New Kind of Creepy

Extra Life Hangover

Yesterday was a really strange day for me.  In part I am simply not used to staying up as late as I ended up doing for my leg of the marathon.  When it came time for me to get offline and got to sleep around 2:30 in the morning my time, I found that I couldn’t do it.  I tossed and turned trying to calm back down enough to actually sleep.  It might have been the monster I had about midnight, or it might have just been the adrenaline of having streamed, but in whatever case it took me until probably 3:30 to finally sleep.  When I got back up around 9:30 that morning I was feeling groggy as hell, but also feeling like I should attempt to get up and around for the day.  Everything about the day just felt “off”.  By the time I got out of the house to get breakfast, they were out of sausage rolls.

I generally edit AggroChat Saturday night and upload it, so instead I had to do all of that yesterday morning.  By the time I posted my blog post it was around 1:30 in the afternoon.  I started laundry and attempted to chill out playing some Rift, but it seemed before I even turned around that it was time for Walking Dead, and ultimately bedtime.  It felt like the day was going in fast forward, or I was stuck in slow motion one of the two.  I cannot imagine how yesterday must have felt for the folks who actually did do the entire 25 hours themselves.  I feel like I am extremely old at this point, because there was a time not too long ago that staying up til 3:30 in the morning would not have had this sort of massive negative effect.  Hell there were many times while playing WoW that I did just this for one reason or another.  All of this makes me all the more impressed for everyone who managed to complete the entire thing.

New Kind of Creepy

One of the things that Rift has excelled at over the years is introducing extremely creepy gameplay elements into the MMO genre.  Sure Ct’hun was a giant eyeball with tentacles…  but it never felt unsettling.  So much of the things that you end up fighting against in Rift just feel wrong somehow.  Storm Legion for example had all of these strange machinations that looked to be knitted out of mismatched piles of flesh.  Even the agents of Crucia in their gleaming storm trooper armor… felt somehow unnatural.  So when we move to the Nightmare Tide expansion you see this landscape that should be friendly.  Full of pinks, blues and greens in all manner of pastel tones that should signal something relaxing…  but trust me that just makes it all the more creepy.  Especially as you hear these disembodied siren songs echo across the zone that remind you of the mermaids song from Harry Potter gone horribly wrong.

The storyline of this expansion once again involves multiple threats forcing their way into our world.  One of the threats is familiar, the forces of Maelforge are draining the Plane of Water and invading it.  As you wander around Goboro Reef you encounter their devastation as large sections of the realm are already dry, and you help the inhabitants deal with the consequences.  This however is just the most obvious threat.  There is an undercurrent of madness as well as you start to encounter the Akvan, nightmares taken shape and form.  They follow the dark god Demogos who appears to be the embodiment of the nightmare.  This expansion seems to be taking us past the bloodstorm and into something more sinister, making the players realize that the dragons were far from the worst threat we had to face.

Wandering with Style

The gameplay style seems to have improved greatly over Storm Legion.  While they have still stayed far removed from the very quest hub based leveling of the first 50 levels, the replacement this time around feels far less grindy than it did in Storm Legion.  All of the Carnage quests have been reduced in number it seems, so instead of having to kill 10 to 20 of a thing, we now only have to kill 4  to 8 to get completion.  Right now my focus has not necessarily been on quest completion but on exploration.  Goboro Reef is huge, and is full of little nooks and crannies where all sorts of interesting things are hidden.  I went up into a fissure under water, that originally I thought might have just been a place where the terrain didn’t quite match.  Instead I found that it was very much a purposeful gap, because at the end of it I found a treasure chest of sorts, in the form of a lost clutch.

I like that the zones allow me to wander about without feeling like I have to be focused on this thing or that thing.  My focus right now is on getting as much Thalasite as I  can, since I have so many tradeskills to level that all require large amounts of it.  Thankfully it is fairly plentiful on the reef, but you often times have to leave the immediate clear path to find it.  Often times you have to leave dry land and go swimming into the walls of water to snake your way up onto platforms where the ore sits.  This is the process I am enjoying, the slower pace of discovery that makes this an enjoyable game to play while going through my most recent netflix binges.  Yesterday I wandered around the zone while finishing up the second season of American Horror  Story, and I found the whole experience enjoyable… both in the game and in the show.

Addicted to Minions

Part of what is making the piddling so damned enjoyable is the introduction of the Minions mini-game.  In essence this works similar to Crew Missions in Star Trek or Crew Skills in Star Wars the Old Republic.  You collect these cards, that represent creatures that you can then send out on missions.  You start with a single mission slot available, but you can unlock additional slots through the spending of credits.  As you can see here on the right hand side of the screen I currently have five minions going at the same time.  Each mission takes a fixed amount of time, and costs a certain amount of stamina which is the number shown with the little lightning bolt like icon on the left side of the mission and minion cards.  I am uncertain how fast stamina is recovered, but generally speaking I have been able to keep sending out minions while I play.  When a mission is completed a little demon head icon appears in your notification pane, next to the time.

Right now I have encountered four basic kinds of missions.  The first kind rewards some form of crafting material, and there are multiple flavors of these “Hunting” or “Harvesting” missions.  Certain minions have icons on them relating to one of these skills, and if you match a minion with a mission card you have a better chance of success.  Similarly there are Diplomacy missions that return items that give you notoriety with the various factions in the game.  Some of the missions are searches for Artifacts, and I have had one of these reward as many as a dozen different artifacts from any manner of zones in the game.  My personal favorite are the dimension missions, because they reward random dimension goodies, that can be anything from simple building blocks to actual dimension keys.  There is another type that is called Assassination, but I have not actually encountered these, so not sure what exactly they reward.

So as I quest around and hunt for ore I keep sending my pack of critters out on missions, and every few minutes I get rewarded with all sorts of random goodies.  One of the things about me is that I love RNG elements, especially ones that have a potentially awesome payout.  I love sending out my retainers in FFXIV on ventures because of the random and interesting things they bring back.  Minions are like this on steroids, because the payoff can be extreme.  There are 1 minute, 5 minute, 15 minute, 8 hour and 10 hour missions that I have encountered so far.  The 10 hour missions require that you either spend adventurine or credits as well as the normal minion stamina cost.  Right now I don’t have a clue how to get adventurine other than the small amount that I have gotten from purchasing the expansion, or buying a minion starter kit.  In any case this definitely fuels my “Faff” and gives every little bit of aimless wandering more purpose, because I am letting my minions go find goodies for me.  I really hope the minion game ends up getting added to the mobile application.

#Rift #ExtraLife