Author: Ravious

.

Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

.

Star Wars: The Ol’ Impressions

Thankfully my server or time played  was perfect. I never had a queue, but that seemed to be a rarity. Anyway, I felt like I got a solid play session or two in. I would say getting I got enough time to make a solidly informed consumer decision.

First, it’s rock solid. A lot of love and polish has gone in to making the game really smooth in pretty much every factor. Sure, there are a few minor bugs here and there, but if there was a vision to how the game would be, it was pretty much implemented to the fullest.

Second, the vision is of course something branching off of a vanilla MMO, which World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Rift et al. hold domain. There are some twists, which I am still digesting for future posts here, but my gut feeling is they don’t change much. It’s like the difference between presenting a nicely cooked steak on a plate and one that has been sliced for the guest to show a nicely cooked interior. It’s a steak either way. The two things that hit me were interactionable cut scenes replacing quest text and groups of mobs as being a single encounter. I’d be really interested to see how different those two things feel after 20-30 levels of gameplay.

Finally, I would love to play, but I don’t feel like shelling out $50 plus a subscription to play something essentially super-shiny vanilla. With holiday gifts needing spending, I might pick it up next year. I think I would enjoy the journey of going through each class’ story. So much of it feels though like “play together, alone.” I am a little worried at what might become of the end game too. I know once I got a whiff of Rift’s near-release end game I quit the game. For now, I think I will just look forward to stories and spoilers.

–Ravious

The Inevitability of $1,000 Mounts

Ever check out Gamebreaker.TV? It’s a really nice site, and I particularly enjoy the enthusiasm of the crew there, and our good friend Rubi of Massively joins in the fray there to make sure their MMO thoughts are refereed. Anyway, whenever microtransactions in MMOs comes up over there, so does the $1000 mount. I have to agree, the experiment of having one would be awesome. Yet they always add the caveat of “not game breaking.”

Well, hey, RockPaperShotgun tells us that a company decided to make a 1000 euro item. The 10th drone, normally available in game after what appears to be a long grind of getting drones 1-9 was made available for one-thousand quackers (like smackers, but European) for only four days. Then 2,000,000 euros fell in to the company’s lap, meaning for those already under the influence of Thanksgiving wine, they sold 2,000 of the drones.

Let’s recap: Continue reading The Inevitability of $1,000 Mounts

A Flag in the Sand, Thoughts on “E”

After two years of stagnating in my Steam library I am finally playing Assassin’s Creed. I blame it on a friend who Tweets some awesome thing about the series every now and then. I admit I had no idea what the game was about except I would perch like a bird in high places and assassinate people that needed killing.  Having got past the initial tutorial places, finally seeing the meat of the game was a revelation. It was well worth the $5 I paid for it at the time, and I will likely get the sequel as soon as I am done with the first.

I didn’t realize how much of an “explorer’s” dream the game was. The cities are sprawling and lively. There are plenty of nooks to find and crannies to stuff bodies in. A lot of time and love was spent on each area to constantly feed moments of ‘neat!’ It’s so free-spirited that when I get bogged down in a sword-fight, I am just hoping it will be over all the sooner. I want to keep exploring, and to keep the explorer heart busy, there are two distinct modes of exploration in Assassin’s Creed: guided and hidden.  Continue reading A Flag in the Sand, Thoughts on “E”

[GW2] Valley of Movement and Microexpressions

ArenaNet’s Chuck Jackman (pronounced as Scottish as possible) shows off the new dialogue cut scenes in Guild Wars 2 in one of the latest blog posts. Unequivocally, he started the doom of ArenaNet and Guild Wars 2 by having to summon eldritch gods to get the job done. It is possible that everybody will be insane/dead before a beta starts. Still, which do you think is scarier, Cthulhu or an art director that has probably already bested a few of those gods? Anyway, amongst the cries of the damned, Jackman writes:

We also use a layered and additive approach on the face. This allows us to animate a mood or emotion-based “face idle” and layer on the lip-synch animation as well. We can then drop additive facial gestures at the appropriate time in the dialogue. For example, we can have a character looking timid or frightened while they talk. Then maybe something happens to scare them and we can drop an additive flinch animation onto the character’s face, body, or both independently at just the right moment so that they react to what is happening to them in the scene.

I have to say that this sounds really cool, especially after watching some deadpan facial expressions on the heralded Skyrim. An official video of one of these new dialogue scenes gives the full impression. I find two teachings colliding from my untrained pundit’s eye: microexpressions and constant movement. Let’s explore both! Continue reading [GW2] Valley of Movement and Microexpressions

[SWTOR] Emotional Rollercoaster

Supra-edit: BioWare’s Stephen Reid says these two things are unrelated. So as not to waste prime article space, these other two things are also not related.

I just got a free beta key for SWTOR from Rock, Paper, Shotgun! I thought, well I didn’t think Rift was going to be all that fun, and playing in beta changed my mind. Maybe a free romp in SWTOR will do the same. Here I come static lightsaber battles!

Then I remembered I would have to install Origin. That brought my high crashing to the ground. I really don’t want to install something on my computer that seems shady at best. If EA simply wanted a great way to bring updated games the PC, why didn’t they just leave it at that instead of creating EULA-backed spyware. Any corporation that asks me to believe them when they won’t even explain what they deem necessary… well, I have my personal high road on this one.

In the world of quid pro quo, I don’t mind a source gathering information for say an operating system that I need or a game-buying service that I love, but making SWTOR’s rider the installation of Origin brings my high back to “meh.” I am now mulling my beta key. I want to play, but not that much. Put too many hoops in my way, and I have plenty of other games to fall back on. Still the first hoop (getting a free key) was a big one.

–Ravious

EDIT: Winged Nazgul to the rescue! Up we go, rollercoaster.

[GW2] Questing for Skills

Lots of neat tidbits in the latest ArenaNet blog post including UI changes, character customization stuff, and skill quests. Okay, so that’s not what they’re called. “Skill challenges” is the official title, but this new system for getting the non-weapon skills unlocked has me squirming a little. Flannum writes:

Skill points can be acquired by undertaking what we call a skill challenge. There are 200 skill challenges in the game, and they range from defeating tough opponents, to answering riddles, to drinking a particularly potent drink.

He goes on to say that this is an evolution of one of their earlier profession specific “challenges” because this new iteration allows for players to group up to do a skill challenge together, regardless of profession makeup. Sounds pretty good, until I looked at the picture. That’s a lot of things to unlock. Continue reading [GW2] Questing for Skills

[GW2] Skill Developments

It’s pretty apparent that even after the profession is officially disclosed, ArenaNet is not happy to let their professions stagnate in pre-beta testing. Profession and skill herder, Jon Peters, wrote a really nice Friday blog post on the official ArenaNet blog about some of the things that have been iterated upon for Guild Wars 2.

First off, the engineer gets… well another skill bar putting the profession as skill master, one full skill ahead the elementalist. An engineer gets 4 toolbelt skills which are based on their slotted heal skill and 3 utility skills. This is 23 more skills for the engineer. What’s really nice is that this also allows the engineer to not have to rely on skill swapping utilities quite as much to adapt prior to combat. For example, an engineer in a single-target DPS fight might not want to pull a flamethrower out, yet it would suck if the engineer is heavily penalized for having the skill-turning utility locked in the slot. The toolbelt skill still gives the engineer some benefit for having the flamethrower slotted even if the flamethrower is not going to be used. Continue reading [GW2] Skill Developments

Pure-ish Exploration

My go to game right now is The Binding of Isaac. Most games seem to take around 1/2 hour or a little more, but each game is a pure treat. The crux of my delight is that each game will be explored and played differently because the engine procedurally creates the dungeon, bosses, and loot each time. X-ray goggles for example let me pass through the secret doors, which normally need to be found by placing a bomb next to a wall and praying it is the correct wall. Now I have more bombs available for other things. Anybody that has played a roguelike, especiallyNetHack, will be comfortably familiar with this type of exploration.

For me, this is one of the most pure exploration scenarios available in any game. Unlocking a map or reading quest text in an MMO seems to pale by comparison. The developers made the chunk of game to be explored, and others have already explored it. I would go so far as to say that in an MMO the only explorers getting pure-ish exploration are the achievers working on a world first for a raid. Everything else evokes as much exploration as me going to a museum.

I want to be the scientist finding new discoveries. I want to see emergence that the developer could have only dreamed of. For me that is a purer exploration. Continue reading Pure-ish Exploration

[GW2] Nose to the Asura Gybrasion Device

After the mega-cons, things have seemed slow from the Guild Wars 2 standpoint. There are a few interviews coming out of the smaller conventions, and a few blog posts showing off environmental concept art or the audio’s team trip to a never-used nuclear reactor have been posted. Perhaps the biggest drop in October was the grawl race’s lore posting. So, it’s been kind of slow on the news front.

I can’t help but feel that the ArenaNet team has shown the demo of their game, and now it’s time to get it done. The only mode of play that’s not been seen in action is World v. World (WvW), which I imagine to be similar in spirit to Dark Age of Camelot or Warhammer Online‘s RvR fronts. Things like WvW, other PvP maps, more dungeons, more events, and of course the elusive eighth profession have all been mentioned as being designed or refined in the Fall interviews. Continue reading [GW2] Nose to the Asura Gybrasion Device

[Rift] Defeating the Defeatist

Jaradcel writes up another in-depth guest post on Rift PvP. Enjoy! –Ravious

Lately with the amount of PvP I have been doing, it feels like my brain is beginning to bleed “learn2play” attitudes. I have caught myself replying to obvious troll bait yells or even doing so myself.

Upon consideration, I feel like one of the root causes of this, which is far less prevalent in a PvE aspect, is because of the way developers tend to design for PvP. There are several reasons, but to start the ball rolling: Developers tend to cater to the defeatist.

Continue reading [Rift] Defeating the Defeatist