The State of MMORPG Gaming as 2016 Closes

This year more even than last demonstrated that MMOs are in a weird space, where the conventional aerchetype set by Everquest and then World of Warcraft (yes, and others that no one really remembers prior to WoW) has --I think-- moved from being "the only way to do it" to being both something of an oddity and also a conscious style/design decision. Today if you make a game that functions on the traditional questing/leveling/pve/pvp structure set by the industry nearly two decades ago then you are doing so because you want to actually offer up that style of game, not because it is in any way the golden apple of design (or seen as such).

We had a time when MMOs were being cranked out constantly, and in Korea at least it seems this still goes on, with a fair number getting awkward ports over to the US. But in the US, new MMORPGs need to do stuff differently, and often don't look anything like a conventional MMO used to....to the point where the line between MMO and other game is often blurred considerably. As a result, some games (like The Division, Destiny or even GTA Online) might well have a valid claim to the MMO part of the name. But despite this, I want to look at how the "tried and true" MMORPGs are doing these days.

As usual, I look at these games with the following important caveat, because I am not a normal MMO Blogger: I probably am lucky to land 50 hours in a game per year, and if an MMO gets 200 hours out of me in a year I must really, really like it, enough to devote that much of my precious time to it. When some guy comments online about how you can level to 100 in game X in a couple weeks*, remember that I am not that guy, and I have played, for example, The Elder Scrolls online continuously since it's date of release and only just hit the level twenties....albeit with like 9 characters, but you get the idea: I am the player for whom all the pre-end-game content in an MMO matters. The End Game is not for me, and I find it a time sink anyway when I do miraculously get there. When I hit level cap in WoW, for example, and wrap the current story (as much as the solo quests allow me to see) then I am done with that game; I have no time, ability or interest in the End Game raids and other nonsense.

So, with that said....here's what I followed/played over this year:

The Elder Scrolls Online

This year Elder Scrolls Online upgraded to a "One Tamriel" edition which was basically a smoothing out of the leveling experience....you can now basically go anywhere and group with anyone and the game accommodates your level accordingly.  The net result was more freedom of play and a bigger focus on what you are doing now rather than where you need to go. TESO remains my favorite fantasy MMORPG on the market right now, with beautiful graphics, enough of the Elder Scrolls aesthetic to make it interesting, and for a casual MMOer like myself it's a great game to pick up and play on those odd Sundays when you have a four or five hour block of time for some serious gaming. It also remains one of the more affordable microtransaction experiences; the most expensive items remain vanity-based, but the game regularly has sales and reduced costs on its crown points which means you can make it quite cost effective if you are patient.

Verdict: will continue to play this most likely until I finally reach level cap. Someday. But sometimes I just can't get into the experience and have to put it aside for weeks at a time, only to come back to it randomly and suddenly totally dig it again. I think it's the fact that there are moments where it feels like 95% of my quests are being delivered by ghosts, about other ghosts. Why the obsession with the ghosts, Zenimax???? WHY???

Neverwinter Online

I jumped back in to this for a few weeks earlier this year and was pleased to see that it had grown quite a bit in content. I played long enough to start (not actually succeed....just start) comprehending the bizarre multi-tiered point structures of the cash shop, but ultimately grew annoyed with the whole mess once more when I took a month away from the game, came back, and found it too annoying to bother with re-learning all over again. That said, I think Neverwinter really doesn't require any purchasing for a casual MMOer to enjoy for a while, as the game feeds you pretty much the essentials as you go. Their hook is to offer you lots of cool stuff you want to buy, and hope you do exactly that. Restraint will make this a much cheaper game, since unfortunately the cost of store items remains too high for my tastes, and their sales often do little more than drag the outrageous costs down to "almost affordable but not quite."

Verdict: I really enjoyed the play of NWO once I figured it out and learned to ignore the weird currencies design to make you pay money in the cash shop. I was disappointed to see that leaving and coming back a few weeks later left me feeling a bit out annoyed with all of it again. When I feel the temerity to stab at it once more, I will.

Defiance

This game is getting older and older, but still has periodic new events, usually driven by cash shop sales items. It remains a fun shooter to mess around with, and ties in to the Defiance TV series, but I've never been able to really enjoy it as much as I feel I should these days, since Defiance itself delved into the "MMO shooter" genre first, laying the groundwork for much better games to come, games which knew the audience for this style of game much better than poor Trion did (The Division, GTA Online and Destiny, for example). I may give up and delete it, but not before I finish watching all the episodes of the TV show.

Verdict: I think I may be done with this one, but who knows, I thought I was last year, too.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

I honestly did not have this on my radar, but three things happened: first I got into White Star --a lot-- earlier this year which really put me in the mood for some good, pulpy Star Wars-adventure. Despite my interest, I didn't think of SWTOR as an outlet for this desire. Then a new expansion was announced, featuring a cool trailer (here) that reminded me of why Bioware is so cool. Finally Rogue One released, and I rediscovered my fluctuating, on-again, off-again love for all things Star Wars. On a lark I snagged the expansion and loaded the game.

Since then I've been hooked and it's dominated my December game time, more so than any other game except The Division. The cash shop is not annoying me like I remember when it first came out...the prices aren't spectacular, but they are more affordable on average...$40 in coins gives you enough to snag the key items and vanity crap you will no doubt want to decorate your PCs with. It's still not perfect, but the game also was overhauled with a faster, more story-focused leveling experience which has so far proven much smoother and more entertaining for the casual MMOer like me. People are bitching about this change online, I noticed.....but my guess is Bioware needs people who are playing the game and spending money, not end-gaming it and no spending money? I don't know.....but I do know I am currently quite obsessed with this game, and I honestly did not expect that I'd end the year stating that SWTOR is my darling MMORPG right now.

Verdict: I feel a strong desire to actually experience all of the story content in this game and can only assume EA and Bioware have found some form of mind control to hook me on the game. That or I'm just enjoying how even trivial quests are made entertaining with Bioware's live actors and cutscenes.

The Crew (Complete Edition)

I feel an obligation to include this game on the list, because it is absolutely an MMO and maybe even an RPG, due to the fact that you follow storylines in the game. When this first came out I was less than impressed, but several expansions later and The Crew is a pretty fulfilling and interesting experience, with some decent (but not perfect) car physics. You are totally playing online with other humans, but it is fairly easy to ignore them if you want, for most things anyway. That said.....unlike Horizon 3, where you have to choose to go online, The Crew is always online all the time. I've been enjoying touring it's rendition of the United States, which is a world filled with aggressive drivers attempting to perform ever more outrageous stunts and races with increasingly tricked out cars in various locales. The new expansion adds cops and chases in to the mix, making the overall experience feel pretty rounded.

Verdict: I'd like to play this to the "end," whatever that is for a car game but suspect Horizon 3 will beat it up and take it's stuff as that game steamrolls out more compelling content.

World of Warcraft: Legion

Legion is definitely a return to form for World of Warcraft, and I jumped back in entirely because my nostalgic love for this game was rekindled by the Warcraft movie earlier this year. I had left off somewhere in the middle of Warlords of Draenor on my alliance warrior, and enjoyed playing through WoD which I really think was a better expansion now than I previously gave it credit for. The Legion expansion is interesting....but it's the "newest" which means that once you hit the new content the leveling process slows down and the game's flaws (such as agonizingly painful quest lines, horrendous environment designs, generally dated graphics even after the recent attempts at improvement) start to stand out. Maintaing your garrison is fun, though....but I have to say, I am not sure I like the weird turn of events in Legion all that much....the weird pseudo-Norse stuff, the superhero feel with artifact level weapons and all that are just not really proving all that fun for me (yet, I's still persevering). My main gripe though is that as I play my horde warrior through Pandaria content to get to the good stuff in WoD, I am learning to REALLY HATE PANDARENS...and Pandaria...it's just so gimmicky and trite for the horde storyline so far, and the increased leveling pace makes it such a fragmented experience that I am basically just trying to find the will to level my orc warrior to get her the hell out of there as fast as possible.

Verdict: I wish Blizzard would cough up news of a WoW 2, one which looks and feels more like the movie. Leave the original WoW as a legacy title for gamers with older rigs.....we need something genuinely new for Warcraft's future, please! For now I will probably find myself leveling my one warrior to the level cap slowly and surely while enjoying the lower level content I find more palatable...and exploring more of WoD's territory, which I think is the best since BC.

Off the Radar

I have a few games I used to love which have all but dropped off the radar. These include:

Rift: despite releasing new content this year, I never did recover from when Rift went F2P; the cash shop is too messy and expensive, and the design decisions from level 50 content onward were just no fun, with a questing approach that worked great before the F2P experience but leads to a fragmented inability for casual MMOers to figue out what the hell is going on, where to go, or why to care. Rift still remains a great experience from level 1-50, approximately, with diminishing returns beyond that point. Verdict: I am done with it.

Guild Wars 2: I gave up on this game. Much like Rift I have no idea what the hell is going on, or why it took me so long to level up back when I was invested in the game. Leveling up seems much faster now, but the purpose of one's existence in the game is constantly called in to question due to a questing structure that seemed innovative back in the day proving to be boring and pointless now. It's basically a problem I describe as "invisible progress," in which the cycling of recurring events/themes doesn't give you much direction on where to go.....if you can adjust to the "fill the hearts" thematic of GW2's exploration process, and you can accept the almost (to me) incomprehensible math behind how damage in combat works, then GW2 is probably a better game for you than it is for me. Verdict: I am keeping it installed for now, but I think not for much longer. A damned shame.....I love the original GW, and so wanted this one to be a major innovator going forward.....so my frustration at not being able to grokk it is very annoying.

DC Universe Online and Marvel Heroes 2016: The DC Heroes MMORPG and the Marvel Heroes 2016 action RPG both are fun experiences, but from very different angles. I spent a bit of time in both, and came away from the experience realizing that the best moments I experienced in both games paled in comparison to taking 2 hours to watch the latest movie or read some comics. Verdict: Deleted and moved on. I do want to thank Marvel Heroes for letting me run around as Moon Knight, though....if only you were a real game, and not a Diablo knock-off, the most ill-suited design choice for Marvel characters imaginable. And as for DC Universe.....it helped clarify just how inappropriate the MMORPG classic format is when applied to a comic book superhero universe.


*The reason I make this distinction is because of an experience I had (often) best summarized by this story: sometime around mid 2008 I was gaming in WoW with my wife and her active guild when I was treated to a fascinating conversation explaining why I was a casual gamer because I could not devote more than 30 hours a week to the game. When I pointed out that that would mean I would have to devote a minimum of 4-5 hours per night, seven nights a week to meet the minimum, I was met with a sea of "yep, absolutely" type responses from the guild, who had no problem with this concept. I took a long break from WoW after that. 

The Elder Scrolls Online - Sinking its claws in deep after a second chance

So I've bounded back and forth a bit on Elder Scrolls Online.

First I decided pre-release that I wasn't going to get into it at all. Then I watched my wife playing in beta and decided it looked like it might be worth investigating, so I bought a copy on some credit a few weeks after release.

What I discovered initially was a lot of fun....and it felt very "Elder Scrolls" to me, having that "thing" that I can only define as what Bethesda --or in this case Zenimax-- can do to make an RPG fun.

Then I started to run into some problems. The first problem was ridiculously long load times. When a game takes 8 minutes from clicking on the shortcut to actually playing, and you only have 30 minutes to play that's a clear sign you need to play another game.

Then I would get in and find horrendous lag was leading to death constantly. Also, I was literally doing it wrong, I figured out later. I'd get in to TESO and forget this is a twitchy combat game, not one where you stand there trading blows.

I decided not to renew my sub at the end, but a few days later I recanted on this decision and decided instead to go back and try it another month. This was actually spurred on at least partially by my adoption of Wildstar, which had an open beta I could jump into. Wildstar is an interesting game and I think I will enjoy playing it, but in the course of messing around in the beta I realized that Wildstar had a lot of "MMOisms" that were actually styles of play I had really burned out on. Static storytelling....bubble balloon dialogue, cartoony WoWish graphics (I knew that in advance, it was not a selling point for me, but the look is actually very stylish and interesting), and a combat system that is a bit different but still much closer to its WoW DNA than...say....Elder Scrolls.

So after a bit of Wildstar I realized that I really ought to go give TESO a second chance. I did so, jumped back in, found some patches that seemed to dramatically improve lag issues (haven't had any lag problems in the last week of playing) and have been having a great time simultaneously leveling up three different characters. Hey, I also discovered that TESO lets you skip the intro sequence once you've done it. This has the unique effect of making TESO feel just like any other Elder Scrolls game where you're just another wanton criminal given an accidental reprieve.

At this point I've decided that for the foreseeable future I'm going to focus on TESO and will also give Wildstar a earnest chance. I'll continue to let Defiance and Guild Wars 2 linger as games I play when the mood strikes (and while it doesn't strike often I enjoy both a great deal when time and interest permit). I've deleted WoW and Rift completely now: I tried to level up in WoW in preparation for the next expansion, but I just can't muster the energy to care anymore. WoW, for me, is a fond memory of a great game from the old days, and the desire to stick with it is just gone. And as for Rift....I'll never reach level cap, and I don't quite know what went wrong with their 51-60 content that it's such a slog to get through, but I will always remember it fondly from the days before it went F2P. As F2P goes Rift is top notch, yes; but there are a lot things that become less important or even counter-productive to the design of a F2P MMO over a pay-to-play version. F2P for example benefits from slower advancement, and markets potions and perks you purchase to speed up experience gain; the older subscription model actively encouraged the designers to come up with bonus experience events for a contrast. The best time to play Rift was the eight weeks leading up to Storm Legion's release, when all sorts of craziness was going on and world events were popping everywhere that were designed to dump metric tons of XP on participants. The post F2P Rift is a painful slog that, if played the way it wants you to, will cost you more than $15 a month in purchases to stay relevant, and as always that means that the only people who benefit from F2P models are those who have no money at all but tons of time, or those with no time but tons of money (and no common sense).

Anyway....its now TESO and Wildstar for me until one or both go F2P!

Back to Normalcy for a While....on Raging Swan, Firefall, Defiance and Thief

I was going to do "13 Days of 13th age" but that requires some effort. I have a 13th Age module I plan to put on the blog soon, but I did not actually find time between now and when I came up with the idea to actually write anything. Yet. So maybe soon, perhaps another month with 13 days in it. Or maybe I'll just play catch-up later on in March. I need to recover from my 28 Days of Savage Space a little bit longer...

Today's blog is back to talking about meandering stuff.....

Raging Swan Press

Raging Swan makes some fantastic Pathfinder books, very utility-focused and useful for GMs who like to mine modules for content. Great stuff. But, did you know they are also available in print through Amazon, Noble Knight and possibly other locales? I discovered this by accident while emailing them about if they'd ever do a print option on rpgnow.com, and the answer was just what I wanted to hear: so I now own all three Tribes compilations, Caves & Caverns, The Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands and Scions of Evil. Scions of Evil, by the way, is a 200 page book full of fully statted villains of all varieties. Great stuff.

Firefall Beta

I tried Firefall's beta....again....at the urging of cohorts who love it. All it did was remind me that I really do like Defiance and need to play more of that (which I did). Firefall looks and feels to me like a slightly subpar shooter/MMO blend (Defiances heavy on the shooter side, Firefall slightly on the MMO side) with awkward armor designs and a heavy dose of crafting mania. I plan to give it more time, but not before I've divested myself of more gaming with Defiance.

Thief

Thief finally arrived, the first new title for the next gen consoles since their release days (Tomb Raider doesn't count). It's fun....and it does open up more after the opening sequence, fyi...but i can see why some people might have issues with it. I find it to be a rather enjoyable, low-key game about a thief in a grimy dark ages-meets-steampunk city of misery, and it's really kind of fun in its own special way. However, if you can try before you buy it's a good idea, as people have a lot of different expectations about titles like this. For me, it's reminiscent of Dishonored, but with you as more of a average Joe thief with a couple cool tricks and an absolute disdain for violence, rather than being a supernatural super assassin.

Defiance Q&A

My wife got to participate in the Defiance Q&A held on Wednesday at Raptr here. She's Malyki in the questions/comments part. I have to say, the devs at Trion Worlds are my favorites, nice guys and very engaged with their gaming communities. No wonder I enjoy both Rift and Defiance so much...and my wife of course 10 times that for Defiance!

MMOnday Blaaaagh! Defiance: the first 13 hours

I got a decent amount of game time in this weekend with Defiance, including several hours on my laptop while teaming up with a friend who recently upgraded his seven year old computer to something more state of the art. Overall a well rounded experience for first impressions.

Defiance is essentially a shooter-based MMO which aims to capture several crowds: the MMOers looking for something different, the Halo dudes looking for something different, the console crowd in general and anyone who'd like to experience a (so far) co-op experience online in a massive multi-player environment. Depending on your level of appreciation for this style of game, this level of story focus in a genre not always well-regarded for its stories, and your tolerance for twitch-based game play your mileage may vary in terms of enjoyment. For me? This was a no-brainer. It hits most of my "like" buttons in fast succession.

If you'd like a chance to explore Defiance's setting before approaching the game, a good place to start is with the Defiance 14 minute pilot preview. It's on Hulu and Xbox Live for free download right now, and offers an excellent glimpse into the look, feel and style of this new multimedia experience. The two lead characters in this preview also happen to show up in the game, which is not unexpected as my understanding is that Defiance will have a lot of crossover between the two, and of course the big gimmick here is that events in the game will influence the TV show.

So based on the thirteen-odd hours I've sunk into Defiance so far, here are my off-hand observations:

Plot and Cinematics

They go hand in hand here. The cinematics are great, and quite entertaining. There's only one starter zone, unfortunately, and everyone essentially drops in as "ark hunters," in the employ of one Van Bach, a  suspiciously shady mad scientist gun merchant type who has a bit of a reputation. The lead-in to the game approaches information dispersal in one of the following two ways, and I haven't decided which its going for: 1. it's being coy about info, expecting you to fill in the gaps throught the TV show and web site, or 2. it's using economy of information to dole out as little front-loaded background as possible, to let the player organically learn about the world as you go. Whichever was intended (my money's on #1) the effect for now is the same: hints of a very big world with very little hard information to go on, and lots of inferred possibilities. It works for me.

I won't go into the plot here because frankly I'm still piecing it together but the short version is: it's Earth, after an alien empire shows up with colony ships and starts terraforming. Earth had some sort of unifying government thanks to a thirteen year warning of the impending alien arrival, but that wasn't enough to do more than make humans a modest underclass presence in a vast galactic empire. Some sort of rebellion hit, and humanity, along with another minor (I'm guessing) race called the Irathient managed to strike a major blow at the Battle of Defiance. Now, thirty three years since the Votar empire arrive there's a steady stream of debris falling from space thanks to a vast graveyard of ancient colony ships and war time debris. This immense field of orbit-decaying junk forms the basis of the arkfalls that happen. A lot.



Quest Giving

The game gives you your own Cortana...called Ego, here....an interactive AI only you can see which also lets you resurrect and (best as I can tell) summons gear and vehicles for you. It's not entirely clear to me how the ego powers work, just that they do. This is a post-Halo, post-Mass Effect, post-Star Wars universe in which the ability to perform weird powers which once might have been labeled psionics is nothing unexpected now. Anyway, Ego is your guide and primary quest giver. When you aren't getting radioed in for a new mission or stumbling across one, Ego is manifesting in key spots to lure you over to talk to her, upon which she will spring another quest on you. It's actually a very effective way of repacking traditional quest delivery into something that feels fresh.

This is a Trion game, however, so the defined quests are the least interesting things to do (albeit much more interesting than any other more traditional MMO). Rather, the arkfall events (reminiscent of rift and invasion events in Rift) and the open-world active instances are the really interesting bits. There's a lot of crazy stuff going on and you can drive around randomly to stumble on all kinds of things. This is one of the reasons I liked Rift so much, and the same core formula serves Defiance equally well.

I don't know if there are traditional "closed" instances in Defiance yet; I haven't found them if there are, but I wouldn't be surprised if they exist somewhere. Time will tell. I guess I could google it? Google seems to suggest as much...and PVP areas too...but still haven't seen either in my playthroughs.

Chat

Defiance suffers in its chat options, which I suspect suffer from a build designed to accomodate consoles. You can't send whispers, you need to find players to group with through the friend mechanic and if you were hoping for casual Barrens chat while marauding through terraformed Earth then you'll be sorely disappointed. They need to work on this, badly, before the traditionally social end of the MMO crowd evaporates.

Gameplay

The game is perfectly functional with a mouse and keyboard (and my wife is playing it this way just fine) but I am using my Xbox controller and finding it a more generally satisfying experience since I can kick back in my chair and not be hunched over the keyboard.

It's run and gun twitch-based shooter mechanics. So far all I've seen in PvE environments, so no idea how the PVP side of the game works (and I'm only assuming from stuff I've read so far that the game has implemented PVP yet), but the gameplay is very solid-feeling. It's a third-person perspective game, but not a cover-based shooter, so you don't worry about sticking to the environment by accident. This is good....it means the world is a bit more organic looking, and you don't see chest high walls to hide behind anywhere.

One huge plus (so far) is that the game's mechanics don't appear to be based on a level mechanic at all. You do raise your rank in EGO power, which gives you more perks to work with your Ego skills, but the vast majority of advancement in this game is the acquisition of guns, mods, gear, outfits and vehicles.

The vehicle mechanics are serviceable and perfectly good for the kind of game this is. You will get annoyed at the static environment...when I hit a flaming barrel I expect it to tip over, not to stop me with the resistance of a 50 ton concrete wall!....but the good news is you can run over bad guys. Players ignore each other in terms of the driving, which is good; if you had to watch out for your fellow man it would get ugly quick...not hitting players in this game right now would be downright impossible.

Vehicles come in all sizes and shapes, and larger ones can carry passengers. Cool.



Grouping

I played for several hours in a group and while it was quite fun, this is where a lot of bugs cropped up. My single player experience has been 99% bug-free, but in a group I found some weird issues, including:

1. My cohort, despite being a tough female machinist would appear on my screen as a big male survivalist
2. On more than one occasion we could see each other on the map but didn't exist in each other's frame of reality. There's a "go to friend" button which was not taking us to each other. We ultimately figured out that somehow my buddy had lost the quest line we were on, and had to eventually backtrack to get him back to it.
3. Quest lines, speaking of which, are a more traditional "grab this and complete it before moving on" style, similar to The Secret World's approach (or any old shooter's approach). So my friend, who is a WoW junkie, was having a hard time kicking the grab-every-quest-everywhere mentality.
4. Even when we got him back on track for a quest line I had now finished, when he ran into the instance area he disappeared and I was experiencing something entirely different from him. Is it phasing, or a glitch? I had no idea, and the game offered no clues to illuminate the situation for us.

The fact that I was playing on my laptop at his house while he played on his big screen made these glitches all the more obvious and amusing. If we'd been playing remotely, it would have been even more frustrating.

Performance

On my decent home rig this game runs great. On my laptop which has a decent icore 5 processor but no dedicated GPU it ran surprisingly well on low and medium performance, but the experience was still lacking. If someone trashes this game on the grounds its got consolitis or poor graphics, be suspect that they are running a suboptimal rig, because I can gaurantee that the difference between a low-performance setting and a max-performance setting in Defiance is huge. That said, if you were stuck with a low-performance PC and understood your computer's limitations but really wanted to experience Defiance anyway, I don't think you'd be too disappointed....it was still fun to play on the laptop, even if it looks noticeably less pretty.

What's it Cost?

This is a one-time purchase to be supported by a "season pass" for the next five expansions and a cash shop. I haven't even bothered to look into the cash shop outside of claiming my special edition items, but most of the shop content seems to be outfits and gear; I've found myself enjoying the game with what it offers and the cash shop experience is extremely non-invasive, highy ignorable (so far).

Verdict

I'm going to keep playing and enjoying it. The game has fun gameplay, controls that feel "right," and a compelling storyline as well as enough variety in the MMO-questing elements to make it click better than prior efforts. This is not another Tabula Rasa, although I really need to see how much content overall the game has. For me it's probably going to last a long, long time. For the insanely dedicated hardcore MMO and shooter crowd? No idea.....time will tell. The game does have a metric ton of repeatable content, though...and the fact that there's no leveling mechanic means you can (best as I can tell so far) wander back to older areas and enjoy the region all over again and still feel a challenge.

I'm still in Mount Tam right now (the area after the tutorial zone) and still slogging my way through on four different characters (you get four character slots). According to the wiki there are five total areas all set in the San Francisco Bay area. Mount Tam is a huge zone, so if the other four are as big, this game should last me a long, long time.

Oh hell yes it's Friday

Been a long week! There was no Magic World this week, too busy. Defiance released this week, but I've have maybe 2 hours free to play it, though I did get some crazy characters up and running in the wilderness of ruined Earth. My Wednesday Pathfinder game went down as planned and the group wrapped up a massive nearly...hmmm...six month long story arc that involved Tiamat, the Chaos God Molabal, time travel the distant past and far future, the end of the world in the future, the destruction of the Far Realm and the rebirth of a new Feywild. If you don't know my campaign, the short version is "a lot of major crap went down, and everything is different."

Needless to say, the players are excited to be returning to their home port to fight simple, happy foes once more, like petty dictators and river pirates!

I don't railroad or plan this stuff, so the changes the players wrought need to be accounted for going forward. I have some ideas, but I'm hoping to spend time this weekend updating the next story arcs to include the effects of those changes. Wiping out the far realm....not that some version of it couldn't return....was pretty huge. It's a tacit acknowledgement on my part that I am well and truly done with 4E, and it gives me some wiggle room to expand into Pathfinderized planar resources (such as the Great Beyond or the impressive Dark Roads & Golden Hells planar book from Open Design.)

The Far Realm actually showed up as an alternate cosmology idea in the 3rd edition Manual of the Planes, and if I reintroduce a Far Realm of some sort in the future I will probably lean on this book. Since I have left the plot with a suggestion that some sort of feywild is returning (in my Chirak setting the entire feywild was a victim of an ancient apocalypse) then I might look at the treatment that realm gets in the 3E Manual of the Planes as well.

Anyway....more next week! Probably more B/X D&D, more Pathfinder, more Magic World and maybe even a early review of Defiance.

It's Officially "Too Many Games Weekend" - Defiance, Gears of War: Judgement, Resident Evil 6 and Neverwinter

For those who are, unlike me, able to restrain themselves and stick to a single game title for ponderously long periods of time (like...literal hours!) this may not be an issue. But for those of you like me who have an insatiable urge to get all of this stuff while it's hot, and at least dabble in each game as it manifests on my PC or console...this is a tough weekend. A quick recap, and "status of opinions so far:"

Gears of War: Judgement - I haven't played much yet, but the game is looking good, seeing as how it is built on the foundations laid by Gears of War 3. It's a bit weird playing a game without Marcus Fenix, however. Baird's a worthy character, but after the epic conclusion of GoW 3 stepping back ten years in time to a different squad of gears (none of whom I recognize, which suggests they will all suffer horrible fates at some point) is a bit weird.

GoW:J has also taken a moment to shake up the formula a teeny bit. Experienced Gears fans will find that the four weapon selection using the direction keys is gone, to be replaced by a style approaching other franchises a bit. This may or may not bother some. Still....this game has an intensely polished feel.

Resident Evil 6 on PC - downloaded, played the intro again, will probably replay the campaigns I've already slogged through on the Xbox 360, because frankly everything is always better on PC, and you know it. Plus, I noticed the keyboard QTEs were much easier to complete than they were on the 360 controls. Beyond that.....not much to report yet. Graphics of course look better.

Neverwinter - I got into the 3rd beta, and so far its fun. It's more ARPG-like, and the trappings of D&D are everywhere at least terms of story, presentation and name...but the game definitely plays more like a better D&D-skinned version of Tera Online or more elaborate Diablo III with over-the-shoulder cameras. You can tell that the game is built on a much revamped and improved Cryptic engine, but it's far and away more polished than Cryptic's prior efforts pre-Perfect World days. My wife is loving it and has been in all the betas so far. Me....I'm a bit burned out on fantasy MMOs, to be honest, so I am concerned my apathy toward the game has more to do with my general lack of interest in fantasy MMORPGs right now than any actual play issues. The game, as I said, feels very smooth and polished and looks great. I'll reserve judgement for now. It's going to be F2P anyway, so it's guaranteed I'll be playing it on release. Whether or not I'll feel like spending money on it is another matter entirely.

Defiance - I got invited to the weekend beta. I wanted to check this game out because I was having a hard time from the trailers determining quite how this game would play and feel, and was worried it was going to be another Tabula Rasa. Well...guess what....it's actually an unbelievably amazing game, a very polished and extremely immersive experience. Defiance isn't so much competing with other MMOs...or even other multiplayer online shooters like Planetside 2. It's effectively Trion's effort at capturing a genie in the bottle, by nabbing the MMORPG elements people love and blending them with the style of RPGs like Mass Effect 3 and shooters like Halo 4 and Borderlands. It's a third person perspective game which will feel very, very comfortable to you if you've played Mass Effect 2 and 3. Defiance is all about skill while letting you level through additional powers, equipment and looks. It's a huge world....even in the few hours I played I realized I was in a much more expansive environment than most MMORPGs offer, even the really big ones. You get a vehicle very early on, and you need it. The vehicle driving feels great, too. 

Also, the cut scenes, voice acting and character models are absolutely gorgeous. Really amazing production values. 

Defiance went from a "suspicious this will be worth my time" game to a "will be preordering this weekend, and need to reconsider how many other games I really need to buy now, since this one will be occupying all my time."

The fact that it's apparently going for a "buy to play" model supported by a season pass with 5 planned DLC releases is just one more perk. I prefer that sort of model for whatever reason to the subscription model or the (shudder) F2P approach that is designed to gouge you with nickel and diming doom.

I'll be playing a lot more Defiance when it comes out April 2nd, and will let my wife jump on my account this weekend to check it out, too. This game is going to be huge, I think, and people need something that's got the cinematic quality, gorgeous graphics, smooth gameplay and attention to detail that this title is offering. I feel like some sort of Trion groupie praising it, but damn, those guys really know what they're doing apparently.

Oh yeah....God of Wars: Ascension came out, and I snagged it, what with my brand new PS3 sitting around and all. Logged very little time in but the game looks good and plays like God of War did back in the PS2 era....the last time I actually played a God of War game.

Hmmm....what else? Oh, Dungeons & Dragons Next popped out an update. Downloaded it, glanced at the classes. This may be good, I don't know. I've sort of decided I'd rather just see the finished product and make a decision then. My entrenchment with Pathfinder is strong, so D&D Next needs to do something weird and interesting to break the Paizo spell on me right now....and the playtest packets are not showing it.