D&D: Daggerdumb

Pressed for time, Mr. Randomessa and I didn’t have a chance to pick up Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale on its release date. Truth be told, I hadn’t even known that Daggerdale had released, as I hadn’t heard anything about it on the gaming sites I frequent, nor had Atari (whose newsletter I signed up for) notified me, nor had I seen so much as an ad blip anywhere. We just thought to check the official website to see if an official release date had been revealed, and it had in fact already come and gone.

We should have known something was amiss when we went to the very link provided by Atari for buying the game online and saw that player reviews had placed it at 1.5 out of 10. We should have cottoned on when we called our local GameStops and found that there were three copies of the game for our entire municipality, and they still had not sold two weeks in.

Still, the thought of being able to dungeon crawl together was too exciting a draw to pass up on, and a $15 box price can’t really be beat, so we took the plunge anyway.

I won’t bother to review Daggerdale here. I’ll only take this moment to say: don’t make our mistake.

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Resolutions and Hopes for 2011

I have started and stopped this post in progress several times already, and it has evolved from a “2010 in Review” post to the slimmed down version I offer today, a day late. Seems my first resolution for 2011 is to keep things simple.

Other resolutions I have on offer:

• No more long-term subscriptions. I have now made two poor gambles in long-term subs in the hopes that I could get around my distaste for monthly payments, but it is now obvious to me that long-term consistent gameplay is not really where I’m at. Even in the event that a game captures my interest, I would do better to bite the bullet and subscribe only as needed than to go all-in for a year (or the game’s lifetime).
• Accept that Fantasy is “the” genre for me. DC Universe Online was fun, and Star Trek Online has its moments, but the moment I glimpsed my Bahmi Chloromancer in robes, fighting chained spirits, or my Dwarf cleric in her chainmail, I felt at home. This will save me a lot of trouble when it comes to Star Wars: The Old Republic.
• No more arguing on the internet about alleged vs. known facts about upcoming games. However, I do expect to have to make a post in around a year’s time about ArenaNet’s actual claims about Dynamic Events, akin to my post about Mythic’s Public Quests. I’m collecting my sources and I’m checking them twice.

I’m also encouraged about other gaming options that are coming to fruition in 2011. There will be not one, but two D&D-inspired multiplayer games, as well as a multiplayer Lord of the Rings RPG, and I could not be more excited to see if these scratch any of the itches I have previously been unable to get anywhere but in MMOs. I am also extremely excited to play, of all things, a single player game in The Sims Medieval. For some reason, The Sims don’t ping as a single-player game in my mind, with all the resultant problems of feeling lonely and caged in not raising their ugly heads.

That most of these are expected out in spring of 2011 means I will have to ration my time between them and Rift (there arises that dastardly subscription opposition again), but I hope they will help me get over the tricky hype road to SW:TOR and beyond. And, of course, if Guild Wars 2 should see a 2011 release, any and all bets for gaming outside of GW2 are off.

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