Rift, Planes of Telara

So, the game that has been consuming my free time these days is called Rift, Planes of Telara link.  This game was in development for a few years, and I was able to get into the closed beta and play through it.  This is going to be a somewhat lengthy post, so bear with me a bit.

First off, what kind of game is it?  It's a Fantasy MMO based in a world called Telara, which sits at the crossroads between the other dimensions of the cosmos (earth, fire life death etc etc) and it was protected by seals.  During a great war between the Guardians (followers of the Gods) and the Defiant (users of ancient technology) the seals guarding the world were broken, and the various elemental forces began to invade.  It's up to you, the players to protect the various towns, outposts and strategic locations around the world, preventing them from being captured and taking back the ones that have been overrun by the invading forces.

Character creation is pretty straightforward to begin.  You pick a side to belong to, the Guardians or the Defiants.  Each side has three races that can be selected, with slight racials giving each race a different ability or resistance to some element.  Once you chosen a race, your able to customize your characters appearance.  This includes height, build, facial features, hair and optional features such as tattoos and piercings.  Once this is all set, you get to pick your basic calling.  There are four to choose from.  The warrior, the cleric, the rogue and the mage.  What these paths determine is what souls you are able to acquire in the game.  Each calling has 8 souls attached to it, and these souls are what you use to customize your characters abilities.  I'm primarily familiar with the warrior calling, so I'll use those souls as an example.

Every level you gain in the game gives you skill points your able to put into your souls.  Your able to have three souls equipped at one time, and can have up to 4 slots for builds, thus allowing you to have multiple builds depending on the situation.  Every soul gives you some base abilities, and as you put points into them, they will unlock more abilities.  So let's take the paladin for example.  The skills you gain with it are bonuses to blocking, armor, more hp and such, and as you place points into it, you unlock more skills, such as disarming blow, shield throw and even a ressurection spell.  Now, you can then add some other souls, such as reaver, which is a tank/debuff soul for a warrior.  So by putting points in this soul, you get the ability to drain your opponents strengths and make them easier to fight, or you can go void knight and gain resistance to spells and powers to grab your opponents and bring them to you.  You could also take a dps soul like beast master and use that souls powers to offset your defensive capabilities.  You can even unlock special pvp souls that use the same pool of points and will give you extra bonuses when fighting in the warfronts.

So onto the pvp.  Honestly, it's been alot of fun for me.  I play a warrior, tank mostly, on the guardian side on a pvp server.  The queue times for us are not that bad as there are many more defiants then there are guardians.  The first two warfronts I've done are the Black Garden and the Codex.  The Black Garden is similar to to capture the flag, but with points.  For holding onto the flag (in this case the fang of Regulos) you aquire points, but the fang is dangerous to hold, so your constantly taking more and more damage from holding it, and eventually it will kill you.  The codex is a control warfront.  As you hold onto control points, you aquire points, first team to 1000 points wins.  You gain rep with certain pvp factions as you battle and favor.  You spend favor to earn some decent gear, plus unlocking more pvp souls and ranks.

Tomorrow I will go into the dynamic world aspect, how the dungeons work and how the rift system itself works.

PAX Review

So I ended up going to PAX East this weekend, and holy hell was it alot of fun.  I started there on Friday and walked around the expo hall, picking up some free swag and checking out the latest games.  Played some Vindictus on the new Alien Ware machines and checked out the Duke Nukem forever demo, the Knights of the old Republic Demo and many others, including quite a few indie games coming out of the Boston area.  Went to go see the unveling of Kingdom of Amular, made by the game company Curt Shilling made, and not sure how much I can talk about it, but it's looking to be quite a spectacular game and I am eagerly looking forward to giving it a shot.  Sat in one some D&D panels, and played alot of table top games, including giving the Heroes of Shadow powers a run on Friday night.  So overall, the experience was quite worth the exhaustion and general lack of sleep I got through the weekend.

Rift

Rift post coming soon, still tired from PAX.

-cough-

Is anyone still here?  No?  Oh well, here we go.

So I'm back to writing this.  It has been some time I am aware.  Some things have gone on.  I'm moved into a new apartment, I've been playing quite a bit more board games as of late, as I went through a period with my home computer deciding it hated life and everything about it.  Still getting my systems in place and all set as well, so only been playing a few video games as of late, but I figured I'd like to get back into writing this blog, seeing how things can go with it.  So I'm not going to have a set schedule as of yet, as I'm not sure yet what format I really want this to be in.  I'm contemplating putting up a few videos of my d&d group, and possibly going over games I play on Tuesday nights at a local comic shop near my old apartment.  We shall see.  For now though, if anyone comes across this, I hope you enjoy your stay.

Away for a bit

So, going to take a break for awhile.  I want to catch up on alot of games I have lying around, work on some personal stuff, etc etc.  I'll be back eventually though.

Missing posts

I realized with stuff going on and my general level of being tired, I've missed a few posts here.  Expect some corrections and extra posts up to address this issue.

Dominion

So a few days ago a friend of mine brought over a card game that he bought called Dominion Main Page .  The basis of the card game is that your a lord trying to acquire more victory points then your opponents.  You do this buy buying parcels of land or acquiring cards that grant victory points.  Turns play out in a very simple fashion.  At the start of your turn you have 5 cards in your hand.  You can play one action and buy one card with money. Once your turn is done, you discard your deck and draw 5 more cards.  When your deck is empty, you shuffle your discard pile back into your library.  You keep playing until three piles of cards have been exhausted on the board, and then count up the total victory points everyone has.  What makes this game unique is there are around 50 different types of cards beyond money and land, and you only get to select 10 to play with.  So depending on the combination of cards you play with, the general flow of the game will change.  The first time we played, the cards gave extra points for the more cards you had in your deck, so we all focused on trying to acquire as many cards as we could.  The second time we played, the cards were more focused towards either making our opponent discard cards from their decks, or on acquiring more cards from the field.  So depending on the combination of cards you collect, the mechanics and strategies you employ will vary widely.  I'd highly recommend this game to anyone who is interested in a different kind of card game.

Games I'm playing right now

Working on a few games right now, so just thought I'd list them out.

1. Dragon age origins
2. Castlevania lord of shadows
3. Fallout New Vegas
4. Fable 3
5. Vindictus
   That's about it for now.

Scaling difficulty

Something I've noticed in a few games I play (Oblivion, Dragon age and somewhat as well Fable 3) is the concept of scaling difficulty.  This is different from choosing what the level of difficulty is at the start of the game.  What this entails is, as the game progresses and your characters increase in level, power and skills, the enemies around you scale up with you.  What this means in practical terms is that your characters never tend to be too overpowered for an area.  The enemies will scale up in terms of equipment, damage, armor etc.  This makes it so that your always being challenged by certain groups of enemies.  I personally find this to be somewhat of an annoying mechanic, as it tends to make it so after spending time finding new equipment, leveling and doing things of that nature, I walk into the next room and the guardsman are now wielding +5 swords of player slaying.  This is a mechanic that I have personally not seen that much in games except for the few I mentioned, so if anyone knows of any others they have seen, feel free to let me know.

Downloadable content

Downloadable content (also known as DLC) is a somewhat new feature to find in many games these days.  It's much more common on console games for the xbox and ps3, but is also found on some pc games.  What is is is new content for a game that is downloaded after the fact, more often for an extra cost.  This can include new maps to play with online, new items for a character to use, or even more levels.  Some good examples of this are Mass effect 2 and Dragon age, both by Bioware.  Each game had multiple releases  of new content that you could purchase.  This content ranges from some new weapons, to new missions and even advancing the story beyond what the original game offered.  Some people find this to be a greedy opportunity by some game companies to cash in on the popularity of the franchise.  They claim that the developers could have made all of this available in the game from the start, and that they should not have to pay for it.  Others see it as small expansion sets for games and are willing to shell out the extra money that is required to continue the adventures of their favorite characters, or to have a small edge in a battle coming up.

A recently new part of DLC has risen recently, and that is the advent of exclusive content for buying a game.  A good example of this is Fable 3, and also Dragon Age again.  Depending on which store you bought the game from, you got different in game items, such as different armors, weapons or even small trinkets.  This has led to some game stores (most noticeably Gamestop) offering exclusive items for pre-ordering the games from their store.  This has angered a lot of players, as the items being offered end up being as good, or even better then anything else you can acquire in the game.  This forces players to get the games at gamestop, so that they can remain competitive and not fall behind their friends in terms of power in games.  Personally I don't mind a bit of DLC for games if the original game was robust enough to stand on it's own merits.  If I can play a game from start to finish and feel satisfied, then offering me new content to play through will only make the experience better.  If a game was not that enthralling to begin with, offering me new levels for more money is not going to make me want to play it anymore.