So I played a bunch of games over the last 5 months

First of all, let me get the 2011 Awards out of the way.

Worst Blogger: Me, for posting five posts all year, all of them in August, for no apparent reason.

I’ve meant to write a bit about some of the old and new games I’ve been playing over those five months, but I always want to write massive walls of text like I did for Runes Of Magic and Atlantica Online, and I never feel like I have quite enough free time. So instead, I’m going to try to bang out a paragraph or two about a few new games, a couple of old games, and a couple of betas.

Without further ado, here is the last five months in gaming!

Rusty Hearts

I picked up this free-to-play title in order to complete an achievement and get another entry in Steam’s Holiday Sale Gift Pile competition. I’ve slagged off Perfect World in the past for making an excessive number of excessively similar games, but this ”gothic themed beat-em-up” is actually quite a different kettle of fish.

Set in a Transylvania distorted by a heavy filter of Asian sensibilities and dialogue translations at the “martial arts movie subtitle” level of quality, the story is some preposterous tosh about heroic vampires that try not to drink blood and a village menaced by the shadow of Vlad’s castle. Gameplay is you versus swarms of enemies, smashing them to pieces with grand sweeping blows – it actually reminded me of some classic arcade games like Golden Axe. But then combine that with traditional MMORPG mechanics like levelling, skill cooldowns, “! over the head” quests, etc.

I’ve certainly gotten my bit of fun out of this. Steam says I’ve played for 17 hours, and I enjoyed them. I’ll fire it up again next time I’m in the mood for some bash and slash, and I’d say it was well worth a download if you think that sounds like fun.

Spiral Knights

Another free-to-play game I picked up for the Holiday Sale Gift Pile competition (by the way, I didn’t win anything worthwhile at all, just some discount coupons for games I had no interest in buying). This is a cutesy action RPG, I guess you’d call it somewhat Diablo-esque in style, with its view from above, running, dodging, kiting, shooting, etc.

I did spend a few more hours playing this after completing my competition achievement, so I’d have to say it was at least OK, but it didn’t grab me in any really meaningful way. I don’t regret the download (it was fairly small, well under a gigabyte iirc), but I don’t really see myself launching it again.

Uncharted Waters Online

This one was mentioned on a forum as an example of a shamefully overlooked “AAA sandbox MMO”. AAA is an exaggeration – it’s at a level of polish I’d say was roughly on par with Atlantica Online. It’s not bad but you’d never mistake it for a genuine AAA commercial title from a major studio. But with that out of the way, I’ve got a lot of good to say about this game.

Set in a sort of mashup of 15th and 16th century history, you play a sea captain, sailing ever-finer ships as you travel the world exploring, trading and fighting. You know what game it actually most reminds me of? EVE Online. You have a similar mix of non-combat activities (trading, exploring, manufacturing). You can learn to fight by hunting NPC pirates, and then venture into “hostile waters” to either hunt player pirates, or become one yourself. Your capabilities are heavily defined by the ship you are currently captaining. And you have that real sense of distance – travelling takes quite some time, and there are no hearthstones to magically take you back home again!

There are three main paths in the game – Adventure (exploring and discovery), Trading, and Battle. I’ve been dabbling in them all over the last week and am not sure which one I most want to follow, because I’m enjoying all three. Luckily the game allows you to develop your choice of skills, with a class system that allows you to switch classes, and where your current class really only defines which “favoured” skills advance more quickly than others. You’re certainly not locked into any one path.

Anyway, I’d like to write more extensively about the adventures of Banquetto the Portuguese chandler at a later date. Maybe I will even manage to do so.

The Lord of the Rings Online

This continues to be a bit of a “go to” game for me. I picked up the “Rise of Isengard” expansion – foolishly paying full price at release, since it went on sale before I got to the point where I was actually high enough level to visit the new lands. Anyway my Guardian main is now level 68 and questing in Dunland, and LOTRO continues to be a perfect “pay as you go” title for me. Sometimes I’ll play heavily for a couple of weeks. Sometimes I won’t even launch it for a month or two. But when the mood takes me and I do play it, I always enjoy myself.

Guild Wars

I did ease off on Guild Wars quite a bit, after playing heavily throughout June to August. However I had a few more good sessions which led to me completing my “Legendary Guardian” title – doing every mission in the three campaigns (58 missions in total, iirc), with bonus objectives / Master rewards, in hard mode. I’m actually pretty proud of this, since a number of the missions are regarded as being rather rough to solo. This was an achievement which made me feel that I had actually achieved something, in terms of testing my skills, and having to improve them in order to succeed.

I have 19 points in my Hall of Monuments, just one more needed to get another Guild Wars 2 title and pet. I could get that in the blink of an eye just by going to Kamadan and buying a miniature off someone. And if the mood takes me to go for the “Ascendant” title in GW2, I can probably get up to 25 HOM points just by splashing around some of the cash in my stash, on more miniatures, armour and weapons.

EverQuest II

So when EverQuest II merged their free-to-play “EQ2 Extended” model with their regular EQ2 model in December, I decided to take another look at it. Thought it might be fun to dig up the level 30-something Brigand I played for a month way back when. As it happens, I couldn’t actually track down the details of that account, so I just started a new character.

I got all enthused for a few days, and even dropped twenty bucks to buy the latest two expansions when they had a “triple Station Cash” sale on. And then I got sick of it for exactly the same reason I’ve gotten sick of EQ2 the last couple of times I’ve tried to play it: the combat is boring boring boring. By far the worst implementation of the “tab target, autoattack, buttonbar full of skills” MMO combat system I have ever seen.

Once my new Guardian got to the point where I had more than a full button bar’s worth of marginally different attack skills, all on 10-30 second cooldowns, I knew it was time to stop. Again. Oh well, enjoy the twenty bucks, Sony.

Diablo III Beta

Yes, about a month ago I finally got an invite to the D3 beta!! I wrote up some impressions over at the D3 forums, but here’s the conclusion I came to after playing through the (very short) beta with two of the five classes:

I have zero doubt that we're onto a huge winner with Diablo 3. I can't wait to get home from work and play the other three classes, and I really can't wait for release!!

It feels good. It feels really good. I have a few concerns regarding linearity and difficulty, which may be premature since the beta is so short (just part of Act 1 of the game), and I have some other concerns about the lack of reason to replay with new characters, compared to Diablo 2 which – for better or for worse – did force you to start fresh if you wanted to pick different skills.

But the day this title goes on sale, I will buy it. No doubt, no question, this is a release day purchase for me.

Path of Exile Closed Beta

Given my excitement about Diablo 3, it’s ironic that just a few days ago I got an invite into the closed beta of the earnestly D2-influenced indie title Path of Exile!

Now, there’s a lot of angst on the D3 beta forums from fans who see every divergence from D2 as a personal insult. It’s clear that what they want is Diablo 2, with ten years newer technology behind it. Well, they’re going to get their wish. It’s called Path of Exile.

I’d been following this game with some interest, thought it looked cool, and expected (being an indie title and all) that it would be pretty rough visually and technically, since small teams generally find it impossible to match the polish that a major developer can bring to the table. According to my beta NDA, I’m allowed to post “general opinions on the game,” so here’s one: I was completely wrong about that. This game absolutely oozes polish and the graphics are simply stunning.

The minute-to-minute gameplay is incredibly closely influenced by Diablo 2, right down to the near-identical health and mana balls. The character progression is quite different, but it’s identical to D2 (and very different to D3) in one important way. Let me quote from the developer’s Beta Manifesto:

We do not want players to be able to completely respec their entire character easily. The game is designed to be fun to play, so if you want to play a Bow character rather than an Axe character, you’re meant to start a new one.

Now that’s the Diablo 2 spirit!

This is another game I’d like to write more about, although I’ll have to take some care to abide by the beta agreement – I’m allowed to discuss “publicly available information” but not “unannounced information”, so I’d need to investigate what exactly has been made publicly available.

A funny thing occurred to me about Guild Wars..

One of the main driving factors behind me deciding to check out Guild Wars a couple of months ago was that I was liking so much of what I was hearing about the upcoming Guild Wars 2, and thus thought it made sense to try the original game.

And, as I said in that previous blog post, I'm enjoying it very much.

But the funny thing is, a couple of the elements I find most interesting in Guild Wars are going away in the sequel. This isn't necessarily a huge problem, since the sequel is also promising some very cool new ideas.

The huge one, obviously, is the departure from the "heroes & henchmen" model. I have played Guild Wars 100% solo, never grouped with another human in the two months I've been playing. I guess I've been treating it like Diablo 2 - a solo game which can be played online to give the opportunity to trade with other people. This is certainly not the only way to play, and the hardest areas of the game were surely not designed to be played this way (although there is an active community dedicated to doing so, as can be seen in guides like Completing the Underworld with Heroes). But it is what made GW different, for me, after so much time spent playing traditional "solo content / group content" games like WoW and LOTRO.

Guild Wars 2 takes a much more traditional approach. You play a character. No henchmen, no heroes, if you don't want to be alone you can either play with other people or play a ranger so you at least have a pet. And there is traditional group content in the form of dungeons: "Unlike most of the rest of Tyria, which can be explored by solo players, dungeons are designed to be played and enjoyed in pre-arranged groups, composed of either your regular guildies or a pick-up team".

Actually, an equally huge change is going from the lobby & instance model of Guild Wars to a true persistent world. But the instancing isn't one of the things I find interesting about GW. Well, it allows some novel ideas, like "vanquishing" (the achievement of killing every single monster in a zone in hardmode), which really couldn't work in a massively multiplayer persistent world, but really, it's hard to argue that this change will lose more than it gains.

I also really like the fact that GW has quite a horizontal character development model. Getting to the maximum level, 20, really doesn't take that long. There's no real gear grind for powerful weapons and armour. Progression from level 20 is mostly about making yourself and your team more and more flexible, collecting more and more skills and getting all the heroes in the game recruited, so you've got more options when it comes to arranging your build.

We don't have full details about how GW2 will work yet, but the level cap is apparently 80, which sounds like a large and imposing number. Apparently the time to level should be quite flat and not exceed 90 minutes, but even so, that could be 100+ hours of play to level cap. I guess that's shorter than some MMOs, but longer than Guild Wars. Will there be gear progression? I've read that "equipment will be a more significant part of PvE and World PvP gameplay" but that doesn't necessarily mean a full WoW-style ilvl progression.

Also, it sounds like skill combinations are going to be a lot more constrained in GW2. My GW necromancer, for instance, could choose one of 35 elite skills, and then seven of well over 100 other skills. Sounds like a lot of combinations? Well, on top of that he can pick one of nine secondary classes, and pull in skills from that class too. Or take up to three PvE-only skills from the dozens available from various factions. The combinations are, effectively, infinite. GW2 apparently condenses your options from an elite and 7 others down to an elite, a heal, and 3 others, with your other skills being determined by your weapon type. And the full skill list will be shorter, although no doubt future expansion will add more, just as each campaign and expansion has added more skills to Guild Wars.

This is probably sensible. I don't think anyone would claim GW necros had 35 useful elite skills, or 100+ useful non-elites. Nor would they say that there weren't genuine balancing nightmares in a game with so many skills. A "quality over quantity" approach is what I'd aim for if I was a developer. But I can't deny that I expect a frisson of disappointment at the shorter list of skills.

I hope this isn't all coming across as too negative about Guild Wars 2. I'm not intending to be - I'm extremely excited about it. Next post I'll write about some of the things that have me salivating with anticipation.

Six years late to the party, but it's still going off

April 28th, 2005. Guild Wars launches, to a pretty positive critical reaction, and sells a bunch of copies. Two stand-alone campaigns and an expansion pack follow, and a loyal fanbase is established.

June 3rd, 2011. After hearing people say "you know, this game is pretty good" for more than six years, I play Guild Wars for the first time.

A bit of LOTRO ennui and a couple of disappointing free-to-play titles, combined with a rising tide of hype about the upcoming Guild Wars 2, led to me finally succumbing to the ever-present background buzz of Guild Wars fans and installing the free trial. It's quite a limited trial - I thought it was a traditional "two weeks" but it actually also has a 10 hour playtime limit. Luckily for them, 10 hours was more than enough to persuade me to open my wallet.

And for the two months since then, I've been well and truly hooked and playing quite heavily, as well as browsing the forums and blogs, theorycrafting, doing all the stuff you do when you get hooked on a game. There's a lot to like about Guild Wars, here are some of the main things that have kept me happy.

It's cheap as

Guild Wars, not exactly being new anymore, is now pretty damn cheap. And if you have a currency as strong as the Australian dollar, it's even cheaper. The Trilogy pack and the Eye Of The North expansion, all up, cost me the princely sum of A$34.47. And of course, as the fans will constantly remind you, Guild Wars is B2P - "buy to play." Once you've bought it, there is no ongoing subscription. There is a cash shop with some conveniences like increased storage space and more character slots, plus cosmetic outfits, but it's not something I feel pressured to spend money on.

I love the solo player plus team game style

One of the things I really liked about Atlantica Online was the concept of controlling your main character, plus a team of NPCs. And I really like running a team of eight, myself plus seven heroes, in Guild Wars as well. Apparently being able to fully customize your team was a fairly recent addition to the game, previously you could only have three heroes and four "henchmen", whose gear and skills you could not customize. So I'm glad I came along when I did.

Like Atlantica, the strategy of team building is a huge part of the game. Picking your heroes, collecting the necessary skills to give each of them a good build, arming them - it's a great meta-game. And given the quickly-reached level cap and deliberate lack of any real gear curve, this strategy is by far the main determinant of how powerful you are, making for a very skill-based rather than grind-based progression model.

I love the fact that there's actual difficulty for the solo player

In far too many MMOs, solo play is simply a "time invested = rewards" formula, while actually difficult content, where you will fail if you're not good enough, is reserved for group play. When I was last playing WoW, my guild was progressing through the tier 11 raid content, which was sweetly tuned and really chafed our asses to the point where our final victory over Nef, after a number of weeks of attempts, was delicious. At the same time, I was levelling a worgen alt - going through Kalimdor from level 1 to 60, my only two deaths were both from falling when I over-enthusiastically took shortcuts down cliffs. At no point in those 60 levels was I ever in the remotest danger of dying due to enemy action.

Playing through Guild Wars, currently I have completed the Prophecies and EOTN storylines in normal mode, along with most of Factions, and done some missions and vanquishes in hardmode. There have been missions that I wiped and failed. There have been dungeons that reduced me to graveyard-zerging with maximum death penalty. There have been vanquishes that ended in tears as I hit max death penalty and got kicked out.

I have a list of things that I have tried and failed, that I am mulling over tactics for, ready for fresh attempts.

This is awesome. Especially since, as I said earlier, there is no real gear curve - if you fail, you need to adjust your build, adjust your tactics, and try again. Can't outlevel and outgear the challenge.

It's an achiever's paradise

I've definitely got a bit of an achiever-type personality, and Guild Wars offers an enormous amount of achievements to pursue. Complete every mission. With bonus objectives. In hard mode. Vanquish every zone. Map every zone. Collect every skill. Open vast numbers of chests. Max out reputations. Collect prestige armour and rare weapons. Collect miniatures. It's crazy! And the Hall of Monuments is a genius idea to get current players excited about doing all this stuff, in order to earn cosmetic rewards for Guild Wars 2 (I'm up to 10 points out of a possible 50 now).

I can see that it would take a long time to get to a point where you'd say "I have nothing to do." And if you stop playing for a while to play something else, no big deal, since it's buy-to-play, you can come back whenever and there's still an endless list of things to achieve!

Yep, I'm more pleased with this purchase than any game in quite a while, and definitely foresee myself playing for a fair while. And Guild Wars 2 is definitely now top of my list of upcoming titles I'm following with interest.