I’ve been a horrible blogger lately, and I’m sorry =/ A sickness got ahold of me and lots of busyness at work has been keeping me away, so I’ll go ahead and comment away for awhile. (So pardon the randomness).
Regarding the bombshell that Jacobs dropped today regarding WAR, I’m not one bit surprised. Last fall I commented that shutting down beta for 2 months was a bad sign. I got slammed for that, called a naysayer by people who presumed “the break is needed to make WAR the great game that it can be!!!!one11!” Hey, at least if they cut a bunch of the features and polish up what they’re releasing then we might see the game ship. Not to mention, have some time to finish the end game so that people stay subscribed to the game past the first month. Guys, just because you’re releasing a game to a bored 10 million WoW players doesn’t mean you get a free pass. It still has to be a better game than WoW and give them a really GOOD reason to leave their friends, their level 70 time commitment, their guild, and the virtual world that’s dear and familiar to them. Hopefully WAR will shape up to be something that doesn’t suck especially now that they made a cut for quality…(I’d like to buy another MMO in the next year) but I’m doubting it’s that one.
Only two capital cities? How well did that work for EQ2 at launch?
But, like Scott said, this will be gone and forgotten when the game launches. As long as the content that made it into the game is good, then it won’t matter that they skipped out on a few things. If WAR manages to get and hold a decent number of subscribers, they can add that meat later. We shall see…
In other news, the new iPhone came out today. If you’re crazy or lucky, you might have gotten one. I still have my old iPhone from last summer’s release…and I’m done with the iPhone. I’m ready to move onto the Blackberry Bold that is hopefully dropping next month. I realize the new version is fixing a lot of my complaints (no GPS, EDGE network is slow, freezing) but I think that I need to move on to a phone that’s a bit more reliable email wise. I’ve had problems getting and sending mail on the iPhone. If you picked a new one up, let me know how you like it. I’m known to be convincible.
On the WoWfront, it’s been kind of slow lately. I haven’t played too much because I went on a game shopping spree over the last week or so. I’ve mostly only logged on to raid – I did Kara last weekend and SSC/Hyjal a couple of times since. I also made a baby warlock that I played around a bit with – but I love druids too much to really play anything else. I’m thinking that I’ll just be grinding pvp and dailies on Pawtopsy for awhile and hopefully get my +heal up that way. I still need the Merciless Gladiator’s Salvation and several other pieces. I’d also love to get an epic flying form at some point.
As far as other games, I picked up the Warcraft III Battle Chest and I’ve been playing through WC3 again. Man, that game is so amazing. I’d never been a huge RTS fan, but that game really made me love the genre. The lore alone makes it worth it, I just love the story. I also picked up a couple starter sets of the WoW Trading Card Game, but haven’t started to play that yet. I didn’t manage to get a druid, but I’m hearing that my friend did – so hopefully he’ll trade me for a gnome mage or blood elf paladin. ^_^
I also picked up The Witcher. This game is so well done and I’m kinda bummed that I haven’t had the chance to play it more. My new computer runs it so beautifully and the game looks great. It’s also a lot of fun and slightly Oblivion-y except with a better skill tree system and better character models. I look forward to getting more into it. I also am finishing up Lost Odyssey for 360, which I abandoned a couple months ago when WoW stole my attention. I’m just starting Disc 3, and I still love the game just as much as I did. Escaping from the Staff at the end of Disc 2 was so reminiscent of FF7 that I almost cried out of nostalgia. It’s a fabulous game.
Luke also bought a Nintendo DS this week, which is so freaking awesome. I’ve been delaying getting one because I always feel like I have too many games to give a DS the attention it deserves. Well, he went ahead and did it so now I’m hooked to that as well. I’ve only played a bit of FF Tactics A2 but I love it. The graphics are so retro and awesome that it makes me want to make an isometric tile based game RIGHT NOW. (Luckily, I can.) This makes me want Chrono Trigger to hurry up and get here. It’s only my favorite RPG of all time, and the DS rocks. (I may end up needing my own DS because I feel like I might steal Luke’s too often…)
Anywho, that’s the news from me. Too many games, not enough time.
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
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Two words on DS games: Civilization Revolution.
The magical 3rd word? Soul-sucking.
Oh, and would you mind updating your blogroll to my new address, Cuppster?
Gracias, chica.
The problem with Mythic’s apparent move is that, while the cities can be viewed as additional features (cut ‘em out and players will forget about it), cutting out classes — and not the same class from every race, but different classes from different races — upsets core balance. There’s no way you can cut out the tank class from two races and the barbarian class from two races, while leaving the tanks and barbarians of other races, and still have a fair fight in an RvR-focused game. If they’re going to do that, they need to postpone release until those classes can be replaced.
They’re obviously focused on quality, and that impresses me. But, from an outside perspective, I don’t understand their reasoning at all about maintaining a 2008 release.
And if you end up getting Civ: Revolution for your 360, let me know and we’ll have to conquer the world together sometime.
Not to play WAR fanboy, but if you look at it from a Realm Vs. Realm perspective, both sides are still balanced, perfectly even.
I don’t think these 4 classes missing are going to matter in the long run, because each side still has the equal amount of classes and choices in terms of class role.
After the last 2 ‘announcements’ by Mythic you’d hope they would make the next one good. Yeh, WC3 was crazy. I played it after WoW and didn’t actually realize how many of the skill portraits thingies were copied from WC3 for WoW.
Meh, lack of blogging happens. Sure is for me right now too – but I’ve been busy getting ready to leave the country in a few days and get back to the US. So, that’s my excuse anyhow.
I don’t think the WAR thing is nearly as bad as a lot of people are making it out to be. At the end of the day, I’d just as soon have some nice, finished, well polished content, than a bunch of extra, unpolished, bugy, broken content. I see a whole heck of a lot of the former rather than the latter. The balance is still fine too, as is the amount of content in the game, as long as the cap cities weren’t too much of a focus (beyond the RvR goals, which are still there). I think 6 cities + 24 classes being knocked down a bit is just an example of feature creep getting cut down, more than real core gameplay mechanics or anything missing. I mean, that’s fairly ambitious.
Now, if it ships buggy, broken, and unfun, that’s a totally different story.
Considering the trend in online gaming… in general, always possible.
“I see a whole heck of a lot of the former rather than the latter.”
… Ignore that line. That was originally intended to refer to something I deleted!