Tag: nostalgia

And Now We Are Two

Posted on by Gazimoff

Another year, another anniversary! It’s now been two years since I started Mana Obscura, intending to share my views on mages in World of Warcraft. Since then it’s been an adventure through several different MMOs, from Lord of the Rings Online through to the upcoming Guild Wars 2. There’s never been a dull moment!

It’s been all change here as well. I’ve since handed the Obscurecast podcast over to the very able Razerbug and Damarai. They’ve since been joined by Sil, with the trio doing an excellent job with the show! My old co-host Pewter has also been busy starting up her new blog under the great title Decoding Dragons.

Then there’s the third piece of news: I’ve recently joined ZAM.com as a staff writer! I’ll be covering new and upcoming MMOs, as well as providing the odd piece of comment and opinion. It’s an interesting role as I’m now writing for an editor, agreeing assignments and having my articles copyedited before they’re published, but I’m learning a huge amount about writing as well.

I’m not going to be sitting back though – the MMO landscape is constantly changing and there’s always going to be something new to write about. There are new games and new designs constantly being revealed, providing a continual feast of material to dissect and chew on. Any hopes of me going quiet are sadly dashed.

I’m honestly grateful to you all for joining me through it thus far, and I really hope that you’ll stick with me for another few years yet. There’s a long way to go on this MMO adventure and I’m only just getting started.

All my thanks,

Gaz

The Best Raids: Past, Present Or Future?

Posted on by Gazimoff

Last week a subject cropped up in one of the article discussions: is Warcraft raiding getting steadily better all the time, or has it reached a peak and is in decline. Answering this by itself can go either way – more people than ever are able to experience tier 13 due to the predicted arrival of LFR, but by contrast I’m observing more raidgroups than ever struggle with recruitment and retention.

Talk to your fellow raiders about the tiers that they’ve done and it’s likey that you’ll get some interesting answers depending on how long they’ve been playing. I did a similar straw poll on twitter recently. The top two raids were Ulduar and Karazhan by some margin, with Sunwell grabbing the third spot. Raids from Vanilla and Cataclysm barely got a mention.

I’ve asked the same question before and I constantly get the same answers. Ulduar, Karazhan and Sunwell. I’ve been trying to think why these instances are so well loved by so many raiders, and I can only think of a couple of reasons.

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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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Reminiscing Isn’t What It Used To Be

Posted on by Gazimoff

Today’s article is a guest post from Bordy.

Patch 4.3 in WoW will introduce the long-heralded art of Transmogrification; the ability (at a cost)to convert the look (but not the stats) of your current kit to match that of other kit that you own.

Why though is this welcomed by so many?

Is it because of some hankering for the ‘good old days’ ™? Do we long for the days of Vanilla WoW, 40-man Molten Core raiding, Onyxia victory parades into Stormwind, Necropolii hanging in the air above our capitals and a truly barren Barrens?

If so, do we gloss over the lack of well-thought out quest hubs, running the length of zones repeatedly to do and hand in quests, no achievements, no battlegrounds,no arenas and no flying mounts?

Is it maybe due to a reaction to the look of kit sets nowadays? Vanilla dungeon/raidsets were distinctive (whether you liked it or not). This was followed by the Burning Crusade when we were obliged to change that kit to the most garish kitstyle/colour combinations that were truly out of this world. The outcry maybe led us to kit and sets that are arguably (in some cases) more dull, but more homogenised and easier on the eye when combined. Do we long for the old days of distinctive kit in a bold, but tasteful fashion?

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Smile Week: Gold-Plated Memories

Posted on by Gazimoff

It’s been a week since I started talking about the things I find great about MMOs. In that time I’ve looked at a whole bunch of stuff from how the games are built to how they’re supported. In the final post for the week, I wanted to talk a bit about one of the things that always stays with us from our time gaming: memories.

Over the time I’ve been playing Warcraft I’ve collected a whole bucketload of memories. There’s the time I ended up discussing jam-based artillery or the occasion I went on a bike ride through the jungle while being chased by dinosaurs. There’s even the tale of how my Warcraft journey began and where it led to.

My best MMO experiences have been defined by the people I’ve played with and the things we’ve got up to. Phil Carlisle, Namaste CTO dropped me an email on this theme at the beginning of the week that I’ve been itching to share with you. Here’s what he said:

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Engineer Gazimoff’s Smile Week

Posted on by Gazimoff

Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Game

I’m going to start off with a screenshot. I can’t remember when exactly it was taken, but it was early on in my Warcraft gaming career when the raidgroup I was in was clearing through Blackwing Lair. That puts it at late 2005 or early 2006 – I don’t quite remember but it’s probably something like 5 years ago.

Back then the game was a completely different landscape. Raiding was new, MMOs were new, voice chat was new. Spell rotations were built on what seemed to work rather than World of Logs parses. If I had to give it a smell, it smelled like dirt after a heavy rain. I remember the days when I used to log in and just stand in awe.

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Is It Fun?

Posted on by Gazimoff

I was recently reminded about something that happened during a recent-ish beta. I’ll spare the blushes of the game involved by not mentioning names, but I’ll share this little episode. There was a bit of a conversation on the beta forums that went a little bit like this: one group of people didn’t like the game at all while the other group felt that it was perfect.

I chimed in with my own thoughts. I felt that the graphics engine had been poorly built, making me feel that my finely tuned computer was rendering a powerpoint slideshow of my relatives recent trip to France. I felt that the network code was abysmal, with players and NPCs popping around the place like dancers in a nightclub with a slow strobe light.

Technical issues aside, I felt that the interface was so clumsy it was like juggling fish while riding a unicycle on an oil slick and trying to spell that Welsh train station. I felt that I had enough time to compose an epic opera to the God of Sewer Rats while waiting for creatures to respawn. There were key concepts in the game that weren’t explained in the in-game help or the forums, turning city travel into some twisted point-and-click adventure.

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PC Gaming Is Dead

Posted on by Gazimoff

Looking at the PC section of my local video games store is a depressing sight. The shelves that were once pride of place are now consigned to the back, flanked by preowned console games. The content of these shelves isn’t much better – it’s full of “safe” titles. Sequels, sure-fire hits and money spinners.

When did the PC lose its lustre and sparkle? When did it become the third choice for developers? Why are only a few genres – strategy and MMO – still PC centric?

But most importantly, if anyone can make games for the PC then when did it become so boring?
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An Appreciation of Developers

Posted on by Gazimoff

Earlier this week I stumbled on a brilliant idea from Scarybooster. For a couple of years now he’s been running Developer Appreciation Week, a chance for us to say thanks to all those in the video games industry who make our lives that little bit better.

I know I’ve been a grouchy malcontent recently, poking holes and picking problems. Yet to be fair, Scarybooster has a point. I honestly can’t remember the last time I stood up and said “You know what, for all its faults you still made a bloody great game that I’ve had great fun playing.” Sure, I might think certain things could be better but that doesn’t mean that the fatalistic “everything sucks” approach is the right one.

That said, there are some groups of people within the video game industry that I wanted to single out for special thanks. While I appreciate the work of everyone who spends their day job producing this form of entertainment, I reckon these folks deserve a particular mention.
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What Cataclysm Means to World PVP

Posted on by moguestposter

This guest post is from Bordy, a longtime friend who doesn’t have a blog of his own and so decided to use mine. You can find him on Twitter @snuffleorc.

Who among us Vanilla Veterans does not look fondly back to the mass battles between Southshore and Tarren Mill? Cataclysm wasn’t what ended these, but it certainly prevented it ever recurring, with the loss of Southshore as an Alliance town.

Southshore and Tarren Mill were roughly equidistant from faction cities (Ironforge and Undercity respectively). The geography of the land was suitable to mass PvP too: No town walls, roughly flat (albeit with a small slope), mostly open ground with minor cover/obstacles and a small tower in the middle. Designers of battlegrounds should take note!

Of course what actually put an end to the SS vs. TM battles was the creation of battlegrounds. These could be instanced and thus enabled Blizzard to spread the server load of all those wanting to participate. The old SS/TM battles could get very laggy, as fun as they were. Battlegrounds though do not, for the most part, offer mass PvP in open ground. Warsong Gulch is just too small (in as far as combatants go), Arathi Basin has a few more combatants and of very uneven terrain. Eye of the Storm again splits forces up. Alterac Valley comes close at times, but is spread out and more recently simply involves a chase to kill NPCs. Strand of the Ancients, Wintergrasp, and Tol Barad all involve assaulting and defending.

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