As it turned out Pandas was a great idea, so with that in mind I hope for greater open-mindedness from Blizz regarding new playable races to be introduced over the coming years. Here are some suggestions that I, with input from Pike, would especially like Blizzard to consider:
1) Tuskarr. These are top of the list, and should have been playable since Wrath instead of adding DKs. They are The Best Race. They are big fat Walrusmans who build big Walrusman moai and I forget to finish my sentences AND they have the best lines! “Visit again when you can!”
2) Ethereals. They are the Second Best Race, and I can’t even begin to fathom why they’re not playable because they’re blatantly superior to everything else that isn’t a walrusmans.
(everything after this point is in no particular order)
3) Ogres. They really should have been playable since Day One, let’s be honest here.
4) Mantids. These guys look metal as all hell and I’d very much like to be able to say things like “It’s time to swarm.” or “I must speak with the Adjunct!”.
5) Grummles. I love them and their constant talk about luckydos is amazing. I especially like how their name is their luckiest luckydo, so some of them have names like “Half-eaten Fish” and “Wooden Spoon”.
6) Naga. The quests in Vash’jir where you are a Naga Battlemaiden are great, because you get to see how cool as heck Naga are. Turns out they’re refined, treat their underlings reasonably, and act with respect and decorum! Also they have that crazy spinny-blade blender move that minces everything.
7) Iron Vrykul and Iron Dwarves. Rock-based robots covered in baller glower runes? Yep I’m okay with that sign me up please.
8) Tol’vir. Yesssss these guys are also baller as hell. Hanging out in Uldum being big old cat-taurs looking like they really do deserve to be in charge? Do want.
9) Arakkoa. I wanted to be one of these bird-people when I first saw one in Hellfire Peninsula all those years ago, and I still want to. Because creepy bird-people.
10) Aqir. Yes more bugs. I like being a bug! I want to be a bug leader of a gigantic, terrifying hive-mind that consumes the world, deal with it!
11) Faceless Ones. Tentacles and a complete inability to have pronounceable names add together for a pretty amazing race.
Blizz please make Wilford Brimley playable.
What about the rest of you guys? Any races in particular from the WoW setting you want to run around doing dailies as?
For obvious reasons Dwarfs make the best Brewmasters, so when Pike and I rolled a couple of Monks I chose Dorf as my race. I quickly found that the best reference to anything in WoW is sitting down there in Coldridge Valley.
This is a reference to Parappa the Rapper in the Year of Our Lord 2012.
Based on this alone I’d be quite happy to call Pandamans a shining success, but as it turns out absolutely everything about this expansion I’ve seen so far is solid goddamn gold. I’ve no doubt my dear co-blogger Pike will have a lot more to say on the subject seeing as she is the one who is actually good at this videogame, so I shan’t go into it in too much detail, but I cannot stop playing this freaking game. Would you like to know more? Well then, let’s consider that the Panda Inn music is peerless:
Just wait until the kazoo kicks in.
Oh, and Pokewow? The thing I long scorned as a shameless gimmick intended to bring in people who would otherwise have no interest in the game? I was COMPLETELY WRONG in every way. Pet Battles is absolutely freaking insanely brilliant and addictive and anytime I find myself at a loss for other stuff to do, welp, time to set REAPER PRIME on some chumps. (REAPER PRIME is a Tiny Harvester about ten inches tall.) And I think that’s the key to what MoP has done right – there’s a huge variety of things to do open to you and a lot of them require minimal investment of time to get started. For all the old man “danged kids” lamenting Pike and myself do I have to admit I’m pretty glad to see the narrow idea of what endgame is in the past.
I should go play some bad games so I stop fanboying over stuff but, heck, I just want to enthuse about how great videogames are so here we are, with constant posts about great games!
I only just heard the news now, but apparently the word came down from on high at NCSoft last week – City of Heroes is being shut down.
Now I’ve really got two separate but related topics in mind here, the first of which is City of Heroes itself and the second of which is gaming companies and their attitudes, so this post might be a little longer than usual as I delve into both. I do apologize to those who prefer snappier posts but I only have so much control over my sesquipedalian loquaciousness.
Long ago, I played City of Heroes back when it was very new. Before the first ‘Issue’ (as they call their patch-expansions) even came out. It wasn’t a perfect game by any means but it was a great deal of fun, with an obviously massive amount of care and love put into it. Along with FFXI it was my first MMO, and it’s one that’s stuck with me since even if I haven’t played in a good long time. It still has an active community today (Though not for much longer, obviously) and it’s pretty sad to see how surprised and shocked everyone was by this news. It really came from nowhere and I’d hate to think about a community I’ve been part of for years just being unplugged.
My visage upon hearing of this news.
When I say people were shocked and surprised, it should be noted that this seems to have included the actual devs at Paragon as well. One day things were fine, they were excitedly discussing the next issue and their plans for the future, and the next they got a phone call saying to wrap it up, the show is over. There was no forewarning, no discussion, not even a hint of anything like this coming until NCSoft made the call. NCSoft have had a terrible year so far, in large part because they were banking on Guild Wars 2 being a success (and by all accounts it, monetarily at least, is). They’re also insisting on keeping Aion limping along even though who the hell plays Aion. But City of Heroes, a steady game with an active fanbase, and in the green? It gets cut. Apparently NCSoft don’t see as much of the money from CoH as they do from other games, presumably because of something in the arrangement when they handed it from Cryptic over to Paragon, and this warrants ending the game and closing the studio.
I don’t want to get into a big ol’ anarcho-syndicalist rant here (actually yes I do but) but it seems to me like certain people, both within gaming and without, could stand to take a longer-term look at their income sources. Something doesn’t have to beat a Hollywood blockbuster to be worthwhile; look at Paradox Interactive. Their games are never going to outsell Halo and they know it, but they’re not dumping their core franchises for this. They’re carrying on, making investments some of which work out (Darkest Hour) and some of which don’t (Magna Mundi), but they’re not sacrificing beloved games like Europa Universalis in order to try and beat Modern Warfare 4 to market. City of Heroes was still making money, and even if the projections suggest that will stop, they could have at least had the decency to A) give the devs some forewarning and B) give them time to put out a final issue to wrap up loose ends. Give both Paragon and the game’s players some respect, in short.
Of course we all know that gaming is not a business to get into, even if you love games. It’s a long, hard job with absolutely stupid hours, atrocious pay, filled with nepotism and hierarchies, and with companies run by either college kids who happened to get lucky in the 80s and never learned proper business, or by businessmen who don’t know the first thing about videogames. Except Valve. Valve is actually a great place to work, apparently – and it shows.
If you are anything like myself or Mister Adequate, then you will be well-acquainted with that obnoxious insect that comes around every six months or so and nibbles on you and makes you nostalgic for World of Warcraft and won’t stop nibbling until you actually re-sub. This invariably results in a few weeks of playing little else but WoW until the bug is satiated and flies away– for the time being, anyway.
I was visited by this bug about a week back and after several days of trying to ignore it and swat it away while it hummed the Karazhan theme in my ear, I recently caved and re-downloaded the game. I know, I know.
Now I haven’t played in months and months and one of the things that I always felt bad about was that I left my long-time main, Tawyn, rather unceremoniously dumped in Stormwind in a bunch of greens from the new Cataclysm content– basically I played for about a month after Cata launch and then realized “You know what, I’m still bored of raiding and heroics” and logged out and didn’t return. So poor Tawyn wasn’t retired in her level 70 epics or her level 80 epics– no, she was retired wearing [Boring Uldum Pants of the Whale] and such. Obviously this wasn’t going to do, so the very first thing I did was transmogrify into old stuff from my favorite ever raid instance, Karazhan, and various assorted BC heroics. For the first time in years, Tawyn matched my figureprint of her and the mental image I have when I think of her. I… really can’t express how good this felt.
Suddenly, playing my character was fun again. Because suddenly, I didn’t look like a scrub in greens. Nor did I look like a mishmash of epics from the current content. Rather, I looked like my character— something I was proud of.
Don’t get me wrong. I still don’t feel like raiding or doing heroics or really any sort of endgame. But at least I can deal with dailies and things like leveling once MoP comes out (should I get the expac– I’m still not sure if I will.)
The new patch comes out tomorrow and it gets rid of hunter stat sticks, which means I’ll lose my lovely Sonic Spear and I won’t be able to sport my Legacy in the future. But you’ll have to pry Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle out of my cold, dead, purple hands.
So Europa Universalis IV has been announced, which is something that we’ll no doubt be talking about in greater detail within the next few days, but for today’s Friday post I want to share a video I found the other night. Basically it’s a guy talking about how an MMO guild or raid leader is probably better equipped for a leadership position than someone who has just gone to school and has no other experience, and how the guild/raid model could be applied to businesses. In other words, he’s reiterating stuff any MMO player has already known for years. It’s kind of nice to see other people realize it, though. Now if only we could clone this guy and put him in charge of employment around the world, right?
Whilst visiting Pike her brother generously donated a guest pass for Diablo III, letting me play until the Skeleton King in Act I. Back in England I gave it a try yesterday, and found it a fairly enjoyable game that seemed to lack something that D2 had which was so compelling, though I hadn’t yet identified what that was.
But this post is not about that. No, this post is about what just happened. I figured “I’ll play it for a couple of hours, see how it goes; the Cathedral was definitely better than the outdoors, maybe it continues improving.” so I fired it up. Logged in. Got this.
More like WHYablo
I was trying to play single player. Indeed, I was not yet at the point where you decide whether you’re playing solo or multi; this is just what you get. Yeahhh… no. We’re not having any of that. I’ve not spent one penny here and I am outraged at this. How people who spend LODS OF EMONE on the thing have failed to riot and burn down Blizz/Activision HQ is beyond me, but they are clearly exercising the saintly virtues that Diablo and his brothers seek to extinguish.
There is no reasonable basis for this. If you are going to make people connect to play in single-player, then you best have a reliable freaking service. Taking the servers down for regular maint does not constitute reliable. It’s fine with an MMO; heck it’s fine with any game in fact, but you best believe people should be allowed to play their single-player game in single-player mode when they want to, not when you permit them to.
In short I just uninstalled D3, I will not be buying it at any point in the foreseeable future (Blizz did me a favor actually because I have no money), and I’d urge anyone on the fence whether they want to support insane policies like this one with their patronage.
Hey guys, Pike here. For today’s blog post I thought we’d try something new: this post will contain the thoughts of both myself and Mister Adequate, all in one spot! I’ll say something on a topic and then my esteemed colleague will give his own opinion. Heck, if this works out well we might do it even more in the future. For now, though, I thought we’d talk about something that is big news in the gaming world right now: Blizzcon.
I probably don’t need to inform our audience of the new World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria, but just in case you’re an alien species who has just landed on Earth and decided to check our blog first thing, here’s a link.
Here’s our first impressions:
Pike’s Thoughts:
I think the first thing that struck me was total amusement. I’d heard the rumors of “Mists of Pandaria”, of course, but wrote it off largely because it seems like the Pandaren idea was one of those things that Blizzard never quiiiiite took seriously, to the point that they’d had the idea in the past and nixed it. (Am I the only one who remembers the Pandaren rumors flying around back before BC? Metzen’s statement that they were originally slated for BC and then replaced with Draenei did not surprise me in the slightest for that reason.)
Once the initial amusement faded away I decided that there were a lot of promising things here. The whole idea of having a neutral race that chooses its destiny at level ten is, in my mind, brilliant and long overdue and should have been done a long time ago with goblins. I love the idea of Pandaren as a race in general. I love the idea of a monk class and a brewmaster spec, and especially that dorfs can be said class/spec.
There were other things that didn’t excite me quite so much. The focus on a Horde/Alliance conflict didn’t really effect me either way, beyond Metzen’s enigmatic comparison to Warcraft 2 which caught my attention because I’m a geek like that. The idea that talent trees are essentially going away is something I’m iffy on, but I can see where they’re coming from. Pokemon Pets sounds like a fun idea on paper but in practicality it sounds like one of those things that is going to be too much of a hassle for me to bother getting into (see also: archaeology, spirit beast collecting, most holiday achievements, and all the other things WoW has introduced over the years that are great and all but which I have no interest in).
Anyways, ultimately my reaction to the expansion was roughly 50% “This sounds GREAT” and about 50% “This sounds meh/could go either way”, which, to be honest, is pretty good considering that there was really no “I HATE this” involved. That said, my overall interest in WoW remains low. As long-time readers know, my WoW playing over the past year and a half or so has been very off and on and largely dependent on whether I deem messing around on an alt for a few hours a week to be worth $15/month at any given moment. I love me some pandas, but I don’t even think they’re going to change anything for me, personally. Not when I’ve got so many other games to play!
Got all that, Spike?
Mister Adequate’s Thoughts:
M.o.P.
The funny thing about MoP is that it gets abbreviated to MoP. The other funny thing is that I actually think Pandaria is a really cool addition and I’m all for it. I was hoping they would show up in a much earlier expansion. I am definitely very excited by the fact they can choose which side to join, and I’m seriously hoping (but not at all expecting) that the “Alliance vs. Horde” thing bears some fruit because for a game called Warcraft there’s a distinct lack of, well, War.
I’m also massively excited for the new Monk class. I’ve always been a bit perplexed by their reluctance to add new classes – it’s not like the current ones have ever been balanced anyway. So it’s hugely exciting to see a new one on the way and quite honestly I think that alone will be enough to sell MoP to me.
But aside from what I outline above I’m quite a bit more pessimistic about it than Pike is. I’m not at all convinced that the pokemon angle is a sensible one, for a start. I’m not aware of all the details yet of course but I’m tremendously suspicious of the new talent changes. I’d been wanting them to return to how they used to be, and then become considerably MORE complex and in-depth, not reduced to something that’s barely an afterthought and gets introduced at Blizzcon as “Talents are gone!” The game needs to stop pandaren to customizing appearances and get back to customizing your characters as combatants. And if they do care about appearances so much, just rip off City of Heroes.
So I can’t say I’m desperately enthused about the expansion at this point. It’s got a couple of core things I really, really like, and a bunch of ancillary stuff I’m either disinterested in or downright skeptical of.
(Also if you are the aforementioned alien species can we borrow your spaceship?)
During that week, I messed around a bit, mostly on alts, and I had a little bit of fun, but not quite enough to warrant resubscribing. I let my free week run out, satisfied that I’d gotten my WoW fix for a little while.
Then I remembered that I’d just put a whole bunch of crap on the auction house right before my time expired.
…
So I resubbed for a month. For no other reason than to ensure that a bunch of virtual gold doesn’t have to rot in a virtual mailbox.
So last week, Mister Adequate resubbed to World of Warcraft, and then promptly tossed me a Scroll of Resurrection (at my request, I won’t deny it). This was despite a lot of warnings from people that I’d get pulled back into it and that it would eat up all my time. Still, I went ahead and activated my free week and logged in.
The first thing I noticed was that my poor neglected main was still buffed with a buff from the Lunar Festival which just goes to show you how long it’s been since I logged in.
The second thing I noticed was that I’d apparently been kicked from my guild for inactivity, which didn’t bother me too much because last I checked most of the cool people had either moved to a new guild or quit playing.
Upon flying to the training dummies I noticed a third thing, which was that I somehow still remembered all of my keybinds. That tickled me a little bit.
Anyways, then I got bored and logged out for the rest of the day.
The next morning I was feeling nostalgic for Burning Crusade so I picked a random alt that was in Outlands and did some quests. I did that for about 45 minutes and I felt proud that I still sort of knew how to play a hunter. And you know, it was fun for a little bit. But then I got bored again and logged out and spent the rest of the day playing Civ.
My reaction to that decision
The third day I logged into a completely different alt, one who was in the midst of the re-done Cataclysm quests in Ashenvale (this particular alt still had the Christmas gnome buff from December). Again, I messed around for about an hour and then it was off to other things, both games and otherwise.
So, you may be wondering where I’m going with this. Believe me, I don’t intend this to be some sort of WoW or MMO bash. As far as I’m concerned WoW is still the best MMO on the market today, and the majority of my memories of the game are fond ones. But I think I attempted to come back to it too soon. My interest in it simply has not been rekindled in my absence. You have awakened me too soon, Scroll of Resurrection!
Yes, that is a pony Ragnaros.
I think I’ll resub for a month, just to get Mister Adequate his free month for the Scroll of Resurrection, but I can’t envision myself doing anything beyond messing around with alts for a few hours each week. You never know, of course, but more and more I’m thinking I should let the game lie for a bit longer.
There’s more to WoW than endgame, of course, and my particular playstyle at the moment– derping around on alts for a few hours a week– is certainly a valid one, but is it worth the $15/month when you’re as broke as I am? I’ve yet to decide. Currently I’m leaning toward “no”. But we’ll see, I suppose. We’ll see.
