so far not playing it very seriously. For me it is old-school enough that it is best enjoyed 15 minutes at a time.)
In other news: I’m taking a break from social media for a while (it gets really depressing seeing how wonderful everyone else’s life seems to be while you’re struggling) and because of that I need an outlet for random yammering; you may see more frequent blog posts that have absolutely no point to them. As someone who works from home full time and rarely leaves the house, I need to talk to SOMEONE even if it is the faceless Internet!
What a strange game this was. I’m pretty glad I finished it. The story, fragmented though it was, made it worth the time, though I still don’t know that I’d blanket recommend it to others.
In a lot of ways it feels like the devs were making an open world Final Fantasy and then deadlines started looming and they changed their minds. I spent something like 30 hours playing through the first 8 or so chapters in an open world, doing a ton of side quests and exploring. I remember an Achievement popping for having completed 80 side quests, so I did more than 80. As you play through this part of the game you level up your characters and gear, of course, but you also do things like improve your car and customize Chocobos. Chocobo riding levels up. Fishing levels up. Cooking levels up. There’s even a point where you can start growing things…
And then suddenly the game becomes a more-or-less on-rails experience and you leave cars and Chocobos behind. I spent 30 hours on the first 8 or so chapters and about 8 hours on the final 6 chapters. Also by the time I left the ‘open world’ portion of the game I was leveled near to 50 and doing level 30 content, but by the end of the game I’d only accumulated a couple more levels and the content had caught up to me. I’m glad I did all those side quests or the end of the game would’ve been brutal.
The combat system is so close to being fun, but too often things get too hectic, or a bush or wall comes between your character and the camera and you can’t see what is happening. Towards the end of the game there are some boss fights that change the fighting system and honestly even though I beat them, I still don’t really understand what I was supposed to do. Button-mashing got me through. When the main combat system worked, it was really entertaining.
The Crows Nest is a good place to stop for a bite,
Spoilers Below!
While I never really grew attached to any of the 4 main characters as individuals, during the open world portion of the game I did start to enjoy them as a group. There they are in life-or-death battle and they’re still trading quips, but they’re looking out for each other as well. One of them will draw Noct’s (and the player’s) attention if someone is really hurt, for instance. Between battles they bitch about it being too hot or too cold, or talk about how they can’t wait to get some food. Just kind of normal stuff. It did feel like a group of friends and I was an honorary member of the group.
That all unraveled in the linear part of the game when Ignis, who is kind of the den mother of the group (as well as being the cook) is blinded during an off-screen battle. In that same battle Noct’s intended bride and childhood friend is murdered. Yeah, shit got real, real fast. Noct is consumed by his grief while Ignis is trying to come to terms with his loss of sight. Gladiolus, the tank of the group, takes exception to the fact that Noct is dwelling on someone who is dead and not doing more to help their hurt brother. The two start to fight, a lot. Prompto, who is kind of the ‘everyman’ of the group, tries to hold the team together as best he can.
During the next expedition Ignis wants to come; he asks that the group not leave him behind. I said OK (there was an option to leave him behind and I’m not sure what would’ve happened if I’d chosen it. I’m guessing the others would’ve insisted he come.) Ignis is now walking with a cane, but he is new to feeling his way and moves slowly. If Noct (and you, the player) move too quickly the others yell at you about leaving people behind. In the meanwhile poor Ignis is stumbling and falling frequently. Prompto tends to hang back to help him while Gladio harangues Noct about his behavior.
Lunafreya dealing with an uppity god
From a story point of view I found this super interesting. Usually in a setting like this (an ‘adventure’ story) if one of the band gets hurt they’re immediately ditched to either die a noble death or to be retrieved later as an afterthought. That the gang brings Ignis with them is both heart-warming and heart-breaking. Just to drive the latter home, the next time you camp you don’t get Ignis offering you a menu of delights for dinner, instead you have 1 choice: a cold can of beans. It’s just kind of gut-wrenching.
From a GAME point of view, though, this was really annoying. Not being able to run as you’re exploring areas was super frustrating, made more so by Gladio at times yelling that we need to hurry (which is kind of his default thing he says through the whole game) and then yelling that I was going too fast. And the meal thing: I’d spent those 30 hours finding every recipe I could, and gathering food from all over the place, so we’d have a wide selection of food (each meal has a different set of buffs that last through most of a day). Having that all taken away really sucked.
Anyway, I guess that’s enough about a five year old game. Overall I enjoyed it, but not to the point where I want to stick around post-story to chase Achievements or clean-up side quests. I was level 52 as the closing credits ran and I have side quests of level 99! The level cap is apparently 120, so I guess they expect people to just keep on exploring for a LONG time post story. Yeah, I didn’t like it that much. If I squint I can see a truly great game in the design doc, but what got delivered was like a 3 out of 5 title.
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.)]
