Neverwinter - The good, bad & ugly after 31 levels

If you want to witness my first steps into Neverwinter and enjoy horrid resolution, audio quality and my accent, take a look at this:

I need to get a lot more leveling done in order to prepare a huge article, so I'll have to keep this brief. Neverwinter is a decent game if you don't expect it to be a Swordcoast-based WoW. Seriously, there is no Swordcoast here. If you're expecting some vast world to explore, to travel from Luskan all the way to Amn and back, you're playing the wrong game. In Neverwinter, you explore exactly that - Neverwinter. The various quarters of the city as well as its immediate surrounding areas. It's actually a lot like Stormreach in Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO). You know, every sewer grate, every hut, every abandoned tavern is a dungeon, there should be monsters crawling out of every fucking mailbox, everything is divided into tiny instances, that kinda thing. It's... alright. I'm not a huge fan of it, I'm sure everyone would have preferred a vast, roaming game world to explore, but there's still plenty to see.
Here's a plus: The amount of FedEx quests (kill this, loot that, run an errand) is relatively small. There is an insane amount of dungeons full of cutscenes and voiceovers and hidden treasure chests, secret doors and traps. None of them are mazes, neither the layout nor the "puzzles" are anywhere near as complex as they were in DDO, but the stories, the boss battles, everything is a lot faster-paced, more spectacular and so far, I can solo everything, the obvious group-based instances and PvE events (fight back X waves of enemies) aside. I haven't died a single time, so far. Not sure if I'm good, my class is OP or the game is just too damn easy.

Character customisation (stats & skills, not appearance) sucks massively. I miss being able to fully tweak and upgrade my toon the way I could on DDO. Neverwinter has incredibly restrictive skill trees, which suggest some kind of free-form character development, but "you need to spend 10 more points on tier 1 abilities" crap prevents me from really doing what I want. Yes, each class gets three different feat trees to choose from in order to make them a tiny bit less like everyone else, but the feats are about as exciting as "1/2/5% more damage", "5/10/15% more threat generation", "Armor is 3/6/9% more effective". Massive yawnfest here.

Here's another big plus: The companion system! I'm using a tag team of pets. The founders' pets, to be more precise. I'm leveling up my direwolf, then whip out the panther whilst Mr. Wolf goes into training and so forth. There are tons of other companions ranging from flaming hawks to ghostly armors and swords to guardian angels and even a honey badger! People, too. You know, a cleric, a wizard, that kinda stuff. They all change looks and look bigger and badder as you level them up. I really like it!
As for the item shop: Yes, they're offering ridiculously overprized epic mounts and epic companions, healing stones and what have you. But you can buy mounts and companions with gold, tokens and many other of the 25 billion meta-currencies in the game. And in a game world, which has been instanced into countless tiny fragments, mounts really aren't all that useful for anything other than looking awesome.
Cash shop exclusive respec tokens are evil, but by the time you'd even want a respec, you will have made enough shop currency to afford respecs, simply by playing. And, once again, the feat and skill trees are so incredibly restrictive, there's simply not much there to warrant a respec in the first place.

My one big problem is this: The quests, while mostly fun and exciting, are entirely linear. There is one large chain of story-quests, interrupted by occasional bits of FedEx. I'm halfway through the leveling stage after only two days. If I roll a new toon, it's the exact same quests again. No alternative starting zones, no branching storyline, it's all linear. What's worse, you must grab every single quest and do all of them in order if you want to keep leveling up and avoid running into quests of a higher level than your character. And even then you'll want to do the occasional pvp match, pve event, instanced dungeon or user-generated quest to keep up with your leveling.
Oh yeah, those things! PvP feels more like an afterthought right now, it takes me forever just to get into a match and it's all just domination, i.e. capture and hold points on the map. Boring. But you get tokens for epic gear. PvE events are nice, you just thrash hordes of mobs for about 15 minutes and get awesome loot. The dungeons are great, BUT - the dungeon finder, well... think WoW. People don't talk unless there's an argument over loot or somebody dies and it's the cleric's or the guardian's fault. There's always that one dumbass rogue who rushes ahead to solo the entire thing, the cleric who is constantly AFK without telling anyone... well, you get the idea. Better play with people you know and love or prepare for a load of crap. And yes, you can inspect players to see their gearscore. Enjoy that!

User-generated quests... well, I've seen one or two really awesome ones, so far. Also, spelling and grammar is atrocious in every single one of them. It helps to imagine every single NPC to be talking with a Russian accent. Seriously, those awful user-generated quest texts! "I am slave trader!", "Go to forest!", "Kill big monster in arena!" it's Compare the Meerkat all over again! Also, 50% of the foundry quests are nothing but lame arenas. One small area, 3-5 waves of bad guys, crappy chest at the end, that's it. The kind of shit one can whip up in five minutes. To be fair, it's still early days, it's all beta, good things will come, proven by the foundry on Star Trek Online, which brought us quests so awesome, some of them were more amazing than the stuff made by Cryptic.

Now enjoy some screens, I gotta level some more!

-Cat

Happy Dance Time! Yaaay!

One more day till Neverwinter. I was lurking the forums and tripped upon quite a few posts from people complaining about how the game launches on a Thursday and they had to work. And part of me wanted to reply, saying, "Guess what, I work at home, I can spend all day and night playing Neverwinter if I want to!"
Just because I'm a jerk, because I like to brag and in spite of the fact that the editorial office might contact me and tell me to do a review on some F2P game about My Little Pony or some shit. You know, something that is due a day or two after the Neverwinter headstart, forcing me to work and neglect my gaming.

Well, the phone call just came. Right now. And guess what? I'm supposed to review Neverwinter, possibly work on some guides here and there, as well. Now I'm not gonna play this game day and night because I want to, but because it's my job. Imagine you're really looking forward to the launch of some new game, you're hoping to spend as much time playing it as somehow possible and suddenly you're being told you're getting paid for doing so. Life is sweet! :D
Got some pretty sweet feedback about my magazine column, where I get to bitch about whatever I want, as well. I'm not sure my job could be any more fun right now. Unless... hey, maybe it's finally time to send that job application to the Mythbusters? ;)

-Cat

Neverwinter - Three days to go and a bit of research

As the headstart phase of Neverwinter draws near, there's a certain amount of paranoia going around on the forums and among the members of my guild. 40 bucks for a mount on the cash shop? Five bucks for a respec? The pricing we've seen in the final closed beta weekend was the highest I have ever seen since the early stages of Allods Online.

That said, a closed beta is exactly that - nothing is set in stone. And since I've already mentioned Allods: Thanks to the once ridiculously overpriced item shop in Allods Online, people ran off as quickly as they came and the game has never quite recovered from its bad reputation, even though Allods is now very enjoyable if you pay very little or nothing at all. This isn't 2005, you don't get married to a single MMO and put up with all the bullshit they throw at you. If people disagree with certain game mechanics, balancing, content (or lack thereof) or outrageous pricing policies, users will move on. And that's exactly what's gonna happen to Neverwinter if people feel that they're getting ripped off or if they cannot get what they want without shelling out substantial amounts of cash. One would assume that the guys at Perfect World Entertainment, the publisher, have enough common sense to be aware of that, so it's a bit early to doom this game based on a few not so "micro" transaction examples taken from a closed beta event. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt - for now.

Some smart people on the official forums were kind enough to do some maths for me. Neverwinter allows you to earn a certain amount of item shop currency each day when you take part in certain events and quests. Using the cap and conversion rates of the most recent closed beta weekend, obtaining a $40.00 mount without spending any actual money would require you to farm for 84 days. Not a happy thought. That said, this example is only accurate if we assume that the pricing for mounts and the daily cap of cash shop currency you may earn are both final.
Here's another interesting fact to take into consideration: You may earn unlimited amounts of item shop currency* by using the auction house. Granted, you play enough to find plenty of stuff to sell and people are willing to buy all your stuff, you may sell as many things as you want each day and earn a theoretically unlimited amount of cash shop currency. Of course this also works the other way 'round: You could spend real money to buy whatever you want right off the auction house. Let's hope that the most powerful gear will be bound on pickup, because otherwise we're looking at some seriousy pay2win right there. That said - if a player spends real cash to buy my items, said real cash goes straight to me. Why would I complain about that?
*The auction house uses a meta-currency, 'Astral Diamonds', which may be directly converted to 'ZEN', the currency used in the item shop. Daily events reward players with raw Astral Diamonds, the amount of which can be refined and traded for ZEN is bound to a daily cap.

Potential risks and ripoff mechanics aside, it looks like it will be very possible to afford some of the goodies you want, simply by playing the auction house if farming is not your cup of tea. And that's a huge plus in my book.
If you're not familiar with Cryptic MMOs, then you might be surprised how naming characters and server shards work.

Duplicate character names, i.e. two different players naming their character 'Bob', are entirely possible. This works because not only are players identified by their character names but also their Perfect World account names. That way, the game would identify me as Bob@Berserkerkitten and the other Bob as Bob@RandomPerfectWorldHandle. Don't worry, the character is still just going to be labelled Bob.
This is great news for everyone who is paranoid about having to reserve their favourite nickname and/or being unable to get into the game from day one. Of course this also means you'll have to brace yourself for entire legions of Drizzts, Sephiroths and countless rogues named Shadow, Death, Ripper, Raven and any combination of the above. But without silly accents and shit. Yay!

For the launch phase of Neverwinter, the server will be split into three seperate shards: Dragon, Beholder and Mindflayer. According to the FAQ, they're doing so to keep login queues and other problems one has to expect with the launch of any MMO to a minimum. Once the initial surge of players dies down a bit and the launch phase is over, all three shards will be combined into just one server. There is no EU server, no US server, no localised server - it's all just one (!) server. Star Trek Online (STO) works like that and they're doing so with mixed results.
By my own experience, STO has its laggy moments, where my avatar would rubberband all over the place and combat would become somewhat problematic. This doesn't happen a lot, but saying it doesn't occur at all is simply not true. Seeing as Neverwinter uses a fast-paced realtime combat system similar to GW2, I'm a bit worried that the servers may not be able to provide a lag-free experience during the peak hours.
Another problem is language. On STO, the language in all public chat channels is English. I've been called a Nazi, a Kraut and all kinds of other nice things for speaking German in public chat, be it on accident or to respond to some other player, who asked a question in German. Players get the possibility to create their own custom chat channels where they may speak any language they want, but this solution is messy at best. Not every new player on STO knows about this feature and the German community is spread over a half dozen channels (#German, #Deutsch, #STOGerman etc.) which makes staying in touch with the whole community a pain in the ass. Neverwinter uses the same chat infrastructure. You won't give a shit if English is your native tongue, but otherwise... ew. Not fun.

Oh, speaking of public chat: Since there is only one world-wide server, which has players from the US, Europe and pretty much everywhere around the globe, be prepared for endless public discussions about religion and politics. People argue about these things on STO all the time, with the occasional talk about Star Trek - and people defend their favourite Trek generations, novels and captains just as passionately as their religion. Get ready for a whole lot of D&D nerds doing the exact same thing! ☺
One positive way to look at this is how it makes a nice distraction from all the chat re: your mother and the occasional [anal] and Chuck Norris spam. For the sake of your sanity, it is still highly advised to stay the fuck away from global public chat.

-Cat

Horny crossdressing MMO teenagers

Five days till Neverwinter headstart and everyone is positively excited now. Positively excited? Do people really say that? Am I using it right? As opposed to what, negatively excited? I'm confused. Ahem, anyway...
The game isn't even ready to play and I'm already facing a bit of a dilemma regarding my main character. I know I'm gonna play a tiefling. I know my tiefling is gonna be a guardian fighter. And originally, I really wanted my tiefling to be male. Goes better with my grumpy personality, the fact he's a tank, integrated voice chat, yada yada yada. But the tiefling guys look a bit so-so and the female ones... damn! Hot damn! Dat ass!

I haven't seriously "mained" a female toon in an MMO since early WoW, where my friends and family forced me to play Alliance. I was hoping to play a male Tauren, which wasn't really an option on Alliance side and all their male characters looked awful. Male humans with pre-cata haircuts? Or male night elves, the missing link between human and ape? ARGH! So I did what everyone did and rolled a female night elf. Eventually, she got turned into a male Worgen, because now that everyone is playing chicks in every fucking MMO, I'm starting to get somewhat annoyed with them.
Seriously, have a look at Guild Wars 2. Whenever large groups of people gather for mega bosses and other popular events, at least 50% of the characters are female humans (and norns) dressed up like... I'd say hookers, but even those have a little more self respect than that. And the sluttiest of them usually come with names containing sweet, angel, petite or something pseudo-Japanese and of course Kira and Amy. Brrrr! Look, I enjoy staring at exposed tits and asses as much as the next guy, but being surrounded by horny 15 year olds who live out their wanking fantasies is one of the reasons I don't play MMOs much anymore today.

And if I roll a sexy tiefling girl, I'm gonna be one of those guys. But, judging by what beta footage I have sighted so far, tiefling guys are so meh and tiefling girls are so rawrrrr... though I'll admit I'm a little alarmed at how attracted I seem to be to girls with tails. o_O
I'll start rolling a guy, see if I can get myself to like playing him and if all else fails... what the hell, it's gonna be a lady. On a funny side note, one of my female guild mates is gonna roll a male dwarven fighter as her first character. Ha!

Speaking of guild members: Originally, nobody even followed Neverwinter much, but when I got my surprise founders' pack, I started talking about the game some more and now everybody is gonna check it out with me. Well, five days after me, to be precise, but that only makes things more exciting. I'm going for the tanky class, Claire is gonna be a cleric, so we've got the most important stuff covered and the rest of the guild can go hurrdurr DPS. And if previous MMOs are anything to go by, then Claire and I should be able to duo most group content, since good tanks and healers can make damage dealers somewhat optional. I can't wait!

Also, reptiles: We had Hugo Bosc with us today when we went outside and people freaked the hell out. IT WAS AWESOME! Everyone stopped and stared. The elderly lady next door was really brave and ended up stroking him. She was seriously scared at first, afraid he might bite her or lash out at her, but after a while she got really confident and pettet him like a little kitten.
He's about a year old now and growing fucking HUGE! He's easily 2ft long by now (we're guessing around 70cm) and he'll be twice that big in the not so distant future. And he's getting really tame!
He still has his grumpy days, biting the cats and bits of clothing and hissing and struggling when he's had enough. But he's not aggressive, he won't come after you for no reason and, given the choice, he'll always go into hiding rather than coming out to bite. Considering how scared, shy and wild he was, he's made some huge progress. Claire has done a kickass job with him. I'd like to take some of the credit here, but it mostly her. She's incredibly fearless with all snakes and lizards. I take him out, carry him around and everything, but she's the one who really has him under control, calms him down when he struggles and freaks out and steps in when he goes nuts. Most people would get scared shitless.

-Cat

Only ten more days to go!

There, I've done it. I've gone and downloaded the fucking client. I had access to the Neverwinter beta weekends, but I never got around to actually joining them. Too much stuff going on with the guild on GW2 and, to be perfectly honest, I'm not a big fan of closed beta events.

You see, in a closed beta they let you create a character, play the game, do all the stuff you'd do after the actual release. And then it just ends! So they get you hooked, you want to keep on playing and the whole thing just gets shut down again until the next weekend event, which may be god knows when. What's worse, all your gear, the character you got attached to, everything you've achieved, earned and done gets wiped again. And that means you have to start over. Repeat stuff. Replay the same tutorial, the same first dungeon, the same introduction after every wipe. And by the time they finally go live, you've seen it all so many times, it's just not fun anymore.

I didn't watch a whole lot of gameplay footage or read any previews for similar reasons. I just didn't want to get all hyped up on something that's still weeks away. But now that I've been granted one of these for free, well...
Truth to be told, I'm almost feeling a little guilty about the Founder's Pack I'm getting, considering I'm not really interested in most of what's in there. Don't get me wrong - I'll gladly take all of this stuff for free, but there's no way in hell I would have paid that much for any of these items. The 5 days headstart, 2 million item shop monies and an exclusive title to flash at random noobs like a mighty epeen are nice to have. I'm really happy with all that stuff!

But a Menzoberranzan Renegade, a spider mount (yuck!) and a pet panther? Alright, the 'I'm too stupid to be inventive' army of Drizzts is inevitable, so maybe it isn't such a bad idea to limit some of that stuff with an artificial buy2play threshold. At least until all of that stuff will make its way to the cash shop for much less than the initial 199.99 - six or so months after release, if that.
Thing is, I don't wanna be a drow. And when it comes to ingame pets, I'm really more of a dog person. And I believe I have seen somebody riding a giant wolf in one of TotalBiscuit's videos, which looked that much more appealing to me than a premium spider.
Hey, it'll be great to have access to all of this stuff from the very beginning and I'm sure I'll enjoy my panther and my armored spider until I manage to find all the stuff I really want, so no complaints here. Still, it's fucking hilarious. Are you one of those guys who'd kill for a founder's pack, but you're not stupid enough to shell out such a huge amount of cash on a fucking F2P game? Are you tempted by the exclusive class, mount and pet? I bet you're hating my guts right now, considering I don't even intend on using any of that stuff. Ha!

Oh hey, mounts trailer!

And if you think that trailer was weird, check this out:

This is so wrong.
You might be tempted to say that Satan himself is the head PR guy. But it's probably just Satan's dim-witted cousin. I don't like this at all.

I know those trailers are supposed to be funny, a bit over the top and nothing dead-serious, but they're dividing their customer base into premium heroes and freeloading maggots before the whole thing has even launched. Be better than everyone around you! Be awesome! Don't pay up and you'll be stuck with a shitty horse! They're deliberately making the free horse look shit. Why the fuck would they do that? Yes, great, you can be awesome for money, but should free players feel punished for not wanting to spend cold, hard cash on a founder's pack?

I'm veeery sceptical about the whole thing, because Neverwinter's publisher, Perfect World Entertainment, has forever ruined another Cryptic game for me: Star Trek Online. Sure, before PWE took over, the F2P version of Star Trek was ridiculously... well, FREE! There was absolutely zero incentive to spend any money whatsoever and it's a miracle they managed to keep the thing running for so long. Great for me as a customer, of course - get all the good stuff for free and never pay for anything.

And look at that game now: Enemies drop 'lockboxes' with what feels like a 50% drop chance per kill - also known as ALL THE FUCKING TIME. These lockboxes have a <1% chance to contain ridiculously powerful goodies like exclusive starships. But as the name suggests, the lockboxes are locked. Duh. And the quickest and easiest way to fix that is, naturally, the cash shop.
"So just ignore them", you might argue. Well, every single time one of these boxes drop (as in, literally every 30 or so seconds), a need/greed roll window pops up. They actively interrupt gameplay up to a point where you spend more time passing on that shit than you do blowing up the Borg. And the fun doesn't stop there - whenever some random player lucks out on a lockbox and gets a rare ship out of it, EVERY SINGLE PLAYER ON THE WHOLE FUCKING SERVER GETS AN ONSCREEN MESSAGE! "Player XYZ has just found some fucking premium ship in a lockbox!"

It's like playing a fucking cash shop commercial. And remember when you could spend a tenner or so on that cool new ship you've been drooling over and then you were done with it? Well, if you want the newer cash shop ships, such as the beefy Odyssey Cruiser or the new Andorian Escorts and you want them with all their features and abilities, you don't have to purchase them once, not twice, but THREE GOD DAMN TIMES! And for that amount of money, you could almost afford a copy of Guild Wars 2.
This is the publisher behind Neverwinter. That's the kind of shit they're pulling off in their games. So why would things be any different in Neverwinter? Allow me to remind you: Pre-launch founder's packs for 199.99 USD and trailer videos, which make fun of you if you can't afford them. According to the forums, they've already offered $40 mounts in the cash shop during closed beta. Yay.

Another, albeit smaller concern of mine lies within the actual gameplay. The classes, and/or lack thereof, to be precise. So we get fighters, wizards, rogues and clerics and... that's it. Yes, yes, they're making two fighter "classes" with the sword&board style guardian fighter and the great weapon fighter, but come on now. How the fuck is this D&D? Where's my customization, my freedom, the possibility to switch from one fighting style to another instead of limiting myself the second I create a toon? Where are essential classes like rangers and paladins? What I've seen of the classes and their abilities so far, isn't very D&D at all. And their character roles have been reduced to a minimum outside of combat. Traps in their current state do no serious damage, groups just roflstomp through dungeons, there's no point in scouting, exploring, disarming, you just rampage through there, kill shit, be done.

Still, all bitching and concerns aside...

It looks so fucking good. Not just graphically, but the whole thing looks fun. I'm actually itching to roll my first toon and level him along with his companions (maybe take turns leveling a wolf and the panther? Hmm...), breeze through the content and then bitch about lack of proper endgame. Hehe!
And, crappy selection of classes or not, there are lots of possibilities for future content. Not only does the setting provide countless classes and kits, but also tons of additional races for future updates. I'm not honestly in high hopes of ever rolling a dual chain axe gnoll fighter in an MMO anytime in this life, but... you never know. :P
I really hope PWE won't fuck this up and ridiculously overprice everything and/or slam me in the face with stupid cash shop advertising every step of the way. I hope the game won't be too simplistic and too mass friendly for me to be enjoyable. I'm getting so sick of MMOs and the assholes I get to put up with on there, I'm really not sure the Forgotten Realms setting alone can really be enough to make me love this one. But, for what it counts, I'm genuinely excited about the upcoming headstart phase and I'll be sure to take a really close look.

-Cat

Mario is fucking hardcore! o_O

This might come as a bit of a shock to you, but I'm not the most social, friendly person around. In the three years that I've been living in the UK, I had exactly one visitor, because I couldn't stop my brother from showing up when he was in the area. Don't get me wrong. He's a nice person. I think. I don't really know. We don't talk. We have absolutely nothing in common. Point being, my not wanting any visitors had nothing to do with him, I just don't like guests in the house full stop. They make me wear pants. Common courtesy suggests I change my desktop rotation to images, which don't solely focus on female anatomy. I can't scratch when and where I want to scratch. I can't be me. You can do that around a best friend, but acquiring one of those would require you to let people into your house and possibly your life and I'm just not that kinda guy. Claire once told me that everybody needs a Wilson. Tim Taylor had a Wilson. Stranded Tom Hanks had one. Even House had a Wilson. Maybe I'm just gonna buy another reptile and name him Wilson or something.

Like all normal people, Claire has friends and family. And one member of her family, her sister, came to visit us yesterday. And like all visitors, her sister would sit on our couch, there'd be that awkward moment of silence, followed by the obvious question: Now what?

I knew this moment would come! It always does! Another reason why I don't usually have guests - they don't just want to eat, they also demand entertainment! So I did the dumbest thing one could possibly do in this situation, something that hasn't been a good idea for decades, something no sane person ever would do: I trusted Sega!
I think that Sonic and All Stars Racing Transformed is a pretty decent game and playing the PC version with two Xbox360 controllers works like a charm. Add a third one and the whole experience turns into a nightmare. We've been messing around with it for an eternity, but either one controller would steer at least two characters or one controller would do nothing at all or the buttons wouldn't do what we told them to do in the configuration utility. We simply couldn't get it to work, no matter what.

So we turned to Nintendo. Smash Bros. usually results in things being said and done, which should never be said or done and the only alternative was New Super Mario Bros. This might brand me a heretic, but I don't actually care for Mario. Or anything Nintendo. And platformers, well... they're a bit like those rubbery microwave hamburgers. I'll have one if there's really absolutely nothing else in the house, but they're not my first choice. But seeing as Sonic had let us down and Guild Wars 2 had failed to spark the interest I was hoping for, I reluctantly fired up one of the fat plumber's countless adventures.
Holy fuck.

Things that should never be said and may never be taken out of context? "Help me pop my sister!" "You gotta fucking wiggle it! Wiggle harder!" "For fuck's sake, will you jump on me already?" "Don't make my mushroom go big, I see a midget pipe!"

This game is the biggest trolling contest I have seen in my life. It's still the same old Mario formula, jump and run across side-scrolling 2D landscapes whilst dodging the local fauna and flora, bottomless pits, lava and all sorts of hazardous shit. But with all three of us playing at the same time. Ideally, people help each other, share power ups, jump off of each other's heads to reach tricky spots, that kinda thing. Of course that's not how it plays out. Picture folks pushing each other off platforms and to their deaths, hogging all the power-ups, reviving fallen team mates right above a bottomless pit... we've killed each other so many times, this game really doesn't need Bowser in it. We're taking care of each other just fine. We laughed so hard, we were in tears.

It's also the fucking hardest Mario game I've ever played, granted, I haven't been in touch with these games since the (S)NES, N64 and various portable versions. It feels like I've stepped into some kind of parallel universe. Games like Call of Duty spoil me rotten with checkpoints and auto saves whenever I kill three bad guys, self-proclaimed "core gamers", myself included, complain about how everything gets dumbed down, too easy and too casual-friendly and that damn Mario game killed all of us more often than any other game we've played this decade. Maybe we all just suck.
Holy crap. I wouldn't want a WiiU in the house unless I can get one for free and I'm not gonna turn into some kind of redeemed Nintendo fan. But I can't remember the last time I laughed so much.

Oh, speaking of free stuff: I got a Neverwinter Heroes of the North founder's pack! You know, that ultra hardcore deluxe mega package, which costs 200 bucks? I fucking love my job. I also love how, until this very day, critics say that there's absolutely no bribery going on. Or at least... emotional blackmail? Video game publishers and their PR guys are the nicest people on the planet. They shower critics with gifts, special collectors' editions, invitations to press events and god knows what. When I get tons of awesome free stuff and the game in question turns out to be crap, I feel bad for writing about how crap it is. I'm not saying I'd give 90something percent for an awful game if I'm handed enough free stuff, but honestly now, when a publisher is incredibly friendly and supportive and showering you with cool stuff, ulteriour motive or not, won't that make you hesitate at least a weeeee little bit when you're cranking out a really nasty review? In a perfect world, a critic wouldn't be swayed by these things one bit, but that's because they wouldn't accept any gifts in the first place. And who would seriously forfeit one of the coolest perks that go along with this job?
Mind you, this has nothing to do with Neverwinter, I'm just rambling about stuff in general. I have yet to play Neverwinter, I'm dying to give it a try and I'm a huge D&D fan. I can't wait for it to start! :D

-Cat

Warframe - Free2Play Space Ninjas, Teamplay and a bit of Diablo

A F2P game by Digital Extremes. If you don't know them, I pity you.

"Good morning! I just woke you from cryostasis! You have no memory, so let me just say that you're a fucking cyber ninja and your favourite thing in the world is gutting random space marines. I could tell you why, but who the hell gives a fuck? Go out there and kill something!"

I may be paraphrasing a bit, but this is basically how the Warframe tutorial introduces you to life as a futuristic master of gun and blade. There's no story to speak of. All you need to know is that you're a so-called 'Tenno', a guy in sci-fi ninja armor (also known as a Warframe, ahaaaa!) and your job is to eliminate some creepy fuckers known as the Grineer. And holy fuck, do you eliminate those guys! You get to use all sorts of shotguns, rifles, (akimbo) pistols and SMGs, as well as assorted swords, knives, axes, hammers, the works. On top of that, each of the available dozen or so warframes gets to use unique special abilities such as fireballs and super jumps, as well as a few special moves shared by all warframes, such as wall-jumps, kick-flips and all that fancy athletic stuff any talented ninja picks up in grade school.

Badassery

Each mission has you and up to three co-op partners infiltrating an enemy spaceship, a mining facility or some other kind of base, where you get to carry out various objectives. You may have to find and rescue a prisoner or take an enemy VIP hostage, upload a virus or steal an artifact. With the exception of "kill 'em all" kind of missions, you always go in, fulfill the objective and get the hell out again. Depending on your style and abilities, you may do so in a stealthy fashion, sneaking past enemies or taking them out with a quick melee kill before they can sound the alarm. Or just go in guns blazing, alert every last soldier on the whole damn ship and blow them to kingdom come.

In case of the latter, Warframe goes out of its way to make you feel like a real badass, a force to be reckoned with, up to a point where it gets hard to tell whether you're really the good or the bad guy. Corridors fill up with dozens of enemies as the sirens announce your intrusion, heavily-armored soldiers taking cover behind crates, ramps and rails as they take aim at you. Make no mistake - Warframe is not a cover-shooter, so unlike some of the more cowardly enemies, you cannot actually sit safely behind a crate to snipe at the Grineer. You have to charge right at them, balls out, hack and shoot those suckers to bits! Speaking of bits: You'll get to see more than one exposed ribcage as you blow the armor off a baddie, carving them out like a pumpkin, guts splattering all over the place. You spend lots of time shooting aliens, cyborgs and robots, but some of the more humanoid baddies sport some rather gruesome dismemberment options upon death.

Sometimes enemies will trap you inside a small section of their ship to halt your progress. That's where this 'hacking' minigame comes into play.

Most of the 'trash' is really just that. You cleave your way through them, loot ammo and weapon upgrades as you make your way towards the mission objective and only the real big swarms of enemies and the rarer, boss-type Grineer pose a real threat. This is especially the case when you team up with random players via matchmaking. Don't get me wrong - the servers are always busy and active, finding a group of players never takes more than a few seconds, but chasing after a bunch of grossly overlevelled and overgeared veterans as they hack and slash their way all over the place isn't always fun. It doesn't help that Warframe takes score for everything you do. Players compete over who had the most kills, most headshots, most items looted and so forth. This may not bother you so much if you don't mind a bit of competition. Personally, I prefer playing on my lonesome or with my partner, which makes for a much slower pace, but also allows for a much more intense gameplay experience.

Intense, not only because we're playing the content at the appropriate level (you can repeat every mission an infinite amount of times), but in doing so, the odds to become overwhelmed and run out of ammo are a lot higher. And that's when Warframe is the most fun! When you have sabotaged the equipment on a mining facility, there's a dozen bad guys running after you and you're down to 20 pistol rounds and your katana and nothing else. Now you get to wall-run, glide down zip-lines and squeeze through ventilation shafts to make it to the extraction point or you make a stand and face an insane amount of bad guys against all odds.

Warframe also gives you plenty to look at in glorious DX11.

Good Diablo, bad Diablo

Warframe uses a healthy dose of RPG elements. Weapons and warframes rank up as you use them, allowing you to modify them with upgrades you find along the way. Warframe upgrades may raise your health and shields, increase your sprint speed or strengthen your special abilities, whereas gun upgrades power up your rate of fire, crit chance, maximum ammo and so forth. Melee weapons may even be upgraded with certain elemental flavours, allowing you to punish the opposition with fire and lightning strikes. Combining gear modifiers, i.e. stacking multiple +40% shield mods, will upgrade them to a +80% shield mod, much like gems in Diablo 2 and 3. However, there is no trading system, no auction house, a mailbox or any way to pass unwanted mods to other players or receive some of theirs. On the plus side, this eliminates trade spam, "gold"sellers and people maxing out their toons through an auction house without actually playing. The obvious downside is, that you may find all kinds of upgrades for stuff you're never actually going to use. You may still use unwanted upgrades to power up existing mods, but at a much slower rate.

The sweet thing about this system is that you can use just about any kind of shotgun, sword, pistol or whatever you fancy and keep on upgrading it, keeping gear viable at just about any stage of the game. Entirely new gear rather than upgraded stuff is obtained either by crafting (materials drop during missions), spending credits (only basic stuff) or buying them with cold, hard cash. Real money. Every cash shop item can also be crafted. However, depending on the item you want, getting your hands on the required resources may take days, maybe weeks to obtain, whereas shelling out a tenner here and there will buy you those sweet, sweet rewards straight away.

However, all the rarest, most powerful items in the game can only be crafted. Money will not buy you power! Also, some of the guns and warframes are tied to an experience limit, which you have to reach before you're even allowed to use them. A brand new player just buying all the best stuff with cash? Not possible.

Another Diablo-esque feature about Warframe is the randomized map layout. Even when you replay a mission you've already completed, the map will change, there may be different hazards, even the objective may change as you progress. You may be told to fight your way through a space-zombie invested facility to sabotage some machines, when suddenly the Grineer invade the place and you have to kill every last one of them. These events can happen completely at random, which is great.

What's not so great is the actual map layouts, which repeat over and over again. In fact, you may come across the exact same locker room inside a single starship three or four times, each time in a completely different area of the ship. The random bits and pieces of each map are composed of modules, pre-generated rooms, which are randomly added here and there and there's always a certain amount of repetition involved.

In Warframe's defense, the game has only just reached open beta status and more content and visual variety will certainly be added as time goes by. Also, you're invading a fucking starship! Why would the locker room on deck 3 look any different than a locker room on deck 4? And why would a starship of the same design you invade on another mission look much different and feature a completely new interiour?

The repetition is logical to some extent and there's more variety as you level up and unlock new locations. Still, a certain feeling of deja-vu is very difficult to suppress when you walk into the exact same locker room again and again on every second mission.

Weapon mods raise your damage, crit chance, rate of fire and overall fun.

The way of the ninja

Yes, you can run up the walls, do epic backflips and kickjumps and slide across the floor whilst John-Wooing the crap out of fuckers left right and center. That's cool, fun to use and actually doable with a mouse and keyboard - this game was designed with a PC in mind, it's not a crappy console port and the controls work reasonably well. If you can't get the hang of the more difficult moves, the game won't punish you. The worst thing that could happen is that you fall down a bottomless pit and you'll respawn a few seconds after to try again. However, if you consider yourself a true ninja master, Warframe will throw plenty of tests your way. As you level up your gear, your player rank will grow along with you. Whenever you're ready for a rank-up, you need to pass a test. You might be required to shoot several waves of enemies with only your pistol within a strict time limit. You might have to run up walls whilst shooting targets. The challenges get ever more difficult as you rank up and if you screw up, you'll be forced to wait 24 hours before you may try again. Using certain items may require you to reach a minimum rank, but the really high, difficult to reach ranks are for bragging rights only. If you really want to test your skill, this is the way to go. If you can't be bothered, you won't be punished. Pretty neat.

Nothing to lose

If you're patient enough to craft all the guns and warframes you're drooling over, this game won't cost you a penny. If you're not that patient, look at it this way - you can spend a few Pounds, Euros, Dollars, goats or whatever the fuck they use in your country, unlock your favourite warframe straight away (you get to pick from one of three free ones at the beginning of the game) and be on your merry way. No time limits, no gear damage or any other shit to force you into spending money over and over again. You buy the stuff you want and keep it for good. That's pretty fucking generous, as far as F2P shooters go. And if you care about jumpy, hacky, slashy and shooty coop ninja games at least a bit, then there's no reason why you shouldn't be heading to Steam's F2P section right the fuck now.

-Cat

And 2013 continues to be awesome!

Hey there, my 20 or so anonymous readers!

Remember our baby raptor?

So delicate and tiny, his head making up 30% of his entire body. And look at those huuuuge baby eyes. Well, that was a half year ago. Look at him now:

You can't see his loooong tail in that picture, but even then he looks pretty huge compared to how little he used to be. And he's still gonna more or less double in size from where he's currently at! Ha!

He's pretty tame by now. He will attack the gloves we use for feeding and handling, because he associates them with food, but once he realizes that there is in fact nothing to eat, he lets go pretty quickly and avoids the hand completely.

Our scaled friend isn't a huge fan of being picked up and removed from the safety of his tank. The house is big and scary, there are nosy cats roaming about and it's hard to explore when Claire holds him by the tail like it was some kind of leash. Though he doesn't seem to mind that much. In fact, whenever he's had enough, he'll come straight back to her, jump into her lap and climb up onto her shoulder. He's still a bit shy around me, which makes sense, since Claire brings the food and I just clean up the crap. She's the chef and I'm the janitor, go figure!

I'm amazed at how fearless she is when it comes to handling that guy! You see, Hugo Bosc was a Christmas present. To me, because I had been drooling over him ever since the day they got him at the shop. I've been fascinated with large monitor lizards ever since I've seen a bunch of Komodo dragons on tv. Now, of course he's never gonna be as massive as one of those guys, but their intelligence, inquisitive nature, the way they move, the way they look like fucking dinosaurs, it's all there and incredibly fascinating. So yeah, I'm a big fan.

Claire, on the other hand, has always been more of a snake person. That's a weird thing with reptile enthusiasts. For some reason, you're either into snakes or lizards, but many people aren't into both. Claire has always kept snakes. Her python is her pride and joy. When I wanted a bearded dragon, she would tolerate our lizard, but she wasn't exactly crazy about the whole thing. I'm the lizard guy here.

But after she had spent lots of time taming our little Savannah monitor to prepare him for being a present and all, he began to grow on her. Believe it or not, she really likes our beardies now, too (yes, plural, we rescued one a while back). And to see how she handles our monitor lizard... holy fuck! When it comes to jobs that require even the tiniest amount of dexterity, Claire is doomed to fail and fumble. I'm saying this with all the love in the world, but she has difficulty unboxing a pizza. I have yet to see her finish a bowl of pasta without dropping half her dinner on the sofa, herself and the carpet. She's just not very good at using her hands.

But when she handles reptiles, it's like she turns into a completely different person. Like she's channeling Steve Irwin or some shit!

You see, a Savannah monitor isn't exactly a hamster or a kitten. When that sucker hisses at you, it's pretty damn scary and you better leave him the fuck alone. His tail-whip can cause serious bruises, his claws are fucking sharp and you'll want to thoroughly clean out any bite marks he might give to you. It takes some getting used to!

When I had my first cat, I'd freak the fuck out whenever it tried to scratch or bite me, because I didn't know what to expect, I didn't know just how painful it was really gonna be and there's that innate fear of pain any sane human being should possess. Nowadays, I don't even give a fuck. My cat wants to bite me? Here, take the whole hand! I'm not scared of you! 

With the monitor lizard it's like the first ever cat all over again. Is he just inspecting my hand or does he consider it food? Is he struggling because he wants me to put him down or is he about to shit all over me? I can't read or predict him, I don't know what to expect, how harmless or painful certain mistakes are going to be. Claire? Damn thing hisses at her, she tells him to shut up and grabs him anyway. Holds him in place when he tries to run off. Until he calms down and chills the fuck out. She chucks him in the bath tub, leads him around the house by his tail, treats him like some kind of stuffed cuddly toy and he puts up with it. I've seen some weird shit in my life, but this is really something. A special kind of weird shit. 

Oh, speaking of weird shit - check this out:

It's so awful, it could be an old Sega commercial. Yes, yes, or Nintendo, but I think Arenanet are reaching a Sega-level of stupid right there.
And it's fucking genius! People see it, they realize it's April 1st and then assume that the whole thing isn't actually for real. Well, look at this:

Not only did they add a whole blocky pixel world for people to explore, but they come with freaky chiptunes, as well.

My only problem with this new content is that I don't care about jumping puzzles and secret rooms and bonus treasure chests and 100% completion and crap. I'm a fighter, not a fat Italian plumber! And since our guild has exactly 5 active members, myself included, well... I get dragged along for this stuff. I'd much rather kill random people in pvp and let the guild handle this stuff on their own.

That said, I find it amazing how much new stuff they manage to put into their game so fast, all the time, at such high quality. And no extra cost, at that. The fact I'm not personally interested in adventures of the jumpy variety doesn't make the new 'Super Adventure Box' any less awesome. Yes, I think the Halloween scavenger hunt was lame (loved the dungeons and the fucking chainsaw!), the Karka invasion was awful and the toy factory was fun for exactly one day. To me, this stuff is the best new content quality-wise. The new 'living story' adventure segments look pretty neat, as well. I'm just amazed at how they pull this off, especially when I look at how other games do it.

Cataclysm... eh, let's not talk about it. Water under the bridge and all that. Ever since the start of MoP, WoW gets content updates every three months, right? Mostly daily quests, no new 5man instances and a bit of raidy stuff, which average Joe gets to enjoy for about 30 minutes per week. Not really super massive amounts of stuff, but it gives people something to do. Provided they're willing to pay 9 Quid, 13 Euros or 15 bucks a month. Then there are "free 2 play" games, where every new bit of content is released in the form of 'adventure packs', which force you to shell out cash or you don't get to play them at all. And there are F2P games, which really aren't. Like SWTOR.
I paid money to play GW2 once. Exactly once. When I bought the actual game. I've upgraded to the digital collector's edition with ingame gold. That's it. No fees, no adventure packs, no "you must be this rich to play". I'm fully expecting them to announce some whopping expansion pack any day and I'll happily shell out any amount of money they'll want for it. But right now, the damn things just keeps on growing and adding more and more stuff and it's all free. I don't know how the fuck they do it. How they manage to add so much stuff at such an insane rate or how they afford running their servers without monthly fees and nothing but useless shit in the item shop. Name changers, makeover kits, decorative town clothes... who the hell buys that stuff anyway? Lots of people, apparently, because ANet have to pay their employees somehow!

In other news, I had a chance to interview Mark fucking Jacobs about Camelot Unchained! He's the guy behind Dark Age of Camelot, which many gamers consider the one and only true RvR MMORPG out there. So it's not a big surprise that Camelot Unchained is going to be another RvR game, which will feature no pve, quests or dungeons whatsoever. So, um... how the hell is that even supposed to work? In a day and age where most MMOs feature massive pvp battles as well as raids, dungeons, personal storylines and what have you, he wants people to play a game, which features nothing but player vs player battles? Well, I had a chance to ask him and he seems pretty serious about the whole thing. I can't wait to see how the game turns out and I wish him best of luck with it. I'd love to share the whole interview right here, but I don't think my employers would be too happy with that. :P
Still, how fucking cool is that? I love my job! :D

Of course nothing is ever perfect. It's Easter, I'm down with the zombie flu and I'm craving a healthy mix of bed and computer games, but I need to crank out some articles in a presentable fashion by tomorrow. And I'm just sitting here procrastinating. Back to work with me!

-Cat