Category: Gaming

Ice, Ice, Baby (EQ2)

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night I finally got Riowa the Berserker to level 52, which meant he could finally don all that neat Frostfell ice-themed gear he’d earned the tokens for. Woot! I made sure to take a portrait of him all decked out, then of course never uploaded it. Doh.

I’m not actually a fan of the ‘frost’ particle-effects that comes with the gear, and I didn’t have enough time (it was midnight by the time I dinged) to see if it was one particular piece that triggered it. If it is, I’ll have to cover that piece up with something.

The trinkets, sword, shield and bow are all good gear that I can use for a while, but the armor and jewelry all has a big negative to heat damage resistance. So Riowa now has heat resistance of zero — thank goodness they don’t allow negative numbers!! Angela glanced over at my screen, saw the stats and quipped “Don’t go adventuring in Lavastorm!” 🙂

But EQ2 vets will probably be horrified to learn that my level 51 character was still wearing level 32 armor (granted, mastercrafted but still) so even with the lack of heat protection, this stuff is a tremendous upgrade and was free.

Anyway, now that I’m in my new duds, it’s time to go back and clean up a bunch of gray quests (probably mentoring one of Angela’s younger girls to get ’em green) and working up harvesting skills. I only have 8 days left on the account and I have to confess I’m going to miss it.

I had a nibble on some freelance work… it’s a Gift of the Magi conundrum. If I pursue the work, I’ll have money to play games, but no time to play them in (it feels like it’d be an on-going gig). If I skip the work, I’ll have time, but no money to pay for them…

In which Saylah does my job for me…

Posted on by Nimgimli

I was going to rant on about why I enjoy solo play in MMOs tonight, but I’m feeling pretty talked out (thanks to a long comment-discussion at Stylish Corpse) and generally snarky (thanks to spending 90 minutes in a Verizon store today) and anyway, Saylah said in a paragraph pretty much what I was going to say in like 10,000 words. I’m referring to the last paragraph of her post.

I’m not some kind of solo zealot or anything, but my style and my personality (yes, I know you all think I’m warm and cuddly, but really I’m pretty much a prickly bastard with very little patience in real life) just lend themselves to solo play a lot more often than to group play. I like having other players around me to talk to, trade with, and most of all, just to watch (I love the aspirational aspects of seeing high level characters with crazy gear and knowing that eventually I can get there too). I just often don’t want to, or don’t have time to, join myself to these people at the hip. I really don’t do well with waiting, and that’s my biggest problem (along with rather extreme shyness). I start to go bug-nuts after waiting around for 5 minutes to get a group rolling.

And single player RPGs are static. I actually *do* play them, but its a different experience than playing an MMO solo. Anyway, I also like games that change constantly as the developers roll out new features and content. And lastly, I like that MMOs are endless (well, not literally, they’ll all get shut down eventually). This preference of mine often makes me laugh at myself since I so rarely stick to a single game long enough to finish it (in the case of a single player RPG) or hit cap (in the case of an MMO). But we’re often not logical in what we like or dislike.

Anyway, I’m gonna go solo in some MMO or another. 🙂 Like I said, Saylah said it better and more succinctly than I ever could.

MMO Soloers get some love from Turbine

Posted on by Nimgimli

As an oft-time solo MMO gamer, I’m used to being spat upon by the herd-mentality masses. “Go play a single player game!” they scream at me. “Your [sic] an idiot for paying a monthly fee to play a game by yourself!” Or even, “Hey solo player… YOUR MOM!”

OK OK I’m being a bit over-dramatic but seriously, there’s a big component of the community who seems to think there’s something “wrong” with preferring to play an MMO solo. And some day I’ll do a big long whinging post about why I do it, but that day is not today!

No, today I just want to direct you to this guide to Solo Leveling in LOTRO. Why is it worth noting? Because it comes from Turbine themselves. So apparently they acknowledge and appreciate that some of us prefer the solitude of a quiet walk through The Shire to a booze-laden Tavern League Quest Marathon.

Actually, the article doesn’t feel all that solo-oriented and if you’ve never played LOTRO it’s a decent “Getting Started” article for anyone to read. If you’ve played a grouped character and want to start a solo alt, the article isn’t going to teach you very much. Hopefully future installations will be a bit more meaty with regard to the soloist.

War Wishy Washy

Posted on by Nimgimli

I haven’t gone back to check, but I think in my Warhammer posts I alternate liking the game and griping about the game. Maybe it’s because I have fun in one session and it raises my expectations for the next one and then I get disappointed, so have low expectations for the following session and get a pleasant surprise? 🙂

Today’s gripe is once again back on the lack of polish and slow leveling speed. My Witchhunter was level 18 doing quests that required killing mobs level 21-23, and had rested experience. I completed 3 kill ten rats quests, a fed ex quest and a couple of Kill Collector turn-ins and earned maybe 1/6th of a level over the course of the session. That’d be fine for 3 easy quests, but if felt pretty paltry considering they were tough quests for my level (I died a lot…level 23 mobs are dicey) and the fact that I had to clear a lot of trash mobs of level 20-21 to get to the 23s I needed.

I mean, it wasn’t horrible, but I would go back to turn in one of these quests totally psyched to see the EXP bar zoom up and then it’d just nudge over a smidge. 🙁 A tad disappointing. And all the rewards are too high for me to use! LOL.

Worse though was more evidence of the lack of polish. I was fighting big cats that could stun me. What would happen would be my hotbars would suddenly go dark. Then I’d get a text message saying something about being stunned. Then finally my character would switch to a prone stance. These were distinct sequential events. And note how I didn’t say “my character would fall down” because he didn’t. One frame standing, next frame prone.

Plus the old ‘stuck in the shooting animation’ bug when I use my Trial By Pain (I think its called) skill to kill something. This is the Witchhunter skill where he rapid-fires his pistol at point blank range. If the target dies, the Witchhunter keeps firing and firing until you do something that’ll make it stop. I finally figured out jumping would do this. That one’s just aesthetic though and it impacts you *after* a fight, not during it. The stun thing, where seeing your character get knocked down is important feedback, is a bigger deal.

Quote of the day, heard on the regional channel where a warband was doing OpenRvR: “Get ready, I can feel the lag of their approach!”

I can’t wait to try Warhammer next Fall after Mythic has had plenty of time to polish and flesh out some thin spots. There’s a gem of a game hidden in there somewhere!

EGM: Rest in Peace

Posted on by Nimgimli

So the official word is out. Electronic Gaming Monthly is dead. The issue on the stands (or possibly in your hands) now is the final issue. It’s not a surprise, of course, Ziff-Davis has been hurting for a long time, and the print magazine business is in a bad, bad way.

But I can’t help but be a bit sad. EGM has been around for something like 20 years. Seeing anything with that kind of heritage die is never fun.

Not that I’ve always been a fan, mind you. I’ve always been in the situation of being unusually old as a gamer, and when EGM first came out it was writing to a 12 year old audience when I was in my late-20s. And it was about those lame console games when I was a computer gamer. A *real* gamer! 🙂 But the magazine seemed to grow up along with the first generation of gamers (and consoles) and for the past few years I’ve been reading EGM regularly. And it was OK. Which sounds like damning with faint praise, but OK is pretty good in the world of gaming mags. I’ll miss it.

I’m told the European gaming magazines are still quite good, but they’re a bit pricey for my tastes. In the US we’re left with GamePro (terrible the last time I looked at it; granted that was years ago) and Game Informer (house organ to that vilest of chains, Gamestop) and a few smaller niche mags like the curiously titled Beckett Massive Online Gamer.

I sometimes miss the heyday of gaming mags, when titles like Computer Gaming World and Strategy Plus (later Computer Games Magazine) were densely informational magazines packed full of great gaming info. And I hope you will forgive me that arrogance since I was an editor at the latter for a while, but it was a great mag way before I joined them and for a good while after I left.

Gaming blogs fill in the gaps to some extent, but there are so many of them that missing great posts is inevitable. Plus you can’t spend a lazy Sunday afternoon stretched out on the couch reading gaming blogs. Well, not as comfortably as you can a print mag.

1Up.Com has been sold to UGO and hopefully will stay 1Up.Com, but I guess we’ll see. I’ve managed to remain unaware of UGO, and I went there tonight and left quickly. Way to busy and EXTREME!!!! for my tastes, but then 1Up pretty much feels the same way.

Anyway EGM, thanks for all the information and entertainment you’ve offered over the years. John Davison (now at http://whattheyplay.com) was probably my favorite leader of that battle-weary clan of game journalists, but I was really looking forward to what James Mielke was going to do (he took over just a few months back). Ah well, the only constant in life is change, as they say.

Lover’s spat

Posted on by Nimgimli

I don’t usually get real personal on this blog, but I think I know you all well enough now that I feel comfortable telling you about this. I just need to tell *someone* y’know? Just need a willing ear to listen to my tale of sorrow.

Y’see, Valkyria Chronicles and I have had our first fight.

Things were going so great, and even when the fight happened, I just thought it was a little thing that we’d just get through. A speed bump on the way to our long term bliss. But days later, we’re still at an impasse.

I just can’t beat Chapter 7.

Worse, it’s a *long* battle and I’ve played for over an hour before hitting the “Game Over” screen. It isn’t that I’m a poor battlefield commander: rather, the problem is the mission is one big fat puzzle, and you pretty have to resort to trial and error before you can get past it.

## CHAPTER 7 BATTLE SPOILERS FOLLOW ##

The goal is to stop a mammoth tank that follows (it turns out) a pre-set route through the battlefield. The tank is bristling with turrets that’ll kill a squad member in one turn if caught out in the open. And the tank can’t be hurt until it blasts a stone wall (which it has to do every so often in order to move forward), at which point some vulnerable Radiators are exposed for 1 turn. Classic boss-battle stuff. There are 3 of these radiators, and after you knock off two of them, enemy reinforcements arrive, including an unkillable character with a 1-shot=kill weapon. Worse, by the time these reinforcements show up, the AI has a so many Command Points that the newbies sweep across the battlefield all at once. So you’d better have everyone in deep cover when they show up.

There are 4 stone walls that the enemy has to blast, and 3 radiators to destroy, so you can muff one attempt. Basically you need to use your tank and lancers to destroy the turrets, then when the radiators appear, charge the tank with a grenade-carrying troop (ie, not a lancer) and stuff a grenade down the opening of the radiator (and once you destroy one, the others drop, so its not good trying to get 2 from 1 wall blast). So far I’ve gotten as far as trying for the 3rd spot, and I gosh-darned MISSED throwing the dang grenade (and really you’re just dropping the thing in a hole). ARGHHHH!

Each play through I get a bit farther along, but again..we’re talking an hour each attempt. I just now googled and there are some walk throughs for this mission, and I guess I’m going to resort to them. It’s just been such a shock and a disappointment to find such a puzzle-based, trial & error dependent mission after all the fun I’d been having finding my own way to fight each battle.

I’m hoping this battle is an anomaly and not the way the rest of the game plays out. I hate “puzzledy” strategy games. I want to develop *a* winning strategy, not find *the* single pre-programmed ‘win’ strategy through trial and error, y’know? [Having now read a few of the aforementioned walk-throughs, it’s clear there isn’t literally 1 way to beat the mission, but still all the methods are pretty similar, and you’d still never be able to beat the battle until you played a few times to learn where and when the triggers were.]

Runes of Magic

Posted on by Nimgimli

So today I deemed it Long Enough for the aggravation of downloading and installing the Runes of Magic beta client to wear off, allowing me to give the game a fair chance. Problem is, there seems to be an NDA in place, which makes no kind of sense to me… what’s the point of an NDA with an Open Beta? For what its worth, I didn’t notice anything for them to be worried about in letting people talk about the game.

I’m going to ride a fine line here and talk about stuff that you could find out from ‘authorized sources’ with a bit of Googling. You’ve probably heard RoM referred to as a WoW clone, and that definitely is the first impression you get, from the art style (though with a lot more ‘cute’ thrown in here) to the interface. If you’ve played WoW, the game will feel very familiar to you. But then, that could be said for most fantasy-themed MMOs, and you could swap “WoW” for “EQ” or “DAoC” and it’d still pretty much apply. Combat and Harvesting are both very WoW-like indeed, but beyond that the game does diverge somewhat.

The most obvious difference is that there’s no subscription fee, and the idea is that you buy “Diamonds” with real cash to spend in-game on items. To that end, a lot of things in the game are time-limited, and you get a taste of this early on in the life of a character when you get a gift bag with a 24-hour mount in it. This is a horse that’ll be with your character for 24 hours from the time you get it (and I’m assuming they mean 24 real hours regardless of if you’re logged in or not, but I’ll check on that [EDIT: Confirmed, I popped in for a second this morning and my horse had 10 hours left.]). The “Item Shop” is full of stuff like this… buff potions and limited time mounts and so forth. We call these micro-transactions but they aren’t all micro – a permanent mount without a time limit will cost you about $20 USD in Diamonds. Hopefully there are other ways to gain a means of transportation.

housekeeperAnother big difference from WoW is that there is housing, and every player gets a small instanced house early on in their career (I had mine by level 6). There is no charge for the basic house, and you get a nice chest to store items in. But the biggest deal of all is that every house comes with a housekeeper! That’s her to the right there. She looks very professional, doesn’t she? You can expand your house in various ways by spending House Energy, which you get in exchange for Diamonds, which you got in exchange for real cash. Housing looks closer to EQ2 than to LOTRO. Rather than the very-limited “hooks” of LOTRO, it seems like you can place items at will in your house. That was true of the storage chest you’re given, at least. I haven’t managed to get any furniture yet.

Another difference: every character gets a secondary class. My character hasn’t gotten there yet, and there was a lot of debate in chat over whether you can change your secondary class or if, once picked, it’s a permanent part of your character. More exploration needed there.

And then there are the titular Runes. From very early on you’ll be finding Runes of various kinds. Runes can be attached to certain weapons and armor (assuming said item has Rune Slots in it) to give them bonuses, and they are also used in Crafting. They work as you’d probably expect: once a Rune is attached to an item it can’t be removed (possible exception: there’s a potion in the “Item Shop” that sounds like it would remove a Rune). It requires no special skill to apply a Rune to an item. Just right-click the Rune and click on the item you want to attach it to.

New characters get a nice quest chain that takes you through combat and getting harvesting skills and stuff, as well as good basic equipment. I was playing a Scout (think Hunter) and quickly got a nice range of skills to use (ha! pun not intended). Every time you level up you get a bunch of skill points to apply to these skills; so far I’ve been able to keep everything maxed, but I’m sure that won’t be true over the long run.

All in all, it seemed OK. I had fun for the short time I played and will probably give it some more time eventually, as long as I’m not forced to do much buying from the Item Store. I get that they need to fund the game somehow, but $20 for a horse seems pretty steep to me. But there’s no real “US” store to buy Diamonds from, so maybe they’ll adjust the costs for release? I will say that of all the free2play MMOs I’ve tried, this feels the closest to a “traditional” sub-based, fantasy-themed MMO. Whether this is good or bad, I leave to the reader. If you can’t afford WoW or EQ2 its nice to have an option, but its also nice to find unique offerings in the free2play-space like Wizard101 or Atlantica Online

Vanguard crafting

Posted on by Nimgimli

Tonight I popped back into Vanguard to do the crafting intro quests. I’d forgotten how complex the crafting system is. Basically its a turn-based mini-strategy game where you have a finite number of Action Points to create an item. You can spend these points to progress the item towards completion, or to try to improve the quality of the item. Sometimes bad things happen, and then you need to spend Action Points to counter the bad things. That’s a very, very brief overview.

I’ve been doing a lot of crafting in EQ2 recently and the differences & similarities of the two systems are interesting. EQ2’s system is a lot simpler (the current system…at launch it was quite complex) but happens in real time. You fire off skills to improve progress and durability. Durability goes down as progress goes up and the goal is to keep durability high while progress climbs from zero. Sometimes bad things happen, and then you need to cast a skill to counter it.

So in both systems you need to get Progress to 100%. Both systems use raw materials to start the creation process. In Vanguard, you do what you can to improve Quality from Grade D to C to B to A. If you run out of Action Points, you fail to make anything. But there’s no timer… you can stop and ponder your next action for as long as you like. Some actions use various additives which are consumed in the process of crafting, and you can only bring a finite number of these additives into the crafting mini-game.

In EQ2, you strive to keep the Durability meter high. There are 4 ‘tiers’ of Durability and the quality of the finished product depends on what tier the Durability meter is in. At lower Tiers you’ll create nothing but might get some components back. At Tier 3 you’ll get a basic item, and at Tier 4 you’ll get a Pristine item (this varies with what you’re making..sometimes you’ll get a higher quantity rather than better quality). The limiting factor here is your mana, since casting skills use that up. And the clock is always ticking. You aren’t limited in the amount of time you take, but you are limited in the amount of time you have to react to bad things happening.

The EQ2 process quickly becomes fairly routine and doesn’t take much thought. It’s a good unwinding exercise; something you can do while chatting or just kind of zoning out and letting the cares of the day drain away. It’s very rare that you fail to make a Pristine item once you have the system down. And you can churn out item after item pretty quickly.

It’ll be interesting to see how Vanguard compares to this experience. Running through the newbie quests, I was fairly bewildered, and things are very simple at the start. Apparently the number of Actions available rises as you get to higher levels of crafting. At this stage, it’s more fun and interesting than crafting in EQ2, but I’m not sure if that’ll hold up when it comes time to grind for levels. One nice thing is that you can get Work Orders that don’t seem to require raw materials (and don’t produce anything usable) just to skill-up on. Of course, EQ2 has Work Orders as well, but they require raws. On the other hand they generate status for you and your guild, so there’s an added benefit to them.

Anyway, I just find the two systems from two SOE games to be similar in some ways and yet very different. I’m not sure how far I’ll get crafting in Vanguard for now, but I hope some time to be able to return and take it to higher levels.

Honestly, the lure of adventure is pretty strong right now. So many bizarre creatures out there to hunt!
Vanguard Moon

EDIT: Or not… logged back in to Train (because I know me, otherwise I’d forget) and got caught up in a bunch of crafting quests and did almost no more fighting!! Fun crafting quests, too. Helping build defenses for a village under attack by Hobgoblins. 🙂

Steamfont Grinding

Posted on by Nimgimli

So Riowa my Berserker has all his level 52 Frostfell gear, but can’t wear it yet. So last night I decided I wanted to get him to 52, or at least closer. I opened up my (perpetually full) Quest Journal and just about *everything* in it was now gray, I’ve spent so many levels in the Frostfell version of the Icy Keep. Deleting quests is hard for me (that A to B to C character trait again) but I didn’t want to spend my time finishing gray quests, so Angela offered to take me “grinding” in Steamfont.

It was her level 61 Fury and my level 50 Berserker. She didn’t technically have to mentor me (I didn’t get the warning that she was too high when we formed the group), but I asked her to, more for the fun factor than for the experience (though that was a nice plus for me). In my lay-person’s opinion the Fury is kind of over-powered to begin with, and I knew if she kept her natural level I’d just be on Looting Duty, which I hate. I want to at least nominally contribute to groups I’m in (even though she loves nothing more than mass-killing groups of mobs with her crazy AOE spells).

The good news is that we roamed through the zone, killing named mobs and me getting the ‘zerker to 51 and nearly to 52 before his Vitality ran out. It was late enough that I didn’t want to quaff an exp buff potion so we called it a night there (I’ve got scads of these things since I’ve never used them and I have all the veteran rewards — Sony counts the time since you first activated the account, ignoring whether you had an active sub or not, and I bought EQ2 at launch ). Her Fury hit 62 and earned an Achievement point and I earned two Achievement points and even got some gear drops. So everyone made progress.

The bad news was that Steamfont seems to top out at Blue-Con mobs for Riowa, and he’s really never been there! I’ve leveled him so quickly that I’ve just passed whole zones by, apparently. I guess that’s what my other six characters are for, eh? But I want to make a point with them of hitting different zones when I get around to leveling them. SO MUCH CONTENT! Wow, this is a huge game!

Earlier in the day I played a bit of LOTRO and got my Champion to a whopping level 33. Again, a game I bought at launch…I’m not exactly a leveling machine. That’s what happens when you play too many different MMOs, I guess. 🙂

Dragonchasers goes Free2Play!

Posted on by Nimgimli

This being a new year and all, I sat down with the budget today, and things are not looking good. I’m still not entirely sure what the 10% salary reduction will look like after taxes, but we were playing it pretty close to the bone to begin with. Just a few posts ago I was idly wondering if I could swing a Station Pass so I could play EQ2 and Vanguard, but after looking at the numbers, not only was the answer “no” but in fact I had to cancel EQ2 as well, at least for a couple months. I need to get some regular freelance income rolling in (or have things look up at work and have my full salary reinstated) and until then a monthly game subscription isn’t really in the cards.

I still have almost a full month of EQ2 paid for, over a month of Warhammer Online, and until Jan 31 in Vanguard’s “Come back to Vanguard” promo, so I’m not going to be feeling any kind of a sting for a while (and who knows, by then maybe another source of income will have made itself known). And I’m patting myself on the back for springing for the Lifetime membership to LOTRO, because I’ll have at least that one AAA title to play.

But rather than be glum about this turn of events, I’m looking at it as a challenge. Free-To-Play MMOs are getting better all the time, and micro-transactions rock in that they’re a) micro and b) one-time expenses. So I’ll be looking at a lot of F2P MMOs, and watching for other gaming deals, and getting the most fun I can for the least money. (Right now I’m downloading the ad-supported version of FPS Area-51… about 2 days after I said I’d never play a FPS again… but I figured its FREE so why not give it a try.)

Hopefully I can keep things semi-interesting around here, though I acknowledge it’ll be a challenge when I’m playing some obscure game about sand gardening while everyone else is playing DC Universe Online or something. But I’ll try!!