Tag Archives: PC gaming

Wrapping up: Baby steps edition

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In the spirit of setting my own casual goals I’ve started to wrap up some endgame content in FFXIV. Even though I had caught up to the 4.4 story I hadn’t touched 4.5 untill tonight. With some help from a friend I tackled the new dungeon and got the 4.5 story done. I’ve seen a few interesting plot twists, including the real identity of “Shadowhunter” (spoiler! it’s Gaius, yes, that Gaius) and am now patiently awaiting the final patch where supposedly I turn into the Warrior of Darkness. My gear still remains on the bare minimum to do content however. As of right now I’m sitting at ilvl 364, which is only 4 above the bare minimum needed. A big part of this is to blame on my weapon which is sorely lacking behind compared to all my other gear. So my big focus right now lies with upgrading said weapon and I have a two-route option to do so.
The first one is to farm Tomestones, the Mendacity kind to be precise, and kill Kefka three more times. I finally managed to kill him for the first time on Sunday and I have to say the fight wasn’t as horrible as I thought it would be. So that’s Sigmascape wrapped up and a new minion, scroll and weapon possibility to chase. I also count that as baby step number one because I know I’m sorely behind on this content and I do want to see Omega through to the end.. So I expect some more catching up in the future.
The second route is to keep on farming Heaven on High. You need to exchange your gear strength for 10 tokens and I’m currently sitting at 2 with the possibility of getting 4 more, which still leaves me with 4 to get. The weapon is a slightly better one than the one I get via farming Kefka (it’s a 5 ilvl difference) and the queues for farming Heaven on High aren’t actually that bad. It’s quite easy to just take an hour of my time and run 3 Heaven on High instances and pray for tons of silver chests. It also nets me Mendacity and Genesis tomestones which I can then use to purchase more gear for my WHM or my alt classes. My priority though lies on getting that weapon upgrade so that is what I’ll be focusing on for the forseeable future.

In other baby steps news. My Blacksmith made it to level 30 which means I only have my Alchemist and Leatherworker to go. Since I’ve decided to take the lazy route and just level it up via Ixali dailies I don’t expect them to be 30 in a day. Basically the Ixali dailies give about two levels when I do all of them per day and it takes me about an hour to do them. Right now I’m not really pushing myself to do them every day but whenever I feel like it and it seems to work out for me. The progress is there, just slow and it’s really a task that I do if I don’t find anything else to do.

Next to FFXIV I’ve been slowly pushing up my Nightborne Mage in WoW. She’s just hit 90 tonight and I’ve done about 10 levels of progress in Mount Hyjal alone. I’ve not taken a character through that content in a very long time and I have to say that about 8 years later the story still holds up and the zone is still nice to level through. Chucking bears out of trees, rescuing animals, riding a gryphon while lancing Twilight Scum out of the sky. Killing black and twilight drakes. It’s so much lore that has gone to the background with WoD, Legion and now BfA. It makes me nostalgic for what Cataclysm was and how much fun I had raiding Firelands and Dragon Soul. It was interesting to see the struggle between the Twilight Cultists and the Legion. I forgot that they actually weren’t the best of friends. Now I’m on the doorstep of Warlords of Draenor and I want to get that done as fast as possible. As far as leveling goes it’s my least favourite expansion, simply because of too many Orcs… Especially on Horde side. I hope I can keep the zones I need to do there limited to a minimum but I guess I’ll see when I get there. Only 20 more levels to go for my Heritage Armor atleast so that’s a nice goal to work towards.

In Kingdom Hearts I’ve gone through Toy Story world and have landed in the Kingdom of Corona, aka the world of the Disney movie Rapunzel. I’m still having a blast playing through the game. I’ve been trying to unlock as many things as I possibly can and have made a ton of headway when it comes to the cooking section and the classic mini games section. Unfortunately I’m not that good with spotting the Mickey Mouse heads so I’m probably going to look up a guide once I beat the game to get all of that stuff done. I’m hoping to finish the Kingdom of Corona somewhere this week and move on to whatever world is next. It’s a time consuming game, I’m only 10 hours in and I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface, but I can’t wait untill I see how the story plays out. Hence I’m avoiding spoilers and any Kingdom Hearts 3 related content like the plague online. I want to see and finish this in my own pace. Even if that pace is baby steps.

The Backlog part 2: PC games and MMO’s

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Welcome to part two of my backlog series!
In the previous part I talked about the catalog of games I own for my Playstation 4, WiiU and Nintendo 3DS.  With a list of about 40 games to complete there you’d think I would have my work cut out for me. Well guess what! Next to my consoles I’m also an avid PC gamer with a (not that big) catalog of games going on there aswell.
Like most people who play on PC I have a Steam account. Even though I never really got into Steam in the first place, I was forced to make an account so I could play Tomb Raider. Ever since then I’ve been selectively buying the games I would like to play. Steam sales are therefore never really an attack on my wallet because I’m not the type of person to buy a game just because it’s on sale. There’s plenty of games I will never enjoy and thus will never buy, even if they are 80% off on Steam sales and thus “worth” buying.
Because it’s easier to just post a screenshot of my Steam Library than to type up the games I have manually I’ll do just that… And then comment on the games that are listed.

As you can see I don’t really have that huge of a collection of games, resulting in me actually having played atleast an hour or more on most of them. There are a few there which I haven’t touched at all yet which are Child of Light, Rayman Origins, Jet Set Radio and Sega Genesis & Mega Drive Classics. The latter two I got for free with a SEGA/Steam special collaboration. Child of Light was one of those games I was always attracted to but never purchased untill it was on a very big sale. Rayman Origins ties in with refusing to install the damn Uplay client.
As I said, I have put some time in almost all the games that are listed. Usually making my way through atleast the first level or the introductions or whatever. The two games I have played most are DuckTales Remastered, where I am actually close to finished and Civ 5, which I have played on a few weekend nights with my ex. We would start at 22.00 and play untill 04.00 and still not be finished with our playthrough. I have very fond memories of these gaming sessions and although I haven’t really touched the game in a while, I think it was more than worth the money I spent on it.
As you can also see most of the games on there are platformers, my favourite genre. I do really want to start working through these games and I think I’ll pick up where I left off on Ducktales first. It’s the game where I’m closest to actually finishing so that should not be a real issue.
As far as other games on the list go, I am doing a Trine 2 playthrough with a friend and I really want to get into Stardew Valley. Although I have started a playthrough I feel like I messed it up already and I’m a bit lost as to where I was so I think I’ll start anew and stick to it for now.

Non Steam Games
I have a few games that are not tied to steam hanging out on my shelf. I haven’t played much of these at all. Not more than playing past the tutorial anyway. Which is kind of a shame since they are all good games! The (tiny) list consists of:

  • Assassin’s Creed III
  • Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
  • Warcraft III + Expansions

I never played any of the Warcraft games and the third was the only one still readily available so I picked it up a few years ago to see how it plays. I played through a bit of the initial campaign but due to being busy with my studies and other stuff I didn’t really have the time to dig too deep into it. Same goes for my Assassin’s Creed games.

MMO’s and other “neverending” games
Here is the section with my favourite game genre: MMO’s. Although many games try to fit into this category for me it just means the MMORPG’s like WoW, Wildstar, FFXIV and the like. I have gamehopped quite a bit throughout my MMO career and still have about 4 big MMO’s lying around, of which three are waiting to be picked up and played again. With other neverending games I mostly mean games with ladder systems like MOBA’s and Hearthstone for example. Games that keep you busy and reset themselves often so you’re never actually done with them. Here’s the list of games of that type that I have installed, own and/or play.

  • World of Warcraft. Although currently being on hiatus untill Legion I don’t want to look at my /played time. I think I’ve sunk most of my time into this game out of all the ones out there.
  • FFXIV. My current MMO.
  • Wildstar. Bought it at release, never got past level 20 though, sadly.
  • Guild Wars 2. Same story as Wildstar. Liked the game a lot, but never got past level 25.
  • Diablo III. Still actively playing. Season 6 just started and I have a level 70 character! I just really want to get the rewards so I should start working on finishing up Chapter 4.
  • Hearthstone. Somewhat active play. I make sure I get rank 20 atleast in every season for the card backs and slowly work my way through the adventures. I don’t do serious ladder play.
  • League of Legends. Dormant at the moment. Ever now and then I fire it up for a game. I don’t seriously rank.
  • Heroes of the Storm. See League of Legends
  • Overwatch. See this game isn’t technically out yet, but I know I’ll be playing a lot. A LOT of my friends pre-ordered it and from the beta stuff I’ve seen it’s an awesome game so I’m really looking forward to putting time into this. Not sure if I will ladder, but you never know!
  • I’ve also dabbled around in Blade & Soul, Lord of the Rings Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic but never really enjoyed those games so uninstalled them and never looked back.

This really concludes my PC “collection”. Most of the games I own are in my Steam library and I have a lot of games that I play that I can’t really finish. I’ve tried playing multiple MMO’s at once, but just couldn’t make it work. I really hope I can keep up playing both FFXIV and WoW when Legion launches, but I’m sure my other games will suffer for it. Especially with me being in the working force I just have much less time to play games than I used to have. And now I regret not using the free time I had before to go through atleast a part of my games catalog.

For part three I will have to dig around and dig up my old games collection. Although I have gotten rid of a lot of my old games (we used to borrow stuff from family and copy it with CD-key, yes I was a pirate of the digital times from very early on!) I do have a lot of original copies of stuff lying around. I also still own all my old SEGA games plus the console, all my old various Gameboy games and old Nintendo DS AND a Playstation 2 with a nice catalog of games. Not sure when part three will be arriving, but I’ll do my best to not keep you guys waiting for too long!