Star Wars: The Old Republic has one thing going for it, and that’s Bioware. Bioware are a great development house that genuinely give you the feeling that they love their games. They get it that games should be interesting, deep, and enjoyable to play. Knights of the Old Republic was good, and it set the stage for this MMO. Dragon Age 1 and 2 were both good (even though I found 1 to be boring at times), and Mass Effect 1 and 2 were both OUTSTANDING.

Bioware will make this game great. I trust that they will find every way they can to make the game great. However the Star Wars theme seems pasted on. If I were to make an MMO in space, and make it a primary objective to make it story driven, Star Wars seems like as good a place as any to start. Star Wars lore is deep, it has a long storyline, and there are a lot of angles that can be covered. However, the game is set 3500 years before any of the Star Wars movies. I suppose this is meant to cover the Star Wars universe well before the more thoroughly covered time frame of the movies. This is a good idea, but the character classes seem a little too familiar with old school Star Wars, in particular the Smuggler and Bounty Hunter classes. I guess I take issue with the concept that the game is Star Wars so it HAS to have smugglers and bounty hunters. I can’t say for certain that this is why those two playable classes are in the game but I can’t get it out of my head that it is because a couple of marketing guys from Bioware and LucasArts sat in a meeting room and agreed that because it is a Star Wars game, there must be smugglers and bounty hunters as playable classes.

But it seems counterintuitive to me that this game is set three and a half millenia prior to the events that were depicted in the six Star Wars movies to prevent too familiar a landscape from being painted and to give Star Wars fans something new to look at rather than a bunch of Han Solo and Boba Fett lookalikes running around the central hub zone when that is exactly what we are going to get. This game is going to take place 3500 years before Star Wars, but there are going to be hundreds of Boba Fett and Han Solo lookalikes running around the central hub zone. I wouldn’t bet against at least one of those zones being from one of the Star Wars movies.

Mass Effect is an outstanding storytelling game. There are things going on and you are in the middle of it. As you play through, you are interested in what is going on because it feels important. The games are that good. There are so many side plots and relationships between characters, races, species, organizations, etc. The last time a game that did a great job of telling a story was made into an MMO that fleshed that story out in detail was … World of Warcraft.

Warcraft was a real time strategy game. Those are typically pretty limited in the story they tell. Blizzard went deep into the details of the backstory and that story was told in the battles of the war that played out across three games and expansion packs. The foundation was laid for a MMO that was very story driven if you allowed yourself to be troubled with the story. If it were one way for The Old Republic to truly follow in World of Warcraft’s footsteps and possibly be the “WOW Killer” that many people want it to be, they could have followed that one basic fundamental aspect of the game. Base it off an in-house intellectual property that has major plotlines fleshed out but has a million untapped avenues to explore.

The more I think about it, the more it just screams “MISSED OPPORTUNITY”. I would honestly be more excited about their MMO if it were based on Mass Effect.

Raiding got to the point where it was taken for granted and it became a feature to be exploited by the publishers of MMO games. It wasn’t always that way.

The first great MMO game was undoubtedly EverQuest. You can make an argument for Ultima Online, but EQ was the game that had the epic boss battles that required real progression for tactical familiarization and gear upgrades and single encounters that required 100 (or significantly more) players to overcome. Raiding as we know it now didn’t exist for quite some time. Not until an update in the Planes of Power expansion brought the raid interface with a maximum of 72 people was raiding even really recognized per se. In later expansions, the facet of raiding was manipulated even more to include smaller raid groups and instanced content where a structured group was the only group allowed into an instantiated zone. Before instanced content in EQ, all zones were open world and accessible to any and all. Before instanced raid zones came about, the raiding guilds on a particular server had to agree on a schedule of the current raid zones based on respawn schedules as opposed to an awkward first come first served approach.

World of Warcraft started off simple. The raid progression was straightforward. The end game raid cap was set at 40 people. Quests for “flagging” for raiding zones were in place. All of this was in place almost from day one. Raiding was a f eature of World of Warcraft because its makers knew what EQ was. They knew what drove EQ players to play that game for unGodly numbers of hours.

I think the disconnect has to do with what raiding is defined as. Are raids a feature or are raids a means to an end? EQ had encounters that required huge groups of people to overcome. Those endeavors became raids. Raids became more organized over time. Now raids are something that are designed into an MMO. Raiding has become so trivialized and taken for granted, it is something that every player of an MMO is expected not only to do, but to be given every opportunity to be successful at. It has got to the point where everybody who plays WoW is expected to be able to “complete the game” as if they were playing a single player RPG. To anybody who was raiding EQ in its heyday from 2000 to about 2002, this is just sad.

Raiding is what the best players did together. They were exclusive groups because the designers of EQ’s end game content made the encounters hard. Guilds comprised of players who did not have the composure to learn from mistakes and many many “wipes” never succeeded. The top guilds were looked upon as arrogant elitists. That was mainly because those who felt that way were excluded. They were excluded because those top guilds needed to maintain a certain level of competence and qualification because otherwise, they would waste a lot of their personal time playing EQ by wiping unnecessarily because new or unskilled players made costly mistakes.

It is just not that way anymore. Blizzard has managed to bring down the level of difficulty for their game to the lowest common denominator. It is clear that this is what they want.

Unfortunately, because they have done this along with their status as the utimate 800 pound gorilla, most subscribed to MMO in history with numbers (at their peak) that will never be achieved again by any MMO, they were in a position to influence how we see MMOs for the indefinite future. They have influenced us all to expect an MMO “for the masses”. they have influenced us to expect instant gratification. They have influenced us to not want a real challenge. They have influenced us to not have to work all that hard to build a heavy duty player-character. They have influenced us to expect to win.

That’s not how things always were, but unfortunately it is probably how things will always be from now on.

And that’s sad.

I was playing some Terraria. That game dug its hooks into me deep fairly quickly. That game has a ton of potential and I think the developers are going to make that game amazing. As it is, it is very simple but extremely compelling. The exploration aspect got my attention. I suffered a lot of really frustrating, cheap deaths but kept coming back for more. I was putting in play sessions of many hours. I was able to collect most of the game’s loot after a couple days so now most of the game is trivial. I am hoping for some content expansions so I can play more.

Torchlight was on sale yesterday on Steam for $3 so I picked it up. That’s a great game. The UI is superior on XBox 360 but it is still very good on PC. My n52te makes it very intuitive. I am going to get my money’s worth until Torchlight 2 comes out.

I also finally broke down and got the Valve Complete Pack on sale for $50. There are quite a few games that I either never got around to playing or never quite finished over the years that I look forward to playing on my PC. I never quite finished Half Life 1 the first time around. I never touched Half Life 2. I got Portal 2 when it first came out for Xbox 360 and played a little with my wife. I’d like to play Portal 1 and 2 on PC. I will definitely get some fun out of the whole package. Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 should be fun as well.

I got Bioshock 2 for PS3 for $10 at Gamestop the other day. A buddy of mine gave me Ghostbusters for PS3 because he didn’t want or need it anymore. I was pretty pumped up about the Ghostbusters game when it was in development … before Activision axed development of all its games right before the Blizzard deal.

There are a lot of great games coming out this year. I am excited about Modern Warfare 3 (even thoguh I hate COD Multiplayer), Skyrim, Battlefield 3, and possibly still Star Wars The Old Republic. If the Ico/Shadows of the Collossus PS3 re-release comes out I will get it, and I will get The Last Guardian.

My wife and I are planning on starting a family soon so my video games budget has taken a hit and will be coming under a little more scrutiny, but I will still be getting most of what I want.

I guess what it boils down to is my motivation to play end game. The end game in WoW simply doesn’t do it for me anymore, so I am not going to set aside my own valuable time to chase end game with a guild whose drama becomes part of my life and time. There were no competent progression guilds that raid on an east coast friendly schedule on my Central Time Zone server (Khaz Modan) and I did not feel up to the task of proving myself to the newest batch of up and coming guilds. I certainly have the ability, but I do not have the desire. If there were a guild that I had really wanted to be with, I might have felt a little different but that is simply not the case.

So here I am about five months later, five months without any MMO action.

I just built a new PC. I am happy with the performance, but there aren’t any games I really want to play at this moment. Certainly not any MMOs. It feels like a waste almost.

I am becoming a little more interested in SWTOR. I reserved a guild name in case I want to run with it when the game launches. The name? “Killing Machine” of course.

I logged on to my storage alt. My decision to quit playing back in January was rather abrupt so I made little to no preparation to do so. Both his personal bank and the 5-tab guild bank that I maintain for storage were full of Wrath of the Lich King materials. Lots of cloth, cooking mats, some enchanting mats, raw epic gems, and almost everything that I had held onto from when I leveled my main character’s Inscription skill at the beginning of the WOTLK expansion and never bothered to get rid of. I put everything on the auction house. All told it was about 26k gold worth of auctions.

I logged onto my Hunter. I reconfigured his talent points after a little toying around with the Wowhead talent calculator.

Then I did some work and reconfigured the key bindings and redid my macros and bindings for my Nostromo n52te and MX Revolution mouse. After I got the basic controls to work, I started flying around. I purchased the new riding/flying skills and set my hearth to Stormwind. Then I set off for the new leveling area in Mount Hyjal. After some stumbling around, I got used to the new Hunter mechanics, the main one being the switch from Mana to Focus as a resource. After questing for a bit, it really started to become second nature.

After I hit level 82 I decided to try out one of the new dungeons. I went to Burning Steppes and discovered the new Blackrock Caverns zone. I queued up for the dungeon and got started. After a few tentative pulls learning how things were going to work, I started going full on with the DPS. I topped the damage meter for the run. Not bad for my first dungeon run in the new expansion, especially after a nearly 11 month layoff. After I hit 83, I ran a few more dungeons, including Stonecore. I have topped the damage meter in every run I have done so far with my numbers getting higher every time, partially attributable to gear upgrades … partially attributable to my growing comfort level with the class mechanics. The last run I did, I topped the damage meter with over 7k DPS. I’m still 83 and I pulled 10.6k single target DPS on the second to last mob in the zone Ozruk. I can’t wait to finish off 85 so I can run Heroics.

I have heard a lot about the difficulty of the content in this new expansion. So far I haven’t seen it. The leveling routine seems rather easy. Almost as easy as WOTLK was. the regular difficulty dungeons seem as easy as anything in WOTLK. I am assuming that the difficulty scales up significantly in the Heroic level dungeons. I talked to one friend who was so concerned about the difficulty level of the new zones that he is seriously considering quitting over it. That intrigues me but frustrates me at the same time. A lot of my old friends don’t play anymore, so I am concerned about fiding a group of good players to run with. I do NOT want to subject myself to failing with bad groups if these zones really are that much harder.

WOTLK taught WoW players to be lazy. It taught players to expect to go into a zone with 4 random players and blow through it with minimal effort. I remember back early on in The Burning Crusade expansion. Heroic groups were very well thought out, and pickup groups tended to be doomed to failure. I often ran with top notch players because my skill in the crucial area of crowd control was much appreciated by those with whom I played. The dungeon runs were easy for us, but most other players had a hard time. Eventually, with the changes to game mechanics and the natural scaling that came along with the improved gear in the expansion really trivialized everything in the game. But early on they were hard. WOTLK was different. Everybody was ready for Heroics the instant they turned level 80 because the game was just so easy.

I am very curious what kind of DPS I can pull in Heroics with a good group and with a few more gear improvements.

And of course that leads naturally to the next question … do I still have what it takes to be a top notch raiding Hunter, and will I have the time and/or desire to be one going forward … time will certainly tell. For the time being, I have a few more levels to go … I am halfway to 84. I  have been playing a few hours here, a few hours there … trying to spend quality time with my wife and dogs, and still get things done around the house. My approach is totally different this time around.

My plan had been to sit in the wings and wait for the next great MMO, get reacquainted with my consoles, catch up on my reading list, get back in shape, and enjoy not having anything to do with WoW. My plan for this blog was to chronicle that process. I had meant to go through the discovery of my next MMO and put it into words and share it here. FF14 is a disaster. SWTOR is looking more and more underwhelming as time goes on. The Kingdoms of Amalur MMO isn’t going to be here anytime soon.

I have been enjoying my consoles as of late, but they haven’t really given me much to talk about on this blog. Castlevania Lords of Shadow was great even though the  final boss fight against God knows who was repetitive and annoying and the ending was just weird. Force Unleashed 2 was excellent until I got to the Darth Vader fight at  a point which I had assumed was a middle of the game transitional storyline encounter turned into being the annoyingly repetitive final boss fight … bringing what was otherwise a tremendously enjoyable game to a premature end. I have been playing Fallout New Vegas, but I haven’t got too far into the game yet.

This brings me to World of Warcraft. I really did intend to never play again. The Cataclysm expansion launch came and went and I was mildly interested. The expansions always bring an opportunity for a fresh start. he Burning Crusade gutted the game. The game’s best geared players replaced every piece of gear as they leveled from 60 to 70, then furthered the process as they got into the new content. The game was thrown completely out of whack as raid groups were reduced from 40 to 25, so much of the expansion saw many guilds in a constant state of adjustment as they figured out how they would adapt their players and approach to the new game. A lot of players found themselves out of a job and many people floated from guild to guild throughout the expansion. Wrath of the Lich King was an experiment in what I like to call online socialism. The entire expansion was an entreaty to the lowest common denominator of gamers. It was a complete dumbing down of the game in almost every way to appeal to lazy, mediocre players. High end content seemed designed to allow casual or players otherwise incapable of defeating difficult content to achieve success and get the same rewards that better and more capable players could get. It sickened me.

Cataclysm by all accounts is a return to a much more difficult game. There has been a complete reworking of game mechanics for almost every class. The stat system has been redone. Everybody I know tells me that the early content is very difficult and it is tying mediocre players up into knots. I am intrigued.

So a couple of days ago I downloaded the game client. Then I reactivated my account. Then I upgraded my account to the Cataclysm expansion. I logged on yesterday and cleared out my storage character’s bank and 5 tab guild bank of all the WOTLK materials I had hoarded before my abrupt decision to quit. It all added up to over 26k gold worth of auctions. I am extremely curious how much I will make from it all.

Tomorrow I will reconfigure my key bindings to work with my Nostromo n52te and Logitech MX Revolution mouse. Today (as I serve a 24 hour duty period at work) I will complete my research of Hunter mechanics and the new shot priorities. Tomorrow I will dive headfirst into leveling with the expectation of being done in about two or three days. Then I will get into polishing my technique to a mirror shine and reestablishing myself as a top player.

Then I will have the tough decision to make. I will then decide what my intermediate to long term plans with WoW are. To refuse to acknowledge what WoW is and the time commitment it entails is foolish. If I decide to play WoW again, it will be to accept the time commitment for what it is and begin adjusting the rest of my life accordingly. If I decide to go forward, then I must decide whether I will seek a guild that raids on an east coast friendly schedule or look into forming my own east coast friendly guild.

I must admit that even though I really did enjoy the extra time that I had, courtesy of not playing an MMO, I am a little excited about playing again. I enjoyed the commitment of keeping up to date on the game and its many changes. I enjoyed playing. Now I will greatly enjoy making myself a killing machine in the World … of Warcraft.

I’ll be waiting in line for Reach tonight.  Don’t ask me why, but I am excited about this game.  I’ve been left behind for lack of participation in the console shoot ‘em up world over the last few years, but I am going to give Reach a good effort and try to get my feet wet again.  That should hold me over until Fallout New Vegas and Force Unleashed rock my world next month.  So look for Sente KM on Xbox Live and try not to embarrass me too much!

I’ve been toying with EVE Online, but I think I am going to cancel my subscription.  As intriguing as that game is, and as enjoyable as it can be at times, I question what it can do for me and the answers are not convincing.  I cannot grind to get ahead and establish myself as a top player faster than the average player, and because of that it will literally take me 6 months to over a year before I can play at the level that I like to play MMO’s.  I am not certain I want to put that time commitment in, when I have no certainty whether there will even be a hard core player base still paying to play the game at that time.

That makes me ask myself what the future holds for me in MMOs.  I love not being tied to my computer, but I miss the times I had playing EverQuest and World of Warcraft at a high level.  To this day, nothing beats building my EQ guild Infinite Alliance into something special and later raiding Plane of Time and flagging for the Gates of Discord and Omens of War expansions before I quit to play EQ2 and then WoW.  WoW was incredible to me early on getting Molten Core and Blackwing Lair on farm status, then after losing my place in my server’s top guild Sunder after a long hiatus, having to hustle to re-establish my reputation as one of the top players on my server during the later time frame of The Burning Crusade and on into Wrath of the Lich King where I was able to prove myself once again with the guild Cataclysm.  I am done with WoW and how their bean counters have ruined what was once an incredible game.

Final Fantasy XIV looks outstanding. The Old Republic looks great and shiny, but my gut is telling me that it has letdown written all over it. Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning has a ton of promise but the MMO version won’t be a reality for a long, long time.

In the meantime, I have real life things that need to get done.  It amazes me that people accomplish things in real life while playing MMOs hardcore.  That is something that to this day I have never been able to really claim, so my future in MMOs is cloudy.  I love playing MMOs at a high level … so who knows?

The last thing on my mind in terms of gaming is mobile gaming, namely mobile device gaming on stuff like iPhone, Android, etc.  Lately I have read so many articles stating sales numbers of casual mobile games compared to stuff like PSP and Nintendo DS games and take the opportunity to declare the death of those platforms.  I think that’s stupid.  Hot shit consoles have not killed PC gaming, nor will bite sized mobile games kill PSP and the DS.  To think that sales numbers alone should dictate where investment and developer focus should go is just ridiculous … just because you can sell a million copies of a casual game on the iOS platform (or Android, or Windows Phone 7 or whatever) at a low development cost and a low retail cost doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for high production value games on more powerful platforms.  The PSP does things that the iPhone or iPod Touch can’t do.  The high end PC does things that the consoles cannot do.  I wish the tech geek press would get that through their heads.

Three hours until Halo: Reach hits the east coast and I’ll get to work being a baddy that gets killed by everybody.  Cheers.

What made Wing Commander special to me was in equal parts outstanding story, immersion into that story, deep and fun space combat mechanics, and an x-factor that I still can’t quite put my finger on.  One of my greatest frustrations in gaming is how Wing Commander has been neglected and abanadoned as a franchise.  It really is too bad.  I even read every Wing Commander fiction novel.  Some were good, some were awful, but I loved the immersion because I loved the property so much.

Privateer was a freeform style sandbox single player game set in the Wing Commander universe.  The Kilrathi War was still raging, and the game itself took place in the remote Gemini Sector (WC1 was in Vega Sector, WC2 was in Enigma Sector).  Every so often you would run into deserter Kilrathi pilots in Kilrathi spacecraft in addition to Terran Confederation military craft and local militias.  The setting was so well done.  The game was totally sandbox and it was years ahead of its time.  You could basically do whatever you wanted.  You could run combat missions as a mercenary for hire or a freelance pirate.  You could be a merchant and buy and sell goods (buy low and sell high).  There were different types of ships to fit with the different activities you were interested in.  I loved this game and I have often looked back fondly on my time playing it in the mid 90s.

So, the other day I walked in on a guy I work with and he had an EVE Online website on his work computer (we are allowed 30 minutes per day for personal web browsing and I am certain he was within his alloted time).  I asked him about it and he suggested I try a trial account with him as a referrer.  I did a little research on the game, then I downloaded the game client and created an account.  Ever since then, I have been enthralled with the depth of this game.  It is not a twitch game for sure … quite to the contrary it is a little slow and requires massive amounts of patience.  However it is deep … VERY deep … Marianas Trench deep.  My head spins when I try to wrap my mind around all the things that can be done in this game.  And the damn thing is, it totally brings me back to my days sitting down playing Wing Commander Privateer.

So now I am hooked on this game.  I like how I can log in and kill stuff or alt-tab out while mining.  I like the many options I have and the different paths I can take.  Will I aspire to be a resource collector?  Prospector?  Businessman?  Combat oriented mercenary?  Or a griefer pirate?  Or will I do numerous paths in no particular order?

The time sink factor in this game is different than anything I have seen.  There is a passive skill-up system that works even when you are not logged in so traditional grinding as it is known in MMOs doesn’t quite apply in this game.  Some very high end skills take months to complete … and you basically just wait for it to complete … and while it is going, that is the only skill that is training.  Definitely different.  This game definitely requires some commitment and direction.  Otherwise I can play as much or as little as I want and still progress.  There are a lot of things I am still learning, but the basis of this game intrigues me and I really do like it.  This is also the kind of game I could play concurrently with another MMO if I chose to do so … and eventually I probably will once I start with my next MMO … whichever that may be, but probably SWTOR.

As I had mentioned in a previous post, the game I am most excited about is the single player RPG/MMO combo project from 38 Studios.  The idea is that they will release a MMO, preceded by a single player multi-platform (Presumably Xbox 360, PS3, and PC) RPG whose story will set the table for the MMO, kinda sorta like the Warcraft 3 RTS storyline set the plot for the beginning of World of Warcraft, which in my opinion worked out very well.  38 Studios has what appears to me like an All Star cast of creative talent.  RA Salvatore is creating a new story, Todd Macfarlane is creating the artwork, Ken Rolston who was the lead designer of the excellent Elder Scrolls 3 and 4 RPGs is the lead designer, and Curt Schilling is the front man.

I just found out that the RPG will be announced at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con on July 22.

http://www.televisionaryblog.com/2010/07/san-diego-comic-con-2010-thursday.html

1:15-2:15 World Premiere of the First Game From 38 Studios— Be among the first in the world to see the video game debut from Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios. Hear from the visionaries who have teamed up to create this highly anticipated RPG and the rich world it is set in, including 38 Studios’ executive art director Todd McFarlane (Spawn, Spider-Man), executive creator of worlds R. A. Salvatore (Forgotten Realms), lead designer Ken Rolston (Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion), and founder and chairman Curt Schilling. Learn all about this ambitious new project as 38 Studios unveils the name of the game along with the world premiere of the game’s first trailer directed by McFarlane. Attendees will also receive a limited-edition poster. Room 6A
Categories: Action/Adventure | Comics | Games

Needless to say I am pretty excited!

I also have no desire to play anything on my Playstation 3, Xbox 360, or my Wii. I have a passing interest in playing some stuff I have for PSP and DSi, but not overwhelmingly so.  I beat Red Dead Redemption not too long ago, what a great game that was.

As a gamer, I am taking a break from playing anything really for at least the next few weeks if not longer.  There are a few older games I never got around to playing and I might pick up to finish for the stories before a lot of stuff comes out later this year … mainly the one I have in mind is Force Unleashed.  Later this year, I am interested in Force Unleashed 2, Infamous 2, Patapon 3, and Fallout New Vegas.  In the meantime, I will probably try my RTS skills out when Starcraft 2 comes out on my birthday.

What I am really waiting for right now is Star Wars: The Old Republic.  I don’t plan on playing much of anything, particularly MMOs, but if I can get into one of the public beta testing periods, I will gladly jump in and play it because right now that is the game I am waiting for.  I miss playing a fun MMO with other good players.  A few of my old Sunder mates are putting together a guild for when TOR comes out so I am looking forward to playing with them again.  It should be fun.  I plan on taking about two weeks off for the game’s launch, and I plan on buying a new beastly computer to run the game (in addition to renewing my digital photography and Photoshop hobby).

In all honesty, the MMO I am really interested in is the 38 Studios Project Copernicus.  The team putting that game together gives me high hopes that this will be the game that will end all MMO games … but there are so few details available it.  TOR is a lot more tangible at this point in time and it has me very interested, but Copernicus is what I really have my eye on.  If TOR disappoints, I will probably hedge my bet with Final Fantasy 14 … but I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.  I love not having myself tied down to playing an MMO right now, but I really do love MMOs.  It sucks if you think about it.  World of Warcraft turned out to be such a letdown.  Right when I got to a point where I was at the top of my game, and I was as good or better as anybody on my server at my class, Blizzard started dismantling their own game.  The new Cataclysm expansion is just going to be more of the same mediocre crap they’ve been delivering the last few years.  It’s too bad.

What does a gamer do when he is not playing games?  Well, I’ve been putting a dent in my reading list.  I just read Karl Rove’s Courage and Consequence.  Right now I am reading Wealth of Nations, and once I can get it on Kindle, I want to read The Grand Jihad by Andrew McCarthy.  I’ve also capitalized on all my extra time by working on my Go game and practicing martial arts.