12 entries. 3,817 words.

June, 2012

• The Secret World. 2012-06-29 9:08 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Status
  
  I’ve had a burst of gaming enthusiasm in the last month or so, ending my streak of playing basically nothing since Christmas. As usual, I tend to gravitate toward RPGs and MMOs. The last MMO I played before my break was Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I found enjoyable, but not enough to keep playing past the free month. Then recently, on an impulse, I bought TERA, which boasted a totally fresh new action-based combat system, but again, it didn’t keep my attention past the first month. After that I played LOTRO again, which is a bit dated now but still one of the best MMOs around. 283 words.

July, 2012

• The Secret World, Likes and Dislikes. 2012-07-02 2:08 AM.
  • MMORPG
  • Reviews
  
  Here are some of my impressions from playing The Secret World for a weekend of beta and a few days of the head start. Likes: The “investigation” quests are awesome! You can Google the answers, of course, but trying to solve them without is a trip. We’re talking old school adventure-style puzzles and riddles here. (Make sure to turn off General chat if you don’t want to see spoilers, ‘cause, you know, people are lazy.) You can die. You don’t really know how powerful new mobs are until you attack them. (In fact, as it turns out, sometimes you have to die to complete quests, because the ghost world can be explored too.) It’s pretty painless—all you have to do is run back to your corpse, just like WoW. Almost every quest is repeatable daily, so you never have to grind on mobs. (Though it is still fun to shoot zombies at random.) Having an out-of-combat sprint toggle is great for getting around. It’s sort of like riding a mount, and you can do it from the beginning. I wonder if you can increase the speed later on? The flexibility of creating your own “backpacks.” You can carry 50 things, but they can be organized into any number of bags of any size, which you can pin to the screen or not. For example, I made one to hold crafting supplies, another for things to sell, and another one pinned to the screen for healing drinks. Humorous NPC quest givers and great voice acting (which you can easily skip if you’ve seen them before). Dislikes: 836 words.
• Melanthius Is Open. 2012-07-04 9:55 PM.
  • Administration
  
  I had this impulse to put all my gaming-related posts on a new site, so here it is. I had the melanthius.com domain sitting around doing nothing, so it seemed like a fine time to put it to use. Needless to say, I will be modifying the theme considerably. I am not sure why all of the “gaming” WordPress themes all look the same: Awful. The only thing I will salvage will probably be the color scheme and possibly the Opal font (I don’t know what it’s actually called, but on the Amiga, the super-rounded-letters font was called Opal). 99 words.
• UltrViolet in The Secret World. 2012-07-07 2:22 AM.
  • MMORPG
  • Stories
  • Theory
  
  This is what my main character looks like in The Secret World. He makes me laugh whenever I look at him. I just wish I could have made him with a pot belly. FYI combining shotgun and sword seems like a bad idea, now that I’ve already committed to it. I was going to use the shotgun for AoE attacks and the sword for single-target attacks, but there’s no compelling need to split them up like that. Both shotgun and sword have plenty of AoE and single-target attacks. 88 words.
• Maybe Some Other Time. 2012-07-08 12:40 AM.
  • MMORPG
  
  I was going to write up a bunch of hints for The Secret World’s investigation quests, but then I realized that 1) I don’t really have the time to do that, and 2) I don’t really want to do all of the SEO to get them into search results. So, if you were dying to see spoiler-free hints for The Secret World, sorry. :) 64 words.
• Down the Rabbit Hole. 2012-07-17 1:59 AM.
  • Dungeons
  • MMORPG
  • Status
  • Theory
  
  I’m a bit surprised to say this but I don’t think I’ll be playing TSW beyond the free month. In fact, I stopped playing long before the free month ended. I’m still glad I pre-ordered it, though, because it deserves to have a chance. But I realized that I don’t feel much of a sense of character advancement while playing. You don’t get new weapons very often, and you don’t really get new powers very often, either. Like I said before, as your character advances, you get more choices of powers, but you don’t really get more powerful powers like you might expect. So often times, when you gain new abilities, you find there’s no reason to change what you’ve already been using. The only things to look forward to are new NPCs telling new stories, and maybe a new piece of clothing now and then. 1,371 words.

August, 2012

• Guild Wars 2 Head Stop. 2012-08-25 1:58 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Status
  
  Well I thought it would be a nice Saturday. I’d get up, log into the Guild Wars 2 Head Start along with the rest of the entire Internet, and have a nice morning of adventure. But nooooooo. It’s been down for two hours now. Not just intermittent connectivity issues; we’re talking 100% dead. And the information coming out of ArenaNet is somewhat lacking. About once an hour we get something like, “We’re looking into connectivity issues. Thanks for your patience.” 80 words.
• Guild Wars 2 Head Start Weekend. 2012-08-27 2:23 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Reviews
  • Status
  
  The hype is finally over and Guild Wars 2 is out (if you pre-purchased it, that is). After being down Saturday morning, GW2 worked flawlessly for the rest of the weekend. Usually the hype far overshadows the actual game. But in this one rare case, it’s possible that the hype was justified. Let’s talk about Guild Wars 1 for a second. I never got into it. Certain things just bugged me. Mainly the lack of a jump. I’m not one of those people that bunny hops everywhere, but I never realized how often I jumped until it was missing. The other thing I couldn’t get past was left-clicking everything instead of right-clicking. 410 words.
• Necromancer Daggers. 2012-08-28 1:59 PM.
  • Classes
  • MMORPG
  • Theory
  
  Whoa.. I knew that Necromancer had melee-ish capability when you equip daggers, but I didn’t realize until last night just how much raw damage it puts out. I’ve been using a Staff or Axe/Dagger combo, but last night I decided to try out Dagger/Dagger again, and holy crap I was suddenly killing stuff super fast. I’m still not really happy with the Necro’s AoE capabilities. I haven’t found any decent AoE damage spells (compared to the Elementalist at least); it’s mainly AoE debuffs, which are not terribly useful in PvE events. I mean they are useful, but everyone just blasts AoE damage so debuffs aren’t necessary. By the time the debuff spell finishes, all the mobs are dead anyway. 170 words.

September, 2012

• Pointers in Games. 2012-09-17 2:06 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Opinion
  
  Guild Wars 2 is an awesome game. But there is one thing about it that drives me insane. In fact, I have the same problem with almost every game that has a pointer. You can’t see the pointer! This is a major problem in GW2 because many of your abilities are ground-targeted spells, so you need to be able to point to the spot where you want to cast it. (I use the option that automatically casts wherever you are pointing.) If you’re out soloing it’s not a problem, but many times you’re in an epic battle with fifty people pounding on a boss and there’s flashing and fireworks and dazzling spell effects going on all over the place. Picking out the pointer in those situations is near impossible for me. Even when I wave the mouse around like I do on the desktop, it can still take a long time to find the damn thing. 214 words.
• Greens and Blues. 2012-09-17 7:55 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Am I crazy or did GW2 make green items better than blue items, which is 100% the opposite of every other MMO in history? Did they just arbitrarily pick the colors or is there some logic to it? Somebody “on the Internet” said blue < green < yellow makes more sense because it follows the color wheel. But, like, green < blue < purple follows the color spectrum (ROYGBIV). 69 words.

December, 2012

• My First Look at Skyrim. 2012-12-08 2:09 AM.
  • RPG
  • Single-Player
  • Steam
  
  I finally got Skyrim in a Steam sale. I’m not sure exactly what I expected but I kind of thought it would be something a bit more … well, different from Oblivion. All of the same annoying things from Oblivion are still there in Skyrim. The most annoying of which is when five people walk up to you and start talking at the same time. While you’re already talking to someone else. Not to mention the laggy, unresponsive sort of feel to the interface, which is particularly annoying considering you’re supposed to play it like an FPS. I’ve played FPSs, Skyrim, and you, sir, are no FPS. 133 words.