Every so often I like to go through my drafts folder and clear out a lot of half-formed posts that’ll probably not be finished any time soon. So here’s a weird hodge-podge of post starters that never took flight:
Now that I’m getting back into Guild Wars 2 properly, I’m taking my Mesmer through the world and story in the hopes of mastering this tricky but alluring class. At least I already have her exotics and ascended jewelry set from a while back, so she’s good to go — after I give her outfit a once-over!
Mapping early zones isn’t that mentally taxing, so I’m just playing the tourist, poking around for interesting vistas while checking off to-do items. I don’t think I ever recalled seeing this underwater statue before.
It also gives me much-needed time to get used to my Mesmer’s skills and the semi-chaotic nature of her fighting style. And there’s almost no chance of dying, as even packs of six or seven mobs don’t pose a threat.
Queensdale and Divinity’s Reach done, and I’m at 6% world completion. There’s a long way to go, a long long way. But that’s fine, because it also means plenty of stuff to do and to accomplish!
Next up is Kessex Hills. I do map completion much like how most people do puzzles: Start at the borders, get a full outline going, and then fill in the middle. It’s another quaint early Human zone, so no trouble there.
I logged into Fallout 76 today to a pleasant surprise: Outside of a nearby train station, someone had stuffed a suitcase full of goodies for the taking. I got about 12 treasure maps, a really nice chest piece, and a three-star legendary machine gun. I can’t use the latter two until I’m 50, but still, that’s pretty cool.
I’m moving into the quest series that has me make contact with the Raiders and Settlers factions. But to get to the Top of the World for the next quest will be quite the journey that I haven’t made yet. So once again, I’ll be hopping from discoverable waypoint to waypoint doing a bunch of stuff along the way. Such as finding out about this secret cadre of crime fighters in a manor!
After messing around on the starter island for what felt like an abnormally long time, I finally teleported off to the mainland. Time to start my adventure all proper-like! An old crone nearby informed me that I used to be a demon hunter, but I got caught, tortured, and my memories ultimately erased.
The first thing I did was to run up a hill to get a bird’s eye view of this area. Nice hands you got there, zone.
When it comes to new games, there’s this barrier that has to be passed in order to make them a mainstay. Think of it as a bubble. If I’m going to invest any serious amount of time into a title or get through it all or whatever, I need to push past the barrier and into the bubble. But the bubble wants to push back for a while, which is why I may dip into a game and then bounce right off of it back into a comforting older title. The more complicated or time-involving a game is, the more resistant that bubble is to being popped.
I’ve found that — again, for me — enthusiasm isn’t often enough. Sometimes I have to make several running attempts at making it through the barrier. And I’m feeling that with Palia. The barrier here is that it’s certainly a time vampire in the best of ways but also that it was really rough around the edges in early launch. So I bounced after a couple of promising weeks. Yet this is a game I do want to become comfortable playing, and so I need to get enough time in it to transition into my crop of familiar titles.
To work on this, I’m going to dedicate at least one play session every day for a month to get to know Palia better. They don’t have to be super-long sessions, just enough to do a few things and continue to get a feel for it. And besides, I like the roadmap this studio has for the game and its potential. I don’t think it belly-flopped past the point of viability, especially with some of the projects on the horizon and the Switch launch.
About all I have a handle on is the fishing, which I like to spend 10 minutes here and there to do. This time I fished up a homemade bookshelf to add to my house! That was the good news. The bad was that both my smelter and my sawmill weren’t processing anything — in fact, they hadn’t finished the tasks I assigned them weeks ago. I’d fill the hoppers and then it would just… do nothing. Yet I couldn’t scrap them, because I’d get this “crafting in progress” notice. So I’m not sure what the issue is here, but it’s going to be a serious one if I can’t figure it out.
So long story short, I went back and forth with the support team at Singularity Six over this, only to be told that they couldn’t do jack squat. There was a fix in the works, apparently, but either their GM powers couldn’t manually fix these stuck producers or they didn’t have the manpower for it. The only thing to be done, then, was to shove the malfunctioning units into the far corner of my plot and head out to gather enough resources to make a new smelter and sawmill. Which I did.
My teenage daughter and I have been bonding through watching Star Trek: The Next Generation this year. I haven’t seen these episodes in decades and am finding that many of them hold up surprisingly well, while she’s delighting in some optimistic space opera with geeky elements. When the Star Trek Online team sent me a poster from the game, I made her day by gifting it to her. We both play the game off and on, and it’s given us another conversational topic for breakfast or car rides.
Bio Break 