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Achievement unlocked – Level 50!

July 25, 2010 in PC gaming by with 0 Comments

zubbyy_is_happeh I hit 50 on my Mage today! As you can see on the left, he is very happy about that.

When I started four (almost five) days ago, he was almost at 46. Obviously the rested XP helped a great deal. I got about two levels out of it before I went back to normal.

I found the best way to level was a combination of questing and random dungeons. Granted, randoms don’t always go so well since you are playing with random people from other realms. But fortunately I didn’t have too many bad experiences. In fact, my level 50 ding was in a random on Sunken Temple. I did that instance about ten times. I no longer want to go back there for a while, if possible.

Now it’s back to questing and randoms until 58. I’m pretty sure I won’t be making it to 58 in the 4 days I have left of my trial… but that’s no biggie. I have a friend coming to visit for two weeks on the 30th so I doubt I’ll be playing WoW after that anwyay. Once I’m 58 though, I’ll be heading thru the Dark Portal and that’s when shit gets real. Can’t wait.

Here’s the link to my character’s armory page if you wanna check that out. Gear judgments are most welcome!

-Rav4ge

WoW’s Goblin Starting Zone looks really kick ass

July 18, 2010 in PC gaming, Ramblings by with 0 Comments

I am very happy with what I am seeing in this video. The environments are gorgeous and colorful, the questing looks better then ever with all those scripted events, and I can’t wait to get a hot rod like that for my own green self when Cataclysm hit shelves. Blizzard has really nailed it with this expansion (from what I’ve seen of course), and coming from someone who hasn’t bothered with WoW’s expansions due to lack of new things for lowbies, this is definitely an expansion I’m going to check out sometime. This makes WoW’s current starting zones look like something out of a F2P MMO (yes, including the Death Knight starting area). It’s simply kick ass!

-Rav4ge

LOTRO going free to play? Uhhhhh…

June 5, 2010 in PC gaming, Ramblings by with 0 Comments

f2pdwarf

I know what you’re thinking. Yet another blogger giving his thoughts on Turbine’s biggest MMO going F2P. My apologies. It has to be said.

Turbine released this bit of news to everyone very recently, and as usual I was a little late on the announcement. At first I was pretty pissed. I remembered reading rumors about it and thinking to myself, “nah, LOTRO isn’t dying like DDO was. It’ll never go F2P.”

Boy was I wrong. And pissed. I just bought all the expansions a while back and I actually was thinking of re-subscribing because of how much I enjoyed the last free weekend even they had. But, after some thinking I’m a little more okay with Turbine’s decision. It only makes sense that LOTRO would go F2P after the success of DDO’s re-launch as a F2P title a while back. I think it would be safe to assume Turbine would make more off LOTRO if it also used this revenue model too. Even so, I will miss the old LOTRO. Once a game goes free, in come the Maplefucks and Runetards who won’t pay for MMOs. It’s these kinds of people I really do not want to see in a game like this. LOTRO really does have one of the best player bases I’ve seen in an MMO, and that may or may not go down the shitter once the inevitable happens. Hopefully it won’t be that noticeable.

Still, I have signed up for the beta and I will definitely be returning to LOTRO for the beta or the relaunch. I encourage you to do the same, especially if you haven’t played LOTRO yet.

-Rav4ge

Darkfall first impressions

February 23, 2010 in PC gaming by with 1 Comment

Note: game does not actually look this good.

Yeah, it happened. I finally caved in and bought Darkfall which has probably the most mixed opinions of any MMO ever. Some people love it, others think it is a complete pile of shit, and some are sorta in between. Well, I am here to add my humble opinion to that pile.

After dropping the fifty bucks for the game over on the site, I downloaded the client and began patching. Prevab, who also plays Darkfall (and did a review of it right here on this site) chose Alfar as his race so I pretty much had no other choice than to go Alfar too. Why? Well, Alfar are the only race in the game that have no other racial alliances. So this was the only way I would be able to play with him properly. Why he chose Alfar, I will never know. I wanted to be a wolf man, not some emo british metal-loving pansy-ass elf.

After making my character (Darkfall only allows one character per account by the way) I hopped into the world of Darkfall, not knowing what to expect. My first thought post-login was this – DAYUM this game is ugly. And it was! It’s probably because I picked Alfar so the starting zone is all dark and gritty to go with the racial “style” but damn those were some ugly textures.

I picked up the first two quests – kill 4 goblins and get 4 goblin axes – and headed out to kill some goblins. I kinda got lost along the way and ended up falling off a cliff into a very large swamp. My map said there were goblins in the swamp, so I began looking. This is where Darkfall began to get me. I was so used to being able to actually see mobs plain as day in other MMOs, but this was different. I couldn’t make out anything among the destroyed buildings and rubble the swamp contained. It felt like I was actually out hunting something. I felt like I was all alone in some swamp with goblins, with no one there to help me. Everything was silent. Then out of nowhere, I heard the sound of an arrow flying through the air and a split second later my character screamed in pain. The chase was on! From there, I ran around a corner and waited. When I came out for a look I spotted a Goblin Scout, just about to launch another arrow in my face. I ran up to him and spammed my melee attack until I saw him hit the floor. Seemed to work well enough. I gathered his possessions and went back behind cover to try and spot more goblins. This went on for a while, and eventually I had killed more goblins than necessary because of all the ones that had attacked me out of nowhere when I had been looting their friends’ stuff. I felt like I was doing really well and owning these gobbos up – until the goblins got wise and ambushed me. I had been looting more stuff and had foolishly let my guard down when three goblins (shaman, scout and fighter) began attacking me. I tried to run, but the shaman finished me off with a magic missile and I fell to the ground. When you die in Darkfall, you lose everything. Even your quest items. I ended up safely gathering four more goblin axes before handing both quests in and then logging off. Nevertheless, it was a good experience and definitely a unique one.

I like this one so far though, more then I thought I would. The world can be lacking in some areas while others seem very finished but the AI provides a very different sense of tactics that I have never before experienced in an MMO. It just felt really different. The UI is pretty good too. I’ve heard people complaining about it before, but I was comfortable with it after about 30 minutes of use.

The only problem I have with Darkfall is the fear of not having much to do in the future. It seems the PvE is generally quite dry and grindy (which is not a problem when the combat is so great) but when the whole game is about grinding skills it will become a bore for me quite quickly.

But still, Darkfall has serious appeal and I can see myself continuing to play it.

-Rav4ge

Battlefield Bad Company 2 beta thoughts

February 6, 2010 in PC gaming by with 0 Comments

7486

I decided to go ahead and pre-order BF:BC2 on Steam so I could get early access to the beta. I played it a good ~2 hours Friday night, and I can tell you right now that for the one map/one gametype offered, I had a lot of fun. If you’ve played the previous Bad Company, you probably know what’s going on here.

The gametype offered is called “Push” which involves one team as attackers and the other as defenders. There are sets of objectives on the map, usually two at a time that must be destroyed through bombing techniques in order for the attackers to advance to the next set. In order to do this, bombs must be planted at each objective, and it’s up to the defenders to make sure these bombs never go off. After both objectives are destroyed a second area of the map is unlocked and two new objective points appear. And the game continues on like so.

It’s a lot of fun, and coming from MW2 I was surprised at how realistic the gun play is. Weapons (like in the first game) have some pretty nasty kickback and the accuracy isn’t great so you really have to make sure you’re firing in bursts and keeping your recoil down. There are a bunch of different weapons in the game, and as you rank up you gain access to them, similar to MW2. There’s also vehicles of varying sorts but I’m not big on vehicles in FPS games so I mainly went on foot, though I did have fun riding the quads provided to the attackers. And of course you have the Frostbite engine here too which means hiding in buildings isn’t always a good idea. Everything (well… almost everything) can be destroyed.

The game also looks pretty nice, on par with MW2. There’s a lot of action going on around you almost always so I really had to crank the settings down in order to get a decent frame rate. While I didn’t get huge lag on high settings, the framerate was somewhere between 20-30 FPS which for me is not acceptable. That’s something I’m hoping will be improved because right now the game is pretty hard on your system.

So far though, I had a lot of fun with this one and I anxiously await the release in March. I’ll definitely be playing this from here on out, it’s a blast and more maps and gametypes can only make it better. See you on the Battlefield!

-Rav4ge

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