Too Much Stuff

Posted on September 23, 2008 by Scott Jennings| 29 Comments

I’m playing Warhammer, because I can be a Bright Wizard and set things on fire. Longtime readers will know that this is a key requirement of my MMO experience. On the positive side, Warhammer is tons more stable than Age of Conan was, and I can actually run it. On the minus side, I’ve heard rumors that there is an NDA’d test server with a “SECRET PATCH” waiting to go out with class balance changes. If Mythic actually has managed to run a test server with an NDA… well, that’s certainly original. After all, no one really cares about the details of upcoming patches, especially when they contain class balance changes! So on the positive side from that, that is definitely something World of Warcraft isn’t doing. Take that, haters!

But then there’s the Witcher. The Witcher is a great RPG from Poland which lets you play an amoral drugged-up medieval vigilante that leaves a path of sex and violence in his wake. I find this concept cool for some reason. And they just issued an Enhanced Edition which features an English translation that doesn’t suck. No, really. It’s a FEATURE. To be fair, I don’t think anyone really expected a deep RPG from Eastern Europe to have great dialogue that shouldn’t be cheaped out on. But anyway, I should really play that.

But there’s the Force Unleashed. It lets you be a DARK JEDI and THROW STORMTROOPERS AGAINST A WALL.

But there’s Rock Band 2, which is like Rock Band, but TWO!

But there’s my old World of Warcraft guild, which occasionally sends me plaintive IMs asking me to come back, promising they’ll never return to Molten Core ever again!

But there’s

But there’s

But there’s

But there’s not enough hours in the day.

This entry was posted in Meta, The Witcher, Warhammer, World of Warcraft, _. Bookmark the permalink.
  • Tal

    PLEASE come back! I won’t touch MC!

    We miss you.

  • http://www.sparkplaymedia.com Matt Mihaly

    Don’t forget about Viva Pinata 2 (best gardening game ever….#1 in a field of at least two or three!) and Geometry Wars 2 (what every 2d space shooter ever made wishes it could have been). I haven’t even had a chance to unwrap Rock Band 2 yet.

  • http://rog.gameslate.com/ Rog

    Plus having Bejeweled as a World of Warcraft addon gives everyone another excuse to play Bejeweled.

  • Mortarion

    To be fair, we don’t actually run Molten Core that often. In fact, I don’t think we’ve ever run it *without* you. It’s just that there’s some wacky quantum-mathematical formula governing it which means that, on the evenings that you log in, the rules of probability dictate that we must be going to Molten Core.

    Hence, from your point of view, it appears that we are in a constant-state Molten Core raiding flux loop.

    But seriously, next time we’ll do ZG or somethin’.

  • Ciarnat

    If you come back now, we’ll get you a beer mug with its own wench…

  • Merkwurdigliebe

    Don’t forget replaying Diablo 2 as a poisonmancer this time.

  • Vetarnias

    “On the positive side, Warhammer is tons more stable than Age of Conan was, and I can actually run it.”

    In my case, it’s quite the opposite:
    Age of Conan = Computer below system requirements, frame rate barely breaking the two-digit mark, making a slide show look more dynamic, but it rarely if ever crashed.

    Warhammer = Crash to desktop at random points. Could be immediately on logging in, or an hour later, but it will crash. I have never had to log out of this game in the proper fashion this far.

    But at least Age of Conan didn’t go bragging about how its system requirements were realistic.

  • Athryn

    According to my sources, the Elder server (the NDA’d test server) got shut down at release. Granted, this was from a tester who ended up not buying the game.

  • Walter Yarbrough

    Hearts of Iron . . . 2 and 3 . . . are calling.

    Play Communist China with me . . .

  • http://vandermint.wordpress.com/ vandermint

    “But there’s not enough hours in the day.”

    You could spend less time sprucing up your blog. Getting all this white space just right probably took days.

  • Scott Jennings

    It took me AT LEAST 15 seconds to click “Apply This Theme”!

  • dartwick

    I meant to try Spore.

    But everynight this week I decided I would rather play WAR than I would spend the time buying Spore and installing it.
    In fact I let a lot of stuff go this week that I meant to do.

    Its a good feeling I havent had for a long time – I hope it lasts through the end game.

  • http://kfsone.wordpress.com/ kfsone

    Rock Band or Guitar Hero needs to embelish with a guitar that has a full range of tilt meters and accelerometers so you can control your on-screen character to add a dance-dance like component. Shake your guitar the right way and see your avatar do the chuckberry!

  • Anonyous

    Honestly, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the original Witcher translation. It certainly didn’t detract from my enjoyment of what was for me the best PC RPG since Baldur’s Gate 2. Bought the EE just for the sake of supporting the developers, since I’d like to see a sequel as soon as possible. (Speaking of voting with your dollar, if any of you like Koei games and aren’t console gamers, consider dropping $19 on Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI via Direct2Drive. Since Creative Assembly decided to move the Total War series away from its initial Koei influences, I at least have been itching for more of their signature gameplay on the PC.)

    Maybe it’s kind of unfortunate that we need a Polish developer to rescue Western RPGs in an era of underdeveloped sandboxes, “cinematic gaming” snoozefests and phoned-in regurgitations of stale tropes (I’m looking at you, Bioware). But if this is the level of quality coming out of eastern European dev houses, keep it coming!

    On a completely unrelated note, Warhammer seems to have a memory leak that leads to an inevitable crash if you play long enough. That was ~5 hours on my old bog with 3GB. Playing on a new box with 4GB RAM and haven’t experienced any crashes yet–but I’ve also substantially lost interest in the game as leveling becomes glacial, scenarios and PQs become very samey in T3.

  • Freakazoid

    I never picked up witcher because of the long load times and other bugs I read about. I imagine by now they got SOMETHING right, so maybe I’ll pick up this extended edition afterall. Have they added the fully nude pics to the US version yet?

    I decided to forego warhammer for a while, and I’m glad I am. Gives me time to spot the overpowered classes and roll one of those. I also avoid the dirty feeling I get paying for beta.

    I also like your new layout. I can actually copy/paste comments now!

  • Iconic

    “#

    I meant to try Spore.

    But everynight this week I decided I would rather play WAR than I would spend the time buying Spore and installing it.”

    You’re missing exactly nothing.

  • kazamx

    About WAR having a secret server. You know many other MMOs have those servers too? The patch is released to these guys to play with and give feedback on before the general public test server. This gives them chance to iron out the most obvious problems before the public hear about them.

    Seems pretty smart to me. Why don’t you hear about the secret servers for other games you ask, there under NDAs too.

  • Knurd

    To watch you cliche puppets do what you do, makes me do what I do…

    BC: rearmed (precision gaming)

    Mercenaries 2 (co-op greatness)

    Braid (you know you like it, fuckers)

    Your dead business model will SWALLOW YOUR SOUL.

  • http://www.thisisnotacommunity.org D-0ne

    dartwick,

    Spore is a massive disappointment. I’d like to get my $50 back.
    Every time I break my “wait 90 days” rule for online games I get burned.

    I’ll wait the 90 and see what the reviews of WHO are like then.

  • http://wowpanda.blogspot.com wowpanda

    A whole new feel and look of your website??!! I am a raging neo-conservative and I want the old one back, pleasssssssssssssssssssssssssssse.

    Ok on a serious note, where is the broken toy image? You know that catch image got value too right?

  • http://construed.wordpress.com dmosbon

    “It took me AT LEAST 15 seconds to click “Apply This Theme”!”

    Was that after you looked at my blog? HEHE…

  • chabuhi

    Tried Spore – great through creature phase. My wish for it would be an option to stop at that point and just allow your creature to live as a virtual pet on your desktop. You could still design vehicles and even buildings that the creature could use, but it would just be a pet doing its own thing. Get bored, “roll” a new critter.

    Witcher … LOVED it when it came out! Still love it, and the EE did bring some nice new touches and fixes. However, they actually re-looped the VO and it is dismal compared to the original. I don’t know if the actors didn’t have a chance to get back into character or what, but the updated English voiceovers are … meh.

  • chabuhi

    Oh, and to answer Freakazoid’s question above: US version of Witcher is still censored for evil boobies, even in EE.

    Have to say, though, aside from a still frustrating early quest (read: twitchfest syndrome), The Witcher is definitely one of my favorite RPG’s in a long time.

  • Vetarnias

    If we disregard my own technical problems with WAR, I’m still very disappointed with the way it is set up.

    To consider:

    -Meaningless and disjointed “crafting” system serving no apparent purpose of its own (why can’t they for once create a fantasy MMO with a meaningful economy?). This is to me the biggest indicator that the game has far less depth than it seems to have.

    -Complete absence of high personal/guild stakes (such as player-owned keeps) in comparison to impersonal “faction” stakes, which are rather meaningless and especially so on a server where one side is overpopulated.

    -The PvP system is ingenious, but will probably get old very quickly if the impact it has on the world is akin to little more than a battle simulator.
    -No human tank for Order. Not a personal gripe of mine, since I decided to play a ranged-attack character this time around, but I see it mentioned regularly.

    -No community whatsoever around the game, exacerbated by the lack of official forums. All you get instead is a few surrogate forums held by fans of the game, where hyperbole is fine as long as it’s in support of WAR.

    -Not much sense of a community in the game either. I’m a North American, but since my only available time is at 4 AM, I chose to play on an Oceanic server, considering it’s prime time in Australia/New Zealand. However, I see very little chat in game; ironically, that automatic group detection has succeeded in killing off those “lfg” posts, the last trace of a reminder that you weren’t playing a single-player game. I’m still in Tier 1, but I see very few players who have joined guilds.

    -Major discrepancies in server populations. A few at High/Full, and others at Low on both sides. (There are maybe 3 out of 6 Oceanic servers with populations above Low, and two of these are almost full in peak hours.) It’s a game I wouldn’t want to start playing 6 months from now, since Tier 1 is probably going to be empty on most servers; the currently full ones will be filled with full-grown players, and the others won’t probably have enough people in any but the last tier. It’s one thing to kill your young, as in Shadowbane, but here it’s really about gradually sectioning them off so they can play king of the lowest-tier sandbox.

  • Balasarius

    US Edition of the Witcher can get Euro boobies here:

    **NSFW**

    http://www.nakedskins.com/Overview/p13_sectionid/13

    **NSFW**

    Plus, some fully nude models.

    I don’t know if this works with the EE, but I think it should.

  • Andy O.

    OMG YES! Too much STUFF!

    Hello FALLOUT 3?! I’ve barely touched Spore yet, Guitar Hero: World Tour (Drums kick ass, already tried em), I can’t think of much else, but I am already swamped, and Warhammer (surprise surprise) is fun, as long as you play Order.

    Destruction sucks for some reason, I think it’s because everyone wants to be evil, and so they have to wait for us to click into RvR. I never have to wait for RvR as an Order player. Word to the wise, but try both and decide for yourself.

    Now I’m thinking of Steaming The Witcher Enhanced, I never played it, and with an 81 Meta rating, I’m suprised I didn’t give this one a more through run.

    -A.

  • Axecleaver

    The Witcher was fantastic – I still haven’t finished it, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable RPG. I liked the original, non-enhanced version just fine.

    WAR has been great, too. Pretty good launch (aside from the shenanigans with CE, SE, etc release servers changing – that ended up scattering our alliance around a bunch of servers despite weeks of planning). The pvp in WAR is well-integrated to the game as a whole, and has been a lot of fun.

    I do agree the crafting is a little lame, but in terms of community – maybe it’s your server, or your guild. Our community is coming along really well.

  • Durendar

    Not enough hours in the day? Hell yeah.
    Not enough days in the year? That too!

    Fallout 3 is on the way, I have the Fable Pub games (acquired by my brother as a little bithday present) which now means I -will- be playing Fable 2, and I recently picked up Civ Revolution, too.

    Despite all these things, I get dragged back into Moon Guard on a highly regular basis.

    Wrath is coming! You can come back, too ^_-

  • http://www.digbejeweled.com Bejeweled

    If you’re into bejeweled you can play a couple of variations at http://www.digbejeweled.com and also save your high-scores and compete with others… i’m an addict :-)