I’m still upset with how it turned out…  Like how my two belts are separated!  C’MON!

The Pickaxe and Sledgehammer are with the only weapons I have because, well, I’m a freaking Miner first and foremost.

Straw?!  Well, yeah…  I need that garbage to fix my gear!  (The rest is in my bazaar for a trillion dollars.)

And once I level up a bit more I’ll move everything again!  YEAH!…

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Running between Limsa Lominsa and Ul’dah

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Beckon of the Elementals - Gridania

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durrrr

NEW ADDED 12/16/10

The only real downsides are that the game is laggy (especially if you’re not current with your CPU/video) and is quite complex.

And the biggest up-side is that second listed “downside”: It’s quite complex.

If you’re a hardcore World of Warcraft fan, you’ll hate it because similarly to XI, XIV does NOT hold your hand and lead you along.  This is Final Fantasy.  It’s storytelling, beauty and community.  It’s not about OMFGLEWT.  (If grinding away for slightly better equipment is for you, stay out of XIV; SE doesn’t want you there, Eorzea’s community doesn’t want you there, and I do not want you there.  Stick with your WoW pacifier.)

Instead of trying to explain the complexities of the crafting and gathering classes (not professions, classes) or anything else that makes XIV unique, I’ll just slam up some screenies.  Why?  Because I’m tired of the seriousness of this post!

Here’s the interface with the official release (combat bars are brought up when in combat and macro bars are brought up when commanded – neither shown here):

Everything on screen can be moved anywhere just by dragging it to a new location.

Damn straight!

I’ll never learn to dance without your help, kid!  I’ll come, I’ll come!

Visually, it becomes even more stunning if you set the buffer to “Double” and start up.  I’m trying to not cause a PC explosion so I don’t.

TA!

A good gaming pal called me up today.  At first, I didn’t want to answer it since I was crazy busy.  But, because it’s so hard to deny him, I did.  What did he have to say?  Everything he could possibly say about the “awesomeness” that is the World of Warcraft expansion Cataclysm.  He begged me to check out a bizillion images from the Alpha.  So I did.

With the catchphrase “Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same” one expects crazy great things.  Well, it’s just not true.  When I returned his call informing him of this, he all but exploded.  He’s a die-hard fan (and HC raider) and finds the good in everything released for WoW, even the absolute shit.

So, a big deal with Cataclysm is the so-called destruction of the vanilla world.  After seeing quite possibly every single Alpha image released, I’m having trouble finding the “destruction” in it…  “Oh my god, you’re going to love the new Org!” my friend said.  Really?  New?  The devs planted some random sticks in the ground in Orgrimmar…  Yeah, that’s about it.  All 40 old-world zones I had the displeasure of looking at again had NOTHING significantly different (as a new river running through a zone is far from being significant).  Oh, look, that’s a new Goblin shop, that’s the biggest actual change I saw.  Whoopity.

New zones (like Twin Peaks, Twilight Highlands, Deephome) appear to be nothing more than old zones slightly reskinned.  SLIGHTLY.  But you have to give the devs credit for what appears to be combining two old zones and dimming the lights so it looks different and calling it a new zone, right?  No.  Of absolutely everything I looked at, the only zone that appears unique in the tiniest sense was Vashj’ir.  That’s it.

Face it guys, there’s nothing new going on there.  Oh, unless you want to re-roll a Werewolf!  YEAH!  …

Blizzard continues milking the Warcraft name and the mind-numbed players.  But hey, if you enjoy grinding levels and farming in a re-skinned Zangarmarsh, have at it.  This household has sworn off Blizzard.

When LucasArts revealed that it was partnering with BioWare for a Star Wars MMO, millions of people (including Rodians, Mon Calamari, and Twi’leks) paid attention. Star Wars: The Old Republic promises to be like no other MMO to date. At PAX 2009, producer Jake Neri revealed how the game’s story and combat will distinguish it from the pack.

“What we’re really trying to do with The Old Republic is introduce the idea of story into an MMO. The genre has a ton of good games — games that focus on combat and exploration and progression, but when we came together with BioWare to make this game, we wanted to focus on story and what that means in an MMO.

When we looked at the combat and we started out, the goal was to make it heroic and cinematic. One thing that’s interesting — I don’t know if everybody knows — is that everything that we’ve shown is up to level eight. At level eight, most classes you see are pretty impressive. We’ve got cool bounty hunter abilities that people look at and say, ‘Wow, I can’t wait to do that!’ Our Sith warrior flipping through the air and rocking people to the skull — people want to do that, right? It’s cool. It’s unique. It’s exciting. It’s heroic. From the beginning of the game, we’re trying to deliver that experience.”

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Focus on story?
From all I’ve been reading, it sounds like this game could end up being very linear and play out like a console game. I hope not.
Not to mention the dialog in the films is absolute crap.  And from “proudly” released videos showing the voices (which every single character has — dialog seems to happen in console-style cinematics), the creators are sticking to the same style of shit Lucas gave us for 13+ hours.

Whatever the case, I plan on playing it at launch. My hopes are not up. Have you seen the actual gameplay? Pretty basic/straightforward. As for visual appearance, the gameplay looks bad… It looks to be on par with games released a decade ago. But it’s still in development so maybe it’ll get cleaned up. If not, I’ll lose interest really fast. A game’s play can be phenomenal, sure, but when I’m looking at it for hours a day, it needs to be appealing to the eye.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

More FAIL from Blizzard.