West Karana

Gas Powered Games, creators of Dungeon Siege, Dungeon Siege II, Space Siege, and Supreme Commander, is bringing the Warcraft III “Defense of the Ancients” mod to your computer in an entirely new game. Raise a demigod, crush the enemy, it looks like a cross between DotA and Shadow of the Colossus.

If you’re at all interested in multiplayer tactical PvP, they’re letting people who pre-order by September 19th into the beta.

Plus, it’s distributed by Stardock, and they’re good people.

Pre-order Demigod, Test it Today!

Gas Powered Games and Stardock are happy to announce the limited beta test of Demigod. If you pre-order Demigod from Stardock’s Impulse digital download platform, you can start testing the exclusive beta right now.

To pre-order Demigod, simply follow this link.

This is a limited time offer. Signups for this cycle of the beta test close on Friday, September 19th, though the beta itself is ongoing. If you miss the beta this time, check the official Demigod website to find out when the next cycle begins. While you’re there, please join our growing community of enthusiasts and testers.

Set in an awesome future-fantasy world, Demigod is a mix of real-time strategy, tactics, and role-playing. There’s an opening in the pantheon of the gods, and players pick a Demigod to wage war against others who are also trying to ascend to true godhood. Each Demigod
goes into battle with its own set of unique abilities and powers, and players “level up” to unlock even more.

For additional information on Demigod, check out its official site.

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.

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.

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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.