Smuggler video. Looks pretty good!
Back to the Future
Well hot damn, these are some cool shoes. All proceeds to the Michael J Fox foundation (Parkinsons). Too much for me though!
Awesome Trick
Impressions
So, impressions without breaking an NDA right?
A new beta phase is starting in a few weeks, with the current one ending shortly. Some people were able to sample it recently. All told, this is a beta and beta is beta. I expect there to be lag, I expect there to be balance issues, some tweaks to numbers and a large amount of bugs (I log about 10 an hour). What I don’t expect to be missing is gameplay strategy and content.
Example. Depending on the zone you’re in, you might have 10 quests or you might have 40. One particular zone is simply bereft of any direction or cohesion, you don’t know what to do or where to go. This in itself isn’t bad, I’ve played a few games like that. The issue is that the other starting zones all appear to be the complete opposite – providing story and direction and actual content. Even the best of these zones has areas where there’s simply nothing. Wide areas where there simply is nothing to do other than walk through it or ignore it. You’ll find dozens of these examples in the first 10 levels – complete interior zones with 5-10 rooms and you never have a single need to go into any of them. So much effort by the artists, so little by the developers – a real shame.
Another topic which grates me to no end is forced grouping. There is no game other than Everquest that currently forces you to group to complete exterior content while leveling. Sure, there are optional spots from time to time, maybe a dozen or so while leveling to max. I found 5 in the first hour – three quests at level 3. After leaving the starting area, I had to travel THROUGH a forced grouping zone to get to the next hub. Don’t get me wrong, I do like grouping up, it is part of the point of MMOs after all. What I dislike is being forced into doing it with such a piss-poor design. Let’s say you’re in a zone and you have 10 active group quests. Finding someone is an act of asking in chat or finding people running around you. if they are nearby, super. If not, then getting to the actual spot can be a 10 minute affair. Ridiculous. Use Rift’s system for quests and porting people to the right spot. Add a summon part button. It’s simple, other games have done it and done it much better.
Last is character development. This is so fluid during beta I can’t comment on the value for launch but as it stands, leveling pace is decent, if not linear in time spent. What is a concern is class power. When you level up you either get a new skill or an upgraded one. The upgrades are minimal really, since you start off dealing huge damage in the first place. Let’s say I do 100 damage per hit at level 1. By level 15, I might be doing 150. Enemies also scale at this rate, except for elites. One I killed had 13,000 hit points. Do the math on how long it took to kill him, simply mashing the same buttons over and over again. Boring does not begin to describe it. Each level should mean something or it should not. Right now, we’re in the middle ground where it makes you think you’re stronger but in fact, it’s marginal. How about the skills grow on their own after I’ve trained and I only need to go back when I get something new?
Still a lot of work to do and a short period of time to do it in. As I’m looking at it, it has less chance at success than Rift due to gameplay mechanics and horrible community tools but both can be turned around in short order. Unless of course they are looking at a 3 month turnaround for players – which is what I give it optimistically.
The weekend
So the long weekend is here, yipee! Fishing and beer and family, great stuff.
On the side, Deus Ex is one of, if not the best game I’ve played this year. Infamous 2 is good too but this game is amazing. Action/stealth RPG with a great story and art direction. Like playing Blade Runner.
On the other side I got into a rather important beta this week for a rather large game. There’s still an NDA, so no posting details but suffice it to say that the game is still in beta and that the projected media timeframes for a deliverable are EXTREMELY aggressive based on what I’ve seen. This coming from someone who has tested and played every MMO that has breached the 50K subs market except for EvE. The stuff in there is ok when it works but there’s not enough stuff. SO much great artwork and it’s like an empty shell. Ugh
What be new?
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
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.
Update to Feb post
I’m back!
DCUO – as expected the servers merged this week. A lot of new content, still lots of bugs. I give it 6 months to go free to play or close.
Rift – a million active subs, a great game. I just don’t have time to play. It really is quite good but there are too many grinds in it currently for my tastes. I think WoW has spoiled me into thinking I should be raid ready in a month of playing, not 3.
Dragon Age 2: Demo was fun. Game, not so much. All the fun was gone from the first one, which admitedly was just the strategy part. Ugh, so much potential wasted.
Infamous 2: Great game, great story. Tons improved over the first one. Way way too short and the game is balanced upon plateaus. You start weak in a zone, finally get an ability that makes all events trivial for about 30 minutes, then move to a new area. Repeat 4 times. I can see this being further improved upon but its still damn good.
FF13: I played this last fall then again during the summer. After the first time, I still have the same reservations about the way too linear story but I tried a different approach to combat. The 2nd last boss (the last one has always been a joke) killed me consistently with a random death spell for an hour – which is one of the dumbest mechanics I have ever seen. My characters were about 95% maxed too by that point. The near thing about the linear aspect though is that the bosses are balanced since the game knows just about how powerful you will be at any given time. Contrast this to past FF games where you could powerlevel early on for a huge advantage or conversely, need to grind in order to progress.
SW:ToR
So this is the new Star Wars video from Gamescon in Germany. If you weren’t aware, the game is in beta currently so I would expect it to come out in November. What does that have to do with anything? Well, the graphics and movement and zones are pretty much all done. Content being worked on is likely just raids and dungeons and building whatever dynamic content they can. Basically, what you see here is what the game will actually look like.
Second, the way the skills work is likely static. Sure, there might be some tweaks but the lightsabers will work like you see them and the lightning too. What may, or rather should, change is healing. If healing is anything like what’s in the video, I can guarantee you won’t see healers in the game.
Third and this is the saddest part, this looks identical to WoW, EQ, Rift and all that jazz with a new skin. A crappy skin at that. You know that feeling in a game where your character does something and you go ‘Wow, that was amazing?’ Shouldn’t we be seeing the best the game has to offer at this point? All I could think of was meh…
On the flipside though, I have been reading that there will be 200+ hours of single player content. Something like the content of KOTOR x3, which is really nice. I think I’d pick it up just to play it until I run through that content. I can see the level cap is 50 and current games (Rift is one) let you reach 50 in about 40 hours of playtime. This is both an advantage for those who don’t want to take years to reach the cap but a bummer in that it’s rather fast. 200 hours equals about 8 days or about what WoW vanilla took back in 2004. Except WoW had no story and it was a 100% grindfest from 30-50. It will be interesting to see how this works out instead.
Final summation: Sad to see this video. It doesn’t inspire confidence at all. Happy that there’s supposedly a lot of content though.
A month just like that
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!
Leo's Life 