The Long Game

I am playing the long game with both Diablo III and Elite: Dangerous as a matter of course, and with Warcraft III just because that is how I feel like handling it.


Warcraft first. I completed the first main campaign, leading the humans under Arthas to Northrend where he claimed the cursed sword Frostmourne and killed Mal-Ganis before returning home to slay his father, the king, and take the crown for himself. Not a very nice guy, Arthas. It looks like the next campaign is Arthas again, this time as the lich king leading the undead in their quest to... well, I don't actually have any idea. I guess that is my incentive to continue the game.


Season 2 of Diablo III competitive play has begun, and I'm leveling up my fifth character, a crusader. So far this class is more fun than the Witch Doctor I played in Season 1, and I may hit 70 faster this time around, leaving time to get more Paragon levels and gear up for rifts and greater rifts. Last time around I hit 70 and bailed, more or less. It probably helps that I started my crusader off in adventure mode from the jump, which is a lot less tedious than the campaign, which I have had my fill of for the time being.


Elite, then. I mentioned my plan in my last entry, and that's more or less what I did--find trade routes and focus on making money until I could afford the best scanning equipment for exploring. I did detour into bounty hunting a time or two, but now I'm off for some serious exploration. I think I might take a few days' trip into the unknown before returning to sell the data, upgrade ship components, and repeat, with the idea to eventually go to the extremes of the galaxy and to afford larger and larger ships. I'm still in a Cobra, which is a good all-arounder, but could already afford a Type 6 for trading if I really wanted. Maybe after this exploration stint I'll get one of those and work up to an Asp for some really uber-hardcore exploration.

At the End of One Journey, Middle of Another, and Beginning a Third

I played through most of Journey with my 3-year-old daughter Mia beside me, sometimes grabbing the controller and walking in circles. I don't have too much to say about it other than it is pretty, and empty. The perfect thing for a bunch of breathless impressionables to imprint upon themselves in a space otherwise fairly devoid of such. A lot was made of relatively little.

I thought I would dip back into Fallout: New Vegas for some of the DLC, and I even went so far as to cue up one, Lonesome Road, for my next session. Turns out that will probably be on hold for a while.

The brunt of my gaming time over the last several weeks has been with Elite: Dangerous. It's very addicting. I've gone through an exploring phase (Sidewinder, Adder), followed by a bounty-hunting phase (Eagle, Viper), a short detour into mining (Hauler), and now I'm concentrating on trading (Cobra) with the intent to return to exploring once I can afford the best scanning equipment. If I was a bit hesitant to pick it as my 2014 GOTY, any doubt in my mind has since been long forgotten. I may play it off and on for a very long time.

Now, though, I turn my focus back to the RTS genre, to a classic I've never played to date, Warcraft III. Can I hack it? Is it as hard as Brood War? Will I get into the story and then feel like I need to go play WoW more when I'm done? Will this be the game I spend most of the next couple of months on? Answers to all these questions and more to come.