It’s said that you don’t really know an MMO until you get to its endgame. Once you’ve done all the fun leveling up, what keeps you logging in, night after night, when there’s no real game goal to strive toward?
That’s the question, right? Each week, when the Coriolis Storm resets the deep desert, Calrain asks what we should work toward for the next week. Gear or vehicles? Spice or plastanium? Maybe try to get some more people and do the deep desert labs? Or perhaps we should focus on the Landsraad?
These questions would have easier answers if we were on a server with more active people. So preface all the questions above with, “In a deep desert where we’ll rarely meet any players…”
We do know other people exist; someone is leaving these Harkonnen bases in threatening places.
This sets up the possibility that we could be harvesting the same large spice blow; Darkonnens on one side, Atreides on the other, wondering who will shoot first.
That’s the reality Funcom would like you to live in. In the reality we actually live in, a worm would come by within seconds and ruin all that prep and potential PvP. No, the real PvP happens deep in desert labs, or in northern bases when the players who own them are logged out.
Though last week was crazy busy for me, Calrain and I did make time to take the carrier and crawler north of the line on the hunt for spice. Cal flew the carrier, I rode slung beneath it in the crawler. We knew there were large blows further away, but the carrier flies so slowly when hauling that we contented ourselves with medium spice blows. Cal would lower me down; I’d use those skills I honed in Farming Simulator to harvest the spice; he’d pick me up. If either of us heard any worm sound or ominous music, I’d stop, he’d pick me up, and we’d check for wormsign. Sometimes, it turned out we were just being paranoid. Sometimes, it turned out we’d just escaped disaster.
Cal and I finished up the DLC. It was kooky and creepy and fun, and at the end, we got permission to build a treadwheel. A treadwheel is basically what a monowheel would be, if it had two wheels.
No, not a bicycle. A treadwheel.
Treadwheels turn out to be super useful in the deep desert, especially once you’ve attached extra storage and a scanner, as I have done. They are really zippy and can bring you all around several clusters of rock islands in seconds. As I built this week’s deep desert forward base, I took time out to harvest fuel cells and titanium from the area. Zip zip zip.
Thanks to Stingite blazing the trail, we were able to make our first appearance in the Landsraad — that’s Order of the Wombat at number three. Turns out a lot of the awards are pretty cool; custom weapons and armor and color, loads of cash, rare crafting components…
All it took, for us, was killing a lot of NPCs, turning in Mark 3 shield generators, and some scrap buggies we found in the Basin.
This week is a little more challenging (although Stingite has gotten us to the number 2 position purely by killing stuff). Most of the minor Houses haven’t unlocked, yet. Our forward base this week is near the House Novebruns control point. I hunted down their representative in Hagga Basin and she said she would tell me what it is they wanted… if I handed over 300 spice melange.
Now, maybe that’s something other guilds have plenty of, but that would be a real struggle for us at this time. Plus, handing her that much spice would open that achievement up to everyone, both Harkonnen and Atreides, and who wants to be that generous?
I said “no thanks,” and took off. Who wants her *&(*&^ house vote anyway.
