Way back before the holiday mayhem started, I received a promotional from Blizzard to play the Pandaria expansion for two weeks.  I wasn't feeling any real need to go back to WoW but I heard so many good things about the latest expansion that I took them up on their offer.  Amazingly, Blizzard managed to get back a little of the magic that surrounded the game during the heady Lich King days.

What Blizzard had managed to do was keep all the great things about the Cataclysm expansion and curtail its excesses (such as too many cutscenes, phasing and vehicle quests).  The smooth sailing questing lines that I enjoyed in Cataclysm, with no back and forth to the same areas, has been introduced to Pandaria as well.  I loved the new story lines and the mysterious Pandaren continent.  As crazy as it may seem, Blizzard managed to throw off its European Middle Ages Sword fantasy shtick and totally immerse itself in Chinese Middle Ages Sword fantasy shtick.  The new expansion feels like a different game.

The artwork is absolutely fantastic.  Despite the low fi graphics, Pandaria looks lush and colorful.  Great attention was paid to creating wide open spaces as players leave the initial forest area.  The vistas are gorgeous and created with care to mimic real Chinese scenery.  The game's equivalent of The Great Wall is a true achievement.  What is even more, the new score for the expansion is just as beautiful and matches the art.

The class tree lines have been pared down to very straight and simple techniques.  On my Paladin main, this was a relief.  I mostly played as a Retribution Paladin since I mainly just solo play.  During Cataclysm my Pally was hamstrung because her hits depended on the game's casino wheel to roll triple diamonds.  This meant she either wiped NPCs with just a look or she would be forced to keep hitting for minutes on end.  It was strange and frustrating.  Thankfully that is all gone.  The wheel of big hits has been tamed and now Pallys do reliable damage.  I spent a bit of time on my other main, a warlock and she is doing rather well too.  However the warlock is nowhere near the powerhouse it used to be and was once the scourge of PvP and PvE alike.

Cross server areas....  I'm holding back my opinion on this element.  This was Blizzard's way of trying not to close empty servers.  In fact I was a little dismayed and confused when I was visiting Silvermoon to see it filled with players with hyphenated designations/server names.  There are only certain areas where the cross servers work and those areas are mostly low population.  However I've noticed that it hasn't led to happy, happy family results.  It mostly leads to people from my server snarling at cross server visitors to go back to their own servers.  It doesn't help that the players sharing my server are from Moonguard (which has a terrible reputation as being the red light district of WOW).   We'll see where this goes eventually.

I have run two dungeons so far, Stormstout Brewery and Shado-Pan Monastery.  Both times I held my breath when I signed up for LFG.  WoW still has a terrible reputation for nastiness among its players.  I have to admit I rarely experienced this in any group, even during my heyday in the game.  However I am no longer the player I used to be nor even half as good.  So I was terrified of being cut out of a dungeon run.  My fears were unfounded and the two groups I was matched with were calm and cool.  Out of the two dungeons I found Stormstout the more enjoyable.  The fights were slapstick instead of the intense atmosphere in Shado-Pan.  I especially enjoyed rolling barrels into a monkey boss who liked to throw banana peels at players.

So far I have found a lot of enjoyment in this expansion, and I was glad to purchase a few extra months to see it develop.  Does that mean I will be going back to WOW.  I'm not sure.  I'm not the motivated player I was years ago and there are times when weeks go by in which I don't play any games.  A regular subscription isn't cost effective for me at this time.  But I can say that I will probably spend 3 to to 6 months in Pandaria.  Because right now, looking out at the game scenery while standing on the Great Wall is just too enchanting.

Wootberry Joos!

The team behind Raglan Shire in SL has created an animation series inspired by their VR town and community.

Its adorable and I can't wait to see what else they have in store.

The closure of a game...

A few days ago, Tiny Speck announced that they will be closing Glitch.

I am rather saddened by the news but also extremely unsurprised.

When I started to play the game last year, it amused and charmed me.  It also had a rather grim, creepy, horror tale vibe that appealed to me.  Despite its cartoony graphics, the game reminded me of the more involved gameplay in such games as Second Life and Eve Online.  Strange as it may seem, Second Life and Eve Online share quite a number of gamers between them.  Glitch entered this strange relationship and became a third in a gaming triangle of weird, wacky, dangerous and thought provoking games.

Tiny Speck's announcement that its closure was partly due to being unable to find a large audience, unspoken was that the audience it did have didn't pay it enough.

Well I don't think the game's audience should be blamed for outright mismanagement on Tiny Speck's part.

They didn't promote their game enough.  They heavily relied on the word of mouth viral idea.  Which isn't a bad thing but it should be done ALONG with regular marketing.  The viral needs to get started than as people become more curious more professional marketing should take up the slack.  Tiny Speck just did the viral and never backed it up with concrete advertising.  The actual marketing they did do was in the form of one release trailer two years ago, that baffled prospective fans and gave them no idea what was actually IN the game.



I mean really, even myself (a fan of the game), said WTF WAS THAT?

Consider that the trailer was released two years ago and it stated that release was Spring 2011.  By the time I joined, Fall 2011, the game was barely out of beta.  It wasn't even accepting open sign ups.  I believe I just sent in an email to Tiny Speck and a few weeks later, I received an invite.  Truthfully I don't even know how I won this invite because I heard that a lot of people never received one.  Was it a lottery system?

Why did a newly released game need a lottery system?  Why did it need to throttle and bottleneck its audience?  Again, it could be my previously stated thought that the game wanted to be a viral success.  But we also need to get a more reality based reason, this game could not properly scale with its potential audience.  Prokofy Neva, in regard to Second Life, has often thought that Linden Lab purposefully throttled its audience due to scaling issues.  I think Tiny Speck did the same with Glitch.

In fact they slowly allowed more and more people into the game Fall 2011 into Winter 2012.  And most of these new people were due to established players sending out personal invites.  Mind you, there were still potential fans waiting for invites from their emails to Tiny Speck.  Apparently most of these people were ignored.  And that had to create a kind of blacklash to the Viral goodness that Tiny Speck was trying to establish.

One of the major signs that the game was not scaling properly was centered in the issue of housing.  The housing in Glitch of Fall 2011 consisted of the player becoming authorized with a game permit.  This required the player to apply and wait in a crazy office staffed by lazy NPC monsters asking inane questions.  It was a hilarious send up of any professional bureaucracy.  After receiving a permit, the player had to gather up game money then buy a house in a desired district.  Each district had its own style of houses and different sizes from hovel to mansion.  However within each district was a number of "streets" shared between a few players.  Once these streets were full, the housing was sold-out.  It turned out to be an incredibly popular gameplay option with the game's fans, it forced Tiny Speck to constantly be spewing out new districts along with their streets.

As I said, the game was failing in the scaling area.

Instead of working with the issue, Tiny Speck did the worst possible thing to do, they pulled their game out of release state and sent it straight back to Beta.  Yes.  Crazy wasn't it?  Whatever marketing they had planned (and it had to have been more than just that one awful trailer) was nixed and signups were closed.  Even personal invites were no longer an option.

What did this mean for the game?  Their audience was kept small ON PURPOSE!  It was not allowed to grow.  They never left BETA.  They used the illusion of all those potential fans, languishing on a wait list, as a reason to throw more money away on the game.  They counted the proverbial birds in the bush rather than the one in their hands.  So folks, they ballooned their costs in man hours, game assets and other development on an illusion of more fans.  Meanwhile back in reality, those potential fans chalked off their unreceived invites and rightly deduced that the company was mismanaging its game, then moved on.

I even saw this problem and left the game because of it.  The ill conceived beta was mainly to deal with the housing issue.  In place of what the game had, the houses were now all free, turning a previous achievement and valuable commodity into something worthless.  The new houses were ugly as sin.  The ways to "expand" these new houses were slipshod and unappealing.  Of course, the small fan base was ecstatic over these changes.

However the game never opened up its signup page again.  It didn't even allow players to send personal invites until just before the closure announcement.

And their announcement had the gall to state that the game never received the audience they thought it would attract.

Well its hard to get an audience if you don't allow them into the front door.

Of course, there was also a problem of the game being built on Flash.  Which is dying and being superseded by HTML 5.  Obviously Tiny Speck wasted all of its money on the jackass BETA ONCE AGAIN plan instead of getting a start on reconfiguring its code into the new standard.

Well no use crying over the mistakes.

It is a shame.  The game had potential, it had a potential audience.  Which the company allowed to slip away.  A cautionary tale.

Hamster Lovin

Second Life was the first program that got me into massive multi-player worlds. In fact, I think I found SL so easy to learn because I was not a gamer. So the arcane UI was not a hinderance. It did however make learning WoW's UI a torturous experience. Anyway games come and go but I always find time to wander a bit around SL. A lot of people find the place daunting and unfriendly but to people willing to stick out the learning curve it becomes more like "Cheers". Fall is the best time in Second Life. People are starting to gear up for the holidays and the major shopping events and hunts begin all over the grid. Right now the place for SL hipsters to be is The Arcade Gacha Event.

The Gacha events have taken up the slack of the much missed and very much loved Seasons Hunt event. Unlike treasure hunt events, Gacha events are a bit like going to Atlantic City. You put a bit of money into a slot machine and win various different prizes. It can be addictive. Especially for popular items. The Arcade Gacha Event is set up like an old Victorian, Atlantic City pavilion. It is filled with little slot machines which contain numerous variations of prizes that consist of furniture, clothing, knick knacks and avatars. The big hit of this event is Beetlebones' Hamster.

This adorable hamster is a mesh based avatar that a player can wear. It comes in various colors. The price to play and win a coveted color is 100L (around a $1 real money). So far, I have only 4 colors.

The Arcade event is extremely crowded and I haven't been able to get back after my first visit. But I will be heading back to bet on more hamsters and other fancies.

For those interested, Second Life will be coming to Steam soon. There are some changes being made to accomodate this new partnership. Perhaps it will even out the steep learning curve. Who knows? If it does, then you too can be a hamster.



The Hamster vid is from Larcoco's Flickr stream

Some Time Later...

It's been some time after the release of Guild Wars 2 and updates are trickling into the gaming blog/news community.  Tobold had an interesting post regarding falling play numbers for GW2.

This is not a surprising result to me or many other people.  In today's game environment, new mmorpgs only have a small window of opportunity to make a mark.  GW2 attempts to keep this window open with their buy2play formula.  The company is, in essence, trying to recoup their expenditures as close to the front as possible.  Then glide on store purchases.

So at this point, a fall in the number of hours played are not a worry for GW2.  What would cause worry is a fall in store revenue.  Anet has not released any kind of serious financial health information on the game (except that it sold 2 million copies), so we can't tell if their store is a success or failure.

Since the game marketed itself as casual friendly and no subscription, the creators may have counted on the ebb and flow of players.  They released the game knowing that Blizzard was going to send out a big expansion (Pandaria) in the same time frame.  I feel they knew they would lose players to the biggest game in the industry.  The question is, how much did they plan around that fact?  Will Anet crumple into a heap much in the same way that SWTOR did when it flagged in numbers?

It is still too soon to tell.  As for me, my own hours in the game have flagged.  This is not due to falling interest in the game.  I still enjoy it.  But I find myself engaged in RL activities and I feel that is much healthier than loafing about in an mmorpg.

Also, for the record, I did not buy nor do I plan to buy Mists of Pandaria.  I'm taking a wait and see attitude toward WOW right now, especially since I felt burnt from the Cataclysm expansion.  The expansion I am thinking about buying is, crazy enough, RIFT's Storm Legion.

To Rohan

A few months ago I received an invitation to participate in Turbine's Riders of Rohan closed beta program.  The email didn't make an impression on me since I decided to write it off as a phishing attempt.  To my surprise the legitmacy of the email was confirmed when I logged into Turbine's LOTRO forums and was able to see the Closed Beta discussion site.

I downloaded the program to both my Windows computer and to, my surprise, my Mac computer as well.  The majority of my play time was dedicated to testing the Beta client for the Mac.

Mac Client

As far as performance for the Mac client, I had no major problems.  My Mac is a mid-2007 and it ran the beta client rather well.  My graphic settings ran comfortably on mid to high.  There were a few strange artifacts here and there (such as flickering) but those problems were also shared by the windows client too.  However, I can't vouch for the client staying playable for older macs for the release in October (if they release the mac client with ROR).  Many things could change and that may make the client unusable for older macs.  As of now, it works amazingly well.

Rohan

I don't want to release too many spoilers for the new expansion.  But to just say that right now, the quest stories for Rohan are very interesting.  Every quest left me waiting to learn more as I traveled to each new quest hub.  The graphics are outstanding.  The Turbine art team really went to great lengths to capture the area from Tolkein's books.  The area now has new music scored by the Chance Thomas (returning due to popular demand).  All I can say is that theme used to introduce the player's entrance to Rohan is wonderful.

Game Play and Mounted Combat

Regular game play has not radically changed in this expansion.  Everything is still the same for most classes with some added tweaks.

The real change comes with mounted combat.  Mounted combat is not like the mount system used in WoW's Lich King expansion.  Turbine is really taking chances with this new system and tailoring it to act as closely as possible to real world dynamics.  Each class has mounted attacks that closely mimic their regular combat technique.  But just punching out these attacks are not where the difficulty comes into the picture.  Every player must learn how to maneuver their mount around enemies.  The horse mounts are based on heavy combat destrier models used during the Middle Ages.  Since they are large and muscular, they don't turn on a dime once they are up to full speed.

This is where Turbine has added in a special trait line, in which players can choose between speed or strength or a mix for their mounts.  If you choose a quicker horse, a player will gain speed and manuverability over health.  These horses suited for DPS classes need to keep moving since being unhorsed is an ever present probability.  Believe me, you don't want to be unhorsed in the middle of an NPC warband.  The trait line geared for strength and health are for the tank classes.  But that doesn't mean a player gets to stand still while attacking.  A player needs to move to build up fury for their mounted attacks.

The mounted combat tutorial does give good basics but the majority of the learning curve is spent in regular combat.  Once you learn how to maneuver the mount into and out of combat, it makes this new fighting style very exciting.

Delayed Launch

ROR was originally set to release today, the 5th.  But due to various bugs, the date was pushed back to October 15.  I believe that was a very good decision.  The major reason why this was done was to ensure that mounted combat was as smooth as possible.  There will little issues with mounted animations and manuverability.  I believe Turbine is really close to the end result so an extra month is just what was needed.  There were also little graphic anomalies during quest instances and some broken NPCs.  Which shouldn't be too hard to fix up.

All in all this will be Turbine's most exciting expansion in quite awhile and I'm looking forward to it.

The launch of the good ship GW2

So it has been a little over a week since GW2's launch.  This is counting my extra days because I pre-purchased.

And I must state that I am satisfied with the game.

The problem that irked me the most, the female caster armor, looks as if it has been addressed.  The starting gear is still that atrocious bikini miniskirt lacy underwear number.  But as soon as I was able to level up the tailoring craft, the outfit turned into a harem dance girl outfit.  Still a little squicky but not as bad as the mini skirt.  Later on a quest reward gave me an even better looking shirt with fuller coverage.  The character still looks sexy but just not the stripper-in-search-of-a-venue look.  I'm hoping that as the character levels there will be a consistency in the gear.

The game has been crowded beyond imagination from the first day I logged in.  Most thought that the majority of players were the pre-purchase crowd and things would be smooth for actual launch day.  The auction house was down for the majority of the headstart.  Which most overlooked since the game had not officially launched.  So I know that I was hoping that it would be up for opening day.

It was not.

In fact I think the game developers miscalculated how popular the game would be.  They were happy with the pre-purchase numbers and most likely did not count upon fence sitters (after all you can't hope for hypothetical crowds).  But it turned out that they showed up in greater numbers due to word of mouth.  I think I've spent more time on overflow servers than I have on the server that I chose to play on.  Even though the overflow servers were created to address large crowds and forestall the need to add extra servers (which may go empty a few weeks down the line), this nice solution groaned under the weight of all the players.  I heard of tales of disconnects, crashes and groups being split up due to being sent to different overflow servers.  The auction house has not been up yet.  ArenaNet has not opened up its forums so a true account of player discontent or lack of it is unknown.  However they did bite the bullet and started to add more servers.

Personally I haven't experienced any major problems.  The AH being down is inconvenient but not game breaking.  What would concern me would be actual problems with character attacks.  But unlike SWTOR that suffered from ability delay, GW2 is blessedly free of that problem.  The attacks are just as smooth as the ones in World of Warcraft.  Which is a very genuine achievement and it is practically the only game that has come close to that gold standard.

To conclude, I'm very happy with the game.  I can see myself spending time in its world more than I planned.