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Spider-Man: Web of Shadows

If you’re looking for a web slinging video game fix, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows might be what you’re looking for.  On my quest to find good games cheap, I ended up picking up Web of Shadows on Amazon used for $12 or so.  Being a Spider-Man fan and looking for a new game to play, I decided to give it a try.

Most of the Spider-Man games I’ve tried in the past were pretty pathetic really.  Usually just trying to leech off of the success of the Rami movies.  In fact I don’t remember a good Spider-Man since Sega Genesis.  So it was pretty surprising that Web of Shadows actually turned out to be pretty fun and well done in most areas.

First and most importantly in my opinion for a Spider-Man game – the web slinging is actually well done and interesting in this game.  That was the first thing that immediately caught my attention.  It’s pretty damn fun just swinging around in the city beating up criminals.  It’s very acrobatic and cinematic feeling and my favorite feature of the game.

Web of Shadows let you play the game with some moral choices affecting the game.  You can either use the black (symbiote) suit or the classic red (and blue) suit.  You also are prompted to make different decisions at certain points of the game and you can either choose the black (evil) response or the red (good) response.  I choose to play through the game as “good” although there were a few times when the choice was pretty hard to stick with.  I’m finding that my moral compass in these decisions doesn’t always match up with my intended play-through.

The combat is pretty damn good.  It’s very fast paced and the differences between the black suit and red suit are noticeable.  The red suit is more classic, fast, acrobatic style Spider-Man while the black suit is much more aggressive and powerful in it’s attacks.  Both suits have their uses in the game and while I liked the flashy moves of the red suit by about half way through I was favoring the black suit’s “get over here” move to much to really use the red suit anymore.

There are a lot of aerial, fighting above the skyline fights in the game that make things pretty fun to watch and play.  Overall, between the swinging and combat style of the game, it’s worth it alone.

The story starts off seeming decent but quickly gets drawn out and predictable.  Also, Mary Jane appears to be a complete hoe-bag now also.  Kind of strange.

There are some issues with the game.  Twice the game became unplayable for me.  One time in my wolverine fight, my Spider-Man just froze in place and no buttons would respond anymore.  I just had to wait for the bad guys to kill me off and reload my save.  The other time, Rhino got stuck in the wall and wouldn’t move.  Had to reset the game and reload my save point.  Besides these few bugs and the camera being pretty wonky at times I found the game to be good overall.

Worth picking up if you want some web slinging, fast paced fighting.  I’ll keep an eye on these developers for any other games I might want to pick up.

Exploring the Capital Wasteland

Last November I decided to revisit single player RPGs and to try and catch up with the rest of the gaming world and had heard about a couple different games that were good, Mass Effect and Fallout 3.  I ended up ordering both of them and started playing through Mass Effect initially and my first impressions were going well but decided to give Fallout 3 a spin just to make sure the disc and such worked (I buy used games usually – no way in hell I’m forking over $60 for a game unless it’s AMAZING beyond belief or it at least tricks me into thinking it is.  Right Tekken 6?  *grumble*).  Well, my Mass Effect disc was probably pretty lonely for the next 35′ish gaming hours because I played Fallout 3 pretty exclusively on my Xbox from there on till I finished it.

I did end up choosing the Xbox version over the PC version for the ability to sit around on my couch and felt I could enjoy the game more playing in my living room instead of sitting at my computer desk.  There is a mod SDK for the PC version which gives it some more variety and options over the 360 though so I’m not sure if I made the right choice there but I enjoyed the game regardless so I wasn’t too worried about it.

Story

The story of Fallout was pretty compelling for a video game and the ability for your decisions to affect the outcome of some things in the game is a welcome feature.  There’s actually a consequence for being a saint in a disturbing wasteland or being a complete douche.  I opted for sort of a middle-ground, slightly “good” character but didn’t really take shit from the NPC’s either and my moral compass did slip a few times and got impatient with something and just slaughtered someone to steal a quest item or objective or whatever.

The main story line seemed like it was in line with my “good guy” attempt at playing the game and while there was some predictable events through the main story, some of the events were pretty damn cool also which left a pretty fulfilling story experience.

Graphics

The graphics in Fallout 3 were just plain good.  The weapons, characters and everything was well modeled and looked great.  I thought I’d get pretty tired of the wasteland themed desert look and it turned out I was right but it took a lot longer than I thought to reach that point so it beat my expectation there.  I haven’t really ran into many new games that have bad graphics and it seems one of the main reasons for the huge budgets of these games these days.

Gameplay

More aiming on a console controller.  This was one of the other reasons I started second guessing my decision but Fallout’s new VAT targetting system makes the console aiming pretty bearable for my PC gamer roots.  The VAT’s targeting system allows you to sort of pause the fire fight and lock on to specific parts of your enemy, like shooting their leg to keep them from running from you or towards you, etc.  I found myself using this system quite a bit through the game.

Conclusion

Overall, Fallout 3 was an excellent RPG experience and am now looking forward to Fallout New Vegas which is coming out soon.  I may get around to trying the DLC’s for Fallout 3 before then also if I can get through some of my backlog of games.  If you haven’t played Fallout 3, what are you waiting for?

Shoryuken!

Street Fighter IV was one of the first games that I picked up when I got my Xbox 360 last year and one of the main reasons I wanted the 360 in the first place.  I used to love playing fighting games with my childhood friend Taurean and there was a lot of nostalgia behind my interest in the game.  I still remember playing the original Street Fighter II for a quarter in a little grocery store by were I grew up.  That store has been torn down and turned into a parking lot for years.  That along with all the arcades within a 50 mile radius being out of business, Street Fighter 4 has given me a little flashback to different times in gaming.

I’ve been playing Street Fighter quite a bit since I picked it up and while I am not at competition/tournament level, I have a pretty solid foundation in the game and enjoy it a lot.  There’s also a very deep community around it that has sparked quite a resurgence in the fighting game genre’s popularity – and in turn caused some pretty terrible games to be released to try and leach off it’s success. *cough* BlazBlue *cough* King of Fighters XII *cough*.

Besides the nostalgia of playing Super Street Fighter II with my old friend; over the course of the last 5 or so years and being mostly focused on MMO games, I have grown quite discontent with the competitive PvP aspects of MMO’s.  Quite honestly I don’t find them to be good “competition” at all – well at least the theme park style ones like Aion, WoW, WAR, AoC, etc.  I have some different opinions about the open systems of games like EVE/Fallen Earth but that’s a different topic.

Most PvP in those themepark style MMORPG’s is heavily dictated by equipment (and level of course) thus the main influence is time available to spend playing the game and “grinding” gear.  Now this doesn’t mean time spent practicing in a fighting game isn’t a factor.  It certainly is.  However there’s a difference between taking the time to practice combos, game mechanics, matchups vs. the taking time to “grind” equipment.  It removes a major portion of the human element from the competition and replaces it with game dice rolls and chance.  If I practice PvP (execution/strategy/etc) on my frost mage for 2 weeks and am wearing mostly green gear than I will likely still be killed fairly quickly by a fully geared gladiator rogue even though I may have superior skills in PvP.  This is an extreme example in many ways.  While it may be technically possible to kite the rogue 100% of the time if you got the jump on him and kill him due to game mechanics, your margin for error is incredibly small and in most cases you’ll be 2 shot by the rogue in reality.  There are dozens of variables on why someone wins a fight in both MMORPG’s and fighting games but ultimately in a fighting game it comes down to who is better at it.  While PvP in an MMORPG comes down to who has more time.

Now I’m not ragging on people for spending a lot of time playing games because if I was, I’d be struck down for being a hypocrite.  My point is in a dice roll combat system heavily influenced by stats/gear; a major portion of the fights control is taken out of my hands and decided by the game’s mechanics thus I no longer consider MMORPG PvP to be competitive or fulfilling.  I have had fun with it as a meta game within the larger scope of an MMORPG but to play an MMORPG for the sole purpose of PvP competition I find to be pointless and unrewarding.  Did you win because you’re better or because you got a lucky crit and they didn’t?  Did you win because they were wearing their PvE gear instead of their PvP gear because they’re out mining?

Now there are advocates that “war isn’t fair” so who cares if they’re lesser geared (i.e. don’t have as much time to play as me).  I still won!  Well I suppose you can look at it that way but to me it seems like you’re trying to sell the griefing session to yourself as a victory.  These type of people are usually also the first to complain about lag, an exploit (that doesn’t exist) or some other excuse when they loose; and it comes down to a simple truth.  They’re not playing to be competitive.  They’re playing to feel superior to other people or in the case of battlegrounds/arena; they are playing as a alternative way to grind gear.

Any form of skill brings with it an inherit sense of arrogance and pride.  That’s human nature and to deny it is to be untruthful.  The issue can resonate in two ways.  People that feel inadequate so they feel they must “conquer” other people to feel satisfied and people that have exaggerated egos and arrogance and can not handle the emotional impact of failing (and in turn crushing that ego).  These two situations usually result in camping, griefing and other unpleasant acts in MMORPG’s that I just don’t find in fighting games.  Now there’s bad losers in everything; I should know as I’ve gotten my share of hate mail on Xbox Live from sandy vagina’s in SF4 but even with that, the sportsmanship is still on a whole other level than what I’ve experienced in MMORPG’s.

Of course the amount of PvP that takes place in the open world, at least in World of Warcraft is small compared to arena/battlegrounds.  However the same issues apply in regards to gearing/stats/dice rolls taking priority over player skill.  There is one aspect of MMO PvP that fighting games don’t capture and that’s of teamwork.  Fighting games are mostly 1v1 scenarios.  However I would prefer an FPS over an MMO for a team style PvP game even though my FPS skills are pretty mediocre.

In conclusion, PvP is best served where player skill is the dominate factor over dice rolls and gear stats but that doesn’t mean MMO PvP can’t be an entertaining side game at least some of the time.

So I kind of got into a hurry making a post for 2009.  I wanted to spend some additional time talking about some things in more detail.

Gaming

I spent a lot of time exploring different interests in gaming through the year.  In 2008, I covered my interest in this a lot better, and I want to get back to that.  A quick look at my Raptr profile shows I’ve been pretty busy:

http://raptr.com/XingYuen

There’s some games there I finished and need to review, some that are an ongoing interest and some that I’ve stalled on and need to get around to finishing.  One thing I do want to point out about my reviewing; that is that I am a cheap ass for the most part and it’s very rare for me to fork over $60 for a single player game I’d probably beat once and never come back and play again.  Couple that with the fact I’m still years behind on the console gaming scene means the stuff that I’m playing and is new to me, will be old news to most people.  Don’t say there wasn’t a warning.

Games I finished in 2009 that I am going to review for sure:

• Warhammer 40K: DoW2
• Left 4 Dead
• Fallout 3
• Titan Quest
• Torchlight
• Plants vs Zombies
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance
• Company of Heroes
• Burnout Paradise

Games I’m still playing that I will write something about at some point:

• Street Fighter 4
• Tekken 6
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Guitar Hero series
• Mass Effect
• Assassin’s Creed
• Various 360 Arcade titles
• Borderlands
• Halo 3
• Bioshock

Other topics of interest:

• Various MMO experiments
• Call of Duty series and why they can suck a goose egg
• Hellgate London (die already!)
• Steam and digital distribution
• MMO’s in general
• More up to date progress in WoW/EVE (yeah EVE)

As you can see, this will give me plenty of subject matter over the year.  If I can get half of it done, it’ll be a huge step in the right direction.

Music

Quite honestly, I have been completely stagnant on this interest for the past couple years mostly.  I grew pretty tired and uninterested in the digital sampling production methods I had been using and felt blocked creatively.

I’ve thought about trying to pick up an actual instrument of some sort and explore that interest.  We’ll see where this goes.

Professional Life

Things in my professional life are going well.  I am working for RestorePro in Sandusky, OH.  They are a disaster damage restoration company and have been kind to me and given me a great opportunity to support their IT infrastructure from within the company and help develop some marketing solutions all while trying to keep up with the insane speed of web technology development.

Personal Stuff

As for personal stuff, I keep this pretty simple on purpose.  As always, I despise drama and bullshit in my life so this is pretty straight forward.  Sorry, no Springer to be had here.

Going on two years with my wonderful girlfriend Michelle.  Things are great on that front.

Got a new Jeep Liberty in the fall to get ready for the frozen tundra that is Ohio during the winter months.  So far this has been a good investment as last Saturday’s 4 foot snow drift in my drive way proved.  Fuck you snow drift.  Jeep > Snow Drift.  The downside of course is the thing sucks down gas like a crack head on the first of the month.  Guess that’s the cost of not pushing my car through a Blizzard.  So be it.

I started a weight loss regiment 6 weeks ago.  Down 30+ lbs so far.  Not too bad.  Moving into the IT industry 10 or so years ago did a number on my health but I’m going to fix it while I still can and so far things are progressing as intended on that front.  I’d like this to lead back into picking up my training in martial arts where I left it.  Still got a ways to go.

That should just about do it for now.

Shooting Zombies in the Face is Fun

Okay, this update is coming WAAAYY late, I know.  Better late than never right?  I ended up buying an Xbox 360.  I haven’t really been into console gaming since Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo – yeah, that long.  I owned an original Playstation and a Playstation 2 but never really played it much because I was into PC gaming by then and consoles seemed to limited.  I’m sure I missed a lot of great stuff along the way.

Resident Evil 5 is the first Resident Evil I played from start to finish, not because it’s the “best” one I played but because I never played the other ones really.  I seen the first couple back on the original PS in passing at friends houses or whatever but I never bought it/rented it or otherwise.  With no expectation other than shooting African zombies (I killed the white African zombies also, let’s not go there), I walked into Resident Evil 5 with a pretty open mind.

The game looks very nice.  I’ve been pretty impressed with the Xbox’s graphics, seeing as my last console experience was like playing with construction paper and dull Crayola compared to the stuff out now, most people probably already know it has good graphics so talking a lot about that is pretty pointless.

The game follows our protagonist, Chris Redfield, the whiniest zombie slayer I’ve ever witnessed whimper around the ghettos of African towns and villages slaying mutant zombies, mutant dogs, mutant tar monsters, mutant bats, mutant spiders, mutant praying mantis’, mutant sea horses – you get the idea.

Controls were strange to say the least.  Aiming with a analog stick on a controller was pretty hard for me to get used to after years of PC gaming.  At one point I would have compared it to jabbing a razor blade under my finger nail while submerged in salt water.   Once I got the hang of it though, the controls seemed reasonabily responsive and intuitive.  The knife was always sort of clunky to use other than breaking open stuff for herbs and ammo.

Speaking of herbs in Resident Evil, what the hell does gnawing on a tea leaf have to do with repairing half my brain being eaten by a rabid zombie?  The health sprays didn’t really make any sense either.  I get a spear thrown in my gut by a satan spawned tiki man and our hero’s solution is spray on a little Paul Mitchell?  Whatever.

The game was pretty short, but fun.  Not huge on quick time events being thrown in randomly but I guess that is pretty common nowadays on these games so it’s probably best I just suck it up and get used to it.

By far, the most annoying thing about the game was my stupid sidekick Sheva.  I wanted to kill her more than the zombies through most of the game and I’m pretty sure that’s not inteded.  Half the time I’m running away from her instead of the monsters so she doesn’t blow one of our Christmas colored “special” leaves on my 2% missing health that I just happened to get playing chicken with some thing that looked like a Starcraft Mutalisk.

Other than her, the inventory system is the remaining failure of the game.  Someone might want to apply some basic common sense.  500 rounds of ammunition taking up less space than a moldy egg?  Do the devs want to get anthrax mailed to them?  What the hell are they thinking?

Overall, I had a good time with the game and while I am not too keen on replaying it just to dress the characters up like clowns for alternate costumes it was at least worth 1 solid play through.

More fun Xbox 360 gaming is in my future I think.

It’s been a few months since Warhammer was released to the foaming at the mouth PvP’ers in MMO space.  Turns out that all this Open World RvR hype wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.  Since it’s release, WAR has been in steady decline in activity in both my guild as well as other metrics.  Of course like any game with a rabbid fanboy following, there will always be Mythic groupies in denial of that but there’s not much logic and reason can do to help these people.  It’s hard to point to any one thing that is causing the massively hyped Warhammer to scream “WAAAGHH!” as it plummets in activity (and likely subscribers).

Obviously, like every other MMO launched in the last few years, it wasn’t quite up to snuff with the big kid on the block: World of Warcraft.  It’s inevitable that comparisons were going to be drawn between the two yet there are people that insist that WAR shouldn’t be compared to a game that’s had 4 years to mature.  While this is a wonderful idea in lollipop land where the clouds are cotton candy and filled with lovable puppy dogs, that’s a pretty good distance from reality.  People forking over $50 for a game and spending $15 a month for the right to play it are simply not going to give two shits whether the game is new or not.  WAR isn’t competing with WoW 4 years ago, it’s competing with WoW now and if it’s going to be a sub-par game than it’s going to suffer because of it.  No amount of wishful “but WoW had 4 years to get this polished” thinking is going to change that.  WAR has had those 4 years to see the improvements WoW made (and raised the bar because of) and if they choose not to meet that bar, then they (Mythic) has to suffer the consequences.  Welcome to reality.  Players just want the game and whatever class they play to work and be fun.  Two things WAR struggles with in more than one spot.

Mythic was touted around as the masters of “open world PvP/RvR” but it seems like for being so savy at it, they made some pretty obvious mistakes in how it was designed.  First of all, when you design such a massive RvR world with so many huge zones that require massive amounts of people to make them “work”, it’s probably not a good idea to create instanced PvP areas (Scenarios) that yield better rewards (faster RP/XP) that have repeatable quests in a war-camp ensuring no one ever leaves the war-camp.  I’m not a game designer but it didn’t take much deduction to realize that’s completely counter productive to Open World RvR.

Now they’re in quite the pickle because there’s a bunch of RP farming crazy people that adore the grindtastic appeal of this “queue for a scenario, turn in repeatable quest, queue again” style of playing the game which are in starch contrast to the people wanting to do Open World RvR but being screwed out of it because people are busy humping the Scenario quest givers.

This brings up another point entirely though.  I constantly hear people saying how much the LOOOOVVVEEE open world PvP/RvR just for the sake of it, but when push comes to shove, they don’t do it.  They prefer the scenario grinding.  It’s pretty obvious that most people are full of crap and they are just going to do what yields the most personal reward; in this case the best renown/XP (Scenarios).  WoW had it’s dirty little hand in making this gaming mentality flourish but that’s the truth of the matter and it seems like Mythic is in denial of this along with the players themselves.  It’s almost like it’s just become cool to say “I love open RvR” just so you fit into that “I was an old school PvP’er” crowd.  It’s like when your parents tell you how they had to walk to school uphill both ways in the blistering heat summers and frozen tundra winters because they didn’t have nice things like shoes, bicycles, cars, etc.  It adds a sense of validation to sit in some fantasy high chair so they can look down on the “WoW kiddies” or whatever.  It’s all bull-crap, they need a scoobie snack to PvP just like everyone else.  Most people that do take keeps avoid fighting just to farm the keep lords for loot bags.

Of course there are those rare gems of bizzaro people that wear shoes on their head and actually do PvP for PvP’s sake.  Once in a while the stars align and there’s another tribe of these aliens on the opposing faction and a fight does break out in a keep.  This is when things really go tits up.  Melee DPS is reduced battering ram duty, manning a ballista that does less damage than pissing on a dark elf or my favorite keep taking tactic.  Putting your thumb up in the upright position and then inserting it into your anus.  That’s pretty much the options you have as melee DPS in keep/open world RvR.  Meanwhile the ranged DPS battles it out until whichever side has the biggest zerg (and brought the most Bright Wizards/Sorcerers) claims victory.

There’s many other problems like abandoned public quests for example.  This is mostly due to there simply being too many of them and people busy feeling up the Scenario quest givers in war-camps.

Hopefully Mythic can get their crap together so this doesn’t end up on fail-boat isle along with AoC but a lot of things will have to change in both design philosophy as well as technical things like people still having massive crash to desktop issues, performance problems on good hardware (let’s face it, WAR’s graphics don’t look good enough to be demanding) and lots of bugged abilities for a variety of classes.

Wrath of the Lich King launched yesterday and that sure as hell isn’t going to help matters for Warhammer.  Of course there’s those people that think it’s a good idea to cheer along as people abandon WAR for WoW as if they’ve somehow purged their holy land of a heretic.  In a game that’s so dependant on masses of players for it’s ORvR mechanics to work, you’d think a hint of common sense would strike them that it’s bad for ANY player to leave their game.  Nothing like cheering for your own game’s demise.

Since I first played Warcraft II back in 1995, Blizzard always had a special place in my heart as a game developer.  I didn’t really think of game developers individually at the time but I couldn’t help but recognize the quality of the game as something “different”.  That became the industry known Blizzard “polish”.

Now it’s 2008.  Blizzard’s World of Warcraft is a behemoth in the gaming industry let alone the MMORPG market with it’s boasted 10 million subscriber mark.  10 million customers forking over a $15 monthly fee on a 4 year old game title is something that would make the biggest oil company executive envious.  With all that success, it seems like things have changed a good bit over at Blizzard.

Back until the release of World of Warcraft, Blizzard was a fairly quiet company letting it’s games do the “talking” for them.  Even World of Warcraft’s release wasn’t heavily marketed compared to some other titles.  Their Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft franchises utilizing Battle.net to offer free online gameplay raised the bar for many other services at the time.  Blizzard became a sort of martyr.  A game developer made of gamers.  Their fanbase was quite rabid about it – waiting eagerly for any news of a new Blizzard title.

Whether it’s because of working with Vivendi for so long or their recent merger with Activision; or maybe neither and Blizzard has just outgrown that comradeship feeling by getting so successful.  Either way, their new approach to business and gaming is starting to feel a lot less like the warm and fuzzy “gamers making games” and a lot more like the corporate fist feeling me up with no reach around.

Whether it’s charging $10 for the pleasure of changing your name or paying $6.50 for a little dongle to do my job of protecting my user name or password.  It seems like everything Blizzard is doing is a way to raid my wallet with little regard to me as a customer.

What happened to just making good games and selling some gimmicky paper back books?

Now we’re seeing entire diasters like the Blizzcon problem, DirecTV ripoffs and even going so far as to charge me for wanting to change my elf around a little bit.  It really feels like Blizzard is losing touch with me as a fan and just wants my $$.  Any sensible person would tell me that’s the way “businesses” work and normally I agree but I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that my romanticized belief that there was a company out there that cared a little more is simply not true anymore.  If it ever was.  Ah well, reality here I come.

My first week of Warhammer Online has come and gone.  Overall, the gaming experience is pretty much what I expected after spending so much time with it in beta.  After my bad call on Age of Conan, I made sure to spend a lot more time in beta this time around to make sure I knew what I was getting into.  Warhammer has lived up to the expectations I created in beta so far so it appears it was a good call to spend that extra time pre-launch.

The game’s PvP systems and content are excellent, especially impressive for a week old game.  RvR is easy to find, the quality of PvP is pretty good as well.

The biggest problem right now is that the combat animations seem a little clunky, especially for casters.  It doesn’t bother me too much.  Some people are having a much larger issue with it which you can tell pretty quick from reading sites like Warhammer Alliance.  Usually any validity they may have gets thrown out the window on WHA because the poster makes some vague comparison to WoW – in turn the Warhammer fanboys go apeshit over it.

There’s also some fairly lengthy queues on some servers.

Overall, Warhammer is a good game.  It’s nothing ground breaking and it’s not perfect but it’s good and I’ll probably be playing it for quite some time.

Been playing more Warhammer Online over the weekend.  People that were in the last preview weekend event got in a few days early on the “open” beta – and by open they mean pre-ordered the game apparently.

I have to say, Warhammer and the Mythic team make it really hard not to be impressed by what they’ve done since the preview weekend.  Pretty much all of my gripes were addressed directly and there’s a new layer of polish on the game that was missing before.  There’s enough changes to make me feel that they had a lot of work done and ready to go on the first preview weekend but were holding it back for some reason; either that or Mythic is actually a good dev team and the shortcommings of amaeturs like Funcom have just set my expectations really low.

One thing that is even more clear to me however is that Warhammer is a PvP game through and through.  Don’t get me wrong, I knew what RVR meant but in relation to it’s competition; the PvE pixel dragon slaying crowd I’m not sure will be able to find a home in Warhammer.  This makes me wonder really what it’s viability against WoW can be.  Is raiding dungeons big enough of a deal to keep people in WoW?  I’m sure it is for some people but Age of Conan was marketed as a mostly PvP game also and it sold about 800,000 copies and it was a pile of crap – and of course they lost half those people.  WAR should be able to set a similar early benchmark and retain more than 50% of it’s box sales as subscribers for 30+ days.

I guess it’s hard to tell really how many people in WoW would be willing to jump to a “PvP game”.  For me personally scheduling 5+ days of my life for raiding 4+ hours a night in WoW is a permantent thing of the past so I welcome the very well done RvR in WAR.

Well…  After my preview weekend experience, the last thing I expected was candid and honest review from the developers themselves.

As it turns out, they pretty much addressed most of the issues I had with the game on my first impression on Warhammer Alliance.

Folks,

Okay, it was a wild and crazy weekend in WAR and while some of you might be tempted to go all Samurai on us for a couple of the bugs, overall things went very, very well. As long-time readers of my notes now, I won’t do a Nick Winters and we are anything but pathological liars so we’ll always own up when we make a mistake and we made a couple here. So, let’s talk amongst ourselves and have a little chat about the top nine list of the biggest issues and where we stand in regards to them.

(1) Client Crashes – I’ve talked about this as one of the reasons why we didn’t release the NDA until recently. Here’s the current status.
- Just a little too many currently. While we are better off than we were in beta, we must do better still before release.
- A number of players will lower spec machines had more CTDs than higher spec machines.
- Number of fixes already in pipeline. They are working their way through our testing servers and will be pushed to the players once they have been vetted internally.
- Engineering time for CTD issue has remained heavily committed; our top engineers are working on the various issues.

(2) Monster Pathing and AI – Well, what can I say other than not even all of King Tut’s wealth could have made us feel better for messing up on this one. Well, maybe all his wealth. 
- “Yes, that monster seems to be behaving a little oddly”. Monster responsiveness was very sketchy, odd pauses and tethering issues.
- “Oh, was I supposed to go in that direction?” Pathing sometimes wonky – mobs get stuck or go in wrong direction.
- Utter confusion at times as both monsters and pets will engage and disengage seemingly at random
- Internal server optimizations last week broke the pathing/AI. And I mean really, really broke it. This truly was a “Opps, we broke this code” moment for us and we don’t have many of them.
- Going to ensure that this problem is fixed this week. As I said in my first Preview Weekend, this is a major concern for us. Fortunately we have no underwater combat in this game or some of the NPCs may have been appropriately dubbed land sharks.

(3) Pet Responsiveness – With similar issues to Monster Pathing and AI, this was not our finest hour.
- Need to transfer “combat responsiveness” fixes to pets – have pet move immediately on button press.
- “Oh no, Mr. Bill!” Pets suffer from same pathing and lack of response as general monsters. Pets hopping around like they were headed to Del Staters.

(4) Global Cooldown Timers –This seems to be a hot topic for players to talk about. However, things aren’t always as they seem.
- Reality and perception are two different things, Warhammer has a GCD of 1.4s, WoW has 1.5s
- “Ability not ready” messaging needs to be improve, a sound effect if Global Cooldown in effect, maybe more cowbell?
- Need to improve on the feeling of sluggishness of the GCD and UI. Bug with display where our timer shows 2s when it is really 1.4
- The next best thing to a queue is? We will add in better “slop timer” to allow players 0.3s extra to pre-queue a second ability followup.

(5) Better animations
- So much more coming in the next two versions of the client. We are currently incorporating serious amounts of new animations into the game. Hopefully nobody will sneak a coneheads model into the game.
- Look at what my XXXX does now? Over the next month we will address many class-attack specific issues across all 20 careers.
- “U think you can dance?” Nope, but we have added new racial animations for movement, fidgets and redid some emotes.

(6) Texture Blurring
- Textures are currently cached in a manner that results in blurriness on entering a region.
- We will look at adding a client scalar.

(7) Client Performance – This is one of those issues
- Need better scalers on effects, sounds, graphics, etc to help lower end machines (already lots of additions to coders)
- This thing loves memory like Dan Aykroyd loves bass. We have already improved the memory consumption of the client and taken 100M out of current test best.

( Targeting, Camera, etc
- Currently our targeting system differs from many MMOs in terms of our features and how we go about things. We will identify and make a more standard initial setup but allow flexibility.
- Will add additional keybinding selections to allow flexibility

(9) Renown rank gear
- Unfortunately, a new bug (well an old bug we fixed and then managed to break again) which allowed Rank 10 RR 6 players can go to Tier 2 to get better gear and then come back to Tier 1 and own scenarios. We are currently working on a fix.

I hope you enjoyed the Preview Weekend and we thank you for your interest and we hope, patronage of our game.

Guess what folks, that’s the news and I am outta here!

Mark

P.S. The reason for all the Saturday Night Live references was that a poster or two dared me to work a certain phrase into the update. I kinda took that and ran with it.

Source

Honestly, this pretty much turned my MMO world upside down.  I’ve never seen developers talk straight to the community like they’re not a cesspool of retarded dick holes so consider me impressed.  Two cheers for Mythic Entertainment.  If they can really make progress on these issues and keep up this kind of communication I’m sold and will be forking over my $50 for WAR.