Three faction PvP. Who even likes that stuff anyway? You get bits all tangled together, everyone looks the same, what color are we supposed to be?These objectives are complicated and hard! Why do I keep getting double teamed? Well, that's the way I like it, and it seems like the bandwagon is loading up quick. All aboard! 2012 is the year of the threesome!
Rift is the latest to jump on the train and if they manage to capture their incredible depth of talent focused in just the way they know how to do it, I think it could be a very strong contender in this three sided arena. Oh it might seem like I'm biased towards Rift due to the content on the blog, but Guild Wars 2 has been the light at the end of my tunnel after WAR collapsed into a heap. The PvP in Rift just never clicked for me, not mechanically or the feel or anything like that, just for a purpose. This could set up a big change.
Guild Wars, at least from the beta event, didn't seem to have actual WORLD PvP, so much as it had MASSIVE server vs server vs server battlegrounds loaded with keeps, siege weapons, and littered with objectives everywhere. From what I've heard, TSW has actual world PvP, but that's been through whispers and light on details. The specifics on how affected players on hasn't been revealed to me. Rift appears to be dedicating a large portion of Stillmoor to open PvP which might be more similar to how WAR handled things, minus the doors and keeps. Crafting will be taking on a role in building up armaments somehow, but details are light at the moment, and the test server goes live on Thursday.
Maybe it was all just a conspiracy to get us to be nice to each other for a solid month and somehow change the underlying cynicism of blogging entirely...
What? No, no, don't mind my errant rambling. I'm sure it's nothing. Let's just get onto the part where I tell you things about blogging shall we?
Yes, come down further, away from that little bit. No one wants to see that anyway.
Yes, down here.
Ok. Blogging. You're thinking about it. But why the hell would you want to do this? I'm giving up precious free time right now that could be much better spent playing the games that I write about. Honestly, just because you're a gamer doesn't necessarily mean that you'll have an inclination to write about it. Do you already write things? Are you a long-winded commenter? Do you frequent forums and twitter and other methods of socially stalking developers and other like-minded players? These are good signs that you've got a knack for writing spunk loads of content. The rest of you, well...
It's not much of the inspirational "Go get 'em tiger!" introductions to blogging that you might be seeing around the internets, but I think it's a much better tempered one. Not everyone can handle it, and I've seen quite a few fizzle over time. It's one thing to feel pressured to ignite that natural talent latent inside of you for the good of all mankind, but it's quite another if you intend to throw some shit against the wall because someone told you it might be fun for a while. Lets cut the crap, you didn't come here to get slapped around and discouraged, obviously you're a reader and you think you might have something as a writer. Lemme just expose myself a little bit.
I started writing a journal as part of a summer assignment as a kid, my parents pushed it on me and I pretty much hated every minute of it. My life as a poor kid was boring as fuck. They noticed that my entries were really short and literal about things that I did during the day, which wasn't much. After a couple weeks of that, they told me to make up stories about what I wanted to do. There was a surge of creativity that flowed from my clenched fist like waterfalls of lead on that lined paper. I did in all reality spend a fair amount of time outside playing in the dirt, pretending I was a giant and crushing ants, or running around in the woods acting like I was a tiger a la Hobbes, much to the dismay of my little brother. They gave me license to take that childish freedom of imagination and run wild with it, as long as I wrote something.
That was 5th grade or so and I haven't stopped since. Through middle school my journaling tapered off because I discovered DnD. This was a whole new outlet for creative writing. I took it upon myself to create entire fictional worlds filled with adventure, and eventually with a group of friends we began to play in them. Writing took a turn to storytelling and world building, but it didn't change the talent. During high school I was allowed to take two years of creative writing classes during which I wrote a 600-odd page book on the school computers, it was rough and unfinished, but it got me all the English credits that I needed. Also, as a point to brag, I was the only kid in my school to pass the creative writing portion of the standard state testing scholarships. Won 2500$ in grant money toward any college in Michigan.
After high school I spent a handful of years travelling the state, living on couches, generally enjoying life and pulling in experiences. I didn't actually settle down and start gaming until I got a real job and became involved in a couple browser games. One of which had a creative writing contest, so naturally I entered it. It was supposed to be three entries of 1000 characters each, micro-stories. I read that as 1000 words each and wrote a short story in their world setting instead. The site owner wrote me a personal email telling me that he couldn't accept the entry unless I could somehow shorten it, which I did, and won anyway. I got set up with lifetime access to the game and any of the betas they ran. Kinda cool, but it was just a little webgame and they went out with a whimper a couple years later.
2008 rolled along. Warhammer Online fired up.In many ways, WAR did manage to free the community to talk about so much more. I've heard it referred to as a turning point for gaming blogs, at least the ones in the circles that I follow. For all the blogs that were involved with it in the beginning, for all the ones that took part in the Warhammer Community Promotion Initiative, dozens of us have grown up into better things. My time blogging for WAR brought out some of the best stuff that I've done, it opened up a new aspect of writing that I hadn't had much experience with. A community of writers, supportive, helpful, critical. Overflowing with shared knowledge, different views on the same experiences. It's a zen type of feeling, where everything flows well. You have a place in the world. I think with blogging, and this community in particular, when you write for yourself and you pay just as much attention to those around you, it's easy to fit in.
It's worth it you know. People are innately creative, in their own ways. I believe that. For some of us it's stripped away at too early an age, but chances are if you're still playing games there's something left over. Don't take me the wrong way, I have a history of writing stretching back as far as it possibly can. That doesn't mean it's required to stand up a blog. Any time you get started, make it real. Write what you want, how you want. Write about things that you feel like you could talk about for hours. Ramble! I do some basic spelling and grammar checks and generally re-read my work before it gets posted, but it doesn't always make sense. Sometimes that's the beauty of it.
Maybe you're more structured in your life and creating lists of things to do and check off comes easy for you. That's great! That might be a cool concept for a blog, checklists of things to do. Creativity comes in many different forms. If yours naturally comes out looking like something formal, don't let anyone try to tell you that it's not how things are done. Hell, we have one great blogger in our midst that does everything using bullet points, and I think that's pretty cool. There's bloggers that seem to get out barely a dozen sentences before they wrap up a post, and it's totally legit. Not everyone needs to have huge walls of text, maybe you don't either. Try a bunch of different styles on your own and see what fits you best.
Want a place to practice? Try 750words.com I used to journal there back when I was getting started with a blog. I needed somewhere anonymous to deal with some unpleasant things in my life and it was a great reminder to let things out. Stress relieving at times depending on what you're using it for. The theory is that good writers can write something every day, at least 750 words. That should sum up most of the waking moments of your life while your brain is kicking on and can occasionally be pretty revealing when you really let your subconscious out to play.
Today most of my writing is done on Evernote.com. it's online so I can access it anywhere with a pretty minimal login. It saves constantly for those derpy times when I manage to close the window mid-post or hit the wrong key combination somehow. For the most part it even formats properly when I want to turn something into a blog post, which is a huge bonus. Nothing was worse than getting deep into a post for the formatting to go sideways from a copy paste. Also, I don't feel as guilty leaving half finished rants, for some reason. But that's a personal thing.
There's my insightful post on getting a blog. You might not be cut out for it. Some people are creative in other ways. If you find yourself naturally engaged in topics however, I'd guess a little bit of practice in writing will get you moving in the right direction. It seems counter-intuitive to waste a bunch of writing on journaling when you're interested in publishing a blog. Sometimes that's just what it takes to get the juices flowing. Not to mention the practice, if you can't go back and read your stuff out loud, it's probably not quite time to start hitting that publish button. There's very few professional bloggers in this group, and you can pick out the more e-famous ones pretty easily. That's no excuse to write up a sloppy mess. Have pride in your posts, treat them well, and make it something that you love. Writing is for yourself first and foremost, but you never know when someone will make you an offer that might have otherwise passed you by.
Ah, Nude Body Inspectors, just in time for the weather to start warming up and the ladies to wear things a little more comfortable.
Wait, no... that's not at all what NBI is for. Lets try that again.
It's been a while since we had a chance, as a blogging community, to encourage those of you out in the readership to join our ranks. Well now is the time! For the next month blogs all across the interwebs will be reaching out for new bloggers to speak up and let us pimp your wordsmithery! Do you have an opinion? Are you relatively cheerful, or maybe just a colorful asshole? You too could get involved in the wonderful world of blogging! Come on already, we LIKE reading. New hands on the keyboard are exactly what I'm looking for, and there's tons of support to be had with the NBI.
Head down to nbihq.freeforums.org for all sorts of advice, ideas, and a huge host of some 70-odd bloggers that are more than happy to help out. Or ask me! I'm a pretty nice guy when I get to drinking!
If you're interested in writing about gaming, MMO's, your cat fetish, laundry techniques, how to grow pumpkins, or whatever, this is the month to do it. My personal preferences lie with the first two items, but to each their own. I'll have a couple posts throughout the month about why I write, how I got started, and how I keep it going sporadically every couple of weeks with random huge ass walls of text.
Jumping straight into things, as I've put off this post for far too long now. TERA is not a game that I'll be playing in the future. I had a good taste of the "beta" and there's a pile of things that I'd rather not do for a couple thousand hours. The combat is not enough to justify the game for me, and really it's the only seriously redeeming feature. There's other things that take away from the game. TERA makes all the classic mistakes of a modern MMO, improves on very little, and lacks depth. I found it difficult to form an attachment to my character, or the world he lived in. The story was convoluted from the start with poor execution, save for small bits. Once past the intro, you're hero #5123124, go out and adventure so you can be ready for defending your homeland that we let fall.
New characters go through a phase where you're level 20 and have a ton of abilities assigned to your bar (unmodifiable by any means for some reason), along with combos already set up. My Mystic had a problem with this because telling your minion to attack things is done via ability, otherwise they sit around until something has already started taking chunks out of you. Once I got into the game proper I was able to force my minion to initiate fights, but it was missing from the intro. It's odd, giving you a ton of power right from the get-go, then stripping you all the way back down to level 1. I don't understand how that works, if I recall correctly, you start out on a beach talking to a dozen quest givers preparing the army to start fighting, then you have to go save some commander that went on ahead of everyone else. One would imagine this gets revealed to you as to why, but then you're time warped back to when you first encounter newbie island, or whatever it's called. That's the function of it.
Questing is nothing special, save for the occasional cutscene. Yeah, cutscene. There's about a dozen from level 1-20, and they're not terrible. I watched the first 6 or so, but once you get into a grinding mood it's just more stuff in the way. That's what the game does for you, it throws a whole bunch of quests at you, you kill many things, click on some things, drag back the loot and collect xp. Welcome to MMO's 101. Yep, it's a quest hub system. Sometimes you're lucky and the hoard of mobs you hacked your way through aren't a quest line you have to complete at the hub. Sometimes. Every 4 or 5 hubs you get an interesting encounter prefaced by one of these cutscenes. Not that it's challenging, just something to get your attention. Usually an elite mob with a couple of adds that follow him around. Still solo-able.
Apparently, the Guild leveling systems work in a way that I wish ALL of the questing systems work. You get a kill X mobs quest, once you fill it up the counter keeps increasing. Killed double the mobs? Turn it in twice! Now take that concept and track the mobs I kill in an area, that way when I walk through 20 mobs, and you ask me to go kill 20 of them, I can just point at the entrails all over my body and collect my damn loot. Bears, bears, bears! /PaulBarnett Alternatively, all the random quest items lying on the ground should be pick-up-able so I can go up to the dude who asks me for 10 foozles, and dump my load on his face.
Combat. It's different. I wouldn't call it better, or an improvement over what I'm used to, but it's different. It's "action" oriented, which means instead of locking onto a target, your abilities just fire off in whatever direction you're facing. Ditto for the mobs. Unless you're fighting ranged mobs, or unless you're also ranged. You see, when you shoot one of your ridiculously short range ranged abilities, you have to have your crosshairs right on the target. Also, you're stand still during the animation which takes away some of the "action". Melee have abilities that throw them around the screen which makes it a little more action-y, at least they can move out of the way while attacking. As a Mystic I didn't have a whole lot of problems. I basically ran around mobs in a big circle and popped my two AOE's as they came off cooldown until everything died. Oh, and the pets are basically useless, so there's that.
The Slayer was more fun to play, but you also missed a lot more often. Attack animations fired off in whatever direction you were facing, often times dragging you along with it regardless of where your actual enemy might be. There's no turning mid-swing to reposition, and if you're swinging right into certain death, you can't cancel and roll out of the way. This is why I've been quoting the "action" aspect of combat. Instead of there being actual action where you manipulate your character throughout the combat, really what you have is targetless combat animations that force you into planning the entire animation out as part of your movement strategy. That's not MORE freedom in combat, it's less. Decouple the combat animations from movement and you'd have a convincing "action" MMO, but instead you're bound to predefined movements that you just "have to get used to". So your basic combo moves you forward a bit during the animation and you can manipulate this into kiting enemies.
So that's the action part of the MMO, sorry if I burst a bubble, but it's really not as much action as I was expecting. Personally I think it's a step back from tab targeting and ability spam. There's still plenty of movement if the mobs are designed well, standard MMO's could accomplish the same thing if they used the same gimmicky easy-to-dodge abilities instead of more persistant attacks. Turn all of your abilities into ones that work in a specific direction instead of being able to fire off on the fly. I just don't understand why people see this as being more liberating.
Generally I try not to play MMO's on my own. There's two or three other guys that rock these things out with me on a regular basis and I have to say, with a party, this game is a joke. I was pulling multiple groups of mobs and watching them all get crushed nearly as fast as I could gather them up, often without a scratch landing on one of us. It was a novelty to just rol through content nearly uninhibited in a game, but it loses it's allure quickly. The linear paths of the game are too easy to walk, let alone run down. There are a few areas that open up, but the game always feels like you're fight in enclosed spaces. Even when you throw in extra instances to increase the mob population and lower the amount of other people getting them, it's still full throttle slaughterfest with a buddy or two.
It's just not something we're looking for. Maybe the instances have some challenged in them, but to be honest, I couldn't get those guys to stick around the 20 levels to see the inside of one, let alone in a single weekend. There's too much out there waiting that beat out a post-Korean grinder. It's not a beta people, they've had this thing released for a while now in Korea. All the normal bugs have already been worked out, that's why it seems so polished. I can hardly credit it with a smooth beta experience when the full game has been in full production for over a year. If any bugs existed, it was in the translations they had to make. Not core elements of play.
Ending on a high note, I did have a few good things to say about it. The game was really quite good looking. Character models were top notch compared to other MMO's out there right now. With the graphics kicked up to full detail the effects look great. The combo system looks great in theory, but I didn't have much luck customizing it to my liking. The classes were widely varied and the ones I saw in action looked like good fun. This game will do fine, there's enough in the way of aesthetics and a different combat system to keep players for a while. I'm not sure if the subscription will stick around for more than a year, but I've been wrong on a few occasions.
It's just an opinion after all, my experiences are most likely not going to mirror anyone else.
I've only had one solid play session since 1.8 hit, and tonight we're going to take a crack at the new raid zone, but I have some initial impressions.
First off, if you feel like your class got nerfed, suck it up and deal with it. Warriors, I'm talking about you. You are not a single cookie cutter class, you can still DPS very well. Sorry Trion took a shit in your cereal bowl, but really it's coming down to a Learn To Play moment. I can tell you inside and out all the intricate details of running a Cleric. Learn your class, adjust, and get back on top of the charts before your guild is too embarassed to have you hanging around.
Sorry, there were a lot of tears in Global when I logged on. Then I played with a couple competent warriors whose DPS hadn't changed in the slightest.
So yeah, there was some chatter about the new raid zone Infernal Dawn as well. We have our share of elitist guilds on Byriel, only one of them were able to down the first boss, and these were guys that had a full 20 in Gmark gear decked out with legendary weapons and all that stuff. They swear it wasn't the mechanics of the fight, just that it might need to be tuned a little more to make things reasonable. I'm not sure what boss it was. A couple of the guilds tucked their tails and walked away after a few wipes. I hope that's what we do tonight, smacking my face against a wall for hours at a time is bad form. You can either do it, and there's little things you're getting hung up on, or you can't and the encounter isn't right for your group yet.
That's almost always been the case for us. As we've been progressing there's certain phases you go through with new bosses. You learn the mechanics, 20 people take their time to do this. Often multiple pulls. You tweak the party layout for specific healing and DPS requirements, sometimes Tank changes are needed. If you're still not dropping the boss at this point there's probably some gear requirements that aren't being hit by all 20 people. It's a process. However, I'm pretty sure we're gonna walk in there and be lucky to get whatever boss it is down to 80% at any point. Maybe I'm a bit cynical.
We could always get back to fishing I suppose. Yeah, fishing. It doesn't take up a normal skill slot either, neither does Survival, which means you can have your three crafting skills of choice, plus these two. Or maybe you can have 5 crafting skills total. I suppose I haven't tried that part just yet. Fishing is simple, kinda like in real life. You stand near some water, use your pole to cast, and right click to collect fish. Theres a difference in fish caught depending on deep or shallow waters. Shallow is water you can stand in, deep is water you swim in. You can catch smaller fish to make bait, which appears to increase your chances of catching different rarities of fish. Some of them can be turned in for zone notoriety or a box with some lures in it.
Survival is basically cooking and learning how to pitch a tent. Yeah, that's the line they use in-game at the trainer. You catch fish and buy ingredients to make all sorts of things that rival the Drink vendor. A couple of the food items have little buffs on them which one would assume would be desirable. The buffs are spread out over levels too, so you'll probably be coming back to lowbie zones to pick up ingredients to make sure you're maxed out. It's a nice incentive, but I don't see a whole ton of people picking up on Survival, it's a little more intricate than the rest of the skills. Unless fishing takes off and people are throwing all kinds of fish on the AH for cheap anyway.
There's new artifact sets that you can collect from fishing, a whole slew of new achievements from fishing, apparently there's new gear across the lower level ranges (or that might have been broken, saw shard unlocks constantly), there's leaderboards for various activities in case you don't think you e-peen is quite big enough on it's own. It's just Rift being Rift man, they added a whole bunch of content. Instant Adventures can now take part in Ember Isle, which is really cool if you're out trying to get some XP. The Ember Isle raid rifts apparently have some new high end gear as well.
I guess I'll have to go with "no" on the title question. This release is just as solid as any other adding things to do in and out of combat, adding new items, achievements, and areas to explore along with new ways to explore. They seem to be on a good pace for adding things. One day, I'll have to write about another MMO, and I'm sure I'll look back to Rift wishing they had the same development process.
The last day in Boston. Well, we woke up on time, had everything packed, and made our way quite uneventfully out of the hotel and on the road to the convention center. Sorry, nothing cute to report in the morning hours. I'm not one to mess around when check-out time is concerned. Too expensive.
The problem with Sunday was that I had to work on Monday, and the drive home was 18 hours with the stretch of driving alone being the last 4 hours. I figured I needed at least 6 solid hours of sleep to be able to function at work the next day after a 4 hour morning drive, which set the timeline to leave PAX by 2pm at the latest. We left the hotel slightly after 10am, then proceeded by car to the convention center.
I think I may have mentioned my initial experience driving through Boston as being slightly less than positive. Getting to the convention center was no exception to this. GPS took us on a route that was simply wrong, underneath the convention center to where the busses enter. There were no signs remotely helpful aside from the ones that said "No cars, ha ha bitch. Turn around." So we did, and I was presented with difficulty. All directions available to me apparently led to some sort of freeway entrance. Except one, and that was the one that I didn't take.
The turnpike entrance right near the convention center takes you nearly 7 miles outside of the city before there's a potential exit from it, and there's two tolls, somehow, before you can get turned around and head back into the city. 20 minutes later and we finally got near the convention center again. This time, ignoring GPS directions, we followed the path we had been walking for the past couple of days. Parking at the convention center was full, but there was a parking garage about 6 blocks further down.
Yeah, we parked there, got on a bus, and finally made it back into the con around noon. Needless to say, I was frustrated. Frustration leads to alcohol. I went to the bar. Two drinks later and I'm back to normal, or least more forgiving. Right, we had a goal when we made our way back into the con, and that was to get loot. We did a tour around the periphery of the booths where people were selling all manners of things, but nothing was really popping out for us to buy things.
Upstairs at the main entrance there was still a handful of PAX gear leftover but it was getting awfully scarce. They were out of a few t-shirts that looked interesting, and the selection of sizes. I met MC Frontalot, 579th greatest rapper in the world and bought Final Boss from him, even had it signed! I was also ridiculously surprised to see Graham from LoadingReadyRun in the booth next to him selling T-shirts, so I bought one of those too. By surprised I mean I actually said "Whoa! You're here!" to which he replied "Yes! I am!". We laughed, cried, had a beer, made sweet love together, then I paid for the t-shirt and left. It was a weird moment.
At some point we also went back to the guild launch booth to bother Ferrel for our guild shirts. A short trip up to his room was accompanied by a brief conversation about some secret stuff that I might get myself shoehorned into. Blogging related I suppose. I regret not spending more time with those guys, but everything went by so fast. On the way out I stopped to grab some coffee at the Starbucks in the hotel and we wandered off to find the bus back to the parking garage.
Then the driving. There's nothing to talk about with the driving this time around. We listened to both of the albums we bought back to back, which is some pretty good nerdcore stuff. Highly approved, recommended, yada (Hey look! Free singles!) yada. We took the NY turnpike almost straight out to Buffalo, then some other highway deep into the heart of Ohio. We ate at a rest stop in Buffalo and had some terrible pizza from what must have been the saddest girl I'd ever seen. I climbed into the back at around 10pm, wrote up PAX Day 1 and 2, then passed out for a bumpy ride. Kayin was dropped off around 4am, and I drove myself off to work.
All said and done, PAX was great, Boston was great. Definitely adding it to my list of things to do every year. Next time I'm taking a train. Driving isn't nearly as exciting, nor rewarding, as I thought it might be.
I forgot for a while what it was like to have a TV in the bedroom, let alone not have a controlling factor in what was on it. I don't mind the new Thundercats cartoon actually, it's really quite well done. For the first 20 minutes or so that I contemplated getting out from under the amazing comforters in our hotel, I watched it with a twang of nostalgic bliss. Today was the last good day of PAX for us, so obviously we both overslept and none of our devices were left to charge at night. That's what vacation is all about! Another morning wasted waiting for things to charge, but at least we did some proper planning as to different things we wanted to see.
We figured out how to get to the convention center without going miles out of the way, but I still managed to nearly screw that up by taking a wrong turn. We weren't terribly late getting out of the hotel, managed to catch a train by 10:30, detour for Starbucks, fail epically at procuring breakfast and made it into the convention center by around 11am. First thing on the list was going to be the College Humor/Dorkly panel. The line we ended up in was for the Konami/Bandai ShiftyLook panel. Yeah, I was the one leading the pack again.
ShiftyLook.com is taking old, obscure, and often unheard of video games from the pile of Namco/Bandai games and reinventing them into webcomics. This was technically a morning show, and the line of people was incredibly short. I should have taken it as a sign that we were in the wrong place, but it turned out to be worthwhile. I had front row seating and the handful of writers were a mere handful of feet in front of me. They talked about the challenges of bringing these characters to life from backstories that might be as deep as "Game Start". It was an interesting way to go about picking up old content and turning it into something new.
http://shiftylook.com/news/pax-east-2012-shiftylook-photojournal/ has handful of coverage from the panel. They gave out some t-shirts with various characters on it. There was a demo of their tablet game Rocket Fox, even though the adapter was flaky and kept losing signal unless it was held just right. They raffled off some ShiftyLook promo kits and an iPad at the end of the panel, which considering the 20 or so people meant pretty good chances. I didn't win an iPad though, I didn't win a party kit either. Actually at the end they busted open one of the party kits and just started giving away first come first serve of the stuff in there. I got a limited print t-shirt for their SCAR comic. It's pretty slick! Needless to say, Shiftlook.com is on my daily list of things to do for their variety of webcomics. There's pretty much something new every day.
After the panel with a slight fuller bag of loot, net two T-Shirts for me, we made our way back to.. where else? The bar! It was slightly after noon and I think I took their last pint of Sam Adams Brick Red for lunch (or breakfast depending on how you look at it). I don't often endorse eating convention food or anything, generally it's terribly overpriced and of poor quality. PAX wasn't any better. We had to eat quick, the Future of D&D panel was in the short queue! We buried food quickly and got in the line just before it filled up. If there was one panel I was please to have had a chance to see in person, it was this one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yoa_xQTya8Y
I've been vaguely following DnD since they took that hard left turn away from AD&D/2e. I mean, who hasn't? If you played their online games, various Neverwinter games, anything with the DnD name, you were basically playing 3e via PC. I'm not intimately aware of any games that were made with 4e in mind, and after a few hard looks at it I decided that wasn't the route I wanted to take my players either. Oh, did I mention I've been DM'ing a game for a little over 13 years? The new generation of game that Wizards of the Coast picked up took DnD from TSR and had their rapacious ways with it. That's OK. It was their to do as they will with and the only say I had in it all was the vote I made with my wallet.
The future however, is smelling a lot like the past. I think after 3e, there was another hard left turn, and they realized how far away from what people thought DnD really was. 3e turned everything into a skill, streamlined combat down to a science, and standardized magic to an almost sterilized state. 4e threw the skills out the window, busted out a grid and minitures, then told each character the thin line they were allowed to walk. The best games I've had the chance to run were the ones that allowed the characters freedom to escape from the restrictions of skills, abilities, and the other things that we define our characters with. Players are most into their characters when this happens because they start creating the narrative they're playing in by ignoring what skills it might take to accomplish something and just detailing their actions to the point that I as a DM go "Man that sounds cool. I'm totally allowing this shit."
That's what DnD is all about! It sounds like they really want to get back to that old school feeling while preserving all the relatively good decisions they've made over the years. I can see the d20 system sticking around for combat. It makes perfect sense. Abilities will be taking a back seat again, skills are going to be more muted and used more to specialize, feats will be your new source of awesome things you can do (abilities and powers), and classes will be returning to a much smaller list with more specilized versions looking more like the 2e class kits. Among other things. Look, just go watch the video. It's an hour long, but if you were sad about the departure from either 2e OR 3e, it's worth the long watch. I went and watched the whole thing again, and I WAS THERE.
It's happy good time feelings coming from the guys poking around in my most favorite pasttime. I did tweet a handful of things while I was at the show, but my phone was on the verge of tears with it's battery quickly draining of life. The poor thing. I did what I could for it, we headed back down to the freeplay area. While waiting in line we were checking and it appeared that the internet was back and kicking some ass. There were a dozen people playing LoL, some in CSS, L4D2, and other internet-y types of games. After a brief wait we were seated. Kayin, the poor guy, go freakin' hosed. His internet was busted, but I managed to sneak in back to back games of LoL with my phone and battery both charging from the USB ports in the PC. I was kicked from my seat after a solid 45m right at the end of a game, literally, 30s from burning down the core. I gathered up my things, watched it burn down, and logged out as the next dude was seated.
Kayin got in line to play Diablo 3 while he was waiting for my ass, and he was still in line when I got done. I took the opportunity to have more beer (this is a theme for me). Yes, all alone, surrounded by the most peer-est of peers that I've ever had, I drank at the bar. This is where I mention how theraputic PAX has been for me, all the people around just spilling forth gaming frothyness. I only needed to overhear conversations in order to keep myself interested. I even had a reason to interrupt total strangers with random factoids that were otherwise useless at my regular bars. I've decided by this point that PAX, gamers, people that blog and talk and play videogames, you are my people. I totally dig you all, and want to hang out forevers. That might be the beer talking.
Kayin and GettCouped found me eventually, maybe? I should check, but it's 4am at the time of this writing and I'm impatient as to how the rest of this all went. I think I hit the bar at 4pm or so, Kayin was stuck down there for about 30m or so after I finished my first beer. Nothing else was on the docket that we really wanted to see until around 7pm which gave us 3 hours to wander. Did we meet up with the Iniquity crew then? Perhaps. It was one of those days we headed down to them. You know, I think it must have been, because I met Jeremy Crawford who was down on the show floor fighting off a hoard of screaming DnD fangirls (totally fabricated that). It was a "holy shit, idol moment" because Jeremy, if you paid attention to the DnD segment, is the lead developer for DnD Next. I stammered at him for a minute, thanked him for the attention to old school and stared into his eyes for a couple too many seconds before walking away abruptly.
Thanks beer. You make things weirder than they need to be. At least he didn't spit on me or something. We met up with the guys after that. I remember now! They were having lunch pretty late. I don't really remember who was who, but the voices were all dead on. That was great, as it always is, matching up voices to the faces in my head and then seeing them for real. They never match. They don't even come close. There's a word for that feeling that I can't think of right now. Anyways, it was an experience that I hope to repeat in conditions that allowed us more opportunities to drink together! Alas..
We headed back out to the floor and took a shot at The Secret World (noisy, but accurate) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMUXYnDOMEI . I picked up a nifty little Templar dog-tag which is appropriate as I signed up for Templars a year ago. We had a chance to get hands on the game too. I can't say there's a whole lot there I want to talk about. The game just didn't play well to begin with. It's on the same action MMO kick as a bunch of other games, but it didn't feel good. The feel is important, as a melee character when there's no apparent tactile response from the things you're beating on it's a problem. The skill system probably looks way more complicated than it actually is in practice. After about 10 minutes I made the decision that this game was going on my "Pass" list. If you can't convice me with an action MMO that it's going to be fun within the first 10 minutes, it probably isn't going to be.
We wandered the floor for a bit after that. I don't recall much specific until it was time to hit up the next conference hall, How to NOT be a Games Journalist. My brief searching on the googles has no hits for me on some sort of transcript. Great panelists, great stories of various mistakes that people make when submitting content to be published by the bigger sites. It was all a lot of common sense stuff. Don't make typos, do basic research on your facts, be polite and PG-13 at your most crude moments. Basically, a lot of my posts wouldn't pass the tests unless I toned them down a bit. It was an enlightening panel nonetheless and the only one of the weekend that I went up to ask a question for.
I was curious what they thought of submitting a piece that I had on my personal blog to be published on their site. Rarely, I'll do a topical piece that's current. You know how these things go, one site pushes out some post asking critical thoughts or giving a biased opinion and everyone goes off on their own tangent, those sorts of posts. Rarely. Maybe never. Anyway, there wasn't a consensus but Susan Arendt, the speaker, shot it down quick. She would never post something that's already out there and public. That's understandable. However, I was told that sending in a small piece of something original with a link back to the blog so they can feel out my style would be fine. I enjoyed this conference in large part to hear AJ Feely repeat multiple times that she had a job sniffing panties. I did my research, she had a job as a Returns Processor for womens clothing.
I really wish I had the transcript from that panel, but it's just not out there. Yet. Perhaps. After we got out it was beeline to the bar in the Westin attached to the conference center for the annual PAX East Tweetup! (Pics here http://s149.photobucket.com/albums/s62/eq2graphics/paxeast2012/?start=all ) What a great group of tweeple! They kept my buzz going the whole time and I felt right at home chatting them up. It was probably the highlight of the show for me. If you're reading this and you have a chance to make it out to PAX next year, we need to make this event bigger. I'll even order a cab back to the hotel if I need to so I can stay later. I talk with my hands! It's great!
Someone instigated me into growling about EA and their various ways to suck the soul out of things. I don't mind, I know I have my opinions and people like to hear them whether or not they agree. DLC is a tricky subject, if it's done right it works, that's all. There was a lot of Warhammer that came out in me when I start talking about the good ol' days, and a fair amount of Shadowbane. It's funny when we all get together and sort of talk about what we REALLY want MMO's to do for us. Worlds man. Places that you live and breathe and have adventures. The persistent places that you build and can be destroyed. I hope that one day a game pokes it's head up that allows us to actually live in it like Shadowbane or SWG did back in the day. It'll have to play well, have open worlds and stories, and probably need to be incredibly huge to accomodate.
After the tweetup we caught a ride back to the hotel and crashed hard again. Check-out time was 10am and there was still enough show to get us loaded up with swag. If there was any left.
Is this real life? Who the hell left the window curtains open? God damn the sun is burning holes in the sheets. My white flesh cannot take this nonsense. Oh, legs, you need to work for a minute. Straighten out a bit, ow. Ow. Ok, fine, I'll just hobble over here using the bed as support and close these curtains. Ugh, now I have to go back. My head hurts. I kind of need to crap. So tired. Maybe I can just crawl back up near the pillow. Oh, here's my shorts, probably not a good idea to lay around in my underwear with another dude in the room. The snooze button means it'll ring after a couple more minutes, right?
:Four Hours Later:
Well, we missed the PAX Keynote by about an hour before I woke up on Friday. I didn't charge my phone or the battery overnight so that needed to be done before we could leave. I also needed to figure out how the hell to get to the convention center using public transit. This was a totally foreign concept for me. We figured out that parking at the convention would have cost something like 15$ per day, and taking the T Line cost us each 15$ total. Not to mention the novelty of riding a train. I think we finally ended up leaving the room by about noon or so.
There's something about being underground that totally throws off my sense of direction. I'm pretty good with maps and all that, but the trains went underground, and half the roads were underground, which meant the surface maps were covered in all sorts of confusing markings that left me pretty baffled as to which way was up. The first day we got off at the Broadway station which was about two miles south of Summer street that the convention center was on. We eventually got up there, but it was about twenty minutes of extra walking and a cabbie trying to point us in the right direction as we looked pretty lost. There was a nice detour near the USPS mail depot and a lot of fences that I wish weren't in the way, but eventually we found stairs up to Summer Street and got inside.
Finally, walking into PAX. This was my place, these are my people, holy crap these people are weird in ways I hadn't considered being possible. Strangely, I was comfortable with this. We wandered around for a while grazing on the glow of the random screens of gaming goodness all around us. I knew the first thing on the agenda was to meet up with @FerrelES and see what sort of agenda was going on. There wasn't one! I think @hawkinsa1 showed up around then as well. Now, I'm not really sure what I'm doing at PAX by this point, it was basically like all the things I derp around with on the internet, and all the people I socialize with on Twitter had suddenly come to life and congregated into a giant hall. Naturally, I had to poke everything.
Now, I'm not the sort of guy that waits for things. There were lines to get your hands on some of the bigger games. Borderlands 2 eventually had to be rearranged because the amount of people in line for it was a fire hazard. Max Payne had a similar issue with their lines. These are things that I don't really NEED to see. They had big production set up for these games, it was obvious they had to sell big to make up for it. Screw lines, I was all about the open demos where people would walk up and queue behind the person you wanted to play after. Kayin waited for about 3 minutes to play TERA, handy enough there was a rep to explain to him some of the details about the game.
I had already written off TERA prior to this encounter, so I wasn't really expecting anything that could possibly change my mind. The childlike race in skimpy armor left a sour taste in my mouth. I didn't want anything to do with a game that could sexualize what might be interpreted as children. That's dirty. However, it had some of the best actual gameplay of the show. The action MMO genre is kicking off this year pretty hard. TERA has targeting, but only as far as getting details on your target, there's no way to lock on, and you have to aim your attacks to land on the critters. This worked quite smoothly from the looks of it.
Now, I could see this becoming something of a burden after you kill the umpteenth mob, but he had a level 30 character that already had some interesting ways of keeping combat interesting. TERA has a system that allows you to set up reactionary abilities that fire off during one of your main abilities, and it's customizable. You can create your own combos that you trigger mid-combat. The amount of skills at level 30 was pretty considerable, which makes the amount of combos that much more interesting. It looked like something that I should probably have a crack at, even if the art style isn't really my cup of tea. They probably should have given out beta keys or something, if I can't get some sort of demo time with it, I'll most likely pass even though it was interesting to see in action.
Another game we had a chance to get our hands on was Raiderz, another action MMO. Now, normally I'll quickly discount any game that has a z in the place of an s. It comes off as a less than serious game, or childish I suppose. They had shared a demo space with the new D&D game however, and had a considerably less populated line. Hell, it was a game, and why not? That's all the encouragement I needed. Unfortunately, the rep they sent over to explain things to me spoke in pretty unintelligble broken English with a heavy asian accent. It was loud. I gathered he was going to allow me enough time to complete a quest with a characted. I picked the skimpy chick with the giant hammer. I have this thing for giant hammers, and skimpy chicks for that matter. I plowed my way through 10 mobs and got a feel for the combat a bit. Apparently there were ways to dodge, parry, counter, and other things, but I wasn't quite savvy enough to pick it up on my own.
Incompetence aside, the game played quite well. The abilities were like the other action MMO game in that you needed to control yourself as to when you timed them going off or else they would just miss and the cooldowns would be burned. I'm not sure if the hammer chick was the best choice, it seemed a couple of her buffs were pretty trivial and the rest were on longer cooldowns too. I had a charge, and AOE, and a leaping attack to go with my basic swings. I have to admit, I died before the first 10 mobs dropped, mostly because I was just mashing buttons trying to get a feel for things. When you're getting rocked by multiple attackers in that game it's really hard to recover. Apparently, I was supposed to wait until after I finished the quest, because I could have won a nifty plastic cup with the game logo emblazoned on it. Impatient, confused, and thirsty I let some other guy behind me start a new game before the rep came back. I think they gave out a beta key. I don't think I'll be activating it.
Now, I can't speak much about playing GuildWars 2 seeing as how I haven't at all just yet. Other people might say it's the best action MMO out there, but until it launches or an open beta happens, it's pure conjecture. Between TERA and Raiderz, there was quantifiable evidence that TERA won out in the ease of use, flow, and general use of action in an MMO space. While it might not actually beat out GW2 in the end, there's no way for me to determine that.
We made a stop down in the PC Freeplay area. I had a hankering for some League of Legends, and really wanted to get my win of the day in. I didn't bring my PC or anything, so all the gaming for the weekend was going to be done at the show or not at all. Unfortunately, as one might expect, the internet was an unusable flaky pile of garbage. Wifi didn't work, I'm not sure why we expected the wired connections to work. I was able to look at my characters, but actually starting the game just didn't happen. We sat around dicking with things for probably a half an hour before giving up and walking away. It seemed like a common theme at the time. The dudes seating people could have said something. Dicks.
Shortly following this, we decided it was time to go eat. The food court upstairs greeted us kindly with a Sam Adams bar. Holy shit, whose idea was this and when can I give him some man-hugs? I'm guessing over the weekend I dropped at least a hundred dollars on beer there. Love me some Alpine Spring, and the Brick Red on draft was great while they had it. We met up with @GettCouped while at the bar and he introduced me to the Guidebook app for Android. It was delightful. I realized at this point that we had missed a whole pile of the conferences that were going on in various rooms. Or maybe that was the beer talking. After about four, we decided it'd be pretty cool to see the guys from Extra Credits do their thing.
Well we ended up in line for The Future of Online Games instead. I told no less than four random people that we were in line for Extra Credits, and no one bothered to correct me. We were slowly funneled into the Main Theatre, given a Defiance t-shirt (PvE Shooter by Trion) and introduced to a panel of badasses including Curt Schilling from 38 Studios, James Ohlen from Bioware, Jon Peters from ArenaNet, Brian Knox from En Masse (TERA), Rob Hill from Trion, Craig Morrison from Age of Conan, and Bill Murphy from MMORPG.com hosting the event. They all had different takes on a whole bunch of topics. It was interesting to hear right from the top where the MMO space is going and how much innovation was taking place. They were split when it came to monetization, but there was some pretty serious applause when one of them mentioned just making games fun and worrying about money later. I think that was Curt.
DLC and the separation of F2P vs Sub came up as well and they were split on it. They were given a minute to explain what game they were currently working on then there was a short Q&A session of people from the crowd asking questions. I almost wish I hadn't had that fourth beer because things aren't really clear what went on past that, if it's even accurate. Linking the video in the previous paragraph will probably help clear up that confusion! Anyway, at the end of it there was a gameplay reveal from GuildWars and they gave everyone in the theater three beta keys to play amongst their friends. Sorry, my extra two are already accounted for. I'll be installing that shit as soon as I get home. If I like what I've been hearing about, and the political system is all that and a bag of chips, you might well see my focus stray from Rift and lean more on the guildy warring side of things again. I've been missing me some factional conflict and power struggles.
Of course, after that conference the main floor show had started to wind down so we went BACK to the bar again to get another drink or two before @GettCouped talked us into going out on the town for some really expensive steak dinners at Abe and Louies. This was the sort of place you're not allowed to wear a hat. We walked in wearing hoodies, hats, sneakers, and generally in a partially unsober state, but they let us sit down anyway. My hair was doing interesting things. I had a pile of Tuna Tartare, along with a nice big slab of Filet Mignon. The steak, cooked medium mind you, was so tender I could pull it apart with my fork. No cutting with a knife needed. I briefly fantasized about replacing pulled pork sandwiches with pulled steak sandwiches that were equally tender. It was by far the best 65$ I had spent on a single meal in a long time.
We caught a ride back to the hotel, unloaded a bunch of the swag that we had accumulated while we were there and I think everything faded to black by about 11pm amid some League of Legends rap videos and Cartoon Network. Day two was complete.
This isn't actually the day one that you're thinking of. You see, Grim is from Detroit, and if there's anything we like to do more, it's drive. It's the motor city, and chances are if you live in or around it, someone in your immediate family works for the auto industry. Day one for me was actually late on Wednesday night derptastically packing my things after I had gotten home from work. I'm not much of a planner. Packing up the bare minimum of clothes and supplies to make it there was absolutely done last minute. I have no shame.
Involved on the short list of essentials was a fancy new 5000maH battery with two USB ports to keep my phone alive and rocking through the barrage of mixed wifi and 4g signals. Phones tend to freak the hell out at these sorts of things, and getting all that signal is really aggressive on battery usage. I had just gotten in a new bluetooth headset because the old one stopped taking a charge on Monday at some point, very convenient. Thank you NewEgg 2-day shipping, you've saved that piece of the trip. Damn near forgot my hat, although I really had planned on shaving my head to avoid needing it. Lazy bastard that I am, scheduling things like haircuts with overly chatty cougars, really not high on my list of priorities.
It's not a likely stop for a trip from Detroit to Boston. But my trip took a detour deep into the middle of Ohio. Making that 14-hour drive across multiple states alone just wasn't going to do it for me. My long time gaming buddy and guildie Kayin was in the clear for a weekend away from Wifey. He even got a job a couple months ago so he'd have money. He swears this is coincidental, I'm nothing if not a skeptic.
So, the 14 hour trip turned into something more like 19 hours, and I decided, starting at 9pm would be a good idea. I got down to his hour around 1am, and drove until the sun came up. You ever take a 15 hour car ride with someone that you've only met IRL once but have been gaming and hanging out with virtually for years? There's a brief period of awkwardness before everything slips right into normal. No worries at all. Right, that once was St Patricks day in his little hole of a town getting drunk on Bud Light and passing out on his couch. If you needed to know.
So the trip mostly consisted of late 90's hard rock, dubstep remixes, comedy bits via Netflix, random conversation about gaming related activities. Really, it was like any other night, except the driving. Here's something interesting I learned about driving across the country. Every state we went through had a speed limit of 65. Michigan is 70, you know, because we drive everywhere. Other thing, Michigan has no toll roads at all, as opposed to every other state that seems to have them every hundred miles or so. Why do you people insist on making it so damn hard to get around?
Making a note to get a damn EZ-Pass next time I'm driving across the country.
It's been a few years since I've driven on the East coast. Well, at least as far north as South Carolina where some family lives. I did take a boat from the Great Lakes out to the ocean and down to Florida though. That was interesting as a kid. I recall seeing the Statue of Liberty way off on the horizon, and it's been something on my list of shit to see ever since. Naturally, a second detour to New Jersey was required. Let me go there for a second, there is NOTHING you need to see in New Jersey. We had a course plotted to Liberty Park. Almost made it there, except the freeways on the east coast are so goddamn dyslexic it's incredibly easy to miss a slight left. We took the long way around, ended up driving on surface streets and see a bunch of the locals. Not interesting.
Liberty Park, eventually, was fairly nice. We walked out to the pier and got a couple good pictures of her backside. The view of New York was really good as well. The (millenium tower) was about halfway finished and the bottom part was looking great. We took about 20 minutes in total to take in the fresh stank of the Jersey shore before getting back in the car and promptly missing the exit to the freeway. We spent the next hour or so on a series of bridges. Oh the joys of driving cross country.
We did finally make it to Boston around 7pm, making the total trip time for me something like 22 hours, but that's fine. I did this weird passive sleep state when Kayin was driving that left me totally refreshed. The first day of PAX started in the morning, and there was much beer that needed drinking, Sam Adams told me so. We stayed at the Hampton in Cambridge, nice place, terrible view, friendly staff. I'd recommend it if you just need a place to sleep. The rooms were the same size as the rooms in the Westin. Most hotel rooms for that matter are the same size. Oh, and there was free parking, a very valuable commodity in larger cities. The hotel was kiddie corner to one end of the T-Line (subway/train/bus public transit system) which turned out to be quite beneficial.
Once we had gotten settled in, unpacked, bored, and thirsty, we ventured out into the city. The young guy at the front desk of the hotel pointed us to the Government Center Station to find places to drink (turns out he didn't really have a good idea where to drink, but alas). We headed over to the train, and fumbled around with the ticketing bullshit before giving up and buying a week pass for 15$. Boston is really nice. There was literally nothing that I saw even remotely threatening. I don't know what the rest of the country is like, but when you're in Detroit, little things worry you all the time. I've never walked around a city at night and felt relatively safe, but Boston had that effect on me. It was soothing!
We ran into a herd of about 100 Pokemon once we hit the Government Center stop. They were bar hopping, which was really funny since most of the bars fill up when they hit 50 patrons. Dozens of people standing around outside in Pokemon costumes huddled together for warmth with a small contingent of gawkers taking pictures of them from various cellphones (no doubt using Instagram). THIS. This is what PAX was all about for me. Weird people being weird without being effectively judged. I mean, people tried to be all judge-y, be PAX'ers just outnumbered them and were oblivious to it all. It was cool, but that just wasn't our crowd. We made our way around them and found another bar instead.
There was Hockey playing on all of the TV's. Karaoke being sung on the stage, very poorly. Beer specials were 1.50 a bottle and going down fast. Things got fuzzy quick, and the night was under way. After about 6 beers or so someone started playing Tribute by Tenacious D and butchered the first couple of verses. I was helping, and realized that I probably had a few too many to drink. When Grim is singing in public, it's very near time to go home. Or vomit on the side of a building and keep drinking. I remember taking the train back to the hotel, waking up sometime after dawn and taking off my pants, then waking up again and wondering where the hell my pants went.
Ah beer. You've brought us late to the beginning of PAX, and what would be day two.
Grats to Dungeon Siege 3 and Steam for wasting approximately 5 hours of my life over the past two days. This game was definitely not for me. Isometric dungeon crawler where the dungeons are straight lines and the fights are copypasta swarms. It's just a scrolling scenery click fest with very little room for strategy. Another sorry example of an industry that acts more like an industry than an artform by churning out games that need fine tuning. The most complicated part of the game was the menus in menus interface that kept you busy for far longer than necessary. 8 clicks to equip an item I picked up off the ground compared to the 8 clicks it took to kill an enemy. Something terribly wrong here, and it really wouldn't be hard to fix.
I don't want to harp on forever, there were a few... uh. No, not really many redeeming qualities at all. Not for 2012. The graphics were tired and dated (I blame consoles primarily) even if the art direction was good in theory. With the amount of BEAST in my machine I should be running this game sideways with rainbows spewing from no less than three orifices due to all the insane shiny I could be rendering. Instead my CPU didn't poke past the 50% mark, and that's while I'm watching a movie on Netflix to pass the grind time. That's a double fuck you to Xbox and PS3. DIAF already. The world needs to move on.
Yeah, there's some grind. Thinking infinitely spawning waves of enemies every 20m (if not closer). The map is a collection of straight lines, the fighting area is a corridor by any stretch of the imagination. Oh you have ranged attacks? Doesn't matter, melee on you anyway. While their ranged pesters you from afar. There's no strategy, you can't get away from the melee. You can hope your companion will handle them, but all the melee just obscure your ranged targets. It's all mouse clicks anyway, I'm trying way too hard to care about this game design. One would think the melee tuned characters would hold the melee critters better. Guess I shouldn't expect a whole lot from a game whose premise on creature spawning is "Walk another 15m or so".
Combat, as I've mentioned it might have a poke at. There's three stances, I'm not sure why they did it this way, basically there's an offensive or melee stance, a ranged or defensive stance, and a block stance. The first two you can toggle between, which switches your primary weapon, and to block you hold space. They tied three abilities to each stance as well. Nothing is really explained well, and it's all far more convoluted than it needs to be for a game that you can click your way through. Depth is added to all the wrong places, and it doesn't help at all. I get swapping weapons out, and having abilities tied to them, kinda. They could have taken another 3 for each stance and been fine. What I don't get is why the blocking abilities needed to be separate. It's a nitpick, I guess it works. But why bother blocking in this game? You're invulnerable during a dodge, you take some damage when you block. The animations just aren't smooth enough, or interruptive to whatever animation is current, to make blocking actually reflexive. You either anticipate two seconds ahead of time, or you're missing the window to stand there bracing for impact. Needs improvement. You can't jump. I meant to screenshot earlier, there's a point in a swamp where the lever for a bridge is conveniently located 5 feet away. There's some swamp water in the way. Fuck, I don't think I would NEED to jump, there'd be enough room to just stretch my legs across. However, taking the alternate path was required. For fucks sake, my character is a FLYING FIRE ARCHON. It just breaks the whole suspension of disbelief in half and beats you with both ends of it sometimes. Terrible level design. Terrible. Fucking terrible. WTF'ing terrible. Who is making these video games these days? Where are the masters of the art that could make grinding feel rewarding? Where are the artists that made epic dungeons that rivaled the likes of Diablo? DS3 makes me lose faith in the gaming industry. It's a crap shoot at best. Not sure if worth the $7.50 that I paid for on Steam.
There's just too many core mechanics of a game that are badly out of shape. It's passable. People probably play through it because they've paid good money for it. I did not, and therefore have less invested in it's sanctity. I don't need to pretend like it's worth what I paid for, having something to write about is nearly worth it anyway. I can't see a game like this getting fixed to the point that it's worth more of my time. Even IF modding were a thing, they would have a hell of a time creating something of use out of this pile. No wonder it was on sale.
I might take another crack at this Let's Play/Livestreaming thing in the short future, so I decided to see whether or not Livestream is going to behave itself this time around. At any rate, Minecraft was my test platform of choice and once I started rolling... well, I just made a tour of my single player world. There's no narrative or anything, just the game sounds. Didn't think to check that. Basically it's 36m or so of me running through all the crap that I've done.
Performance, I'm pleased to find out, is significantly better that it was in the past. I'm thinking League of Legends will be the next test. Then maybe some Rift. Anyway, if you want to see the crap I've been doing in Minecraft, feel free.
You bastards. You know who you are. Peddlers. Charlatans. Vendors of 20$/hour DLC. Whatever happened to REAL expansions?
It was one thing back in the day to sell expansions as smaller-than-the-original-game pieces of content that extended a story out with new areas, gameplay, mechanics, and all that other good stuff. Sometimes they would cost upwards of 40$, but generally people considered expansions to be a "good thing". If a game was successful, it was far faster and easier to work on a smaller expansion using the same game engine and tools than it was to create a sequel on upgraded technology that would take much longer to finish. Now we're subjected to much smaller pieces of content, and they're coming packaged separately from the main game at launch for reasons that don't quite make sense to me. It's a money grab, and people pay for it time and time again because they're fans of the content, but why? Why subject ourselves to this?
It's difficult to pin down exactly how things have spiraled out of control to a point where DLC is a skin of an existing model, or a short story segment that barely takes an hour to finish. Retail forces like to blame the used game shops while ignoring the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine putting up the defense that games are licensed, not sold. Even though there have been court cases stating very clearly that you get retail money for the initial sale, and defensible "licensing" comes with a specific end date to the license. Used game shops generally sell cheaper than retail and keep the profits in their pockets, but that shouldn't be a concern to the retail market anyway. Their job is to get the first sale which should have rendered the entire concern bunk, but there's money to be had here somewhere.
The mobile and indie game industries are also getting much more prevalence than in years past which means a lot of really cheap addicting games that do all kinds of pyschological manipulation to continue putting quarters in the machine, as it were. As a big retail publisher it's easy to look over and see the little guys making tons of money on a business model you haven't even considered. There's also Facebook with a vast line of games and if you're familiar with Newgrounds there's an nigh endless amount of free or ad-supported flash games that could be played. Microtransactions are a term that comes to mind, even when we've strayed further and further away from the "micro" part of the transaction. It's the same thing now, microtransactions have evolved into the modern-day DLC.
If you pay attention to me (yeah, that's not a cry for help, I swear) you'll know one of the big companies I like to pick on is EA. Not that other big guys like Activision :horksparklepony: :coughmappack: aren't hard to fling mud at by any means, but I'm more familiar with the likes of Warhammer and the various Bioware titles. WAR at launch didn't have any silly ass DLC, but by the time they started going underwater you can bet EA got on top of them to show there's money to be made. Enter the pets! WAR had this whole thing where you could by a progression pack and a vanity pack for 10$ each or 15$ together. The progression pack was practically a requirement as it unlocked RR ranks about 100 (which over time became the current reality of the game). At the time there was a fair amount of distaste, but hey! It was development! The game was going to raise a boatload of cash and DO something with it! :hackWrathofHeroes:
Go down this list of what Bioware has released since 2008 and tell me that's what you want the gaming future to look like. Dragon Age was the first with Wardens Keep. Remember that? It was literally a 7 room keep and a courtyard that you paid money for. The playtime on that piece of DLC was well under an hour, some people getting it done in 20 minutes. 20 minutes of gameplay. What is that worth to you? Are you an MMO gamer? 20 minutes of gameplay might be worth pennies if you're someone like me that pays 15$ a month for 150 hours of gameplay. My point is, these games have been getting shorter and the amount of DLC isn't slowing down any time soon. EA isn't the only guy at the party, as I alluded to earlier, so where are we going with all of this? Here's another giant of the gaming industry, 2009, doing exactly the same thing. What used to be expansions are now simply DLC, short irritating pieces of lowly rated garbage that are vastly overpriced for what is put into them.
Are people really going to continue paying for DLC that more and more frequently just isn't worth the time? Are companies really going to continue to put out low quality bits of filler that just shred any credibility they might have had? The answer to both of these questions is unfortunately, yes. People are rabid for content that comes from trusted faces, and they'll pay out the nose if they think it's going to be worth it. Take a look at Apple stock sometime. I can assure you, they're not out there making technological leaps and bounds, people simply trust them. That's all. Companies exist to make money. They don't give a fuck about you. If they take feedback into consideration, it's because you've said something that will make them more money (or lose less). Or at least, that's the answer that's been given to me. Why should companies give up these sources of revenue that people obviously go out of their way for?
Because it's breeding people like me. Lots of them. You do NOT want to piss off the people that love your games. We're very bitter when crossed. Most of us are more than happy to walk away, sometimes however we get into this habit of just throwing rocks through windows. You might have a huge fanbase that is willing to sit there and pay for any bits of garbage you dribble down to them, but eventually your reputation will start to sink in, and if you look at what Microsoft went through with Vista, it's not an easy thing to recover from.
So lets compromise.
I propose that DLC be treated as a time-limited monetary goal. What needs to happen is this DLC be given a window of time that it can be purchased after it becomes available. The driving factor of that window would be based on the sales goal they have in mind. Basically once a piece of DLC is released, it's sold at a set amount until it reaches it's goal, then it gets taken off the market for a period of time before being added to the base game for any customers that have already purchased it. This is market responsibility in action, and it does a handful of things all at the same time.
- First and foremost, it gives the finacial team a goal they can provide investors. A target if you will. When we hit this number, success happens. Your investment becomes paid off, investors are generally happy with what they dropped some money on, and the company puts a bit in their pocket as a win. - Second, it gives the developers a reason to jam pack this piece of DLC to the gills with content that is engaging and interesting. Adding value to every product drives customer approval, and when approval is high, sales come quick. It lays accountability to the product on the line. -Third, it gives an option to those of us on the periphery whether or not to engage in the early experience of the content, or take our bets that it will sell quick and we can pick it up for free afterwards. This concept of time = money applies for so many other things, gamers are intimately familiar with it. There's probably a bunch of other things that a strategy like this does, but I'm going to stick with these for now.
You stop breeding contempt at some point when you go outside the despicable norm and start doing things that make sense beyond a fiscal level. Trion for example may be the first AAA MMO that hasn't laid off hundreds of it's staff post-launch in many years. That resonates HARD, not only among players that appreciate that sort of sentiment, but in the industry where people get bounced in and out of companies like pinballs.
I just don't see how companies are going to be able to keep up the status quo of 30 minute pieces of DLC. Something's gotta give.
Pardon me while I go find my jaw, it hit the floor a few minutes ago. Here, watch this in the meantime.
Man, I think I'm going to need some ice. Trion why? Why are you doing this to the MMO community? Don't you know we've been trained to expect hyped mediocrity and failure as standard operating procedure? You really expect me to believe that your meaningful open-world PvP objectives and your hinting at moving away from a two faction system are actually going to happen. Ha I say! Ha! Just because you've been able to pull off all of these other amazing technical and artistic achievements in record breaking time doesn't mean anything!
Oh, shit... what is this now?
"If you’ve ever had an active RIFT Subscription you’ll be able to access all your characters (yes, even those above level 20!) for a FULL WEEK to take part in the celebration. Remind your friends and family so they don’t miss this limited opportunity to experience everything new in RIFT!
Please Note: At the end of this return period any characters above level 20 will no longer be accessible without an active subscription. With RIFT Lite your level 20 or under characters are always available to play!" [link]
Now you're just trolling. You KNOW people are clamoring for some free to play action, you dirty tease! I suppose you expect they'll find an obscene amount of value in this game and get off their F2P'ing asses with 15$ a month eh?
Oh, right. I forgot about those minor details, it's only 15$ a month if you're doing the one-month-at-a-time plan. Well hey, some of us are still bitter about being burned on giving up our credit card information. Yeah! So take that! It's not like we can walk over to our local GameStop and...
Well that, uh... It doesn't. Shit. I don't know where I was going with this. Oh yeah, It's been a year. I guess that means I'll be resubbing for another one. Fuck, why not? The world is ending in December anyway, or something.
Many moons ago, back when Grim was a more productive blogger and slightly more sane member of a workforce that didn't make him /facepalm on a daily basis there was a series of posts called Deep Looks. If by series you mean a half baked pair of posts looking at two Cleric souls anyway. I had this idea that I would break down the classes in end game and highlight what was great about them. Turns out, there's a lot of healing going on and I can't be bothered with all of that nonsense really. I like to punch things in the face, or so I thought. You see, if you really want to rock out with your DPS cock out as a Cleric, your really only have one choice. No one expects the inquisition.
See that dude in the middle? He's your classic long range DPS packed to the gills with a variety of nukes, AoE's and CC that will make the girlies all swoon and the panties hit the floor. Well, at least he would if our damn calling had decent scaling into HK gear. You might notice a theme with me since I've picked yet again, the gimp class in an MMO. Let's just dive right into it shall we? Synergy!
Bolt of Judgement - A lovely nuke that has excellent synergy with the following:
Corporal Punishment - Go figure, right? Inquisitors benefiting from corporal punishment? This is a duh ability.
Also fair to point out here is Mental Resilience for extra baby punching power.
At any given time with one of these big badass hitting nukes, I like to pop Fanaticism for that extra spice too.
Your rotation is simple. Sanction Heretic every time it comes up, in the meantime spam BoJ. When BoJ procs, pop Fanaticism and instacast that bolt at maximum damage. Also, keep Vex ticking away, it doesn't seem like much but that 15s duration adds up to 100dps in prolonged fights. Some of you (Who am I kidding, -icar is all you're really going to pair this soul with) might be tempted to use other instant cast bolts that become available to you, but I learned the hard way. Those other bolts like Bolt of Radiance or Life's Vengeance aren't worth the cooldown. For max efficiency you need the synergy proccing BoD and SH. Don't be fooled! I keep my instant cast Life abilities (for building -icar Convictions) on a separate macro to spam as needed.
For AoE, I would go into a really big explanation on all the little nuances but there aren't any. Start off with Soul Drain, then spam Circle of Oblivion until you're out of mana. Chances are the cooldown on Soul Drain won't be up before everything is dead, and even if it is, they'll probably be dead before a second CoO has finished casting anyway. Prolonged fights, sure, fire up that Soul Drain a second time, just saying it's not going to be that much of a DPS boost over keeping a constant channel AoE going. Not to mention, there's a handful of fights where you probably don't want to be in melee range anyway. CoO is a 30m ability and I use it to it's fullest range most of the time which means skipping on Soul Drain anyway.
So there you have it, the Inquisitor in a nutshell. Oh, wait, crowd control? You're worried that mobs and/or players might get close to you? Fine. I'll give you some of the things that can be done.
Got an errant mob that's closing in on you? Excommunicate that little bastard back to your tank. Someone trying to get away from you? Nysyr's Rebuke will hold them in place for a few seconds, afterwards be sure to further Impede them. Feeling claustrophobic? Too many mobs closing in? Beg for Divine Pardon, failing that, instill them with Trepidation. Occasionally you'll get that annoying mob in the back ignoring threat tables. Bewilder him and carry on. Yes, this is spammable. Tired of predictable CC hitting when you don't want it to? A little Perseverance and Determination goes a long way. Mage Armor? Glacial Shield? Reflecting Torrent? No problem! Purge those annoying buffs right off your enemies.
Lemme just get right down to it. If you're not running an Inquisitor spec at least part time as a DPS Cleric, you're missing the boat. This class at 51 points has a little bit of everything. Almost too much at times. Pair it with whatever you want, I enjoy my 51 Inq 15 Justicar for every day activities and some excessively powerful raid healing to boot. Maybe one day they'll fix how retarded Doctrine of Loyalty is... until then. Well, this is what we get to play with.
It's been a while in-between posts again. Grim has been lazy. Bad Grim! I swear I have a couple sitting in the drafts folder, but they're mostly about the awesomeness of 1.6, and now that 1.6 is drawing to a close it feels a bit weird to toss them out there. Maybe I should, I'm sure there's people that have gone on to that other game with the glowsticks who might not know all the glories of the Ember Isle. Anyway, as I am wont to do, posting at 1:30am that is, here we go. 1.7 is on the horizon and we've got a load of notes from the Cleric dev lead.
Right, so if you're not a Cleric or have no interest in it, bugger off. Thanks. Otherwise you're just going to see me whine about a class that I really do enjoy playing profusely.
(pulled from the forums, comments denoted by -- )
Planned Changes for Clerics in 1.7 Hey everyone, just wanted to let you know the current list of proposed Cleric changes now that I'm done with most them and have a chance to post. Most of these will go up with the next PTS push. The rest will probably come in with the push after that.
Obviously remember that none of this stuff is final. Some of these changes may not even end up going Live, depending how things shake out in testing. Also remember that this is not an exhaustive list of every change we ever plan on making to Clerics or a representation of every issue that may concern us.
Clerics Updated the tooltips on pretty much everything. This is part of a larger effort to increase the readability of tooltips in general. You'll also notice that values for damage numbers and the like now include Spell Power, buffs, and whatnot. The goal is that when for example, Bolt of Judgment says it deals 100 damage, that's how much damage it actually does. Resists, buffs, and debuffs on the target may change that, but that's the amount of damage you will do. -- Obviously, this is something that probably should have been corrected a year ago in beta.
Cabalist Dark Passage: Now teleports 10 meters forward. -(prior: 10-15m random) -- A reasonable fix, although it comes with a 5m range nerf. The cabalist is the wannabe RDPS class, but it has too much utility stapled to it to be an elite class. The last big changes addressed playability, but nothing to address scalability into end-game content. There are no pure cabalists in raids, and the few classes that hybrid into it go 22 points at best.
Druid Trickster Spirit, Slothful Spirit, Spiteful Spirit: These have all been changed to spells that deal Earth damage and work from 30 meters. -(prior: melee range, physical damage) Eruption of Life: Now triggers off of any damage. -(prior: on melee hit) Faerie Healing: Increased the healing amount. Faerie's Favor: Now instacast. Increased the healing amount. Now affects up to 4 additional party or raid members within a 20 meter radius if cast by the Greater Faerie. -(prior: 2s cast, ST) Mead Rush: New ability usable by the Satyr. Charges at the enemy and deals damage. Has a 10 second cooldown. Fury of the Fae: The Satyr will now also autocast this when out of combat. "I do want to specify right now though that the Druid will not become a full support soul. There are currently no plans to add a full support soul to the Cleric in the foreseeable future." -- Adding 3 ranged abilities, with Bombard makes it 4, and a charge to the Satyr sure looks like this class is moving away from melee. On top of that you have a sleep and silence that can be cast at range, and an unbreakable 4s root to escape with. In fact, you can hit all 4 of your ranged abilities and rotate casting sleep, shield of the oak, and stone burst with little reason to get in melee range if your satyr is beating on things. That's assuming of course that the spirits are going to be doing more reasonable damage under an elemental type. Those 4 melee abilities? Toss em out, Druid looks like a half-assed RDPS/Support soul now. Druid is now totally ignoreable, you will not see them in raids or dungeons, possibly in PvP but as a prestige pinata pretending to heal debuff.
Inquisitor Corporal Punishment: Now lasts 12 seconds. -(prior: 5s duration) -- As if this buff weren't permanently up, in reality it's a token buff to the soul at best. Inq is the best DPS soul Clerics have. A single buff will not put them anywhere near the ranks of true dps warriors, rogues, and mages. Perhaps 1.8 will bring us a real Cleric DPS soul. They will need to try a lot harder to retain their position as a raid healer DPS, the Inquisicar is not dead, but will have tons of mana problems which will bite hard into it's DPS in raids.
Shaman Battle Charge: Reduced cooldown to 10 seconds. -(prior: 15s CD) Brutalize: Now deals 30-60% of Massive Blow's damage over 10 seconds. Reduced maximum stack size to 3. -(prior: 10-20% over 4s. stack size unknown, ticks perhaps?) Dauntless Courage: Now affects all melee damage. -(prior: physical damage) Vengeance of the Frozen Earth: Removed. -(prior: snare on hit) Ekkehard's Invocation: Now spell available in tier 3. Instacast, ranged, and deals Air damage. Favored of the Valnir: Now increases the duration of Lightning by 4-8 seconds, causing increased damage on each additional tick. -(prior: increased healing received 5-10%) -- The Shaman is getting buffed, but changing. Battle Charge is now your only snare with the removal of Frozen Earth (which was admittedly situational, and typically PvP only), on a shorter cooldown which helps with a handful of bosses in recovery from KB's. Dauntless Courage is a significant buff, but won't be noticed on the overall parse as more than 2%. Lightning Hammer will be at the bottom of the rotation unless it stacks with itself, Lightning Hammer is on a 6s CD, increasing the duration will remove it from any macro to increase it's total damage. This could be a non-factor depending on scalability of the tick, yet to be seen. For me, I'd place it a priority above Crushing Blow and be done with it. Chances are I'm wasting some of that additional harder hitting duration. Pending DPS tests, this ability may be passed up entirely. Replacing Frozen Earth with Ekkehard's Invocation will allow Shamans to close in on a target while dealing damage. Being Air damage, it's another reason to throw points in Stormborn. However, I'd rather not add a ranged ability to Shaman. Also, a comment states that it will do less damage than CB. If that's the case, why not cut it's damage in half and have it apply a snare, then turn Battle Charge into a stun or root. Shaman's ability to hold onto a target in PvP will be diminished, and it's usefulness as a spec as well.
Justicar Reprieve: Increased the effect of Spell Power. Healer's Creed: Now increases the healing you receive by 5-10%. -(prior: reduce mana cost of doctrines 15-30%) Light Makes Right: Now functions properly immediately after purchasing. -- Copy+paste the old Shaman ability into the Justicar and nerf the shit out of -icar healers in one fell swoop. The calling takes a hefty blow with this change, and not enough love to make up for it. Any resentment towards the Cleric Lead will be over the misuse of this nerf. By that I mean (/rant), if they were going to dick about with nerfing DoL, it should have been to remove it from easy access ranks to allow our DPS souls to actually DPS without having to -icar in order to be useful. None of our DPS souls compete with a Warrior, Mage, or Rogue that's attempting to make pretty red numbers. Not one. They're all supplemented by easy group healing and that's fucking annoying(/endrant). Reprieve is a token buff, but still not on par to a warrior tanks big self heal. No significant change however to the role they're intended to play. So as a tank, not much changes. As an offspec, you're reaching for a mana potion a bit more frequently in extended fights.
Purifier Surging Flames: The triggered heal now has a 20 meter radius. -(prior: 15m) Divine Cascade: Removed. -(prior: target deals damage to nearby enemies when healed) Gathering of the Ancestors: New spell available at 38. Puts an absorb shield on up to 10 party or raid members within 35 meters. Applies a blocker that prevents being affected by it again for 20 seconds (this is a different blocker from the one applied by Ward of the Ancestors and the two don't block each other, but they don't stack). 30 second cooldown. Asphodel's Purifier Crystal: 4 point bonus now reduces damage taken by 7% for 10 second. Now overwrites and cannot be overwritten by Protect the Flock. -(prior: no idea, however this buff overwrites the 5% damage reduction buff for a whopping net bonus of 2%) Rise of the Phoenix: New spell available at 44 points. Resurrects with 50% health and mana. Usable in combat. -- Finally the healing classes, apparently what Clerics have to do if they want to be in a raid for any reason. We don't get a buffing soul, we're not allowed to DPS on par with anyone, we can raid heal (warden or -icar) or main heal. Purifier is probably the best tank healer with the combination of absorbs and big heals. Stretching out Surging Flames probably isn't going to make much of a difference, it's nice to splash a bit extra during raid damage. Divine Cascade was a worthless ability, good riddance. The new Gathering spell however starts to point to a Purifier that needs to be taking on a group oriented role. I don't understand why one of the best ST healers is getting better AOE damage mitigation. Gathering way better than Cascade, but it doesn't really fit. This seems like something that would be better suited to Warden. Alas, usefulness in a raid solidifies Purifiers in their role as a main healer. No harm, just a confusing foul.
Sentinel Healing Communion -(prior: 15m), Healing Benediction -(prior: range not specified) : Both now have a 20 meter radius. Marked by the Light : Now has a 15 meter radius. -(prior: range not specified) Life's Return: Now has a 5 minute cooldown. -- Sentinel has a bit more in the way of AE healing, but is still a stronger ST healer. Instead of getting individual spells buffed, it has radii increased. Was this an issue somewhere that I'm not aware of? Are there fights that have pure healers scrambling to hit players that have wandered too far off? I've been through most of the raid fights in the game and I can only think of a couple. But still they would be covered by -icar specs over these increases. A disappointing pass for Sentinel.
Warden Waterjet: Reduced its benefit from Spell Power. Healing Showers -(prior: 7m) , Orbs of the Tide -(prior: 10m) : Both now have a 20 meter radius. Healing Cataract: Now has a 25 meter radius and affects 10 party or raid members. -(prior: 15m, 5 players) Ripple: Now has a 20 meter radius. -(prior: 15m) Cascade: No longer costs mana. River of Life: New spell available at 44 points. Resurrects with 50% health and mana. Usable in combat. -- Warden makes the most sense (of the three) to expand the AE raid heals. Giving Healing Cataract to 10 players will make the spell worth thinking about even though it's very deep in the tree at 44 points. The massive expansion for Healing Showers (31pt) will help quite a bit. Orbs of the Tide is generally on the tank, which is the center of the raid area which should help as well. What I don't like is seeing Waterjet getting nerfed out of the blue, regardless of the amount. Warden from 0-5pt is a great staple for DPS classes due to efficiency of Waterjet as a default ranged poke, the 4pt KB, and the bonus to instant cast damage. This is just flagrant, and flies in the face of the problems that DPS clerics have had for months now. The only justification that I can figure is the 11pt tree ability in Shaman may have been less powerful than Waterjet, even buffed, and the Lead didn't want to see Waterjet being used over his new ability. Which has it's own problems.
So there it is, I'm a jaded Cleric with expectations for that calling that simply aren't being met by the Cleric lead on pretty much any front.
We're consistently behind on DPS in all souls no matter how much we try to stack things. The only true function our DPS souls have at the moment is -icar and spamming heals during very obvious points in AE raid damage while barely cracking the DPS chart. Our Druid is beyond broken and the Lead still wants to repurpose it as DPS (or something) but there's just too much utility built into it to be anything BESIDES support. Not to mention, the changes in 1.7 do nothing for it's DPS and do more to REINFORCE it's position as a support role that it's not supposed to have.
Our Tanking soul is a third rate citizen, the only thing we really have going for us is the ability to hold aggro by spamming DoL, which when your OT is trying to hold a secondary mob, really isn't all the useful after all. Being able to direct our overheal aggro would do wonders, maybe tossing Righteous Mandate on an enemy would redirect overheal aggro to it. Also, why are we wearing bucklers? Warrior shields would give us a large chunk of armor, stats, and additional chances at loot, hell convert all the bucklers and let two callings share the pool of shields. It can all be Warrior stats, that's fine. We like Warrior stats for tanking because they actually help with mitigation.
Our healing souls are becoming more alike each other with each iteration because for some reason the Lead is finding it hard to pinpoint what specific abilities he wants to define each soul. It's really not that hard, and I don't know why it's getting treated like a complex equation. Purifier does absorbs, Sentinel does big ST heals, Warden does HoTs. The thing looming over the head of every healing cleric however is the competition from chloromances that can generally pump out just as much healing and still dps inbetween other support classes and our weak ass Cleric DPS.
Where the hell is the synergy between our souls? They're all built so sterile. Our DPS are bound the the -icar, but that's hardly any kind of synergy if it's a forced position and EVERY DPS soul is tied to it. In theory the Cabalist and Inquisitor should work together, but both of them have 36pt abilities that escalate their core abilities to the point of usefulness in other directions as they get closer to 51. The healers are drawing closer to parity with each other and suffer from much of the same thing. How is it with a class as varied as Cleric, we can't seem to figure out how to be as much fun to build and play as any of the other Callings? The Lead is focusing on a limited number of specific builds that work, and seems to be ignoring specs that COULD work instead.
What's really funny, despite all the problems I've gone over here, I still enjoy playing this Cleric more than any other game so far. I just think there's some obvious things that could be fixed and tweaked, as does the community, but we're getting the classic dev reaction of "Daddy knows best" while seemingly systematically ignoring input from the community for direction on what they find "fun" to play.
I'm a fan of the gritty, dirty, leans-towards-realistic art style when it comes to video games. If something looks like it's coated in plastic, or is just too clean for it's own good, I'll probably pass on it. Initially at least. I like to be deeply immersed in my gaming experience, and the visual art style of a game can break that immediately for me. I don't want to feel like an outsider pulling the strings of a muppet. I want to emulate and have it become an extension of my will. I like the sensation of having to be pulled out of the game when reality strikes.
It's not that drastic, but those are the things that grabs my gaming itch and scratches it with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. Real life is dirty. Adventuring, doubly so. Some people scoff at the thought of having realistic item decay. How many times do you think you can bash on armor with a sword before it loses all of it's cutting power? There's fantastical extensions made to the logic of that to make a game playable, but I still prefer items that break down over time and need to be repaired. Magic to increase the longevity of an item (i.e. enchanted items never go dull), is a poor cop-out.
There's not a lot of good systems out there that embrace item decay. Bethesda tossed it out of Skyrim, although it had been present in the previous Elder Scrolls and Fallout, but apparently it was too much for the masses to comprehend. Minecraft (although not a gritty game) has item decay on pretty much everything and millions of people seem to be OK with it. When something breaks that can more or less readily create a new one. Strong materials last longer and are more effective. Crafting is your everything and the better stuff is harder to find. That's value built into the system. Why do people spaz out when they find diamonds? Because it lasts nearly forever and chews through pretty much anything.
I also enjoy a bit of skill in my games that adds to the dirty feel. It's one thing to lock onto a target and spam a few skill buttons with the limit to your test of skill being staying in range of your target. It's another thing wholly where you're aiming your shots, attempting to hit specific weak points, or nailing the timing perfectly to maximize an effect. When all I need to do is mash my keyboard because my target is guaranteed to be hit, my mind tends to wander. I've been know to tank in MMO's while playing Angry Birds, because really, standing in place spamming taunt just isn't that challenging. Hell, running around spamming AOE leaves me plenty of time to watch Hulu on the side. When focus and precision are brought into the mix, you become engaged on a whole other level. It ties into living out the character and being immersed in your role.
Am I talking about roleplaying? A bit. The problem is, I'm no fuzzy elf with a fancy dress and a french tickler. If I have to sit there and look at an invicible barbie doll that never takes a nick and cuts through enemies without a scratch on their blade, it ain't right. Will there be blood? Not always, not early often enough, but if the enemy (and myself for that matter) at least looks like they're getting their ass kicked, it'll do. It's hard to believe you're sitting on the brink of death when your character appears to be fresh off the factory line. It breaks the barrier of believeablity and in my mind just looks sloppy and poorly done.
When I see an explosion, I expect some debris. When I see body taking a hit, I want some blood spray. At the end of a hearty battle, I expect to see my armor scratched to hell, a few new scars, and the entrails of my enemy preferably hanging off of my person somewhere. When I drive my machine gun-laden dunebuggy into a wall, I expect to see it crumple and twist before flinging my body through the windshield. Some would say I expect too much, but I'm only asking for things that are perfect common sense. Maybe it's an additional animation here or there. Maybe they work a physics engine into the game. At the end of the day my character shouldn't look and act like a cartoon. He should look and act like a big badass goddamn hero.
It's another end of the week at the end of the year. I'm just sitting around watching the twitter stream scroll by while listening to some last.fm and thinking to myself. It's been a while since I've made a post. Well here you go, for your pleasure I'll ramble on about what's been going down in the past month or so for me and my gaming addiction. Working about 100 miles from home sure as hell doesn't do me any good when it comes to blogging. Usually I'll be able to practice my wordsmithery during downtime at work. Being on-site working directly with the CTO of the company that is outsourcing you for contract work, well, there's not a lot of downtime. This is cutting into my gaming time goddammit, so be happy.
Here Be Dragons I did intend at one point to do a follow-up on Skyrim. To be fair, I started one, but it sounded like we were in a sex crazed relationship at the time, so I let it go. It's been about a week or so since I fired up the game so I think the awesome shiny has worn off and it's been reduced to a slightly less pure form of awesome. Skyrim did win a bunch of awards at the VGA's, and they're certainly deserved. I think all I can really do is reaffirm that yes, after 100 hours, the game is still entertaining. The depth shallows out a bit due to the tediousness of always having someone finding work for you to do, but it's never the same work, which is what makes the game deceptively deep.
Being a Bethesda production it has a handful of weird bugs. Dragons flying backwards was an interesting trip. Some of the broken quests are more prominent. I would occasionally find late in the game that jobs you were sent on to places that were already cleared out would be broken. Killing a bandit chief that was already dead had to simply be resolved by using console commands to skip that chain in the quest. This happened more than once, so it seems like a systemic issue. Then there's the UI and menu system, ugh. Spit in the face of the PC gaming master race, it's a console wank job at best. If it weren't designed for controller from the outset, or if an entirely different UI was designed for the PC (seeing as how we have keyboard instead of buttons) that'd be great. Thankfully there's a handful of creative masterminds that have modded the piss out of the existing UI into something more useful. Thank you modding, you make all the pain stop hurting.
Magic is probably the most challenging aspect of the game to get powerful in, followed closely by melee combat. I recall starting out the game running around with a shitty iron sword and a handful of fire. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out which was more rewarding. However, once I started nailing people in the back of the head with arrows from 300' or so, the magic lost its luster. Yeah, it's funny to watch them burn, but they don't react to it quite how I would imagine being on fire would make me feel. Once I hit ~35 or so I decided that this would be a good time to put my 100 Sneak to good use and start flipping around a dagger with that sexy x15 multiplier damage on backstabbery. Let me tell you, if you want to develop any skill in combat and be useful, do it really early in the game. When I hit with the backstab it usually just pisses them off, causes all their buddies in a 3 mile radius to come running to assist, and has me on my heels backpedaling like a bitch. It's worse if I miss, because then I'm not taking a big satisfying chunk of their hp with me. The game is unforgiving at higher levels. You're good at what you're doing, and anything else will make you weep with regret.
You all know the high points of the game, and I didn't want to cover those again. Plenty of other people have. Let me just say that the downside to Skyrim is a drop in the bucket compared to the sheer awesomeness of its vast open world. Don't have it yet? Go buy it.
MMO of the Year Rift has come out with some new stuff with one of its latest patches. I don't know if you heard but they've added this big ass island to the east of the mainland. I consider this brave new land a sort of hardcore mode. Everything is higher than lv50 and most of them are elites as well. If you have friends and want to be challenged to a moderate degree, Ember Isle will accomodate. There's the standard zone events that get people flowing out of the woodwork that brings the difficulty level way down. Also with the new lands comes some interesting dynamic outposts that you can build up turrets and healing pods at. Building them up however invites the denizens of the island to wander over and crush the shit out of your face. Fancy trade-off I suppose.
There's a pile of new dungeons to be had as well, although I haven't yet made my way into Cadaceus Rise, I have done Rise of the Phoenix in Stonefield. Well, we attempted it. RotP is the new 10-man sliver with gear requirements/rewards on par with the first half of Hammerknell. That's the top end of the raiding game if you're not paying attention. The guild has been in there a few times unsuccessfully, but we've made some decent progress on the first boss. Lately the Iniquity crew has been crushing GSB and RoS at will while working on post-Murdantix bosses in HK. One might imagine Rift to have also lost it's luster, but the fellows at Trion Worlds are really keeping on the ball about content generation. I hope their subs stay at a high level for a long time to come and this little SWTOR business is a little bump in the road. From what I've seen so far, Trion is highly committed to building worlds, and EA, who has the ability to dump tons of money into the onset of games, is not. Maybe that'll change with Bioware pulling the strings. Who knows?
Oh yeah, and Instant Adventures are the new hotness that keeps you grinding without realizing you're grinding at all with people you might have never played with otherwise. I would be amiss to not mention this. Basically you can queue up for small zone quests. Kill 15 of these, free 16 of those, eat some mushrooms, whatever. It's busy work with reasonably decent rewards for the effort, and a boss every handful or so. If you need immeadiate action and don't want to wait you can queue for an IA (which has popped immediately whenever I've tried) and run around with handful of people cleaning up the wild lands of Rift. I think the IA's are the next logical progression from Public Quests, but need a bit more reward and risk to really polish them off. They scale well for the amount of people involved too. I've run IA's with full raids of people that had larger bosses and tiny 4-man groups with smaller and more manageable bosses. They also never end. You can get a quest at your capital city that will require you to do 7 IA's, but often you end up doing a handful more just because they're immediately engaging and never lack action.
Rift is still my MMO of choice. Until they stop doing things that define how I think MMO companies should act, they will continue to be my MMO of choice. Pretty simple.
New Addiction League of Legends! This is the latest game on the docket for me. One of my regular dudes has gotten me hooked and I've probably dumped about 20$ into buying up a handful of champions at full price before I realized that not only do they go on sale periodically. I'm about two weeks deep into the game, halfway to the level cap for my summoner, and I've barely scratched the surface. Most of my time has been spent in bot matches getting used to the flow of the game and practicing not-dying. This is a very valuable skill to have as the more deaths you incur causes you to gain less xp and gold, which in turn causes you to fall behind quickly, and unless your team can carry your ass, permanently. I like how unforgiving the combat is to the loser, it makes sense. I'm tired of the PvP games out there where everything needs to be perfectly balanced all the time. If you're getting your ass kicked and you can't adjust to the pace of the game, I see no reason why the game should mechancially adjust to your failures.
I get my ass kicked most of the time. Being an aggressive player in LoL is hard to do, most of my game consists of poking people from range and waiting until they do something stupid. Bot matches are great for this because of how uniformly programmed the AI is. They rarely push deep and get themselves into trouble which is great practice for learning when to run away and how often it's needed. LoL is a faster paced strategy game where you're hyper-focused on the immediate surroundings. Getting on voice chat makes things so much easier as communication is what will make or break games. There's a lot of terminology to learn about LoL, but once it clicks you step up to a new level. I might be giving the game a bit too much credit. From the outside it looks like a top-down isometric single-character RTS, which admittedly is crap compared to commanding armies of units in other RTS's. Coming from a background in WAR however, it serves a specific part of me that needs that fast paced high-risk battle that get's your blood flowing. Be it adrenaline or rage, LoL can get it going and it's something that's growing on me. Probably more posts to come in the new year. Don't worry you people following the blog, I'll announce when I'm ready to close up shop if you're trying to clean out blogrolls and whatnot. Also, don't feel shy about emailing me to get tossed onto mine. I haven't updated that thing in a while anyway. It's probably due for it. Cheers!
Because if anything, this game is very impressive.
When you hold it against other games from the past 5 years, there is really nothing revolutionary going on. Bethesda didn't re-invent the wheel with the graphics here, they just threw a bunch of paint on it. Nice thing is, they're goddamn artists at what they do, that really makes the difference. Skyrim is the smaller of the past three Elder Scrolls games, but is packed from border to border with detail. While it doesn't have the vast landmass that Morrowwind did, it's got sights that you would never have seen from Morrowwind. I particularly enjoy the night, and will likely enjoy it that much more when some darkness mods are available. Under a sky filled with stars, a pair of moons, or the aurora borealis from being on top of the world, the night time definitely has the advantage.
It has a very believable manner of telling you odd little stories as well. Things that really make the world feel at least synthetically alive. First time in a city? Chances are you can listen in on conversations or have events unfold right in front of you. Whole story lines start this way because you hear an argument, someone gets stabbed multiple times in front of you, or people walk right up to you admiring your shiny armor. Maybe you're a bit more on the anti-social side of things. Well, chances are you managed to wiggle your way through at least some of the starting story, but those people around you are persistent little buggers. More than once I've had a courier come running down the path at me to deliver a letter begging me for help on some random errand (that turns out to be large quest chains). If you're not interested in tracking down stories via conversation, Skyrim with offer them up to you on a platter. Ignoring people beckoning, nay begging you to assist them? Not a problem says Bethesda. While you're out exploring, we're going to send random crazy dude who hands you a magical shield amidst a bear attack. No, don't worry about the bear, once you're done with that, another flustered man will rush up to you asking if you've seen someone slightly resembling a random crazy guy who may have been carrying a magical shield. Problem? No buddy, never seen the dude. You want some bear meat? Even the dungeons aren't safe from some story interaction, more than once I've walked into a dungeon with half the place cleared out, or a fight in progress. Why don't you people go find your own damn dungeons? Skyrim will make you it's errand-boy-bitch one way or another. Unless you murder them all. Oh, right, Dark Brotherhood. Murdering murderers of murder for hire.
Daedric Princes! One of my favorite things about the past Elder Scrolls games was tracking down these shrines, activating them, and doing all the crazy god errands to win their favor and epic loot. Well Bethesda is no stranger to worshipping strange gods for favor, it's like a cult I'm told. Skyrim isn't quite as typical as the other games. Sometimes your interactions with the Daedra are a little bit out of left field. Like the woman who was eating corpses, apparently she wanted me to join their dinner party, oh, and bring a priest. They're quite tender. Maybe the haunted house where things start flying around and the voices grow more eerie by the moment, so creepy it drives the ghostbuster that dragged you along to the point of murder. Then you murder him. Then you murder another priest. The Daedra enjoy that sort of thing, murder you know. Oh fine, some of them are a little less bloodthirsty, like the one who's pup has gone missing. You return the poor creature who has been neglected and are gifted a fine axe. You are then commanded to cut off the pups head. Wait. That's just more murder. Curses! The Daedra are terrible gods! I like them a lot!
My female Breton favors sneaking around in heavy armor with a bow and a pair of flaming hands, though not simultaneously. She even carried around a shield for a little while until my precious Lydia the Meatshield showed up to take those hits like a big girl. There's nothing quite like the power a bow gives you. Once you get a nice one enchanted, most of your stealth shots are instant kills. If you're good enough to make long distance shots, you can take out two or three targets before anyone realizes where you're coming from. Lydia, my darling, loves to play the game where I'll take a high perch, and once I start firing, she'll rush into the poor smucks. I need to take a moment to thank Quicksave, because poor precious Lydia has taken quite a few arrows deep into the back of her head. It's uncanny how often I hit her in the head. Disturbing really. Maybe she's suicidal. After all I make her lug around all my dragon bones and scales. Oh, and stand in the dragon breath until she falls down. Did I mention my 6th primary skill is healing? On your feet Liddy! No slouching when there's a dragon to distract! I'm the Dovahkiin dammit!
There's a terrible lot of shouting, or perhaps a lot of terrible shouting? Shouting terrible things in a dragons language of death and pain. Lydia, why are you in the way again? Don't you know when I do my uber-knockback shout you shouldn't be standing at the edge of a cliff? Some of them she shrugs off. I Accidentally. The kill command shout, that lowers their armor and will to live. Spit that one right on her. She literally shrugged at me and brushed her shoulder. What is that?? Surely these designers knew that things like this would happen and coded in a little extra "oops" factor. Oh she's a saucy lass. With her cold dead stare and impatient tone. Lydia, when you're caught looking at her, will make you get off your ass and do something. I recall many a time digging around in dungeons for loot and gold, Lydia would clear her throat at me, I would look up, and her face... oh her face in the darkness. Well, let's say she started wearing a helm. She was shouting with her eyes is what she was doing.
I tried what I could to pay attention to what the fuck was going on throughout, but in the end wandering off to discover locations took hold of me. It's nice being able to talk to the carriage near stables at major towns to hitch a ride. Does wonders for getting to new areas quickly, but you lose so much flavor when walking around. I highly recommend running everywhere. Screw your horse. If you're not working on a specific goal, just point yourself in a direction and let er rip. Did I mention the Daedra that wanted me to cleanse her temple so badly that she flew me a couple thousand feet above the ground and threatened me with gravity if I didn't help? There's things out there in Skyrim that need to be experienced. Frequently. I haven't played Rift since the day before Skyrim released (save for tonight at which we downed Alsbeth cause we're cool kids).
Blaq (http://zewar.wordpress.com) was talking about the third realm in EA's latest Wrath of Heroes which kicked me in the head a little bit about the good ol' days. Right, well that's not really fair. WoH merely has three teams and no realms to speak of. Let's not get me started on kicking inbred puppies, I'm interested in what people mean by the third realm that manages to get badly interpreted on occasion. It's not as simple as putting a third team into a playground and expecting things to work themselves out. As Blaq mentioned, all this does is create two losers that fight each other over an objective while a third team becomes the winner by completing the other objectives uncontested. Who is this fun for? The winning team has no conflict or competition, and the teams engaged in conflict both end up losing as a result.
One would assume that Mythic was trying to harness the energy of DAoC on a faster paced small scale battle with WoH, but that's really moving in the opposite direction of why three realms in DAoC was important. Games really need to be designed from the ground up to reward groups of players for helping each other achieve greater things. That's where the whole pride aspect came from. When you went out and did something epic, it benefitted everyone. This sort of mindset goes away when the only reason you give players to log in for is a personal gain. It's one thing to give players a big ol' sandbox to roam around in and kick each other in the face over, but it's something else entirely when you start to highlight objectives that help out the strangers around you that look the same or wear your colors.
Maybe some of you out there never really played DAoC during the peak of it's lifespan. I certainly didn't, but I've heard enough about the game from close friends that were a part of it to understand why the multi-realm RvR worked so well. A DAoC article for review. There was a level of complexity in DAoC that really required guilds to form strong foundations and realms as a whole to have a leading class of players that could take in the battlefields and execute plans of attack. WAR was a much more simplified version of this closer to launch, but still required some realm coordination back when Forts existed. Today it's a zerg on zerg pile of bodies, that while entertaining for the people who remain, is hardly something a realm needs coordination to accomplish. One thing that I'll attribute to the dumbing down of MMO PvP is the attitude you get from PvP'ers in general. Not that I like making generalizations, but people today are bigger assholes than they were ten years ago. Much bigger. Or maybe they're just getting more efficient.
Because really everything is becoming more efficient. Today we have such wonderous technological advancements like MAPS in-game! Or Guild Rosters that don't require you to alt+tab to your internet browser and be logged into your guild site (upon which tabbing back may or may not crash the entire PC). Quest givers these days have annoying icons over their head, and pretty much a line pointing to your objective. I'm getting away from the point of RvR, but you get the idea. As the lowest common denominator slowly expands to encompass more and more people, you attract a lot of pond scum and destroy the intricate complexities that made the competition that much more valuable in terms of time invested.
I'm in it for the long game, the strategy, political positioning and alliances. I also like the high impact combat, but that's only a piece of any given game, and not a very large one most of the time. It's more of a culmination of different plans, preparation, strategic placement, and honed skills that all turn the tide of a battle. The real exciting battles come from having things planned out, the deck stacked in your favor, and something totally unexpected happens in the middle of execution. Being able to react on the fly is a huge source of adrenaline and overcoming both an expected and unexpected enemy simultaneously is one of my favorite outcomes. You rarely find this in two sided games because people have been trained to follow the person in front of them almost mindlessly.
The third realm is rarely a balanced affair due to this, however, it doesn't mean the third realm is ever a failed state. The dynamics of being the weakest realm, strongest realm, or one that has to temporarily ally with another realm to overtake a more powerful enemy is far more interesting than being on one side or the other of a wave of players bouncing back and for to the flavor of the month realm. I can find enjoyment in being any of the three realms because of the battles. I know if I'm the weakest I can play cleanup when the other two realms collide and destroy each other. If I'm the strongest I can push multiple fronts simultaneously and dominate the field. Alliances between realms are shaky at best and can cause some serious political intrigue when they break mid-combat causing chaos to break out as well.
Sadly, WoH, and probably some of the other games touting a third realm or three team combat, may be passing these factors up. MMO's, to a purist like me, are world building affairs. The Warfronts and Scenarios that have come into popularity over the years are NOT where we need a third realm. It's the big wide open world where it really makes a difference. The guilds, keeps, objectives, resource generation, political system, and all the other things that are involved with being a part of a realm are made dynamic provided they're all attainable by kicking someone else in the teeth. The 3-way battles are just the cream floating on the top. They reason behind the battle makes all the difference between whether it's a sweet whipping cream, or a mouthful of pond scum.
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Grudges are Good
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I'm a fan of the gritty, dirty, leans-towards-realistic art style when it comes to video games. If something looks like it's coated in plastic, or is just too clean for it's own good, I'll probably pass on it. Initially at least. I like to be deeply immersed in my gaming experience, and the visual art style of a game can break that immediately for me. I don't want to feel like an outsider pulling the strings of a muppet. I want to emulate and have it become an extension of my will. I like the sensation of having to be pulled out of the game when reality strikes.
