Games | Superior Realities

I think World of Warcraft has finally been dethroned as my go-to game. I’ll never abandon it entirely, but for the time being, I plan to make it something I only pick up once in a while. So that has left me to wander the digital wilds without a true home, bouncing between games with a greater level of schizophrenia than ever before.

I’ve been working through my backlog of single-player games on Steam. I’ve also been trying some new (to me) MMOs, but those adventures will form the basis of several articles for WhatMMO, and I don’t want to spoil them, so I’ll just say this for now: Spandex is involved.

The remainder of my time goes to hopping between Neverwinter and The Secret World.

Neverwinter: What’s my motivation?

I still have really weirdly mixed feelings on Neverwinter. I’d say it’s a love/hate relationship, but both of these feelings are far stronger than this game deserves. I’d say it’s more like enjoyment/irritation, at best.

It’s still a game I enjoy playing. My endgame has thus far mostly consisted of PvP and Foundry quests, and I’ve been having plenty of fun with both.

Well, the PvP has been a bit rocky lately. I’ve discovered there is little to no penalty to for leaving a match in progress, so a lot of people ragequit the moment something goes wrong. This invariably ends any chance of fun in a match, regardless of whose team they were on, because teams are small enough that a loss of even one person guarantees failure for that team.

But the more evenly matched fights are still very entertaining. The PvP matches in Neverwinter can be nail-bitingly close at times.

And the Foundry’s still a lot fun. I recently finished a very well-put together campaign (Lands of Mirent Tusk, I believe) with an epic storyline culminating in this creatively surreal vertical labyrinth. Still impressed by how the fan-made stuff often beats the professional content.

I did give one of the professional campaigns a go. It’s all right as daily grinds go, but the rewards didn’t seem worth the effort, so I lost interest.

The issue I’m running into is that I feel quite directionless. Thanks to my exploits in PvP, I have all the gear I could possibly need. I don’t have any goals to work towards.

There are plenty of other options for alternate progression: level companions, collect mounts or improve the one I have, track down cosmetic gear, etc..

But all of these things require massive sums of astral diamonds, and the grind is simply brutal. It’s not even the kind of grind you can just knuckle down and burn through because the acquisition rate is heavily gated. My progress to even the cheapest of rewards is so glacially slow as to feel almost nonexistent.

I’ve taken to spending all my gold on mounts to auction, and even that is hardly making a difference.

I’m not a very progression-minded player, but even I need goals to work towards, and there just don’t seem to be any that are reasonably attainable in Neverwinter — not without dumping a boatload of cash, anyway.

I’m not ready to quit over it — not yet, at least — but it’s an odd place to be.

Reminder: Birth of a God seeks reviews

While I’m on the subject of Neverwinter, I should mention that I’m still seeking reviewers for my Foundry quest, Birth of a God. I’d like to see it make its way out of the “for review” section, so if any Neverwinter players reading this would like to give it a go, I’d be appreciative.

The code for the quest is NW-DOAU7PRQS, and the author should be listed as @Dorotaya. Here’s the description:

The Neverwinter Guard has received a plea for help from an unusual source — the Nasher rebels. A Nasher agent recently turned himself in, asking for protection. He claimed his gang had contracted the aid of a coven of dark wizards, but that those wizard had soon begun brainwashing his fellow rebels — or worse. Shortly thereafter, the Nasher was found dead in his cell, with mysterious runes carved into his flesh.

Because of your strong record and unique skillset, the Guard has contracted you to investigate this matter. The Nashers are bad, but the rise of a new cult of dark mages within the city would be much worse.

————

Content: Heavy action, some story, simple puzzles.
Genre: Action/dungeon crawl/horror.
Difficulty: Moderately challenging for soloists. Easy for groups.
Exploration: Mostly a linear quest, but those who go off the main path will find it rewarding.

TSW: The illuminated man

Like most people in The Secret World, I’m in a bit of a holding pattern until Tokyo releases. I must admit to getting a bit impatient. I understand they’re working as hard as they can, but still, we’ve been waiting for Tokyo since the game launched. We wants it!

I did get a little bored and wander away from the game a bit. I’m running low on things to do on my high level characters, and my Illuminati had been in mothballs since shortly after creating him, barring a brief excursion to help a fellow blogger learn the game — which actually turned out to be pretty fun.

But I’ve gotten back into playing him over the last few days, and I’ve been enjoying it a fair bit.

I’m getting used to Kirsten Geary’s mission reports. I still say she’s an overrated character, but she does have her moments, and she’s definitely more interesting than Sonnac.* It’s just a bit hard to swallow her boundlessly acerbic personality — even when she’s complimenting me, I can’t escape the feeling she’s just being patronizing.

*(Mr. Noble, Mr. Right, Mr. Quote Some Ancient Knight!)

I am amused that Geary seems to agree with Sonnac that a lot of the problems on Solomon Island were caused by the irresponsible Illuminati of yesteryear — as opposed to the irresponsible Illuminati of today.

I’ve just started on the Savage Coast, and that’s where the game always seems to get really interesting. I’m looking forward to reaching Innsmouth Academy. Partly because it’s probably the single greatest area in the game, and partly because I’m curious to see it through the lens of the Illuminati. They built the place, after all.

I’m not sure if it’s practice, the fact that I no longer suffer crippling lag, or that assault rifle really is that good of a weapon, but leveling seems positively breezy this time around. I’m cruising through almost effortlessly. Even the ak’ab only killed me once.

I hate those bastards. Especially the little ones. Being attacked by them is like drowning, except instead of water, it’s demonic cockroach-moths.

…Maybe I shouldn’t make similes in the middle of the night.

At any rate, my Illuminati’s adventures should be enough to keep me interested until Tokyo arrives. When I’m not wandering around other games, anyway.

By far the least popular Star Trek spin-off was Enterprise, and it happens to be my favourite. Similarly, Stargate: Universe is viewed as having ruined that franchise, but I thought it was brilliant. Nemesis is my favourite Trek movie, and while it isn’t the most hated, it’s pretty close, usually beaten only by The Final Frontier and Insurrection (I also liked Insurrection). Mass Effect 3 was infamously lambasted by the majority of fans, but I thought it was the highlight of the franchise.

What I’m trying to say here is this: I have terrible taste in everything. So maybe it’s not surprising that Dragon Age II, another universally despised game, is one of my favourite Bioware games to date.

A needed overhaul:

The first thing I noticed about Dragon Age II is that its combat was much improved from that of Origins.

Now, that really isn’t saying much. Origins was probably the single worst example of RPG combat I’ve ever had to slog through, and the combat of DA2 suffers from a lot of the same problems. Ability cooldowns are still absurdly long, and mana and stamina are still insanely easy to deplete and slow to regenerate. These combine to make a game that is so much on auto-pilot that it would make the original Dungeon Siege blush.

But on the plus side, attack animations — even auto-attack animations — were greatly improved and now carry a sense of brutal, visceral power to them. I may have still spent too much time watching my party auto-attack, but at least it was a nice show.

Abilities in DA2 are also a lot more creative and powerful, so at least they felt somewhat worth waiting for.

I won’t say that I actually liked the combat in DA2, but at least there were moments of it where I experienced something like fun.

The other thing that caught my eye right away was the graphical improvements. DA2 looks vastly better than Origins.

And I’m not just talking about the technical quality of the graphics, although that did take a big jump forward. Origins had no style, no personality. It’s like everything in its world was just copied directly from a handbook of fantasy cliches.

DA2, by comparison, has some very distinct visuals. Kirkwall is a city that oozes its own unique, albeit grim, personality, and the surrounding areas have a great sense of desolation about them.

I’ve heard many people complain about the reused environments, but I don’t see it as a major issue. The fact that the game only has one cave does get old after a while, but I felt the reuse of the environments of Kirkwall gave the game world a nice sense of permanence and reality.

But enough peripheral issues. Let’s talk about what actually matters.

The story:

I think I can sum up why I preferred the story of DA2 to that of Origins with one word: investment.

I never felt all that invested in the story in Origins. Maybe it’s my fault for playing as a Dalish Elf, but I never felt like it was my fight. I was running around the country fighting for people who oppress and abuse my people, and I had little to no chance to address any of the injustices I found all around me. It was very unsatisfying.

DA2 did a much better job of making it feel like my story.

I thought it was a very interesting change of pace that the game doesn’t begin with some world-ending threat. It starts as a much more personal story of a refugee family struggling to survive. It didn’t matter that I don’t much care about the world because I didn’t need to. I wasn’t trying to save the world; I was just trying to protect my family, and that made me feel invested in the story in a way Origins never did.

The lack of an over-arching threat to the world was a very interesting change of pace from the usual RPG storylines. I’m not sure I’d want to see it become the norm — there’s a reason epic storylines are so common — but it was an interesting experiment, and it very much played to Bioware’s strengths. It let them delve deeply into character plots and politics without it feeling like a distraction from the real threats.

Even when the plot did expand to world-changing issues, I felt like I was given much more agency than I was in Origins. I didn’t have to accept the injustices of the world, and I was able to be almost as much of a revolutionary as I wanted to be.

BURN THE CHANTRY. SLAUGHTER THE TEMPLARS. FIGHT THE POWER!

Ahem. Anyway…

Of course, it goes without saying at this point that the characterizations were excellent. I’m particularly going to miss Merrill now that I’ve finished the game. And Anders. And Bethany. And Fenris. But especially Merrill.

I thought the interactions with other characters were much streamlined this time, as well. The icons on the dialogue wheel to give you an idea of the tone of each option were a fantastic addition. Those little blurbs Bioware writes are often very vague, and I can’t count the number of times I said something completely contrary to what I wanted to back in Mass Effect. It was a great assurance to have a better idea of what my dialogue options were.

Initially, I was a bit put off by the disappearance of the great Bioware ritual of talking to all your companions after every quest, but once I got used to it, I realized that having conversations only available when characters actually have something meaningful to say makes much more sense. It was incredibly tedious to have to open up a whole dialogue tree just to check if someone has something new to say.

Conclusion:

So yes, I have terrible taste in everything. But hey, at least I’m enjoying myself. Despite its poor gameplay, Dragon Age II was like a book I couldn’t put down. From beginning to end, it kept me engaged and eager to see what happens next.

Overall rating: 8.6/10

Superior Realities

Category Archives: Games

TSW and Neverwinter: Life As a Digital Nomad

Retro Review: Dragon Age II

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