...are not coming yet.
So the things I'm looking at in the MMO future-possibility space:
Age of Conan:
Already out, but falls into this category as, in my eyes, its still far to broken. I'm sure people will (actually the won't) be savaging this and saying its teh awesome, but a) they'd be drowned out by number 3, and 2) it is. Also, I don't care for games that go "look, look, we're mature!", even if thats not what they actually do. Seriously, marketing guys. Also, twitch MMO, no thanks.
Warhammer Online:
Don't care.
Wrath of the Lich King:
Will buy, but I think this is Blizzard's last gimmie expansion. People bought Burning Crusade because yay more WoW. The same will happen with Lich King, but if its the same marginal increase that TBC was, I don't think the third expansion will sell as well. It'll still sell like hot cakes, but less of the everyone buying it.
WAR:
Actually, I do care; I like Warhammer (more a 40k player, but whatever) but I think it'll translate horribly. There's all the fuss about 3 way PvP games being better than 2 way PvP. Warhammer is, by default, 15+ way, where there can be infighting. This is my fanboyism within the GW space showing, but I think Warhammer Online would've been better served by Mordheim Online (or similar). It'd be more like EVE fantasy version, what with the free-for-all-ness and reliance on guilds (in this case, warbands), but thats not exactly a bad thing. It'd still have a focus on PvP, and you wouldn't end up with the horrible lore-fest that is Destruction. Whatever. Don't care.
Chronicles of Spellborn:
Will buy. Its like Guild Wars, only with more shiny. Also, seems to be lacking in the ricockulous hype that every other MMO release ever seems to be getting, which is probably a good thing. Looks to be heavily instanced, which usually turns me off, but tell that to Guild Wars. Maybe I can mention Guild Wars some more.
Guild Wars 2:
Heh. I'm interested, but haven't heard too much. Might buy. Depends on what they do with things. The main draw of GW is the tactical skill bar building (if only for comedy builds), and the lack of levels (protip: to make me buy a game, make it less level dependent. Also, EVE, you managed to fuck something up as I can't like you, much as I want to. Maybe I should try a free trial again at some point and microblog it). If GW2 keeps these, I'm likely to at least try it.
So looking forward, thats one expansion, and one or two games that stick out to me that I want to buy. I'm sure there are more upcoming games, but nothing sticks out to me. For now, I'll stick with my leisurely leveling WoW characters, my comedy build designing in GW, and social play in CoX.
Is that too many anyway?
Showing posts with label GW. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GW. Show all posts
Friday, 29 August 2008
Thursday, 31 July 2008
Micro-transactions and the West
While I was mooching around buying Nightfall to expand my Guild Wars horizons, I noticed a couple of interesting things in the GW store. Specifically, for six of your English pounds (approximately $11.75, €7.50 (although priced at €9 and $10, so tough luck Europe I guess)), you can buy unlocked skills from each campaign.
To clarify for those not in 'the know'; in Guild Wars, once you learn a skill for the first time, it's unlocked and can be used by your pvp characters and heroes, and trained on your roleplay characters more easily through tomes. To learn the skill, with the exception of some basic skills you get when you start a character, you have to pay an increasing amount of gold, as well as a skill point, which you get through some quests and from filling up your XP bar once you hit the level cap (20). This can get quite expensive, when you consider there are 1235 skills in the game.
But with these unlocks in the stores, you can unlock a quarter or so of these for six pounds, times five for each campaign plus core plus the Eye of the North expansion, for £30 ($50, €45) you can unlock all the skills. My opinion: I'd rather just buy the campaign/expansions and do the hard graft to get the skills I want; I doubt I need all of them anyway.
But while I was looking, there's also the extra character slot at the same price. This is much more tempting. Although I currently have a couple of spare slots, I can see myself buying more once I run out. And there are a couple of other PvP-y things you can buy as well: not for me, but I'm sure some people must use them.
City of Heroes also lets people buy more character slots, but as far as I can tell, that's it for Western micro-transactions. (Yes, World of Warcraft sells character transfers and name changes, but thats a money-grab, not micro-transactions (no controversial opinions on this blog, no-siree).) Of course, both are owned by NCSoft, and Guild Wars has both a very different business model and very different game style from other mainstream Western MMOs; I'm still intrigued as to how many people feel its worth roughly three beers to not have to do fuss with skill unlocks, and whether its possible for other games to follow their lead with similar things for purchase. Maybe its worth six pounds to skill up to 350 in a profession in World of Warcraft, of for some number of extra skill points in EVE, looking at things that may have a similar time and in-game cost to the skill unlocks.
I think its a reasonable idea, but somehow suspect people would disagree with me.
To clarify for those not in 'the know'; in Guild Wars, once you learn a skill for the first time, it's unlocked and can be used by your pvp characters and heroes, and trained on your roleplay characters more easily through tomes. To learn the skill, with the exception of some basic skills you get when you start a character, you have to pay an increasing amount of gold, as well as a skill point, which you get through some quests and from filling up your XP bar once you hit the level cap (20). This can get quite expensive, when you consider there are 1235 skills in the game.
But with these unlocks in the stores, you can unlock a quarter or so of these for six pounds, times five for each campaign plus core plus the Eye of the North expansion, for £30 ($50, €45) you can unlock all the skills. My opinion: I'd rather just buy the campaign/expansions and do the hard graft to get the skills I want; I doubt I need all of them anyway.
But while I was looking, there's also the extra character slot at the same price. This is much more tempting. Although I currently have a couple of spare slots, I can see myself buying more once I run out. And there are a couple of other PvP-y things you can buy as well: not for me, but I'm sure some people must use them.
City of Heroes also lets people buy more character slots, but as far as I can tell, that's it for Western micro-transactions. (Yes, World of Warcraft sells character transfers and name changes, but thats a money-grab, not micro-transactions (no controversial opinions on this blog, no-siree).) Of course, both are owned by NCSoft, and Guild Wars has both a very different business model and very different game style from other mainstream Western MMOs; I'm still intrigued as to how many people feel its worth roughly three beers to not have to do fuss with skill unlocks, and whether its possible for other games to follow their lead with similar things for purchase. Maybe its worth six pounds to skill up to 350 in a profession in World of Warcraft, of for some number of extra skill points in EVE, looking at things that may have a similar time and in-game cost to the skill unlocks.
I think its a reasonable idea, but somehow suspect people would disagree with me.
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
I Will Survive
The Tuesday N00b Club: Survivor Edition
Last night saw the beginning of a worryingly hardcore endeavor: reach 1337500 XP in Guild Wars without dying. Not once.
To add to the fun, this is in Nightfall, which I've not done yet, so I don't know the tricks to the missions to do them without dying.
Fortunately, some of the less n00bish of the Tuesday N00bs do know what they're doing, so I guess I cede to their superior knowledge. Or something.
I actually started this rather daunting task last week, creating a fresh dervish and running him through the tutorial zone for an easy level up, and to start out on my explorer track as well, as you can't get back into the Factions tutorial zone. 'Might as well,' thought I, 'at least it gives me a backup title if this one goes tits up.'
First thing on the Survivors to-do list was the first mission. Actually, the first thing was to form groups. Off we split into two groups of four, or a group of four and one of three. And then we jiggled, and shimmied - well, maybe not shimmying - as it turned out you need to take a hero into that mission. Then the mission itself, which was easy as falling off a log.
Next up was The Ferry: getting someone to take us into a later zone. Apparently, there's some glitch in GW where higher level characters can take lower level characters in their group into certain zones they shouldn't be in by that point using a quest. This zone then has a vendor for endgame armor, which is handy when you're second level and don't want to die.
Unfortunately, some of the noobier of us didn't really get what was going on at this point, and, besides, didn't have the gold required to buy the awesome armor anyway, so I just let the group leader map travel around until it was time to start killing things again.
Then we killed some things, and did some quests. Yay for things I understand! Very careful killing of things, with some slightly nervous pulls at times, but nothing our intrepid trio plus Koss couldn't manage, and after carefully managing our XP gain, we found ourselves having killed enough that the quests we had would push us over into level 5 once we handed them in, which is considerably safer than killing things, so we did.
This is where we stopped for the night, but now comes the tinkering of secondary professions. Several people advocated a monk secondary for some heals, but the dervish is already the veritable mage-tank of yore; strong in melee with a bunch of heals, if not the healing focus of the monk. It seemed a little like overkill to grab monk for heals as well, especially as I suspect most of the survivors will do the same. So that decision's still to be made, but I've got a couple of ideas ruminating, and by next week I should have it all sorted.
Also for next week, I need to find some better songs from which to pinch lyrics for the blog post titles for the series.
Wednesday, 23 January 2008
Obligatory Catchup Post
So I've not posted in aaaaaaaaaaaaaaages.
I blame sunspots. That and just having an absolute ton of stuff happening; a show to stage manage, Christmas, moving back and forth to uni, and exams. Exams still aren't quite over, but I've got something I really want to comment on so, I thought I'd try and catch everything up.
Of the three games I can actively play (without setting up a new account or whatever), WoW is far and away my most active one. I now have my 70 mage slowly grinding up money for her epic flying mount, a nearly-20 hunter on the same server to help grind money for same (as leveling is more fun than grinding primals), a 41 druid on a different server to play with friends at uni, and a level 5 priest I'll get to in a moment.
I've not played City of Heroes in a while. The random instances using the same tilesets over and over and the slowness of leveling all just kinda conspire against me enjoying plain old leveling. When I was regularly playing with a group it was fun, but doing task forces (or whatever the villainous equivalent is) requires the grinding 10 levels to get to the minimum level each time, even if I do get a couple of levels out of each one.
I still log into Kingdom of Loathing regularly, even if I don't play all of my turns to their maximum effectiveness. I still listen to every podca- sorry, mp3 recording of their radio show that gets updated on an rss feed (and did even when I wasn't actively playing), but I expect that I'll get the spark of interest again when I start doing things in their hardercore mode, bad moon.
Guild Wars, well, I've beaten it. Well Factions anyway. And doing anything else just seems... flat, there's no objective there, even though theoretically there's plenty I could do. There're the end-game raids, the pvp, and getting perfect weapons and armour. But two of three require other people, which in GW tends to be a bad idea unless you know who you're with already, and the third is grinding. Lots. And solo if you want to get all the loot that drops.
Of non-MMOs, I'm in Ravenholme in Half Life 2 (yes, the original, and yes, for the first time) so that needs progressing. My Team Fortress 2 stats are lacking, although the LAN party I'm at this weekend should remedy that to an extent, I'm at the final boss (maybe) of Phantom Hourglass, and although D&D has been on hold over the holidays, I'm going to try to tie the remainder of that up fairly quickly, as a) I wrote myself into quite the corner, and 2) I want to play!
The main reason for updating this post is that my girlfriend now plays WoW, as a blood elf warlock, hence the level 5 priest listed earlier. After a couple of hours, we've got to level 5, and done the first few quests in Falconwing Square. Of course, I've been doing a lot of thinking after she said she wanted to play a warlock, perhaps too much, but I'm thinking shadow priest + warlock will be good for leveling, and then can convert to a good 2v2 arena team at 70. Careful selection of professions later, and we can be swimming in gold when we get there as well. I actually also have arena talent choices partially planned out.
Conclusion: I plan things too much, especially when its to avoid doing productive things!
I blame sunspots. That and just having an absolute ton of stuff happening; a show to stage manage, Christmas, moving back and forth to uni, and exams. Exams still aren't quite over, but I've got something I really want to comment on so, I thought I'd try and catch everything up.
Of the three games I can actively play (without setting up a new account or whatever), WoW is far and away my most active one. I now have my 70 mage slowly grinding up money for her epic flying mount, a nearly-20 hunter on the same server to help grind money for same (as leveling is more fun than grinding primals), a 41 druid on a different server to play with friends at uni, and a level 5 priest I'll get to in a moment.
I've not played City of Heroes in a while. The random instances using the same tilesets over and over and the slowness of leveling all just kinda conspire against me enjoying plain old leveling. When I was regularly playing with a group it was fun, but doing task forces (or whatever the villainous equivalent is) requires the grinding 10 levels to get to the minimum level each time, even if I do get a couple of levels out of each one.
I still log into Kingdom of Loathing regularly, even if I don't play all of my turns to their maximum effectiveness. I still listen to every podca- sorry, mp3 recording of their radio show that gets updated on an rss feed (and did even when I wasn't actively playing), but I expect that I'll get the spark of interest again when I start doing things in their hardercore mode, bad moon.
Guild Wars, well, I've beaten it. Well Factions anyway. And doing anything else just seems... flat, there's no objective there, even though theoretically there's plenty I could do. There're the end-game raids, the pvp, and getting perfect weapons and armour. But two of three require other people, which in GW tends to be a bad idea unless you know who you're with already, and the third is grinding. Lots. And solo if you want to get all the loot that drops.
Of non-MMOs, I'm in Ravenholme in Half Life 2 (yes, the original, and yes, for the first time) so that needs progressing. My Team Fortress 2 stats are lacking, although the LAN party I'm at this weekend should remedy that to an extent, I'm at the final boss (maybe) of Phantom Hourglass, and although D&D has been on hold over the holidays, I'm going to try to tie the remainder of that up fairly quickly, as a) I wrote myself into quite the corner, and 2) I want to play!
The main reason for updating this post is that my girlfriend now plays WoW, as a blood elf warlock, hence the level 5 priest listed earlier. After a couple of hours, we've got to level 5, and done the first few quests in Falconwing Square. Of course, I've been doing a lot of thinking after she said she wanted to play a warlock, perhaps too much, but I'm thinking shadow priest + warlock will be good for leveling, and then can convert to a good 2v2 arena team at 70. Careful selection of professions later, and we can be swimming in gold when we get there as well. I actually also have arena talent choices partially planned out.
Conclusion: I plan things too much, especially when its to avoid doing productive things!
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