I refuse to fall into the blogger's trap of making excuses for not having posted in a while. But I will talk a bit about what I've been up to gaming-wise. Some news about the new WoW expansion, more on Titan Quest, and an old favorite made new: Diablo II with voice.
WoW: under the Shadow
The long-awaited patch 1.11 finally came out on Tuesday. It's big, featuring Naxxaramas, which is a HUGE new raid instance (18 bosses, about twice the size of the others). It's an enormous ziggurat that hovers above the undead-riddled area of Eastern Plaguelands. There's also a related world event, an invasion by the undead Scourge, featuring smaller floating ziggurats which spew out undead at locations around the world. And lots and lots of related new quests, a new seasonal festival, and the usual gameplay tweaks and improvements and concomitant bugs 
I've been in Naxx to peek, but my guild hasn't raided it yet; should be doing that tonight, if enough people are "attuned" (there's a small but costly prequest required to get in). Naxxaramas is supposed to be very difficult, starting at the level of the hardest two bosses in the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, whom we have killed but not with any consistency, so it should be interesting. I'll write about it when I've seen some more.
Also this week my guild is undergoing a leadership transition, so we're working on "change management" as some of our officers like to say. Our old Guildmaster, who has been leading the guild for about a year now, has left the guild. He managed to do it without being too disruptive or causing a lot of "drama"; he has lasted longer than any other GM of a raiding guild on our server (as far as I know) before being overwhelmed by the stress. He has been a strong leader and I've come to like and admire him; but the guild needs to go on. It's a time to be there and raid and keep things going.
Titan Quest: tingling with anticipation
I've continued to play the Titan Quest demo off and on, and to peruse the TQ forums at TitanQuest.net. This forum has a small but articulate and intelligent community, and several game developers and the author of the strategy guide read it and frequently post. Following instructions from the forum, I went so far as to hex edit my demo characters to unlock access to some of the skill trees not included in the demo, just to play around. (I've planned a hunter-storm character for my first run through the full game, which will give me access to cold and lightning enchanted arrows and a variety of slowing effects, retaliatory damage, and a pet.) I'm anticipating this game rather eagerly at this point; it should be out next Tuesday. I was lucky enough to win a free copy of the game in a contest at TitanQuest.net, which of course makes me even happier.
Incidentally, I completely withdraw my earlier reservations about the item system in Titan Quest. Something which I did not appreciate at first is that every creature you encounter in the game will actually drop what they are using to fight you, which is randomly generated but suitable to the monster type. So if you kill a satyr archer, they might drop a broken crude pine bow, or they might drop a bow with a couple of magic modifiers, in which case they will have been using the same bow against you during the fight. I haven't witnessed it, but the developers have said that enemies will even pick up and use equipment dropped by other enemies if it's better than what they had. This is exactly the way enemy itemization works in Morrowind and Oblivion, and it adds a lot to gameplay to know that to obtain an uber item you will first have to win it from something that has been using it on you. Enemies also have classes and skills just like players, so they will use against you the same abilities you can use against them.
Even in the first six levels included in the demo you can get a lot of very nice items with unique art and stats. I can't wait for Tuesday.
Diablo II: OMG we can talk!
After I wrote about it here, my friend Maztec picked up Diablo II again after many years, and he persuaded me to try out the multiplayer game with him, which I had never experienced. About the same time another friend, Jason, told me about Google Talk, a little chat program with built-in voice. After a relatively minimal amount of fussing we both got it operative and connected to a TCP/IP game of D2, with voice chat hosted by Google.
I found the multiplayer game much faster than single player; not quite as relaxing though, since there is somebody else to keep up with. And with no loot-sharing system, stuff goes to whoever grabs it first, which adds a wrinkle to item acquisition (although since Maz and I are both cooperative players, naturally we were passing each other items we couldn't use).
Voice chat is great for a frenetic game like this; you don't have to pause the action to type. Of course I had to make the usual adjustment which goes with putting a voice to somebody with whom you've been communicating for years in writing only; suddenly they are embodied, and you are confronted (for better or worse) with aspects of their personality that might have been muted or muffled by text-only communication.
I was familiar with this adjustment from the time when my WoW guild switched to Ventrilo for raids. It took me weeks to get comfortable with it, since at first I found that processing information in so many channels at once made it very hard to attend fully to any of them. And some people I had no problem with in text became inexplicably annoying in voice, whether because people who aren't agile with the written language can simply express themselves more fully in talk, or because all of the additional social and emotional information that comes with speech told me more about them than I wanted to know.
Of course it was a pleasure talking to Maz, and I'm overall very pleased with the results of the experiment. I'll be happy to continue with this mode for multiplayer Titan Quest and Uru Live.
