January 4th, 2011

Final Fantasy XIV (PC): Um, rang the New Year's bells for gifts!

World of Warcraft (PC): Did some more exploring, including going through the insect-infested Silithus zone populated by Twilight and Cenarion, the former of which is forceably a bad faction, and the latter of which is one of those not-really-good-hypocritical-type "good guy" factions, yay.

One thing I really dislike about how is how you can only "At War" certain factions. I think the whole Cenarion thing is really shady from the start, from questionable rationale for wholesale racial slaughter ("They're hurting the environment. Somehow we have the technology to know this, and we're also sure it's worth killing hundreds and thousands of people to save this little piece of land from not being what we consider an ideal ecosystem.") to supporting outright eco-terrorism (D.E.H.T.A., a violent terroristic PETA parody that actually scores you rewards and positive reputation for assisting).

And yet, I can't battle with more than half of the Cenarion group, because the one mentioned above you can't "At War" with and attack. So eventually, over time, just by playing I'll gain reputation with them to the point where I'm revered amongst nature-first humanoids-second extremists.

Anyway, we started duoing the Hyjal missions, and they're not bad. Twilight, but at least the faction we're working for I don't dislike. I had brilliant moments, like destroying a camp on foot when the quest name was specifically, "Flames from Above," but that's nothing new. Also lolled at the Twilight guys wearing armor that exposed their abs and sides, remarking that Tam and Twilight must shop at the same place!

Went through some caves with some non-aggro Twilight who of course got tore up till I made it a point to run far ahead, leaving Tam solo. We ended up freeing some slaves, but they and their captor had a crazy fast respawn time, making it hard to get all the drops we needed from them before getting attacked (eventually we just split duties between drops and fighting).

Kristoff Manheim was funny.

I was solo for a bit after that, so I finished up exploring everything I needed for the "Explorer" title, outside of Deepholm, which I can't yet access, then did my Argent Tournament things before returning to Hyjal to do some mining. I had a close call with three Twilight Stormcallers at one point, and escaped without bloodshed... only for Tavia to return, and me realize they were next on our victims list. x_x

We did some dungeons and questing, and eventually got to a "harpy" quest. We took down the first few, then ended up capturing their leader, where we were given the option to "soften her up" or just ask for info. She gave the info freely. And then Tam, the person who wouldn't do a torture quest earlier, had the woman killed instead of freed, despite the option to allow her to go.

So I abandoned since it counted for me, and was pretty displeased with how the whole thing went down. I did some mining, did some archaeology, changed his chair to make Cinnaris more Cinnarisy, and got him to 82, so I finally hit Deepholm and got my first title. "Cinnaris the Explorer" in the house!

I did play around with some WoW and XI model viewers and make a scene of Tam beating up a buncha mobs, heheh, and took a screen from Zangarmarsh, but ended up not using it and making a quicky background. Quite a productive, if at times highly frustrating, day!