A few days ago, Turbine has opened the “Dungeons & Dragons Online” servers for people who pre-ordered the game. It took a catasser a whooping 5 days to reach max level. And there is zero high-end content. DDO is somewhat similar to Guild Wars: it’s an over-instanced turd. In contrast to DDO, GW is €10 cheaper, does not ask for a €15 monthly subscription fee and offers high-end content in form of a PvP system that many people enjoy.
It makes me wonder what Turbine’s business model for DDO is. The catass crowd will likely quit before the first subscription fee is due, the core gamers will hit that wall after two months max and even the casuals won’t be that far behind. Subscriber retention will be horrible, unless Turbine has a solid work-flow for providing major content updates at least once a months in place.
They’re either banking on people sticking around in hope for content patches or they simply see the subscription model as a means to earn another 15-30 bucks on top of the retail price. It seems a bit fishy. Why go with a subscription fee model when you don’t have the content to retain customers?
A gameplay video of Darkfall has been released. Darkfall? I can faintly remember reading about that game like 4 years ago. The stuff in the video doesn’t look horrible but it doesn’t look particularly good either. Animations appear wonky, kinda like a mid-1990s first person shooter. The creepy Spandex-armor thing is forgivable, considering that most MMORPGs do that. I don’t care much for the wilderness enviroment visuals, the trees look like crap. Buildings, on the other hand, are OK. The game seems to be be at least two generations behind in graphics technology but the artwork is acceptable.
The feature list is impressive:
- real-time clicky combat
- free PvP, no restrictions
- entirely free-form skill system; skills are raised by usage; no levels
- player housing
- up to 500 skills and spells each
- NPC hirelings
- huge, seamless world – five continents, hundreds of islands
- up to 10k simultaneous players per server
- entirely crafting-driven economy with item decay
- alignment system, character actions directly affect alignment
- spell casting time depending on armor type (heavier armor -> longer casting time)
- dynamic spawn system
Gameplay seems to be based on massive PvP battles and conquest, including sieges, as well as mounted and naval combat. Guilds will supposedly be able to establish their own kingdoms, engage in diplomatic relations with other kingdoms and even set up a legal system by instructing NPC guards to kill players of certain races and alignments or in response to certain actions.
Darkfall looks like a game that will be heavy on game mechanics and devoid of content. That means the game mechanics have to work perfectly because no one gives a shit about a gigantic game world populated with random dynamic mob spawns.
Chances are that we’re looking at yet another turd. The game has been in developement for about 5 years and they don’t have much to show for it. Conceptually, Darkfall reminds me of Age of Conan, sans the great visuals and the developer credibility. I’m not gonna claim BS just yet because the goals seem to be achievable, albeit ambitious. At least the developers aren’t going all batshit insane with their promises, like Artifact Entertainment did with Horizons. I’m not holding my breath, though.
EQ2 may be one of the most confusing MMORPG experiences I’ve ever had. Normally, I’m kind of binary when it comes to MMORPGs: I either like them or I hate them. With EQ2, it’s different. Every time EQ2 manages to positively impress me, some annoyance or another pops up and royally pisses me off. Today’s observations:
1. Splitpaw Saga. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the game slaps me right into the face with a humungous cock of suck in form of an eight hour lockout timer. I’m talking about the Trials of Harclave, of course. So yeah, I died about one hour into the instance. Bad enough that I’ll have to do it all over again - I guess that’s what I deserve for being a retard who managed to die in a solo instance. What I didn’t expect was the sheer malignant evil of the design monkeys who created this POS. Seriously, EQ2′s instancing system sucks the shit right outta your ass.
2. The new quest difficulty system. Quite possibly I’m just being an idiot and completely misunderstand how it’s supposed to work but I was under the impression that group quests were tagged as “heroic”. Problem is that there are a ton of quests in my journal that are not “heroic” and yet aren’t soloable. What’s the point having a system for categorizing quest difficulty and requirements in place when it isn’t even consistent?
3. The Broker is fucked up yet again but this time he still took my money. I just blew 4g on a skill upgrade I never received. Thanks a ton. What’s up with that anyway? How can such a fundamental part of the game be constantly broken? We’re talking about a $20 million flagship product that was released more than 18 months ago!
4. The Brigand class is growing on me. I’m 23 now and I like this toon, even though it looks like Necros and Sorcs can wtfpwn shit I can’t even dream of killing. I feel like a gimp - a fun gimp. Stealth rocks in this game. I love that skill that lets you feign death and retaliate with a OMGWTF huge damage attack when the mob hits you. I wish I had more skills to deal with groups of mobs, though. The one low-damage AE attack on a 30 second timer doesn’t really cut it. It still bugs the hell out of me that melee skills feel like spells in EQ2 but still, the class is fun to play.
5. I’m getting annoyed with the outdated rare spawn mechanic. I’m working on the Lightstone heritage quest and the damn lion won’t spawn. I’ve cleared the placeholder like 20 times but no avail. Wasted like 2 hours on this so far. Definately not fun.
6. Access quests are ghastly abominations and all games should avoid them like rape. In an 18-months-old game it’s hard enough to find low-level groups for dungeons. Finding groups for access quests is virutally impossible. The access quests were a bad idea to begin with and they should have been removed months ago. What’s the point of artificially locking out players from content? I can live with access quests for high-end raid content but in EQ2 half of the dungeons are locked.
7. I’ve encountered several broken quests. Broken low-level quests. That’s plainly unacceptable for an 18-months-old game.
8. I hate how arrows, food, poison and such are scattered all over different vendors and zones, depending on level. It’s annoying as hell and I see no good reason whatsoever for this.
The one thing that strikes me as odd is how unpolished the game feels. Maybe World of Warcraft spoiled me but I can’t shake the impression that EQ2 feels even less polished now than it did at release. Sure, there is a lot more content, less bugs, the classes are all better now and combat is much more fun. The game plays definately better now but it feels, well, patched to death… somehow less coherent. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly the problem is. I guess it’s the sum of all the small and not-so-small annoyances. Hard to tell.
I’m aware that I’m coming off as awfully negative towards EQ2. It’s not my intention to rant my fucking head off like a god damn lunatic. I’m not one of these pathological SOE and EQ2 haters who act like Smed had personally kicked them in the nuts and stole their lollipop at the playground. I quit EQ prior to the release of SoL so I never went through the experience of getting assraped by SOE. That’s why I don’t harbor any particular ill-feelings towards that company.
I think my negative attitude towards EQ2 is the result of feeling let down for the second time. I’ve mentioned before that I used to write for a German EQ2 fansite prior to EQ2′s release. I was quite the fanboy. I quit the job at the fansite two weeks after I got into beta because I thought the game didn’t even begin to live up to my expectations. At release, I leveled a Mystic to 50 and then quit. It felt like a waste of time. I was suckered back into EQ2 by all the recent positive buzz about how greatly EQ2 had supposedly improved. And in many ways, it is a much better game now. Yet, there is still so much about EQ2 that plain sucks and it’s overshadowing all the redeeming qualities EQ2 may have acquired during the past 12 months. I ended up being dissapointed yet again.
I used to play a Priest in a rather successful WoW raid guild. The inadequacies of that class were one of the reasons why I quit the game. Being a gimp who can’t heal a lick better than other healing classes while being stuck with cloth armor and very little utility makes monitoring 40 health bars for hours even less appealing than it already is. Getting assraped within seconds in PvP doesn’t help, either.
The Priest class has two major issues: First, the Priest lacks a clear superiority in healing when compared to other classes that offer tremendously more utility and versatility. Second, the Priest has severe survivability issues, especially in PvP. Priests only heal marginally better than classes that can take a whole hell of a lot more punishment and offer great utility to boot. There are also ability scaling issues. But hey, at least we can “melt faces”, right?
Fact is that the Holy talent tree is seriously lacking and the Discipline talent tree could do with a major revamp as well. And that’s what we’ll be getting with patch 1.10. About damn time.
I have to say that the Priest changes are absolutely fucking amazing, far better than what I could have hoped for in my wildest, wettest dreams. Right now, I’m sitting in front of a pile of soiled hankies as I am writing this up. I don’t even know where to start. Virtually all my gripes with the class have been addressed to some degree, well, except for the 40 health bars whack-a-mole gameplay. Can’t change that, I guess.
There are a number of new talents that improve Priest survivability:
- Improved Inner Fire (50% higher armor buff)
- Spell Warding (-10% spell damage)
- Blessed Recovery (25% of crit damage healed)
- Improved Power Word: Shield (+15%)
- Healing Focus (70% chance of not getting interrupted when attacked)
- Martyrdom (20% chance to resist interrupts)
All in all, Priest survivability will get a decent boost. Good stuff. Most of it probably isn’t extremely useful to a raid Priest but IPW:S and SW are nice. Oh, and the old IPW:S is now part of the core ability. What’s bugging me though is that PW:S still doesn’t scale with +heal items. Ok, so the new talent gives PW:S a +140 absorbtion buff. That will alleviate some of the PW:S suckiness in the short run but given the item progression we will very soon be back to square one. Blizzard should rethink that one, unless it’s already in the patch and Blizzard simply haven’t announced it yet.
Holy/Disc-Spec Priests will also get a nice DPS boost. They won’t be DPS gods but at least they won’t suck as hard as they do right now.
- Holy Fire will be a core ability with a 3.5s casting time
- Wand Specialization will be a first tier Disc talent
- Smite and HF casting times will be affected by the talent that reduces Greater Heal casting time
- Holy Nova will be a third tier talent and instant cast without cooldown (at increased mana cost)
- Spiritual Guidance (25% of SPIRIT added to damage)
Take note that I’m talking about Holy/Disc builds here. All that stuff will be virtually useless to Shadow Priests. In fact, moving Wand Specialization to the first tier constitutes a slight Shadow Priest nerf because they will have to trade Mental Strength for Meditiation and Inner Focus. Meditation is rather useless to Shadow Priests because high-end +dmg gear has very little spirit and the free cast of Inner Focus saves less mana than Mental Strength would have given them.
Most important of all, healing has been improved tremendously:
- Greater Heal will see it’s casting time reduced from 4s to 3s (2.5s with Divine Fury talent)
- Spiritual Guidance (25% of SPIRIT added to healing)
- new Spirit of Redemption (Priests can cast any heal spell for free for 10 seconds upon death)
The casting time reduction on Greather Heal is the big one here. With 4s casting time our signature spell that was supposed to make Priests the best healers (in exchange for being cloth wearer with little utility) used to be mostly unusable.
There will be more changes:
- Silent Resolve will reduce the threat caused by all spells
- Meditation costs will be reduced to three points
- Power Infusion – the new 31 point Discipline talent
- Improved Renew costs will be reduced to three points
- Improved Healing costs will be reduced to three points
- Searing Light talent (+10% Smite and Holy Fire damage)
- Lightwell – the new 31 point Holy talent
- Shadow Affinity costs reduced to three points
- Improved Fade will reduce Fade cooldown rather than duration
- Improved Vampiric Embrace – new talent that increases VE by 10% for 2 points
- Inner Focus cooldown reduced to three minutes
In addition to that, many talents have changed position within the trees, making non-cookie-cutter builds much more viable. Shadow hasn’t changed all that much but Shadow Priests will have two additional talent points at their disposal to place anywhere within the Shadow tree.
Power Infusion (a 20% spell damage buff lasting 15 second on a 3 minute cooldown) sounds nice but I’m not sure it’s useful enough to warrant putting 31 points into the Discipline tree for it. Lightwell, the 31 point Holy talent sounds rather limited in its usefulness. It some sort of bandaging station with 5 charges on a 10 minute cooldown timer. It heals less than bandages but is just as interruptable. I guess it’s a nice option if you invest 30 points into Holy anyway.
We’ll have to see how the changes will affect game balance. Blizzard might end up changing some of that stuff before the patch goes live. There may be potential issues. I can see how 3 Holy-Nova-spamming Priests bumrushing an Alterac Valley grave yard zerg could be unbalanced, especially since they can continue to heal for 10 more seconds after they die.
I think talents like Spell Warding and Blessed Recovery would have made more sense in the Discipline tree but that’s just nitpicking. All in all, I am pretty excited about these changes and I don’t even play anymore. Maybe it will help to keep Priests from burning out so fast so guilds won’t have a gear up a new batch of Priests every few weeks.
I don’t think it’s enough to make me reactivate my Priest since being a gimp wasn’t the only reason I quit. There was also the tedium of being a healer in WoW, some guild drama as well as real-life time constraints.
I thought I’d like the new and improved EQ2. Turns out that the experience is almost as infuriating as it was 14 months ago. It’s not only the game that is lacking, it’s SOE’s quality of service – or the lack thereof.
Some of my gripes may be specific to the German servers. One thing to keep in mind is that there was no server merger for the two German servers, apparently because they are aren’t as deserted as some of the US servers.
Which brings me to my first problem: lag. It’s bad. Really bad. As bad as it was at release. I’m not making that up. I’m talking 10+ second spell lags here. Some zones are simply unplayble during prime time. What’s even worse is the lack of communication with the German player base. The community rep relayed the lag complaints to SOE almost a month ago. Since then, nothing has happened – not even an official acknowledgement that the problem exists and is being worked on. There has been zero feedback and the problems are as badly as they have been weeks ago.
You see, we have a new community guy. It’s a girl, actually. And get this: she’s fluent in German. The old one (Xaycon) wasn’t. That’s right. SOE had initially hired a guy to manage the German language community who only knew German as a second language – and who wasn’t even particularly proficient at that. His postings were riddled with errors and were sometimes barely readable. I’m sure he did his best but you can’t really manage a community when you aren’t absolutely fluent in the community’s language. As a foreign English speaker, I know how long it takes to write up postings in a foreign language and my English is far better than his German ever was. I’m pretty sure that’s the reason why he rarely communicated at all. Back when I was writing for a German EQ2 fansite, I quickly learned that we’d better stick to the French (!) community gal – she’d actually answer our (English) emails. I always thought it was kind of hilarious that the German fansites had to communicate with the French community rep in English in order to get any decent information.
I digress. Anyway, this new community rep chick does her job reasonably well. I’m guessing she is as powerless as the rest of us about the lag situation. If SOE gave a rat’s ass about the German player base, they would have fixed it by now. I guess SOE is quite satisfied with taking our money but they don’t want to properly support us. And it’s not like the German EQ2 player base was tiny. It’s not. We have two servers that constantly show as “red” during prime time. US EQ2 has ten half-empty servers. EQ2′s German player base is probably a rather sizable chunk of EQ2′s total player base. I’m not surpirsed though. SOE has always been asinine in their treatment of their non-American customers. Pre-release they had vowed to get it right this time around – well, they didn’t.
There’s more shit going on. During the past four days, the server I play on came down about half a dozen times, sometimes at as little as a 5 minute’s notice.The broker system is constantly crapping out. It was non-functional when I started playing again. It worked after the KoS patch and now it’s inoperable again. I hope the unscheduled downtime right now fixes it. I’m not getting my hopes up though.
Technical issues aside, I’ve also been frustrated with the Splitpaw Saga Adventure Pack. Yeah, I shelled out the €8 and bought this spectacular crapfest. The content isn’t as bad as it could be, definately not worth €8, but it offers a reasonable, albeit overpriced, amount of content. I could actually get used to the idea if those things went for €3. A retail-packaged expansion usually goes for €24 and Splitpaw sure as hell doesn’t offer 1/3 of the content of a fully fledged expansion and you don’t get a nice box with your download either.
What pisses me off most about Splitpaw is SOE’s antediluvian instancing system. I wish someone would invent some device that lets me kick the asses of MMORPG designers through the Internet. I’ve been frustrated to death by this whole instance lock-out timer retardation some sadistic devil at SOE cooked up. While I’m not the most retarded MMORPG player out there, I’m certainly not particulary l33t either. That means that sometimes it takes me a while to figure things out.
That being said, there is this quest that takes you to an instance called “The Hideout” where you have to destroy supply crates with exploding barrels. Props to SOE for successfully managing to bring crates and exploding barrels into the realm of MMORPGs. Like we don’t get enough of that shit in first-person shooters…
Anyway, this instance has a 15 minute lock-out timer. I tried it four times and each time I failed after 2-3 minutes. Thanks to the lock-out timer I got a whooping ten minutes of gameplay out of a one hour time investment. It’s not like you could do anything productive in 15 minutes so you’re forced to wait in front of the instance until the timer runs out. I stared at brown cave walls and a dozen of repetitive gnoll models for 50 minutes, marvelling at SOE’s substandard artwork. This must be the single most retarded gameplay mechanic I’ve yet to see in a MMORPG. Ok, there were the EQ1 boat rides but those weren’t instanced so you could at least fuck around with your fellow catassers while waiting at the docks.
At this point, I’m not sure why I should continue playing EQ2. Yeah, there is this compulsive “must-log-on-and-level” thing that most MMORPG nerds suffer from but fact is that with EQ2 I’m not feeling satisfied after a couple of hours of gaining good exp and phat lewts. I’m feeling pissed off.
