July turned out to be a slow month. Other than making sure I showed up for Van Hemlock’s Tuesday Noob Club each week, I really didn’t have any MMO commitments. I did some Guild Wars on and off, and spent time in the Wizard101 beta. All the drama over Flagship and Hellgate: London actually got me back into the game a bit. I’d left my marksman at a lowly level 12 last winter, and he’s now level 20! I still think it’s a fun game, and it’s great to see an RPG that plays so closely to the feel of an actual shooter. Keeping in mind of course, I’m only able to play the hunter classes, since they go into first-person view. Hellgate’s third-person camera and control is simply atrocious. Why console developers can nail third-person and PC developers can’t seem to pull it off if their lives depended on it is beyond me.
I just noticed that two of the three games I mentioned aren’t even MMO’s. Wizard101 is awesome but once it launches the players will most likely be the tween market it’s targeted towards, so I won’t be playing the live game simply because of that. I was also in the beta for Holic, which is one of the F2P games but for what it is, seems to be executed quite well. A surprising level of production quality (dare I say “polish?”) and the graphics are cartoony without going totally cel-shaded or anime. It’s more like a marriage of near-cel-shaded characters with Mythos-style terrain art. Holic is already live now. One thing with some F2P games is that while they don’t try to mask the shallow grind-heavy game play like our Western titles do, they do explore boundaries and push the envelope in areas our developers don’t touch. In Holic’s case, they’re embracing User Generated Content in the form of User-created Quests (UCQ) and User-created Dungeons (UCD) (their phrases) but I have not taken the opportunity to explore this aspect of the game yet. Usually when I see an F2P game that lets players set up those little merchant shops that lag the hell out of social areas (hmm… do “F2P” and “social” even belong in the same sentence?) I automatically presume the botters have already taken over. If that’s the case, I’m not seeing it yet in Holic, and for a change the in-game community has actually been friendly, helpful and… nice? It may not last long, F2P tends to attract the less-than-savory members of the internet but for now it is a refreshing change of pace from what I normally experience when I delve into the nether regions of F2P.
I’ve actually been spending more time on the 360 than the PC, especially the past week or so. I still have several titles I’d picked up last year that I haven’t completed, but I’m mostly having a blast getting through Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 and Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. For RPG’s I’m working through Mass Effect and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Mass Effect is cool but still hasn’t sucked me in. One way or another I will eventually complete it. I’ve never actually managed to stay interested long enough to complete a BioWare RPG so by gods this will be my first, come Hell or high water!
A long-time friend of mine also got a 360 this week. His young daughter wanted one so he went in half with her to get it. He didn’t actually make her pay half, but in an attempt to try to get her accustomed to not being so stingy with her allowance (she’s apparently saved it all… over $1,000 in the bank and she’s not quite 9 years old yet!) she thinks she did. So, when he’s playing rather than her, he gets me back into Gears of War (amazing that I completed the entire single player game and barely any Achievement Points to show for it) for co-op mode. We’ll try scrimmaging a bit soon, I always sucked at GoW online. A little Crackdown, too. We’re interested in picking up games we can co-op in as well as play competitively.
Finally, this past week I decided the burnout from over-playing LOTRO in May was cooled down, and I’ve made my return. I doubt I’ll be doing much with my alts since they’re only 10 levels behind my main character, and repeating too much of the same content too quickly will just burn me out again. Besides, I’ve still got a few levels to go and a ton of content to get through (not to mention some raids!) before the Mines of Moria are opened to us. When I left in May, I had just gotten the three-piece Vestments of the Grove armor set for Arwellyn. The past couple days she completed her first Legendary Trait: Lore of the Blade, which is cool to be dual-wielding a staff and sword like Gandalf in the movies. I’d been saving a nice caster sword (nice +Fate stat bonus) but almost immediately after equipping the trait, some kin-mates and I headed to the Misty Mountains for Epic Book 5, Chapter 2 where we fight our way through a goblin camp, up the narrow trails to finally slay their leader Gurzmat. One of the rewards for completion is Doom of Gurzmat, an excellent caster sword with even more dps and more +Fate as well as +Agility. On top of that, it’s the first weapon Arwellyn has acquired with glowing, pulsating special effects! I also took her to Angmar where she has the first piece of the Vestments of Fém set, the slippers. Just looking at the stats, I’ll say it looks more like a set for soloing, very little +Fate but plenty of armor rating, Will, Vitality and Agility. The mobs have been hitting hard anyway at these levels when solo, so Arwellyn has put aside her Lynx dps pet in favor of the original Raven to use the popular “flank and spank” method of solo combat. The raven flanks more than the lynx or bear, and one of the flank skills provides a self-heal to keep Arw going while she and the raven whittle down the mob’s morale.
I also tried a little more PvMP, running my Reaver for a little bit then realizing I’m just horrible at faster-paced MMO melee PvP, I rolled a new Defiler, which is the creep’s new (as of Book 13) healer class. I’ll do a writeup on that later this week maybe. In any event, despite the fact LOTRO’s PvP currently has zero impact on the world, having that whole zone to play in rather than a smaller battleground, and multiple keeps to fight for control over just makes the whole experience so much more fun and rewarding than WoW’s ever did for me. Hell, PvMP alone gets me extremely curious to learn just what the hell RvR really means and how it fully impacts the world in WAR. Turbine’s developers have always been outspoken fans of DAOC, which shows in their keep/raid implementation in the Ettenmoors, and they’ve dropped hints that they want to expand PvMP and gradually start giving it more impact or meaning upon the world.
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