The Road to Mel is Paved with Games - 2/22/11 Updated
By melcene 3 Comments
2.22.11. It's like binary. But not.
So, over the extended weekend I got to mess with a few things.
Dragon Age: Legends
I posted a thread on this earlier today. Mostly on the disbelief that I'm playing such a thing. That I want to continue playing such a thing. Dragon Age: Legends is a Facebook app put out by EA/Bioware. Now, I don't normally do these app things. But from what I understand, in its general concept its pretty similar to many other Facebook games. You play the game, spending energy as you do stuff in the game. Energy recharges over real time. Inviting other Facebook friends not only probably restores energy, but gives you other people to embark upon your journeys with. All in all, the game looks lame, and plays fairly lame. Except that when you're at work, it's better than nothing at all. On the upside, there will be some ingame items opened up in Dragon Age 2 for people who play and complete specific tasks in DA:L. It's something I'll mess with when i have nothing else peaking my interest, or I'm bored at work, but not something to sink a whole lot of time into, I don't think.
Rift: Planes of Telara
I had first seen something about this game at PAX Prime last year. It sounded kinda interesting. Although I had invites to the closed betas along the way, I hadn't had the time to sit down with the game until the open beta this weekend. The game is certainly intriguing. WoW killer? Probably not. Contender? Possibly.
Character Creation
You begin, of course, with the character creation. First, you choose your faction. After choosing your faction, you next choose your base class. On the side of There are the four base classes most people are familiar with: Warrior, Cleric, Mage, and Rogue. From there you customize your character's appearance. The options for customizing your face and hair kind of reminded me of Rock Band. The different faces had names to them, for example, there were "cute" and "oval" (I was making females, of course). The colors for eyes and hair were done in a palette format, which does allow for a wider variety. Overall, I was pleased with the character creation. I wasn't wowed by it, but I wasn't really disappointed either.
Factions and Races
Much like WoW, this isn't so much a good vs. evil, but both sides view the other as the bad guys. While it isn't good vs. evil, one side is definitely more a lighter side, and the other definitely darker. You can see this much in the characters themselves. On the side of the Guardians (the light side) the races are Dwarf, High Elf, and Mathosian (human). On the side of the Defiant, the races are Bahmi (humans), Eth (barbarians) and Kelari (dark elves).
We'll use Clerics as an example since that's mostly what I played around with. Clerics are the healers of RPGs. But in this game, my cleric may be completely different from your cleric. While I may choose a cleric off the bat, what kind of cleric I become is molded along the way, as I choose my souls that I am attuned to. As a cleric, I have the option to become attuned to the souls of the following subclasses: Cabalist, Druid, Inquisitor, Justicar, Purifier, Sentinel, Shaman, Warden (I may be forgetting one or two). Each soul, or subclass, has its own soul tree, or talent tree, and its own spells available to that soul. By the time I was done with open beta (and I didn't get to spend much time with it) I had acquired the souls of the Justicar, Purifier, and Sentinel. I would be the ultimate healer and smiter. At least that was the plan.
User Interface
The initial UI will remind users very much of the base WoW UI, though the initial scale seems a little too large. Something of note, is that this game allows for more UI customization without the use of a MOD than WoW ever has. Its UI customization is much more like that of Warhammers, where you enter a mode that allows you to play with each element of the UI, even ones you may not see often. You can move them, resize them, do whatever you like. You may then save that profile and import it to other characters if you like.Starting the game
The game immediately plops you into what feels like the middle of a war. And ultimately, it is. It's a war against these rifts that have opened up and allowed undead and demons and the like to enter the world. Both factions are trying to put an end to this. Of course, you'll get "kill x quests" and "retrieve x quests." And you can skip through reading everything until you get to your first rift. This section played very much like a Public Quest from Warhammer, although when I went through no one else was doing it at the same time. But if that is the case, if they have taken, and improved upon public quests in some way, that would be a boon to this game.Other wise, from my limited amount of time, the game feels very much like most other MMOs that have come out in the last 6 or 7 years. That's both a good thing and a bad thing. The class system may be what sets this game apart. But in all likelihood, like other games, this one will retain a small following. I may end up picking it up at some point for something to mess with. We'll see.
One of the biggest problems is that Trion doesn't have the advertising power to make this game widely-known. They'll have to rely on word of mouth.
Fable 3
I realize I'm slow on this train. Fable 3 came out at the same time as a host of other great games, and prior to this weekend, I'd probably only sat down with the game for about half an hour or so. However, over the weekend I got to put in some good quality time with it. I'll say, I'm not completely decided on this game. I must like it, because it does leave me with that sense that I have to get back to it, and continue working on whatever it was I was doing. For me, that's a big thing with my RPGs and MMOs. Does it draw me back? Does it leave me waiting in anticipation until the next time I can sit on my ass in front of my tv and play the game? So far, Fable 3 has done just that.This blog is already long, so I'll try to make this section a bit shorter.
Things I like about the game
- The old world is there... just different. I've gone through zones that it took a little while, but I end up recognizing the zone from the previous game, just under a different name. Millfield is one of those. Maybe it did have the same name previously. It certainly didn't have all those posh houses.
- Being able to see things before you buy them. I love this, especially for the clothing and furniture. I'm a sucker for nice furniture.
- Being able to see how your relationships and real estate properties are doing from the world map. Oh, my wife is happy? Sweet, I won't go visit her right now.
- Being able to see a list of quests from the game map for each zone. This helps me prioritize what I'm doing, where I want to go, what I want to do next. I really do like it.
- The sanctuary. While I also dislike the sanctuary in some ways, I love how I can go see how an outfit or tattoos or hair or makeup will look before I put them on. This was a total no-brainer for me. I was the person who downloaded mannequin mods back in Morrowind just to put all my armor on mannequins to look at.
Things I don't like about the game
- No health bar. I have to listen for a heartbeat to know when I'm low on health. Yes, I realize that if my health potion shows up on my D-pad, that means I'm starting to get low. But that doesn't necessarily mean I need to use a potion yet. I truly don't like games that are hopping on this bandwagon of no health bar. And this heartbeat thing just isn't good enough. At least CoD has blood splatters on your screen. I need something visual.
- No easy inventory. If I want to look through my inventory, I go to the sanctuary, go to the appropriate room, press the appropriate triggers and bumpers... ugh. I think I would prefer to have that AND an inventory I can just scroll through. This is especially a headache when you go to sell something at a store.
- Housing upkeep. I don't remember that from Fable 2. And if my property falls to 0%, what happens? Will my renters move out? Does housing continue to degrade while you're offline? I'd imagine so since you continue to accrue income while you're offline.
And now the work day is coming to a close, my brain is close to mush, and I can't think of much more. I may update this tomorrow. We'll see. Tonight, I have demos to download: Dragon Age 2 and Shogun 2.
Dragon Age II Demo - PC
So I played the demo last night (yay!). I didn't even finish it. There were a LOT of cut scenes. And I had Southland to watch.First, I have to say that often in games I am ready to skip right past the cut scene and get to the good stuff. But like its predecessor, DA2 doesn't seem like it will let me down in making sure I have a reason to watch the cut scenes. They're actually good. They're not just some vague narration of good vs. evil. The graphics look pretty good too, even though I was only able to put them to medium (high wasn't available?). And we weren't able to mess with character creation... boo hiss.
I was astounded right off the bat by the combat. I went with a female mage (same as my original game). I love that mages don't just point their staff and shoot it like a wand anymore. The mage moves with the staff are just fricking awesome. I am liking how the spells work too. Cone effects seem to have larger cones now, which was needed. I noticed that fireball and cone of cold no longer do friendly fire damage. I wonder if this is just for demo purposes or if that will be a new thing in the game. I also liked how my hotbar was very similar to before.
I'm not sure if I like how the skill trees are done, or how dialogue is done. Perhaps I would be better with dialogue if I knew what all the symbols meant.
I did run across a big bug though. I had paused my game last night, for a couple hours I admit, to go eat dinner and watch Southland. When I came back to it, I unpaused and was able to pick up combat like I never left. However, right after combat, the game completely froze up as Isabella began to talk about this damn relic. Alt+tabbing didn't want to work well, and ending the task in the task manager even took a few minutes. Not sure if there was some sort of mem leak while I had the game paused or what.
Overall though, I like what I've seen so far and am definitely looking forward to the game.