Shelving that plan for the moment I considered dropping into TESO. No dice; my free month just expired and there's a week before Tamriel Unlimited throws open the gates to the penniless hordes. I'd have enjoyed a few rounds of Triple Triad over in FFXIV but the Welcome Back mat isn't down in front of that door any more.
Never mind, there are plenty more fish in the MMO sea and quite a few of them are flopping around on my desktop. I wonder how Project: Gorgon's coming along?
Rather well it seems. Several sets of patch notes since I last logged in about a month ago. Server up and stable. Plenty of chatter. People running around doing this and that. Feels like an MMORPG that's going places.
After I picked up some used underwear that someone left lying on the ground and found myself accidentally wearing it (looked like orange harem pants - I was in too much of a hurry to get them off to take a screenshot) I decided to go hunting before I could embarrass myself any further. Old-school, walk across the greensward and kill anything that can't get out of the way fast enough, hunting.
A pig got the better of me. So much for avoiding embarrassment. After that I took a bit more care and wandered around dispatching Brain Bugs and Venom Spiders until I ran across some skeletons, the first of which dropped a good upgrade. And so did the second. Skeleton slaughter ensued.
Thus it was that I ended up in my first ever P:G dungeon. It was busy. Must have been three or four other players farming the halls. Loot was good. Next thing I knew an hour had passed. There's no doubt about it: for the kind of people who like this sort of thing, Project: Gorgon is the kind of thing they are going to like.
All of which made me nostalgic for more. Everquest was still down but Vanguard wasn't. It's still there if you know where to look so I popped over to New Telon, where progress is also ongoing. No combat skills yet but as a Disciple I was able to punch a spider. It didn't seem to notice.
After strolling through the green fields of Kojan in the never-ending rain for a while a random thought came to me, the way thoughts will when you walk alone in the rain. Don't I have a whole load of anniversary presents to open in Guild Wars? And might they not contain minis that would bulk up my Hall of Monuments tally? I could get a kitten!
Well, a fat ginger tabby. That was my original HoM goal three years ago, back when we were all overexcited about those Heritage Rewards we could nail down by doing stuff in the elder game. Heritage Rewards we promptly all forgot about the moment GW2 finally launched.
It's a very long time since I've been to the Hall of Monuments in either game but it's still there, austere and pristine in Guild Wars, flooded and and ruined in GW2. I opened all the presents (once I'd worked out the new hand-in step for the tokens ) and among my many new minis I was lucky enough to find a green quality Bone Dragon (one HOM point).
Since I was there I knocked off a set of dailies. Then I had lunch. By the time I got back Daybreak Games were back in business.
I'd been reading the astonishing news on EQ2Wire that after a full decade of treating Provisioners like second-class trades-persons rather than first-class crafters, out of the blue and with no warning or fanfare, someone had decided to add an entire set of Advanced Provisioning books to the game. Not only that but they also added rare harvests to the bushes!
Time was when Provisioners would have been dancing in the streets of Qeynos but over the years the addition of a fair number of special food and drink recipes obtainable via quests, Otters and other sidelines have rendered the situation more tolerable than once it was. Still, it's one hell of a surprise.
My first ever EQ2 character was a Provisioner. It was the only self-contained tradeskill in the original game, which was, of course, why I picked it. He's still there, in his neat and tidy, attractively decorated Qeynos inn room; a Templar in his thirties still but with Provisioning double that level. I was going to get him out and take a look but my pointer dithered and ended up on over the EQ icon instead.
Which is how my level 19 Iksar Shadowknight, born in May 2000, ended up taking the book to Arena, swimming through Lake Rathetear to the gnoll camp, getting out of his depth, literally and then metaphorically, before hightailing it to the South Karana zone line. Some things never change.
He and I and his skeletal pet passed a happy half an hour at the Birdhouse, starting on Darters before dinging 20 and graduating to Rooks. Those birds still have the deep pockets. He had around 57 platinum pieces to his name when he got there and by the time he'd loped the length of the map and sold to Ulan Meadowgreen at the centaur village he had seventy-five.I settled him down there. He'll get another run. Sometime. It's taken fifteen years to do twenty levels on him but he's still on the active list. He's by no means the oldest one on it, either.
After that it was back to GW2 for the rest of the dailies and some WvW and that was the wrap on a very enjoyable day's pottering. This morning when I woke up I went straight to EQ2 and bought those Provisioner books. Then I did a couple of writs and added a craft level just for the hell of it before I logged over to GW2 and did Teq with Mrs Bhagpuss and a hundred random strangers.
Looking ahead, the TTK patch for The Secret World is due very soon along with Tamriel: Unlimited. I'll be making time to check out both of those. Then I'd really like to revisit Allods and the buzz around Star Trek Online is making me wonder why I never went further with that one. Might be a good time to take another look. Further down the To Do list there's City of Steam with the main storyline still not finished and I really must fire up Neverwinter and give Tipa's take on Befallen the once-over...
There really aren't enough hours in the day once you lift your head and take a look around at what's out there.
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How can you track everything going on in all the worlds? I get confused by hotbar skills when I revisit a game I haven't been to in a while, let alone what to do or where to go. I'm getting tired of the MMO dating scene and want something more serious!
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