Weekend goodness and Planetside 2

So, some of you might know that the NDA for Planetside 2 dropped, hooray! I planned on streaming a bit and writing up an impressions so far for here and the PS2 beta forums, but a combination of family and sickness has held it off a bit. Today should be the last day of random crud getting in the way. If I get back soon enough, I’ll have my impressions up tonight and a stream running sometime Tuesday. If not, then the post will be Tuesday with a little streaming on Thursday. Just thought I’d give a bit of a heads up, so enjoy this little taste of things to come!

Watch live video from bloodyselene on TwitchTV

 

See you on the battlefield soon!

Where the hell have you been?

Title says it all. To recap… about a month ago, I had to leave on “vacation” with my family for two and a half weeks, barely having internet access (or in some places, not having it at all). Over that vacation, my laptop broke which means as soon as we got home, I had to ship it off for repairs for another week or so. Only got it back in the past couple days, and I’ve been trying to set everything back up in the meantime.

Downside is, I haven’t had much time to write up a post, and might not for the rest of the week. If I don’t have something up this weekend, I will have a new Planetside 2 post up on Tuesday. This one will be taking in everything we’ve seen so far, and will be explaining why you, yes, you- in the back, with the funky shirt (pay attention!), will want to be playing the game, along with some of the more complex mechanics at work. If you like, consider it to be part two of a series.

On the upside, while I was without internet, I finally found a Games Workshop. Sucks it’s now several thousand miles away, but I managed to snag a few Warhammer 40000 models. So in the downtime I’ve been painting up a basic Tyranid starter army, and it’s actually done quite a bit for my stress. Hopefully that’ll continue, because it really is fun to paint these models.

Rawr!

And so, that’s that. I’m back, and still working on getting life back in order after having everything thrown out of whack for a month. Sorry to have kept you guys waiting and have such a dead period on the site. Now we’re back and ready to inflict on madness on you lot all over again!

“Vacation”

Hey guys, quick update here. I was going to post a nice new Planetside 2 article, when several things went into thew crapper. First, the ‘e’ key on my laptop decided to break. Since ‘e’ is kind of an important vowel, I’m pretty much screwed for writing anything on vacation now. Second, I have no internet, so I can’t post anyways. Writing from a public terminal, and I don’t think they’d like me standing here for 5 hours while I work on a new article. I’m very sorry, I’ll try and update as soon as I can.

-Kana

Updates… from EU!

Hey guys, Kana here. Sorry about the lack of updates, life’s been a little hectic. My step-sister got married and for some reason decided to hold the ceremony on the other side of the planet. So after stressing out about that and then traveling over here, I’m still not done. Reception is being held in Ireland. Kind of overkill, don’t you think?

Anyways, I really wanted to update and let you guys know why I haven’t had a post go out in awhile or where I’ve been. However, I also wanted to ask a question to everyone: What would be more interesting for you to read? I’ve been doing a lot of first-impressions stuff, and that is a lot of fun… but it means I have less time to dig into the nitty-gritty of other games. So I could do something like a first-impressions review on Draven for League of Legends, or I could do a more in-depth look at his mechanics and explain why (I think) he works the way he does and how to exploit his strengths.

And this goes for all games. I can still do story time like with Planetside (and if you haven’t, go look at Planetside 2’s E3 coverage above), and still give the in-depth look. It’s just doing reviews and more advanced coverage will eat a lot of time, and I don’t know if anyone really wants a solid week about one dude or one class in a game. So leave your thoughts and ideas and I’ll see what we can do!

 

Kana, signing out!

Oh happy day!

Very short one today, mostly just so I can squee over how amazing Planetside 2 is shaping up to be. How amazing, you might ask? Well, besides looking at Totalbiscuit’s videos, we finally got to see something I’ve been very interested in. Care to guess what it is? I’ll give you a hint.

For those of you who don’t feel like clicking a link, let me just show you why today is one of those rare days where I get to be in a good mood:

NC Female

Looks good, right? It gets better.

TR Female

Really? Really? She looks like shes outfitted in military gear! You know, what the TR are famous for. Oh man, I’m so excited for this… wait, what about the Vanu?

VS Female

Nope, nope. I can’t stand it anymore. I have to have this game. Keep in mind this is only the Light Assault armor. There are more armor models for Infiltrators, Heavy Assault, etc. But with everything looking this good already? SOE, you stole my heart. I can’t stand not playing this game now! Very eagerly awaiting beta.

Updates

Hey guys, just wanted to give a quick update, just on a couple things for this week. First thing is the lack of posting you may have seen here. Fallen a bit behind in a couple classes, so I’ve been working on catching up. If it was possible to use java to murder things, I’d probably have made a game and written about that by now. Good news though, I’m working on a post for Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer. Haven’t really touched single player, but I’ll be getting into that as well. Mostly a look on multiplayer as a whole, and what MW3 does right and wrong. Plenty of that all around.

Second is, I am actually playing Skyrim. Not on 360 mind you. And no, I didn’t pirate it. After going back to the store to just get credit for my next purchase, the guy offered to trade my copy over to a PC one, one the basis of fan mods and quicker patch time that’d make it at least more worth my while since a complete refund wouldn’t really be in the question. So, thanks Gamestop Guy, I appreciate the favor. To those wondering, quit a few of the bugs have been fixed. I can actually play the game now. It is actually fairly fun, but I haven’t really seen what makes this game oh-my-god-amazing that other people see. Great game? No, not yet. I’d peg it as above-average, just because of the weird design decisions and 360 menu that really doesn’t work on PC. I’ll probably come back to Skyrim if/when I beat it and have another go, though if anyone cares I can give a revised first opinion on the game next too.

Here's a screenshot.

So that’s the quick review of things going on this week. Hoping to see you guys tomorrow for MW3, and maybe for a little more of a look into Skyrim. It does have some things  going for it. Like being pretty! Again! So in closing, since today was the annual TERA Twitter event, I give you… crabs.!

SEE YOU NEXT TIME *crush*

Art of the Blade

Despite that title up there, I’m not going to be talking about art style today. No no, we’re going to be looking at combat and how it affects the players, using various games. The art of combat is a delicate one; if the combat is too samey, then no one will want to play because of a grind. If it’s too different, you run the risk of alienating people because of the overall systems are just too unfamiliar. Now, there are more than a few ways around this problem…

World of Warcraft has a combat system driven entirely by numbers. No matter what, there are just somethings you can not affect in combat, and player skill required drops. Dodges and traps become harder to do because of it, but by giving a massive variety of skills, you can simulate a more real-time combat system. Player skill required starts sliding back up because of the niche use of skills in PvP and PvE, giving the combat a bit more life. The original problem remains though, that there will always be a mathematically superior way, and for some of those classes it will just involved mashing a couple of buttons forever.

On the other side of the spectrum we find games like Monster Hunter, where combat is almost entirely driven by player skill rather than numbers of ‘hit chance’ or gear benefits. Weapons have a set amount of moves that the player can do, and it becomes the players job to learn the most effective way to chain those skills on whatever monster they happen to be facing to maximize damage. Downside is, without the ability to ever do more, some players can become bored. Monster Hunter mitigates this by having every weapon be different forcing players to adapt and change styles once switching over.

Updates!

So, I’m back and not dead. Or undead, sadly. Either makes a terrifying contribution to the world. Anyways, this weekend was the annual Anime Weekend Atlanta convention that my friend and I always go to. The plan was, leave early Thursday and enjoy all three days of the weekend at the con, while I write up a nice little intro to TERA Online on Thursday night.

As you probably noticed, there was no post Thursday.

Turns out, my friend forgot to get us a room with wifi.

So yeah… sorry about that one. Without it we couldn’t really do much (besides write an article so poorly written I’d have to start over again and double-fact-check), and the con kept us going until we came back to the hotel and passed out day after day. So, this week I’m hoping to get into TERA finally. If you don’t know what it is, you’re about to find out. If you do, goody, you know whats coming. Until then, I think I’m going to crash and burn for a short while, letting me regain a little of what the con took from me. As a trade, I bring ponies back for you.

 

(Warning: Language)

Concerning “armour”

Hey people! DDdreamer back again! This time I’m gonna rant a little about one aspect of game design that keeps nagging me: the outright stupid armour designs that seems to plague every game with even the slightest hint of fantasy in it. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Well, feast your eyes on this:

Armour made to unprotect. How counterintuitive is that?

Arsen’s Terrible at LoL – September 19, 2011

So this is super late.