Continuing on from Part 7!
2:45 pm GMT, 8th of January
I’ve picked Outfitting, as it’ll allow Osgard to make armour for himself. He gave up the foraging skill to make room for it, as I’m hoping that herbs and wood won’t play too much of a part in it.
Right away, the trainer has three recipes to sell me. Cloth shoes, leather shoes, and the ability to turn burlap cloth, which I’ve been looting from fallen enemies, into “Bolts of Burlap” which will be a crafting ingredient.
Osgard also got a skill for salvaging cloth and leather armour, and the outfitting button itself, which brings up this window:
The Outfitting trainer offers a couple of quests. One requires me to bring him 4 bolts of burlap and 4 soft leather. The leather flumoxes me briefly, as there is no tailor recipe for that, but I discover that it is a butchery recipe that I can bring up using my til now neglected butchery button.
I hit the “craft all” button for my soft leather recipe. It takes a minute or so to chug though all my leather, then I do the same for my burlap. This gets my outfitting up to 13. I have another quest to make 5 pairs of burlap shoes, so I do that too.
The reward for that shoe quest was a choice of “augments”. Special ingredients I can use when crafting to add an additional property to the item. I chose the dexterity raising augment called Thiefstone. Now to try to use it!
Raising my Outfitting skill has opened up a number of new recipes, so I pick those up. Handily, one is for some “soft leather shoulderpads”, a slot where I currently have nothing at all. When I add the thiefstone to the mix, they become “Nimble Soft Leather Shoulderpads”. Alternately I could use the endurance raising augment I found earlier in an invasion defense to make “Rugged Soft Leather Shoulderpads”. Both only add 1 point of stat anyway, so there’s not a lot in it. I’ll make some nimble ones.
I have been recently informed, somewhat forcefully, by some of my blogging colleagues that it is very bad form to compare anything in Rift with a previous game, so I won’t. I scarcely need to.
I made myself some new leather trousers too. All the gear I can craft is a slight upgrade to the green gear I have gathered through questing up to this point. That’s probably enough outfitting for now, until I replenish my ingredient stocks.
5:00 pm GMT, 8th of January
I’m getting really bad latency during invasions (when there are a great number of players and monsters active in a small area) at the moment, up to a minutes worth, making it all a bit unplayable. This is probably mostly due to me playing on a US server from Europe, but as that is what I’m planning to do after launch I do need to know how well it works. I doubt Trion have their full bandwidth available yet, though it could be that their network optimisation code could use some work. In any case, I don’t know how much more I’m going to get done right now.
4:30 pm GMT, 9th of January
I’ve been playing a little this afternoon. Mostly just defending Argent Glade from incursions. The latency has been playable til around now, but it has started to get very crowded again, so when a big fight starts I can’t do very much as what I can see is up to a minute old.
This isn’t altogether surprising. At the moment you have a vast number of players all cramped together on a small number of servers, and in only a few of the zones. Trion will also not have bought their full allocation of bandwidth yet, and won’t have optimised for overseas players.
So while it IS annoying, and I will tell you about it because it is true, you shouldn’t necessarily be too concerned in the long run.
Let’s take a quick look at Silverwood’s map, so you can get an idea of what we’re facing out here!
The South currently looks clear, but we have 2 fire rifts, and a life rift to the north, all of which are sending out invasion forces. There’s a Life invasion heading for the college, though I’ll be surprised if it gets that far, considering how many fire forces are out and about.
Northern Argent Glade is under constant assault from several directions by the Fire invaders.
While I’m mostly trying to defend the town, there are other folks trying to shut the rifts themselves, and dislodge the enemy footholds. They’re probably a bit tougher than level 12 Osgard though. He did head north to try helping with a rift, but died even quicker than usual. As you can see, rifts to the north tend to be rather higher level than ones from the south or immediately to the east, and the invasion forces they send out reflect that. At least in Argent Glade there is a graveyard to respawn in very close by.
7:45 am GMT, 10th of January
The map updates constantly to reflect the current situation. It’s really quite useful, as the situation is constantly changing, and you need to stay aware of what is going on in your vicinity, It is all too easy to stumble upon (or be stumbled upon by) an invasion force, which will typically result in a quick and painful death.
I’ve moved eastwards now, to a new quest hub. Marsh House, next to the marsh area in the South-East corner of the above map. Strange humanoids known as Boglings dwell there, and I quickly discovered that they had turned to worshipping Greenscale, the Dragon of Life! You’d think that the Dragon of Life would be a pretty nice chap, but it might be more accurate to call him the Dragon of Nature. His invasions are every bit as rampagey and murderous as those from the Plane of Fire, though with a fae-theme and a fresh pine scent.
I’m not too sure what to make of Boglings. There’s definitely some fish in there, but they also have a slightly rodent feel to them in the face. They’re not so much fishmen as fishratonga!
2:20 pm GMT, 10th of January
I’ve finished up at Marsh House, and been sent along the coast to Silver Landing. A new foe presents itself. If there’s one thing more annoying than elves, it’s elves who’ve turned evil! House Aelfwar has turned away from the Guardians, and is instead siding with the Plane of Life. Not helpful, and I’m asked to bump off a few of their scouts on the way to Silver Landing to meet with my new contact.
Oh. Oh dear.
It’s always a bit awkward when the questhub you need has been taken over by an invasion. They have a tendency to kill everybody. Fortunately, they seem to get weaker over time, and eventually enough people showed up to be able to shift them.
I can see this being a bit annoying for folks who just want to quietly get on with their quests, but it is the major feature of the game which is supposed to set it apart. I’m in two minds about it at the moment. If dynamic events were incapable of being inconvenient, it would defeat the whole point. On the other hand, every time I alt-tab out to write an entry, an invasion force invariably finds and kills me almost instantaneously.
This is not hyperbole. While I was writing the above paragraph, these guys showed up and knocked Osgard’s head off:
They’re all Epic, and I’m the only chap here at the moment. I’m not going to be able to shift them just yet.
It could be that there are more invasions running around at the moment than we will see in Live. It’s going to be a fine balancing act to have it sufficiently exciting without it really getting a little bit irritating.
Nice write up, Ark. I took some time to do armorsmithing for my cleric and found the quests and introductory items to be pretty similar. How was the craftable gear compared to what you got from quest rewards? I was pretty impressed that, by level 11 anyways, every single item I could make was an improvement on what I already had — up to 20 skill anyways, where I had to stop.
And don’t worry about comparing the game to others. I don’t see how you can’t, given how much of it is clearly iteration.
Thanks!
It was all green gear, and decent enough. All slightly better than what I already possessed.
I’m not worried. I was just making fun of the yelling at anyone who dares to mention WoW in the same paragraph as Rift.
I haven’t tried the crafting yet, only the gathering, but I’m not really that interested in it during the beta anyway.
Also: out of interest, why are you rolling on the US servers? I’ve always wanted to, but the timezone issues kind of screw up any raiding I might do.
That’s where most of my friends are playing. I tend to live in EST anyway!
Okay! Finished reading them all, thanks for what I’m sure was quite a time consuming livejournal Akr. :D
Thanks for reading! I hope they were at least a little bit useful. They’ll continue when the beta starts up again on the 25th!