Then came the purchase of Borderlands 2! While I really didn’t like the first Borderlands, I needed something mindless to play. Borderlands 2 fit in perfect. Fun, Funny, Not hard to handle. Booted up a Siren and had a blast. Bought a copy for my son (he made a Mechromancer) and we duo-ed that first lap through and did some of the DLC content. Tina Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep was awesome. I’m not a huge fan of FPS, but enjoyed this one. (106 hours of fun)

Played a bit of Skyrim, some League of Legends (see link below on their new character), logged into Everquest 2 and got my level 85 instant upgrade to any character….but didn’t stay to play it. Then I grabbed an Early Access to a game called Gnomoria. A new version of an old game called Dwarves. You control a bunch of gnomes assigning them skills so they can perform tasks: Mining, farming, woodcutting, crafting, fighting. They don’t always listen to what you want, you more suggest what you want them to do, and they will eventually do it. So if they get hungry on their way down deep into your mine while on an assignment to set up a torch…they will drop it and run all the way back up for some nom noms. It’s complicated and difficult at first, and you will fail 1 or 2, or 3 times until you learn from a few mistakes you make (like not training a handful of defenders/fighters from almost the start of the game) Another way to think of it would be – you are in control of a Minecraft server but you dont play the game, you just watch everyone play it and influence what they do. Have played that for a little over 40 hours. Not mind blowing, but entertaining.

One thing that I did grab that was surprisingly fun was The Stanley Parable. I would suggest NOT looking it up anywhere because that will spoil it…but do grab the free demo to check it out. The demo had me wanting to buy it just to enjoy the commentary. I got it through Steam and I think that is the only way to get it. Getting Steam is not a bad thing at all. Click here for a link.

At the present time, I am enjoying a trip back into The Secret World. Still love this game world. No other game I have played has made learning history such fun by making you look things up to solve clues. I did all the new Halloween content (except for killing Jack). Changed from Blades and Blood to Elemental and Pistols, then to Elemental and Blood and am currently still that. I have 73% of the skill wheel complete! Bought the new DLC packs, Last Train to Cairo and A Dream to Kill. Both are well done but a bit small on content. Would have liked a few more hours out of them. The smaller quests just seem like filler (kill 1 rat type) which TSW seemed to not be that full of before. Ran into a few bugs that I had previously reported as bugs and re-reported them. Auction House really needs fixing and better filters. I am used to Funcom not fixing bugs though from inside experience.

I also treated myself to some new toys. Toy number 1 – A Razer Blade laptop. A few years ago I bought an Apple Macbook laptop. I loved the size but I didn’t love that I couldn’t play most MMOs on it. I tried the Windows partition and just seemed like so much work and sometimes it didnt work, and I didn’t have my Excel spreadsheets…. I eventually gave up and just sold it. So a few years later – I thought it was time for a new one. I wanted something small but able to handle anything. It eventually came down to two choices. One from Origin PC or one from Razer. The 14″ Razer Blade won. It is so compact, thin, light, and reminded me of what I liked about the Macbook. It is thinner then half of my son’s laptop. If you haven’t ever taken a peek at one, check it out here. Great speed, nice screen (not visible at all angles though), decent battery life even when turned onto ultra. But it does get HOT. You cant put this baby on your carpet or bed…it will cook itself if you block the vents. The part above the keyboard below the screen gets hot enough that you can’t hold your finger on it for more than 3 or 4 seconds. That is about the only drawback, but understandable for how small and powerful this thing is. Also handy to watch my iTunes movies on my TV. It has a HDMI output.

Next purchase I made last night was a new iPad Air. I have the original iPad that came out years ago and have used it a lot. Definitely worth the money…it got its use. But now new apps no longer work with the old one…it loves to crash whenever I try to shop on iTunes and listen to sample tracks. So I told myself when a new one comes out, I would get it. I like it….Siri still sounds like a robot though. My iPhone did that when I upgraded to 7.0.1 for about 12 hours then she improved. Only thing that I dont feel really improved is the speakers. They still don’t get real loud and its not real high quality sound coming out.

Here is a request – If you read this blog when it comes out – like on your RSS feed or popping in from twitter, let me know. Hard to tell the real readers from the bots and spammers. Hit the comment button and say I DO!

Azz OUT!

In the time between December and Now I’ve done quite a bit. After slowly getting away from The Secret World I ventured back into TERA when they went Free to Play and bought my son with me. Started fresh with a level 6 Lancer and fell in love! Lancer has to be the most fun tanking experience of any MMO I have played. Totally dependent on timing and movement and not having to use 30+ hotbar abilities.

I also returned to Everquest 2 for two months just in time for Valentines Day events like I seem to do each year. Got up to top level again and collected more glowies, got my alchemy up to max, ran with the “Always-On-Daily” guildleaders, Eggrolls and Dreamura and did a few instances, but mostly chrono’d each day trying to complete achievements.

Another MMO I tried out for 2 or 3 weeks was Scarlet Blade. There was so much commotion on Massively about the outfits I HAD to try it. While the outfits were indeed a bit overly revealing, the game wasn’t bad. It didn’t hold my attention too long but I didn’t regret trying it. Also, whips! How many MMOs use a bladed whip as a main weapon! I did use them in EQ2 for a bit, then I switched to my rolling pin! (see above picture of the dreaded rolling pin of doom)

I played Diablo 3 for two or three weeks, finished inferno mode and got to paragon 18 I believe and bought a few new pieces of armor and weapons for my Demon Hunter. Changed my spec to a Strafe/Flame Trail build to handle higher monster levels in inferno.

Got into Skyrim again adding to my hours and hours of gameplay. (think I am up to almost 400 hours on one character!) Built 2 houses, did some of the new DLC, and just had fun exploring.

In other single player game news, I grabbed the Mass Effect series and played thru all 3. I liked it a lot. Doesn’t have the replayability that Skyrim has…but I did restart ME2…and gave up and then started from the middle of ME2 and bought the DLC. I just couldn’t go thru all the planet exploration again! Also bought Bioshock Infinite…really liked that.

My son and I made a Minecraft Server for just us and added a bunch of mods that added things like a twilight world and portal/gravity guns. Even though we played it tons over the years, it still has the magic of sucking you back in…starting fresh in a new world. We probably messed around on that for 3 or 4 weeks.

And now…I am back to Rift. Since it went free to play, I had to come and check it out. First day back – I peeked at my reset soul tree and then logged out. I couldn’t remember a thing from back in March 2011. Then a few days later tried again…they added preset builds so I used one of those…killed a few things in Freemarch and then logged out. A week later I pulled my son into Star Wars:TOR and we started characters there. We got to maybe level 12 and with all the Free to play restrictions and the boring mobs that just stand there…and the way mobs agro you the split second you hit any aggressive button on your hotbar…it was just too much. So I said…lets try Rift.

While I thought TERA had an awesome Free to Play transition…didn’t take things away, but their CHANCE to get things you pay real money for is just not my type of thing…RIFT absolutely wins. Nothing taken away at all, great stuff in the cash shop, very generous to existing players. Sony and Bioware really need to learn to control their greed. Since joining Rift as Free to Play, I have tossed them well over $100, I have subscribed for added bonuses, my son subscribed and has bought some things in the cash shop. The prices for things is very reasonable and you get what you want…not a chest with a chance at getting what you want. I have not regretted anything I have purchased because the prices are low.

I am having tons of fun in Rift. Just hit level 60 on Cynders, my cleric I started back in February 2011. I have so many more zones to quest in I could hit 70 if they increased the cap. I’m addicted to finding artifacts/shinies to add to my collections (and selling them). I have maxed out Fishing, Survival, Apothecary, Mining, Butchering, Foraging, and Runecrafting. Bought a dimension (house) and have been decorating it…OMG they are HUGE areas! My son now has 3 level 50+ character in just 3 or 4 weeks! I think he likes it but is still unsure what he wants to be when he grows up. Another great thing they have is Mentoring – You can lower your level to match your friends or the zone, and still get XP, AND you get your actual level rewards for it. So you can go do events in the level 15 zones and get loot that you would have gotten if you were doing stuff your level.

I invite you to come try out Rift! It really is a great game. Click here to give me credit for getting you to try it!

First – Lets start with why I felt it was going to do poorly. The main thing that I hated was character generation was UGLY and the gameplay was confusing – I will admit I didn’t get beyond a few minutes in a starter area when I gave up testing. Unfortunately they didn’t do much to remedy this and I still feel like I was creating wax models for a neanderthal display at a museum. It is not very good…you can get some OK looks…but…meh. I was quite proud with what I wound up with eventually. Meet Miri.

Now to the good stuff:

NPC voice acting and animations. When you approach someone with a quest it breaks into a cut-scene with the NPC with full voice and custom animations timed with what they are saying. Not the in-game repeated animations…and the voice acting is awesome. Your character never says anything…you may nod…but you just sit and listen to the story the NPCs tell you. You may think this is odd…but it works beautifully and they aren’t forcing a voice to go with your character. Games like Star Wars the Old Republic and Guild Wars 2 both give you a voice you have to live with, even if you don’t like it or it doesn’t fit how you think your character should sound. The cut-scenes and voice acting are even better than Star Wars: TOR.

Questing. Every quest is explained to you in a cut-scene which really gets you immersed into the game. I really didn’t feel like I was doing anything useless…I had a purpose in the world, and I was helping the people or digging for answers. I didn’t feel like I was just running around looking for the next quest to get XP to level which was a nice break from many of the games in the past. One thing that helps this is that they limit how many quests you can have at any given time. 5! One story line quest – 1 action/infiltration/investigation quest – and 3 side quests. Its not like games like Everquest 2, where you try and fill your quest log with 75 quests so if you are in an area, you can try and cram in 5 or 6 quests at once. That’s all filler and I’m tired of it! They did away with the quest hubs. You can also repeat quests after their cooldowns are over a day or 3 later. You sorta need to do this or you will be too weak in skill for the next zone.

Storyline quests take you through a long chain of quests spanning several zones…You aren’t meant to finish these in one go…you will slowly get them done as you explore and advance your character. Action type quest will have you go kill stuff, drop stuff off, collect things. Infiltration quests are meant to be done a but more stealthily…sneak past people, avoid alarms and cameras, hack a computer. Investigation missions are the most unique…These can take anywhere from 5 minute to hours, depending on what you know and how go you are at finding answers. Investigation quest will have you learning a new language and morse code, deciphering unknown writings and hieroglyphics, translating binary, finding hidden meanings in messages, figuring out passwords from hints or photos. I would suggest never looking at walkthrus for these until you just can’t get thru them. Use wikipedia and other sites, but avoid the spoilers at all cost. These quests are fun!

Graphics: The graphics are very good…if you can get your settings turned up.It is a graphic intensive game. I could only turn it up to Medium with a Nvidia GTX 275 and I could tell that the frame rate was getting low enough to be noticeable, but I loved the shadows and lighting. The game also has some lag in spots…so having it lower helps. The textures and lighting fit the mood perfectly in each zone. My biggest complaint is how long it takes for the transitions from zone to zone. We are talking 1-2 minutes to zone sometimes. To boot the game and get back into playing can take 6 or 7 minutes. Really needs some work in that area.

Combat and leveling: I really like that you don’t have a level in the game. When your XP bar fills, you get a skill point and 3 ability points (you get 1 each 1/3 you fill.) Skill points are used so you can equip better armor or weapons…and also add some bonuses. Ability points are used to pick combat abilities, heals, passives. Messing up point placement may delay you a bit but you can just quest a bit more and put the next point where you want it. Ultimately – you can get every skill to max, and fill the whole ring of abilities (though filling the ability ring takes considerably longer.) The screen above is my skill page when I was about 80% through the game…as you can see I can use all weapons and armor in the game at their highest level…you really only need to have 1 bar full in the 2 weapons you use and the bars in your armor to have the best items. You will not lack in skill points.

Above is the ability wheel – sorta like a talent tree. You can mix and match abilities from all the weapon choices but you can only wield 2 at a time. You choose a total of 8 abilities to use at a time – and these you can switch anytime you are out of combat. You also have 8 passive abilities active at a time that effect procs, crit, heal amount, etc. The active abilities have to be from the 2 weapons you are currently using but the passives can be from any weapon. Above I have active abilities from Blades and Blood – but I have passives from Blades, Blood, Shotgun, and Elemental – might even be a Chaos in there. Your combination of skills can make you powerful or totally make you wimpy…so you cant just slap any abilities together…it does take some planing. Swaping out ONE passive for another can make a set of creatures sooo much easier to kill if say, they are extra vulnerable to being weakened. On the left of the screenshot above, you can see that the higher you go in the abilities, the more points they cost. 50 Points for top tier. The green and red circle numbers are showing me the skills I need to finish off the Magus Deck…Decks are preset builds you can use to guide you towards a set of abilities that work well together – and you get a cool outfit for completing it!

Only did 2 instance runs and they seemed fun…But I mostly played the game solo or with 1 other person. TSW could have been sold as a single player game…you can do it all alone (if you ignore the instances) There is crafting which you do in a sort of Minecraft way – putting pieces in a box in a certain shape or pattern, but its not a huge part of the game. There is an auction house to sell and buy items. A clothing store to change your appearance. In TSW – your armor never shows…just your social clothes – which is extra cool. As you can see in the pictures, I change my outfits a lot! There is more to the game but I will let you explore that for yourselves.

Recommendation: Without a doubt – I would tell everyone to grab this game – especially now that it is FREE TO PLAY. You can grab it for $15-$20 and you will get your money’s worth. Took me about 300 hours to get to where I am now and I still have things to go do. They will be adding content packs for like $5 each in the future and they are free if you sub to the game. I wish more games had thinking puzzles like TSW. The main website for the game is HERE.

While visiting her, a friend of hers, Mahyeri, stopped by and noticed how old and outdated my avatar looked, and offered to do a full makeover. I was totally up for a change and shopping. She worked her magic and for once, I can say I am very happy with the new me. I do still see vendor boards and envy some of the models there…but I am enjoying the new improved Azz. Also got me to get comfortable with Firestorm Viewer…I was a strictly Old School viewer user…Hippo was my tool, and sometimes Imprudence.

A week later, I received a message from someone who bought my Teacher’s Helper HUD…a device used to read notecards if you are giving a pre-written speech or give a tour or class you give over and over. The texture wasn’t rezzing, so I checked it out, and found a bug in the scripting (not having to do with the texture) so I fixed the device and sent her a new one. We kept talking about stuff, and I found out she was involved in the Gorean Sims. Gor was one of those unmentionable lifestyles people whispered about in my early SL years…so I never really gave it much thought. But this time, I considered learning a bit about it…why not?

She is a slave girl in SL (and RL), owned by a mistress whom teaches classes about law and the scribe caste of Gor society and is a magistrate of a city. Ok, teaching…I know about that from Jokay…I will take some classes and see how they do it. See what the role play is like. See if I have fun. The most troubling thing about the general RP part is I do not have a dominant personality in that I don’t feel I should tell someone what to do and I also don’t want to play the slave part as I want to control what I do. So I am taking classes and learning the history and meeting people…and I am also doing what I love most…BUILDING and creating.

Krista, the slave girl (kajira) I mentioned above and who has become an awesome friend, was just getting done having a Sim built for teaching classes, holding court, and other activities. I arrived in time to help decorate. Krista is newish to SL in that she doesn’t know how to build and manipulate prims…so it was easier to let her rez items and me move them around and place them. The sim is on a homestead server, thus limited to 3750 prims…so the builder that she hired had to be reasonable in his choices. But it was not how I would have done it…I don’t like to use prefab transparent window-walls, I hate textures that stand out and glow, and look fake. I am very critical of everything I build, probably way more than I need to be to satisfy 80% of SL.

I just couldn’t sit by and let it exist the way it was…so I volunteered to help give it a facelift one building at a time. I flew around SL looking at newer building techniques, new textures, all the new mesh. I bought new tools, textures, and sculpt maps. And then I started experimenting. I found wood textures I liked…a nice stucco, I cool tool to make a sculpt from multiple scuplties, some book textures, and shelf sculpts.

I made the first building…a library/courthouse, based on the same layout the first builder had used and it turned out fantasic. It was a bit more prim heavy, but not much. It had real 3D sculpt windows with glass instead of a window alpha on a wall texture…and it didn’t look all glowie. Above and below are before and after type pictures. Made new furniture and shelves. The library contains well over 500 notecards on everything Gorean. Each shelf row is a different subject. I still need to be a good little librarian and organize it better.

Based on the library build, I then replaced the Tavern and Tea Room/Inn buildings. Replaced the landing point boat with a dock…then remade the circular classroom into a square, open, outdoor learning spot. Added a gallery building for displaying artwork, remade the arena, and then finally replaced the central park-like gazebo area. Deleted many of the horrible glowing plants and decorated with some good looking ferns and trees and am now done with the main face-lift part. The living quarters are still the old build but they aren’t important at the moment…or used.

Paths need to be adjusted so they all match, and some of the furniture and landscape plants still don’t quite look right, but I think it really has turned out super well. At the same time, Jokay has gotten the facelift bug and we have redone the Jokaydia landing point in quite a drastic and awesome way. From boring flat grass and brick to a breath-taking foresty-nature setting like in the picture below of Jokay. You should drop in and visit both of these builds – Search for Jokaydia or Gorean Campus in world!

I played a Demon Hunter right from the start. I knew that’s what I wanted. I always gravitate towards the bow wielder, ranged, stealthy characters. I was not disappointed. Demon Hunter is a blast to play, I haven’t felt weak at all. I am now on Inferno Mode Act 2. Also have a Monk at level 51 (Hell mode Act 1), Witchdoctor level 35, Wizard 18, Barbarian 16. ALTS!!! YAY!!

Going through the game the first time didn’t feel overly easy. It wasn’t hard though. Each time around through the 4 different difficulty levels, (Normal, Nightmare, Hell, Inferno) Act 2 gives you a bit of a gear check and a wake-up call to make you pay attention a bit more now that you cleared act 1. Inferno mode though turns from Fun to Stressful. You now walk slow…place traps way ahead of time, shoot off the edge of the screen to see if you poke something ahead of time…. and then in comes an elite group that is Mortar, Extra Health, Teleport, Reflect Damage…or how about Walling, Desecrating, Fast, Invulnerable Minion… Might as well just stand there and die! And if that isn’t stressful enough, how about the normal mobs that can one shot you also. I wind up playing one part of a quest and then I go farm on an easier mode to relax.

Farming! I have my Magic Find suit…I got good enough items that I can survive farming even in Hell Mode. I do not find very good stuff though even running around with 5 neph buff and having close to 300% MF. I have no clue how people are getting some of their items. I might get one good item out of 30 or 40. Not a great one though. I sell my good items on the auction house for a REASONABLE price. Not sure why people are pricing things so freakin high. They really think there are people out there with 300 million the first week? If I try and I mean really try and farm items to vendor and plop a 20k item on the AH…I might be able to make 100k an hour. There are people putting up legendary items for 15 million while there are 25 pages of that same item for sale and 98% of them are cheaper and most priced around 50K… do they lack that much common sense? And NO, the 15 million gold item does not have better stats than the one priced at 40k. I just don’t understand humans.

The best thing they did in D3 was how you can pop into a friends game anytime. I log in, see a friend playing…click their name to quick join, and I appear in their game, it gives me the quest they are on, and I click their banner and teleport right to them. No travel time, no running….so simple! Compare that to say, a level 10 friend in Fallen Earth in Sector 1 asking you to come help them while you are on the far east side of sector 3. YEAHHH see you in 45 minutes! (at least when I played Fallen Earth) Then I need to drive 45 minutes back!

Second best thing…excellent voice acting! They got some good voice actors in here. Not monotone, or emotionless reading off a page acting. Good Stuff. By far the best of the female VA is the Anna Graves as the Demon Hunter.

Then there are achievements, randomized dungeons, randomized placement of instances, companions that change what they say as you change difficulty levels…they did a good job trying to make repeating the acts feel fresh each time around.

If you play through from the start with a new class, the game seems extra easy, I assume because you are use to the game now and how everything works. Playing with a friend or two seems to make it even easier even though the difficulty to kill mobs gets harder as more people join.

I am up to about 190 hours in Diablo…So I guess it was worth the $60 – I have my solo and farming Demon Hunter, my Monk which I play with only my son…and the Witchdoctor I play with some friends. Now that some are reaching Inferno level, I’m sure I will default to my Demon Hunter to make my way to the very end.

TERA! I stopped Beta testing TERA, I did play some of Week #3 but It wasn’t sticking with me, and I wasn’t seeing anything that I disliked or that was broken being fixed. At that point I cancelled my pre-order. After release, I decided to buy it anyway. I was bored with all the other games I was not in the mood to play.

So I get into the game and was very confused. I was starting at level 20…I had quite a few skills and I had no control over those skills as far as moving them around on my hotbar. I went along with it and completed this so called, introduction to the game, zone. If they thought people were confused by the new action type controls vs the tab target and click method…congrats on confusing them more! It’s like me buying a leveled character with skills off Ebay and attempting to play. Who thought this was a good idea? the ONLY thing that was good about this introduction was that it gave you the back story lore of why you were in the original starter zone. This should have been made a 5 or 10 minute cinematic. Not make people use skills AND get use to battle and confuse them as to why they are level 20 already. POOR POOR design.

You then leave that area and are taken to the original starter zone and you are level 1. So how does this make sense? You were level 20 in the past and now you are level 1 in the future. Starter zone was pretty much how it was in beta. They did seem to make the mobs a bit tougher…but still I didn’t die again until I was level 17. Guild Wars 2 beta weekend I died at level 4! Basically in TERA, nothing agros you for your first 10-12 levels. Too easy!

Then the thing that always makes you feel good when you go into a game that you beta tested is when you see bugs that you reported still in the game. True unmistakable bugs. It was so nice reading general chat with people totally confused as to why they couldn’t find Vekis the mean tree that eats piglings. A day or two later they fixed it by taking out the cut scene that told you the wrong direction to run to find him.

They did seem to lessen the number of buttons needed for skills for the archer. I liked that. The game was still fun though..don’t take my post as a huge negative towards that game. It is a great change from tab targeting and whack-a-mole MMOs. You can look back at my past posts to read more about combat and game play. They do win the award for The Worst Voice Acting in a game though…the most bland and boring of any game I have played.

I joined the RP server this time around hoping to get a bit more involved and not play the game solo. My first guild was one of those that you get invited to, until you find a guild you might like. I sent them a message in my application to send me message when they were free to find out if their guild was a fit for me, and they instead just let me in. I quickly found out that this guild was no different than listening to general chat, which was still totally filled to the rim with immaturity and idiots.

Then after more searching and grouping, I found a new place…a guild that actually wanted to RP. I am far from being an RP pro. Some of them seemed very into it, posting stories on the forums, playing off each other. Then we attended some events. Now I’ve never been in an official RP guild or event (outside of being part of a GM crew in a game). Does it always take 3 to 5 minutes for people to respond? It was almost unbearable waiting for people to banter back and forth. I was enjoying doing something different though.

Recommendation for TERA – it is fun and it is a nice change from the typical MMOs. It’s only $49 and some people have discount codes for it too. It is worth trying out if you can put enough time into it the first month to get a higher level character and see if you truly enjoy it.

Also I have 2 games I am in closed beta testing for…One will be good….one I fear will fall on its face and not be what most were hoping for. I haven’t played the first for over a month now and the second I just can’t seem to get into trying it past the starter zone. Soooo, I am now playing Diablo 3! Also – I finished Skyrim – time played – 290 HOURS! Money well spent I would say.

They mentioned that they added a /bug command this time to report bugs but it only took you to the screen that told you to email your bugs. I don’t know if it was broken or they thought this was what people wanted, but it is sure not what was needed. They also told me to post opinions in the forums and not email them…so others can comment and add to your thoughts. That is a good thing, but with 1000’s of people posting – your post instantly gets buried and no one sees it long enough to build up and good collection of comments.

I continued on my warrior on Friday night and got past 20, but started feeling overwhelmed with all the buttons I needed to press. Like I said in the first post -Beta Week 1- you don’t click skills on a hotbar – they are all mapped. I am horrible at using the mouse, ASWD AND number & F keys to play a game…I am a clicker. Having my mouse with 12 buttons helps a ton but the warrior is getting too many for my brain to handle and I’m not even half way to max level.

Saturday I started an Archer. Over the weekend I got her to 23 and am having just as much fun, if not more with her. The ability to sometimes choose how to chain your skills makes it much easier to handle and not need to map half your skills, though it does make it so you can’t use them out of order. Archers kill a bit slower than a warrior and you need to dodge a bit more.

The areas I got to see this time are pretty nice and the music was great. I do have a bit of a problem with the character sound effects being used a bit too much, like almost every swing makes you grunt or yell in some way. Also horses are always grunting, breathing hard or neighing every step of the way. Too much realism shoved into a small amount of time.

What I did realize about the questing is that it is extremely linear and everyone has to take the same path. I skipped a level 15 area with my archer that I did on the warrior, only to have to backtrack because you NEED to do the main storyline quests or you are missing a chunk. Its not hard to go back through quickly to clear them, but you catch up to the next level area only to have to do the storyline quests in the higher level area you completed before you had to backtrack. This means that there are more than enough quests to get you leveled and it is fine to skip some in each area. If you are a completionist like me, you are going to be a higher level than the mobs you are fighting as you quest throughout the game. This isn’t a bad thing, as for some reason, many quest rewards right now are 1 or 2 levels higher than the mobs you are fighting. Kinda irritating sometimes not being able to equip your rewards.

Starting around level 20, you start to get quests you need a group for…some you can try alone but it is very hard. Some you just can’t do alone, others are quite a fun challenge solo, as in the Basilisks. I killed 2 out of the 3 I engaged and they took me about 5 – 7 minutes each to kill, and a health pot or two. All depends on how good you are at getting out of the way for each attack it does. This mob probably had 6 or 7 distinct attacks it would randomly do, some easier than others to avoid.

Last night at 1:00 AM – 2 hours before servers went down, I made a little Elin Bunny Mystic on a PVP server. I ran into someone wondering how to start a duel. We wound up fighting (i lost) and then teaming up to quest for a bit. Their name was Thirteenyearsold (not sure why there are brackets around their name) and they kinda seemed like they were 13…wanting to just play with anyone that will run around with them…but then again people love to complain and troll about the way the Elin race are a bunch of little girls made for pedofiles to play. People need to grow up or climb out of their little bubble worlds and realize everything isn’t based on sex and have negative meanings.

I hear cries of balance needs and agro adjustment but I haven’t been in a group situation where I could see those areas. I found a few typos, graphical bug with a fence, and some quest oddities that could use fixing, but pretty much looking good so far.

I started my Friday night excited to try TERA out. First smart thing they did was limit you to ONE character per server – out of two servers. This way people played the game instead of trying out all the classes to see what they were going to play in 3 months…and actually made them advance to test the game. I was disappointed when I got into the game that it had no bug reporting tools…just an email address to send reports. I think ease of reporting should be a beta test’s #1 concern. So I basically opened up an email window and wrote down things I found wrong and my opinions and they got it all at once today in one big grouping. I hardly found any bugs at all! No crashing either.

Lets start with some of the highlights: The graphics are beautiful, characters are good looking, outfits are skimpy (not that that is always good). They added a bunch of really nice features that many MMOs dont have off the bat. You can dye your armor…you can pick out a favorite armor look and remodel ugly armor to look like your favorite with the new stats.

All mining and herb nodes can be harvested by your entire group at the same time using the person with the highest skill to determine what you all get. You can gamble with your craftables too! Stick 5 in a box and try your luck at doubling….then tripling, and beyond…but you might lose it all!
Don’t like battlegrounds or dueling…how about creating a Deathmatch of 3 v 3 or 5 v 5 – a free for all battle wherever you want in the world…and then placing bets on the winners! Anyone can walk by and join too if you open it up.

Some armor and weapons can be enhanced several times as in +1 +4 +7 like some MMOs let you…of course it can fail but it lets you be able to collect and create some nice stuff. I didn’t get into enhancing or crafting yet. Other things they have are an achievement system, guild banks (i know right, guild banks from day one…how odd) and they will have guild housing eventually. I heard there is a placeholder in existence already.

The starter area for Tera was not very good. Let me explain. I just came from Star Wars: The Old Republic where I didn’t have to read any quests…they were all read to me, so I am a bit spoiled from that. I had to read all the quests now which I found to be boring. I didn’t get engaged in the story at all and quickly found myself skipping reading quests except for the key parts. This isn’t a good thing. They need an opener that makes you want to dig into the lore.

Second thing is they made the starter area too easy. This is an action game, so people need to learn to get out of the way when something is attacking. There are no dice rolls to see if something hits or dodges. But the mobs are so slow and weak in the starter zone that it made it not so fun. A tree attacking every 10 seconds giving you way too much time to get out of the way and if they do hit you, it is for hardly any damage (see above screenshot for the combat log). I know people need to learn – but this was too simple. Mobs also live longer than in most games so you throw your fireball at them 10-15 times till they die and none of them are aggressive to you the whole time. Risk in games make them more fun and the starter area offered no risk. First time I died was at level 17 when attacking a higher level boss out in the world with another person and I died at the last possible second. How many games have you played that it took that long for your first death? If they add more risk, the starter area can be fun.

After you get out of the starter area and to the main city and onto the next area (and get your first horse for freeeeee), things begin to pick up on the fun factor. There are packs of mobs, but not the boring 2 or 3 standing still doing nothing but waiting to be killed. The groups wander around and patrol. It may be a single mob, it may be a pack of 3 or 7 or 12. Mobs will dodge back or side to side…charge you, knock you down, run away and other neato stuff.

The combat is pure FUN. No using tab to pick a target… just walk up or aim your recticle and swing or shoot. If you swing and there are 10 things right in front of you – you will hit them all. Take a few whacks and dodge out of the way quick and rush back in from behind. Ranged classes can take a leap backward if things get too close. Run around a pack of mobs to get them more clustered together and then charge in.

You do have a hotbar for skills but you cant click them while fighting. It’s all keystrokes and mouse clicks. I am a clicker by nature but have gotten use to action games like Dragon Nest, Vindictus, and Hellgate. People that are clickers can play these games…you might need a new mouse though. That is what saved me. I bought a Razer Naga Gaming Mouse which has 12 number buttons on the side to press with your thumb. I LOVE it.

As you gain new skills, some can be chained together but you don’t have to activate them with your buttons, you can use the space bar for many of them. EXAMPLE: I have a nasty opener attack on my warrior that takes a bunch of swings at a mob…by the time i’m done they will probably attack back so I would hit my next button to jump over them and attack from behind, but I don’t have to find that button because the dodge and jump are chained to my opener attack, and on the screen a little note appears to hit the spacebar to activate X. After jumping there is another skill that chains to my dodge, to twirl around low to the ground if I hit the spacebar. I don’t have to though and it gives you a few seconds to activate it. Same with a retaliate attack…if I get knocked down, I have a skill to spin attack when I get back up. I don’t have to keybind that at all…the game lets me know to hit the spacebar to active that skill. At level 17 I use my left and right mouse buttons (simple attack and the other my flip dodge) and 2 or 3 number buttons on my mouse. I have other skills mapped but I don’t use them often or not in combat.

Over the weekend I played a Sorcerer to level 12 or 13 and a warrior to level 17. I had the most fun on the warrior flipping, slicing and dicing. Character creation is pretty good. They have quite a few presets to start from, then you can choose hair style and color, face and skin color, face details like eye color and makeup/tattoos, then you can fine tune your eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. No height, thickness, or breast sliders.

So what started off as me not really enjoying the game eventually turned out to be fun. If they increase the fun factor by adding some challenge to the starter area and engage people with the quests a bit more, I think it will really grab people and be a nice addition to the large list of MMOs. Come back in 2 weeks for the second closed beta update!

I’m still playing League Of Legends just about every day. For playing the same map over and over, its still loads of fun. I have since gotten into actually PvPing with some people. PvP is much easier to handle if you are talking to a partner (usually my son) or your whole team is on skype. They have since increased the variety of bots that you can fight against and improved their AI which was a great thing, you are now matched against 5 random champions from a pool of 40 instead of 12. Also – people are under the impression that LOL is a PVP game only. This is far from the truth…you can play LOL purely against the computer with friends or strangers and have tons of fun without them calling you a noob. Its great to pop in and out of without trying to find someone your level or travel 20 minutes to meet up with them like other games.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is sitting and rotting. I havent really played since I posted the review. I cancelled my subscription on the 18th and as soon as I did, I was locked out of my account, which should have stayed open for another 2 days. I wasn’t very happy about that and I think that just made me not want to play more. I re-subbed cause my friends wanted me to play with them, but I have yet to get on and meet up with anyone.

Skyrim – I did continue to play this until SWTOR took me away from it. I think I am up to 190 hours and still not nearly done. I have popped in and done a quest or two now and then – still a great game. In the past few days, Steam/Bethesda have released the Construction Kit and a new texture pack for people with high end computers. I took a peek at the Kit and it was confusing I remember tweaking and creating areas in Oblivion and it was easy. I guess I’m going to have to look at the instructions! *GASP* There are already tons of mods to add to Skyrim on Steam for people to check out.

Hellgate and Dragon Nest – Still great games, but I have been game hopping a lot… Dragon Nest PvP is kinda fun – I was actually doing good. I really miss these action type MMOs. Tab target and clicking hotbars is just ruining my fun in SWTOR. Which brings me to the next reviewed game…. TERA.

I have gotten my invite for the TERA closed beta!! I downloaded it on Monday – which took over 24 hours. Many people were saying they were getting 300 kb/sec minimum. I was getting 50 to 200 Kb/s with my Verizon DSL connection which they say is a 3MB/s speed connection. I dont think I ever get over 250 kb/sec with them no matter what I download, even torents. This has prompted me to start changing my email in all my game and billing accounts to my domains so I can dump Verizon and grab Comcast. Not that Im going to be any happier with the customer service but at least it will be faster. Verizon is HORRIBLE with CS. Totally irritating trying to deal with people that are not even in this country telling me things that are untrue and have no clue about fixing your problem beyond reading a script from a book. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

TERA closed beta starts this Friday, Feb 10th, so I will be making some posts after each test for the next few months. It is set to release May 1st and hopefully not be shut down by NCSoft’s court case against them. Above is a picture of me from last night when, for some reason, the server was left open for a few minutes. I got to mess with the character creator, which isnt too bad, and go kill a few simple creatures. YAY for ACTION MMOs!

All in all, it is just another RPG MMO with leveling and killing stuff for quests. What makes it special is that every quest has full two-sided voice conversations, which adds something special. You see each other’s faces while talking and the characters have emotional facial expression and body movement for what they are saying and how they react to your answers. Each time you are required to respond, you pick from 3 answers, very similar to Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Some answers are funny, some serious, some mean…. The answer for most quests will not effect what quest you get or what you have to do but those answers will change how your companion feels towards you. Now and then there will be answers which effect your light or darkside reputation and some really will change the direction of the quest and your path through the game. I am enjoying being a blunt good guy…watch video below.

There are 4 starting areas, two for light two for dark with 2 of each class sharing a starting area. The storylines are well done and are basically continuous through the game. Each class has its own unique storyline which takes you through each of the planet areas. While most of the side quests are the same for the classes, your class will change the dialog a bit. If you like to complete all quests in an area, you will be able to skip some planets which will leave fresh material for your alts but you will still have to go to those planets to do a few quests that your storyline needs you to do there. Nice to see they put in enough quests and areas to let you choose incase you hate questing somewhere.

Combat is one thing I am not in love with. After going through 2011 playing many action based non-targeting MMOS (Hellgate, Vindictus, Dragon Nest) it is hard to come back to a tab-targeting based game. I was loving the 5 to 8 button hotbars or not using hotbars at all. But SWTOR has decided that is what people want. So I now have 34 or more buttons to push and remember what they do. I’m not quite sure why these companies think this is fun. Switching to an alt character is hard if you didn’t play them for a while because you sit there and try and remember what these new 34 buttons do.

My next complaint is the layout of the mobs. Its almost always packs of 3 things standing around, maybe one paces back and forth a tiny bit. If it is a harder mob, there might be just one. But the game is just start combat, kill a pack, stop and heal, move to the next pack, start combat, kill, heal. Don’t always have to heal, but you may have to wait for power, force, cooldown, or reload. It is way too much stop and go and not enough non-stop combat fun. Play one of the above games I mentioned and you will see what I mean by non-stop fun.

The Companion system is a nice thing. You get 5 + 1 companions you can use, picking up 1 here and there as the game progresses. They are a nice way to compensate for an area you are weak in, so if you are tanky, you might want a healer/DPS, or if you are DPS, you might want healing, or something to tank for you. Companions can also be sent off to sell your grey items for you while questing (Like Torchlight) and they can also go on gathering missions and they are the ones that craft items for you. There are a few crafting materials that can only be gotten from sending out your companion. I kinda don’t like this feature as it makes it very hard to get something you want quickly if you even have the skill to do it.

Next gripe: Travel! The cities in the game are needlessly HUGE. Its nice looking, but 50 foot or more ceilings….huge long hallways and rooms…maybe they are planning ahead for very tall aliens in the future. This design makes things very far away from each other on foot. They do let you use a speeder but you can’t use one in space ports or in some buildings and both of those are rather large usually. And to top it off, to get to another location where a friend is, you have to run through your current town to the spaceport, run through the spaceport to your classes ship hanger, run through the hanger to your ship, get in your ship, run through your ship to the Nav station and fly to the planet. THEN run back out through your ship and exit, land in an orbiting station, run through your ship hanger to an elevator, down, then run through the orbiting station to the shuttle, take the shuttle to the planet, run through the shuttle bay to an elevator, down, run through the next hallway out your class exit port and now you have to run through that space port to get outside and THEN you can use your quick-travel item (if you have visited the place you need to go) or hop on your speeder. Absolutely huge waste of time and totally useless traveling. One additional thing to add to that time are the loading screens when you change zones….UGGGGHHHHH – go to the bathroom and go get a snack.

The game released with a few bugs that probably shouldn’t have been in the release, I’ve sent them about 15 bug reports ranging from receiving in-game emails from quest people I let die, to strange graphic glitches, or quests that won’t let me abandon them. Some of the bugs I can see slipping in cause they would have needed many people to discover like guild chat issues.

So, to wrap it up, would I recommend Star Wars: The Old Republic?? I guess I would, but if you have MMO burnout from WoW or Rift, this will not be any different for you. It feels like a single player RPG with co-op ability. It has a bunch of well done storyline quests and isn’t a huge wall of text to read for each quest…you actually don’t read anything except the responses you can give and even they are tiny one sentence summaries of what you will actually say. One last point is the population…when you are in major towns, you feel very alone, with mostly NPCs and a few players here and there…maybe. I think they went too far splitting up the servers, but maybe they had to. So – BUY if you want a new game and are not feeling MMO burnout. Don’t get it if you are burnt out…play Skyrim instead.