Time to Loot Journal: February 2021

I spent a good portion of this month unwell, unfortunately. Strep throat straight into a bout of Bronchitis, so I spent a lot of time at home feeling decidedly sorry for myself. At the very least, doing better now. The cough will persist for a while yet but at least getting out of my chair and walking to the kitchen doesn’t make me feel breathless any more! A major plus, let me tell you.

Black Desert Online was a good game for a month feeling like that. It isn’t too demanding to play and even better I can set it to do something AFK when I need to rest again. And some days were filled with the need to just lie down and try sleep when I could.

I’m finding that as my health recovers though, so too is my appetite to try out new things again. This past weekend, I tried out a bunch! Which we’ll get to in due course… But first, the look back!

Looking Back

One Year Ago

• Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem launched, albeit with a slew of bugs including server capacity issues which knocked online play out of action for a while. Some of those bugs being fairly game-breaking, right in the final moments.
  
  Wolcen has since had a year of patching which was well required and has now made it (at last) to a content update. Still not enough for me to jump back into yet- but maybe next year.
  
• I woke up, and got up, early — without a reason. Yes, I do think this noteworthy. It probably won’t happen again for another 5 or so years. This spawned a bit of discussion and despite my attempts at the time, I must admit a year later, I’m still no better at early rising than I was then. Still far prefer to stay up late and sleep in than the other way around.

Two Years Ago

• Anthem launched. Twice. Early access (i.e., for those who preordered) Feb 15th and then for ‘real’, Feb 22nd. And what does Anthem get for its two-year anniversary? Well… One year with not so much as a hotfix, and then the death knell — Anthem Next, the attempt to reboot the game, has been axed. RIP Anthem.
  
• We had a discussion on Microtransactions and I worked out that if box costs had risen in line with development costs of AAA titles, we’d have been looking at roughly $97 USD for a standard edition of a game.
  
• The Division 2 had a private beta which I managed to get access to. I ran through a series of impression posts — on the early game, the end game, and the Dark Zone (PvP).

Gaming Goals

February’s Goals

• Dragon Age: Inquisition — Complete the main story of the base game.
  Which is to say, I needn’t necessarily have completed the DLC chapters. Although if I can — all the better!
• Black Desert Online: Reach level 51+ on new Seasonal Character
  I started a Musa, one of the many, many classes new to me. It’s still possible I’ll reroll it to something else, or even return to my original Ranger. If I take that latter route, then my goal instead shall be to reach level 56, and unlock my Ranger’s awakening weapon and skill set. (As she is already 51.)

Smashed one goal and utterly failed the other one. I kept going with my Musa, and made it to level 59. Like I mentioned in the intro — BDO has been a great game where can switch my mind off and just… play. I did use some of the AFK Combat/Skill tomes here and there which helped a lot too though.

My mega interest in the game is waning somewhat, but I do still want to complete the season pass (which will entail making it to 61) before the end of the month. We’ll see though.

Dragon Age: Inquisition though… Haven’t so much as launched it all month! I’m not going to remove it from my sidebar yet, but I’m also not going to set another goal for it this month.

March’s Goals

• Black Desert Online: Complete the Season Pass!
  This ends with the close of March, so it’s now or never. This will entail making it to level 61 and some other gear and kill goals along the way. The gear side I’ve actually already done, the kills might take a bit though as they include boss kills and I’m unsure that any of my existing kills will count.

And I think that’s all I’ll set. I might end up jumping back into Dragon Age: Inquisition and completing last month’s goal, but I won’t set it as the final levels of BDO and the boss kills will certainly be enough of a goal on their own.

Games Played February 2021

I’m more than a little suspect on the total hours this month. I can’t be sure how much of BDO’s counted time was truly active time. BDO does have a feature whereby you can minimise the game to the task tray while doing an AFK activity, but I didn’t always do this.

Because I learnt fairly early on that my PC will put itself to sleep when I do.

On top of that, there were a number of times where I literally fell asleep at the keyboard and then trundled myself off to an actual bed when I noticed without shutting everything down.

I considered trimming the hours by hand to account for this, but really I have no idea to what. Possibly more than half of BDO’s time should be cut though.

In any event, WoW is still well represented in my hours despite dropping out from a few raid sessions. I used the time instead to work on switching my Covenant back to Venthyr, a process that was less painful than I feared and I’ll no doubt cover off in some detail later. :)

Also the Outriders demo hit, although I haven’t had time to put my thoughts together yet. (The cliff-notes version though is: It definitely has some jank around the edges, but it’s solid. The asking price is my only real reservation at this point given the aforementioned jank!)

The Blog

8 posts published in Feb. Between being unwell and the short month, I’m OK with this and it could possibly have been a lot worse!

This brings the overall total to 375 posts published (including this one).

Most Viewed Posts

1. WoW Shadowlands: Changing your Covenant
2. Deep Rock Galactic: The Solo Experience
3. Humble Choice: February 2021
4. Humble Choice: January 2021
5. Transport Fever: Things I Wish I Knew When I Started

A pretty crazy number of people interested in what happens when you change your Covenant in WoW at the moment. I’ll be sure to follow this up with the changing back post soon! Who knows where things will land after the 9.0.5 patch that is supposedly going to be tackling issues with Covenant and Legendary balance.

1. This is a guest post I wrote for Magi