Demajen

[TSW] ‘The Secret World’ – First Impressions

demajen — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:38:33 +0000

Funcom have finally allowed the general public to play their anticipated modern day MMORPG for this weekend’s beta event. I wrote a blog a while back on my anticipation level for the game and how the excitement was wearing off in the face of repeated marketing spiel and the lack of real footage. Today I’ll examine whether my fears were justified, or if my finely-homed British cynicism had nothing to worry about.

What Is ‘The Secret World’?

The beta experience lets you create a member of the Templars secret society. This is kinda cool, from my perspective, as the Templars are the ‘British’ secret society in the game, and are the society I was always likely to play should I pick the game up. You start off, very briefly, as an ordinary member of the public, until you swallow a magic bee while you are sleeping and gain super powers. No, I’m not making that up. It does sound like utter bollocks until you see the actual cutscene of you gradually, over the course of a week, gaining some modicum of control over your emerging abilities. It’s a pretty good intro, if I’m honest, and while the magic bee seems weird, the tone of the story is set quite well. This is a ‘real’ world, with all the benefits of a modern society. (Though this doesn’t explain why all the computers in-game so far seem to run through a DOS/Command Line interface).

One week after magic-bee-ification, a woman with a very strange accent knocks on your door. This was my first real experience with the game’s voice acting quality and, really, I feel it does the game a disservice. A lot of the game’s story is told through cutscenes — cutscenes that I would say are a little more interesting than the ones in SWTOR — with a high standard of animation and VA. But this first woman… her accent is so unplaceable that it actually made me cringe. It sounded like English wasn’t their first language and that they’d learned English inflection from a book. Maybe this was supposed to be the case, but if so, don’t use them as the very first character you hear speak in the game. In a modern setting it is perfectly fine for you to have non-native speakers of the primary language, but at least make it more obvious that’s intended, not just bad voice acting.

Anyways, the woman gives you a letter from the Templars and you, as a silent protagonist, make your way to London, to the Templars HQ, where you are greeted by a black geezer in a sharp suit called Sonnac, and told that you need to head to Kingsmouth to solve a local mystery about fog and zombies. There’s no pomp or initiation. You’re there, you’re in, you get a bit of training in weapons and magic, and then you’re off to an island in New England via Agartha, the many branches of the world tree that are spread throughout the hollow earth.

Welcome to Kingsmouth

Kingsmouth is a dark, dreary, atmospheric fishing town straight out of Lovecraftian horror. Homages to popular horror culture are, in fact, everywhere: Lovecraft Lane is one of the main roads.

Almost immediately after exiting Agartha, you’re confronted by a man called Boone, the self-titled “Last of the Cowboys”, and introduced to the game’s questing system. It’s a cross between the set questhubs or RIFT or WoW with the more open, explore-and-find-stuff model of GW2.

I don’t quite understand how TSW’s quest journal works. It seems you can only carry a limited number of quests at a time, and even then, certain ones will require you to pause or cancel others before you can start them. It’s weird.

I do like how they are tiered, however. Rather than “kill ten zombies”, return to quest giver, “kill ten frenzied zombies”, return to quest giver, “kill ten zombies with fire” repeat ad nauseum, you’ll pick up the quest and you’ll follow several tiers of objectives in a chain without needed to return to a quest giver. It has a nice, bite-size feel to it. Even if you only have a limited play time, you feel like you’re working towards something.

That isn’t to say that TSW only has kill quests either. There are seven types of quest — or missions as they are called:

Story missions are just what they say on the tin, following the game’s narrative. They are multi-tiered and very rewarding. They are also, naturally, very spoilery so I’m saying no more about them here, except to mention that you can’t even complete the first story mission in the beta because it’s blocked off after about step 10.
Action missions are focused around some kind of fighting, often cinematic or dangerous. Action missions have their own little cutscenes to add story and flavour to your game experience.
Item missions focus on collecting or following items. They have objectives scattered across the zone. I’ve seen some that ask you to follow blood trails, collect medical reports, hunt for supplies, and many other types of task. Of all the different types of mission, item missions are the only ones I’ve seemed to be able to hold multiples of at any one time.
Investigation missions are very cool. They’re focused on riddles, puzzles, and lore. They’re all to do with history and the background of the game’s three secret societies. I’ve done two so far. The first, The Kingsmouth Code, is fiendishly intellectual, and ensured my mind jumped through hoops to find the answers to clues. It led me on a merry chase across Kingsmouth, and the final tier of the quest was very rewarding. The second, The Vision, tested my memory and recall skills, leading me across the zone to places I’d already been and hopefully remembered various aesthetic details of.
Sabotage missions require a different kind of approach. Rather than kill quests, these are focused more on the avoidance of confrontation. Getting round guards, avoiding cameras, ensuring you don’t trip security systems. Metal Gear Solid it isn’t, but it’s a nice shakeup from the norm of other games.
Group/dungeon missions are, unsurprisingly, for groups to try together. I haven’t seen any of these yet so couldn’t comment on what they entail, but I imagine they go hand-in-hand with instanced dungeons. I have ventured into some solo dungeons, but don’t know if group dungeons are in the beta yet.
PvP missions are the second type of mission I haven’t tried. My lack of interest in PvP means I haven’t explored it in TSW. I know it’s there — a note popped up on screen about it once I got to Kingsmouth proper — but I haven’t looked into it at all.

That’s a nice variety, and each of these mission types feels distinctive and rewarding. Now if I could just find a better explanation of how the mission tracker works…

The rest of this article is going to follow the same format that I used for the Guild Wars 2‘s first impression post. I figured a little consistency would help.

Graphics

The game is incredibly atmospheric, with drifting fog everywhere. DX11 light effects and shaders cast creepy shadows around. You only have to look at the screenshots peppered through this article to see what I mean.
DX11 also allows the game to run well in windowed mode so you can alt-tab to your web browser if needed. (Not that you need to. The game has an inbuilt web browser brought up using the ‘B’ key.)
Cutscenes are excellently done and seem less cliché than in SWTOR. This may be due to the more mature content. Animation quality is high.
The character aesthetic that clothes are cosmetic and your equipment comes in the form of talismans and trinkets is great. It allows you to look how you want without worrying about statistical improvements changing your character’s appearance.

Currently the game is quite poorly optimised. The motion blur effect would cause my video card to hang a couple of times per hour. This happened more in London than in Kingsmouth. At least I thought it was the motion blur, but even when I disabled the effect it still hung… weird.
For some reason, at default gamma the game was very dark. I had to fiddle with both my monitor’s and the game’s gamma settings to be able to do some of the sewers sections without giving myself a headache.
Texture quality seemed a little rough in placed. Most likely this is due to beta client download size. It’s certainly no dealbreaker though.
Character customisation is very limited, but this is flagged in the beta notes. My biggest quibble is that the default female faces are all hideous. There are no sliders to play with either. Or a dye system to change clothing colours. I saw a lot of very similar people running around. Naturally this will change for release.
Facial animation and lipsynching is poor, there’s no way around it. It simply doesn’t hold up to the standard of the motion captured animations for everything else in cutscenes.
Weapon and spell animations and effects lack weight and visual lustre.
Alpha channels (transparency effects) aren’t working properly. When corpse running, the fog shows an obvious checkerboard pattern when viewed at certain camera angles.

It seems like an awful lot of negatives there, but I must say that graphically I was generally impressed. Most of the negs are minor niggles or obvious beta issues.

The church in this image was a real standout point, graphically.

User Interface (UI)

Clean and modern UI reflecting the modern day setting.
The ability to add custom waypoints to the map via just clicking on the minimap is a nice little touch.
Waypoint markers for mission objectives aren’t too intrusive and are pretty accurate — though it would be nice if it were more obvious you would have to go all the way round the block to reach something the waypoint lists as 10m away…
The skill wheel has a huge amount of potential, with 500+ skills unlockable. It’s clean and easy to use.
You can remap almost every key in the game if you want.

The inventory system is…odd… While the tutorial panel does help to clean up how it works, it could do with more automation.
It’s also very tricksy to distinguish between items. So many of them have very generic, single-colour icons that telling which is a health potion and which is a shield potion becomes very awkward — especially because you can’t seem to put them on your hotbars.
Interacting with doodads in the world is unnecessary inaccurate. Ladders especially. A dedicated [INTERACT] key would be nice.
While there is an audio cue for those of us who play with the game sound on, there is no visual clue that you’ve aggroed enemies.
While the onscreen effects that happen when your healthbar drops low are great for increasing the tension and sense of panic, they occupy way too much of the screen.

All in all I liked the UI. I think I just need to spend more time with it to get used to stuff.

Sound, Music & Ambience

Very impressed with the game’s soundtrack. It sets a perfect tone for the game I’ve experienced so far. It has all the right kinds of creepy.
The title screen music is great, and I ended up listening to the different tracks for quite a while.
Music dynamically reacting is great, especially since it is the only cue you get when entering combat.
The voice acting is, for the most part, stellar — if a little hackneyed and cliché in places.
The near death dynamic ambience and music change, like the visual change, greatly heighten the tension and atmosphere. Keep the audio, dial back on the graphic cues in my opinion.
Dialogue is well written and feel contemporary, with plenty of pop culture references in there.

I’m no prude when it comes to profanity, but I feel that sometimes the swearing in the game is a little forced. It doesn’t always feel natural, and that can be jarring. It’s almost like the writers said, “Yeah, we’re going to an 18 rating so we may as well stick swearing in as much as we want.” Sometimes less is more, people.

Big fan of the game’s audio direction. This comes as no surprise to me. While the rest of Age of Conan may leave a sour taste in my mouth, I regularly listen to the game’s stellar soundtrack.

Gameplay

Here we go then. The meat and potatoes of my experience so far with The Secret World. Take a bathroom break before we begin; this may take some time!

Tiered “mission” system makes for good, bite-sized gameplay chunks with a series of escalating objectives and urgency.
Investigation missions are well-written, thought-provoking divergences from the norm of the MMO tropes.
There are a lot of quests off the beaten path. Rather than having obvious quest hubs like in RIFT/SWTOR/WoW, you can find quests by exploring. It’s not as dynamic as GW2′s events system, but it is a step in the right direction allowing for greater storytelling potential without limiting tasks to a specific area like GW2 seems to — a mission can take you across the entire map.
Modern conceits help mask (but don’t fully hide) some throwback to older tropes. The use of mobile phones to literally “phone in” your results is a nice touch.
The story and narrative elements are F*CKING AWESOME. They are, in fact, my main reason for wanting to play the game more, I’m so very impressed with them.

Mini cutscenes help give a pace and urgency to missions and tasks and, unlike SWTOR, don’t overstay their welcome.
The modern setting and conspiracy theory backdrop hook the player in with the familiar, then get them invested in the surreal.
The realistic style and ambience add to the immersion and storytelling, in contrast to SWTOR’s cartoony stye.
Being steeped in myth, legend and pop culture references, the game works for a wide ranging audience with varied backgrounds.
Just looking at the map of Kingsmouth throws up Dunwich Road, Arkham Avenue, Lovecraft Lane, Elm Street, and Belmont Avenue. (All references to Lovecraftian Horror or other horror-related media.) There are tons more references that I probably missed.
Honeycomb-shaped Lore pickups and achievements add to a real sense of stepping into a world of the unknown that looks so familiar on the surface, allowing you to feel like a real investigator.
The Lore and Achievement panels reveal just how huge the game must be, since we’ve seen only the tiniest percentage of the game’s content so far. I never lacked for something to do, and constantly stumbled onto more while chasing other goals.

The SP and AP systems work well and off a reasonable speedy sense of progression and always working towards something. They allow you freedom to try out different playstyles without having to roll a new character, and you can swap out abilities you’ve unlocked at any point out of combat assuming you have the appropriate weapons to use them with.

The quest/mission log is unintuitive and seemingly arbitrary in how many missions it can track at any one time.
There is no fast travel system, so regardless of the minor speed increase given by the out-of-combat “Sprint” ability, it can take a long time to cross even the Kingsmouth map. Why we can’t get bikes, mopeds, or even cars in a modern day setting is beyond me. At least have some kind of on-rails taxi service… Or say vehicles can only be used on roads, and you could even have special off-road vehicles for other maps that would limit you to specific trails in jungle settings, or whatever. Currently it feels like a typical subscription model travel system, and after GW2′s no subs, waypoint-heavy gameworld, TSW feels very constricting.
Combat is… well… Let’s look at it in detail:

While this could simply be due to having only very basic skills unlockable in beta, the actual variety of skills is lacklustre.
Weapons lack any feeling of weight or impact. Enemies don’t react to getting hit. Neither do you. You get little in the way of visual feedback until you hit 10% health and your screen starts flashing red.
No aggro cues meant that I was happily running along, being scratched by zombies from behind, and not even noticing my health bar dropping because my character didn’t seem to care.
Enemy scaling suffers too. Without a leveling system, there’s no real way of telling how powerful an enemy is compared to you. Or, if there is, it needs to be picked out more clearly by a tutorial.
Talismans don’t seem to make a huge amount of difference to your combat abilities or survival. Only weapon power increases seem to have a real effect.
Kill stealing… really… Could they not have looked at GW2 at least once and thought “Oh, that looks like a good idea.” Same goes for node-stealing.
No active dodging (at least so far) makes combat look a bit like GW2 in terms of limited skill builds, but feel nowhere near as polished. Bearing in mind that TSW is releasing on June 19th while GW2 is still months off…

While the SP and AP systems give a nice bite-size chunk of progression, it doesn’t feel like you’re getting more powerful. In GW2, you know you’re getting more powerful because of having a leveling system, and you are simply scaled to an area. In TSW, it’s not made as explicit. It could simply be a psychological thing, but it is nevertheless a thing.
On the subject of SP and AP, it isn’t made particularly clear what kind of “leveling curve” there is — is it an exponential curve where the more AP you’ve spent the longer it takes to get the next one? This might explain why there are EXP boosting items available in the game (and, I assume, the cash shop). I fear it could get very grindy because of this…

Conclusions

So there we have it, folks. It took several days to write, and most of an afternoon to format, but I finally finished getting my thoughts out there.

Is The Secret World ready for release? No, not really. It has a lot of kinks to fix in the month before launch. Very few of them are game-breaking but I’m honestly surprised nobody has pointed them out already. I don’t know how close this is to the “final” — ie. release — build of the game, however.

I haven’t preordered yet. I may do so if I don’t get a beta key for the next beta weekend. I’d honestly prefer if they did a standalone preorder like TERA did where you can pay a fiver and get into all the beta weekends, then upgrade to the full game by release if you wanted to. As it is, Funcom seem desperate to make money from this title, as I mentioned in my previous post on the game.

Nothing wrong with wanting to make money, of course, but there’s a taste of urgency — almost of desperation — about them at the moment… Still, there looks to be plenty of content for at least the price of the box based on my V4M scale. £1 = 1hr of content. Could I get forty hours out of TSW in the state it’s in? Add in a few new zones of the same quality of Kingsmouth and yeah, almost certainly.

So I’ll keep an eye on it!

~Demajen

[ART] “Sisters” – W.I.P. (#3)

demajen — Mon, 07 May 2012 23:00:25 +0000

Pretty much done with this experiment now. Looking back there are quite a few things I would do differently — but there always are: especially when I’m creating a painting with multiple subjects in.

Still, it hasn’t turned out badly for a couple of days trial & error. The image may take a while to load, as its a few hundred KB. Click through for larger.

Decided to add a splash of colour using a Multiply layer.

[ART] “Sisters” W.I.P. (#2)

demajen — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:39:50 +0000

It’s been a day full of painting issues. First the composition was off. Then I couldn’t get Maeve’s dress to look right. And now… now it looks more like a mother/daughter shot than two sisters, even if Maeve is the younger of the two… Hopefully rendering up Maeve’s face and hair will help!

Maeve, Queen of Air and Darkness; Titania, Queen of Fire and Light

[ART] “Sisters” W.I.P. (#1)

demajen — Mon, 07 May 2012 02:10:44 +0000

I was in an arty mood today. Haven’t been in one for a while, so I figured I should take advantage of it.

Here is the work-in-progress result of my labours. It’s about as far as I could get before my finger joints starting locking up. I concentrate and press way too hard on my wacom’s pen. Doesn’t help that our family is genetically dispossessed to arthritis either…

This is just a small section of the whole image. The rest of it needs a lot of work.

[GW2] 5 Cool Things In GW2 That I Didn’t Find Out About Until After BWE1

demajen — Thu, 03 May 2012 19:07:45 +0000

After a five year development time, it is unsurprising that Guild Wars 2 is a hugely ambitious, massive game. Therefore it should shock no one that the game isn’t very well documented yet. Here are 5 things I only found out about after the first beta weekend had finished.

Please note, I take no responsibility for the number of you going “WTF?!” at the scene in the banner… I found it while exploring. It creeped me out.

1. Bankable Crafting Materials

Interestingly enough, most of the upcoming points are about items and inventory management. The first one is something I really wish I’d known while playing. A lot of the “white” quality items you get are labelled as “crafting materials”, “salvageable” or “used in the creation of X”.

Salvageable items can be broken down into their component parts using a salvage kit. The basic kit has 15 charges and will turn anything salvageable into common crafting materials. For example, a thin leather strap could be salvaged into leather; or a cloth coat could be salvaged into jute scraps.

Crafting materials quickly fill up your inventory, even though they stack. There’s a lot of different types of them. Fortunately, all items labelled crafting materials or cooking ingredients can be right clicked on and allow you to transfer to crafting material storage. I noticed this option when I was moving stuff into my bank, so I didn’t realise that, actually, you can use it anywhere in the world. That’s right, all those common crafting mats can be dumped into your account-wide crafting/bank storage at any time. This will help immeasurably to ease inventory clutter.

The somewhat rarer items like blood and tiny claws — blue quality items — can’t be stored in this way it seems, unless they’re blue-quality cooking ingredients, in which case they can. I’m hoping that all crafting materials can eventually sent to storage this way, allowing inventory management to be really tightly controlled for us hoarders!

2. Bags

However, there are additional ways to cut down on inventory clutter: namely the existence of several different types of bag. Five, in fact:

First you have the basic slotted bags, which seem to range from 4 slots up to 20 slotters, created by three different professions (tailors, leatherworkers, and armoursmiths).

Then you have Invisible Bags/Invisible Packs/Safe Boxes. Items in these will never show up in the “sell to vendor” window. Nor will they be compressed into other bags should you use the compress button.

Craftsman’s Bags, unique to tailors, will automatically fill with crafting materials if there is space in them, before depositing crafting mats in other bags. This way you know where in your inventory they are likely to be to more easily transfer them to storage.

Padded Equipment Boxes, unique to armoursmiths, will automatically fill with weapons and armour.

Oiled Leather Packs, unique to leatherworkers, will automatically fill with junk (grey) items.

The maximum slottage for each type of bag is 20, so unlike the specialist bagtypes in World of Warcraft, there’s no storage advantage for choosing a specialist bag over a regular one. The advantage is simply in knowing where your stuff is going to be in your inventory. It’s possible that there won’t be a “sort inventory” button at any point because these different bags will serve as it. Personally I think the idea is cool, but I’d still like that auto-sort button too.

I know a lot of people will love the invisible bags or equivalent — accidentally selling something when you’re trying to clear out your junk is frustrating, though I hear green-quality items have a “confirm sale” box pop up if you try and sell them to cut down on accidents.

3. Junk Management

Speaking of getting rid of your junk, I was rather disappointed that GW2 doesn’t have a “sell all junk” button. Turns out it does — but only in the current dev build. It hadn’t made it into the BWE1 build. It will automatically sell your grey quality items when used and you’re at a merchant. I love this feature in RIFT and am glad it’s making its way to GW2. It’ll save a lot of scrolling through the sell list looking for those grey names — unless you’ve got an oiled leather pack, in which case they should all be grouped together anyways!

4. Selling Items on the Trading Post

Here’s a massive convenience feature. I’ve never really been one to trade on auction houses in other MMOs. I’ve mostly disenchanted or salvaged items into materials or sold them to vendors at the nearest quest hub, because heading back to the major city and auction-housing everything broke up my playtime too much.

In GW2, you don’t have to do that. While you have to physically be at a trading post to pick up gold and items, you can actually put items on the trading post from anywhere in Tyria. Got a phat green sword drop which you’re sure someone will pay top dollar for but are in the middle of an area you’ve had to fight tooth and nail to get to for the last thirty minutes? You don’t have to waste any progress you’ve made to teleport back to town; nor do you have to waste valuable auctioning time while you complete what you’re doing in that area. Just right click the item, select sell on trading post, enter the appropriate details, and you’re done.

Again this frees up your inventory space, adds a great amount of convenience, and keeps your adventuring relatively uninterrupted. Sure it’s not realistic — unless the carrier pigeons who carry your mail are magically reinforced to carry around greatswords — but I can take a little immersion breaking to further my enjoyment of the game!

5. Music Customisation

I mentioned in my first impressions post that I was disappointed the music playlist customisation hadn’t made it into the beta client. Turns out, it had. There’s just no GUI for it. In your USER/Documents/Guild Wars 2 folder, there is a local.dat file, and two empty folders: one for screenshots, the other for music. To get your customised musical selection working, all you need to do is create a playlist of the correct name and place it in the folder.

Supported playlist formats are .wpl, .m3u, .pls, .asx, and .wax. The files can be .mp3, .ogg, .flac, .wav, .aiff, and a bunch of even older filetypes like .mid or .it files.

There are currently eight specific playlists recognised, but on the forums Jim Boer has stated that they could very easily make it so you could change music for specific areas of the game. Current you can use: Ambient, Battle, Underwater, City, Crafting, BossBattle, NightTime, and MainMenu as your playlist names — so you can test it right now with a custom MainMenu.m3u playlist if you want. Stick it in the folder, boot up the game, and if the main menu music is whatever is on your playlist, you’re doing it right

Personally, I suspect I’ll have some of the Dissidia: Final Fantasy tracks for my battle music, to try and get that classic Final Fantasy feel. Hell, I may even use some of FFXIV’s tracks, since I’m unlikely to ever hear them in that game again.

Not bitter. Honest. ¬_¬

So there you have it, five cool things I wished I’d known about during BWE1 so that I could have played around with them. I’ll certainly be having a fiddle during BWE2 though… whenever that is! In fact, I’ll be prepping some playlists before the event.

Let me know what your customised playlists are like!

~Demajen

[GW2] BWE1: Necromancer, Guardian, Elementalist & Engineer

demajen — Tue, 01 May 2012 17:14:02 +0000

I’ve mentioned several times before about how I’ve been finding it difficult to pick a Profession to play in Guild Wars 2. This was affirmed over the weekend when I tried out the Necromancer, Guardian, Elementalist, and Engineer. Here are my first impressions based on the level 1-10(ish) experience on Necro, Guardian, and Elementalist, and the 1-5 experience on the Engineer.

Necromancer

Unsurprisingly I chose Necro first. It’s something I’ve waxed lyrical about the aesthetic of, and the whole minion mastery idea has appealed to me ever since I learned about it in GW1. It had a steeper learning curve that I expected, however — much like the rest of the game if I’m honest.

Demajen Gravethorne, Human female, started off as I knew I would, unlocking all her weapon skills. By level 7 I’d got everything sorted, and I quickly discovered that I favoured a staff setup for longer range combat and group stuff, swapping to an axe/warhorn combo for solo or upclose work. I wanted to like the dagger mainhand, because of its life-draining theme, but I just didn’t find it very damaging considering how close you had to get to use it.

I was, I admit, kinda disappointed with the minions. I discovered late last night that minions have been bugging out frequently in beta, so it wasn’t just me who found the shadow fiend utterly useless. Mine wouldn’t attack unless I was physically hit.

I only got to level 12 or 13 with the necromancer, not because I got bored, but because I wanted to try as much out as I could. I did a bit of personal story, most of the Queensdale hearts and events, and found most of the skillpoints too. I think upgrading my weaponry would have helped increase my damage output a bit, but it wasn’t until later that I realised just how much of a difference even a seemingly minor numbers boost could have on your character. Looking back, I know what I’ll be spending my karma on as soon as I get it!

Guardian

Dylan Hunt, my male Norn Guardian surprised the Hell out of me, and not just because I was actually playing a cool-looking male character (which I very rarely do). I know I like paladin/knight-like archetypes in games, but I didn’t expect Guardian to grab me as much as it did.

From the moment I stepped out into the Great Hunt, I felt incredibly satisfied with the meaty weight of the one-handed mace, but that was nothing compared to the sheer joy and maneuverability of the greatsword and staff weapon switch combo I used pretty much exclusively after level 7.

Thanks to its better armour, the Guardian seems considerably more survivable in melee — though I was still dying a lot — but this allowed me a great opportunity to really get better at the game, so that when I switched back to Necromancer and tried Elementalist and Engineer later, I was much more skilled at evading attacks and watching for trouble.

I have to admit, I probably played more Guardian than Necromancer during the beta weekend, completing the entirety of Wayfarer Foothills. There was just something about it that I felt the Necromancer lacked a bit, but I really can’t put my finger on what…

One thing I struggled with on the Guardian was gaining a sense of identity. In the end I went for a bit of a dps build with support at range for grouping, a lot like I did for the Necromancer. I should have wiki-d the various Guardian skills and traits to put together some ideas beforehand, but I really didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did. I’m not saying that I’m going to switch to Guardian at launch — after all, one of my guildies will be playing a Sylvari Guardian to replace his Resto Tree Druid in WoW after Cataclysm kinda ruined his sense of visual identity — but it is much higher on my radar now than it was.

Elementalist

Speaking of high on the radar, I also really enjoyed my time with my female Norn Elementalist/Fashion Model. Ellajen was predominately a water and air-based caster. I really loved the ice sound effects and the zappy lightning. I barely managed to unlock all of her weapon skills by level 11, so I didn’t get much of a chance to really develop a playstyle for her. Come to think of it, I still don’t think I managed to unlock staff…

Elementalist felt extremely versatile, both in terms of playstyle and adaptability in combat. Having four attunements at your command at all times means you are very flexible, but it also means that you really have to know your Profession — it has twice as many weapon abilities to use after all: twenty per weapon instead of the max of ten that the other professions (except Engineer) need to worry about.

I found myself constantly having to flick to the Hero Panel’s “weapon skills” pane, or mousing over tooltips, to remind myself what did what. I imagine that if I’d not been so time-limited and stuck with one profession throughout, this wouldn’t have been an issue.

Instead of repeating the Norn lands, Ella went to the Charr homeland and spent several hours wandering across the beautiful Plains of Ashford, fighting undead, getting scared in crypts, and generally blasting stuff into frozen pieces. I kept Saikyo updated on my progress with Elementalist — he plans on playing an Asura Elementalist after all — and he sounded intrigued by the potential.

Engineer

I rounded off the first beta weekend event with a mere five levels of Engineer. I wanted to unlock my first utility slot and try out the flamethrower. Go figure. So Khaleel, my Charr male engineer worked pretty hard at clearing the opening sections of the Charr homeland.

I confess I found the pistol combo rather weak to start with, but I did warm up to it once I unlocked an offhand pistol. Glue Shot was rather useful when an area I was protecting came under attack by waves of enemies. It was testament to how GW2 teaches you to play that I survived eight waves of attacking Flame Legion solo (only getting downed once) near the end of my beta experience — something I wouldn’t have stood a chance of doing at the start.

I hope I have some time to play more of the Engineer in the next BWE. Now I have a better clue how the game works in practice, as opposed to just watching it in videos, I can probably get ahead of myself next time. Especially if the servers stay up longer and are more stable.

I really want to try the rifle, which I didn’t have time to find and unlock skills for in BWE1. Hopefully it’s a slightly higher damage option.

I also want to try out the turrets and really get a feel for the flamethrower, which I barely got to use before forcing myself to log out to get sleep before work on Monday morning — darned real life getting in the way of my fun!

That’s it for my first impressions. Suffice it to say, I’ll be closely following how these professions get tweaked between now and release. Next time I’ll be trying the other professions out to see what they’re like. Who knows, I may enjoy them even more than I did these four…

~Demajen

[GW2] Beta Weekend One – Impressions & Feedback

demajen — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:08:09 +0000

So, that Guild Wars 2 beta eh… What larks, eh Pip!

Over the next few hundred words I aim to present to you my impressions of the GW2 game and client as of the weekend of April 27th-29th.

Very First Impressions

My first impression of GW2 was awful and entirely my own fault. I got a new case for my PC on the Friday, and figured I had enough time to strip everything out of my old tower and install in the new one. I was entirely correct with this assumption, despite stripping half the flesh off a couple of fingers trying to get my gfx card out of my tiny tower.

However, in my haste to put everything back together to test it all out, I’d somehow managed to connect my primary monitor to my secondary gfx card — the one I normally use for running my second monitor and physX stuff. I was thus rather shocked when GW2 ran like complete ass even in character creation, and it wasn’t until I’d fought through the human starter area as a necro and the framerate hadn’t gone above 10 that I realised it might be a PEBCAK issue.

After sorting cables out, rebooting GW2 etc, the game was so much better it was unbelievable. However, the servers were lagging horribly — not surprising considering the size of the BWE — and soon went down. When they didn’t come back up I realised that I should probably do something more with my weekend than sit in a chair refreshing the log in, so I went out on the town.

When I got back, things were very different. Obviously ANet had done a ton of work on increasing server stability etc while I was imbibing Southern Comfort, so I got to find out what GW2 while a bit tipsy is a like.

(FYI: It’s just as much fun as when sober ;D)

Feedback: The Pros and Cons

Constructive criticism is essential for any content developer — be they writers, artists, or videogame developers. What follows is thus a series of Pros and Cons revolving around four areas important to me.

Before I begin, I must confess that I had more fun in just a few short hours of GW2 than I did in 60+ hours of SWTOR. This isn’t because I think SWTOR is a bad game, but simply that GW2 does so much right for me and my playstyle.

I didn’t get any video recording done, sadly. Nor, in fact, did I take as many screenshots as I wanted. Mostly because I was too busy being Mr Runs-Round-N-Rezzes in combat, and its hard to hit the PRT SC key when you’re dodge-rolling out of the way of massive balls of flaming death. There are a few pics of my experiences dotted about anyway.

Without further adieu:

Graphics

I found the overall aesthetic of the game absolutely stunning. I tried to explore as much as I could (not just because the game incentivised it thanks to its points of interest system — more on that in a bit) and everywhere I went I found something super awesome to look at. From the godrays shining through the swamp canopy near the ruined Temple of Ages to the shimmering ice in the Svanir Dome, everything I saw was gorgeous.
The UI itself is just as gorgeous, with splashes and strokes of paint breaking up harsh edges. More on the UI shortly.
On the Saturday and Sunday where I did most of my playing, the game ran very smoothly. I didn’t test my exact framerate, but it certainly ran as well as — if not better than — RIFT, which is pretty demanding with maxed settings. In fact, I was able to run the game at its current maxed settings, and even in massive zergs of 20+ people I barely got any fps drops. My system isn’t a powerhouse either: for the record I’m running Windows 7 64-bit with 12gig RAM, an i7 920 @2.67ghz, and using an Zotac GeForce 580GTX as my main card, and a cheapo 520 GT as my secondary card, running at 1920×1080. The game also loaded very smoothly despite not using RAID-enabled HDs or any kind of SSD.
I was pleased to find that characters look awesome right from the start. So many games will have your starter and levelling gear looking absolutely pap (yes, RIFT, you again!) but not GW2. I’m particularly fond of the steam-powered charr weapons I found littered around the Plains of Ashford (which were gorgeous btw… remind me very much of the concept art). Oh, and while I’m mentioning Ashford, exploring the ruins of the Abbey was a nice touch. Creepy as Hell too!

While I didn’t suffer much of a fps drop with all the particle effects in big zergs (which really surprised me) the effects themselves are very obscuring. This is feedback that ANet have had many times over the last couple of months and have mentioned they are working on. It is sometimes very difficult to target enemies because of everything going on, and even harder to spot their ‘tells’ for when they’re about to unleash a big attack. TERA has mobs’ eyes flash red before they unleash a super attack. While this would probably look out of place in GW2, something artistic and fitting with the aesthetic wouldn’t go amiss I think.
I noticed in the Style tab of the cash shop that there is a not yet implemented preview function for gear. I assume that there will thus be a Wardrobe function for ingame items where we can see what armour and weapons will look like on us before we are either high enough level to use them, or have the necessary currency to purchase them. I like being able to see what aiming for, and feel a wardrobe is a pretty essential feature.

User Interface (UI)

The game’s UI is gorgeous and, for the most part, very accessible. It aims to keep you looking at the action at the centre of the screen — though I admit I often found myself panickedly looking at the Endurance bar or when my Heal was coming off recharge! It tries to allow you concentrate on dodging and staying mobile.
The compress bags function is great. I can get a bit OCD about having gaps in my bag windows, often spending some time between vendoring stuff in RIFT filling in the gaps in my inventory so that the junk starts piling up after the stuff I’m interested in. More on this below, however.
The weapon skills panel is very useful, allowing you to see what you have unlocked (with full tooltips) as well as what you haven’t. This affords you a handy reference place for when you’re trying to pick your weapons for the next encounter.
The dye mode gives you the ability to trial and error your looks, which is much better than dyes being tied to physical vials like in RIFT. Nothing gets applied until you close the Hero panel, so you can tinker to your heart’s content, even with the pretty limited palette of beginner dyes. I read somewhere the dyes weren’t currently account bound: hopefully this is a bug!
There are lots of little flourishes in the UI. I’m very fond of how the XP you get from completed achievements and events turns into little golden sparkles that flicker across your skill bar from the tracker/log and fill up your XP bar with a sound like jingling coins. It feels very rewarding, and helps keep you constantly aware that you’re making progress.
The map is a strong feature, featuring the same aesthetic design as the rest of the game — a more painterly approach on unexplored areas instead of a darkened-out “fog of war” effect. It does take some getting used to the different levels of the map, especially in cities. I imagine the first thing I and many will do in each city is find the waypoints nearest to the bank and crafting stations!

While compress bags may help neaten your inventory, it doesn’t help organising it. Bag spaces fills up extremely quickly if you’re conscientious of hoarding crafting materials (like I did until I realised that, duh, it’s beta… you can’t take it with you!) An auto-sort feature would be extremely useful, like the old addons for WoW or TERA’s native functionality that sorts items by type in your bags: all weapons together, all chest, hands, legs items, etc. That way I could quickly compare the five focus offhands I had to quickly see which I could dump.
While 99% awesome, the skills panel is not without a minor niggle: I’d like to be able to see what I’m aiming for in-game without having to get to level 5 and 30 for utility and elite skills respectively. I know they are locked until I get to those levels. I also know I can just go to the Mists to check them out, but that’s a tiny cutback on freedom that I’m not fond of.
While we’re talking skills, the tooltips could do with a bit of standardising. For example, Hammer of Wisdom lists a 15 second duration. Sword of Justice doesn’t list one, but definitely has one — not that I thought to time it.
Another issue to do with inventory management is to do with bank panes and auto-stacking. Currently if you deposit an item into your bank, it doesn’t stack with like items already extant in storage. You have to manually do that. There is also no way to compress your bank panes.
Some kind of mention of the crafting storage would be great. I discovered it purely by accident. I also only found out today, several hours after the close of beta, that basic crafting materials like cloth scraps etc can be deposited directly to crafting storage from anywhere in the world: you don’t need to go back to the bank! (This is awesome!)
Why do I need to fully log out of the game to change my character? Return to character select option please?
Speaking of other characters, it would be nice if you could see speech bubbles for other players in the game world. I don’t focus too much on the chat log — especially since player and npc names are the same colour — and thus don’t often notice when I’m being spoken to by a guy right next to me.
Speaking of the chat log, please let us change text colour or at least the colour of names. It was very confusing trying to tell NPCs and players apart. I imagine it’d be fine on a RP server, but I don’t plan to do that!

Sound, Music, and Ambience

During server outages, I spent a fair chunk of time listening to the login screen music. Jeremy Soule is still rather good
I was really impressed with the quality of the voice-acting. While it is obviously not finished for many of the cutscenes, what was there was very well done indeed, offering a dynamic range of vocal expression often lacking in games. Lord Faren made me laugh more than once, despite my determination to find him an annoying ponce.
The best kind of ambient sound is the kind you don’t notice until it’s not there. When night fell in Ascalon and I wandered into a graveyard, I felt uneasy even before the ghosts appeared and proceeded to remind me that I wasn’t really high enough level to be there.
I loved the way music shifted in and out depending on the situation. When combat became more desperate, especially in the fight against that damned Flame Legion Shaman champion, the music ramped up in intensity, adding more fuel to the fire (if you’ll excuse the pun).

Not much to complain about in terms of sound design. The gunpowder weapon effects were a little too loud, even when well away from their source; as were the whispers of various NPCs around Divinity’s Reach — I know whispers carry better than normal voice a lot of the time, but they shouldn’t scare the crap out of you the first time you hear them with headphones on!
I was saddened to see the custom music feature wasn’t in the game — or if it was, that I couldn’t find it. Hopefully this isn’t a cut feature and will be in future builds!

Gameplay

While I’ve played with strong communities in FFXI and WoW for small group content, I’ve never felt like I was playing with people in open world content. Guild Wars 2 changes that. It really felt like people were working together, forming impromptu groups, to get stuff done.
In fact, I’d say the game is definitely more fun when paired up with another player. This is great for me, as I expect to have friends playing with me a fair chunk of the time. Sidekicking will ensure we’re all being challenged by the content too. In fact, the game is definitely challenging. Maybe I’m just bad at it, but I was definitely dying a lot more than I ever expected to.
Having an extra pair of hands along really helps the content feel more manageable, especially when delving into the tougher areas in search of that illusive skill challenge — I’m looking at you, narrow pass full of Ettins in Queensdale with a Veteran Ettin at the end! In fact, if I saw another player in an area, I often found they’d tag along with me and strike up a conversation or join me in a group, or vice versa, simply because there are only positives to joining people.
For me the biggest game changer in GW2 is the lack of killstealing and instanced nodes. I don’t need to race for that copper node to beat others to it. It’ll still be there for me when I’ve finished killing X, Y or Z nearby. Likewise, there’s no need for the selfish person to run past me to the node instead of helping me kill the nearby mobs. We both get XP for the mobs; we can both mine the node. Everybody wins. We can work towards common goals together, rather than doing exactly the same thing along side each other. I know that’s been ANet’s marketing spiel for a while now, but it really makes a difference!
When you do down a mob, loot is instanced too, meaning you never steal someone else’s loot. As long as you’ve got a few hits in on a mob, you get a roll on its loot table. This is probably why my bags filled up so bloody fast. Good job I discovered you can make 8-slot bags straight away as soon as you learn Tailoring!
For the most part, events scale really well. I almost never felt like I was being unfairly or frustratingly penalised for tackling appropriate level content. More on this below for those exceptions
You can fail events. I’ve seen feedback that you can’t, but that’s wrong. I was in several assault events and defense events that we failed. In fact, one of the failed defense events led to another series of events where I had to help escort the surviving NPCs to a nearby town so they could relocate their stuff while efforts were being made to muster a counter-attack and rebuilding effort.
If you want a real challenge, then fight higher level mobs. Enemies of your level and maybe one above are about the right difficulty. Mobs two levels above your attacks start to glance rather than being full hits, substantially reducing your damage output. Mobs three levels above you can one-shot you if you aren’t quick with that dodge roll. Effective use of conditions — cripples, blinds, dazes, knockdowns — were essential to beating higher level enemies, and I failed more often than I succeeded. Speaking of…
The downed state is awesome. You will get downed a lot in GW2, even in the starter areas. Get used to the downed state. Also get used to rallying only to be immediately downed again. Be quick on that Heal and Dodge, people!
Hunting for things on the map was great fun. Apart from the one instance in Wayfarer Hills where I was getting frustrated trying to find the last Place of Interest (which, it turns out, I was being blind and was almost smack bang in the centre of the map which I’d been skirting the edges of looking for secrets) hunting down skill challenges, PoIs, and all the waypoints is very incentivizing. So much so that you get a reward mailed to you if you complete all 4 types of task in a zone: unlock all skill challenges and waypoints, find all places of interest, and complete all renown hearts. It would be nice if the rewards were specifically tailored to your profession/armour category however. My Guardian got a lovely cloth chest that he couldn’t wear.

I mentioned some exceptions to the rule on scaling. A couple of events such as the centaurs invading the camp pass, sons of Svanir assaulting a city in the north west of Wayfarer Hills, and the event with the worms below the lake seemed a mite unfair and badly tuned. The worms one especially, with largish groups of worms quickly decimating you before you could do anything. The last wave of the sons of Svanir assault hit when I was pretty much the only person left standing, and unsurprisingly six shaman and a ton of ice elementals made me explode!
As an Elementalist, unlocking all the different weapon skills for all the attunements took absolutely ages. Offhands especially could, in my opinion, do with speeding up their unlocking a little. I couldn’t really discern what the pace was supposed to be. I thought it was simply a percent per kill, but now I’m not sure. Going back to earlier areas seemed to unlock them a bit faster than in later areas, so is it something to do with a percentage of damage, especially in larger groups? *shrug*
I only found two bugs in my entire playthrough. This kinda made me feel sad that I wasn’t doing a good beta testing job, but also happy as the fewer bugs there are, the closer to release we get. For the record, the two I found are using Flashing Blade on a Guardian when right next to a Sons of Svanir arbalest teleported me under the world, where I promptly fell into a great watery expanse with an overabundance of lightbloom effects; and the escort quest as part of the human noble early personal story, where the paper maker and his packmule seemed to randomly teleport around me rather than pathing properly.

Conclusions

I had such an awesome time in the first BWE. I admit I played solo for most of the time — as in, without a party or guild — so I didn’t experience many of the bigger issues to do with overflow servers and parties, or the cap of 100 on guild membership. I also simply didn’t have time to do any PvP which, in hindsight, I’m rather regretting now.

Next beta weekend, I’m going to try out the other professions: warrior, rogue, ranger, and mesmer, as well as do some PvP and crafting. But so far, I’m pleased to say that despite being a little bit sceptical of the hype, and prepared for another massive letdown like Final Fantasy XIV, GW2 is actually living up to my expectations.

[GW2] Guesting, World Transfers, and Server Lists

demajen — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:19:45 +0000

There comes a time in every MMORPG player’s life when they have to make that hardest of choices: which server do I play on? It used to be that you were 100% locked to that world after making that decision, and only through a convoluted process (that usually involved a fee) were you able to change your mind.

Guild Wars 2 is attempting to be more lenient. Here’s how ANet’s system works.

Home Worlds

Your home world in GW2 is exactly what it implies. It is the server you attach yourself as an online entity to. It is tied to your account, not to individual characters, so the home world of all your characters is the same. There’s a list of the EU and NA home worlds to the right. For the purpose of an example, I’m going to say my account is bound to the “Far Shiverpeaks” home world. (I have no idea yet which world I’m rolling on.)

I have five characters on my account. Their home server for WvWvW is the Far Shiverpeaks. I can move my account and all its associated characters from Far Shiverpeaks to the much-cosier-sounding Ring of Fire by paying 1800 , purchasable in the cash shop.

(That’s pretty expensive if we consider the leaked cash shop prices from a few weeks ago – $1.25 for 100 . It’s over $20. But again, those were leaked and probably in no way reflect current prices. However, judging by the “known issues” page in the GW2 forums, it sounds like the cash shop is going to be in BWE#1, so we’ll have a chance to check it out for real.)

All my characters would get moved to the Ring of Fire world, and and subsequent characters I make will belong to that world. It’s also the world I’ll represent in WvWvW PvP.

Guesting

Here’s a not so hypothetical situation. I have a friend who I played FFXI with. He lives in Canada. He is quite likely to get GW2. In most games if we wanted to play together, one of us would have to suffer the consequences of being too far away from the game’s servers. If I played on NA servers so we could play together, I’d suffer lag, and vice versa.

And even then, the timezone would often get in the way, so we’d suffer latency issues all the time for only a couple of hours benefit per week when we get to play together.

GW2 does away with this through its Guesting system.

Because friends lists and guilds are account based, I’ll know when he logs in regardless of what world we’re on. He could roll on a NA server like Sorrow’s Furnace and happily play there during his play hours, with decent latency etc. If I was to log onto Ring of Fire and saw him also playing, because we’re on our account-bound friends list, I could “guest” over to Sorrow’s Furnace and we could play together for a short time, depending on timezone difference.

This allows us the opportunity to play together, albeit with a bit of latency, without sacrificing the quality of our gaming experience for the rest of the time. We could even alternate if the experience isn’t great, but still want to play together.

Guilds and Guesting

The biggest question I have about the guesting system right now is about how guilds work with it. We know that it is our account that joins a particular guild, not a singular character. Does that mean that I could invite my friend to An Unlikely Krewe despite being on different servers, because it is account bound, or are guilds going to be limited to individual worlds?

If it is the former, this is a massive stride forwards for international guild communities, who can play on their own world to take advantage of their regional latencies, but still get together on one or the other world server for guild/community events.

If it is the latter, it is a step back from GW1 with its thriving international guilds, which came about because of how that game’s server structure worked. Plus it really cuts down on the freedom the guesting system otherwise seems to offer.

This morning’s blog by Martin Kerstein says that we can play on any world “where you have friends” — does he mean people on your actual account friend list, or is he just saying that you can go and play with people in your guild if it is possible to split them across worlds?

I think this is very much another instance of where a tiny bit more clarity on their blog would have cleared up much community confusion. Here’s hoping for some clarification from MK or someone else on the team about how and if this affects international guilds, and in fact how guilds and guesting work in general.

~Demajen

[D3] Diablo III Open Beta – Second Impressions & DRM

demajen — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 13:40:29 +0000

I want to like Diablo III. There’s a lot of stuff in it I enjoy, based on the two playthroughs of the beta content I’ve done. But unfortunately one issue overshadows and outweighs all other pros and cons I have with the game.

The single-player D3 experience requires a constant connection to Blizzard’s servers. Any hiccup on their end or mine and my progress since a particular checkpoint goes byebye, I get kicked out of the game, and have to load everything back in.

Quite frankly, this isn’t on. I can deal with the need for a constant connection when playing an MMORPG — of course I can: a persistent connection is required to access a persistent world filled with other players — but there aren’t any other players in my D3 campaign. Why, therefore, do I need to be connected to the internet to play it?

This smells like bad DRM to me. Ubisoft have a notoriously bad reputation for this kind of thing with their Assassin’s Creed series of games, and this seems just as bad.

Now undoubtedly Blizzard’s servers aren’t going to be anywhere near as flaky and congested at launch. Stability will ensure I could play at any time as long as I have an internet connection. But that, in my mind, is no excuse. Single player games shouldn’t need persistent connections, yet more and more we’re seeing them do so. I like the Assassin’s Creed games, but I didn’t buy the PC ones until Ubisoft backtracked and removed their online DRM.

Diablo III is shaping up to be a fun game to play, but on the basis of the above principles I think I’m going to have to cancel my preorder. Always-on DRM for a singleplayer experience is a dealbreaker for me. The game needs an offline mode.

~Demajen

[D3] Diablo III Open Beta – First Impressions

demajen — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 11:06:24 +0000

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I’ve never played any of the Diablo games. I have, however, played the original Torchlight, which naturally takes many cues from the two Blizzard games. So it was with a mixture of wariness and interest that I downloaded the D3 beta yesterday in preparation for this open beta/stress test weekend. I’ve had D3 preordered through Amazon.co.uk for a while now, because it’s under £30 on there whereas it’s £45 through Blizzard’s store. My experiences with this beta will finalise whether I go ahead with the order or cancel it.

First Impressions

My very first impressions are, perhaps, rather unfair. I tried to log in for over an hour last night, but the Battle.net servers kept either going down or were very busy. This is not surprising with a stress test, of course, but I just thought for a moment that maybe Blizzard should have anticipated this a little better — as if it hasn’t learned anything as a company over the seven years or running World of Warcraft. Still, I’m not going to hold it against them. Last night I’d just finished a long day at work, was grouchy and impatient, and in no mood to be complementary about any product, from Blizzard or otherwise.

After a nice long sleep today, I managed to log into the game for the first time, and was faced with a pretty limited character creation screen. Five classes, two genders, aaaaaand… that’s it?

I flicked back and forth through the available five classes: barbarian, demon hunter, monk, witch doctor, and wizard, before plumping eventually for a female monk. This shunted me into the game world — after a couple of errors that said it couldn’t connect, but apparently did anyways…

To New Tristram & Beyond

One of the biggest issues I have with not having played the previous two games in the series is that I am completely ignorant of the lore. This means I’ll miss a lot of details, cool easter eggs and the like, that players of the previous games will get a kick out of. D3 needs to stand on its own, of course, so I’ll be writing from that viewpoint.

As my monk made her way through the fog-shrouded landscape, I had pretty mixed thoughts on the graphical quality of the game. Nothing particularly blew my mind. In fact, I’d rather have liked a slightly closer viewing distance, because everything was slightly too hard to see considering the dim lighting. That being said, the lighting effects themselves were excellent, and there’s a real sense of atmosphere with the mist-shrouded landscape.

The dungeon/crypt levels too are very well-designed and atmospheric. Loose flagstones hide loot or enemies, jars of ashes are everywhere, and lecterns hold rare scrolls and journal entries. The dungeons are also infested with enemies, from huge shambling undead that explode into maggots, to tiny imps and carrion bats that swarm you. Combat doesn’t exactly feel challenging in these first few levels, but that’s no surprise.

One thing I am particularly fond of are the health orbs that drop from enemies. This curbs the huge reliance on potions that Torchlight features, granting a real sense of momentum as you battle down through the levels of the crypts.

Speaking of momentum, I’m very chuffed with the feeling of progression in the first 10 experience levels of the game. Every level unlocks something new, be it a new type of ability slot, a new ability for an already unlocked slot, or a new rune to add to one of your abilities. Couple this with the constant trickle progression of slightly better loot the further you get, and you have a game that invites you to keep on playing so that you can power yourself up. It’s obvious carrot-on-a-stick mechanics, but it works.

Another thing that adds to this is pictured to the right: you get bonus XP based on what is essentially a kill streak — how many enemies you can kill without there being a significant portion of downtime between them. The 68 monsters killed “massacre” to the right was from an event called the “Jar of Souls” which spawned an absolute ton of pretty weak skeletons to kill. I was about level 7 at the time. Nothing came at me in such big numbers again, which is a shame as I would have liked to see if I could beat it. Bear in mind that you don’t need to beat your record to get the kill streak XP, you just need to get a proper kill streak.

Unsurprisingly, the weakest link in the game so far (for me) is the story. Admittedly, I don’t expect masterwork storytelling in a dungeon crawling loot-a-thon, but a little bit of intrigue goes a long way. The mysterious “falling star” mentioned multiple times that has ploughed through the cathedral in New Tristram is a nice hook, but I hope there’s a more-layered narrative in the final game.

So Will I Be Buying It?

I honestly don’t know yet. The lack of real character customisation on an initial aesthetic level bothers me a little, as does the fact that you need an always-on internet connection to play it. Sure, I’ll have one, but always-on connections mean that if the game’s servers hiccup for whatever reason (like they’ve done several times this morning) then you get kicked out of play. For a single player experience, I personally don’t think this is on (and it’s one of the reasons I dislike Games For Windows Live so much).

Still, I enjoyed the experience with the Monk, and I’m hoping that the next character I try will be a completely different experience, so that the feeling of repetition doesn’t set it.

~Demajen