I dropped by my local EB Games on Tuesday to pick up my preordered copy of Dragon Age Origins, and walked out with my wallet a bit lighter than I'd intended:
My haulWhoops.
A Boy and His Blob was purchased primarily due to nostalgia - I'm old enough to remember the original game on the NES - but also because I'm fairly certain that my wife is going to have a good time playing this re-imagining of the game as well. Likewise, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a pure wife-driven purchase; she has been eying up the sequel (The Diabolic Box) for weeks now, and I convinced her that we should play the original first.
I'll be starting up Dragon Age Origins just as soon as I finish Dawn of War 2.... I already have a character ready to go, and I completed Dragon Age Journeys weeks ago for the unlocks.
If you have a few minutes, I highly recommend checking out the latest post on That's a Terrible Idea. Evizaer discusses different skill-based progression systems using Ryzom and Darkfall as two unique examples. It's an informative read.
The big kerfuffle in MMO land today is the new World of Warcraft Pet Store. WoW has been offering an increasing number of supplemental microtransactions for a long time (server transfers, gender swaps, renames, etc.) but apparently fluff pets have pushed many people past their breaking point.
My opinion: Any game that forces you to pay for a subscription in order to play should NOT use microtransactions to allow players to obtain unique items or services that cannot be gained via normal game play.
Tobold is probably also right: the floodgates have been opened.
8 comments:
Nothing wrong with a little indulgence now and then :)
I loved professor layton, such a charming game.
Enjoy!
Dragon Age has been an incredibly rewarding game so far - even if the blood spatter is increasingly ridiculous (and battles can be a little tedious). The dialogue and voice acting is really top notch, and while I normally coast through lore diversions in other games, I find myself pressing each character for more information about their past. In this way, they become pretty well-rounded, full realized characters - and I'm not even that far into the game.
And there's the rub. I can tell already that this game is going to be a massive time sink. I'm hearing "60 hours" as a minimum play through, and they're not kidding.
Also, I've been having a fun time discussing the differences between my playthrough and my husband's. It's amazing what sort of details change just because of the race/gender you chose.
Basically, I can't wait to get out of work so I can go and play some more.
DA:O is great so far for me. It's been 7 hours and there've already been a couple moments that have been more pungent than most I've found in other games over the past few years. The battle system is nice, as well. Probably the best RPG experience I've had since Mass Effect.
Thanks for the shout-out, as well. :)
love love love Layton. I am on the diabolical box now after doing curious village on my vacation. I thought it would be all easy peasy stuff, but some of it stumped me. Apprantly I tend to make things harder than they actually are.
Dawn of War II, excellent game! I think you'll be happy with your purchase of Dragon Age, it's a really good game so far.
Oh noes! Blizzard is trying to find new revenue streams in WoW!!uno! It's going into the crapper!
The real affronts to the game happened much earlier, with fishing changes, dailies, early mounts, team leveling, rep reductions, and reduced experience requirements. Instead of making the game more interesting, driving subscriptions through narrative, Blizzard chose to cheapen old achievements.
Why selling Kung-Fu Panda pets, which is cute, undercuts the game like removing attunement requirements makes no sense whatsoever to me. Other people are already spending more money than their subscription fees to make the game more fun -- up until now, it's called hardware. No reason not to let Blizzard cash in a bit with some as innocuous as a pet store.
If people want to plop down real money to buy pixels, that's their choice. I wouldn't buy either pet, but that's just me. The pets do not give an advantage to gameplay, and besides, part of the money is going to charity.
I love how people think the pet transactions are going to kill the game, like everything about WoW that's ever been complained about on any forum that was said to be "game breaking" and would "kill the game" has actually done so. For a supposedly "dying" game, WoW is still thriving ridiculously.
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