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I made it back from my vacation with a pocket full of pesos, a second-degree sunburn and the flu as a souvenirs. The trip itself was phenomenal, but the week since has been hell. It hasn't been until the last few days that I've started to feel better. Also, I'm watching the Super Bowl halftime show as I write this, trying to figure out how the hell Bruce Springsteen got so famous. I just don't get it.

I'm going to be a little a heretical today, and in a couple of different ways. First, I'm going to put my fanboyism aside to talk some shit about Privateer Press, and then I'm going to show off my latest painting project - and it's Games Workshop. Before we jump to conclusions, I'm not giving up on Warmachine or anything, but every so often I need to switch things up and paint something different. When you are working on an army, you tend to paint the same kinds of things with the same colors over and over again. Eventually, my enthusiasm starts to wane and I find that I've gone several weeks without painting at all... when that happens, I usually go pick up something not Warmachine just to "cleanse the palette." Think of it as a sorbet for the painter's mind.

But before that, I just have to ask... what the hell is up with consistency of the Privateer Press range lately? I came back from my trip excited to see what was new on the PP preview pages... I found Molik Karn and the Shadowhorn Saytr. I don't know what it is, but the quality of the sculpts seems to be getting spotty lately. The Shadowhorn isn't terrible, but it's also kind of cartoony and posed horribly. And Molik Karn's face... I'm not sure what to think. The armor looks great, but that face... that mouth... it just looks ridiculous. Maybe I'm still bitter from my 2-dimensional Black 13th models, but it sure feels like they are slipping. I hope they get a handle on the sculpt quality - I got into the game because I had never seen a range of miniatures as consistently beautiful as the Warmachine/Hordes line. I'd hate to see that slide.

Now on to my weekend project. I just haven't had the will to get back to my Sword Knight UA, and so I decided I'd like to paint something other than Cygnar just to get the juices flowing again. I ended up playing quite a bit of Warhammer Online while I wasn't feeling well, and I really think the mounted dark elves in the game look cool, so I decided to try my hand on a unit of Cold One Knights.

They are really nice models with quite a bit of detail. Paining scales is always a lot of fun, and the dinos were definitely the high point. With my Warmachine painting, I don't get to do much drybrushing these days, and I kind of forget what an effective technique it can be.

For all the concern about Privateer Press going to plastic, this just cemented in my mind that not only do I not care - I welcome it. Assembly was easier, I dropped him twice while painting him and my heart didn't jump into my chest, and best of all: I got an entire unit of five cavalry models for $20. That’s not too bad when you compare that to $100 for a full unit of Storm Lances.

I'm still working on my sci-fi RPG plans. I've got some ideas, but I'm probably going to set up a separate site to put all that information on, so I don't overwhelm Gamehole with it. More on that soon.

Labels: miniatures, MMORPGs, RPGs, wargaming, Warhammer Fantasy, Warmachine

I can't believe how quickly the weeks are going by! It's almost November at this point, which means the deluge of Christmas titles is about to hit! And what does that mean? It means I'm going to break the bank buying games for the next two months, and half of them won't even get around to being played until sometime in the middle of next summer. Hell, I still haven't broken the shrink-wrap on F.E.A.R., and it's been in my game drawer since spring.

Most importantly, we are weeks away from Neverwinter Nights 2 landing in my hands. D&D in videogame format is drug that I have no natural resistances to. I failed my save long ago. The fact that the old Black Isle guys (now Obsidian) built the game is icing on the cake. To this day, Planescape: Torment remains the best story-in-game-form I have every played. I just can't wait.

In the mean time, I've been playing quite of bit of Guild Wars: Factions. To be honest, the whole Guild Wars thing was kind of lost on me the first time around. I bought the game and tried to play it a couple of times, but it just never made sense. Not that it's a particularly complex game, but it definitely has its own conventions. The Prophecies campaign (at least the pre-searing piece) was gorgeous but just felt completely empty to me. The skill system seemed limiting, and I never could figure out the crafting/item system. To make matters worse, just about the time I started feeling vaguely comfortable with the game's basic mechanics, they threw The Searing at me, completely pulling the rug out from under me again.

Needless to say, factions came and went with little interest on my part. Finally, a few weeks back, I started to jones for some MMO goodness, but with NWN2 and FFXII on the horizon, I wanted MMO without the long-term commitment. So, I decided to pick up Factions, figuring that I could play for a bit, and then put in on hold while I dove into the aforementioned titles. Luckily, I ended up much more impressed with Factions than I ever was with the original. While the core mechanics remain mostly unchanged, the new player experience has improved by leaps and bounds. Things like classes & subclasses, skills, attributes and item crafting are all explained much more directly, and the chain of opening quests are entertaining while doing a great job of leading you through the game's core mechanics. I suddenly got it, and now I'm fascinated with the whole meta-game of skill collection and selection. The game has so many levels of strategy and nuance that I can suddenly see why it has it has such a huge following.

Within just a couple days I had my Ritualist/Mesmer up to level 15. I look forward to finishing this campaign and going back and playing the first campaign now that it all makes sense. Nightfall looks impressive as well, adding an entire third campaign with a decidedly middle-eastern flavor. Compared to the first game, I've also like the addition of more utility-type classes. I was a big fan of the Paladin and Shaman classes in WoW, and it was nice to see the same type of support classes appear in Guild Wars. I can't wait to try out the new Paragon class from Nightfall. Too bad you can use the new classes to start the earlier campaigns. That would have been a really neat feature...

I am a little confused that I'm already level 15 in a game that level caps at 20, and I've just gotten out of the starter area. I'm guessing that most of the missions are ran after you have already capped out? This would mean that the real focus of the game is coming up with strategically useful and synergistic skill combinations, as well as the out-and-out PVP battles - which I'm okay with. I'm already starting to feel my computer-controlled henchmen become less effective, and I'm wondering if the the game is trying to push me out of the nest into real grouping... Either way, I'm having fun with it, and it's nice to see a sequel that not only focuses on adding lots of new content for the hardcore player, but also tunes the game's presentation to bring in new players. The experience give me high hopes that Nightfall will continue this trend, and might just be be the most polished Guild Wars yet.

Labels: Dungeons and Dragons, MMORPGs, PC games, RPGs, video games

I've been playing Oblivion in almost every free hour I've had since I bought it. It's been years since a game has grabbed me like this. The game itself is an amazing accomplishment - the world seems to live and breath on it's own, even moreso than the "persistant" worlds of MMOs. Days turns to night, storms come and pass, people go about their business. If you spend a couple of days in one of the towns and you will actually start to get to know the residents, their patterns, where the live. The amount of detail is staggering.

Oblivion sports a brand of open-endedness that makes Grand Theft Auto feel like it's on rails. I'm just over 10 hours into the game, and I have yet to complete the first step in the main quest. In the meantime, I've explored half a dozen dungeons, been arrested for petty theft (and unfortunate misunderstanding), liberated a town from its oppressive head-of-the-watch, freed a painter from within one of his paintings (a high point so far), and rescued an entire hamlet that had been accidentally turned invisible. There is definately no lack of things to do in this game.

Instead of picking one of the game's standard classes, I chose to build my own custom class. Basically, it's a variation of the Crusader class, modeled after a D&D-style Paladin. The game uses a simple system of major skills and favored attributes that lets you effectively put together almost any classic high-fantasy architype you can think of. I've dropped in a little screen shot below, so you can see my build. He's an Imperial (for the speechcraft bonuses) and born under the sign of the Ritual (for the big heal spell and the turn dead ability).


There are so many potential ways to put together and advance a character in this game, that I would love to see some of the way other players would put together the same type of character. Drop me a comment if you have a particularly cool build.

Anyway, it's pretty clear that I'm impressed with the game. Hell, I'm more than impressed. This is the type of game that transends "gaming" as a hobby, and becomes a hobby all it's own. If anything is going to lay down a challenge to Warcraft's stranglehold on RPG gamers, this is it. And, I'm apperantly not the only one who thinks so.

Labels: MMORPGs, PC games, RPGs, video games

I rented BLACK on the PS2 over the weekend just to take a look. So far the reviews have been luke-warm, with the general consensus being that the game was a solid, if uninspired, shooter. Based on this, I went in with only the shallowest of expectations. What I found instead was a great looking game that did a fine job of balancing the best aspects of the fast action shooter with more tactical games like Ghost Recon. This isn’t an all out run and game – situational awareness and judicious use of cover (as well as the extraordinarily abundant exploding vehicles) are the keys to your survival. The few maps I played were nicely varied and all flowed well. The only real drawback for me was they absurdly durable heavy-armor shotgun guys. (Tip: don’t waste bullets on these fuckers – rush ‘em and wail on them with the butt of your rifle.) Other than that, what I saw was shiny.

In other news, I saw that Bioware is opening a MMO studio in Austin, I assume to take advantage of the large number of talented folks who have been left adrift by a nasty string of corporate implosions. What can I say – more Bioware can’t be a bad thing. Ever. Baldur’s Gate is still probably my favorite game of all time (if you are wondering, StarCraft is a close second). While I think their last few games have been a little flat, they are still better than most of the shit out there today. Beyond that, Co-CEOs Greg Zeschuk & Ray Muzyka just seem like good, savvy dudes, who are doing things for all the right reasons. I hope they kick some asses in that space, because right now Blizzard is the only shop that even kind of gets it, and frankly, they probably get it just a little too well for the good of the market.

On that note, tonight marks my exit from the lands of Azeroth. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since about a month after retail, and I have to admit that it’s been one of the most amazing gaming experiences I have ever had. The depth and breadth of the world Blizzard has created is astonishing. But, as with all things, there comes a time to move on, and for me, this week is it. At this point, the high-level content is just too much of a time sink. Between work, wife, and kids, I just can’t find a continuous three to four hours to get a decent group and run an instance. Still, the game is a masterpiece, and it’s hard to leave behind a character and a group of people that you’ve grown so attached to. It’s been fun.

Now, it’s onto Oblivion. I picked up the Collector’s Edition last night (a nice package by the way) and dove in. I haven’t made it too far yet, because I spent over an hour in the insanely detailed character generation. The game itself looks amazing (even if there is something somewhat disturbing about the character's faces) and it has the same epic, wide-open feel that made Morrowind so great. I can’t wait to dig in deeper.

Labels: consoles, MMORPGs, RPGs, video games

First off, I guess I wouldn't consider this a review - as is the case with most massively multiplayer games, it will take quite a few more hours before I've seen enough of the game to weigh in on the whole of what D&D Online has to offer. Still, I've spent a fair amount of time wandering the streets of Stormreach, and I've already seen enough to weigh in with some first impressions.

D&D Online is a bit of a departure from your traditional MMO game. Rather than roaming across the countryside grinding away at random spawns, D&D Online rewards player almost exclusively for completing quests. Each quest has it's own dungeon, and the tend to be somewhat complicated affairs, carefully constructed with multiple stages and objectives. Each dungeon is instanced, as seems to be the trend these days, so you and your party will have each adventure all to yourselves. The hand-crafted feel of the levels and the instanced nature go a long way to conveying the feel of a good old D&D game, at least the first time you go on each quest.

Which leads me to the game's primary downfall: You will go go through each of the adventures many, many times on your way through the game. Thankfully, each level can be played at one of three difficulties, each unlocked successively as you complete the last. As with any online game, it doesn't take players long to figure which missions offer the most bang for the buck, and they tend to want to run those over and over, which can make it hard to find groups for the less popular missions. This is also where the hand-crafted levels run into one of their biggest issues - they play the same each time through. The game could have really benefited from random trap placement to keep the rogues on their toes.

The instanced dungeons end up making the game play a lot like Guild Wars, where the town is the only true massively-multiplayer space, and exists only for finding a party or buying and selling goods. This makes for a light and fast experience that is easy to jump into and find some action almost immediately. At the same time, it also makes for somewhat of a thinner experience than I was hoping for. In many ways, this is MMO-lite, and I have a feeling that it won't take long before the subscription fee starts to chafe because of it. In many ways, it's too little game for too much fee.

The game focuses almost exclusive on group play. This is not a game for soloers or duo players. While it may be possible, it's certainly not enjoyable or rewarding. In fact, most dungeons demand a full and well-balanced party.

As you would expect, the tried and true D&D rules are in full effect here, although with some slight tweaks to make them work for an online game. Almost everything is exactly how you would expect it to be, from races and classes to attack rolls, feats and skills and saving throws. Spells per day and resting work a little differently, just to keep the game from becoming overly-punishing for casters. Spell casting classes now have a mana pool, like most MMOs, which regenerates when you rest. The catch: You can only rest in taverns in town, or at special rest shrines in the dungeon. It's about as close to D&D as I think they could have gotten and still put together a online game that wasn't just miserable for low-level spellcasters.

While D&D Online does a good job adapting the 3.5 rules, I was a little disappointed with their handling of the Eberron campaign setting. Eberron is an amazingly deep world, and already well built for a more traditional MMO. Just look at a map of Khorvaire and you can see how easily this game could have been translated into an epic MMO of sweeping scope. The world already comes equipped with it's own Lightning Rail mass transit system to move people quickly around. The Five Nations and the Last War provide a context for active PvP. The various nations and territories even have their own natural level progression: Starting in the Five Nations, moving to the Mournland, the Eldeen Reaches, or the monstrous nations (Darguun, Droaam and Q'Barra), and finally on to the Shadow Marches, Demon Wastes, and ultimately across the sea to Xen'Drik or the Argonessen. Okay - let's be fair. What I'm really saying is I wish they had made a game with World of Warcraft scope set in Khorvaire.

In the end, D&D Online does delivery a dandy little hack-and-slash multiplayer experience, but not much more that that. Without a $15 a month subscription fee, the game would be a slam dunk. As it is, I have to say that I'm less than enthused. I can't imagine that D&D Online is going to have any real longevity with players. For most players I think the experience will be too one-dimensional, while the hardcore players who really like the game's structure will chew through the available content in no time.

Labels: Dungeons and Dragons, Eberron, MMORPGs, RPGs