Everquest is a game known in part for it’s interesting factions and your ability to not only completely wreck them… but in some cases improve ones that started out bad in the first place. My High Elf Ranger for example was friendly with Paineel, and my friend had an Iksar Monk that was completely at home in Rivervale thanks to hours and hours of clearing Runnyeye. The factions have interesting names too like “HighHold Citizens” or the “Deepwater Knights” and are fairly granular in that you might be perfectly fine in most of a zone but one specific area will attack you on sight because you wrecked your faction. I had a weird dream last night that there was a law firm that acted as a mediator to help you repair your damaged factions. I don’t remember exactly I was there or what faction it was that I had offended, but I remember being across a giant board room from some NPCs that just kept chanting “You’ve ruined your own lands, you’ll not ruin mine!”. I eventually was able to appease them slightly with an assortment of bear pelts, slashed deathfist belts and bone chips… which only makes sense in Everquest.
The primary thing that I played this weekend was our April AggroChat game of the month… Night in the Woods. I don’t want to talk too much about this other than it being really good and I highly suggest playing it yourself. That said the suggestion is with a tiny bit of reservation because I found it a deeply emotional experience. There are things in the game that pattern my own choices in life and others that were the road not taken. I am mostly saving the ammunition for the podcast next week, but I have some feels about this game and its characters and small town life in general.
I also played a bit of Defiance 2050 this weekend… and I have to say I am deeply confused by this title. Maybe I completely misunderstood what this game was supposed to be. I had gotten the impression that it would be a game where a bunch of time had passed since the original game and that the world had drastically changed. So as a result I was deeply confused when I followed a sequence of events in Mount Tam that if I am not completely mistaken are pretty much exactly what happens in the base game. So I am not exactly sure what is up with this one, because it seems like the same game with no changes that I could see? I did not play for terribly long but was extremely confused the entire time because I kept expecting something new. Yes I realized that I just used confused three times in rapid succession… but I am trying to drive that emotion home here.
The other bits of my weekend that I did not specifically call out here were spent in Monster Hunter World working on the weekly objectives… namely hunting Black Diablos and doing 9 Star missions. Here you can see me hanging out with T’Challa who I did not realize was into Monster Hunter World… after taking down Xeno’jiiva. Things I learned this weekend… my fear of Diablos is largely unwarranted because waiting this late into the game to really start farming it… means it is way easier than my memory would tell me. The last time I had fought a Diablos was the one needed to clear the main story step. I have avoided these like the plague because that fight… was pure hell at the time. Now I seem to be able to take them down pretty easily and I did four of the weekly event quest involving taking down both a normal Diablos and a Black Diablos. As far as the 9 Star quests… I SOS Rouletted them which involved two Xeno’jiiva fights, a double tempered bazel fight, and a tempered rathalos/hard tobi fight.
I did also spend a few attempts on Kulve Taroth and figured out that you can filter your session by folks doing the encounter. I’ve been kicked a few times… the first because I am guessing they wanted a fixed party comp and I snagged the last slot they were saving for someone else. The group disbanded and was locked when it was reposted. The other time I am guessing that it was for simply being a longsword player because that seems to be the weapon type that everyone bags on as this games “Dragoon”. I mean it isn’t wrong… I take a lot of damage and do plenty of stupid things but more often than not I also break big parts off things with spirit helm breaker. Other than that I wound up getting into a few really good and chill groups and got more weapons… sadly no more oranges but I did get a couple of decent purples. I have this interesting collection of death shots and in this one I think I died to a magma splash, either that or someone else fainted and this was my final action shot. I have a few really good ones from my many attempts at Nergigante as well because the scene at the end of the encounter always seems really interesting to me… so more often than not I take a quick snap. All in all it was a pretty good weekend and I am really looking forward to next weeks AggroChat so I can get all of these thoughts related to Night in the Woods out of my head.
The factions of Everquest are actually a fond memory of mine. I really enjoyed being able to walk around freely in GFay as a dark elf because I put forth the effort.
Bizarre dream, but strangely apt.
My wood elf druid was KOS in Rivervale, most of Kaladim, and some of Kelethin — for certain indiscretions involving levelling from about 34 to 49. She was sure she was a druid of Innoruuk.