A mixture of hope and apathy

At the moment I’m kind of adrift on an uninspiring sea of MMORPGs. There’s no siren call strong enough to tempt me into paying a subscription fee, I’m just not finding anything particularly alluring. Too much of the same old same old I suppose. So instead I’m just fiddling about with single player and F2P stuff, whilst I wait for one of the more interesting online games on the horizon.

As always I am tempted to return to EVE, but also as always, it’s just not life style friendly enough for me and my regular AFKing. Alas, I can’t see me being able to play EVE the way I would like to anytime soon. Though it’s probably a positive thing that real life prevents me from doing so, as I know EVE can devour you like a Sarlacc with the munchies. For now I’m mainly playing Star Trek Online. Just nipping on for an hour here and there to play through episodes or missions and set my next batch of Duty Officer assignments running. It’s free to play, quite engaging and I’ve always had a soft spot for STO. That said, the game won’t ever be my long term MMO love affair, but is more of a regular casual flirtation, perhaps with the occasional tongue. Flashing eyes across the office, the odd late night drinking session, but not quite worth a divorce.

Oh, I've downloaded RIFT again and will dick about the free 1-20 bit. Not logged in yet.
The only other online game I’m playing at the moment is Tribes: Ascend. It’s free to play, the cash shop is not essential and most importantly, it’s fun. This reimagining of the classic Tribes 1 and 2 is getting better and better and I recommend people try it out. Just be warned that it is not like your normal online shooters. It’s MUCH faster and you have to learn to lead your shots a lot more than normal. It’s all about predicting people’s movement and it can take some getting used to. Anyway, it’s a good game and recommended.

At some point soon I will be making use of my 2 weeks free in both WAR and DAoC, but I doubt very much I would subscribe to either in the near future. Obviously I’m a fan of both games, or at least what they once were, it’s just that WAR would really need to do quite a lot to make up for the Wrath of Heroes disappointment. The less said about that the better. Actually, as I write this I’m changing my mind slightly regarding DAoC. There is a bit more chance that DAoC could persuade me to take up a month’s subscription. It did grab me last year, surprising me how well so many things still played and looked. I swear if that game had a decent UI update it could see a reasonable resurgence.

Aside from those retro distractions, for me it’s all about the upcoming games; Planetside 2 and Mechwarrior Online. There’s a load more Planetside 2 news appeared in the last couple of days, which I’ll gather up and post about soon. Mechwarrior is continuing to drip feed news at a slow steady rate, though we’re still waiting to see some in-game footage. I hear we may see something soon however. Mechwarrior isn’t a MMO of course, but this blog is about stuff that interest me, so meh whatever. Oh and Hawken looks great. Me like mechs.

Elsewhere, I’m not totally writing off Funcom’s “The Secret World”, yet I don’t find myself particularly caring about it either way. To be honest I’m not quite sure why. Despite my many misgivings regarding Funcom, I do like what they try to do and certainly TSW has many features that tick my boxes. My apathy confuses me slightly. If I don’t get on the beta then I doubt I will try it until well after launch.

And on the subject of apathy… If for a moment I take off my Hat of Trolling+3, yes Guild Wars 2 has much potential and does look like some serious PvP goodness. That doesn’t change the fact that it will never be a game I get excited about and I still find it hard to motivate myself to write about it, but it’s certainly one I would like to see realise its PvP potential. Obviously Kill Frenzy and I will try it out.

Hopefully sometime soon we’ll start to get more news on Dark Millennium Online and World of Darkness. Both games are perceived as being on rather rough seas, what with the challenges faced by THQ and CCP, but I guess we just have to wait and see what news arrives. I still have high hopes for both games, purely due to their settings. Actually that’s not true. I have some confidence in CCP to deliver something interesting and hopefully sandboxy. Plus THQ have some excellent 40k games in their stable, so we know they’ll do the 40k universe credit when it comes to atmosphere at least.

I think that’s it for major MMOs of interest to me, can’t think of anything else. There are a few small games I have an eye on, but they’ll get posts of their own at some point. Oh and for the record, Diablo 3 I’m indifferent to and World of Warcraft Panda bear stuff just doesn’t work for me. Sorry Blizzard, as if you care lol :D

SWTOR 1.2 patch trailer

And basically it's lots of cool little things that are standard fare in many other games.



New raid and a warzone too, so that's some proper new content.

I hear that there is a redesign of Ilum happening. Alas I suspect that will be doomed to failure because of SWTOR's fundamental problems with it's two factions. Ilum itself can of course be dramatically improved, but I just can't see how they can fix the monumental faction imbalance and suddenly have loads of people wanting to play the boy scout republic dullness. Even if they put faction based population caps (instead of the ri-cock-ulous zone based one they implemented before), that will just mean many folks from the overpopulated side end up PvEing the PvP zone.

Anyway, it's perhaps foolish for me to focus on the PvP issues of SWTOR. It is after all designed primarily as  a PvE experience and on that front the 1.2 patch is looking reasonable I guess. It's not quite at the level of RIFT's content updates, but it should be enough to keep people interested.

Trion release a 2011 review + looking to 2012 video

And it's worth a look.



I was planning on checking out RIFT again at some point this year, it's just such a well made game and I do like the way Trion do things. No doubt will be a temporary dabble when I do though.

In between my F2P dabblings I have been Minecrafting

Not exactly OMG amazing or anything, but it takes a lot of gathering materials and some careful building when you're doing it all with vanilla survival mode. Lots of perilous balancing on things... And damn I had some bastard Creeper moments to deal with...

Click me and I get bigger.

For those of my generation in the UK

STO - Cryptic looking at adding a third faction and maybe a fourth

Dan Stahl, Cryptic's Executive Producer for Star Trek Online, has posted up the latest Ask Cryptic article where he replies to a range of player submitted questions. Despite there being a lot of the "promising but non-committal" answers that game developers tend to give, it is well worth a read and gives a bit of insight into future plans. Certainly Dan is promising a focus on adding new content, but the quotes I'm most interested in are these:

Q: (WazzaG) When will we see a Romulan Faction? I always read answers along the lines of “when the KDF has more content.” When will they have enough content so you can then launch a Romulan faction?
Dstahl: This is the number one long-term question on my mind and something I’m working directly with Jack (Cryptic’s CEO) and Perfect World to address. While I can’t give you a date, one of my goals in returning to Star Trek Online is to address this very issue.

Q: (KeithCrimson) When do we get to play as a Cardassian?
Dstahl: We’ve been holding off on having playable Cardassians and Romulans for the time being as we envision having a complete faction devoted to these races. That is the only reason we haven’t added them as playable species in the game yet. They are reserved for future expansions. That said, depending on what our timeline is for future expansions, we haven’t ruled out the possibility of having a few Cardassians or Romulans appear in Fed/Kdf ranks. So this is very TBD still.

OK so clearly it's not going to happen anytime soon, but it does sound like it will happen. Particularly the Romulans if that's the number one thing on their minds right now. Now, bare in mind STO is not a RvR game and as such a third faction would not turn it into DAoC in space, but aside from the obvious PvE additions and masses of new content, it would open up more PvP options. Plus it would sure make a lot of people very happy and be one hell of a news headline for the game. New factions are big media hype news, Romulan ships look cool, things that look cool and have media hype will attract players. And that's without considering the attraction for Trekkies.

STO has exploded in popularity since it went F2P, on a couple of occasions I've even had to queue to log in (not for long thankfully) and from what I see in game it looks like their cash shop is very successful. Everything in the cash shop can be earned without paying real money, since you can convert in-game currency "dilithium" into Cryptic Points to spend in the store, but that takes time to earn and it's pretty clear people are putting money in to get stuff quickly. Which is all good for STO and only increases the likelihood of Cryptic being able to introduce major expansions.

This is purely a personal opinion, but I suspect we will see an announcement of a playable Romulan expansion for STO being made around the Summer of 2012. Followed by a series of episodes related to it over the following months, then see it going into beta on tribble in December and going live Jan/Feb 2013. He says, speculating hopelessly :P

WAR dev on a right question roll

Keaven is on a mission it seems. Another dev discussion post and this one has yet more sensible ideas to suggest.

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Wanted to start a new thread to consolidate discussions on gameplay enhancements/updates for things not necessarily part of the campaign, and not dealing with scenarios. Some things that fall into this category are...

• PvE Gear Revitalization
• Addition of new gear pieces to close RvR Gear Gap
• PQ / Lair / Dungeon Revitalization
• Talisman Charges/Refill mechanic

This won’t necessarily be for any one patch in particular, but will help focus our efforts over the next few patch cycles.
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Uhm wow? Potentially more gear gap fixes, making PvE content relevant again and a change to the bugged yet flawed concept of talisman charges.

2 days in a row with talk from Mythic that I am liking. Keep it up chaps!