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The Game Archaeologist's World of Warcraft confession
As you may well know by now, I wasn't an early adopter of the MMO scene apart from a brief exposure to BBSes in the '90s and Anarchy Online and Final Fantasy XI in the early 2000s. To be honest, I found that MMOs were as intimidating -- and fascinating -- to me as pen-and-paper RPGs. You see, in high school I started buying RPG manuals and devouring them cover-to-cover, but I could never find friends or like-minded people with whom to play. The genre was a spectator sport for me; I was looking in from the sidelines and imagining what would happen if I actually got to be part of a D&D session. Likewise, MMORPGs in their earlier forms appeared as user-friendly to me as that house on the block with overgrown shrubs, a rusty iron fence, and a mangy, ever-barking mutt in front of it. Maybe it was really cool inside, or maybe it was a death trap from whence there was no escape, but I never had the courage to find out. Let me put it this way: I purchased and read the entire Star Wars Galaxies Prima Guide three times over without once signing up for the game. I'm sharing this with you because I always want to remember that what we take for granted today -- that MMOs are friendly, fun, engaging, and a downright natural part of many of our gaming lives -- isn't always true for those curious lookey-loos who feel intimidated by the scope, busy UIs, subscription fees, or the often bizarre attitudes that long-term MMO players exhibit. For me, it took one game that tore those barriers down to extend a welcoming hand to me, guiding me into these awesome games. Of course, that was World of Warcraft. And even though my geek cred would be so much higher if it were something earlier or, well, not so mainstream, that wouldn't be the truth. So today I'm going to share my story of how I got into MMOs and why the early days of WoW were some of my most treasured gaming memories.
November brings updates to Final Fantasy XIV's travel and questing
The Final Fantasy series as a whole has been marked by a surfeit of crystals, and Final Fantasy XIV's Aetheryte is heir to the tradition. Floating just above the ground, these crystals serve as both a nexus of quests and a point of transportation. Both of these functions are getting a distinct boost with the pending November version update set for the 24th. Teleportation costs are being reduced for both the major cities and three player-selected "favorite" camps, allowing players to zap from place to place faster. Return costs are also being reduced to 1 anima, allowing players who are either lost or in a dangerous region a quick option to get to safety. Meanwhile, levequest functionality at crystals is being improved, with players able to scale the difficulty of a given levequest downward once the quest has been started. This goes hand-in-hand with adjustments to the strength of enemies found in guildleves and improvements to the rewards of leve-linking, giving players more incentive to try to push themselves to the limits of what they can accomplish. The changes should be welcome boons to Final Fantasy XIV players, allowing easier movement and questing under all circumstances.
