As you… may have heard, Phantasy Star Online 2’s PC launch was all sorts of horrible, especially from an installation perspective. Belghast over at Tales of the Aggronaut spent a post airing his grievances over the plagued launch, but in all fairness, he also followed that up with several articles about facets of the game that he’s discovering and enjoying.
“This is Title Keeper Lachesis and she is your friend,” he pointed out. “It seems like this game is constantly throwing new titles at you for doing the most mundane of activities, and each time it does… you can get free stuff. Essentially this vendor will show you which titles you have unlocked and allow you to claim some sort of item for each of them. These range wildly from rez dolls to exp boosters, but regardless it is worth the time to check it periodically and see what you might have unlocked.”
Read on for more MMO essays, including looking ahead to World of Warcraft’s Torghast tower, having fun in Elder Scrolls Blades, running dungeons in Neverwinter, and more!
Misdirections: Torghast queasiness in World of Warcraft
“I have been doing quite a bit of reading lately about the central feature of Shadowlands, Torghast Tower. As I may have mentioned a couple of weeks ago, it is my considered opinion that this feature will make or break the expansion. Blizzard absolutely positively has to get it right.”
Galactic Antics: Inquisitorial catch-up in SWTOR
“As for what I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing (okay, maybe pushing it there) when I started out but now do on pretty much every character involves questing. Like most people, I’d imagine, once I’d finally worked out how to level ‘properly’ (let’s not talk about my very first character, a Commando) I would completely stop doing quests beyond my class stories once I’d out-leveled them. Exploration was entirely incidental and was rarely ever deliberate.”
Chasing Dings: Elder Scrolls Blades — actual fun
“No matter what sort of encounter you face, the creature or creatures that come at you have specific weaknesses. The key to success here is matching your attacks with their weakness. Creatures typically have both a weapon and an elemental weakness, and if you can match both of them, the fight will be over pretty quickly.”
Inventory Full: AdventureQuest 3D four years later
“From then onwards the gameplay is remarkably similar to how I remember it from four years ago, only now everything’s on castors. If I had to pick one word it would be ‘slick.’ The flow is just about perfect. So perfect, in fact, that when I thought to tab out and check the time so I could start on this post, I found I’d lost nearly two hours of my life.”
World of Warcraft Classic: Pros and cons of playing on a distant server
“Without a doubt, playing when everyone else is asleep or heading off to work has the greatest benefit on larger servers, as you never have to deal with queues. Though I play on Mankrik — which has far fewer players than Whitemane, Herod, and Faerlina for sure — I still hear complaints constantly from guildies, friends, and random pugs about how they are, or were “stuck in the queue.” However, I seldom have this problem, unless I try logging on first thing in the morning, of course.”
24 Hours In: Dungeon running in Neverwinter
“One reason I’ve been doing the daily is that I was curious if the revised challenges of the dungeons would still be noticeable in a group with one or more max level characters. The first two runs I did didn’t tell me much, since it was Cloak Tower and I’ve been able to successfully run that one solo since level 20. That five players raced through it was, then, no surprise.”
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.
