Since this is sort of relevant to more than the Moonspeak crowd I guess game blogging will happen on this account for now and I'll just post links to it from the other one.

( Act II )

-First, it's really kind of a bad idea to require a constant internet connection for a single-player game, especially if your game is so popular that it crashes your servers. At the very least there should be an offline mode, even as ubiquitous as high-speed internet is these days. Why is there a Latency bar in SP mode anyway?

-However, the content of the game itself is pretty good - it's essentially one of those oldschool 3/4th view adventure RPG type of games (King's Quest minus the dictionary puzzles, perhaps, or the dungeon crawl stages of Warcraft 3), which I'd thought had gone all out of style these days. The graphics are somewhat less cartoony, but the environment is varied and vibrant even in run-down old castles and zombie infested ruins. Blizzard is not one of those game developers who succumb to the Real is Brown aesthetic.

-Plot is simplistic enough - save the world from the invading infernal legions - and occasionally some of the voice acting sounds a bit flat, but presentation and atmosphere-wise it gets the job done.

-Playing a Wizard, as seems to be my wont in most non-MMOs, which seems a pretty decent setup as long as you're good about kiting (have yet to drop below 50% health, or use any potions). There seem to be a total of 6 activated abilities, and while the default bind of "basic attack" to the left mouse button is convenient, it has the unfortunate side effect of unintended suicidal charge due to the fact that clicking on the terrain with the left mouse button is also how you move.

-Important to remember that spell damage appears to also be determined by weapon properties.

-Enemies on the overworld appear to respawn whenever you exit the game, and the dreaded Inventory Management Puzzle is already looming on the horizon. Also am not sure what the criteria are for shop restocking, as I recall wanting an item but not having the money for it, completing a plot sequence and then returning to town to discover it had been replaced by something else.

-There exist dungeons, which appear to be defined as "indoor zones with multiple levels populated by mobs and treasure chests". The topography may or may not be randomly generated.

-Item names in blue script indicate magical properties, of which the most useful are the life-draining ones (there is no passive health regen, though health orbs appear often enough that usually it is not an issue).

-Monster names in blue, on the other hand, seem to indicate Magical Mobs of Extra Power, though they drop better stuff. At my current level the difficulty of a mob is determined solely by how fast it moves, how many HP it has, and whether it has a ranged attack.

-The answer to "is it okay to loot people's stuff if you're doing it to fund your efforts to save the world" appears to be "yes". Especially when said people are corpses you search for pocket change.

EDIT: Perhaps the same team that worked on MoP had some input into D3 as well.

While I sometimes dream about WoW in the sense of playing the game, dreams of actually being in the game world are rare as it's more meta than immersive. This time around there was something about defending a castle against a lich (multiple liches?) who wanted to use an ancient tomb nearby to raise a bunch of ghosts. Sylvanas Windrunner in a hot air balloon was involved somehow. The undead were apparently allergic to the color blue, so much of the time was spent running around trying to find those colors in tablecloths, drapes, and flowers. Then the kitchen staff got turned into zombies (this one's probably the fault of the D&D game) and the final encounter before the alarm clock struck was talking to a classy lady in a giant fur coat, who was totally not some kind of monstrous undead denizen in disguise, really.

For extra lols, the dream-avatar was, of course, my paladin, which was unfortunate in a mystery/haunted house castle setting as paladins did not have lockpicking and plate mail is not designed for fitting through small doorways. I recall being mildly miffed that the dream had not managed to get to any combat parts and actually get to beating up the undead.

Diablo 3 is apparently out today. And apparently the Asian/European servers imploded yesterday, so perhaps the US ones will too. You'd think Blizzard to have more experience in this sort of thing.

-D&D is getting slightly better in that we only had a couple of guys "faint" (@FF6) instead of die this time, though we still can't seem to get through an average fight without blowing so many resources that we need to sleep after every fight or two. Given the sort of system 4.0 runs on, it is true that a series of smaller encounters is less difficult than one large one of equivalent point value, but there is still attrition.

-Not a huge fan of the online character builder, even if it does have a bunch of updates with books that weren't in the offline version. It might be that my netbook just isn't powerful enough to run it well, but it's slow as molasses and crashes all the time.

-Pandas continue to be awesome. Seriously considering whether I want to swap mains to a Brewmaster Monk come MoP, as a feature of Monk tanking is that they convert 30% of any damage received into a DoT rather than having it all hit in one chunk, which is almost like having an emergency cooldown up all the time. Video game characters do not generally suffer from deterioration in performance based on damage, only a point of critical existence failure, so regardless of how much damage you take as long as you don't drop below that critical threshold having damage spread out over time is always a benefit. Theoretically, if the overall amount of damage is a significantly higher number, it could drain healer resources in the long run, but that is rarely an issue in the WoW system. At the very least I'll probably make the panda my primary alt, since it's much easier to swap alts straight up for another of the same role to minimalize role juggling for other people.

-It'd be nice if it took less than an average of 4 tries or so to load the game without crashing, however.

-Normally, watching multiple anime series back to back causes some whacky dissonance, or maybe crossover fanart. Watching Gundam Unicorn right after Fate/Zero was kind of amusing though, since Gundam does such a sterling job of summing up many of the things wrong with F/Z's trainwreck protagonist. Someday, there will be a series about a supernatural psychiatrist who solves people's personal issues after beating them up.

SQUEE PANDAS.

*ahem* Now that's out of the way...

There was a kerfluffle a bit back in beta that resulted in extended forum arguments about a couple of lines of quest text. The gist is that there was one NPC that would hit on female PCs, some people got offended, Blizzard changed the text, then other people got offended that they changed the text. On the one hand, as a reasonably enlightened individual I support gender equality. On the other hand, I just don't really care about stuff like this unless it's extremely pervasive throughout the game (when did compliments about appearance become automatically offensive, anyway?), which it obviously is not. If we're going on about sexism in MMOs I personally think that bikini armor and huge tracts of land to be more of an issue than a couple of lines of quest text. Some people may be offended, sure, but then every time Garrosh opens his ugly mouth I want to sock him a good one too, so I'm not sure one case of "NPC saying something the player might find rude" should be given special attention because it trips the political correctness wire.

Then again, the whining about how it's the end of the world because Blizzard changed the text to avoid offending people - they are, after all, trying to sell a game here - is classic complaining about other people complaining. In either case, attempts to apply a single rule across all instances regardless of context, for any topic that is at all subjective, always end poorly.

Corollary to the above may be that the flirty, slightly obnoxious ladies' man type of character is such a staple of many types of fiction that I'm at least desensitized to it. Wonder whether the reaction would have been any different had it been a female character instead, kind of like how occasionally there are comments from guys about how seeing other guys in skimpy clothing is disturbing, to which I generally respond with "now you know how it feels when women see bikini models everywhere in advertising".

Need to make a panda icon.

After about a week of intermittent crashing and downloads, finally got MOP to work, though it takes about 4 tries on average to start the launcher without it crashing immediately. Game itself appears stable, however.

-The PrintScreen button is probably getting a bit tired. As suspected from the early screenshots, the artists have gotten the cartoony Asian fantasy aesthetic down pat, and everything looks absolutely gorgeous.

-Pandaren being Chinese themed means that a lot of their names and terms are supposedly Chinese, though they seem to wobble between the pinyin approach and the noun-verber approach. The pinyin is mostly accurate, though there are bits where it wobbles between Mandarin and Cantonese, though somewhat simplistic, like the spirit of air called "Dafeng". This is compounded by the fact that while the VAs are good, they can't pronounce Chinese.

-On the bright side, they've thus far declined to attempt a pan-Asian approach and mix in fortune cookies and yakisoba Japanese or Korean elements, making MoP one of the few Wutai equivalents that is almost entirely based off of Chinese rather than Japanese culture.

-Pandaren are cute, like giant teddy bears. You could make an effort at creating a grizzled "badass" panda, but really they're just cute. There's a red panda skin, which on the females gives them the same sort of big floofy tail.

-The female Pandaren dance is carameldansen.

Non-Panda-Related

-AoE taunt removed. Not sure this is a good idea, though I guess it depends on the content design.

-Holy Light, Holy Radiance, and Divine Plea now Holy only abilities. Granted, it's not like you spend excessive amounts of time out-of-role in instances or raids, but it's nice to be able to do some stuff now and then in emergencies.

-No more auras, except Devo Aura replaces Raidwall and works only for magic. Divine Protection also only works for magic, requiring a glyph to change it back to 20%/20%, kind of the opposite of what it is now. Feels kind of silly as that just gives Prot specs a mandatory Glyph. Bunch of new glyphs added, will need to copy over a Scribe.

-Pets appear to have been propagated to all characters? Have not tried out the Pokemon game yet though so not sure how trading is supposed to work.

-Intro to Pandaria quests do not appear to have been implemented yet, though there's a Portal Panda who will port you there.

Geek interest movie progression dictated Avengers this weekend. Mostly pretty fun, with a lot of snappy dialogue courtesy of Joss Whedon. All the characters managed to stand out, more or less, though there were definite pains taken to ensure that, eg., Black Widow was an effective contributor to the team alongside people like Hulk and Thor.

( minor spoilers )

Sort of relevant.

I hate life.

Japanese gaming news is kind of dead right now, unfortunately, so some stuff on English language games instead.

@Mass Effect 3 Ending Debacle

Been /popcorn-ing at this for awhile, and rather surprised that it's gotten so much attention from non-gaming sites. I don't have a personal stake in it beyond "yes the ending was terrible, no I'm not obsessed enough to send petition letters at the developers", so it's been pretty entertaining to watch. The latest news is that they're releasing free DLC sometime to "clarify" the ending, whatever that means.

However, one issue that I really wish the debate would just drop already is the use of "artistic integrity". "Artistic integrity" doesn't apply that well to video games because a) games by large studios are much more affected by things like budget, schedule, and market research, and I tend to think that "artistic integrity" is kind of the opposite of "changing or dropping a bunch of plot elements cause you ran out of time/budget", "hold single player content hostage to make people do unrelated multiplayer", or "failing to proofread/debug your game thoroughly" and b) puts me in mind of writing essays required for high school art classes on the deep symbolism and meaning inherent in a ragdoll made of toothpicks and tinfoil, all the while suspecting that the creator pulled said meaning out of their rear end. There is such a thing as bad art, or bad writing, and playing the "deep and profound art" card does not exempt you from criticism (see: Anne Rice).

Also, different media place different requirements on their creators. If a high fantasy novel takes a sudden twist into vampires vs werewolves in urban dystopia in the last 20 pages, the audience has a pretty good case for being somewhat discontent. Unlike art in a visual medium, the entirety of a narrative is not obvious from first glance, so some level of internal consistency has to be maintained to meet audience expectations, or the creator has to describe what it is they're trying to sell; if you tell your audience you're making A but provide B instead, they're going to get a bit upset. It's fine for Evangelion to descend into weird psychological shenanigans and turn the genre on its ear because Evangelion is weird from the get-go, but you can't tack that onto Gundam because nowhere in narrative does it ever imply such a thing; people don't watch Gundam to see everyone suddenly melt into orange goo. Probably. Whether it's directly contradictory marketing statements or the themes implied in the game itself, trying to handwave the fact that you've promised one thing and provided another in your product with "art" doesn't really fly.

So it's highly unlikely that they didn't see this backlash coming, but also kind of baffling as to what they thought to do with it. Trying to convince your audience that this thing they really don't like was your original intent all along, as opposed to saying "sorry logistical constraints, will do better next time" seems a bit of a losing proposition.

@Pandas

One of the best design decisions they made in the recent years of WoW is allowing people to buy gear with VP. This is because VP is a guaranteed reward for effort, rather than a "hope the RNG doesn't hate you" system. It's why having sudden gaps in VP (shoulders at 378+, for example) is kind of annoying because no matter how many times you run that instance, the item is not guaranteed to drop. Even if VP is much less immediately rewarding than random drops, the guarantee of it eventually coalescing into a reward is much more assuring than vague hopeful "maybes". I could do with less excitement in this department.

Of course, the only items currently in the game with a stupidly low drop rate are vanity items like mounts, but I could also say that the probability of 15 Hagara kills (probably more like 18 considering those time I overslept raid) and 0 Conqueror tokens (supposedly a 30%ish drop rate) is abysmally low, too. And that doesn't stop it from happening anyway.

So the news that they're removing VP-purchasable gear in MoP is rather alarming, and I tend to think that rather than adding to the longevity of the game it'd cause ragequits instead. I suppose we'll have to see. I'd care more about the "individual loot" thing in LFR if I were incapable of doing the normal raids with my guild, but I have to say that, even though my main purpose in raiding is not to acquire loot, it's rather unsatisfying to still be forced to use LFR loot despite having cleared DS for a few months now.

On the other hand, PANDAS.