Pumping Irony

First, MMORPG.com put up their GenCon Overview article, which just included a few bits of vague information of what is coming down the pike in Module 8. A decent read, but really no juicy information.

Jerry from DDOcast, on the other hand, has put up a couple articles of his GenCon experience, including more useful information as well as photos of some of the new content being demonstrated.

Module 8 will have high-end content, continuing the story lines for both the Reaver’s Bane and the Gianthold Tor series, which should keep the level-capped adventurers and raiders happy.

The real treats are some brand new features, though.

First is the New Player Experience, or NPE. Before anyone brings up Star Wars: Galaxies’ ill-fated NGE, this is not an overhaul of all of the game mechanics. It is quite literally a new tutorial area for new players and new characters. Players unfamiliar with actual D&D 3.5 rules (such as myself) will now be able to select character templates so we don’t gimp ourselves during creation. The original system will also remain for those more knowledgeable of the D&D mechanics. New characters start on the snow-laden island of Korthos where they’ll learn the basics of DDO’s gameplay, culminating in a scripted encounter with a white dragon before finally hopping a ride to Stormreach to begin their adventures with the rest of us.

Jerry also posted pictures of some of the early Harbor quests, such as the Goodblade series, which have been completely redesigned and repurposed for the NPE. Looks awesome and I look forward to trying this out. I think I’ll wait until Module 8 goes live to roll either a cleric or paladin for a permadeath guild. I’m debating either the Sublime Permadeath guild on my home server of Thelanis or Mortal Voyage over on Argonnessen. My former guild leader is with Mortal Voyage so that alone is tempting, and I like the permadeath rule set they’ve adopted.

Finally, Module 8 is bringing an age-old mechanic of D&D into the game: hirelings! This sounds similar to what we’ll be expecting in Guild Wars 2: each character can bring a single hireling NPC to help with certain aspects of the quest. In GW2 your companion does not take up a party slot; Turbine has not yet stated if hirelings will or not. Once inside the quest, players can summon their hireling for a limited time. Like GW’s heroes, the hirelings will act on their own or can be commanded. If your group lacks a rogue for traps, one player can bring along a rogue hireling to handle them, and so forth. Again, hirelings are more similar to GW2’s companions in that each player can only bring one, rather than GW1 where a single player can bring up to three heroes.

As a follow-up to my previous posts about Turbine rumors, today the latest one hit: is Turbine bring DDO to consoles? This appeared first on Joystiq, then Massively picked it up and ran with it.

First, consider DDO’s active real-time combat system. This particularly lends itself well to consoles in terms of the base melee aspect. On the PC, melee is a single right-click and your character does a random combat animation. Press a key to block, another to dodge… all combat mechanics very familiar to most console gamers.

The instanced nature of DDO would also be a boon for the console platform, given that consoles usually have much fewer resources and RAM than a comparable PC would. The instanced zones and dungeons would keep performance maximized on the consoles.

Communication… well, that’s always been a topic in regards to console MMO’s but as I’ve said before, both Xbox 360 and PS3 accept any USB keyboard and the Xbox has a mini-keyboard attachment that snaps right onto a controller. More importantly, while there is a degree of chat in DDO, nearly everyone utilizes the game’s integrated VOIP during adventures. No idea about the PS3, but I think all 360’s come with a headset for use on Xbox Live already so no additional purchase necessary.

Currently, DDO has the typical $15/month MMO price scheme (although I jumped on the $10/month they offered awhile back). Massively Speaking #8 (hey, that was great hearing Cameron in a podcast, by the way!) hinted that Turbine is actively looking at alternate pricing schemes for DDO, including free-to-play. I can see DDO doing quite well for itself switching to the Guild Wars 2 model: pay for the game, play for free, then charge for additional content packs. I’ve stated many times that I foresee issues particularly with Xbox Live’s Gold members when they discover they have to pay one fee for the Xbox Live services they’ve been using, but a totally separate fee for any MMOG’s. Xbox Live users are already accustomed to paying for new Downloadable Content (DLC) so that particular price scheme, I feel, would be a tremendous hit on both platforms and we’d see DDO’s total population grow.

Adding fuel to the fire are two items from Turbine themselves. First, as I mentioned a few days ago, Turbine is looking for a Senior Console Engineer. Then came yesterday’s announcement from Turbine’s Community Manager, Meghan “Patience” Rodberg, that DDO’s popular Weekly Development Activities will be ceasing because what the DDO team is working on is under tight wraps, and that additionally DDO is going to be getting some major PR pushes in the coming months. Here are two blurbs from her announcement:

Q: Why is the WDA going away?
A: There are two critical factors that went into the decision, so let’s talk about them a little:
The first is that following the completion of Module 7, the DDO development team has been working full-tilt on several things that are still under tight wraps. This means we’re unable to include them in the WDA – making it next to useless.
More importantly, though, is that DDO will be getting more and more focus from Turbine’s marketing and PR teams over the coming months. This renewed focus has already begun, in fact, and you may have noticed an increase in the publicity for DDO. This is a good thing! The pickle is that as time goes on, we will be getting even more press coverage for the game; this means that we’ll need to offer exclusives to the media about things that are coming up next for DDO – things that as a result cannot be included in the WDA.

Q: What are these top secret things you mentioned?
A: They are top secret. In time we will bring you more information, but currently we’re not at liberty to discuss them. If we told you, we’d have to… well, you know.

Now for a huge negative: DDO’s UI. No I don’t mean those fugly icons (seriously Turbine, get some new icon art) but the complexity of it all. My highest character is level 7 so far, and I already have the same number, if not more, hotbars onscreen that I had back when I was raiding and PvP-ing in WoW. And a lot of the slots in my WoW hotbars were fluff; just items I put there for convenience not because I needed them. In DDO, I feel like I need those slots onscreen, and I can only see it getting worse as I progress to higher levels. Real-time combat or no, DDO does have a standard MMORPG UI and that is simply unacceptable in a console environment. I’ve wondered if a shift to drop-down hotbars would work, similar to how EA designed the UI for the console versions of their RTS titles, Battle for Middle Earth 2 and Command and Conquer 3. That UI works great within the scope of an RTS, and could possibly work well for our standard turn-based MMORPG’s but again, DDO is real-time, fast action, and I don’t know how that would translate when it comes to a fighter quickly needing a Trip skill or a caster needing to quickly select a spell from his repertoire. If a console DDO is indeed on the “top secret” plate over at Turbine, I am extremely interested how they handle the UI translation.

Now, just to put away all thoughts that Turbine is going to blow all their recent fund-raising just on DDO, I’ll reiterate Time Warner was one of the lead investors last week, and their representative specifically said “Online interactive entertainment is a huge growth market and we are very excited about Turbine, its unique capabilities and the obvious opportunities that exist with our own broad portfolio of IP.” In my previous speculations, I linked Time Warner’s involvement to their Harry Potter IP, but don’t forget the potential aspect of implementing aspects of the Lord of the Rings movies into the MMORPG. Turbine only had a license with Tolkien Enterprises for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit series of novels but nothing with New Line Cinemas. However, Time Warner is the parent company of New Line, so who knows? Maybe as an eventual result of this new turn of events we’ll finally hear Howard Shore’s glorious soundtrack in-game? Maybe we’ll see the NPC graphics reflect the looks of the actors? So much potential here, it would be a shame if it fell short. As their rep stated, Time Warner does indeed have a huge IP portfolio, so I’d still keep a Harry Potter-themed game as a possibility, or any number of their more popular franchises that could be brought to the MMO space.

I’ve been distracted with Guild Wars this weekend, so didn’t notice that my server of Thelanis won the Race to the Subterranean to open the new raid in DDO’s Module 7, The Subterrane, housed under the ruins where the Marketplace Bazaar once stood.

That goes a long way in explaining why I was unable to find any low-mid level groups last week, yet the server was quite active! Speculators were giving Sarlona the edge because that server has a reputation as being home to many a power-gamer, whereas Thelanis is viewed as the unofficial role-playing server. Apparently the Sarlonians were too busy power-leveling their new monks to raid, and Thelanis took the lead and unlocked the new raid on Friday! Congrats to my fellow Thelanians, and I hope to some day join the ranks in those raids.

My understanding of the Race to the Subterranean is that it was similar to WoW’s War Effort to open the gates of Ahn’Qiraj. Where WoW took donation of crafted items and such, DDO had tokens in each of the prior raids. Players on each server raided, collected tokens and turned them in to count towards opening the Subterrane on their server. I’m not sure what time frame Turbine had in mind for this event, but Thelanis pulled it off in three days! That’s a crazy amount of raiding, folks!

Turbine pushed Module 7: The Way of the Monk onto the live servers this morning! Looks like an awesome content update, and will likely be the impetus to get me back into DDO a little this month. I’d already downloaded the pre-patch and had DDO updated today while the servers were down, so that when they were back up I didn’t have to download as many files to make the full update official. Nice touch, I hope they continue with their new downloadable pre-patch policy.

Turbine put up the full patch notes, but I’ll just touch on a few of the nice ones that caught my eye.

• Monks have been added to the game as a new playable class! No idea how appealing the monk class will be to me, but adding new classes to games is always a good move, and I look forward to grouping with some.
• Class trainers will now teach characters of any level, and will warn you if you are about to multi-class. I don’t multi-class (yet) but I appreciate being able to use any trainer rather than remembering which trainer in which city ward trains which levels.
• Two new raids have been added to the game! Woohoo! I don’t have any characters raid-worthy yet. I think my Wizard might be a level or two from starting the Vault of Night series, which ends in the Red Dragon raid, though not having been through that yet I don’t know if I’ll be able to actually do the raid at the same level as when I start the first quest. Either way, I’ve been terribly excited since the beginning to see how DDO handles raids, and I’m so glad a huge-ass red dragon will be the first. The two new raids introduced today sound very cool and I look forward to playing them someday.
• Once a day quests have been added to the game. WoW strikes again! DDO daily quests… hmm… I’ll have to check them out for sure. The patch notes specifically mention low-level characters, so I’ll be interested to see exactly what level bracket equates to “low-level.” With any luck, Koriander will be able to run them at level 7, although he’s as squishy as squishy gets and has difficulty soloing gnats…
• UI Improvements. Several improvements in several areas of the UI went live today, and are they ever nice! Kudos to the first step (on the DDO side) of what looks to be an ongoing overhaul of the Turbine Engine’s UI system.
• Three-Barrel Cove is now a wilderness area! The original Three-Barrel Cove was something akin to an outdoor quest hub. A small pirate town with some pirate mobs outside the pub to fight and a few quest NPC’s scattered about the map, including quests for The Fire Caves, which was a really fun dungeon. The last area that received the “wilderness area” treatment was the Waterworks dungeon. Afterwards, Waterworks was still Waterworks, it just had the new wilderness area-specific quests. Three-Barrel Cove on the other hand, has been completely revamped! Every aspect of the zone, from the town to the terrain, is completely new, and it’s nothing short of incredible! The zone looks to be roughly the size of Searing Heights and the other new wilderness areas, so plenty of exploring to be had!

I thought I’d read that Module 7 would also introduce a completely new tutorial experience, but I just created a monk and was taken to Smuggler’s Cove and did all the exact same content I’d done last year on my other characters. Arriving in Stormreach in the Wavecrest Tavern was humorous, as everyone else had also created monks! It was like a city-wide pajama party!

For more fun details, hit up Massively, they did a huge Module 7 preview treatment last week, with interviews, screen shots and videos!

I mentioned recently I was taking a break from Vanguard until my friend Daniel gets to a level where we can duo and group. Vanguard was included in my Station Access, which I canceled recently, and SOE advised that I needed to allow the Station Access to expire before I could renew Vanguard on its own. Station Access expired a few days ago, but I’m going to hold off re-subscribing to Vanguard just to make sure I give Daniel time to get his cleric leveled up. Otherwise, I’ve got Dolndruth right in the middle of the CIS chain and it’s just damn fun so I’d be tempted to keep at it and perpetually out-level Dan’s cleric. Having an inactive account rather forces the issue.

So, that leaves me with only DDO and LOTRO as active accounts, though it’s debatable if I should count LOTRO since I’m a lifetime member.

Speaking of DDO, I did get to participate in the final event in the 2nd Anniversary last night. My guild set up a raid in the marketplace. That was the first time I’d ever been grouped with more than a single guild member in DDO, and I have to say even though I don’t know most of them very well yet, seeing all of us banded together did instill a sense of pride and of family. It was a nice feeling; a bit surprising yet very satisfying and welcome. I have screen shots of various times during the event but didn’t get time to resize and upload them to my gallery before I had to leave on this trip. When I get home I’ll either just upload them to the DDO gallery or perhaps edit this post with a few screen shots. Otherwise, I’ll defer to DDOcast where stories were posted, many with screen shots and videos, with each change that occurred during the past week of the Shavarath invasion!

Synopsis: Devils from the plane of Shavarath instigated an invasion of Stormreach. Random portals appeared in the marketplace and small bands of devils attacked every few hours. A few days later a huge swirling portal appeared over the Bazaar tent. Soon all the NPC vendors moved out of the Bazaar and into the Rusty Nail tavern near the bank. A floating citadel appeared between the bank and the Bazaar tent, with platforms to climb to the top and meet Veheer F’Nord who is leading the research team to discover the devils’ intentions and a way to defend Stormreach. The vortex over the Bazaar grew in power and the tent flailed helplessly in its wake. Devils took up residence and posted guard at each entrance to the Bazaar and a magical force field emanated from the portal, protecting the devils from further attack. Last night the Stormreach wizards set up a counter assault, firing magical beams into the portal from points along the tent’s perimeter. The beams coalesced into a single beacon of power which succeeded in destroying the portal to Shavarath! However the ensuing explosion also destroyed the Bazaar as well, leaving a debris-filled crater in the center of the city! A quest is now available to defend from four waves of increasingly difficult devils, minions, and bosses.

This is my first live event in an MMO and I must say, the whole counter-attack thing was really cool and immersive to watch and experience. Seeing the magical blasts go up in sequence, merge, then get out of the mages’ control, destroying both the portal and the tent was awesome to say the least. The “Devil Assault” quest… much less so. The whole thing consists of two rooms, the second of which the group gets locked into as waves of devils, hell-hounds, etc. appear from three portals. I expected much more out of that. Some of the NPC dialogue over the past week makes it sound like we’ll eventually take the battle to Shavarath itself, so I hope more is coming and that simple portal room wasn’t the extent of this event.

Aside from the DDO event, I’ve spent time in LOTRO as well. I mentioned some potential kinship drama recently. Still not totally sure what was behind it all, other than the bottom line was both Exodus and Swifty & Hammo wanted more members available for raids. Why not simply create an alliance? I’ve been told that it was Swifty & Hammo’s idea for the two kinships to merge, though in reality it seemed more like an acquisition where Swifty & Hammo remains with the name and leadership intact, and simply absorb Exodus members. Whatever. It seems most of Exodus stayed and I’m now hearing it was mainly the upper echelon of (former) Exodus “management” who wanted to be in S&H. Regardless, all of us are welcome in Swifty & Hammo, though I still have to ask why there’s no Exodus-S&H alliance?

Anyway, my original “rule” (and we know the rule about rules…) in LOTRO was that I would have two “mains” and each would get equal time. I did great with that up until the low twenties where I wound up taking the Lore-master out more. She is now level 33, and had a great time last night (stayed up way too late though) with a group in Garth Agarwen, an instanced outdoor dungeon in the Lone Lands. She’ll need to go in at least once more to get a few more quests complete, and she’ll also need to get a group to complete some quests that are outside the instance but still in that general area, where all mobs are elite. She also has her first quest from Radagast the Brown to get non-combat pets, so I am very much looking forward to getting those completed. I also spent some time with my Captain, Gared, who’s been stuck at level 24 for some time. I thought I’d get him through some quests and up to level 25 where he could ride the Bree-horse he was given as a holiday gift from Turbine. We did that, and got a few groups in the Lone Lands and Gared is already level 26! Thankfully, one or two of the quests also rewarded a piece of heavy armor. Gared is woefully outfitted with a smattering of both heavy and medium armor. He’s a prospector so I’ll need to take him out gathering rich iron and ask a kinsman armorsmith to hook him up with a full set of heavy armor. Gared fellowed with a kinswoman, Elibeth, who was also level 24 at the time, who had crafted her own set of heavy armor appropriate for that level and she graciously offered to make Gared a set as well if Gared provides the materials, so that will be his mission next week, provided Arwellyn doesn’t take all my LOTRO time.

Turbine is preparing an event for DDO’s 2nd Anniversary, and they’re being pretty tight-lipped about it. We do know the Module 6.1 update, released yesterday, contained the “live event” code from LOTRO and the anniversary event will be its official unveiling in DDO.

Jerry from DDOCast and player VonBek did a “first impressions” writeup with screen shots of Stormreach yesterday. I ran around the city and snagged a few screen shots as well last night and today.

Stormreach is suddenly beset with dark clouds, giving the city a gloomy and somber mood. Stormreach has frequent rain showers normally, but none since this strange new storm appeared, though there is the occasional lightning burst.

A mysterious glowing rune or glyph has suddenly appeared on the street in Soulgate, near the entrance to the Catacombs of the Church of the Silver Flame.

VonBek reported mysterious flashing lights, and took some nice up-close screenshots of some. I’ve only found one so far, and it always flashes as I’m rounding the corner down the street, never up close. I thought perhaps it was timed, but after testing that does not seem to be the case. Pretty much every time I’m near the rune/glyph at Soulgate then run near the intersection where the Market and House Deneith meet, this light flashes very quickly.

Turbine is, of course, hamming things up with role-playing style news updates on DDO.com. I’m sure more will follow, culminating with the anniversary event itself on Sunday and lasting until March 9th.

I’m wondering… is that rune/glyph a clue? Since it’s next to the Catacombs, will there be an undead invasion of Stormreach? All we know is from MMORPG.com’s interview with Kate Paiz at GDC, Kate said “the city of Stormreach will never be the same again, and you can quote me on that.”

It’s been awhile since I actually played through an adventure in DDO, and even longer since I played my wizard, Koriander, because of my concerns that he was being viewed by the other group members as not pulling his weight. See, once you’re in an adventure, there are no regenerating Spell Points (ie. mana) in DDO because there’s no such thing in D&D. No regenerating Hit Points (health), either. Hence I have been exceptionally conservative when playing Kori because I don’t grind repeatedly through the same dungeons, therefore I do not have them memorized to know what’s coming up, when I should hold back and when I should let loose. So Kori has been tending to cast the odd spell here and there, then relying upon wands, which are becoming increasingly useless.

The wizard class in DDO is the finest casting I’ve seen in any game, however, and it’s one of the reasons I love the game. I typically avoid playing casters in MMO’s, with the exception of my Monk (and Necromancer) in Guild Wars because that game also handles spells differently than your typical MMO would.

So, with Daniel busy working up his new Vanguard Cleric to duo and group with my Dread Knight, I took time away from Vanguard so he could catch up. Walking out of the office, I happened to notice my Harry Potter DVD’s which prompted me to play DDO for the excellent wizard class.

I started off finding a group doing some lower-level adventures just so I could re-familiarize myself with Kori. One of the chests we looted had a Robe of Power III which bestows an additional 30 Spell Points so Kori is loving that!

Next I found a group heading into Tangleroot Gorge where we completed the short quest to find Chief Ungurz, a hobgoblin chieftain at war with the Splinterskull hobgoblin clan. Chief Ungurz started us on Assault on Splinterskull, a seven-chapter quest chain taking us into the upper and lower sections of Splinterskull Fortress. Each chapter of the quest gave increasing experience points and by the end of the whole thing, Kori was hovering tantalizingly close to level 6! To date, all three of my characters are level 5, which is very easy to reach but it seems there’s a lull from 5-7 where groups can be difficult to find at times. My only complaint was during Chapter 4. There’s a section of the fortress where a nasty spider named Whisperdoom lives, along with his three daughters. Our job is to enter Whisperdoom’s lair and destroy his egg sacs. Killing his three daughters is an optional objective for bonus xp, but Whisperdoom himself is not an objective so everyone in the group went into Sneak mode and hid in a corner then someone (with high Armor Class) pulled Whisperdoom away so the rest can go in and destroy the egg sacs. It’s the same tactic used in old-school Upper Blackrock Spire where a hunter would kite General Drakkisath while the group dealt with his guards. The difference was you still had a nasty fight on your hands to kill Drakk afterwards, while there was no need to touch Whisperdoom at all. Bit of a shame, really.

I felt I was at least getting the hang of the wizard class by now, though I was noticing that my days of wands would be coming to an end soon. My former stand-by, the wand of Magic Missile (3rd), was barely doing any damage at all. The other wands were doing none. Rather than think of the wizard in the role most MMO’s place it — nuker — I will work on diversifying my spell book to include buffs and especially some crowd control, which is likely the low-level wizard’s best defense.

I was up for more action after Splinterskull, so I found a group planning on running the Catacombs on Elite difficulty! Catacombs is a very long, challenging quest chain that takes roughly 3 hours to complete in one sitting. It’s split up into multiple quests, some of them multi-chapter, so doing all of the Catacombs at once is not necessary, but our group went for it.

The basic storyline behind the Catacombs series is that of the Dryden family. Friar Renau of the Silver Flame has lost touch with his niece Marguerite, who is being held in the Sanctuary (read: insane asylum) section of the Catacombs, part of the Church of the Silver Flame in Stormreach. Upon entering the Sanctuary, we quickly discover the place has been overrun by undead! Something is amiss in Stormreach! Renau sends us upstairs to talk to Bishop Dryden, who turns out to be Marguerite’s father. Even more undead are now in the Catacombs, and we find the spirit of a former asylum inmate who tells us Marguerite herself is responsible for the undead uprising. The bishop sends us further into the Catacombs to retrieve a rubbing from the Bishop’s dead (and evil) uncle Gerard to look for clues to Marguerite’s whereabouts. Gerard had been using a power called the Duality which gives power over both life and death and allows one to raise the dead, and it’s suspected Marguerite is now using the Duality herself. A few more chapters and intrigues, we meet up with Marguerite who has become a powerful wraith. She tells us it was her father, Bishop Dryden, who manipulated his insane daughter to use the Duality. We rush upstairs to confront the Bishop where we learn ultimately, the Bishop has been possessed by the spirit of his brother Arkasic Dryden. Forcing Arkasic’s spirit from his body, the Bishop faints and the final boss fight is on!

This fight can be tricky as Arkasic has the Duality at his disposal: if a party member dies, Arkasic can raise him as an undead, and there are spots of grease on the floor where the Bishop’s two iron defenders died, which can lead to party members slipping and falling, taking them out of combat for a few moments.

We were victorious, defeating the vile wraith of Arkasic and his undead legion! Kori attained level 6 mid-way through the Catacombs chain but I did not take the time to go train until afterward. Friar Renau has a large list of unique items as the final reward. Kori chose a cap of wizardry which bestows an additional 25 Spell Points, at which point I was horrified to learn bonuses do not stack in DDO! The +30 from the Robe of Power III outweighs the +25 of the cap, rendering it moot. Live and learn, yes, but that was an exhaustive lesson…

After training up, Kori is officially level 6 and was greeted with a mail stating he had achieved over 400 total favor with the various patrons (ie. factions) of Stormreach, and I had unlocked the Drow race for a new character! I’m kinda thinking a Drow rogue might be fun…

Addition: A bit ahead of schedule but I also wanted to offer a congratulations to The Sublime Permadeath Guild, also from my home server of Thelanis, who will be celebrating their two-year anniversary on March 7th. I believe they’ll be planning a player event, also. I see The Sublime running around all the time, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about both The Sublime and their way of doing permadeath. I actually did create a cleric to join The Sublime, but haven’t worked up the nerve yet… I suspect I’d really enjoy it, however. It would feel even closer to D&D (barring divine intervention or having the luck of a cleric’s resurrection, in D&D when a character died, he was dead) and I enjoy the exploration aspect of the adventures rather than rushing through just for the xp, which too many PUG’s do.

Thankfully, I’m a Founder on LOTRO with a Lifetime membership, so that’s working out great. My super-awesome kinship has been very understanding that I didn’t want to get sucked into the “must.play.all.day.and.night” rut that I found myself in with WoW. I want to do the dungeons and raids with them badly, but I want to make sure I can keep things casual so I’ve been on break from LOTRO.

Turbine recently announced a special $9.99 per month plan for DDO which I jumped on. I’m also in a super-cool casual family-style guild in DDO and, while I love the adventures in the game, the problem with a totally group-focused game is that if I can’t find a group, I can’t play the game. I do look forward to playing the high-end content, and it sounds like some amazing and awesome content is coming this year. In the meantime, if I can save $5 per month to keep the subscription active and pop into Stormreach anytime I want, sounds great to me.

My final subscription was the SOE Station Access, where I have Everquest II, Vanguard, Star Wars Galaxies and Planetside active.

However…

I haven’t bothered to play Planetside in months because I never saw more than 10 players on a server and it has an atrocious UI along with horribly flaky mouse movement in the menus. I understand it was great in its day, but apparently that day has come and gone so even as a curiosity, Planetside was a failed venture for me.

SWG. Whoah. Not that I necessarily mind adding quests and all but SOE did such a poor job of it in their misguided NGE overhaul. I could even adapt to that but, much like Planetside, the game has serious population issues. To date, I’ve encountered a grand total of six players and have seen not a single line of chat from anyone. The graphics are badly dated and I truly resent being hard-locked at 30 fps when I could be having a much smoother experience. SWG was my first MMO and I have fond memories that nothing else will ever replace, but I guess it’s true: sometimes you just can’t go home again.

EQ2. I have created several characters of different races and classes and the farthest I’ve managed to advance any is level 9. Other than the random bit of music, I have struggled to find even a single enjoyable element to the game. EQ2 is quite popular and arguably has more content than any other MMORPG on the market. Originally, I decided I would put up the fight and work my way towards whatever quality content surely must be out there, but I finally had to be honest with myself. With other games out there willing to “show me the money” with quality content from Moment One, why should I have to punish myself wading through this muck? It’s a shame, and I wanted to like EQ2 but it just wasn’t in the cards.

Vanguard, surprisingly, I’m having a blast with and I’m in a friendly, fun and helpful guild. Even though Karen has abandoned us like red-headed step-children to go adventure in Norrath. Grouping has been incredibly fun as well as challenging, and I’m thoroughly enjoying being the “Rock Star Tank” again. Actually, I may be enjoying tanking more in Vanguard than I did in WoW, because the Dread Knight class simply oozes coolness and I enjoy the challenges it presents. I also have a real-life friend playing Vanguard now (also a new guild-mate, yay!) so that’s an additional compelling reason to play. Well-known population problems aside, I can honestly say I’ve seen quite an influx of brand-new players over the past few weeks since GU3 was released, and it’s been wonderful. I’m seeing players in nearly every town I visit, the chats are active, friendly, and Chuck Norris-free (well, mostly).

I wasn’t having any financial issues, but I finally had to come to terms that I was paying an extra $15 per month to play Vanguard, because as wistfully nostalgic as I may have been, I’m not going to return to SWG, nor can I tolerate being logged into EQ2 for more than a few minutes, so it’s wasted money.

So, as of a few minutes ago logging out of the Java chat with an SOE customer service rep (thanks for the help, by the way, Eric) I am now left with only a normal monthly subscription to Vanguard and the new 33% discounted subscription to DDO. Should another game roll down the pike, I can add it without batting an eyelash as the total cost would be close to what I’ve been paying anyway with the Station Access and full-price DDO, but right now there are no titles current or in the immediate future that are piquing my interest whatsoever.

I just logged into DDO and the following alert popped up: (Note: only active subscribers can read the links)

Dungeon Closures: Depth of Despair, Sanctuary, The Vile Apothecary.

We have discovered a serious issue in the following dungeons, with Large Violet Slime, dividing infinitely.

Think of it as a cell dividing repeatedly and infinitely, until the dungeon is filled with thousands of slimes.
The dungeons affected are:

Depths of Despair, in House Deneith (CR 4)
Sanctuary, in the Catacombs in the Market (CR 2)
The Vile Apothecary, in the Market (CR 4)
The Slime Infested Warehouse - Search for the scrolls (For Goodblade)

For more information, click here.

I’d imagine that would suck to have your adventure brought to such an end, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that crashed the client too, but what a hoot it would be to intentionally pop into one of those dungeons just to see the slimes dividing and filling the dungeon! Quarion even posted a screenshot attachment of it happening. Reminds me of some of the “whoops!” moments in WoW such as the “Corrupted Blood” plague when Zul’Gurub was released.

In other DDO news, Module 5: The Accursed Ascension went live yesterday. Module 5 Final Release Notes. My patcher got me updated as soon as it went live but I was occupied with Vanguard. I don’t have a high level character in DDO yet so I can’t see the new content yet but I immediately noticed improved performance and a few nice looking UI elements. I’m curious if this update implies UI skinning, etc. just like LOTRO does? Also they finally fixed the textures on the lighthouse island in the Harbor as well as replacing the ocean textures and effects with all new ones that are LOTRO-quality. LOTRO has some of the most beautiful water surface effects I’ve seen, and certainly the best I’ve seen in the MMO genre. Waterfalls, however, they botched but this isn’t a LOTRO article. I was already impressed with DDO’s graphics but with the new engine improvements, texturing and water effects, it’s just downright gorgeous. I also noticed in the options we have the texture cache and crowd quality options that LOTRO has, which is a very good thing. I’ve been hoping that Turbine would take measures to keep both their games on the same engine build and it looks like my hopes will be answered after all.

The release notes are quite a huge list, as usual, but I did spot this way down near the bottom, which confirms my initial observations:

Engine Upgrade

• We have significantly upgraded the game engine for Module 5. A short list of improvements is as follows:
  • Client Performance: Users should see an improvement in performance at all graphics details. Hitching, rubber banding, and momentary freezing is reduced while overall rendering performance is much better.
  • Graphics Improvements: Several graphics options are new or optimized. Antialiasing will produce better image quality, windowed mode has better controls, and graphics effects have been rebalanced to produce better results at different graphics qualities. Because of these changes we recommend that users go into Options -> Graphics and select “Detect Optimal Settings”.
  • Bug Fixes: Many engine related bugs (both minor and major) have been fixed.
  • Network Performance: The network code has been optimized to use less bandwidth.
  • Water Shaders: Most water has been significantly upgraded, and now produces scene reflections depending on detail level. The medium graphic quality experience has also been greatly improved around water.