Warning: This is going to be disjointed as hell because a) I’m writing it over the span of several days in various states of kid-managemen and b) No one is paying me to do this, so what do I care? :)

SO.  I got my assassin to 50 a couple days ago, and finished both the plot lines last night.  Unfortunately, the story did not improve since my other post on the subject.  The game play stayed about the same.

I. Story

Ia. Class story: Inquisitor

The Sith Inquisitor story is, in my opinion, crap.  Poorly written (although the dialogue itself was OK, given the constraints of a lame story).

The Inquisitor storyline is shared by the Sorcerers and the Assassins – the two force “heavyweight” classes lore-wise (one can make themselves entirely invisible for hours at a time, while the other can toss storms of lightning around, compared to the Sith Warriors who seem to kind of be the bruisers to me, less concerned with the esoteric aspects and more about the ass-kicking).  I mention the force heavyweight bit because that’s kind of the angle I was coming from – hoping my story would involve me becoming powerful and learning some Cool Force Shit.

To be fair, you do learn one thing.  Just one.  You learn how to absorb “force ghosts” (think the dudes from the end of Return of the Jedi) and use their powers for your own.  That’s kind of cool, in an evil sith-y way.  That’s the route to personal power you take.  That’s IT.  Which is, not, in itself terrible.  I wouldn’t mind it so much if that were the only bit of laziness around (nevermind that it makes the player character seem like a loser lightweight – your would-be-nemesis can fucking fly around and nuke shit with force lightning … while you are forced to rely on outside help just to survive his lightning.  *yawn*).  Oh, and they called eating ghosts FORCE WALKING.  Because that makes sense?  I would think “force walking” would be like walking on water or flying or hell, even like astral projector or something.  NOPE.  It’s eating ghosts.  OK. /facepalm

Unfortunately, the weirdness continues.   The light-sight stuff doesn’t make any sense or fit into the overall story unless you mentally force it.  Basically the dialogue options go 1->2or3 then 2/3 both go on to step 4 together, so frequently there was a disconnect between what my character might (rpwise) actually want to do, and what he winds up doing because there is only one path in most quests (disclosure: SOME quests have an actual different light and darkside choice, but none of that seemed to really matter in the long run aside from getting a couple light or darkside points).

I was hoping the finale would redeem all this crap, but it didn’t, much.  The last (2) fights (You fight the same fight twice, the second time the boss has double the hp…good times) were well balanced, and felt tough & semi-epic, but I really didn’t buy the villain, at all.  He wanted to kill you because he had some problems with your mentor and…  you were breaking with Sith tradition or something (this part would have actually made more sense if they had addressed me being an alien – which *is* a rarity, and made him xeno-phobic or something – BUT that wouldn’t work for a generic storyline, playable by all the races, so they didn’t do it.  This goes back to my earlier point about the writing here being *lazy*).   Anyway so you beat him blah blah and then you’re on the Dark Council, woopdy doo.  I think I should be a “Darth” too, but I guess inquisitor titles are still broken, because I’m not.  Oh, and they call you “Darth Imperius” – they don’t even use your name?  WTF.  Just don’t voice act that part… just say “congratulations to our newest Darth!” or something.  LAZY.

There’s more, and more I should say, but it’s hard to think right now with 3 kids making various levels of noise ;).  Maybe more later.

OH.  And you know those awesome intro cinematics?  The ones that cemented my purchase of the game?  Yeah.  That’s it.   You just get a shitty game-engine cutscene for both the endings.  Total bullshit.  They should have at least had a cutscene for the Empire & Republic shared arcs.

Ib. Empire story

Which brings me to the shared Empire arc (doable by all 4 classes).  I guess there was a story here?  Really it was just “Do some Empire shit on each of these planets you happen to be on anyway.”  Foil the Republic, kill some Jedi, etc.  (Note: There are A LOT of Jedi.  Must have taken a lot of work to wipe them all out in time for SW 4).

So, there wasn’t really much of an “Empire story” per se.  Some of the individual planet ones were kind of interesting – I mean, about as interesting as you can make a “Kill X rats” or “Get y pieces of rat feces”.  Which is to say – pretty interesting.  Don’t get me wrong, the baseline is still the same (no real improvements here) but SWtoR & WoW have shown that they can make the trinity of generic questing (I forgot “Bring thing Z to person Q”) interesting enough that you forget the underpinnings.

So no real complaints about the Empire plot arcs.  They were what they were – generic quests made as interesting as the writers could.  HOWEVER.  The finale bit for the last planet was really annoying – they’ve got these supposed crows of people cheering you and it sounds like a fucking office party for a Local Small Business after 2 beers doing a round of golf claps.

A cinematic of the final battle or something would have really helped here…

Ic. Companion stories

I’ve done most of them about halfway through (5-7k/10k) and the Ashara one all the way through – because that was the romance option (so I figured it would be the most put together).  Well.  It was, I dunno…in a vacuum it would make sense, but it didn’t make much against the backdrop of what else was going on.  Especially her calling you “my lord” and bowing in the final scene (and I’m light side, remember), that made me feel icky.  That’s just me, I realize.  Lots of people are going to be going darkside here and then stuff will make sense (although I’ve been told that you can’t turn her to the darkside, so the story is basically the same… and yeah, no sense making).

The set up was all there for tempting her to the dark side, but I guess they just forgot about that?  Or maybe the parent company forced them to out the door the damn thing before everything was fully baked?  (A la Dragon Age 2 and its *wonderful* re-use of the same scenery ad nauseum.)

II. Gameplay

The gameplay was pretty solid, if basic.  Interrupts were nice – when fighting bosses with things to interrupt – the one boss I had real trouble with was an Empire storyline giant robot…died about 7 times before enlisting some help.  He had nothing to interrupt, just a huge hp sack with heavy damage.  Compare this to the inquisitor line bosses who generally have multiple things to interrupt, forcing you to prioritize and strategize… better design on the inquisitor stuff, imho.

I’ve done a fair bit of PVP, and it’s all been pretty fun so far.  But, I don’t generally PVP in other games so I don’t have much to compare it to.

Instances are generally entertaining.  I have yet to try any hard modes yet.

III. Overall fun and “worth it” factor

The story did keep me playing the game – but mostly because I kept hoping it would get better!

If you enjoy basic wow-style mmo stuff, and like the Star Wars setting, you’ll probably enjoy this game.

If you’re looking for an awesome story set in the SW universe… I certainly cannot recommend playing the Inquisitor path.  I’m not sure if I’m going to play mine ever again, really.  It left that bad of a taste in my mouth.

The Assassin class was enjoyable – I’m guessing it may be one of the trickier classes to play, based on comments I heard others make and how I saw the other classes appear to be performing.  In enjoyed being able to skip 80% of the trash mobs…not looking forward to them!

IV. That Being Said…

I’m canceling my sub just so it doesn’t auto-renew, but I may renew anyway, we’ll see.  I’m going to give Soldier a shot, as I want to try something totally different and I’ve heard the Soldier is one of better storylines.  So far (l13, Commando), it definitely looks to be a different experience.   We’ll see how that carries into the 40s.

So.  Yeah, this happened.  I was completely planning on skipping this game because… another Star Wars game, who cares, right?  (Don’t answer that!)

However, two of my real life friends were excited about playing and I like playing games with people I actually know IRL, so I went with it.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t get everyone on the same server, but oh well.

So.  The game is basically Mass Effect (or KotOR, but I didn’t play that, so ME is my Bioware comparison point) plus WoW.  I mean, like exactly.  You have got all your standard quest types, having to farm massive cash for mounts that come way too late, etc. from WoW, stacked on top of the companion and plotline system from the Bioware games.

There are a couple of other little tweaks – like the fact that you can send “companions”/pets/party members off on crafting quests to harvest resources and create items for you while you are doing other things.  This is really cool in theory and in practice, although the durations of the missions just gets STUPID the higher level you are – currently mine are 15-35 minutes.  5-20 seems like it should be the sweet spot for me, but hey, game balance and time gated progress, right?  They have to keep people p(l)aying.

I have a level 40 assassin and 26 sniper, so I’ve definitely been playing.

Null, my (Lightside!) Sith Assassin

The space missions are also great. I mean, they are simple, but they add a ton of fun to the game for me and as you level up new objectives are added to the missions, so even the starter mission continues to be interesting..  I think that’s what really sold me on it – the fact that hey I have a starship but OH hey I can blow shit up with my starship? WIN.  Also, hitting 80 missiles is akin to getting a mount as far as improving your ease of experience goes.

The story IS generally pretty good, or at least mine was up until recently.  I liked the Inquisitor plotline up through level 30/end of chapter 1-ish.  After that, it seems to be just getting stupid/sloppy/lazy (“force walking” = ingesting ghosts?  WHAT THE FUCK?  That doesn’t make any kind of linguistic sense.  Turning ghosts into macguffins = meh.), but the beginning was good.)

They also have the whole light/dark good/evil plot dynamic that I guess KotOR probably had.  You can choose various dialogue options that may get you Light Side or Dark Side points and potentially affect the outcome of a mission or dialogue.  Generally, they seem to have no effect save getting you light/dark points and companion points (no one seems to refer to any of my past light/dark actions, so I guess no one notices that I’m a light level 3 sith lord /shrug), but inside the instances (dungeons) there are generally a choice or two that affects the flow of the dungeon – like venting a crew out of an airlock to expedite something or taking the long way and saving them.

It’s also worth pointing out that some of them are really bizarre.  At one point, another Sith kills my apprentices (whom I never bother to train).  The lightside response is to bribe him to leave??  You have to actually take a darkside point hit in order to fight the bastard.  Other times the “light” choice will be more “evil” on an “average human moral compass” kind of level… I wonder how much of it is intentional and how much is sloppy writing.

This game has a lot of room to grow – filling in companion gaps (agent & inquisitor go 10-15 levels between companion 2 & 3 – and companion 2 doesn’t even really count!), adding a wardrobe system so you aren’t quite as restricted in your looks, adding gear coloring/dying, fleshing out their legacy system (right now you just choose a last name that is account wide and dump xp into that “legacy”, but nothing happens), adding more visual options, instances, free range space missions, etc.   I’m curious to see what their update strategy looks like… I’ll be around for a little while at least.

This got me thinking about why this might be.  I mean, what is it about pet classes that I enjoy so much? I had no answer for that.  So I moved on.  Into the past!  I started thinking back to the first “MMOs” that I played (I use quotes here

• a) because I can
• b) because I like lists and
• c) because that exact term wasn’t yet in use
• d) because lists break up monotonous text)

… which were…. MUDs!  [Note: It's worth following that wiki link and skimming it if you have no idea what I'm talking about.]  And some of them even have pet classes.  Which I played.

Indeed on, the MUD that I really got into – Everdark (no web page, but point your telnets at everdark.org:3000 for

• a) an awesome experience
• b) a blast from the past and
• c) graphics only limited by your imagination)… circa 95-98 maybe, the class I focused on was the Undead.

Classes were (and are – it’s still up!) much simpler than modern MMO classes.  Each class, there called “guilds” has about 10 skills and they all share the same resource system (just ‘spell points’ – no endurance/mana/energy/rage/fury/etc.).  The Undead guild, of course, has a pet!  You can, after killing an enemy, animate the corpse to follow you around like a textual zombie badass  (Unless it was just a squirrel, then it will be textually squashed).  The strength of the pet varies by the strength of what you killed – I think.  It’s been a while.

               . '@(@@@@@@@)@. (@@) `  .   '
     .  @@'((@@@@@@@@@@@)@@@@@)@@@@@@@)@
     @@(@@@@@@@@@@))@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@)@@` .
  @.((@@@@@@@)(@@@@@@@@@@@@@@))@\@@@@@@@@@)@@@  .              1974-2011
 (@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@)@@@@@@@@@@@\\@@)@@@@@@@@)                 In Memory
(@@@@@@@@)@@@@@@@@@@@@@(@@@@@@@@//@@@@@@@@@) `
 .@(@@@@)##&&&&&(@@@@@@@@)::_=(@\\@@@@)@@ .   .'
   @@`(@@)###&&&&&!!;;;;;;::-_=@@\\@)@`@.
   `   @@(@###&&&&!!;;;;;::-=_=@.@\\@@     '                 MudOS v22.1
      `  @.#####&&&!!;;;::=-_= .@  \\                                    
            ####&&&!!;;::=_-        `                     Admin: Skywise
             ###&&!!;;:-_=                          Arches: Phoebe, Zack
              ##&&!;::_=                                   Nameless, Bax
             ##&&!;:=
            ##&&!:-           _____                   _            _
           #&!;:-            | ____|_   _____ _ __ __| | __ _ _ __| | __
          #&!;=              |  _| \ \ / / _ \ '__/ _` |/ _` | '__| |/ /
          #&!-               | |___ \ V /  __/ | | (_| | (_| | |  |   <
           #&=               |_____| \_/ \___|_|  \__,_|\__,_|_|  |_|\_\
   jgs      #&-
            \\#/'
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Rest thy weary feet, and be our 'guest'.
What is your name:

[ascii'd above: The Everdark login screen, partially cut off because my blog is scrawny. ]

[TANGENT

One thing worth noting about MUDs, and definitely Everdark, is that a quest on a mud is completely unlike what you are used to from quests in MMOs these days. I mean... for one there were no online hint sources - many muds would destroy your character and ban you if they caught you doing something like that anyway, but the ones I played just weren't big enough to have fan-based web pages (many had their own pages).  For another thing, the quests were actually hard.  I don't mean hard like you needed a 60 person raid, I mean hard like you had to use your goddam brain.    Many, Everdark in particular, incorporated complex puzzles in addition to the standard monster slaying.  Some quests were simple, some took months to figure out, and some many people never figured out.  There was definitely something to the feeling that you accomplished something that only 10% of the population had.

TANGENT]

As near as I can tell, Everdark must have initiated my love of pet classes.  I tried a few of the other guilds – I definitely remember some time as a Fighter – but they had no pets so I eventually left & returned to Undead (it’s worth mentioning that switching guilds carried a penalty: a death, at minimum – it was harsh enough that you didn’t just go around hopping guilds all day.  BUT, you also didn’t have to make a new character to try a new guild).  Before this I’d played plenty of PC-based RPGs – the SSI gold box D&D games, the Phantasie series, Wizardry, etc.  But I don’t think any of them had any real pet classes (until Diablo 2, I can’t think of an RPG with a solid pet class) – I mean, sure you could call your party your “pets”, but there generally wasn’t a central “you” character.  So, the roots of all this must lie in Everdark.

Everdark pets, general summary:

• Druids & Illusionists get an easily summonable “dumb” pet whose strength varies with the summoners.  The pets have a generic “damage” attack.
• Rangers get a very customizable (name, sex, description) bloodhound pet that can be used to scout out other rooms and chase enemies.  Pets have a generic bite attack.
• Mages get a customizable (name and spell used) apprentice pet.  Two of the spell choices for the pets are not strictly direct damage spells.
• Undead get a variable pet – its strength and abilities are dependent on the power of the foe whose corpse you use.  It can also be commanded to use various kinds of equipment – there were/are a number of hidden “tricks” as to what it can wear and take advantage of.  Undead pets are the only ones who can wear equipment.  Undead pets can have up to three abilities (they are the only pets with multiple abilities, I think).
• Ranger/Mage/Undead pets can all be commanded to stay in one room and wait or to follow their controller, if I remember correctly.

I think some of the appeal is that I get to play with a mini “team” without having to rely on other humans.  Face it humanity: I’m not your biggest fan. I mean, I love people in specific – but people in general… rarely impress me.  So, there’s that.  Pet classes do tend to solo very well.

Is there more to it? I don’t know, maybe this journey down memory lane (this will be a sequence of posts, as time allows) will bring me to some kind of epiphany.  Along the way I’ll also try and look at the progression of pet class construction, gameplay & balance – not to mention the innovations each new game did (or didn’t) bring to the table.

NEXT TIME: Evercrac- err – Everquest!   More undead!

<—>

Alright.  Home, wife and boys thoroughly hugged (all) and put to bed (the boys).

I took a few pictures on my phone that I will intersperse so I have something to intersperse.  I so rarely post pictures, might as well fill up a post.

First: The trip:

I rode the train up from Portland with a friend.  We stayed at the Moore Hotel, in downtown (?) Seattle:

It was not one of the “official” PAX hotels listed on the website – which was probably why it was affordable.  All the employees we encountered were friendly and helpful and it was an all around solid place.  I’d recommend it to anyone

The trip was relatively uneventful.  We departed, then talked about very geeky things, as geeks are wont to do, then arrived.

Saturday & Sunday morning we had breakfast at Seattle Coffee Works:

Where I had the best 2 mochas of my life.   Now, I’m not a coffee connoisseur or anything – the truth is that I generally hate “coffee taste” – so I go with mochas when I need a coffee fix.  So, I’ve tried more than a few over the years.  Anyway, this happened:

and it was good.

We also ate at a decent Mexican place (a little pricey and not particularly to my taste, but it looked really popular – we didn’t have a reservation so wound up eating at the bar), a good Vietnamese place (good food, nice interior – seemed like a good place for a date), and a good burger place (the fries were killer but the burger had onion cooked into it.  If you like that kind of thing, you will probably really like the burgers).

We also got drinks one night at the Nitelite:

It was right next door to our hotel and recommended by a guide book my friend had, so we figured what the hell.  The drinks were DIRT cheap ($3 for a 7&7 & 2.75 for a rum & coke) and the place was apparently a local dive.  The music was a bit loud, but it seemed like a good place to go if you aren’t into the club scene and/or just wanted to sit with some friends and have multiple drinks without emptying your wallet.

On to the games!

There was no Diablo 3 (due to there being no Blizzard).  WHAT THE GAMER FUCK?  Seriously . Ugh.  I bought my ticket so long ago – before any of the attendees were announced (I think they probably sold out before many/all of the announcements went up), so I couldn’t exactly plan for this but… I kind of expected Diablo 3 to be there. I mean, I think it was at the last PAX I went to (3 years ago?) So… you know.  Oh well, lame.

So that was at least 30% of the games I wanted to check out… the others were Guild Wars 2 and Secret World.

I got in a little bit of play time with GW2 – only about 70% of a session because damn room closed halfway into our play sessions.  I went with the Sylvari – because I saw this, which was awesome – and because I wanted to check out a character with some abilities.  Here are a couple super high quality phone camera pics:

My Sylvari ranger with leaf wolf pet.

I was pretty happy with the way the game played.  I went with a ranger, and she started with a bow and a sword + torch combo as alternates.  You could also equip an axe primary or a dagger or warhorn secondary (or any combination).  Bow was fast animating ranged attacks, axe was slower animating (and, I assume, higher damage – but I didn’t check) ranged damage, sword was standard melee except I had some crazy attack where I spun around in a circle around the enemy, warhorn let me use a buff of some time (I forgot), dagger had a throw option and a poison option and the torch could be thrown to ignite an enemy or you could make a bonfire at your feet for a pbaoe fire attack.

Lots of options.  I didn’t see any pet specific skills on demo, but I understand there are some.

I was a little underwhelmed with the axe, but I suspect that was probably because of how much faster the bow felt – although I think I was killing things at the same rate, the bow just felt more zoom-zoomy.

A better shot of the character.

I watched a number of folks play through the Norn & Char newbie areas as well, and everything looked great.

The other “new” game that I wanted to check out was Secret World, which, unfortunately was not playable.  However, we did get into the little “secret room” deal where they showed the audience some of the first dungeon and several game features.  The fact that you’ll be able to have all 500+ skills on a single character (and thus no reason for alts), is going to make for a really interesting experience.

I was a little bummed when the presenter described gameplay in terms of the trinity (tank/dps/heal), BUT the positive thing I took from it is that anyone can configure themselves any which way.  I’m hoping this will allow for some relatively “new” options – stuff like a ranged character with defensive skills & taunt, or maybe a melee tank type with controls, etc.

We went to a couple panels – the big Guild Wars 2 one and a much, much smaller City of Heroes Freedom panel.  The GW2 panel was good and answered lots of questions (no kill stealing – everyone gets credit or no credit, no level capped characters griefing lowbie events – they get auto-sidekicked down), as well as gave out some new tiny bits (multiple guilds per character, a sidekicking system – I was pleased to hear them use the word “sidekicking” – lots o other games & companies try and come up with a different word for it… to try and avoid giving credit where credit is due maybe? :P).   The was a funny bit where they told the audience they had taped prizes to the bottom of some of their chairs… and many people proceeded to rip off the warning/instruction labels taped to the bottom of the chairs… totally not me <.<.   On the whole, solid panel, but nothing spectacular.

new costume set: berserker/viking

The second panel was the City of Heroes panel on the new issue (21), Freedom.  They mostly just went over stuff I already knew (because I’m a CoH forumite…not much gets by us – even the backpack announcement, which sounded like they expected it to be surprising, was old news), but it was pretty cool to hear the devs talk about it, and hear their answers to audience questions.

There were a couple new things, like the viking/berserker costume pieces I’ve got a shot of above there.  They also revealed the rewards for the signature story arcs:

Still not enough Astrals or Incarnate Threads to matter, unfortunately.  For a once a week award (which I’m guessing takes longer, time-wise, to acquire than 2-5 BAFs)… 1 astral or 10 threads is incredibly paltry and almost insulting.  I hope they crank that up. a bit.

There was also a guy dressed up like Lord Recluse:

What else?

There were lots of great cosplayers!  I mean… there were lots of terrible ones too, but plenty that people obviously put a lot of time and effort into.  Google around a bit after folks have had time to post their pictures.  I saw this costume Sunday and it stood out as one of the best (to me).  I had a feeling she would show up pretty quickly in the cosplay galleries (the one below is from “comicbookmovie.com” and kotaku has one of her as well):

I didn’t recognize the character, and asked her what it was… a video game done in anime style is all I got (the name was something Japanese that I didn’t retain) – if anyone happens to know the specifics, please let me know, I’m curious how close she got to what she was aiming for.  The white & vivid red, the red contacts and butterflies, it just worked.

There were tons of others (lots of decent LoL ones that I’m sure will turn up on the forums there, lots of Mortal Kombat – I saw very little to no super heroes or Street Fighter costumes), and I’m sure many that I didn’t see.  I know that when I went with Jen & Z the last time we saw a great Fruitfucker costume and an (I think) functional, human-sized Gameboy.  I saw a couple human-sized Gameboys this time, but none functional.

Another solid costume that I remember having to stop and turn and check out because it was so well put together:

Of course, it also looked hot as hell to walk around in (there were several costumes of that sort).  There were a ton of good Star Wars costumes but, frankly, the volume of those renders them less impressive these days.

Other odds and ends:

A place where you totally shouldn't plop.

.

The Eve dude lecturing us on Iceland and bumping boats and cod (yes, this is why we stopped at the EVE booth).

.

Even bounty hunters need a break.

.

And, of course, the place with the best cell data reception in the house:

The 6th floor bathroom

What?  It was the only place I could get twitter to work!

ANYWAY.  Couple things:

• This game has the longest launcher/start up of ANY MMo I have tried.  Heck, it takes longer to launch than most stand-alone games.  Longer than any game I can think of at the moment anyway.  True, it’s not too bad on my 6 core desktop, but it’s pretty damn long on my laptop.
• AoC has a distinct visual style.  This is a good thing.  You may not like it (I don’t particularly, it’s too washed out and bleak for me so far), but at least it exists.  This is in contrast to something like Rift that I don’t really feel has any particular visual appeal to it beyond being “up to date” and competently done.
• Free to play!  For the most part… I had to pay to unlock the class I wanted to try (Necromancer).  But, it’s a one time $8 or $10 or whatever.  So I’ll be able to pop back in until the game dies and continue dragging my zombies around.
• Fatalities.  Or critical hit kills or something.  Some skills are actually based off these.   Enemy plays a different death animation, generally gorier.
• Oh.  Almost forgot: adult themed.  So, in addition to the fatalities you’ll find : bare breasts.  (That seems to be the extent of it as far as I’ve seen).

On my first try at a character, I made it to level 10 as a Demonologist.  Note: this is NOT a pet class.  I was horribly disappointed to find, upon reaching level 10 or so, that the pets are just a buffs with shitty attacks.  Generally shitty buffs too, at least the first one.  I think having your pet out gave you ~60 mana.  I’d never ran out of mana at that point, so I could care less.  The pets do attack but… you know… it’s like autoattacking in Rift.  For the most part, pointless.  So, FYI , the Demo is the wizard/dps/blaster class, not the pet class.  As soon as I realized that, dropped that like a rock, unlocked necro and took that to 21-22ish – basically played it all the way through the intro zone.

The tutorial/intro/starter zone effectively cuts you off from the rest of the game world until level 21 or so.  And I mean completely cut off – as near as I can tell, highbie friends couldn’t even come and visit.  So I played through the entire thing just to get a feel for it.  It was… well, it had a story.  This is a good thing.  It had a story very specific to this world, which I liked.  I didn’t really like the story, but it exists.  I at least followed along and read about the plot points (contrast this to Rift where, with 3 level 20-25s now, I don’t think I’ve read a single line of plot).

I will say that one thing that kept me playing my necro was how good the tier 1/skill you use forever spell looked at low resolutions.  It makes daggers out of ice that look like broken shards of glass, but instead of just shooting them in a line like every other mmo, they kind of converge on your target from a sphere surrounding it.  I was like “Wow, if this looks tolerable at low res, it will be awesome cranked up, right?”  Unfortunately, no.  It doesn’t scale up that well.  So, the game looks pretty decent at the low end, but only so-so at the high end.  I don’t have any screen shots saved, but I’m sure you can find a ton by googling around.

Final thoughts:

• As far as F2P fantasy MMOs go, this one is really good.  I mean, for paying nothing you can do pretty much whatever you need to do (at least as far as I got – DO NOT FORGET to buy a bag from the vendor in the bar at night time).  I spent money to unlock a class, but if you’re happy playing one of the freebies, just go with that.  I suspect that most/all MMOs will offer a F2P option soon so, as the field grows, this one will look less and less compelling to cheap gamers.
• As far as MMOs that you pay for – I’m glad I never paid money for this one ;).
• Distinct (but aging – nothing near as bad as the previous generation though) visual style.  Also, the visuals feel “European” if that means anything to you.   Like, they feel a lot like some low-budget Euro games I’ve played over the years.  Especially the GUI….which needs work.
• Genuine, non-generic story & world flavor.

My initial impression of it was that it was an insanely bland looking fantasy mmo.  By “bland” I don’t mean that the graphics are bad, just completely lacking in character.  One thing I did love/respect/appreciate about WoW was how much the character & world design just “pops”.  It does.  Now, the cartoonish kind of style they have there may not work for you – but I still think it gives that place a great flavor all its own.  I haven’t seen anything like that in another fantasy MMO yet.  Everything kinda looks the same.  Rift is no different in this regard (my initial reaction still holds).

It does have some unique flavors: the rift invasions themselves look pretty unique and have a noticeable effect on the world – not to mention the way they manifest and dissolve is pretty well done.  It has a couple mounts that look neat, or are neat ideas at their core (two tailed foxes, two headed turtles, Star Wars looking pony horses), but the execution just falls flat for me.  Again – I want to clarify that they are not poorly done, I just don’t find them interesting or inspired.

Same with the armor and gear.  Speaking of, man I am spoiled by City of Heroes.  I am SO OVER gear.  CoH has a limited inventory/gear system – and that’s about as much as I want to deal with these days.  All 4 of my characters in Rift (I made one of each class) look pretty stupid.  None of them looks anywhere near as good as CoH LAUNCH character from 7 years ago.  Sure, the polys are smoother (they’d damn well better be!), but they just look like crap.  My highest level character is only 20, so “maybe” it gets better later… but “later” is worth nothing in my book.

Another gripe about armor & gear: not once have I been presented with a difficult gear choice.  Every item I have gotten has been either useless or better than my current gear.  In some ways this is a good thing – it saves me from having to think about my gear – but in another way it’s kind of… well, it’s not really a gear system if it’s not presenting any choices, is it?  This aspect I’m fairly sure improves later in game, espcially as you get planar & crafted gear and stuff, but in the 1-20 game, the equipment-sub-game is a snorefest.

Random gripe: autoattacking is a bizarre joke.  I’m trying to figure out why they even have it in the game.  So far they have all been slow and deal very little damage in relation to you skill attacks.  Plus, one of your skills is pretty much always ready to go, so why would you ever NOT use it an autoattack?  Out of end/mana lately?  The only time that has happened to me so far has been when I died.  Maybe it becomes relevant later in game…

Let’s look at the two big (only) selling points of this game:  The Rift system & the classs/”soul” system.

1. The rift system

Every so often a portal opens up somewhere (sometimes, right on top of you!) and an invasion from either the other pvp realm (but so far, just staffed with npcs) or an elemental plane (fire, air, water, earth (? haven’t seen that one yet), life or death) happens.  Or a raiding party sets out across the map with some kind of target you have to either defend or kill them before they get to.   These vary wildly in size from tiny single small rift events that you can (carefully) solo to fucking epic, map-covering events that take 20-40 people and an hour to clear.

The small ones are great, and add spice to things and have, so far, been really manageable and generally fun.
The large ones are also fun – IF you’re in the mood for a raid type event.  If you’re not, too bad, go to another zone, play another alt, or log out.  Because these events are srs bsns and can either remove all the quest npcs or kill them (and it took a while for them to respawn last time… I eventually just logged out in frustration).  I experienced the first one of these epic rift invasions last night and it was both a positive and negative experience.

Positive in that yes, it is fun to have an impromptu raid style event happen and have dozens of people trekking around on the map in caravans, killing giant bosses and the like.  Note that this would be super obnoxious without the free mount I recieved for signing up for the game via a friend (without the free mount, I may have barely been able to afford one of the normal ones).  The caravans of players move too fast, and if you fall behind you get annihilated by the rift spawns if you don’t know safe paths around the map.  The map terrain is odd, and didn’t seem to cater at all to making you way safely to the big rift event goal spots.  I died many, many times trying various paths to get to raid event spot alone.  Sticking with the group was by far the best way to go – but, if you happened to die in an event or something, it was really tough to catch back up without getting stuck in a death loop.

Negative in that, jesus christ I just wanted to turn in my quests and move the fuck on!  Instead I spent an hour+ clearing the event and then, when the npcs STILL didn’t respond, another 20 minutes trying to help with the “cleanup” (getting rid of dozens of tiny rifts left scattered across the map).  At that point I just logged because the npcs still hadn’t returned and something kept killing me.

I imagine (hope) that at higher levels there are more zone options available.  Maybe there is another 15-20 zone (aside from the pvp zones which I have no desire to visit), but it hadn’t been presented to me via the plot or quest chains yet.  If it exists, the devs would be wise to introduce players to it earlier so they can avoid zone events if they choose.  Then again… I suspect this is all by design.  How do you get your whole zone involved in a raid?  Give them very few other options.  Otherwise a large chunk of the players would just leave and grind elsewhere?  I dunno.

2.  The class/”soul” system

One of the big selling points of the game is that Rift is a multi-class game by design, from the ground up.

It will let you go all out dps or heal (probably tank too, I haven’t tried warrior much) if you really want. And I do mean “all out”.  One of the souls I was looking at had at least a dozen different healing effects.  I can’t see how you would ever NOT have four or five off cooldown.  I don’t know what kind of person would find that playstyle fun, but they must exist, because the trinity (tank/heal/dps) exists (at least in most mmos, I love how it mostly doesn’t in CoH!).

Generally, this seems to be ill-advised, at least for soloing.  All the solo specs I looked at (for cleric & mage), the ones that people say are actually good, involve a bunch of dps and a (usually instant) self heal.  Even the rogue spec I wound up going with was based around the bard soul, which has a maintain (you can’t do anything else while it is going) type attack that damages and heals.  There’s probably a warrior soul with some self healing too….

So, there are a handful (6-8ish) of souls for each of the four (warrior, rogue, cleric, mage) classes.  Each soul is something that might be a separate class in another game.  Like rogues have bard, ranger, assassin, etc. Mages have elementalist, pyromancer, necromancer, etc.  You can invest “soul points” in up to 3 soul “trees” at a time.  I have two separate builds unlocked on my mage (you can get up to 5, I think) – this allows you to switch between completely different builds & playstyles almost at will (I don’t think you can do it in combat, I haven’t tried as it takes a few seconds to trigger and despawns any pets you have).  On my mage I have one that favors elementalist then has a couple points in chloromancy for (you guessed it!) an instant heal.  The other build favors necromancer with some points in warlock (which gives me a second self-heal).  Both seem pretty strong, and definitely stronger than they would be if I didn’t mix souls.

I’m really not a fan of most of the individual souls, but the system in general seems to work as advertised. It’s something different at least.  So far, some of the souls seem pointless, but I’m sure they get a decent skill or two in there somewhere.

Other random thoughts:

• Many of the pets are ugly.   Seriously, graphics department – can you make these things any blander?  Earth elemental & warrior panther, I’m talking to you.  Even the shit pets should be given attention, especially given the amount of time we have to spend looking at them.
• You train up individual spell levels as you level up (as opposed to just having them scale with you – hello money sink!).   This should make the spells LOOK more interesting.  Especially for your first spell which, for the mages at least, seems to be something that you use the entire length of the game.  Nothing quite as interesting as staring at the same tiny blast for 50 levels.  Again, City of Heroes has me spoiled here.  Even the simplest attack looks generally awesome.
• I miss the side-kicking system.  Evidently this hasn’t spread to non-superhero mmos yet (in addition to CoH, Champions has it & I think DCU Online might as well).  This means that I have to wait how long to play with my friend’s level 45?  I suspect I will stop playing before I catch up, but I signed up for a month, so I’m going to see how far I can make it on my mage.

Overall I’d say it has some neat ideas, but just isn’t interesting enough to warrant playing unless you really want another fantasy mmo but are tired of all the other ones.

HOWEVER.  I am kinda interested in seeing where the story goes.  If I could just fire up the game and hit ‘skip’ every time a fight started and ‘warp’ to take me from conversation point to point, I would totally do it.  Because I want to know how “my” story ends.  I keep hearing tell of how the things you did in chapters 1 & 2 actually affected the outcome – I really want to see that.

So.  Yeah.  DA2 is just sitting on the shelf waiting for me to finish it.  Someday.  And Bioware (DA & ME franchises) is now off my “buy on release day” list and now on my “maybe never buy” list.  Maybe I’ll rent ME3 after it’s been out for a few months.  I think I’ll just stick to reading summaries for DA3.  But hey, maybe something will change and the DA3 design will have all the marbles again.  Environments that vary.  Fights that vary.  More enemy types.  Less console-ish.

*That I can remember.  That disclaimer should probably go after everything I say that involves things I may have done a decade ago.

I’ve tried most of the other big name MMos to come out (WoW, LotR, Rifts Beta, etc.) and none of them can really hold my attention.  You’d think after 6-7 years I would get bored but they’ve somehow managed to continually put out quality content and find new ways to keep me interested.

Near the end of last year, with issue 19 (“issue” is the term they use for their free content updates), they introduced the beginnings of their “end game” – the Incarnate system.  I won’t go into this much, but it’s basically an advancement system that allows characters to become more powerful without gaining levels.  Similar to the old EQ “alternate advancement” system where you earned points to invest in other abilities except that it is actually good and does not suck (imho of course).

Taking out a turret in the Lambda trial

They have expanded on the system in issue 20, which came out last Tuesday, and the new abilities you get are, to put it bluntly, awesome.  Like, almost surprisingly so.  Gaining them does tend to make you feel like you have grown in power, maybe even more than the feeling that earning a level would.  Not to mention each ability tends to be visually stunning (I’m not a fan of using CoH videos and screenshots, because they always tend to look like crap… but if you keep in mind that the actual game looks better than any screenshots/movies you will see, it helps ;) ) and customizable – you can completely recolor the blasts linked in the video, as well as changing some aspects of their effects via different progression trees.

One interesting thing about the visual aspect of the game is that it still looks good even after all these years.  It helps that they did an engine upgrade last year with the “Going Rogue” expansion pack.  But, even on old systems that can’t run the new graphics, the game still manages to be visually compelling (to me) due to its unique style and massive, massive customization options – in addition to creating up to 5 different costumes for your character, you can also change the colors (and sometimes the animations or shapes, where weapons are involved) of your individual powers.

The robot's name is "Security Team" - I'm the tiny guy dead center.

It’s true that the new “Incarnate content” for issue 20 is basically just two trials (“raids” in the parlance of other MMOs), and this might not seem like much.  BUT… I’ve probably done each of them 20 times over the last week (they are very short with a literate team) and I’m still having a blast.  Depending on what kind of character you are playing, the experience varies quite a bit.  It takes several (15ish?) runs through the trials to unlock all the new powers, and perhaps more to create the specific powers you want – so figure you’ll be spending a lot of time there if you really want to involve all your (level 50) alts in the system.  The general advice is to pick 1, or a handful, and concentrate on them – and this is good advice.

The trials brought with them a league system, which is like a giant team, or rather a way of organizing and communicating with 6 teams of up to 48 total individuals.  These two trials in particular only allow 8-16 (the Lambda trial, pictured above) and 16-24 (the Behavioral Adjustment Facility, or “BAF” for short, trial), but that is plenty.  Plenty of cats to herd…

One thing that I noticed pretty quickly is that the trials are not actually hard.  At all.  If you are literate.  And, you know, you’d think that in a game full of pictures and words that you need to read to figure out how to do things to those pictures and things that everyone would be literate but sadly this is not the case.  These trials demonstrate solidly that my server has a player base that is only 85% literate, at best.  There are some specific things you need to do during the trials.  Generally very, very simple things.  Like: “Don’t stand there, follow the guy” or “give the item to your team leader” or even “don’t click that” (yes, seriously).  Very simple things that can cause your team to lose the entire trial if you do not read or listen to the leader’s directions.  So, it’s kind of fun to see the trails as a big fat sieve that shows you quickly who is competent and to what agree.

Of course, “losing” a trial doesn’t really matter all that much.  You miss out on 1-2 rewards but, especially if you are just working on unlocking your slots, you still earned lots of credit towards that so it’s not a wash.  Generally, people with multiple slots unlocked will have passed the competence barrier anyway, so it’s really only there for people new to the trial.  Most of them do fine.  I say “Do that!” and they do it, and we win.

————————————————————————————————————

tl;dnr: The new incarnate powers & trials are a bunch of fun and the first time I’ve ever enjoyed an endgame system.

Currently, I’m somewhere in the beginning of the second act, and enjoying it.  The increased pace of combat makes things a lot more fun… for the most part (one caveat so far, below), and the game looks AND runs great, even on my laptop.  The same laptop which DA1:Awakenings runs horribly on…  someone screwed up, eh?

Some thoughts… OK, gripes actually:

• wtf is up with Dragon Age and blood, seriously?  The bit with Merrill slashing her wrists and blood spraying everywhere and her not even reacting?  DUMB.  I get the blood mage bit, I really do.  But blood spraying everywhere from a slit wrist is going to cause some discomfort.
• blood: continued: I get that it’s funny to have people joking and carrying on conversations with blood all over their face and breasts.  It’s part of the “quirkiness” of Dragon Age… but it still feels very odd in a game where everything else is so serious.  [Yes, I know you can turn it off - or at least you could in the first one - I'll probably do that, I just haven't mucked with the settings much yet.]
• Wow, was installing the DLC not at all simple like it used to be.  DA1 had a nice in-game interface for doing it, AND IT WORKED.  DA2 has a nice in game interface, but it links you out to bioware’s social website bullshit.  And then you have to downolad a separate installer for the various pieces of DLC that came with the sig edition (Exiled Prince, Black Emporium, and signature edition stuff).  There were some other things – individual items – that you just turned on in the website and then didn’t have to download anything, but I suspect this is because they are already built into the game files.  Why doesn’t the in-game DLC management piece work?  Sloppy.  Mocking even.
• They completely gutted your interactions with party members.  Remember how you could go to camp and bullshit when party members whenever you wanted, and eventually advance into romances and stuff with the right plot points and items?  Now you can only talk to them when they have a quest.  I’m completely serious.  One of the defining features of Dragon Age … reduced to a couple quests.  ARGH.
• Only your main character (Hawke) can choose their specialization.  All the other characters have a preset specialization.  This is not horrible, but limits the kind of specialized parties you could have in DA1.  Not horribly so, as they still have most of the trees available… but not all.
• Expanding on the above:  Each npc is locked into a weapon spec.   Hell, one of them is locked into using a single weapon!!
• Party members are locked into a single armor/gear visual.  Yep, that’s right.  It’s a party-based rpg where you can’t change your other party member’s armor (only the non-visual items like rings & necklaces).  Seriously what is going on Bioware?
• The first “boss” battle (the rock wraith).  Am I playing Zelda here!?  I dunno, it just felt way too console-ish.  Designed for the Xbox & PS3 version crowds I guess.

Even with all those complaints, the game is quite fun, the story is interesting, and plenty of the fights are challenging – at least for my party.  I went with a noble-ish acting dagger rogue for my first play through.  I like that you don’t have to spend points in pick locks and whatnot, but it does feel a bit like more dumbing down.  Then again, in this case it makes things a little clearer.

Some positives:

• Fighting is a bit more engaging and fast paced (as I mentioned).  The “reinforcement” mechanic is kind of interesting: almost every fight consists of multiple waves.  Sometimes these ways “jump down” off of nearby buildings, which is amusing.
• Spell visuals are pretty good across the board.  I’ve been turned away from several mmos lately based on incredibly boring spell visuals (imho), so it’s nice to see a game where they took some extra effort.
• Status effect + combo interaction is a nice bonus.  Basically, each class has attacks that do bonus damage IF an npc is under a status effect triggered by one of the other classes.
• I haven’t messed with the control-type spells much, but the one I have (petrify) is actually useful, and even works on enemies above minion rank!   So far.  I need to try the glyphs eventually.
• The way they differentiated the weapon types (double daggers, sword+shield, 2hd weapon, archery) works pretty well as far as advantages, disadvantages – each is pretty noticeable.
• The party members are all generally interesting, story and personality wise.   They would probably be even more so if you could INTERACT WITH THEM MORE.  Ugh.

Random note: I swear a couple of the NPCs are based off of celebrities.. Isabella’s face just reminds me too much of Salma Hayek (as do her… weapons), and there’s a Chantry type npc who appears in the cutscenes who reminds me of that waifish girl from the pirate movies and the soccer movie.

It’s Magic of Civilimoo, basically.  The tech trees remind me of the way MOO worked but, upon reflection, I suspect Civ works that way as well.  The magic and hero stuff is straight out of Master of Magic, as are the summoned units – in a good way.  I’m a little surprised that the nonhuman races are so limited, but hey, room for an xpack I guess.

Oh, something we should get out of the way: It runs like SHIT on my laptop.   My laptop is a “gaming” laptop, and its about a year old.  Dual core 2.4/4GB ram/Geforce 9800M GTS – very decent and well above system specs for this game.  But, we’re talking barely to non-playable, and yet I still played through a whole game  – with most of the graphics turned completely off (in “cloth map mode” shown below) – so that should say something right?

Normally you only get the cloth map (which IS *very* cool) when you zoom way out, but a few posters on the forums suggested I try that to deal with my massive slowdown issues.  It did help – the game took about 3x as long to start slowing down, but it still did.  Near the end, everything was super jerky.

OK, so what’s to like?  Well, I’m going to compare it mostly to Master of Magic because, that’s what they are going for – they even tried to get the MoM license at one point, but Atari or whoever was holding it wanted to much.  So, what advantages/improvements does it have over MoM?

• Alternate victory types – at least one:

I'll take what I can get.

I can’t count how many times I wished MoM had something like this.  Maybe I don’t want to be a *total* dick and wipe everyone out for once?

• More things you can do with hero units:
  • You can marry them to your sovereign, produce kids with them, then marry those kids off to other empires (if you research Dynasty tech).  Not only does this improve your relationship with the country, but it gives you a good chance of getting a magic using hero – only your sovereign is an innate magic user, anyone else you have to use a spell (with a maintenance cost) on them to allow it.
  • You can station them in cities to improve prestige (birth/growth rate): every hero unit has a special ability, and some of them do much better stationed in cities (like the +20% food ones).  However, you’ll probably want to level them up a few times and dump some stat points into Charisma, so the amount they improve prestige by increases.
  • As per Mom, you can equip heroes individually
  • You can have an apparently unlimited amount.
• The tech tree is brilliant: the way it’s integrated into the MoM style gameplay, the fact that there is a viable reason to pursue each branch and every single node had something of value, IIRC – yada yada I could go on.  It’s great.
  

  Tech research choice window.

• The cloth map, as mentioned above, is really pretty neat.  Especially handy for finding things that are hard to see on the main map.
• The resource system is also very well done.  Every resource has value independent of the others, and finding a certain one (metal, horses, magic crystal doodads) can and will drive you down a research path that exploits that resource.
• Diplomacy in general actually functions.  A major complaint with MoM was that the diplomacy was a joke – and, except for trading spells, it pretty much was.  Here, it’s key.
• The enemies seems relatively smart so far.  Strong enemies bully you for bribes, weak ones ask you for help.  The last game I played the enemy hard-tech rushed the high end mace and was destroying me.  I turned it around, but it was tedious (esp. on the laptop), so I just called that one a draw and started a new game.

Limitations/complaints/bugs

• The magic system needs work.  Mostly just the interface, but sometimes it plain doesn’t work.
  • I haven’t figured out how to pick which unit from a stack I want to buff.  You may not even be able to.  Instead I have to destack, buff, restack.  Very annoying.
  • City buffs, especially the +1 food one (one of the two best, imho) are random as fucking hell.  Sometimes it will let me cast them on a city, but about 80% of the time it just does nothing.  I click and click and click and it just stays in the ‘select target’ mode.  DRIVES ME CRAZY.
• Having to defend/police your caravans is really annoying.  When the game is running like muck soup, the last thing I want to do is try and get guard units out to intercept that single wandering spider that is a billion times weaker than my weakest unit but that will still slaughter my caravan.  Too bad you can’t stack caravans with other units to aid them?  Or can you? Need to try that.
• The slowness on my laptop. I was really hoping this could be my “laptop game”.  When I go downstairs to the workstation, I generally prefer to play multiplayer games.  The laptop is for the single player games that can sit for 30 minutes while I AFK and parent/clean/etc.
• No High Score/Hall of Fame list?  Maybe this is just buried somewhere and I can’t find it, I don’t see how they could possibly leave this out.

Note1: I was finally able to play an hour or so on my workstation, and it seems to be running well.  Except for the periodic (maybe 2 in an hour?) crashes.  Thankfully the game autosaves every 5 turns.  The fact that it was worth ignoring the crashes should tell you something about the engrossment level.
Note2: I’ve only had this for a couple.

OVERALL: THREE STARS : because it plays horribly on the machine I want to play it on.
POTENTIAL: FOUR AND THREE QUARTER STARS: because there is a ton of room for growth/improvement and Stardock seems committed
WEIGHTED OVERALL: THREE AND THREE QUARTER STARS: because I think I’ll actually be playing this for a while, buggy or not – but not as much as I would be if it ran well on my laptop.  We’ll see how I feel in a month or two.  Hell, maybe I’ll find a fix for the laptop issues.