Woot woot! GU55 is going live today, and we’ve just received the patch notes.
The Golden Path is of particular interest to me. I’ll be visiting the newer newbie zones to see what has changed. It’s a bit odd, and a shame, that the original starting areas of Qeynos and Freeport continue to be neglected, but maybe that’ll come in a later update. In any case, Maltheas is going to be in a quest-feeding frenzy for a few days.
In other news, I was lucky enough to win a Collector’s Edition of Sentinel’s Fate yesterday from SOE’s twitter quiz. Thanks guys! It cheered me up no end, and I’m looking forward to investigating the tier 9 crafting content as a result.
With Sentinel’s Fate almost upon us, I figured it was time to check in with Maltheas, and the Extreme Questing Leaderboard! When last we checked the crazytable, it looked like this:
Everyone’s favourite Ratonga was sitting at 8th. Once again, the tables I use cover the level range from 1-59, as it starts getting silly to to compare level 38 Maltheas with folks who are approaching the level cap. Here is the table as of today:
Gah! Maltheas is still stuck at 8th, as while he has added 107 quests to his tally, everyone else has been just as busy. The team of Annya and Kirskax, being nearest his level, continue to be the ones to best measure against, and they have increased their lead by an impressive amount. Nevertheless, the race continues, and we’ll catch you up yet, guys!
GU55’s revamp of the Butcherblock Mountains, and Kaladim, will offer some new questing opportunities when Tuesday arrives, though those opportunities will be there for everyone on the table. Let the games *BONG* begin!
This time of the year tends to be the point where my internal sunlight batteries, which have carried me all the way through winter, finally run flat, leaving me listless and even more grouchy than usual. It’s hard for a game to please me in February, and traditionally this is when I let subscriptions lapse. Breaking up is hard to do, sometimes, though not this year. This year breaking up was right easy.
I’m thoroughly bored of Star Trek Online, and have cancelled the recurring billing. It might look and sound like Star Trek, but it doesn’t have the heart that made me adore the show so much. Kind of like when your beloved gets replaced by a pod-person. They look the same, but deep down, you know.
In search of something new I tried the Fallen Earth trial yesterday, but just couldn’t get into it. Maybe it was the UI, which I found overly fiddly, or the FPS/MMO hybrid nature of the combat. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with the game per se. It’s not you, it’s me. I’ll probably try again in a few months, if it’ll answer my calls.
So what of the future, as the days get longer, and with any luck it stops snowing all the bloody time?
Everquest 2, that old faithful friend, launches it’s Sentinel’s Fate expansion on Tuesday. I won’t be buying that just yet, as my gaming fund really can’t justify 30 pounds for an expansion right now, and Maltheas has no need for level 80+ content. Game Update 55, which also comes along on Tuesday, will have enough game-changing effects to keep him busy for a while anyway.
I do have a trial for Lord of the Rings Online that I could try at some point. I played it for a couple of months when it was released, and quite enjoyed it, but found the mid-levels to be a bit tedious. I’m told that is much improved now, so quite looking forward to revisiting it.
Finally, Allods Online is entering Open Beta this Tuesday. Well, they call it “Open Beta”, but given that the game is free to play anyway, and that characters will not be being deleted at the end of Open Beta, to all intents and purposes it’s launching. I find the idea of a group sharing duties onboard an astral ship to be far too intruiging to not check out. It is rather what I was hoping would be possible in STO, so I will be very interested to see exactly how it was implemented. Sure, it’s overly cutesy, but maybe at the moment I could do with some adorable gibberlings, and bright colours.
I was thinking about the story I bumped up from the depths earlier. I mentioned how when I run D&D, I try to treat every sentient being as an individual. This is probably my liberal philosophy speaking, but I can’t believe that any sentient mortal race is inherently evil. Their culture certainly might be, and individuals certainly are, but if they were born into a different culture, would they not turn out differently? Eitherway, good or evil, they are ends unto themselves, and not just swordfodder.
Of course, ideas like that work a lot better in a tabletop game than they would in MMOs, where we need a constant stream of beasties to beat up. We go forth, often for the flimsiest of quest dialogues, and kill gnolls, orcs, and dragons, simply for not being on the approved species list. Sure, sometimes they’re doing something that needs stopping, but a lot of the time they’re pretty much just standing around in their homes.
It is unreasonable behaviour for characters who would style themselves as good.
Take the case of Vrewwx.
The last time Maltheas had bumped into Vrewwx was Frostfell 2008, when he was sent into a castle of frost, which was not doing anyone any harm, to destroy a white dragon egg. Fortunately for Vrewwx, he managed to escape his egg before he could be murdered. He had not, so far as I am aware, committed any crimes while within his egg. The egg-squishing was a pre-emptive strike. This was a Christmas event, and we were cast in the role of King Herod!
This year Maltheas returned to the Icy Keep to cause further mayhem in the name of “investigation”. He found more than he bargained for. Vrewwx appeared, much grown in the span of twelve months, and gave Maltheas a piece of his mind.
Maltheas is given food for thought by Vrewwx the Dragon
That young dragon has far more wisdom than most of the Qeynosian questgivers. I really hope we don’t end up having to kill him. It is hard to argue with his accusation, though in our defence, the same beings that created him also did not really give us much option other than to solve our problems through hitting them til they stop moving. That’s the way of things in MMO, at least for now.
It’s hard sometimes, being a compulsive quester. You get asked to do all sorts of dubious deeds. Maltheas is lovely little fellow who serves the god of healing, trying desperately to atone for his own youthful crimes while briefly a member of the Bloodsabers. In the minds of Qeynosians, Ratonga are on the borderline between person and monster anyway, so he understands the situation of the gnolls a little better than most. If he could somehow bring about peace between Qeynos and Blackburrow, he would. My perfect world event would involve the players working together to bring such a peace about, and the reward would be playable gnolls. Of course, Blackburrow would then be classed as a mini starter village rather than a dungeon, but I hardly ever see anyone in there anyway these days. It’d send a nice message that a war does not have to last forever.
I know. I am such a carebear that I feel sorry for the NPCs.
A content patch! The Borg missions have arrived have, and Admirals now also have Daily missions to attend to. In addition, the Borg should be cropping up in exploration missions now. Vital, because quite a lot of folks have made it to Admiral now, and have not had terribly much to do.
My favourite change is that the annoying wait after completing an exploration mission should be gone too, making it much easier to build up a decent stack of badges of exploration.
Good stuff. Keep it up, Cryptic.
General
* The pre-order bonus Borg Bridge Officers should now display their traits. They were always there, but they were not visible.
* You no longer receive an error message when clicking the “Call for Help” button after dying when you are not on a team.
* Added the ability to filter the types of PVP Queues displayed when looking up what Queus are available.
* Updated instructions given during game play on how to assign Bridge Officers
* Closing the mail window no longer prevent you from interacting with objects and contacts until you walk away from the mailbox.
* We’ve improved framerate when viewing the Skills window and reduced the lag when decreasing the rank of a skill.
* The Character Rename button should now work properly
Missions
* Borg missions are now available to Fed players when they arrive in the Borg Sector
* New Daily missions are available for level 43+ players that offer Marks as rewards which can be used in special stores in the Staging Fleet, K7 and Ganalda. To to your remote contacts for details.
* Added repeatable Star Cluster and Deepspace hunting missions versus the Borg for both Fed and Klingon players
* Updated the Klingon Player introductory mission progression to help get players to Ganalda
* Federation PvP missions have been added
* Updated Miral Paris’ following/combat AI on Regulus IV ground to be more robust
* Fixed some bugs in the Klingon daily PVP missions – players with ground objectives (kill X captains on ground) might not have seen this complete if they were in an indoor PvP map
* Fixed some text bugs with the Klingon daily PvP missions
* Fixed the number of Klingon PvP missions required at each rank to be 3 per rank
* Made all repeatable Star Cluster missions have a 30 minute cooldown from start of mission instead of from turn in.
* Made all repeatable Deep Space Encounter missions have a 30 minute cooldown from start of mission.
Powers and Skills
* The ability to skill up captaining the Negh’Var is now available in Klingon skill trees. Some space weapons tooltips were reporting 5% chance, when the chance was actually 2.5%. Disruptor damage resistance proc now works correctly
* Tri-cobalt mines dropped correctly now
* Mines only slot in aft weapon slots as design intended
* The primary explosion from abandon ship no longer affects friendly targets. The resulting delayed warp core breach will still affect friendly targets.
* Field Logistics is now correctly listed as an Admiral skill
* The Engineering ability Aceton Field had a bug that caused it to appear as a ground power on Bridge Officers even though it’s a space power.
UI
* Added a missin icon for the Anesthesine gas applied power.
* Corrected a bad description on one of the Tribbles.
* Corrected a bad display name on the Pre-order Automated Defense Turret.
* Added the missing icon for Vulcan “Logical” trait.
* Updated message text when renaming characters to be clearer
* Added a Crew button to the inventory window that opens your status assignment window
* Updated the the Cancel and OK buttons
* Rearranged elements of the Ship customization window to match the layout of the character customization window.
* Updated the headshot displayed for a saved costume
* Added proper indentation to objectives displayed in the mission journal.
* Spending skillpoints on your captain, then attempting to spend skillpoints on a bridge officer without first hitting accept will no longer trigger an error message to be displayed.
* Upon deleting a Klingon character, if the next character in character selection was a FED, the UI no longer remains in the red-Klingon scheme.
* Updated the power tray sensitivity so that you must drag an element completely off the tray in order to remove an item. This prevents losing an item when trying to move it to another slot and dropping it accidentally.
* Add lots of additional information to the character selection screen.
* Purchase and Cancel buttons are now always available when customizing a costume.
Visual and Sound FX
* Hooked up correct beam up fx for some critter groups
* Fixed Plasma sniper rifles so that the laser sight no longer comes out of the player’s foot
* Adjusted shields on Borg ships that were sticking out strangely
I needed a bit of a break from the slightly monotonous space combat of Star Trek Online, so I’ve been checking out a few free online games. Today I had a bash at Warrior Epic.
Warrior Epic is a sort of Diablo-esque affair, though using a 3D engine for both world and characters. I picked it because it was described as you having a Hall of warriors that you could send on missions. I was expecting to be able to take a team of characters with me, but it turns out you can only take one character on any given mission, though inventory is shared between all your characters. Being an online game you can team up with other players if you choose.
There are a similar selection of classes, and Warrior Epic is guilty of one of my major Diablo annoyances: That each class is restricted to one sex or the other. All but one are human. I must admit I quite like the non-human Pangolans, perhaps because they remind me a little of Red XIII from Final Fantasy 7, so I decided to try one first. Each class has a choice of two paths. Meet Paco of the Green, a tamer. Tamers are a ranged class with some handy pets of both mobile and static varieties.
Paco of the Green, a Warrior Epic Pangolan Tamer.
While you pick missions from a list of what is available to you, the dungeon layout is different each time, though with less variety than you might be accustomed to. The mission selection screen actually tells you what possible rewards can be found at the end of each dungeon, and the equipment rewards shown there grey out once you find them, as you’ll only ever need one of them. Alongside with equipment, another loot option is monster souls, which you can use to enhance your existing gear.
Seeing what the random item generator would bring forth for me was one of the great joys of Diablo, but in Warrior Epic you only receive a single non-random loot item at the very end of a mission, in a relic chest. (If you’re grouped, every player gets their own item.) When creatures die, they look like they’re dropping a shower of money, and occasionally items, but they’re not. It’s just xp. Some folks are wired up to love getting xp, but I’m not one of them. As that seems the only reward for doing the subquests, I can pretty much just skip them to get to the relic chest faster. So far as I can tell, you receive the same amount of prestige whether you do the subquests or not.
Prestige is a sort of currency you receive for completing missions, mostly used to buy more warriors for your hall. Most shop items and hall upgrades cost gold, which you cannot earn ingame. That must be bought with real world cash. According to the FAQ, you can also get them by filling in surveys and offers from “preferred partners”, in a similar way to how the Facebook game Mafia Wars used to do, before they got busted for offering godfather points for signing a petition opposing US healthcare reform. Warrior Epic may have taken down its offers for the same reason.
As you level, you gain skillpoints which you can put into a number of paths. Pretty standard stuff.
One thing that certainly isn’t standard though, is how Warrior Epic deals with death. When you’re in a mission, you have three lives. The first two times you die, you get back up on full health. The third time you die, that’s the end of the mission. You might think “Bah! Now I’ll have to start the mission again.”. Afraid not. You’re dead. Or at least that warrior is. You can buy more with Prestige, and have a little stable of them, so you can afford to lose a few. Don’t worry though, you can still hang out!
Your dead warrior’s spirit will come with you, and can be brought out with much fanfare to kick arse once per adventure. You *could* also spend prestige to raise him, but frankly, having them around to call forth as vengeful spirits is far more interesting. The exact effects summoning a spirit will have seems to depend on it’s class and level at the time of the unfortunate incident.
Warrior Epic - Sometimes they come back.
That’s a bit of a rubbish screenshot. My undead barbarian (Oh sorry. I mean Pit Fighter!) pal has just squashed all my foes, and is in the process of departing. Apparently, when you die you also become huge. You can bring up to three dead friends along with you. Mr Muscles there kindly volunteered to get deaded so Paco could use him as an emergency button. There are not many games where you deliberately kill off your own characters! I formally request this feature in every MMO.
All in all, it’s not a bad little game. I’m not sure I’d spend money on it, but as free games go it’s quite polished, and good fun. Warrior Epic is certainly capable of entertaining you for an occasional hour or two when your regular MMO’s server has gone down for “unplanned maintenance”. The Warrior Epic website is here. It was about a 1.2 Gigabyte download.
It appears that the Ewoks have been roped in to be the mascots of what passes for Valentine’s Day celebrations over in Star Wars Galaxies. Is it a rule over there that every festival has to be tied to a furry humanoid? Folks are still trying to lose the pounds they gained during the Wookie lifeday festival. Are Ewoks particularly wise in the ways of love?
Anyway, this is as good an excuse as any to indulge in one of my favourite things. Barbershop Quartet!
Lets sing along!
Yub nub, eee chop yub nub;
Ah toe meet toe peechee keene,
G’noop dock fling oh ah.
Yahwah, eee chop yahwah;
Ah toe meet toe peechee keene,
G’noop dock fling oh ah.
Coatee chah tu yub nub;
Coatee chah tu yahwah;
Coatee chah tu glowah;
Allay loo ta nuv.
Glowah, eee chop glowah;
Ya glowah pee chu nee foam,
Ah toot dee awe goon daa.
Coatee cha tu goo; (Yub nub!)
Coatee cha tu doo; (Yahwah!)
Coatee cha tu too; (Ya chaa!)
Allay loo ta nuv,
Allay loo ta nuv,
Allay loo ta nuv!
