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.