I started teaching at Lee College in Baytown, Texas (close to Houston). It’s been an interesting, yet very positive, ride so far. I like the students, and now if I can just get past the health part of the process, I should be fine.
This semester I am teaching five sections of public speaking, one section of interpersonal communication and one section of business and professional communication. Most of those are great, although the business and professional communication is a night class, starting at 6:00 pm and ending at 7:15 pm. It’s a bit of a struggle, but as I kept saying all last year, I want to teach, not sit in a lab and just help other instructors teach better.
The one (or two) drawback(s) is that it doesn’t give me a lot of time for writing, filming videos, or (okay, three drawbacks) playing games. The one game I’m currently involved in is Guild Wars 2, which is one of those games that occupies any gaming time you have so that you rarely play any other games. It’s a fun game, and they keep churning out new add ons, constantly keeping you occupied. The only problem I’ve had with the add ons is that they make them awfully difficult if you’re not already an expert in the game. I’m pretty good, but definitely not an expert. I remember playing one of the add ons, and I couldn’t get beyond the opening of it because the bosses send me into a corner in a fetal position because they make those add ons way to freaking hard. I play this game to have fun, not to be stomp;ed by boss guys that seem to laugh at me, stomp me into the ground and then steal my lunch money, demanding I bring more to them next time he arrives to stomp me into the ground again.
Well, that’s all for right now. I’m still in dire need of a new kidney, which I’m starting to suspect I will never get. So, read my books, and read them soon because soon that’s all that’s going to be around to communicate on my behalf.
So, recently I went through a couple of games (callout to Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn), and after growing bored with those games (or finishing them outright), I found myself looking for something new to play and that’s how I found about Coinlooting.com. As I went through my Steam games, I remembered DC Universe Online was one of those that has been in my folder forever, and I started thinking about looking at it again.
You see, years ago, I fired up that game and played to about level 13 or 14, but kind of gave up there because it was one of those games that had a lot to do up until about that level, and then it basically threw you into the larger world, and all I remembered was being slaughtered practically everywhere I went. There never seemed to be a sense of “go over here and there are mobs and missions of your level” aspect to the game, and everywhere I went was just instant death. So I quit.
This time, I looked at the game and decided I would give it yet another try, and if I ran into the same problem again, at least I would have a few days of putting around before giving up once more.
Now, I’ve been playing the game about a month, and let’s just say that I’m really enjoying it. I’ve maxed out (in level to 30) one character and am about to complete two others in the very near future. But what I’ve discovered is that even though level 30 is the highest level, the end game becomes much about leveling gear than just the character’s level. In order to run higher content, you need higher level gear averages, and then you can compete for even higher gear to continue that type of progression.
But there are a lot of things you can do as you get up there in level and gear. And there’s much more than just simple gear acquisition. There is also base building (their version of personal housing), various types of implants and even ally progression (you get an ally that can jump into combat with you for tiny fractions of time that you can level up to get stronger and more useful).
But what really make the game shine is its coordination with the DC Universe itself. Throughout the game, you interact with the heroes and villains of DC so that you start to feel somewhat like a part of that universe rather than someone living in an amusement park that runs into a glorified version of Mickey Mouse or whomever. Every character chooses from a series of heroes or villains that match the power class you chose when starting your character, so quite often you’re communicating with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Joker, Circe or Lex Luthor. And then you end up interacting with a collection of the rest of the DC Universe as you progress through stories and missions.
Just recently, I discovered the Broker (which is the game’s version of an auction house), and I’m quickly learning the aspects of that part of the universe, having gone from having about $10,000 or so in game money to building a Bruce Wayne-ish level of wealth at about $170 million. Strangely enough, the Broker feels like a game all on its own, and it can be quite addicting.
The one tiny criticism I have with the game so far is that in order to really take advantage of much of what the game has to offer requires you to subscribe and pay their monthly (or in larger increments for more time) fee. I subbed for a year so I don’t have to worry about that, but I can easily see how the game might get really frustrating for anyone who plays it with the hopes of maintaining a free account. But that’s really a squabble for another time because I’m subbed, so I’m having a great time, and honestly, the game developers have to make some money or the game’s just not going to be maintained going forward. So there is that.
But one thing I really enjoy about the game is being a superhero (or supervillain). It was the one aspect of City of Heroes that I truly miss, and one of the problems of superhero games is that there aren’t a whole lot of them left out there, and of the ones that are left, they’re generally not that good. I mean, there’s a Marvel one out there, but I’ve played variations of that, and it is very transaction needy, and it doesn’t really feel like it has much of a story continuity that would keep one returning. Unfortunately, City of Heroes was canceled back in its hey day by a company that just didn’t have a lot of faith in its franchise (although there may have been some intellectual property issues as many players adopted the names or characteristics of well known franchise heroes, and I suspect there were lawsuits in the works because of that). There has been one very recent attempt to recapture the ideals of City of Heroes in a game called Ship of Heroes, but I played during an early beta (or later alpha), and it felt very rudimentary and in need of a lot of growth before it would be a fraction of what was once great about City of Heroes.
For now, DC Universe seems to be able to fill the superhero need, and the developers appear to be interested in maintaining content going forward, so as long as they continue with that trajectory, I suspect the game might be well worth continuing to play.
So, up until recently, I was heavily involved in playing Shroud of the Avatar. It’s an okay rpg-like game, but there was a substantial learning curve involved and a heavy financial burden that was necessary in order to even become a somewhat productive member of its society. Sure, you could play for cheap, but like most things, cheap meant living cheap, and it was never really that much fun. But right before it was released, I invested heavily in the game, paying an absurd amount of money for a house and stuff (mainly a tiered system for joining), and even after that, I never really felt like I was going to become one of the better classed citizens around town.
You see, a lot of that was because in order to be one of those better-off citizens, you pretty much had to invest in the game back when it was in its kickstarter faze of existence. But I didn’t know about it until much later, so my chances of ever investing heavily in the game (and getting something out of it) never could happen. It’s like investing in Facebook AFTER its IPO. Sure, you might make a few dollars, but you were never going to make the CEO-like profits that you would have gotten by investing before the IPO. You were always going to be a second-class citizen.
So, while I haven’t completely left that game, I realize there’s not a lot for me there, so I’ve invested in going back to a previous game, one that I invested in since the beginning: Star Trek Online.
Now, Star Trek Online is one of those weird entities out in the MMO world, mainly because it probably should have gone out of business a long time ago, but lived long enough to be able to sustain itself and then reinvent itself as new Star Trek entities came on the scene to make it viable again.
And eight or so years ago, I paid about $300 for a lifetime membership, which means that I’m still racking up free money and benefits from the game that have made that initial investment completely worth it. But that’s not to say that I haven’t made it worth STO’s time either. I’ve put a lot of money back into that game, buying ships, in game zen currency (to buy other stuff) and even entire expansion sets when they were appropriate. It’s one of those games I’ve always felt was worth the price, even though I might have kicked myself almost every time I shelled out another hundred or so dollars.
But if you love Star Trek, and oh yes I do, then it’s really the perfect game for you. A lot of the game is grind, where you’re doing things that are just completely time consuming, like training skills so that you might one day actually use them, or fighting bad guys on some washed out planet so that you can build up enough of that faction’s marks so that you might one day be able to buy some ship engine you’ve always wanted that can only be bought by that faction’s store. Stuff like that.
But it’s got all of the pew pew you could ever ask for. And I figure that for the next three or four months (or until the next WOW comes along), I’ll be playing it on an almost daily basis.
And shelling out stupid money from time to time.
Cause that’s what they do best. Take your money.
And that’s what I do best. Give away my money. Not sure I’m all that satisfied with that realization. But I’ll be fighting some Romulans, so I’ll have to think about that later.
One of the greatest MMOs in history (at least according to my beliefs), City of Heroes, was shut down by NCsoft in November of 2012. It was probably one of the saddest days of MMO history because it was such a wonderful game, regardless of the little nuances that needed to be fixed (but isn’t that the way it is with most computer games?). But Paragon Studios (the development house that maintained the game) was a part of NCsoft, and NCsoft had a history of closing down beloved games (it was only a few years before in February of 2009 that they shut down Richard Garriott’s ground-breaking Tabula Rasa). So, it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise that NCsoft was going to be closing down yet another.
The funny thing is that a year or so ago before they closed City of Heroes, I had just gotten back into the game, joined a guild (or whatever they were called in that game) and was playing on an almost daily basis. And then they announced the servers were going to be closing. I was devastated.
City of Heroes was a really unique game. On the surface, you created a custom-made superhero with all sorts of interesting skills, and then you went into the game to stop bad guys all over the city. There were “dungeons” or operations where you went into specific scenarios and fought bad guys. And as simple as it sounds like it was, it was a lot of fun.
A couple of games tried to capture that same kind of spirit (or concurrently attempted to do so), such as DC Universe, Champions Online and Marvel Heroes (remade as Marvel Heroes 2016). A number of superheroes MMOs came along later, but so far, none have matched the fun and complexity of City of Heroes.
One of the things that made City of Heroes (and then City of Villains that came later before it was collapsed back into City of Heroes) so unique was the different levels of play built within the game itself. I don’t mean “easy” or “hard”, but the levels of play designed within the game as in when you’d be playing the game, you might start to discover that there was more under the surface than what you were playing. I discovered this the last time around (I’d quit and restarted in that game a number of times). It’s like the old Everquest where you’d be playing an area for months, constantly grinding the content, only to discover that there was a secret door hidden in a wall you’d been walking by so many times before. And that would open up a whole new way of playing that you didn’t even realize was right there in front of you all along.
City of Heroes felt like that from time to time. You’d be playing along and then suddenly realize there might be more under the surface, and once you found it, your whole concept of the game became that much deeper.
So, for years, we all felt sad as this game was lost to us. NCsoft still makes numerous games that are well played today (I still play Guild Wars 2, another of their titles). So many times I remember reading an essay about how someone wished the game would be remade so we could all play it again.
And then a recent report (see the embedded link) indicated that a pirate server of City of Heroes has been active for years. Keep in mind, this isn’t an official version of the game, but an unauthorized version of the game, maintained by someone who may or may not have been profiting off the game (I don’t know enough about the situation to say one way or the other). And if that’s the case, then there’s a really strong chance that NCsoft is going to crack down on them like Disney going after a company sporting a mascot of a mouse with big black ears or Star Wars after anything involving, well, anything Star Wars-related. Companies aren’t really fond of anyone else using their intellectual property.
So the hope is that NCsoft doesn’t crack down, or even better, realizes that there’s still a strong interest in this game and goes out of their way to give us an updated version of this beautiful vision. But they’re much better at shutting things down, so I’m not holding out a lot of hope.
So, the story is relatively new, which means anything can happen. Which also means that something good can come out of this, and even though the chances are slim, perhaps something wonderful can happen from this.
For those who don’t actually already know this, my Ph.D work is in political science, and since then I’ve taught political science for years before adding another graduate degree and focusing on communication. However, one thing that always seemed to grate at me was that no matter how hard I tried to be non-political, it was practically impossible. Not for me. But for anyone who happened to be in the audience. Let me explain.
To explain, it’s important to probably point out my political affiliation, because that helps to explain why it’s even stranger. Back when I was first going through undergraduate work at West Point, I was a staunch conservative. There was no problem that I felt couldn’t be solved with our military, states’ rights and did I mention our military? When I got to grad school and started learning massive amounts of information about politics, I started to realize that I hated politics. A lot.
So, I sort of became an anarchist. And that has all sorts of problems if you’re capable of actually understanding what an anarchist is. You see, people think an anarchist is some crazy liberal that throws Molotov cocktails at cops. Well, that was one type of anarchist, specifically the Russians at the turn of last century and maybe the French, well, anytime in history. As an anarchist of my type, what it meant was that I hated the fact that we need a government to do anything because what almost always happens is we become part of corruption and oligarchy, to the point where government is almost always used as a tool to oppress other people. There are good people in government, but over time, those people get drowned out by people who see government as that tool to push through their personal agendas, and there’s no end to the types of agendas they might want to push (social programs, religion, anti-Internet policies, anti-gaming policies, anti-Shania Twain fundamentalism, etc.). What it doesn’t mean is that I want to throw Molotov cocktails at anyone. That requires upper arm strength and exercise, both things I do like to protest against.
Anyway, getting back to my original point, when I was teaching political science, one thing that inevitably happened in class is that some young student would want to know what my political affiliation was. And it was rarely out of actual interest. It was almost always to figure out whether or not to listen to anything I had to say as useful. If I picked an affiliation that was different than his or hers, they discounted everything I had to say. If it was the same, they often felt they knew as much as me and then didn’t have to listen any further. If I chose my usual tact and said that I don’t have an affiliation, or that I don’t discuss it, they automatically decided that it had to be the opposite of the one they had, or they assumed it had to be liberal (no, not sure why that assumption was always made).
That brings me to an interesting phenomenon I’ve come across recently. Over the Christmas break, I found myself overly interested in following a number of channels on Youtube that I found interesting. Mostly, it was ASMR artists, but when that got kind of boring (or I didn’t need to sleep), I started to branch out and find other types of subjects. My first “go to” was gaming channels, but I’ll be honest, the majority of those are awful, often hosted by some teenage mentality that tends to scream into the microphone, or thinks it’s 1980 and has lots of flashy stuff trying to send watchers into seizures. But a few of them were actually pretty good, and one of them is actually a bit of the subject of this post.
I don’t remember how I found it, but I came across a cast called The Quartering, hosted by Jeremy Hambly, a Youtube game industry reviewer who leans to the conservative side of the house. Having watched his podcasts over the last year, I would recommend his site if you’re interested in interesting perspectives on the industry, but at the same time understanding that sometimes he seems to get a little high on himself and takes on fights that are generally left to different avenues of the Internet. An example is how he has a tendency to want to create a space that lacks politics when it comes to computer gaming (something I highly support) but then falls right into the same territory himself when he goes anti SJW (social justice warrior) and becomes political in trying to advocate for not wanting to become political. Yeah, it’s kind of the same thing I ran into when teaching political science, and even though I was completely aware of the problem, the problem always exists. What I did discover to be the ONLY solution is one he hasn’t reached yet, and that’s to stop caring about politics, rather than focusing on politics as an approach to not being political. Yeah, I know that sounds bizarre and strange, but it’s basically the only way to deal with it.
This last week saw some interesting developments for Hambly as he lost one of his main sponsorship deals with a coffee company when it was alerted to one of his recent videos (that pissed off people who tend to get riled by SJW politics), so he decided he was no longer going to accept sponsorship deals. Unfortunately, this type of drama continues, no matter what someone does about it.
What I would like to say is that when he’s not dealing with actual politics, his information is actually pretty interesting. However, one thing I have noticed is that because he has such large numbers of subscribers (I believe it is upwards of 100,000 subscribers, but could be off on that, although I know it’s pretty damn high), Hambly does often ignore the fact that his influence quite often becomes a McLuhan message is the medium factor (he’ll go on an anti-Electronic Arts rant and then laugh when EA suffers financially, arguing that it was EA that caused its downfall, not the fact that perhaps Hambly’s negativity might have attributed to the down turn).
Moving away from Hambly here (as I said, I actually like him and think his information is informative, so I don’t want to get into a criticism mode here), one thing I’ve started to notice is that there are a lot of Youtubers who attempt to adopt the Hambly model, but completely fail to do so, and only make things worse because they turn into shrills for anti-establishment thought without doing anything other than harping on how much enjoyment they get out of the drama. Having watched a lot of this behavior over the last year or so, I am starting to feel that a lot of these commentators are somewhat responsible for the down turn the industry is starting to feel. I mean, think about it: If the majority of the people covering the industry keep talking about how bad the industry is, it’s going to feed the perspective that the industry is nothing but bad.
I used to work for the industry (both Maxis and EA), so I had a unique perspective myself, but at the same time I also realized that there are a lot of diverse minds in that atmosphere and whenever I tried to get a “this is how they feel at this company”, I find myself often realizing that I was putting too much of a spin on the thought based off of anecdotal information I received from a very limited observation of what I was able to see myself.
It’s amazing how this game looks so much like a visual from my every day life.
For the longest time, I was holding out on playing Shroud of the Avatar. Which is kind of strange, considering the fact that I’m exactly the type of player the game has been looking for. You see, I grew up as a programmer and gamer while playing every Ultima game ever made. If you follow the natural evolution of that series of computer games, it eventually leads directly to Shroud of the Avatar. The chances of me not playing this game were slightly lower than zero percent. Yet, it took me a number of years of the game being in development for me to finally decide to sign on. I guess that probably needs a bit of unpacking. So, let’s unpack.
As I mentioned, in the early days of computer games, Richard Garriott developed a series of games that ran under the IP of “Ultima”. It was a series of roleplaying games where you played a warrior, a mage or some semblance of fantasy classes and unlocked the secrets of the world before facing down against some huge big bad guy (or girl) and then saved all of the land. A review:
Ultima 1: You fought against an evil wizard named Mondain. But Mondain had a secret student and lover. This takes place on Sosaria.
Ultima 2: His lover’s name was Minax. You then have to defeat her. But she and Mondain secretly had a kid. Of course they did. This takes place on Earth through all sorts of time periods.
Ultima 3: The kid was kind of weird, in that Cylon kind of way. You, as expected, had to defeat him. This takes place on Sosaria.
Ultima 4: Gets weird and colorized. You spend the entire game becoming the ultimate character, an avatar. This introduces the virtues and eventually becomes the foundation for all of the Ultimas. This introduces Britannia.
Ultima 5: A bad lord under British gets corrupted by the shadowlords and basically takes over Britannia. You gotta stop him and them. Takes place in Britannia.
Ultima 6: A bunch of gargoyles get involved, creating a plot about immigration and enforcement. Or something like that. You act as an example and make everyone happy again. Much merriment is involved. Takes place in Britannia.
Ultima 7: Probably the best of the single player games. Takes place in Britannia and introduces the Guardian, who is a kind of twisted version of enlightenment. He sticks around for two more games. Takes place in Britannia.
Ultima 8: You get taken to some other place and do some stuff. To be honest, never really got into this game as I got stuck on the dock in the early part of the game, couldn’t figure out how to get out, and then just decided to play another game instead.
Ultima 9: Game becomes first person. Much more interesting world (still Britannia) but seems kind of lonely as the new perspective seems to eliminate a lot of npcs you’d normally meet. It’s the final encounter with the Guardian. Involves a Captain Kirk mind meld sort of conclusion, but should have been expected.
Ultima Online: Garriott brings the series to an online environment by making the argument that when Mondain was around, he split a shard into multiple pieces, each of which was another copy of Britannia (meaning you were on a different server). Game has lasted over twenty years now, even though Garriott has been divorced from it for most of that time.
Shroud of the Avatar: This is the eventual successor to the franchise, even though the understanding is that Electronic Arts still owns the rights to the Ultima name. It’s been pretty much understood that EA has no idea how to actually allow a franchise to breathe, so fortunately Garriott has given new life into what was once a very original idea.
So, what is Shroud supposed to be like? Well, it released officially on March 27th of this year, although it’s been in extended beta for a number of years now. Several times during the beta, the world was reset, so people had to start over, but the current beta that was playing through was allowed to survive and on March 27th, the game went from idea to actual release. Much rejoicing was had. Not much change, however, occurred. Okay, some change happened, but it was mostly patched kinds of changes without much of an impact on what was happening with the world itself.
But the story itself argues that the avatar has returned to Britannia (or Novia, or whatever land this is supposed to be now). A bunch of comets have caused problems, and there appears to be some kind of “evil” that may be under the surface. But for the most part, other than a couple of dragons wandering around and a ton of bad guys, pirates and thieves, not much seems to be going on in the lands. There are extensive player owned towns and an appearance here and there of Lord British (Richard Garriott’s character), but like Ultima Online before, the one thing sort of missing appears to be a general purpose behind what’s going on in the adventure. It might be there under the surface, but it’s not obvious enough to someone just starting the game. For the most part, when starting the game, you’re told that the Oracle (kind of like a benevolent-sounding Guardian from before) wants you to somehow unite the concepts of love, truth and courage (which were the foundations of the original eight virtues). As for why, I’m still trying to figure that out. And what happens after that, still kind of confused. I’m going to be really disappointed if we discover after all of this preparing and adventuring that we were really trying to figure out where Lord British left his car keys.
The combat mechanics are pretty decent and quite extensive, if one takes the time and effort to learn them. The game can be played on a simplistic level, but there are decks involved in the combat skills, so you can start to develop some really complicated types of maneuvers. There is also quite a bit of involvement with the crafting system as well.
The player housing is pretty awesome as well. As this was a huge part of Ultima Online, I would have been shocked if this was not the case. It’s a bit expensive, but judging from the conversations on the official boards, there may be some effort to make the land choices a bit more achievable for the common player. I’ll admit I’ve probably spent way more money than I should have playing this game, but I’m not the typical player; I do stupid things like that. Most people are generally a lot smarter than I am when it comes to that sort of stuff.
Where the game really needs to grow is in attracting players to run around in that world. They’ve done the one right thing by offering a free access sort of pass to players exploring the game, but a lot more needs to be done to get those same players to want to stay. Right now, the initial price to play the game after visiting is $40. That’s the price of a general AAA game that’s just been released. Although that price can sometimes go up to about $50, the $40 price tag is still pretty close to what people generally remember paying for a newly released PC game. And yes, the game was just released, but it is still showing a lot of early growing pains that may take many months to fix. Those are the kinds of problems people are going to see when visiting the game for free, so this might make it really difficult to translate into full members of the game itself. As long as housing is costing people over $100 in real money, people are probably going to avoid this game like the plague. Add to that the majority of the negative feedback for the game has been about the price of transactions in the game, and you have a recipe for why this might be a difficult sell.
One other problem that hasn’t been addressed all that well is another positive feature of the game: The single player game built within the game itself. You don’t have to play the game online. You can actually start the game as a single player and enjoy pretty much the same world. Without other people. The obvious negative to that is no one else is playing with you, but the positives are numerous, including three npcs that become your partners and experience the world with you, so you’re not always under powered by being alone. But like I said, they haven’t given this avenue enough attention because there are some blatantly missing things, such as player owned towns. On the surface that makes sense, but in reality, those player owned towns are often used for reasons other than housing. A lot of the connections to other zones come from linkage people have made tying numerous towns together (like carriages, balloons and boats). If no player owned towns exist, those connections just don’t exist. Which means there are islands throughout the game that have no ability to be reached because no player connection was made beforehand. So, it’s just eye candy real estate in the game where you can never visit.
As I said before, it’s easy to come up with things to complain about in pretty much any game. It’s no different in this one. Which bothers me a lot because there’s so much strong potential with the game. There are times when it can be a lot of fun. We just need to find better ways to get more people to experience that fun without the costly aftertaste.
Overall, it has a lot of potential but can easily defeat itself by letting these types of problems fester longer than they need to. Unfortunately, online devs are historically really slow at addressing these kinds of things, or in addressing them at all. And once the game starts to go in the down direction, the spiral doesn’t end until the game is gone or a shadow of its original self.
Up until recently, I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, finishing up the last expansion’s final missions to defeat the evil entity known as Revan, who it turns out, wasn’t really Revan, but could have been, and might have been, but (fill in story stuff that didn’t really make a whole lot of sense). Anyway, I finished it, defeated Revan-or someone a lot like him- and then became level 60 (the highest in game), got end an end game experience, and then discovered the game wasn’t over, but I had just finished the new content. So, I was back on the main station then trying to figure out what to do next. I mean, I had saved the galaxy, I had achieved everything, and well, I didn’t know what to do next. So I quit.
Not having anything to do, I picked up where I left off with The Secret World, which is one of those games I’ve learned to love to hate. I mean, it has all sorts of things going for it: HP Lovecrat world, horror, zombies, guns and swords, and all that. But what it doesn’t have is a lot of new fun to it. I’ve felt like I’ve done most of what there is to do in that game. Everything new is just the next level of stuff I’ve done before. There are new lands to go to, but I haven’t felt like they’re all that special. The one event they did have that I truly enjoyed was a nonstop situation where huge golems attacked and you had to join with dozens of people and fight a long battle to kill them. That was a once a year thing, and now it’s over. So, it’s back to the grind. So I finally just stopped playing, looking for something new.
Which brought me back to Defiance. Defiance is one of those games that was a lot like the now defunct game of Tabula Rasa, where you basically grab your machine gun, shotgun or whatever, and fight invasions that are sometimes completely out of control. But you pull the trigger and let loose endless streams of bullets. It’s kind of fun. But it’s limited fun, in that it needs a lot of people on at all times, and these battles are sometimes harder to find than you would imagine. When they happen, they’re a blast, but other times, I find myself just staring at the world map (it’s mostly San Francisco, Marin County and Silicon Valley, or what’s left of them after an alien destruction thing happened) and hoping something pops. And quite often, nothing does. So a lot of this game is just me staring at the map, thinking, man I wish something would happen.
Which leaves me looking for another game. Something fun. Something big. Something enjoyable.
All of this stuff completely makes sense, after 4 years of flight school….
I joined Elite: Dangerous, which is a space shooter kind of game, but I have yet to be able to get into it because the learning curve involves actually learning to fly a space craft with the same intensity I imagine someone going to Air Force flight school might have to undergo. I’ve done a couple of the tutorials, but I’m starting to get really frustrated with the game. Other people who play the game seem to love it, but when you can’t seem to get beyond the tutorial, it starts to feel like one of those games that you’re going to put into a drawer and never look at again.
Which, of course, leaves me with the quandary of not knowing what to play next. I’d love to find a shoot em up kind of game like Defiance that has actual people playing it, events that occur whenever I want them to, and seems worth the effort. Games like World of Warcraft are dead to me now, as I’ve played those to death and have no desire to ever wander the roads of Azeroth again. So, I’m not sure what to play next. But it needs to be something because I love playing games.
I guess I’m waiting for Fallout 4 to come out one of these days. I already played Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim and all of that sort of stuff. That leaves me anxious for something new, but not something boring or stupid.
Most people who know me know that I am probably one of the greatest fans of the Ultima franchise ever. There probably isn’t a title in the series that I don’t remember with great fondness, including some of the more obscure entries in the series. I was probably one of those rare individuals who was devastated when Richard Garriott decided to part ways with Origin (the company that was bought by Electronic Arts and then gutted by that same company). As long as he was part of the franchise, there was always the hope that he would create yet another installment in such a great universe.
Well, he left and he is supposedly working on Shroud of the Avatar, which is kind of a follow up to the series, but time passed on, and people aren’t that into the whole franchise any more, mainly because it spawned Ultima Online, and that game was allowed to whither and die (well, it’s still around, but it’s still spiraling out of control and trying to die).
This week, EA, through its Origin online service, has decided to give away Ultima VIII to anyone who wants it, for free. Unfortunately, for anyone who wants to explore the Ultima universe for the first time, this is somewhat of a strange way to do so as Ultima VIII was never about the Ultima universe but about some alternative location that the avatar ended up going during the adventure. None of the companions are in the game, and to be honest, I’m not even sure the virtues have anything to do with it. Sadly enough, after Ultima VIII, we had Ultima Online as the only entry in the universe and then one last attempt to recapture the magic, a more first person perspective in Ultima IX, which was plagued with so many problems.
It’s probably important to point out that there is still a huge audience that desires anything Ultima that might ever rear its head again. Unfortunately, because of corporate crap and creative licenses, we’re probably going to see very little brilliance in this universe again. So at least with Ultima VIII, there’s the opportunity to live in that mindset again, as it was as close to Ultima as we were probably ever going to get after the wonderful world that was Ultima VII, which I argue is probably the greatest Ultima world that we will ever come to know.
There’s really never been another world quite like it, and I know I speak for a lot of people when I say how much I wish we could somehow go back to that world with the computer technology we have today. So, at least until then, if ever, we can at least pretend we’ve found something close by revisiting those worlds that brought us closer, even if they didn’t bring us exactly there.
Recently, I found myself back in the world of Azeroth, or to those who need more information: World of Warcraft. I’ve been playing that game off and on for years, and recently I ran out of stuff to play, deciding I’d fire up the game again and see what I’ve missed.
Now, to catch up our story, when we last left our characters in the sword and fantasy world, I was level 85, and the last expansion was Cataclysm. Since then, there have been two expansions: Mist of Panderia and Warriors of Draenor. Well, Draenor is brand new (weeks old) and Panderia has been out for a while. But to get from 85 to 90, I had to go through Panderia, at least until I could go to Draenor, where the game lets me level up to 100.
What I wanted to talk about was Mists of Panderia, which from what I’ve been reading didn’t get the most stellar of reviews. And I can understand why. As I played it, it felt very much like an attempt to parody the world of China, and to do that it introduced a new race of Kung Fu Pandas. Yeah, I’m not kidding about this.
But after all of that, I found a couple of really interesting tidbits to keep me going. And those tidbits were specifically story related. To give you an example, I was playing through the story and at one point you have to relive the incidents that a Dwarf engineer went through. Now, the voice over is a Scottish dwarf who has probably one of the funniest voices in the game, and just listening to him narrate made the game fun alone. But then there comes a time where he’s spotting for a sniper and then befriends a raccoon, which the sniper then kills. Now, this may sound kind of harsh or violent, but it was probably one of the funniest scenes in the game by far, because this poor dwarf took the whole cartoon violence very seriously and for the continuation of those missions NEVER forgave his partner for killing his pet raccoon. The whole banter was quite inspired and well worth the play through.
And that’s the point. I think a lot of games are missing the sense of fun that Blizzard tends to invoke in its games. At one point during the beginning of Draenor, you meet a new soldier on the frontier, and his name is something like Newbie Greenguy, or something like that. It reminded me of the one noob character they had running through Cataclysm who the undead npcs were always trying to kill off, just to get him out of the game and out of their hair.
Those kinds of funny moments are truly inspired, and I wish there were more of them in other games.
But for now, I’m happy finding them whenever I can. And sometimes you find them in the strangest of places. One of my favorites for the longest time was when I found a Dwarf Fishing Rod, which was actually a shotgun. It’s one of those jokes that takes you a second to get, but it so cool when you finally do.
to love to hate. I mean, it has all sorts of things going for it: HP Lovecrat world, horror, zombies, guns and swords, and all that. But what it doesn’t have is a lot of new fun to it. I’ve felt like I’ve done most of what there is to do in that game. Everything new is just the next level of stuff I’ve done before. There are new lands to go to, but I haven’t felt like they’re all that special. The one event they did have that I truly enjoyed was a nonstop situation where huge golems attacked and you had to join with dozens of people and fight a long battle to kill them. That was a once a year thing, and now it’s over. So, it’s back to the grind. So I finally just stopped playing, looking for something new.
