October 30, 2008

TSO – Crafting Teaser

If you’re a crafter in EQ2 (and lets face it, I most certainly am) you’re going to be VERY excited with the newest expansion, The Shadow Odyssey, scheduled to come out in November. Be sure to check out the Village of Shin if you’re an experienced crafter for a few new quests, including one where the reward is the cloak pictured above (and below).

 

One of the interesting points of this new expansion is that it sends adventurers out into older zones – not exactly re-using them, but at least getting them out into Norrath a little more. The Village of Shin came out in The Fallen Dynasty adventure pack, and crafters as well as adventurers have been sent there off and on to complete new quests. A lot of the new content will work the same way, you head through an older zone (such as Lavastorm) to reach the new content (like the new scaling dungeons). 

There is of course brand new overland content too, with the Moors of Ykesha which I’ll go into more detail about tomorrow.

Dabbling in WoW (again)

No, I’m not leaving EQ2. Or EQ1 for that matter. I’ll still be partaking in the Friday night Nostalgia, and still playing EQ2 (though lately that has been less, I simply don’t have anything I feel like doing right now. I’m eager about the expansion and looking forward to that). You can blame my re-kindled interest in WoW on a few select people, whose blogs I read daily. With NaNoWriMo coming (two days away!) I wanted a game that I think of as on a ‘lighter’ scale. Where I can dip in for an hour or two and feel like I finished something. Right now (for me personally) that game is not EQ2. Don’t read into that though! I’m not going anywhere and Sony knows they own my soul. 

So I patched (for three hours?) and then moved WoW over to the laptop. Grabbed the curse client and fanangled my way through add-on city. Finally I was ready. 

A few changes happened while I’ve been away. I haven’t been away *that* long. 

Achievements. I LOVE this. They remind me very much of the knowledge book in WAR. I’ve always loved being able to look at my characters and KNOW what they had done. It gives me something that WoW had always lacked for me (due to easy leveling, and cheap server transfer costs) PRIDE in a character. I don’t have the slightest idea what the points are used for (if anything) but I’ve only finished off a very small percentage of the ones available. 

I’m low level, no where near end game. My highest characters are level 47 (I have a few of those) but I’m looking forward to exploring and getting back into things. We’ll see how long it lasts this time around. 

Oh, another thing I know nothing about. Glyphs. I have a glyph page. I don’t know how you make them, or what they’re used for (something about enchantments?) so if anyone has some resource out there I could read, send it my way! I read everyone else’ sites about WoW and what fun they’re having but a lot of the technical bits are still in some foreign language to me. I’m not too worried (yet), but I know I have a lot of catching up to do!

No, I won’t ever be the big end game player like others I read about. I’m sure I’m too far behind, but I will have a lot of fun learning and relearning everything I need to know.

Everything But the Kitchen Sink

Yesterday was another LBP day. That is to say (I rhyme so well at 7am!) that I spent most of my time either trying to connect to LBP online (didn’t work until 6pm or so) trying not to lag into spikes with Tipa and Said, or adventuring on my own gathering more costumes and more building materials. When the servers finally did come online, I tracked down Tipa and Said and spotted them in the Meerkat zone. 

The lag was horrible. I felt like I was watching everything in slow motion any time I joined someone else who was hosting. If you’re the host, things are just great. It really made playing very difficult. 

Another thing that was difficult was that I don’t have a keyboard plugged into my ps3. Something I am going to fix this weekend. It meant that any communication would have taken me literally hours. I don’t want to wear a headset while I’m playing, and I don’t want to have to voice. So a usb keyboard is the way to go. It was VERY hard to communicate with everyone. Said and I ended up logging into vent and then Said would type things out to Tipa because they both were using keyboards. 

I thought playing co-op in a duo where the person was literally in the same room with you was hard, that is NOTHING compared to playing online. Especially when there’s lag involved. I think we all died more times from getting pushed off of the side of the screen by anything else. 

You know what though. Despite all of that, and what a very rocky start the online portion has been – I’m loving it. Every bit of it. I’m sure over time the online portions will get better – and it’s not essential to the game. You can play other people’s levels by yourself while you’re connected and have 0 lag. You can create your own areas just fine, publish them for others. Add your friends zones to your favorites, etc. There’s still so much creativity and just plain fun that even with the frustrations I think this is a fantastic game. I started working on the three wedding zones, and got a load of new outfits. They are very difficult for me to complete though, especially without dying. It will take some time (and a whole lot of luck) and me re-doing the zones a few times before I feel like I can run through and gain the ‘aces’ reward for completing it (and passing all the check points) without dying. 

It’s easy to lose track of time when playing. Especially when you never know when the next costume or building material may be coming your way. Tipa sent me a message with an attachment for LBP and I don’t have the faintest idea how to see it or how to get it or what it is. Suppose that makes a good goal for later today. 

I have two days before NaNoWriMo starts, Christmas upcoming (and I’m making a lot of my gifts, so they take time), as well as all the other real life obligations that everyone has to deal with. With all of that going on plus EQ2 + EQ1 – call me crazy, but I re-subscribed to WoW. More about that in a post later today (have I mentioned yet how much I love delayed publishing in wordpress? Well I do!).