Post soundtrack: “Time” by Freddie Mercury (From the excellent and unavailable soundtrack to the musical “Dave Clark’s Time”)
"It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.”
Kind of like this blog. (Goodness, where has the time gone?)
This has been an interesting year, with my gaming becoming increasingly portable and small-scale (I love my 4th-gen iPod Touch, although I’d love one of those prohibitively expensive iPads even more), and my MMO time being increasingly short in duration and generally tourist-like. Needless to say, I’ve been short of things to write about. (Although I’ll qualify that by mentioning that my life outside of gaming has been entertaining, with 23kg/50lb of weight lost since my last post in January with a new interest in fitness and diet now sharing my spare time, and a mostly painless 40th birthday now safely behind me)
Anyway, with SWTOR almost upon us (Impatient? Me?) I’ve been feeling the desire to dabble in writing once more, with a focus on TOR while it holds my attention but ranging a little further afield in time. (It helps that a good number of MMOs I’ve spent time in the past with have either become or are in the process of transitioning to free-to-play – have to love that kind of low barrier to entry)
My initial plan (once the head start begins) is to re-roll my beta bounty hunter (admittedly, mostly because of delightful starting companion Mako) and see where the game takes me. (I played Kia, the character in my screenshots, up to around level 28 in the last beta and enjoyed myself thoroughly, and now I want to see where her storyline takes her – and me.)
I enjoyed most of the mechanics of the class (unfortunately I have a tendency to pull more than I could handle on occasion, and even with a healing companion to back me up I found that it’s not really easy to burst down one mob and heal myself and tank the other two mobs beating on me, all at the same time), plus the storytelling (and the accompanying voice work, which worked wonders to help immerse me in my character) was easily good enough to keep me from pressing space to fast forward through the dialogue in the best WoW tradition.
In other personal gaming news, I’m still subscribed to WoW (having made the foolish, in hindsight, decision to sign up for the Annual Pass – I’m giving serious thought to taking the nuclear option of deleting my account completely), but am not playing other than transmuting truegold once a day and selling various pets in the AH – I don’t have the patience (or the thick skin) needed to spend time in the dungeon finder and LFR to gear up for… Well, for no real reason, if I’m not raiding.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the Star Trek Online F2P beta, and found that the new Duty Officer system is curiously more absorbing than the rest of the game (indeed, the character XP it awards is actually quite effective for levelling your captain on its own). Skyrim claimed my attention for a while before TOR beta, but I find it hard to go back to it now with its less-than-immersive storytelling, regardless of how open the world is. Dungeon Defenders also claimed my attention for a while (I’ve levelled a squire to level 58, and an apprentice to nearly 30), but I’m running into the limits of my solo-play patience again. Champions Online was an entertaining enough brief distraction, but it didn’t really hold my attention, much like City of Heroes (although CO had less of a “What can we sell you today?” vibe than CoH).
The F2P Everquest 2 tempts – or rather, the Ratonga do – but I just haven’t been able to find the appeal in the rest of the game world. Global Agenda is currently still installed despite my lack of playtime, but Dungeons and Dragons Online has finally been uninstalled, along with a few other titles that had been gathering digital dust and electronic cobwebs. (Oh, the Defense Grid expansion, You Monster, tempts me to the bottom of my tower-defense-loving-soul but I’ll probably leave that for the time being – Also, Hey! Isn’t it nearly Steam sale time?)
Anyway, I’ll leave this entry short and to the point (insofar as I’m ever really all that concise) and get back to mentally urging time to pass faster.
Has my headstart email arrived yet?
How about now?
Now?
/wave
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