Arcane Gamer

It’s been about 4 weeks now since my last post, this due mainly to the fact I hadn’t really achieved anything of note until this weekend when a lot of pieces just seemed to fall into place.

On Saturday - Tudor my Swashbuckler hit the level 80 adventure level cap, achieved by just quest grinding. This is by no means the end now for Tudor until the next expansion, I still plan to further his career as an alchemist and get him from his current level 38 to 80.

Grissom had a fantastic weekend - he did a “Nest of the Great Egg” run, dual boxing with Negnar to both make it easier and to mentor down for the chests off names. This netted a Dirge lvl 68 Master1: “Garsin’s Haunting March”. He also got the quest advancement for leading Hoo’Loh to the Great Egg.

Griss next went to the Sanctum of the Scaleborn to get the blood from one of the Warriors, this proved real easy because at level 78 you can pretty much run around with most mobs non-agro to you. Next was a trip to the Palace of the Awakened - I knew I should have been able to dual box it, but a bad pull near the top ended the run, and with that I decided the day was over.

On Sunday - I was pretty much just planning to have a quiet and relaxing few hours in EQ2, and this for me usually means crafting or harvesting. I thought I would have an attempt in the Crafting Chat Channel to see if there was anyone able and willing to help with advancements to Grissom’s Epic Crafter Quest. I still had 6 of the 9 items required still to be crafted, and made sure I had everything including the fuels sitting ready in my inventory.

This proved to be very successful - another 3 items done, with thanks to the following players on the Befallen server.

Nasheedat the Tailor for making me the Solstice Robe.
Frilly the Carpenter for making me the Picnic Basket.
Solonoir the Jeweller for making me the Ruby Encrusted Stein.

I then spotted Darkthorn who was asking if anyone wanted to come along to the Halls of Fate, and before I knew it - the blood from the Abominations, the Centurions, and Sothis the Dragon were crossed off the “Blood of the Brood” quest list. The Bloodscale dreadknights from PoA were all I required to get to the last and easy sneak to the egg part of this signature quest and as luck would have it - so did others in the group.

Job Done!

Grissom in his class hat after completing The Blood of the Brood quest.

And the end to a great weekend that gave me a much needed positive mental boost towards EQ2.

I find that as the years pass - my enthusiasm and love of video game entertainment has never faltered. That’s not to say I have become a great player, but I have had a whole lot of fun along the way.

From the costal holiday resort amusement arcades of the late 1970’s to my first home computer in 1982 (Sinclair ZX Spectrum). From the large array of personal computers such as BBC Micro, Commodore 64 and the Amiga, to my long term and rather costly home of the modern day PC system.

And not forgetting of coarse a collection of consoles from Nintendo, Sega, and Sony that tempted me along the way.

The great irony I find is that the older I get the easier it has become to afford to buy the nice shiny video game hardware my heart desires - however as I am always working to pay for it I never seem to get the time to use it.

And that is more long winded way than I originally planed to say I pretty much missed most of the Everquest 2 XP bonus weekend. I managed about 2 hours on Sunday to run Randle around the Fens doing quests; this netted about 43% XP towards level 71. But I was kind of disappointed a little as I hoped to have the time to get a little closer to 72 and an amour shopping trip. But I guess there will be other chances.

On Oblivion…

I also managed to play Oblivion for a couple of hours on Friday night, and this time remembered to take a couple of screen shots.

First - this is Nenea my game character, she is based on the Mystic Elf, and is a custom class I chose to name Arcane Archer (not very original I know).

And next is shot showing the retextured coins.

At the moment I am steering away from starting the main quest and just soaking up all the smaller and guild related quests I can find.

Continuing with my quest to make Oblivion look and play better than it does straight out of the box my focus changed to the games characters, and in particular to find some player created Mods to help create a character I would be happy with.

This task was pretty much achieved with a single Mod, or rather a Mod that collects and combines a few Mods into one package. Beautiful People 2.7

This mod combines the following mods:
Ren’s Beauty Pack and Mystic Elves
Nequam’s Ainmhe, Nequam’s Elaborate Eyes
KyneTarse’s Vampire Hunter’s Sight and Khajiit Night Eye toggles
Grimdeath and Syko Fox’s Tang Mo
Capucine’s Colorable Beast Hair
Com’s Argonian Headsets
Trigger190’s Bald Hairstyle
Theodic Marthil’s Skyrim Khajiit.

It was Ren’s Beauty Pack and Mystic Elves that caught my eye. The higher resolution skin textures remove the vanilla games blotchy skin look, and there are some nice hair and eye choices. Plus of coarse I want to play the female Mystic Elf character.

Happy that my character creation needs were met I then found a few smaller, but very nice little Mods:-

Vagabond’s Better Gold.
This changes the gold coins you sometimes find in game to look like the one that came with the collector’s edition of the game (and very nice it was - I do have one).

Better Potion Bottles.
This is just a re-texture, but they sure look better than the vanilla ones.

Reznod’s Mannequins.
You can buy Mannequins for your houses and store your armor sets on them.

DarkUI’d DarN
Slightly more important Mod this one, it changed my UI to be a little more PC orientated.

Improved Soul gems by Quarn.
Adds color to Soul Gems so they no longer all look so similar.
petty - light green
lesser - dark blue
common - light blue
greater - dark purple
grand - orange

That’s about all the mods I have installed to date - except for an improved weather one that I can’t remember the name of at this time (I’m at work now).

Talking of work - I had better get on and do some.

Griss.

My wanting to play Oblivion again (not that I got very far when I first played it back when it was released in 2006) hasn’t slipped away. Despite it being about a month ago now since I installed the base game and all the official add-ons and expansions from both Knights of Nine and The Shivering isle - I have spent a fair few hours messing about with the game.

The original plan was not to go crazy with installing player Mods - but the problem I had with the game originally was not liking the levelling up system, so I set out to change this, and - well… things kind of went on from there. But now I think I am finally in a happy place with the game and ready to start playing over the weekend.

What follows is information of player created modifications I have installed into the Oblivion game. The order I have listed them in is not the order in which I installed things myself - but this way should avoid some of the little mod conflicts I had - although they were nothing major and easily rectified. As always though I would suggest reading each Modifications readme file before installing, and of coarse make a back-up of the games folders so you can return it to the point at which you were last happy.

First thing was to check the game was officially patched to v1.2.0416, installing the Shivering Isles expansion may do this for you, or will have to go visit the official games patches section to download it.

Next was the Unofficial Patch V3.
What this does is best described in their own words.
“This mod is a joint effort to fix the vast amount of bugs currently existing in Oblivion v1.2.0.416, fixing over 1,600 bugs so far!”
One of the important fixes for me with this patch was the ability to get a custom race like the Mystic Elves out of the starting dungeon prison cell. The vanilla game leaves you unable to trigger the stating conversation.

Then I upgraded the games landscape, caves, dungeons, and interior Textures with higher resolution ones using Qarl’s Texture pack 3. First I used the full blown package - but found even using an 8800GTX with 756mb of Vram this produced a little stutter whilst running in areas requiring lots of texture changes. Although this was minor - I was still pleased to find an optimized (Redimized) version that reduced the file sizes of the textures but maintained the new found level of detail.

Again this is the modders own words:
“With the third version of his texture pack for Oblivion, Qarl set very high
standards for the visual quality of games using high resolution textures. He
showed possibilities that inspire other texture artists and even professional
game designers can learn from just looking at his work. But his pack also set
high demands on PC hardware. Even high-end systems still stutter with the
enormous load it demands.”

“That’s why dev_akm and I, Bomret, decided to try lowering the system
requirements while still maintaining the unique, high-resolution, very detailed
look of Qarl’s textures. We have put almost every QTP3 texture through a very
complicated and time-consuming process to achieve this goal — all by hand (no
automated scripts). We chose to make our decisions on a per-texture base while
keeping the overall look and performance in mind at the same time.”

“The name “Redimized” means Reduced and Optimized.”

Next was to find a mod that would bring a better balance to the world of Oblivion, and there were a couple that interested me, but I went with Francesco’s levelled Creatures and Items Mod along with the optional new item and creatures add-on.

This choice was purely down to personal taste, I just liked what I read about the changes it makes more than with other available mods. Having run around a couple of dungeons with it installed I like the way it makes challenging but balanced game-play and promises to maintain this from start to finish.

The changes it makes are vast, and it’s best to go read the site’s Info to find out more.

If like me you have played the game before, the extra Item and Creature add-on for Francesco’s levelled Mod will also breathe some new life into the old dog.
Here is more info in their own words:
“There’s also an items add-on adding 1.400+ new (carefully balanced) quality items to loot lists and a creatures add-on adding 120+ quality user made creatures of many types/level ranges and dozens of new re-textured variants of existing creatures/animals”

Ok -think I will wrap up this post now as it covers pretty much everything I did in regards to the games world, next time I will talk about the character related cosmetic stuff, and a few other texture changes.

Just when I thought I had finally got my head together in regards to Everquest 2, spent hours of thought and soul searching to pick just 2 out of my 5 characters to devote my time to… they go and introduce the “Living Legacy” event, and along with it reactivate all closed accounts.

This of coarse meant (due to being the weak minded person I am) I found myself dual boxing with Negnar my Mystic again. Perhaps this post should have been titled “I’m Giving up - Giving up”.

What could I do? The chance of 2 months free dual boxing was just too tempting, so out came all the alts over the weekend.

Randle achieved the most - he completed enough quests to get past the -20,000 faction required with the Bathezid Watch, and then worked his way through part of the Epic Crafting Quest which included a fun packed trip to Nektropos Castle for a spot of Red^^^ rat dodging before finally getting his Epic Recipe - The Picnic Basket.

Feeling a bit lazy I scanned the Broker rather than spending time harvesting and bought all the Rare’s required for the last part, but it will probably take sometime before I find enough kind and willing crafters to help make all the items required to finish the quest. Not that this is a bad thing - when done I will wear my Cloak of The Master Carpenter with pride.

Whilst doing all this Randle my Guardian also hit level 70.

Negnar dual boxed with Randle to help keep him alive in Kunark and hit level 73.

Auberon my Fury spotted a group requiring heals - logged in and joined them for an Obelisk of Blight run that gained him level 66.

Grissom and Tudor didn’t gain any levels, but they did a few adventure writ runs for the guild. I’m trying my best to keep saving that status for September and the Live Update that will introduce Guild Halls to EQ2, although I am not sure as to how status will be used or if our guild “The Allied Qeynosians” on the Befallen server will be of a high enough level to obtain a hall.

Currently our guild is at level 65, which is really good considering how few active members we seem to now have. Without doubt this achievement is mostly due to the relentless efforts of Maria, she logs in nearly everyday and works through a few adventure or tradeskill writs - this level of dedication has netted her around 4.5 Million in Guild Status.

So that’s where I am with EQ2 at this time - back to having 2 accounts whilst my second is free with this promotion, then it will be decision time as to whether I will pay to keep it going or not.

In the dark recesses of my mind there is another new alt looming as I wonder if there is a better healer type than my Mystic to match with Randle the Guardian whilst dual boxing. With all the bonus XP days we may have coming and the supply of XP potions I get rewarded for a Veterans account - now would be the ideal time to create one. I will have to hit the Guardian forums for an answer I think.

I have to admit to feeling a little disappointed with Age of Conan last night.

Nenea my Ranger completed the last of her trainer quests and left Tortage to enter the game proper. Around Tortage I had great fun, and enjoyed the main quest line which I thought was much more engrossing than most of the stuff I have done in Everquest 2.
But alas upon leaving Tortage I find the NPC quest givers no longer talk, instead its back to either reading the text quest descriptions that to me seem to need a better and clearer font, or as I find myself doing now - just quickly clicking through it without reading.

So what happened?

Did they run out of money budget for the voice actors? Or is their philosophy simply that after level 20 we should have the player hooked enough so we no longer have to bother.

I don’t want to make a huge deal about this, but it really did feel like Age of Conan took a step backwards when this happened. Perhaps it’s just me, but I feel it’s about time that today’s so called Next-Gen MMORPG’s show a consistent production level from the moment you enter the world for the first time - right up to the current end of game content.

I think before adventuring any further into the game I will roll another character tonight and go through the first 20 levels of content again. Not sure as to which class I will go with yet, but it will definitely be a spell weaver of sorts - so either mage or priest.

The reason for this is mainly because I really only want one character in AoC - so I want to be sure I am not going to invest lots of my time into a Ranger only to wish I was in my more comfortable role of a mage later in the game, especially whilst grouping.

Griss.

At the moment I am very much in the new MMORPG bubble. You know - where everything is new and exciting, quests are bountiful - and those level ups just keep coming. Well I’m making the most of it whilst it lasts - as inevitably from past experience the bubble will burst, and life will become a grind.

Whilst out adventuring one thing that was puzzling me was that I could not find stuff to harvest for crafting, but I have since learnt that crafting is not available until you reach level 40.
The developers did not see the point in players grinding though a system making worthless stuff for low level players who are levelling up quickly, they thought players would get a better experience if the started crafting at a later stage when items created would have better stats and worth. I would think this pretty much kills the game for those more dedicated MMO artisans who like having alts and the ability to create everything they need. I’m looking forward to experiencing the crafting element of AoC as I read it is quest based levelling system.

A few hours in - and I have got to grips with my skills and the combat system now, this is evident because my death rate has dropped a lot. That snare trap skill I have really does help me get a few extra ranged shots in before switching to melee and the creatures labelled “Boss” are now falling at my feet, although I am yet to get any nice loot drop off them.

Something that feels a little alien to me at the moment are the loot drops, you really have to look closely at them because although that new item dropped may be the same level and of the same name as the one you already have - it may just have one of its stats 0.1 higher. I guess I have just got to get to grips with a decimal point in my stats and not living in an integer world.

Also the types of armor seem a little strange. Unless it is hidden behind the scenes amongst the dark bowels of the games mechanics I don’t see any level of mitigation attached to armor. Some of the cloth armor I have found has had better stats than the leather items, so I have been wearing it - and doing fine. Could it be that mitigation against damage is just based on your class and level and does not get affected by armor modifiers? I guess it would make life easier for the developers.

The game itself is running and looking great, visually it kind of reminds me of Oblivion with its lush landscape littered with the weather beaten ruins of buildings and structures. There is zoning, but the loading times aren’t too bad, and some of the zones a pretty big.

After learning that the DX10 version of the game did not ship (so even if you select it in options it is not actually running) I decided to load the game on my faster Windows XP machine. This has a Intel Dual Core CPU with a stock speed of 3 GHz but is overclocked to 3.6 GHz. It has 2 Gig of DDR2 RAM and an 8800 GTX graphics card. The graphic options are set to “High” with AA x2, and AF x8.

I’m not sure of what the FPS are, never thought to check. I will take a look when I log on tonight and update here.

( Update: 27/05/2008 ) – Average frame rates: 35 FPS in Tortage City areas, 40 to 55 outside, and around 50 to 70 in dungeon areas.

After a quick search of the internet I see the Age of Conan Game Engine is a rebuild of the “DreamWorld” engine used for Anarchy Online. It also uses SpeedTree - the same programming package used for foliage in Oblivion (ah - that explains my earlier thoughts). Cheetah - is used for improved ambient graphics, and a Perlin noise-based system for realistic looking and behaving clouds.

Nenea - my Aquilonian Ranger is now at level 18.

 Well that’s the end of my lunch break here at work, better go look busy.

Griss.

Although I never pre-ordered Age of Conan, and never really followed its creation progress with anticipation of playing - I did spot it whilst out shopping this morning and in a moment of weakness found myself purchasing it. I think the term is impulse buying. 

So despite cutting back on my alts in Everquest 2 - I now find myself with a second MMORPG sucking my time away, what a weak minded person I am.

Installation time seemed a little lengthy, and as there were no pretty pictures or information being displayed during the install - so I found myself actually reading the games manual. After the install was another expected wait whilst the patcher updated the game with what turned out to be nearly a 1 Gig download.

Next was the setting up of an account, I found it a little bit annoying that 3 times in a row the name I picked for my account was taken and I had to retype in some of the details each time I tried to enter a new name. In hindsight I should have just went for something more obscure - rather than trying to pick something more memorable.

Eventually I got to the character creation and picked a server to play on.
For the first time in years of playing online games I am a European server. Despite living in the UK I usually play on U.S. servers as I do like crafting, and harvesting whilst the server is quiet due to the time differences is a bonus, as is my stuff is selling whilst I sleep. Also I tend to find a few more adult gamers like myself on American servers, and I do not mean more mature - I mean older. But who knows, perhaps finding groups to join will be easier.

Creating a new character is always great fun, and so is stepping into a new world for the first time.
I have played a few MMORPG’s in the past like Star Wars Galaxies, Dungeons and Dragons online, World of Warcraft, Auto Assault, and Lord of the Rings online. But so far only Everquest 2 has managed to hook me and keep me playing.

After what seems like forever - mainly because it always takes me ages to create a new character, I entered the game for the first time. Taking time over character creation is not a bad thing I guess as I may be spending the next few years playing as this avatar, and this time I wanted to try a few different things - so instead of going straight for a mage class I picked ranger, and then surprised myself by creating a female character. It’s not like me to play female characters in MMO’s, but she looked so much better than any of the male characters I came up with.

Nenea my Aquilonian Ranger stood alone on a beach after a shipwreck, she found herself no longer enslaved but free and on the island of Tortage, but to stay free she would have to fight.
And fight was exactly the first thing I had planned, so it was off towards the nearest mob. Luckily there were a lot of crocs around and I got my first taste of combat.

Combat is a little different, the creature you are attacking has the ability to shield itself and you have to hit it where it is least shielded to do as much damage as possible. This makes things feel a little more involving than other MMORPG’s I have played. There are also special moves you can use, these I received from levelling up, they are on reuse timers.

Below is a quick picture on Nenea, now I’m off to log back in.

Lord of the Rings online saw fishing introduced in update, or book 13 as they call it.

It looks like this is to be the first of a range of hobby type activities they plan to introduce, and they define “hobby” as an activity done for fun or profit.

Here is just a brief summary of things that caught my eye in the official post:

Some types of fish cannot be found in all locations - you will need to do a bit of exploration to catch’em all!

Any fish you catch will increase your proficiency; however, as you become a more experienced angler you will find that only appropriately-challenging catches will improve your skill.

Bait will increase your chances of catching fish for a small amount of time.

Special fish can be brought to the Fishing Taxidermist for mounting on plaques that can be placed in your house.

There are Titles to be earned as well as fishing-related quests and deeds.

Official source post can be found here.

I really hope EQ2 revamp their fishing system at some point, and I hope they notice the efforts of the Lotro Developers. In the mean time I wait with interest as to what the next introduced hobby will be in Lotro.

Despite some AFK time I spent about 2 hours running around in EQ2 on Tuesday night (post is a little late due to image insert problems with wordpress).

Live update 45 was active and the first thing I noticed was the extra bank slots, 4 extra slots for each character and 4 shared. Using 36 slot Rosewood Boxes to fill these extra slots gives room for an extra 288 items (or stacks of items). The 4 extra shared slots will be very welcome for storing harvested stuff for crafting and collection quest items.

Weaponsmiths were excitedly showing off the stats on the new revamped recipes they have, whilst casually advertising that they had them on the broker or were taking orders. It was nice to see no one was complaining about spam and were letting them have their day. Although I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to the stats I will have to take a look at the broker over the weekend as one of the stiletto type daggers I noticed did have a 4 second delay on it, and although I am not an expert hardcore DPS player - the forum posts I have read in the past all seem to indicate that this is good for getting procs off and helps increase DPS more than faster weapons.

I also had a quick run around Grissom’s house at 2 Bayle Court to just mull over the idea of letting Randle set his carpenter shop up there. Still not sure though, and will take a look at Qeynos Harbour rooms at the weekend. I did however take a quick snap-shot of Griss in his bedroom; he has just dinged level 77 and bought a Di’Zok Ceremonial Cloth Robe which he is wearing.

The rest of my time was spent running around the Fens doing a couple of quest with Tudor who is closely approaching level 78.