Month: September 2010

A Minecraft Tale

Posted on by Nimgimli

Apologies in advance to those of you sick of Minecraft posts….I know there’s a ton of them but I just can’t help but add to the chorus.

It took me a few tries to get into Minecraft but once I did, wow did I get hooked hard! And what’s making the game extremely fun to me is promising myself that I’ll accept all consequences. When something really bad happens to you, it’s so tempting to just shut down the program without saving. I refuse to do that, and it gives the game a bit of Diablo-addictiveness when you respawn with nothing in your inventory and zombies crawling all over the place.

So far I’ve died when a Creeper blew up outside my door, taking it and a chunk of my wall out. I’ve died when a skeletal archer shot me through the window pane of the door, leaving me dead inside my lair (note to self, never get stuck at 1 heart). I’ve fallen down very very deep shafts, losing everything permanently, twice.

Right this moment I’m stuck at the bottom of a deep well. How’d I get there? Well, I died just before dawn. I respawned to find a bunch of undead still around. I ran, and somehow got disoriented and lost. I couldn’t find my lair!

As the day wore on it was tempting just to suicide so I’d respawn and regain my bearings, but that was against my rule. So I punched some trees to get wood and quickly cobbled together wood tools. I saw a tiny vein of coal and climbed up to it. I dug it out and dug myself a temporary shelter. Then I made a crafting table and put together some torches, but promptly forgot doing this (stay with me).

I knew it was going to be a long boring night without more wood to make tools, so with a bit of light left I headed out to find some trees. I traveled further than I should have and darkness started to fall. I turned to run back to my temporary shelter and learned that it’s hard to find your way to a new place in twilight when you can no longer see distant landmarks. I was lost again!

With it getting very dark very quickly I just dug straight into the side of the nearest mountain and blocked myself in. Now I was in the dark. And (doh!) forgetting I already had torches, I started digging out an area to put down my work table. My screen was totally black and I dug and dug but never found a spot to put down the table.

I couldn’t figure out what was happening. Then (/facepalm) I noticed the stack of torches on my tool bar. I equipped one and jammed it into the wall and found that I’d been digging straight down and not realizing it. I couldn’t see the top of the shaft I was now in. 1 block wide and who knows how many blocks deep.

I sighed and began carving a spiral staircase out of the side of my shaft.

When I get out, I’ll still be lose and now out of coal. But I’ll persevere! I know I will!

Loving this game. FF XIV launched today but I’m playing Minecraft!

Another day in… FFXIV: Levequest tips

Posted on by Nimgimli

Hmm, I was going to title this post “Another Day in [the name of the world FF XIV takes place in] but y’know, I can’t remember what it is. That’s probably a bad sign, right? I just seem to have a block when it comes to the names in this title.

And yet I still enjoy myself. Last night I spent the last of my gil on a tool to start leathercrafting, then grabbed a bunch of Local levequests. I ended up completing 3 and failing 1.

A few (maybe obvious) things I learned:

1) When you accept a levequest and are asked if you want to Activate it, say yes. Saying no just cancels the transaction. Activate is basically a confirmation dialog.

2) You can gather the materials for several levequests at once. The materials don’t show up in your inventory but you can see that you have them by looking at the levequest in your journal. So grab a bunch of stuff and find someplace quiet to do your crafting. Make the stuff for several levequests then run around and deliver them.

3) The item you have to make for a local levequest is a valid recipe, so make a note of it. I’ve started a spreadsheet to track recipes (which is geeky fun to me) but I’m sure soon enough all recipes will be on one of the many database websites out there. So if you get a levequest to make a square maple shield, by examining the materials that pop up in the crafting panel you’ll see what the recipe for a square maple shield is.

4) As a reward for completing a Local levequest you’ll get another recipe followed by “First Item: ####, Second Item, ####” etc, where ### is the name of a component. This is just describing the recipe you got… you’re not getting these items as loot. All the actual loot items you get are listed before the recipe.

5) You get enough materials to make more items than you need to complete the levequest. Make them all; you’ll still get exp and skill points from making the extra items. I’m hoping in my heart that when it comes time to turn in the materials the game takes your best results into account.

6) Speaking of which, take the time to make good quality items. I’ve seen some places say to just spam the Rapid Synthesis because quality doesn’t matter, but it seems to me I got better rewards when I turned in better quality items.

7) Which leads to my final bit of advice which is to stick to easier levequests for a while, at least if your goal is to earn gil. I think that making good quality items on a Skill level 1 levequest will reward you better than making shoddy items on a Skill level 5 levequest.

Um, take that last bit with a grain of salt though. In fact take this whole post with a grain of salt as I’m still figuring things out.

There was a patch yesterday and my Raptr client didn’t track my play session last night. I fear those two facts are connected, which is going to make tracking FF XIV a pain.

I actually drew my sword last night, for the first time in days… I think this weekend I might focus on combat jobs for a bit.

Here’s my character. He’s (at the time of this writing…this sig file is supposed to update automagically) physical level 9 and he is level 6 Botanist (harvesting plant materials, including lumber jacking), level 5 carpenter, level 4 blacksmith, level 4 Miner (harvesting rocks and minerals), level 3 gladiator, level 3leathercrafter. Not shown is level 3 fisherman.. I haven’t worked on that since day 1 so maybe the sig maker only lists the 6 most recent updates?

Bracing for impact (FF XIV)

Posted on by Nimgimli

Final Fantasy XIV continues to grow on me. In fact it was a bit later in the day that I wrote my last post that I kinda fell in love with it, warts and all. Part of the ‘challenge’ to enjoying the game was letting go and playing the game Square Enix’s way rather than trying to play it like it was a Western MMO. Shocking to imagine, but the blank notebook that comes with the Collector’s Edition is actually an essential game tool. You need to take notes while playing this game. And then compare those notes with others in order to find patterns.

Anyway, so I accepted FF XIV for what it is, which means I slowed down, stopped worrying about levels and experience and started thinking about how I’d make myself some new gear. I’ve been studying Carpentry and Blacksmithing, and harvesting everything I see as I run back and forth delivering the goods I’ve made. This takes a long time but.. y’know, it takes as long as it takes. Last night I logged in about 10 pm and between then and midnight I managed to do one single levequest. I had to deliver the goods to a camp I’d never visited before and the run out there was interrupted frequently by sparkling nodes that needed harvesting.

So I’ve made my peace and am ready to buy some Crysta soon. I’ll play for at least another month.

The one thing I’m concerned about is the launch on Thursday. The hate is bad enough among CE buyers (who, one would suspect, are people that researched the game before buying). When stacks of boxes show up on retail shelves tempting impulse buyers looking for a break from WoW while they wait for Cataclysm…things are going to get UGLY.

The community is going to be vile for a month or so after launch. I’m half-tempted to put the game aside for a few months, but the last time I did that the game folded before I had a chance to play much. The other alternative is just to stick my head in the sand and ignore everyone else, but we, The Community, are deep in the ‘figuring out how this game works’ phase and so I really *need* fellow players at this point.

I guess I’ll just have to thicken my skin and persevere.

If you’re thinking about trying FF XIV, I urge you not to. Instead, wait for a free trial or something. I think most people who try it are going to hate it, and the rest are going to LOVE it. In particular if you’re a theory-crafter who needs to min-max characters, stay far, far away. There are a lot of systems here that are not explained by SE and might never be; it’s up to the players to figure out how the world works. On the other hand, if you’re someone who loves tinkering and figuring out how things work then this might be the perfect game for you.

Am I liking Final Fantasy XIV?

Posted on by Nimgimli

The Collector’s Edition of Final Fantasy XIV arrived last Wednesday and I’ve been dabbling in it since. I’ve had a few people ask me what I thought of it. Figured it was time to dust off the blog to talk about it.

Caveats first. I played Closed and Open Beta, but in both cases very lightly. In the case of Closed I got in via winning a Fileplanet key on the last weekend Closed Beta was running, but I didn’t realize it was the last weekend so I didn’t play as heavily as I might have. By the time Open Beta arrived, launch was close enough that I didn’t want to be bored with early game content from having to re-roll, so again I didn’t play it much.

Second, FF XIV arrived the same week that Civ 5 did, and just a few days after the Sony Move, so my interests have certainly been divided lately.

So am I liking FF XIV? Yes, but conditionally. When I talked about the beta I said that it was like playing a single player RPG in a lot of ways. I no longer feel that way, really. This is more a sandbox game with some really engaging newbie quests, or so it seems. Maybe I’ll find more rich story-telling later but for now I’m in a sandbox game, for sure.

The only quests on my plate right now are the levequests, which you may as well read as leveling quests, in my limited experience. They kind of focus your sandboxing. Imagine if some said “Make a castle like this one!” and showed you a model (while you were playing in your sandbox). That’s what a levequest is. It has you doing the same things you were already doing, only with a specific goal.

I like this sandbox feel of “Go out and do whatever you feel like doing” but you have to make your own goals a lot of the time. I like that my one character can change to any class by changing tools. I like the look of the world. The graphics are beautiful to me, but that’s certainly subjective. I like that the game is so different that, for the first time in a while, I feel like I’m learning a new game, not a riff on all the games that came before it. There’s a lot of trial and error and/or web research. For me, as a change of pace, this is fun. I do wish the game had come with a thick manual though.

Sitting at the top of the list of things I don’t like: the payment system. First, the pricing. You pay $9.99 just to have an account, and then you pay $3/month per character, and that includes your first character. So an account with 1 character is $12.99/month. If you want two characters, it’s $15.99/month and so on. You can save if you sign up for 3 or 6 months at a time. Of course the good news is that you don’t really need more than 1 character and if you stick to just one then FF XIV is cheaper than most sub-based MMOs.

Worse is how you pay for your sub. You can’t just give them a credit card. Nope, you can either sign up for some third party service called ClickandBuy, register you credit card with them, and then use that account to pay, or you can buy Crysta, which are basically FF XIV points. These you can buy via PayPal or “Ultimate Gamer Cards” that you can pick up at Wal-Marts or certain drugstores or Gamestop. 1 Crysta = 1 cent. So a 1 month sub can be paid for with 1,299 Crysta. But guess what? You can purchase Crysta 500, 1000 or 2000 at a time. You can’t buy 1,299 Crysta so you’re going to have to have left-overs.

Remember Chronicles of Spellborn? We saw how well janky payment options worked for them.

Anyway enough ranting about the payment system. Let’s talk UI & controls. A lot of people hate the controls and the UI. They aren’t that much of an issue for me but if you expect to translate your WoW or Warhammer or EQ2 controls to FF XIV you’re going to be very disappointed. The good news is that they’ve improved the mouse cursor response rate in the launch version, but I still tend to jump from Gamepad to all-keyboard and don’t use the mouse much at all.

FFXIV supports macros and lots of / commands and you’re going to want to use both of these at certain times.

I guess this is long enough for now. If you jumped over the tl;dr stuff I’ll recap. I like the game, but I tend to play it for an hour here, an hour there. I don’t get sucked in and play it for hours straight. It’s a very casual game for me. I’m still dinking around with low-level jobs, seeing what they all feel like and getting a sense for what I’m going to want to do.

It has a player-driven economy from what I’ve seen, but sadly no housing. Somehow to me a sandbox game needs housing to feel complete. Housing gives crafters a lot of stuff to build, after all.

My guess is that I’ll keep playing for a month or two and then probably let it go and give it another try when it hits the PS3. It feels like a game that’ll be perfect to play when stretched out on a couch with a controller in my hand. The generally slow pace of the game just whispers “relax” in your ear every time you sit down to play. This is a game that’s going to drive power-leveling types mad since the pacing is so mellow in everything.

If you have specific questions feel free to ask them but keep in mind I’m playing at my own pace and Civ V keeps sucking up entire evenings of my playtime. 🙂

Update: Werit asks for more examples of how FF XIV is sandboxy. Hmm, maybe this is a definition thing. To me a game being a sandbox indicates more a lack of features than anything. There isn’t a lot of structure here. You can be whatever you want to be (well, once you buy the level 1 tool for that class) and from what I’ve read most of the good gear comes from crafters, so there’s a good amount of buying and selling raw materials and finished goods (though no central Auction House, which is a problem). At the moment I have 0 quests in my quest log. I don’t have NPC’s telling me where to go or what to do. I just have the ability to practice at any of the available jobs to get good enough to do whatever I feel like doing.

Hopefully that makes sense?

Update #2: One important point that I realized I left out of this post. While I’m liking FF XIV I wouldn’t recommend it in general terms to MMO players. I think some players will really love it but even more will really hate it, so I suggest doing a lot of research before buying.

Recettear: Another point of view

Posted on by Nimgimli

You should read Tipa’s posts first!

I wasn’t going to do a blog post about Recettear since I figured other sites would cover this sweet little import better than I could. Sites like Siliconera and RPS (and Tipa, of course).

But then Victor Stillwater expressed some hesitation about the game because he’s not great with sims. I’m not either, and I’m loving Recettear so I wanted to re-assure him.

The basic setup of Recettear is that every day is broken into 4 segments. For each segment you can run around in town buying stuff to sell, or open your shop to sell stuff, or you can go dungeon-diving (which takes at least 2 segments and at times more). Every week or so, you have to make a payment to your friendly neighborhood loan shark, or it’s GAME OVER.

Tipa says she’s met great success doing smart deals via buying items in town and re-selling, and doing “Fusions” (crafting, basically).

As for me, I cannot resist the allure of a hack & slash dungeon crawl. I head to the dungeons whenever I can.

Which probably has something to do with why I’ve lost twice, once in week 1 and once in week 3.

But losing is not the end! When you lose the game, you get a Game Over screen and then you ‘wake up from a dream’ on Day 2 and can try again. When this happens, you’re back to having 1000 pix (gold), but you have the inventory you did when you lost. You also keep your Merchant Levels and your adventurer(s?) keep their adventure level.

That makes things easier the next time around (the game calls each try a ‘loop’ so I’m on my 3rd loop now). And in turn makes Recettear the kind of game anyone can play, as long as they don’t mind replaying some parts. I love games like this!

Each time through not only is your character ‘stronger’ but you’ll have learned something. Like when the News say there’s a cold snap, stock up on hats and scarves. That’s what killed me in my second game. Weapon prices dropped and I bought a TON of weapons with the intention of selling them when prices rebounded. But the cold snap came and no one wanted weapons; they all wanted hats and scarves. Next time, I’ll know what to do when the cold snap comes!

I also love the almost ‘rogue-like’ aspect of dungeon crawling. Once you head into a dungeon the only way out is through a door that appears once every 5 levels. If you die, you lose all but 1 of the items you’ve collected (though unlike a true Rogue-like you don’t lose the experience/levels that you’ve earned). Before that door there’s always a boss. So there’s always this balance between hanging around getting items & experience (monsters respawn but treasure chests don’t), and getting to that 5th level, the boss and the door quickly, before you run out of health and the food that restores it.

As I said, I find it really fun and sometimes I’ll spend the entire 4-segments of a day in a dungeon. That means I don’t sell anything and if I die, I don’t gain much to sell either. Which is why I get stuck when it’s time to pay off my debt.

But so far, I don’t mind. It’s a neat ‘secondary’ way to play the game.

For $20, I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of this game.

So here’s my tip: If you know you aren’t going to be able to make your loan payment, stop selling stuff. You’ll just lose your pix during the game over, but you won’t lose items. By picking everything up you can start the next loop with a full item shop!

The challenge of story-telling in games

Posted on by Nimgimli

WARNING: This post contains massive Red Dead Redemption spoilers!

There are days when I’m really glad I’m not a game designer, and today is one of them, because today I’m thinking about story-telling. Consider a novel or a movie, and more specifically, consider pacing. Most writers take you on a journey full of ups and downs, full of contrasts. The best way to convey an emotion is to preface it with some contrasting emotion. So when everything seems grim and suddenly something wonderful happens, you really feel that sense of joy. And vice versa.

Not in every case, of course. Some stories are just relentlessly joyful, or relentlessly grim. But usually we get variety.

But in games, that’s so hard! Gamers expect an intense experience from start to finish. At best they’ll forgive some slowness in the beginning of a game before things really get rolling, but once the plot is in motion we expect more, More, MORE, MORE!!!! Everything has to ramp up until some ultimate battle at the end.

Red Dead Redemption tries to tell a richer story. [Here come the spoilers.] When you finish the plot and kill the dude you’ve been hunting throughout the game, you’ll expect the credits to roll. Hell, there’s even a great “end of the game” song that plays as you ride off to your homestead to re-unite with your wife and kid. It feels great!

Then you get there…and the game doesn’t end. Now you’ve got more missions doing mundane things like herding cattle or teaching your son to hunt. This goes on for a while and compared to earlier in the game, the pace is sedate. I might even go so far as to call it boring.

And then, the last loose end gets tied up. The US Army comes gunning for John Marston. It’s a scene very very reminiscent of the ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He’s stalled his attackers long enough for wife and son to get away, and now he’s holed up in the barn. He realizes there’s only one way this is going to end. Only one way for his wife and child to be free. He has to die. He bursts out of the barn and there’s.. I dunno, 50 enemies, and he’s gunned down.

For me it was a real “oh….shit” kind of moment. I kept wondering how he was going to make it through. (After all, I has side quests to finish!) But he doesn’t. Instead, we fast forward a few years and step into the boots of Jack, his son, now turned gunslinger and going after the man who killed his father.

Anyway, so that’s the plot of Red Dead Redemption. Marston’s death wouldn’t have the same impact if you hadn’t just spent 30 minutes doing these mundane quests where you’re just taking care of your family and your farm. Marston is content at last, and just wants to be left alone. We get that. But the government agent who’d been pulling his strings all this time just can’t have Marston hanging around, knowing what he knows.

The problem is, gamers don’t like those mundane quests! We’re rushing to finish the game; we’ve got 4 more on our “to play” pile that we want to get to. We’re pumped up on adrenaline from taking out the last boss…and now you want us to herd cattle?! Are you crazy?

So how does a game designer give the player that breathing space he needs to settle down, so that the next plot point has the impact the designer is going for, without making the game play boring? And wow, how much testing did they do in RDR so that the maximum number of people get lulled into that sense of complacency before the last battle. Put too many mundane quests in and people will just quit. Put too few in and the sudden switch back to death and combat won’t have the same impact.

I have a friend at work who thought RDR had the ‘dumbest, worst ending’ of any game he’d played. I also know he was really rushing to finish the game, and I think that had some impact?

To me, Red Dead Redemption’s story was amazing. I was thinking about it for weeks after finishing. Generally I finish a game and move on, but RDR has stuck with me the same way a good movie or book would. I’d love to see more games with this kind of storytelling, but I can see how hard it is to make a game like this, and how good the rest of the game has to be in order for gamers to stick with you through the slow bits.

Much easier to design a game based around killing stronger and stronger enemies until finally you kill the strongest enemy, then cut to the credits.

Red Dead Redemption shows us that games can be so much more than a shooting gallery, if we’re only willing to let them be.

Back to WoW?

Posted on by Nimgimli

I found my receipt for Wrath of the Lich King. I bought it on July 23rd. Before this weekend I’d logged into WoW once since installing it. And had stayed logged in for all of 10 minutes.

Last night I finally got around to going back, trying to run my level 60 hunter. The last time I played him, Burning Crusades was brand new. The last time I played him at all seriously was months before that. Trying to pick up where I left off, with a default UI, was…challenging.

Today I canceled the account again, but it doesn’t run out until the 26th. Since I’d spent $40 or $50 on WotLK (and $30 on two months subscribing) I figured, what the hell, time to roll a Death Knight just to see what that’s all about. So I did.

There’ve been some neat convenience features added to WoW since I last played, like the quest info on the maps and the neat little details on what stats will go up or down if you change gear. But otherwise, WoW feels like WoW.

If feels old to me in a way that, for example, EQ2 does not. Early in the Death Knight campaign you have to go into a mine, and it easily could’ve been the exact same mine I went into to kill Kobolds at the North Abbey back in 2003 or so…whenever they added the human race to the alpha/betas. The buildings are the same buildings, the peasants the same peasants.

Now, that’s fine for the old content but this was the newest, coolest content Blizzard could deliver? The one real improvement I noticed was audio; there were some really first rate screams.

Hopefully Cataclysm includes a graphics update along with all the other goodies. (Does it?)

In fairness, I should say that WoW still has the best ‘feeling’ melee combat of any MMO I can think of. There’s just something impactful (I may have just made up that word) about hitting an enemy with a sword that makes it feel like you’re really letting them have it.

Ah well, I always said you can’t go home again. I did get my last evening sitting at the dock in Westfall, watching the lighthouse. And y’know what? It really just wasn’t the same. For me, WoW no longer holds any magic, I guess. Sad, really. I hope Cataclysm can bring some of that magic back.

A few more quick FF XIV tips

Posted on by Nimgimli

Server just crashed on me, figured I’d share a couple more things I’ve learned.

In case you missed it, there’s a separate configuration tool you can use to tweak graphics settings, gamepad bindings and so forth. Find it at something like “C:\Program Files (x86)\SquareEnix\FINAL FANTASY XIV Beta Version\ffxivconfig.exe”

It should be in your Start Menu too, under SQUARE ENIX -> Final Fantasy XIV Beta

I was able to set the game to full screen. Petter said he wasn’t given that choice. I’m not sure why one of us could and one couldn’t. I’ve had crash problems when Alt-Tabbing so went for a Windowed res anyway.

My Wired Xbox 360 controller wasn’t recognized by default. I hear a lot of people prefer playing with a controller. If you have one, that config tool should allow you to enable it, but you’ll have to bind commands yourself. I’m still futzing with that to get a good layout.

The IJKL keys move the camera. You can try using WSJL to move (W & S for forward & back, and J & L for turning). That can be a challenge but some folks swear by it.

Turns out you can pan the maps with IJKL too. That’ll make navigating much easier!

The following two images are copyright Square Enix… hopefully I won’t get thrown in jail for sharing them. My Open Beta account doesn’t seem to have access to the beta test site where these came from, and they can be pretty helpful:

Getting started in FF XIV

Posted on by Nimgimli

I thought I might share a few tips about Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV, now that it’s in Open Beta. I am NOT an expert on the game but I’ve played enough to figure out some of the frustrations newbies have.

First let’s talk about pacing. FF XIV is 1 part MMO, 1 part adventure game. The pace of it is pretty slow, there’s lots of text to read, lots of in-engine cut scenes to set the mood. Lots of conversations with NPCs, plenty of story to uncover. If you’re looking for a fast-paced game, FF XIV probably isn’t right for you. On the other hand, if you love single player Final Fantasy games, FF XIV will be right up your alley.

Second, interface. Hot topic. FF XIV uses its own interface. If you’re used to mouse-driven MMO’s you’ll hate the interface here. You will use the mouse, but the primary control device is the keyboard. Tab will select a target and Enter will interact with that target. (You can click on a target if you prefer.) To progress a conversation, hit Enter again. F toggles between fighting and passive stances. 1 on the numeric keypad toggles between walking and running. R toggles auto-run. – on the numeric keypad opens the main menu. Spacebar opens the chat input window. Basically it’s worth having a look at the keyboard bindings in the configuration menu.

The mouse is mostly used for camera control. At least, that’s how I’ve been playing.

[The following assumes you’ve started as an adventurer class, not a craftsperson.]

OK so you finally start the game, create a character, enter a city… the first bit you’ll go through is like a prolog that sets up how you’ve arrived at this new city. This is an instance and no other players are in it. It’ll end with a battle. Once you finish that you’ll zone out of the instance. There’ll be some NPCs nearby (green names). Talk to them. No, they won’t have ! over their heads. One will offer to escort you to the adventurer’s guild (I’ve done 2 of the 3 [?] starter cities and am assuming they all start the same.) Accept and a cut-scene will show you arriving at the destination.

Once you get to the Adventurer’s Guild, talk to the nearest NPC. He/she ought to give you the option of “Small Talk” (back story, basically) or a quest name. You can always open the main menu and check your Journal to find out who you need to talk to. Once you engage this person (and yeah, you might need to talk to a couple NPCs before you find the right one) s/he’ll chat you up and then send you out to a camp in the wilderness. This is the start of a chain of quests that teaches you the game.

Finding your way might not be easy. There’re two maps you can check. Hit M to see a generic map of the area, and check your quest journal to show a map localized on your destination. Step 1 is getting out of the city. I’ve been in two starting cities. The one that’s a port town was a bitch to get out of. The desert town was much easier. Anyway, finding your way around the city is part of the game; there’s not a lot of hand-holding here. Once you get outside it should be relatively easy to find the camp you’ve been directed to. Look at the Quest Journal’s map and compare the landmarks with your ‘big’ [M] map. Off you go.

When you get to the camp you’ll find a big crystal in the middle of it. When you get near it you’ll notice (or not) an icon floating near the top of your window. What I do at this point is open the main menu (- on the numpad, or click the icon) and at the top of the list you’ll see Aetheryte or whatever this crystal is called. At about the same time you contact from the Adventurer’s Guild will be talking to you via text chat.

Bottom line is, you’ll get a bunch of options off this crystal. First pick the Tome one…that’s a quickie user manual. Take the time to read it. Yeah I know, you want to kill. Read it anyway. Once that’s done, initiate the levequest from the crystal. You should be offered a buff. Accept that too. You’ll be prompted for a difficulty level. Pick Solo. The levequest will be to kill a few mobs…and now you’ll see a glowie arrow on the edge of your minimap. Follow that to the area where the mobs are. You’ll see them as pulsing orange circles on the mini map when you get near.

Time to fight! Target the mob, then hit F to go into Attack Mode. Right now you have 1 attack, bound to the 1 key. So hit it and you’ll attack the mob. Hit it again and again. You’ll see there’s a stamina meter that goes down but I’m not sure it’s possible to run out of stamina at this point. There is no auto-attack; you have to spam that 1 key. Position counts and if you really want the practice you can try to circle-strafe behind the baddie but it probably won’t be necessary.

Between fights if you need to heal, hit F to go out of attack mode.

If the mob drops loot it’ll go into your inventory. Don’t bother trying to click on the corpse. As far as I can tell that does nothing (maybe later you might be able to harvest from it?).

Once you’ve killed your requisite # of mobs a glowy spire will appear next to you. Interact with that (Main Menu, top choice) to reap the rewards of the levequest and teleport you back to camp.

OK you’re done here, time to run back to the city, to the adventurer’s guild. Your contact will tell you about actions. Yup, you weren’t paying attention but you earned some new skills.

Setting up skills is obtuse as hell.

1) Open the main menu, then Actions & Traits
2) On the right panel you’ll see an empty dropdown menu. Drop it down to reveal Sword, or Axe, or Bow, or whatever your weapon is.
3) Choose that weapon and you’ll see you’ve got 2 or 3 new skills that aren’t slotted
4) On the left side, click on the box next to your default skill. We’re going to bind a skill to the 2 key, that’s the second box
5) Now click the skill you want to bind over on the right side.
6) A pop-up window appeared, outside of the Actions & Traits panel. Awkward! Click “Equip in Main Hand” to bind the skill to the 2 key

Well, unless you have a shield skill or something, then I guess you’d equip it in your off hand.

Now talk to your Adventurer’s Guild contact, and s/he start you on a series of quests to explore the city.

I guess that’s enough for today. Hope this helps you get started and helps you avoid some of the frustrations that you might encounter.

Note: Final Fantasy XIV is not going to be for everybody. In fact, it isn’t going to be for most people. If you tried it and hated it, that’s fine, but don’t post a comment here. I’ll remove it if you do. There’re plenty of places on the web to bitch about how much FF XIV sucks.

I’m trying to put together a place where people (like me) who are enjoying the game, or are willing to give something different a try, can come and get a bit of help and/or ask questions. I don’t mean to come across as an ass but, well, I just want this to stay on topic, and the topic is helping other fans of the game learn to play.

Dead Rising 2: Day 0 – Brilliant marketing or major stumble?

Posted on by Nimgimli

So yesterday the mini-prequel for Dead Rising 2 went on sale for $5.00. At least I think that’s what 400 points equates to. I hate MS Points, but that’s a rant for another day.

I’ve heard people criticize this game as being a paid demo and you can certainly look at it that way (though curiously enough, there’s a trial version… which would be a demo of a demo) but I guess their intent was to deliver you some unique content that would get you psyched for the game. At $5 that seemed ok and I liked the idea that I wouldn’t have to replay this content in the full version. And after an hour or so of playing I felt like I had a really good idea of what the full game would be like (though since I played a bit of the first Dead Rising, I had a good idea anyway).

So maybe this is brilliant marketing. They get a few bucks out of us, we get a fun experience and excited about the game. And it was fun, though I felt the rather heavy storyline (your 6-7 year old daughter has been bitten and you need to keep her from turning into a zombie) kind of jarred against the campy fun of jamming a traffic cone over a zombie’s head and then bludgeoning it with a purse. The voice acting of the little girl is what made the difference I guess..she sounded really cute, though the Dead Rising engine can’t actually make anything or anyone LOOK cute.

Still, I had fun and don’t regret the purchase at all. So, marketing thumbs up!

But then there’s the flip side. Dead Rising is kind of a 1-trick pony. You kill zombies with any and everything available while playing what’s essentially an adventure game of sorts. Find hidden items, escort people. There’s a bit of level-up goodness, too.

For me, Dead Rising 2: Day 0 really scratched that zombie obliterating itch. I liked it! But I felt like it was enough and that I really didn’t need to run out and spend $60 for more of the same in the full game. Admittedly I wasn’t 100% convinced to buy before I tried Day 0, but it was within the realm of possibility. Now it isn’t. Dead Rising 2 is now on my “grab it on sale for $20-$40 sometime in the future” list.

I guess you could point at a demo and argue that it is the same double-edged sword, but Day 0 has to be a bit longer and more engaging than a typical demo in order for them to justify the $5 cost.

I’m just wondering if Capcom will generate more, or fewer, sales by putting this out there. I guess we’ll never know for sure.