Regularly Playing: June 2024 Edition

Good Morning Folks. Over the fifteen years of this blog, I have attempted to create a good number of reoccurring posts. In all cases, I have failed to maintain them for very long. However, one of the series that I managed to keep going relatively frequently was “regularly playing”. The idea behind this is that every few months I would update the similarly named widget in my sidebar showing what games I could be found in. If you mouse over one of the buttons, you get a popup indicating how you can find me in said game. If you click on the button it transfers you to the game page, or better yet if a profile system exists it links directly to my character profile. However this only really works if I update things frequently… and I have not made one of these posts since October 2022. At some point along the way I updated the sidebar and just did not make a post… poor form Bel. Yesterday I updated my bar again and this morning I am going to finally acknowledge the proper format and make a post.

Traditionally these posts have been broken down into four categories:

• To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
• To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
• To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
• Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.

Since I am largely “off the format” I am not going to attempt to catch up from the last post in October 2022, but instead talk about changes in the bar that I made yesterday.

To Those Remaining

I have to be honest, we are not starting off with the strongest footing. Diablo III is likely hanging by a thread at this point. I have left it installed and very rarely poke my head into the game, usually for the first weekend of a new season… only to disappear rapidly. Diablo III is sort of my baseline ARPG at this point and the bare minimum amount of joy that a game needs to give me in order to engage with it frequently. There has been a lot of innovation in this game over the years since it has launched, but honestly, after getting into Path of Exile it feels extremely simplistic. There are times I want that, but I am not playing this nearly as regularly as I think I probably should.

For the longest time, Diablo IV was also hanging by a thread, but I feel like with Season 4 the game has redeemed itself. I have at least as much fun as I do playing Diablo III during the start of a new Diablo IV season. I still do not consider D4 to be a terribly brilliant game. Many of the features are “aggressively fine” or more likely the bare minimum needed to make something enjoyable. Blizzard has lost the plot. What I mean by that is that Blizzard games used to have a clear focus and a clear vision, and now it feels like they make the safest possible decisions. The content updates they have added to Diablo IV are uninspired, and essentially the most basic iterations on the same general themes. They are no longer “bad” and I hope over time they will actually start being “good”. For as much as I disliked the Necropolis mechanic in Path of Exile, it was at least really interesting and attempting to do something cool. Diablo IV feels like the content diversity found in a McDonald’s menu… where everything sort of feels the same.

Fallout 76 is a game that I enjoy greatly… when I remember to play it. That probably sounds harsher than I mean it to, but I always seem to have objectives in other games that I am working towards and sort of forget to log into this game instead. I think the challenge is that when I do play Fallout 76 I need large blocks of uninterrupted time because the world is extremely unpredictable… or at least I am not seasoned enough to make it FEEL predictable given that I am still leveling. I know my friend Nimgimli is playing a lot of this game right now and it would be fun to run around with someone else… save for the fact that my level range is probably too low to reasonably link up with anyone. I know Thalen also plays this game fairly regularly and I would probably feel way more comfortable imposing upon his grace to drag me along through content. Anyway, it is a super interesting game that gets a shocking amount of updates, but also sort of quietly just exists in the background doing its own thing.

I’ve had a series of sort of lackluster game discussions here in a row, but now we reach Guild Wars 2 which has been one of my primary games for a while now. My history with GW2 is pretty wild given that I was an alpha tester… resigned from said alpha test… and then struggled with trying to get into the game from launch until 2017 when I finally began to grok it. However, since 2018 I have been properly hooked on the game and now spend 99.9% of my time on my Norn Longbow/Greatsword Power Soulbeast Ranger. I know those are a lot of words to be said in a row, especially if you know nothing about the game but essentially that told those who do know what I run around with build-wise. This past year I have crafted two legendary weapons, thanks in large part due to the headstart boxes that you can get through the Astral Ward chores. I’ve been working towards crafting a third one, but need to do a full world completion and farm up a gift of battle before I can craft it. Damned fun game and especially great for drop-in gameplay without the need for other players. However, I do want to get into organizing Strike and Fractal groups on “the regular” so that I can expand my horizons.

Last Epoch is another game that I am deeply devoted to. I am pretty much going to play every new cycle that releases, which is the name for their seasonal content loop. There is one starting in early July and I am pumped for the additions to the game that it is going to bring. Last Epoch and Diablo IV are an interesting contrast game-wise because they are both games that are “just starting out” which means they lack some depth of content. However, everything that Eleventh Hour Games introduces is deeply interesting in some way. The new patch is adding even more systems to the game and for the first time feels like something Grinding Gear Games would have created as a league in Path of Exile. If you have not had a chance to watch the Harbingers of Ruin trailer and are in any way a fan of ARPGs I urge you to check it out.

Friends… this has been my “main” game for the last few years. It took me four leagues to finally really begin to grok how to properly play this game, and even then… I tend to prefer tanky “zdps” builds. While I have a mountain of complaints about various aspects of Path of Exile, I love it so freaking much. I am uncertain there will be a time when I am not playing this game at league start, and it would take a heck of a lot to draw my attention away from it permanently. For the last five leagues I have earned a totem pole for my hideout and I feel like I want to keep that traditional rolling. Necropolis is a league where I checked out fairly early, but so did most of the player base. That is not to say that I won’t be there with bells on when the next league launches sometime in August. Do I recommend this game to other players? Honestly not really. This is quite possibly the most obtuse mess you will ever encounter, but if you can climb that mountain and reach a point of understanding… it becomes deeply rewarding.

To The New and Returning

Folks I am so happy to add Final Fantasy XIV back to my list of games, because with it has come a pretty significant change in my perspective. I’ve had this mental block against grouping with other players… and more specifically against tanking for strangers. I can’t really trace it back to a single incident that led me down this path, but it was that way for several years and recently I was able to return to doing the thing that I love the most… tanking. Nothing makes the heart grow fonder than being isolated from FFXIV for two days… and now I am pumped as heck for the drop of Dawntrail tomorrow. I am really looking forward to leveling through the content and then starting to get up so that hopefully I can do the raid when it launches. I am also super pumped that my friend Ace is equally bought back in and it is going to be a blast doing nonsense like roulettes with them.

I’m also tentatively adding back in World of Warcraft to the list. I came back several months ago and played through the Dragonflight campaign and largely enjoyed it. Then I played a little bit of Plunderstorm and really came back properly during Pandaria Remix. It was all of the grouping with strangers in PMIX that I feel probably got me over my mental block of grouping with strangers. World of Warcraft can have some pretty toxic players in random grouping, and honestly… everyone in Pandaria Remix was delightful. Maybe this was an anomaly or maybe I just built up the negativity of strangers to a fever pitch in my mind and it did not necessarily represent reality. Maybe the WoW community has just aged to the point of maturity and they are less awful than I remember them being. Whatever the case I enjoyed myself and plan on giving War Within a shot when it drops. I doubt I will ever go back to mainlining this game but it is fun enough to visit from time to time.

To Those Departing

This one had been hanging from a thread for quite a while. It seemed that I was only logging in during a major announcement to soak up some free pulls and spend zero time actually playing the game. I uninstalled this yesterday and decided that I am finally going to stop pretending I am actually engaging with it. I am not dissatisfied with the game, I just haven’t been in the mood for it. I had a heck of a lot of fun playing it for a while, but “Space China” and how much content was contained within it and the constant need to keep going back there sort of killed the pace for me. The first two “planets” were freaking great, but things bogged down in the Luofu. I am sure at some point I will return when I am in the mood for turn-based combat, but for now I figured I would reclaim the disk space and the mental bandwidth.

This was honestly the game that prompted me to update my sidebar yesterday. I think I am officially done caring about New World. The recent marketing debacle has led me to believe that the game is no longer going in the direction I want it to be going. Yesterday I made the step of uninstalling the game for the first time in three years and reclaiming the large amount of disk space that it was taking up. It is an interesting game, but it has gone the way of Bungie and removed content that I liked from the game… namely First Light turning into the expansion zone for Angry Earth, and now Cutlass Keys being consumed to build a zone for the upcoming Aeternum rebranding. I checked the fuck out of Destiny when they started vaulting content, and what they have done feels pretty similar to that. I get that they are struggling and this whole ARPG rebranding nonsense is a last-ditch effort to become relevant… but discounting the few players who were playing your game is the wrong way to get there.

Wrapping Up

Maybe I won’t wait a year before making one of these posts again. I seem to have settled into a series of forever games once more. I have my cycle of ARPGs that I shift between each time they release new content, and then I have a few MMORPGs to bounce back and forth between. I am pretty happy with the state of things because there is almost always something that I want to be doing in each of them. There will of course be single-player games that I spend a weekend and play through like I did with Horizon Forbidden West when it was released on PC, but really… very few of those last long enough to ever make it onto one of these posts. For now, I am really looking forward to Dawntrail dropping tomorrow and then the Harbingers cycle in Last Epoch in early July.