Category Archives: Video Games

The game was released a couple of weeks ago, and of course I was on board and playing it the day it came out, well the day before it came out since it was pre-ordered. I have been holding off on making any comments about it because I wanted to take the time to play some parts of it through a couple of times. Now that I have done that, I will start with the random observations about the game.

First, the beginning of the game is entirely too easy. I can understand the need for a beginners section, as this is a standalone game there will be a lot of gamers playing it that have never played the original. The problem with the ease of the beginning is the difficulty of the rest of the game. It is entirely possible to plug along and do all the quests and missions on the little island (the beginner’s zone) without ever dying, or even coming close to it. The second you step outside the city on the mainland it is possible to die without ever getting a spell or attack off.

My first time through I was trying to save cash by waiting to upgrade armor. I died so many times in the initial quests on the mainland that I was seriously considering just giving up on the game. It is not that I don’t like a challenge, I just didn’t understand my own skills, as well as those of the hired mercenaries, to be able to take on the monsters there. There is just a gap in monster levels between the island and the mainland. The last things you fight on the island are about level 12 while the first things you fight on the mainland are level 20. In a game where level 20 is max, 8 levels makes a hell of a difference.

There really should be either additional zones on the island that let you face some higher level monsters, or zones on the mainland that let you face lower level ones. There is simply no way to test out the effectiveness of your skills on higher level enemies until you are actually fighting in the city. Which wouldn’t be so bad except for the greatly improved AI in the game. The first enemies you face when you reach the mainland will target a single party member hit him all at the same time, and since it is a computer controlling them by “same time” I mean within thousandths of a second of each other, making it impossible to heal before the inevitable death.

The second character that I took to the mainland didn’t have nearly the problems that the first one did. This was mostly due to knowing what attacks the enemies were going to use, who they were going to attack first, and what character classes would work well together against the particular groups I was fighting. So it wasn’t nearly as impossible as I thought, but it really does need a place where you can practice against monsters that are above level 12 and below level 20.

The other thing that really stands out about Factions is the availability of high-end weapons. The rare (relatively) “green” weapons seem to be a lot more common in Factions, not that it really matters since they really aren’t that great in comparison to the other available weapons. The weapons that you can get from collectors now is, in many cases, vastly superior to the best of the “green” weapons. And those are the weapons that anyone can get with a minimum of effort.

The economy of the game, being directly related to available items, is changing dramatically because of the ease of acquiring such powerful items. A shield that used to sell for 50,000gold has exactly the same stats as one that you can get from a collector if you just pick up a few mossy webs during battles. Clearly no one is going to buy the one for 50,000gold any more. Which is great for the player, not so great for the bots.

Speaking of the bots. If you have ever done an ebay search for Guild Wars, just about all you see is money for sale. It seems that in order to slow the sale of Guild Wars stuff on eBay, they just made it easier to get all of it. Since it is no longer necessary to have a sword that costs 100k, what when you can get one with better stats off of a collector, you can really have a really well equipped character by the time you are level 20 with nothing but the gold that you are rewarded for completing quests. Of course there will always be people that don’t want to do the work and are willing to pay someone to do it for them, so the bots will live on, at least their prevalence will die off a little bit.

In case you didn’t notice, I took a couple of weeks off on the blogging. I didn’t have anything to write so when I tried to put something together it was obviously forced. You know it must be some bottom of the barrel crap if I think it is too bad to post, I mean look at what I do post.

I have also been playing a lot of Guild Wars lately. That game simply kicks ass. It is also an enormous timesink. You can’t really just pop into it for a ten minute goodie run, well you could but not looking for anything actually good. Once your ass hits the seat you are in it for at least an hour, probably a lot longer. The reason for that is the cooperative missions. There are missions that can’t possibly be done solo, some that require precise party formations to be completed at all. Finding a party for any particular quest is often difficult, unless you are a healing monk, in which case the party will find you. That was the reason that I had stopped playing it some time ago, I was just tired of wasting my time looking for a group to do a mission.

My wife plays the game a lot more than me. As a result she has characters that are far superior to mine, and never much of a problem finding a group. She also developed a list of friends that she frequently played the game with, and ultimately left my guild to join one that didn’t suck (which left only myself and a friend in Washington in the guild). She downloaded a program called Gamecomm, which allows her to communicate with her party members via a headset instead of the keyboard. After seeing how this technology made missions which seemed impossible turn easy I decided it was time to start playing the game again.

My wife got her guild leader to invite me into their guild, which required me leaving my own guild (thus leaving the friend in Washington as its only member), and it has been nothing but fun ever since. I also use the gamecomm program, but I usually just listen to what she and her friends are saying, which is often hilarious, as I muddle along on lower level quests to try to reach the areas of the game where the good shit is. The members of the guild I belong to are fabulously helpful, they have taken time out of their high level item quests to help me through some low level dreck, and having them tell me what I need to do during the mission (via a headset) makes it so that I look like slightly less of a noob. I’m still a noob though.

The worst part of it is that my highest level character, the character that they invited into the guild, is name “Probably a Mistake”. Yes I named my character “Probably a Mistake”. So when they are talking on gamecomm or in chat they refer to me as “probably”, even if I am playing a different character I have to tell them that I am “probably” so they know who I am. I really thought that character was a mistake when I made it, and it is. Smiting monk isn’t as good as I thought it was going to be once you get to higher levels. While it is easy to change the skill set to become a healer, the name can never be changed. I will henceforth ever be known as “Probably a Mistake” or “Probably”, thankfully they have yet to call me “Mistake”, at least not when I am in game anyway. I just wish I would have used my standard alias when I formed that character, it would be so much nicer to be referred to as shadow, or twin, or ST than “probably.” At the very least I could have gone with the joking moniker I used when I set up my first internet dial-up account: Big Dick McGee, though I guess that would have been a mistake, probably…

I have played a lot of video games in my time, probably more than I would care to admit. I have even paid monthly subscription charges to play one (Everquest). I have found, over time, that the majority of the game producers just don’t give a shit about the end user once they pony up the cash for the game. Diablo II still offers the online multiplayer for free, but Blizzard doesn’t really seem to give a shit about the community in general. Why should they? The game is like five years old.

Guild Wars, on the other hand, is actively doing all they can to keep the game both fresh and fun for all of the players, regardless of the fact that you don’t have to pay a fee to play it.

See, they took a normal monster from the game, rebuilt it out of candy corn and put it back in. Just for Halloween. They made a lot of changes to other things as well, cauldrons and the such appearing in the middle of towns, skeletons and candles all over the place. I thought it was extremely cool. Everquest never did anything like that in all the time I was playing it, and I was paying for that service!

I should also note that these candy corn monsters were not merely a background, they were the actual fighting minions that my wife was using as she headed out into battle. That is my wife in the middle of the photo, looking a bit petite (as always) next to the lumbering hulks beside her. Much like real life come to think of it.

I can tell you, from first hand experience, that candy corn doesn’t have to mutate in any way to become deadly. Have you ever eaten any of that shit? You kind of hope it is laced with cyanide about the time you taste it. Definitely better to be bludgeoned to death with it than to have to actually taste it.

Still, Kudos to Guild Wars for throwing in some creative and festive artwork. They didn’t have to do it, but they did. I think little things like that are going to make Guild Wars into on of the longest running games ever. The fact that they do minor updates almost daily doesn’t hurt either.

I haven’t actually played Guild Wars very much since I purchased it, there is no particular reason for that. There were no pressing time/schedule issues that would have kept me from playing it, no ultimatims from the significant other, I just hadn’t been playing it much. I am pretty sure that the reason I hadn’t been playing it much is that it is one of those games where it takes me a good half an hour to remember my skill keys (for each character) and even longer to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing the last time I quit playing. Guild Wars solved that all, damn it.

Guild Wars now has a slick new mission interface that tells you every quest that you have started in any town, listed immediately under a big old town heading. Hard to say you don’t know where you need to go when it tells you which town to go to, then goes further to tell you exactly what you have to do once you leave that town. Still, it doesn’t tell you exactly how to use your spells/skills, but they are easy enough to figure out during the first few minutes of play each time. Not that you really have to learn how to use them, more that you assign different skills to different hot keys based on your character; It would suck to cast a fireball spell when you meant to cast a heal party spell, if you know what I mean.

My wife has gotten into the game far more than I have. Not to the point that she is getting into some sort of weird cosplay fetish (though that might be cool, come to think of it), but she does love to beat those baddies up. We actually tried to start brand new characters ( a couple of months ago) that would play exclusively together, but that idea all went to shit when neither of us was happy with starting at the bottom when we both had characters that could kill everything on the screen without a thought (her characters more so than mine). Today, however, we finally managed to get the game going.

The game starts out with little quests; Wander just south of the city to find my lost ‘x’ and bring it back for reward ‘y’. There are hundreds of those little quests as you wander through the towns. You don’t have to do them but you will end up with better weapons and armor if you do. The game also has ‘missions’. The mission is something that is supposed to move you from one zone to the next. You do the missions to open up new quests basically. You really have to do the missions though, cause at some point you will no longer get any experience doing the quests in the previous area. The missions are a good thing.

The missions can also be done solo at lower levels, though they will require a damn good group of people at higher levels. You could do the missions solo at higher levels, but that would require the A.I. of your helpers to be unbelievably high, I.Q. of 32 or so. That might sound low but if you were the programmer, and you tried to think of every stupid move someone might try to make, and then someone tried to make all of those moves -I’ll call him Jimmy-, you then have to try to account for the best and worst possible move in any situation. The A.I. can only be so smart. The A.I. in Guild Wars is pretty damn good, but sometimes you end up with your mercenary stuck in a corner beating up the air that he breathes.

I ended up playing a bit of Guild Wars with my wife tonight. My wife’s character was 12 levels higher than me, and I had already done the stupid mission in the first place, but it was pretty damn fun to have her playing there with me. Guild Wars is bringing husband and wife together.

Go Guild Wars!

Have you ever played it? I never had, until just yesterday. Imagine Diablo II, in 3d, without the annoyances of Everquest. I really enjoy this game.

The online play is free, of course, and the graphics are simply amazing. The quests are possible, at least so far, solo or as a group, and the rewards keep the game moving along.

There is not a requirement that you get 6-8 guys, all from the same guild, to do a quest, it is possible even if you have no affiliation. There are a bunch of weird quests that you have to do to improve your armor and the such, but that is all optional (not really if you want to live). This game melds the sprite based Diablo II type game so seamlessly with the EverQuest type game that Iwas amazed at how fluid it was.

The biggest and most persistent complaint about MMORPG’s is that they have a level treadmill, meaning that you can only go up in level if the planets all line up just right: You have to be in the right group when the right monster spawns. I know that is true, since I did play everquest. Guild Wars, however has totally shattered that belief.

Each time you leave town the monsters spawn. I am not sure if party size matters, but even if it does, and there is only one of whatever you are trying to find, you could simply go back to town and respawn the zone. If you leave town alone you can still complete the majority of the quests, provided you do them in the correct order.

The good attributes of the ‘maphack’ that people use on Diablo II are embraced rather than scorned. You can see, at a glance, whether the hunk of crap you are picking up might be usefull, whether it is magical, whether it is a quest item.

The map is displayed on the screen, with unexplored areas blurred out, but, it is displayed, and it shows monsters! Blizzard seems to frown at the thought of showing the monsters prior to them entering the screen, my question is do they assume that a human (with normal vision) can see only in say 1024×768 ressolution, and only in two dimensions? If that is their assumption I have a load of “Star Trek” to watch before I believe that they have a cybergenic leg to stand on.

In summation, Guild Wars good.