The Farstrider Scout

…Is the poor man’s CoD4.  That pretty much sums it up.  It plays almost the same, sans toggled stances (COD4 has toggled prone and crouch stances, CA has crouch that you have to manually hold).  The biggest difference is the unlock system.  In COD4, you gain experience and rank, unlocking weapons which are immediately usable.  CA has a system by which you gain experience and rank, unlocking items, but in order to actually use them, you must rent them with the in game monetary system.  Obtaining this money seems to revolve around a “more people you kill, the more money you get” setup.

The biggest difference overall is price.  COD4 still runs for about $40 in stores, and free to play.  CA is FREE.  What this means is that the game is flooded with skilless n00bs, and people who are veterans of COD 4 that play tend to shine.  This can be a good thing and a bad thing, but most of the time it’s just hilarious, especially when a teammate wastes two clips of ammo unloading on you, only to get his dumb ass blown away by someone from the opposing team.  What’s even worse, is that when you DO hit a teammate, you get an audible message to check your fire.

But that’s what happens when you appeal to the unwashed masses, just like WoW.

 

In our efforts to find something to play yet again, we bounced back to Guild Wars to pick up on the Prophecies campaign again…  And a short time later, before we knew it, we had finished it!

Unfortunately, this is actually a bad thing.  With GW2 in the works, ArenaNet isn’t working on any new content for Guild Wars, so the more we do, the less there for the future.

Granted, there’s still the Factions and Nightfall campaigns, plus the Eye of the North content, but Gina doesn’t feel that it’s worth it…  And at the moment, there are other games that I would rather play by myself.

So, with Age of Conan being a bust (for now – I’m still kind of hoping Funcom will come through, but I doubt it), and nothing else really “doing it” for us, Warhammer Online is the next thing on the horizon.  Gina is pretty gung ho about it, but I remain skeptical.

Yes, it looks alright.  The things I’ve read sound really good in concept.  But there are a few things that keep me going “Why should I play this game.”  One of them is the developer – Mythic, of DAoC fame.  Granted, I had several good years playing DAoC, but Mythic was my first experience with a “bad” developer (Are there really any good ones these days?). 

The second is their parent company, and publisher – EA.  EA, in the past few years, has grown to be a monolithic, and dare I say it, monopolistic, company.  They currently hold several exclusivity contracts for major sports associations in the US, pretty much guranteeing that games made for the sports those associations represent are the only ones played and bought.  Now, while I’m not a big fan of sports games, I am rather unkeen to support this kind of practice.  In addition, their Battlefield series, which I do play, has suffered as a result of poor decisions.

Thirdly, to me, despite what I hear, this smacks of a WoW-clone (and therefore, an EQ I clone).  I’ve found that, while WoW was fun, the endgame became a staggering and ever growing curve of forced grouping and choice between raiding elitism, or selling my soul to the arena, neither of which I was interested in.

Lastly, I feel that there are two camps when it comes to Warhammer – Warhammer, and Warhammer 40k.  Now I completely understand that in essence, they are one and the same, at least as far as a timeline is concerned, but I see myself as being from the latter camp.  And Warhammer Online can’t give my my heavy bolter or Land Raider APC.

Take a very long time to finish.

Gina and I did our first ever task force missions earlier today, running errands for Positron with a friend of ours.  We started around noon, and I don’t think we finished until around 4 or 5pm.  It really started getting old after the 6th mission, and we were all glad when we completed it.  None of us really gained any experience out of it, as I was 25, Gina was 16, and our partner in mayhem hit 16 shortly after starting.  The biggest benefit was probably the 100k prestige we racked up, which I immediately put to good use in the base.

On a better note, I’m enjoying running around and exploring all of the newer content that’s available.  It’s a far cry different from the standard, run-of-the-mill “defeat these villians in this cave/office building/sewer” missions that make the game only playable for a few hours at a time.  I just hope there’s more of it ahead.

I finally managed to find my EOS utility CD, as well as a flash card reader, and was able to get the pictures off my camera.

I’m not going to post them here due to file space (I only have 100mb TOTAL available for this site), but I did upload them to Picasa, so you can view them here.

Also, the track photographer took a LOT of photos, which can be seen here.  Big kudos to him!  Unfortunately, he left after the first changeover, so there aren’t any photos of the stock classes, or anything from the second run when most of the cone destroying seemed to occur.