Swtor: The rakghoul world event, it’s actually fun!

Most of the time nowadays, I find anything that has to do with dailies to be incredibly boring, like a chore my mother used to give me to earn my allowance. Most of time it’s some kind of boring, stinky job that my parents didn’t want to do so why not make the little one do it instead right? I hated it then and years later, my disgust for anything relating to chores is still very much alive.

So when I heard that the new Rakghoul world event involved daily, my interest in the event dropped to an all time low. Yay…. more dailies to gather some pointless reward… whooohooo.. But, I figured I should at least do them once while I could.

And I was more than pleasantly surprised. Sure, it’s still dailies and I still have to gather a ridiculous amount of tokens for some reward but, the quests are actually fun to do… Basically, the Rakghoul plague, the Star Wars equivalent of the zombie apocalypse has escaped containment and showed up on Tatooine and now the whole galaxy is in a state of panic. What are you to do?!

Well, you can head to Tatooine to figure out what happened, investigate a crashed starship or if you’re more into scavenger hunts there’s a few you can do to gather pets and other cosmetic items. There’s also world bosses to kill for a title and a lot of people on Tatooine if you like world pvp. Finally, if you’re feeling devious, you can get the plague and work to spread it around by infecting as many people as you can, not unlike the old corrupted blood event in WoW back in the day.

But what really brings it all together is all the little changes everywhere like containment officers and droids in spaceport, panicked refugees, news report, etc… It add a nice little touch to what could be an otherwise static mmo setting. It also made me travel back to Tatooine, a beautifully crafted planet that I skimmed over the first time in the name of leveling… if only for bringing me back to Tatooine, the world event gets my thumbs up.

I’ll conclude by saying that Swtor managed to impress me again. On top of patch 1.2 they added a complete world event that’s actually fun. I know people are saying Swtor is still missing a lot of features that it needs like a dungeon finder but if they keep adding stuff at this pace, I can see it challenge even WoW.

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Patch 1.2 first impressions

So much new stuff!!!! Where to begin?? Quite honestly there’s so much to cover in this new patch that I’ll just go along with whatever crosses my mind.

Is that improved performance?!

I talked to a few people and everyone seems to have noticed an improvement in overall performance. I know my game is more responsive and more fluid. I don’t remember reading about it in the patch notes but I certainly won’t complain. Kudos to Bioware because improving engine performance is not easy and not the most glamorous job.

Legacy overload!

Okay, I spent most of the evening messing with the new legacy system and found out I had too much fun with it. It also triggered a truly bad case of completionism and I’ll have to fight myself to not go nuts trying to check in all the boxes and get all the upgrades.

I do believe this is going to be a very popular feature and likely one that will be picked up by others MMO. The only downside I see so far is that it will prevent the movement of players across server but I’m confident it will do more good than harm. So far, I’m pretty pleased with it.

Free goodies!

I was pretty happy with the free goodies Bioware is giving us. Free pet, free time and incentive for people to come back. But Syp did point out a few valid points about the 50 days issue and I can see how some might feel cheated because they preferred leveling alts.

Final impressions

I’m pretty impressed by 1.2 so far. It does feel now more like what the game should have been at launch and hopefully Bioware will keep adding great features like this at a steady pace. They still have catching up to do but it’s an impressive step in the right direction.

I’m also hoping this will bring some more people into the game. The game switchers and the wow fanbois have mostly left but we’re seeing new faces also. I’m hoping this will convince a few more to join. The game is not empty by any means but the more we are the better and I truly want this game to be a huge success.

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I finished Demon’s soul

Today I get to gloat a bit because I managed to finish Demon’s Soul! Woo!

For those of you who only feed on the sweet blood of MMOs, Demon’s Soul is an action rpg from 2009 on the Playstation 3. It is considered, along with its sequel Dark Soul, to be one of the hardest game to come out in years. I already reviewed Dark Soul on this blog and both games share similar features so I won’t redo the whole review and instead focus on the journey through this game. If you want, you can read my Dark Soul post and most of what I wrote there applies to Demon’s Soul.

A journey about overcoming failure

Playing and completing Demon’s Soul is a lot about being able to fail and have the will to try again. It’s one of those game where once you have beaten a level or a boss you look back and tell yourself “Well it wasn’t that bad, you just have to do X to get through here”. It seems somewhat simple when you look back on it but the real difficulty is in getting to that point. In order to get the knowledge to beat the various challenges, you will have to fail a lot first.

And failing in Demon’s Soul can be incredibly frustrating because the price of it can be steep. Every time you die, you have to start back at the beginning of the level and you lose all the souls (xp/currency) you had accumulated. If you can make it back to where you died you can pick them back up but if you die again on the way… they’re lost forever.

And it’s pretty much how the games trick you. A lot of the challenges and enemies in Demon’s souls are not that bad in themselves… if you pay attention and are careful. If you don’t any of them can take you down which means every enemy has to be taken seriously. Now what do you think happens when you died in some far off place and you left a ton of souls on the ground? You try getting back, but you’re stressed out, which leads to a mistake which leads to drying again and then you lost a ton of stuff…

Controller meets the wall…

I’m barely exaggerating here, my controller did fly off at least once into the wall before I realized what I was doing.

But, if you’re able to take a deep breath (and maybe a short walk on top), pick the controller back up and try again, sooner or later you will make progress and kill another boss and suddenly you’re staring at the end boss… which by the way is a complete pushover… go figure.

For those wondering why you would suggest yourself to this torture I’ll answer by saying that when you do succeed you get a feeling of accomplishment that few games can deliver. So much so I had to share it with the world on my blog.

Okay… tips now

I know some of you might have questions about how best to go about Demon’s souls so here a short list.

• Ranged, magic especially, is king. Don’t go with a pure melee character. Good ranged damage will make your life a lot easier.
• Stay light-footed. Keep under 50% equipment weight so you can roll of the way of attacks.
• Shields are great! I know some people do it all with dodging but I couldn’t live without a good, strong shield.
• Don’t walk around with a ton of unspent souls. Chances are high you’ll die soon so if you have a ton of soul you could spend, backtrack and go spend them. If you die you’ll have to make the trip again anyway.

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Single player frenzy

Hi!

I have a confession to make… I haven’t played much MMO lately. Some Swtor, some World of tanks and some Lotro but not a lot. I’m in the middle of a single player game feeding frenzy.  The thing is that I made  this long list of games I have completed and games I possess recently in an effort to get a few games done and diminish my backlog of games. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who has unplayed games at home.

So, this made me realize I really needed to get a move on and I’ve been in full single player game mode since then. I did manage to finish three games on my list so far and I’m nearly done with my current two so it’s pretty motivating. I hope to be able to clear a good chunk of my list in the next few months!

Hopefully this won’t be yet another failed attempt

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Wednesday Lotro: Sidetracking in Combe

Hi there! I know I missed the last two weeks but I’ve been rather busy with a lot of things and I’ve simply had other priorities. But this is why I love Lotro F2p model, I can simply play less without feeling like I’m wasting money.

In the time I did play, I managed to nearly clear all of the Human starter area and quests. I still have one or two steps on the human epic quest left and about 40 flies to kill to complete my giant fly-killing deed but I’m confident I’ll be done in no time and then I’ll go on to finish the last part of Breeland, the barrows downs and northern area. Afterwards I’m thinking of heading back to the dwarf/elf starter areas to clean up all the easy deeds but we’ll see when I get there.

Skirmishes!

A side effect of getting to level 20(and getting my undying title! yay!), was that I was reintroduced to skirmishes, mini instances revolving around a particular event or battle designed for small either solo or groups of up to twelves with all sort of configuration in between. If that sounds vaguely familiar it might be because Blizzard is promoting a similar feature to come in MoP.

I have to admit I’m a bit torn as to what I think of skirmishes. They’re pretty great… in small doses. What I mean by that is that doing one of them once in a while keeps them fresh and interesting. However, farming them for all the titles and the ridiculous numbers of marks required for some options…. gets crazy boring fast. You can only liberate the Smials so many times before you know the placement of every mob by heart.

In the end though, I’d rather have them than not and they make a nice distraction from the usual questing rhythm.

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