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. >.<