Getting distracted.

Yes, this is almost recursive irony. Getting distracted while looking for a distraction. So while I had discussed MMO's I instead find myslef playing around with an ARPG. For those knew to the gaming acronyms, ARPG is Action Role Playing Game. It's a pretty broad category though, games like Nioh, and Dark Souls are ARPGs but so too are games like Diablo 3 and Torchlight. The ones that appeal to me most are the ones more like the Diablo franchise, especially those like the classic Diablo 2.

Ahh, so anyway, getting back to the distraction. I started playing an Early Access game on Steam called Wolcen. It's still rough around the edges, what game in alpha doesn't, and it definitely still has the odd crash and bug, but there is something very interesting. Graphically I haven't seen a better looking ARPG. More to follow, and I think rather than MMORPGs , I will look at ARPGs.

Picking a new MMORPG.

So on this page, I've got one entry, I really plan on changing that. I've been looking for something to replace World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2. I quite each one for different reasons.

Guild Wars 2 is based almost entirely on exploration, and PvP as well. There is ultimately very little story to draw you in. The Lore is really only so so, and while the "Living Story" is not horrible it's not so memorable as to pull you in. There is not much in the ay of real PVE at end game, and NCSoft + Arena Net have done great job of advertising that you are going to PvP at end game, down to the fact that they have even tried to make it seem E-Sprots like.

World of warcraft has just been dumbed down so much, it may be nostalgia talking to me, but the fact that I've gone from needing 6 bars in Wrath of the Lich King, to merely 3 in the current expansion is not really a good thing. Shorter bars isn't the problem, though, it is that the complexity is gone along with the bars. Now fewer bars doesn't mean complexity has to go too,  Guild Wars 2 is a perfect example of that. It effectively only has two bars for every class (engineer, revenant, and elementals excepted) yet it now feels like a more complicated situation than WoW does.

So in any case there is a MMORPG role in my gaming zone, so I'm off to look. I figure I will talk about each game I try and my feelings about it until I find one I want to stick with.

Guild Wars 2 finally has me.

So a confession.  I've owned Guild Wars 2 since September 2012 (basically just a couple months after it was released). I would love to tell you that it was initially one of those games that just hooked me and I've been playing it like mad ever since. Truth is, for some reason I never got into it. It's possible that the main reason is because the classes I have historically liked in the MMO genre just had anime styled armor which I didn't like. Maybe I just hadn't reached the level of burnout with various other games, I just don't know why it had never clicked. 

With the above in mind let me now lay out the further scenario. I had more or less burned out on most games, and because of family responsibilities I had lost my "gaming" PC to boot, all I had then was my beloved Macbook Pro that I had upgraded to last year. That in and of itself limited what games I could consider playing, plus since I also use my Macbook Pro for work, well I only have so much room I'm willing to use. So since, as I mentioned before, I owned a copy of Guild Wars 2, I decided to give it one last shot. 

The game has changed, a lot, since I last played. Oh the graphics are the same (gorgeous even toned down for my laptop) , and the professions are the same, and frankly the basic mechanics are the same. However what they have changed is the leveling experience, and class mechanics. And I think the leveling changes are what finally got me moving forward. 

In previous iterations of Guild Wars 2 you could have access to all you professions weapons by level 2 and you unlocked their abilities not by leveling up, but by use. While that may sound great and grand in theory what it does is great a low level "grind fest" so that by the time you leave the very early zones you have every weapon fully unlocked. Now the reason why this "grind fest" burned me out back in the day, is that it meant you got a lot of skills but it became very easy to miss key parts of the game which you might otherwise have not. For me the pieces that I tended to skip were dodging, and understanding things like retaliation and effective weapon swapping. With the current leveling mechanic the weapons unlock skill areas as you level. You cannot even use an offhand weapon (or get those nice 4th and 5th actions for your 2 handers) until Level 7. This rather simple change means even the low level mobs require a little finesse now and then, which means you learn to dodge/evade. Am I great at it? Heavens no, but at least now I spent time practicing it. 

Another aspect of the leveling that was lacking in previous version was the disjointed personal stories aspects. So much of the personal story is treated as time sensitive, for instance one Human story is about finding a child that went missing at a circus, but in the earlier version of the game their were level requirements to progress each part of a "story's chapter". Since each chapter has multiple missions it ultimately destroyed the weight that the the story might contain. Take the aformentioned Circus story, it started at level 10 an concluded at level 20. Being forced to move away from the story to get to the level requirements robbed the story of what I think the developers had in mind (namely something compelling that went beyond the old mom tropes). In the newer edition of this game, they just open up the chapters when you hit the max level needed for the events you play all parts of the chapter. I really love this aspect because it means if you lose the immersion from the personal story it is because you chose to, not because you were forced to. And maybe this was the ultimate payoff for me, because the personal story has been an absolute blast, it has kept me very involved in the game, to the point that for the first time in may 3-5 years I was at my keyboard last night saying "Ok, let me finish this last part to this chapter and then I will go to bed"

So Long story short, From September 2012 - December 2014 , 0 Characters to even Level 24. January7th to January 26th , 2 characters > Level 60, and enjoying every second of it. Finished the Lion's Arch Chapter of the person story as Part of the Order of Whispers, hoping to finish that same chapter tonight with the Vigil.