Biggs' Zone

A Geek's Cogitations, Conjectures and other Cortical Experiences

Tag: Gaming Page 26 of 28

SWTOR: Patch 1.2 Impressions

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On April 16, 2012

In Gaming, SWTOR

Greetings Force-fanatics! It has been nearly a week since Game Update 1.2 went live and, while it did spark a couple controversies, I’d say the general feeling is fairly positive. While I’m not a hard core PvP gamer, I know that many were disappointed to hear that the Ranked PvP was yanked out at the last minute from patch 1.2, but I’m sure Bioware had a very good reason for doing that. On that same note, I have not had an opportunity to try out the new Warzone so I can’t really offer a perspective on it – though I hope to give it a try in the near future.

I also won’t be able to provide any feedback on the new Operation, Explosive Conflict, as I do not have a toon that is ready for operations.

So lets talk about the things that I have actually taken the time to investigate and the two biggest components would be the UI Customization and the Legacy System changes.

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Soapbox: What Is With The Whining?!?

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On April 13, 2012

In General Cogitation, Soapbox

OMG, what is with all the whining!!?? Yes, I am aware that I am whining about whining. It isn’t hypocrisy, its cognitive dissonance. So be that as it may, there seems to be a lot of people whining about everything recently. UI changes, patches; are we, as a society, so spoiled that our immediate reaction to change is to focus on the negative?? I am fully in favor of technology evolving to bring us information faster but a pitfall of instant gratification is we seem to always expect the results to be perfect and we whine about it when it isn’t perfect.

I hate to tell you this folks, but there is no such thing as perfect. There is no such thing as 100% and if you always expect perfection from someone else doing the work then you will forever exist in disappointment.

Whaaaa! Too Much White Space!!!!

Whaaaa! They Nerfed My Class!!!!

WHAAAAA! **TIMELINE!!!!

If you think you can do it better, then get to work but remember that human beings are imperfect therefore anything we create will also be imperfect. Why can’t we be grateful for the positives of change and understand that nearly everything in technology is iterative; meaning that it will constantly change and, in theory, improve with each iteration.

This is the problem with social media, the loudest people on the Internet are typically the most ungrateful! Buck Up, Sally!!!!!

/end soapbox

** For clarification, I have made some negative comments about Timeline in the past but it has been merely for propaganda purposes. Personally, I have no issue with Timeline.

The MMO Times: First Contact

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On April 10, 2012

In Gaming, MMO Times, MMORPG

Issue 30

Hey Gamers! How does another issue of The MMO Times sound? If any of you are confused by the name of this issue, April 5th was First Contact Day because April 5th, 2063 is when Zeframe Cochrane makes first contact with the Vulcans, so there is some useless nerd minutia for you.

So this issue we have more SWTOR news, including a launch date for Game Update 1.2 (WOOT!). There is also some more beta and pre-order information for Guild Wars 2 and TERA. Again, I didn’t really talk too much about Mists of Pandaria because there aren’t a lot of details that are unknown at this point. Contrary to what I have said in previous posts (and on Google+) I actually have been trying out the MoP beta, perhaps I will cover that in a blog post.

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What’s Your First Contact?

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On April 5, 2012

In Gaming

I want to start off by saying Happy First Contact Day gamers, trekkies and sci-fi geeks! The second thing I want to say is that this post is not asking when you had a close encounter (sorry Fran Drescher). Instead, since this blog is predominately a gamer blog, I thought I would ask what your first gaming experience was. You can choose any platform (i.e. console, PC, MMO, etc). I just thought it would be fun to do something to commemorate this truly nerdy day.

Obviously I will start. The original Nintendo was my debut into gaming. Super Mario Brothers, FTW! I also played a lot of Blades of Steel with my dad, which was often entertaining because he didn’t like to lose. NES became Sega (which was the first gaming system I bought myself) where I played a lot of Mortal Kombat and Sonic, then Super NES and pretty much every iteration of Nintendo after that. I never bought a Playstation. I didn’t play XBox until I met my wife, she had the original XBox and we still have the XBox 360. We never got the Kinect and probably never will.

PC gaming didn’t really start until freshmen year in high school and it started off slow. It was my parents first computer and it was Windows 3.1 on an IBM Aptiva, it had a 4 MB hard drive, which was HUGE back then. I mostly played things like Descent and Sim-City. It wasn’t until college, when I got my own PC, that I really got into PC gaming. First Person Shooters were my primary gaming medium of choice. I think I played Half-Life my entire college career.

It wasn’t until a “Fuzzy” friend of mine convinced me to check out World of Warcraft that I tried out MMORPGs. The rest, as they say, is history.

The MMO Times: The Panda’s Are Coming!!

By

On March 29, 2012

In Gaming, MMORPG

Issue 29

Hello Again, Gamers! Despite the title, there won’t be a lot of Mists of Pandaria information in this issue, mainly because there is so much out there that I didn’t want to flood this post with articles just about the next WoW expansion. If you really want to check out all the upcoming features for MoP I would head over to MMO-Champion, they have quite a comprehensive collection of information.

Instead I tried to keep things more about other games because, despite Blizzard’s best efforts, there are other games out there to play then just WoW and after nearly eight years, the other games are just more interesting. I did include a couple of WoW-related posts but I think people might enjoy some new information about upcoming (new) MMOs like Pathfinder Online and World of Darkness.

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WoW: Why I’m Not Going to Beta MoP

By

On March 21, 2012

In Gaming, MMORPG, World of Warcraft

I suppose it wouldn’t be completely accurate to say that I won’t opt-in for the Mists of Pandaria beta, I probably will. In fact I may even log in to check it out, but I probably won’t do any long term testing of the expansion. In fact I probably won’t participate in any beta for a game (or expansion) that I intend to play when it goes live. I have decided this after playing the beta for SWTOR.

I discovered, after participating in the SWTOR for nearly 8 months, that once the game goes live, it starts to feel stale pretty quick. Granted there are some subtle changes and sometimes that is good and sometimes, not so good. For example, in SWTOR there was a preference in the Social options that I used all the time while I was in the beta, but when the game went live, they took it out. I never found out why but I was pretty disappointed to find it missing.

Eventually SWTOR became exciting again after I leveled past all the quests that I had already done repeatedly (because of data resets) in the beta. Be that as it may, I would still like to avoid that kind of repetition especially in an expansion where the level cap is only increased by five (which means there will already be some repetition, relatively quickly, when I start leveling the alts). I hope that I don’t discourage anyone else from participating in a beta. The beta test is an extremely important part of software development and the more people that participate the better the user experience will be (in theory) when the product goes live. It is also kind of fun to say that you had participated in the beta of a popular game.

Cheers!

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