Guild Wars 2 & 1 and Tera Online

Guild Wars 2 & 1

Like just about every MMO player (or so it seemed) I played Guild Wars 2 during the recent beta weekend. Despite never playing Guild Wars 1 for longer than a week, I’ve still been interested in how the sequel would turn out. ArenaNet still has problems to fix, they’ve resolved most of the issues I had with the original game. All of the invisible walls are gone making the world more inviting to explore. The towns are no longer glorified game lobbies.

My only complaints about GW2’s beta weekend were the lag and the art/animation style. The lag was something I expected and was totally reasonable given the volume of players that ArenaNet was supporting. The graphics and animations weren’t something they really needed to address, it’s just that the Asian influenced art style has always something I’ve tolerated rather than enjoyed.

All in all, I enjoyed GW2 as much as I’d hoped I would. The only surprise to come out of the weekend has been a renewed interested in trying GW1 again. This must be the fifth or sixth time I’ve tried to let the game hook me, so I don’t give it good odds of succeeding this time, but I would like to have some emotional connect to the old world as I think it’ll give me more appreciation for the changes when I start playing GW2.

Tera

Even more surprising to me than an impulse to give GW1 another shot, is the fact that I bought Tera Online and have been enjoying it. Tera’s not something that’s been on my radar at all. The Eastern art style and animations (especially the running animations) are really not my thing. Because of my GW2 weekend, renewed interest in GW1, and several friends really enjoying the game, I ended up buying the digital download from En Masse and rolling an Archer on the PvE-RP server.

The combat is definitely the strongest feature of the game for me. There’s no tab targeting, so position, timing, and aim are important to winning fights. There’s no auto attacks, instead a primary basic attack is bound to the left mouse button. There’s also the ability to set up skill chains, so instead of manually having a rotation where you go through ability hotkeys, you can link multiple skills together and then start a chain with a hotkey but then press space bar to fire off  chained skills. Initially this sounded pretty bland to me, but in practice it’s quite fun.

Unfortunately the combat is really the only fun thing for me about the game. The art is definitely beautiful, especially the environments, but the characters and animations are something I play in spite of not because of. The lore and quests in the game are also very standard. Too be honest, I haven’t given them much of a chance which is pretty out of character for me. I’ve even been skipping the cinematics that play during major points in the main story line. I think it’s because Tera doesn’t feel like a game I’ll be playing past the free month (or maybe the first subbed month) so I’m just sprinting through the game taking whatever fun I can from the combat systems.

Tera is basically MMO candy. I feel a little guilty playing it, and I don’t expect much longevity from it, but I’ll enjoy it while it’s fun and move on once it’s not.

Three things.

First, I know a few of you were expecting to see an update on my newest hobby, specifically the Enterprise-B that I recently finished. Unfortunately my plans for the week changed radically on Monday, so that will have to wait until next week.

Second, Scarybooster is having Bloggerpalooza this week. He emailed a bunch of bloggers, including myself, a few questions and he’s posting the results all this week, so go check them out.

Third, there’s a trailer out from Bethesda for a (new to me) game called Dishonored that looks amazing. It is of course mostly, if not all, cinematic but the premise and setting both look really interesting to me.

DAW: Geko and Heretic

In my Developer Appreciation Week posts, I’ve gone from thanking developers in general to a specific team, and today I wanted to thank two specific developers from Cryptic who work on Star Trek Online.

First, I want to give a heartfelt thanks to Al Rivera, aka Captain Geko. Last year was a pretty rough year for STO and I was pretty down on the game in January. Then Podcast UGC had an epic two and a half hour interview with Geko which gave me some much needed hope for the future of the game. It also marked a renewal of the transparency and community engagement that have been trademarks of Cryptic over the last two years which had both faded during the last third of 2011 while the F2P conversion was taking place.

Which brings me to my second thank you. Geoff Tuffli, aka Heretic, is in my opinion the gold standard for dev-player communication. He’s been the driving force behind the excellent Duty Officer system, and he’s done an absolutely incredible job in engaging with the player-base both through the forums and via in-game channels.

While I have a lot of respect for the entire team, given what they’ve gone through in the last year with the Atari to Perfect World transfer and then the F2P launch, I think Geko and Heretic deserve special recognition. Thanks so much for all your hard work guys.

This is the third year for Developer Appreciation Week, started by Scary from ScaryWorlds.com head on over an check out his posts.

DAW: Trion

Continuing with Developer Appreciation Week, today I wanted to thank the Rift team at Trion.

It feels strange highlight a game that I’m not currently playing, even more so since my subscription lapsed about a week ago. But that has everything to do with lack of time and nothing to do with the game itself. Rift occupies an odd niche in my gaming ecosystem. I played it rabidly at launch and hit the level cap with the initial wave of players. Then my guild collapsed and so did my interest in playing.

I’ve tried since to recapture my initial interest but have yet to succeed. Even after only a couple months’ absence, the game feels completely different because of the speed and volume of Trion’s updates. The Rift team is constantly tuning and adjusting the game, and they are also adding new content faster than any MMO developer I’ve ever seen. At some point in the future, when I next return to Telara, I expect it to feel like a new game.

Thanks Trion, you’ve set the standard for MMO live teams.

This is the third year for Developer Appreciation Week, started by Scary from ScaryWorlds.com head on over an check out his posts.

Developer Appreciation Week

I don’t envy game developers, and especially not those making MMOs. It’s an impossible task, trying to make everyone happy at the same time.

I was playing STO the recently and in the general chat people were discussing the new mining daily that was implemented. I’ve played it myself and had fun bouncing around the asteroid, playing the beam alignment mini-game. I never once thought about how much dilithium I was earning or how much time it was taking. Rarely do I ever think of the word efficient while playing a game. Not the players I was reading though. They were complaining about how little they got from it and they’d be better off doing other dailies to get dilithium. Fun for them was getting the most dilithium or skill points, etc., per hour spent in the game.

There’s very little overlap between players like me and min-max players, so I want to put out a general thanks to all game developers that have to grapple with pleasing everyone all the time. Thanks for everything you do.

This is the third year for Developer Appreciation Week, started by Scary from ScaryWorlds.com head on over an check out his posts.

Mass Effect 3: No Spoilers

I’m not going to give any spoilers or talk about the ending (see here for that), I just want to address the story and game mechanic changes from ME2 to ME3 and give my general impressions.

Story

There was one often asked question when Mass Effect 2 was released that’s been making the rounds again, “Should I play from the beginning or just start at 3?” My recommendation from then is as true if not more so:

You don’t have to play the first to enjoy the second, but it is a better experience having played both.

The game is much better if you’ve played both 1 and 2. There’s two entire games worth of emotional investment in the characters and events. This is one of the few video game series where I’ve laughed so much, and it’s the only game I can think of that’s made me tear up. And ME3 did it twice.

I have been consistently impressed and amazed with how many characters from previous game I ran into. I got to see how people I helped from both prior games had gotten on with their lives and what difference my Shepard’s actions had made in their situations. My only regret was that it’s been so long since I played the first game that I often had to be reminded (conveniently enough there was always an option via in-game dialog) who they were.

One disappointment for me was how few crew from either the previous two games were available to return to my ship for use on missions. The extended dialogs available on the ship are great, but there are also some awesome lines available during the missions. Of course all of the ones that were most important to me were there, but after the wide selection available in ME2, the mission team selection screen seemed a little empty.

Combat

For the most part, the combat in ME3 is the same as ME2. You have powers to set an ammo type, thermal clips to handle reloads, and a cover system.

You are no longer restricted to certain weapon types because of your class though. Instead all weapons have a weight value, and the more you carry the slower your powers recharge and become available again. I really liked this as it let my Soldier Shepard load up on several different types of weapons to handle sniping, general combat, and close range situations, and accept a hit to how fast powers became available again. Had I been playing an Adept or something similar, I could’ve gone the other route and just carried the lightest pistol possible and had super fast power recharges.

The weapon customization system has also a changed. You can add two upgrades to any weapon. Upgrades can be found on missions or purchased (either at the Citadel or through your armory once you’ve visited a Citadel store the first time). I especially liked that you could put a scope on any weapon and have a scope sight when you actually aimed it. For someone like myself, who’s not all that accurate with a sniper rifle, having a pistol with a scope and damage upgrade was really good as a high rate of fire rifle replacement.

The pace of combat has sped up. Enemies will use grenades to force you out of cover (and vice versa), so tactical movement become much more important.

Speaking of cover, I’ve read a lot of reviews complaining about the fact that going into and out of cover as well as jumping from one cover spot to another shares the same button as sprinting. While I got caught on that a few times myself, I didn’t find it frustrating. I imagine that has a lot to do with the fact that I don’t play shooters often. Mass Effect is a hybrid RPG/shooter (action?) game and as such doesn’t do either as well as a more specialized game does. Someone who doesn’t play a lot of shooters won’t notice the rough edges as much.

Multiplayer

I was really not happy about the addition of multiplayer to the game. It felt to me like something that EA was pushing so they’d have a way to add more revenue streams, like selling multiplayer maps. After seeing some of the videos I was a little less leary of the idea though, and I tried to keep in mind the lessons I learned from ME2 that the PR tone of a game often has little to do with the tone of the game itself (such as the aweful Jack promo videos).

Just after the game released, there was a bit of drama related to War Assets versus Readiness where people were upset that you had to play the multiplayer in order to get the best ending. Basically BioWare designed the system so that for every fleet or unit you recruit to the effort to free Earth you get points. However the points are adjusted by a readiness percentage, with the idea being that the more combat practice units get the more effective they’ll be. This incentivises people to play the multiplayer, which a lot of people didn’t want to do.

For myself, I had planned to give the multiplayer a shot, and I’m super glad I did because it turned out to be a lot of fun. How much fun? My final playtime for the single player game was roughly 32 hours. My overall playtime is 66 hours (or at least it was when I wrote this), and I’ve been continuing to play even after beating the game when my Galactic Readiness doesn’t mean anything.

I’m enjoying it so much because it’s co-operative multiplayer not competitive. You’re on a four person team fighting through 11 waves of enemies. You can revive fallen comrades for a short time and anyone who gets killed before they can be revived automatically revives between the waves.

An interesting side-effect of playing the multiplayer is I’ve gotten a chance to play the non-soldier classes, and this has started me considering additional play throughs of ME3 to try out the other classes in the full game.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve loved ME1 and/or ME2 but haven’t picked up ME3, you should. I know there’s a lot of drama around the final minutes of the game but that’s 15 minutes out of 32 hours, and even then it’s a matter of personal taste. Lot’s of people like the ending, lot’s of people don’t, but there’s only one way to find out for yourself.

Day One DLC Effect

Found this in my Evernote drafts, pretend like I posted this a week ago as I’d intended to. Obviously I need to work harder on my resolution not to publish and not over-edit or leave stuff in drafts forever.

I’ve been catching up on my news feeds today and just ran across the drama about Mass Effect 3’s day one DLC, From Ashes. After listening to Total Biscuit and reading various posts, I’m left wondering why there wasn’t the same huge deal made out of the Warden’s Keep DLC for Dragon Age. I don’t remember blogging about it, but I remember being pretty pissed off that somehow there was DLC available for a game on the same day it launches.

I’m very curious to see how this DLC integrates into Mass Effect 3, but it can’t possibly be worse than Dragon Age: Origins where you actually had a quest prompt that then redirected you to the store.

Regardless of the realities of scheduling, where developers actually have time between completing a game and when the game ship to implement new content for digital distribution, it just feels like the design of the game was scaled back and I’m not getting the complete package for my initial money paid. Logical or not, it would be better for developers to hold DLC until after the first week or two as suggested by John Walker on RPS.

For myself, I had pre-ordered the Collector’s Edition from Amazon months ago (the day it was announce actually) so I’ll be getting this DLC gratis. I ordered the Collector’s Edition because I love the series. Were I waiting for launch day to pick up a regular copy, this DLC wouldn’t have changed my mind about just getting the basic edition.

I understand that some people feel like this content will be integral to the story and so they’ll be missing out unless they pay the additional dollars. This may be true, but frankly I doubt it will be that central to things, and once I’m done with the game I don’t really think I’ll miss whether or not there was one additional character on my crew. Honestly, I’m a tiny bit glad it will be available at launch, I think I would’ve enjoyed having Kasumi along on more missions rather than just the Stolen Memories DLC.

The upside of downtime.

Star Trek Online went down unexpectedly last night for a few hours. I only ran into the tail end of the outage as I was working on some Enterprise model kits, so it didn’t actually impact my playtime much, but I did realize something.

There really are a lot of people playing STO since the F2P relaunch.

Now, I pretty much already knew this because there’s been a noticeable bump in the number of ships orbiting Earth Spacedock and DS9,as well as a major increase in sector space traffic. But seeing how fast the outage thread grew last night really highlighted for me how much the playerbase has grown.