Here’s my annual summary of MMORPGs that are on my radar for the new year 2017. Here is last year’s post. I am only considering “classic” style MMORPGs in this list, not things like MOBAs or brawlers or Diablo-clones or whatever else people call MMOs these days. If it’s not on this list I either forgot about it, don’t know about it, don’t count it as an MMORPG, or haven’t heard enough good things to bother investigating.

Here’s a chart I just made showing all my Steam purchases in 2016. I computed the cost per hour for playing each game, based on the price I paid for the game and the number of hours I played (according to Steam). In this way I came up with a list of games sorted by best entertainment value. If the cost per hour came out more than the purchase price (such as Bastion which came out to $37/hour), then I capped it at the purchase price.

Last night I only had time to play one game, so I decided to play some FFXIV again, as part of my as-yet unannounced goal of catching up with the Main Scenario before the expansion arrives. I was stuck at a point in the Main Scenario where the next quest requires level 58, but I was only at about 57.8. So I thought I would do a few quests to start getting a feel for my character again.

In the most shocking news heard since WildStar announced they were going free-to-play, Daybreak revealed they will be closing down Landmark in February. I bought one of the $99 Founder’s packs. I don’t exactly remember why, but I remember seeing that video showing them digging holes in the ground and thought that was pretty dern cool. It turned out to be the most ill-advised game purchase decision of my entire life to date.

I know blog readers don’t care about videos, but I wanted to record my Top 10 game videos from 2016 for posterity. One day I decided to click on that Analytics tab on YouTube and found there was actually some information there, like which videos people watched. YouTube ranks videos by watch time, not views, which I suppose indicates that these are the videos that people actually stuck around to watch the most, for some inexplicable reason.

As part of my continuing efforts to catch up in LotRO, I played through another Book in the Epic Story. In the last book, we were looking for a ring called Narchuil, which is pronounced quite differently from the way it looks, according to not-Ian McKellen Gandalf in the voiceovers. (It’s something like “Nar-wheel.”) (Per usual for my LotRO posts, I will not be attempting to add the diacritics to all the weird Elvish words.

I’m a little miffed that I’ve run out of level 58 quests in the Dravanian Hinterlands only about halfway to level 59. Alphinaud and [redacted] stopped talking to me about the Main Scenario almost immediately after I ascended to level 58 and entered Idyllshire, which is apparently the new Mor Dhona. They now want nothing to do with me until I get to level 59. So I did every level 58 quest I could find around Idyllshire and the Hinterlands, mostly involving the gobbies’ loony adventures building their city government.

I completed a second Book in LotRO over the snowy weekend. Last time we rescued Laerdan and found half of that elusive ring Narchuil. After Laerdan stormed out of the council meeting, Elrond asked me to talk to him. Laerdan believed the rest of the ring could be found in the (presumably dead) hands of a captain whose ship sank somewhere in the north. He asked me to meet a dwarf friend of his in Forochel, because he wanted to stay and patch things up with the Elves.

It was a weekend of big achievements in Final Fantasy XIV. When last we left our intrepid Warrior of Light, she had run out of level 58 quests halfway to level 59. I ended up doing some Clan Hunts, some Battle Levemetes (a word which I still do not think is a real word), and thanks to suggestions from Aywren, a handful of Beast Tribe quests for the Vath and Vanu.

I’m trying a new thing here. This is both a diary of my Morrowind adventures and an index to the videos. P. S. Don’t spoil anything for me, I haven’t finished the game yet. :) Morrowind 1 - Arriving in Seyda Neen. Story. I’m a Dark Elf Witchhunter. I was released from prison and transported by ship to Seyda Neen, on the southern coast of Vvardenfell island in the Morrowind district.

A while back I said I was playing ESO again.. welllll, I sort of lost interest. (I think it’s because I find the quests very depressing, and it also seems like everywhere you go and everything you do is basically the same as what you did before.) So it’s mostly FFXIV and an occasionally foray into LotRO for me these days. I finished the Aetherial Research Facility. I got a nice group with a very “professional” tank, who explained the mechanics concisely and non-judgmentally.

Thanks to a bunch of tips, I learned that what I should have been looking for as a Crystal Tower-replacement is called Void Ark, not Alexander. It took me a little time to figure out how to unlock it, because the quest that takes you to it starts out in Foundation with some random guy on the street who doesn’t look like he would ever lead to anything good. I found him from the 3.

First there was Void Ark. I watched a guide on YouTube but I didn’t understand much of it, so I just jumped in. (It’s easier to learn mechanics first-hand.) It turned out to be fairly straightforward to get carried through there. Just like the Labyrinth of the Ancients raid at 50, everyone is so over-leveled that you hardly even see the mechanics, and mostly all you have to do is follow along, avoid AOEs, and pick up the loot.

I wasn’t going to buy Conan Exiles right away, because I could tell from the streams and the early gameplay videos that it wasn’t ready yet, but I bought it anyway because I just didn’t feel like playing FFXIV. $30 isn’t too much to waste on a game, right? Eventually they’ll fix it up into a finished game, surely? To nobody’s surprise, I should have waited for a sale. Let’s start with the bad stuff.

For some weird reason I’m still playing Conan Exiles. Probably some misguided need to get my money’s worth out of it. Also it’s a fairly relaxing game world to be inside right now. I can safely ignore everything in the real world while I’m breaking rocks. (And that is a big chunk of what you do-everything requires tons of stone.) However, I will continue to list everything that’s wrong with the game, hopefully to shame Funcom into feeling bad about releasing their game too early.

My recent test drive of Conan Exiles and a comment from Jeromai reminded me of a topic I once started writing about but never finished, which I will now take up again: What makes a good survival game? What defines a survival game? The Forest (way back in 2015) What prompted me to visit this topic was a comment from Jeromai: That he became more interested in Conan Exiles after hearing you could play it solo.

You might be wondering why I’m still talking about Conan Exiles after trashing it for two posts in a row. Welllllll, see, it’s still kind of fun. :) Some random shrine of some random priest. It has that same sort of addictive crafting progression treadmill that ARK has: I want to see everything you can craft, so I have to keep leveling up and unlocking new recipes and finding more and more resources.

I played a large amount of 7 Days To Die this weekend. I finally discovered some things to make the game more enjoyable beyond the 7th day. A trip to the market. I bought 7DTD way back in February 2015 for $25. That must have been before my $10 rule or a random exception, because I don’t think I’d heard about the game beforehand. I didn’t play it very much in 2015 because it was still early, but it was fun, and I liked what they were doing with it.

As I was catching up on MMORPG news story titles in my feed reader, I noticed that Revelation Online had started Early Access on February 27. For all intents and purposes, this is what we would normally call a game launch. You have to buy a Founder’s Pack to access the game “early,” but supposedly there will be no more character wipes, which sounds a lot like a launch to me.

So I’m going to write some more about 7 Days To Die since it’s all I’ve been playing lately, and there’s this weird expectation that bloggers are supposed to post things occasionally. I gave up on Conan Exiles because I already feel like I’ve done everything in the game, or I should say I’ve seen all the game mechanics that are in the game. Those mechanics are: Gather stuff, build stuff, and kill stuff.

Rescued from the drafts folder… Blatantly stolen from therepopulation.com because I don’t have any screenshots. I was initially glad to hear that The Repopulation will be coming back. I splurged in a moment of weakness and bought it for $20 on Steam back in February 2015. I don’t remember why I bought it. I think I had heard some positive feedback about it, and I had heard also it described as being heavily inspired by Star Wars Galaxies, and I was curious to see what a SWG-like game looked like.

Better late than never, here are the games I played in January, according to ManicTime: <td> 76 hrs </td> <td> 15 hrs </td> <td> 12 hrs </td> <td> 7 hrs </td> <td> 2 hrs </td> <td> 2 hrs </td> (Only games played 2 hours or more shown.) Despite an attempt to get back into ESO, it was FFXIV that kept my attention the most, at least until I ran into a progression roadblock and dropped it for Conan Exiles in February.

Games played in February, according to ManicTime. A pretty strong survival game theme here. :) 7 Days To Die - 67 hours Conan Exiles - 62 hours* Rise of the Tomb Raider - 9 hours ARK - 4 hours The Secret World - 2 hours ESO - 2 hours * Conan Exiles approximated since ManicTime counted every new version as a different game.

Another post rescued from my drafts… Book 14 begins with Laerdan preparing for a journey south. He asked me to collect a bunch of gear for him that he left strewn around Eriador, because the hero’s journey always involves fetching stuff. It was a lengthy, boring scavenger hunt. When I returned to Rivendell, Laerdan was gone. In a note, he said he sent me away so I wouldn’t interfere. I spent all that time collecting his gear for nothing.

From a draft written somewhere around October 2016… I finally got around to watching Amazon’s teaser video, thinking that it would erase my earlier skepticism and soften my opinion about their upcoming games, and maybe even start to get excited about the possibilities. Unfortunately it only pushed my skeptical buttons even harder. “What if a game was built for Twitch,” wonders a voiceover 12 seconds into the video. Instant buzzkill. The video goes on to mention Twitch about five times in the first 60 seconds, before anything about games.