Category Archives: PC Gaming

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

Guild Wars 2 – Beta Weekend Two Nearing A Close

As I write this, the Guild Wars 2 2nd Beta Weekend Event is nearly drawing to a close. The developers at ArenaNet have a hit on their hands. Seriously I am starting to have a major crush on this game and foresee it being a major point of fun in my life… far more than World of Warcraft ever got, and even more than Star Wars: The Old Republic got to. I may have waxed nostalgic about it a bit so far, but I may indeed do more… far more.

This isn’t to say the game is 100% perfect by any means. There are a few outstanding issues I would like to see fixed before launch, but launch soon please guys… Continue reading Guild Wars 2 – Beta Weekend Two Nearing A Close →

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

Initial Reaction to Guild Wars 2 – BWE2

It is just a day into the Beta Weekend Event 2 for Guild Wars 2. So far so good. Some (if not most/all) people who pre-ordered from the US Amazon store have gotten in. This created a stir, since everyone else had to pay the full $50 to pre-purchase the game to get in (pre-orders cost a $5 deposit). I personally don’t care. If the people cancel, Amazon bites the bullet on those orders since I am sure they have to pay whatever price they pay for each key they give out. It wasn’t what ArenaNet (the developers) wanted, but at the same time they want to keep Amazon happy. I understand people being upset, I mean we paid $50, the pre-order people paid $5 or so, and we can’t cancel, they can, but personally it doesn’t matter to me, I am enjoying the hell out of the game and wouldn’t want to cancel.

Anyhow, on to the initial reactions to the Beta Weekend Event 2 so far. I won’t go over the stuff I covered in my coverage of Guild Wars 2 so far… Continue reading Initial Reaction to Guild Wars 2 – BWE2 →

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

Guild Wars 2 – BWE 2

There will be a new Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event coming June 8th to the 10th…

Beta Weekend Event 2 will begin on Friday, June 8th, at noon PDT (GMT-7) and will run until Sunday, June 10th, at 11:59 p.m. PDT (GMT-7).

Source: Announcing the Next Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend.

So far I have the 9th and 10th off, so I hope I can stay off and get in game a lot that weekend. Hopefully I can get some really good game time in as I am super stoked about having some real time in the game, which I didn’t get last time, and nearly none at all during the stress test day.
Continue reading Guild Wars 2 – BWE 2 →

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

My New Thoughts on Guild Wars 2 Character Slots

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In my previous posts about Guild Wars 2, I talked about the 5 character slots that were available during the Beta Weekend Event at the end of April. At the time I argued for more slots, I am pulling back on that. I think 5 is fine as a default. However, I think that those of us with Guild Wars (1) accounts should be given at least one character slot for having the main game and one for each expansion campaign we have linked to Guild Wars 2 prior to the game’s launch. It would be cheaper for a player to buy additional slots via the ArenaNet store, but this, along with the recently announced name reservation system, would be a nice bonus for Guild Wars players. Like the name reservation system, there could be a rule requiring you to have logged in since January 1st of this year (for the purpose of the character slot extensions, you get credit for the campaign expansions even if you didn’t play them so long as you logged into the main game or one of the expansions). If a player has all the expansions and unlocked the Hall of Monuments perhaps could gain one extra slot in addition to the ones I said, regardless if the characters are declared ancestors or not. This idea is especially important if they drop the character slot limit to 3 as with the original game, in which case they really need to give Guild Wars 1 players additional slots for the game and expansions as a reward.

Gaming, PC Gaming, Portal 2

My First Portal 2 Level

I am a huge fan of Portal and Portal 2. Right now, until May 10th, you can get Portal 2 for $6.74, 66% off the regular price. Anyhow, I just made my first level for the game using their new Perpetual Testing Initiative. It is the first Portal 2 level I’ve ever attempted to build. I spent less than an hour building it (probably closer to 30 minutes) and about an hour tweaking it. It is a very easy puzzle, but I think mildly fun and not bad considering I’ve never done anything like it before… well that isn’t completely true, I made some Descent levels eons ago…

The editor is fairly basic and easy to use and I think it is capable of fairly nice maps on its own, though to get the full detail you need to use the Hammer editor, but for most of us I think the new editor is more than enough, especially as they add more textures and options to it.

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

Guild Wars 2 Dynamic Events

One of the key features of Guild Wars 2 is the dynamic event system.

Before going on, perhaps it would be helpful to see how most games and MMOs in particular work, for my non-game playing friends/family/visitors. Those familiar with the basics of quests can skip ahead. While walking around you may see a NPC (Non Playable Character) have an icon over their head letting you know they want you to do a quest (do something) for them. You talk to them and they will let you know what they want. More and more this tends to be voice acted rather than having a long text box to read, but either way you are normally given a chance to accept the quest or not. Normally if you don’t pick it up then you can at a later time. If you pick up the quest and fail completing it, you can normally abandon the quest and pick it back up again. After finishing the quest you will turn the quest back into the quest giver or somebody else, which could be across the game map.

Generally there will be several quest givers in a given area, these are called quest hubs. Continue reading Guild Wars 2 Dynamic Events →

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

Next Time in Guild Wars 2

As I’ve said again and again and again… I really enjoyed last weekend’s Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event. The developers at ArenaNet did a really great job of putting together a really terrific game. Not just a great MMO, which is in itself an amazing feat, but a great game overall, one that challenges standard MMO conventions, much to the chagrin of those that are used the more hand holding that others give at the early levels.

There are a few weeks to the next expected beta weekend event. Odds are it will be near the end of May, as ArenaNet has said they don’t have a date, but they should be about once a month. So what to do until then, and just as importantly what to do during that next weekend?
Continue reading Next Time in Guild Wars 2 →

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

The Original Guild Wars – MMO on the Cheap

While I’ve been talking a great deal about Guild Wars 2 a lot lately, it may be a good time to note that it has that 2 at the end…

Like Guild Wars 2, the game doesn’t have a subscription fee. There is the original game, and three expansions, Guild Wars Factions, Guild Wars Night Fall and Guild Wars Eye of the North, which sort of bridges the game between Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2… But you can get Guild Wars and the first two expansions for only $29.37 at Amazon (see link below). So for price of just one of the first two expansions you get all 3 and never have to pay a subscription fee. With the first game you get 4 character slots and two more for each expansion pack so that should be 8 character slots in the trilogy pack, add two more if you get the Eye of the North expansion.

Given how great Guild Wars 2 is, I wonder how many people who skipped the first Guild Wars went back and got it?

Best Deal:

Continue reading The Original Guild Wars – MMO on the Cheap →

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

Gamebreaker Has Seven Things They Took Away From Guild Wars 2 This Weekend

Gamebreaker posted Seven Take Aways From ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend, and the TLDR version is that they loved it. Obviously since they get to play games for a living, or at least in part, they spent far more time in game then I did and got to explore far more of the content. I barely scratched the surface and the highest I got my “main” was 8… I really didn’t get to play nearly as much as I wanted at all this time around, thanks largely to Real Life… work… kids… etc… Anyhow, on to more Guild Wars 2 news/notes…

They mentioned the confusion lots of players had, and how GW2 is very different than any other MMO. There is a mention of the overflow server issues and how some people had luck with one fix, and ArenaNet is looking into it, but do you want to be split and play or have everyone stuck looking at a counter until the map is ready… and it turns out the overflow isn’t for the world but for a specific area, which explains why I got sucked out of the city and into the foothills when playing, I was probably qued in the foothill overflow, crossed into the city, but the game never took me out of the que for foothills overflow. Unfortunately the bug reporting system is shut down as that still qualifies as a bug IMHO…

The lag was bad Friday but I was fine Saturday night and Sunday night… especially Sunday.

And the cities. I commented in one of my thoughts of the game that the cities were amazing… unbelievably amazing. They were proper massive cities, not just something you had to pretend was a city.

Anyhow, it is a pretty good article and makes many great points.

Get select items from this post:
Guild Wars 2…

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

And Another Thing – Yet More Guild Wars 2 Thoughts

I thought of a few more things to add to A Few Hours In – Guild Wars 2 Thoughts and A Few More Hours in Guild Wars 2. These are fairly minor and I probably could have edited the last post, but as I’ve been doing new posts each time anyhow… yes, yet more thoughts on the Guild Wars 2 Beta Event from this weekend.
Continue reading And Another Thing – Yet More Guild Wars 2 Thoughts →

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

A Few More Hours in Guild Wars 2

So this last weekends beta event is over now and I got a couple to a few more hours in the game. To follow up my first thoughts of Guild Wars 2 here are some other pluses and minuses I came away with from this weekend’s Guild Wars 2 Beta Event.

+ Huge areas, especially the cities. Stormwind in WoW should be like Divinity’s Reach here. The size of cities in WoW was a huge disappointment. SWTOR was better than WoW, but I really enjoyed Divinity’s Reach. Hoelbrak was cool as well (no pun intended).

+ Good server performance and little lag… well after the first day or so of issues they seemed to get things under control, that first day was tough… That said I see some people complaining about lag, so perhaps it was hit and miss for some. I think the key issue is picking the correct server, when the server list came up for me, the European ones were first though I live in the US. It should be local servers arranged by density then alpha, then out of country servers by the same arrangement. If they add Asian/Oceanic servers as well as US and European, then I am sure they could figure out which set to display after the local set.

+ Questing. I like the story mode quests, the heart quests and the dynamic events. The story mode quests aren’t as strong as SWTOR story mode is, but very strong none the less. No quest hubs is a general plus for me. It would perhaps be nice if there were a couple odd quests that could be picked up at odd points, but I liked the heart quests overall… of course one could argue that hearts and dynamic quests are just quest hubs without the normal quest givers…
Continue reading A Few More Hours in Guild Wars 2 →

Gaming, PC Gaming

My Noted Past in Gaming

Most of my life I have just been a geek blogging, or posting in official and fan forums for games, tv shows and the like, but I have on at least two occasions made a notable impact on the gaming world… well impact may be a bit of a stretch, but still was at least a footnote…

The first footnote, involves Shogo: Mobile Armor Division where I got thanked for solving an issue in their official FAQ (they have shut the official site down, but it is still on the Wayback Machine where that link leads to).

The second footnote involves the fact I ran a fansite for a game called Mortyr. Despite the fact I had no artistic talent and near zero coding skills, it became the semi-official fan site for the game and I got thanked in the game’s manual. I was in touch with the developers, and they gave me stuff to give away, which I did, and shipped at my own expense. The Wayback Machine doesn’t have Mortyr.net though so no linking to that oldie. I kept the site going for a short while after the game came out, but real life, and the fact the game didn’t do well in the market (it got panned more than needed, it was okay, and made some cool advances in the genre while is hindsight was a bit stale in many others)… plus the site was expensive to run so I let it expire.

I’ve been on at least two small closed betas which I count as being actually in a real beta. I’ve been in a few other “closed” betas that were near public betas that I don’t count, and of course any public beta that I hear about that I think I might be interested in. I don’t know if I had much of any impact in even the small closed betas there… so it is that Shogo and Mortyr are my two minor footnotes in gaming history for me. They might not be much, but how many ordinary non-game market people can say that at least two different game developers have publicly thanked them for their contributions in official material?

EDIT: Most recently, I tested Small World 2 for the iPad, and I’m in the credits of the game.

I also recently (May 2015) got in the press preview for Rebel Galaxy. See Getting an Early Look at Rebel Galaxy.

Edit February 2016: I was among the lucky people invited to stream Gigantic while it was still under NDA. As this edit is written, I have a few Gigantic VOD’s on my Twitch Channel (highlight 1, 2, 3 and 4 just in case they get lost behind lots of other highlights), and a YouTube video that is pending my writing a script.

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

Playing Guild Wars 2 This Weekend

For those of us having Guild Wars 2 pre-purchased already, we’ll be able to play the game from Friday noon to Sunday at Midnight (all times Pacific). Unfortunately for me, most of that available time will be spent at work, but I’ll get some time in here and there. I’ll share a few thoughts after the weekend.
Guild Wars 2 is an Massive Multiplayer Online Roll Playing Game, like World of Warcraft or Star Wars: The Old Republic. But unlike them, there is no monthly fee. The game is also balanced and structured differently than most MMOs. There aren’t the usual 3 primary class types that all other classes break down into, that is, there isn’t a healer, a tank and a damage class, everyone gets to do them all to some degree.
Their intro video gives a good overview of what they were aiming for…

Then there is Guild Wars 2 – Mass info for the uninitiated, a good article about the game. The game holds lots of promise, we’ll see if they can deliver… this weekend is still beta, so plenty may change between now and the final release, but it should be getting close…
Continue reading Playing Guild Wars 2 This Weekend →