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Too Many Games

May 30, 2014May 29, 2014 by Belghast

I’m a Cheater

Once again I am doing what I consider cheating… which is writing up a post at night that I intend to post in the morning. Basically tomorrow is another one of those “ride in together” days, because directly after work we have a big end of school cookout thing to go to. So I simply won’t have much time to do my faff about verbally thing tomorrow morning. As such I am staging a post tonight, and doing the same thing everyone else… but for whatever reason I feel like I am somehow betraying the ritual by doing. Today’s topic I have been kicking around for awhile, so I figure this is as good of a time to spring it on my adoring readers… look I like to pretend I have adoring readers okay.

Too Many Games

Right now things have reached a sort of critical mass with me, and there are entirely too damned many games right now that I want to be playing. This could not have hit at a worse time considering how busy the tail end of school is combined with the fact that we have weddings and graduations and such to attend. Normally I feel like I can reasonably juggle three to four games at a time bouncing back and forth between them. The other day I posted saying that multi-gaming was even an awesome thing to do… considering it kept you from getting bogged down in the decisions a game company makes that you don’t necessarily agree with. However for me, I am spreading myself super thin with a ton of different activities that I want to be doing. So today I am going out outline each of the games that I am playing and lament the things I would love to have time to do in them.

Elder Scrolls Online

Right now I still consider Elder Scrolls Online my primary game. At roughly two months since headstart I am still very much loving this game. It has some problems, namely with difficulty of grouping, but as far as the game itself goes I dig it massively. I’m working my way through Auridon and slowly creeping up on Veteran Rank 2. I have so much that I still want to do in this game, but lately my schedule has limited my time in it. This is the type of game that I can only really play if I am fully focused on it, and this is doubly so with the veteran content. Shit can go wrong in a heartbeat if you are not doing all the right things, so it means on the nights I am not feeling all that… I end up playing something else.

Wildstar

This game is the new hotness it seems and it launches tomorrow, at least for the headstart folks. I mostly preordered this game in case I decided I was in love with it, and I wanted to make sure I secured the preorder bonuses. I really dig the pre-order house, and I did not care for anything in the Collectors Edition pack… so I went with the normal. I am still so up in the air about this game… there are things I like and things I don’t like. Right now I am simply not sure who is going to win out, however since everyone is playing it, and it scratches the same itch that World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic do… going to give it a good college try.

ArcheAge

Speaking of games I am conflicted about… welcome to ArcheAge. I find so much about this game intriguing and repulsive at the same time. It is this fusion of one of the most interesting games system wise and class wise… combined with one of the worst communities I have experienced. This game has invented new ways for you to grief your fellow players… and this is the sort of thing I have zero interest in. That alone would be enough to make me go running and screaming into the night… but the class system is so damned interesting to me. I love the concept of “Rift without Restrictions” and that is pretty much what the open class system seems like. It reminds me so much of the way the class system for Horizon worked… and that is a great thing.

Heroes of the Storm

I want so badly to be playing this game right now… but I also want so badly to not be playing this game with strangers. The MOBA thing is one of those things that I really only enjoy if I am queuing with people I know. That said supposedly the queue times are greatly improved with the new client. If you are in the HoTS alpha… please let me know! I need more people to queue with, and I feel horrible for being in this game when so many people want in… and not playing it much.

Defiance

The last few nights I have been playing this game again and really enjoying myself. The whole shift in how I approach it has really helped quite a bit. I would love to see more people playing it because I think it would be far more enjoyable to run around as a group. I still have yet to really scratch the surface of any of the story content, and feel like I should do that. Really enjoyed the first season of the television show, and would love to get caught up on the in game content before the next season starts.

Final Fantasy 5

At this point I am behind my friends in this game, and quite honestly I am struggling to get the oomph to play it. That said I feel like I should really finish this game as part of the FF5 draft thing we did. I feel like I would be a horrible person if I didn’t finish it. That said I also know I am going to get talked into doing the Four Job Fiesta in a month… so not sure if I will finish before then either.

Trove

There is something about this game that makes my inner child squeal with glee. Things are just so damned much fun, and the mob design is amazing. That said I have been out so long and so much is changing on what seems to be a near weekly basis that I feel hopelessly lost. At some point I need to resort to reading through all of the patch notes starting around the time I last played in the hopes of understanding how things have changed. The combat in this game is just enjoyable, I only wish I could play it with a controller. I guess in theory I could use one of the keypad mappers but I have been lazy.

Landmark

Oh Landmark… how I love you and am completely bored with you at the exact same time. Right now it is less a game and more a toybox for you to build in, with a ruleset wrapped around it. This was really fun while I had giant things to build… and while I was progressing through the ranks of collecting the next best mining pick. Now that I have topped out, and have fleshed out most of what I wanted to build… I log in pretty much only to mine copper and pay my upkeep. What I need to make me care about this game is the combat system. Here is hoping I will fall back in love with it when I can run around the world killing things.

Diablo 3

I still don’t have a character to 70, and I feel like I have somehow failed for not doing this. Basically this released way too close to the launch of Elder Scrolls Online… and I never gave the game the attention it deserves. At some point soon I really want to work on leveling my crusader, since I have technically beaten the game on my Monk. I am struggling with the desire to simply grind the last two levels to ding 70. I figure at some point I will have a renaissance of caring about d3… but it might be awhile before I cycle around to it again.

Rift

The new souls were released and I have yet to even check them out. I really would like to level my cleric to 60 before the 3.0 patch hits, but I have no clue how long that is. Right now I am logging in on a weekly basis to get my patron gifts and that is about it. I thought it would be really cool to do a streaming series where I try and remember how to tank, and do a public service of tanking elites. I’ve heard the queue times are absolutely insane, and I know personally I have waited over two hours without getting a DPS queue. I still love this game, but at the same time don’t really know what I want to do in it.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

A few weeks back I was playing the hell out of SWTOR and enjoying myself. While I have let my subscription lapse again… I would love to pick back up on my Sith Juggernaut and see what happens after Balmorra. I have never actually made it off this planet imperial side, but I was really damned close to doing this when I was last playing. The real challenge will be if I can manage to play the game without subscribing… or will I re-up again only to cancel a few weeks later.

World of Warcraft

Finally there is good ole World of Warcraft. Once upon a time I had a grand idea of getting everyone to 90 before the expansion. I have failed miserably at keeping up with this ambition, but who knows if I will actually do this or not. Right now all I have left are the Priest, Monk and Warlock… all of which are over 60 at the least. The Warlock and Priest are both in Pandaria content, but at the very beginning. I might get a wild urge to play again and push these guys across the finish line. Either that or I might completely abandon this until the release of Warlords of Draenor. In any case the account is still active, because I pop in periodically to dink around with stuff for the guild.

Nothing at All!

Tonight I will be playing…. nothing more than likely. We have an end of school cookout and by the time we get done there… we will likely crash, or walk… or walk then crash. If anything I launch Wildstar and create my characters. Right now I am planning on having my Chua Engineer and an Exile Warrior of some sort… just not sure if that will be Human or Granok. In any case I have nothing exciting to report about my master plan for the evening other than hanging out in the real world and eating some good food.

Shores of Oblivion

May 7, 2014 by Belghast

Mornings Are Hard

This one in particular is extremely difficult for some reason. I guess it could be the fact that I fell asleep at the keyboard last night, and as a result ended up getting to the actual bed far later than I had intended to. Now as I attempt to jump start my brain with caffeine I am realizing how frustrating the act of a morning can be. More than anything I am finding myself extremely easily distracted. Of late several of us have been slowly migrating to Anook.com as a social site. Primarily this is for the fact that it is ideally suited for a multi-guild meet-up site like the Alliance of Awesome. At this point I am wondering if I could simply transplant my folks from the House Stalwart forums to the site as well making the whole experience more fluid.

For those who don’t remember… or were not reading my blog at the time, the Alliance of Awesome is a weird experiment that we have been running. With the launch of Landmark alpha, several of us realized just how many different overlapping groups we were a part of. So we proposed a grand alliance, and since then many of us have been laboring to make those efforts successful. Right now the AofA as we call it, is a combination of Combat Wombat, Dark Religion, Mercy Gaming, Multiplaying and House Stalwart. Elder Scrolls Online was the first game we really went into as a large amalgam guild and so far it seems to have worked extremely well. I have been shocked at just how little drama has been involved, but I guess that is to be expected when most of us are “thirty somethings”.

Shores of Oblivion

Last night was an odd sequence of events. Firstly I was supposed to be doing a pen and paper thing with several of my friends. However I did not want to get into anything too deep because I knew I would need to go do things with my wife when she got home. As a result I ended up piddling around in Elder Scrolls Online while waiting in a holding pattern. As the evening went on, the time of her arriving home kept slipping backwards, so in grand total I ended up playing and streaming my gameplay for a few hours. The mission of last night as always was to finish up Bangkorai. I have finally reached a point where I think there are just two objective areas left in the map. However completely by accident I seem to have moved past the zone and into Coldharbor by following the storyline.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVAt some point soon.. or at least as soon as I can find a wayshrine in Coldharbor I will be venturing back to Bangkorai to finish up the last few things on my map. I find it almost impossible in this game to “skip” content. It drives me absolutely insane that there is still a black skull on my Alik’r map from a world boss that was bugged out. I feel like I have to explore every corner of the map before I finally and reluctantly move on to the next area. At this point I am just a stones throw away from 47, so I figure that I will ding 50 well before I even come close to finishing Coldharbor. That zone looks equally huge as compared to Bangkorai. When I posted the above picture on Anook, someone commented about the Mudcrab. That is “Butter” my faithful companion that has been with me the entire journey. I am not sure why I bonded with the brown mudcrab pet over the Monkey, Bantam Guar or Red Mudcrab… but I did and he has been at my side throughout all of this.

Crush the Resistance

I love the Elder Scrolls Online with every fiber of my being, but the game requires a lot of focus. This past weekend and the last few days I have struggled a bit in trying to maintain that focus. Wandering around the world requires you to be constantly aware of your surroundings, because an afk in the wrong area can end up with a hefty repair bill. As such I need a game that doesn’t quite matter so much. For a long while this has been landmark, but I have reached a point of builder burnout there for the moment. On a whim this weekend I decided to fire back up SWTOR and I have been piddling around on my Caithar Sith Juggernaut. I never really got to see the Sith side of things, so overall it is pretty enjoyable. I opted to go Light Side Sith, which seems to be far more my style anyways. I am this island of honor and nobility in a seething mass of evil.

To be truthful… this specifically is the reason why I logged in over the weekend. On “May the Fourth” they gave everyone that happened to log in an adorable astromech droid pet. I could not pass this up, because of my friends… I am the only one who ever seems to be nostalgic enough to re-up a game subscription and revisit games the guild has moved on past. So while it started out as “get this thing while it was available”, I am actually finding myself enjoying the game again. It is no real competition for ESO, but it scratches the itch that most everyone seems to be satiating with Wildstar beta weekends. Additionally… after all this time I finally have a machine that will run SWTOR on maximum everything. This client is so poorly optimized that even on my laptop with dual video cards… it runs like complete shit. No clue how long I will piddle around with SWTOR, but I might even stream some of my adventures.

From the Desk of Doctor Hannah

Another good friend of mine decided to enter the Newbie Blogger Initiative fray. Dallian, otherwise known as Doctor Hannah from twitter… has had a blog for ages, but for the most part it had lived in a dormant state. I think both the blog and the twitter account started as a joke reference to the now infamous Tabletop episode where Felicia Day creates this massive backstory of Doctor Hannah while playing Last Night on Earth. So while the blog started off as a joke, at some point during its life it morphed into being Dallian’s personal space. With the NBI he is taking the step of rededicating himself to blogging more regularly, and about his gaming side as well. In this post on the forums he mentions wanting to do at least a post a week, but so far he has made like four posts this month. I will do whatever I can to help support this effort, but in the meantime you should totally pop over to his blog and check it out.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #SWTOR #DoctorHannah #NBI2014

2013 Retrospective

January 1, 2014 by Belghast

Grand Experiment in Review

2012 was an extremely horrible year for me and at least professionally I would rank it as quite possibly the worst year I have ever had. I would put it as worse than the year I was out of work for six months after the dotcom crash. On September 11th 2012 my company suffered what they thought was a network attack, that only later the security guy pulled his head out of his ass and realized it was a regularly scheduled security scan… that he himself authorized. The results of this was a massive overreaction that caused me and my team to spend the rest of the year and a good chunk of the beginning of this year rebuilding damned near everything that touched the web. Why did we have to do this? Because they quite literally pulled the servers out of the racks and sent them to the FBI, leaving us next to nothing to work off of.

So next to that year, this year has seemed like an absolute dream. However it has been more than that for me. 2013 has been a year of personal growth and exploring new things. In April when I finally pulled my head above water after the “faux” security incident, I really wanted to make a break back into blogging. I fell off of the planet shortly after the security event and simply could not bring myself to write about anything. Coming back I devised what I called a “grand experiment”, namely to blog each and every day even if I didn’t think I had much to write about. At this point there are 237 posts categorized as “The Grand Experiment”, and without fail I have blogged every day even when it was a struggle to do so.

Has the experiment worked? Well functionally yes I have managed to blog every day, but more importantly has it provided an interesting stream of content? Quite honestly I don’t know. Most of the time I feel like I am a little kid writing to a make believe audience. When I talk to someone who mentions something I have written… I am always shocked. I feel like no one actually reads my stuff, that I am mostly just writing it for my own benefit. People seem to enjoy what I write, and I have a regular stream of readers… but I will never have the type of audience that the bigger bloggers have. I am just too rough around the edges for that sort of thing. For the most part I am happy with the results of a year of blogging and my long-term goal is to make it at least one full year of posts without pause. That of course will be up April 26th of 2014, which seems like it is far in the future right now. However I don’t see myself losing steam at any point soon.

A Healthier Me

Another big change in my life over the course of 2013 is that I am considerably lighter. In March my wife and I began to shift the way we relate to food. I say it in terms like that because really we have completely changed our relationship to food as a whole. To say we went on a diet doesn’t really encompass the level of change. Diets are about the short term, but we wanted to make permanent and long-term changes in the way we ate. Namely we focused on trying to find a new and sustainable way to live. At this point I am 70 lbs smaller and have hit a bit of a plateau over the last month. However the fact that I survived both Thanksgiving and Christmas without breaking that plateau makes me happy enough.

My wife on the other hand continues to lose at a steady pace and is now down roughly 60 lbs. At some point I need to get super serious again, as I have become lax of late. However the current weight seems to be a place I can comfortable stay without any real intervention. I have reached my goal and it is time for me in this new year to refocus myself and set a new one. I will never be a small man, I come from a long line of really big people. I am however happy enough being able to say I am a “smaller” man. The thing I was not expecting to be honest were the health benefits. As a whole I am far healthier than I was a year ago, and the primary benefit is that my Asthma that I have struggled with my entire life… and have even been hospitalized for… is really a mere nuisance these days. I can go months on a single inhailer, and that is not a thing I have ever been able to do in my life.

Professional Growth

In the last year I have grown more into the role of the manager of my group. I have learned to delegate more, which is something I have always struggled with in my life. I was good at accepting assignments, but never very good at passing them on to my troops, instead trying to take them all on myself. My team is pretty amazing and I would be lost without them. I guess in some small way I have learned to have more faith in them, and trust that they will do as much diligence with an assignment as I would have. As a result I have shifted more into the architect role for my group and part-time project manager and full-time traffic cop. Making sure all of the assignments are going to the right places and all seeing at least some progress.

We usually have 50-60 active projects for a team of three people. So it involves lots of juggling. Various forces in my company want me to move up into a permanent management position. However I simply do not want to distances myself from the “real work” enough to take them. Additionally right now I am responsible for three extremely highly functional people, and I don’t think I could cope with being put over less functional people that I would some how have to whip into shape. I am not really great with confrontations, and as a result I think I would flounder. Either that or it would be similar to me as a raid leader, and I would turn into a real asshole. For the time being I think I am happy with where I am and what I am doing.

I Wrote A Novel

One of the things I have always wanted to do in my life was to write a novel. I made several false attempts at various times over the years but never could seem to push myself to do it. This November I joined the NaNoWriMo event, and over the course of the month knocked out my first novel. I have no idea if it is actually any good, because honestly I have not even read it since finishing it up. I plan in the new year to tear it asunder as I edit it, and fix any issues. However regardless if it completely sucks, I have accomplished a goal. I managed to write a novel, and that is a thing most people can’t say about themselves. I didn’t do it to get famous, or be published, I did it mostly just to prove to myself that I could.

The weird thing about it is, November seems like a lifetime ago. The whole concept of writing 1500 words per night was just absolutely draining. My entire life revolved around that novel for those thirty days, which is honestly longer than I have stuck with anything like that in my life. More than anything I feel like it was a venue of personal growth. I did a thing I never thought I could, and I did so in a methodical way in which it felt like success was assured from the moment I started. Sure I faltered a few times along the way, and there were a few days I didn’t write a blessed thing. However I kept moving forward towards the eventual 50,000 word count goal and I achieved it. I think more than anything I am proud of this accomplishment from 2013.

A Year of Gaming

This is a gaming blog afterall, so during 2013 I played a lot of games. I played way more games than I can ever manage to remember, but I will try and run down a few of the big ones. The list of major titles is as follows.

Oddly enough I am beginning this new year not entirely differently than I began the last year. January 2013 I was still involved in the launch of Mists of Pandaria, and it was not until April that I really began to distance myself from that game entirely. World of Warcraft and I have this love/hate relationship. I get frustrated with it so much, because it seems that they always seem to take the most short sighted solutions to problems, and there are so many games that there that do various things it does…. so much better. However as a total package I feel like the game is unbeatable. It offers the most good things in one package. The realization for me however after my 2+ years of absence from being serious about the game is that it is not about the game at all. World of Warcraft is about the people playing it, and I had missed the ragtag group of people known as House Stalwart immensely.

The game I probably played the most often during the year however was Rift. I want to love rift so badly, the promise of the game is really great. The problem is it just lacks something that I can’t quite put my finger on. It is a technically superior game in every aspect, but it is like it lacks a cohesive narrative that makes me care about the world every single day. The dragons were a thing I thought I could get behind. But now that we have systematically killed each of them off, I cannot say in a single sentence what the world of Rift is. I think that might be the problem, there is no one clear narrative to the game. You cannot say “this game is” and have even half of the people agree on it. I still play it occasionally and there is still an incarnation of House Stalwart there that Psynister and Fynralyl are keeping alive. I thank them so much for being there, but I just can’t seem to care about the game right now. I am sure at some point I will again.

Final Fantasy was another major force for the year. This was a game I never intended to like because really I feel like me and Japanese RPGs had a messy divorce quite some time ago. I had a group of friends actively wanting to play it, so against my better judgment I went along for the ride. What I found however was a really well crafted narrative and dungeon experience. If I could have kept experiencing new bits of immersive content, I would have likely stuck around. However once you reached the end of the game, it was exactly that… the end. All paths lead to massive amount of grinding, and for whatever reason… while I can stomach grinding all day long in World of Warcraft… I could not stomach the particular FFXIV brand of grinding. Namely I blame this on the overall lack of meaninful drops in the game. If I have a chance of getting something cool while killing mobes, no matter how remote the chance… it feels exciting to me each time I open a loot window. There was nothing that could drop from mobs in the world that I would ever care about. Additionally gearing up to get to a point where we could raid, was just not a bridge I was willing to cross.

Games for 2014

There has been a game I have been in super secret closed door testing since February. I cannot name the game by name, but I have to say I am still extremely excited about it even after most of a year testing it. I have watched the game grow from something that felt polished to something that really is amazingly rich and polished. I don’t think I will quit WoW this time for another game, because I have set down some pretty solid roots there again. However I know I will also be playing this game, at the very least two to three nights a week. It is probably the least wow-like game I have played in a long while, and because of that I feel like there is room in my heart for both games to have a unique space.

Past that I am really not certain what 2014 will hold. I know that I am not really interested enough to purchase a PS4 or an XBox One, so I think I will be exiting the console mainstream once again. I am mostly a PC gamer to be honest, and since my gameloft has been taken over by my wife I am okay with not having access to the consoles. More than anything I am looking forward to the various stores beginning to liquidate their stocks of PS3 and XBox 360 games, so I can pick up the titles I always wanted to play but didn’t have the desire to pay for. Additionally there are still a lot of things on the DS/3DS that I want to play, and I am looking forward to picking up the newest Zelda game. I am sure there will be a number of surprises along the way, games that catch my fancy enough to deserve lots of blog posts.

I hope that 2014 will be as positive force in my life as 2013 has been. Additionally I hope each and every one of you out there can say the same. My friend @AlternativeChat has declared 2014 the “Year of Faff”, and I am down with this notion. I think we all need to learn how to faff about in the game worlds we are in, because stopping and smelling the roses is the only real way I know to break the cycle of burnout. I have tried my best to embrace this concept, and hope to continue to do so in the year to come. More than anything, I feel like I am sick of jumping games every three months, and I get the sense that the gaming world as a whole is somewhat sick of that as well. I hope we can each embrace our own faff, whatever that might mean.

Rediscovering Dungeons

June 25, 2012 by Belghast

Here in Oklahoma it has been insanely hot and by Thursday it is supposed to be in temperatures over 107F. As a result, I have been actively trying to avoid leaving the comfort of air conditioning. This meant that this last weekend, I spent the vast majority of it logged into Argent Dawn in World of Warcraft. The game still has a pretty firm resurgent hold on me.

Am I Really Back?

Honestly at this point I am still not 100% sure if I am really back, but I have moved from seven days of free time to actually paying for the first month. I had planned on doing this anyway, just to make sure my friend got his mount, but I have to say I am already finding myself making plans for the future. Right now I have a stable of sub 85s, and I admit I am looking forward to leveling them.

I spent the largest portion of the weekend working on Exeter, my Paladin. This was actually my very first character in World of Warcraft, and I had grand ideals about playing it as a main. Due to not being able to keep up with my friends, and the failings of protection paladins early on in vanilla, this never quite panned out. But nonetheless the character has always had a special place for me.

When I last played the character over a year and a half ago, I had just started on Vashj’ir and decided to swap from Retribution as I played in Wrath, to full on protection. With some minimal ability swapping, I was able to pick up the character pretty quickly and continue on questing. I have to say the Cataclysm Tankadin is a blast to play. I have given paladins crap over the years, even on this blog, but the gameplay is extremely infectious.

Over the course of the weekend I finished Vashji’r, quested through Hyjal, mined my way across Deepholme and finally reached 85 while doing the first few quest chains of Uldum. I have no clue how many actual hours of play it took me, but with all the perks granted by a level 25 guild, it seemed like it just flew by. Instead of watching my xp bar I found myself just following along the quests, and before I knew it I had hit the cap.

While I have complained about “kill ten” quests before, I have come to realize that at the end of the day I really do prefer them. Having a traditional questing structure gives me a sense of purpose as I check things off my list. When I have played more open ended games, like Guild Wars 2, I have felt like everything I did lacked that same sense of purpose. As much as I had complained about the disconnected feeling of Cataclysm, the quest flow is pretty nice and has enough other kinds of quests to break the monotony of the kill tasks.

Grouping Should Be Fun

When I left WoW originally it changed my game play deeply. I went from being the center of each group as the main tank, to actively avoiding grouping all together. I had developed a phobia of being needed at all, since I had spent the previous seven years responsible for the happiness of so many others. I grouped when I absolutely had to, but the rest of the time I was off by myself and seemingly happy.

With the release of SWTOR, I gave grouping another try. However choosing to level as a dedicated duo, left me feeling chained to having to play whenever someone else was online. When it came time to run flashpoints, I just found them not as much fun as I remembered dungeons being. I think in part, I just didn’t like the design of the Star Wars hard modes. I don’t mind hard encounters, but I have always felt that they should be an endurance game, not twitch reflexes.

Many of the SWTOR hard mode flashpoints, just felt cheap and irrationally punishing. Colonel Daksh in Maelstrom Prison for example, goes into this phase where you have to avoid getting in line of sight of him. Essentially 2 or 3 times per fight, everyone in the group has to do an intricate dance avoiding being seen. If you are seen at all, it is essentially a one shot death. If you aren’t dpsing him fast enough, you also die from the incredibly short enrage timer. As we wiped over and over to one thing or another, the attempts just ceased to be enjoyable, and given time flashpoints were just something I completely avoided.

Remembering It Can Be

Thanks to the coaxing of my friend, coming back to WoW I have been grouping again. I eased into it by duoing some old raids, until I built back up my tanking ability to some extent. Once I got back into the swing of a heroic, including the “new to me” hour of twilight five mans, it felt like coming home. Unfortunately it seems like we can only muster full guild groups on Friday or Saturday nights. But those last few nights, have been some of the most enjoyable gameplay I have experienced in years.

Friday night we gathered up to work on various achievements, that each of us had outstanding. We knocked out a couple still remaining from the Icecrown five mans, and then moved on to the redesigned Zul’Gurub. ZG has always been one of my favorite places in Azeroth, and in vanilla I spent hour after hour there both tanking and healing it. When I heard they were removing the raid and making it a heroic, I was extremely disappointed. However, considering they went from a raid to a five man, they’ve done the zone justice. While none of the fights are exactly the same, they each feel very similar in nature and still have a very epic feeling to them.

In an hours time, we had knocked out every available Zul’Gurub achievement. While there really wasn’t much in the way of gear upgrades for anyone involved, we had a complete blast doing it. I am remembering the side of gaming I used to love so much, but the circumstance of having to be both guild and raid leader robbed me of. Running around with my friends taking down baddies, has re-awoken a piece of my inner child I thought was too jaded to ever feel this way again.

Well Rested Return

One of friends, mused that I just needed some time away from the game to get my perspective. I think that honestly might be the case. Too much frustration had built up, over too many things not directly related to gameplay. Coming back now, I have a new pair of rose colored lenses and my buffer of bullshit has been emptied out. I never thought it would be WoW I was returning to however. I really thought with my recent return to Rift, that it would be the one that held my attention. As much crap as we have all said about “pandas and pokemon”, I think the upcoming expansion will breathe some life back into the game. I just hope that my return, others will be willing to give it a fresh start as well.