MMORPG

Team Spode vs the Kite Runner We’ve been on the rocks the last couple of weeks, progressionally-speaking. Gianthold Tor has given us an extended learning curve as we learn how to become giant and dragon slayers (which will likely involve specific resist gear for each dragon). When we decided to take a break and finish up the Sands of Menechtarun content, designed for level 12 that we thought would be trivial at our levels (14-16), that also kicked our butt. ...

Tipara, member of the Sinestro Corps Okay, so in SOE’s DC Universe Online, people are getting random superpowers by being infected with some superpower thing cooked up by Brainiac. You wake up one morning, you have superpowers. Maybe you have to escape from Brainiac’s space ship, but whatever. With DCUO’s Lords of Light (or whatever) expansion pack, you can have Green Lantern or Sinestro’s powers. Including a power ring. Note power ring on my character below. ...

Tirelessly defending kobolds. Huh? Turbine pushed its “Vault of the Artificers” update live today. As well as enabling the new Artificer class to be unlocked through gameplay, the update brings a new “Challenge” dungeon system. Whether this is similar to World of Warcraft’s upcoming Challenge dungeon system is unknown. DDO’s version is a first person real time strategy system. We’ve seen adventure-themed tower defense games such as “Orcs Must Die”, now we get resource gathering and management in an RPG context. ...

Dragon in the Tor Modern MMOs have trained me to believe that no matter what class I play, I’ll be able to solo anything without trouble. That’s the compact MMO devs make with their players. So my natural tendency is to just pick a target and wade on in. You just can’t do that in DDO. You have to know your place, and my place is in the back. This means that sometimes stuff dies before I can get to it, or I have to take out my bow and snipe stuff from the periphery. I just can’t take aggro. But sometimes my role means I get to take the lead. ...

My bot army We don’t have to play on off days in our DDO static group, but most of us do. Since you have complete control over your leveling, you don’t have to really worry about outleveling everyone… though DDO goes by the D&D rules here, and you can only gain one level at a time. High achievers like Our Gleek become perpetually stuck at the top end of our range, earning no xp until the rest of us laggards catch up. ...

All anyone is talking about these days is Winds of Pandaria. I desperately want to join in, but how? I don’t play WoW any more. I’m feeling a little left out. But hey, why let that stop me. I may not play WoW much any more, but I have played another game that was desperately trying to attract new players while keeping old ones – EverQuest. A game that is still going strong. At this stage in its life, where WoW finds itself today, EQ added a race of dragon people, a whole new accelerated leveling path. Later came mercenaries that allowed almost any class to easily solo. All this kind of stuff. ...

Horn of Agility Once I understood the story behind “The Crucible”, I knew what to do. Immediately upon entering the dungeon, I accused all my group mates of being witches and consorting with the devil. They were taken away, forced to confess, and executed. I alone lived. Nobody will say anything, either, because I might accuse them of being witches at well! I am very good at sniffing out witches… as proven by my success in exposing my group mates. ...

Yeah, I’ve been in the Winds of Pandaria ALPHA for awhile. I’m telling you, it’s AWESOME. You guys are gonna freak. NDA prevents me from being too specific, buuuut… ya know Deathwing? Yeah. He’s a mount and you can ride him. Wanna play a Pandaren Monk? Their special ability is KUNG FU LEAP. You start a jump, and then this map of Azeroth comes up, and you can land anywhere you like. You jump into frickin’ ORBIT, and guess what you see when you’re up there? Well, I can’t say, but you will need new pants afterward. ...

Ophiga and friend The big news yesterday was the dropping of the Press NDA for Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. I read all the press reviews I could find; I’ll point to some of those later on, but almost all of them credited the storyline for pulling them deeper into the game. The game mechanics may be old hat, and the standard roles, dungeons and raids are present, but the story, by all accounts, is worth the price of admission. ...

If you were given six months to live, you wouldn’t spend it leveling up a new character in some MMORPG. You’d want to do something that gave your life meaning. Six months at the end of your life isn’t more valuable than six months right now. In fact, six months right now is way better. Truth is, your friends and family don’t care that you leveled a character. They care about the time you spent with them. (Fact is, it’s almost certain nobody in the world cares about your achievements in video games, and in a couple of years, neither will you). ...