Blue Kae

I know, I said I was giving up on the game, but Rock, Paper, Shotgun posted about a mod that allows all kinds of cheating. I don’t actually want to cheat, but the boss battles feel so out of place in the game. It really comes down to cheat past this block, or not play the game at all.

My plan is to use the debug mode to bypass the boss battles, but that’s it. I may even go as far as disabling the mod after each boss battle is over so I’m not tempted to cheat. I’m thinking of it as editing Eidos’ rough draft.

I never played the original game or the sequel, and I wasn’t following DX:HR any more closely than to be aware it was in development and planned for release this year. When it came out and was getting rave reviews from the press and more importantly from internet friends, I decided to buy it through Steam.

About five hours into the game and I’ve stalled out.

Why?

Initially, I thought it was going to love this game. With the strong story, hacking mini-games, and shooter combat, I was getting a strong Mass Effect vibe. But I switched to playing a few other games over the weekend and haven’t had any burning desire to go back. That usually means I’m done with the game. I have an awful track record for picking up games again and doing more than dabbling.

So what happened? Why did DX:HR fizzle when ME has kept me enthralled enough to play two games to completion?

Characters. ME 1 and 2 are not just the story of Sheppard. It’s the story of his crew and teammates. Were it not for Sheppard’s interactions with Tali, Miranda, Mordin, Wrex, and the rest, I don’t think I would’ve finished either game. DX:HR has none of that. Jensen is a loner with only minimal contact with others via comms and some face to face with his helicopter pilot.

I wrote the above during lunch Monday and then that night decided to give it another shot. I had apparently nearly gotten to the first boss battle in the game, which should explain why my playtime on Monday was sixteen minutes. After ten minutes of running in, skipping the cutscene (I did watch it the first time), and then getting plugged full of lead, I quit. It was not fun. It’s pretty disappointing to me to leave yet another game unfinished, but I have too many other demands on my time to play something I’m not enjoying.

Who on earth thought it would be a good idea to put a boss battle in which you fight a heavily armored maniac with an automatic rifle in a game that’s all about stealth and cover? I really, really hate it when a game switches gears like that. If the first five hours of a game are training you to play carefully and stealthily, you don’t then drop the player into a sealed room with scant cover and your enemy standing ten feet away and perfectly aware of you.

Anyway, I quit in frustration and went and played some nice relaxing Star Trek Online instead. Klingons made an excellent target for my frustration.

After getting a good night’s sleep, I was thinking about trying again and just bumping the difficulty down a notch (I’ve been playing on the middle/normal setting). But after reading Jon’s experiences with the game at howtomurdertime.com, I don’t think I’ll bother.

Despite my best intentions, I didn’t log into Rift until Thursday evening. It turned out to be excellent timing though since I noticed a guildie was standing next to me when my Mage, Kae, appeared in Meridian. One with a familiar name. A quick check of the guild roster confirmed it was my good friend MMO GamerChick. What are the odds that the first time I log into Rift in weeks that I’m standing next to someone I know.

Any-who, GC and I chatted a bit and she ran me through the cake quest before heading off to bed. I spent the rest of the hour I played restoring my PvE Stormcaller/Elementalist/Dominator role back together. My other two roles (Healer and PvP) were reset as well, but I didn’t bother with them. I want to research Chloromancers before I rebuild my healing role, and I was never really happy with my PvP role so I don’t mind just starting from scratch.

I also checked in on my alts. My Warrior and Rogue were fine but my Cleric was reset as well. Fortunately a reset at level 18 is much easier to deal with than it is at 50 and i quickly had my Shaman/Inquisitor/Warden back up to speed.

So now that my characters are playable it’s time to see the world. With the XP boosts available until the end of the month, I don’t want to spend too much time with Kae, but he’s my main and I want to make sure that any limited time titles or pets that I get, I get for him.

So this weekend I hope to revisit my favorite places in Telara with Kae before exercising my alts and getting some levels on each of them. All three are around 18. I find it easier to switch between classes if I’m always in the same general area. Between rested XP and the half-iversay event bonuses maybe I can get them all up to 28?

Feel free to leave me any suggestions for things to see and do.

When I was on my break, I saved a link to the SWTOR forums posted on Twitter by Zelibeli. The post talks about the distribution of player guilds that have been pre-registered and shows that there are more guilds/players on the Empire side than the Republic. That alone is interesting since in most MMOs the “good” guys usually end up with more players, although I think that has more to do with which side tends to have the uglier character models.

Even more interesting was the distribution of players by faction and sever type.

Type Empire Republic Total 
PvE     17327  18262    35589
PvP     31556  15093    46649
RP       4819   8049    12868
Totals  53702  41404    95106

There’s very little difference in strength between the factions for PvE rules, but Empire players dominate PvP and Republic players out number Empire 2-to-1 in RP.

Usually I’m pretty good about staying on top of milestones for the blog, this one snuck up on me. Today’s post about Rift was my 300th!

Feel free to leave a Sparta joke in the comments.

I was very impressed with the speed and quality with which Trion updated Rift for the first several months after it launched. World events, new types of rifts, and even a cosmetic system were all added much faster than I expected or hoped. Now that I’m contemplating logging in after a couple of months off, I’m starting to see the negative side of Trion’s incredible productivity.

In the past, when LotRO was newer and development on the game was more active, I could take six months off and still get back up to speed quickly on the changes. After only two months in Rift, I feel like I’m treading in some deep water. There’s new dungeons, tons of class changes, and my roles have all been reset.

I guess it is possible to have too much of a good thing, but it beats the alternative.

It seems appropriate that my last post before taking time off was about a lack of excitement. I hadn’t actually intended to take a break but I’m glad I did. I’d hit a dead spot gaming-wise and myself having nothing to say. Not to mention, I had my family summer vacation (took the wife and little Kae to Michigan, it was amazingly fun).

Even though I took my netbook with me and had some small Steam games loaded on it as well as Minecraft and a copy of my current single player world, but I didn’t end up playing anything. I also didn’t miss playing MMOs while I was gone. Which surprised me.

Instead I was mostly unplugged for the week, and read a lot.Although you can’t tell from the massive pile my backlog of books makes. I swear it grows even faster than my backlog of games.

So now that I’m back, what’s going on?

• There’s a demo is out for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine and it looks amazing. I played a bit last night and had an absolute ball taking a chainsword to hordes of orcs. If the rest of the game plays the same it will be a ton of fun.
• A surprise MMO came of of Gamescom this year: Wildstar. The videos I’ve seen look great and the features I’ve read about sound promising. The studio, Carbine, has a good pedigree and some experiences people, but the publisher is NCSoft and that gives me pause. NCSoft is infamous for killing games quickly and having security issues. Granted they’ve given a lot of support to ArenaNet and I haven’t heard much lately about account hacks, so maybe they’ve learned from prior mistakes. I also agree with MMOGC and would almost prefer to see the IP done as a feature-length movie instead of a game. Either way, I’m keeping my eye on it.
• Stargrace made a very excellent point about games being a way for people to entertain themselves. I’ve actually worked on a post similar to hers talking about how lazy some players seem to be. There seems to be a growing expectation that a gamer should be able to sit back and almost be forced to have fun, kind of like watching TV, instead of having to invest some effort in the experience.
• Big news at STO… the Perfect World acquisition is finally completed. The game had been in an odd limbo state since the release of Season 4. Because of the acquisition, Dan Stahl and the other developers had been much quieter than usual and the game had kind of stalled out content-wise with the Foundry being offline because of bugs. The floodgates have opened though. Dan posted a very interesting response to one community member talking up PW’s confidence and interest in STO, and Cryptic seems to be following up by posting a lot of job openings. Add in the fact that the Foundry is finally back to 100%, and I think the rest of the year should be pretty smooth sailing.

I’m likely forgetting some things but those are the major events I wanted to catch  up on.

I pre-ordered the standard edition of SWTOR from Amazon. I wanted the digital version but it’s only available from Origin.com and I’ve already talked about how I feel about that. I’ve also applied to the Multiplaying group’s guild, Delusions of Grandeur. It feels odd to me to be applying to a guild for a game that I can’t even play yet but apparently it gives the guild some kind of benefits so I went ahead and pitched in.

All in all, that is the most attention I’ve given to TOR in months. Now that there’s a release date, of sorts, I feel like I should be excited. I feel like I should be impatiently waiting for the December. But I’m not, I’m much more excited for the upcoming Arkham City. It’s odd because Star Wars was my first scifi love. I was incredibly excited for SWG when it came out. It took me weeks after watching the Phantom Menace to admit to myself that i didn’t like it.

Maybe it’s prequelitis? I gave up on them after watching Attack of the Clones. I’ve never seen Episode 3 and can’t even tell you what the movie title is, or care to Google it. I did watch some of the animated Clone Wars series and enjoyed it but a lot of the magic was lost. Fumoggin midichlorians.

Maybe it’s trust? I was a huge fan of KotOR but never played the sequel after reading about all of the bugs and half finished story, so I should be ecstatic that BioWare is doing a real sequel. Maybe if TOR were a single-player game I would be, but it’s not and I’m not convinced either BioWare or EA are up to the challenge of managing an MMO after seeing how poorly DragonAge’s patching and community were managed.

Maybe I’ve gotten too good at countering the hype?

In the end it doesn’t really matter. I’ve pre-ordered, I’ll be playing at launch, and I have friends that are excited enough for ten of me.

I keep meaning to roll a Klingon faction character, but I never quite get around to it. While I think Klingons are an interesting species, I’ve never cared much for them as a faction. For me Star Trek has always been about the Federation. A month or two ago my interest in the KDF was rekindled when Matt Highison, Lead Character Artist for STO, posted some art for the new Gorn coming in Season 4. I’m sure TOS fans don’t like them, but I really like the new design.

I hopped onto Holodeck a few days ago and rolled my first KDF, Rress the Gorn.

He looks okay, but not great. He just doesn’t have the bulk and menace I expect from a Gorn.

This is what he looks like after the Season 4 update. Now, Rress looks like he could rip the arms of a Wookiee.

It’s here! It’s here! It’s here!

Even though I’ve been playing quite a bit on Tribble over the last few weeks, it’s still really good to have the ground combat update on Holodeck. It’s completely a perception issue on my part, but knowing I’m playing on Holodeck gives me more of a sense of permanence that’s just not there when I play on Tribble. Tribble is like Vegas. You go there to have fun and goof off, but it doesn’t count.

I logged in on my main Bryn and headed out to Gamma Orionis. One of the things I’ve been waiting to do is replay Assimilation. This mission is part of the Undine front missions and includes the Universal Assimilated Module, which was added as part of the Borg equipment set after I’d finished that chain of missions.

Pre-Season 4, Assimilation was one of my least favorite of the story missions. There’s a ton of Borg ground combat in that mission, and I remember dying while playing it. Possibly it was just because I was Science, possibly I wasn’t doing something correctly, but I think it was because of the way ground combat worked. Melee enemies tended to run up on me, so battles largely consisted of running backwards in circles trying to shoot enemies. Not fun.

Now that Season 4 is here, I picked up the replay from my Ready Room console and headed to NGC-4447. After completing a few space objectives, it was time to beam in with Bryn’s team. I started playing the mission completely in shooter mode but part way through I had to change that to just toggling into shooter mode before starting combat after accidentally clicking my mouse a few times and shooting Borg’s in alcoves. Turns out they don’t like that.

The new content was fun enough that I started out just clearing out all of the Borg I ran across  even if they weren’t hostile. I only started switching my Boffs to passive mode and leaving Borg alone once I saw how late it was.

I had a lot more fun than the first time I ran the mission. I made it all the way through the mission without dying once, although I did have to resuscitate my two tactical officers a few times. The pacing was faster, the battles were more engaging, and dodging behind walls worked well to break aggro and give my personal shields time to recharge. The kits are much more effective as well.

I hadn’t really noticed on Tribble, but I was using a Physicist Kit and dropping an Exothermic Induction Field (EIF) on a group of Borg did a noticeable amount of damage. Pre-Season 4, most of the DoT’s in Science Kits seemed more like bonus damage than actual attacks. Often, I would just use the roots and shield debuffs and that was it. Now though, using EIF or Hyperonic Radiation, has a noticeable effect. There were several instances where DoTs killed Borg that were down to a quarter of their life who had adapted their shields before I was able to remodulate my weapon.

I know there are issues with Season 4, especially for the Foundry, but I’m still really happy with the update. I’m really looking forward to leveling up my alts now that I can look forward to both types of combat in the game.