WoW is starting out ever easy

Posted on by Nimgimli

So as I mentioned in my last post, I started a new character yesterday. He’s now level 15 or 16 and holy smokes, World of Warcraft is holding my hand to the point where I’m feeling molested.

Now to be fair, level 15 or 16 is maybe 5-6 hours of playtime? My /played is around 8 hours but I have a habit of walking away from the computer and leaving my dude sitting around while I take the dog for a half hour walk or something. So I’m guessing 5-6 hours of actual game time. Maybe 6.5.

The new player experience really couldn’t be much easier. Everything you’re asked to do is carefully laid out for you. You’ll never have to make a decision for yourself when questing. At the most I’ve had 4 quests in my log (if you don’t count a couple of Harvest Day Event quests) and usually it has been 1 or 2. They’ve always been carefully grouped together so I got to an area, kill 10 rats (1 quest) and picking up 6 widgets (2nd quest) and killing a named mob (3rd quest). An arrow on the mini-map shows you what direction to go. In the case of a named mob, he shows up on the map as a skull so you know exactly where he is. Anything you need to collect has huge sparklies that you can see from far, far away.

Once you complete one grouping of 2-3 quests in a location you’re led by the nose to the next NPC who’ll give you 2-3 quests in the next highly specific location. (Sometimes it’s a cluster of NPCs). So far I’ve found exactly 1 quest that was ‘off the beaten path’ a bit.

If the area you have to do quests at is more than a few seconds run away, there’ll be a temporary (and on rails) mount available to take you to where you need to go. When you level up, pop up announcements tell you if there are new skills available at your trainer (who, btw, appears on your mini-map) and reminds you if you have a talent point to spend.

Speaking of talents. When you hit ten you have to pick one ‘branch’ of the talent tree to go down. That’s the first real decision you’ll make in the game after picking your class (you’ll be locked out of the other two for a while once you choose). Once you do that, you’ll have 3 talents to choose from, so that’s another decision, but as of right now I’ve maxed one of the 3 talents and am working on a 2nd and still haven’t unlocked the next tier of talents.

The level of difficulty so far has been near 0. I’ve died once or twice from not paying attention (you tend to zone out pretty quickly – like once I was poisoned and never noticed since I was watching TV while I played) but always it’s been a few seconds away from a graveyard. Health and mana regenerate like crazy so I’ve never needed to eat anything or use bandages or anything like that. Granted as a druid I can heal myself, so that probably has a lot to do with it. That poison (corruption, actually) might’ve been a much bigger deal for a non-healing class.

Now, I’ve been sortof enjoying myself just because the lore is quasi-new and I’ve been enjoying seeing how the world changes, but I would NOT want to level a 2nd Night Elf because the actual gameplay is about as compelling and mentally stimulating as playing solitaire.

Hopefully by level 20 or so things will start to branch out, but damn, this is the longest tutorial I’ve ever played through.

Back to WoW again!

Posted on by Nimgimli

Someday I should count how many blog posts I have that are titled “Back to WoW.”

But here I go again! But c’mon, how could I resist? My history of WoW is long and at times intimate. I have a friend who works at Blizzard who got me into the Friends and Family Alpha long, long ago, and I played the heck out of WoW for the first couple years it was out. That was before it was hugely mainstream and everyone was expected to have exactly the right gear and play their classes exactly the right way — back then we played to have fun. Crazy, huh?

But the world of Azeroth became more or less real to me in some ways. I mean the locations. There are (or were) places in that world that invoked specific memories. So how could I not go back to see what’s changed?

The last time I went back was just a few months ago when, for reasons I no longer recall, I ran out and purchased the Wrath of the Lich King expansion and rolled a death knight. In 2 months of subscribing I played enough to get that death knight to level 58. That’s what? 2-3 hours of play? So that was a good investment of cash, eh? About $70 between the expansion and 2 months of sub.

So today I renewed and rolled a Night Elf Druid. Yup, starting from scratch (for now anyway). I dunno how many of the differences I’m seeing are from the Cataclysm patch, but they’re interesting to me (even if I’m not sure I agree with all of them). The Level 1-5 area for the Night Elves has been super-streamlined and you get through it in about 6-7 quests, some of which take seconds to do. Vast swaths of that area now go untouched. That’s great for vets but I’m not sure if it won’t be a bit overwhelming for newcomers, if any exist.

Owners of the WoW Collector’s Edition now get all three pets instead of having to pick one. 🙂

Here’s a really odd change (and I’m sure you can turn this off). Mobs only have names floating over their head if you have a quest to kill them. That’s really bizarre, but I have to admit it makes it super-easy to find the things you need to kill. Just look for anything with a neon sign over its noggin.

I do have Cataclysm pre-ordered but I almost wonder why. My highest level character is 60 (the cap when I last played with any kind of regularity) so the extra levels aren’t of much interest. I guess I’ll get access to the two new races but beyond that…it seems like most of the changes that come with Cataclysm, at least the ones that pertain to lower level characters, are included with the freebie patch.

We’ll see, I guess. I imagine I could have fun playing a Worgen for a little while..

Perpetuum

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’d been watching the enthusiastic Perpetuum tweets and blog postings of some of my Twitter friends with interest when what should arrive in my in-box but a code to give the game a try. Thanks to Perpetuum’s PR team for this opportunity to test their game for free.

In Perpetuum you’re trying to harvest resources on a distance planet that is occupied by a race of robots. Rather than send humans to the planet, scientists have discovered how to beam a person’s consciousness into one of the robots on the planet. Basically we’ve become the body snatchers in this game.

What that means in practice is that your in-game avatar is a robot, but you can hop between different robots once you have access to more. You do have a ‘human’ avatar but it’s basically just a face in a window now and then. Think of it like EVE Online. In fact thinking of the game like EVE Online only planetside will help you wrap your head around Perpetuum a lot more easily than my describing it all.

Perpetuum is a big game. You’re not going to just log in and play. There’s a steep learning curve and a heck of a lot going on and within a few minutes of starting to play your interface will be a mass of windows. This gets better as you become familiar with the UI and start tucking frequently used windows into permanent locations, and again, if you’ve played a lot of EVE this’ll be much more comfortable to you than if you’re coming from a level-based fantasy MMO.

There are a few key differences from EVE that immediately jump out at you. First, you have direct, WASD control of your robot (as one option…you can also lock on a target and ‘approach’ it or double click a spot on the terrain to go there). Second, while Experience Points accumulate in real time (like in EVE), rather than queuing up skills these EP’s just go into a pool that you can then spend at your leisure. This means you don’t have to spend your out-of-game life worrying about whether or not you have enough in-game skills queued.

But like EVE, this is a huge sandbox of a game. You decide what you want to do. Be an industrialist? A fighter? A crafter? A bit of all three? Work the markets? Steal (some of the terrain is PvE, some is open PvP) etc etc.

I didn’t get very far in Perpetuum so I’ll stop talking game mechanics now and refer you to Scopique, Stargrace and Sara Pickell for more specifics. Blue Kae is playing too but hasn’t blogged about it (yet). I really look forward to reading the Perpetuum stories that these people will share as they continue to play.

But Perpetuum just isn’t a good fit for me. First, everyone tells me not to bother trying to solo, and I’m definitely a solo player, more so now than ever. Second, it’s the kind of game where you have to spend a lot of time researching what’s going on: where the best market prices are, how to find a blueprint for robot Y, and things of that nature (I’m being vague because I’m basing this on the stories of others; I honestly didn’t get far enough for this to be an issue.). I no longer want to spend that kind of time on a game. When I get a little time to spend on gaming, I want to spend it playing, not researching.

Basically Perpetuum is a game for hardcore MMO players. By ‘hardcore’ I mean people for whom MMOs are their primary leisure activity. I used to be a hardcore player, but now MMOs are just one of the many things I do and I’m not willing to cut down on reading blogs/twitter, or playing with the dog, or watching movies or reading books, or even playing single player games, in order to devote more time to one specific MMO like this.

That’s NOT a knock on the game; in fact Perpetuum makes me long for the days when I had 15-20 hours a week to spend playing games: I love the theme of the game and, as I mentioned, I’m enjoying the game vicariously through reading my hardcore gaming friends who’re playing. I just don’t think it’s a game where you can do well by logging in for 30 minutes on Monday, an hour on Thursday and then 2 hours Saturday afternoon. It feels like the kind of game that’s going to want pretty regular attention: you want to be part of a corporation, keep tabs on deals on the market and so forth.

One last thing worth mentioning is the price. Perpetuum costs $10/month, and nothing else. There’s no client to buy. So if you’re curious (and didn’t get a code from a friend) you’re only risking $10 to give it a try. If you like deep, rich sci-fi games and MMOs, and you have time, I urge you to give it a go.

Now I have a challenge for game designers out there: is it possible to build a big sandbox game like Perpetuum (or EVE) and offer enough roles in it that hardcore gamers anxious to totally immerse themselves in the politics and economics and deep in-game technology can be satisfied, but casual gamers can also play and have a much narrower, but still satisfying, role?

FFXIV – Another free month

Posted on by Nimgimli

So a new post at the Final Fantasy XIV Lodestone says that Square-Enix is giving subscribers to the game another 30 days of free trial.

However I haven’t seen this mentioned at any of the gaming blogs, and in particular Massively has been mum on the topic, which has me second-guessing my understanding of what’s going on. Or maybe I’m just reading the wrong blogs.

The post is dated today and specifies that it applies to “All users who registered a FINAL FANTASY XIV service account and purchased a character by November 19, 2010.” so unless I’m missing a loophole it means that everyone is getting another 30 days, gratis.

November 25th is the tentative release date of the next big batch of improvements (details here) and maybe S-E just wants everyone to see where the game is going…I dunno.

I’m happy though. Now I can keep dabbling for another 30 days without spending any additional cash. So yay!

Facebook’s messaging dog & pony show

Posted on by Nimgimli

I originally wrote this for my blog over at ITWorld, but then decided it was a bit too ranty for a pro blog, and anyway it isn’t really my ‘beat’ over there. So I decided to post it here (in its raw, first draft form). Very very off-topic but hey, a good rant is always entertaining to someone (even if that someone is just the one doing the ranting):

Yesterday Facebook held yet another event (they’re getting to be like weekly occurrences, these Facebook events) to unveil their new not-an-email system, the Social Inbox. Well, part of it was the Social Inbox. I was one of the 30,000 or so people to watch the announcement online and I never figured out what the overall name of the system was. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it a “modern messaging system” but that was about it. Ryan Faas covered the event but I was so bemused by the dog and pony show put on my Zuckerberg and Facebook Director of Engineering Andrew Bosworth that I had to chime in.

Warning: old guy “you kids get off my lawn” rant incoming.

First, the whole system is apparently based on what high school kids do. We were told that high school kids don’t send emails because there’s too much “friction” involved with all the tedious details like a subject line and a salutation. Really? Adding a subject line is that hard? In this Facebook-powered new world order how are we going to scan the dozens and dozens of emails that we as professionals get, once subject lines are abolished by these high schoolers? How many important emails does the typical high school kid get, anyway? Of course they don’t need full emails: they’re just chatting with each other about high school kid stuff. Why are we modeling general-purpose systems on such a specific demographic?

Another anecdote, this one shared by Bosworth, talked about a box of letters that his 90 year old grandmother keeps in her closet. These are letters that his grandfather sent his grandmother when they were courting long, long ago. Bosworth lamented the fact that he doesn’t have a box of letters. Facebook to the rescue again! By archiving all your conversations, whatever format they’re in, Bosworth suggests we’ll all have our digital box of letters when we get old.

Now what’s wrong with this picture? I’ll tell you what. If you can’t exert the energy to add a subject line or a salutation to your email, chances are whatever you’re writing probably isn’t worth holding onto for the next 70 years. The reason Bosworth’s grandmother’s letters were so dear to her is that his grandfather put some thought and care into what he was going to write. All those social micro-updates about where you’re going to have lunch aren’t going to be that interesting to you when you’re 90. Trust me, you don’t need to keep every word you write. I’m not claiming there aren’t a lot of passionate and thoughtful emails flying back and forth through the ether; clearly there are. But if something is really worth saving, it’s worth saving on your own terms, not in some service that may or may not exist when you’re old and gray.

One last thing. During the Q&A session someone pointed out that their Facebook friends weren’t really their true friends. Their real friends were their email friends. (This came up while discussing the feature where a Facebook friend’s message gets high visibility in the Social Inbox.) The response was, essentially, that this person was doing it wrong and that all your Facebook friends should be true, legitimate friends and not just people you’ve encountered online. I know that my list of Facebook “friends” includes plenty of people that are, at best, acquaintances. I don’t want these people’s messages about Karaoke Night at the bowling alley back in the town I grew up in to be a ‘high priority’ message. So I guess I’m doing it wrong, too. (To be fair, you can ‘train’ the Social Inbox but having to do so seems to go against Zuckerberg’s assertion that people don’t want to fiddle with this stuff. Specifically he mentioned that no one wants to make lists.) Considering how many activities on Facebook (mostly games) pressure you to have lots of “friends” I found this attitude particularly disingenuous.

I’m really not condemning Facebook’s modern messaging system: I’ll give it a try and maybe it’ll change the way I do business, but I somehow doubt it. I don’t really want a unified inbox where all my business correspondence gets mixed in with emails from my dentist about my next checkup and IM conversations with my girlfriend about what we’re going to have for dinner. There’s something to be said for keeping different types of content segregated. Heck, I have several different email accounts for just that reason.

And that’s without even considering Facebook’s spotty record when it comes to privacy.

Maybe I’ve finally officially reached curmudgeon status, but I just don’t think most of us are ready to turn over all our communications to Facebook. At least I hope we’re not. I’d hate to see one company wind up with that much power.

What do you think? Are you ready to sign up for the Social Inbox?

To MMO or not to MMO; that is the question

Posted on by Nimgimli

First of all, I wanted to thank everyone for their thoughts on my “Age & Blogging” post. I’m going to keep that topic here but I’ve kind of paralyzed myself now… so many people chimed in that I feel like I have to come out with a strong post to start off the series! LOL But it’s slowly been forming in my head, so please bear with me.

But for today I’m back to gaming and wanted to share a dilemma. Square-Enix sent me an email this morning warning that my free trial period to FF XIV is about to end. First of all, a big kudos to them for drawing my attention to this fact. I can’t tell you have often I’ve forgotten to cancel MMOs I’ve stopped playing and then had them auto-renew: money out the window.

I like FF XIV and as I mentioned here before, I bought Crysta to pay for a month of subscribing (this was before S-E gave us an extra 30 free days). So I’m set to pay my way…

Except ever since we brought the puppy Lola home, I haven’t really touched any MMOs. Life was busy before she joined our household and she makes it busier (though generally in a good way). This past weekend I had some free time and I could’ve logged in, but instead she and I (and Angela, on Saturday) went for a couple of long walks in the nearby state park.

When I do have some time for gaming I’m never quite sure if it’s going to be for 10 minutes or an hour. So logging into an MMO feels too time-consuming. I want to play something I can jump into and have fun with in the first few minutes of firing up the game.

Now that Lola is getting into some patterns of behavior that ‘chaos’ in my day is easing somewhat and I could probably go back to MMOs, but now there are all these single player games that I’m interested in. (I mentioned on Google Buzz that I have a bad habit of buying too many games when I have no time to play…as if buying a new game could somehow scratch the itch of wanting to play.) So I have Fable 3 and the rest of Undead Nightmare in Red Dead Redemption and Rock Band 3 w/Keytar and The Shoot for PS3 Move and Amazon had a great deal on Enslaved: Odyssey to the West… all of that purchased in the last month or so. And of course Minecraft.

So it makes no sense to spend my Crysta on a month of FF XIV now; I have all these single player games that I splashed out for, after all. But on the other hand I don’t want the game to vanish while I’m waiting to find time to play it. That happens to me all too frequently. Gone are the days when one can assume an MMO will be there when you find time to get back to it. Today it’s play it now or accept the fact that you may never play it again.

Smart money is on canceling FF XIV and if I get an MMO itch, going to LOTRO or DDO or something… a game where I don’t need a monthly sub, so if I play for 20 minutes/week I won’t be wasting cash. But man, when I was playing FF XIV I was *loving* it. But it also occupied all my time…it’s a time-sink of a game, unlike more typical ‘bite-sized experience’ MMOs that we see today.

I’ve got a couple more days to ponder this decision… but I really think I’m in the mood to play a game that has an ending, just to get some stuff off my plate. Here’s hoping FF XIV will stick around long enough for me to find time to go back to it!

Age and blogging

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve been thinking a lot about age and mortality lately, and the shifts that have happened in my perceptions of the world as I start to see the first glimmerings of the light at the end of the tunnel that is my life.

Seriously…I look at all the unread books I own and wonder if I’ll live long enough to read them (definitely not, if I keep buying new ones). Things of that nature. Now my mom is in her 80’s; if I live as long as her I have plenty of time left. But I’m the age that my dad died at now. If I follow in his footsteps I don’t have long at all.

Anyway, I was thinking about blogging about these changes in attitude that creep up as we get older.

But I’m not sure if I should do it here, or if I should start a new blog. I’m not sure most of my readers really care about this stuff that they won’t have to worry about for 20 years or more.

I think, once I’m gone, that it might be interesting to read an online journal of a person slowly coming to grips with mortality and then passing on. Jeez, that sounds really morbid and I don’t mean it to be at all. But I wonder if other people think the same things I do.

Y’know the old “You kids get off my lawn” attitude that we joke about…that’s becoming reality for me, in a way. I find it interesting, when I can look at it dispassionately.

Anyway, what do you readers think? Do it here or keep it separate from all the gaming and puppy talk?

Minecraft obsession renewed

Posted on by Nimgimli

Since bringing Lola the Puppy home, I’ve found it tough to find time for gaming. I feel like every time I sit down to relax she’s getting into something or needs to go out or is just being so cute that I have to get down on the floor and play with her.

But Minecraft was scratching my gaming itch. It’s the perfect 5-minute game. It starts up fast, pauses when it loses focus and I always feel like I can get something done no matter how small an amount of time I have available.

Friday night I was doing one of these quickie sessions when a skeleton killed me. Note to self: Don’t try to engage a skeleton when on a narrow ledge with no room to maneuver. It was the first time I’d died in ages and when I respawned… I recognized the area.

I should back up a bit… I’ve been working on the same world since I discovered Minecraft. I had been building myself a lair weeks and weeks ago when I got killed, respawned and became disoriented. I wandered off in the wrong direction and got lost and was forced to build a quickie hideout as night fell. Well one thing led to another and the quickie hideout got expanded upon and grew into something quite elaborate and my original lair was forgotten.

Back to Friday. I respawned and recognized the spot. I knew where my current lair was, but also knew my original lair must be nearby. Low and behold, I found it! Now I had 2 lairs… I started bouncing back and forth between them, but always found myself trapped in the ‘wrong’ one when night fell.

So I decided to connect them via underground tunnels. From that simple decision came an epic run of Minecraft. It took me until Sunday night to link the two lairs. In the process I learned a lot of respect for engineers…if it was this hard to do in a grid-based world, how hard must it be in real life!!?

I actually got the X & Y coordinates pretty accurate but I ‘estimated’ depth and was way off. I tunneled from one lair right underneath the other and came out on the far side of a mountain.

My second attempt linked the two lairs up, and along the way I found some intriguing caverns that will require further exploration. For now I just made glass tunnels through them so I can observe what’s going on in there.

In doing all this Minecrafting I suddenly realized Lola had settled in. I was playing for a couple hours at a time and she was entertaining herself (a good long hike Sunday morning helped…she was knackered all day from that), so I guess I can start “serious” gaming again.

I’m kind of burned out on Minecraft now…I’ll give it a rest until another great idea comes along, then obsess over making it real. In the meantime, I still have some FF XIV time left. Maybe I have time to play again, finally.

Puppy, Week 1 (puppy post)

Posted on by Nimgimli

So Lola has been with us for 10 days now.

This past week was one of radical adjustments. Honestly by Tuesday I was really having second thoughts about the decision to get a puppy. She requires a LOT of attention/supervision.

But by, say, Thursday we’d all started to adjust and she began to ‘pay us back’ via tail wags and couch company and puppy-breath kisses.

She’s smart as heck and seems to train almost naturally. Her bathroom stuff is becoming routine…she’s learning where on the property she can go (our complex has a designated pet area) and she’s good about letting us know when she needs to go out. We walk her often (5-6 times a day) so that she can avoid accidents and be a winner.

Her being a winner is important to me. I try to challenge her, but not go too far, so we always end an activity on a positive note.

Still there are adjustments. She wakes up early so no sleeping-in on the weekends. And us being out and about means we have to be vigilant for ticks. We’ve found 2 on her and 1 on me. Today is her first vet visit and she gets her anti-tick/flea/heartworm/hookworm/etc/etc medicine refreshed which will help her but I still need to remember to do a ‘tick check’ whenever we come in from a walk.

Even with adjustments every day feels packed. Adding a couple of dog walks to doing two jobs, and factoring in that many ‘around the house’ things take longer due to puppy interest and it’s just go-go-go most days. I know this will get easier eventually but there are definitely times my nerves start to frazzle!

Gaming has traditionally been a big part of my life, but there just doesn’t seem to be time to do any ‘regular’ gaming now. I’ve canceled my MMO subscriptions and mostly I’ve been doing what gaming I find time for on the consoles (with her snoozing against me on the couch).

As busy as things feel, they feel more balanced, too. I spend a lot less time at this keyboard and a LOT more time outdoors getting exercise. Yesterday we talk a walk down to the nearby reservoir to see what reaction she’d have to water. I thought she might have some retriever in her and that she’d charge right in, but she didn’t. Instead she kind of sniffed the water and when a wave hit her, she’d had enough. Granted it was pretty chilly, too, so that one test might not mean too much.

Our next big challenge is overcoming separation anxiety. Since Angela is home all day the dog just has no clue what it means to be alone and she starts to whine and howl. This is a real challenge since we can’t just let her do it (neighbors would have a fit) and it’s hard to correct her when we aren’t there! So that’s a work in progress.

Overall though, she’s settling in really nicely and has become an important part of the family.

The Puppy Chronicles, Day 2 (puppy post)

Posted on by Nimgimli

Never fear, this’ll probably be my last ‘daily’ puppy post. Tomorrow I’m back at work and we need to settle into a routine. I’m still working on that balance thing… I haven’t found time to touch a game all weekend. The horror!

Anyway, last night was a good night. Lola got into her crate without too much fuss, whined once at lights-out but then slept through until morning. I got up before she did, in fact (at about 6:45).

Her big challenge today was the guinea pigs. Today was cage-cleaning day. When we do cages the girls, Mimi and Mona, get to romp around in their ‘playpen’ — an open topped temporary cage that we put on the floor. It gets them out of the way and they love their floor time as they chase each other back and forth.

Today Lola was in the room. We’d taken her for a good long walk ahead of time so she was tuckered out and she was just lounging on her bed chewing on one of those vile bully sticks. Angela sat next to her holding her leash just in case (we keep a short leash on her most of the time so she’s used to it). She gave the girls a stare once or twice but a quick correction broke her focus. After a few minutes she totally ignored the girls, and they her. So it was a big Win for everyone.

We’re getting the bathroom stuff down pretty well. I went out to do some shopping and while I was gone Angela was in the bedroom with Lola with a baby gate up so she couldn’t go wreak havoc in case Angela fell asleep (we’re both semi-sleep deprived). Lola started fussing at her. Angela would correct her and she’d stop for a few minutes then come get Angela’s attention again. Finally Angela got the message and took her outside where it was clear she needed to do her business. So that was good news; Lola knew that she had to go out and let Angela know about it.

Food is a problem still. She’s eating but not as much as I’d like. We feed her three times a day and when we first put the food down she’ll gulp a few mouthfuls and then either distract herself with a toy, or flop down and go to sleep. She’s slept a LOT today; I think her big few days are catching up to her. I know they’re catching up to us!

Tomorrow I’m back to work and Angela starts the hard job of teaching Lola to be alone without fussing. I’m not sure how she’s going to do it… how do you correct a dog that wants you back in the apartment without giving her what she wants?

Things are good though..anxiety is dropping for everyone, Lola is a total sweetheart who’s part of our ‘pack’ and the guinea pigs are no longer freaked out with her being around. I think we’re on the right track, at least!