If you're a regular visitor to this humble blog, you'll already know that we're into dragons. Well... not into dragons like certain people who like to refer to themselves as furries, but... you know, like that:
This is Hugo Bosc, our pet monitor lizard.
We have a whole bunch of reptiles now, but if I had to pick a favourite, it would be Hugo. High entertainment, low maintenance. He craps once per week. Once. That's it. It's also beneficial to his health when you feed him now and then (duh), but he's the easiest pet we've ever had. And walking a 3ft reptile around town is one of the coolest things you can do. He looks a bit smaller on the picture, but he's roughly 1 meter in length now - and still growing. The only thing that was even better than walking our pet dinosaur was walking our pet dinosaur whilst being followed by a big tortoise. Went on regular trips outside the shops for his exercise, but he's been sold now. Not Hugo. He's ours. He's not going anywhere. ♥
Virtual dragons are still going well, too.
Apparently, there are some hard mode dungeons for 5 players when you're at the level cap and all, but other than that, you can pretty much solo everything. In fact, some people claim they're soloing the "endgame" dungeons, as well. I guess all it takes is a decent dragon.
One might argue that this kind of destroys the point of playing an MMORPG, but if I can choose between doing something on my own and teaming up with a bunch of random morons, I'll always go solo. So yeah. Go dragons! Go Dragon's Prophet! I'll solo, thank you very much. Or do the occasional duo with Claire. Besides, it makes sense that way - your dragon is supposed to be powerful, you should feel his strength, not consider him another boring battle pet, so if you need to team up for fucking everything, it'll only serve to make you feel like a wimp. Boo!
The above video is based on the first ~2 hours of gameplay - read this entry if you want a little more detail.
Claire's family has picked up the rather unusual hobby of horsery and horse-related competition in some MMO targeted at little girls and the creeps who stalk them: Star Stables. I'm not even kidding. Her mother, grandmother, aunts, sister, everybody is racing horses on the internet now. To be fair, it is pretty amazing how online gaming can help the whole family stay in touch, allowing them to play and chat across three generations. Glorious, modern times, indeed.
The only kind of horse I care about comes with baked potatoes and steak sauce, but there's a different kind of animal, the feeding and care of which the bear and I have picked up: Dragons. According to the story of the game Dragon's Prophet(DP), the noble elder dragons have created the entire world and everything in it, apparently for the sake of boning the shit out of everything. I might be paraphrasing a bit here, but the basic idea is that dragons have mixed with just about every kind of animal you can imagine, so you'll find wolf dragons and bird dragons and crocodile dragons and so forth. Most of them are friendly, they're all incredibly smart and powerful and you can force them to be your friend by sitting on them until you break their will and they stop trying to throw you off. The game refers to this process as taming. Uh-huh, sure.
Taming and training said dragons is what DP is all about. Every player, no matter what class and skills they have, gets to tame dragons. "Where's the fun in that?" you might ask, seeing as you're not really all that special if everyone around you has their own dragon. Well, the idea is to make your dragon unique, to teach him the perfect set of skills to match your needs and play style or, better yet, the perfect tag-team of dragons to help you through every situation. Picture it like creating your ultimate Pokémon team, an analogy I hate, because I find Pokémon utterly annoying and stupid, but the comparison is still valid.
You see, when I started the game, the good people at Infernum were nice enough to sponsor me Whisperwind, a cool-looking, scaly green dragon:
I take a shot of Vodka whenever I see a player, who named their dragon Toothless.
His primary attribute is strength and he comes with a whole lot of kickass melee abilities. And since I'm playing a melee character with a big sword and a heavy armor, I figured that Whisperwind would complement my character perfectly and that he'd become my 'main' dragon.
So I played for a while, ran a few generic errants for various NPCs until I came across my first dungeon and found a little rock drake thingie. I don't remember its exact name, but it's basically a mix between a peacock and a dragon, which came with a unique, rocky texture as opposed to his more colourful friends. So I sat on him until he agreed to like me, I had him fight by my side for a bit ANDHOLYSHITITSHOOTSLIGHTNINGANDFIREANDOMFGWOW!1
I looked at his stats and he was the exact opposite of Whisperind - a complete nerd! His primary stat was intelligence and he had a lot more ability slots than Whisperwind, who presumably excels at sports, guzzling beer and beating up smaller dragons for their lunch money. And he came with his own assortment of devastating spells, which quickly made him the strongest dragon in my humble collection. Oh yeah, you'll want at least two or three dragons to accompany you at any given time for various reasons:
- Dragons may get injured in battle or simply get exhausted and need a little break, so you'll want a tag-team partner to take over
- Some dragons might be excellent tanks and/or healers, but cannot fly or swim. Some dragons might be mediocre fighters but grant amazing buffs. Different situations require different dragons
- I've run out of bullet points and I think I was convincing enough, but the list looks better when I mention at least three things
Not all dragons sport wings or the ability to swim, but they may be really fast runners.
So now I had this tag-team of dragons, one of which used nothing but melee attacks, much like myself. The other one was a genius with devastating magic attacks. Sweet Jesus! But those dragons are much more than mere WoW-style hunter pets or, worse, Neverwintan companions. They're your tanks, your healers, your scale-clad army of one, when you can't be arsed to play with random strangers. Because who the fuck does that in MMOs anymore?
You see, the four classes in DP are damage dealers. Yes, one of them is called a guardian, but he doesn't get an innate taunting ability and there is no dedicated healer class, so he's pretty fucked without a properly skilled dragon. The ranger relies on bows and gunblades, there's a ninja-style oracle and some spellcasting fellow and that's about it. They're all pretty fast-paced and devastating, they can hold their own in a fight if they have to, but the moment you're surrounded or facing a boss, it's your dragon who runs the show. Dragons tank. Dragons hold off the enemy so you can get away and save your ass. Dragons fucking rule.
And they allow you to travel in style.
Dragons come with random skills, random amounts of skill slots and random attributes. You may tame a dragon, who comes with nothing but crafting passives, which help you gather more resources if you're into that sort of thing, but it also means they're useless in a fight. I ended up with such a dragon, a complete waste of space - except he knew how to heal. So I sent him and Mr. Nerd to training until the nerdy one had learned the healing spell from the newest addition to our lair - whom I've immediately released back into the wild when he was done teaching my other dragon. "We'll call you!" Yeah. We won't. His resume went into the shredder, he's not even in our system anymore. But our employee of the month took his healing magic. Hurray!
The amazing thing is that nerdy magic dragon turned into an amazing healer right off the bat! The moment my health drops to anything below 90%, he puts regenerative goodness on my character and battles have become infinitely easier. This dragon dishes out insane amounts of spell-based damage, tanks bosses for me and keeps me alive all at the same time. I don't have to give him orders, there's no need to set up an AI, the dragon just knows what to do! Considering how incredibly brain-dead and useless AI-companions in most other MMOs are, the dragons in DP are pretty damn impressive.
And when you fight bosses like this ugly fucker, you'll WANT someone else to tank!
In the long run, I may have to specialize one dragon in buffs and healing, another one in magic damage and have a third one to taunt and tank and they should excel at running, flying and swimming, respectively. Or maybe have three jacks of all trades and switch them in and out as they need breaks. I'm not entirely sure how much customization and fine-tuning will be requicked as difficulty increases towards the higher levels. The first 20 levels went by rather smoothly.
What's less fun is how tedious it can be to teach one dragon's skills to another dragon. As you send them to field training, your dragon might not learn any new skills at all or pick up a useless crafting ability you didn't want, forcing you to shell out some small amount of RL cash (or daily quest currency) in order to unlearn the unwanted new talent and have another training attempt. Patience (or endless amounts of money) is key.
What's great, though, is how you can put armors, saddles and other goodies on your dragons to make them stronger and sexier:
Shiny metal armlets and butt covers!! Whee!
DP has its flaws. The possibility to solo dungeons with your dragon (or team up with a loved one, like I do) is awesome. Nuking zombies with pumpkin bombs is hilarious. Fighting boars, bears, wolves, goblins, bandits and cultists is... meh. The game world is full of generic kill and fetch quests, generic creatures... in fact, dragons aside, the whole game world is dull and generic. I love the dragons, the taming, the training and everything that goes with it, but the world doesn't suck me in. To many of us, Azeroth is (or at least used to be) our "happy place". It's cartoony, sure, but it feels alive and immersive and there's a lot to see and to do. It's a charming, believable world. And I don't feel that when I play DP. No quirky, lovable characters or fantasy races, nothing to make me feel like it could be my virtual "home" of sorts. I don't enjoy Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn much and I'm glad I don't have to play it for work anymore, but Eorzea immediately drew me in. You can love or hate FF 14, but its amazing world is what draws over a million paying customers into the game right now.
DP? Not so much. It looks really nice and I'm sure I'll encounter some stunning, unique landmarks as I level up and explore, but those green fields and lush trees and lakes and mountains could be part of any game. Allods, Runes of Magic, any random Korea grinder - I've seen these exact same landscapes dozens of times, in dozens of games and I see nothing new, nothing that speaks to me, that stands out. This is probably not going to be a problem for most of you, unless you happen to MMO-hop like I do, but it makes me sad. I love the gameplay, I'm actually looking forward to taming and training more dragons tomorrow, but I'd be twice as excited if I could be fully immersed in the world. That said, my first impression is still really good and, some annoying technical (Nvidia-related) issues aside, I'm having a great time.
Remember when this blog was still updated? That was before I had to write four articles in a single week. Such a massive workload is entirely new to me, except maybe around the holiday season and even then that's usually just one or two weeks of stress. These last few months? Holy fuck.
I'm having fun and everything, but this is the first time I feel I might have overdone it a little. Gonna finish one article today, somehow crank out the remaining three as we get closer to the weekend and next week it's time for another huge article, a medium article and a video. And then I'm just gonna chill for a week! I hope. Wait... I think that's when my column is due. Aw crap, I need a vacation! -_-
There's a very cool side effect to all this work, though: Money. So much money, in fact, that I'm starting to lose track of all the money I have or am about to receive. It's a great feeling when you check your bank account and find a surprise 300 Euros and you can't fucking remember why that amount has been paid out to you in the first place! Now, don't get the wrong idea - I'm not filthy rich now or anything. But I'm used to juuuuuust about managing to pay my bills and having a little something left for food. No money to go out, order a pizza or do anything fun. And right now, well... I think we're gonna make an appointment at the register office sooner rather than later. And wedding plans aside, we can actually afford proper, real food, the odd takeaway here and there, all our bills are paid and we're pretty much debt-free. I haven't slept so well (and so much!) in years!
I have started another playthrough on Dragon Age, hoping to finish both games before Inquisition is released, even though they probably won't let us import savegames, anyway. I'm dying to play Saints Row IV, but I didn't even buy the game, knowing I wouldn't find the time. I'd cry myself to sleep every night. Argh! Oh yeah and we're also doing this:
I could fill another 28 million paragraphs about how complex this game has become since I've last played it and how they finally made all kinds of ship and character types viable. In the past, you'd play a tactical officer in an escort ship or you'd suck. But with the addition of special duty officer abilities and certain skill tweaks, it's now entirely possible to run a cruiser or a science ship and outperform any hurrdurr cannonboat escort. Which doesn't mean they suck now or anything, they're just no longer the one and only way to play.
The downside is that the Bear and I are completely nerding out over setups and builds. You need to set up a skill tree. A selection of traits. Ship gear. Item sets for ships, which grant all kinds of bonuses. Choose bridge officers, whose abilities greatly affect the way your ship performs in battle. Choose duty officers, who provide buffs to your regeneration, cooldowns, resistances and all kinds of things, depending on how you set them up. Reputation passive abilities, which may raise your shield rating or your crit chance, depending on how you specialize.
Like all Cryptic games, Star Trek Online is very casual-friendly and you don't need to look into any of that stuff in order to beat 99% of the PvE content. On the competitive side of things, however, you can spend endless amounts of time and money upgrading, fine-tuning and optimizing stuff. It's so deep, complex and full of possibilities, I can't remember the last time I've seen anything like it. Probably never, at least in an MMORPG. Everything needs to be idiot-proof, streamlined, intuitive... STO feels rather nice and refreshing with its complex ship setups. Hope that's all here to stay.
Also, spiders. We're breeding them. Sort of. Having spent several years around reptiles and their creepy, crawly live food, my phobia of spiders has more or less fixed itself. I wouldn't exactly pet one of those many-legged fuckers, but I can tolerate 'em. Which turned out to be a bad idea. You know, I'm not a huge fan of just squishing them. They're living, breathing beings, creepy or not. They have to live somewhere. Doesn't seem fair to just kill them, because they happen to hang around the house. And there's a positive side effect: We didn't have any fucking mosquitoes this year. The spiders are incredibly efficient at keeping them away. Alas, they're also rather efficient at reproduction. What started out as half a dozen or so tolerated spiders has turned into entire families of them. The problem is gonna fix itself, now that it's getting colder and all, but the whole thing did get a little out of hand. Not a big deal for the most part, but it's a bit annoying when you touch one of the fait, hairy ones instead of the light switch.
Speaking of hairy - my hair's gone! You see, I was always rather proud of my long, wild mane. It's all rawr and manly and shit. But after more than a half decade of just growing that crap and never getting a haircut, I had so many split ends, the whole thing looked so thin and flimsy and awful, I needed a reset of sorts. So Claire shaved my head. We both expected the worst and we were both surprised by what a sexy beast I still am. I have a good face. Hurray! Let's wait and see what I'll grow this time. My entire scalp is covered in manly stubbles, there are no alarming bald patches or anything, which is always good. Maybe just go for short hair this time around, like normal people. Or let it grow if it's actually still thick enough. Can't really tell before it's back. Heck, maybe we'll do a regular shave, because it actually looks kinda nice. Who woulda thunk?
Oh well. Between the start and the end of this entry, I have finished my first article for the week. Only three more to go. More money. Awesome!
The good thing about having to work pretty much all the time these days is having the money to pay all the bills, buy food, live. The downside is that there's so much to do, I just don't get the time to update this blog as much as I would like to. Another downside is, well... more work = more responsibility.
I like having a todo-list of sorts when it comes to my monthly work orders. On monday I gotta hand in this review, on tuesday I gotta preview that, write a guide on wednesday, post some news on saturday and so forth. But once you work for more than one publisher, it gets difficult to organize these things. And when one or several titles turn out to be downright unplayable and you need to postpone a deadline, organizing stuff becomes downright impossible.
There's also the fact that, once you write about stuff with a potentially larger fan-base and more powerful publisher than your average Korean grinder, you'll attract much more attention. And not just the good kind.
I wrote a little preview on the reboot of Final Fantasy XIV a while back. Nothing big, just a little two-pager. The game costs a monthly fee and I dared say, at the end of my preview, that I wouldn't want to pay that to play the game, as it doesn't really do anything new or groundbreaking that you can't get in plenty of Free2Play games.
Blasphemy, I know. I'm not saying the game is bad. It's a traditional MMO, which doesn't attempt to revolutionize the genre, it does exactly what it says on the package and it does a good job at it. FF-setting aside, it offers more or less the same stuff I can get on WoW. Or, if I don't like monthly fees, Rift, Everquest 2, you get the idea.
Stupid new game hype. Everyone is losing their shit about this game right now like it's the next big thing. Give it another month or two until the masses realize they're still just killing boars and farming endgame tokens (I lied, there is no endgame) in a fancy environment and the sheep will move on to Elder Scrolls Online and WildStar, once again fully believing in the "next big thing" only to feel utter disappointment within a month.
But the damage had been done, there was a 30-something page hate-thread about me and my preview on the official forums and people came up with fascinating conspiracy theories about how I hate Final Fantasy and infiltrated various gaming magazines to harm the entire franchise. Funny. I remember playing the first MMO of the series in Japanese, because I couldn't wait for the NA or EU version. It didn't just end with random nerd rage, though. Square themselves felt the need to tell me how dissatisfied they were with how I felt about their game. Which is interesting, considering I had told them exactly that in an email, weeks before I wrote that preview. To which they replied I was never supposed to write any more reviews or previews about the game. Interesting stuff. I'm not entirely sure what gives them the authority to tell me whether or not I'm allowed to review their shit, based on my personal opinion about their games.
This whole situation is new to me. I'm used to 14 year olds, whose "life-long experience with games" consists of a dozen PS3 games and clicking through a few pages on Wikipedia, telling me how much I suck at my job, that I don't have a clue what I'm writing about, they want me to get fired, blah, blah. When I was that age, I used to idolize most critics and I would have killed to have a job like that, but I guess the power of the internet can turn all of us into assholes. Zero fear of consequences and all that. But over 30 forum pages about how much I suck and an angry game publisher throwing a fit because of my preview was something else. The psycho shit their product manager had tried to pull on me for revenge could fill a whole new blog post. Stupid, manipulative asshole!
I finished my review on the game last night. And I stand by my original statement. The game does what any traditional MMO does, without adding anything new or groundbreaking, but it's worth looking into if you're not expecting the "next big thing" and you don't mind the monthly fees. Nothing more, nothing less. There will be some die-hard fans, who will demand my head on a pike, others will complain about the score being too high, the usual kinda crap. You can't please anyone on the internet and I can live with that.
What pisses me off is how much I've been fretting over the whole damn article. How petrified I was to even start writing the fucking thing. All because of some publisher telling me I "wasn't even allowed to write about their product", putting me on a guilt trip, trying to manipulate me into giving out a better final review score or staying away from a review altogether.
You can tell yourself not to care. That you won't be affected by such bullshit, just do your thing and give your honest opinion. But can you really? It's tempting to lash out when somebody tells you, "Dude, we didn't even allow you to review our game!" Then you get the usual crap like, "All the other reviewers had a much more positive opinion about our product than you did!"
I can't deal with all this nonsense. Not really. When I write about a game, it's my opinion, my personal thoughts and experience with the product. Don't give me shit about being "objective", there is no such thing as an "objective review". You can try to be fair, but in the end, personal opinion affects everything. And I can't stand having somebody trying to manipulate me into thinking I'm being too harsh or having somebody act like a total dickhole, making me want to be harsh. I can't work like this!
I think I'm done talking to publishers. Next time somebody has a problem with one of my articles, they can talk to my employers, sort it out with them. Gaming used to be about fun. All this mass market multi million dollar bullshit is turning games into a joke and the whole fucking industry with it.
