Regret Not Trying a WoW RP Server

Every so often I'll be talking with a friend and the topic of WoW will come up.  It usually goes the same way every time too with us talking fondly of memories playing with friends and shit back in Vanilla or Burning Crusade days and then getting pissed off with it some time shortly after that and begrudgingly giving up on it.

While thinking about WoW I realized that while I don't have much urge to ever return to it, I do sort of regret never playing on the games RP servers.  I always played on a PVP server and admittedly at the time I didn't "get" RP servers like that.  I just wanted to play the game, kill shit and get sick epic gear and that kind of thing was reserved for the kind of fat acne ridden, basement dwelling nerd with no real friends.  (I was a horribly judgemental teen, sorry)

Once I got to university though I started playing Dungeons and Dragons and I came to the realization that role playing was actually really fun ESPECIALLY if you've got a good group of friends and a few drinks to help things get a little silly.  It made me think though that I sort of regret not giving the RP servers a chance back when I was at the height of my WoW playing time.

In case you're not familiar with what this entails, an RP server is a place where you don't just play the game but you actually have to play your character as if it was a real person in the world of Azeroth and not just a loot collecting machine.  This of course includes stuff about the way you talk to other players but also how you move around the world and things like that.  I have friends who have tried RP servers before and they said the one of the best things about it was that the main town chats actually had conversations going on in them rather than just people spamming for groups or to sell items.

I would never go back to WoW now, my backlog is so huge that playing an MMO is probably a bad idea but I'll always kind of regret not giving that side of the game a go.  Then again, if I had done it I probably would have been all grimdark and shit so for my own sake maybe it was a good thing I didn't.

MMOs From My Youth

I don't play many MMORPGs any more unfortunately due to a combination of not having much time and a backlog of games in the triple digits.  However, back in my teens I played a hell of a lot of World of Warcraft starting with vanilla and quitting at the tail end of Burning Crusade.  However, before I gained some financial independence and I was able to pay the monthly fee for the game, I used to seek out free MMO games so I thought I'd share with you some of my old, F2P MMO experiences from back in the day.

1) Sword of the New World

Sword of the New World was an MMO me and my friends played over one summer holiday from school.  It was released in 2006 in Korea and had English versions going live in 2007 and it had an interesting gimmick of multiple character control.  Most of the time when you think about MMOs you imagine controlling one player and then if you want to group up you have to find other players, right?  Well in this game you controlled up to 3 and from there you could party up with people for quests and stuff so even our small group of 4 players looked like a huge group of people in game.  That said though, aside from the multiple player control and the interesting world set in a sort of fantasy take on the Americas during the age of exploration, I can't really recall much else.

2) Rappelz

A friend of mine once introduced me to Lineage 2 back before it became free to play except instead of actually paying for it he showed me a private server that allowed us to play for free, it was a good time.  However, as you would expect, the private server got shut down and it was really that first experience with Lineage that gave me my first MMO itch.  Rappelz attracted me because, at least graphically, it reminded me of Lineage so I thought this might help scratch my grind itch.  It did for a while, the game play was nothing special but it played fairly well and it's gimmick was something involving pets that you had to collect and level in order to help you in combat and stuff. 

Interestingly it seems like this game is still available to play so you can check it out if you have a weekend to waste on an MMO from 2006.

3) Trickster Online

A very cutsey online game that I remember very little of which looked sort of similar to that other isometric MMO that almost everyone played but the name I can't remember right now.  Anyway, the thing I remember most about this game is digging. You could dig to get items and a lot of the quests I vaguely remember involved digging up stuff.  While it wasn't the best game I've ever played I was looking for something to go hard on the grind with and this said that it had a level cap of 300 which just blew my goddamn mind.  I didn't play it for very long and I probably got no higher than about 25 but it was the thought that counted.

I thought that Trickster went down for good years ago but a quick google search for the image revealed that the site is still up, the client is (probably) still available and the level cap is now 400.  I would kind of like to try it again but a grind that hard would mean I'd have to sever all ties with anything else I think so I'll stick to working on my endless backlog.

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It would be nice to one day find time or not have a backlog so huge that I could really sink my teeth into another MMO.  That said, I'd probably be staying away from the Korean F2Ps and trying something like Final Fantasy 14.  Maybe one day.

I've Fallen Out With The MMO

I used to like MMORPGs a hell of a lot.  I had a pretty good group of buddies and we'd always play things like World of Warcraft (up to Lich King) and Guild Wars and we have some pretty fond memories of those days adventuring together.  Even now as I walk around some of these Japanese stores or peruse certain websites on the internet I see shit like Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 and I get all tempted to play one again but something keeps holding me back.

I've fallen out with MMOs pretty hard which is a shame because I do like playing them.  Not too long ago I was streaming Path of Exile with my co worker and we were having a good time but we gave up before too long mainly because I just wanted to play other things.  One of the main reasons I find it hard to give time to MMOs anymore is because of my backlog.  The thing is a couple of hundred titles long so the idea of sitting down and sinking a few hours into a genre of games that essentially don't end feels like a bad idea when I have so much on my plate already.

That's the other thing too, purely multiplayer games that don't end just don't sit well with me personally.  I like to play something alone, with a self contained story that has an ending and a credits roll at the end.  I don't want to have people waiting on me to do a dungeon or have to rely on player run market places to help get ahead.  I play games to chill and having that extra pressure from other players waiting for me to do shit or hold me to some kind of standard that I don't care about (gear score for example)

The one other big turn off with MMOs for me, especially new ones are subscriptions.  For the longest time Free to Play MMOs have existed, tons of them so the idea of paying for a MMO seems silly now.  MAYBE back in the day you could justify it because most F2P MMORPGs sucked massive amount of dick but now things like Guild Wars 2 are free to download and play.  That might be a bad example because there's never been a monthly subscription for those games but you see what I mean?  Why pay for it when  nowadays you can get a good quality online adventure for exactly no money,

MMOs aren't a genre I dislike by any stretch but I just find it difficult to justify sinking so many hours into that genre.  It's a shame because there's a lot of cool looking shit out there and yet I just can't bring myself to download them and give them a try.  Maybe one day when I clear some of this backlog off my list my opinion will change, I can only hope.

Paying to NOT Play with World of Warcraft

Well I didn't think I'd ever be talking about this game again.  I still remember back when I was in high school, just after I finished my GCSE exams, coming home and loading up WoW for the first time.  I remember back during Burning Crusade, when I said "fuck it" to study during my A Level study leave and just whittled away the hours on this game.

Now, World of Warcraft is a completely different beast.  From what people who still do play have told me and from what I've read, it's been dumbed down a great deal and it's only a mere shell of that game that I once had rather fond memories of.

I suppose this post is a kind of extension of the money grubbing rant I made a while ago, so before I even start talking about this stuff, if you want to know how I feel about cash shops and microtransactions, then you can get a general idea from this video.

Now, World of Warcraft isn't exactly new to the idea of nickle and diming its customers.  I remember just after I stopped playing Blizzard released some kind of mount that looked like a bunch of stars in the shape of a horse or something.  People were laughing at it and calling it a piece of shit because there wasn't any way to earn it in game, you had to BUY it from a cash shop.

The reason it was met with such negativity from the player base is because the whole reason you play subscription based MMOs is so that you don't have to deal with this cash shop dog shit.  You buy the game and pay £7/month or something and you get access to everything for that.  In a genre like this where the developer is CONSTANTLY expected to create new content for an ever expanding world, then I won't begrudge them for a subscription fee, but a cash shop is taking the piss.

But times have changed and by the looks of things it seems like all the smart players have fucked off to other games because recently THIS happened.

That picture is from the in game cash shop and is giving players the option to BUY a max level character for $60!  Why would anyone do this, really?  You could buy a NEW game for that much money but Blizzard expect (and people will) people to shell out $60 for a max level character, I mean Jesus Christ.

But I'm not mad about this, why would I be? I don't even play the game anymore.  I'm genuinely confused as to why this is even a thing though.  Part of the fun of playing an MMO is the journey to the end game.  Levelling with your buddies, doing quests and learning the lore of the land as you go, it's great fun.  But instead Blizzard are expecting people to just cut ALL of that shit out and just jump straight into level 90.

I get that people want to PVP and stuff, but what's the point of playing an MMO if you're just going to skip the levelling?  Especially when your skipping out on this much content, it's like your paying to not play the game, I'm genuinely confused as to why anyone would want to skip it when they are already paying a pretty sizable amount of money just to play.

Maybe one day someone will explain what the appeal is, but until that day I'm just going to blanket label you all as nut jobs with more money than sense.

Hitting the Grindstone with Tera Online

I've not played an MMO for a long long time.  I tried something that I forgot the name of when I first started this blog but I lost interest in that game pretty much the moment after I made the post about it, so here I am giving MMOs another chance with Tera: Rising.

Tera used to be a pay to play MMO that went free to play because monthly subscriptions on MMO games seem to only work for World of Warcraft now and any other game that tries that shit tends to die pretty quickly.  That said, after giving a brief look over Tera's free to play features, they don't seem too limiting and it looks like you can still have a good time without spending a penny.

Anyway, first thing first I made my dude.  There seems to be a lot you can do with the character creator, but there is this weird bug that people are getting at the time of writing where if you take too long it crashes, but I don't care anyway so I just went with some presets.

So after making some fat demon thing with an axe I took my first steps into Terra.  I was glad the game actually had a functional and fairly easy to use interface from the get go.  I have played a lot of free MMOs where the UI just flat out doesn't work or it's so confusing that it takes you 10s of minutes to work out how to do basic things.

So the combat is all in real time and it's a bit action gamey which is really cool, but as far as I know this isn't a new thing anymore, but either way it's pretty fun and seems like it'll be interesting once I get some skills for my Berserker.

I've not played it enough to really comment on what it's like but right from the get go there is one thing I really really like.

When you are swapping out new gear, it tells you what the thing you currently have equipped is like compared to the thing you are looking to equip.  There are so many games, both single and massively multiplayer that DON'T do this and it really fucks me off, so one step in Tera's favour is that it has this feature.

So far, smooth combat, nice graphics that run well on my piece of shit laptop, voice acted cutscenes and all sorts of other cool shit mean that Tera is gearing up to be quite fun.  Finally the cash shop looks like it's all cosmetic stuff rather than Pay2Win dogshit, but I've not had a good look round it yet so maybe I'm wrong.  Either way, fun little game, I'll keep everyone posted!

Path of Exile Open Beta

I have a rather limited experience with Diablo 3, and the game was fine really, I had fun with what I played but it didn't really feel like Diablo anymore.  Diablo 3 was no more Diablo to me than something like Torchlight is Diablo. 

Anyway, this thing is also not Diablo, but it bares a closer resemblance to it than Diablo 3 did.  This, is Path of Exile, a game that has just recently gone into open beta.  Path of Exile is a free to play MMORPG and to sum up the whole game in very simple terms, it's fucking Diablo.

It's a little bit more than that.  While there are a lot of things that players who enjoy the Diablo series will like with this game, it does do things to stand out on its own.  While the game is free to play, everything you need to enjoy the game and be efficient in combat and stuff can be found within the game.  Dropping money on this game will not give you an advantage, it will just get you cosmetic stuff and some boosts.

The gameplay itself is pretty simple.  You go through acts, with out without friends, beat bosses and get loot.  The endgame is made up of "maps" which are usable items that create portals to areas, so party up and get your clicking finger ready for those.  Right now there are 3 acts in the main game, with the third added just recently and I'd imagine more to come.

What really blows every ones mind when they think of this game though, is the passive skill tree.

This thing is fucking nuts.  It's a big grid of over 1000 passive buffs, and every time you level up you can move one step.  Fans of the Final Fantasy 10 sphere grid will know exactly how this shit works, and if you go on the website you can play around with it and make yourself a build.  It's pretty good but its sort of intimidating and really you just have to take it as you go.

Finally, the last thing I really like about this game is, no currency.  This may sound weird, as selling items nets you "orbs" and identify scrolls.  You can then use these to buy other items, or use them on your own equipment to improve them.  The only reason I really like this system so much is because the in game chat is completely devoid of gold selling bots spamming rates.

Anyway, give it a go, especially if you were unhappy with Diablo 3.  It's fuckin' free, what have you got to lose?

Free Game Friday: Pandora Saga: Weapons of Balance first impressions (Level 1-10)

So another Friday means another free game for you to piss away those weekend hours on.  This week I bring to you a free MMORPG available on Steam called Pandora Saga: Weapons of Balance.  Due to the fact I've been playing other games and I've been keeping busy with my job and such, I've only had a chance to reach level 10, so I'll give you the story so far.

First, this is a game developed by Atlus Online, the company that also gave us the likes of Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine Online.  Quite frankly, last time I played SMT: Imagine, it sucked so fucking hard I wanted to rip my own fingernails out.  I'm a huge fan of that series and even I was bored to death grinding through its boring world and uninteresting dungeons.

Luckily for us, Pandora Saga is nothing like SMT: Imagine and the first 10 levels have actually been pretty good so far.  So the story so far is as follows, I started playing on Monday and I created a elf spellcaster.  Now here lies my first issue with the game, not a huge dealbreaker but a issue none the less.

This is what a male elf looks like.  The reason I picked an elf is because they are naturally adept at magic, and being a spellcasting class I thought this would be a good choice.  The only problem is, all the elves look like fucking children and there is no way to de-shit a Pandora Saga elf.  That said there are quite a few playable races (off the top of my head I think it's 5) and the elf is the only really stupid looking one.  For those that have played the game and are reading this anyway, yes, the elf has a shitter design than those silly little dog bastards.

Anyway, so when you fire the game up you don't get bogged down in stupid long winded tutorials, your in town, surrounded by a load of high level players selling shit, and your only direction is to go talk to the city guard guy and get a quest.  The game basically tells you nothing and has you figure most of it's shit out for yourself, which SOUNDS like a bad thing, but it's not so involved that you can't figure it out with a bit of common sense.

So the quests in this game are standard free MMO fare, "go kill X amount of bastard Y for item Z" etc. but what more do you expect from these kind of games really?  For the first 10 levels that's all I've really been doing, but it doesn't feel like a grind because you're never asked to kill huge numbers of monsters and the rewards are big enough to give you a level each time.  However I have run into a few technical issues with monsters clipping into the scenery and when they do that you can't hit them.  It's just been a mild annoyance now but I've got a horrible feeling it's going to fuck me over hard later.

 Also, this picture is a little small and it's kind of hard to see, but that is a level 44 stray wolf just milling around the first quest area.  Sure, this doesn't seem like much of an issue at first but putting an enemy this high level at the start of the game makes me question how big the world is going to end up being.  I can't seem to find a complete world map, but then again I've not looked very hard for one.  Aside from that, the gameplay is smooth and it plays a little bit like Lineage 2 which is a game I used to have a massive MMO boner for but even if you weren't part of the old L2 crowd I still think there is some enjoyment to be had here.

The other thing I want to touch on here is the skill system in this game.

 It's a pretty cool idea where every level you get a certain number of Stat and Skill points.  With the stat points you can really fuck yourself over if you go drooling all over your keyboard and put them into parameters you don't need.  But if you don't have severe brain damage this really isn't a problem.  The real cool thing is the skill points.  Every level you get a skill point to apply to one of your abilities, in my case the various schools of magic.  Once you learn a skill from that area, you can then level up that area further by using those skills.  This means, that even if you go make a load of stupid choices early on with your skill loadout, it can be fixed with enough grind.  It's a cool idea and I can't wait to see how it plays out later on.

There is also a shitton of other systems such as horse mounted combat and a warring nations as well as guilds and PVP etc.  but I've yet to try any of this out so hopefully I'll have more on that when I do another post when I hit 20 (providing I don't quit before then).  There is also a cash shop but I've not even looked at it, no idea what's in there or how it may help/break the game or whatever, but I've been doing fine without it.  Finally, the game is plagued with gold spammers that sometimes makes chatting to other players impossible.  Luckily these fuckbends come and go so it's not a problem that is present 100% of the time and hopefully ATLUS will do something about it eventually (Not fucking likely).

Anyway, that's a little overview of Pandora Saga, check it out, it's worth a chuckle or two at least.

Free Game Friday: Realm of the Mad God

OK! It's Friday night so it's time to give you mugs some free shit to play so you can flush your weekend down the toilet and have a shitton of fun while doing it!

So the game this week is a little gem called "Realm of the Mad God" and oh lord is it awesome.  Realm of the Mad God is a top down, 8 bit MMO Shooter.  If this sounds weird to you its because it is, but that at least makes the game worth checking out. 

Basically, after doing a short tutorial you spawn in a hub world populated with a few entrances to the game worlds.  Up to 65 people can enter the game world at a time and you're all sort of in one huge party with the aim of killing the Mad God.

So you create a guy, give him a name and a class and go questing.  The pace of the game is fast, and I mean REALLY fuckin' fast and after the first few levels the enemies get tough.  Finding people to group with (which is done automatically by standing near them) is super important for survival.  So go forth, collect loot, and after you kill enough shit, you get teleported to go fight the Mad God.  Winning gets you loot and fame which you use to upgrade your guy and unlock more classes so you can go questing with different equipment sets and abilities.

However, the real kicker to this game, the thing that makes it really interesting, is the fact that there is perma-death.  That's right, if you die in this game you lose your guy and all your loot and have to start right from stage 1.  Granted, levelling to the cap of 20 is super fast, but losing a load of fame and items is still as bad as a spiky stick to the ballsack.

So give it a go, you can play it for about 15 mins and still get good progress in but the game is addictive as all hell.

The game can be found at http://www.realmofthemadgod.com/ or you can play it off Steam if you have an account there, so have it!