Month: May 2012

A little more Diablo 3

Posted on by Nimgimli

When Diablo 3 launched, I wasn’t a fan. I was hoping for a real sequel to Diablo II in more than just lore and the very broadest of brush strokes, but that’s not what Blizzard delivered and I found it hard to adjust. I was anticipating a game with endless character building possibilities but Blizzard opted to deliver a more mainstream title for today’s more casual gamer. People no longer see having to re-roll a character as part of the challenge of gameplay and learning a game; they see it as an annoyance.

Anyway while Raptr was showing people racking up 18 hours in the first 3 days of launch, I put about 5 hours in total in the first week. I just didn’t find it all that interesting so I stopped playing.

Friday night, after almost a full week away, I picked it up again. I spent some time tweaking the controls (I have Move on W and Stop on E & D) so it controls a little like a direct control game (downside is I keep hitting S meaning to backup but instead pop up the Skill window in mid fight) and I have easy access to the few hotkeys the game gives you. I think these adjustments helped me let go of the dream of a sequel to Diablo II since the game now played so differently. I also turned off the stupid, stupid system that makes you bind certain skills to certain buttons and only lets you have 1 skill in every category active at a time. Now at least I have some tactical customization options.

You can probably tell by the tone of this post that I still harbor some ill-will towards the game, but at least I’m finding it fun in small doses now. Mostly I’m just soaking up the lore and the random chat going on around me. My Templar companion makes me chuckle fairly often and the things the villagers say can be amusing as well. The gameplay still seems awfully simple and there are some very odd decisions that seem to have been made as a result of yanking features. For instance they’ve gotten rid of Town Portal and Identify scrolls. Casting Town Portal takes a few seconds and I understand that…you don’t want it to be an escape mechanism from a tough fight. But Identify takes a few seconds, too. Why? Why have Unidentified items at all if you just have to right click them to identify them?

I do miss those scrolls though. I miss having a full inventory and having to decide if it’s worth the cost of a Town Portal to go back and sell, or if I should just discard some low value objects and press on. On the other hand, not requiring them keeps casual players clicking away, which is what Diablo 3 is all about. Click click and click some more! It could almost be a Zynga game.

Another thing that’s a bit disappointing was finding out that my rate of fire while holding down the left mouse button is much slower than the rate of fire I can obtain by rapidly clicking it. On the one hand, the ‘hold down’ rate of fire is sufficient to kill most enemies before they get near me. On the other hand, if the game ever does ramp up the challenge spamming that button is going to play hell with my RSI issues on my mousing hand.

I’m a bit baffled by the loot system, too. I’ve had a few Rare items drop but they’ve tended to be no better than Blue items I already had equipped, even though they both have the same level requirements. Nor do they salvage into anything interesting. I guess they’re meant to be vendored? Or maybe I’ve just been unlucky. I did find one rare Quiver that is pretty interesting..it has a bunch of stat boosts on it. Most of my Rare stuff has been dull, though.

So far gold has been kind of irrelevant. I’ve been spending all mine to level up the Blacksmith since the merchants never have anything worth buying, I’ve never had need of potions, and scrolls have been removed from the game. Essentially there seems to be a lack of gold sinks in the Normal Difficulty game. I understand this all changes a lot on higher difficulties though. I don’t want to use the AH because honestly the game is providing absolutely no challenge at this point (still in Act 1, remember) and I certainly don’t want to make it any easier.

My goal for now is to chip away at my first play-through, enjoying the story and the lore. Then when I have the higher difficulty levels unlocked I’m hoping the gameplay gets more interesting (or maybe even before then…perhaps later Acts get more exciting). Or perhaps I should re-roll as a barbarian (I’m playing a demon hunter) since I hear in general the game is much more challenging for melee characters. Or maybe Blizzard will put a $9.95 “unlock” item up for sale that lets me jump to higher difficulty levels before finishing normal.

Still, I’m at the point where I can jump in and spend an hour having fun just making monsters go “Blammo!” and listening to my Templar pal hoot and holler and ask for more fights like that one. This is way beyond where I was during launch week when I was just pissed off that I’d flushed $60 down the toilet for a game I really didn’t like.

I really wish players could just pick a difficulty level from the start. I think that would’ve changed my experience considerably.

TGIF Gaming Wrap-up for 5/25/2012

Posted on by Nimgimli

This will probably be my last TGIF post for a while. I do these mostly for myself and at this point, week after week of nothing much to report is just boring me. I can’t begin to imagine how dull the posts are for others! I might start ’em up again when I find myself juggling a bunch of games.

Purchases This Week
Aside from some extra Hero Academy armies, no new purchases this week.

Played This Week
Raptr says 1 hour of TERA and about half an hour of Diablo 3. I’ve also been playing a lot of Hero Academy and Ascension on the iPad.

Plans for the Week to Come
Hope to fit some TERA into the weekend. I also feel kind of obligated to give Diablo 3 another try in order to understand what all the fuss is about. At this point I’ve only put in 5 hours, which means I’ve paid $12/hour to play. That burns me up! But I just am not feeling any compulsion to continue playing.

I might be on the lookout for some new strategy games to play, too. Real, turn-based strategy games, not “RTS” strategy games that depend on APM or whatever the measurement is. But I need to find something that’s not too complex because I don’t have hours and hours to devote to learning to play. We’ll see.

For my US readers, happy 3 day weekend! To everyone else, happy 2 day weekend!

Taking a break, and turning to tablet gaming?

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve been doing “TGIF” gaming summaries here at Dragonchasers for a few weeks now, and I often rough them out on Thursdays since not much is going to change between Thursday night and Friday evening. So I was checking my Raptr profile and it shows that in the last week I’ve played 1 hour of TERA and 30 minutes of Diablo 3.

Apparently, I’m taking a break from gaming. I was wondering why I was feeling so relaxed.

See, with sunset so late in the evening now, I’ve been getting in from walks with Lola at about 9 pm. Trying to then compress catching up on RSS feeds, catching up on emails and writing a blog post and leaving enough time to get into a ‘real’ game like TERA was really starting to stress me out, and I kept staying up much too late to try and fit everything in. I was tired and grumpy at work, where I was trying to juggle keeping up with G+, getting in some RSS tracking and, y’know, doing my actual work, all while feeling like I could put my head down on the desk and go right to sleep.

So this week, I just stopped gaming. At least, I stopped playing TERA which is the only ‘real’ game I’m interested in right now. Instead I’ve been gaming on the iPad.

WTF? What have I become? I’m the guy who is always ranting and raving about how we need true handheld systems and true consoles because “mobile gaming” just doesn’t cut it. So have I switched teams?

No, actually I haven’t. I’m not playing action-based games on the iPad and I still think the lack of physical controls makes action-y games not great on a tablet. Instead I’m doing a bunch of asynchronous multiplayer strategy gaming (back in ye olden tymes we’d call that “Play by Email”) with friends. Friends who, like me, were hardcore gamers at one point (and possibly still are) but who (and I’m doing a bit of assuming here) find it hard to squeeze gaming in during the week these days. But grabbing the iPad to play a turn of Ascension or Hero Academy? That, they have time for.

So I chill on the couch, send off a turn and do some work until I get the notification that one of my buddies has taken his turn. Then I bounce over, make my move and go back to working. It’s a great way to fit some fun into the evening without making it into a stressful thing. And it’s been a great way to re-connect with my gaming friends, who’re scattered all over the world.

I’m Dragonchasers in GameCenter and pasmith in Hero Academy. I still suck at both games so if you want some easy wins send me an invite.

I’ve been really happy with the 3rd generation iPad even though I really still prefer Android over iOS. For multiplayer gaming, iPad vs Android is like Xbox vs PS3. What matters isn’t the actual platform so much as being where all your friends are. When I had an iPad 1 I was kind of on the bleeding edge and not many friends had tablets (nor were there many MP games out there). But now, iPad ownership is common among my old friends and, while we’re focusing on just two games right now, there are plenty of others for us to move onto if we get bored.

Angela and I are planning on moving in a few months and we need to start planning and packing for that. The days are still getting longer and Lola is showing no signs of losing her ‘puppy energy’ any time soon. Packing and long walks aren’t going to leave much time, so I’m not sure I’ll be getting back to doing much ‘real’ gaming before the fall. I do plan to keep Saturday nights as my big ‘gaming’ night though (Sunday is the 1 day of the week I can sleep in so I can stay up late gaming…when I don’t fall asleep by accident!)

I’m actually kind of looking forward to coming back to gaming reinvigorated after taking a semi-forced semi-break.

First look at Torchlight 2 (and how it differs from Diablo 3)

Posted on by Nimgimli

Runic Games is running a Torchlight 2 stress test this weekend and I was lucky enough to get an invite. I already have TL2 pre-ordered, mind you. I’ve been waiting for this game with the same kind of anticipation many of my friends have been waiting for Diablo 3.

The two games share an awful lot of similarities. Both are action-RPGs that are focused on looting and leveling and both are pretty casual-friendly. Both are mouse driven and played from a 3/4 view 3rd person perspective.

The big difference? Torchlight 2 is the sequel to Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 isn’t. 🙂

My biggest disappointment with Diablo 3 is that there’re no strategic decisions to be made when it comes to growing your character. For a given class, everyone unlocks the same skills/runes at the same level. There are certainly tactical decisions to be made (Which skill/rune combo is right for this area of the dungeon I’m in?) but everything is easily reversible and at a given level everyone has the exact same skills to pick from (disclaimer: I’m still in Act 1 so maybe this changes).

Compare this to Torchlight 2 where every time you level you get 5 points to put into stats. Here’s a strategic decision: do you want to focus on one stat or spread things out? If one stat, which one? With the dude I’ve been leveling I’ve been putting a ton of points into Dexterity and relying on increased critical hits for causing damage, and my dodge stat for avoiding damage. Is this smart? Not sure yet, but it’s the strategy I’m using with this character. Later I could roll the same class and put a ton of points into strength and have a different kind of character.

Diablo 3 also has stat increases each level but the game decides what they are and most players probably don’t even notice them. Fans of the game like that they’ve got one less thing to worry about and tell me that they’d probably spend the points the way the game is auto-spending them anyway, so it’s just more convenient this way. That may be true for your first character in a given class but I think Torchlight 2 will have a lot more replayability.

But it isn’t just stats, there are skills too. Each level you also get a skill point, and each class has 3 skill trees. You can specialize in one tree or spread things out. You can also craft a character that fits your playstyle. Spend a lot of points in passive skills and your actual playing experience will be fairly simple. Or spend point unlocking a ton of active skills and your fingers will be dancing on the keyboard hitting different skills constantly. It’s all up to you.

Diablo 3 has some of this on a tactical level, but in Torchlight 2 you won’t be able to get everything on a single character. That’s going to encourage multiple play-throughs with variants of the same class and should help keep the game interesting long after folks have squeezed all the goodness out of D3. (Let’s face it, this style of game is all about the journey and leveling up characters after you’ve experienced the story once.)

It all boils down to more choice. Diablo 3 is about cool loot and tactical choices, while Torchlight 2 is about cool loot, tactical choices and strategic character building. Torchlight 2 also gives you two sets of weapon slots and lets you toggle between them, which makes combat more interesting. Add in the pet you have right from level 1; a companion who’ll run back to town to sell excess loot and buy you some more pots, as well as helping out in battle. Oh yeah, and you can fish for treats that’ll turn your pet into some other creature for a while.

I’ve been playing an Outlander, a class described as “a gunslinger with some secret weapons!” He was ‘born’ with a pair of pistols but soon enough I found a nice bow and I was playing him as an archer for a while. But then I found a nice magical ‘claw’ weapon, so now when things get into melee range I switch over to a pair of claw weapons. Plus he has a ‘glaive’ that he can throw and that bounces around hitting more than one enemy (that’s his first magic spell) and I’ve been leveling that up. He also has a kind of rage mechanic where the more things he kills quickly the more powerful he becomes, and I’ve been spending points on a passive skill that slows down the ‘draining’ of rage between fights. Basically I’ve ignored his ‘gunslinger’ side and he’s still very playable. I could roll a new Outlander and put all his points into ranged attacks and that would be a very different character.

Now, let’s give Diablo 3 its due: in terms of sheer spectacle, D3 beats Torchlight 2 hands down. The artwork is better, the lore is better, the NPCs are more interesting, the sound design is better. And D3 has the ‘bonus’ that everyone and his brother is playing, so if you’re looking for a multi-player game, someone is probably ready to join you.

Torchlight 2 just has more interesting gameplay, more replayability, and costs $20 instead of $60 and probably runs better on older computers. If you find yourself enjoying Diablo 3 gameplay but are hankering for something a bit more meaty to sink your teeth into, then consider dropping a Jackson on Torchlight 2 when it comes out in (I’m guessing) a month or two.

Here’s a gameplay video. This isn’t an epic fight or anything; I just fired up a game and started recording. It’s a little hard to make out but about a minute in I switch from bow to claws, and later back again, and you can see the blue glaive flying around now and then. The wolf is my pet; her health is at the top left corner of the screen. Middle center bottom of the screen is my rage meter.

Game And Let Game

Posted on by Nimgimli

One of the biggest challenges of being part of a global gamer community based on social networks is existing in such a huge ‘hive-mind’ without losing your identity.

Definition of hive-mind in this context: The majority opinion of the influencers in my social graph. The hive-mind that I experience is almost certainly not the hive-mind that you experience since you and I follow a different set of individuals. I don’t mean hive-mind in a negative context, by the way.

For me personally, I find it can be frustrating when I don’t “get it” when it comes to a particular game. A couple of recent examples: Guild Wars 2 and Diablo 3. People who I know, respect, and even look up to are ecstatic about these titles and their enthusiasm is infectious as heck. They get me super excited about these games.

But the excitement dies as soon as I start playing. Now don’t get me wrong, I liked what I saw of Guild Wars 2 during the beta weekend, and I like Diablo 3 well enough, but I’m not feeling the passion that the hive-mind is feeling. I don’t find myself dying to play them while I’m at work, for instance. I certainly don’t feel the urge to cheerlead for them. They’re good games but I don’t love them. I want to. I want to be as excited about these titles as my friends are. It’s fun being in love with a shiny new computer game!

[Backdoor clause: I reserve the right to change my mind about GW2 once I play it more. LOL]

But love is fickle and you can’t make yourself love a game. The best you can do is try to open yourself up to it’s possibilities and see if it can win you over.

But too often we don’t do that. Instead, we give in to the temptation to try to ‘correct’ the hive-mind. While I think to some extent this is a natural tendency (we want our friends to have the most fun possible and in our opinion the games they’re playing aren’t the most fun ones out there) it almost never leads to a positive outcome because our technique is flawed. Our friends love their game. 90% of the time [I made that number up] pointing out its flaws is just going to annoy them (and some of what you see as flaws they’ll see as great features).

(Think of this in terms of people. Your best friend just fell head-over-heels in love with someone who is really cheap. You point out how awful it is that your friend’s new love regularly stiffs the server at your favorite restaurant and it’s making your gang unwelcome at the local hangout. 9 times out of 10 your friend will find an excuse for his/her new beloved’s behavior and if you push the issue, they’re just going to get mad at you. They’re in love! They aren’t looking for reasons not to be!)

For me, and for plenty of others (whether they realize it or not), it’s a constant struggle to “Game and let game.” on social networks.

It’s OK that I don’t love Diablo 3 or Guild Wars 2. Yes, it’s a little sad that I can’t join in on the constant delight that my friends are experiencing, but game-love is fleeting and by the time the dog days of summer hit the hive-mind will have moved on to something else and maybe I, too, will love the new discovery.

I’m going to try and adopt “Game and Let Game” as my new motto. I will continue to extol the virtues of the games that I love on social networks, but I’m going to try to refrain from pointing out the obvious (to me anyway) flaws in the games my friends love.

Oh, and just to be clear, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t talk about a game’s flaws. I’m really speaking to context. I’ll write a blog post explaining what I find missing in Diablo 3, sure. But I won’t jump into a thread on G+ where a bunch of people are sharing the delight they’re finding with the game in order to point out flaws. Let them enjoy the game they clearly love. If they want to read my criticisms, have it be their choice. Don’t shove it in their faces.

I’m hoping if I adopt this new philosophy it’ll make my social graph a tiny bit more pleasant for everyone, including myself. (I’m no altruist!) And maybe, just maybe, others will pick up on the better karma and kick it forward to others.

TGIF Gaming Wrap-up for 5/18/2012

Posted on by Nimgimli

Whoa, almost forgot this. Still boring…

Purchases This Week
Almost got through the week unscathed, but just today I bought Crusader Kings II for $10 during an Impluse “Flash Sale”. I blame Chris.

Played This Week
So here’s an interesting thing. I use Raptr to track my time. If I go to my Raptr profile it says I played 4 hours of Diablo 3, 1 hour of Guild Wars and 55 minutes of TERA this week.

But this morning I got my Raptr Weekly Summary and it says 4:24 Diablo 3, 2:34 TERA and 1:18 of Guild Wars. That seems more accurate. I know I played more than an hour of TERA!

I’ve also been dabbling in Hero Academy on the iPad (I suck..want some easy wins? Start a game with me, username pasmith), and last weekend I spent a good amount of time in The Secret World beta, though I wasn’t tracking it so I’m unsure exactly how much time it was.

Plans for the Week to Come
There’s another The Secret World beta weekend this weekend, and I’m hoping against hope to get into the Torchlight 2 stress test weekend.

Otherwise, I’m planning on diving back into TERA this week. And I’ll keep poking along in my solo play-through of Diablo III, depending on if the lag clears up.

Happy gaming, folks!

NBI: How not to build an audience

Posted on by Nimgimli

Hello again, new bloggers! You thought I’d forgotten you, eh? Not so, not so…

So by now you’ve got your blog going and you’ve hopefully found a writing frequency that fits your schedule. Now maybe you’re wondering how to attract readers.

Well, I can’t tell you. I’ve been writing Dragonchasers for 10 years now and I have like 500 readers who generate less than a thousand page views a week.

Why?

Well it could be because I suck at writing, but I don’t think that’s it because on my other blog I get as many as 10,000 page views/day (though that’s not typical… about 1,000/day is typical).

So I’m going to have enough hubris to not blame the quality of my writing, but instead to blame the quality of my marketing.

I figure if I tell you what I do, you can do the opposite and you’ll probably get plenty of page views.

So the first thing I do is, I don’t care about page views. I’m narcissistic enough that I actually enjoy reading my own writing, so I tend to write this blog for myself, not for my audience. I think they can tell and so go find someone willing to cater to their needs.

You should probably be more aware of your audience and try to judge what it is they’re interested in. How? Simple: ask them. Your fans will tell you what they like and don’t like if you ask them. In fact they’ll feel more committed to you because they’ll realize that they’re important to you. You may not have a lot of fans yet, but nurture the ones you do have and their numbers will grow via word of mouth.

Second, if you really don’t want an audience, be really inconsistent. Write three posts on one day and then go two weeks without writing any. Be nurturing and rational in one post, and in the grip of a flaming nerd rage in the next. Keep the audience totally guessing about what to expect next and it’ll guarantee that you’ll never have to pay for extra bandwidth.

But if you want an audience, you should probably find a voice and try to stick with it. Being angry is fine if that’s your shtick. There are plenty of popular rage bloggers out there. If you want to be wacky and weird, go for it. Again, plenty of wacky and weird bloggers have devoted followings. Ditto thoughtful bloggers who talk about game theory or what not. Just don’t mix these things up. Don’t go from philosophical musings on the nature of gaming to talking about how you want to build a sculpture of your favorite character out of navel lint and ear wax. People find that jarring. Once you’re established you can drift a bit, but even then it’s worth it to preface ‘out of character’ posts in order to warn people that they’re about to get a taste of something different.

Third, I’m an asshole on social networks. People block me all the time. People who block me certainly don’t read my blog. Mission accomplished!

In order to build an audience, DO get involved with social networks but remember that now you’re selling yourself. People absolutely will remove your blog from their RSS feeds and unfollow you based on one outburst. We all have more things to read than we really have time for and in some sense we’re all looking for excuses to cut down on sources. So don’t be a doormat, but do remain rational and respectful on social networks. You probably do this anyway because you’re probably not an asshole.

Fourth, swear a lot. Some people hate swearing and many will get nervous about reading your blog at work if you’re filling their screen with 4-letter words. As soon as I finish writing this I’m going to go find a nice jpg of a naked woman to insert into this post. I bet I can get 50 people to drop me from their feeds if the image is raunchy enough.

For you, keep a lid on excessive swearing and provocative images. None of us can admit it, but most of us do a lot of our blog reading at the office. Don’t make your audience nervous about opening one of your blog posts within sight of their co-workers.

Fifth, and I don’t do this one, but plaster ads all over your blog. People hate ads and they’ll avoid you in order to avoid them.

For you, skip the ads for now. Not everyone is sensitive about them, but some people are, and until you’re established you’re not going to make enough for it to matter. In particular stay away from sponsored posts or links because they make you look like a sell-out in some people’s eyes.

Bandwidth ain’t free and the best way to keep your costs down is to keep your audience down. So follow my plan and you’ll never have enough of an audience to worry about.

Or if you’re one of those crazies who’d like an audience and maybe to grow your blog into something more than a hobby, use me as an example of what not to do. Work hard, be true to yourself and your audience, be consistent, and before long you’ll have a huge number of devoted followers.

I can’t believe you want that kind of pressure, but whatevs.

The day Diablo 3 broke the Internet

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m in a really lousy mood today, and it’s all because of Diablo 3. Though it isn’t Diablo 3’s fault.

Diablo 3, in case you didn’t know, is a video game. You’d be forgiven if you thought it was a cure for cancer or the key to world peace, because god damned if people aren’t giving it that kind of weight.

I bought it but I only played for 90 minutes or so. My ‘gut’ response was fairly tepid but I’m trying to reserve judgement until I get farther in. I’ll admit I’m one of those curmudgeons who would’ve been happy to pay $60 for Diablo 2 re-skinned with better graphics.

So how’d Diablo 3 break the Internet? Why am I bitching this time? Well, first of all let’s set hyperbole aside. I’m not talking about the entire Internet, I’m talking about the gaming-oriented parts of it. G+ and I assume Twitter, and personal blogs.

But I feel like EVERYONE is mad today. Some people are mad at Blizzard because of the DRM model and/or the fact that the servers are/were down. Some people are mad at the people who are mad at Blizzard. Some people are on very tall seats, pompously chiding the people who are mad at Blizzard. Others are on equally high seats, pompously chiding the people who are mad at the people who are mad at Blizzard. Of course there are people mad at the people on those very tall seats..mad at them for their condescending attitudes. People who bought Diablo 3 are angry, people who didn’t buy Diablo 3 are angry. People (and here’s where I come in) are angry that everyone is angry about a stupid video game!

The game-facing web today is a giant cluster-fuck of bad feelings and ill will, and it’s all because Diablo 3 launched.

It reminds me of a story…

I used to be a bartender in a local-kind of bar in a resort town. One day, Gerry Cooney walked into the bar with a friend. This is long enough ago (mid 1980s) that everyone knew who he was. Conversation almost immediately died down. Cooney sat at the end of the bar, quietly talking to his friend, and had a beer or two. Then they got up, left a nice tip and thanked me, and left the place.

And suddenly the clientele went nuts. Guys swearing that Cooney wasn’t so big and they could take him. Other guys calling bullshit on that, which led to whether or not guy A could even take guy B. Next thing I know I’m trying to manage 3 separate altercations at once. I started ejecting people from the premises left and right… everyone was mad and throwing punches willy-nilly.

Now Gerry Cooney didn’t do anything and carried no blame, but he was still the cause of everyone having a terrible night down at the local pub that night.

Diablo 3 is the Gerry Cooney of the club that consists of my gaming friends on social media and blogs.

I think I’m just going to put my head down and wait for this whole thing to blow over.

First glimpse into The Secret World

Posted on by Nimgimli

So as you probably know, Funcom’s new MMO, The Secret World, is having an NDA-free beta weekend. I got in via a PAX East give-away and I’ve now had a wee bit of time to play. Here’re my thoughts based on the first hour or two of play.

TSW makes a pretty horrible first impression, at least in the beta. Character creation options are very limited (there will be more on release), textures on the characters are just awful (details like laces or decorative medals are just ‘painted on’) and there’s a lot of exposition in the form of NPC monologing in the little prologue (which was apparently crafted for this beta).

Your best bet is to get comfortable and just go along with the prologue in order to get it out of the way asap. Once you leave London and head to New England the game starts to really open up.

TSW uses a classless system and at low levels at least, gameplay is going to be defined by your weapon. I chose a sledgehammer for mine. My first 3 skills were a basic attack which generated a Resource and had the potential to Weaken an enemy; a longer cooldown, more powerful attack that also generated a Resource and could trigger AOE secondary damage if used on a Weakened enemy; and a big cone-shaped AOE attack that consumed all those Resources. The more resources, the more damage. You can hold up to 5 Resources and for a Hammer-wielder they’ll fill by themselves, but doing attacks causes them to fill faster.

Honestly at low levels combat isn’t all that exciting but I think it’ll get more interesting as we get deeper into the game. You’re constantly unlocking Skill Points & Ability Points that you can spend on new skills & abilities, but you can only have 7 Active and 7 Passive Abilities in use at any time (Skills seem to be more generic buffs to particular weapon types). So after a while it’s going to be like Guild Wars where you have to pick and choose from your Abilites in order to develop an effective set (or Deck in the game’s nomenclature).

When you finally get to New England, you’re supposed to be on a small island off the coast somewhere near Maine (one of the NPCs talks about kids going to Bangor for hay rides) but everyone on the island was imported from Queens or Jersey or somewhere like that. If you’re not from New England this might not be as jarring as it was for me, but wow, did the voice acting directory ever get these accents wrong!

But once there, you’re kind of overwhelmed with quests. Quests work differently than they do in most games. Rather than run around and gathering a bunch of kill ten rats quests, you can only work on a single quest at a time, as far as I can tell. There are about half a dozen different types of quests and maybe you can work on one of each kind? Still figuring this bit out.

But I want to tell you the [SPOILERY] story of one quest just to try to illustrate why I’m liking this game so much. The Sheriff of Kingsmouth, which is under attack by zombies, wants you to help set up surveillance cameras. So step one is leaving the safety of the barricades and running around pulling down security cameras from buildings (well almost constantly fighting zombies). The first few are really straight foward… you just right click on them. Then you find one you can’t reach, and you have to find a way to climb onto the roof of the building to get to it (via jumping on boxes around back). Then there’s one really high up. To get to that one you have to climb a ladder to the roof of an adjacent building, then leap across the gap between buildings, only to get the camera and find out its broken. But there’s a note attached to it saying there’re replacements in the basement.

You head into the basement of the building, which turns out to be a solo instance. The janitor in charge of the building has turned into something inhuman, though with his last shred of decency he warns you to stay away and then barricades himself behind a series of booby traps. You need to get to him though, so your next task is figuring out how to avoid the booby traps.

The first few are laser trip-wires that you can just leap over, but then you come to a grid of lasers. You have to enter a side room to turn these off. Inside the side room are security cameras, motion sensitive, which will set off deadly bombs if they detect movement. Suddenly you’re in a stealth game, avoiding the cameras by timing their movements and scurrying from cover to cover. Eventually you come to a switch that’ll turn off the grid of booby traps in the hallway, letting you get a bit further.

Before you get to the janitor you’ll have to walk through a maze of laser beams and do another security camera-avoidance room. When you finally get to him, he attacks, so then you have to kill him. And finally when he’s down, you can collect the last camera. I died 4 times in that darned basement!

But you’re still not done. Now you have to place 4 cameras around the Police Department barricade, avoiding or killing the Ravenous Hordes of zombies while doing so.

Once THAT is done, you head back into the police department and access their computer system to bring the new cameras online. When you do, you can actually access the cameras to see what’s going on out there.

Then FINALLY this minor side quest is finished. It was one of the most elaborate quests I can remember doing in an MMO.

So exploration, combat, jumping puzzles, stealth puzzles, more combat, more exploration, more combat and then some basic computer skills, all required to solve that quest.

I have to admit at first I found the basement to be annoying as heck. MMOs aren’t supposed to make you figure out things like this! But then I made a conscious decision to treat The Secret World as its own thing, not like “another MMO” and I started to really get into it.

I’m probably done for the beta weekend. TSW doesn’t lend itself to being played under time pressure, in my opinion. When you’re playing a weekend beta you tend to want to go through content as rapidly as possible so you can see as much as possible, and The Secret World seems designed to be a game you have to think about, puzzle over…maybe even walk away from now and then. Try to rush through it and it’s just going to be frustrating rather than enjoyable, like trying to rush through an adventure game.

I still have a TON of questions and honestly it doesn’t feel like a game that can get polished up between now and June so I expect a rocky launch, but I really like what Funcom is trying to do here. I’ve pre-ordered; I’m happy to support a company that’s breaking the MMO mold; I can tell you that the chat was full of people taken by surprise and really frustrated that they weren’t being given more explicit instructions, so I think TSW is going to be a niche hit that’s disliked by many MMO vets.

When I gave up on SWTOR I remember saying that I was done with MMOs because there weren’t any good ones coming out any time soon. Now I’m hooked on TERA and excited about both The Secret World and Guild Wars 2. Talk about being spoiled for choice; I guess there’s still life left in the MMO genre!

PS: Sorry no screenshots. I was hitting PrintScrn on the assumption it was taking shots (I wasn’t really paying attention) but as in AoC the screenshot button is F11 or something. Doh!

TGIF Gaming Wrap-up for 5/11/2012

Posted on by Nimgimli

TERA is having more staying power with me than I expected it to, honestly. So another boring wrap-up.

Purchases This Week

Nothing! Wait, I lie… I bought Ascension for the iPad for 99 cents.

Played This Week
Last Friday was our first Guild Wars: Eye of the North session and that prompted me to do a bit more in Guild Wars. About 3.5 hours this week.

I spent half an hour in the Firefall beta before a visit to the game’s forums turned me off the product.

The rest of the week was all about TERA (13 hours of it).

Plans for the Week to Come
Lots of plans. Tonight is Guild Wars: Eye of the North with friends. Monday night, if I get done work in time, is a Guild Wars 2 beta/stress test session. Between those two lies a The Secret World beta weekend.

Then on Tuesday, the juggernaut that is Diablo III launches.

In whatever spare time I can carve out around all these other games, I hope to keep on moving forward in TERA.

Too many great games available at the same time!

Have a good week, everyone!