Book of Saturday (Day 150)

Playing so much Path of Exile lately has really put me in an ARPG mood, so I've decided to revisit a game I purchased many years ago but never finished. Titan Quest is yet another in this genre of games reminiscent of Diablo II. Like PoE, the classes are not static, although instead of a massive skill tree shared by all characters, each prospective class is created by selecting from two mastery trees. These mastery trees can be combined to create a wide variety of different classes.

It's been so long since I played it the first time, I couldn't remember much about it at all, but it seems like it'll be really solid. The controls seem very smooth and fluid in comparison to some other games in this genre. There seems to be more of an emphasis on physics in particular. The setting is not the typical dark fantasy established by Diablo but instead the mythical Ancient Greece, which is pretty interesting.

I'll probably try to make some sort of summoner as I so often do in these games. It looks like there are summoning options in several of the mastery trees, such as wolves and dryads for Nature, a golem in Earth, and an undead lich in Spirit. I'll have to decide which combination I go with later, though I think Nature will definitely be one of my choices.

I'd still like to beat the Merciless difficulty in Path of Exile but I guess a short break won't hurt since I have been playing it pretty obsessively over the past few days. Playing another ARPG may not have been the best way to avoid being burned out, but I guess we all make errors in judgment. . .

I've really been enjoying having a game to play cooperatively with someone. I play League of Legends primarily because it is a way to socialize with some of my friends--in fact, it has often been the only way for me to do so. I feel like it's a much more comfortable method of socialization than hanging out in person, as terribly sad as that might sound for me to say. Recently though, a lot of my friends have pretty much stopped playing LoL entirely and so have I. I still stay logged into the client a lot of the time but I rarely play.

Even if I've primarily been playing PoE with only one other person, it's a form of socialization that I sorely need, as primitive as it might be. I used to play World of Warcraft with this guy years ago, but it had been a long time since I'd spoken with him at all. He's a former coworker--and at the time, I thought, a good friend. However, he socializes with others in much the same way I do. He doesn't. We lost touch, but I still had him added as a friend on Steam. After I tried Path of Exile and liked it, I thought of him and remembered he was a pretty big Diablo II fan. We've been playing PoE pretty much every night since then.

I feel like a lot of the people I connect with are similar to me. They're socially awkward or introverted or both. And I guess that's fine, because I would prefer not to be pressured into social situations involving large groups of people. It's just easier and more pleasant for me that way. But I like to keep touch. I don't want to just. . .vanish out of someone's life like that. But it happens all too frequently with people I've known and I'm not entirely sure how to fix it.