A Few Game Comments
No WoW last weekend, with people otherwise occupied. I'm not sure what our priorities are, though it was discussed there's just enough time left to complete Dragonwrath if we tackle Firelands every week (and get a Rags kill in there). With Deathwing down, that might be the most "worthy" goal.
SWTOR has announced they're going free-to-play "this fall." No real surprise there with subscription numbers dropping and competition increasing (Secret World, soon to be Guild Wars 2 and Mists of Pandaria). Time to work out a different system of incentives to try to tap the larger F2P play base. We'll see how that works out for them.
The lasted ME3 Multiplayer DLC added some a batch of interesting classes. The N7 Destroyer particularly interests me by being... sort of what a soldier class should have been, in my opinion: sturdy and gun-heavy. I can actually use a full-auto assault rifle with it without feeling like I'm flailing everywhere.
I've heard about Day Z, an Arma 2 mod that drops people into a world of free-for-alls and zombies, and decided to watch some videos. It's... fascinating in a way, but also somewhat depressing. There seems to be a progression. New players start out with some trust of others, maybe make some mistakes with zombies and die, then let someone else get close and get capped from behind once. Maybe twice. Then they're so jaded by it that they start realizing they can't trust anyone. Experienced players start seeing other players as an easier way to get resources than sneaking around town and risking being overwhelmed by zombies - or sniped by strangers. It seems pretty brutal. And while the buildup seems fun - finding food and water, finding better weapons - there's not much way to hold onto that when someone can come along, shoot you, and make you start over from scratch. With a large group, it might be fun, but it solo play seems doomed from the outset.
SWTOR has announced they're going free-to-play "this fall." No real surprise there with subscription numbers dropping and competition increasing (Secret World, soon to be Guild Wars 2 and Mists of Pandaria). Time to work out a different system of incentives to try to tap the larger F2P play base. We'll see how that works out for them.
The lasted ME3 Multiplayer DLC added some a batch of interesting classes. The N7 Destroyer particularly interests me by being... sort of what a soldier class should have been, in my opinion: sturdy and gun-heavy. I can actually use a full-auto assault rifle with it without feeling like I'm flailing everywhere.
I've heard about Day Z, an Arma 2 mod that drops people into a world of free-for-alls and zombies, and decided to watch some videos. It's... fascinating in a way, but also somewhat depressing. There seems to be a progression. New players start out with some trust of others, maybe make some mistakes with zombies and die, then let someone else get close and get capped from behind once. Maybe twice. Then they're so jaded by it that they start realizing they can't trust anyone. Experienced players start seeing other players as an easier way to get resources than sneaking around town and risking being overwhelmed by zombies - or sniped by strangers. It seems pretty brutal. And while the buildup seems fun - finding food and water, finding better weapons - there's not much way to hold onto that when someone can come along, shoot you, and make you start over from scratch. With a large group, it might be fun, but it solo play seems doomed from the outset.
With a large group, it might be fun, but it solo play seems doomed from the outset. The true message of a zombie horror story in entirety.
ReplyDeleteHeh. There is something to that, certainly. I feel it's sort of amplified in a video game. It's easier to brush off the moral aspects: "Oh, it's just a game." The mechanics of the game don't really support thinks like building a community. The ways spawns works seems to push toward raiding settlements for supplies rather than building up. Partly because communication is limited (I'm unclear on if there's in-game voice support, but even if so a lot of players don't have microphones and are limited to text chat), it's difficult to coordinate and converse with others, making it harder to trust strangers - or even see them as other people. So while I think most people/players would recognize there's more safety in numbers, it's harder to make that happen in a virtual environment. So... very interesting reflection of humanity in a surival situation, but it's inherently limited in the portrayal, too. I was reather impressed to see the map looks ridiculously large. And while some things are pretty rough, like zombie/player animations, there are a lot of little details too, like the food/water/health system and vehicles. Now if communication were better and there was some further encouragement to work together (beyond having someone to watch your back in an immediate sense) and a reason to treat people as something other than walking item drops, I think it'd be even better. I actually kind of want to play it short-term, but not enough to buy the base game.
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