The Game Dame

Ya think?? HAHAHAHAhahahaha… woooo… boy, I crack myself up.

Still, below is a quote from the Battle.net email that Blizzard sent out, and here’s the blog post I wrote after Wrath came out. Your assignment: compare and contrast.

Our goal is to create the premier online gaming destination for Blizzard gamers, with new community and communication features like cross-realm World of Warcraft chat, real-life friends lists, cross-game communication, and much more.

You decide.

I haven’t officially discontinued my WoW account, but I’ll probably do it this week. I realized after looking at SpartanUI that the lovin’ feeling is completely gone. A few months ago, I would’ve absolutely LOVED this UI. It’s clean, stylish, and out of the way. But now I look at it and I think two things:

1. It looks a heck of a lot like Aion’s UI. Wouldn’t surprise me if some add-on developers got some under-the-table “help” from Blizzard to combat the competition.
2. It made my skin crawl to think about playing the game again: leveling, button-pushing, doing dailies, putting up with pugs…

I just got this really depressed feeling like I have let my friends down by having zero interest in playing the game.

It is interesting learning about Aion, but I’m not sure about when I’ll go back to playing that either. It’s also very button-pushy. As in: push button one, wait for cooldown, push button 2, wait again, take a potion if necessary, flash heal, repeat.

The game I’m enjoying most right now is Fallout 3. It’s very immersive. It’s like BioShock meets Oblivion. I’m totally geeking out on it!

In my previous post I told you about character creation in Aion and today I’ll continue describing my experiences with the Aion UI in terms of how  it compares to WoW. (Click any image for gigantor version.)

Graphics

The graphics are nothing short of spectacular. The regular gameplay graphics are on par (and in some cases better) than WoW’s cut scenes. I delight in exploring to find new stunning sights and new critters. Sometimes I come around a new corner and just gasp at how amazing the view is.

Home cities

The home cities – there is only one per faction – are stunning and large, along the size of Orgrimmar. However, they are not very intuitively structured, unlike Undercity or Ironforge, but the maps are labeled so you’re never lost.

NPCs

Having said that, the NPCs leave a bit to be desired. I really can’t tell one from the other because they’re not very memorable. Also, there is only one throughline story on each faction (up to level 14 where I am) that has a recurring, vaguely interesting character. There are no Thrall/Jaina storylines, no Tirion Fordringers or Sylvanas’s (Sylvanae?).

Animations & emotes

Lastly, the character animations are entertaining. If it starts to rain and your character is standing still for a minute or so, she breaks out an umbrella-sized leaf over her head. If it’s snowing, she puts her hands up to marvel at the snowfall.

You only have about 10 basic emotes to start with – laugh, dance, greet, etc. There are more complex ones that you can buy from vendors, like a birthday song or a marriage proposal!

User interface

You can see that the UI looks extremely familiar, no? It’s a little cleaner and more compact and you can put it on the bottom or the top of the screen.

1) Standard HP/MP bars with one addition: DP. I think this stands for Daeva Points. (At level 10 you get your wings and you become a Daeva.) These build over time as you kill creatures. For every 1000 DP you get a special attack. You can save up to 4 attacks (4000 DP) or use them as you go along. Unfortunately, they take a LONG time to build up and they reset when you log off. I’ve played for as much as 2 hours and only JUST gotten to 1000 DP.

2) You get lots of attack bars: 2 sets of 4 each.

3) Your options menu and a monitor of your faction influence. Since I haven’t gotten to any PvP yet, I am not entirely sure what this meter shows. All I know is that you don’t build rep over time like you do in WoW, it’s a dynamic bar that moves during combat. Or something like that.

4) This is your flight timer. At first you get 60 seconds of flight time, longer if you glide once in a while.

5) Mini map, of course. By default it does NOT point North (the top of the map is wherever you are headed and changes accordingly), however you can change the settings to keep North at the top.

6) Optional quest tracker. This is very intuitive to use and stays out of the way, unlike WoW’s built in quest tracker & some add-ons I’ve used.

Map

The coolest thing about the map is that it has a second option. You can display it normally by pressing M, or you can display it as a transparent HUD, like the picture to the right. Very useful when you need to see more of a general direction than the mini-map shows.

Surprise! Bet you forgot you had me in your feed reader, amirite?? Well, you know I can’t hide from you for very long. It burrrrns!!

I received Aion for my birthday from my most wonderful husband and I’ve been playing it instead of WoW since it launched. (Well, technically, since the day AFTER it launched because the servers were foccacta on launch day. Must have borrowed Blizzard’s IT folks or somethin’. HA!) So, for all my WoW buddies, I decided I’d give you an overview of the game for the next several posts. [Note: click any picture for a super-large version of it with tasty detail!]

Summary impression of Aion

Holy cow am I having a ton of fun playing this game! It’s absolutely gorgeous. It’s also a stunning new world with new kinds of creatures that don’t rely on fantasy clichés (no elfs or goblins). The gameplay is fun and exploring is entrancing. If it falls short so far – and I’ve only played to a max level of 13 – it’s in the areas of story and tutorials. But even those shortcomings are not overly bothersome and later I’ll explain why. I have not played any PvP, since I’m still in the starter zones. Once I get there, I’ll let you know if my opinion changes.

Starting an Aion character

The game is pronounced “eye-on,” not “ay-on.” It loads from the main NCSoft launcher, which can also launch Guild Wars, CoH/V, or any other NCSoft online games. Here we get to the biggest beef I have with the game: after you click “Aion” on the launcher, it takes about 5 minutes to load. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. I click it and then go load up the laundry or scoop the litter box and when I come back it’s usually STILL loading. It takes a crazy long time.

Then you get to the server selection screen. No, your eyes do not deceive you: that’s the ENTIRE list of servers available. Worldwide. When it says “High” population, they are NOT kidding around. I definitely recommend getting on one of the new servers because lag is a definite factor in the starting zones.

Then you choose your faction. I’ve pasted together the screenies above so you can compare the two worlds, but normally you only see one world at a time. That’s because you can only have one faction on each server, just like on a WoW PvP server (in Aion, all servers are PvP). I also added the green labels to the pictures so you know which is which.

Now let me explain what you’re looking at. The lore says that Aion was a god (or energy beam or whatever) that existed like a pole through the axis of the world and protected it. Then, a horrible event occurred called – wait for it – the CATACLYSM (no joke!) and it split the world in half. Imagine breaking an egg in half and holding one half above the other so there’s a space in the middle but it still forms an egg shape. That’s Aion’s world: still rotating, but ripped in half. (Why the god Aion couldn’t stop the cataclysm or even still exists is unknown to me as yet.) The bottom hemisphere is known as Elysia; the top is Asmodae (AZZ-mo-day). Since the planet rotates skewed on its axis, even more so than Earth, the light from the sun comes in at an angle and is only able to light the bottom half, Elysia, leaving Asmodae in permanent darkness.

That’s not as bad as it sounds. Asmodae in practice is actually quite light for game play purposes. (It’s not like Bioshock or the caves of Oblivion or anything.) You’d probably never know it was the “dark” half of the world if they didn’t tell you that. Think of it as Netherstorm. On the other hand, Elysia is very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed during the day, along the order of Elwyn Forest.

Classes

You have only 1 of 4 classes to choose from at first: Warrior, Scout, Mage, and Priest. The selection screen is cool because it shows you what the class looks like in max level-capped gear, so you know just how awesome you will look. (You look pretty cool at lower levels too, actually.)

Those classes do exactly what you think they do from their names. At level 10, each class breaks into 2 subclasses and you can only choose one.

There is only one main healing class in the game (Cleric) and there is only one tanking class (Templar). There are no hybrids (Chanter is the possible exception). Only one class has pets (Spiritmaster) and they are more like ghouls/minions than hunter pets. Here are your WoW equivalents:

Customization

Now you can go completely nuts. Customization is way beyond anything you can do in WoW. There are literally so many options that I don’t think there could possibly be two characters exactly alike in Aion. Lemme show you…

Above is your basic screen. (Note that the “Basic” tab on the right side is selected.) There are about 50 hairstyles per gender. You can see the color combinations.

And now I’m gonna blow your mind…

If you click the “Advanced” tab, you get sliders to monkey with every single aspect of your appearance. EVERYTHING. You even get to choose the type of voice your character has!

Keep in mind that those screenshots are ONLY of the appearance choices. I didn’t even show you the character size options. You can be as huge as a Tauren (and fat or skinny) or tinier than the smallest Gnome you’ve ever seen. You can even make your head large or small, regardless of body size.

More in this series!

In the next post, I’ll talk about entering the world, the graphics, and the gameplay, including the UI, combat, flight (you can fly at level 10!), and other goodies. With screencasts! ZOMG!

So, I’ve been gone from WoW because my monitor died. I’m now in the process of researching a new one. My question to you, dear readers (if there are any left out there), is this:

If you were a fabulous but affordable WoW monitor, which one would you be?

PS: The image on the left is one I’m considering:
LG – 23″ Widescreen Flat-Panel LCD HD Monitor

What to my wondering eyes did appear, but a magical display at CVS! Click the image to see the delightful details. There’s a Horde box with an Orc, featuring Citrus Cherry flavored Dew, and a blue Alliance box showing a Night Elf who prefers Wild Berry flavored Dew.

On Saturday my desktop’s monitor died. It went kablooey in the morning so I had to stare the rest of the day in the face without the prospect of WoW. I pouted until mid-afternoon.

By dinner time, I had come to the tough realization that I had been very addicted to WoW. I kept wandering around the apartment looking for… what? I don’t know. I was restless. I walked from the bedroom to the living room, into the office — and then made the entire circuit again and again. I petted the cats. One appreciated it, the other asked me, uncivilly, to shove off. I took two naps. My husband did his usual Saturday stuff, keeping an eye on me and wondering what he could do to cheer me up. My primary emotion was sadness. I missed my friends. I missed the automatic mindlessness of cranking up WoW when I didn’t know what else to do. Or, more often, when I didn’t want to face something else I had to do or think about. I felt lonely, having been jerked away from a social circle without my consent. I also felt unexplicably guilt-ridden, like I was letting someone down, but I didn’t know who it was.

Sunday was even harder. The entire day drew out before me like a long shadow at sunset — and felt just as cold. I dusted off Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for the Xbox 360. I hated it. I started a new class 4 or 5 different times. I couldn’t get the hang of the controls. There were too many spells for the D-pad hotkeys (it’s probably a MUCH better game on the PC). The hint book I had bought last year is HORRIBLY written and I wasn’t finding it helpful at all. I kept wondering, “Why am I banging my head against this game??!?” And yet I continued to try. I felt compelled to fill up the brain-space.

Sunday is the one night a week we allow ourselves to splurge on a restaurant for dinner. We went to Panera. I tried making conversation with my husband about truly bizarre topics, mostly centered around facing one’s own limitations. Afterwards we browsed Barnes & Noble, a free pastime we both enjoy. There’s a Best Buy in the same shopping center and I begged for us to window-shop the monitors. “Oooo, pretty.” In the bookstore, I couldn’t get myself interested in anything I touched, fiction or nonfiction. I noted the horribly sad state of the SciFi/Fantasy genre (more on that in a future post). The predominating emotion was loss.

This morning I woke up cranky and resentful. Nothing pleased me. The weather was bleak, yet the holiday filled the parks and beaches too much for me to enjoy them. Again I tried playing Oblivion, this time finding a bit of enjoyment in it as I solved some of the frustrations (turning up the brightness so I didn’t get lost in caves, pausing the action a lot to switch spells, etc.). At some point in mid-afternoon I started to achieve a little peace. I cleaned off the top of my dresser. I sorted some clothes to take to Goodwill. I came up with the idea for this post and some others. I realized there are a lot of things I want to do around  the house on my I’ve-been-meaning-to list. I even started thinking that losing WoW might turn out to be a good thing for me in the long run.

By the way, thank you all for the kind comments and emails you’ve sent. They have definitely helped take some of the sting out of this whole situation.

Photo by Natalia Romay

This is certainly not how I had planned for it to go down.  I was still in the “bargaining” stage of grief about whether and when I wanted to quit WoW. I wasn’t sure if I would quit, but if I did, I wanted to do it when my heart was clear and my mind was at peace with the decision. Unfortunately, none of those things came to pass before the decision was made for me.

The monitor on my PC decided to go the way of the old ones today. The laptop I’m using to write this post doesn’t have the graphics power to run WoW. The other desktop computer we have is an old Mac which could run TBC but cannot handle Wrath. Even if I could somehow figure out how to use this laptop’s monitor with the desktop, it wouldn’t be able to handle that computer’s Nvidia graphics card output (I did, after all, only pay about $600 for this laptop).

So, abruptly, I am bereft of WoW and everything else that is on the desktop until I can afford to buy a new monitor. Since I’m unemployed at the moment, I have no idea when that kind of money will come our way. As such, it’s probably best for me to cancel my WoW account in the meantime. I can’t even use the network to access the files on that computer because I’d need to set up the sharing.

Even though I know it’s been coming, my leaving the game, I feel heartsore. I don’t get to go online to say goodbye to my guildies. I don’t get to give away any of my valuable items to noobs. I don’t get to have any closure on it whatsoever. It feels like I’m leaving town under cover of darkness, never to see some friends again.

I don’t think I’ll stop writing this blog any time soon. I’ve still got things to say about the game — and goodness knows I probably couldn’t keep my mouth shut even if I tried. I may start writing about other games. That is, if I actually start playing any. (I do have Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for Xbox 360 gathering dust on the shelf.) Who knows, I might even pop-off about non-game stuff here. We’ll see. I do have one post in the works as a result of an email thread with guildies last week, so I know I’ve got at least one more WoW post coming this weekend.

I know I will talk to my best WoW friends (hi, guildies!) in email threads next week, but I want to express my sadness that I couldn’t tell them all this in-game. I’m going to miss playing with you guys, BIG TIME. Hopefully, you’ll welcome me back after I’m able to get a new monitor. Love y’all…

I stole it from Kestrel. Who took it from Softthistle. And I love the idea, so I’m doing it even though I wasn’t tagged!

Here are the “rules”:

1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random… Read More” 
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random 
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band. 
2 – Go to “Random quotations” 
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. 
3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” 
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days 
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. 
4 – Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

Here’s mine — I think it came out so cool! — with Flickr photo credit to Che-burashka:

I hereby tag:

• Ess at Outland Bound (if she’s still out there somewhere!)
• Sylus at In the Mind of Sylus (if he has time between homework assignments)
• Ratshag at Need More Rage (before anyone else can get him!)

Notes for a next generation MMO

A little part of me has died today. Our guild master told us that he was taking several months off from the game, with an eye toward quitting altogether. Last week, another key guildie, also from For The Horde, announced his intention to take a financial vacation from the game. As I mentioned in my last post, the game is also getting old for me. My main point was that Blizzard has failed to bank on and expand what makes the game most addictive and fun: its social aspects. 

I’ve looked at other MMOs, and have been pretty bored by what they offer. All of them seem to be copying WoW. None of them is really thinking outside of the software box. The only differences among them are graphics style/quality, content (storyline), and play style (PvE, PvP, strategy, sims). Even the genres are limited to Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Nothing new. All you have to do is paste those labels onto some dice, roll them, and *POOF!* you’ve got a new MMO! Of course, by “new” I really mean “same old, same old.” How can these MMOs compete with Blizzard if they are only imitations?

Way back in the dark ages, I interviewed with Blizzard for Subscription Marketing Manager. It was essentially a customer loyalty job: how do we keep current subscribers and bring back former ones? I was (and still am) uniquely qualified for that job, but they passed on hiring me. I gave them a list of things both in my interview and follow-up emails which I thought they should use for customer retention. If they’d only have listened to me…

Here are just a few of the things that Blizzard could’ve spent time and money on to improve the game, rather than just crank out new dungeons  which are merely mish-mashes of old dungeons:

Read the rest of this entry…