Day: October 31, 2008

New Headgear

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I think I’ve found the secret to Warhammer. Log in with absolutely no expectations.

Last night I had an hour or so before bed so I logged in just to bash about a bit, knock off some solo PvE quests or whatever. And I did that, then headed to Bohsenfels to turn in my assorted heads, books, reports and bobs… that’s when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something unusual.

There’s a little bit of farmland north-east of town, and spectral figures were floating around in it, I thought. But I looked again and they were gone. I decided to investigate and a moment later they were back. Sure enough, I’d stumbled on one part of the Witching Hour event.

After reading Ysharros’ post about the event, I’d pretty much written it off as being an event only for hardcore players that put 40+ hours/week into the game. And to complete the whole thing, it might be. But 15-20 minutes of beating down restless spirits (they’re all of level 2!) is enough to complete the first phase, so now I too have a mask! Important Note: The mask was found on the corpse of the 50th restless spirit I killed. I’m just assuming that wasn’t coincidence and that it was Mythic’s way of delivering the quest goodies for that phase of the live event. All the other spirits I killed had like 3 brass coins and nothing else; I’m glad I’m anal enough that I was still checking them when I hit #50!

I was encouraged by the amount of chat going on in /region, and that a lot of it had to do with RvR, and not just the Witching Hour quests. Keeps were being attacked and defended and the realm was coming together to fight the good fight. I looked at the clock and muttered a curse at myself for waiting until so late to log in (damn you, LittleBigPlanet!!!). But hopefully this level of involvement will continue throughout the event and beyond.

Since I still didn’t have one of those jaunty Witch Hunter hats, I figured I’d just run around with a Goblin Mask on until I found one. I’m all about style! But I realized I still hadn’t turned in the quests I’d finished. And what do you think one of my rewards was? Uh-huh, that’s right: jaunty hat FTW. I just need to get to a vendor who can dye items now. The quests were also enough to push me into Rank 17…one more rank and I can tag along with CoWs in Tier 3!

Tonight will be devoted to the 8 hour Ghost Hunters Live Event on Sci-Fi, but I’m looking forward to jumping back into Warhammer tomorrow. Maybe I can find one of these cauldrons and get part 2 of the event done as well.

Happy Samhain to all my readers! Don’t like the ghoulies get you when you’re out enjoying the holiday!

Sony’s Blunders

Posted on by Nimgimli

Is anyone else wondering what the heck is going on at Sony’s Entertainment Division? The past few weeks have seen one mistake after another:

  • SOCOM: Confrontation (an online only game) launched with the servers not working at all well. This is secondhand info but I read enough reports about the problems that I’m confident that they were real and widespred. People spoke of spending more time staring at menus waiting than actually playing the game.
  • LittleBigPlanet got delayed because of the Qur’an lyrics in one of the music selections for the game. How did this only become an issue in the eleventh hour? Wouldn’t you think you’d get a translation of any song lyrics that were going to be in your game, well before launch? The delay took a lot of the ‘bang’ out of the launch; instead of a single launch day when everyone was getting the game, we got a launch window of about 4 days. Which might have been a blessing in disguise because….
  • LittleBigPlanet servers were also borked on launch. Not only did this mean you couldn’t play online, it also impacted the single player game (if you were logged into PSN, which must of us are if our PS3s are internet-connected). I talked about this here; the long and sluggish load times I experienced were indeed caused by the game trying to talk to the servers and not being able to. Not the way to make a good first impression.
  • Last and admittedly least, the Mirror’s Edge demo is hitting PSN and XBox Live Arcade this week. There’s a lot of buzz and anticipation built up around this game, and for once, a demo was coming out first on PSN, and not on XBLA until the following day. Except the Playstation Store didn’t get updated until late evening ET. I’m thinking it was somewhere around 10 pm? I started to download the demo, but (Playstation Store servers being the slow beasts they are) had to go to bed before the download was complete. Advantage squandered.

I love my PS3 and during the prior console generation I appreciated the broader range of games offered on the Sony platform than you can generally find elsewhere. But now the JRPG’s are moving to the 360, and the ‘quirky’ games tend to show up as downloadable titles so you can get them anywhere. The only advantage Sony seems to still have is hardware reliability and even that may be fading as Microsoft finally starts getting the 360 hardware right.

Sony has been struggling and this holiday season is its change to turn that around some, and maybe it can. But it needs to stop making these highly visible blunders if its going to gain (and retain) the confidence of gamers. Fable 2 is only on XBox. Fallout 3 looks better on XBox. And Microsoft’s game servers tend to be pretty reliable. Let’s hope that the Resistance 2 servers are rock solid when that game launches.