Action RPGs Archives - Page 188 of 190

Bad Launches

August 26, 2013August 26, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people… it is the beginning of another work week and I still feel sore as hell from the weekends adventures. The odd thing is my thighs are killing me… and I am guessing it was from all the random times I had to squat down to take a shot throughout the wedding festivities. I still need to sift through the photos and cull it down to a final set of “wedding pictures”. As I just reached up to scratch my forehead… it appears that the sunburn is starting to peel… so I have that itchy mess to look forward to over the next few days.

Pre-launch Problems

The above animated image pretty much sums up my experience with the weekend pre-launch of Final Fantasy XIV a Realm Reborn. Essentially I got to play a bit before the wedding madness started on Saturday morning, and then at almost every point afterwards I received some form of an error trying to log in. Essentially I think all of the issues encountered can more or less be chocked up to the poor infrastructure we have seen at various points during the other tests. Almost everything about this weekend could have been reconciled if they had the forethought to include an actual login queue system.

Sure there is a sort of queue that exists, but the highest number in queue my friends and I have seen is somewhere in the 400s… which leads me to believe that the queue is limited to something ridiculous like 500 members. This leads to the very fun process of spamming a character login only to get the ubiquitous 1017 error stating the world is full. That is hands down the most frustrating part about the whole experience. It seems like complete blind luck as to whether or not you are going to make it in.

Bad Timing

Ultimately another large portion of the failure that was the FFXIV head start, was the fact that they were holding it entirely over a weekend in North America. Normally pre-launches begin on a Thursday night and continue on through Friday… at which time they can begin to see what the scaling issues are going to be like and adjust accordingly. Holding it on a weekend essentially means that all infrastructure resources in North America are closed for the weekend. I feel as though if they could have thrown a few more servers at this issue a lot of the problems would have been resolved.

Instead the game team and infrastructure resources are operating on a significant time lag. An example is that Sunday evening… at what would be 8:30 am Japanese time… they managed to stabilize the JP servers. As a result I was finally able to roll a character on the Japanese network of servers and at least spent a little time before going to bed playing around on Ultima. My friends think that this morning we will see the EU/NA servers stabilize similarly. I still question whether or not they actually care about customer service, but that is part of a much larger issue.

Bad Launches

So far this is probably the worst game head start I have experienced. Normally when a game launches, we get a few blissful days of stability during the head start as only the pre-orders get to play… and then can chill out for the first day as the servers burn around us knowing you already have characters that are pretty far into the game. Quite honestly this is the first time that I can remember ever experiencing large periods of not being able to play the game at all… during a head start weekend. Lots of head start experiences have been riddled with lag or other issues… but the game was at least partially playable. During the entirety of the weekend I got roughly 2 hours of gameplay.

One of the things I found interesting however is that while talking to friends over text and mumble… I did not realize just how subjective a launch experience was. For me I herald the launch of Rift as quite possibly one of the smoothest I had experienced. However talking to one of my friends… he remembers tons of issues during that launch. This lead me to crawl back through my forum posts and blog posts from the time… and I literally found no mention of any issues brought on by the launch. Did I just not notice the issues because I was enjoying myself… or did I really not experience the problems that he had made note of.

So this makes me wonder… how many of the bad launches I have experienced are purely subjective? For example, I considered Guild Wars 2 an extremely solid launch since it was playable for me the entire time… albeit I spent most of that time on the overflow shards. However the simple fact that we could not really play on our “real” shards made it an extremely frustrating experience for certain other players. Do they consider that launch a failure… whereas I consider it a pretty solid success? Additionally I struggled with massive amounts of lag during the SWTOR launch, but my friends consider that to be one of the more successful launches to date. It felt like a rocky start to me, and as such I got extremely frustrated by it.

King of Bad Launches

So far the two worst launch experiences I have played under are both from the same company. World of Warcraft has gone down in history as the rockiest start. I can remember the game being more or less unstable for a solid month. I remember almost always being able to connect to play the game… but functionally the server side lag made it next to unplayable. There were times I could level without issue… so long as I never attempted to loot anything I did not already have in my inventory. Likewise the launch of Diablo 3 was essentially an unplayable mess for the first few weeks and constant error codes. I had far less forgiveness in me around that launch, because after the rocky wow start… they should have had better preparations in place for another blockbuster success.

The thing is… at the launch of WoW more or less the gamers dealt with not being able to play the game… because it was in so many ways leaps and bounds ahead of what else was currently on the market. It was “worth” waiting for. I feel like companies simply do not have the luxury of time to fix their problems. I posted a complaint about the Final Fantasy launch over on G+ and immediately people brought up the failure that was Diablo 3. Gamers tend to hold a grudge against the games that floundered and while some of them will develop a short memory and return to your game happily once the issues are resolved, there is a certain percentage that will never again trust your company.

With these catastrophic infrastructure failures… I feel as thought Final Fantasy XIV has roughly a weeks time to fix everything and get the servers in a relatively permanent state. The roughest part is the fact that this is occurring during the pre-launch and we are not even seeing the final launch day crowds. Right now every one of these frustrated players has the opportunity to log into amazon, or green man gaming and cancel their preorder. I know of a handful of players who have done just this. The rough reality is that other than the Final Fantasy diehards, the title is just not good enough overall to make the masses wait to play it. There are way too many other games on the market, and many of them without the subscription fee.

Wrapping Up

Here is hoping that the next few days see massive improvements in the stability of Final Fantasy XIV. Right now I am extremely disappointed and this probably goes down as the worst pre-launch I have experienced. The next few days will determine if it can compete with Blizzard for the worst launch category. Hopefully they can throw enough hardware at the problem to fix it quickly. I hope you all have a great week, and that you were able to get in more playtime than I have to date.

Defense of Subscriptions

August 23, 2013 by Belghast

So it is neither morning nor Saturday when I sit down to write this. I am about to cheat massively at my one post per day thing… primarily because tomorrow is going to be pure hell. I have to get up and around early because I have a wedding to photograph for a friend. I am completely terrified at this prospect but I figure I will make it through one way or another. However with all the mess going on tomorrow I simply will not have time to do my leisurely two hour jaunt through blog post land that I normally do. As a result I am writing up my post on Friday… and since I am impatient I am going ahead and publishing it today as well.

Defense of Subscriptions

Over the last few days since the joint announcements that Wildstar and Elder Scrolls Online will be subscription based, I have seen a lot of negativity floating around the blogosphere. You have one camp claiming this is the revival of subscriptions, and a diametrically opposed camp claiming this is a fluke and long live the free to play revolution. Personally I can see a place for both in the game industry and I feel like we will see lots of both in the future. Subscriptions are not going anywhere… because quite simply put high quality games have high dollar amounts associated with them.

Most of the games we now think of today as heralds of the free to play “revolutions” started their lifespan as a full functioning subscription based game with a $60 box cost and a $15 a month subscription fee. This is the case for the Turbine games (Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online), the Cryptic games (Star Trek Online, Champions Online), the Sony Online Entertainment games (Everquest, Everquest 2, Vanguard, etc) and the new darling of the free to play market… Rift. Each and every one of them experienced a decently long period of selling boxes and racking up monthly service fees before ultimately converting over to some sort of a freemium model.

Purely Free to Play

I was brainstorming with my friends, and quite honestly we had a hard time listing off significant MMOs that have launched as free to play. There is a whole string of poor quality Asian market games that are too long to ever mention. The only game I can really think of that does not have a subscription fee or box cost associated with it is Neverwinter. Dragon’s Prophet to some extent is in the same boat, but it is still technically in open beta… and was also an Asian market transplant with a good deal of the costs simply being regionalization. Neverwinter is most definitely a sub par gaming experience, with a good deal of incident costs hidden into the system and at least for me… overall forgettable gameplay.

As far as buy the box we have Defiance and Guild Wars 2… both of which appear to either be struggling or at least having a good deal of growing pains. Trion has recently set about a massive restructuring of the company that involved dissolving the offices that supported Defiance and pulling that staff into the main offices in Redwood. Guild Wars 2 has also going through a series of changes trying to deliver content at a more frenetic pace to try and keep paying customers glued to the screens. Additionally with each update comes a slew of items that can only be acquired by unlocking the in game loot boxes.

My main issue to date with the Defiance and GW2 experiences is that while they are rolling out regular episodic updates… they are essentially throw away experiences and are only available for a limited time. Defiance is really too young to fully judge, but they are about to release their first real DLC pack. It will be interesting to see just how much content that adds to the game. Guild Wars 2 on the other hand, seems completely tied to the concept of an expiring series of “living story” events. In neither case are they really expanding the game on a regular and permanent basis to add value to that initial box purchase.

Paying Initial Cost

Rich game worlds with hundreds of hours of content cost an extremely large amount of money to develop, produce, market and ultimately distribute. While I was disappointed when Wildstar announced its model, because ultimately it meant the cost of entry was just too high for someone like me… that only casually had interest in the game in the first place… I fully understood the decision to have a subscription. Box costs and subscription costs help pay off the excessive costs of game development. It has been said multiple times that the average blockbuster game costs far more than the average blockbuster movie. Additionally the development of the game is a much longer drawn out process that someone has to bankroll until it finally sees a profit.

Lets take Elder Scrolls Online for example and try and work through some hard numbers. Please understand that I am creating a pure guesstimate based on what I was able to pull together from Google. Zenimax Online studios is in the Baltimore Maryland area, so there are certain broad assumptions we can make based on average costs in that region. According to Wikipedia they moved into their current offices in 2008, and based on the E3 PS4 presentation, Elder Scrolls Online is slotted for a first quarter of 2014 launch. That means that Elder Scrolls Online will have in essence been in development for roughly six years at the time of launch. Please understand I am trying to just pull together some rough figures, it might have entered development before that and potentially after that.

The Hard Costs

Over the course of those six years, if you figure an average of 100 employees made an average of $45,000 a year… you get $27,000,000 in salaries alone. Some employees will make more, likely some employees will make less.. and over the course of those six years you would have had significantly fewer than 100 and likely now in pre-launch mode significantly more. From google we can see that the average price of office space in the Baltimore Maryland area is around $17 a sqft. For sake of coming up with a figure we are going to say their offices are likely around 30,000 sqft, so taking that over the course of the six years you have $3,060,000 in rent. Factor in a leased digital internet line ($300/mo), water ($400/mo), electric ($1000/mo), and gas ($400/mo) you have a vague guesstimate of $151,200 in utilities over those six years. Finally if you figure roughly $3000 in computer equipment for each employee, you are at roughly $300,000 not factoring in ANY servers at all.

So far in things I can quantify you are talking about a guesstimate of over 30 million dollars on only a very few factors. There are so many factors that we just cannot come up with a number for. For example it was said that Star Wars the Old Republic took roughly 200 million dollars to develop… and that a majority of that was voice acting time. This is something I simply cannot come up with anything sort of an estimate on. All the voice acting rates I found online were so widely varied that they were meaningless especially when you consider the names that folks are getting are the Steve Blum’s of the world that are sought after for damned near every gaming project on the planet. I don’t really know how detailed the voice acting is for ESO, but every demo I have seen to date gives me the impression that the game is fully voiced… which would lead me to guess bare minimum 100 million on the hundreds of hours of voice talent.

I’ve heard before that it costs roughly 1/3 of the total cost to develop a game… the rest of the costs go into marketing and distribution. So at this point we are already sitting at around 130 million not factoring any tool licensing costs, or server infrastructure and network costs. If that represents only a third of the total costs of the project… no wonder games NEED to sell boxes and charge a subscription to break even… let along fund future development efforts. Essentially a AAA game experience is really damned expensive. If you figure a company receives at most half of the $60 box cost… it would take selling over 3.5 million boxes just to make up for 100 million of the cost. The reason why that $15 a month is so important is they are getting the entire portion of it.

Someone Has to Pay

Ultimately if we want nice games… someone has to pay for it. Either these huge gambles can be paid off in box costs and monthly subscriptions… or they can be financed on the backs of a handful of “whale” players. But ultimately there is no such thing as a free ride. Game development and game infrastructure have large fixed costs that simply cannot be justified away by a players desire to not spend a dime. We have nice free to play experiences in essence because players that came before you… paid for the cost of going there first. They helped to pay off the loans that these companies I am sure have to take out to bankroll this kind of protracted effort.

AAA game studios simply cannot afford to build games out of the goodness of their hearts. They have to pay ultimately hundreds of people just like you and me to build and support the games. These are not nameless faceless corporations… they are businesses just like the one you likely work for… with a human resources department, and social security tax deductions and payrolls to make. This is a real job for someone, and we can’t expect them to get some beer and pizza and knock out a game in their free time. Overall the game industry pays some pretty shitty wages as compared to the IT industry as a whole. I know for a fact that I make well more than any of my friends that currently work in the industry… and have pretty much since my first job out of college.

It is almost expected that part of the benefits package for these folks is the fact that they “get” to make games for a living. Thing is though… they had to gain their skills the same way all of us did, with lots of hard work and sweat equity and now they work in an industry with next to no job security… because it all hinges upon the whims of whether or not gamers like us ultimately purchase their product. So ultimately… all of these things factored in… I have ZERO problem with the concept of buying a box and paying a monthly fee when it is something I am committed to. My friends in the industry need to eat, and pay rent, and survive on a day to day basis just like I do.

Free to Play

The free to play model seems to work extremely well at financing the daily upkeep and expansion of an existing game. I think it has been the savior of a lot of games that have filtered their way out of the popular consciousness and were no longer drawing in active subscribers. It is awesome being able to fire up an account you haven’t played in years, and revisit old characters. While you are there more than likely you will spend at least a little money on the game. Essentially it is the model of “some money is better than no money”. The thing is, like I said above each and every one of these games that we vaunt so highly as free to play successes all had their time of box sales, expansion sales, and monthly subscription fees to pay back the excessively expensive development costs.

Do I get frustrated when a game that I have purchased the box for… and paid multiple months worth of subscription fees goes to free to play? Hell no… because while I might bitch and moan on a regular basis about various aspects of gaming… I LOVE the games I play. Whatever helps a game I have cared about succeed is ultimately going to be good for me personally in the long run. The games that reward me in some way for being there in the early days and helping pay off the huge debt a company brings with them after a game release… I love those even more. But I go into their free to play conversion knowing that ultimately they will be better off in the long run with incremental sales.

Additionally players who start at the beginning of an MMO will always have a tangible lead on players that start later, especially if the game converts to free to play. You have a head start in the economy before it stratifies, likewise you understand the lay of the land and where to acquire the best stuff. When Rift went free to play my account had so much stuff unlocked thanks to longevity of play that a starting player would not have had. For the explorers you get the feeling of actually discovering things before they are common place and on every website. So while you might have had to pay for the box and subscriptions, you are getting something for your trouble that no one will be able to take away from you.

The games that did not have a box fee and a subscription however have to claw their money out of you somehow. So while I get annoyed at loot boxes and item purchases and artificial gates to my gameplay… they are just trying to survive however they can, because ultimately at launch they were millions and millions of dollars in the hole at day one. I feel like launching as free to play is going to forever doom a game to jumping through coin slotted hoops as you play the game. Rift right now is the best player experience but I feel like it is only that way because they had two years and an expansion of relative success to pay off and fund a fully functional staff during all that time.

Wrapping Up

So if in a few years time… The Elder Scrolls online… that I have used as an example all the way through this post… decides it is beneficial to it to go free to play. I will greet the change with open arms, knowing that ultimately this is going to be the thing that keeps a game I hopefully will love healthy and open to the public. Going to go ahead and wrap this up, and likely get it posted. I hope you guys have a great weekend and that I can survive tomorrow. Sorry for breaking my own rules and cheating a bit by double posting on a Friday… but expect that I will have a normal post on Sunday.

Fear the Reaper

August 22, 2013 by Belghast

Hey look, it is morning again… and once again time to push random thoughts into Live Writer. I wish to god I knew what the hell was up with my sleep patterns. Last night I started attempting to go to bed around 8:30, but I still tossed and turned and woke up half a dozen times. I feel slightly less zombified than I did yesterday… but it is still not that great. I am beginning to suspect this is all thanks to my friend allergies, and then fact that I have been stuffed up for weeks. Maybe tonight I will try taking some Benadryl before hitting the sack.

Elder Subscriptions

Yesterday I wrote a rather long ramble about how the subscription model is something I am only wiling to pay these days, if I am really committed to a given game. I provided for an example the fact that I would be more than willing to pay a monthly subscription fee for the Elder Scrolls Online for example, whereas I simply am not for Wildstar. At the time of writing the post at 6 am… I did not realize that at 4 am that same morning it was announced that ESO would in fact be a subscription based game, and be charging something along the lines of the standard $15 a month “wow rate”.

The thing that I am comforted by is the fact that they seem to understand that for a subscription fee you have to give a kind of “premium” access. In the age of free games being really good, and easily accessible… you cannot simply allow players access to your game for the monthly fee. You have to sell your players on a service… that you will provide regular updates to them for free as part of that monthly commitment. The original interview that announced the information leaked a handful of details to this fact.

30-Day Free Time when you purchase the game, and then a monthly fee to play.
$14.00 / €12.99 / £8.99 per month.
Discounts for setting up multiple months at a time.
Game card support.
Promise: new content every 4-6 weeks.

The last part is going to be crucial. So many game developers have promised regular content updates. Some of them deliver for awhile, and then taper them off over time. Not to pick on them… but The Secret World was supposed to have monthly episodic releases… yet a little over a year into the game we have had 7. Granted there are multiple mitigating circumstances, namely the loss of most of their staff… but still very few companies have ever actually delivered on the promise of regular content updates. To the best of my knowledge the only two that have really excelled at it are Trion with Rift and Arena.net with Guild Wars 2.

Elder Scrolls promises to provide us a massive game world to explore, with two decades worth of land mass… literally every area we have ever explored in an elder scrolls game. But we all know that there will be a string of players that has burned through every inch of that content in a single week of playing. The success of this game will be to provide a constant stream of updates, and at a frequent enough pace to keep the players always engaged in the game and not gobbling up content in a purely episodic manner. That is the problem I currently have with The Secret World, the content is infrequent enough that I stop playing while waiting on the next “issue” to release… only to come back and gobble it up and then leave once more.

I feel like the trick that Elder Scrolls has up its sleeve that we are really not even fully capable of wrapping our heads around.. is that fact that it will be a fully fleshed out MMO experience launching on a console. Currently DC Universe Online is the best “MMO” experience that console gamers have, and at the end of this month Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn will be joining it. However both of those are limited to PlayStation 3 players only. ESO will be launching on both the PS4 and XBone and will be adding a completely different dynamic to the sink or swim equation.

Elder Scrolls in general is already massively popular among console gamers… so it will be interesting to see just how many of them are willing to pony up a monthly subscription fee to continue that experience. To me it feels like the console market is relatively untapped territory… and it could be the thing that ultimately pushes ESO over the top. There was a lot of gnashing of teeth among the PC gamers that we would be getting a watered down experience since ESO would be launching on the consoles as well… but I look at it in a completely different light. If we want regular content delivery… we ultimately want Zenimax to make as much from this game as they reasonably can to keep funding constant development time.

It will be interest to see how this all plays out in the end. I have been shocked at just how civil the discussion has been on the Bethesda forums. Sure there are a handful of doomsayers explaining how that ultimately this will lead to the end of Elder Scrolls as we know it… but the majority seem to be taking the announcement of a subscription model well. Normally that forum is a wretched hive of scum and villainy… that is known for its completely outrageous demands. My hope is this is a sign of how the Elder Scrolls community as a whole will take the announcement. Ultimately this is the community that Zenimax has to lock down as far as a subscriber base, not necessarily the roaming community of nomadic gamers.

Fear the Reaper

Another surprise from Gamescom yesterday was the announcement of the new Diablo 3 expansion… Reaper of Souls. What is so surprising about this to me… is the fact that Blizzcon is only a few months away. This is the type of announcement I expect Blizzard to hold in reserve for their own convention. This does however provide them a little bit of momentum and building anticipation as they move towards November. I will admit… this cinematic had me dusting off my Diablo 3 account and playing some last night.

Like many of my friends… I ultimately lost interest in the game once I finished the main storyline. We beat the game and then retired our characters completely. For me at least it has always been a problem with the click to move control scheme. However thanks to regularly getting coaxed into playing League of Legends… it feels a little less foreign than it did… and as a result I rather enjoyed playing my little monk last night. Overall I was a much bigger fan of Torchlight 2 than Diablo 3… but returning to it now it feels better than I had remembered.

Ultimately my one major problem with the game still remains. I hate the fact that I have to play on their servers, and as a result have to deal with server lag while playing essentially a single player experience. Most of last night things were going peachy… however there was one moment when I died due to a massive lag spike and went from full health to dead almost instantly. This is at the end of the day the most damning strike against the game. There should still be a “Lan” mode… even if you have to dial home every so often to save character data… the bulk of the interactions should be happening independent of the server.

I still feel like a complete sucker, that a pretty trailer got me to break out a game I had not played in over a year. I have always been a fan of the blizzard cinematics, and this is no different. They always manage to tell a compelling tale for whatever they are choosing to show. Overall I really don’t much care for the design of Malthael… but he does seem sufficiently creepy to carry the role of bad guy for another Diablo 3 chapter. WoW Insider has a rundown of the features… that include:

A new Crusader class, wears heavy armor as a tank, buffs/debuffs friends and enemies, not unlike Diablo II’s Paladin
Reaper of Souls will officially by Act V of Diablo III
Level cap raised to 70
Paragon level cap removed
All classes will get new spells as they progress to level 70
Something called a "multilevel Legendary item"
Substantial updates to the loot experience, "Loot 2.0" as named by Blizzard — you’re more likely to pick up items tailored to your current class
Overall loot reduced, not picking up as many items not needed by your current class
New Crafter: Mystic — re-roll stats on items, gives chance to create better gear
Two new endgame modes/activities: loot runs and Nephalem Trials

My hope is that the overall experience is far less forgettable than Diablo 3 was for me… and this will add features to the game that make me want to play it more often than you know… once a year.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap things up and head into work. Yesterday we got the new washing machine installed and I was able to do the loads of laundry that had gotten wet and soured due to the flood. Things feel like they are mostly back to normal. At some point we need to rent a carpet cleaner and try and get rid of the massive water stain in our bedroom, but that can be done later. The rest of my week will be focused on getting read for the wedding I have to photograph on Saturday. I hate weddings… so here is hoping that sitting behind the lens of a camera will make it less heinous. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope your weekend is going to be far less busy than mine.

Crashing Castles

July 16, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people… and this time I actually mean it. I am not sure what it was… the fact that I was completely exhausted by the end of the day, the hour or so I spent playing with friends… or the 15 minute walk I took before bedtime… but something helped. I went to bed around 9 pm and slept the entire night through without any panic attacks. Probably some of the best sleep I have gotten in awhile. So thank you all for the varied suggestions yesterday on the subject.

Crashing Castles

One of the best side effects of the steam sale, is it is a great opportunity to get your friends hooked on amazing games when they get priced on the cheap. I’ve been a huge fan of Castle Crashers for years, and used to play it with some friends on the Xbox 360. When it was released on steam… I picked it up immediately because seriously… it is worth buying on every platform you own. Right now it is going for the absolutely bargain basement price of $4 as part of the daily sale… and should be up there for at least another 24 hours.

As a result I got recruited last night when Ashgar picked up multiple copies of the game and gifted it to anyone who didn’t already have one. I have to say this was exactly the type of fun I had been needing. For me, Ash and Tam it was much like coming back home to our side scrolling fighting game roots… and we all adapted pretty quickly. Rae on the other hand, we could tell never really played that type of game… this compounded with the fact that she was playing with the keyboard… made the evening frustrating for her.

On that note… I highly suggest you pick this title up especially if you hail from the era of Final Fight and Double Dragon. But if you do so… I also highly suggest you have a gamepad to play it on. This was designed to play with an Xbox 360 controller… and I feel it plays best when I use that. It is completely playable on anything else however… but just remember all the tips and suggestions given in game… will be geared towards that specific controller. It won’t say press heavy attack… it will say press Y.. so if you are using something else there had to be a bit of translation in your head.

Just as a note to anyone on my steam friends list. I will almost never turn down an opportunity to play some castle crashers. There is something about this game that is so pure and fun that it just takes me back to the days of feeding quarters to gauntlet or teenage mutant ninja turtles and playing with three other friends. I really hope they create a sequel someday that is just as fun. The only game that I might like more than this as far as side scrolling beatemups… is Guardian Heroes… if it ever made its way to steam I would be immensely happy. Speaking of which… I need to get some people together to play the D&D Shadows of Mystaria steam port.

Granite Falls

Right now on my little warrior I am slowly making my way through the granite falls area. Stonefield has always been one of my favorite areas in the zone, in part because it was the area shown in the original cinematic trailer for the game. Additionally the town of Granite Falls is one of the prettiest in the game, and the falls themselves have always looked extremely epic. Sooner or later I will end up having to buy the Granite Falls dimension so I can have my very own copy.

I am up to my favorite quest chain as well, involving the crypt near town. Essentially giving me ANY quest chain involving undead and I will be happy. I started working on this over lunch, and got about halfway through the sequence of quests before I got drafted for castle crashers last night. My hope is that today I will push through the rest of Stonefield and move on to the Scarlet Gorge area. I feel like this is an area that just does not get enough credit in the game. I will have to play up another character when they have gone through with the redesign of the zone that is supposedly in the works.

Defying Reason

Also over lunch yesterday I decided on a whim to boot up Defiance for a little bit. I have an odd relationship with this game. I like it mostly… but I just can’t seem to take playing it for very long. I am happy to log in, kill a few rounds of mutants, maybe complete a quest… ride around in my dune buggy for a bit… and then log. I figure it would be much more enjoyable if I was playing regularly with a large group of people, but solo I seem to have a very short attention span.

I guess overall I just don’t like shooters as much as I once did… and the whole behind the back shooter thing works well but feels just awkward enough to give me a low tolerance for it. I really like the television show and the world, but so far I see little resemblance between the two other than having my very own “cat woman” telling me what to do. I just wish that the story had been set in the St. Louis area that we are vaguely familiar with in the television show… instead of out in California. Additionally since I am NOT from the California area and have never been… there just isn’t the same payoff as there is for other people. I didn’t realize that Mount Tam was an actual place… but I would have been able to pick up landmarks in Missouri.

Ultimately it is a good game… and it is pretty enjoyable… but I have the same patience with it that I have for Borderlands 2. I seem to be happiest when I play in spurts, unlike my friends that can literally play Borderlands 2 for hours and hours on end. Defiance definitely scratches a similar itch for me… and I finally found a weapon that I like. Essentially it is a heavy energy machine gun thing… reminds me of shooting a BAR in the WW2 area shooters. I can take down the baddies pretty successfully with it… but I cringe at the thought of eventually out leveling it. I have yet to find another weapon that I enjoy anywhere near as much as it.

I think this will continue to be one of those titles that I boot up every now and then… but never really dig too far below the surface. Additionally the game feels very “un-social”, and very much single player. I rarely if ever end up encountering other players when I play, and if I do they are usually buzzing around on their way to the next objective. I am sure this changes as you get higher in the content, but I am still in the starter area essentially. I could push through I am sure and get to the next area… but I figure why force myself when I seem to be enjoying little spurts of play here and there.

Wrapping Up

Well it is that time again… I need to wrap this up so I can get on with my morning and get into work. Today is trash day, so I need to make sure that is out by the curb. Additionally I really need to run some stuff by the cleaners. If I don’t get a start on these things I will end up extremely late for work. Right now I am essentially the boss, as mine is off on vacation… but it sets a bad example if I start slacking myself in the process. I hope you all have a great day… and here is hoping that today will be relatively panic free.