A Green Mushroom

One of the goals on my gaming to-do list was to keep playing the daily Trial Roulette in FFXIV as long as I'm having fun with it. A couple days ago it stopped being fun for me. I've never been a fan of endgame grind or the gear treadmill that happens when you reach max level in a MMO.  That's where my character is at currently in the newest expansion, Heavensward.  I was doing only one trial every day (the one I think is the most fun) but even that has lost it's appeal. I'm not done with Final Fantasy XIV.  I still think it's a great game.  But I am done with it until they do the next major content patch.  I want to experience new things in my games, and I'm not getting that from FFXIV right now.  Luckily for me, they've been fantastic about releasing regular content and story updates in the game. Now I just have to wait for the next one to land.

I'm inspired by Izlain's post on the first day of this Blaugust event.  He has created a gamer to-do list.  I'm constantly doing this in my own head as I'm working through my backlog, but I never formally write it down. But since I loved his idea so much, I think I will write it down this time just to try it out.  It might be nice to have a gaming to-do list formally written out.  Izlain did a top 10, but I think mine will be slightly less: Persona 4 Golden - Continue playing until I either beat the game or grow bored of it and decide to retire the game. Hearthstone - Get to at least rank 20 by the end of the month.  Do the Tavern Brawl's every week for card packs. FFXIV Heavensward - Do the daily trial roulette as long as I keep having fun with it. (I'm already bored of the other roulette options) KOTOR II - Finally try the PC version since it got a major official update and has a community content fix patch on Steam. Valkyria Chronicles - Get ba...

After hitting level cap and completing the story in Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward I feel like I'm pretty much done with the game until the next story patch hits. The end game content of MMOs is usually tuned to be really fun with a consistent group of people.  Typically this is called a Guild but it goes by many other names.  In FFXIV it's called a Free Company. I have a fantastic free company and they're always up for running content with anyone.  They're super inviting, friendly, fun to talk to, and a blast to run content with. "So", you might ask, "what's the problem?" Well, I have kids.  2 little kids under the age of 5.  They need things at all hours of the day.  It's better now that they're both out of the baby and toddler stage, but they still consistently need things even after they're all tucked in for the night.  Sometimes it's some water for their water bottles, other times my little one needs help with the pot...

Ok, I finally finished the main story of Heavensward.  Let's talk. This is Final Fantasy XIV's first expansion and for me it's a mixed bag.  There's both good and bad. First, The Bad.  I hated leveling through this expansion.  Heavensward increased the level cap from 50 to 60.  The first 5 levels weren't too bad, but the xp curve after level 55 drove me crazy.  The story no longer gave enough experience to keep leveling up and I had to do a ton of grinding.  I nearly gave up on this expansion at level 57, 58, and 59.  I would finish literally every quest available to me and still have half a level of experience points left that I needed.  It was infuriating. But the reason it was so infuriating was because the story was level gated... and the story was fantastic. So, let's talk The Good.  The story is amazing.  It is easily the best story in an MMO expansion that I've ever experienced.  It builds on the story ...

This still isn't my full review of Heavensward, but I need to vent a little bit. The story in this expansion is great, I have fun every time I get to do main story quests.  But, the experience curve in Heavensward is crazy. There is so much downtime between levels and since story content is level locked it gets annoying quickly. I would pay good money to just skip leveling and be able to play the story quests of this game without being interrupted. I want to see the end of the story, but I really don't like grinding levels in MMOs.  It's not my thing.  I hope this doesn't turn me off of the game permanently.

The first expansion for Final Fantasy XIV, Heavensward, launched yesterday!  I've been really excited for this expansion and I don't know if I've ever felt this invested in a MMO before.  I'll write up some more extensive impressions for my Final Fantasy Project later, but for now I wanted to talk about launch week. Although Heavensward technically "launched" yesterday it has really been launched since last Thursday.  Anyway who preordered the game could get into the servers starting late last week and get to the expansion content.  That includes me and a lot of people in my Free Company.  It's been fun being in this early access phase but it's also been frustrating. The frustration comes with trying to log in to the game.  If you can get into the game and log on to your character the servers are rock solid.  But, what often happens, is you try to log into your data center (the step before character selection) and the server doesn't respon...