Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Well, I took a look at storytelling , so why not look at combat in the MMOs I've played? WoW : This is the first MMO I really picked up, so I may be biased. It's sort of the baseline in my mind. It's not perfect, but it works well. Bottom line in my book is that it works. I rarely had any trouble targeting what I wanted to target. Abilities and auto-attacks hit your active target or specified area. Facing is important (especially as a shield-user). AI aggro mechanics are mostly pretty basic, straightfoward, and built-in with tanks having specific aggro-boosting abilities. With rare exception, abilities both have a cooldown and are limited by a global cooldown. There's some difference between classes with a secondary resource - mana, rage, focus, etc. And there are a lot of abilities. I had... 4 bars? Six? Eight? It sure felt like a lot, though some of those were regularly-used non-combat things like mount summoning. Boss fights, however, got interesting. "Tank...

I had some discussion about story and presentation, having just done Arah in GW2 this weekend for a couple people. So here are some sort of general thoughts... Now, it should be acknowledged that telling a player-driven story in an MMO and offering real choice may be a Sisyphean task. Offering real choice means more development time in making branches of the story. Making any story that centers on the PC involves some slight-of-hand in a multiplayer environment to be even remotely believable. And on top of that, opinions vary on what the best way really is. WoW : The game always kind of skirts the issue of player involvement. Big bad bosses are taken down by "heroes" or NPCs. Questgivers occasionally show recognition for the PC, but it's pretty trivial and interchangeable. With major bits of story "told" through raids, it's pretty easy to miss out on some things, too - though Blizzard has been more inclusive with LFR instances and such. Ultimately, I so...

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 ...

Beta stuff galore, it seems... I've seen a number of articles based on Guild Wars 2 beta experience, including some clarification over dynamic events and how personal stories tend to work with multiple players. It all sounds fairly promising, but the question still remains of how it will actually feel after a couple months of real play. It seems so much Mists of Pandaria info came out last week that catching up is beyond me. And that's okay by me, I suppose. I like what I see in the looting changes. I still don't care too much about the talent revamp and all yet - I want to see a more final form and find out how it works in a less-theoretical sense. Someone mentioned that SWTOR 1.2 is adding new story, which got me looking closer at some articles there. It appears to be true, but the addition is new plot on Corellia that sounds similar for both factions. That's a far cry from additional class-story content, which is what I'd really want to see. And that's ...

In a weird place at the moment. Weird, yet normal? WoW remains on the brink, yet this seems like the first weekend out guildleader saw what I've been seeing for weeks - that our current roster just isn't up to "real" (in the sense of pushing into relevant progression) raiding. Come our usual time, we have about 6 people on - which we ran a few 5-man dungeons with this time around. After an hour or so we might cap out at around 8 level 85 characters. With just a little luck, that includes two tanks and two healers. If everyone were rock-star perfect, we could probably do normal 10-mans with that. People might have improved via valor point gear, but from what I saw the last time we were in Dragon Soul: 1) the currently-available healers probably can't successfully dual-heal Firelands/Dragon Soul and 2) we'd also probably be light on DPS. It's something I'd be willing to try, but I don't expect it would end happily. This time around, we PUGged a c...

I pretty much ignored the Superbowl. And got up today to a respectable amount of snow on the ground - thankfully light enough that it hasn't been back-breaking to clear. WoW was an evening of dungeon-running for me. Our guildleader got in a Firelands raid to get a little bit more progress toward Dragonwrath. An hour or two after our usual start time, we had a good number of people on (8 85's and 2-3 lower-level), but I think it would have been a rough group to raid with, light on the healing, and several people weren't real interested anyway. The vague possibility is there. GW was the Canthan New Year, so we did a few holiday quests and hung out for the finale, opening a bunch of prizes to get... not one celestial dragon so far as I know. Ah well. No telling what we'll do next week. Winds of Change side quests that I didn't pay any attention to? Some more time with SWTOR , mostly solo but with a little paired trooper/smuggler play. There seem fewer non-inclu...

So... hmm... Finished out my Agent's class quests and Corellia, which seems to be the last PVE world. And... yeah... Strange to have been playing so much and now I'm "done" though I could keep playing. Class finale? Not bad. Closure on the hunt for shadow forces in the galaxy and defeat of what passes for a nemesis. There's still an opening, as the Agent is left in a position to hunt down other threats to the Empire, but there is not much in the way of unresolved threads. That's probably as good as can be expected. Not the ending and credit-roll that you'd get in a single-player game, though. Faction finale? A seemingly-resounding victory on Corellia. The irony here is I'm given to understand the Republic finale pushes the Empire OFF Corellia, and takes place later chronologically. There's more fanfair than any other world I can recall, but it's not a conclusion to the war. I still have to wonder how they're going to add to the game. ...

Quick roundup again. WoW saw the finishing out of Ulduar hard modes, and the resulting drakes for 5 people or so. We may do some of it again for others, but it's hard to say what we'll do as the lack of a complete raid goes on. Haven't been spending much other time on there as there doesn't feel a need to cap VP if I don't need 397 gear and I don't like the blue PVP set as much as the red. We got through another couple missions in GW last night, leaving two in the current Winds of Change chain. There's talk about press in the GW2 beta next month, a more open beta around April, and a release sometime in 2012. My SWTOR agent is level 47, so nearing the end of the class story. I'm amused at just how much it's instilled the attitude of "the Sith suck" - my character is fighting a war and uncovering conspiracies while the Sith of the Dark Council keep getting in the way. Had a couple people I know online start characters on the server, to...

Let's see... Weekend was okay, if too short. WoW had probably more a turnout than I was expecting since the raid was semi-officially called off. With 5-6 people, we ended up doing 8/13 hard-modes achievements for Ulduar. Flame Leviathan was probably the hardest because the vehicles don't scale up that well and with so few people it's hard to man all the necessary positions, but we pulled that off after a few tries. GW actually had a third person on for the first time in a while, and we got another mission out of the way. More time spent on SWTOR , and I think everything I've said still holds true for my experience. Coming up on one month and my agent is level 44, with a second character (a trooper played with someone else) is about 11. It snowed pretty good over last night and this morning. This is the sort of storm I don't mind, though. Even if I was clearing 5-6 inches of new snow out of my way, things cleared up and the plowed streets weren't much more ...

So while some people (who mostly don't seem to be playing it anyway) have taken issue with SWTOR, I'm still finding it an entertaining ride. My agent has gone from foiling internal Imperial terrorists to deep undercover work with Republic SIS and even has a minor Crichton-Harvey thing going on (bonus points if you get the reference). She's also helped the Empire secure holdings on a handful of worlds, but the class storyline is more intimate and more compelling. It's also nice that (partly due to stealth abilities) I can largely play it as a single-player game. The monthly fee is still a drawback, though. WoW feels bleak at the moment. After a couple holiday-induced weeks of no raiding, I've slacked off myself and not capped VP the last week. Saturday we had 7 people show up, only one of which was really a raid healer (and it was a "new" one to our group at that). That... does not make for current-content raiding. It seems we've lost all our previous...

I'm not offended, or even really concerned with, the ability to play an evil character, unlike some people . What does concern me is whether there are consequences to those (and other) choices in SWTOR. I've already been thinking on that the last few days. Since I'm not likely to play through an entire class a second time to do things differently, it's difficult to be certain, but I have lingering doubts. One of the writers, Alexander Freed, said in a recent interview : Well there is a core storyline, so choices have to eventually weave back into... not the exact same narrative but a similar narrative that ends up dealing with a lot of the same things. You can't make your choices branch into a completely different game. But there are ways to respect the choices while still doing that. It's not hard to change lines of dialogue so long as people eventually come back to the same place they can be having very different experiences in those places. I've seen...

It dawned on my at some point in the weekend that it's been a looong time since I went into a weekend, much less a 3-day one, unfettered by time obligations. No requirement to be on WoW, no requirement to be on Guild Wars, no requirement to throw things together and scurry off to parents' abode, no leaving town or places I had to be... It was actually amazingly relaxing for the most part. We'll see this coming weekend how things gear back up for WoW and GW. I want to get raiding again, but... just have to see who shows. - I've been playing some more SWTOR - not obsessively, but with some frequency. My agent just made level 33, has recently acquired a second combat companion, and is at the end of Chapter 1. Time for some more observations... The gameplay is still reasonably solid. I've accepted the lack of auto-attacks, but I still don't know if this is actually better in some way. I still really like the starship combat missions, even if they're rep...

It's taken a few examples and some forum research, but I've come to understand (I think) the intricacies of orange-quality items in SWTOR, and they're... interesting. There's already the standard hierarchy. Gray items are most sellable, white items are basic no-frills stuff with no stat enhancements beyond armor/damage, green items start to have stat modifiers on them, blue items have a few more points than their green counterparts at the same level, and purple ones even more (and perhaps a slot for an sugmentation). All of them can be found, though white-quality armor/weapons pretty much disappear after the first half dozen levels. Crafting patterns you buy are for green quality, but you have a chance to learn blue versions of the patterns by reverse engineering green items (and purple from blue as I understand). Then there's orange items. Orange items have modification slots and the stat benefits of orange-quality items are entirely based on those mods. If y...

Christmas is Sunday? Really? Sheesh. That seems strange to me, even if I do have a Christmas song stuck in my head and have for the last 36 hours or so... I actually dumped some free time into creating a World of Darkness character, ending up with a wealthy, immortal weaponsmith with ties to the Shadow Realm. Shades of Tony Stark or Batman (though not as extreme as either) turned in a more supernatural vein. And... that's about it. With a little bit of XP unspent and apparently no connection information for the MUCK, I couldn't dive into play even if I were highly motivated to do so. Heh. A few SWTOR observations: - I still love the Agent's ship and the space combat missions, limited as they are. Reminds me a touch of the old X-Wing arcade game (or Star Fox, or...). A few ship upgrades can make the starting missions way easier. - It's all too easy to dump credits into crew skills (doing Armstech/Scavenging/Research). I keep realizing I'm back down to 10k credi...

The holiday doldrums set in a week early (or so it feels to me). In WoW, we knew our guild leader would be gone Saturday, but he was the only one I was aware of. He tried to get a group together Friday night. That almost worked, but with our primary healers unresponsive or absent, current raid content was out of the question and we just knocked out Blackwing Lair, the old 40-man raid with about six people (easily) before I headed off. Saturday was disappointing as I think there were only three other raiders online at the usual start time (ironically, including said guild leader). I had hoped he'd be the only one missing at, at the worst, we could struggle through something or even take a partial team into LFR or take on the easy Alizabel and Morchok quick-like. Then when Guild Wars time rolled around Sunday night, I was the only person online . No progress. I expect Christmas night to be as bad or worst and New Years just as bad. So... it feels like we'll be rebuilding our g...