Well its been a long while since I penned something here, I’ve been stuck in the wilderness of life, what with work and trying to make a difference when working from home - and keeping my gaming life going - since its primarily my main form of escapism from the darkening world at large - I have been a bit lost.

Conan

Another wilderness I have been lost in is Conan Exiles: Ilse of Siptah. A land where survival is key and everything else is possible if you source the resources, learn how to craft it, build it and get to a point where you can raise a sustainable settlement, fend off the nasties, and start to explore the dungeons and the wild landscapes of lands of Siptah.

Theres some crazy stuff to learn regarding forging the very material to rip a tear in the fabric of the sky and pour down thralls from the exiled lands. You’ll fight them and their minions or you will capture them and coax them into joining your settlement.

Honestly, a persistent server, where you can PvE to your hearts content, with your co-op mates, its just sublime. It’s like a true MMO, but with proper survival and base building, world exploration, culture appreciation and dungeon crawling all layered with a hint of the supernatural and occult. I’ll not worship those dark gods, by Crom!

Tribe of Midgard

Yet another more concise wilderness to rush around is Midgard, the Viking lands where nightly attacks by the Hel spawn and Wandering Jotuun are always trying to smash down your settlement and demolish Yggdrasil the tree of life.

Much like a cell shaded top down isometric version of Conan, you find, gather and build what you can, you defend your village throughout the night cycle and you hunt and do quests during daylight. All alongside other players, if you want. The pace is much faster, your progress through the weapons and tools trees has to be rapid to keep up with the increasing enemy difficulty, plus you need a warband to get to the point where they can down the massively powerful Jotuun making a bee-line for your village hell bent on bringing ragnarok to your doorstep!

Intoxicating

There is something intoxicating about persistant worlds where you get to craft something together and can drop in and out when you have time and make more of a difference. In these times, being able to have so much agency in a virtual world, compensates quite a lot for not having a similar level of agency within your real world.

I’m a born wanderer of virtual worlds

I’ll rest here a while, though.