<3 Gaming

So over the last couple weeks or so Aion was released to much anticipation. I myself having vowed to not play another MMO ended up succumbing to my darkest desires of social gaming and bought a copy. Why oh why dear gaming gods did you let me do this? Blagh!

Anywho, after purchasing and installing the game, I have hardly done much else besides play the game in my spare “alone” time. Which by the way has also been drastically wtfpwn’d by the addition of a new family member seen here. Bringing the total dog count up to two, and the total amount of time spent being mauled by love filled puppies, to double whatever it was, surely a large amount of time though. <3 Puppies!

Back to Aion! So of course I pick a cleric as my class, healing archetypes are always my poison and why should this game be any exception? The first thing I notice is that Aion is AMAZINGLY BEAUTIFUL! Its tons of eye candy around every corner and the musical score to back it up is surprisingly refreshing for a fantasy based nerdgasm… er, game. At one point I believe I even made the comment to a friend that the combat music in a particular zone sounded distinctly like Sonic the Hedgehog which was completely unexpected and pleasant. Other than that the game feels very much like the now ingrained MMO experience I had playing WoW and the WAR beta. You have zones, you gain levels, you collect boar intestines for rewards and money. Pretty much anything you have done in a previous MMO you do here now. There are a lot of neat little things that are fun, such as each spell having its own unique and very distinct animation that make the game enjoyable but there are the annoying things as well. Such as gathering, something that starts out as fun and interesting and then quickly turns into boring and monotonous. Level 25 as it stands is essentially the stepping stone from the game being largely PvE and quest based to becoming more of a PvP run world. The grind (and yes its a grind at times) to 25 is almost too much of a chore if you are doing the content solo, but if you manage to pick up a leveling buddy along the way, or you have lots of patience (that one is me) then content just flies right by. The following should be used as a summary of the 1-25 levling experience:

1-10: Fun new and learning.
10-20: Wings!!!! Also questing is fairly fun and the landscape even though small is diverse.
20-25: Definitely a bit grindy at this point. You are basically holding on for the PvP which starts at level 25.

Overall though the game has been rather fun. It is nice to have something fresh to play, after five years of World of Warcraft one tends to tire of the same content over and over. Another great thing to note is that due to the Korean release a year before then coming to the North American continent definitely helped squash out the defects in game. I can’t say I have had anything really just bug out on me in my total time clocked, though I have had a couple random game crashes to the desktop. Very very few and far between though. Anywho at last it is time to try out this PvP stuff and hope that the game remains and becomes even more fun than it is on my way from 25-50. Be back on a report of me getting owned in the Abyss!

Sometimes I think to myself “Whatever happened to that guy I used to pwn noobs with on <insert game name here>?” More often than not the thoughts are just a passing wisp in the wind of my mind’s wandering. However today I had a conversation with a friend who made me stop and ponder more thoughtfully about it.

If I take a look back at my history of gaming I realize that a large majority of it was very social. It seems that the stigma of a gamer being typecast as the loner who sits on his computer has not ever applied to me (ok there was a short bit of time when this was true) or maybe not even the majority of current gamers. On top of that it seems that the social experiences I have had with gaming may have even furthered my desire to continue playing.

When I was twelve I lived in a small city. My brother and I were too young to stay at home by ourselves so we would be dropped off at a day care between the end of school and parents finishing work. This day care happened to be run by a woman who had three sons, the oldest of which was only a year or two older than me. This guy was the definition of cool, for me. We would spend hours watching him play Final Fantasy 3 (the US SNES version) or take turns amongst the three of us on bouts of Tekken 2. It was then that video games became something more to me than just another game. It wasn’t just the fact that the games were interesting, but I genuinely had tons of fun playing them with other people.

The next big step for me was when I hit my freshman year of college. Up to that point my gaming was still fairly social among friends who I went to school with. We would play Diablo 2 (LAN), Starcraft (LAN), or Goldeneye. With college however came the internet. A commodity previously sparse at my home due to dial-up was now overflowing from my cat5 cable eager to feed my newly built computer’s hunger.

At the time I was playing Warcraft 3, but fell into Counterstrike, Day of Defeat, and even a bit of Natural Selection. I remember campus wide CS and Halo matches, and when nothing was going on I would hop on to bnet and play some WC3 with the new friends I had made there. It was almost total immersion. Then my junior year of college came, and probably the biggest social game in history of video games was released that winter. World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft is the best video game ever made to date. Even though now I could care less to play the game at all I say this because the game is so diverse and all encompassing that you can spend months and days playing the game, and have fun the whole time. I still manage to get sucked back in whenever a new expansion comes out. Put bluntly fun was had on large proportions, and it was with tons of other people. During my time with WoW I experienced quite a bit. I remember in Vanilla that upon reaching 60 and gearing up a bit that I somehow managed to get into the Death and Taxes with the help of a friend. At the time I had no idea of the scope of what that meant. I just knew that they were suppose to be the best guild on my server, it was only after joining did I realize that these guys were somewhat of a big deal even for WoW standards. My time with Death and Taxes taught me many things. Most importantly how important organization is in team gaming. I don’t think any of my time spent with any other raiding guild has been nearly as successful in organization as DnT was. People not only knew their jobs but were able to listen to and respond to each others actions with amazing precision. It was probably the first time I had ever felt I was in over my head yet there I was often rolling as the only druid through Molten Core progress raids and holding my own… I digress.

The realization of social gaming has become apparent in almost any video game you can pick up these days. With services like Steam and Xbox Live its almost impossible to find a game that is solitary even if it is single player. If gaming is not already a part of everyday modern life then it surely will be in the near future when you see what is knocking on innovations door. With new social gaming comes new people to play with. Sadly some of my old internet friends have become lost to the waves time, either because I have forgotten their names myself, or the only means of communication I had with them has been severed. I am grateful to have been able to play with a very diverse and fun crowd of people and hopefully will be able to continue doing so for a long time into the future.

Extreme fun. The Far Wilds is probably close to the order of crack on the addiction scale. Alc, linked us to this on Subcreation about a week back and I started playing (thanks to Valoren for the motivation) about a week ago. I just have to say that I am completely impressed with this game.

If you have ever played an TCG such as Magic the Gathering (awesome), Pokemon (not as awesome), or Yu-Gi-Oh (why not cut yourself?) then you will already feel on fairly comfortable turf before stepping into the fray. The game essentially plays as a mix of RTS and TCG. The objective is fairly simple. control flux points, which nets you glory points at the end of your turn provided that you control more flux points than your opponent. The first to reach the glory cap wins the game.

How it is a TCG:
You build decks. decks contain various cobminations of creatures, buildings, enchantments and spells. Four major card types help provide the diversity. Similar to the way you have color themed decks in Magic the Gathering. You can mix and match color sources as well to make cool combos. The four factions are: Slyvan, healy range types mostly, the Mountain Fold, lots of defensive abilities, the Dark Legion, a largely offensive batch of cards, and Elemental mostly control cards.

How it is a RTS:
The game takes place on a map as I mentioned above (no I am not an idiot I just thought it was worth mentioning twice :p). The map has five flux points positioned in the same place every time you play. However the terrain of the map changes randomly every time you play a new game. Terrain can come in various forms, such as deserts, mountains forests, and so on, and can actually be helpful or harmful to you while playing. For example most creatures exhibit reduced movement while traverse a mountain or forest. The strategy comes into play not only in the order in which you play your cards now, but where you place your buildings and units.

The game itself:
There are a few pros and cons to the game as with any game. It is up to the player to determine how they weigh for each. I will start with my cons since bad news is always best to be heard first.

The game client sucks. No offense developers but it really is buggy a lot of the time. Fortunately there is a second client, and for anyone who happens to get extremely addicted to the game all you need is a modern web browser and flash player installed. The browser based version of the game runs extremely well on all platforms. I tested it out on Ubuntu + FF and there was zero difference in game play. Another downside to the game is that if you are attempting to play the game for free (it is entirely possible to do so by the way) then you may end up burning yourself out on the game before you can do anything. Gold is primarily earned through placing on the ladder and winning tournaments. Sadly if you start free that means you start with the basic decks available to all players and they suck. Right now this is part of the experience I am going through. I am currently trying to either justify dumping $20US into gold purchases or maybe giving up entirely.

The good news. As I mentioned before the game is free to play for those with patience. There is also the added bonus that you get phantom cards (they have a 20 day timer on them) for use in ladder play and challenges only. The browser client does make it possible to play the game from pretty much anywhere. It would be pretty cool to see it played on. Also the community is fairly small. You can actually interact directly with the developers in game and you can quickly get to learn who the fan base is. Last but not least the game does seem to be fairly balanced. Granted if you don’t have any cards it sure makes it hard to play well in a game, but once you get a few phantoms you will be surprised at how much more fun the game becomes.

All in all I have had a lot of fun with the last week I have been playing. Its a nice challenge and a new presentation for two old but great game styles. I highly recommend anyone who is a fan of either TCG or strategy games play this a bit.