State of the Game(s)

Been a long time since I blogged. Out of practice. There seemed to be very little to say also.

This past month, I've been...dabbling.

City of Heroes-wise: I finished Sejanna, messed around with a brute, tried to level Interdict and hit my head on the roadblock of 'blasters need teams and teams don't need blasters (especially at lvl 45+)' and so on.

(Replace the word 'need' for 'could really use one' or 'would benefit from' if 'need is too strong for one's preference.)

Then Midnight Hour was announced, and I fell straight into pre-issue funk. After eagerly refreshing one's inbox for 2-3 weeks' running with zero news of a beta invite, the shine wore off.

Haven't been back except to log two servers' worth of characters to get the 4th anniversary badge, and note that the Unspeakable Constraint purple recipe which dropped during a lvl 50 BP mask farm (so I was desperate for a team... 4 AoE powers just aren't fun otherwise. And I was sk'ed, thank you) had finally sold for over 4mil the exorbitant price I set it at.

Recipes were going for 20-25mil, I put it up at 31mil, and got 35mil - 2mil in WW fees... add that to the 14mil I already had... Making Interdict officially the richest m'fing robot (and character) that I own in CoX.

Age of Conan: The only thing I've managed to beta test is the download speed of the patches, which I'm glad to say isn't horrible. Downloading the client with Firefox's DownThemAll went up to miraculous speeds of 1+MB/s. The client itself patches at standard 100-200kb/s, dipping at busy periods, and rising to blazing speeds of 700-800kb/s at times.

Still waiting to try it out. I don't think I have extended plans. Maybe stick around for 3 months or so, until WAR comes out. I just want to try their new combat and spellcasting system, mounted combat if possible (lvl 40 sounds quite far away), and sample the world of Conan in all its Dark Sun-like (harsh) acrylic fantasy guts n' glory.

Speaking of acrylic fantasy wonders, that brings me to Guild Wars. My fallback game of choice. I love its little minigames. There's the design-the-best-skill-build-for-this-situation minigame, followed closely by the gotta-collect-them-all skill buying and capturing game, which leads into the gotta-farm-enough-money-or-items-to-get-what-I-want extended game, and neatly goes back around into a circle to get the optimal farm build, unsoweiter.

Then there are the inumerable mission options - story, challenge or explorable area quest - and the 'farm faction' or 'obtain special hero' sidetrek that seques back into the main circle mentioned above.

And then the Third Anniversary hit. Not only did it feed my mild (kept that way on purpose) miniatures collecting frenzy, I got hooked on Rollerbeetle Racing. Now that's the way I love PvP. No penalties for losing, even the last beetle to cross the finish line - if within a certain time - gets a little token reward to say, good try anyway.

Half skill-based (firing the correct skills at various points can either speed you up, or interfere with your opponents) and half luck-based (you can choose to veer off the course to get bonus skills, some of which give you a chance for uber speed or massive disruption) so there's never one person winning all the time and pwn'ing everyone to misery, and letting everyone feel they've got a reasonable chance of first place.

And a well-designed course with multiple valid paths/choices - some are shorter, but the long ones give a chance at a bonus skill - encourage learning of the map.

Did I mention the beetles look fucking cute too?

Anyhow, there are so many possible paths through this game (especially now that I bought Nightfall), that I'm almost crippled by the choice. Decisions, decisions.

Mostly, I find that I need money. 1 platinum per skill tends to drain one's savings dry with ease.

Dungeon Runners: Continuing the trend of dipping my toe into little games, I decided to give this game one more go. After all, it is free. And I like it now. Their "chunk" upgrade seems to have done the trick.

The first time I tried it, I was turned off by the horrible camera, and not very customizable controls, the plain graphics and the non-stellar gameplay for a melee warrior, which seemed to consist of running up to mobs that you had to click to target and clicking wildly to swing a sword, while trying not to barf due to the unintuitive camera movement. To rub salt into the nauseated brain, higher health potions were membership-only, and so were the highest ranks of weapon/armors apparently.

This time, I tried a ranger, so blaster-y attacks while still relatively sturdy.

What caught my eye this time was the graphics, which reminded me oddly of WoW. Cartoony. Then the jokes hit me. (How can you not like a poison ranger whose first spell is a PBAoE poison cloud that's linked to a fart sound?)

One other nice thing I learned was that they've switched to a classless system. So now you can buy skills from all three trainers, and be a fighter-mage, or a ranger-fighter hybrid and so on. Similar to Guild Wars, you can only pick a certain number to take with you inside the dungeon. More flexibility = more longevity after all.

Eventually, I got the hang of the camera movement by adapting to a more Diablo-like style of play. Click to move, hold down left mouse button on the mobs (instead of clicking wildly and being terrified of breaking one's expensive mouse) for rapid fire, and keeping a more isometric view rather than the standard 3D MMO style.

Not too bad for a very Diablo-ish game. Especially now that they seemed to have moved their membership option so that not all of the higher level loot is forced as membership-only.

There were plenty of ads everywhere (during zoning and death), and on the top of one's screen, but fortunately for me (and them), all the ads were NCsoft ones - so I had zero issues with it. I'm such an NCsoft flunky already anyway. Go ahead and tell me about Exteel - tried it already. Guild Wars Eye of the North is out? Yep, I know, I'm a fan. Tabula Rasa? Hee hee. Try harder. No matter what you flash, I'm not going back. Lineage 2? Looks cute, looks nice, then I think about FFA PvP and I get a sanity check all over again, so no thank you.

I'm attracted to the idea of being able to dress up in a WoW-like fashion, but with less hardcore 24/7 effort required. But I'm not really keen on dungeon-crawling 7 floors deep to get to a big boss and doing it all over again per dungeon, shooting differently skinned monsters. I finished the first dungeon and got tired before the second one.

My guess is that there's only so much of certain playstyles we can handle with games of one type. I dabbled with Diablo. I'm fond of Hellgate: London, which pretty much plays the same. Love the atmosphere personally, though I acknowledge the polish is completely missing from that game - audio speech dialog that doesn't match the text is surreal. Dungeon Runners, on the other hand, doesn't have that problem. Some of the NPCs are hilarious. My ranger trainer sounds like a Greenpeace tree-hugger. The bank NPC sounds almost like Arnold Swarzenegger. Yet oddly, I prefer Hellgate's dark gloominess to DR's bright cartoon fantasy. Maybe part of it is because Hellgate doesn't dangle an insistence to join as a member everywhere you look...

Not that I begrudge NCsoft the $5. If I ran out of games and needed a month's amusement or two, I probably would put down the money to play it seriously.

For now, free is the way to go.

After all, I'm paying for LOTRO, and yet haven't spent much time with the game at all. Kinda odd. It's partially the server. Really quiet. Partially the character, a soloing tank has always been a bit glacially slow to play. Partially a money problem - me broke, so cannot do anything fun, fix for Guardians too late to save my savings, and the thought of logging in just to farm money to do fun stuff, is a bit offputting.

Theoretically, this is a good time to, though. There's a new fishing hobby that I really want to try. And they've made the trash mob bodypart collecting more effective by narrowing down the vendor trash to a few common parts shared between monsters, rather than 4-5 different things from each monster type, clogging one's inventory. (I'm a horrible packrat enough as is.)

We'll see. Grind is in the eye of the beholder.