Games

After yesterday’s totally important post, we are going right back to my regular nonsense. I am still playing an excessive amount of World of Warcraft and I am still very much finding it relaxing. At this point currently I am working on an Undead Death Knight and have just started on Frostfire Ridge in the Warlords of Draenor content. I mean I realize that Death Knights get a bit of a boost, but it feels like I am moving slowly because I opted to do Howling Fjord instead of Borean Tundra. While I like the look and feel of the Fjord so much better, I gotta say across the board Borean Tundra is just a better built zone. The objectives are more tightly clumped and there is way less travel time between them. The amount of time I spent flying halfway across the zone in Howling Fjord was significant.

I am somewhat obsessed with leveling an army of Horde characters while this buff is active. One important note is that at the beginning of this process I had two characters sitting at 120, my Warrior and my Demon Hunter both of which were leveled during the early days of Battle for Azeroth. Now you can see I have a pretty formidable stable with effectively five classes missing… Death Knight and Monk that I have already made progress on and then Priest, Shaman and Rogue which are not exactly favorites of mine. For the sake of transparency I should state once again that I spent my boost on the Mage since that is my least favorite class to play, and it also serves as a handy bank alt given its teleportation properties and ability to rapidly deliver stuff to friend characters.

I am of course the consummate adult while going through the leveling process. This time I decided to write a word instead of just drawing a penis with my trail of gunpowder. Sadly it mostly translates as “Euck” but oh well an effort was made. I have been informed that this is client side only, so while I didn’t do this sort of nonsense when Warlords was relevant, I absolutely do now knowing it harms no one. I have to say, as much as I generally did not enjoy Warlords, it is a way better feeling expansion if you are playing the Horde. Additionally that intro sequence while frustrating because it is unskippable, is pretty freaking epic feeling. I feel it is some of the best crafted content in all of World of Warcraft, because it feels like you are playing through a movie for awhile. I’ve always loved the Borderlands style title cards introducing each of the Villains as you encounter them.

In other news I finished the process of unlocking Kul Tirrans on the Alliance side and I now have a potbellied Druid. I don’t love the Alliance content, not in the same way as I did the Zandalari content… but it is equally competent. The funny thing about Kul Tirrans, especially seeing mine… is that they just remind me of the Norn from Guild Wars. I have no interest in leveling another Druid right now, but I mostly chose it for class because it has freaking amazing shape shifted forms. I dig the whole Drust thing, but I am also a huge fan of my Worgen Druid so it would be real hard for me to pass up being a Werewolf. If they had Paladin as an option I would probably consider race changing Exeter over to a Kul Tirran, but alas that is not a thing. Mostly I am just happy to have this done because this was the last thing that I absolutely had to be playing Alliance to complete. I can finish out the rest of the requirements for the Mechagnomes from my horde characters.

The above shot is just something I am posting because I thought it was really cool. I am not exactly sure where I was flying from, but I was headed over to the Dark Portal and this vignette in the distance just looked really cool. Sadly I never could time my screenshot for when one of the lightning flashes happened. There are times when this game still looks really pretty even though the engine at times feels a little dated. The world really is massive at this point, and while we spend most our time zipping around in portals… it is occasionally nice to manually fly over top of it to see vistas like this one.

This morning’s post is likely going to be disjointed because I did not get quality sleep last night. Over the last week I have almost rediscovered the practice of farming transmog gear from old raids. Largely I have been focused on the Warlords of Draenor raids, and more specifically Mythic Hellfire Citadel and Mythic Blackrock Foundry. I have two 120 Paladins and 1 120 Warrior that I have been running in an attempt to collect the various cosmetic bits of these raids. The Tier 18 Warrior set for example is one of my favorite designs as it is a call back to the Wrath set from Blackwing Lair. At some point I hope to collect all of the appearance options for it.

The influx of new gear has lead me to craft a new transmog for my Horde Paladin. Largely this came about by finding a really cool mace and a really cool shield and trying to make something that works with it. The funny thing about this transmog is that I don’t believe ANY of the pieces actually are from the same set. Luckily however any time “fel” is involved, it is highly likely that they will also have gold highlights, which effectively glue together a bunch of disparate pieces. We all know the cosmetic game is the real game, and since I have the Transmog Yak, I find myself trying to stay Transmogged as much as humanly possible. Wearing armor that doesn’t look like crap, greatly enhances my enjoyment in the game.

Another thing I noticed in my travels is just how often the Horde still has control of Wintergrasp. Lets talk really quickly about things that frustrate me from the Wrath era. Vault of Archavon is a fun little raid that never actually drops any loot that the character I happen to be farming it on can use. However when I popped open the map earlier I was reminded of how much it bugged me that the layout was not symmetrical. It absolutely looks like there should have been another wing to open up on the upper left hand side. Similarly it bugs me that there are portals underneath Wyrmrest Temple that don’t go anywhere. There are just little areas of the world that FEEL like they should have something going on, but don’t which has always felt like a bit of a lost opportunity.

Another thing that has been floating around the blogosphere during Blapril is the Quantic Foundry gamer motivation profile. If you are so inclined you can check out my full profile here. So there are aspects that surprise me. I would have expected that my social component would be significantly higher, but in truth I spend a lot of time organizing communities… and then spending my actual time in game soloing. In fact soloing is my default stance these days and it is a rarity that I actually group up with another human being, which is partially desire and partially circumstance that voice chat does not work while playing through parsec. I absolutely agree with the Mastery rating because I rarely give a shit if I am actually good at something, and I really don’t have much of a competitive streak. Immersion and Creativity both track I guess, and I do have a pretty strong leaning towards action oriented things.

If we dive into the secondary motivations it feels a little more nuanced. I am absolutely not a completionist, and I rarely finish video games. My community score is real strong, which also makes a lot of sense given my lack of a competitive nature. I also really like feeling strong… see me soloing two expansion old raid content for fun and profit and similarly I could care less about a challenge. The fantasy vs story thing… at first confused me until I read their definitions and again I mostly agree with it. I care more about the lore of a world and being able to create MY character in than world, than the continuity of a story being told with a character that I did not choose. I also really like blowing things up… though I would not necessarily call myself an “agent of chaos and destruction” as they describe it. When playing Mass Effect I only ever choose the renegade option when it is really warranted… like punching reporters.

So the question is then, how good is it at recommending games. When choosing the “Balanced” option It spit out the following list for me. All of these are games that I own and have talked about more than once on this blog. They are also all games that I greatly enjoyed for one reason or another. When flipping things to the “Niche” pick, it again spit out a list of games that I largely already have played and enjoyed including some picks like The Legend of Dragoon, which is one of my favorite PlayStation era RPGs. It also grabbed Grim Dawn, which I have written about at length and is probably one of my favorite Diablo 2 style games. It highly suggests Slime Rancher and Hellblade: Sensua’s Sacrifice which are games I own but have never played, so maybe I need to give them a try soon.

Do I think this is valuable and something I should actually follow? Probably not. Notice that the absolutely highest recommendation is only a 3.3, and there are other games that appear that I am way more into like Diablo III that only ranked 1.7. The problem with trying to boil down a game to a number is the fact that not every person plays every game the same way. You take an MMORPG, and there are dozens if not hundreds of different patterns to follow while playing it, and all of them can bring with them immense enjoyment to the player. I like farming older raids so I can look cool in World of Warcraft, and that isn’t exactly a standard pattern of play for a lot of players, but it also really makes me happy when I am doing it. Games are ultimately to nuanced of an experience to really be boiled down to a set of specific statistics, however I do think this does a reasonable job at giving recommendations in spite of all of this.