So having taken some time to look over some of the various suggestions I’ve gotten in regards to what people have found interesting or memorable in and about the old Barrens, and in a way the responses I got were both more and less than I’d hoped for. On one hand, most of the things which people did find memorable seem to have stuck with most people – on the other, many responses has also made the Barrens sound something like the most boring place on Azeroth where very little of interest ever happens. Still, in an effort to put all of this together, I went loose on some old maps, the old mapviewer and Paint Shop Pro in order to try to put it all together.

(click to humongify)

The most obvious point of interest is Crossroads, the central hub of trade, travel and just about anything Barrens-related, situated along the Gold Road. It apparently hosts most of the more memorable people, including the famous Mankrik, along with smaller notables such as a Forsaken Apothecary, a tough and capable female Orcish warriorshaman who champions gender equality, a Troll researching the Silithid and apparently a butcher that has a thing for the innkeeper. Oh and it gets attacked a lot.

For other settlements there’s the neutral Ratchet, which seems notable mainly for being Neutral and having Goblins, though they also fight pirates, contain a single high- or blood- elf that appears aligned with the Horde and – if I recall – helped facilitate some degree of trade between the Horde and the Alliance at some point. There’s also Taurajo which seems to largely be remembered for being That Hunting Camp that Burned in the Cataclysm, and also for housing a Quillboar captive – beyond that it’s a good place to run into Tauren. There’s Bael Modan which is a surprisingly fortified dwarven settlement that upsets Tauren by doing archaeology – it also explodes in Cataclysm. Northwatch is a Kul Tiras remnant fortress that – I believe – used to be marked as friendly to the Alliance in spite of implications that it probably shouldn’t be – I seem to recall a reference to the Alliance essentially taking it from them to use as a staging ground in Cataclysm.

There’s also a few scattered farms and watchtowers throughout north to central Barrens, including one farm north of Dreadmist Peak which is apparently burnt down already; central Barrens also seem to have a few various small camps that look like mixed Orc and Tauren architecture, including at least one that’s been razed near Taurajo. I can find two mines, one which seem to be held by the Horde, the other in the north surrounded by Horde architecture but was actually held by Venture Co if I’m not mistaken; speaking of Venture, they also have an oil-drilling operation by the Sludge Fen. At least three peaks seem to be inhabited – Dreadmist Peak being home to Sarilus Foulborne while the peak north of Wailing Caverns had a Tauren camping that was involved in some quest relating to Wailing Caverns, while the one east of Crossroads seem to hold an Orc hut.

There’s generally Centaur settlements near any oasis – including the one by the Wailing Caverns, and Quillboar seem intent on camping near mountains, particularly the ones where large brambles have sprouted. Most of Dreadmist Peak, on the other hand, seem to be held by Burning Blade cultists. There’s also what I think is a large Raptor population in an indent within the mountain range not far from Northwatch. Harpies seem to be camping the only non-oasis forest in the Barrens, to the Northwest. Wreckages suggest caravans and logging operations there have been under assault.

Oh and there’s this odd camp out on an island that looks like a (former?) prison camp where warriors used to go for training in order to obtain Berserker Stance. And a group of couriers that seem to handle messages between Ashenvale and Theramore.

Over in Dustwallow Marsh, Brackenwall Village is an Ogre camp which is Horde-aligned I think? – I can’t recall seeing anyone mentioning it. Neither Mudsprocket nor the Grimtotem camp seem to be in place yet. Tabetha has her cabin off in the middle of the swamp, Swamp-eye Jarl is going mad over in his own cabin (which used to have a semi-hidden quest about a report on Theramore made by an Orc Spy, I believe), there’s two watchtowers aligned with Theramore (one populated by high elves or half-elves?) and a third which is run-down and held by the Theramore deserters. There is a mine present in Dustwallow Marsh, north of Brackenwall, but if I recall correctly, it’s inhabited entirely by large spiders whose eyes are coveted by Swamp-eye Jarl.

Of course, Orgrimmar and Theramore still exist, but they’re more their own zones than anything, so I’ve not included them here; neither is quite as dependant on memorable NPCs or the like to garner a visit as most other places might be.

Unambigously Evil antagonist factions at work seem to include the Centaur, Venture Co, the Burning Blade (serving the Legion), the Qullboar (seem to eventually align with the Scourge), Harpies, Pirates and Silithid. Alliance-related factions openly antagonistic to the Horde seem to be the Kul Tiras remnant and possibly the Theramore Deserters (I seem to recall they weren’t really in a state to really be all that openly antagonistic, mind).Horde-related factions openly antagonistic to the Alliance seem to be mainly Grimtotems from Stonetalon and Mulgore (They don’t seem to have a Dustwallow camp this early on) and Warsong Orcs in Ashenvale, plus a few spies keeping tabs on Theramore. The only truly neutral faction I can find seem to be the Goblins out of Ratchet.

Of course, this isn’t every single detail people told me of, nor every single thing I’m actually aware of, but it should be the rough gist of it. It doesn’t mean that every single thing will find space in the actual Story Arc either; since I’m largely trying to avoid spoiling what my actual plans are, this is more about story potential than actual story, so far.

The Horde is one of those story elements I – as a narrator – felt I’ve always had to tiptoe around because there is a lot of animosity built up that is just waiting to explode in nearly any situation that could remotely be interpreted as Horde versus Alliance. Much of this is really just by Blizzards own design – not only is World of Warcraft designed largely around a constant “mine is bigger than yours” oneupmanship, but Blizzard also tends to put a quite a bit of effort into ensuring that it is particularly mired into the Horde versus Alliance conflict. From the overall game narrative to the player-versus-player aspect to matches on who can shout their faction the loudest at Blizzcons, there’s a significant effort being put in to ensure the two factions remain at each others throats.

It’s not all a bad thing, of course – some of the more interesting aspects of the World of Warcraft narrative comes from moments when one side is only told half the story and you can tell it’s not quite as clear-cut as the NPCs make out, and it’s up to you to try and work out the missing gaps. Of course, the continuing conflict also tends to breed some of the biggest issues with the Warcraft narrative overall due to the standing conflict between the PvP and the PvE narrative – especially when it comes to neutral factions guiding both the Horde and the Alliance towards a common threat; doubly when said neutral faction have members with clear ties to either the Horde or the Alliance.

This puts me in a situation where it feels like if I don’t treat the introduction and presence of the Horde within Beyond the Tree with delicate care and kid gloves, a whole lot of people are going to accuse me of rampant bias and feel that I’ve personally slighted them; contrasted with how it also feels that if I don’t come down brutally enough on the Horde, a whole lot of other people are equally going to accuse me of bias and call me a traitor. And it feels to me like these two very potential responses are likely get in the way of my wanting to tell an interesting and hopefully honest story.

It gets even more problematic due to the fact that I’ve been playing World of Warcraft extensively myself in the past – I’ve been part of the environment that breeds that kind of animosity and I’ve definitely had my issues with portions of the Horde and some of its player base in the past, meaning that I keep having to second guess myself and whether I design segments the way I do for the right reasons because my motivation will no doubt be questioned repeatedly provided I actually decide to go through with Arc Two.

One of the more prominent motivations I’ve had for Arc Two since basically the first story draft for it was always that I wanted to take the vanilla to Burning Crusade Horde (which was where we were at back when I started laying out the story for Arc Two) and make an attempt to find the Horde that I had used to like from back in Warcraft III but felt had gone missing since World of Warcraft. The problem with this prospect, of course, is that not everyone agrees that the Horde from Warcraft III did go missing, and the Horde that I thus want to explore and write about may not entirely agree with where Blizzard eventually took them, nor what some might want to see out of them.

So I thought, it’s now 2012 and what better way to start a new year than ask some random people on the internet for help! …well okay, on reflection putting it like that makes it sound more than a little bit mental, but bear with me. Basically: Do you consider yourself familiar with Warcraft as a setting? Have you spent plenty of time leveling around central Kalimdor back in pre-Cataclysm days? Have any fond memories of quests and NPCs in that region? Read on, because You May Be Able To Help.

Here’s the thing: with 2012 starting there’s a whole lot of things I need to start sorting out – one of which being my general indecisiveness in regards to whether or not I actually want to continue Beyond the Tree into Story Arc Two. While I’m no closer to actually making a direct conclusion in that regard, I’ve decided that if I’m going to have a chance at making a proper decision, I first need to see if I can make the story arc compelling enough for me to follow, which means that it needs to be more than story – it needs to have potentially interesting moments, encounters, mini-stories and all those kinds of things littered alongside the main story trail.

The problem, though, is that as things are for the moment, at least a noticeable portion of Arc Two is likely to take place in and around the Barrens, with potential visits to Dustwallow Marsh and maybe Durotar, and seeing how I have never once managed to level a Horde character above level 10… there’s a whole wealth of characters and quests and experiences there which I’ve never really touched all that deeply upon.

So, what I want is for you lot to tell me which characters in the region of the Barrens, Durotar, Orgrimmar, Dustwallow Marsh and Theramore, from before Cataclysm, which you think are interesting/have good story potential/absolutely must be referenced. I want to know their names, I’d love to have a link to them on some place like Wowhead or wowwiki or wowpedia, I want to know what kind of role they play in the overall Warcraft narrative, I want to know where they were situated and I want to know who they are and what makes them worth a mention. The Why there at the end is of particular importance – since I have no personal connection to most, if any of, these characters, I need to know why I should care about them.

So what am I in particular interested in? Well, characters which are “interesting”, but I’m not sure if that definition could be any more diffuse, so it might be better to say characters that somehow stood out to people. Are there any equivalents to, say, Hogger, or Edwin VanCleef, or the Furlbrows, or Gryan Stoutmantle or Gwennyth Bly’leggonde, or Raene Wolfrunner or any other character that somehow ended up meaning something to people. I’d also like to know of characters that have a clear opinion on the Horde-Alliance war, both for and against – are there any characters that speak for full on war, are there any that speak for peace in our time, are there ones who think the whole deal is just stupid.

So, to recap: I want you to tell me about any NPCs – be they Horde or Alliance or even Neutral – that existed around the Barrens, Durotar, Orgrimmar, Dustwallow Marsh and Theramore pre-Cataclysm that had some personal significance to you – who they are, where they were, why you think they’re interesting or important or whatever. That one NPC who sent you on the most annoying quest ever, or that one NPC that always snuck up on you and annihilated your low-level alts… I’m interested in those stories – what makes them interesting.

The final bit I want to end with saying is this: Does this mean that Arc Two will happen? I don’t know; it means that part of me wants to make it happen, but I’m still not sure if I can find the energy and urge for it. And if Arc Two does happen, does a mention here mean an NPC will be included somewhere? No, it doesn’t – nor does the amount of people thumbing up one particular character really affect anything. What I’m looking for is purely how interesting they sound to me from a writing perspective, combined with how well they and their location might fit into what my plans are.

So, with all that said, have any NPC stories to share?

So The Old Republic has been out for awhile – technically a week, with another week of early access for early preorders, which means that I’ve had ample time to play the game – ample enough that I’ve hit 50 with my first character, though I still have a few more narrative beats to go before reaching the actual conclusion of her class narrative. Still, it’s given me more time than a weekend to sample the game and collect my thoughts together regarding what I think of it.

I’ve found that the obvious comparisson to World of Warcraft is quite interesting if you look at it in detail – many of the mechanics are designed very much the same way, but the intentions they’re used for and the results expected of them are all from a much different mindset which puts a much different spin on it. If you look closely at the seams there are a whole lot of clear differences in emphasis that really reflect upon the whole end result and permeates the two separate products.

For one, BioWare has tried to keep the progression curve sensible – they haven’t really succeeded because the level progression system is ultimately a very artificial and game-y construct whose very nature is to scale player power and player challenge with player progression and ensure players move forward at a pace dictated by the design. But they have tried, and I discovered that as the game progressed, enemies which were classed as Elite (golden) early on in the game, such as Sith Apprentices, slowly became Strong (silver) and eventually Normal enemies as I progressed; there has certainly been some effort put in to try and avoid the issue where your average untrained level 40 farmhand can utterly destroy your average level 20 hardened elite soldier without effort, but the system is still there because it’s part of the design. I understand why it’s there and that it’s part of the draw, but I can’t help but feel I’d much rather have seen them just increasing numbers than toughen up the same type of enemies.

This also crosses into the matter that the average battle in The Old Republic is actually generally more challenging than those in World of Warcraft – if you don’t pay attention, a Strong (silver) foe can actually cause quite a bit of harm, and they’re not all that uncommon. This is further underlined by the enemy balance being a little here and there, with some specific types of foes being significantly more difficult than others of their same difficulty class, and the game sometimes being inconsistent in just how large a challenge it’ll throw at you. There’s been occasions where a smaller, mid-planet battle has involved as much as one Elite and two Strong foes at once (where both the elite and the strong duo would make a challenge just on their own), while some end-planet encounters were merely a Strong foe backed up by two Normals. And all of this is still to say nothing of the times when the game gives you what sounds like it’d be the kind of challenge you normally eat for breakfast until the quest log cheerfully tells you it’s actually balanced for four people.

Another thing that’s a clear difference of emphasis is the way The Old Republic treats your character, which is to say the significant amount of respect the game has for your character and what they’ve accomplished, even in the case of detractors or enemies hurling insults. By contrast, World of Warcraft tends to have this constant undertone of laughing at your character for being an absolute idiot, often setting up situations where your only choice is to undertake actions that are phenomenally stupid all while the game makes it very clear just how stupid the decision is, and once you’ve gone through with it, the game effectively laughs at you for being stupid. Sure, World of Warcraft also lets you play the role of grand hero from time to time, but it always seem to be while elbowing you in the ribs to ask whether you were dropped on the head as a child one too many times.

Comparably, in The Old Republic, even characters who responded with frustration, annoyance and distaste at how entirely un-useful my character spouting yet more mystical force nonsense was still acknowledged who and what she was and what she clearly was capable of for having gotten that far; and more yet who clearly ended up very thrown by being told some philosophical mumble, but put on a polite smile and said they’d get right on following the “advice” before getting to what they needed to have done.

There’s also this sense of scale, which unfortunately hits significant limits likely due to performance – where World of Warcraft is typically hypercompressed to a level that’s outright ridiculous, The Old Republic offer vast open spaces to traverse (and no flying mounts to skip around effortlessly with!) which gives a sense of size and expanse to the snow fields of Hoth or the dune seas of Tatooine. On the other hand, it also means you have a Republic Senate building large enough to house the entirety of Stormwind and have space over, yet is much more sparsely populated with NPCs. Blizzard has a much greater attention to letting NPCs wander around and live their own life, and while The Old Republic does have things like that, it’s not as common, and seems even less so because the voids available to fill are just that much greater. Of course, having the senate building full of NPCs walking around would likely eat away at precious performance both on server and client sides, but I’d love to see the populace living up to the scale of the world itself.

Speaking of the world itself – I’d love to see more interactible chairs and the like – there are several locales that are full of seats and the like which would make absolutely amazing meeting and speaking places… if you could interact with them in any way. Other things that would help are generic talk animations when speaking in /say and speech bubbles; your character turning their head to look at who you have targetted is a nice touch, but there’s definitely more features I’d love to see implemented just to help acting in and interacting with the world beyond cutscene dialogue. It’s one of those cases where the potential is there, but it’s not really tapped and I’m not sure if it actually will be.

But let’s move on to the central feature, the part of The Old Republic that’s meant to make it really stand out from its peers – Story.

While I still have a few beats to go (maybe two hours at the absolute most) before reaching the conclusion of the consular story and I don’t want to spoil it to those who picked other classes or haven’t had time to finish yet, I’m going to start by saying that I’ve found the journey of Kayrin Olana from a padawan recently arrived on Tython to a highly accomplished Jedi Master and diplomat both entertaining and compelling. Sure, I’d be hard pressed to call it groundbreaking as a game story, but in typical BioWare fashion it’s a basic but functional story with usually good presentation behind it. Well okay, the consular story does drag itself along throughout most of chapter one, part because chapter one is so long, part because it’s pretty sparse with handing you clues to work with, but once past that it starts taking off to interesting places.

The way she developed, she quite quickly became the typical “model Jedi” – she’s calm, patient and serene and dedicated towards doing what’s right, even at the expense of herself, the Jedi Order or the republic. She still has a bit of a dry edge to her which makes itself known on occasion, but for most part she’s entirely content in doing the right thing and spouting Jedi Wisdom of varying utility to anyone who provides the slightest prompt for her to do so.

All throughout this I’ve found I really like the orange quality of equipment present in The Old Republic – what it is is essentially an equipment class that has no inherent stats on its own other than which slot it goes into and what type of equipment it is, and it then gains all its statistics through swappable modification items, such as armouring to improve the armour, and so forth. As a result, Kayrin have been using the same low level hooded robe since around level 10 and it’s still a fully competitive piece of combat equipment as I’ve just kept swapping out the old mods for new ones as I’ve gone. This is even more expanded upon by several vendors (refered to as social items vendors) throughout places in the game offering various froms of guard uniforms or the like available for purchase provided you have the appropriate social level which are all also of orange quality, so spend enough time grouped and you can pick something completely different for your active combat gear if you wish.

I found the companions I picked up ended up growing on me too, though only being able to bring one at a time strictly limits how much time I’ve gotten to interact with them – a limit only increasing by the combat difficulty often insisting that I bring team members that are useful over ones that are not. I would, of course, love to have more banter and interaction between them, and I’d love for more of them to speak up during space combat, but unfortunately so far no.

There’s another thing with interactivity that very clearly comes out of the widely different types of armour and four body types – since the game can’t make assumptons as to your characters size and shape, we’re back in all character interaction being essentially look but don’t touch – there’s very little direct character contact and it puts characters at an arms length interaction which is understandable but really a pity. I understand the amount of work that goes into animation, so I realize just how much I’m asking by saying this, but it’d be great to see characters able to touch shoulders or hug or the like when appropriate – it simply adds to the percieved connection between them.

Of course, it’s far from a perfect game – the UI is limited, there are still several strange bugs that come with it its recent release and BioWare’s inexperience with a project of this sort, and there are a whole lot of abilities that are situational, conditional or sequential in ways that simply cry out for the existence of conditional macros, which unfortunately are absent. There are also several elements of the UI which I’d love to be able to move around but most of it is pretty much entirely static. You can really tell too that BioWare didn’t really think about the UI when they made many of the abilities – many are situationally interesting, certainly, but the UI provides little space to easily place them in easily accessible places and less indication when they’re available for pressing. Certainly, World of Warcraft had similar issues with its UI, but its UI was built entirely out of lua script and could be modified by way of that; The Old Republic has a static and macro-less UI that makes the large amount of abilities all the more difficult to juggle.

Beyond that, I’ll admit I’m still finding it difficult to judge what kind of staying power The Old Republic fields – I haven’t really looked at end-game content yet, but considering how the journey towards end-game is comparably much more interesting due to the greater emphasis on narrative and character, I’m having a hard time seeing how the end-game content can really live up to that. Of course, I’m told that the PvP is actually quite fun (until the legions of premade inquisitors come to ruin your day, anyhow), but while I haven’t tried it yet, I have a hard time seeing how even that could really hope to stand up next to the class-personalized journey up to 50. It may surprise me, definitely, and I suspect we might see a whole lot of quick iteration for upcoming content throughout early 2012 to expand both end-game content and provide actual features for the legacy mechanic.

I wasn’t there when apparently everyone else on the internet were handed out their crystal balls, so I can’t make the same kind of accurately contradictory predictions regarding The Old Republics longevity like everyone else; especially since I suspect the game won’t remain static in the near future – BioWare have already said they have something they’re adding for people who like the space combat, and that features for the Legacy mechanic is coming, so I’m quite curious where it ends up. And, to be honest, even if I don’t end up sticking with it, I do hope the game manages to keep around for awhile, even if only because the scene could use another heavyweight name next to World of Warcraft.

For the moment though, I’m looking forward to hitting the conclusion of the Consular story, and already have at least three more alts in mind to play in the coming future. I suppose after that, we’ll see where the game is. Presently, I’m happy enough with it.

I’ve been wanting to write a few words about Saints Row the Third for some time now, but I’ve been putting it off for pretty much the same reason that I want to write about it. My problem is basically this: How do I qualify that the most fun game I’ve played of 2011 is somehow still a bit of a disappointment? And furthermore, how do I keep the disappointment from overshadowing the fact that it’s still the most game I’ve played of the whole year?

Let’s start with the first part of that – with November now over I’ve played both The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, having gotten to try The Old Republic already for a weekend, and had enough time to conclude that I’m simply not going to get Arkham City working unless I’m willing to pay for a second, digital copy as my computer is simply unable to read or even recognize the first DVD as valid or even existing… I feel I can honestly judge that yes, indeed, Saints Row the Third is and will remain the most fun game I’ve played for the whole of 2011. It’s an amazing ride of completely over the top hilarity almost from start to end, and the game keeps constantly redefining where the limit into completely crazy lies.

Let me try to put this in terms of things that actually happen. During the latter half of the second mission, you find yourself in a gunfight with enemy thugs while in free-fall over the city of Steelport. Much later on in the game, you have another mission where you get a repeat of this situation – except your enemies are now VTOL Fighter Jets, and your two Submachine guns have been swapped for a tank. Oh and the third mission gives you a set of UAV drone controls, empowering you to rain down missile-shaped death from the skies from that point on. Restraint is for other games; Saints Row the Third makes Over The Top its mission statement and then keep climibing.

And the game is completely on board with this every step of the way – the characters typically react to all the insanity with the complete acceptance that all of these things are totally normal aspects of their daily lives and usually just run with it – especially in terms of justification. Much like Saints Row 2, where other games either step in to prevent players from going on murder sprees or quietly fold their arms and wait until the players start behaving according to script… Saints Row the Third accepts that the player’s main means of communication with the world around them is through violence, bullets and death and subsequently has the player character be for most part an unrepentant sociopath. There’s very little of the stark gameplay-narrative dissonance that many other games suffer where a character will express thoughts like killing is wrong or guilt over death caused or the like only for the game to then happily ask you to slaughter throngs of enemy NPCs for the sheer sake of game mechanics; in the Third, your main character has no problem happily expressing how their preferred plan is typically “Let’s just go in there and shoot everyone”, which is also typically exactly what you’ll be doing.

So where does the disappointment fit into all of this? Well. The thing with Saints Row 2 was that it wasn’t just madness upon madness – for all its silly clown exterior, it had a surprisingly functional narrative that not only blended in with the completely insane setting, but even delivered several much more serious and somber moments, and it wasn’t afraid to let either step aside when the other needed the center stage. Essentially, Saints Row 2 struck me as a game where the narrative, the setting and the gameplay all typically walked hand in hand and worked together for a combined result. The Third, on the other hand, typically only uses the narrative to set up the madness and doesn’t really think more about it – while there’s a whole lot of opportunity for story and serious moments within story, it doesn’t really bother much with it. Occasionally you do get glimpses that the Volition that made Saints Row 2 are still in there, but there’s a severe lack of desire to let the story speak and seemingly almost a worry that the story might dare get in the way of the crazy. There’s also a distinct lack of show in favor of tell, and sometimes even a lack of tell in favor of nothing at all – plenty of moments within the narrative are poorly portrayed or are constructed in ways that set up expectations that are then never lived up to. Along the same route, some characters are introduced and then pretty much just put in stasis except for the odd moment; the Third is simply a great deal weaker in terms of narrative, and it’s a real pity because the potential really is in there. It’s just untapped.

What makes the narrative void all the more surprising is the sheer level of personality that was poured into some characters – in particular that of your main character, the boss. Here’s the thing, Saints Row the Third – much like its predecessor – lets you pick one of several different voice sets which provide your character with a voice, accent and personality; in this case three male, three female, one zombie. This choice is completely unrelated to what kind of body you picked (making it entirely possible to have a female character trying to channel the voice of Jason Statham, for example) and changes nothing in regards to how the missions actually play out. What it does change is what your character says, and subsequently how most of the dialogues in the game turn out. There’s a surprisingly large amount of difference too, with several during-mission dialogues going off on completely different tangents depending on what voice you use, and then there was that one mission…

There’s this mission where you impersonate STAG (Special Tactical Anti-Gang) commander Cyrus Temple, which essentially means that for the duration of the mission, you’re put in Cyrus Temple’s body model all of your characters lines are done by Cyrus Temple’s voice actor. Considering that voice personality sets are inherently unable to affect the actual narrative of the game, not to mention possible to change at nearly any given moment, it’s a case where I would’ve expected the lines of your character to be entirely generic… which makes it absolutely fantastic that they aren’t. I was playing through the game using the Female 2 personality, which is this over the top russian accent, and hearing the voice of Cyrus Temple slip in a few of her grammatical quirks and then throw in a few remarks in regards to her obcession with her underling Pierce Washington was a complete riot. The other voices all have entirely different lines there, which is such a great little detail.

It’s a game crafted with love, which makes the moments where the attention to detail simply disappears all the more strange and bothersome. And as much as I maintain that between the insanity, the unhinged mayhem and the delivery of the russian Female 2 boss voice, it is definitely the most fun game I’ve played all year, it also leaves so many places where it simply could’ve been so much better.

Still, Volition aren’t done with the franchise yet, so here’s to hoping that they’ll take the opportunity to learn and bring back some of the narrative strength in the future. Oh and that they keep the russian voice for future installments, for it is awesome given vocal form.

So The Old Republic had a beta weekend going last weekend, which to my understanding was open to pretty much everyone who had signed up for the chance to test the thing prior to the announcement that it would happen – meaning that I actually got a chance to try it. Though the amount of time I had with the game became somewhat limited between insomnia and spending almost an entire day between sunday and monday without electricity or internet, it’s given me the opportunity to formulate an opinion built on more qualified factors than trailers, developer claims and second hand experiences.

So, in the apparent catchphrase of my beta testing consular, This matter bears investigation.

Before I get started, I’m going to preface this by stating how and why I play MMOs, because I feel my answers may be somewhat atypical. While several friends of mine have mentioned looking for the next new MMO to get involved with as World of Warcraft fatigue sets in more and more, I’ve never really been doing much of that. As I’ve mentioned in prior posts, adding random people from the internet to a game is typically something that is more likely to reduce my enjoyment of it than increase it; I prefer to try and immerse myself in my current actions and the reason for them, and there are few ways more effective at drop-kicking me out of that state than some random internet person running up to me and spouting some nonsense in internet shorthand. Or wordlessly challenging me to a duel, because that’s how communication works.

Which is not to say that it’s all bad – I’m well aware that not everyone you meet is going to be a rotten internet egg; I’ll even admit that some of my greatest (though also some of my worst, in all fairness) experiences from World of Warcraft involve roleplaying with random internet people, and sharing group content with friends can be great fun. But when I’m out running around on my own and trying to get immersed in the story and context of what I’m doing, having to wait for respawns or communicating with people who consider “lol” an appropriate form of punctuation is going to be detrimental to my enjoyment.

My point with all of this is that the primary reason I first had an interest in World of Warcraft was because it was Warcraft, and that it was made by Blizzard – it being an MMO was something that made it less interesting to me, not more. So now when I’m looking at The Old Republic, it’s really the same thing: it is Star Wars and made by BioWare, not because it’s an MMO.

Right, with that out of the way, let’s move on to my actual opinion of the game.

The first, most obvious and ultimately unavoidable comparisson is going to be to World of Warcraft, regardless of how warranted it might be or not. There’s an undeniably great chunk of mechanics and other gameplay functions that are almost entirely mirrored, but there’s also a difference in focus that makes it akin to comparing, say, StarCraft II to WarCraft III – or perhaps less charitably, comparing either to Command & Conquer: Generals. Most mechanics are either mirrored or have analogues, and a great deal of The Old Republic has clearly been designed to be easy for players (or former players) of World of Warcraft to get into – between the interface, the abilities and the most obviously apparent mechanics, it’s going to be very familiar.

In fact, the first solid opinion I formed was that The Old Republic seemed a whole lot to me like if you took a late Burning Crusade-era World of Warcraft, put it in Star Wars and hade it made by BioWare instead; for all their touting of Story as another pillar to the design, it struck me less as an innovation and more of solving a particular problem completely opposite from how Blizzard chose to solve it, the problem being that most people don’t bother reading quest texts. Where WoW chose to deal with this by making quest texts less important to read, TOR solved it by making you more likely to want to read them – or listen to them, in this case.

Of course, there’s an inherent problem in that approach, which is to say that I found that thinking of it like World of Warcraft in Star Wars Space actually limited my expectations of what I could do. For example, I spent most of the test playing a Jedi Consular branching into the Jedi Shadow advanced class, and I found early on that I had a hard time adjusting to the fact that several of my ranged force powers were actually considered instant cast and were possible to use while in motion since their visuals took time to execute. Later on and perhaps more significantly, I found that since Jedi Shadow is a rather rogue-ish stealth-using melee class (with a backstab ability!) I kept having the expectation I should stick mostly to melee, constantly forgetting that my (admittedly rather short-) ranged force powers were still every bit as useful as they had been prior (Jedi Shadows use the Willpower stat to boost both melee and force power damage) and sometimes it’d simply be a better idea to pelt a more difficult melee enemy from range for awhile.

So it’s a curious game to play from the perspective of a World of Warcraft veteran because on one hand it’s obviously very familiar, but on the other hand it’s been designed with some very different intentions in mind. The distinction between melee and ranged is much looser in The Old Republic, with the result that TOR seems much more accepting of letting ranged characters fight while on the move. Of course, many of these things might change as the game balance grows and matures, but for the moment there’s a kind of innocence to the mechanics where they’ve not yet gone through years of rigid balancing and embrace possibilities that WoW seems to reject because they don’t fit the rigidly enforced balance.

Which of course leads into the fact that The Old Republic isn’t finished yet – not only can we likely expect balance to move and adjust over time once it’s out the gates, but the version held up for test definitely wasn’t final; not only having a tendency to lose half the settings set when disconnecting or crashing, player-created channels were notoriously temperamental and I personally kept getting stuck on or halfway falling through the ground in regions of Taris, so they definitely have work left to do in the weeks remaining until launch, and most likely even following that.

So the question then, is it good?

Well, I certainly want to play more of it, so there’s that? It’s hard to judge the entirety of an MMO on a mere weekend of playing – I only reached level 20 and didn’t even go through the entirety of the first story arc for my class, so so there’s very clear limits to how much of the game I’ve actually experienced. I didn’t get involved in the crafting, the level differences between me and my fellow nubs meant I didn’t really try much in group content and my focus with the test was largely centered around deciding whether or not I’d enjoy a Jedi Shadow as my first main character.

I had fun though, and I definitely want to see more of it when it hits actual release. I’m not going to presume I’m in a position to make any projections as to how long it’ll last as I wouldn’t have expected WoW to last nearly long as it did for me either, but at a glance it’s certainly fun. Not perfect by any stretch, but I’m curious how it might mature over time.

I mentioned earlier that The Old Republic struck me as if it was built out of late Burning Crusade-era World of Warcraft, and the reason for this is while The Old Republic brings its fair share of tweaks, changes and refinements compared to WoW, it also doesn’t incorporate all the refinements that WoW itself introduced with Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm, for better or worse. There’s a fair few things introduced purely for convenience (being able to tell which quality loot a corpse has through un-subtle pillars of light and the loot area option comes to mind), and I’m actually rather curious what might happen if the market manages to support both WoW and TOR at the same time; there’s space for plenty of beneficial cross-polination between the two for as long as they share market, and I think both might be better off for it.

Jumping topic, I was suprised how fun I found the Space Combat missions minigame, considering just how similar they were to parts of Rebel Assault – a game I never cared much for at all. Of course, I kind of expected I would like those missions so it’s a bit of an unsurprise of a surprise, but after comparing the two I think the best way I can probably describe the space combat is “Like Rebel Assault, but less tunnels and more Fun.”. They’re a bit unrelated to just about everything else, being more of a distraction minigame than a vital part of the experience, but being able to upgrade your spacecraft with better gear through money is a nice addition; the availability of upgrades being tied entirely to player level is a bit more arbitrary, but since you actually get optional quests for space missions, nevermind gain experience both for said quests and for kills you do during the missions, it’s not too large a disconnect.

Of course, it’s also a far cry from the X-Wing series that I have great fondness for, but seeing how the last game in that series is over 12 years old and how the genre itself is almost dead these days, I’ll take their rail shooting offering and run with it. Mind you, I’m not going to deny I’d love to see it expanded into something larger and more freeform, like taking the flight and combat mechanics from FreeLancer and put it into a combat scenario within a limited arena. It’s not something I expect or demand they do, but as someone who has logged quite a few hours flying TIE craft, I’d absolutely love to see it happen.

The final thing I feel I should mention is roleplaying potential because, let’s face it, that’s much of what made World of Warcraft last as long as it did for me, and… well, in The Old Republic it seems a bit of a mixed bag. Not having speech bubbles for characters (nor animations that happen when a character talks over /say) makes interacting over local chat seem a bit awkward and disconnected, and while there are some rather nice looping animations (I’m a fan of /ponder, personally), a whole lot of animations that seem like they shouldn’t loop still do loop, and for all the effort BioWare have put into giving the classes character in quest dialogue, emotes that have sound attached seem to lack almost all of that personality.

On the other hand, with the addition of player starships, they’ve provided a great personal and private stage for player interaction that Blizzard stubbornly refuses to provide, including the part where other players can be present as your ship travels between worlds and even see the jump to hyperspace through the bridge window, and there are several other great and expansive areas that look good for just wandering and interacting.

LIke most other aspects of the game, it’s an element I feel is difficult to predict both how it will grow and mature on its own; in my opinion, it’s a field that BioWare could vastly improve by a few more additions, but I’m uncertain whether they’ll actually take the time and effort to do so or not.

Considering how BioWare have at least once suggested they’re considering letting guilds have instanced capital ships the way players have player ships, I think it’s an aspect of the game that has potential, even though I’m not sure to what extents BioWare will live up to that potential just yet.

So, bottom line. Is it the greatest game I’ve ever played and does it automatically make rainbows appear and kittens parachute from the sky with messages of world peace while accompanied by angelic chorus? Well… no, it isn’t. Nor can it really lay claim to being the most fun game I’ve played this year – Saints Row the Third stubbornly holds that title in a vice grip and has no problems fighting dirty to keep it. I had fun, however, and I can easily see the game lasting me through one or two full class story arcs in the least – I don’t regret preordering it by any means. As for whether it’ll keep me around for the long haul… I find that hard to judge at the moment. It depends on more aspects of the game than I’ve tried, as well as how many of my fellow nubs decide to come along for the journey.

For now, I’m content in putting my trust in the Force. So to speak.

While there have been more than one game keeping me quite enthralled as of late, I’ve yet to figure just how how to best describe my thoughts on Saints Row the Third, so instead I’ll take the time to ramble on the game which I haven’t finished yet – part because the thing is nigh endless. So, with that in mind, let’s talk The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

The first thing that really comes to mind, and what seems to have been my opening statement each and every time I’ve been describing Skyrim or basically any piece, improvement or flaw of thereof to anyone I know is that Skyrim, for better or worse, is an Elder Scrolls game. This essentially means that it’ll have quirky mechanics, awkward controls, clunky UI, unimmersive generic NPCs and amazing bugs – and it has all of those things; some not to quite as critical degree as Oblivion did, but it definitely has them. That said, it also means that it by default will be one of the largest, most immense and most free-form sheer pre-made world exploration games on the market, and that its fans will typically forgive a whole lot if the aforementioned issues because few other companies and titles offer the kind of worlds (and the kind of freedom to explore them) like Bethesda and Skyrim does.

And let’s be clear here – Skyrim is really good at what it does. Being the culmination of the move from scale to detail that started with Morrowind, Skyrim is packed with all kinds of incidental detail. A large chunk of the many dungeons, landmarks or just random burnt down houses or whatnot seem to have some kind of story attached to them; it might not be a deep and complex story, nor does it have to be one told overtly in text, but many places have these small things you can discover that hints at there being some sort of story behind them. From a broken cart in the mountains containing a journal telling of a family trying to move, to a cavern filled with spiders hiding a secret side tunnel containing a vampire coven, to a burnt out corpse by the shore surrounded by other burnt out object with a book on the Flame Cloak spell… everywhere you turn in the land of Skyrim you’ll likely stumble over some detail, some quest or some story to catch your interest. Of course, as stated, none of these stories will be very in-depth or especially complicated, but the sheer amount of them provides a realm that can be explored as you go. Unlike most games, the Elder Scrolls series typically doesn’t care if you don’t want to follow the main story arc – if you’d rather run off be a great dungeon explorer, or rise within the Mage College, or fight for Honor with the Companions, or restore the glory of the Thieves Guild, or help re-establishing the Dark Brotherhood assassins, or pick a side in the Skyrim Civil War…it’s totally fine with you going off to do that instead – or doing nearly all of the above if you so like. Of course, it won’t really try to excuse how, say, the Companions question the martial ability of the dragon slayer/world savior/war hero/arch mage/thane/whatever armoured in the bones and scales of the dragons they have slain that stand before them either, but, well. Elder Scrolls game.

The thing that surprised me the most though was how Skyrim has several decisions you can make that I actually found somewhat difficult to make – in my case most notably picking a side in the Civil War. Of course, you don’t have to pick a side and can sidestep the choice entirely, but as much as I’ve been wanting to actually see the civil war through, I’ve yet to decide which group I’d throw it in with. I find there’s no obvious right or wrong since you can make any number of argument for really either side of the conflict, so it’s entirely down to which faction speaks to you – or your character – the most. And to be honest, I like that it’s a difficult choice to make – if it was simple, then it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.

Skyrim is also possibly the first Elder Scrolls game that actually succeeded in making me interested in, well, it being The Elder Scrolls, as opposed to The Whatever Things where the first thing I tend to do being locating as many interesting-sounding mods as I can, plug them all into the game and then go about mucking up the canon about as much as I possibly can by indulging in all sorts of strange races and artifacts. With Skyrim, I suddenly found the actual setting itself interesting, rather than just some strange backdrop for unrelated adventures, which is quite the change.

So clearly, my only recourse was to make my first character an Argonian a Velociraptor named Bites-Faces.

It really served a whole lot of angles, starting with how I happen to be quite fond of Jurassic Park and continuing in that argoniansvelociraptors are generally the most alien of all the races of Tamriel, which felt fitting going into a setting that for all my prior visits to it in earlier games still came across as very alien. It also played right into my tendency to focus on stealth in Elder Scrolls games, and eventually Bites-Faces evolved into a sneaky, aggressive, knife-stabbing ambusher. Or rather, she would have, but due to a strange quirk with the dual-wield perks that made the attack speed bonus only apply to power attacks if your mainhand was a full size (ie: non-dagger) one-handed weapon, it eventually became knife-and-sword-stabbing ambusher. But oh well.

It progressed rather well up until I stopped faffing about doing about everything but the main quest line only to discover that due to all the thematics involved (seeing how we are in Skyrim and everything), I felt it’d all be much more appropriate if I played a Nord instead.

So I tried doing just that, swapping out dual-wielding stealth for mace-and-shield. And going entirely overboard on aesthetics and deciding to try to stick with Steel Armour and instead just improve it as far as possible. And that too went rather well, up until I found myself having decision angst regarding whether I should run with the Imperials or the Stormcloaks, as Bites-Faces had been neutral. Mind you, after having logged quite a few hours into Skyrim by now, I’m starting to hit a point where I might actually be getting a bit tired of it. Conveniently, the European PC release of Batman: Arkham City seems like it might show up just in time for that.

At the end of the day, Skyrim is a good game – better than I expected, seeing its franchise and creators, even. Of course, it’s still occasionally rather awkward, it still throws up some rather odd and awkward bugs every so often from weird crashing to dragon corpses suspiciously appearing in random places to a great deal of other things. Of course, I expect that most people who have even a mild interest in it are also already playing it, so it’s not like anyone’s going to be looking to me for buying recommendations. Still, Skyrim is better than I expected, and I’m very curious what the game will be like about, say, a year from now when the modding tools will have been out for awhile and people will have had time to fiddle around with the game and see what they can make with it.

Hopefully it’ll involve versions of cowls and circlets that count as heavy armour, if only to further feed my innate aversion to anything even remotely helmet-shaped.

So. Let’s talk Saints Row.

Having never owned an actual gaming console and instead stuck with computers since my Commodore 64, I’ve never played the first in the series, though I’m told I haven’t actually missed out all that much. I did eventually play its sequel, and it’s one of those games that can’t really be mentioned without first pointing out just how utterly horrendous the PC port was. Between performance issues, timing issues, input issues and plain straight up bugs, the PC release of Saints Row 2 is possibly one of the most flawed PC ports ever, and both Volition (the original developer) and CD Projekt (the ones the port was outsourced to) should rightfully feel highly embarssed over its very significant lack of quality.

With CD Projekt typically seen as PC gaming heroes for initiatives such as Good old Games and releasing fan-favorite The Witcher series to critical acclaim (and utter disinterest from me, I’m sorry to say) and Volition admitting just how terrible the port was and vowing to do future ports in-house and properly, I’d like to say that both companies have hopefully come out stronger from the experience. Something which sadly does not change the fact that the PC release of Saints Row 2 is in many cases an utterly broken and unplayable mess.

What also doesn’t change the fact but does a truly heroic attempt at mitigating is the determined efforts of the modding community, with things such as the Saints Row Powertools to try and fix the very broken timing issues and the Gentlemen of the Row mod to both fix bugs and add content (as well as add on-screen 360 gamepad button indicators because the keyboard controls for steering are utterly broken forever). It doesn’t quite fix the problem that most of the time the game performs about as well as a Tyrannosaurus Rex playing Bruce Wayne on a stage reproduction of Batman the Movie, but it kind of succeeds in taking an all but unplayable game and make it somewhat endurable provided you get along with the other parts of it.

Said other parts naturally being why I’m actually rambling about the game at moment of writing. While I recognize that saying this might make people wonder just what other galaxy I’m from, but I kind of bored of Grand Theft Auto as a series when the third one came along. My fondest memory of the series as a whole is still with the second – I’d somehow managed to obtain a program that could edit cars both visually and numerically, and promptly edited one of them into looking sort of like a shark (you know, if you tilt your head sideways and squint at it) and then gave it amazing durability, weight and engine power. And then took absolute glee in plowing all other vehicles off the road. The third game was comparably more sane than this and while I’m sure there was still random silly driving antics in there, most of what I remember of it is that the story was just really, really boring. I still did manage to complete it somehow, but since then the series just hasn’t been able to grasp my attention any.

Enter Saints Row 2, a game that wholely embraces that the main draw is complete over the top gun fighting, car driving insanity, and makes the entire game and setting adhere to that principle. There’s no attempt at justifying your character in any way as any kind of moral good, or even the lesser evil – they’re a complete and unrepentant sociopath whose reaction to running over ten respawning pedestrian NPCs and then subsequently firing a rocket launcher at the nearest car because it looks funny is pretty much exactly the same that the reaction of the player calling the shots will be. Where most games will either outright fail you for not playing along with the justified hero schtick, or turn around and roll their thumbs while impatiently waiting for you to get your act together and start playing along, Saints Row 2 is completely on board with that players will test where the boundaries lie and is for most part happy to simply go along with that. While it results in a game world that is so filled to the brim with over the top insanity that it ceases to be anywhere near believable as “real”, it often succeeds better than many other games I’ve played in syncing up the world of the narrative with the world of the gameplay, and to me comes across as more consistent.

What really surprised me though wasn’t the insanity, because I’d been made prepared for that – it was more the times when it actually calmed down from it and presented more somber moments. I hadn’t thought it’d do that, nor that it could do it nearly as successfully as it did. For all its crazy, the game is still aware that sometimes the madness must pause for story to work, and it still tells that story within the framework of the setting itself. More yet, for being a character that really has neither name, past nor identity, and can be nearly anything you want them to be (including putting a male voice on a female character or vice versa, if that’s your preference), the Boss – whom the player plays – has a surprising amout of characterization going for them, with each voice having its own unique lines and quirks. Personally I ended up sticking with the hardass latino voice set, for example, and my Boss of Saints Row 2 subsequently proved to have no inhibitations about breaking out the heavy spanish when she felt it appropriate.

Of course, remember those sociopathic tendencies I mentioned the Boss having? What I found helps the story significantly is that they do come up, on occasion – they don’t halt the story or make it into a moral play or anything, but the game has no problem with being honest about you being every bit as guilty as your enemy in how things escalate, and there’s even a few hidden missions toward the end where some guy from the first game voiced by Captain Anderson shows up and points out just how much crap the boss is causing and how the world might be better off without them. The Boss, of course, disagrees and refuses to really learn from it, but I found myself with an interesting contrast of a game that both embraces crazy, murderous fun while at the same time being totally honest about how it kind of is a really bad thing to really do those sorts of things.

WIth all this in mind, I’m really looking forward to its sequel Saints Row the Third, in the hopes that they’ve recaptured the same kind of narrative balance of madness, fun and seriousness, even if the trailers very much focus on the madness and then crank it up to eleven. I’m not saying I’ll consider it a deeper or better game than any of the aforementioned three, but I think there’s a very good chance it might be the most entertaining simply by knowing when to not take itself seriously.

It’s worth mentioning as an aside that Saints Row the Third releases on the 18′th – or 15′th if you’re in America, because while Volition announced awhile back that the PC release of Saints Row 3 will, in fact, happen on time with the console releases in accordance to what they had said earlier, it still apparently suffers from the Internet having oceans.

After roughly some two years of silence, followed by some activity on twitter, we’ve finally gotten our announcement about where the new MechWarrior game is headed. The full title is (as some clever people on mektek puzzled out) MechWarrior ONLINE, and it will be taking the form of a free to play team-based multiplayer game. And… I’m not entirely sure what I think about that, yet.

While this might sound like a strange position to take for someone who’s making a webcomic based on an MMO, I typically don’t think that the addition of random people straight off the internet is something that will instantly improve my gaming experience. Often it’s far more towards the opposite – it becomes something of an obstacle I have to overcome to find my happy gaming fun times. So the announcement strikes me as new MechWarrior – awesome. They want to make it very MechWarrior-y, great. Happy dance. They want to hold it close to the original setting, fantastic. Lead me to victory, Hanse Davion! They want to make information warfare a key aspect, great – I always loved the ability to go passive sensors and be all sneaky, and I have fond memories of using C3 networks to great effect in MechWarrior 3. But it can only played with random internet people. Well, drat.

Okay, okay, it’s a bit early to make all that many assumptions on just how it’ll play, and I admit that I still really want this game to be good.

So what do we actually know so far? Well, it’s a MechWarrior game (behold my fantastic research!), also it’s team-based multiplayer. And free to play. And set for release 2012.

Well okay. We’ve got three confirmed ‘mechs so far – the 100 ton Atlas, the 50 ton Hunchback and the 35 ton Jenner. (images courtesy of PC Gamer) Also they claim they intend to make the outcome of battles persistent in the world (ie, a great house conquers a planet, that planet remains with that house unless conquered back), and they intend to run it with time advancing in real time as people play, and starting at the in-universe year of 3049. Meaning it’s only one year away from 3050. Meaning CLAN INVASION, GO! Also lostech.

Oh and hey, they’ve stated they’ll be doing their best to support all types of joysticks and flight systems. Yes, joystick support? In a modern game? Shock!

So yeah, I’m not entirely sure what to expect of this. On one hand, it sounds a bit like they want to make this – on a mechanical level – into every bit of the MechWarrior game I’ve been wanting for quite a few years. On the other hand, online multiplayer only. And it’s far too early with far too little data to make anything but amazing conjecture about how it will be like at this point. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on it, but we’ll just have to see what it actually turns out like.

Right, with that out of the way, I think the simplest way to sum up my thoughts at this moment is either “I don’t know.” or “It’s too early to really know anything specific.”; I’m going to admit I’m pretty conflicted on the whole issue, but for reasons that may not be immediately obvious. The thing is – while the announcement of Mists of Pandaria as the next expansion hasn’t claimed anything that I’m immediately opposed to, it hasn’t exactly gone and addressed any of the issues that are the cause of me barely even playing World of WarCraft anymore either.

I know some people who are vehemently opposed to bringing in both the Pandaren and Pandaria, and I know some people who feel that the proposed changes to both talents and other mechanics are downright idiotic, and I know some people who feel the addition of the non-combat pet combat minigame is demeaning at best. For myself? I’m somewhere between ambivalent and indifferent about any and all of those issues – none of them are direct deal breakers or deal makers in any sense – some bits sound like they could potentially be rather interesting if done right, others reek of an attempted author’s saving throw, especially the bit about getting Diablo III plus beta entry plus some shiny horse if you sign up to stay for a whole additional year. For the whole though, none of the mentioned bits really push me in one direction or another – some of the additions sound like they could potentially be interesting or even fun if Blizzard manage to draw me back, but none really sound intriguing enough to do said drawing on its own, and it really comes down to what I mentioned earlier – none of it really touches on the true reason why I’ve ended up more and more distant from the game.

Don’t get me wrong, though – parts of me really wish to get that spark back. I watched the free stream of Metzen standing there on stage and being full of passion and glee over what was coming and to a point I’d love to just believe in all that passion and that it’ll be awesome because the geeked out dude with the beard and the Alliance shirt and Thrall’s hammer told me how awesome it would be so how can it be anything but. After all, I wouldn’t be putting together a Warcraft-based webcomic if I didn’t have some affection for the setting still lingering, and part of me would love to find the magic again with old Moonfall and her Draenei compatriot. On the other hand, we’ve been here before, and at this point I feel rather reassured in saying that I’m definitely not part of the intended target audience. It might still be interesting, of course. It might still go places I want to see, but I’m definitely not going to expect it to without reason to believe it might.

And at the end of the day, a whole lot of things can happen between then and now – for one, The Old Republic is looming with its release off in december, and that might be fantastic, or it might be awful. I know several of my fellow nubs and I are going to at least give it a try, me with the attitude of “it sounds kind of like World of Warcraft, but in Star Wars with some added interesting ideas and made by people who try to keep it at least slightly consistent.”, which might be all that I want out of it. Of course, it might also utterly fail spectacularely at being that, in which case I don’t know what’ll happen. After all, there’s also this theory going that the hinted at but not stated subtitle for the upcomming MechWarrior announcement may end up being “ONLINE” (it would match the few pixels at the top, as well as the hinted E at the end), and if that’s the case then I might find myself with a sudden urge to get myself a Davion Guards insignia and mount a few Autocannons, or any some such.

So, in short and to reiterate, I don’t know. Mists of Pandaria could either be a great set of changes and just what World of Warcraft needed to get back to the top of the game, or might make people try to add “Settled the Turtle” next to phrases like “Jumped the Shark” or “Nuked the Fridge”. (I didn’t explicitly have a problem with Crystal Skull, mind you, but still). We’ll have to see, but none of the announcements so far have really been enough to sway my opinion in either direction.