...and Diablo

All's fair in love and war. And last time I checked, this wasn't  fucking Lovehammer.

Ah crap. I've spent waaaaaay too much time on Star Trek Online over the last few days, bought too many new ships and upgrades and weapons and ALL THE THINGS. Destroyed noobs, made videos, happy stuff. The fleet is still fun and it's obvious that Star Trek Online attracts a pretty unusual crowd of players. Well, nerds, trekkies, that kinda stuff, obviously. And the atmosphere in fleet chat is always very fun, friendly and everyone is surprisingly helpful and supportive whenever somebody needs a hand with a mission or is a few credits short of a new item. I haven't seen anything quite like it since Final Fantasy XI - and that one had a lot more drama among players than STO does.

You still get the usual bunch of weirdos, of course. Captain SOULGOTH aboard the USS SOULDEVOURER of the Fleet Angels Apocalypse. Yeeeeah... that's totally Star Trek, alright. There's also a "Star Mistress Dragoon Raven" and I'm not entirely sure whether that player is just trying super hard to look cool or whether they typed out random words because they couldn't think of a real name.

The next expansion, Delta Rising, is on the horizon and will potentially turn every high level player's gear into shit, which is frustrating, because most of that stuff required countless hours and/or a mountain of real money to obtain. I'm not sure how to feel about that. On the one hand, it'll be annoying going from best of the best to utter crap in one update, on the other hand, there's my motivation to play. You know, do stuff. Work towards new items. 

Meanwhile, it's still fun to be #1

My friends are going a bit insane over patch 2.1 for Diablo 3 right now. It adds a handful of new features, most of which only entertained me for a few hours, but I'll admit it's a pretty epic time killer when you wanna switch your brain off and just hack your way through thousands of zombies and demons. A semi-educated chimp could successfully play the game, which is probably why today's Blizzard games are so hugely popular. And to be fair, I'm pretty sure our hypothetical chimp would enjoy himself during the experiment. I know I did.

What's making the game so much fun is how an expression like "build diversity" isn't just some kind of fancy buzzword, which many game developers throw around, but they're actually offering various fun, interesting setups and play styles for each class. And they do that by changing the way certain core abilities work through legendary items. Rather than just adding higher and higher damage stats and attribute bonuses or yet another proc, many legendary items make your character's abilities more powerful and more fun to use. A skill that summons a bunch of guys to fight for you might suddenly summon twice as many guys. A spell that fires a powerful projectile might suddenly fire three projectiles instead. A powerful special attack might suddenly come without a cooldown or it might no longer cost any resources to cast. And then you start building your character around these items and the abilities they enhance. 

I'm fighting rather comfortably on Torment IV right now and I'm now receiving Level 23 rift keystones, which are somewhere between Torment V and VI in difficulty. And I'm handling them okay. You can see a video of it right here:

This is a whole new situation. I usually focus on only one or two games at a time and play them till they bore the crap out of me, but right now I want to play at least four or five titles simultaneously. I'm having fun on STO, Diablo 3 is nice in short sessions, I still have to finish the story on Borderlands 2, Warframe is getting some fun new content and then there's Divinity and our co-op playthrough on Baldur's Gate. And friends are trying to drag me into Hazard Ops, which appears to be another fun, cooperative shooter, which is basically Gears of War 3 on PC. And then there's a new Dragon Age on the horizon...
I'm used to being frustrated, because I have a million games and nothing seems fun. Right now, however, way too many of them seem fun. Argh!

-Cat