Well folks I am about as ready as I am going to be for Endwalker, and now the waiting starts. Sure there are a lot of things that I could have done to get prepared for expansion, but being completely honest… the whole grind everything to 80 sapped the will out of me. Yesterday over lunch I spent about thirty minutes turning in belts to the Maelstrom vendors for Grand Company Seals… and having to dump them periodically into ventures. So at least I should be set on running retainers through ventures for quite some time. For those who are curious the only things currently in my inventory are:
- Two Stacks of Potions gained through copious amounts of Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High
- A Phoenix Down – because of course you have to keep one of these around
- A stack of really cheap food that I am just going to use for getting that +3% xp boost
- Gysahl Greens to keep my battle buddy summoned to fight by my side
- Way too many clear prisims but I refuse to get rid of them because at some point I will level a tradeskill high enough to make them into glamour prisms
- Glamour Prisms and Removers because they never leave my inventory
- Some Versatile Lures because I might decide I need to fish as part of a quest
I’ve had people comment about how clean my inventory is… and I beg you to please pay no attention to the bulging vaults of my retainers. I have a bad habit of just cramming things in their inventory until I absolutely cannot ignore it any longer. That said… I am ignoring it a bit longer because supposedly there are gacha boxes going in on the Grand Company vendors and turning in all of this gear should earn me a lot of them. Basically I’ve ratholed so much gear into my retainers for the purpose of leveling the jobs all the way to the maximum level. However when it came to actually doing that… I just bought a set of poetics gear every 10 levels and never touched any of the accumulated dross from my bank. So very little of it do I care about for glamour purposes, so I fully expect to convert all of it into gacha boxes.
As is often the case… I pre-ordered Endwalker so long ago that I had to log into the MogStation to verify that I had in fact set up everything to be able to participate in the head start tomorrow. Thankfully they give us this very useful screen to alleviate our fears. What I do not love however is that they make us wait so freaking long to get the actual key to register it. The MogStation being awful is a meme, but god is it true. In theory buying a game FROM Square should automate all of these steps, but nope I had to manually register the head start code, and will have to manually register the final key as well. Anyways if you are like me… and concerned about making sure you can log in as expected… maybe check your own MogStation.
Since New World is a shit show, I have been branching out and finding other things to keep me entertained until I can officially walk on the moon. Lately I have been playing a lot of Cyberpunk 2077, and really this game does not deserve the stigma hanging over it. Mass Effect Andromeda and Cyberpunk 2077 are both games that were killed by the bad press that came from launching way too early. Within the first week or so enough patches had been released at least on the PC that the games themselves were extremely enjoyable to play through. Granted I am not the sort of player who goes out of his way to purposefully break games, and I largely completed missions as intended. However since launch a whole slew of patches have gone into the game and the most important of these… is your cat can now move around your apartment.
This time around I opted to start a Femme V with the Nomad Backstory. While I feel like Corpo is probably the strongest because of the quest dialog options it gives you… Nomad is pretty great as well. Truth be told that in this world… I would more than likely live the nomad life or at least it seems way better than living in the slums of the city. The Nomad vehicles are my jam because they go really fast and handle extremely well… which honestly is all I want from a game. They also have this whole road warrior vibe to them which I dig greatly. There are a lot of things that seem to have improved… and a few things that were removed. For example you can no longer get legendary quality mantis blades for free without actually fighting anything. These appear to only be available for purchase at ripper docs, but supposedly they added other legendary cybernetics items to make up for the loss of the free blades and the monowire.
My only real regret is the fact that I have started this play through… and am starting to really get into the story again… and know that come tomorrow I will not care about it at all. As a result the last few nights I have not really been moving the plot forward and instead doing a bunch of the side missions which hopefully means I can pick up at some point in the future and sink back into the life of V after the shiny has worn off Endwalker a bit. Similarly I fully expect to check back into New World, though the current trajectory of that game does not give me much hope. I found out this morning that there were apparently stealth nerfs to the crafting of dungeon keys, so that they now require quadruple t he amount of stone than they did prior to 1.1.1. So it seems that not only did they wreck open world grinds… but they are now trying to slow down the dungeon grind as well.
Tomorrow I will likely be pretty late doing a blog post. I expect to get up tomorrow morning and play for a bit before writing some of my initial impressions. I will keep things spoiler free of course and just talk about the general shape of my feelings. However hopefully none of you will actually be reading my post and will instead be enjoying Endwalker yourself.