Dark Souls

So this game is a bit old, I'm aware.  Considering though the sequel has come out, and there are still a decent number of people playing this, I don't feel so bad or awkward talking about it.  So let's get right into it, shall we?

Dark souls, made by From Software, is considered to be the spiritual successor to Demon souls.  It also has a very healthy reputation for being tremendously hard.  This reputation is not completely untrue.  Yet, I'm getting ahead of myself a bit here.  Let's break it down into it's basics.  Dark souls is a third person adventure rpg where you are an undead.  In this world, undead are banished to the undead asylum, to rot and eventually go insane.  One of the interesting features is undead keep coming back to life, until eventually they go hollow, whereupon they can truly die.  Your character is freed by another undead, and you begin your journey to discover the land you've arrived at.  Your given choices at the beginning to determine your starting stats and equipment, and also given the option for various minor items to help you on your way.  Your stats determine your play style and kinds of equipment you can wear, along with the skills you are able to use.  Each stat affects different aspects of your character, such as what weapons you can use, spells you can cast, health, stamina, defense and such.

As you progress, killing enemies and collecting items, you gain the currency of the entire game, souls.  Souls are used to repair equipment, buy items from vendors, upgrade items and also level your character.  When you level, you decide what stats get increased, and each stat you improve makes the next stat that much more expensive to level.  Because of this, you will want to figure out what kind of play style you will be using during the game.  Items have various requirements to use, and also can have various bonuses.  Swords can become stronger if you have more strength, or more dexterity to use more lightweight weapons.  Some even have special abilities you can use, and others can be improved at the various blacksmiths into even greater weapons.  Eventually you can even form weapons and such into fire, lightning, holy and other attributes, even craft epic weapons from the souls of dead bosses.  Of course, this only happens if you can keep your souls.

So, there are bonfires in the game, and they act as your save points/leveling points/basic crafting.  They also function as return points when you die.  And you will die, a lot.  When you die, a few things happen.  You become hallowed (more on that in a bit), you lose all of your souls, and you teleport back to the last bonfire you used.  Now, you have the chance to make it back to wherever you died, and get all of your souls and humanity back.  Oh ya, all of the enemies are back too.  This also happens whenever you sit down at a bonfire, everything comes back to kill you.  Enemies come in various shapes and sizes, and you need to learn their patterns and how to fight them, which is also dependent on your play style.  I'm playing big weapon, heavy shield, lots of armor fighter, so I tend to block everything they throw at me, swing really hard, and repeat.  Works well for some guys, other enemies, not so much.

So I mentioned hallowed earlier.  So normally your hallowed, which is almost full undead.  If you use a humanity at a bonfire, you can revert this, and become human.  This has a few benefits.  First off, you can now summon other players into your world to help you.  Keep in mind you can't communicate, so you'll need to use gestures to get them to know what you want.  You can also invade other peoples worlds, killing them for souls, humanity and covenant ratings.  Ah right those.  Covenants are various groups you can find and join in the game, that award you weapons and spells if you earn ranks in them.  This can be done by turning in certain items, killing other players, assisting other players or offering humanity.  Some of them are hard to find, but they all offer unique items to the player.

So to me, one of the biggest things about this game is the world.  Every part of it feels natural, connected and part of the story.  You can see the ruin and decay, that hints at the previous splendor that this place had.  The npcs you meet all have back stories, and you can choose to find out what they are up to, ignore them or even kill them if you choose, gathering their gear to improve your chances at victory.

This game can be easily found on steam, in most game stores and is available for the ps3 and xbox 360.  I would highly recommend picking this game up.

Quick update

Just a quick update so people know I'm alive and kicking.  Got engaged, pc broke, life and such blah blah blah.

Going to do a write-up of Dark souls and how it has freaking ruined me, and also going to do a few articles on various MOBAs I've been playing with lately.

PAX East 2014 - The year of the MOBA

So PAX east 2014 has come and gone, and with it, all semblance of sleep and a regular day pattern.  I spent all three days hanging out at the con, and thought I'd share some of my thoughts on what I saw there.

So the reason I'm calling this the year of the MOBA is that alot of the big name games there this year were MOBAs.  League of legends were of course there, with a massive booth in the corner of the expo hall.  Blizzard was there as well, showing of Heroes of the Storm and the new WoW expansion, Warlords of Draenor.  The new orcs must die game was also a MOBA, and a new one called Dawngate had signs all over, and gave out free beta codes in every swag bag at PAX.  Along with that, we also got new cards against humanity packs, league of legends skins and even some pwnmeal (oatmeal holding the cards against humanity packs) and some other small items we could now use.  There were some other big name games there this year, including the new Wolfenstein, The evil Inside, Battlemage Lickdom and of course, Wildstar.

Alas, I did not get a chance to play many of the big name titles, as the lines for the expo halls were long, and I did not get in early enough.  I did see one game that looked very interesting, a new RTS called Grey Goo, but the section of the con they were in kept dropping power, so I did not get a chance to play it either.  I did get to play the new orcs must die, which was alot of fun, and some indie games along the sides.

Honestly, this year was mostly me catching up with some good friends, seeing a few panels (one run by my new friend Ben, who gave a good panel on how to be a better GM) and of course, meeting new people in the lines, playing some tabletop games and just enjoying the overall atmosphere.  Looking forward to next year, where I hope to post a day by day synopsis.

Diablo 3 - Reaper of souls

So been a bit.  Not dead yet, just been working on some stuff here and there.  Let's get down into a new review shall we?  This time, we're hitting up the new Diablo 3 expansion, the Reaper of souls.

This is going to require a little bit of back story to understand why this expansion and patch were such big game changers to the game.  When Diablo 3 first came out, it had one big problem going for it.  The real money auction house, and the loot system tied to it.  For anyone who has never played any of the Diablo games, it runs a very simply formula.  You kill monsters, to get more loot, to kill even bigger monsters, to get better loot, wash rinse and repeat.  Diablo 3 kept to this style, but added an auction house to sell the items you did not want to other people for in game currency or real world money.  In theory, this could have gone very well.  In practice though, the loot that dropped was actually almost never useful to your character.  For example, let's say your playing a Barbarian.  Big hulking warrior, you need strength, vitality and possibly crit chance and such.  The problem being, you'd get items like wands, crossbows and non strength items, which were no use to your character.  So you had to trade for better items to progress through the game.  Gaining even one better piece of equipment in this game can mean the difference between trudging through a pack of monsters, or laughing gleefully as you rip them to shreds and carry onto the next group.  So to combat this problem, Blizzard recently released patch 2.0, nicknamed by the community loot 2.0 patch.

This patch addressed a few issues.  The first of course being the loot system.  With this, loot was geared much more towards your toons that you were playing, so barbarians got mighty weapons, while wizards would get wands and demon hunters bows.  It also increased the rate at which you got items, so you were constantly getting upgrades and improving your character.  This was also accompanied by a new paragon level system.  Once you hit max level, you were then able to keep leveling, acquiring paragon levels and using them to increase your stats, such as strength, life on steal, movement speed and others.  This gave a way for you to continue to level your character once you hit max.  Combined with the fact that all of your normal characters and hardcore characters share paragon levels, and it helps you begin new toons, giving them a nice boost to start the game.  They also changed the difficulty levels of the game.  Now enemies scale in level with you, and you can increase the difficulty to acquire more rewards for your efforts.

Now onto the expansion.  The actual expansion adds a new act (Act 5) a new class (Crusader) 10 more levels (making the max 70) and a new mode (adventure).  The crusader is a holy warrior, much like the paladin of diablo 2, wielding sword and mace in conjunction with laws and holy spells to smite their enemies.  Act five sees you chasing down the angel of death, preventing him from killing all of humanity in sanctuary and taking you through westmarch, the marshes and even Pandemonium, the battle field between heaven and hell.  The biggest draw of this expansion to me though, is the adventure mode.  This mode allows you to travel to any map in the entire game to fight whatever you desire.  Along with this, the game gives you random quests called bounties to complete.  These will give you gold, exp, blood shards and rift shards.  The blood shards can be used to gamble on new items for your characters, and the rift shards can be used to summon nephalem rifts.  These rifts contain random zones and monsters, along with a final boss in each that rewards you greatly for your efforts.  This to me is the real meat and potatoes of the expansion, and will keep me playing for a great long while.  If you own the original, it's in your best interest to get the expansion, as it only makes a good game even better.

Quick update

So just posting something quick so I don't ruin my rhythm of actually updating this once in a blue moon.  I've been a bit busy with work and life stuff, but am still aiming to keep this thing going.  Lately I've been playing Diablo 3 since the 2.0 patch, and once the new expansion hits and I have some time at it, I'll give a quick write up of how that is.

New Page Up

Just a quick heads up, as part of the site re-design I've made a small page that will list various terms and phrases I use in my postings.  Since not everyone will know all of the terms for all the various genres of games and such, I thought a small page to detail what some of the mean might be helpful for some people.  We'll see how it goes.

Steam Early Access

So I have a new graphics card underway, and thanks to a friend of mine, my pc has sound once more, so hopefully more game reviews will be coming down the line in the future.  For now I'd like to talk about something that has cropped up here and there, and that has been discussed by much better writers then I.  The Steam Early access model that cropped up a few months ago and is now peppering the entire service with dozens upon dozens of games for sale.

For a quick rundown, generally when you buy a game, your buying the full game, your aware of what's supposed to be included in it, and you can roughly guess the game will be in working order (runs fine, no major issues etc).  Early access is another way of saying paid beta/alpha access for a game.  If a game is in early access, it is telling you it's not done yet, may not have most or even alot of the planned features in place yet and is currently working on new builds to improve the game.  Some of them will offer a reduced price for the game, or even give you special bonuses for essentially pre-ordering the game (which in of itself could be another topic to discuss).  When you select an early access game, you get a small blurb from the developer about what they want to accomplish, a list of recent updates and sometimes planned updates.  Anything else is generally left up to the developers or can only be seen once you've purchased the game (this includes lists of planned features and such)

So I do own an early access title (Dungeons of the Endless, it's a rogue like/tower defense game, so hooray for hitting two of my favorite genres).  I think the system has merit, in that it can get people involved early on in the process of seeing a game, and even having a chance to talk about, discuss and help shape a game.  So far the updates have been decent for this title, and they give a good amount of information on what is changing and what is planned.  This gives me, the early tester/backer, good information to know what is coming, and if I was to recommend the game to other people, I could use this information to persuade them to give it a shot.  However, there are other games that do not display such information, the updates are sporadic and not very detailed, and they do not have a list of what is planned vs what is currently in the game.  Total biscuit, a very popular you tube reviewer does a better job then I could talking about some of these games, found here Link .  I've managed to avoid any of the games with these pitfals, but you never know if I will run into one in the future, distracted by shiny things and all that.

So there is alot more to discuss about this, but I wanted to keep this a bit brief for now, and come back to it in a few weeks to see what other people think, if they know of any games in early access worth mentioning, and what your general opinion is about this.

New design is in progress, upcoming games, topics for discussion

So as you can tell by taking a look, I took a quick stab at changing the site around a bit (my girlfriend helped with the color choices, as I have no artistic taste or talent whatsoever).  So while this is going on, time to list out a few things coming up

• I'm going to be playing in a Dresden Files Fate RPG soon, and once I have a few sessions under my belt, I'll write up my thoughts on the system
• I've got a few steam reviews I want to toss up, some older games and such I'd like to talk about.
• Going to add a few board game reviews, as the mechanics behind them are quite interesting.
• Going to try adding in a weekly kickstarter look, to direct people to projects I believe are fun.  If anyone has any they'd like me to share, let me know.

That's about it for now, just letting people know this blog is alive and kicking.

New site Design

Just a quick heads up.  Since the basic design of this hasn't changed since I started, I'm going to attempt to give it quick make over, make it easier to read, more pleasing to the eye etc.

Final Fantasy XIV - A new start

So many moons ago, I had given the beta of Final Fantasy XIV a shot.  To put it rather bluntly, the game then was horrible.  The races were merely re-skins of Final Fantasy XI races, the classes were not much better, and quests were so horrible to even attempt to get that after playing for only 30 minutes, I uninstalled the game and never looked back.  I did see it pop up once in awhile about how it had gone through a few dev teams, that they were trying to remake the game, and how eventually they scrapped the whole thing and started over.  This caught my attention, as it's rare for a game developer to do this for any title, let alone an entire MMO.  So i followed the new dev cycle, tried the beta, and have actually been playing the game since it came out.  Since I'm known among my friends as someone who will play almost anything, I believe I should explain whats new and improved.

So the aesthetics of the game seem much improved.  The maps and towns are bustling and full of various npcs and monsters going about their business.  The races have also been redone a bit.  They are still similar to Final Fantasy XI's races, but with new genders added, model changes and the introduction of multiple variants.  These variants give you more height and appearance options, along with different starting stats for each subset of a race.   The classes have also been redone, moving into four sets of classes.  You have disciples of the Land, Disciples of the Hand, Disciples of War and Disciples of Magic.  These break down into gathering classes, crafting classes, combat classes and magic classes (a marauder is a war discipline, while a summoner is one of magic).  Every character can be any class, and you can switch them at anytime just by changing your main weapon.  So you can be walking around with an axe, happily it about as a marauder, and notice someone is in need of healing.  Swap out a staff and suddenly your a healer.  Throw on a sword and shield and then your tanking as a gladiator.  Along with these, you can eventually earns jobs, which are like advanced classes.  They offer more options and sit atop of other classes, enhancing key features of those classes.  So a marauder is an axe wielding tank, while the job of warrior improves your abilities and offers new features to help tank and absorb damage.  You also have an armory to store 25 of each kind of equipment (helm, armor, main off etc) so you can carry various sets of gear with you.  You also have a room which allows you to store more items, sell them and hold special gear you earn from quests and events.

Now onto the meat and potatoes.  For PvP, there is not much there yet.  The last content patch added in a 4v4 arena style combat, and so far that is all there is in terms of PvP.  So if you want a rich PvP centric game, this is not going to be for you.  If you want a good PvE experience though, you'll find things to like in Final Fantasy XIV.  You have your basic quests you find scattered throughout the world, along with a main storyline quest which will reward you with decent gear, and makes sure you travel along the world.  Along the way you can also do dungeons, guildhests, fates and levequests.  Dungeons are common place, and range from quick and easy to challenging and drawn out.  The game has a built in duty finder for these, which means you can select multiple dungeons to queue for, and it will assemble a team for you.  The bosses range from simple mechanics (tank and spank) to more complex (protect pillars in the room so you can use them to hide from the bosses attacks).  Guildhests are like mini dungeons or challenges.  They usually center around a certain theme, and seem geared towards preparing you for more advanced mechanics coming in the dungeons ahead.  Fates are like Guild Wars 2 events around the world.  They will spawn on maps, and require you to defend a location, kill a big enemy, escort someone etc.  These will give you gold, exp and seals for your company.  At a certain level you join a grand company, and the seals you earn during the game allow you to buy gear, mounts and other items from the company vendors.  Levequests are the last bit of leveling you can use.  You find levequest vendors around the world, and can opt to perform quests for them.  They offer a variety of them to do, usually 6 or more per area, and you can repeat them as much as you want.  You can also get these quests for the various crafting and gathering jobs, to help you level those faster.

I will say I've been enjoying what they have done so far.  They just added in guild houses and are working on player housing next.  The dungeons I've done have been fun, and I just hit max level, so now I can begin to do hard mode dungeons and raids.  The next big patch is coming, and they seem to be keeping pace with content coming out.  So unless WildStar or ESO blows me out of the water, I may have found a home in Final Fantasy XIV for the time being.