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Played Wildstar today.

Not bad - I'm not a fan of the interface...where as some games like GW2 and Rift, etc have a "interface" button, Wildstar has 3...F to talk V to collect loot, G to ahve your science bot science.

 

The look is...ok

the Level up Is over the top 

 

Played an Engineer and a Medic one from each faction. I like it.

Not sure I'll buy

 

 

And I read a rather SCATHING review of Elderscrolls Online.

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I've had some good zone chat, but there are plenty of trolls on there too. It's pretty random.

 

I've been trying to decide on my race/class combos. Lots of good stuff, so it's hard to decide. I'm set on my first three classes, though. Some screenshots:

 

post-676-0-69105900-1399796930_thumb.jpg

 

Female Draken Stalker.

 

post-676-0-92020100-1399796967_thumb.jpg

 

Female Aurin Spellslinger. I don't care if the bat ears make no sense. Kind of reminds me of Darkstalkers.

 

post-676-0-85793700-1399797008_thumb.jpg

 

Male Mordesh Warrior.

 

I'm liking Esper and Medic so far, but haven't settled on races for those. I'm not overly fond of most of the races. Humans seem kind of meh aesthetically. I like both male and female Granok, but not so much in game. A bit too cumbersome. I'm thinking maybe Mechari male for the Medic, if they fix the running animation, which is just odd. Maybe Chua for Esper. Like the animations for Chua, and the evil/maniacal laughter. Engineer is the only class I'm not too fond of after a low level test drive, but I'll likely make one eventually.

 

I agree with Enforcer on the keybinds. Not well thought out. Maybe designed by an octopus who chugs double espressos all day or something.
 

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Ya SW:TOR's FtP system is, if not THE stingiest, one of the most stingiest ones out there.

 

The action bars you have are a result of Preferred status. I'm not sure what possesed me to spend money on the game but until I did, I only had the 1 action bar under in the middle of the screen.

 

Still got Cartel Points to spend but I doubt I'll ever go back to that game. Oddly enough, it just doesn't feel star warsy to me.

 

I was doing really well until a patch made everything too tough to solo. One of the things I am starting to realize is that MMOs don't do "larger than life" very well. In Champions Online, I hated the fact that street gangs basically all had superpowers. It was frustrating to think that I had ended up in Syndrome's world. Star Wars follows along those lines with the Jedi Knight being the most ineffective character that I played. The Soldier, by contrast, was much more capable of surviving and laying down some serious damage with his assault cannon. There is a disconnect between the films and the MMO.

 

Presently I've returned to Star Trek Online after a few year hiatus. There are many great things to like about how PWE/Cryptic extended the play life of characters at the level 50 cap. I have had a couple of incredibly annoying bugs along the way, but mostly been having a blast. I can see where the dilithium and "mark" farming will get old, but right now it is the kind of mindless distraction that the doc ordered.

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I decided to play a little SW:TOR the other night. I figured I'd make a fresh Jedi character and try out the storyline, choosing the most "dark side" options in the dialog trees to see what happened.

 

The Jedi starting zone was so horrible story-wise that I just quit after a few minutes. I'd started a Bounty Hunter a while back, and thought the story there was pretty solid. No glaring MMO-isms to speak of, some interesting RPG elements in the quests/dialog trees, etc. Felt like the game's reputation for good storytelling was deserved. The Jedi start area? Bog standard MMO quests, where my level one Jedi Padawan is asked to go take care of a bunch of raiders killing trainees. Asked by a bunch of senior Jedi who are just standing around with their thumbs up their butts... Sorry, those higher level guys should have at least been occupied with something, making it a necessity to send me off. Not just seeming lazy. Kind of killed the story part for me.

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I think the piss-poor Jedi storyline was very typical of the way Bioware approached Jedi. I've played through the tutorial for every single class.

 

Republic

  • Trooper: On the Republic side, I consider this the best of the stories. There is no stretch to understand that a trooper follows orders and this particular trooper happens to be good enough to be assigned to an elite squad. Story is oh so predictable though.
  • Jedi Knight: Bad for all the reasons Pattern Ghost mentioned. Combined with the sense that this is not the Jedi Knight you were looking to play, my least favorite story and start and character. The story does improve after the tutorial.
  • Jedi Consular: Bad for similar reasons to the Jedi Knight. At least the Consular has some fun gameplay that isn't crippled. Again, the story starts to improve once you get out of the tutorial.
  • Smuggler: Good. No major issues with the story. The character, as a class, is a bit bland for me. That doesn't make the story any less good though.

 

Sith

  • Bounty Hunter: Okay. I wanted to like it and I do like the Bounty Hunter on the whole. The story is pretty typical underhanded underworld stuff, but solid enough that it shines in comparison to either Jedi.
  • Sith Warrior: The mirror to the Jedi Knight in every way. Good story, motivations that make sense, and though the mechanics are similar, they seem to fit the character type better.
  • Sith Inquisitor: My favorite start on the Sith side and my favorite character in the game. I played a female and that British accent kicking back some very sarcastic comments was absolutely worth it.
  • Imperial Agent: To be honest, I don't think I got very far before I dumped the character. I can't seem to recall anything about it. I suppose that says all it needs to.

 

The game was just too restrictive. Space combat was not fun. After the last patch I was around for, even the garden variety baddies got too tough. That disconnected me from the story of playing a jedi and put me into the position of playing a frustrating MMO. Like all MMOs, the missions are usually Go Here, Fight This, Activate That, Repeat Until Brain Dead, Collect Reward. he worst is when you go to point B, do whatever it is you do, return to point A only to find point C was right next to B. 

 

And that is the last I am going to say about Star Wars the Old Republic.

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I was doing really well until a patch made everything too tough to solo. One of the things I am starting to realize is that MMOs don't do "larger than life" very well. In Champions Online, I hated the fact that street gangs basically all had superpowers. It was frustrating to think that I had ended up in Syndrome's world.

 

 

I was just talking to my wife about this the other day. I remember my first MMO experience. My younger future-brother-in-law was playing one of the earlier MMOs and let me make a character on his account to try it out. I'm pretty sure it was Everquest. So, I made an Ogre warrior. I then headed out of town on my first adventure, to kill some giant rats. Another player passing by me on the way out of town gave me some gear to get me started, which I thought was nice. Figuring I was even better equipped to kill rats than a moment ago, off I went . . . and was promptly obliterated by rats. RATS. 

 

So, my first impression of MMOs was that they were games where rats could beat up Ogres. What a silly genre. I didn't play another MMO until City of Heroes came out. You know what? It felt a LOT better to be beat up by street gangs than rats. :snicker:

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I was doing really well until a patch made everything too tough to solo. One of the things I am starting to realize is that MMOs don't do "larger than life" very well. In Champions Online, I hated the fact that street gangs basically all had superpowers. It was frustrating to think that I had ended up in Syndrome's world. Star Wars follows along those lines with the Jedi Knight being the most ineffective character that I played. The Soldier, by contrast, was much more capable of surviving and laying down some serious damage with his assault cannon. There is a disconnect between the films and the MMO.

 

Presently I've returned to Star Trek Online after a few year hiatus. There are many great things to like about how PWE/Cryptic extended the play life of characters at the level 50 cap. I have had a couple of incredibly annoying bugs along the way, but mostly been having a blast. I can see where the dilithium and "mark" farming will get old, but right now it is the kind of mindless distraction that the doc ordered.

 

I had that same thought.  In fact, I had that exact same experience. I tried out the Jedi and was sort of impressed with his abilities but he didn't feel very Jedi-ie to me . . not at all.

 

Then I made a Trooper to play with one of my sons and the difference between the two was like night and day.  My Trooper was kicking arse and not even bothering with names while my Jedi felt like Oliver asking contritely for some more.

 

I played STO for a while, can't really remember why I stopped playing.  I have been kicking around the idea of trying it out again but I dunno, I'm not really a Star Trek fan.

 

It also doesn't help that I'm not max level. And, like all MMOs out there, after a point they seem to forget about all the people below level 50 and just concentrate on stuff for the max, or near max, level players to do.  While I can understand that I'd also think they'd want to keep their low to mid level players entertained enough that they stuck around to become the high level characters able to reap the benefits of the countless man hours soaked into that content.

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Well, Carbine had their first kerfuffle early. One of the pre-order perks is early name registration. Normally, pre-orders get to start playing a few days early (headstart), which means they'll also have a bit of an advantage in getting the name they want. 

 

For some reason, Carbine decided to take that last bit of it one step further, by letting pre-orders register a single character name and a single guild name in advance, so that when the servers go live, they will have that name waiting for them.

 

Unfortunately, Carbine also made another decision, which was to not name launch servers until the last minute. From what I gather this is to avoid one of the big problems of an MMO launch, which is a huge surge of players, followed by a huge drop off of players. If you buy/lease enough hardware to handle the surge, you're going to get stuck with a lot of useless hardware after the subscriptions drop off from about 30-90 days out. Then you end up with a bunch of underpopulated servers, giving the impression the game is dead. If you merge servers to fix that, you have to deal with naming conflicts, and so on. It's not an easy problem. So, anyway ...

 

Since they decided to do the early name registration yesterday, and they don't have a final server list, they had to make name reservations global. So, if for example, I reserve the name Marama (I did), then nobody can create a Marama on any server in the game, anywhere. Not even in Europe or Oceania. Initially, the lock out for the name was going to be for 90 days, and it'd be freed up on any servers it wasn't used on after that. That was mistake one. People were rightfully upset that so many names were going to be locked down for so long. So, they moved that back to two weeks. Which still sucks. The right thing to do would have been just to go with the standard headstart, really. People are at least used to that small edge going to pre-orders, and would have some shot at getting the name they want by trying different servers.

 

Now, the BIG shot to the foot was that the website they set up for it naturally crashed big time. It also seems that the programming and design of the page was a steaming pile of poo. See, the idea was that this would be a first come, first served race to reserve names. Now, when the site works for some people, and not for others, it becomes less of a race and more of a lottery. To add insult to injury, people with some knowledge of web programming could write scripts to automatically enter their name and refresh the site repeatedly until it worked, meaning they had a huge edge in efficiency. If all of this wasn't bad enough, people had names reserved, with screenshots showing they'd successfully reserved them, only to have them lost or changed randomly.

 

Aside from the race to reserve a name being borked, a lot of people couldn't reserve perfectly innocuous names due to arcane naming restrictions.

 

Carbine hasn't really addressed the community on this faux pas yet. Can you say PR nightmare? 

 

The registration was supposed to begin at 11 am PST (PDT? Whatever. When did they change the initials anyway?). I was at the vet with my avatar up there and didn't get back until about 1230, and the site was already down. It came back up after 1, and was very crashy, so I did the sensible thing. Instead of mashing the button until I was blue in the face, I took a nap. =)

 

After I woke up, I was able to get in and reserve Marama, which is a name that I've used in MMOs since City of Heroes. I have a pad with about forty or so suitable names I've thought up, so I'm good to go even if that gets borked up somehow. I'm not that attached to any particular name for generic Fantasy/SF games. (Though for full disclosure, I've moved my WoW Warrior Marama to different servers a couple of times, lost the name, then later paid for a name change when the name became available again. Not so much that I'm in love with the name as much as that character is now a Marama in my mind, and not a Deirdre or Maegwen.)

 

For a guild name, I've reserved Slackers. For anyone wants to slack with me when the game launches, I'll post the server I pick when it's closer to launch.

 

 

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Here's a video showing the hoverbike rental, and the quest pointer arrow. I'm not sure if the hoverbike rental is a fixture of the town or if it's one of the things that Settlers can build, but it's pretty cool. It doesn't currently seem to have a cost associated with it, which makes it even more cool. You basically get a mount to ride until you dismount. So, if you're in town and need to cross the map again to get back to questing, it's very handy. The zones are fairly big, so it's a nice feature.

 

Video is a bit choppy at first. My frame rate dropped to 10fps at the beginning when I started Fraps. I need a second drive to record to, might put that on my b-day list.

 

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I played STO for a while, can't really remember why I stopped playing.  I have been kicking around the idea of trying it out again but I dunno, I'm not really a Star Trek fan.

 

It also doesn't help that I'm not max level. And, like all MMOs out there, after a point they seem to forget about all the people below level 50 and just concentrate on stuff for the max, or near max, level players to do.  While I can understand that I'd also think they'd want to keep their low to mid level players entertained enough that they stuck around to become the high level characters able to reap the benefits of the countless man hours soaked into that content.

 

Not much of a fan either. I am having a blast, but the fresh coat of paint is starting to show wear now. It is my curse with MMOs. I hate grinding. I'm more of a story experience guy. Everything in STO is grinding. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the grinding missions and the story missions. I also want a ship that is only available through the C-Store so that means I'm farming (grinding) dilithium every day. SW:TOR taught me the foolishness of paying real currency for their micro transactions.  Now I exchange dilithium. It is a slow process. Very slow.

 

I have just as much fun playing lower level characters as higher level ones with one exception; Sector Alerts. Dropping in to say "Hi" to the Borg pretty much demands the best ship you can muster with all the bridge officers configured correctly, the duty officers set up just right, and the right equipment loaded. That said, my Escort can dish out a fair bit of punishment when the need calls for it. Not the most by far, but still respectable. The most powerful I saw was this giant Romulan ship (the one from the recent Star Trek reboot) firing all of its forward weapons with a couple of buffs. Absolutely awesome to see it open up on a Borg squadron and watch as two spheres, a probe and half of a cube's health just disappear. Fastest sector alert I ever played. When we got to the boss, it was dead in under 15 seconds. 

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Not much of a fan either. I am having a blast, but the fresh coat of paint is starting to show wear now. It is my curse with MMOs. I hate grinding. I'm more of a story experience guy. Everything in STO is grinding. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the grinding missions and the story missions. I also want a ship that is only available through the C-Store so that means I'm farming (grinding) dilithium every day. SW:TOR taught me the foolishness of paying real currency for their micro transactions.  Now I exchange dilithium. It is a slow process. Very slow.

 

I don't mind grinding as long as it doesn't feel like grinding. I did a lot of it in WoW.  I do like a good story and it's why I hardly grouped and didn't like grouping with one of my friends. I liked/needed to sit there and read the quest txt and all he did was click "accept" and then run off to complete the quest.

 

WARNING! Slight Tangent! - Interestingly enough, I logged in one day to find him swearing up a storm in Guild chat because of this quest he was on.  Apparently, he'd just died like the 15th time and couldn't defeat the quest mob.  After I asked what quest and he told me, I asked "Did you pick up and use the Hammer?" His response: "What hammer".  I told him where it was and how to use it. I also told him that if he'd read the quest text, he'd have known what to do.

 

Yeah, still not sure why I spent $10 on SW:TOR.  It's just not Star Warsy enough for me.  I do think I spent some money no STO, not sure how much or if I even did since it's been that long but I just can't bring myself to download it and start it up again.

 

And while I know I can get most of the stuff through converting dilithium, when I did it before it felt like I was doing a job and not playing a game. (Also one of the reasons I don't Raid or join Raid Guilds. I don't feel I should have to fill out an application as I'm playing a game, not interviewing for a job).

 

 

I have just as much fun playing lower level characters as higher level ones with one exception; Sector Alerts. Dropping in to say "Hi" to the Borg pretty much demands the best ship you can muster with all the bridge officers configured correctly, the duty officers set up just right, and the right equipment loaded. That said, my Escort can dish out a fair bit of punishment when the need calls for it. Not the most by far, but still respectable. The most powerful I saw was this giant Romulan ship (the one from the recent Star Trek reboot) firing all of its forward weapons with a couple of buffs. Absolutely awesome to see it open up on a Borg squadron and watch as two spheres, a probe and half of a cube's health just disappear. Fastest sector alert I ever played. When we got to the boss, it was dead in under 15 seconds.

 

I think I tried a Borg Sector Alert once.  Got creamed as I was very low level.  I went to another one and just hung back and watched the fire works.  The animations/space battle was an awesome sight to behold.

 

PS: Hopefully my reply makes sense. It seems a bit disjointed to me but I'm not sure how to fix it.

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