#games

Not long after yesterday's post, I finished the Janthir Wilds main story quest. I've been working through Everything Else since then.

We're a day in to Janthir Wilds. I'm not done with the story yet, but I've got some initial reactions. So while I drink my coffee, I'll write some of that down for posterity.

Janthir is out today, and that's gunna be my focus. But there was something I forgot to mention in my Looking Forward to Janthir post: my hope that the homestead instance can evolve into something more down the road.

The next GW2 expansion is live in two days: Janthir Wilds. I'm cautiously optimistic that it'll be more interesting than SotO was. At the very least, homesteading should be a good addition to the game.

The new model for updates is to not talk much about them, so as with SotO, we don't know a ton about JW. I have some expectations and hopes that I'll outline. In a few days, I can go revisit this post and see how JW did.

Something I've wondered is what role time plays in storytelling for live service games. The gaps between major updates may not translate to equivalent periods of time passing in-universe, but it gives players a lot of room to get to know characters. If you're coming in as a brand-new player and slamming through the entire story in one go, do big moments for characters have the same impact?

The next GW2 expansion, Janthir Wilds, is launching soon. I've posted a bunch of stuff about SotO on fedi, but I should organize my thoughts about that in one spot. Fair warning: most of my thoughts are rather critical.

There will be spoilers for the SotO story in this post!

In a previous Age, Comcast launched a TV channel for Gamers. It was a lot of talk shows and PR-parroting, but it had a gem that seems to be forgotten: Portal.

I got back into 40k when Rogue Trader came out last year. I had some ultramarines and necrons back in the early 00s, but what I really liked was the Black Library: inquisitors and space wolves and regular-old guardsmen being ground up into nothing to keep the machinery of a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy running for one more day.

I played EVE on and off for the first ten years of its life. I saw it featured on Portal, thought it was gorgeous, and immediately went to sign up on their forums and for their closed beta. There's a lot I can say about it, but I wanna retell a story from New Eden. Unlike most EVE stories -- tales of titanic conflicts and betrayals years in the making -- this one is tiny.

Between our second Eberron campaign and Blood Lords, we had a brief foray into Paranoia: Red. It was an interesting TTRPG that sounded up our alley, but ended up being a bad fit for the group.