Mass Effect 3 - Spoiler Free Review

To be entirely fair, no review can ever be "spoiler free"...any details I tell you of the game or its make are ruining some level of exploration. However I am trying my best here to keep things general, and to leave those precious moments of discovery up to you, while I focus mainly on the elements which made the game good and bad. This is by no means comprehensive, more of a "player's opinion" on bits of the game.

Putting WoW on Hiatus

Though World of Warcraft was at the outset going to be one of my primary topics here, I am finding lately that I am preferring other games; in the past few weeks I've bounced around Tribes: Ascend, Mass Effect 2 and 3, Killing Floor and a little bit of Skyrim. I mainly just log on to WoW during my groups weekly raid night....we're a fairly close group of RL friends and it's a way of keeping up, we're not exactly progression focused. For various reasons the game just isn't holding interest...it isn't compelling or engaging.

I have no doubt I will return to it with Mists of Pandaria, but outside of the aforementioned raids I don't see myself doing much with WoW...everything I have left to do in WoW besides that feels more like a chore than fun....I was logging in to do LFR because I felt like I had to use up my lockouts, not because I was enjoying it.

I still plan to discuss the game however, and as the March news of Mists comes trickling in I'll see about adding some posts.

Healing away the Symptoms

Just yesterday I was reading a post by Liore at Herding Cats about Guild Wars 2 and it's attempt to eliminate the trinity. Like any avid MMO player I find myself skeptical about anyone who claims they will eliminate the holy trinity; but it got me thinking about just how fragile the trinity is, and how really it is just a few small innovations away from non-existence.

Reasons to hate Mass Effect 3

I mean the title of today's post with no small amount of facetiousness, last week I downloaded the demo for Mass Effect 3 and since then have played the multiplayer for over 40 hours with friends, and the single player...oh about 20 minutes. Back around the time Dragon Age 2 came out and was a dismal failure to mare Bioware's otherwise nearly spotless record, I made a resolution that I was not going to blindly buy the next Bioware product. This of course was Mass Effect 3, and up until last week I had been more or less content to let its release slide past me without a second glance. That changed when I downloaded the demo and first tried the multiplayer with a group of friends. A testament to its addictive quality we (who usually call it a night around 11-12) played until 2:30 in the morning and only quit because fatigue was setting in.

Winning, or, "Two sides of the same coin"

When it comes to competition there are two distinctive schools of thought when it comes to what counts as a “win” and what does not. They don’t have distinct names per say; both have been dubbed something negative by their opponents and something more positive by their proponents.  

The Twilight of Pures

At this point in WoW’s development I am beginning to think that Pure classes are one of the issues holding back the game’s development.

Blizzard Subscription Holding Steady

The most recent WoW subscriber numbers have come out, and I'm actually rather surprised by the numbers.