Games, games, and more games

[rathanel]

It's only been about two months since my last entry, so I fear I'm going to be accused of post-whoring, but sometimes you just have to take these things in stride.

Obligatory Stuff That Matters Update: Not much has changed on the real life front. Still employed, still like my job, still like the people I work with.

Comments

[kaziel_fateseer]

Mirror's Edge: I tried this as a demo (typoed it to demon on the first try... somewhat appropriate?) on my PS3 and I know exactly what you mean when you say "Repeatedly launching myself off a building because I didn't hit some random obstacle at the right angle is also rather irritating." I probably did this a dozen times before I made it through the demo. There are definitely game's I'd rather play.

MMOs: They are, at core, a grind fest one way or another. You can't have constant story progression without eventually running out of content, plus the role of MMOs is to keep you playing (thus paying), so to a limited degree, they don't want to remove the grind. Doesn't mean they don't want the grind to seem more fun, but you even consider WoW to be grindy, which many consider the least grindy of MMOs. Sadly, there may not be an answer for you. You may just be one of those players who wants a game to be giving him new storylines and fairly constant progression.

FFXIII: As for the companion games they are on PSP and PS3. Final Fantasy Versus XIII will exclusively be on the PS3 (unlike FFXII which will be on the PS3 and the XBox360), while Final Fantasy Agito XIII will be for the PSP. For details, check out: http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Agito_XIII and http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Versus_XIII

Dresden Files: Been a reader of this series for about... two or three years. It's really solid, and I much prefer the books to the show because it's what I saw first. Not that the show is bad, it's just what I know. Also, as darkprism mentioned, Jim Butcher has written a fantasy series that he's almost done with (one more book), so if you like Dresden, you might want to give it a glance. Oh yeah, and Jim Butcher also has a prequel to Storm Front in the form of comic that he had done (he's getting the entire series done in comics, but wanted to start it off with something new), so that's another thing to check out.

[rathanel]

In the case of WoW, I found myself looking ahead to an endgame that seemed every bit as bad or worse than FFXI's and decided I didn't want any part of it. The easy-mode style of the game didn't help either.

"You may just be one of those players who wants a game to be giving him new storylines and fairly constant progression."

This is quite possible... Most/all open world games have failed to capture my interest, and I generally stick with games not because I find them super-awesome fun, but because I want to know what happens next. The exceptions (BG2, Civ-series/Fall From Heaven, MoO2, and a few others) tend to be pretty deep and have a lot of variance in any given playthrough... or so I imagine.

FF: Figures, I currently own neither a PS3 nor a PSP, and this is unlikely to change any time soon.

[kaziel_fateseer]

I would argue that the endgame in WoW isn't [i]as bad[/i] in one sense, but altogether a billion times worse than it in others.

Upsides include, from the get go, that Blizzard chose instanced content for it. Problems like fighting over HNMs, having to schedule with other LSs to do Dynamis, and waiting on another group to finish a BCNM/KSNM were never problems that entered the equation. And as time has gone on, they have made it more and more accessable to the average player. In The Burning Crusade, it went from 20-man and 40-man raids to 10-man and 25-man raids. With the most recent expansion, they made things even more friendly to "casual" players by making every raid instance available to both 10-man raids and 25-man raids. Yes, they did design two separate version of each fight, scaled for more people and, usually, harder in the 25-man version (additional abilities for example).

The upsides to FFXI's endgame are a certain amount of permanency. The rewards you get from the various types of endgames in FFXI are likely to last forever, or at least be good in certain circumstances. In WoW, the gear you get lasts until you reach the next raid dungeon, or maybe the one after if it's really good. The gear you get from the final raid dungeon will last that person until the release of the next expansion. Maybe it won't be immediately replaced, but it will eventually be replaced. It sorta devalues the worth of gear if, eventually, it will be replaced by green or blue quality loot from the next expansion.

Yeah, most real open world games don't do much for grabbing my long term attention either. Like any of the Elder Scrolls games. Though I think that's a mix of the open-world aspect, combined with a piss-poor leveling system. And the more I play games which are labled as "Sandbox" games, the more I realize how most... aren't. Like inFAMOUS... While it seems kinda sandbox-ish, you are limited to where you can go, and you need to do certain things to open up new areas of the game. I tend to get distracted on most sandbox games by the little side missions, forget the story, and then stop playing.