Gaming

In preparation of the Mists of Pandaria Turbo Mode in like 10 days, I'm playing World of Warcraft, and catching up on all the stuff I missed in the last three years. So far, I've leveled two characters to 70, although I skipped all dialogue and cutscenes. I just don't care at all about this stuff in this game.

I gotta be honest though, while the quest progression while leveling is fine, once you're done and max level it becomes a complete clusterfuck. Since this is the tail end of the expansion, all the story content that has been released in the last 18 months, just gets dumped on you. You just get tons of new story quests. One third of which you can't start, because you need some reputation level with a faction or something. Another third needs a previous story to be done first, and the last third you can actually do. Your quest log is full of all that useless bloat, and it becomes a nightmare to sort through. Then there are tons of quests that are supposed to introduce you to the various new mechanics that were added, but those basically drown in the sea of all the other shit. I'm not the biggest fan of the forced story and gating of everything behind it in FF14, but at least I never needed a guide to find out which campaign quest I should do next. Also, important quests that unlock stuff are usually marked with a different color indicator, so they aren't hard to miss. That's something Blizzard should definitely copy. Luckily I have a bunch of friends, who play the game continuously, who I can ask about the most important stuff, otherwise I'd be lost.

I'm really into collecting pets and pet battles in the game, so I've been spending a lot of time flying around, catching everything new, etc. I wonder why Blizzard never added pet battles to the companion app or released it separately for mobile. Back in the day, I'd definitely spent a bunch of time just doing random battles (and would probably still now). I might have to look into setting up the game on my Steam Deck and try out just exploring, catching all the pets, or do the simple quests.