Something New: Dunegon Runners

This weekend would appear to be the exception to my normal no-posting-on-the-weekend practice, but maybe I’m just making up for the fact that I’ll be taking the first week of August off from blogging (I will be in the backwoods of Pennsylvania wearing goofy costumes, with nary an internet connection in sight.)

Anyway, having lots of time this morning and having already played several hours of pretty much everything else already this weekend, I downloaded and installed Dungeon Runners. Now, this is not an MMO, per se, although it has a couple of semi-massive elements; it’s a free-to-play Diablolike.

The controls and interface are thus reminiscent of Diablo, while the graphics and art style leans more toward World of Warcraft. In fact, if it weren’t for the rather limited camera controls and the annoying reliance on click-to-move that every NCSoft title seems to share, I could easily see how someone would at a glance think this was WoW. The weapons are a little more ludicrously large, but it has very much the same look.

Gameplay is pretty much what you’d expect from a Diablo clone not far removed from its roots; space-based inventory, fairly shallow character development and combat systems, a lowish selection of character types, and 100% instanced content. Combat is click-to-attack, and you can tie other, less standard abilities to the right-click if you want. It’s level-based, but if there’s a cap it’s at least in the neighborhood of 100. The game is sharded, with inspired names like ‘PvE World 1,’ and individual servers seem to top out at a couple hundred people. There are PvP servers, but I wasn’t inclined toward that myself.

While it’s free to play, there’s a membership option which apparently removes the banner ads, which didn’t bother me too much - at least they’re for other NCSoft games instead of, say, auto insurance - and gives you in-game discounts on gear, higher stacking limits on potions, and some other minor perks.

There is at least one very interesting and appealing feature in the game: there are no character classes. In the beginning you pick between Fighter, Mage and Ranger, but all that does is determine what you start with, and you can freely allot your stat points wherever you want (and respec them for a token gold cost,) and buy abilities from any of the archetypes. It makes me wish there were some other options (such as stealth,) and maybe there are later on in the game, but it’s rather nicely done. The music is also very good; at least, I liked the bouncy renfairish stuff played in the towns. The dungeon music was less pleasing to my ear.

Although Dungeon Runners reminds me why Diablo was as good and addictive as it was, and is quite decent in its own right, I doubt very seriously that I will be spending a ton of time in it. Then again, it’s free, and I have plenty of room on my drives for the occasional diversion.

Holy Crap, Says Ardwulf

I don’t post much on the weekends, so on Saturdays and Sundays the hits to this blog usually dip by quite a lot. This was on target when I checked this morning.

About 1 AM, after getting back from seeing The Dark Knight (which was amazing, and which you should all go see,) I checked again and found that I’d been linked by Massively and my hit count was through the roof. Looks like the “Best MMOs on the Market” series is garnering a lot of notice - the EQ2 piece had already been linked by the EQ2Players Town Crier, which from my chair is a nice accomplishment. Now the EVE article gets linked by Massively.

So thanks, James Egan and Massively. And thank you, whoever you are, for reading; I’m very flattered (and a bit taken aback) to get all this attention.

Weekend Links

Watch THIS.

Then, go watch THIS.

Equally awesome in totally different ways.

Contemplating the Dots of Death

I didn’t feel all that great upon arriving home last night, so I took a nap in preference to doing anything online… but afterward, I did hop into Vanguard for a short while, completing a quest in the Trengal Keep area (not one of the actual TK quests – one of the side quests,) and working a little ways toward level 28.

With the help of a friendly Paladin, I took on a roaming named 5-dot mob in the area. It was tough, but we took it down. The four-dot spiders we then proceeded to fight seemed just as tough. Is it just me, or is there no big jump in mob toughness between four and five dots? There certainly is between 3 and 4 – Ardwulf can comfortable take on even-level 3-dot mobs; pulling every trick out of the Ranger’s largish hat, he has occasionally managed to defeat two of them. But he’s gotten smoked every time he’s tried to solo a four-dot.

I also, again, played a little bit of EQ, completing the go-talk-to-the-trainers part of the tutorial and moving on to the actual adventurin’ and killin’ parts. I’m doing this in small doses – half an hour or so at a time – as I slowly get used to the interface. The graphics which I formerly dismissed as outdated seem pretty appealing now after a few hours in Asheron’s Call. No screenshots yet – but I’ll throw something together sooner or later. Same with AC, as per request.

One of the pleasant things abut the game is that I can very comfortably play it in a window, allowing me access to other applications while I’m playing. And there’s a function that’ll take you directly to your EQPlayers site (but no in-game browser, alas.) Gameplay seems quite deep, at least at this point, but not especially user-friendly in comparison to more modern games of its type (WoW, EQ2 and Vanguard.) This is all in-line with my (very limited) previous experience with the game. Again, though, this time I feel compelled to give it more of a chance, without feeling burdened by a subscription cost into playing a lot.

I’m on Luclin, by the way (same as Tipa’s Nostalgia bunch,) with the character name of Turlough, Barbarian Warrior, if anybody wants to send me a friendly tell.

A Diversion From Diplomacy

I got in a few hours of Vanguard last night, a little bit of Team Fortress 2, and a little bit of EverQuest, which I am slowly playing around with. I’m still in the tutorial area and my initial analysis is that while I don’t much like the controls or the interface, there are some interesting things in there that have been dropped from more recent games racing to be just like WoW. I’ll have some more detailed thoughts on EQ sooner or later; I have a StationPass and am in no particular hurry, but I find myself wanting to see more of the game.

I’m also playing around a very little bit with Asheron’s Call, which I signed up for a trial on. Anyone who thinks EQ is outdated should really look at AC, which makes it look like Crysis in comparison. By today’s standards AC is almost unplayable, and if the subscription numbers I’ve seen are actually correct, the audience largely agrees. Still, it’s an important piece of MMO history that I wanted to at least take a quick look at before it goes away forever. There was never any question of me sticking with it, but it’s really too bad that AC2 went away – I would have liked to have tried that game.

In Vanguard, I petitioned the second broken Diplomacy quest last night and got it updated, but I’m nowhere near there at the moment, so I haven’t turned it in yet. I’m a bit unclear as to how players are supposed to get the necessary status to actually proceed down the Web questline; around the fourth quest in the chain you start needing chunks of Noble faction, and nothing I’ve completed thus far gives me very much of that. Still, there are a couple of additional Diplomacy quests in Halgarad that I haven’t yet completed even aside from the tutorial questline, so I will eventually make my way back there and work on those.

I also dipped my foot into Trengal Keep again – enough to hit level 27. This puts me one level away from exceeding my previous MMO character progression record (in WoW - I have already surpassed my highest level in EQ2,) as a percentage of the level cap. It’s progress.

A Diplomatic Impasse

The dearth of screenshots today is a result of my spending the early morning running around like a fool looking for my keys instead of grabbing my flash drive (which contains all of my many hundreds of Vanguard screenshots) before leaving. Alas! But I did spend considerable time in Vanguard last night.

Many months ago I had gotten stuck on an apparently bugged Diplomacy quest in Halgarad; the one where you need to convince someone to reveal her information source, then go talk to that source. But not only was there no quest pointer to the guy, when I finally did find him there was no option for the quest parley in the NPC dialogue box. And that’s where it sat for a long while. No Diplomacy for Ardwulf.

Last night I determined to start the quest over, so I headed on up to the Warchief’s hall, intending to ditch the quest, get it again, and do the initial parley over. When I got there, though, there was a green scroll floating above the Warchief’s head – indicating that a quest is ready to turn in, and sure enough, it was the one I’d been stuck on, despite one objective never having been marked as completed. So it may have been fixed, or the objectives changed without altering the quest text. But either way, I was happy to finally be past it.

It’s important to note that this is a level 1 Diplomacy quest – part of the Varanjar introductory questline, and the one that gives you an item that grants enough standing to actually get started on the Thestran Web questline (more on that later.) So even though I had managed to somehow get Ardwulf up to level 5 in Diplomacy, it was by doing a couple of miscellaneous Diplomacy quests that had no prerequisites, and by brute grinding of civic diplomacy in Derogar’s Post, the level 1-5 starting area, and levels don’t give you standing all by themselves.

So I started on the follow-up, completed that, and followed the pointer to the Halgarad Diplomacy trainer to pick up another quest intended to teach me Rebuttals (a particular type of Diplo card.) And sure enough, there I got stuck again; the NPC simply does not have the parley as an option, despite my abandoning the quest and logging in various combinations. I filed a petition over it, and within the hour a GM got back to me, updated the quest objective, and I was free once again to pursue Diplomacy.

Until I did the follow-up and went back to the same NPC, and got stuck again in exactly the same way. Sigh. I will petition it and I have no doubt that it’ll get fixed promptly, but as I discussed a couple of weeks ago, lots of people just don’t bother to file petitions – they’ll either work around bugged quests, or if they’re stuck at that point, give up. This is not a good thing when it comes to quests in the starting area of one of the (in my opinion) most appealing races in the game, dealing with something that is supposed to be one of Vanguard’s marquee features. There is apparently some kind of structural problem in the quest code that’s being looked into, and it’s nice, if optimistic, to think that one small change to the code may possibly fix most or all of the bugged quests in the game.

The important thing this time, though, is that I am not stuck where I am. The items I have give me enough standing to at least get started on the web quests, and I did just that, doing the first two parts of the Halgarad leg. Now, these quests are the major low-level Diplomacy questline in the game, broken up into several parts which take you pretty much all over Thestra and in the end not only give you a very nice set of Diplomacy gear, they also position you nicely to get the Tier 1 Diplomacy mount, which is a bit faster than the regular old T1 horse. I don’t know whether another mount will actually be worthwhile or not, since I already have the regular T2 mount, but I intend to pursue it anyway.

Oh, and while I was in Halgarad I talked to the faction guy – he gives you a pendant that’s a nice Diplomacy item in itself and also lets you get the factional token drops. So I’ll be working on that now as well, although I don’t know exactly what kinds of mobs drop the faction tokens. The racial mounts for both the Varanjar and the Lesser Giants are in Halgarad, so I got to check them out – they’re neat, but I don’t lust over them the same way I do for, say, the griffin. At any rate, we have factional armor incoming, which I find more interesting than getting a weird mount - I like my horse.

And in a nice surprise, Stargrace added me to her friends list on Xfire last night, and also sent me a mysterious in-game mail that I’m not sure what to think about. A couple of other readers of this blog have added me as well, which is great for all sorts of reasons, but I hope that it also implies that a couple more people will be playing Vanguard and adding to the still-climbing Xfire stats on the game. In that sense, I encourage all Vanguard players to sign up for Xfire, most importantly because I am lonely and need friends, but also to add to the surging buzz surrounding Vanguard at the moment.

Trengal Keep: Wipefest!

Ardwulf ventured again last night into Trengal Keep, and it was both fun and frustrating. I managed to get most of the way to level 27 and completed the second part of the main questline. They way this works is that there is a central questline with at least five parts, each of which takes you deeper into the ruins, and some side quests as well. Pretty much every mob beyond the guys at the gate is four dots or higher, and there is at least one shortcut inside, which drops you into the area for part 4 or 5. So completing part 2 was a nice little accomplishment.

Alas, things did not generally go smoothly. Although we had a group composition that was virtually ideal as far as classes go, the fact that our lowest-level characters were the tank and healer really hurt us, and we consistently managed to get bad pulls and adds and wiped several times. I think Ardwulf died seven or eight times, and although I only ate the XP loss once, I was pretty frustrated during parts of the run, which is not good.

This highlights, I think, a couple of things, one of them the liability in playing a DPS class rather than a tank or healer. And the lack of coordination endemic to PUGs without the benefit of familiarity with one another or a Vent channel to coordinate things. Despite this, I really do enjoy playing the Ranger, and Ardwulf has gotten some really neat stuff in recent levels.

I ended up making the long journey back home to Halgarad, with no real purpose in mind. But I found that the Diplomacy quest I’d gotten stuck on many months ago had been fixed, or at least had gotten a work-around, so I completed that. So I can actually start looking to working on Diplomacy again. Maybe even crafting, since I’m barely keeping my financial head above water buying arrows on the broker. Sooner rather than later, though, I’ll be heading back to Trengal Keep.

The Best MMOs on the Market: EverQuest II

I was never an EverQuest player. Oh, I was aware of it from the very beginning - it was seen as a corrosive element in the tabletop RPG community back then, an insidious and possibly Lovecraftian thing seducing away our players with pretty graphics and simplistic, shallow gameplay. So it feels weird, in a way, to be saying now that EverQuest II just might be the best MMO that exists.

It has its weaknesses, of course – a lack of robust PvP and a world that makes liberal use of zoning and instancing – but those players for whom PvP is an appealing factor can still find it in a mature arena system or PvP servers, and zoning and instancing affects look and feel, but really doesn’t have any larger impact on how the game actually plays.

And let me tell you, it plays really well. Although it follows the pattern of this kind of MMO very closely (that formula having been established by the original EQ in the first place,) with its questing and killing as the primary avenues of advancement, with gathering and crafting as sideshows and a level-cap game largely directing players into endgame dungeons and raids, it does a lot of those things better than either its predecessor or its much larger competitor, World of Warcraft.

Questing, for example, is deep and varied, with quests that can be triggered by in-game events, that scale with your level, or that give you things like housing items, titles or languages instead of just new and better adventuring gear. There’s a status system that tracks how much of a bigshot you are. You can carry 75 quests in EQ2, and you’ll find that you need all that room in your quest log, because there’s so much to do. There are collections – which give your guild status and you gear and XP, and which don’t require you to fill up all your bags with junk – and Heritage Quests which net you powerful items and loads of status, and which are very challenging to complete, and major storyline quest chains. Group content is there as well, and there’s none of this ‘gain five levels and then just solo it’ business – it’s group content, which you’ll be hard-pressed to complete even having significantly outleveled all the mobs. But there’s also more than enough solo content to get all the way to the level cap having never grouped once and still not see it all. The huge world has dozens of zones large and small, bristling with content both casual and difficult.

EQ2 also has the hobby’s best guild management tools, and allows guilds as well as characters to move up in level, gaining tangible benefits for doing so, like special mounts, bigger banks or fancier housing, and soon, guild halls. Server populations tend to be high and lively, with plenty of people looking for stuff to do at any given level, and allowing crafters of all level to make a nice profit selling their wares.

Crafting is another highlight of the game, finding a very comfortable middle ground between WoW’s system of clicking ‘craft’ and walking away to return to a pile of useless vendor trash and Vanguard’s fussy approach that can result in a valuable item or a pile of useless slag at the end. It’s an interactive process that is nonetheless intuitive, and the variety of things that can be made, from potions to housing items to armor and weapons, is staggering. And crafting is useful across the whole of the level curve, which is the primary edge it has over the WoW system, where items better than the drops you get are the exceptions rather than the rule, and occur largely at the very high end which requires a load of tedious grinding and farming to get to. EQ2’s crafted goods are invariably useful, and typically just as good as anything but the highest-end raid drops.

The graphics of the game are something of an acquired taste, with character models that some people find ugly or unappealing and landscapes that tend toward the photorealistic in some places, and toward the abstract and stylized in others. Many newer areas lean towards the latter. It’s worth noting, though, that an alternate set of character models are available for many of the races, which some people find more palatable, and which can be turned on by race and gender, allowing players to pick and choose which ones they like.

Even if one concedes weaknesses in art design, though, one must also admit that EQ2’s client has aged pretty well. It can still be difficult to run the game with some settings turned up to maximum even on an excellent modern system, but it looks pretty good on very manageable settings, and the client runs stably and efficiently on even modest configurations – although it won’t run on just about anything, like WoW will. Too, as much as WoW gets praised (justifiably) for its level of polish and lack of annoying glitches and bugs, EQ2 is easily its equal, and an extremely credible case can be made that EQ2 is more polished in a number of areas. Broken quests, mobs stuck in walls or floating in midair, abilities that don’t work right – these all happen from time to time, but in the big picture they are all extremely rare, to the point where it’s very possible to play quite a lot and never encounter them.

There’s a variety of races and classes available that exceeds that available in most other titles by a comfortable margin, and some of the latter (like the Illusionist and Coercer,) don’t have anything even remotely like them in any other game. There is generally so much content that it’s virtually impossible to do it all in one pass, making great use of both the large character selection and mentoring systems, both of which allow you to see and experience content that you missed the first time around. There’s so much to do that the game gives you the option to turn XP from killing things off, to minimize outleveling of content.

EverQuest II is sort of a sequel to the original game, but it doesn’t much matter whether you ever played the first one or not. Its continuity does not depend on the older iteration, and gameplay is different enough between the two that having played one will grant no particular advantage in the other. There are easter eggs all over the place for players of the earlier game, but having missed pretty much all of those hasn’t hampered my enjoyment of EQ2 in the least.

And yes, there’s a free trial available. It may or may not sell you on the game, but it’s hard to argue that EQ2 isn’t one of the best MMOs out there.

Warhammer: Aftershocks

Over the weekend the folks at Mythic have had to do a lot of ass-covering to alleviate the panic seen in most segments of the Warhammer fan community over last week’s announcement that four classes and four capital cities will be cut from the game. The good news (for Warhammer fans) is that they are (I think) more or less succeeding in this, although a certain small but vocal group is still not happy about it, but some of those people won’t be happy regardless of how good WAR is or how smoothly it launches. You can’t please everybody.

For one thing, none of the stuff that’s being cut is even in the beta, and evidently the axed capitals weren’t very far along. As in some of them weren’t past the concept art stage. I would think that implies that the higher-ups on the WAR team have known for some time that this material wasn’t going to make it in at launch without another lengthy delay.

However, it also seems like deleting four capitals is going to have a minimal effect on the rest of the content; starting areas are divorced from the capitals anyway, and all the races will keep their own starting areas and progression zones. And evidently the RvR capture of capital cities is going to be retooled so that a faction needs to have already taken some secondary objectives before trying to seize the other side’s capital.

I think there are legitimate concerns as to how this is going to shake out, but at the same time it seems to me that much of the reason for panic and apoplexy has probably evaporated, especially given that a rational look at WAR’s class selection will show more than sufficient variety, and I think that given the new setup of one capital per faction, balancing between factions will be sufficient. If nothing else, the announcement itself strongly implies that there will not be another major delay, and that WAR will go ahead with launch some time before the end of the year. How it will fare against WotLK (for which we also lack an announced release date) remains to be seen, but I’m pretty sure that WAR will launch respectably even if the WoW expansion launches on the worst possible date (the same day.)

Maps, Ruined Keeps and Newbie Islands

Over the weekend I did something else I have never done before: I patched up Vanguard’s Test Server and logged in there. The Isle of Dawn, the new starting area for the upcoming trial program, is live there and I was very excited to check it out. Today’s screenshots are from the area. I made a Varanjar Druid and got her up to about level 7 in adventuring. I plan to take her through all of the Isle content over the next week or two, to try it out, but what I’ve seen so far seems very well-done so far. What struck me particularly was how smooth Vanguard ran throughout the entire area. Not a hiccup to be found – and it even looks like the weird inside-the-head effect that you sometimes get when walking through a formerly collidable object has been fixed, or at least lessened.

Moving forward, now that it’s patched up, I figure I’ll keep at least one character on Test. I want to make sure to remember to take a bunch of character screenshots, so I can compare the old models with the new when that goes live – and that ought to happen in the next few weeks.

I ventured, for a second time, into the treacherous depths of Trengal Keep. Again, I had a wonderful time, and again I was forced to bail out after an hour or so, when real-life things got in the way. Thankfully, I am not having any trouble at all finding people to group for the dungeon (even if this last group did consist of a tank, a healer and four Rangers,) so I plan to hit it at least another time or two this week. I am still on Part 2 of the main TK quest chain, and seem to be in no danger of reaching part 3 unless I can spend a few hours working the place, which I have yet to do. Possibly this weekend I will attempt to pull a late-night run and try to get as far as possible.

I also hit level 26 – experience gains in this major dungeon continue to be excellent, and the Veteran’s XP potion I was using helped a lot as well. I would sure like to save a few of those for Crafting and/or Diplomacy, so I think I will check out the rest of the rewards I can /claim and see if I can get any more of them.

This additional grouping has me more convinced than before that I need to find a good UI mod, because the group window in the default UI is so huge and clumsy. So I’ve been looking at options, from CoreUI, which I was using last time around, to Drox, which I’d tried but found to be a bit too complicated and fussy for me. There is now also CustomUI, which takes all the elements of Drox, Core, Darker and a couple other UI mods and lets you mix and match elements from any of them. It sounds like it would take a lot of fiddling time to get it just like I’d want it, but I may check it out anyway.

I did already install InfoMap Advanced, which is a great improvement over the default map, which looks fairly pretty but is not incredibly useful – it doesn’t even show roads. InfoMap Advanced not only does show roads, it tracks POIs in a more efficient way, and can even be set up to show the locations of harvesting nodes.

Also, I’m settling nicely into Xfire, which I’m liking more and more. If anyone reading this is on there, my ID is Ardwulf – look me up and add me to your friends list!