For some reason, the screenshots from LOTRO look even better than when you’re in-game! Here’s my dwarf, looking, dwarf-like.
Category Archives: Games
Goodbye EverQuest
So yesterday I closed my last remaining EverQuest account. It’s been a fun time, but I’ve just gradually moved away from EQ. Some of it is frustration with the game, some to do with the direction it had gone and was going, and some is just because I’ve been doing it so long.
The game in my view is damned if it does now and damned if it doesn’t. They needed to close the gap between ‘hard-core’ players and ‘casual’ players or risk totally losing one of those segments of the playerbase, however, each change to achieve that alienates another bunch of players. While I understood the need for the changes, they didn’t enhance my game they just made me feel like it wasn’t worth trying.
The people in EQ kept me playing for longer than the game alone would have and without them it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much fun, so if any of them read this – thanks, it really was an honour.
I’m past devoting that much time to a single game, I play Lord of the Rings On-line casually, sometimes spending lots of time in game and sometimes not playing for ages, but I can always pick it up and drop it as required. It suits me, and I love the lore. So if you know me and you want to say hi, pop in to the [EN-RP] Laurelin server and look me up.
Thanks to everyone in the guilds I was in, the groups I was in, and anyone who had to put up with my control-freakery nature.
SMORG (Smallish-Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game)
We’ve had MMORPGs (massively multi-player online roleplaying games) for a while and now we’re increasingly just calling them MORPGs (Multi-player online roleplaying games).
During a conversation with friends we decided you needed Smallish-Multiplayer Online Roleplaying games (SMORG) to cover old games which have shrinking player bases, games which never really took off, and games which naturally thrive with small groups of players.
So, feel free to use this term.
I cancelled my last EQ account yesterday
These posts are archives of forum / blog entries I made on my EverQuest guild website. The website won’t be around forever, and I wanted the posts all in one place so I didn’t lose them, this blog seemed like as good a place as any.
I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise to most people, but I cancelled my last EQ account yesterday (Grayhelm) after stopping the other two in the last few months. I’ve not been in game for quite a while, it seemed silly to continue paying for it.
It has been my honour to experience this game with you, to be there at 2am during our breakthroughs, to be there during the fun times and the hard times.
EverQuest is a life experience, not just a game. It’s a social environment in which people form relationships, and those relationships kept me in the game well past the point where the game alone was fun. That’s testimony to the quality of the people, in the guild and in the game as a whole.
I don’t regret my time in EQ.
(The website is safe for as long as it’s required. I will continue to maintain / patch the code as required.)
Take care folks, enjoy what you do where ever you do it. If you’re ever in Lord of the Rings Online on a European server let me know (I hang out there casually, killing Orcs and screaming Baruk Khazâd!)
You can find me here -> http://perceptionistruth.com and you can mail me at my regular mail address (which is gnomtrix at gmail dot com).
Fascinating D&D history
Fascinating post over at Adventures in Gaming (link here) which charts the potted history and origins of basic Dungeons and Dragons and AD&D 2nd Edition.
Well worth a look if you’re remotely interested in roleplaying.
Take a ride on the Moria-go-round
I’ve played a lot more of Moria since I wrote my first mini-review and have seen a lot more content and thought I’d post a quick second review of the expansion. When I wrote the first article I’d completed most of Eregion and had seen Moria. Now I’ve spent a week exploring Moria, and have seen about three-quarters of the major locations and quested heavily in nearly half of them.
So how is it holding up?
Moria
The first thing I want to say is that the music in Moria is just superb. It easily makes the game a much richer experience and is both dramatic and appropriate. The music changes depending on which area of Moria you’re in and gives you a sense of the danger or safety of the location. The folk who scored this game deserve some recognition in an award.
Graphically Moria is as good as my first impressions made it feel, if not better. The architecture is epic and grand, and while each area has a distinct graphical look and feel, they also fit well together and a number of themes are present (for example, huge dwarf face carvings, or columns of immense proportions).
I’ve included a short video to give you an example, I was going to use screenshots but as I say in the video voice over, they didn’t capture the grand scale, because until you see the camera rotate, you don’t always realise how huge everything is.
Running around the place makes you feel like you’re taking part in an enormous adventure, the re-taking of Moria is in your blood, and you’ll do whatever it takes to defeat the evil and help the dwarves win.
Speaking of evil, there’s plenty of it around within the halls of Moria. Goblins and Orcs abound and they’ve been given a graphical facelift for their appearance in this expansion. The goblins look even more like those in the Moria segments of the movie, and the Orcs are subtly different from those in the rest of the game. The mines don’t have a huge range of other creatures within them, but there are worms, bats, beetles and other insects, frogs, salamanders, lizards, morroval, spiders (yes Oly, it has spiders) and wargs (so far). A lot of the critters don’t attack on sight, but there are enough enemies that do to make running anywhere a challenge. The intelligent creatures (orcs, goblins, morroval) are broken up into particular camps for the most part, while the other critters are spread throughout the mines in varying quantities.
The Moria area is broken up into 10 major locations, but they share the same chat channels (if you’ve played Lord of the Rings online you know that major locations such as Breelands or The Shire have their own chat channels for out of character, trade, advice, etc.) This is useful because it ensures you can talk to players anywhere within the Mines, but that each location gets a detailed map and a different feel. As well as the main locations there are instances and areas outside of the mines (other than just Eregion and Lothlorien). Movement between locations is achieved usually through a narrow entrance (either a corridor or bridge), although this isn’t always the case. Each main area has at least one horse master (although you use goats) and at least one main quest providing area (usually a dwarf camp).
So we get to the quests, the core of the Lord of the Rings Online and I have to say, Moria is just as pleasing in that regard as Eregion was. The quests are engaging, usually make some sense and encourage exploration of the surrounding areas. There is plenty of confusion caused by the use of multiple names for the same places (dwarven names and common names for example) which can sometimes lead you on a merry run around, but it all adds flavour. Each major hub has a bunch of quests in the immediate area and they expand the lore and tell the story of the Mines. As usual, there’s then one or two quests which send you off to the next major hub when you’ve finished the main lines in the current location. However there’s nothing to prevent you running ahead and picking quests from any location, and in fact it does sometimes help because quest tasks do overlap every now and then.
I do have some issues with some of the quest rewards (mainly weapons) but I’ll cover that in the Legendary Items section below. There is a new addition to the range of quest rewards – direct item experience which provides a nice boost to any legendary items you’re working on at the time. My Minstrel has quested (casually, so no Elite instances) throughout all the previous zones including Angmar and Goblin Town, and the armour and jewellery rewards from the Moria quests are useful upgrades in most cases.
The quests cover the usual range of activities, helping people escape from enemy infested areas, killing various numbers of enemy creatures, collecting random pieces of paper or lost artefacts and helping the dwarves generally gain control of the surrounding locations. There are some nice touches (and a feature of the LoTRo quest engine I love), for example you are required at one stage to recite a story in front of various dwarven statues to honour the builders of Moria. In general the quest experience is high quality and engaging.
Legendary Items
I covered Legendary Items briefly in my previous post, having not had much chance to play with them. Now I’ve had much greater exposure and I find them both over- and underwhelming. The choice and sheer number of items is overwhelming. A two or three hour questing session can result in 5-15 Third Age Legendary Items for myself and Grete which we split. Maybe one or two of those are useful for our classes and the rest are for classes we don’t play. On top of that we gather further items which can be traded in for Third Age Legendary Items that are always useful for our class. So far, in about a week of play we’ve seen two Second Age Legendary Items (supposedly better than Third Age). On top of the sheer number, each item appears to have randomly generated benefits, so they’re sometimes hard to compare.
If you can’t use the items you can break them down into Relics, and up to three Relics can be placed into an item to further improve it. Additionally, the Relics can be merged together to make more powerful Relics (5 to 1). You can be earning XP on up to 6 Legendary Items at a time, even if they’re not currently equipped. Breaking down items one level after they’re reforged (every 10 levels) produces better rewards than if you had done them a level earlier (i.e. breaking them down at 11, 21, 31 is better than 10, 20, 30). The rewards can include Relics, items which give item XP when clicked and Legendary Shards.
Add all those things together and it’s very easy to get overwhelmed with choice. I had originally thought we would get a weapon and keep it for a long time, levelling it as we went. However it’s clear we’re going to be switching weapons quite a lot early on, until maybe getting just the right one for a little while. But basically, I find it all overwhelming.
And underwhelming? Yes, because so far the Legendary Items don’t seem that fantastic. Yes, they add bonuses you can’t get anywhere else, and some of those are cute, but I’m past caring about tiny improvements in stats on characters, I did that for seven years with EverQuest, now I just want to be able to survive the quests I do with Grete and friends and be able to complete the non-hardcore content. So in some ways, the range of features on Legendary Items doesn’t impress me.
A final word on this, the reward everyone gets for gaining access to Moria is a Legendary weapon. However, quest rewards further on inside Moria still give normal weapon rewards. Those weapons are pretty impressive in their own right. I’m confused about this choice, because I thought we were being encouraged to use Legendary Items as weapons, and yet a few quests in we’re being offered clubs and swords which far outstrip the DPS of the Legendary Weapons we’re wielding. This confuses me a great deal and I’m not sure what the intent of the developers was. Yes, some classes dual wield and so need two weapons, and someone suggested you could use a nice quest reward while levelling an inferior Legendary Weapon until it got better, but those seem like minor issues to me. Either Legendary Weapons are where it’s at, or they’re not and the mixed message from the developers tarnishes this otherwise interesting mechanic for me.
Lothlorien
Lastly a very brief word on Lothlorien. I ran my dwarf all the way through Moria and out the other side (and very scary it was too). Lothlorien is initially blocked by another set of quests, in an area just outside the mines. As I understand it, the Lothlorien area is quite small, the development team focussed their efforts on Moria (and did very well) and the larger Lothlorien will be the result of the next free book of material.
Conclusion
I am so happy with the Mines of Moria. I think the development team did a superb job capturing the feeling and the scope. With the exception of one or two minor flaws this expansion has been the best MMORPG I’ve ever experienced.
Cool game
Spotted this link over at Critical Hits, and they’re right, you really should check out this cool game. It’s like a puzzle game with a stream of ‘stuff’ you have to re-direct to fill up meters, but as you do so they play sound and as the levels get more complex so does the music.
You need your speakers on, really, it’s cool. Play’s fullscreen, so probably not something you can get away with at work.
Heroism and D&D
I read this interesting article over at Dungeon Mastering website about why we should be thankful for D&D. I commented over there, but wanted to expand on what I said. Here’s my comment,
RPG Blog Carnival: Transitions and Transformations
Introduction
Interesting concept over at Critical Hits about a blog carnival, covering the topic of Transitions and Transformations. I thought I’d have a go at writing a little piece.
Here’s my opening premise. Roleplaying is all about transformation, the very core of the concept is transformation and growth and transformation permeates every level of the game.
Transformation:
The act of transforming, or the state of being transformed; change of form or condition
Roleplaying is Transforming your personality
At the most basic level, playing a role or taking on another character is a transformation. Your personality or behaviour is transformed from your regular state to a new state. The act of roleplaying encourages you to transform your view point, your understanding and your personality to that of another. Whether this is to accommodate a different mythology, universe, period of time or even a different race or gender doesn’t really make much different, the root action is to transform yourself to another state of mind.
Character growth as Transformation
On top of that we have a basic mechanic in virtually all roleplaying games of progression or growth. Powers develop and improve over time, skill trees open up, abilities become greater, whatever mechanism the game uses, most games offer some progression or improvement. That progression is transformation and a necessary skill of roleplaying is adapting to that change over time. What you could do in the past has changed and what you can do in the future will be different. While this is true outside of roleplaying games, inside the game the rate of progression is much greater (on the whole) than it would be in non-gaming life. This transformation of ability at pace means you must adapt to change quickly to bring your new strengths to bear on tougher and more complex challenges.
Social Transformation
Roleplaying is a social activity; a form of interactive storytelling. In any social situation relationships change over time, another example of transformation. In order for gaming groups to be successful they have to deal with those relationship changes, and for long running gaming groups this can be a serious challenge. This transformation can occur in-game with character relationships, as we learn more about our characters and the other characters in the game, our relationships change and morph, and equally it changes in the real world as we learn more about our gaming friends, or add new friends to the group.
Transformation makes the game world real
And lastly a key element for me. Static game worlds feel fake where-as worlds which undergo transformation feel real. If characters have little or no impact on the overall state of the world, at whatever level (local town, big city, country, continent, solar system, what ever is appropriate), then we may begin to wonder what the point of our interaction is. Clearly there are some gaming situations where that feeling of helplessness is core to the game, but even then we would expect the world around us to change as the result of other influences. A transforming world helps us feel part of that world, and a world which transforms as a result of our gaming actions makes us feel as though our characters have some real presence.
Conclusions
I think the original premise of the Blog Carnival was probably to discuss examples of transformation and transition within games, maybe specific examples, but for me the whole roleplaying experience is about managing transformation. Transformation of personality, character strength, relationships and world setting. Those four things make up the changing environment of roleplaying and are the essential elements of a dynamic and interesting roleplaying experience.
How who you are affects how you roleplay (or DM/GM)
I was reading this interesting article over at the Gnome Stew which discusses how your life experience affects how you roleplay. I read the article and the comments with interest, because clearly my life has been pretty boring over the last 37 years compared to those folk. I went to University, did a computing degree and have had a desk job ever since (support, development, technical support, infrastructure, etc.)
I think however, that one of the major elements in roleplaying is problem solving. Specifically, team based problem solving. On top of that you have all the other elements of team working, communication and planning. Those skills are invaluable when roleplaying and they’re invaluable in most other aspects of life as well. I think good shared storytelling involves conflict and conflict resolution, and underpinning that is a root cause of some problem (or many problems and challenges) that you have to overcome as a team. In too many games those problems are simply boiled down to ‘you meet 10 orcs’, in good games, those problems are more varied, more complex and have deeper roots.
I’ve always been interested in solving problems, it’s why I enjoy being in an IT support function so much. The varied challenges, the different problems and the requirement to understand causes and implement solutions really gets me going. It’s no different during roleplaying, both as a player and as a DM. As a DM, I introduce lots of problems (or try to), and game play is driven by overcoming those challenges. As a gamer, I want to be challenged to solve things, not just ‘the best way to defeat this encounter of 10 orcs’ but the best way to get somewhere, the right strategy to defeat some complex powerful well organised enemy, solve the underlying causes of political strife in a small town, understand what happened to cause some problem that people are experiencing, etc. And I want to do that in a team environment.
Team based problem solving where you come together with disperate skill sets and arrive at a successful conclusion is something I enjoy in the real world and in my gaming, be it board games, tabletop roleplaying or MMORPGs.
So I guess that’s how who I am affects how I roleplay.
I guess this depends on the kind of person you are. I know a lot of roleplayers who wanted to play the sneak, the liar, the bully, the bad guy. They got a kick from it, a challenge, and that’s fine, I can live with that. Some game settings thrive on that, and some thrive on trickery or deception. Some game settings intentionally blur the line between good and bad, that’s how they’re designed to be played.
But D&D, in it’s original form and even more so in 4th edition is about being a hero or heroine. It’s not about beating up folk and extorting treasure, it’s not about attempting to overthrow legitimate kingdoms and take them over, it’s not even about killing orcs for the sake of it.
It’s about smiting orcs because they are evil. It’s about recovering treasure from the vaults of evil lizardmen. It’s about rescuing the good people who need to be rescued and putting down the evil tyrants who took them in the first place. The world is in peril, the forces of evil stand on the brink of victory, this is your chance. To make a stand. To be the light in the darkness. To shine brightly, for however long it takes to drive back the storm.
Don’t muddy the waters with morals.
Be strong. Stand firm. The enemy is upon you.
Now is the time for heroes.