I was always a guild wars fan, in part because there’s no subscription fee.
Guild Wars 2 is still going. They do expansions every so often, but it’s been almost nothing but horizontal growth. No new level caps or gear tiers. Just stuff like “as a necromancer, you can summon spirits to fight for you instead of getting a death powered scythe” trade offs.
I am absolutely loving the expansion that was just released. Just like the one released last year, it has excellent “hangout maps” where I can just roam around and enjoy the ambience, complete random events, and find the occasional collection/achievement item. The music is gorgeous and the scenery immersive.
I haven’t tried all the new subclasses yet, but I’m having fun with the ones I have tried.
Nice! I got the new expansion but haven’t gone far in it yet. I played around with ritualist (my favorite from gw1) but reaper might still be my true love.
But I love that it’ll all just be there when I get around to it, and I can still have fun doing old content. The wizard tower convergence is a recurring favorite of mine.
I do love that convergence. It’s got the right level of challenge where you can’t just coast through it, but failures are rare. I like how they added the weekly rewards to convergences. It keeps them populated.
I mostly play engineer, and similarly it’s difficult for me to give up my beloved holosmith for the new subclass.
I was wary of the new yearly expansion format, but so far all 3 have been excellent.
I just can’t be bothered to grind through levels in an MMO anymore. I recently thought play LOTRO again, by level 15 I couldn’t be bothered with collecting 12 boar foreskins for the 25th time just to unlock more quests doing the same fucking thing. To make it worse, no one is playing helms deep, the 1 bit of level scaled content IIRC.
ESO was different by level scaling eveverything so you can play with anyone for almost anything and it works pretty well. But their cash shop puts me off.
I also don’t have much patience for “it gets fun later I promise!”.
Guild wars 2 will scale people down for earlier levels, but the majority of content is aimed at the level cap (which hasn’t changed since launch ten years ago).
I don’t know how long it would take a new player to hit the cap. With friends, I think you could get to the cap via crafting in like 30 minutes if they spot you the resources.
I was trying to get all of them first go around and already messed up one where I had to explode 3 powder kegs, and I only missed the first one because I had to reload my pistol and was already past the first barrel by the time I finished
I was lucky enough to play WoW when it first released. Nothing will ever come close to the experience of Vanilla & the first two expansions. There were no aggregate sites with all the info/strats/drops/… it was pure discovery.
I remember doing Onyxia for the first time with randoms and getting our asses whooped like you wouldn’t believe. Then someone told me that Molten Core would soon be released and contain TEN of these bosses back-to-back. While we could scarcely fathom bringing one down.
Suffice to say, our first foray into MC (again with randoms) was… painful. Got our asses whooped again, this time by the trash mobs there.
Yeah it was wild. There were so so many things to discover, just wandering around. I remember getting stuck in the sewers of undercity once. My finest moment 😁.
Lies, there were no randos for any 40m raids, only some zg, later maybe aq20. Winning anything, looting anything was too low chance, compared to so big repair costs and highly chance of just wasting time.
Also limit of 8 debuffs on a boss, bye bye afli warlocks.
Lol there were definitely rando mc raids at the beginning. They weren’t very successful mind you, but people did get some purples from trash which were insanely better than any other gear at that point. Eventually they got enough people geared and trained to do the first few bosses. Reaching Raggy was, at that point, only possible for dedicated raid guilds.
If I could choose not to start WoW again, I would avoid it like a plague.
I wouldn’t call it adiction per-se, but my problem with WoW is that even though I hate what Blizzard is doing, the extreme loss of quality both in game (recent example - they released a patch where one of the main feature are class campaigns, and 8/12 questlines didn’t work and had major 100% repro blockers, like requiring items that do not exist) and in Customer Support, and how it’s more and more obvious that they just want to milk the playerbase of their money without any kind of effort, I still keep playing. It’s not love-hate relationship, I actively dislike Blizzard.
But, it’s one of the only games my partner is playing and that we can play together, and I also have a lot of friends in the guild I’ve been playing for the past two years with. I mostly just log in for a dungeon or two with her, or a regular raid night with my guild, which I enjoy.
If I stopped playing, I’d give up a lot of friends and also an activity with my partner that we’re mostly used to. She doesn’t really play other games. So far, it’s still worth it, but I’m really conflicted every time I have to give Blizzard more money, since I’m basically held hostage.
I highly recommend looking for a free server, i.e Turtle WoW (assuming it won’t get shut down, they are getting sued IIRC), because those people are actually making an effort to make a game they love better. Blizzard is just exploiting people like me, and their nostalgia, without any regard for the game. It’s a shame Morhaim lost the battle against capitalism and was driven out, and it’s extremely aparent on the quality of the game and direction Blizzard is going.
Just to be clear - the game in itself is pretty all right and fun to play, what I have issue with is the way how extremely obvious is that Blizzard does not give a fuck, produces low-quality slop without any semblance of QA, and just plain exploits the playerbase. It could’ve been so much better with the resources they have, but they chose not to, and just cut corners more and more. And I highly despise that. Patches are broken, there’s reskinned content that’s heavily time-gated, and it just screams “low effort”.
Do yourself a favor and don’t think about giving Blizzard money.
Not really defending them here but it’s worth noting that the buggy campaign wasn’t the main game. It was in Legion: Remix which is an event where you make a new “time runner” character and play it through the Legion expansion at like 10x speed and power. I found it to be extremely boring and haven’t played much of either in a few months
True, but the point was mostly that in this case, it’s extremely apparent that there were 0 QA checks before they released it or they simply don’t care. As someone who worked in QA, I can imagine them missing a lot of bugs that are happening on Remix or the main game, because they could require some obscure combination of finished past quests and an account state that can be hard/impossible to properly test for all cases, while also having millions of players, so some may encounter it.
But in the case of a major class campaign quest being impossible with 100% repro rate, because it needs items that are not even in the Remix, that’s inexcusable. It’s also easy to fix, and should be marked as critical because it’s a progress blocker. The only conclusion is that they either didn’t know about it, or just don’t care becuase they know that the community will just suck it up. It shows extreme disrespect for the players. Hell, when Remix released, you couldn’t even finish the first quest and if you tried re-logging, it didn’t let you login. It was extremely broken to the point of being unplayable for the first two days.
I’ve had similar experiences even in retail. Just getting through the main campaign of last patch required re-logging to unstuck a quest 4 times (which I specifically counted), not to mention the desyncs.
I could understand something like this if it was a developer that doesn’t have the resources, but Blizzard has and had in the past, but they decided to reduce quality just so they can increase their (already astronomical) profits.
+1 to shitty customer support, it’s what made me quit and never ce back. I got 4 months of free sub from a giveaway but I didn’t have the latest expansion so I sent them a msg asking if they could freeze for a month so I can get paid and buy the exp. They said they can’t freeze but if I don’t play a single day of those 30 days they could refund it. So I waited.
Month later I ask them for the refund and they say they can’t do it, what the previous rep said was wrong, it’s so stupid I said I would just quit for good.
It sounds like you’re the unicorn with a healthy WoW habit, lol!
But I totally get the feeling of being attached to it because of personal relationships that are WAY more important than doing the Right Thing when it comes to not sending money to a vendor that you don’t think deserves it.
For the Chaz’s coronation day they closed the food banks, and pre-arrested a bunch of peaceful protesters (released without charge afterward the event).
It goes the old telltale way of presenting fake choices that dont really matter because the optional character are being written out of team scenes mostly, one romance option is completely ignored because the devs clearly favoured the other and put her in every scene and the dispatching minigame they advertised the game with has absolutely 0 impact on anything. You could fail every dispatch, only do the mandatory ones and nothing would change.
I just started playing on Turtle WoW a few days ago and never had as much fun in WoW before. Just amazing classic+ experience and a really nice community. Also free, is pretty nice.
Turtle WoW is just amazing. This is how you release new content without power creep or losing meaning from the existing content. I never enjoyed WoW more than with Turtle.
They just were, you can read up on it but from what i understand they actually didn’t want to destroy the data this time but instead have it handed over.
Lots of people hype the game up, but boy is the gameplay boring to me. I love a good turn-based game, but not turn-based battles.
Especially didnt like Blitz ball. And the story wasn’t good enough for me to keep playing to find out. I played about 20 hours and got to the Seymour Wedding scene, after the desert area. That’s about where I dropped the game.
To be fair, I don’t really like JRPGs that require grinding, especially turn-based games with no tactical movement which require grinding, so I was already not going to like the game. But I had read that the story was one of the best among Final Fantasy. Also super hate random battles, especially when I am just trying to explore somewhere I already feel like I “cleared” out with battles. Also, gigachad Lulu was carrying like the entire time I played. L bozo Waka, your brother hated you bro. Ject would have been a better protagonist than Titus. Better design too.
Honorable Mention: XenoSaga.
My experience with XenoSaga can be summed up with: “When I am in a Designing Horrendous Boss Battles and my competition is The Developers of XenoSaga:”
I dont hate turn-based games as a whole. I do enjoy turn-based games like XCOM, Tuned Heart, Vagrant Story (its combat is somewhat turn-based), Galactic Civilization, and Mega Man Battle Network, for example.
I do not enjoy turn-based games where the only thing the player does is select an action from a list, with static party members and the same music/cutscene/background etc. For example: Wizardry, Octopath Traveler (I liked the art though), Pokemon, and XenoSaga. I also didn’t like Slay the Spire because of this. I didn’t like the autocombat in the XenoBlade games either.
Its hard for me to pinpoint exactly why I might like one game and dislike another even if they are similar in gameplay. Legend of Dragoon held my attention because at least I had the QTE during battles that gave me something that would directly impact my actions, but my save was corrupted and I haven’t got around to restarting the game.
The only time I actually enjoyed a game with this kind of gameplay was ironically the mobile game NieR Reincarnation (RIP). It wasn’t exactly turn-based, but it was similar in that all the player does in combat is select when to fire a character’s skill. Everything else is automatic. But I really like all of Yoko Taro’s works, and I liked the story and felt it was worth going through the combat for the story. Also, combat was over pretty fast, usually ending under 60-90 seconds.
Blitzball was interesting but I felt like it was an undercooked gamemode. It wasn’t explained super well and was frustrating occasionally. It didn’t really add to the story and just felt like filler, so except for the ones time I was forced to play it, I never touched it.
Final Fantasy X is probably my favorite Final Fantasy of all time. Just don’t play X-2, assume the story ends immediately.
The HD remaster has some “cheats” to smoothen your experience, if you ever want to give it another shot:
No random battles
Infinite gil
All non key items
invencibily (to make up for low levels)
This way you can enjoy the story and move quickly through the game.
If you don’t enjoy turn based battles nor grinding I think this IP is just not for you. Definitely nothing before Final Fantasy 12. Maybe Final Fantasy 12 is ok, though I thought the story was on the weak side.
Ha, yes I heard X2 was pretty universally disliked.
I have really tried to like Final Fantasy. Over the years I have tried plyaing a few of them, like the FF 13 - 2 Lightning (?) demo, whichever game had “Lightning” in the title. I didn’t really like it. I suppose the only Final Fantasy I will ever like is FF Tactics.
IMO, if I am going to use that many cheats just for the story, I might as well just watch the game “movie” or whatever on YouTube.
I tried it whenever it was like brand new. I think I tried the demo before the game even launched on Xbox 360, though I can’t be certain. I don’t really remember much about what I played except the main character had pink hair I think and there was a lot of blue or like, ice on the screen.
Also tried FF 7 (the original on PSX) and FF 4 on SNES. I haven’t tried Crisis Core, but I did have it on the list of games to try, even though its not a mainline game.
I know it’s humor but you shouldn’t buy a new 2ds anyhow. It’s the worst and most fragile model. The top screen breaks very easily when closed and replacing it is not worth the effort.
I thought the point of it was that it was more durable. The most common break was folding the screen the wrong way and snapping it in half. Is the pic above even a 2DS?
EDIT: That’s a 2DS XL. Looks like it would have all the problems of a 3DS.
Yes, that’s a NEW Nintendo 2ds xl. The new is very important since there are (very few) games that only run on new with more power and ram.
So the issue with these is that the top is so flimsy that if you close it and put the plastic under stress it will break the screen. If it’s open and you stress the screen from the front, it’s okay.
So what happens is that people toss it on the couch closed and sit on it (note comfy couch) and upon opening see the broken screen.
Ive seen this happen first hand a few times. This does not happen with any 3ds or the regular (ugly but very sturdy) 2ds.
It was much cheaper, and the 3D Effect has some downsides. For one, on some games it’s really not done well so can be skipped. Later games don’t support it at all and also that a surprising amount of people also can not even utilize it because they do not have 3D vision.
I’ve had a “new” 2DS XL since 2019 and it’s fine. It’s really not bad and the top screen is fine. My only complaint is with the battery life (it uses the smaller regular 3DS battery) and the downfiring speakers.
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