Tag Archives: RPGs

The Tale of Garn Chapter 1

I had been planning on doing this for a while now and all of the buzz surrounding the release of Fallout 3 was the final straw – time to play through The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion one more time! I’ve never gone through the main quest entirely and indeed haven’t spoiled too much of it for myself yet either. I also have a ton of add-ons installed, most first the first time, including the legendary Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul. This should be an interesting adventure indeed. As this is the first one of these I’m doing don’t expect any miracles from it – it is mostly for my own amusement.

From the journals of Garn:

As I sit in my cell, lost in a combination of deep thought and a numb daze, I’m suddenly startled by a commotion in the corridor. Imperial guardsmen burst into my cell and violently push me into a corner at sword point. I’m amazed to see a figure clad in majestic garments who I soon find out is the Emperor himself escorted in. At first I’m absolutely stunned wondering what this could possibly be related to but it is soon obvious that their reasons for being here have nothing to do with me. They open a concealed passage in my cell wall and hurriedly proceed down into a dark passageway.

“What, no cake with a file in it?”

I’m dumbfounded – one of the last guardsmen to leave warned me not to follow the party yet he wasn’t able to seal the passage and here I stand. How can I refuse this temptation? I have to think for only a moment before step down into the darkness.

Despite trying to keep my distance from them I quickly catch up to the escort and it becomes obvious why they are in such a hurry – the Emperor is being aggressively pursued by a group of crimson robed assassins. Upon surveying the scene of the scuffle I make a snap decision and snatch up a fallen guard’s sword. I figure my best chance of escaping is to aid these guardsmen in the defense of the Emperor less be escorted back to my cell or put to the blade myself.

“Exploring the tunnels beneath the prison.”

A sword feels natural in my hand and I have little trouble helping to fend off the assassins. I also quickly discover my apparent familiarity with the forces of magic as, in the rage of combat, flames shoot forth from my hands to scorch one of my enemies. These are only subtle hints but this is more progress in remembering how I ended up in this prison than I have made in months of quiet pondering.

I’ve created a custom class based on sword and heavy armor combat combined with destruction, restoration, and conjuration magic abilities.

As we near the end of our journey through these old, disused tunnels the Emperor confronts me. Puzzlingly enough he insists that I have some greater role to play in his story and entrusts me with an artifact called The Amulet of the Kings which he says I must deliver to the leader of the order of his personal guard, a man named Jauffre, with the ultimate goal of tracking down his lost heir. This is quite strange indeed. The Emperor claims to have never met me before but, dreams or not, he clearly knows more about me than he is letting on. Before I have much time to inquire further an assassin finally completes his task and the Emperor is slain with a cowardly attack right before my eyes.

“Garn and the guards congratulate each other after successfully escorting the Emperor to the sewer entrance.”

Baurus, the last of the Emperor’s guard to survive the assault, interrogates me before pointing me in the direction of the sewers and insisting that I hurry on my way to deliver the amulet to Jauffre. Again, I’m puzzled. Why does Baurus trust me so much to deliver this amulet? How does he know that I’m not a conspirator myself? It seems clear to me that my mysterious past is catching up to me.

Diablo 3 Announced!

So Blizzard‘s mysterious mystery image mystery is no longer a mystery! Or something… Diablo 3!

In better fashion that most game announcements Blizzard has simultaneously released a great website with plenty of cool info, lore, screenshots, and a couple of videos including a 20 minute game play movie.

“Who knew you could set your camera like this in WoW?!”

A few quick impressions:

The game play movie looks awesome! Day 1, collector’s edition purchase for me.

It looks quite a bit like Diablo 2, only refined in some areas and using a much more modern 3D engine. The 3D engine, from what I can tell, actually reminds me quite a lot of Titan Quest‘s and doesn’t look to be all that advanced which hopefully means the game should have relatively low hardware requirements. One advantage of using a 3D engine is greater control over animation and many of the animations shown in this preview are fluid and much more expressive than those of the past games. So expressive, in fact, that I can’t help but wonder if the player avatars will be more fully fleshed out characters this time around. It does appear that the game has an overall slightly more cartoony, stylized, and less gritty look, with simpler looking models and a brighter, less dreary color palette than the previous two games. This is sure to irk some hardcore fans of the past games, especially those that despise World of Warcraft, but honestly it isn’t taken to WoW extremes and doesn’t stray too far from the previous two games.

“Apparently the world of Sanctuary is 80% bridges.”

There is apparently going to be a lot more randomization in dungeons and available quests and events this time around which should make replays a lot more entertaining and varied. This is definitely a good thing as the random elements of the Diablo series strike me as one of its appeals but not one that has been sufficiently explored considering its Rogue-like roots. Of the two classes shown in the preview the Barbarian looks to be very consistent with the design of the Barbarian class from Diablo 2 while the witchdoctor looks like he was put together to replace the Necromancer. The mini-boss they showed in the trailer is fuckin’ huge! This gives me hope that the bosses featured in Diablo 3 will be a lot more epic than those of Diablo 2 – I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was amazingly unimpressed by The Lord of Terror himself. There were some other nifty things like destructible environments and both sexes available for every class as well but those seem like minor bullet points to me.

“Making undead corpses dead corpses.”

Beyond the videos I found the content on the new site to be quite awesome. The descriptions of the few released classes, monsters, and locations are all done in character with the renowned scholar Abd al-Hazir telling us of his research into these various topics. Pretty good reads and I loved the quip about the skeletons hiding in barrels for hundreds of years. Good stuff and I can’t wait to read more.

We’ve also got Deckard Cain’s journal. Anyone who played either of the previous two games should remember Cain and it appears as if he has a major role to play in Diablo 3 as well, maybe even larger than in previous games if some of the hints I’ve read are to be believed. Anyway, Cain’s journal sums up the plots of the first two games from his perspective, complete with his delightful Sean Connery-esque accented voiceovers and even all of the cut scenes from Diablo 2 thrown in as well. This stuff is a must for Diablo fans to dig through!

All of these screenshots are Blizzard’s and not mine. Of course, if they were mine this post would be much, much more interesting.

Now Under Construction!

Last night was interesting. I fully intended to play a little GTA4 which I have been neglecting hardcore lately for Age of Conan. I’d decided I’d go ahead and play a couple of hours of AoC first before moving on to GTA4 to finish off my tiny amount of free time for the night. This was an incredibly stupid decision as MMOs are infamously addicting and GTA4 is a game in which I’m not heavily invested yet and the inevitable happened. Yep, I ended up playing AoC all night.

Well, I’m not sure “playing” is the right word as I didn’t do all that much of that. I ran through the “Outflow Tunnels” instance solo once to finish up a quest there and I ended up leveling while turning it in. A few guild members talked casually on about the game on our Ventrilo server which eventually lead to an interesting discovery about the fact that map waypoint data could be copied to other machines/accounts which means that once someone had mapped out all of the crafting resource locations (which are static!) that file could be shared and the hard work wouldn’t have to be duplicated.

“Plumbing, Hyborian style”

So, I get these resource waypoint files installed myself and wander out to a resource area to start training my gathering professions which is something I’d been meaning to do for a while now but had put off for various reasons. Sure enough my zone map is littered with waypoints and I start gathering away. This should save me tons of time!

Later conversation on the Ventrilo server shifted to the subject of our guild city. My guild had already claimed a guild city location yet hadn’t actually built anything there due to the massive funds involved. We’re a casual guild and most of us are still in our late 30s or lower. It turns out the architect supplies needed to build our Keep (which is sort of the foundation in the build process) require about 2 gold pieces which is a hefty sum for anyone at these levels. A few days earlier one member had suggested that we make everyone level 35 and over donate 10 silver which, by his estimation, would get us the gold we needed no problem. The guild leader instantly decided that this was, in fact, a great idea and started telling people left and right to throw some silver into the guild bank. With no records or logging of any kind I was hesitant to drop a third of my money without some kind of guarantee it would be used properly or that I wouldn’t be accused of never submitting it. Eventually I gave in and several others donated their silver as well. So the majority of the members on the Ventrilo server reach the conclusion that our Keep should go up tonight with several of them pledging additional funds to make it happen. Nice – I’d get to see it go up!

Soon a few guild members, more than we’d ever assembled in one place before to my knowledge, met at our guild city location (which just so happened to be in the same zone I was gathering resources in) to witness the event. We all casually chatted, joked around, PVP’d with each other a bit, and soon our keep was on its way up.

“What do the hardend, blood-splattered warriors of Hyboria do when they get together? Why dance of course!”

Even in a video game it’s pretty surreal watching a massive man-made structure just raise out of the ground as it did. Definitely cool.

“Raising the roof, yo.”

So now we have our very own Guild Hall!

“Time for a house inspection…”

Of course, like almost everything else in Age of Conan, it was buggy and/or unrefined as hell. You couldn’t use any of the chairs or other decorations in the building apparently. The design of the structure itself seemed less than ideal for defense – it didn’t take much imagination to realize that glitch jumping off the towers onto the ledge above the opening in the hall’s ceiling produced a potentially useful defensive position yet by the design of the building that obviously wasn’t the designers’ intent. There were numerous odd collision issues, particularly with climbing the stairs of the towers. The whole thing was targetable and with being a massive structure fighting in and around it seemed to produce a lot of difficulty with click targeting never mind the ugliness of having the whole structure highlight on mouseover and your tooltip constantly up. To make matters worse any errant clicks while you were in or around the Keep often produced a popup box showing information about upgrading it to the next tier. Highly, highly annoying.

“Death from above!?”

Still, it was kind of nifty I suppose. I’ll withhold judgment on it until we’re much further a long in the game but so far I don’t feel that AoC’s take on guild structures completely delivers on the player owned structure concepts of some of the more open ended games such as Ultima Online or Eve Online though the PVP orientated “battle keep” guild cities of the end game hopefully address some of those concerns. I’ll continue on with that whole discussion in a later post though.