Important Stuff!

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

The MMO, where a franchise goes to die

I didn't want to say it, I really didn't. I had hope, I said to myself "Bethesda knows what they are doing, they will deliver an MMO Skyrim and it will be awesome," then they started opening their mouths and I began to feel like someone hit the reverse on the time machine. Welcome back to 2000!

I understand that many players pine for the fjords days of Vanilla WoW or the feel of Everquest, but when take off the nostalgia colored glasses we remember that the memory is primed to remember the good moments and forget the numerous times we wanted to plant our keyboard in the wall or wished for features to be fixed/improved. I loved Final Fantasy XI, I recall it fondly and remember the dozen classes, good looking visuals (for its time)...but I forget having to spend 2+ hours searching for a party just to level, losing hours worth of work because of a bad pull and so on. I don't want to go back to that, as obnoxious as things like LFR can be at times, I'd rather have a bad group in a few minutes than no group at all.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Diablo 3 Musings Part 1 [Minor Spoilers]

It has been almost a week now and I feel as though I have enough of a handle on Diablo 3 to give a fair review of it thus far. Currently my highest level character is 33 and I have finished the game on Normal, played a little on Nightmare. I know Hell and Inferno are a whole new ballgame and I'll address those another time. As is my custom I am not looking to attach some 1-10 score to the game...I am going to point out my opinions of what works, what doesn't work, and what nags at me as I play.

Warning, there are some spoilers ahead but I will try to keep them minimal and vague.

Monday, May 14, 2012

Playing for fun v. Playing for competition

The long hiatus is finally over, finals have come to an end and I've a few weeks to enjoy the beak...how wonderfully convenient that it should happen to be right before Diablo 3 releases and I like much of the world will try extremely hard tomorrow to crash Blizzard's servers. However we have a day to kill before it releases! In the meantime I have taken up World of Tanks again after some rumblings in the blogosphere had refreshed my memory of it. However since I last took up the game I've found some new trends within I find unpleasant to deal with; namely the game's insistence on keeping a permanent record of everything done.