Dungeons and Dragons and books, oh my!

A couple of weeks ago I splashed out and bought a D&D book of amazon.co.uk, then about a week later I spotted another one I wanted in Waterstones, and bought that as well.

These books were both 3.5 edition (which I haven't figured out how to pronounce yet)

The other day, Wizards of the Coast, who produce D&D have anounced 4th edition.

Now, on the one hand, this is a Bad Thing™. I have three 3.5 edition books. There are people with shelves and shelves of them, which will (probably) be obsoleted when the new ones come out.

On the other hand, this is a Very Good Thing™, as the game will (hopefuly) be more streamlined, like the new Star Wars Saga Edition, also produced by Wizards. This will (presumably) mean that most of the 3.5 books aren't actually needed, as a lot more of their content is incorporated into the core rules.

On the gripping hand, both of the above, balancing out to a Good Thing™. The rules will be in place from the core 4th edition books. The flavour text from 3.5 will still be perfectly acceptable. The conversion from 3.5 to 4th edition characters should be relatively simple, even if some nuances are lost.

Overall, I am pleased with this announcement, even if it means the raw mechanics of some of my books will be slightly obsoleted: it won't matter as the flavour will still be there.

Guild wars: a story of surprises

As I posted the other day, at the weekend I purchased Guild Wars Factions, so I thought I'd do a quick 'first impressions' post.

On the way home, as I often do with a new game, I popped open the box to have a look at the manual. Expecting a flimsy bit of paper saying 'how to install' and a 4 disc behemoth of a game, I was pleasantly surprised to find only two discs and a dirty great manual of Everything You Need To Know And Some Stuff You Don't.

Arriving home, I unlock my linux box, shove the disc in, and 'sudo wine /media/cdrom0/install.exe', or whatever it was. Similarly surprising, it worked.

Well, perhaps 'worked' is a little strong; once it was all installed, and I took the 30s to add Factions to my PlayNC acount, I boot up the game and there's no mouse rendered. 'No problem', thought I, and I plunge onwards. Maybe a half an hour later, I realise that I'm not getting anywhere, as GW seems quite click intensive. So off I trundle to find some hackerish way of seeing my mouse.

Long story short, I end up running a program that renders a cat chasing my mouse around the screen. Kinda annoying, but means I know where it is.

I knew that GW instances basically the entire game, but I didn't realise that it downloads all the assets for each instance as you zone in (surprise! I guess). This worked fine, until I tried to zone into the first zone after the first town. Then everything went kinda wrong. Guild Wars crashed, causing X (my linux gui rendererer) to crash. Darn. Well, I'll restart it then. After reinstalling my graphics driver again, X still wouldn't load. I reinstalled linux, and still nothing. I think sometheing got corrupted in my /home partition, the bit where user files and programs and stuff get stored, and which doesn't get formatted on reinstalling linux. Unfortunately, I don't have a clue which bit is likely to have done this, so short of just experimenting renaming random files, I was kinda stuck.

So with a dead linux partition, I booted windows, and installed Factions there. As expected, this worked fine and I actually got a chance to try the game.

Its pretty okay!

Impulse Buying

This is perhaps the downside of Guild Wars: guilt free(ish) impulse buying. It doesn't matter if I play that much as there's no subscription.

It also gets bonus points for installing cleanly on linux first time, although it doesn't render a mouse, which is a bit of a bugger. Although I can't seem to zone into the first area past the first town, but I expect thats nothing some more RAM won't fix.

Decisions, decisions

Having decided to move away from WoW, I'm now kinda between games (even if I do still have access to WoW until October). I've been looking for the cheapest way to get ahold of CoH, and I think amazon is it (at the moment anyway). So sticking it in my basket, I found all three Guild Wars boxes, that I put there a while ago while pondering whether to keep going with WoW.

Of course, I don't need all three in the slightest, I only really need to get the one. But which one?

From what I can gather, in general, the differences between them are 1) the plotline of the game, b) the classes availible and III) the abilities each class can potentially get.

Now of these, the most obvious is the character class. With this in mind, the choices boil down to: default set, default + Assassin and Ritualist, or default + Dervish and Paragon.

Now, I'm not really a paragon-y person, and dervish, scythes, woo, not that great an appeal, so it looks like Factions is the one for me.

Of course, there could be other wildly different things between the campaigns, but I don't actually know what difference they make, so I'm going to throw this out to the (not many) people who read this:

Which Guild Wars box do you recommend I get and/or avoid? Why? Optional bonus question: should I just wait until GW2?

Goodbye Spellslinging, Hello, erm, spellslinging?

I've made my decision. I'm going to shelve my WoW account, and sign up to City of Heroes.

I no longer have any kind of longing to log into WoW. My belf rogue is kinda petering out of interesting things to do; I did go to Wailing Caverns (one of my favorite instances in the game) with her, but the newbie zone has run out of interesting things and now consists of 'clear this village of foozles'.

My mage ran out of interesting things to do as soon as my guild collapsed and there was no more Karazhan to run. Seriously, Karazhan is good fun, provided the group your with knows what their doing and has a good leadership. I've been on runs where we cleared everything and runs where we wiped on Moroes all night, the difference being who was running it.

My twink, who I never got around to blogging about, also got shelved when my guild collapsed, as there was noone to bug to run her through various instances to pick up the gear she needs.

I doubt I'll get WLK, see previous posts for why. If they reitemize Naxxramas to be the Karazhan of Northrend, I may be more interested, but I get the feeling that they won't; Blizzard say their statistics show Kara is the most popular instance, but I get the feeling thats because a 10 man raid is so much simpler to put together, easier to organise and plain out more fun than a 25 man. If they make Naxx 25 man, they've missed the point entirely.

So on to CoH. Much as it kinda bugs me, I expect I'll delete the main I currently have, and restart exactly the same character. Primarily because I buggered up in skill selection, partly because I want to tweak the costume a bit, and a little because they managed to make leveling fun.

Also, a teency bit of 'I want that newbie zone kill 100 dudes badge'. Damn, badges >_>

The Emerald Dream

I've been thinking about what I'd like from an expansion for WoW, and had the following thought:

I'd use the Emerald Dream, and make it an overlay on Azeroth: mostly the same ground map, but with different doodads. The Kalimdor and Eastern Dreams would each have a selection of content ranging from, probably, 20-80. I'd put portals between particularly 'green' zones, for example Ashenvale, Feralas, Felwood, assorted other places, and these zones would be about the equivilent of the portaled from zone. The less natural zones, Plaguelands, Desolace etc, would be corrupt areas, at higher levels. The Blasted Lands and the Black Portal would overlap both worlds.

The terrain would be fixed to allow flying mounts, both in the Dream, and in Azeroth proper as they're using the same terrain data. Populate the dream with, say, the remaining good parts of the Green Dragonflight, the Cenarion Circle, maybe a couple of new factions. Throw a selection of new instances accross the whole level range, including a couple of dungeons at equivilent to (not harder than) the highest stuff from the previous expansion.

Presto. Lots of birds with one stone. Percieved downside by Blizzard: no increase to level cap. But throw in a druidic hero class, maybe find something else that can be made a hero class, and there's your artificially extended playtime.

I fully expect that none of this will happen, but if I had my way! *shakes fist*

Obligatory Lich King Post

I seem to like covering the 'if you've been hiding under a rock' posts, so if you don't know what I'm refering to in the title of this post, I'm sure you can find out plenty more on basically all the sites linked to the right.

Frankly, I'm not impressed. Woo, another ten levels. Good point: more leveling, as thats what Blizzard seems to be best at. Bad point: mise well give up raiding again.

Woo, hero class requires repeating content that you have to have done at least once through.

I think it says a lot that two of the headline features are 'change your hairstyle' and 'new dances'. Great. Could we get some actual useful gameplay please?

My plan for WLK is the following: Get in the beta, see everything, go back to leveling my rogue. If it turns out that its a carbon copy of TBC with 'weird and wonderful' swapped for 'snow and trees', then I won't bother getting it at all I expect.

The one 'feature' that stands out the most to me as 'broken mechanic' is an increase in the skill cap to 450. Surely thats just mudflation staring out of the feature list? If my 375 skill tailoring gear lasts me to 75, the level that 375 skill equates to, I'll be very surprised.

tl;dr version: not impressed, probably won't buy.