Killing Zombies!

No, wait, zombies are silly, I don't want to make a post about zombies. Therefore, I won't! Ha, take that, Renée Descartes!

Also, I've redesigned my blog. Largely because the old one looked like arse, as it happens. I'm also intending to keep up a more reliable daily updating schedule again, so stay tuned!

Here's what I really want to talk about; classes! Specifically, classes in gaming.

See, whenever you have a game with different classes, that is something that the developers and/or publishers like to tout as some kind of really innovative measure, having forgotten that it's only been used in gaming for roughly as long as the concept of pressing buttons on a control pad to make shit happen onscreen, that also brings a whole lot of variation and versatility to the game. After all, if you have five classes, that's a whopping five games in one!

Bollocks.

What we're always stuck with whenever a game features different classes is a different set of skills for each and every one, but the game itself is the same fuckmothering game every single time you pick it up. Diablo II with a paladin is the exact same game as Diablo II with a barbarian, only you look kinda different when you click things to death.

Now, this is what impressed me greatly about Star Wars The Old Republic. There were different classes, like in every MMO and their dog, but each class had a different main quest that tied into the type of character it represented. For instance, the smuggler gets a main quest that is centered around finding some kind of hoity toity treasure left behind by some twat or another, and the sith sorcerer gets a main quest centered around getting into the fucking ruling council of the empire.

These don't just lend a little colouring to the regular monotonous grind of MMO questing, it is a substantial enough part of the questing experience that you get a considerably different experience depending on which class you play. Heck, you even get a different set of sidekicks with actual personalities and storylines of their own with each and every class. Okay, Bioware, you can stop showing off now; we already know storytelling and characterization are your little EA prison bitches.

I happen to have discovered that the polar opposite to Bioware's erect macho grande is the flaccid and whimpy Dead Island. Now, I might've said at some point that it's a good game, and I still think that, but by fuck have the developers phoned it in when it comes to the four different characters with supposedly different skillsets.

They all get the same story, conversations, if you can call them that since you don't have any choices to make whatsoever, and weapons. The only thing that differentiates them is their skill trees, which are still not particularly different except they seem to have been randomized for each class. So yes, they all get roughly the same skills, except they're switched around the trees randomly. What the fuck, Dead Island? I thought I could trust you! I know one game that isn't going to be joining my group of plucky survivors after the zombie apocalypse has kicked off!

That was about zombies, wasn't it?

Fuck.