Category: World of Warcraft

Because I could use some distracting right now

I came to the conclusion this morning that I have the MMO itch again. I just don’t know how to scratch it. Short of going back in time and fixing it so that my beloved City of Heroes doesn’t get canceled (and that never ends well), I’m stuck looking at the old or trying to figure out the new.

(And, yes, my long-time correspondents are probably sick to death of this post, since I’ve repeated it periodically the last four years. Sorry, folk.)

On the “old” side, I’ve tried LotRO enough times to know that (a) it’s an amazing recreation of Middle Earth and (b) its gameplay just drives me nuts.

I’ve also tried WoW in the past, and it never quite gelled for me. Obviously it’s the benchmark for all things MMO, but in the long run we just sort of ran out of gas on it. It might be worth giving it another try.

We tried out WildStar, but for some reason it, too, didn’t the cut.

Star Trek Online? Nicely steeped in Star Trek lore, but more of a ship simulator in the ST universe than a role-playing game. Also not really suited (that I found) to duoing with someone.

DC Universe Online ended up feeling to button-mashing for me. And, again, it really didn’t seem to lend it self to partnered play (almost anytying but).

Is Champions Online still out there? Also a bit button mashy, not very duo-abled, and I found it tonally offputting. Also, the auction house was irksome.

What I am looking for from an MMO? Fortunately, I have some posts whining about that dating back (yeesh) a number of years. In sum (and roughly in order of priority).

1. Duo-friendly. A big part of my gaming life is playing with Margie. A game that makes it difficult for us (and usually just us) to play side-by-side, due to different start points, or poor leveling / sidekicking setups, or advancement requiring guilds / raids, or whatever, is going to be a frustration to us.

A game that actually rewards or scales properly to team-ups is a big advantage.

2. I need to feel heroic. Jogging everywhere in the world? Doing boring grind missions? Imperiled by battling three opponents? That’s not feeling heroic. (Note: this doesn’t necessarily mean “super-hero” or “comic book hero”.) I’m not looking to slay dragons on Day 1. I am looking to feel like I’m triumphing more often than not, and in a meaningful fashion. (This was an area where LotRO failed me.)

3. A variety of content / replayability. I don’t want to feel railroaded through just one course of action. I want parallel ways of gaining experience and exploring the world and so forth.

4. Well-written content. I don’t mind humor, but overall I want to take the story seriously. (One of my problems with Champions Online.)

5. A good resource / loot / crafting mechanic. Yeah, I know. I want to be able to play and advance without spending hours in a crafting room or haunting auction houses. Alternately, if I feel like doing that, having reasonably enjoyable / profitable mechanics for it are to be desired.

6. Soloable. Though we game together a lot, sometimes we like running solo, just to try something new, or because the other person isn’t around or doesn’t feel like gaming. (This tends to be tied a lot to #4.)

7. A reasonable, non-pervasive payment structure. I don’t mind paying money for a subscription (I know, how drolly 00s of me), but I’d like a chance to get my feet wet before I buy. On the other hand, I do not want to end up in a freemium game where it’s in my face all the time that only by spending my own cash on a regular basis am I going to get anywhere. I’ll pay for something special, but if I have to be regularly spending to play and advance, I’d rather have a monthly sub and not worry about it.

8. Alt-friendly. For whatever reason, Margie and I are both alt-aholics. Paper dolls are our friends. We like to try out different character types and combinations. We’d like to play something (in conjunction with requirement #3) that doesn’t require us to delete characters in order to roll up new ones.

9. Optional but available social options. Sometimes you feel like a PUG. Sometimes you don’t. A decent gaming community where there are options to group up when one is so inclined (e.g., when soloing) would be keen.

10. Instanced missions are keen. Because a bunch of PCs standing around waiting for the bad guys to respawn is kind of lame. And frustrating.

I also want a pony and a rocket ship and a Winnebago and peace on earth, goodwill toward men.

With the understanding that I’ll never find everything I want, and the CoH servers aren’t going to magically restart next weekend — anyone have some suggestions?

#gaming #boh

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So what am I playing these days?

Well, not a lot, but a few things I dabble in, more or less:

  • Ingress:  Assuming that counts. I’m over half-way through L7 to the (current) L8 cap. It’s nice, fun, casual gameplay as I commute on the LTR to/from work, deal with some portals in range from my office desk, farm a portal up the street from my house, and try not to obsess.
  • LotRO:  Not much. Margie and I occasionally get on and duo together, and I even ponied up (so to speak) and bought a horse, but I’m still not feeling the burn. Maybe part of it is because Margie knows so very well what she’s doing, and I’m a relative noob, but part of it remains the non-heroic drudgery and occasional glass cannon nature of LotRO gameplay.  Though it remains beautiful and imaginative beyond belief, and I do enjoy playing with Margie per se.
  • WoW:  Rarely, but occasionally.  See “LotRO,” but with brighter colors and shallower story.
  • Torchlight II:  This has been where most of my gameplay has gone of late.  It’s all solo play, and non-cloud, but I’ve been enjoying running multiple alts through different bands of the game. In theory, Margie and I could set up LAN play to do this together …

I did some very limited beta work with Marvel Heroes, and found it modestly enjoyable (same Diablo style as Torchlight II, but with an immersion-breaking plethora of the same heroes running around). Anticipate trying it out more when it goes live, but not enthused enough to spend any money on it as of yet.

So, besides mourning CoH, what else game-wise have I done lately?

The extended memorial service for City of Heroes, posted earlier today, aside, what’s new for me and online gaming?

Um … honestly, not a heck of a lot.

First off, it’s been a busy month or two. Margie’s been away on business. I’ve been away on business. Holidays and social butterflying and all that sort of thing. And the next month isn’t looking any better.

Secondly, yeah, I’ve been in mourning. Mercifully, Margie talked me into playing CoH one last time before it went away. But since then … really haven’t felt the yen.

And thirdly … well, I haven’t found … the thing. The game to take its place.  I’ve done some World of Warcraft solo and duoed, and likely will some more. But while it’s a decently pleasant passtime, I’m just not feeling the characters as such (something I became very aware of as I was crafting my endless memorials). There’s more variety (if of a less-rich nature) than of Lord of the Rings Online, but, honestly, I don’t feel invested in the characters in either game. With everyone wearing whatever they pick up, and the power/skill selection being fairly categorized, the players are (absent a strong social environment, which we’re not and not likely to get into) pretty much cookie cutter in nature.

(And that, I’m realizing, was one of the geniuses of CoH — that your fundamental appearance could be so different and unique, and the encouragement to have an origin story and a cool super-name to go with it, and that even your power selections could be tailored and tweaked and recombined and enhanced and respecced and recolored to make you completely individual. The focus was more on the characters than on the setting, though the setting was still pretty full of content.)

I’ve given Champions Online another go, and while some of those CoH advantages might seem to pertain, it feels both too mechanics-driven and too arduously neutral / balanced, to the point where every blast power is kind of like ever other blast power, and so forth.  And the setting starts to come into play again as feeling uneven and alternately goofy and grim. Plus, the whole game feels like a carnival in so many ways.

I haven’t retried DC Universe Online, or Star Trek Online, but I don’t recall much (or see much in current press) to make me feel they will fit any better.

Maybe we need to try D&D Online again / some more, since that has such character differentiation. There was something vaguely disjointed about what experience we had there, but we didn’t really drive things to any great conclusion.

I keep hearing encouraging words about Star Wars: The Old Republic — and highly discouraging words about it, too. But maybe that’s a possibility.

People keep suggesting to me Guild Wars 2, but aside from my fiery passion to not give another red cent to NCSoft, I hear a lot of trouble in that particular paradise, too.

So … what next?  I haven’t the foggiest. And, honestly, given the “firstly” above, I don’t expect to make any great progress until January. At least. At the earliest.

And that’s okay, right? Because it’s not like I don’t have eleventy-dozen other things going on. And while Playing Game with Margie is a lot of fun and doing-stuff-togethery, it’s not the be-all and end-all of our relationship.

I’ll — we’ll — find something that we enjoy together. And (assuming it’s a game), we’ll give it a try. And we’ll have fun. Or not, in which case we’ll move on.

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, brah,
La la, how the life goes on.

A WoW Weekend

This was our weekend to play around with World of Warcraft a bit, as a couple.

Margie’s key impression: “It’s Disney LotRO.”

Which has a lot of truth to it, except, of course, that given the order of release one should instead characterize LotRO as “Tolkien WoW”.  That said, there are a lot of similarities between the two games in terms of engine and screen layout and mechanics and all. The art style in LotRO is a lot more realistic, and the Tolkien-based storyline lends a bit of panache to the proceedings, but …

(Margie is suggesting I give LotRO another try.)

So Les and I leveling up characters to 15 in two decent-length sessions were one thing. When Margie and I tried it, we ran into immediate problems with limits on Starter Edition (F2P) accounts. The main problem being: Starter Edition characters can’t initiate groups. So if you have two Starter Edition people playing, they have to play as solo characters running around together. Which makes mission completion more lengthy and complex, and creates real problems when you (virtually) turn around and you can see where the other person is.

Only the fact that we were in the same room made it feel viable.

I’m sure Blizzard has good reasons for the restrictions, given the attacks and hacks and exploits that Black Hats have had, but it did make it more difficult.

Also, we have problems in Panderia, with both of us phased separately on the same server, making it even less viable for us to play together.

That led to a decision Friday evening to go ahead and upgrade my account to a paid subscription — $20 gets the Battle Pack with a couple of expansions in it (handwaves specifics), and a month of play. With that, I could take on the “mentor” role that Les did for me, and we figured at a minimum we’d get $20 of entertainment for the two of us.

Well, one fly in the ointment. Blizzard / Battle.net immediately charges your card, but doesn’t immediately make you a subscribed member. They claim it can take up to 72 hours to validate that you aren’t an Evil Spammer or Despicable Gold Farmer or something.

So we spent Saturday and Sunday doing awkward paired solos, running a pair of humans up to 8 or 9, and then a pair of night elves up to 11.  It was only on late Sunday night that I was able to invite Margie to a team (though some of the other features had kicked in before then).

Net-net, I had a good time, and I think (glances her way) that Margie did, too.  The starter realms seem to be fairly linear in their quest paths, but it seems there is plenty to do after getting out from that.  The biggest problem I see if we move forward is figuring out which of the very kind guild offers we’ve received from various friends to take advantage of.

Meanwhile, now that I’m a paying player, I’ve been able to formally invite Margie in (using a different email addy), which means that I can take advantage of those “recruitment bonuses” that Blizzard is offering. Which means rerolling the toons Margie was already playing, but that’s just a weekend’s worth.

So, for the moment, WoW seems to be on the play list.  Still other games out there we want to try, however.

Looking for Another Game: More WoW Thoughts

So I’ve been playing more WoW (solo) whilst pining away for my wife who’s on a business trip.  After Les duoed with me to 10 with a Pandaren, I did some solo play with different races (Gnomes, Dwarves, Draeni, Worgen, and Night Elves) in an array of classes (hunters, warriors, druids, rogues, paladins).

Each of the races I tried has its own starting zone, and its own story (apparently influenced greatly by which expansion set they came out with, or when they were last revamped by another expansion).  The result are some very highly flavored starting zones that not only give you plenty of practice with the mechanics, but give you a strong story and sensibility for the race in question.  The starter area missions don’t drift radically from the standard “go hunt/kill X things” / “go gather X items” / “go take a message to X over in the next town” types of things, but they do mix them up pretty well, tend to  group the missions nicely (there are very few “jog 30 miles over there, find something, and bring it back to me” / “that was great, now go bring back three more” sorts of missions), and wrap them up in as much story text as you could want.

I haven’t gotten into any crafting/auctioning yet (is that actually available for F2P players?), but I’ve done the (borrowed pretty straightforwardly by LotRO) resource harvesting.  Not so much my cuppa, but the money’s good.

The screen layout of trays gets pretty darned busy, especially since the tray icons are so small (and there are smaller ones beyond that).

Though non-instanced for the most part, I’ve not had significant problems with interminable waiting for things to respawn, so far at least (LotRO had more problems with that, as I recall).

I’ve resigned myself to having to loot, but at least there’s now an autoloot option in WoW. Though, unlike many other interface options, you have to turn it on for each alt.

Though I’ve not played with any of them, Les mentioned any number of helpful UI mods to help tailor the interface to the game.  Definitely some room for research there, if this is the (a) way we go.

I like the WoW graphics, for the most part. I can understand folks wanting highly realistic stuff, but the more animated feel of WoW is fine by me.  I’m less sanguine with the “everyone dresses almost exactly alike for the first Nteen levels because they take the same missions and get the same costume rewards” feel to the costuming (even at 15th level, Les and I looked like a brother-sister combo whose grandparents had bought them matching outfits for Christmas …). By the same token, it’s a shame when you find something you like, then have to change it because it’s obsoleted by newer, better loot you picked up.

Based on Les’ and my run through the training levels (through 15) on Panderia, I’d say the game certainly is duoable. Looking forward to see what Margie thinks of all this.

Looking for Another Game: World of Warcraft

Yeah, I know.

WoW has been sort of the EVERYBODY’S PLAYING IT, SO YOU SHOULD PLAY IT megalithic giant that people either love, or love to hate, or both. Maybe it’s still cool or maybe it’s not, but it still has 9 million subscribers or players or some metric that means a lot of people play it.

I dabbled briefly with WoW over at Lee and De’s house, oh, about seven years ago (while trying to decide if this new “City of Heroes” was thing was where I wanted to be, when I heard all these great rumors about “World of Warcraft”).  Under Lee’s tutelage I rolled up a Tauran warrior and went hallooing off into the wilderness.

And, about an hour later, decided I’d had enough cross-country racing when I was in junior high, so I darned well didn’t need it for my MMORPG. Plus, kinda dull and boring missions. Plus weird stuff about being dead and either having to run (again) back, or wake in the graveyard and have something bad happen to your stuff, or something.

WoW became the online gaming Microsoft (or IBM or Apple, depending on your hi-tech era of Nine Hundred Pound Industry Gorillas), and I enjoyed making fun of it and not giving it a second thought.

Until Les, of Stupid Evil Bastard fame, offered, in my CoH Grieving, to introduce me to the game and escort me from first level.

So … WoW is free and pretty un-gimped up to Level 20. So, good for toying with.

And having someone experience to walk me through (chatting via Skype) worked out okay, though, to be honest, I think I could have figured most of it out.  WoW uses a lot of industry standards (many of which, in fact, it probably set) in terms of interface and the like.

We rolled up a couple of Pandarens because, well, who wouldn’t? I played a Hunter, Les a Monk.  My female Pandaren was nicely zaftig. Les opined his male one actually mirrored his own body structure.

And, y’know what? I had fun.  The basics are pretty familiar, the intro zones in Pandaria are nicely laid out, with good stories. I like the graphics. It seems like they’ve filed off some of the dullness and grindiness that the game used to have for beginners.  We played for a couple of hours, dinged to 6th level, and parked it (I had other plans), and I really enjoyed the mix of missions and activities. And the setting /story was also quite nice.

Too early to apply my checklist, but things look fairly promising.

I think I’d like to play some more. I don’t know if it’s The Game I’ll Be Playing, but I definitely want to play more (and get Margie trying it out, too).

Not sure if I should be thanking Les, or plotting some dark and bitter vengeance toward him … but I’ll settle for a thanks for the moment.