After a whirlwind world tour, and a couple of dings, it was back home to Stygia again, to find ourselves at last, ready for the big black pyramid that had been bothering me since I got out of Tortage. You can't really miss it, giant squatting monstrosity visible from clear across the zone, and so obviously a Den O Evil that it was something of a relief to actually be eligible for all the lead-in quests involved.
There's actually two instances in that neck of the woods, and we decided to warm up with a go at the other one first; the Treasury of the Ancients. One of the desert nomad types out front of the Pyramid turned out not to be there to mooch off the enigmatic Oracle of Derketo, but was in fact looking for some freelance antiquities retrieval specialists to wander by. Hello there!
I was actually very impressed with the Treasury actually. It's very short, as instances go, and somewhat linear in design, but... well, I don't want to spoil it actually, as the scripting used inside does something I never thought I'd ever see in an MMO; create suspense. Actual edge of the seat stuff, which coming from me, the kind of gamer who is generally immersed as a lily-pad these days, is saying a lot. Stuff Happens in there, and at points I was doubting my senses, and detecting actual signs of panic in myself. Remarkable, and worth a go if you're in that neck of the woods. Very well done. Its apparently a solo instance, but we were duoing. I can only imagine what it's like alone...
We made it out alive, and largely as sane as when we'd went in, and it was on to the main event, the Pyramid of the Ancients. This is more of the normal kind of MMO Instance kind of thing, a large rambling multi-levelled tomb full of objectives, monsters and the like. This one is very well done though, and almost DDO-like it it's design and complexity. It has traps, environmental effects, winding passageways, invisible ninja ambush, and a number of sub-bosses which required a little more than my usual Meet-n-Greet tactics, ("Hello! Can I interest you in the Good News!"... mash Hellstep...), instead involving using previously dropped items to significantly debuff them down to manageability.
Quite a quest haul on the rampage through, and I'm sure I dinged once just inside the place, which is always nice. Things went a bit complicated when we reached the summit and the final boss. A novel and curious designed encounter. The chap starts off normal enough; a largish thug in dire need of a concerted pamphlet campaign, but soon demons up. It's always the demons in AoC!
Once in his full glory, it all gets rather hectic, and choreographed, and reminded me somewhat of anecdotes I'd heard from the Front Lines of endgame WoW. Although not doing an awful lot of straight damage during the ensuing melee, the chap comes with four different insta-nukes he can casually toss out. They take a second or so to charge up, which you can see happening if you've got him targeted. Now, all through the preceding rampage, we'd been collecting four useable gems, which when used, will protect the team from the correctly colour coded blast. Had a bit of trouble with these; important thing to note here, is that they're No Trade, so it is vitally important to have the team work our who wants to be in charge of what gem.
We didn't, of course. I ended up with one and my compatriot had the other three. All made for quite a slapstick exercise, as we tried to coordinate gems, which seem to have linked reuse timers, and whose buffs overwrite each other, meaning that you can't just spam all four constantly, and of course, actually kill the bugger. On the plus side, the respawn shrine thing is only next door, but on the negative side, the entire thing resets if you all die. And there's a door that shuts behind you, preventing the old Tag-Team Attrition Strategy.
I was somewhat divided on the whole thing to be honest. Objectively, I couldn't help be impressed by the intricacy of it all. Its a very well designed encounter, which at an intellectual level, I approved of thoroughly. On the other hand, we did get our arses handed to use repeatedly, which has been known to make me grumpy! It was a good kind of grumpy though, and that special kind of nagging failure which makes me go away and plan and plot.
We'll be back...
I'd always shied away from the whole Meeting Online Friends in Real Life thing in the past, being that sort of person that revels in the cosy bubble that online anonymity provides. You hear stories about that kind of thing, often of The Crying Game Variety, but all sorts of other Urban Legend grade mishap too. Still, the ongoing Poddessy I seem to have embarked on is doing a lot of positive things to my long-withered and gnarled psyche, so the idea of meeting Internet Folks at a highly specialised horticultural gathering in the south of England wasn't quite as terrifying as I thought it would be.
Armed only with a Studio-In-A-Pocket recording device, and a low tolerance for chili, M'Producer and I headed out for a very surreal yet thoroughly enjoyable day out, much of which the Producer surreptitiously recorded, and cobbled together in a somewhat more elemental episode than usual, in many senses of the word.
The Van Hemlock Summer Roadshow (ep 13): In which six gaming nerds brave the themepark of the tastebuds that is the West Dean Chili Festival, in a Typical British Summer's Day. Burnination! Sombreros! Ninja-Kiwi-Assault! No small amount of MMO Discussion! And Samba!
It was very odd actually. One's friends are often the product of circumstance; people you get on with at school, college, university or work. They become good friends of course, but the common ground initially, is often nothing more than a quirk of geography. For common interests there are clubs, societies, evening classes and such, but for me, it was always The Internet, a place where I could easily get in contact with folks that like what I like, but whom I'd never actually meet.
Little wonder then that we spent something like seven hours nattering about gaming, a mini festival of obsession within a larger festival of obsession. You just can't talk about this stuff around The Normals...one of the main reasons I blog and podcast at all.
Anyway, a fine day out, despite the weather, and chili poisoning, in fine company:
Of Ice And Fire
Killed In A Smiling Accident
And here's that Cave Story thing Changeling Bob was on about:
Aeon Genesis: Cave Story (English)
Back to a more normal kind of show next week, but definitely going to have to start paying more attention to the UK Gaming Calendar, I think!
So I swallowed my Stygian pride and am now a world-wandering mercenary. I was hoping to get all the way through Khopshef Province without having to go elsewhere to level, but I'm an explorer at heart, so it was always going to be an inevitable thing I guess. Its an opportunity in disguise I think, and an opportunity to spread The Good News to ignorant foreign savages!
Its quite interesting to learn how much the two alternative zones, The Wild Lands of Zelata and Conall's Valley, differ from the Stygian adventure zone, and its more than just the scenery. Wild Lands seems to have quite a few more instances on offer, for example, while Conall's seems to have more than average in the way of group-based questing. They all look good, mind you, and I'm just enjoying the scenery of it all; suitably epic landscapes in all the zones I've seen so far. And of course, grabbing all the yellow !'s I see, and if you do it like that, a bit of of a worldwide smorgasbord of missioning, there seems very little need to hunker down and grind on mobs, certainly at this lower end anyway.
I'm learning that it isn't meant to be the usual kind of thing; a balanced set of alternative equivalents, so that each 'side' gets their own version of it all, there seem not to be any 'sides' in that sense, and instead, we're all meant to go to all of the zones. Fair enough, a wanderer I shall be!
Impressive sights so far include The Maze, a brooding spider and demon infested set of canyons that we were slightly overpowered for, and anyway, you know what spiders and cobwebs are like around Fire. Good News suitably driven home, we then went off to the big ruins in the middle of the map, which had another huge staircase! I love the Heroic Rampage Up The Big Staircase, so it was great to see the theme is repeated out in the post-Tortage real world. Once up the top, its on to the ever-present Undead Hordes, and beyond that, the enigmatic, and often LFGed Sanctum of Burning Souls. We peeked inside, then ran away screaming from the first 'trashmob' in the place, a rather enraged huge spider monster. Probably have to hold on the missionary work in there for the time being, I think.
Quite enjoyed the Border Range side instance place, which we happened to be just about the right level for, which is always nice. Its a winding canyon pass on the border between the warring nations of Aquilonia and Nemedia, and it seems the big military push has ground to a halt somewhat. Enter two hapless mercenaries, stage left! An interesting chain of quests in there, although we did have some troubles getting the requisite ticks in the journals. The Ranger went afk briefly, and me, full of enthusiastic zeal, managed to completely depopulate the place of the Dark Beast werewolf things, before they'd managed to get back. Unfortunately, the group shared ticks require your little team to be quite close together, or all land some damage or something, which meant the Ranger didn't get any of the ticks along the quest for my somewhat frenzied spree, so we had to both leave the place, degroup, regroup and then go back in to reset the place, to let the Ranger have a werewolf or two. Oops, my bad!
The plot thickens as we find a lost and routed Aqulionian patrol, and are sent all the way through the pass to the big Nemedian Fort at the far end and free a gaggle of prisoners. The whole 'not being close enough' thing reared it's ugly head again; I got all a bit Red Mist again, and was somewhere on the other side of the enemy camp, enlightening the natives on the Word of Xotli, (I love my job), while the Ranger was actually getting on with the whole Freeing the Prisoners bit, and by the time I calmed down, they'd already scarpered. No tick for me! Still, this must have been one problem they'd anticipated, as by the time I'd finished unsuccessfully beating myself against the closed fort door (which it turns out, you're not supposed to break down at all), the cage magically closed and filled up with prisoners again, allowing me to be a Hero too. Phew! So all in all, a bit quirky, but still a fun self-contained romp.
Later explorations have seen me poking about the Cimmerian lands too, which are all very Alpine, and a quick peek into the Fields of the Dead, which I'm not quite ready for yet, but which seems to be the only L40 Adventure zone on the map, so I expect plenty of Good News to be spread in there in the weeks ahead. Not wanting to neglect my Resource Gathering duties (Or more precisely, wanting to free up six quest slots), I then finished the tour by heading into Lacheish Plains, the Cimmerian Resource zone. I expect its quite nice too, but I ended up far beneath the world on entry, so will have to come back another time to see that properly. The Perils of Foreign Parts...you wouldn't get that kind of thing happening in Stygia, I can tell you!