GAMING ROOOOUNDUPPPP!!!

The older I get, the more and more amazed I am at how time flies. Combined with my penchant for history it is easy to see what people mean when they say tempus fugit.

In the past two weeks I have been doing naught more than usual, with one exception - I decided to give Fallen Earth a shot. Sorry Ryzom, I'm sure I'll return someday (because you are a genuinely good game) but there is just too much going on right now. On top of Fallen Earth, Torchlight is coming out in 10 days and Dragon Age not long after that. And of course, most of my free time is being spent working on my own RPG project, WOTAN.

Fallen Earth

What can I say? If I was going to spend $50 on an MMO I should have got Darkfall. Seriously, though, Fallen Earth is a great game so far despite its warts. I am currently level 9 and doing my obsessive compulsive rounds of all the starter towns looking for the bonus AP missions. If you are not familiar with FE, that is I am trying to complete all the missions (quests) that award bonus skill points which are used to raise my character's skills.

FE has no classes, only skills, and so far that is my favorite aspect of the game. It is a marvelous antidote to the cookie-cutter EQ/WoW/etc. model where customization is done secondarily through "talents" or "traits" or whatever semi-arbitrary label they are assigned. I am focusing predominantly on crafting, which basically means I am by default a melee character, as melee and crafting have stats that overlap the best.

And that is fine with me as future wasteland ninja. Or, well, maybe. I am already fidgeting around with the cancel subscription button. But it is not because of any problem I have with the game, though the game does need some work - in my opinion it should have a more advanced economy, free-for-all zones like EVE's 0.0 space and there are lots of glitchy little bugs that need to be squashed.

But I, perhaps oddly, am not worried about any of those things. So far Icarus has been one of the more communicative studios I have seen, even going so far as to have a GM active on their global help chat channel all hours of the day. Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where that was considered normal? I also like that at least one more game has come out that isn't a generic class-based themepark grinder.

This is going to likely be the only time you ever see me mention the game Aion on this site. I don't bear it any animosity, but I also have absolutely zero interest in that game. It is practically by definition a themepark grinder. I have no desire to even participate in a free trial of that game, were it available.

This is maybe why even though I am not sure FE will hold my fickle and buffeted-from-all-sides attention, I have no regret at least giving it a shot. If the Aion bug had crawled up my butt, I think I would be singing a different tune, however.

Torchlight

I am not a huge ARPG fan, but when the 'ol repetitive-stress-injury isn't agonizingly inflamed I enjoy a little Diablo/Titan Quest action. Of course my tendons are soon fire within minutes reminding me why I play those games only very rarely.

Tennis elbow aside, I was really, really, really looking forward to Mythos. So much so I was practically on an Internet candle-light vigil trying to get into the beta. Of course, that game was canceled around the same time flagshipped became a verb. So it wasn't meant to be.

Now imagine my joy at hearing about Torchlight, which is essentially Mythos reborn. And it's a single-player game priced under $20? I am so on this it isn't even funny, to use a favored turn-of-phrase of an adolescent Fortuente. If you read the link, apparently the Torchlight single-player will also be released with full modding tools intact.

Dragon Age

I have considered this a must-buy for quite some time now. Like since 2003. That said, the more I have been thinking about it, the stronger I feel that I am actually going to take a pass on this one for now.

WHAT?!? YOU ARE GOING TO MISS OUT ON THE BIGGEST FANTASY RPG GANGBANG SINCE BALDUR'S GATE 2????

Yes, I actually am. I have my reasons, and they all revolve around perception.

Perception 1: Money. It's expensive. Is it going to break my bank? No, but is $60 still a sizeable chunk when I am already throwing around $20 here and $30 there and even that $50 on Fallen Earth? Yes. It is going to be Christmas soon, after all and I have a child as well as utility bills.

Perception 2: Electronic Arts. Do I really need to elaborate on this? Bioware may be good 'ol same as always (which is doubtful regardless as both they and the industry have grown a lot in the past 12-odd years), but it's a simple fact that they are now an EA brand. And EA is on a weekend bender of a downloadable-content binge the likes of which might make Charles Bukowski proud.

Which means probably having to deal with some sort of asinine EA download manager or even having to use the wretched EA online store. No thanks.

So I am adopting a wait-and-see approach, perhaps even a wait-and-yarrr approach if I have the extra time. If I yo-ho-ho and the game turns out to be a genuine work of genius, I would probably feel compelled to fork over the cash out of respect, even if I continued to use the swashbuckled edition. More than likely, I will probably just pass until it has been out a few months or so.

DDO

OK. I had some issues with DDO. Namely, the Turbine customer service department could not service their way out of a wet paper bag. Or something like that. Whatever the reason, be it drastic overwork, incompetent management, utter lack of morale, plain laziness or all those things (can you tell I have worked in customer service in the past?), they are not getting the job done.

Basically I had a ticket on hold for about a month. All I wanted was for the points I purchased during the summer beta to be applied to my original account. I mean, really. No response for a month. If it wasn't for my increasingly incessant bitching, I can guarantee you I would still be waiting.

In true comedic fashion, the first time they "resolved" this issue also, I was not awarded the points I paid for but rather a large number of points - for being a founder account or somesuch reason - which I had no idea I was entitled to. Alas, in my hasty reply was elicited the mighty F-bomb. However I am confident the reason my actual purchased store points were alotted to my account  was due to my having the original transaction IDs. PayPal +1.

All of that being said, it is partly DDO's fault I am considering leaving Fallen Earth. Damn Dungeons and Dragons with your complex, gamist character system, marvelously atmospheric dungeons and interesting, semi-twitch combat.

Wait, Fallen Earth has all of that too (after some fashion)! Oh the conflicting emotions! Wait, no. Fallen Earth has a $15/month subscription and DDO no longer does. I guess we have found out together the mystery of why I'm willing to cast Fallen Earth to the side though I basically enjoy it.

Grand Ages Rome

Ah, City Builders, my true (and truly nerdy) love.

Grand Ages Rome continues to prove itself to me as an interesting side-track from the traditional city-builder formula while still keeping a lot of that formula intact. The thing I enjoy the most by far is the horde-less resource system. What I mean is that the lack of warehouse or stockpile which is in virtually every historic city builder, at least every one I can name off the top of my head.

Managing resources as a streaming figure changes the game up in a refreshing way, though it's not necessarily something I would studios other than Haemimont try to copy. Because I do find myself missing the need to manage roads and resource transportation. But it's OK.

I never mentioned it before, but I play the game at the highest graphic settings and the textures they use are friggin' exquisite. I sat with my three year-old today for a while zoomed in on the city I was working on (Cyrene free-build). I invented dialogue and little stories to go with the various citizens going about their virtual lives and he ate it up.

LOTRO

I basically unsubscribed in a fit of pique relating to the DDO debacle related above. I thought I had uninstalled it as well, but it was still on my computer. Strange, as I am certain I didn't imagine that. Perhaps Gandalf snuck into my interwebs.

I am not sure what my future with LOTRO holds. On one hand I am not excited with the themepark structure of the game - and increasingly so - and I am just not of the mind with all this subscription stuff. In addition, I am yet more fearful of the potential introduction of a "LOTRO Store." While I think the RMT business model naturally works out well in DDO, I really do not think it would work in LOTRO (or many other games like LOTRO).

I'm also not terribly taken with the idea of the Adventurer's Pack. It bears the hallmark of crappy marketing. Plus the Mirkwood "expansion" sounds thoroughly underwhelming. But that is all my opinion. More objectively speaking, they are doing what they have always done which is to make WoW for a different crowd. They did it well and I have no doubt Mirkwood will continue that trend.

I myself am just past that style of game for the most part. Of course this saddens me a bit, because I have a really big boner for J.R.R. Tolkien just like any other fantasy nerd with plastic pointy ears. More internal conflict ... all these emotions over ridiculously abstract things like online video games. Well, no matter. My subscription runs out on December 18th, so we shall have to see what the next two months hold in store for yours truly.

That sounded ominous for some reason.