zephie's game journals
the years have come for him, and the years have a bow
i wonder about how often i have opinions about this game that begin with "for an MMO," especially with how often i'm finding myself thinking about how much i'd like to be playing a singleplayer Elder Scrolls game. why am i still on here instead? i think i just like posting about it on my little website. anyway i say this because i've been doing a lot of sidequests and i will say that, for an MMO, the sidequests are very good and cool. this is the only MMO i've played where the sidequests don't feel like they're only there to help me level up. of course this is just because of the story and setpieces, the game side of things definitely wants to speed me along by telling me exactly what to do, which is why i say the sidequests are good, for an MMO
i don't think i've done any actual dungeons yet. there are "delves" which are like sort-of almost-dungeons? i don't know what the proper dungeons are like (hoping they're not but still expecting them to be more like WoW/FFXIV dungeons (bad)) so i don't know how different delves are. i can just kinda enter them, un-instanced, other players can come and go, no complex mechanics. there's some story littered about with journal pages, etc. each one is mostly a bunch of rooms and hallways with the same enemies, a skyshard, a sidequest and a boss
it's the boss that makes delves seem weird structurally because it's not really presented like, this is the end of the delve and this is the boss i fight before i leave, because there's not a clear progression path through the area, but you get an achievement for killing the boss - "clearing" the delve. and because other players are just around i can very possibly make it to the boss room and not know it's the boss room. because there's no boss. because other players killed it. i've also encountered rooms i thought were the boss room, and that the boss had already been killed, so i hung out for a while waiting for it to respawn. but it was actually just a big empty room
noo don't call the guard we thought it said Ember's House haha honest
shame this game has a trimmed-down dialogue system because i'd definitely have the INT not to ask such a stupid question
i did a quest about uncovering corrupt college staff that ended kinda far from the college but i went back to see if things changed and it's nice :)
i wanted to take down all the big bad world bosses in this region which involved a lot of waiting for someone else to show up. what surprised me was how possible it seemed to take them on alone, it just would've taken a very long time and been very difficult. it's just that after a while the boss gets bored and decides to regenerate all his health and go back to where he started. so close to escaping that one MMO trapping and letting me best a guy if i'm good enough. it was fun i was zip zoomin around dodging blocking actually trying for once! the combat actually felt good but then oops time's up, the tooltip said you're meant to take on this guy in a group, we can't just let you do it alone what do you think this is a dark soul? make some friends idiot
i can go werewolf if i get bitten by "certain NPCs" i've read, unlocking a bunch of skills and quests to hone my wolfetry. i don't know if straight werewolves i run into can do it, i've let them go wacky on me for a while waiting for a bite but nothing's seemed to have happened so far. the other day i did run into another player stripped naked letting them go particularly wacky on him, but i killed them before i saw him backed into a corner and i ran away before i had some angry naked dude yelling at me about his sex dogs
a thing i've found cool that i enjoy is the random(? maybe not there's probably a way to track them) big hell anchor/portal/ritual places that show up and spawn huge waves of deathguys. it took me days of playing and occasinally wondering what that loud thundering sound and explosion in the sky was before actually going over there and seeing a bunch of players. an interesting choice that's been made regarding combat in this game is giving me full credit for a kill as long as i got a single hit in, so running into these events and just landing a bunch of babyshots onto the massive waves of lil scamps running around builds up the big numbers real easy. i do also wish they didn't always happen in set places because it seemed much cooler when i'd see something going on way in the distance and thought it was a randomly occurring thing
the ritual ones make more sense because they happen at these dedicated sites and there's always this foreboding dialogue among NPCs beforehand, which is funny when i clear the event and an unspeakable nightmarestorm of killhell dissipates, then they just reappear and go back to saying "hmm does the energy feel particularly killhellish here... oh but it's probably my imagination"
i have also learned in doing these (usually when i'm the first one there and i try to rush in on my own) that there really is no penalty to dying, the soul gems i use to revive on the spot are very easy to get in bulk
i can't believably say i haven't been having moments while playing where i've thought, "yeah this game's pretty cool" can i. not when this is the case. i tend not to easily believe my enthusiasm to necessarily be genuine enjoyment when it comes to MMOs just because of the nature of them - i'm suddenly really absorbed in filling out this collection log or leveling up this skill? yeah dude they probably had a team of psychologists on hand to make that the case. but in consciously trying to seek out what the game has to offer besides the slime, i'm giving this game a respectful nod. "yeah this game's pretty cool"
i don't know maybe i have these moments with every MMO i play and i just don't remember because they become too few and far between due to the time spent on the slime. it could be the game's "do anything at any point" structure that, while i have said sucks in terms of the effect it has on the game's storytelling, helps make these moments not have to be so few in far between. because everything's scaled there's no grind to get to the good stuff. FFXIV has crazy grind to get to a lot of "the good stuff" because you play through the base game, then the first expansion, then the second expansion, etc. but luckily a good deal of the story is the good stuff in that case. i even remember having moments like these playing freaking RuneScape, like oh you know these quests are actually really fun and interesting they're like little point and click adventure games haha, but many of them literally require a thousand slime-hours to be able to do them
whenever i find myself getting very into a large RPG the plan becomes to play so much of it that i burn out on it as quickly as possible (smart). i think, hope, that this has now happened. i can't be sure because i'm off ADHD medication for a few days due to the clinic i'm with being comically useless so maybe i'm just unenthusiastic about things in general. which would be a shame because this would be the best time for me to be playing an absurd amount of this game. i do want to play another RPG, but what's stopping me right now is wanting to figure out some things about this website first, such as "to what extent do i want to weave general personal journaling about mental health and medication into my so-called video game journaling". i have to make this clear because i keep typing out a sentence then forgetting what the rest of the paragraph has been about so sorry if this just feels really disjointed to read