Kindgoms of Ambivalence

At least for now, I’ve decided to pass on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

In a rare case where comments from friends are echoing official reviews, the game seems to have a pretty forgettable story. That was the part that made Reckoning a questionable purchase. Then, while watching the Destructoid video review, I heard two words that sealed it’s fate: boss fights. I had two words of my own when I head that: no thanks.

Sorry, but I immediately had Deus Ex: Human Revolution flashbacks when I heard that. Also, just to prove that there’s other games where boss fights ruin things, I’ve never finished Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising because the boss at the very end is ridiculously difficult.

I would definitely be more tempted if I didn’t have Skyrim sitting on my computer waiting for my return, not to mention the fact that Bethesda just released the Creation Kit for the game, but for now I’m going to pass. Besides, I’m sure it will show up on one of Steam’s ludicrously cheap sales.

The cost of business?

Cryptic’s announced another round of lottery boxes for Star Trek Online. I was mildly interested in them as I was reading through the Dev Diary, until I got to the part at the end where I read you need a key from the C-store in order to open them.

Blarg.

I really don’t like this. For starters, I’m not a gambler. I don’t like going to casinos or race tracks or buying scratch offs.

Beyond the gambling aspect, I prefer to have the store ties in games as minimal as possible, since I’m a subscriber. I can develop selective blindness so I can ignore the C-store and D-store buttons on the UI, they’re much more subtle than the gold bordered boxes Turbine uses in Lord of the Rings Online. But I really don’t like the idea of getting a lockbox as a loot drop from regular play and then having to go to the store to get a key to open it. Suddenly there’s something that is coming into my inventory which is directly pushing me towards the C-store. That’s okay for non-subscribers, after all Cryptic needs to make money both to stay in business and to reinvest in the game, but not for a subscriber.

Before F2P, C-store items were always nice optional things to have, and I spent money on quite a few uniforms, bridge packs, and ships. But as far as I can remember, there was never an item or mission that I came across in the game that directed me to go make a purchase, I always had to go to the store to seek it out.

So, depending on what the market looks like, I’ll either be discarding any lockboxes I get or putting them on the Exchange (too bad there’s no way to sell them for dilithium). Despite this lockbox stuff, I’m still completely excited for the start of The 2800 Feature Episode Series 4 this weekend. It’s like Star Trek is back on television!

Foreboding

Uh, I just got a really awful sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Why?

Karpyshyn hasn’t been involved with Mass Effect 3 due to his work on Star Wars: The Old Republic.

That’s from a Eurogamer article about fan outrage over the canonical errors in the most recent Mass Effect book, ironically entitled Deceived.

Now, I have the book but haven’t started it yet because I’m finishing up some other reading first, so I can’t say whether or not the book is really as bad as the Internet is claiming. I imagine and hope that it’s not and that thing’s have been a bit over blown, as is often the case. But the sinking feeling I’ve gotten isn’t because of the book, it’s because the same guy who wrote the first three books and two games, didn’t write the third game. The story has been the major driving force for me in the game, and between Karpyshyn’s absense and the change late last year to delay and include multiplayer, I’m really wondering if we’ll get a strong finish to the trilogy.

I hope so, but I’m going to start planning for disappointment. I’ll be extremely happy if I’m wrong.

Ubisoft never disappoints me.

I love the Anno series of games. I love the art style and the game mechanics involved in city building. The combat systems are a bit rough, but I normally turn those off. The real challenge for me in those games are building a stable trade web between multiple islands.

Despite my love for the series, I haven’t and won’t be buying Anno 2070. I want to, I really do, but I think it’s asinine of Ubisoft to include their patented must-be-online-POS-DRM in a single player game that’s available through Steam. Why on earth I want to deal with two layers of DRM? Especially when the one layer that’s not needed and offers zero incentives isn’t even managed properly.

Almost there.

It’s been a really really really long wait. Really. But it’s almost over. The next Featured Episode Series for Star Trek Online, The 2800, starts on Saturday, February 11th, and focuses on the Jem’Hadar fleet lost in the Bajor Wormhole in the DS9 episode Sacrifice of Angels. I couldn’t be more excited, and I’m looking forward to running the first mission with Fleetmates.

Spring cleaning my computer.

On Friday I decided to do spring cleaning on my desktop and reinstall Windows along with everything else. I hadn’t intended to. Originally, I was just going to do a backup onto a new 2 TB drive that I’d bought, but then I started thinking about just moving my current 1 TB to a secondary slot and installing everything from scratch. I’d been having some weird errors sporadically during shutdown, and besides, and it had been two years since I installed the OS.

I always forget how much time it takes to do a fresh install. I’m not talking about Windows either. Windows 7 is actually pretty quick to install and is mostly an automatic process. No, what’s taken the most time has been putting all of my games back on. Since this was supposed to be a clean start, it didn’t make much sense to just copy over my old installs for my games. Instead I downloaded them all. Interestingly, the install processes for Star Trek Online, Champions Online, and Lord of the Rings Online have all changed somewhat. First they all had a Pando pre-download that’s much more obvious than the way it used to be handled. I like that it’s more upfront. Second, both Cryptic games installed to my C:\users\public folder.

Besides those three MMOs, I reinstalled Star Wars: The Old Republic and Rift. I’m a bit surprised that I put Rift back on my machine. My primary rule for doing these computer cleanings is that I don’t install anything back on the drive unless I’m going to play/use it. For instance, while I did reinstall Steam, I didn’t download all of my games again. I just reinstalled Skyrim and Orcs Must Die. I didn’t even remember that I’d bought the full version of OMD, which is another reason not to reinstall my full Steam library.

So I started thinking about it and realized that I haven’t actually given up on Rift as completely as I thought I had in my January writeup. Although, I believe it’s more about what Trion’s doing than the game itself.

So that was my weekend, and a good part of Monday. I’m still not done really, but I’ve done as much as a I need to for may day-to-day. Most of my pictures and videos and such are stuck in a Prior Install folder that I’ll pull stuff out of as I need it. Sometime in November, I’ll take a look at what’s left in there and probably delete it all.

One last thing, I really love my Coolermaster Sniper case. It’s completely tool-free, which means I was able to open it, remove one old hard drive, move my original down a slot, and insert the new drive without messing with a single screw. So nice.