Playstation Love

I decided that I haven't been spending enough energy and time with my PS3.  I saved up a lot of money to own this system 2 years ago and for the last year I've been neglecting it, well, other than watching Blu-Rays, but that isn't or rather wasn't, at the time of purchase, the reason I brought it home.

The beginning of my PS3 revival is pretty simple, I decided to start playing Uncharted 1.  I had already played to chapter 6 a year ago, when I purchased it used and I wanted to finally finish it.  So over the course of two days, I was able to accomplish that seemingly small task.  The game was fantastic by the way.  Loved every minute of it and after finishing it immediately started playing Uncharted 2, but that is for another blog post.  So while playing Uncharted, I would post my love for the game on G+ and Twitter.  Several people on those networks, who I trust when it comes to gaming suggestions, suggested that I pick up the Playstation Plus package.  It features a lot of added value like automatic system upgrades, saving games to the SoE cloud system and most recently the ability to download a full game and play for free.  I thought, what a cool idea.  I can pay 50.00 for a year's service and every month I can choose to download a free game to play and since most games they release will be older games but still be in the 30 - 40 dollar range, I thought it would be a great deal and I could come out ahead in the end, plus you get all kinds of discounts on other items as well so its a win win for Team Oakstout.  So today I finally broke down, logged into PSN and started working on becoming a new PSN Plus member.  Course my connection to the store was pretty janky.  Then thing started getting a little strange.  The system had not problem taking my 50.00 for the Plus upgrade, but anytime I tried to search the store to see what items Plus members had access to, I would lose the server connection.  (I'm already feeling the Sony Love through my backside at this moment.)  This happened about 4 or 5 times, so I decided to give the server a little bit of time. Eventually, I decide to venture back into the store to see what FREE goodies I get for being a Plus Member.

After turning my nose up at a few things, not a fan of Virtual fighter, already own Little Big Planet 2 and I already own Warhammer Space Marine on Xbox already. Finally I decided to go with Infamous 2. I start the download.. or at least I think I start the download but I will come to that.  After spending a little more time in the store, trying to decide if I really need those 2 extra courses for Hotshots, I go out of the store to check my download progress and to my surprise I discover that it hasn't started and when I prompt it to start, it says, you don't have any room on your hard drive poor boy, you'll need to delete a few things. Since the PS3 is a bit more like a computer than the Xbox is, it makes finding out certain information harder, eventually I was able to check and see exactly how much space I had on my hard drive. To be honest, ts been a while and I wasn't really even sure how big the drive was to start with, its been a while.  Come to find out I'm sporting around 75gig with only 10 left and the game I want is 15gig.  YIKES!  Good thing I didn't purchase the game.  But now I'm thinking I just spent a lot of cash on a feature, monthly free games, that I can't really take advantage of because my HDD is way to small.

So, I start deleting stuff and finally get about 21gig free, so the download starts, automatically I must add, sure it starts automatically but it couldn't bother to tell me it was hung up or that it hadn't started.  I think sometimes the PS3 is way more complicated than it needs to be, but that is another post as well.  Anyway, having it start automatically is nice, but when its done I'll still only have about 6gig left to do anything with and that won't really help me take advantage of the free game I get every month with Playstation Plus, especially if I want to keep said games on my system.  I am notoriously lazy when it comes to finishing games, if you haven't heard.  Still I want to take advantage of this free game crap and apparently I'm kind of stuck, well, not exactly.

I start looking online to find out how I can change out my wimpy HDD and get a beefy mainly drive.  This apparently is a huge feature that Sony has to allow users the ability to upgrading their systems hard drive.  I look around and discover that in the long run its fairly simple.  Unscrew this, unhook that, pop this out, pop that in and the next thing you know you have a new drive.  Luckily for me the cost of a new drive isn'tt so bad, I can get a 320gig for around 60.00 at Best Buy.  I could go bigger, but I figure that the 320 gig will let me put around 20 or so 15gig games on my system at one time and if that isn't enough space then I'll just have to get an external drive down the road.  The main issue is restoring everything.

A lot of sites say you only have to install the new drive and the system will format and put the system back on, all you have to do is run a utility backup before and a restore after.  Others say you have to have a thumb drive with the new upgrade system software on it and do a bunch of button mashing on your controller, then restore from back up all your games and saves.  Some sites and videos reference the Slim while others show the Fat PS3.  Its all very confusing so I'm planning to plan for everything by backing it all up on a external and then having the system upgrade software ready if need be.

Hopefully by next week, I'll have a nice big drive to download lots of free PSN Plus games.

Course I could be wrong.

Rift Hammers

Played some Rift the other day.  This is my first try at the game since I tried the game 3 months after release with a weekend pass.  I have to say that I do like the environs and the feel of the game.  The only thing that really bothered me and to tell the truth its the same thing that bothered me when I went back to try EQ2 a while back.  Its the way the developers have dumbed down your choices in the game.

Let me explain.  When I first played EQ2, you started as a generic class.. priest, rogue, warrior, mage.. then your progressed and got to choose another path to take and then further on another path.  I always thought that aspect of the game was really cool, but they have dumbed that down.  Basically you can pick what your ending class will be from the start which takes a lot of the mystery out of what your end up being when your all grown up.

Rift has done the same thing.  You get to pick what 3 Souls you want to start off playing and the game hand holds your decision making.  I wanted to be a cleric so I chose a specific kind.  I got 3 souls from the start and after I acquire a point, the game instructs me on how I need to place that point to be the cleric I originally chose.  I'm not hip to that idea.  I don't like hand holding in games and for me, the original experience of having to gather your souls through questing was pretty nice.  It added flavor to the game that now seems rush rush.  Put your point here and lets move on, no need to make a decision till way later in the game.

I don't understand the mentality of developers to release a game and then after a few months start, water it down for those who are lazy.  Do they think that by streamlining those options your going to get an influx of new gamers?  Come on, that's just insane.  If anything it will drive the returning customers nuts that you've dumbed it all down.

Well thats how I feel anyway.

Hypocrite! My Guild Wars 2 preview

First off, I am going against my own creed, my own rules, my own zen of blogging.  I never ever review a game before its released.  I also shout down those who do, because my argument has always been that the game is not done until its on the shelves then its fair game.  If its being tested then there is still time to fix the flaws and to right the wrongs.

I am about to break that rule.

Why?

Well to be honest, in order for me to participate in the Guild Wars 2 beta or BWE GW2 I had to actually PURCHASE THE GAME!  Therefore, if they already have my hard earned cash, I should be able to talk about their game with honesty and justification.  I say this because by bringing parts of the game to light which are as yet, unfinished or for the most part confusing, I am hoping that the product, which I already paid for, is complete and ready for my enjoyment.

The first thing I have to say is ArenaNet, shame on you for making the decision to be in the beta a financial burden on your fans.  If could go back, I would have chosen not to participate in the beta and thereby saving my hard earned cash for something that would be more productive like a couch dance at the Gold Club with Mindy.  But I'm stuck like a lot of others.  I'm not even sure I can get my money back if I really wanted to get it back, but putting that out there was just crazy and manipulative.  I understand that players of the original Guild Wars are in a gaming desert, thirsting to be in the beta and to them, throwing out cash so they can taste the new flavor of their beloved  much hyped much anticipated sequel is something they don't mind doing.  I still think its taking advantage of your fan base like no other game before it, so shame on ArenaNet.

Now let me talk about the game.

There is no specific questing.  There is your story line and then there are the quests that you pick up in the dynamic event areas or as I call them the public quest areas.  Basically, you walk into an area and you get a message that says, please help Farmer Todd by killing all the monster worms in his corn field.  So you go over, start killing monster worms and you get an update saying "Farmer Todd also needs help putting the fires out started by the monster worms".  So you now have two ways of helping Farmer Todd and therefore achieving faction with him.  After full faction is acquired, basically you can see a solid filled in heart on the map where Farmer Todd is standing, you can then purchase gear upgrades and other items from him with Karma which is earned during the dynamic event.  Each mapped out zone has a few "Dynamic Events" and each is designed for a specific level.  Once you get full faction with the "Quest giver" there really isn't any point in staying around unless your grinding cash, Karma or XP.  Once done with an area, you will most likely move on to the next dynamic event, however the game is designed so that moving from one area to the next can cause you to be under leveled.  I found that if I ran with a group, because all these areas are group driven, I could easy do dynamic events that on the surface were too high for me, but with all the players running around helping I was able to finish and get full faction.  Eventually this made it hard for me to progress to new dynamic areas because there weren't enough players in an area to help advance and I ended up getting stuck and grinding already completed dynamic areas for XP.  To me that seems like a scaling issue.  As a solo player I should be able to complete a dynamic event by myself but in some cases I just can't due to the difficulty of the quest and the mobs themselves being too aggressive.

I did have one character that didn't encounter the wall, but to do this I had to acquire XP by other methods besides just dynamic events like exploring, gathering crafting items, spending time actually crafting items in town, and spend some time working on my character's story line quests.  I think the idea is to do all those so XP is a constant flow and your not suck in an area trying to grind out XP, but who will spend time doing all those things? Not being able to "Quest" is hindering the XP flow and that is an issue in my view.  You can not rely on one aspect of the game to give you enough to advance so that your hitting each level appropriate dynamic area on cue. If you hit that bottleneck and your not spreading your XP gathering out over different areas you end up just grinding out XP on mobs or Dynamic Events that you have already done, which can sour anyone to any MMO game.  They did mention that you can craft your way through all the levels, but that would require you to go out and gather materials or at the very least have enough cash to purchase them on the market.  But there really isn't any risk if you level up that way.  Making a magical boot isn't going to kill you.

Course all that is fixable.

Another thing is they need to do a better job of explaining different aspects of the game, once its released.  I was unaware until the second Beta Weekend that the game incorporated a combo system.  Basically you can augment an attack by combining it with the attack or spell from another class.  So if the Elementalist puts up an ice shield around the monster and you shoot an arrow through it, then the arrow does ice damage.  That is just an example, I'm not even sure you can create an ice barrier, however the basic principle still holds, classes can combine to augment certain attacks.  I actually found this out by ACCIDENT, when I researching about "Condition Damage" another added feature that the game does a poor job of explaining.  If an item has "condition damage" as an ability, if you hover over that, it should at least tell you what "condition damage" means and it does not.  If I hover over intelligence in my character panel, it will tell me what intelligence does, not sure why it can't do the same for "condition damage".  I would tell you what it means but I'm still a bit fuzzy on it myself and to be honest since I had to look it up then you should have to as well.  Combos are just too cool not to put it right out in front as a selling point and yet, I knew nothing about it till late Sunday afternoon during the second Beta Weekend.

My only other complaint is the importance of dodging.  Well, its not my only complaint but it will be my last for this post. For the second Beta Weekend, I decided to try out the Warrior.  One would hope that something as beefy and armored as a warrior would take a hit better than the squishy classes.  Not true.  Sadly I died a lot.  I actually started surviving when I discovered the trick.  The trick is to run away.  At times the game play a lot like Diablo 3 on Nighmare level and that's really not cool when its like that at level 4.  I personally think that levels 1 - 7 or 8 should be the easy levels.  Meaning, that is when your learning how to play, enjoying the cool parts of your new class and just figuring out strategy.  But with GW2 it ramps up pretty fast and if your not surrounded by groups of people when doing a dynamic event you end up dying and spend time waiting for someone kind player to revive you.  The best way to avoid death is to dodge and run and to be honest that isn't very heroic for my character, especially a warrior.  But this issue seems to only be with melee classes.  Ranged classes don't have as much to fear and I've even herd said a few times that
Rangers will probably be one of the more prevalent classes on the servers along with Elementalists since they have ranged attacks.  This really puts a damper on playing a melee class in my book.  Look, I'm not saying make all of it easy, but if I die a lot in the first 6 levels then either I'm retarded and considering I've played a lot of MMO games that's highly unlikely or your game is just too FUCKING HARD on melee.  So fix it.

Besides dying a lot with the warrior, eventually I found a rhythm that helped.  I also got some advice about picking up the Healing Signet in the first couple of levels, which increased my survivability a lot.  But that is just wrong.  If I have to blow my first 3 points on a Healing Signet instead of choosing a different attack or buff then I'm not getting to play the game I want to play.  I'm being backed into a corner and I'm  playing the way the designers want me to play and that is not right.

It sounds like I don't like the game, but I do.  At first I did not.  It seemed strange not to have traditional quest givers and having to constantly change weapons till you found a set of skills that complimented your play style and other unexplained reasons for not falling in love at first sight.  But the more I played and the more I got use to the style of play, I learned that this could be the game for me.  I can see myself playing this a lot with friends and even soloing a good bit.  Its graphically beautiful, the attacks seem very fluid and the ability to switch weapons mid fight to give yourself another set of attacks is pretty nice.  I still think they have a lot of work left to get the game just right for release but for now the game handles and looks fantastic.

I wouldn't advise anyone to run out and buy a copy just to get in the beta.  I for one might end up skipping a few once I get a nice feel for how the game works, just so I don't spoil myself before release.  I will say that they need to get on with finishing the game.  A lot of people have already started wondering what exactly did we pay for so far in advance and was it worth it to get in 10 or so beta weekends or will that experience sour us once the game is released.


These are just my thoughts and they shouldn't sway anyone from purchasing the game once its truly released.  I say all this so I can feel better about my decision to purchase the game.  I want to make sure that I put my complaints on file so if the game doesn't improve I can point my figure and go, this is when you didn't listen to your fan base and that is why you failed.

Ignorance

Its ok to have an opinion and as long as we agree to respect each others there is no need for you to say my opinion is wrong!

This goes for games, life, faith and choice of lifestyle as long as its all within the boundaries of the law. You can say your opinion is the right one as long as you don't shout at me saying mine is wrong

Just an opinion!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Diablo III is great... BLIZZARD STILL SUCKS

Another epic Blizzard Failure.  Apparently they patched today in order to fix a few things and completely unhinged the system again.  Not sure what their over all plan was but it felt just like release week more to the point if felt just like the actual day of release.  Look, I'm all for putting out patches, but can you guys test them before causing a major meltdown every time you decided something is broken, which it isn't and add something to the game which we don't necessarily need.

I'll say this again, if the game had an offline mod where people could play solo I don't think I would complain at all.  If I wanted to access the AH or play with others I'd have to log in, but not allowing people to have any and I mean ANY access to the game while a bunch of crack head techs try to figure out which one of them left the jelly sandwich inside the log in server is just simply poor planning and more importantly poor customer service.  yea I understand issues upon release, I get that, but the game was FINALLY running very smoothly, now is not fit to keep my door open.. yea I said it.. DOOR STOP NOT APPLICABLE.   Look this isn't old hat to you guys.  I mean you released WoW for gawd sake and StarCraft 2 to much success.  I mean its not like you guys were blindsided by people wanting to have a taste of the new Blizzard designer drug.  Hell, you should have been entrenched warriors ready for the battle.  Already hardened by WoW and SC2. This shouldn't be an issue for a system like Battle.net which has been in place since the release of Diablo 2.  There should have been veterans in there working to keep everything going, understanding how important it is to keep the log in servers running and people in the game enjoying their hard earn labored produced crack.  Instead we get.. well.. we get more Error 37 and "Can not create game" because someone forgot where they put the log in server or if they even turned it back on after patching the game.

I mean come on man.  

I know its harder than Brain Science or Rocket Surgery, but don't they hire top notch people to make sure that shit is up and running and customers aren't on the forums or calling them every 10 seconds wanting to know when they can start enjoy the game they have been waiting what over 10 yrs for?  Can't we as gamers catch a freakin break?  I mean if they aren't getting us addicted to an MMO, which is always down once a week for maintenance, now they design another game to act like an MMO, but isn't, but it is because they do maintenance once a week and they can't seem to get that together long enough to even get the system back up and FUCKING running, like an MMO.

So look, Blizzard please fix your fucking shit.  I don't want excuses, I want an off line mod so I can play this $60.00 game that is slowly turning into a pile of what my dog won't even crap out. And turning me into a raving lunatic, who is yelling, screaming and letting spittle run out his mouth because of the anger you have induced in me by your FAILURE to insure that people will have proper access to your game.  I mean come on man, if you guys took as much care getting your servers up and patched as you do crafting that EULA which we have to accept every freaking time you make any kind of change.  Btw, we just want to play, we don't really care that no matter how much time we invest in the characters or all the time we spend outfitting them or all the money we try to make that your still the sole owner of each and every character, item and drop of gold on your server.  JUST FIX THEM so we can enjoy more of your game crack.

Wow.. that was a hell of a rant.  Sorry.  I was hoping to get to play with a friend of mine this evening, who I've not spoken with in almost over a year and not played a video game with in over 2 and Blizzard completely tanked the idea by causing the game to crash a LOT.

TERA ONLINE: First Impressions

Tera Online is a Asian MMO that has been recently how do I say, Westernized.  It was released in Korea on January 25th 2011, so its been around a while and recently got released in the US on May 1st.  I actually first became aware of Tera sometime at the end of last year.  A bunch of gamers that I follow on Twitter and G+ where chatting it up a bit, but since SWTOR was coming out the door and I had already committed myself to that little MMO, I didn't really pay much attention to the chit chat.

Fast forward a few weeks ago when Tera Online held their Open Beta.  I had pretty much given up on SWTOR and had resigned myself to spending my time playing League of Legends and Minecraft with a few friends.  I even reactivated my World of Warcraft account because that's what people do when they don't have any place to go, they go home.  Well, I was seeing all the rumblings happening on Twitter and G+ and I figured I'd try and mooch a beta key.  I actually got lucky when someone said that Gamespot was giving them out on their website.  So I hoped over grabbed me a key and started the download.  I have to say that I wasn't expecting anything exceptional.  I really didn't know a lot about the game nor had I actually played any Asian MMOs though I know a lot of them are F2P in the US and a few are even browser based.

So here I was really shocked when I just couldn't get enough of the game once I logged in.  It had the character models had the typical Asian Manga style as I expected but they been cleaned up for the western audience, basically covering up the breasts a bit more and putting underwear on the women models so players wouldn't be getting an eye full every time your character climbed a ladder.  The other exciting part of the game was that the graphics were just awesome.  It had been a while since I was really impressed with a games graphics and I have to say this game is probably in my top 5.  It just looked great.  I took a ton of screen-shots that I shared with people in my G+ circles the entire beta weekend.  The other interesting thing, which I'm sure everyone knows about since I'm probably late coming forward with my Tera impressions is that you have to actually "Aim" at your target instead of just Tabbing to it like in most games.  There is no auto attack.  You basically aim a small reticle at the mob select your attack skill, some are actually bound to your left and right mouse buttons, and start doing some killing.  The reticle also has a range finder on it so you always know how far you are from the mob, that way you don't over shoot your area effect spells. You can also dodge incoming attacks complete, combo attacks and have a great time wailing on monsters.  The action is fast and furious and its the best time I've had in an MMO since my first days of WoW and to be honest, I didn't really read one quest.  I was too busy grabbing them and going out to see what combos I could do that would cause the most damage to the mobs.  I mean after a while, I didn't even care if I had a quest to kill stuff, I would just attack them because, it was fucking fun.  Another great aspect of the game is that when you get a quest to say kill a specific mob, then a small exclamation point appears over that mobs head so you know instantly that these are the ones you need to kill.

I played every chance I got during the weekend and even found, after I tested the launcher, that the game was still live on Monday morning that I just had to jump in and try my third alt.  Making alts in this game is just a ton of fun because each one has a different way of dealing with attacks and heals.  It has the basic class types, Priests, Warriors, Sorcerers, Archer and then the off shoots of them, Berserker, Mystic, Lancer, and Slayer.    There are also 7 races one of them is a furry animal race while the others are a bit more typical, except the Elin, who look like a young child with tail and ears, a basic manga staple if you ask me.

So after much deliberation and watching the chat in my G+ circles, I decided to pick the game up on launch day, cancel my SWTOR subscription and sign up for a 3 month trip into the world of Tera.  So far  I've enjoyed the crap out of the gamer.  It will be a little grindy to some and the quest language isn't the best considering they translated it from Korean to English, still its not that important.  The voice overs can get a little annoying especially when the guys in a specific area tend to repeat the same stuff back to you, but you can't really say that's a deal breaker.

The only disappoint me is the crafting.  Its is a bit on the expensive side at first and since you don't start making decent money from quests until level 14 or 15 it might be around level 20 before you can start working on your crafting.  I did decide to invest a little bit of my early cash on getting my alchemy up enough to make some decent health potions which have really helped since my warrior tends to soak up a lot of damage when I'm not dodging, something I'm not proficiency at yet  Some classes do better with health and mana regen than others.  Priests don't do a ton of damage, but they have lots of spells to heal and restore mana.  Lancers are very good with dishing out the damage and mitigating it as well, but they are very slow with their attacks and having to block a lot doesn't make killing fast and efficient, like say the warrior or beserker.  I did play the archer for a little during beta but I've been sticking with my warrior, sorcerer and my priest.  Yes, I'm leveling up three alts at the same time.  I'm doing this so I won't get bored like I did in SWTOR.  Yes repeating the quests in the same areas can be boring, but its just grinding.  And yes that's all this game really is because you don't play it for the story you play it for the cool combat.  Everyone I have met says they hate grinding but with Tera grinding is more fun.

They make the MMO genre fun again because they don't put a lot of restrictions on you.  Most items you get from loot aren't binding to your character.  So you can take them off and sell them or give them to people. Your bank is shared by all your characters so you don't have to move around from character to character trying to find that one item you need, you just open the game and its there for all.  At level 11 you automatically receive a quest to get your free mount.  Its the same as everyone else but still, its a free mount. The game just makes things that seem tedious in other games, less so in theirs.

I'm having a blast.  I'm sure there will be somethings about the game that players will hate, but if my friend over at Pumping Irony can get into Tera  considering his feelings about subscription MMOs, the the game must have some decent on some level, right?

Guild Wars 2: Disaster waiting to happen?

I finally broke down and pre ordered Guild Wars 2 on Monday morning.  The announcements went out yesterday that people would be slowly receiving their beta invites and as luck would have it this morning I received mine.  YEAH!  Course this weekend I'll be mostly visiting relatives with very limited time to try out the beta, but still I will be able to dip my toes in the water of Guild Wars 2 goodness.  At the very least I can see the starting areas and how my new gaming machine that I built in January of this year will handle the graphics.  I haven't really been looking at a lot of GW2 media.  I have checked out what others have said either in my feed or on Google+.  Players are pretty passionate about the game.  While playing the beta for Tera this past weekend a lot of the local area chat consisted of conversation, passionate ones, about how Tera would hold up once GW2 got released, because GW2 is awesome, its going to beat everything, it will be the best game out there.

There were a lot of pretty strong opinions concerning a game that really has only been seen by a few players and those who have gotten to play the demo did so at a  convention, which frankly is designed to run flawlessly and on the best gaming machines available. Course before the passionate descend on me let me also state that there are a lot of people who have been participating in the close beta who will have a valid opinion of the beta, not the actual released game, so that opinion is valid if only concerning parts of the game they have experienced that will continue to be part of the released game.

How do we know as players that GW2 will be the next in gaming revolution?  Will  the mounds of press media that has been descending upon us for months and is now threatening to cover us in an avalanche of information before the game is actually released give us what we need to know whether the game will be worth of our hard earned money?  I've seen videos, looked at blogs and still I'm not sure if GW2 will be the best MMO out there or just invalidated hype.

I hate hype and I hate people in the betas professing how much a game like GW2 will change the face of gaming or that it will be the most god awful game since Vanguard.  Either way, I am excited about my participation in this weekends beta so I can get my own opinion and therefore make sure I've made the right choice by pre ordering the game.

Hope to see you there.