All the news that's fit to be on Goblin Axis

Alright, so here's what's goin' on in the video gaming world of your friend and mine, Gravity Zombie:



The biggest news of the last few weeks for me is The Elder Scrolls Online, which, at its inception, I really had no interest in. My initial impression was that it was going to be yet another triple-A MMO that ended up being a spectacular failure. Then again, generally any time I'm not actively playing an MMO or getting hyped up for one, my internal consistency defense mechanisms spring into action and I spit venomous bile at the genre as a whole. I don't think I'll ever hit the level of sheer obsession I'd hit back in high school playing World of Warcraft, but that's just to be expected. I'm older and a little more jaded to the genre, but I can still have fun with it from time to time; it's just not that serious anymore.

That said, out of curiosity I applied for beta a hell of a long time ago, and actually managed to get into a few of the tests earlier this year. My initial reaction was I guess what you'd call determined indifference. Maybe that's not what I mean. The thing I'm trying to say is that I wasn't really interested in playing the game after I'd gotten started, but I earnestly wanted to give it a legitimate shot so that if I ended up not liking it, I could definitively say "I do not like this for the following very interesting reasons."

The thing was, after I got out of the brain-fryingly boring tutorial zone and the game opened up a bit, I actually was pretty impressed; particularly after a later patch tweaked the combat a bit to make the combat a bit more responsive/less floaty and disconnected-feeling. The thing in particular that surprised me was that the game really did find a midpoint between Skyrim (which understandably is the TES game this feels the most like) and a standard MMO.  There are your standard "Kill five humdingers" or "collect six stupid pieces of crap" quests, but they're a little more spread out, and each is generally just a small piece of a larger, more narrative TES-style quest. It is honestly refreshing when compared to the standard method of moving into a quest hub, absorbing the quests like a sponge, doing them, then returning to bask in all the exp and minor gear upgrades and followups. Entering the game with this kind of MMO completionist mindset can be maddening, given the sheer number of quests the game unloads on you , but it's doable and, at least in my experience of the last week, feels less repetitive than the average MMO. I'm wondering if I'll still feel that way in a week, but I digress.

One thing that really attracted me to the game (and built unimaginable hype levels between the first and second beta test weekends) is the flexibility of the class system. That is to say, your choice of one of the four starter classes simply changes  which set of three skill lines you have access to. The classes, at least in aesthetic, are roughly analogous to a typical fighter/rogue/wizard/cleric quartet. In practice, though, each class has the tools to fill any role in the holy trinity (which, while the game tends to shun typical MMO mechanics, definitely still exists in ESO, for better or worse). How you build your character determines how you're going to play far more than the class choice does, which is nice. The downside to this is that you never really get a feeling of class identification.

Like, in World of Warcraft, I played a warrior, so I knew that these were the tools I had to deal with different situations, these were my limitations, this is my role and backrup role in a group setting, and so forth. The way ESO does it is way more freeing, but for whatever reason I don't feel like my character is, you know, "special" for having the abilities he does. It's kind of hard to put into words without sounding like I'm grasping for straws. Maybe I am. What I do know is that I'm playing a heavy armor, two-handed melee Orc Sorcerer, and I don't really feel like a sorcerer or a warrior. I just feel like a generic spellblade from Skyrim.

I do want to stress though that this is overall a feel problem more than a problem of mechanics. Mechanically, I think the system is great and I'm happy with the flexibility of it. I think having only four classes to pick from kind of amplifies the problem, but again. It's a feel thing so who cares?

All that said, there still is the chance for ESO to crash and burn just like The Old Republic and Rift and all the other sub-based MMOs that couldn't keep up their initial momentum and fell into the pit of F2P (Or in the case of Warhammer Online, died out entirely. That was more of a licensing thing though, so I guess it doesn't really apply here). Personally, aside from a heapin' helpin' of bugs (as is expected of a TES game), I'm pretty happy with the experience. Especially when you consider that this was a game I initially had no interest in.

In non ESO news, I've recently started to get back into fighting games after taking a few years off. Street Fighter 4 more or less dominated my life from 2009-2010 before I moved on to Marvel 3 and whatever else Shoryuken told me to buy. Eventually, I just got kind of burned out on the whole thing and kept my 360 and fight stick more or less untouched in my closet. For old times' sake, though, I recently started watching some major tournament streams and marathoning episodes of Gooplays and Excellent Adventures, and they brought me back into the fold. That, and of course, the upcoming Ultra Street Fighter 4, which I'm planning on picking up for PC when it finally comes out this August.

I'm slowly but surely getting back into the loop as to what changed in AE 2012, but really I'm mainly just messing around with trials and training mode because I'm too cheap to sign up for XBL Gold just to lose a bunch of matches to people who didn't take three years off. Having typed that out, though, I'm very much debating just picking up a month or three to tide me over. Though, when the console port hits, everyone's going to leave me in ghost town with AE 2012, because I'm definitely not buying that patch. THESE ARE THE CHOICES.

And last but not least, the PC port of Dark Souls II comes out a week from Friday, so that's PRETTY FUCKING FANTASTIC RIGHT GUYS? I have a similar relationship to the first Dark Souls that I did with Street Fighter 4, in that both of them came along at a time when I won't say I was "done" with video games, but I really wasn't spending as much time playing them or reading about them or anything like that. Dark Souls and Street Fighter 4 broke these dry spells and dominated my life for like a month (for DS) to a year and a half (For SF4, MVC3, BlazBlue, Mortal Kombat 9, et cetera). So, that said, 2014 looks like it's going to be another year that pulls me deep into the abyss of video gamin' and renders me unable to do JAAACK SQUAAAT otherwise. But that's the price you pay when you're some guy named Gravity Zombie.