Dragon Age

Dragon Age. Bioware. Ignoring the Terrible trailers. Yes? Anyone else looking forward to it like me? Here's to hoping they continue to be true to their word with their games and hype and this is a decent sequel to Baldur's Gate.

On Discussion of Guild Wars

So ya, Guild Wars by NCSoft. Great company, great game. Not the best game in the world and not for everyone but lots of fun for what it is. Not a true MMO by nature, it's actually a very interactive single player game as there will be only a single instance in the game where you may interact with more than a total of 16 individuals at a time.

With that out of the way, lets present my beef this morning: people who believe Guild Wars was designed poorly on the basis that you can not play the game without other players. Now, without mentioning it, the game is actually very easy to play all by yourself if you're decent at theory crafting but that's not the real answer for this. If heavy theory crafting was the only solution then there would be no rage towards this. Rather, the game is very kind to you in that it will always offer alternatives to taking a player party. The most easily accessible of these options being the NPCs. Guild Wars offers you a specialist NPC of every class to fill any role you need, taking as many as you'd like up to a full party. The NPCs aren't as good as a real player but with even close to a full party of them, you can handle anything the game throws at you. Literally, anything. There will be no map that can't be done because you're taking only NPCs. Sure, you might fail if you offer nothing to the team and merely lead the party to death constantly but then that's no ones fault but your own.

A personal story if I may interject this rant for just a moment. There is a particularly difficult mission in the story mode of Guild Wars known as Thunderhead Keep. This is one of the few missions that can't be skipped and that you generally want to do because of the rewards offered in the area after it. Many players find themselves stuck on this mission for weeks trying to gather a party competent enough to deal with this mission. Among them I found myself one day, desperately trying to find seven other people who could moderately work together so as not to fail miserably. This went poorly for the first two days and I was just about ready to give up when my brother asked me why I didn't just go with computers if players were so incompetent. At first I scoffed at him, thinking that if players weren't strong enough what chance did computers have? With that in mind though I was getting desperate so I decided to give it a try. I was a warrior of course, probably one of the worst classes to take on this mission and least useful in a party of NPCs as I couldn't coordinate them as well as a someone who could stay in the back lines could. Of course, with all of this doubt and failure in mind, I was shocked and astounded when we won without a single casualty. A fluke, it must have been. So I decided to try it again and brought my Healing Monk and lo and behold, another success! Okay, I had one more character, lets try it on a mesmer now, they're much more fragile and the party will have to expend energy to keep me alive too so I may end up being a huge detriment; two casualties and one of them was me but the party pulled through! So then, I realized why it was so difficult to do this quest with players: anyone who was still there was so absolutely incompetent at this game that they couldn't succeed even if the computer was doing all of the work for them.

Okay back to the raging. So you have theory crafting and computers for you if you absolutely, desperately don't want to touch other players. There is no excuse not to use one or the other as even in traditional single player RPGs you generally have a party to help fill roles that you can't perform on your own. The game is also nice enough that you don't need to grind/farm for skills or equipment so no matter what you'll be well prepared with a quick stop at the npc vendor in town. Maybe this isn't good enough for you though, maybe you Demand to solo the game but you'll be Damned before you have to think about how to perform the job of multiple people! Okay, so the game has programmed events in that you can utilize such as catapults or cannons or bombs or what have you that will work just as well to go through a level if you're willing to slow down and setup traps for enemies.

NO! Absolutely not! There will be No waiting around and being prepared for the enemy! I payed for this game to play not plot. So you refuse to theory craft, no NPC help, and no traps or utilization of in-game help mechanics. Alright, if you demand o rush through the game so badly, then run through it. Guild Wars lets you run through it. Watch enemy maneuvers and equip one or two of those handy speed boosting skills you picked up along the way and Guild Wars will let you bypass any and every area or mission that you can't be bothered to do.

No cowardice! I'm soloing it so that I can prove how brave I am to all the internets! There will be no running. Only my own mettle counts towards bravery! -- Okay, that's fine, go to the PvP arenas to really show off how macho you are. If you win a few PvP games in a row, you automatically progress in the story.

But wait, this still isn't good enough. The game is still clearly forcing you into contact with other people and/or forcing you away from the story line. Well then I'm sorry, this game isn't for you and I hate you with a passion. Please just go back to Maple Story and never look back as you will not be missed.

/Nerd Rage