Inventory Full Advent Calendar 2025 - Day 23

My Christmas List - Simple Plan

 

 

Ho Ho Hopefully - The Maine

 

 

Christmas Card - Joyce Manor 

 

English: NPS, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

One Thing, Then Another

What I wanted to write today was a review of the first season of Arcane, which I finished watching last night. Bit late but still...

That, however, requires some time and thought and I have, if I'm lucky, about an hour to get this post written, edited and published. So that's not going to happen.

I will spoil my own future review, should it ever come to be, by saying I found Arcane to be one of the most impressive animated series I have ever seen. And I've seen a few. The animation itself is quite possibly the most detailed, fluent and expressive I've ever seen outside of a cinema or for that matter inside and the script was pretty damn fine, too. Not to mention the voice acting.

Better stop before I really get into it. I just wanted to say it was magnificent and I'm an idiot for not watching it when it came out. Maybe I'll save the full review for when I've seen the second season, although that could be a while. I need a breather after the emotional beating the first one gave me before I get back on that particular horse.  

I don't want to skip a posting day just because I can't write the post I wanted to, though. I'm aiming for 300 posts for the calendar year, which means I have to come up with ten in the next nine days. The Advent Calendar has me covered for three so it's seven in nine but of those nine I'm working three and I generally don't work and post so it's really seven in six. 

Can't afford to skip a day, then. Hence this half-assed excuse for a post.

One card any games blogger can always play is the good old "What I've Been Playing" number. In my case, that'd be EverQuest II. Quite a bit of it, in fact.

Enough that my Sage is now halfway through Level 134. The cap is 135 so he's nearly there.

He would actually be there already if it wasn't for the shameless time-gating. I'm not just talking about the reputation grind, the details of which I laid out a week ago. I got that done in about four days by doing the three-hourly quest once in the morning and again in the evening each day, much the same as I used to do the Overseer missions. 

With that finished, I thought it would be back to regular questing until I got to the end of the Signature quest and hit the cap. I was half right.

There's no more time-gated content within the questline itself. The problem is that there isn't much more questing at all. It took me one more session to finish it all. 

It was fun. I enjoyed it. I have no complaints about the quality. It's the quantity I'm not so pleased with.

When my Sage reached the end of the Tradeskill Signature, he was still some distance from the cap. It took him to the very beginning of Level 133. It also gave him a Familiar, an Advanced Spell Book with some of the new recipes and granted him license to fly in the two opening zones of the new expansion. 

All of which is very nice but it's not the end. He still needs two more books and the power of flight in the third zone and for all of those he has to be Level 135. So how is he supposed to get there?

By doing time-gated, repeatable quests, of course! There's a single quest available and it has an eighteen-hour refresh. That's a lot more manageable than the three hour refreshes of the last one but also less amenable to shrinkage by super-human effort (Aka Obsessive and Unhealthy Gameplay.)

Putting a positive spin on it

On the plus side, the quests are very easy and the xp is substantial. If he'd bothered to pop a potion before handing them in, he'd be 135 already. I wasn't in that much of a hurry so I left it until today to do that. He's now one more boosted hand-in away from the Big Ding, which should come... let me see... I did the hand-in around two o'clock this afternoon so... eighteen hours... hmmm... breakfast time tomorrow.

At that point he'll be able to buy the other two recipe books from the vendor in The Unknown and fly anywhere he fancies. Then he's going to need an unconscinable amount of rares for all the Expert spells he'll have to craft for himself, Mordita the Necromancer and possibly the Inquisitor and the Wizard, too. If I have any sense, which is a debatable point, I'll take him through the Adventure Signature line first, so he's robust enough to do his own foraging in the new lands. Otherwise he'll have to use the silly magic hand and that's soooo sloooow....

The issue with the Adventuring Signature is the speed of leveling. Mordita is on the final stage now and once again I have to say it's been an entertaining story with enjoyable gameplay. I'll maybe do a proper write-up on it when I've finished. She just has one instance left, according to the wiki. It should only take her another hour or so.

And then she'll be right around where the Sage was at the same stage, I think. About two levels shy of the cap. Only I don't think Adventurers get a nice little 18-hour repeatable that gives half a level every time you hand it in. I think what they get is a whole load of side-quests, repeatables and collections that each net maybe 4% of a level. 

I could be wrong. I hope I am. I guess I'll find out when I get there. I fear it could be a while before Mordita caps out, though, and if Barnabus is going to do it too, he has at least a dozen or so hours ahead of him to get to where she is.

I said it was entertaining. I didn't say it made sense.

Which, I suppose, is the standard, intended, expected gameplay of an MMORPG. After all these years of going on about how much I like leveling and how the journey is the best part, blah blah blah, I can hardly complain if I don't get given my five new levels in the first five minutes, can I?

Except there were several expansions where that was pretty much what happened. Okay, not five minutes, but fast. The questline gave you so much xp you were capped long before you got to the end of it. 

And I liked that.  It was a great example of giving someone what they want not what they ask for. If they'd done a poll in advance, asking if I wanted to level faster, I bet I'd have said no. But they didn't ask. They just did it. And it turned out that was what I wanted, even if I didn't know it.

And then, a couple of expansions ago, the whole thing went into reverse and then some. We didn't even go back to how it was before, when the main questline in an expansion would take a good, long while but you'd come out the end of it there or thereabouts at the cap.

Instead, the current model has you still in the middle of leveling up when the story reaches its conclusion. After which you have to cobble together whatever sources of extra xp you can find to make up the difference. There's always enough, somewhere, but you have to go look for it. Or in my case read a guide.

These things change all the time, of course. If they don't, all the complaints are about how stale and repetitive the expansions are getting. If they do, it's all "Why try to fix something that wasn't broken?" There's no winning with MMO veterans. 

For all that, I think this is a pretty good expansion so far. I can quite easily imagine taking multiple characters through it over the course of the year. And we get a pass on leveling for the next one with the bi-annual rise in Level Cap, so really I have two years to bring everyone up to speed.

Always assuming, that is, that there is another EQII expansion in 2026. And 2027. If I had to bet on it, I'd bet there will be but I wouldn't bet my shirt, let alone my house. 

I should probably just be grateful we're getting expansions at all and stop nitpicking.

Inventory Full Advent Calendar 2025 - Day 22

 

Christmas Christmas Christmas Christmas Christmas Christmas 

Parry Grip 

Cat Shirts For Christmas - Parry Grip

Reba Spike, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Inventory Full Advent Calendar 2025 - Day 21

 

Sometimes You Have to Work On Christmas (sometimes)

Harvey Danger 

The Elf Song

Crowder 

Liam Quinn from Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Inventory Full Advent Calendar 2025 - Day 20

 

White Christmas  - Lou Reed

White Christmas - Iggy Pop

 

christmasstockimages.com, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

That Was The (Steam) Year, That Was

Hah! I needed something quick and easy for a post today and look - here comes the Steam Replay, riding to the rescue. I wonder how accurate a reflection of my gaming year it's going to be?

MassivelyOP has a piece up about how it's not likely to be all that relevant if you mostly play MMORPGs, which obviously is all they 're really interested in over there, much though they try to spread the net wider, MMORPG obsessives being perhaps a little thin on the ground to support an entire business model, these days. Oh, yeah, they have an article about that, too.

And it's true most longtime MMO players probably log in to their games of choice via dedicated launchers. That's the way it always used to be done and most successful MMORPGs are old, just like the people who play them. (I should, perhaps, make it clear that my personal definition of an "old" person is - and always has been, at least since I turned 27 - "anyone over thirty". I'll call it "middle-aged" if you prefer, but admitting to being middle-aged is just a way of saying you know you're old but you don't want to admit it...)

Ahem. Dragging myself back to the point, unless you play an MMORPG released in the last few years, New World say, or Lost Ark, chances are you don't play it on Steam. You could, probably, because every developer wants to be on Steam, which is why a lot of time and effort gets directed towards preparing all kinds of older MMOs to meet the requirements of Valve's platform. 

Guild Wars 2, for example, added a Steam client while i was still playing. I could have swapped across but I'd have had to start over from scratch, even though everyone ends up on the same servers. Obviously I didn't do that. Ditto for EverQuest II. And, for that matter, EverQuest. And LotRO. 

Or just about any other MMO you can think of. They're all on Steam but very few seem to allow you to move seamlessly over without requiring some sort of restart. That's why most people stay put, I imagine. MMORPGs are time-sinks. Who wants to lose years of progress? 

So much for the legacy market. For new MMORGs it's a very different story. When I hear about a new game I'd like to try, almost the first thing I check is whether it's on Steam. I'm significantly more likely to take a look at it if it is. That was a deciding factor for me this year when I gave Blue Protocol a go. 

Anyone notice I left BP:SR out of yesterday's round-up? Entirely unintentional. I just forgot about it until about ten seconds after I hit Publish. Not sure if that's a reflection on the game or not.

Surprising, really. That I didn't think of it. It's the most recent of the new games I played in 2025. I was at it all through the Autumn until I suddenly stopped, for no reason I can think of. 

The Steam Replay is quite useful for checking my memory. Seeing whether offhand assertions like I was making yesterday stand up to close examination. In this case, it seems they do and they don't. 

For example, I said I recently went back to Once Human but it didn't stick. What I hadn't remembered was that I kept doing that all year. Look at it. In, out, in, out...

In fact, the most recent attempt was one of the least successful. I played quite a bit of Once Human back in the spring and summer, apparently. I have no memory of that whatsoever.

Conversely, I remember my time with the next game very well indeed. It's not an MMO like the last two. It's a single-player game. Replay tells me I only played it for one month.

That's because I finished it. 

Finishing? It's a thing you can do with single-player games. MMO players may not have heard of it. 

Well, I say I finished Cloudpunk. What I did was complete the storyline and get a Game Over screen. There was more I could have done after that. I remember claiming in a post that I was going to go back and tidy up some loose ends but as the empty months show, I never did. 

Will I? Not likely. I rarely return to games to complete anything that wasn't covered by the main plot. Or to play them through for a second or third time just to see the alternate endings. 

I do sometimes go back years later and replay a game as if it was new, which it might as well be, since I won't remember anything about it. But all that fiddling around with different outcomes does nothing for me. The ending you get should be all the ending there is. Anything else is a fever-dream.

Also, to be completely accurate, I started Cloudpunk in December 2024, although not until after Christmas. I bought it in the Winter Sale. 

That's another cheap post waiting to be written: "What I bought in this year's sale". Can't write it yet because I haven't bought anything so far. I will, though. I know for a fact that I'll be getting a Steam Card in my Christmas Stocking and I already have some possibles and probables marked out.

That's one thing Steam Replay can't tell me - how many cheap blog posts it's provided across the year. It's a lot. Not least, all those Next Fest demos.

Two dozen demos equates to eight in each of the three Next Fests. I don't think it was quite as tidy as that but it would have been close. Also, as you can see from the chart, the timings don't quite match up. 

What's going on there? Did I miss the June event completely? Or did I somehow eke it out across the whole summer? 

Nope. I played six demos in June. I guess that means the chart above is telling me the percentage June represents of my whole year's play, then?

That's my problem with these things. I'm not someone who can glance at a chart or a graph and instantly take in all the implications. Or, rather, I am but whatever it is I think I've understood is quite likely to be wrong.

I'm not innumerate. I can interpret this stuff if I make the effort. But I do have to make that effort. It doesn't come naturally. Which means these annual wrap-ups are probably less thrilling for me than they are to a lot of people. Making sense of them can feel a bit like doing homework.

And as for this kind of thing >>>

Does anyone know what these spider-web graphics mean? Is that meant to suggest the Survival games I played were equal parts gory and story? 

Seriously, I have no idea. We never did these at school. Maybe they hadn't been invented then. They are certainly not intuitive. I guess I could go look it up but I'd have to be more curious than I am to do that. 

I'm a lot more interested in the comparisons Replay makes between my stats and everyone else's. I'm sure they're accurate but they're hard to believe all the same. 

I've been saying all year that I've been playing fewer games and spending less time doing it than I have for decades. Replay bears that out:

All the numbers are down on last year. Fewer games played on fewer days, possibly with less engagement, if you equate Achievements with that. Perhaps the most worrying statistic of all is that I only played for new games all year. Obviously Steam isn't counting demos there.

In that, I seem to be following the trend. It's what I keep hearing from many sources. People in general are tending towards old favorites rather than trying anything new. No wonder the games industry is in trouble.

Even more worrying is this:

Look at that. All the numbers that went down are going up. I don't think of myself as much of a gamer and I did less of everything and it was still more than most people. A lot more. 

I guess most people who have Steam installed either don't use it much or only log in to play a handful of favorites. I wonder how many there are like Mrs Bhagpuss, who presumably still counts as an active user even though she hasn't logged into Steam for nearly four years? 

Although that might change soon. I thought she was about done with video games after a couple of decades of pretty intensive play but a week or two back she was visiting someone and they showed her Baldurs Gate 3. Now she's hinting she might like something similar - or BG3 itself - for her birthday. Those hooks never really come free, do they? 

Whatever I get her (I'm open to suggestions. I don't think her machine will even run BG3. We bought it in the expectation she was done with graphically demanding games.) chances are I'll get it on Steam. It's just so much more convenient, isn't it? 

If that does happen, it'll be interesting to see what her Replay looks like for 2026. I mean, I never really intended to make much use of the platform when I started and now look at me. Way above the norm!

Inventory Full Advent Calendar 2025 - Day 19

 

Blue Christmas - Tiger La Flor

Blue Christmas - Porky Pig

Blue Christmas Lights by David Anstiss, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons