MMO Archives - Page 441 of 442 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Rift: A Comfy Chair

June 3, 2012 by Belghast

This weekend I have spent most of my time reacquainting myself with the world of Telara. While much has changed, it very much feels like sitting back down in a comfy chair, much the same as returning to Everquest II always has been. A year has been a pretty long absence from the game, and in that time many changes have taken place.

The most subtle thing, is the fact that it seems the entire world has been given a face lift. Granted the above screenshot doesn’t exactly show it off to the highest state, since I have been playing mostly on my laptop. Everything from the character creation screen, to the world itself feels different from my memory, and from the screenshots I still have from earlier. I’ve talked with Scopique off and on throughout the weekend and he felt exactly the same thing, otherwise I would have thought this just an artifact of not having been in game awhile.

The game as a whole is the same basic game it always has been. It is a “wow-like” at it’s core, and is still the basic quest driven adventure it always has been. However I have to say, everything Trion does, is carried out with the utmost of attention to detail. So while the experience feels like a throwback, in terms of the games on the horizon and in beta, it is without a doubt the absolute best “wow-like” experience out there.

Bring on the new

I am not exactly sure how to quantify it, but the game as a whole feels much more fleshed out than it did at launch. The game world back then, felt extremely spartan. There are far more constructs in place to add some additional depth to the game. Instead of leveling with some arbitrary soul choices, that you make through a series of quests, you are asked to choose a predetermined path. Each of these paths offered, highlight some of the more common and well designed builds, but give you a feeling of purpose.

Personally on my Guardian Warrior, I chose the heavily Reaver-centric tank build. Each time you gain points to spend, the game makes suggestions of the best possible path to gain abilities. So far, as a result it seems like I always have exactly the abilities I need, at the level I begin to need them. I got my shield throw ability, right about the point I started needing to split up pathers. On my high level defiant Rogue, I picked the Huntsman spec, and it ended up giving me a far more capable Ranger spec than I ever managed to create for myself.

Basically this seems to make the game far more digestible as a whole. I’ve personally found myself spending a good deal of time on the two new trade-skills, Fishing (as seen in the image above) and Survival (think cooking). This really was something missing at launch. There was no functionality for creating crafted food, which forced you to rely on vendor bought food just to survive. Not only is the food better and stat granting, but it has been a good cost savings as well. At level 17 I have roughly 3 platnium, which is far more money than I can ever remember having in the past.

The mind numbing and annoying

One of the interesting things that has changed since I last played is the fact that the game is now apparently free until level 20. This has had some pretty negative effects on the community, or at least what passes as a community at low levels. As is custom in Rift, players are placed in a level gated “general” chat. The level 1-29 chat channel is packed full of children, and with them mind numbing annoyance. If the channel at all represents the future, we are royally screwed.

Luckily I managed to get into a very lively guild, The Gaiscioch Family. So now my screen is filled with friendly green spam, and it is far easier to ignore the rabble. I can imagine that paying customers long for the day they ding thirty, and move up to the next chat bracket. On my high level characters, defiant side, the community seems very healthy and friendly. So I am hoping that this is just something we can chock up to the fact that there are a large number of “non paying” customers at the low levels.

On a whim

I re-subscribed to the game on a whim, and in response to news this week of the expansion. After looking at the long list of features that had been added since I had last played a year ago, intrigued me, and with it I chimed in for a 3 month subscription. I’ve had quite a bit of fun this weekend playing it, but I am sure as the week comes on I will go back to playing a good deal of Everquest II and Diablo 3 again. I plan to play the game off and on and experience the Guardian content I never got to see.

The guild I am in now, seems really nice and always in action. So I could imagine that if I leveled up I could experience all the expert content and even some of the raids if I so chose. The big question is, that since I pretty much renewed my subscription on a whim, what exactly do I want from it? I am generally happy to quest along, and do the occasional rift, so I assume that bring my happiness once more.

While the core mechanics work the same as when I got bored with it before, it feels like they have beefed the game up in the fluff department, which is what had been lacking for me before. With the expansion comes player housing, and with the next patch mentoring. Right now I am finding the Rift mobile client pretty addictive. Through playing the scratch-off game, I have managed to win 10 or so of the purple rift currency. So as a result I have all the best gear you can buy from the rare planar vendor. So while it is a viral gimmick, you can actually really improve your gameplay just by playing it every hour.

A year later

A year after I left Rift, it has become a pretty great game. Everything about the game, from the maps, to the nameplates, to the mobile client just exudes polish. It is always funny to listen to general chat, and year people complaining as is the case with any MMO. I think to myself, anyone complaining about the game that has tried to think of everything, clearly has never played a game with a roughly cobbled together UI and little planning. I think much like Everquest II, the game is in its most playable state since release. Unfortunately, just like EQ2, the people that hold a grudge against the game will likely never give it a fair shake. Here is hoping that the expansion can rekindle the game for others. I luckily have the ability to feed my whims, but it will take a bit more than that to bring in the folks that can only play a single game at a time.

Bring On The Storm Legion

June 1, 2012 by Belghast

It is the beginning of a new month, and with it closes the #NBIMMO fun. As a result Syp has posted a poll for the NBI Awards on Bio Break. You can cast your vote in categories like “Promising Star, Game Specific” and “Most Interesting Angle”. The categories have narrowed down the field with five blogs competing for each award. I am not really sure how long the voting is set to run, but get over there are show all these new blogs some love.

Entering the Storm

There had been some rumors circulating about this, but yesterday Trion dropped a 100 megaton bombshell on the community announcing their upcoming feature rich expansion: Rift: Storm Legion. The announcement of a new expansion is never that huge of a surprise. We have come to expect them roughly a year after release. However this is one of the most ambitious and feature packed expansions that I have seen in recent memory. Some of the features include:

Two huge new continents, reportedly more than tripling the size of the existing game world.
Dual-faction island city of Tempest Bay.
Four new souls, one for each of the callings
Level cap raised to 60
Ability to “Instant Adventure” your way from 1-60 if you choose.
Greater variety of onslaughts, rifts, and events.
Seven new dungeons zones.
Three new raid zones.
A new single player Chronicle.
Massive colossus battles that supposedly effect the world in ways we have not yet seen.
Personal dimensions: Guild and Player Housing.
New “Cape” inventory slot.
New Grandmaster tier of crafting.
New puzzles, artifacts, collectables, achievements, mounts, pets, titles and more.

The Past Year

A little less than a year ago, I made on post on this blog titled “It’s Not You, It’s Me”, where basically I admitted to cancelling rift and outlining some of my reasons for doing so. There are multiple reasons, some of which I have come to realize really were about me, and my lack of wanting to commit to doing any form of organized gameplay. I can’t hold any game responsible for that, because honestly it has been an evolution I have gone through, from very serious raider, to very serious casual player. Since then I have played a ton of EQ2, LoTRO, gotten bored with SWTOR, and been dabbling in Guild Wars 2 and Secret World betas.

The primary problems I had with Rift, was the lack of “fluff” the world had. Nothing in Telara seemed to exist, just for the fun of it. All things seemed to be tied to some purpose, or needed by the single questing patch per faction. I enjoyed the game, but just ran out of things I felt worthy of doing. There were plenty of collections and achievements that I could have gone after, and I had many factions I could be running dailies with, but when I ran out of quest storyline, I just ran out of things I was interested in. Rift events were a blast, but after a point they also became old.

Trion Listened

I can’t say that Trion listened to me, I don’t have the ego to even imagine that, but what I can say is that my entire guild seemed to go through the same gradual leaving that I did. We went from having 50 active players, to 10, to 5, to none. So while they may not have listened to me, I can tell they heard the community as a whole that wandered off, because in the last year they have been insanely busy. I stopped actively playing the game sometime last June. Here is a list of some of the major content achievements as taken from this amazing “welcome home” thread, for folks coming back to the game.

PVP Rifts.
Cross Server Looking For Group.
3 “Sliver” 10 Man Raids.
Chronicles Solo/Duo Instances Added.
Planar Attunement Post 50 Advancement System.
Master-Mode Dungeons.
Support for player made Add-ons.
Ember Isle – New questing zone for level 50 characters.
Instant Adventures – LFG open world adventures.
Cross-Faction Auction House.
Rift Mobile App.
In-Game Character Weddings.
6th Role Slot.
Crafting from bank.
Mercenary System to balance the sides in PVP Matches.
New Fishing and Survival Trade-skills.
New “Seal” crafted Inventory Slot.
Nameplates for mobs and players.
Streaming Client.
Guild Finder system.
Leaderboards.

Expansion before the expansion

So in one year they have added an entire expansions worth of content already. I’ve always respected the folks at Trion, and thought given time, they would turn the product into a really amazing place to be. I subscribed for roughly a years time, even though I only played the game roughly 4 months. I had faith in the team, and figured my subscription was a “donation to the cause” of sorts. Seems like that “donation” has been repaid in massive amounts of hard work. Even before the expansion proper launches, 1.9 is waiting in the wings and seems to fill up any of the remaining gaps in the game.

The two big things for me that are coming in 1.9 are Conquest Mode, and Mentoring. Conquest promises to take us back to DAoC style 3 faction PVP. I have long held the opinion that what is wrong with PVPin general, is the fact that games focus on the Red Vs Blue mentality. I can remember in DAoC, the factions to some extent self balanced. If one team was a bit stronger, the other two would temporarily gang up to even out the odds. I think the Conquest mode will be a shot of adrenalin to a languid PVP culture.

If you’ve read my blog at all, you have heard me go on and on about mentoring and how great it is. Literally this is the one feature that I think every game needs. Being socially focused, it gets frustrating when new friends start and you can’t really help with out without absolutely steamrolling content for them. This is really no fun for anyone, for you laying waste without consequences is boring. For your friends, they end up just following you around aimlessly never actually learning how to play their classes. When you can mentor down to your friends, and run the content for real, you get to relive the experience and do so with your buddies.

A Pat on the Back

It is so easy to focus on the negative things in the game industry. Trust me there are plenty, and I have been a bitter ass for a very long time when it comes to the flaws in games. That said, I feel that it is all the more important that we point out what is going right in the industry. With the expansion, Trion will have added in every single one of the “must have” features I could even muster. On top of that, it triples the size of its game world, and with that comes a flood of new content for players to experience. Essentially they have answered the challenge posed by all of us who unsubscribed, and have done so in really heroic fashion.

I still very much love Norrath, and am having a blast still in Everquest II, but I almost feel like I need to resub to Rift just to applaud them for their efforts. At this point I have been gone long enough that essentially I will need to completely re-roll to remember how the hell anything works. That said I think I will be doing just that, and taking a tour of all the changes first hand.

I had already decided that I would not really be playing Guild Wars 2 or Secret World anymore until the launch. I played enough of the games to realize I liked it, so I don’t want to wear off that new game smell. So between the ever present EQ2, Rift, Diablo 3, and piddling around with SWGEmu… I think I will have plenty to do for the foreseeable future. It needs to be said: Great job Trion.

Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Rundown

April 29, 2012April 29, 2012 by Belghast

In all honesty I thought I would never be writing this post. I got an opportunity to play the game last year, and what can I say, I really hated it. The entire thing felt extremely “grindy”. I felt clueless as what I should be doing and what I should be focusing on. I went from heart to heart, and event to event, and would still end up having to go out into the fields and grind random mobs just to get to the next story element.

All that said, I was just honestly expecting too much for the state the game was in. There has been so much obnoxious hype surrounding this game, and so many often times violently devoted fans force feeding the notion that Guild Wars 2 was the gaming Messiah. After all of this, and after reading the Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto blog post, I was expecting bottled magic. When this unrealistic expectation did not appear before me, I rejected it wholly and had essentially written off the game.

What changed my mind

I really hated the original Guild Wars, but even saying that I own two different accounts from two different attempts to play the game. I expected to give Guild Wars 2 a chance, regardless of my pre-disposition. With the very public beta weekend coming up, I went ahead and preordered the game to give it another chance. Essentially I went into this weekend expecting the game to be horrible, based on my previous experience.

I allowed myself to play the game with a fairly clean palette. What can I say, the game has grown on me. I can’t entirely attribute this to my change of attitude, because really the game is in a much more polished state. Previously most of the mobs were not even properly itemized, so that only added to the feeling of purposeless grinding. This time around I allowed myself to wander aimlessly, explore, and work my way through the various objectives on the map in a much more fluid way.

The Strong Points

Dynamic Mentoring:

This is by far my favorite feature of the game. As you move through the world, and it is a huge one, your level is automatically mentored down to the content. If you wander back in a level 4 area at level 15, you will be scaled down to level 6 or so allowing you to participate in events. The best part of this is that you gain experience and karma similar to your native level.

Auction House Anywhere:

This weekend there were some major issues with the Trade post system, but when it was working it was nice. Essentially you can open up your commerce window, and buy and sell from the trade post anywhere in the world. Once the bugs are ironed out, this will allow you to clear your bags of anything worth selling very quickly. The only negative of the system, is that it is not terribly straight forward, and it takes a bit to figure out that you have to physically go to a trade post location to pick up your items and earnings.

Dynamic Role Switching:

Early in the process, they have claimed to be abolishing the holy trinity of MMOs. This is certainly true from one perspective, but I like to look at it slightly differently. Each weapon set, gives you your first 5 hot bar abilities. Each weapon combo, gives your character a completely different feel, and you can swap these out on the fly based on your situation.

I tended to focus on a sword and board style tanky warrior all weekend, but my choice of main hand greatly changes the flavor. From my shield, I gained hot bar slots 4 and 5, but if I equipped a sword in my main hand, I gained a good deal of mobility with a nice leap, as well as a powerful cleave. If I swapped in an axe, I lost the mobility, but gained a strong 360 multi target AOE. If I changed it out again for a Mace, I gained several new defensive abilities, including a really strong block/counter attack combo.

If I dropped the shield entirely, and equipped a two handed sword, it gave me a series of very powerful AOE attacks, perfect for playing a more dps role. If I equipped a rifle, I had the ability to actually do powerful ranged damage. To complement these weapon abilities, are a series of skills that you purchase with points earned by doing the various skill challenges spread across the map. While there are still very clear tanky, dps, ranged, style roles, it feels like you have the freely to swap between them at will just by changing out your gear.

Huge Detailed World:

I cannot emphasis this one enough. The world is massive, and filled with tons of exploration candy. I put on several levels by just roaming around aimlessly trying to unlock the various points of interest on the map. A lot of times in these games, you sacrifice detail for size. However every little corner of the map seems to have the same artistic care as the main hubs. I found lots of little secret paths, stuff hidden under water, and plenty of other reasons to go off wandering.

I have a friend who claims she is part mountain goat, and she would have felt right at home in this world. If you can see it, there seems to be a way to get up there. I’ve only actually seen a very tiny portion of the map in my roughly 20 hours or so of gameplay. I’ve already seen snowy mountain peaks, lush forests, and murky swamps. The best part of the world are the cities, they are more detailed than I have ever seen in an MMO. They didn’t just get the city proper right, they got the surrounding land, and suburbs as well.

The Weak Points

Limited To Original Server Choice:

This one is pretty massive to me. When you first log into the game, you are asked to choose a server. At this point there is no real way to fully understand the ramifications of this choice. Essentially this server becomes your home server, and the only way to change servers is to pay 1800 gems (which if it follows standard cash shop trends equates to $18). There is a system in place, that lets you play on other servers as a guest, but since this was disabled during beta weekend it is uncertain how limiting this will be.

Why is this such a huge deal? Well this is just one of the ways the game is not super friendly to groups of friends that want to play together. As a long time guild leader, it is always a struggle to try and get all of your members on the same server at the launch of a game. SWTOR had a great system that let you preload your guild onto a server intact, but even with that there were a good number of stragglers that could not be bothered to sign up for the system.

As a result, even with that system in place it was a mess those first few weeks getting everyone re-rolled in the right place. Essentially there is no re-rolling on a new server without an additional cash outlay. This system is going to be a wholesale nightmare for large guilds, and will likely cause a certain measure of un-necessary fragmentation. I know personally that I can afford to pay to swap servers, but not every member of my guilds can. My only hope is that for a few weeks after release they turn on the home server moves for free.

Overflow System:

This honestly could have just as well gone as a positive, but it has some rather crippling side effects. When you load into your server, instead of placing you in a queue, you get placed into the Overflow system. This is great because it allows you to get in and play immediately, but in essence it places you in limbo. You are not really on the server as the rest of your friends.

So if you are trying to hook up and play with other players, you can wind up in separate instances with no way that I could find to swap between them. Since this entire system is a bit murky, I figure this is going to cause more than a small bit of headache. All that said however, I applaud the efforts they have made to remove queues from gameplay.

No Golden Path:

This is what gave me so much trouble when I had played it last year. You have series of instanced storyline quests that move the tale of your legend forward. The problem is there is no clear path outlined for you to get from point a to point b. If you were like me and went into this expecting the same basic quest construct as the rest of mmo-dom, you will likely find this as mentally jarring as I did.

Guild Wars 2 essentially is a sandbox, much the same way as Skyrim was. Quests exist out in the field, in the form of the various hearts on the map, but there is no guiding hand to make sure you go by and visit them all. On your map, there is a completion score showing how many hearts you have completed, points of interests discovered, and waypoints unlocked. I found that wandering around and exploring, took me across most of the major hearts and events, but I just had to change my mindset.

Voice Acting:

This is something odd, because while playing this weekend I recognized a good number of the voices from SWTOR. The male warrior voice, sounds like the same actor that played the Jedi Consular. Another voice I recognized as the woman who says “Oh Spanios” during “Lovers” quest on Tython. The problem is, the voice acting as a whole is not nearly as high quality as it was in SWTOR. While some of the same actors obviously were involved, the delivery just feels a good deal more stiff, and forced.

On the positive side however, the world is full of dialog. As you walk through the cities there is often times a murmur of multiple conversations going on at the same time. It really makes these areas feel more lived in. The only place you really notice the stiff delivery of lines, is during the story quests, when you have nothing else fighting for your attention. It wasn’t bad enough to keep me from playing, but it was noticeable.

The Takeaway

As the weekend has gone on, the game has grown on me more and more. Essentially I have adjusted my outlook to fit the game, rather than trying to mold the game into what I was expecting from other games. GW2 harkens back to an older era of MMOs, where the focus was on exploration rather than following a pre-planned path. Will I be cancelling my paid subscription MMOs to play it? Not likely, but I will be playing Guild Wars 2 when it releases.

Scarybooster put the game in perspective for me this weekend. Essentially he said that he is viewing this game as competing with the other free to play experiences. When you view it in that way, then it wins hands down against the other f2p titles. The world is huge, engaging, and as you move through it you are in no way gimped for not having spent money. When you look at the game like that, it is a complete no-brainer to buy.

For many players this game will be enough to make them cancel their subscription accounts. For me, it just scratches a different itch. I have no plans on cancelling either EQ2 or SWTOR for the sake of this game. I am in the position where I can do that. I think for your average player, this game will be enough for them. The game is a much more polished experience today, than it was at the tail end of last year when I initially tried it. So I have some hope that all the little bugs and annoyances will be given a thick coat of shine before release.

So all this said, I am taking back my opinion on the game. I am officially “un-writing it off”. I look forward to release, and look forward to seeing how the game progresses as we go through other beta weekends. As we close out the weekend, I made it to level 15, after 20 or so focused ours of gameplay. With 80 levels worth of content, and large chunks of it unique to each race, it looks like there will be more than enough content to satiate us. Fun combat, lots of content, and no subscription fee seems like a win to me.

On Recapturing the Magic

April 28, 2011 by Ariad

or “I’m New Here So I’m Going To Start By Disagreeing With Bel”

Bel’s post below, "Warcraft Broke Me" got me thinking. I’ve been in largely the same boat he is, having finally stopped playing World of Warcraft without getting heavily into any other MMOs. You should read the post, it’s a good one, but as a quick recap he’s rediscovering the joys of not being tied to a game and, as he’s put it to me a few times, is "living an actual life again".

I’m doing the same thing. In the last month I’ve started working out again, picked up painting, get out and hang out with my friends a lot more often, and largely don’t really see a massive lack in my MMO schedule. When I play (Rift, currently), I play because I want to and I have fun, and when I’m through having fun I stop and do something else. It’s probably terribly inconvenient for the hardcore in the group, but I actually legitimately enjoy every moment I spend in game, which is something of a surprising new feeling.

For me, though, it doesn’t feel like a whole new paradigm, or a huge shift in the way I play games from here on out. I remember the feeling when I left Everquest, and how I played a few games hyper-casually (and even not so casually), but without the devotion of scheduled playtime and other things. I played a handful of other games before sinking into Star Wars Galaxies and dropping down that rabbit hole… despite the feeling I had at the time that I would never get into a game as heavily as I had Everquest.

The Pendulum

It all feels like a pendulum to me. Back and forth, with one end being a total disconnect from MMO-playing and the other end being the depths of hardcore, scheduled raid leadership. It hovers at the edges of the swing, but it still feels like it’s swinging, and when I don’t expect it, it’ll come hurtling the other way and while I look around now at my "freedom", I’ll play something, blink, and then realize it’s three months later and I’m leading or helping lead a raid group.

I think the only time things have ever really not worked out has been when I’ve tried to push the pendulum one way or the other before it’s good and ready. I tried to force myself to drop out of the raiding scene in WoW at once point, stop playing the game entirely and concentrate on some important stuff (like getting a job), and while I had the discipline to stay away until I’d accomplished what I needed to, it was less than a week after that I’d come back to the game, voraciously seeking what I’d tried to be rid of. I’ve started MMOs with the plan of having a solid group, planning on hitting max level and grouping together and even raiding, and it always seems to fall apart. It feel s forced, like I’m stopping the pendulum mid-swing and trying to make it reverse.

The Priority

I’m almost certain I’ll end up back in the hardcore scene at some point in the future, sticking to a solid schedule, showing up on time (or early!), making sure everything is in order and accepting no distractions, going through all of the trouble of recruiting, helping people improve, and dealing with drama and the other issues that come up. When that happens, it’ll almost certainly be fun, and I’ll have no idea what will trigger it. It might be tomorrow, it might be years from now. At the time I went from being an egregiously casual WoW player to a hardcore raider, I would have told anyone who asked that that switch was the least likely thing that could possibly happen, but there it went.

Right now, my priority is having fun. The pendulum swings, and I have fun. Best I can ask for, yeah?