Last night was night three of good sleep after taking a quick walk before bed. Additionally it has broken loose the log jam that was my weight loss plateau. As of this morning I was down another three pounds since starting the walking. The weird thing about the sleep however is that I am pretty much dead to the world. I didn’t dream, I don’t remember sleeping… I just went to bed and woke up with the alarm and everything between is a void. I seem to be getting rest because I am not absolutely dead tired in the morning… it is just an odd experience since I normally dream and remember the dreams.
Don’t Starve
Over the last few nights one of my friends has been playing the hell out of this game, so last night I decided to fire it up and give it a shot as well. It has been compared to turn of the century film version of Minecraft… but quite honestly I didn’t have that feeling at all. Essentially “Minecraft” to me means taking raw materials and building something permanent. So for me Terraria is a Minecraft game… but Cube World for example is not… regardless of how much it looks like it.
It took me awhile to adjust my expectations… what we have here instead of a building game is a survival game. Something I find far less interesting. Essentially you have to gather resources during the day, and survive the night all while not going crazy or starving. You gain sanity by standing near the fire each night, and as you get more insanity you start to see hallucinations everywhere. I’ve heard that eventually the hallucinations will attack you if it gets bad enough.
I can’t say I really enjoyed myself massively… but the gameplay instead fell into the mildly entertaining category. I think at my core I am a base builder… and the lack of the ability to build a permanent basecamp to go adventuring from really harmed my enjoyment of the game. I have seen screenshots that seem to suggest that later you are able to build fortifications to keep your camp safe. Additionally at least at low levels, it seems like you are almost penalized by trying to keep returning to a central base. Since in essence you can plunk down a fire anywhere you happen to be when night comes.
The other big problem I have with the game is a lack of permanence. The goal of the game is to “beat” each world by solving some puzzle that allows you to progress to the next one. So even if I could build some form of a base, I would be abandoning it every time I moved to the next tier in the game. Even in Minecraft when I decided to venture out and build a new base camp… I know that I always have the previous ones to return to if I so choose. Essentially it seems like the game has all the survival hassle of Minecraft, without the elements that make it fun for me… the wholesale world building.
The game is well designed, plays extremely smoothly and has a great retro look and feel that is immediately appealing. If you really like the survival aspect of Minecraft and similar games than this might be just the thing for you. I only managed to survive 3 nights on my first foray because I kept trying to engage in combat apparently too early. So that throws another money wrench in my enjoyment… to be happy in a game I need to be killing something regularly. My friend is having a blast with it, so it might very well be down your alley… however it goes in the “not really for me” bucket.
Goodbye Granite Falls
Between the laptop lunch fun and the beginning of last night I managed to wrap up the last of Stonefield with Baby Bel over Faeblight. The tail end of that zone is much more enjoyable than I remember. I am sure it was equally epic when I ran it originally… but there have been some tweaks that seem to make it flow better. Firstly I remember there being a gap where I was uncertain exactly where to go… so the transition up to the camp near the Phoenix Gate seems to be messaged better. Additionally the “rumble” with Guardian forces at the tail end of the zone… actually occurs in Stonefield now. Previously it sent you across the bridge into Scarwood Reach… where it was extremely easy to get into mobs way too high for your level.
So major Kudos for them for fixing the flow of this tail end content. Additionally the whole opening of the Phoenix gate felt far much more epic to me after having done the Rise of the Phoenix raid instance. I guess I am in less of a rush this time through the game… and as a result find myself enjoying the content much more. I still have problems with a few things… like Meridian and Sanctum still do not seem worthy of being capitol cities… but there is enough good always to make up for the few frustrating spots.
Has the Must Haves
Essentially when I was working on my MMO must haves list… I came to the realization when a friend asked me… that Rift is the only game on the market that has almost every single bullet point I listed. While I am looking forward to Elder Scrolls Online… it also seems like a vastly different kind of game… much like The Secret World is. So as a result… I feel like even after that game launches… Rift will still be my traditional MMO crush. I feel like I will always be playing rift at least some of the time.
There is just so much to like about the game, and so many different options for things to do. Especially now with the gem store… you can expand your character in ways you never could before. Recently for example I picked up Artifacing for Belghast over on Deepwood. This adds to his already existing crafts of Armorsmithing, Weaponcrafting and the three harvests of Butchering, Mining and Foraging. At this point it is just easier to add additionally tradeskills to that one character than to try and level up new harvesting abilities elsewhere. The one thing I really wish however is that we had cross shard mail between our own characters.
Better Mentoring
One of the sore points right now is that mentoring should be a bit easier than it is. I am not talking about lowering your own level… because that seriously could not be any easier. What I am looking for is the ability to invite any 4 friends to a group… click a button… and have it queue us for a random dungeon to meet our level range. Right now we essentially have to mentor manually to the lowest common denominator… sometimes it lets us queue for a dungeon… other times we have to remember where the hell the dungeon entrance is and run in manually.
One of the most powerful things about Rift is that it is functionally possible to group with your friends regardless of shard or level range. Trion really needs to put some effort into ironing these tools out to make it a much simpler proposal. I want to be able to group a bunch of people together and see a list essentially of things we can do… and then queue for something on that list without having to do much fiddling. When we have done this manually there is usually a lot of trial and error until we get everyone in the right zone at the right time at the right level. Streamlining this process would be a massive boon.
Wrapping Up
Well I have pissed away another morning rambling on about nothing much. Now has come the time for me to gather up my now empty coffee cup, run it to the kitchen and get on with the day. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope mine personally is far more uneventful. While I was on vacation, nothing much happened. But every day this week since I have been back… there has been a crisis. Yesterday for example McAfee decided out of the blue to mark an FTP Server Daemon as a “Potentially Unwanted Program” and in the process quarantined it… taking down a number of automated processes with it. I just want a nice calm day where I can actually remove items from my task list, instead of chasing down fires.