Tag Archives: MMOs

E3 2008 stuff

There hasn’t been anything too exciting going on with me lately. I’ve mostly been playing Grand Theft Auto IV on 360 with the little bit of spare gaming time I’ve had lately. That, and a retro PC game I’m planning on reviewing very soon. I’ve also been playing a little bit of Armed Assault single player on PC and the occasional romp through my Rock Band drum tour.

Speaking of 360 games my library got a tiny bit more respectable this week. A friend saw a copy of Beautiful Katamari and nabbed it from Toys R’ Us for 8 bucks or so. I went back there with her to check on what else they had and the gaming section clerk practically forced me to purchase a copy of Prey for 4 bucks. I’d heard mostly good things and I figured for 4 bucks why not? He also offered me a cheap copy of Condemned from his private stash but I (foolishly?) resisted temptation. Monday afternoon I ran over to Gamestop to take advantage of the 20% off 3 used gamed or accessories coupon that I had been waiting on and ended up picking up Battlestations: Midway, Dead Rising, and Lost Planet. Oddly enough only Battlestations: Midway was actually on my “games to buy cheap sometime” list but Dead Rising I’ve heard almost nothing but praise about and I had thought Lost Planet looked slick since well before its release. It’ll probably be quite a while before I play any of the above though as it seems that GTA4 will continue kicking my ass for quite a while to come but at least I’ll have them for a rainy day. Now I just need to resist the urge to go back out and buy some more of the older games on my wishlist…

Since last time I posted we’ve had E3 so I figured I’d briefly run over which of the games shown more or less at or around the time of the show that I’m interested in. I’m sure I’ll forget quite a few!

First, the Microsoft stuff impressed me the most. This shouldn’t be any big surprise since I’m generally not a Sony fan and most non-rabid fanboy types from all circles agree that MS had the best showing. The Netflix integration, if its as good as it sounds, should be amazing. As it is now I use a lot of Comcast’s “On Demand” service and would probably use Xbox Live’s rental service more as well if it weren’t for the very similar content selection. I’m assuming that Netflix would give me a much wider selection along with hopefully much more economical flat monthly fee based pricing. Sign me up! The new player avatars (dubbed “MiiToos” by some forum comedians) seem interesting. I’ll hold off final judgment until they’re in our hands. I’m not sure what to think about the new layout but unlike some 360 fans I don’t hate it and since I do think the dashboard interface needs an overhaul I’m willing to give it a whirl. The new parties addition sounds great. Lets just hope it works as good as it sounds.

I can’t not mention Nintendo. The Wii MotionPlus thing, a controller add-on that is supposed to give the Wiimote more precise, 1:1 detail motion detection seems like a pretty big deal to me. The sometimes amazing inaccurate and just plain weird motion controls in virtually all Wii games is one of my biggest complaints about the system and I’d love to see more games make use of 1:1 controls especially given that I, like a lot of people, was under the impression that was what the Wii was going to give us in the first place. New Wii sports game? Bought!

Ok, ok… Some games in no particular order. I’ll try to keep it brief:

Spore still looks awesome. The creature creator was a lot of fun. I’ll definitely be purchasing it.
Rockband 2 looks great. I’ve gotten a ton of enjoyment out of the first one and still do for that matter. The fact that it’ll be compatible with Rock Band’s DLC and even many of the songs on the disk is a big selling point for me and an amazingly smart move on their behalf. Now I just need to decide if I should drop the 300 bucks for the super badass drum kit. 🙂
Gears of war 2 is definitely on my list. I played the first one well after the hype had worn off and it actually surpassed my expectations on every level.
Fable 2 is almost certainly a purchase for me. Most of the criticisms of the first game were accurate but ultimately my biggest one was that I had a great time playing it and wanted more.
Mirror’s Edge looks very interesting. I’ve got my eye on it.
Alpha Protocol looks killer. I generally love espionage games as well as RPG+FPSish hybrids.
SOE’s Free Realms looks pretty nifty despite its kiddy focus. I’ve always been drawn towards more social MMOs such as Ultima Online, Eve Online, and early Star Wars Galaxies. I really don’t understand why there aren’t more companies going that direction. I guess it is simply easier to bank on people being addicted to vicious level grinds than having a second life.
Left 4 Dead has a lot of potential. Valve + Zombies… OK!
Little Big Planet still looks amazing.
A new Wolfenstein game? Ok… In my humble opinion Nazis + undead, sci-fi, alternate history stuff always has a chance of being great… period.
A new KOTOR MMO eh? I like Star Wars and I enjoyed KOTOR so I’ll definitely be watching this.
Deadspace. Sci-fi survival horror. Jury is still out for me but if it incorporates enough interesting gameplay elements I could definitely see myself purchasing it.
There’s also apparently a new Halo game of some sort in the works, rumor has it that it may even be an MMO. If it’s an MMOFPS then I’m sold. I loved Planetside and I love other FPSes that try to incorporate massive and persistent qualities such as the Battlefield series. Sign me up!
Speaking of the MMOFPS genre one of Sony’s big show offs was MAG – a “massive” tactical FPS (or 3PS?) game. I have to admit this kind of shit is right up my alley. I hope it ends up coming to PC… I’d hate to have to break down and buy a Blu-ray player. 😛
Halo Wars looks cool. I dig the Halo series and am definitely drawn to the idea of a Halo RTS.
Castle Crashers… Where are you?
Fallout 3 looks great. I loved the first two games and I loved Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series of games so this seems like a no brainer to me. I’m sure a lot of Fallout fans are still crying about it but not I.
Mercenaries 2 needs more press. The first game was one of my favorite console games from the last generation and was seriously underrated in my opinion. Mercenaries 2 looks to be more of the same GTA3-in-a-warzone type goodness.
Megaman 9! This shit looks tight! I’m not a huge fan of platformers but when I’m in the mood, along side the Castlevania series, the Megaman series is one of my absolute favorites.
Puzzle Quest: Galactrix – hey, how cool is this?
I don’t know much about Battlestations: Pacific but the first game (Battlestations: Midway) looked and sounded great, in fact I just bought a copy as I mentioned above, so I’m definitely paying attention to its sequel.
The Brothers in Arms game looks interesting. I’m a large fan of the Full Spectrum Warrior series and the first two Brothers in Arms games were essentially FSW and a WWII FPS mashed together. I only played the first one but I enjoyed it enough for this to catch my attention.
Dawn of War 2. Not much to say about it except Dawn of War is probably one of my favorite FPS games of all time and 2 looks to be more of the same.
Operation Flashpoint 2 has finally recently come out of hiding and looks amazing. I need to see more but I can’t imagine not buying this.
I haven’t play Saints Row yet but it looks and sounds like a competent GTA3 clone, enough to make my “someday” wishlist even, so naturally I’m watching Saints Row 2.
Tomb Raider: Underworld looks decent.
The Witcher: Enhanced Edition will probably end up in my collection sooner or later. I’ve yet to play The Witcher but it looks good and I figure this re-release is the perfect opportunity to finally nab it.
Finally, Borderlands looks amazingly interesting. I remember hearing about this game before but somehow it fell completely off my radar until I watched some of the newly released gameplay footage. Another FPS with RPG elements… And like Fallout 3 it seems to be set in somewhat of a dark, gritty future as well. I’m very interested in this one!

All in all plenty to look forward to. I’d almost say “too much” if I didn’t know that half of the games that look interesting now will probably either suck or at least be too mediocre to worry about come launch time.

Now Under Construction!

Last night was interesting. I fully intended to play a little GTA4 which I have been neglecting hardcore lately for Age of Conan. I’d decided I’d go ahead and play a couple of hours of AoC first before moving on to GTA4 to finish off my tiny amount of free time for the night. This was an incredibly stupid decision as MMOs are infamously addicting and GTA4 is a game in which I’m not heavily invested yet and the inevitable happened. Yep, I ended up playing AoC all night.

Well, I’m not sure “playing” is the right word as I didn’t do all that much of that. I ran through the “Outflow Tunnels” instance solo once to finish up a quest there and I ended up leveling while turning it in. A few guild members talked casually on about the game on our Ventrilo server which eventually lead to an interesting discovery about the fact that map waypoint data could be copied to other machines/accounts which means that once someone had mapped out all of the crafting resource locations (which are static!) that file could be shared and the hard work wouldn’t have to be duplicated.

“Plumbing, Hyborian style”

So, I get these resource waypoint files installed myself and wander out to a resource area to start training my gathering professions which is something I’d been meaning to do for a while now but had put off for various reasons. Sure enough my zone map is littered with waypoints and I start gathering away. This should save me tons of time!

Later conversation on the Ventrilo server shifted to the subject of our guild city. My guild had already claimed a guild city location yet hadn’t actually built anything there due to the massive funds involved. We’re a casual guild and most of us are still in our late 30s or lower. It turns out the architect supplies needed to build our Keep (which is sort of the foundation in the build process) require about 2 gold pieces which is a hefty sum for anyone at these levels. A few days earlier one member had suggested that we make everyone level 35 and over donate 10 silver which, by his estimation, would get us the gold we needed no problem. The guild leader instantly decided that this was, in fact, a great idea and started telling people left and right to throw some silver into the guild bank. With no records or logging of any kind I was hesitant to drop a third of my money without some kind of guarantee it would be used properly or that I wouldn’t be accused of never submitting it. Eventually I gave in and several others donated their silver as well. So the majority of the members on the Ventrilo server reach the conclusion that our Keep should go up tonight with several of them pledging additional funds to make it happen. Nice – I’d get to see it go up!

Soon a few guild members, more than we’d ever assembled in one place before to my knowledge, met at our guild city location (which just so happened to be in the same zone I was gathering resources in) to witness the event. We all casually chatted, joked around, PVP’d with each other a bit, and soon our keep was on its way up.

“What do the hardend, blood-splattered warriors of Hyboria do when they get together? Why dance of course!”

Even in a video game it’s pretty surreal watching a massive man-made structure just raise out of the ground as it did. Definitely cool.

“Raising the roof, yo.”

So now we have our very own Guild Hall!

“Time for a house inspection…”

Of course, like almost everything else in Age of Conan, it was buggy and/or unrefined as hell. You couldn’t use any of the chairs or other decorations in the building apparently. The design of the structure itself seemed less than ideal for defense – it didn’t take much imagination to realize that glitch jumping off the towers onto the ledge above the opening in the hall’s ceiling produced a potentially useful defensive position yet by the design of the building that obviously wasn’t the designers’ intent. There were numerous odd collision issues, particularly with climbing the stairs of the towers. The whole thing was targetable and with being a massive structure fighting in and around it seemed to produce a lot of difficulty with click targeting never mind the ugliness of having the whole structure highlight on mouseover and your tooltip constantly up. To make matters worse any errant clicks while you were in or around the Keep often produced a popup box showing information about upgrading it to the next tier. Highly, highly annoying.

“Death from above!?”

Still, it was kind of nifty I suppose. I’ll withhold judgment on it until we’re much further a long in the game but so far I don’t feel that AoC’s take on guild structures completely delivers on the player owned structure concepts of some of the more open ended games such as Ultima Online or Eve Online though the PVP orientated “battle keep” guild cities of the end game hopefully address some of those concerns. I’ll continue on with that whole discussion in a later post though.

Totem of Splurgin’

The new MMORPG “Age of Conan” was just released a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been playing it heavily in my quest to find my ultimate dream MMO. While this clearly isn’t that game it is pretty cool and I like the Conan mythos quite a lot anyway so for now it is pretty entertaining. More on the broader subject of AoC in future posts I’m sure.

One interesting thing about Age of Conan is that there are several exclusive items that can only be acquired by dropping down some extra cash. It isn’t as crazy as some of these newer Asian MMOs where in game items can be bought left and right with real money but it isn’t necessarily too far gone either. There are a couple of items that come with the Collector’s Edition of the game, there were a couple preorder items, and then there is this one: “The Totem of Origins” which comes with the latest issue of PC Gamer magazine.

“What? People still read these things?”

Well, I’ve got to admit that I’ve got mixed feelings about the whole “pay for advancement/items” thing and really the whole issue of “microtransactions” in gaming period. Despite being somewhat against them in general I’m hypocritical as can be – I’m a total whore for these kinds of things. If I’m really into a game throwing out a few bucks here and a few bucks there for a rare item or ability doesn’t seem unreasonable at all to me and God knows I’m “really into” most of the MMOs I play even if only for a very short time. I guess as I’ve gotten older and my time is more at a premium I’d rather drop the cash than to spend countless hours grinding away most of the time. Combining my limited time and anti-grinding mentality with my love of collecting, and my obsession with MMO games is a recipe for fucking critical levels of impulse buying.

Anywho, I broke down and spent way too much time (and probably gas) trying to track down this latest issue of PC Gamer and finally found it last weekend. I entered my code and claimed my Totem of Origins yesterday and tried it out for the first time this morning. Pretty sweet item!

Here’s the lowdown: In AoC you have one “teleport” or “recall” type ability that, as exactly like World of Warcraft, lets you teleport to a single “bound” location (of which there is a limited, static selection across the world) once an hour. It is a pretty limited ability but it does save you a bit of time traveling on occasion and god knows you’ll be doing a lot of traveling all over the place while questing in AoC which is even more tedious than in most other newer MMORPGs due to all of the zone and instance loading screens you’ll encounter.

“Skinny lewtz!”

The Totem of Origins is essentially an item that casts that same ability, permanently bound to your faction’s capital city, useable once every 24 hours. This means you’ll almost never have to worry about binding to that particular city and, being on a different timer, it allows you to potentially use the two different abilities to travel between 2 places very quickly if needed. Pretty cool, especially since the 3 capital cities are regional hubs in the game and you will be traveling to/through them often. The item’s cooldown isn’t a huge bummer for me because with the hour cooldown on the other ability I typically only recall once or twice per session of which I usually only have one a day. If anything I’d actually say the biggest disadvantage of the item is having to keep it on you when inventory space is such a limited commodity in this game.

“Waiting for the “happy ending”…”

Is it useful? I think it might be, sure. Is it game breakingly powerful or otherwise unbalancing? Nah, definitely not. Is it worth the 6 or 7 bucks at the newsstand? That is the tricky one. On one hand, virtual item buying ethics aside, you’re paying god knows how much equivalent in game cash (the game hasn’t been out enough for those exchange rates to stabilize) for one item of limited use. On the other this is supposedly going to be a limited, fairly rare item. Once everyone who wants one snatches up these magazines the people who passed it up or came to the game later have no chance in getting it and that is what really seals the deal for me. Items are usually another way of customizing your character and having an attachment to your in-game avatar is very hard to put a price on indeed.