Wow! Been several months since I updated this page… One would suppose nothing had happened. But it’s not really the truth. Perhaps it’s just because this page is mostly for myself. And I really doubt anyone reads it much =)

But anyway. Most of my MMO-activity since last post have been mainly SoG. I’ve done a lot of work on the map (http://sog.houseofkenja.com/map/). But it’s mostly on my dev site and haven’t really been published yet.

Apart from that I found one of the golden eggs ( pics in the gallery) that should result in a life time account for Dark and Light… With less than a week before release I still haven’t heard from those guys yet. But then so has nobody else apparently.

Of course Dark and Light was supposed to be out already. A month ago. But some issues made them postpone it. Just before they where supposed to shut down SoG I had acquired myself a barony (Mathang - provided by the nice people from SDA) and I spend some time online making sure I would keep it. Mostly because at that time it was said you would transfer your title into Dark and Light. But then SoG was prolonged two weeks and DnL was delayed a month. And finally the title inheritance was dropped. So basically SoG died that day anyway.

From there on I have played a bunch of boring trials of MMOs. Not really worth speaking much about since I didn’t stick around much in any of them.

But now Dark and Light might finally be released. They are running some stress tests on the new server cluster as I write this - with some nice big failures to check off in their test reports. And on sunday us pioneers should be released into the lands of Ganarath… Just enough time to get a dummy map up of DnL with basic functionality… But I have a blog that talks more about that…

Well. I’ve been playing the game for awhile now and everything considered it’s going great… Except…

Well. I’ve joined a guild - Age of Judgement - because it looked like the most interesting around. But apart from the initial spark of activity from when people could actually play the game the activity level of the guild has gone down drastically to a level where I hardly see or interact with anyone from my guild. But so far there are no obvious alternatives and in any event I’m planning to give it a bit more time.

As for the game there has been lots of issues. The servers are still plagued with stability issue and players are getting locked out of the servers for short or longer periods due to various bugs. But them most of my time has been spent mapping the 3 kingdoms we currently have access to - the result of which can be seen on my SoG site. Still lots of ground to cover on that but I’ve started to wind down to focus on other issues now that I have most of the towers plotted in.

So far I’ve been involved in to major events. The current story line has revolved around getting a major town rebuild. As a requirement for that a bridge needed to be rebuild. The first attempt split up the player base into language communities. Some had to follow a number of dwarves coming from Al-Drifa while others - including the english speaking - had to protect areas along the route. The event was a total disaster. But not because we happened to loose the event.

What happened was that along the route the dwarves where killed by players who had turned traitor. Specifically a light side guild called ‘The Seventh Phoenix’. But as I understand it mostly light side players where protecting the dwarves. And since lights can’t kill lights it was impossible to defend against a light side guild attacking them. Also the communication was disastrous. At least at the english event area we heard nothing of what was going on even tho there was a lot of other languages being used on the event channel. So basically there was a lot of confused people standing around trying to defend an place from larger and larger waves of high level dragons.

The second event was almost equally confusing. The event was a second try to rebuild the bridge. This time each language community got a dwarf each and had to protect it from one spot down to the place where the bridge is to be build. There was a number of feature characters (FC) at the english event. And they tried to do some role playing to ease the event along. But it was hardly perfect and at some points they even broke the IC/OOC barrier. But along we went.

The dwarf we where to protect turned out to be dark side so us light side players where not allowed anywhere near him for most of the event. We went down the road and cleared it easily. I think at some point the dwarf got killed in the confusion. But he was quickly resurrected. We quickly made it to the chasm where the bridge was to be build. But then what? No information was given and the only english talk on the event channel was from a FC on the side of Dragoon taunting us and said we had won this battle. But at no point did we hear from ‘our side’ of the event what was going on. Instead we could decipher from another dwarf that spoke french that she seemed to think the event was over and the ones who had protected her had won at least.

In the end I left and it seems that 3 or 4 dwarves made it successfully to the end. So at least we get to move on with this story arch.

But why the traitor guild still claims what they are doing it for the good of everyone is still a mystery. I personally hope the event coordinators have not spilled the beans on where they are taking the story to whoever they have tried to recruit for this event. But instead the people of that (or those?) guild(s) who right now seem to be on the side of Dragoon have been convinced by the role playing of some FCs that they are doing the right thing… If the latter is the case we’ll see if they have been mislead. But the point is I really hope the event coordinators does not offer all the OOC answers to guilds who they are trying to participate in less popular roles of events. If they do role playing is never going to be very earnest in this game.

Well. Looks like there is some interesting things going on in the world of Ganareth. If the game will turn out to be any good is still hard to tell tho.

Well the launch of Settlers of Ganareth has come and gone. But actual game time has been severely limited in my end.

When we pioneers where allowed into the game late last monday it all started with all of us having a bad ini file we needed to delete so the patcher would get a new one that wouldn’t crash the game client. The good thing about that is that we tickled into the game at a relatively low pace and allowed us to at least play for a while. And get back in as the random client crashed happened.

But then the pressure on the login server increased. In addition to 8881 pioneers (give or take) a number of normal Settlers attempted to get into the game (and some reportedly with success - even though they where not supposed to get in until the day later). And as the pressure climbed the login server buckled.

Since then the normal settlers have all been allowed into the game. But the login server never stays up for long. So getting into the game is quite a battle in prime-time. As of this writing I haven’t been online from home since the initial hour or so monday… But then I wasn’t home all tuesday.

As for my initial impression of the game? Well… I’m not sure I have one really. The game client is buggy. But the UI seems to be sufficiently customizable to be usable. But UI settings are not saved if you crash. So you need to quit the game yourself to get it saved… Quite risque since you don’t know if you can get back in.

Apart from that with only 4 FXP levels under my belt I am still only a citizen. I have no class/path skills and I’ve still not really formed an opinion on the game yet. I will say - however - that the scale of the game seems huge. I haven’t been off the n00b island yet. But just flying around on my dragon I managed to get lost right away. I guess some more ingame time will eventually make me more comfortable with my surroundings so that won’t happen so often.

In any event I’ll be making the character page for aspiring caster-of-some-sort ‘Eldarath’ and his pet dragon ‘Catherine’ as soon as I get back into the game and figure out how to make screenshots

Well. As it happens I was rather bored this weekend. So I was kinda looking though my email and lounging around the ‘net with my trusty browser. I eventually happened across a mail from the Dark & Light guys informing me I’d been ‘invited’ to be a Pioneer (not really an invite as much as a mail informing me I could get a special and limited pre-order account).

Now I signed up for beta for the game a long time ago and have pretty much since forgotten about the game. Only occasionally checking glancing at it whenever I’d get a spam mail or if they showed up at one of the usual MMO* news sites I frequent.

But bored as I was I reread the mail and noticed that the signup for this Pioneer pre-order offer started the day before. So I figured I’d go check out what was happening with the game.

At first glance the game don’t really look so hot - the character models look like plastic dolls. But then I read a bit about it and it kinda sounds like another attempt to make some of the better details of the Shadowbane concept work… What’s scary is that a lot of the forum posts sound a lot like they could have been copied from the pre-launch Shadowbane forum too (worries about free PvP and stuff like that).

Anywho what’s happening is they are doing a prequel of the game to put some player-made background into the game. So basically they let 18881 players play a scaled down game for 4-5 months before the actual game is released. The idea is to allow the players to put their mark on the game I suppose. That phase of the game they are calling ‘Settlers of Ganareth’ and they are allowing the Pioneers (the 8881 limited pre-orderies) to actually lay the foundation for their character in the final game by allowing some limited inheritance from the Settlers of Ganareth character to the one in the final Dark and Light.

Well. I guess I couldn’t miss the opportunity that this might be fun. So i figured ‘what the hell. It’s only money’ and signed up for a Pioneer account… I then found out that a lot of the dedicated fans of the game have had problems getting through the order process for the Pioneer thing while I just stepped through it… So I guess I’m a lucky bastard (depending on if I actually find the game any fun I suppose).

But basically that means that from the 8th December I’ll be wasting my time with that.

After an initial spurt of enthusiasm and motivation on my return to PlanetSide (and finding a sensible outfit) it’s all come to an end.

I now have to admit that I generally don’t feel like playing often enough for to make me feel I get my moneys worth. Lately I’ve played a couple of hours once or twice in a week. And a lot of the time I’m only joining the game because I feel like I have to since I’m paying for the damned thing!

I suppose some of it is rooted in the fact that I never really got any good at playing the game. But then on flip side of that I think possibly I never really bothered to try to get good because I have trouble seeing the point of the game.

I initially rejoined the game to try out the BFRs (and the Core extension I suppose. Didn’t bother to buy it first time ’round). And once I got that and tried them out my main motivation for the game was fading. But in the mean time I DID manage to find an outfit that worked a bit more like how I see the game so I did manage to pull some motivation out of that.

But the fact that the game is still as unorganized as it’s always been has a tendency to kill every effort of organized battles. And that in turn kills the game for me. A long time ago there was people suggesting better faction/battle management tools to better centralize control of battles. And it looks like people are still suggesting many of the same things today… And noting seems to be happening about it.

But then for me I’d still have trouble seeing ‘the point’ I guess. Cleaning a continent (or planet as they are called now) is great after a big and hard battle. But it don’t mean much since the two other fractions will soon take it from your side…. And ’round and ’round we go…

So now I suppose I could - once again - try to see if Face of Mankind can be any fun… Or perhaps I should just sit back and wait for a beta invite to Dungeons & Dragons Online and get some single player games (and coding) done in the mean time.

Well. It’s been quite a while since I posted on this site last. I’ve got this WoW review I really wanted to complete - been writing on it since I started playing it and now I’ve stopped. But well… I’m too lazy I suppose.

Anyway I’ve had some vacation these past two weeks and the weather has been miserably AND I hurt one of my feet just before going on vacation. So most of my time has been spent doing nothing. So I kinda remembered PlanetSide and looked it up and ended up deciding to trying it again.

Mostly I figured I’d try the Core Combat stuff since I never got that expansion before. And also those new BattleFrame Robotics look fun. So I set off with reviving my old subscription and getting the expansion… Well… I had to wait 6-7 hours as a fresh install on my old CDs it took a while to patch.

But finally I was ready. And to my great surprise they even have joystick support in now. So that makes the birds somewhat controllable. W00T!

Anyway when getting into the game it seems most of the factors from back when I played are still in place. Generally the battlefield is highly unorganized and most of the time the sides simply Zerg to gain the advantage.

As was the case back when I played before finding a good outfit (or guild if you like) is tricky. Most outfits don’t really take matters too serious and just move around and do ‘whatever’. Even tho they do create outfit squads for doing battle together. They usually don’t make a big deal out of working too much together - apart from sharing a vehicle whenever it’s convenient.

Of course on a grander scale it’s not gotten much better either. Mostly some random people who have worked their way through the Command Ranks will attempt to direct the battle. But mostly they seem to be ignored since ‘nobody put them in charge’ (for the uninitiated Command Ranks are simply a separate experience point system that don’t really require any leadership skill to get).

Oh well. I guess I’ll look for a good outfit that suits my needs while my patience with the game holds. If that don’t work it’s back to retirement from that game. Perhaps something new has come around by that time.

Having played the Neocron 2 open beta for a couple of weeks now I’ll now ramble a bit about the game to get it out of my system.

After - apparently - having worked on the ‘Dome of York’ expansion since release of the original Neocron game two years ago Reakktor is now gearing up for the release of Neocron 2. And it looks like they managed to create an expansion that caters to mainly their core players. And offers almost no reason for new players to enter the game. Mainly I think new players will be people who happened to find their way into beta and got stuck

Neocron is one of those games I always wanted to like. It’s a Sci-Fi cyberpunk styled FPSish MMORPG with lots of features that at least seems fresh. Trouble is the game never was very well documented and some parts of it is rather complex and unintuitive. I think I have played the 10 day trial 3 or 4 times and still had a lot of unresolved questions about the game. To be fair I didn’t play all 10 days of those trials. While playing the open beta of Neocron 2 I got a lot of those questions answered tho. Not because documentation has become better (there is none). But I started asking a lot of n00b questions on the help channel and ended up with - some - friendly answers. Still I think I can safely say that I’m an example of how hard the game is to get into as a new player.

Neocron 2 is being billed as something of a cross between an expansion and a new game (the name clearly suggests a sequel more than an expansion). Everyone playing on the old NC1 servers will have to upgrade and transfer to a new server if they want to play NC2. The thing is that it isn’t really a new game. They added some features like Hacknet and … Well … A better graphics engine. Apart from that they added some more zones to play in - including a new city.

Neocron 2 also represents a shift in focus of it’s game play. One of the main focuses of NC2 is making the game a conflict between the two main cities Neocron and Dome of York - apparently. And another is to make factions more important. To cover the first they have moved all of the ‘outlaw’ (aka anti-city) factions to Dome of York (according to the game lore DoY was very badly damaged in a war with Neocron. So it kind of make sense that a lot of people there don’t like Neocron).

To make Neocron more focused on factions they have changed their player crafting a great deal. Specifically they have made a lot of high-end items and components faction specific. That means only people with high standing (i.e.. Sympathy) in their own faction can buy their faction specific items in their faction HQ.

Ok. So this new Hacknet. What’s that? Well Hacknet is an attempt to give hackers something to do. In NC1 there was a profession that only really did one thing: hack locks on stuff. Now it hacks locks on stuff AND rule the new Hacknet.

Basically Hacknet is supposed to be a cyberpunk styled, William Gibsonesque, matrix sort of thing. A virtual world inside a computer network. In reality it’s a bunch of new zones in neon colors composed of narrow walkways. It’s filled with software agents of different kinds. Some work like NPCs you can talk to (so far it’s mainly faction databases that allow to download faction specific blueprints to build items in the real world). Others work like a security force to keep hackers from opposing factions outside. And - conveniently enough - each faction have a couple of zones with hostile software to level on. Most of the hostiles one wander off the walkways and drop to the ‘floor’ of the zone and mix with misplaces mutant monsters (that for some reason spawns in Hacknet). All in all I’m disappointed in Hacknet. It’s basically just turns a hacker into a ‘psi monk’ (the caster class of the real Neocron world) and places him in a domain of his own.

The biggest problem with Neocron 2 is the bugs tho. And apparently if you happen to be a Neocron 1 player you have gotten used to that by now. It leaks memory. It crashes. There are graphics bugs running rampant. NPCs are missing. And a bunch of other issues of various degrees of seriousness are unresolved. And still the game is being released now and I’m not spending my cash on it until it improves it’s stability… So considering the apparent history of Neocron 1 I might never play that game again. Ah well. Another one that got away =)

Well. One of my old buddies from Shadowbane (and the guy who got me to try it the first time ’round) invited me back to FFXI. And always looking for trouble - while being somewhat disappointed by my first week back in SB - I figured “what the hell”. So went in and activated my account again and was lucky enough that they had deleted my old char so I had to start over again .

Anyway. FFXI is - obviously - the adaptation of the popular Japanese Final Fantasy franchise by Square. All the way back on the original NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) they had a couple of games out. And they followed Nintendo all the way to when Sony came out with the Playstation with GameBoy and SuperNES games. And finally they have made some hugely successful games on the Playstations. So obviously a successful franchise based on RPG concepts would have to become a MMORPG.

Well. Unfortunately that was just what they did. They took the same stuff they had in FF IX and X and added some multiplayer aspects to it. And all in all it’s become one of the strangest MMO’s I have ever seen.

While I’m told it’s not like that later on. The game starts out leaving players pretty much on their own. The reasons to find other people and form a group to hunt in is no-excitant (except perhaps for silly ones like being social). And to make it even better it’s almost impossible to find anyone to group with since you have to be within one or two levels for all to make any experience at all (else high-level will take almost all and lower-level will hardly get any).

Well. leveling has always been tedious anyway. but we all got to do it so we can move on… But the other features make up for it… right? Well. No. Not really. Since there are none.

The game basically have 3 things to do. Hunt, do missions/quests or craft. Missions is usually a combination of hunting and puzzles. Sometimes with a bit of crafting thrown in (if you wanna save your gold and make items yourself anyway). The reason I list both missions and quests is that missions are a story-line where you get ranks in your nation. And quests are where you do stuff for citizens and get ‘fame’ so you can do more missions for other people.

As it is now there is two things to add try and tie players a bit more together. First there is the obligatory “guild system”. Only in this game it’s a ‘linkshell’ and it’s pretty much just a chat channel for friends. Second there is the battle between nations - that everyone pretty much ignores it seems. It’s pretty lame anyway. Something about what of the 3 player nations - or one NPC nation - that ‘owns’ a zone.

The one positive side to the game is that you don’t really have to make any choices about anything except your race and your avatars look and with 5 races - 3 of them with two genders - who all only have little variation, that’s easy! After that you can take the various classes pretty much as you like. Most classes are locked to start out with tho. So you have to make it to level 30 before you can start unlocking other classes. But you never loose your levels when you move to other classes. And you can change between classes in the comfort of your house (everyone has a house. And they are all the same. No upgrades!).

Crafting works the same way. Sign up in your friendly neighborhood guild and start learning a trade. The tricky part of crafting is to figure out the recipes that are not given out easily (or stored anywhere in the game interface for easy reference). But as always secrets like those are easily available on the ‘net. So it’s just about getting your crafting rating up so you can make better stuff… And so on… And by the by. All skills - crafting or otherwise - gets better with use. So the more you do stuff. The better you are.

To top off the game it’s taken the ‘Japanese’ feel of the former FF games and turned it up a notch. The best mage race is an annoyingly little creature called a Tarutaru. They are the rulers of one of the 3 nations. And everyone there talked with a ‘cute’ and ‘adorable’ mix of lisping and child-talk. ARRRGHHH! The humans are called Hume, The elves are not elves but Elvaan (and I swear the guys who made Lineage II stole the 3D model when they made their elves). Then there is the big ugly, male only, Galka. And - of course - the female only feline humanoids that goes by the name of Mithra.

So basically we have an endless level treadmill game with little social interaction (you can find friends everywhere there are other people. But the reasons for random people to be forced to get to know each other just isn’t in this game).

Not to be left behind other MMORPGs the famous developers of FFXI have recently added PvP. Of course it’s not like anything else out there. Instead of breaking with the ultimate bluebie experience of the game. They have made instanced arenas called ‘Ballista’ where PvP battles can be fought out without getting in the way of the peaceful crafting of the more enterprising players. I haven’t actually tried this thing. So I can’t really say if it’s any good. But it seems a bit like a watered down version of the faction-based PvP offered by other games.

Also they have figured out that expansions are the way to go. For the US release of FFXI the first expansion was included. But a new one has just been declared golden master. Where the first one mainly added more land to explore the new one will - apparently……… do the same. Yup. More land and more items. But then they have been adding wonders like ‘Ballista’ for free. So perhaps they just need a way to distribute heavier content.

Well. As with my first experience with FFXI it seems very repetitive and mind-boggling boring. But then I haven’t really gotten up to a very high level yet. So perhaps it changes… We’ll see.

Well… A day before Ubi announced 15 free days of gaming to previous subscribers I decided to give the game another try and reactivated my account. I had been considering it for awhile. But with the latest addition of mines I figured it was as good a time as any.

So into the fragments of Shadowbane I went. Thankfully I still had my old characters from the - now closed - Death fragment. Some of them I had already migrated to the Vengeance fragment the last time there was 15 free days. But fortunately I still had one of my primary that needed to be migrated. Fortunately because if you migrate them now (as opposed to when I migrated before) you get ALL your gear from the bank with you too! Nice considering I had a couple of items that can’t be found anywhere anymore.

Well… Being a role-player I figured I’d join the Mourning fragment. Well… Since it seems to be the most active - and the only one with active recruitment by role-playing guilds - it seemed to be only natural. I quickly figured that since my char is an elf I should join one of the two RP-based elven guilds Court of Evermore or House Avari. And since the Avari’s is very restrictive I went with Court of Evermore. Joining the Court was pretty simple. I emailed an application and soon I was in. So I fired up the game and asked the first guy I could find to guild me.

Now. Mourning is - like all but one fragment - supposed to be for US players. But since a lot of Europeans have been playing before there was a European fragment I figured there wouldn’t be much trouble with activity. But it seems my first choice was not too good. The number of players in the Court in European hours is very small. Hell even the times I helped guard our mine (between 2:00 and 4:00 CET - in the morning) there where never more than 8-10 members online. So while the guild seems ideal it’s hard to role-play with people who are not there at the same time.

Still. Player count is still higher on Mourning - when I play - than on the European one. So I guess I should just keep looking. Trouble is I’m ever so picky about guilds I join…

Sometimes I get the feeling that a lot of the gaming industry simply dong get MMORPGs. Sure they all try very hard to make fancy games with nice enthralling graphics. And when it comes to features they happily copy them from somewhere else and tweak it a bit to make it seem a bit fresh. Some even tries to copy new kinds of - traditionally - single-player games and making them into MMO-something-or-other. But they still don’t get what its really about.

Now the reason I’m ranting over this is that i recently installed yet another MMORPG. This time it was the EVE trial. Its one of the few attempts of making a space based MMORPG. Space based MMORPGs have not exactly been the most popular type - Just look at Earth and Beyond. And I think I know why