MMO slumps are always an interesting time for me. Right now I’m between MMOs as I wait for FFXIV A Realm Rebort and WildStar to launch. I’ve been tempted to go back and play WoW during this 7 days trial Blizzard is running; anyone who ever had an account can come and play completely free for 7 days. A lot of my friends have gone back to quickly run all of the raid finders to see the content. I logged in tonight because I never uninstalled, and signing up for the trial was instant and no pain at all. I just can’t see myself seriously playing WoW. I’m not playing because I need my WoW fix, I just feel like I’m missing out if I don’t take advantage of something free.
Marvel Heroes came out today. Graev and I have been waiting for this one for many, many months. We both signed up for the founder package and bought a hero like five months ago (or whenever it first came available). I picked up Rocket Racoon (because I have an unhealthy obsession with small characters, especially when they are animal-like) and Graev bought Hulk. Marvel Heroes is free to play, and you can install and play entirely through Steam. If you haven’t been following the game, think of it like Path of Exile meets a high instanced MMO, or Diablo 3 but when you run out of town you see lots of other players fighting the same monsters as you. It’s hack n slash with Marvel super heroes. We’ll write up a more formal review after we log enough time to give adequate impressions.
Minecraft is still my go-to-game. Our community server is getting more and more packed each night. I built a workshop, mined out miles of caverns, and collected an enormous nest egg of materials. One of my friends is really fond of building worlds with one of the mods (this stuff is way above me) and I had her create me a really bright, colorful, cheerful world. I built a castle and warlock tower with Graev (he wrote about this a few days back) and I have relocated most of my building to a new workshop. I’m in the process of assisting… or rather watching… one of my friends build me a biofuel system.
Check out the screenshot on the above/left. On the surface is a cart that goes around on a track planting and chopping trees. It deposits those trees, wood, and apples into a box that sorts them down into machines which burn the wood into coal, juice the apples, and convert the trees into mulch. In the end I get apple juice and some sort of biofuel. My goal is to have a renewable energy source to fuel my crazy storage system that uses gregtech ME stuff. I won’t even pretend to understand any of this stuff.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf comes out on Sunday, and between all these other games I’m almost not even bothered by the fact that there aren’t any great MMOs to play. This might be the first slump in years where I think I’m okay with them taking their time to get it right. I say that, but in a few days I’m sure I’ll be complaining about wanting a virtual world.
I didn’t realize Marvel Heroes was free to play, I might have to give it a look now. How much content is locked behind real money transactions though? Also Rocket Raccoon is awesome, I hope they don’t screw him up horribly in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie.
I played Rift for a bit with a free month from Raptr, but then just sort of stopped. I realized I was just playing it because I had nothing else to do. Since then I’ve been spending a lot of time working through my PS1/PS2 RPG backlog. Lots of fun playing games like Lunar.
@theredcomet: Yeah it’s F2P, but I have no idea about content. I haven’t seen any money barriers other than unlocking heroes quickly. We’ll include those details in our upcoming review.
Why don’tcha play Folk Tale and tell me whether it’s any good?
18k buckets of apple juice … DJO would be proud 🙂
I played a bit (very short session to be honest of Marvel Online). It didn’t convince me to buy a founder’s pack but I have the game redownloading this morning before I left for work. I will try it a bit further f2p.
Right now my main go to game outside of when I am playing Pirate 101 with my daughter is the very good “The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing”. Over all it is a general ARPG but it is solid and also offers a unique tower defense type mini game that I haven’t seen implemented before within an ARPG. Over all it has been more than worth the money.
I have a ton of games that I have kickstarted that are still 6 months to a year+ away like Battle Worlds: Kronos, Torment, Divinity:OS, Starbound, and Grim Dawn so right now I am playing the waiting game. Well at least until sometime in June when my preorder of Shadowrun Returns should be out.
All in all right now I am back hooked on ARPG thanks the TAoVH being such a good game. I even reinstalled D3 along with TL2, Dungeon Siege 1,2 and 3, and Titan Quest to help hold me over. Heck even put Dragon Age and DA2 back on. My harddrive has turned into one huge repository for action RPG games.
I am downloading marvel heroes as I type this.
No experience playing yet.
Waiting for wildstar opinions in forums by the time it came out…. maybe ill jump aboard.
@Michael Whitt: While I liked pirates 101. I didnt like the fact thats its a demo and you hit a hard paywall around the point where you meet the floating big whale island.
That would be fine normally if they are up front about it. But they advertise it as F2P.
Yeah… marvel heroes seems to crash to a black screen as soon as I log in.
Guess I’ll wait for a patch. (yes my drivers are up to date)
It seems to work now… Picked Scarlet witch out of the free heroes.
Not sure what to put my power points in… hmm
I’m getting pretty hyped for Animal Crossing. My roommate is getting a copy and my girlfriend is going to be playing in my town. I also bought/installed Dungeon Siege III at the request of one of my friends. Otherwise I’ve been hoping between a few demos (“Papers, Please”, “Undertale”) and my go-to game is still League of Legends.
Marvel Heroes is one of those games I just enjoy in spite of its shortcomings. For me the simplicity of it all is an actual advantage. I’ve already sunk more time into it then I have any other ARPG in a long time and I have a lot left to do.
If you have an Xbox check out State of Decay. It’s like DayZ (but actually good) meets Animal Crossing. The developer plans to patch in Coop and work on a PC MMO version if the currently released version does well.
Been playing Torchlight 2 to fill in gaps between dota 2 matches.. heh
Sins of solar empire for single player crazy long RTS matches. I highly recommend this game. Perfect mix of real time and 4x strategy game.
Just bought Alan Wake and the expac on steam for 4$, not interested in the game that much but for 4$ i.. could.. not.. resist…
ME is (thankghods) not gregtech! travesty! :p
@theredcomet In regards to content being locked behind the cash shop the only obvious thing that applies to are the Daily Missions. The game currently has 3 terminals where you access those missions after you complete the main story. The Green terminals are the easiest missions and you can play them as many times as you want. They do however limit the number of shards that drop per 24 hour cycle. The shards are turned in to earn fortune cards which can reward special loot. Also there is a chance of a cosmic key dropping from those missions. Those keys are then used to unlock missions in the Purple terminal, which are group missions, or the Red terminal, which are the most difficult dailies.
The cash shop comes into play because you can buy cosmic keys for 100G ($1) if you do not want to endlessly grind out Green terminal missions to have a chance of getting the key. What the drop rate is for those keys I do not know, but you can pretty much assume it is low.
I like to limit my play time with MH each day so I do not burn out. I keep seeing people talk about the ‘end game’ but I would hope that the plan is to keep creating new dailies now that the game has launched which will give players more maps and villains to encounter.
@Blargh: See, this is why I have you make all my stuff.