Blog Retrospective: A Look Back to February 2011

 So here's how this concept for posts started: while writing the prior blog on Resident Evil Village I did a link on the search bar to prior posts that spoke about Resident Evil. While perusing those posts I was more than a little surprised and entertained to see that many of them are so old now that they talk about situations and perspective that feel like ancient history to me. There was a time, for example, when you couldn't get the original Resident Evil games from the PS1 era on GOG.com, or to play Resident Evil Revelations you needed access to a Nintendo 3DS. Hell, some of those posts are written before Resident Evil 6 came out and caused Capcom to rethink their approach to the series! Other posts were me writing about the batshit crazy multiple-character scenarios of RE6. 

Bottom line is.....my blog started in February 2011 and spun out of a time when I had more free time and less to worry about (also, less money, meaning more to worry about in a different sense), I was involved a lot in learning how to self-publish online and my then fairly new marriage hadn't yet even spawned our first child. So when I started this blog I was recently married to my third (and final) wife, did not have a child, was using online publishing and POD as a source of income (mainly to get more money for games) along with my then accounting job, I ran RPGs Wednesday and Saturday nights, and my video game time was centered around MMOs on the PC and the Xbox 360, my exclusive console of choice back then. I also note an old air of pragmatism that I think I should try to re-adopt, as I tended to have one thing (say, one console, one e-reader or one MMO I was obsessed with) that I was thoroughly focused on. Meanwhile I lived in an apartment up near the mountains in our local city that was small but very cozy for my wife and I. We had a lot of cats.

To contrast today, my wife and I passed our 16th anniversary last September, my son is 14 years old and asking me for advice about his sundry girlfriends, I am still gaming on Wednesday nights though not Saturdays anymore, I haven't touched an MMO at all except to occasionally pop into Guild Wars 2 just to see what's up only to play an hour then log out for another six months, and I don't have a single console....I have ALL the consoles and I have a real problem with handheld PCs, too (and tablets). In fact I have a problem with collecting and hoarding gadgets and I really, really need to stop doing that. Meanwhile I no longer put any effort into self-publishing online outside of the blog, mainly because the long term reward-to-effort value simply wasn't there; I get more fun doing the blog for fun, and while I still write a lot, its mainly for the home campaigns and the entertainment of my player group. I am no longer an accountant, and am instead a business owner who hires accountants to do that work for me. I am, ironically, still working in the exact same building as I did in 2011, but its by coincidence a completely different company that I have ownership in. Oh, and I own a house which is a 30 minute highway commute away. And we have even more cats than we used to, though only one of the cats from 2011 is still with us (he is 17 years old now).

I only had three blog posts in 2011: an introductory blog post, one which talked about our experiments in Swords & Wizardry, and a third one which talked about The Rising Dark, a book on the lands of Agraphar, a setting I published for Swords & Wizardry and had also adapted to D&D 4E (holy cow, that was the edition of 2011....yikes...). The Lands of Agraphar is still available in print at Lulu, I think....PDF probably at Drivethrurpg. I never used it as written; I ended up modifying and adapting its scenario concepts to other systems and settings, notably D&D and my Lingusia setting. You know....I have this book on my shelf even today, in my S&W section. I should pull it out and run the thing as originally intended at some point, it would be a fun exercise.

Apparently I played and was only mildly impressed with the game Singularity in Feb 2011, commenting on how it was good enough to finish but also not good enough to feel good about finishing. Weird, as over the years I have replayed that game a couple times and liked it more on a new playthrough. I recently tried getting it to work on the handhelds but it is difficult to get Singularity to play nice with modern controller schemes, unfortunately....and then I thought, "I should really play some of the new games I have stacked up, like RE Village." So that went away.

I also talked about being into the early adopters of the free-to-play model of MMOs: Champions Online and D&D Online. I really did love those two games, but eventually the interest petered out. Both games were fairly decent at least early on in their F2P models, with the goal being to sell actual content such as scenario packs and classes and stuff. They would eventually turn this approach into a far too expensive proposition, and as we all know, F2P models have turned into predatory nightmares that are so bad now I simply won't give a F2P game any effort or energy, noting that rare exceptions remain those which sell you actual content even if their base game remains free (so "free to try") like Guild Wars 2 or Destiny 2.

Okay! This might be a fun exercise, periodically digging through the ancient archives and revisiting long lost eras of this blog. Maybe there will be more of this. 

Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire

It's been a busy couple of weeks so I am unexpectedly behind on my routine blog posts, but fear not...things will eventually normalize.

So for the last month or so I've been up to this:

Guild Wars 2 has sucked me back in.....after lamenting the sorry overall state of the MMORPG scene in leading up to my Birthday I received the deluxe Path of Fire expansion. This prompted me to make a real effort to dive back in to Guild Wars 2 and...you know what? I really enjoyed it! Apparently its exactly what I needed right now for computer gaming, and the story structure of GW2 suddenly feels much, much more "user friendly" than all the other MMOs I have grown tired of. I especially enjoy not getting constant, endless quests from angry ghosts and snooty elves (TESO, you vex me!!!) and instead get to enjoy a quest structure that lets me wander and explore while also enjoying a personalized, semi-branching epic tale in which the NPCs are actively assisting rather than just making excuses to get you to do all the dirty work. Amazing!

Path of Fire is the second major expansion (following Heart of Thorns), and it is the first expansion in the history of the franchise to introduce mounts. The mounts are varied (five core varieties with a bazillion skins) and a lot of fun to handle....the mounts also have some combat tricks to them as well, and you can use them in any region of the game world. The only issue is you need to hit level 80 and start the Path of Fire campaign to unlock them on your character, but they make that easy....if you don't have an avatar at level 80 already the different iterations of the PoF expansion all include a token to start a character at level 80.

So far the story is amazing, and very in depth with lots of interesting characters. I never actually started the Heart of Thorns campaign, but it seems that this one directly follows it, so I stopped working on this campaign so I can get through Heart of Thorns first. But seriously....the story development, structure and focus is much better than all other MMORPGs out there. As a side note, if you were not a fan of the "framed" conversations of the vanilla GW2 campaigns they seem to have dispensed with that format and all stories are "in game"....at least, so far.

Anyway......despite my pessimism about the MMORPG scene at the start of the year, it looks like Guild Wars 2, at least, has managed to fill this void for me. Just in time, too! I have begun to at last get tired (a bit) of Tom Clancy's The Division end game, which is fantastic but also can only go so far with the main storyline ended.

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!

Giving Neverwinter Online a Second Chance

In a series of amusing steps I went from being a little incensed at Perfect World's severely limited "why did you stop playing?" survey to curious about the game and suddenly I'm back to playing. The process worked sort of like this, and suggests some important reasons to consider why NWO is actually a decent game, despite some oddities that may or may not be deal breakers:

Step 1-get back into FR lore/books: I resumed reading Salvatore's Forgotten Realms novels again. Also started reading some other D&D novels that are now accessible on ebook. In this process I discovered that books which once offended my literary sensibilities when they were new (i.e. Avatars Trilogy) are suddenly kind of fun to read. So my reading tastes have shifted with age, apparently. 

Step 2-grow annoyed at useless survey: Got that survey, which prompted me to think about key issues I had with NWO. Truth is, I deleted NWO because I didn't have time to focus on it and didn't want to take the time to figure out if it was going to be a costly venture or not....a legitimate issue with all F2P model MMOs.

Step 3-play a medley of MMOs and go "waitasec...": Wife got back into Everquest II with some of her online cohorts this weekend. This prompted me to download EQII to try it out with them. End result: although I sense a really interesting story and background in EQII, it left me wondering why I was doing this when I had other games under my belt that still had lots of time, investment and life left in them (i.e. D&D Online, Rift, Guild Wars 2). So I stopped EQII and skipped over to some of the old mainstays to see if they would pique my interest again.

Step 4-go back to DDO and remember it's got problems: Quickly eliminated D&D Online after a few hours playing through only to lose all the XP again with a party wipe at the end of a dungeon, reminding me of why I never got very far in the game (highest PC I have through normal progression is level 13) and also why I found it so frustrating. Annoyed at beholders I met, wishing another game would let me engage with some iconic D&D critters and environments. Hey...waitasec....

Step 5-Acceptance that tabletop space and MMO space are different beasts (also, bribes): Realized that I ought to just get over the lack of "D&D-like design" in the char gen and just try NWO again. Accidentally discovered I had 200,000 astral diamonds and that these could be exchanged to purchase in-game zen. This got me enough zen to get four characters slots and an extra companion slot. Also discovered I had a code to redeem for an orc wolf buddy (mount?) at level 20. Cool.

Step 6-Scrub brain of expectations, resume game with fresh slate (also, drow!): With a fresh mind I approached NWO once again taking my own advice from my first overview of the game: to treat it as an experience in its own right and not as a D&D-simulator for the MMO-verse. Noticed drow had at last unlocked for everyone, made a rogue. Discovered the rogue is far more fun to play than either warrior class. Why, NWO devs, do you guys hate warriors so much?!?!? So drow rogue for me!

So long story short, here's four tips to properly enjoying NWO:

1. treat it as a lore-rich experience in the Forgotten Realms. Ignore the D&D part and get it out of your head that the game should be a simulation of the D&D tabletop experience in terms of rules and processes. If this is hard, go play DDO for a while; you'll either stay there or realize, "Yes, NWO is a better and more rounded experience, even if DDO has a lot of cool stuff...it also has a lot more frustrating stuff, too."

2. Make anything other than a warrior type character. I can say rogue is good, and have been told clerics kick butt. Will try a wizard soon.

3. Remember, even though NWO is ostensibly based on 4E mechanics, it's only superficially so. The similarities are enough for me to really miss my 4E gaming days, but should not be problematic for anyone who had issues with 4E.

4. Finally, and most importantly: don't let veteran MMO gamer jadedness dissuade you! It gets me all the time when I try new MMOs, and it's a real bummer when it does. NWO is better than I give it credit for, but MMO fans are suffering from a serious level of overload and choice these days. I think NWO deserves a bit more consideration than I was giving it previously....although they still need to get more classes in (warlock, ranger, paladin and warlord would be fantastic) and at least one more race (dragonborn).

Investing in NWO probably means less time with Guild Wars 2 for me....which is okay; GW2 is a game which commands time in a slower and more methodical way for me. I'm still keeping up with Rift when the mood arises, though. I will soon have my first level 50 defiant rogue over there, and look forward to someday getting her or my guardian warrior to level cap (60) in the laborious albeit interesting Storm Legion content.

Guild Wars 2 Super Adventure Box Commercial

Awesome:

Password Idiot Ball and Guild Wars 2

Areanet has a  lot of issues with hacked accounts, which can be troubling no doubt. It's also had some odd management on its account log ins in the past, and in the old days of the original Guild Wars I had found myself on more than one occasion stumped at how to log in, how to get hold of someone to help fix the issue and ultimately even trouble finding the CD Key that was often necessary for this process. I have hardly any physical CDs with keys anymore, its just not something I do in the PC universe thanks to Steam and digital delivery in general. The idea of a CD key as a necessary requisite to resetting a password seems excessive, but maybe its necessary?

I was trying to get Guild Wars 2 set up for remote play on my laptop when I realized I couldn't remember  my password. To recover it I once again need a CD Key, attached to a disc and box that I may or may not still have, mostly likely buried deep in storage. Yay.

Still, GW2 customer service on a query reset my password. Problem solved! Not so fast, human meat space error is guaranteed to insure failure here.

First problem: they won't let me recycle any previously used passwords. I've only used a couple passwords to date, but when I tried to enter some passwords  previously to log on, passwords that were in sync with my "system" for such, it didn't recognize them....but it seems to have remembered them because I can't use any of them at all. I used quite a few (12) figuring maybe I had reset it to one of them at some point. I only show two previous changes on record, so that means at least 10 should be good, right? Apparently not. The system says they have been used previously...or were entered, at least. It remembered my attempts, not merely my actual passwords. Greaaaaat.

Their password reset also suggests the XKCD method, which is to link several conventional words together which our simply meat brains can easily recall but which sophisticated computers allegedly will never get. So guess what happens? I come up with one, and it works. I log in. Yay! I go to my laptop, easily remembered password in mind. It doesn't work. Whaaaa??? Somewhere in the space of two damned minutes I either forgot a portion of the password, or just as likely I mistyped it (twice) in the first place and am not correctly recalling it but not realizing what I typed is not what I entered.

So on the one hand: I get the idiot ball today because holy cow why didn't I write it down carefully before ever typing it in? On the other hand, Areanet's approach to security is infuriating and my ability to get into my account depends on my willingness to write down an elaborate password that is unrelated to any of my previously used password conventions; also, the willingness of the moderators at Areanet to give me a second chance. Ugh!!!!

All I wanted to do was play a bit of Guild Wars 2 on my lunch break. Is that too much to ask? Of my addled brain...and A-net's intense security protocols....I guess so.....

"In Ascalon we Call it the Idiot Log"

FOLLOW UP: Areanet kindly sent me another reset, and this time I thought long and hard about a decent password, wrote the sucker down, and then entered it. I may now pass the idiot ball on to another hapless soul in the interwebz.

2012 RoC MMO Year in Review

Green Armadillo at Player vs. Developer did a sort of cost-analysis/overview of his 2012 MMO expenditures and time, and I thought it would be fun to do something similar, with more of a focus on my "year of MMOs" and what they amounted to (if anything). So, here goes...



Star Wars: The Old Republic
TOR may have come out in December 2011, but I didn't get my copy until late January. My wife played this game continually for close to a year, but it seems that her interest (and that of her highly dedicated RP guild) waned dramatically after the game went F2P, at least partially due to the over monetization of the game going forward (paying for content previously announced as free, for example, and the souring of the community due to the flood of F2P gamers who are sight-seers and gawkers, and presumably not very RP-friendly).

For my own purposes, TOR has a great single player experience wrapped in a world of MMO suck. It has padded regions (Coruscant, for example) that drag on and on, and feel very tedious and grindy to someone like me who approaches this game less as a new Star Wars MMO and more as the KOTOR 3 single player experience we really wanted. Still, the free to play option opened it back up to me, and I find that being able to jump in and play occasionally is making the game more accessible and fun, now that I don't have to worry about a monthly fee. If Bioware/EA could just realize that a person like me would prefer to pay for a couple extra character slots and not have to subscribe, then we'd all be a bit happier.

Conclusion: SWTOR moving F2P was a smart move for certain types of players, but the game still has problems. That said, it's a casual friendly MMO if you can avoid falling asleep during the long slog through boring padded areas like Coruscant.

Tera
Tera was billed for its action MMO combat and its unique revision to an otherwise very Korean style setting. The game was pretty compelling, initially....but some odd hiccups left me cold in the end. A major problem was its early billing snafus; I signed up for six months on a deal when it first came out, but after four weeks I realized this wasn't a game I was going to care for in six months, so I tried to cancel the subscription. Surprise....they didn't provide for a way to cancel! I did get my money back, and in a twist of irony that changed my opinion of the matter from "they are sleazy con artists" to "they or their billing service are merely incompetent" I still got my six months of play time. Which I barely used until the tail end, in a bid to revisit and see if my feelings had changed. They did not.

Conclusion: Tera is a weird action MMO that is fun to play but it has some unfortunately disturbing undertones, a bit too much of the Korean Cutesy for my tastes, an excess of BDSM inspired armor and for all it does offer it just doesn't seem to feel as satisfying as other, better games out there (among which I would include Rift, GW2 and TOR). And their crappy billing issues soured me from ever letting En Masse have credit card or paypal info again, period.

Guild Wars 2
Guild Wars 2 was heavily anticipated and I was ready for it on its first week or so of release. It's timing was atrocious, however (for me, at least), as I had gotten sucked into Rift and so found my precious game time seriously divided. GW2 is a fantastic game, but thanks to its Buy-to-Play model I have been able to safely play it just a bit, and othewrwise set it aside for now while I concentrate on the two other games worthy of my attention.

Conclusion: all MMOs should look at GW2 in the future, for both the payment model and for ideas on how to innovate. Not too closely...a future full of GW2 clones would be sad.



World of Warcraft
Blizzard sent me a 10 day "please come back" trial to Mists of Pandaria. I logged on, tried a pandaren monk, then jumped to the original Kalitherios who was still stuck in that god awful fhsibowl undersea region, was reminded why I left WoW during Catalyclysm and deleted the game, again.

Conclusion: WoW is getting very long in the tooth, and the only way to appreciate it these days is to be stuck with a low end PC, or otherwise avoid other games entirely.



Dungeons & Dragons Online
I was a HUGE proponent for DDO when it went F2P, and it was the first F2P game I also decided to invest in. I rationalized that if I spent $15 a month for a year, I'd have spent $180 in that time, and if I spent that (or less) on in-game purchases over time, then I'd be ahead.

In the end, I spent more than that (and in fact bought about $50 of turbine points plus the expansion pack at half off on a Steam sale this year) but I also played it heavily for more than two years, and only in the last year did I lag badly. DDO has a huge disadvantage over other MMOs, that outweighs (for me) it's advantages: it has a major grind component, and it's XP is (except for slayer/explorer missions) tethered to mission completion. You can spend a long time leveling in this game if you play in the way I do, which is slowly, mostly solo, and with a methodical pace in mind. I have friends who can blast through this game from level 1 to 20 in weeks. I envy them, because they have a system. The system necessary to earn XP at the fastest rate in DDO is beyond my time frame or network of friends, unfortunately.

Conclusion: DDO is still great, but my love for it has been replaced by Rift. Still, I like to revisit on occasion, even if I've given up hope of ever getting to max level.

The Secret World
The Secret World is everything I want in an MMORPG with a modern horror theme, short of it being a single player experience. It has immersive, thoughtful storylines (with key stories fully voiced), a mature theme that's not just "adult" (although it delves in that direction occasionally, too) and a smart world that really meshes well with the modern urban horror/fantasy trend in fiction these days. However, it was subscription based for a while, and so like GW2 it was something I didn't feel I had time for with my Rift obsession.

Now, of course, that has all changed and TSW moved to a Buy to Play model just like GW2. This was a very smart move, and it has revitalized my interest in the game....more so even than for GW2, because while GW2 is an innovative drwarf-and-elf free fantasy MMO, TSW is a modern horror MMO that ditches the Tolkienesque fantasy entirely.

Conclusion: I'll be playing a lot of TSW in the future and plan to focus my money on their planned future content.

Age of Conan
I've tried to get back into AoC a couple times. Unfortunately their cash shop was pricey, the play mechanics felt clunky if you stayed away too long, and the game can't survive its main crippling issue (one that TSW fixed) which was that 90% of its primo A game content was front-loaded in the first 20 or so levels, and everything after that right up to level 80 suffered from a "rushed to finish" conclusion. I recently tried it--again--in the wake of some changes that opened up previously gated instances to F2Pers and I was shocked at how empty the game was (okay not really) and how it just doesn't hold up to today's crop of games.

Conclusion: AoC is a game I want to play, badly. Just not the one that actually exists.

Champions Online
When this went F2P two years ago I was in on day one, took advantage of their first two weeks of excellent discounts, and basically absorbed this game (as did my wife). Then we burned out as the game dragged along; the momentum could not be sustained by the title itself, which still needed more...sometuing...to make it better.

Perfect World Entertainment came along and snapped Cryptic up. At first this was bad; a merge of accounts between Cryptic and PW made accessing their games problematic for a while, enough so I gave up on trying. Eventually they got their act together, and by the time I got back in Champions Online was sporting all sorts of impressive new features. It now remains, like DDO, a game I like to keep installed even if i only jump in once every couple of months or so. Unfortunately it's not really that exciting to play (for me) anymore, and I hate the crafting/equipment mechanics of the game with a passion, but the character generator is bar none the best there is (now that CoX is dead).

Conclusion: it's worth vacationing in Champions every now and then, and Perfect World made Cryptic respectable again...a miracle!

Rift
Rift snuck in toward the start of the year and snagged me first with its Lite F2P through level 20 and then with its mixture of interesting story content and compelling mix of traditional and innovative gameplay. It is officially the first game since 2005 when WoW and the original Guild Wars sucked me in to grab and keep me for the long haul. The core game is so good I continue to mainly play it while I occasionally log onto my level 50 guardian warrior and explore the new Storm Legion content at an excessively leisurely pace.

Anyway, I don't need to blab on about how great Rift is, as I've done that a lot already this year. Suffice to say it's my top dog in the kennel right now.

Conclusion: I bought a one year sub along with Storm Legion. That's about as dedicated as it gets for me in the world of MMOs.

Next Year
I'm looking forward to Elder Scrolls Online. I think some new titles like Firefall and Wildstar may be dark horses ready to sweep in and change everything up. I suspect more publishers will eyeball the B2P model just as much as the F2P model, and if industry analysts like Michael Pachter are right we may see a decline in the number of MMOs being pumped out as publishers grow wary of entering a saturated market.

Monday Recap

My ME3 multiplayer handle is docfuturity

No column, article or game content today...hopefully by this weekend I will have some time to sit down and write a new series of articles that tie into the existing projects, including the Golmadras articles for AD&D and the Sarvaelen series for Legend/RQ/BRP. I might even try to do some new material for Chirak, or post up some existing content I've had lurking about.

This weekend I had a couple modest milestones in the world of video gaming: two single-player campaigns I had been slowly working on over many months (a few minutes here and there) at last concluded: Quake 4 (one of the last of the "old school" shooters or one of the first of the new school, depending on how you look at it) and Modern Warfare 3.

This was my second play through on Quake 4 (the first was back on the 360 when it first came out). I think I enjoyed it more now, but it was interesting seeing how the game has aged, and also how id's old school shooter design still resonates. It was funny playing a game again with health and armor counters, healing through health kits and armor pieces, and a metric ton of ammunition randomly scattered about. I don't know whether finding a health kit in the heart of an alien empire or a regenerating health meter is less realistic anymore....with shooters, you sorta go with whatever your audience will ignore for the sake of a good time, I guess.

I know it's a bit late to talk Modern Warfare 3, but I have to say that I can't tell if the MW3 single player campaign was just unusually lackluster or if the Call of Duty formula (it's very, very formulaic) is starting to wear thin. I still enjoy the multiplayer (well, to be fair I enjoy the component of multiplayer that lets you play solo) and the black ops and survival missions are a lot of fun....but the resolution of Price's tale of endless vengeance against Makarov felt just a bit drawn out here. I look forward to a future Call of Duty from Infinity Ward that is not about Russians invading the US and Europe, or how the only guys in the world capable of surviving for three whole games are British Special Forces units gone rogue.

I mean, it seems to me that China or even the Middle East would be a better fit for a Modern Warfare title right about now...

I'll make a prediction, though: a future Call of Duty title will be highly futuristic, maybe even Mass Effect style futuristic, and will take place in Spaaaaace....! And I would be very happy if they did something like that, actually.

Either way, I had to finish MW3; after blowing through Spec Ops: The Line I sort of felt obligated to scrub the grime away with a clean, white-washed game. I admit, though, Price and his motives (even his allegorical name) looked a lot more suspicious in light of playing Spec Ops....

"I got your Heart of Darkness right here. Where my boot is. Up your arse."

I picked up Mass Effect 3 for the PC over the weekend and am glad I did. I don't know why but the multiplayer experience is a more solid and generally better experience on the PC, and I am surprised to say that I am enjoying it more using a mouse/keyboard for controls than the Xbox controller (for whatever reason the Mass Effect series on PC doesn't allow for controller use). This is not the norm; usually third-person perspective titles are generally easier to manage with a controller, and tend to be optimized for the experience (I tried Spec Ops: The Line both ways, for example, and found it much easier to manage with the controller than the keyboard and mouse).

Anyway, having a lot of fun with that....more so even than with the conventional MMORPGs. I want do delve more deeply into Guild Wars 2, but I spent the weekend in a state of mind where playing MMOs started to feel draining. I played a fair amount, in short spurts....but a fair percentage of play time was really "standing motionless" as I'd get the boy to lay down for a nap, then go to play, find myself tired as well and go nap. Or he's wake up. Or it was time to cook. You name it. But I did get a few hours in on both.

Overall Guild Wars 2 is a more interesting and engaging experience but I was put off by the early release crowds. It's difficult to explain, but the short version is its possible to be in a public quest like, "Help the farmer walk over here" and have 120 people all escorting him at once while demolishing menacing spiders you can't even see on screen....so I decided to wait a while and play when the crowds thinned a bit.

I was about to run out of time on Rift and decided to play it a bit, see if I wanted to continue. I extended my time a month, and then sunk a fair amount of time into my Bahmi rogue. What I've noticed about Rift is it's a very rich game, lots to do, in a Wow-esque way, and the rift events and invasions add a special dynamic element to it. But after I hit my early level 20's (past the point at which the game is free to play for everyone) regular players get sparse. Moreover, the grindy element of questing gets noticeable when they keep sending you to roughly the same area over and over, which may be why a lot of people say they like all Rift has to offer, except for the soloing. The game can play like this for hours: find quest hub town, gather 3-5 quests in area, do those quests, come back and turn in, then get 3-5 more quests at the same hub for the same region. Over and over.

So I think I'll continue with Rift....but only because my slow pace on the game makes it less intolerable. It's a game I can play for 1-2 hours and feel satisfied about, but if I tried grinding it for a really long session I would find it tough to stay interested (or awake, judging from my efforts to do exactly that this weekend). In the meantime, I may play a lot more Guild Wars 2 soon, but I like that I can enjoy that game (with its buy-once-play-free model) forever and ever. WIll enjoy more GW2 just as soon as the new player mobs thin a bit and I can see what's happening on screen!

Post-Labor Day Weekend Recap: Guild Wars 2, Mass Effect 3: Leviathan and More

Well, I haven't got any articles or new material in queue right now so for the moment it's just more of me blathering on about stuff I'm into at the moment (which, as you may have noticed, seems to be mostly a mix of D&D and video games).

My wife and I grabbed Guild Wars 2 this weekend. I enjoyed it, played a few hours, can safely say that the game is very dynamic and does a lot for the MMO design by culling the best concepts from across the board and adding in a distinctly new feel and pace. It's a fantastic game. I'm intrigued to see just how much of the original Guild Wars is in there, in the sense that GW2 plays very little like its predecessor, yet so many bits and parts evoke that Guild Wars style, from the looks (much sharper but still "Guild Warsian") to the soundtrack and general ambience.

I'll talk more Guild Wars 2 later, because this game does a lot to move the entire concept of the MMORPG into the future, but playing it resparked an interest in my other MMO love, RIft, which I also played more of. Rift is more traditional, but it is traditional with some innovative twists, and playing it in contrast with GW2 actually improved my appreciation for it; Rift is dynamic and open world in a different way, with a metric ton of oddities to collect, pursue and figure out, but in a very methodical fashion. GW2 is almost frenetic in its pace, so the more leisurely approach in Rift suddenly feels sort of distinct. The fact that I can't even play WoW for two minutes before deleting the game again is only helping the case for the future of MMOs. There are some very good games out there now, and they all blow WoW out of the water. Forget about numbers; if the discerning gamer prefers quality and substance over volume, there's a veritable buffet of MMORPGs to choose from.

And despite all of the MMO madness I still somehow managed to fit in some Max Payne 3 time (I absolutely love this game, it's storyline is oozing noir and bullet time in the best way possible) and I am methodically working my way through a new Mass Effect play-through, this time with male Shepard, and on the PC (having just acquired ME3 on the Labor Day sale). Also, it's really difficult to play games on the TV while Marcus is sleeping; his room is positioned so he can look through his door (which he is now able to reach and open from his crib) and see the TV. He gets very frenetic when the Xbox is on. Dad likes hearing sound but doesn't have any headphones with a good reach, so its easier to hide in the study where the PC provides more options and is not visible.

(Which means yes, I own or have owned all the Mass Effect games and DLC on both PC and console, making me officially Bioware's bitch.)

I also snagged Mass Effect 3: Leviathan and while its good so far I seem to have gotten stuck on the creepy base with the mind-controlled miners. Can't figure out if I'm overlooking something (a security terminal) or if the game is bugged out on me.

 

EDIT

So I had a long bit here about my general dissatisfaction with gaming followed by a bit of clarification that I have bipolar tendencies which often cloud my perspective on things, and sometimes gets in the way of my sense of enjoyment in RPGs. After some thought I realized that this was yet another case of "feeling off" so I figure I'd better just snip that bit away and leave the remainder of the summary as follows:

Read more AD&D Premium books, will comment on lots of interesting bits and observations soon!

My Saturday campaign wrapped up at long last after almost three years, retiring their Pathfinder characters at level 14-15. It was a satisfactory conclusion and I am happy to see another high-level campaign die, albeit spectacularly.

I am tempted to play 4E again but my Wednesday group has talked me into going for a new low level Pathfinder game instead. I'm going to start a new one in Chirak. But I really have an urge to play 4E. I like that system, at least the way I run it. I am continually bothered by the fact that the hobby seems to have run into an outer threshold that won't allow it to grow past a certain point, or at least be accepting of whatever interests we all prefer.

I think, in the end, I'd be happy if WotC also reprinted the core for 4E with full errata and updates, to go along with their reprints for 1E and 3E. That would go a long way toward aknowledging that D&Ders are a diverse lot, even if we ourselves tend to decry the "others" amongst us who are busy having the wrong type of fun.

More gaming articles to come as soon as time permits!