Gears of War(hammer) in the Street (Fighter IV)

Its been a while since I’ve updated. Haven’t really had much to blog about or time to do so.

The Public Test Server is up though and I did send in Dabiggun to at least scope it out and I liked some of the things I saw. First of all, the addition of the Open Parties/Warband button in the top cluster has made that much easier and much more obvious than it was. Secondly, the PQs have been differentiated into easy, normal and hard in the other tiers. A big improvement in this is that they all show up on the mini-map now, even if you haven’t explored the area they are located in. It is big help to know where they are if you want to rep grind a chapter. Additionally, mousing over the icon for a PQ on the map, shows you difficulty, recommended level range for it, and how many people are working it at the time. So you don’t run to one only to find out that there are so many people you won’t get crap for your work.

Lately, I’v been playing my Xbox more than WAR. Gears of War 2’s Horde mode has been a blast to play and my roommate and i have worked our way to level 45. In horde mode, they take out all the needless story line, and linear maps, and you play on a fairly small open map and have to survive incoming waves of locust. Each set of 10 waves gets progressively harder with tougher, larger, and more more accurate hordes coming at you.

That was until last night. My roommate came home from work with Street Fighter IV. And it is IV, not 4, because any SF junkie will tell you it is a drug. So that has taken up residence in our 360 for the forseeable future. I like the game but am not very good. The graphics are amazing, some where between a cross in cartoony classic goodness and crisp 3D renders, plus a sense of speed and epicness that the game is able to provide make the game enjoyable, even if you are on the wrong side of some pwnage.

Till next time…WAAAGH! on.

Week Nights of Murder

Well Night of Murder has officially kicked off and is in full swing. I thoroughly enjoyed working on this Live Event over the weekend and earning the Basic and Advanced rewards and working towards the Elite and 100% completion rewards.

However, one of the tasks is presenting a problem for us Destruction on Vortex. All weekend, at least while I was on, we maintained control of all the Tier 2 keeps(except one Sunday night), which I am solidly in the middle of. This has made it rather difficult to assassinate 10 Keep Lords. However this did spur into my first serious foray into ORVR. It was a lot of fun, even if we failed to take the keep. This dimension of the game is a lot of fun and spurred on some more team work with other players and zerg-goodness. Seige weapons are a blast but their usefulness is limited, it was more like firing for effect considering the constitution of player characters vs npcs.

I really like this live event and leaving it run for a week allows players like me, IE: not hardcore, to be able to complete these quests and enjoy the game to the fullest. I like the idea of having racially themed events and dispersing them throughout the year. It is good that it promotes different aspects of the game as well. For example, i had shied away from the ORVR lakes, but with the mission to assassinate keep lords I dove in with a group and enjoyed it. Great work Mythic, can’t wait to see what you have planned for Bitter Rivals.

I’m still pumped about bitter rivals and trying to not get too attached to my Black Orc for when I reroll a Choppa.  Though the Black Orc is growing on me a lot. I love being able to eat hits and deal decent amounts of damage, Though I do miss my ranged abilities. It is looking like the Choppa is gonna bring some burst dps to the orks. I like the idea of building up fury(berserker or whatever they are calling it) and then choosing to pop it all  on a big attack and start building all or use little bits to do consistently high levels of damage. I cant want to be choppin’ some noggins for lobbin.

TGIF: The G stands for Gork…or maybe Mork

Well the work week has come to an end and I’m ready for the weekend. Updating this from my desk actually. Anyway, aside from a brief two hour delay in my day due to snow I haven’t had much chance to play WAR this past week, but have been keeping up with the WAR news and have some takes on it.

With Regards to 300,000 Subscribers

There have been plenty of naysayers and nonsayers commenting on this and I won’t say too much. However this DOESN’T spell the end of WAR. With a 300,000 subscriber base that translates into $3,897,000.00 per month assuming everyone bought the 6 month package, which is the cheapest and and probably least purchased subscription. That being said, those funds are more than enough to pay for continued development, servers and maintenance, and also keep them generally staffed. IE they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Also on the announcement of Official Forums

I think that this is a good step and necessary for the growth of the game. I’m glad that Paul was willing to revise his opinion to suit the needs of the players rather than force players to conform to the companies desires. Again this is tentative but I am excited about the concept of participation based access. The more good(useful) participation you provide the more access and rewards you will be granted. I think that this will help to strengthen our WAR community and the player communication with Mythic itself.

I’ve made it through a week of blogging and look forward to some upcoming posts. Best of luck to everyone on the Night of Murder.

On the Eve of the Night of Murder

Night of Murder

Friday, February 6th – Sunday, February 15th

You could be marked for death so don’t take any chances! Kill all the enemies you see and let the god of Murder figure out which souls he wants to claim. Uncover the secret altars of Khaine and Lob Noggins till your Noggin Lobbin’ limb lobs right off!

Rewards:

Basic – Shadowbane Potion that grants the title “The Murderous”
Advanced – Screaming Skull for Destruction and Murder Fang for Order
Elite – Talisman of Fell Whispers

World Drop – Khaine’s Regard (ring) and Burning Blood Potion

(Text and image above have been taken from Warhammeronline  Herald©)

Tomorrow kicks off the Night of Murder live event and I for one am looking forwar0d to it. I enjoy collecting titles and working through the alternative quests that pop up with these events. We’ve been given a glimpse of what the tasks will be to some extent, and we know what the rewards are. I love these live events. It adds a sense that the game world isn’t just a static thing, but more closely mirrors life in the sense that there are always things going on. Short post today but trying to put something up every day. So far just a whole bunch of spit against the wall and still looking for what sticks. Chaos is strong!!

A trip down M(mmo)emory Lane

Reading over Regis’ post  “One, Two, Many, Lots” got me thinking about my MMO gaming history. For me it all started with Diablo 2 on Bnet. I wonder how many gamers got their starts there? Nothing was greater than running the secret Cow Level and slaughtering them and King Cow. This was the first game, let alone rpg that that I was able to play online with friends.

After a while, my D2 buddies got onto Final Fantasy XII. I’m talking initial release on the PS2. You know the one, the one that came with the hard drive you had to bolt on to the back of the PS2…YEAH old school there. I remember I played the elf-type race. I don’t remember much but I remember a few things. Server stability was horrendous, crashes and glitches galore. Game play was mediocre at best. And once you hit level ten it was damn near impossible to get anything done solo. Talk about a pain in the butt, especially when you had to fish for a party for an hour and then only got 30 minutes of game time in before someone had to split causing the whole party to fall apart. I lost interest pretty quickly in this game. Could never get on and meet up with my friends especially since they were higher level than me and quit without ever having an alternative in sight.

Then came World of Warcraft. I got on a few months after initial release and played on and off, never seriously enoughto get through the mid levels(30-40). I peaked out with a 54 orc shammy after Burning Crusade came out. Last year i just got sick of it and quit all together. Before I had quit I started following another game in development.

…that game was Warhammer Online. I eagerly waited for the game to release and went crazy with all of the delays, despite the fact they were done to make the game better. I just wanted to play and built a new computer so I could bask in the awesomeness when it came out. A lack of funds and rash of good console games put WAR on hold but a few patches and some new content later I’m back in the game and loving it.

There have been elements of all these games that were good. I think that D2 laid the ground work for early MMOs like FFXI and EQ.  Everything was laid out on a the UI and point and click adventures and hunting for gear started with that game for me.

We have yet to see multiclassing like was available in FFXI. (For those who don’t know. Instead of having unlimited character slot, they gave you 1 free character slot and you could play all the classes on that character and eventual have a primary/secondary class active at the same time.)

I think WoW has laid a lot of groundwork for what people come to expect from an MMO and is by far the most dominate on the market. A lot of game play across the board comes from the platform that WoW built for us gamers.

I thank all the developers who worked on these games and can’t wait to see what’s i nthe future, especially you Mythic. MMORPGs devouring time and money since 2001 woohoo!

sorry ’bout the wall o’ text there

Robin Hood of the Public Quests

Let me say first of all that I really enjoy the PQs. I like being able to work with other people without waiting forever for a group to get something done. and influence rewards sweeten the deal in many cases. Granted, a lot of the gear you can get through a PQ blows the influence rewards out the water.

Last night, I was working through a PQ as Dabiggun, grinding out the long initial kill fest to get to stage 2. Just as I finish up that stage after maybe 20-30 minutes of grinding two healers run up and start working on the second stage. I thought it was a little ticked since I felt like I had done the long boring part and here they come to steal the reward at the end. We we grouped up to get through and I wouldn’t have been able to beat the final boss without them there, after a long battle with 2 champs and a hero we were rewarded with 1 gold bag and 2 green bags. I was first in contribution, but the other better of the other two was close. I had  a decent 500 roll, but the other person rolled 900+ and got the gold loot bag. Needless to say I was frustrated with my lack of reward for my hard work. GAAAGH!

I realize that is part of how the PQs work, but it is frutrating to spend so much time working on a PQ and then give up the best loot at the very end. I think the contribution points need to be worth more than the roll points to avoid situations like these. Though for some classes the tend to get less contribution based on the rolls they play in combat. Its tricky to get the rewards fairly dispersed among all players. Especially at lower levels when there are big groups of players all attacking the same PQ. I still love the game. Its like Benjamin Franklin said(and I’m paraphrasing here) “WAR is the worst MMO, except for all the others.” There will always be gripes and things that aren’t perfect but I’ll keep coming back for more…I’m good like that. Till next time Waaagh! on

Weekend Waaagh!

Got some quality play time over the weekend. Don’t get as much play time as I would like during the week. Though lately WAR has been sharing game time with Gears of War 2. This weekend I was able to explore the rest of Tier 1 for the Greenskins and move on to Tier 2, putting on a good burst of leveling and gaining several levels with minimal time. I was able to participate and get some great loot from PQs, run instanced RvR, and general questing. It amazes me at the variety of things there are to do in this game. I love to be able to have several different things going all at once  like running a PQ while waiting for the battleground to que up.

Some impressions of my Black Orc through level 11. To this point it has been very fun to play. I’m usually not a fan of tanks but the BO’s battle plan, which builds progressively with each swing gives this class a unique niche. I like the flexibility of working the different abilities to maximize effectiveness. For anyone who doesn’t know, there are three stages: No plan, Da Good Plan( Hit ’em), and Da Best plan (Hit ’em again).  In RVR I’ve thoroughly enjoyed beign able to take hits and give thme back, something that is lacking with the Zealot, even going down the DPS mastery tree. My favorites to see in RVR are any light armored DPS classes. Especially a bright wizard. I love charging through enemy lines and dropping him before the healers can do anything about it.

WAAAGH!

Dabiggun

Bitter Rivals, Better Arrivals

So Mythic has announced a new event kicking off next month and introducing two new classes to WAR. This is very exciting for me, i had looked forward to rolling a Choppa at release, but the prerelease news that it was being cut was heart breaking. I knew the Orcs would be needing some love with just having the Black Orc and Mythic is finally delivering.

As a current player I thoroughly enjoy playing my Zealot, but I’m an admitted altoholic and have fallen off the wagon some with a new Black Orc. Damn Mythic and their 22, soon to be 24, classes! lol. I find that being a clothie healer has few benefits and a lot of drawl backs. Like a short life expectancy in RvR when pretty much anyone finds me.  I’m looking forward to seeing more melee DPS in WAR that isn’t rogue style, ala Witch Elf and Witch Hunter. I wonder what some of the paths will be for the two new classes. Mythic has ssaid these two mirror each other. Deos that feel like some what of a cop out to any one? I’m excited to see it, but it does feel like a little bit of short cut to me. Either way I’m excited to see what’s coming in the not so distant future.