Everquest 2’s Game Update 54 is mostly a bugsquashing release, with an eye to dealing with as many long-standing niggles as possible before the next expansion, Sentinel’s Fate, arrives in February.
Alongside that, we of course have the return of the Frostfell celebrations (Yay!), and a new monthly event which will celebrate each city of Norrath in turn. Frostfell is Maltheas’ very favouritiest time of the year, and he’ll be digging out his special Frostfell hat and robe very soon.
The patch notes are below. Hit “More” if you’re on the front page.
Continue reading Everquest 2 GU 54 hits the Test Center. Bugfixtastic patch notes.
It is possible that I have just become a lot more stupid than I used to be, but try as I might, I couldn’t get Dragon Age’s editor to do ANYTHING without something going horribly wrong. Even though I’d not even changed anything, I somehow managed to break the main campaign and corrupt my saves. Weirdness abounded, with my party just standing about, refusing to follow me, and greeting me as if we were meeting for the first time. Talking to my dog (Chompy) teleported me below the ground. All around there was misery and gnashing of teeth.
Turns out I wasn’t the only one, and there was actually quite a good reason. The toolset’s database is mismatched with that of the live game, so without jumping through a few hoops it’s very hard to make a mod that isn’t going to be having some issues. As I am a very strong believer in not releasing buggy mods, I have decided not to make any until the toolset is patched sometime next week. Sorting out my own bugs is one thing, but I need to be able to trust the toolset to not be throwing in some extra ones. Modding is hard enough without faulty tools.
If you’ve found your game is broken after trying out the toolset you may be able to get things working again by following these instructions. They worked for me at least.
How to fix Dragon Age if the Toolset broke it.
1. Open up the toolset. Go into File, Manage Modules, and create a new module. Don’t ever open up the Single Player module again, as just opening it is enough for it to start writing files and causing trouble. As the toolset automatically loads up the last module it had, and the Single Player one was it’s default, that’s why just opening the toolset was enough to break things. With another module loaded now, you should be safe from that issue going forward.
2. In the Tools menu in the toolset select “Empty Export Directories”.
3. Go into your My Documents/Bioware/Dragon Age/Modules folder and rename the Single Player folder.
With any luck Dragon Age is now fixed and your regular campaign game will now be working properly, though any save games you made while you had mismatched data will still be messed up. Hopefully you have a recent save from before that happened!
I’m looking forward, once the toolset is fixed, to making a few modules of my own. We’ll see how that goes.
Aye indeed. I’ve picked up Dragon Age: Origins, and am hoping to do a spot of modding for it if it turns out to be within my abilities. I never really got into Oblivion, but I greatly enjoyed the Morrowind and Baldur’s Gate 2 modding scenes.
Bioware have just set loose their first post-release bug fix, which you can download here. It performs the following works of wonder:
* fixed potential corruption of character statistics
* fixed portrait appearance sliders when importing a character from the downloadable Character Creator
* fixed import for preset face settings from the downloadable Character Creator
* made Easy difficulty easier
* slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty
* fixed video issues when running on a very wide screen display, including ATI Eyefinity displays
DDO, for the most part, follows D&D’s paper rules quite closely, but there are a few glaring exceptions that can catch folks out. Such is the case of grazing hits.
Grazing hits occur when you have not managed to roll high enough to beat your opponents AC, but have still rolled fairly high. Players do grazing hits on a roll higher than 10, but far more important is that monsters also do grazing hits.
How often a monster does a grazing hit depends on the dungeon difficulty. The threshholds have been tweaked a few times, but at the moment appear to be:
Normal: 17 or higher
Hard: 15 or higher
Elite 13 or higher
As you can see, on Elite, 40% of monster attacks are going to do you some damage, no matter how high your AC is, (as a roll of 20 is an automatic proper hit).
A grazing hit only does base weapon damage, such as d6 for a shortsword, even if it’s a +5 shortsword of flaming, it still does just d6. If it’s a greatsword, it’ll be 2d6. Some monster’s physical attacks are very substantial, even when just considering base weapon damage.
Fortunately, players get some respite from grazing hits, as we are born with a feat that reduces our damage received by 50%. Shields and centred monks also get a % reduction in grazing hit damage. These reductions take place after Damage Reduction has been applied.
However, especially on elite, if you are being stabbed at by several enemies, each of whom is going to score a grazing hit if they roll 13-19 for half base weapon damage, you are in very real danger of being rapidly nibbled to death.
While we might argue over the maths, at the least it is very useful to all to have some source of damage reduction, as even a single point of DR can make a very real difference to how well you deal with the regular smallish amounts of damage from grazing hits.
You can read more about this subject here, and here.
By all accounts Free to Play (F2P) Dungeons and Dragons Online has been a roaring success. In my own investigations I have found multiple packed low level instances filled to the brim with folks asking foolish newbie questions. Counter-intuitively, DDO subscriptions are up 40%, presumably because the F2P model allowed players enough time and content to get a bit hooked, and be sure they liked what they’d be getting. Myself, I am sticking with an F2P account, though I confess I spent some money to buy enough Turbine Points to unlock the Warforged and Monk, and grab a couple of adventure packs. I shall be endeavouring not to spend any further cash, and perhaps the free points you get during gameplay and the free content will be enough to keep me in adventures for now.
To my mind DDO has been brought back from the dead, with a second chance at glory. It had a lacklustre launch with insufficient promotion, never really making the splash it deserved. An awful lot like Everquest 2, in fact. Both games have been hiding in WoW’s shadow for far too long. I can only hope that the influx of money to Turbine will be put to good use feeding an ever-expanding DDO live-team. I’ll give Turbine one hint: If you’ll finally sort out Gnomes, and their Dragonmark, I’d be willing to spend a few points on unlocking that.
There was a time when EQ2 also sold adventure packs. Sundered Splitpaw, Bloodlines, and the Fallen Dynasty (the Isle of Mara) were all sold as online-only mini expansions for the price of $7.99 (if memory serves me right) These days they come as part of your core install, and they were sizable chunks of content worth their asking price. At some point, SOE realised that they could get that much money for a single appearance-only hat, which took a lot less effort. There have been no adventure packs since Legends of Norrath and the Station Cash shop opened.
Recently there has been a great deal of unhappiness with a new development in EQ2’s love affair with RMT (Real Money Transactions). In the next set of Legends of Norrath cards, there will be a loot card which grants one-time access to a special dungeon. Given how difficult it will be for anyone to get that card, it must be pretty awesome in that dungeon.
In DDO when you buy an adventure pack, which grants you access to a set of dungeons forever, you know exactly how much it will cost you. Everquest 2 expects you to gamble, buying packs of cards until you are lucky enough to get the one you want. I do not know the exact odds, but my experiences with getting loot cards from my free packs suggests you would need to buy a great number to stand a good chance of getting the specific loot card which opens the dungeon. This will restrict the number of people who get to experience this dungeon to the extremely lucky, and the obsessively addicted.
It is about time that Everquest 2 ended the charade that most people buy Legends of Norrath to play the card game. They do it for the loot cards, and it is a cynical exploitive way for SOE to make money. They should just remove loot cards from LoN, add them to the shop, and sell them honestly with upfront pricing, rather than forcing its customers to buy lottery tickets in the hopes of getting to experience new content. It should be noted that EQ2 also has a subscription fee. I do not think that having both extreme RMT AND a mandatory subscription charge is sustainable. I’d be happy for the RMT to go away, but I think that is not the way the MMO winds are blowing these days
Given the success of Free Realms, I have a feeling that EQ2 may be making the leap to being Free to Play, supported by RMT, with an optional subscription like Free Realms and DDO have. The streaming technology used by Free Realms has been adapted for use in EQ2 (and was responsible for the dreadful memory issues many people experienced after Live Update 53), and will be enabled at the time of the next expansion to make for a smoother new player experience. We have been promised that there will, at that time, be a great influx of new players, and I doubt that’s going to happen just because they get to start in Halas. My prediction is that Everquest 2 is going F2P. Feel free to poke fun at me if I turn out to be wrong.
Update 29th July, 2010: In the end, EQ2 did go F2P, though not in the way I hoped for. You can read about that here.
Wheee! Still struggling with the character creator, I’ve had another try at Spelling Bee. Mostly working on his body shape, to make him somewhat less hideous to the eye, and fiddling with his haircut, I finally came up with something reasonably decent to be getting on with.
There was something about his face though. It was nagging away at me. Imagine my dismay when about five minutes into the tutorial I suddenly realise:
That my majestic literate bee has ended up looking like a manga Michael Jackson. He’ll be taking a trip to the tailor as soon as practical, for a new head.
I’m gearing up for the Champions Online Early Access on Friday. The Beta server is still open, and so I’m beavering away at trying to convert my old City of Heroes characters.
 Spelling Bee in City of Heroes.
 Spelling Bee in Champions Online.
I have a little work to do before I fully recapture his beelike majesty. OK, I admit it, he’s hideous. This is not helped by the complete absence of horizontal stripes as a costume pattern option, and the limited colour choices, which are almost all far too glowy. In truth, Champions character creation seems a bit more limited than CoX, which surprised me seeing as it is essentially the same team behind it. Turns out I also prefer the graphical engine of CoX in general, as Champions seems kind of fuzzy and weirdly lit most of the time.
I greatly enjoy City of Heroes, and often pop back for some Bee fun, so I am hoping that Champions will eventually fill a similar gap. Currently though it feels a lot more limited. While it is unfair to compare a fresh game with one that has 5 years to mature, it is still the case that new games should be expected to be better than their ancestors, and I am unconvinced that Champions is. Or possibly I’m just bitter about the horizontal stripes thing. I only spent a little time in the open beta, so it is too early to jump to too many conclusions, but Cryptic’s previous work still provides strong competition. Cryptic must work hard to speedily add all the features that folks have come to expect from a superhero game.
I’ll write more on Champions once I’ve had more of a chance to play it on Live.
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