Category: Gaming

The return of the weekly Dragon Age video!

Posted on by Nimgimli

I guess the Bioware/EA press juggernaut took a week off to catch their breath. But they’re back and this time a decent video of the combat system in Dragon Age. Clearly the people being filmed expect you to be watching this before you play, so there’s a bit of redundancy (assuming you’re playing DA:O right now, and if you aren’t…why not!?) but they also talk about where they drew inspiration from and what they were ‘going for.’ (You can decide if they hit their target.)

A short epilogue talks about how many more stories there are to tell in this universe. Whether that’s a tease for DLC, an expansion pack, or a sequel, I don’t know. I’d be happy with all three, myself.

City of Eternals hits closed beta

Posted on by Nimgimli

Back when Ohai formed, mostly I thought “Cute name” and then pretty much forgot about the company. They’ve been keeping a low profile until now, when City of Eternals stepped out of the shadows (and you will, I pray, pardon the pun).

This is a web-based, Facebook-connected MMO featuring vampires and zombies and other things that go bump in the night. Oddly, the coverage I’ve been seeing comes from places like TechCrunch and VentureBeat, not the gaming sites (at least, not the ones I read). Facebook games are suddenly big business (just ask EA) and these techie/vc blogs are paying attention to the money.

I’m not in the beta so I’m not being coy when I tell you I don’t know much about the game, but here’s some video from TechCrunch. Hard to really tell much about any depth that may or may not be present, based on the rather simple combat shown, but hopefully their pool of testers will broaden considerably in the near future. You can sign up to be considered for beta here, but you may need to log into your Facebook account on the way to that link.

Question of the Day: Would you play an MMO if you knew it only had a year to live?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Wow, not sure I ever tried a title that long… let’s see what happens.

Anyway, all this idle speculation about the future of Warhammer Online (not to mention Champions, not to mention the early death of Tabula Rasa) has me wondering something.

Would you start playing an MMO if you knew it was only going to be around for 9-12 months?

I’m not going to do a formal poll but I’ll offer my own conflicted answers to the question, just to get you started.

On the one hand, I have an unhealthy level of curiosity about games, so knowing a title won’t be around too long might prompt me to sign up just so I could get a chance to check it out before it ‘dies.’

On the other hand, one of the aspects of MMOs I love is how open-ended and never-ending they are. If I knew one was going to have a limited lifespan, I’m not sure I’d want to bother putting the time into it to ‘establish’ myself.

I do know I quit Tabula Rasa very much intending to come back to it, then when I heard it was shutting down, it didn’t seem worth the effort of going back. Yet I found myself wishing I’d played it more when it launched.

Still I feel conflicted when it comes to answering this question. What about you?

Cross-Post: EA to lay off 1500 employees

Posted on by Nimgimli

I don’t usually do this, but since it is topical I’ll make an exception.

My blog post at ITWorld today is an opinion piece (and I wish that site emphasized posts tagged opinion more) about the EA layoffs:

Game developer Electronic Arts announces 1500 job cuts

A bit more ‘extreme’ thoughts that I didn’t feel comfortable sharing over there; I think this is a really bad sign for the so-called ‘core gamer.’ It sounds to me like EA is shifting it’s emphasis from the PC/Xbox/PS3 triad over to free-to-play web games with micro-scams… I mean micro-transactions.

I never would’ve imagined Facebook would become such a threat to “real” games.

TorchEd release imminent?

Posted on by Nimgimli

RunicGames said on their twitter account today: “TorchED update, we found a bug on the last build, going to try to fix it tonight and get it out tomorrow. Updates in the forums!”

So here’s hoping we get it tomorrow. They’ve posted a few items to get you prepared and/or psyched for the toolset:

First, you’re gonna need .Net installed.

Second, here’s Ten Helpful Tips for Using TorchED

I’m so sucked into Dragon Age I’m not sure I’ll be able to pull myself away to play with TorchED right away, but I have been thinking when I’m finally ready to get my hands dirty, I’ll start with TorchEd and before taking on the rather intimidating Dragon Age toolset.

Rags to riches for me. I haven’t had a neat RPG toolset to play with since NeverWinter Nights, and now I have two at the same time!

Dragon Age: Hoisted on my own petard

Posted on by Nimgimli

So after promoting Dragon Age heavily for the weeks leading up to the game, I’m happy to say that it is everything I hoped it would be, and I’m very much enjoying my time in the game. I spend much too much time reading and re-reading the codex and chatting up every NPC I can find who has a conversation tree (including my own party members).

Because of this, and a slow start, I assume I’m far behind other folks who are just jamming through this like they would any other game while I savor each moment. According to Raptr I have 15 hours into it, and probably another 5 when I wasn’t running the Raptr client. And yet I feel like my journey is just beginning.

The downside is, I don’t have anything to post about the game. I hate spoilers and I don’t want to spoil anything for others. I’m burning to talk about the choices I made but can’t really do that without spoiling things for myself and other people. Heck I’ve started unfollowing (temporarily) people on Twitter who’re talking specifics about the game.

I’m finding I’ve really missed this sense of “What happens next?” in my gaming. I’m usually playing MMOs months after thousands of people have hit cap and are talking nonchalantly about so-and-so actually being a dragon and the instance that exposes her and so on… you can’t really prevent spoilers in an MMO unless you’re one of the obsessed individuals who stays up for 72 hours straight to be the first to hit cap. The first time you do a group-based quest someone (who has done the quest 4 times on different alts) explains exactly what is going to happen when. Just the nature of that kind of game when you’re a slow leveler like me.

I had no idea how much I’d missed rich western-style single player RPG gaming until I started playing Dragon Age: Origins. I’m already thinking of the different choices I’ll make the next time I play. And I’m wondering what sorts of side stories we’ll see both from Bioware and from talented amateur game designers.

I see this one having a pretty long reign on my hard drive, even if it may mean some quiet days here at Dragonchasers.

Dragon Age backstory – If only I had known

Posted on by Nimgimli

If I’d known then what I know now…

I’m not going to go into spoilers, but some events that happen in the Dragon Age storyline are going to hit people who read the prequel novels a lot harder than those who didn’t. If I’d known ahead of time what was going to happen in the story, I would’ve urged folks to read The Stolen Throne and even The Calling (though it wasn’t that great a novel it did contain a goodly amount of backstory) before playing.

And yes, with the weekend here I’m finally done waffling and creating ‘alts’ and am actually moving forward in the story!

Dragon Age: Origins — Learn2Play!!!

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you bought your version of DA:O digitally, or if you bought the console version, you might be interested in downloading the manual for the game (I haven’t seen the console manual but I’m told it’s pretty thin). I just had a read through it and learned some nuances I wasn’t aware of. Plus it gives some info that might help you in picking a race/class combination.

If that isn’t enough, there’s a fan-led project called Dragon Age: Origins – The Missing Manual (at least, that’s what it is called until O’Reilly, who publishes “The Missing Manual” series, hears about it). It’s very much a work-in-progress but already does a good job of making existing information easier to parse. For example, this chart on what each character behavior setting does is, to me at least, easier to grok then looking at the tool tips in-game.

DA:O Toolset Installation problems for Steam/Impulse users

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you bought Dragon Age: Origins digitally you may encounter problems installing the Toolset. Bioware is working the problem, but in the meanwhile here’s what I did to get it installed.

Run the installer. The problem happens while installing MS SQL Server, and specifically while configuring it. You’ll encounter an error with an ignore/retry prompt. Leave that floating on screen.

Open:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\dragon age origins\tools\toolssql\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Install\sysdbupg.sql
(substituting paths as required; I did this on Windows 7 Home 64-bit)

Search for:

SELECT @certificate_name = QUOTENAME(@certificate_name, ””)

and replace the line with:

SELECT @certificate_name = ”” + REPLACE(@certificate_name, ””, ”””) + ”’

Now hit Retry. You will probably get a new error along the lines of “Unable to Create database.”

Now open:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\dragon age origins\tools\toolssql\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data

and delete these files:
temp_MS_AgentSigningCertificate_database.mdf
temp_MS_AgentSigningCertificate_database_log.LDF
if they exist.

Finally go back to your installer and click on Retry again.

The installation *should* proceed smoothly. If it doesn’t, check the error logs in:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\dragon age origins\tools\toolssql\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\LOG
to see if you can tell what’s tripping things up.

There’s also a problem where the installer tries to write the uninstall.exe file to the wrong directory. Haven’t found a fix for that yet, but hitting Ignore lets you finish the installation and run the tools. Might mean some manual registry cleaning some day when you uninstall the tools though.

More details can be found here:
http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/8/index/109796/1

and here:
http://social.bioware.com/wiki/datoolset/index.php/Installation_with_Steam

I tested this on my Steam install but forum denizens say it works for Impulse as well.

[Updated the steps to take out a shortcut that may have been causing problems (see comments.)]