GnomeDepot.Net » Miscellaneous Madness

Weekend – Open Beta Version

Sisca — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:09:15 +0000

Lately I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed in EQ2. There are so many different things I want to do that I find myself paralyzed by choice.

This weekend I decided that what I needed was a change of scenery and since both Champions Online and Fallen Earth had open “betas” I figured I’d give them look. I plan on writing a more detailed post on each of them later but here’s my one line review.

Champions: City of Heroes 2.0 or maybe CoX evolved and that’s not a bad thing.

Fallen Earth: The love child of Fallout 3 and Eve with a crafting system that I find very compelling.

More later – the iPhone is ok for short posts but not so much for longer writing.

Odds and ends

Loredena — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:11:17 +0000

A couple things I noticed — the dev team (influenced by Brenlo) are definitely making changes to encourage the less-hardcore amongst their audience. Someone complained about the research assistants, and specifically complained that it reduced what he could sells Masters at. Brenlo’s response? ‘As a 76 ranger with 30pp to my name, I don’t consider that a bad thing’. I’ll point out as well that when the research assistants were mentioned at the opening night kickoff, there were a cluster of young men who loudly booed; the rest of the crowd cheered. It appears that even amongst those hardcore enough to pay for Fan Faire, that it was in general a popular move.

During the session in which the change to all raids going forward was discussed, such that at each pull of a boss mob one can, through lore, set the difficulty level, a top-tier raider complained that this reduced his guild’s sense of accomplishment. This elicited a handful of responses: From the devs, they pointed out that since it IS handled through lore, the entire encounter changes based on the difficulty level, such that one might not even face the final boss on ‘easy mode’, and Rothgar pointed out the likelihood of achievements that indicate the mode/boss killed. Brenlo’s response was a bit more pointed — this is one of the few times I’ve heard a producer of any MMO state outright that it is a business decision. It is not cost-effective to produce raid zones that only 5% of the population ever sees (Brenlo’s stated percentage), and this change is in part to greatly increase the number of guilds that can work their way through the zones, and both see them and experience the lore.

Fan Faire – EQ 2 edition

Loredena — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:45:29 +0000

I attended two EQ2 sessions at Fan Faire so far today. The first was on quest mechanics, the second on more-general game mechanics. What was interesting in the first was watching the process of rewriting a quest — in this case, that really annoying open-the-gate quest in Thundering Steppes is being rewritten! No longer must you know Halasian, nor come only during the day, to earn the right to come and go as you please. Further, the story line makes more sense, AND does not require you to lower your faction with the centaurs! Instead you’ll collect guard tower reports, find a box of coins (look under the sofa!) and kill a highwayman causing problems, all to make the road safer. For how the quests themselves are built, I’m afraid you had to be there, or talk to someone better at conveying it then me. suffice it to say that while flexible, the tool IS still by its nature limiting in what can be done. There was one point of interest though — there is a desire within the dev team to add other ways of advancing/completing quests that is not so dependent upon kill-10-rat mechanics. This will require rework of the tool, as well as some gameplay mechanics, but they seem to be keen to do something there.

From the game-play mechanics session came announcements of, yes, new mechanics! Planned for LU 53 (which is targetted for September according to Brenlo):

1) auto-mentoring! yes, you will be able to talk to someone in your home city and choose a x0 or x5 level to be mentored down to, automatically, so you can go out and complete those quests at the appropriate level without having to find someone to mentor. So as not to discourage ‘real’ mentoring, you won’t get that 3 times increase in AA experience, but it otherwise will work the same way. And, should you find someone to mentor while you are automentoring, you can end it, and switch to mentoring a player — they are hoping this will get more people out in the lower zones, but appropriately leveled. Furthermore, they plan to add some missions (obtainable at level 80 only, sadly) which will require that you be at a specific level to complete them, thus utilizing the new system.

2) the current achievement system is being renamed to Alternate Advancement, or AA to make way for a brand new achievement system! This will be account based, not character specific, as it is intended to be viewed as the achievements of a given player, not character — they compared it to XBox Live Achievements (and yes, I see the irony . So, you will see achievements for things like kill 1000 goblins (which will retroactively play off the slayer counts) but also for exploration, completing a zone, crafting 100 tables or other similar items. There will be meta achievements (so for instance, finish a zone, followed by finish an expansion) and achievements that are either cumulative across alts (the kill rats quests can be done by any combination of alts) or require something be done by multiple characters (get 3 to 80 for instance). Having achievements be across the account gives the devs more freedom for class-specific achievements they said, as you were likely to have ONE character who could meet it. They also didn’t want people to feel forced to get the achievement on every character. Also, as part of this both the quest journal and the persona window will be revamped.

3) raid scaling — new raids (not existing ones, unfortunately) will be set up to have ‘tiers’ of difficulty, on a per encounter/boss mob level, that will be handled in a lore-appropriate fashion (not a popup select difficulty). So, a smaller, inexperienced/undergeared guild could choose to take the zone, or just a specific encounter on ‘easy mode’ while the top teir well-geared guilds can opt for heroic/uberhard mode. Rewards will scale accordingly, but this should both permit greater utilization of content (they want more people to see the zones and experience the lore) and the ability to work your way up as a guild through the difficulty level of a raid.

There were a lot of hints about forthcoming announcements as well, but nothing specific.

On a completely unrelated note, before the sessions I had an chance to talk to Kaitheel and tell him how much I love the live events. He is very enthusiastic, happy to talk, and young He did share a few tidbits though — Tinkerfest will be 9 days long, to include 2 weekends. Nights of the Dead will likely be extended from last year’s 2 weeks to 2.5 weeks this year. Also, having learned that players hate to have things removed, the Icy Keep will return at Frostfell! even though that dragon is likely to have shown up elsewhere in the meantime….

Danger…Fallout!

Sisca — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 09:19:27 +0000

This week is my birthday and Lore got me the collectors edition of Fallout 3. I still consider the original 2 some of the best games ever and I have high hopes that this one will carry on that tradition.

Last night I was torn between attempting the newest D.I.R.T.Y. quests and playing Fallout…Fallout won and I have to say that so far it’s done a pretty good job of bringing the classic series into the modern world.

The first half an hour or so was basically a combination tutorial/character creation session which was pretty cool but I’m hoping there is a way to bypass parts of that since it’s really only entertaining once. I don’t think it will be a spoiler to say that you actually get to start in The Vault in this one and after the tutorial part and the initial quests that have you leave the vault I spent the rest of the night in the first town you come to.

This is where I can really see shades of the original games. After 3 hours of running around exploring town, talking to people and picking up a bunch of quests I already have what appear to be conflicting quests and I know that choosing one side is going to have an impact on how the story progresses.

So far my only complaint is the first person perspective and the real time combat. I’m getting used to the first person part – though I still don’t like running around either armed or with my fists up like I’m about to punch everyone – but I think the combat might take me a while. I need to play around with the VATS (paused slow motion Action Point based system) to figure out if I can make it come closer to duplicating the strategic turn based combat of the originals.

I’ve seen a couple of complaints about the lock picking and hacking mini-games but I find them entertaining. I find it interesting that they managed to give them appropriately different feels. The lock picking is a slightly twitchy while the hacking is a more mental exercise though neither is overly difficult. It’s true that as an RPG it should be about the characters skills and not mine but I find it a bit more immersive to participate in these activities and I can see that it would be easy enough to tweak the difficulty of the mini-game to make it easier for more skilled characters – I’m not sure it works this way I can just see how it could be made to.

I have a feeling it’s going to be one of those games that takes me forever to finish though since I’ve got about 4 hours in already and I haven’t even left the first city.

Gaming, Interrupted

Sisca — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:44:23 +0000

Last Wednesday SoE surprised everyone with the rollout of GU48 in EQ2. We knew it was coming but everyone figured it would either be later in the week what with Fan Faire taking everyone’s time and energy the previous weekend. This update added a ton of content that Lore and I were looking forward to so Comcast deciding to help us celebrate the release by having our internet connection drop off was NOT appreciated.

It was just the internet connection, cable still worked just fine, so we called, they checked, it was working intermittently but at much slower speed so they were going to send someone out…on SATURDAY!. Suddenly, on Thursday it was back, though we did still get the occasional drop, and I got an automated call saying it might have been fixed remotely and asking if I wanted to cancel the service call. Needless to say I declined. It appeared to be working Thursday night and Friday night but on Saturday morning it was back to dropping offline. I called, naturally while I was on hold it came back on, and they said the earliest the could send someone was Sunday afternoon. Lore had to do some testing for her project at work on Sunday so she called them back, told them Sunday was unaccepetable, especially considering we had originally had an appointment for Saturday that we had canceled because they had "fixed it remotely". They agreed to try and get someone to come out that afternoon and promised her a call back by 2:00 PM to let her know if it was going to be possible. After getting no call by 3:00 she called back only to first find that they could locate the call tracking number she’d been given and then when she finally got through to someone they told her sorry the earliest was going to be Sunday after all.

By this time the cable is back to mostly working and it continued to mostly work all day Sunday. Sunday afternoon the guy shows up, checks everything in the house, replaces one connector where the cable comes in the attic but I think that was just for show. When he goes to check the connector box, in our neighbors yard, he finds that the cable has been damaged, probably by a weedeater. He ends up replacing the cable run from the junction box to the house due to the fact that water had gotten into the damaged section of the cable. I’m still not 100% convinced that was the problem since, as I said, we would go for hours at a time with no issues and the TV never had any issues.

Not that it matters, since we’ve had connectivity issues with them before and since Comcast has announced this whole bandwidth throttling thing Lore has been down on them for awhile now. With this round of issues we’ve decided to switch back to Speakeasy DSL. It’s not quite as fast but it’s fast enough, we very rarely had any connectivity issues with them and when we did they were always upfront about the problem and very responsive. The only reason we switched was because Comcast offered a good deal on the TV/Internet combo which has long since expired. As an example of the difference, when we called Speakeasy offered us $20.00 a month off the regular price if we signed up for a year and an additional $10.00 off for being a returning customer and waived the installation fee. They’ve also sent us daily updates about where the install stands which to me is more important than the discounts since it shows a willingness to communicate with their customers.

I was actually able to get some gaming time in this weekend so I’ll update that later.

Technorati Tags: Comcast,problems,Speakeasy

Do you know where yours is…

Sisca — Thu, 25 May 2006 12:58:05 +0000