With the release of Stormblood, Final Fantasy XIV returns to become my most-played game of June. The hours below are padded a bit because I frequently left the game running while I was AFK. Final Fantasy XIV - 70 hours Dark Souls III (The Ringed City DLC) - 9 hours Secret World Legends - 3 hours

Too busy playing to write anything. As of now I’m about 3/4 of the way to level 65, plugging away at the Main Scenario Quest in Yanxia. (See YouTube for excruciating detail.) Here are some screenshots. This anonymous lalafel photobombed my shot of the Kugane market. Arriving in the underwater village of the Kojin (I call them ninja turtles). The underwater palace Shisui of the Violet Tide. A little haunted forest in The Fringes called Dimworld.

Still too busy playing to write anything. I’ve reached the Azim Steppes and level 65. Here’s some more screenshots. :) The picturesque part of The Fringes. Not sure if floating or crucified. There is a very tall stack of rocks in The Ruby Sea. UFO sighting in Yanxia. You can’t go to that zone yet. :) Gasp! Foreshadowing! The Azim Steppes, exactly where I am in the story as of Tuesday night, and yet another lalafel photobomb.

I won’t try to summarize the entire Main Scenario-I’ll just say that I’m completely hooked and invested in the story as of level 66 in the Azim Steppe. The hokiness and stiltedness of the FFXIV-style cut scenes that most people complain about are completely unseen by me. If canned emotes and stoic nods-essentially the 3D equivalent of a puppet show-is what they have to do to deliver quality storytelling at a consistent pace, I’m fine with it.

I see a lot of people on Twitter and at least one person on a certain MassivelyOP podcast mention that they keep trying to play FFXIV but they just can’t get into it. I consider myself a pretty jaded MMORPG player, and I can certainly understand the reasons people don’t like FFXIV. But I thought I would try to document here how I personally overcame the biggest criticisms people have with the game.

Slight diversion to see the Binding Coil raids: I’ve always wondered who the twins’ parents are. They never talk about them. Wonder twin powers, activate! (I’m sure I’m not the first to make that joke.) See you back in the future. Meanwhile, back in Stormblood: I wonder if you can get outfits like these. Probably best to stay out of her way. Calm before the storm. U MAD BRO? … Tolkien’s eagles were here the whole time!

I didn’t intend to weigh in on @Sypster’s post about side quests, but apparently I did. :) In An Age and GamingSF also had some good responses. I think the basic argument Syp made is that side quests distract him from the main story, so he would prefer to eliminate them and boost the experience gained from the main story. I can understand that perspective. I’ve forgotten what’s going on in the main story of MMORPGs plenty of times.

I saw someone somewhere (FC chat maybe?) mention that they wished FFXIV would make their dungeons 5-man instead of 4-man so that DPS queues would go faster. (Belghast also recently lamented over the problems of leveling DPS.) It’s an interesting idea but I don’t think going to 5-man would significantly help the problem of slow DPS queues. I’m quite sure the ratio of DPS to tanks and healers in any given MMORPG is probably something like 25 to 1, if not 100 to 1.

I reached Bard level 70 Sunday afternoon. Yay! But that’s not all that much of an achievement in FFXIV. You can’t do much of anything with the endgame until you finish the Main Scenario Quest. And… I finished the Main Scenario Quest Monday night! After reaching level 70, you need to do the Ala Mhigo 4-man dungeon and the Menagerie 8-man trial. I finished Ala Mhigo with a relatively uneventful PUG Sunday night.

I’m going to make an attempt here to summarize the FFXIV Stormblood story for my own future reference. There are going to be spoilers ahead if you haven’t played, although I’ll try to keep it fairly high-level and leave out every detail of how everything turns out. (That means I’m not going to tell you who lives and who dies, muhahaha.) (You can consult any of a wide variety of Wikis if you really need all the details, and may I also suggest the 58 video series I uploaded to YouTube if you get really bored and need to see all the spoilers?

Standing Stone Games started taking orders for the Mordor expansion in LotRO, which is “expected” to release July 31. $40 for the no-frills version.* The moment is finally here. The moment I’ve been dreading for so long: The moment when everyone else will get to experience the MMORPG cultural event of the decade, while I sit on the sidelines, peering longingly through the cracks in the fence, trying to catch a glimpse of the prize at the end of the rainbow.

Thinking Play had a very interesting post recently about Play Personalities, something I had never heard of before. I recommend reading it. It’s a bit like a Meyers-Briggs test for how you spend your leisure time, or the Bartle Test. Here’s my self-assessment of how I fit the different play personalities: The Joker. Nope. Well, maybe a little. Sometimes I do like to poke fun at things that other people find deadly serious, much to my own detriment on Twitter.

I’m going to try to document here what I’ve figured out about gathering collectables in FFXIV, because there is almost a 100% chance that I will forget this someday and a future version of me will need to re-learn it. Collectables are similar to the Grand Company Provisioning missions you can do once per day, which look like this: Collectables are a bit better, though, because you can hand in a lot more every day.

“Remember when we used to talk about Three-Monthers? Ah, those were the days!” -Bhagpuss That quote from Inventory Full made me chuckle, because I had recently been thinking that it took me precisely three weeks to play through the Stormblood expansion story. And that was going slow, recording everything, talking to everyone around the quest givers, and reading all of the unvoiced text out loud for the video. I could not possibly have done it any slower.

I posted a comment on Aywren’s blog that made me think I should write a short post about what I’ve learned about the Stormblood Bard job. Then I wrote a way too long post about it, because that’s what happens when I’m bored for long periods of time. I’ve leveled a Samurai from 50 to 55, but other than that, I’ve been playing the Bard almost exclusively in Stormblood. I’ll admit the new abilities were a bit tough to grasp at first, but fortunately it wasn’t an impediment to playing through the content.

Final Fantasy XIV and the Stormblood expansion dominated the month of July. Final Fantasy XIV - 154 hours Secret World Legends - 3 hours Lord of the Rings Online - 2 hours

Since I’m home this week (see tomorrow’s post :) I had a rare opportunity to actually watch the Guild Wars 2 Path of Fire expansion announcement live today. (Those things are usually timed so that only the unemployed can watch them.) Not only that, but I could write a post about it and publish it with a screenshot all in the same day! Path of Fire is scheduled to release September 22, 2017, less than two months from now.

To make a long story short, I left my old job and will be home all this week before starting a new part-time job Tuesday. (Technically it’s in the same building.) Being home is weird. I’m not quite sure what to do with myself. I haven’t had a full week off of work since the last time I changed jobs, which was in July 2014. That means I’m writing this post on Tuesday morning on my gaming PC, which is a very strange situation for me.

I mentioned a Let’s Play series showing Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 in my last post: Out of intense curiosity, I’ve been watching this series for a while, trying to take some notes about what I like and dislike about 1.0. The YouTuber showers praise on the game while he plays, more than it deserves-to the point where I wonder if Square Enix actually paid the guy-but he’s at least enthusiastic. He is more of a talented radio-voice-guy than a talented gamer though.

I didn’t know much about Dark and Light except that I had a vague sense that it was a PvP-style MMORPG that had been cancelled and then salvaged. Yesterday I saw a screenshot of the game float through my Twitter feed that looked amazing, so I totally broke my own rules and impulsively went to Steam to buy the Early Access version for $25 (on sale). The bottom line: It’s not an MMORPG at all.

I haven’t yet bought the Mordor expansion (I probably will, despite the hype-destroying trailer), but it dawned on me that LotRO is one of those rare MMORPGs where you can actually explore the world without having to unlock zones by completing quests. So I decided that I wanted to run my 95 Runekeeper as close to Mordor as I could get. I made it all the way to the Black Gate.

So Tuesday afternoon I went out to my garage to get some tools, and a very friendly cat popped out from beneath my car and meowed. I meowed back and the cat went on to explain with a long series of meows that he was very hungry and he further asked if I might have some extra food please? Now I’ve seen probably a half dozen different cats wandering around the vicinity of my house in the last year, not to mention packs of stray cats hanging around the cul-de-sac where I last lived (I am pretty sure a neighbor across the road fed them).

I did indeed buy the $40 edition of the Mordor Expansion, and boosted a Hobbit Minstrel from level 24 to level 105 so I could actually play said expansion. (Folks on Twitter seemed to think Minstrel was a good solo class to play.) Once again the gear you are given looks awful, like a suit of white underwear. I guess they really want people who use level boosts to look like total newbies compared to the people have been playing all along, which I suppose isn’t entirely inappropriate.

Here are just a few thoughts about the announcement of The Thirteenth Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, because I wanted to schedule a post for today, my first day back at work (yuck), and this was the only text I had available. I don’t have a problem with a female The Doctor. Whittaker was very good in Broadchurch. And that’s about the extent of my thoughts about the announcement. I’ve never looked up to The Doctor as a male role model, and can’t even conceive of anyone who has, or what it might be like to be a man who believes they’ve lost their favorite male sci-fi role model.

I was having some fun in the Mordor expansion, bopping up to the Black Gate, talking to Gandalf … pardon me, Mithrandir … meeting those four “adventurers” with different personalities. It seemed like they were setting up those four folks as characters we might see again throughout Mordor, following their adventures so to speak, and it seemed like a good story idea. They all had their different reasons for going into Mordor, and it was the hook I needed to get interested in the zone.