That Rift Moment

Yesterday was a fairly stark contrast to Saturday, but a pretty welcome one.  After milling around the house and blogging, and my wife doing the same we decided to embark upon a journey to Joplin.  We didn’t really make it out of the house until around noon, but by then the 50* temperature had warmed into the high 60s making my choice to wear shorts more justified.

Cameras at the ready

We brought with us our cameras, but they did not leave the car for the most part.  We roamed around for a few hours but didn’t really find much of anything up there that “inspired” us.  It had been a few months since our last trip to Joplin, so we had plenty of things to do as we ran around town.  But for whatever reason, each time we talked about stopping and roaming around, we were both decidedly meh on the topic.

I feel like at some point we need to take a trip to a nature preserve or something of the sort.  That seems to be what both of us are leaning heavily towards wanting to shoot now.  The recent round of thunderstorms has finally caused Oklahoma to green up, and I think both of us want to take pictures of that before summer starts to brown it again.  We have a list of places that we have talked about, but honestly we need to just do it.  Our problem yesterday was that our default weekend shoes are sandals, which are not exactly conducive to stomping through the weeds.

Return to Moriban

When we finally made it home for the evening I contemplated jumping back into the Neverwinter, but all day I had thought about how much fun I was having with the new build in Rift.  I am super glad that I did, because a short while after logging in one of my favorite people showed up.  Plasmodia is like this friendly mad scientist, and one of my highlights of playing Rift with Machiavelli’s Cats.  Her and her husband Marklaar were both super awesome people to hang out with, and apparently had missed me.

So over the course of last night I hung out and chatted, and generally did not pay much attention to what I was doing.  This is a good thing when a game supports this.  I happily ground my way through packs of mobs, loosely following whatever objective was highlighted on my minimap.  I generally tend to play really poorly when I am chatting with someone, as a result I used to run laps in Dalaran while I had to talk to someone for any length of time.

That “Rift” Moment

I am no stranger to doing stupid things, but at one point last night it was getting a bit excessive.  I was absolutely getting my ass handed to me, enough that I was starting to question this new miracle spec I had stumbled into.  It was round about this point that I remembered…  I have experienced this before.  Sure enough I looked up at my buff bar and noticed that not  single one of my 9 buffs was currently active.  Upon cycling through the buffs it was like I was a whole new person once more.

I would love to say, that this was the first time I had encountered this problem.  However anytime I go back to Rift for awhile, I ultimately end up running around like a buffless noob.  I’ve heard that there are mods that will remind you that you are “naked”, so I guess it might be time for me to investigate one of those.  Overall though I had a blast just hanging out and chatting, and while I was on guild chat seemed to liven up.

Small Group of Friends

I had noticed that Alea Iacta Est Rift was certainly more quiet than I remember, and last night talking to Plas I found out the reasons.  Turns out that a good chunk of the AIE/Cats folks wandered off into Defiance and are happily shooting mutants there.  Luckily I was able to play enough of it during Alpha and Beta to realize that it really was not the game for me.  As much as I love the concept of a Science Fiction MMO, the result never ends up being something I really enjoy…  at least for any length of time.

Another issue that is going on right now is that it seems the officery types are AWOL as well.  I have a feeling that some of the Defiance folks will be burning out on the game, as a good number of individuals on my twitter and google plus feed already have.  My hope is that some activity in Rift will draw them back.  Plas and I plotted to start doing Wednesday night dungeon groups, and I believe we will be having the first of these this week.  Right now that is likely going to be me, Plas and her hubby Mark and then anyone else we can tempt from the guild.  If you play on Deepwood and are super good natured, and friendly to absolute nubitude…  look me up.

Beauty of Dawn

So in a completely different direction, I had to post this.  I seriously cannot go a single day without listening to it.  This is Beauty of Dawn, a song by the already famous Malukah that apparently she teamed up with Zenimax Online Studios to create.  From my understanding, she wrote this song after an extended play test of Elder Scrolls Online.  Whatever the inspiration, it is completely amazing and so rich and evocative.  The song just feels laced with lore, and hopefully when the game releases we will understand all the things she is talking about.

If you could not tell, I am kinda a huge fan of the Elder Scrolls Setting.  I first got into them with Daggerfall, and have been a rabid consumer of all things Tamriel ever since.  There have been so many times while playing Oblivion and Skyrim, that I thought to myself…  man this would be really amazing if I could just play this with my friends.  My hope is that Elder Scrolls Online ends up being just that… Skyrim with friends.  I realize there are certain MMO trappings that you have to have to make the genre survive, but so long as the core gameplay translates I will be happy.

This is day four of my experiment, and if you have made it this far I want to thank you for reading.  The daily posting thing is still not extremely comfortable, but I look forward to doing it each morning.  I find sitting down and rattling out my thoughts relaxing.  Hopefully over time, it will even be useful to the community… though I sincerely doubt that.  This is going to be an insanely busy week at work, so I think I will need this little morning sanctuary to keep me sane.  Hope you guys have an awesome day, and awesome week if you don’t check back in before then.