The Great Installation

After the hardware mess of Thanksgiving week, I was presented with a new challenge… or a new opportunity if you prefer.

I had to figure out what to games to install.  This was something of a test, as it determined what games I really want to play and which I keep around “just in case.”

The first two were easy, as they are games I have been actively playing on a daily basis.

World of Warcraft
Of course WoW had to get installed.  Warlords of Draenor is still new and reasonably fresh and my friends and family are playing.  An install from scratch wasn’t too bad either.  I don’t use many addons and I do not modify the UI much.  Even so, I was surprised at how much the game saves on the server side of things.  I only had to make a couple of tweaks and download a few addons and I was back and running.

EVE Online
EVE Online is the other one that was a no brainer, a game that appears on the “Games I Play” section of the side bar of the blog.  Getting EVE installed was quicker than WoW, there being simply less assets to download.  I think WoW was 24GB while EVE was less than 8GB.  But after the install was another story.

There are a lot of finicky little settings that EVE stores on your system.  I spent a lot of time fiddling with chat channels and the overview and what appears on the Neocom bar and so on.  Every warning or alert that I ever dismissed and told never to bother me again is back and live.  And so many notifications.  I had this about under control and then CCP launched the Rhea expansion this week and all the icons changed.

Not that the changes were necessarily bad… I no longer think “what does the Pentagon have to do with the market?” when I go to buy something.

Visual closure does it…

But learning the new icons at a point in time when they were also mixed up from the order I was used to wasn’t helping me much.  And logging into my alt restarted that whole process.  At least there is a utility out there to copy settings from one account to another, so once I have my main set, my alt can be molded in its image.  I’m just not sure when my main will be set.

Installing EVE also meant installing a few helper programs, like EVE Mon, the GARPA Topographical Survey, and EVE Fitting Tool.  That’s the way things roll in New Eden.

With those two installed and running, the question of what else makes the cut came up.  The next choice was actually easy.

Steam
Technically not a game, but it enables the ability to play a lot of games.  I have around 120 in my library, though 40 of those were from the time I bought every PopCap title during a Steam sale because I wanted Peggle. The price for everything was the same as the Peggle list price.

Of course, with Steam installed, I had a long list of choices.  From them I chose:

Total War: Rome II
The current staple of our somewhat on hiatus Friday night group.

Defense Grid 2
The fruits of a Kickstarter campaign.  I still have a few levels to get through.

Shroud of the Avatar
Another Kickstarter game.  This one is hardly done yet, as the large yellow letters at the top of the window indicate.  But Lord British has put the whole thing on Steam now, so I can let that take care of keeping it up to date rather than the native installer/patcher, which has been a bit wonky.  And it relieves me of having yet another set of log on credentials to remember.

And that was about it for Steam.  Just three games.  I will probably install Civilization V again at some point when I get the urge to play, and maybe War Thunder, but I didn’t feel the need for either right away.

After those, I only installed one more game.

EverQuest II
I have been telling myself for a while now that I am going to go back and play EQII again for a bit.  I have some nostalgia welling, what with the 10 year anniversary and all.  There is a whole post exploring HOW I should go about that in progress, probably for next week.  But in order to get there I have to have the game installed.  Fortunately, I long ago gave up on modifying the UI for the game, so the defaults were pretty much what I was working with already.

And that was pretty much it, which leaves some games I write about, or claim I pay attention to, not on my system.

Those not installed included:

EverQuest
The high holy of games when it comes to nostalgia, I am so lost and so out of touch with the live game and the current expansion that there is little point in my installing the game.  At some point, if SOE decides they are going to create another progression server or farm nostalgia in some similar fashion, I may go back.  But for now I am out.

Lord of the Rings Online
I think it is time to admit that there has been a parting of the ways between myself and LOTRO.  Buying a Lifetime subscription to the game was the best MMO deal ever for me, and I got my money’s worth and then some out of it.  But after the last class revamp I haven’t been able to bring myself to go back and relearn the game.  Add in the fact that I haven’t been more than a few steps beyond the far side of Moria in all these years, and it might be time to admit I am done.

Rift
While I loved the original game and the instance group made their home there for a while, the Storm Legion expansion never clicked with me.  While their free to play model is the most generous around, I still have no real desire to go back and play, much less so with Trion’s Glyph client now a requirement.

There is also a pretty long list of games I wasn’t really playing or paying much attention to, which did not get installed again.

• World of Tanks – Haven’t played it in ages
• GuildWars 2 – Never really clicked with me, plus I lost all my account info
• Star Wars: The Old Republic – Gave it a run again earlier this year, but never really got into it
• Need for Speed: World – Our some-time driving game diversion, haven’t logged in for over a year
• Diablo III – Played through it twice, liked it post patch, but not enough to play again
• Path of Exile – Was a good Diablo clone, better than D3 probably, but network issues chased me away a long time back
• Torchlight II – Since I am listing the other pretenders to the Diablo throne, in the end this was the most disappointing of the three, as Runic released it then pretty much walked away
• Neverwinter – Home for our group for a bit, not a bad game, but down the priority list
• PlanetSide 2 – I tried this at launch, but it quickly became a hack-fest, so haven’t been back since
• Dragon’s Prophet – SOE’s Asian flavor of the month, didn’t really hook me

That is about the state of my games right now.  I suppose this leaves me plenty of room to install whatever great stuff shows up in 2015.