GamingCrap

(Guest poster, SteveH) Yesterday I promised I'd write a shorter article on the classes I played while roaming around Guild Wars 2. It might have been a bad play for me to promise it would be a shorter talk but I am keeping my promise about the second article! So, without any further typing, here it is! The classes for Guild Wars 2 are as follows: thief, ranger, necromancer, mesmer, elementalist, warrior, guardian, and engineer. I played all of them briefly and the elementalist and guardian the most. Before I get into that, this might be the best time to explain how Guild Wars 2 handles skills. In most MMOs a character gains a skill every other level or so and ends up with more skills than any sane person can keep track of. In my experience it's best to find 5 - 10 skills that you commonly use, put those in a position easily accessed, and then putting the rest around the extended skill bars and almost never use them. Guild Wars 2 changes that in a few key ways but the ma...

(Guest poster, SteveH) I'm no wizard, sorcerer, or any other conjuror of magic, I just happen to get into a few betas! Anyway, here in lies my thoughts of the weekend I spent in the Guild Wars 2 beta. It was sort of open so there's no NDA I have to fear. Guild Wars 2 has been the MMO I've been waiting for both in terms of me hearing about it and thinking to myself "yeah!" and in terms of my feelings after I played it and thought to myself "yeah!" Why for? The biggest reason, for me, is just how fluid it all is. You know the general MMO formula, quests you can do alone, quests you need a small group for, and then quests you need massive amounts of people for. Yeah, that was fun a while ago, but now I just don't have the time or patience to sit around and "LFG" for hours on end. This is what killed Star Wars the Old Republic for me, "DPS LFG" (2 HOURS LATER!!!) "DPS LFG.... please?" I just can't stand that anym...

"Why would I spend $60 on Old Republic? I have Skyrim to play!" I said. "Ugh, this beta is pretty bad - how could Bioware have released such a half-baked product?" You may have heard. Well, now you're seeing me eat my own shoe. I broke down and bought The Old Republic for its launch and have been playing it daily for an hour or two (or many more on select weekends) pretty consistently. I only partially feel bad about spending the money on it. What it gets right Warzones  - like battlegrounds in World of Warcraft, Warzones are your quick two-team PvP affairs. The maps are all based on objectives: Voidstar = Assault a thing, Huttball = Capture the flag named "Huttball," Civil War = Control things. As simple and fast as these warzones are, they actually promote playing the game and not just farming kills. You get more rewards for winning and you get rewarded for performing or assisting the objectives of the game (kind of), which is a nice switch from...

(Guest poster, SteveH) Oh come on, its only been, what, 3 or 4 months since I last wrote an article! Yeah, I know. But I've got a good one today! Late last week I got a bet invite to Diablo 3! After beating the Skeleton King (the end boss of act 1 and the end boss of the beta) with all but one class I'm ready to type up my experience with it. First we must explore the "getting there" portion, pre-Saturday patch, then we can get to the good stuff. So lets begin at the beginning (an odd choice). The download and install was as easy as one would imagine, I started it on its path when I came home briefly for lunch and it was done by the time I got home from work for the day. After dinner and some homework I was ready, willing and... not able. This brings me to problem 1 with the game, always online. When I tried to log in I would get an error message telling me that my request timed out and I should try again later. I tried again and again for a few minutes and th...

I tested Star Wars: The Old Republic this last Friday as a republic Jedi Knight (how edgy is that?). What you'll see here is from just about 4 hours of game-play, which, yes, is not enough time to truly test everything in the game. I'm going to be quite candid, and while this may seem very negative, my overall rating for the game (well, RTM candidate beta) would be a B-, 74%, 3.7 out of 5, whatever. I'll just go straight down the list of the focus areas I generally care about. Graphics : Sub-par. It's somewhat cartoon-like, but not as cohesive or stylistic as World of Warcraft. It's kind of in-between, and doesn't really pull it off well. I was suspicious of Bioware since Dragon Age 2, and it seems that their art team is functioning at about 80% capacity. It's not horrible, it's not bad, it's blah. Animations are decent, and at first glance seem a lot more "matched" than WoW (when you hit a guy, they parry or have a hit animation) but it ...

(Guest poster, SteveH) Hurrah! Yesterday I reported a release date push back, today I'm announcing a release date release! Star Wars: The Old Republic now has a release date of 12/20/2011 ! Warm up those blasters and prepare to jump to light speed!

(Guest poster, SteveH) If you hoped to see Diablo 3 by the end of this year, as was previously stated, well, hope is lost! Word on the Diablo 3 main site tells us that Blizzard is officially pushing the game back to early 2012 in hopes of using that time to open up the beta a little more and ironing out issues found in said beta. /sigh I still hold to hope that we will see Diablo 3 before the end of the world. Though, now that I think of it, is there any major religion that sites the games release as one of the signs of the apocalypse? I think maybe... If you don't believe me, here's my proof!