Fantasy Hip Hop

Yes I know what a strange name for a blog post. But I try to keep the titles of my blog posts entertaining regardless of the content. You can all ways plan on unique and snazzy titles from MMOGChronicles.

Every once in awhile I find that I cannot stay focused on any one game for much longer than a day or two. Usually when this happens I take a break from playing MMOs and run to other genres or go outside and face the evil sun. Well I have hit one of those periods, in the last week I have tried WAR, Allods, Guild Wars, Aion, and most recently Fallen Earth. Now I think that I may stick with fallen earth because it is more of a sandbox game and I have not played one of those in a long time that was any good.

I think I am just tired of the old fantasy setting that all of the other games follow. I want something a little fresh and new to play with. There are only so many times I can play a Wizard, Rouge, and Healer before I get tired of it. They are the same in all of the games just different names and maybe a few different skills.

So I am going to take a break from Fantasy type games for awhile and maybe MMOs all together if Fallen Earth does not stick. I really do not get any enjoyment out of hopping from game to game trying to find one that I find fun. It almost like, a junky looking for a new high.

I have been playing a lot of Xbox lately and I am enjoying it a lot. I have become especially fond of Trials HD. If you have not tried that game and you enjoy torture as a game mechanic this game is for you. Some of the challenges are so incredibly hard that you will sit for hours redoing it over and over and over. Somehow it still manages to be fun. It is a very fun game especially if you have friends that have played it.

I would also appreciate any one that knows of a good Fallen Earth blog to let me know what it is.

 

The WoW Killer

Several games have come out in the last few years that people thought would be the WoW killer and none have succeeded and some even say that WoW has managed to kill these wanabes. So far nothing has even come close to denting the giant. But that will change and it will change in the next 2 years.

The player base of WoW is just waiting for something to come out. They are growing tired of the slow content releases, the lore, and the forced grouping for the endgame that is now required to play. The original player base of WoW is now 5 years older and has less time to play than they did when they started.

Wow is a very solo friendly game and that is what originally gets people hooked they get all the way to the upper levels of the game and then are forced to group to actually progress much farther. While people are doing this I do not think that they are enjoying the game as much as they did when they first started. But because of the lack of any serious competition they stick with it and log in to do a few raids and log out. But forced grouping is just one of the reasons that WoW is going to start seeing a decline this year.

The game is just getting old and updates are to slow to come. I think people are just getting tired of the world that they are playing in and are looking for something that is as good as WoW but different.

The "WoW Killer" will not have a subscription fee. It will thrive on micro transactions and box sales of expansions. The subscription payment model is entering its final years and will soon be in the minority. This will open up the game to a whole new segment of players that refuse to pay a monthly fee to play the game.

There are a lot of games that are currently following this model but they are doing one thing very wrong. They are trying to copy WoW they even go as far as copying the art style and the whole feel of WoW. This is a fatal mistake because people do not want to play a bad copy they want something entirely new.

The "Wow Killer" will be mostly a persistent living world. It will be a place that will be fun to just explore and they will be able to really get into the world. It will have dynamic spawns that will change depending on what players do. It will use instances to tell a story and the story will be a big theme in the game and it will be epic and solo.

Grouping will be done automatically they will take the PQs that were started with WAR and build on them and make them much better. Grouping will happen without people even noticing. It will be a very dynamic experience that will change depending on what players do.

The game will not be based on an already established and well documented IP. Basing a game on an IP holds it to strict rules that have already been set and limits the developer's freedom to do as they wish. Basing mmos on existing IPs is probably the reason that no game has come out that has killed wow. When you base it on an existing IP people already know if they like it or not and that hurts the game.

The game that I believe will be the wow killer is Guild Wars 2. They have learned from their mistakes in the original and are going to build a great game. They have the talent and expertise to pull it off. It will have enough marketing and brand recognition to get people to try it.

I do not believe that it will suffer the same "WoW Tourist" effect that a lot of other games have had and even if it does with it being free once they buy it they can jump back in at any time and try it again. I think this will make it grow slowly and eventually over take WoW. It will not take most of it subscribers from current games but like WoW did before it they will come from new people entering the market.

Gaming last week

Well with my new found spare time I have not posted more blog post like I wanted instead I have been playing more games.

Warhammer online

I started a new rune priest and have gotten him to level 14 almost entirely by doing scenarios. I find that leveling a healer is a lot different than the way that I usually play. Soloing is slow and kind of painful but I absolutely kill it in scenarios. I am maxing all of my stats to maximize healing and it shows when I am at the top of the charts for healing on most scenarios. It is nice to know that sometimes you are the reason that your team won. Without you it would have been total annihilation.

Borderlands

I have started this up again because I never managed to finish it last time. It is a very enjoyable game I love the art style and the game play is just awesome. The biggest problem I have is that I have to wait till my kid goes to bed before I play it and that is limiting the time I could be spending on it.

Tomb Raider Anniversary

This is an old game that I picked up at the last buy 1 get 2 free sale at game stop. The original tomb raider was the very first time that I had played a true 3d game. It has a lot of nostalgic value to it. I also really enjoy the puzzle adventure type of games like this. It is a lot of fun to go back through some of the stuff that you remember as a kid and relive it in adult hood.

A week of Decisions

Last week was a week of change and decisions for me. I had many decisions to make that had an influence on this blog. I really don't like how restrictive wordpress is (design wise) but I don't want to pay for hosting. I had also come to the realization that Star Trek Online was not going to work out for me and I needed to pick a new game that I felt I could stick with. What made me make all of these decisions this week is that I just got reduced to half time at work and thus I have a lot more time to play games and less money to do it with. It should only be temporary but I like to view this as a chance to really work on the quality of my blogging content and maybe explore some other ideas I have had for websites. 

So I started to look at the best way to make my blog a little more personalized and quickly realized that wordpress was way too restrictive and you could do very little to make it look better. So I looked at blogger and they allow you to edit anything you want and allow scripts. So before really looking into it I started the transfer process. I got it all transferred and then figured out that blogger does not do pingbacks. How are other bloggers supposed to know I linked to them? It really kills conversation between blogs. So I transferred everything back to wordpress and am going to take the transfer a little slower. I will post everything on both sites until I figure out what one I want to keep. So you can follow me at Mmogchronicles.com (Wordpress) or mmogchronicles.blogspot.com. I really do like blogger more so I will eventually move there but I will do it slowly so I don't mess anything up.

The second decision I had to make was what game I will play now that STO had failed for me. So I started by posting this survey and I posted it to reddit and it got more votes than I thought it would but not enough considering all the choices that I had. The results showed an overwhelming amount of people would choose WoW if they could only pick one game. So I went to WoW and tried one of their trials. Second was the release of allods I had tried the game for a few hours during beta and decided that I would try it at release.
So throughout the week and weekend I played various games trying to figure out what one I would play. I don't like switching games all the time and I know that it does not interest readers if I keep switching. I finally figured out at about 11pm on Saturday night while I was running my warrior around auberdine that I don't like to do nothing but quests. I like to mix it up with some PVP and I don't like to wait till max level to do it. So I queued for a BG and quickly found out that the game had changed and I was not going to be competing in his game without a max level character. I was a warrior and I was getting 2 shotted by people.

Then it hit me Warhammer! That was my answer. I reactivated my account and started RVRing in about 2 mins. Tried out some of my other characters and all of the other tiers were really active. Their free trial thing is working out well. It felt like a newly released game. 

So there you go I am back to a place that I think I can stay for awhile and with the new patch coming I see me playing this for some time.

World of Warcraft Leveling

The last time I really played WoW was about 3-4 years ago. I played a hunter from release all the way up to level 52. I know a newb but I was talking to my brother in-law who just recently got into WoW and he is level 70ish, we were talking about played time and how it seemed to me that leveling had gotten much easier. So I logged onto my original hunter and /played….. 12 days played, logged onto my level 20 mage and 2 days played.

His character only has 3 days played. So while this is not proof because I am a notorious slow leveler it still shows a significant difference in leveling time required. The question is why? I thought at the time that I was playing my hunter that leveling was perfectly fine and if I had put my heart in it I could have made 60 easily in the time that I had played. Now I am just 4 hours in and I am already level 10 on my new character.

It seems that with each expansion of the level cap they made the new leveling cure about the same as it was before. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of raising the cap? I can see that Blizzard wants to get everyone to the cap so that they can just focus on that content and make it better and expand it without alienating the leveling masses. But while I am playing through this beginner content again it is a shame. There is so much good stuff here I would like to be able to explore it more but before I know it I am moving on to the next area. There is a ton of content that just got skipped over because I out leveled it.

When Catacysm comes out they are going to find out that they need to lower the leveling speed a bit so people can enjoy all the new content that it is going to bring otherwise it will be hundreds of hours of content wasted.