Chaos Crashing!

For my birthday I received (after asking everyone I knew since I’m far too broke to buy it myself) the expansion pack to Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II entitled Chaos Rising. Chaos is my second favorite faction in the Warhammer 40k universe, next to Orks which are already included in the game, so as soon as it was announced I knew I had to own it.

I’ve got some positive stuff to say about the expansion and some negative stuff. I loved the fact that it stayed very RPG like and indeed it seemed to move more toward an RPG feel with this expansion. We now have dialog “trees”. Sure they don’t branch but I can see them testing the waters for their 40k MMO. The story is another solid area. It was well written and had me sitting there nerding out at several parts. Of course that is partly because I am a huge 40k fan.

The biggest negative for the game was that it has a bug at the moment that causes your game to crash to desktop when you beat the final mission, sometimes. This DID happen to me and I went straight to the forums where I found out it is a somewhat common problem. Relic assures us that they are working on the problem so that’s good. What’s not good is that the game uses Games For Windows Live which means any patch has to be sent to Microsoft for approval before it can be released. The last time this happened, when Dawn of War II launched and people were getting crashes left and right, it took a week from the time the patch was done to the time it could be released. A WEEK of not being able to play what I’ve paid for because of GFWL, a service I hate completely.

The only new unit you get is the Librarian (I am speaking of the single player campaign), though you do get to mess around with a few tanks and your librarian can, if he becomes corrupt, control enemy units. This is always fun to control a big unit and have it turn on it’s friends. If you can’t tell I did go Corrupt, and I found another complaint in doing so. Like in most RPGs that give you the option of being evil, you often have to perform poorly at the game to get the evil points. For example there was a mission where, if it took me over twenty minutes to complete all my squads would gain corruption points. I was done in five minutes but had to let them sit for fifteen in order to get the corruption points.

There are other ways to get corruption, some of them pretty interesting, though I won’t spoil it for you. I haven’t tried the pure route yet to see the difference but I will once Relic gets their patch out. In the meantime the game will just be occupying space on my hard drive. Or maybe I’ll play some Last Stand.

Another complaint was the voiceovers. Most of them are quality, well all of them were pretty good at least except for Thaddeus. He sounded monotone and boring. It was like he wasn’t trying and no one cared. It stands out a LOT when he is having a conversation with anyone else. The sound problems don’t stop there either. Sometimes the voices get very quiet for no reason and then they will increase in volume again, then get quiet again. It really kills the mood.

All these complaints aside I would recommend getting the expansion to anyone who enjoyed the base game, or to anyone who enjoys the 40k universe. Of course this is only AFTER THEY PATCH IT! Trust me, beating the final, 40 minute boss fight only to have it crash RIGHT after, before anything saves, is very demoralizing. Maybe it’s not a bug, maybe it’s Chaos.

A day at the Festival!

LOTRO is a unique MMO for me. I enjoy playing it but it’s never grabbed me like other MMOs, never made me want to stay and play for months on end without thinking of other games. Sadly I never bought the lifetime subscription as that would alleviate my guilt about being subscribed for months at a time without playing.

Another thing that limits my LOTRO playing is that it’s become the MMO I play with my wife. She’s played games all her life but only got into MMOs with World of Warcraft. Since then we’ve tried them all. For a while we playing WAR together, then we bounced around and finally we landed on LOTRO. We don’t have tons of time to game together like we used to so LOTRO ends up taking a back seat as we mess around with our other games/projects.

We decided to load up the game today and maybe get to level 40 (we’ve been 38 for a while now). Then we discovered that it was the Spring Festival! I have to get something out there right up front. Me and my wife are event whores. If there is a holiday or special event in an MMO we want to be there and we want to enjoy it. This started for me in Ultima Online with their developer run events, and moved into WoW with it’s holiday’s.

Sadly it seems the racial dances are the same as the Winter Festival dances so we didn’t bother doing those, but there is a version of Whack-a-Mole that is hilarious fun. You run around a yard and swing boots at these mole like creatures. There’s three versions of it with the regular one requiring you to stomp three Shrews, the medium giving you a time limit to stomp said Shrews, and the final version which requires you to stomp ten Shrews AND plant 5 seeds. I was lucky and managed to do this first time, while also getting the huge Shrew. Doing the hard one was the final bit I needed to get the title “Spring Dandy” which I will never use, for obvious reasons.

There are actually several really fun Spring Festival challenges including an entire quest hub built around a hedge maze which I found particularly enjoyable. Another notable quest was Bullroarers Challenge in the Shire which required you to get drunk and them walk/jump along a crooked fence top to get to another platform. That would be a multiple manslaughter count in real life but it was a blast in the game. Except for one little detail.

I HATE THE DRUNK EFFECT! I hate it in every game I have ever played that has had it. It makes my eyes hurt, and it makes me feel uncomfortable. I’m unsure if I can turn it off in LOTRO but I’m hoping so because it’s terrible, especially the more drunk you get.

I’m writing this while waiting for the Shrew challenge to start over, and after I finish this I should really try and get at least the last 15% of the level.