So I’ve been a busy boy, between stuff at work and a week out of town and the stomach bug. So lets do a little recap roundup shall we?
TOR – I have both my characters in the mid-20’s now. I grind out about a level a week, which is pretty normal for me. I just hit Tattoine for the first time last night and it felt…weird. Landing on Tatooine as an Imperial Agent just felt so *not* Star Wars. In fact, the whole Empire thing is starting to wear on me a bit. I may have to let one of those two Imp characters lay idle for a bit so I can scratch the Republic itch. I will wait until update 1.2 though – the Legacy system means that my Republic alts, all at level 10 on another server are basically useless to me. And I am not running through Tython for the umpteenth time without Sprint if I can help it.
World of Tanks – I’ve spent the last week doing my runs on the Test Server, which has been a breath of fresh air. The Russian players are actually quite nice, and much more skilled than their American counterparts. I have wondered lately if I was just bad at WoT or if the teams were so bad it was hard to excel, and its definitely the latter. In all the matches I’ve played on the test server, I’ve only once seen the team deploy poorly, without watching the map. As one EU player said after a match, “we didn’t get beat because we made bad choices, we just got beat because they were better than us.” I don’t get many of those matches on the regular server. Much as patch 1.2 for TOR will turn it into what it should have been at launch, patch 7.2 will certainly do for WoT. The new tanks are excellent, and the graphical and game updates are all well done. The M18 Hellcat is almost all that we wanted it to be (it can’t quite hit 89 kph, and the option of the 105mm howitzer is missing). Time to learn some Russian and make an account on their server I think.
Sandbox Vistas – I’ve shelved this for the time being. The remaining options just don’t appeal to me all that much, and the announcement that Dawntide was shutting down, while somewhat expected, was ultimately very disheartening. At this point, unless I get the itch to try Ryzom or Wurm, I’ll probably just keep a keen and interested eye on ArchAge instead.
Star Trek Online – Yeah, I know. But a friend has been begging me to run some missions with him since it went F2P, and I was just a few points shy of my Akira and Nebula. So I logged in last night and did one mission. And I have a few things to say: one is – who killed the graphics? Its like a whole new engine in there, and it looks like crap, even with all the settings dialed up to max – which, by the way, is something I could not do with the original game. Balancing that out though – praise the Alpha Quadrant, they actually fixed ground combat to make it manageable, and the skill system to make it less of a headache of WTH, and changed the progression to the point I breathed a sigh of relief. I did one mission to finish up the jump from 19 to 20. That same amount of skill points would have required me to do 3-4 missions when I was in the game before. So now its time to claim that long awaited Akira and learn about that whole “duty officer” thing. Its like the bizarre crossbreeding of TOR’s companions with your Bridge Officers and a far future version of Pokemon. I feel like I have to catch them all!
And decide if I want to shell out some real bucks for that Nebula.
Harbinger Zero 