What the hell is Soul Sacrifice? People keep comparing it to the Monster Hunter franchise. I’ve never played a MH game so I can’t really say. When I got my Vita on a Black Friday sale I did pick up Ragnarok Odyssey which I’m told is also a Monster Hunter style game, but I much prefer Soul Sacrifice so far. Better graphics, smoother controls, and a sense that the RPG mechanics have more depth.

Basically the "point" of the game is you load into a map, kill some monsters then the boss. Rinse, repeat. There are no outright character levels, but you do level up your Life and Magic, plus boosting your offerings and crafting sigils. If this were an MMO we’d be screaming "ewww it’s just a grinder" because essentially that’s all it is. But because it’s a single or up-to-four-player co-op game, gamers are apparently willing to exempt this style of game.

Again, I can only compare to Ragnarok Odyssey but one of my primary complaints about RO was the (so far) extremely limited selection of maps. And maybe that’s the case with Soul Sacrifice, I don’t know but the demo had more variety and a far superior setting to its maps than anything I’ve seen in RO so far. Also I’ve played a few online multiplayer games so far and not only is Soul Sacrifice’s netcode better than Ragnarok’s, it also performs better. Ragnarok would stutter and cough due to all the particle effects in combat. Soul Sacrifice has been flawless so far.

In Soul Sacrifice players are Sorcerors whose job is to wander the world murdering monsters. Once you kill a monster, it dissolves into an oily pool then for a short while you are able to absorb its soul to power yourself up. You can choose to Sacrifice the soul which will increase your Magic LV (short for level) or Save the soul which increases your Life LV. Magic LV increases your offensive abilities while Life LV increases your defensive. In the demo there is a global cap of 20 so for instance if you chose to get 19 Magic and 1 Life you’d be a literal glass cannon – heavy damage but can be easily taken out. Reversing that would make you one hell of a support player but not doing much damage. I have about 5 or 6 hours into the demo now and am sitting at 10 Magic and 6 Life so I’m hitting noticeably harder than I was but can take hits better and my heal offering is a little better, too.

The game’s "spells" are called Offerings and you can equip up to 6 of them. Two trays of three offerings, and press the right trigger (RT) to switch trays. Collecting more of the same offering will let spend the extras (and possibly require some soul shards, not sure on that one) to boost the offering to get more casts per game before it runs out of power. Each map has a few items that will let you recharge your offering power, provided you do it before it’s totally run out, however recharging your offerings consumes the item. I suspect at most there are four items per map, which would equal one recharge per player assuming everyone’s playing nicely, otherwise someone might be hosed and run out of useful offerings if the other players use up the recharge items first.

The final magic players can cast is a Black Rite. These are super-powerful spells that have a good chance of killing any boss (at least if it’s health status is red) but comes at a high cost: it’s only available when you are close to death yourself and it has lasting aftereffects that can only be erased by spending lacrima tears. (I’ll get to that in a bit.) The Black Rite available in the demo is Infernus which deals a devastating blast of flame but costs your skin, which reduces you to half defense.

At the beginning of the game you find a magic book Librom which is very reminiscent of the Necronomicon from the Evil Dead movies. It talks to you and you relive bits of its previous owner’s life, along the way learning his abilities and becoming a Sorceror yourself. Librom provides you with all your missions, changing your gear, offerings, Black Rites and so forth, but also at the beginning of each game he prompts you to wipe his tears by touching the screen. His tear droplets are called lacrima which becomes another currency used to erase the effects of Black Rites, recharge Offerings, and other game functions as well as changing your name. Easy enough to get but for cleansing the Black Rites and recharging Offerings alone will probably become part of your regular farming routine.

Your right arm is your source of power, all spells are cast from that and you can craft sigils using parts collected from soul shards found on the maps then carve them into your right arm (ie. a socket system) to give additional buffs to certain Life or Magic abilities.

In addition to boosting the existing offerings, and crafting sigils, you can fuse multiple offerings to create an all-new one, for example adding an elemental attack to your arm or whatever.

Another important thing to use every so often is Mind’s Eye which alters your vision so you can see soul shards, recharge spots and health status of your team and monsters. For bosses it not only shows its health (green is healthy, red is getting close to death and vulnerable to a Black Rite or sacrificing an ally) but also shows its cursed spots which will give you a critical hit if you can target or otherwise strike those locations.

You’ll notice I mentioned sacrificing an ally? Yes, for single-player you get various NPC allies and if they go down you can choose to Save or Sacrifice them as well. If you sacrifice your ally, a devastating attack is unleashed but that ally is "permanently" dead unless you spend lacrima to erase that event. Also sacrificing allies makes your other NPC allies less likely to want to team with you. In multiplayer, you can save or sacrifice your teammates for the same devastating attack and the dead player is put into a mode similar to Mind’s Eye where he can view health status but also see the actual attack and damage numbers, so being dead can actually help you figure out a good build. At least until the hardcore players go through it all and put the data on forums and wikis.

I’m having a blast with the Soul Sacrifice demo and look forward to receiving my full version that I’ve pre-ordered from Amazon. I think every single Vita owner at AGE is getting the game, so I should have plenty of friends to co-op with so I’m looking forward to leveling up and seeing what else the game has to offer!

Given the exponential growth of the MMO sub-genre of gaming in the past decade, especially the past five years, I have to wonder if the concept of a “main” or “primary” MMO even exists in today’s up-and-coming MMO player or if it’s just a holdover, a relic, from us old-school players?

It seems like a good deal of us blogger-type players may talk about the growing research that long-term sedentary activities are not only unhealthy but shorten one’s lifespan, and a lot of us seem to agree with that point. Or at least inasmuch as we take advantage of the choices we have today and instead of sitting around playing one MMO for 16 hours per day, we’ll spend 12 hours playing 3 different MMOs.

As an old-schooler myself, I can’t speak to those who’ve come into the genre in the past few years, but I also can’t help but notice that even those old-schoolers who extoll the virtues of balancing one’s life, of not being addicted to a single MMO… we all seem to secretly (or in Keen‘s case, openly) desire that One True MMO to come along again that will latch it’s unbreakable tentacles into our virtual soul and not let go. It sometimes appears less that we want to rekindle a romance, either with the genre itself (which due to its very nature inspires burnout) or to recapture that wondrous feeling of our first MMO “love,” but that we want more than anything a new, better addiction.

Is there such a thing as a “primary” MMO anymore, or is that simply an older train of thought from a past era?

Beta Weekend 4 will be next weekend, April 12-14 and will not wipe characters from Beta Weekend 3! Level cap is increased to 50 (60 is the launch cap) and finally the four Professions will be playable. No new classes or races were mentioned in the announcement.

Open Beta will begin April 30, so that’s an additional two weeks for Cryptic to finalize feedback from BW4 to the OBT client. Seems each Beta Weekend was spaced roughly two weeks apart so far, and Cryptic has taken a lot of steps tweaking things based on each event’s feedback. The Open Beta announcement does seem to indicate that the new classes hinted at, especially some type of Ranger and Druid, won’t make it into the launch game.

On that note, a recent interview with Cryptic CEO Jack Emmert hints that a monetization scheme for races, and probably classes, might be that the basic version will be patched into the game for free then a Premium version with extra abilities or attributes could be in the Zen Store. This philosophy matches that of Star Trek Online where some ships, such as last year’s introduction of the flagship Odyssey and Bortasqu’ ships initially free during the Anniversary event then moved to the Dilithium Store, meanwhile upgraded versions are sold in 3-Packs in the Zen Store.

I’ve clocked between three and four hours in Defiance today, so I thought I’d give a handful of impressions so far.

Chris over at LevelCapped wrote his impressions earlier today and referred to Defiance as “RIFT with Guns” which is probably extremely accurate since RIFT is Trion’s first game. However, since I haven’t played RIFT (seriously, why is it all caps?) past level 5 or so, I can’t really say that myself. Instead I’ll say Defiance is “Guild Wars 2 Lite with Guns.”  

I see Defiance and Guild Wars 2 very similarly because in their normal game worlds, the focus is on a combination of solo and “massive co-op” gameplay. In both games if there’s some form of “dynamic content” such as an Event in GW2 or an Arkfall in Defiance everyone around can simply run up and contribute to the objectives without being hassled with formally joining a Group or a Raid.

The starter missions have been simple enough to get into, and the voice acting was good to adequate, depending but nothing downright bad yet. After creating your character, the limited tutorial only gives a rudimentary synopsis of the EGO system and has you pick up and equip a few starter weapons then sends you out on your own. The User Interface (UI) is rather minimalist and confusing in a few points until you figure out what is where and how to get to what you want quickly.

Finding things to do is easier in Defiance than Guild Wars 2 at least. Simply bring up your map and every mission type is shown, as are all the Arkfalls. It’s up to you to choose what you want to do at any given time, whereas in GW2 you have to wander around a given zone (or rely on third-party event timer apps) to have any idea what’s happening when and where.

Mission types are Main Missions, which make up the storyline of the Defiance game, then Episode Missions are more cinematic and include tie-ins to the Defiance television series. There are several variants of Side Missions to be found as well, ranging from Time Trial races to “survival mode” style Hotshot and Rampage missions, as well as other types of Side Missions. In addition there are Co-op Maps, which are four-player instances. Naturally there’s PvP to partake in as well, in either instanced battleground form or the open world Shadow War. I did try one of the Shadow War… things. It was a 38v38 fight but it’s still considered “open world” and once the battle is over you just continue on as usual; I don’t even think there was a load screen?

In terms of being a “real” shooter, Defiance is pretty darn close. It isn’t 100% “pixel perfect” regardless if Trion claims it is or not. But it’s maybe 97% there, and people coming from the MMO side of things who aren’t big shooter players probably wouldn’t know the difference anyway. Thankfully, it’s nothing like an RPG shooter such as Tabula Rasa (RIP) where sure you aimed your reticule but once you clicked the mouse button to shoot, it was MMORPG mechanics determining the hit/miss/damage calculations just the same as if you’d clicked a hotbar button on a traditional MMORPG.

My main gripe with the third-person shooter aspect of Defiance is the camera. For all the blustery talk over the years of “the PC is the primary platform for shooters” PC-only studios seem to botch third-person way more often than they should. In Defiance, the camera is positioned too far off your character’s right shoulder, so if you’re anywhere near a wall or any object that could be used for cover there’s a good chance that while your reticule shows it’s aiming at the target, your gun is actually aiming at the wall or object. Switching to “iron sights” aiming will be more accurate to check if you’re actually aiming at your target or not. There’s also no mechanic to toggle which shoulder the camera is positioned from, which would really help if you’re in a bigger fight against large numbers of mobs and you’re attempting to take cover.

Defiance is technically “Buy 2 Play” like Guild Wars 2, and is scheduled to have 5 DLC packs. Trion is already selling a Season Pass at $40 though since Trion has not yet specified what those DLC packs will be and what type of content they will contain, I would recommend holding off until more information is released. There is a “real money” currency called Bits but in the handful of vendors I’ve found so far, they took both Bits and the in-game currency Scrip. I think there are some Bits-only convenience items in the Trion Store such as extra inventory space, though, so all in all the Purchase plus Transactions experience should be very similar to Guild Wars 2.

The transmedia experiment should be interesting with the game and the Syfy series hopefully maintaining some concurrency. I’ll likely just be a passive observer over social media as everyone watches the show since I don’t really watch television anymore due to other interests and my job pretty much prevents me from watching live tv on a regular basis. The show will also be available on Hulu but only the free web version not Hulu Plus. I have an extreme aversion to watching television at a PC desk on a PC monitor so… unless Hulu gets the rights to stream it over their Plus service, I’ll likely never see the show.

Not to break my arm patting myself on the back, but after reading most of the other Neverwinter articles out there, I thought my coverage of CBW #2 was by far the most comprehensive, and I will stand by what I said then. This post will be shorter and simply address some additional thoughts I experienced during CBW #3. Downside: It’s been two weeks so I’m a little fuzzy on a few things now and also my keybind to save screenshots with the UI didn’t save over to CBW3 so I lost a lot of the screenshots I thought I’d been taking. I didn’t feel like running Fraps at the time for UI shots, unfortunately so… lesson learned.

One of regrets I mentioned in CBW2 was that I did not have time to level my Trickster Rogue to 10 to see his first Daily Power, Stealth, in action. Fortunately there were no character wipes so he was waiting on me for CBW3 as well. I leveled him to about 13, both solo and partnered with Oakstout for some dungeon quests and Foundry quests and we had a blast. Oakstout was playing his Guardian Fighter initially so enjoyed tanking and stabbing over his shield while my Trickster Rogue threw volleys of daggers, or *bamf!* teleported around the enemies for some super-fast stabby action.

Adding the Stealth Daily to the mix was indeed a lot of fun, but with or without it, I feel the Trickster Rogue is a very strong melee class and very effective both solo and in groups, and I hear it’s also one of the predominant classes found in PvP which I have not tried yet.

Some of the complaints about characters in CBW2 were animation-related, such as the normal pose for the Control Wizard who ran around with two fingers in the air. His pose has been tweaked already and wasn’t nearly as annoying, I meant to play one again but ended up spending all my time with the Devoted Cleric while Oakstout tried the Control Wizard, He initially found the class a little hard to work with and squishy but he found a groove with it as he leveled and it ended up being his favorite class so far.

Great Weapon Fighter

CBW3 introduced the Great Weapon Fighter to be play-tested. The GWF is an all-out offensive melee fighter who specializes in Area of Effect (AoE) damage with a huge two-handed weapon (Great Weapon, where the class gets its name), and is in fact somewhat weaker against single targets where the Guardian Fighter and especially Trickster Rogue excel.

His first two At Will powers are Wicked Strike on the left mouse button, then Reaping Strike on the right mouse button. Both are area swipes for hitting multiple enemies, though Reaping Strike is also a chargeable power by holding the RMB down then releasing it. Depending on one’s playstyle, this can make Reaping Strike more or less desirable. I found the GWF’s mobility to be an asset, whether simply side-stepping out of the way of an attack or using his Sprint ability, as the class generally has fewer defenses to balance out his offensive powers. Charging Reaping Strike slows the class down and if a player is accustomed to a faster pace, he won’t like using Reaping Strike and will change it out for another At Will power once more are unlocked by leveling. I found that for my own playstyle at the low levels, it worked best if I ran into a group of mobs and used Roar, one of the first Encounter Powers, to knock them back a bit then while they stood up and came back to me I could fully charge up Reaping Strike. My other favorite Encounter Power was Mighty Leap which was especially handy for boss fights where the boss is able to knock you back. Mighty Leap throws your weapon at the target then you leap to it, catching the weapon and slamming into the ground for nice area damage; it’s a great way to get back into the fight with a single key press after being knocked back.

At level 10, the GWF gets his first Class Power, Unstoppable and a Determination gauge on his UI. The GWF gains Determination from both dealing and taking damage and once the gauge is over the halfway mark, he can use Unstoppable which is one of the GWF’s few defensive abilities, causing his attack speed to increase (but damage per strike to decrease) and he takes less damage for the duration as well. The mitigation also scales with the percentage of Determination as it decreases; initially, you take hardly any damage but as Determination gets closer to the 50% point your incoming damage gradually increases.

Out of all the classes I’ve played so far, I found the Great Weapon Fighter to be the most expensive at lower levels in terms of using health potions. The other classes I got by fine with potions looted from enemies, but I used so many with the GWF I had to actually run to a vendor and buy more. I suspect nearly everyone ends up choosing a Cleric-oriented Companion as soon as possible for that reason. [Spoiler: there's a quest later on which rewards a Cleric Companion too, so if you're wanting to collect multiple Companions on the cheap, something to keep in mind.]

Based on the initial GWF build we got to test, the general consensus was that in PvE the class is best at tanking the adds in a boss fight while the Guardian Fighter handles the boss itself. In PvP, players said it was a great counter to the Control Wizard.

Companions

Just to add what I said in my CBW2 post, Companions do have a little customization to them. When mine reached rank 10, another skin unlocked which allows me to change his appearance. It’s a preset costume so it’s currently nowhere near as freeform as Star Trek Online where I can customize the appearance of every costume piece my Bridge Officers wear. But it’s still a nice touch to at least be able to tweak the appearance of your Companions even a little.

As your Companions level up, their training time quickly increases as well which serves as incentive to eventually start spending Astral Diamonds to rush the training. Since it was beta and I was too busy playing content versus grinding AD, I tended to time training my Companion when I wouldn’t need him or when I planned on logging that character out for awhile.

Mounts

At level 20, you gain your first mount though if memory serves you do have to buy it from the mount vendor in Neverwinter. 2 gold or thereabouts, so saving up for that should be your first long-term goal in the 1-19 bracket. Mounts are summoned with the ’6′ key, which is never part of the UI until you unlock your first mount. Far as I can tell, all mounts are tradeable (probably the Zen Store ones too) so you can buy them then sell them on the Auction House.

You initially get your choice of Horse which is the basic mount type in the game. Others are available from the Mount Vendor then really fancy ones are in the Zen Store.

One problem I noticed right away was my character’s pose while riding. She leans forward in a near racing pose so to get her to also look forward, the model bends and stretches her neck to the point it looks like her neck is broken. Obviously the models and especially animations and poses still need to be worked on, hopefully prior to launch.

Zen Store

I wrote quite a bit about the Zen Store in the last article so I won’t repeat myself here, though I will say this: over the years as the so-called “Free To Play” (F2P) business model has appeared and become more popular, players always inquire about the Item Shops but it seems no one ever writes about them very much, be it bloggers or “professional” game journalists. Which is why last time I had the attitude of “if you want it done right, do it yourself” to hopefully lead by example.

One thing that I have noticed about Neverwinter is that compared to Champions and Star Trek, it is slightly more intrusive that it has an Item Shop and they’d like you to spend money. Champions and Star Trek also have optional subscriptions still, and I do know a good deal of players still sub to Star Trek at least. Neverwinter is full F2P with no subscription option.

Remember when Lord of the Rings Online switched to F2P and players were (still are?) complaining how intrusive the LOTRO Store was? It seemed that nearly every UI frame had some sort of LOTRO Store button or icon ready to sell you something.

The one time I’ve noticed it “suggestive selling” is when you’re incapacitated in a fight. A “Near Death” UI frame appears where you can Call For Help (your Companion will stop fighting and come revive you; a similar mechanic exists in Star Trek) or Release which sends you back to the most recent campfire you visited but also resets the mobs past that campfire. Obviously that means if you went down in a boss fight, releasing resets the boss to 100% as well.

Notice it’s pushing a few Zen Store items? A Scroll of Cure Serious Wounds will recover  you from near death to full health at your current location. A Scroll of Mass Cure Serious Wounds will do the same for your entire party.

A pack of five Scrolls of Cure Serious Wounds is 300 Zen, or $3 USD and 500 Zen for a five-pack of the Mass Cure Serious Wounds scrolls.

This is a touchy subject. Many players, myself included, feel this is still a totally optional purchase. But I’ve always been the type of MMO player who is willing to concede defeat and try it again, even through respawns, which is exactly what will happen when my party and I click the Release button and reappear at the most recent campfire. Players who want to revive on the spot without resetting the boss to 100%, well those scrolls exist, therefore a certain segment of the players are saying those items are “Pay2Win.” Unless there is no other option to revive, period, I will continue to disagree on that. It’s a convenience item, nothing more, in my book. Also don’t forget the Astral Diamond Exchange where players can trade their AD for Zen and vice-versa! If you collect enough AD you can buy someone else’s Zen from the Exchange then buy those scrolls from the Zen Store.

The other controversial item in both CBW2 and CBW3 are Scrolls of Identification which, as the name implies, are used to identify gear. Apparently in CBW1 these were available from normal vendors but the past two Beta Weekends they were only in the Astral Diamond vendor and cost 800 AD apiece. Players are raging over the change. I did not have a single issue with scrolls. In fact, I had two or three full stacks of them because they drop relatively frequently from mobs and chests anyway. Simply mousing over any unidentified item will still show you if that item is a (mathematical) upgrade over your current item, thus saving me the need to spend a scroll if it was not an upgrade. If the item cannot be used by your class, the icon is red so why would you spend a scroll to identify it? For myself, simply playing sensibly and only using the scrolls on items I could use as an upgrade led me to having more scrolls than I needed. Now, if someone were perhaps aiming for a very specific build and only wanted gear that boosted certain abilities then sure, the mathematical algorithm used to determine if an item is an upgrade may in fact not work out since you may desire one that is equal to your current item but boosts the abilities you want instead of what your current item does. So I will concede that for certain play styles, scrolls may be a more in-demand commodity than for others. But I would also say that the relative scarcity of scrolls as well as their AD price tag may serve as a slight balancing factor with the various currency economies that will grow in Neverwinter.

Yes, STO is getting a third faction! It’s being handled a bit differently than a lot of us had hoped, however. Personally, I was hoping for a fully-fledged Romulan faction that, once (or if) STO ever overhauls their PvP system, could escalate into three-faction territorial control PvP. But that’s not the way it’s going to work, at least not at LoR’s launch. Right away, there’s a problem with that idea going up against the Romulan story line that’s already in the game, especially with the New Romulus content.

According to Ask Cryptic: Legacy of Romulus, players can start a Romulan character and play from level 1 (KDF characters can be started from level 1 as well!) and their exclusive Romulan Republic story will serve as a prequel to the game’s existing Romulan story arc, which has been somewhat tweaked to tie in the new story with the old and with the new faction. Reman characters are also part of the expansion but are not immediately available, being instead an account-wide unlock as part of the New Romulus reputation. I will assume those of us who are already at Tier 5 reputation will be “grandfathered” in.

The Romulan faction has a full set of leveling ships, as well as ships that can be purchased with Dilithium and Zen Store-exclusive ships, and Romulan Republic duty officers.

Here’s where the Romulan faction takes a curve from what we’d hoped for: at some point each Romulan or Reman captain will have to choose to ally himself with either the Federation or the Klingon Defense Force. So in terms of PvP, STO will remain a two-sided game.

One of the reasons Executive Producer Dan Stahl gave in the Ask Cryptic was fleet starbases. The Fleet Advancement System first went live with Season 6 in July, 2012 and the biggest fleets in the game are just now reaching Tier 5 starbases and are now devoting their full attention to advancing their embassies. The fleet starbase and embassy setup is currently tweaked for large fleets. Smaller fleets such as my own are struggling to get enough resources — namely Dilithium and Fleet Marks — to complete projects and it’s been a huge point of contention, not to mention players burning out from the constant grind, myself included. “Something” is being done to address this in the Legacy of Romulus expansion but Cryptic hasn’t said what that something will be yet. Anyway, the team was afraid introducing a third faction of Fleet Advancement might be too much and end up driving people away due to the burnout and grind, if they feel they have to “start over” from Tier 0 starbases and embassies with the new faction. So the Romulans will have their own story missions, ships, costumes, a faction-only social hub and all, just no Romulan fleet starbases.

A brief journey into the forums revealed another reason this solution may be beneficial in the long run: KDF Queues. Currently, the KDF is already a small subset of players. Partially because Star Trek itself has always been about Starfleet first, but also one cannot simply stroll into the First City — you have to level up a Federation character to level 24 (I think?) to unlock the KDF faction, so it’s turning away those who want to play the “bad guy” faction from the start. Allowing the influx of Romulan captains to ally themselves with the KDF will hopefully increase the total amount of players for the KDF side and therefore reduce the queue times.

A few days ago, the first code update for the LoR expansion went to the Tribble test shard. No new real content to test yet, this first build is primarily testing a new character creation system which is somewhat modeled after what’s being done in Neverwinter, and also the all-new LCARS User Interface (UI) for every aspect of the game, as well as introducing the Nukara Strikeforce reputation.

There’s a ton of, shall we say “issues” on the Tribble build, some related to this being an expansion and a lot is going on behind the scenes that is breaking some things in a sometimes “seriously, wtf?” manner but that’s what a Test Shard is for, so I am not going to get into any of that.

First, the new Character Creation system. Currently only Federation characters can be made. There was a way to “glitch” the creator to access the Romulan costumes but I wasn’t able to get my own screenshots of those before the glitch stopped working (for me anyway). Someone else captured most of them HERE for as long as that stays active.

The overall idea is a more streamlined and modern approach, similar to what’s being done with Neverwinter. There are a bunch of pre-made faces, etc. to choose or if you want to get into the nitty gritty, all the existing options we’re used to are still there as well. The screen itself is quite nice, it shows your first ship (the Miranda-class frigate for Federation) then in the background the NPCs animate while they talk to each other and starships fly by the viewport. It’s a nice touch.

Then the new LCARS UI for gameplay. This is a Work In Progress and naturally players are marching with their pitchforks in anger. What else is new? Gamers scream for change up until you give it to them, then they scream to change it back.

Here’s what it looks like in space right now. With the borders, some of the UI elements are a few pixels larger but the UI Artist says he’s making several changes before it goes live. I like the colors for the Weapons, Engines, Shields and Auxiliary settings, those were just white before. The “flat” look makes me think of “Windows 8 ‘Metro’ meets Star Trek LCARS.” Also new are the colors. Allies are now green and enemies are still orange, but both colors seem a faded hue, and again the artist is taking feedback. I’d like a little more vibrant hues and while we’re on that, something completely different that stands out for fleet-mates and teammates. I understand the colorblind segment of the players is having issues with the new green color anyway so that will likely get changed soon.

The Interaction UI Frame has been resized and reskinned as well. Nearly every NPC interaction is using this new frame. Some appropriately appear as if they’re talking to you over your ship’s viewscreen such as the one above requesting docking clearance at Earth Spacedock. The NPCs on ESD I talked to did not have the viewscreen graphics, so that was fine, but playing missions when your Bridge Officers talk to you — and they’re usually standing next to you — the viewscreen graphics are there which is odd from a “why are you talking to me from the ship when you’re right here?” sense. Hopefully something that can be addressed for normal play as well as adding a switch for Foundry authors to specify which should be used in dialogue.

Here’s the new character selection screen. Showing a KDF so they’re not being ignored here. Each faction has its own color scheme (and apparently user-switchable color schemes are coming such as TNG, Voyager, etc. colors) and the mousewheel will zoom the camera for your character and slightly for your ship. On that note, the new character sheet also has a 3D “paper doll” now so you can zoom and rotate your captain, your ship and your crew!

Captains will be able to re-train your Traits now! Also, just like the Reputation systems currently add new Passive and Active powers, new Traits are coming that can be earned as part of the game’s new focus on what other games would call “alternate advancement.”

Here’s a quick peek at the Nukara Strikeforce reputation tab. I do have detailed shots of each tier but don’t feel like really getting into that in this post. One point of contention with some users is that the high-end Ground Set listed is the same set that is currently in the Lobi store. Some people are upset they may have paid a lot of money to acquire the lobi crystals for that set, other people just see it as they paid up-front to have that set for months in advance. For my two cents, I’d rather not have actual gear in the Lobi store period.

Anyway, there’s a few shots of the first version of the new UI coming to Star Trek Online and its Legacy of Romulus expansion! I’ll talk more about the expansion once Cryptic officially adds the new playable content to the Test Shard.

However, after spending a fair amount of time in the Neverwinter Beta Weekend 3 (more on that in a later post) I also decided it was time to re-try GW2 and somehow in the process I ended up trying out TSW as well. Here’s a few comments on each:

The Secret World

Despite my comments above regarding the circle-strafing and kiting oriented combat, I do really like TSW. I stuck with it, playing off and on, for a few months, working up through the first dungeon: The Polaris then attempting to start missions in the next zones, Savage Coast and Blue Mountain. That’s where I ran into a brick wall: by that point the cabal (guild) I was in had transitioned off to some other New Shiny MMO (they’re back to TSW now but only on Monday nights) and bottom-line: I play in mornings so I need other players online at that time. A combination of lack of other players and lack of soloability due to design and also my crappy deck(s) and gear, I gave up out of frustration.

One of the long-term goals of TSW were the Decks. You can build your own, and it’s highly suggested that you do, in fact, just like you would in GW1 but aside from taking Funcom’s Decks and studying them to learn the ability synergies, they also unlocked outfits to wear. Decks took several hundred AP/SP each, though, which is why they were — and still are — long-term goals to aim for.

Since I left last year, Funcom has added Starter Decks which are much quicker to obtain and give players a viable deck to work with at lower levels, plus outfits to wear, while slowly working toward unlocking the advanced Decks. I had left off using a Pistols / Blood Magic deck that ended up being sub-optimal in nearly every way but at least served to teach me a little about how TSW synergies can work. I played The Polaris with that deck so I had QL3 weapons and talismans already which made unlocking The Maverick started deck a pretty quick affair. Plus I like the outfit!

As for building up those AP/SP I know Rowan will tell me not to repeat Kingsmouth Town for the seventh time or so, but I tried it his way and with low gear and skills, I simply was not able to solo in Savage Coast if I had more than one mob on me. And you always end up with multiple mobs there. So, Kingmouth it was!

From there, I previously had points in Blades so that got me started on the Champion starter deck; only trick was I had nothing in Fists so I had to slowly build up enough AP to unlock that. A few missions later, I unlocked the final ability for Cage Master starter deck, which is Fists and Blood Magic. All three are good viable decks, though I find The Maverick easiest simply because I have higher weapon skills and higher Quality Level weapons than I do for the other decks.

Here are my current stats in the Chronicle.

On the one hand, I’m actually excited to want to return to The Secret World because it really is a very cool setting with mature and thoughtful content. However, even being F2P the population (at least in Savage Coast and Blue Mountain) is still extremely low. If I do see other players, the chats are nearly silent which isn’t a good sign. Plenty of players hanging out in London and Agartha but the latter crowd always seems to be LFG for end-game content. On that note, TSW really needs to work on its UI. For a newer title, the chat window is one of the more primitive I’ve used. Ever. I was going to complain about the lack of an LFG tool aside from the LFG chat which no one (in zones anyway) uses but before I embarrassed myself, Google tells me one was in fact added in an update. But it’s located in the Menu somewhere, not something I noticed at any point the past few days (probably because I never click the Menu button). So I’ll save my comments on that for when I actually give it a try. Still, I do feel TSW would benefit from two things: First, make it truly single-shard so population isn’t as much of a problem, and make the content “public” like GW2 or NW where there’s no “mob tagging,” no “kill stealing” or whatever. If it’s difficult enough to get a group already, stop being so old school and forcing players to be in a Group UI for every aspect of the content. Over the weekend, Rowan was kind enough to login and run several missions with me and I had a blast! Having that one other player to quest with is all it takes. Don’t need a full group, just two players can get through most of the world mission content I’ve played so far.

Guild Wars 2

When GW2 launched, my plan was to make a Guardian and call it a day. No alts. But coming from GW1 and completely ignoring all the pre-launch hype on GW2, it through me for a loop when I only had tiny list of weapon skills I could ever use. Through drops and quest rewards, I ended up with one of every type the Guardian can use and it takes less than 5 minutes to unlock every weapon skill for that type. So I find the unlock mechanic to be a pointless mechanic that could be removed to save a few KB of file size. If it’s over that quickly, why bother? By level 15 I was in the next zone, Kessex Hills and basically doing the same thing I’d been doing in Queensdale. I couldn’t see anything necessarily to look forward to other than leveling up and unlocking enough Skill Points to buy the remaining skills, none of which sounded very interesting anyway. The content seemed to be aimlessly wandering a zone hoping to find an Event happening, and hoping to find other players doing that Event. GW2 seemed to be very much like SWTOR and WAR before it: within a week or two everyone had moved to the higher zones and no one new was coming in (either new players or players rolling alts) to populate the lower zones.

So in the past few days I’ve been playing again to try to “get it.” My Guardian is up to 27 now but I keep getting so angry I eventually broke my rule and rolled an alt: a Ranger. A huge frustration is the game tends to drop my target for no apparent reason. I don’t know if this is a bug or a feature. I’ll be wailing away on a mob then out of the blue I’m dying because it’s no longer targeted. WTF? For the record, this is also happening on the Ranger as well. I’m coming to suspect that it’s an angle thing, if the mob gets to a certain angle the game decides I’m no longer fully facing it so rather than warning me or doing something useful, it just drops the target and I stand there getting whacked until I happen to notice I no longer have a target.

Another frustration was I finally (!) managed to find an Event with other players. That’s been an unfortunately rare thing in GW2 even the past few days. I was grouped with Oakstout and we were talking on C3 and I was shouting “I can’t see what’s happening!” He’s saying if I see “white numbers” then I’m hitting the boss and getting credit for the event. “No, you don’t understand, I see nothing but white and flashes of other colors because too many effects are going off! White numbers? I have no idea, I can’t see shit!” And that was the final play on the Guardian. I suppose I could grab a Scepter and happily fling slow-motion magic spitwads at range, but for now I’m playing a Ranger to try to understand GW2 with fewer frustrations then hopefully I will come back to the Guardian.

Using a bow certainly lets me see what’s happening at least, and it’s easier to stay back far enough to be out of all the particle effects. I’ll just say this: I’m an eye candy fan myself, but there can be too much of a good thing. When it prevents me from playing effectively (or at all) there needs to be some setting to auto-dampen particles when in a big fight.

So far I’ve unlocked all the weapon skills except Spear and off-hand Axe, simply because I haven’t come across those weapons yet and I have an aversion to buying white noob weapons in any MMO. This time I’m trying to pay more attention to the various UI elements as I play. I used to complain that some Events would pop up and I’d see the marker on the map right away while other times I’d see the Event notification but nothing on the map. Now I know to give it a few seconds and small icons will appear on my minimap pointing the general direction of an Event that’s further away.

I have heard a lot of people say how wonderful GW2 is from an Exploration point of view. I disagree. Oh, from the perspective of “isn’t this scenery gorgeous?” yes, it’s absolutely an Explorer’s dream. But I see the Exploration itself as an Achievement system. I load into any given zone and I’m presented with a list of how many Hearts, POIs, Skill Challenges and Vistas I need to find for 100% Map Completion. In other words, I’m given a checklist to complete. That is pure Achiever mentality.

I am liking the game more than I did initially. Probably enough to stick with it this time. I feel I’m understanding the overall design more than I did. Maybe. Here, let me sum up what I feel the game is “about:” You run around a zone doing all the Completion content, spending Karma to get gear (unless you read ahead in your Story quests to see if that gear will be better) and that should put you roughly at the level for the next zone. Rinse, repeat. I’m kinda running on the assumption that by the time I finish all the Hearts in any zone, that will get me a full set of gear upgrades (assuming I’m going to the next higher zone, not an equal or lower one) so that I’m geared enough to start the Hearts in the next higher zone? At level cap just run the same stuff over and over for Karma and Laurels to get Ascended Gear (or whatever the end-game gear is called)? Throw in some WvWvW for good measure?

Similarities

After putting a few hours into both GW2 and TSW the past few days, one impression struck me as similar: both involve memorizing each zone to repeat the content optimally. In both games you start out wandering aimlessly exploring until you happen upon an Event (GW2) or a Mission (TSW). At least GW2 labels everything on its map; TSW you really do have to memorize the location of almost everything when you go back and repeat the missions. So I learned that GW2 has multi-stage Events, as Oakstout was taking me through one in Kessex Hills he knew right away which stage it was at then where to run (hurry hurry!) to get into the next stage. But you learn that from repetition, just like learning and optimizing instance runs, the same mentality applies to the public Event content in GW2 or repeating the Missions in TSW, at least that’s how I’m feeling about it right now.

I mentioned population already in TSW, now let’s talk GW2. I’m on the Sanctum of Rall server world which is labeled as “High Population.” I just logged out of the game a few minutes ago and there were maybe 2 other players in the lowbie zones I’m questing ”Eventing” (?) in. That was also the case in TSW a few minutes prior to checking GW2. Yet I also logged into Star Trek and Champions and both those games are hopping. Why? Single shard. I don’t care that it would break the concept of WvWvW — strict server-based MMOs should be a thing of the past at this point, and I do feel it’s harming most MMOs if even GW2 on a “high population” server, I can’t find anyone doing Events. Yes, I complained about TSW being too difficult and solo-unfriendly, now I’m going to turn around and say that the Events I’ve played in GW2 that can be completed solo (not all can) are… boring solo. Far as I’m concerned, Cryptic is onto something here and in this day and age if an MMO has zones you load into versus a streaming seamless world, then your MMO should be truly single-shard and re-think your grand PvP concept to make that work.

This weekend, the Control Wizard was the newest playable class, and a maximum level cap of 40. The Foundry toolset, crafting and PvP were not yet available for beta testing. The Foundry editor has been available for the alpha testers, however, so plenty of Foundry quests were in place for us.

The next Beta Weekend begins March 22, and will add another race, the Great Weapon Fighter class, and there was a contest to complete 100,000 quests this weekend to unlock level 50 for the third beta. Given how many players I saw this weekend, I’d say that contest is in the bag.

So far Open Beta is planned for some time in April.

A Brief History of Neverwinter

Cryptic had original planned Neverwinter as a graphical lobby-based online cooperative Action RPG, not an MMO. Think Guild Wars or maybe Dungeons & Dragon Online, where you have multiplayer hubs to interact with players then your adventures are instanced. However when Perfect World Entertainment acquired Cryptic Studios in May, 2011 they wanted an MMO, and delayed the Neverwinter project to accomplish that change in scope.

My Beta Agenda

What I did was try each class to level 7 just to get a basic feel of the class and take a peek at its skill trees, etc. which made up the tutorial then the first several quests once you’re in Neverwinter proper. Only two character slots were available, that’s why I only played them for a short time then deleted it to make room for the next class. I started with the Control Wizard, then the Guardian Fighter, Devoted Cleric then Trickster Rogue. Since the first two classes had been deleted to make room for the latter, I played the Rogue up a few more levels and chose the Cleric as my primary test class and got her to level 16 to obtain the first Companion. So I will talk a little about the classes, but use the Cleric in particular for specific examples. I will state unequivocally that in hindsight I wish I’d had time to level each class to 10 since that’s when they get their first Class Abilities, which gives the player your first “Eureka!” moment when suddenly you begin to see more clearly how each class can play out.

Because comparisons are always necessary for this type of game, here are the ones I will use most often because I feel they are most appropriate: obviously Cryptic’s other MMOs, Champions Online and Star Trek Online — STO in particular since I’m most familiar with it, TERA, Guild Wars 2, League of Legends, and Path of Exile.

Disclaimer: I have not played tabletop D&D since 2nd Edition AD&D and my last session was summer of 1994. I have zero experience with 3.5 or Pathfinder other than playing DDO a little bit, and zero experience with 4e which is what Neverwinter is (loosely?) based upon. Therefore I am unable to make any direct D&D ruleset::Neverwinter comparisons other than stating I believe it is impossible to have a 1:1 parity translation of a turn-based tabletop game into a real-time multiplayer videogame. Concessions will always have to be made from both sides of the table. Having said that, the classes in Neverwinter are built to fit into specific Roles like those in 4e from what people are telling me. For example, the Role of Defender in 4e is a tank, but also a damage dealer in his own right, so not quite the “tank” we’re accustomed to in MMOs, and that also applies to Neverwinter’s Guardian Fighter.

What Is Neverwinter?

For the TL;DR, at a glance summary, Neverwinter is: a fast-paced Action RPG in the vein of Path of Exile (kill monsters for fun and loot) but in a third-person MMO format which uses a League of Legends-ish control scheme (you always need the mouse active during play so all your skill, etc. keys are easily reachable from your WASD movement position) with TERA-influenced combat mechanics and a light sprinkling of Guild Wars 2-influenced features.

Neverwinter Tech

Neverwinter is running on the latest iteration of Cryptic’s Core Engine, obviously. A lot of the zone sizes seem roughly comparable to, if not bigger than, what you’d see in Champions Online. I have a fairly decent gaming rig, not top of line and Neverwinter was out-performing Star Trek Online (which is my main MMO) for me. In instances and even some of the Adventure Zones I was getting near 90fps with my graphics maxed (though I left anti-aliasing at the default 4x) while in the main social area in the city of Neverwinter I was in the 30s to 40s due to the intricate city design and crazy number of players. Zone load times were noticeably faster than Star Trek as well. The game runs in DX9 by default though there is a DX11 (beta) setting which dropped my framerate to half the DX9 numbers. Graphically, Neverwinter is pretty decent, a slight step up from Star Trek’s latest zones, though character faces and especially animations need some work still. The Core Engine has a lower asset budget than some of the popular licensed engines so you’re not going to see visuals along the lines of TERA (Unreal Engine 3) for example. However, this allows the game to run on more machines than a TERA or Age of Conan will.

Like the other Cryptic MMOs, Neverwinter is single-shard with population-controlled instances. It seemed like Neverwinter was able to hold more players per instance than Champions or Star Trek but I have no hard numbers to back that up with. Traveling, at least within the city itself, is accomplished by getting to any gate, then a map appears and you can click any destination on that map.

Playing the Game

Here is an example of how the game UI is laid out by default:

Fairly standard MMO interface for the most part. NPC icons are pretty self-explanatory for the most part, and Quest NPCs use the standard punctuation mark icons, as shown. Not shown in this image is a Foundry Quest NPC such as the Well-informed Harper, which uses its own unique icon. Many of the Cryptic Quests have voice overs that continue playing even after I rapidly clicked through the dialogue so just above the chat box you can see a voice over UI element that shows which NPC is talking and a button to mute the voice.

In the center of the screen is the targeting reticule which is used to aim at whatever you want to interact with. The game is played in “mouselook” mode, meaning if you move the mouse, your aim moves with it. You can press the left Alt can to enter “cursor mode” so you can click things with the mouse cursor but once you start moving or press Alt again, you’re back to mouselook.

Just like TERA or DDO, for example. Neverwinter uses a “soft targeting” (I’m borrowing Turbine’s term when they implemented that into DDO a few years ago) system that works well enough but could stand a little fine-tuning as it was especially problematic trying to interact with NPCs with a lot of players around or targeting a player in a group combat. If you click your mouse button for each attack, you can easily switch from target to target. Once an attack is active (or if you hold the button) you’ll lock onto that target for the duration of the attack, then the soft targeting releases again. Or if you want to hard lock onto a target, hold the left Ctrl key and release when you want to switch targets.

To the left of that is the Divine Power gauge for the Devoted Cleric class which I will talk about later. Each class gets its own specific gauge to fit with its Class Power. Guardian Fighters start the game with their Defense gauge displayed though I’m uncertain if it functions until level 10 when you unlock the Class Power. The other classes’ gauge doesn’t appear until they get their Class Power.

Moving down to the hotbar, you’ll notice you only have hit points, no mana! Cooldowns are used in place of mana to prevent rapid spamming of devastating attacks. The left and right mouse buttons use your At-Will powers while QER use your Encounter Powers. 1 and 2 use your Daily Powers and Tab uses your Class power. Similar to Guild Wars 2, powers can be switched out at any time (I didn’t try in combat but I will assume that’s a no-no). 3-5 are your potions. The big D20 icon in the center is your Action Points. Fill your Action Points from using your At-Will and Encounter powers, and you can use a Daily Power which depletes your AP. The green chevron on top of the Action Points icon is your Stamina gauge, which is used for your sprint or dodge moves. Each class has its own unique dodge maneuver. Controller support was removed for this weekend’s build, unfortunately. Everyone said it played incredibly well with a controller during the last beta event so hopefully that feature will reappear for launch.

The Quest Tracker UI is fairly standard as well. Quests can be toggled on or off the Tracker from your Quest Log. The little scroll icon enables a glowing trail (similar to the Fable games) that leads you to your objective or destination. The trail can be toggled on or off in the Quest Log or with the ‘Z’ key. To the left of the minimap are the next three upcoming public events, which you can queue for. This weekend it seemed like all those were labeled level 60 events (level cap was 40) so I did not get to try any of those.

Finally, the icon that looks like a sun with the Ctrl+I label is for Invocation. Once per hour, you can invoke your god (chosen during character creation) for random rewards. I received a couple thousand Astal Diamonds (more on that later), runes and other useful items, for example.

The only part of the onscreen UI I do not like at all is the toolbar at the top center. It’s small enough that it’s unobtrusive but it’s just ugly and somewhat difficult to read. Not that you’ll need to read it once you learn the keybinds…

The zoom level you see in this picture is also the default and not changeable! This is definitely something I (and every beta tester) would like to have addressed. There is an Inspect Mode you can toggle with the ‘B’ key then zoom in and out with the mouse wheel. You can even run around and use powers, but your UI is gone the whole time so it’s very much less than ideal. The current zoom level is certainly playable but there are times I’d rather be able to change the zoom during encounters or even just to look closer at my character without having to fool with Inspect Mode.

When picking up a quest, rather than simply popping up a little Quest Dialogue UI, Neverwinter switches to a sort of cut-scene view, which also hosts the Dialogue UI. Merchants and other NPC types also use this same view mode.

In addition to the Quest NPCs there are Job Boards in various spots where you can pick up user-created Foundry Quests. I also saw a few Bounty Master NPCs who offer a bounty for collecting various object you might find in the zone you’re questing. For example, the Tower District is infested with the Many-Arrows orc tribe, so you can trade ten Many-Arrows Insignias for a Gruumsh’s Bane consumable buff which gives a +25% damage versus orcs for 30 minutes.

Another feature you’ll see (and actively seek out in dungeons) are camp fires. Again, very similar to TERA, standing next to a camp fire for a few seconds will fully heal you and apply a 15-minute buff which gives +1 to all attributes. See the picture for the Trickster Rogue to see a camp fire in action.

While the crafting system itself was not in this weekend’s build, crafting materials were. Or at least that’s what I’m assuming they were. So I think this is how gathering works: while running around the Adventure Zones or Dungeon Instances you might come across objects like chests or whatever. Treasure chests can be opened by anyone, while some object require a specific Skill such as Thieving, and other objects can only be opened with the appropriate Kit such as Arcane or Nature. Kits are consumable and also have a chance to break. All the kits I was using at early levels had a 65% chance to open the object, and several broke. I didn’t go around checking vendors but I’ll assume normal kits are available for in-game currency. I did see Profession packs in the Zen Store (more on the store later) which I presume had a quantity of high-quality Kits.

Aside from the normal style (including Foundry) quests, players can also routinely queue for Skirmishes. The ‘K’ key brings up the Skirmish UI. As you level up, more Skirmishes become available. The two I was able to play this weekend were Blacklake Terror which is the first low-level Skirmish, then Orc Assault. Both of those two are essentially a survival mode. You enter each of them in a camp-type area and the party has to jump down into the arena where the action takes place. Once you jump down, there’s no way out until it’s over. A few waves of basic enemies come out (zombies for Blacklake Terror, and Orc Assault should be obvious) then you switch to a few mini-boss type enemies mixed in with the normals, then finally the Skirmish Boss makes his entrance with a brief cut scene. Advanced players might be able to use environmental effects if they can position enemies just right, for example in Blacklake Terror there are a few barrels of explosives that will cause area damage if the group can move the fight there. Of the two in their current state, I enjoyed Orc Assault the most. Plus Blacklake Terror had a glitch at the end where you couldn’t leave the instance unless you either logged out or used the /killme command, both of which place you back at the doorway so you can exit.

Finally, let me talk about the Dungeons. I could almost say that, like Path of Exile (or Diablo, whatever) the whole point of Neverwinter is running Adventure Zones, Skirmishes and Dungeons. I ran a few of the Quest instances in a small group, including one with Hudson and his girlfriend, then I leveled to 16 so I could run the first true Dungeon, Cloak Tower which has been talked about on Massively and other MMO sites from the first Beta Weekend. Dungeons are also queue-able just like Skirmishes. All the “dungeons” during Quests and certainly the Cloak Tower Dungeon were very well laid-out with plenty of twists and turns, hidden areas to explore for loot, traps — everything D&D dungeon running is famous for.

Combat

Combat in Neverwinter is a fast-paced affair. The MMO Trinity of tank, healer, and damage (plus crowd control) does exist, but is not explicitly required. I only did maybe two group activities that actually had a tank (one of which was running with Hudson who was playing the Guardian Fighter class), other times we had a Control Wizard who was doing so much dps he was the “tank” and it went fine. Everyone has potions, so just like Path of Exile, everyone is responsible for themselves and having a Devoted Cleric just makes things go easier.

Combat itself is extremely similar to TERA. Very fast-paced Action Combat, but also just like TERA once you use one of your powers you stop in place while performing that action. For some people, this can be a make or break deal. I don’t mind it, but you have to learn the ups and downs of this mechanic. Also like Path of Exile (and Diablo, etc.) you can simply hold down the mouse button to spam attack, at least for casters; I don’t remember if the melee classes would spam with the mouse button held in. Now, this can be good for constant damage but it also locks you in place longer. The biggest damage seems to come from what I’ll call targeted attacks by the enemies. A mage-type enemy might target the ground surrounding himself or a party member and a red circle appears for a few seconds prior to the attack, or a melee-type character who is about to use his area damage attack you’ll see his attack arc highlighted in red for a few seconds. This is similar to TERA where all the enemies and bosses had specific “tell” animations, which once learned, would indicate which special attack was coming so the party could hopefully react in time. With a simple “don’t stand in the fire” mindset, this is where your Dodge move comes in. Either double-tapping one of the directional WASD keys or pressing one with the Shift key held will execute your dodge move, which uses a certain amount of Stamina which slowly regenerates. Through level 16, I was only able to do two Dodges before my Stamina was empty, so that’s something else to pay attention to be effective, and if I held the left button down to spam that At-Will power on my casters, I was quite often locked in place for so long I was unable to Dodge the enemy’s special attack. So left-mouse spamming can be fine but you’ll need to be more situationally aware so you can stop spamming before a special attack and be able to use your Dodge. One other thing I noticed was that it seemed once an enemy started a melee attack animation when I was standing face to face with him, even if I walked (not Dodged) out of his attack range I would still take the hit. Dodging, however, did avoid the hit. I guess that’s the trade-off for being an Action (MMO)RPG versus a straight-up action game or perhaps that’s a Working as Intended mechanic?

Moving on to the Classes:

Guardian Fighter

The Guardian Fighter fits the 4e Role of Defender, and is your one-handed weapon plus shield tank class, but he also deals quite a bit of damage unlike the typical Trinity MMO where the tank’s dps is gimped. The Guardian Fighter’s weapons that I’m aware of so far are sword and mace, and I think an axe.

Let’s talk TERA for a bit! My main character in TERA is a Lancer, which is the tank class in that game. When TERA first launched, a Lancer could walk into a group of mobs, use Challenging Shout which is a 360-degree Taunt, then hold the right-mouse button to bring up the shield in defensive stance and just sit there turtling while the group killed the mobs, occasionally popping out to do Challenging Shout again. Sure, you could mix some attacks in there and were wise to do so but the mechanics allowed lazy turtle tanking. I was guilty of doing this myself. In a later patch, the Resolve mechanic was added, and displayed as a bar below the health and mana. It was normally filled but when the Lancer goes into defensive stance to block, the resolve bar starts diminishing so the player has to make some attacks to regenerate a little resolve. Run out of resolve and no more blocking, which is… bad. The Guardian Fighter uses an extremely similar mechanic where he has a Defense (I think that’s what it’s called) gauge displayed and blocking will slowly diminish his defense so he has to make some attacks in order to keep his defense up to continue blocking. I forget if the taunt ability is 360-degree like TERA or a wide cone in front of him — I think it’s the latter. It sounds simple, and to a degree it is though there is definitely a large degree of tactical readiness required to be effective, but it’s incredibly fun! I love tanking on my Lancer in TERA and I love tanking with the Guardian Fighter in Neverwinter. A lot of the Guardian Fighter’s Encounter Powers seemed to focus on area damage as well, to help keep aggro and to do a little damage all the enemies facing him. His crowd control-style attack is a shield bash (I think) which knocks the enemy back. I don’t mean knocks him back a couple feet, either, he gets knocked all the way across the room! It’s just fun to do, fun to watch, and hey, it’s effective.

Control Wizard

As the name implies, this class fits the 4e Controller Role and specializes in crowd control combined with damage. His weapon is an Orb, not sure if there were other weapon types for this class yet. He starts off with the Magic Missile power on the left mouse button, which is spam-able. Magic Missile does good damage then on every third strike, launches a barrage which does extra damage. Next he gets Frost Ray (I think that was the name?) on the right mouse button, which is held down for a constant slowing effect while doing damage. The slowing effect lasts a few seconds after releasing the button so you can maneuver, Dodge or attack with a different power. One of his next powers lifted the enemy off the ground while doing some damage. The enemy is immobilized and cannot attack so in a group this is a useful power to do some burst damage without fear of counterattack. Unfortunately this was the first class I played, so the first to be deleted to try more so today I’m a bit fuzzy on the other powers I got to play with on those early few levels. I did group with some higher level Control Wizards and they looked fun, though.

I will say this: out of all the animations that need to be addressed, I thought the Control Wizard’s should be top of the list. He’s very cinematic with crazy moves that would make me have a chiropractor on speed dial if I tried them for real, but a lot of them just look a little awkward and need to be polished up a lot. And his stance. Oh gawd. The Control Wizard runs around all the time with two fingers pointing up, not quite a “Peace” sign (his fingers are together) but almost like he’s going to ask everyone “excuse me, do you have any Grey Poupon?” That single-handedly was the most annoying thing about the class and the reason I finished the tutorial them switched to another class. Otherwise my original intent was for this to be my main class at launch. So, Cryptic artists and modelers, please fix this!

Trickster Rogue

The Trickster Rogue fits into the 4e Role of Striker, specializing in burst damage, stealth, distraction and dodging. The only available weapon types I saw through level 9 were daggers. This class is pure fun, no two ways about it! His first left mouse button At Will power is a swift dagger swipe which damages all enemies in the rogue’s foward arc. His right mouse button throws daggers. He has 12 daggers he can throw, which slowly regenerate (no pesky ammo carrying here) but if he uses all 12 he has to wait for the full power cooldown before he can throw more. His first Encounter Power is Dazing Strike, which as it sounds, will daze the enemy you’re targeting. It does have a brief activation period, and using it from Stealth will cut the activation in half. Cool animation for it, you *Bamf!* teleport like Nightcrawler from X-Men to the enemy’s head then whap him a good one and fall back to the ground. I was playing a gnome so perhaps the taller races don’t appear up in the air like that. Then he gets Bait and Switch which drops a decoy of himself then scoots backward. The decoy will attract the aggro so you can position yourself for plenty of backstabbing goodness as long as your decoy has hit points. The third Encounter Power I got to use was Deft Strike which again lets you *Bamf!* teleport behind the enemy then give him a quick backstab for damage and a slowing effect. His first Daily Power is Bloodbath which… oh my gawd is just too fun, especially if you’re fighting groups of enemies. You *Bamf!* to each enemy, delivering a nasty strike each time, or for a single target like a boss you *Bamf!* all up and down the boss. It’s hilarious and effective! After playing my own Trickster Rogues then playing with some in groups at higher levels, I regret not getting one more level so I could have played around with Stealth, his first Class Power.

Tactical positioning is a Trickster Rogue’s best friend. Striking from behind or the side is most effective and should be utilized as such in groups to be most effective. Face to face melee is what the Guardian Fighter is for. Trickster Rogues are for sneaking and backstabbing.

The other trick (ha!) up the Trickster Rogue’s sleeve is disarming traps. Some of the early dungeon quests had traps like saw blades in the floor, or arrows shooting out of the walls. Only the Trickster Rogue can disarm them so that alone can make him an invaluable party member. I read some of the higher level players saying some of the traps later in the game can be quite lethal if you’re not careful.

Devoted Cleric

The Devoted Cleric class fits the 4e Role of Leader and is the only “healer” class in Neverwinter. As I’d mentioned before, everyone carries potions and is largely responsible for themselves (plus you never know if your party will have a cleric when using the public queue) so to a certain degree, a dedicated healing class is unnecessary. I played the cleric to level 16 and had a blast with it, though. It’s a combination healer (mostly light heals) and ranged damage. The Devoted Cleric’s weapon type is a symbol, and aside from heals focuses on area crowd control and single-target holy damage. The first At-Will attack is Lance of Faith which shoots magical spears of light at the enemy. Like the Control Wizard’s Magic Missile, this is a spam-able power by simply holding the left mouse button but again, you’re locked in place longer doing this and may get hit by an enemy’s special attack. The next At-Will attack is Astral Seal on the right mouse button. This does some damage but more importantly puts a light healing buff onto the target, so for the duration of that power any party member who attacks that enemy will receive a small heal. Needless to say, you keep that active on bosses! There’s practically no cooldown, so if there’s a group of mobs I was usually able to put Astral Seal on most, if not all the mobs so there was party healing going on no matter what was being attacked. The first Encounter Power is Bastion of Health which is a player-based area heal. It’s great for topping off the party after a fight or running in and giving a group heal in a pinch but it’s still a comparatively light heal when it’s all said and done. Handy, but if the party is in real trouble, it won’t save them for long. Next is Healing Word which is a handy-dandy heal over time (HoT) that comes in a “stack” of three. It works similar to the Trickster Rogue’s dagger throw — I can toss a Healing Word on any friendly player, and there’s a brief cooldown before I can toss the next one. It will slowly regenerate back to three on its own but if I toss all three, now I have to wait for the full power cooldown (I think it was 15 seconds) before I can use it again. Healing Word also stacks so if I keep targeting the same player the first one might heal (just to be clear: I’m making these numbers up; I did not record the actual heal values) 50 hit points per tick, the second one increases to 150 and the third to 300 hit points per tick. I kept switching the third Encounter Power but I think I mostly stuck with Daunting Light which is an area effect. The first Daily Power is Avenging Angel which is just awesome. You summon an glowy angel which does devastating damage to your target on its descent, then heals the party on its ascent. It all happens very quickly but it’s an excellent effect. I also unlocked the Hallowed Ground Daily Power which creates a large circular area effect that damages all enemies, and heals all players, within its area. Good stuff! At level 10 the first Class Power, Channel Divinity, is unlocked. This is where the Divine Power gauge shown way up at the beginning of the post comes in. The Devoted Cleric builds Divine Power from both dealing damage and healing. It has three tiers (the ‘+’ symbols on the gauge) to fully fill it. Pressing tab will bring a blue glow on your symbol and switch your At-Will powers to Punishing Light on the left mouse button, which is a hard-hitting beam of blue energy for single target damage, and Soothing Light on the right mouse button for a stronger single target heal. You’ll need to hold the buttons in for the optimal effect. The Divine Power gauge diminishes fairly rapidly even with all three tiers full, so I’m hoping there’s a way to slow that down or have the gauge hold more power at higher levels.

The “soft targeting” can be an issue with the heals, specifically Healing Word and Soothing Light so far and is similar to healing with TERA’s Priest class in that respect. For example, when I ran the Orc Assault skirmish with Hudson, he’s down there tanking the boss with his Guardian Fighter but there were a few Trickster Rogues down there as well, plus some Neverwinter Guard NPCs assisting. Finding Hudson in all that mess became troublesome, so once I did manage to target him that’s where holding Ctrl to hard lock onto him came in handy so I could ensure my Healing Word would go to him instead of someone else who didn’t need it.

All in all, I really enjoyed the Devoted Cleric far more than I thought I would. It was almost the best of both worlds, being able to do damage (roughly on par with the Guardian Fighter) and toss light heals as well. Soloing was easy as a result, too. I even soloed a dungeon quest instance that was two levels higher than my cleric by kiting, dodging and keeping my HoT active. In groups, since healing (so far anyway) isn’t as critical as in other MMOs, I was able to toss a few Astral Seals on the mobs and that kept anyone attacking it with constant light heals. I didn’t have to pay critical attention to health bars that way so I could feel free to just play the game, cast my damage spells and every so often check health bars to see if anyone needed some extra help.

Companions

One of the appealing factors to me about Star Trek Online is having a full crew of AI Bridge Officers. If I’m soloing I can choose four of them to bring along on any away mission, or even if I’m in a group or two or three players that still leaves a few slots open that BOffs can fill. Neverwinter has a similar mechanic called Companions. You get your first Companion at level 16. They come in either animal or people flavors. For my Devoted Cleric, I went the traditional route and chose a Man  at Arms (tank) Companion but I could have chosen any other archetype, including a dog which fits the dps role. Unlike STO where a full group of five players means no slots left for Companions, Neverwinter lets everyone bring his Companion along too. So in the Cloak Tower Dungeon, we had five players and five Companions. Granted, they’re AI so carry with them all the negative baggage that AI “pets” in MMOs have earned over the years, but still they’re a nice touch. Your companions also level up. Mine leveled while inside Clock Tower so I waited until we finished the dungeon before I sent him for training. This reminded me of Star Wars: The Old Repubic where you send your Companion to do tasks. It took five minutes for my Companion to go train to level 2 and come back, or I could spend Astral Diamonds (more on this in the next section) to speed up the process. The runes you find as loot or as a random reward for Invoking your god can be used to buff certain Companion stats. One difference to STO is I cannot control my Companion directly. In STO I can position each individual BOff, I can manually click their abilities, or tell them to attack a specific target before I run into battle myself. In Neverwinter, my Companion stays at my side until I enter combat. In the case of the Man at Arms, as soon as I shot the first Lance of Faith at an enemy, he did a charging attack and took the aggro long before the mob ever made it to me, so it wasn’t a huge deal running around the Adventure Zone I was in.

Difficulty-wise, Cryptic has stated they intend the general content in Neverwinter to be duo-able with a player and a Companion. Star Trek has difficulty settings which are popular for the more hardcore-ish players, so I’m unsure how Cryptic will handle appeasing the segment of the playerbase who wants more challenging content aside from the Dungeons and Skirmishes.

The Companion tab in your character sheet lists both Active and Idle slots for companions, and since I only got the one companion before the beta ended, I am unsure how exactly the mechanic of having multiple Active companions will work since (I think) you can only summon one of them to adventure with you. But the Zen Store sells extra Active and Idle slots.

There is a vendor where you can buy the other basic Companion types for 2 gold apiece, but the rest of the really good Companions are in the Zen Store.

Free 2 Play: Monetization

Cryptic’s previous MMOs, Champions and Star Trek both launched under their previous owner, Atari. They both began life as a subscription MMO, with optional Lifetime memberships, before transitioning to a hybrid F2P model as they exist today. Players still have the option to subscribe to Star Trek, and yes, some still do. Neverwinter, on the other hand, is releasing fully under the watchful eye of Perfect World Entertainment and there are no optional subscriptions to be found. Neverwinter is fully F2P from the start, so aside from the pre-launch purchases of the Founders Packs, expect Neverwinter to be somewhat on the pricey side, either in terms of money or time. Or both.

Neverwinter is taking an identical approach to currencies as Champions and Star Trek: there is at least one “normal” in-game currency, such as Gold in NW, Energy Credits in STO or Resources in CO. As you get higher level and interested in more “elite” gear, that currency becomes — to a degree — less useful in place of the exchangeable currency, in this case Astral Diamonds.

Astral Diamonds are the Neverwinter equivalent to Dilithium in Star Trek or Questionite in Champions. You gain some grinding certain mission types and you can also exchange them for Perfect World’s real-money currency, Zen, which is used to buy from the Zen Store (item shop). The Zen Store includes mounts, companions, extra bag slots, character slots, companion slots, and so forth. In Star Trek, we spend Zen to buy the best starships then spend Dilithium (and/or reputation points) to get the best gear for them. As I mentioned, Dilithium is exchangeable among the players for Zen, and vice-versa. No Zen appears magically from Cryptic, it’s all purchased by players who have the money to buy Zen but not the time to grind out the Dilithium on their own so they trade their Zen for Dilithium. The other players trade their Dilithium for Zen, now they can buy stuff in the Zen Store. It’s an incredibly popular mechanic that truly lets people experience everything in the game without spending a dime, if they’re willing to put in the time to do so. In Neverwinter so far, I noticed I could spend a few Astral Diamonds to speed up my Companion’s training or to respec his runes. I’d imagine there will be a gear treadmill using AD for the best stuff just like Star Trek does. The Astral Diamond Exchange was already up and running this weekend, as was an Astral Diamond vendor which I forgot to look at. I do know that the very in-demand Identification Scrolls are located at the Astral Diamond vendor, though they also drop as loot.

Zen to US Dollar ratio is easy math: one penny per Zen. So if something like the Greater Bag of Holding (24 inventory slots) is 1000 Zen, that equates to $10 USD. I’m already accustomed to Cryptic / PWE’s prices from Star Trek and they seem similar in Neverwinter. Sales aside, the normal price of the Odyssey 3-Pack or the new Andorian Kumari 3-Pack is 5000 Zen, or $50 USD for three ships. So far in the Neverwinter beta Zen Store I see three mounts priced at 4000 Zen, or $40 USD. The most basic mounts are 500 Zen, there’s a few for 800, some at 2000 and a few for 2500 Zen. (You get your first mount at level 20 for 2.5 gold, and I think there’s a normal vendor for the basic mounts purchased with gold just like the basic companions, by the way.) Companions in the Zen Store start at 1500, then 2000, a few for 2500 and the most expensive Companion is the Honey Badger for 3500 Zen! I’m assuming this will also be like Star Trek where there’s a mixture of a sense of wanting to collect everything you can with optimizing certain ships (or companions in this case) to certain situations. For example, the description of the Acolyte of Kelemvor companion (2000 Zen) makes it seem he would be more effective than other cleric-type companions when fighting undead.

Other Zen Store examples are: character slot for 500, active companion slot for 350, idle companion slot for 100, extra bank slots for 300, change your name for 400. There’s a Bag of Holding for 600 which is either 12 or 18 inventory slots, then the aforementioned Greater Bag of Holding at 1000 Zen for 24 inventory slots. There are also dye packs in the Zen Store but no cosmetic outfits yet.

Finally, like Champions and Star Trek, Neverwinter will have lockboxes. They weren’t in the game yet, but the Lockbox Keys were in the Zen Store already at their normal price of 125 each or 1125 for a pack of ten.

Conclusion

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Neverwinter and can definitely say this will be a game I play at launch. Due to my job’s schedule and as a result my day off schedule, I tend to do my gaming in the mornings. I live on the East Coast, which means the typical server-based MMO will have a low population during those hours. At a bare minimum, I like to see other players chatting and adventuring and hopefully the opportunity to get into some group content. Low player population during my playtime has been one of the primary reasons I’ve left every MMO in recent memory, and one of the primary reasons I’ve stuck with Star Trek — because Cryptic’s games are all single-shard. They might be population-controlled instances but that still means you see plenty of other players adventuring, the chats are active and groups are readily available 24/7 and for me, that is an extremely important factor in an MMO. There might be other MMOs that I just adore (The Secret World comes to mind) but due to low player population, I can’t find a group to do the content I want to play, so I end up leaving. I don’t have that problem with Cryptic’s setup.

Whether or not you will enjoy Neverwinter will depend on what you’re looking for. I’ve spent a great deal of time hopefully describing how the game feels and plays. There are plenty of videos on YouTube by now to see it for yourself. Like I said earlier, if you think of it as sort of a third-person Path of Exile meets TERA combat with a League of Legends-esque control scheme, with the expected bits of MMO bullet points, that’s about what you’re getting. It’s a fairly linear early leveling process, though I’m hoping that opens up once I’m in the mid and high levels. General quest content-wise, players writing Foundry quests and entire Foundry campaign storylines are the bread-and-butter questing attraction. Endgame will likely comprise running Dungeons, Skirmishes and PvP — hopefully Cryptic is able to keep adding more of that type of content quicker than they’ve been able to in Star Trek until recently.

If you demand every game with the MMO tag be a sandbox, Neverwinter is not for you. If you prefer slower combat, Neverwinter is not for you. If you like having twenty hotbars full of skills and consumables, Neverwinter is not for you. If you want to slow down and deliver pies in the Shire or find some idyllic location to roleplay a picnic, Neverwinter is not for you. (Not to say roleplaying cannot or will not be done in Neverwinter, it’ll just be a little different from the player handling the character perspective.)

If you want to just jump in, have a good romp with friends and strangers killing monsters in adventure zones, dungeons and skirmishes, look no further, you’ve arrived in Neverwinter. So I guess it might be fair to say Neverwinter isn’t as “deep” as some players think their MMOs are. I tend to think they’re all varying degrees of shallowness, it’s just a matter of where your personal interests and investments (time or money) lie. Sometimes it’s ok to simply want to have a little fun and leave it at that.

In no particular order, here’s my personal favorite 2012 releases:

Mass Effect 3

I adore the Mass Effect series, and I played through all the DLC. When multiplayer was announced for 3, I had the same “huh?” questions as anyone else, but it turns out Mass Effect 3 has my all-time favorite cooperative Survival mode, slightly surpassing Gears of Wars 3’s Horde 2.0 mode mostly because of the variety of classes and enemies. BioWare has released four DLC map packs for free so far as well as increasing the number of available classes to play, adding personal challenges to set as additional goals, weekly balancing and almost every weekend has a new Operation with specific goals for specific extra rewards.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II

I gripe and gripe about the Call of Duty games for various reasons, but the bottom line is my gamer friends (namely Hallower and Oakstout) prefer the faster paced jump in, jump out of Call of Duty over Battlefield 3, which they disliked to the point of trading in. However, I’ve always been a fan of futuristic military shooters beginning with Battlefield 2142, then this years’ Ghost Recon Future Soldier and now Black Ops II. For the first time ever, I don’t have any specific complaints about a COD title other than my general COD complaints such as quickscoping. I usually perform better in Black Ops II than I ever have in a COD game and I intend for this to be my go-to first person shooter for competitive multiplayer in 2013.

Ghost Recon Future Soldier

I never played any of the old-school Clancy games because my PC back then wouldn’t run them satisfactorily, but I’ve enjoyed all the current-gen console games such as the Advanced Warfighter series, the Rainbow Six Vegas series, End War and Hawx. So when Future Soldier was announced, I knew it would be a pre-order. Many reviews ripped it a new one, but ya know what? I really enjoyed the hell out of the campaign and the multiplayer is something fresh that doesn’t have the hyper-speed run and gun of Call of Duty. It attracts adults instead of kids, and being a purely objective-oriented shooter, it emphasizes patience and teamwork over kill/death ratios.

Borderlands 2

I can’t say the story makes more sense than the first game, but I can at least say there’s more story there. More importantly, the new characters you interact with are hilarious with some fantastic dialogue and excellent voice acting to bring that dialogue and these characters to life. Graphics are better, performance is better, pretty much everything has been improved in Borderlands 2 and it makes an excellent way to spend time running around shooting and looting with your friends.

Far Cry 3

Holy crap, was this game excellent! It’s been forever since I was so hooked on a game that I finished it so quickly, getting every single achievement (currently only lacking the final three co-op achievements). When they began hyping the game up and releasing videos, I was excited because while I’ve been playing Skyrim on and off (currently on again) this year, Far Cry 2 was a disappointment on many levels and Far Cry 3 was looking to fix them all. I was hoping for “Skyrim With Guns” and that is damn close to what Far Cry 3 delivered. It’s not 100% open-ended like Skyrim, but it worked to its advantage since it’s so much more faster paced than Bethesda’s RPG behemoth. You’re encouraged (and eventually forced if you don’t figure this out) to mix up your Sandboxing with your Story playing. Do a little sandbox action, gather some plants to craft with, discover new locations, maybe liberate an outpost or few for travel points then do your next Story mission. Despite the co-op not being popular in reviews, Hallower, Oakstout and I enjoy it because it can be challenging and it’s something a little different than your typical co-op. Co-op isn’t a mainstay experience, but I’d sorta liken it to last year’s Syndicate game which we still play from time to time.

Forza Horizon

I absolutely loved this game, which surprised me because I typically prefer more action or “driving combat” games like Blur. I still haven’t finished Forza 4 which is a pure racing sim but Horizon is more casual, more fun, and more varied. Plus it has the open world to just drive around in and have fun, work on some challenges along the way. The newly-released Rally expansion is also great and very different from the base Horizon game. Highly recommended!

The Secret World

Funcom really outdid themselves with TSW, delivering something both unique in several mechanics and certainly in setting and genre. Voice acting and story telling is excellent even if the coding for the NPC’s eyeballs gets a little freaky looking. Recently TSW switched to a “Buy2Play” business model which should definitely help its population. It’s been awhile since an MMO has had any legitimate challenge and entertainment so TSW is definitely tops on my list once I start getting back into MMOs next year.

Ghost Recon Online

I’m including this simply because I’ve been playing it frequently and really enjoying myself. It’s difficult to tell if the game is still in beta or has released; it seems to depend what you read and where you read it. It certainly needs more players, but as I mentioned with Future Soldier above, one nice thing is that it attracts more adult players instead of yappy annoying children and teens. It does use the F2P model though from what I’ve experienced so far, everything with the exception of the XP Boost can be purchased for the currency you get from playing (RP – Requisition Points) in addition to the “cash” currency Ghost Coins. I’m hoping the population increases and players drop a few bucks here and there so the dev team makes more maps and other features, but for now GRO is my favorite team shooter on PC. I have PlanetSide 2 installed but not really interested in playing right now. Maybe after the January patch…

The two big expenditures I had planned were: laser eye surgery, which I did list on my 2012 Resolutions, and getting a new living room furniture suite, which I did not. My girlfriend has been in support of the laser eye surgery up until this year when she was suddenly very much against it, citing long-term studies just coming out saying it "doesn’t take" in many or most cases. I don’t know. I’d still like to do something though. Eyeglasses suck, and that’s the best thing anyone can say about them. The big derailment came from having to replace my HVAC system unexpectedly, which cost me just over $5,000 and put my personal spending on hold.

Real Life Resolutions:

• Get my résumé updated and apply for jobs. Looks like 2012 will be the next big pilot hiring boom, and I would like to be caught in that particular explosion.
• Finances. Other than a few minor tweaks to my 401(k) I still have no idea what I’m doing with investing, stocks, or anything else. I may end up needing someone who can teach me face-to-face for this one, or at least get me pointed in the right direction and occasionally shove me when I turn off the path.
• Alcohols. I still don’t know my wines, though we did go to a wine tasting at a local winery in St. Augustine and I brought back several bottles that I enjoyed. I’ve learned to appreciate a couple Malbecs but haven’t bothered to memorize which ones. I read that one Malbec is just as enjoyable as the next, but in practice that simply has not been the case. My girlfriend had been on a Merlot kick for a few years but now she’s switched to Cabernets and Malbecs. I still prefer vodka in my drinks and earlier this year I did my own grapefruit-infused vodka which was tasty! Bitter drinks still don’t cut it for me, although I’ve had two whisky-based drinks recently that oddly enough I enjoyed.
• Balanced life. If anything, due to my schedule and being left alone most of the year, I’m probably worse off right now than I was this time last year. Funny thing about being left all alone is that eventually I just get used to it and even though I might crave company and socializing, the moment I get it a sense of resentment at interrupting my solitude and my "do what I want, when I want" enters the picture. It’s very strange and I don’t appreciate it. I did learn a few new places around me, but not in the areas I’d hoped to explore, which I still haven’t explored in any fashion whatsoever. Maybe in ’13…
• Sports. Ha! I still hate sports. I had planned on at least following the local NFL team, the Jaguars but holy crap they’ve had such a lousy season, mostly phoning it in except for what, two efforts which had some excitement? I just couldn’t be bothered other than checking the Jags official app weekly or so to see how badly they lost. I think what most of us are hoping is that for next season some contracts are non-renewed. We still have some dead weight players and some prima donnas who either do not, can not or will not pull their weight. But hey, it’s winter and snowboarding season has started and the X-Games are next month so that’ll be good!
• Relationship. In terms of our overall relationship, affection, growing as a couple, 2012 was a good year. Spending time together, however, was not in the cards anywhere near as much as either of would have liked, as implied in the "Balanced life" bullet point. My schedule was pretty rough most of the year and often I was home when she was traveling for work or to care for her mother. Her condo was recently sold so she’s in emergency "find a place to live" mode right now and I’m hoping she gets a place closer to my condo so we can see each other more often during the times we’re both home together. I have no plans on moving or buying a bigger place the two of us can share until I find out if I’m able to get a new job or not.

Gaming Resolutions:

I didn’t do this last year, but this year’s should be simple enough.

• Stop buying so many games! In theory, this should be easy in 2013. The current console generation is winding down and now that the big fall season of weekly AAA releases has passed, I can stop looking forward to the next releases and instead focus on actually playing and completing the 70+ Xbox 360 games I own.
• Try to get back into MMOs, at least a little. Last year I was pretty heavy into Star Trek Online and it’s still my favorite but doing the same dailies every day for the 8K Dilithium limit per day finally burned me out. I’ve been in-game the past week for the Winter Wonderland and it’s been fun and the game still has a nice community for the most part and plenty of players at any given time of day which is important to me with my unorthodox schedule. Guild Wars 2 turned me off almost immediately but maybe sometime in 2013 I’ll be willing to patch it up and give it a fair chance. The Secret World is one that I did really enjoy in terms of setting and storytelling but it’s a difficult game to solo and there were never any players to group with during my normal play times. Now that TSW has adopted the "Buy2Play" model (please work on shifting Age of Conan to that this year too, Funcom?) the couple times I’ve logged in, I’ve seen launch week quantities of players running around so hopefully that will continue.
• Prestige at least once! Much as I’ve griped about Call of Duty games, Black Ops II is my favorite multiplayer game right now. I got to level 50 (out of 55) pretty quickly before new games like Far Cry 3 took me away but I’m in a bit of a quandary: do I get 55 and Prestige immediately or do I get to 55 then hang out and get a bunch of Golden Guns before Prestiging?