EQ2 – Page 2 – A Pixel Nomad

Forever Wandering Through Games

How long has it been since you stuck with a single MMO for at least a year? I remember when Tipa used to put out a challenge to people to stick with a single game for a year, and almost no one could accomplish it even when the choices were much more limited, let alone these days where there are games for every genre you could possibly think of. Sure, we may play one game at a time, or two games, or have some combination of F2P & subscription, but more and more I notice that we are ALL becoming nomadic gamers, bouncing between games when the mood strikes (or when that new shiny pops up on the table).

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just something I’ve noticed over the years. I would love to be one of those people who stick with a single game for any length of time but I simply don’t have that in me any more (for a few reasons). One reason would have to be the price point. Money fluctuates throughout the year and my game choices will change based on that. A good example is EQ2. My subscription expires the 2nd week of July, so I find very little motivation to log in and play right now as I know I won’t be re-subscribing (baby on the way, I simply have to re-allocate my funds for a bit). I’ve never really enjoyed playing games with a sub as a F2P player, not because I think F2P is “bad” but because I’d rather have access to the entire game. Speaking of – why doesn’t Trion offer some sort of bulk subscription plan that offers access to all of their games, much like station access? Rift and ArcheAge would certainly be two games I’d love to check out more of, but I’m not sure how I’d feel about the F2P options (especially in ArcheAge where owning land is tied to having a subscription). Offer a package deal and those subscriptions become a lot more favorable. I blame Belghast and Bhagpuss for my sudden interest in Trion games, both of them have been posting about Rift / ArcheAge on their blogs. I was interested enough that I updated glyph though I haven’t actually logged in (yet).

Speaking of EQ2, a new server opened up yesterday. It’s the Isle of Refuge, and it runs just as all the other servers in the EQ2 line up do, except the majority of items can be sold / traded and don’t have the heirloom tag. There’s a great write up about it over at EQ2wire, and the server reminds me a lot of Firiona Vie, the RP server over on EQ. There are a few other rules to the FV server besides that but it was one that stuck out to me. Why Daybreak has added such a server I have no idea (nor does anyone else it seems if you read through the comments on the article) but it’s nice to see things are not completely stagnant.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Games for Christmas

The hustle and bustle of Christmas is coming to a close, and I hope everyone has had a happy and safe holiday. It’s a bit of an odd time of year for me. I love Christmas, it’s one of my favourite times, but it’s also incredibly lonely. My family lives too far away to visit, and I don’t know a lot of locals. My online friends are typically busy with their own happenings (as it should be) and so I watch from a distance, happy but sad if that makes any sense.

I did get a handful of great games from friends this year which was really awesome of them. I got enough WoW time to keep my account active for the next year (thanks Kasul and Shadowgeist!) I also received Stonehearth (thanks Scarybooster!) The Men of Yoshiwara (thanks Moumix!) and Aviary Attorney (thanks again Shadowgeist!) so even though it wasn’t quite the holiday I had planned in my mind, it was still very lovely. I didn’t spot anything in the steam sale that I wanted to pick up, but it’s always a great time for me to pass on some games to friends when funds are tight. I know Christmas is not all about the gifts or what you get from other people, but it does feel nice to be able to give and make someone smile.

I also decided yesterday to start up Minecraft again. I installed the new Infinity Evolved pack from Feed The Beast, and set the game to expert mode. This creates a more ‘difficult’ timeline in order to get things done, but what they mean by ‘difficult’ is ‘time consuming’. It’s not hard, it just takes a lot more time. One of the mods included makes it rain chicken / pigs from the sky on Christmas day. That would be what is showing in the screenshot above. I set up a home next to a mountain and began collecting items to better gear myself. The server is a bit crazy, I walked through 5 towns just to get to the place I wanted to settle. Each town had bits and bobs that I wanted to loot and take with me, so by the time I actually built my house, I had everything well established.

I’ve also been playing Wurm Online and World of Warcraft. In Wurm players received a reindeer decoration item which was pretty cool and nice of the developers. I didn’t log into EQ2 at all this holiday season, and a lot of the reason behind that is because I can’t seem to ‘get into’ it in such short spurt play sessions. I can’t do dungeons or raids simply by queuing, and I really wish I could.

A lot of my gaming has been limited because of a bug with Windows 10 and my mouse, too. For some reason it keeps performing double clicks when it shouldn’t. I know this is an issue with my logitech G700 mouse, I’ve seen lots of threads about it, but there’s no solution to keep it fixed permanently at this time and it bugs me to no end. It makes playing any game with mouse direction or clicking at all almost impossible, or at least incredibly frustrating. I’ve been plugging in the laptop mouse to game in the meantime, but that mouse is tiny and awkward. I keep holding off on purchasing a new mouse (like a corsair) in the hopes that microsoft or logitech or whoever will actually fix whatever my issue is (I’ve tried multiple drivers, I’ve tried no drivers, etc) but it’s certainly not happening any time soon.

Anyone else get any awesome game related gifts this Christmas? Let me know in comments and as always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Do You Need Combat in your Games?

Spurred on by a conversation on twitter with Belghast and Adrel I started thinking about the games that I play that I enjoy more than others. Two immediately came to mind, Wurm Online and the Sims franchise. Both are games that (due to my play style) have very little if any combat – and I love that about them. Yes, arguably you can combat as much as you want in Wurm Online but that’s not how I tend to spend my time. In the Sims games there’s almost never any combat, not in the traditional sense. Of course there are ways to encourage combat if you want (you can make enemies and start fights) but for the most part the game is pretty peaceful. Then there’s all of the visual novel games that I enjoy playing, games like If my Heart Had Wings, and Dandelion – Wishes brought to you. Mindless games I enjoy just because like Cook, Serve, Delicious. Building games like Cities: Skylines. These are the sorts of games that entice me the most and I suppose until I sat down and looked through my games it’s not actually something I noticed before.

That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy combat in games, too. I do. Diablo 3 is pretty much nothing but blowing things up. The thing is I get very bored of those games very quickly – just like Belghast tends to get bored of games that don’t have combat in them (per our conversation earlier). I think that in the majority of games I play I spend my time equally between combat and no combat depending on the game. EVE Online is a good example. There’s combat, and I do combat via missions, but a lot of the time I’m running delivery missions or I’m mining or I’m doing industry things that don’t involve any combat at all. The same can be said for EQ2 and WoW, sure, there’s combat, but a lot of the time I’m harvesting, decorating, or crafting and none of that (at least for me) involves any combat at all.

Do you have a preference or are you about equal in terms of combat vs. non combat gameplay? Would you tend to fall asleep if one or the other aspect was missing from your game of choice? Let me know in comments!

IntPiPoMo Day 1-4

Never heard of IntPiPoMo before? Well, no time like the present! I’m going to swipe the information from Gamer Girl Confessions, and you can find the post about it here.

NaNoWriMo is about writing 50k words throughout the month of November. If a picture is work a thousand words, that would mean we’d need to post fifty pictures!

These can be screenshots from any game, or even photographs you take in real life and want to share on your blog. They can be anything–character selfies, shots of combat, sharing your game UI, showing off that awesome-tacular Deathclaw kill you got in Fallout 4… you get the idea.

So without further wait, here are my first four screenshots for the IntPiPoMo of 2015. First up, EverQuest 2. Long time readers of this blog will be very familiar with my love affair with this MMO. I played it fairly steadily for 7 years before wandering off – and returning – and wandering off – and returning. It has been a few years since I’ve played with any sort of consistency, but that seems typical for video games. Below I’m wandering around in Commonlands, enjoying the sunset.

Next up, another of my MMO loves (and my current one) Wurm Online. I’ve been playing Wurm for 6 years now, and if ever there was a sandbox to love, well. This is it (at least for me).

Next up, Cities: Skylines. This game (to me) was everything that Sim City should have been, at a more cost effective price. Bugs? Sure, all games have a few of those, but it ran the way I expected a polished product to run, and I had hours of enjoyment from playing. Now they’ve released a few DLC, and while I haven’t picked those up, they are on my wish list.

Finally, we have Tropico 5, and my island being pummeled by natural disasters. That’s OK, my citizens didn’t need homes anyway…

There you have it, the first four days of IntPiPoMo, underway. Expect more screenshots throughout the month, I’ll probably post them in a bundle like this every couple of days instead of posting them individually. Don’t forget, you can participate too! The rules can be found on the post linked above, and it’s a really simple little project to get into. Plus it gets you looking at your screenshots folders – and lets face it, there are probably a lot of those, along with some fantastic memories stored up.

Happy gaming!

New Header, New videos

Pictured above is a new header I had designed by Belghast, yay! I’ve been trying to get a new header for my blog that I could use on various social media sites for ages now, but lets face it, my skill in creating these headers is pretty much zip to none. In instances like this instead of getting upset that I can’t create the header myself, I decide to find someone who can. On that same note I’ve also commissioned someone to create a new cartoon-esc avatar for me to also use across social media, so I don’t have to keep using my real picture. Now, why would I do this? It’s for a few reasons. Number one is that I’d like things to be uniform across all of these places. Number two, I’d like to do more streaming on twitch / youtube, and I don’t particularly want or need my real image gracing the pages. It took me a few days to find someone who was willing to give the avatar a try, but I’m confident that I’ll be happy with the results. I’m incredibly happy with the new header for the blog, and I’m looking forward to transitioning that header over to other media over the next week.

Speaking of media, I did do two twitch streams on Saturday. I did a short recap on Wurm Online (where the sound is absolutely horrible, my apologies. If you want you can fast forward past the part that’s playing music so it doesn’t drown out my voice so much) and then another stream later on in the day where I was exploring the Festival of Unity SPLAT event on Antonia Bayle (so much fun). I plan on picking up a new mic before too long, and I’m also picking up a webcam, something I’ve actually never attempted to do in my streams. I would like to make these streams a weekly thing, but that will depend on how busy I am and what games are on my plate. Wurm Online for example is not the most thrilling of games to broadcast unless you’re going out on a hunting trip or are working on terraforming the property.

You can follow my twitch channel if you want to be notified of streaming, or if you’d like to see the videos I’ve made in the past, I have most of them over on my youtube channel. Again I can’t promise that I’ll actually go anywhere with any of this, but it’s a nice fun little hobby on the side, and who knows. Maybe I’ll develop a knack for it over time. In the meantime, I’m incredibly happy to finally have updated my site a bit. After all, it has been 9 years since I started blogging on MmoQuests. It was time for a facelift.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!