Hiatus 2012

I took a break. It may have been considered long by some, but it was a needed break nonetheless.

1. Recap
2. What happened
3. Now What
4. Only WoW
5. Agenda

1. Recap.

• I had plans for:
  • Writing 'How to Twink' the deadvulcano way
  • Posting GW2 information and videos

• I was writing periodically on my gaming experience

I will probably still make the 'How to Twink' guide, but it will be slowly built as a side project. The gw2 information is unnecessary with all the coverage already available. (That and I don't want my favorite classes gimped.) The gaming experience will be mainly information about what I'm planning and producing as I work on developing games.

2. What happening?

I have been programming after several years of military work. During these past months I have created a few prototypes of games I've been thinking of making. This most recent prototype, which I built in about 4 weeks, is the most complete game I've ever made. Once it was finally finished I played a few games of wsg again.

I have played 2-5 wsg games periodically. The f2p bracket has changed considerably.

3. Now what?

Programming mostly. I'm not sure if I'll post game ideas and work load here to possibly help other aspiring indie developers. Or if I should just keep a clean split between the various parts of my e-life by producing elsewhere.

I can understand why many people prefer to keep that distinction. But in reality these game developers are also players. Maybe they served in the military for several years as well? Who knows? But I know that watching the journey is much more enjoyable if its easier to understand where the person is coming from.

4. Only WoW?

WoW is why you know about me so far. I still have several hours of f2p footage that I want to put together once my movie making skills have improved. We have known, loved, and played to same game together for years. But playing gw2 really did kill WoW for me. Its not that WoW is unenjoyable, its just that its less enjoyable than gw2 by a substantial margin. I will likely continue to login to WoW because mages have been a large part of my life for years. But the flavor of this blog may change drastically as I open up more information.

5. Agenda:

• Learn about developing indie games, and develop indie games
• Build the twink guide, I will probably start with something basic like what the scoreboard means
• Programming wise I'm working on shaders next, specifically GLSL
• Adjust the site to reflect elements I'm bringing together now. (does webgl work?)

GW2 Beta April 2012

Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend April 2012

Purpose:

I played the first public beta for Guild Wars 2. I went into this as an avid WoW player. Specifically I went in as blind as I could. No attempt was made to learn about the abilities, and the only thing that I knew about the classes came from the official Guild Wars 2 site. The only thing I knew about combat was that you can dodge and that abilities changed based on the equipped weapons. I knew there was a downed state, but didn't know anything about the abilities in that state.

I could only really do this once. Since after I have some experience in the game I cannot ever go back. I tried to avoid looking into what the abilities specifically did and avoided any analysis of what I should be doing with the abilities. The purpose was two-fold.

First – To get an idea of how a new player with primarily WoW experience will view the game.

Second – To have a poor starting point to assist in writing my “How to improve” article.

Events of the Beta Weekend:

I recorded everything that I did in the game. There are some poor recorded frame rates in the beginning (PvE experience levels 1-12) which I didn't fix until over halfway through my PvP experience. I understand that the game is not optimized for graphics cards yet, but my last few videos recorded fine at max settings with some slight downgrade by recording at ½ frame. I took notes on paper when various experiences came up that would not be obvious in video form.

Projects:

1. Show the experience of playing Guild Wars 2

• This will play out a bit like a diary of things that occurred during the game play
• I'll indicate various problems with the game flow for the public portion of my feedback
• The videos and notes will guide this process chronologically

2. Do a detailed comparison between WoW and GW2

• So much to go over here, several things have already been covered by other players
• This will be relatively detailed and cover topics from subscription to core design scheme

3. Show mistakes in PvP and the initial plan on how to fix some of these

• This is how I intend to leverage a fresh game experience to go over improvement stages

4. Give some analysis on what I expect to occur as GW2 enters the market.

However:

I'm still working on other projects and this hasn't been at the top of the list for awhile. This article is intended to show what I collected and give a view of future projects in this category.

GW2 Ruined WoW

Guild Wars 2 ruined WoW for me.

I played SWTOR and came back no problem. The animations and terrible expertise mechanic was enough to make WoW look good.

I tried Rift for a bit, and while the graphics were nice the animations and some of the combat felt a little bit off. It was essentially a wow clone with a few new ideas.

I tried Tera's open beta weekend and had a great time for the most part. I'll go into more detail on that later, but realistically it has way too many grindy elements.

I played Guild Wars 2's first public beta weekend. Best gaming experience I'd had in a long time. I've heard enough from the developer blogs to know they are moving in the right direction. They are working on bringing the next generation of MMO's.

My joy with this is primarily from a game designers perspective. But I nearly completely lost that perspective as I played the game. Its only when I would stop between recordings to view and compress that I had a chance to regain that perspective again. This game gave me hope in the industry. So many problems were solved. The PvE was amazing, the PvP was amazing, the entire experience was nearly exactly what I hoped to see.

I realize that its still an uphill battle against established WoW players. Many may not even take a look. But they would be missing out on what could be. GW2 not only solves MMO game mechanics, it solves some gamer interaction mechanics. There is plenty more to say about this, but I'm working on compressing the rest of my videos from the beta to go into more detail.