West Karana

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.

* EverQuest II — Getting the guild ready for guild halls is going to take more time at the loom to get my level up to the point where I can go on crafting missions as either tailor or jeweler. Plus, the construction of the griffin towers and teleport spires happened while I was off in EQ and World of Warcraft respectively, so this is one world event I am determined not to miss. Also, I need to finish the Veksar quests. My group bailed out at the last mob for no good reason, even though I could easily keep the boss mob mezzed while the group killed the adds. They just decided to leave.

* Vanguard — Vanguard got a new game update yesterday, haven’t had a chance to see if Tipa the Startled Halfling Bard and Henry Stout the Astonished Disciple have gotten their eyelids back. Plus, I need to finish Stout Henry goes to War. Last week’s craziness pushed everything back a week.

* Guild Wars: Nightfall — I actually have played this some, though I didn’t write about it because it went terribly. So I have to go back and try the next mission again. It wasn’t the game’s fault. My head just wasn’t in gaming last week.

* Wizard 101 — I love this game. Meeting Gnewt and his wife, and then right after making a new friend and doing a VERY TOUGH instance together that took a LOT of teamwork, strategy and deck management, rekindled my love for the game. It’s an MMO which does things differently. That’s what we WANT, right? If only they had an adults-only server that drops the kid protection features.

* Metaplace — I was just offered the opportunity to be part of the beta test. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, and in fact if Spore hadn’t taken over my life this week, Metaplace surely would have.

* City of Heroes/Villains — When Issue 13 comes out. I am going to HAVE to take a few days and see if my dream of becoming a pro game designer could be more than a dream by WRITING some missions. Can I craft a great story and also design interesting levels and challenges? Here’s my chance to find out.

So which of these do I give up for WAR?

I don’t have time for the games I am ALREADY playing. I wanted to start writing a series on free-to-play games, but the three hours or so a night I have to myself are already overscheduled, so I have no chance to do more… even though I want to.

Okay, this is skipping ahead a bit, but I’m so mad. I basically manage to single-handedly hold the Sunspears together after Spearmarshall Kosmir became demon-chow. Veshta totally killed us. We fled to some caves — caves filled with vermin! Huge bugs! Koss was kidnapped! So I pretty much had to do it all myself. Afterward, I was totally the hero. It was MY place. MINE.

So WHERE THE HECK did all these OTHER players come from? *I* didn’t invite them!

Sigh.

Okay, wayback machine time.

When we left back at Day 2 (and sorry for no Day 3 last week, I was at the SOE Fan Faire), I was level 19 and finishing up all the quests I could find before I moved on.

Today, I lept right into the fray. The Castellan in the Sunspear castle gave me three tasks that I needed to complete in order to prepare for the battle against Koura that was sure to come.

The first task was to bolster the army by going to the Sunspear Tombs and enlist the help of the dead. Which is kinda weird because, hey, they’re DEAD. They probably got dead by LOSING, and I doubt death has given them many opportunities for training, except for training in decomposing or providing homes for worm colonies.

But hey, I’m not in charge (yet), if that’s what i gotta do… so I went to the tombs and knelt in front of the gate, and a Sunspear warrior appeared — and attacked us. Just as a test. And guess what — we WON. EASILY. I DON’T see how much help a bunch of dead warriors will be when their leader can’t even put up a decent showing against a bunch of newbie adventurers.

So, color me dubious.

The second task was to train some recruits, which just involved taking them bug hunting. But they would come in handy later (although not handy enough to change the outcome of the battle in which they took part).

The third task was to obtain the blessings of the wind gods to give us safe passage from Istan to Koura.

This involved summoning the wind spirits — and killing them. See a little pattern here? After we killed enough of them, they promised to speed our ships on their way. Which is really interesting, because we basically kicked their butts. We kicked ghost butt at the Sunspear tomb, wind spirit butt at the docks, and we expect these people to HELP us?

Well, I think we have to really wonder about the quality of help we will be receiving from them. Or, who they will be helping.

Anyway, tasks done, we formed up on the docks, marched into the ships, and the wind spirits sped us to Koura.

Ah, the sounds and smells of battle. The crash of high-flung stones plowing through the troops. The screams, the blood, the horrid monsters, barely controlled by their summoners. The thrill of victory.

Not, of course, OUR victory. Not even MY victory.

Oh, we were well-routed by forces beyond our control. The wind spirits brought us here because they knew what we would find here. Our own deaths. The Sunspear dead must have been nearby as well, to carry their dead back with them to their eternal rest in the Sunspear Tomb. They carried Spearmarshall Kormir with them.

We started off well, going from place to place, easily defeating the enemy. One of the new recruites even figured out a way to turn the bombards against the city, opening its heart to us. And so we rushed in, certain of victory. Spearwarden Veshta of the Koura, though, summoned the power of the disgraced Sixth God, Abaddon, and four demons appeared. One bit through Kormir, and busied itself swallowing her from the inside out. Those of us that lived ran and ran and ran. Most of my squad survived, but Koss was gone. Dead, captured or scattered, we didn’t know. But as the days and weeks passed, as we Sunspears stuck on Koura looked for a place where we could stop running and regroup and no word came, we had to come to terms with his loss.

I chose an anonymous henchman to take the place of the boisterous, fun-loving Koss.

We Sunspears and Istan in general aren’t any too popular on Koura. A lot of the people think we got what we had coming to us on the Consulate Docks. Donkoro, who thankfully had managed to escape with me and had invaluable wisdom to share, suggested a friend he knew. That friend wanted nothing to do with us, but he did know of a cave system which would be perfect, if bugs hadn’t overrun it. Perhaps we could…?

Oh, yes we could. I eat bugs like that for breakfast.

Um. Not really.

With the caves cleared, the Sunspears that survived the rout trickled in (and opened a new hub). We took on odd jobs. While interrogating a Kouran scout, we heard tell of some prisoners that had just been captured. Koss? No, these prisoners were all dead, and the villagers who had been healing them were themselves arrested.

We freed them, but they hadn’t seen anyone like Koss. Although…. there were rumors of some very important prisoners at a castle on the coast. We soon found out that Koss was alive, and among them. KOSS!

What do you think? Of course we rescued him!

After that, I spent a few hours working on random quests. I got my first elite ability, Simple Thievery, from a corsair named. He had a regular skill I don’t have yet on him, so I might go back for that one, except that it took a very long time to fight down that deep. So: level 20 — would be like 22 if I were still leveling, but that’s two more skill points to use. Opened a new hub with a new advanced weapon crafter (haven’t found armor crafter yet). I can now change my secondary job, have a new hero skill trainer and a new regular skill trainer.

I only got two blades on the Consulate Docks mission because I couldn’t find the last field marshal units before I accidentally triggered the final encounter, so I’ll have to go back and do that again. I am now a Sunspear General and well into the main portion of the game. Sixteen missions to go in the main plot, but I’m taking my time and doing every side quest so it may be some time before I finish Nightfall.

So before Guild Wars kindly implored me to log off after a mere four hours playing (and how kind of it to be so concerned for my health!), I had cleared out every single quest, aside from the main storyline quest, in my quest journal. Monuments had been protected. Salads had been made. Sentient seeds had been traded. A guild invite had been rejected (after I did some research in how to reply to tells… was the first time I had ever spoken to someone in the game). Forlorn lovers, brought together. Wayward children, found and brought home.

And the Sunspears were grateful. So grateful were they, that the Sunspear scouts would no longer give me bounty buffs. I guess once I became ***SUNSPEAR CHAMPION*** (woohoo), I was above such things as “promotion points” and “experience” and “loot”. I did learn that my party takes a share of loot, and that in a full eight character party, I am getting 1/8 of the loot that drops. Which seems unfair. For some of the rarer drops, I had to boot everyone from the party and go out hunting alone.

Just me and my giant, eight foot, pink flamingo. Of DEATH.

Now I know why people are always talking about “farming builds”. You need to go solo so you can get the loot. But that’s okay. I’m set on loot for now. I crafted all my level 15 armor and a new weapon and have stacks of raw materials in my storage vault for the next tier.

At level 18, I was ready to take on the main quest once again and save the world. After… I did some recruiting.

Is it like this in the real military, where just before you get shipped out on important missions, you have to go recruiting? Well, that’s what they had me do, anyway. I had to placate some visiting dignitaries by agreeing to train one of their students. And THEN I had to go running around finding new Sunspear recruits, without letting them know the fates of the Sunspears they are replacing. Naturally, none of the recruitees would be at all available unless I took care of the critters that had been hanging around forever, eating children and the such.

I went back and mastered the Apocrypha mission, then moved on. In this mission, which I had to do twice due to not completing one of the bonus mission objectives, you find a corsair delegation, KILL them, dress up in their clothes (first pic), talk your way through some Kouran guards (Koura is an ally nation who is really your enemy but nobody on Istan knows that, officially), and this is important, KILL EVERY SKALE IN THE AREA for the occasional Rhiktul monitor lizard that hangs out with them. Okay, no, I don’t know what this has to do with a clandestine meeting between the corsairs and the Kourans. But you only get 1/3 swords for completing the mission if you don’t kill them.

Anyway, once you meet up with the Kouran spear marshall, the mouthy monk you were forced to bring along starts spoiling the whole thing by flinging off her disguise and vowing to kill them all. So, yeah, we’re kinda forced to fight with our lives from that point. That was NOT part of the plan, and the Sunspears back home are LIVIDLY ANGRY. They know nothing about any corsair/Kouran conspiracy, and so it’s off to face the Tribunal.

There’s a couple of progress bars on the left which shows how well your case is going. Each person you summon to the stands makes your case worse. Every statement you make regarding the facts of the mission are twisted and distorted. All seems lost until Tennoli (the mouthy monk) brings Kosmir back from the hinterlands, and she puts a quick stop to the kangaroo court. Because she has PROOF the Kourans and the corsairs are in collusion, and she knows what Nightfall is.

And that was the end of Day 2. Level 19 and about dive more into this dark conspiracy. I haven’t changed my build, it’s still working out fine, and I think I have to get access to more skills before I can really start with the complicated builds.

There’s little hints that I will be sent to the mainland soon…

In search of… Ancient Erudites…

When a bunch of the most knowledgeable people in MMOs suggest to me that I should probably look into Guild Wars because it sounds like I need something different, well, I buy the game. And yeah, even though the game could be best compared to Dungeon Siege II with massively multiplayer cities, I do consider Guild Wars an MMO. Every city, town, hamlet, guard post and quest hub I came to were filled with people, selling stuff, looking for groups, looking for escorts to far away places, offering 100% no fail inscriptions — it was alive in a way that only MMOs manage.

So, first day. I started off as a Mesmer, not knowing really what the class did but someone said “try Mesmer!” and so I did. Mesmers shut enemies down. If the monster tries to cast a spell, it hurts. If the monster tries to attack, it hurts. If a monster has a buff, it hurts (and is removed). If they stand around doing nothing, it hurts, but not as much. With elite skills (which I clearly don’t have), Mesmers can prevent monsters from using a skill, or even take that skill away from you and use it against you. It’s a pretty unique class, I’ve never played anything like it before. It does tend to infuriate monsters, so I am using the command window to send my heroes and minions ahead to get aggro before I start with the mesmering.

I chose Ranger as my secondary class, because of Franz Mesmer, the scientist who discovered “animal magnetism” (later called Mesmerization, and even later, Hypnosis). So it just seemed proper that I have an animal companion.

When I looked up my build (Me/R) on various Guild Wars sites, it wasn’t listed at all. Those two classes don’t work well together. But, they suggested, a Mesmer can do quite well without worrying about their secondary class. Push points into Domination so stuff hurts a LOT, and into Inspiration to regain some health and energy, and you’ll make your mark.

So, until I do the respec quest and can change to a more conventional build, that’s just what I’ve done. At level 12, I’ve put the vast amount of my points into Domination, with some in Inspiration and some in Fast Casting. And if I need to swap this around for specific missions, it’s just as easy as visiting any non-instanced zone. I’ve done a little bit of traveling for skills.

There are games out there where you know just how and where to use a skill, and then you do that, over and over. Guild Wars is not that kind of game, and without the many, many wikis which teach you how to choose your skills and use them together, I would be entirely lost. And I want some of those higher level skills, which build upon each other to make cities of pain. I think City of Pain is a Mesmer skill, actually.

I chose to start GW with the Nightfall expansion, because that gave you heroes which leveled up with you, and for whom you could choose their skills and gear. You start off with the hero Koss, an out-and-out tank. He tanks the mobs so I don’t have to. In fact, it gets to be such a furball of mobs most times that I don’t WANT to play a melee. Standing off a bit making things hurt makes me happy. Of course, they come at me anyway… but every time they attack me, it hurts them so much I smile :) I went with healer and motivator (javelin-throwing) henchmen. As we leveled, I played with Koss’ build a bit so he could better protect me and not worry so much about the damage. Next to come was a healer hero, and last, a disruptor hero. And not long after I had bid adieu to my last henchmen, my party size increased to eight and I was able to get them all back again as I headed to some truly awful killing fields.

Just going out and killing things won’t get you much of anywhere in Guild Wars. Quests help (and are very often the same sort of kill X, run from here to there quests you see everywhere). Your rank in the Sunspears, the impartial, a-political guardians of the region, is a major plot driver. You gain rank not only by doing quests, but by talking to the scouts on guard outside resurrection shrines, who give you a bounty buff for a certain sort of enemy in the region. While you have that buff on (permanent until you zone), you will get double experience for enemies of that type, PLUS you gain rank in the Sunspears. So the first thing you do when entering the wilderness is look up the local scout and get the buff, and if you see anything matching it, you kill it. You can have multiple bounty buffs, so in larger wilderness zones, you might be running with two or three and really pulling in the bounty.

The wilderness zones are full of side quests so that you never find yourself setting off to do just one thing. In fact, it’s incredibly easy to get distracted. Like, I’m supposed to be clearing this quarry of mobs, but this guy standing near a monument needs his tools. He doesn’t want US to run off and get them, FOR ONCE. Instead, HE’LL run off and get them, all we have to do is just guard the monument until he returns. Easy money.

The moment he leaves, the lizard-like Skale decide to attack. Wave after wave after wave of scaley awesomeness. I still haven’t survived that encounter. But combined with a Skale bounty buff, it’s excellent xp and rank, until I die, anyway. There is a sort of debuff you get when dying, but since it’s entirely cleared by just popping into the nearest town or outpost, it really only gets annoying when you’re deep into a zone and you don’t want to have to fight through all those monsters again.

There is a main plot to the game, which you pick up as you gain rank. Some evil queen wants to rule the world, and she wants the Sunspears out of the picture before the astronomical event known as Nightfall. Isaac Asimov once wrote a story about a planet with five suns, and once in several thousand years, they’d all end up on the wrong side of the planet and night would come and the stars would come out and civilization would collapse. I don’t know if the GW Nightfall has anything to do with that. But they seem to just have the one sun. My best guess: an eclipse. Anyway, the first mission — which can be repeated for better scores — was to save a village from invasion. I did that with all mission objectives completed. The second mission was to delve into some ancient ruins, solve various puzzles, be under continuous attack and take down the monster Apocrypha, who, it turns out, was the only thing keeping the undead from invading the land (oops). One secondary objective was to not kill any Sunspear ghosts, but temporary-ally Koromir, local head of the Sunspears, didn’t get the memo and attacked every one she saw. After the first one, I found you could just run away from them and Koromir would give up on it after awhile to follow. So I need to return and redo that one. These missions are full of cut scenes and remind me very much of the similar plotline missions in Final Fantasy XI Online.

Crafting is pretty complex, given you don’t do it yourself. You bring raw materials, which can be found, bought, or salvaged from trash loot. One of the first things I did was change into a nicer looking outfit. Most stuff can have “inscriptions”, which give some benefit to the armor or the weapon. You can remove the inscriptions from items that have them, giving the occasional piece of trash loot a value it otherwise wouldn’t have. You can further supplement certain items with runes, so pretty much everything you (or your heroes) use or wear will eventually be specific to you and your needs.

And everything you unlock, be it runes, inscriptions, types of weapons or armor, will be available to you on any PvP character you make. Because the PvE game is only half the story. I haven’t done PvP yet — it starts at 20 — but I have observed some matches. I bet the best teams know all about each others builds and work together for real pwnage. I’m not normally that into PvP, but this one seems based more on skill than items… might be worth a look.

And that was just the first day. Impressions? Most WoW-likes just give you little bits of the game at first, then gradually give you more, so that after a few months, you have it all. Guild Wars seems to take the opposite approach. Give you everything, VERY quickly (at level 12, I am more than halfway through the leveling process, and I think the pre-20 game really must be considered an extended tutorial). And then you spend the rest of your time in the game refining your play. And PvPing.

It’s definitely a whole new game.

I will say, however, that I haven’t been this confused by an MMO in a long time. In a GOOD way. I’m going over the newbie FAQ I found paragraph by paragraph.

More later.