I’m going to try and take something Tobold said recently to heart and treat this blog more like a diary of my gaming thoughts, rather than trying to write glowing reviews and pages of useful information.
So here goes.
The Older Gamers: Following up on a recommendation from a good friend possibly over a year ago now I’ve joined The Older Gamers community. I’ve yet to actually meet up with anyone from there in game, and unfortunately discovered that the Tera division (which is why I got round to signing up in the first place) is based on a US server. Still, it’s a big, active community and should hopefully provide chat and discussion for any games my RL friends aren’t playing. Without having to resort to ‘official’ forums and fight it out with trolls and other forms of online dicks.
WoW: Committed to annual pass until November. However, the game is boring me now. I’m enjoying not being committed to two nights a week to be part of a raid team. And besides, I have no interest in heroic mode raiding. Give me more content, not hard modes any day.
Tera: I’ve joined a big active guild and getting into this more as I play it. I am really enjoying the active style of combat and have done some group stuff in the first instance now. There’s still the problem of being the only one of my RL friends playing this and the Korean grind nature of some of the game, but it is very pretty and much fun. Which is kind of what you want from a game!
I was slightly surprised to discover that as well as the grind applying to crafting and gearing up it also refers to the lack of quests in the Korean version of the game (at least post level 20). That never seemed an issue when playing DAoC. The quest system of WoW changed that and had become the de-facto model for western MMO. I say had though as having experience the renown hearts version in GW2 I think that works a lot better.
The Secret World: Having pre-purchased a lifetime account on a whim I played a day in the beta last weekend. I must admit I liked the ability wheel setup. I tinkered with by build of 7 active and 7 passive abilities quite a bit and easily had enough points over the day to mix and match between 3 weapons (pistols, hammer, blood magic). I did get a bit frustrated with some of the puzzles on the missions but wasn’t completely blocked ever.
Diablo III: Managed to beat the first boss (Error 37) about 24h after release. So far I’ve barely scratched the surface. The Witch Hunter felt a bit dull with the plink plink of arrows. Plus she came across as a hard nosed dullard. So I tried a Barbarian instead. After much smashing and body parts flying in all directions I think this was the right choice!
GW2: I’ve been really excited and following all the hype for this. I had a good time on the beta weekend clearing the first human zone with a Guardian character. However, having played more Tera and some The Secret World, my gut feeling currently is that the combat system in GW2 is very basic. That said, all I’ve really done so far is solo stuff or events with so many people around it is just button mashing FTW. I’ll need to give small group instanced stuff a try to see how things pan out with no tank/healer roles. Tera has the same style (and better I think) of active combat, but also retains tank/healer roles. Fortunately there’s so much more than just the combat system to GW2 and the hope that the WvW combat lives up to the hype.