Monday, October 27, 2008

A Nickel for my thoughts? Ok how bout a penny? :P

Boooooo! Hope you are well and enjoying Halloween and the corn mazes. There seems to be tons of them in California lately. Its a great place to go with a special someone and get lost. Anyways, I've had a lot of thought lately reading all the MMO blogs in the blogosphere as best I can and one of the posts that really piqued my interest was a small question Zubon asked: "Are we excited for expansions? Why?"

Really simple right? And his main point was that why cant we just have more content I think, without, you know, the level grind and losing all our gear progression and all meaning to our rep grinds and everything else. Now, granted some games do expansions like this pretty well and often but most of the big name ones seem to believe they need to raise the level cap and so on.

Anyways, I personally think it all depends on where your focus lies. Is the trip or the destination your focus? I enjoy WAR for example, not the grind to 40 at which there is nothing waiting, but I enjoy the journey in scenarios. (Yes I do enjoy them) And I don't enjoy Open RVR solo, with no guild helping me on the servers where I am not in Casualties, and trying to find some action which will immediately get me killed. If a keep is under attack by the enemy side, once I get to it, the attackers aren't about to let me near the keep to get inside and defend it. If it is under attack by my side, Its a better enticement but I still have hesitation to go because they may be inside and somehow the gate with its wolverine regeneration powers has repaired itself so that I can't get in to help.

I see no good reason other than that the game was rushed in development by EA, why there are no secret tunnels usable by the defending party, or why low level Scenario based RVR cannot occur. None at all. And where is my hand-holding tutorial that helps me figure out this whole keep siege thing is fun in the first place and super rewarding? (I'm not saying I personally need this but I usually have a good gauge as to what a new player would like) This is why you need a keep siege scenario early Mythic. (see Tier 1) I also do not see any reason why terrain cannot be destructible (and don't give me that "it's too hard" crap please, Worms 3D did it ages ago just fine.) Or shallow tunnel digging,(under the edge of a wall) or building siege weapons anywhere you please instead of on contrived platforms alla Lord of the Realms 2 or any other such rts game :)

The REAL reason of course is that the designers of WAR had no vision of anything nifty or new OR they just didn't have time yet. Because really what we've got now isn't even as good as PVMP in Lotro and that was created as an afterthought, albeit it has been polished some since. And yes, they did add gates and battering rams and little siege weapon plop platforms but where are my Orc-apults? and where are my alternate methods to get in? and where is the reason to do so? I'm not mad at you Mythic, I'm just trying to help you be better. Is that so wrong? Ouch ouch!, OK I'll stop!

Alright, this post is too long and is just about WAR so far. Lemme talk about Lotro vs. Wow's expansion in another post. I shall hereafter conclude my thoughts about WAR.

All I'm saying is WAR has fun scenarios, I'm just not enamored with the game. My brothers think they are more fun than Wow's bg's. Personally I think they are almost identical anyways, just more constant killing cuz it takes longer to kill. I like the ones people like the most, but I also like Phoenix Gate and a few others. I'm glad they won't nerf them because I'd like to level just to see the content later. The only reason I care about levels at all is as a content access mechanism, otherwise I could stay at lvl 1 and be happy happy the rest of my life if I could access all content (Big time explorer here) , and compete in pvp. Someone beating me just cuz they've spent so much more time in the game is stupid. They should be given more options maybe but not more power, especially after the "level cap" Otherwise we end up with gear based pvp just like Wow, just like Ultima, just like Nodeka and Runescape and so on. Yes that mirrors old DnD too and possibly table top WAR (though that might be more based on strategy which is good) but is it the best way? /e proceeding to work on next post about expansions :)

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