Ever find yourself running down a list of “little things” that impress you and keep you busy in an MMO when you’re trying to recommend it to a friend? Then you’ll totally understand where Aywren Sojourner is coming from with this post about FFXIV.
“A while back, I farmed up a big batch of fruit for our new FC to dye their chocobos,” she said. “I have several characters who have been surviving on desert yellow vanilla chocobo color… more than I wish to admit — including my RP main! It’s still somewhat tedious to feed all the fruit one by one, but really, it doesn’t take that much time. It’s just one of the things that slipped through the cracks.”
Read on for more MMO blog essays, including a first look at Atlas, the detrimental effect of bad MMO communities, 2019 gaming resolutions, and more!
Inventory Full: First impressions of Atlas parts one, two, and three
“It’s always easier second time around. In what felt like a matter of minutes I had her fully dressed, with a waterskin and a campfire in her bags. Atlas is an odd mixture of the realistic and the ridiculous. Resources come from predictable sources — meat and hides from animals, wood from trees, flint from rocks (Yes, I finally worked that one out) but somehow you can carry a fully-functional campfire in your backpack and, as I later discovered, set light to it on the wooden boards of a flat raft without the obvious consequences.”
Unidentified Signal Source: The Division
“Where gameplay is concerned firefights were a lot more lethal than I’m accustomed to. Elite space ninjas and god-like heisters need not apply. Once we got a handle on the overall gameplay I started launching our missions in the “hard” difficulty, which is respectably difficult. We went from an occasional failure to sometimes 5-10 failures for large fights. The rewards are typically pretty good though, so it’s probably worth it if you’re not in a hurry to blow through the content.”
“I didn’t play anything close to a good new MMORPG this year. It’s really difficult to be optimistic about the genre right now. Project Gorgon is a decent start, but with at least one bug that makes it unplayable, it’s not ready for prime time yet and doesn’t yet deserve an award. One wonders if there will even *be* any more ‘MMORPGs’ as the market collapses into the more simplistic ‘MMOs.'”
Superior Realities: It’s not the band I hate, it’s their fans
“As a free-to-play fantasy ARPG, it’s in my wheelhouse enough that it should theoretically be worth a look, if nothing else. Unfortunately, its community has done a singularly good job of turning me off the game. You see, I can’t recall ever hearing anyone say anything good about Path of Exile that wasn’t couched in the form of a dig at Diablo III.”
Going Commando: Ossus is a great planet
“It’s not just pleasing to the eye (to be honest I feel that most of the planets added after launch have been), but it also has a very ‘vanilla’ feel to it. I think the main reason for this is how vast and open it is. I’d say it’s probably similar to Yavin IV in size, which isn’t huge, but the quests are very widely distributed across the area. I can understand why this ‘larger than life’ design might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but personally I really like it because it kind of serves as a counterpoint to the game’s ‘theme-park-ness,’ which is to say that while SWTOR likes to take us through very tightly directed stories, having large and open zones at least makes the planets feel like actual worlds instead of as if they were just designed to serve as set pieces for the quest narrative.”
Coffee Cakes and Crits: Top 10 toys in World of Warcraft
“We all like bubbles, I have resisted the urge to macro this to my hunter’s spells for a very long time. It is tough to resist, but I have!”
Occasional Hero: Gaming resolutions for 2019
“I love LOTRO. Every time I log in I wish I was playing more often. Yet sometimes it’s hard to get myself to log in. I don’t know how to explain it. And it happened again with the Legendary server: I started off strong, logging in almost every day, and then I fizzled out in December. I want to find a way to motivate myself to log in every day again, and get to 50 before Moria hits. Maybe start work on an alt?”
Every day there are tons of terrific, insightful, and unusual articles posted across the MMO gaming blogosphere — and every day, Justin reads as many as he can. Global Chat is a sampling of noteworthy essays, rants, and guides from the past few weeks of MMO discourse.
