Ooh, new content!!! It seems to be mostly member-only (which I am anyway), but I guess that’s OK for now.
Our latest update has a ton of new stuff. Here are the highlights:
* There are new members only combat, non-combat and collection quests added across the world (see below for details).
* Bristlewood now has its own warpstone
* Added in several new in-world minigames to Seaside
* Pets will stay happy, clean and fed for longer and will also find collection and mining nodes more often
* We’ve continued to optimize video card performance to allow lower end cards to have higher frames per second in game
Members Only Quests have been added to the following areas:
Merry Vale:
* Ronnie Britesmile is not allowed to play until he finishes his chores. He might give you something cool if you give him a hand!
* If you’ve already found Mugwopp for Blorple at the Greenwood Camp, he’ll have a new task for you.
Briarwood:
* Recruit Agga afraid of getting lost in the hedge maze. Help him piece together a map.
Farnum’s Farm:
Rucks, the farmhand, has thrown down the gauntlet and has a series of challenges for skilled harvesters. Dare you take him on?
Pixie Nursery:
* Blazing Star and Flax thought that if they put a collar on their pet fish, no one would take it from the pond, but it’s gone now! Help them find out what happened.
Wuagachug:
* Tugaboom would like a brave fighter to help him solve the rebelling Bixie problem.
Shrouded Glade:
* Cella Cedernook found a baby penguin and need help caring for it. “*Squeel!* It’s so cute!”
* Meanwhile, Emil Jadefish and friend had a little boating accident. They could really use a hand!
* Tald Daybreaker’s friend is lost up in Misty Mountains. Are you brave enough to rescue him?
Sanctuary:
* Auralie wants to invite the queen to her next party, but is too shy to ask. Can you help her deliver the invitation?
* Feldman wants to be a famous journalist, but need help gathering more information for a story he’s working on.
Blackspore Swamp:
* Sirdo “Squirrel Chaser” is embarrassed about his nickname. Would you be willing to help him out so he can overcome his bad reputation?
Seaside:
* Rainchaser has more challenges for you.
* Kendall, the lifeguard, needs someone quick to help him out.
* Mr. Mudd is sickened by the trash on the beach, but has a fun way of cleaning it up.
New combat quests:
If you’re a member see if you can help out the following people:
* Spruce Waynehammer’s pet, Robin, keeps getting lost in the Bat Caves.
* Susy Cloudrunner by the Briar Patch has a big bear problem.
* Yuri Petaldancer by the rebelling Bixie Hive wants to taste what royal honey is like.
* Blari wants to cure the sickly saplings in Bristlewood Glade, but isn’t strong enough to fight off the creatures there.
* Vasher claims he’d like to recover some old explorer bones from Cracked Claw Caverns so he can give them a proper burial.
* Buttercup Webbywand’s spider was kidnapped by trolls in Grexan’s Camp.
* Help Puck Petalpucker near Misty Mountain ace his science project.
* Johnny has an idea for you to try out at the Mushroom Cavern.
* Jimmy Squarefeet’s snowman friend has been kidnapped! Seek him out in Snowy Canyon.
* Jenny Greenteeth wants to plant some friendly plants in Treeleaf’s Retreat.
Bonus Update Notes for the 19th of May. It didn’t deserve its own post at the time,
Pets
* Members can now try/buy the ghost cats and dogs located at the Blackspore Pet Adoption Center.
* Players can rent Max the Lazy Dog at the Blackspore Pet Adoption Center.
Treasure Vault
* The Member’s Only Treasure Vault has received extensive improvements.
They didn’t give us full patch notes this time, but we did get a list of highlights:
* Members will now have an increased chance of encountering rich mining nodes
* Member potions and spheres are once again being distributed in-game
* The Marketplace now has a Members Only category
* There are several new items in the Marketplace
* The Briarwood warpstone is once again active
* A pet adoption center has been setup in Blackspore
* Base Ninja health has been increased across all ranks
* Contract: Life and Death Magic and Contract: That’ll Teach ‘Em are now repeatable quests
* The Changelings in Darvon’s Descent are no longer able to keep the artifacts they stole from showing up on the minimap. Players on the quest Stolen Artifacts should have an easier time locating them now.
* The quests “I Love Mushrooms†and “A Thorny Situation†can now be completed
* At the end of a kart race, Portraits, Total Time and Placement now appear properly
* The quest path will now properly update when selecting quests in your Quest Journal
* The lightning bolt bomb powerup is much more zappy than before! It will now blow up enemies from greater distances!
* Quickchat is now available from the Friends list
* Players will now be removed from the acquaintance list once they are added to the Friends list
In addition to the highlights, we’ve stomped out a lot of bugs submitted by our players. Thanks a lot for your help!
This was just announced, and is going to be headed in beta soon. I adore anything based on ancient China, so I’ll certainly be checking it out. The good guys will be followers of Taoism and Buddhism traditions, so I might be able to recreate my old Taoist Priest D&D character :) I hope there are some hopping vampires too!
Yes indeed! In the absence of any other MMO I much feel like playing at the moment (though there are quite a few incoming) I have jumped aboard the FreeRealms bandwagon. As I already had an SOE Station Access account, I get FreeRealms membership included on that which allows me to access some extra content over the free version, so I figured I might as well give it a try.
It’s rather fun! While I am not sure there is enough there to satisfy the hardcore gamer for long, even after it loses that new-game shine I can see me popping in to play my favourite minigames. My favourite so far is Penguin Produce, which is a penguiny take on the old game where you build turrets to destroy successive waves of evil-doers, to prevent them from reaching your tower. I’ve not had so much puzzley fun since Yo Ho Ho Puzzle Pirates!
Free Realms update notes for the 6th of May are after the jump.
Darkfall is having a few teething problems at the moment. From the server failure yesterday, to the 6 hour queues for their single server that have been common for the past few weeks, there have been so many problems that they’ve had to stop selling the game to new players. All that is frustrating the users, and could lead to Darkfall’s failure on its own if not rectified, but this post is about how I feel Darkfall is doomed in the mid-term, even when it is working as designed.
First, I need to try to explain a bit about Darkfall’s alignment system.
There are three racial groupings. You might be tempted to think of them as your team, as in WAR, but that would be extremely unwise. Everyone not in your racial grouping is considered a racial enemy, and thus red to you.
A blue named person is thus someone in your racial grouping, with positive alignment.
Killing any red gains you +1 alignment. Killing any blue gets you -1 alignment. When you hit -10 you yourself become red. (The numbers might be a little off, but that’s the general nature of it anyway).
It is thus trivial to regain a blue name after committing a few murders. The common methods of doing so are to either go perform a massacre at one of your enemy race’s newbie areas (new players are not granted any form of protection), or if you are a team of murderers, repeatedly kill eachother.
Moreover, you can kill anyone in your group with no penalty at all, which has led to an entire industry of tricking people into your group then butchering them. You can loot other people’s kills without any sort of alignment hit. You can also jump in front of someone who is fighting a monster, causing them to accidentally hit you. You may then murder them without penalty.
The net result of all this is that blue on blue killing is rampant. Anybody who is not in your guild or alliance is considered a target.
This would be a lot less of a big deal except for one thing. Darkfall is full body looting. Just as in Ultima Online, everything upon your person may be taken by your killer. Ultima Online had a well-thought out murder system that meant that someone who made a habit of attacking innocent travellers would not be able to easily return to being blue. That is the price you pay for viewing your countrymen as a harvestable resource. Darkfall, on the other hand, has no consequences for such unsociable behaviour.
Because of this, I do not see communities forming in Darkfall. There will certainly be clans, and clan-alliances, but everyone outside of them will be considered either a threat or prey. As the social aspect in MMO is the main thing that keeps players playing in the long-term, this is a bit of a problem. I do not see roleplaying surviving either, outside of clans.
There is also nowhere safe you can go. Towns have a little protection, but you can still be killed quite easily there, unlike other PvP games where town was considered a safe haven. Having to be constantly on twitch-ready guard is fine in a game like Quake where you just play for short bursts, but it is terrible for an MMORPG. It’s too darn stressful, and could probably drive you paranoid in the end.
Crafters and merchants need somewhere safe where they can trade and craft. We are familiar with being attacked in the wilderness, while harvesting. That is the dangerous part of the job in UO, but if you can be killed at the forge, or mid-trade at the bank, and robbed of all you’re carrying, it renders the whole playstyle unworkable. There will still be crafting going on, especially in-clan, but folks for whom being an independent crafter is the main part of the game will find only pain.
The self-styled hardcore PvPers are against a murder system because it would prevent them from running around surprise-killing whoever they like, “diminishing their freedom”, but people do not like being prey, and it will not be too long before all the non-PKing folks have either moved on, or become PKs themselves. Not everyone wants to play a homicidal maniac. As the advantage in a fight always goes to those who strike first, those who do not strike as soon as they see someone will die over and again. They will either also start striking first, or they will leave.
As it stands, the only playstyle that Darkfall really works for is the full-blown PK. Everybody else will be driven from so “hardcore” a game, and the hardcore folks will say good-riddance.
The Hardcore crowd though, is more diverse than it admits. A small portion is genuine, and enjoys the thrill of combat to the extent that they care not whether they win or lose. A far larger portion just enjoys getting easy kills, but when the “sheep” have left, they will find they more often than not are the ones getting looted, and they will not like that. Of course, the largest portion of the Darkfall hardcore crowd is not hardcore at all, but just pretends to be for fear of being labelled “carebear”, a label like “hardcore”, which is so mutable as to be meaningless. When these people start dying more than they can kill, they too shall move on.
Which will leave the truly die-hard player killers, and a few large clans who are self-sufficient and enjoy the gang-warfare aspect. These will probably all fit on a single server (which is lucky as that is all there is right now anyway) with room to spare. As the only people who won’t kill you are members of your clan-alliance, things will tend towards these becoming ever larger. Soloers and small independent clans will mostly have either left or merged by then. Aventurine themselves may not actually see this result as failure, as they have frequently stated that they want Darkfall to be extremely niche, but I find it doubtful that their investors will be quite so impressed at the idea of deliberately driving customers away.
If a decent murder point system, such as UO’s, were to be dropped into Darkfall, that might save it from the fate I foresee, but I think, given the speed with which Darkfall’s developers work, that any such change would arrive far too late.
I am probably going to give Darkfall a miss (though I thank my friends for letting me borrow their account to have a fiddle around), and will wait for Mortal Online to find some way to horribly disappoint me instead.
For the last few days my internet connection has gone rather badly wrong. I am getting speeds reminiscent of when we were all on 14.4 dial up modems, which is pretty unhelpful for either EQ2 or Warhammer Online. Virgin Media are saying the local fault may take up to a week more to fix. As Maltheas would say, “Boos!!!!!”. It’s just as well though, as my Dad is visiting in a couple of days and the house needs some heavy cleaning to get up to his standards. So for now Maltheas abides a time in the Village of Shin, pondering the fate of Luclin.
Everquest 2 has launched a recruitment scheme with goodies for both the recruiter, and recruited. If any readers of this blog are interested in the 14 day trial, drop me a note in the comments, and I’ll shoot an invite off to you.
I’ve not popped into Warhammer for a while now. I notice that of the European servers, Burlok is the only one to be offering an xp bonus to both sides, so I’m guessing population is still an issue. In truth, I had started finding the RvR mechanisms increasingly irritating, lacking anything like the strategic depth of PotBS. The simple-minded nature of the war looks set to continue, though the bloodthirsty side of me is somewhat heartened by this upcoming change in patch 1.2 :
To help place more emphasis on Keep claiming and defence, as well as to combat the “defence by not defending” strategy, we are introducing the Zone Control Domination mechanic. With this system, players who take and hold all Battlefield Objectives and claim Keeps in a contested zone (in Tier 4) or a shared RvR lake (in Tiers 2 and 3) have the opportunity to capture that zone, forgoing the standard mechanics of Zone Control.
Each Battlefield Objective and Keep will be worth 1 Domination Point. To capture a zone via the Domination rules, your Realm must have all 6 Domination Points. In Tiers 2 and 3, capturing all six points in a shared RvR lake will give the capturing Realm control of the entire Tier. These are represented as small pip marks on the Zone Control Bar.
Battlefield Objectives and Keeps have different requirements for earning their Domination Point, as follows:
To earn a Domination Point from a Battlefield Objective, it must be owned by your Realm for 30 minutes.
To earn a Domination Point from a Keep, it must be claimed by a Guild and then held for 2 hours. If you lose control of a Battlefield Objective or Keep at any time, you lose the Domination Point.
Multiple Domination Points cannot be gained from a single source (for example, it isn’t possible to get 6 Domination Points by capturing Martyr’s Square 6 times).
If a zone that was taken over by Zone Domination is put into a contested state, all timers and Domination Points are reset.
That should, I hope, help to spread out the zergs a little, by forcing us to defend multiple locations.This new method of capturing zones is as it should have been from the very beginning, though I am somewhat irritated that keeps have to be claimed by a guild, rather than simply taken by the faction.
The change will improve the RvR on the level of base carnage, but it will also greatly shorten the length of the campaigns. A war campaign in Pirates of the Burning Sea takes a minimum of a few weeks, most likely longer with some back and forth, and involves a large amount of strategic planning. I wonder how quickly in WAR, from a starting map, could a campaign be successfully concluded (by the taking of the enemy capital)? With these changes I suspect it could all be done in a single weekend, given ideal conditions.
Now, I know that WAR never claimed to be a game of high strategy, but it is strategic depth that makes each campaign different from those that have come before it. I fear that by having so few real choices in how to go about the WAR campaign, with things changing so quickly that there is no time to think about anything more than the most basic of responses, it severely reduces replayability and long-term interest. I may just be speaking for my fellow strategy geeks though.
Right, I’d better get back to scrubbing the kitchen floor!
Reading an EQ2 forum a couple of weeks ago, I saw someone mention that on the PvP servers, folks like to lock their characters at 10th level. in order to try to accumulate a few achievement points, to give them an edge against enemy players.
That got me wondering. How many achievement points is it possible to have at 10th level? The posts thought perhaps 5 or 6, but I suspect that is an extreme underestimate of the amount of achievement xp that is out there. The answer is extremely important to anyone trying to survive in the hellish lands that are the Everquest2 PvP servers.
Maltheas, Ratonga Templar of Rodcet Nife, is my questing character, doing his level best to do every single quest in the game. He is permanently combat-xp disabled, and only enables quest xp when I have decided he absolutely needs to in order to proceed. Currently at level 34, he has over 400 more quests done than anyone else in the 30-39 level range (though given that most keen questers will have levelled out of tier 4, that’s not a terribly accurate guide.). More germane to my new project is that he has 81 Achievement points . He would have many more achievement points if he had not been born long before achievement points existed, so did not get AA xp for many of his early adventures. Yup, he’s a four year old character who is still level 34. Extreme questing takes time!
There are, of course, a lot of characters who have done more quests than Maltheas, but they are all significantly higher level. Here is the current leaderboard for characters up to level 50, the original level cap.
Needless to say, I’m extremely confident that our adventurous rat can smash the current top total on that chart. A mighty feat that absolutely no-one apart from me will care about in the slightest! I probably ought to post a little more often about what he gets up to, and the extreme-questing playstyle, but we’ll leave that for another time.
Alfrik, my new side project will be level-locked to 10th, and try to acquire as many Achievement points as possible. He’ll do this purely through soloing. I’ve picked a good soloing class for the job, the paladin. While I play on a PvE server, the results will still be applicable to the PvP servers, though it would be more time-consuming to achieve there, on account of being regularly murdered. This is where he currently stands, having just poked around a bit in the Peat Bog and Forest Ruins thus far.
Not sure whether to include exploration events yet. Technically he could run around the world getting every possible exploration event, but . For now, at least, I’ll stick to doing it the old-fashioned way with just quests and named monsters. Of course, he’ll snag a few explorations while he’s travelling around anyway. Decked out in a full suit of crafted iron platemail that he knocked up, let’s see how far he can progress. I’ll try to remember to post an occasional update!
