Category: games

Vanguard Beta 5 – First impressions

I got an email Friday that because I had a station access account I had been given an invite into the open beta. The message said it might take quite a while to patch the client and suggested starting it before going to bed. I started it at 11 pm Friday night and the patch finished around 8 am Sunday morning. I am guessing they sent out quite a few invites. I hope.

When I first started out that morning there were only 5 races or so available so I maid a doggy (whatever the heck they call them) The models for characters are what is known as unibody. Meaning they all use essentially they same geometry for the neck down and replace the head for different races changing default proportions a bit. Ok, doggy created. Made him a ranger. Joani was looking over my shoulder, commented something that roughly translates to “ehhh, so-so” The world geometry has nice movement to it, but looks very flat (trees look like animated flat pictures kinda)

Game play wise it is somewhere above EQ1 and below EQ2. You have some of the things you would expect in a game currently. Quest indicators floating above NPC’s heads. It has a decent quest journal. And that is all you see at first. Crafting looks kind of detailed but I never beta test crafting, it aint my bag. Harvesting sucks because just to do it you need to gettrained. I find that annoying, but I knew going in that they wanted a less friendly atmosphere for stuff. Quests are the typical kill 10 rats, deliver this here or there, etc. One nice feature in the beta is a feedback window that pops everytime you finish one.

The ranger class at early levels played like you would expect. So Later I logged back in and saw that more races were available which opened up more classes including the bard. I Enjoy playing bards, probably means I have a persecution thing going on because bards tend to get the short end of the stick in most games. Vanguard bards seem actually pretty interesting. You get a compose window where you can customize songs, not really high enough level to coment on this other than it looked cool.

One thing that soon annoyed the bejesus out of me was character tags (the little floating name tages over character and npcs) stand next to someone and their tag obliterates your view of pretty much anything else. I am now in the habit of playing in third person view and it just occured to me that this probably would not happen in first person view, which is how I ran EQ1. Geometry as is typical of new games gets you stuck all the freakin time. I also accidentaly hit the recall spell while in combat and could not cancel it for nothing.

Well thats it for now, I may get in there and level something up past lvl 10.

Xbox 360

Joani got me an Xbox 360 for Xmas (it is ok to use the marketed short form of Christmas when refrencing and Xbox) and I have been having quite a bit of fun with it. She wisely chose an awesome bundle. It came with 2 wireless controllers one of which has a rechargeable battery. The 10 GB hard drive. Some Xbox Live games on CD. A headset. and I think that covers the bundle. All in all a nice package. So part of my time was spent getting it on the network and checking out Live Arcade. She came down to find me playing Texas Holdem and thought that might be fun to join in on. However the challenge vanishes when you realize it is intended for folks to play over live, cuz what fun is it to see the other persons hand (same room one TV that sort of thing).

Well, while looking over things from CES this year, I came across this blurb.

On stage we showed for the first time, through a game of Uno, what the Live experience will be on the PC, and how it enables casual and hardcore gamers alike to connect with their friends regardless of what platform they’re on.

This will be very very nice for us no need for 2nd box just to play the arcade stuff head to head. I have a sister who I could get hooked in, we might be able to hook in her dad and sister. Very cool.

Oh and Guitar Hero II is on the way, here are some of the exclusive tracks coming with it.

• Billion Dollar Babies (Alice Cooper)
• Dead! (My Chemical Romance)
• Hush (Deep Purple)
• Life Wasted (Pearl Jam)
• Rock N Roll Hoochie Koo (Rick Derringer)
• Possum Kingdom (Toadies)
• Salvation (Rancid)
• The Trooper (Iron Maiden)

Vanguard Releasing too soon?

I came into the MMORPG fairly early but not at the very beginning, so I’m not a total old schooler. This info is strictly for background for those who do not follow this stuff. Vanguard is the brain child of Brad McQuaid one of the founding fathers of Everquest. Everquest is where I got my start playing this stuff, and I have fond memories of the game. However no way would I sign on to play a game where this bug is still being worked on just days from release.

5. Ships dropping people into the ocean while crossing chunks

If you played EQ1 then you will remember this happening to you after you had waited for 20 freakin minutes just to get on and travel from one continent to the other. You would think after dealing with a problem like this for years in EQ1 that Brad would have set his dev team down and said “OK, we are going to put boats in the game. Do not impliment them unless you can be 100% sure passengers are not left floating in the ocean.”

There looks to be a huge list of features they had planned to put in the game that are going to fall into the black morass of “forth comming after release” Brad is a big pie in the sky guy, ffs there are still things he had promissed for EQ1 that never made it into the game and that one is almost 10 years old. Brad had the right idea for the game as far as not out and out copying EQ2 or WoW, but dude, stick to your guns and release a remotely close to finished game.

I do hope it succedes, he has some nice goals for the game and it would be cool for the hard core folks to have somewhere to go.

Vanguard Status Page

(Update to the ship bug as of 1/9/07)

6. Ship Bugs – Getting stuck on ships or falling to your death after chunking.

DnD Friday, Interview with Charles Stross

The following interview took place a few years ago on the now defunct planewalker.com website. We did this interview and one with Bruce Cordell which I am also going to post, heck I’ll stick them in pages over to the right. Might as well use this wordpress thing for all its worth. I’ll just link to them from here.

Charles Stross interview

Bruce Cordell interview

Titan

One of the first Avalone HIll board games I owned as a kid was Titan. Joani and I have comitted to going to GenCon this year and one thing I love to do there is play board games, hopefully I’ll be able to get into a round or two. Two player games are a race to develope (recruit) tougher monsters for you army. Multiplayer games are more about getting out of the way long enough to not get smoked. I bumped into this page while checking out Eric Pass’s site which I used to frequent when filling out my DnD collection. Of particular note here is Eric’s collected page of Titan slang.