Ark's Ark

MILWAUKEE, Wis. (AP) — A sad day for fans of role-playing games: The man who co-created Dungeons & Dragons is dead.

It’s considered the grandfather of fantasy role-playing games and has inspired legions of adoring fans. Gygax’s wife says he always enjoyed hearing from them. - Associated Press

Here’s the great man at his best:

Goodbye Gary. The only time our lives directly intersected was that time you commented on that DDO related Youtube post I did (Sadly taken down by the authorities :( ), but you gave my generation the chance to use our imaginations in ways that had never been possible before. Your work will live on. I’ll be rolling some dice in your honour this Thursday, and my cleric will strike down evil in your memory.

The Green Lodge took our first trip to Redwillow last night, and we were most impressed by it. Not least because of the sheer number of chests we found! It’s nice to come out in profit. We met our first giants. Meeting a new monster is always a cause for excitement for us, and we were right glad that half of us were dwarves.

While searching for a lever to open a chest I couldn’t pick, poor Jorreck, bane of all poisons, got solidly stuck behing a rock and had to recall. Later, when turning in the items we were questing for, we had a horrible time. We couldn’t find the research scrolls that we had most definitely picked up (but we weren’t sure by who), and so couldn’t continue with the quest. We must have spent 20 minutes searching for them, and poking the NPC. Finally our ingenious bard, Flere, realised that they must have been left behind the rock when Jorreck recalled out, and of course no-one had looked behind there for fear of getting stuck.

So hurrah, we managed to continue. It made me think about how quick we are to label things bugs, when sometimes it’s just misfortune, or not knowing (forgetting in our case) how the game-world works. Of course, getting stuck behind things (though thats the only time we can remember it happening), and chests that are unopenable, really are bugs.

We shall be returning, I am sure of that. While looking for details on the chest we couldn’t open I came upon a list of the rare loot that can be found in Redwillow, and I think we can find homes for all of it.

Been a busy week. After the DnL debacle, I was still thirsting for a world based MMORPG to supplement DDO.

I was persuaded by some good friends on the DDO irc channel to give the new Everquest progression server a try. It’s a new sort of server, where each everquest expansion has to be unlocked by the players, usually by someone raiding the nastiest enemies of the previous expansion.

What I found out: That I have no idea why I ever found it fun. It’s ugly, laggy, and as for corpse runs, well, I don’t know why we ever put up with that nonsense. I just find myself getting horribly bored. I will persevere for now though.

Seeing as I was going to break my vow of never touching another SOE game (They keep buying everyone else anyway. At this rate I’d never play a MMORPG again.), I figured I might as well go for the Access account option, and have a little poke around EQ2. The game has changed a great deal since April 2005 when I quit, and I found I had no idea how to play my existing characters, at least not without doing grave harm to their kills to deaths ratio.

So I decided to start a new character on the newest servers. These happened to be PvP ones, but I figured, hey, it’ll make being a questaholic more challenging.

What I found out: That non-consensual PvP sucks horribly. If I step out into Antonica, within a minute I’ll be dead from some stealther sneak-attacking me. Given the feebleness of my reaction times, and my utter lack of killer instinct, this is not going to be a long lived experience. Nevertheless, until I stepped out into Antonica, I was having fun, so I shall keep my eyes open for a fresh regular server being opened. That seems pretty rare though, unfortunately. A shame, as there is nothing like the delicious taste of a clean start. Til then, my much mistreated Access acount will be put back into it’s state of suspended animation. Probably. Unless I get really bored.

I am anticipating DDO’s Module 2 with something akin to the feeling I get when someone waves a bag of pork scratchings before me (Sadly an all-too uncommon event). If QA clear it in time, it’ll be this week.


Brannoc: We'll begin with a brief introduction from our guests and then proceed with the chat. Now would be a good time to send those questions to [QT]Sprite!
Sporkfire: Hi, all. I’m Victor Wachter, Community Relations Manager for DDO. Glad to see you all here!
Samera_DDO: Hi there. Samera here. Community Relations Specialist.
Nereid_DDO: Hello, I am Nereid, Producer on DDO
Solas_DDO: Greetings. I’m Solas, DDO Gamesystems.
Gubtug_DDO: Hi, I’m Gubtug, Art Director on DDO.
Graal_DDO: Howdy, I am a game mechanics designer
GelatinousCube_DDO: *jiggle*
Codog_DDO: Howdy. I’m Codog, a Senior Game Systems Engineer. Happy to be here.
Tuttle_DDO: Hola, Captain Tuttle here. Design Manager on DDO.
Denour_DDO: Evening, I’m Andy “Denour” Gillis, I am one of the Game Systems Engineer on DDO. *Wave*

Mysterious 5 minutes silence.

Codog_DDO: After module 2, players will see a number of improvements to both ranged and melee combat. Some of these improvements include increase of ranged attack speed as players level up, improvements to activatable melee feats, and a number of new action point benefits.

Hmm. I hope you found that more illuminating than I did. The prospect of live events coming out way is pretty neat though.

A little while since I posted. My guild and I are still playing DDO keenly. Tonight we ventured into Three Barrel Cove for the first time, and chaos ensued! The fire caves are toasty death for anyone who has difficulty not falling into things, and that sadly meant me. Usually, my tumbling protects me from taking serious falling damage, but unfortunately does not make me lava-proof. Nevertheless, we emerged victorious. As if there was ever any doubt!

Lots of interesting things coming our way in DDO. While Drow are rather low down my list of races I want to see, it’ll still be a welcome option. And the promised increase in inventory space has me drooling. No word on whether that will be more bank storage space, or more personal inventory, but either will at least give me somewhere to put my vast stocks of collectables.

Don’t pay any attention to the doomsayers of the DDO forums. DDO is certainly not dying.

And Oblivion? Well it didn’t take me long to get rather bored with it. Oops. Maybe single-player RPGs can’t keep my interest any more. That one didn’t anyway.

Anyway, I’ll try to write a little more regularly. I tend to go through phases of activity.

Sporkfire just announced that an interface for dual wielding would be one of the game enhancements included in April’s Dragon’s Vault module.

At last, we dual wielders will be able to switch between weapons easily. Extremely good news.

Ruins of Threnal - Southern Ruins:

• New enemies and objectives have been added to the Ruins of Threnal.
• Players will now find locked doors that will impede their progress. Perhaps searching for the keys will help.

 

No more completing South Threnal in fifteen minutes flat, rushers! Unless of course you’re in Europe, in which case you probably have at least another week. :(

Mini-spell icons (just like wands) are on the way for both potions and scrolls.

- Graal

Sounds handy indeed! This refers to the tiny icons that are put on top of the regular item icon. I would like to see, at some point in the future, a wider variety of potion icons. Baldur’s Gate 2 was particularly good for having a wide variety of these, making it simple to grab the right one in a hurry.

Having mage scrolls look different to clerical scrolls would also be rather useful.

Look for information on the next update over the next few weeks. We’re still focusing on the launch, but we have quite a bit of information to share with you all on the future of DDO! - Calandryll

I wish they’ed hurry up with giving us some details. I’m eager to have something to talk about other than a rather flakey rollout. Though happily the global system failures striking the US servers don’t seem to be happening in Europe yet.

What we do know is that the first update will add the first dragon (red, I believe) to the world, which is mildly exciting. Rumours regarding monks continue to circulate, but the only thing I’m confident will be in the first update is some high level adventures, and a whole lot of bug-fixes. Anything else is being kept quiet for now.

Hopefully the material components for 4th level bard spells will make it in, if they aren’t hotfixed first.

Of course, there’s probably multiple reasons why folks are crashing. This is but one of them:

For some reason, DDO does not limit the amount of frames it outputs in the same way as other games.

It is massively overtaxing your graphics cards, quite possibly causing overheating. If you do not select “sync to refresh” it is pushing out frames at a rate that simply force your PC to pass out. As seen in this pic:

Here, I have very briefly unticked “sync to refresh”. I am getting an FPS of 209, shown by Fraps in the top right hand corner. This is clearly an utterly ridiculous frame rate. Until I discovered that ticking “sync to refresh” would limit my fps to 60 (as my screen refresh rate is 60. Yours might be something else), I couldn’t make it to the end of character creation without crashing.

Even at 60 fps, I have to turn everything down to low in order to prevent eventual overheating. I don’t need 60 fps at ugly. I’d be a lot happier with 30 fps with some detail.

I can’t post on the US boards. I am getting very frustrated with the tech support over there suggesting that this mysterious epidemic of overheating graphics cards is due to hardware failure. Please, tech support, acknowledge this issue, and stop blaming our computers.

It is true that some folks don’t seem to be having a problem. Such is the way of bugs It is however, affecting both NVidia and ATI cards. I also expect that the same issue is also responsible for some the stuttering and jerkiness that people are seeing.

I am sure this will be fixed, but I really hope they make it quick. Release is a really bad time for such a bug to be added to the game.

Later note: It appears, that on my PC at least, this out of control framerate only occurs in windowed mode (or in full screen mode if you have not set AllowFakeFullScreen=False in UserPreferences.ini, in which case full screen is really just a borderless window). Unfortunately, alt-tabbing out to check other software eventually causes me to crash, so it’s not much of a solution for me.