BF3 might be a fantastic game at heart but with all that hassle, the heavy team-play orientation and punkbuster spyware I just don’t care for it. These games have gone down the crapper game-play wise since Battlefield 1942. Reminds me of the five minutes I spent playing Counter Strike. There should be a special game-mode for people who like team games, i.e. coordination and social interaction. The rest of us are fine with running over and picking up wooden crates with a red cross on them and only existing in a team so far as to not purposely shooting our teammates.

This game will be a virtual bonanza for cheaters that are able to bypass Punkbuster. I mean, a radar or wallhack would be golden in this sort of game where you feel about as lost as an ant on a football field. Maps have poor visibility, everything moves too fast, you die at a split second and you’re all like "the fuck was that". Something is clearly wrong with the gameplay and learning curve here when the first thing that comes to mind isn’t how great the game is but rather how much you could use a hack.

If it comes down to a contest, I much prefer the lumbering pacing of World of Tanks. I don’t know if its some sort of commentary on aging. I mean, I still enjoy games like Unreal Tournament and such. Tribes and Planetside were fun. I’m currently moving through Deus Ex: Human Revolution and I quite enjoy that. It’s too bad that somehow, somewhere along the line, someone ruined PC gaming.

I’ve been playing the open beta now for about a month and after about 600 battles I thought I’d offer my opinion as WoT goes live on April 12th.

Bottom line that I’m fairly pleased with the game despite all its wrinkles. Sure it’s no strict MMO by any stretch but that is also a blessing. Because if there is one thing I’m sick of it’s instances, crafting, honour points, badges and unobtainable epic gear. Nor does it have any social interaction worth mentioning. I didn’t try any of the clan features of course. If I was that social I wouldn’t be playing a WW2 tank game in broad daylight would I …

A few points:

You’ll spend most of the game hiding in bushes. That is a fact. The ability to buy various modules like camo net and binocular telescope etc only add to this. As do the tank destroyers and SPGs. Crazy fast dogfights happen less often, especially as you upgrade to bigger, slower tanks. Fancy manoeuvring gets you killed most of the time, at least if the enemy team isn’t sleeping on the job. That makes WoT more a question of wit and strategy but also dulls the gameplay a bit. Once in a while you feel like just rushing the enemy in the most chaotic way imaginable. And sometimes that is what happens, but it’s rare and the entire team must act accordingly. Otherwise it’s back to the bushes. My best games by far have been the cowardly / prudent ones. Typically where your entire team rushes in and get themselves killed and you get to mop up the enemy team as they make their suicide rush.

Matchmaking is another part of the problem of why you can’t rush in. Or really enjoy all matches. Issues with player skill matching and team balance aside, my gripe with the game’s matchmaker is that you can be matched against tanks two or three tiers above or below. It’s fun to be top tank or the tank in the middle, but being at the very bottom of the barrel is no picnic because of how the game mechanic works. Gun and armor improvements makes it hard and sometimes downright impossible to win against a higher tier tank. At least in a fair fight where luck plays no part. Your peashooter of a gun will just bounce against much thicker armor. I’d like it a lot more if the matchmaker only set a maximum of two or three different tiers against each other. Perhaps there could be some user options to set?

Another issue is with the advantages you get from spending real money. Faster levelling, sure, but I’m more concerned with gold ammo and premium tanks. I don’t know if any sane person will buy gold ammo in the final version, but if they do they will have an enormous advantage, depending on the tank and gun. I’m thinking of the VK3601H’s conical for instance. As for premium tanks, they are generally substandard for their tier, but they have a more or less pronounced matchmaker advantage. Put simply, they more often get to be "top tank" and are usually matched against lower tiers. I think most people can curse the amount of Churchill heavy tanks they encountered levelling up and in the live version there are going to be more premium tanks than ever before. Another five or six at least counting the award for the closed beta testers (of which I am not a member sadly).

Finally, there is the grinding. The bane of all MMOs. Even with premium things get really slow and boring after tier five or six. And a new tank takes more of an effort to upgrade. Now, you should be just fine at any tier, with plenty of fun, but the matchmaking issue makes it natural to always escape to higher tiers.

Even so, I will probably continue to play the game as it goes live. On a strictly free to play basis. "Loltractor" here I come …

The reviews are in and overall the reception has been extremely positive (Gametrailers HD review, Escapist).

Too bad it seems tied to that pile of shit called steam. Not that I ever considered paying for a game I didn’t have to. Currently jabbing the F5 key over at my local friendly torrent site. If we are to get a tad nostalgic I believe that Civ I was indeed the first game I pirated on the PC platform back in the day. Good times.

Another sort of non-related issue could be that of DLC. It has been hinted that some content will indeed not be available at launch or only available to pre-orders or whatnot. I can’t vouch for the veracity in this but the mere suggestion that a game has been in any way downsized to create 0-day unnecessary DLC packs is seriously discouraging. Horse armour anyone? Not that any of this is something that piracy can’t solve. I have yet to see a DLC that hasn’t either been given a scene or direct p2p release.

Already looking forward to Civilization VI in 2015 …

Addendum: Having now played Civ5 I can see that it is a mixed bag. On the one hand the game is recklessly addictive. So it’s not so much a debate over whether this is a great game, because it is, but rather some of the fine print.

First of all, the game feels dangerously rushed and unfinished. If it had been any other title it would have been a disaster but since this is such a masterpiece you tend to accept many of its flaws. There are in my opinion three categories of problems with Civ 5. The first one is the simple bugs and glitches. Interface issues mostly. The slow start-up speed, wonky alt-tab, performance issues etc. The second is the extremely poor AI implementation. Kind of speaks for itself. The third is the sense, and I do stress the word "sense" here, that they have saved quite a few civilizations and even units for DLC or other types of expansion packs. Not that they haven’t done that before. It’s been the same thing with just about every Civ game to date. Just look at the amount of units that were added in Warlords and particularly Beyond the Sword. So I should probably take it easy with the outrage. I just hope we wont have to wait two years for a solid expansion. Perhaps DLC can be a positive influence here as they are able to more easily push smaller and more frequent upgrades. Then after a year or so they can sum it all up in a boxed expansion pack. And all pesky bugs aside, we can be sure Firaxis will support their game in a comprehensive way over the foreseeable future. Looking at Civ 4 once again, they kept patching both the core game and the expansions for about two years after release. That is more than you can say for most game developers.

Kane and Lynch 2

Mafia 2 was a complete disappointment as well. Never played the first game. Expected GTA. Got some sort of Mafia role play in a city that is surprisingly flat. The player is tightly bound to the central story. There is nothing else to do, and there is no point in acquiring extra cash from petty crime. It’s just an enormous hassle to get away from the cops and there is nothing you can do with the money anyway. Guns are just about everywhere and you don’t really need another beige suit. Cars run like bathtubs on wheels and you have to to a ton of driving to get to all sorts of pointless locations to do meaningless things. And then drive back again. Plus, on the technical side, the game runs like crap. I suspect Nvidia (the real mafia) managed to ruin the game with their physx crap.

You know it’s been a slow month when Worms Reloaded turns out to be the only thing with any value to it. While it lasted. Which was maybe a few hours tops.

Champions Online had a free week so I decided to try that on. Unfortunately, the game turned out to be a complete turd. Laggy, boring, infuriating, difficult and jittery. With a color scheme from a gay pride parade. I loved the character creation process but that was about it.

R.u.s.e. turned out to be ok though. A hell of a lot better than Starcraft anyhow. But playing it reminds me once again that I’m not all that good at RTS games. Shit, I hate having to juggle infantry, mechanized and air with a dozen different firing ranges while maintaining scouts to revealed hidden units approaching through the woods, allowing artillery and fighter-bombers to target incoming armour and protecting your ever expanding resource network. The only good RTS games are those where you can hide behind towers and defences indefinitely to build up your ultimate army. Like Supreme Commander 1.

Oh well …

It’s a good thing Civilization V is coming out in two weeks time then. If they play their cards right (and previews would suggest exactly that) we could have something to play for years to come. I rebooted Civ 4 a while back and easily sunk twice as much time into that compared to any of the recent good games that have come around.

Where would Starcraft 2 fit in all of this? Is it just semi-retarded or is it too generous a description? At any rate the game lacks any sort of strategy, not that it was present in the first game either. I don’t really remember. No real unit diversity, no base planning or layout, no proper base defence structures. Even the nice little things from the single player campaign, like resource caches, seem to be unavailable, at least in skirmish mode. Just amass the biggest heap of units, bring healers and swamp your enemy. Real sophisticated. Your base just seems like a parenthesis, kind of like in Demigod. Replay value seems real low on this one.

Well, it turns out that there is actually a way of emulating the XBOX360 controller for individual games and without overwriting system files. The Xinput controller emulator (with vibmod) simply translates direct input commands to xinput and makes any gamepad work seamlessly with XBOX360-supporting Games For Windows titles.

Sadly, while I got it working flawlessly, I could never get used to a gamepad in this title either. I mean come on. FPS game with grappling, parachuting, jumping, aiming, rolling and god knows what else all at the same time. My proficiency with a gamepad remains extremely low and I don’t foresee learning to use one any time soon.

Unfortunately the beta server has a tightly regulated uptime schedule. Just a few hours per week. Don’t know why. Perhaps because they monitor the game closely, for reasons of game testing or to keep the airwaves free of non-kiddie friendly language. Running a game like this must be several degrees more complicated compared to an adult title. I guess.

Addendum: I played the game some and I have to say that so far it has all the signs of a legendary turd. The interface is confusing (to an adult even). Missions and mission management are both awkward and uninspiring. Frame rates seem awful at times. Inventory management is a joke. The plot is weird or non-existent. Travelling from zone to zone is backwards as hell. And that is all besides the predictable glitches that you expect from a beta, but in this case take far too long to fix. The game is just evolving too slowly. What is their ETA anyway? Two years from now? Is it going to be free to play? If so, it’s alright. But charging money for this pile of crap seems downright criminal. I just don’t see how they’re going to salvage this unless they start working double-time. It’s a beta after all. Not some early alpha sketch. If it has fundamental flaws now it’ll never work.

In fact I’d go so far as to question the morality of making MMOs targeted at children. Especially if they’re this shallow and fraudulent.

The game is a lot like Grand Theft Auto and Red Faction Guerrilla in many ways. But unlike GTA this is fun to play. Something that GTA lost along the way. So, JC2 might have its flaws but in the current gaming climate it still is one of most innovative and remarkable games to come along in years. Repetitiveness and lack of finesse in some parts hampers the end result but for now, JC2 is king of the hill.

Also, kudos for keeping the game small when most games are 7 – 15 GB these days. Fast loading times and smooth graphics don’t exactly hurt either. And as an added bonus, the game was designed by Swedish developer Avalanche Studios.

The whole experience with the island hopping reminds me a lot of one of the first sandbox games ever released, Hunter. That was sheer brilliance back in the day.

One final word of warning though. The game seems to be heavily favouring Nvidia hardware. Too much to be a coincidence in fact. Could be another rigged game. Just saying.

Setting aside the fact that some aspects of the game felt somewhat shifty and that you only get to experience a fraction of the single-player campaign I still came away liking it. Sort of. Even though it’s a different game altogether from SC1 and SC1:FA.

A great many things seem to have been simplified. There is now a tech research tree instead of factory upgrades. And there doesn’t seem to be a bonus to constructing certain buildings next to each other, like energy generators next to factories. SC1 had complex base building theories originating from this little feature. I like how factories only come in one flavor, and can build all units that have been researched. But I do miss having three different generators, three different mass extractors etc.

Also I am unsure how resource management really works. Seems you just pay once for structures now, and that you no longer have to manage power consumption of shields, defensive guns etc over time as they come online and you lose generators in combat. Also I am unsure of whether you actually use energy and mass storage facilities anymore. Plus, at least the one experimental unit I did build constructed a lot faster than I remembered. And it doesn’t seem to be possible to use multiple engineer units to speed up construction of buildings and experimentals. Assigning an engineer to speed up construction at a factory still worked though.

Bottom line is that a lot of the focus has been shifted from base management to action and combat. But SC2 still holds a lot of promise … and besides, when was the last time we saw a good or even passable RTS? Most people seem to be waiting for Starcraft 2. I couldn’t care less as I never liked the first game. And especially since Supreme Commander 2 runs beautifully and scales on any hardware and Starcraft 2 is reported to run like ass even on the fastest system.

I really want to like this game. But I don’t know. Will it work out or will SC2 be yet another example of consoles (in this case the XBOX 360) ruining and "dumbing down" PC gaming? I guess we’ll find out in a few days. Also looking forward to a version with no Steam and less unskippable intro videos.

Edit: Got the final game and I’m sorry to say that I was underwhelmed. It’s an Ok game but nothing more. The more I play, the more annoying I find the game’s signature unit spam. And as far as the AI is concerned it’s either stupid and easy or stupid and hopelessly difficult. There is no middle ground. Even though I don’t play RTS multiplayer and never will, I can imagine that MP sessions will be short unless you pay attention. Just build a handful of fighter/bombers and sic them on the enemy ACU and you’re done. No one can withstand a nuclear explosion in the middle of their base early on after all. I reckon the problem is that units are simply too fast and easy to build in SC2 and that games resolve far too fast because of it. Which also means that you’re unlikely to ever have time to advance within the tech tree. Just upgrade your air units with more health and shields if possible and keep spamming. Air units after all don’t depend on fuel anymore as they did in SC1 so you can use them liberally. I’d go so far as to suggest playing MP games without air units.

Verdict still stands. WotLK is the grindiest game ever. Leveling my top three characters to 80 was easy enough once I had done it once and could buy "cold weather flying" plus swift flying mounts for the other two. I also changed some professions around. Leveled mining and jewelcrafting. Then finished leveling enchanting and took up inscription. Finally leveled alchemy and kept herbalism. No point in keeping skinning since it isn’t profitable anymore.

Still as inaccessible to casual players as ever. Refusing to do instances goes without saying of course. But then there is the camping for rare spawn pets. Or that mount. Or grinding reputation. Or scanning the auction house for hours, undercutting, cancelling and reposting. Getting jewelcrafting recipes will take months, unless you vacuum every last piece of titanium ore at the AH for prospecting (at almost 400 gold per stack!). In particular, inscription is undercutting hell. Nothing you make at skill 400+ will make any money. You end up posting the same couple of hundred old glyphs over and over and over … I had to move all of that to a special alt just to keep the mailbox clean. Ahahaha, and people wonder why there are gold sellers in WoW. Try making the game a lot more casual and less grindy and I’m sure things will change.

I think I’ve had enough for now. Perhaps I’ll be back in Cataclysm.