Wings Over the Pyre

Current Mood: mellow
Current Music: T.M.Revolution - Vertical Infinity - ULTIMATE (Squid's Redoubt)

OK, two questions:

1. Who buys a Charr a sweater for Christmas? They’re pelted! They don’t need sweaters. Not even hanging out in the Shiverpeaks (which probably brands me as a terrible geek just for recognizing the setting).
2. Who let an Asura dance like that? And why? More importantly, why didn’t they have Maurice LaMarche voice him in the voice of Vekk / The Brain?

If you have no f-ing idea what I’m talking about, the machinima above was made in Guild Wars, one of the MMORPGs I’ve been playing for years, since the beta, in fact. I’ve been continuing to play quite a bit of it lately, since Eye of the North was released.

And, yes, totally worth it to go get Gwen and Pyre Fierceshot together as Heroes in your party, then go over to post-Searing Ascalon City and head out to destroy Charr by the fistfull. Hatered, on! Whooooooo!

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Genitorturers - Flesh Is The Law Maxi CD W/ Live Bonus Tracks - Flesh Is The Law (Squid's Redoubt)

Right, so the Eye of the North preview sneak-peek weekend is off with a bang and some thunder, and I’ve already burst my way in to get the new Heroes and get my characters decked out with a few new goodies.

On the right, here, you can see an in game shot of Gwen from her appearance at the Eye of the North. Various folks’ll be disappointed that Gwen is no longer a bit auburn-haired, but I think the black-with-strip-of-grey is definitely in keeping with this new, extremely pissed off Mesmer-chick she’s become. I’m a little disappointed in her actual power output, but I think I can get her revved up with a bit more work on the skill selection. In the meantime, I may end up either turning her into a multiclass or just using Vekk the Asura for his disgustingly scary air-and-water Elementalist power output. Some truly obscene stuff.

Anyway, overall Eye of the North is bringing some fun new mechanisms to the game. Aggro ranges are a little high right now and the opening “defeat the Charr patrols” mission is insane, in the sense of “Jesus, I’m expected to actually wade through this many nasties?” Difficulty is pushing upwards, which isn’t actually a terrible thing (except the Ice Elemental boss I wiped on until my party was at -60% death penalty before we took him and his boys out). There’s a lot of juicy, delicious violence to indulge in here, which is the best part of any new expansion and Guild Wars knows how to bring the intensity.

I fully expect to have the new Norn Hero by the end of the weekend, and will engage in happy, lustful thoughts. Mmmm, hot blonde Viking giantesses who can turn into savage bears.

Does life get better?

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: Satanicide - Heather - 20 Sided Die (Squid's Redoubt)

Or at least one of the things that I wanted to know is revealed. In particular, what the heck was up with Gwen, and what became of her? If you played the first Guild Wars campaign, “Prophecies,” you remember Gwen. Annoying, young, wants a flute and flowers and a new cape, and then you comfort her mother in the Underworld? Yeah, that Gwen.

Judging from the latest concept art for Guild Wars: Eye of the North, she decided to get hard-bodied and heavily into corsetry before taking up Mesmer-riffic power. Which is kind of ironic since you’d think if she’d been living on the fringes of Charr territory, quietly hating them for the last eight years, you’d think she’d have gone into Ice Elementalism to spit right in the face of their fire-obsessed culture.But no, I suppose she decided to go into crazy interrupt-power just to stop their crazy spell-power.

What? I’m looking forward to the Eye of the North pre-release weekend preview this weekend. Yes, I’m going to be playing, trying to get my Hall of Monuments stocked with a few things, hopefully a pre-release weekend trophy if past releases are any measure.

Aren’t you?

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Various Artists - King Of Pants - Xmas Lists (The True Meaning Of Xmas) (Squid's Redoubt)

If you ever wondered what running with me is like in World of Warcraft, yeah, it's kinda like that.

The Undead Warlock, that is. Not the Orc Cleric.

Though Heather would have you believe it should be an Ork cleric. Mainly because the idea of a Warhammer 40,000 / World of Warcraft crossover has such fascinating potential. (Would that be War of Worldcraft or Warcraft 40k? Chaos cultists en mass versus a group of human newbs? Orcs versus orks? ("Paint the mount red to go fasta!") Undead versus Necrons?

OK, maybe that last one is kind of unfair. Wands versus Gauss Flayers? Barely holding together corpses versus living star-metal? Vastly unfair. But fun.

Oh, and non-Warcraft (Guild Wars, in fact), I have new images up on my Flickr account from Guild Wars screenshots. Yes, that really is what the game looks like. In-play.

Obviously, I figured a few of them were worthy of the full wallpaper treatment. I run my game window large enough that actually framing them as appropriate doesn't hurt the quality much at all, a fact which should terrify you in and of itself.

Yes, most of my GW characters are hot chicks. I admit it. It's no secret shame that it's much more fun to follow a character around whose hip sway makes you ready to party than one that just leaves you cold, and the Factions Ritualists are the absolute mistresses of having round, heavy breasts and wide, round hips.

So, yeah. I'm out for the moment. Tired.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Judas Priest - Devil's Child (Squid's Redoubt)

This is the sort of reason I adore Guild Wars. Their writers have a finely tuned sense of humour.

Wekehsa: All of these drakes can't be a coincidence. I've heard that Lord Yama the Vengeful is fond of employing unusual means to destory his enemies. This must be his work.

Koss: Lord Yama the Vengeful? Wekehsa, in the future, you might want to refrain from stealing things belonging to anyone with "the Vengeful" in their name.

Koss: You should also add "the cruel" and "the bloody" to that list.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Tragically Hip, The - Darkest One, The (Squid's Redoubt)

That's right, it's time for Mad King Thorn to rampage around in the cities of Guild Wars again. Or less rampaging than strolling in and making the assembled citizenry go through various gyrations to earn his favour (and lots of little Halloween goodies). Which is just fine with me, since it's easy enough to get the goodies he's passing out as well as the "big thing" for this year, which is, apparently, a big ol' pumpkin head.

Thorn's appearing in Lion's Arch and Kamadan every 3hrs past midnight PDT on the 30th, so we're into the cycle. The above was actually taken at his first appearance of the year in Lion's Arch, which, given the time, was remarkably well-attended. The whole bit is running about 20-30min, where he orders the crowd through various /emotes and ending up with a big competition of Mad King Says.

As a reminder ... laugh at his jokes. Seriously.

I need to run my Elonan Dervish through the event in Kamadan, then possibly my Necromancer through it once in Kamadan as well, if it turns out the final goody is different between the cities. Yes, I'm an obsessive collector. Bugger off.

PS: I ran through the Elonan set. The prize is a Witch's Hat, pointy and black. Now, just need to do it one more time for my Necromancer. :) But that's hours from now.

Semi-related to the title, the core food for tonight's party is bought and in the fridge. Yes, nyxsis, you get your pumpkin pie. No, Starchild, that doesn't get you off the hook for bringing victuals. The new Whole Foods is a damn fine place, that's all I'll say.

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: DragonForce / Valley of the Damned / Heart of a Dragon

OK, night is really just on the way.

Yippie!

More concretely, Guild Wars: Nightfall opened it's doors just a few minutes before 3a this morning, and I was one of the first folk through the doors into the new continent of Elona. This was a good thing, because not twenty minutes after I got on-board, the population spiked like the damage Mesmers do to Elementalists.

At this point, I've run through the introduction Tutorial and made it to Level 5. But I get ahead of myself.

I decided, in a fit of madness, to pick up the Collector's Edition version of the Nightfall box, since having passed on the Factions CE, and have since regretted not having the soundtrack and other in-box goodies. The GW folk know how to pack a CE with goodies. Nightfall includes:

The highly coveted, limited run, Collector's Edition will include the Guild Wars Nightfall game as well as a Making of Guild Wars Nightfall behind-the-scenes DVD, a collector's art book, collectible skill pins, a character mini-standee, a poster-sized map of Elona, the Guild Wars Nightfall soundtrack CD, and more.

From the GW FAQ site.

Friends, don't let my casual tone fool you. When Morgasm and I opened the box tonight, we looked at each other and said the same thing.

Damn.

You could seriously kill someone with this box set.

Plus, goddamn, cardboard desktop stand-y?

OK, as to mechanics ...

There's been a huge number of mechanical changes to the Guild Wars character system introduced with Nightfall and back-ported to the other Campaigns. For one, the new Storage System which introduced a separate crafting material box in Factions is now global; every continent has it. This saves so much trouble you just don't know, especially for we folk who want to have the coolest armour selections for each of our characters. More crafting storage, more options for armour. Straight line.

The other major global change is that your secondary profession is no longer fixed. Let me repeat that: Your secondary profession can change, without losing purchased skills or removing your old skill point allocations. Tired of being a Necromancer/Ranger, as you were since the beta release of Prophecies? Go become a Necromancer/Ritualist and make use of the Factions Spirits, or pop over to Elona and become a Necromancer/Paragon for the most bizarre skill selection mix ever. There are six classes available in Prophecies (Warrior, Monk, Ranger, Elementalist, Mesmer, Necromancer), eight in Factions (Assassin, Ritualist), and eight in Nightfall (Dervish, Paragon). In total? Ten possible character classes with, in theory, any character from any Campaign able to switch between any secondaries so long as you own that Campaign. Combine that with the fact that as long as you're in town, you can freely switch around your Attribute point allocations and your Skills/Spells to your heart's content, without a gold charge or even reset time. This means that with the addition of Nightfall's secondary profession exchange, we very well may have the world's most flexible MMORPG, here.

So how does actual game-play go?

I've run through the opening Tutorial with a Dervish and played her up to Level 5. The addition of Heroes to your roster (persistent Henchmen you select Skills for, allocate Attributes for, and equip equipment for, is excellent, even though the first guy you end up with has been permanently nick-named Shaft in my mind because he's brash, aggressive, and ... dear Hell, check out that 'fro!

The AI for both aides and monsters has been significantly beefed up, so they use combos far more intelligently, now. This is both good and bad, since that means they try not to bunch up nearly so much, making it far harder to bust out an AoE that actually hits a number of targets. A bad thing for me, since my Dervish build is almost wholly about busting out AoE point-blank damaging effects of one sort or another. Regardless, with AI being brighter all around, you can count on battles being a lot more interesting.

The first set of mission arcs in Elona pretty much just run you through the opening area doing FedEx missions and the odd "collect insect limbs" bits. An interesting addition are Sunspear Scouts who stand by each Resurrection Shrine and offer you a bounty on a specific kind of enemy in the area (ie. "insects"). Killing things you have a bounty for seriously increases your Sunspear Rank (to the tune of one point per kill), so you'd be a fool not to take every bounty you come across every time you leave a city. Increased rank means more points to dump on your Heroes, and that can save your ass.

If anything, Nightfall is even prettier than Factions, which is hard to believe. Prophecies, on release, was a little bit bland, with a sort of generic Euro-fantasy look tinged with post-apocalyptica, and a muddled, subdued colour palate. Factions gave it an Asian twist and expanded on the palate a bit, giving it more warm reds and some jade blues. Nightfall, capitalizing on the Northern African motif it's taken on, pulls in more golds and warm browns, at least in the opening area. I'm betting we end up with more focus on bright greens later as we get closer to the Sea of Jade.

Monsters are disgustingly detailed in textures and, overall, somewhat larger than the ones in the opening areas of previous Campaigns. There's the definite feeling of being an already-established stone badass in Nightfall, which nicely continues the trend that post-Searing Ascalon began, the implication in plots and missions that you are somebody, not just a random schmo who is coming along with thousands of others. This is facilitated by the "everything's instanced" design of Guild Wars, so they can actually write and direct detailed cut-scenes and such where you are actually part of things.

Given the changes to game-play introduced in Nightfall and back-ported to the other Campaigns, this would be an excellent time to get into GW for the first time. The absence of any monthly fee and the truly amazing amounts of character re-tweaking you can do mean that even if you put it aside for a while, you can pick it up, guilt-free, and if you want to try an entirely different kind of character its remarkably easy to do so.

Rating: A+

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Evanescence - Whisper

OK, granted, overly dramatic title for the little I have to say.

Yes, I have Nightfall pre-ordered. The wallpaper above is one of the huge selling points. I love scythes and a character Class that gets to swing them and take on the forms of the gods? I'm pretty much sold; the ability to command sand and wind is just gravy. Nightfall seems to move the GW style over into the realm of the desert djinn, going for the whole ancient Arabian / Indian hybrid mystique. It's an interesting call, and one I like. aesthetically, even if the world's climate might not be for the best, there.

If you go poking around my Flickr, you'll see I have a wallpaper up for every Class in Guild Wars, now. I think of it was "easy reference."

Guild Wars is doing something that I think other games should pay close attention to. On the screen to the right, you can see a sales screen, one built into the base client. There you can buy new character slots, and even unlock all the Skill sets from the Prophecies Campeign for each Class, or all of them from each for $50. Plenty of good stuff there if you intend to play serious hardcore PvP.

Integrating a sales-front to improve your enjoyment of a game into the game client and making it easy to buy stuff is something I expect to see more of.

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: violent
Current Music: Various Artists - City Of Prague Philharmonic - Nic Raine / The Planets: Mars, Bringer Of War, The

Yes, it's true.

I've headed back into Guild Wars.

Last night I got a wild hair (and when youdon't have to pay a monthly fee, you can get wild hairs) and decided to go ahead and create a brand new character in GW, a Ritualist that pretty much only dropped Spirits (which is what Ritualists do, drop Spirits), and that's about it. Everything she does is designed to augment the ability to drop Spirits. The only thing I took Monk for was to get Smiting Prayers, for Enchantments on myself that make directly attacking me a bad decision.

Luckily, Starchild seemed to have a wild hair too, and so we created brand new charas for the Factions starting area, and hustled off.

Now, we were both Ritualists with the intention of going different directions on our secondaries. Starchild wanted to go Ritualist / Necromancer, to take advantage of the Ritualist ability to boost the HP of summoned creatures with an Attribute(Spawning).

In about 4 hours, both is us hit level 9. That's out of a max of 20 levels, almost half-way there.

Some people might not like the fact they can get things rolling that fast, but for me its great. Missions unlock more and more Skills as you go, and because you can juggle as many Attribute points as you like anytime you're in a non-exploration area, you can totally change your build at any time. Tired of being a Spirit-summing-based Ritualist? Dump the points from Communing into Channeling, and become a kind of scary near-Elementalist tossing out the nasty. Switch out the Skills on your bar and voila, you're off into another set of Skills which feed into one another as cleverly as you can discover how.

And soon ... Nightfall, with two more Classes.

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: impressed

Because, darn it, my mind isn't damaged enough, I must share.

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Stephen Lynch / Superhero / D & D

New blog I'm reading written by one of the guys who works at NCsoft includes this insightful bit embedded in a much longer and still interesting piece:

Specifically, I’ve been trying to catch up to my Uberwife, she of the many level 60s all in post-BWL gear. Her main dual wields a Perdition’s Blade and a Gutgore Ripper and her stat bonuses can only be described in imaginary numbers. Yet, in what can only be described as true love, she actually wants me to catch up to her so we can stare at CTRaid output together.

The problem, now, is that I am a permanewbie. As in, I constantly reroll. I *always* reroll. I am *never* happy with my avatar; I am always thinking that some other mystical combination of class and race and starting location and server will be the Magic Number Combination that will unlock the keys to happiness or something. The first game where I actually achieved maximum level (aside from Ultima Online, where you could cap out a character from breathing hard) was Dark Age of Camelot, and that only because guilds managed to get powerlevelling down to a science. Don’t ask what realm rank I achieved though, because you’ll only laugh. (Oh, OK. RR3, on a nightshade.)

However, my wife finally discovered something that would break the permanewbie conundrum - a secret concoction of bribery and guilt. Oddly enough, this is also what powers most marriages, so it works out rather well as a system. So she has been raining quest hellfire and damnation down upon my character, who is only peripherally along for the ride. Last weekend we finished up Felwood, did all of Winterspring, Sunken Temple (with some help) and all the necessary paperwork for Blackrock Depths.

My little character is now level 57. This is attracting no little attention. When our guild leader noticed, he blinked, and said over Vent, “wait a minute. Scott has a character over level 20?” My wife helpfully said that I was free to tell him to bite me. (I did, using Shakespeare).

You know, I'm one of those people.

I fully admit, I really enjoy running through the low-end areas of the virtual universi than the supposed "end-game" content. Its just not interesting to me, largely because it utterly shifts the game's underlying assumptions from one mode to another, typically from solo-friendly / small-group-friendly content to the necessity of hooking up with more than a friend or two to thirty to forty in order to see anything or enjoy anything at that point. And, yes, World of Warcraft, I'm looking at you. The opening, "newbie" areas (which, truthfully, generally reach from the start of the game to roughly a third to half-way to end-game / level cap) have the kind of craft any creator puts into the first thirty pages of their script, the part designed to hook and hold someone coming to the story.

But the end-game ... Dear Hell, does anyone but the hardest of the hardcore actually enjoy waiting on 40 people to get their shit together and self-organize into something remotely like a coherent group, then spend six hours or more with this team of flailing incompetents trying to get a goody-drop that one or two people max out of the entire swath will actually get to touch? I know Morgasm enjoys that sort of thing (she's actually told me she's got no interest in Auto Assault because it's too easy to level, which is a thought so alien it has to get a green card just to enter my noggin') but for we folks who actually have jobs that eat more than a trivial portion of our waking hours or social lives which resemble less the butterfly and more the sloth, it would seem that designing a game to cater to that demographic target would be less than ideal.

In fact, I feel so strongly about it that I've posted multiple threads in the Auto Assault fora that specifically address how I would design content to be friendly to we solo and small-group folk as well as the "I like scary numbers of people to play with" folk. Well, my answer to the latter group is "go play a different game, you jackasses, since pretty much every other game on the landscape caters to your slack-jawed kind," but you didn't hear that from me. (Yes, there are links to three different threads embedded there. Worth reading if you like to see me occasionally being polite -- somewhat.)

The secret, as I see it, is scaling, something Diablo II did without much thinking hard about it back in "the day." (Strangely enough, D2 is a Blizzard property. You'd think those guys'd learn.) That is, while the general area might be shared, the meat really should be, effectively, instanced, and not only instanced but the content should be adjusted such that its properly keyed to the size / power of the people playing through it. This can be as true for the areas which get opened by newbie mission arcs as the late ones, and has the great advantage of veteran players getting to go back through the early instances and finding a repeatable challenge that's appropriate to their capabilities, and incidentally extends the replayability of the whole game, plus scales gently to the folks involved, be it just me, or my group of friends.

I also find it interesting that no one has really made use of random area generation in an MMORPG for anything significant. Its not a hard task, especially as server power keeps spiraling upwards and code for distributed computation becomes easier to create. Random generation and scaling go together well, and really help in adding non-crafted content to a game that responds well to expansion. Coupling hand-crafted missions / environments with procedurally-created content would seem to be an obvious way to extend the reach of your game.

Why no one has done these things for an MMORPG yet continues to elude me. (I'm aware of another project in development that uses this very concept, but I'm NDA'd. You'll just have to bribe me with green peanuts and schoolgirls to find out more.)

Someone in the comments to the blog post I opened this with complained of "Auto Assault feels more like a single-player game than an MMORPG." In my mind, that's not a drawback, especially when I look at Elder Scrolls: Oblivion's sales and hear people talking about how good it is, both critics and grognards alike. It seems to me that one of the real draws of the MMORPG genre of games is pointedly not the social aspects. Pretty much everyone with experience agrees that the average other MMORPG player is an utter moron who has neither tactical nor strategic acumen. We don't get online to get social, we're looking for an audience. We want to show off the latest blind we pulled off of Mozak, we want to hang out with people we already know, we want to be able to efficiently get resources we want, and we like the feeling when we're able to help someone else out as long as the investment to do so isn't too high. Its not the socialization we're coming in for, its the open eyes and ears. Even PvP can be seen as performance art rather than socialization; it's less important that you socialize with your group than your murderous capability have an audience, and that audience is squirming at the end of your sword / mace / canon / laser.

The idea of mating essentially single-player game content to an MMORPG back-end seems to me to be a winning combination.

I may be a permalowbie, but the statistics would tend to suggest I'm not the only one, and really, not even in the minority with my distaste for the "must raid" mentality that's permeated MMORPGs. There definitely needs to be more design experimentation that tries to capture more of the "casual" non-raiding non-heavy-guilding player base. Interestingly, NCsoft has done the most I'm aware of in this field: Both Guild Wars and Auto Assault are pioneers in many ways, and they have equally interesting stuff readying for roll-out.

Good news, permalowbies! We are looking at good stuff coming down the pike.

Current Mood: enthralled
Current Music: Warren Zevon - Poor Poor Pitiful Me (Squid's Redoubt)

Dear Hell, below. I just racked up 40 consecutive wins in the Shiverpeak Arena. I could have gone about as long as I'd like, but I got hungry and need a shower.

That's a crazy run. I feel darn cool.