EQ2 choices, EVE PvP Tourney.

Posted on September 12, 2007 by SynCaine

Not much gaming time the last few days, so not a whole lot to write about.

I was incorrect about the EQ2 trial limiting you to only the Fae. Seems you get access to all the race/class combos when you make a second character, so only your first must be a Fae. Still an odd choice by SOE, but not as bad as having no access to the other races at all. I also played around with the setting a bit more, as EQ2 gives you the choice to tweak almost everything in terms of the graphics engine. The alternate models are an awesome upgrade, and much needed as some of the original races looked awful. I’m still trying to figure out what exactly gives you the most bang for your buck. Hopefully tonight some serious time can be given to EQ2 and I get a better feel for it, and make a decision on whether it’s worthwhile to pick up the full version.

In EVE, aside from more skill training and some mission running, I watched a good portion of the PvP tourney matches. I must say the format and presentation of the matches was top notch. If I had one grip with the tech side of it, is I would love a high res version of the matches available, so for the better ones you can watch it in full detail. As far as the commentating, it was very hit or miss. Most disappointing was the final match, where one of the commentators had no interest in the match itself and talked repeatedly about the EVE-TV vs. CCP match. Very unprofessional considering it was the final, and overall disrespectful to both competing teams. That said, most of the time the commentating was very good and informative. I look forward to the next tourney, hopefully with some rule tweak to force some greater variety in ships, and perhaps getting the bigger ships into the combat.

Posted in EQ2, EVE Online | Comments Off on EQ2 choices, EVE PvP Tourney.

EQ2 first impression, Vanguard trial request.

Posted on September 10, 2007 by SynCaine

So EQ2 finally patched itself up, only 4 hours or so later. I actually managed to watch all of Terminator 2 on DVD and still have some time to spare before I was able to create a character.

On to the game itself, I find it odd that the new trial of EQ2 limits you to only playing the Fae, without letting you even look at your other options. Considering the variety of race and class combos in EQ2 is viewed as a plus, the trail completely eliminating this is a bit of a letdown. I still can’t decide how I feel about the graphics in EQ2, while on the surface they seem good enough (I have it on high settings, 1900×1200 getting 30fps) something about them bothers me. It’s like 95% of the game is in high res, and then you run into a low res texture and it just sticks out like a sore thumb. It also just seems overall boxy compared to LoTRO, or even WoW. The UI is serviceable, but nothing to write home about. One minor bother is that when shutting the game down, it takes a good 30 seconds or so to close out, and close to a minute on the other comp. Odd, but not a deal breaker.

After playing for two hours or so, I’m undecided. It does not jump out and scream ‘buy me’ but at the same time it’s not a huge mess and it certainly does have some hidden charm to it. Clearly more time is needed, and I intend to put a few more hours into it.

However, while playing EQ2 I realized I would also not mind giving the recently revamped Vanguard a try. For some odd reason, as far as I know, Vanguard does not have a free trial. Considering I intend to play either EQ2 or Vanguard with my girlfriend, and she plays on an older comp, a trial is a must to see if the older comp can even handle the game. After a bit of searching, it seems Vanguard has a buddy key system similar to what LoTRO had. If anyone reading this has a spare key they would not mind sharing, email me at syncaine(at)yahoo(dot)com. Hopefully I’ll be able to compare the two and see which one will be a better fit for us.

Posted in EQ2, MMO design, Vanguard | 2 Comments

EQ2, trial of the neverending download.

Posted on September 7, 2007 by SynCaine

Just a quick update, I’m attempting to give EQ2 another shot after reading a few blogs about how its been improved a great deal since release, so I downloaded the new Fay trial. I create an account, and then it begins to download an update.

And downloads.

And downloads.

Oh and then it downloads some more.

And for the last hour now, its estimate time for completion? 4 minutes. It’s been at 4 minutes for the last hour. Awesome, awesome first impression Sony, top notch. All I know is this game better blow me away in the first 10 minutes, because with this ridiculous updating crap, its already started off in a bad light.

Posted in Uncategorized | 111 Comments

One great big lovefest.

Posted on September 7, 2007 by SynCaine

It’s been very nice reading all the comments in response to my post about the upcoming WoW expansion. If nothing else, it shows that a great variety of people play MMOs, and everyone has a different view of what’s good/bad.

Many people could relate to my feelings on the game, loving it to the point of burning out. For others it either never clicked, or only clicked for a short period of time, and others still are enjoying what the game offers at a pace that works for them.

Regardless of which camp you belong to, it would be impossible to deny that WoW has indeed greatly expanded the player base of the MMO community, not just in overall numbers but also in the type of players we have today. MMOs are no longer limited to kids in the basement grinding away for days at a time. We now have players from all walks of life, all ages, and from both sexes playing together, which in itself has expanded the appeal of MMOs, since they are generally build around the sense of community and team work.

As the player base expands, it creates more opportunities to meet someone interesting that you get along with and can learn from. The reason WoW had me hooked as long as it did had little to do with the content in my final months; I played purely for the love of my guild and the people in it. That attachment would surely have faded much soon had the group not been as diverse and interesting as it was. What this means is that for the final 2-4 months, the reason I paid Blizzard $15 a month had nothing to do with the latest patch or update, they could have done nothing during that time and I would still have logged in each night. Granted the reason we had as great a guild as we did was because WoW was a great game to play together, but at some point the greatness of the game got outshined by the greatness of the people playing it.

It’s with that frame of mind that I look forward to new games to experience; for the chance to once again meet and get to know a wide variety of people, enjoying and experiencing a great game together.

Posted in MMO design, World of Warcraft | Comments Off on One great big lovefest.

It’s not you baby, its me. I’ve changed, and its time we move on.

Posted on September 6, 2007 by SynCaine

Funny how this whole blog traffic thing works, I write a simple ‘don’t care about the new WoW xpac’ post, and I get linked from major web sites and set a new single day hit record. Go figure.

Also amusing is the first ping back on the post below is basically a pre-release ‘hope’ article about the possible upside of Wrath of the Lich King, how players should be thrilled at the opportunity of seeing and fighting alongside Arthas, a fan favorite from the Warcraft world. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but before TBC was release, was it not going to be super awesome to fight against Illidan? Oh wait it is, for the .04% of the population who have seen him, or so I’ve read…

Granted its not likely Blizzard will make the same mistake again and tuck the focal character of an expansion away for a few guilds to see, but who knows what they WILL do to alienate fans. WoW long ago hit ‘cash cow’ status, meaning all it must do now is maintain, or at worse bleed slow to continue raking in the cash. At the same time, it’s aging, and I’m sure more than a few people at Blizzard are looking forward to moving on to a new project, if for no other reason that to work on something new. That means the core leaves, and others come in, likely with some new ideas. If those ideas are not what the audience is looking for, you get TBC.

I’m not saying the new xpac will be a disaster, my point was that I have little interest in it for the same reasons I had little interest in TBC, it’s more of the same, and I’m looking for something different. But who knows, perhaps by the time WotLK is released, maybe I will once again be looking for something that WoW provides, but between EVE Online now and the crop of quality MMOs releasing soon, I have my doubts. I wonder if Blizzard has any of those feeling as well…

PS: Thanks for the front page link BBC.

Posted in EVE Online, MMO design, World of Warcraft | Comments Off on It’s not you baby, its me. I’ve changed, and its time we move on.

The love and hate game, WoW style.

Posted on September 4, 2007 by SynCaine

Perhaps it’s just me, but I have a feeling the tide is turning for WoW, especially with the new info released about the next expansion and how the Hero class system will be used. In a nutshell, the Hero class system is basically re-rolling your character with a new class available to you, with the option to skip a bunch of early content. They are adding a new class to WoW, but making players jump through a hoop to get access to it, while at the same time NOT delivering anything new to current characters, which was the original plan way back when WoW was released. Back then Hero classes were planned to be an extension of your characters growth, enabling you to further specialize your class by going down a particular Hero path. It was delayed and not part of the original release due to balance issues, or at least that was the official statement back then. With each patch, players awaited the arrival of hero classes and what they could bring to WoW. After a few years, we finally get that announcement, and clearly it’s not what was promised way back when. Add this disappointment to the fact that Blizzard seems to be getting lazy with the future development of WoW in general, and it’s no surprise that a segment of their player base is growing weary.

I personally quit WoW after burning out on raiding, and saw nothing of value in The Burning Crusade. Once I learned that Illidan was to be the featured end boss of the final raiding instance, I packed it up and cancelled my account. The account has TBC on it, and yet my main has never stepped foot in Outland. I did play through the new blood elf and draenei content, but those characters remain dormant after hitting level 20 and being filtered back into old zones. Nothing that I have read about WoW since quitting has ever sparked me to return, and this is a game I spent over 2000 hours on one character playing full time for two years, along with many alts, some who also reached level 60.

That said I know my father is still addicted to the game, and has likely log in more hours than I have, albeit in a slightly longer time frame. He has never raided, or even seen all of the end-game 5 mans, but he has tried almost every race/class combo the game offers, many to the high 50s. He generally plays solo, avoids PvP, and as far as I know does little crafting. He enjoys the character growth and questing. We are about as different as you can get in terms of how we play WoW. For him TBC has added some nice extra content that he as enjoyed, although not nearly as much as he enjoyed the original 60 levels. One thing he is very happy with however is that he still has plenty of quests to do at level 70, so when he hits the level cap he has not run out of content. He is not as item focused as I was, so the fact that many of the quests don’t offer an upgrade for a reward does not bother him much. He does the quest for the enjoyment of the quest itself. It will be interesting to see how he views the recently announced expansion as more info is released and we get closer to it going live. As I stated above, the news does nothing for me, but I have a feeling he will find a great deal to look forward to. My question now, and one I’m sure Blizzard has also considered, is how many players fall into my camp, and how many fall into my fathers?

Posted in World of Warcraft | 45 Comments

Mining Op = Success

Posted on September 4, 2007 by SynCaine

The good thing about three day weekend is you get three days off. The bad thing is after three days, you go back to work. The terrible thing is the next three day weekend is far away, and you just had one. On the plus side, only four work days till the normal two day weekend is here again…

As stated in the post below, my Corp had a mining Op planned for Saturday, and overall it was a huge success. We managed to strip mine three belts in Ghesis, coming away with a good bit of minerals to produce new ships and fittings. Overall it was fairly uneventful, not unexpected considering Ghesis is a 0.5 security area, as well as being fairly low traffic. It was nice to see 6-12 (depending on the time) of us working together and as a team to accomplish a common goal. The final minerals count also shows exactly how far a Corp can get when its members work together, as we mined far more than we could have working alone. Perhaps when more of us are closer to combat ready, we will trek out into a .0.4 or below system and get the more valuable ores. Currently only a few of our members are truly skilled at flying a battleship, although those members have been playing EVE for two years or more, so they are very skilled. It’s up to us new guys to catch up and prove our worth. In time I’m sure we will, until then, the training continues.

Posted in EVE Online, MILK Corp, Random | Comments Off on Mining Op = Success

Noob lessons in EVE, long weekend of goodness.

Posted on August 31, 2007 by SynCaine

I got my first Cruiser a few days ago, a shiny new Caracal. Having been on some level 4 missions with my Corp, I picked up some fittings off the wrecks, and after a bit of shopping, the Caracal was all set and ready to take on some level 2 missions. I set the destination and hit auto-pilot. As the Redsox game was on, I walked away and watched a few innings, as the auto-pilot had 17 jumps to go. I came back to the computer to find myself looking at a pod. I’m an idiot. I had not noticed that the course auto-pilot had picked took my though a 0.3 security zone, and sure enough, a Pirate must have been waiting for silly noobs like me to fly in and make an easy score off of. So my first Cruiser lasted all of about an hour, and fired off exactly 0 missiles before getting blown up. At least the pirate was nice enough not to pod kill me, so thank you MirrorGod for that. Lesson learned.

As usual, the Corp had my back and donated a new Caracal to the ‘help noob Syn’ cause. Sadly I had to buy all the fittings, and so now my Caracal is fling around without a single named pieces, and overall an odd setup. I have one heavy missile launcher, five assault launchers, two large shield expanders, 2 passive shield recharge fittings, an explosion dampener, and two ballistic control systems. It’s been working so far in level two missions, so good enough for now. No afterburner does make for some slow wreck cleanup though. Top speed of 206, wee.

This weekend should be a good one, and not just because Monday is a holiday. My Corp has scheduled a mining op for Saturday, which I am looking forward to, as I’ve only mined with 2-3 people before, so I am curious to see how it goes when we get a good sized group together and wtfpwn some asteroids. Sunday we have our level 4 mission day, which is always a blast. I’ll have to pick up a few more heavy missile launchers before that to hopefully contribute a bit more in terms of dps. Cross your fingers that I don’t get mass targeted and blown out of the sky, but odds are good that I will.

Posted in EVE Online, MILK Corp | 5 Comments

This is the world largest blog with the title ‘Hardcore Casual’ *

Posted on August 30, 2007 by SynCaine

LoTRO recently announced a 7 day free trial (good) and that they have ‘4 million characters’. (stupid) Why anyone today would report the number of characters their game has is beyond me, unless you want to compete with the awesome ‘game’ that is Second Life. (It might get you a story in Time however; since that seems to be the only MMO ‘game’ they report on)

I understand companies have PR machines that need to take whatever is happening and make it look good, but Turbine’s PR people seriously dropped the ball on this one. You completely discredit your success when you release a report with the number of characters your game has. Either give us active accounts, or just don’t report numbers at all. Or really man up and just show how many people are online, like EVE or Battle.net do. Sending out a misleading fluff PR statement like Turbine did only gets you flamed, as seen here, here, and here. Nice job.

I think this misstep is most disappointing because LoTRO is actually a good game, with great support. Every patch released has improved the game in significant ways, and all the upcoming features also look promising. So LoTRO is not the second coming of WoW in terms of subscription numbers, that’s ok. It has a solid base to build a great MMO from, give it time and let it grow. I think it has sold well enough at this point to warrant that, at least.

Posted in Lord of the Rings Online, MMO design, World of Warcraft | Comments Off on This is the world largest blog with the title ‘Hardcore Casual’ *

Mario Strikers Charged

Posted on August 29, 2007 by SynCaine

I’ve been playing Mario Strikers Charge casually the last few weeks, both online and off. It’s a cartoon take on soccer featuring various characters from the Mario world (only Mario though, not the entire Nintendo roster) performing over-the-top moves on both offense and defense. While overall creative, none of the moves are really groundbreaking or a huge shock when you see them. Mario becomes huge, Wario farts, Bowser breaths fire, etc. You pick a captain from amoung a selection of major Mario characters, and then three sidekicks from a roster of lesser knowns, such as Toad, Hammer Bros, Koopa Troopa, etc. Each captain and sidekick has varying stats, like shot power, passing, defense, speed. Unfortunately in an attempt to keep it simple, the stats don’t vary enough, and you only get a few basic setups. More important than stats is each characters special moves, as they vary in power quite greatly. For example, Toad’s flip dodge is a cheap way to bypass the goalie (if timed right) for an easy score, Hammer Bro’s hammer toss dodge and special shot are both powerful tools for scoring, and Bowser’s shell move is… well not as great.

The feature set is fairly standard. You get a training mode, a tournament selection, offline versus play, and most importantly, online play. The offline stuff is fairly basic, but the game shines when you get online and start playing other people. The online setup is very basic, which is great. You connect, play either random people or a buddy, and then get right into it. Playing random people, you get auto-matched, and can accept or decline based only on the other players connection strength. Once you accept, the game setup is the same as it was offline, pick your captain, 3 sidekicks, and off you go. The game goes quick; I believe its 4 minutes per game, best of 3. The overall game is frantic, as you are constantly dodging, tackling, using special items. At first glance it appears the game is TOO fast, and scoring is more luck based than skill, but after some time with the game online, you learn what type of tricks and combos get you the best results. Nothing is a guaranteed score, and even the best thought out plans can go wrong by some random twist of luck, but the game is a bit deeper than it seems at first glance.

Overall I have to say it’s a worthwhile purchase. It’s a great game to pick up and play for 30 minutes or so, and in that time you can get in a few series online. The offline stuff will also keep you fairly busy, as there are plenty of items and stadiums to unlock. The graphics won’t blow anyone away, but they do their job, as does the music and sound. As with many other Wii games, you can’t exactly point to one factor of why it’s entertaining, but it is, and you keep coming back for more.

Posted in Console Gaming | 2 Comments