Planetside 2 trailer released

Many of us had started to suspect that the hacker problems for Sony and SOE may have meant the death of Planetside 2. But oh joy, its hasn't. The first proper trailer is out.



This for any serious PvP MMO gamer is a big deal. 3 faction RvR and no PvE, this is a strategic combat game and if its half as good as the original then we could be in for a treat. The video may not look that amazing to someone who didn't experience the original, but take my word for it, this has massive potential.

Kill Frenzy will be playing Planetside 2, of that there is no question at all.

HD link on Youtube here.

Sceptically optimistic

It’s been quite entertaining reading the various reactions from around the internet to yesterday’s visit/skype video with Mythic by myself and a selection of other bloggers. People do so love a drama. First off, I find the NDA and the way information is released as frustrating as anyone, it’s not something I’ve ever had to care about before, but at the same time I can understand why things are done that way sometimes, certainly I can in this situation. Mythic have been badly hit by over-hype in the past, so they’re trying to be cautious, while at the same time share some info and get some opinion on other things before moving forward at the end of this month. Is the way of doing this right now correct? I don’t know really, I’m not annoyed by it enough to cry, but obviously I’m well aware that I am a bit biased as I got to take part in something that most don’t. Though to be frank, over nearly 3 years of writing shite here I have chosen to not put annoying adverts up, so make no money from blogging and other than any enjoyment I glean from writing, the only thing I get back from this place is some extra info on games, invites to things like yesterday and a few more beta invites than normal. If that’s a problem for you, well I don’t give a toss, get over yourself you twat.

That’s the problem with every MMO really, there’s always a little army of forum trolls and bitter ex-players that will pour derision on anything and everything the developers do, whilst at the same time there’s the blinkered brigade that will go on about how great everything is regardless of reality. In WAR’s case if you’re rational about it you can see that both of the extremes are wrong. The ever decreasing server list over the last 2 years is a clear testament to the game’s problems, you can not argue with that decline, but the fact that it is still going when others are not, that yesterday’s events happened at all and that patches continue to be developed show it’s far from dead in the water.

In light of what I learnt yesterday I am not leaping round in excitement for WAR’s future, but neither am I packing my bags and remember I have quit the game before when things pissed me off. Regular readers know the things that would make me excited, they also know what would make me quit. If you’re expecting WAR to either collapse or rise to the top of the MMO charts like some acetylene fuelled phoenix, then you’re wrong. I would recommend taking a more middle view, don’t get pulled into hype and expect too much, but don’t listen to the doomsayers and instead I would recommend accepting that WAR does have a future.

I am sceptically optimistic, but no more or less than that.

In other news, I'm gonna be pimping some old KF vids prior to a future event ;)

From today, the stuff I can say

OK so have got a few things I can post about. It’s quite restricted and I can only apologise for that. I hate the “Something exciting is coming but we can’t say!” shite as much as the rest of you, but rest assured that if I thought it was a load of old bollocks then I would say so here. Also while I am obviously omitting the majority of what Mythic showed us today and from my lack of RAGE™ obviously I don’t think it’s a load of old bollocks, I don’t want to overhype it either. It’s not a 3rd faction or one of those second coming of MMO awesome things we’ve talked about before, but it is an interesting development. I wouldn’t even bother speculating to be honest.

So anyway, what I can say for now..

Patch 1.4.4 is due in August, but I didn’t catch when 1.4.5 was due. I’m a little mixed up over what was coming in which patch, you can blame dodgy streaming over Skype for that confusion.

Fortresses are in development right now. There will be developer discussion posts going up about them. The intention is for them to not work like they used to and instead to be something you do alongside the main campaign. The concept of DAoC style relic raids are of course being played with. I know we’ve been here before with forts, but there was some significant and lengthy discussion about them today and currently forts are expected for 1.4.5. Watch the forums for the dev posts.

Mythic are working on the “defensive win” style rewards/bonuses/things. Something that will make people to want to defend zones, keeps and objectives.

Ranged Careers are being focussed on for 1.4.4; in particular Shadow Warrior, Magus and Engineer were mentioned.

ORvR development and improvements continue to be worked on. Also PvE’s relation to WAR and RVR is being pondered on, it’s not as ruled out as in the past, not that RvE is desired of course.

Mythic have been going through WAR’s zones, dungeons and even areas that didn’t make it to WAR live, looking for areas that make for good places to smush faces. These are being looked at for reworking into new scenarios and the like, just as we’ve already seen with College of Corruption and Eternal Citadel for example. A lot of areas were mentioned from all over the game, for example the Library in Land of the Dead. Basically Mythic are really trying to make the most of the wasted assets they already have.

OK, there's probably more that I've not remembered or couldn't hear properly (Skype video can be dodgy and my daughter was choosing to be quite chatty...). Keep an eye on the other bloggers.

OK so..

It’s been a bit of an odd one. I shall first explain what has complicated things.

I’m still on the skype thing with Mythic and will be for a while I think, but about 15mins ago it was mentioned that we were under NDA. Now I didn’t know anything about this and hadn’t seen one. It turns out it was emailed to me this afternoon for me to reply and agree to, but since I was at work right until I got home and put Skype on, I hadn’t even looked at that email account and until just now nobody had even mentioned it. Which as I didn’t know, it meant I tweeted a couple of things about WAR. Not anything too big mind you and nothing about the big news, I was saving that for this place…

Now, since I didn’t know about or agree to it, legally I am not under NDA in any sense. However, I’m not about to shite on Mythic and burn my bridges with them. So a bit later on we’re going to confirm what they would like us to reveal or not and I shall respect that. Until then I will just say this:

• There IS proper WAR development going on.
• There is something happening that is a big deal and has a lot of potential.
• If you think you know what it is, sorry, you don’t.

More info ASAP.

Countdown to tomorrow

Tomorrow then is the slightly teased about July 6th and something WAR related is indeed happening. Mythic have invited a selection of the US bloggers to their offices to show them future developments for WAR. However this time is a bit different and some of us EU types have also been invited, via Skype.

So tomorrow I’m racing back from work to see what gets revealed, I say race as time wise its a bit tight with getting out of work for the start... but should be ok. I don’t know what it is we’re going to see, I‘ve no real idea if it will be a huge exciting OMG shock or a big letdown, but I am pretty sure that Mythic have a fair bit to talk about. I say this as we’re getting:

• 30min presentation
• 1hour Q&A
• Another 30min presentation

If you’ve ever had to do a presentation or pitch for work, you’ll know that to do a full hour worth of talking means you’ve got to have a fair bit of subject matter. So I am very intrigued indeed. I could post my guess as to what it is, but I’m not going to since it’s only tomorrow and I don't want to risk looking like an even bigger prick than normal :P

Are hopes to be dashed once again? Or could we be turning an unexpected corner? I shall update ya'll ASAP tomorrow.

Countdown to tomorrow

Tomorrow then is the slightly teased about July 6th, something WAR related is indeed happening. Mythic have invited a selection of the US bloggers to their offices to show them future developments for WAR. However this time is a bit different and some of us EU types have also been invited, via Skype.

So tomorrow I’m racing back from work to see what gets revealed, time wise its a bit tight with work for me... but should be ok. I don’t know what it is we’re going to see, I‘ve no real idea if it will be a huge exciting OMG shock or a big letdown, but I am pretty sure that Mythic have a fair bit to talk about. I say this as we’re getting:

• 30min presentation
• 1hour Q&A
• Another 30min presentation

If you’ve ever had to do a presentation or pitch for work, you’ll know that to do a full hour worth of talking means you’ve got to have a fair bit of subject matter. So I am very intrigued indeed. I could post my guess as to what it is, but I’m not going to since it’s only tomorrow and I don't want to risk looking like an even bigger prick than normal :P

Are hopes to be dashed once again? Or could we be turning am unexpected corner? I shall update ya'll ASAP tomorrow.

Kicked things off with my Zealot

It’s been another mixed week of gaming temptations, with the highlights being of course WAR and then last night a Kill Frenzy Arma2 session providing much comedy and tension. Only in Arma 2 will you get a spectacular death caused by a police car and a chain reaction of exploding motor cross bikes, a herd of cows murdered after being mistaken for Spetsnaz and our KF elite special forces team assaulting an airfield on mountain bikes as several miles of woodland burned to the ground after to a collection of Stinger missile related calamities. Arma 2 I love you.
 
Anyway, regarding WAR, as mentioned recently I’ve been dabbling with alts a lot and have decided to turn that into a little test of what WAR would be like for a returning player with level 40 characters with relatively low RR. Which careers would be ok and which would be a nightmare?
 
I’ve mainly been playing my Zealot this week, taking him from renown rank 40 something to 58. I’ve also focussed my play style on DPS, only switching to healing when absolutely required. It’s actually been really good and I have really fallen for the class again. I now think that the change to Harbinger is actually an improvement, certainly for someone in my position, as it so dramatically buffs your heal or damage stats that it frees up renown points to be used elsewhere. This allows you to set up a much more rounded character than is possible with any other career. If you don’t know, when Harbinger is turned off it transposes all your Intelligence, Magic Power and Magic Crit into the healing equivilents, Willpower, Heal Power and Heal Crit. When you turn the Harbinger on it does the opposite. As such without any effort at all you can have extremely good healing stats relative to your level and it takes a lot of pressure off you to desperately upgrade your armour. It also means that regardless of spec, you can switch modes and at least heal or hit moderately hard, certainly enough to be able to rescue a situation or finish someone off.
 
From this week I feel that the Zealot is generally in a pretty good place. When I used heal based tactics I’ve been able to quite comfortably keep my group alive, found it to have an enjoyable mobile play style and also had excellent renown gain. DPS mode is not as effective, but was still quite reasonable and I at least felt like I was having an impact. It doesn’t hit that hard compared with the proper DPS classes (mainly…), yet it is potent enough to kill people and I have won plenty of 1v1 fights against a range of careers. Scenario scores don’t mean a great deal, but for what its worth I’ve regularly been in the top 3 Destro when there were enough other healers that I was able to focus on just doing damage. Also with it’s heal and armour/resist debuff tactics the Zealot can have a real effect on the outcome of fights. In a couple of city sieges I was in a heavy AoE warband and the difference when I used the AoE heal debuff was quite noticeable.
 
AND the class has a range of perfectly viable specs that can both heal and DPS well simply by changing tactics on the fly. This is a huge bonus for me and as you can probably tell, I am very pleased with how the Zealot performed. I’ve had to force myself to play other characters and am constantly tempted to switch back to the Zealot. I’m thinking I may concentrate on getting him into Worn Sovereign armour as a priority. So Zealots, yes indeed, I can recommend them for both returning and new players alike.
 
I’ve started dabbling a bit more with the Squig Herder and Magus, more on those as soon as I’ve put enough time in to trust my opinions.