West Karana

I haven’t done a “what I’m playing” thing for awhile. So here’s my current roster of games, and I’ll start off with what I’m NOT playing. And that game would be Mythos.

MMOs:

Mythos had one of the strongest beta communities on record, with unparalleled access to devs. Community Manager Taylor Baldree would hold court in the #mythos IRC channel every night. Devs would respond daily on the forums. And all that was leading to a game that I very much wanted to play. With Hellgate: London’s reprieve by Namco Bandai, let’s hope there IS hope for Mythos as well.

Pi Story and Florensia — I played a few hours of Pi Story in closed beta, but it ended before I got too far in the game. Florensia, I didn’t get into the closed beta but has since gone open. Pi Story is a 2D side scroller MMO in the vein of Secret of Mana or Legend of Mana — a fast, action RPG MMO. Florensia is a Japanese pirate/fantasy adventure which has been compared to OnePiece. I like Japanese MMOs because they generally are closer to Western sensibilities than Chinese or Korean MMOs. I really want to get back to Pi Story, but will probably be on Florensia for a few days to check it out. Huge production values, I want to get a look at it.

Wizard 101 — W101 has been my addiction the past couple of weeks, but it is getting a little grindy and bugs in the Tomb of Storms in Krokotopia are making it difficult to progress. It IS beta, after all, so I am not too concerned. I am about at the point where I can write a decent first look at it, and then sit back and wait for release. This is one darn addictive game, but I begin to dread battles because as you move up in levels, each battle takes more and more time. Even with other people, the games have become so fantastically strategic that it’s hard to see how well their target audience does once they’re facing two rows of Rank 4 Elites and your deck contains only three 404 point heals…

City of Villains — love the game, love the characters, just don’t have time for the grind. I didn’t even actually intend on playing it last weekend, I just wanted to use the character creator. I just kept getting swallowed up into mission groups — random people would invite me all the time, and all but one of the groups were great.

EverQuest — Tuesday and Friday nights are for EQ. It took awhile to get used to the game again after so long away, but I am very comfortable there once again. Finding groups outside the Nostalgia nights is still a hassle, so, as when I played before, I don’t bother looking for groups. I just run around and explore or work on my epic. I don’t hold out the hope that the next expansion will bring anything for casual players; sounds like the whole faction grind, tiered high end raiding system they love so much now. But that’s okay. They already wrote MY EverQuest, and it’s still there to play.

EverQuest 2 — I haven’t logged on EQ2 again since I finished my storm armor quests. I hate soloing, and I only stuck it through the considerable soloing for that assassin armor because I wanted to take a screenshot of my character wearing it. My goals in EQ2 — getting my troubadour’s mythical epic, or finding a high level casual raiding guild — seem impossible. My level 80 troubadour and inquisitor are guildless, and it’s so depressing not having anyone to talk to when I log in that I don’t spend much time playing. I think my inquisitor might still be sitting in the bottom of RE2 where she was when she was kicked out of the group so they could bring someone else’s healer in. My troubadour has been unable to even get a RE2 group, and I have no idea how I am supposed to report on EQ2 happenings when I don’t even have a guild :/ It’s tough and depressing.

Vanguard — I’ve been spending some time in Vanguard, running around, doing quests, and hoping to get a good sense for the current state of the game. Again, being guildless and playing entirely solo are so crushingly soul-draining that I can’t play long before I just want to fill the emptiness with a game that has people I can talk to in it.

Looking back, it looks like I have been largely playing games with easy grouping and fast-paced gameplay. Not surprisingly, these are the two trends I think herald the forthcoming next wave of MMOs that will supplant the WoW-likes.

My thoughts and good wishes go out to the folks at Flagship Studios, developers of Hellgate: London and Mythos. Word came today that they’ve closed their doors. Some rumors say their Korean publisher will be taking the games over, other rumors suggest that though Flagship is gone, the employees and IP could be snapped up by some other company.

I can’t help but be reminded of Sigil’s employees standing out in their parking lot a year ago.I absolutely hope everyone lands on their feet. I never played H:L, but I did play Mythos a lot, and was really looking forward to its release.

I just had a thought, while writing the Mythos article. We all know where Mythos came from. Diablo II game play with a Warcraft art style. Diablo II came from Diablo, and Diablo was heavily influenced by the rogue-likes Moria and Angband, I think? Both those games were inspired by Hack, which was inspired by Rogue, which was heavily influenced by Temple of Apshai (I’m guessing), which took its inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons.

Now, World of Warcraft was inspired by the Warcraft RTS games, EverQuest, and Dark Age of Camelot. EverQuest took its inspiration from Toril MUD, which was based on other MUDs back to Diku, which was itself based on D&D and earlier MUDs which were inspired by Infocom’s Dungeon/Zork, which was inspired by Crowther and Woods’ Colossal Cave Adventure, which was based on real spelunking. Dark Age of Camelot took its inspiration EverQuest, so there’s some inbreeding going on there. Warcraft polished earlier RTS games, which draw heavily from those old Avalon-Hill war games, which likely got their start as variants of the board game Risk (total speculation for purposes of illustration only).

See where this is going? All these games take certain ideas — call them genes — and mix them up to form new games. What if we could, to push the analogy, sequence these genes, and directly diagram the rise and fall of genetic markers over the years. We would have a new handle on how to judge games. Point and click vs WASD? XP grind or quest grind? Group or solo preferred?

When someone says WAR is like WoW, we could say well, it’s 75% like WoW, 10% like DAoC (and since both games draw from EverQuest) can trace half its heritage all the way back to 1999. Now this 25% here, this was never in WoW, and there’s our difference.

And more importantly, we would be able to really focus on truly new and innovative ideas. “Whoa, in this game, your character loses levels if the player doesn’t log in. Is that new? Will it spread to other games?”

Virology and genetics can tell us a lot about gaming evolution, I’m guessing. Evolution? Yeah, I went there. I think we all can see these games are not a product of Intelligent Design… (Sigh. Devs, forgive me. I had to take the shot. You understand, don’t you?)

As is way too often the case, I start writing a story about a MMO for Massively, and then get drawn into the game. Such was the case Sunday night with Pi Story, and last night with Mythos (both stories will show up today on Massively.com).

Mythos is an easy game to get lost in, but I have to admit I have not been playing much since Flagship introduced the Overworld. I was going to wait until all the new content was in (they are just working on Zone 2 now), and then do a weekend’s worth of leveling ahead of open beta to get a good feel for the new stuff.

What with Blizzard’s announcement of Diablo III, I was looking to get back into some hack and slash, action-rpg action. And so I went to Mythos to spend a minute and came out hours later.

Mythos has added a new MMO-like camera system, so when you’re out in the world, anyway, you can have the camera low, like in WoW or EQ2… except not like them. It’s a little off. And since Mythos, like Dungeons and Dragons Online or Age of Conan, has no targeting — you hit what gets in the way of your weapon or spell — it just doesn’t work. Though I like being down low for looking around, fighting requires a higher perspective. Unfortunately, the old isometric view has problems in dungeons; unless you’re in a very low view, it looks like you’re walking through cubicles in an office instead of caverns in a dungeon.

Also, there seems to be a lot less magic in the world. My baby bloodletter is six, and only has two magic items. Even boss battles are unlikely to drop anything green or better, when in the past they used to always drop at least something. With the low level quests not granting magic items (they never really did), it’s definitely a magic-scarce world out there.

I don’t want to really get into a preview of Mythos, because it’s still a game in heavy transition from the old instanced world to the new wide open one. It’s not done, they are not saying its done, so don’t come away thinking anything I say means anything with the finished game. They are introducing at least one public quest (O RLY!) which sounds like it will be a heck of a lot of fun. The devs seem totally committed to and excited by the game, and guess what — it’s still a lot of fun.

It’s really the same as before, just with open zones instead of instances.

Spent some time in IRC and on the forums waiting with a lot of other Mythos fans for the rumored arrival of Mythos’ Overworld, which turns the heavily-instanced game into a game which rewards exploration and wandering about in the same way Oblivion does.

I managed to get it patched (finally), play it for awhile and do a quick write-up about it before I collapsed into bed. So check it out :) I’m really excited about this game.

I’m recovering from a tooth extraction before I return to work :/

Om Fox last night, we got to see the judges fawn over teen belter David Archuletta and damn indie-rocker David Cook with faint praise. Really. If David C. were a girl, Paula would have told him he looked lovely. However, DialIdol.com predicts that opinions of the judges aside, David C. has won this by a landslide, based on busy signals of people trying to call in. My own thoughts? David A. has real talent, but I still thought his songs were boring. If he weren’t singing them on American Idol, I wouldn’t give them a moment of time. David C.’s songs didn’t reach out and grab me either, but if I were flipping through radio stations and he was singing, I’d probably leave it tuned there. I thought he should have rocked out a lot more.

And over in the Mythos forums, players are trying to guess when Flagship Studios will release the new Overworld mega-patch. It was just promised as “mid week”, and the devs are apparently trying to get a grip on some nasty bugs before they push the patch out for testing. I don’t know if the Overworld is going first to their test server or the beta server, but I’ll find it wherever it is :/

I feel a little like a relic at this moment. Everyone is talking about Age of Conan, Warhammer Online and Wrath of the Liche King, and I realized… I have no interest in any of them. I have a coworker in the AoC closed beta, but going around in gangs randomly ganking people wasn’t that fun in EQ2’s Nagafen from either end — seemed really pointless to me, though I did enjoy the feeling of danger and risk it brought to the game.

Still, they will rise or fall on their merits, and I’ll be watching from the sidelines. I have my EQ1 and EQ2. Mythos is coming out, Champions Online and Chronicles of Spellborn are on the horizon. I can spend my time anticipating those, while enjoying the good games I am already playing.

Flagship Studios is being incredibly responsive to its beta players, retooling Mythos at a fantastic rate to improve the game play and move it away from the “Diablo II”-clone label. It’s turning out to be something new to Western MMOs — a AAA-quality, Free to Play MMO with microtransactions. Dungeon Runners shares a lot of similar elements, and is released while Mythos is in beta, but it does not include microtransactions and has shown a greater reluctance to move in any significant away from the Diablo II model. Plus, I consider it rather dull. Mythos’ over the top, here’s a hundred mobs at once, edge-of-the-seat gameplay gets addicting after awhile.

Anyway, since I won’t be playing any of the current generation of MMOs as I wait for the next, here’s my quick takes on my hopes for them.

Age of Conan: This will be the EverQuest 2 of this generation. Few people will be able to play the game properly, but those who stick with it may find a fantastic game. It will follow the EQ2 arc. A quick burst of initial interest will give way to mass defections. AoC will fix the problems, get back on track, and in a year, the game will be where it should have been at launch and the players who stuck with them will be having fun.

Warhammer Online: The game can’t possibly match people’s expectations. EA Mythic may think that with enough money and marketing might that they can pull people away from WoW. Unfortunately, they are doing nearly nothing to lure non-WoW players to the game. They may think they can get a couple of million players without Blizzard noticing, but a lot of other companies have thought that in the past. It is impossible to drag WoW players away when they release a new expansion.

Wrath of the Liche King: I’ve seen the videos. This expansion is going to blow in the doors. AoC may struggle through because it is a significant departure from WoW, but Warhammer Online is going to be pounded. WoW will keep its crown for another year. By the time people finish the new content, Warhammer Online will seem like a has-been, and people will be more likely to wait for the next new shiny rather than give WAR a try. It’s all about the opening weekend — or free month. It is impossible to entice people to leave WoW unless Blizzard shoved them out the door first.

Why EA Mythic thought releasing against WoW would ever work… I dunno. Blizz was never going to give them an easy, uncontested launch. About the only thing EA Mythic can really do now is delay it a further six months and put in something so cool that the delay would be worth it.

There’s also SOE’s new MMOs, The Agency and Free Realms, coming out at some point, probably around the WAR and WotLK launches. The buzz on both these titles is so incredibly low, as are the expectations, that almost anything they can do will look like a success. If either game compromises the PC gameplay in favor of the PS3 gameplay, you might as well write them off right now. It won’t be these games that convince anyone to buy a PS3.

Anyway, I’m afraid all you’ll be seeing on the pages of this particular blog is more EQ, EQ2 and Mythos adventures for awhile. Mythos won the Mythos vs Dungeon Runners competition on my hard drive by virtue of not being boring. I am HOPING to get into the Spellborn beta (Spellborn devs, HINT HINT). I’m not sure I can talk about another beta I am in, but my high hopes for it were utterly crushed.

AoC, WAR and WotLK players — I’ll be looking forward to reading about your adventures :)

There’s a fine line between ‘research’ and ‘ah, what the heck. game on!’. I crossed that line several times yesterday.

Wanting to check out any recent Mythos changes (and there are some coming soon), I logged on, intending just to run around. But I wasn’t the same person that was just casually playing and had been stalled at level 20 for the past few weeks. I have Kanthalos at MMOre Insight to blame for this. I’d originally built my Bloodletter up the Crimson Hand (pet) line and hadn’t really branched out from that. This turned out to be an ever less of a good idea, since I spent ever more of my time keeping my pets alive and resummoning them. Eventually I would just wade into melee myself and just ignore the pets. When Mythos added skill respecs, I respecced to Martialist, the weapon spec. That’s when my hybrid spec really started to hurt, since I couldn’t wear the best armor or wield the best weapons.

But I’d been playing all wrong ANYWAY. My pet spec had taught me to carefully weigh my pulls and to not get over my head. My NEW spec — where rays of death power strike mobs, who then send out their own rays of death power — rewards over pulling. Pull enough, and even the worst boss mob dies, instantly. Aside from certain Zone 3 dungeons where mobs snare you and silence you, preventing magic or potion use, clearing a mob-filled dungeon room was as simple as running a circle around it, then firing a single blast into the center. Mopping up strays took just a few more seconds.

I got three levels in about as many hours. I’d mostly skipped Zone 2, but Zone 3 is annoying with those snare/silence mobs and Zone 2 was there to help :)

The other thing Kanthalos taught me was how to game the Briss quests — these are repeatable, randomly generated quests which offer one of three random rewards. Usually they are junk, but occasionally he has something nice. I used to grab one occasionally, do it, get the crappy reward and sell it immediately. Turns out you can accept and abandon his quest (and those of other similar quest givers), and keep on asking for a new one until something you like is offered. Since I have very little luck going — most of my gear has either strength, dexterity or both on it to support my hybrid spec — I don’t get very much purpose+ quality loot in the normal course of a dungeon run. Briss and his friends made sure I was well-geared… except for the pants.

Those are a problem. So I respecced my crafting line to legs and am farming the components for the best pants I can make. Unfortunately, it will be tough making pants with all that strength on them…

I completed another couple crafting quests. I’m currently on one requiring a specific kind of ectoplasm, of which I have found precisely one. I think I need about twenty… and it only drops in Zone 3 dungeons to boot.

I have never grouped with anyone in Mythos. Mythos’ major failing in my opinion is that it plays just like a single player game. Flagship is going to be making it more MMO-ish, but with no reason to group, why would I? I’ve soloed lower level epic maps. It’s still the same game. I don’t think I have even ever spoken to another person in game, aside from asking questions in the general channel.

Of course, I was trained by Diablo II to see other players as cheating semi-literate jerks, who would alternately reward you with duped loot or kill you where you stood. Still, there is as little need to group in Mythos as there was in D2, and so, solo I’ll stay. Perhaps if I was playing on Elite mode, as so many players seem to be these days, then the need to group would come along with it.

After the character wipe, I might give Elite mode a shot.

Okay, thanks for the info about Mythos’ Active Camera mode. This lets you get a little lower down, and lets you use the WASD keys to move around. Q and E to turn. INS to fix the camera (I remapped this to F since I have no friends… on Mythos :). Turn on this mode by going to the GAME tab in options and checking Active Camera Mode and UN-checking Pitch Lock.

But hey, how does it look???? Well, watch this video and find out — and I even NARRATE it! Yes, my first, deadly step toward video blogging. Except, you know, with just game video.

You DON’T want to see my bedroom.

Anyway. Here ’tis. Enjoy! If you can!

And for comparison, here is what Mythos looks like with the regular camera view, and point-and-click to move.

I wrote an overview of Mythos crafting this morning, you can read it if you like, but that’s not what I’m pleading to Flagship about.

Please, PLEASE… let us play in the third person from-behind view like WoW and EQ2… Your game is so gorgeous from down here. I don’t love Diablo so much that I’ll be unhappy if you toss the overhead view for third person over the shoulder. And get rid of point-and-click in favor of WASD. Actually, I love the game — but please consider lifting camera, movement and targeting controls from WoW or EQ2, either one, I don’t care which.

It would be amazing.

Nostalgia the Guild took most of my time this last weekend. It’s supposed to just be a very casual, once-a-week grouping experience through EverQuest’s old world, and it shouldn’t really require as much work as I’ve put into it. However, I don’t see how it could have taken any less, either. If you have a static group, how do you keep everything arranged? Maybe I just want everything planned out.

I haven’t been getting a lot of cooperation from SOE. Their guild creation page appears to work but never gives any sort of confirmation, and a petition revealed that all the times I had filled out the form were pointless, as the request was not in their system. The guild creation page mentions that you might not hear anything from them for weeks or longer at the best of times. This is frankly unacceptable. I won’t be a nice consumer and silently wait weeks or longer without knowing that the request has been at least received. I’ll call SOE tech support this afternoon. Creating a guild for a small number of people who are returning to EQ for a time should NOT require petitioning and a call to tech support and weeks of time. Ever.

Aside from that, EQ is going well. I did the halfling ranger armor quests given out in Rivervale and made level 15 during the camps. Every time I have done these quests — I’ve done them for my Stromm cleric (and wore at least one piece into my 40s, the shoulders), I did them for my druid for looks, and I did them for my rogue — it’s been camping those stupid thorn drakelings, and this weekend was no exception. Most of the experience, though, came from camping the orc lumberjacks beyond the Wall. I wasn’t sure if they had placeholders, so I killed all the wandering goblins and orcs and anything else that conned blue to me. I dinged 15 before I’d gotten enough of the right kind of orc lumberjack, so I gave up because I didn’t want to get too far ahead of the rest of Nostalgia. The last I checked, we were spread out between 10 and 15, which is very good as we head to Kurn’s Tower basement this coming Friday.

There’s just something funny about seeing a flowering tree in the middle of Kor’Sha. Like, oh, this place is so dreary. Wouldn’t a tree right here brighten up the place? It just radiates health and good living! I hadn’t know about the warden tree before I was doing some sort of quest with my son (who played a warden) and a couple of other people, and was getting kind of annoyed because whenever I tried to fight something, it seemed there was always a tree in my way. I’d move a little ways off to get a clean shot and THERE WOULD BE THE TREE AGAIN! WTF??? I think Andy nearly killed himself laughing. He’d been summoning it, of course. Anyway, we cleared the Temple of Kor’Sha and killed the Overking all in a couple of hours, which was really a hopeful sign. We’ve been taking two nights to do it recently. Perhaps it was the addition of a couple of old friends from Eternal Chaos. I don’t know if they were just there for the progression kill or if they will be staying, but it was nice to do it all in one night. Maybe soon we can begin work on Leviathan again.

I spent a little time in Mythos this weekend. I have been leveling a satyr bloodletter on the FFA PvP “Shadowlands” server. Since towns are deadly places, people mostly stay out of them except for quick runs in to sell. There are no safe spots and as such, there is no chatter, no community, no nothing except tombstones and sudden death from above. Seconds after I snapped this screenshot, a gremlin pyromancer ported in, pinned me down with a pet and blasted me to bits. Even in FFA PvP, if you’re going to build any sort of community, you have to have some safe spots. Compared to the vibrant, active community on the PvE side, PvP seemed barren and dull.

Turns out a lot of Massively writers are MMO fans — who knew? And a lot of them play City of Heroes/Villains. So, take a bunch of people who work together and play the same MMO and pretty soon you have a supergroup. Ours is called Maliciously. I transferred Madame Scurry v1.0 from Virtue to Freedom and spent time running a few missions. EQ is hard to return to, but CoX welcomes the occasional player. You just mash the buttons for the win. Stalkers are particularly nice, since they cannot be seen by enemies and have a one-shot assassination from hiding attack. It’s the power of the cockroach not to be seen and to survive any disaster. Scurry lives!

While discussing the possibility of “classic” servers in World of Warcraft, Cameron waxes nostalgic about his own yearning for the simpler days of gnoll-pounding in the Karanas. I loved those days too — my blog is named after one of those old zones, and my header images are all from EQ1, so you know I’m standing right there with Cameron, casting SoW, shooting off careless lightning and healing as best an old-school druid can. I was so nostalgic at one point that I restarted on a new no-transfer server, Stromm, and went through the entire game from scratch (xping in East Commonlands and Permafrost and Oasis, seeing the world once again), so that helped sate that particular yearning.

Honestly, though, you can’t become the person you were, who didn’t know what was around the next corner. Not in a game you have already played. You have to move forward. And so this is my challenge. It is difficult, INCREDIBLY difficult, but will leave you with those same sorts of memories that you had when you first got into MMO gaming.

Pick a MMO — any MMO — and uninstall every other MMO from your hard drive. Additionally, pay no attention to any new MMOs that may be coming out. None of this trying it for a month to see how it goes. Just make it a game you have not played before. The game itself doesn’t have to be new — just you. It could be fun to pick up a really old game like Asheron’s Call and just jump into the deep end, or pick up Age of Conan and wade through blood for twelve months.

One player. One game. One year.

If you run out of content, bug the devs in the forums about expansions and run through the game again. Meet people like yourself. Form new friendships, see things and do things that dabblers will never see or do. You almost certainly did this once with another MMO and now you remember how much fun that was. So do it again. Here’s some suggestions.

Vanguard, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Mythos, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Chronicles of Spellborn (assuming it ever releases), EVE Online. I deliberately leave out EQ2, WoW and LotRO, since they are popular enough that there’s no mystery or chance of discovery to them at all (especially WoW, but then, you probably already played that game anyway). If you’re daying, you might even try Star Wars: Galaxies. Don’t believe the common wisdom about games. People absolutely thrive on trashing games they don’t like, even though other people may enjoy the game (in which case, they feel, those people are WRONG and should be playing a different game). It doesn’t matter what people say. You’re going to choose your game and through thick and thin, when you decide to sit down a spend a few hours in an MMO, that’s the one you will choose.

MMOs cannot be fully enjoyed by dabblers. Commitment is part of the attraction.

Second step to this is to blog about it. If you aren’t a blogger, Blogspot and Wordpress (West Karana runs on Wordpress) will set you up, for free, no cost to you, in about a minute. Day 1 of the new game: Create a character and just write about how that goes. Win or suck, this is your game for a year. So keep a journal online, and in five years when you look back upon this year fondly, you’ll remember everything that happened.

The question is — could you play a single MMO for an entire year in order to get that same sort of feeling for a new game that you did for the one you remember?

Me? Well, I’m still loving EQ2. But there will come a time, maybe this year, maybe next, when I *will* take this challenge. Currently, Chronicles of Spellborn and Champions Online (neither with any sort of release date) are at the top of my list. I expect AoC and WAR to be too dominated by griefers to be much fun, but I’ll be trying out both games just to see.

Mythos will be hitting open beta “real soon now”, so if you haven’t already, you’ll have your chance to get into some free-to-play, Diablo-inspired, action-MMO-RPG fun within weeks. When you get there, though, there’s one thing you really, really have to know when you begin to build your character.

Mythos hates hybrids. It’s sad!

The nasty part is, you might not be aware that you ARE building a hybrid. I’ll explain.

Your three major stats in Mythos are Strength, Dexterity and Wisdom that are the prime attributes for Bloodletters (your melee class), Gadgeteers (your ranged class) and Pyromancers (your nuker). Your actual abilities are independent of your stats — you get them through Diablo-esque talent trees as you level.

You are building a hybrid whenever you make a cross-spec build — a str/dex bloodletter who attacks from range (and uses a hybrid weapon like a crossbow or a polearm); a dex/wis gadgeteer who tosses nukes in with the bombs and rifles; a str/wis pyromancer who plants a lot of persistent effects then wades into the fray. I was a str/dex bloodletter; I was polearm specced and relied on my pets to keep things busy while I sliced off their heads/vaguely head-shaped things from the rear. The problem wasn’t the weapons so much; except that *good* hybrid weapons were really rare, and I found myself using the same one for about ten levels — now it was a really good weapon, but Mythos is centered around constantly upgrading your loot and armor. Still, that wasn’t the problem.

There is almost no hybrid armor or jewelry. If you want the really good stuff, you’ll find it’s very high in strength, dexterity or wisdom. The rare hybrid stuff — like a dex-based belt that adds str — usually is so high in one stat (dex) that it can’t be worn by someone with balanced stats. As a result, I have a lot of stuff banked in the hopes that I will eventually become high enough in one stat to wear it. My Red Hand Bloodletter (the pet-based sort) eventually had to be abandoned because Red Hand is a mana-bound tree (keeping pets up takes increasingly more and more mana and hence Wisdom), all my gear was str/dex, and because of the rarity of hybrid gear, I was way behind, gear-wise. I respecced from Red Hand to Martialist because I didn’t have the mana or mana regen to support the old spec, but because my strength was so low, I was nerfed from the start. A non-viable character.

It might be fun to play with a hybrid character in Mythos, but… don’t. Choose a stat and stick with it. That way you will have more flexibility to choose items with +Luck on it (your ticket to uber items) rather than ones that desperately try to prop up your fail. It was so bad in the end that if I accidentally took off the wrong item, all my weapons and certain bits of my armor would turn useless, and I would not be able to put the thing I’d taken out back, either, so I’d have to use intermediate pieces of stat-raising armor to get everything back on again. It was PATHETIC.

It’s been a little over a week since I started blogging over at Massively, and while I am really enjoying myself, I think I still have a lot to learn about story ideas. It’s all about the page views, right, and what brings in the eyeballs better than our dear old friend, porn. So I suggested this to the editors, and they pretty much informed me that they already had plenty of Second Life coverage, and maybe I could work on this piece about “Shoulder armor through the ages — how high is too high?”.

“No no no!” I cried. Well, typed. “What if I just go to various games, undress my own characters, and make a calendar from those pictures?”

Blank stares. Let me give you an idea: Concrete floors have more expression. So, grumbling beneath my breath, I vowed to do that article and show them just how good an idea it was. Here, then, for your enjoyment: Massively Multiplayer Women. (They didn’t like the title, either… hadn’t they ever seen Age of Conan!!!???)

City of Villains: Sometimes, it’s not what you wear, but how you wear it. Black Oyl was a petroleum researcher at Texxon when she fell into a tanker full of $110/barrel crude. This would have been fatal if the light of the brightest Gamma Ray Burst ever recorded hadn’t hit Earth at that precise moment. Black Oyl emerged from the tanker wearing a dollar’s worth of oil on a five dollar body and fights oil executives by seeing that their stretch limousines are detailed poorly in the Houston luxury car wash.

Dungeon Siege 2: “But DS2 isn’t even an MMO!” pointed out the editors. Always blocking my flow with details! You’ve heard Chalice Eversong’s story a thousand times, it’s the kind of growing-up story everyone can relate to. You and a friend get drunk one night and sign up as mercenaries for an evil army, and even though you really suck at fighting and get your butt kicked by tree branches, somehow, it turns out you’re a legendary hero and are the only one that can defeat your boss. And then your boyfriend dies, you get captured by tree people, forced to do menial labor all the time, blah blah blah, it’s happened to all of us. Chalice just wants to show that just because you’re prophesied to save the world doesn’t mean you can’t let your hair down with your party once in awhile. Hey, that’s why it’s called a PARTY!

EverQuest 2: “I’m NOT doing this!” yelled Nashuya. “Oh, yes you are,” I said, as I stowed her armor, bit by bit, in her pack. “This is a GREAT idea for an article, and you’re gonna just have to grin and bear it!” This was before my editors said that actually, it was a crappy idea for an article. Nashuya’s blue-tinged skin positively glows in the light of the corpse-flames of Fallen Gate. Nashuya protests too much. Way back when EQ2 first came out, player characters were assumed to be shipwreck survivors without a penny — or armor — to their names, and looked just like this until they did some quick armor quests. Now new characters come complete with armor, weapons, and a selection of promising spells and combat abilities. It’s just like being back on newbie island, Nash!

Sins of a Solar Empire: Yeah, I know. Don’t start with me, okay? The Kor Battleship “EDS Eliza” is two kilometers of the meanest hunk of ship in three systems. She appears here clad in nothing but ten meter thick electro-strong neutronium plating. She’ll give ya the ride of your life and then kick you back to that ice planet with the arctic research lab from which you came.

Dream of Mirror Online: No, this ISN’T my character. DOMO characters are CHILDREN. What kind of pervert ARE you? This is one of DOMO’s Mirror Kings. Yup. In DOMO, even the guys look hot. Boys and girls alike can look forward to what they can become. And, yeah, this may look like some high-end animated cartoon, but this is actually what DOMO looks like. Pretty cool, huh?

EverQuest: Relaxing in the guild hot tub, Vah Shir beastlord Shinai Oftheancients lets her guard down for this candid shot. Her name…. well, that’s a long story. See, we had this guy in the guild that wanted every single weapon that dropped that he could use. The weapon he wanted more than anything else in the world ever was one called the Shinai of the Ancients, which dropped in the Plane of Time. So prior to every PoT run, he’d send tells to every other person who could wield it and ask them to let him have it. He would also helpfully suggest to officers that he deserved to be given it outright, should it drop. So I made this beastlord, named her Shinai, got her to level twenty so she could have a last name, got an officer to invite her into the guild and proceeded to wonder, loudly, where my weapon dropped. Fun times!

Mythos: Wuvwy Angel is just a large cyclops in a small world. Since, in Mythos, player characters are monsters (gremlins, satyrs, cyclops and most monstrous of all, humans), Wuvwy can’t complain about not being understood. She just has trouble getting people to see her soft, feminine side. Me? I’ve never seen anyone prettier. Nobody can wear a torn nightshirt like she does! Now, put down the gun, please? Oh yeah — open beta soon, guys.

Vanguard: Huh? This IS undressed! In the Victorian-age sensibilities of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the best skin is covered skin. Tipa is a fantastic bard; you might even say she’s outstanding in her field. Get it? She’s actually out STANDING in her FIELD! *Cough* sorry. Am I done yet? Oh, one more?

Pirates of the Burning Sea: Liz Strickland is dressed for the Caribbean SUN, but what she likes best is the Caribbean FUN. Stepping off her Bermuda sloop, the first thing she asks the dockmaster is where the heck the disco is in this rat-infested excuse for an outpost of the glorious United Kingsom. When the sun goes down in the British Empire, baby, the lights come UP.

—

Well, anyway, you can see what a brilliant idea this was. The editors just don’t understand me. Tomorrow, another article they rejected: Implementing the I WIN! button in World of Warcraft.

Mythos, still in closed beta, has completely relaunched. No more beta codes to give out (sorry), but if you have been a beta tester, you will have to uninstall your current client and download the new one. I did this this morning; things look shinier. Expect a new look at Mythos soon.

Bristlebane’s Day (apparently) goes live today. The revelers are in North Qeynos at the Claymore, and West Freeport outside the Executioner’s Pit. I have no idea if there are quests associated with them; I couldn’t get a word out of them on the Test server.

Sins of the Solar Empire, the game, is harder than Sins of the Solar Empire, the demo. I’ve had to restart twice. First time I expanded too slow, the second time, too fast.

I’ve been very, very bad with EQ2 news. I promise to be better! There’s been some lower level stuff I’ve been doing that I really do need to write about.

WAR has been kicked back to the fall. This means that people who were trying to decide between AoC and WAR need worry no longer; they can get AoC and play it until WotLK or WAR come out, then move on. This gives AoC a good four-five month window, which is more than I expected for it. So: WAR moving, good for AoC, bad for WAR, since now it has to compete with Wrath of the Lich King, and I think we all know who will win that battle.

No news on the EQ2 or EQ1 expansion front. SOE did a DevDiary chat with Thomas Sincinch, an EQ2 character artist, and he said the next expansion was still early in production. However, the Shard of Hate will be live soon — it’s on Test now, and I hope to take a look inside it soon.

Rock Band solo project — since I got a mic stand for Rock Band, I’ve been working on a solo-duo — me singing and playing guitar at the same time, guitar on hard, singing on medium. It is VERY DIFFICULT to play songs you have never played on the guitar controller on hard, while singing songs somewhat on time and in key. I’m singing now in Amsterdam for something, I forget which. My last battle was for Dan, Dan the Super Sound Man in Stockholm, where I finished Highway Star with five stars — but I knew the song and the words. Hardest has been when Metallica’s “… And Justice for All” came up in a random song set. I’m sorry. Just wasn’t up to speed. Just a couple of songs from completing Rock Band drums on Hard — Police’s “Next to You” and “Run to the Hills”. I’ve been working on how I sit when I play and can get the double kicks fairly well (they tend to “bounce” when you’re in the groove). I’ve also been dipping back into online dueling, this time on Hard. So I guess, I’ve officially graduated from a skilled Medium player to a fairly confident Hard player. Boston’s album makes me crave more albums from 70s rockers. My pick would be Blue Oyster Cult’s “Imaginos”, but that’s a dream that will never come true. Perhaps “Fire of Unknown Origin”? That contains a lot of their hits. Of course, the obvious pick would be Phish.

Working at Massively really is *work*. It doesn’t leave me as much time for gaming as I would like, but I know I will get faster with the articles as I do them. Right now it is taking me an hour or two for each post. I want to get that down to half an hour per.

It’s not so much that it takes me a long time to write — heck, I can sit down and write pages without pause — it’s making the Massively style my own. It’s incredibly easy to write in my own ‘voice’ — I’ve had so much experience with it, after all — harder to write in someone else’s. And my own particular writing style is long and rambling; Massively wants tight, focused articles that get right to their target, deliver their payload of news and information, then fly quickly off — without sounding forced or boring. It’s a real education. Every article I write has to be trimmed down substantially — especially if it’s about something I’m really interested in, like Spellborn.

Anyway, the weekend is here soon. Hoping for three Massively articles each day, time spent in both Vanguard and EverQuest 1, and I’ll be taking my Bloodletter into some new parts of Mythos to see what’s new.

I might sleep, too, but I’ll have to check my schedule first.