It’s a month or so that my primary focus is back to single player games (even if I’m enjoying an healty dose of WAR). It’s not the first time my gaming focus changes, I guess it’s just a balancing act. On the train, this evening, I realized it was several weeks since my DS got some attention, so here I am, hooked to Fire Emblem once again, when I’m not trying to complete GTA IV on X360.
After several weeks of absence (mostly due to RoK burnout, man that expansion was as big as boring, leveling-wise), I’m back to EQ2 to prepare for the November expansion.
Behold the portal to the Shard of Fear, a monument to Innoruk!
I found the game in really good shape, with lots of new players and additions from the Living Legacy promotion and events, a complete reitemization for levels 1-59 to keep old contents viable even with the new level branch of RoK (70-80). Once RoK got live, the chance your old raid gear would be useful in the new continent was very very slim. Now the item progression is more organic and there aren’t dramatic changes between old legendaries and new uncommons-rares.
How i’d like to see something similar in WOW, to get the seam between classic and TBC more organic.
As soon I logged, I was instantly invited to a Shard of Fear group. I needed about an hour to readjust to the game with my Defiler!
Killing purple demons, a matter of pride!
Well, sometimes it just feels so odd: an heroic paladin sent to kill demons, that are pink, violet or purple.
It’s a matter of justice or… fashion?
Age Of Conan it’s a design and usability mess. Don’t even get me started, I won’t. As I won’t even tell you anything about the huge amount of technical issues and bugs that a modern MMOG should not have anymore.
So I decided to dump the game for now, maybe returning in a 4-6 months to see if something is changed, while the morons the early adopters do the beta-test for me. There’s no reason to end my trial period before deciding: leveling in general is simply too easy to justify the waste of time and the endgame at the moment is not even playable, so why I should care? The game has not even set clear the objectives a player should be willing to achieve at the moment, everything is a very moving target, with several radical redesign decision that will need to be taken in the next few months, shuffling priorities and player interests in the process.
I still need to decide where to settle seriously, since my EQ2 guild is on “play what you like” mode for the summer and I started to feel a bit bored even back there.
Speaking of a less hardcore interest, The Lord Of The Rings Online is doing a better job to keep me interested: very well written quests, where “exploration” has a meaning and it’s not just the end of following on-screen arrows. I really like the Epic quest lines, sure they stole a lot of ideas from Guild Wars, but who didn’t? And frankly, LOTRO does Epics better than how GW does Coops.
I also went back to Asheron’s Call for a while. Damn, that game aged so well it could be a viable option if you could bare blocky models with hi-res textures, no wonder they still have a strong community. Speaking of communities, I also found several odd players, like the one who insulted me because I used the word “Vendor” while asking for advices. He said I should return to play Ultima, mixing insults with lots of “Vendor Sell”, “Kal Vas Flam” jokes I frankly don’t get anymore. Does he even know that Ultima is almost forgotten as well as Asheron’s Call, nowadays?
Does he even log off anymore?
Well, my recent stint for the direction EVE is turning (an headless feature-monster unable to sustain anyone else than the core playerbase that blackmails developers), I was literally hungering for another trader/PVP MMOG (a real MMOG, not just a web based game with a 3D front-end).
Thanks to my recently-renewed Station account I found Pirates Of The Burning Sea and, man, the game is everything CCCP continously promise EVE will be, including territorial conquest and has a reasonable and flexible draft-system for fleet battles that just rocks: the 25 players in the faction that deal the most damage to an enemy faction port are the most likely to be drafted in the battle that will ensure the conquest. A smart way to reward active players and keep things interesting.
The off-boat experience, the boarding system, the missions and PVP mission perfectly integrated in the gameplay just shine. Especially beacuse I craved for them for three damn years and all I’ve got was more and more focus on damn huge fleet battles without any strategy or game design included!
To make a long story short, I rolled a French Privateer, called Lezard Escargot. This is funny because I usually mock up my French colleagues using any stupid jokes I can think/read of on the net. When I saw that on the Roberts server the French population was a little low, I jumped in to pay for some of my running jokes about them.
I can’t comment on the trading side because this sunday I was literally swamped in EQ2: everything started with a simple price check on the broker and ended on a mega 10 hours session with two raids (I’ve pics of the Death Toll one and I’ll try to write here and on Ars Ludica about it, since it’s one of the most game-defining EQ2 moments, together with Estate Of Unrest), and several steps for my Claymore Timeline. Anyway, probably you will read a bit more about my POTBS experiences!
Well, it is known that I have a very slow playthrough rate when it comes to RPGs (mostly because I play even five of them in parallel), and my replay of Final Fantasy VII is no exception. In the end, despite my last intentions, I bowed down to the almighty PSP (as an emulation device, at last) and started using it instead of pSX 1.13, mostly for convenience purpose.
So what, you may ask? Sephiroth went mad (for no believable reason, to a more careful analisys) after Cloud and his charming carnival were involved in a slightly homoerotic rescue mission for Aeris, an indefinite amount of flashbacks and a long chase against Sephiroth itself.
To be honest, the recall of the love triangle between Cloud, Tifa and Aeris was better than the real thing. I mean, the guy is blond, muscled and has blue eyes, but all the girls literally fights for him even if they don’t know him at all… Even if the motivation of Cloud resembling the lost Aeris lover is rational, it is the acting that doesn’t fit: too aggressive and in the same time, submissive. I guess it’s the teenager’s view of love in Japan, but it’s still sassy.
Sephiroth. Where to start with this guy? It’s surely one of the most cool looking villain ever conceived, he also leaves the stage among the flames, but his motivation are really confused or, at least, badly presented. I mean: since the game feed you a long flashback with highly Lovercraftian influences about the Sephiroth’s discovery of his own supposed heritage, why to deliver a such superficial fall from grace to create a fearsome villain? By being the SOLDIER spearhead, Sephiroth is supposed to be cold, detached and self-controlled type of guy, just like the algid Cloud (who seems a complete sissy, in the flashbacks). Given the length of the game, maybe Sephiroth should have been detailed a bit more before becoming a villain.
It hurts to say, but as a regular Final Fantasy-esque villain (with lots of Kefka’s influences), Rufus is better presented, despite being your classic villain stereotype of which not much is known aside he’s evil for his own good.
I guess the problem with Sephiroth is that we know too much of him but too few informations adds up to create a believable villain psychology.
Other aspects are magisterially presented and laid out. The Red XIII side-story, while pretty brief is a nice touch, especially for such a secondary character. The set-up for the Reunion and the spooky Niebehlm village recreation is as scary as I remembered it. I was amazed how combat scaled well for a Final Fantasy game, the last play-through I had with Final Fantasy titles was from the classic ones (1, 2 and 3) and the early, more mature, ones (4, 5 and 6) that aren’t exactly game design masterpieces, when it comes to difficulty scaling and progression.
Well, I plan to finish Disk 1 ASAP (don’t hold your breath, though), so I guess I will recap all my considerations in a final wrap-up before moving further.
Well, after looking at the great Final Fantasy Retrospective on GameTrailers, I was shocked and saddened by the fact I didn’t recall almost anything about Final Fantasy 7. I was able to recall specific game-defining moments, but the bulk of the gaming experience was a bit foggy.
Since I will be away from home for about another month, with only a crappy Thinkpad R52 to keep me company (aside a PS2, a PSP and a DS), I dumped my FF7 discs, installed pSX Emulator and here we are. Why not playing it on the PS2? The reason is simple: Playstations scratch discs like people drink water and I’m always on the move, so being able to carry the game with the laptop is great. I didn’t go for the PSP option because my huge hands ache after long sessions on the bloody thing and FF7 deserves a lot of attention to be appreciated (and to be able to save).
So here we are, Reactor 1 was blown up, Cloud agreed with Tifa to stay a little longer as an Avalanche mercenary and the attack at Reactor 5 started. Reactor 5’s layout was very similar to Reactor 1: it is a pretty understandable design choice that adds realism, making the city more believable and consistent. The boss battle on the top of the Reactor, with the long fall of Cloud and the introduction of Aeris it’s just a classic example on how get players on their toes. After the chase for Aeris, it is clear that Cloud is almost out from the denial phase of his own Hero Journey and he’s about to accept his role in Avalanche and in the overall Final Fantasy storyline.
The game is exactly as I remember it: simple but very effective to convey emotion and a sense of huge participation to the player. Through the lens of ages, I found some quirks that simply shouldn’t be there. The most hindering and sad game design choice for FF7 till now is the almost complete inability to understand where your player can go and where he can’t. It is frustrating: the indicators to help you navigate maps are ugly and cumbersome and, frankly, they only make the whole thing feel like a last-minute solution to a huge ovesight in the quality assurance and ergonomy department. No game that lasts so much should have so detrimental flaws. No game should need a finger pointing at where your character is on the screen.
The problem is in the representation of locations: details abounds, but the PSX low resolution and the confusionary texture choices made the pre-rendered backdrops a complete mess at best. Sometimes it’s hard to recognize a door from a solid wall and lens flares and other pre-rendered lighting effects just worse the situation.
After a long exposure to Final Fantasy I, II and III, the low encounter rate was a bit relieving: the random battles are a lot, but not too much to be a nuisance. Just getting re-used to the Materia system: i’d like to have some original set-ups for the various characters.