Tactics matter: If you are grouped, use flanking and draw fire off each other, especially for the mutants with shields. Go to high ground and use sniper rifles from range to avoid things with nasty

attacks that will kill you quickly close in. If you are down, try and crawl to cover or out of bad ground effects before you self revive.

Loadouts: I started with 2 loadouts. You can have different gear and different EGO powers set up in each one. I set up one for precision and ranged attacks and one for close combat attacks. Easy to switch them out.

Mods: Weapons that can be modded will show the slots when you view them, but only some weapons can be modded in all slots. Pay attention to the type of slots that can be filled and only buy the right mod for the right slot. (P.S. The episode quest’s final reward is a weapon with all 4 mod slots available.)

Vehicles: The dodge charger is faster, more durable, and can carry a passenger. The driver side and passenger side doors actually matter for getting into the vehicle, which is pretty cool. Set waypoints on your map (right click an objective). You will see a dynamically updating path marker to your objective, which is a good way to avoid getting into bad terrain or getting lost.

Distractions: There are a ton of bright and shiny things out there. Pick a path and stick with it or you will never feel any continuity in your questing. Go back later and do the side quests and kill things in the area if you want to. That being said, stopping for arkfalls is worth doing. There are some very nice rewards from those, and they feel like epic struggles against some very nasty things. Speaking of very nasty things, if you see a giant hellbug spit big blogs of nasty in the air, they will kill you if you stare at them like a Newb and get hit.

Outfits: You can have a different outfit for a different loadout and the episode quests are likely to help you add to them. I have 4 I can pick from now, but my armor and sunglasses are likely to stay with me for a long time. These shades look great with my facepaint and markings!

That’s it for now, I’m still learning the ropes, but it is a very fun game. I do recommend having a partner to run around with if you can manage it.

Oooh Ha! Ha Haaaa! Envy my portable Hutt teacher

Makeb is really well done, well worth the cost of my pre-order, especially with the early access time and my lovely Hutt holo-trainer. My main complaint is that it will be over with far too soon. The flow of the quests and the experience of gaining these new five levels is so smooth. For those who gobble up content too quickly, it is almost too smooth, but it is clear that the game has taken game design improvements to heart. I feel that sense of excitement and wonder that I had when I first started playing Old Republic. I’m trying to pace myself, I’ve only touched the initial quests Empire side and I’m only half-way through Republic side, but it is hard not to keep playing and staying up late. I have yet to even try out the new mini-games they’ve added with the seeker droids and Shroud content, but I will try it out once I get to 55 on my Consular.

Happily, we have two very different story experiences we can have on the planet. I won’t spoil it, but you really need to play both a Republic and an Empire character through the planet to see how different your entry to the world and the story arc is between the two sides of the war.

Can you say Ubiquitous vendor trash…

I would say my only dissatisfaction is with the crafting side of the expansion. Maybe it is worthwhile to people who really love building different looking mod-able gear, but I’m much more practical in my crafting needs. I want gear I can build to help me with entry into Operations, not cosmetic gear that does nothing but look pretty. With the cartel market, even augmented gear and some of the cool looking cosmetic gear just doesn’t earn back my credit investments. So far I’m very disappointed with how much time and credits I’ve invested in my crafting and the lack of tangible benefit to having invested them.

I suppose that is my feeling about crafting in general though, not just in the expansion. My advice to you, sell your 450 crew skill missions for any of the gathering skills on the GTN. The credit cost and time your companion is away on the mission is not worth the materials returned by those. You can gather the same number of materials in a fraction of the time just wandering around the initial zones.

Kudos to the writing and design team at Bioware on this one. They’ve done a fantastic job with the visuals and the ambiance. Companions have new dialogue and HK is much more interactive now. I feel sad for the people who didn’t pre-order soon enough or at all. Many in our guild want to run the old content but have no takers, as those of us seeing the new world are far too engrossed.

Rift Fire Mask

I hope to post more info later, but between Carnivals, extra XP weekends, family visits and a new SWTOR expansion coming out, my time to play is getting pinched. I do want to play during these first days of game excitement when everyone is learning the ropes and the zones are populated. I think the biggest challenge for the game will be keeping numbers high enough that people have plenty of support and backup against some of the bigger nasty things. Getting used to the FPS view for the game is going to be MY biggest challenge. I’m just so used to driving with my mouse in MMOs and panning my view around.

I love high rate of fire weapons, so my first character had to be a soldier for the assault rifle. I don’t know if I missed the customization options during beta or if they were added later, but be sure to look up in the left corner when you are setting up your character’s looks. There are several options to scroll through. The dev team may want to make those options pulse the way they have set up other things to pulse in the UI to draw attention to them.

Hopefully later this weekend I’ll get a chance to group with my husband and get further into the initial zones so I can talk about gameplay. I’m waiting for him for now so we can support each other on the quests. It is always much more fun that way.

Mage plus plate = nifty look

I’ve been playing SWTOR and Rift a lot lately. My husband and I finished up the Bounty Hunter story quests with levels to spare. We’re both only 46th level and couldn’t have done it without helping each other out on the Corellia quests. Man, I wish I’d been on the ball to screen cap some of my memorable cinematic moments of the final quests of the Bounty Hunter. Escape pod locks will never be the same again.

I’ve been playing with a 4 person group of RL friends on Sunday afternoons pretty regularly, Empire side. We have all 4 classes covered and wreak havoc across the galaxy. While I haven’t quite finished up my class quests, I did hit level 50 on my purple-lighting darlin’ Inquisitor. I promptly built some upgraded armoring and hilts for her, only to realize that I could immediately get most of her gear from PVP and Tionese starter packs. It was weird. While I’m happy to not have to run another set of gearing up FPs for her, it also felt a bit odd after doing it the hard way for my other 50s. I kind of miss the custom look I had for her which I exchanged for some set piece bonuses.

We’re starting a couple of Jedi Knights to play together. He’s going dark side, but I decided to play some light side for a bit since my Bounty Hunter and Sith Inquisitor are nasty evil types. It will be interesting.

We’re also playing Rift on the occasional evening and have been slowly leveling toward 60 in Storm Legion. I’ve been working on some crafting with low level alts and let me tell you, trying to run through high level insto-kill zones and climb mountains to avoid high level mobs has made me really appreciate the lack of falling damage that has been put into the game. While it is a bit odd to fall off the top of a mountain unscathed, I’m glad not to add that death to the ones handed to me by the mobs I’m trying to dodge.  But I WILL turn in that crafting workorder though it kills me (again and again). I’ve added a screen shot of my Mage, whose wardrobe gear I happen to really like right now. I  love not being stuck wearing a dress/robes for my caster. I sure wish I could put a cosmetic overlay like this on my SWTOR characters.

Couldn’t quite get the vantage of the iconic Star Wars location and the bloom of the fireworks, but you get the idea!

I got a couple of other shots I thought were particularly lovely and just had to add them too:

Illum has such gorgeous skies, they make a wonderful backdrop for my Sith Warrior’s salute.

Another shot of fireworks against an Illum sky, gorgeous!

When I found what they sell in Tempest Bay, I was glad they gave us a healthy plat stipend in the Beta test. I was able to purchase a few of the different dimensions, Shoreward Island, Dolcega Valley and Faen’s Retreat are shown in some pictures. Also some customization of the tiny free starter dimension, Warden’s Point. Enjoy…

Dolcega

Dolcega

Warden’s Point

Warden’s Point

Faen’s Retreat

Faen’s

Faen’s

Faen’s

Strozza Estate from the top most point. Used building materials to make ramps to get up for the view. Pretty courtyard but can’t go inside anywhere.

Aurentine Plaza, a slice of Tempest Bay. This is just the view, the room behind is the dimension, but I found the sounds the gearworks made to be annoying, won’t move in there.

Shoreward Island. You get the whole island, but only the tower can be entered. The lovely cottage is shut and shuttered.

Shoreward Island dimension: Looking down the spiral ramps inside the tower.

Finally, here are a few screen shots of the controls and help tips:

Dimension tabs you can open from inside.

Main dimension menu, permission setting options.

I’ll bet a lot of children went SQUEEEE! over this picture

My friends’ kids love Jar Jar Binks, so in that area, he hit the mark on making a character that their generation can relate to. And maybe that is what a lot of the decisions that we callously mock were all about. Han didn’t shoot first, that wouldn’t make him a very good role model for my friends’ children. It makes me take a look at the first 3 epidsodes with different eyes. Maybe if I watch them with the same child-like wonder I felt when seeing the original movies, rather than my more jaded grown up eyes, I’ll be able to better appreciate them.

I saw so many people with young children express their joy over being able to take their kids to see a new Star Wars trilogy, just like they remember being taken by their parents. And really, that is what it is all about. With eyes toward the future and respect in my heart, I’m super excited for whatever Disney does with our beloved galaxy far far away. And yeah, I am super excited for the goosebumps I know I’ll get when I read the scroll of a new saga on the big screen in 2015.

It is a big wake up call to myself. When we use our words selfishly and without a broad perspective, we may end up regretting them sometime later when we realize how shallow and shortsighted we’ve been. So feel free to kick me in the proverbial butt if you see me talking smack in the future.

As I’ve been playing a few different games lately, I have come up with a long list of “man I miss X feature” as I play them. So here is a mish-mash of features that I’ve been missing and some things I’ve had to get used to doing again. I do wish games would borrow some ideas from each other more often, (ok, a lot of ideas), while still remaining unique in their own ways.

Favorite flying horse!

World of Warcraft has moved a lot of the acquisitions such as unique pets and unique mounts to be account wide. I really love that all the hard work I put into grinding for some of these fluff items can now be enjoyed on any character I play. No longer is the lucky drop of the Headless Horseman’s mount stuck on a character I don’t play very often. Instead, all of my characters can now benefit from it. WoW also has some amazingly clever pets and such a plethora that you can collect. Some of my latest favorites have been pretty easy to come by with just a few steps in a quest chain rather than a grind for reputation and a purchase, well done Blizzard.

Such creative pets!

Rift has a really smart auction house interface. As I was selling off some extra artifacts I’d collected, I noticed that one of my characters had put the same artifact up for sale earlier. The AH was smart enough to realize this and automatically matched prices for me. Both Rift and WoW allow you to fill in the search box for items you are selling by clicking on the items from your bags. SWTOR’s auction house is primitive by comparison to these two games.

I really like being able to quickly see how many people from my guild are online when I log in. Both Rift and SWTOR show a guild count in your UI. With how heavily into guilds WoW is, I’m very surprised that I have to open my guild, then click on a separate roster tab to see if anyone is online. Both Rift and WoW are miles ahead of SWTOR in the kind of information you can see about your guild, but that one little feature of seeing quickly and easily if anyone is online turns out to be a big deal for me.

WoW’s new monk class and Pandaran race

WoW having each race start in its own unique “training ground” for brand new characters is pretty nice. I played their new Pandaran area and it gives a real flavor and sense of character to this new race. I really wish SWTOR hadn’t decided to share a starting planet with two classes. It makes trying to play every class in their game a bit more boring after a while. Rift is even worse in having only two different starting areas, in terms of a lack of support for my altitis. Another thing WoW has done with their latest expansion is to not make you visit a trainer to learn new skills as you level up. I really like this feature.

Rift souls are such a smart idea, especially the new souls that they are adding with their upcoming expansion. While it can be harder to learn and build your roles up, the flexibility of play in a single character is fantastic. With their new souls, they are giving classes a completely different type of game play to try out without making people re-level a character. As I was beta testing, I tried out the melee combat role for my cloth wearing Mage. It was fun and a real change up for the class. I love that my mage can switch from a fully built set of bars and abilities for healing, to a fully built set of bars for ranged DPS, and soon to a fully built set of bars for melee DPS, on the fly.

I have had to force myself to read quest text a lot lately. I tend to skim through it and just accept quests and move on, and that loses a lot of the story. It is a real struggle for me to balance listening to the voice acting in WoW and Rift and reading their quests in order to make up for the easy richness of the story you get in SWTOR. Picking up quests in SWTOR is much more entertaining. Oddly enough, I really had to get used to picking up and turning in quests solo again in Rift and WoW. I’m so used to waiting to talk to NPCs until my husband is ready to talk to them with me when picking up and dropping off quests in SWTOR. I’m not sure which I prefer. Sometimes it is nice to just get and turn things in at my own pace, but I do like feeling like a party when everyone in my group in SWTOR is represented.

Just needs a little paint and some furniture

Much more homey with a deck overlooking the sea

Having a place to call home is a surprisingly nice feature in a game. While I’ve never considered myself a big player housing advocate, seeing the potential in Rift’s upcoming customized dimensions has opened my eyes to why this feature is so popular. I got to play around with customization options in their beta and I spent hours enjoying myself doing so. It was great to be able to express my creativity so fully. I’m not sure how much time I’ll spend hanging out in my nifty dimension, but making it nifty will certainly be fun. I enjoy having my ship in SWTOR, but it isn’t really mine to customize. My female trooper is stuck with stupid girlie posters on her locker, and that just doesn’t feel quite right. I’d love to be able to change some of the features of my SWTOR ship and customize the interior. I do like that I’ve been allowed to unlock features on my ship such as a mailbox though. I can’t believe how much I dislike the capital cities in WoW or how much I dislike not having my own private retreat in that game.

Quinn hard at work.

Crafting is another area where I have been missing features from other games. I really like sending my sidekick in SWTOR off to pick stuff up for me, or having my crew busily getting me needed materials while I adventure. Crew missions rock. I also LOVE being able to put all my crafting stuff in a cargo hold and still be able to make things from anywhere I happen to be standing. Having to go to the bank in WoW and pull things out into my overflowing bags has been driving me bonkers lately. Rift also tracks crafting components that are in your bank and lets you craft from bank stock. However, Rift makes you stand at workstations to build various items rather than just allowing crafting on the fly.

Mod-able gear in SWTOR is one of my favorite things about the game. I can customize my look while keeping the same stats, at least until end game. I love the variety you find among people playing the same classes, at least until end game. You still get a lot of cookie cutter max level characters running around, but it is getting better with some of the newer sets of gear. Rift’s wardrobe feature takes customizing the look of your character to a whole other level. I love wearing a certain set of gear for the stats, but looking completely different. I just wish they didn’t make additional wardrobe slots so dang expensive. WoW’s gear is still cartoonish and annoying to me. Even their attempts to let you reforge and customize aren’t implemented very well. Being able to wear pants if I want to on class that typically is stuck with dresses/robes by default is pretty important to me. What I do miss gear-wise from WoW is how they have pieces of heirloom gear that are account wide and scale to your level. Now if I could just hide how they look by putting on wardrobe overlays, I’d be a happy camper.

custom looks, same stats

Travel is another really big part of MMOs and is handled so differently in Rift, WoW and SWTOR. SWTOR giving me sprint at level 1 and letting me unlock faster riding on my speeder at level 10 is fantastic. Their quick travel options are also something I really love. Once you visit a place and learn its travel point, you can get back to it every 30 minutes (or faster with unlocks) with a button click. WoW has portals and you can fly around once you get high enough level, but they still make you slog around by inconvenient means for a good portion of your play time. Rift is my least favorite overland travel game, but I do like their porticulum system where you can fairly quickly get to an instant transporter. SWTOR’s is by far the most convenient in letting you travel from anyplace you are to anyplace you’ve been on the same planet. A lot of people don’t like SWTOR’s galaxy travel and having to get to your ship to leave a planet, but I find it one of those important distinction building features. I do love my flying mounts and having the option to avoid a lot of annoying monsters in WoW. If SWTOR decided to add some atmospheric travel options, or just stopped knocking me off my speeder after a while, I’d love it. I do enjoy being able to bypass terrain features in WoW.

And lets not forget SWTOR and Rift letting you revive in place. I really don’t like running back to my corpse in WoW. SWTOR giving every class an out of combat energy and health renewal option is fabulous.

This is a pretty big MMO Monster by now. As you can see, there are a lot of features I’d mosh together if I had the chance, and I’ve only been talking about 3 of the games I’ve played most often lately. What are your favorite features if you were building your own Frankenstein’s MMO?

Maybe we should go back to the harbor

I love thought-provoking talks via Twitter. They make me want to write and they help me put my thoughts in order about things percolating in my mind. Today’s brain brew is all about game hype, game expectations, why we love some games but don’t love their successors as much, game success and failure, and what I’m thinking of as the perfect storm for failure that has plagued several games lately.

I’ve come to one conclusion that MMOs that are based off of very popular single-player games or popular books are probably doomed to failure. I can’t say that for sure because the future remains unwritten, but it seems very possible. You can’t recapture in an MMO the same arc and satisfaction that you got from a single-player RPG or a well-written series. It is like having a book that you love so much that you re-read it, then turning that book into a story that has a start, a middle, but NO END. You can’t recapture the hero’s journey in an MMO because the journey never ends and no one is a unique flower.

Why did people love Knights of the Old Republic so  much, but those same people don’t love the game that expands upon its world, Star Wars: The Old Republic? Maybe because by its very nature as an MMO, the SWTOR story/world can’t take you on the same journey. It is the song that never ends. It is played by people with MMO expectations. It is also played by Star Wars fans and while it captures the adventure, humor, flavor, and much of the essence of the IP, it doesn’t have a happy ending because it doesn’t have an ending. I wonder if that makes sense to others the way it does to me. The game is unsatisfying to the Star Wars movie fans in the same way that a book or movie without a definitive end is. We finish up our epic journey and then we putter around at loose ends. I don’t think people’s excitement over the game was unfounded, I just think their excitement over existing  within it as an MMO was. It has much better re-playability than most MMOs, but a surprising number of people don’t want to play more than their one archetype.

Now on to that whole “perfect storm” concept. The current environment for the games I love is full of storm clouds of turmoil, social media challenges, financially strapped customers, a likely aging player base with more real life responsibilities (I don’t know if younger gamers are a big demographic or if they are too busy playing social games on their smart phones), emerging technologies, trolls who ruin reputations without a care, heavy competition, and long-standing games that their loyal customers refuse to leave. It seems to be more than the usual environment of heavy competition. Players have very high expectations and a thunderously loud voice in which to share them. Production costs versus what people are willing or able to pay just don’t seem to mesh. In general, it is more turbulence than most companies could have foreseen a few years ago. Gale force winds have come upon them rather quickly it seems and I wonder if they saw any red skies at night.

There are evolving social issues that players grapple with in their daily lives, pitfalls in the social media revolution that topple companies and even political regimes, and those social challenges hit game developers too. People have billowing expectations and surprisingly broad reach and the skies the limit in their potential sphere of influence. Players are connected to each other and to the companies that build games in ways that didn’t exist just a few years ago.

Blizz and WoW built their massive player base during calm skies and they’ve managed to hold onto it so far. Their giant cruise ship has been able to weather the rogue waves that have swamped some of the younger games trying to ride the storm in much smaller boats.  Years ago developers saw what WoW was doing and thought, we can be successful too, we can bring that kind of fun to our players, and we can give them more/different/better. Sure, assuming the players they seek are willing to allow them to do more/different/better instead of clinging to their comfort zones. And assuming we didn’t all start to spiral into a cycle of long term unemployment, high gas prices, high food prices, and all the other pressures that compete for increasingly limited resources.

While I’m grateful we have so many fantastic ways to escape from reality, I’m almost overwhelmed by them. I never keep up with all the things I’d like to do and see. Some really entertaining things never get my attention, no matter how good they might be.

I really enjoy cooperative game play and some of the mechanics of MMOs. (I also almost equally dislike some of the mechanics of MMOs and some of the side effects of massively multiplayer environments. I don’t like being reminded that the world is full of rude people, especially when that happens during my fun time.) But despite some really stellar moments in several of the MMOs I play, most especially in SWTOR, I’ve never enjoyed story in my MMOs the way I’ve enjoyed it in my single player RPGs. I’ve never “read” my game story content the way I enjoy reading books, even though most of the games I play have a wealth of written information. SWTOR tries very hard to blend the awesome elements of a good book or a good RPG, but I wonder if by its very nature as an MMO, it won’t be able to fully satisfy its readers, viewers or its RPGers who are trying to recapture a very different experience.

Deciding on the quality of games that exist in this highly complex environment isn’t easy. I think people judge games on criteria that are overly simplistic at times. And really, the future of several  of our games, both the highly successful and those in their infancy, still remains unwritten. I don’t envy them being born under such stormy skies.

Farewell to Z’ha’dum and Krath

In the early days of long queues and many servers, we had this idea of splitting Imperial and Republic between multiple servers. Thus began my orderly Vorlonn and strength-through-adversity Z’ha’dum legacies. It made sense for my fierce red-skinned Sith Warrior to go by Z’ha’dum from Babylon 5. My cooperative but manipulative and secretive Smuggler made sense to go by the inscrutable Vorlon name and thus was born my two primary servers. One would focus mainly on Republic goals and characters while the other would explore the Empire side of things. Each would give me the option to try two versions of each class in each faction, one dedicated to the dark side and one dedicated to the light side. That was then…

This is now… With shrinking populations and a much smaller player base, decisions were made that didn’t take my concepts into consideration. My thought processes weren’t shared by the game decision makers. Someone decided, hey, lets give people more slots and then smoosh them all together onto crowded servers where they get to fight each other over daily quests and world bosses like children squabbling over pinyata candy. But, rather than smooshing them in such a way that they could play light side dark side of every class, lets only give them 12 slots instead of 16. And rather than letting them pick which servers they get squished onto, lets just take that pesky choice  out of their hands and only make it to suit our own needs and desires.

Time and energy invested here

The initial step to consolidation left me with characters stranded for months on a dead server. I deleted characters and moved Imperials over as I could, but still had some remnants of my Imperial glory left behind. That would have been the perfect time to give me options. Instead, I was given a carrot on a stick, which I couldn’t fully take advantage of due to a lack of available character slots, and then left to wonder what would become of my hard work and legacy? What would become of the crafting skills I laboriously built to support my characters?  I still wonder what will become of the XP bars for each of my Legacies when one is forced to consume the other later today.

It would have been nice to be able to preserve my legacy by moving it to a RP server, thus giving me the freedom to pursue my idea of seeing the classes from both sides. If I want to explore new options, I have to start over on a RP server. Now I’m stuck without legacy perks or crafting skills that are duplicated and wasted on my brave new mega server, because I wasn’t given choice or options. That more than anything else makes me mad. I’m a victim of the MMO market overflood, but have been a loyal paying customer from the day the servers opened. I sure don’t feel like that now.

So farewell Krath and Z’ha’dum. I suppose I went there and died.

(Update: post merger, my level 23 legacy still has the same XP as before, so none of the merged legacy XP was added in.)