While I am thinking about it, I want to point out to any and all readers that the word “melee” is pronounced “may-lay” not “mealy”.  Don’t believe me?  Follow this link, click the audio icon and hear for yourself:

http://www.answers.com/topic/mel-e

I bring this up because people are constantly fucking this up.  I don’t think I have ever heard it pronounced right on any podcast I have ever listened to.  I was watching an IGN review for Naopleon: Total War on youtube and the well spoken gentleman doing the review screws it up (it happens around the 2:40 mark).  IGN is a well funded site.  These people are not amateurs.  They should know better.  Someone along the ediding line should have heard that and said: “Hey Joe, it’s may-lay you insufferable prat!”

I have heard that British pronunciation tends to be more like “mealy” but they are just all wrong and I am of course 100% right.  Don’t even get me started on people who pronounce grimore like “grim -o-ray”.  I think it is funny that these words occur often enough in my life for this to be an issue.  However, I will stop now before a mealy breaks out and I have to call out muh-day.

Well, I picked up Final Fantasy XIII yesterday.  Unfortunately, it was also a Tuesday yesterday which means raid reset for WoW, so I was busy doing WoW stuff until about 11:00.  However, after that I ended up putting in nearly 3 hours of play into the game before heading off to sleep.

People are right, at least in the beginning, the game in incredibly linear.  Like, so linear that it might as well have been an action/platformer game.  However, the story begins pretty epically.  The music, graphics, and overall presentation are off-the-charts good.  While I like some characters better than others, I don’t yet find any of them annoying.  In fact, I completely adore Lightning.  Yes, she is totally a female Cloud, a brooding ex-soldier type, but she is a complete and total bad ass so far.  She is strong and powerful and her voice acting has rocked my world so far.

Combat in the game is fast and fluid and I see a lot of potential there.  I say that because I am not yet to a point in the game where it has opened up all the possible options during combat, I think.  I only JUST learned about paradigm shift right before turning in last night.  Paradigm shift injects much needed tactics into what has previously been “mash the x button” combat for the first 2.5 hours.  Paradigm shift is somewhat like an on the fly AI change for the CPU controlled party members.  It also shifts your available skills, I believe.  A simple example:  you set your paradigm to “balanced” so that people fight and your healers keep people healed.  Then when the enemy’s weak point is opened up, you switch to all out commando attack paradigm so maximize the opportunity.  If Square-Enix delivers with it, it should inject some much needed tactics and consequence to choices made during combat.

My biggest problem with the first 3 hours of the game were not that it was so linear, believe it or not.  My problem was that the game starts and you aren’t gaining experience, or AP, or TP, or anything resembling some sort of “reward” for winning combat and advancing your characters.  You can see that you are rated at the end of combat, and it awards you a number of “points” but so far those points are useless other than to be used as a measure of how good you did in the battle.  Protip: during the early battles, your options are so limited that pressing ‘x’ repeatedly (on the auto-battle option) as fast as you can will result in 5 stars for every fight.  I am hoping that this changes, and the Paradigm Shift option that opened up should provide a way for the game to make it so.  Only time will tell though.

Literally the last thing that happened before I went to bed was the opening up of the Crystarium system.  For people who have played Final Fantasy 10, this is the sphere grid.  For those who haven’t:  it is the syetem the game uses for character advancement.  In combat you earn a certain amount of CP (crystarium points) and you spend them on the crystarium board.  The board has a variety of areas, one for each Paradigm available to that character, and in each area are a series of crystal nodes that you can “go to” by using up your CP.  Each node you reach unlocks something new; HP/MP upgrades, skills, attributes, etc.  THIS is what I was waiting for.  Now the game is starting to feel like an RPG.  It is a shame that it took 3 hours for the game to introduce this system to me, but then again … it is explained by what is going on in the story.

So that’s it for day one!  I am going to try to blog about my progress in the game as I play it.  I probably wont keep up on a day to day basis, but I will try to be as close to that as possible, even if it means some shortish posts.

So, today is the big day.  The game once touted as being one of the main reasons to own a PS3 is finally out today.  While I have not yet played Final Fantasy XIII at all, one cannot escape the hordes of reviewers coming out to point out how different and, specifically, how linear Final Fantasy XIII is.  I am not sure how I feel about this.  To be honest, I heard the same things about Final Fantasy X and when I played it and discovered that the overland map had been replaced with a bulleted list of locations to visit, I was pretty worried about the game.  Well, I shouldn’t have been.  Final Fantasy X ended up being one of my favorite games.  So I am going to give Final Fantasy XIII its due.  Linear or not, if I enjoy the game, then who cares if it is linear.

Another thing, somewhat related to the linearity thing, that people are complaining about is the lack of towns in this one.  Supposedly there are no towns and instead, you can shop at save points.  Am I alone in thinking that this might just be a good thing?  I have played SO many JRPGs and been utterly turned off when encountering a new town.  Towns in JRPGs are nothing but massive hubs of NPCs with pages and pages of text, usually boring and entirely irrelevant text at that.  However, I always feel obligated to explore the entire town and talk to everyone just in case they had some item or kicked off some side quest.  I can specifically remember one city in particular in Lost Odyssey being this huge sprawling place filled with NPCs and hidden, worthless, items.  I sat down to play and spent hours trying to make sure I found everything and talked to everyone.  Thats not fun.  In fact, I often find myself sitting down to cuddle up with a good JRPG and find myself wasting an entire night on dialog, unskippable movies, and running around towns trying to find the right NPC to talk to to forward the story.

So if Final Fantasy XIII has eliminated a lot of this bullshit, I might just love it.  Yes, please let me jump right into combat and actually DOING stuff in the game.  I don’t care if it is linear for the first 25 hours.  If it engages me and keeps me from falling asleep on the couch before the opening cinematic is done, then I will be happy.

Because I am a lazy blogger I had not even gotten around to blogging about the lowering of prices in the Allod’s Online shop (yay!) before seeing that they simultaneously went and changed game mechanics to require that you actually need to use more of the items at once to be effective.  I don’t even know what these perfume items really even do in game, but I do know shady, underhanded, greedy tactics when I see them.  So, screw it.  Allods Online is now uninstalled and I will never come back, much less spend a single dime in their store.

Today the digital edition of Sentinel’s Fate hit the virtual shelves.  Since I bought a physical copy, the only reason I would have to buy the digital edition would be to get the Guarding of the Learned appearance armor that comes with the digital edition.  My first point of confusion is that on the steam page for Sentinel’s Fate, is that it says:  Coveted Guarding of the Learned armor* to provide extra protection on your journey.

Wut?  Since when does appearance armor provide any extra protection?  My guess is that this is simply flavor text written by someone who doesn’t actually know jack about the game.  Oh wait … there is an asterisk.  Maybe the footnote explains it.  Nope, all it says is: * In-game item: Limit one (1) per character. Non-transferrable. No cash value.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/24190/

My problem with all of this is that for a person new to the EQ2 experience, there is a chance that they will see this on Steam,  think: “Wow, that armor looks awesome!  I am sooo going to make a bad-assed magician using that armor”.  Then they buy the game and not ONLY can they not wear their new armor until they play through the first 20 levels of the game ( a fact not mentioned anywhere on the Steam page, and fairly important since it is also never mentioned that this is appearance armor ), but when they do reach level 20 they find the armor is for looks only and has zero stats.  They might feel a little misled given that the selling point claimed that it would “provide extra protection on your journey” implying that you would have a leg up in the game thanks to this item.  Shame on you Steam/SoE!

Another point I am confused on is why we were given a $10 coupon to buy the digital edition of Sentinel’s Fate when the only reason to do so would be because you want the appearance armor.  So $40 – $10 = $30.  Thats a $30 piece of appearance armor?!  Wow.  Holy shades of Allods Online Batman!  Ok, so you would also get 500 station cash too, so to be fair, its more like $25 piece of appearance armor which is still way more than any other set in the store currently.

I don’t know what to do.  The appearance armor does look nice, but I think it is simply a pallet swap of the armor I already have from the physical edition.  Truth be told, the $10 coupon would be better spent giving it away to my brother, who has expressed interest in getting into EQ2.  That way he can catch up with all the expansions and rediscover the game, and SoE potentially gets a new customer vs. me having another piece of appearance armor I might never even use.

A few days ago, I came across this video:

http://screwattack.com/videos/The-Only-Thing-I-Know

While I feel for the guy, he is wrong.  How I choose to spend my free time is my choice.  I think it is somewhat broken to feel like every waking moment you have should be spent being productive.  It is very clear to me that video games are the best way I know of ( for me) to just zone out.  You basically take all your problems and worries and you shelve them for an hour or two.  You don’t abandon them.  You don’t ignore them.  You just realize that there is nothing you can do about them right now, and you do something to help relax and get your mind off them.

This guy sounds like he had some bad stuff happen in his life.  It sounds like his wife left him, he lost his job and he blames his gaming for having nothing to show for years of living.  Maybe he is right, but I think that the real problem is not with the games themselves, but with his inability to budget time, notice what is really important in life and not let his habits wreck things for him.

His video throw up numbers about the average number of level 80s people have in WoW and then he lists how long it takes, throw in a little multiplication and … OH GOD!  People are wasting YEARS of their lives!  I don’t buy it.  There are numerous ways to level faster in WoW.  Not only have they increased the amount of experience gained in lower level areas now, they have introduced a class that STARTS out at level 55, and if you participate in the recruit a friend program you not only get TRIPLE experience for both of you, but as you level you earn “free levels” that you can give out to people to help them catch up.  Tons of people I know do this.  They download the client and start a new account, do the recruit a friend thing with it, dual box both characters up to level 60 with triple exp and “gimme” levels in a matter of weeks.

Hell, WoW is not the only game to do this.  In EQ2, every max level character you have provides a 10% bonus to exp for ANY alt characters you level.  On top of this you can get exp bonus potions that boost exp gained for a set amount of time, and it stacks with other bonuses.  If you have 5 or 6 max level characters in EQ2, you can end up with 200% bonus exp with no effort at all.

Sure there are people out there who do have a real problem with addiction, but is that the fault of the games or is it really a flaw in the person themselves?  I have been playing games for decades now.  I played them through school and college.  I played them while working full time as an adult with a wife and two kids.  My life situation dictates how much gaming time I have to spare, my gaming habits do not dictate how much time I have for real life.  Sometimes it is hard, but making the right decisions is what being a responsible adult is all about.

Besides, his video has a mixed message.  He rails against gaming and talks about how it screwed everything up and he wants you to hear his message and consider that you might be wasting your own life  … and then he shows PAX at the end and talks about how games brought this community together and these people seem happy and mostly level headed and how great it is that games formed such a community!  Sorry, but I am calling bullshit.  This guy allowed his own addictive nature to run away with the escapism that games provide and he screwed his own life up over it.

Remember my last post, where I lavish praise on Allods Online and I speak of a glorious future where our MMOs are all free-to-play, supporting themselves with some sort of cash shop?  Yeah … forget I said anything.  Seriously gPotato?  This is no good.  In fact, if this doesn’t turn out to be a huge mistake, I am not going to waste my time with the game anymore.

Allods Online looks amazing.  To get such a deep and rich MMO experience that seems to offer just as much as any triple-A title does, and to have it be free-to-play is amazing.  It makes me wonder if the concept of paying a monthly fee for MMOs is going to become an outdated notion soon.  It used to be the case that free-to-play meant that you were getting a shallow MMO experience filled to the brim with instancing and grind.  However, Allods Online is essentially a WoW clone … but for free.  If you want to take down the WoW juggernaut, you have to convince people to move to new games in groups.  People tend to want to play what their friends are playing and there is no way to get people to try a new game like making it free.  Its not like Allods is a pioneer of the free-to-play model either.  You have Free Realms, The Chronicles of Spellbound, and recently Dungeons and Dragons Online all being top notch games that are free-to-play.  Lets not also forget that the impending Star Wars: The Old Republic will be free-to-play as well.  These are not shallow, throw away games, out to make a quick buck.  They are heavy development efforts who are fully embracing a new way of making money and overcoming the monthly fee barrier to entry.

How many more games would I play if I didn’t have to pay?  I absolutely adore Lord of the Rings Online, but I rarely play it since I am almost always subscribed to two other MMOs and that is my personal limit.  I love EVE Online, but I tend to play it in brief thrusts, followed by a lapse.  These days it seems that when a subscription based MMO begins to fail it enters a sort of death spiral were more and more people cancel their subscriptions and the population lowers, which makes the world feel empty, causing more cancellations, server merges, rinse and repeat.  It is downright depressing to step into Vanguard: Saga of Heroes these days.  Such a beautiful world, but one essentially devoid of life.

Nexon made a bajillion and two dollars with the free-to-play model and I suspect that if newcomers Allods Online and SWTOR can find their place, that people will begin to question the value in paying $15 for WoW, when they can get a very similar experience for free elsewhere?  I would love to see a future where I can pay my $50 for an MMO and only pay again when I want to, while still being able to play online.  With so many MMO titles out there all asking for $15 a month, it forces me to pick and choose.  Two of you get my money, the rest get zero.

P.S. – Tabula Rasa would make a perfect free-to-play game, NCSoft.

During my hiatus, Star Trek Online launched.  Would everyone who is blogging about it kindly stop?  You look like you are having an awful lot of fun.  I am very much enjoying my stay in EQ2 and I am already invested in Sentinels Fate.  Getting Star Trek Online would mean skipping out on Mass Effect 2 and adding another MMO subscription to my pile and I just don’t think I am willing to give up my adventures in EQ2 for right now.

But, … oh man, is that the Enterprise?

As I mentioned in my last post, Vanguard depresses me.  Having recently started Station Access back up, I just had to download Vanguard and have another go at the world of Telon.  Right now Vanguard is “celebrating” its 3rd year as an MMO.  I use the term “celebrate” lightly since, unless you happened to log in for the live event, you wont find much celebrating going on at all.

My ranger in Vanguard was hanging out near Misthaven Crossing and I decided to take the riftway to New Targonor for the 3rd anniversary quest and celebration.  In making this trip I saw NO ONE until I made it to New Targonor and went down to explore the town a little bit.  Here you have this massive, gorgeous city with no one in it, save one Blood Mage doing some crafting.  After a bit of poking around I decided to get down to business with the 3rd anniversary quest.

It took me a while to find the celebration quest giver.  Mostly because there was no in game graphics or fanfare going on to indicate any sort of celebration was taking place.  When I did find the little guy, he gave me a single quest, the reward for which was the 3rd anniversary present.  He did mention celebrating the history of Telon, which was great!  But the entirety of the quest was to just turn right around and turn the quest in.  There wasn’t even a speech about Telon or its history, just a “Happy 3rd birthday vanguard.  Have a box of stuff” message.

The items are great.  The bag you get is especially fantastic.  However, it made me really sad because it is so obvious that SoE had a skeleton crew create this event.  I couldn’t help but imagine the little halfling that gave me the quest delivering his lines in a high pitched monotone dripping with jaded boredom.  It felt less like a celebration and more like when you ask a friend if they are OK and they say “yeah” but you can totally tell that they are so totally not.

It is so sad to watch Vanguard die like this.  I think it not only is the best looking SoE game available, but it plays very well.  The interface is clean and easy to familiarize yourself with ( if you’ve played WoW, you know what to expect).  There is great diversity in race choices and while all the class staples are there, you have a handful of special ones like Blood Mage, or Psionicist that are pretty neat.

However, the scope of Telon is just too big for the community left playing it.  In fact, Vanguard has had a problem of bloated scope from the day it launched.  It needs people.  I can’t help but wonder if a free-to-play model, similar to DDO wouldn’t be in order.  It is abundantly clear to me that Telon wont survive without finding people to play it.  Asking people to pay $15/month for the game is a bit much at this point.  However, a free-to-play model could bring people in where they could, perhaps, feel compelled to spend some money in the in-game shop.

I would love to see this happen, but I doubt it will.  It feels like SoE has already put the game out to pasture.  Its sad.  I feel like there is so much wasted potential there.