Hurray! I Survived the Steam Sale!

It may not be as insane as the summer and winter sales, but this year's autumn sale ran surprisingly long, or at least longer than I remember the thing going in years past, and had quite a few really tempting deals. Thankfully I behaved myself though, only getting Skyrim on this go around.

I'd been holding out on that one for ages because I don't like paying $60 for a game. They had it for half off, which doesn't happen often so I finally capitulated and picked it up. For now I'm going to skip on the Dawnguard stuff because after talking with friends and reading up on it some more, it sounds like it's a bit of a tough one to justify getting. Maybe if I was into all of the daedric stuff in a big way it might be worthwhile, but the expansion wasn't really winning me over, even at ten bucks.

Skyrim itself is a ton of fun so far. A lot has been tweaked for this game, but some of the stuff I like include how the combat feels a little smoother, and faster paced than previous games, the visuals are great, and haven't been giving me any problems like obnoxious draw-in (which I found Oblivion suffered from quite a bit), and, as always, there's tons to explore.

I'm not going to go into a full review of the game here, as I'm only about ten hours into it right now, but I did want to mention that I'm enjoying it. But yeah, really happy that I abstained from gorging myself on deals at this sale. Now I just have to do the same or better at the winter sale, which can't be too far off.

Still No Dragon's Dogma for PC, Missed Opportunity?

After a bit of a Twitter mishap Capcom's crack team of spin doctors have come out and emphasized that the company still has no plans for a PC version of Dragon's Dogma. This came about after someone tweeted them and asked if there would be to which they said yes, but immediately backpedaled on once they realized what they'd said.

Generally I lean towards PC and handheld for my current gen gaming, so I was disappointed by this news. I'm not really inclined to get the 360 version of the game in part because the price has barely budged on the thing since it came out, and also because I find it infinitely more comfy to lounge about with my laptop playing games than actually using a console now. However, this may change if I find it on the cheap, or I give up hope on a PC version, and just capitulate.

Personal biases aside, it still seems a strange choice on the part of Capcom to neglect the PC with this particular game. Firstly it's very much in line with the sorts of RPGs that PC gamers tend to gravitate toward. Dragon's Dogma certainly gives off a bit of an Elder Scrolls / Two Worlds / Risen sort of vibe with its exploration-heavy third person RPG-ing. Second, it feels that Capcom's release choices on the PC are a tad arbitrary. Stuff like Devil May Cry, Lost Planet, and Resident Evil gets a PC port just fine. They even released some Bionic Commando stuff for it, yet no Dragon's Dogma.

An interesting idea I heard recently about PC ports of games is that it seems in some cases a game only gets the port if it under performed on the consoles. An example of this could be Rockstar Games. Everyone was clamoring for Red Dead Redemption to come to PC, but LA Noire was ported instead. What's the difference between the two? The former sold like gangbusters on consoles, the latter not so much. So, it wouldn't be surprising if LA Noire got ported real quick as a means of scraping a few more dollars in on the project. Would Dragon's Dogma need to suffer a similar fate in order to get a PC port?

The game has done alright for itself since releasing, clocking in at a little over one million sales as of late June of this year. So perhaps Capcom is content with that. They've been pretty rigid about the game not only in terms of not porting it, but also refusing to drop the price on it. I usually see it in stores still at $60 and sales only see the thing come down to around $40. Maybe they see no reason to bother investing money in a port, and they are satisfied with how the game has done up until now.

Nonetheless, there are still a lot of people that have not yet picked up the game, and simply aren't interested in it until a PC port is made. The question here is if this is a vocal minority that would want the game. Moreover, could a port see a similar fate as Dark Souls did where many people railed for a PC version of the game, and when they finally got it people complained. Maybe Capcom saw this and decided against a PC version.

If there is genuine demand, though, it's hard to come to terms with Capcom not making a PC version of Dragon's Dogma. The game already has a good reputation, and it is a lot more similar to what PC gamers look for in an RPG than a lot of other JRPGs out there. With that, I just can't shake the thought that refusing to port the game is leaving money on the table.

Dungeon Siege 3: Final Thoughts

Blasting stuff in the face with a rifle

The other day I finally finished Dungeon Siege 3, so that's one more game out of my backlog. Hurray! Before completely closing the door on it, though, I did want to jot down some final thoughts on the game. Overall, I didn't find it hugely entertaining. A lot of the gameplay is common to the Diablo-alike sub-sub genre of action RPG except with nothing to really set it apart from the pack in a meaningful way. Moreover the game is pretty easy. About the only reason I bothered to play to the end of it is because I found the story mildly interesting, but then again it is a game from Obsidian, and they're usually pretty good at that sort of thing. Looking back on my time with the game, I'd have a really tough time recommending it to anyone, even if you get it for dirt cheap in a bargain bin, a Steam sale, or whatever.

The game takes place many years after a big uprising. A group that prides itself on protecting the land, the 10th Legion, is accused of killing the king, and the people, lead by his bastard daughter, Jeyne Kassynder, rise up and destroy this group. After this civil war breaks out as Jeyne tries to take over the kingdom while a royalist faction tries to maintain control. Fast forward to the present and this war is still going on, though things aren't looking great for the royalists. Where the player comes in is that there are a few descendants of the 10th Legion as well as survivors of the massacre, and players must pick one of four characters to restore the legion and bring an end to the war. Much of the story is typical fantasy fair with a bit of politics tossed in. It's not top tier storytelling or anything, but it did manage to keep me entertained. In fact, and as I said earlier, it's the one part of the game that kept me playing until the end.

Of the four characters I chose Katarina, a gun-toting women with an Eastern European accent. I chose her because I wanted a ranged class for kiting, and generally shooting stuff from a distance. The other characters are a mage, a knight-ish paladin kind of guy, and fire spewing archon (kind of a demigod-like creature). Whoever you don't pick will accompany you on your journey anyway, so they're never too far away, but you can't control them. They just do their own thing, and only one can be out and about doing stuff at any given time. I found the guns to be fun to use. Katarina has a rifle for hard hitting long ranged attacks, and a pair of pistols for when enemies get too close, plus a bunch of special abilities. It's a nice mix of weapons.

Most bosses are pretty average in size, but this guy was
impressively huge

Much of the time I found myself mowing down trash enemies from a distance with my rifle while I had my archon tanking them up close. It wasn't very challenging at all unless I was being hit by a large number of bad guys at once, and this rarely happened. Boss fights could get a little bit more exciting because there was a lot more to dodge, or other things that needed to be done besides wailing on the actual boss. However, difficulty in these cases was still mitigated by liberal amounts of dodging. So, challenge was weak during my playthrough on normal. I guess one would really need to crank up the difficulty if they want to be pushed hard by the game. Luckily there are a decent amount of settings to choose from in that regard.

In terms of presentation, I liked the visuals. There's a good amount of detail to everything, and the game kept me moving forward so the environments stayed reasonably varied, not repeating themselves or anything. The characters looked nice, and there were some snazzy lighting effects, especially when spells were being blasted around. The one thing that really bugged me about the visuals was the camera because it can be a huge pain in the butt. It defaults to an auto-follow setting that makes the thing swing around in really inconvenient ways, and even if you turn it off the camera feels slow and unwieldy. Sometimes the thing will also decide to zoom in a whole bunch making it impossible to see enemies properly. The camera is very problematic.

What to do with Jeyne now that she
is defeated

I should also note that I was playing the PC version of the game, and it was obvious that the thing was a very quick, ho-hum port of the console game because it didn't feel like the game was optimized for the PC. The thing that bugged me the most was the save system because it's just save slots without the ability to actually name them myself. It would just display a time and the place where I performed a save when I'd go to load one up. The problem here is that there are some choices to be made in the game that will obviously change the course of the story to some degree, like choosing whether or not certain characters live. I would have liked to have been able to set the saves such that they could be easily pulled up if I wanted to explore multiple branching story paths. Instead I have to remember the time and place that I made a save before one of these events happens which is very inconvenient.

In the end, I just didn't enjoy my time with Dungeon Siege 3 very much. The game is quite easy, and the camera intolerable. I didn't find the combat all that engaging, and then there are the more nuisance-y issues of the game, like its save system. I mostly soldiered through for the story, but I could see even this not being enough to hold some people's attention. Even if you find the game on the cheap at a Steam sale or something, you may be better off skipping it. The thing will still gobble up 20 hours of your time, and there are better action RPGs out there.

Guild Wars 2: Here Comes the Gear Grind

One of the things that I've really grown tired of as far as MMORPG gameplay conventions go is the gear grind. Your character hits max level, and it's time to smack around particularly powerful monsters again and again until you finally shake out that extra fancy piece of equipment that you've wanted for your character. Mission accomplished, Wizzy the Wizard is now +11 more intellect than she was this morning. All it took was killing the same boss 47 times before that Staff of the Undead Muffin Master finally dropped. By the way, is now a bad time to tell you that a new batch of dungeons is going live in three weeks with all new weapons and armor, rendering all of your current gear obsolete? Yeah, sorry about that!

The whole process quickly becomes an exercise in tedium, as players run the same dungeons over and over again to get all of the gear that they want. Much of the time it's not even that it's a challenge. After ten or so trips through these places, most of the people know the fights, and are just in it for the loot. Up until now Guild Wars 2 has been able to avoid this, and Arena.Net talked up how the game was not going to be grindy, but now it looks like this is going to change with the addition of ascended gear.

It's been a way of getting players to keep playing a game by keeping a carrot with slightly better stats dangling in front of them, but the whole gear treadmill is getting tired. Sure, games need a way to keep certain subsets of their player base happy, usually those who plowed to level cap and are thinking, "What now?" but I'd hoped that maybe Arena.Net would at least try and do something different instead of the same old same old.

I'm not entirely sure what would be a good alternative to a gear grind, but it's not something I'm looking forward to in Guild Wars 2. In fact, I don't even see myself participating in it. I'll be taking my characters to level cap at my own pace, explore the world to my heart's content, maybe craft some stuff, and that will be that. I find myself gravitating back towards single-player RPGs of late if only because they have one feature that trumps anything an MMO can throw at you: a pause button. Seeing one of the few MMORPGs I've enjoyed of late tapping into one of my least liked facets of that genre is actually turning me away from the game, and it's a shame.

Dungeon Siege III: A Reminder of What Bad Cameras Are Like

The camera is pretty useless at this angle

Okay, a quick rant for today. Well, maybe not a rant, but a little bit of grumbling on my part. I've been muscling my way through Dungeon Siege III over the last few days so I can hopefully finish it, and add one more game to the list of ones I've actually managed to finish. It's an okay game. The story is keeping my attention, and the visuals are kind of nice. However, the camera is driving me nuts.

The thing isn't fixed so it moves as my character runs around and if for whatever reason, my pointer finds its way to the edge of the screen, it sends the camera spinning. I've been constantly wrestling with it, shoving the camera back into a position that is at least somewhat useful for me, but much of the time it becomes a constant battle because it likes to shift around again every time I move somewhere else. This is especially "fun" during battles or other heat of the moment situations where the mouse is being flung around the screen with wreckless abandon. Often it leads to even more frenzied twirling of the camera.

Only recently have I learned that I can disable this. However, then I have to manually move the camera around with the A and D keys. There's still no option for the trusty hold right mouse button and flick style of camera control that has worked so well in countless games before. Frankly, I wish auto camera wasn't an option in the first place. The other problem is that sometimes the camera will zoom in a ton so that it's right on my character making it so that I can't even see where the monsters are around my guy. It's far from helpful.

I think I would have been happier with a fixed isometric view for the game. It's a bit more old school, but at least there wouldn't be that constant battle with the cameras. I'm over half way through the game, though, so I'll try to soldier through it. Like I said earlier, the story has been keeping me entertained, so I'd like to see how it ends. The combat itself is pretty fun. I'm playing as Katarina who uses a rifle and pistols, and she's a nice ranged class character. Still, it's hard to overlook the cameras. They're not the worst I've seen in a game, as there are plenty of PS2 titles in my library that are far more worthy candidates for "Worst Camera Evar!", but it's still tough to overlook the issue.

How about you? Are there any games out there that really stand out for you because they have bad cameras?

So Many Games That I Still Want to Play

I think the next game I'll try and finish is Dungeon Siege III. I'm already
seven hours in, and the game isn't that long, so I might as well.  It's pretty fun too.

For the longest time now I've seen my backlog of RPGs build and build. It's feeling like quite the daunting task to actually get around to finishing them, but I've finally decided to buckle down and put at least a dent in that backlog. A big reason it even exists is from all the years I pretty much just played nothing but World of Warcraft, and ignored everything else. When I finally pried myself away from that game I realized, "Hey! There are a bunch of really fun RPGs out there that I haven't played yet!" and from there I started loading up on them. I guess the nice thing about that was that these games were getting older by then, so they were really cheap. Mountains of games were picked up at Steam sales for $5-$10, then I got to thinking that I should collect all of the DS RPGs, and most of the worthwhile current gen JRPGs. That's when my backlog ballooned. Now I've probably got a good 40-50 RPGs I need to get through, and these things are pretty meaty, so I suspect it's going to take a while to complete them.

This has actually gotten me thinking about my consumption of games. For the longest time, I would watch release schedules and just get games as they came out. I think that this is a pretty normal thing for quite a lot of people, but now I'm more inclined to wait. It's not just because I have a mountain of games before me that really should get around to completing, but also because I'm just so much more aware of how quickly game prices drop if I wait. This is especially true on the PC where Steam has lead the charge in aggressive price points, but even on consoles it's much more worthwhile to wait. Why should I fork out $60 for a game at launch when I can wait six months, and more that likely get it for half that? Heck, some games can be had even cheaper if one is patient. I got both Tales of Vesperia and Lost Odyssey for about $10 each, and that was a great deal.

Phantasy Star Zero is another one
on the to-do list. I'm a sucker for
space cowboys.

Granted with some games, if I wait too long, they'll disappear, and be really tough to find later on. Thankfully these are easy to spot because it's mostly games from Atlus, XSEED, NIS America, and I guess Aksys that tend to have more limited print runs. So, if they're putting out a game that I'm interested in, and it's physical release only, then I know to give it a lot more thought about buying the thing quickly lest I have to pay a premium for it down the road because of scarcity.

Collecting and payment strategies aside, I've also realized that simply looking at all of the RPGs that have come out over the years up to this point that there are a massive, massive number of amazing games out there that I haven't played. I could pretty much stop buying new games now, focus on older ones, and be very well served for at least a decade, perhaps longer as I try and play through all of these games. There are still plenty of 8 and 16-bit games I haven't played, several on the PS1, the PS2 has an absolutely massive number of RPGs I still have yet to play, and just browsing through the stuff available at GoG.com, there are countless DOS RPGs that I know I would like to spend time with as well.

Last Remnant is
another game in my
backlog. If only Rush
wasn't so annoying.

I'm not really swayed much by graphics, so I'm okay with visiting older games as well as newer ones, so I could see myself making an effort to play a lot more of these older RPGs going forward. I think the industry, thanks in no small part to marketing, has conditioned gamers to always move forward and consume the next big thing, ignoring older stuff, and leaving it in the past. I guess that sort of behavior is good for business, as it keeps people putting down money on recent projects, but I want to take time to enjoy my favorite genre in all of its eras to this point.

There are just so many RPGs out there, and only a limited amount of time that I can put towards them. Now I want to take the time to check out all of the games that I missed during my time with WoW. It looks like I'm going to have a busy five or so years ahead of me getting through them all, but I'm up for the challenge. Thankfully we're heading into a relatively quiet period of RPG releases, so I do have some time to actually play these games without being interrupted by other releases. How about you all? Do you have a backlog of games that you want to get through, or do you actually complete each game before getting a new one?

SWTOR Going Free to Play Next Week

If you don't play the game, this guy will come to your house

It didn't take very long for Star Wars: The Old Republic to change its business model. A year ago at this time it was still being hyped up as the next big thing, and that it had a good chance of dethroning World of Warcraft as the dominant MMORPG in the market. Now here we are less than a week away from the game going free to play.

The question is how many people will come and check it out now that they don't have to pay money to play it. If you go full on F2P in how you approach it, SWTOR will be a very limited experience, though, granted, a lot of games of that type can be described the same way. Players will only be able to enter a limited number of PvP matches, instances, and space battles per week, chat communication will be limited, and their characters will receive experience a lot slower than normal. So, it looks like the game is really trying to encourage people to fork out some cash to get the most out of the experience be it through purchases on the cash shop that is about to be implemented, or simply subscribing, which gives players access to all that the game has to offer right away.

Jedi vs Machine

I played SWTOR a fair bit when it first came out, but eventually got tired of it after a couple of months. A lot of the gameplay mechanics were too similar to WoW for me, especially coming off that game which I played pretty consistently for seven years. Instances and PvP had a very similar vibe to Blizzard's MMO juggernaut, and combat was pretty much hot keys and cooldowns. For all of the hype that SWTOR had saying it would make surpass WoW, I thought it was just too similar, and eventually gave up.

Maybe now that it's free to play, I'll go and fiddle around in it now and then. I'd be taking a very, very casual approach to it. I have no interest in the PvP, the instances, or the space battles. I pretty much just want to enjoy the stories, and explore the game world. That's about all I would do in it, and at a very leisurely pace. So, maybe it could be worth it at some point. I'll need to clear a bunch of space on my hard drive first, but possibly one day I'll get to playing it again.

When you fart, don't try to pass the
blame to a jedi. They don't like that.

It's weird, though, because the only things I'm interested in about the game are ones that could just as well have been implemented into a single-player experience, and that's kind of what I would have preferred in the first place. I'd have liked it if Bioware hadn't made SWTOR, and just did KotOR 3 instead. Give it a big galaxy to explore, and maybe toss in some limited multiplayer in the same vein as Saints Row 3. That would have been pretty great, I think. For now, I'll just have to make due with a free to play SWTOR.

Guild Wars 2: Time for an Elementalist

'Tis my elementalist.  She's rather easy on the eyes. ^_^

During my time with Guild Wars 2 I've mostly played characters that use the conventional weapons of fantasy gaming warfare. I've played a ranger who uses bows and arrows, and an engineer who burns and / or blows things up. However, I've not bothered with magic users yet so I've decided to do something about that and have went and made myself an elementalist. Now I'm setting off to burn, freeze, electrocute, and crush my way to a better tomorrow with her.

First things first, I rolled a Sylvari this time since I've not tried that race yet. They're a sort of plant people all covered in leaves who live in a really big forest, but I still prefer to look at them as Guild War 2's equivalent to elves. Their behavior is extremely similar to those mythical creatures present in so many other fantasy RPGs. As you can probably tell from looking at my character as well as the one from my last post, I'm quite fond of the color blue. If I can work it into my character I most certainly will.

Fried bandits.  Add some plum sauce for extra flavor!

Anywho, questing time. Like every character in the game, the first little bit of time I spent with my elementalist was in an instanced starting area. In this case, a magical forest called The Dream. This is where Sylvari first gain consciousness before being born into the real world. The place has seen better days, though, because now it's being attacked by something called The Nightmare, so I had to go fight a bunch of its minions, mostly wolf-like things, and a giant tree dragon. It was very straightforward and didn't last very long, which I liked because some of those early areas when you roll a new character run a little too long for my taste.

After finishing this area it was off to the regular game world where I've mostly been hopping around doing random quests. I started out in the area around the Sylvari capital but quickly got bored there, and have since been doing this and that here and there, making use of warp gates to get to other factions' capitals quickly, and do some quests in those parts of the world instead. I've headed to the realm of the Norns, enjoying the frozen mountain tops and viking-like motifs, as well as some quests in the human lands with all of their green, pleasant, rolling hills. I'm quite a bit more partial to those areas of the game world than the other races' areas.

Human zones have a lot of pretty
fields in them.

I've also dabbled a bit with the story quest for my character. These things can be pretty entertaining I've found. Usually I just tune out stories in an MMORPG, but Guild Wars 2 has been doing a decent job of their's to this point. About the only thing I don't like about the one I'm doing now is that it's introducing this big bad called "The Nightmare Court". After playing Kingdom of Amalur, I'm not really in the mood for yet more elven courts at war with each other, with me being dragged into the mess. It's getting very cliched very fast, but I guess game story writers think it sounds cool to have factions with "Court" in their name, so I may be stuck with it for the time being.

Combat with an elementalist is pretty neat. They can shift between four specialized auras: fire, air, water, and earth. The one you have up is the one that will dictate what kind of attacks you will have. This is compounded by the fact that different weapons also have different attacks, so a dagger would have different fire attacks than a stave would, for instance. So far I've only tried the stave, and a combination of scepter and focus (an off-hand weapon). Of the two setups, I much prefer the stave. It's abilities hit way harder than the scepter, and it has one really neat attack when using air aura that causes lightning to arch between multiple nearby targets for quite a bit of damage. It's pretty great for melting enemies while leveling. I'm actually surprised the game starts players off with the scepter, because it's not much fun at low levels, and left a bad taste in my mouth. I'd much rather have had a stave from the get go.

Picturesque!

All in all, I'm liking my elementalist so far. It's a pretty neat class, especially with how it can hop between so many different types of attacks. She's not as survivable as other classes, but I can manage. So far it's been enjoyable the time I've spent leveling her. I'll write more soon on the subject after I've leveled her up a fair bit more.

Eden Eternal: Searching for a Cutesy Game to Fiddle Around In

Fireball, goooooo!

Usually when playing an MMO I go for something with fairly realistic graphics. Stuff like WoW, Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings, and such have received the majority of my time. However, for the last little while I've had a hankering for something a lot more cartoon-y in the aesthetics department. The change of pace would be nice, I figure, as they seem to be such a carefree environment with a much more Saturday morning cartoon feel to them. So, I've gotten to fiddling around in Eden Eternal for a bit, as it does indeed seem rather cute, and they even let you play as this little mouse character, which is kind of adorable.

It looks like the game has some sort of job system similar to the Final Fantasy series where characters can switch classes as they please, but most of these get unlocked as your character reaches a new level. When starting out I only had two classes to choose from: warrior and mage. I chose to go mage because I like playing magic users in these sorts of games. There are also heroic traits that I had to chose from before starting that permanently augment my character's stats. You can only pick one of these, and from what I can tell they're permanent. They cannot be changed later like classes. I opted for one that would improve my character's intellect and magic critical chance.

So, with that I finished making my character and was plunged into the game world. It's certainly a colorful place with cheerful NPCs, and rather friendly-looking enemies. They're not such a friendly lot when they start hitting you, though (but still cute). The music is peppy, but extremely repetitive. It's just the same little ditty over and over again, and it started getting on my nerves after a while. The worst part is that the tunes started getting stuck in my head after a while. I recommend listening to your own music while playing.

Quests are extremely typical fair: kill ten of these, collect five of those, etc. and the game has an auto-pathing system to it so you don't even need to manually move your character to the next batch of baddies that you're supposed to smack around. Just right-click on their names on the little quest list thing to the right of the screen, and your on-screen alter ego will start running there by his / herself.

When your character gets where she's going, and it's time to start bonking monsters over the head, combat is also traditional with a series of hot keys and cooldowns. My mage just cycles between his fireball and lightning spell, occasionally tossing in an ice spell. I haven't had much use for other abilities that he's learned so far like area effect attacks. Maybe those will come in handy at higher levels, but I'll have to wait and see.

The visuals are bright and colorful

This has really been the pattern up to about level 10 for my character: gather up all of the available quests that I can find, run to each area, kill many monsters, then move on to the next to do it again. It's absolutely not a hugely innovative experience in that regard.

Character development seems pretty standard too. At each level-up I get a point to spend in a talent tree which helps to make my character a little more unique in terms of its abilities. So far I've focused on a talent that will reduce the cast time of spells, as well as one that increases magic crit rates. I've not seen a huge improvement from this, but my fireballs do seem to be launching a little quicker now. There's also points that can be spent on improving the level of spells that my character knows. I'm not sure why this is here, as I always seem to have enough points to max out all my spells at each new level. There doesn't seem to be any choices that need to be made in terms of having to choose specific ones that I want to focus on and make into my character's specialty. Maybe this is something that happens at higher levels.

I've yet to try changing classes yet, but my character does have the ability to turn into a priest now, so maybe I'll try that for a bit. I'm not sure if I'm able to carry over abilities from other classes during these changes, effectively making a hybrid class, so I'll need to check that as well. I do think I'll need to grind a lot on monsters in order to get my character's level up on the other classes, though, as I've already completed all the lowbie quests, and can see no other way of going about that.

The second zone that I went to
seems to have a seaside town

Anyway, Eden Eternal certainly doesn't offer anything new from what I've seen, and I suspect some will find it a boring grind. For now I'll keep it on my computer, and try leveling up a bit more to see what there is to see. It's pretty relaxing, as I just keep it in windowed mode, and play it in the background while doing other stuff. Just set the auto-pathing for its next destination, then go back to reading the news or whatever, and come back after a bit to smack around some monsters, then repeat the process all over again. I'm not looking for a hardcore raiding or PvP experience here, just a cute, cartoon styled game to futz around in when I've got some free time, and so far this game is filling that want reasonably well.