Time has been warped by the pandemic. 2020 seemed to last a decade, and 2021 went by at ludicrous speed. I was thinking about my Ravnica game, which is actually coming close to being two years running at this point, and mistakenly thought we were about to hit the one-year mark.
Games, be they video games or tabletop RPGs, have been an anchor for me in these times. When vaccines finally became available, my Sunday D&D game started to meet in person again, and things were sort of going in that direction, though Omicron's intense communicability has raised questions on that front - in fact, for the first time, one of our group actually got it. (I've actually been a bit under the weather lately myself and have been isolating while I wait for test results to come back, which have taken longer than usual thanks I'm sure to the high demand).
Still, we can be thankful that we live in an era of the internet as that allows us to play these games remotely, even if I really prefer being in person (though logistics are a bit simpler when you don't have to cross Los Angeles to play).
I don't expect my Ravnica campaign will have finished by the end of the year, given the existing pacing, but I think there's a possibility we could hit tier 4 - something I've been excited for and dreading in equal parts. I am resolved that this campaign will not only let players hit level 20, but also that they actually get to play at the level cap for a reasonable time to actually get to use all those features.
There are a lot of things I need to get through, story-wise. I have some players' personal quests to resolve, and of course once they're done with the current guild bad guy, we still have the Boros, Orzhov, Selesyna, Gruul, and Dimir villains to handle before we take things truly interplanar.
From a player perspective, I'm very excited to finally play my Artificer, a character I've been wanting to play for a very long time. (And if he dies, I think I'm just going to roll up another, probably.)
I am hoping that at some point in 2022 it'll become more possible to get a PS5. I'm a little torn - I know that Microsoft bought Bethesda, and thus there's a possibility that future Elder Scrolls games might be Xbox-exclusive, so it remains to be seen where we really go with this. I'd like to play Elden Ring, and I don't want to find myself in the situation like Breath of the Wild where I only have the biggest game for the system on the previous generation console (though as I've said, I feel a bit like the kid in the Emperor's New Clothes when it comes specifically to BotW - I mean, it's fine, but I think it tosses out a lot of what I like about Zelda and brings in a lot of things I don't like about "open world" games).
On the MTG front, I'm excited for the upcoming sets in terms of flavor, though of course their mechanical themes leave a lot yet to be explored. I have a love-hate relationship with Arena's approach to building your card library - it's great to be able to get rare and mythic rare cards with relative ease, but it also means that basically everyone is always running tournament-level decks, leaving it very hard to eke out a few wins with more thematic, fun decks.
Of course, my relationship with WoW has shifted a bit in the last year. There is, of course, the flood of horrifying news about how a company behind such great games was such a cesspit of abuse. And then, a separate issue, there's just a sort of fatigue I have with WoW. I'd hoped Shadowlands would be a Legion-like reinvigoration of the game, but while it started very strong, I think the pandemic-induced delays have made its rougher edges show that much more.
Naturally, my biggest hope is that 2022 will see us better able to peek out from our caves and game with one another.
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