To no one’s surprise, my December ended up being busy, and, while I got a respectable amount of gaming time in, I never got the time and/or inspiration to write about any of it before the new year, so I’ll dive right in and catch you up on what I’ve been up to.

The biggest news from WildStar is that I finally hit 50 with my medic. I really love the way the medic plays as a DPS, and I’m in the process of piecing together the beginnings of a healing set. I’m hoping to start running veteran shiphands and dungeons with my guild soon, but I’m not promising I won’t get distracted by something else. I like the fact that, when you reach the cap, your XP doesn’t just disappear, giving you no reason to continue with content after hitting 50, but goes toward earning Elder Gems. I guess Guild Wars 2 has a similar system in Soul Shards, but the rewards for Elder Gems seem more worth my time.
I also took a little time out to get a couple of characters up to 14 so I can have some extra housing plots to mess around with, as well as scouting out a potential alt (Spellslinger? Engineer? Warrior? None of them are jumping out at me yet, which bodes well for my medic). My main character’s housing plot (pictured above) is desert themed, featuring scattered scrubby plants, a rowsdower farm (filled with plushie rowsdowers and rowsdower statues, since I don’t think you can get real ones), and even a crashed UFO. While I really like my house, it kind of rules out a lot of decor options. The first of my two new plots is going to be winter/ice themed. I say “going to be” because so far all it has is a few snow-covered rocks and the wintersday sky from the cash shop (which is beautiful, by the way). I’m holding off on dropping the 2 plat (ugh) for the snow-covered ground until my medic is a little more financially stable, and without that it loses a lot of its effect. The other plot is a bit of a hodgepodge at the moment. It’s where I dumped all of my space ship parts from the event they ran a while back, and I’m hoping to take that theme and run with it. It’s my engineer’s plot, so I’m hoping to make a kind of garage for ship building and repairs, which also happens to make it a great place to put all of my crafting and gathering stations. I’ll be sure to post some screenshots if/when they are a little more interesting.

I’ve been making my way through the jungles of Heart of Thorns with my revenant, slowly but surely. I won’t spoil anything, but the story is starting to take some interesting turns. My wife is working on a revenant of her own now, and I’m a bit torn as to which class to work on with her. The druid elite spec looks really fun, but I’m a little burnt out on the vanilla ranger. The thief’s daredevil elite spec also looks fun, but I’m not really sure if it’s my style. Then there’s my warrior, who I really like, but the Berserker elite spec doesn’t really interested me, though to be honest I haven’t seen many (any?) in action and never messed with one in the beta, so maybe it’s better than I think. I could, of course, also bring along one of my 80s for the sake of masteries and some much-needed hero points. So far I’ve spent a lot of time jumping around between all of the above, not making any significant progress on any of them.

One day I got a random craving for a superhero MMO. Marvel Heroes satisfies this craving most of the time, but I like the creative aspect of inventing my own hero instead of playing one Stan Lee invented fifty-some years ago. I never got to play the much-loved City of Heroes for more than an hour or two at a friend’s house, and every once in a while I get vicarious nostalgia for it just from reading fans’ reminiscences. So I loaded up both Champions Online and DC Universe Online and played both for about half an hour before remembering why I never played much of both and uninstalling them. It’s really too bad, because I really like the idea of a game where everyone can run around (or fly around, as the case may be) in tights and capes with campy names flinging all manner of superpowered attacks around. How is it that City of Heroes was so well loved, yet no one has really filled its void? I know there is a variety of revivals and spiritual successors in the works, but all of them still seem quite a ways from completion despite being in production for some time.

As far as non-MMOs go, I picked up Shovel Knight on the Wii U eShop. Normally I prefer PC versions of games, but it seemed wrong to buy a game like this that’s a love letter to Mega Man and Zelda 2 on anything other than a Nintendo console. Also the Wii U’s touch screen allows you to switch magic weapons without pausing, which is as close to a good a use for the tablet as any. It’s wonderfully weird and the levels are beautifully crafted; I highly recommend it.
I picked up Ark: Survival Evolved on the Steam Christmas sale. I think I’ll save this one for its own post, but for now I’ll say that I haven’t punched this many trees since the first time I played Minecraft.

So that’s what I’ve been up to for the last few weeks. With the Holidays over with my life should be a little more normal, so I should be back to more frequent updates soon. Happy new year everyone!