Weekend MMOing
WoW went pretty well, all things considered. Had some minor staffing issues with the raid - hastily filling in our tenth slot with relatively raid-inexperienced folks. Still, we made decent time through our usual six bosses. No work at Ragnaros. Personally, I made out like a bandit with four drops.
Guild Wars was okay, though we suffer from part of what I find annoying about the game. For all the supposed convenience of outpost-warping, it's still hard to coordinate which characters have been where and who has access to what zones.
I've noticed another detail that's put me off a bit with City of Heroes, Champions Online, and now DCUO: lack of immersion in cities. There's always at least one big city that serves as hub and quest zone and the blocks are... either crawling with (mostly-hostile) quest mobs or sparsely populated by a few folks who might spout random lines. It doesn't make me feel like it's a real city in the least. DCUO even has moving headlights on streets visible from far away that fade as you get closer. Compared to any of those cities, Stormwind in WoW feels real and thriving in spite of the smaller scale, simply because there are NPCs set up all over and I can enter so many buildings. This matters to my immersion in the game. And with the looming threat of Brainiac's invasion, it feels a bit off to have to deal with a ton of other factions as well.
I'm still undecided on the controls. Chat is... clunky, and I think it's mostly because the overall interface was designed to accomodate PS3 controller-based play. The group loot window seems unnecessarily invasive, blocking out everything like most menus. The lag, login queues, and zoning problems that exist currently are brutal, but I suspect they'll be ironed out over the next few weeks (something like a 1000% increase in concurrent logins can do that to a game). For now, though, it seems like I have to go through the queueing process twice on average before actually getting into the game.
Tried a little of the villain side and things are a predictable mirror. The safehouses look similar in layout (haven't seen the Hall of Doom yet), the enemies are the cops instead of the crooks, but the general feel and flow appears roughly parallel.
Guild Wars was okay, though we suffer from part of what I find annoying about the game. For all the supposed convenience of outpost-warping, it's still hard to coordinate which characters have been where and who has access to what zones.
I've noticed another detail that's put me off a bit with City of Heroes, Champions Online, and now DCUO: lack of immersion in cities. There's always at least one big city that serves as hub and quest zone and the blocks are... either crawling with (mostly-hostile) quest mobs or sparsely populated by a few folks who might spout random lines. It doesn't make me feel like it's a real city in the least. DCUO even has moving headlights on streets visible from far away that fade as you get closer. Compared to any of those cities, Stormwind in WoW feels real and thriving in spite of the smaller scale, simply because there are NPCs set up all over and I can enter so many buildings. This matters to my immersion in the game. And with the looming threat of Brainiac's invasion, it feels a bit off to have to deal with a ton of other factions as well.
I'm still undecided on the controls. Chat is... clunky, and I think it's mostly because the overall interface was designed to accomodate PS3 controller-based play. The group loot window seems unnecessarily invasive, blocking out everything like most menus. The lag, login queues, and zoning problems that exist currently are brutal, but I suspect they'll be ironed out over the next few weeks (something like a 1000% increase in concurrent logins can do that to a game). For now, though, it seems like I have to go through the queueing process twice on average before actually getting into the game.
Tried a little of the villain side and things are a predictable mirror. The safehouses look similar in layout (haven't seen the Hall of Doom yet), the enemies are the cops instead of the crooks, but the general feel and flow appears roughly parallel.
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