Monday, July 1, 2013

Some Brief Monday Thoughts

I was up late working last night, so if you saw me on WoW, that was me trying to stay awake while waiting for the "all clear" signal.  (Flying mounts are great for temporary parking.)  Regardless, my brain is in a bit of a fog, so I'm keeping this post low key.

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For those people who are interested in that sort of thing, the new Dragon Age 3 trailer was released the other week.

It's for mature audiences only, kids.


No, I've not played the Dragon Age games (I know, I'm a baaaad CRPG player), but I do have the Dragon Age RPG box sets from Green Ronin Publishing, and I do enjoy the setting a lot.  In fact, if you're into pencil and paper role playing games as well as computer games, you might want to check the Dragon Age RPG out.  Wil Wheaton even did a play through of a Dragon Age RPG adventure on his Tabletop YouTube series:

Part 1...

...and Part 2.

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When slogging through yet another teleported area of Belsavis, Elara expressed her frustration by pointing out that this prison complex keeps going on and on.

(You and me both, Dorne.  You and me both.)

But at least the ending to Belsavis is in sight, for which I'm eternally grateful.

I know I'm in the minority, but I still think that Taris is my favorite Republic zone, with Nar Shadda as my favorite Imp zone.  Taris just has that mysterious "what the hell are we doing here anyway" and "OMG we're all going to die!" feel to it --plus TOR Undead-- and Nar Shadda has the sort of double crosses that you'd expect out of the Hutts.

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You can tell that Star Trek Online and Neverwinter are both Cryptic games, because the cash store design is similar.  The difference is that Neverwinter was designed from the beginning to be F2P, whereas STO endured the switchover from subscription to F2P.  However, the "success" of STO's store definitely influenced Neverwinter's design; people complain --often rightly-- about the invasiveness of the STO online store, but if it weren't for people lining up to buy items from the store Cryptic wouldn't have copied that design into Neverwinter.

Likewise, it's not a surprise that TOR's cash store has evolved the way it has.  Bioware is merely responding to what sells so they can keep the game afloat, and if people had bought different items, the TOR cash store would look quite a bit different than what it does now.

I was thinking about this when I logged into WoW and saw the latest pet for sale in the Blizzard cash store.  Sure, Blizz doesn't call it that, but that's what the store is:  a store to maximize Blizzard's profit by selling in-game items.  They don't need it like the F2P games do, but it serves a similar purpose.


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