WAR Is Not Quite Dead – Yet

How much effort does it take to put together an email to all subscribers to inform them of changes to a game?
I’ll tell you – Bugger all
Every time there’s a Beta run for WoH I get an email, I get emails all the time from SWTOR, LOTRO and STO – what do I get from WAR – nothing.

James Casey finally bothered his arse to write a Producer’s Letter 

So what does it tell us -
There’s a patch 1.4.5a coming out to fix the relic and fortress mess that was 1.4.5
1.4.6 will be a bug fix patch because that is what the community has been asking for.
1.4.7 will be the introduction of Dynamic Objectives to ORvR “The goal is to give more fun and rewarding things to do“
A later patch will see a new Live event involving demons.
Changes to crafting have dropped over the horizon for now
The WOH team they have finally finished the T7 armour – well worth the cost of dropping support for WAR.
Inactive names on servers are going to be cleared up – a little late now – this should have been done prior to the big merge.
“We have some new ideas for pets and other items for our store” – I dread to think.
At least they’ve stopped pretending that there are great things around the corner.

Not exactly inspiring  - a little more effort wouldn’t go amiss
It’s all very similar to the stagnant period that MMOs go through just before going F2P

Cannot See Target

After many weeks of hopping from one character to the next I finally got to the end of a chapter 1 with my Imperial Agent.
The quest was Defender of the Empire and I had to defeat Darth Jadus with my sniper – no problem I thought; that was until I got the “cannot see target” message every time I tried to shoot him.
What do you mean you can’t see him? He’s there in front of you with a dirty great red name tag on his noggin ….. Oh! He’s stood on some steps and that’s why you can’t see him.
After trying various methods I finally took him down only to discover that he regenerates to full health and I have to do it again – bollocks – I’d just spent a fortune repairing my armour; you can’t res your companion if they die on the steps either.
I submitted a bug report about the “cannot see target” only to be told that they know about it and they’re working on it – hmm not much help here then.
I had a look on the forums and there’s quite a few posts regarding this – apparently I’m supposed to kite him for 2 hours hitting him with DoTs and hiding behind display screens – so rather than wasting more time and armour I dropped onto my Bounty Hunter.
Once again I started getting the “cannot see target” error on the lead up to the end of chapter 1 – deep joy – luckily I was able to target the end boss.
So now I have a Legacy – it’s taken quite a time but that’s comes from alt hopping, having your eldest son commender your PC over yuletide and doing stuff to the house.
I then rolled a Sith Warrior/Juggernaut – I wish I’d done this one before – I’m really getting into it. The responses in the quests feel a lot more natural and not so contrived – might actually see this one through to the end.

BTW – Stronghold 3 isn’t as bad as the reviews made out.

The Universe Is Big And Getting Emptier

The launch of SWTOR hasn’t been without its problems with some glaring omissions and silly little problems. I would guess a lot of this was due to rushing to get the game out for Christmas in some sort of acceptable state.
But the recent video from James Ohlen (Game Director) is just another example of the disingenuous crap that many software companies come out with when their product doesn’t quite match up to all their pre-release hype.
What’s that the players want? An adjustable UI? Never thought of that. What a load of bollocks.
Bioware supposedly absorbed Mythic so that they could bring their vast experience in the MMO genre to SWTOR – in which case they should know what happens when they treat their customers like idiots.
There are noticeably less people playing SWTOR now – at least I’m no longer tripping over resource ninjas but it’s harder to find people to team up with. The game also feels empty, not just through the lack of people but depth of play – there’s something missing but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
The landscapes are very nice, the animations are good and so are the character voices but some of the dialogue grates after a while. Maybe that’s it – listening to the same phrases over and over but in different contexts and choosing responses that don’t quite work out as you expected. I find it becoming rather disturbing that I can pick up “alien” phrases that are repeated with obviously different meanings – wanna wanky & killy mcranky – perhaps they hoped we wouldn’t notice.
Then again SWTOR seems very short on humour - one of my favourite animations is the freeing of the cocooned imperial soldiers as they fly through the air and plummet to the ground but was it designed to be amusing? It’s all very serious and earnest – maybe I’ve missed out on some subtle nuances; I can’t remember much in the way of humour in the films and I can’t be arsed watching them again to check.

40k celebrates its 25th anniversary this year but it seems that THQ are struggling to get the funds to complete Dark Millenium – lets hope they get it sorted out.
On the up-side The Lord Inquisitor has got the greenlight from GW to continue with his film project – the sample videos look excellent and this is well worth supporting.

Not sure what’s going on over at WAR – there are many conflicting reports about the latest patch and for Kai to post that the bug with the Dwarf/GSkin T2 perma-lock is unfixable is rather unsettling; especially as it was fixed at one time.
When you’re in a hole – stop digging.
At least there was humour in WAR.

SWTOR: A Love Story

While playing my Imperial Agent I put my James Bond head on (with a mercenary bent) and so far I’ve bedded two women – or so I assume.
The flirt was on, the screen went black and we were then back at our starting positions to continue the dialogue – the ladies seemed happy enough with my performance.
I don’t want to see any prurient toon-on-toon sex-action but wouldn’t some sort of nice cut-scene be better than a black screen.
How about the standard rocket taking off, a train entering a tunnel, waves crashing on the shore, the mightiest oak in the forest being felled and then a post-coital narc – the game has got a 16 rating after all.
Speaking of which – there seems to be many young children playing this game wittering on about pre-adolescent bollocks.
It’s especially annoying when they’re talking about watching Star Wars on something called a Blue Ray and start calling me an old fart when I tell them that I saw the film in the cinema when it first came out.
It has its advantages though – the servers are fairly quiet during school-time and there’s no fighting over resources or quests.

I Want To Play WAR

I keep going back to the WAR Bioware forum in the vain hope of finding some little chink of light that will once again awaken my enthusiasm for Warhammer Online.
I then saw a tweet from  @JSchabbing linking this video of RvR in WAR
Ooh I thought – looks like it’s livening up – so off I went to see what was happening.
I logged into my T4 Blorc and noticed mail for me – it was from my old guild mate Jagd saying that he’s quitting and leaving me his gold.
Sorry to see you go Jagd.
Bit of a downer but I checked the War Report and sallied forth unto Caledor – nothing – couldn’t find anyone – not even a little stunty. Undaunted, I flew around the regions chasing red crossed swords on the map and looking for groups until I became daunted.
So I logged onto my T2 Shaman – there were 8 Destro running around like headless chickens up against about 12 Order – I lasted about 15 minutes before I gave up in frustration.

I miss WAR and I want to play it but not in its present state.

Oh Dear! That Didn’t Go As Planned

SWTOR 1.1 hit the servers a little later than planned with several changes - http://www.swtor.com/patchnotes/1.1.0/rise-rakghouls
As well as bug fixes etc. it gave us a new flashpoint ‘Kaon Under Siege’ and an expansion to the ‘Karagga’s Palace’ Operation.

Anti-aliasing has been enabled to allow the game to chew up even more of your gpu.
The first thing I noticed was that the abilities are no longer greyed out on cooldown – now it’s very difficult to tell when the ability will be available near the end of its cooldown. Might have been better to turn it red while on cooldown.
I also had problems with getting abilities to activate and targetting – I couldn’t tie it down to anything in particular but it was rather annoying.
There have been quite a few changes to PvP – I’m saving myself until I get to level 50 until I dive into that; judging from forum posts it’s rather unbalanced and not worth it at the moment – lots of rage-unsubbing.
Hmm – thought Bioware would have enough knowledge and experience from Mythic to get PvP right – unless they’ve unleashed Carrie Gouskos on it.

I received an email this morning from Bioware to inform me that I can use the “Founder” title as a reward for being one of the first subscribers. Cor!

At the same time Star Trek Online went F2P.
The changes to STO over the past few months have been amazing; the game is a lot more immersive – better graphics and sound effects and best of all the space battles aren’t run on rails.
I’ve got a feeling I might be playing STO more than SWTOR.

Meanwhile back in WAR – Mythic posted the dates for testing the relic thingy
http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=1702
Looks like they value the input from the US more than the EU – nothing new there.
Mykiel has finally got round to a new post at Stratics - http://war.stratics.com/?p=406
18 people turned up for the PTS test?

No Passion For SWTOR

While off work last week I played a lot of SWTOR  and it dawned on me that I’m really not all that fussed about the SW worlds.
I played WAR with many years of GW gaming behind me and I really felt a part of the Warhammer world but I found the SW films all presentation and no substance – typical US tat – and, consequently, I didn’t get into the SW universe.
I started out following the storylines but I’ve begun to spacebar the dialogue, especially the non-class quests; I don’t feel particularly involved in the class quests and it all seems a little shallow – maybe it was a mistake starting several alts.
I’ve got a Jedi Knight and a Bounty Hunter at level 30+ and an Imperial Trooper and Sith Inquisitor both level 10+
I’ll keep plugging away at it though and see if I can break through the ennui barrier.
Where are all the augments? Is no one doing slicing as a craft?

WAR 1.4.5 hit the PTS last week with the return of the fortresses and the new relic thingy http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=1695
with a feedback thread here Dev Discussion – 1.4.5 PTS – Feedback it doesn’t seem like many players turned up to the test.

Wrath of Heroes started its Beta 4 session last weekend – giving away 1500 beta keys; I bet people were queuing overnight to get hold of them. It doesn’t seem to be making much of an impression on the gaming world and judging by the Facebook comments interest is beginning to wane.

There have been various rumours about Dark Millenium being cancelled by THQ to which THQ responded with typical management waffle -  ”no decisions have been made” about Dark Millenium; doesn’t look good.