Month: October 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.

Character Transfers incoming to Warhammer

Posted on by Nimgimli

Everyone else has blogged about this too, but when I was getting ready to write my daily lunch-hour post I was drawing a complete blank. So I’m taking the easy way out.

We are pleased to announce that in the coming days we will be offering Free Character Transfers from our servers with lower populations to a set of servers with higher populations. To help you better prepare for these transfers we have provided additional details below.

http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=416

Casualties of War’s Destruction side is on one of the servers that is currently tagged as a ‘Source’ server, so they need to decide if they’re going to move. My Destruction characters are on one of the servers tagged as a “Destination” server, so that’s good news for me. More warm bodies to wreak havoc with. CoW won’t be moving to ‘my’ server though as they’re on a Core Server and I’m on an RP one.

I’m glad they’re not letting people cross server-type lines in the transfer. There actually is RP on my RP server…not big elaborate stuff, but on a small, on-going scale, and its fun.

I’m still on the fence about what to do at the end of this Warhammer Month (the 18th of November, iirc). I enjoy the game when I play it lightly. When I start playing it a lot, the frustration builds. But do I want to spend $15/month for an MMO I’m going to play lightly? On the other hand, I still am somewhat confident that Mythic will continue to improve things (slightly less so after results I’m hearing about this Witching Hour event). And on the third hand, I don’t want to break my ties with CoW.

A perfect solution for me would be a Lifetime Subscription offer. That I’d snap up and then be able to relax and enjoy Warhammer when I’m in the mood for it without that nagging feeling of “I *should* be playing this game more since I’m paying for it.” That’s the route I took with LOTRO and I’m really, really content with that decision.

I’ve got a few weeks to decide what to do. But I have both LOTRO and EQ2 expansions pre-ordered. Maybe I’ll let Moria languish for a while and play EQ2 and WAR together for a month or two, then dive into Moria.

Little Big Planet Day 2

Posted on by Nimgimli

I jumped back into this again, just for a few moments. Which turned into an hour and a half.

Servers are up finally, and load times are way way down, so as I suspected in my last post it looks like the game was phoning home for some reason and slowing down load times.

I re-ran the level that I got 37% in yesterday and got up to 50%. Still lots of hidden goodies! Then played through a few more levels, finishing the first “section” which unlocked more modes. Tons more fun tonight than last night, with jet packs and hazards and getting flung all over the place.

I downloaded my first user-created level. The bad: it took a bit for it to download. Not, y’know, 15 minutes, but maybe 3-4, which is a long time when you might get total junk. Also, in a way it made it apparent that Trophies will be pretty easy to farm in this game, since the level had a little treasure room that I got a 50X score multiplier in.

The good… it was a simple but fun level that had me laughing out loud the first time I played it. And of course I’ve forgotten the name of it, but I “Hearted” it so if you friend me (Dragonchasers is my PSN name) I think you can see what I’ve ‘Hearted’. Now what I love tonight I might think is mediocre after I explore more, so keep that in mind.

All in all, I’m totally sold. This is as great a toy as I’d hoped it would be. I imagine it’ll also be a cash cow for Sony… I’d be really surprised if they didn’t offer weekly DLC packs (I’m thinking $1-$2 packs with a bunch of items and stickers).

Improving PvE in Warhammer

Posted on by Nimgimli

Rick and I have been having a bit of a (civil) brawl over at his blog. The topic is PvE in Warhammer. The nice thing about a back and forth with a smart, lucid guy like Rick is that it gets you to thinking.

My basic “problem” with PvE right now is basically lack of population doing it. Running the solo quests isn’t a problem, but doing group-based quests (essentially, Public Quests) can be really hit or miss insofar as finding other people interested in joining forces.

Anyway, jumping right in, and I don’t claim any of these as original ideas; I’m sure other, smarter people have already considered them.

1) Summoning Stones and a PQ Queue: Scenarios are popular (in part) because they’re convenient. What if Mythic put in a PQ Queue? You click a button to enter a queue for some or all PQs in your level range, then you go about your business. Once there are enough people in queue for a PQ, everyone gets teleported to a Summoning Stone near that PQ area, already grouped up and ready to fight. PQ’s wouldn’t be instanced; you could still get to them the old-fashioned way. This would just be an alternate and convenient method of getting into a PQ group without having to run back and forth across the world looking for groups.

2) Checking Open Groups from the map: How would it be if you could open the map, hover over a region and get a list of all the Open Groups active in that region? You could then join one of those groups and head to them. One of the frustrations now is that you might be in Region A, lonely and unloved, while there’s a Warband pwning PQs in Region B and you’d never know about it. This idea would require more Flight Masters though. As it is now, by the time you get to another region the Open Group might have broken up. (This idea could also help LakeRvR.)

3) Checking for Open Groups while in a group: So you’ve been there. You’re in a group, you’ve run a PQ a few times. You want to go to another PQ. But is anyone doing it? How do you check? You can’t. You have to quit the group you’re in, look, then if you come up empty, rejoin the group and keep grinding the current PQ. This idea is more a convenience than anything, but when three or four people want to do another PQ it’d be nice if you could just say, in the current Open Group, “Hey, I see there’s a group of 5 doing the next PQ over. We could switch over to that.”

So there you have it, my contribution to the idea gene pool. Rick’s point is that the only thing wrong with PvE is that people aren’t organized. I agree with him to a certain extent. Presumably people *are* out there somewhere doing it. They’re just not responding in /region chat and they’re in Open Groups that I can’t see from where I am.

Last night I logged in to find a Warband of 2 full groups doing a PQ. I quickly joined them, finished the current ‘run’ and then we did another. And then the group dissolved. Where’d they all go? Unknown. Three of us moved to another PQ in the same chapter and the rest of the night was spent calling out over /region for helpers, and not getting any bites. Maybe everyone had gone to another Pairing? Maybe everyone had logged off? There’s just no easy way to tell, given the tools we currently have.

Witching Night begins tonight, which is gonna mix PvE with LakeRvR, and I’m excited to see what impact that has on doing pure PvE PQs.

Feel free to add to the GroupThink by listing your ideas to help PvE in the comments below.

LittleBigPlanet quick look

Posted on by Nimgimli

Amazon finally delivered my copy of LittleBigPlanet today. I only got an hour or so with it, so the usual huge caveats apply…this isn’t a review or even an in-depth first look.

Bad stuff first: the online servers are borked. Trying to upload a high score (which happens automatically) fails, and there are other times where I *think* (hope?) the game is trying to call home and can’t. The reason I say I hope so is that the level loading times are just awful. The screen actually will freeze for long seconds before going back to an animated “loading” state, and I’m hoping again that this has something to do with the online servers. I should’ve tried logging out of PSN and trying again.

Once you’re actually *playing* the game though…it’s just a joy. Pretty much exactly what you think it would be… a physics-based platformer. The first couple levels (that’s all I did) are a mix of tutorials and gameplay. They’re very easy to complete, but getting all the hidden goodies on level 2 won’t be easy. I snagged 100% of the items on level 1 but only 37% on level 2.

The ‘marionette’ system is really neat. Turning the controller makes you sack dude (or dudette) turn its head. Holding a shoulder button lets you control the corresponding arm with the analog sticks. So you can turn and point and wave your arms around..it’s pretty cute (though has no impact on gameplay). And there’s all the dressing up and decorating that you’ve seen in all the videos.

The presentation is superb, with Stephen Fry narrating, a great (and now Qur’an free, I suppose) soundtrack and those super sharp visuals you’ve already seen.

Now all that said… I’m not sure its a game I’ll sit and play for hour upon hour. I think its going to be more of casual “drop in and play a level or two” kind of game for me. But we’ll see. I just think at this stage in my gaming life I’m more interesting in compelling narrative than in just completing levels. That’s not really a flaw of the game though.

Oh, and I’m guessing this will be an absolute blast in multiplayer!

The end of living care-free in Albion

Posted on by Nimgimli

In a way, I blame this all on my dog. If he hadn’t found that treasure chest with the ring in it, none of this would ever have happened.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Things were going swimmingly in my new-found career as adventurer/wood chopper. I’d met up with the Abott that my mentor had sent me to, and while he wasn’t immediately trusting of me, it was clear that with not very much work the denizens of this sleepy hamlet would be eating out of my hand, and the Abott would judge me worthy of whatever hare-brained quest he had in mind.

But then I went down the Pub. You know how it goes. You have a few drinks, the bard sings a few songs about your exploits, you start dancing with the local girls and *of course* a few of them are going to fall for you.

I played it cool and all, but then she hit on me. Hard to have a tumble when you don’t have any digs to have it in though. Good thing I was flush with cash, cuz her cleavage was t3h hawt. I could buy a house but didn’t want the hottie to wander off while I got that sorted out, so what the hell, I proposed. After that she was happy to follow me around.

And then the damned dog found the treasure chest with the ring and I was out of excuses. Next thing I knew, I was married. Together we bought a house, and I wasted no time showing her to the bedroom. It was a night of unbridled passion, but I was barely done with breakfast the next morning when she announced she was pregnant!!!

So here I am, a young lad, full of potential, and saddled with a wife and kid. Now instead of spending my nights down the pub playing SpinBox and listening to the bard sing songs about me, I’m home making funny faces at the kid. And suddenly I have to worry about money. How much of a budget does the wife need to keep the house running and her happy? 25 gold a day? 35? 50? 100? I have no clue! And she’s all going on about how “We can do so much more for little Gemma” (she picked that name..who calls a kid Gemma??) and I have no clue what she’s getting at.

I need a new sword, some flash threads, coin to tip the bards! Instead I’m buying furniture…or will be, if I can somewhere to buy it. And as for that night of passion, you think that was repeated? No sir, no chance of that. Damned village girls all just want to hook themselves a flush adventurer hubbie. Once they get the house and the kid, they totally lose interest in the more interesting aspect of marriage. Harumph!

The Warhammer Worm Turns

Posted on by Nimgimli

So yesterday, not 12 hours after I posted a long, whiny, whinge-filled post, I logged back into Warhammer, and had a blast. Somewhat paradoxically, this only confirms the points I made earlier in the day. The game hadn’t changed in 12 hours. I hadn’t changed. What changed was the server population.

After 4 or 5 sessions of logging in, grinding Chapter 7 Influence with nothing to show for it but that little bar filling up ever so slowly, I finally found not just a group, but a couple of groups doing Chapter 7. We eventually formed a Warband and ran through the Plague Trolls PQ a few times, which finally got my influence capped, and got Gillain to level 16. It’s not a particularly inspired PQ but I was just happy to be out of there.

Finally free of the area, I traveled up the road a bit to the next quest hub. All the while it sounded like there was some pretty decent OpenRvR going on, but I was still licking those wounds a bit so I ignored it. The new quest hub offered a bunch of quests and I quickly knocked out several of them. I stumbled on a small Open group doing a Chapter 8 PQ with the aid of a high level White Lion, and tagged along completing that a couple of times and getting some nice new armor for the trouble (some blue witch hunter gloves dropped and I was the only witch hunter there).

So to recap: prior 4-5 sessions I gained Influence, a little XP, a little coin.

Last night in one session I gained: capped Chapter 7 influence, made rank 16, another half-level of experience, about a third of the influence I need for Chapter 8, explored a new area, read some interesting new quest lore, got sweet new gloves, a new sword, and some gold.

Clearly last night is the kind of gaming I’m paying to enjoy. So what can I do to maximize this kind of gaming session?

  • Play in Prime Time. I think I’ll Just Say No to playing during the day on weekends. I have plenty of other things to do that are more rewarding than drifting around an empty world.
  • Be willing to give up. If I log in and after ten minutes or so can’t find a group or something interesting to do, I’ll just log off and do something else. Being stubborn and forcing myself to stay and grind just makes me unpleasant
  • Stop being anal. Sharing a Tier 2 PQ with a level 30 White Lion was kind of a wake up call that its OK to leave content behind for now. I’m an A-B-C-D person. If I read a magazine, I start at the front cover and read through to the back. When I’m playing an MMO I feel driven to complete an earlier section before moving on to the next. I’m only hurting myself by doing this. The content isn’t going anywhere.
  • I’ll put this one in for Ysh: Ask. I’m part of a guild and I really need to get over my hesitation about asking for help from them. This has been a struggle for me. I don’t really think most of the guild even know who I am, and certainly they don’t know who my character is. That’s my fault, not theirs. If I never say anything and avoid Vent whenever possible, how are they supposed to get to know me?

If anyone has suggestions to add to this list, *please* leave a comment. I’m not alone in this “Warhammer is a good game when it isn’t sucking” kind of opinion. Maybe we can help each other to help ourselves to maximize the good times and minimize the sucking times.

Empire in Chaos

Posted on by Nimgimli

Empire in Chaos by Anthony Reynolds is a Warhammer novel written specifically to go along with Warhammer Online. It follows the trip of a motley band of adventurers from point A to point B where they encounter a battle. If that sounds dull, well, you’re right.

While there’s some fun early on in the book as you figure out what class each character is supposed to be, overall there’s just not much plot here. Annaliese Jaegar (a shameless surname ripoff from Felix Jaegar of the Gotrek & Felix stories) is a peasant girl who becomes a Warrior Priest, so at least she grows and changes over the course of the book, but the rest of the gang — Udo Grunwald the Witch Hunter, Thorrick the Ironbreaker, Eldanair the Shadow Warrior and Karl the Knight of the Blazing Sun — are caricatures of their classes who for the most part arrive at the end of the book unchanged from when they entered.

There are a *lot* of battle scenes and writing these is Reynold’s single strong point, but after a while you just start skimming “mighty axe blow opens him to the waist…blah blah blah…bits of brain spatter across her face…blah blah blah…screams of dying men and horses…yeah ok when does the *story* start again??”

But as for the rest of the writing, it is *abysmal*. I imagine what happened (since Reynolds seems to have written some other novels that have decent Amazon ratings) is that this was a super rush job that no editor ever looked at. The point of view drifts aimlessly from character to character to third party back to another character until you can only guess at whose internal voice you’re hearing at any given time. There are just bad passages all over the place; the kind of bad that makes you stop and read the line aloud to someone else so you can both marvel at its spectacle. Y’know, Angrily he said, “You must follow me now!”, with anger in his voice. That’s not an actual quote; I should’ve jotted some of them down.

I could (and did) go on and on, but to prevent another huge wall of text I’m just going to hit delete and say: this is a bad book. It’s badly written, badly edited, has a bland story and a bad ending. The most horrifying thing about it is that the epilogue seems to set up a follow-on volume.

Oh, and the whole thing is written from the point of view of Order. If you play Destruction you won’t see much about your side other than them being a big old bag of evil.

Warhammer Bullet Points

Posted on by Nimgimli

Since my last post was exceptionally whiny even for me, and a typical Pete Wall Of Text, I figured I’d summarize:

  • Warhammer is primarily an RvR game
  • When the game is firing on all cylinders, it is amazingly fun
  • Whether or not it is firing on all cylinders is totally up to the players *on both sides*
  • Warhammer fun cannot be scheduled. Every log in is a roll of the dice; you might have an awesome time and you might be bored to tears
  • The only consistent way to more-or-less control the experience is playing scenarios

Most of this is based on Averheim. On Ostermark (an RP server) things feel somewhat different.

What I realized from summarizing these points is that maybe people don’t grind scenarios because they’re the most efficient way to level. Maybe they grind them because they’re a more controlled play experience.

Point 3 is a biggie. For as much trouble as it can be forming a group in a PvE game, you have twice as much trouble in an RvR game. You need a group on each side that is interested in doing RvR. And of course you can’t LFG on the other side.