Gaming moving in the right direction (mine)

June 4, 2013

Remember when certain people would argue that World of Tanks is not pay-to-win? That gold ammo can’t aim for you and gold tanks aren’t even that great and blablabla? They look a bit silly now that the company behind the game just admitted they had a P2W game. Woops.

Being right aside, I’m happy about this. Not because I care about WoT itself, but because I’d much rather see the Riot/LoL model of selling quality fluff win over selling power. LoL doing it and being the most popular game out right now was big for that, and now Wargaming saying they are following suit further drives the point home.

Not that this will help so many of the fledgling F2P MMOs, because the key to selling fluff and making money off it is it has to be quality. If most of the LoL skins looked like the typical garbage you see in F2P MMO shops, Riot would be doing as well as Turbine or EAWare, rather than dominating the industry.


DF:UW – Dungeon content in a virtual world

June 3, 2013

Last Friday the latest patch for DF:UW was released, and it included the first dungeon added to the game. Sunday night OTG and allies put together a group of eight to go check it out.

Entering the dungeon works like it did in DF1, where you click on the portal entrance, charge for a few seconds, and then you are taking down into the dungeon. You are not in an instance like in themepark MMOs, but rather in a different ‘zone’ that anyone else can enter as well.

A bit of strategy plays into entering or exit a dungeon, as we sent in our warriors first and delayed the entry of our squishy characters. This is done in case someone is camping the dungeon entrance/exit, but that was not the case last night.

Once inside, we explored what is ultimately a large loop with a few offshoots, one being a spawn of lizard-like creatures and another being the boss room. The main room of the dungeon contains a large cave troll (new mob) spawn, featuring cave trolls (easy), cave troll shamans, and cave troll fighters (fairly tough in numbers). The boss is a Primordial Troll Juggernaut, who while not overly difficult for our group of eight, was not a complete pushover either.

The dungeon itself has a good look and feel thanks to the advanced lighting and effects new to DF:UW, and the spawn rates are such that you are always kept busy. The loot from the troll mobs was nice (they drop gold and a good amount of large pots), and the boss mob drops a key to a chest that, among other loot, usually had 1-2 portal shards inside.

The dungeon overall would be decent content in a pure PvE game. It’s not huge or overly challenging, but it is larger and more detailed than the starter dungeons found in the capital cities, and just from a pure PvE perspective we had a good time. Of course DF being DF PvE is only a part of the equation, and like almost all locations, the PvE also drives PvP, with the dungeon being no exception.

The first time we arrived at the dungeon we found one player just outside trying to recall. We quickly gave him an express ticket home, and found a decent amount of dungeon loot on his tombstone. Once inside, we found another player farming and he too was dropped quickly. After killing the boss once and farming for about 30 minutes, we left the dungeon to bank at our nearby hamlet.

Along the way back we came across a few players, killed a couple and had the rest run away. On our trip back to the dungeon, we caught a naked player on his mount, killed the mount, and chased him to the nearby village. He ran into a house he owned, and one of our members followed him inside. He killed him, looted a treasure map, and found himself stuck inside as the door had been closed. The owner came back, we asked him nicely to open it, he refused, and so out came the battle spikes to blow his door down.

On our third run in the dungeon, we had two geared warrior run into the boss chamber with us, and a short, cramped melee commenced. They did well, taking down two of us before one of them got very low and ran away. We made the mistake of not pursuing immediately, forgetting that in order to exit the dungeon he would have needed to charge at the portal, and that would have been easily interrupted. We left the dungeon shortly after and called it a night.

I think the dungeon is a great addition to the game. It brought new feats which you progress through at a good rate thanks to the quick spawns, the boss is something different, and your PvP tactics need to adjust thanks to the limited spacing. It’s very ideal for a group, adjusts well for small or large numbers, and creates a new PvP hotspot in the world. Hopefully AV doesn’t take too long to add more, and we get them ‘soon’.

Video of the dungeon from Ripper Exe. Enjoy!


Massive Chalice

May 31, 2013

:Throws money at screen:


DF:UW – TheMercs crush VAMP

May 29, 2013

Good video here from TheMercs showing solid group tactics and how to string out a much larger force. Also love that voice comms are included in the video, as it gives a much better view into how such a group operates and what it takes to PvP at a high level.


DF:UW – In the halls of old Aradoth

May 28, 2013

Darkfall: Unholy Wars takes place (I believe) 200 years after the events of Darkfall. Aventurine hasn’t done a lot with the lore, but in-game some areas reflect this more than others. The location of today’s story, the city of Aradoth, is a prime example of the change.

Right as I logged on a few members of NOX were attacking our city of Kvit. I don’t know how many they killed, but as a response force was gathering they left. Once our force was gathered, and being eager to engage in some PvP, we decided to head over to the home of NOX, the city of Aradoth.

In DF1 Aradoth was a very popular city for a number of reasons. It was a city with a mine, it was centrally located, and it was highly defensible since it was located inside of a mountain and accessibly only through winding cave tunnels. In DF:UW, the city itself is now outside, next to the mountain.

As we rode up to the city, we could hear the sounds of combat, which we correctly assumed was dueling. Our force crept right up to the city zone line, surveyed the situation, and picked the right time to rush in and murder the occupants.

The initial surprise of the attack worked, and we brought down a good number of them quickly, with only three fleeing. Two fled out of the city to the east, and one fled into a mountain tunnel. The group pursuing the target into the tunnel quickly lost him, and then one of them had trouble finding his way back out. Meanwhile, the rest of us chased down one of the two that fled east.

The splitting of our force, along with some general miscommunication, resulted in one of our numbers going down in the city, which forced all of us to re-enter and deal with the naked mob that we had created. That however was successful, and we were able to recover the fallen’s gear bag and get everyone out of the city.

We rolled to a nearby chaos stone to resupply and bank some loot. While at this stone a local informed us of a group farming nearby that had killed him, so we followed him to the spot and killed his killers (while he amusingly yelled “revenge” in area chat).

At this point we had the option to either return home, or head back to Aradoth, where we knew a response force was gathering. Picking action over pixels, we went back to Aradoth.

We again swept into the city and killed those around the bank, and yet again one player fled into the mountain. This time however we all followed inside.

What’s really cool about the mountain is it now contains the ruins of old Aradoth, right down to the location of buildings the old city had and the layout of some of its tunnels, which was very nostalgic for me having spent a good amount of time in that city in DF1.

A new addition however was a second exit from the tunnels, which the one enemy player used to get out. The exit (from what I saw, which was brief) appears to be a narrow gap among some rocks that you need to climb up on. One of our players found it, the rest of us did not. Unfortunately for the one player, he jumped right into the full NOX response force, which quickly brought him down. They then started attacking the rest of us, and the call was made to retreat back into a larger room before fighting.

We ran back and hid amongst the ruins, waiting for the enemy to run by. They did, and once five or so were in the room, we jumped out and attacked. Initially the battle was going in our favor, and I personally chased around a primalist to keep him from healing others. However as the fight dragged on, more and more NOX members spilled into the area, and we were eventually overwhelmed. I went from chasing one primalist to dodging 3-4 warriors all swinging at me. All but two of us went down.

The two that survived did so thanks to the rubble in the tunnels, as they were able to hide long enough for the enemy to clean the field and move out. Once they did, they were able to recall home.

Not a fully successful return to Aradoth, but a lot of fun.


DF:UW – Scroaching

May 23, 2013

Last night there were multiple large sieges not involving OTG, and since our clan had no formal plans to attend, I made my way down to the area to do some good old scroaching.

For non-Darkfall players, scroaching is basically attending a siege as a neutral third party and picking off anyone you see, while also trying to grab as much loot as possible. It’s an evolution of the word roach (though I can’t recall why it went from roach to scroach, someone in the comments help me out)

Since I was solo, I focused more on the looting part than the fighting, and set out with some basic gear and a mount. Once I arrived at the scene of the first battle, I dismounted and crept from tree to tree, doing my best to not get noticed as I moved towards the closest gravestone. At each gravestone, I looted anything of value before ducking back into the shadows. After five graves I was close to being overloaded, and rather than push things further I rode off to bank my spoils. Round one was a massive success!

I returned to find that the battle had ended and the winning side was cleaning up the battlefield. Since I had little to lose, I took a chance and ran in, hoping people would assume I was an ally. That didn’t work, and shortly I had a small mob on me and was killed. Round two not so good.

A second city was also sieged that night, and since I still had time before our scheduled PvP practice, I again set out to see what I could loot. This city was on the coast with a lot of water surrounding it, and I was able to swim out to a little island with a good view and watched the battle unfold.

Making a judgment call on when the battle was at its peak, I swam across to the closest grave and again began the looting. I then made the mistake of killing a disconnected player (the allure of plate was too strong…), which drew the attention of a mage in the area, who started throwing fireballs at me. I ran towards the water and lost the mage, but sadly the island I swam to had a group of five waiting and I was brought down. Greed kills indeed.

Scroaching is far from an honorable act, but its part of Darkfall tradition and a good change of pace from normal PvE/PvP. Its low risk (other than time), high reward, allows you to see larger PvP battles play out, and gives you a bit of a rush as you sneak around and try to avoid any attention.

Tonight OTG has our own siege, and I’m sure random scroachers will be in attendance.


Xbox One supercut

May 22, 2013

This had me laughing pretty hard.

 


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