Vanguard

I’ve played Vanguard before – but only up to 18. I still consider myself a Vanguad “noobie”. I felt more like a noob than ever after running through the new player experience, “The Isle of Dawn”. Almost everyone I met there had at least one max level character, and for those Vanguard experts, the noob island was easy and fun. To someone still fairly new to Vanguard, it was a somewhat frustrating experience. I crashed to desktop four times, got stuck in an elevator three times (being warned each time I typed /stuck yes that my usage was being logged and I could be banned), and drowned in the middle of an open room with no water in sight. ...

Vanguard offered its Game Update #6 yesterday, finally fixing and updating their character models, something promised pretty much from launch. Worth it? Definitely. Prior to the fix, my halfling bard had had her eyelids removed, and further changes to the ambient lighting system had left her face perpetually in shadow. Here she is pre-patch and as she appears now; below is a closeup of her face. Today I’m going to sing a serious song about love, commitment and OOOH LOOK AT THAT PRETTY BIRD!!!! ...

Well, first of all, I’m not playing WAR because I’m at work. But even when not working, I have a bunch of games I’m already playing. And its exciting stuff for all of them! EverQuest – Nostalgia FTW. You know, I don’t think we’ve ever had an official group xp night in the same zone twice. The only time we revisited a place was Sol B and Permafrost when we were farming the dragons. And we have still only seen a small fraction of the zones in the game. Friday, we grouped in Plane of Storms, Warslik Woods and Dagnor’s Cauldron for various things – all new zones for us on a group night. Small fraction of total zones. It’s wild how big EQ is. ...

I was writing a new Stout Henry story last night, when I got the idea to try and model him with the character creators from all the MMOs I had which could actually make unique characters. That left out EverQuest and World of Warcraft right off the bat; neither one has many character choices and people generally look a lot like other people of their race and gender. I started off with City of Heroes, because its character creator is legendary. Unfortunately, the options are not tuned so much for a medieval adventurer wearing simple clothes and wielding a staff. Still, after a couple of tries, it didn’t come out too bad… but it wasn’t Stout Henry. ...

I didn’t just play Guild Wars this weekend. I stopped into Wizard 101 a little, and, oh, finally got around to moving Dina from Befallen to Najena, where she happily joined Nostalgia. Almost as soon as I got transferred and reset my AAs, I got a group invite to Runnyeye 2. Who was going to be the enchanter for the run? Me. Yup, troub mezzes were going to be the only thing between us and total annihilation. It got a little nervewracking on the final epic x2 mob, since the usual strat is to mez all the adds, kill the boss, then kill the adds. Well, I can only keep two locked down. Three with no resists, but that’s iffy. The group leader figured out a strat where only two needed to be mezzed at a time, we did it, and we won. ...

I’ve had my level 75 cleric on Luclin for about… four months now. The level cap on EverQuest is 80. There have been three expansions since I last played her, The Serpent’s Spine, The Buried Sea and Secrets of Faydwer (I played TSS just long enough to get to level 75). A new expansion, Seeds of Destruction is about to come out. And I don’t care. I haven’t even joined one group her level. Because I know what my job will be – sitting on my ass watching other people have fun while I press the heal button occasionally. Doesn’t matter what level or what expansion, my job was the same. Same as when I was a rogue. Druid was a little different; when the druid was my main, I could solo well, or be bad at stuff in a group. They’ve since made druids better in groups and given clerics the ability to solo somewhat, but really, my complete frustration at the mindless repetition of playing EverQuest, combined with the difficulty of finding a group, drove me to quit. I only came back for the Nostalgia group, but once again, I find I have zero interest in leveling, except insofar as I get to see areas of the game one last time. SoD may well raise the level cap to 100 and promise pie, but there is absolutely nothing that will get me to willingly join the grind again. ...

I haven’t done a “what I’m playing” thing for awhile. So here’s my current roster of games, and I’ll start off with what I’m NOT playing. And that game would be Mythos. MMOs: Mythos had one of the strongest beta communities on record, with unparalleled access to devs. Community Manager Taylor Baldree would hold court in the #mythos IRC channel every night. Devs would respond daily on the forums. And all that was leading to a game that I very much wanted to play. With Hellgate: London’s reprieve by Namco Bandai, let’s hope there IS hope for Mythos as well. ...

Not a lot of time here, but I did want to talk about some recent adventures in Vanguard. After completing the Veskal’s Keep quests (including a very nice, nearly epic one about purifying the Tree of Life), I thought, “Self, it’s time you started working on your racial mount. After all, what’s a halfling without a giant, carnivorous, ugly, smelly, dangerous, awful, disgusting, mutant, radioactive ant to ride upon?” Sure, other races get cool mounts. We get friggin’ ANTS. “Ma’am, your giant radioactive ant is eating the children. Could you please park it elsewhere?” ...

NCSoft’s first quarter report came out, and they don’t want to talk about their space marine-fps-mmo, Tabula Rasa, except to say they are fairly disappointed bu its performance. I should refer to it by its full name, Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa. Richard Garriott, if you don’t know of him, is “the legendary video game programmer and designer, noted as one of the PC Gamer’s “Game Gods”. I found this little tidbit on a vanity web site called “Richard in Space”, where you can meet Richard Garriott as he prepares for his space tourist flight to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. ...

Last Thursday I did a huge interview with Vanguard developer Lenny “Tiraslee” Gullo, and as well as talking a LOT about the upcoming VG game update, he let me play with a lot of the new mounts and showed off some of the new spell graphics. Well, after wrangling with Windows Movie Maker for a few days (the heat of a thousand exploding stars cannot come close to my frustration at that program’s limitations, but at least it’s free), I finally finished putting it in some sort of shape, and it’s being rolled out on Massively in three parts today. ...