Is Everything Alright?

Even More General Blathering,

I had problems before with special characters. That’s because I use UTF-8 as input method, but for some strange reason, wordpress used latin1 as encoding in the MySQL database. So far, I had been able to work around it. But when the Chinese in the last post broke, I finally decided to solve this problem. I went and converted the tables from latin1 to UTF-8.

Everything seems to have gone fine. If you come across weird broken characters or strange behavior, please drop me a line and I’ll look into it.

Late Realization

World of Warcraft, ,

I’ve known the term “Pandaren” for years. Not that I used it much, but I had heard it. It wasn’t until last night, when I was driving home, that I realized that the “ren” wasn’t just any fancy ending, but derived from the Mandarin word “rén 人” for “person, people”. (cf. 人民共和国 for “people’s republic”, and 人民币, “people’s currency that will soon be worth more than dollar and euro, because capitalism and dictatorship under a self-proclaimed communist guise works frighteningly well”)

So the pandaren are literally the panda people. Except in China, of course, because the word “panda”, according to wikipedia, is of uncertain origin, and in China they’re typically called 熊貓, which literally means “bear cat”. So bear cat people.

With a name like that, I’ll call bullshit if we don’t get another druid race choice.

[Blizzcon] WoW: The So-So

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After the good stuff, now the things I’m not sure or worried about. The outright disappointing things, I’ll talk about in another post.

Pandas as a race: We’re getting as the main selling point a race that started as an April fools. That is somewhat silly, literally. I never understood what the thing with these drinking pandas was. I concede that some players got really worked up about those pandas, so I guess it might work for them. I’m a bit worried that the whole panda focus we’ve seen yesterday makes for a one-trick-expansion though. That would be the last I want.

edit: If Blizzard is aiming for a more light-hearted expansion, I can get behind that. A lot of the great conflicts that we fought out in the past, against the Lich King, against Deathwing, but most of all, against each other, made the world a less likable place. If all I see is dreariness, what is there to fight for (instead of against)? If they succeed in making the world dear to me again, then that’s a plus.

Pandas as a race for both factions: Obviously somebody at Blizzard thought that pandas are so supremely awesome that nothing would be able to stand their ground against them, and whoever would end up with the not-panda would be annoyed. Huh. Like when Horde got the elves, and Alliance got some retcon space goats? And Horde got the goblins, and Alliance some weird werewolves? Even as someone who always played Horde, I feel for the Alliance routinely getting the short end of the stick when it comes to new races. I wouldn’t have complained if Horde would have gotten some ersatz pandas this time.

On the other hand, this will then be the first race that will be available to both factions. That raises interesting questions. One of the reasons why races are bound to factions was suspected to be PvP; at least, that’s what I heard. (It also fits well with my “PvP is the root of all evil” mantra, so it’s easy for me to believe.) The silhouette of a character already gave away their allegiance. This will go out of the window. Maybe that’s the first step to freer choice of faction/race combination? Maybe some EQ2-style betrayal? I’m probably assuming too much though. If anything, it would probably be an extra battle.net shop option for transfers.

Talent revamp: It looks like Blizzard really likes the way they’re doing talents in Diablo III; so much that they’re now porting this to WoW. It’s really a mixed bag (that’s why it ended up in this post, right?): on the one hand, it emphasizes interesting choice, and choice generally is good. (We recently had that discussion on several blogs. See Psychochild, Tobold. Yes, I’m paraphrasing the results. *g*). On the other hand, it feels like it clamps down the players in an even more rigid system than the talent revamp we got last time around. And Blizzard fundamentally redoing the whole talent system twice in such a short time means they’re obviously not happy. Will we get yet another one after this? By going the D3 route, Blizzard put all their talent eggs in one system basket. Let’s hope that basket works. And for two such different games at the same time.

Removal of ranged weapons: That felt very odd. There will be no ranged weapon slot any more. Warriors and Rogues will throw their weapons. Wands will be come main hand. Hunters are the exception, and will instead not have a melee slot any more. Does that mean they’ll have to hit the enemy over the head with their bow when it comes close? No, it seems minimum range will be removed too. Yay for point-blank bow shooting.

This is an example how Blizzard is going for fundamental changes more and more these days instead of minor fixes. Back in the good old days(tm), warriors, rogues, and hunters could equip ranged weapons. Priests, mages, and warlocks could equip wands. Paladins, shamans, and druids could equip… nothing in their ranged slot. That was considered the “hybrid tax”. And it was the reason hybrids ran around with Egan’s Blaster. Then, in patch 1.10, they got relics to equip in that slot. It was a fix to give hybrids something to do with their empty slot. Compare to today, where they merge melee and ranged slots, merge ranged weapons into melee ones, and work around that. Which one is better? I don’t know. I personally could do with a few less sweeping changes these days; we already had enough in cataclysm. On the other hand, I know that I might be prejudiced when it comes to that topic. But it seems we’re going full circle on this one, because relics are scheduled to be removed from the game again.

[Blizzcon] WoW: The Good

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I can’t say I followed the Blizzcon information with bated breath. Instead, I skimmed over MMO Champion, and that’s almost it. Let me first say that a lot of information disappoints me. However, I realized that a lot of my posts lately had a negative vibe. So I’ll start with a positive thing I found in the information. Besides, it’s already past 1am here, and it’s a lot faster to write a post about the things I like instead of the things I don’t (sadly).

The saving grace for me so far? The mistweaver. It is a monk specialization, a healer. But not one of those pansy healers in dresses that stand in the back. No! This healer is supposed to be in the middle of things, punching and healing. A melee healer. This sounds all kinds of awesome on paper.

Back when I started playing Vanguard, the disciple was one of the classes I fell in love with. It worked wonderfully in this game. You hit stuff and healed people in your group. It was awesome fun. If Blizzard can pull this off well, this might be a real reason for me to try out this expansion.

Of course, and though I hate it, I have to become a bit negative or at least wary again. How are they actually going to pull that off, especially in raid settings? Melee has had a disadvantage in many situations in the game since… forever, almost. It’s only gotten worse over the years. Melee has to pay attention to at least as many environmental effects as ranged, and they lose their possibility to do damage if they have to move into the wrong direction. A healer that can’t heal because they have to dodge an environmental effect doesn’t sound very appealing. Especially because exactly those elemental effects might necessitate healing. And especially especially since healers already have to juggle health bars. Watching health bars plus watching the ground around you plus intricate melee positioning is more than anybody has had to do so far, and sounds like a little bit too much stress in my book.

Vanguard also has another large advantage. In Vanguard, you can have two targets at all times. An offensive target, which you attack, and a defensive target, which gets beneficial effects. In Vanguard, disciples do their healing and buffing by cycling between group members, while they still can attack whatever is in front of them. I wonder how targeted healing will work with damage dealing in WoW, if you can always only attack or heal.

Of course, Blizzard could change a lot of things around to make the mistweaver work out better. They could reduce their reliance on move-out-of-the-fire effects, which would also make melee more fun again at the same time. In that way, by designing it to cater to a melee healer, they could fix the game back to an (in my opinion) overall better state. They could even extend their focus system to create something similar to the Vanguard offensive/defensive target system.

Blizzard obviously isn’t afraid of change, just look at the “yet another major talent remake” that is planned for the next expansion. But we’ll see whether they can change the game in a way to make this class/spec work.

What do you think? How on earth could Blizzard make a melee healer class work in WoW? Or do you disagree and think such a class would be fine in the current situation, without any changes needed?

The In-Depth Testing of Everquest II

Everquest II, ,

Today, EQ2wire quotes Everquest2.com announcing the incoming start of the beta phase for their upcoming expansion “Age of Discovery”. The beta will start on October 27th and end on November 14th.

Yes, that’s less than 3 weeks of testing. For an expansion. Granted, people talked a lot about how this expansion mostly seems to deliver things that were originally promised for their Destiny of Velious expansion, and that AoD looks more like an adventure pack than a real expansion. I can’t say, I’ve not played the game for long enough to judge.

But still. 3 weeks. Last time SOE tried such a breakneck speed, GU61 ended up horribly broken and needed numerous fixes. (Yes, that’s a different link for each word.) There’s still itemization broken in  several places, two months later. And here I thought mistakes are something you learn from.

I really would love to like Everquest II, but why, oh why do you make it so hard to do that?

I missed the date

World of Warcraft,

I haven’t played WoW much recently. In fact, I’m not sure I played it at all in the last two weeks. Healing random dungeons as a priest was fun for a time, but the new world content didn’t grab me. It’s just all too much Horde vs. Alliance for me. I always played my characters more along the lines of the Cenarion Circle or Argent Dawn. Having this constant fighting being shoved down my throat, and almost no chance to avoid it, is one of the reasons Cataclysm didn’t end up as the thing I was looking for.

Anyway, back to the point. Two weeks of not playing, so that was a good sign to finally cancel my account. Second time since 1.6 only. I even had it in my calendar: 18 October, WoW account renews.

Well, it renewed at 2:32am in the morning. At least now it says 18 November, 2:32 will be the next renew.

Crap. Oh well. Another month to maybe or not play the game more. Another month to tell the few remaining friends what I’m up to. Though with Real IDs, I could’ve done that through Starcraft II for less money.

Movie and Game Music

Even More General Blathering, General Game-related Blathering, Rift, World of Warcraft, ,

I love music. I played the piano for many years, starting when I was 6. Stopping it when I went to university (because I didn’t have access to a piano, and didn’t want to save the money to buy an electrical one) is one of the few things I would change if I could live my life again. Needless to say, music is important to me. My friends and colleagues tell me it’s easy to recognize me when I walk by, even if they don’t see me: it’s not so much the gait, but the fact that I’m almost constantly humming or whistling when I walk.

There are some melodies that I don’t know where I got them from, or whether I made them up. They form a repertoire I use all the time; I combine them with each other, with songs I just heard, and so son. Several bits and pieces of WoW music made it into that repertoire. I never looked up their names, because to me, it forms part of the magic to not know their name and where they came from.

As you gathered from that, I generally play with sound and music on. I know many players (especially of MMO games) turn off their music, and sometimes even their sound, to play their own favorite music. I rarely do that. Music is an integral part of a game experience for me. Sometimes more than the latest and greatest graphics.

The fact that some WoW pieces made it into my repertoire means that in my book, WoW did it right, music-wise. Since I don’t know the names, I can’t point out which I like most, but I’ll at least try to listen to them and give you pointers  at the end of this post.

I wonder whether one of the reasons that Rift hasn’t “clicked” with me yet is the music. To me, it sounds too generic. “Cue generic theme no. 23, please!”, and such. I still have barely touched Scarlet Gorge, so it might be too early to judge. But at level 29, I would’ve expected some memorable music already, and most of it simply sounds like muzak to me so far.

Now, of course, you might argue that these WoW songs are ingrained my head because I played the game for 6 years. I thought so myself. But last night, I was amazed when I watched “The Fellowship of the Ring” for the first time in about 8 years. (A decent movie, I might add, as an opinion from someone who read most of what there is to be read by Tolkien. And “decent” is probably close to the best you can get when it comes to a LotR movie.) I suddenly realized that the hobbit theme song was one of those that made it into my repertoire. I’ve watched the movie in the theater once, and then maybe once or twice on DVD shortly after they were released. And still, that one song stuck with me over  8 years. To me, that’s a sign that music that “clicks” with you doesn’t need a lot of repetition. You hear it, and it stays with you.

Please, game designers, don’t disregard good music. I don’t want choirs singing faux-latin ad nauseam (Faux latin is one of my pet peeves!), I don’t want bombast all the time. If you care to get a top-notch graphics designer, pay the money to get a great movie or game musician. I agree that the basic fighting sounds you’ll hear millions of times over the course of a game are important; get good sound designer for them. But if you want to create worlds, give them a flavor. And in my option, nothing invokes feelings and images better than music.

 

Alright, so I went and tried to find out what some of my favorite WoW themes are. I never bought a collector’s edition (for various reasons, a different one each time), so i don’t have any soundtrack CD and need to go by what youtube tells me. These are in no particular order, because this post has been in my draft section for too long as it is, and I don’t want to spend another week ranking the music:

  • the Barrens theme (or, I guess, more generally, the “horde wilderness” theme), especially the clarinet theme
  • the human wood theme, as in Elwood Forest
  • the Tanaris, Silithus, and Ahn’Qiraj theme, especially the klezmer, and how the music slowly is deconstructed the farther you move into the temple
  • TBC: I liked a lot of the music there, but it didn’t stick with me. It was just ambient music. Decent ambient music, but still ambient music.
  • the Grizzly Hills theme
  • the Storm Peaks theme
  • Cataclysm: Why can’t I think of any new theme in there that caught me? Might this be a contributor to why I finally got tired of WoW?

The Gold Pet

World of Warcraft

So Blizzard finally accepted the inevitable. You can’t fight gold sellers. And if you can’t, why not try and make some money of it at least? We’ve all seen how Blizzard is creating its own ebay for Diablo 3. And soon, they will add another pet to WoW. Only this time, you can sell it for gold. Brace for the incoming flamestorm. Or, if you’re like me, don’t, because you don’t read the “right” forums.

To be honest, I am very dispassionate about the whole thing. It’s yet another pet, and not even a really cute one either. Or rather, it’s trying so hard to be cute that it looks a bit weird. And instead of buying gold from third parties, you now can buy the pet, and hope to sell it for gold, without the risk of getting your account banned. Oh noes. The sky is falling.

The question is: will it sell well enough? Blizzard increased the demand potentially by making it per-character, and not per-account. But it’s hard to gauge the demand, and that may make the prices vary wildly. Maybe at some point, there will be an official pet:gold ratio, but I doubt it. The problem is also that, if you want gold, you can invest real-world money. But it doesn’t work the other way round, because you don’t have a monetary advantage from buying the pet. That’s why PLEX work: every EVE player is naturally interested in getting their hands on them, because they will save on subscription money. But only a small subset of WoW players will be buying the pet.

So, I’m interested how this will play out. I won’t buy or sell any of them. Hell, I’m thinking about canceling my subscription for only the second time since I started playing in 2005. But I’ll watch it and maybe ask friends whether they noticed anything in that regard in a month or two.

Some Rift Impressions

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Over the weekend, I had a little bit more time to play, so I gave Rift another shot. Told you I wouldn’t give up that easily. Plus, I got a lot of feedback on my last post, both here and at the Ancient Gaming Noob. Thanks for that, it helped!

I’ll just pick up a couple of points and talk about them. The first two are purely game-related, the other three are more about the community.

Souls and Roles

I’m still working on understanding the soul system. I’m slowly starting to like it, though it still seems there’s so many options that I’m not sure whether I’ll ever get them all. I’m a bit worried I might not be able to try out everything I want until I hit max level! At least unless the curve flattens considerably.

I spent some time on Sunday to redo my roles. I love to support, so I got a dedicated support and a dedicated healer role. My supporter is an archon/chloromancer. I’m not sure how helpful the chloro part is actually. The plan was to get Lifegiving Veil to bring some AoE heals in case they’re needed. Haven’t been in a group yet in which that would’ve been necessary, and I’m not sure yet it would make a big difference. I like the archon as a soul though; you’ll see it in the other roles.

My healer is a chloromancer/archon, with just enough to get shared vigor and consuming flames. The latter is nice as an instant bubble to rescue someone if my direct heals are on cooldown. I very much like chloro healing, though I can imagine it has its limitations. Actually, I think I ran into one already, but more about that dungeon run later.

Finally, I bought my third role last night because I wanted to experiment with a leveling dps role again. I had originally started out as pyromancer (fire! who can resist playing Tim?), but was way too squishy and got killed easily by adds. On the other hand, I have a dislike for pet classes, and I’m not a huge fan of death magic either. That meant that most of the cookie-cutter leveling specs went right out the window. I actually played my healing spec for questing for a bit, and it works reasonably well, it is just slow. I then combined the pyromancer’s DPS with a bit of chloromancer for some healing ability. I’ve yet to try that in really demanding situations; it seems to work better than a pure pyromancer though, so we’ll see. If all else fails I’ll proably have to take the necromancer soul for soul purge, which people claim is all sorts of awesome. I’d rather not, though.

The specs are still a bit ad-hoc and inconsistent. I’m often not sure which talents to take and just wing it. I just hope I don’t do anything blatantly wrong and will start worrying when stuff doesn’t work well any more. At the moment, most content is easy enough for me not to worry too much.

Puzzles and Cairns

Oh boy. I tried, I really did. I got the hint that Freemarch’s puzzles and cairns are hidden in Lake of Solace. I scouted all of it, but couldn’t find anything. Turns out I just wasn’t looking closely enough, literally. The “object distance” setting was only about halfway to max, and so when I though I was looking at the lake ground, I was actually looking at the lake ground sans objects.

I only found out about that after I gave up and asked the almighty Internet. It also told me the place of two or three cairns. I didn’t go and get the place for all of them, but how am I ever gonna find those on my own? At least most other puzzles won’t be underwater (I hope!), maybe that’ll make it easier. Otherwise I’ll have to admit I’m too bad for puzzles. 😉

The Community

First of all, I’m playing on Argent, a RP server. It’s not that I RP much, but I often pick RP servers to play on in MMOs. My impression is that the community is generally not as negative and chuck-norris-y there, plus I like it when roleplaying goes on, even if I don’t participate (I do every now and then in LotRO). I can’t say I’ve noticed much RPing in Rift yet, though. Maybe I’m in the wrong places; Meridian might be the capital of the defiants, but it doesn’t really feel like a city, more like a convention center (no houses and such, just a marketplace, two halls, and a tower); I must’ve missed something there.

All in all, the community so far has been a bit of a hit and miss for me. If I had to choose right now, I’d put it somewhere between LotRO and WoW.

Example 1, chat channels. The 1-29 channel was very lively last night. Some of the topics were pretty awful though, I was close to switching it off. In the end, I’m glad I didn’t, because I had a quite funny conversation with a couple of people. Too bad I didn’t note the names.

Basically, I said that I liked the game, but the lore felt kinda dodgy, and brought up the “great sun, and ascended!” line. We started brainstorming and came up with our own version of lore, which basically goes like this: You wake up as the first ascended ever in the future. You’re then sent off to the past, which naturally is a parallel universe in which all the other one-of-a-kind ascendeds seem to end up in. Which is why the quest givers around have you kill boars instead of doing valiant deeds. Of course, in this parallel universe, language must have also changed a lot, to the point where “great sun, an ascended!” means something along the lines of “oh great, another scrub”. I liked the fact that I didn’t get shouted down in chat immediately for something that might sound like criticism.

Example 2, dungeon runs. I’ve seen everything in the 6 or so I’ve done so far from horrible ones where nobody says any word at any point, over arguments between DPS and tanks about who is a noob and who has the wrong attitude, complete with porting out pouting and group kicks. But, and that is the good point, most of them were pretty decent.

My high point was a run of Darkening Deeps at 21. I zoned in and realized I had no idea what that zone was. Then I realized everybody else was at least 4 levels above me. Healing Darkening Deeps at 21 was… interesting. Actually, everything went fine (not sure how much the supporting cleric helped with that though) until we reached the spider boss.

Oh damn. See, somehow we had no real AoE damage. And that’s bad, because the boss summons a lot of tiny spiders that can overwhelm your group, plus it cocoons people who you need to free. We had a lot of wipes there.

  1. Cleric support got cocooned when there were a lot of spiders up; I couldn’t keep the group alive on my own.
  2. I got cocooned first, then Cleric after me. Consequently, not enough healing.
  3. We had a couple in the group. A rogue tank and a warrior dps. They decided to switch so that the rogue could AoE. Problem being, the warrior had never tanked before. Stuff didn’t go so well.
  4. Original rogue tank asked other DPS whether it could tank. DPS ran into the boss without saying anything, and without tank spec. At least the wipe was fast.
  5. Back to our original roles. Cleric got cocooned and wasn’t freed. At least he claimed so. I couldn’t target the cocoon, but that might be me. Cleric left angrily after that wipe.
  6. The same DPS that caused the last wipe stood too far outside, melee couldn’t reach him, took to long to free the person, spiders overwhelmed us. (couldn’t keep up the healing – a higher level might’ve saved the group there.) DPS left without a comment after that try.
  7. Finally, we got another AoE DPS as a replacement. Pulled the boss, healed pretty much as before, and boss died. It felt so much easier with the right role.

What I liked was that most people (the original three plus the replacements) stayed constructive and didn’t start blaming the others. I knew I was on the low end of the level range and actually offered to leave at some point, but they told me it wouldn’t change too much, we were just lacking AoE. We (well, me not so much, since I don’t know anything about roles and souls yet) continued to look at the problem and think of different ways to go at it, and in the end won. That was fun.

Even though to most players, this will probably nothing to brag about (“wiping on a level 23 boss lol!”), I liked the constructive atmosphere, even though, to be honest, I’d rather not be thrown into a dungeon again as a healer at the very low end of the level range. It was quite stressful at times.

Example 3, group quests. That’s a thing I sadly can’t say much good about. I picked up a couple of group quests for Freemarch in Meridian when I hit 15 or so, and now that I’m 24, I still have the ones to destroy the three spires, and to close 4 death rifts. The problem with the rifts is that there hardly seem to be any death rifts up, and it feels a bit arbitrary whether you get an update or not. The larger problem is the spires, in that nobody seems to do them. I’ve never seen anybody else around them, and the group finder couldn’t find me other people for that quest either. I tried soloing them last night, but even at 24, I got overwhelmed. Maybe I’ll try again at 26. If anybody of you is still on that part of the quest line too, tell me and I might join you!

So yeah, that concludes my thoughts on Rift for the meantime. I enjoy being heal and support, and it seems like I might enjoy my practically free month. After that, I’ll see. It’s hard after 10 days to say how I’ll enjoy the game after the other 20.

Not getting Rift yet

Rift

Last week, Rift had a sale on Steam. The game was just 5 Euros, or 6.25 for the “Digital Collector’s Edition”, which comes with a slow mount and a bigger starting bag for each character (plus some other stuff that I can’t even remember). I sometimes spend multiple times that much on some groceries for a nice dinner on the weekend, plus a good bottle of wine, so I thought “why not?” Especially since it came with a free month of play time. On a side note, are they really that desperate for players at the moment? A sale like this that early in the game’s life feels… interesting.

I had tried Rift in beta, but had not been too terribly impressed. Nevertheless, I wanted to try the game at some point, and had the free trial on the radar for some time now. I just hadn’t had any time yet.

My plan was to level a Guardian and a Defiant through the prologue, and then decide on one for the time being. After playing the Guardian side, I knew I sure didn’t want to do another 40+ levels of that self-righteous zealot bullshit. After I also played the Defiant side, I wasn’t exactly impressed (steam punk time machine armageddon ho!), but it felt better than the Guardians, so I sticked to my Kelari mage.

The game sure has a couple of things going for it. It can look really nice on high settings (though the fan on my still relatively new Ti560 is getting much louder than in any other game!). I like how the rifts integrate into the landscape. I’m still trying to figure out how many types of rifts and invasions there are, and whether the spawn points are static or whether a rift can spawn anywhere on the map. I also like the ease of finding groups.

That, however, leads me to the point I’m still on the fence about. yes, finding groups was as easy as clicking a button, but it didn’t feel all that social most of the time. Sure, it is better than the average WoW pug, which seems to have at least one total jackass 50% of the time. In Rift, you group, and you ungroup, and never say a word. That this is actually an improvement is probably more of a concern about the general state of affairs.

I’m also sitting in decision shock half of the time. There’s so many souls, and soul combinations. And then you spend points in those souls. Which souls to take? How to spend points? I could try out all combinations that seem at least feasible to me, but there are so many, I can’t overlook the solution space. It’s disheartening. It’s like when I’m sitting in a restaurant. If they only have a choice of 3 main courses, it’ll be easy to decide. If they have 30, it will take me 20 minutes and I will still feel like I might not have chosen the right thing. Maybe I’ll make a post about this problem in more detail at a later point.

Which, finally, brings me to the points I don’t like. The first, and most important, one is that wherever I go, I’m seen as a sight to behold. At level 7. “Great sun, an ascended!” First of all, how do you know? I might’ve missed that part of the lore, all of this is still very fuzzy to me, but am I wearing a magic tattoo that everybody but me can see? Besides, I don’t want to be a hero at level 7. I want to be a scrub, and work towards being a hero. Maybe. One day. What fun is it to start out at the top of the food chain already? And how did these people ever get anything done without ascendeds, anyway?

Overall, the whole lore feels dodgy to me. I like the fact that each side shows you an indoctrinated point of view on their truth, but I would’ve preferred if the prologues had talked about the same events at least. It would’ve given the whole thing a “two perspectives, and there’s no black and white” kind of feel. In addition, I would’ve preferred if the back stories had given me the feeling that both sides are kinda right, and have a point. What I actually felt after the introduction was that neither side was very likable, because both were way too stubborn in their ideologies. That bodes ill for immersion and identifying with your faction in the long run. What’s up with two factions anyway? Useless artificial partitioning of your player base. But I digress again. More food for posts.

Finally, the streamlinedness. It feels like I start at quest hub one, do quests. Then get a breadcrumb quest to go to hub two, rinse and repeat. I heard before that Rift is so great for exploration, but I can’t see that yet. Does it get better? Do you get off the rails after the first zone? People might say that I should just go and explore stuff if I want to, but the problem is, a) the streamlined quest content makes it feel like this is actively frowned upon, and b), other games have instilled in me the fear that if I do too much exploring, I will outlevel content and (again, due to the streamline) will have to work through stuff that isn’t exciting at all any more if everything is grey.

So, the bottom line is: there is something about Rift. I like some things about the game. But it feels to me like there’s really fun stuff in there that I’m just not getting.

But don’t fear. I’m a late adopter. Many games take time to grow on me. Most extreme example: I bought Diablo II on release, played it for a week, then let it rot on the shelf for a year or so. Then, I started playing it excessively.

And I still got about 3 weeks of game time. Things might change. Who knows. Maybe I’ll grow to like stuff I don’t yet, or at least ignore some of those things.