Author: johnk

Orion’s Champion Proposal: Transparency Turbine-Style

The STO community lavishes praise on Cryptic for their transparency, but I think Turbine deserves at least as much credit–and perhaps more for not over-sharing. A case in point is Orion’s latest dev diary post about the upcoming changes to the Champion.

Orion’s Page – Blog Archive – Champion Proposal: Final Stages

Elf ChampionMy first LOTRO character was a champion based on a character from a LOTR-based NWN persistent world. Gameplay with that champion (rolled two years ago this month) felt a little lethargic and uninteresting compared to my eventual love, the runekeeper. I’ve dabbled with champions since then and liked what I’ve seen in changes to the class and overall combat engine.

From Orion’s latest post, this update to the champion class will be significant.  I’m not a big enough champion nerd to appreciate subtle changes in how skills and stances relate, but a few things stand out:  no more shields, no fervor penalty for two-handing, and far fewer on-defeat skills. That last one is big for me as a solo; I don’t get to use on-defeat skills as much wandering around alone.

My sense is this champion tune-up is on par with or bigger than what the runekeeper got a few months ago. Some of those runekeeper changes didn’t stand out in the dev diaries but ended up being fantastic; i.e., Master of Writs. Pairing solid posts like Orion’s with Turbine’s usually-well-delivered updates has me eager to roll a new champion and see how it feels when the time comes.

I’m not so eager for STO Season 4 and the Duty Roster System: Cryptic’s having problems in the discussion and delivery departments lately, and they’d do well to take a few pages from Turbine’s book. Turbine’s communications with the LOTRO community are more measured and better timed. It may help that the LOTRO community seems better behaved but no less passionate: their forums suffer less from heat/noise–except for those trash-talking PvMP forums, of course.

It also helps that forums.lotro.com supports RSS feeds to get around the heat, noise, and overload that trying to stay on top of STO’s forums inflicts on me.  Hint, hint.

Another STO Hiatus

I’m on another hiatus from Star Trek Online. Once again I find myself waiting to play the game STO could be (with the Season 4 update in July) rather than the game it is now. But it’s more than that this time. I’ve had a string of annoyances and disappointments with the game, customer support, the Foundry, and active participation in the forums. Perhaps my love for STO has finally died the death of a thousand cuts.

I’ve played STO enough to scratch off the veneer of Star Trek and see too much of the generic MMO RPG beneath. LOTRO and STO got my attention and my cash because of the intellectual property, not because I like MMOs.  Although the massively-multiplayer aspects can be fun sometimes, they’ve also been immersion-breaking, road-blocking, distracting, and even discouraging.  It feels like these games have all the limits of a computer-based game with none of the advantages of a real multi-player (tabletop) RPG.

It’s not clear what Atari divesting itself of Cryptic Studios means for the developer of STO.  Word in the forums is “business as usual” of course.  For me, I have to wonder if the game will last long enough to reach the break-even point for my lifetime subscription–especially given months of hiatus I’ve taken since launch. It seemed like an easy bet with such a big IP back then. Oh well.

I may pop into STO and LOTRO for a few hours here and there, but I’ll probably devote most of my game time to single-player games: a heavily modded The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Portals 1 & 2, and either Mass Effect or Dragon Age to psych me up for the  MMORPG that might be more RPG than MMO: Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Here’s hoping!

Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself–and Spiders

Some new screenshots from the upcoming Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim include a giant spider.

The Dreaded Giant Spider from Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The Dreaded Giant Spider from Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

I found it through a Kotaku article that includes some other great shots. The best part of the article isn’t the amazing pictures or even the fact that this endless-waster-of-time is getting closer to release. It’s the comments.  About spiders. About really hating spiders.

If you ever thought a video game could not touch some deep human emotion, fear of spiders in this case, you were very, very wrong!

New Skyrim Shots Feature Orcs, Cat-People, And The Dreaded Giant Spider — Kotaku.com