Tobold recently was not impressed by Assasin’s Creed 1. He expressed the same baffling opinions that I often hear about AC, which gives me a chance to be baffled in a public blog post. I’ve always like Assassin’s Creed. At the time AC1 came out, I thought it was mind-bogglingly revolutionary. It was the best mo-cap I’d ever seen, the graphics looked realistic as crap, the city landscapes were amazing, and it had so many friggin actors on the screen at once. Also, nobody had ever seen “Parkour” before. All of that innovation is unfortunately lost on a modern audience, though, and all anyone sees when they go back to AC1 is the boring and repetitive gameplay. (392 words.)

Bye Warhammer! I wish I’d been able to log into you before you left, but your publisher apparently can’t manage simple things like letting people easily login and play you, even when you’re free. Gotta think that might have something to do with your departure. Anyway, you weren’t a bad game. Certainly better than EQ1 or AC which are inexplicably still running approximately fifty years later. Warhammer Online is the first MMORPG I’ve played a significant amount that shut down, and only the second MMORPG from which I’ve lost significant characters. (I lost my original Asheron’s Call characters when Turbine moved from Microsoft to their own servers.) (116 words.)

Wow. I just read an article on Massively about the pricing for Final Fantasy XIV guild housing. It’s rather high, and it has enraged the FFXIV community. At least according to the article. For myself, I’m not into housing on a good day, but I’m definitely not into housing if it’s going to cost me a bazillion jillion gil for a starter house. Before we get to the housing, I’ve got to say, Square Enix knows how to put out some friggin’ patch notes. The FFXIV 2.1 patch notes are the most detailed patch notes I’ve ever seen, to the point of obsessive compulsion. It’s a complete encyclopedia of patch information that must have taken an enormous amount of time to put together. Kudos to them. (331 words.)

Why doesn’t everyone use invert mouse? I simply cannot comprehend it. Yet informal polls show that only about 30% of people use invert mouse. I choose the invert mouse setting because I want to mimic the controls of a flight simulator, which is pretty much the de-facto standard 3D environment control scheme. In a flight simulator (and presumably a real airplane), you push the stick forward to go down, and you pull the stick back to go up. So clearly when using a mouse, you should roll the mouse forward to aim down, and roll the mouse backward to aim up. (170 words.)

I bought a 3-month subscription for WoW when I suddenly got interested in playing again. Now that I’m running out of interest, the subscription will be expiring in January. It’s obvious that game developers are not doing subscriptions anymore, but I have to say, it’s pretty awesome to play a game where you aren’t bothered with cash shops or gems or other alternate forms of cash-based currency. Anyway, my highest-level character in WoW is a 66 Night Elf Hunter. I rolled him back in Vanilla WoW when a Hunter was just about the only way to go around soloing without spending all of your time either dead or healing between encounters. He’s still the guy I do all my solo questing with, but now it’s trivial beyond belief. I just mow down all the mobs in the Outlands like cutting grass with a butter knife. Or cutting butter with a scythe. Or something. It’s actually not very fun. I typically log in with him, finish a handful of quests, and then log out. (493 words.)

So you say you wish you could play an MMORPG like the ones in the old days? Something like UO maybe? Well get yourself a copy of Mortal Online and experience what MMORPG life was like in the late 1990s. Previously, I thought that Wizardry Online was a pretty old school, hardcore MMORPG. But WO is a total cake walk compared to Mortal Online. Here’s the first thing you need to know about MO: You’re going to die and lose everything. (3464 words.)

I was moderately shocked last night to receive an email from Trion with a code to get into the Trove Alpha. I was even more shocked to discover a complete lack of an NDA. Although, if you think about it, I did actually pay $20 (or whatever it was) to see this alpha, so it would be weird for them to restrict me. There are very few options in the game right now, which I found surprising. (I just didn’t expect that game options would be added so late in the life cycle of a game.) The only in-game option is to pick full screen or not. If you’re an invert mouse person, you have to edit your Trove.cfg file and set InvertY = true. If you’re not a WASD person, you’re out of luck. (640 words.)

I’ve been thinking about character names. Normally I make up new names for all my characters, but I know a lot of people carry over their names from one game to another. You always see people trying “get their names” when a new game launches. One day on a whim I decided to re-use a couple of names from Rift characters for some EQ2 alts to see what it was like, and I found it very weird. (149 words.)

I did something odd over one weekend. I installed and played both Everquest and Asheron’s Call for a little while. Everquest is free-to-play now, if you didn’t know. You can download the client and log right on in there, and there are a surprising number of people who apparently do just that. The little newbie cave must have had a dozen people in it wandering around trying to figure out how to play. (608 words.)

I’ve always wondered something. Most of the world uses WASD for their keyboard controls, right? I’m assuming so because that’s how every game is pre-configured. I, however, use ESDF for my keyboard controls, so I have to change the defaults on every single game I play. I am not bitter about that. Mostly. I chose ESDF when I re-did my Quake keyboard binds way back in the day because it seemed like the natural choice, because my ring finger, middle finger, and index finger naturally rested on SDF anyway. If I needed to type a quick message, my fingers were right there ready to do so. (227 words.)