Category: Gaming

Weekend recap: EQ2 bonanza

Posted on by Nimgimli

So aside from re-subscribing to WoW, the weekend was mostly about EQ2. (Hmm, it just struck me that in the past few days I’ve griped about how lost I felt in EQ2 because there’s so much new stuff, and griped about how WoW seems so unchanged!)

I leveled my Berserker to 40, finishing out all the gray & green quests he had laying around for Butcherblock, including a fun storyline involving fighting off an invading bugbear army. I did have to call in the cavalry for the last step of that one. Angela brought in one of her healer girls and mentored me as I fought the last boss.

So now I had all these skills at Apprentice I, so I jumped on my Alchemist who was level 38 or so, but with 100% Vitality I quickly caught him up and got the ‘Zerker to at least Apprentice IV on everything. The Guild Hall makes this *so* easy to do. There’s this huge pile ‘o resources that you can draw directly out of, and all the crafting stations have been nicely laid out around vendor NPCs. The only time I had to leave the Hall was to buy training books off the crafting vendor. Thanks to everyone in the guild that have made the guild hall possible: I’m definitely riding on coattails in that regard.

I also played a bit of LOTRO, but that was mostly busy-work, trying to get my inventory organized across various characters. I turned in my Moria rewards, which seem mostly meh. There’s a cute “pesky dormouse” that you can put in your house, but he takes up a large wall slot. And a songbird, also for the house. And a pocket item that wasn’t too interesting (to the point that I don’t recall what it did). Let’s see. A horn that gives a hope (or whatever hope is now called) buff; that could be useful. And then potions for resistance to the 4 elements. Of those items, I could pick any 3. I got the dormouse, bird and horn.

I also gave up on trying to tank with the Champion, and re-arranged his traits. Dropped the one that let him carry a heavy shield and the ones that gave him better taunting and went full-on damage improvements. Oh, and I raised up his cooking a lot, just burning through components to get some inventory space cleared up. So my main LOTRO character spends his time either slicing & dicing orcs…or baking blueberry muffins.

Virtually no single-player gaming this weekend.

Willpower saving throw: Failed

Posted on by Nimgimli

So at approximately 11 pm last night, I renewed my WoW subscription. And yes, the baby polar bears figured into that decision, more in terms of timing than in terms of the decision to renew. I felt it coming on, now that CoW is moving into WoW, and figured I may as well get the cute little rat pellet while I could.

I logged in a bunch of my old characters to get the bear and to be baffled by all their gear and crap, then rolled a new character on Rexxar, the CoW WoW server (how could I resist that). And I felt an overwhelming feeling of buyer’s remorse.

THIS again? Kobold varmints, kobold workkers, kobold laborers… defias headbands, grapes and garret’s head? It all came back in a rush. And it really struck me how little WoW has changed in the past 4 years, from the point of view of a level 1 character. I was astounded that, for instance, hovering the mouse over gear in your backpack doesn’t pop-up an “Equipped” window to allow you to compare (though this does happen during quest reward pay-offs). I was surprised that the graphics haven’t changed, that there were no new options for faces or hairstyles. That the character voices were exactly the same. It just felt old to me.

I mean I know that leveling is crazy fast now, and I see some interface tweaks like the fact that PvP has its own Tab, and Blizzard put these totally pointless Achievements in. Pets now ride in a tab on your character sheet. People who’ve played WoW all along told me “It’s like a totally new game now.” and I guess I took that too much to heart. Yeah there are some changes but it doesn’t feel ‘fresh’ in any way, shape or form.

I’m just a bit annoyed with myself. I now have subs to EQ2 & WoW and the on-going LOTRO Lifetime. Which means no going back to Warhammer for another month.

At the same time, I’m excited to be trying a PvE game with CoW members, where everyone is pretty much doing the same thing. We’re all rolling fresh on Rexxar and are going to check out all the old instances and stuff. I’m still trying to decide on a class. The character I rolled last night was a Rogue but I dunno if I’m into that experience. I get impatient with all the skulking around. I might start a drenai if for no other reason than the fact that I haven’t run through the newbie drenai experience a dozen+ times, like I have all the original race areas.

EQ2…so very, very lost

Posted on by Nimgimli

I spent most of my gaming time this weekend playing EQ2. Now I played this game at launch and I’ve gone back to it intermittently since then, but since launch Sony has released 5 expansions for the game.

And I find I just have no idea what’s out there any more. And the only reason I realize how much I don’t know is because I look over at Angela’s screen and say “Where is that?” and she’ll rattle off a zone name that I’ve never even heard of. Turns out I’m unaware of huge swatches of the gameworld.

This leads me to wonder how much I’m missing in other MMOs. LOTRO has had a series of free expansions since launch and honestly I’m never sure if I’m in an original area or an expansion area, so I have no idea if I’ve explored everything there is to explore.

I guess the only way to really keep track of an MMO is to be active in their *shudder* forums. But my experience is that after about a day surfing the official forums of any MMO, I’m ready to delete that MMO from my hard drive and snap the CDs in half; forums tend to attract the real bottom feeders of online society, and it only takes a few of these wretches to drown out all the well-meaning people who are saintly enough to endure the environment and stay around to help people. I come out of these places thinking “I do not want to associate with these people EVER AGAIN” and logging into the game means associating with them, so I just go off the game altogether (even though in-game experiences tend to be much, much more positive than forum experiences — this is an emotional reaction on my part, not a logical one).

WoW am I ever tempted

Posted on by Nimgimli

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

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

[SOURCE]

Back to EQ2

Posted on by Nimgimli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TGIF, WRUP for Weekend of 11/21

Posted on by Nimgimli

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

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

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

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

What about you? Any gaming plans for the weekend?

Mosby’s Confederacy released

Posted on by Nimgimli

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

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

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

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

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

The New XBox Experience

Posted on by Nimgimli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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