Here we are at the end of the week and I am finally done talking about Sony, Star Wars, and Free to Play conversions. It is time for the Rift update, a game that has no intention of going free to play. Good for them.
And I do not really have that much to report.
We seem to have an issue getting all of us online and in-game at the same time.
Saturday night rolled around and there were just four of us again. This time Jollyreaper was in and Earl was nowhere to be seen.
We decided to do some rift stalking for a bit in hopes of Earl showing up late and to help bring Jolly up to speed with the group.
But in the randomness of the game, there was no big death rift invasion like we faced last week. There was the usual fire rift or two.
Beast of Flame Defeated!
And there were footholds were scattered about and there were wardstones to be retaken, but it was not the same as the sort of unified event that hit Freemarch last week.
Kill the blue thing!
So while we advanced our guild quest a little bit, we ended up clearing out most of the stuff in the vicinity.
Guild quest - We're already level 2
We went back to Kelari Refuge and picked up the quest path where we Jollyreaper left off last time we were on. This turned out to be a good thing, as some people in the group missed a couple of the quests along the way.
In a sort of leap-frog quest method, we got up to where Earl left off, then ran on ahead for a bit, scaling a couple of the “better in a group” quest chains.
Getting to the top of this tower... better with a group
We ended up out on another stretch of beach up the coast from Kelari Refuge where we ran into one of the first sets of quests that were not really group friendly.
It wasn’t the huge pain of the New Halas starter quests, and it certainly wasn’t the first quests we had run into that did not do group updates, but it might have been the time that we had a couple of quests as a group that each required individual updates. We were scooping eggs out of corpses and picking up underwater sparklies and that sort of thing. Nothing really challenging.
But when quest objectives do not give group updates, you start to wish for a way to track where everybody else in the group stands. There might be a way to do that in Rift, but I have not figured it out. Fortunately, we work together on Skype, so we just kept calling out updates until we were all finished.
It sure was pretty out on the coast
The coastal quest hub cleared up, we decided not to get too far ahead of Earl and leave the questing at the next hub, the mine.
Our last goal for the night was to make it to Meridian, which was not much of an effort at all. As I said previously, Freemarch seems like a big zone to me until I decided to travel across, and then I seem to get there pretty quick. It is actually an interesting illusion, though it might just be an artifact of my own perception.
And so we quickly found ourselves on the steps of the Defiant capital city.
Welcome to Meridian!
Parked there, we will enjoy the benefit of rested experience, something that seems a bit odd to me. Why do you only get rested experience if you camp in town? Quirk of the game I suppose.
Freemarch before us
But now we have access to all that the capital city has to offer.
Now I have to remember to tell the group to patch before Saturday. This weeks Ember Isle update was about a gigabyte. And while the patcher is efficient, it only took an hour to download over my slow DSL connection, that is still an hour I would rather be playing.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 