Posts filed under 'World of Warcraft'
Session Time: 1h20m. Advanced Shalalah from 6 to 8. So very unmotivated.
…actually, that about sums it up. Most of the time I spent searching for flatland cougars, for various quests. Not only were they extremely hard to find– maybe one for every nine wolves– there was about a 50-50 chance that they would drop one or both of the quest items I needed.
Folks, this is not my definition of fun. Gambling HP for a quest drop is not fun. Especially when the penalty for losing derades your equipment, making it harder for you to defeat enemies to maybe get items to sell for money to repair your equipment with.
The Good: Thunder Bluff is pretty.
The Bad: Now the game’s starting to show its true colors, and they’re a washed-out kinda greyish. To get an accurate idea of exactly what shade of grey, load up the game and die on purpose. That shade of grey.
Opinion Change: Lowered significantly. I imagine that this would be more fun with other people. So, without further adieu, I give you the next phase of the Unbelievers project: The Interrogation.
August 8th, 2006
Session Time: 2h spread between Friday and Saturday; advanced from 3 to nearly 7. Would have been more if life had not interfered.
So this weekend was my first experience as a member of The Horde. This is as opposed to the horde I was already a part of, ie pasty-faced nerds with the second-most popular thing in their hand on a lonely Friday night– a mouse. As stated before, I was playing a Tauren Shaman named Shalalah. And the first thing I noticed is that the Taurens steer like cattle. This is not an idle gag meant to go for the easy bovine pun; I mean that quite literally. It seemed as if my enlarged, meaty bulk actually had a significant more amount of inertia to overcome before I could even start moving. I caught myself pressing down harder on the “w” key, if that tells you anything. I am very glad that there’s no voice-chat built in because the number of times I screamed “MOVE, DAMN YOU! RUN LIKE RONALD McDONALD IS BEHIND YOU WITH A MEAT GRINDER, YOU GOD DAMNED SIDE OF BEEF!” would certainly seem to be annoying to other people. I know it was to the police.
Public disturbance aside, I had my first experience on a real team this weekend. One of my quests was, again, to go into some cave and retrieve the cranial section of some named monster. As a Shaman, however, I realized I was a bit more fragile than I was as a Hunter. So as I entered the cave, a Tauren Warrior offered to team with me, as we had the same quest. We joined forces, and set off together. I’d said I don’t usually play support classes in games; I prefer to get my hands dirty myself. However, hanging back and casting spells seemed to really jive well with my partner’s hacking and mauling. Now, granted, it wasn’t always clear as to who got to loot what corpse; yeah, there were the sparkles, but it wasn’t clear why I was able to loot or why he was. As we approached the monster’s lair, I began wondering if I was going to get shafted once he got his monster head. Boy, was I surprised. As it turned out, once the named monster was dead, we were both able to loot the requisite noggin. So, score one for that system. Still, I wasn’t thrilled witht he prospect of walking back home alone, so I used my hearthstone.
Which turned out to be really, REALLY dumb as I was dumped back to the starting village. Because I’d been smart and decided not to set the village with the inn as my home point. So, score one for my own idiocy. I would much rather that the game give you an option of home points to jump to.
One other thing happened of note; I had completed a quest and progressed past the ‘complete’ text a little too quickly. I wondered if there was a ‘completed quests’ log, but couldn’t find it with a cursory inspection of the quest log interface.
I realize that within the lore of the Warcraft universe, the Taurens are the ’spiritualists’ of the Horde. They are the analogues to the Native Americans, who are supposedly in tune with nature and in harmony with the earth. There is definitely a very strong tribal vibe to the Tauren environment and the quests themselves; at one point a spectral vision hound led me way out into the middle of nowhere to meet some old geezer in a shallow cave. And while I might be flippant about it now, while I was doing it I found myself slipping into it just a little. Leaving monsters alone when I didn’t need their loot, that sort of thing. Even without paying too much attention to the storyline, that says something.
But I swear to high heaven, if you make me chase another phantasmal monster that I can’t kill or tell to slow down while I get away from the five wolves following me and chewing away at my HP, I will tell you exactly where to stick that totem. And it ain’t gonna be in the well.
The Good: There’s variety in the missions depending on your starting race. Short sessions still feel productive. Teaming is easy, and efficient even at low levels.
The Bad: Teaming needs a better explanation in-game. Taurens move slower than my XP bar does in CoH. Skill ‘upgrades’ are unclear– should they replace old versions of spells, or go aside them?
Opinion Change? No change this session. Partly because there was a lot of not-playing going on this weekend, but also partly because it’s just not wowing me as much as it did previously.
August 6th, 2006
Session Time: 1h15m. Advanced Ceilai from 9 to 10; gained various pet-related abilities. The Talent system first became available.
I have always said that I’m “too busy” to do certain things. This is usually an alias for “too lazy”; however last night, I actually was too busy. See this wonderful new site and all that jazz? I did this. Took me the better part of the night, too. So at around 8:30, I figured, “It’s hunter time.” I logged in and found myself at an awkward stage.
I wanted to go back into the Barrow Den, knowing that I was close to completing the quest but also knowing that I would be violently and repeatedly destroyed. However, I also knew that I was very close to Level 10, whereupon I’d get all those lovely pets that pretty much help to define the Hunter class. So, I did what any self-respecting gamer would do. I decided to grind the last three bubbles to 10 by hunting random monsters. Now, under normal circumstances I’d be looking at a good hour by itself of killing; however, I’d left Ceilai logged out and at an inn since Monday evening, so she had a significant amount of rest piled up. Within about twenty minutes, I was happily at 10– and I still had rest left over!
I ran back to town, dumped the less-desirable detritus (Herbalism is a very nice skill to have, as flowers tend to go for relatively high prices), and went to see the trainer. Three quests, in sequence, had me taming various animals in the lower parts of Teldrassil. Granted, I had little knowledge of what I was doing, but the quests were extremely simple and I was quite happy with the results– bucketloads of experience and a handful of skills “for free” (I’d been expecting to have to pay 4 silver for the right to tame a pet). I don’t exactly recall where on the experience bar I logged out at, but I’m sure it’s at least a third of the way towards 11.
Also, once I hit 10, I was awarded a Talent point. This works somewhat like feats and skills from the D20 system (specifically, Neverwinter Nights or KOTOR). Talent points go into a class’ talent trees, where they can be allocated towards skills such as enhancing your strikes or giving you an edge while taming beasts (to use the Hunter examples). It’s a staple of most RPG systems, but I fail to see what’s so special about it that it had to wait until Level 10 before it became usable for the player. Also, I certainly hope you get more than one talent point each level, because right now it looks like the system will have very limited use beyond specializing your character into one skillset (ie it’s not possible to make a limited jack-of-all-trades who can fulfill different roles in different parties). Not saying that allowing someone to focus their Hunter into archery or beast taming at the expense of the other is a bad thing, but it could be seen as limiting by someone like me who wants to be as flexible as possible in his play style.
In short, I want to be a min-maxing twerp. But that’s not easy with the system. Ergo, the game sucks; and certainly my dissatisfaction can’t be the result of me trying to shoehorn my preconceived notion of how to play into an extremely rigid system.
The Good: I’m sold on the rest system; it allows for short sessions to be productive. Beast mastery is an interesting system; I don’t usually play as ‘controller’ types, so managing multiple people on the battlefield is a new challenge for me. The Talent system shows promise for players who want to give their character a focus.
The Bad: Ran into a little bit of trouble in trying to advertise an item in the trade channel; the manual’s instructions (type /trade followed by your message) just plain didn’t work. Finding ‘quick work’ (ie short, readily-available missions for low rewards) isn’t easy. If your rest wraps around to the next level, there’s no indication of how much you have remaining.
Opinion Change? Improved quite a bit. This session was basically a test to see if players could be productive in short bursts. I’m probably going to focus on Shalalah (my Tauren, remember him? I almost don’t) for a week or so to see if the Horde has it any easier.
August 3rd, 2006
Session Time: 2h20m. Advanced Ceilai from 8 to 9; rest state started at four “bubbles” (roughly 20 minutes of gameplay before it was exhausted). Completed a quest in the Fel Rock area and made it halfway through a quest in the Banethil Barrow Den area.
So, I’m enjoying myself. Why??
Let me start over here for a moment. The gameplay is very much the same as it was over the last couple hours. Leave town, kill things, collect the resulting detritus, sell detritus for a paltry sum. Occasionally talk to an NPC to get XP, money, or shinier detritus. I’m not paying attention to the storyline any more than is required to actually complete a quest; that is, I read over the quest descriptions looking for key words such as “north”, “dungeon”, and “kill”. I really have no emotional attachment to or investment in the story surrounding Azeroth, and I don’t see that changing unless the game makes a bigger effort to engage me. Rob called the setting “unoriginal”, and while it’s hard to refute him, there are a few things which manage to impress me. When I find them more than once during gameplay, I’ll let you all know.
One thing I thought was quite interesting was a quest I literally stumbled upon by accident. I had been wandering through Darnassus and accidentally found myself teleported to a small fishing village on the south end of the island. I was, of course, grateful for the 70 XP I gained from “exploration”, but more interesting to me was the fact that I had found a teleporter. It was a glowing purple aura. Later int he evening, I came across a similar aura surrounding a particular tree in the hollow south of Darnassus. Naturally, I approached it, thinking, “great, where will this one take me? Nothing happened; well, no actual transit happened, anyway. The tree could be interacted with, actually, and it awarded me with a fruit that “would be of interest” to one of the previous quest NPCs I’d dealt with. It was a rare stroke of luck that I actually remembered who the quest was talking about, and a few minutes later I had completed the task. It was rewarding– not just in the large monetary gain afforded me upon turning in the fruit, but also because it involved no combat (until the fruit was planted and the quest already complete; the monsters spawned were pathetically easy, though, so it hardly counts) and wasn’t made blatantly obvious, either by the game’s “!” markers or by any other in-game indication. It’s an interesting mechanic and I am looking forward to seeing more of this type of quest in the future.
As said in the summary, I did wander into a couple of dungeon-like areas; actually caves, and not specifically “dungeons” (the term in WoW is reserved for the instanced missions, I believe). Fel Rock was actually an interesting place for a hunter to go, as demons spawned pretty regularly and were easy enough to handle solo. I may go back there just to take out some more demons, as they tend to drop the occasional handful of coins. The Barrow Den, however, was a different story. It’s loaded down with gnarlpine monsters, who are curiously not as affected by the hunter’s Nature-elemental based powers as, say, a demon. Moreover, there are way too many of them in the cave. Now, granted, this is mitigated quite a bit by the fact that there are usually many more adventurers entering the cave than there are monsters, but the quest I have involves collecting items from treasure chests scattered in the dungeon. Which means that unless your group is all on the same page, you’re likely to fall behind the meat-shields– er, excuse me, casters– who’re plowing their way through the depths. The mini-map is useless in the dungeons as it doesn’t account for height. Finally, and this is probably a shortcoming of the Hunter class, it’s too closed-in for ranged attackers; you can probably only get in about one or two shots before the monster closes to melee range. I suppose once I get a pet, I can have that hold the monster at a distance while I pick it off, but that’s a portion of a level away.
On a completely unrelated note, the quest in Fel Rock required me to decapitate a monster and bring the smaller portion of the corpse to the quest NPC. It is exactly the first time I’ve ever given head for XP. My slow descent into levelwhoring has begun!
The Good: Quests can be gained in unorthodox ways, and also solved in unorthodox ways. If you ask politely (read: not in global chat), people will generally point you in the right direction. I’m getting oddly familiar with the gameworld; as soon as I logged in, I answered a new player’s question. The map of the island is almost complete for me. Apparently there are many UI mods available; however, I’m refraining from using them so I review the game in its default state (otherwise, it would be fair game to bitch about GTA: San Andreas for having Hot Coffee); this is also why I’m only accepting limited help or information from external sources.
The Bad: If grouping is discouraged until Level 20, why are the low-level areas too full? Is there a way to turn off duel requests or otherwise indicate to people “No, I will not duel you, stop asking me”? The WoW forums are a dark and scary place, much like SomethingAwful but with less parental supervision. Moving windows in the UI should not require a mod. The minimap remains near-useless except in finding your corpse. Death penalties are not clearly defined in the manual or documentation.
Opinion Change? Improved somewhat. Quest diversity is good, but it’s still boiling down to “kill things”, “collect things”, or “deliver things”. I would love to see a quest revolve around a riddle that the player has to solve; bonus points if it requires knowledge of the gameworld that can be learned from within the game (no strategy-guide-only answers, please).
Comments for this post can also be found here.
August 1st, 2006
[Note: Hah, the sun is shining and there’s not a cloud in the sky. There are no fiber-seeking backhoes within ten miles of me, and I’ve sacrificed several small animals to Lord Jobs and W’oz-Loggoth. Let’s see the power go out THIS time. This update is going to happen if I have to sit next to an Ethernet port with a spark plug and a battery.]
Session Time: 3h40m spread between last night and this morning. Logged off at 10:00p, resumed at 10:30a. Advanced Ceilai from 4 to 8. Rest state indicated one and a half “bubbles”.
I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I honestly think I’m not doing something right when I play an MMO. Or rather, this MMO in particular. I have found that the quests I’m offered have become much, MUCH more lucrative once I get out of the noob garden and into what might be considered a “real” area. We’re talking jumping from rewards of 10 copper for collecting 9 items to 1 and 3/4ths silver (equivalent to 175 copper) for collecting three things. Also, I’m more apt to take a quest that has me delivering something or collecting items gained from non-combat situations than I am to take one that says “go into the den of scary monsters and slay them all”. I get more fun out of not fighting than I do out of fighting. Why the hell do I play MMOs, then?
Jonny brought up an interesting point. A lot of the reasons I said I wasn’t thrilled with WoW so far are reasons he doesn’t care for CoH. The problem, I think, is that we’re both working from different definitions and tolerances for “grinding”. So, to try to get a better idea of where he was coming from, before I logged into WoW this morning, I jumped onto my primary City of Heroes character and started going through old missions that I had never bothered to finish. Basically, I went ahead and turned the game into the most boring waste of two hours possible, because not only did I not accomplish anything, I actually managed to break the game temporarily (one of the missions was, in fact, bugged). I’ll give him that– both games have an abundance of boring stretches of just killing monsters. However, usually when I say “grinding” I’m referring to a “street sweeping mission”, where you’re charged to defeat X number of enemy type Y.
The reason I equate the two– because let’s face it, there’s not really a whole hell of a lot of difference between the two– is because those types of missions only serve to break up the long, winding level treadmill into smaller chunks. Also, they force the player to space out their exploration or utilization of some of the game’s more tailored aspects.
In CoH, instanced missions usually correspond to the level of the player (though you can outlevel the missions if you ignore them long enough– which is what I did this morning). This basically means you always have available a set of enemies at or near your level to go through. These aren’t the entirety of the missions, though, as CoH does feature “kill X of Y in common area Z” missions (but less frequently now than before). Is an instanced private mission grinding? Yes. Do I like it better than WoW, where you’re competing with every other yahoo in the world for seven Gnarlwood Mystics? Yes, because in CoH at least I know they’re MY seven Mystics, and not “whoever gets there first”. That said, I have to admit that the spawn rate in WoW does manage to keep the zones relatively populated with challenges. I had to hunt down a named monster– something Dreameater– and after I killed him, I was slain by the four Mystics gang-banging me from behind. ANYWAY, once I ran back to my corpse and revived, Dreamwhatever was back and being killed by someone else.
Now might be a good time to mention something on death. I died for the first time today. And the second. And third, fourth, and fifth times, too. Death in an MMO is a trivial thing, and I’m not complaining that I died at all. I’m actually somewhat impressed with death in WoW. There’s no penalty if you revive yourself save for the fact that you’re going to die immediately after being revived because your corpse is still being used as a chew-toy by the nine monsters what killed you.
I’m getting more used to the UI than I was before. Most of my complaints are just “I’m not familiar with it” rather than “it’s broken”– aside, of course, from the “you can’t move windows” thing. The G15 LCD does give me a slight advantage in that I can see how many inventory slots I have available to me, as well as the durability of all of my stuff at once.
As for the “sameness all over” of the environments, Jonny has it right in one as for CoH. I’d be a bit remiss if I said City of Heroes was an exemplar (ha ha) of excellent city planning. It’s piss-poor in some places. First off, there are no street names! Gah… this isn’t a criticism of CoH. What was bothering me about World of Warcraft, though, is that apparently you are the only person who is a cartographer. There’s no way to easily navigate through the areas (though in the game’s defense it might not have been bright of me to pick the darkest most confusing starting area, either). There are signposts along the road, but that’s no replacement for a waypoint system. You can apparently click on the mini-map to make a funny little noise that does nothing.
To try to see if my difficulties with players not having more clues than buttons on their mice, I decided to willingly go to the so-called “infamous” Dark Iron server. Dark Iron, it shoudl be noted, is home to several webcomic artists’ guilds including Penny-Arcade and the like. I started up a Dwarven Paladin on Dark Iron and prepared myself for the worst. There was nobody there. Might have just been the noob area, or odd timing on my part, or it could have been something else, but I saw all of three other players while wandering through and doing my first couple quests in the tundra. Including one guy who challenged me to a duel, beat the snot out of me, and then said, “heal me”. So, my choices are “idiots” or “nobody”. At least until I start teaming up, though, I’m going to refrain from any more generalizations about the populations of the servers because quite frankly, any game is going to have huge numbers of morons. There’s a relatively small number of “good” people to play with in CoH, too, and they don’t exactly make their presence known unless you know where to look.
So, that said, I’ve got to go and register for the WoW forums now.
The Good: Getting more used to the UI; good habits are starting to form. I’m more comfortable with the control scheme and gameplay flow; there are a couple more interesting quest templates (harvest X, reclaim Y which was stolen by Z). The commerce system kinda sorta works.
The Bad: The average player thus far is an unhelpful jerk who’ll attack your target for no reason other than he thinks you’re in trouble or he wants the monster for himself. Rewards seem to be uneven; i gained 850 from a single quest but 350 from another somewhat more difficult task. Scarcity of money as well as steep prices means players have to make very tough choices about their training early on before they understand the impact of those choices. You should never have to choose between armor/food and learning a new skill.
Opinion Change? Slightly better. The game still hasn’t done anything to piss me off too royally, and some of the things I ragged on it for are remarkably similar to what I liked about CoH. I suppose it’s a “deja vu” thing– I’ve already done it once, why should I do it again?– but I’ll try to curb my comparisons to CoH from here on out because they’re too similar. Instead, I shall judge World of Warcraft as it compares to Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls.
Comments for this post can also be found here.
July 29th, 2006
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