Terraria and My Aversion To First Person

You know when you get sideswiped unexpectedly? When something tackles you and changes you and you never saw it coming? Well circumstances dictated that I added yet another game to my current playlist, bringing the grand total up to four: WoH ( aaahh ^_^), Aion (oh :| ), Age of Empires (eh?) and Terraria (oO).

As with all the others (excluding AoE which is a relic from my youth), I was coaxed into playing Terraria. Less coaxed, more drawn into, in one of those occasions where you need to try something new to rinse your mouth from the taste of all the tried and tested games in your repertoire.

Terraria could be described as the love-child between Minecraft and a 90s side-scroller with JRPG aspirations. You dig, craft, build and kill. Not necessarily in that order. And if you're as adept as me you'll be doing a lot of accidental item throwing, cliff falling and drowning in two inches of water as well. I haven't done much of the building and crafting but that's simply because I am one to delegate. But, in consequence, I am not yet very familiar with the depth and complexity of said system although it has proved competent enough so far.

A cat within a cat

So why not play Minecraft instead, seeing as it's all the rage right now? I've tried Minecraft and there are two things who will, most likely, always steer me away from it. First of all, it's all the rage right now and I am repelled by hypes. I'm even considering not giving GuildWars 2 a try (was that a gasp I just heard?). I refused to dive into SW:tOR and we all know how clever a choice that was on my part (one of few). Secondly, Minecraft is best played in first person. I say "best" because I don't see the usefulness of having half my screen blocked by a self-representing fugly block.

I have this thing with first person in that it makes me nauseous. Physically ill. Like when you play Katamari Damacy for the first time or for too long. Or maybe that's just me. It is an attempt to mimic how a human perceives the world around it but my screen will never be wide enough to accurately simulate my entire field of vision, nor is there anything that can properly mimic where my focus rests except my own personal focus, which chooses inside my own field of vision and not just the screen and... Maybe I just over think it. Or maybe it's a kind of Inception effect.

I went off on a tangent there didn't I?

The main appeal of Minecraft to most people was the absolute freedom of the game and that progression revolved around the accomplishment of your own personal goals. I, for one, am a self-proclaimed sheep, meaning that I'd rather be told what to do and strive to do my best to accomplish it. I'm not a leader nor have I ever aspired to be one. So I'd much rather follow one to achieve a goal I relate to and believe in. In that respect, Terraria trumps Minecraft in that it actually has events that trigger and things to strive for. You can still dick about as much as you'd like but all of your exploration and subsequent gear progression serve to enable you to kill bigger and badder things.

All things considered, it is probably not a game I would devote many of my lonely hours to, what with my reluctance to create goals for myself, but it has filled the void born from a need to play a simple and non-massive multiplayer game. My void is filled.

Yes, I know how that sounds.

Taking Solace in Murderous Rages

It was the best of weeks. It was the worst of weeks. And then it was a gaming week. Which then turned into a full blown gaming month.

Around the first week of March I was a very excited young woman. You may have guessed why. I was on pins and needles and everything seemed like it might turn out ok. But lo, things did not turn out so. Like so many other facets of my life things went tits up, as it were.

If you thought I might have spent March playing Mass Effect 3 you would be wrong. It was my original plan, yes but, after a few hours of gameplay, my disillusioned self concluded "well, if Shepard doesn't give a fuck, why should I?" And so no, I have not yet seen the ending. Something tells me I'm a happier person for it.

No, my solace came in a very unexpected form. I had been playing most of the beta weekends of Wrath of Heroes and suddenly, they opened the servers 24/7. I found myself logging in more and more often, relieving me from the stress of grinding in the colorful and peppy world of Aion. Every day I seem to have less and less of a reason to go back to that game and every day that I do I struggle to find a reason to stay. We all know where this is headed.

Wrath of Heroes however, has griped me tight. It's the Warhammer vibe, no doubt, with its grittiness and kill thy fellow man motto. I have become very good at this last part, if I do say so myself. However, the game is not without its faults. It is an EA game after all, farted out by Bioware Mythic to retain the Warhammer IP or so I hear.


One of the things that irked me the most was their decision to change everybody's name to match their Origin ID. I didn't even know I had an Origin ID, I'd never even thought about it. It doesn't upset me as much that they did it than it does that they gave no fair warning and no subsequent explanation. Mythic is not well known for their communication skills with their player base and this does not prelude a positive change.

The game also still currently sports just three maps, which can get a bit old when you've tried and tested almost every strategy. In its defense, the game is still in Beta and we are hoping not only for the return of the old heroes but for the introduction of some new ones, new scenario maps and distinct queues for people in different mastery tiers.

In the end, like with most online time wasters, it's the people that keeps me coming back and that make the experience terribly entertaining. So thank you all for having me in your warbands and thank you to those that let themselves fall under my gobbo stick.

Wrath of Heroes: In Need of a Gentleman Caller

Hmmm, yes I know how that sounds.

While I wait for further developments on several fronts, I've occupied some weekends playing the closed beta of BioWare Mythic's WAR inspired F2P, Wrath of Heroes.

If you're familiar with WAR but not so much WOH, so it goes that the game consists of basic scenario play with three factions, distinct from each other by color alone. You can pick from a variety of Heroes to play from, including Glowjob (I know that's not his name) the Shaman, Conrad the Warrior Priest and Korith the Shadow Warrior. For more detailed information go here. Or maybe ask me for it. But this is not what I'm here for right now.

You have the choice of pugging it out, hoping for a semi-cohesive group with people that half-know what they're doing (lol) or you can group up in a warband of six beforehand. The game actually incites you to group up as it not only reduces the time you have to wait for a pop but also awards you with more money at the end of a battle.

It's dangerous to go alone. Take this!

WOH has made something I used to know very clear again to me: it's all about the group as a whole. Just today (which is not actually today but more like two days ago) I was invited to a warband as soon as I logged on. I had no idea who had invited me and ended up amid strangers. Being the friendly healer that I am, I set forth to do my job, hoping that this Warband was somehow seasoned and people had pretty much figured out that the basic strategy for winning in a game where heals are restricted to AoEs is to stick together. How wrong I was. Six people spread as further as you can get in Mourkain Temple. So I facepalmed my way through a few scenarios, making what I hope were helpful suggestions but getting a lot of CAPS in reply.

Luckily for me, my effort was noticed by the leader of another Warband and I got a tell after a scenario was over praising me on my healing and asking if I needed to group up. Maker, yes. So I casually dropped the dysfunctional band I was with and accepted a new invite. And what a difference skill makes. In a game that has no gear or over-the-top skill customization, knowing what you're doing and grouping with like-minded individuals is all it takes to win.

Wrath of Heroes recently implemented something called Perks in their Heroes' mastery trees. These are skills that become available for activating once a certain criteria is met. The best thing about this is that you can buy one Hero and buy his Perk to utilize it on another Hero entirely. I say "best thing" because I haven't had to pay real money for Heroes yet. I guess that if I had it would be... not so great. But I digress.

The Skaven Hero has a Perk in his tree that allows him to turn into a Rat Ogre after a 13 assist streak. As a Skaven, assist streaks are a bit harder to get as it is a damage focused stealther. But as a healer... well... as long as your team is killing things, assist streaks are a dime a dozen. You can see where this is going, right?

Once I found a pretty decent Warband to join, things started melting like butter. Our six-man party consisted, most of the times, of three Shamans, the odd Warrior Priest, and two Engineers, sometimes a White Lion. When I got to use the Perk, the remaining healers did their best to keep me up and quite successfully. I once said I hated healers. I might have to recant that statement. The Rat Ogre has a pull on a one second cooldown (ô_Ô) and a knockdown with impressive damage on maybe a three second cooldown. It is enough to roflstomp most things without prejudice. If, added to that, you manage to find a boost that triples your damage, like I did that one time, you can knock things down for 1000 damage. 1k is the maximum hp of a  Shaman. So the Rat Ogre is fun. It is serious fun.

But I still haven't explained the title of this post, have I? Well.

Since joining an organized guild I became accustomed to a certain degree of organization in cooperative endeavors, especially when these endeavors consist of getting other things deaded. The main thing I miss about these groupings are the target callers. We'd always have one. As you would imagine, an enemy goes down faster when it has six people bashing it down than just one. A target caller, a person that can discern what enemy should go down first and says so, can be the most valuable weapon a faction has. It's the hand that guides the spear... or something equally poetic.

Managed a 15 kill streak before I died.
And since I'm horrible at staying alive, that's quite impressive.

Although we didn't have a target caller per se, WOH allows players to ping locations on the map, an easy, simple, straight forward way to get people where you want them. The main problem with this is that without a human actually yelling at them to move their fat asses, most people will take pinging more as suggestions than orders.

I've said it before and I shall say it again. Most of us players are mere sheep. Granted, some sheep provide better wool than others, but sheep. There are a few of us, though (no, I don't count myself among them) that are shepherds. (Ah, Shepard...) They'll guide the herd to safety and victory. These become your guild leaders, your warband leaders, your target callers.

And I wish I had one in real life.