It’s time once against for the prestigious Endgame Viable Awards for 2017, posted a bit early because the 31st is a Sunday. Hopefully I won’t play any new games over the weekend to skew these results. 2016 Awards 2015 Awards I give out three awards: Game of the Year, MMORPG of the Year, and MMORPG Expansion of the Year. In my warped worldview “Game of the Year” sort of implies Steam game of the year and excludes traditional MMORPGs.

I allowed myself to buy one game in the Steam Winter Sale, which was Divinity: Original Sin. Then, a few hours later, I bought the Skyrim Special Edition, because I saw everyone on Twitter talking about it which reminded me that I wanted to buy that too and, hey, what a coincidence, it was on sale. But this post is about Divinity: Original Sin. It’s an isometric, turn-based strategy RPG which can trace its ancestry back to games like Baldur’s Gate (the earliest example of this kind that I can think).

This is a post about The Last Jedi, so don’t read any further until you’ve seen the movie. I’ll give you some blank lines to click away. Note: I added an update way at the bottom of this post. I’ll give you a few more blank lines just in case you accidentally flick your eyes down lower on the page. Okay, get ready. Brace yourselves. This is going to change everything you’ve ever known about everything, and your life will never be the same.

I’m not entirely sure how to categorize a post about Warframe. It’s usually covered by the MMORPG press but after only a few minutes with it I can say it’s obviously not an MMORPG. Perhaps I finally need to add that “MMO” category to my blog, for discussing what are effectively little more than regular old multiplayer games. I’ve never heard anyone say they didn’t like Warframe. In fact I’ve heard a lot of “positive buzz” about Warframe.

I alluded to trying out Kritika Online in my last post, so I thought I would write a bit about it. For one thing, I want to have a post to link to later in the year for my “Game/MMORPG of the Year” post, and for another thing, Friday is looming, and I don’t have anything to post yet. I downloaded and played Kritika on November 22nd, the day before Thanksgiving.

Tobold recently declared that the MMO blogosphere was dead to him (paraphrasing slightly), so I suppose it’s my duty to point out that we’re still here, sort of. Tobold was one of the first, if not the first MMORPG blogger I read, way back in the olden days when he talked about Vanilla WoW all the time. He was one of the original models for how I thought a blog should look.

I finished up the Living World Season 4 episode Daybreak over the weekend. This post is going to contain story spoilers, so if you haven’t finished it yet, look away! My thoughts are pretty similar to Bhagpuss’s. But I’m going to start with the things I liked about Daybreak. I really liked the quality of the cut scene at the end of the first chapter, Eye of the Brandstorm, when Aurene showed us that vision.

The Guild Wars franchise wins the month. Guild Wars 2 - 37 hours Guild Wars 1 - 21 hours Dark Souls III - 6 hours Final Fantasy XIV - 4 hours I played a little Dark Souls III because I still need a new character to finish my The Ringed City DLC blind playthrough. I feel like it’s been an extremely light gaming month, but when I add up all those hours and divide by 30, it comes out to a bit more than 2 hours of gaming every day.

I’m not going to write about how thoroughly exhausted and beaten down I was last night after completing the epic ~45 minute death march of a fight in the first chapter of the first episode of GW2’s Living World Season 4. Instead I’m going to keep it light and talk about jumping. I saw a remark somewhere in passing about jumping in MMORPGs (apologies but I can’t remember where) which inspired me to write this.

Bhagpuss said something interesting in his last comment: In general I think the idea that GW1 had good writing is fanciful. Much though I like Prophecies, the writing is pretty shoddy. I think when people praise the writing they are mainly talking about the plotting, which is fairly coherent. The dialog is mostly stilted and unconvincing, often risible. First, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word “risible” in my entire life.

Since I’m done with Guild Wars 2 until November 28th (I got bored with dailies), I had a crazy idea a few weeks back to re-download and play Guild Wars 1 to have a look at the story. I’ve always heard it’s good. I own this game. So why not play it? I’m not entirely sure, but I think I own all of the available GW1 content. I originally bought it somewhere around 2011, and later I think I bought all of the expansions sometime after Guild Wars 2 came out when I saw there were some achievements and titles that you could get from linking your accounts or something.

In light of the announcement of World of Warcraft Classic, everybody’s abuzz with WoW nostalgia, so I thought it would be fun to re-post my very first thoughts about WoW Vanilla from 2006. From blizzard.com - I can’t find any screenshots prior to 2014. World of Warcraft October 10, 2006 Inspired by the recent episode of South Park, and being bored with FlatOut2, I finally installed my trial version of World of Warcraft yesterday, which I’d gotten with a video card about a year ago I think.

I usually prefer to post nothing instead of a post about blogging*, but since Roger brought it up, and I just said two posts ago that there’s nothing to blog about, let’s talk about blogging! Rather than write something that stands on its own, I’m just going to respond to the parts of Roger’s post that jumped out at me, as if it were a Usenet post. The Nature of the Beast “I’ve written several pieces that I’m proud of.

I mentioned that there was nothing to blog about. Then I started catching up on all the things I’ve missed in the MMO landscape over the last month or so. CCP VR Layoffs. Apparently CCP decided they didn’t want to be a pioneer in VR after all. Presumably this means they’ll need to figure out how to increase revenue from EVE, a fourteen-year-old game that new players run screaming from.

I’m in another “there is nothing to blog about”* mood so this is a brief update to tell you that I finished the GW2 Living World Season 2 again. It was more entertaining the second time. Except for every combat encounter, of course. But it felt considerably easier the second time through, and I only remember wanting to punch my monitor on two of the bosses. That’s an overall smaller monitor-punches-per-episode rate than Living World Season 3 was.

Guild Wars 2 posts do fairly well for some weird reason (but not as well as Dark Tower posts, go figure), so here’s another one. If you aren’t caught up with GW2 there might be some accidental spoilers below. I mentioned before that I’ve been re-playing the Living World Season 2. Eventually I’ll be uploading them to my YouTube channel, because hey, why not. “Pivot to video” and all that.

In general, I don’t think about WoW very much, but when Blizzcon comes around every year, Twitter explodes with chatter about this game. Even more than the moderate level of chatter that persists year-round. It continues to amaze me how many people seem to live completely inside a Blizzard bubble. I guess there’s nothing wrong with focusing completely on WoW, but, to me, WoW is just one game out of a hundred, a game that remains dormant roughly 22 months out of every 24 months.

Not surprisingly, there was a Steam sale for Halloween, and one of the games that’s been on my wish list for a long time was really cheap: Necropolis. They apparently made some changes from the original launch version and now call it the “Brutal Edition.” I didn’t want to buy it, because even though it was only $4.49, I didn’t want to send the signal that it was “okay” to release an incomplete buggy game at launch and then fix it later.

As a bit of a data junkie, I’m nauseated to report that I forgot to re-install ManicTime after I had to reinstall Windows this month. Did I even mention that on the blog? Well, if I didn’t, my SSD failed earlier this month, so I had to reinstall. That means I am missing game-playing statistics from the period of roughly October 11th through October 28th, rendering my report for the month of October completely useless, and indeed any report I planned to do for the entire year of 2017.

[UPDATE: If you’re here to find out what the “Good vs. Evil Edition” actually is, as compared to the movie, I don’t know. I did not see the theatrical release. My best guess at this point is that the “Good vs. Evil Edition” includes a behind-the-scenes featurette after the movie, which I did not watch.] Mere moments ago, I finished watching The Dark Tower on FIOS-on-demand. This post will probably contain some spoilers for the movie and possibly even the books, but it’s not that bad, really.

This is a post about my NaNoWriMo process, so feel free to skip it. I’m writing it mostly for myself to remind me what it is, so that I’ll be ready for November 1. Typically I prepare a Scrivener project with 30 documents named “11-01” through “11-30,” each with a 1,667 word target goal. Each day, I open up the document with the appropriate date and start writing. I try not to read much of what I’ve written the previous days, other than maybe the last paragraph if I need to continue with a scene I didn’t finish.

Now that I know GW2 dailies give out gold, I started doing them. They aren’t very fun to do. :) Talk about mindless busy work. No wonder I’ve been ignoring them. I’ve never been a big fan of “doing dailies” in any MMORPG, and I usually leave a game for something else when I get to the point where that’s all there is to do. So it takes a lot of mental energy to push through these completely arbitrary, meaningless tasks.

I’ve been doing a lot of Alliance Raids in Final Fantasy XIV since 4.1, so I’ve seen the loot window a whole lot lately. This is a 3000-word screed on everything that’s wrong with the UI in this window. This is probably not unique to FFXIV, by the way. But it’s the one I personally see most often. First let’s go over how it works in case you haven’t experienced it.

Soon you will probably see a lot of talk about the launch of Destiny 2 on the PC. I’m trying to be more discerning with my game purchases these days, so I have no plans to pay full price for an over-hyped, mediocre shooter whose main attraction seems to be a large cult following. Maybe if it goes on sale I’ll take a look at it, but who are we kidding, this is Activision/Blizzard and it’s never going to go on sale, so I’m probably never going to buy it.

I started to write this as a comment on Aywren’s post about Alliance Raids, but it was getting too long. I agree completely about using the Alliance Raids to level from 50. My testing shows you get 200-250k experience per run (tested at level 58 and 59), not counting rested experience, and Roulette bonuses, which add that much more. That’s a crazy high amount of experience-per-instance, bested only by dungeons, which usually take longer to get into and finish.