February 2007 Entries
Another Tuesday, another rampage across the lands of the Istani. The basic business of teamwork seems to be coming together well for us now; practice having taught all three of us who should be doing what and when, and we're now into lands that allow a higher number of party members, which in turn, is allowing us to bring more Heroes and Henchmen along for the ride.
Although all the Heroes get unlocked for each of us, as we progress along the over-arching story of Nightfall, the business of equipping them, and keeping their skills up to date and useful can...
Good news, everyone! The top boffins in the Planetside equivalent of Q's Workshop have been hard at work coming up with new, innovative, and hopefully very comical, ways for Combat Engineers to blow up other people, and the fruits of these labours are soon to be unleashed:
OGRank: Planetside: Deployables are coming!
The new toys come in the form of two new certifications, which presumably will tack on the end of the existing Combat Engineering Certification:
Engineering (3) -> Combat Engineering (2) -> Fortification Engineering (3)
Engineering (3) -> Combat Engineering (2) -> Assault Engineering (3)
Looks like you'll be able to buy both Assault...
A different sort of card game last night, as one of the regulars had a prior engagement, leaving just the two of us playing. I'd not tried the EVE CCG in a two player game yet, and it quickly became apparent that this makes for a much quicker sort of game, although my increasing familiarity with that actual rules must be helping too.
Two teams vs three is an interesting design decision for any PvP type of game really, and seems to make an entirely different sort of war. With two teams (World of Warcraft, Star Wars: Galaxies) it's easy to...
Tuesday N00b Club again last night in Guild Wars: Nightfall, and time to decide on Secondary Professions. If Nightfall is anything like the original Prophecies campaign, we'll get the chance to change this choice later on down the road, but there's a considerable amount of Adventuring to be done until then, so it's quite a big decision, and a tricky one from my perspective, as I'm so used to thinking in terms of solo viability, and in any event, I still have trouble getting the hang of a truly hybrid character.
On previous occasions, mostly with my 'main', a Ranger/Necromancer, I...
Ah, my old friend, the Exit Survey. Seen quite a few of these now, often several for the same game, as I buzz about MMO obsession like a bluebottle on a windowsill, or something. It's that page in the web-based account management setting where they get to try a bit of minor post-mortem on a love gone awry, in the hope that the answers you give might help the game do a better job of maintaining the spark of romance with it's other hundred thousand lovers, and indeed, help it make itself more attractive for future reconciliation.
I often find you...
Slightly overshadowed by the whole Valentine's Day thing, it's also Chinese New Year time (18th Feb), and another excuse for the MMO to do something a bit different. I'd kind of forgotten really, and it wasn't until I looted a 'Lunar Token' during a re-run of the Infusion mission in Guild Wars, mostly to capture the 'Barrage' Ranger Elite skill, that I remembered.
Intrigued, I headed to Lion's Arch, figuring that if anything was happening in GW, it'd be happening there, and I wasn't wrong. The place was almost unrecognisable, festooned with red paper lanterns and seasonal NPCs, fortune tellers, lamp-lighters,...
Two new categories on the right, since both the EVE Card Game and the Guild Wars Group are becoming regular things. I'm sort of breaking my own rules a bit, talking about the card game, since this is supposed to be an MMO Blog of sorts, but feel free to skip the CCG category posts if you're just here to read me ranting about my inability to hit the side of an Amp Station with a Bolt Driver, or similar!
Last night's game was of a quite different texture to the first outing, with us doing a much better job of...
Was tidying up after another protracted, but enjoyable EVE CCG session last night, staring at my unusually dormant PC and had one of those brutally frank examinations of self, realising that I seem to have drifted out of Everquest 2 again. Normally this is my cue to start ranting and railing at game design, grinding, monotony and the nature of fun, but to be perfectly honest, I don't think it's actually EQ2's fault this time.
At a purely mechanical level, it remains a good solid game - well, I think so anyway. Various refinements over the years have made it...
It was the newly formed Tuesday N00b Club's inaugural outing last night, making a shaky but encouraging start on the Guild Wars: Nightfall Campaign. I'm probably breaking the First and Second Rules of Tuesday N00b Club, even talking about it here to be honest, but until 'Brad Pitt' learns to use CTRL+Space instead of just Space when pulling mobs, I don't feel quite that guilty, to be honest.
It all started as a bit of a bid to bring some kind of order to the chaos that is my evening free-time. I've played dozens of these things now, and met quite...
Thank god...news! I've done absolutely nothing of memorable note at all, online, in the last few days, so was all set to grind out a half-arsed opinion piece on that whole EVE Online Cheating Devs Fiasco, (of which I know nothing about, having not played EVE in a year, not been in any of the corps mentioned and never having owned a Tech 2 BPo), when Turbine obligingly lift the Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar Closed Beta NDA. Huzzah!
This signals the start of the main phase of the Traditional MMO Launch, as all us blogfolk start having...
An unusual night in last night, and one which didn't involve the PC at all, as I got a chance to try out the recent EVE Online Collectable Card Game, first hand, which has it's own website here.
What with all the first-time fumbling with rules on my part, and the fact that we played a three-player game, we only managed to get the one full game in, over perhaps about two hours or so. We played with decks built beforehand by one of my opponents, from the basic starter packs of cards, with some boosters I think, each deck based...
Purely by chance, I ended up taking part in one of Planetside's "Rabbit Ball" events last night. They've been doing these for a while now, in an attempt to spice up and vary the day-to-day base-capture board-game of the usual session in there.
I'd been pottering about on the smaller peripheral fights, going where-ever the 'Instant Action' sends me, as I tend to do, and mostly found myself bouncing between various small incursions into friendly (NC in my case) continents with perhaps less than ten highly mobile recon/assault troops on each side. I tend to do best in the bigger...
A bit of a lull in the ongoing Guild Wars storyline for me at the moment. Last session saw me and my Elementalist friend finish Missions 23 (Ring of Fire) and 24 (Abaddon's Mouth) without too much fuss, although both were quite hard work. We've fought our way up a very Tolkienesque volcano, to the top, and then we did something very silly indeed, and now the world stands on the edge of firey destruction, proving once again that the biggest threat to any half-way stable magical medieval society, is Heroes. Ooops! Our bad! Naturally, since it was our fault,...
Another month, another Carnival, which is now 21 already, making it eligible to drink beer in the US, or stand as a Member of Parliament here in the UK, where we've already been drinking since 18! (Three years being the accepted length of time to develop the really good alcohol problem considered helpful for representing The People in this country, or something.)
Jason Preston: Carnival of Gamers #21
All sorts of interesting bits and pieces there...off you go!
Still quite enjoying Planetside, having settled back into my regular reservist character on Werner NC. It's the one featured in the Medal Case link to the right, and having gained a fair degree of competence with the Rocklet Rifle, I'm determined to get a medal for actually killing things myself. All my present medals are mostly from the Support Category, gained indirectly - by helping other soldiers kill stuff in some manner, reflecting the somewhat lazy and back-footed play style I normally enjoy.
For me, it's not really about charging out there, guns blazing and racking up hundreds of +1 to...