Ahoy, me hearties! Fireside Recap scallywag be here to deliver ye the shortest Recap that ever sailed the seven seas. We be settin’ course for the lawless waters of low sec to plunder ISK and kick over every last sandcastle, then be back in port just in time for GTA6 to drop anchor and/or supper. Pack yer booty, hoist the mainsail, and set sail, ye salty dogs!

-Asher Elias, deployment announcement

A couple of weeks back Asher said on the weekly fireside that we would be going on a deployment.  We were given some doctrines to stock up on, both sub caps and capitals, and were told to be ready to move after the fireside on October 31st.

I packed my nearly 14 year old Archon carrier, which has been in exactly one fight (the fiasco at Atioth), and made sure the fuel bay was full.  Going on the road to shoot things is why I am still around.

The Saturday fireside was short, with just a few updates and the announcement of the pirating theme of the deployment, accompanied by the ping at the top of this post, and I was quickly in the first fleet for carriers and faxes under Zintage Enaka, who is also one of our CSM representatives.

We undocked from the Keepstar in C-J6MT, gated to an adjacent system, and made the first of a half dozen jumps to get us to our deployment destination.  The first couple were to friendly Keepstars where we could land and tether, waiting for our jump timers to run down.

Capitals landing on a Keepstar

Then it was to a Fortizar… where we could still tether, but was a sign we were leaving the core of our empire.

Jumping off a Fortizar

We had soon maxed out our blue timer, which caps at 5 hours, which in turn meant our red jump timer was running at 30 minutes between jumps.  (The EVE Uni Wiki article on jump drives and jump fatigue will explain this if you are interested.)  That coincided with us starting to jump to low sec systems where we had to dock up in stations that led to a bit of comedy as ships bumped.

Capitals bouncing as they arrive

This managed to push a Zirnitra dreadnought far enough out of range of the docking perimeter that a Rangnarok titan showed up, one shotted him, and got clean away.  The Zirn pilot was reimbursed for his loss, but it does show that convoy operations have their hazards.

A bit of waiting, undocking to jump, and then a bit more waiting ensued as we made our way to our final destination, which was Siseide, a low sec system in the Heimatar region.

Our initial destination station

There was an insurgency going on in the area when we arrived, which meant that null sec rules applied for things like warp disruption bubbles, so there were some station games going on.

The undock bubbled because we can

That cleared up when we got our own Fortizar up on grid.

My Archon warping to the new Fortizar

All in all, a somewhat uneventful move op.  One of many I have been on over the last fifteen years at this point.

Being that it was Halloween and we had places to be, I missed out on some of the follow up operations.  A couple of fleets were undocked and timers were set on structures all around the constellation, which was set to be our area of operation.

The plan is to shoot structures and either get fights or destroy structures.  Simple.

A Tatara reinforced

I might have missed the ensuing drama.  Mostly that was because I gave up on r/eve a couple months back.  Too much concentrated stupid for me to bear any further.  But it was bubbling up into our coms and into local where were had situated ourselves.

Now, I will clarify that this was from a pretty small minority of people in low sec… but those few are also the biggest loud mouths, starting with Youngpuke2 who initially declared that this deployment was entirely due to the Ansiblex nerf.  That logic doesn’t track for even a moment… it tends to argue the exact opposite of that… but when you’re committed to dumb ideas it is difficult to not double down I guess.

Then he changed course and began to whine about the null sec blob, as one does.  I thought he said we were showing a LEVEL OF COMMITMENT here!  Are you questioning our level of commitment?

So, while most of the locals (including well known low sec alliances such as… *checks notes*… The Initiative and Fraternity) agreed to join together to fight the Goon menace… which is kind of what we want… YoungPuke2’s Sedition alliance has decided to sulk and be angry on Reddit instead.  This has led to some fun propaganda.

Deepwater Hooligans has likewise decided to stand down.

Rumors that Sedition and Deepwater Hooligans have paid us to come stomp out their competition are completely unfounded.

Meanwhile, Asher seemed delighted at the response.

(8:26:21) directorbot@goonfleet.com: Guys if I had any idea that lowseccers were THIS fragile I would have deployed us long ago. Thanks to everyone in cope-lysium gathering all the lowsec tears.
‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍
~~~ This was a broadcast from asher_elias to all at 2026-11-01 16:26:21.531535 EVE ~~~

So it goes.  Anyway, we’ll be there for the next two weeks or so, undocking 250 ship fleets hungry for action and bringing massive tidi wherever we go.  We’ll see how this all plays out.  I’ll be fine with some structure kills if that is all we end up doing.

Fantasy Critic League – Like Fantasy Football, but for Video Games

Week forty-four had just a single title queued up for release, Phantom Blade Zero, but there was still a fair amount of shifting in the scores.

First though, we need to set the bar with where things stood last week.

Week 43 Scores

The score updates started on Sunday afternoon after the week forty-three post had already gone live, with a bit of a hit to One Piece: Grand Gourmet.

• One Piece: Grand Gourmet
  • [Picked by Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 80.0 to 78.3

That was followed Sunday evening by the first scores rolling in for the week’s one title, Phantom Blade Zero.

Phantom Blade Zero

The Chinese developed wuxia action role-playing game… I looked that up… landed with a seriously solid initial score.

• Phantom Blade Zero
  • [Picked by Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)]
  • Now has a score of 90.8

The question, as always, is whether or not a title that comes out strong can hold onto a high score as more reviews arrive.

The next day saw a small drop.

• Phantom Blade Zero
  • [Picked by Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 90.5 to 89.5

Not a bad hit, but it still had some time before launch.

One Piece: Grand Gourmet on the other hand, continued its decline.

• One Piece: Grand Gourmet
  • [Picked by Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 77.9 to 76.1
• One Piece: Grand Gourmet
  • [Picked by Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 76.1 to 75.0

That was more than counteracted when Phantom Blade Zero launched late Wednesday night with a score of 88.8… could you have picked a more on the nose score… boosting Shawn’s score.

However, it was not enough to alter the rankings on the board, so Shawn remained in 7th place despite all the score gyrations.

Meanwhile the league bot was busy announcing a bunch of titles with scores higher than many of our picks.

• The Wolf Among Us Remastered
  • [Available]
  • Now has a score of 83.1
• Tenebris Somnia
  • [Unpublished]
  • Score has gone UP from 82.9 to 85.0
• Songs of Glimmerwick
  • [Unpublished]
  • Now has a score of 83.3
• Tenebris Somnia
  • [Unpublished]
  • Score has gone UP from 85.0 to 86.7
• Colorbound
  • [Unpublished]
  • Now has a score of 84.5
• The Witch’s Bakery
  • [Unpublished]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 88.3 to 85.0

The bot is currently set to announce notable missed picks, which I thought was anything with a score of 85 or over, but the bot must be feeling like piling on by including Songs of Glimmerwick.

Then there was one final score hit for the week.

• Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse
  • [Picked by Play Forever Mwahahaha (Shintar)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 84.4 to 83.3

And that was the week, leaving the scoreboard… unchanged save for individual scores.

Week 44 Scores

There was no change in the rankings.  Everybody held their positions… the the league predicts there are some changes coming.

On the upcoming front, we had another title push out to 2027.

• The Duskbloods
  • [Picked by Play Forever Mwahahaha (Shintar)]
  • Estimated release date changed from ‘2026’ to ‘2027’

That looks like Shintar needs to make another pick.

We also had two bids.

• Bids in TAGN League
  • Guns of Eschaton
    • Won by Rusty Shackleford (Shilgrod) with a bid of $25
    • Dropped game ‘Ecco the Dolphin Re-Something (Unannounced)’ conditionally
  • Hollow Knight: Silksong – Sea of Sorrow
    • Won by Play Forever Mwahahaha (Shintar) with a bid of $11
    • Dropped game ‘Enter the Gungeon 2’ conditionally

Shilgrod dumped the unannounced Ecco the Dolphin title for Guns of Eschaton, while Shintar dropped Enter the Gungeon 2 for the Hollow Knight: Silksong expansion.

That is a bit of a roll of the dice for Shintar, hoping for a big score, as the Hollow Knight: Silksong expansion is only estimated for this year… and there isn’t a lot of this year left.  Given her other remaining title just got pushed out to 2027, she might need to budget for two picks with her remaining $16.

All of which left the upcoming titles… the next 10 of which are the last with solid dates, looking like this.

Week 45 Coming Up

Next week we have two titles.  There is WoW Forever, my final title for the season, and the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, which has the potential to be the GTA VI sized title for Switch 2 players this year.

Related:

• TAGN Fantasy Critic League
• Fantasy Critic Site
• Fantasy Critic How to Play
• Fantasy Critic FAQ
• Fantasy Critic Most Desired Reviews
• Open Critic Review Site

WordPress.com announced this past month that paid plans will be allowed to upload premium themes downloaded or purchased outside of the stock selection they maintain.  Or fail to maintain, which is probably the real reason for this.

I have suddenly gone from “All the supported themes kind of suck for my needs” to “There are too many choices!”  So I’ll have to see if I can wrestle with that problem.

Also in this month was the PHP2Shell critical vulnerabilities crisis that got a lot of site owners in a panic.  WP.com assured us that sites it hosted were all protected… and what would I be able to do about it in any case?

Then there was the Monday morning I woke up and found that the classic editor had once again disappeared from the hosting panel.  The block editor is probably fine for something, but writing isn’t it.  This turned out to be related to a changed WP.com made to the dashboard settings, where if you are set to “default” you get the classic editor and if you are set to “classic” you do NOT get the classic editor.  Somebody make sense of that.

War is Peace and Default is Classic

Anyway, I was back up and running by lunch.

And then, somewhere along the line in October, the site passed the 8,000 post mark.  I didn’t know you could stack crap that high, but here we are.

One Year Ago

The deal for the Saudis and Jared Kushner to buy out Electronic Arts had been finalized and approved and I was saying farewell to whatever the company meant at that point.

Amazon Games gave up on big online games, announcing New World would be closing and that their ever changing plans for something in Middle-earth would be changing again.  They were more interested in AI driven slop like their Snoop Dogg voiced Chaos in Court title.

There was also the big Pokemon Go update that boosted the level cap to 80… which was a bit of a let down actually.

Over on the Enad Global 7 front I was wondering if we were going to get any EverQuest 3 news.

With that not forthcoming, EverQuest did announce the Shattering of Ro expansion, while EverQuest II did the same for the Rage of Cthurath expansion.

Meanwhile, on the LOTRO front, SSG was giving people a chance to transfer characters off of the recently closed 32-bit worlds.

I was also wondering if we were going to see any more updates in No Man’s Sky to follow up Voyagers and expand on the corvette thing.  They seemed to lack for a landing pad, for starters.  The Breach expedition did give us some new corvette parts at least.  I went off to try that. Potshot and I also started to search for a paradise planet to settle on.

Over in New Eden CCP launched the annual Crimson Harvest event.  They also announced the candidate list for the CSM20 election, published the September 2025 economic report, announced the upcoming Catalyst expansion, kicked off Alliance Tournament XXI, began the CSM20 elections, and ramped up the final week of Crimson Harvest with new rewards.

In null sec Fraternity announced its invasion of The Initiative space, something they would never, ever come to regret, and PanFam pulled back their staging system, a portent to their coming collapse.

Also, the Reavers SIG turned eleven, though it existed mostly as a Discord chat channel by then.

In Palworld we were poaching in the No.1 Wildlife Sanctuary after which we were off to the mountain cold.  The it was on to a fiery mountainside climb.

We were also taking a look at the cozy title Palia.  We ran around and made ramen together.

In a Friday bullet points post I looked into Valheim coming to PlayStation, Microsoft laying people off and raising the price of XBox game pass, Sackbird studios being formed from layoff refugees, the demise of Greg Street’s Fantastic Pixel Castle plans, Embracer spinning off Coffee Stain while loading it with debt, and Ship of Heroes complaining about being review bombed.

And on the streaming front we watched Kaos with Jeff Goldblum, Rick & Morty season 8, and House of Guinness.  I wrote whole posts about each.

Five Years Ago

In a bit of irony I unleashed ads on the site in order to pay for the premium WordPress.com plan, otherwise they would be unleashing ads on the site.  But at least I was getting some of that ad money guess.  I kept that up every so often before finally deciding I had done that enough.

Facebook changes its name to Meta and Mark Zuckerberg announced they were going all-in on the idea of a VR based online metaverse.   John Carmack had some issues with the plan, while reality… made Zuck look like the man-boy dumbshit he is.  Nothing since has changed my view on that.

Then acting EG7 CEO Ji Ham spoke about the company and its plans.  Meanwhile EverQuest announced the Terror of Luclin expansion and EverQuest II announced the Visions of Vertovia expansion.  It was also Panda time in EQII.

Those expansions got me on to a bit of a comparison between the EQ expansion machine and WoW.

Blizzard announced the WoW Classic Season of Mastery plan, set to launch in November, an attempt to give a slightly different vanilla experience… and a temporary one at that as it closed down just a year later.

There would also be no BlizzCon 2022.  Covid and stuff.

We were getting into Diablo II Resurrected as a group.  We remade our group after a bit, working our way through the first act.  We got stuck into Act II pretty quickly, making it through to the end.

On my own I played a necromancer through the first difficultly level.  I was playing on Battle.net for some reason, where there were queues to get online.

Carbot and Honest Game Trailers had their own special D2R videos.

Amazon Games’ New World was live and I was trying to play… though there were issues.

In EVE Online there was a bit of a mining boom in the wake of World War Bee.  CCP was also going back to native MacOS support.  They also introduced CRAB beacons to the game and changed the tax structure.  And then there was the return of the Crimson Harvest event.

the Reavers SIG turned seven years old.

I also did an EVE Online Friday Bullet Points post about Quasar, Totality Day, Faction Warfare, mega skill point offers, monocles, and an exploration of the new user experience.

In my series on immersion I tackled Minecraft.

I wrote something about Words with Friends 2.

At home we were getting ready for No Time to Die by watching the previous four Daniel Craig Bond films… and rating them.  And then we went and saw it and I wrote a bit of a review.

Likewise, with the coming of the new Dune movie (part I) we watched the 1984 version of the tale.  The new film got a bit of a review here too.

Ten Years Ago

Amazon’s game studio announced some games including the alleged MMO New World.  Being given almost no information about New World did not stop some people from banging the hype drum, boosting expectations, and generally setting themselves up for disappointment.  I wonder how that turned out?

Also announced was the Nintendo Switch, which would allow millennials to play video games at roof-top parties, if the trailer was to be take literally.

Civilization VI launched and became the first Civ title I did not acquire at the soonest opportunity.  It just didn’t excite me.  Instead I was getting my strategy game fix with Stellaris.

I reviewed the Mineserver Kickstarter campaign a year after its launch.  The units were nine months late at that point, with no end to the wait in sight.  The whole thing eventually failed to get off the ground.  Another Kickstarter crash and burn.

I made it to level 20 in Pokemon Go.  There was also a Halloween event.

Tom Chilton, of unfortunate quote fame, let out another one when he said that World of Warcraft had over 10 million subscribers again after the Legion expansion launch.  Blizzard, having taken a vow of silence on subscription numbers the year before, denied everything and claimed he was mis-quoted.

Over at Daybreak they were discontinuing game cards and taking H1Z1: King of the Kill off of Station Cash as an RMT currency.  They did give us firm dates for the two Kurnak based expansions for EverQuest and EverQuest II.

In EVE Online, while we were fortifying Delve our foes in the Casino War began to turn on each other, with Pandemic Legion and their followers declaring their intention to take Tribute and Vale of the Silent away from Circle of Two and TEST.  All I could do was give a Nelson Muntz, “Haw-haw!” at that turn of events.

Still, that wasn’t half as much fun as CCP declaring casinos against the EULA with the coming of the Ascension expansion.  Our foes would have to actually earn ISK in-game.  I wondered what that would do to the economy.

We also got the YC118.9 update which, among other things, meant the death of the in-game browser.  We did get breast cancer awareness skins.  Yay, pink skins!

At our end of New Eden there was a lot to do.  I was fighting the Blood Raider menace with my Ishtar and looking for ways to help the coalition.  Reavers turned two years old and were blowing up citadels and fighting over timers in Querious.  The coalition itself was ranging up into Fountain with a new doctrine.

CCP was also busy on the VR front, launching EVE Valkyrie and EVE Gunjack, the first games in the VR offensive.  EVE Valkyrie was an Occulus Rift launch title FFS!  All of their VR titles would sputter and fail… along with VR itself, frankly… and later be shut down, with everybody involved laid off… unless they were Icelandic citizens.  They get lifetime employment.

And in World of Warcraft the Legion got its first post-launch content drop while my own enthusiasm for the expansion was starting to wane.

Finally, I was at EVE Vegas, but since it lasted through Halloween I didn’t post about it until November.  Also, a new version of my blogger feed was operating in the side bar.

Fifteen Years Ago

We all said farewell to Steve Jobs.

Tobold was predicting that CCP would go bankrupt in 2012.  I am NEVER EVER going to let that one go… at least not until Hilmar does the place in.

I summed up what I liked and disliked about Need for Speed: World.

I got Civilization II running on Windows 7 64-bit.  People still come here for that article.  I managed to get it to run on Windows 10 since then.  But it didn’t work back then with my original 16-bit copy, I had to get the 32-bit version, Civilization II Gold Edition.

I started another contest, this time for Azerothian travel posters.

I recalled the start of the alien invasion!

EA was planning to unify all of its free to play online games to use the same in-game currency… something that never actually happened… also, I think all the games on the list are dead now.

Nintendo was talking about augmented reality on their new 3DS console.  Five years later we got Pokemon Go… on iOS and Android.

The announcement of their Unity release got Gaff and I back to TorilMUD to mess around with the Tako Demon.  I had to work to remember some MUD command syntax to get his corpse afterwards.

Then there was BlizzCon.  The instance group was already bemused by Cataclysm, and the mention of Pandas did not revive our spirits.  Pet Battles seemed interesting at the time.  In coming to grips with the Pandaria announcements, I assumed that I would end up buying the expansion.

And then there were other WoW related things, like the announcement of the Guardian Cub, which some people predicted would be like PLEX in EVE Online.  Not quite, but it probably provided test data for the eventual WoW Token idea.

In EverQuest, on the Fippy Darkpaw server, after much complaining, SOE seemed to suddenly wake up and start doing things.  Problems were, you know, solved!  It was becoming a kinder, gentler server.  Sort of.

And then there was Rift.  We started scouting it as a potential home for in instance group after the disaster in EverQuest II.  The scouting went well enough that we all ended up in Telara.

Finally, I was sorting through many press releases and wondering where this so-called GDC Hall of Fame was.

Twenty Years Ago

The site got a mention in VirginWorlds Podcast episode 33 while Blessing of Kings was telling me how to be a raider in World of Warcraft.

I was defending instancing and game company forums as well as moaning about the fact that I couldn’t find a decent video card for my AGP motherboard.  Also, Blizzard’s WoW patcher was pissing me off as well while Lore was mocking WoW groups. [Damn, that was done in Flash, so I guess it is gone now.]

Our Saturday night World of Warcraft instance group completed our first full dungeon run in the Deadmines.  That meant my first dungeon run write up.  And my second.  But we got it on our third try.  Then it was off to The Wailing Caverns.  Did anybody have a five player dungeon adventure path like WoW back then?

I decided in EVE Online that covert ops would be a good career choice.  It certainly sounds cool.  However, the effort was cut short when I got to some of the pricier skills.

When it came to the then upcoming Lord of the Rings Online, I was up in arms about pointy ears and monster play, while the approaching Age of Conan made me think more about Barsoom.

I felt that fall urge to run around in EverQuest,  no doubt prompted by another EQ nostalgia post, plus I wanted to take some pictures of Faydwer in order to compare them to the upcoming EverQuest II expansion, Echoes of Faydwer.

I also jumped into EverQuest II and got all confused (nothing new there) about the trade skill changes that occurred during the 10 months I was away.

And I spent some time carping about MMO pricing plans and wondering what pen and paper games might make good MMOs.

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Dark Age of Camelot launched.  While I never played it… we were about to have a new baby in the house and we were having internet issues, and the world was falling apart due to 9/11… I had some friends who gave it a try.  I remember it being billed as “EverQuest without the suck” at some point.  Anyway, it is still alive, which is surprising because EA owned it… and still owns it, through Broadsword runs it for them.

Civilization III also showed up back in October of 2001, and I most definitely bought a copy of that.  I liked a lot of the ideas it brought, but it lost some of the raw simplicity of its predecessor.  I ended up playing a lot more Civ II even after Civ III was around.

Then there was Motor City Online, which was a bit of a precursor to Need for Speed: World.  I am kind of sad I missed it.  Of course, it was an EA MMO, so they scrapped it in less than two years, opting to go all in on The Sims Online.

Thirty Years Ago

Marathon Infinity, the last of the Marathon series of shooters from Bungie came out.  That was the era of the awkwardly shaped software boxes.  I owned a copy.

Most Viewed Posts in October

Out of the 20 posts on the list, only 19 and 20 were published this month.  But you can see the theme for what was popular; WoW nostalgia, Enshrouded, a bit of No Man’s Sky, Pokemon Go, and a couple old favorites.

1. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
2. Cat Catching in Enshrouded
3. Planning My Path to 50 Platinum Medals for Level 80 in Pokemon Go
4. Enshrouded and our First Night Sanctum
5. Building My First Corvette in No Man’s Sky
6. Planning my Platinum Medal Strategy for Pokemon Go Level 49
7. EverQuest Legends – Some Additional Unrest
8. This One Simple Trick will Up Your Pokemon Go Steps Dramatically!
9. No Man’s Sky – Playing with Friends
10. In Which I Fish and Play with Water in Enshrouded
11. The Test of Righteousness
12. 20 Games that Defined the Apple II
13. The Purloined Letter – WoW Subscriber Numbers Leak from a GDC Presentation
14. Wrath of the Lich King Zones Ranked
15. Finding an Infested Mine in Valheim at Last!
16. Making Level 73 in Pokemon Go and onward to Level 74
17. Getting to The Elder in Valheim
18. The Journey to Orgrimmar and Ragefire Chasm
19. Crimson Harvest 2026 Lands in EVE Online Today
20. The Search for Music in Enshrouded

Game Time by ManicTime and Nintendo

I had eight titles with time recorded in October.

1. EVE Online – 40.92%
2. Over The Hill – 31.00%
3. WoW Forever – 9.87%
4. Stardew Valley – 8.64%
5. Valheim – 4.56%
6. Art of Rally – 1.73%
7. Stars Reach – 1.72%
8. No Man’s Sky – 1.57%

EVE Online

I spent a good chunk of my gaming time in New Eden this month, mostly pursuing the Crimson Harvest event objectives and working on that achievement to visit all of the systems in Amarr space.  I finished the former… I did not get a Molok BPC sadly… and then kind of left off on the latter with 612 of 689 systems visited.  I’ll get to that later.

No Man’s Sky

The start of the month saw me finishing up the Our Journey Continues expedition.  But once that was done I moved on to other things… though we did get the Forsaken update just this week.  I did briefly peek in on that.

Over the Hill / Art of Rally

Somewhat unexpected, Over the Hill showed up and gave Potshot and I something to fiddle with while waiting for WoW Forever to arrive.  It is a simple yet fulfilling title which clearly ate up some time.   I also reinstalled Art of Rally just to take a look at the previous Funselektor driving game.  I am much better at off road objectives that don’t have a timer than rally racing, that is for sure.  But I’ll get to that.

Pokemon Go

You’d think I could have gotten three more max battles this month… and I would have been there had I been willing to use the cash shop to unlock the artificial limits imposed by the Saudis… why is it always them?  Anyway, that will be done in November for sure.

• Level: 76
• XP Progress: 97.5% of the 203,353,000 xp needed for level 80
• Tasks for Level 77
  • XP: DONE
  • Platinum Medals: 41 of 41- DONE
  • Power up 7 Pokemon to their max CP: 7 of 7 – DONE
  • Win 100 Max Battles: 97 of 100
  • Make 10 trades with Pokemon caught at least 300km apart: 10 of 10 – DONE
• Pokedex status: 944 (+4) caught
• Pokemon I want: Phione, Manaphy, and Arceus, none of which have been released yet
• Current buddy: Swapping between Pikachu buddies to get candies for another max CP

Stardew Valley 

My daughter and I have carried on, though we missed a weekend here and there due to travel, work, and school.  Still, we try to get together to play when we can.

Stars Reach

Playable Worlds has been pushing hard to get people to log in, holding events every weekend, though that hasn’t seemed to boost their numbers anywhere close to where things need to be for financial success.  I dropped in a couple of times, though not during events due to time conflicts, and found very little that interested me.  Builders have grabbed land around the portals on the few planets, outside of which is the desolation zone where they have strip mined, which was a predictable outcome.  I ended up uninstalling the game.  Maybe something interesting will arrive at some future date.

Valheim

I have been lightly playing Valheim since it hit 1.0 last month.  There was something wrong with the original world I started off with, so spawned a new world with a different seed where things seemed to be going better.  The exploration bug seemed to be satisfied more so with Over the Hill in the back half of the month, but I’ll get back to Valheim I am sure.

WoW Forever

I did not play as much of the beta as I thought I would, but I played enough to sell me on the whole idea.  It is fine.  We’ll see how it ends up going once it launches.

Coming Up

Kind of a big month coming up.

Probably the biggest video game news will be the launch of Grand Theft Auto VI.  Since it will be on consoles only initially, and since I barely started GTA V… 98 minutes played back in 2019… that will likely be a non-event for me.

And for Nintendo peeps, there is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time coming in November as well.  I think this video sums up the tension between the two launches pretty well.

More on my front, we will see WoW Forever go live next week.  That should be comedy and chaos for at least a week as Blizz tries to deal with the onslaught of new players, old players, sight seers, bots, gold farmers, and RMT spammers trying to rush the gates.

Back in 2019 I declared that first day login issues and the like were a problem the industry was never going to solve.  We now have the most popular, well funded MMORPG studio poised to test that thesis.  They know what is coming.  Can they prove me wrong?  And will it really matter if it all settles down in a week or so anyway? We shall see!

EVE Online also has the Fractured Skies expansion coming out on November 10th.  Expect them to throw some free game time and have login rewards to entice people to try out their new stuff.  While PC MMOs probably don’t have much to fear from GTA VI, CCP/Fenris trying to soft launch, early access, paid alpha test EVE Vanguard within a week of that does feel like folly.  But there was never going to be a good time to do that, now was there?

Finally, the US has a big mid-term election on Tuesday where only voter fraud and blatant electoral interference should save the Republicans.  Can their evil malice overcome their stunning incompetence?  We shall see.

Art of Rally

If Over the Hill is a love letter to a past age of off road vehicles and adventure, then Art of Rally is the same thing aimed at rally cars of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, then into the 90s in an alternate rally timeline where Group B didn’t scrap things in 1986.  It is described as:

Race in the golden era of rally. Drive iconic cars from the 60s to Group B on challenging stages through stylized environments inspired by real worldwide locations. Will you master the art of rally?

As with Over the Hill, there is a list of vehicles that mimic real world counterparts that you can drive on stylized rally courses all over the world.

Art of Rally came out in 2020 (I picked it up during the Steam Summer Sale back in 2021), but you can feel where key ideas for Over the Hill came from.  The cars are a little rougher in design, and the landscape is much more stylized… it is a bit like driving a rally on a mini-golf course at times… but the look and feel declares it to be an ancestor.

Racing through Kenya in the il nonno 313

As with Over the Hill, I recognize many, if not most, of the vehicles on offer… both from real life and from time spent with the Forza Horizon series.  That Fiat 131 Arbath above, I am pretty sure I have that in Forza Horizon with the very same livery.

The il cavallo 803 like Magnum use to drive

It also “feels” very much like Over the Hill in the way the UI responds, the position of the camera, and the physics of motion when it comes to cars moving very fast… sometimes way too fast… and flying, rolling over, or crashing head on into things.  It also has a mod system that was clearly the model for what is in Over the Hill.

The problem with the game is that I am very bad at it.

There are videos of the game with people drifting through corners at high speed, but when I get out there I can never get that right and either slide off into the trees or slow down so I am driving like your grandmother through the turn.

While it has a variety of settings so you can do things like turn off damage so your car isn’t completely struggling after you’ve hit the fifth tree to jump out in front of you, it cannot shake the essence of the sport it is simulating, which is to go fast in a race against the clock.  The journey is important, but you need to get through it as quickly as possible to succeed.

Over the Hill, by contrast, sets no time limit on you.  The journey is the adventure and you can take as long as you want getting to the destination.  It has a problem solving element to it that, combined with often getting multiple tries at things where there is rarely a single correct answer, distinguishes it from Art of Rally in a completely fundamental way.

Then there is the fact that Art of Rally is very much a single player game.  It is you, on the road, alone.  You do not even race against other cpu driven cars.  The most you get is a ghost car that lets you visually race against you previous best effort or against a world wide best time.

When you compete in events the other drivers just have times assigned… probably with some small amount of RNG… based on the skill level you assigned them.  When you put it in super easy mode you always get the best time if you can at all stay on the road.

There is also an online leaderboard, so you can see how you’re doing against other players when it comes to times.

But you cannot race directly against somebody else.  In Forza Horizon I find that is most of the fun of the races is comically crashing into other cars and such… for me at least.  Potshot might have been in for Art of Rally if we could have been bad together.

That, however, is not the game that Art of Rally is.

Which is fine.

I am not the target demographic.  Everything isn’t about me.  And there are still a lot of things I like about the game.  It has a stylized charm with its low res models and scenery and the small crowds that are around the courses.

The crowd staying off the road in Norway

I am honestly better at driving the support van you can unlock than most of the rally cars, no doubt due to its acceleration limits, which keep me somewhat in check.

Das Speedvan before I took it out for a spin

And then there is the free roam mode, which you can unlock after having done a certain number of events.  That lets you wander the course, day or night, at your own pace… though it is a bit odd when you find that the fans are still hanging around the course after dark.

Don’t you people have homes to go to?

The free roam mode also has a collection mechanic with places to go and things to do that feels a bit like a prototype of what became Over the Hill.

A point of interest to stop and take a picture

So, while I am bad… very bad… at the actual core aspects of the game, the actual driving in a rally under time pressure, it still has some things for me.

I get it out now and again and run a race or two or tinker around.  It is likely never going to be on my most played games list, but as I said, it has its charm.  And it is available on PC and consoles.

Related:

• Funselektor – Art of Rally Web Site
• Steam – Art of Rally 

The Wolves of Mordor

The expansion itself is billed as follows:

Answer the call of the hunt by traveling to Draugardh, a distant corner of Mordor where the Free Peoples’ victory proves far from complete. Not every shadow fled when Mordor’s fires dimmed, and some of the Dark Lord’s oldest servants issue forth to threaten those who caused their master to fall. As terrible howls pierce the night, will you stand against the were-wolves of Mordor, or fall prey to the evil that stirs there?

SSG has finished, for now, farming the brief bits of the deep appendix at the back of The Return of the King about distant Harad and other points south, and has turned its eyes back towards Mordor where there still lingers a bit of the IP they have yet to exploit.

As I have noted previously, that may sound more than a bit cynical, but I am torn on the subject.  I want LOTRO to survive, to remain available, which necessitates selling more content every year.  That is the business model.  On the other hand, even the mighty appendix at the end of The Return of the King only has so much in one can hang ones hat on, and I fear some day we might end up in with content answering questions nobody cares about, like a Middle-earth version of the movie Solo.

But that might just be me.  It is perhaps the one MMORPG where the lore matters and I pay attention to it willingly.

So I do wonder where SSG will go in its meandering journey to avoid the Grey Havens and the end of the book.  I mean, technically, we could go back to Numenor I suppose.  That’s in the appendix.  It just has the problem that Professor Tolkien noted so many years agol; no Hobbits.

For now though there are still locations in the back end of Mordor to visit.  I expected the expansion to get to the Sea of Rhun, but SSG decided to take its time revisiting Mordor and only made it as far as Draugardh, on the way to Rhun, but not yet there.

Maybe next years expansion.

As previously noted, the expansion is available in three packages varying from just the content to all the fluff you might desire.

• Standard Edition – $40
• Collector’s Edition – $80
• Ultimate Fan Bundle – $130

All the pre-order goodies are no longer available, which I believe included a level 160 character boost.

There was no increase in the level cap, the company opting to halt that ongoing upward climb for an expansion by adding in a new mechanic called Survival Instincts.  That, the new nosy neighbors, and the new zones look to be the extent of the update.

There is also a brief expansion trailer.

So the Wolves of Mordor is set to go.  The launcher didn’t even take that long to update for me.

Related:

• LOTRO – Wolves of Mordor expansion page
• LOTRO – Wolves of Mordor Update 50 Release Notes