Rift Beta: First Impressions

I spent some time playing the Rift Beta last week. Specifically, I had the opportunity to participate in Rift Beta 5 from Tuesday through Friday. I chose to play a Defiant Warrior. In those four days I managed to reach level 19, completed a buttload of quests, helped close many rifts and joined in on some PvP action.

Below are my first impressions.

Probably the first thing I noticed when first starting the game was how polished it was, beginning with the game launcher and patcher. I had no problems getting the patches (about one every day during this beta) and the patcher even told me that I needed to update my video drivers, which turned out to be true. Only a couple of times did I have trouble connecting to the servers, but overall, the login experience was exemplary.

Second thing you'll notice is how similar Rift is to a World of Warcraft. Sure there are some bloggers and plenty of players in-game who get upset whenever the comparison is mentioned, but it's impossible to deny. It's not just similar, it's exactly the same in many regards. Many of the talent trees look to be ripped directly from WoW. The crafting is the same. The type of gear and loot is the same. Combat is the same... Now I'm not saying that using someone else's ideas is a bad thing, but I am saying that those who get upset at the comparisons are delusional. That being said, WoW hasn't ever been particularly innovative itself.

The biggest talking point of the game is, of course, the Rifts themselves, so let's talk a little bit about the Rift System. Basically, a Rift opens up in the zone and goes through various stages spawning different mobs until the Boss mod spawns and is killed. Anyone who comes along can help defeat the mobs at the various stages and get loot for success. If you played Warhammer Online, Rifts are basically transient Public Quests. Sometimes they are there, sometimes they are not. But the basic functionality is almost exactly the same.

Rifts can grow stronger if left alone for long enough and there is supposedly some way to enter the Rift itself to drive back the invaders, but I never saw any of that. Perhaps it's for the higher levels. Rifts were interesting and confusing at first, but quickly became kind of pedestrian after I helped close a dozen of them and realized that they were really just another grind for special 'Planar' currency. I'm hoping that they are at least tied to some sort of system that gauges the local player population, because otherwise, they will suffer the same fate and annoyance as the Warhammer PQs when the majority of the active playerbase out-levels the starting areas.

Another one of Rift's big talking points has been character customization via 'souls'. While I do like the system, it's not as groundbreaking as some folks seem to think. It's really just a more complex talent tree system. I guess the main difference between this and other games with talent trees is the number involved and the fact that you can switch out your trees. There are still limitations. It's not an open system. Being a Warrior, I can only choose talent trees that are part of the Warrior archetype. Sure I can be a Death Knight and a Paladin at the same time, but the functionality really doesn't change. And some of the abilities between the various souls are so similar to other abilities that one of them ends up being useless.

This system does make it easier on those players who like to try out every class as they only need four characters per faction to experience all the options. And it also allows for lots of character variations, though I imagine that balance issues will be common and frequent, particularly when PvP is involved.

Speaking of the interface, I want to give kudos to the Rift team for giving the players plenty of UI customization options straight out of the box. Every single part can be moved, hidden and re-sized. It's very nice to have this functionality available from the start without having to use an addon.

They also provide a variety of dyes you can buy. And every armor slot takes both a primary and secondary color. They look pretty good as well! At least I thought I looked spiffy.

Crafting is pretty much the same as Wow. Gather resources from static spots that respawn regularly. Grind out a bunch of items noone will ever use to increase your skill a few points. At least you can salvage the items you just made and hope to recover a couple of spare resources. To the game's credit, I was able to fashion a useful two-handed axe for myself at level 16. Unfortunately, that axe was replaced about half an hour later with the reward from a PvP quest. Looking at various quest rewards, faction merchants and such, it seems that the best gear comes from helping close the Rifts and PvP (I didn't get a chance to go into a dungeon so I can't speak for that). I don't see the Crafting side of Rift as being particularly engaging or interesting.

At level 19 I already have five different types of currency in my pack. And I'm not talking gold, silver, etc. This is actually five separate systems of currency! I have regular currency, I have Rift currency, I have crafting currency, I have PvP currency and I have faction currency! I'm sure there are many more types ahead. In fact I know there are because I saw vendors who wanted money of a type I hadn't seen before. I find this an overly complex and un-needed system, especially when the vendors that take these various currencies are scattered all over the land. It's basically just creating new carrots to grind for, but I guess that's what Themepark MMOs are really all about.

Combat is pretty standard MMO fare. Select target and mash buttons to hit them with various effects. I actually found myself a bit overwhelmed initially by all the action options I was given due to having various abilities from three Souls. By level 5 or 6 I had to expose two extra action bars on-screen just to keep all of my abilities visible!

The only PvP I saw during my few days in beta was in the Warfronts (aka Battlegrounds). Pretty standard. Ten players per side. Grab and hold the special crystal in the middle while killing the other team. Get some honor points at the end. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum until you can purchase the gear you want from the PvP vendors. I hear there are options for Open World PvP (I was on a server that was labeled as PvP), but I saw none of that during my excursions.

Overall, I found my time in the Rift Beta to be fun, but lacking in anything new, though Rift does take the bar for Themepark MMOs a notch higher. It adds Public Quests (Rifts), dyes and guild leveling from Warhammer, and the graphics and class selection of Vanguard. Does it have the upper level content to keep the gear junkies occupied? Hard to say as I only reached level 20. But there certainly seemed to be a lot of excitement about the game from other players in the starting zones.

I was a bit disappointed that Rift failed to improve in some seemingly obvious areas ('Gray' trash item drops? Quest items that take up inventory slots? Really? I thought we were beyond these annoyances...), and I could already feel the grind, even in the first 20 levels. But, I do think that Rift will be a fresh arena for a number of players who have grown tired of Azeroth and it's adjoining planes. Lack of innovation hasn't ever really held back many games, and I firmly believe that Rift's polish and stability will help to give it a solid launch.

Die2Night Review: Zombie Fever grips the web!

Who knew that trying to survive against hordes of zombies while being cooped up with complete strangers, many of them a bit insane, could be so much fun?

Die2Night, a new web-based, zombie survival game, lets you do just that. Thrown into a town with 39 other folks, your mission is to work together to survive the horrible, zombie-filled nights ahead for as long as possible.

The game is free to play, though of course, there are some options to pay for perks. What makes this game really interesting is the social dynamic. When you start, you join a new town of 40 citizens, each one another player. There will never be any new citizens. Only losses to the zombies and the mental anguish that comes with any post-apocalyptic horror.

Within the game you can go out and scavenge the wasteland for goods, or stay in town and try to build defenses against the oncoming hordes that descend each night. But within each decision lies a social dynamic. There are only a certain number of action points to go around each day. And if you don't have enough defenses, people die. So agreeing what to build and when to build it becomes crucial. And at some point, food and water start to become scarce (water is also used to kill the zombies, making it doubly precious), lending even more stress and conflicting motives to the situation.

But the game leaves everything wide open. You have very little control over your fellow citizens, and if they decide they want to build a ham radio while you're trying to nail together mattresses to survive the night, there is nothing you can do but complain! And believe me, someone will complain! Which leads to another facet of the game, personal politics! You can issue anonymous complaints against any or all of your fellow citizens. If anyone gets a total of eight complaints, they are 'banished', allowed to live in the town, but unable to take from the common stashes. Apparently the banished players get some special abilities that upstanding citizens don't, including the ability to start a coup, but I haven't yet been banished myself, so I don't know for sure. I'll have to work on that...

The varying interactions within each town are varied and fluid, and an endless source of both amusement and frustration. Giving players their own tools to deal with internal social issues is brilliant, and an area that I hope gets fleshed out more in the future. It certainly is something that is missing from most online games. Generally the best option you have is 'mute'!

I've just scratched the surface of the game, having only survived for 4 days in my best outing. But each town has been a different experience. And the developer promises more new content in the future to keep your days as a survivor varied and interesting.

This game manages to fill two niches - free web-based game, and zombie apocalypse game, doing an excellent job on both counts. Definitely worth a look if this sort of thing interests you!

Dawntide Open Beta Journal #1

Note: These experiences are from the weekend on July 2-5th, 2010.

For various reasons, it's been a while since I've checked in on the Dawntide beta. But now that the game has officially entered open beta, I thought it was time to pay it another visit.

After the expected patching and updating (which went very smoothly), I logged in to find my old characters had been deleted. No big deal. I quickly make a new character, choosing to start with skills in Lumberjacking, Carpentry and Fletching, as well as some basic combat experience.

I login to the familiar newbie town and immediately notice that every tree in town has been cut. Fair enough, I spy a few green-tops still standing across the bridge out of town, and head out to begin anew my career as an aspiring lumberjack.

As I wandered the landscape looking for more trees to harvest, I also took the time to practice my combat skills on the local rabbits and ducks.

Combat is the typical pick-target, push various attack buttons type. You do have the option of entering different stances (Balance, Force and something else). Each stance builds up specific stance points that can then be used to trigger other abilities. The combat animations seemed to be mostly nonexistent (they would occasionally fire off for special moves, but otherwise, combat was nothing to watch)

I tried harvesting a flower poking up from the ground, but after the casting timer wound down, the flower vanished and I received an error message telling me that my skill was insufficient to harvest this item. Would have been nice to get that message before the timer. It would also be nice to not deplete the resource.

Looking at the mini-map, I see a castle-type structure not far down the road. Perhaps it's another town? As it turns out, it was just an empty one-room keep, with a guard outside. But across the road was a camp full of vendors. Alas, none of them specialized in Fletching. I did however, find a general vendor who sold all sorts of random items and recipes at discounts. This vendor would also buy items!

Well, in theory anyway. As it turns out, everything I had was considered worthless. But the vendor did provide a couple of cheaper than normal recipes as well as an Icicle scroll. Magic! I had started the game with a single 5-minute buff spell, which I used every chance I could raising a couple of magic skills in tiny increments (and actually, you can just recast a spell over and over as long as you have mana, gaining skill the whole while, but that sort of mindless repetition bores me too quickly). But now I knew a real spell, one that would bring icy doom to my foes!

Heading back towards the main town, I scan the horizons, searching for something to practice my new Icicle spell on.

I do spy this monstrosity in the distance, but having a healthy respect for my newbie status and my general lack of knowledge about the game, I give the mushroom-headed beast a wide berth.

Continuing onwards, I see a small, wee bunny hopping in the grass nearby. Perfect! Target bunny, cast spell, and... er.. well, nothing. Did I miss? Did it not work? I have no idea as there was no animation or text report. Hmmm. Let's try that again. Still nothing. So I do things the old-fashioned way, beating the bunny to a pulp with my hatchet and left hook. So it wasn't a ghost bunny (another common bug with the game world), perhaps I was doing something wrong. In my next combat encounter, I try mashing the spell button during melee. It seems to cast the spell, and maybe my animal foe lost a larger chunk of health than normal, but it's difficult to tell without any sort of combat feedback (sometimes numbers will float up from the target, but this also seems to be inconsistent). I try again a few more times and surprisingly, during one encounter, I actually do see spikes of ice shoot up from the ground underneath my opponent! OK. So I guess it is working, again it was just the animation

Next objective: How to make money? In my previous foray into the world of Dawntide, I recalled making bows for money. But looking at the vendor prices this time around, I didn't have enough cash to purchase any bow recipes. Looking ta my options, the only one that seemed viable was selling lumber. So I started a new career as a Carpenter, cutting down trees and making them into boards to sell to the vendor. After doing this for a bit, I was able to purchase the hunting bow recipe and discovered I also needed to know how to craft a bowstring. Alas, that recipe was another 3 copper!

Luckily, the general vendor had some pre-crafted bowstrings for sale! Seeing that as a much quicker option (I had no idea what sort of materials might be requested of me in order to make a single bowstring on my own), I purchased 10 or so and set about to crafting. After a couple of sad failures I had success! A Hunting Bow of my very own! Using up all of the remaining bowstrings, I managed to create two extra bows to sell. Looks like I had finally reached a point of being profitable!

Having finally achieved one of my initial goals, I now needed some arrowheads to go with the many arrow shafts and feathers I had sitting in my pack. But on my way back to the vendor, I was suddenly disconnected from the server (an unfortunately common occurrence) and decided to save that journey for the next Journal.


I really haven't been keeping up with the development of this game, but from looking at their news page, they seem to be on a steady patching cycle, which is always a good sign. At the moment, the random disconnects and crashes are way too common for me to want to spend much time in-game. Hopefully these technical issues will be cleared up soon and I can venture back into the online world of Dawntide without the frustration of having to login again every 10 minutes.

Short Summary: Has potential, but still has many technical hurdles to overcome.

Dragon Age: Origins - Impressions

This writeup was originally titled First Impressions, but I've ended up playing much longer than I had planned on before posting this, so First Impressions no longer applies. I would call it a Review, but I feel like that term would be a disservice unless I had finished the game or played through a significant portion as well as experienced the content with different starting characters. But, I've done neither, instead spending my time as a Dwarven Warrior, stumbling around the countryside, looking for trouble.


VOICE ACTING AND CHARACTERIZATION

Once you start playing the game, it quickly becomes obvious that this game is driven by it's story and voice acting. Every single conversation you have is completely voice-acted (though oddly enough, your character never utters a word aloud during these talks, making him/her seem like a semi-creepy mute). On top of the main storyline voices, when back at your camp, you can choose to engage any of your party members (you can gather various party members in your travels, each with their own unique personality and interests) in a personal dialogue. These can vary based on previous actions, how the party member currently feels about you, and even items in your inventory! There have been a number of times throughout the game where I felt like I was watching a movie as a certain portion of dialogue played out.

It is not unusual for your party to have conversations amongst themselves while you're wandering around. And oftentimes, one or more of your party members will chime in during a dialog scene, giving their own comments and opinions on the matter. This is really well done and helps sell the world. The characters come to life at every turn, even without your direct input.


COMBAT

Getting used to the combat system took me a while. It is a fairly typical setup, with an overhead view and an action bar full of ability icons, but this game adds a few wrinkles. At any given point you can pause the action and issue new orders to your teammates. You can also give them predefined actions based on certain criteria via a tactics system. For example, If being attacked by melee -> use block skill.

It's a very interesting system. And once you dig into it, you can actually set up some fairly complex AI for your party members. Unfortunately, the limited number of tactic slots really hurts. I often found that I was barely able to give them some basic orders and tell them to try and use a healing potion when near death. It would be nice to have a couple of extra base tactics slots for each character, especially given the number of abilities and stances that are available. Even purchasing extra slots at every opportunity, it still was never enough.

Feeling fairly confident in my brain vs computer abilities, I decided to play the game on the Hard difficulty setting. I do feel challenged quite often, and some Boss fights can be particularly rough, but once I clued in to the healer necessity (see below), things got a lot easier, though it's still no pushover.

I do have to say that I am pretty unhappy with the over-reliance on healing in Dragon Age. Healing potions barely cover it and are an easy way to go bankrupt. Even my dedicated tank character, using all of his stamina-draining defensive stances, gets easily mauled. It's virtually required that you either pick up the healing-oriented party member early on, or you spec one of your other characters into the healing tree. Even if you make maximum use of your stuns and such, there is still way too much damage being slung about for any party to survive the onslaught.

Dying during battle has no long-term effect. Instead (assuming that your party wins), all characters that were depleted completely of HP during the battle get back up, though each will now have an injury that reduces their effectiveness in some way. However, injuries can be instantly removed with application of an injury kit. So this effect never really plays a part in the game unless you forget to use your kits. I found that I was much more likely to either win the battle outright, or fail completely, forcing a reload.


RANDOM THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS

Travel between sites is done in a simulated manner, with the player choosing where to go from a world map, and then watching a little blood-stained trail plod across the map, occasionally stopping for a random or scripted encounter. Once you reach a designated stopping point, there are usually a couple of zones there, one with friendly NPCs who serve as merchants and quest-givers, the rest for the local storyline events and for some random monster-bashing. The zones are pretty rigid, though they all have side quests and points of interest to be found if you go poking around enough.

I loved being able to complete the 'go kill these guys' quests without being required to have the quest beforehand (something that was promised in one of the infamous Warhammer Online promotional videos from Paul Barnett, but which was never delivered in-game).

I wish the talent trees were actually trees, giving you more branching choices rather than a bunch of linear ones.

When shopping with a vendor NPC, a handy-dandy popup window shows up when you mouseover an equipment item, allowing you to compare its stats to what you are currently wearing. Unfortunately, you are unable to compare items to anything any of my party members are using, which makes it a bit difficult to efficiently shop for your party members.

I found that there wasn't enough hotbar space to include all of a character's abilities.

I've had few instances of terrain trouble where a character would get stuck and not move unless I took control of them manually, and I've also had enemies hop up on benches where one or two members of my party would refuse to attack them

Sometimes story choices vanish for no apparent reason; sometimes you're offered dialogue choices that don't actually reflect what has happened previously (for example, one conversation choice I had at one point was 'So only one person can go through', but before this choice popped up, I had no idea that my progress in this particular quest would be limited to one person. That was revealed in another dialog tidbit that I hadn't yet accessed!)


FUTURE

It looks as if DLC will be a big part of this game, with no less than four downloadable options available right from the start (based on your purchase), plus several more available for completing certain parts of their browser-based game, Dragon Age Journeys. And on top of that, even though the game has been out for only two months, they've already released their next purchasable content for the game and have another expansion coming right behind it! They obviously plan on milking this for as much as they can. But if you're one of those players who gets a new game and rapidly burns through all the content, this might be good news!

And as with most games of this time, you can always turn to the mod community to find new and/or altered game content.

OVERVIEW

To be honest, Dragon Age: Origin was a little different from what I had envisioned. I was expecting a more open world like the Morrowind series. But Dragon Age is much more of a rail-driven game. Sure you can choose what order you visit the cities in, but visit them you will. And you will also solve many of their problems, one way or another. You can't really just go off an do whatever you want to for extended periods of time.

But despite my complaints and nit-pick, the story, characters and just plain 'fun-factor' are excellent. Overall, a very entertaining game.

Mortal Online Open Beta: Day One

So the Open Beta for Mortal Online began yesterday. The client was available via torrent, but it seems today they simply have a direct download link.

Anyway, I had no technical issues with my setup. The download worked fine the first time around, installation was simply extracting the files from the zip, the updater ran, showed me the most recent patch notes and downloaded everything successfully (though there was a significant pause before the download actually started).

When I first tried to login at about 11pm PST last night, the servers were down. I checked back about an hour later and they were up, so I tried again, go in, and was soon making my first character.

The rough edges were immediately apparent. There were no mouseovers telling me what all the stats I could edit were for, there was no info about what differences there were between the races. I ended up just kind of speeding through the process, eager to see the world first-hand.

Waking up in the game world proved to be a laggy affair. My hard drive was given a thorough beating as the scenery and textures slowly popped into place. So the first thing I did was go and turn all the graphics options to the lowest settings. Some took effect immediately (such as turning off shadows), but something else I did (not sure what) said a client restart was required. But I was impatient, and once the trees had finished loading, the client seemed much more responsive.

There I was, in front of a nondescript wall in a forest with a bunch of other similar looking players, all with our starter axes. Of course, it was only moments before one of them came at me with murderous intentions. Luckily, being in combat stance causes you to move slower, so I was able to get some distance and give myself time to figure out how to wield my own axe! Once that was done, it was back into the fray! A few awkward blows were swung (combat feels very clunky), a few hits made, but no deaths that I saw. Quickly tiring of this, I instead turned my axe on some nearby trees, acquiring some wood. I noticed a small deer grazing nearby, so I decided to try my axe-wielding skills on the local fauna. But as I approached, the deer ran! It stopped a short distance off, so I tried again, and the same thing happened (though I did manage to get in one swing first)! It was a very cool moment to realize that this creature had some sense of self-preservation, and that I would probably need a bow to kill it.

Giving up on the slaughter for the moment, I scrolled through the very strange and confusing skill tree interface, trying to figure out if I had any crafting skills and how to use them. Alas, that quest was unsuccessful, but I did discover a Snooping skill! So off I went towards the nearest player who wasn't swinging their axe at me. Success! I could see in his pack, and it looked just like mine, empty except for a bit of lumber. Obviously this player either got some warning message about my actions (or he was just paranoid from all the axe-wielding maniacs in the vicinity), because he spun around and took a swing at my head. Departing the area quickly, I decided to just snoop as I was passing others, rather than standing around waiting for them to get angry. It was a mixed bag of failure and success, but it was interesting to notice how cautious everyone was. Noone attempted to run through you if they saw you coming and most people seemed to give other players a wide berth!

A short run down a nearby road and I found myself in a town. It had a number of buildings and seemed to be a decent size, but it felt oddly empty. The buildings were just lifeless husks, and all of the NPCs seemed to be gathered in a central market area, standing about in random spots (at least I saw no pattern in their placement). I checked a few of them, and all of the ones I saw seemed to be selling raw materials. Seeing some other players around, I again tried my hand at Snooping. Unfortunately, one of the players called for the guards, and I was quickly slain.

Now this was something new (in an old-school sort of way). Rather than being transported somewhere after death, I instead became a ghost. I couldn't see the nearby players or NPCs any longer, and the scenery gained a sort of washed out and smeared effect. I checked the in-game help to see how I could return to a more fleshy state, and found that I was supposed to look for the 'white lines' which would tell me where the priests were. I looked around and saw a number of white pillars of light extending into the sky. The brightness was supposed to tell you how close they were, but with the Death effect making everything blurry, it was difficult to get a good read on the markers. I made a brief stab and tracking what I thought was the brightest one, but when I climbed up to a second story and it appeared to be beyond a line of hills, I gave up and used the beta suicide option, which transported me to the closest priest. I expect that experience will help in the future when trying to locate a priest for resurrection, but they really should try and make it a bit clearer.

Once I was back in the land of the living, I made sure that I still had my newbie axe, and went to sleep next to a nearby tree. I was going to try and create another character before calling it a night, but the game crashed when I logged out.

====

In this short adventure, I could tell that the game is very unpolished and unfriendly to new players. There seems to be a severe lack of feedback given. A number of times I would try chopping a tree and receive no message about success or failure. My Snooping attempts never told me that I was being flagged as a criminal (which I assume is why I was guard-whacked in town). When first starting the game you're given a list of starting areas to choose from, but no information at all about what the differences between them might be. Melee combat is extremely crude. Supposedly they have a major combat patch on the way, but until it's implemented, I can only comment on what's actually in-game.

Despite all of this, I did feel engaged and I'm eager for another chance to dive into Mortal Online. Hopefully I'll be able to allot some more playtime this week and get a better idea of how the game works and what it's all about.

My next goals are to craft something and to learn a new skill! Oh, and maybe kill someone!

Fallen Earth Beta - Initial Impressions: Part II

Follow the link below for my further thoughts and experiences in the Fallen Earth beta.

My Kingdom for a Horse

So here I was, still at Embry Crossroads. I had completed a good portion of the quests in the area, but my main focus was on crafting, and that semi-confusing, overly-complex system had taken most of my time and all of my chips (which is the currency used in Fallen Earth). But it was time to move on, and there was no way I was going to cross the barren, scarred wasteland on foot. I needed one of them horses that it seemed everyone else already owned. But the various parts needed to 'craft' a horse, as well as acquire the necessary training manual, would cost me several of the larger size chips.

Well I didn't have much cash, but I did have a ton of crafting materials in my various bank vaults. I figured that I would just see what I could make, and then sell the resulting product to an NPC vendor for a nice profit. What proceeded from there was an odd little dance I had with myself and the various merchants. I would look for items I could craft where I already had most of the ingredients, purchasing the missing parts, then selling the resulting end-product. Sometimes I netted a few chips, other times I lost some. I didn't seem to be getting anywhere closer to acquiring a horse. So I opened up my vault with all my food-type resources and took everything out. With only a few minor purchases, I soon had a good dozen items queued up for cooking. As these foodstuffs were busy percolating in my pack, I poked around to see if I could secure some other parts I needed. Luck was with me that day, for I found a rusty car outside of town that yielded no less than eight scarp fasteners (which are used often and are also relatively expensive to purchase from the NPC vendors).

While on these excursions, I was also trying to fill out some gaps in my crafting knowledge, namely ammo for my revolver! I finally located the ballistics trainer, and also figured out what skill book I needed to purchase. Aha! It turned out that actually crafting the ammo was an easy task, using fairly common materials, so I soon had enough ammo to last me for a while, especially since I had begun using a sword as my main weapon.

After much brewing, grilling and preserving, I managed to sell enough cooked goods to gather the necessary cash to purchase the horse materials. I completed the horse-training recipe, and voila, there she was! I hopped on and took her out for a spin. It was a sweet ride, one that I wish I had gotten much earlier. And even better, the horse comes with its own pack slots! My mission completed, it was time to move on. I had a couple of quests directing me to Oilville, which was just a short jaunt to the north, and so to Oilville I went!


The Bustling Metropolis of Oilville

I thought that Embry Crossroads was a happening place, but Oilville was even more active. More players, more quests, and a token system for acquiring gear. A number of quests around town gave out special 'gears' as reward. These gears could then be turned into an NPC just outside of town for various armor and weapons. I took a glance at what was offered and realized that what I already had was equivalent or slightly better than what they offered. I guess all of that time spent on crafting had paid off after all!

So I begun the great quest project, cleaning out sandworms, assaulting raider camps, and various other odd jobs around town. Not far from town I ran across a few foes on the road, so I jumped off my horse and waded into the slaughter, patting myself on the back for a job well done. But then I turned around and witnessed a horrifying sight! My horse lay dead on the ground!! I'm not sure what happened, but a CoG (one of the enemy factions) was wandering around nearby, whistling innocently. My vengeance was both swift and deadly. I took a look at my preciously acquired horse, hoping that there was some way to revive it but I quickly realized that I had no veterinary skills. Luckily, by this time, I had more than enough chips from completing quests. So I hoofed it back into town and went over to the stables area to see what my options were and to train a new horse if need be. But I noticed that the stable master had an option for 'towing' my horse. It only cost a single chip, so I gave it a shot. It seemed to work as I then had the option of removing the horse from the stable. Would it be whole and healthy? Unforunately not. Instead I was suddenly presented with the corpse of my equine companion being tossed at my feet. Hmmm... that wasn't quite what I had expected. On to the trainer, where I picked up a vet book. Sure enough, the repair skill worked and my faithful mount was soon back in action!

So I booked around the Oilville area for a while, completing numerous quests and shooting up through levels 7 and 8 very quickly. Focusing on the quests also rewarded me with lots of money as well as the experience gains. I was well on my way to level 10 when the closed beta ended, having gained 2 & 1/2 levels with only a few hours of gameplay after leaving Embry Crossroads.

At one point I had a number of fedex-type missions to a nearby town of Kingman, so I hopped on my trusty steed and rode over there, encountering a large camp of bandits who had taken over the main highway along the way, and spotting an imposing structure on a hill in the distance. As it turned out, this was the infamous Kingman Prison, and the local townspeople had plenty of killing that wanted me to take care of for them inside. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see much more beyond riding around the outside, but it is a very impressive structure that can be seen from miles away. I believe this is the first major instance/dungeon in the game and it's domination of the local skyline really drew my attention and fostered a desire to see what was inside.



Miscellaneous Thoughts

Horses are great! I like that they have a 'fuel' meter that needs to be replenished. But it seems to be a large enough pool that it wont be a constant maintenance chore. Their extra pack space is a nice addition, and the fact that they can be killed adds another point for realism (though it's absurdly easy to 'tow' and revive them afterwords). One side effect of the fuel meter for horses, is that players tend to park them in town rather than riding them everywhere, including inside buildings. This little touch of seeing several horses lined up outside of various buildings really helps to give Fallen Earth that feeling that it is something special. But of course, once the teeming masses hit the game, I suspect that people will be more than happy to ride their horses up and down the stairs rather than leaving them outside.

I am a little worried about buffs. It seems that there are quite a lot. Even with my newbie self I can eat, drink and take painkillers, all of which provide a 30-60 minute buff, and then on top of that, I have two mutation powers that provide more temporary buffs. I've heard that following a mutation path in character development will open up even more buff options. One player on the forums said that he generally has 17 buffs going at the same time! This is a bad trend for several reasons. 1) Reapplying multiple buffs is a pain, 2) When you start stacking buffs on buffs, at some point they become required in order to compete with other players, 3) its just confusing and hard to keep track of when you have a dozen little buff icons with various effects.

I've also heard rumor (though it should be taken with a grain of salt as I haven't experienced the clan or faction systems yet), that player clans have no faction restrictions. If true, this is a huge blow to the PvP potential of the game and kind of destroys the point of even having factions in the first place, especially if players can teach the faction-specific recipes to other players.

The game does have an auction house, but there was almost nothing for sale. But that's pretty typical for test/beta servers, so I not worried about the lack of auction activity. But given the crafting-oriented nature of the game it will be interesting to see how the economy develops once it goes live.

I never had a chance to experience any PvP in my time in the Fallen Earth world. At one point during my wanderings, I did have a message flash on my screen that I was entering a PvP area, but there was noone else around, and I wasn't even sure what it was that made this a PvP area, as there didn't seem to be anything interesting or useful in sight. But, from what I understand, there is no open PvP in the game. There are 'conflict' towns, but apparently not a whole lot of PvP actually happens there, though that might be due to the beta mentality. It sounds like this part of the game hasn't really been fleshed out. Hopefully that is something the devs will work on in the near future.


Summary

And that's pretty much it for my gametime in beta. Though I found the game difficult to get involved in initially, once I passed that first invisible hurdle, I began to enjoy it a lot more. I'm still undecided as to whether or not I'll make the purchase for launch. I have several other games awaiting my attention, including a Blood Bowl league and guild leadership in Warhammer Online.

I suspect that this is one of those games that will have a rocky launch and a lot of mediocre reviews, but given the chance, it has enough potential to develop into an engaging MMO with a unique niche. There does seem to be plenty to do in the starting zone, but those who prefer racing to the endgame will probably end up bitter and disappointed.

So, if you enjoy crafting and are willing to deal with various UI issues and a semi-clutzy combat system, then this is probably a game that you will enjoy. If you're a PvE-raider type, or someone looking for fun, meaningful PvP, then you probably won't find enough entertainment in Fallen Earth. If you're just looking for something different from the saturated fantasy market, then I recommend giving the beta a whirl to see if the game catches your attention, though I do suggest that you give it enough time to get out of the starter towns and into the wider world before passing judgment.

Demigod: Intial Impressions

I've played a lot or RTS games, starting with Dune 2, and proceeding through a plethora of others including Warcraft, Command and Conquer, and many more. But in recent years, it seems that the emphasis has shifted towards more and more micro-management and base baby-sitting, which I don't get a lot of enjoyment from. One of the best variations (and one of my favorite games of all-time) was the Myth series. One of the best features of this game was that it focused on controlling you troops. There was no base building, and when a unit died, it was gone for the rest of that match. This allowed the player to focus on the strategy and action of the game. Alas, the company behind this game pushed out one too many games in an attempt to cash in, ended up folding under, and no one since (that I know of) has tried to resurrect this type of gameplay.

Bu now, along comes Demigod! Demigod is an RTS game, and there is micro-management, but you're not worrying about sending peasants out to harvest gold or making sure that your Space Marines are securely nestled into their bunkers. That's all piddly stuff, beneath the notice of one who is aspiring to ascend to godhood. Instead you focus on your character (who can easily carve their way through waves of soldiers without breaking a sweat), crushing the pitiful mortal forces arrayed before you, clashing with enemy demigods, increasing your power and skills with battlefield experience and acquiring powerful artifacts as you and your team try to emerge victorious over the lesser contenders!

It may sound confusing and overly simple at first. "All I control is one character?" I can hear the laments even now. But, despite its seemingly shallow gameplay, once you get into it, you realize that Demigod is a complex game with enough variations to make sure that no two matches are ever exactly alike. Each Demigod has their own distinct playstyle, and even then, your strategies and options vary based on which skills you choose to focus on.

Gameplay is based around already developed bases that each side controls. Each base has a number of defensive structures, a shop to purchase basic equipment, portals that spawn computer-controlled soldiers (who are nothing more than fodder for your elevation to godhood), and a citadel where you can purchase upgrades for your entire team. The objective is to break the defenses of your opponents and destroy their citadels. In between the bases are various flags and capture points that provide a range of different bonuses to your team. Only the demigods can capture these flags, which creates an interesting dynamic as you frequently have to decide between aiding your troops or taking a detour to try and grab a nearby resource flag. There is a surprising amount of back and forth on the maps. The presence of one or more demigods in an area can radically shift the balance of power on that section of the map. And having your defenses broken does not mean the game is over. In a recent match I played, my team was not only assaulting our enemies' citadel, but we had captured both of their spawn points, which cut off all non-demigod reinforcements for them. I figured the game was a lock, got careless and died. Ten minutes later, they were in our base, doing the same thing to us, and my team eventually lost. I was both astounded and delighted to see such a major swing of momentum when playing with nothing but AI opponents. I imagine that multiplayer matches get even crazier!

So far I've only played the single-player game (though since all the maps are designed for team games, there were numerous AI-controlled Demigods who do provide some decent competition). I wanted to get a feel for the game, try out all eight Demigods and become more knowledgeable about a few of my favorites before diving into the maelstrom of fighting other players. And apparently, their multiplayer setup has been having some major difficulties. But that's alright. I'm fine with honing my skills against computer opponents while they work out the kinks in the system.

The number of maps are pretty limited at the moment, but I'm sure that list will expand in the near future. The developers have also stated that they plan on having free releases in the future that will include new Demigod characters. Demigod is easy to learn (which is good since there isn't a tutorial). I was able to dive right in and start playing. The basic controls and UI layout were very intuitive, and I pick up more advanced strategies and tricks every match I play.

All in all, I've found Demigod to be a very entertaining game that helps to grow the RTS field in new directions (though technically, the free player-created mod for Warcraft III, Defense of the Ancients, has had similar gameplay for a number of years now). This game should be enjoyable for anyone who loves RTS games, and also for those who found the genre, but disliked the amount of micro-management generally required to play most of them.

Here are a couple of related links about the game that you might find interesting and/or useful.

Tom Chick's overviews of each Demigod character

Demigod wiki

Warhammer Online: Patch 1.2 First Impressions

Here are some random thoughts from my 4 hour play session, of which ~90% of that time was in the RvR areas.

Seems like load times for zoning have decreased. My lag was about the same as usual. I didn't have any of the crashes that a lot of players were complaining about last night.

The Twisting Tower scenario is interesting, though it does seem overly laggy. Also, I'm really tired of the whole pie-throwing gags, especially in scenarios. We don't need extra distractions in the middle of a pitched battle. Add in achievements for accomplishing the goals in the scenario rather than throwing pies! I also had WAR lock up on me in the middle on the new scenario as the eye 'cleansed the tower'.

Being able to see everyone in your warband on the mini-map and full-size map is pretty sweet. And the graphic dot used to denote the position of other players in your warband is very distinctive and readily stands out on the maps. I can finally tell where everyone is with a quick glance at the map! Certainly you can say that this is something that should have been in on release, but at least they've polished it up at the same time they fixed whatever issues were causing players to not show up.

Not much comment about crafting, as I don't really do any in WAR. I do have a low-level cultivator and was happy to see seeds available on the guild quartermaster. It was also exciting to occasionally get dye ingredients. I haven't read up on the details, but I thought I would be able to get seeds back when harvesting, which so far, hasn't happened. Perhaps my skill level is too low?

The new RvR domination system is interesting. It definitely spiced up the RvR last night. I think we've had a total of 5-6 zone flips since the patch (probably more by now). I haven't yet decided whether the constant zone flipping will be a good thing or a bad thing in the long run. Previously, I always felt a strong sense of accomplishment when we locked a zone. And I still felt that last night (especially after expending a lot of energy to defend numerous assaults on Objectives we had locked down), but I wonder how quickly that will pass.

Some RvR zones have now have a contested PQ. We completed it a couple of times in Black Crag as we passed, simply by killing the dwarf slayer guarding the flag. Not sure if something different happens when you keep your hero alive instead. It also wasn't clearly explained that you pick up your reward in a chest off to the side of the warcamp. If someone in our group hadn't known, we probably would have missed it entirely.

Things are a bit different in PvP now. I'm still working on figuring out how I want to setup my tactics since a lot of abilities have changed. And I'll need to respec my mastery points sometime soon, as one of the mastery tactics I had previously purchased is now a 2-hander buff (I use a one-hander and shield). I ran the Da Biggest shout pretty much all night. Not sure if anyone in my group noticed the additional buffs they were getting. And despite knowing beforehand that melee DPS would be able to enter the postern doors of enemy keeps, it completely slipped my mind in the heat of battle and I was very surprised to have several White Lions charging up the ramparts! I look forward to seeing how this plays out in the future. It did seem overly easy for them to simply run through the patrolling guards and get to a spot that was safe from the NPCs. I think there should be several guards stationed inside of every postern so that they have to fight to get inside rather than simply Flee their way in.

Crowd control is still out of hand. I spend over half of any large-scale fight either disabled, knocked down, disarmed or rooted. It's especially bad for melee as roots effectively bring your contribution to the battle to 0. Burst damage also seems to be pretty crazy at the moment. I started thinking about equipping the wounds and/or toughness tactic for most of my tactic sets. I'm also hoping that will start seeing some small class tweak patches over the next few weeks.

Small and Independent Gaming Links - Part III

Time for another installment of links and minor commentary on a variety of small and independent games.

First off, we'll start with a couple of purchasable games. Both of the following games have downloadable demos available.


Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble - This is an odd sort of game. Kind of an unholy union of Clue and the Choose Your Own Adventure books. You control a gang of girls in a 1920s high school who set out to solve mysteries at their school and around town. You move to various locations, choose which girl from your gang will interact with the other characters, and through a series of lies, taunts, exposing of secrets and other such pettiness (all resolved through a series of mini-games) you'll discover the sordid side of this small town. It costs $20 for the full version, but you can download a demo that will let you play for about a half hour or so and give you a good overview of what the game will be like. It has a very interesting aesthetic look and feel to it, and I found the demo engaging.

Venture Arctic - I think the best way to describe this game would be as an environmental Populous. You play god over a small section of arctic wilderness, encouraging the creatures to breed and eat via altering their area through placement of food, encouraging births, warming and cooling the ground, and sometimes even direct intervention. The big issue is balance. Even though some animals are predators and some are simply grazing herd animals, there needs to be food for everyone, and not an overabundance of any one type. I found that the micro-management required was a bit much for me, but then again, maybe if I was a proper force of nature, that wouldn't have been the case. I also disliked the direct intervention part of the game. You can make specific, individual creatures pregnant or sick, and you can also place new creatures directly. I think this genre would be better served by instead giving you more generic tools to encourage growth or migrations. But aside from that quibble, all in all, I found this is an interesting game. It's cartoony aspect would probably also make it fun for kids. The demo lets you play for 30 minutes. The full game costs $20.


Now onto the free games! These are all flash-based and can be played in any modern browser.

Grow - Interesting little animated, puzzle game. You select from a series of pieces that fire off a particular animation. But, what happens with each piece depends on what pieces have gone before and which ones get placed after it. Sometimes they will interact with other pieces in new and interesting ways. You have to figure out what the right order is to place them in, basing your guesses on the animation results. That's about the best I can describe it. Anyway, it's free, and there are actually a number of different variations to play. Definitely worth checking out, though if you're having trouble with a certain puzzle, it can get annoying to have to sit through the same animations over and over.

Mastermind - Become an Evil Genius and take over the world! Send your minions out to rob, steal and kidnap while building up your base, researching superpowers and managing a coffee shop as a front! I find the interface a little awkward and cramped, but for a free browser-based game, its a fun little distraction. And who doesn't love being evil every once in a while!?

Majesty of Colors - Odd little mood-evoking game that puts you in control of a colossal, underwater, Lovecraftian creature and gives you choices of how you want to interact with various humans and other things that come into your domain. The game doesn't last very long, but it does have multiple endings to explore based on how you choose to respond. It's all drive by the mouse. No keyboard interaction. Worth taking a few minutes to look at.

The Space Game - This is a tower defense type game set in space. You start off with a single station and need to assign miners to gather minerals from nearby asteroids, set up turrets to take care of incoming pirates and upgrade your base and other components to be stronger and more efficient. Fun little game. It's flash-based, free and has a number of levels specifically designed for people to try and get high scores on.

Sagrario's Room Escape - This game is in the traditional, click-on-the-picture format. You're tasked with figuring out how to escape a room with seemingly no exits. You have to look at and interact with the few items that are in the room to solve the puzzle. The interface takes a little getting used to, and sometimes the clue is simply clicking on the appropriate two pixel square on the screen, which can be annoying sometimes (for example, opening the briefcase on the first room). Another important bit which I probably wouldn't have figured out without reading some hints, is that you can sometimes view items in your inventory, then use other items from your inventory on them. That wasn't really an intuitive interface interaction for me. I also had a lot of trouble figuring out how to correctly spin the dial on the safe. This is an interesting puzzle game with potential, but the interface flaws really kill it for me. Might be more fun for someone who is more in sync with the author's thought patterns than I am.


And I'll close this post off with two links are good spots to go look for other Indie games that might interest you.

Indie Games Blog - This is a very active blog (at least one post a day), giving short reviews and links to a wide variety of small, indie games.

2009 IGF Finalists - These guys always have some interesting games to bring to the public eye. This link goes to the page listing their finalists for their 2009 awards.

And there you have it. Several distractions to keep you from doing any real work!

Small / Independent Gaming Links - Part II

This is a followup to my first post. Click the link below to see some links and thoughts about a few interesting, independent, free games that you may never have heard of.


First off, we have two constructor set type puzzle games. You use the tools provided to put together machines that accomplish certain goals.

Fantastic Contraption - Assemble a self-propelled contraption to move past obstacles and reach the end goal.

Incredibots - Similar to Fantastic Contraption, but with a lot more complexity in regards to the types of machines you make.

The Eyeballing Game - Very simple concept, but engaging nonetheless. Find out how accurate you are when gauging angles, distances and straight lines.

Auditorium - This is an interesting concept. You move and resize circles to deflect rays through certain spots on the screen. As you successfully do so, bits of music play. The object is to get all of the bits of music to play at the same time. It's basically a puzzle game, but the ebb and flow of the music as you try and manipulate the rays properly lends an ethereal and calming air to the whole process.

Minotaur China Shop - I havent played this one yet, but the concept makes me giggle.

Fun-Motion Physics Games - Blog with commentary and links about various games with physics.

Warhammer Online: 2-week Impressions

It's been exactly two weeks since the official launch of Warhammer Online (not including the head start). And I thought it was about time for another post. Most of it will be complaints (because the annoying bits seem to stick in my memory), but I give the game a thumbs up rating overall!

In my last post I bitched about the dumb way that Mythic decided to roll out their servers, and I still stand by that.

My guild had initially chosen Skavenblight as its server of choice. But since that server wasnt open until the official launch date, it has a very low population. So low that we felt forced to switch servers. There just wasn't very much PvP action. And to top it off, Destruction had a great than 2-1 advantage in numbers, making our chances of finding a fun fight very slim. We switched to a more populated server (Ostermark), and even though we're a week behind most of the larger guilds, both in guild rank and character levels, our intra-guild activity is at an all-time high and everyone seems to be having lots of fun. Encounters with enemy players occur often, and the keeps come under siege from one side or the other on a regular basis.

Skavenblight is still a low population server to this day. And its unlikely that this status will change anytime soon. Most players want interaction with other players in their MMO, particularly when its focused on PvP. So new players will gravitate towards the more populated servers, leaving the low-pop servers out in the cold.

The interface needs a lot of work. Chat tabs have lots of issues (hopefully somewhat alleviated with todays patch). You're unable to customize what you see in the frames (for example, the large player pictures next the their status bar). Text sizing within frames is independent of frame size, so if I shrink down a window, the text shrinks with it, making most text unreadable. There is a lack of real options for the action bars. I can only have 1 2 or 4? Not 3? I can't turn them sideways? Or have them active but hidden? I'm sure some user mods will come out with these features, but since the game is only two weeks old, the mod community is still in its birthing stage. I installed a mod that gave me different unit frames, but then it screwed up my ability to edit the interface, so I had to remove it entirely.

I've also had horrible, horrible graphics lag in major RvR encounters. I've tried all sorts of changes to the graphics settings, but oddly, the one that seems to work best is using the default 'balanced' setting. Manually turning all the settings down and turning off the extra fluff seemed to actually make things worse. I also had someone suggest that I remove my combat log tab, which I've done. We'll see if that makes any difference.

Another issue I've run into with my guild is a severe lack of guild vault space. I can fill up our entire guild vault by myself after a couple of hours of PvE and Scavenging. There are just so many varieties of crafting materials. And for a large guild with 100+ players, this really becomes a major problem. We've ended up using the Guild Auctions as storage space instead. It's also pretty annoying that you cant stack items in the vault. You have to pull things out to your pack to get them to stack properly.

The amount of gold/level selling services spam via tells and in-game mail is pretty ridiculous. I reported them at first, but that doesn't seem to have much effect, as I find myself getting spammed by the same people the next day. Hopefully this will die down, as gold really isn't very useful in WAR once you get your mount. But this ties into my next point

No right-click functionality within the chat window. Right-clicking just brings up the options for opacity and such. I cant actually interact with the text in the window at all. I'm used to WoW where I can do such things as party invitations, sending tells and reporting gold spammers, all with a quick click. I have to say that I'm pretty surprised that such functionality didn't make it into WAR.

They just changed the way scenario queuing works other day so that you can queue for any scenario for your level from any zone pairing or the same Tier. This means that I can queue for the Chaos and Dark Elves scenarios without leaving my preferred Greenskin lands. This is an excellent change for those who love playing in the scenarios, but overall, I have found that I'm enjoying scenarios a lot less due to this alteration. No longer do scenarios have racial flavors. I used to go into the Gates of Ekrund and find that at least half, if not 90%, of the players were Dwarves or Greenskins. I knew that I could encounter my hated enemies there. Now its just a random mishmash of players from all over the world. All racial flavor has been removed. Also, this change has also had the undesired effect of pushing the average level of characters in scenarios up quite a bit. Now a large percentage of players are at the top end of the level range, making scenarios much less enjoyable for lower-level players.

Open RvR can be quite a bit of fun, provided that both sides show up for the fight. And though most large fights are reminiscent of the old Hillsbrad/Southshore battles back in the old days of WoW (ie. pre-battlegrounds), it has become apparent that there is room for tactics to play a part in the results. Using terrain to your advantage both to hide your own forces and to force the enemy into choke points is a viable strategy. Flanking maneuvers can also be highly successful. For example, a few nights ago there was a keep under siege by the forces of Order. We ran out there and went inside via the back postern door. But sitting in a keep waiting for the door to fall is not something I particularly enjoy, especially since I didn't have any siege equipment on me. So we sallied forth, catching a couple of players who were trying to camp the back door and then moving around towards the front. This resulted in some initial success, as we pulled a few players over and tore them up, but soon our foes realized what was going on and smashed our ranks apart, sending us back to the warcamp. After a couple of run backs and more defeat, the Order forces finally broke through, took the first floor and began trading long-range fire with the Destruction forces camped inside. Myself and several other players took positions out front, attacking any Order reinforcements that tried to run inside. A few of their stouter characters managed to get past our blockade, but we effectively blocked and/or killed the majority of them. This in turn forced those players inside to try and clear us out, which in turn gave the upstairs defenders an opening to push down to the first floor, and in-between our two groups, we crushed the remaining Order forces and drove their army back to their warcamp! Good times!


But beyond any issues I listed above, I am having a lot of fun, which is really the most important part of any game. All of my complaints can be fixed by Mythic to one degree or another. And in spite of those, I still login daily.

We have a large, active guild (which makes a huge difference), and there is almost always at least one warband engaging in RvR somewhere in the world. Just so long as I can get my graphics issues worked out, I see myself continuing to play this game for quite some time. My WoW time is way off in the distance of my rear view mirror and I wont be looking back that way again!

Warhammer Online: Preview Weekend Thoughts

Played some over this weekend, though I tried out a lot of different classes using my newly patented Smash 'Em leveling technique (queue for scenarios constantly as soon as you log in, doing quests while waiting in line. I hit level 5 and renown rank 5 in under an hour using this technique).

Here are some random thoughts and comments in no particular order.


I noticed that a lot more low-level items come with slots these days. I assume this is to give the as-yet-unreleased Talisman Making profession a use from the start. I just wish they would patch it in so we can see how it works.

It seemed to be very popular to level up to 11 (the max for the Tier one scenarios) and queue for scenarios. That way players could feel powerful by tearing through the lower-ranked opponents. But, since PvP gives experience gains (and pretty significant ones at that), at least these putzes will eventually level out of that Tier, which is a godsend in my opinion. None of that perma-twink BS that is the bane of low-level WoW battlegrounds.

I took some time to stop in one place and just look around, taking in the action that was going on. Even though WAR is a themepark MMO, they do an excellent job of making it feel alive, with NPCs fighting it out, reinforcements running around the camps, explosions and artillery combat happening at a steady pace. It would add some flavor to the game if these bombardments actually caused some damage (not a lot, just something to keep you on your toes).

Every class plays differently. I haven't played them all, but I've spent at least a few levels with Shaman, Squig Herders, Ironbreakers, Engineers, Bright Wizards, Marauders, and of course, lots of time with the Black Orcs, and they all have different mechanics or styles of play. Add this on top of the ability to PvP right out of the starting gate, and replayability becomes a huge draw for WAR (at least in the early levels. The grind might get more tedious as you get to Tiers 3 and 4).

Scavenging is a very useful money-maker. Butchering not so much, since animals are less common than humanoids.

Still no functioning banks, guild or otherwise. Same with the auction house.

The polish is definitely in progress. A lot of people seem to be complaining about the clunky feel of combat, but for those who have been in beta previously, the new system is much improved (though it can still use more improvement). The low-level game just seems a lot slicker and tighter than it did a month ago.

I haven't played all of the starting areas, but the Greenskin area seems to be a lot more compact. I felt like I was running around a lot more in the Dwarf, Empire and Chaos starting areas.

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).

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!

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