I haven’t played enough of Guild Wars 2 to really form a solid opinion on the game. The following are some observations that I’ve made so far – over maybe four play sessions, total.

1. This game is gorgeous. The lighting is spectacular. But taking screenshots of the beautiful scenery is stupidly annoying. I have to /sleep to get my character out of the shot, and that doesn’t always work too well. My character’s shoulder often gets into the frame.

2. Dynamic events are spiffy. Imagine masses of people swarming a world boss, coming and going as they need to. They are like mini flash mobs. This is exciting to watch and be involved in, but is a little … unorganized?

Without dedicated roles everyone really does their own thing. When a player falls, he can be rezzed in combat by other players. Very cool.

I kind of … like organization, though. I like being a healer. I like parties and raid groups, where you meet other people. For dynamic events, nobody is really in a raid group. It isn’t planned at all. You just join in and start smashing.

3. It feels fairly grindy. I kind of feel like I’m playing a Korean grindfest, somehow. Even though I’m not chain-killing a single mob or repeating a farming circuit in one zone, it is very repetitive.

Filling in farts hearts throughout a zone is different from questing. Sort of. You can do various activities to fill a heart instead of following a quest chain. I do like this.

4. Guild Wars is charming. But not as charming as Warcraft. Maybe this is because Warcraft is significantly more established?

I’m also not into the lore as much yet. Warcraft has this massive history behind it. The characters and places I’ve known since childhood. Tyria never had this place in my life. I never played the first game (even though I had wanted to!) so I never had that backstory going in.

There are novels about Tyria coming out now. I do plan on reading them if I am able to get more into the game!

I need to give the game some more time. I’m sure it’ll grow on me as I continue playing it – especially because I am playing it with people I know IRL.

Divinity’s Reach = Stratholme (pre-Arthas)

So today Star Wars: The Old Republic finally finished downloading. Yes, that’s right. I am officially a Jedi. You would think that after downloading the game, I could boot it up and start slashing away at stuff. Right?

Wrong.

So very, very wrong.

After launching the game my monitor went black with an error message. The game had changed the settings on my graphics card or something. After panicking and making faces to rival this and clicking and starting in safe mode about a thousand times to try to fix the problem, I called in the big guns: my little brother.

He ended up attaching his behemoth of a monitor to my computer and we clicked a lot of buttons and changed a lot of settings before magically making it work again. Like. Magic.

Long, hair-being-pulled-out-from-frustration magic.

He had all the patience of a Jedi master as he sat and attempted to help me through the character selection screen. Again and again and again because honestly, I can spend hours in a character selection screen. What a good brother.

Well, Prim and I are off on gryphon speeder to avoid some flesh thingumers that want to kill us.

Confession time: It’s been more than three weeks since I’ve written a post for Image Heavy. Before I left on my mini-vacation I had scheduled several weeks worth of posts!

The Boyfriend and I are taking a bit of a hiatus on Warcraft. I’m not quitting, I promise. I’m taking some time to explore other hobbies and play some other games before returning to Azeroth and all of my spectacular friends therein.

I will continue to post screenshots of my virtual goings-on here at Image Heavy and as soon as I’m back to my gnome-adventuring-in-game we will return to regular Warcraft programming!

Archaeology has made it possible to see parts of Azeroth I’d never have noticed before. Flying all over continents, searching for digsites – you see a lot! I would have never started this blog if I hadn’t seen the places that Archaeology sent me too – not to mention the bits and pieces of lore in the Archaeology items!

This is a time consuming, tedious profession that is not for the faint of heart. Those to love it really love it, though.

You play a Glitch. You have a home street, a house, quests to complete (but you don’t have to), skills to learn and upgrades to be imagined. It’s easy to get started and be sucked in for a few hours without even realizing it!

Glitch is web-based! You are able to send links, which can be clicked, through the in-game chatbox – extremely convenient  for the “Live Help” chat, where kind players and staff answer questions almost immediately. Auctions, detailed character creation, skills, and friend rosters can be dealt with without loading the game.

Characters can also take “snapshots” if they have a camera in their inventory. Cameras can be upgraded with filters too!

Each Glitch day is four real life hours. Throughout the day you lose energy and mood – you gain energy by eating and your mood is increased by drinks. Ur, the gameworld, is massive and getting around can tire you out!

If you’d like to play Glitch with me, my character’s name is Miss Eva.

EDIT: As of December 8th, Glitch will be closing for good. This beautiful, crazy and whimsical game will be disappearing. New signups aren’t available as of November 14th, 2012. I’m compiling a gallery of Glitch screenshots on this page.

Throne of the Four winds can be completed by a group of level 90 characters with little trouble. It can be found in the southern part of Uldum and is definitely worth the run!