Month: November 2008

WoW am I ever tempted

Posted on by Nimgimli

This weekend is World of Warcraft’s 4th “birthday” and to celebrate it, anyone with an active account gets a baby polar Blizzard bear pet (as well as an achievement I guess…I don’t even get what the point of WoW achievements are).

This probably circles back to me not fitting into the “too old and too male” comments that sur- rounded Wizard 101, but I’m seriously tempted to re-activate my account just to get this little guy!! I’ve always been a sucker for non-combat pets in MMOs, for whatever reason. Probably the same reason I’m a sucker for non-combat pets in real life, I guess.

[SOURCE]

Back to EQ2

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night I *finally* booted up EQ2 for a real gaming session. Sure glad I activated on Tuesday — one tenth of my monthly fee squandered! (See, that’s the mentality that a monthly sub causes in my cheapskate brain that a lifetime one doesn’t.)

Anyway, sheesh, talk about starting on a negative note. Let’s get on to the good stuff. My berserker’s hotbar was filled to the brim with 30+ skills that I no longer had a clue how to use effectively, so I started out by knocking some gray quests out of my journal. A few updates past, gray quests started giving Achievement Point experience so they’re actually worth doing now. I played for about three hours and never took on anything more dangerous than “green” but it was a good shakedown to get the kinks out.

The increased leveling speed was really noticeable. I made almost half a level by doing gray and green quests and killing gray and green mobs. My ‘zerker is a wisp of experience away from level 40 now. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I do like getting the rat pellets of new levels and abilities. On the other hand, I’ll always feel like I failed to reach cap (if in fact I do reach cap) “fairly.”

What really struck me last night, though, was how much “local knowledge” is contained in a long-running MMO. My berserker is in Angela’s guild (of course) with a few other old friends, and I was just listening to them talk and feeling totally lost. The shorthand lingo that gets used and the common knowledge shared makes the game really confusing for a “noob” and I’m essentially a noob who is starting at level 40ish. This isn’t even remotely an issue exclusive to EQ2; all MMOs have their own local dialect. I just usually return to MMOs guild-less and so am not immediately exposed to the lingo.

What also struck me is how much deep lore there is behind the game. I went to Butcherblock vi the Sinking Sands and saw a dude who had work for me, so I stopped to chat. Since I was alone I read everything he had to say, and he had a lot to say about the political climate of the main city in the area, what sorts of dangers I might face there, who the local tribes were, and so forth. I think I stood there for 10 minutes reading and re-reading until I’d absorbed all the info.

On the negative side of things, I’m not sure EQ2 does enough to put events and things in your line of site. They have a lot of “live events” that come with updates and patches, and whenever I’ve wanted to partake in them, I’ve felt like I needed to ask Angela where they were. That might just be laziness on my part (it’s easier to just ask her) but I’m not sure. But I just consulted her on how SHE learns this stuff and it sounds to me like she learns about stuff by reading the patch notes or surfing forums. I’m a firm believer in putting all the info a player needs IN THE GAME in such a way that most players will self-discover it. Use Town Criers or something in the main cities, near the banks, that sort of thing.

Last and trivial point in this wall of text. I took some screenshots, which you can see parts of in this post. These are the default quality screenshots and I think you’ll agree they don’t look great. I wonder how much bad press this has given EQ2, because the game looks pretty sharp when you’re actually playing it. I need to tweak the settings in order to get better screenies.

Oh, and one more last point. My crashing is gone; turning off multi-core support seems to have fixed it.

TGIF, WRUP for Weekend of 11/21

Posted on by Nimgimli

Whew, what a week, eh? Everybody seems to be buried under work this week. Blogs have been relatively quiet, at least. I haven’t been in-game much.

I had huge plans what with 2 expansions and NXE (New XBox Experience), but so far this week I’ve played LOTRO/Moria for about 3 minutes (just to make sure everything was installed right) and EQ2/TSO for about 45 minutes. NXE did occupy a good bit of my time Wednesday, but last night I worked late, had to do some shopping, and we didn’t sit down to dinner until after 8 pm, then had some real-life chores to do. I got into another beta (NDA prevents me from saying which one) and got that client d/led but by the time it was all patched it was after 11. I created a character and looked around for 15 minutes and then it was pretty much time for bed.

But we’re a few hours out from the start of the weekend, at least where I’m sitting. What do I want to play? *deep breath* EQ/TSO, LOTRO/Moria, Fable 2, Wizard 101, Battleforge beta, Other Beta, The Witcher, LittleBigPlanet, Rock Band 2… and two days to play all this in. I think I’m going to have to make some tough choices, eh?

I won’t mention that Gwyn has me almost sold on Wrath of the Lich King, and that CoW’s 2nd game is going to be WoW. Temptations abound. BTW, CoW is recruiting again, so if you’re looking for a guild for WAR or WoW, read the announcement and apply.

What about you? Any gaming plans for the weekend?

Mosby’s Confederacy released

Posted on by Nimgimli

Tilted Mill’s Mosby’s Confederacy has been released on Steam for $20.

Man, it’s killing me that I don’t have the time or money to jump right into it. I really enjoyed Tilted Mill’s Hinterland and am currently really enjoying their browser-based Nile Online. Plus they’re a local developer…hard at work about a 5 minute drive from where I am right now.

Mosby’s Confederacy combines turn-based ‘base building’ with RTS tactical battles. From their website:

As John Singleton Mosby, one of the Civil War’s most interesting and dynamic leaders, you are charged not with leading vast armies into battle, but with commanding small bands of skirmishers, scouts and guerilla fighters on opportunistic missions to scout, ambush, steal supplies and harass a larger and better armed force of Union soldiers, in this game of turn based strategy and real time tactical combat for the PC.

I can’t wait to get a chance to play! If anyone does before I do, please share your thoughts.

The New XBox Experience

Posted on by Nimgimli

I spent the evening messing about with the New XBox Experience. Figured I’d share my thoughts like everyone else has. Download and install was fairly quick: 10-15 minutes (this was right after work ET so I’m sure everyone else was grabbing it at the same time). No problems there.

Creating an avatar was actually more fun than I expected it to be. The examples I’ve seen in the past all looked kind of boring middle-class, and there’s more variety than that. Now that I have an avatar….who knows? I took a gamer-picture of it, so that’s something.

My old theme got borked under the NXE, so I sprang for a premium Fable 2 theme. That fancies up your friends list (a place I very rarely visit) but otherwise is just an expensive wallpaper.

Overall, the interface is more cuddly but feels less efficient to me, but maybe that depends on getting used to it? You can hit the XBox button on your controller to bring up a mini-version of the old ‘blade’ interface and from there quickly launch the game in the drive…but that’s one more step than I used to have to do, when the “Play game” button was on every screen.

There’s a jillion ads, as there has always been in spite of MS charging us $50/year to play online, but they seem more intrusive now since you have to flip past them.

I can’t really used the “copy game to hard drive” since my launch unit doesn’t have the space, unless I delete lots of stuff I’d rather not delete. Fable 2 wanted about 7 gigs of space. Don’t ask me where all my hard drive space has gone..I have a handful of demos and lots of Arcade Titles. I guess I’ll need to do more purging if I want to try “copy game to hard drive” and still have room for downloading demos.

Netflix integration is a great feature, but nothing in my queue was being offered in HD. So it looks just like it looks on my Roku box, except I have a nice remote for the Roku box, and there’s no fan noise with it (though this 360 is much quieter than my previous two have been).

Overall, it feels kind of “fun for an hour” and now it’ll be a matter of figuring out my way around the interface. I don’t really feel like I’ve gained much. If I had a bigger hard drive, or if I didn’t already have a Roku box, then the install to disk and Netflix features would’ve been big wins, but for me personally, it was really much ado about nothing. But hopefully MS can build on this interface and offer new, cool features.

If you’re a really social gamer who has a big Friends list that you’re always looking at, and is always playing online with your buds, then the update is probably a lot more significant for you. For those of us part of the dying breed of people who enjoy solitude now and then… it’s kind of “meh.”

Upgrades and patches and crashes, oh my!

Posted on by Nimgimli

So last night, leaving work, I was like a kid the day before Christmas. Not one but TWO shiny new expansions awaited me at home. By the time I went to bed, I felt like a kid on Christmas afternoon who’d found that all those mysterious packages had held socks and underwear.

I first hit LOTRO to get Mines of Moria installed. I’d opted for the downloadable version of that, and had “pre-downloaded” and installed the expansion a few days earlier. When I got home, the servers were down for a hot fix, but I ran the client anyway and… it took two hours to convert the game to Moria! Urgh. Once that finished, I logged in (after sitting in a queue) and played “spot the differences” with the UI (which primarily seemed to surround traits). I’d read about the big combat changes but I didn’t really see anything markedly different, but then I’m no theorycrafter. I wanted to get EQ2 going so I logged out after a few moments.

Angela had run the updater for EQ2 for me in the afternoon, so no patching was necessary. I had to re-open my account, apply my key and off I went, back to Norrath. My Dire Bear was kind of cool, but not as cool as the higher level ones (my character is 38) and not as fast as my horse. And beyond that… nothing really. I can’t fault Sony; they’d made it clear that this expansion was for level 50+, but I figured I’d find *something* shiny and new to excite me, but not really. I did log in to find I had 153% of the experience I needed to level from some change made in the past. So as soon as I got a point of xp, I dinged to 39 and half-way to 40, so level 50 doesn’t seem out of reach.

But then I crashed. Silently and with no fanfare. The screen froze for a second and suddenly I was looking at my desktop. I rebooted the PC, just in case, and once Vista eventually lurched back to life I logged back in. Played for 20 or so minutes and bam! Another crash to desktop. No obvious cause…nothing that connected the two occurrences in my mind. When last I played EQ2 (this past summer) the game was rock-stable for me, so I dunno what’s up. I have updated my video drivers since then; maybe its the PhysX crap in the nVidia drivers? I started surfing the support forums, but by this time it was after 11 and I finally just said “To hell with it” and went to bed, dejected and rather cranky.

And woke up even crankier this morning. Tonight I get to check out the “New XBox Experience” which honestly doesn’t sound all that exciting, but we’ll see. I’m going to set EQ2 to use a totally default interface in case one/some of my mods are out of date and breaking that game. If that doesn’t fix it, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Probably let it set for a few days until I’m more in the mood to troubleshoot PC gaming. If it turns into a long-running diagnosis/fix attempt cycle I’ll just write off my return to the game as a bad idea and go back to Warhammer.

Ah well. At least its Ghost Hunters night!

BattleForge

Posted on by Nimgimli

There is a Battleforge beta, and I am in it.

That’s all I can say about my first evening in the beta without breaking NDA. But I can talk about what the game is, given that you could read about it in previews or on their website. Prior to a few days ago I hadn’t even heard of the game, that I can remember, but Fileplanet was giving away beta keys so I signed up. Figured the game could use some exposure.

Turns out that Battleforge is a mashup of MMO, RTS and CCG. Acronym soup! Mostly, the game is an RTS game, but what units you can create is determined by the cards in your deck. You create a deck in the same way you would in Magic or any other CCG. The MMO aspect comes in via a persistent meta-world (anyone remember Cavedog’s Boneyard…this seems similar). Within this meta-world you can choose from solo, co-op and pvp missions. By doing missions you earn more cards (I think??) which allows you to tweak your deck more.

It seems like a fun and interesting premise. I’m not sure what the cost is going to be, and in all honestly all I played last night was the solo tutorial mission, so I couldn’t significantly break the NDA even if I wanted to.

I’d like to say I’ll be playing a lot more of the beta, but with Moria and Shadow Odyssey both out today (and Amazon pulled through and the latter is expected to arrive today), Wizard 101 still begging for some attention, and Fable 2 still drawing me in regularly…I’m not sure WHEN I’ll play this one.

I’d say if you enjoy RTS games, it’d be worth signing up for the beta, though.

Weekend Recap

Posted on by Nimgimli

Weekends just fly by, don’t they? I get home from work on Friday night, turn in a circle 2 times and its Monday morning. Magic, of the darkest, bleakest kind.

Gaming-wise, I was all over the place this weekend; I’m not even sure I can remember everything I did. I signed up for Wizard 101 and played that for a while. I did some mellow deed grinding in LOTRO on one character, and some solo questing on another.

I played more Fable 2, which is proving to be as much fun the second time through as it was the first. I’m a lot more erratic this time, trying things to deliberately put my character off balance. I’ve stolen from shops here and there when they’re left untended (which is a lousy way to make a living, btw…they don’t have a lot of cash-on-hand). I’m a lot less hesitant to fight and kill. I slap male villagers who try to flirt with me (I’m playing a woman this time through), causing some townsfolk to fear me a little. My inner-13 year old can’t resist stripping my hero in the middle of Bowerstone to see which NPCs love her more, and which hate her more, when she’s in her undies. The jeweler turns out to be gay and likes it a lot when I strip, to the point where she’s ready to marry me. I don’t have the money to buy a house yet though.

I also checked back in with The Witcher, which I’m both enjoying and finding a bit frustrating. It feels pretty slow-going (probably a lot of this is psychological as sometimes a week goes by between sessions) and I really really wish I could remap keys and moreso, mouse buttons. The right mouse button fires your selected spell, and the middle mouse button activates mouse-look. In every MMO I play, I set the right button to mouse look. So I keep firing spells when I really just want to look around.

But, the mood of the game is delightfully grim and I’m playing it as “honest” as I can. I had an encounter with a woman being accosted by a group of thugs as she made her way home from the tavern where she works as a serving wench. I gave them fair warning, but they were spoiling for a fight. Soon enough they were all dead. Then I offered to escort the young lady home to her grandmother’s. We were accosted by barghests several times, and I drove them off several times, but then the lass fell too far behind me and when we were attacked, I didn’t get back in time to save her and sadly, she was killed.

This being a single player game, I could’ve reloaded my last save point. But I didn’t. I want to, as best I can, live with the consequences of the mistakes I make. I won’t re-start from the beginning if I die, mind you: I’m not *that* hardcore. And I’m sure there will be some “primary quests” that I have to successfully complete in order to drive the story forward. But otherwise… living with the consequences.

Anyway, The Witcher is pretty decent so far. I wish they hadn’t put a Poker-Dice game in it though (what we used to call Bar-Dice when I was young) because I spend far, far too much time gambling instead of adventuring!!!

Let’s see, what else? Oh right, I played some LittleBigPlanet. I kind of feel guilty about this one…it’s a great game but I just don’t find myself getting around to it very often. I think I really need some kind of narrative to draw me along in a game, and honestly LBP has no narrative. It’s just a big playground. And as previously blogged, I played a game of Hinterland on Saturday night. Oh, and Nile Online throughout the weekend.

See what I mean? I was all over the place, and that was BEFORE the 2 expansions launched. I’m pretty content in letting Warhammer lapse for now; it just wouldn’t make fiscal sense to be paying for two subscription games, based on how erratic my gaming habits are these days.

So what about everyone else? What’d everyone play this past weekend?

Update Week!

Posted on by Nimgimli

This week is going to be full of excitement, once we get through the typically dreary Monday.

Tomorrow, the first major Warhammer patch goes live, LOTRO: Mines of Moria launches, and EQ2: The Shadow Odyssey launches. I’ve got Moria pre-ordered and pre-installed but I have to wait for Thursday, apparently, for Amazon to get Shadow Odyssey to me. In between those 2 MMO expansions, Wednesday brings the “New XBox Experience” which should be worth an evening of playing with.

I am, frankly, more excited about Moria than I am about Shadow Odyssey. On the other side of the room, however, Angela can’t sit still, she’s so eager to get the latter, and she has zero interest in Moria or LOTRO. Moria brings 2 new classes and a level cap raise, along with lots of other stuff, not least of which is 2 more character slots/server. Odyssey is directed at casual level 50-80 characters, from my understanding, and since my highest level EQ2 character is 38…well you can see why I’m not that excited.

Still, more games to play than I have time for… I kinda hate the 4th quarter holiday rush of game publishers.