Gaming by the Hour – week ending 6/24/2012

It was a slow week, with 3 hours spent ingame among 3 different games.

The first hour went to a new game on my list – Ghost Recon Online. I had not even heard that this was in development before getting an email Thursday announcing a beta key giveaway. Having played and enjoyed many of the previous games in the series, and looking forward to Future Soldier, I decided I had to give this surprise title a shot.

The game is pretty slick, similar to previous titles, and as with most multiplayer shooters, you have to skill up to use better weapons and gadgets. It will be interesting to see where this fits in with Future Soldier on the horizon, and with a name that includes ‘online’, I got a sense that there would be some kind of persistence to the world, but I didn’t see any hints of that in the hour I spent in the beta. If they could put some sort of world continuity between game sessions other than a simple leveling up process that other shooters already have, it could be a really good addition to the genre. I fear though, that it will end up being ‘more of the same’ with a little Ghost Recon flavor. When a shooter comes out that has some consequences for winning and losing ground/flags/bases beyond extra XP, and offers me something to get involved in that lasts more than 10 minutes, I’ll be interested – I hope GRO has figured this out, but I will not hold my breath.

I cut my time short in GRO when a call for logistic pilots went out in Eve. Once again my time proved fruitless though as we formed and caught a Titan bridge only to watch the enemy scatter.

After the excitement of Mittens’ implosion at FanFest, Burn Jita, and Hulkageddon, things have really slowed down in Eve. Hopefully something will start soon to make logging in more exciting – if not, I may have to start up a wormhole alt or something.

My final hour of gaming this week went to The Secret World. This was the last of the beta weekends and I decided to roll a quick Dragon character to see what the starting area looked like for them. The beginning cinematic was similar, with the main difference being the Dragon ‘recruiter’.

I followed the story along, met the first contact, and went through all of his conversation pieces learning the basics of the Dragon interpretation of the world, but called it a day after that. I decided I wanted to wait until early access, which starts this next weekend, to really step into this world.