Guild Wars 2 : Second Beta Weekend

I have the unfortunate situation of needing to be at work during the second Guild Wars 2 beta weekend event. Granted, the first event didn't quite get me anxious to play again, I did want to try as hard as I can to really like the game. I wanted to see what all those who are hyping up the game are seeing.

But for the hour or so I was playing, only one thing came to mind: I wanted to go back and do something else. Specifically, I wanted to play more Diablo 3.

Guild Wars 2 has yet to show itself as THE game to play. While I do not have any buyers remorse for pre-purchasing the game, I do want to try to find out why I am not raving about the game. ArenaNet seems to just have everything done right. Graphics and visuals are just amazing. The cities feel alive and vibrant and are large enough to actually be cities. Motion and combat is fluid and the ability system is pretty interesting.

But something just feels....generic....about the whole thing. Not a whole lot of the game feels new and refreshing. Certainly not how RIFT was at launch. SWTOR's game universe also had a freshness to it despite relatively archaic game design. The world of Guild Wars 2 feels like the run of the mill medieval fantasy world that I've seen many times over.

I guess a huge part of the letdown is the story. Particularly the dialogue cutscenes. If they just removed those and replaced it all with quest text, it may actually feel more immersive than it is now. The awkward animations really, really detract from any attempt to lose myself in the story. There is also something creepy about how characters barely move and stare in just that one way in all those cutscenes. It has been rather painful to watch.

There are also some disconnects with the story. In the human lands, there does not seem to be much connection between the prologue and the story after it. An invasion of centaurs leads to some huge bone hands....and they are never mentioned again. At least the centaurs re-appear, but the bone hands and elementals; their involvement is not touched upon. Perhaps it will later in the game, but by then, the event would probably have been forgotten. You would think that something able to summon such a montrosity would be looked into by authorities and would require a hero to help figure deal with a larger, overarching threat.

Dynamic events have been a huge part of driving the hype of the game, but it too is not quite as good as I was led to believe. The problem is that the dynamic event feels less dynamic if you can wait for it to happen. Granted, there does not appear to be set times for events to happen, but they do happen fairly often. Unlike RIFT's titular rifts, GW2's events are strictly local to just a small area and so they are far more predictable. Some of the events are also very boring.

As alive and as dynamic as ArenaNet wants the world to feel, ironically there isn't really all that much to do. Yes, exploration is supposed to be a major activity, but exploration can only go so far. I go into a new area and see wheat fields. Yay. But also nothing happening at the time so it's several minutes of nothing really happening except for me walking across large farmland. After dealing with an area's quest, you don't really get an option to do it again.

All this said, everything is in beta. Even if some complaints are about things that will likely not change, there's still time for ArenaNet to put some more meat into the game. As it is, I don't look forward to the game as I normally do for big releases. Its come to the point where I won't mind only being able to play a week after release if timing does not line up right with my schedule.

Highlights:

• Yes, even after an entire article saying how I dislike the game, there are still highlights. Lets not say I'm not an impartial reviewer
• They have Asura models in the world now and one gives an activated event. I haven't tried repeating it though. The novelty of herding little Moas into a pen really wears out quickly.
• Yes, the Asura are really cute. I am now 100% sure I won't be playing one.
• Abilities seem to have been buffed. I don't remember dealing quite as much damage as I do now with some guardian abilities.
• Speaking of which, purchasable abilities have been streamlined to weed out the weird or weak ones. Skill point costs are also lower.
• Skills are now tiered. No more getting some more advanced skills until you get enough of the lower tier skills.
• Some UI enhancements. Mostly minor, but definitely makes sense.

Diablo 3 Beta: Initial Impressions

With some shock, I received a beta invite to Diablo 3 in my email earlier this week. Of course, the first thing I had to think was "it's a fake!" and logged in to the Battle.Net site. Surprise, surprise, Diablo 3 Beta is actually in my games list. Sadly, I had to wait a few days to download since I didn't really have the time to play it.

**Important Aside - always, always go to the official site to validate beta invites whenever possible. Sometimes clicking links is the only option emails give you, but you have to be very careful to check where that link is really taking you to.

It has been a very long time since I played a Diablo game. I totally loved the original game and would play it when I could. Diablo 2 on the other hand, not so much. The second game did not catch me with it's story and, as a result, it felt very grindy. Could be my fault for skipping stuff, but to further the story, I had to get to a certain level and going through the same dungeons over and over just became too tedious.

So how is Diablo 3? One word sums it up nicely: fun.

The beta is actually quite small - only 13 levels out of what looks like 30, maybe more. It only shows the very first part of the game, up until the fight with the Skeleton King which only gets you to level 8 or 9. There are no cinematics yet and, partially because of that, the story is quite lacking. It does look like they are testing mostly mechanics, gameplay, and perhaps loot drops and leveling numbers.

What? I still need to kill stuff! And find breakable things!

So what the heck made it fun? I think I have spent hours killing the same kind of mobs over and over again, but it has not grown old. Between 2 characters, i've finished the beta at least 10 times. And yet I still am compelled to log on and play some more.

Part of the fun is that everything you do had some cool effect. The level 1 abilities may seem simple, but they still killed monsters in 1-2 hits. Some even knock away enemies off to the outside of the playable area. There are also so many destructable objects, even those that cannot be directly targetted. There's just so much primal joy from using an ability and watching tables, chairs, even walls smash and break. Yes, these are shallow reasons, but when you can't get enough of finding things to break and kill, it is reason enough.

Take that you fearsome furniture!

Sometimes killing and breaking things do get old, but then there's also the loot. Certainly not ultra powerfull stuff (although some of those drop too), but scrolls, gold, and training pages to improve your crafting drop frequently as well. The training pages actually may end up the more valuable drop as the crafted gear looks pretty strong. Gold drops do seem to scale with the player's level as my level 10 barbarian can get 20g from a level 1 monster. That may be a bug though.

The other part of the fun is the sense of discovery. Like other Diablo games, the map has some randomness to it. Not completely new maps though. Rooms and corridors are liberally copy/pasted in, but the actual layout of the dungeon maps are changed from game to game. You can log out after exploring a dungeon and come back to the same dungeon with a different map layout. This can also be an annoying feature if you get disconnected and need to spend several more minutes finding the entrance to the next dungeon level.

That leads to one of Diablo 3's flaws - the game only works when the servers are online. There is no option to play offline. Then again, a fully offline client can lead to exploits and hacks that can interfere with online play. It would not be hard for some enterprising person to run exploits like duplicating items or gold if the game is available offline. This kind of thing would be very bad especially for the auction house.

Speaking of which, the auction house in beta does not have the real money option enabled yet and works passably when selling and buying gear. I was able to make some decent gold, but since there aren't that many people in the beta, demand drops off pretty quick. I do find it interesting that you can sell items that are stored in the shared stash chest, each character's inventory, and even what each character is wearing. Convenient for sure, but I smell a mobile app on the way.

Since the game is always online, each game session has it's own "instance" which can be joined by other players. By default, your game is set to "invite only" where you can find a friend and invite him/her into your game. Other modes allow others to jump into your game either by finding your Real ID or using the game finder to locate others who are in the same quest as you. Monsters do increase in power when others join so it provides a nice challenge, but the loot is currently a little broken with the end boss giving me only low quality items. Not sure if that is intended or i was victimized by poor RNG.

There is still a lot for me to find out and do in Diablo 3. There are still other classes I haven't played to a higher level and there are certainly more updates to come. Apparently, the game files already include models and maps for later levels, so I really look forward to testing those when they are made available.

SWTOR: The Last Beta

So this is it, the (very likely) last of the weekend beta tests for Star Wars: The Old Republic. And boy this is going to be a whopper. There's no official estimate as to how many people have been invited or have accepted the beta test, but we can probably give a good guess at it. Bioware did indicate that there are around 1.4 million registered accounts on their site, but that number is inflated due to those with multiple accounts, including yours truly. Still, given that there are over 800k retail box pre-orders in the US alone, plus the fact that around 200k+ codes were given away through media partners, that number may indeed be reached. However, given the test is on a US holiday weekend, there is a huge chunk of people who won't be able to play so the number may be closer to 700k, which is still a lot.

Will the game experience problems on day 1? It certainly would not be a stress test if it didn't. However, Stephen Reid did mention that they intended to use this test to determine how they deal with Early Game Access. I would not be surprised if people would be given a set time they are allowed to log on during the day that the beta starts. Doing this gives me high confidence that they are really committed in a smooth release. Not high confidence that release will be smooth? Of course not. You can't plan enough for events like this, especially with the numbers they will be expecting. Can they pull it off? I belive so. But, at the same time, I will not be surprised if things do go wrong.

As long as "things do go wrong" does not include deleting the whole game. *cough*

One thing I did find interesting is how excited I ended up being for the game. Earlier this year, I was lamenting on how long Bioware was taking to even give a release date and that my interest in the game was waning. It was to the point that I was almost ready to give up waiting. But then the large scale betas happened. Getting my hands on the game did so much to alleviate a lot of my concerns about the game and brought back to life that little dying spark of excitement I had. I was happy to send in bugs I found and provided my feedback. Now, I just can't wait to test it again or play it when it goes live.

See ya'll in beta!