Marleybone: The Land of Endless Errands
This past weekend, Rynala and I finished the Marleybone world in Wizard 101. We are really going through this game a fast, but still enjoyable, pace. Marleybone is based of England in the late 1800s. It is the land of dogs, cats, rats, top hats, canes, gentlemen, gangs, and Sherlock Bones.
The main plot of the zone is the recent surge in gang crimes as well as the famous thief Meowiarty's escape from prison. While the main storyline is fairly interesting, the side quests make the world a terrible experience. When creating the quests for Marleybone the quest designers clearly had a love for backtracking.
Marleybone's zones take place primarily on the roof tops of the city. Why only on the rooftops? I have no idea but it works for the most part. For the first three zones, you take an airship to the start of the zone. Hyde Park, Chelsea Court and the Ironworks are the first locations you go to. Sent to each of these locations by Sherlock Bones, you are attempting to find out why the gangs in the city are becoming more violent. The O'Leary Gang is made up of cats and rats that are burglars and charlatans. For the most part you spend the first half of Marleybone solving petty crimes.
In each of these first three zones are a few women quest givers spread out through the zones. When you initially go through these zones, you may do a quest here or there for them while working through the main story quests, but it is after you complete the main story quests for each zone that more side quests unlock. The problem with these side quests are they are backtracking intensive. Almost all of the women have quests for you to go talk to some of the other women in the other zones. It would not be so bad if the women were at the entrance of the zones but they are often very deep in or near the end. By the time you finish all the side quests, you will probably have gone to Hyde Park and Chelsea Court at least five times each.
Wizard City has a little bit of backtracking occasionally but it is nowhere near as extensive as it is in Marleybone. Krokotopia, MooShu and Grizzleheim have next to no backtracking at all. Marleybone definintely takes a different tone with this. In Krokotopia you are overthrowing an ancient evil that is stealing souls and then you go to Marleybone where you are trying to recover stolen purses. It just is not that exciting. In the end, I think Rynala and I sped through Marleybone at a breakneck pace just because we wanted to get through it so badly to move on. MooShu is proving to be a much more enjoyable experience.
While most of Marleybone tests my patience, I really did enjoy ascending the Big Ben clocktower for the climactic finale against the main villain of the world. It felt reminiscent of the Golem Tower in Wizard City. We were watching a stream of Blizzcon this past weekend and we were ascending the tower during Ozzy's concert at Blizzcon so it helped to raise the excitement factor a bit. The best part of the night was the timing on the final boss. It was a fun fight to some good music and the boss happened to fall over dead at the very second one of the songs finished. The timing could not have been more perfect.
All in all, Wizard 101 still proves to be a very enjoyable experience. I hate crafting but I plan on saving that for another time.
PS. It just so happens that this is my 150th post.
WoW 2
I was wrong afterall, but I am glad I was. Seeing things in action has a way of bringing it all into perspective for me. When I first read the Cataclysm leak information I was very skeptical, but I always am when I read "leaks". Now that I have seen all the information and videos from Blizzcon, I find myself to be very excited about what is to come.
I cannot help but wonder if this might be the closest thing we ever get to a WoW 2. Instead of eventually putting out a WoW 2, it seems like Blizzard would rather jsut constantly do graphical and mechanical updates. I know a lot of my heavy raiding friends are not too happy about the stat simplification but I find myself really liking that. We are still at least nine months to a year away from the release and so much can change in that time but until then, I find myself very enthusiastic about what is to come.
EDIT: Rem over at Do Not Try This At Home put up a great post on why Cataclysm is so exciting.
Writer #2
I think Mord was really eager for me to post last week, so I feel bad posting this a week after he announced it. Anyway, I am the oft-referred-to "Rynala." I'm going to put it out there right away--I'm completely new to blogging, let alone game blogging. I probably won't match Mord's word count when it comes to posts. I guess I'll start off with my gaming resume of sorts.
I got into video games via my older brother, starting on the classic NES with Battletoads, Double Dragon, Super Dodgeball, to name a few. I progressed to Sega and the N64, but never SNES or Playstation, until a couple years after the PS2 came out. My brother and I played on the N64 for a very long time, much longer than anyone should play on a console, and with very few good games. I did play the hell out of Ocarina of Time, but for the most part I didn't consider myself a gamer. At one point, I got into a couple of PC games, Alice and Clive Barker's Undying. On a trip to the Philippines in '05, I got a hold of bootleg copies of Warcraft III and Half-Life. The latter I played almost to completion. I got too frustrated with the high levitating platforms near the end. While I did not actually finish Warcraft, I watched my brother play a majority of it. I never got much into MMOs until I met Mord. I played Ragnarok on a private server for about a month, got up to level 99--twice...? And then quit. If you've ever tried playing it, maybe you can explain to me how leveling works on that game.
Currently, I mainly play MMOs with Mord, and tachose include Wizard 101, Guild Wars, Chinese Aion, and on the rare occasion, WoW. When not gaming with Mord, I try to play Strongbad's Cool Game for Attractive People, and I'm working on finishing Crayon Physics. Which are Mord's, not mine.
Cataclysm Skepticism
The World of Warcraft buzz for this past weekend has been the "leaked" information on World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, the next expected expansion. Personally, I remain skeptical. While most of the changes have been met by mostly optimism by people I have spoken to, I feel that many of the changes go against the past design philosophies of Blizzard.
I originally told myself that I would not do this, but I decided to go ahead and do a point by point breakdown on problems I see with the information. I warn you again, I remain very skeptical on this.
The level cap in the next expansion will be slightly lower than expected this time around; 85.
This suggests Blizzard wants more room for expansions before hitting the level 100 cap. With less leveling to do (along with the revamped leveling listed below likely to increase the speed and ease of leveling), leveling a new race remains appealing for new and existing players alike.
The notes talk about a "100 cap" as if level 100 would be a level ceiling that you cannot go past. Since when has that existed?
Leveling from 80-85 should be a much bigger deal, the idea is to make sure that gaining a level really means something and doesn't make you feel like you just have 4 more levels to go.
This flies in the face of the design Blizzard has been pushing. They have been all about making leveling faster and easier. Unfortunately, most players hate leveling even though I love it. I have always seen leveling as the best part of the game, no matter the public opinion. So leveling is now seen as not a big deal and a big deal at the same time?
As for the classes, most of them I could see as plausible. The ones I have a problem with are:
• Tauren Paladin
• Tauren Priest
• Gnome Priest
Taurens have always been a very nature-based race. The switch to following "the Light" seems like a great departure from their origin and too much of a stretch for me. Not only this, but it would make the Taurens the first race to be able to play EVERY healing class. Personally, I would much rather see Forsaken Paladins since many of the Forsaken could have been paladins in their past life.
Goblins
Deathwing once again sought the services of the goblins, as slaves. Unable to refuse such an offer, the goblins were enslaved by him. A large group have resisted however. With their previous homes devastated by the cataclysm, they escaping to an island off the coast of The Barrens. As they strive to recover, they come across an Orc captured on an Alliance ship and rescue him. The Orc turns out to be none other than Thrall himself, and in return offers the Goblins a place within the Horde. These events are carried out in a quest line, allowing players to experience first-hand the reasons behind the Goblins' shift from neutrality.
So this assumes that the Goblin home of Undermine was destroyed in the Cataclysm. That would be unfortunate to never be able to see the location in its full glory. Furthermore, how did Thrall end up as a prisoner on an Alliance ship? Do you really think the Horde armies would leave him that vulnerable.
Worgen
The cataclysm has cracked open the Greymane Wall, finally revealing what has happened to the kingdom of Gilneas and its citizens. With the Worgen curse taken hold, they have found a partial cure, allowing thme to retain their Human minds even when transformed. Venturing forth from Gilneas and seeking help from the Alliance, they have decided to join them, to combat the new threats of Cataclysm.Gilneas will make extensive use of the phasing system (much like the Death Knight starting area), to show what happened while the kingdom was cut off from the rest of the world and lead up to present day.
Worgens will have two forms, a Worgen form and a Human form. Players will be able to customise the look of both forms.
Worgen are a race from another dimension that has no morality. They live only to kill, pillage, and destroy. As for these, there would have to be a good reason they kept their human minds while transformed. I also think that allowing players to shapeshift and customize both forms will have a lot of people rerolling and worgens becoming an Alliance majority. Though I do think it would be cool if you did not have a choice on when your character transforms and it would be based on the day/night cycle.
Classic Azeroth Revamp
A cataclysmic event caused by Deathwing and Azshara will change the face of Azeroth as we know it. Most of the new content for Cataclysm will take the form of a revamped Azeroth, taking advantage of newer additions to WoW such as phasing and daily quests. Most of the quests and mobs in the classic zones will also be redesigned to make leveling less painful. With the revamp, a greater narrative and sense progression will be offered to players. Some zones and dungeons will change drastically to fit this, e.g.,
• The Barrens will be split into two separate zones of two different level bands.
• Azshara will become a low level (~10-20) zone.
• Some of the zones like the Thousand Needles will be flooded.
• Durotar is wrecked and apparently Orgrimmar could be destroyed. A new Orc city is rebuilt over the course of the expansion.
• Gnomeregan will be part of the expansion as well and gnomes might be able to reclaim their capital. (The last part is still unconfirmed)
• Wailing Caverns will be become a lush tropical area as a result of the druid's magic.
• The Blackrock Spire will erupt and a new version of Blackrock Mountains will be available, apparently Ragnaros will be back too.
I think this troubles and makes me not believe the information more than anything. Blizzard has been very careful in the past not to remove content from the game. The only times portions of content has been removed has been Naxxramas and soon Onyxia and both these times it was to revamp it for max level.
Destroying Thousand Needles? I have also heard that places like the Wetlands, Duskwallow Marsh, Stranglethorn Vale, Tirisfal, and Duskwood could be destroyed or mostly wiped out. Blizzard has never destroyed content like that before. For instance, what would happen to achievements such as Loremaster or Explorer? Would they be changed or just disappear? The ONLY and I mean ONLY way I could see them destroying the world in this way is if they opened up a portal in the Caverns of Time that allowed you to return to the world Pre-Cataclysm and complete things you had from that time but even that is a sticky solution.
The Guardian of Tirisfal
Malfurion Stormrage will be returning to Azeroth to aid in the creation of the new Guardian of Tirisfal - Thrall! Med'an's role in these events is currently unknown.
What interest does Malfurion have with the Guardians of Tirisfal? The WoW comic books are terrible, but they are taken as canon. In them, Aegwynn was the one that was reforming the Guardians of Tirisfal with Garona and Med'an (the son of Garona and Medivh) as key members. Malfurion and Thrall have no connection to it.
The New (New) Horde
Thrall will hand over the leadership of the Horde to Garrosh Hellscream, while he serves as a coordinator for both the Horde and Alliance forces in and effort to combat the new threat of the Naga and Black Dragonflight. Without Thrall to keep Garrosh in check, he declares open war on the Alliance. In the political upheaval Cairne Bloodhoof is implicated as a traitor to the Horde and murdered by Garrosh. Cairne's son Baine takes over as the new Tauren chieftan.
I do not see Thrall as someone who would ever leave the Horde. He is forever loyal to his people. He knows Garrosh is a loose cannon and is not ready for leadership. I could see Saurfang taking over the Horde long before Garrosh. And if Garrosh murdered Cairne, why would the Tauren stay with the Horde?
All in all, the information seems like a by the books checklist of all the wishes people have been wanting for years. It seems too in line with what people have been asking for. While I may have the unpopular opinion, I hope it is false and I will remain skeptical until we see proof at Blizzcon this weekend.
The New Addition
Unfortunately, I was away from home all this weekend so I did not get the chance to write up a proper blog post for today. I want to, however, make the announcement that Rynala is going to start making occasional blog posts on this site. Her first post will hopefully be posted sometime this week.
I hope you all enjoy her thoughts and views. Her posts will most likely be about her thoughts on the current games out or features they contain. She has only been playing MMOs for about a year now so she is still relatively new to the genre so I very much enjoy her views as someone who has not been around since the beginning.
Hopefully, I will get a proper post up tomorrow and she will have one out sometime this week.
Going Back to School with Wizard 101
I never expected to go back to Wizard 101. I had played it earlier this year and got to level 7 which equals out to about four or so hours of play. The lack of communication tools made it hard for me to adapt to the game and I eventually gave up. No guilds or ways to organize made it difficult to play by myself.
At one point, I went and fought a boss along side a random person and during the fight we had a fantastic conversation. The problem was that you cannot add someone to your friends list while in combat because most of the standard UI is disabled while in combat. The boss struck me down and the other person could not heal me back to life but was able to kill the boss. When the battle was over, I was instantly teleported back to the commons area. Since names in Wizard 101 are not unique, I was never able to find or contact that person again to say that I enjoy the fight and the conversation or suggest that we should travel together. Furious with this, I uninstalled the game and figured I would never go back.
About three weeks ago, Rynala was off visiting her folks and I found myself looking for a game to play. We do a majority of our gaming together and so when I am solo gaming, I feel like I am missing out. I decided to go back and try Free Realms again since I was on a new computer and I hoped it would not have the weird issues I had before. The main reason I wanted to get back into it was that I had heard great things about the card game and felt like I needed a card game fix. I created my character with my standard custom name "Mordiceius Isagirl". The name was quickly approved but within minutes changed to "Mordiceius Isawirl". Furious once more, I uninstalled the game and promised I would never return. And unlike Wizard 101, I do not think I will have a hard time keeping this promise.
Since I could not get my card fix from Free Realms, I decided to return to Wizard 101 but I also decided to try to get Rynala to try to play it with me. I hate playing MMOs where I do not know anyone so I took my Guild Wars approach. She agreed to try it out and although she did not seem to be getting very into the game at first, it seems she is growing to love it now. I too am singing a different song about this game. There have been multiple surprises for both of us.
When I asked Rynala's first impression of the game at around level four or five, she said "The game is cute, but I do not know if it has any long term potential." I agreed with her at that point for the most part. I saw us playing it for maybe a week or two as a nice diversion and then giving it up. But the further we got, the more we enjoyed the game.
The biggest surprise for me was the story of the game. When you first start the game, you are introduced to the Professor of Death Magic, Malistaire. He apparently went crazy, is power hungry, and wants to destroy Wizard City. Simple enough, I thought. Eventually though, the world gets pretty fleshed out. There is a chain of quests in Wizard City that send you to the different schools of magic to learn their history and eventually you go and learn the origin of the world. I figured the story would be just simple story of going and defeating the death professor. I did not expect a fleshed out world and origin stories.
This game is marketed towards young kids, mainly preteens, so I figured the story would not get too deep. I expected something more like a bad Saturday morning cartoon rather than anything approaching Harry Potter. When defeating enemies, I assumed we were just knocking them unconscious, not killing them. This changed when I was in Krokotopia and had to defeat and evil Krok boss. After he was defeated, I was sent to a new area in the zone and the first quest giver was the ghost of that Krok boss trying to redeem for his sins. In the same location, I found the crypts of two warring families. Even in death they were still fighting and angry about the burial place of the queen that formerly united them. I have fought bosses that have been turning this peasant race into mindless slaves as well as bosses that are harvesting the souls of the dead. I never expected story like this in Wizard 101. It leaves me craving more every time I log off. A game with a good story can often make me forget any other flaws of the game.
One of the things that was added to the game recently that was not in when I previously played is player housing. You start out with a dorm room near the schools of magic and eventually can buy a house or even multiple houses. Furniture, trophies and other items for your house are rewards from quests, drops from bosses, can be crafted or bought off the auction house. I know that Rynala has loved spending time decorating her house she recently purchased. I have not yet purchased a house beyond my free dorm room, but I have a total of over 70 housing items that I have received just from quests and loot drops.
The pricing options have also been something I have taken advantage of. You can pay monthly for $10 a month or a reduced rate per person if under a "family plan" or you can purchase "crowns", the microtransaction currency, to permanently purchase zones. You can play the first ten or so zones for free but beyond that they cost crowns to unlock at about a couple dollars per zone. I believe that you can unlock majority of the game's zones by purchasing about $80 to $100 worth of crowns. This may seem like a lot initially, but really I think of it no differently than spending $50 on a new MMO and then paying for three or four months of service. The difference is, after I buy all the zones, I have them for good and never have to pay another cent.
Graphics and voice acting. Usually I do not expect games marketed towards pre-teens to have much bang in the graphic department. The worlds graphics in Wizard 101 are surprisingly good when you use the high quality textures. All the maps and menus have wizard and monster stick figures drawn on them which are often quite amusing as well. All dialog in the game has voice over which is majority of the time fantastic as well. It may seem like fluff but it definitely adds to the immersion.
Wizard 101 is not without its flaws. The language dictionary can sometimes be infuriating when not recognizing what I would consider to be common words and not allowing you to type or spell out numbers. Trading is limited with only allowing you to trade "treasure" (special loot drop) cards and nothing else. So you can only trade cards for cards. You cannot trade money or other loot between accounts. There is limited trading between characters on the same account via a bank box.
All in all, I am very excited to be playing this game and I fully expect it to be keeping me entertained all the way to Aion's launch. I love the pricing system so that I know months down the line I can return to the game and play through everything (if they have not released anything new) without paying a dime.
Back in the Saddle
So my month long classes are over and I am back to the normal work schedule. Hopefully I can get back to blogging regularly. After not blogging for over a month, it is going to take some getting used to again.
My last month has been filled mostly with work but I did get the chance to game a little bit. Almost all of that was done with Rynala and split between Aion, Guild Wars, and Wizard 101, with Wizard 101 taking over most of our gaming time of the past two weeks.
In Guild Wars, we finished up Nightfall last month and started in on Eye of the North. I cannot say I much care for Eye of the North compared to Nightfall. Nightfall seemed to be the highpoint in the storyline. But then again, I guess it is sort of hard to top the story of killing a god. It does not help that Eye of the North has a bunch of reputations to grind (UGH!) and is not as long as the other campaigns. We only have the last mission and the final boss left and we are not even that motivated to finish. I think it just disappointed me that the last major storyline in Guild Wars was not that exciting. At least it was still better than the terrible story that was Factions.
Aion has been an absolute blast. We initially went and leveled Elyos and Asmodian characters to level 10 on the NA open beta and then went and played on the Chinese servers since the US beta servers are only up every other weekend. We leveled another set of Elyos characters to 10 and then switched to Asmodian and played them to level 15 or so. At this point we stopped because we did not want to burn out on the game before the NA launch in late September. We probably will not touch it before then.
Aion does have me quite excited. A lot of people just shrug it off as a "WoW-like" but I think that is one of the beauties of the game. It feels a bit like WoW while still having new and foreign elements. Something old and something new. Makes it a lot easier to transition. Either way, I think it is a solid game and I hope it does well after launch. I do not want to speak too soon, but I almost think that it might beat WAR is subscription numbers. One of the big disadvantages WAR had (other than imbalances and broken endgame) was it launched two weeks before Wrath of the Lich King. I do not care how good your game is, it is hard to compete with the 800 pound gorilla. Aion will be launching two months after WoW's patch 3.2. By this time anyone who came back for 3.2 will be getting bored with the content and it will still be at least another three to four months until patch 3.3. It will be a perfect time to draw people away from WoW.
Wizard 101 surprised me. I had played earlier this year and got a character to level 8 before quitting. The lack of community tools, guilds, uncensored chat, or friends in the game pushed me to leave. Reflecting over my MMO time over the last few years showed me that as of recently I have become more and more of a social gamer and so it makes it hard for me to get into games like Wizard 101 if playing solo. To combat this, I talked Rynala into trying the game out with me. She might not like every MMO I try, but she is usually always open to at least trying them. Just like Guild Wars, I figured Wizard 101 would be a lot more fun playing it as a team the whole way through.
I created Seth Lifeweaver, the life wizard and she created Victoria Duskrider, the death wizard. For the first couple hours, she was skeptical and thought she might play it for a week or two but it had little to no long term potential. As we progressed further into the story of the game and deeper into the gameplay, she really started enjoying it. As of last night we both hit level 15 and are about ready to head into Krokotopia, the second world in game. Personally, I was surprised when I found out how fleshed out the story and world actually are. I may be a very social gamer, but I also need at least someone decent stories in my game. This is a reason Wizard 101 works for me and Free Realms does not. Wizard 101 is a realized world with an ongoing story. Free Realms is just a collection of minigames thrown into a hub world.
Anyway, it is great to be back to blogging. I just have so much catching up to do in my blog reading for the last month. >.<