Tag Archives: PC

Metal Gear Mania 2025 – Metal Gear Solid (Bonus)

I’d actually been tossing around the idea of a Metal Gear Solid series playthrough for quite a few years now. I came to love other series in the genre, like Splinter Cell and Hitman, and suspected I’d really enjoy these games as well. It also felt a little odd to have zero experience with such a highly influential series, and one that a few friends of mine absolutely loved as well. Having picked up the HD collection for the Xbox 360 at release, something like 15 years ago now, my only problem was that it omitted the first Metal Gear Solid. As followers of this blog are no doubt well aware, I’ve been a long time Xbox devotee and until relatively recently, didn’t own a single PlayStation console. It might sound silly, but not having a good way to start such a narrative heavy series from the beginning felt like a real barrier to entry.

So, what options did I have? Well, I could obviously buy an original PlayStation or maybe even luck out and find a fat PlayStation 2 with its highly sought after backwards compatibility, but I’d been downsizing my vintage console collection and didn’t really want to buy another old console, especially for a single game. Another possibility was emulation, but way back when I first started seriously considering a series playthrough my PC was pretty old and I worried about being able to emulate the game smoothly, the accuracy of the PlayStation emulators available at the time, and my lack of an actual PlayStation controller to play with. Another option was the PC port of the game, but it always sounded just a little compromised to me, though opinions on it did eventually change and I decided that would be my path forward.

A little later, I learned of the existence of the PlayStation Classic which I’d somehow totally missed. A cheap dedicated emulation machine that I could plug into a modern TV, complete with a couple of apparently good quality recreations of the original controllers? It even included Metal Gear Solid in its selection of out-of-the-box games! For a fleeting moment this seemed like an even better solution, but sadly, the more I read about the PSC and its heap of emulation issues, the more I talked myself out of the idea. On the plus side, this did lead me to learn that the PlayStation 3’s backwards compatibility was actually one of the better ways to play the original MGS. A PS3 also meant I could play an even more exclusive Metal Gear game, Metal Gear Solid 4. Sold!

“MGS on the PS3: Ready for action.”

I acquired an almost brand new PlayStation 3 Super Slim along with the original PlayStation versions of Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions, and the PS3 versions of Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection and Metal Gear Solid 4. This also led me to embark on a fun little journey to build a library of many of the other most interesting PS3 exclusives I missed out on during the era, though that’s another story. Of course, as luck would have it, the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1, which includes Metal Gear Solid, was announced shortly after this, and now Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2, which includes Metal Gear Solid 4, is due to be released this year. Talk about winning…

Still, I thought it might be fun to give those two runner-up methods a shot to compare them to my time playing through the emulated game on my Xbox Series X via Master Collection Vol. 1.

Starting with the PlayStation 3, there are actually two distinct options. The digital PlayStation Store release (which is the version that came with the The Legacy Collection) was probably the most widely played of the two. Believe it or not, my used copy of the Legacy Collection actually came with an unused code which I was able to redeem for it. Yes, in 2026! The big advantage of this version is that, of course, it doesn’t need to load from disc which means much faster load times and none of the nostalgic noise of the disc spinning and the optical pickup unit moving around. Some claim it runs a bit better than the disc version, though whether this is simply due to the faster load times is unclear to me. I’ve also seen claims that it has some minor visual issues, but again, nothing I noticed. The disc version, on the other hand, is often claimed to be the more “authentic” experience of the two.

In the brief time I ran through the cargo dock and heliport areas, I didn’t notice any notable visual differences between these two versions. In fact, the only thing I noticed is that the disc version, by default, has no smoothing whatsoever, which makes the stereotypical PS1 jaggies and particularly the dithering look absolutely atrocious. While true to the image output back in the day, a CRT TV would have smoothed the entire picture over considerably. To remedy this, the PS3’s emulator does include a “Smoothing” filter you can turn on which really helps. The digital version, on the other hand, already seems to have some light smoothing effect enabled from the get go and enabling “Smoothing” ends up smoothing it even more than the disc version. This is especially noticeable when looking at the font whenever text is displayed – you almost can’t tell the font wasn’t originally so nice on the digital version.

In any case, I concluded that I would have been quite happy to have played through this way, only losing some of the relatively minor conveniences provided by the Master Collection Vol. 1 version. Plus, the added authenticity of playing with a DualShock pad isn’t insignificant.

“The PC version running in widescreen with no filtering. Mind the mess!”

I also wanted to try out the PC port. Watching this excellent video by Retro Renew, I more or less followed their recommendations for setting up the GOG version and the excellent MGS Launcher. This allowed me to run the game in higher resolution, in real widescreen, with fixed sound and lots of other useful options exposed, and with great controller support. I’m not sure if running this version or running DuckStation or some other emulator with all of the bells and whistles cranked up will get you closer to a modern experience, but in any case, this was surprisingly nice. The game looks great running on my system at 1440p, and while it could be my imagination or just my fondness for the hall effect sticks on my lovely 8bitdo controller, I’d swear the modded analog controller support feels even better than playing the game on my Series X. This PC version also brings some interesting out-of-the-box features included in this unique take on the “Integral” version of the game such as the ability to play entirely in third person and the ability to save anywhere, and without going through Mei Ling to boot. Of course, there are some downsides; namely Psycho Mantis’s fourth wall breaking antics being nerfed.

As with playing the original version on the PlayStation 3 as above, I really only played around in the beginning few areas, but if that was anything to go on, I think I would have been quite satisfied with playing through the game this way. I actually liked it so much I decided to leave it installed for next time I fancy a jaunt around Shadow Moses Island.

“The master collection version running in High Resolution mode.”

As mentioned in my main Metal Gear Solid post, the emulated version that is included in the Master Collection Vol. 1 does include some tweaks and neat features of its own. You don’t get save-states, but you do get the ability to manage your virtual memory cards, including adding dummy saves for other games for Psycho Mantis to taunt you with. You can add in image smoothing, a CRT scanline filter, and going the opposite direction, the ability to run the game at HD or 4k resolutions, which looks quite nice, though it does appear to apply some sort of automatic smoothing/filtering, which I know some people will hate. There’s also no option for true widescreen or even a non-linearly stretched widescreen, which is a big bummer. Of course, there are mods and fixes to address some of these limitations on the PC version of the collection. Overall, given its availability, the other included contents, and Konami’s shockingly decent post-release support, I think the Master Collection is probably the best option for most players.

I could go much deeper into this topic by installing DuckStation and/or acquiring a PlayStation Classic, but alas, I’m really itching to move on to Metal Gear Solid 2.

Surviving Survival Part 4

I don’t recall how it ended up on our list, but the next game my little weekly co-op group dove into was Atlas. Atlas is closely related to Ark: Survival Evolved in numerous ways, from its studio being founded by Ark’s founders, to some shared tech and gameplay systems. Instead of dinosaurs, Atlas is pirate themed. Pirates! While I haven’t played a ton of pirate theme games, I’m certainly not immune to the allure of the idea. Sid Meier’s Pirates is a bonafide classic, I got sucked into the idea of (and quickly bounced off of) Pirates of the Burning Sea way back in the day, and I’ve almost caved and jumped into Sea of Thieves numerous times now, for example. Glossing over user reviews, there was actually very little negative criticism about the game itself, instead the harsher reviews usually focused on the controversial way the game had been abandoned. That really didn’t affect us as we were going to host our own server and treat it like any of the other cooperative survival games we’d been playing.

“Easter Island, eat your heart out!”

Except, it was pretty evident from our first few hours in the game that this was actually much more of an MMORPG-like experience than I realized. While the character creator was pretty neat, we were then dumped on a small island where we each had to do a bunch of tedious tutorial quests related to gathering x of y, running between NPCs, and killing groups of mobs; you know the drill. While progress seemed quite slow, it’s well documented that I’m a sucker for MMORPGs and the fact that we somehow accidentally got our co-op group into one was pretty exciting for what that could mean for future games if we actually enjoyed it. Eventually we managed to wrap things up on the starter island, get our first ship, and head into the high seas. Yaaaarrrrr!

Figuring out how to sail our ship was kind of fun, and the mysteries of the open sea, from storms and sea creatures to shipwrecks and floating loot, and at one point being chased by an incredibly intimidating undead pirate ship, was all pretty exciting. The first few islands we stopped at were literal copies of the starter island, which was… weird. Getting a little further away, we finally stopped at a legitimately new island and started to explore. This led to more gathering and crafting and some new stuff to fight, but honestly wasn’t much different than what we saw on the tutorial island. We then raised anchor and, maneuvering around more scary looking enemy ships marked on the map, set down onto yet another island. Exploring was kind of fun, but again, more of the same with not much in the way of new materials to gather, animals to hunt, or enemies to fight.

“Braving a storm at sea in Atlas.”

After only about 9 hours in the game, 2 of my group had decided they’d seen enough. Our time with Atlas wasn’t horrible, by any means, but the repetitive grind, occasional sharp spikes in difficulty, slightly janky feel, and lack of much a unique identity or any other hook to keep us playing soured the experience just a bit too much. Interestingly, since then Windrose, which looks a lot more like the type of game I thought Atlas was going to be, has hit early access with a lot of buzz. Maybe I can convince the crew to get back together and go a-plundering at some point in the future?

Next on the list is The Planet Crafter. The Planet Crafter was another game I wasn’t really familiar with, and with its simple conceit and cartoony graphics, honestly didn’t really sound all that interesting to me. You’re some sort of engineer who arrives on a planet’s surface and needs to manage oxygen, food, and water to survive, harvesting and crafting to build better and better technology along the way. Sound familiar? *yawn* In fact, that description makes it sound almost identical to Icarus which I talked about in Surviving Survival Tres. Except, as entertaining as it can be to be stupidly reductive, The Planet Crafter actually turned out to be one of the best survival games we’ve played together.

“On the surface of Prime, not too long after landing.”

Upon closer examination, intriguing wrinkles in that simple conceit start to show. You’re not just some engineer, you’re actually a criminal who was sentenced to do this work. Interesting. What work? Terraforming the planet! Yep, unlike the aforementioned Icarus, the terraforming hasn’t already been completed – that’s your job, buddy! Not only that, but they didn’t send you down to the planet’s surface with no resources just because like the assholes in Icarus, but something went wrong and your decently equipped lander/habitat unit actually crashed, so your survival is at least somewhat out of necessity.

While all of this is pretty neat, where the game really shines is its systems. It manages to distill the basic “tree-puncher” formula down to the point where almost everything is done with a single mouse click. At first this feels kind of unintuitive, but soon you’ll be locked into the mindset and almost never have to wonder how to perform any action in the game. It’s fantastic! The whole terraforming thing is also a pretty interesting twist on your typical survival game. Much of the tech you’ll be building contributes to the pressure and heat you’re outputting, gradually transforming the barren planet to one with a blue sky and clouds, which leads to rain, which leads to the water level rising, which leads to moss and trees, which leads to insects, and then fish and eventually mammals. It’s super cool, and working towards that goal turns the game into feeling something more like a cross between Astroneer and Satisfactory. I rate both of those games highly, so this is no small praise.

“Many hours later, the world is looking much more hospitable.”

There’s also a focus on exploring more of the map to find new resources, as well as finding more and new tech by exploring shipwrecks, abandoned habitats from previous terraforming attempts, and long buried alien temples. There’s even something of a story to go along with all of that. This is somewhat similar to exploring in those two games, but much more of a necessity, and well balanced between being risky and being fun and rewarding.

Just like in Satisfactory and a lot of these kinds of survival games, I spent a lot of my time exploring. Unlike those games, so did the rest of the group. I think that speaks volumes.

“The crew and I about to enter an ancient temple.”

We completed terraforming the planet you start on (Prime) before taking off and heading over to the moon Selenea which started the cycle all over again, only with twists in what material was and wasn’t available from the get go, including some new things, and a limited ability to move items and resources between our original planet and the moon. While we didn’t finish terraforming it, the fact that we even played so much more of the game after “finishing” one playthrough says a lot about how much we enjoyed The Planet Crafter, and I could definitely see us coming back to it at some point in the future.

Next up was a game I’ve already mentioned in this series, Enshrouded. I’m happy to report that between a lot of patching since the last time we played it, adding more content and a lot of quality of life improvements, and playing with our full group this time, it finally hit more like I’d originally imagined it would.

“Soloing an apparently evenly matched mini-boss.”

One of the first things I noticed when jumping into the game this time was the graphical overhaul it received. I believe the models, textures, and animations are still mostly the same, but at some point it got a lighting rework which made the game look so much nicer. I think it might also run a little better to boot, but that could be my imagination.

There are so many more survivor NPCs to recruit to your base, making it feel much more lively, and necessitating a settlement approach to construction even more than before. Of course, most of these new NPCs bring new recipes to craft and new quests to complete. In fact, that relates to one of my few complaints about this playthrough – there are way too many quests, and they don’t chain together like in a well designed RPG, rather your quest log is just stuffed with random tasks to complete all over the map, and every time you cross one off it feels like 3 more pop up. I’m perhaps exaggerating a little, but it did feel kind of overwhelming and tempted us to simply not worry about them that much. That said, when things got slow and we started to feel a little bored, crossing one or two off of the list was an easy way to remedy that.

“Man, Enshrouded is full of incredible views!”

That was more of an issue later, but one thing that endangered our playthrough early on was the difficulty of the combat. I’ve previously described the game as more of an action-adventure game along the lines of a modern Legend of Zelda game, but its take on combat might be more inspired by the Dark Souls series and the like. Stamina management is important, as are blocking and rolling and dodging in and out of combat to avoid what otherwise can be fairly punishing attacks. Thankfully this is much more of an issue for the first few levels of the game, as between obtaining new and better gear and selecting new skills as you level up, combat gets considerably easier as you progress.

At this point the game is still in early access so I’m not sure it actually has anything resembling an “end” quite yet, though we did explore almost the entire map including maxing out our skill points and defeating what is, at least at the moment, its biggest and hardest boss, the Fell Dragon Youngling at the Howling Peak. This was easily the most poorly tuned and frustrating part of the entire game, and we hit our heads against that particular challenge for large portions of at least two different sessions, and probably would have quit over it if we weren’t hard-headedly determined to get beyond it, even if it wasn’t actually blocking any of our progress.

“On the other hand, finally slaying this fucking thing felt great.”

We finally quit the game when we felt like we’d more or less exhausted the more notable content, and between the three playthroughs I’ve done I have about 127 hours in game. My first two were probably in the single digits, so yeah, we definitely put our time in! While it was dicey at first, in the end I think Enshrouded has earned a spot amongst the best co-op survival games we’ve played thus far. It might not be my absolute favorite, as some more unique experiences edge it out, but it’s a great game, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it when it finally reaches 1.0 (projected to be quite soon) and beyond.

Finally, on a much less positive note, is Nightingale. This is another game that I’d heard nothing about but ended up on our radars somehow, and we all picked it up during a Steam sale. I was feeling a little down on the idea of jumping into yet another boiler plate tree-puncher, after all, we’ve played quite a few of them, often one after the other, but once we started playing the game and learning its systems, it was growing on me.

“Puck is always around to creepily advise you on your next steps.”

To back up for a second, Nightingale has kind of an interesting theme, mixing Victorian-eque gaslamp setting with fae mythology and magic, and more than a little interdimensional travel. It looks gorgeous much of the time, and its systems are fairly interesting, albeit it apparently pivoted from being an MMORPG to a more traditional open world survival game at some point in its development. I don’t know much about its history, but I get the distinct impression that, not unlike Atlas, some shit went down, and as a result, the game just didn’t quite hit as hoped. I don’t believe it’s been abandoned yet, but it definitely seems to have lost just about all of its early access momentum and hype, sadly enough.

So we jumped into the game and started trying to figure out what the hell we were doing. The fact that it took a little while to figure out some of the systems at hand was actually a positive, since it meant it wasn’t quite as cookie-cutter as I’d feared. We traveled all over the first realm completing quests and exploring points of interest before finally moving on to the next one. In the next one, we set up a new homestead to serve as our base of operations, and then spent quite a while gathering, crafting, and otherwise teching up before moving on to knocking out quests and otherwise clearing the map. Unfortunately, the latter task felt a lot like what we’d done in the previous realm, which gave me some concern about the gameplay getting too repetitive if we continued to play it so methodically.

“Exploring the mysterious realms of Nightingale.”

At some point we got a quest to try out a new ability to more freely travel from realm to realm by opening our own portals, which brought us to yet another new, though much smaller realm. This one was quite different, and the promise of all of these unique realms was starting to be evident. Once we cleared it and went back to continue where we left off on the second realm, however, we made a startling discovery: our homestead and everything we’d had stored in it was totally gone; the map was back to its original state. While we still had our character progress, losing all of this work, including some special quest rewards, took the wind right out of our sails. While we found reports of similar issues evidently caused by bugs from years back, it still isn’t clear to me if we could have somehow screwed something up in the way we traveled back to this realm, or if it was indeed some kind of bug. In any case, after fruitlessly looking for some solution to restore our progress, we collectively gave Nightingale the middle finger and moved on. Major bummer!

Flying Around, Underground

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about World of Warcraft, or any MMORPG for that matter. While I skipped Shadowlands entirely (I’m sure I’ll play through it some day) I jumped into Dragonflight not too long after its launch and started gradually chiseling away at its campaign. It was rarely a priority, and the amount of time I spent on it waxed and waned without much of a discernible pattern, often with massive gaps of no activity at all, as has been the way I’ve casually played World of Warcraft for many years now, with the major exception of the launch of World of Warcraft Classic, of course!

“Vibin’ in the Emerald Dream.”

You know, I don’t think I ever wrote about how that ended. To keep it short and sweet, in an amazing recreation of how a lot of WoW guilds probably ended back in 2004, and indeed have ended in many games before and since, my dozen or so guild mates (all coworkers!) found ourselves with differing levels of interest, different gaming schedules, and different playstyles, and as soon as we entered into the mid-late stage of leveling, when things really started to slow down, that lack of cohesion started to matter more and more, and we began to splinter. At first one or two people made the call to leave, and then our numbers continued to bleed. I think I quit not long after writing my one post about WoW Classic. I might have made it into my 50s, I don’t recall, but I hit one of the very same leveling walls I remember hitting back in the day, yet this time I simply decided I’d had my fill and that the experiment was over. No regrets, it was a fun little trip back in time!

Back to Dragonflight though!

This expansion’s big new feature, Dragonriding/Skyriding, kind of sucked at first, but as I got used to it, and of course as I leveled it up, it started to feel superior to the old way of flying. Challenging at times, yes, but also much funner when it all worked correctly. This is especially true now that Blizzard allows it anywhere, with any flying mount, and more recently, has removed the need to manage your vigor – this has dumbed it down a bit, for sure, but also makes it a lot less of a hassle, and therefore more appealing for casual travel. Dragon racing challenges are fun, even if they did kind of feel like extraneous, bolted-on content. I also loved all of the customizable mounts you unlock throughout the campaign, though I wish so many of their customization pieces weren’t locked behind reputation grinds and other endgame busywork. Such is life in Azeroth, though.

“Thar be dragons! and boy, do they have a lot of quests for you to do.”

Dragonflight also added the new Dracthyr race and its exclusive class, the Evoker. Of course, I had to play through their new introductory questline just to check them out. While I don’t think the Dracthyr are quite my style, the Evoker is pretty fun, and I’m sure some will love both. I’d recommend anyone playing “retail” WoW to at least try them out, if you somehow haven’t already.

The Dragon Isles and their new zones were really quite enjoyable. In many ways the variety of biomes, enemies, and storylines reminded me of my first playthrough of Wraith of the Lich King’s Northrend zones, although with a ton of added verticality to support Dragonriding shenanigans, of course. Part of that might be due to the return of some old favorites, the Tuskarr and the Centaurs, having major parts to play. In some ways it felt like a return to form to me, especially once you make it to the Ohn’ahran Plains and The Azure Span.

At some point I stopped to catch-up with all of the dungeon related quests I’d skipped while leveling, which happened to coincide with the addition of the new Follower Dungeons feature. This basically lets you bring a full party of NPC bots into dungeons, so now even the most asocial WoW player can at least play through the more story-relevant dungeons and complete dungeon related quests. I gave this a spin and I was delighted with how well it worked. Unfortunately, I later found out the hard way that because I’d reached max level, this feature was no longer available to me. I guess I’ll have to finish those quests when I can easily solo those dungeons or *gulp* join a PUG. That felt bizarrely punitive, though I believe this has since been changed, thankfully. Another new feature to help out us lowly casuals is “Warbands” which is just a catchy way of saying that there is a lot more in terms of items and progress (reputation, various unlocks) shared account-wide rather than per character, similar to Star Wars: The Old Republic’s Legacy system. About time!

“This random return to Dalaran’s sewers was certainly unexpected.”

Once I finally beat the main story quest (I lost a lot of steam when I finally reached the final zone, Thaldraszus, plus Plunderstorm is always a major distraction when it comes up) it was onto the areas added via seasonal patches. The Forbidden Reach wasn’t that exciting, but it had some cool quests and was kind of a fun diversion. The Zskera Vaults was a cool idea, but playing it so long after their release, the excitement to keep pushing through them just wasn’t there. Zaralek Cavern was also kind of neat, giving me major Planetside: Core Combat vibes. It wasn’t until Bel’ameth and the new Emerald Dream zone that I really connected to one of these new areas. Overall, a little boring, but part of that is on me as this seasonal content, even the meatier stuff, is design to keep players occupied during the current season, and don’t quite hit the same once their time has passed.

By the time I wrapped all of that up, The War Within had been out for a little while, so I continued right onto that expansion’s main story quest. TWW feels like much more of an iteration on what was done in Dragonflight than we typically see with WoW expansions, which I definitely prefer to throwing away most of the prior expansion’s systems and pretending like it never happened. Dragonriding is still here, as are its racing challenges. The crafting system is still more or less the same (unfortunately – I’m not a huge fan) and its talent trees were expanded upon instead of more dramatically overhauled. Likewise, Follower Dungeons and Warbands were iterated on quite a bit, becoming more standard features of the game. In fact, one of TWW’s biggest (and best) new features feels like it was built on top of Follower Dungeons.

“The majesty of Hallowfall!”

Delves are basically little micro-dungeon instances scattered all over the Isle of Dorn and Khaz Algar. Most people will run Delves solo, choosing only to bring your NPC companion, Brann Bronzebeard, though you can run them with up to 4 people. There are a lot of challenges related to grinding through Delves, which can lead to an endgame gear progression track, amongst all kinds of other goodies. There’s also quite a bit of variation and customization in the system – beyond the huge number of delves, each has multiple, sometimes drastic variations, quite a few tiers of difficulty, you can level and customize Brann in various ways, etc. I had quite a lot of fun running Delves, and while I won’t go into describing every mechanic around them in detail, I did progress quite far, using them instead of my usual PVP grind for catching my gear up once I hit 80. Between my own experience and what I’ve heard and seen from others, I’d definitely call them a massive success, and thankfully, they appear to be a mechanic that is here to stay for now, already confirmed to be coming back with Midnight.

The only thing I didn’t enjoy about TWW’s campaign was its odd habit of locking various things behind completing the main story quest. For instance, at one point I really wanted to create an Earthen alt, but I had to beat the campaign to unlock it. Okay, that’s somewhat understandable, but those delves I was loving so much? I couldn’t access higher difficulty tiers nor the “bountiful delves” which have better loot until, yep, beating the campaign, despite being max level for much of the time. And I have to say, the main campaign of both of these most recent expansions felt far longer than I wanted them to, despite how much I enjoyed them overall.

“I could run around in a mech killing elites for hours on end. In fact, I did.”

TWW’s campaign was filled with all kinds of cool moments and areas. I loved the Dwarven inspired architecture of the Isle of Dorn, the city of Dornogal, and the Ringing Depths. Hallowfall and the Arathi Lamplighters were an unexpected, extremely cool surprise. I can’t say that I loved Ajk’kahet nearly as much, but as a Warcraft 3 fan it was cool to see Nerubians get so much more attention. The seasonal patch zones were really cool this time around too. For some reason I got absolutely addicted to Siren Island – I’m not sure why, it just clicked with me and I ended up almost 100%ing it. I don’t think I’d had that much fun since tooling around on Mechagon Island in Battle for Azeroth. It should come to no surprise, but The Undermine, the huge Goblin city zone, is an absolute trip. While I didn’t obsessively grind it like I did Siren Island, I really loved how much detail went into it – speeding around in my G-99 Breakneck while some sleazy jazz plays in the background, passing by all kinds of bizarre Goblin robots, trash blowing around in the streets – there’s nothing else like it in all of WoW. K’aresh, the Ethereal zone, was neat but ultimately didn’t do much for me. Perhaps I just had a sour taste in my mouth because I accidentally triggered “The Warning” questline which locked me out of doing it’s main storyline in the proper order.

I wrapped up almost all of the TWW storylines and side quests the very week the Midnight pre-patch came out. It’s a good thing too, as my Outlaw Rogue feels a lot less punchy after its stat squish and talent changes, and the patch itself has been a bit rocky, with broken add-ons, performance issues, and the occasional disconnect. Nothing new for these huge expansion pre-patches, I guess, so hopefully this has all shaken out before the launch of Midnight. As usual, I’ll probably wait quite a while to dive into it to find out for myself. In fact, I believe I’ll be taking a break from WoW for quite a while.

“If you like Warcraft’s Goblins, you’ll loooovvvve Undermine.”

I should mention that I’ve played quite a lot of other MMOs in recent years, but I’ve yet to write about many of them here mostly because I’m planning to revisit almost all of them sooner or later. Next on that list was New World, which I played a bit at launch and haven’t been back to since. I liked it a lot at the time, and I was already planning on going back into it to see how it has shaped up, but now that it is closing down in early 2027 it seems I have no choice but to make that a priority. 🙁