Unfortunate Wildstar News -- Robotom signing off

A couple days ago it was announced that Wildstar would be shutting down and sadly that Carbine Studios would be shutting down as well. I went and took a look at Carbine's About Us page and was immediately heart broken knowing that these fine people had lost their job.

I don't have any insight as to what happened other than the obvious . . . the game no longer became profitable. That's when a game shuts down. I'm sure there were all kinds of things that happened along the way that led to this, and from the mutterings I've heard around my gaming circles was that it just wasn't a unique enough game from World of Warcraft. Of course when I logged on this morning to pay my tributes, it was all the talk.

LOL Princess Sponge with the random feature request causing the game to fail.

I've written enough about Wildstar that I have it at least tagged here on my blog. In fact, this link will get you to all three times (now four) I've ever penned a word or two about Wildstar. If you follow that link, you'll also find that I Twitch streamed it a couple times. (Come to think of it, it might have been one of the first games I ever streamed.)

Here's a few thoughts on the game that seem to be rolling around in my head still about the game:

Housing -- The first thing I remembered from my time playing Wildstar the one thing that REALLY caught my attention more than anything else was the housing system. It was simply amazing. In fact I remember thinking, oh crap, don't let the Wizard101 players see this housing system because they'll want everything . . . ALL the things in this system. I'm telling you, it's one of the best I've ever seen.

Combat -- The telegraph markers on the ground for combat were really fun and also kind of frustrating. The game kept you moving around like you were in an FPS and I remember doing some strange finger acrobatics with the WASD keys on my keyboard because of this.

The blue box was the "telegraph" of where my lightning blast was going

Promotion -- There were some strange things about Wildstar's promotion.  I remember watching a livestream at the time of Wildstar's launch, and it seemed like everybody in the world was really into Wildstar at the moment. Kinda fun. The really weird thing was that they had a couple guys just hanging out in Times Square that they'd cut to every once in a while. It was really baffling.  Like why did they need to do that?  Did those two guys just happen to be in New York and they thought, OH, LET'S TIE THIS IN SOMEHOW! Or did they actually ship a couple people out to New York to stand in times square.  So strange.

The one really cool promotion that brought me into the game was a sale on the box price of the game as they transitioned into free to play.  If you went to Gamestop and bought the boxed copy of the game for a discounted $10, you got like a mount or something. It was like a going out of business sale without going out of business. I'm all about that.

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At the end of the day, my highest level character was 25, which I believe is half-way to the level cap. I feel like I missed out on a lot, but I also saw a good chunk of the game and had a great time while I was there. 

This morning I removed the UI, logged on a few characters and roamed around the world just taking in the coolness of it all.  Here's a few screenshots memories for you from this morning.

What a stunningly beautiful, unique, and fun world they had built over there at Carbine.  I found a lonely little island in a desolate place of the world near my favorite Robot Engineer character Robotom Digilover. 

I figured this would make a great logging off point for him.  I will forever imagine my dude spending the rest of his days playing with his pet robot on this little island, waiting for the war to finally stop.

Thanks for the memories, Carbine, and for making a great game. Robotom Digilover raises a glass of oil to you and salutes.

Happy Dueling!

Of Twitch and Sunday Night Games

Hey all! I hope you had a fantastic weekend! I decided to really give *personal* Twitch streaming a go over the weekend (as opposed to the KI Live Twitch stream) and hosted a couple of play sessions on Friday and Saturday.

If you'd like to see the entire broadcasts, I've marked them both as highlights:

First Wildstar stream
First Pirate101 stream

Out of the two, the Pirate101 stream was probably the most fun and definitely the longest. We streamed on Saturday for about four hours. My boys were dancing around and having fun (and even I got into the dancing), and the people in the chat room really made it a great experience for them.

#KyleisAwesome

If you don't have four hours to watch the entire Pirate101 stream rebroadcast, I did snag a few highlights from the stream:

Monkey Trust Hugs
The Markiplier Story / Ron Perlman hype
Kyle Skystaff Takes Over the Stream

It was a lot of fun to play with everyone, and Vanessa showed the patience of a saint. ;)

It may not seem like much to the outside observer, but this was pretty huge for me. It took a lot of talking to myself to JUST DO IT! I guess I just finally accepted that my house is a recipe for a trainwreck Twitch Stream . . . and that's ok! Hopefully I'll get a chance to practice more and really get "my style" down.

It sounds like I need to get NightBot for my channel.

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SUNDAY NIGHT GAME

The crew decided to get back into DC Universe Online for a bit, so I resubbed for the month and got a few upgrades in the new content. A few things have changed with how loot is distributed, and it seems better--you get a choice between a couple of drops now after big bosses.

I thought about streaming the Sunday Night game and then I realized that my dear friends can sometimes have quite the mouth on them, and I want to keep my Twitch stream appropriate for younger audiences . . . so that's out!

Blighted Redeemer and myself decided to try one the easiest of the new duos, and then the rest of the group played a bit in a four person instance while I sat out. I took advantage of this time to clean out my inventory, try out the new daily solo content, and get reacquainted with the controls. (I also PvP'd Spode between their instances to the tune of 5-0 *flex* and took him down a notch despite my lack of CR. That's always a good time!)

Then I tried the new Zamaron duo because I had hit 113 CR. It was tough, but myself and a random 121 CR stranger managed to finish up the instance and take home the loot. I ended up CR 116 for the night, and just like the guys were saying: it looks like grinding that Zamaron Duo a few times is really the way to go if you want to bring your CR up.

So . . . Looks like we're back in DCUO for a bit on Sunday Nights!

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Hope you all have a great week and thanks to those who came to my streams to cheer me on! We'll do it again some other time.

Happy Dueling

Wildstar Weekend and a Final Fantasy 13 bug

So, as I predicted, once my kids saw me playing Wildstar, they'd be all over it.  The big surprise though?  My daughter REALLY digs it . . . the art style especially.  Here's her:

Combat is a little challenging in this game. It involves a lot of swirling around the target and keeping them in a telegraphed field from your character, which can be interesting also given mob density. It's a lot of button mashing, strafing, and dodging while keeping track of where everything else is around you. It's not the easiest system to master, but it can also be a lot of fun. :)

The hilarious moment from yesterday, was when my daughter was certain there was a giant boss mob she needed to defeat for a quest. I was watching her play while she struggled with the controls, and she finally managed to down it with the help of a higher level player (after being defeated several times--obviously tuned for a small group), but it still didn't complete the quest. I made her click on the quest, which brings up a quest arrow pointing you to the right location. She was determined that it was the right boss, but nope . . . wrong boss. LOL!

I'm just happy to see her enjoy playing a video game again.

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So, as you can tell, I didn't get a lot of playtime on Wildstar because everyone in the family was taking turns, but I did manage to make it to level 14 and check out player housing. WOW! I really, really love some of the features of their player housing. It looks like a fun system to play with.  More on that some other day.

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Side note, I managed to get to Chapter 7 in my new quest to finish Final Fantasy 13. Unfortunately my game started acting really buggy and would actually crash my PS3. Egads. I blew out the dust from the unit, did a system update, and said several nice words to it while petting it softly (I'm sure this helps), but the PS3 refused to cooperate.

I'm going to roll back a few save files and try it again. I don't know . . . part of me thinks maybe I have a corrupted save file, but I have no idea why that would make the game act the way it was acting.  Worth a shot I suppose. I did a search on the net, and apparently, this is a bug many people have run into. It's weird though since before I was all the way up to chapter 12/13 area. *shrug* I WILL FIND A WAY! EVEN IF IT REQUIRES BUYING THE PC VERSION!

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I hope you all had a great Labor Day weekend! Let me know what's up in the comments below.

Happy Dueling!

Weekend Catching up with Friendly!

WHOA . . . weeks like this shouldn't even HAPPEN. I was busy from start to finish and I've still got a long laundry list of things to do, say, think about, and FIX!  My word where does that time go?

So let me catch you all up on all things Friendly Necromancer . . .

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1- Blaugust Conqueror!

That's right, I came, I wrote, and I won (along with a lot of other great bloggers as you can see here in the Blaugust Results). Happy I could join in and rock it.

Also, to my surprise, I won a free game from Bel's collection . . . I opted for  . . . Terreria! I've now got that downloaded and on my list of games to play and write about in the future.

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2- Wizard101 turned Seven. Wait a second . . . seven years? SEVEN!  Can't believe this game has been such a major part of my life for so long! Make sure you get your free gifts and take advantage of those amazing member benefits! My word the double seeds are coming out of my ears!

I also hope you all had a chance to join us on KI Live the other day. PARTY TIME! Believe it or not this was also our 1-year anniversary of the show.



. . . the things I do for you guys . . .

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3- WILDSTAR!  Yes!  Wildstar!  So if you haven't heard, Wildstar is going free to play very soon, and you can pick up the boxed copies of Wildstar at select GameStops for $10.

But, Friendly, why would I pay for a boxed copy of Wildstar when it's going free to play?  Aha!  Because you get cool stuff from buying the boxed copy before and when it goes free to play.

. . . plus, I just have wanted to play this game forever and never had time.  I finally bit the bullet and jumped for the game, so I can get a jump start on the free-to-play madness that's already begun.

So you may hear me talk a bit more about this game in the future . . . for now . . . Robotom Digilover, the dominion aligned Settler Engineer Robot and his two mini-robot sidekicks are kicking butt and taking names in Ellevar.  Level 10 and growing.

I'm super psyched about it. I might even stream some play. :)

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4- Final Fantasy 13.

OK, a few days ago I promised you all a story about why I was once again playing Final Fantasy 13.  Grab some popcorn.

At one time this was the new thing and my children were much younger and . . . more dangerously curious than they are now.  My son really wanted to play the game, but I felt he was too young to do so, and I was worried he'd save over my game.  I started putting away the CD and hiding it from him so he couldn't find it, and I played all the way up to what I thought was probably the very last fight or close to it. 

I kept dying and dying in this fight and decided that I probably just needed to go back through some old content or nearby mobs and level up a bit before trying it again.

That was my plan at least until my son, with a burning desire to play the game, went into the back end files of the PS3 and thought maybe he could directly play the game from messing around with these. Long story short, he somehow deleted my save files, and I was out. I was super irritated and obviously I explained to him that . . . made daddy less than happy.

So much so apparently he still remembers this encounter to this day. He's a super sweetheart of a kid with a really good soul (he's my high-functioning autistic super hero). Out of nowhere the other day he asked me to bring back this game and finish it . . . that he was still sorry he deleted the save files.

It's a huge time commitment, but I can't pass this one up to get it all straight and help him gain a new memory.

The only bummer is that I can't take screenshots from my PS3 of Final Fantasy 13, so . . . if I share pictures and things from this . . . egads . . . I might actually have to take pictures of the TV?

Ugh . . . if anyone has a good inexpensive suggestion for capturing PS3 screenshots, let me know.

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5- I finished mowing my lawn today.

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And there you go . . . A quick catch up on what i'm doing, and thank you for sticking with me.

Happy dueling!