I’ve been working on a fair number of drafts and getting caught up in all of them, so I haven’t posted a lot! It’s a weakness of mine I’m looking to work on in 2025. In the meantime, I wanted to talk through some of the things towards the end of the year that I was most interested in discussing.

WoW’s 20th Anniversary

WoW turned 20 years old this last November, and easily closer to 25 years of total development and maintenance age. WoW is a game that has meant a lot to me, unironically – it has given me a virtual world to immerse myself in, introduced me to plenty of people I’ve enjoyed the company of and some I haven’t, has given me confidence in myself and my general decision-making and leadership ability, and even as it has transformed over the years, it has always offered me something I’ve found worth engaging with. I’ve enjoyed my time in Azeroth and beyond greatly, and even at times when I’ve been annoyed with the game and the decision-makers behind it, it has been a hobby and hyperfixation for me perpetually.

The War Within Is (Not) Good and I Enjoy It Anyways

TWW as an expansion to World of Warcraft has been the most I’ve enjoyed the game in a while. It has also been awful with weird balance decisions, multiple game-challenging bugs and issues, and a generally-improved story that also still doesn’t go far enough in service of remedying complaints from Dragonflight. Yet I still find it enjoyable. A big part of that is down to changing how I play – focusing on alt progression, doing more focused profession gameplay, and then getting into the harder progression PvE content when I feel like it, including still-weekly raids and occasional forays into M+. Season 2’s early preview looks a bit rough on the balance side, as so far no changes are coming for Brewmaster and I feel like the content changes datamined for the Season 2 dungeon pool are concerning on the tank gameplay side, but the raid looks like it could be fun, Brewmaster is still good to great in raids, and I’m still overall excited for what comes next. Maybe let’s catch some of those bugs that have, coincidentally, been creeping up in number since Microsoft shitcanned most of the QA team, yeah?

Final Fantasy XIV Yawntrail

Okay, okay, it’s a bad wordplay joke, but man, I have been disappointed in Dawntrail. The story themes and overall presentation were pretty good, but the MSQ has been an overall letdown and 7.1 has not exactly infused me with hope. The Savage tier was enjoyable but I am winding that down on my main and my alt team is somewhat unlikely to even sniff M4S but will likely be progging right up to 7.2, the Alliance Raid has been kind of a let down for me (I have no positive sentiment for Final Fantasy XI so it’s just a bunch of nothing references that don’t do anything for me), and I haven’t even really touched side content yet – Chaotic Alliance Raid does look kind of fun but also reports infinite horror stories, I haven’t so much as zoned in to EX3 yet, and the first Allied Society of Dawntrail is something I haven’t engaged with at all on either character.

I like FFXIV and the increased challenge of most PvE queueable content introduced in Dawntrail (Savage was a bit disappointing in that regard, though) has made playing the core game better, but I’ve also been so focused on WoW goals and FFXIV has not tried hard enough to pull me out of WoW and into it at the moment. It’s a predictable weakness of FFXIV’s safe formula – they launch so little content to start an expansion and it’s not until 7.2 and beyond that actual content really starts to ramp up, so the launch window, when we should be most excited, is a let down. By the time 7.2 launches, WoW will have already lapped the game on content drops for their new summer 2024 expansions and the nature of the two games means WoW’s content is more repeatable and overall feels more fulfilling even if it is sometimes elongated grinds and timegated storylines. I just need to see more from the FFXIV team to show they understand what players are experiencing with this expansion and that they have plans to suitably change it, but until then, I can be a raid logger and still get most of what I want from the game, so I guess that’s just fine.

A Look Back at Dragonflight

I wanted to do a big write-up about the end of Dragonflight, the expansion to WoW that brought me back after the dismal days of Shadowlands, but I think I can ultimately do it better service here: Dragonflight was a good-enough expansion that served as a reset switch for WoW, playing it safe and not going far enough in some ways but ultimately laying the foundation for a better tomorrow free of the shackles of the time-gated, systems-grinding setup that the game has had since 2016. Regardless of the flaws and faults Dragonflight did have, and there were quite a few, I think the expansion did its job overall, and for me, there’s always going to be a little bit of positivity associated with it because it is the point at which I worked to improve things for myself in-game and found myself enriched by the community I helped to build. For all the iffy decisions made by Blizzard and the changing structure of WoW content as it found a new footing, Dragonflight to me is stories about Breakkas and Imacut’yu (who is technically from Legion but whatevs), it’s about me rolling into the Terros hole during progression, it’s about good calls and laughter in the weird moments of raid and dungeon gameplay. It is, already, nostalgic in some ways – and it felt like a proper return for me, bumps and conflicts aside. There is plenty of room for the game to do better, to be better – many of which The War Within has not yet learned – but it stood apart from Shadowlands by simply allowing me to play the game in more ways and enjoy the content without a laundry list of chores to do, and that was the most important lesson I wanted Blizzard to learn from the Legion > BfA > Shadowlands cycle of borrowed and gated power.

The Depressing State of the Games Industry

Gaming is my number one hobby, and so it is depressing to see how unstable the industry actually is. As the reign of AAA studios is challenged by a larger than ever offering of indie titles and novelty, we’ve seen the sad human impact of the bean counters – layoffs, studio closures, titles cancelled and blown to bits even days after launching, all the while some smooth-brained morons complain about gaming being “woke” or too full of “DEI” (just say racial diversity you bigoted blowhards!) and get the drool-faced dumbasses of the internet to nod along in agreement while noting how independent of thinkers they are as they regurgitate the same dull-minded, incurious thoughts. I’ve always sort of bristled at the idea of being called a “Gamer” because of the stereotypes and negativity it carries, and the last year has only really reinforced that. Professionally, as someone closing in on the end of a game development and programming degree, the instability of the games industry is concerning, and as a fan and person who plays video games, the industry is simultaneously exciting (lots of fun and unique indie projects, established franchises continuing in decent directions) and bothersome (the increasing reach of microtransactions and gatcha mechanics, games built for maximum monetization over anything fun or engaging outside of paying, games following a rote formula with few deviations, growing increasingly stale and dull). With the coming announcement of Nintendo’s Switch successor and a new year of releases, I am curious to see what comes of it, good, bad, and indifferent.

I Joined A Charity Streaming Team

I’ve documented here that I have been intermittent about streaming as a focus, trying to work to overcome the jitters and get online through different experiments (daily streaming streaks, events, etc), and for 2025, I’ve joined the Extra Life charity through the team started by one of my WoW raiders. So now on twitch.tv/kaylriene, I’ll be streaming to benefit my local children’s hospital and using that as motivation to get online more and vary up my streaming ideas and schedule!

Personally, In Closing

2024 was a hard year for me, full of disappointments, a death in the family, and some moments of existential dread both local to me and at a higher level (have you seen the news lately?). It was also a year with more new friends and experiences that I enjoyed. Sometimes it feels weird to use the calendar year notching over as this massive line that separates things even as I recognize as I grow older that time is just a continuous stream and the number we assign it in our hubris only serves to demarcate when different events happened, but I still find it useful in that it helps me to remember the major moments and place them in that same stream of time. I look at 2025 with a certain amount of dread and fear of what may come next in many ways and levels, but also excited for the fresh possibilities that do exist. Ultimately time is what we make of it for ourselves and I think my goal for this year is to be more cognizant of that and to work to make things I can control better for myself and those around me, which has been a guiding principle for me for a while now.

In gaming, I’m excited to see the content updates to come for my big two games, which should include two new raid tiers in both games, expansion announcements for both, and more. In spite of the relatively iffy qualities of both new expansions that launched last summer, I’ve enjoyed both games still and have thriving social networks in both. I think the biggest symbolic belief I have in a new year is the possibility of new outcomes and changes and I am interested to see how things change as we progress through 2025.