I woke up 50 minutes ago, at 5AM, after near enough four hours of sleep. That's not a normal amount of sleep for me - I usually get my full eight, or a little more - but yesterday was a day of upheaval and new things, after which I usually sleep very poorly, so four is actually pretty good going.
Yesterday's upheaval came in two parts. Indeed, my dreams last night featured both: my excitement over a new blogging site and the posts therein, as well as a surreal but very important sense that something I needed was entirely in the hands of somebody else, who had no idea what exactly it was that I needed in the first place.
The former, obviously, reflects my having made an account here on cohost; the latter is because I spent last evening playing the Archipelago randomizer with some friends.
Archipelago, for those not already in the know, is a cross-game randomizer that creates a single multiplayer game out of several individual, unrelated games. It does this by syncing items between games in randomized locations, with logic such that no game finds itself locked in an impossible situation. ("I need key A behind my friend's door B, but they need key B behind my door A" will never happen!)
It was pitched to me a week ago, but the only game on the archipelago list that appealed to me at all - having barely or not at all played every other option - was Dark Souls III, a game I have a complex relationship with, and which I had already replayed in the last few months.
Despite my initial apprehension, I eventually agreed to join in on a big 7-player instance last night. I would be playing with forced equip rules, meaning any equipment picked up by anyone else - meaning a card in Lex's Slay The Spire, or a charm pickup in Jonty's Hollow Knight - would be forcibly equipped to me on the spot. This was my only way to change equipment, although equip requirements had thankfully been removed from everything.
The result was five hours of total chaos. On multiple occasions, powerful +7 hammers were replaced with broken swords in the middle of boss attempts, giving me no choice but to die and run around, picking up items for everyone else, until someone found me a usable weapon again. Several times I was halfway through lamenting the worthless whip that was just forced into my hands when it was suddenly replaced by a +9 katana, or vice versa. Despite the obvious first-attempt teething issues that plagued all seven of us, the experience was so novel and thoroughly enjoyable that, though I'm barely over halfway through the game right now, I'm already seeing it in a new and more positive light.
More importantly, it's given us a lot of laughs and let us deepen our friendships by playing together in a new way. The change that Arxhipelago represents isn't the change of my Firelink Sword to a useless shortbow, but a change in my relationships with both Dark Souls III and my friends.
I feel in some way that the same is true of cohost: it's (certainly for me, someone who has never blogged in her life) a twist on my regular online usage habits, and a new way to communicate with the friends I already have.
What sets cohost apart, though, is that it also has the potential to make us some entirely new friends. So, here's to broken straight swords, big posts, and upheaval.
