Friday, July 20, 2012

Catching up

So what's been happening...

Diablo 3...Didn't last as long as I'd hoped, lets be honest. The myriad issues have been widely documented so no real need to go into them too much here.  I ultimately lost the desire to finish Inferno with the feeling of playing the game becoming indistinguishable from a bot and leveling alts was too repetitive in the end.

With both a Monk and Barbarian around the mid 30s slogging through Nightmare in order to do Hell in order to do Inferno felt like a chore in to be undertaken before the good stuff.  Hardcore mode was a bit of a non-starter with the way my characters would nearly always die upon its first encountering an enemy each session due to the game freezing as everything belatedly loaded from Blizzard's servers.  There was nothing to do about this and the game is clearly quite badly optimised in this regard.  I could go on about the Auction House (its not pvp or pve its pv-ah) the immersion breaking disconnect between what happens on screen visually and the hit detection, the laughable storyline, Bliz admitting that there's no endgame, Inferno mob affixes (immune? the last bastion of the creatively bankrupt dev) the underwhelming loot yadda yadda...

Lets say it was a disappointment.  However looking at my characters i seem to have a good 150hrs of time played so from that respect i must have got my money's worth and like any single player game, once you've had your fun its time to move on.

So it didn't bridge the gap to Guild Wars 2 sadly.  I pre-ordered rather than pre-purchased as paying to beta test is not something i personally want to support as acceptable practice.  I'm sort of old-fashioned in imagining that beta is beta rather than an extended product showcase cough, SW:TOR cough... Also although is frustrating to wait i'd rather not spoil too much of the content for myself beforehand.

The way i'm determined to play the game is to take my time with it, slowly discover everything and explore.  No need to rush to max level.  Also if its a 'three monther' that's just fine.  Its free to play and three months will be more than i got from D3 for the cost of the box price.

In the meantime for my gaming fixes the Steam Summer sale conveniently started and provided me with Portal 2 for £4 and Trine 2 for £3 both of which are of course very good and worth a bit of blogging about separately.

I also rescued my Wow account and reconnected it to Battlenet and took advantage of the 7 day free Cataclysm trial to mess around with a few alts.  I'm in two minds whether to buy a month's sub for to carry me over to GW2 I don't really fancy buying both expansions at this point in time though having left Wow previously shortly before Cata hit.

I suppose i should also say what happened to Eve and Rift so that this blog's stories connect up.

Lastly and obviously can't say too much about this due to the NDA i got in to the End of Nations closed beta this weekend.  Having missed playing a good RTS not going by the name of Starcraft really since the days of Total Annihilation this caught my interest as its published by Trion (although developed by Petroglyph) and although no longer playing Rift i have no bad words to say about them and would happily recommend Rift to others.  I downloaded and patched up and had a quick play of the tutorial and will endevour to play some more over the weekend.  As mentioned above I will indeed attempt to beta test it ;)

Anyway, there you go... a gaming life.  I don't think i'm a natural blogger which explains the frequency of postings.  I don't feel the need to form and expound an opinion on every issue of the day, i much prefer to read other's.  But now and then i have a few half formed opinions buzzing around that i would like to write down and formulate so i think this is basically how this blog will go.  Its a cathartic thing.





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