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!

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.

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.

So#2, I tried to track down my account information so I could log in.  It wasn’t set up under the email account I’ve been using for the last 10 years (wow!) – Jen vaguely remembered my previous email (it was an @home.com account I think…comcast or  the SoCal equivalent or something long since gone), but I didn’t.  I tried the password/account name retrieval options at their website a couple of times, but no go – it was sending emails out into the ether.

I called their phone tech support and the guy on the other end – who was very, very polite & helpful – was eventually able to track down the account(s) I had not played in NINE YEARS.  Yep, they hang onto those things forever.  It was a pain – I went through my list of all the zip code’s I’d lived in, but we couldn’t find anything.  This turned out to be because they had one letter of my last name wrong in the system.  Wow, so many people screw up my obscenely basic surname that I’ve long since ceased to be surprised by it.  Anyway, we finally found it via a combination of character & server name.  Yeah, I remembered my main’s name.  But I’ve used it elsewhere, so this is not that surprising.

Anyway, he hooked up and reactivated my account for a couple of days.  Hell no I wasn’t about to pay for it – at least without seeing it first… then maybe if it didn’t suck…  But oh, oh how it does.

Wow, the graphics aged so insanely poorly.  I mean, there are games from 1994 (and probably older… Gold Box games, where are you?) that I can still play and *gasp* even enjoy the old school graphics on.  But this was not one of them.  I mean – the character selection screen (above – yeah, the level cap is like 90 or 95 now!) is not… super horrible right?  No, it’s not.  It’s not something people would pay for these days, but uh… you know, I’ve played worse.  Here’s an in game shot:

It actually looks way better in the screenshot than in game.  Some games – like City of Heroes, for example – seem to screenshot horribly, with nothing flat looking as good as in game – but this one… Well, let’s just say the above makes the game look better.

Modern browser games look better than this.  FREE browser games.  Yet people still pay $15 a month for it.  Yeah, you heard me – they haven’t even dropped the price.  At this point, I guess if you’ve invested 11 years of your life (Are their people still there from launch?  There must be.), why would you leave?  Yeah, why indeed.

O.O

So yeah, that flashback lasted me all of 20 minutes of fiddling around trying to remember how powers worked.

OH.  And, back in EQ… monsters were tough. No, I’m not talking about bosses, I mean your every day, average “even” con.  I remember that I liked playing a necro because I could actually solo – yeah, melee types (and others) could barely even solo even cons.  Compare that to WoW or any other modern game…  Here’s a video I found of a guy comparing a necro killing a mob to a full team killing that same critter:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQTpRg8q_4k

Wow.  Flashbacks to kiting and fearkiting common dog/rhino/cat critters across the plains of the “new” Kunark expansion in 2000 or so… Yeah.  It took FOREVER to level.  Compared to today’s games anyway.  Evercrack.  Evercrawl.   I mean, I had fun at the time – because, what else was there?  UO?  Meridian?  Maybe a couple others I’ve forgotten.

Anyway, so ends this trip down memory lane… next time, a better one.

But, I was feeling pre-underwhelmed.  I haven’t played a strategy game that really grabbed me in a while, maybe since Civ 3 or something… and even that was mostly just the “1 more turn!!” addiction.  Also, Blizzard’s whole bizarre/stupid privacy changes (saying they were going to force people to use their real names on the forums, then kinda going back on it), integrating battle.net & SC2 with Facebook… all things to make me cringe.

But, you can ignore those things and just play the game.  I think.  It does make me sign into battle.net before it even lets me play the single player campaign (which is 7 kinds of stupid)… I guess this is so you can use the in-game messenger thing (yes, it has an in-game messenger, but so far you can very easily not look at it) to nag your FB friends to play with you or buy the game.  Or something.

Also, playing the beta may have burned me on the game because it was multi-player only, and MP was only a portion of what I loved about SC.  Certainly it’s not where I expect to spend most of my time.  I kind of figure that once I finish the campaign I’ll only play online as a lark – League of Legends covers my online/pvp/multiplayer needs quite well.

Anyway, I just went and played the game.  League of Legends was down anyway, so might as well.

And I had a lot of fun.  Went through maybe 5 missions.

• The between-mission spaceship/prep scenery where you can talk to the characters is actually pretty cool.
• I really like the special tech you can unlock via Zerg/Protoss research.  I like that you have to make choices there, and can’t get every option.
• I like the rate at which new units are coming, usually 1 per mission and on a mission kind of keyed to that unit so you can see their strengths.
• I love the research and mercenary options. I thought it (research done outside missions) would be annoying, but I love it.  It adds … something to the game.  Makes it more rp-like, maybe?
• The units look good, and seem quite varied.

Some weird/negatives:

• It doesn’t run as well as I think it should on my (still pretty good) laptop.
• It doesn’t recognize my video card… which seems insane as it’s an Nvidia card with pretty new drivers.  maybe because I’m using the beta drivers?
• I had to turn down the detail, which is really frustrating as it looks pretty damn good with stuff turned up.
• It tends to kind of crunchlag during some of the cutscenes – mostly just when the big convict guy is talking, but occasionally in game as well – usually when someone is talking over the action.  I don’t see why this is at all because, while the game is good looking, frankly I don’t see how it’s anything that should be pushing a decent graphics card  – even one from last year.
• The install is 12 gigs!!  (I’m sure 80% of that is the movies)

I need to see if I can play without the disk… I have a feeling I can’t because I heard it spinning up and down, but maybe if there’s a way to trick it and put all the data on disk that will help a bit.

I set out to hit 200/180 or better – and I did, so there’s some geek pride for you.  Usually, whenever I get up 18-20, the matchmaker starts putting me with teams that are obviously worse than me (which is saying a lot), or a bunch of leavers – it wants you to be about 50/50.  Kind of.  What it wants is for each team to have about a 50% chance of winning – which is a good thing.  Really, as many complaints as I have about the matchmaker, I haven’t seen anything this good in another game yet.

So yeah, almost 400 games in and I’m still having fun.  The free-ness is a nice perk too (although I do buy some of the new champs and skins when they go on sale).

Note: If anyone ever gets tempted to try the game via something I said here, please do so through my referral link – we get some tiny goody when someone we refer hits level 10.  Crazily, at least one guy has done this 1500 times already.  I don’t even know how that is possible – did he pay a bunch of gold farmers to do it or something??

The referral system seems to have boosted the number of quality youtube videos – tutorials and the like, so I’d say it’s a succeeding probably far and above what the marketing dept. might have guessed when they thought of the idea.  You can check out tons of videos for any champs you may be interested in before you buy – not to mention pick up some pointers that might not come through in a text guide.

Of course, the counterpart – the other ancestor – D&D & pnp roleplaying in general, is extremely social (jokes about the players social skills aside).  So, maybe RPGs & MMOs are really siblings, or cousins, not a strict lineal relation as time would have you believe… maybe the parents (D&D and uh.. computers I guess…) had one child early in life (RPGs) and the other in their 50s (MMOs).  Makes me wonder if the parents will be around to see their youngest grow up – or has it already?  WoW would like us to think so, but I’m not convinced.  I think that whatever “virtual reality” becomes will be the adulthood of the MMO.  WoW is like… early puberty maybe?  We’ll see.

Also, Guild Wars 2 is looking good.  They’ll have a good size audience carry over from GW1, and are doing some pretty different things in MMO land (big budget with no monthly fee for one thing) so the potential for something special is there… I’m looking forward to it.

/end rambling

OH, and the unofficial month of blogging more than usual is over (April), so I’m back to my sporadic updates.  Enjoy?