Category: MMO

First taste of LOTRO RuneKeeper

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve been doing my best to resist rolling another LOTRO character since I have a passel of them in their teens and only one over 30. But the Runekeeper’s combat/healing system intrigued me, at least on paper. I’ve never been able to stick with a traditional healing class… I just don’t seem to have the mindset for it. But I thought maybe the Runekeeper would be different.

So tonight I caved.

I spent so much time creating him that I didn’t get to actually play much. But what’s really weird is that he has no weapon, except his rune. So when he melees (which isn’t very effective and isn’t something he should be doing) he’s just swinging this brick-like rune around. Really odd.

At the puny level of 3, I’m thinking this is going to be a pretty group-centric character, but we’ll see. I have 1 HoT, 1 DoT that stacks but takes a long time to cast, and a couple of DD lightning spells so far. It takes a long time to kill stuff, which makes him feel a lot like a healer.

Obviously level 3 is insignificant insofar as getting a feel for a class. But I just had to share the weird brick-fighting technique. I’ll play him more sometime over the next few days and see what happens after he gets to the teens.

At this point my characters are “born” with almost a full bag of freebie stuff! 4 cloaks, 3 Moria Coins, a Bree Steed Receipt, a decorative piece of armor and a ring of agility!

A bit more City of Heroes

Posted on by Nimgimli

I hadn’t planned to play more City of Heroes this morning, but I was looking at the update notes and was curious about the new “Shield” powers. I logged in and created a throw-away character to check them out. Something about the character creation tool in CoH always brings out my inner 13 year old. My ‘real’ characters are male but when I’m experimenting I inevitably end up with a large-breasted hottie female character.

So here she is. The shield doesn’t even show until she gets in combat, which is a bit of a shame.

Anyway, I logged into my “main” after than, and set up a second “Build” to see how that worked. I couldn’t figure out a way to change your archetype, though (I don’t think you can but I’m not 100% positive) so couldn’t take Shields on him. It was still kind of fun to build a level 13 character from scratch, but I think the “multiple builds” thing is really intended for higher level characters, since my two builds aren’t all that different. One has Combat Jumping and the other had Hover but otherwise they’re pretty similar.

I did some ‘standard’ missions today, and they were fun but I started to remember how dull it got running through the same run-down buildings over and over again, or the same caves. But then I spotted a building on fire, and ran to help put it out. You get a Fire Extinguisher temporary power, and the patches of flame have “Hit Points” that you knock down with shots for the Extinguisher. I jumped into a team and we put out the fire, which was different and kind of fun.

I may even play a bit more today, and I can see subscribing at some point in the future, but probably not for a long period. But $15 to play around in CoH for a month sounds like a decent deal to me.

City of Heroes welcomes back ex-residents

Posted on by Nimgimli

To celebrate the release of City of Heroes Issue 13 , NCSoft has reactivated all old City of Heroes accounts for this weekend only. Of course my wandering eye couldn’t resist.

Let me start by saying that the NCSoft Launcher pretty much rocks. I fired it up, clicked a button and the entire City of Heroes client installed on my system. No hassles whatsoever. And why oh why don’t they come out with a Station Pass-style bundle subscription? They’ve got 7 games to offer now, with Aion and Champions Online in-coming, and Tabula Rasa sadly exiting. It just seems like a bundled sub might save TR, making it a “value add” title. They could just leave a small team to work on it slowly. I’m guessing obviously, but I figure that’s how Sony gets away with keeping Everquest Online Adventures and Planetside running.

Anyway, back to City of Heroes. My most recently played character hadn’t been played for 481 days, so I was rusty as hell. The last time I jumped in (also on a freebie weekend) a friend of mine had given me a lot of advice on my forum, and so I went and re-read all that. But having been away so long, I’m not sure how much of the cool stuff I found was part of Issue 13 and how much has been around for a while.

I had a new contact when I logged in, and so I went to speak to him. He started a long story-based series of quests surrounding a cure for The Lost (those warped people with the tv sets on their heads). Maybe I was lucky, or maybe the quest scales, but it was just the right level for me (my character was only level 10 when I started, 12 by the end of the day) and was really fun and interesting. Much more interesting than I remember quests being back in the day. I got some Merit Points for completing the chain, though I doubt I got enough to do much with.

I also went through the Invention tutorials, which I’d never done before, and made myself some nifty enhancements. I found some places where Heroes and Villains fight together against the Rikti, though you have to be level 35 to get involved with that.

It struck me how funny it was (in retrospect) for Funcom to talk about Age of Conan’s active combat as some revolutionary system, because my CoH character fights the same way my AoC character did, with ‘arc-based’ melee attacks that require positioning in order to hit the max number of baddies, and no auto-attack.

A couple systems that I do know are new are “Day Jobs” and a “Leveling Pact.” The former is a system whereby if you log out in certain places, your character will go to a day job and earn some kind of bonus when you play again. So log out in a Police Station and you get bonus experience when next you play. Log out in a hospital and you’ll get a health regeneration buff. That kind of thing.

“Leveling Pact” is something I’ve never seen before. You make a pact between your character and a friend’s character, and those two characters will always remain the same level. So if one of you plays every night and the other plays twice a week, you’ll still be the same level when the less frequent player does get a chance to log in. Kinda neat.

There’s lots more new things in Issue 13 and you can read all the details at the official site.

*sigh* Another fine game. It was great to get a chance to see how far City of Heroes has come, and I’ll add it to the “would like to play again some time” pile, but that pile is getting darned big at this point.

The Story behind IGE (MMO gold sellers)

Posted on by Nimgimli

Did you know that much-reviled IGE was formed by former child-actor Brock Pierce? I sure didn’t.

Wired has a lengthy article on how the company came to be. Get comfortable; this is clearly an article from the print mag moved to the web and it goes on for a while. But I found it darned interesting.

The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire

Friday is for crafting

Posted on by Nimgimli

There’s something about Friday nights that make them perfect EQ2 Crafting. I get home, tired and cranky from a long week, but feeling the relief that is a few days away from the salt mines. Crafting in EQ2 is … soothing. But it takes a good amount of time. I don’t do a lot of it on most weeknights because I always have that vague time pressure of “a few free hours, then bed and back to work”. And by Saturday I’m ready for a bit more action than crafting provides.

So yeah, Friday is for crafting.

The new Shadow Odyssey expansion adds Crafter Quests starting at level 50, so I’ve been pushing my Alchemist lately. Tonight I took him from level 43 to level 46 before his Vitality gave out (and I’m too stubborn to use a character that is out of vitality when I have so many other options). About haflway through the night I idly mentioned that he had 4 Achievement points not spent (he is also a level 28 Swashbuckler, but hasn’t unsheathed a weapon in years). Angela pointed out that there are new Shadow Achievements that relate to tradeskilling. I looked and sure enough, there’s one for harvesting and another for crafting. I put all 4 points into the latter and now my Alchemist is making an extra 8% Crafting Experience. Sweet!

So many good games to play. Really it is an embarrassment of riches.

Poster Child

Posted on by Nimgimli

[EDIT: Reworked version of the post with -25% whinging on my part.]

In a recent post at /random, Rick used myself and Heartless as examples of people who don’t like Warhammer. (In the original version of this post, I accused him of using me as a Poster Child for the Don’t Like Warhammer campagin, which was a bit over the top on my part, but I just mention it since that’s where the title of this post comes from.)

I found that surprising and kind of upsetting, to be honest. I mean, its true that Warhammer wasn’t grabbing me as much as it was others. But my experience with Heartless is that he has fairly passionate objections to some of the things Mythic has done/is doing. Nothing personal against Heartless (in fact I admire that passion), but I don’t feel I’m in the same category.

I was so surprised that I went back and re-read a bunch of my Warhammer posts. The specific post that Rick linked to had me wondering why I love Fable 2 so much while others hated it, and talked a lot about the immersion I felt in LOTRO. The harshest thing I said about Warhammer in that post was that “I’ve gotten somewhat less enthusiastic about Warhammer.” That’s hardly ranting against the game.

I have posted some introspective rambling trying to understand why I wasn’t finding as much joy in Warhammer as others do, but this post wasn’t complaining about what’s bad in Warhammer. Here’s a quote from that post: “Warhammer is very focused on the gameplay experience, which makes it unique and (in my opinion) very valuable.” Haven’t you ever observed a bunch of people really loving something that you’re not seeing the appeal of, and wondered why you aren’t “getting it?”

To rewind the clock a bit, I let my Warhammer account lapse because I’d promised Angela that I’d play EQ2 with her when the TSO expansion came out. That really had nothing to do with Warhammer and everything to do with domestic bliss in the house. 🙂 And then CoW started playing WoW so I re-upped there to play with them since I missed the herd – this was an unexpected decision but time was of the essence if I wanted to keep any kind of parity with the rest of the guild. (Of course, the bear factored in, too.) Had I planned on having 2 paying subscriptions at once, I probably would’ve kept Warhammer and EQ2, but sometimes we wind up in places we never set out to be in.

There are certainly games I enjoy more than Warhammer Online, and I’m strapped enough right now that I can’t justify paying for a game I’m not playing (though that didn’t stop me from snapping up a Black Friday deal on a 60-day timecard for War). That just seems sensible to me; it isn’t my job to invest in the continued development of any game unless I’m either a) playing it or b) going to reap fiscal rewards from it.

I’ve been continually impressed with how quickly Mythic reacts to player feedback. Of course in order to do that, they need to HAVE player feedback to react to. So I’m not going to feel bad about my sharing things that bother me about the game, but if I’m giving the impression that I have a strong dislike for it, well, that isn’t so. I’m not playing Warhammer now because I have other things to play. If Warhammer were the only MMO on the market, I’d be all over it.

And I’m actually rather excited about the 1.1 patch. When that drops, I’m going to use that 60 day time card and rejoin the War.

More Megaten Beta

Posted on by Nimgimli

With all the MMO subs I have running, tonight I dove back into the Megaten beta. I guess I’ll call it that, rather than Shin Megami Tensei or Persona Online, since that’s what it’ll be called in NA. I snagged a few screenshots but the screenie function is kind of not-great. The game looks much sharper than these screens would indicate.

Tonight I finished my training, which took a while as I got the hang of chaining attacks and allowing for charging time for defenses and what not. Then I headed out on my first quest, to bring back a Pixie Leader. We needed scales from her wing to cure a wounded comrade.

It took me a while to figure out how to “tame” the pixie; hopefully in release players will get a bit of extra handholding. And once I did, she floated along beside me with the title “Treated like a slave by Gillain”!! Hmph. I need to do something about that!

There’s a lot to this game, though. I spend a lot of time running around gawking at the demons that other players have summoned. There are cards that you find that, presumably, can get you demons. I’ve got a piece of gear that needs fixing, so I’m guessing there’s some kind of crafting. And the combat is quite fun (and a bit challenging) so far. Skills are increased by using them, and there are no firm classes. As you gain levels (so yeah, you do get levels) you get points to spend on your attributes. If you’re going to be doing a lot of melee, you boost strength. Mages will boost magic and gunners will boost agility. Then you have a big bunch of skills and choose which of those you want to improve. Once “toggled on” every time you use those skills you gain expertise in them. Gain enough and that skill levels up.

I still don’t have a full grasp of all that’s going on, but I’m *really* liking what I’ve seen so far. But keep in mind that I really enjoyed the Playstation versions of Persona, too.

Learn how to train a pixie below this guy. Spoiler Alert!

You have to use the “Greeting” skill (it should be on your hotkey bar by default..in the Skills window its labeled as “Talk”) on the Pixie Leader 3 times. After that, she’ll either join you or get bored and leave. Just keep trying until she says something about wanting to come along. Once she says that she’ll morph into a green egg-shaped thing which you can click on and collect, and after that you can summon her.

Beta report! Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine

Posted on by Nimgimli

I was reading Tipa’s post about Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine (aka Megaten, aka Persona Online) this morning, and not an hour later Massively had a post announced beta client and keys were available from Filefront.

I was kind of in an “Off the grid” mood tonight so a beta mmo where I was completely anonymous sounded like just the thing (that, and Tipa hasn’t steered me wrong yet). I snagged the client, patched up and jumped in. I was warned going in that the servers were being a bit flaky tonight; they just rolled out some big patch I guess, and this *is* beta, and sure enough I didn’t get too far in before I got disconnected and as of right now even their web site is throwing an Error 500.

But from the half-hour or so I got to play, I was very pleasantly surprised. The game starts feeling very much like a JRPG, with you an untried hero ready to fight against the demons that have invaded our world from otherwhere. The perky older, more experienced warrior that guides you through your first steps is a comfortable cliche and does a good job of teaching basic controls (and I’m pretty sure this first bit was a solo instance). Oddly when you leave her side, you go to a ‘virtual battlefield’ where a crusty old cliche warrior walks you through the same steps. I imagine one or the other of these sequences will be cut from the release game.

Tipa’s post covers the early game well enough that there’s no need for me to rehash things, and she got more time in. Combat is active/actiony, and thankfully WASD movement is supported (not always a given in Eastern MMOs). The interface felt clean and crisp. The art-style is pure Persona and so is the music. It just had a real nostalgic feel to it. Unfortunately a lot of the storyline text is still in Japanese, and the fact that this bugged me in itself says something about the title: I want to know what happened!

Definitely another title to put on my “to play” list. These Free-To-Play MMOs are really growing in quality lately. Not very long ago they were all cookie-cutter grind-fests, but not any more.

Back to the Burning Seas

Posted on by Nimgimli

So as threatened, I patched my client and headed back to the Burning Seas.

The avatar combat still looks terrible. The actual combat system seems interesting on paper (I’d forgotten all about it) but it just feels so clunky and broken… blech. The naval combat is still pretty fun and interesting, but I had forgotten how long a battle can take (15 minutes, easily). At sea, the game is breathtakingly gorgeous and I’d forgotten all about that, too.

But what really surprised me was the community. I knew I’d be lost so I logged in as a level 3 pirate on the Blackbeard server (all my characters were on closed servers so I had to move them all first). Now granted, pirate faction + Blackbeard server is probably the worse combo I could have picked but.. wow. Close your eyes and imagine how terrible an MMO community can be. Got that mental image? OK, it was worse than that. I logged into hearing one person with a big mouth being attacked by a dozen others in the “nation” chat channel, with insults about his genitals, bathroom habits, parents, etc, etc. Every immature, moronic insult you can imagine, they were using on this guy (who was giving as good as he got, to be sure).

I did end up talking to one person after I asked if, in fact, the game has just devolved to talking shit at each other. This person offered me a helping hand and told me that the economic game was “broken” so players mostly traded directly.

So let’s see:

1) Avatar combat: still awful
2) Ship combat: still fun
3) Community: Wretched, awful, terrible, vile, disgusting, horrible
4) Economic game: apparently broken

Yeah, I’ll be playing this a lot. /sarcasm I might actually try another faction on another server, and I do thank the single decent soul in the Pirate Nation channel on Blackbeard and very much hope I just caught the game on a bad day, for his/her sake.

I really wish someone could take the naval combat game out of Pirates of the Burning Seas and put it into something better, because that really is fun (assuming you have the time to put into it). And I readily grant that I’m being terribly unfair saying all these mean things about the community based on an hour spent in it.

But I can’t help but think its time for this one to be put to bed.

Pirates of the Burnings Seas

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night as I was logging into EQ2 to do a bit ‘o crafting, I noticed that my Pirates of the Burning Seas account was active for the next 12 days. How weird is it that Sony re-activates accounts without any notification (unless it got lost to a spam filter)?

I’m sort of tempted to update my client just to take a peek in to see what improvements they’ve made to that game. In retrospect, my reaction to POTBS was a foreshadowing of my reaction to Warhammer. I enjoyed it until I’d got bored with the thin PvE content, did a bit of PvP, then left. Actually PvP in POTBS was a lot more hardcore than it is in Warhammer since you could lose your ship if you got ‘sunk’ enough times. More like EVE in that way.

I love the ambiance of naval combat in POTBS, but really the glory in ship to ship battle in the age of sail comes from fleet battles, not the one-vs-several battles that were offered in PvE, which looked great but quickly became routine. You could do small fleet battles in PvP but I just don’t have the heart to risk a few weeks of wheeling and dealing to get a ship built, only to lose it forever in a night’s play. Had I built the game, I would’ve had the players controlling a handful of ships, adding more as they leveled up.

The land combat, the swashbuckling, was terrible in POTBS. They keep promising to give that an overhaul but I’m not sure if they’ve done so yet. And the land environments were all cookie-cutter. When you entered your first town it was fun to explore, but then you’d travel down the coast to the next port and find that the town layout there was exactly the same. *yawn*

But there was a very rich economic component, and I’m still loving Nile Online. The problem here in POTBS was that the ultimate goal of the economic game was buying ships for PvP. Adding some kind of properties you could buy — a mansion or something — could make the game interesting from a purely economic point of view.

Maybe some of these changes have been made. It might be worth just taking a peek to see how the game is looking these days. I’m sure Bildo would be 100% behind me playing another MMO!!! 🙂