There was a video posted last week (it’s embedded above) talking about a problem with Skyrim. The creator, Mumbles, focused on the Thieves Guild in Riften. In case you do not recall, the Thieves Guild quest line starts when the player visits Riften. They will be approached by a man named Brynjolf, who claims all of the player’s wealth was gained through illegitimate means—stealing, extortion, robbing the dead, things like that.

I’m not going to summarize the problem Mumbles addresses. The video is not even five minutes long. Just watch it; she makes her point pretty succinctly.

Anyway, it’s no secret that I did not like the Thieves Guild quest line. It had its moments and started with a cool premise, but I didn’t like it overall. Compare my articles on the Thieves Guild with my articles on the Dark Brotherhood, and you can see that I was far more enthusiastic about the Dark Brotherhood. It is simply the better faction. The writing was better, the quests were better, the design was better. All well and good, but this doesn’t really touch on why the Dark Brotherhood is better. It wasn’t until I watched Mumbles’ video that I realized what makes the Dark Brotherhood stand out.

On WoW Insider, Matthew Rossi posted an article titled “And the Dungeons Keep on Shrinking.” In a nutshell, nothing captures the same epic scope of Blackrock Depths and Blackrock Spire. In the comments, there were people disagreeing with what Mr. Rossi had said regarding Blackrock Depths. Their main complaints were “it was too long” “it was too big” “it makes LFD a chore” and “it’s too easy to get lost.” Let’s address this shit, just because I’m bored. Also, I did a mock-up that would totally fix BRD.

A good tank is capable of leading her group through the entirety of Blackrock Depths in less than an hour. It’s a larger time investment than any other dungeon in LFD until reaching the current endgame content. There are also 20 bosses and not much trash between which makes BRD the best place to acquire more gear in less time compared to other dungeons. However, this large boss count is what people get caught up on, despite how few of them we actually need to kill in order to “finish” the instance.

Last time I talked about World of Warcraft, I argued why legacy servers are an awful idea. Let’s just be honest: vanilla Warcraft was a mess. Sometimes I wonder how the game survived that first year, but I digress.¹

With patch 5.0.4 out the door and Mists of Pandaria on the way, players seem to be clamoring for a return to classic; it’s probably just the same dozen people who have been posting on the forums about it for the last year, but whatever. Last time, I made mention of what Blizzard can do to appease to the players who want legacy servers—why would anyone want that?—without actually providing legacy servers. Blizzard actually has the means of accomplishing this, as I’m about to suggest a new dungeon set in the Caverns of Time.

Think about it: the Caverns of Time is a great way for Blizzard to return to vanilla Warcraft without devoting the resources to maintaining the hardware to run a vanilla Warcraft server. It’s brilliant in its simplicity.

Oh, and in case it’s not obvious: The Shattered Timeways is NOT a real dungeon… yet.

I am sometimes often accused of being too critical when I judge gameplay mechanics. For example, while I understand that an invisible wall is sometimes the best way to limit a player’s movement, generally I find them to be a product of lazy game design. I also think it is cheap to temporarily take away a player’s abilities during an encounter just to make it more difficult (like removing Ezio’s ability to use “acrobatics” in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations or decreasing the player’s health in Bioshock).

I feel the same accusation mounting as I write this, but I cannot help it. For a while now I have felt that games lack a certain amount of creativity in their plots. It was difficult for me to put my finger on it exactly, but I felt like I encountered the same story in every game I played, even though they were very different at first glance. After I thought about it, though, I realized that there are two plot devices that are far too common: zombies and super weapons.

Uber Entertainment rolled out Super Blitz mode for Super MNC. I love it. It’s fast, frantic, and chaotic fun. I never really cared for Blitz mode in Monday Night Combat because it was too slow and too easy. Super Blitz mode fixes those issues, and adds a bunch of new stuff.

For the uninformed, Blitz pits Pros versus Bots. Bots will come out and march down a lane toward your Moneyball, and your team has to defeat them. As defeat the bots, more bots and varieties of bots come out from additional lanes. The game ends when your Moneyball is destroyed, which is inevitable. On average, matches will run for 18 minutes.

Being a fan of new stuff and trying new things, these are my notes for players unsure about playing Super Blitz. (Hint: just play it, you’ll love it.)

Psychonauts was originally released in 2005 on the Xbox and was met with limited commercial success despite being received with critical praise, which raises the question: how did consumers know to avoid the game? Prescience would be the most fitting answer—perhaps the discs were printed on psitanium— but it’s far more likely that Majesco simply did not market the game as well as Double Fine would have liked.

Recently, the game was included in Humble Indie Bundle V which, as a gift, brought the game to my immediate attention. I had heard good things about Psychonauts for several years before I finally had a chance to play it. Even though it could be better, I would hesitate to call it a bad game.

I love world building. Ever since I was a child, I loved building things. I would create toys for myself out of construction paper. I would build structures (with secret passageways) with LEGO blocks. I would draw elaborate maps on grid paper for my own imaginary video games. It is for this reason that I am enamored with the creativity-enabling aspect of Minecraft. The recent Adventure Mode update only makes things better because now I can build an awesome map (in Creative Mode) and then release that map for players to explore in Adventure Mode.

I like world-building and adventure gaming and although Adventure Mode caters to both of my interests, I believe there are more ways which Mojang can improve upon their current designs.

I was raiding with my guild in Dragon Soul recently. We killed Deathwing, the Aspects channeled their energies into the Dragon Soul, and Thrall fired the artifact off. Deathwing exploded into a poof of fireworks—rather anti-climatically, actually. All that was left behind was an Elementium Fragment.

Our loot rules are as follows: main spec rolls beat off-spec rolls; anyone who hasn’t won gear yet gets priority over those who have won something. Simple, except the Reins of the Blazing Drake dropped. It’s not a piece of gear, so main spec and off-spec don’t apply here. What was our raid leader to do? Open rolls, of course!

Time has finally come to conclude my analysis of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. In case you missed them, please read through the previous articles on Sequences 1-3 and Sequences 4-6. The goal of these articles has been to express the problems in game design and to see if these problems were addressed in the upcoming Assassin’s Creed III, which is slated for an October 30, 2012 release date. Without further ado, let us see how the end of the game stacked up against the previous sections.

Uber Entertainment recently rolled out a new Pro character, Artemis, for Super Monday Night Combat. She’s a mutated woman from the Outland who uses an energy-based bow and radioactive-themed debuffs. She’s a sharpshooter with a kit that makes her great for focus-firing with her teammates.

I don’t like it.

I’m not opposed to Uber adding more sharpshooters, per se. Before Artemis, the only sharpshooters were the Gunslinger and the Sniper; sharpshooters were the last role to have only two playable characters. Enforcers have Cheston, the Veteran, the Gunner, and the tank. Strikers have Megabeth, Karl, and the Assault. Defenders have Leo, Combat Girl, and the Support. Commandos have Wascot, Captain Spark, and the Assassin. More variety and parity is a good thing.

So what’s not to like about a new Pro? Much, actually.