Roleplaying games

I’ve read somewhere that after the boom of WoW and the so-called “free MMORPG” (in which you buy items paying with various funny in-game currencies, using micro-payments), Everquest 2 was losing lot of players.

It must be true, since I found a pleasant surprise when I was checking the website for the Rise of Kunark new expansion: they gave me 60-days of free trial. I heard that is a promotion they’re doing with people that were previously paid-subscribers like me. However I stopped playing it in 2005 for time problems, so I was pleased to see that Sony was remembering the people who paid even so long ago.

So I downloaded the client and all the various patches (almost an entire afternoon gone!) and resumed playing with my old character. Quite lot of stuff has changed, new AA (Alternate Advancement) that help people solo. Talking with people in game I also understood that Sony did a very strong job to fight the EQ Gold vendors / sellers, by applying a strict banning to everyone was caught sending in-game email to sell gold!

Also, I’ve found that soloing now is more enjoyable, with the new Kunark zone perfect for my old character (that was a level 62 inquisitor).

So it’s all good? well, no, not exactly - soloing is great but grouping is really a problem now. Maybe because there aren’t many players around, or simply because everyone is playing with people they already know. And I can understand why: last time I found a group we waited 45 min (yes you read well, 45 MINUTES!!) for a tank to come!!! of course after the 45 min was gone, I camped and left the group (I have a real life too!).

So there are still the old problems: takes a while to travel from one place to another, and if you’re like me that can’t spend too many hours a day on a MMORPG, you really don’t watn to waste precious time traveling on Everquest lands…

A pity because the game itself, with his detailed combat system, is really good now. And has depth, with lot of quests and storylines. But if takes 15 min to reach a zone I want, I don’t see myself playing it for long time in future. I know that would break the realism, but some fast teleport thing available to every player, would be much appreciated!!

I’ve already talked about the graphic bug I’ve encountered for this game, so I’ll move on. It’s not all that negative, luckily
The game itself, as already said, isn’t much different from the other classics, like Everquest 2, DAOC, and so on. You have the classic cycle: kills to make adventuring experience, earn new spells/skills, level up and kill even more bigger stuff. Buy new equipment to become even more powerful.

Ah the equipment, of course, can be made by other players, artisans. I didn’t test the crafting system carefully so far, but doesn’t seem to bring any particular innovation. A fun thing, now you can harvest directly on the corpses, for example on poor wolves cadavers to get the wolf skin, and so on. Then you can make new stuff using your crafting skills and try to resell it to get some Gold pieces, which in Vanguard are always welcome, like in any other MMORPG

The last part, the most innovative, is the “political” part. Yes you can become a politician! you have to learn your way up to become the best diplomat, then you’ll be able to influence things in a much larger scale.

It is a MMORPG made for hardcore fans. Reminds me of the first Everquest: getting to level 10 will take a few days of play, while in EQ2 or World Of Warcraft will take you one afternoon, if you know where and what to hunt. Also the death penalty is quite high, and this adds up to the overall difficulty of the game.

The gfx, if you’re lucky enough not to have bug, is very good, but in my opinion not much better than EQ2. The world though is HUGE, that must be said - and the 17Gb of installation says it all!!

Overall , is a good game for the hardcore players. Those more “casual” oriented, will probably find it too hard, or too slow. It has many bugs and problems as it is now, and I would reccommend to wait a few months to see how things progresses! Even EQ2 when released was in this situation, but after 1 year it was greatly improved.

I’ve recently bought the latest Sony’s MMORPG, called Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. I must say that at first glance seems quite similar to many other games like everquest 2, and I’ve been playing it only since a week. The first impression definitely wasn’t positive. But let’s talk in order.

First of all, the graphic, which is awesome. But, as the title of this post suggests, there are LOT OF BUGS

On my Nvidia Geforce 6600, was a total pain to make it work! I had installed the default drivers that were working fine for ALL the games I had played in the last 2 years. But no, on this one, there was a really nasty text bug, explained well by the screenshot below:

In practice the text was like “baking” on the background texture, and if you tried to scroll up/down, it was “painting” everything making all the quest (or other game texts) unreadable… I tried to setup the various options but was useless, I found out that turning the setting UseStencil=False in the Vgclient.ini was solving that bug, but creating another interesting side effect (see below):

everything was invisible!! hard to play even in that other “graphic mode” !

I was very pissed until I found some strange drivers on a site called www.3dguru.com . I was reluctant to download any .exe from relatively unknown sites (the fear of spywares or trojan on internet is justified those days) but I was so desperate that I gave it a try - and it worked!

Yes I could play the game like a normal person - but what a PAIN!!! also, for some reason those drivers don’t make the OpenGL games work properly. So once I’m bored of Vanguard, which I presume within a few months maximum, I’ll probably uninstall them and reinstall the official Nvidia ones…