Guild Wars 2 + Lexx?

I am never going to be the type of blogger who breaks news. I should just get used to that. However, feel free to show up here for all of yesterday’s news!

Via I Love Guild Wars, and sknr.net where the link has now been modified.

Ellen Dubin, a lesser known (ouch, sorry Ellen) Canadian actress, will be playing 3 roles in Guild Wars 2. This information was apparently leaked somehow, possibly through her publicist. She appeared in 6 episodes of Lexx, possibly her most well known roll(s). She was also in all 24 episodes of The Collector, a fairly terrible syndicated show about a man who collects souls for the devil. She also had a part in Napoleon Dynamite. Check me out, I’m doing all your IMDB homework for you.

And I thought Felicia Day would be the only one making fanboys soil their pants.

She’ll be playing:

Torrun is a Norn, low status character
Mighty Grika is an Asura, middle status character
Tyrana is a Charr, high status character

MMO Blogging Tips Part 2

Massively recently put up interviews with 9 community managers from MMO’s and asked them a series of questions specifically about blogging. I tackled Part 1 here, hoping to summarize and see if they had anything to offer me or anyone else. Here’s Part 2.

In that post I made a big deal of not really wanting a close relationship with a game I’m trying to be objective about, and not really seeking out a large readership. Some of the questions weren’t therefore relevant, but there were plenty of small, useful, pieces of advice buried in there. Hopefully in this post, the questions shift focus a little bit.

What level of honesty should bloggers have regarding the benefits and flaws of your game in balancing the interests of the readers and the interests of your company?

To their credit, each CM quickly acknowledges that honesty (hokey as it may sound) is the best policy. I don’t think any blogger worth their kilobytes would allow themselves to any degree of dishonesty that would mislead or even soften the blow of their posts. There isn’t much point to being dishonest. It won’t get you hits, it won’t make you popular, it probably won’t get you anything.

Is it better for a blogger to remain with the masses or get inside access to information for the community relations and marketing purposes of your company?

I suppose this is exactly what I’ve been talking about. Should a blogger actively seek out and disseminate inside information? I don’t think so. Beta access is one thing, but, when you’re on the inside, in bed with the people you’re blogging about it makes it harder to rip them a new one when they screw up. Inside information would be great, haul in new visitors, keep your readership happy. The choice is clearly up to the blogger as most of the CM’s say.

From your professional standpoint, what are some of the key differences between bloggers and major MMO news sites?

The Community Managers skim the surface on this question, mentioning that MMO news sites post often, and not at all in depth. I think it goes further than that, there’s no narrative, you rarely know who’s posting and there’s rarely any commentary or insight. There’s no enthusiasm or disdain from major sites. I read major sites that post publicity material for games that I know have major problems, but all I ever hear is whatever the marketing teams send them. You get way more than that with individual bloggers.

Many bloggers have sites unabashedly dedicated to whatever MMO they are currently playing, but because they maintain the site throughout the rise and fall of many MMOs, they develop a constant following. Other bloggers create blogs focused solely on one MMO, and the readership is based on the sole MMO’s popularity. Is there necessarily a better way in your opinion, especially with regards to building relationships between bloggers and your company?

Obviously if you’re looking to develop a close relationship with your chosen game community, you need to focus. That’s my opinion though. Some of the CM’s agree, but some are open to bloggers with a wide breadth of experience. I think the most interesting thing said in response to his question is when Baribeau says “Create good, well-written, regular content with a unique perspective and it doesn’t matter what you write about — you’ll have a following.” That’s probably the best advice in both part 1 and part 2.

A bright-eyed blogger comes up to you at a convention and begs for some simple advice. What do you say?

A lot of good advice here, finally. Mostly a summary of everything that’s come up. Write a lot, cultivate your skills, don’t blog in a vacuum, network.

This was actually a good feature for Massively. A far cry from their usual bland CNN approach. Getting inside the heads of Community Managers was informative. Interesting that I’m not really going to take half of this advice though, am I that stubborn? I’m not really interested in networking. The only thing I’m going to be working on is writing in a more interesting, funny, and less boring way. If only there was more information about Guild Wars 2 I could probably get my frequency up too. I wonder what their stance on stealing random images and using them in your blog posts is.

Dalish Origin

Although the lore behind Dragon Age is pretty extensive and deep, I’ve mentioned before just how cliche it can be in some situations. The first origin story I tried out is a great example of this.

I picked the Dalish Elf origin story. To begin with, centuries ago the Elves in Dragon Age were enslaved. An interesting twist on elves as they are usually civilized and advanced. They rose up freeing themselves, but eventually became an outcast class. The Dalish Elves roam the forests staying away from humans, adhering to their ancient forest like ways, which is where we get cliche. They’re in tune with the earth and all that crap. Fantastic.

You start out in the forest, where you run across some “Shemlens” a slang term for humans. They’ve stumbled across an ancient ruin, that for some reason is right on top of your campsite but you’ve never come across it before. Sigh. So you go inside with your buddy and fight your typical ancient ruin monsters, skeletons, giant spiders, and discover a mysterious magic artifact. Personally I was shocked there was something inside. Yada yada yada your friend dies, you’re forced to join the Grey Wardens, you leave your clan behind forever.

You’d think there would be more originality to this than that. I can honestly say I’ve played 3 bioware games that start the exact same way. I like the Dalish Elves, I do. They travel in these caravan wagons and seem to set up RV style at campsites. They’ve got these pack animals, Halla, that are like deer. The slavery background and the way they’re discriminated against is interesting. Their lack of knowledge of their own history due to that enslavement is interesting. Unfortunately everything else is played out garbage.

That’s only one of the origins though. We’ll see about the rest.

MMO Blogging Tips

I read Massively pretty regularly and stumbled upon this post where they try to establish how bloggers can establish a more firm relationship with their chosen game’s community and the studio through their community reps. They got in touch with 9 community managers and asked them several questions.

It seemed like a post directed at me. There’s plenty of advice for your average blogger. However, for me it just brought up a lot of questions.

Their first question is essentially, “Why are blogs important?” Well to me that’s pretty straightforward. Professional sites have something at stake when they try to tell you something. They’re there to make money. The impersonal announcement of something at Tentonhammer for instance, doesn’t insure there will be any insight, commentary, or criticism. Often they’re just re-posting public relations emails. Forums are a mess. For the most part you’re hearing from a very vocal minority. The opinions expressed are fractured and short. Very little is espoused upon at length. Most of the time it is a bitch fest. Not that blogs aren’t, certainly mine is a bitch fest. At least blogs provide a more coherent voice, a narrative that is more easily understandable. A forum provides an epithet, a blog provides a novella. I hope so anyway.

The second question is about building a relationship with their companies. The obvious answer, which virtually all of them give, is to straight up email them about your blog. Let them know you exist. Contact them on twitter, facebook (ugh) do whatever it takes to get noticed. Now for someone interested in a giant readership, getting feedback on your posts, getting into a beta, whatever, that’s an extremely good idea. I haven’t done this. One of the big reasons I only have one (hi jaimie!) or two readers is I don’t advertise this blog. I wouldn’t know how a single person ever finds this place. That’s because for one, I’m not confident in my writing ability, so I’m not even sure I want a plethora of blog readers poring over my blog. I’m also concerned about having too close a relationship with community managers. It would be nice to get into the Guild Wars 2 beta, or be informed of upcoming Old Republic tidbits directly, but immediately that puts me into a position where I’m kind of compromised as an unbiased voice. I’m sure that does not bother most people, as long as it improves their readership.

The next question is about furthering that relationship. Basically what I hear from their answers is be pro-active. All the things about life I tend to not do well. Be friendly and contact them often, let them know how big your readership is, pitch ideas at them, get on that PR list. Have an open and honest dialogue with your girlfriend, er, I mean readership and express their views as well as your own. Be professional, constant bitching and immaturity (there goes my chances at the GW2 beta) will not help you.

The last question in part 1 is about what not to do. Be professional also means, don’t be a douche. For instance, if I were to call the constant problems over at Runes of Magic a giant pain in the ass, that would probably be unprofessional. So I won’t do that. Also, if I were being professional I would not swear very often. If I’m blogging about a family game, I can’t get linked by a community rep to a post where I say douche. That will not happen. At least I don’t say fuck on this blog right? Don’t rage, sabotage, misrepresent, beg, threaten, harass, or otherwise be a douche.

There are various insights from these guys into what’s helpful to them, and how to get hooked in, and I suppose indirectly increase readership. There’s also a few mentions of the kind of things that get their attention, reviews, requests for Q/A, passionate commentary. It’s worth a closer look if you’re interested.

Thus far I don’t think this line of questioning is really helpful to me. I’m not sure I want that closer relationship with my favourite community representatives. I wouldn’t want to altar my writing style, whether it be rants, criticism, swearing, or constant bitching to be compromised by my wanting to get into the Guild Wars 2 beta. Anybody get the impression I want into the GW2 beta yet?

Runes of Magic Server Downtime

There was a patch this morning, and apparently people went ape shit. One of the changes was a nerf to durability on caster weapons, apparently they go down now! I suppose they were always meant to.

What’s confusing is, this meant that later in the day they took the servers down, and they’ve been down in the middle of the day for several hours.

Sometimes Runes of Magic just seems like a big joke ran by amateurs.

The forums are so flooded with people trying to figure out why you’d take the servers down in the middle of the day that they’re offline in Europe, and the American forums have been closed except for one section where you can talk about the servers being down.

The patch itself looks interesting, if not substantial. The only real change with any meaning is the addition of the new instance, if anything else changes the game I haven’t really seen it because I’m mostly playing Dragon Age for the moment.

Which is convenient, no listening to guildies complain on vent for me. Kudos to RoM community managers for making sure there’s a forum open while the servers are shut down. I’m sure that will not backfire in their faces.

Mo Melee, Mo Problems

One of the key things bothering me about Dragon Age, the only thing really, are the fights. Typically it will go something like this. I’m wandering around an ancient ruin, 8 giant spiders, or 8 skeletons spawn from nowhere. I don’t have enough healing or crowd control, so I die. I then have to restart, retreat back to some point where I can change my party around or buy/make pots and hope that it doesn’t go wrong again.

Not really fun.

Not that I think games should be easy, no. But I do think the challenge they represent should be more than “instead of 5 skeletons, lets make it 8 this time so it’s harder!” That’s really boring. Unimaginative.

There are very few non-melee enemies in Dragon Age. How hard would it be to throw some Mages in to make it hard? Everything in the game ends up being a big cluster fuck pile on. To make matters worse I’ve only got 2 casters to choose from, and one ranger among my henchmen. Everything else is warriors, rogues, etc.

Come to think of it, Runes of Magic had this exact problem. The vast majority of mobs were Knights. From mushrooms in the newbie area to Deadwood Hunters in the high levels. They don’t even have warriors or rogues as mobs. Funnily enough Knights are the worst dps class in Runes of Magic, which makes the majority of leveling in RoM pretty damn easy.

At least DA throws in some archers. Also there’s plenty to do if you’re bored of fighting, and I suppose the option to return later, when you’ve out leveled the problem.

Better With Age

One thing that is unsurpassed by other games in comparison to Dragon Age: Origins, is the writing. The characters have depth and backgrounds the likes of which I have never seen in other games. Sure the overall story arch is a little too generic fantasy setting, but the characters are deeper than the flaws in Runes of Magic. Or in fact, more successfully written than my jokes.

The voice acting is pretty incredible too. There’s only a few recognizable names, followed by a few people you might recognize if you check their IMDB page, but in general I don’t think I’ve come across a better voiced game ever.

One of the few flaws I’m running into, are the loading screens. It’s getting kind of ridiculous. If I start searching for my television remote in order to relieve boredom while I’m loading the next area, something is wrong.

The battles are repetitive, but there are efforts to throw some variety in there occasionally. An ogre I had trouble defeating early in the game gets thrown in with an entourage for an interesting battle or traps are set up in a battle area, or I’m thrown into a tournament of some kind. At least there is effort to diversify.

Bioware’s only continuing fault that I’ve seen in most of their games is the lack of diverse enemies. They’re not the only ones with this problem though, Bethesda produced 2 incredible games both flawed by the fact you only really ever fight 5 different things.

They get better with each game. That’s hard to do consistently. You might think after Electronic Arts bought them something would be lost in translation, but at this point I will be playing Mass Effect 2 as soon as I finish Dragon Age.

Dragon Age

I’ve been playing it. Which sort of hurts the whole MMO blog thing, but I guess I’ll post here about it.

Essentially after playing MMO’s for so long, it’s really noticeable when you switch over to an on-rails experience. I can’t explore or go goof off to do anything, Every experience is one I’m designed to have. Which is okay I guess, it’ll never hold my interest long term but it’s fun for now.

One thing I noticed is just how similar Dragon Age is to Bioware’s other RPG’s. I guess I thought with a brand spanking new and original Intellectual Property it would be different from Neverwinter Nights 2 to a great degree. It isn’t. Much of the mechanics are very similar. I may as well be playing Neverwinter Nights 3. Even the items and rate they drop are pretty similar.

Another thing is the generic setting. I don’t think it could get more generic aside from the Grey Wardens. The story is good but I find myself sighing at just how bland everything can get. The one slightly interesting twist, elves being the down trodden lower class former slaves instead of haughty pompous highly civilized immortals, is drowned out by other cliches.

I’m not that far in yet, I like some of the Henchmen, although again they are a bit cliched at times. Some of their conversations are great, and there is a real sense of personality from some.

The fights can get repetitive, which drives me nuts. The story is great but it’s punctuated by just plain repetitive fights. If I’m going to be fighting the same things over and over I just wish I didn’t have to fight so many of them.

For a game that’s supposed to be one of the best of the year I’m surprised at just how unimpressed over all I am. It’s got a lot of good points but in general it’s kind of bland.

Guild Wars Security and Other Links

A few new things to talk about. We’ll start with security. Don’t use the same password for everything, or if you do, don’t use the same username. You know what? Just don’t use the same anything. Security sucks lately, and the push from hackers and RMT types trying to rip you off has increased in recent years because they realize it’s profitable and the risk is much less so than getting into someones bank account.

You don’t get prosecuted for stealing someone’s guild bank.

Which is why it deeply concerns me that someone has hacked Guild Wars Guru. I used this site plenty when I was playing the game, and have never fully sworn off Guild Wars.

All this coming such a short time after all the Aion and Guild Wars drama involving hacked accounts. Days after the NCSoft game survellance unit put out a publicized plea for everyone to protect themselves.

Getting away from the hacking story, Martin Kerstein, a community rep for Guild Wars 2 was reading a discussion about adding professions and races in the distant future of the game, and actually just up and asked Eric Flannum, Lead Designer, to comment. It’s a fairly interesting insight into their take on race and profession and what they’re looking for. All those concept profession threads now have some guidelines I guess.

Via Kill Ten Rats, Mondes Persistantes had an interview with the Guild Wars Live Team with little new information but a fairly candid introduction to the team. It’s translated over at Guild Wars Guru.

In my ongoing attempts to plunder the depths of this thread over at GW2 Guru, check out the recently confirmed GW2 artwork in the upper left.

Finally there’s a quick mention of Guild Wars 2 here, which I probably shouldn’t even post since it’s not worth going to and I don’t recommend you do. Honestly I don’t think World of Warcraft fans and Guild Wars fans have anything to do with one another.

Massively’s Flameseeker Chronicles

Lately I’ve read over at massively that they want to have more focused articles on specific games. Their coverage of news alone wasn’t satisfying or bringing in enough people maybe.

In any case they put up their first Guild Wars/Guild Wars 2 post with a crap ton of community links, perhaps lacking a few key sites but I really could not have done a better job. I mean I just didn’t know Arenanet has it’s own twitter.

I’ll also admit, although I am pretty much Anti-twitter, Anti-Facebook. I don’t like to see game companies use them as marketing tools, because that’s all they end up being, empty shells that are used to market their game. However each time I check out the GW2 twitter, I usually come across something new.

Anyway, kudos for massively for bringing a more personal approach to their coverage. It is sort of the point of blogging after all.