Category: Gaming

Upgrades and patches and crashes, oh my!

Posted on by Nimgimli

So last night, leaving work, I was like a kid the day before Christmas. Not one but TWO shiny new expansions awaited me at home. By the time I went to bed, I felt like a kid on Christmas afternoon who’d found that all those mysterious packages had held socks and underwear.

I first hit LOTRO to get Mines of Moria installed. I’d opted for the downloadable version of that, and had “pre-downloaded” and installed the expansion a few days earlier. When I got home, the servers were down for a hot fix, but I ran the client anyway and… it took two hours to convert the game to Moria! Urgh. Once that finished, I logged in (after sitting in a queue) and played “spot the differences” with the UI (which primarily seemed to surround traits). I’d read about the big combat changes but I didn’t really see anything markedly different, but then I’m no theorycrafter. I wanted to get EQ2 going so I logged out after a few moments.

Angela had run the updater for EQ2 for me in the afternoon, so no patching was necessary. I had to re-open my account, apply my key and off I went, back to Norrath. My Dire Bear was kind of cool, but not as cool as the higher level ones (my character is 38) and not as fast as my horse. And beyond that… nothing really. I can’t fault Sony; they’d made it clear that this expansion was for level 50+, but I figured I’d find *something* shiny and new to excite me, but not really. I did log in to find I had 153% of the experience I needed to level from some change made in the past. So as soon as I got a point of xp, I dinged to 39 and half-way to 40, so level 50 doesn’t seem out of reach.

But then I crashed. Silently and with no fanfare. The screen froze for a second and suddenly I was looking at my desktop. I rebooted the PC, just in case, and once Vista eventually lurched back to life I logged back in. Played for 20 or so minutes and bam! Another crash to desktop. No obvious cause…nothing that connected the two occurrences in my mind. When last I played EQ2 (this past summer) the game was rock-stable for me, so I dunno what’s up. I have updated my video drivers since then; maybe its the PhysX crap in the nVidia drivers? I started surfing the support forums, but by this time it was after 11 and I finally just said “To hell with it” and went to bed, dejected and rather cranky.

And woke up even crankier this morning. Tonight I get to check out the “New XBox Experience” which honestly doesn’t sound all that exciting, but we’ll see. I’m going to set EQ2 to use a totally default interface in case one/some of my mods are out of date and breaking that game. If that doesn’t fix it, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Probably let it set for a few days until I’m more in the mood to troubleshoot PC gaming. If it turns into a long-running diagnosis/fix attempt cycle I’ll just write off my return to the game as a bad idea and go back to Warhammer.

Ah well. At least its Ghost Hunters night!

BattleForge

Posted on by Nimgimli

There is a Battleforge beta, and I am in it.

That’s all I can say about my first evening in the beta without breaking NDA. But I can talk about what the game is, given that you could read about it in previews or on their website. Prior to a few days ago I hadn’t even heard of the game, that I can remember, but Fileplanet was giving away beta keys so I signed up. Figured the game could use some exposure.

Turns out that Battleforge is a mashup of MMO, RTS and CCG. Acronym soup! Mostly, the game is an RTS game, but what units you can create is determined by the cards in your deck. You create a deck in the same way you would in Magic or any other CCG. The MMO aspect comes in via a persistent meta-world (anyone remember Cavedog’s Boneyard…this seems similar). Within this meta-world you can choose from solo, co-op and pvp missions. By doing missions you earn more cards (I think??) which allows you to tweak your deck more.

It seems like a fun and interesting premise. I’m not sure what the cost is going to be, and in all honestly all I played last night was the solo tutorial mission, so I couldn’t significantly break the NDA even if I wanted to.

I’d like to say I’ll be playing a lot more of the beta, but with Moria and Shadow Odyssey both out today (and Amazon pulled through and the latter is expected to arrive today), Wizard 101 still begging for some attention, and Fable 2 still drawing me in regularly…I’m not sure WHEN I’ll play this one.

I’d say if you enjoy RTS games, it’d be worth signing up for the beta, though.

Weekend Recap

Posted on by Nimgimli

Weekends just fly by, don’t they? I get home from work on Friday night, turn in a circle 2 times and its Monday morning. Magic, of the darkest, bleakest kind.

Gaming-wise, I was all over the place this weekend; I’m not even sure I can remember everything I did. I signed up for Wizard 101 and played that for a while. I did some mellow deed grinding in LOTRO on one character, and some solo questing on another.

I played more Fable 2, which is proving to be as much fun the second time through as it was the first. I’m a lot more erratic this time, trying things to deliberately put my character off balance. I’ve stolen from shops here and there when they’re left untended (which is a lousy way to make a living, btw…they don’t have a lot of cash-on-hand). I’m a lot less hesitant to fight and kill. I slap male villagers who try to flirt with me (I’m playing a woman this time through), causing some townsfolk to fear me a little. My inner-13 year old can’t resist stripping my hero in the middle of Bowerstone to see which NPCs love her more, and which hate her more, when she’s in her undies. The jeweler turns out to be gay and likes it a lot when I strip, to the point where she’s ready to marry me. I don’t have the money to buy a house yet though.

I also checked back in with The Witcher, which I’m both enjoying and finding a bit frustrating. It feels pretty slow-going (probably a lot of this is psychological as sometimes a week goes by between sessions) and I really really wish I could remap keys and moreso, mouse buttons. The right mouse button fires your selected spell, and the middle mouse button activates mouse-look. In every MMO I play, I set the right button to mouse look. So I keep firing spells when I really just want to look around.

But, the mood of the game is delightfully grim and I’m playing it as “honest” as I can. I had an encounter with a woman being accosted by a group of thugs as she made her way home from the tavern where she works as a serving wench. I gave them fair warning, but they were spoiling for a fight. Soon enough they were all dead. Then I offered to escort the young lady home to her grandmother’s. We were accosted by barghests several times, and I drove them off several times, but then the lass fell too far behind me and when we were attacked, I didn’t get back in time to save her and sadly, she was killed.

This being a single player game, I could’ve reloaded my last save point. But I didn’t. I want to, as best I can, live with the consequences of the mistakes I make. I won’t re-start from the beginning if I die, mind you: I’m not *that* hardcore. And I’m sure there will be some “primary quests” that I have to successfully complete in order to drive the story forward. But otherwise… living with the consequences.

Anyway, The Witcher is pretty decent so far. I wish they hadn’t put a Poker-Dice game in it though (what we used to call Bar-Dice when I was young) because I spend far, far too much time gambling instead of adventuring!!!

Let’s see, what else? Oh right, I played some LittleBigPlanet. I kind of feel guilty about this one…it’s a great game but I just don’t find myself getting around to it very often. I think I really need some kind of narrative to draw me along in a game, and honestly LBP has no narrative. It’s just a big playground. And as previously blogged, I played a game of Hinterland on Saturday night. Oh, and Nile Online throughout the weekend.

See what I mean? I was all over the place, and that was BEFORE the 2 expansions launched. I’m pretty content in letting Warhammer lapse for now; it just wouldn’t make fiscal sense to be paying for two subscription games, based on how erratic my gaming habits are these days.

So what about everyone else? What’d everyone play this past weekend?

Update Week!

Posted on by Nimgimli

This week is going to be full of excitement, once we get through the typically dreary Monday.

Tomorrow, the first major Warhammer patch goes live, LOTRO: Mines of Moria launches, and EQ2: The Shadow Odyssey launches. I’ve got Moria pre-ordered and pre-installed but I have to wait for Thursday, apparently, for Amazon to get Shadow Odyssey to me. In between those 2 MMO expansions, Wednesday brings the “New XBox Experience” which should be worth an evening of playing with.

I am, frankly, more excited about Moria than I am about Shadow Odyssey. On the other side of the room, however, Angela can’t sit still, she’s so eager to get the latter, and she has zero interest in Moria or LOTRO. Moria brings 2 new classes and a level cap raise, along with lots of other stuff, not least of which is 2 more character slots/server. Odyssey is directed at casual level 50-80 characters, from my understanding, and since my highest level EQ2 character is 38…well you can see why I’m not that excited.

Still, more games to play than I have time for… I kinda hate the 4th quarter holiday rush of game publishers.

Romantics & Dreamers

Posted on by Nimgimli

Sometimes I just don’t understand other gamers. Why do they hate the things I love, and vice versa? There’s something about me that’s just different from most gamers. And I finally figured out what it was.

I’m a romantic and a dreamer.

Fable 2 actually got me thinking about this. I loved the game, and the ending was incredibly moving to me. It left me feeling quiet and thoughtful for a long time. But I read other impressions of the game and they’ll tell you the ending sucked. Huh?

Well, if you’re playing with your fingers and eyes, the ending did suck. If, like me, your heart was thrown into the mix, the ending was amazing. One of the most thought-provoking endings I’ve ever encountered.

This morning Angela was working on a web site that I’d done the database design for. I knew she’d have a certain number of questions about the choices I’d made, so I didn’t want to get too engrossed in anything. So I logged into LOTRO to work on some Shire deeds. The character I was running is well beyond the level of the Shire but he never did the deeds in there. So mostly I had to run around and ‘discover’ landmarks, and hunt lots of very gray bugs and slugs and wolves.

And y’know, I was enchanted. Whenever I’ve been away from LOTRO for any amount of time, I’m a bit stunned when I return. The landscapes, the music, the people going about their business…it all feels very much like a “world” to me, and one where there is still hope and happiness. Watching the sun come up and the clouds move slowly across the sky. Watching brooks babbling over rocks, and the sunlight reflecting off the water. It all feels very relaxing. It feels like I really am in Middle Earth. And it makes me want to defend this place from the intrusion of darkness.

And at the same time, I know for a lot of gamers what I was doing would be considered pointless grinding and a huge flaw in the game. They wouldn’t stop to watch a shrew clean its face or nibble on a tidbit it’d found. They wouldn’t notice the sky. They’d find a hobbit outfitter that sells cosmetic items and snort and think “What a waste of money..why would I get this for my toon?”

Actually, I think “toon” is significant. If you think of your characters as “toons” then yeah, every time you think about them you’re reminding yourself that this is all really just a spreadsheet with graphics layered on and that there’s a most efficient way to increase those numbers quickly. I think of my characters as characters or, more often, as “me”. I have to deliberately say “Gillain did this” rather than naturally sliding into “I did this”.

I feel faintly embarrassed to be admitting this. Ysh was talking about Wizard 101 a few days ago and someone commented that he was too old and too male to play Wizard 101. It’s just part of our culture (particularly among the young, and I consider anyone under 35 or so in that category) that guys are supposed to be hard and apathetic about beauty (except for hot women, of course) and fluff. We’re supposed to be all about the killing and efficient leveling. Competition and being the strongest and the best.

But that just isn’t me, at least a lot of the time. I’m about the experience. That’s why I get so excited when I run into Gotrek & Felix in a tavern in Altdorf. It’s why I mutter under my breath when I have to slog through a marsh and ruin my new boots. It’s why killing 10 rats isn’t a problem for me, but killing 10 bunnies is.

I mean yeah, I really like getting a new level, and I enjoy winning a bout of RvR. But not all the time. I need more than that, and maybe that’s why I’ve gotten somewhat less enthusiastic about Warhammer. Mythic deliberately designed a GAME rather than a WORLD and I kind of miss the world aspects sometimes.

Anyway, no real point to all this. I’m certainly not saying one way is better than the other (and I don’t think there’s a dichotomy here…it’s definitely a gradient kind of issue). I just find it harder to find other gamers like me than I do the type that is very goal-driven and not really about the extras. Maybe we need to form a support group or something.

Thanks for reading all that, if you’re still here. 🙂 As a reward, here’s a couple of ‘wallpaper’ screens I took this morning. Very valuable, very rare!!

lotro lotro

Tilted Mill pwns my Saturday

Posted on by Nimgimli

After running around in the rain doing errands all day I sat down for some sweet MMO gaming. But I decided, maybe I’d play a bit of Hinterland first, since I haven’t been back to that game lately. Next thing I knew, 4+ hours had gone by!

I won my game, which sprang me from the grasp of its spell, and then…logged in to Nile Online to check the status of my cities. I was almost ready to upgrade my palace to level 5, but I need to ship some goods from my new city to my old. But the new city wouldn’t have a ship ready for about half an hour. So I puttered around, twiddling my thumbs until that was done, then shipped the goods, which would take 18 minutes to arrive. So more thumb twiddling even though it was after midnight and I was beat. Finally got everything where it needed to be and started the 5 hour build.

So I didn’t log in to War, or Wizard 101, or activate my EQ2 account. Because Tilted Mill apparently owns my soul. Dunno what will become of my when Mosby’s Confederacy comes out!!

Totally unrelated and random side note. One of my chores was taking a bunch of change to a Coinstar in the local supermarket. I assume this is a national thing: it’s a machine that you dump all your change into and then get some kind of money out of. I took mine out as an Amazon gift certificate (no charge that way…they take some percentage if you get cash for your coins), but anyway… Much to my surprise, I got a bonus coupon for $10. From now until Dec 7th, if you turn in at least $40 worth of coins, you’ll get $10 extra (after you fill out a coupon and send it in). I had no idea this promotion was going on, and from sheer luck turned in $41 worth of change. Yay me!

Details here. Maybe be worth emptying that change jar of yours.

Random sidebar to random side note. I turned in 147 dimes, 42 nickels, and 2,447 pennies.

A Wizard is born!

Posted on by Nimgimli

Spent maybe an hour in Wizard 101, due to the influences of Ysh and through her, Tipa. Well, honestly I’m not *quite* that easily swayed…it’s a game I’ve heard some low-level but positive buzz about for a while. These blogs just pushed me over the edge.

So far its pretty much what I expected in tone, but the combat system is actually more interesting than I thought it’d be in one particular way. Combat is turn-based (card based, really) but it takes place in the world. For some reason I assumed I’d be whisked off to a private battlefield when it got time to fight, but no. And other people can jump into your battle if they happen to be running past. That’s pretty neat. No need to form a party or anything…just stand on a caster’s circle and start fighting. In the same way, additional mobs can jump in.

Anyway, I’ve barely scratched the surface. But checking it out is easy enough…no need to pay for anything until you’ve learned about the basics of the game, and the client is quite lightweight, so no need for an hour of downloading, either. So if you’re curious, check it out.

I’m actually most confused about how to pay for it, if I choose to stick with it. I can pay $10/month, or I can buy crowns and pay for access in crowns, but how many crowns that’s going to cost me is pretty unclear. But I think I’ll just play for free for a bit longer before I fret too much about that.

TGIF, WRUP, and other acronyms

Posted on by Nimgimli

So last night was all about the Thursday Night Football, thus no gaming was done. In fact overall damned little gaming got accomplished this week, much to my chagrin. XFire says I spend 2 hours playing Warhammer in the past 7 days, and that’s the game I spent the most time on, PC-wise (not that I always trust those numbers). I did play the Left 4 Dead demo on the 360 a couple of times, and spent quite a bit of time at Nile Online.

Yes, fascinating stuff. But what of the future? This is an odd week for me. I finished Fable 2 and didn’t/don’t want to wade into some lengthy single-player game because next week the LOTRO and EQ2 expansions hit, plus the “New XBox Experience” arrives (which, granted, will probably only be interesting for an evening). I could be playing Warhammer but fear getting sucked back into it, only to have my account turn off early next week.

So I feel like I’m in a quasi-holding pattern. I might stalk follow Ysharros into Wizardry 101 over the weekend, just because it sounds fun and easy. Quick to download, easy to learn… just some nice concentrated fun. Or at least that’s the vibe I’m getting.

Or I could fire up the EQ2 account and get re-acquainted, but I dunno… does it make sense to get re-acquainted only to install an expansion and have to relearn stuff? Might be just as easy to wait.

Curiously, I’ve paid very little attention to the big MMO expansions. I know WOW has Lich King and a Death Knight class and that’s about all I know. Moria has legendary weapons and 2 new classes, which I know very little about (but I’ll roll a Warden because I always roll any class called Ranger or Warden). The EQ2 expansion I know ZERO about, except that Angela is super-psyched for it. I guess it adds… new stuff. I don’t even remember the full name of it!! LOL.

This makes me an un-informed consumer but a happy gamer. I love discovering stuff on my own, and THEN researching it to learn the nuances. Werit wrote a post called Too Much Information that captures my feelings well enough that it seems pointless for me to repeat them here.

Apparently there’s a big free content update either going into Age of Conan, or already launched. Interesting. I’d like to jump back into AoC at some point. But then Ardwulf has me wanting to take another look at Vanguard, too. Plus Chronicles of Spellborn launches sometime soon, and I wanted to look at that as well. And I’m definitely not ‘done’ with Warhammer Online!

Is it any wonder that MMOs have churn problems these days? So many interesting choices and it’s hard to justify two concurrent subscriptions for most people. Add to that the lure of so many fantastic single-player games out now. It all just feels like too much. Are there enough gaming dollars to support all this content??

Anyway, let’s get to the WRUP part: What are YOU playing this weekend?

Nile Online status update

Posted on by Nimgimli

Woot!

» [8:02 pm] You sent off ships loaded with resources to found a new city! It will take 12 hours to complete.

It took me three or four days of focused gathering and buying, but I established my second city!! Or am establishing it.

I’ll now have leather as well as kohl to trade.

In other news, I got all official and stuff and added an “About me” page.

MMO devs need to be Left 4 Dead

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night I played through the Left 4 Dead demo again, mostly to make sure I’d given it a fair shot. I still don’t think I want to spend $60 to kill endless hordes of zombies, but I did come to appreciate some other aspects of the game.

During the hype-storm we learned a lot about L4D’s “AI Director” system. This system modulates the game experience in real-time. If you’re getting your arse handed to you, the number of baddies will abate a bit. Conversely, if you’re sailing through effortlessly the AI Directory will spawn more enemies to make the game a little more difficult.

It’s hard to quantify these changes in a game with as many enemies as L4D, and more so in the course of a 2 level demo played twice, but let’s assume this was working as intended. It felt like it was. I performed a lot better during my second try but the game didn’t feel any easier. But what I *can* quantify is that the experience was different in two play-throughs.

For instance in my first session, I ran into what I assumed was a “mini-boss” character in the subway. This massive creature came crashing through the wrecked subway car using the ‘terrain’ intelligently and provided a good challenge and change of pace. If felt like an “Encounter.” The second time through, I approached this intersection carefully, waiting for the boss. And he wasn’t there. In fact I didn’t encounter him at all in the second run through the levels, though I did encounter another “hero zombie” that I hadn’t the first time. Additionally ammo caches showed up in different places and the zombies came from different directions.

Which leads me to the title of this post. How cool would it be if MMO devs could incorporate this system into our favorite online games? Both in terms of scaling the difficulty of an area based on player concentration, but more so in having random bosses roaming around providing “Encounters” at unexpected times? Some games do a little of this: think of resource spawns, or random chests that you might come across out in the world.

I’m imagining an instanced dungeon that could be done by 1 person or 10. Obviously the loot drops would be better when 10 players took it on, but a solo-er could at least go in and have fun and experience the storyline of the dungeon. And every time through could be a little different in order to keep players on their toes.

I’m also imagining random Encounters that are self-contained quests. Your party is out questing when you unexpectedly run into some strong mob. If you can defeat him, you get some quest experience (maybe an NPC runs in to reward you or whatever) and loot, same as if he was a fixed Quest. But he isn’t…the next time you pass through this area, he isn’t there. I’m not suggesting a whole MMO built around this: set-pieces are part of the fun of an MMO. But I’m thinking of these as an addition to what we play now.

I also was once again impressed by the AI of my NPC party members, and it’d be interesting to see more MMO devs follow the Guild Wars example of allowing us to hire some extra muscle to fill out a party. I understand there’s a delicate balance between helping the MMO experience and essentially destroying it by letting everyone just hire NPCs rather than grouping. But wouldn’t it be nice to hire a healer (or tank, or whatever) rather than standing around with 4 friends yelling “Looking for Healer for BigBadInstance!” for half an hour?