I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas holiday with their friends and family. I was off for the week, and didn’t really take great notes. I know what I played on what days, but it all kind of jumbled together as the week went on.
As always, I still had an amazing time gaming through out the course of the week. Wednesday (Christmas Day) was really the only day I didn’t manage to get some gaming in. Qvaid and I had plans to game a bit later in the evening, but they fell apart after getting back late from Christmas with family. No complaints there, it is just the way it panned out.
Like the weeks before, there was plenty of play time on Outward Definitive Edition and World of Warcraft for several of the group.
An honorable mention goes to Falken and Iron for some time they spent getting wrecked in Valheim trying to get a foothold into Ashlands. I didn’t play any Valheim myself, because: 1. I’m paying for a WoW subscription and only get 3 days a week to commit to it, 2. I couldn’t connect to the server during testing, and spent any free time working on automation scripts for the dedicated server (which mostly turn out to be a bit of a bust), and finally 3. Error (my son) doesn’t really care for Valheim much. It is sad, but I’ve mostly chalked that up too the unfortunate events of we tend to go through spurts of building moods, and he doesn’t have much of an interest in ‘building’.
Another honorable mention goes to Error and Bubbles for some time in Sons of The Forest early in the day on Sunday. Error was up and playing quite a bit earlier than I anticipated on Sunday morning. Now Error was already away from his desk when I walked into the Home Office / Game room, and Bubbles was hard at work on the base, gathering, etc… Kilen joined the channel in Discord and was tutoring them on what to do once Error and Bubbles were off exploring and gathering more resources. We did get an invite from Error to join them, but both of us opted out due to numerous facts. Neither Kilen nor I had the game loaded, and figured at best I would have some time configuring it to run on Linux (although to be fair, most of the time that is a relatively painless process). Kilen did load it up later and asked if I might be interested, but I declined for the time as I was still trying to catch up in the quest lines in WoW.
Over all, it is nothing personal to anyone in the gaming group. I’ve spent a very decent portion of my life just playing whatever everyone else wanted to play. For the time being, I’m content playing WoW for the time frames that I’m not gaming with Qvaid. It has brought me a renewed sense of nostalgia that I lost quite some time ago. It certainly isn’t the game we played so many years ago at launch, or perhaps even not over the course of years after on and off. However, from a personal standpoint, I’m a huge fan of the fact that I can play 3 days a week and still make fairly decent progress in the over all schema of how the game now operates. I know it won’t last forever, but I’d like to hold onto it for at least as long as it takes to get my fill before the time comes and I’m ready to move on to other games.
Days played: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday
Players: Qvaid, Hobbit
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: Over the course of the time played, Qvaid and I made incredible progress in New Sirocco. By the end of our game play we’ve managed to get all 6 specialized buildings up, 3 of them fully upgraded, and 5 houses. Those buildings consist of the: City Hall, Food Store, Black Smith, Alchemy Shop, Chapel, and the Arena.
Qvaid and I discussed it, and while it isn’t necessarily the initial choices we discussed, we decided to try and get the most out of each New Sirocco build that we could. Since we took The Holy Mission Faction, we wanted to have the Chapel in this build and we sacrificed our initial plan to go with the Water Purifier building. We can just collect water from the trough in town and boil it to make it useful after all. (I will say, we’ll probably miss the specialized water it produces at some point).
When we called it later Thursday evening / early Friday morning, we had The City Hall, Food Store, and the Black Smith fully upgraded, along with the stock hall (to hold more resources). We just barely got the last 3 buildings laid down after we completed the quest for the Ember Heart. I’m here to say that fight was far more challenging without the use of traps that Qvaid and I made use of on our previous play through!
Once we had the buildings down, and were at a point in the quest line where we could rest, we called it for the night, and that was pretty much the end of our adventures for the week.
Days played: Friday, Saturday, Sunday
Players: Error, Kilen, Hobbit
Friday, Saturday, Sunday: The weekend in World of Warcraft mostly consisted of solo runs for everyone through quests. Ironically, Error didn’t really get a lot of play time in and what little he did was frequented with interruptions and extended away from keyboard moments. He was certainly missed, and we are all hopeful the upcoming schedules might pan out a bit better for him.
On that note, Error, Kilen, and I did have a spell where we were working together on new characters a bit on Saturday. Error wanted to try running some Horde characters, so all 3 of us started new Horde characters on our server, and rolled through the start in Exile’s Reach, and then headed to the Wilds of Pandaria. Not long after reaching Pandaria, Error had another extended afk, and Kilen and I decided to hop back on our main characters so we didn’t get too far ahead of him in the new and exciting project.
The remainder of the time played was mostly Kilen and myself rolling through quests in The War Within. Kilen managed to complete the story line and I believe he now has access to all the new playable races for the Alliance. I tried to accomplish that myself, but I fell short as the time off dwindled to a halt later in the evening on Sunday. I’m sure the fact that I worked on side quests as well, didn’t help accomplish said goal though. 🙂
Even still, I enjoyed all the time played, and even with the interruptions, we had some good conversations and times as always.
