Happy Days

As I continue to spend the summer at home, mostly indoors, I'm slipping into a comfortable routine. With Blaugust in full flow I'm enjoying knocking out a post a day, some days two.

With the musical doors open I'm bursting with ideas as I release the pent-up store of topics I've been sitting on for years but since this is and will remain first and foremost an MMORPG blog, I feel almost obligated to put up a gaming-related post to match every time I wax musical..

Which isn't a problem. I'm settling into a pattern of playing short sessions of several MMORPGs each day. I log into Riders of Icarus with metronomic regularity but all I do is afk for the thirty minutes required to notch up the daily login rewards. I have my latest minion out, a crab. He's taking his time to level up - he's Level 15 now with ten more to go to match my Trickster's twenty-five.

After that's done I log out and swap to Guild Wars 2 for some dailies. I abandoned the two holiday events, having missed too many days when I was really ill, so it's just the regular dailies for now. That takes anything from twenty minutes to three-quarters of an hour in total on three accounts.

I've dropped the third account for the time being, mostly due to getting a bit burned out on doing so many dailies every day for several years now, although this morning I did log the third account in for the first time in several weeks.

I logged that account in because I wanted to check the report that populations on almost all North American servers had dropped substantially, which turned out to be true. This is only relevant to World vs World but it does, finally, seem to confirm that the game mode is reaching its own endgame.

There could, of course, be any number of reasons, from summer holidays to the upcoming World of Warcraft Classic launch but I'm fairly convinced now that the main reason is simple burnout and boredom with a part of the game that has been ruinously ignored for years.

Pandas really know how to travel in style.

After that I've been moving on to World of Warcraft where I've been having much fun with pandas. I'll probably put in a couple of hours there after tea this evening. It's relaxing and fun.

Another MMORPG that I'm finding very relaxing to play in two-hour sessions is Final Fantasy XIV. Lots of bloggers keep writing about this one and a couple of days ago I felt myself getting the urge to give it another go.

Almost everything I read about the "proper" FFXIV is a complete anathema to me. The idea of doing repeated dungeons or grinding "tomes" or plodding through an endless interrupted T.V. show in the form of the Main Quest sounds about as much fun as root canal surgery.

Playing FFXIV as a sandpark virtual world in the endless free trial, though, is a wonderful alternative. The whole game opens up, begins to feel like a proper place where my character lives and has a normal, fantasy life.

Dance emotes as quest rewards is a nice idea.

I've been wandering about picking up side quests, nibbling away at my class and MQ now and again and generally just being an adventurer for hire. It's been thoroughly enjoyable in a way I never found the game to be when I played it the way it's supposedly meant to played.

I've drifted to Level 32 as an Archer, three levels from the trial cap, but today I added the Bard job, entirely by chance and to my surprise, as I went through my Journal clearing all the quests I'd picked up. I can keep adding jobs for a long, long time and thereby reset my level to keep the free trial going indefinitely.

At Level 32 I have yet to leave Gridania and The Shrouds. When I first played, back at launch, I'd been to all the zones and was way further along on the MQ. That felt like an on-rails grind. Now I feel free.

I'm about done with Gridania for now. I have breadcrumb quests to take me to both of the other regions but I think I'll just ride my Chocobo down to either Thanalan or La Noscea and see what turns up.

Take that, Figgy Pudding!

Any day I might pick another MMORPG and give that a run. EQ2 will come back into play at exactly the same time as WOW Classic. I fancy doing a bit more in Elder Scrolls Online, just to see if the questing is as bad as I remember. I need to get back into Star Wars: the Old Republic at some point and all the talk of DCUO on The Switch has made me think about logging in for some superhero fun (and Lair decoration!).

I'm still playing and enjoying Kingdoms of Amalur, too, although I haven't logged in for a couple of days. I might play some of that later this evening.

All in all I'm I feel like I'm in a good place with my gaming. I wonder if WoW Classic will blow all that out of the water and turn out to be an obsession that sucks up all available play time, or whether it will just fall into place as another two-hour session slot.

I guess we'll find out soon enough.