Friday, March 23, 2012
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It’s been a while since I managed to update this and provide some interesting updates! Since I last updated this site I’ve played SWTOR excessively - and found it to be an excellent game, although it didn’t manage to catch me enough to keep playing a lot once I hit the end of the storylines. It’s still well worth the money as it’s somewhat of an interesting evolution in mmos from a storytelling point of view.
Falling back on old habits, I revisited Dungeons and Dragons Online, which should be considered one of the more challenging and fun PvE-oriented online games out there, not being extremely friendly to new players (read: WoW players) as it requires a bit of research before you start it properly, but the rewards are well worth it once you get into it. It’s also free, and if you want a PvE-challenge type game where you can (and will) screw up your character builds, feel free to check it out and sign up here!
One game I’d like to mention in addition to these is the upcoming DotA 2. I’ve been playing this every now and then in the beta, and I’m really enjoying a quick skirmish with bots there. One of my major gripes with Heroes of Newerth (and other similar games) is how matches tend to end up in constant blame-fests. How a typical game usually works out is that one guy dies early and gets some quick insults yelled at him from his teammates. This guy then realizes he has 15-60secs of downtime cause he’s waiting for the respawn, so he hits caps-lock and starts blaming everyone else and commenting on how horrible they are. If you’re really lucky now, someone will respond and in the process losing their focus so they’ll end up dying as well, at which point … you guessed it, more people with capslock-time! There’s a pattern here…
I really enjoy playing these games, but with the state of the community for them being as it is, I only really enjoy them playing with/against my friends – and DotA 2 manages to satisfy that in the sense that even if we’re not 6-10 people online, we can still “bot it up” and have heaps of fun! So, I strongly encourage people to try it out when it comes out.
Diablo 3 deserves another mention, I’ll most likely be playing this a fair bit, although I’m slightly concerned with the server splits again. I would really like more games of the type that Diablo 3 is to adopt the server-system that Guild Wars is using, where you have your character and can freely select which servers you want to play on for any given play-session, as opposed to what seems to be the norm with having to maintain multiple characters if you want to play with both EU and US friends.
Monday, July 18, 2011
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I recently fell into the trap of Lord of the Rings Online as they were transferring EU ownership over to Turbine, and found that the improvements done since I last played 2 years ago were quite interesting, and made me really want to play more, so, I did!
The major changes since I last played involves first off the free to play model, you no longer need to pay to play, yay! Of course, there are some limitations to what you can do, but with a fair bit of dedication, you can actually make it to the end without paying at all.
Second off, they’ve “solofied” the Epic storyline, which means the horribly difficult group quests which you needed to get through to progress the storyline now has the option to do them solo. You then get a buff which makes you roughly as strong as a full party alone, and can have fun without worrying about others getting you killed.
Last, but not least, they’ve added Skirmishes, a new set of small instance dungeon types, where you customize the level, group-size (or solo), and the dungeon/loot scales according to your settings. The best part with this is that the rewards gained here can be used to buy gear equivalent to decent quest rewards at that given level.
A final note on Skirmishes… While running these you get to pick a Skirmish Soldier which works as your sidekick while running around inside, now, it’s possible to run all the skirmishes with all the different soldiers, and that’s pretty much what everyone says as well – but in my experience, for the QUICKEST progress through these skirmishes, always go with the Sage decked out with heavy AE, until you start running out of Power/Health and get downtime as a result (was 40+ with my characters), then switch to a Herbalist with the Power Regeneration skill.
Give Lord of the Rings Online a try, it’s free, Signup Here! Enjoy! :)
Friday, March 18, 2011
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Tuesday, March 08, 2011
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Wednesday, January 19, 2011
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Monday, January 17, 2011
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I got a fair few questions about class compositions in the different brackets after posting the class stats. So, here are the current top 20 comps in the 2v2 and 3v3 brackets for EU over 2200 rating.
This is accurate as of January 16th 2011.
I’ve been wondering quite a bit what the current class representation in the WoW Arena is, as a result of this, I decided to grab the stats from blizzards lists and make a lovely little chart!
This represents the 2200+ rated teams across all BGs for EU. I decided to post this here now to see how this will change come the 4.0.6 changes! :)
Chart should be accurate as of January 16th 2011.
Thursday, October 07, 2010
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I was going to write something about this towards the end of the Open Beta, but as they still hadn’t addressed most of my concerned, I didn’t go for the game at all. I think this gamespot review says it all though, it’s very accurate in terms of what’s crap really. I honestly hoped that this game would be something I’d be playing now, and it’s quite sad to see such an excellent opportunity for a good fun online game wasted.
The end of the review says it all - Updates may address a multitude of flaws, but "fun" is not a feature that can be added with a simple patch.
Monday, October 04, 2010
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After playing through an insane amount of SC2, having heaps of fun grabbing all the different achievements you could think of there, and feeling quite challenged in the process, I was pleasantly surprised to see achievements in place for Civilization 5 as well! However …
There’s obviously a fairly huge difference between the gameplay in SC2 and Civ5, but there’s just something that made me worry slightly as I was going through the list while playing my first few games… they’re quite simply all piss easy for someone who wants to “achieve”! You can just set the game to fit whichever achievement you want to get, and soon thereafter… you have it! With the obvious exception being “Do 1000 things” – with no tracking of how far you are along with these, you just stop caring after a while…
I think in a sense, the achievements implemented in Civ5 to a certain extent made the game a lot “worse” for me personally than if they hadn’t been present at all. My OCD kicked in and I just rushed through the list in no time, only the 2-3 multiplayer achievements and the “do insane amounts of things” remain…
I think I’ve grown accustomed to the fact that single player games have a challenge in the sense that you want to complete them, but you also want to have something to show for it, even if it’s just a simple image or a small icon you can see somewhere in your account profile… it’s “something”! And now that I’ve rushed through these, the game feels like it’s “over” in a sense, whereas in Civ4 I would play it just for fun quite a few times to try out various things, I’ve found myself come across a mental block which says “why bother? it’s not THAT much fun, already done everything… and I get no more achievements…”
I can safely say that the achievements in SC2 prolonged the game by an insane amount for me. There’s no way I would’ve replayed the entire campaign on Brutal difficulty if I hadn’t been able to get that little shiny achievement and the ability to use a picture of Kerrigan as my avatar. In addition to that, they added achievements to carefully thought out challenges, which again partially trained me in terms of what to expect from multiplayer – resulting in me getting hooked on that as well.
So, instead of saying No More Turns – Civilization 5 should say No More Achievements!
Friday, September 03, 2010
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As a long-time Final Fantasy fan I’ve been looking forward to the next online game with a fair bit of enthusiasm. However, the closed beta testing I was a part of didn’t convince me at all, and for those who know me – that’s a fairly worrying statement given that it’s both an mmo and a Final Fantasy game.
I’ll go into details on the actual gameplay after I’ve had some more time to see what they have fixed since I was in the closed beta, but there’s just a fair bit of extra annoyances that really put me down here.
The whole account management system is horrible and nowhere near intuitive, when you click to get accepted into the beta and need to search through the site and go through a ton of screens to simply apply the key to your account.
Furthermore, the performance in-game was quite horrible, as various other sites have mentioned, the graphics requirements are quite simply insane for a “casual-friendly” online game. Note that that might have improved since last time I played, but seeing how the launcher alone manages to slow down my PC, eat up more CPU and make my gfx fans go more crazy than on SC2 at 2560x1600 with Ultra settings in a 4v4 Zerg Insane AI match – it’s not a good sign in terms of performance in general.
All that said, head over to http://entry.ffxiv.com to check the game out for yourself!