Tale

$4 for Neverwinter Nights 2. Don't mind if I do. It'll be the third time I've bought everything in there, except only the second for MoW, but I like being able to play without Steam or discs.

Is it released yet? What about now? ... Now? What if I say please?

If I did that, I'd end up sticking to books and TF2.

This is what I have to do practically every time I take a break. Wrath-Cata wasn't too bad. Mostly lost my shard bag. But I also never got up to raiding, so I didn't bother figuring out a rotation.

I logged onto my 85 once yesterday and just got intimidated by all the new buttons and different functionality. And my GEAR! With spirit on it! GACK This is why every time I go away for a while, I have to roll a new character. Just so I can relearn the class through leveling.

I keep telling you to go to Demonology. And I keep telling you to quit your blasphemy.

Everytime I come back, they change Warlocks some more. Now I don't even have Shadowbolt. And Spirit is useless again.

The grind is the part that always kills it for me. I enjoy the leveling content and soloing, but the second I have to start doing reps or dungeons multiple times, I just stop logging in and unsub. How is the leveling content?

I'm tempted to resub to WoW. Someone stop me. I miss my Warlock collection. I hear they have green fire and new talents!

The moment you've all been waiting for, Tale's final comments on the Heart of the Swarm story.

Heart of the Swarm. I'm pretty sure I'm nearing the end, so I'll save talking about the plot arc and story again for later. I do like the campaign. The missions are interesting, though Kerrigan being a little overpowered does take something away.

So you have it installed on a different drive than Steam? Have you tried redownloading it onto the same drive as the Steam install? Or are you on limited bandwidth?

Running commentary on Heart of the Swarm part Tres

Citadel doesn't expand the actual story in any way, it's just character exploration. Leviathan is the DLC for ME3 that has story implications. And there are people already worried about what it might mean for ME4.

It is, but there's more to that than it simply being story content that explains things between 2 and 3. It had new boss fights, new abilities, new enemies to fight, a temporary companion and new banters, choices, this little hub with funny stories creatively told. It had a whole mess of content. It was all around quality. Compared to Arrival, which similarly was a bridge DLC, but did nothing new, had no choices, no companions at all. Yet was even more important to the start of Mass Effect 3.

Twice as good as my first attempt. Which was 3 hours of sculpting to create a hill.

There's also a customer base that looks at them and thinks that the products with them are shoddy and exploitative. Brand is about public image, after all. There's a market for fast food burgers, but you shouldn't offer them at your restaurant if you want to be seen as high class. I think microtransactions are losing lots of that low class stigma, but that's only because of a push from people like Valve and the MOBA front with the free-to-play model. The "$60 with microtransaction" model doesn't seem like something EA has the popular backing to make people reassess. It's all about the brand, still. Reboots feed off the popularity of the old titles. It's going to be harder to maintain that brand the more often you put it out there. Exceptions occur, but for every Call of Duty there's two Guitar Heroes. And even Call of Duty is reportedly on the decline. There wouldn't be nearly as big a push for the next Longest Journey game if it was TLJ 8, instead of simply TLJ 3. But of course it applies to games. If it didn't, Lara Croft and Thief wouldn't have been rebooted, just given sequels. Tales of the Sword Coast and Awakening aren't the kind of story baggage creating DLC I'm talking about. Dragon Age 2 and Baldur's Gate 2 have zero reason to care about those expansions. I'm talking Lair of the Shadow Broker, Arrival, and that Dead Space 3 DLC. In fairness, Ubisoft Montreal has been absolutely terrible about this going back to Prince of Persia 2008, far worse than any EA studio. It doesn't kill franchises, but it's intimidating to newcomers. Have you never seen someone ask "do I need to play the older games first to understand it?" When the answer is "yeah, but you also need to play the DLC" that's going to be offputting to some people. That's going to limit people coming in and also negatively effect the older fans who already are in but missed it. There's lots of complaints about not knowing what was going on with ME3's opening because that was split into a DLC and a comic book. And Kai Leng because he's from books, as well.

I don't know how people think they were all that similar. The pacing and tone are completely different. The advanced skills and loadout change kill the need for specialization. The Earth tutorial is probably the worst level in the franchise, with overdone and transparent scripting. I'm sorry, I guess that turned from "they're different" to "some of the things I hate about ME3."

More of Tale's running commentary.

I'm against microtransactions. I absolutely love DLC done right. Quality DLC is good! DLC that only exists because they needed to push out DLC, so they put the B-team on it is bad. I think there needs to be more brand consciousness. Microtransactions don't strengthen the brand. DLCs that use recycled maps, or that are simply guns and armor don't strengthen the brand. They don't promote confidence from the audience, they won't bring in new audience members. And confidence from the audience is a very big issue, especially for EA at the moment. If enough crap gets put out there, people will start avoiding the quality as well. That was the crash of 83 in a nutshell. What they do is shift the conversation from what is being done right to what is being done wrong. And that conversation seems to be why Lucas left Star Wars. There's an audience for low quality, admittedly. That's how Seltzer and Freidburg make their living. That's why the Resident Evil movies refuse to die. But I don't think EA wants to be them. Though their Direct-To-DVD tie-in movies give me cause to doubt. Aside from quality, there's also the saturation issue. Why are so many franchises being rebooted? Because the developers/publisher doubt they'll be able to grow the audience with all the old baggage behind them. Lots of DLC is just adding to that baggage that hurts growth. This is a problem for comic books at the moment. And games are seeing it too. The audience is not growing, it's becoming very isolated, because it's only the people who have all this knowledge of backstory that have been following or are willing to follow. The biggest part of this for DLC is story critical DLC (and tie-in books). It's adding on a whole other layer of backstory that people could be missing, and even some of them the regular recurring fans. And the resulting reboots are retcons are doing nothing for confidence either. How many people do you think Marvel and DC has lost to their "never stay dead" problem? Probably a little less than if they kept those characters dead. They've trapped themselves in a no-win situation where they struggle to grow because what they need to grow will alienate their core. And that's poisonous. Because they're adding all this baggage that their core feels needs to be honored, and those are the very people they rely on to aid growth.

He was good for turning EA around from a shovelware producer. He's supposed to be the reason they stopped doing movie licenses. Remember those Lord of the Ring and Harry Potter games? It's taken Activision until recently to see the problem there. There are quality licensed titles, granted, EA had a few good LOTR games and Activision has the Transformer titles. I'm not intimate with all the problems, but like I said, Activision is coming to the same conclusion EA had several years ago. He pushed for fewer games, higher quality. But then we started getting more, low quality DLC, and the recent moves to microtransactions in AAA titles. Which is sort of like dating your abusive ex because she changed her hair color and calls herself Star. Yeah, they're not paying licensing fees anymore, but they're saturating their brands and devaluing them. I also suspect some level of undermanagement in his tenure. But I'm not in a position to say that with any credibility.

I heard about that. I hate tie in novels that insert themselves into game plots. I hate cross-media stories in general. Fine if they want books for Starcraft, that's cool. Why do they have to be in the middle of the stories from the games and about the same characters? Make whole new stories instead.

Now for Tale's running commentary on Heart of the Swarm. Those are nitpicks, especially number 3. Though I do hate retcons. By the second mission outtro I had already gotten past all three. Kerrigan herself is well characterized, though may be falling into the "women are defined by relationships" trap.

I really doubt that's a strictly DRM thing. It wouldn't have been so easy to cut out if it were. My benefit of the doubt suspicion is that they are simply very strongly attached to the idea of SimCity Social to the point they have no regard for non-social play. On the other end, and in-line with the DRM idea, is that always online enables them to verify integrity for DLC and microtransaction purposes.

Finished Game of Thrones season 2, so I'm back to being focused on Wings of Liberty. Also checked out the first map of Heart of the Swarm. Jim's gone creepy on us. Kerrigan a bit too. The drama is too much for me.