Month: October 2008

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Dairy Heir

Another flashback of Asheron’s Call 2. You’re welcome!

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The following is a quest that a group of players (including me) in Turbine’s Vanguard program helped to create and which was put into the game. The Vanguard program was a developer selected group of players that were given early access to new content on the test server, as well as having a forum with direct developer contact for feedback.

They placed special Dillos in the game, which were named after the players that were involved in creating this quest. I was one of them, it was quite surreal to go see my NPC in the game.

Continue reading Dairy Heir

Recurring Apocalypse

The City of Heroes/Villains Halloween event is on. As usual, previous years’ content returns (with changes: go door-to-door rather than camping one, and Spirits are not spawning as often as intended — sorry badge hunters). This year’s new thing is the Zombie Apocalypse, patterned after the Rikti Invasion. Sadly, the two zone events cannot happen at once, even with the LGTF, but that would be awesome, especially if they fought each other.

After Halloween, zombies will return as an occasional event, again like the Rikti (although presumably with no non-event trigger like the LGTF, although again: awesome). This leads me to again wonder: why would you live in Paragon City? Even after you get used to walking past werewolves, rock monsters, and alien invaders on your way to the corner store, the apocalypse is a recurring event. Welcome to Sunnydale?

: Zubon

Feral Intendant Guide

This was originally written by me on Feb 20th, 2004. I hated to see it go away forever so I put it here mostly for my own gratification. This is in regards to the long-gone Asheron’s Call 2. I dedicate this weekend to AC2 flashbacks.

General

Turbine describes the Feral Intendant (FI) as a resilient creature of the jungle. He is a hunter, a killer, an explorer of the deepest undergrowths. He claims some of the jungle creatures as his friends, and they have learned to work with him to achieve devastating results in combat.

Continue reading Feral Intendant Guide

The Ettenmoors

I can’t really go back. To a great extent, Warhammer’s open world RvR is everything the Ettenmoors wanted to be and is not. It is not greatly difficult to mentally transpose Order and freeps, Destruction and creeps, and see how (shock shock) PvP works out better in a game built for it. Compare the creep Defiler with the Greenskin Shaman: even the names are similar, but the Shaman is a much more fun, viable class. Would you rather play a Reaver or a Marauder? I had more examples here, but I am already losing the people who have not played both games.

One way that The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume One: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ wins is if you think of creeps as “playing the monsters,” rather than being their own thing. If you just want players being a more realistic AI, where the real market is the freep classes, monsters work brilliantly. They even replicate the PvE mechanics: they have high hit points (and can trait for “ridiculously high”), few abilities, few appearance differences, large numbers, and little resistance to crowd control. They respawn quickly and tend to trickle in at a constant rate, although occasionally you get a huge train. You can easy pull a few, because people will rush out and be easy kills, although you risk pulling the entire zerg if you do that a few times. Healing still draws aggro, although the de-taunt abilities do not work in PvP. Players can capture and defend keeps, but if people wander off, the monsters quickly return things to the “all red” default state. And just like the tutorial, beginning creeps are easy fodder, weaker than all the real players.

You can debate whether that is the intended “monster play” implementation. The NDA for The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume Two: Mines of Moriaâ„¢ fell this week, so maybe the PvP changes there are significant. It will take a while for the effects to shake out what with new levels, new gear, across-the-board defenses nerf, etc. How dead with the Moors be for that first month after the expansion releases? (Note to Turbine: the 5-10 page Dev Diaries are really annoying. I don’t want to load a new page every two paragraphs. You don’t have ad revenue, so why are you doing that? I never finished the Runekeeper diary.)

: Zubon

New Chronicles of Spellborn Site

The Chronicles of Spellborn has a new site live that is actually good. It may not be the best of all things, but it has what I want: gameplay information at the top. The game has an odd take on hotkey bars: you get one bar at a time that rotates with each attack. What especially interests me is that they have learned from City of Heroes:

Dress to Impress — What it really means.

  1. Right at character creation, you can choose from a large variety of clothing and armour, i.e. there is no “newbie clothing”. In other words, “you can look cool right from the start”
  2. Pick a ranged and a melee weapon from a vast assortment. Your attacks are based on Skills (like “Slash”). Such Skills can be executed with any melee weapon, be it a long-sword, double axe or dagger. That means, you can freely pick any weapon that looks cool on your avatar. When a Skill is executed, the avatar will automatically equip the designated weapon. E.g. when you use “shoot” the avatar will switch to his range weapon. With the weapon choice, you also determine your visual fighting style (one-handed, one-handed-with-shield, two-hander).
  3. You can wear the weapons and armours in any situation you want, because you can upgrade and customise them. You do not need to switch to uglier equipment because it is “better”. It means that even the short dagger from character creation can become your personal “epic” weapon if you upgrade it with powerful sigils.

: Zubon

WAR-oboros, take two

I wanted to return to the concept of WAR-oboros because I saw the concept evolve, if only in my own perception, the other night.  The early play was glorious.  I signed on and saw some Tier 3 alliance activity for defending the Keep in Talabecland, Passwatch Castle.  I took it as a sign and flew there immediately while a hearty band of Destruction refused to let the overbearing Order through the second door.  Our vengeance was swift was we pushed the enemy players that refused to flee from the RvR lake all the way back to the other Keep, Stoneclaw Castle.  We decided to sweep all the objectives, and while on our way to the distant Hallenfurt Manor Battlefield Objective a message came up that Stoneclaw Castle was falling.  Over ventrilo I heard Aliens-esque battle cries of my comrades-in-arms dying.  “There must have been 70 Order in there.  My screen was just red text.”  We knew the Order-zerg would be heading to Passwatch Castle for their revenge, and so they did.  There were so many that the second Keep door fell within nearly 1 minute of the outer Keep door breaking open.

While my warband did its best to slow down the horde of Order, another Destruction warband remained in the orclands.  They refused to heed our multiple calls for help; the leader booting one of my guildmates for suggesting that they go fight Order where Order seemed to be.  The leader pronounced with his boot mid-swing that they just wanted to take Keeps.  Vanilla War-oboros mentality.

Bitter from the lack of help from the stupid Greenskins and licking our wounds at Hellfang Ridge Warcamp, the warband started discussing the best way to take on the Order zerg.  It was decided that the best we could do is attack an undefended Keep in the hopes of either being ignored or splitting their zerg into people that wanted to keep attacking and those that wanted to defend their newly claimed treasures.  We could only attack the tail.  It would take a strong leadership to reverse the course of nearly 3 warbands of Order players.  So we retook Passwatch Castle, undefended.  It seemed that Order’s hydra-headed snake would not be easily split.
–Ravious

Funneling WAR

I am going to address something that was said on Warhammer Alliance. Lemming Jesus, in a rather pouty post, said that Warhammer Online was “neither massive nor multiplayer” because the the population was far too split up.  I agree for the mid-levels (but not to the degree of rage-quitting), and suggest a different route.

I would have had ONLY one racial pairing to begin with as the main part of the game.  Tier 1 would remain the same as it is now.  Tiers 2-3 would NOT have any Dark Elf vs. High Elf (DEvHE) or Greenskin vs. Dwarf zones (GvD).  Tiers 2-3 would all be Empire vs. Chaos (EvC) as it is now.  However, Tiers 2 and 3 would have an additional “contested” map (like Prague for Tier 4) between the two current maps.  Then Tier 4 would begin to umbrella back out to include the DEvHE and GvD zones with future released Tier 4 zones focusing on their story and conflict.  In other words, DEvHE and GvD get the shaft with initial content, but later content would go to those racial pairings.  This would kill two birds with one stone by making the mid-level areas have higher population density, and giving more end-game later on.

This is not wholly my idea, as Lord of the Rings Online nearly does the exact same thing (only they don’t umbrella back to the Shire for the end game… yet).  It allows the race to matter in terms of story, and for the player to get a feel for the race.  But, then it elegantly funnels the population together to start moving en masse to the end game.  At the end game you want lots of content, and I think Mythic made a big error in providing so much population spreading content for the slow-moving mid-levels.

For alt-oholics and what not, the three racial pairings with so many zones is fantastic, but it makes for a lot of ghost towns, empty RvR lakes, and sad and lonely public quests whose final Hero boss sits in a dark corner and cries himself to sleep while holding a shrunken dwarf head because no one will ever get to his stage.  It’s too late now, and my hindsight is not even 20/20.
–Ravious

Celebration System

Let’s hit the wayback machine. I don’t just want a ding, I want a lot more. I want an entire celebration system. No more of this “little graphic and audio effect” nonsense. Give me fireworks that shoot 100 meters into the sky along with Ode to Joy, as if this were Peggle. Send a message to my group, the zone, and my guild. Keep a permanent journal on my character that commemorates the moment with a time stamp, what put me over the edge, and a note about how awesome I am. Then have the nearest NPC send me a letter in the mail reminding me of how awesome I am, for the next time I hit a mailbox. And think of some more ways that the game can tell me just how great it is that I leveled. If I hit the level cap, have a statue that looks like me (at least when seen from my client). Ooh, better: have two lines of them along the path to the main castle (or whatever), with the number of statues set to the number of characters you can have on a server. If you cap all your characters, they all see lines of YOU YOU YOU OH SO AWESOME as you ride into the castle.

Also, give me a menu option so I can toggle all that crap off, at least other people’s meaningless ding spam. I mean really, this is all about me, not them.

: Zubon

That statue idea isn’t half bad, really.