Monday 11/10/2025 Post: Packers Lose and Eagles Win

 I am putting as much effort into this meme as the Packers put into their offense tonight.  Another embarrassing loss for this team.  Highest paid QB in the league by the way.

 

Acceptance At Last

 Hear ye, hear ye, let it be known across the land that I, Heartlessgamer, have come to peace with the New World end-of-development announcement. Not really, but I have a grief checklist to complete, and the last checkbox is acceptance. And if there is anything certain in life, it is death and taxes; and for MMORPG players, completing checklists.

 The acceptance stage of grief is all about exploring options, new plans, and moving on.

 Except I can't move on yet because New World dropped a bunch of new content in what we assume will be the last major patch. Multiple in-progress features were released to the game: daggers, the Reekwater revamp, global storage, and more. That means there are immediately new things to do and try in New World, and I owe it to my 4,000+ hours invested to try them out.

 As far as new plans go, I was able to play a little bit of ARC Raiders, a game I was waiting on for months after it didn't get shadow-dropped this past summer. It’s an amazing game with incredible experiences. So you'll find me over there in the solo queue, beating down robots and screaming, "FRIENDLY FRIENDLY FRIENDLY DON'T SHOOT!"

 That brings us to exploring options. What MMO is Heartless going to go play in the wake of New World's demise? I'm glad you asked.

 Guild Wars 2 jumps to mind immediately, as I have put an enormous number of hours into it prior to shifting to New World as my daily driver MMO. I have tried revisiting it a couple of times during my time playing New World, and I own the expansions up through Path of Fire, but in those revisits I couldn't jump backwards to tab-target combat. New World really spoiled me with its action combat. But if New World isn't an option, then Guild Wars 2 combat is still pretty good.

 Guild Wars 2 also has an amazing in-game economy, which was one of my favorite aspects when I've played it for extended periods. It is also casual in nature with true horizontal progression. Most time in Guild Wars 2 is spent doing something of interest vs. doing something strictly for vertical power gain. The barrier to entry for PvP is also low, which makes it easy to try things out—and easier to get friends to consider it.

 Albion Online is also attractive to go back to, as I have a few hundred hours logged there. While it is a step back visually because of its top-down isometric view, it more than makes up for it in variety of features. The in-game economy is unmatched in my opinion, and I played the market aspect of the game for months even after I gave up on PvP and PvE content. It is solo and casual friendly, but at the same time offers a deep, grind-it-out aspect for the more dedicated player. There is every level of PvP content you can imagine: risk-free and repeatable through to hardcore drop-everything-on-death.  Then private housing islands, crafting, refining, gathering, collecting, and even fishing!  There is a lot to enjoy about Albion Online.

 Ashes of Creation is in alpha testing and is the "next big thing" in MMOs (if there is such a thing). I've had a mixed history following and writing about this game. I don't think it's ready for my time yet, so I'll keep on watching and waiting for its fuller form to make it to a release.

 

 

 In reality, I am going to keep playing New World. I have a few months, at least, of enjoyment left. My friends and I will also be playing ARC Raiders. Then we'll re-evaluate early next year and maybe—you never know—just possibly, New World might get a lifeline.

Daggers of Depression

 New World Aeternum released a minor patch last night and with it they pulled back the curtain on multiple pending updates to the game that were in the hopper before Amazon rug pulled the entire studio and canceled the game's development.  Chief among the surprises waiting us was the reveal of daggers as the next weapon that would have been in New World.

 Daggers show up as a weapon skill tree option and their skill trees are available.  They cannot be unlocked yet and no daggers exist in the game yet (that we've found anyways; could be a drop hiding out there).  Update: daggers can be obtained from Reekwater's new vendor but they cannot be equipped.

 

Update: you can get daggers from the Reekwater Soulwarden vendor that was added in the patch.  Do the new Reekwater questline to learn more.

 The assumption is there is a quest or some other gating element not yet in the game to be able to equip the daggers. Update 2: And we can actually equip daggers!  Holy f'ing sh!t.

Dagger skill trees

 The Well of Fortune in Cutlass Keys was updated to include a dagger cache which goes to show that they were not forgetting about the FFA PvP zone and that they had plans to update to be relevant again in the new end game system.  Unfortunately no information on how to learn the dagger cache recipe (or the recipe for the new perk charms also pictured).

Dagger cache and unreleased perk charms in Well of Fortune

 Reekwater also received a zone update and a new node of the main story quest was added to the zone. We knew a zone rework was underway for Reekwater so its good to see some of that making it live into the game. 

 This all adds up to bring us into the depression stage of our grief journey since the end of development announcement.  Daggers were a much desired weapon within the community and knowing that areas like the FFA PvP zone were getting some love for the new end game was very promising.  Everything was headed in the right direction for this game.  Thank you to the few remaining devs who are letting this stuff leak out in the update files. 

Sunday 11/2/2025 Post: Packers lose to the Panthers

 The Green Bay Packers lost 16-13 to the Carolina Panthers. Once again, an early turnover for the Green Bay Packers became an insurmountable challenge for the team to overcome.

 Matt LaFleur coached teams, whether Aaron Rodgers or Jordan Love at QB, never seem to be able to adapt when the early game goes poorly. Sprinkle in some "f*ck it, chuck it" from Jordan Love, and this game was painful to watch as a Packers fan.

 The defense couldn’t get off the field, and the offense couldn’t execute. Then Matt LaFleur made the baffling decision to go for a TD on fourth down late in the game instead of kicking a field goal.

 This is the same Matt LaFleur who, a short few years ago, did the opposite in the NFC Championship Game—where he kicked a field goal instead of going for a TD. In the NFC Championship Game, it was the wrong call, so maybe that was in his brain here. But in this context against Carolina, a field goal made a ton of sense.

 Sure enough, after turning the ball over on downs with no points, the Panthers promptly gave it right back, with our defense finally figuring out how to stop Carolina. Then we marched right down and scored a TD.

 Had we kicked the field goal earlier, we’d have been up by three, but instead we settled for a tie ball game and gave the ball back to Carolina with 2:32 left in the game. A few plays later, time ticked away and Carolina kicked the game-winning field goal.

 Shocked Pikachu face. Damn, this team is dumb sometimes. Fire LaFleur or something, I guess. 

 

What Stage Are We At Today

 

 It’s been two days now since Amazon announced the end of development for New World: Aeternum, so let’s check in on where we are with our grief.

Denial
Anger
Bargaining ← we are here
Depression
Acceptance

 We speedran the denial stage. It didn’t take long to go from news of layoffs at Amazon to the announcement that New World’s development was ending. Maybe at first we could tell ourselves it wouldn’t be the entire dev team, but that was squashed quickly.

 Anger came swiftly to the shores of Aeternum. If we did a word diagram of the community feedback, the words “fuck” and “Amazon” would be big, bold, and centered.

 Now comes the bargaining phase, where each of us takes our grievances to our higher powers — for some, that is, sadly, Elon Musk. There’s a furious rumor that xAI is going to buy out Amazon Game Studios and New World. A plausible press release is making the rounds. There is some credence to this; xAI has well-known intentions of getting into gaming, and Elon has said he wanted a game out within the year. X is probably better than the game being dead, but I have some real-world grievances with Musk that I’d need to grapple with.

 So here we sit — hoping, and for some, praying — things will change and we’ll get our New World back. Tune back in tomorrow, where we stare over the edge of that slip into the depression stage.

Note: this post was edited with the help of AI (ChatGPT). The thoughts are my own.  The grammatical correctness and em dashes (—) are the AI.   Yes, I realize the irony here with mentioning xAI as a possible suitor.