Bleh. Feeling more than a little spaced out. I've been pulling a few near all-nighters lately, ever since picking up Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed for the PC. The odd part of it is that the enormous choice in games is having a sort of diffuse effect on interest in any specific game.
MMO-wise, CoX is on hiatus. I am perfectly ok with that. I'm still content to give them my $15 a month because I want to both support future development and the vet awards. That's fine, it's not really pinging on my guilt radar.
(Except that I really should check on about 4 alts' auction house sales and maybe pull some valuables out of there before the 60 days fubars my hoarded LOTGs. Right. One todo list thing to complete, and that's it for CoX.)
I'm restless regarding LOTRO and GW. I like both games. Enough to casually play them, now and again. Each fulfills a little something in my player motivations list. And I enjoy the lore and story background of each game. I also like the regular non-asinine updates.
I do wish I could invest more time into both, but going hardcore into them means some pretty tough grinds and ignoring everything else for that period of time. And I'm not willing to do that. Yet. Maybe sometime in the future. As of now though, it just means that I wonder if I'm getting my money's worth out of them.
Still, the money's already invested in GW, so it's a foregone conclusion. There's just the guilt factor there that says, dammit, you have Nightfall and EoTN, why aren't you playing it? Right now?
LOTRO, I don't know. I like Turbine's updates. I don't really begrudge them the $9.99. That's like, less than $20 SGD. I can forgo a) a restaurant meal a month or b) movie ticket and popcorn x 2 or c) a music CD, unsoweiter, and pay it without blinking.
Sometimes I wonder if I should just have chosen the lifetime subscription and not have to worry about it. Still, there's research that suggests a monthly subscription fee system actually creates a trickling reminder to appreciate and get one's money's worth out of something. And $120 every year is not a big deal, and is more valuable for Turbine in the long run, and more valuable for me in that I reserve the capability to vote with my feet and leave should they make a change in design that I deplore.
Again, it's just the "hey, you're paying for it, why the hell aren't you playing it right now, all the time?" thought getting in the way.
And we move right on down to the next MMO on the block. Age of Conan. I definitely don't begrudge them their US $15. I'm still liking the choppity combat action. I'm making progress. I like the quests and lore on the whole. The bugs can be annoying, but I have confidence that they are fixing things at an acceptable rate, and the game will be very good in a couple 3-6 months' time. I'm fine with accepting this future trade-off for the new MMO smell factor, which makes my worlds' populated with people, and still fresh and exciting to many.
The problem? I'm evidently not playing the game fast enough. :/ If I was just soloing along my merry way, I would have no issue with this. I'm seeing about 30-40% of my guild race along up to 60, 70 and max level 80 though. (And me still stuck at lvl 56.) Why am I concerned? Because I want to do raids. Exploratory ones, if possible. I don't really want to end up in an already-explored grind-for-loot exercise. Sheesh. And obviously, the moment 24 people hit max level, the leaders will start organizing the first few guild raids. Already, some of the max level ones are casting about joining PUG raids and what not.
Alas, I do actually work. So by the time I get back from work, I only have a limited amount of playtime. Two days out of those five are out of commission, thanks to Funcon's "marvellous" scheme of arranging regular updates "out of peak hours" (read: US prime time, NOT aussie prime time, even though I'm playing on an ostensibly Oceanic server). The only reason why I'm not hopping mad about that is that each update is patching quests that I was stuck and bugged at, so I deal with the 7pm-12 midnight server down notices...
I'm not the worse off. I'm stuck right about the average, to above median levels. Lots of people in the guild sub-40 and below. But some of those could be alts, and some of those might just not be interested in raiding. It's all the others on top that I have to 'compete' with. Heh. The ironic thing is, I don't even care about the gear. I just really want to be there when they're finding out what to do.
And I can't do that unless I'm significantly higher in level, and there's no acceptable way I can possibly achieve that. I'm certainly not going to pay anyone to power level me, and I'm not even in favor of powerleveling myself with farming mobs and repeatable daily quests. Because what is the damn point of racing to raid if you're not going to experience the rest of the game either? I just evidently need to play AoC for 8-14 hours a day, and that's not possible either if I want to be able to AFFORD my games and my computer. :)
Sighs. Therefore I must sadly assume that seeing an exploratory raid is possibly out of the picture for the first few zones, and experience that sort of thing when new raids come out and we happen to be all max level already. Conclusion: play through AoC at normal comfortable pace, and what happens, happens.
Still, one can't help but feel if we pushed just a little harder, we might improve our chances of 'acceptance' into raid opportunities and what not. I put that word in quotes because I mislike what it implies. I really do not want to fall into the trap of having my self-esteem predicated on someone else's approval. (As an aside, I note the interesting use of the word 'we' in the preceding sentence. It's like subconsciously assuming that both me, the player, and Lycaeus, the character, exist and we, working in tandem as a sort of avatar, can achieve something.)
Scary slippery slope, all the same.
What has just greased this damn slope, or rather, put caltrops in its path, or maybe both at the same time, is my purchase of above-mentioned singleplayer games. (And more, I have two RTS games waiting in the wings, the latest Dawn of War expansion and Battle for Middle-Earth.)
Amusingly, both are console ports, and rather cinematic action RPGs. Ah, how I've missed story-based games. And they look effing good too, since they were meant for the Xbox360 and are now supertweaked for PC graphics. Besides having to wait six months or more for them to turn up as a port, everything else justifies my choice of spiffing up a PC over buying a console.
Anything buggy tends to be worked out. Graphics are better. Higher resolutions if yer PC is capable. Owning a usb gamepad means that all control options are available. If the game happens to play better with a gamepad, I can do that. (Assassin's Creed is like that.) If the game has exceptional keyboard and mouse support, voila, we got it covered. (Sniping and other such FPS aiming is SOOOOO much easier with a real mouse than a crappy analog stick on a gamepad.)
Assassin's Creed has an interesting gimmick. You're actually playing someone in modern times experiencing his past ancestor's memory as an assassin in that era of Templars and crusades in Jerusalem. It neatly explains away things like your HUD and accesing save/load games as part of the memory accessing machine.
It's been temporarily set aside for the king of story games, aka Bioware. I like Mass Effect. It's kinda like Knights of the Old Republic without the Star Wars. (And since I loathe Star Wars, it is much improved in the process.)
They've done wonders with branching possibilities here. It wouldn't be a Bioware game if character creation didn't affect your later story experience. Significant choices include male or female (romance options with either a female/male human and a mono-gendered alien), birthplace (spaceborn, colonist, or earthborn, affecting some dialogue options and NPC reactions), and psychological profile (very simplistic but quite archetypal: sole survivor of a traumatic experience, war hero, ruthless efficient 'end-justifies-the-means,' which again affects dialogue and NPC reactions.)
Classes are split up into 3 pure options: combat specialist, tech specialist, and biotics specialist (read: telepathic/telekinesis 'magic' abilities), and 3 hyrbid options,: combat/tech, tech/biotic, combat/biotic.
Each given an MMO-like spin: The soldier (combat specialist) is a straight up melee tank/brute with an assault rifle, the vanguard (combat/biotic) is melee DPS (aka the shotgun), the adept (biotic specialist) is like a pistol mage with damage and crowd control, others mix in some messing around with first aid (omg, healz) and debuff/utility (mostly tech) and the new-age ranger (hem, sorry, the infiltrator) is the combat/tech who gets to mess around with sniper rifles.
I can see replaying Mass Effect to be quite appealing. Character customization is also quite good, with a variety of faces, though a bit limited in the sense of being hard to create a particular desired look. Should I pull the chin slider forward or back? Does shrinking or expanding this nose make me look fugly? There was a conscious decision to only allow hairstyles that fit into a military helmet, and have a look that befitted someone in the military and so on.
So I'm a tide disappointed that I can't quite recreate my homebrewed characters as I imagined them - guess I'll have to wait for All Points Bulletin to see if their creator is any more powerful - but it hits the important aspects close enough. Like hand grenades, horseshoes and all that.
The power of Mass Effect is apparently to support other options beside being all-good and all-bad, unlike KOTOR. I believe that experience'll have to wait for my third playthrough. I'm already having enough fun recreating Astral (goody-goody Paragon, Earthborn Sole Survivor - Adept - keeps getting killed, oddly enough. So squishy. But so potentially powerful if only I could get some levels on her) and Carla (end-justifies-the-means don't-fuck-with-me Ruthless Spacer - Infiltrator - who is having a blast one-shot-sniping-things from safe and fary away).
The cinematic storytelling style is pretty good. Makes you feel like you're in a movie. Dialogue options tend to let you choose nasty or nice options, but everything is all voice-acted and quite fun to experience. Best feeling so far: Achieving an important milestone in game, thus inheriting a ship and getting to make this dramatic Babylon 5-like speech to the entire crew, with uplifting music and all. And yes, you pick the speech options.
The downer is that saving while in combat is prohibited. So if you get massacred at a set point, you get to play through ad nauseam the buildup cutscenes before getting to the combat - where you get horribly brutally killed again.
(So I forgot to put any points into basic body armor. I'm a bloody mage, I'm supposed to be squishy. Getting sniped and one-hit-killed is NOT fun though. And I couldn't help but think that the sandbox play let me pick a option that I was -not- ready for in terms of level. It took 23 tries or more to get out of that particular ambush grave. On the bright side, I probably totally mastered tactical combat with that set piece battle. Take cover here. Don't get blown apart by scenery. Don't get close to the damn tankmage NPC who has a nasty habit of charging like a bull if all his support is destroyed or if he gets too low in hitpoints, and hiding behind cover otherwise. Tell stupid squadmates to move to cover at those locations or watch them get sniped to death. And there was still an element of luck in my squad AI managing to engage the tankmage NPC and draw him out into the open where we FINALLY took him down without dying ourselves.)
This game is the reason I've been stopping playing Age of Conan at 1-2am and promptly losing sleep to it until 4am or longer. Bah.
Still I'll have to admit that it's getting a bit...samey.
More on this in the next post.
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