GuildWars
Team-based Free-to-Play MMO from Arenanet.
Part Two of the Tuesday N00b Club Sorrows Furnace rampage went well, seeing us complete the last bit of To Sorrow's Furnace; Noble Intentions without too much mishap and roll on to the finale of the interesting but underused Sorrow's Furnace quest set; The Final Assault.
It isn't a new place by any means, dating back to September 2005, long before the addition of the Eye of the North dungeons, but the place functions in a very similar manner; a large underground map whose contents can alter depending on currently active quest states. I'm not sure why it had taken me...
PvP Night this week in the Tuesday N00b Club, and rather than the usual two teams of our own guild beating on each other in the guild hall, I thought it might be fun to try Alliance Battles instead, which was probably ill-advised, thinking about it. That's the one with the three teams of four, versus their three teams of four and while your own team of four can be hand-picked and carefully balanced, you have no idea who the other eight are going to be, making overall coordination quite difficult. That still doesn't stop the occasional Pocket Rommel...
An excellent excursion with the Tuesday N00b Club last night, where it all went to plan, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and we Got The Job Done. Not that every week isn't like that of course, but it all seemed to flow quite well yesterday.
We went and had a crack at Arachni's Haunt, a two-level Eye of the North dungeon on the Tarnished Coast, which has a very spider-ish theme, all webs, eg sacks, pop-up and drop-down ambushes and a squad of hopped-up Asuras led by Commander Hixx. The whole place is rife with Aliens in-jokes including a flaming Asuran Staff...
So, how am I doing? One aspect of the Multi-Game Hopping Lifestyle they don't tell you about, is the splintering of self that it entails. One night, I'm a Superhero, another I'm a Swordsman, and yet another, I'm a Space Trooper. All of these are theoretically different people; the alternative is to RP it up as if I'm some kind of secretly time-travelling do-gooder, Dr Who style, which is just going to get complicated very quickly indeed, and not a little clichéd in the bargain! So while not much of a role-player in the traditional sense, I guess...
Bit of a special guild outing this week, as the Tuesday Noob Club hit Nightfall's Treasure Trail. We alternate PvP and PvE nights of a Tuesdays, and as a leader of sorts, I'm always on the look out for interesting and novel things to do each week. The basic game is interesting enough of course, the very episodic nature of the main storylines providing any number of mini events. A typical GW Mission can take from fifteen minutes to an hour or more, and all have a very set define task, along with extra bonus objectives to carry...
Despite a rather up and down schedule over the last few weeks, I've still been managing to turn up most week for the Tuesday N00b Club, which is very much still alive and well. Well, alive in the 'Ongoing Week to Week Interest' sense of the word, rather than the moment to moment 'All Aboard the -60%DP Express' sense. We do well most of the time, but aren't so veteran that we can't be steamrollered by the occasional end stage maps and challenges. Part of this is the simple business of having a team full of people, and...
So perhaps the whole GvG debut wasn't quite the path to glory I was expecting, and all in all, it looks like we'll need an awful lot of practice before stepping up for that kind of beating again. It'll come in time, I'm sure, and at present, the plan seems to be alternate weeks PvP and PvE for the Tuesday N00b Club. Our PvP nights are largely Scrimmage and Alliance Battle based, which is an altogether less harsh and brutal kind of way to while away one's evening. It's still no place for the fragile ego, mind you,...
Like much to do with The Tuesday N00b Club, our initial foray into the rather harsh world of Ranked GvG Combat happened sort of by accident. It was to be one of our semi-regular internal guild Scrimmaging Nights, you see; a carefree evening of friendly bashing each other's heads in in the comfort and security of our guildhall. I generally like these; no consequence PvP on a strictly among friends' basis, where we get to try out some of the less useful skills and builds, using a wealth of skills which aren't terribly potent in a PvE environment, and...
Another bumper session of thrills and spills yesterday with the start of the TNC Survivor Challenge, which basically does exactly what it says on the tin. After the usual early meetup and nattering session, a large proportion of the guild all went and rolled up brand new characters in the Nightfall Campaign, entering themselves into what promises to be a gruelling and lengthy elimination gameshow of sorts; our very own version of Survivor!
Wing Commander of the Zeitgeist that I am, I actually had to go and look up what that actually was on Wikipedia. Ho hum. Our little event...
The Isle of Solitude, or at least our Isle of Solitude anyway, is usually such a tranquil place, languid under a Elonan afternoon sun. Blue turquoise and gold trim, white stone and ornamental fans; one of the more soothing places to lounge about of a Tuesday, waiting for folks to show up before heading off in to any number of outland wildernesses, in search of Adventure, and we'll often stand about chatting there, catching up on the week, swapping stories from all the other MMOs our diverse band occupy the rest of the week with, and so on. ...
The day I was silently dreading arrived this Tuesday. The Tuesday Noob Club has been slowly growing over the last few weeks, with various folks getting in touch and joining us on our weekly excursions. Mostly seems to be long-time or abandoned soloing folks, looking to play with Other People who don't use F-bombs in place of adjectives, or indeed, words and sentences. A surprisingly good selling point, as it turns out, and quite by accident, I seem to have become a Guild Leader. An entirely new kind of MMO experience for me, and typically, when I even...
My life seems to have gone all PvP lately, which is somewhat uncharacteristic of me, the Eternal Handwringing Carebear. I'm sure it's just a phase, but last Tuesday saw the first Tuesday N00b Club Fight Club. The first rule of N00b Club is...you do not blog about...doh! The four of us online that night have various dabbling experience at the PvP side of Guild Wars, but nothing organised or particularly practiced, and I've always thought it was a bit of a shame in my own case. Guild Wars is possibly one of the few MMOs I think has...
Two new faces in the Tuesday N00b Club of late, which had previously been a very more exclusive club than is probably healthy, and with new members come new lists of completions to sort out. While much of Guild Wars can be soloed via clever management of Heroes and Henchmen, things really do go much more smoothly with more warm-bodies in play. The previous session, and our new Dervish Friend's introduction to How We Do Things went well, and was probably quite representative, all things considered, what with us all getting comprehensively wiped out down to -60DP...
So there I was, pottering about in Cavalon, the Luxon Capital and hub of the Jade Sea area of Guild Wars: Factions, early Tuesday night, without a care in the world. Indeed, the most pressing concern I had at the time was 'Will my Mesmer's bum look big in Luxon Armour?' Turmoil! Then my regular Tuesday night colleague comes bouncing in with a cheery 'Oh! Cavalon! Let's try The Deep!', and it all went downhill from there really. Each of the Guild Wars offerings has an area like this. When you've beaten the story, and won,...
Not a big fan of April Fool's Day on the best of years, but this year, it seems to have happened on a Tuesday! I'd successfully dodged the usual low-grade idiocy all day, and then THIS happens:
Yup - they turned us all into stickmen!
Incidentally, the cup in the middle is that $100,000 Tournament Series Trophy I was rambling on about in the podcast. The text when you click on it reads:
$100,000 Tournament Series Trophy
Presented by the Zaishen to the 2007 monthly champions of the $100,000 Tournament Series.
Monthly GvG Champions:
- Heart of Ashes and Dust (May) ...
Still playing Guild Wars, despite the Tuesday N00b Club having effectively 'completed' it all. In celebration of all that, we actually went and set ourselves up as a proper guild - better late than never! This was quite easy, and simply required that I pay some NPC in Lion's Arch a whopping 10gp. I didn't even need to get nine random strangers to sign a bit of paper, and it seems guilds of one are quite allowed. The hardest bit was thinking up the obligatory witty and faintly abusive guild tag. We settled on 'The Tuesday Noob Club [Tue]'...
A missed session Guild Wars session last week, with both of us finding Real Life to be growing ever more intrusive of late, and I wonder if this gradual but suddenly noticeable shrinking of my spare time is just bad timing and bad luck, or something more fundamentally life changing; me growing up finally perhaps. Anyway, no such impediments this week as we plunged on into Destruction Depths, the next and penultimate step in the Eye of the North campaign. Our various allies, who we'd spent much of the campaign trying to get on-board, are all now in...
Hot on the heels of the prestigious Van Hemlock Game of the Year award, it is indeed, back to Guild Wars: Eye of the North, and a bumper session this New Year's Day in fact, which saw a number of things get done, many of which improved my faith in my own gaming abilities, and mood in general, given the shambolic failures of the previous session posted here. First job of the night was the final sprint on my regular companion's attempt at Legendary Survivor, a frankly ridiculous title if you ask me, which entails getting...
Bah! The Tuesday N00b Club slammed headfirst into yet another brick wall of adversity this week, this time in the form of another overpowered mega-boss monster, and all in all, left me in a rather despondent mood really. It exposes a certain hypocrisy about the game, I think, or at least the direction the game seems to be taking increasingly in recent expansions and campaigns. Guild Wars has been, for me at least, a fascinating exercise in almost collectible card game style 'deck-building' strategy, coupled with an extremely well executed variant on Diablo. But its the unique skill and...
Back to work in Guild Wars: Eye of the North, and after a emotional and fraught sojourn on the Tarnished Coast, we now strike out east, to the Charr Lands. Little Gwen is now all grown up, and many years have passed since the Searing destroyed Ascalon. She's found hate-fuelled gainful employment in the ranks of the Ebon Vanguard, a kind of commando regiment from what is left of Ascalon who make it their mission to take the fight to the enemy, and cause all sorts of ructions deep in Charr territory. Using the nearby Eye of the North...
Bit of a quiet week on the Guild Wars front, with RL getting in the way and making us miss a turn, as it were. Annoying, but we're not in any particular hurry, so I don't mind. I still got a few hours of solo questing in though; largely inconsequential side-jobs for cash and xp that don't really count in the grand scheme of the ongoing story that much. These were mostly in the 'mid-game' regions of Tyria and Cantha, as I play a bit of catch-up, bringing my Mesmer through the Factions story and outposts, only this...
You know, thinking back, I'm not sure if I can remember a time when Guild Wars wasn't an emotional rollercoaster of rapidly alternating success and defeat. Last time saw me getting all QQ about the Eye of the North's Shards of Orr dungeon, a rambling gauntlet of rather powerful and extremely angry undead - skeletons, zombies, and the like. A hardcore speedhump dropped somewhat casually in the path of our softcore story-based cruising, and quite irritating, all in all. Of course Irritation is my Fuel, and after the last post, I went away and got extremely obsessive about the whole...
Oh alright then! The evening started out well enough, with me logging across to my Factions Ritualist to help a friend, who is attempting to be come a Legendary Survivor the Hard Way; i.e. playing through the missions properly, rather than find a safe cluster of mobs just inside an explorable area and repeatedly grind on them until eyes bleed. In this case it was #9(K) - The Eternal Grove, a challenging and tricky 'defend the hill' type of mission, a lot like Prophecies' Thunderhead Keep and Nightfall's Dzagonur Bastion. To make matters even more awkward, my Survivalist friend...
Its off to the sunny and lush paradise of The Tarnished Coast this time, as we get to work on the second of the three big story branches in Guild Wars: Eye of the North; The Knowledgeable Asura. We'd used one of their underground gate thingies and arrived at Vlox's Falls, an outpost just south of, but unconnected to, Sanctum Cay, and here learnt of the Asuras' enigmatic 'G.O.L.E.M Project', which promises to be some kind of dangerously eccentric magical weapon system. The Asura are the classically absent minded and befuddled genius types provided for comic effect, as seen...
Before setting out on the next leg of our journey, in search of Vekk's Asuran compatriots and the magical knowledge they hold, we spent a fair amount of this weeks session filling in the gaps in the quest log for the various snowy Norn lands.
Many of these quests give out entirely new skills, in new tracks that any profession can use, and which work of reputation rankings, rather than attribute levels, a bit like the Sunspear skills. My own Cry of Pain is now prodigiously powerful, due to my PvE grinding of bounties during Nightfall and subsequent Sunspear...
What did you do for Halloween, Van Hemlock? Well! I'm glad you asked! Let's get the annual 'I don't see why you Americans make such a fuss' rant out of the way early and get straight to the scooped out pumpkins, and free stuff, shall we? Only two real games on the go this year, City of Villains and Guild Wars, and both did very well. Second Life has no centralised community as such, and no 'GM Events' to speak of, so nothing special there really. City Of Villains entered into the spirit of the thing by adding the...
More Guild Wars here! I seem to be settling into the few specific titles a lot lately. I don't know what's come over me - I'm probably ill or something. I'm sure the wheel of interest will turn again soon; most likely around the Revelations 3 'Trinity' update for EVE Online, I expect. Until then, its on with Eye of the North.
Having accidentally stumbled on yet another world-threatening Terror From Beyond Space/The Deeps/Hell/The Past, this time in the form of the fiery subterranean 'Destroyers', we've now found ourselves among new friends and an odd company indeed. A Dwarf and Asura...
Hi ho, its off we go - the Tuesday N00b Club vs Guild Wars: Eye of the North. After a surprisingly amount of feedback, (for which I'm most grateful), you, the readers of this blog, have chosen my Nightfall-based Mesmer to go on to face this latest set of challenges. Despite my seeming indifference to the matter, I am a little glad to be honest, and some of you seem to have rather astutely picked up on my slight preference for the somewhat more complex gameplay available to the Mesmer Primary or Secondary class.
Anyway, there's just the two of us this...
Hello all! Its Choose your Own Adventure Van Hemlock today. Well, choose your own Adventurer to be more precise. The Tuesday N00b Club has faced trials, tribulations, adversity, drama, and all that stuff, and now, after a three-film epic much like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, only with a much smaller budget and far shabbier production values, we've finished the main stories of Prophecies, Factions and Nightfall, the three Guild Wars 'basic' games, and are now ready to have a crack at Eye of the North. Eye of the North is a bit different however, and is GW's...
Three missions remained when you last joined us, but we got through a lot last night. The story so far had the Kurzick and Luxon finally putting aside their differences, and the whole lot of us, under the direction of Master Togo, heading off to the Harvest Temple, a ruined edifice at the far southern end of Cantha. This temple is something of a historical focus, as the cut-scenes explained; the site of Shiro's initial downfall, and first defeat two hundred years ago - an act so apocalyptic that it turned the seas to jade and the forests to...
The Tuesday N00b Club reconvened this week, and remarkably enough, had all done our homework. The bulk of the required 10,000 points was made up from a number of PvE overland quests, scattered about the various outposts and Luxon home regions, with all three of us variously making up the shortfall with forays into Fort Aspenwood, and the Alliance Battles. Not quite sure what went on in there to be honest, as I only made it as far as the lobby for those. Unlike Fort Aspenwood, which is eight randomly lumped together players going at it with...
Life in the Luxon Army isn't all Jade and Nagas, as we found out last night. The story so far sees us trying to unite the long warring factions of Kurzick and Luxon, in the hope that with their combined strength, the world might be saved from the temporarily at-bay Shiro Tagachi. Leading that effort are Master Togo and his number one student, Brother Mhenlo. Mhenlo has gone off to sort out the Kurzick side of the problem out, leaving us and Master Togo to somehow convince the Luxon peoples that maybe the whole neverending civil war thing is...
Well, knock me down with falling masonry and call me Lara Croft! After an undeniably enjoyable, but somewhat slower pace than the Tuesday N00b Club are used to, averaging at one mission a week in Guild Wars: Factions so far, last night saw three in a row! It's not like we're working to any kind of schedule or anything, and the pace is usually dictated by a kind of easy-going and relaxed attitude to the whole thing. It's nice to have at least one mission to ramble about here each week, but in general, we'll get there when we...
Having completed the necessary spiritual preparations of the 'Weh no Su', previously, we're now worthy enough to consult with the deceased spirit forms of various long gone ancient heroes of Cantha. These spirits reside in the Tahnnakai Temple, in the east of the sprawling metropolis of Kaineng. After an bracing slog through a cyclopean sewer system, crawling with the Afflicted, and of course Kaineng's more regular supporting cast of ninja street-gangs and very angry samurai types, we arrived at the temple.
There is one hero in particular that we want to have a bit of a chat with; Vizu, a long gone Assassin...
Last time saw us discover that, once again, we are pawns in a Great Game, and with the intervention of a group of godlike beings known as 'Envoys', we have been directed to seek out The Oracle, who will guide us on the path to becoming 'Weh no Su', or 'Closer to the Stars'. This path to mystical enlightenment is the first step toward us being able to meet our nemesis, Shiro Tagachi, on anything like even terms. At the moment, he's cheating quite a lot, raising armies of mutated dead, being rather too good with the old twin daggers,...
Seems my Internet troubles are all better now, and last night saw an uninterrupted Guild Wars: Factions session, where we managed to make up for all the lost progress of Tuesday. This week sees a new addition to the Tuesday N00b Club, in the form of a Ranger/Warrior with some rather unorthodox ideas about Melee Axemanship which I was initially dubious about, but which seemed to be working quite well as it turned out. I don't know a lot about Warriors, per se, never having seriously given one a go for any real length of time, but being a Ranger...
Don't mind me - I'm still seething. Not much to report on the MMO Obsession front lately, although not for want of trying at least. An almost conspiracy-like combination of technical troubles serving to keep me mostly offline since last week; ISP troubles, server troubles, network issues, and somewhat bizarrely, some Friend of Humanity having at the Internet with a twelve-bore, and being successful enough to stop me getting anything useful done in any online game for the majority of Monday night. Living in the UK, as I do, I'm largely oblivious to the whole nest of vipers that...
Guild Wars: Factions continues, and this time saw us picking up with the investigation of a sudden outbreak of a quite horrific plague on the island of Shing Jea. While the early symptoms seem to consist mostly of an irrational bloodlust, causing the afflicted to attack former friends and allies with impunity, the more advanced cases are something else again. As we joined up with a group of Master Togo's more advanced students in the Jaya Bluffs and Haiju Lagoon, further isolated outbreaks required our investigation, and subsequent cleansing, and many nasty symptoms became apparent, including wholesale mutation of...
Thanks to some kind of network implosion at Arenanet Towers, they had another go at the Dragon Festival this weekend, and I happened to be online during a large part of it over Sunday afternoon.
I was actually out alone with my original Prophecies Ranger, making a start on the Nightfall stuff with that character, following along behind in the Mesmer's wake, and joining the outpost dots, partly to grind out some cash for the somewhat costly set of end-game threads for said Mesmer, and partly to get another go at the various Treasure spawns. I'm happy enough with my...
And so back to Guild Wars, and a whole new adventure! This time, we're having a go at Guild Wars: Factions, an earlier offering than Nightfall, which I'd completely missed at the time. I'm rubbish at keeping up with what's new, in general, and tend to end up banging on about all manner of interesting thing that everyone else has already played to death. I don't mind though; on the plus side, by the time I get there, these games are usually quite comprehensively balanced, fixed, patched and smooth. I went and bought the thing at a real...
In the far north of the canyon lands of Vabbi, the great river leaves the mountains and springs of remote and unknown uplands and pours down various cataracts, continuing, as it ever has, to carve it's relentless way through the ravines of Vabbi, before widening and slowing, and delivering it's stolen fertility to the lowlands and flood plains of distant Kourna to the south, and the seas around the isles of Istan.
But here, at the Holdings of Chokhin, the river is mighty, powerful, driven by rains, made vigorous by the tight and steep channels it has carved for itself over...
A bit of extra-curricular Guild Wars activity recently, seeing me poking about with nervous curiosity at the Great Temple of Balthazar and environs, mostly for a sense of completeness with the World Map uncovering. The various PVP-dedicated bits of the world of Guild Wars are largely campaign independent and mostly located on a separate island chain, where live the Zaishen Order, a kind of monastic order mostly concerned with the pursuit of enlightenment found by beating each other to death, and beyond. On these islands are a number of lobbies for various types of PvP event, along with the Guild Hall, which...
Dramatic Music! Tense Plot Culmination! "Previously on The Tuesday N00b Club..." flashback! I'm sure you've all be unable to eat, sleep, concentrate on worthwhile and/or necessary Real Life Tasks, nervously wondering if we'd fall at the final challenge, or if the imaginary online pretend world of Elona would be saved! Again! By us! More importantly, is it even possible that the word 'Closure' can ever be applied to an MMO? Well, let me put you out of your indifference...we won! Huzzah! Bucking the trend of one successful night out followed routinely by one disastrous one, this Tuesday session saw...
Meanwhile, in Guild Wars: Nightfall, the Tuesday N00b Club forges ahead, and an end is in sight. Night has fallen on Elona, and the world slowly but inexorably slides into a twisted version of it's former self, made hideous by the taint of a chained, maddened and vengeful god. Only a small band of plucky and driven heroes stand between the end of all things, and the slim hope of salvation, restoration, and victory.
I'm getting quite excited by it all actually, largely because of the clever way in which the Guild Wars Campaigns, and Nightfall in particular, are constructed.
Threaded throughout each campaign...
And so, after an awful lot of dawdling, detours, side-trips, expositions, reversals of fortune and sundry other sub-plots, we've finally made it to the Desolation. This is a distinct new region of the worldmap of Nightfall, and possibly one of my favourite to date. We're now in the wilderness, having left civilised lands behind, and the new areas are not really like (or inspired by) anywhere historical at all, instead being a rocky tortured landscape of sands, ruins and sulfurous deserts, all presided over by the large dark 'Nightfallen' tendrils, which seem to have sprouted from the earth pretty much everywhere...
Some trepidation ahead of this week's Guild Wars: Nightfall session, given the rather nightmarish difficulties we had with the various crack Margonite assault squads were were encountering in both mission, and overland areas, but overall, the session went very well, which seems to be setting a bit of a pattern for these weekly outings; one week we'll be magnificent conquering heroes, and the next we'll be kicked up and down the continent like mistreated puppies.
This week turned out to be one of the decent trips, mostly to a great deal of post-mortem, research, adaptation and a lengthy meeting...
Harsh times this week in GuildWars: Nightfall, and the thing definitely seems to be getting more difficult now. Either that, or we've missed something fundamental with the builds. Only one mission this week; the Grand Court of Sebelkeh, and it took three goes, and even then we only came out with the 'Standard' award - i.e. the bare minimum performance it will grudgingly allow you to continue the story with. Oh the ignominy!
The mission is a contrast to many so far, in that the whole thing takes place in one relatively small room, inside the huge floating Temple of Lyssa,...
A quite hectic push forward in GuildWars: Nightfall this week, seeing us tackle two quite tricky missions in our own inimitable style, and then trying them again properly and succeeding. Due to a previous misunderstanding about choice of Heroes, we're now currently splitting up at several points along the story, and ending up having to different missions, depending on whether we picked Magrid the Sly, or the Master of Whispers to be our own personal lackeys.
Each of these two supporting characters in the overall epic drama that is the Nightfall campaign, has their own little story arc, and it seems...
After a rocky last session, we launched back into GuildWars: Nightfall this week with a certain dogged resignation, most of which turned out to be quite baseless. A variety of refinements based on last GW rant saw us push through the Rihlon Refuge Mission in a much more successful manner, and surprised us with a Master's (Bonus) completion to boot, and things are on the move once more.
(As with most of my Nightfall posts, a somewhat belated spoiler warning!)
We now find ourselves on the run, once more - you know the drill - vast nefarious army, lead by a...
Something of a frustrating session this week in the Tuesday N00b Club, exposing one of my long time gripes about this otherwise very serviceable MMO, and the three of us came away from it all in various stages of Grumpy, I suspect. I know I did, and on the whole, I think we've started to hit that stage in the progression from start, to what passes for the 'finish' in an MMO, where the carefree frolicking of youth, becomes replaced with something altogether more gritty, challenging and serious.
We started out as enthusiastically as ever, romping through the necessary primary quests...
Stalled again with The Tuesday Club, another missed session meant that it was down to two of us once more, to find productive, constructive and entertaining ways to occupy the evening. This was mostly in the form of a number of secondary quests, and of course, "filling in the corners".
The various Guild Wars World Maps have always fascinated me. Starting in Pre Searing Ascalon, pressing 'M' and seeing this vast, richly imagined and exotic continents, all fuzzy with ignorance. The Post-Searing map of Tyria is a thing of mystique and beauty in and...
Back to work in Guild Wars: Nightfall, with our injured member of the Fellowship now down to a dose of painkillers sufficiently low enough to allow the operation of a mouse and recognition of simple coloured moving shapes on a computer monitor. Not that we'd have particularly have minded them trying to participate anyway, and indeed, given that they're a Dervish/Warrior with an alarming propensity to go berserk if a monster even looks at their skirt funny, it's questionable whether we'd have even noticed!
Still RL takes precedence, and all that, but we're reunited at last and are now moving...
Still a man down this week for the usual Tuesday outing, leaving our GuildWars: Nightfall characters somewhat stalled outside the Venta Cemetery Mission. This is part of the trouble that has always plagued any attempt I've made to maintain useful or meaningful MMO Friendships. Every time you add one more personal connection, it multiplies the amount of determination, coordination and patience required for all of you to remain comparable in level, or at the same place in a story, or generally equal in any useful way. There's only three of us in this particular Regular Group and already it's proving...
An absentee this week from the regular Guild Wars Nightfall night, leaving two of us to pick away at a few sub-quests, poke about in Tyria, unlocking all the outposts we'd already got, with these new characters, and eventually, and somewhat inevitably, a stab at Hard Mode, on our previous 'main' Tyrian characters - the ones that had finished Prophecies.
I must admit to having gone into it with a disapproving frown before even trying it out to be honest, as the whole thing smacks of a cheap kludge to the problem of end-game content shortage to me. Mind you, it...
So, when last you left us in GuildWars: Nightfall, we'd all fallen out over the classic 'Friend of my Friend is not necessarily also my Friend' type of conundrum, and somewhat lost track of where we were, and what we were supposed to be doing, and for a moment there, during the long dark teatime of the soul this week, I even considered on giving up on the whole thing and just doing solitary maudlin cyber-tourism in Anarchy Online on Tuesdays, instead.
Luckily, despite pretensions at being a brooding over-sensitive Byronic type in my online dealings (complete with big shirt sleeves),...
Warning! Today's rambling contains feelings, hissy-fits, drhama, sub-optimal gameplay, and scenes of an Emo Nature! If you are easily offended by painful examinations of self, here is a link to a video of a man making an iPod Smoothie with an Industrial Blender, and I'll see you all next time!
I guess it started off okay, the usual sort of thing - a bit of minor tidy up questing on Istan while we waited for all three of us to log on, and then it was back on to the Primary Questing - the storyline of Nightfall. By now, myself (The...
Anyway, back to it, and onward with the ongoing adventures of our Tuesday night Guild Wars: Nightfall group.
We'd kind of stalled a bit lately, mostly due to conflicting schedules meaning that one of more of us was unable to play, and we'd still not made it off the island of Istan, (lower-left), which forms, for Nightfall, the newbie area covered by the 'Pre-Searing' section of the original game. Mind you, Istan certainly seems bigger, better laid out, and more full of interesting place, people and things to kill than Pre-Searing Ascalon ever was, and we've all still got a number...
Tadaa! Something like a year after getting started, and while everyone else is digging into the Nightfall campaign of Guild Wars, talking up the forthcoming Viking-based expansion of Guild Wars, and talking down the furthercoming World of Warcraft based 'Guild Wars 2', I've finally finished the original Prophecies campaign. Woot!
It was supposed to be Tuseday N00b Club, but we had a prior cancellation, leaving the two of us unable to continue in Istan (due to The Pact), so we logged back across to our 'mains', in so much as the term has meaning there at all, my R/N with Beastmastery...
A somewhat short Tuesday N00b Club this week, beset mostly by Technical Difficulties of the ISP kind, with two of us having connectivity troubles that pretty much ruined the evening, causing a great deal of waiting around and frustration.
It's such a delicate thing really, such a precarious existence, and one I've come to take for granted a bit, I think. Being able to sit down, connect, log in and carry out my affairs in any one of a dozen escapist fantasies, and a dozen alternate lives. Granted, a slightly alarming number of these tend to involve being told by one...
The Mehtani Keys area of GuildWars: Nightfall is quite possibly one of the best looking zones in an MMO I've seen in a very long time. The Tuesday N00b Club spent a fair amount of time there this week, what with our ongoing mission to root out and destroy a sudden appearance of mystery undead in the lands of the Istani.
It's a large area of very shallow seas, knee-deep in most places, studded with gloriously sun-drenched sandy atolls, topped with light tropical vegetation. Rope bridges connect some of the isles together, and simple fishemen occupy a idyllic village on tall...
Another Tuesday, another rampage across the lands of the Istani. The basic business of teamwork seems to be coming together well for us now; practice having taught all three of us who should be doing what and when, and we're now into lands that allow a higher number of party members, which in turn, is allowing us to bring more Heroes and Henchmen along for the ride.
Although all the Heroes get unlocked for each of us, as we progress along the over-arching story of Nightfall, the business of equipping them, and keeping their skills up to date and useful can...
Tuesday N00b Club again last night in Guild Wars: Nightfall, and time to decide on Secondary Professions. If Nightfall is anything like the original Prophecies campaign, we'll get the chance to change this choice later on down the road, but there's a considerable amount of Adventuring to be done until then, so it's quite a big decision, and a tricky one from my perspective, as I'm so used to thinking in terms of solo viability, and in any event, I still have trouble getting the hang of a truly hybrid character.
On previous occasions, mostly with my 'main', a Ranger/Necromancer, I...
Slightly overshadowed by the whole Valentine's Day thing, it's also Chinese New Year time (18th Feb), and another excuse for the MMO to do something a bit different. I'd kind of forgotten really, and it wasn't until I looted a 'Lunar Token' during a re-run of the Infusion mission in Guild Wars, mostly to capture the 'Barrage' Ranger Elite skill, that I remembered.
Intrigued, I headed to Lion's Arch, figuring that if anything was happening in GW, it'd be happening there, and I wasn't wrong. The place was almost unrecognisable, festooned with red paper lanterns and seasonal NPCs, fortune tellers, lamp-lighters,...
It was the newly formed Tuesday N00b Club's inaugural outing last night, making a shaky but encouraging start on the Guild Wars: Nightfall Campaign. I'm probably breaking the First and Second Rules of Tuesday N00b Club, even talking about it here to be honest, but until 'Brad Pitt' learns to use CTRL+Space instead of just Space when pulling mobs, I don't feel quite that guilty, to be honest.
It all started as a bit of a bid to bring some kind of order to the chaos that is my evening free-time. I've played dozens of these things now, and met quite...
A bit of a lull in the ongoing Guild Wars storyline for me at the moment. Last session saw me and my Elementalist friend finish Missions 23 (Ring of Fire) and 24 (Abaddon's Mouth) without too much fuss, although both were quite hard work. We've fought our way up a very Tolkienesque volcano, to the top, and then we did something very silly indeed, and now the world stands on the edge of firey destruction, proving once again that the biggest threat to any half-way stable magical medieval society, is Heroes. Ooops! Our bad! Naturally, since it was our fault,...
Old news now, of course, in this whirling helter-skelter of Information Superhighways and what not:
Slashdot: eBay Virtual World Delisting Skips Second Life
All quite complicated, and still on-going I think, but the basic gist of it is that the megalithic online car-boot sale that is eBay, has decided that it wants nothing more to do with the mind-wrenching conceptual hijinks that is Online Virtual Asset Ownership, and have decided to just pull the lot. Including imaginary stuff from Ultima Online, which is actually allowed to be traded in this manner, and yet not including imaginary stuff from Second Life...
More Guild Wars mayhem, and a surprisingly enjoyable session that saw me complete missions 20, 21 and 22 of the basic Prophecies campaign; The Ice Caves of Sorrow, The Iron Mines of Moladune and Thunderhead Keep, mostly without frustration or incident, making a much longer night of it that I normally spend in there, and now I'm on the Ring of Fire Islands, and have only three more missions to complete, to finish the Big Story, as far as the original game goes at least.
The session was mostly spent 'duoing' with my previously mentioned friend, the one with all the...
GuildWars continues, with a surprising break in the progress deadlock the other night. Regular readers will remember that the last we heard of my GW-self, they were stuck in the Crystal Desert, on one mission in particular:
GuildWiki: Thirsty River (Mission)
An irritating mission, and one I'd come to learn by heart, largely because I'd attempted the thing so damned many times now.
Enter, loop right, clear devourers and sand giants for morale, loop back round, cross to the other side, clear sand giant, follow path ahead, clear devourers on corner, follow path, to oasis, clear devourers, giants, up to gate, impatiently click...
Spent some time over the last few days being slapped about the head by the Halibut of Frustration, in Guild Wars. My time there is rapidly dividing into two distinct phases.
There’s the solitary overland roaming, when I, and five mostly silent, entirely predictable and totally obedient AI NPC henchmen form up a party and explore the various non-mission Explorable Area regions of the Crystal Desert – Prophet’s Path, Salt Flats, Diviners Ascent, Arid Sea, Vulture Drifts, Skyward Reach and The Scar. I’ve always found GW to have one of the more good-looking MMO worlds – well designed and varied regions,...
Back to Guild Wars once more, and the familiar unfamiliarity, as I try to work out how the hell yet another dusty abandoned MMO works – the usual sort of deep and philosophical questions: who, where, what, when , why. Time for a little stock-taking!
(Note: Whether or not Guild Wars is technically an MMO at all is a matter for some debate. I’m going to just ignore that debate and call it one, simply because I can’t be bothered to invent a new term for it! It’s close enough for me.)
My main GW Self seems to be a L20 Ranger/Necromancer,...
I really don’t get Halloween. To me, in the UK, it’s always seemed a rather lacklustre and unremarkable affair, primarily manifested by the necessity to hide, in one’s own home, so that the roving gangs of 13-17 year old juvenile delinquent thugs think that you’re out, and move on to demand money with menaces…err…'Trick or Treat' elsewhere. At least at Christmas they have to sing a bit first. Humbug indeed!
In MMO-land however, it’s a much grander affair, and curiously, usually seems more meticulously and lavishly observed than anything Dec 25th has to offer. I can only imagine that this is...
Decided to take the night off of Second Life the other night, and go for a bit of a wander. I’m still quite surprised how much of a draw the ‘Metaverse’, as they keep liking to call it, has on me actually. Getting on for seven years into The Grind, in various different guises, I sometimes wonder if SL wasn’t the sort of thing I’d been looking for all along.
It stems from not really having the temperament for long sustained repetition activity I guess – I’ve never really been able to knuckle down and actually grind mobs for any...
You know you’re getting old when you have to start looking up what all the cool kids are calling the not-so-cool kids in the playground on Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary. Internet memes move too damn fast these days. In my day, they’d just bellow ‘FAG!’ on the zonewide ooc chat and be done with it. Everyone knew where they stood, which more often than not was in a state of impotent disgust, and just reach for the Ignore List. Some of the more witty and debonair types would extemporise and mix it up with a ‘ghey’ here and there, (note...
GuildWars is rollicking along, and I’m discovering it to be a rather strange gaming experience, and quite different to most of my previous online excursions (see sidebar). It has a strange duality to it.
One the one hand the extensive use of instancing, and story-driven mission areas, with cut-scenes, makes for a much greater sense of actually being in a story, than any MMO I’ve come across, and only Asheron’s Call 2’s ‘Vaults’ had offered a similar level of participation in any non-‘event’ type capacity. My own personal version of this epic story is moving along (no spoilers here), and...
Another day, another world. This time it’s Guild Wars, and the beleaguered and shattered land of Ascalon. You take on the role of determined freelance Hero, wandering the wilds and generally solving problems with the judicious application of brute force.
It’s a popular, and indeed, overused theme, but the execution here is very well done, and in terms of gameplay mechanics, Guild Wars brings a lot of novel and fresh ideas to the genre. Also, as previously mentioned, it has no monthly fee at all, despite being every bit as polished as World of Warcraft or Everquest II.
Three Good Things
Lavish: The...
Becoming suddenly impressed with online gaming trends that everyone else discovered eight months ago, but that I was too cynical to get involved with at the time, is very much part of the mission statement here at Van Hemlock, and in that vein, I went and bought Guild Wars at the weekend.
I wasn’t going to touch it really, already having a fairly full MMO plate at the moment, but two main points recommended it to me. Firstly, I wanted to catch up with an old online friend who I’d not seen since we wnet our separate ways from post-CU,...
Demonstrating my typical nose for all things fashionable in MMO, I've not got Guild Wars yet. I live in the UK, and like usual, my local game shop, (imaginatively named 'Game'), is proudly sporting 'Reserve Your Copy Now!' fake boxes for it; yet again we, the second-class citizens of Elbonia must wait until the USAF can air-drop PC Gaming Relief Parcels on our ravaged war-torn land. That said, if I was really that frenetic about the game, I'd have probably ordered direct from the US via Amazon or something by now.
It does sort of strike me as an impulse-buy though,...
Everyone say hello to the new kid on the block:
Guild Wars: Now Open for Business
Not quite sure what to make of this one, but I suspect it'll be nowhere near the Warcraft-Killer everyone not playing WoW would like. PvP is always a spikey subject, and in the face of nearly a decade of collected evidence, not for most people. However, many elements come into play, including the amount of skill needed, twitch or stat-grooming based, ambushing, penalties and rewards, and all that good stuff. Personaly, I only go for PvP in Planetside, and only then because it's so free of...