Warhammer Online: Guild Beta Impressions - Part III

Phase 3.3 saw the opening of the Tier 4 zones, along with character wipes and the ability to make level 31, templated characters.

Seeing the Tier 4 zones and getting a chance to try and push the zone control so that your side can assault new zones was interesting, but it also revealed some flaws with the system.


For example, its possible for your side to gain control of all the objectives and keeps in an area, but still lose control of the zone. I know that PvE and Scenarios also have an effect on the zone control, it just feels kind of weird to have physical control of a zone, but the magic meter tells you something different.

Keep combat is very one-dimensional. Attack the front gate, run in, attack the keep lord. The only difference with the higher tier keeps is that they require you to bust down two doors. The keeps look fancy, but 90% of the area is never used. It's also odd that there are no NPCs on the walls. You would think they could stick in some static archers.

Tier 4 areas have a bit of an interesting setup. In the middle there is a zone that is 80% RvR, flanked on either side by two PvE zones that feed into the middle zone for control purposes.

Thunder Mountain is the central Tier 4 area for the Greenskin/Dwarf pairing. It is a badlands type area, with a volcano in the center. Very cool atmosphere, very crappy for actually getting anywhere. Due to large chasms dominating the landscape, you often have to take a very roundabout route to get to where you need to go (note: this is for the RvR area. The PvE areas of the zone don't have this issue), resulting in a lot of running around. This is especially annoying because it is the RvR area. I don't want to spend more time running back to the combat than I do actually fighting.

The Empire vs Chaos area of Praag on the other hand, is a great RvR setup. Almost the entire zone is encompassed by the town, which each side having a warcamp on the outskirts to give them easy access to the interior. Objectives are on a general line through the middle of town, with one keep at each end. This is much more fun than running around on windy paths in Thunder Mountain. It also gives more of a feeling of an actual war, since you're fighting in a city instead of out in the middle of nowhere at some random spot.

I really think that Mythic will have to revisit the RvR zones for the other two pairings to make them as interesting. Currently, 90% of the outdoor PvP action happens in the Empire vs Chaos areas.

Another thing that really bothers me is zone control resetting periodically? I find this feature a bit odd. Apparently, you are under a time limit in regards to gaining control of zones. Otherwise, the zone resets entirely. Pretty lame design, IMO, but I guess it goes along with the theme park style of gaming. After several posts about this issue, I finally got some details from a Mythic employee. Once you start a keep assault, you have 60 minutes to win before it resets (though I'm not sure what exactly causes the timer to start. Hitting the front door? Destroying the front door? Attacking the keep lord?). Also, once one of the final fortresses is taken, you have 36 hours to take one of the other two, which will then open up the capitol for attack. If you don't beat the time deadline, the Tier for which the fortress was taken resets back to its default values. All objectives in that zone become neutral and the keeps revert to initial ownership. I find this to be a pretty lame mechanic. Maybe if they had an NPC spawn that retook the keep, that would be interesting. But as it is, it just suddenly pops back and you have to start all over from the bottom. My preference would be to leave it in the hands of the players to retake the keeps. Make the players actually fight for what is theirs rather than just resetting the pins for another round. But, I guess that goes along with the themepark MMO.

Leveling is definitely slower post 30. But its still not too bad. Definitely much quicker leveling than any of the other fantasy MMOs on the market.

I continue to be impressed with the whole open party concept. It works very well, with most successful open Warbands being formed around a small core of guild players. There are a few issues. The main one that bothers me is that I cant always see where everyone in my warband is on the map. But, this is a bug that affects all warbands, not just open ones.

Talisman making is still not in game yet, but drops for it have begun to appear. Some items have enhancement slots, so I am assuming that Talisman making will create items for these slots, kind of like Jewelcrafting in WoW.

Got a chance to play with some of the dye options. The colors seem to be a lot more apparent on the higher-level gear. And it does make your avatar stand out. Unfortunately, there are only a dozen or so color options, and some of them are priced differently. I've seen some hints in-game that they plan on letting Apothecaries create their own dyes, but it seems that this feature isn't fully implemented as noone has managed to actually make any.

The game has improved quite a bit over the last month. Things generally seem a lot smoother, particularly client-side. I still get occasional graphics lag, but it is vastly improved.

And before I finish up this post, I suppose I should talk a bit about the guild system. Forming a guild in WAR requires a full party of 6 players to gather at the guild registrar in Inevitable City. You then pay a fee, pick a guild name and you're all set. The guild window has several tabs, including one for managing alliances. The UI has a few issues, but all-in-all, its well laid out and fairly comprehensive. One of the more unique aspects of WAR is its Living Guild system, whereby your guild gains levels. Each level opens up something new, from standards, to special access to the guild area in the capitol, to designing your own, personal heraldry (which has quite a number of options to choose from). This system seems to work pretty naturally, and quickly as well. We had to remake our guild several times during the beta, but we were always able to gain back the early levels rather easily. The highest level our guild achieved was 9, so I cant comment too much on the details above that, but it definitely was a source of pride for us to see our guild growing as a result of our efforts to bash in some stuntie heads!

Warhammer Online: Guild Beta Impressions - Part II

Here is the second of my beta impressions from the Guild Beta. This post is kind of short, since this phase only lasted a week. This was labeled Beta 3.2 and opened up the Tier 3 zones. My random thoughts are below in no particular order.

Note: This was written in mid to late July.


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In addition to continuing to play my Black Orc, I also played a bit in the starting zones for the Empire and Dark Elves as well as playing a Squig Herder up to level 10.

I noticed that the Tier one objectives for Empire/Chaos were a hotbed of activity. Likely due to the fact that they are all of 10 seconds outside of the camps, and sit smack in the middle of both sides. On the other hand, the objectives for the first two Greenskin/Dwarf zones are tucked away in a corner of the map that noone ever goes to. So those objectives usually switch hands with no conflict whatsoever. Of course, it was mostly a mindless zerg (if you played WoW before they implemented battlegrounds, this is akin to the mass Hillsbrad/Southshore fights that used to happen on a daily basis).

Beta 3.2 saw the opening of Tier 3 zones, but they seemed strangely empty. It also seemed that the racial pairings aren't as in your face as they were in the other zones. The only times I saw any enemies in the two Greenksin/Dwarf Tier 3 zones was when they were riding by to go to the Gunbad dungeon.

Speaking of dungeons, I believe this is the first dungeon available for Destruction players. It's called Mount Gunbad and is designed for mid-20s players. It involves delving down into a cave to take on some goblins that are breeding super squigs. Though you have to go through a portal to get inside, the dungeon itself is open, which means that everyone is in the same instance. I think it's divided by faction, since I didn't see any enemy players inside, and all of the quest givers were goblins. There is no party-size limit, so you can take as many players as you want. Unfortunately, I crashed soon after entering and was unable to get back to my non-Guild group due to respawns, so I didn't get to see much of the place.

Some of the scenarios are pretty lame. For example, there is one King of the Hill scenario that is actually on a hill. Unfortunately, a number of classes get a knockback ability, which they will use to knock you off the top of the hill, forcing you to run back up. Another scenario requires you to grab and hold an artifact. The usual result is that one side gets it first, then camps below their spawn with it. Sometimes I have fun, sometimes I don't, usually revolving around how well my side is doing. If you enjoyed WoW's battlegrounds, you'll probably enjoy WAR's scenarios. Though sometimes you might end up waiting a while to get into a scenario, one good thing is that once the scenario is done, you're returned to the exact spot you were in before you entered. Makes it easy to continue on with questing or activities while waiting in line.

This phase also saw the push of the Realm War 'leader boards' which are pretty dumb at the moment. For one, they don't update and still have info from two weeks ago. For two, they're really not that interesting. For three, I don't see any info about the actual war. That is what I want to know! Which keeps are controlled by who, where has the fighting been going on for the past couple of hours. What objectives are available for attack. How close are we to pushing the gates of our opponents' city? This is the sort of info I expect to see. I could really care less about who spent the past 24 hours grinding renown points. But, I'm assuming they have plans to make it more interesting.

Next Up: Part III, which includes info from some time we were given in the Tier 4 zones with templated characters.

Warhammer Online: Guild Beta Impressions - Part I

Note: These are my initial impressions from the Guild Beta and were written a month ago. A lot has changed in the game since then. More recent thoughts will follow over the next couple of days.

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I'm not going to be able to post this before the NDA is lifted, but I wanted to gather my thoughts together from Day one onwards. This initial writeup was made from my experiences playing exclusively as a Black Orc with an established guild (Shadowclan) for the first 10 days of Guild Beta (July 15th - 24th).


First things first. The ambiance of the Greenskin starting area was good. You start out in a fungus-lined cave and emerge to beat on some dwarfs as your first quest. Initial leveling is quick and painless (I was 30% through level one before even fighting anyone). Since I logged in on the initial day of Guild beta, the starting area was quite crowded. I didn't really have issues with completing quests because of the crowd, it just resulted in a lot of extra lag.

The User Interface is very customizable, though they still have some work to do. You are given the option to go into layout mode and move, hide and resize all of the various parts of the UI. Unfortunately, you don't have control over text attached to the various panes, so resizing sometimes makes the text unreadable. But, all in all, having this functionality straight out of the box earns lots of bonus points from me.

Public quests are awesome! Though the roll for loot is more random than you might expect (and generally leads to initial shock and griping after you finish 1st in contribution but then get a bad roll and no loot), it seems to work out in the long run. It really works best if you have a group that will run through the same public quest a couple of times. Public Quests are centered around the various Chapters on quest progression and participating in them gives you influence points for that chapter. Each chapter seems to have three or so public quests associated with it. Oftentimes the one closest to the camp is the busiest while those further away are mostly empty. Some public quests are also labeled as difficult, but in exchange, the rewards are better.

While on the subject of public quests, I should probably also talk about grouping. In particular, WAR's open group system. By default, all new groups are open, meaning with a couple of mouse-clicks, anyone nearby can join. By far, this is the best grouping system I have ever seen. I've joined open groups for everything; from Public Quests, to assaulting Keeps.

It also helps that no quests (at least as far as I have encountered in the first two Tiers) are hindered by being in a raid/warband. I can complete quest objectives no matter how many players are in my group. In fact, many of the public quests encourage large groups (some of them require killing 100 mobs to advance to the next stage). Being able to complete all quests in a warband (WAR's version of a raid which allows up to 24 players), also negates the pressure many players feel to only allow certain classes to join. It just really doesn't matter that much. This might be different in the high-end content, but that sort of stuff will likely be organized ahead of time anyway.

It's kind of interesting to think about the ramifications of this open group concept. WoW received a lot of praise for its solo-friendly content. WAR takes that a step farther, but in a kind of sideways manner. Most of the standard quests are easily done solo (and in under 10 minutes), but it is so simple to join a group, that you tend to find yourself grouped for pretty much everything else. You're still solo in a sense, in that you're not with a specific group, but you're also being social by grouping. Hard to get my point across in words, but trust me, its a beautiful concept that works extremely well, especially in this sort of RvR environment.

Joining an open group is as simple as two clicks. One click opens the group window displaying the list of open groups in the nearby area, how far away they are, who the leader is, how many players are in the group and what the group is involved in (PvE, RvR). You click the join button and voila! You're in the group! So it manages to meld the soloist into group play in a very smooth manner. The only issue is getting the word around about this feature and how to use it. It's very common to be involved in bashing something and have someone come up and ask for an invite when your group is already open and they can just join whenever they want to.

There are options for kicking troublesome players and banning them from joining your group, but I have never seen that used in beta. Even if a player just goes AFK to leech, it usually doesn't really matter than much (and its a rare sight in my experience). Instead of walking into a mob area and seeing several players doing their own thing, you walk into a mob area and see several players fighting together. Even if they're not working directly together (IE, everyone is beating on a different mob), they're all working towards a common goal.

Its also nice that quest drops happen automatically. You often don't even have to loot. You can just kill the required mob and immediately get a notification about completing a quest objective. I've even finished a number of quests without realizing it due to groupmates completing the required steps while I was nearby.

Mythic has definitely raised the bar on ease of access with public quests and public grouping.

One of WAR's taglines has been War is Everywhere. And I have to say, that is pretty much true so far. Not only are a lot of the quests in the first 4 zones of the Greenskin area based around smashing stunties (Hoowah dat!), but the scenery evokes the feel of a WAR in progress and a number of public quests are shared by both sides, though working at opposite goals. While these are technically PvE areas, they often result in heavy PvP fights when both sides show up. And in these sorts of PQs, there are usually NPCs fighting it out even when no players are involved!

Collision detection does indeed play a role in PvP, especially when you have narrow stairs or other choke points. And there have been a couple of times where I've managed to hinder someone's escape by blocking their path. It seems that slipping around someone blocking you isn't too difficult, but it can delay and confuse players enough to make a difference. I haven't yet had a chance to really coordinate on forming a wall, but I guess that it is possible.


Now for the low points.

First off, I'm curious as to how Mythic defines polish. They have said for a while that they were in the polish phase, but yet there are lots of major bugs and missing features. While major things such as combat, movement, creating guilds, are in place, other things aren't; banks for example!

Secondly, the much-lauded Living Cities, the system who is at fault for loss of four out of six capitol cities.. In current beta, the two existing cities are supposed to be at their peak level, and to be honest, I really see nothing special that I haven't already seen in every other MMO. They have vendors, they have trainers, they have a banker (not working), auctioneer (not working), a mostly-empty guild hall, a couple of quests and a dungeon or two inside the city. Whats so special about all of this? This is what I EXPECT from a capitol city. If a lower-level capitol doesn't have these basics, then its not much of a capitol at all. And why cant they shove this stuff into four other cities? Maybe there is more secret features that aren't in-game yet, but currently, I am thoroughly unimpressed. The graphics are very pretty, but I was expecting something different and special with the Living Cities system.

Crafting, well, at the moment, all we have are the gathering skills and apothecary. And really there's not that much new about either. Apothecary is very much a grind to gain skill, despite the claims in the crafting videos. You still have hard skill limits on everything, so you end up standing near a vendor, making the same potions over and over again to increase your skill so you can use the higher level components which have skill requirements. They should really just remove the hard skill limits on raw materials and allow players to use everything from skill level 1. The user is presented with a success meter showing their chances of making the potion. If they want to use up their higher-level materials on low-chance mixes, that should be their prerogative!

Single-race viability certainly seems possible, though I don't think there is enough faction-specific symmetry to preclude a guild from taking the best classes from 3 races and combining them into a force that could easily dominate any equal-sized single-race group. But, if you're not worried about dominating and just want to have fun, you can certainly do everything, including PvE and RvR, as a single-race guild.

RvR seems too isolated from the rest of the world. The RvR areas in the first two Tiers are rather large, but there is nothing there besides the battlefield objectives and keeps. So, what generally ends up happening is that one side runs through and captures the points, then everyone leaves because its boring in the RvR when no opponents are around. Then an our later, the other side comes through and does the same thing. Rinse and repeat over and over. And this rut certainly isn't helped by the fact that the announcements about objectives/keeps being attacked are either non-existent or way too short. For example, the objectives give the previous owners three minutes to respond when they're taken by the other side. However, it takes a good minute (or more) to run there from the nearest flightpath. Add by the time you get to a flight master, fly down there and hopefully join an RvR warband, you're already too late. Keeps don't send out any defense warnings until the keep lord is under attack.

This all basically makes RvR a round-robin game of taking turns on capturing objectives. I can only hope that there are more points of interest or things to do in the RvR areas in the higher Tiers.

I upgraded my CPU over the weekend (from an Athon 3500 to an Athlon X 64 5200) and the difference was just astounding. I went from having low graphic settings at 1024x768 and still getting lots of graphics lag when too many models were on the screen, to running at 1440x900, high graphics mode and only occasional slight stutters when loading new graphics content.


Next up! Some looks at the game from a different faction's perspective and hopefully insight into missing features and higher-level tiers (Mythic willing).

Farewell to Warcraft

This post is actually several weeks late, as I canceled my World of Warcraft account last month and the subscription expired on July 11th. So, I will likely have very little, if nothing to post about WoW in the foreseeable future, which is a bit unfortunate as my posts about the interface and Heroic Mechanar are the most popular ones on this site. However, in replacement I hope to have an ongoing series about my very casual foray into Age of Conan, and I am in the Guild Beta for Warhammer Online and plan on creating a number of posts about my experiences that will be seen here as soon as the NDA drops!

Age of Conan: Initial Impressions Part I

I played Age of Conan during the 'open' beta and did not really enjoy it that much, so I decided to give it some time to see if Funcom would end up crashing and burning or if they would manage to pull their act together and quickly take care of the major issues. So, here we are, 2 months later and I found myself purchasing and installing a copy of AoC.

I'm hoping to document my progression through the game on a regular basis, though it will be a bit sporadic since I am also participating in the WAR Beta at the same time. So here we go with Part One...


First off, installation. Both installation and the patching process went smoothly, though I was a bit annoyed to see it taking time to copy the movie files in several languages to my computer when I had selected the option to install the English version. Why even give me that choice at installation time?!

But once I was in-game, my experience was quite fun. Performance was much better than when I was in the beta. I only had to tone down a couple of fluff settings to get a decent 45-50 frames per second. However, this did drop noticeably once I started encountering other players.

I'm not really interested in doing a bunch of standard run-here collect that quests in Age of Conan, so I resolved to only pursue the destiny quest until I got away from Tortage. Unfortunately, that revealed a hole in the Destiny Quest line. Mainly, the requirement that you be a certain level to proceed past certain sections. Now keep in mind that I wasn't doing any side quests, but I also wasn't avoiding combat. I killed anything and everything along the way and I still came up about 2/3 of a level short when I reached the part that requires you to be level 10, and a little over 2 levels short at the step that required level 15! Kind of annoying. I can understand having level restrictions for later parts of the Quest, but this is the starter, newbie island. It should be easy to complete this initial part and move on to the larger world. I could see it being especially bothersome when having to run through the same exact content for every character you make!

And, I do have to again complain about the fact that while I'm in my own private instance, I have to zone in and out of the houses! And to make things worse, the main quest NPC that you talk to repeatedly is also in her own private zone! Come on Funcom! Give me a break, here!

Anyway, since I had two levels to go before I could continue on my annoying, but required Destiny Quest, I headed over the Acheronian Ruins and kill some Picts while gathering up a nice Pictish outfit. As I made my way through the instance (which is very breath-taking. Kudos to the level designers for this zone) I saw a number of other players around. Most noticeable were the Necromancers who seemed to always have a number of pets and who would simply wade into the middle of a group of 4-5 Picts and emerge victorious, grabbing loot before moving on to the next pack. Meanwhile, I was left skulking about the edges, trying to grab lone Picts, two at most, though I could sometimes defeat three at once if I was lucky. I'm guessing that Necromancers the current uber-powerful PvE class?

Ended up with a LOT of deaths while grinding away in the Ruins (since I didn't have a half-dozen pets around to help me out). But I could see where having a couple of buddies to group with would make it much easier, and more enjoyable. It also seems that the NPC Picts are very good at seeing through stealth (or maybe stealth just becomes a lot less useful after level 10). I have my stealth maxed and the only time I was able to sneak up on a Pict was when they had just spawned.

I found the button-smash combat more interesting this time around. Perhaps because I realized that timing can make a big difference. And I definitely appreciate the interactiveness of the system, though it forces you to rewire your reactions when coming to AoC from other MMOs.

I ran into an odd bug with setting up hotkeys for the left-bottom bar. After quitting the game and then logging back in, the bar no longer displayed text showing me which hotkey was bound to which slot, but the hotkeys still worked. Not a hug deal, but a little confusing if you aren't aware of the issue. Another UI issue is the fact that the Feats screen doesn't display how many feat points you have available. You just have to try and select a feat and see if it works or you get an error message. Seems like a simple enough thing to fix, so I'm not sure why this issue is even in the game at this point.

Overall, my first few hours were fun, though it 90% solo, and 90% of that in my own instance. Hopefully my next installment will include some time spent with the Shadowclan Picts!

The Gutting of Warhammer Online

In a very surprising announcement yesterday, Mark Jacobs informed the Warhammer community that Warhammer Online was cutting out some pretty major parts of their game, including all capitol cities except for Inevitable City (Chaos) and Altdorf (Empire) and four careers! Holy Feature-Cut Batman! I don't think I've ever seen such a major gutting of game features since the great MMO disappointment that was formerly known as Horizons!


This is a pretty huge blow in several ways. First off, the capitol city removal. To me, this is almost a game breaker. Not having a capitol city completely destroys the culture of those races who are now forced to inhabit a city that is not their own. Very sad indeed. Not to mention the pain of having to deal with traveling to your racial-specific areas from someone else's capitol city every single time you want to adventure there! All the quests are going to be dogpiled into these same cities and they will be the ONLY place to trade, sell, repair, etc, and I shudder to think of the lag that everyone will get to experience in these towns. It will be like WoW (pre Burning Crusade), where only one city on each side is the hotspot and the other capitol cities are ghost towns. And that makes me weep.

Mark Jacobs has posted further elaboration on the VN Boards, part of which includes a thought about maybe rotating in cities so that the focus is on one at a time. That is an even more horrible idea. Who cares if the players are spread out in three areas of the game? That's what the game is about! If one side decides that they want to make a serious push on one city, then maybe they would need to try and coordinate with the other races to focus on that particular section of the world. If they cant get organized enough to manage that, then they don't deserve to lay siege to capitol cities. Sieging a capitol city is supposed to be a big deal anyway, right? It shouldn't be happening every other month!

I won't suggest additional delays to the release date (which would be fine with me), but personally, I would much prefer to have some sort of placeholders in place instead. I don't mind if my capitol city doesn't grow in size and cant be sieged and maybe doesn't even have all the amenities of those for Empire and Chaos. But I do want a place to call home. A place where I can meet up with my fellow Greenskins that is OUR home. They can always patch in city improvements later, but losing that cultural quality in the initial launch is a hard thing to swallow. And yes, I know that they'll add in the cities at some point. But how long will it take? Will the cities be less interesting because a majority of the player base has already outleveled a significant portion of their content? Given the loss of entire career options, its not as if each race has a lot of options for replayability. And how much of that initial awe and excitement of being part of our own capitol city will be lost? Too much, IMO. I really don't care how fancy Inevitable City is. I'm not planning on playing a Chaos character. I'm a Greenskin at heart and I want a Greenskin city, not a couple of token Greenskins in someone else's town. Knowing that you'll be making major changes in the future allows you to plan for that ahead of time and lock off parts of the capitol city area as needed. Blocking them off entirely is a demoralizing and crushing blow to those races.

The loss of no less than four careers is a bit less galling to me (likely because it didn't hit any of my main class choices directly), but probably even more damaging in terms of gameplay. Those races that have lost careers are now much less viable as single-race entities, especially the ones that have lost their tank class! Single-race guilds are reeling beneath this announcement. ARAC all the way it seems, which makes me weep even more. If you wish to read more, there's also a thread covering this topic.

These changes seem to really destroy the concept of racial-pairing and will have a huge impact on both RvR and PvE.

So, I issue a heartfelt plea to Mythic. I certainly understand the desire to get things right and not release half-assed efforts, but I also understand that MMOs go through a lot of changes, especially in the first few months after launch. I can only speak for myself, but I would rather have partial, incomplete content that maintains the immersion and flavor that I've been eagerly awaiting for well over a year, instead of HUGE missing gaps that force players into a big, generic mash that undermines the concept of racial pairings. Let us have our cities and classes, as incomplete as they might be rather than completely denying each race their individuality.

Crafting and MMOs: A Look from Three Perspectives

Crafting has always been a system that has attracted my attention, especially from a design standpoint. Partially because most games seem to relegate it to a sidebin.

As serendipity would have it, there has been some minor discussion from three different games in development about their crafting systems. Those being Warhammer, Earthrise and Darkfall.


WAR released a podcast several weeks ago where Mark Jacobs talks about crafting in WAR. This was followed with a three-part interview (which seems to be divided into three parts just to be annoying since each part only has 3-4 questions).

In these , we find out that the WAR devs claim that their crafting system is non-recipe based, which is a bit disingenuous. There is a recipe system, its just not presented to the players up-front, and it is more flexible than crafting in most games, which tend to go for crafting systems that are extremely static (IE, X +Y makes Z with no variations). In WAR, the crafters will be able to play around with various ingredients to alter the results of the standard recipes.

WAR also plans on having only a few, limited crafting options at launch; three gathering professions and two crafting. In the interview, Jacobs explained that they would rather start with a small subset that can be expanded later and do it right, rather than trying to do everything at once. And that's certainly a philosophy I can agree with. Three years after launch, WoW is still working on trying to make their crafting professions useful, and failing for the most part.

The ability to customize your potions based upon your needs is great. The more control you give to the crafters the better. I also find their idea of having more gathering than crafting professions interesting, though we'll have to see how it plays out in-game. Is the world going to end up flooded with crafters who cant get hold of materials because there is too much competition for them? WAR also wants to make it so that crafting doesn't replace item drops and quest rewards, which I'm a bit leery of. Now we're headed back into EQ and WoW territory, where the crafted items are only minor bonuses compared to what you get from defeating the Big Bad Boss.

On the other side of the coin, you have Earthrise. In a recent interview, the talked about their plans for crafting (which are also revealed in a post on their forums. They are planning on making crafting THE way to acquire items. Players will be able to craft every item in the game, and they will also be able to make customized items by sticking various parts together. A complex system, and a bold venture by Masthead, but one that I hope works out well so that other games will feel emboldened enough to make crafting more than a side diversion from their amusement park rides.

And then, to round things out to a nice even three, I also want to include mention of a recent post from the Darkfall devs (yes, apparently they are still alive). In Darkfall, the plan on letting players

"You can gather crafting materials from killing mobs, and looting and/or skinning them. You can harvest materials from the environment, for example from rocks, trees, bushes etc. You can get the materials faster from organized resource production, like mines and farms, while collecting in nature is slower. You can craft crafting materials used to build complex items when they’re made of building blocks. Finally you can kill players and take theirs."

Hey, they're stealing my ideas! Though I didn't go into complete detail in the linked post, I've actually had a similar concept floating around for some time, so as you imagine, I'm excited to see how Darkfall handles it (assuming that they ever release their game). I really like the idea of being able to harvest from almost anywhere, ala Ultima Online, but also encouraging player cities/guilds to invest resources and time into creating semi-permanent structures that function as advanced resource harvesting centers. Not only does it allow for multiple levels of play and interaction, just within the harvesting system, but it also provides focal points for interesting conflicts between players.

So, there we have it. Three games will very different philosophies about crafting, though all look to be trending in the direction of giving more control to the player. I certainly hope that this is a sign of things to come in the future of MMOs.

Burning down Ahune

Last night I gathered together four guildmates to head into Heroic Slave Pens and take on the new seasonal boss, Ahune. Getting to him was easy enough, though he appears towards the middle of the first large cavern, which meant that we had to clear out a couple of extra mob groups.

I won't delve into his abilities too much since that's already covered elsewhere, but I will say that we had several wipes as we tried to figure out the encounter, each time getting him slightly closer to death, but the sheer number of little water elementals he spawns kept overwhelming us (and the ice spikes certainly didn't help). After seeing how little damage and hit points these little guys did, we decided to go all out offense. I switched out my tanking gear for my epic PvP suit, wielded a two-hander and spent most of the fight in fury stance (as the main tank). It was a hectic fight, and I had a couple of close calls (the damaging debuff that the main add puts on you is pretty rough), but we emerged victorious! The smaller adds only have 2000 hit points, so it was pretty easy to bring them down with all of us targeting them. With both myself and another warrior using whirlwind, we were able to work over the elite rock elemental at the same time. Then, when Ahune was vulnerable, we were already in the proper stance for damage. Couple fury stance with Blood Fury and Death Wish and you have some serious damage output! Our group makeup was two arms warriors, one elemental shaman, one beastmaster hunter and one holy priest.

Overall a fun fight, though expect to have a few wipes when you're first learning the encounter.

Bartle and WoW

So there's been some buzz going around lately about Richard Bartle's latest interview. Most of it coming from enraged Warhammer fans who take umbrage at his comment that he wont play WAR because he already played it and it was called WoW. I think that statement is fair enough, and in fact, I hope that WAR is similar to WoW in many ways, because WoW does do a lot of things right. Anyway, there has already been a lot of talk about that on other blogs and Bartle has even responded on some of them.

But, I'm going to skip commenting further on that bit and instead focus on the rest of the interview, because I found a lot of his comments about WoW exceedingly odd.


My first impression on reading the transcript is that Bartle seems to have some trouble voicing his thoughts. Some of his responses are pretty jumbled and they all kind of ramble. My second impression is that the title is very misleading as he really says very little about how he would change WoW. He has one comment asking why the WoW auction interface doesn't accept buy orders, and another about the limitations of the LFG tool. Both good points, but the rest is a semi-coherent ramble.

As far as I know, Bartle hasn't done any active MMO development in years, and from some of his responses, that's probably a good thing. He says that he has played WoW to the point of having three level 70s (which is about all I can understand from his disjointed mutterings about his character progression). But, it also seems that he wanted to play WoW as a solo game almost entirely (and I also don't understand the part where he bitches about being 'required' to farm Stranglethorn Vale if he chose leatherworking? You know, there are plenty of skinnable creatures in other zones and also a little something called the auction house).

He has a very odd comment about having trouble getting a group together to get his last 0.5 Tier armor piece for one of his level 70 characters!! I don't know why he's so focused and upset about trying to get a level 60 blue armor piece for a level 70 character, but I doubt anyone will argue that the LFG interface in WoW is subpar. I've managed to get into a couple of instance groups using it, but, for the most part, the only reason the LFG tool ever sees any use in-game is so that players can get access to the LFG channel and manually assemble groups themselves.

Then he goes off on a rant about Karazhan and mentions several times about how its impossible to go into with PUG. Maybe Bartle should have tried harder, because I see Karazhan PUGs forming all the time. The process for acquiring a key to Karazhan is pretty painful, and the fact that they used to require EVERYONE to have the key was just plain dumb, but I'm really not sure why he calls it a "guild breaker". Karazhan was the first epic-level raid zone that Blizzard created that could be easily explored by even the most casual of guilds.

It seems as if he really had little idea what he was doing in WoW (or he's just really, really, really bad at explaining himself). Now granted, I have had my own share of complaints about WoW, but I have also played for 3 years and delved into every aspect of the game; crafting, soloing, raiding, PvP of all sorts, and even roleplaying, so I feel I have a pretty solid base from which to throw out my complaints, suggestions and applause as warranted. But from reading this interview, I have to wonder if Bartle should have had his daughter show him how to play the game.

Fall from Heaven: Initial Impressions

So I finally got around to trying out the Fall from Heaven mod for Civ IV and I have to say that I am impressed. It's a pretty major reworking of the game, giving it a distinct fantasy feel that fills that longtime void left by Master of Magic.

First off, a disclaimer. This is an alpha work in progress (they're currently on version 0.32), so there are plenty of bugs and balance issues as well as a lack of consistent documentation. But if you're willing to put up with that, it can be a very entertaining experience.

Here are a few highlights and general observations of the gameplay:

• Magic, magic and more magic - 12(?) different types of magic; dozens of spells; civilization specific 'world spells'; various summoned units, some permanent, some temporary; buffs, debuffs, direct damage, terrain alteration, etc. Did I mention that you might want to invest is some magical units and research?


• Religions have a major effect on your civilization and the game in general. Choosing your religion can change your alignment as well as affecting what types of units and buildings you can create.


• Tech research is extremely slow, which encourages specialization, but also makes the game drag quite a bit. I definitely wouldn't play any slower than normal speed (I usually play on epic) and have been considering increasing the game speed even more for my next round.


• Lots of new unit promotions and a shifted focus towards veteran units. A number of units (including all heroes), gain experience just for existing.


• Lots of new abilities such as units that can walk on water, land units that can attack and board naval units, area effects, and more.


• Barbarians are more dangerous (especially the annoying giant spiders that like to hide in the forests) and can build hero units of their own.


• Warriors are an important and viable unit for much of the game


• Researching mysticism early seems vital. Not only does it give you a cheap source of research (via the Elder Council city improvement), but it also paves the way for future magical research.


• Every civ plays quite a bit differently.

Click the link below for more thoughts and summaries of my first two games.


My first time playing the game, I just chose a random starting civilization and ended up with the Grigori, an agnostic civ as it turns out. This ended up being good in one way, since it gave me one less aspect of gameplay to worry about, but I also felt like I was missing out on an important part of the game. I also started off with my typical standard-Civ strategy of trying to get a worker out quickly and learn bronze working so he could cut down trees and speed up production. This is not such a great strategy for Fall from Heaven. Chopping trees only gives a small production bonus and tech research is significantly slower, making those early research choices even more vital.

Before I abandoned that game, I did manage to build several of one type of my special units, Dragonslayers, and send them over to a nearby barbarian city that happened to be occupied by a dragon! After defeating the vile beast, I occupied the city and discovered an 'improvement' called Dragon Hoard that gave culture points as well as gold. The most interesting part though, was that this improvement could be picked up by a unit and taken to a different city for safekeeping!

For my second game, I wanted to experience the magic side of the game, and I also wanted to try my hand at being evil (Fall from Heaven has an alignment system that can have a major effect on diplomatic relations as well as your civilization progression in general.) I immediately locked onto the Sheaim, a civ who's ultimate goal is the destruction of the world! Sounds good to me!

So I start out at one end of the continent. I get off to a slow start and find my one and only neighbor infringing on my territory and establishing an outpost in a hilly desert area near a small lake. I managed to build some of my special units, the Pyre Zombies and declared war on him taking the outpost that would eventually become the seat of religion in my small, decadent empire.

At one point towards the middle of this game I definitely had a WOW! period where I really felt like I was an evil bastard, driving my pitiful population as hard as I could while the wastelands piled up around us. Setting the forest on fire and watching it burn, leaving charred trees behind where once there had been lush green foliage as far as the eye could see (the trees eventually grew back). Zombies and demons poured out of my cities, slaying his warriors as they tried to cross the desert and striking back into his forests whenever I was able to get a few units together. My economy was in shambles, my people illiterate, but I was actually maintaining status quo by pillaging improvements and regularly sending groups of slaves back to bolster my production. In the meantime, I was focusing my research of dark magics and deals with demons, which gave my lands this sort of sickly red and black color scheme. Meanwhile, my opponent had founded the Tree-hugger religion (the actual name escapes me at the moment) and was building an army of Fawns to supplement his seemingly never-ending train of warriors. I also found it oddly appropriate that my evil religion (Ashen Veil) had been founded in this town that sat on the edge of the desert and was surrounded my mines, a truly miserable place indeed. I was inspired to write the following couple of bits during my escapades.


Turn 282 - My troops rampage through their countryside, setting forests ablaze at every turn. I have not the power to assault his cities in force, but any troops caught outside of their protective walls are quickly destroyed and the survivors sent back to my capital as slaves where they are sacrificed to aid in finishing the Prophecy of Ragnarök. My economy is in ruins, but I drive my people forward on the brink of destruction, bolstering my faltering civilization with riches from the plundered towns of my foes.

Turn 287 - We have begun to encounter strange woodland creatures defending the cities of our enemies. Though hoofed, they have the smell of fresh air about them, and thus are not demons. They have proven little match against my zombies so far, merely slowing our assault with piles of their furry bodies.

Turn 304 - Rosier the Fallen has been summoned and the Stigmata raised in our Holy City. This was the same outpost that our foes had planted near our borders, prompting this entire war. Once a small village, barely eking out substinence in the hilly and barren lands on the edge of the desert, it had been turned into a city of industry and corruption. Deep mine shafts have been dug into every hillside, vile temples have been established and a eldritch Planar Gate was built to call forth minions and allies from beyond the void. Demonic whispers came to our priests through this Gate, bringing with them a lovely and deadly succubus to help fulfill our goals of conquest and destruction. And with the newly learned art of Necromancy, diseased corpses now answer our call as well. It is tough finding a proper balance of troops, but I suspect that this infernal hero on my side will soon sway the tide of battle. Slaves are still being sent back to the homeland on a regular basis to provide fresh blood for anointing the Ashen Veil temples. Meanwhile, our sages work diligently in their attempts to contact the demonic forces directly and bring their might to bear on our side.


At about this point I finally got my act together and pushed a stack of units (led by the hero) behind the front lines and took several towns. Unfortunately, I went for capture instead of razing, figuring that I was on the verge of wiping him out. It didn't work out that way and my economy quickly went down the toilet. Just as things were looking really grim (0% research and I was still hemorrhaging ~30 gold a turn), I finished researching Infernal Pact, which brought a new civilization into play, the forces of hell themselves! I was then offered the option of abandoning my current civ and taking control of the new one. Given the dire straits I was in, I chose to jump ship and found myself in control of a small city out in the tundra on a different continent. I had a very large demon hero and a number of various other demon units. Unfortunately, I happened to be next to two goody-goody civs who quickly declared war on me and started blasting my units with holy spells at which point I decided to call it a game.

All in all, I've had a very interesting experience with the game so far and it has occupied most of my gaming time for the past week. If you like fantasy, strategy games, or are just a Civ fan looking for something different, I highly recommend checking it out. Given the sheer scope of the changes and added features coupled with sporadic documentation, it can be extremely confusing. I suggest looking up anything you're unfamiliar with the Civopedia. Here are some useful links:

Forum thread with links to download latest version as well as an FAQ

Strategy link #1

Strategy link #2

Small / Independent Gaming Links (mostly)

I've recently gotten into the whole RSS feed thing lately, and have been subscribed to a number of gaming blogs, which in turn have led me to a plethora of independent games, a very large side of gaming that doesn't get a lot of press but can generate some amazing results. These links have been gathering in various emails and such, and in organizing everything, I decided I should share them there.

Some of these have already generated their own threads, but I included them here just for sake of completeness

Some of these are flash games, most are standalone downloads, some are free, some cost money, but they all have at least some sort of demo and are all worth a look.

Click the link to see the list.


Game Links:

Indie games of the year from Games Tunnel - Lots of good stuff here! I've only tried a handful of the games listed, but every one I tried I found interesting and considered throwing 20$ at it. Even if I only play for a few hours, that's money well spent, IMO. Anyway, the listing is broken up by genre and every game seems to have a free demo download available. This site is an excellent source for finding small games of all sorts.

Toribash - Hard to describe. Its a fighting game, but the player manipulated their fighter by tweaking muscles and joints. I havent even tried to play multiplayer. I just have fun seeing what happens with different combinations of muscle contractions and extensions. And if you cant get into the game itself, you might be interested in simply going to YouTube and searching for videos players have created.

Dwarf Fortress - I've talked about this game a lot, but it always deserves another mention. Still very much an alpha, and still has ASCII graphics and a painful interface. But the sheer genius of it all is well worth the pain. Go here to download a version with pixel graphics.

Tower of Goo - Just what it sounds like! Try to build the tower as tall as you can before it falls apart.

Jello Car - Platformer with some interesting physics.

Orisinal - Collection of odd flash games by one guy. Some are more entertaining than others.

Hoshi Sage - Another flash game. Objective is to 'discover' the star. The interesting part is that each level has different ways you manipulate the objects.

Putty Challenge - Puzzle game involving blocks of putty that you can merge and break apart.

Last Stand 2 - Zombie attack survival simulator. Part strategy, part shoot 'em up. Flash based I believe.


Here are a few links to games that I haven't looked at yet.

7-day rogue - Results from a competition to create a rogue-type game in 7 days. I haven't had a chance to look at these yet, but it seems like there is some nice variation and its not all about bashing monsters in a multi-level dungeon.

Chronotron - This one sounds really interesting. Its a platformer, but you have multiple versions of yourself that you use to accomplish your goals. The copies repeat whatever actions you did before you copied yourself, requiring you to coordinate with them in real-time.

Music Bounce - Don't know enough to make any comment, but it must have caught my attention for some reason!

Fall from Heaven - Mod for Civ IV: Beyond the Sword. Haven't tried this out, but I've seen it mentioned numerous times in various blogs.

Gamma 256 - Collection of small, experimental games

LOTR Total War - Mod for Rome: Total War. Unfortunately, it requires the Alexander expansion. I wish they would do a version for MWII.



And finally, here are a couple of miscellaneous links that aren't games.

Miscellaneous Links:

Dominance War - Concept art competition. There are a LOT of extremely cool drawings here.

Gaijin Smash - This is a blog about being a black American and teaching English in Japan! I found it laugh out loud funny and bizarre! Follow the link and scroll to the bottom to start with the oldest posts and work your way back up. Otherwise you'll lose out on the history which can put some posts out of context.

AoC Beta Impressions: Part II

I had expected to get a few days to play around in the AoC beta after the boost to level 20, but, apparently, this was a one-day only event (thanks for letting us know ahead of time Funcom!).

So here are some various extra observation snippets to go along with my Initial Beta Impressions post.

Open PvP - Funcom has some serious design flaws if they really plan on having open PvP as it was on Saturday. In addition to the numerous zone-in campers (which is easy to do since there is so much instancing), and the res-point camping (which is also easy to do since you get a friggen loading screen everytime you res, even if you died only 3 feet away!), there is also the oh-so-fun, kill you while you're in a cut-scene dialog with an NPC! Not only can you be attacked while you're forced into this meaningless multi-stage conversation (while you are given lots of conversation options, it ultimately all boils down to either accepting or rejecting the quest. None of the other options matter one bit.), but because it is a pseudo cut-scene, you cant even tell that you're being attacked until you finish the conversation and find yourself dead. Very poorly planned.

PvP is fast and furious. Most of my PvP experience involved dealing with the zone campers. Luckily, I had maxed out my hiding skill so as long as they were attacking someone else when I zoned in, I could quickly hide and move away. I jumped in and helped to fight the bastards when I could, but I still died every time, even when I managed to kill someone, resulting in a net experience gain of 0. As with my experiences in the battlegrounds, I felt like I had very little control over the result of the combats. Of course, this was all involving level 20-24 characters, so the ability options were limited, and I didn't get much time to practice, so my player skills were sadly lacking as well.

The best method of leveling seems to be by doing quests that involve killing NPCs or venturing into areas with hostile NPCs. A lot of the in-town, go talk to so-and-so quests didn't give much, if any experience. They do have quest hooks that send players to the various main towns for each race.

Traveling between the three major towns is as easy as finding the appropriate NPC and asking for a ride. There was no time limit or cost that I saw. The first secondary town in Stygia also had an instant transport from the main city. I didn't see anything similar in Cimmeria.

I ran into numerous terrain and graphic bugs. From seeing my avatar sink halfway into the ground to jumping into a river expecting a swim, only to find myself walking along the river bottom. And then I had to recall out of the river because the terrain was too steep for me to climb out. At times, my screen would suddenly become a mishmash of screwed up textures making the game completely unplayable. Luckily, I could alt-tab out and back in to fix the problem, but it could have easily resulted in my death if I had been in a fight or someone/something had wandered along and decided to attack me. This happened to me several times in Stygia.

I will give Funcom credit for allowing me to alt-tab out and back into AoC with no problems. Something a lot of other games don't handle very well (TF2 locks up my machine if I try alt-tabbing).

As of Saturday, my client was still throwing errors everytime I hit the esc key. Graphics lag and loading times were still about the same for me.

AoC either has some serious memory leaks or does an extremely poor job of offloading unused textures and graphics. Framerate and responsiveness start to seriously deteriorate after a while. Seems to be especially noticeable after changing zones a few times.

Res points seem to be few and far between, which makes for lots and lots of annoying running. At times, I was reminded of the old WoW days when there was no graveyard in the southern half of the Barrens.

Skills UI. I had numerous lines in my skill list that had no text, but allowed me to put skill points into them. Were these actual skills or just a bug?

I see there being a problem with competition over quest objectives in the early days after release. Not only did I have trouble finding the right types of mobs to kill at times, but I had one quest in town where I was supposed to climb a tower and steal a jewel. After suffering through the awkward, figure-out-the-one-spot-near-the-wall-where-you-can-climb mini-game, I got to the top of the tower to see that the jewel was gone and another player was also already there waiting for it to respawn. I sat around for a minute or so before logging off. When I logged back in later, the jewel was there, so I grabbed it and moved on, but when you have hundreds of players trying to do the same quest after release, its going to be a nightmare.

Didn't get to see any part of crafting aside from finding a couple of pieces of leather on critters I had slain.

I found no method for returning to the character selection screen without going back to the main login screen. And getting to the main login requires the user to hit escape, select exit game, then wait 30 seconds. What year are we in again? How such a simple and expected feature could be missing from a top-end game is beyond me.


In summary, AoC has potential, but it looks like it is being released too early (something that no MMO, including WoW, has really managed to avoid in my experience). And nothing about the game or gameplay made a strong impression on me. I haven't pre-ordered and I don't feel any special need to play at launch. I may pick up a copy later in the month, or I may wait a while to see how they do with the patches and updates, or I may not even play at all. Only time will tell.

To Twink or not to Twink?

Not, its not really a question. At least not for me.

I've thought about this a couple of times in the past but then I always come back to the fact that the whole process of 'twinking' is specifically to unbalance the competition and make the game easier for the 'twink'. Before video games, this was usually the other way around. In order to make the game more fun and engaging, the experienced player would give the newer player some leeway or a small advantage to try and balance out the skill discrepancy. Twinking is the complete anithesis to the concept of fun and fair gaming.

And to top it off, its pretty sad to see that Blizzard is considering adding extra support to the twinking process in WoW...

Tom Chilton: Potentially legacy items, haven’t really talked about those in the past.

We are planning to do certain types of items that essentially bind to your account, so they are deliberately created as twink items. You might be able to find one of these items when you’re doing an end-game instance or raid, something like that.

You might be able to get an item that binds to your account so you are then able to hand it off to your other characters, but, it does have to stay within your account. They can be deliberately overpowered for a low-level character to help level up, or whatever. link

That being said, I see no problem with having characters who don't level so that they specifically can stay in a certain bracket for the battlegrounds. But when these characters start sporting level 70 enchants and enhancements, its gone way over the edge in my opinion.

Age of Conan Initial Beta Impressions

Here are my initial impressions of Age of Conan, assembled after playing in the 'Open Beta'* . I started as a barbarian, read nothing about how to play, instead realying on the in-game help and my personal gaming experience. My barbarian has hit the level cap of 13, completed her destiny quest as far as she can in this beta and has participated in a half dozen PvP matches.

*Funcom's concept of Open Beta is quite a bit different. Basically, everyone only gets access to the newbie island, and has a max level of 13. As you might imagine, this means that a significant portion of the gameplay is not even visible to the Open Beta Testers.

Continue reading to see my comments on my experiences so far.


Graphics and System Requirements:

First off, I should talk a bit about graphics and game lag. There has been a lot of press about how crappy the AoC client is, and while I experience significant graphics lag, the game never crashes while I'm actually playing, though I do get booted back to the login screen every half hour or so, and the game also crashes everytime I quit, but at least it does so in a nice way, allowing me to continue using my machine without a reboot.

My system is a bit below par. I just last week bought a GeForce 9600 video card, but my CPU is a couple of years old; single-core AMD 3500+. I started playing the game at 1440x900 with effects turned off or low, but the graphics stutter and loading times were just too much. Switched to a lower resolution and still get occasional stuttering, but its definitely playable.

The game does look very nice. The water is beautiful, and the swimming animations are very graceful. I had my first moment of awe at the graphics when I stepped into the Archerion Ruins and stood on the edge of a cliff, looking out over the mountainside at the impressive ruins in the near distance. And this with all of my graphics settings on low! I imagine it looks even more spectacular with some bells and whistles blowing.


World Enviroment and Instancing:

AoC has a LOT of instancing. Not as much as Pirates of the Burning Sea, but more than I like dealing with. Do we really need an entire instance for the main inn in Tortage? There are a total of 6 or 7 NPCs inside, and I rarely see other players there. What is gained by forcing players to zone in and out to talk with their trainers besides extra loading screens?

Annoyingly, I find myself getting hung up on objects pretty often, ranging from rocks to the edges of ramps, to random terrain bumps.

The starting island seems to be a railroaded experience. Sure I can wander off down the beach instead of following the path, but I can't choose to walk up that hill next to the road. There are lots of barriers to free-form roaming. Hopefully this sort of rails-driven outdoor experience will be less obvious in the higher-level areas.

And that brings me to climbing. Climbing is a bit disappointing. I'm not even sure why you have to put points into this skill. You can only climb in very specific areas (which has been certain ladders during the solo quest as far as I've seen). I also found it very difficult to see where I was supposed to climb for some missions. The help topic on climbing stated that 'higlighted' areas, but the highlighting is so minimal as to be nonexistent. The flickering light from torches seemed more like highlighting than the actual highlighting! And then, once I did find the right place to climb, I often had to move around a bit before I could find that sweet spot that would force the game to recognize that I wanted to climb! It really seems to add nothing to the game.



User Interface:

The User Interface is pretty standard, with a few extras thrown in such as target of target, the ability hide your helm (I dont know why they just dont make the helms less obstructive to begin with) and various other minor tweaks. The main action bar is paged, allowing you to set up numerous variations if you so desire. It also has what they call a 'special action bar' that is also part of the main bar, but accessed by holding down the alt key.

However, there is an unfortunate lack of customization available. I can move the two extra action bars on the right side, but I cant move the main bar, the map window, the health bars, etc etc. A lot of the popup windows are movable, which is nice, but I really don't understand why MMOs are reluctant to let advanced users move the basic parts of the interface. You can only setup hotkeys for the main bar and the special action bar. I found no way to hotkey the extra action bars. This, coupled with a lack of support for macros makes me unhappy.

I was also unable to resize any of the UI elements and found the icons in AoC complex and dark-toned, so that they didnt really stand out. I had to look at the mousover text to tell which abilities were which. I would much prefer the default icons be simple, with a nice contrast of colors, and then, give the advanced users the option to change their icons to the fancier ones if they so desire.

On nice feature that AoC has is the option of being able to setup an alternate weapon set that you can switch to at a click of a button (not sure if you can hotkey it or not). This makes switching between ranged and melee weapons easy, as well as just having an alternate loadout for specialized situations (though I would guess that the ability to switch weapons at the drop of a hat and then hit weapon-specific abilities before switching back will be a ripe area for abuse and exploits).


Combat:

Combat is interesting. Its very heavy on the button-mashing, which is both good and bad as it requires more player interaction, but it might end up being a pain later on. PvE was mostly a button-mashing experience for me. But once I started trying out some PvP, I started putting some more thought and effort into the timing of my swings and the usage of my abilities.

The shielding concept is intriguing on paper, but doesn't seem to translate well into actual gameplay. I'm not able to easily tell which way my enemies are swinging, oftentimes the differences in swings are very subtle. And its so simple, easy and quick to swing your weapon from a different direction (I tend to use all three types of directional attacks constantly when I'm fighting), that trying to respond equally quickly with shielding AND match up to what your opponent is doing seems impossible. Switching shielded sides is also a little slow. I found the ability to alter my shielding useless, and just left it on the default setting. I suppose if I was familiar with certain classes and knew that XX class has mostly right-attack combos, then switching shielding to that side might help. But that leads to another complaint I have about AoC combat...

There seems to be a lack of visceral feedback during combat. I felt like I had no idea what my opponent might be getting ready to do. I supposed this might change a bit with experience, but I found combat to be mostly just flinging about my abilities. I stealth up to someone, make an attack and see a message about 'attacking from stealth', but then my character waits to swing, and when I do, I dont seem to do extra damage. Am I doing something wrong? I really have no idea.

There seems to be a lack of escape options once you enter combat (at least for me). I felt like once combat started, whether I was going to win or lose was already decided, mostly being determined by how many extra mobs had run over.

I also occasionally had issues with various plants/ferns making it impossible to see what was going on during the fight (this happened while fighting evil plants, so I couldn't draw them out of the foliage). Kind of a pain, but I was able to just mash attack buttons until it died.

The various combat movement actions (activated by hitting a movement direction key twice in quick succession) are an interesting addition. I wasn't ever able to make much use of the sidejump (it doesn't give any visible bonus and takes a couple of seconds to activate), but I did use the jumpback option to get a defense buff and the momentum option (moving forward twice) to get another buff that gives me a chance to stun my target whenever I hit. Both buffs are short, and it seems they have some sort of cooldown timer, but I didn't see anywhere that told me what that timer was.


PvP:

The only PvP we get to experience in this demo are the arena matches. You sign up for a PvP match by opening the social window, going to the PvP tab and then choosing which type of match you want to participate in. It then puts you into the queue and reports on how many people are trying to join a PvP match, and how many are waiting for the same arena that you are, which is a very nice feature. I initially signed up for a Capture the Flag match, then saw there were 20 people in line and only 1 other waiting for the same match. SO I switched to the more popular Deathmatch and soon found myself inside (more on PvP later in this article). The annoying thing about this interface is the fact that you cant minimize it. I would like to be able to walk around and do things while waiting for a PvP match without having a large, intrusive window getting in the way.

PvP is where I started thinking about how to actually use my abilities and the combat system. Fighting NPCs is mostly a button mash, but when you're taking on player characters that are running around, stunning, rooting, etc, then the game steps up to a different level. I still have the issues with combat mentioned above, mainly that I cant really tell what is going on. Hopefully that will improve with experience.

It still seems to be fairly standard tactics-wise, go after the person standing in back casting spells. Kiting seems to be viable for certain classes, rangers in particular. As a barbarian, I had no crowd control options and no way to easily close with someone who is running away. In reports from the PvP weekend, I heard comments that most melee characters have a charge ability, but it wasnt available at level 13.

I'm a little concerned about how melee will be able to fare in long-term PvP. They are always the most susceptible to crowd control, and given the twitch nature of AoC combat, it might be even more difficult to get in hits. And, of course, there aren't any options for dodging spells. All of the healers I tried to attack seemed to have a several second stun which they didn't hesitate to use.

I've also run into a couple of bugs. Once, when zoning into the start of a match, I was stuck in the brazier next to the resurrection totem and couldnt get out. I had to wait until the other team came along and killed me. Also, there was another instance where a player from the other team was invincible.

I noticed in the end-match summary for the PvP arenas that each player was given a score. This score was entirely based on killing blows! Hopefully, this score doesnt really mean anything, but if it somehow plays a part in the experience you get or otherwise is important in any way, then it needs to be modified.

You accumulate PvP experience separately from regular experience. What this is good for, I have no idea.


Summary:

Overall, its really hard to make judgments on actual gameplay with such a small preview snippet. Given that AoC has 80 levels, there are obviously a significant amount of character abilities and customization that we don't see. And we don't even get a glimpse at battle keeps, player cities, crafting, open world PvP, mounts, other cities, etc etc. This 'open beta' is really more of a marketing push. It reminds me of Ryzom, which had an unlimited free trial, but you could only adventure in the newbie area. And thats basically what Funcom is giving us at the moment, just a taste to whet our appetites. Unfortunately, that taste has been... well... slightly different, but not overly flavorful. But since I've only taken a little nibble, I'll give it a chance and take a few more bites to see if I can acquire the taste.

Look for a followup post in the near future. I plan on trying some more PvP as well as investigating other classes and maybe a bit of additional exploration on the newbie island.

Age of Conan Open Beta keys available

Fileplanet has keys available for the AoC 'Open Beta'. Not really sure how open it is when you have to pay for a fileplanet subscription to get hold of them! Actually, the beta keys are available elsewhere, but it seems most sites are having various contests whereas Fileplanet is using a first come first served method.

I bit the bullet and shelled out the $16 for a quarterly Fileplanet subscription. I hope to get some use out of my money by downloading demos for games I've heard about before I cancel it. I discovered after I had already signed up, that if you hit the 'No Thanks' option in the bottom right of the subscription chooser page, apparently you're then given the option for cheaper subscriptions!

I downloaded the entire 12 gig (!) client last night and found out this morning it was corrupted! So, I went ahead and installed Fileplanet's download manager which looks like it will be a much safer bet for acquiring the client without problems.

Anyway, hopefully I'll be able to check out AoC for myself soon and get an idea of how this game will play (unfortunately, there will be a level cap of 13 for this beta, which seems kind of lame. And, now that I think about it, might be an inadvertent message about the state of their game at later levels). Expect to see a couple of first impression posts from me once the beta opens (which is May 1st I believe).

The Next WoW-Killer will be...

Age of Conan? Nope. AoC will be a niche game. Heavy graphics requirements, its mature rating and its attempt to have a PvP-focused game while still appealing to the raid AND the 'casual' crowd at the same time will keep its population low.

Warhammer Online? Nope, though I expect WAR to be in 2nd place in number of subscribers for a Western MMO unless they just really drop the ball or lose focus on what their game should be.

Some other game? Nope

What will kill WoW is WoW itself. It's inevitable, and expected. The game gets stale, players get bored, move on to other activities (be it MMOs, other games or real life events), sever populations begin to fall, servers get merged, devs start working on other games, etc etc.

WoW will follow in the footsteps of other successful MMOs and have a long, long slow descent into the twilight realm, joining its forefathers such as Ultima Online and Everquest in semi-obscurity.

So all the talk about such-and-such game being a WoW-killer is just dumb and a waste of energy. Nothing short of a nuclear holocaust is going to cause World of Warcraft to suddenly lose millions of subscribers.

Warhammer: Unanswered RvR and City Siege Questions

Mythic has been giving us a lot of good info about RvR and City sieges lately. But after my experiences with Shadowbane and WoW, I've come to the realization that players will cheat, lie, scam and abuse every loophole they can find if there is some gain in it for them. I can only assume that Mythic has seen some of the issues that have arisen elsewhere, but they still have left a lot of questions unanswered that I would like the answers to such as:


*How is determined who gains control of a keep that was just assaulted successfully? Killing blow? Most damage?

*Same question regarding the battles with the King and other big bosses in city sieges.

*What happens if you sack a city where the king is already captured?

*How are AFKers in Scenarios dealt with?

*Do you gain Renown points for winning a scenario instance even if you didn't get anywhere near another player or capture point?

*How long do players of a sacked city have to wait before they can try to reclaim it?

*Do the players reclaiming their city have to deal with the whole instanced gate battleground thing first or can they just charge back into the city proper and fight the invaders directly?

*Is there ever any loss of Renown points or do they just continue accumulating forever?

*Can you see who your opponents will be in the instanced scenarios? If so, then how will they deal with the groups who send in a spy ahead of time to make sure their opponents are weak before the rest of the group enters?

*Will off-peak hours players be able to take keeps with little to no resistance?

*If some keeps are in lower-level zones so that higher level players cant go there, are we going to see 'twinks' (oh, how I hate that term!) controlling these keeps?

*On the other hand, if all keeps are accessible to all players, wont the high-level players just come and dominate the lower level keeps?

*How do they plan on dealing with 'twinks' in the instanced scenarios


Sounds like they have some great concepts, I just hope that the developers have enough experience with WoW's Battlegrounds to understand how players will try to abuse their system. If not, things could get ugly...

WoW Patch 2.4 Impressions

Note: The initial draft of this was written a week ago

Not a whole lot in this patch that affects a blacksmithing warrior directly, so I'll mainly focus on the new quests and the Shattered Sun Offensive.


First off, the new 'World PvP' quests are a bust. Especially the one for the Spirit Towers in the Bone Wastes. That quest tasks you with the incredibly difficult job of taking one, thats right one, of the spirit towers. Now anyone who actually knows anything about this PvP objective knows that taking just one tower is really a nonsensical task. Usually all of the towers change hands at least once during the period that they're open. Sow how does this play out in reality? Everyone runs out, groups at one tower, captures it, then rides off to turn in their quest, completely ignoring the rest of the towers, leaving it up to a handful of players (usually less than five for each side) to actually work on achieving the objective. The quest for Halaa is slightly better, but not by much. For this one you have to kill 10 players near Halaa. Oh great! Killing players near Halaa! I never thought of doing that before! *sarcasm off* Finding players to kill near Halaa has always been difficult. Either one side or the other almost always has a significant numerical advantage, making actual combat pretty rare. The best chance you have is by camping the fly point. This quest does nothing to change the interest in Halaa.

How about something meaningful, like actually holding the damn town for a period of time opens up new vendors and quests? Or a mailbox or bank? Or anything worthwhile!

Failure on both counts.

There are a number of new daily quests available in Shatrath. They are all pretty simple and one is even related to resource gathering so it can be done in the normal course of harvesting raw materials. The others have you searching for items amongst the Ethereals of Blade's Edge, the Blood Elves in Netherstorm and taking readings in Nagrand. All pretty easy, though the Blood Elf one can sometimes take a while depending on your luck.

One good thing about some of these new quests is that they reward you with a care package. These packages always contain a useless green item but also sometimes have a Badge of Justice! I found two badges in a total of 10 or so packages. Bonus for me since I was just doing the jobs for cash.

The change that has directly affected me the most is the unbinding of Primal Nether and Nether Vortex. I spent all my gold on hand plus everything I've made from the new dailies to upgrade my epic, blacksmithed axes. Both my two-handed and one-handed axes have now been upgraded to their full potential. Only a year after the raiding players were able to do so! Initial prices for the Nethers were ~250 gold for a Vortex and ~50 gold for a Primal. Prices have steadily dropped since then, and with the plethora of new daily quests, getting gold to purchase these items is extremely easy.

The new 5-man instance, Magister's Terrace is fun, and somewhat of a challenge. It's very magic heavy and the magisters and warlocks hit like a two-ton Tauren, but with spells. You definitely need to make good use of corners to draw them in and spell reflection is extremely important for the tank. I've only been in once and we made it through to the end with only one wipe, but then had trouble with Kael'thas. The final battle with Kael'thas is very melee-unfriendly (but thats nothing new for WoW). Trying to avoid the balls of arcane energy that spurt out of his head while also not touching the floor but getting into melee range while 'swimming' through the air at extremely fast speeds just isn't a whole lot of fun. It's very doable, just annoying.

The Shattered Sun Offensive quest progression on the Isle of Qeul'danas is very well done. There are always a couple of daily quests that aid in the progression of the Offensive as they are completed. So the more players that are on your server doing these quests every day, the faster the Shattered Sun will improve its foothold on the island. As the advance reaches a new phase, new quests are opened up and the old ones are deprecated so that they still give cash and reputation rewards, but they no longer directly help the Shattered Sun in their efforts.

I appreciate how the Shattered Sun actually takes over buildings and kicks out the mob spawns as the battle progresses. The quests are pretty quick and mostly painless, though on a PvP server you always have to deal with the jerks who have nothing better to do except run around looking for players to kill who are low on health.

Now on to the bad. Mainly, BUGS! Several extremely annoying ones in fact. First off, our guild bank is unusable. The number of allowed withdrawals never resets, meaning that once you hit your limit for withdrawals from the clan bank, thats it... forever! Or at least until they fix the bug, but who knows when that will be. The issue doesnt seem to be getting any attention at all on the bug report forums thought the GMs have given out some rather dumb suggestions for fixing it such as 'Delete your WTF folder' (isnt this their answer for everything? It doesnt work by the way) and the oh-so-interesting 'Have you entire guild stay logged off for 10 minutes!. What?! How will that fix anything. And anyway, my guild isnt that active. I know there are plenty of times during the day when noone is online.

Note: The Guild Bank issue has been taken care of since I initially drafted this post

Secondly, my computer locks up when I try to teleport to/from Quel'danas. Sometimes I can simply close out WoW and login again, but most of the time a full reset of my machine is required! I can fly back to the Undercity and return to normal space/time that way, but using any sort of time-saving travel method just doesn't work. Again, the usual GM answer is to delete your WTF folder. But you know what? Everything I've changed about my interface, from addons to video settings, resides in there. Forcing the user to re-jigger their entire interface from scratch is not a valid solution. And why would any of the files in there have such a debilitating effect that my system is locked up!? This is definitely a client issue, not an addon issue.

Overall, Patch 2.4 is a good addition to the game. Lots of new content, especially for enchanters and jewelcrafters. Tons of shiny new items to buy for the PvE crowd (including the arena armor sets, which is a bit odd, but I've given up trying to guess where Blizzard comes up with some of their decisions).

Outsourcing Quality

This post was inspired by a quote I saw from a Blizzard talk at DICE '08

"A lot of studios wouldn’t do QA, tech support, PR internally..."

Really? Well no wonder so many games turn out crappy. How can you adequately perform any of those roles if you aren't invested with the product? And how can you be invested if you don't work closely with it. All of that interaction amongst departments is vital. QA and developers need a close, active relationship. Otherwise its too easy for both sides to be dismissive of the other. Same goes for Tech Support. How often have you been frustrated by talking to someone in tech support who has obviously never talked directly to anyone involved with making the product and has no clue about the product in question beyond what their screen prompts tell them? It's happened to me too many times. And the experience was always awful.

But let's focus some more on QA, because that's where my experience lies. I have worked in QA for almost 10 years now at a variety of companies and with a varied amount of responsibility, including a year and a half at Origin working on UO, and a summer at Sega working on console games.


Sega was awful. I never even set eyes on a developer during my three months there. They were completely isolated from us. You never knew if they saw your bugs or not. Or if they even cared. And, in fact, we were at times told to only enter crash bugs. They didn't even want to hear our thoughts about gameplay, interface, etc. Result? None of the QA folks cared, none of them enjoyed the job after the first few weeks, and the turnover was tremendous. Crappy job, crappy games.

Contrast that to my previous QA job with Origin where we all worked in the same building and QA was right next door to all of the developers and programmers. The developers would come to us when they had a question about a bug and we would do the same when we had questions of our own. Not only was the communication great, but a general camaraderie developed amongst all involved, from HR to the server techs.

Towards the end of my tenure there, we were even getting QA involved with the initial design process, which IMO, worked great! I was the lead for that project (character transfers) and was able to point out potential issues before development began as well as get a head start on creating thorough, informed test plans. Result? What was probably one of the smoothest feature releases in UO's history.

But I'm digressing into personal reminiscence now. In short, all parts of the process should be kept as close together as possible. With distance comes communication issues, estrangement, lack of enthusiasm and a disinterest in taking ownership of the product. And I just fail to see the advantages in that.

Blizzard Still Clueless on How to Make World PvP Interesting

So this recent quote from Blizzard once again proves to me how little they understand the concept of meaningful PvP:

"Based on the information we already know, I think Lake Wintergrasp will be more active than Halaa because one of the things that hurt Halaa was the Diminishing Returns on honor points. With this removed in patch 2.4 people will be able to continue piling up honor points until they've had enough. I know rewards play a huge factor, so with the knowledge that people have now of items we've made available through honor points, I think it will continue to be a busy place for a long time."


Blizzard seems to somehow think this lack of interest in their oh-so-cleverly-designed World PvP Objectives is directly related to diminishing returns on honor gains for killing other players! Obviously, it has nothing at all to do with how worthless Halaa is as an objective. There is nothing there worth fighting over! A couple of vendors selling mostly junk and two quests involving gathering tokens/dust for items that are only interesting to a handful of players in the 66-67 level range.

How about making something worth fighting over for a change!? If they really wanted Halaa to be a point of contention they should have made it THE town in Nagrand. Give both sides small encampments with flightpaths where the current towns are, but move a majority of the quests and vendors into Halaa so there is a genuine reason to want to capture it. As it is, Halaa is just a novelty that quickly wears thin for all players, and thus, completely fails as a PvP objective. Give me a chance to actually make a difference or have an effect on the gameworld! Removing the diminishing returns on honor for killing other players will have no effect at all on the action around Halaa. And if Lake Winterspring is nothing more than a glorified battleground, well, hopefully by then I'll have better options for MMO PvP.

Halaa is by far the most active of their six outdoor PvP objectives, and even then its mostly just one side overpowering the two to three players on the other side. That should be a clear warning that something is seriously wrong with your world PvP designs. And let me give out a little hint: It's not due to diminishing honor returns!

The WoW Battlegrounds are popular due to the carrots available at the end of the racetrack. A lot of those carrots are rather nice and tasty. But the carrot rewards for World PvP are small, stringy things with no tastiness or lasting value, and for some of them (I'm looking at you Zangarmarsh and Hellfire towers), the measly little carrot can be taken away in mere minutes, before you even get a chance to take a bite. Even worse are the towers in Terrokar Forest. It's nice that the bonus from them last for several hours, but, someone then decided that you would also have to run through the local dungeons again, and again, and again, ad nauseum, to gather enough tokens (which are only available while your side controls the towers) to buy items that are also only useful to a very small percentage of players in a very strict, sub-70 level range! Insanity and stupidity all rolled into one!

So Blizzard either needs to come up with some better veggies for rewards from their World PvP Objectives, or completely retool the impact these objectives have on the game. I doubt that either will happen and battlegrounds and arena will remain the only semi-interesting points of PvP in WoW.