Category Archives: Games

What be new?

Posted on by

Not much actually!  Surprising that.

I recently restarted Batman: Arkham Asylum for another playthrough.  I remember it being longer though and somewhat tougher.  I am interested in how the sequel will make you not want to be in detective mode 100% of the time.  The only time I saw Killer Croc was in the cutscenes, it was too hard to see him with normal vision and hit his collar otherwise.  And of course, the fights with Poison Ivy (a shooter, really?) and Joker (just plain stupid and anti-Joker) are horribad.  Scarecrow, Bane and Croc are all well done, and within their characters too.

Shadow of the Colossus and ICO are coming out together this fall for the PS3.  SotC is, in my opinion, the best game on the PS2 and one of the best in the past 10 years, so I’m more than happy to pick it up.  Still waiting on the Last Guardian to have a release date!

Diablo 3 news is still coming out.  No beta yet, though apparently in early September.  Starcraft 2 was the first Blizzard game I did not buy and I am still on the fence for this one.  I loved me some Diablo 2, lots of fun and a decent story.  Then again, that was over 10 years ago and the hack and slash genre has changed so much.  You should give Torchlight (sequel coming early next year too) so you have an idea how the genre can be fixed.

Of course, Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Beta invites have started though not many.  True beta should open late September with a launch date of November.  If they are unable to launch before Christmas, they will be smack in the middle of WoW’s next expansion launch in February.  There is a lot to like here and a lot to not like.  I read that they plan on limiting access to the game at the start by selling less copies than people want.  This makes sense so that the servers run properly and we don’t see another repeat of WoW’s first 4 months.  Then again, I don’t really see people sticking to the game past the point of WoW’s next expansion if the game is so similar – as it appears to be.  Rift did enough different to keep people on board and I pray that there’s more to TOR than what I’ve seen so far.

WoW is Dying

Posted on by

I started playing World of Warcraft on launch day in November 2004.  Back then, it was a great progression from Everquest in that is was more player friendly, better graphics and was overall a better system.    It did maintain the nose grinding raiding mentality of the day though.  When the first expansion came out, raiding was the #1 priority and because of gating, maybe 5% of the entire population saw anything but their town gates.  It was a flawed system that catered to a super small minority.  Next expansion, Lich King, swung the pendulum the other way.  Gear was easy to get, raids were pretty easy too.  By the end, people with skill could faceroll the final boss.  A lot of people who had been with the game for the first 4 years thought this was ridiculous and to be honest, based on the game’s history, it was.

We’re now 6 years in and there are 3 main expansions, each with 4 content updates each – so 16 or so modules in 6 years.  Contrast to ANY other game with over 200K subs and you get an expansion at max every 18 months and multiple content updates within. Rift is 6 months old and has had 4.  With the ease of single player content in WoW, people can hit max level in a week of play, see every dungeon in 2 weeks and perhaps attempt to raid for another month.  At best, any new content is completely worn out within 3 months yet WoW has insisted upon a 6 month cycle.  People burn out and leave.

Late last year the recent expansion came out, Cataclysm, whose goal was to to simplify stats and talents yet increase the difficulty of mechanics.  This meant you needed a lot of skill to succeed and for the tanks and healers, this was a huge pressure that simply did not exist for 2 years.   Quite simply, the game is standing at a point where a bad tank (20% of the smaller groups or 5% of the largest) take 100% of the blame of failure.  This has caused huge burnout and as numbers have shown, WoW has lost 1 million customers since the expansion came out about 9 months ago.  Sure, they still have 11 million left but 1 million people is $15,000,000 a month lost.  Any game but WoW would love to even break the 1 million player mark.

So WoW has issues, core fundamental issues, that have been ignored for a while now.  Many of the original devs have left due to the change in vision and started their own games.  Free to Play games (DDO, LOTRO, AOC) have shown that you can have tremendous success with simplified modular games.  Pay to play games have faltered incredibly in the past yet Rift seems to be taking a different path where WoW has evidently been lacking.  They listen to players and have a general need to appease all of their players, not just the hardcore raiders.

What is WoW doing to combat this?  Backtracking of course.  Huge threat changes to make tanks easier to play.  A possible new expansion with a mind blowing casual focus.  Customization options for armor and weapons.  A new patch schedule.  4.1 came out after 6 months, 4.2 came 4 months later and 4.3 looks to be 3 months after that and it would be the final update.  That means the next expansion is due in February-March 2012.

A game company doesn’t completely reverse its method of operation on a whim, it smells the blood in the air and makes drastic changes to the core mechanics.  It’s done this every major expansion, adding to the core combat of the game while completely ignoring the communal aspect from the start.  Every game that has had success since has seen this as a tremendous weakness and has fought to combat it.  I think we’ve reached a point where we can honestly say that Blizzard killed WoW.

 

EDIT: I wanted to add a bit more about raiding.  A particular website keeps track of WoW raid boss kills, world of logs.  In the past expansion, 12,000 kills were recorded for the Lich King – the final boss.  The tier before that had maybe 20,000 kills.  Think about those numbers.  With an average of 20 players per attempt, that’s less than 250,000 people, excluding those who did it multiple times, who saw the final encounter.  Best case, 2% of the player base.  Even the current content has only upped it to 4%.  How sad of a state it is that such a tiny percentage is the target market.

A month just like that

Posted on by

Been a while since I last updated.  First, since the last update I’ve been at home on parental leave with my daughter.  That is piles of fun and I wouldn’t swap it for the world.  I feel sorry for people who don’t get the opportunity.

Game-wise a few things.

DCUO – 31 days after it launched the game emptied.  The first patch did hit yesterday though, with a fair amount of new content.  Is the game sound?  Close enough.  There are still some pretty nasty bugs, horrible grouping tools outside of being in a guild and a lack of general things to do at level 30, which takes a week to get to, tops.  I’ll check back in 5-6 months but I expect server consolidation by that point and maybe some sort of store added.

Rift – Lord.  I wrote 3 guides for this game and it’s not even out yet.  It does what Warcraft and Warhammer want to do but without the baggage of years of crap.  Warhammer failed (there are only 4 servers left I think) because it ignored PvE.  WoW is failing because it removed the community aspect of the game and took a left turn on the last expansion to correct the errors of the previous.  Rift gives people a fresh take on PvP, PvE, dynamic content and choice.  Time will tell how well people want it.  The only real competition is SWTOR and I am having a lot of trouble seeing that game be a success the more I hear of it.

Dragon Age 2 – The demo came in yesterday.  It looks amazing.  It plays amazing.  So many things have been improved.  Bioware makes great games because of the story and I doubt I will be disapointed here.  Now I just need to find the time to play it!

Finally, house renos.  We’re starting this weekend and the entire main floor is being redone.  That’s quite the task but it will be fun!

I Like Games!

Posted on by

No secret here, I love games.  Let’s knock off a few…

Rebuild – A browser flash game where you have to rebuild a city in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.  The first time I played I got trounced so I then went to easy mode and tried a few things.  Now with a good strategy, you can get through hard mode without too much trouble, you just need to balance everything and always, always make sure your base is defended at the end of every turn.

Rift – Sort of like World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online.  Fantasy setting, great visuals, dynamic content (rifts appear in the sky randomly and attack the world).  The Soul system allows near infinite customization of play style.  Great buzz about the game too.  I bought it to play the beta and I’m writing a few guides for it.  Might not be the next WoW but I think there’s room for it.

DC Universe Online – DC Comics online, so a superhero MMO.  It’s available on the PS3 too, so it plays more like a multiplayer twitch game than a huge MMORPG.  Actually, I bought it and have been trying to upgrade to Windows 7 at the same time, so all I’ve seen is the loading screen and youtube videos.  Good press here too as it appears to be a step up from City of Heroes and the crud that is Champions Online.

Plants vs Zombies – A tower defense type of game where you plant, uh, plants in order to stop zombies from eating your brains.  Made by PopCap, the makers of eternal crack Bejeweled.  Of all the devs in the entire world, these people know how to make fun.  Wife is addicted.

World of Warcraft – I got my Rogue to 85 rather quickly then with 40 minute queues to play in groups, I leveled my Shaman to 85 as well.  I modified my gold making methods to pull in about 10,000 gold per day (average coin drop from a kill is like 1-2g for perspective) and I’m realizing it’s more of the same but with a larger amount of crappy players.  When the expansion launched, it added a new layer of difficulty to group play where you couldn’t just smash any old button, you needed to pay attention.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see that 25% of the group playing population is not accustomed to that and you get times where it feels like you’re playing with chimps.  I also realize I don’t have hour blocks to play with a daughter to take care of, so my play is very sporadic.  I find I don’t mind that one bit.

WoW: Cataclysm

Posted on by

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, with no TV and no internet, you know that World of Warcraft is launching its newest expansion, Cataclysm.  The game celebrated 6 years this week and let’s face it, the game needed some tweaking to the areas that were 6 years old!  So, they unleash a dragon, destroys the world and they rebuild then entire game from levels 1-60 (max will be 85), which covers every zone that was over 4 years old.  Pretty impressive and ballsy.

Did I mentioned 12 million players play the game?

Posted in WoW

What's You Playin'?

Posted on by

Civilization V.

You know that feeling you had when you first tasted apple pie and you were like “damn, this is the best thing ever”?  Then you had an even better apple pie with ice cream?  Imagine they made ice cream out of apple pie, distilled down to its greatness in an easy to eat package.  That’s Civ V.

Everything* has been improved upon.  Hex tiles for better movement.  More land improvements, better politics, better research, more culture, happiness means something, terrain combat means something, military unit improvements, no more stacking 1000 hopplites against a single tank.  (*)The only thing that seems to be worse is the computer AI but I am guessing that will come with a patch.

I picked this up on Tuesday night and put in 6 hours after I downloaded it from Steam.  Time just flies by and all you can think is “I can play another turn”.  That other turn means an extra 50 turns.  This game is crack.

On a side-ish note, you should be using Steam for game purchases.  They have every game you can think of, a log of the games you have so you can reinstall it on another computer (laptop and desktop for me!), many games save their files on the Steam network so you can continue from one PC to the next. Not to mention the games are always cheaper and often come on sale.  Try it out!

STEAM Sale

Posted on by

I know many people don’t like the idea of buying a game without a box but I’ve used STEAM a few times now with great success.  If you happen to wipe your box, you can always reinstall the software since it’s account based, sort of like linking your hotmail account to all your games.

Right now, STEAM is having a huge sale, like 50% off almost everything they have.  How about Bioshock 1, 2, Borderlands and all the exp packs plus 20 more 2K games for 85$?  Crazy.

Take a look!