Six Degrees of April 8, 2016

Six Degrees

The six sites I looked at this week diverge significantly from those from previous weeks. There is much less focus on MMOs this week and in particular, there is only a brief mention of Warcraft at all, compared to the first week which was almost all about WoW. These sites cover a wide variety of topics from poetry to role playing to horse breeding to video game music.

The six sites I visited this week are:

1. Casual Aggro
2. I Have Touched the Sky
3. MMO Ramblings
4. Aywren Sojourner
5. Murf Vs
6. Waiting for Rez

Casual Aggro

Ocho over at Casual Aggro hasn't posted in a while, but his last talks about retro-gaming. In his Tales from the Backlog series, he looks back at Champions of Krynn, a Dungeons & Dragons type game with graphics that fit the time. These games were great. While they are not as fancy as today's MMOs, these games captured the story and imagination of fantasy role playing games, dare I say, better than today's graphically intense triple A titles. And they were not easy – leveling up usually involved multiple saves and resets. I'm glad to see these games still around and perhaps some of the developers now could learn a thing from them. How about we not make everything simple until max level…perhaps people wouldn't complain about a lack of content then?

I Have Touched the Sky

Rowan Blaze over at I Have Touched the Sky talks about something he calls ARPil in which bloggers talk about their RP characters. I think this is a wonderful idea to give your role play characters backstory and flesh out their lives. Apparently this is the brainchild of Pizza Maid, and if you go over to her site, you can see a list of the questions people are talking about during the month of ARPil. I've never gotten much in to role playing in MMOs, but I've seen plenty and read plenty of RP stories about characters in MMOs. This I think ties in pretty well with the first article from Casual Aggro that talks about old-school role playing games. There was always more of a sense of role playing in older games – these days I see people racing to get to end game content and completely ignoring quest stories and the flavor of games. Perhaps ARPil will get more people involved with the journey of games rather than the destination of the end game.

MMO Ramblings

Whoa. Melbrankin over at MMO Ramblings writes an interesting poem he calls Dust. I applaud him in being poetic – I am horrible at poetry and usually have a hard time understanding or even reading poetry. I like the site though with poetry and art, I just feel a bit intimidated by his creativity.

Aywren Sojourner

Finally something a bit familiar…Black Desert Online. Aywren posts about horse breeding and trying to level up in Black Desert Online. This is the first on my journey this week that actually talks about MMOs. Wow, from the past few weeks, I thought there were tons of MMO blogs out there, but while it is good to see such diversity, it is nice to get back to something I've been playing. Horse breeding is one f many things you and do in BDO to make money. Similar to other sandbox games, you can always make money on things that speed up travel…Eve = ships, Wurm = horses. I find the analysis of horse breeding interesting particularly because I will one day be trying out animal husbandry in the game as well.

Murf Vs

In this post, Murf goes back to 1992 to reminisce about Street Fighter II and the music. During the month of April, Murf is going through a year of his life and picking a video game song for that year. For 1992, Murf chose Guiles Theme from Street Fighter II from the SNES. It's pretty cool going back like that and listening to music that meant so much at the time. I remember many tunes from games that will stick with me for the rest of my life…music from Civilization II, Diablo II, and many others formed the back beat of many years of gaming. I never got into the Street Fighter series but I know it's been pretty beloved by a large number of people so I'm sure there are a bunch of musical themes that people can recall from it. Wit this post along with the poetry from Melbrankin, I really feel the topics I've been writing about are pretty mundane.

Waiting for Rez

Ironweakness talks about a new MMO available on Steam called Tree of Savior. I have not heard about this game before but it looks interesting. Apparently, there are 80 or so classes that are going to be available – that's quite a few choices to make, but I love all the options. I guess whatever class you want to head towards, you begin as one of four base classes – cleric, swordsman, wizard, and archer. It seems the biggest issue is the tendency to out level content. Ironweakness is currently running a cleric heading towards a monk, having already leveled up an archer and a swordsman. The game looks like it has a neat art style and from the post, sounds like something I should put on my list of games to check out.

This week has been a pretty good Six Degrees week. Lots of diversity and a new game to check out. A lot of people reminiscing this week…I wonder if that's because it's Spring and people are looking back at the start of the year. In any case I enjoyed looking at thes posts and sites and am gonna keep up with this experiment.

Morning Ramble 2.57