Strange things are happening around here. We have a new neighour living in the flat above ours. She likes leaving little notes at our door. To let us know we're too loud and she cannot sleep. Don't get me wrong, she seems nice enough about it, telling us to "turn down our tv at a reasonable hour" and all that. It's just - we don't watch tv. We're not overly noisy. Not that you'd be able to hear us, anyway, because we happen to live right next to the busiest, noisiest road in town. And literally two buildings away from the local pub, wich releases hordes of binge-drinking zombies into the night. But no, she is only bothered by our alleged noisy tv, because her bedroom happens to be right on top of our living room. Which is apparently our fault now.
Speaking of the geographical alignment of our homes: Her bathroom happens to be located exactly on top of our bedroom. Dear neighbour: we can hear you shit. We could also hear you vomit your guts out at 4am last saturday after your heavy night of drinking. Very classy and lady-like. I didn't say anything. You know why? Because it's none of my fucking business. Now if only that kind of courtesy worked both ways.
On a happier note, I'm getting more hooked on Everquest 2 than ever. Maybe it's the battle rabbit mounts or the sabretooth squirrels. I'm not even kidding:
I usually prefer my rabbits to be cooked, but I'm strangely tempted by this mount.
Or this one.
Um... nope, sorry.
The game has changed a bit over the years. Not anywhere near enough and it's probably too late for any major changes, but some of the quests are just a bit awful for newcomers and returners alike. When you finish a low-level zone, move up to the next zone, only to bump into a random quest-NPC who sends you right back to the noob zone, for instance. He gave me the names of some characters I was supposed to help, but he didn't reveal their location, he didn't say where to look for them and then you're stuck running all over the place or looking it up on Google.
And it gets worse. On the next step, he sent me to some place called the "Crypt of Betrayal", saying it's a place somewhere in the capital city. That's all the information you get. Turns out there is no direct entrance to the crypt from within the city. Instead, you have to make your way from your current zone into the city, into the "Down Below", which is their sewer system, head down to one of the many secondary levels of the Down Below, THEN head into the Crypt of Betrayal from there. The game doesn't tell you any of this. In fact, none of the places I just named even come with a map, so you'll be fighting your way through hordes of monsters, endless winding corridors and floating, pixellated shit (it is a sewage system in a ten year old MMO) hoping to click on some coffin, which is supposed to contain a bunch of spare parts for some gnomish invention. Because that's where you keep spare parts. In a coffin. And that's where you keep coffins. In a sewer. It's so intuitive.
Heck, even the fucking "crypt" was full of stupid quests. There was this corridor full of minotaurs. You have to kill about a dozen of the fuckers to get to the other end of the hallways. That's where a quest NPC awaits and asks you to kill ten minotaurs. Only you already killed them all just to get to the NPC, so now you're waiting for them to respawn. Sigh.
Much of the game's content is borderline unplayable without "EQ2Map2", the community-made atlas system, which adds maps, markers and locations to every area in the game. And since every area contains about eleventy trillion quests, getting a map plugin with all the pointers already drawn out for you isn't exactly ideal, either:
Now find that one dot, which marks your quest.
There is no nice way to say this. EQ2 requires an insanely high tolerance level for bullshit or else you won't be playing this for long.
Case in point: My most recent quest. It was the coffin spareparts guy again. Asking me to grab a couple things from the "ruins of varsoon". Again, he doesn't tell you how to get there or what that place actually is, so imagine how much fun it would be if said ruins turned out to be a six man group dungeon full of heroic mode bosses and shit.
But don't worry. The place only turned out to be a six man group dungeon full of heroic mode bosses and shit. Better still, I got the quest at level 29, but the baddies inside that dungeon went all the way up to level 35. But let me fast-forward to when something really cool and unexpected happened:
Pictured: Winning
You're gonna have to take my word for it, because my pet is an oversized, blocky dickhead, but on that picture up there I'm beating the final triple heroic level 35 boss guy while I'm level 30. Something that wasn't remotely possible when I last played Everquest 2 which must have been about 63 years ago.
But now that the alternate advancement system allows characters to beef up all their favourite abilities and skills way before the level cap, in addition to classes with battle pets and the disturbingly competent AI mercenaries, everything seems possible. Sweet!
Don't get the wrong idea here. I didn't just casually walk in there and started beating the crap out of everything with my brain switched to snooze mode. I have to control my character's abilities through keyboard shortcuts, click my pet's abilities with the other hand at the same time, tab through targets and make sure I pull in a way that won't cause my mercenary to run off and pull the entire fucking instance. This shit is hard work. But damn, did it feel good!
Dungeons in EQ2 were always a big pain in the ass to play. When I first got into this game many years ago, I played a berserker, go figure. What sounds like an awesome DPS-heavy class really turned out to be a tank, though. Berserkers are hired to be main tank and that's it. No other role for then. So I had to lead the way through a MASSIVE labyrinth of shit with no map, pull targets, tank and turn the mobs around so their backs would face the rogue - yes, that was the tank's job back then. And you don't just AoE your way through that shit, either. In fact, if you use area attacks at the wrong time, you'll pull an entire room full of monsters, wipe out the entire group and start the whole dungeon from the beginning. With respawning monsters and no checkpoints. Whee!
Eventually I just gave up on dungeons, because the only thing that's worse than having to be the tank when you're a complete noob is having to be the tank when everyone just expects you to know the way to every quest objective and every boss, as well as every tactic for every boss battle. A complete noob on EQ2 who has never been to those dungeons before? Unthinkable! Yeah, that really didn't work for me.
Now I can do that shit on my own. I can see all the content, play all by myself if I want to, kill all the bosses and keep all the loot. It doesn't get much more awesome than this, really.
Just me, my wolf, my mercenary and my mushroom.
This is probably not going to work all the way up to the level cap, but it works for now, it's a fun new way to experience Everquest and I'm happy with it. Heck, if you prefer it the old-fashioned way with groups and everything, you can still do it like that, but I'm glad I can always just take a tanky or a healy mercenary with me, who won't bitch at me if he dies and who won't need-roll on any of my loot. And they're pretty capable, as far as AI companions go. Sweet!
When Everquest 2 came out a little while before World of Warcraft, I didn't really care for its setting, especially when compared to WoW. I mean, WoW has big, ugly orcs with massive axes and spiky pauldrons and even with the odd pink-haired gnome here and there, WoW is pretty brutal and dirty. In a good way. War, fantasy, a bit of Mad Max, some steampunk, it's pretty cool. Heck, even the goodie-goodies of Azeroth inspire badassery:
BAM!
Then there is Everquest 2:
You too can be a Froglok.
And more Everquest 2:
Not pictured: Badassery.
Azeroth is about twelve billion times cooler than Norrath. I'm really not big on the whole fairytale-feel of Everquest 2.
Of course you don't have to be a frog or a fairy. You could be a troll or a big, ugly ogre or even a hooded assassin on a pegasus, who is also a dragon:
Thought I was only making it up, didn't you?
But even with some badass races like barbarians and lizardmen and awesome classes like necromancers and shadow knights, half of EQ2 seems to be placed somewhere in the Disney universe.
You see, I've decided to take another look at this game a few days ago and tried one of the newer classes, the "Beastlord". They're basically rogues, as they go all stealthy and stabby and are mostly melee-orientated, but they also get to tame animals like hunters do on WoW. Which makes them fantastic solo-characters, because their pets do all the tanking while you do the backstabbing.
And since race kind of matters in EQ2, I have picked one of the races, which favour rogue-like classes: The Ratonga. They're quick and agile, they're proficient with all things stabby, they're smart and they're natural thieves. So, I'm a rat-rogue, hiding in the shadows, stalking prey, slicing and dicing my way through the enemy lines and commanding wild beasts to do my bidding. I AM DEATH!
Death happens to be fucking adorable.
Yes, basically my character is Mickey Mouse with glowy green eyes and an oversized viking helmet, riding on a burning, undead horse. My pet tiger could probably eat the entire package in one quick bite. Meanwhile, Claire picked a dragon-like Sarnak, the females of which are among the tallest races in the game:
"Please don't eat me!"
If I get on my mount and park my character next to hers, it'll make me look like a furry midget on a burning pony:
If you can't stand to see berserking rats, dragon-people and pixie assassins in your game, then EQ2 isn't for you. But anyone who enjoys a bit of racial diversity, well... there are 20 different playable races right now. And while they do range from frogs to lizards to cats, you also get the usual suspects like dwarves, humans and every flavour of elf known to man. And then you get to choose from one of the currently 26 playable classes in the game. Enjoy!
There are also about 38 billion mounts, pets and armor sets.
Everquest 2 has gone Free2Play a while ago and may well be worth a look, depending on how much you can enjoy certain (out?)dated mechanics and visuals. Unlike its earlier F2P versions, you now get to choose just about any race and class you want to play, with the exception of the "Freeblood" vampire race and the Beastlord class, which cost extra, as they're part of an expansion. Speaking of expansions - the F2P version includes all the expansion content for free, with the exception of their newest Xpac content, which is fair. You still get 85 levels of free content, which is about as much as it sounds.
Unlike WoW, EQ2 goes for a more realistic look, which was breathtaking nearly a decade ago. Today, well... let's just say the game can't deny its age. It's not ugly by any stretch of the imaginaion:
It won't absolutely blow you away, either.
Many characters and armor sets look pretty impressive, but certain landscapes look bland and artificial, outdoor textures are blurry and washed out. But the game truly shows its age when it comes to quest design, storytelling and basic user-friendliness. Or lack thereof.
Quest NPCs in EQ2 have the annoying habit of sending you back to the same spawn of monsters again and again. "Please swim over to that island of orcs and kill 8 of them." And here's the followup quest: "Please swim back there and burn down their tents." Next followup quest: "Swim over there once more and poison their food." And so forth. NPCs will tell you to loot specific items or kill speficic baddies in a certain area, then send you back to interact with different items, kill different enemies or go after their boss. It's not gaming's most annoying problem, but most newer MMORPGs have abandoned such shameless content-stretching for a reason.
And sometimes the story behind those quests is just lame and nonsensical. At some point I was sent to explore a cave alongside some scout NPC. So we went through the whole thing together, until there was just one tiny, last little room left to explore. That's when the scout told me to return to the cave entrance to report back to the NPC who gave us the quest. Why? Fuck if I know. "I'll scout ahead real quick, you go and report to the guy." Right. Because checking on that last tiny spot on the map is something he could only do by himself or whatever.
Since gold and experience points generally matter more than a coherent story, I went back there, reported in and the NPC immediately told me that something wasn't right. "The scout should have returned by now, but he hasn't." Um... what? He said he was gonna inspect the rest of the cave and sent me back FIRST, so OF COURSE he hasn't fucking returned before me! How would that even work?
So of course I was sent all the way into the cave AGAIN, only this time I was supposed to also go into the last little room I wasn't supposed to enter before. And since you're not complete retards, you'll already know that I found the scout right there. Dead. So I had to run back to the cave entrance once more, tell the guy what happened. End of story.
Ha! As if. I was sent to find a way to kill the guy who killed the scout in the final room of the cave. So there was a bit of side-questing outside the cave for a while, I got myself a nice magical boss-slaying potion, then I had to make it all the way inside the cave for the third time to kill the damn boss. Sigh. EQ2 does this kind of thing a lot. If that's a deal-breaker for you, then EQ2 really isn't for you.
You'll be sent into the same spawn of monsters A LOT.
By today's standards, the game is rather lacking in the user-friendliness department. Hitting escape won't bring up the options menu, unless you tell the game to do so - inside the freakin' options menu. The UI comes with a little EQ2-Button, which brings up a huge list of settings in what looks like the Windows start menu. This thing lets you write a biography for your characters, which passing players may read. You can set prefix and suffix titles and a surname for your character. "Bob" may turn into "Slayer Bob Boson the Dedicated". You may flag yourself a role-player and act in character, you get to choose from various voices for your avatar, you can name each and everyone of your summons and pets, customize your shapeshifts and illusionary forms if present, apply alternative advancement points, dragon points, pet points, class traits and specializations, racial abilities... it's one of the deepest, most complex role-playing experience you'll ever find, but it's far from intuitive.
Oh, if you happen to own a webcam, your ingame character will begin to mimic you. I'm not making this up - check this out:
If you fast forward towards the last minute or so of the video, you'll also get to hear some of the optional voice modulation, which allows people to sound like ogres or trolls or whatever they're playing at the time. Here's the official video, which gives you a better impression on how this thing works:
EQ2 lets you activate realtime 3D portraits when you play in groups, so you get to see everyone's facial expressions. What a fucking cool feature!
And that stuff right there stands for what makes EQ2 so great until today. It's all about the role-playing, the characters and the incredibly detailed game world. Claire's character isn't just a freaking armored dragon. She's also a shapeshifter, who can transform into a wolf, a tiger or - oh god why, some kind of tree, I suppose? Characters act out many of their emotes with speech and everything like they do on WoW and each race gets different voices to choose from for each gender. All the monsters and creatures speak their own languages, which you can learn!
The first time you fight, say, a bunch of gnolls or goblins, everything they say to you will sound like a bunch of gibberish. Even their speech bubbles look like somebody facerolled across the keyboard whilst switching the font to Wingdings. But keep fighting and looting them, collect relics and tokens, which allow your character to understand them a little more whenever you study one until their speech finally makes sense. The gibberish turns into proper English, the text bubbles suddenly become legible and you may even communicate with other players in goblin tongue, if only to troll everyone around you.
You may also study an enemy's anatomy. Slaughter a bunch of orcs, study their bones and intestines and ultimately learn a new special attack, which deals extra damage to, well, orcs. Or birdmen. Or golems. Or whatever anatomy you've just mastered. You also get a nice trophy, which you can put up for display inside your own house.
It ain't much, but it's home.
Newbie characters will eventually gain access to a small room at their local inn. It's really just a little room or two and you'll get some basic furniture like a chair, a bed and a table, but you can buy, craft and quest for more furniture and decorate the place with carpets, portraits, pets, trophies, mirrors, lights, beer kegs or even set up your own shop where people can buy all the unwanted crap you find on your travels.
The style and size of your home doesn't just depend on your virtual wallet and whether you only wanna shell out a few coppers worth of upkeep for a crappy inn room or shell out platinum for a massive estate. Each city offers a different style and architecture to its inhabitants. Don't like the city you started out with? Travel the world, find a place you like better and apply for citizenship. Don't like being a goodie-goodie in the fairytale kingdom of Qeynos? Betray your faction, become evil and move to Freeport! Or vice versa. Yes, EQ2 has faction betrayal. So if you've always dreamed about being a hulking ogre paladin in shining armor, go ahead and change sides.
Mind you, changing factions doesn't work at the swipe of a credit card like it does in certain other MMOs. Instead, you have to follow a lengthy line of quests, eventually become exiled and then spend the rest of your virtual life as a neutral exile or earn the opposing faction's trust. Or even change your mind and suck up to your own faction again. It's a bit of a lengthy process, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. If betrayal was easy, there wouldn't be much need for factions to begin with.
That said, good and evil characters don't "hate" each other as much as, say, the Alliance and Horde do on WoW. So unless you're on a pvp server, your good character may form a party with evil characters, you may send mail to evil characters and trade with them. Just don't try to walk right into one of their capital cities. You can sneak in there through the sewers if you want to visit a friend, but the guards generally aren't too happy to see members of the opposing faction.
EQ2 doesn't make questing with friends too complicated. In fact, it encourages it.
Claire's evil warden shape-shifted into a wolf, my good beastlord, our pets and a Sarnak mercenary.
Not only can you team up with the "enemy" if you so choose, but you may also temporarily lower your level to that of a friend, so you can enjoy the same quests and content together.
The game also allows you to hire mercenaries, which can function as tanks, healers or damage-dealers. Okay, that feature actually costs a small fee to permanently unlock, but in case of my beastlord it was well worth it:
Beastlord, pet wolf, monk mercenary. That's a small group right there!
And while Norrath will always be a bit too magical, happy, colourful and over the top sugary to me, there are certain sights, features and activities even I can't hate.
Hooded dragon assassins!
Pegasus Knights!
Cow... um... lizard... things?
This guy!
Commander Fluffy!
Dapper, dual fish-wielding goblins!
Captain Salty (which, funnily, is also my Xtube handle)
Anthropomorphic rats with sunglasses!
Riding creepy-ass gryphons!
Everquest 2 may no longer be the prettiest MMORPG out there. The quests are as bog-standard as they come and getting the hang of all the customization and features is about as complicated as running the ISS space station. But at a starting price of nothing, you also get a shitload of game for, well, no money, really. And if you crave tons of races and classes to choose from, faction-betrayal, a fantastic housing system, some of the best crafting in any MMO (which I didn't mention, because I hate crafting :P) and maybe even facial recognition to truly act "in character", then why not give this thing a go? Even if you used to play this game years ago like I did, it may be worth another look, because they've finally added some essential features like a useful, working map system and quest markers, so there is that.
Before I start talking about what games I'm currently wasting all my spare time with, here's some lizard:
Followed by even more lizard:
Anyway, back to business.
When it comes to fairly reviewing a game, I may quite possibly be the worst games critic around. Take World of Tanks, for example. That game is more popular than tits right now and its active player count is higher than the population of a small country. Back when they released the first beta version of this game, I've been asked to review this thing and I've cancelled the job halfway through my play session. I told them the game was so unbelievably dull, boring and downright shit, we simply shouldn't waste our valuable magazine space reviewing this garbage.
I still hate it. I guess it's basically Counter-Strike with tanks? I was stupid not to see how hugely popular this shit would become.
I'm looking at them, but there's absolutely nothing happening in my pants.
Here's another fun example: The War Z, now rebranded to... I dunno, Infestation: Survivor Stories or some shit. Awful DayZ-ripoff. I never played DayZ. I don't like zombie games. I don't like zombies. They asked me to play The War Z. And I gave it a relatively high review score. I dunno, 68, maybe 76 percent or so? Again, I didn't have any experience with the game it was ripping off and my experience with The War Z was actually quite fascinating.
I started the game with nothing but a flashlight and a candy bar, walked around for a bit, avoided zombies, eventually ran into another player and figured our lives would be easier if we tried to survive as a team. He, on the other hand, decided it would be that much more fun to crack open my skull with his fucking flashlight. Then he took my candy bar. Asshole.
This never happened. It's one of many staged screenshots showing off gameplay, which doesn't exist.
I played the game some more, got eaten by zombies on the next character, eventually ended up avoiding just about everything that moved and finally survived long enough to gather some basic weapons and equipment. Eventually, I stopped trusting anyone around me and watched myself become a murdering asshat, who would trick friendly players into believing I'm harmless, then loot their corpses.
It wasn't great, there were bugs, the AI and visuals were a bit shit, but it was an early beta, my first impression was decent, I gave it an okay-ish review score based upon my adventures on there. And then a whole truckload of 5-10% reviews rained down on that game, it turned out half of their assets were stolen, the official screenshots on the website were staged and the whole thing was just a huge cash grab and I looked like a complete idiot, giving the developers the benefit of the doubt and handing out a good review score because I genuinely had fun. And not a clue, apparently.
Next-Gen racing = Moist cars
To my defense, I am funny, reliable and a decent writer. And everyone ends up handing out a bogus review score, eventually. Like the guys who rated the PC-version of NFS: Rivals 80% and up. There's no new Need for Speed this year and the team that developed Rivals has since been dissolved. I like to believe it's all because Rivals was so shit. I have no way of knowing whether it is because of that, but the thought gives me pleasure. TB made a "Let's not Play" video about it, highlighting pretty much everything that is wrong with this game in a few minutes. Stuff, which most paying customers agreed with, yet none of the professional reviews ever mentioned. In other words: Professional metascore of 76, user score of 3.1 on Metacritic. And then critics wonder (do they still?) why nobody trusts them anymore and lots of readers are convinced that certain high review scores were simply bought. Who could blame them?
And all of this leads me to Call of Duty: Ghosts, which racked up an amazing user score of 1.9 ("Overwhelming dislike") on metacritic. Again, magazines were a lot more forgiving (and, quite frankly, a tad more realistic), but damn, I hated this game. With a passion.
Notice the past tense there? Scary, huh? Yeah, I had another look at it the other day and I'm actually doin' alright on there on occasion.
29/2 and then the match ended. Boo!
When Ghosts came out, it was a laggy, stuttering, unplayable mess. The lousy optimization was rather surprising, considering how Ghosts simply doesn't look all that "next gen". Then there was the usual amount of hacks, cheats and exploits, as Ghosts launched with no anti cheat measures whatsoever. Top it off with a community manager, who addressed upset users on twitter as crybabies and you get an incredibly bad game with a hugely disappointed community.
None of this should happen in an overhyped AAA title. There is no excuse for this and, while most of these issues have been resolved at last, there's a lot of annoyed CoD fans, who will never touch this game again. And I can't really blame them after all the hype, stupid-ass release events with RL marines playing the game, Eminem performing a trailer song and tons of other stupid PR crap like that.
It's no surprise that all my friends went back to the previous title of the series, Black Ops 2, never to take another look at Ghosts again. Back then, Black Ops 2 was superior in pretty much every way. Today? Well, if you ask my friends, Black Ops 2 is still ten times better than Ghosts, but I had a look at both games and, surprisingly enough, I disagree. I have spent a few hours playing both of these games in their current state and, while my "results" are based heavily upon my stupid opinion, I now consider Ghosts to be the better (multiplayer) game out of these two.
Below, I'm going to do a side by side comparison on various aspects of the games and tell you which game I believe is better - and why. If you disagree, please go to the comments section and tell me your opinion, so I can delete it.
Visuals
Yes, Ghosts is still using the same old engine CoD has been running for eons and it shows. "We have tweaked and added so much stuff, it's practically a whole new engine" is nice PR-babble, but reality looks a bit different. Or doesn't, for that matter. It looks like the same old game. Still, you can't deny that Ghosts comes out on top when you directly compare the two of them, if only by a little. And I refuse to take into account those heavily-staged PR shots you find all over google, which show at least half a dozen players, five massive explosions and three epic killstreak rewards on every single screen. That shit is heavily edited and never happens ingame. But at the end of the day, Black Ops 2 looks like this:
And Ghosts looks like that:
I'm not here to argue whether or not Ghosts looks good enough to be called "next gen" or how much better Battlefield looks. I'm not comparing Ghosts to fucking Battlefield, I'm comparing it to Black Ops 2. And Ghosts has the better graphics, plain and simple.
Performance
While Ghosts may look slightly less dated, getting it to run at an acceptable frame rate without reducing visual quality to a pixellated mess is difficult, annoying and too complicated. What exactly does the terrain detail setting do? I can set it to normal, extra and off, the former two settings causing severe hiccups and stuttering, whilst providing no obvious graphical improvement whatsoever. What the fuck does distortion do? Why does the game not explain this? Why does changing the image quality setting to anything other than "extra" make my game look like I'm trying to emulate it on a Nintendo DS?
Black Ops 2 may not look as pretty as Ghosts, but it runs at solid, stable frame rates, even on mediocre hardware. Ghosts? You wish. This round goes to Black Ops 2.
Maps
Black Ops 2 multiplayer has exactly four maps: Nuketown, Hijacked, Siege and MORE FUCKING NUKETOWN. Yes, I know, you do occasionally get different maps in the rotation, but people will always and always and fucking always choose Nuketown over absolutely everything else, followed by Hijacked. Heck, there's a Nuketown only game mode, where you can start shooting people the second you spawn, without even having to move, because THE MAP IS TOO FUCKING TINY AND THE GOD DAMN SPAWNS ARE BROKEN! Black Ops 2 has some really nice maps, which support various play styles from fast-paced run&gun to camping and sniping like a pussy. There is also a god-awful map in the fucking desert, which is so massive, you'll run around for ten minutes not finding anyone to shoot and then you get killed by a guy, who is taking a nap on top of a crashed airplane with his sniper rifle. Fun.
Ghosts is an equally mixed bag. Some of the original maps the game launched with were far too big, causing matched to feel tedious, slow-paced and boring. I mean, do I really need a map, which consists of a multi-story car park, a multi-story office building, a cafe, some ruined buildings and a dozen fucking side-corridors and shit for 6on6 matchups? You could put 24 people on there and you'd still be running around for ten minutes trying to find an enemy. And then get shot by that one asshole who just sits in the corner all day and waits for random players to walk by. Ghosts has received several new maps over the past six months, most of which are absolutely great and make a regular appearance in the rotation. But those fun new maps only make the bad original maps look even more shit in comparison. No winner!
Players camp inside the castle and its towers, the cottages in the background and inside a bunch of old ruins not shown on this screenshot. And some just lie in the grass and watch the clouds go by.
Guns
Maybe I should have put this higher up the list. After all, CoD is all about dem guns, right? Anyhow... the guns in Black Ops 2 are fun to shoot, because they're ridiculously easy to use. You can press and hold that trigger on your light machine gun, fire round after round after round with pinpoint accuracy and there is no recoil, no shaking, the damn thing just does its job. There are a few exceptions here and there, such as the Scorpion SMG with its insanely high rate of fire, which kicks like the proverbial horse, but for the most part, the weapons have little to no recoil, they're incredibly accurate and, aside from sniper rifles, surprisingly weak. You can shoot a guy and shoot him and then shoot him some more and he'll shoot you right back and then you'll circle-strafe around for a while until one of you finally runs out of HP and dies. Players in Black Ops 2 are fucking bullet sponges and can take a comical amount of hits.
They've been firing at that guy for three whole minutes and he just won't die.
Guns in Ghosts kill much faster than they do in Black Ops 2. When the game was released, people complained that it felt like playing hardcore mode, because they usually died in only two or three hits. The really powerful weapons in Ghosts also come with more recoil. There are weapons, which are incredibly accurate, but require more hits to kill an opponent, particularly over large distance. And when you try to shoot a guy on the other end of the map, you'll notice how your assault rifle sways back and forth ever so slightly as you aim down the sights, making it even more difficult to hit your target. It's still far from being a simulation, but the guns are both deadlier and more difficult to use than before. Now, whether you prefer the toy guns in Black Ops 2 or the deadly guns in Ghosts is a matter of personal preference. Two guys crab-walking back and forth for 10 seconds until one of them finally dies is a bit silly, though, so to me, this point goes to Ghosts.
Customization
Both Black Ops 2 and Ghosts give you tons of options to customize your weapons, perks and kill streaks. Wanna run faster, longer, like a ninja and without making a noise? There are perks for that. Wanna use two primary weapons or three attachments on a single gun? Perks, perks, more perks. Wanna change the appearance of your character, their body armor, headgear, skin tone or even their gender? Well, that's where Ghosts has got you covered, while Black Ops 2 takes all the visual customization away from you. With one exception: Your character will appear "lighter" or "heavier" depending on your weapon of choice. A machine gunner will usually carry some heavy body armor, snipers get a hood for some reason, but that's about all the influence you get on your character's appearance in Black Ops 2. And if you think that being able to play a female character in Call of Duty is a pointless, unneccessary feature, then Mrs. Kitten will strongly disagree with you.
Claire doesn't like being forced to play male characters all the time.
On top of that, Ghosts also has more, better, cooler killstreak rewards. Yes, Riley (the dog) was hugely oversold and overrated, but guard dogs are cool in multiplayer. Support streaks, which allow inexperienced players to provide their team with ballistic vests and other goodies even when they die a lot are a great feature. Some people complain a lot about how the dogs are supposedly too strong, for noobs, too hard to kill and what have you. Look, unless you walk around a corner and bump right into an enemy dog, at least you have a chance to shoot the mutt first or run away. Now try that with a hunter killer drone in Black Ops 2, which is in every way as easy to obtain for "noobs" and kills you out of nowhere, with even less of a chance for you to do anything about it. Point for Ghosts. Player Count
Black Ops 2 peaked at nearly 10k players today, Ghosts only had about 6k. They're both somewhere around the 1-1.5k mark after midnight, which is far from spectacular when you compare it to CSGO's whopping 150k players, but there are enough folks around to play the most popular game modes with. If you're into obscure hardcore modes, you might be out of luck on both games. Still, Black Ops 2 has a slightly higher player count, even though it's a year older, so it gets a point. Cheaters
I refuse to refer to them as "hackers", because the aimbotters on CoD are simply a bunch of asshats using 3rd party hacks and tools, written and sold to them by actual hackers. Spending 20 Quid on a program, which does all the aiming for you doesn't make you a hacker, it makes you a complete tool and a moron. Anyway.
Ghosts had so much blatant, shameless cheating, wallhacking and aimbotting going on, it sometimes felt like the few players without those dirty little helpers were in the minority. VAC didn't support Ghosts, cheaters didn't get banned and the leaderboards were topped by folks, who had supposedly racked up several billion kills. That was a half year ago. Cheaters now get VAC-banned and the forums show the usual amount of allegedly innocent victims. Of course you also get threads started by paranoid (crappy) players, who call absolutely everyone around them a cheater and insist that there's at least a dozen of them in every match. But when you look at the lobby leaderboards before the start of a match, you'll rarely ever find a player, whose average K/D is at or above 1.0. When Claire and I played last night, we had only one obvious cheater, who followed and shot people through walls and didn't really care much to hide what he was doing. There was the occasional round where somebody had an insane K/D of 10 or more, but when you looked at their stats, their average K/D was somewhere around 0.96 - which, by the way, applies to me, as well. See hat 29/2 screenshot I at the beginning of this post? My average is just below 1.
For every amazing run like this one I get three equally shit ones.
Here's the thing, though: We also played a whole lot of Black Ops 2. Again, we only had one painfully obvious cheater last night, whose crosshairs jumped from one enemy player's head to the next at machine precision, without the tiniest bit of swaying or oversteering and through walls and obstacles. Perhaps he was just insanely good and blessed with the gift of second sight, but then again, his screen probably looked like this:
This shit happens in just about every competitive online game.
Both games have cheaters. They're not running rampant like lots of people suggest, they're not fucking everywhere and many of them are stupid enough to get banned. You will always get a fair handful of assholes, who just can't play by the rules and have to download their "skill", but you get those in every CoD. No points here.
Now, if this whole thing were dead serious and we were counting points, then Ghosts would win by a small, biased margin.
Look, I get it. Just because I think the killstreaks are cooler on Ghosts doesn't mean they're cooler for everybody. Just because I think both games have a mix of great and sucky maps doesn't mean you can't clearly prefer one game or the other. The point I'm trying to make here is that there isn't one horrible, awful, broken Call of Duty and one that is insanely good, vastly superior one, which blows the other completely out of the water. They're simply not that different!
Of course they fucking aren't, that's what everyone had been criticizing about the whole fucking series since, I dunno, Modern Warfare 2?
In conclusion
CoD: Ghosts is no longer the unplayable, broken mess it was at launch. If you hated the game for the way the guns handled, for its visuals and for its design and gameplay, then you're still going to hate it. They didn't turn it into an entirely new game - they just added a bit of anticheat support, ironed out the performance issues to an extent and added new maps and guns. They made it playable, nothing more. It looks a bit prettier than Black Ops 2, the guns are a bit deadlier and some of them are harder to handle. I happen to like it that way, others prefer the "run around each other for a minute and fill each other with bullets until someone finally dies" type of gameplay from the earlier games of the series. It's all a matter of preference. But you get people with 30something kills and 2 deaths in both games, whether they're just really good or maybe using 3rd party helpers. You get the god-awful community in both games. You get a few maps you absolutely fucking hate in both games and some people will use weapons, perks or killstreaks you consider stupid and OP in both games. Because no matter how you look at it, it's still all the same old Call of Duty. Now what a surprise that is. :P
"In a top ten list of the most inappropriate things I've ever masturbated to, the Thatcher funeral came 4th." Yeah, remember that story I said I was gonna write and then publish on here, chapter by chapter? Still working on that. Consider that sentence up there a little teaser. Just, you know, too much work and all that. And it's my job to write, so... look, if you've spent 12+ hours writing a huge-ass article about how to play a class on some MMO, you're not gonna spend the rest of your day writing a story for fun. Bear with me. Or don't, what do I care? What could you possibly do to me, huh? Mwahaha! Ahem...
Got dragged into a Diablo 3 live stream today. Total accident. Some colleagues were streamin' something and I stumbled right into that thing, so I played and talked about it for a while and everyone was happy. And we looked so cool together!
I'm still trying to get used to the idea of having fans. Some guy sent me a friend request on Facebook the other day. Without telling me who he was or why he wants to be friends or anything, but I usually accept requests and if people don't talk to me after a while I just call them out and troll them a bit. Trolled him too, been a bit of a jerk until the other day, where he just offered me an expansion key for Diablo 3. Claire's mum is getting into the game right now, so I asked around on Facebook whether anyone could recommend a place that sold the expansion for a little less than Blizzard does and he just offered his for free, because he didn't need it. Made me feel like a right asshat.
Turns out he added me on FB because he likes this blog you're reading right now and he reads my columns and articles in the magazine and I've been a total jackass about it. I'm not a very nice person. I don't claim to be. Some people believe this whole thing on here and in my articles, during streams and everything is just some kind of persona, a show I put on for a virtual audience or something. And then they add me on Facebook and get all shocked and surprised when I'm rude and inappropriate on there, which usually ends with them unfriending me as quickly as they requested to be my friends in the first place. I may have to brush up on the ol' people skills a bit.
That said, don't expect me to behave like some kind of role model. Yeeees, I know, that sounds all cheesy and arrogant and full of myself, but hear me out. Somebody actually wrote that to me the other day. That he is concerned, because people know me from gaming magazines and websites and podcasts and some kids may look up to me, so I shouldn't joke about what a nice day it is to sit on the porch with my crack pipe. So, dear kids, if you're reading this, I don't really have a crack pipe, drugs are bad, go to school and study hard to get a proper job one day, okay?
Seriously though, how does one even react to such overdramatic stuff? I'm pretty sure I don't inspire anyone to do anything. And anyone intelligent enough to appreciate my stuff should also be smart enough to figure out when I'm being sarcastic, right? I'm not role model material. I dropped out of school, I never knew what to do with my life and I just happened to be offered the coolest job in the world. Insane luck. If it hadn't been for that one special day where the right people tripped upon my blog and asked me to write for them and get paid, I'd probably be living in a cardboard box under a bridge near you. Right now. So. Whatever you do. Don't use me for inspiration. Unless you're doing something sexual. Email me pictures!
Diablo is still fun, though it gets a bit silly at times. Randomized item and monster names, for instance. I have a ring named "The Sink", which I like to throw out on occasion. Not without properly announcing it first, of course. Monster names are even weirder at times. Rare baddies on there get names and titles generated depending on their abilities and skills. So you might get a "Pann, Mangler of Heroes" or "Hatemonger the Murderer". Which is fine, gives the whole thing a nice, scary touch and all. Some of the monster job descriptions do get oddly specific, though. What's up with "Xann, Crippler of Princes"? Is that kind of specialization in such high demand in hell that they'd hire demons just to, I dunno, poke royal offspring in the foot or something?
It's not something to be so proud of that you'd make a big deal of it, right? I mean, how do they introduce each other in the break room? "Oh hey, I can mangle 32 heroes all at the same time!" "Well, that's pretty cool, I guess. I crippled a prince once. Got a title and everything." Mkay.
Another thing that confuses me about Diablo is the resources many of the characters use to use their special abilities. Remember when all that shit was simply called mana? Well, some classes still use that, but others now use fury, hatred or wrath, which are all different words for the same thing. They all benefit from the power of being pissed off. Why they all need different-sounding names and varying colours for that is beyond me. Would it really be any different if they just used mana, instead? You know, like in the first two Diablo games?
My subscription for TESO has run out and so far, I'm not tempted to come back. On top of all the technical problems, the non-existent endgame and the poor support, there is this one problem with the game, which has bothered me a lot: Your decisions don't matter one bit. See, every so often you get to choose whether you wanna execute or spare a villain, because he might be oh-so sorry and he'll make up for it or some shit. Or you'll have to kill one guy and spare the other, so you have to choose who lives and who dies. You never run into any of these fuckers again. Ever. Heck, even at the end of... hang on... FUCKING SPOILER
SPOILERSPOILERSPOILER! If you want to play TESO and not get part of the story ruined by me, stop reading right the fuck now. Okay? Everyone gone? Here goes: Even at the end of the storylines for both the fighters and the mages guild, you get to decide the fate of their respective leaders. And it doesn't fucking matter what you choose, because you'll never get another quest from these NPCs again, you'll never have anything to do with them ever again and the game simply introduces a whole lot of brand new replacement characters instead, no matter how or what you decide.
It's fucking lazy writing. They give you the illusion of a choice, but everything always plays out 100% the same and there are no consequences to your actions. And once you figure that out, some of these decisions will feel awfully forced and not very believable at all.
See, there is this one quest where two souls end up sharing the same body. They're two mages, both of which get their souls put into one body and they take turns at who gets to be in charge. And they're dying. For reasons the game never really bothers to explain properly, only one soul may occupy a body or they'll both be destroyed in the end. You can see where this is going - you have to decide which of the two souls gets to keep the body. The other soul will be destroyed.
Here is where it gets stupid: Not only do both souls want you to decide which of them gets to live and which of them dies, even though they've only known you for about five minutes and couldn't give two shits about your personal opinion. They're both okay with dying! Both of them basically say, "Oh, it's okay, my friend here should live and I'll die in peace, knowing at least one of us made it." And this isn't some cheesy Elder Scrolls death where they turn into a spirit and spend an eternity drinking, singing and fucking along with their dead Nord friends somewhere up in Sovngarde. Their souls will be destroyed. That's it, no afterlife, no nothing, dead and completely eradicated for good. And they're both cool with it.
If that quest was at least trying to be remotely believable and realistic, both of them would beg for their miserable lives. Something like this: Soul #1: "I wanna live! Kill the other guy! He shouldn't be alive in the first place! He starts jacking it the moment he gets to take over for a while! And not just to anything! He's looking at the fucking corpses when he does it! We're on the plane of death and he squeezes knuckle children at the sight of dead bodies!" Soul #2: "Don't listen to that filthy liar! If anything, you should destroy him and allow me to live! So what if I wack it now and then, it's the only damn thing you can do around here! At least I'm not fucking the corpses!" #1: "You what?"
#2: "Oh, you head me! This guy is the real sicko! When he's in charge, he skullfucks the rotting bodies of grizzly bears, right in the eyesocket! Destroy him! Think of the bears!"
You know, that way you're gonna feel like shit at the end of the quest, even if there is no real consequence to your decision. It'll stay with you. Not like this happy happy joy joy "Oh, it's okay, go ahead and kill me, I don't mind" nonsense.
My TESO customer support drama finally had its happy ending. A full 23 days after I had filed my ticket, every stolen item and every stolen gold coin had been restored to my account. Not without asking me for stuff such as my Paypal transaction ID for the purchase of this game, which had happened sometime back in February, without any instruction on where the fuck I would even find it. Not without sending two satisfaction surveys before the issue was even close to being resolved. But we got there in the end. I honestly didn't think they'd manage.
This is also where my adventure in TESO ends - for now. I'm 68% into the third veteran rank and I've lost all interest and motivation. Having to complete at least a hundred quests in order to gain another level is tedious, having to kill 32,000 monsters or enemy players to achieve the same goal is a sick joke. Don't get me wrong - I love the setting, the characters, the questing and everything, but the overall pace is so, so very awful, it kills whatever fun I used to have on there. Frankly, I was looking forward to exploring the remaining two thirds of the world, finishing quests here and there, discovering dungeons and what have you.
But not like this. Not when finishing an entire quest line rewards with with anything from .5 to 2 percent of a level-up. Not when fighting a single veteran level enemy is annoying, two of them is tedious and fighting three of them at a time is downright impossible without exploiting the horrid and broken shield bash. I know, I know, early days, WoW had its problems when it was new... god, I'm so tired of that nonsense. I get that shit every single time I point out another MMORPG's flaws.
"The wow servers died a lot at launch. The wow ingame support was crap. Wow this, wow that." Yes. Wow launched nearly a decade ago and the only competition it had was stuff like Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot and Ragnarok Online. Blizzard never anticipated the insane amount of players WoW attracted. This whole thing was unprecedented and there was nothing like it.
It's fucking 2014 now. There is no excuse for setting up the "European Megaserver" that hosts hundreds of thousands of European players all at the same time in the fucking US. Not in a game with a fast-paced realtime combat system, where you're supposed to manually block and dodge enemy attacks, which is annoying during the early morning hours and fucking impossible during prime time. There is no excuse for displaying people's user IDs in public chat and allowing everyone an infinite amount of login attempts whilst entering wrong passwords over and over again, requiring zero authentification whatsoever. There is no excuse for outsourcing your customer support to the cheapest, shittiest bidder you can find, so when you file a hacking ticket, it'll take an entire two weeks for a response, which reads like, "I have noticed your ticket is two weeks old. Does your problem still persist?"
But that's not even the point. What really annoys me about this whole "Well WoW wasn't perfect either" nonsense is how WoW didn't have any serious competition. What were people supposed to do when the WoW servers went down? Cancel their subscription and go back to Ultima Online? HA!
Today there are how many AAA MMORPGs out there, all of which offering more or less the same stuff you get in TESO and the vast majority of them costing no monthly fee whatsoever?
YES, all new MMOs have problems and flaws. That doesn't mean you're not allowed to point them out and criticize them. Especially in a day and age where quality MMOs like Guild Wars cost nothing aside from the price for the game key, whilst TESO charges 15 bucks or whatever the fuck they pay with in your country, every goddam month.
And don't take it from me - look at fucking Metacritic. And while some of my colleagues still insist that this game is oh so fucking great and should be rated somewhere between 80 and 90 percent, because non-existent customer support, constant lag and server problems and the world's dullest and most frustrating "endgame" should not influence the fucking review scores for some reason, the world has moved on regardless. The players, AKA the folks who dare voice their opinions without having to fear that certain big publishers will refuse to sponsor them, have rated this mess an underwhelming 61/100, many of them have moved on, waiting to be disappointed by the upcoming WildStar.
Look. I don't hate TESO. I think some aspects of it are pretty great. I fucking love the pvp. In fact, I'm tempted to resub when patch 1.1 goes live and the experience for killing enemy players will be doubled. Because I'm pretty fucking great at killing enemy players. But great pvp alone isn't enough to make me want to pay a monthly subscription fee. And their new multiplayer endgame, Craglorne? Bunch up in teams of 12 to face extremely difficult challenges in order to obtain endgame gear, which will become obsolete with the next content update? This is exactly the kind of shit that made me unsubscribe from WoW.
So what do I want? "Progress", feeling that my character grows stronger, the possibility to play any way I want and a carrot on a stick, where the fucking carrot is ultimately obtainable. You know, the kind of thing Diablo 3 is doing right now. Yes, I'm comparing games across different genres here, so fucking sue me. Both of them try to keep me playing as much as possible after reaching the dreaded level cap. Diablo rewards me with infinite paragon levels and a seemingly infinite amount of cool items. Last night I have found an amulet, which doesn't only make my character immune to poison - poison fucking heals me now. It's fun, it's unique, it feels powerful without being game-breaking. TESO rewards me with a new veteran rank after 20something hours of grinding boring quests, which results in one extra skill point (I have well over 150 of the damn things and don't know where to put them anymore) and some slightly better gear. New veteran rank weapons literally get 2 more points of damage than weapons from the previous veteran rank. There are ten of those super-exciting ranks (12 when patch 1.1 goes live) and that's it. You're done. Those veteran ranks themselves take an eternity and a half to obtain and provide no sense of progress whatsoever. And the means to obtain them are all equally unattractive. I don't care about ultra hard group content in an Elder Scrolls game, I don't wanna spend entire days questing to gain half a level and eradicating the population of a small country to gain a rank-up isn't very attractive, either. And again, even if I did - what then? Two points of extra damage on my new sword. Wheeeee!
Flaws, bugs and problems aside, I had a whole lot of fun for the 150 or so hours it took me to reach level 50 in TESO. If nothing else, the leveling content is more than worth the initial price for the game, even if you never touch it again. I don't regret playing it. Not at all. But I'm not paying a monthly fee to be part of a dreadfully slow "endgame", which provides no fun, challenge or sense of progress at all. Some of the content they've announced for the coming months looks tempting. Thieves guild, Dark Brotherhood, that stuff is always great. I just wonder if anyone will be around to play it.
Ha! Life is fucking hilarious. Ever had one of those days where you do some stupid shit, just because you're in the mood and you really, really like doing that one thing you're good at and then people show up from all over the globe and throw money at you? Probably not. I'd assume that's a relatively rare thing, right?
What the fuck am I even talking about? Well, I had ignored the whole monetization thingie on my blog for a while until it turned out I'm actually making money with all the stuff I'm posting on here. No "time to stop being a games critic and pay all the bills blogging about obscure old arcade games, reptiles and my penis" money, but "oh hey, I can totally afford a pizza right now" money. I'd throw together a nice little something for cracked.com and try for even more money if I wasn't so afraid of getting rejected by my #1 favourite comedy site on the 'net, but I'll find the motivation one day.
So. Yeah. Thanks for showing up. Thanks for the pizza. And the ego boost. Life is good.
Oh hey, about the whole games critic thing - you may know how I occasionally mention what a shitty games critic I really am. I'm not talking about my abilty to write or how reliable I am with deadlines - you won't find anyone better than me at freelance slave work price range. So they hire me for the funnies and all that, but I don't know shit about rating games. Case in point: TESO vs Diablo 3.
You may recall how hyped up I got about The Elder Scrolls Online a while back. Then I got stuck on a quest blocker for an entire week. Then my account was hacked. Then nobody could be arsed to look into the hack (as of this moment, my unresolved ticket is 20 days old). Then bots raped the everloving shit out of every boss in every public dungeon, making it impossible for (human) players to even get a single hit in. Long story short, I've cancelled my subscription. I thought this game had the potential to become the next big thing and right now I don't even wanna look at it.
"The... The... um... Hey Bob, what did the elves call that stupid tree again? Bob? Ah fuck it, I'll just leave the text the way it is, no one reads that shit anyway."
I'll give it another chance at some point, benefit of the doubt, yada, yada, yada. Right now I'm glad I don't have to play it for work anymore.
Meanwhile, I've moaned about the Diablo 3 expansion a lot, saying it'll lose it's appeal within a week or two. To be fair, I wasn't entirely incorrect. My Bnet friends list used to show 20ish people playing Diablo 3 at any given time. Now they're AFK or they're on Hearthstone or WoW. The hype has definitely died down a lot. Ironically, I'm completely hooked on this repetitive shit.
Blizzard makes characters look badass with the blurriest, shittest textures imaginable.
Yes, I'm getting my guaranteed legendary every hour or so and there's been a major shitstorm on the forums the other day, when all the slow pokes finally figured out how the loot system works months after I complained about it on this very website. And my biggest point of criticism still stands: Diablo doesn't reward player skill or talented play. It just rewards you for logging on. For spending time on there. Or spending time outside the game for a day or five, then logging back on to get showered with even more legendaries.
But let's not get into that all over again. Despite all of that annoying crap, I'm hooked to Diablo's legendary items. Not all of them. Many legendaries are just like any other item, but with slightly better stats or some boring extra stat nobody gives a crap about. But the really cool legendaries can completely alter the way one of your skills works. A special attack might no longer require resources, it might fire larger, stronger projectiles or benefit from every possible skill rune all at the same time. These items can significantly alter your play style and the way your character handles and feels, which is pretty fucking awesome.
I had a halberd, which summoned a herd of murderous cows to fight by my side. There's a ring, which summons an imp, who gobbles up all your useless vendor trash and converts it into higher quality loot. Legendaries might slow down or haunt all the baddies around you for a certain amount of time or protect you with an energy shield whenever you get surrounded by enemies. Some of them make you run faster when you're injured or cause you to leave a trail of lava, which isn't just a cool visual effect, but causes damage to anyone unfortunate enough to stand in it.
When Diablo 3 first came out, it was devoid of innovation. Legendary items looked fun, most of them had abysmal stats and were complete garbage and when they finally got an upgrade, they'd been traded for ridiculous amounts of real money on the now defunct auction house. The new legendary items are inventive, they're incredibly fun to use and it's damn addicting to collect them, because there are so many of them. An amulet, which creates clones of my character and has them fight beside him? Fuck yeah!
Well, looks like my first impression was wrong. For both games. Stay tuned for when I'll hate Diablo and go back to TESO in my next entry!
