Time Flies...

It slowly dawned on me two days ago that I have yet to add another article.  My friend asked me what happened, and I actually didn't have a reasonable answer.  Time has flown by over these last few weeks.


I am rapidly becoming a huge indie game follower. I've dabbled in/finished /listened to the glorious music of Minecraft, Journey, Flower, Dear Esther, and the Unfinished Swan over the last few weeks.  I have finished Journey and Dear Esther, and rapidly making progress in the Unfinished Swan. They are really some amazing games, and it blows my mind how great they are.  I turned a potentially two hour game (Journey), into like a 10 hour game attempting
to find and discover all of the secrets for that gorgeous white cloak.

I have also played Path of Exile's latest beta.  For those who haven't heard, it's essentially a Diablo II style experience, which I think the cool kids call it an "arpg".  I have never touched Diablo, Torchlight, or any of the other clones for that matter, and I never really had much interest.  To be honest, I was bored and a little bit curious.  I chose a ranger and picked up the class, and I finished Act 1 two days ago.  I also got a really nice exotic sword, that I'm pretty sure is really rare.  People were cursing at me on the first day of beta for getting it.  Figures I get the leet weapon in a game that I don't tend to stay in very long.  Overall, I've been surprised how much I like the game, and yet how little I care about the story.



Speaking of terribly boring story, I tried Tera for the first time this evening.  It was...interesting.  I don't really understand the starting experience, and why they decided to throw you into a level 20 area without knowing how to even attack.  I picked up a sorcerer and had leveled up while following wherever the latest quest took me.  It struck me how fast I started ignoring the quest text, only to move on to the objective.  The days where that kind of gaming was fun for me, I think are long gone.  I'm not sure if it's the dynamic events in Guild Wars 2 that spoiled me, but I don't think I can ever click on that damn exclamation point again.  I found the critics of Tera to be pretty accurate. The game is beautiful, and the combat is decent (though not being able to move while casting was a rather big letdown), but the quests are terable (sorry for the pun).  I think I'll be dropping this one quite soon.  I think the PvP could be potentially pretty awesome in this game, but I just don't think I can get past the leveling aspect of the game.  I think I'll leave it on the desktop for a rainy day.

Overall, I have played a myriad of games, and have been impressed by most of them.  I think there's something to be said about the games like Journey, PoE, Flower, Dear Esther, the Unfinished Swan and the like.  Massive corporations with multi-million dollar budgets commonly fail to capture the beauty  elegance, and simplicity of indie games.  I suspect in the future with Kickstarter and the like, the most popular games will eventually start spawning from more and more unknown developers.  And I think that may be a good thing, a world where finally innovation and design are the only things that matter. No matter what happens, I think gamers will "win".

Also, if you are waiting for me to actually get back to writing about Guild Wars 2.  Don't worry, it won't be long.