X-Force, issue 007

Just wanted to say this issue is cray cray. It's got some really hard questions all packed in next to each other like kids on a back seat. Cable clones look forward to one day of life and then have to pop themselves or die in agony (presumably) and that's just the start. Privacy vs 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear' issues as well? Man, pile on the issues!

It's the sort of crazy thing that, while I acknowledge as hard to come up with and even harder to consistantly do, is what comics are damn good at and need to keep doing the thing they are good at.

Its an issue with issues. Which is what it should be. I'd recommend getting this one just to be baffled.

Also a neat cover of Domino on the front!

Watch Dogs : Did hacking just turn out to be a gimmick? Do all sandboxes suffer from gimmickdom?

So it appears that perhaps just classic old GTA style driving can get you away in Watch Dogs. And even if you do hack, you don't see it because it's behind your point of view, or if they show an exploding pursuer in slow mo it tends to make you crash because of the disorientation from the camera going from the explosion back to driving.

Do all sandbox games have this trouble? Dishonoured seemed to have this problem too, where just a few powers were needed to complete a mission and anything else was just getting baroque about the matter. And the sandbox - if it doesn't force the use of hacking, then hacking becomes a throw away, unnecessary gimmick. If it is forced, then you get less of a sandbox!

That's the thing about a sandbox - it tends to make everything not matter. Just another thing amongst many things. A bit like real life!

But seriously, do sandbox game makers need to start thinking about how they implement these things, giving a secondary layer of rewards for using hacking. So someone could be rated a supreme hacker if they wanted to, or maybe they might focus on conventional escapes and fighting.

But ultimately it's the audience that might have to accept that any new thing in a sandbox will, at best, have some incentives and ratings for it - it's not going to force gameplay to be entirely different, all by itself.

Dragon's Crown (6/6)

There's also a weird power you can get for the dwarf which is eagle dive - the higher levels have you dropping bombs as you glide across the screen after a double jump. The more skill points in it, the more bombs. Not sure where the heck this comes from - it seems like an unholy mix of warhammers dwarven flying steam helicopters and D&D.

Anyway, that's my current look into the game - entering into the hard mode now, still with the dwarf. Haven't played the other characters much yet still enjoying it just on the one character...but then again, maybe the wizard needs to step boldly into the dungeons, yet again...

Dragon's Crown (5/6)

Not sure about the toughen up power. You have to stand there for a period to do it. I presume it's like the wizard having to recharge - except they coded it that if you hold down the recharge button after using it for another attack, the wizard will start recharging, while the dwarf ignores the button if it was also held down during another attack. Which is annoying.

Also it's duration - I really have no idea. The visual indicator is so subtle it's really impossible to tell amongst the leaping and flying bodies and beatings when it ran out. Still, it's something you can do to prep before a battle and if you are doing really well, do so inside a battle as well!

Dragon's Crown (4/6)

And the wrestle mania!? The dwarf does a lot of crowd control (compared to the archer, who seems more attuned to boss killing). Grabbing enemies above his head - if you jump he takes them with him and you can throw them down. Buy into a skill for that and they create a blast radius when they hit, no matter if it's a great big lizard or a tiny fungi guy, boom - damage all the other enemies. If you can get into a sequence of making half the screen get slammed by a falling body then go to the other half, grab somebody who was just getting up from the last slam you did and knock them all down again, you can just make the screen shake with thrown bodies! A rare few enemies can't be picked up, but they are pretty rare - even in hard mode, it seems. Though it is annoying when the old grab 'em and throw em reflex kicks in but they stay resolutely on the ground!

Dragon's Crown (3/6)

The funny thing is is how much of Dragons Crown captures D&D style tropes - yet it utterly ignores one of them completely. It even has you drag along a thief to open doors and chests (instead of the main characters kicking them open - but it is fun to have a comedy relief character (whom you can trick into walking into geysers of fire!)).

But there are no clerics! Where are the clerics!?

Well, probably because it doesn't really work so well as a brawler. Sure, you work together, but you independent characters working together, not dudes who cannot do anything unless a cleric is patting you on the back through the whole thing. Which is probably fairly like D&D in a way, as you could go in sans cleric. Though mostly you didn't. So DC slips in on the edge case, with that one!

Dragon's Crown (2/6)

The dwarfs power strike - oh yeah, is that a fun button! They've done well on that one - I think you are invulnerable during the wind up. Which is great when a zombie just decided to do it's grab rush in your direction and instead you see it slide around your charging up character, then get pounded by the hammer strike

I think I probably use it fairly inefficiently - you are probably supposed to beat 'em up (as if this game was some kinda beat 'em up!) a bit first, then drop the hammer. Since you will lose the weapon right after doing so. Though I improved unarmed attacks for precisely this reason. In fact I got unarmed attacks to 100% damage - really I should buy it up further. But again I'm still not sure what it does.

Anyway, love that one smashing button - and the way you watch a bosses health bar suffer during it!

Dragon's Crown - Who let the Dwarves out? (1/6)

* I've played the side scrolling brawler 'Dragons Crown' a fair bit, recently. Decided upon the Dwarf mostly, though I dabbled in the arts of wizardry for brief while (which was good but whoa, you get weak when your mana runs out and you can't get the few seconds you need to recover it!). Called him Braddock - I was playing AD&D a little while back with a dwarf called Murock, so I don't know if that was a call back to him. It's funny sometimes when you take a table top character you didn't get to play out fully into a CRPG! Anyway, it's a great game in many respects. It gives you points if you don't die at all during a stage, but on the other hand if you use up your lives, you can spend gold to recover and to me the amount wasn't that much per revive. So you both strive to do well, but at the same time you can just push through with accumulated points if the going gets tough (and that boss really does just need to be killed! Stupid 'Gazer', I'm looking at you, you Beholder with the serial numbers filed off!!). The magic gate in the game becomes randomised after awhile, while unlocking the stable - so you can choose to go to a random stage for free, or pay to go to a specific one. And after doing a stage, you can press on to another random stage. And you can buy more bags to hold more supplies for these extra long excursions! It's actually a very nifty design, meaning you don't just need to find one good weapon, but instead it's beneficial to find several, to put in other bags, because doing several dungeons in a row gets higher gains, cumulatively.

More about it in the following five parts on Dragon Crown!

Slender Dust 514

It doesn't matter if you have a shot gun. If you shoot, he will yet live and your second shot will miss. If you try to aim for the head, he will sense you and move, spotting you! He will kill you - his back is your death, not his! The horror is in the not understanding!

So, they brought out a new slender game - that was quick! And this one is set in space, with guns! The guns are there to break your spirit, of course, because like the goggles, the guns, they do nothing!

No, you will stand two meters away and shot gun the slender man as he types things on the interwebs. He will simply sidle backwards and although you will plant another half of a shotgun blast, he will end you like the slender man ends everything!

Oh, they pretend these are other players. But that's just part of it - this is the future, and the future is multiple slender men, all able to kill you as soon as they can see you! Oh god, don't be seen!!!1!

Sometimes when the slender man kills you, you don't die straight away. There's a mechanic there that lets you call for help from the not-slenders (your team). And...you guessed it, it's there to break your spirit! It'll even say that someone with a revival unit is near you - and then they go away. You call for help and nobody comes - this is how much the slender man kills you! Right inside!

It ties in to the whole hunting around for scraps of paper - here you find yourself hacking various pieces of machinery, some which are objectives, others which help your side of not-slenders. You 'hack' them because that's to remind you of what the slender man will do to your body if he sees you.

At first the game seemed a fairly uninteresting excursion to death land (even at the academy stage) and I had assumed you probably need to be elbow deep in the skill system before you can hack. But no, everyone can hack. And the thing is, you get the same points for hacking (or more!) as you do for when the slender man lets you think you killed him! This is a game changer! Clearly the who gun thing is what we all knew it was - there to raise your hopes, simply to dash them to the ground! No, you are instead to go to various pieces of machinery and if you have the skills to hold the circle button down for a period of time and watching a progress button, you can get just as many points as if you managed to pretend kill the slender man! 50 points! 50 of what, I do not know? I have no idea - but 50 sounds good!

So, dash on through, find various machines that will put your heavy thumb skills to the test! And lose the scenario anyway! It's okay, you get a fair wack of cash and skill points even if you lose - because the slender man wants you to know, you're not going anywhere!

Serious Sam 3 - Quick Thoughts

Playing Serious Sam 3 recently and apart from technical issues trying to get it to run, it's an engaging game. I'm actually dying on a regular basis (after having gotten into the last half of the campaign). Which of course just takes you back to the nearest quick save - making it a puzzle shooter essentially. It's not really about massively good aiming skills with the mouse (like Quake live is). It's about figuring the right corner to hide in, the right weapon, or even right sequence of weapons to use. And about knowing when to run away!

Good to play a game which actually fights back against you/is cunning enough to kill you a few times.

[Gamma World 4E Solo Playtest] Dystopian

Going the solo test was interesting to begin with. See, trying to create some sort of story that either 'hooks in' players or can just be dropped, never to live, not even in bad fiction format, forever, is just an incredible exercise in creative whorism. I'm not attributing this to exclusively to GW, plenty of other games I own operate off the same principle - your supposed to make some compelling story, but if everyone just doesn't feel like it, well, in effect you may as well have just thrown your effort in the bin. And you know, that's fine - the texts in all of them basically tell you that's normal for how you treat your creative outlet. I guess perhaps this read comes to a head in my contact with Gamma World because it's actually succinctly written, while all the other books (rifts, blue planet, D&D 4E and lower, underground, hol, others I forget, etc) use obsfucation methods, primarily very large texts and hiding the tell tale signs in various semi random positions amidst mountains of text that suggest something else entirely. So it feels a bit bad to knock the book that is better written and more honest for it.

As a nod to the recent narrativist threads, what of the idea of not writing a story? "Just let it play out, man!" along with the well written article. It depends - to me, GW and the other books, they allow a dead character, devoid of any desire or hunger, to be brought into play (an exception to this is 'The Riddle Of Steel', I think). Drumming up players to do more just feels like tacking on some sort of TROS spiritual attributes onto it, but being in denial of that modification of the game. It definately wouldn't be just playing the game. I'm pretty damn sure that upon contact with the regular joe gamer, you will just get dead characters. Perhaps with non gamers you wouldn't, interestingly, but I suspect the structure would soon train them into dead characters. Probably from having their alive and fruitful character becoming dead, ironically, at some random moment and that really being a non moment in play due to structure. But anyway, that's my nod toward that idea. Any argument that it doesn't break down that way?

So anyway, it occured to me to skip that self flagellation process (one that feels like being a whore sitting in a window sill facing the street, there for taking or forgetting on whim) and simply play by myself, so instead of just looking at this thing I'd bought, I could actually, you know, play it. Sure, it's kind of an equivalent of masterbating, but a cheap thrill beats not only beats no thrill, it also beats beating yourself up for the hope of a grander thrill that may just not come.

And after a couple of encounters won (one PC), barely, I have this reluctance to play further. I really wonder if I have some instinctual grasp of the crap shoot and that comes out as reluctance to play further. Because the odds will eventually add up and kill me. There is no other mechanism that'll make anything else happen. And that'll be it. If it were a book you were reader, the character just gets pinched out and no eplilogue, nothing, the book just ends. How bizarre is that?

And I've kind of being trying to think of ways to get to level 10 or continue play and in as much, experience play.

But the reason I type this is because I suddenly thought I have experienced play. And it is utterly dystopian. All the bright and colourful monsters - do they make it some mario-esque fun land? No, they actually add to the dystopia. Are you going to find it fun dying to a wierd moving cactus that shoots spines at you? Unless as a person you heartily enjoy schadenfreude, the cartoonishness of the monsters adds horror instead of levity. The world is a cartoon and joke filled - and it's going to murder you just as much. Whats the difference between a scar faced man or a clown faced man murdering you - the latter makes more of a joke of your end. That reminds me of Hol as well - haha, the soddomy bikers! How funny is that idea! And yet if you play it out, is it funny when they are going to either kill you or incapacitate and rape you? There's like this family guy-eque humour in making them and thinking about them, but if you actually make fiction via playing the rules, how is that funny anymore?

So I was basically trying to dig through the bleak stone to find the seam of gold to follow in play. Until I realised that either the bleak stone is the seam is the fun of the game, or don't play it.

Now, you get alot of bullshit advice, just like in the other books I mention, where it's all about the fun and...what the hell does that mean? I'm guessing it involves stuff which, since it's advised in the text, is essentially in game stuff, but in terms of experiencing the system in play, it's advice to stop the players experiencing the system. Well, every time the GM thinks they don't seem to be having fun. It's classic 'stone soup' design, where the game insists its fun ... if you just add an ingrediant ... or two ... or three ... or a dozen. And after two dozen things your GM adds into the pot, isn't this game just freaking awesome!? Except it's the classic stone soup - it was just a pot of water that is vacant anything. What tastes good isn't the pot of water.

Except Gamma World isn't vacant. Revealed of it's stark core, just as much as drinking straight whiskey has its place, indeed you might want an evening of drinking straight whiskey and being in a world where joy and hope and sense of noble death are utterly, utterly blown away. No, I'm not being sarcastic. It's be a hell of a frightening ride to just feel the dead world and maybe beneficial for it. Beneficial if you don't go in expecting a mario fun land. If you've ever written fiction and no one gave a shit about it but you still did (and good on you), well play this and expect to make fiction that doesn't even care about itself. Zip, a critical, that PC is gone and...so what.

There's a feeling in that. One that does not confirm your existing beliefs. One that does not comfort. GM, resist the temptation to put 'fun' first, and you might find another type of fun. One which requires nothing of you. One which might require a few stiff drinks to get over.

It depends though - I don't think that was the intention of the designers. So is it really playing the game to play it that way? Probably not. And yet when you get rid othe GM pulling the wool over your eyes every time you stop having fun, it is the truth of the game.

And where else would dystopia be, but beyond good intentions?

Handle with care.

Far cry: Search for treasure, Philip!

I really think farcry 2 could have done with dual currencies. I'm playing it and I keep thinking that.

You work in rough diamonds (blood diamonds), and once you buy a gun with them, you have an unlimited amount of them.

I really think that if they used paper money as well as diamonds, it'd add more of a sense of currency to the game. Like the diamonds unlock the gun, but if you want a replacement after because yours got lost or rusty, it costs paper money.

The environment is pretty spartan - really there isn't much point to exploration, and yet at the same time nor is it like space invaders and shuttling you instantly to the next war (ie, there's lots of driving, but not much to see).

While if your collecting cash here and there, it makes the world seem more textured as there, like, actually appears to be something there. Even if you have more cash than you really need, there still seems to be more to the word if you can actually grab something from it that's potentially of use.

Perhaps they were shooting for a grim, nihilistic, empty world feel. But that's the problem with shooting for feel like that - it might make actually playing the game (as opposed to looking at it) not very fun.

Nice legs, shame about the cash

I will avenge my greenhouse!!1!! With my knee gun!

I've heard a few people around the net comment on player vs player games and the cash shop crisis that lets some people effectively buy their victories by buying the better weapons with real money - weapons you can't get without spending money. It's often described with some bitterness.

I think I get the bitterness now, as it comes from actually finding some attraction to the game, only to suddenly find that attraction scoured away unless you pay cash. It's a bit like one of those stories you hear where a guy gets picked up by a chick and he's feeling pretty big - then he finds an enormous bill at the resteraunt she drags him to, as it was a honey pot operation.

I was playing epic duel, which for a slow connection is good for PVP as it's turn based. I was quite enjoying the game...but then you realise how much cash stuff there is. Not only that, you find you only have one character slot and if you want to change class, cash it up, my friend. Do they tell you this choice is permanent unless you have cash? No. Wanting money is fine - but put the price sticker up front. You don't get shops where there are no prices and when you hit the register they charge whatever (well, perhaps in boutique stores, but this isn't boutique, is it?)

But beneath all that there is a chirpy, likeable game. It's just that that game has a pimp.

Driftwurld - latest update

 Yay! I've added the next stage, which is harvesting crops so you can trade the food to a shady mercenary, for your first real firepower - omega frag grenades!

But the reason that power is needed is because of the raptors sneaking around!

Once you have 30 tactical skill (the skill aquisition is accelerated to this point) you can harvest.

I like what I've done with the harvest game - it combines the 'spot that your in trouble' keep your eyes peeled game I did with tactical combat along with a memory game, as the raptors north/south position is flashed ever so often and when the time comes to move, you have to remember it so you can go the other way!

I'm enjoying how I'm fitting in somewhat challening obstacles in my game (which is better than I've seen on a professionally laid out vampire game on facebook)

http://www.driftwurld.herobo.com/login.php

I think this is a little bit of fun to play in itself, AND your building up your account in the game. There seem to be alot of browser games out there with many players, but the game play just seems to be clicking and not fun. I hope I can draw some people who want game play that's a bit of fun.

I've also made an no log in version if you want to try it out. Of course it's not going to record your results in the database, is it!

http://www.driftwurld.herobo.com/tactics/reapol.php

And congrats to is (screen name: iz) for getting top brawl skill and top tactical skill! If you play the tactical game you can see his victories showing up on the event field!

Thanks for reading!

Looking at : Torchlight - very difficult takes awhile to...get difficult

I chose very difficult for my first play of torchlight. Or whatever the highest difficulty there is, but without the use of hardcore mode. Hardcore, which I'll probably try out sometime, as the natural direction to take is to make a waddling tank - will that be fun? I'm curious, but this topic is about difficulty.

But after about seven hours of play only now is it really presenting difficulty and requiring manouvering. On the upside it's doing it on a consistant basis - I'm guessing if I did more side dungeons I'd be higher level and have better gear.

Sadly I obviously went through six hours and 59 minutes of not so challenging play - I don't know why I'm drawn to it. Moth to the shiny flame? Already spent money on it, may as well try?

I think it 'pushed back' so to speak near the start, but really, the solution was to keep the attack or magic button held down and a finger over the heal potion button. That's it. I guess that's a timing skill as atleast these potions take a little time to heal you instead of insta healing you like in diablo. Instant heals just mean buying tons of potions and mashing the heal button over and over will be enough.

Guild Wars 2 : Death and other inconveniences

Things had gone terribly wrong on the set of 'I love Lucy'

Quoting from the healing and death page of guild wars 2,

Players who have recently been downed several times will take longer to revive each time. If no one revives you, you can spend a small amount of gold to come back at a waypoint. It's as simple as that, and why not? Why should we debuff you, take away experience, or make you run around for five minutes as a ghost instead of letting you actually play the game? We couldn't think of a reason. Well, we did actually think of a reason--it just wasn't a good one. Death penalties make death in-game a more tense experience. It just isn't fun. We want to get you back into the action (fun) as quickly as possible. Defeat is the penalty; we don't have to penalize you a second time.

Now the interesting thing about this compared to a board game like chess, or a quake live match, is if you lose/are killed, well, you just lose. That's the end of the game. While the idea (perhaps not very good idea) of a mmorpg has you...well, still there - the games still going.

Really death in a mmorpg is perhaps more like being hit by a single bullet in quake live. Or perhaps a rocket!

And yet it still involves hurt that matters in the bigger picture.

I'm not sure a lack of a death penalty works out, as dying doesn't matter in terms of the bigger picture. It'd be like whether you dodged all the rockets or got hit by every single one in a first person shooter doesn't matter in terms of the bigger pictures. So instead of 'ROCKETS!!!!1!' it becomes 'Oh, rockets...whatever'. And it's correct - it is indeed just a matter of whatever because it wont affect a thing.

Now I'm inclined to agree on the whole ghost thing, as you can't lose at it except to get literally lost and waste alot of time. That is boring.

And a debuff? It's a death spiral - it's like if your hit in a FPS, you become slower and so get hit even more. So I somewhat agree there.

But after going past those options, they seem to have gone to the extreme and have no penalty at all! Unless you count that small gold fee they mention.

Not to mention the whole 'tense <> fun' thing - plenty of people lose matches of FPS each day - the tension of whether you lose is part of that.

Now what I imagine they'll have is that you die, come back and you waddle up to where you were before in a mission or 'quest' and keep going. Why bother having death at all in that case, since your just going to waste time running back from a waypoint (same as the whole ghost thing) or someone raises you on the spot and...big deal, it wouldn't have mattered if you die. The whole 'downed and last ditch dramatic attempt to live' isn't dramatic at all, because it doesn't mean much except for potentially a ghost run.

I don't think this works out at all. But I'll grant it's what alot of other games roughly do already (that's not to say that it works in those games either).

It just seems to generate the illusion of danger/danger of losing. Really when you look at it, defeat isn't a penalty at all - it just has the illusion of being so.

But in reality all they are coding is an inconvenience, as much as the ghost walk.

Hammering on!

Sorry for the pause, I've been playing alot of the warhammer endless trial and it is still quite engaging!

I will say though, and I don't blame the designers for this, when I tried out the other side - I lost perhaps all sense of importance of the game world? I guess it's because I was fighting for the cause of order first and then...destruction really is destruction. I just cancelled the meaning out so it ended up just the gamism, like playing quake live - not gamism and a sense of a cause your following. BUT as I said I don't blame the game designers - what are they going to do, lock you off from playing a side? Nah. There might be ways around it, but it's not something they have to do. Also it might just be something I experience, and I might be part of a minute demographic in that. But it made me think, all the same.

To be (subscribing) or not to be, that is the question

Actually that titles a little hyperbolic. It's not a huge question.

But I've been thinking about subscribing to warhammer online for awhile, but the first thing is they had a massive accounts stuff up recently, where people were charged up to thirty times their normal sub in one month. They are correcting it and appoligising, though they aren't offering any free time for the inconvenience, either.

Man still shouting at Evony advert

That's not even the biggest thing - the thing is people who were no longer subscribers also got affected! I mean, while playing I can imagine dealing with a stuff up, but I can just imagine finishing with the sub, then a year latter a bunch of financial pressures start to kick in and pow, they stuff up again just when it's vital my finances remain as is.

On the other hand I'm thinking that once I finish subscribing I could change the billing info to bogus numbers.

The other thing are some issues that Tesh has raised about subscriptions. I mean, what am I buying? It's rather like buying a newspaper, but if you don't read it all today the paper is gone tomorrow unless you buy it again.

I mean, given that, is subscription really an inappropriate word? When you subscribe to a magazine, you keep the copies. Granted with a gym, once you stop paying you can't go in. But it's called a gym membership, not a subscription.

The other thing with a gym is that it's not about content. You go there, you see if you can buff yourself, tone yourself - your not there to look at something pretty someone made (though perhaps you check out other members...hehe).

So while warhammer has PVP that involves self improvement, it also has a lot of 'your almost about to see this new thing' content tease, if you get what I mean?

What am I buying? If I buy even for the 'gym membership' factor, I'll be setting myself up for a big content tease. Content I can only see if I shell out money - and I mean, we have girlfriends for that! ;)

Looking at the Warhammer Online Free Endless Trial #3

One important element in warhammer is how your not stuck in a linear path in terms of what your doing. For example, I don't know if they changed it since, but in WOW you either PVP'ed, or you quested out in the world. You had to stop questing, head all the way into the heart of a city and sit around waiting on a battle que.

In warhammer, you can have your thumb in a few pies at once. You can be questing around, but have set yourself into a PVP battle ground que from any point (even from the very moment you start playing a new character, actually). It'll pop you into the scenario once its ready, then put you right back afterward. That way if you want to do PVP, questing is something you can work on in between scenarios rather than being a big one or the other, not both situation.

To me, the low level PVE questing is much the same as other mmorpgs - somewhat interesting, but if it's the only thing your doing, the shine wears off quickly. However, if your breaking it up with an occasional intense PVP scenario, the questing doesn't drag on an keeps it's shine. Or if your enjoying the questing just for its own sake, don't turn on the scenario que. It's up to you and you shape how you play, rather than being stuck in the way some developer decided to go.

That and you can dip into public quests as well while on the way to your normal quests, which you were doing while you were waiting on the scenario que - you genuinely choose how you have fun and in a way that doesn't hurt your progression (sure in other mmorpgs you might have freedom to explore, but generally it hurts your numbers progression - and if that doesn't matter to you, then 95% of mmorpgs don't matter to you).


I'm done - go play! :)
......

Looking at the Warhammer Online Free Endless Trial #2

I've been playing for about a week or less now and have gotten a few classes to level 10. I'll talk about how I feel about play now - latter I might get into my first experiences.

One thing I appreciate is that characters are solid in PVP combat. You can't run through another person. In world of warcraft this just seemed A: The most incredibly lamo tactic, along with jumping (which you don't see in WAR combat either) in world of warcraft and B: If you have a slow connection, it was even more powerful.

I mean, why bother with this sense of a world with living, breathing characters (who have been drawn and animated with so much care) when you then have combat with surrealist tactics like walking through someone? Why not make a seduku world or some such, where some arbitrary mathimatical rules are the key issue? Why try and make all these stupid powers named in relation to real world actions, like charging, and they look like a charge, but then the heart of combat involves walking like a ghost through, and then back through, other people?

Anyway, you can't do that in warhammer online. And as said, people don't jump around in combat either. It lends a solidness to gameplay, and even with my slow connection I can actually connect with people in melee combat on a regular basis.

Looking at the warrior priest class (hope I've got the name right there), because I'm playing it right now, I find their healing actually is kind of a challenge to do, instead of just dropping heals everywhere then doing nothing when your mana runs out. Instead you build up healing points by bashing things. That or you can sit there for five seconds using a power to regenerate a bunch of healing points. So along with the targeting, where you can target an opponent and a friendly at the same time, your looking to slap opponents with melee attacks (some of your powers grant healing to yourself and comrades) to help charge up healing so you can then turbo heal a bunch of folks, then run in and bash, etc. You don't stand there sort of wack a mole clicking on team mate bars that are dropping, healing, then doing nothing if your mana runs out.

That's another thing that deserves quick mention - the action points your character uses to attack, they regenerate very fast. And about twenty seconds after you've left combat your health comes back at a fast rate too (about a quarter every five seconds). This game isn't really about slinking around, licking your wounds and not doing anything on a repeat basis!



Okay, I'm out for now, more soon!