A brighter tomorrow?

A step in the right direction?  I’d say so.  With Aion I’ve been nearing the limit of my enjoyment.  You can easily tell this is happening when you begin to notice problems with the game more frequently than before, and those problems start to bother you.

I’m happy to say that the Aion team is doing what they can to better their game.  There’s been a large number of changes and additions to the game, some of which I have yet to experience.  Overall it seems they’re speeding up the leveling and adding more customization options via appearance and “motion”.  The motion consists of buying “guides”, which aren’t cheap, you then apply these to your character and can jump, rest, stand, and run in various ways.

Ninja motion

Levitation motion – aka Rocket shoes

Back on track.  The biggest addition to the game is simply the graphics.  They did a major overhaul to provide more stylish gameplay to players with superior computers.  I am not one of these, but my brother is and it does look a good deal crisper, brighter, and vibrant.
Let’s see, what else…

There’s now a mentoring system to facilitate low level players joining higher level ones.  Nothing unheard of and definitely a great addition to the game.  Most games should have this feature in my opinion.  A cool feature that I haven’t experienced before is the reward system for players who mentor others.  Mentors can do daily quests while assisting their companion and will receive tokens that can be exchanged for weapons, armor, accessories, and other special rewards.  This is great incentive for others to actually want to help others.  They’ve also simplified looking for others to mentor by adding an additional section in the LFG window specifically for mentors, LFMen… >.>

There are, of course, many, many, other notes to this patch and most of them didn’t pertain to me (the pet system would be one).  If only they could patch the community.  That would be miraculous.

- Thrangis

Charr Week – in a steel-plated nutshell

Charr Starting Area

The village of Smokestead will be the first place Charr players will have the pleasure of experiencing.  It will be the stage for setting up the mindset and attitude of the Charr, so look for those subtle details in the locals and their buildings.  What’s so important about this area?  It houses one of the main cattle industries for the Charr’s hungry legions.

After the first few play sessions in the Plains of Ashford, it became clear that the Village of Smokestead wasn’t meeting the goals we had set out for it. You might think that after we had put several months into the map, we’d have been resistant to making wholesale changes, but we thought it was more important to make the game right than to just get it done.

The Domain of the Charr

I half expect the Charr who survive warfare to die of lung cancer.

Writing the Charr


I was glad to see a decent change in the voices between the races.  They remind me of the voice actors for the dwarves in Dragon Age.

Artistic Beginnings

Q: Kekai, how did you approach the charr design for Guild Wars 2?

Kekai: My approach was simple: make the charr badass. And then make them even more badass.

Even though this pretty much sums up the charr now, they had to start somewhere.

The Legions


Great lore/story piece.  I had often wondered why the Charr never tore at each other to unify all legions under one.  Originally I had thought it was because it was too similar to what the Flame legion had done and they wanted to forge ahead for the sake of being progressive.  However, I came to find this:

Adelbern’s curse [the foefire] upon the lands of Ascalon swept through the humans. In a white-hot moment, it destroyed their physical forms and cursed their spirits to wander the land, forever fighting against the charr. Because the ghostly enemy was unrelenting and never completely defeated, the High Legions of the charr were forced to work together from the outset if they wished to survive. Although they detested the forced unity, the need to defend themselves and Ascalon taught the three legions how to work together without sacrificing their individuality.

Very interesting…

—–

Anyway, thanks to Blaq for kicking me into gear and rounding up the Charr week.  In all honesty I had read it and completely slipped on writing about it.  Until the next moist morsel of GW2 information!

- Thrangis

AVG Free 2011 – on the fritz

My AVG was throwing a fit today.  I was bombarded continually with requests to reboot my PC in order to “finalize” an update.  So I reboot, it asked me again, I rebooted again, it asked me again…  I suddenly felt a moment of déjà vu.  I had run into something like this with AVG back in ’09.  Here is how I fixed it:

  1. Download AVG Free 2011 (you can do so here)
  2. Run the .exe (“avg_free_stb_all_2011_1170_cnet.exe” in this case)
  3. When prompted to proceed, do so.
  4. Select “Add or Remove Features” and continue
  5. Click next (to approve that random code thing they give you)
  6. Leave your destination folder at default, click next (unless, of course, you have your AVG in another directory)
  7. AVG will install the missing data needed
  8. Restart your PC when prompted
  9. That bothersome reboot message shouldn’t appear anymore!

I’m only throwing this up because I didn’t run across anyone telling how to fix this (yes I looked >_>).  Anyway, I think it has something to with the AVG updater not downloading all the files needed for it to finish updating… or something to that effect.

- Thrangis

LotRO – November update right on schedule

The new patch, which focuses a great deal of attention on Rune-keeper and Lore-master (woo!), is now live.  It’s a relatively quick patch (took me about 10 minutes).

Be sure to give the patch notes a quick glance.  There’s some updates to the whole F2P content as well, such as max level cap access.

update: I just got a look at the “meta-deed” mounts that came with the update.  I really like the goats. :)

[side note]: be sure to check those online shopping spots for the Cyber Monday sales! Newegg, TigerDirect, Amazon, Overstock…  just to throw a few of my hot spots out there. :)

- Thrangis

Rift Beta and Other Updates

Rift

Just finished updating my account with a Beta Key…  nothing is “for sure” but my chances of getting into closed beta are improved.  Overall the game has some interesting features I’ll hopefully get the chance to look into.  As always, this is the place where I’ll be putting my thoughts!

Vindictus

I’ve been keeping myself busy in Vindictus, to the best of my abilities, and am just now getting into the content of Ainle.  With the next update around the corner I hope I can get my Evie high enough to jump on in with the rest of the other players.  x]

LotRO

There’s no real rush to progress any of my higher level characters beyond where they’re at, at least not yet.  With discussion of Turbine planning to remove the unjust “Radiance” mechanic from the game, I’m going to hold back from attempting to gear myself out with the latest in radiance pieces.  However, I did manage to progress through most of the book quests that I had previously been unable to do (hard to find fellowships).  There were some changes made to allow for solo-style players (or players having difficulty finding a fellowship) to do some of the harder chapters in the book quests.

Journal of Grudgery

Now, I’m well aware that any journal entries for Thrangis are going to be way overdo and I’m sorry for the huge delay (especially to those who enjoy the entries).  I’ve been working on something extra for the next post.  Just need to wait a little longer. :)

- Thrangis