Happy Strain Day

I’m a Dargon!

home-headerLast night I had every intent of playing World of Warcraft, but that didn’t actually happen.  One of my good friends decided to re-up WoW for a bit, and since we had not played in ages we made tentative plans to hang out on horde lowbies over on Scryers.  July 3rd The Scryers is merging with Argent Dawn the server that I have 11 Alliance characters on, and this will give me 11 Horde characters as well.  I’ve always had friends on both side of the fence, but had trouble choosing to roll a character over there and give up a potential character on the alliance side.  The merger of the two servers solves all of this.  However last night didn’t actually happen and while I logged in a few alts and loaded them up with the few heirlooms I had laying around, I didn’t actually play them much.

Instead I fired up Divinity II again and continued questing my way through their extremely interesting world.  Apparently none of the screenshots that I took actually recorded, which is a problem I am noticing more and more with Dxtory.  If it has been open for any period of time, it seems to forget how to work.  So as a result I am pretty much going to have to start shutting it down and reopening it every night before I sit down to play.  I thought I had recorded quite a few nifty things, but in reality it is probably best that they didn’t record given that they probably were spoilerific.  A lot of interesting stuff happened last night and I am not entirely certain how I feel about some of the choices the game made me choose.  When a game makes me feel like that, it is probably doing a good job.

Happy Strain Day

home-header This morning the first “Ultra Drop” as they call it is now available for Wildstar.  This big patch weighs in at well over 3 gig and includes two new max level zones, a slew of new housing options and various cosmetic customization.  While I am nowhere near high enough level to appreciate any of this I am amped to see it happening.  Basically I am always happy when a game releases content for free to its players that expands the footprint of the game.  So many companies have promised a progressive patching schedule but to date very few of them have actually manages to keep up the promised pace.  The holy grail seems to be a patch a month, but the problem is that real life gets in the way, and things often don’t work out quite like they intended.  So far the only company that has come close to this sort of schedule is Guild Wars 2, with its bi-monthly story updates.  The problem there is that it didn’t actually expand the game, and was just a sequence of self expiring quest content.

The funny thing is that apparently some of the player base considers this too soon.  I was floored to read on twitter when a friend of mine lamented that she was not even close to finished with the current content, and was frustrated that she already felt “behind”.  Me personally I want to be flooded with content, so I can pick and choose what I want to complete without feeling the need to actually play every little morsel that comes out.  Now my tune will change completely if I find out that this is some sort of limited time or expiring content.  For the longest time Rift had done an amazing job of pushing out little content patches, but over the last year they have put in a number of limited time events that have caused me to really want to stop playing entirely.  We talked about this a few weeks back on Aggrochat, but when a company tries to force me to log in every day for a period of time…  I ultimately get frustrated and just stop playing entirely.

Day One DLC

WildStar64 2014-06-25 21-18-34-634 The early patch like this is really designed to give the player base confidence at the end of the 30 day trial period.  It essentially is a way of stringing the player on and making them want to renew their subscription that should be expiring around the time the patch lands.  The thing is… this is so commonplace now that it is literally meaningless.  The patch landing at almost exactly the one month mark, is really the equivalent to a brand new game shipping with day one DLC on the CD.  This is content that was in the works and ready to go at the time of launch, that was essentially held in reserve to land right at the one month mark and reinforce player loyalty.  That is not to say that it is actually content that COULD have shipped in the game, generally speaking it is done but not stable or untested, and requires a month or so to incubate and get ready for prime time.

Even games as notoriously slow at patching as Star Wars the Old Republic, had their one month in patch that introduced a brand new dungeon “Kaon Under Siege”.  The real test is going to be if we see a similar “Ultra Drop” timed for August 1st and September 1st as well.  No company has really proven that they can continue to expand their game content on a month by month basis, thereby justifying the expense of a subscription fee.  I would love to think that Wildstar is going to be the exception here, but when no one has actually managed to accomplish it once the subscriptions start slipping…  I just don’t have much confidence.  That is the unfortunate reality is that a number of players are already “done” with this game, as evidenced by a string of tweets saying as such.  Will be interesting to see how the numbers shake out once all of these people flake off.

I’m Around Awhile

I personally am subbed for at least another six months, but I am hoping that this will be my new MMO for a long while.  There are a number of players that are showing extreme commitment and subbing for an entire year at a time.  Right now I want to be playing, I just can’t handle the large scale social interaction at the moment.  Coming home and crawling into my own private single player world is just too comfortable at the moment.  However within a few weeks I will get tired of being alone and will happily return to Wildstar.  Here is hoping that there are still a large number of people playing it then.  If not I might end up switching factions to Exile.  I feel as though we probably picked the wrong side to play on Evindra since every person on my twitter feed seems to be playing Exile there, and since they are locked to only 6 character slots are not wanting to play Dominion as well.

I don’t feel like Wildstar is going to be a game that I stop playing just because my current circle of friends stops playing it.  I played Rift for most of a year successfully by relying on the good graces of other circles of friends with their established guilds, and I figure I can do the same with Wildstar if it comes down to it.  The sad truth is that unless the game is World of Warcraft, House Stalwart and the Alliance of Awesome so far don’t have the best track record of actually staying in any game for any period of time.  I think this is mostly a multi-gaming thing, and I am just as guilty of it as anyone.  Right now I want to play Elder Scrolls Online as well… but I just don’t end up logging in and doing it on a regular basis.  So I feel bad for the folks that are over there and playing in relative silence.  Once my current crush on Divinity 2 wears off a bit, I will likely return to ESO and try playing that since it is a much less frenetic game.

#Wildstar #DivinityII #Evindra #ElderScrollsOnline

7 thoughts on “Happy Strain Day”

  1. I subbed to Wildstar for a year and like you, I’m going to play both sides equally to see where the people go. I’m not attached to the faction really. I’m slowly playing and enjoying myself. The people I see quitting that were “super fans” are the ones that are trying to keep up with the hardcore and feel overwhelmed thinking they NEED to only love Wildstar. Just relax and play whenever you want and don’t feel the need to push to 50 where all the cool kids are. My highest character is 20.i have 5 other alts I’m happy to play. I’m getting them all to 15 then cycling through them having fun.

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