As you may still remember from my previous entry, my somewhat flawed gaming experience on FFXIV had greatly improved after a helpful linkshell (guild) spontaneously adopted me. Their help didn't come without an ulterior motive. You see, I'm a paladin. Also known as the only tank in the game. So when they help me get my class quests done, drag me along for epic boss battles and make plans for how, when and where I'm gonna get what kind of insanely powerful gear, they don't just do that because they're so incredibly nice, but because it's incredibly nice to have a well-geared tank around. Works for me. And yes, I said epic boss battles:
Yes, they're referring to me as a 'she'. The Final Fantasy online community still lives in some happy, slightly dated universe, where people assume that only female gamers play female characters. Nobody actually cared to ask me. Thing is, with my trademark name and everything, playing the cat race is the only logical option. And since there are no male cats on FFXIV, well... guess I'm just gonna roll with it. They're in for a fun surprise when we get on voice chat!
Something weird is happening here. In most MMOs I've ever played, I avoided guilds and all responsibility. I played most online games by myself or with friends and family and only until I had managed to get as far as somehow possible without being part of a larger ingame-community, who takes part in raids, world pvp and what have you. Get to the level cap, grab some welfare-epix, score a rare pet and/or mount, get bored, move on.
On FFXIV I'm actually training to become one of the main tanks. I'm fully aware of the responsibility, the schedules and, most of all, the severe punishment for fucking up. One of the endgame boss battles comes with fun tactics such as 'save your defensive buff for exactly this special attack or you'll die and kill the entire raid'. But hey, no pressure!
I'm not entirely sure why the hell I would do this kinda crap to myself. Maybe for nostalgia's sake - the one and only other game where I seriously tanked a lot and made a bit of a name for myself was Final Fantasy XI. Maybe it's because there isn't much else to do on there. Those 4 quests per 12 hours aside, there isn't any actual solo content. And maybe it's because the game has a community, much unlike any other MMO-communities I've ever seen.
Heh. Yeah, I know. I paused for a second when I wrote that sentence about the community, asked myself if I'm biased, because I kinda like the game. But I still think the game is shit. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but people, who actually enjoyed FFXI (aka nobody outside Japan and the US). But the community is fucking nice! Yes, those guys are helping me, because they're hoping to get a powerful tank out of this. But they're still being friendly and helpful, selfish motives and all. Everyone is. Because that's just the thing - in a game, where you constantly depend on the help of others, you only have two options: Be nice and supportive like everybody else or GTFO. Can you imagine me being nice? Of all people? HA!
If you've played WoW, especially after Cataclysm, you'll know that you don't actually depend on anybody, unless you're planning on fighting your way through endgame raids on hard mode. The game has abandoned elite ('group') quests a long time ago and everything else comes with an automatic group finder. Click one button and there's your heroic dungeon, your pvp team or a whole fucking raid group. You don't have to be nice to receive help. In fact, the game rewards you for being an asshole: Ninja-loot everything, need-roll your way through the dungeons and don't give a fuck about anybody else. You'll never see those suckers again! Pandaria will put loot right into people's bags to stop the very assholes that have been created by WoW. A nice idea, but the game still teaches people to be dicks. Quest-monsters with crappy spawn rate? Tag it before the other guy gets it. Shiny, glittery quest-loot? Shift into travel form to grab it before that other dumb fucker gets it. And keep pushing that DPS and make fun of everyone you top on the charts!
FFXIV doesn't allow for most of that nonsense. When you start a quest to kill or loot stuff, other players cannot interfere with your shit. They can't even see your quest monsters until you tag 'em. They can't click your shiny, looty objects. And with a lousy 4 soloable quests every 12 hours, you'll want to group up with people and share whatever you've got, rather than piss them off for no reason. It's a weird system, which borders on virtual bullying, forcing people into being honorable and respectful, but it works. That's Japanese game design for ya.
And I'm seriously enjoying it, warts and all. Plenty of wards, really. The UI is still shit. Lots of people talk about how good the new UI supposedly is, because the original one sucked so much more in comparison. But having over a dozen buttons for basic interaction like trading, summoning mounts or opening a god damn door isn't good. Having a shitload of skills spread over three action bars, yet being unable to see more than one action bar at any given time isn't good.
Then there's this:
Look at this shit! This picture maps a small fragment of one of the game's outdoor areas. Can you imagine how incredibly fun it is to try and navigate a maze like that? Yeah, me neither. Whatever idiot came up with this kind of thing for a leveling and questing area deserves to be crucified. And thrown in a lake. A lake of boiling cat piss.
I could go on. About how NPCs repair your gear to 99%, but you can't auction shit until it's repaired to 100%. About how every single quest suddenly rewards me sauerkraut. About how I'm forced to grind so much more than is healthy in any game. But strangely enough, most of that stuff doesn't bother me enough to make me stop playing.
The game knows! It knows everything!
I had an epiphany during my most recent session on Age of Conan. Where I had to spend 20 minutes waiting for a pvp match. And people were too busy insulting each other in chat to actually take part in the pvp, so the whole thing ended in a crushing defeat without anybody fighting back: I end up hating most online games, because my game experience, my personal fun will always be fucked up by stupid people. Every god damn game allows assholes to ruin the whole damn thing for me. Have people bitch at each other in pvp and refuse to fight? Fine, no pvp rewards for me. Have them steal my quest mobs? Fine, no experience for me. Have them need-roll everything? No loot for me.
On FFXIV I actually like playing with others. They help me kill some paladin quest boss baddie, I get new gear and abilities for a reward and they get nothing. But I'll be sure to help them with their quests in return. And it turns out that when there's no griefing, no trolling and no harassment, it becomes so much easier to get over some of the most awful and stupid game design of this century. Fascinating stuff!
Technically, it wasn't my first ever MMO, but Final Fantasy XI was my first true MMO-love. The first big, real MMO I've seriously played for a long time. It's a bit older than even World of Warcraft and terribly complicated, anything but user-friendly and most of my friends and colleagues consider it one of the worst online games of all times. Ironically, these same people treat Ultima Online like the holy grail of online roleplaying. And judging by its amount of world-wide active subscriptions, FFXI has been a strong second to WoW for quite some time! Long, long ago, mind, but still...
They key aspect to FFXI was on something the vast majority of today's online games have abandoned: Teamplay. And I don't mean adding the occasional group quest here and there. Leveling up, unlocking new abilities and skills, raising your level cap, acquiring important gear - all of these things were tied to quests, which were simply impossible to do alone. Every player depended on the help of others at some point, even if it meant teaming up with fellow adventurers, who wouldn't benefit from helping you in any material way, be it gold, experience or items.
In theory, that's a pretty horrible concept: You cannot achieve anything unless you get help from people, who don't have any connection to your personal quests. If you weren't shy to socialize with people and ask for help, though, the system worked out beautifully and created a community I haven't seen in any other game. Everybody depended on each other, people were willing to help and hoping to get a little help in return. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. I'll never forget the fun I had with my guild (or Linkshell, as they are called) on there.
When Final Fantasy XIV launched roughly one and a half years ago, it had no actual group content. Except, of course, inviting other players to share perfectly soloable quests with. They tried to enforce that sense of camaraderie with dumbass mechanics like gear damage, where you had to run around looking for players to repair your god damn underwear in the middle of nowhere. I'm not even making this up: Every female toon came with a set of panties, which would take durability damage over time. And it was prohibited to self-repair them, because doing so would require you to take them off. You seriously had to look for other players to repair. Your. Fucking. Underpants. I want all of you to know that this is the kind of game we're talking about here.
I tried to love this game. I seriously did. Visually, it mimicked it's MMO-predecessor so well, it looked like a prettier, much cooler version of it, with all the cool races and classes and monsters and landscapes fans of the first online FF experience knew and loved so much. But beneath the surface, it wasn't simply broken or unfinished. There was simply nothing there! No content, nothing to do! The game would literally allow you to do 8 quests every 24 hours and stop you right there. If you decided to level up by grinding baddies, the game would penalize your experience gain at some point until you'd completely stop gaining experience points for the rest of the week!
I don't want to bring up any more examples of how blatantly evil and stupid the very idea behind this game was. Basically, they created a cool tech demo, a pretty but lifeless shell with no actual game behind it, sold it to idiots like me, who fell for the neat graphics and the idea of a prettier, faster-paced FFXI-remake and in the end, they got fired. Final Fantasy XIV remained entirely free to play for the next year to come, no subscription fees, no paid extras, no nothing. And a new developer team has taken over.
I haven't really touched the game since then. Tried it here and there since it was free, nothing really seemed to change and eventually I ignored it. Then they announced dungeons, raids, massive boss battles, the fabled "2.0 total overhaul" is supposed to happen this year and curiosity finally got the better of me when they introduced the job overhaul, along with job-specific armor sets. Anyone familiar with FFXI AF armor will know what I'm talking about. And it looked good:
So I logged on and became a paladin. I loved being a paladin on FFXI. Fighting at the front line, calling the shots, setting the pace. It was unbelievably stressful and awesome at the same time. Tanking, helping out with the healing, blinding baddies to avoid getting hit too much, difficult, complex multitasking for... okay, I'm getting carried away here. Let's just say I love being a paladin. On anything that isn't WoW.
When I say I came back to FFXVI to become a paladin, what I really mean is that I got the required class upgrade quest, but I couldn't do it, because it required a full group of players. And believe it or not - when I asked around for help, not only did I find a bunch of nice players to join me on my quest. When they realized I didn't have my own mount (which had not been implemented when I last played), they helped me obtain my very own goobbue:
This is my fucking mount! Rawr?
So after a fun little adventure I had a brand spanking new monster to ride around on and I was a real paladin! And when I got ready to part ways with my new friends, one of them sent me a trade request and without me asking for any help, I had an extra 200,000 gil (monies) and a link pearl (aka guild invitation) in my pocket.
During my absence, the guys at Squeenix have added quite a bit of new stuff to do. There are the new 'Grand Companies', which send you on quests around the globe. You get special class quests every five levels, on which you obtain class-specific gear and abilities. Resting at the brand new inns grants you experience bonuses for faster leveling rather than punishing you for excessive grinding. And while the game still only allows you to pick up a terribly restrictive 4 new quests every 12 hours, at least these new 'allowances' (that's what they're actually called!) stack over time for up to 99 consecutive quests.
Most of all, you actually have a motivation to do all the new stuff. You'll want to unlock the cool new classes. With the upgraded combat system, playing a paladin is actually fun! I won't lie to you - the UI, whilst somewhat improved, is still atrocious and borderline useless. Why do I have to switch back and forth between three individual hotbars instead of just displaying all three of them at the same time like on every other fucking game allowed me to do a decade ago?
And it's inconsistencies like that, which make Final Fantasy XIV a bad game today. Not the horrible, broken, abysmal game it was last year, but it's a far cry from being finished and enjoyable. Why can I stack up to 99 quests allowances, yet I only receive 4 of the stupid things every twelve fucking hours? One quest takes roughly 15 minutes and then there's no more questing to be done for the rest of the day. Why do I get rested XP bonuses to encourage killing mobs, when monster spawns feature enemies, which are nearly 20 levels apart from each other? When I'm level 35, I don't want to be in an area where half of the mobs are level 25 and the other half are level 39! On average, their level is just right. But most of them pose no challenge and yield no experience and the rest of them are almost impossible to kill. Which idiot came up with that shit?
Some of the new Grand Company quests (or 'leves' as they call them) are supposed to be quick and easy to get you right into the action: Activate them right at the quest area, jump right in, none of them take longer than 15 minutes. The bigger Grand Company quests are the exact opposite and are absolutely atrocious: The game will send you to the other end of the game world, forcing you to spend a full 10-15 minutes traveling to your quest destination. Once there, some other quest NPC will send you to yet another spot, which is yet another 5-10 minutes away. From there, you'll usually get into a small fight, which takes less than a minute to resolve, then you gotta run all the way back to the second quest NPC and THEN you're supposed to travel back to town to hand in your report. It's an easy 30+ minutes of walking around and boring, dumb cutscenes full of endlessly stupid, mindless drivel and shitty writing, half a minute of combat and zero sense of reward.
Just what the fuck are you talking about?
The really sad thing is how, as a fan of the first FF online game, I'm enjoying FFXIV now, lousy design and everything. Teaming up with my new linkshell, unlocking new pieces of set armors and getting new abilities, earning the right to own and name my own chocobo - it's actually fun, if just for nostalgic value.
He looks delicious!
The main problem with this game is that it's like a Final Fantasy XI inside joke. They're adding more and more references to the original Final Fantasy Online, from advanced jobs to artifact armors to summon-battles against Garuda and Ifrit. If you've experienced these things back in the day, they're more than likely to conjure some happy memories. In fact, these elements are good enough to be mildly enjoyable. But only if you understand the reference. Only if you've actually been there, if you're willing to relive some of those happy old days some of us had back on FFXI.
If you haven't played, maybe even disliked the spiritual predecessor of FFXIV, then I just don't see how you could possibly enjoy this game. Fancy graphics or not - would you enjoy playing a game, where doing boring run of the mill kill-quests is tied to a cooldown timer? Would you enjoy flicking back and forth between three different action bars, because you can't just display them all at the same time? Would you enjoy a game that considers pointless walking around for 20+ minutes actual content? Would you enjoy being sent to the asshole of the universe on a level 25 quest, with a level 25 character and aggressive level 45 monsters lurking along the way? And quest dialoge containing, "And lo how they quicken"?
Yes, this game has dungeons now. From what I've seen, they're a total of two. Two dungeons. Two 'raid' boss encounters for groups of eight players. And seven advanced classes, which you cannot unlock without the help of other players, whith abilities and gear you cannot unlock without teaming up. You may not mind if you're the social type. But if you like getting stuff done without depending on others, you're fucked.
There is simply no way this game will ever succeed with anyone but the most die-hard fans of the series. And by series, I'm really referring to the 8bit games, 'Tactics' and the previous online game. This is a game made by people, who have never seen, let alone played a modern MMORPG. I refuse to believe that any of those guys know anything about WoW, Guild Wars, SW:ToR or any other online game people have talked or cared about, recently. It fails on even the most basic stuff. If I can't just log on, jump in, grab a few quests and start leveling, because everything feels tedious, complicated, like fucking science and full of artificial limitations, if you can't even get your fucking key elements straight, then you won't win any new players. Fancy new class armors or not.
And that's a damn shame. I mean, look at this:
Those are the characters Claire and I are playing. Yes, the tails, freaky haircuts and hair- and skintones may not be everyone's cup of tea. Freaky anime shit. But the level of detail, the animation, the way these two interact with each other is so impressive, life-like and unlike anything I've ever seen in any other game. That stuff looks really, seriously good! The first time I hopped on my massive goobbue it felt so strange, so surreal, the last time I've seen anything like it was in a Studio Ghibli movie.
I can't in my right conscience recommend this game to anybody. Because it's horrible. Because it feels like you have to do a college course on FFXIV before you even understand basic questing.
But if you do have friends who are seriously willing to help you through job quests, if you're dying to own a chocobo, if you're as stupid and naive as I was, getting tricked by the fancy graphics and the incredible soundtrack, well... let's just say they finally have airships travelling from town to town and repair NPCs, who sort you out all the way to 99% at reasonable prices. And a market search counter, which lets you buy your stuff straight away instead of forcing you to find a fucking retainer. They've started to add basic comfort features and common sense. But that's as good as it gets.
My job requires me to be an MMO whore. Play a game 12 hours a day, explore every single aspect of it, possibly including classes, features and content you personally don't care about, so you can write a fair review, create a helpful guide, or at the very least, come up with an article that somehow covers up the fact you're just stealing it all from Wikipedia. And before you know it, you're already supposed to check on the next big title. Ooookay, since 95% of the stuff I do is F2P, it's not that strict for me, but you get the idea. Play a lot of stuff all the time. Download and install game after game after game.
This behaviour will inevitably cause you to neglect and eventually forget about certain games you enjoy. Games you'd play for fun and not just because it's a job. From this blog's headline, you've already derived I'm talking about Age of Conan here.
Like most people who, at some point in their life, came out of a vagina, Claire happens to have a mother. And said mother was playing AoC the last time we visited the family, while I was sitting right next to her. And I was watching her for a while and asked myself, "Why the hell did I ever stop playing that?"
This is solo content.
Hyboria has always been one of my favourite virtual hangouts. Sure, four years after the launch of AoC, the game world isn't as stunning and breathtaking as it used to be, but it's still gorgeous enough to draw me in. There is this omnipresent contrast of sheer amazing beauty and rancid filth. You can watch the sunset at the docks in a fantastic, very realistic and life-like city, seagulls circling around, dockworkers unloading crates from the ships and what have you, only to be interrupted by a drunk pirate, who decides to take a massive piss right next to you. You get blazing deserts, snowy mountains and lush, green fields and forests as much as bloated corpses dangling from the trees, with crows pecking at their eyeballs. I like it, because it's plausible. It makes sense. Most games usually go for one extreme or the other: They try to impress players with massive, majestic cities and landscapes or they're over the top gory and dirty and depressing. But you can't have a nice, big metropolis without poverty, without dark, creepy corners, where the shit piles up in the streets, where people riot, where disease and decay spread. There is a constant sense of dread. There's probably something lurking around the next corner, waiting to jump you, wanting to kill you for a million reasons or just out of desperation and hunger.
The other day, one of my friends told me he has some level 80 toons on AoC, wanting to know whether or not there is any point in coming back. So I had a look around.
I suppose that for anyone enthusiastic about being part of a major guild and taking part in the raid content, the answer is pretty simple: The final Khitai raid encounters have only been implemented today and if you want to grind your way up the raid tiers for sexy and powerful gear, then that's the way to go. But maybe you're more like me, you're not the most social kinda guy and you just can't get yourself to ask around for endgame dungeon groups, let alone raids. AoC has no dungeon finder at the moment, people spam the global chat channels to find people and the abreviations alone are enough to drive away most fresh max level players. LFM HoX Khitai HMs AA EXP req pst!
Even if you can figure out what all of that means, people require you to be kitted out in gear ten times more powerful than what is actually needed to beat most dungeons, they expect you to know all the boss tactics and if you're a newcomer, you'll be in for a hard time. The game has been around for a while, the veterans have played most of the pre-raid and lower tier raid content to death and unless you're part of some big, helpful guild, which is willing to teach you the basics, trying to get into the whole thing might just be a bit too intimidating and overwhelming.
Feeling lonely? Steal a wolf pup and raise it to be your pet!
Seeing as AoC also features so-called pvp 'minigames', which work just like WoW's battlegrounds, you might get the idea to just get stronger by taking part in those. And in theory, that's entirely possible. Winning in pvp raises your pvp level and nets you tokens, tokens and pvp levels are required to purchase epic pvp gear, epic pvp gear makes you more powerful. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, the truth is a lot less fun than any of this. A vast amount of players taking part in the minigames have spent a massive amount of time getting all the epic pvp gear you're drooling over. They do more damage than you could ever dare dream about, their shiny armors prevent you from even putting a dent in their health bars and most of them are capped out on the dreaded AA-system. You see, once you reach the level cap on AoC, you get the possibility to make your character even more powerful by gaining so-called AA points. 'Alternative Advancement'. For the most part, it's a pretty cool feature. Instead of standing still and not getting any stronger and better, you may use AA points to raise your resistances, your overall DPS and unlock whole new special attacks and skills. And if somebody has been an active subscriber for the past 2 years and has gathered 700 AA points and you just dinged 80, well... you're fucked.
Basically, it's like this: Every other player has better gear than you do. Gaining ranks and tokens to obtain some of the weaker, first-tier pvp stuff requires hundreds of utterly frustrating, humiliating pvp matches, where you're little more than a walking free kill. Everyone will hate you. The enemy team will always attack you first, because every kill looks good on the scoreboard and you're the softest target. Your own team mates will tell you to fuck off and die, because your very presence most likely ruins their chances at winning the match. And even if you spend 20 Euros on the most basic cash shop pvp stuff to stand at least a small chance, the vast majority of players around you will still have better gear and a headstart of a couple years on farming AA points.
My pvp level is 4 right now, with the maximum being level 10. If I'm lucky, I can get about 5% of pvp experience per day. That's 20 days of getting my ass kicked and being insulted by everyone on the server to be allowed to buy some epic gloves and bracers. Then I gotta get to pvp level 6 to get my epic leg armor, which will require a little more experience and take a little more time. I will probably start self-harming somewhere halfway to pvp level 7.
If you're good, you can finish even the toughest solo dungeon without raid gear.
There are surveys and forum threads about this, people are trying to find a solution to make pvp more fun and less frustrating to newcomers, without alienating the veterans too much. Nobody is entirely sure how to fix this mess and until they come up with a working solution, I really wouldn't recommend pvp to anyone, unless you actually love getting hurt. And I'm talking one-shots, tea-bagging, people openly threatening to flay you, your dog and your entire family if you ever dare set foot into any pvp-related area again. You can grit your teeth, ignore it, hope for the next level up and gloat over the occasional kill you might get against some other unsuspecting noob, but for the most part, it's just cyber-mobbing.
So, would I recommend coming back if you're level 80, you're not into raids and you're not stupid enough to consider going for pvp gear? YES!
That is, of course, if you've actually stopped at the level cap and you haven't been around for Turan, the F2P transition and possibly even Khitai. And if you don't mind spending a bit of money, because in order to get anywhere at level 80, you won't get around a subscription and buying access to the areas of the expansion and the adventure pack.
One of AoC's biggest highlights are the level-scaling solo instances. Khitai comes with the Forgotten City and the Breach, the former of which had just been added an extra hard 'Unchained'-mode, where baddies are level 83 and drop tons of nice loot, if you can defeat them. In Turan you get to explore Dead Man's Hand and the Isle of the Iron Statues, the latter being an incredibly tough solo instance full of level 84 critters. If you want to see how good your gear and spec really are, this is the place to go. It's harder than any other solo content I have ever seen in this game, but if you try hard enough, it can be done without any raid gear.
If you haven't been to Khitai before, just getting there can be an adventure in itself. If you don't want to pay the fare to get there safe and sound, you will have to earn your spot in a caravan by fighting a giant kraken, diving for lost treasure or cleansing an undead-infested oasis. And even without the dungeons, Khitai is a wild and exciting place to explore. The four adventure-zones are chock-full of solo quests, most of which are repeatable, so you may raise your standing with certain factions and unlock sexy new armor or even a brand new battle pet or a mount. Stealing a tiger cub and teaching it how to hunt can be a lot more exciting than just clicking a tame hotkey on any random monster.
Of course none of this comes without a certain MMO-esque grind-factor and a certain amount of repetition. At some point you will know all of the solo dungeons, you will know all the quests around Khitai and you'll end up repeating them only for tokens to obtain better gear, that cool wolf pet or a big tiger to ride around on. But that will happen to you, no matter whether you're a pvp-nut, a raid fanatic or the proverbial lone wolf. At some point, you will end up repeating content in order to unlock some sexy new reward. The carrot on a stick.
The nice thing about AoC is that even as a solo player, you still get that carrot if you want it. If you don't want to do heroic dungeons, raids and pvp on WoW, the game ends at the level cap. On AoC, you become stronger and stronger by earning AA points, you get the fun, repeatable solo-dungeons, which also serve as a cool benchmark for testing new gear and specs and you get Khitai's epic adventure zones. And with a dungeon finder and a pvp revamp on the horizon, using all this content to warm up and relight the old flame a bit isn't such a bad idea. And if none of that works for you, there's always gratuitous violence and tits.
My home isn't just my proverbial castle. It is also my workplace. And when I'm at work (i.e. playing video games or making fun of them), I don't want to be disturbed. People disturb me. And so do pants. This is my home, this is where I live and this is where my wang shall never be constricted by pants. In fact, we do have a rule around the house, which says that my significant other has to make a phone call and warn me 30 minutes before she brings any visitors. Otherwise, I will not be wearing pants. Which doesn't bother me in the slightest.
One potential threat to my pantsless workplace castle freedom is the existence of neighbours. There is a flat right on top of our own and over the years, our living experience has varied greatly with each set of upstairs inhabitants. The current pair would be Fat Chick and Monkeyboy. Fat Chick probably has a real name, but I choose to call her that, because she has no other apparent qualities. She's about as entertaining to talk to as a bottle of 3in1 Shampoo and even less pleasant to look at. The first thing that jumped into my mind whenever I see her is, "Wow! She's FAT!" So there you go.
She used to live with a strange creature I like to call Monkeyboy. By their loud arguments I derive he must be old enough to earn money, but he has the voice and looks of a 12 year old boy and he rides around on one of those little monkey bikes. It's what kids do around here: They wear their pants around their ankles and expose their butts like somebody in jail willing to sell it for a bowl of soup. And they ride around on shitty miniature bicycles.
Fat Chick & Monkeyboy were the most tolerable neighbours we've had so far. Which doesn't mean I don't hate them. I really do. But after living with a dipshit, who practiced with his guitar at 3 in the morning and a bunch of stoners, who made the entire block smell of pot, this latest couple of mutants were a welcome change. Sure, their absolute lack of talent didn't stop them from singing at the top of their lungs all day and listening to them playing their shitty old N64 games at maximum volume until midnight each day wasn't the most pleasant experience I could ever imagine, but it was tolerable. Most of all, they left me the hell alone. Eventually, Monkeyboy left Fat Chick and never showed up anymore and Fat Chick has been evading me ever since she had a nice long stare at my wang through the living room window. I didn't force that stupid old cow to plant her fucking flowers right in front of my damn window and I'm not gonna put some fucking pants on, just because she's hanging around outside. So there's that.
Sadly, the days of peace are about to come to an end. Monkeyboy came back this morning and the Bear and I woke up to one of the more entertaining upstairs arguments. "You're disgusting", I heard him shout in his 12 year old voice. I was really getting my hopes up there! Thought maybe she took a massive crap in the litter box or something. But then he said she's disgusting when it comes to money. What a stupid choice of words! You can be disgusting with food, fetishes, kinky habits, but money? Lame!
He spent the next 20 minutes shouting at her for wanting all the money back he spent on their bills, food and every other thing. I wasn't exactly dying to know all the details, but it's a nice, hot summer day, all the windows are open and he was beeping and squeaking with all the noise he could make, so it was rather difficult to ignore.
He was also slamming doors with the rage of an angry kitten. Or maybe they were playing ping pong the whole time, but her screaming at him to stop slamming doors after every gentle 'tink' suggests he must have been raging with all his teenage might. And then she puked her guts out. Here's a fun fact for ya: When you pour a liquid down the drain of your sink or your tub around here, i.e. water or vomit, it doesn't just disappear the way you might know it if you live in a country where people know shit about plumbing. It flows through an outdoor pipe along the wall of the house and gathers in a sinkhole in the backyard, which happens to be right in front of our bedroom window. It's a very cool thing to wake up to: We could hear Fat Chick cough and gargle upstairs and all the puke came down through the pipe downstairs. Whee!
I don't think they'll be living here for much longer. Fat Chick's mail has been piling up in the corridor for a few weeks now. Angry letters. Somehow you can always tell payment reminders and bills from regular mail. They look official. Threatening. Maybe it's just how they tend to come with big, red exclamation marks on them or how nobody dares pick them up, but there's a bit of a scary aura about them.
Yes, I know. None of my business and all that. But come on. Those fucking letters are there, right in our corridor. And it's a bit difficult to avoid hearing all those arguments. And the puke. Might as well take pleasure in it. Because that's what we did. We held hands, looked at each other, laughed for a while and went back to sleep with a happy sigh.
I wonder what the new neighbours are gonna be like. And whether we get to nick another cool high-tech microwave oven, when the current neighbours disappear without a word of warning or paying any of their bills. I just hope they're gonna leave me alone. Well... I guess I can always show my dick if they piss me off.
I know, I know. Diablo 3 is fucking what little there is left of my sanity. For the best part of a decade I was hyped about it, preordered it about five or so years ago, then I stopped caring the more I heard about what it was gonna be like. Told everyone I wasn't gonna play it much. I even wasted a ton of money by refusing to write any guides or articles about it, because I simply didn't care about the game enough.
I was still getting the game, of course, what with me being a monthly pass idiot and all, so when it went live, I gave it a try. Well, several hours after it went live, because the Blizzard servers didn't work too well and you can't actually play Diablo 3 unless the servers are up, even if you just intend on having some singleplayer fun. That's like being forced to wait until the missus comes home before having a wank.
And it was fun. Sure, it's all candy-coloured, it really looks ten years old and the soundtrack... well, let's just say it's not as good as the music in the original games. Not by a long shot. As I played through the piss-easy normal difficulty, I thought maybe I was just that good. First time I ever died on my first ever character was at level 21, while I was rubberbanding like mad and lagging like crazy (yes, insane lag in a singleplayer session, which other game offers that?), I couldn't get away from a boss baddie and - WHAM! That was the end of me.
I came to terms with the oversimplified character-progression long before launch (no more manual stat increases, no stat requirements on items, it's all super casual now), I got some fun out of the simple skill-system, which had replaced complex talent trees and before I knew it, I was well on my way through Hell difficulty. The game still felt insanely easy and D3 Hell simply isn't anywhere near as tough as Hell is in Diablo 2. But that didn't bother me - Inferno mode was on the horizon. Even the somewhat dumb and predictable storyline wasn't a big deal. So the Diablo 1 hero wasn't just the 'wanderer' now, but suddenly became Leoric's eldest son Aidan, apparently he shagged Adria the witch and she gave birth to Leah, who - GASP! - eventually becomes Diablo.
It's all a bit weird. Tyrael and Adria have new voice actors and sound nothing like they used to, Tyrael is a black guy and Diablo is a girl. It's kind of a 21st century equality thing or summat. I mean, everyone is either black or a chick or a combination of these two now. It doesn't bother me, but that kind of thing stopped being unique, cool or surprising quite a while back. Of course there's also a lot of soulstone talk going on. You know, trapping the souls of Diablo and pals in a soulstone, so they may not be reborn and all that? Well, turns out that after killing Diablo at the end of the game, there is no soulstone around, they just do a quick Osama on his body and say evil is dead now and everyone can live happily ever after. Erm... huh? What? But didn't they kill Diablo exactly like that in that weird anime teaser and then he was reborn? So why is this no longer a problem? Hellooo?!
Okay. So the story is a bit shit, the music is shit, the visuals are a bit dated, the game is a bit too easy... oh and did I mention there are no more rune words or any rune enchantments for that matter? No horadric cube and all that? I know, 15 year old Diablo 1 didn't have any of that, but at least it had stats allocation and... well, character progression was probably a tad more complex back then. But oh well, I was having fun, I was leveling up like mad, I absolutely destroyed the first three, stupidly easy difficulty levels and then I got started on Inferno. Heh... yeah.
I'm playing a barbarian. I'm not a huge fan of the barbarian, but it was the one of the five boring classes in this game I could tolerate the most. According to my stats, I have about 70% resistance vs absolutely every form of damage, both physical and magical, I have tens of thousands of hit points and just as much DPS, all the most powerful gear one could farm on hell difficulty and none of it matters. Because on inferno difficulty, you run into packs of elite mobs, who will trap your character and hold them in one spot, then either kill them with a single melee attack, nuke them with stupidly powerful pink lasers or they just surround you with minions, which happen to be invulnerable, yet they're insanely efficient at stopping you from running away or grabbing health pickups.
The most popular strategy to defeat those guys is "kiting", which is a fancy expression for "running away like a pussy". Basically, you're supposed to run away for 20 minutes and only attack whenever your most powerful, 2 minute cooldown abilities become available. If you take too long to beat a particular baddie, the game will put a curse on you and you will lose health over time.
They said inferno was going to be incredibly difficult. I suppose they got that part straight. Alas, none of this is actually challenging or fun in any way. It's not difficult in a way that you could overcome these baddies by getting better at the game or mastering your character. It's difficult in a way that enemies use a selection of incredibly cheap, stupid, frustrating and blatantly unfair abilities to humiliate you in every way imaginable.
I don't mind baddies with obscene amounts of health, who dish out massive damage. I don't mind monsters with nasty special attacks, for as long as they can be countered or evaded in some way. But enemies, who just create magical walls around you or simply immobilize your character from a distance, then take you out in a single shot, aren't fun. This isn't clever gameplay, it's not brilliant design, it's not "getting more complex with every level" as had been announced at Blizzcon. It's cheap. It's cheap, unfair and nothing but that.
The main problem, however, is how the entire game becomes centered about these broken, annoying groups of "rare" baddies. They drop all the good loot. They buff your chance at finding more gold and better items up to 75%. They drop more stuff than Diablo and all the "regular" bosses combined, they're ten times more powerful than Diablo will ever be, they make all other enemies and bosses completely redundant. Which would all be nice and neat, if they were actually fun to kill. If you've played Diablo 2 on Hell difficulty, then you've probably spent a LOT of time killing Diablo (or Baal) for loot. And they generally dropped some nice stuff. The fight was actually pretty fun, everyone was getting excited over the impending loot drops, it was repetitive, but strangely addictive at that.
The rare baddies on Diablo 3 aren't fun. Not remotely. And their loot, whilst nicely colour-coded in blue and yellow, is rarely ever worth the effort. Why oh why do enemies on a level 60 mega hard difficulty setting drop level 56-59 items half of the time? What the fuck am I supposed to do with a wizard staff, that has shitloads of strength and dexterity on it? Why do I have to spend an eternity farming those fuckers, dying fifty times per pack, only to get a bunch of insanely useless loot, which goes straight to the vendor at 250 gold a pop?
Don't get me wrong. I don't want the first monster I run across to explode in a cloud of epic, super-powerful gear that will make the rest of inferno a cakewalk. But in its current state, there is no fun to be had on inferno. Risk vs reward isn't just fucked up, it's simply not there! Die over and over again against stupidly powerful enemies, grit your teeth, force yourself to kill them no matter how frustrating the process, get rewarded with useless trash.
Diablo 2 was tough on hell. It took a lifetime of farming (or 20 monies at any Chinese D2 website) to get all the best gear. But it was actually fun! It was hard, but it was doable and it was fun. Diablo 3 isn't. Normal - Hell are a joke and Inferno is a kick in the nuts.
It's a nice game, sure. I think it's worth the money. I had fun getting where I am. But now I have zero motivation to keep playing. Even if I keep trying until eventually they may or may not adjust this crap, the impending real money auction house pretty much ruins the fun. So I could spend all day farming the most powerful stuff if they ever manage to make it playable. Or I could just leave 100 Quid at the RMAH, get all the most powerful stuff and be done with it for good. Hurray.
I dunno. I think I'm just gonna wait for Torchlight 2 now.
I don't wanna go into that whole 'WoW sucks and is full of idiots' kind of garbage all over again. Or how I'm not a fan of pandas. Plenty of blogs about that, really. Done my fair share of bitching about it, as well. Thing is, I have friends who are actually crazy about the whole thing, one of which happens to be a GM and... well, let's just say he seemed awfully hurt when I kept on bitching about the game. I'm a troll at heart (the flaming type, not of the tusked variety), but even I get older, wiser and more mature. At a much slower rate than most people, but there ya have it. Friends working at Blizzard don't enjoy my bitching about WoW. Kinda like a certain friend at Frogster doesn't appreciate it when I crack jokes about Aion or Tera. Fair enough - I don't like any of them making fun of my work or the magazines I write for. Respect and friendship 101. Or something. I dunno... it's not the point of this entry, anyway.
Something has happened today. Something I wasn't expecting to happen in a lifetime. The end of an era. At a very early stage in our relationship, I have introduced my significant other to WoW. Just plain old vanilla, BC wasn't even out. Feels like eons ago now. She never played any computer games before and turned with her arrow keys like the complete noob she was. My old man was there, my brother played it and it all felt unlike anything we had played before. The enchanted teletubbie forests around Darnassus actually still felt magical and wondrous back then, my old man's dwarven hunter, Redbeard, felt so incredibly fitting and my night elf warrior was the biggest asshole on all of Alleria.
I had experimented with Ultima Online before, I used to play Ragnarok Online like crazy, but completely unfamiliar with the holy trinity of MMOs I was entirely oblivious about the concept of tanking or how that was supposed to be my job when I first stepped into the Deadmines. The first cape that actually resembled a, well, cape... the first gold coin in my inventory, the first pair of pauldrons... countless little milestones, everything was all nice and new - one of my friends wrote a rather witty blog about it a while back, comparing these experiences to the first time you ever get laid (and you're in the unlikely and fortunate position of stuff actually going as planned). You never forget these moments and as time goes by, nostalgia will make them even better and more exciting as they ever really were.
I remember our first little guild. 'Die Glücksritter'. Loved the name and the idea behind it, but the whole thing eventually fell apart when our more ambitious members decided to join the bigger, more powerful raid guilds. Nowadays, that's perfectly normal - you join a leveling guild for their bonuses and benefits and as you grow up, you leave them for a raid group, a band of pvp nuts or whatever floats your boat. And then there were the Goatbusters. Fun, tiny guild I had started with Claire after we had infected the entire family with WoW fever.
I don't wanna get too boring with all the details here, but we did have lots of fun, went on some incredibly exciting dungeon runs and even a few raids here and there and we've got quite a few stories to tell. You can probably relate if you've stayed with the same guild for several years. There is something undeniably fun about the whole thing: You know a bunch of regular people in real life, they're average Janes and Joes like everybody else, but on WoW, we've all slipped into our roles, everybody had their one favourite main character. It's a bit like a bunch of people with secret identities, with alter egos, boring office guy turning into a blood-thirsty orc at 8 every night. You get the idea. Like those cheesy super hero families. Everyone had that one silly character that best suited their personality. It was all just fun and games, but it was a neat little escape from real life.
The best part about it all was leading the guild, taking care of things along with Claire's druid: Libranzer. Yeah, I know. And don't ask me. Something about her being a Libra and what have you, I don't know, she's my partner, you don't criticise that kinda stuff, let's move on. And we'd decide where to go, what to do, one of us would do the tanking for the rest of 'em, we'd help with basic gear setup (i.e. what gems, enchantments etc. to use) and show off with 2on2 arena ratings higher than anyone else's - for as meaningless as they most certainly are.
But as time went on, I gradually lost interest in the game until it turned into nothing but a chore. Claire wanted her arena gear, so I'd log on to cap conquest points with her. Raids? Seen 'em all. At least the ones our guild could actually handle. Dungeon runs with the guild? Again? For the 20th time that month? Not in the mood. I really just showed myself to help Claire get her stuff and logged off again right after. At some point, even Claire got bored of the arena, of constantly grinding for stuff that would become obsolete after the next patch. So I stayed away and she only logged on 'for fun' and to chat with the family.
And tonight it finally happened. She mentioned it on several occasions, but I didn't believe she would ever do it: She passed on guild leadership to her sister. She is not going to renew her subscription after it runs out, she's not buying MoP and even though she had beta access for about a month now, she has not actually looked at the beta. Not once. And for reasons I cannot quite explain, I feel rather sad about the whole thing. Not sad enough to be wanting to stop her in any way, of course. But this is it. This is actually it.
You see, I have quit WoW plenty of times. And most of the time I had zero intention of coming back, but it's hard to live in a relationship where your partner spends up to 8 hours a day playing that stupid game. In a way, she was my anchor - she'd discover some cool new features that came with some new update or an expansion or what have you and she'd drag me back. And I won't lie to you: For as much as I hated the farming, the grind, going after some stupid mounts, sets and achievements I never really gave a fuck about, there was something incredibly fun about these days, as well.
Claire and I simply kicked ass. We tackled dungeons together that nobody else in the guild could finish. We were unstoppable in duels, we topped the scoreboards in pvp, we ran a nice little guild and we explored Azeroth side by side. It's one thing doing all of this stuff with friends, with a guild, with people you enjoy hanging out with. It becomes a lot more fun and meaningful if you're doing it with someone you love. I know it's all a bit cheesy, but what's the most heroic thing most of us will do with our partners in real life? File a tax return?
On WoW, we fought side by side, beat countless opponents in the arena, helped each other through the toughest dungeons, saved each other's lives countless times and faced all kinds of crazy challenges together. And eventually, you start caring about your partner's character just as much as you'd care about your own.
Alright, alright. I know there's a whole bunch of people out there, who don't know shit about RPGs and who just play whatever class is considered most OP at the time. People, who change race, gender and faction more often than their own underwear and who don't actually get attached to their toons. I hope you're all gonna die of ass cancer, but that's a different story. But Claire and I (and everyone in the guild, really) love our characters and we hate leaving them, for as much as WoW bores us these days. So seeing her pass on guild leadership, knowing she's gonna park her ass in Moonglade to 'settle down' and end her adventuring days once and for all, watching as Libranzer takes her well-deserved rest... it's sad. It's also incredibly cool, because I don't have to feel guilty about emptying those 40 gigs of space this monster of a game was occupying on my HD, but it's mostly sad. I'm gonna miss her. I'm gonna miss those days where her and I would slay dragons, keep the squishy guild mates out of harm's way and brag about our stupid arena rating and the new gear we'd obtain faster than anybody else.
Those are some of the coolest gaming memories I have. And no matter how much WoW may change, whether it remains the most successful game of all times for another 8 years or whether upcoming new titles will eventually render it outdated and obsolete, no matter how annoyed I am at the bunch of drooling idiots, who call themselves gamers today (did you SEE those mutants at Blizzcon?), I will always treasure those days, those adventures and all the fun and excitement we've had.
And even though Libranzer and Sabreclaw will finally settle down for good, there's already a new, eager young pair of adventurers eager to explore a whole new world. Tyria awaits, Guild Wars 2 is on the horizon and we can't wait to write a whole new story on there, obtain a whole bunch of new fond memories and fight our way through dungeons and legions of foes, which we've never encountered on any other game. And we're bringing a whole lot of friends, who will join us when we create our next little guild...
So fare thee well, Libranzer. Rest well, Sabreclaw. Azeroth is in the hands of a new, more panda-friendly generation of heroes now as our old heroes finally retire. But our next big adventure is only about to begin.
Something weird has happened to me during the Guild Wars 2 beta weekend. Something that has not happened to me in any mmo since... gee, I don't even remember. Final Fantasy XI about a decade ago? I was happy to see other players, who were finishing the same quest that I was working on! Can you believe it?
You all know what people say about the community on WoW. How it's bad, full of jerks, everyone is a selfish prick, yada, yada, yada. When you think about it, that's the game's own fault. It teaches us to be assholes. You have all stood and watched as some other player attacked a boss or some kind of rare baddie, watched the player's health go down, stood there as he got in trouble... and you didn't help. In fact, you wanted him to get it over with and fucking die already. And when he finally did, you stood on the player's corpse and claimed the monster for yourself, showing that noob how it's done.
Why? Because you don't get any experience for helping random players, your quests won't update, you get absolutely nothing out of it. All you see is some random prick killing your fucking monster and you want him to suffer for it. Of course you could have just invited him to your group, but he had already tagged the monster and besides - come on! He's in your damn spot, fighting your damn quest mobs! There's no way in hell you wanna help that sucker!
That very same thing happens all the time, to every player in one variation or another. You're running for some glittering object on the ground, which you need to pick up to finish a quest and some asshole druid appears, shifts into travel form and outruns you, because he too needs that item. One of my friends has spent ages camping a rare baddie she wanted to tame with her hunter and some other player popped up, demanded a thousand gold and when she didn't respond, he killed the critter in the middle of the taming process.
Every other player is an enemy. Pandaria will eradicate the fight over items by moving boss loot directly into people's inventory and skipping the need and greed rolls, but all the phasing, cut-scenes and Asia-flavoured stereotypes in the world won't stop other players from going after exactly the same quest items, the same quest mobs, waiting for the same stupid respawn.
Now, let's move the whole thing to Guild Wars 2. You're watching another player, who is fighting a boss baddie. You jump in to help him and as the two of you fight, help each other, maybe even throw a heal and a buff or two, more and more people join in until eventually, with everybody's help, you have managed to defeat the bad guy, the event is finished, everybody gets experience points and loot. You don't even have to invite any of the other players - they're all free to join the fun and they all get rewarded according to their contribution. And suddenly, you don't want them to stay the hell away from your kill. In fact, you welcome them, because the whole thing is quicker and easier with more people. Quest difficulty scales up with the amount of participants, so more people usually means more action, more fighting, more experience and more loot. More people = good!
Here's another thing: Reviving other players = good. Everyone gets to resurrect fallen players and doing so will earn you titles, achievements and experience points. Go and ask for a revive in the local chat channel when you die on WoW. I dare you! Yes I know, graveyard is just around the corner and all, but when a paladin walks right past your corpse and you're politely asking for help and they tell you to fuck off, it does somewhat hurt the gaming experience. On GW2, people will give an arm and a leg just to bring you back to life. Sure - they're doing it for nothing but selfish reasons, but they're still helping.
And while I'm at it: Your character's personal story is not as moving or detailed as the story you get on The old Republic. You don't really make any decisions, you don't choose to be good or evil, it's all pretty much pre-scripted. But it's your fucking story. You get to watch your own character talk and act and come to life. When is the last time you've experienced your own story on WoW? For the past couple of years all we do is tag along with Blizzard's pre-defined heroes, watch the story of Thrall and his buddies unfold and nobody gives a fuck about our characters, their own stories, about us - the players. And while I can appreciate that lots of people love the novels and comic books and stories about these characters, I just don't care about their heroes all that much and I don't want to play a game to experience the story of someone else.
