Regularly Playing Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Regularly Playing: March 2025 Edition

March 7, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. One of the long running themes of this blog is how much I like the concept of reoccurring posts. Another running theme is how bad I am at actually following through with them. One of these series was “Regularly Playing” where in theory I update the sidebar of my blog with the current crops of games that I am playing on the regular that then show my account information when you mouse over them so folks can find me if they so choose. The general idea is that you have a list of games that you are likely to hear information about advertised on the front page… even though we all know that I tend to fixate on a single game for weeks at a time before jumping to the next one. However behind the scenes I am flipping back and forth between games as my mood hits me.

The core problem with this is… my updates in this series tend to happen way less often. The idea was to have a monthly roundup of things that I was playing but what it ends up being instead is a semi-yearly truing up of the sidebar. For example my last update in this series was June 27th of 2024… when I acted as though I would now make it a regularly feature of the blog again. We can all see that this did not happen. Before that the last update was during the great blur in October of 2022. This is funny given that at least part of my claim to fame is being a consistent blogger. Anyways… I am not making any false promises here but I did think it was far past time to crank out one of these posts and to more importantly update the damned sidebar.

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.

Some of these categories only really make sense if I am doing this on the regular, but we are going to attempt to make one of these happen regardless.

To Those Remaining

After being very frustrated with the launch state of Diablo IV in 2023, it has honestly turned in to a pretty decent game. This has more or less taken the place of Diablo III as being that short term game that I am happy to play for a week or two before finishing everything up that I want to finish and moving on with my life. It also has some of the easiest group game play out there, and while it lacks the depth of Path of Exile it is a fun time to be had with my friend Ace as we tackle the seasonal journey. I am not saying this is a phenomenal game, but it is far from “bad” at this point and is honestly pretty damned great if you are interested in some super chill ARPG fun. That is not to say that the game does not have problems… all of which can be chalked up to the shitty design practices of Blizzard. Ace and I have a joke about Blizzard design philosophy. They give you this super sweet kitten that is loving and adorable… but it has permanent explosive diarrhea. They have some really cool ideas, but they always come with some shitty downside to them.

Being brutally honest… were it not for the fact that I own a home on Cactuar… and extremely hard world to get housing on… and had lost said home from not logging in previously… I would likely not be actively playing Final Fantasy XIV. I am very much in the mindset of playing Final Fantasy XIV during an expansion… and then at the end of an expansion right before the release of the next expansion. The rest of the time I am just paying yearly rent for the privilege of home ownership. I know this is dumb, and I know that I should stop doing this… but I keep doing it anyway. I think my mind might just be broken when it comes to the traditional MMORPG gameplay model. I enjoy them when I enjoy them… but struggle each time to get reconnected and back into the normal rhythms of logging in daily and treating it as my only game. I also really hate gearing… which is weird given that used to be one of my favorite aspects of playing MMORPG expansions.

Guild Wars 2 on the other hand… is designed in a way that makes me love it. It has way more of an ARPG design aesthetic and it is so easy to drop in and participate in some epic feeling content… and then tag out without letting anyone down. I love large world group content and I love doing things like WVW where I can just blend in with the crowd and not have to give a shit about human connections. For me it is largely a solo game… that just happens to have lots of friendly and helpful people also playing it. Everything about the design model for this game rewards players for doing the right thing and stopping to rez players or help them out. When you see other players doing something, it is always a positive and a force multiplier. The long tailed grinds also give you projects to focus on when you want to play more seriously. Right now with the way my mind works, this is hands down the best MMORPG.

Last Epoch is going to be the best ARPG on the market at some point. This is just a fact. It has the best class design, and the best itemization and crafting already. What it lacks is endgame content, but given how solid the foundation is it is only a matter of time before they gather up enough to make this game into a proper rival of Path of Exile. Ten years down the line we will be thinking about EHG and Last Epoch in the same manner that we do about GGG and Path of Exile. I am extremely excited for the upcoming Season 2 launch on April 2nd, and with it a focus on more endgame content as well as a bunch of interesting crafting options. It looks like this is going to be landing in a lull in other games, but I would give up a Path of Exile league start to play this next season. If you have read this blog for the last few years you would know what a bold statement that is for me, given that I practically play every single league and event that comes out for Path of Exile.

For years when someone has asked me what my favorite video game is, I have always answered Castlevania: Symphony of the Night without missing a beat. While I still love that game with all of my heart, I have to admit the true answer is Path of Exile. I started taking this game seriously in 2019 and since then it has effectively dominated this blog for months at a time. During that time I have dedicated over 250 posts to this game and will likely keep doing so each time new content releases. It is a very hard hill to crest, and getting engaged in the game is going to take a lot of effort and research… but once you finally reach a point of comfort with it the endgame potential is limitless. Each new league also radically shakes up the game and changes how you need to interact with the character building process. I’m easily over 4000 hours into the game… and still feel like a beginner at times. There are almost no games on the market with the level of depth that Path of Exile offers.

To The New and Returning

One of the things that I am trying to do with this post is be a bit more honest about the games that I am playing. I almost never talk about mobile games on this blog. I think the only ones that I have actually ever really talked about at length are Pokemon Go and Dragalia Lost… the later of which is no longer even in operation. I had more or less stopped playing mobile games because my old Razer Phone 2 was performing so poorly that it almost was not worth it. However when I swapped to my OnePlus 12R, it opened back up the world of mobile games and I started adding them into my pre-sleep rotation. Essentially every night for the last year I have played a little bit of AFK Journey and find it an extremely enjoyable daily activity. I am not a big spender when it comes to games like this, but I have given them a few bucks here or there namely if there is a cool looking costume on their $7 pseudo-battlepass system. Essentially I level up my characters and play a round of all of the various battle modes and whatever events happen to be going on and when sleep claims me put it away for another day.

I know this game has only recently come out, but playing it has made me remember all of the things I loved about Monster Hunter Worlds and how much it dominated my life for a point in time. There are around 150 blog posts that I have made over my time playing that game, and I can already tell that this is going to be a regular rotation for me for awhile. At a minimum I want to get geared up so I can start participating in the event quests as they get released, because Monster Hunter games have some wild collabs and some interesting cosmetic gear to collect. Now that I am in High Rank I am getting back into the swing of finding my own fun in the game and setting my own goals rather than following the main story quest. This is honestly my preferred method of playing and I am glad I am past the forced section of the game. I’m just about to HR 20 and looking forward to collecting the REAL version of the Arkveld armor that I am wearing in the above image.

I had so many hopes for Path of Exile II, and honestly… it satisfied almost none of them. I am not actively playing this game but I know with the impending release of 0.2.0 I will give it another spin to see how much I want to keep playing it for the long run. Recently returning to Path of Exile 1 though… has made me realize just how lacking Path of Exile II actually is. Right now there is a battle for the soul of this game happening and depending on how it goes… will ultimately determine if I write this off in the long run. Right now the core game feels like a sluggish mess for anyone not playing one of four builds that are actually functioning pretty well. Even those builds take specific gear and a lot of levels to really make them feel phenomenal. Grinding Gear Games needs to do some real soul searching with this one and determine what sort of game they want it to be. If it is a cumbersome souls-like experience, then I am out. If they improve the leveling experience, add some decent movement abilities, and fix the endgame… then maybe it is going to be a great experience. I am thankful however that they split this game from Path of Exile because at least that game is largely in a great state.

Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket – Android

I will be honest. I am the wrong generation for Pokemon in general. I played Pokemon Blue a few years after it came out on a Gameboy emulator but did not play another game until Pokemon X and Y released. I watched my fair share of the Pokemon cartoon because it was playing while I was getting ready for work. I played some of the early WOTC version of the Pokemon TCG, but only because it was released by WOTC and briefly popular with the MTG community before the kiddies invaded the card shops. I am too old to really be in the core audience for Pokemon. However I do like opening card packs, and have a basic understanding of the card game mechanics. Essentially every night I open a few packs of cards as part of my nightly mobile gaming routine. I occasionally play some hands of the game against the NPC opponents. Calling this a game for me… is questionable. I am not going to spend money on virtual packs, but I do like opening virtual shiny cards every so often… but it will never mean quite as much as if something like this existed for Magic the Gathering that was mostly just a pack opening simulator. If Arena gave me two five card packs each day… I would probably be playing that.

To Those Departing

This one hurts a little bit to admit, but I think I am mostly done with Diablo III. With the release of Diablo IV, this game went into true maintenance mode. There will be no new seasonal mechanics coming out, and since the launch of Diablo IV they have simply been rotating through previous seasons. Diablo IV is finally in a state where playing it mostly feels like playing a fancier version of Diablo III, and as such has completely replaced the niche that this game filled for me. Instead of Ace and I getting together for D3 season launches, it is now D4 seasons. This game will always hold a very special place in my heart, and I am sure every so often I will fire it up again just to revisit it… but there are just better ARPG experiences out there. I am sorry my old friend, but it is time we officially parted and I stop pretending that I am every going to truly play you with the same vigor again.

I really love this game, but just have not really been in the mood to play it. I am not sure when I uninstalled it… but prior to that I was only logging in to collect daily freebies. I would absolutely play this again in the future, but never really got into the seasonal loop of this game. I also never leveled anything all the way to the upper levels to be able to participate in the “reindeer games”. I deeply respect the game that this has become, and were I playing on console I would probably be way more into it than I am. However given the choice between mindless grinding in Path of Exile and mindless leveling in Fallout 76… I just always chose Path of Exile. If I had a regular group of friends to play with, it would probably be different but this as a solo experience is not near as exciting. If the AggroChat crew started playing again I would likely happily reinstall and join in the nonsense.

Like I said for Final Fantasy XIV… I am just not in the right mindset for playing MMORPGs these days. I enjoyed playing through Dragonflight, but it never really caught my attention as anything other than playing through the Main Story Quest. I loved Pandaria Remix, and when the next one of those type events drop I will probably be back immediately. I attempted to play War Within but never made it out of the first zone. I have all of the social reasons in the world to be playing this game as some of my oldest gaming friends are happily playing it… but for whatever reason it just doesn’t scratch the itch anymore. That is not to say that World of Warcraft is probably in the best state it has ever been since at least Legion, if not Wrath of the Lich King. It really is peak Warcraft, but I think I have just outgrown it. When I think fondly of this game I think about specific people and a specific point in time when it was the center of my world… not the actual game itself.

Wrapping Up

I would love to tell you that it won’t be another year before I sit down to write one of these posts. I am still very much an ARPG gamer and will probably continue to cycle through whatever active season/league happens to be going in between Diablo IV, Last Epoch, Path of Exile, and Path of Exile II. I also find myself with way more affinity for games that are ARPG-adjacent like Guild Wars 2 and now Monster Hunter Wilds. The drop in nature and largely single player focuses progression really hits the spot for me, and will probably continuing doing so for a long while. I marvel that there was an era when I used to raid three or four nights each week and arranged my schedule happily around the schedules of others. I miss playing with other people regularly, but I think I might just be too far gone to ever adapt to doing it again. I am an old gamer that has become very set in my ways at this point.

I hope you all are having a great week and have a good weekend ahead of you. For me… I plan on spending most of it in Monster Hunter Wilds and hope to catch up with some of my friends and do some hunts together.

Regularly Playing: June 2024 Edition

March 7, 2025June 27, 2024 by Belghast

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.

Games Played 2022 Edition

December 30, 2022 by Belghast

The Grand Experiment – Tracking Games Played Since 2012

Well my friends it is time once again for me to drag out the spreadsheet porn and share with you my gaming habits from the last year. Since this post is likely going to see some fresh eyeballs who have never experienced this level of nonsense before let me give you a high level of this project. One of the cool things about daily blogging is that it gives me a pretty solid record of what I was doing at any given point since April of 2013 when I embarked upon my first daily blogging journey. I also take fairly meticulous care of saving my screenshots and have a collection sorted by game and genre that makes up well over 50,000 individual files and takes up around 140 GB. This has allowed me to more or less reconstruct my playing habits back to 2012.

For years I used a service called Raptr, but when it died I lost something that I considered to be a relatively valuable resource. I knew that trying to keep track of hours played was a fool’s errand and for Steam games that interface did a relatively good job of that. Instead what I wanted to track was whether or not I played a game in a given month. This was a simple data point that allowed me to view how my tastes in gaming shifted over time. The pattern that emerges is that I have a dozen or so “forever games” that I shift back and forth between, and a number of games that I visit for a month or two. Since starting this nonsense I have logged 374 different games that I have spent time playing and of those 236 have only been played for a single month.

Exploring Games PLayed in 2022

Games Played Longer than 3 Months in 2022

This was very much a year of forever games for me it seems. I spent a lot of time visiting old favorites, and this is also the year that I finally “groked” Path of Exile and allowed it to start dominating my life. The above list is every game that I spent time playing for more than three months. Some of these are going to be terribly deceiving because for example, you would think this year is dominated by Final Fantasy XIV and that would be a lie. What I did throughout the year was log in every 4-5 days and either go house shopping or retrieve my money because I failed to win a house in the lottery. Similarly, I played Guild Wars 2 quite a bit for several months in a row, and then have fallen into a routine of logging in and farming the guild halls for resources or doing the occasional world event, but not really spending a massive amount of time there.

Fallout 76 has been something I have quietly played off and on whenever the mood hit me, and it wasn’t really that I started actively talking about it until the rest of AggroChat got into it. New World was a major force in my year because I was either playing in maintenance mode for the first few months, playing on the PTR for the middle of the year and hit rerolling and hitting the game extremely hard for the last few months of the year. I decided to track World of Warcraft Dragonflight Alpha/Beta separate from World of Warcraft as a whole because I very much approached the game from a more clinical tester mindset. I’ve not actively played World of Warcraft legitimately since December 2020 and as such have not paid for a subscription either. Basically, my time in Dragonflight did not really feel like I was truly playing the game because I was playing a series of disposable characters for each testing session.

Apparently, I played Torchlight Infinite More than I thought

The game that sort of surprised me for how long I actually spent playing it is Torchlight Infinite. The weird thing about that is that I don’t really particularly like the game. I got into it from a testing standpoint and between mobile testing and PC testing, I dipped my toes into the water for six separate months. It isn’t a bad game necessarily but it isn’t exactly a game that compels me either. Similarly, I kept trying to play Monster Hunter Rise and never really attached to it. Whatever magic that kept me glued to Monster Hunter World for as long as it did seems to have passed because from what I can tell Rise is essentially a spiritual successor but I am just not finding it nearly as enjoyable. Lost Ark is similarly a game that I kept trying to enjoy, finally giving up on it and moving on with life. I am not entirely certain what it is about that game that I don’t enjoy but it is very much “not for me”.

Total Number of Games Played in Each Year

Something that I started doing last year is adding a bunch of graphs to this shindig. There seems to be a weird ebb and flow pattern arising from the number of games I played in a given year. There are years where I churn through a lot of games, and then years that I play significantly fewer. Considering the number of “forever” games that I engaged with, I would have thought this was going to be a low-count year I did have an exceptionally frantic few months in the beginning. January, February, and some of March I was a game-finishing machine. I was all about the single-player lifestyle and seemingly catching up for so much lost time. I thought that trend would carry forward but apparently, that did not, and starting in March I was diving hardcore into Guild Wars 2 and really finding a place for it properly in my life. Basically, I approached it with the level of gusto that I had Final Fantasy XIV several times in the past. Once that trend started it seemed to reignite my play of shared world games where admittedly I still mostly play like a single-player murder hobo.

Another thing that I like to do is compare the top games that I played this year against the top list of last year. The first thing I noticed as a trend is that this is the year that I effectively stopped playing mobile games. There is a period of time when lay in bed attempting to let sleep claim me, and that previously had been a time I played random mobile games. I would play a game for a few months, then when I got to the point where it started needing a financial investment I would bounce and move to another one. Instead, I have spent more time sifting through things like Instagram and Tumblr rather than playing a game. I have to be honest, the mobile gaming experience is fairly miserable in general on Android and I don’t really find that I am missing it.

I played an awful lot of Action RPGs, and while I had distanced myself from Diablo 3 in 2021… it made me miserable doing it. So this year saw a bit of a resurgence as I allowed myself to play it once more. I also branched out and played a lot of other games from Path of Exile to Undecember. Last Epoch is actually shaping up now to be a game worth playing and I am actively looking forward to the multiplayer client testing. Elder Scrolls Online and Destiny both fell by the wayside further and Guild Wars 2 really moved into the forefront of games I care deeply about. GW2 had been a title I had struggled to really understand for the better part of a decade and finally for whatever reason this past year it clicked for me. New World continues to be a major force in both years and while I was very much in a depressed state about the future of that game at this time last year, this year gave it a brand new lease on life.

Games Played Since the Start of This Project

Comparing my Top Games of All Time from Last Year and This Year

I am shifting things up a bit differently this year. In the past, I had posted a snippet of the larger chart and it didn’t really mean anything. Instead, I am looking specifically at the total months played counts at the end of this year s contrasted with where we were at the end of last year. World of Warcraft has finally been dethroned, but admittedly this is only due to some trickery and me not counting my time spent testing Dragonflight as me playing World of Warcraft. If you added the 4 months that I tested Dragonflight to the Warcraft totals, then you end up with Final Fantasy XIV finally tying it. For me, my “truth” is that I was not actually playing World of Warcraft but instead focused on rigorous testing and writing bug notes, so that is ultimately how I logged it but I could see the argument the other way around.

Destiny fell to third, and I found it funny that Diablo 3, Elder Scrolls Online, and Rift all held their relative positions at Third, Fourth, and Fifth. I technically did log into Rift and play for a little bit but not terribly munch. I was feeling nostalgic and trying to figure out what the hell I was doing the last time I played largely drove any of those feelings from me. Guild Wars 2 and New World shuffled the order as did Minecraft. You are not reading that wrong… I did in fact play Wildstar this year admittedly with the emulator server client that is deeply incomplete but I will be keeping tabs on that as it progresses. I do feel a bit bad because if trends continue to follow by this time next year Everquest II will have most likely been pushed off the list.

Something that I started last year is charting all of the games that I have played for longer than six months in total. You can really see that there are six games that have dominated my landscape for the last decade and that is Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, Destiny, Diablo 3, Elder Scrolls Online, and Rift. Of those I am no longer really playing World of Warcraft or Rift, so their influence will continue to be diminished while games like Guild Wars 2, New World, and Path of Exile are starting to gain ground. It will be interesting to see what this looks like in another decade if I keep up with this nonsense. I had been fairly regularly playing Magic the Gathering Arena but I largely stopped that. I am not entirely certain what led to me not playing it, but it has been ages since I have even booted it up to claim free cards, let alone sit down to play an actual game.

Another thing that I started last year is keeping track of my longest streaks. What I mean by that is the most months in a row that I have played at least some of the game. This list changes a lot more slowly because while I may shift through several games in a year, it is very rare that I keep at them for more than a few months at a time. New World is gaining ground as a serious contender at twenty-three months so far, and Path of Exile while much further back in the pack is gaining ground with seven months. It is going to be very hard for something to top the salad days of Destiny and how active I was in that game. Thirty-Three months is going to be extremely hard to top and even Diablo 3 had its streak broken last year.

Another Year in the Books

Sometimes I roll into this post with thoughts about what might be on the horizon for me as a gamer or blogger, but this time I really don’t know what the next year might hold. I thought last year that I would be focused more on single-player games, and while the first few months were definitely that… I quickly fell back into my shared environment gamer ways. I am so far removed at this point from regularly gaming with others, that I wonder if I will ever get back to my “pugging” for hours at a time sort of ways of my past. I’ve not raided in any form since 2016 and even then I was not the most serious raider. I think I might have largely closed that chapter in my life and instead, find comfort in having other people around… but doing my own thing.

For those who might want to go back in time and see how this series has evolved, I finally actually created a proper category on my blog for it. I know it only took me seven years to get around to doing this. I think one side goal is to do a better job of charting this data as the year is going on, rather than having a flurry of activity in the last few months trying to catch everything up. Another thing that I want to do is dive back into Guild Wars 2 and finally finish up my Skyscale so I can fly like a proper player of that game. Maybe even finish my Epic Weapon that I started and then largely walked away from. I would love to be able to dive back into Final Fantasy XIV but I wonder if that game is “finished” for me. I am feeling about it much like I felt about World of Warcraft at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. The narrative was wrapped up in a clean and satisfying manner and it is going to take a lot to really engage me in quite the same way as I had been for the last ten years.

What are your goals for the coming year? Do you think this whole game-tracking project that I keep doing is pure nonsense? Feel free to drop me a line below. I hope you all have had a great holiday season and that you have a phenomenal start to the new year.

Regularly Playing: October 2022 Edition

March 7, 2025October 26, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. It was this morning that I had the sudden realization that I seem to have let one of my long-term reoccurring segments just completely die. For years I have done this thing where I update my blog sidebar with the games that I am regularly playing, and then create a semi-monthly post talking about where I am with each game and the games that are cycling out of the mix. However, the last one of these that I have done was from March of 2021. Some pretty significant things took place last year that derailed a lot of events in my life, but it would be nice to get back in some sort of regular cadence with these posts as there are often games that I am playing but not really actively talking about.

Generally speaking, one of these posts is broken down into subsections:

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.

Unfortunately given the length of time that has passed I am not sure if any of these really make sense for this “catch-up” post. Instead this time I am just going to talk about the games that I am poking a stick at periodically.

While waiting on the New World patch drop, I found myself in a bit of a doldrum where nothing much sounded good. When this hits, I tend to dive into some sort of open-world game like Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, or Witcher 3… and more recently Cyberpunk has been in that “nothing else sounds good” rotation. Generally speaking, I tend to play for a few nights and then nothing much comes of it, but this time around I am precariously close to a second complete playthrough. I am also finding a ton of content that I missed the first time around, and I think I am way more attached to femme Nomad V than I was to my original male Corpo V. Judy is without a doubt the best romance option in the game and it ends up being super sweet.

I got a bit of a late start on Season 27, and because most of the conquests are sorta butts this time around… I have yet to finish things up. Essentially I need 3 Conquests to get Set Dungeon Mastery. I need to do this at some point but other things have just been drawing my attention. It is a bit harder than in past seasons because I am mostly soloing everything and don’t have my partner in crime Ace along with me. I need to buckle down and finish things off, but ultimately what caused me to fade for a bit was the severe performance issues that I was having. Hopefully those have passed now.

Another game that I have been poking around for a while now is Fallout 76. I am not playing it super often, but at least once a week I dive down into the world of irradiated West Virginia. Right now the AggroChat folks seem to be going through a bit of a renaissance launched by Thalen’s discovery of the game. I need to figure out a time I can join in, but I am way behind in levels due to a reroll recently. I spent some time fucking around in a custom world and it seemed as though I was gaining levels… but said levels did not carry over to the main game.

If you have been reading my blog lately you will know that I am back in New World and created a brand new character over on Themiscyra to experience the game from level one again. The new player experience is so much better and the leveling and balance are much better than it was at the original launch. I am closing in on level 60 without really trying terribly hard, and my goal is to effectively complete all of the quests in the game. For the moment I am filling all of the various stashes that I have access to with materials and I hope to grind up Armoring and Weaponsmithing to 200 so I will have a good start at the game. At some point, I will need to find the various legendary crafting materials that unlock the 600 item-level weapons and armor, but I have plenty of time.

I’ve wound down the experience of playing Path of Exile Lake of Kalandra league, and I have to say it was pretty frustrating overall. I feel like I chose a bad league to go all in on. I did manage to knock out a number of the achievements and completely unlocked my altas, so I accomplished the things I had set out the do. I am not sure if I am going to be quite so amped to dive into whatever the 1.20 league ends up being, however. I am just not sure if Chris Wilson’s vision for the game fits the sort of experience I actually want to have. I am still interested to see what mobile Path of Exile ends up being like and the 2.0 experience… but my hopes are being tempered greatly by the frustration we experienced with this past league.

I have to admit I am not playing a ton of this yet, but slowly easing into it. I would greatly prefer that it supported a controller and whenever that patch lands, I have a feeling that it will become my primary phone game. The touchscreen controls are not amazing, though probably better than most mobile games. The game seems way less greedy with its mtx or at least the things that you can buy with real-world cash don’t seem to matter that much yet. I need to try some of the other classes but so far I am digging the “not-barbarian” character. I am not playing much of the game on PC mostly because if I am sitting at my PC… I have other games I would rather be playing.

I think I am mostly winding down Tower of Fantasy. While I do enjoy it much more than I did Genshin Impact, I find myself in the old familiar trap of only logging in to collect my freebies and then logging right back out. I am not sure why the experience went flat for me, but I just stopped wanting to play it quite as much. I think maybe around the time I was winding this down is when the Brimstone Sands patch landed on the PTR and re-ignited my love of New World. As one star rises another sets, and as a result, Tower of Fantasy was on the losing end of that equation.

World of Warcraft – Dragonflight Alpha/Beta – PC

I played a ton of this game when I first got into the testing. I really liked the more directed testing phases of giving us a new zone to explore each week. I have to admit I ate that up and completed the quests in each of the new areas. Unfortunately when things opened up more and I was given access to play the entire experience from start to finish… I deflated a bit. I think the biggest frustration is that it seemed every single time I logged in, I had to reset my talent points and the profiles that I saved were getting wiped. There were several times I logged in… stared at the wall of talent points and noped out of choosing them and setting back up my bars again.

As far as Dragonflight itself… the pre-patch has landed and I still do not have a World of Warcraft subscription or own the expansion. While I had a lot of fun playing the test phases, I am not sure if it was enough to really draw me back into the game. I have to be honest… World of Warcraft feels like a really old game at this point. A lot of what I have been focused on of late is more action-oriented games, and Hotbar combat just feels weird. Like I never thought I would get to that point but here we are. I still don’t feel amazing giving Blizzard money either… so I guess time will tell if I get caught up in the expansion launch zeitgeist or not.

Then there are games that are bound by NDA that I can’t talk about other than in the vaguest of terms. One I have access to and is eating up a bit of my time, and another I have created an account but have not received the game client. I am torn on whether or not I like NDAs in general because, on one hand, it keeps the players from getting just completely burnt out and bored with listening to news about the game before launch. On the other hand as a content creator, it sucks having a void that you are afraid to talk about. I get to the point where I am almost afraid to cover even public news of a game for fear that maybe just maybe something that ISN’T public knowledge will slip out.