To The Future!

Posted on by Gazimoff

What a year it’s been! There’s been a couple of major launches with both RIFT and Star Wars: The Old Republic attracting a lot of attention and enjoying success. There’s been a whole series of subscription MMOs switching to a free-to-play model and doing really well with it. And regrettably there’s also been a few shutdowns, with both Lego Universe and Star Wars: Galaxies switching off their servers.

I’m told that it’s traditional to spend today reflecting on the year just gone and make resolutions and predictions for the future. I’m not going to bore you with my own version of  the Year In Review – there’s some great month-by month roundups over at MMO Melting Pot. I’ve donned my Soothsaying Hat though (it’s very impressive) to bring some forecasts for the future, though I’m not confident they’ll all hit in 2012.

The last year has been a little strange for me. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for nearly seven years now and I keep on expecting for a game to replace it. So far none have provided more than a few week’s diversion, but now that I find myself playing Warcraft only to raid I think the switch can’t be far off. I’m currently playing both SWTOR and Warcraft, with the former grabbing the most of my gaming hours. I’m not sure how this will evolve in 2012, but I’m expecting one of them to lose out to Guild Wars 2.

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Questions To You: On Criticism

Posted on by Gazimoff

As we move into the new year I wanted to take some time to pose a handful of meta-questions. Instead of doing my usual role of talking about MMOs, I wanted to get some feedback from you on some broader questions. I’ll have a handful of these over the next week, with the first one about criticism – what is its role and when does it start becoming excessive?

There’s a great many things that I like about the current crop of MMOs, the community that surrounds them and the culture that they promote. By the same token there’s a whole bunch of things that I’m not a fan of – behaviour, poor design and unengaging content being a few. That whole edge-point should provide great critical blog-fodder for years.

This is a bit of a tricky topic that I’m trying to handle carefully, so I apologise in advance if I mess up slightly on this one. One of the easiest and yet hardest things I find as a blogger is about being critical. When is it right to be critical, what’s the right level to aim for? Am I being harsh or unfair? Are my claims defensible?

Am I being fairly critical of a game, or am I just bashing it relentlessly?

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SWTOR: The Broken Mess of Crew Skills

Posted on by Gazimoff

Over the last few days I’ve been digging into the crafting system in Star Wars: The Old Republic. This isn’t something I really got into during beta – I was too busy waving around my lightsaber and shooting lightning from my fingertips to be concerned with harvesting materials and making pointless items.

I’m regretting that decision now, as I’d have loved to provide some choice feedback on the system. Other people may have found SWTOR’s biggest flaw, but for me crafting is about even with my issues on Space Combat.

For those of you yet to dig in to the intricacies of fabrication in Bioware’s MMO, here’s the run-down. At level 10-ish you gain your first companion, and with this you can learn Crew Skills. There’s three categories: skills that make things, skills that gather things and skills that send your companion on missions. Credit where it’s due, the last two choices are interesting as they allow you to focus on questing while your companion does all the tedious work of banging rocks together.

But pick a crew skill that makes anything and be prepared for a whole galaxy of redundancy. Let me explain.

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Five Things To Do Before SWTOR Launch

Posted on by Gazimoff

With the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic due tomorrow for Early Access preorder players and on 20th December for everyone else, now is the time to get those last minute pre-launch activities complete. With the hours ticking away til we’re finally allowed to invade the live servers, now is a great time to distract yourself from clockwatching with this collection of useful missions.

The Last Minute Tune-Up

Now would be a great time to clear out your PC and have it ready for some intense game playing. Start by checking for driver updates for your graphics card and running Windows Update for all those latest bugfixes. Clear out a healthy amount of space for wherever you’re planning on installing the game- you’ll need about 20Gb for the client and another 5GB for temporary files. If you have one, look at squeezing the client on to your SSD in order to improve those load times.

Grab the Client

If you’ve preordered the game you can now pre-load it onto your system ready for your early access to become active. In order to do this simply head over to the pre-load page and follow the step by step instructions. You’ll need around 25GB free space to perform the install. Remember to run the client a few times to make sure it’s fully patched and ready to play.

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SWTOR Razer Naga Setup Guide

Posted on by Gazimoff

Razer Naga MoltenIf you’ve been playing MMOs for a while then there’s a fair chance that you’ve splashed out on some specialist kit to improve your gaming. One of the most common accessories is a Razer Naga – a high quality gaming mouse bristling with buttons to make spells and abilities easier to execute.

I’ve been using one of these in Warcraft for a while, but I was also keen on getting it set up for Star Wars: The Old Republic. While Bioware’s MMO doesn’t explicitly support the Razer Naga, it’s very easy to reconfigure it and unlock the untapped power lurking in your Mouse. This guide should cover everything you need to get up and running, as well as a few pointers to some more advanced features.

To set up the Razer Naga for Star Wars: The Old Republic start by finding the mode switch underneath the mouse. In ‘123’ mode the thumb grid of mouse buttons map to the strip of number keys along the top of your keyboard. For me this isn’t very helpful as I tend to fire primary abilities with my left hand using these keys. By switching it to ‘num’ mode the thumb grid buttons map to the number keypad on the far right of the keyboard – something I never use while gaming.

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My MMO Manifesto

Posted on by Gazimoff

About a week ago Brian Green asked a problem over on Google+. After seeing that various bloggers were complaining about the stagnant situation of current MMOs, he asked what it is we truly want to see from the genre. I can understand why – it becomes frustrating when you’re trying to improve the games we play, yet the players don’t seem to be asking for it.

With that challenge in mind, I sat down and wrote a wishlist. Then I edited it. Then I threw it away and started again. Then I started grouping and merging concepts together to come up with a list of ten points.

Have a read through and see what you think. These aren’t in any order of significance, although you may feel that some are more important than others.

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SWTOR Space Combat: Missed Opportunity

Posted on by Gazimoff

As I’ve been playing the beta for Star Wars: The Old Republic, I’ve been trying to experience as much of the game as possible. A significant chunk of that is the Space Combat minigame. Basically this involves using the ship you earn at around level 15 to take part in space missions, such as escorting a ship, disabling an enemy space station and so on.

While this minigame is fun in it’s own way there are some significant limits on how this combat works. All the action is on-rails – your ship flies a preset path from one point to another. All the action takes place around you, from enemies coming in to intercept through to capital ships dropping out of hyperspace.

What this means is that the experience gets very repetitive very fast. While you can move your ship around your limited field of view to avoid asteroids and debris, there’s no opportunity to do things differently. Enemies arrive at the same time every time, so once you’ve recognised the pattern to the attacks you can sail through it easily.

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Firelands Raid: In Review

Posted on by Gazimoff

The Hour of Twilight is finally upon us and Patch 4.3 has arrived. I’ve already dived into the new Dragon Soul raid instance a couple of times and I’m having fun with it, although I’m very keen to get into the later boss fights there.

Before I get too heavily involved in new stuff I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the raid we wave goodbye to. Firelands, also known as Tier 12, left me with a bag of mixed opinions. It had some really outstanding and enjoyable fights in some areas, but was marred by a couple of pretty annoying boss mechanics.

To help me explain I’ve put together a short video going through each of the seven different encounters. It helps to demonstrate some of the things I’m talking about, particularly if you’ve not done the encounters yourself.

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How Beer Prevents the Zombie Apocalypse

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’ve been thinking recently about zombies and beer. You might think that the two are unrelated to each other, but I think there’s more about it than you’d think at first glance. You see, I think that we can avoid the upcoming zombie apocalypse through the careful and in-depth study of beer. Allow me a moment to explain.

There’s a lot said about the upcoming zombie apocalypse, and I’m fast coming to the conclusion that most people have it wrong. There won’t be a mysterious plague or infectious bite that will spread from person to person. There won’t be a secret mutagenic compound that will be leaked into the water supply. I don’t even think we’ll have rage-infested simians to deal with.

No, I reckon that the zombie apocalypse will be brought on by the devolution of our own intellect. By continually offloading our need to think, to make decisions, to experiment, we’ll become our own zombies. Devioid of any ability or desire to reason or argue, our precious grey matter will start to atrophy until the cranium containing it begins to collapse inward. Our thoughts and opinions will be based on what we’re told to have.

Go eat Brain. Brain taste good. BrainCo deep-fried medulla oblongata with major sauce taste best. Only ten credits. Nom now, nom often!

How would beer protect us from such a devastating end? Simple.

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The Gaming Couple & Star Wars

Posted on by Gazimoff

Earlier this week we finally preordered Star Wars: The Old Republic. The decision wasn’t based on the recent beta weekend – we’d decided months ago that this was the next game we were going to play. Instead it was purely dependant on what we’re doing during the holiday season and if we’d have a chance to take advantage of early access.

By ‘we’ I mean myself and the lady who I started playing Warcraft with some six or seven years ago and who married me last year. I completely agree with Ravven: the best thing a gamer can do is fall in love with another gamer.

Going into SWTOR represents hitting the reset button for both of us. Back at the launch of World of Warcraft we played together, leveled up characters together and raided together. Since then three expansions have passed and our interests in the game have diverged. I’m only logging in to raid these days, while my wife has moved on to other games.

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