A Month in Gaming
Last month panned out pretty much as I expected. Blaugust and writing daily blog posts took up a fair amount of my leisure time. And then I lost a few days due real-life social activities. What gaming time I had was focused mainly on The Elder Scrolls Online. I’m sorry to say that I’ve ground to a halt in The Lord of the Rings Online. My level 113 Guardian remains at the Black Gates and for the present I simply do not feel disposed towards working my way through Mordor again, which I did just a year ago on my primary character. I have undertaken a few quests with my level cap Lore-master and will endeavour in the weeks ahead to at least complete the Vales of Anduin region. LOTRO at present doesn’t have much of a hold on me, although I may well become more enthusiastic once the next expansion is formerly announced.
At present ESO is more than keeping me busy. I’m enjoying the Ebonheart Pact main story and have also experimented with my Necromancers skills. I currently have a Magicka build that gets things done and I’m rather pleased that I figured it out for myself. The game is filled with content, engaging zones along with plenty of other players. Furthermore, unlike other MMOs, ESO has accessible group content. I tend to group with two friends and we can tackle delves and even group bosses that can be found in each zone. Then of course there are the Dolmen. ESO is the only MMO that I play where doing something collectively is not an uphill struggle. You form your group, travel to where the action is and get on with it. There are no complexities involved, be they cutscenes or copious amounts of bestowal dialogue. I even got a free mount and non-combat pet for being a Twitch prime customer!
Looking ahead to this month, I have high expectations for the new story mission, Awakening, coming to Star Trek Online on Tuesday 10th of September. I have been critical of late of the way Cryptic seems to be taking a somewhat scattershot approach to modernising the game but new narrative content is new narrative content. The question remains will the new story along with patrols, events and sundry system changes be enough to keep me regularly engaged with STO? I’m not so sure. I must admit I’ve be considering dusting off an old game such as Starfleet Academy or even give the mobile game Star Trek: Fleet Command a try. Although the former is more likely as I bought this classic recently from Good Old Games for a ridiculously cheap rice. Although Star Trek: Fleet Command looks intriguing, I’ve already been burned by the other mobile game Star Trek Timelines. I really enjoyed the concept and the way the missions panned out after you selected your away team. But is had a typical mobile game business model and eventually you hit a brick wall and have to start spending money to progress.
I may also trawl though my back catalogue of games on Steam, the Epic Store, Origins and Uplay and see if there’s anything that immediately takes my fancy. I recently managed to fit in the single player game Mafia. Therefore, I see no reason why I can’t do that again. I certainly feel it will provide some variety to this column which fast seems to be becoming “MMO corner”. Someone mentioned point and click games recently on the Blaugust Discord Server and I’ve suddenly become very nostalgic for the genre. I have keys for the Syberia trilogy somewhere among my game collection. This franchise has quite a following and the games are critically acclaimed. Perhaps I should give them a go. Or maybe I’ll dust off one of the earlier Sherlock Holmes games from Frogwares. Either way both would be interesting experiments as well as providing something to write about.
