Meh

Meh, Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) gets its own card game. This is something that would of been awesomely cool at launch, but feels completely tacked on now. Plus, Sabaac is the penultimate card game for any Star Wars role-playing game, and no company seems to be willing to touch it. I honestly had wet dreams when it was mentioned that SWG would possibly have Sabaac in game at some point. Sadly it never happened.

I am not going to blast SOE too hard on this one. I am a sucker for card games and the market needs more of them on official online platforms that don't cost an arm and a leg to participate in (I'm looking at you MtG Online).

I've said it before; these sort of projects are the ones I can bear coming out of SOE. I just don't like the tacked on feeling of most of them. Can't one of them be launched on its own platform without a tie-in to a B-rate MMO?

Woot

My all-time favorite console RPG, Chrono Trigger, is headed to the Nintendo DS.

Take that Diablo III.

For posterity's sake: I have played Chrono Trigger DS before, it was called Chrono Trigger SNES.

Yawn

Its Diablo III. I feel sorry for anyone that believed different. After the Starcraft 2 announcement in Korea, I gave up all faith that Blizzard was out to shock anyone with their future games. Blizzard will stick to their IPs and make really good games with them.

Diablo III is hack and slash. Really good looking hack and slash. The classes look fun and insanely overpowered, which goes a long way towards making hack and slash something players can enjoy for more than a couple hours.

I'm really on the fence with Diablo III. I know it will be a good game and fun, but is it worth my time? I've tried enough mediocre hack and slash games over the years, avoided Diablo II due to Diablo I burnout, and with little time to play, I don't know what to think of Diablo III.

The one thing that I am curious about is what everyone else thinks. How long can Blizzard live off of these franchises if all we're going to get is well done updates? The last big move, going from RTS to MMO with World of Warcraft, by Blizzard came at the hands of the old-school designers which have long ago left the company.

Don't get me wrong. Blizzard makes great games and I enjoy most of them, but I just wish they could take that great development process and put into something new and a bit more exciting than another Diablo.

Bartle Is Right

The Internet at large is going blah, blah, blah as of late due to a wonderful quote from a man that a lot of MMO veterans have long argued is our "intellectual elite". That man is none other than Dr. Bartle, and here is the bomb he tossed:

Massively: "Are you planning on playing games like Age of Conan and Warhammer when they come out?"
Bartle: "I’ve already played Warhammer. It was called World of Warcraft."

I've railed against the WoW vs WAR comparisons before and completely blistered idiots trying to compare the two based on visuals, but Bartle's comment is not comparing the two. I think Dr. Bartle is 100% correct in what he said. He HAS played WAR already and it WAS called World of Warcraft.

Now, why would I go and say this after arguing until blue in the face that WAR is not WoW? Because of something I've said a hundred times before: players looking for the WoW experience will find it in WAR. All that is WoW can be found in WAR. The defining difference is that there will be a hell of a lot more to WAR than there is currently or will ever be to WoW.

That is not a slight against WoW, it is a statement of fact that Blizzard is the kind of developer that sticks strictly to what they can do right. PvE and all this dabbling in e-sports is right up Blizzard's ally and that is what WoW will always be. The question for WoW has been whether e-sport and PvE can coexist in the same game.

So, Bartle is right. He has played WAR already, because he is an Achiever by his own test. He has three level 70 characters in WoW. I have no doubt he could do the same when WAR launches, but I do not see Bartle ever hitting Realm Rank 80 (the true "end" level in WAR). Just as I doubt Bartle would ever achieve a 2000+ personal Arena rating on his level 70 WoW characters.

Even if Bartle talks better with a backspace key, I doubt he would remove his quote. For him, the experience to be gained in WAR for HIM is the exact same experience he got out of WoW.

To me that is more evidence that WAR is going to be a great game. The complete WoW experience is there, and everyone looking for it will find it. Funny thing is, a lot of these same people will also find out that WAR is fleshed out, full-featured, and actually encourages players to socialize at every turn.

And Cuppy, Bartle's statement was foolish, because as the industry veteran he is, he knew damn well how it would be taken and I think to a certain degree he wanted it to be taken that way. Foolish, his statement was, but wrong it was not. He has already stated he would shut down WoW, so it is of no surprise that a game that will deliver the same quality experience of WoW would be on his hit list as well. Smart people do say stupid things.

Epic Fail 2: Second Age of Conan Siege

Openedge was kind enough to point out that a second siege occurred in Age of Conan. According to him it went "much better", but I'm not quite sure our idea of "better" are exactly the same. For example: to me filet mignon is a much better cut of beef than sirloin. To Openedge, cube steak is better than ground beef, because its not ground as much. See what I did there?

From all reports on the second siege, the only aspect to improve, was that it was semi-playable this time around with top-end gaming rigs reaching an astonishing 15 FPS. Everything else STILL did not work. Walls were still exploited, and when the legitimate way to get through a wall, by smashing it to bits occurred, the attackers could not get past the now demolished structure. Siege weapons sat idle.

Really, I could go on and on with the list of problems that AoC's siege warfare has currently, but it isn't worth the typing. The fact is: AoC's end-game siege warfare was not ready at launch. This is fine for the hardcore guilds currently battling each other. They expected as much, are used to such failures, and will battle on into the future.

Problem is, the hardcore guilds are going to quit, regardless of whether sieges get fixed or not. I've played with every single hardcore guild listed, both against and alongside them, and none of them has stuck in any MMO for any length of time. Sure, their name lives on, but rarely do the mainstay players and leaders of the guild last long. There is always a greener pasture to look forward to.

What happens when these early adopter guilds decline? Does Funcom have the system fixed by then or will the majority of AoC players walk into a disaster? I'm not going to sit around and say Funcom can't get it fixed, but I will chastise them for leaving it in-game in such disrepair. It definitely nailed the coffin shut in my mind. I will never play Age of Conan.

I spent a lot of energy arguing that AoC was a direct WoW knock-off and that the only defining features of AoC were not complete, would not work, and are exactly in the state that beta testers predicted them to be.

AoC has proven beyond a doubt that it is a WoW clone, a barely-capable WoW-clone at that. The PvE game is almost an exact copy, which is fine, but the features meant to define AoC as a non-WoW-clone, just are not ready. Will Funcom fix them and develop AoC into a long-standing MMO for their core audience? Probably, but don't expect any more massive interest in the title. Launch was as good as it will get for AoC.