Rakthar

This is just your usual "Stir up the pot and get comments to drive readership" stuff that the Massively / Joystiq writers enjoy dong.

TOR was almost flying under the radar - I was looking at the size of the threads dedicated to it on both Something Awful and Neogaf, and they were tiny. Prior to E3, other than the videos being released on their website, Old Republic had very little promotion. I was actually worried that people weren't interested because there seemed to be no one talking about it.

Now Lucasarts is finally starting to ease people into the game by promoting it at E3 and showing a great trailer, and it's "Overhyped?"

I don't see how anyone can say this game is Overhyped if they have followed this game's trajectory / promotion at all. Bioware is planning to make this a AAA fully fleshed out PvE game, and wants to go toe to toe with WoW. That means making people aware of the game and getting them excited for it. Sorry, but I don't agree with the premise of this post one bit.

Richard, I actually agree with your blog post because I had the same reaction. I was quite uncomfortable with the lack of options, but for the sake of progressing, I gave him the stick. Afterwards, I found the way it was handled odd and not consistent with the general tone of the game - the presentation, the actions, and such.

Later, someone told me that the idea of Wrath is Blizzard's fascination with fallen heroes and that you get to actually retrace the fall of Arthas through your own actions. In other words, you have exactly the same adventures that he does, and end up making similar moral compromises, with the exception being that in the end you choose to be the "good guy" despite being tainted, whereas Arthas succumbed. Or something, I haven't made it that far into the storyline.

If we look at it from the standpoint of:
-Blizzard knows this isn't something you want to do
-They handle it in a cheery way to make it seem that your character was cavalier about it
-They want until the end of the Wrath storyline to make it clear that these moral compromises for the sake of expediency bear a heavy toll

Does that make more reasonable? Obviously there are better ways to handle that specific incident if it's just meant to be a shocking quest, but is it more acceptable if they want you to have to do a distasteful act so that later on you will be "actually tainted" and feel the burden that Arthas had felt when he fell and joined with the lich king? I think Blizzard could do a better job of communicating that to the player (I didn't realize I was retracing Arthas journey until someone told me) but if it was clear, would it be understandable that you were doing "bad things in the name of good, just like Arthas" and that's why it was handled as it was?

Alliance is really the only way to go

Alliance - when only the very best will do

Who you gonna call? Alliance!

I prefer Alliance - for all my Heroic needs.

Allliance is the best

Alliance is the best now listen to my song~

Alliance is clearly superior, for those who want to look nice in their armor.

Just because a next-gen console supports HD doesn't mean that it doesn't look better without it.

Upgrading your graphical horsepower looks great, without a necessary upgrade in resolution. Want an example? Look at your PC. When you get a brand new video card that's much more powerful, you don't necessarily increase your resolution. Things still look better.

The 360 can push more polys, do way more physics, have tons of objects on screen - none of these have to do with HD.

Consider movies on DVD - they look way better than any videogames, and they're not in high def. Until videogame graphics look like a DVD movie on your SDTV, there's always room for improvement. The idea that HD is required for high qualit graphics is silly, and I hope that Joystiq bloggers can decouple the two. HD helps, yes, but there's so much more to it than that.