Tag Archives: fantasy

Gaming Round-Up: TSW’s Spin-off, Diablo III’s Patch, Heroes, WoW, and More

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I really want to start making a dent in my massive backlog of already written blog posts, but the world just keeps throwing new juicy blog topics at me. Today, there’s a bundle of gaming news to cover.

A preview shot from Funcom's new horror game, The ParkFuncom announces The Park:

Here’s something absolutely no one saw coming: Funcom is putting out a single-player spin-off of The Secret World.

The Park is a horror title set in the Atlantic Island Amusement Park on Solomon Island. Presumably this means it will be set before the events of TSW — this is probably one of the horror stories that got the park shut down.

The amusement park was always one of the more interesting and unusual places in TSW. Aside from being creepy as all Hell, it’s one of the few storylines in the game with no real connection to the game’s main arcs, so this makes for a good choice for a spin-off.

I’m also glad to learn this was Joel Bylos’ secret project. For some reason it comforts me that Joel didn’t really leave the Secret World — he’s just working on a different part of it. Maybe he’ll come back to the MMO later.

Horror games aren’t usually my cup of tea, but I’m enough of a Secret World fan that I’m pretty much guaranteed to buy it.

A preview shot from Funcom's new horror game, The ParkI’m more interested in what this will mean for Funcom as a whole, though. The latest financial reports have been quite dire, and as a fan of TSW, this has me very worried. I hope The Park will be successful enough to turn things around a bit, and maybe boost TSW as well. Hopefully people who like The Park will then want to play TSW.

If Funcom is smart, they’ll take a page from Blizzard and do some cross-promotional rewards. Buy The Park and get an exclusive outfit in TSW, or something.

The really interesting thing is that this might open the door for more TSW spin-offs. The Secret World is such a vast and unique setting that the possibilities are virtually endless. You could get twenty games just from Innsmouth Academy and the League of Monster Slayers.

What I’d most like to see are Nassir’s time in the “special” Special Forces and a prequel about Halina Ilyushin from the Facility. I think she’s one of TSW’s more compelling antagonists, and she deserved way more attention than she got.

Diablo III: Is it about my cube?

In other news, this week saw the release of patch 2.3 for Diablo III, which is arguably the largest non-expansion patch the game has yet seen.

The new Ruins of Sescheron zone in Diablo IIIThe big new features are the Ruins of Sescheron zone and Kanai’s Cube, an artifact with a number of powerful abilities, most notably the capacity to extract powers from legendary weapons and equip them on you character as a new set of passive abilities.

I was very impressed with the Ruins of Sescheron. I have often ragged on D3’s subpar graphics, but Sescheron is absolutely beautiful and without a doubt the best looking place in the game to date.

The detail of the zone is excellent, and not just in terms of visuals. There’s all-new, fully voiced lore — including the incredibly welcome reappearance of Abd al-Hazir — as well as several memorable new monster types. The yetis gave me a nice jolt of nostalgia for Diablo II — which is a bit weird since I didn’t like that game very much.

The Cube is also quite an interesting concept, though I haven’t been able to get much use out of it yet. To my eternal regret, I disenchanted nearly all my spare legendaries before the announcement of the Cube. All I’ve been able to throw in so far is my old level 60 Mirrorball.

But that disappointment is entirely on my own head.

I am eternally impressed by how Blizzard keeps putting out new free content for Diablo III. In any other game, something like patch 2.3 would be a $15 DLC. Blizzard could certainly get away with charging that much for it. But they’re literally giving it away.

The corpse of Elder Kanai in Diablo IIII am increasingly struck by the stark differences between World of Warcraft’s team and the rest of Blizzard. While StarCraft 2 sets a new standard for developer communication with weekly development updates and Diablo III throws free content at players for funsies, WoW is defined by shameless greed, out of touch development, and tone-deaf communication.

Blizzard is still a fantastic company. But you’d never know it if all you play is WoW.

Heroes of the Storm: Infernal Shrines and map rotation woes

Heroes of the Storm also got a significant update this week with its second Diablo-themed map, Infernal Shrines.

Unfortunately, I’ve only had the opportunity to play the map once so far, but based on first impressions (which could prove totally wrong once I have more experience), I’m not sure I agree with the people saying this map is more prone to snowballing than others. My team had a massive advantage for the first half of the match — we won something like the first three or four Punishers — and we still went on to lose badly.

Painful as that was for me personally, it does show comebacks are very doable on that map, and that’s a good thing.

The loading screen for the new Infernal Shrines map in Heroes of the StormOn the whole it seems a fun map. Having the bosses target players as much as structures is a nice change of pace, and I like the way they borrowed monster affixes from Diablo III. Arcane seems especially deadly.

On the downside, the fact that some affixes do seem better than others adds an unhealthy degree of randomness to the map, and the amount of skeletons you need to kill to summon a Punisher seems to favour AoE-heavy heroes, which are already pretty popular in the metagame right now.

Then again, I play Jaina and Tassadar. Maybe I shouldn’t complain.

The addition of another new map also means the map selection has once again been cut down to increase the odds of Infernal Shrines appearing for the first week. It’s a good idea in theory, but it has some flaws.

It kind of sucks if your favourite map is one of the ones (temporarily) cut, and you still have only a one in six chance of getting the new map, which tends to make one pretty sick of the others. I have seen way too much of Tomb of the Spider Queen lately.

You could do custom games, but you lose out on matchmaking, and it’s kind of a pain in general if you’re not lucky enough to know nine other people who are interested in doing custom games.

World of Warcraft: I’m back, baby

The swamps of Tanaan Jungle by night in World of WarcraftYes, despite all my harping on Warlords of Draenor, I have finally returned to WoW. I missed my characters, and I want to get the legendary ring for my rogue.

For the most part my previous thoughts on WoD remain true. It’s a sea of blandness and mediocrity occasionally spiced up by some brain-achingly bad decisions. Garrisons remain the main saving grace for me, though I somewhat understand from where the hate for them springs.

The grind needed to unlock flight isn’t improving my view, either. It’s not really that bad a grind in terms of how long it takes, but the stuff you’re doing is just so agonizingly tedious. Apexis dailies are a special kind of Hell. I mean, I even like the idea of just filling up a progress bar through whatever is at hand, but they’re tuned to be so slow. Every time I kill a mob and see that bar move only 1%, I die a little inside. Add to that crowds of players killing and looting everything in sight, and it’s just miserable.

On the plus side, I finally started leveling my warlock in earnest, and the Frostfire Ridge storyline turned out to be by far and away my favourite part of the expansion so far. Was a great reminder that Orcs are actually pretty awesome when they’re not being stripped down to Saturday morning cartoon villains.

I found the culture they established for the Frostwolf Clan to very fascinating — basically translating the canine pack mentality to a full society of sentient beings — and Durotan is just all kinds of awesome. The way he shut down Ga’nar was just brilliant.

Bladespire Fortress in te Frostfire Ridge zone in World of WarcraftVery pretty zone, too.

Cheating on WoW: The Elder Scrolls Online

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Elder Scrolls Online is a game that’s been my radar since before it launched. Which is a bit odd because my history with the Elder Scrolls franchise is virtually nonexistent.

A quest instance in Elder Scrolls OnlineI am for all practical purposes an Elder Scrolls virgin. I did buy Skyrim on a Steam sale a year or two back, but it failed to impress. I’m sure for a certain kind of player it’s a great game, but after four hours during which a rough estimate of nothing had happened, I just gave up.

Despite that less than stellar experience, though, I remained curious about ESO. Elder Scrolls name aside, it seemed to be doing a lot of things that I appreciate in an MMO. The wide variety of options for customizing one’s build holds a lot of appeal, and while ESO’s reputation as a “single-player MMO” is a stain on its name for most people, it’s a mark in its favour for me.

I had hoped for a free trial, but none was forthcoming, so when the game went on sale for $12, I decided to take a chance.

After a few days of exploring Tamriel, I’m still not entirely sure what I think. I should also mention that I wasn’t able to delve as deeply into the game as I normally do before I write these posts, due to a combination of my limited time before resuming my apartment search in Toronto (which is probably where I’ll be when this post goes live)* as well as ESO’s quirks.

But I’m not sure whether I’ll continue playing or not, and even if I do, it won’t be for several weeks, so I figured I should write up my first impressions now.

My sorcerer in Elder Scrolls Online*[Actually, no. I found a place, and I am currently back home finishing off my packing for the move. Haven’t found the time to spend any more time in ESO since writing this, though.]

A plethora of options:

The odd thing about ESO is that it has very few significant flaws — at least so far — but also very few exceptional qualities. Despite this, I will do my best to highlight the game’s strengths and weaknesses.

By far my favourite thing about the game so far is the amount of freedom you’re given in how you build your character.

ESO does have classes (four, to be precise), but they make up a fairly small part of your character’s build. Every class can use every weapon and armour type, and similar to Guild Wars 2 or The Secret World, your weapon provides much of your active abilities.

I’ve been playing a sorcerer, but I’m using mostly leather and plate armour, and I’ve been shifting back and forth between a greatsword and a bow for my weapon. I’m sure this is a terrible build that would get me laughed out of groups, but I’m enjoying it a lot.

A night shot in Elder Scrolls OnlineWell, sort of. To my surprise, despite having a quasi-action combat system (again, similar to GW2 and TSW), ESO seems to follow the WoW model of combat difficulty. That is to say most enemies drop dead after about two or three hits, and fights are often over before I even take a single point of damage.

This is by far my biggest complaint about ESO so far, and it’s sucking a lot of fun of out of what might otherwise be an interesting game. What’s the point of this deep build system when most enemies die after one or two ability uses? What’s the point of all the game’s intricate block, dodge, and interrupt mechanics when you can just burst mobs down almost immediately?

Someone in chat said it gets harder once you leave the starting zone, but I have my doubts. I find most MMOs generally maintain a fairly static difficulty level for open world content.

On the plus side, something else I appreciate about ESO is that it is a very detailed game. The world is not lifeless and sterile as you would see in WoW and its clones. There are books and notes to read everywhere (though most of them are pretty boring), and there’s loot scattered everywhere (though most of it’s not that valuable).

Where this gets interesting, though, is that some of that loot already has owners. The game has a full theft and crime system where if you’re sneaky, you can rob NPCs blind. But get caught, and the NPC guards will begin hunting you, forcing you to hide lest your ill-gotten gains be confiscated.

The Harborage in Elder Scrolls OnlineGoody two-shoes that I am, I only steal from the NPCs who deserve it… but there are a lot of those, so I’ve spent my fair share of time dodging the guards. It’s surprisingly fun — again, it makes it feel more like a world and less like a game.

I’m a little on the fence on the quest design in ESO. On paper, it’s exactly what I like: fewer, deeper, more story-driven quests. It’s a bit like The Secret World that way.

But the quests still aren’t that memorable, ultimately. They certainly beat the stock standard “kill ten rats” fare, but there isn’t a lot of mechanical originality, and the story-telling remains largely unimpressive, with incredibly predictable plots, a generic setting, and mostly uninteresting quest-givers.

Except Razum-dar. This one likes Razum-dar. Razum-dar is good Khajiit.

Story is usually the largest factor in determining whether I stick with an MMO, and while ESO’s story doesn’t bore me as much as, say, Rift’s or Neverwinter’s, it’s not exactly grabbing me, either.

The woods of Auridon in Elder Scrolls OnlineAnother odd thing about ESO’s quests is that most of them are just out in the middle of the wilderness with little to no indication of their existence until you stumble across them.

It’s another thing I feel mixed on. On the one hand, it’s a good reward for exploration. Reminds me of Guild Wars 2 a bit. But it also feels a bit unnecessarily obtuse, and if I hadn’t already known to look around from reading about the game, I probably would have missed out on a lot of content.

Taking it slow, and other thoughts:

Another issue with ESO is that the leveling is probably the slowest I’ve ever seen in an MMO. Before even hitting level ten, each level takes about as long as leveling 89-90 did back in Mists of Pandaria. If not longer. It’s crazy.

I’m someone who feels the journey matters more than the destination, so this isn’t a gamebreaking issue for me, but going so long without any gear upgrades, or new abilities, or any rewards at all is a little wearing.

Due to the snail’s pace of leveling and my Toronto-related deadline, I haven’t had a chance to try dungeons, or PvP, or really anything but questing. My understanding is that ESO is another game to make the incredibly backwards decision not to include a dungeon finder, so I may never experience its group content, and I think the PvP is just open world faction war, so that holds even less appeal to me than MMO PvP normally does.

A hamlet by night in Elder Scrolls OnlineThe only thing I’ve done that involved other players was a very Rift-like open world event. It was fun enough, but very quick, and it didn’t offer much in terms of rewards.

ESO also still doesn’t have anything resembling an auction house as far as I know, which I find baffling. I guess that “single-player MMO” thing isn’t entirely a good thing even for me.

The one good I can say on social matters is that at least ESO has open-tapping. Which is good because the zones are incredibly crowded, even at low levels.

One final thing I should mention is that I very much like the business model ESO has adopted. No mandatory subscription, and the cash shop is so pure in its devotion to cosmetics and minor convenience that it fills me with wistful sadness, for I know no cash shop can remain this utterly harmless forever.

* * *

After several days of playing, I’m still not sure how I feel about Elder Scrolls Online. It rarely excels, but it also doesn’t have a lot of major flaws. I’m not exactly thrilled with it, but I keep logging in.

Some Elven ruins in Elder Scrolls OnlineAs a result, I’m also not sure whether I would recommend it or not. It’s a lot like The Secret World, but with much lower difficulty and a lesser quality of story-telling. Whether or not that appeals is up the individual.