[PS2] CERTifiable

From the moment you open Planetside 2 until one day you uninstall, your ears will ring with the siren call of "Certs..." the magical currency in PS2 that makes Auraxis go-round. From the get-go you begin amassing certs to purchase everything from upgrades to new capabilities. It costs 10 certs to learn to use an Auraxian toilet. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually it costs 100 just to be able to logout. Certs are gained primarily through earning experience; so killing, maiming, reviving, assisting, hacking, capturing, rearming, sunbathing...basically everything you do in PS2 aside from breathing (costs 20 certs) earns you xp which earns you certs.

Planetside 2: The circle-zerg

So the past few weeks have been a whirlwind of holidays and law school finals, leaving me bereft of time to write anything meaningful or do much in the way of gaming. In that time I did take a shine to the newly released Planetside 2 and it occupied what breaks I allowed myself. SOE has conjured forth my nostalgic side and drawn me into the web of MMOFPS once more and I don't mind much. I loved Planetside, it was the first game I played with "MMO" at the front of its genre. Alas the game is far from perfect; the shift towards a F2P model has had some negative effects on the gameplay that I aim to address in a coming series of posts...the first of which, I call the "circle-zerg".

[GW2] Fraking Fractals

Despite the title I actually don't disdain the new Guild Wars 2 Fractal dungeon(s) all that much. A dungeon that is slightly variable each run and scales in difficulty and requires you to run it to access the higher difficulties? Sounds great!....on paper. In practice this runs into a few issues.

[GW2] A Karka in my back, or, "Seriously Arenanet?"

I've been the staunch defender of Arenanet...I've defended their choice of making the Halloween event video a one-time only affair on the grounds that it was a minor thing that everyone could then witness on Youtube...a non-interactive event. I defended their choice to have hard content on Halloween so long as it was not tied to a meta-achievement.

So while some people were expressing valid criticism, I didn't let it hinder my enjoyment. I still stand by my assertion that GW2 is a quality game.

Then they go and fuck me push even my limit.

Trouble with Binary choice

A decade and a half ago in the late 90's games such as Fallout and Planescape Torment released; among their accolades were the extensive dialogue trees that provided a sense of choice to the player with regards to how the story might play out. Each had varying degrees of success, but it was clear that your choices in any given conversation might effect that sub-story going forward; with some impacting the finale. Fast-forward to 2012 and we're cheering on games like Infamous, Mass Effect 3, and others simply for giving us the "paragon/renegade" options; the distilled, streamlined, and frankly, shallow, facsimiles of the systems that came before.

[GW2] Difficulty, tedium, and clocks

So the Guild Wars 2 Halloween event has come and gone; stirring ripples with its "one-time" event (now reproduced on youtube for viewing pleasure) a temporary zone and PvP games, and a clock tower jumping puzzle that would frustrate M. C. Escher. I decided to step back and ponder my thoughts on the last of those before writing. Why was the Clock Tower so frustrating, why was the aggregate response so negative? For the record, I completed it twice, and I actually enjoyed it once I got the hang of it.

[MMOs] Economies of (digital) Scale

Some time ago I mused that the primary fun of playing a goblin in a game like WoW was that each server represented a relatively small market and as a result there were plenty of openings and opportunities for quasi-monopolistic behavior. Between this and going over the perceived issues with Guild Wars 2's trading post, I've been asking myself what I would want to see in an MMO market.