It’s time once against for the prestigious Endgame Viable Awards for 2018. 2017 Awards 2016 Awards 2015 Awards I give out three awards for PC games only: 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 (because that’s the only place I buy PC games) and excludes traditional MMORPGs.

Bhagpuss has a post referencing, among other things, the deplorable state of Early Access game releases right now, seen in such recent launch disasters as Fallout 76 (not technically early access but, seriously, it was) and Atlas (which as I write this hasn’t been out more than a day and has already been review-bombed to death on Steam). I have nothing to add to his observations except that yes, I agree.

I’m playing RimWorld in pretty much every spare moment of every day right now. This game is just amazing. If MMORPGs had even a tenth of this much interesting gameplay elements, maybe they wouldn’t be dying out. :) Note: I don’t really think MMORPGs are dying out. They’re just evolving into the game equivalent of Marvel summer blockbusters: Designed by focus groups to appeal to the broadest possible audience, which often doesn’t include MMORPG players of the 90s, who are clearly in the minority of gamer audiences these days.

The rest of the world has already played and finished with RimWorld, which I think has been in Early Access for quite some time, but I just started playing it. I happened to see Sean Sands from Gamers With Jobs playing it on their YouTube channel and thought it looked amazing, so I picked it up. I didn’t even wait for a sale, because I wanted to jump into it while I was interested.

This should be a hoot. Because I didn’t play any games in November. As I mentioned last time, I spent November recovering from back pain and avoided the PC computer chair like the plague while I worked on rebuilding my upper back muscles with torturous stretches and exercises. Lord of the Rings Online, 1 hour. I played my level 62 hobbit Hunter in Mines of Moria for an hour. I did not advance any levels in the allegedly super fast leveling curve that everyone says LotRO has.

I don’t normally do month-in-review posts, but since I was largely absent this month, I figured I should do one for a change. I’ve spent most of November trying to recover from back pain. The first day of the month it got really bad, then it got better, then it got really bad again, and now it’s getting better again. I’ve been taking a muscle relaxant called baclofen every day this month, and last week I started going to physical therapy to try to loosen things up.

Exactly one hundred years ago today, World War I ended with the signing of the Armistice. I’m posting this at 11:00 my time, though of course the actual Armistice was signed in France, so I’m probably four or five hours late. My grandfather was a part of the American Expeditionary Force along with a million others, went through basic training, shipped over to France, and arrived just in time for the last offensive in the war, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which began on September 26, 1918.

Lord of the Rings Online opened their Legendary Server the other day. It’s another of what has become known in the industry as a “progression” server, although I feel like they’re stretching that definition in this case. (Then again, nobody has ever defined what a “progression” server is, except Daybreak. Or maybe it started with SOE, I don’t remember.) In this case “progression” seems to mean a new server with a level cap of 50 and nothing else, which to me is the bare minimum of effort.

This will be what I hope is a quick blog post about BlizzCon, largely inspired by peer pressure more than any real interest. In fact, the main reason this post didn’t get deleted was I needed a vehicle to say that I’m trying to reserve most of my writing energy this month for NaNoWriMo. I’m still having back trouble so typing at keyboards for long periods of time is challenging.

October was a slow PC gaming month, partially due to back pain making it hard to sit at in the computer chair to play games, and partially due to a lack of games that interest me right now. Guild Wars 2, 7 hours. The big burst of MMORPG activity for the month, where I caught up with the latest Living World episode. The Witcher 2, 6 hours. I finished The Witcher 1 last month, so I went and installed the second one.

I saw a tweet the other day that made me raise an eyebrow: The content of this tweet baffled me. For starters, how do you “legally get” server code? Who are these people who could theoretically get it? One would assume that the way you “legally get” the Star Wars Galaxies server code is to contact the owner (or more likely owners) of that property and propose to buy or license it.

Bless Online launched on Steam for free the other day to exactly zero fanfare, as far as I can tell. Certainly nobody mentioned it on Twitter or in the blogosphere. I had to use my feed reader’s search feature to find the announcement on MassivelyOP. I’m a big fan of free trials when it comes to MMORPGs, and very rarely have I ever spent money on one without trying it out in some way first.

Trion Worlds was just acquired by a company called Gambino. No wait, it’s Gamigo. I don’t have much to say about this except I’ve never heard of Gamigo before. I’m hardly an expert in the global operations of every company in the gaming industry, but it does seem a little bit strange that the name Gamigo has never crossed my MMO radar in the last twenty years. They seem to be based in Germany, so maybe it’s not that surprising.

I mentioned that I had abandoned The Last Of Us and gotten into Horizon Zero Dawn, so of course, right after that, I abandoned Horizon Zero Dawn and got back into The Last Of Us. You see, I was always interested in seeing the remainder of the story-I was just getting frustrated with the stealth mechanics. Stealth games generally aren’t my forte. Crouching, moving slow, and hiding behind walls all the time gets on my nerves.

I was trying yet again to think of something interesting to write, when I saw Roger talking about Blaugust this morning, which led me to Gevlon talking about Blaugust, where I found out that I’m no longer an active blogger. I mean, sure, I haven’t posted in a week, whereas I normally try to post something once or twice a week. But man, talk about a tough room. Also I’m a little puzzled by his methodology.

MapleStory 2 is one of those MMOs that I never would have looked at twice, except that there’s nothing else to look at right now. See previous post lamenting the pitiable dearth of MMORPGs. The last Nexon game I played was Riders of Icarus, which I did not think much of. I even downloaded and tried it again yesterday, and I still didn’t like it. It sounds like a cool idea to have a game built around collecting mounts and such, but none of that seems to exist at the beginning of the game, which is a huge disappointment.

I stumbled upon a headline from Blaugust alumni MMOist about Bless Online launching for reals on October 23. I’ve alternated between interest and disinterest on this title since at least 2017, but I knew I wasn’t going to spend a cent on it until I could play it first. (Especially after Bhagpuss’s first impressions, parts one and two, made it sound like as uninspired a game as it could possibly be made to sound.

I saw that Sypster posted about returning to Guild Wars 2, so in the absence of anything else to write about, I’ll relay my own experience with that very subject. Back in July, I went ahead and uninstalled Guild Wars 2. Partly because I’d grown to strongly dislike the gameplay (as opposed to the nominal experience of mildly disliking it), and partly because I didn’t think much of ArenaNet anymore.

My World of Warcraft subscription ended weeks ago, and the last time I actually played was September 3rd, a month ago. I meant to go back and complete the Siege of Boralus but I got too involved playing The Witcher again. I rescued Jaina though, so that was a good-enough ending for me. I figured I should finally post what I thought of the expansion. I get the impression there’s a lot of people complaining about Battle for Azeroth.

I uploaded the last episode of my Fallout 4 podcast yesterday. It took me a while to get the concluding episode out due to injuring my hand and cataract surgery and, frankly, a bit of malaise, but it’s finally done. Here is the series page, though it displays the episodes in reverse order. It’s a serial podcast, so it’s better if you start at the first one. In all there are 21 episodes for a total of about 5 hours of listening.

Even with a week and a half of down time from cataract surgery, I still managed to play a few games this past month. The Witcher (Enhanced Edition), 39 hours. This is what I spent most of my gaming time doing after World of Warcraft and before surgery, and a little bit afterward to finish up the story. This is the first time I’ve finished the whole game. It got kind of weird at the end.

In the interests of brevity and not boring everyone to death, I’ll edit the rest of these down to a few sentences. 12. “What is your family ancestry?” My family came from a group of Anabaptists who originated in Switzerland, moved to what is now Ukraine, and emigrated to Kansas en masse around 1874. 13. “What scares you?” A whole lot of things, mostly personal. 14. “What are you most grateful for?

Had a rough night last night with back pain. One of those situations where there’s no way to stand, sit, or lie down that feels better. It’s a lot better today but I’ve also been working harder to keep myself still. Yesterday I tried to ignore it. Big mistake. Frustrating as it might be, there’s always less overall down time when you stop and rest rather than try to keep pushing through the pain or sickness.

Nothing new to report about the eye, except the new normal seems more normal every day. I stopped using the antibiotic eye drops as instructed, and now only use the prednisone (steroid) eye drops 4 times a day for another week. (Those drops drive me crazy because I swear they have chalk in them, as if they simply crushed up some pills and mixed it with water.) I don’t see much of anything interesting happening in gaming.

So I guess I’ll write something about games this time. The eye continues to improve, and focusing on nearby things gets a little bit better each day. (Writing this post has been the easiest so far.) There’s still a slight bit of soreness there which crops up in unexpected ways. Sometimes it hurts when I yawn or squeeze my eye shut, and sometimes it feels like there’s something like a hair stuck in the eye.