2011 in Review – Videogames

Although 2011 had a ton of great games being launched, I only played half a dozen or so, and only finished Dragon Age 2.

I poked around a bit in Magicka, doing missions in co-op with João. Despite the high fun factor the game has, especially in multiplayer mode where blowing up one another accidentally was frequent, we didn’t progress much yet.

MMO-wise, I tried DC Universe Online when it became free to play. Made a character who’s mentor was Batman and I flew around Gotham (which looks great) fighting crime in a colour coordinated outfit (how odd). I’ll have to explore more of of the game, and also visit Metropolis when I get the chance.

I also played Rift with kitten. It’s very polished but I guess the problem was that aside from the Rift system, it didn’t really bring anything new to the fantasy MMO scene.

Then there’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, that will probably be the last game I’ll play this year, and I’ve already written about it. I’ll play it for a while, but I simply don’t have the time to have the same amount of play hours I had when I still played WoW regularly. Most of my guild doesn’t have that time either, so we’re playing SWTOR in a casual way but with some organized instancing sessions, which is fine by me. I’ve been playing alongside João; the Smuggler and Tropper combo works pretty well in combat and I get to have a glimpse at some of the Smuggler plot when I join João’s quest conversations. Some of our real-life friends are in the same guild, so I expect sometime after the X-Mas running around to prepare stuff, we’ll run some instances together.

Videogames I wish I’d played? Too many of them. Shogun 2: Total War, Arkham City and Skyrim. Everyone tells me wonders about Skyrim and how I’d love it. But from all I’ve read, it’s very lengthy and I don’t have that many hours to put into it.

Next year, among other games, will bring Mass Effect 3 in March, Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria supposedly sometime during 2012 (but you know Blizzard…), and Torchlight 2 also sometime during 2012. I’m spending a lot less of my free time on the computer, but those are four titles I intend to play next year.

A Photo A Week 2011 49 – Imperial Titans Reporting for Duty

Started painting some of the miniatures from Horus Heresy.

Star Wars: The Old Republic – Beta Impressions

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away…

The NDA has been lifted and I’m finally having week with more free time available, so it’s a good chance to write about SW:TOR.

 

BioWare has been doing a great job with Star Wars: The Old Republic’s development. The game’s current state is a lot more polished than other MMOs I tried, even after they’d gone live.There are of course glitches and bugs, but nothing terrible. BioWare is known for their great RPGs and for being careful about what they publish, but this is their first MMO.

The storytelling system is incredibly well made, and the complete voice-over of the dialogues actually makes a difference. When I rolled a Trooper I noticed that her voice was the voice of Mass Effect’s female Sheppard, which was a great surprise. I hope the plot quality is kept in higher levels. I remember the disappointment with Age of Conan after leaving the initial area too well.

 

Anyway, the classes seemed well balanced, and after having tried most of them I’ve given up completely on having a Jedi or Sith as a main character. I preferred the Bounty Hunter/Trooper.

I liked the character customization, even though they didn’t include some races I thought were obvious choices. I guess they’re saving them for future expansions. I didn’t see many people with the same look, which means there are enough options available.

The graphics are not state of the art, but their cartoon-ish look will age better than more detailed models and textures would. I re-visited Galaxies when SOE gave everyone free playtime and what looked nice years ago, looks and feels weird nowadays. The simpler graphics also mean that they’re easier to be supported by PCs with lower specs. Not everyone’s going to upgrade their computer to play a new MMO. BioWare was probably considering that more PCs with requirements already reached equals more potential customers for the game.

 

I did an instance, Black Talon, a couple of times with guildies I hadn’t played with in months. The instance was very easy with 1 Jedi tank, 2 Bounty Hunter DPS and 1 companion healing us, and it also easy when we didn’t have a healer with us, the second time around – 1 Jedi tank, 2 BH DPS, and 1 Imperial Agent DPS.

It was nice to see that you could run the same instance twice and, because of the player’s dialogue choices, get a different story and even different bosses. The group dialogue system is pretty cool, with each character choosing a line, and then the highest roll winning the chance to say it and make the story go a certain way.

I was left wondering if they’ll keep the instances this easy further ahead. I’m guessing the answer for that is ‘no’, otherwise they’d get boring very fast.

 

The only issue in the instance was that our group had a weird, long latency/graphics lag spike a couple of times.

Aside from that, the only other problem I had was a graphical glitch which lasted for a few seconds every time I changed my graphics preferences, and the screenshots bug, which caused me to ‘lose’ a lot of screenshots; unless you changed the graphics preferences, your screenshots would be saved as a completely black image. I’m sure they’ll fix that one easily before the game goes live.

Now, for an inevitable comparison: Eight years ago, I beta tested Star Wars Galaxies, and a couple of weeks before it went live on the US, it still had a ton of serious bugs. Characters were lost and the game would crash to desktop, the char would become out of sync with the rest of the server, only to be returned to normal when the servers were restarted, there were some weird graphical issues  and so on.

With SW:TOR it’s obvious that they waited until the game had what could be a launch quality before sending out beta invites to a ton of people. Considering how Galaxies failed despite the hype that a Star Wars MMO got, and considering all the supposed ‘WoW-killers’ that have failed at keeping even 1 million subscriptions, it’s a smart move by BioWare.

 

I don’t think it’s going to be a WoW-killer. But I’m almost certain that it will make a big dent on WoW’s subscription numbers. Most of the people I’ve played WoW with, and who – like me – had played since the week the EU servers opened, haven’t subscribed in months and are only re-subscribing when the next expansion, Mists of Pandaria is launched to try it out. Also, everyone I’ve talked to has had a very positive opinion on SW:TOR after the beta test.

It’s the smoothest MMO beta test I’ve participated in. I’m looking forward to exploring that galaxy far far away when the game launches.