Author: Oz

Jaded old gamer, and father of gamers, who's been around long enough. Still, he's always up for giving the Next Big Thing a whirl.

Patch Note Fun

One of the things that lured me to WoW from EQ, besides the exodus of friends of course, was the light-hearted attitude the developers had about the game. The many tongue-in-cheek quests, self-effacing NPCs, and endless pop-culture references were a nice switch.

LoTRO, on the whole, does not do this. I’m totally ok with that, as they remain very faithful to their source material. There’s a few fun things, like the Moor Cowbell, for example, that add some real-world humor in. Where they do tend to slip in humor frequently, I’ve noticed, is in patch notes. Today’s has a few, but I found one that amused me in the middle of the recently changed armor list:

Helm of the Brazen Call
Knock knock!
Who’s there?
Ida
Ida who?
Ida know!
Shield-bearer’s Gauntlets

Such a massive list, 112 items at the very end of the notes, so most people probably never looked at it. I did, made me laugh. Enjoy.

I’ll Take Your Silence To Mean Acceptance

This is a phrase I hear a few times a day from the leader of the project I’m on. I miss gaming a lot, but what I truly miss most is what I haven’t done in maybe 5 years – testing and tuning of games. Long ago, on a planet with two moons, I used to help in the creation of material in a wildly successful MMORPG. I did a fair amount, but nowhere near the level of some folks I knew, of which I was highly jealous. It was completely unpaid, but it was wildly fun. But it was not always creation of material that I got to work on, sometimes it was fixing bugs and locking out what we called ‘exploits’. To be fair, many of these exploits were simply patching out creative ways to do things that players had through up that the game company didn’t like. As a veteran DM of many a pen and paper RPG, I expected this – players will often find the fastest way from point A to point B lies through undefined area Q.

This somewhat meandering back-story brings me to tomorrow’s patch for LoTRO, Book 8.

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Ozzie’s in a pickle!

Guess what game I bought myself for an early holiday gift? The title should give it away, more than likely. It’s making my MMORPG vacation due to traveling on work so much less painful.

Much geek love for this finally coming to portable. This, Secret of Mana, and Earthbound were my all-time favorite SNES games growing up. I’ve very nearly bought one of those emulator kits for my DS simply so I could play these games. With this release, I see the possibility for Secret to follow (Children of Mana was horribly disappointing) and perhaps, dare I dream, Earthbound. Ness, Randi, and Crono are the three kings of RPG history…

Reading – The Lost Art

First off, I’d like to say I blame WoW for this. As a player who played it for three years, I know what I’m talking about. WoW caters to entry-level players, and not reading quest text in WoW was par for the course – in fact, there’s an option to make it display instantly so you can close it right away, and most did. There’s one quest that even mocks this trend, by saying in the quest text “Blah blah you’re not even reading this anyway”. As an Old School(tm) Quester, back in the days of Everquest, you had to read the text carefully. Those devs were devious in their writing, and the hint for the quest was likely buried deep in the words spewed by the NPC. (They relished in this, they told me several times) This said, I miss the days when people would at least try to figure things out for themselves. I took the week off last week and got a good bit of playtime in on the Lord of the Rings expansion. The quests are well written, simple, and literally lead you around the land, telling a story, with multiple quests usually having you kill in the exact same area. There was only one item in days of questing I couldn’t find from reading the text (which was a paragraph or two at most). From the advice channel, you’d think you needed Indiana Jones to find the target. And even worse, you’d see the same question mere seconds after the last one was asked, and you know that person had to be in the zone at the time.

I wonder if they drive around town shouting out of the window “Hey, where is the Taco Bell?” to passers-by.

Vicariously Expanding

Some time ago I bought the pre-order expansion for LOTRO, filled with great excitement at seeing the first expansion for a game. This tends to really set the tone of the growth of the game in an MMORPG world. Look at EQ – Kunark was probably the most solid overall expansion ever for an MMORPG game. It had not only 10 new levels, it had a new playable race, great lore, and experience content for every level out at the time. I knew a lot of the beta testers and they well knew the sheer envy I had for them and a burning desire to know things they took to their virtual NDA-encased graves (those of us who did serious beta testing for Sony have everlasting NDA’s…there’s a great many things I can never every talk about, sadly). Later expansions were good and bad, but the first one…magic. Move up to WoW – an expansion that was very much like a fireworks display in that it was very flashy but unfortunately faded out quickly. Not that it hurt them, as they continued to slowly keep content dribbling in, but not all we’d hoped for. For my friends still in WoW, I hope WotLK is everything you wanted.

All that said, I await the launch of the first expansion for LoTRO in a mere 5 days. While I sit in my hotel room, a bit over 100 miles away from my gaming computer. For the next week and a half. Are we having fun yet?

A Message from Mrs. Oz

My wife became a citizen this year, which means she can now vote, and for the past few months has been asking everyone she meets (and I mean EVERYONE, including random people at the store) if they were going to vote. Yes, she has an opinion on which she likes, which she does not push on the people involved, but is completely filled with glee that people have an opinion. The country she hails from had a mock political system, that offered only one party, one candidate for leader, which was part of a ruling family that bankrupted the country. The ability to choose your leader is, she feels, akin to super powers. She asks everyone if they are going to vote, and I’ve learned to simply get out of the way when I hear someone say no. The lecture they get about having a choice and failing to execute it is intense. Do not retort about the “lesser of evils” as she will explain to you about what true evil is – the lack of a choice at all.

Not looking nor will I post to convince you to one side or another – simply employ your right to choose. Don’t make me send my wife over.

Moria Release Date Set

Lord of the Rings fans were greeted earlier this week by a splash screen decreeing that the long-guessed date of November 18th would indeed be the launch date for the expansion. Along with launching this, they have also deployed possibly the most confusing pre-order system ever designed. The amount of contradictory information, including *two* official threads, which are being commented on by different people with different information. It’s a bit crazy.

So, in the interest of our LOTRO fans, I have the info after the cut as to what gets you what and where that I’ve compiled after about an hour of work and at great possible risk to me. After all, the wife said no gaming last night…

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Deep Thoughts on Gaming: Part 1 – Time Value

Due to a hectic work and school schedule, I’ve been forced to put gaming on the back burner. That’s hard when you enjoy it as much as I do, and thus when you know you have some time to play, you look for completely different things in a game. Also, taking a step back from gaming more than I have in probably 10 years, you look at games themselves differently. As such, here’s the first of several articles I plan to write on more of a meta level of gaming than I usually post.

First off, the biggest concern for a time-pressed gamer, the Time Value, aka “What do I get for what I put in”.

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Hobbits on Parade

(I was so tempted to make a “Return of the King” rhyme, but managed to hold back. Thank me later)

Ah, long has passed since I last had enough time to post here, and much has happened. In a good and bad way, perhaps, most of this has been out in Real Life ™, and has kept me from playing. Now that I have a few moments here and there to play, I’m not looking as much to WoW as I used to. I have a good raiding guild there to work with, but the Sunwell content seems fairly flat, and I’ve not seen one thing coming in the expansion that interests me at all. So on the suggestion of a friend, I took my precious few hours of free time last week to an old place I’d been before, Middle-Earth.

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Two Point Four aka The Last Freebie

Recent changes in my Real Life have forced my Online Life to pretty much be non-existent. A full time job and full time college will do that to you, plus lots of other personal obligations, such as helping my wife study for her classes – which she passed, with flying red, white, and blue colors and became an American Citizen just yesterday – but I do miss being able to pass my days away in Warcraft. Especially now that we have ‘the new shiney’ of patch 2.4.

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