The Witcher 2 Review

 

I know I’ve been absent from my blog for some time, well life and business has a way of catching up with you. Now that it’s the holidays, and I have some time to write, I want to talk about a game that snuck up me. Now, as a frequent user of video games, I want to talk about a game that came out of nowhere and had me completely enthralled.

If you’re an avid gamer, you know what I’m talking about. That awesome feeling when you stumble upon a game that resonates perfectly with you, and you find yourself playing nonstop. This is particularly amazing when you weren’t looking for that game the in first place. As the incident goes, I stumbled upon The Witcher 2 on a Steam sale, and picked it up with barely a mild interest, honestly, it was a drunken impulse buy.

With an hour or so into the game, I was completely hooked, and amazed by the overall experience that I was having. There are very few games that I can say this about, and The Witcher 2, definitely earns the prestigious merits and accolades. That being said, let’s dive a little into why I thought the game was amazing, and some of the issues I did run into along the way (nothing can be perfect). Join me, for a quick analysis of The Witcher 2, as we peel a few of the layers back and take a look under the hood!

Story, aesthetics, and fantasy universe, now with less spoilery-goodness! (Okay maybe a little)

Let’s start with the games strongest feature, and that is undeniably the story. You will find yourself in a rich fantasy universe, reminiscent of a medieval world; complete with all the trappings you would expect, and more. The world is full of the traditional races you have seen countless times, dwarves, elves, and humans etc.

There are several things that really stand out about the story and the environment with this game, that I felt were incredibly fascinating. First, and probably the most interesting to me, is that there are no real “Good” or “Evil” decisions that you make. Many RPG games follow the traditional style of awarding the player “Good” or “Evil” points for the decisions they make in the game, especially if the game has branching path decisions or not. At first, you feel that this is going to be the case, as you will have to make some pretty big decisions, who to side with, who to kill, who not to kill, what types of reactions you use, etc. Even though you can make seemingly “Evil” or “Good” decisions, you realize by the end of the game, that it doesn’t matter. As is true to reality, “Good” or “Evil” is simply a matter of perception, your choices in game have huge rippling effects, but the world goes on and you don’t transcend into some champion hero, or sinister villain.

I won’t spoil the last encounter, mainly because I enjoyed how the developers let you truly choose, especially against traditional game endings, but needless to say, you will probably be surprised.  Closing comments on the “Good” & “Evil” concept, I feel that not having to worry about what type of points that would be awarded for my choices, I was able to REALLY project myself upon my character while making the decisions on a case by case scenario with how I felt my character would really act. Overall, it allows for a greater sense of immersion in the story and the character you’re playing.

The next piece of the story, and the fantasy universe, that stood out was how pronounced and visible the societal issues between races were in this game, in fact, it ended up completely altering my decision making process to when I started. As spoiler free as I can be, you start out naturally allied with a specific race or faction, but as the game progresses, you see rampant racism, acts of genocide, and other tragedies commonly frequent in real life scenarios.

These issues, were well done enough that it led me to completely changing who I was allied with, which you get to choose eventually through pivotal decisions, and ended up taking me down a completely alternate story path from what I intended to go down from the beginning. In conjunction to that, the game has a particularly “adult” theme to it, so I don’t recommend letting your kids play this if you have any. Don’t let that keep you from experiencing the story though. The adult theme lends a very strong hand to establishing the fantasy setting, and doesn’t feel too over accentuated or gratuitous, as it can feel in some games.

That will segue into my next portion of the story, the romance plot! All at once, you can hear the collective clicks as all of the males reading this close the web browser! (I kid) Seriously though, it’s actually a driving portion of the game, which naturally leads to the “damsel in distress” story arc. Normally, I’d sigh with the thought of the story doing nothing new, but this time, it felt good to me. Plus, there’s a pretty solid twist at the end, which ties into it, so you won’t be let down.

I do have one gripe about the romance plot, but I’ll leave that out, as I feel it might be a bit of a spoiler so I’ll just tease you with it instead!

Summary of story and universe:

Overall, I felt the universe was rich, well crafted, and very easy to immerse myself into. You’ll feel and see the obvious inspirations that the developers had from several sources, yes; some Tolkien is in there too. You’ll be greeted with gorgeous visuals, strong adult themes, societal issues, mythical monsters, a captivating story arc, and a hero cycle that feels great.

Core Gameplay Mechanics:

So on to a few of the functional aspects of the game. To sum up the combat, it is pretty much a third person hack and slash, with menu based special abilities/items, which are used in real time but in a bullet time type mechanic. Confused? Okay in English, you can chop your enemies to tiny bits with your swords, or change your spell & item hotkeys during combat with a wheel menu layout, while you do this, you enter a bullet time state, thus giving you time to strategize without fully pausing the game or interrupting combat.

The combat mechanics feel pretty good, and are kind of fresh. You can choose to go all out melee, or you can bounce around setting traps, tossing magic, and throwing bombs/knives at your enemies.

I feel that there are some balancing issues with the combat, as far as correctly ramping difficulty throughout the game. For example, early on, I was fighting by the skin of my teeth, but I felt that once I crafted some nice swords and armor, plus a few points into my chosen skill tree, that I was unfairly pummeling my enemies after the first chapter. Perhaps this is on purpose, as when I started the last couple encounters, and the end game sequence; I was quickly on my toes again (and dying a lot). It also could have been because I was spending time exploring, crafting, and doing quests outside of the critical path of the story arc. (So maybe I was ahead of the curve a little, which that isn’t inherently a bad thing)

I did feel that on occasion, the combat felt a little clunky with specific encounters. Plus, the AI was a little too easy to deceive at times. Don’t let that discourage you though; you’ll have plenty of moments where you are too busy fighting for your life to notice small issues.

There are a few QTE’s (Quick time events) throughout the game, but they are spread out enough that they don’t detract from the combat. They are usually saved for fighting mini-games, and boss finishers.

Overall, I felt the combat mechanics were different enough to be fun and interesting, but I think there are some balancing issues with the difficulty ramping, and the game didn’t particularly force me to use all of my abilities. I found I was using maybe 45%-50% of my available abilities. I found a few dominant strategies, and stuck with that for the majority of the game. Personally, this didn’t detract from my experience, but from a design perspective, it’s not really a good thing.

UI

Not too many issues, however, I will comment on the inventory interface. At first, when buying/selling, or navigating your inventory, you’ll probably feel a little confused. The interface does a poor job of properly highlighting your selection, and until you get used to it, you can easily become lost. It’s not game breaking, but I feel they could have designed the inventory UI just a touch better.

Bugs/Issues

The most issues I observed on my play through, was some minor AI pathing and reaction issues. Overall, nothing too obvious to the untrained eye. I have heard, from other sources, that there used to be some “blocker” type bugs that would prevent a player from progressing. I believe, that these have been addressed and fixed, as since I just purchased the game and I did not encounter any of these issues. Keep in mind though, there are different story branches you can proceed down, so maybe some of these bugs still exist, but I ran into none of them.

Summary:

The Witcher 2 was a sleeper game for me. I didn’t really know anything about it, but once I spent a few moments in the game I was hooked, and played practically nonstop through the game. Perhaps, the game just happened to resonate to me perfectly, but I feel that anyone who values a compelling story, fleshed out characters, and a rich environment will immediately take to this game. Besides, the game is probably on sale on Steam, so give it a chance and tell me what you think!

Hope you enjoyed my small review of The Witcher 2, and I hope I kept it as spoiler free as possible!

Guild Wars 2 Review lvl 30-80

 

 

As promised, I’ll be covering my lvl 30-80 play experience and some of my thoughts on the process. I’ll be covering a few topics such as core gameplay, story, economy, and end game events/dungeons.

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Core Gameplay:

Not much particularly changes from lvl 30 to lvl 80 in this game as far as significant changes in skills/abilities. Unlocking more traits does make a significant difference in customizing your class. However, the game scales rather well in difficulty to your respective level. At about level 60+ I started to observe the corresponding zones of that level were becoming increasingly difficult, in comparison to the previous areas. When I hit the lvl 80 areas, I found myself dying plenty even with pretty good gear. Overall, the game starts weaning you from a balanced mixture of quests and group events, to almost exclusively group events in the lvl 70+ zones. By the time I reached lvl 80, I began to realize just how critical it is to have the right abilities selected, based off of what you’re doing. The final tier in un-lockable abilities is absolutely critical (At least for the Mesmer they are). This is especially true for running the higher level dungeons, which in this game they can be particularly unforgiving. It’s a nice change in pace for the player because the zones condition you to “mobbing” through quests and group events. Then you jump in a dungeon and suddenly you and four other players have to actually function on a traditional level of dungeon running. Strategic pulls, situational awareness, specific tactics for boss fights, etc.

On a recap of skills/abilities, having only five weapon skills per weapon does not feel entirely limited or boring by level 80. I was suspicious of this system from the beginning; mainly I felt it might be a little over simplified. However, blazing through to level 80 I never particularly felt any boredom with my available weapon abilities. The pacing in GW2 negates this problem, as they elegantly avoided any kind of “level grind” that a lot of MMO’s can fall victim to.

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Story:

Without going into particulars of the story, it does a pretty good job of staying interesting all the way to lvl 80, and plainly sets the player up for some end game events. I did notice however, that the corresponding equipment rewards for completing a quest began to become less and less beneficial to me (In other words they started to suck). While at the same time the experience gains became significantly better. From lvl 65 to lvl 80 I practically only completed my daily quest and my story quests. As I mentioned before, this is particularly nice that they avoided a grind in this game. Many MMO’s have the terrible habit of making the last 25%-35% of the level cap extremely “grindy”. In regards to the story itself, they basically designed a branching path architecture with all paths looping back to the same ending. There are several player driven choices that will change the story slightly and how you as the player experience it. For example you have the choice in which factions you join, and you occasionally choose how your character responds (aggressive, compassionate, etc.).

In conjunction with these alterations in the story, you also have to remember that you can change your story slightly during character creation with selecting your past as noble, commoner, etc. So in recap on the story, it manages to stay interesting and relevant to the player. While also being rewarding all the way to lvl cap, and if you as the player want to experience every possible angle and minute change in story, you would have to do a lot of plays through to see them all, as it will fluctuate based on the variables you choose of race, past, faction, and your characters emotional disposition.

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Economy:

Now this is a fun one! If you’re an experienced MMORPG player, you’ve probably played at least one game where it was literally destroyed (or you’re experience lessened) by the economy being destroyed by gold sellers, or terrible design. If you have not experienced this, then consider yourself fortunate. That being said, let me start by saying it is definitely too early to say how the economy in GW2 will pan out, as these things take time to mature. However, I will offer some of my observations and some of the development teams design decisions.

As I was playing through the game, I was so caught up in blasting through events and quests; I never particularly stopped to pay attention to how the market was functioning. Mainly because since you can place items on the auction house while out in the field, I didn’t care! After a decent amount of time, I was wondering why I was getting more money from the auction house (I had placed copious amounts of items for sell). So I took a visit to the auction house and found I had almost a dozen pages of items NOT selling. Upon further investigation, I realized that items beneath rare status often had 1000+ of them on the market. This does one critical thing, since the supply is vastly higher than the demand; it drives the value of items below rare to that of just above vendor prices.  I believe this is on purpose by Arena Net to combat gold sellers. Basically, a lot of these items are more valuable by being broken down for crafting materials, or by just selling them to the vendors. Rare and above items can only efficiently be obtained by running harder dungeons, or completing large group events. This makes it difficult for gold sellers in small groups, or bots, to efficiently “farm” these items.

Lastly, and most importantly about the economy, is that Arena Net is shamelessly their own gold sellers. If you can’t beat them, join them right? What they have done is implemented “gems” that can be purchased for real money, then used to buy cosmetic items, or (ready for this?) used to exchange for gold on a living, breathing, currency exchange. This exchange even has a variable exchange rate based off of player activity and use of the exchange.  Players can buy/sell gems/gold back and forth. This means that savvy players can watch the exchange and make a profit from strategic buying/selling dependant on the current exchange rate. I don’t know how this will work in the long run, but it’s an interesting dynamic and a fresh way to tackle the gold seller problem. I think it’s somewhat akin to digital piracy. Piracy is rarely a social problem, but usually a problem of a service/good not having a high enough perceived value in regards to its current cost or availability.

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End Game:

Now this is the big question people always ask about a new MMORPG, “Is there an end game?” Thanks to a generation of World of Warcraft players being spoiled by a decade of content being developed, they now expect a newly launch MMORPG to have an equivalent amount of content (Okay I’ll get off of my soap box now J ). That being said, I haven’t particularly been at lvl 80 long enough to experience everything. I can say that the lvl 70-80 zones have a ton of group event quests continually going on. I also have not had time to run the higher lvl dungeons yet either. I have observed however, that they have done something interesting by creating raid quality open world group events. For example, in one of the zones a group event opened up, and not only did we have to kill the boss, but periodically she would go through phases in which we had to go to different locations and perform actions like disabling power generators, then resuming the attack. There were other elements to that fight, but what I’m getting at is I believe Arena Net is aiming for raids that don’t require shouting in “LFG” for hours and joining a separately instanced area. These kinds of experiences might exist, but I haven’t specifically reached them yet. In closing, if there is one piece of advice I can offer if you are currently playing through, or plan on playing through, is to SAVE YOUR KARMA POINTS!!!!! Wait let me say that again, this time more accentuated, SAVE YOUR KARMA POINTS!!! You can thank me later on that one!

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Summary:

So far, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my first play through to level cap on my Mesmer, and I hope the community that’s been established sticks around and that GW2 has a nice long life. I say this because they’ve done enough different and innovative things that they’ve created a nice and refreshing MMORPG experience that I think everybody should experience.

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Thanks for reading!

-Cheers

Guild Wars 2 Review lvl 1-30

So as the title implies, this review will cover my initial impressions from level 1-30 in Guild Wars 2. So needless to say I was one of 400,000 + people to jump into the head start for GW2, and so far I’ve been nothing but impressed. So I will attempt to cover a few topics or categories of my experience to level 30.

Mesmer in front of main Human City

The game starts with a typical well thought out character creation process. The fun part here is that you pick a few things that describe your character, which establishes your story. What this means is there are different variations within the same race depending upon what you choose. For a comparison it feels similar to Mass Effect 1 where you set up your characters past. Except here there are way more variations because of the different races, so in essence you would have to play a lot of characters to get every story line.

After your character is made you launch right into the game and story, you don’t just spawn into some newbie zone and kill bunny rabbits with a stick. After the first story quest is done (you are in an instance for this), then you are free to go wherever and quest. Here is where GW2 REALLY shines. Your character level will adjust to whatever zone you are playing in. This was awesome because I rocketed past in level over my friends, but I could go back and play in their zone with them, and still get experience and money. This vastly recreates replay ability, and helps keep zones from turning into dead zones because there is less people that level. Also, it is particularly easy to get to the other starting areas with your friends. A couple of portal jumps and you are there.

So with that I will segue into questing. The questing in GW2 is seamless and very painless. The only quest you will keep on your HUD is your main story quest. All other quests are specific to the area you walk in. So you walk near a quest giver and it pops up on your HUD, soon as you leave the area it goes away. If you complete it, you automatically get the reward, so you don’t have to chase down NPC’s later to receive rewards. This method helps streamline player progression a lot.

The next best thing about questing is the dynamic group events that happen everywhere. I’m not entirely sure if the group events trigger from a certain amount of players in the area, or if they are on a timer or random. Either way, group events will start up all over the place, requiring a decent amount of players to accomplish them. They vary from taking down a boss, defending a city, escorting an NPC, or destroying objects/cities. The best part about them is that you only have to be in the area and you can participate, very similar to what Warhammer started, but much more seamless and plentiful. For questing, they have a very refreshing take when compared to traditional MMORPG’s.

Event Quest

Event Quest

On to story a little, the story NPC’s are fully voice casted and pretty well animated. The voice acting is also pretty well done. I found I was actually interested in my storyline quest, and found the characters to be believable, this is rare in an MMORPG and should be valued. It should not come as a surprise though, considering how established and vast the lore for GW is in the first place. It’s a rich and very fleshed out world to explore.

Aesthetically speaking, the world is very well constructed. They implemented “view vistas”, which often require some Mario jumping skills plus puzzle solving, to locate. Once you reach the vista you are rewarded with a camera view panning over some grand scenic view (which a lot of these screenshots come from in game). That paired with a good soundtrack (reminds me of playing Skyrim with the music), really helps the player get immersed in the world. The level designs are also very expertly crafted, and well just plain gorgeous in a lot of places.

View Vista Before

View Vista during camera movement

Now some more technical review, lets get on to the character skills setup. Here is one of the most refreshing aspects of all with GW2. You get character traits and character skills. The traits are dependent on your class and you unlock them as you level up, similar to a skill tree. However you can only have a limited few selected at a time, so you have to mix and match five of them on your HUD to use. You can change them out easily, but not during combat. The best part is that your skills are specific to whatever weapon your character is holding. For example, on my Mesmer I switch back and forth between a greatsword and a staff often. When I do this switch, my skills completely change because they are specific to that weapon type. This is awesome because you can quickly change up your tactics to suit the situation. You are also limited to five skills, this might sound like over simplification to people used to MMORPG’s where 80% of your screen is filled with a hundred buttons. This design streamlines the process very nicely, as you can have two weapons types selected, and you can switch between them in battle. This allows you to change your tactics on the fly, which is awesome especially for PVP.

Mesmer blasting enemies with a Greatsword

The character classes are also refreshing (I know I keep using that word a lot, but GW2 is refreshing!) mainly because they don’t really conform to traditional archetypes. For example, my ranger uses a bow and throwing axes which is expected, but she can also use a greatsword. My Mesmer is a magical light armor casting class, so you would expect just wands and staffs right? Well she happens to rock with a greatsword as well. Sounds odd, but they are well executed.

The last thing I’ll compliment them on so far is the server set up. I got on when the servers were fired up, and guess what… no queue times! This is because they smartly implemented “overflow servers”. So basically you play on a server and you’re in queue for the regular server. When it pops it seamlessly transports you to the main server in the exact location you were standing. The only issue with this is when your playing with your friends, sometimes it can be a challenge to get on the same overflow server or main server with them to play. This will work itself out as populations and community’s balance out. It is a nice feature though, because nobody likes seeing “Estimated wait time : 3- Hours”, I know we have all been there.

So now on to some gripes. The largest issue right now is the fact that the auction house, as of the time of this writing, is still down and not operational. This doesn’t anger me specifically, because I realize there are always kinks in an MMORPG launch. I just hope it is fixed soon for the less patient players. I also have observed that there seems to be a lack of variety with different armor models. So far, I believe there are a certain amount of sets between level ranges, I.e. 10-20, 20-30, etc etc. I hope in the future they add new armor and equipment models.

I realize that I’m at lvl 30, which is a drop in the bucket for a total of 80 possible levels. So far this s an awesome experience and completely refreshing for me. I will continue to review the game as I progress towards the “End Game” experience. I hope you will enjoy reading about my experience there as much as I enjoy playing it!

The Secret World Review

To be honest, I really hadn’t followed The Secret World at all during its development. Once it had been out for a week or so I started to hear things about it. At the time I had been playing Tera Online, which had great gameplay but terrible story narrative. So needless to say I was dying to play something with an actual story.

So I promptly started to look at reviews, and once again I observed vastly different and varying reviews with stark differences in opinion. So this was something I knew I had to try for myself. Most of all it boasted an incredibly strong story.

So I bought it, and chose to make an Illuminati character. Other than the entry cinematic, the first portion of an MMO that a player gets to see is naturally the character creation screen. To be honest, I wasn’t very impressed with the character creation. The character models were odd and it took quite a bit of effort to create something that didn’t hurt your eyes to look at. Also, along with the weird character models the selections are pretty limited, at least when compared to today’s standards of options when creating a character.

I obviously did not let this dissuade me in my quest to check this game out, so I ended up creating an exotic Illuminati character and went about playing the game. I won’t go into play-by-play detail of the game itself, instead I’ll put out some of my feelings and initial first impressions after playing through the majority of the beginner area and the first to instances/dungeons.

I was greeted by a pretty strong and compelling story narrative right away, albeit a little odd and different, but I can definitely do odd. If you like Stephen King novels, you’ll love the story and visual aesthetics TSW throws at you. More or less, the main premise behind TSW is that all legends/myths/secrets/supernatural stuff is true and fair game. So pretty much like an alternate reality here on earth. The NPC’s are all fully voice acted, and do a pretty solid job of adding depth to their character. Your character does not speak however, just kind of stands there like a bump on a log, which seemed awkward to me since the NPC’s I was reacting with were conveying emotion to me. To be honest, it felt a little… how do you say.. “Half-Assed”. To go to all that work with voice acting, animation, and dialogue. Then not to even have your character speak? It definitely broke immersion for me just a little.

Getting past that, lets talk a little about the gameplay. Where the story narrative and aesthetic design of the world shine as strong points for this game, the moment-to-moment gameplay combat feels awkward. Some have described it as, “floaty”. The character animations as far as running and acting seem okay, but using abilities in combat just feels jerky and unfinished. After awhile you do get used to it, but it doesn’t feel like they were attempting an alternate style of gameplay, it feels like I said unfinished and or rushed to release. That being said, they did produce an interesting and refreshing take on leveling.

Instead of having character levels, you level your weapons. Your character can carry two weapons at any given time. There are no restrictions when you can change, or what to. As long as you put the necessary points earned from playing into those weapons so you can use them. The other interesting aspect is you are limited to a set amount of usable abilities and a set amount of passive abilities. So you have to carefully mix and match your abilities both active and passive. This creates a refreshing and creative way since you can literally build your character however you want.

The characters also do not use armor; you use talismans and jewelry to increase your base stats. This however brings up an interesting, yet somewhat problematic topic. So instead of wearing armor, you just equip whatever fashionable clothes you like on your character. I’m sure some of you see where this is going, yes that’s right, ITEM MALL EVERYBODY!!!…… oh wait you ask, doesn’t the game have an up front price WITH a subscription fee? Why yes, you would be correct!

So now that I’m done being facetious, your character can unlock clothing via completing “decks” or unlocking weapon trees to completion. While these do give you so cool looking outfits, the exotic and everyday stuff has to be purchased in game via an item mall. This, personally I think is a TERRIBLE design decision. In a free to play model, or even a regular pay up front model, this would seem okay since the clothes are purely cosmetic. However, players are paying a monthly subscription fee, on top of having already paid full price for the game. This is going to come across as nothing more than a money grab, plain and simple. I believe long run, with that business model, they will end up alienating their customers and honestly it probably turned off a lot of potential buyers when they read about it.

Last thing I’ll mention are the quests, TSW does a good job of offering more than, “Hey go here, kill that pig, get some meat and claws, then come back to me and I’ll give you some mad loot!, annnnnd repeat till level cap” style quests. The game does have a few of those, but it also incorporates its version of AGR (augmented reality) style quests, where you actually have to use the built in game browser to research a quest in order to solve it, or just look up a walkthrough. The quests can be challenging and time consuming, but when properly utilized (without cheating) you get that, aha!, moment of elation. The fully voice acted NPC’s do a great job of delivering the quests to you in audio versus assaulting your eyes with walls of text.

So in recap, The Secret World does a great job of delivering a compelling and interesting story with fleshed out NPC’s, but somewhat falls flat on its face with gameplay combat and their business model. This game appeals to those that prefer strong story narrative over enjoyable gameplay, and because of this it will probably end up being played long term by a niche group and will end up being a free to play model or without a subscription.

TSW does have more to it, good and bad, that I haven’t mentioned here. My goal was to give you a rough idea of what it is about. My advice is to seek a friend who is playing and can give you their 24 hour buddy pass, to check it out. Hopefully with time, they can patch some of the inconsistencies. However with Guild Wars 2 on the horizon, time might not be on their side.

P.S. Gonna add a couple pictures at the end because they look cool, and aesthetically speaking they were awesome! (I would have added more but kept forgetting to take screenshots)

Game Industry Future?

I wanted to make a short blog on the future of our beloved game industry (or at least my thoughts and opinions). I hope to start some dialogue with this posting, as this topic is usually at the forefront of my mind most of the time and I would like to hear other peoples opinions. That being said, I feel we are on the cusp of a massive and dramatic change. I feel conflicted by this, because as I see it physical video game media as we know it is probably about to die (or at least become a lot less common).

I feel both sad/happy about the apparent future of our industry. Any child of the 80’s will tell you about their passionate memories of their first Atari 2600, or playing Mario on their Nintendo until it was broken (except for the magic trick of blowing into the cartridge). Then the ungodly hours lost playing RPG’s and fighting games on an SNES or Sega. Unfortunately, as it appears the direction our medium is going, the physical game product in your home is headed towards extinction. I believe it will be similar to what Netflix did to Blockbuster. With skyrocketing development/production costs, developers/publishers have to change their business models. Its been happening for some time now, but this is the first that by and large the industry is really addressing it.

As I stated I’m also excited, mainly because I see the home consoles following the PC business model. Can you imagine? a home console where you purchase games with the efficiency of something akin to Steam? Most recently, Sony purchased Gaikai a cloud based video game streaming company. Naturally people are predicting the future is just streaming all of your video games to any device from some remote location. While nice in a futuristic utopian sense, I still feel that is a long time from now. Can you imagine every user on Xbox Live and the Playstation Network simultaneously trying to stream HD video games through the internet? I would bet a fair amount of money it would be a catastrophic failure.

In closing, there is a lot of conjecture out there on what Sony and Microsoft will do next. Personally, I’m ready for change…. sorry Gamestop, you had a good run but it’s time to move on (next blockbuster). Given the volatile nature of how quickly our industry changes, I hope we as an industry majority are ready for it. I would hate to personally witness a recreation of the infamous 80’s crash. Time to think outside the box and be flexible for the next big thing as an industry. It’s always as it has been, a sink or swim scenario.

E3 shenanigans….

E3 Hatred and our Industry:

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks you have inevitably heard or read something about this years E3 event. That being said you’ve probably read some rather nasty and disgruntled posts/articles regarding E3.  While I do agree with some of the things being said on Kotaku and Gamasutra about E3 being outdated and a horrible representation of the industry we have come to know and love, I think there’s one crucial fact we are forgetting.

Well lets make that a couple of facts to be precise. First and foremost E3 is really an advertisement on steroids, it’s for the consumer NOT for the developer. So attempt to control your angst when your inundated with dub step and trailers showcasing only the popular genres/titles. Now before you blow up my post with your undying love, yes I’m being facetious, keep in mind I’m not defending E3 or saying what it SHOULD be. I’m just saying what it is today and I’m going to attempt to reason out why it’s the way it is right now, or at least why this year it felt so…. bland.

I think it’s healthy to keep in mind that as we all know our industry is a very unique one and ALWAYS in a constant state of flux. That being said it’s become very apparent to me, and anyone that has read any history, that if the industry doesn’t change radically then it’s headed for another crash. Perhaps not as big as the burning ship wreck that was the 80’s crash but similar. Fortunately the major players in the industry recognize this, for the most part, and after this console generation they know they have to change or risk dying. I think that’s why E3 was a major disappointment for most this year. I feel it symbolizes the industry as a whole holding its breath for whats to come.

The heavyweights or waiting to see what the other will do and at the same time attempting to redesign their approach to the home console almost entirely. Since for a long time people expected Sony and Microsoft to announce their next generation hardware at this years E3, that was the hype and expectation for a long time. Since that didn’t happen they attempted to fill the void with other things, obviously less interesting. That partially might explain why E3 this year felt outdated and almost irrelevant to just about everyone, except the “lizard brain 13 yr olds” (as a lot of posts so lovingly put it). Personally I feel it’s just the calm before the storm, if the timeline holds true to the forecast of 2013 being the announcement or release of all the new hardware.

I think right now is the time to really evaluate what would be the most successful business model for the next console generation and give Sony/Microsoft (Nintendo will do as they want, successful or not), our collective feedback. Like or hate either or all of them you have to admit that if they collectively fail the next go round we could be here to witness an industry crash that personally I’d rather really avoid and not witness.

I also think the indie “scene” and the publisher heavy weights really need to stop acting like children and learn to work together for the betterment of our beloved industry. That however is a completely different topic so I won’t go off on a tangent and I’ll save that for another post.

In closing E3 was a massive signal flare that the industry as we know it is on the brink of a game changing evolution. We as consumers and industry professionals need to embrace the change and help propagate it’s success. If your a dinosaur in your thinking and hold yourself back, and others, you need to re-evaluate yourself and our industry. Sit back and honestly ask yourself, are you helping our future or are you a detriment? In a nutshell change is inevitable so if you cannot embrace that, please do everyone a favor and remove yourself from the equation.

New adventure….

This shall be my first post!

So starting a new blog I think should have a little information about the writer and the purpose of the blog, so this first posting will contain a little bit of information about me and my purpose here.

To start things off I currently work in Q/A performing game testing for Microsoft here in Redmond Washington. I’m also currently attending Full Sail University Online for a BS in Game Design. So following that information my purpose here is to express my opinions and observations on games future/past/present, and industry events.

I don’t profess to be an expert authority however I do feel well educated and experienced enough to publish my opinions. One day when enough people are reading this blog it will get some quality feedback. I’m a firm believer in the method of writing down your opinions and feelings while sharing them with other people, it helps you grow and most importantly sometimes it helps show you when your wrong about something.

I hope you enjoy your stay and will return to take part in my adventure of exploring topics and reviewing video games. If you have quality feedback and wish to comment with something worthwhile to say please do, especially if you want to challenge my opinion!