Pumping Irony

Funcom released the 1.07.2 patch to the live servers today, which added the new “Offline Leveling” feature to the game.

Senior Community Manager Oliver ‘Tarib’ Kunz posted the official announcement in the AoC forums:

With this new feature you will get additional levels gained over time that can be allocated to characters in the character selection screen if you wish. It is designed to earn and allocate additional levels to gain over time even while being offline and it’s only available to put on characters that are at least level 30.

The system started off today with giving each active account four levels to distribute. Every 4 days from now on there will be one additional level added to your pool. In character selection screen you will be able to assign these levels to any of your characters. The only requirement is that the character is at least level 30.

The mentioned 4 days are real-time days meaning it doesn’t matter if you ever logged in with your account during those 4 days or not, the additional level will be added to your pool. It is a requirement though that your account is active and has a running subscription.

If all your characters are level 80 and you can’t therefore use these additional levels at the moment, you will keep on gaining levels but won’t be able to assign them to a character unless you start a new one and that one reaches level 30.

It’s important to mention that this feature is completely optional. So you could also choose to never assign any additional level from your Offline Character Progression pool to any of your characters.

Please note: once you have assigned a level to a character it can not be reverted. Customer Support would not be able to take that level away from your character and add it back to your pool. So please be careful when assigning these levels. There is also a button to assign all available levels to the character currently active in the character selection screen. Please make sure you have the correct character selected when using this option.

Naturally, the bloggers and posters who don’t play the game saw this and went off half-cocked on the idea. Shocking, I know; I never would have foreseen that type of reaction…

Here’s how it’s set up. As the announcement stated, all accounts received 4 levels today. Every 4 days, another level is received. Despite the phrase “offline leveling” the timer is running whether you are online or offline, the only requirement is that you have an active subscription. The login screen now has an Offline Leveling frame at the lower left where you can choose to apply accrued levels to any of your characters who are level 30 or higher.

I will only say this once: everyone who bashes this idea had also better bash EVE Online for their offline real-time skill training system.

While giving entire levels seems a bit extreme, in the end the base concept behind this isn’t much different from the Rest XP everyone loves in all the other MMO’s. While you’re logged out, your character is “resting” and accrues a bonus to earned XP. The longer you’re logged out, the more Rest XP the character earns. Bonus XP means you level faster, right? Now consider this: other than playing 24/7 you have no way to avoid Rest XP if you wanted to slow down and smell the roses. Everyone else who sleeps, works, etc. is going to build up a little or a lot of Rest XP and during that time will level faster than they would otherwise. In LOTRO, for example, many players use their Destiny Points to buy additional Rest XP.

In contrast, Funcom is putting control of the situation in the hands of the players. These “bonus levels” are not simply tacked onto your character; you have to specifically apply them yourself. Otherwise, nothing changes for your game if you choose to not use them. It’s not like your character you haven’t played in a year will suddenly be level-capped and you lost out on all that leveling content.

Furthermore, it would take 200 (196 for existing characters who got the free 4 levels today) days to get a character from level 30 to 80 using only offline leveling. That’s 200 days of subscribing to the game, paying Funcom their $15 per month, but not playing that character and not using those offline levels for anything else. If you play that character, he’ll earn XP and level on his own, and I’ve already mentioned that AoC’s new leveling speed is perhaps too fast already. With those considerations, is this really all that game-breaking? No.

So what is this good for? For a long time I’d heard of content gaps where players had no choice but to grind several levels. This may have been great for skipping that, though I hear there’s pretty much content for every level bracket now. Personally, I’d be tempted to skip the Tortage experience on an alt but there’s the level 30 minimum to apply the offline levels. My Bear Shaman is level 35 and I’m dying to get him to 40 so he can get a mount, but this being my first time through the game, there’s no way I’m going to apply any of the offline levels to him. So for me and Firjanon, this new system means bupkis. For veteran players who may want to skip quest chains they didn’t enjoy and help get their alts to end-game where they want them, this could be a great boon.

Apparently I’m weird. Generosity that is – in my opinion – undeserved makes me uncomfortable.

A couple years ago in DDO, I mentioned that I wasn’t comfortable when guild-mates would log in a lower-level character in order to group with me. I log in whichever character I’m in the mood to play, therefore in my mind, so does everyone else. So when they’re on their high-level characters, I have to assume they logged in that character for a specific reason, so when they suddenly login a lowbie in order to group with me, it makes me feel more like I’m being pitied than anything else. Why should they sacrifice whatever they wanted to do just because I’m the low-level struggling to find a group? (Mind, this was two years ago when DDO had an extremely low population due to the subscription-only model.) The flip side is, as always, it’s so much nicer grouping with guild-mates over the General Public.

Yesterday I had another instance of generosity that I am still uncomfortable with today. I’ve been paying a little attention lately to some of the guild recruitment scripts over Global chat in Age of Conan. I narrowed my choices down to three, then got an offer to join one of them: Unforgiven. I seemed to click with them immediately, chatting away about games in general and my experiences in AoC. I had asked a few questions about earning money to Openedge over Twitter because I’m getting closer and closer to 40 when I can get a mount. Most MMORPG’s seem to give higher cash rewards for both quest turn-ins and drops so by the time you can get a mount, you have enough cash to buy it (or you’re not far from it). But so far in AoC I’m not noticing an increase in income in the low 30’s level bracket. Firjanon reached level 35 yesterday and has 21 silver to his name. Openedge says I pretty much need to get out there and just gather resources and sell the rares at the Trader. Ugh! Please tell me I don’t have to do that…

Anyway, I mentioned my concerns over mount finances in the guild hoping someone would have suggestions; preferably ones that did not involve grinding out resource gathering. One of the guild-mates told me to check my mail in about 20 minutes. Never mind that I had absolutely no idea how to check my mail or where the mailbox is (hey, turns out that Trader NPC is also the mailman and banker!) but I knew what he meant by that. I immediately replied with “Whoah, I’m not asking for money! Please don’t give me money!” and so forth. No use – the guy mailed me 1 gold to pay for a horse. Grrrrrr!

Why does this bother me? First, I just joined this guild. I don’t know them and more importantly for this discussion, they don’t know me. I haven’t earned the right to be given that much cash or anything else. Second, I always make my characters earn their own keep. I don’t use high-level main characters to fund low-levels alts. I might send the alts some items I find to help them along (gear or reputation tokens in LOTRO, for example) but never money.

For now, the gold is in Firjanon’s bag. If there is absolutely no viable method of earning the gold to buy his own horse at 40 other than gathering and selling resources, then I’ll use his gold and repay him once Firjanon is earning more. If Firj can buy it himself, I will simply return the gold graciously.

Regarding the gathering, not that I mind it every so often but let’s be honest: it’s boring and grindy. Openedge says gathering quests begin at level 20 but it was much later before I ever visited whatever town had them. Firj is 35 now and I still haven’t completed those initial quests yet. Part of the problem is a glitch I’m experiencing where Firj rarely will exit combat mode once a fight is over. I’ve even been in groups where the fight is over and I can see everyone else sheathing their weapons but Firj stays in combat stance. The only solution I’ve seen is to logout and back in. But I’m not doing that after every single fight. Gathering is not possible while in combat, so even when it occurs to me that I should stop by some nodes and gather, I can’t because Firj is stuck in combat stance.

I put a few hours into Age of Conan during my days off. Firjanon, my Bear Shaman, is now level 32! I’m starting to get comfortable with the character and have added a few new tricks up my sleeve. For the most part, Firj is still adventuring in Conall’s Valley aside from a few jaunts to other zones to complete quests. He’s spent the majority of his time solo, though the western section of Conall’s Valley is populated with a lot of Vanir warriors, including several Elite-status Ymirish Destroyers, making that part of the zone group content only. As luck would have it, the population on Wiccana appears to be healthy, so Firj joined a few brave adventurers against the vicious Vanir raiders.

I had grouped Firj once before but it was months ago, and it was doing some of the Tortage quests, so nothing too serious. His low-level Bear Shaman heals did the job, but that was mostly due to the group fighting normal mobs the whole time. Being the only healer against Elite mobs was something else entirely, and took me several attempts (and several deaths of our tanks while Firj ran for his life) to get a handle on the timing of Fierce Recovery, which is his current “big heal” spell, and honestly, I didn’t realize until I was writing this that it’s not even a directed heal. So even though I did eventually manage to get into a dps/heal routine that kept the group alive, it turns out I still wasted valuable time clicking on the tank then casting when I didn’t need to. I will keep that in mind next time. Indirect group healing for the win!

When I first joined the group, Firjanon was 29 and had 3 or 4 group quests in that area of Conall’s Valley. The first attempt was Firj and a level 29 Conqueror. I haven’t bothered to learn exactly what the other classes in AoC are, but from watching this guy (and a Conqueror who joined later) they seem to be melee DPS warriors, equivalent to the Champion class in LOTRO (with the addition of a buff-banner similar to a Captain) who is able to strap on a shield when necessary but not up to the task of long-term tanking. In short order, the Conqueror and Firj grew tired of having to run away, assuming we made it that far before the Ymirish giants crushed the life from us. So we recruited a level 32 Conquerer. Unfortunately we didn’t fare any better, mostly because I hadn’t yet figured out a workable routine for the Bear Shaman heals. I was hoping for an additional DPS class but a Dark Templar joined us. Again, I haven’t read up on any other class for AoC but the Dark Templar seemed more along the lines of the traditional tank. She managed to survive longer against the Elites than the Conquerors did but still died every single battle due to Fierce Recovery cooldowns. No, that “s” isn’t a typo. Not only is there the standard casting cooldown on Fierce Recovery (28 seconds if I recall?) but there’s also a cooldown (or perhaps an Anti-Fierce Recovery Debuff?) of one minute (I think? Maybe less.) when anyone previously healed from Fierce Recovery cannot be healed by it again until the cooldown/debuff expires. So that was rough, and while I’m normally a very good “standard” healer, I was feeling very inadequate.

Thankfully, Age of Conan is not World of Warcraft, and no one made a single snide comment about my lack of healing abilities, nor did anyone ragequit. Everyone was very cool about the whole thing, and just kept coming back for more. Eventually another Bear Shaman strolled by so we added him to our group. He was level 32 but seemed focused on just smacking things with his two-handed hammer. If he cast a single heal the entire time, I never saw it happen. He didn’t stay with the group long, but it was right then that something finally clicked and I figured out a rotation for my casting and visual scan of my UI that managed to keep everyone alive for the most part. Suddenly the four of us were a killing machine, and only a few times where respawns snuck up on us did our Dark Templar fall in battle. The Bear Shaman can revive fallen party members, but only out of combat. Conquerors have an in-combat revive, though it has a lengthy cooldown.

All in all, I had a blast in a group and it was very educational in terms of how the Bear Shaman actually plays versus how I’d been playing it previously. This was obviously questing in the world, but it did me worlds of good in coming to a new understanding of how the class works at Firj’s level. Not sure when the first dungeons come into play, but I’m really looking forward to that and working my way up to raids at the level cap. Additionally, just killing those Vanir and elite Ymirish raiders leveled Firjanon to 30, then turning in the associated quests took him within a few bubbles of 31! The next day he reached 32 turning in a few solo quests. I still think the XP is a bit crazy; I feel like I’m leveling faster than I’m able to get a feel for being any given level.

The only hitches are gear and Feats. With a few exceptions, Firj is still wearing the gear he got from a quest line from his early teen levels. Or perhaps early 20′s? It’s been awhile since he’s had any significant gear upgrade, let’s put it that way. If I’m not mistaken, at some point during the past 18 months since launch I could have swore I’d read Funcom did a total overhaul of the gear system and made the game somewhat more gear-reliant and the stats more understandable. I’m not having trouble with the stats part. Compare two items, and choose the one with the higher numbers. Trouble is, I’m rarely finding drops or quest rewards with higher numbers. Then there are the Feats. I’ve already stated that end-game raiding is a priority, so I want a build that’s is desirable in PvE raids but it has to be one that I enjoy playing on my own. Trouble is, all the sample builds I’ve seen are from 2008. The game has been patched, skills and Feats have been tweaked, and the Bear Shaman class received a complete revamp a few months ago, so I’m not inclined to think builds from 2008 are still valid today.

Sorry, still no screenshots. Too busy installing and playing all these games to remember to take screenshots then upload them anywhere. I’ll do it next time! (That’s probably what I said last time, right?)

In the MMO Department, I’ve installed the obvious: LOTRO because I’m a Lifetime member and it’s “home” then Age of Conan because I kept my subscription active the past few months and *gasp* the game has come a long way since beta; it’s quite a blast now, and a shame more bloggers aren’t coming back to it.

I took Longasc’s advice and turned DX10 back on in LOTRO but disabled the dynamic shadows. Honestly, I can’t tell it from DX9 like that, but I’m sure there must be some differences somewhere that I’m missing.

Otherwise, despite being either on break or having a broken PC for the majority of last year, LOTRO was almost like I’d never left. I’m still busy grinding daily quests in Lothlorien for reputation so I can get into Caras Galadhon. I also never got to kindred with the Iron Miners so I’ll have to go back and work on that too so I can get the Friend of Nature combat pet. Then of course, I need the last few pieces of Radiance gear to complete the set then continue to the new set for Mirkwood which everyone is saying has crappy stats but the Radiance is required. So other than learning Skirmishes and grinding up my little Soldier — how the hell do I change classes or make it female? All I can do so far is trait him for Warrior (dps) or Protector (tank) — and the fact I’m getting XP again, it’s almost like nothing’s changed for me since I’m essentially still playing the early Moria game where I left off.

Age of Conan, as I mentioned, is a lot of fun! I’ve been plugging along quite nicely, just putting an hour or two per day in running quests. The XP is a bit over the top, though. My Bear Shaman reached level 28 and is already 80% to 29 just from turning in quests and only a few combat encounters. Maybe I’m just spoiled from having a mount in LOTRO but I’m really resenting being locked out of my mounts (I have two War Mammoths) until level 40. I’m assuming (hoping?) that the Bear Shaman will be a desired class for grouping and raiding, though. My primary goal in AoC is participating in end-game, so I want a class that I enjoy playing and is also in demand and can get groups easily. Really looking forward to the expansion!

Guild Wars is installed and up-to-date but I did not install using the -image switch so all I really have is the login screen. I’ll have to fully load each and every zone one by one once I decide to actually jump in and play the game, unless the -image switch also works after the fact?

I was planning on installing DDO but the little installer program doesn’t seem interested in running at all in Win7, even under compatibility settings. I’ll come back to that one, it’s rather low on the priority list, although I’m extremely curious to see how it’s changed since the business model shift.

In F2P Land, I installed that Allods Online game, and not sure I’ll be sticking with it. I do like that they totally ripped off Mythic’s font from Warhammer, though. That font was probably my favorite part of WAR’s UI. Otherwise, yeah, the art style in Allods is very WoW-ish so far. Due to that, framerate is excellent although the engine seems to falter a bit when it comes to loading in players.

I also installed Runes of Magic and spent a few hours today trying to remember how to play my character and how some of that game works. Despite being quite “standard” there’s something I rather like about Runes of Magic. I kinda wouldn’t mind having a regular F2P title as a secondary MMO; something that I like enough to be willing to support the developers by actually spending a little money here and there. It’s been well over a year since I last played, and my character is only level 11 now, but I never understood why Darren raised such a stink over the price of mounts. Compared to other F2P mount prices, RoM’s are right about in the middle; I’ve seen cheaper but I’ve also seen much more expensive in other games. I figure if he liked the game that much (and he seemed to until he saw the price of the mounts and then changed his opinion of the entire game) what’s $10 or whatever towards supporting a game you like that you never had to pay a dime for the box or a subscription? Darren has never struck me as an end-game kinda guy but the prices to play end-game at the same time he was complaining about the horse was the real crime. I think it was something like twice the cost of a full year in a subscription MMO in order to play RoM’s end-game. And he was complaining about a horse? That’s missing the forest for the trees, right there.

Finally, I saw Steam had Champions Online which is now setup as a permanent trial. So I logged into my Cryptic account and got a trial key and put a few minutes into it last night. Graphics are nice and I love the art style but the controls were a bit wonky and unresponsive. I was into comics and superheroes in high school, and I love the superhero movies of today, but I just don’t know that I’m into superhero games, MMO or otherwise. I bought City of Heroes at launch, and I think my character is perhaps level 9? Maybe slightly higher. I sub for a month every couple years, and CoH never manages to hold my interest the full month and after a few minutes in Champions I can tell it would probably be a similar story. But I’ll keep it installed since it’s a never-ending trial so I can pop in at my leisure.

In non-MMO territory, I started things off with my favorite PC shooter, Battlefield 2142. Installed it, patched it to 1.40 then installed the expansion then patched to 1.50. It runs fine but I keep getting PunkBuster errors and kicked off every server I’ve tried playing on. I have the manual PunkBuster updater but it’s not helping. So, no luck with shooters so far. It crossed my mind to pick up Bad Company 2 for PC but I only know two people who have it on PC. I run a Friends of Friends list on XBL that currently has 70 members of the 21+ adult gaming group I’m a member of so it’s not hard to do the math and figure out where I’d get the most bang for my buck. Bad Company 2 is arguably the best shooter I’ve ever played, but playing with the general public rather than squadding up with friends gives a much weaker experience and I’d most likely be stuck with the public if I got it on PC. Plus I get achievements on 360!

Speaking of that, Oakstout talked me into buying Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 2 yesterday. I know the hardcore PC-only guys bitch about the whole Games for Windows LIVE thing but I love it! Not only can I chat (both text and voice) with my friends on XBL but I get achievements too! So far the game is pretty fun. It’s more of an RTT than an RTS, which is more my style, and the bosses are much more active and scripted, similar to a console game boss or an MMO raid boss, which makes for an interesting experience. Apparently DoW2 has a co-op mode too, so Oakstout is looking forward to getting me into a match. JayeDub saw me playing yesterday and said the same thing, and I think both Hudson and SmakenDahead have the game so maybe Oak can get a whole blogger or Casualties of War group for DoW2.

I also installed World in Conflict, another RTT. I bought it launch day because a buddy and I were interested then we ended up only able to play once. That was, what, two years ago? Turns out Oakstout and Aaron both have WiC too, and have expressed an interest in making some rounds there.

Finally, Aaron has spent the past year or so trying to convince me to get Battle for Middle Earth 2, so I bit the bullet and ordered that yesterday as well. He says it has an excellent co-op campaign and I’ve heard good things about the game overall, despite being 3 years old or whatever now.

So, now I’ll be back to bouncing back and forth between the PC and 360 again; between MMO’s and real games again. The challenge I face is whether I can flit from game to game as much as Stargrace or not! Watching her status on Raptr can be entertaining all on its own and makes me wonder if I’m not the only blogger out there with an extremely short attention span!

Before I sign off, non-gaming question: Rather than making backups of important files, settings, and media I bought a new hard drive for this PC. I have the other hard drive installed as secondary, and eventually after I’m satisfied I’ve pulled all the files I need off of it, I’m considering formatting that drive and making the entire drive into the My Documents partition. I could do that easily under XP but does Win7 support that type of thing? And would you recommend doing it or should I leave well enough alone?

Three months and one week after placing the order for all the parts for the new PC, it’s finally working!

Other than the Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS, it’s decidedly a last-gen (ie. DirectX10) system for now. The new DX11 cards were tempting but I’m simply not willing to spend that much just for a video card any more. On a side note, I find it interesting that when I was younger and living paycheck to paycheck I had no problem sacrificing and saving up for the brand-new hardware and now that I can afford it without batting an eyelash, I have a difficult time justifying it. My PC gaming is pretty much relegated to MMOG’s only now, and I think 2009 painted a grim picture for how I am feeling about the MMOG genre as a whole in its current state. At “bleeding edge tech” prices, a DX11 card just isn’t worth it for MMOG’s alone, to me.

This PC has been nothing but trouble from the moment it was assembled, so it was with great joy Monday afternoon when it finally booted up and Windows 7 was installed. After installing drivers and a few other applications, I naturally set out to get my MMO on. Age of Conan was first since it had less updating to do than LOTRO, which took all night to finish updating through two expansions and content patches.

So yesterday I’m enjoying the new PC, it’s noticeably faster overall and games were running faster, yet I’ll admit to being disappointed that I wasn’t seeing quite the speed increase in the two MMO’s. I could tell they were running smoother but I was only getting +10-ish frames per second more than the previous PC. That just didn’t sound right. Not to mention I have a DX11 OS and DX10 video card, yet the DX10 option was greyed-out in both games. Something was amiss. I know AoC is a resource hog but I was expecting to be able to crank up the graphic settings more than I was able to. Didn’t stop me from playing several hours and it was far more stable (from a playability, not technical, standpoint) than it had been but there was still a deep-felt sense of disappointment of “nearly $1,000 and this is all I have to show for it?”

So I made a few comments along those lines on Twitter yesterday and some of the gang went about trying to find out specifically how to enable my DX10 options. Unfortunately none of them worked, for a very special level of noobness on my part, but I want to specifically thank Openedge1, BlueKae and Avery78 for their help looking into the problem. Openedge was even digging through the LOTRO forums looking for solutions — and he utterly despises LOTRO and everything about it — so a special thanks for your efforts, Edge. We’d covered everything from multiple installs of the ATI Catalyst 10.2 drivers, multiple installs of the DirectX Web Setup, checking compatibility settings on the .exe files, and checking a few configuration files, all to no avail.

With great horror and shame, I finally discovered the problem. As I said, this was an entirely new realm of noobness and hell, it’s just embarrassing. Edge tried to get me to fess up and I said “no way!” Then thinking about it, not only does it give me an excuse to write something on my somewhat-neglected blog here but also it’s healthy to be able to laugh at yourself. So here’s the brief history of the past 3 months wrestling with this beast.

I placed the order for the parts on December 1 but it was probably the third week of December before I had a chance to assemble everything and run into the first hitch. It all started with the motherboard’s power LED lighting up but nothing else would turn on. No fans, nothing, and it certainly wasn’t going to consider booting. Turns out I’d had the cables to the power switch, etc. installed vertically like they were on the previous motherboard rather than horizontally. Then again, the manual for my previous motherboard had illustrations and the new one does not, so it took a couple weeks to discover that mistake. It’s mid-January at this point.

Now we’ve got full power to the system. Pressing the power button brought life to all sorts of fans and LED’s and… that was all. No signal to the monitor and from the lack of any sounds other than fans (ie. hard drives, etc.) the system didn’t seem to actually be doing anything resembling booting up. Argh! Is the video card faulty? The monstrous fan came on so it’s getting power so perhaps the GPU is bad? Or is it the motherboard that’s malfunctioning? Maybe it’s just the PCI-X slot? Unlike the other parts, I ordered the video card — an ATI Radeon 4890 HD (my first ATI ever) — back in July after reading Openedge gush about it. So now my freshly-opened video card was well beyond the 30 day return point and I was going to have to spend more cash having it replaced if it came to that.

Over the next couple weeks I did a little troubleshooting [make a note of this, it will be important soon] I learned that there was an extremely high probability that I was one of several customers who ordered this particular motherboard and CPU as a combo package from Newegg, only to discover that the BIOS had not been updated to actually support the CPU yet, preventing the system from booting at all. Hey, that sounds familiar, no? It’s mid-February now, and I spent nearly a week playing phone tag with people from Asus but finally having them send me a replacement BIOS chip (free but I had to pay shipping). The Fedex tracker says it’s going to arrive the first day of my next trip so I took the morning off work so the chip wouldn’t be sitting outside. I hung around the condo all morning but lunch time I was starving so I ran out for 20 minutes and left a note on the door for the Fedex guy. Anyone care to guess when he shows up? Yep! Exactly while I’m out. Oh, and unlike UPS, Fedex pretty much refuses to just leave your packages for you, even if you sign a note for them. Seriously, do they just expect everyone to stay holed up in their homes every second of the day awaiting their arrival with bated breath? I called the support number and in between ripping the girl a new one was informed that no, the driver could not simply come back (he’s only been gone a few minutes, grrrrr!) and I’ll need to sign the door sticker card he left in order for him to leave it. Great! Now I’ve taken unpaid time off work for no reason and the BIOS chip will be sitting outside anyway!

So, I get home Sunday night and sure enough, there was a Fedex package waiting. I dig into things Monday and learn I don’t have space to do the small screwdriver trick to remove the old BIOS chip. I’m going to need to buy an IC removal tool. Crap. I drove to three different stores and no one has one for sale. Crap. So I lugged the case to my car and drove to SmartPC and paid the owner $15 to replace the BIOS for me. Just to be certain it would work, he offered to power the system up to make sure I had a monitor signal and the motherboard would attempt to boot. Sounded good to me. So he plugs in the power cable to the video card then lugged it over to the monitor. I told him there were two power inputs, not just one. He stopped and double-checked and told me no, just the one. A little red flag went up in the back of my mind because I remembered full well that the 4890 had two PCI-E plugs, but hey, he’s the owner of a shop that does nothing but build computers; he should know his stuff right? Sure enough, the BIOS update was all it took so I happily paid the man, shrugged off his jokes about how messy my PSU was (seriously people, no matter how good the price may be, do not ever get a non-modular PSU) drove back home and excitedly installed Windows 7 which brings us back to the beginning of this article and trying to discover why DX10 options were disabled in my brand-new PC.

Remember a few paragraphs ago where I said I had attempted to troubleshoot why there was no signal to the monitor? Part of that troubleshooting involved replacing the new ATI 4890 with my old Nvidia 7950GT to see if a card I knew worked would have the same problem. Partly because I was still wondering if I was going to have to send my 4890 back for replacement and mostly out of disgust and dismay for the whole situation, I never put the 4890 back in! By the time the BIOS was replaced I had completely forgotten about it and thought it was good to go, 4890 and all. That explains the red flag for the guy saying my video card only had one power input. Naturally, having a DX9 card in the PC guarantees that all DX10 options will be disabled as well…

Like I said, that was a whole new level of noobishness!

All is well now. The 4890 is installed, and DX10 has become available. I haven’t gotten around to installing image editing and FTP software yet so I’ll have to wait until next week or so (rough schedule this month so “or so” is likely) to post screenshots.

I fired up LOTRO and… honestly couldn’t tell any difference. I thought there were supposed to be all kinds of shaders for even better-looking water but it looked the same as it has since launch. I finally noticed that the branches of all the trees in Lothlorien cast shadows on the ground and followed the light sources, which doesn’t happen in DX9. However, in short order every fan in my case was running on overdrive. So, for now, back to DX9 for LOTRO. It isn’t worth sitting next to a turbojet engine just for tree shadows and extra-hitchy movement through Middle Earth. Seriously, what is with that game’s engine? They really need to look at changing the tech for pre-caching textures, etc.

Then I logged into Age of Conan. Character select screen shows up and of course I have an even higher framerate while my Bear Shaman impatiently shifts from foot to foot waiting for me to log him into the world. So I oblige him. I think I bruised my jaw when it dropped onto the desk. This is my first time seeing what DX10 can really do live and in-person. Welcome to 2007 right? Whatever! Age of Conan was already a good-looking game in DX9 but had the type of art and textures that could look fairly ugly at times when some options were scaled down. DX10 is night and day, and Age of Conan’s graphics truly shine. Performance is noticeably better with the default DX10 settings and I’m sure with tweaking I can get even better framerate without detracting too much from the gorgeous visuals.

So a year after I started saying I’d build a new PC, 8 months after buying the video card, and 3 months after initially assembling the new PC… I have a new PC!

Funcom has officially announced their first expansion for Age of Conan at GamesCon! I halfway expect this news to slip under the radar since the blogosphere has all but ignored and written off AoC after its dramatic (albeit deserved) fall from grace after launch. The new continent is Asian-themed, which so tempts me to refer to it as Age of Conan: Factions but only because I’ve been playing so much Guild Wars lately!

Eurogamer has a preview article posted already, with some great information. It seems Funcom will be simultaneously addressing the complaints of the amount of content while also breaking from what is becoming the “standard” for MMORPG expansions, namely: no new classes and no increase to the level cap!

There’s no raised level cap in Rise of the Godslayer. There is a new continent, the Asian-themed Khitai (which comes with a new player race, the Khitan), but it contains lower-level content – for level 20 up – as well as a high-level challenge. There are no new classes, and no more levels, but there is an alternate advancement system that will broaden the range of each existing class as well as increase its power. There isn’t just more stuff to do, but there’s a greater variety of it; raising wolves and tigers from cubs to fighting companions to mounts, taking sides in factional struggles.

Eurogamer also has a Rise of the Godslayer screenshot gallery and the first video trailer as well. Check ‘em out!

I must have that new tiger mount…