Everquest has a new Progression Server opening up on the 15th of February.
A progression server is as close to the original launch experience as the developers can get you to without spending a massive amount of time unravelling things. So you do have the updated engine and UI, but all the expansions are turned off. Expansions will be slowly turned on one by one, giving you something approaching the same experience that original players would have gotten through the years.
For the last progression server I was completely foxed because several zones had been revamped, and could not be restored to their original state, leaving me utterly lost in the city of Freeport. Still, it’s as close to launch as you’re ever going to get, so if you weren’t there the first time around it is an interesting opportunity to travel back in time to get a glimpse at the early days of MMOs.
I took part in the last progression server, and while the first couple of days is tremendously fun and nostalgic, it didn’t take me too long to realise that while at the time EQ seemed almost futuristic, it’s actually rather painful for me to play now. I’ve become soft and spoiled, I suppose. So I had been planning on giving the new progression server a miss, even though SOE are kindly offering old players free EQ time between the 10th and the 21st of this month. That was until I discovered what the server had been named. Fippy Darkpaw.
Fippy Darkpaw is much beloved of EQ players. He was, and presumably still is, a spirited little gnoll who frequently charges the gates of Qeynos. He has yet to be successful in his attack, but never lets that discourage him and so is rightfully considered a great hero by the Darkpaw gnolls. You may encounter one of his descendants in Everquest 2 from time to time, if you involve yourself in some of the seedier going on beneath Qeynos. He has assisted Maltheas on quite a number of his investigations, in fact!
Maltheas meets with Fippy in Crow's Resting Place
I am told that the old EQ gnoll model has been updated recently, and that’ll probably remain the case for the progression server, but this will always be Fippy Darkpaw to me.
Yip Yip!!!
So I’ll pay him a visit. I owe it to him after killing him so many times back in the old days, though he and his brothers certainly did me in plenty as well. Today I’m leery of full loot corpse runs, and he probably has a completely new model, but we were both there at the dawn of Norrath, and it’ll be good to see him again. I might pop in on Cuburt too! Continue reading Fippy Darkpaw: An Everquest Pilgrim’s Progression Server
Phase 6 of Rift’s Beta starts today, with some major changes.
However, I’m not going to be playing Rift today because Star Trek Online’s 3rd Feature Episode series, focusing on the Romulans, begins tomorrow. Once that happens, the special end reward from the second series, the Ophidian Cane, will no longer be awarded, so I need to deal with those pesky Devidians tonight. Not because I particularly need the cane, nice though it is, but I can never stand to miss out on time-limited items!
It does look interesting though. Hard to tell exactly how useful it’ll be without trying it out against some unsuspecting evil-doers.
Theoretically we have until 10 am PST on the 5th of February, but I don’t think I want to cut it quite that fine. I’ve already done the first episode, so I just need to finish the last 4 this evening. Should be no problem.
Star Trek Online's Anniversary is still in full flow!
Update: It turns out the Ophidian Cane reward has been turned off already. Sadness :( It was unexpected, as it seems to fly in the face of how we were told this would work. I put in a GM ticket, but I don’t have terribly high hopes for it.
Ah well. I’ll make sure I don’t leave the next one quite so late.
It’s been a while since I made a Minecraft video! In today’s episode I investigate a couple of the recent changes to the game, and bimble around a bit trying to remember what the heck I’m doing.
I have a soft spot for fishing games, especially fishing minigames in MMOs, so I’ll be interested to see how the fishing system develops. I’d love to see more types of fish, and interesting fish recipes available eventually. I also had my first (and second) glimpse of the new Octopus, and gave it a fine Minecraft “Hello!” with my steel sword.
I cracked. I’ve heard so many folks talking about Magicka in the last few days that I decided to pick it up while the special Wizard Survival Pack DLC is still included. That special offer ends tomorrow, by the looks of it, though it’s just a few free items and a spell, and I’ve no idea if it is actually useful. Still, free stuff is free stuff, and I might as well get it while it’s warm.
I’m a little late to the party, and it’s likely you already know far more than I do about how the game works. From what I gather, you create magical spells by combining elements in different combinations, with a wide variety of effects. Sounds like intelligent fun, and I’m going to force myself to avoid any spoilers, for a while at least!
Although I’ve purchased and downloaded it, I’m not going to boot it up just yet. I’m still feeling a bit iffy and don’t really fancy battling internet dragons today. In any case the reports are that Magicka is rather buggy at the moment, though patches have been flowing freely, with another large one due to drop on Monday, so leaving it a few days might not be a bad idea anyway.
Once I’m a bit more chipper I’ll report back on how Magicka plays. I might even knock up a video, though it will pale next to the awesomeness of this one!
I’ll insist on being the green wizard, of course, but as it doesn’t sound like that’s one of the popular choices I’ll probably be safe!
We’ve just had some mildly amazing information about the upcoming changes for Rift’s 5th Beta phase. They’ve obviously been extremely busy over the last couple of weeks since phase 4.
Public Grouping is the biggest change, but as a Rogue I’m also pretty excited about the changes to Rogue energy regeneration.
The changes detailed under “Invasion Improvements” sound like they may deal with many of the concerns I’ve had with invasions in my liveblog. Many times I found myself facing invasions many times more powerful than anyone in the vicinity had any hope of standing up to. Hopefully things will scale a little more sensibly from now on.
Current Beta players all received a 25 use key this week, so we can expect this next phase to be pretty packed. If anybody hasn’t already gotten their hands on one, drop me a comment and I’ll sort you out.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Beta 5 Preview!
We’ve tried to take as much advantage of the relative calm between Beta 4 and Beta 5 as we possibly could. Here are some of the highlights to look forward to in Beta 5 tomorrow. We’d like to detail a number of them and also shed some light on a few things for Beta 6 and beyond.
New For Beta 5
We’re expecting Beta 5 to be at least twice as big as beta 4! By the end of Beta 4, we were running a total of 18 servers. 8 in our Europe datacenter and 10 in the US. This time we’re opening up with 16 in each region, for a total of 32 servers, all with higher population caps, more than doubling the number of people who can be online at once.
If you get caught in too long of a queue during the middle of beta, know that we’ll be keeping an eye out to see if we need to open even more.
Public Grouping. This was a big one for us — just about the single most requested item — and we’re really happy to have it in game for you to try out already.
First, as you’re wandering around the world and target people, if they’re solo or ingroups/raids that are willing to accept new public members, you’ll see a new button in the target frame that lets you join their group or merge your group into theirs if it fits.
Trion Developers Aaron Hooten and Gavin Irby, the designers behind the Scarlet Gorge zone, just got off RiftIRC where they shed light on some of the zone’s secrets. Scarlet Gorge is the first zone you encounter that is shared between the factions, so is likely to also be the first time many players encounter World PvP.
Below, I’ve done my best to organise the sometimes chaotic chat into individual questions and answers:
<Rifty> Motorboat asks: Can I ride on that cable-boat thing in the video? <Gavin> Hell yeahz you can <Aaron> Depending on your level of “scared of hieghtsyness,” yes. <Gavin> I’m just going to ride and do knockbacks on other players all day Continue reading Rift Scarlet Gorge Devchat Log – 21st January, 2011
