Gaming in the Month of September 2018
This past month has been a success as far as my gaming goals have gone. I managed to make progress in each game I focused on and I feel pretty good about the breadth of experiences I was able to get under my belt. Here’s a rundown of the games I played this month and some of my accomplishments.
Everquest 2
Everquest 2 was by far my biggest challenge. Having never played the title and barely touched on the original EQ back in the day I’m really happy to have been able to reach my goal of attaining level 20. I can’t say this was easy but it was definitely a learning or relearning experience. Coming from MMOs like World of Warcraft, Rift, and Wildstar, I have been spoiled by the fact that there really isn’t much danger to fear in the first levels of the game. EQ2 goes against this idea pretty firmly. Not only are there high level wandering monsters in the newbie leveling areas that can easily smash your poor fledgling character but there are many situations where it’s impossible not to pull a group of bad guys who can easily overwhelm you. I’d have to say that in these first 20 levels, I’ve died more in EQ2 than I’ve died in the entire non-raiding, non-dungeoning 1-100 process of WoW. It’s pretty crazy.
Regardless, I enjoyed my time in the Peat Bog, on the Queens Colony Island and in The Caves and now that I’m out and about in Antonica I’m happily running around in the wild. And run I do. These early levels, and I hope it’s just the early levels, have involved quests that have you running from one end of the zone to the other and back again – just to pick up or drop off a pepper shaker. If this is what is meant by old school…well I don’t like this aspect of old school. There’s nothing to be gained by requiring a player to spend 5 minutes running from one place to another just to gain 1% of a level. Oh well, I am having fun and even though the month is over I think I’ll try to keep moving my Channeler forward to see what else there is to see in Norrath.
If you want to take a look at the goals I set up for gaming this month, head over to this post.
Secret World Legends
While Everquest 2 was my biggest challenge, my most pleasant accomplishment this month was in Secret World Legends. In all the years I’ve played The Secret World and Secret World Legends, I’ve never been out of The Solomon Islands..until now. I finally finished off Blue Mountain and the Dawning of an Endless Night mission to complete the 3 Solomon Island zones. I can now move on to…I’m not sure yet…with the assurance that I accomplished something and got all the missions taken care of.
Having attained level 42 I feel pretty good about advancing in the game and I’m looking forward to my next adventure in SWL.
World of Warcraft
I reached level 22 with my baby hunter and I have to say that I’m not really enjoying her gameplay. I have no issues with soloing outdoor content and sending in my crocodile to occupy bad guys as I roam from one quest to the next, but I tried out a couple of dungeons as I ran into the Wailing Caverns quest. In dungeons I feel that my hunter is boring. She pretty much just seems to press a couple buttons to do some damage and, at least in these early dungeons, that’s it. There’s not a lot of challenge to her play so far and I’m thinking I might want to roll a Druid to see how that feels at these levels. I suppose I got used to playing a healer and having to react to the changing situations in a dungeon. And maybe that’s just my point of view…I usually see DPS as monotonous and static. There doesn’t seem to be much variation in the gameplay as DPS whereas with a healer, you alway have to be attending to the tank and possibly others who step into the fire or start taking too much damage. A tank is similar but in my view, they need to know the fight better than a healer since they need to drive the bad guys. On the whole, I prefer healing but I might try out tanking as a Druid sometime. In any case, I reached my goal by attaining level 20, I’m just not sure where I’m headed with this character.
Other Games
The other couple of games I tried out this month were Warframe and The Witcher 3. I got off to a decent start with both games but with time constraints and my desire to reach my MMO goals, I didn’t get too far in either of these. The Witcher is pretty straight forward and there seems to be some good builds that are discussed out on the inter web. Warframe also has a nice following on the web but things seem so complex inside the game. I haven’t figured out the whole frame issues or the weapons and mods and even in the missions I am often at a loss for what I should be doing. Every time I get back to my ship there’s 3 or 4 little windows that pop up with people telling me one thing or another and it’s all kinda confusing. Maybe I’m getting too old for new games or something but so far this game hasn’t clicked with me. I’m gonna keep giving it a try even though the MMO Book Club is leaving tomorrow. As for The Witcher, I didn’t really give this game much of a chance with everything else I was busy doing. I’m looking forward to getting into the game though and maybe I’ll make a better goal in this one during October.
Gaming Plans for February 2018