Good Morning Friends! I had a pretty early night last night and turned in around 8:30, so did not make a ton of progress. I did however get my Summoner to level 90 like I thought I would, and made it up to Titan on my Kraken Warrior which we will run first thing this evening. I like Summoner quite a bit, way more than I thought I would at this time. The only annoyance is the casting times, and needing to interrupt them in order to move out of things. I do wonder how the game would feel if they removed all casting times or allowed you to cast while moving. Most of the summoner rotation does not require a casting time and it is only really the Ifrit abilities that chain me into place, so in theory, if I know movement is going to happen I can just start my rotation at the other end with Titan or Garuda. After being used to dpsing while on the go with the Machinist, this has probably been the biggest adjustment.
One of the more notable aspects of the Kraken project is that mounts look so much cooler when they are not super tiny. I’ve been running around on my Fenrir bike as I am used to doing and it looks so much cooler when I can actually see the detail in it. This is especially notable as the mounts now bank as you turn lending a bit more realistic movement than they previously had. I am not saying I will give my the Lala life on my Cactuar main, but I appreciate seeing a bit more detail in all of the mounts and even the gear pieces. Catboy life is pretty great and I am happy I decided to roll with that racial choice. I’ve always dug the dark-skinned Miqo’te appearances. I wish they had more proper beard action going on but I will life with the tufts around my chin.
I also now understand why folks talk about the ARR MSQ being so rough around the edges. I know they have streamlined a lot of the content, but there are still chunks that seem to drag on forever. For example in the lead-up to Titan, there is this 20-step or so sequence where you have to learn about wine and recover a famous vintage. This is extremely tedious and while the payoff for all of your busy work is somewhat fun… it definitely feels like something that could have been trimmed back a bit. I think the Japanese appetite may be more into the mundane “day in the life” sort of content than the Western audience. I’m looking at you Persona series and all of your tedious running about to do social nonsense. Thankfully I just kept my head down and pushed through it and now can finally fight Titan.
Grousing aside… I have had a heck of a lot of fun exploring the ARR MSQ again with fresh eyes after ten years of playing this game. I have so many fond memories of this era for the game and the group of friends we played it with. Ace and I have lamented how far removed from that era we are. We were joking about our friend Mor yelling “Medica Twooooooo” each time he cast the spell… and that is sadly just a bygone era. It was after the late ARR/early HW era that folks migrated westward and time zones became a problem… and it just became impossible to agree upon a time that was early enough for the Eastern folks but late enough to not collide with work responsibilities for the Western folks. So really if we want to recapture some of that joy we are going to have to start from scratch and rebuild what we had.
It is on that note that I am starting to try and rebuild that friend group. I am not sure what the restrictions are these days but I know for certain that I can group with anyone on the Aether Data Center on my main, and Dynamis Data Center on my alt. What I am looking for is folks who can play in an Eastern timezone compatible range of hours on weekday evenings (not sure which yet), and play a wide variety of roles. What we have currently is a Tank (myself) and a Healer (Ace) and potentially a few others who might be interested in our FC/Friendgroup. So I am throwing out the request to my longterm readers out there… do you want to do some of the harder content in the game? At a minimum I want to do all of the Extremes and Normal raids… and would love to maybe work up to Savage content at some point. I am way more focused on having a fun group than a highly skilled well-oiled machine.
If this sounds like something you would be interested in, drop me a line on one of the MANY platforms you can contact me in, or just throw out a note in the comments below. We will be organizing over on the Super Dungeon Friends discord when things begin to pull together. So feel free to join.
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
Diablo III – PC
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.
Diablo IV – PC
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 – PC
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.
Guild Wars 2 – PC
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 – PC
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.
Path of Exile – PC
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
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
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.
World of Warcraft – PC
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
Honkai Star Rail – PC
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.
New World – PC
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.
Hey Folks! We are down essentially half our folks and as a result, we have a bit shorter show than our normal fare. We start off with some discussion about Grace’s return to Final Fantasy XIV and how Bel “influenced” them into coming back. From there we talk a bit about Four Job Fiesta and how the White Mage start is REALLY rough. We dive into Nova Drift and talk about its roguelike take on Asteroids or Geometry Wars. Tam talks about his love of arcade racers and talks about playing the 2012 Need for Speed: Most Wanted and then Ash and Bel try and sell him on Forza Horizon. Tam also talks about What the Car… which is also loosely a “car game” but not really. Then we try and wrap up the show and suddenly remember that a Nintendo Direct happened and talk about some of the games showed off.
Good Morning Folks! I find myself in one of those transitional periods in gaming… where the thing you really want to be playing has not come out yet, but everything that you are playing is not quite right. I am having a heck of a lot of fun in Final Fantasy XIV but essentially only to the point where I run out of daily roulette bonuses. I spent chunks of yesterday trying to catch up on quests and honestly… I think I am of the mindset of my friend Jay and just going to cancel them en masse and then pick up the pieces whenever I feel in the mood to sort them out again. First I think we should all take a moment to appreciate just how pretty Limsa Lominsa is at night. I think more than anything this is why I decided to switch my allegiance to this city all those years ago.
I’ve been scurrying around trying to do a bunch of prep work, but am starting to feel like I am studying too hard for a test to where I start to second guess myself. I don’t really have enough time to get my gear maxed out at this point, and I have already geared out my Warrior and Machinist to a point where they should be viable for a good chunk of the early bits of Dawntrail. I’ve been pouring “bookrocks” into ninja gear so that I can finish that character out after I have finished leveling my tanks. My Dark Knight is getting pretty close as I managed to knock out two levels yesterday, and will easily get another level today. After that, I will spend the last week working on Gunblade but am unlikely to get it across the finish line before the expansion launch without some dedicated grinding. Essentially I am in this pattern of playing a lot of things… for a little bit of time… and feeling weird about it. Side note if you have not backed up your settings in awhile you might want to do so. I had not backed mine up since 2021.
In Guild Wars 2 I am pretty much playing a little bit each night at reset and knocking out my daily wizard chores. I should be wrapping up Secrets of the Obscure but I gotta say… I am not the biggest fan of Nayos. Right now the story quests have not inspired me to dive deeper into it. The fight with Ceros was easily three times longer than it should have been. That entire instance should have been chopped up into multiple instances because, by the time I finished it, I was ready to gnaw my arm off to release myself from that trap. I am in this weird place with Guild Wars 2 where I still enjoy playing it casually and I like knocking out things that will eventually get me another legendary… but I am having trouble fully attaching to it knowing that I am about to go all in on Dawntrail.
Similarly, I am in an odd place with Diablo IV. My build was good enough to get me to 100, but feels sort of awful pushing harder content. I have been poking at leveling a Necromancer, but the drive to play is mostly gone. Getting to 100 feels like “finishing” the game to me, that was the thing I had never done previously and after accomplishing that goal I was ready to do something else. I enjoy the changes to the game but it also doesn’t really drive me to play more of it. It is nowhere near as rich and textured as Path of Exile and there are not as many different things to interact with. Everything sort of feels very samey where you just keep pushing up difficulty rather than interacting with systems. I keep thinking about respeccing either to Dust Devils Dual Swing or the new Dust Devils Whirlwind… but it feels like it takes too much effort and focus to get me there. So instead I log in… flop around like a fish out of water for a bit and then log right back out.
I am still periodically logging into World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix as my “third game” but honestly a lot of my drive to play it is gone there as well. I’ve leveled and geared one character to the standards I am willing to do during a short event, and leveled a second character…. and now sit less than 10 levels away from the cap on a third. I could level more characters or I could grind out more bronze… but honestly… I scooped up most of the mounts I care about and gearsets are honestly more enjoyable to farm from the raids themselves once the warband changes go in with the expansion. I still have no clue what I am going to do for War Within. I have my Alliance home in House Stalwart, a Horde home on the same server in Facepull, and then another group of friends over on Drenden that have offered me a home. I just don’t really know what I want to do with myself when it comes to Warcraft nor how seriously I want to treat the game.
I feel like I want something that I can really sink my teeth into and no life… but also don’t really want to get engaged in something when in eight days I am just going go degenerate on FFXIV. Path of Exile released a patch yesterday and I logged in this morning because it needed to update its cache after some significant graphical changes. All in all the game seems to maybe perform better. I suppose I could while away the hours where I am not doing dailies in FFXIV or GW2 doing some more POE. There is another league challenge that I could probably knock out if I set my mind to it. I have a bunch of the memories maps and there is one for doing those that I did not touch during Necropolis.
Basically, as the title of the post says… it feels like I am wearing a pair of ill-fitting pants right now and some new ones arrive in eight days. I’m not fully engaged with FFXIV enough to be using this time to its fullest and doing all the raids… most of which I have not even unlocked. I finished up the Stormblood Hildebrand quest so I will keep moving forward in that chain, but I am not sure what else I am really going to accomplish before the 28th. How are you spending your time before Dawntrail? Drop me a line below.
