Why I’m not playing WAR *right now*

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Well, first of all, I’m not playing WAR because I’m at work.
But even when not working, I have a bunch of games I’m already playing. And its exciting stuff for all of them!
* EverQuest — Nostalgia FTW. You know, I don’t think we’ve ever had an official group xp night in the same zone twice. The only time we revisited a place was Sol B and Permafrost when we were farming the dragons. And we have still only seen a small fraction of the zones in the game. Friday, we grouped in Plane of Storms, Warslik Woods and Dagnor’s Cauldron for various things — all new zones for us on a group night. Small fraction of total zones. It’s wild how big EQ is.
* EverQuest II — Getting the guild ready for guild halls is going to take more time at the loom to get my level up to the point where I can go on crafting missions as either tailor or jeweler. Plus, the construction of the griffin towers and teleport spires happened while I was off in EQ and World of Warcraft respectively, so this is one world event I am determined not to miss. Also, I need to finish the Veksar quests. My group bailed out at the last mob for no good reason, even though I could easily keep the boss mob mezzed while the group killed the adds. They just decided to leave.
* Vanguard — Vanguard got a new game update yesterday, haven’t had a chance to see if Tipa the Startled Halfling Bard and Henry Stout the Astonished Disciple have gotten their eyelids back. Plus, I need to finish Stout Henry goes to War. Last week’s craziness pushed everything back a week.
* Guild Wars: Nightfall — I actually have played this some, though I didn’t write about it because it went terribly. So I have to go back and try the next mission again. It wasn’t the game’s fault. My head just wasn’t in gaming last week.
* Wizard 101 — I love this game. Meeting Gnewt and his wife, and then right after making a new friend and doing a VERY TOUGH instance together that took a LOT of teamwork, strategy and deck management, rekindled my love for the game. It’s an MMO which does things differently. That’s what we WANT, right? If only they had an adults-only server that drops the kid protection features.
* Metaplace — I was just offered the opportunity to be part of the beta test. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, and in fact if Spore hadn’t taken over my life this week, Metaplace surely would have.
* City of Heroes/Villains — When Issue 13 comes out. I am going to HAVE to take a few days and see if my dream of becoming a pro game designer could be more than a dream by WRITING some missions. Can I craft a great story and also design interesting levels and challenges? Here’s my chance to find out.
So which of these do I give up for WAR?
I don’t have time for the games I am ALREADY playing. I wanted to start writing a series on free-to-play games, but the three hours or so a night I have to myself are already overscheduled, so I have no chance to do more… even though I want to.

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21 thoughts on “Why I’m not playing WAR *right now*”

  3. None…
    Give up none.
    Stick to your guns, and just wait, like you did with Guild Wars.
    Maybe in a year you will be over the whole “WoW sameyness” that you feel.
    As to GW. Be prepared for many of those “Goes horribly wrong” moments. The wife and I have had many to deal with. We have to enter missions a second time
    ….a LOT.
    I did several posts on this conundrum here
    Team makeup for Missions
    and
    Disparity of Missions
    It is not pretty.
    But, this teaches you the mechanics of the “teams” and how to attack a mission based on it’s layout.
    I wish there was a clue system in place, and I discuss that in one post.
    Who knows….maybe at another time.
    Otherwise, if it continues to go wrong, that is when you resort to more talented players (certainly not me…lol, as I keep getting told in my comments), but do some research on the awesome armor sets, see how they look, and then see what people are wearing those in the cities. They will be the ones to help.
    Good luck, and forget WAR. You would be frustrated if everything you say is true.

  4. There’s a lot of people testing out War and blogging about it. You however are one of the few people I know talking about games like Wizard 101 and classic Everquest. Keep up the good work and don’t schedule away all your sleep time.

  5. Raph, I just got the notice two days ago. I haven’t even downloaded it! But the weekend is coming up 🙂
    @Relm — yeah, that’s my problem. There are so many cool games out there! To be brutally honest and not to disparage fellow bloggers, but I just skip over WAR posts now. It’s like WoW — dozens of people saying all the same things. with the same pictures — it’s just oversaturation.

  6. If you MAKE ANYTHING in CoH count me in as a tester. Im on the Freedom server, global chat is @Cannonball1
    Cant wait for issue 13 to come out, IF IT works right. Should be awesome

  8. lol… you’re in my feed. I get everyone’s stuff, I just go on to the next post if it’s about WAR. I bet if I ever do have a chance to play it, I’ll definitely be adding to the noise just like everyone else 🙂
    I’m on the Freedom server too. I think my global name is @Tipa or @TipaDaKnife. One or the other. I play on the Villain side. I have a bunch of superhero stories I want to tell, but I’ll have to see the tools to know how complex stories can get. I’d like to do a Task/Strike force-level mission arc, but so much depends on the tools. I would love to be able to craft the actual mission areas.

  9. Lucky you, I’d love a chance to check out Metaplace!
    Also, I must echo Relmstein in saying that I actually appreciate the variety your blog offers. Pretty much everyone is just talking about WAR, it’s nice to see something different occasionally.

  12. @Tipa: I haven’t seen any announcement since the Alpha sign-ups closed, which is still what is reflected on the metaplace homepage. Did I miss the chance to sign up for Beta? 🙁
    I’m on their mailing list, but don’t often check the forums or anything, so it’s possible I missed it.

  14. Alright, cool. Maybe I’ll hear something in the future.
    I’m really excited about the idea behind what they are trying to do. I hope they’re successful.

  15. Well, it’s an increasingly crowded field and they aren’t first to market. I’m not convinced there is a need for what they offer, for what any of them offer. If you do a Flash game well, you can bring that into downloadable content for the XBox, PS3 and Wii and make a good bit of money, but it’s hard to see how I could make money in Metaplace. Not that I really want or need to, but someone has to be making money and someone else has to want to spend money to make it work. People’s time is the most valuable resource there is, both for the producer and the consumer of content.

  16. I had thought the business plan for Metaplace involved Raph offering signed copies of “A Theory of Fun” to people who made the best games. 🙂
    In all honesty I’m looking forward to seeing the toolset for Metaplace, but I’m not sure if it will make game creation any easier. At the moment if someone has the knowledge and software to make flash quality games then your correct they probably would make more money on the console download market.

  17. I agree with that the console market is probably the best way if your goal is to make money, but you also have to consider the increased difficulty and barrier of entry that most people face in that area. Braid, for example, cost the creator $180,000 to develop, so while it is praised as an amazing example of an indie XBL game, it was by no means easy to make.
    I was under the impression that Metaplace sought to remove some of the technical barrier that prevented people with good ideas from experimenting with them and seeing what type of gameplay they can come up with. I’ve yet to really see the toolsets, but if they can make it relatively user-friendly it should at least meet that goal. If people realize they have a passion for game design, nothing stops them from then moving on and learning a scripting language or mastering Flash, or whatever else they choose to do. To me, Metaplace could be more like a gateway for these people, something that allows them to get their feet wet first.
    I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how things shape up. I’m hoping to be able to create a fun little action-rpg I’ve been working on a design doc for.

  18. I don’t think ease of game implementation will be the big Metaplace win. You can already make lots of games for free with the Unreal 2 Editor for smaller environments, Neverwinter Nights editor (or NWN2), Warcraft 3 editor, Half Life editor, and Flash/ActionScript isn’t that hard to learn, either. There’s an open source package that works on virtually every OS that has hundreds of game scripting tools, and has bindings for every language out there. I like Python, it works with Python. You like C, it works with C. And all those packages have sample games you can modify to get your feet wet. And all of them will let you use random artwork you find on the web, too. TurboSquid keeps sending me emails begging me to buy some of their ready-to-go 3D models; they have hundreds. If you want to pay a little money, you can get even better development environments, and can do a decent demo of your game, enough to get some playtesting done, before you ever have to go looking for the artists, sound engineers and musicians to make it a pro game. That’s how John Blow made Braid.
    What Metaplace is offering, as I understand it, is the integration of my game with your game, pervasive multiplayer, doing all the back-end work for you. Multiplayer is a hard thing to do yourself. They’ll even host it for you. Most of the web-friendly virtual environments I’ve seen only allow very limited customization. Metaplace games are multiplayer and interoperable from the start.
    The coolest thing about Metaplace will be making an instance of the Metaplace MMO and then changing it to make your own MMO that works with the official one. That oozes awesome.

  19. One note about Veksar and that last mob. Perhaps you knew that the boss respawns the adds on a timer, right about at the same time he gives some (or all) group members a big nasty dot. So it tends to get really busy. I’ve been in Veksar once, and we couldn’t quite handle this guy. It’s also true that we were getting tired, and it wasn’t our best geared tank, etc.

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