Star Wars: The Old Republic Archives - Page 11 of 16

Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 2

April 1, 2015 by Belghast

Yesterday I kicked off my own versions of the Developer Appreciation Week with five companies and game teams that I greatly appreciate it. It seems like we are starting to get some traction because yesterday MMOGames.com independent of my own intervention ran a piece of what we are doing. I still hope to see more people join in the fun and talk about the development staff that they really appreciate it. I play a lot of games… so I have a lot of love to go around.

Blizzard – World of Warcraft Team

Last night was quite possibly my single best night in World of Warcraft raiding. After some sluggish weeks we strolled into Blackrock Foundry and cleared seven normal bosses, then popped out and took down two heroic bosses… one of which was our first kill. To make the night even more special we managed to one shot all of them. After riding that high last night, it is impossible to do a developer appreciation week post without talking about Blizzard. World of Warcraft has been the juggernaut in the room for so long that I can barely remember a time when they were not the clear market dominator. While I have some disappointments about Warlords of Draenor, I feel like they are legitimately trying to turn the franchise around after what felt like years of neglect. It feels very much like they have doubled down on this game, and at the end of the day I am still enjoying playing it with my friends. For a ten year old game to still maintain relevancy is a pretty mighty feat, so my hat is off to the Blizzard staff who have supported it throughout the years and made it this experience that we judge all other MMOs against. It has been the gold standard for good reason. Even if World of Warcraft is not your game, you have to marvel at the level of polish that they deliver when they roll out a new expansion.

Bioware – Star Wars the Old Republic Team

Star Wars the Old Republic and I have somewhat of a checkered past to be honest. I went into this game feeling like it was going to be the WoW Killer for myself and my friends, but ultimately we lasted the same three months that we normally do in this sort of game. When they chose to go free to play, I was frustrated by how insanely restrictive the system ended up being. All of this said… if you can some how push past all of the limited time loot boxes and free to play cludge… there is a great game there at its core. With the launch of SWTOR I tried something that I don’t normally do… I leveled as part of a dedicated duo with my friend Euron. I played a Jedi Guardian and he a Jedi Consular, and we participated in each others stories. The way those two tales interweave was something to behold, and while it felt a bit confining to always have to make sure you and your friend were on at exactly the same times… it was a leveling experience unlike no other. The thing that stands out about SWTOR is the story, and what ultimately killed the game for me was when I ran out of it. Now I know I have several expansions that I can go back and experience and I keep thinking that one day I will do precisely that. In the meantime I have fond memories of the time we were all obsessed with this game, and give massive props to the folks who built such engaging content… that we pulled some fourteen hours a day to get through it all.

Zenimax – The Elder Scrolls Online Team

Since Daggerfall I have been in love with the Elder Scrolls franchise. Each time a new one comes out I end up devoting hundreds of hours to playing it, but all the while I keep thinking… this experience would be more enjoyable with my friends. So when I found out that Elder Scrolls was in fact being made into an MMO I was completely over the moon about it. I was lucky enough to be in the first round of alpha testing, so ultimately I participated in this game for over a year before launching it. Unfortunately this was a bit of a double edged sword because I got to see some features that worked better in early versions of the game, as compared to later more minimalistic ones. When you test a game that long it skews your vision of what the game actually is. Elder Scrolls Online has some of the best story content I have experienced in any game, and there are a number of quest lines that stick out in my memory. The whole concept of being able to continue into another faction after you have finished yours was inspired. The problem is by the time I hit the Aldmeri content I had lost a lot of my steam, and our guild was suffering the traditional drop off in players. Now that the game has shifted to buy to play however I am able to experience this game again and realize just how great it actually is. A lot of the problems I had with it early on have been smoothed out, and the post 50 progression no longer feels quite so grindy. I really appreciate the staff that has been plugging away quietly on making this game a better place to be, and I look forward to playing it more in the coming months.

Trion Worlds – Trove Team

Trove is this quirky world building game that blends MMO combat, MOBA style character design, and Minecraft style exploration and construction. I was lucky enough to be including in the first round of alpha invites for trove, and it has been insane to watch this game evolve. What I love the most is the way the developers have been meshed with the community since day one. Instead of a traditional forum, they decided to open up the process with a reddit, in fact I think this is the first game I can ever recall doing that. In those first days the community was so amazing, because it was so tight knit. You would log in and get welcomed by people that might recognize your name from the Reddit, and there was rarely a time when a developer was not in game talking to players. As the game has progressed the community has gotten larger, and the rigors of development have degraded this closeness a small bit, but it is still very much a game that draws its inspiration from the players. While I don’t play it as much as I should, I have loved watching it evolve around me. It feels like the sort of game you get when you throw a bunch of seven year olds in a room and tell them to solve a problem. It is pure unbridled joy and imagination… and has been good for my jaded soul to see that a game like that can exist.

Riot Games – League of Legends Team

League of Legends is 100% not my type of game. In fact I might never have played it were it not at the suggestion of my friends. Actually I rarely ever play this game other than when a bunch of friends want to do so. That said the experience of playing with a team of friends is contagious. There are a lot of aspects about this game that are problematic for me, a huge one being the still very toxic community. That said I give the biggest credit I can possibly give to the character designers. What League has in spades is the personality that seems to be lacking from so many other MMOs. The characters in League of Legends have a life of their own, and they make you fall in love with them. I have joked for some time, that this isn’t actually a game, but a modern sticker album… because I seem to largely collect characters and skins rather than actually play with them. Each character is really a triumph of taking what are mostly remixed elements and making them feel fresh and new. I tend to stick to the characters I know and love however like Darius, Graves, WuKong and Garen. My favorite gameplay mode however will probably always be ARAM simply because no one expect you to know what you are doing, which is about perfect for me.

Games I Want to Revisit

February 16, 2015 by Belghast

Tomorrow morning is going to be what seems like a frosty one. So I am once again cheating and writing a blog post the night before I intend on posting it. I assume in the morning I will need to spend all of my available time scraping windows and warming cars to make sure we can get in safely. Lately I have been poking my head around Guild Wars 2, a game that I had until Pax South completely written off as “not for me”. Since then I have reached a point of peace with the game, and actually found that I am enjoying it quite a bit. So this morning my post will be a revisiting of games that I would like to give a second or third chance.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Star Wars: The Old Republic has the dubious honor of being quite possibly the worst possible free to play conversion I have ever experienced. If I did not know any better, it might be absolutely functional for a new player. That said having played the game in release and realizing just how gimped the game is without spending a lot of money, infuriates me. Essentially I cannot bring myself to play this game without actually paying for a subscription. I have attempted to play this game a few times since release, but never for terribly long. My last voyage into the game was to try and play a Sith Juggernaut, since I had not really experienced much of the dark side content. When our guild was actually playing regularly I managed to level a Jedi Guardian, Jedi Shadow, and a Trooper Vanguard… so yes all three available tanks. When I finally left the game I was slowly working on leveling my Chiss Smuggler.

Since then they have released several expansions each with their own story extensions. I feel like maybe I am missing something having not seen any of this content. That was the one thing above all else that really excelled with The Old Republic, was that the traditional Bioware story was excellent. This weekend on the podcast we talked a bit about Kodra’s experiences with the smuggler storyline, and I have to say I got those pangs of remorse in my stomach for never having experienced it. On top of this, there is still so much content Sith side that I have never actually seen. The problem that I ran into the last time I played was that the questing just felt so repetitive. These quests are very much World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King era in the way they are constructed. While the storyline itself is excellent, it just felt tiring to keep trying to push through the planets. Still all of this said… I feel like I should give it another shot.

Lord of the Rings Online

Lord of the Rings Online and I have a strange relationship. I never actually played this at launch, but during one of my many breaks with World of Warcraft I joined some friends playing it. There are things I love about this game, and then there are things that frustrate me. I love the community of this game, almost more than I like the game itself. Landroval is an amazing place, and there are so many times I find myself wandering around Bree listening to player created concerts rather than actually completing content. I’ve never been successful at trying to play this game for free, so ultimately I end up subscribing to remove the roadblocks. There is just so much content that I have yet to experience. Last time I played I had just made it to the Trollshaws, which I think is in my late 30s. I greatly enjoy the Champion as far as a class goes, and found it really enjoyable to solo. Which was super important because I have never really found a stable group playing this game.

I follow so many blog of players devoted to LoTRO and I have to say I feel like somewhat of a failure that I have never had a max level character there. As such it sits in a unique place as far as regrets go for me. I am sure I will end up reinstalling this game at some point, and poking my head back there to give it another go. It has been I think two years since I last tried to play, and since then I am sure quite a bit more content has been released. The game is full of so many special moments of nostalgia for followers of the book series. The above picture is from Weathertop, one of these early “oh my god I am actually standing here” moments in these games. I just wish I could clone myself and play all the games I want to play at the same time.

Neverwinter Online

When this game was released I played off and on during the first week… and then never set foot in it again. The biggest problem I had was that while the game was a good action rpg… Elder Scrolls Online was simply a better one. In the weeks since joining open beta for Neverwinter and the ultimate release… I was let into the double super secret alpha testing program for ESO. So all of the time and devotion I would have spent playing Neverwinter, I instead poured into the alpha testing program for ESO. As such I feel like I never really actually gave this game a chance. I enjoyed the Guardian Fighter quite a bit, and it was an excellent mix of tank and brawler giving me the ability to do damage with my favored sword and shield. Again the biggest problem is that I was trying to compare it to the Dragonknight Sword and Shield that I was playing in Elder Scrolls Online and Neverwinter just coming up short.

What interests me about potentially going back is the fact that not only is there official content waiting on me, there is an absolutely insane amount of player created content. My friend Tipa from West Karana blog, has seemingly done an amazing job of recreating some of the nostalgic content from the original Everquest with the Neverwinter foundry toolset. At some point I really want to go in and experience this first hand. The biggest thing holding me back is the fact that firstly, I am not really sure if I can remember my account information. Secondly Perfect World has never given me the warmest of fuzzies, and I’ve always found some of their practices to be a week bit sketchy. Even taking these into consideration I am sure at some point I will reinstall this game and give it another go. There is just too much left there to experience that I have not seen at all.

Death of a Genre

October 4, 2014 by Belghast

Downfall of a Game

One of the problems within the MMO community is that we seem to view each release as a zero sum game. As such when something new comes out, it threatened to chip away at the player base of whatever game we happen to love and are currently playing. When that game falters and begins to fail, with this point of view it becomes extremely hard not to take pleasure in that downfall. The problem is this is an extremely toxic and dysfunctional outlook, and ultimately is what has lead to the current climate in MMOs. For years companies have been chasing an illusive dream of trying to create another World of Warcraft.

This was an inherently flawed vision because really… “mmo gamers” are a rather small niche in the market, and most folks who play World of Warcraft are not actually “mmo gamers”. If you take a look at the size of the market before World of Warcraft, you saw a handful of games with sub-million subscriber numbers. Before the launch of the first expansion World of Warcraft had boomed to be an over 6 million subscriber game. This was not the conversion of all of these other MMO gamers, but instead the conversion of fans of the existing Warcraft franchise into the MMO genre. The thing is… these new gamers are there for a myriad of reasons, but none of them easily translate into a new franchise.

So as these new games launch they are essentially fighting over the same piece of pie over and over. All you have to do is look at my immediate circle of friends. A large chunk of them stuck with World of Warcraft, and it would likely take an apocalypse or the servers shutting down to pry them from it. Another group has wandered away from the game each and every time something new and shiny showed up on the horizon. Very few of these players stick around in any game for longer than three months, and more often they play their free month and then return to whatever the status quo was before the new launch. I watched this pattern play out for both Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar, and the games industry is finally realizing that this is going to happen for every single new game that releases.

Indictment of the Trend

The cancelling of Titan has been a far more contentious issue in the blogosphere than I expected. At this point my point of view is that this is Blizzard admitting that the MMO genre has no more room for new players. While there will always be a core group of players in World of Warcraft just like there is still a core group of players in Everquest, Everquest II, and Dark Age of Camelot… that core group continues to shrink as folks either “grow out” of World of Warcraft as they find it no longer suits their interests, or simply run out of the copious amounts of free time it requires as they get that job, family, whatever. I think they have done some really simple calculus here and determined that there simply is not enough of a pool of players to make a brand new MMO from Blizzard successful.

With World of Warcraft they have a decade long buy in from a large number of gamers. They have literal years of memories and hard to acquire items to keep them chained to the game. With a brand new IP, they are starting from scratch in the same position as all of these games that have floundered have been in. Blizzard brand name recognition just isn’t enough to guarantee success, so I feel like it was a pure business decision that it just did not make sense to further dilute their subscription player base by trying to launch a new MMO. As much as I love the clean subscription model, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to launch a new game with it. After watching what happened to Wildstar and to a somewhat lesser extent Elder Scrolls Online, the market does not want any more subscription games. So by launching a new MMO they would be converting at least a portion of their subscriber base of easy month to month money to far more dicey and less predictable free to play money.

No Joy Watching Wildstar

I find it impossible to find joy in the unraveling of Wildstar that I see before me. I am not playing the game, so I am in essence part of the problem. For whatever reason it was an accumulation of all of the things my BC era self said they wanted in a video game. The problem is we gamers are notoriously horrible at trying to decide what we want. “We” said we wanted a hardcore game like Everquest and a return to forced grouping… then when we got Vanguard no one actually wanted to play that. We said we wanted a hard core PVP game like Dark Age of Camelot… and then when we got Warhammer Online no one actually wanted to play that either. So I find it no suprise that when we said we wanted a return to the golden says of World of Warcraft raiding… no one actually wanted that either when we got Wildstar. The truth is we have no clue at all what we want until we actually see it and experience it.

The problem is that the MMO design ethic has been so wrapped up in trying to target what the public is asking for, that it has stagnated into a mire of “wow like features”. A week or so ago there were a series of posts taking point and counterpoint on whether or not WoW has ruined MMOs. In a way I have to say yes, but not through anything that they did on purpose. World of Warcraft has been this juggernaut that everyone else is forced to content with whether or not they actually wanted to. It is a gold standard that every new game is judged by. So you either have games that try and out feature it like Rift, or out lore it like Star Wars the Old Republic… but each and every new release is at least in someway a response to the success that World of Warcraft was. Without that outlier of success we probably would see a much more healthy MMO ecosystem… albeit a ridiculously smaller one.

Death of a Genre

So I cannot take joy in watching Wildstar, or Elder Scrolls Online or any other MMO falter right now, because I see it as all being part of the same shared ecosystem. When one of these games fails, it is in essence taking a chunk of players out of the pool that will likely never return. So many of my friends have simply just checked out of online gaming for one reason or another, but the core thread among them all is they are just tired of the volatility. The choice is either return to World of Warcraft and make due with the status quo, or jump from game to game to game getting a months worth of enjoyment at a time before the ultimate crash. None of this sounds like a healthy ecosystem, and all of this is what is driving triple A studios away from the notion of even trying to do an MMO.

If you think about it right now… there is nothing really on the horizon for gamers to latch onto. There are a few boutique titles like Pathfinder or Camelot Unchained… that are super focused on a specific niche and that may or may not be at least partially vaporware, unlikely to actually launch with all of the features they are touting. Then you have a constant spin of Korean titles as they have their own MMO renaissance that we went through several years ago. However After the launch of ESO and Wildstar… there is really no big western titles on the immediate horizon. Everquest Next is the closest thing but realistically it is still several years from release. The other games that are coming out are more akin to Destiny than they are to a traditional MMO. So I can’t blame World of Warcraft for this current situation, because in truth it is our flighty nature that has salted the fields in our wake. We are the reason why there is no fertile ground for a new MMO to take purchase. It is because of all of this… that I can find no pleasure in watching yet another game fail.

Pairing Down

June 24, 2014 by Belghast

The Struggle

One of the biggest challenges about this whole “blog every day” concept is that some mornings there is just nothing at all in my head to talk about. When I am sick like I was yesterday, I tend to turtle and pull my head up inside my shell, disconnecting me from the interwebs and all of you fine people. Unfortunately when my biggest source of inspiration is gone, I can get a little bit of writers block. It is mornings like this that I feel outline the importance of just allowing yourself to write whatever happens to pop into your head. It might not be epic and exciting, but it is staying true to the mission as a whole. Unfortunately we are well based the NBI 2014 initiative, otherwise I would spin this into some sort of an inspirational post about struggling through.

This is not a slight in any way to the previous NBI groups, but I have been really impressed with just how tenacious the Class of 2014 has been. Generally speaking there is a significant drop off the month after the initiative as folks take a massive breather after having survived being the focus of so many folks attention. When the spotlight fades a bit, it is rough to keep posting when you inevitably notice fewer people are reading. However this group either is blissfully oblivious to the existence of blog statistics, or they really are writing for themselves, because they seem to still be going strong. A few of the “newbies” are among the most prolific posters in my blog reader, and I am amped to still see them enjoying the whole experience.

Pairing Down

WoWScrnShot_061314_062051 Right now I have come to realize that I am playing entirely too many MMOs to feel like I am making any significant progress in any of them. Over the last two months I’ve played Warlords of Draenor, Rift, ArcheAge, Wildstar, Star Wars the Old Republic, Elder Scrolls Online, Defiance, Everquest II, Landmark, The Secret World, Diablo 3, Lego Minifigures Online and Trove. While I embrace the whole polygamerous thing, I think even for me this is a bit too much especially when you throw in League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm on top of those… and occasionally some Hex and Hearthstone. Mostly I think I need to drop some of the games that feel similar to me from the rotation, or at least games that scratch the same itch.

I feel like I have to keep testing Warlords of Draenor in part out of remembrance for River, and him being so damned excited to have gotten into the alpha process. While I won’t be playing with the same wide eyed amusement that he would have, I am trying my best to enjoy the experience in his honor. However I can safely say that I will not be playing the actual live World of Warcraft anytime in the near future. I think maybe WoW has run its course with me for awhile, and Wildstar has stepped in to take its place in my heart without me really wanting it to. Wildstar really is a much better version of WoW, and I am just embracing that fact. As a result Rift and SWTOR are also losing out, because to me they still fill the same “wow-like” niche. As a result I won’t be renewing my patron account in Rift.

The Non-WoW Itch

It was fun trying to get into Defiance, but the problem is I got into the Destiny alpha… and it was pretty much everything I had hoped Defiance would be. So I won’t be spending much more time trying to get into that game when I know there is something I will like much better coming later this year. ArcheAge I want to like, but it has without a doubt the worst community of griefers I have experienced anywhere. So unless Trion comes out and announces there will be a co-op server… it is pretty much a nonstarter for me and no sense really spending much more time on it. Landmark on the other hand has an amazing community, but right now there just isn’t much game there for me to play. They have built this amazing crafting sandbox, but without combat it isn’t all that interesting to me past the initial build phase. They have added caves so I figure at some point I will poke my head back in, but exploration without combat just sounds boring to me. I’ve officially allowed my claim to be repossessed at this point.

I still have a special place in my heart for Everquest II, and I can’t say I won’t return to it in the future… but for now I think there are just too many other options. EQ2 was one of those games where I hated the combat system but loved everything else about it. Wildstar with its systems within systems is really filling the niche that EQ2 always did, which might be why it is feeling so sticky considering it is replacing both EQ2 and WoW for me. The Secret World is one of those games I love to remember fondly, but never seem to have a desire to log into on a regular basis. I know there is a bunch of storyline that I have yet to participate in, and I keep thinking that some weekend I will play through all of it. That weekend just has yet to arrive, and lately the only time I seem to log in is when I get new hardware and want to test how it performs.

The Also Rans

Diablo 3 is enjoyable, and at some point I would really like to get a crusader to 70… hell I would like to get my monk to 70. I just struggle to find any drive to play it when my own personal internet zeitgeist… aka the folks I hang out on voice chat nightly, are not also playing it. It was really fun up until the release of Elder Scrolls Online and then boom we all vacated the premises. For the time being I am pretty much crossing it off my list until there is another upwelling of desire among my friends to play it. Trove is similarly really fun, but without a lot of people that I know playing it on a regular basis I have fallen back out of love with it. I will likely continue to poke my head into the game irregularly but when I do play… so much has changed that the experience feels very off-putting. The game is in a pretty much constant state of flux, which is awesome if you are devoted to this game, but confusing if you are a “sometimes” player like me. League of Legends will be a permanent fixture in my gaming rotation so long as I have friends who are devoted to playing it. I don’t necessarily love the game, but I enjoy playing with my friends. I personally like Heroes of the Storm so much better, but the problem is with it being in a limited release “technical alpha” state there just are not enough people around regularly to play with. The MOBA genre is really only fun for me if I am playing with a group of friends, and in this scenario League wins out every time. That is not to say that I won’t keep poking my head into Heroes especially as they add new waves of players. As far as Hearthstone and Hex… I am back playing Magic the Gathering in real life with friends at lunch time… so the draw of these games is minimal right now.

Those Who Made the Cut

So after spending all of this time culling games for this or that reason, I figure I should talk about the games I am deciding to keep in the rotation. Warlords of Draenor I am actually enjoying when I do manage to get in and play it. So yes I am partially doing it in honor of River, and his desire to be in the Alpha, but there is something charming about the new content. I don’t feel like it will be enough to keep me in WoW, but for the time being I am enjoying it while I can. Wildstar has pretty much filled the corner of my heart that desire to play a theme park MMO, and it really is the most glorious theme park of experiences once you give yourself over to it. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface on what it has to offer, and I am intrigued at the schedule they have put out before us. I really like that they are choosing to put in “hardmode” single and small group content before augmenting the raid game. That says a lot that they understand that they need to focus on both going forward to keep players.

I still feel like I have so much more that I want to do in Elder Scrolls Online. I want to finish the Aldmeri Dominion content and see the Ebonheart Content, as well as spend time exploring Craglorn. I love this game even though I am not playing it much, and I can’t see dropping it from the rotation anytime soon. I realize that not many players feel the same way about the game as I do, but really for me it is like the best possible version of Skyrim. I have been out so long at this point that I feel like I am going to be extremely rusty. There game has problems, namely it is awkward as hell to do anything as a group other than Cyrodil. They really need to fix this, and I hope that the good folks at Zenimax are looking into things like mentoring. Right now it is a really awesome single player experience, but gets cludgy when you start adding in more people. That said it still does have amazing dungeon design, and there are so many of them that I have yet to experience.

Last but not least is a game that has come in and taken my heart by storm. Lego Minifigures Online is absolutely adorable and I love everything about this game. Last night this was the only thing I actually played, and grouped up with Rae she managed to catch me up almost to her level in experience. Right now we have a vastly different set of mini figures, and it is really enjoyable to group together. We have both opted to get memberships, and the pocket dungeons are awesome… some of them ending up extremely challenging like the Dragon’s Lair dungeon with I think five different boss fights in it. I’ve already gotten more than my moneys worth of enjoyment out of it, so this is definitely going to be in my weekly rotation for a long while. It basically scratches the itch that Diablo 3 did, and cashes in on my absolute love of all things Lego.

So there you have it, going forward I am mostly going to be focused on Wildstar, Elder Scrolls Online and Lego Minifigures Online. I of course reserve the right to change my mind and undo all of these in the blink of an eye. That said I do have a ton of single player games that I want to play through, and both the PS3 and PS4 ready to stream content. I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing Assassin’s Creed 4 for example… and I am absolutely horrible at it, but enjoying myself quite a bit. As far as online games, I am going to try and limit myself to just these games above for the time being. I know in September I will be digging into Destiny and playing that online with friends quite a bit, but it doesn’t directly conflict with the types of games I chose above. Maybe with this abbreviated list, I won’t constantly feel overwhelmed when I sit down at night and try and figure what exactly I am going to do.`