You Games-Meandering Bastard

Yes,Victor, you games-meandering bastard.

You’re playing or trying TOO MANY freaking games.

You have Borderlands 2, Dark Souls PC, X-Com: Enemy Unknown, and Morrowind (using the Morrowind visual enhancer) to tide you over on the non-MMO front.

Then you have an active sub to LOTRO, which you don’t play actively, and WoW, which you’re having trouble connecting to reliably.

AND you got a year’s membership to Pirate101?!

WHAT THE BLOODY HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!

Now you’re considering getting The Walking Dead and subbing to RIFT and getting the Storm Legion expansion? I mean, I understand wanting TWD, but you could never stick to RIFT!

And you want to go back just for the freaking housing?! What the bloody, bloody hell is churning around in your head?

*imaginary hairpull*

For the love of all that is finger-licking good, like fried chicken, curb your purchases, at least till November.

 

Signed,

Victor’s Meandering Mind.

If Stillwater Enters Fluidic Space, is He Still Stillwater?

In trying to come up with a worthwhile title for this post, I’d basically exhausted my mind thinking of a title that did not have overt references to this particular science fiction franchise.

I think using my name in reference to a portion of the canonical space in that universe fits the idea of an unorthodox title.

What’s this all about, you say?

Well, I still have a sub to Rift, and I was thinking of cancelling the sub and not letting it renew since it’s a three-monther, so I was trying to find a game with a sub that I could enjoy casually as an alternative to playing Final Fantasy XIV.

I had settled on two possibilities before bed: heading to the stars courtesy of Star Trek Online, or going dystopian with the help of Fallen Earth. While I had played Fallen Earth previously, my connection issues with the game made it rather unplayable and turned me off from purchasing the game this round. As such, Star Trek Online became the de facto winner in my mind for “next MMO to try” when I got out of bed.

I’m currently downloading a patch for the game, but I’ve settled on a course of action that should be quite interesting.

If you’re a long-time reader, you’ll know that my favorite Star Trek series has to be Voyager, and it’s not because of Jeri Ryan playing Seven of Nine. It was because I thought Captain Janeway was an awesome Captain who upheld the ideals of the Federation in the most trying of circumstances, and because Robert Picardo was an excellent Emergency Medical Hologram.

Well, because of this, I’ve decided to take the long road and play a Science Officer who uses a Science-based ship, working my way to get the equivalent of the Voyager spacecraft and eventually retrofitting said Voyager-class spacecraft into its final form by the end of the series.

As members of the game community come up with new, exciting stories on the Foundry, I’ll also be taking a look at them and hopefully reviewing them for you.  That said, I’m in no rush and, so long as I have FFXIV and STO to keep me company, it should be an interesting couple of weeks here over at Games and Geekery Headquarters.

There’s just one thing though.

What the heck do I name my first ship? SUGGESTIONS MOST WELCOME!

On “Bad” Games, Pricing Models, and the Feeling of Fun

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing - a "bad" game or simply not fun for a majority?

I was reading Beau Hindman’s latest Free for All column earlier and a thought occurred to me that I wanted to put in writing. In Hindman’s post, he was, in part, discussing how the free-to-play movement can be seen as the latest experiential phenomenon to take hold to the world of MMO gaming.

While free-to-play games have had a long-standing history in the realm of MMO titles available to the world, there’s been this stigma that a free-to-play MMO is is some sort of lesser being in the realm of gaming, that it is relegated to the realm of “inferior” products. We know now, through experiencing various MMO pricing models and hybrids of such models of payment, that high-quality and “less-than-high-quality” MMOs can be found in all points of the pricing spectrum.

Now, you may have noticed that I’ve placed quotation marks on some of the negative modifiers in the previous paragraph, and there’s a good reason for that. It all goes back to my personal belief that I, as an individual, have my own preferences and mindsets in life and I cannot truly say that one thing is absolutely abhorrent for everyone. Even the basic ideas of death and poverty or the basic emotions of joy and sadness are so wildly divergent in what they mean to people (such as in terms of what constitutes certain ideas, or what triggers an emotion).

As such, a corollary to my personal belief would be that the “bad” game does not exist. There are simply games that fewer people enjoy and games that a larger group of people enjoy. The sweeping generalizations that Syp recently talked about regarding gaming have to be taken out if we are to better understand why people can feel similar emotions when faced with completely different and possibly opposing stimuli.

For instance, let us take stock of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV and Trion Worlds’ Rift.

When I first installed Final Fantasy XIV on my computer, I played for four or five hours and pretty much left the game entirely because it did not capture my attention. Information on the game and its various activities was scarce, and if you were the type of gamer who honed his skills on World of Warcraft, the lack of question marks to indicate quest givers would drive you insane.

On the other hand, when I first heard of Rift and played the beta, I was also not thoroughly impressed, until launch grew closer and I realized it was essentially a highly polished and technically proficient game with an intriguing storyline. If you check my Rift articles here on Games and Geekery, you’ll notice I meander between thinking the game is “meh” and thinking the game is awesome for having tanks that can self-heal.

If you fast forward to last week though, you’ll notice I barely posted anything. The simple response to this is that Rift could not hold my attention and I was madly searching for a game to occupy my free time. On Saturday evening, I decided to play Final Fantasy XIV again on a whim. I created a new character, rolled on a new server, and looked for the old guild I was chatting with online about the game. I played FFXIV for, as it happens, 14  hours straight that day (a feat that only happened once previously when I went raiding in vanilla WoW).

This week, I was reading through other blogs, and Elementalistly’s entry on how he feels about Rift kind of got to me. It wasn’t that I was offended by his post. Quite the opposite really.

You see, I was beginning to feel the exact same thing he felt when it came to Rift, only I was experiencing what he was feeling with Final Fantasy XIV, the game Elementalistly and I once both found to be less than stellar.

When I compare the two games on a purely technical level, I find Rift to be a clear leader in terms of customer-centric accessibility and polish. Final Fantasy XIV is not perfect, and still remains free-to-play so long as Square Enix deems the game to be in a state that is below their standard of what a good game should be.

Despite this, however, I know that there are people like myself who currently feel about Final Fantasy XIV the same way that Elementalistly feels about Rift. We’re all having fun in the games our preferences and predilections lead us to, and it shouldn’t matter how much you play, how much you pay, or how off-beat your tastes are.

The important thing is that you are happy with what you’re doing, whether it’s when you’re playing an MMORPG, when you’re writing that fantasy novel masterpiece about the adventurous marmot with nunchaku, or when you’re enjoying Direct TV Specials in the comfort of your home.

Can you dig it?! Rift System Requirements Revealed

Over on the Official Forums for the upcoming MMO Rift, Cindy Bowens, Senior Community Manager for Rift, has released the required and recommended system specs for the game.

Below, the system specs themselves:

Minimum System Specification
Operating system: Windows XP, Vista or 7
Processor: Dual Core 2.0 GHz or better
Memory: 2 GB
Hard disk space: 8.0 GB available
Video: Nvidia GeForce FX 5900, ATI/AMD Radeon X300, Intel GMA X4500 or better.
Sound: DirectX 8.1 compliant card
DirectX®: 9.0c, June 2010 update
Broadband internet connection (DSL, cable modem or other high speed connection)

Recommended System Specification
Operating system: Windows XP, Vista or 7
Processor: Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz or better
Memory: 4 GB
Hard disk space: 8.0 GB available
Desktop Video: Nvidia GTS 250 or better
Notebook Video: Nvidia GTX 200M series or better
Sound: DirectX 8.1 compliant card
DirectX®: 9.0c, June 2010 update
Broadband internet connection (DSL, cable modem or other high speed connection)

Folks who have received invites for phase one of the beta should check this out and compare it with their current specs to see if the game will run well enough on their system. Cheers!

Rift’s Closed Beta Begins December 3rd

Just a short write-up for the folks who have been looking forward to trying something new in the MMO gaming sphere.

Trion Worlds’ Rift will finally have its first closed beta test period on December 3rd. The closed beta periods are limited time events designed to look at certain parts of the game, such as questing, PVE content, and the actual Rift system. The first beta test will look at the Defiant faction, and will allow players to try the level 1-20 zones, as well as the Defiant starting zone and Freemarch City.

Massively’s already got a good hands-on look at the game, and it’s rather exciting to see the official forums for the game abuzz with beta discussion.

Feel free to sign up for the beta when you can, and pray that you get in! Good luck!

 

Source: Massively