Mission: Pain in the Rear
I was thinking it would be interesting to have a look at the latest in the America’s Army series, “America’s Army: Special Forces (Overmatch) 2.7.” I realize it’s free and all, but man… what a pain in the rump to get it downloaded. My goal of getting a download without registering for someone’s download service is, so far, looking rather impossible. But I’m going to keep clicking in hopes that I can get it downloaded without inviting some group of yutzes to spam my email.
June Gaming Update
Gave up and uninstalled Vanguard SOH from this machine thursday night. (previous posts about Vanguard). I really want to like the game, but no amount of monkeying around will get it to run tolerably well on my machine. I’ve trolled the forums and asked plenty of in-game questions but to no avail.
Didn’t feel like messing with World of Warcraft again.
Back to Everquest I go. Again. For the last few weeks (once I calmed down) I log on a few nights a week and run around with some old friends and some of the newer folks in the guild. Nobody’s chasing the uber scene. Everyone is pretty content to be casual. No real pressure. Feels a lot like putting on an old pair of well-worn shoes. Smells better though. I’m a couple expansions behind, but so far haven’t seen a compelling reason to rush out and get current.
I activated both of my accounts, but going to let one of them lapse again in a couple weeks. I’ve decided that this time around I’m not going to spend all my time two-boxing with myself. That just gets tedious (for me) after a while. But meanwhile I was able to use the gear from the chars on the account I’m letting lapse (bye bye Darkensolo and Jhersolo /sniffle) to raise some funds. Dropped 30′ish Kpp on a new little Necro-twink-amancer and have 40′ish k in the bank to either upgrade Pliska or that Necro when they level a bit. And if the urge strikes, I still have the bard and the beastlord fully dressed and ready to go.
Don’t Try to Go Back
Got a bee in my bonnet earlier this week. World of Warcraft just wasn’t holding my interest so I figured I’d reload Everquest and see what’s new in that world. Why those sorts of thoughts don’t set off internal alarms is something I’ll just never understand.
Spent some hours Wednesday night getting EQ installed and patched. Spent a little bit of time last night reactivating one of my old accounts and logging in. It was good to see some old “faces”. In fact, I was a bit surprised at how many names I recognized. I wonder how many of those are being piloted by the player that I once knew though?
Things were not good though. I had cobbled together a UI skin over the years that made life easy for me. When I deleted all my EQ junk last year, that skin was deleted too. I had also rather heavily tweaked the key bindings over the years. All my old spellsets are gone too. And, after playing a bit of EQ2 and WoW I’m more into the left-hand WASD movement as opposed to the right hand cursor arrows.
Ugh. I spent an hour or so finding some UI skins that were close to what I’m used to. That wasn’t so rough. Figuring out spellsets and keymappings, however, is just about too much to bear. I was on for 45 minutes tonight just tweaking UI. Then I get to spellsets… that’s a bitch for old characters with tons of spells. Seriously, I just plain don’t remember what spells I used in what situations and the thought of researching them all to figure it out again is enough to make me cry “Uncle!” You got your buff sets (buff1, buff2, travel, etc) then perhaps an indoor fighting spell set and an outdoor set. Maybe the raid set vs the grouping sets. The solo set, the pet create/buff set, etc etc.
Ugh Ugh Ugh. I logged off pretty much figuring I won’t be back. We’ll see how ambitious I feel this weekend I guess.
Some random thoughts on Vanguard SOH
As mentioned previously, I recently received a beta invite to help beta test Vanguard – Saga of Heroes. What follows are just a few random thoughts. No big spoilers, screen shots or surprises. I haven’t actually read the T&C of the beta yet… so not going to push my luck.
The download and registration process was a bit overwhelming. I even had to refer back to the email a few times to make sure I was hitting the steps in the correct order. Two long keys to keep track of through the process: A “CD Key” and some sort of “Coupon Code”. Long story short, I got it all sorted, but was a bit mystified a few times. Not only did I get it working right, but somehow even got it associated with my MS Passport ID. Far out.
The almost 5GB download is brutal. Oh, and after it was installed, I had a 500+ MB patch. Yikes! The installation itself was simple. Not much for options to worry about, just click a few buttons and go have dinner. It’ll be done when you get back.
Character creation is a bit daunting. There’s a large number of races and a borderline insane amount of attributes you can tweak for your avatar. Nose height? Brow size? You name it, you can probably tweak it. Granted, not all of these options work quite yet… but when the came is actually released you’ll have to work pretty hard to have a character that isn’t unique.
For those that played Everquest: Remember that feeling you got the first time you logged in? There you were, most likely a wood-elf, lost in a new area (hell, your first death was probably falling out of Kelethin…) You tried poking around, but it was dark and confusing and you weren’t quite sure where to go or what to do. My first time in Vanguard recaptured that feeling quite nicely. Lol. I hope the sun comes out soon or I’m going to have to get radical with my gamma settings. I’m tired of being in the dark so much!
The newb experience is, currently (and remember, this is a beta) aimed at folks who don’t need hand-holding. ’cause there isn’t any. Figure it out, try OOC, but you’re not getting tossed into a tutorial with a bunch of quests spoon-fed. And really, that aspect is fine. No beefs here. I wish there were more/varied quests but I’m sure that will come in time. If you’re an attention-span challenged WoW addict, you won’t like Vanguard SOH at all the way it currently is. And to some extent, that makes me grin… That being said, even an old MMORPG curmedgeon looks forward to more shortcut keys working in somewhat expected fashions.
Performance doesn’t make me grin. This thing brings my old machine to its proverbial knees. This is a machine I built several years ago, so I shouldn’t be too surprised. Key aspects: AMD 2500+ Barton core CPU, 1GB RAM and a nVidia 6800 GT AGP video card. But dang, it ran EQ, EQ2 and WoW quite well. Vanguard cripples it. I have much tweaking to do as I’d like to be able to see a bit more detail but not have frames per second under 10. I can push 30fp at “low” settings, so we’ll see. CPU is pegged the entire time I’m in the game. With all details cranked, stuff is pretty dang nice looking. I just have to learn to love 10-15 fps. Which isn’t likely. Much OOC discussion with rumors of forthcoming performance improvements, so I’m not too stressed on this yet. And heck, as previously noted, it is beta.
Anyways, I’ll likely continue to dink around with it and see how it all pans out.
Bye again, WoW. Hello, Vanguard SOH
Tried, yet again, to play World of Warcraft. Dunno what the deal is with that game. I really enjoy playing it. I have some great friends playing it. I have fun when I play it. And each time, after 2 – 4 weeks of playing, I completely lose the urge to log back in. Weird. Earlier this week I cancelled, once again. I have another week or so before it expires.
But today something rather exciting happened. I received a beta invite for Vanguard SOH! Big news indeed… I’d been waiting/hoping for this for well over a year. Probably closer to two years. Some of these guys are the same that originally built Everquest, a former addictiongame I played a lot back in the day. As I recall, one of the original motives was to use what they’d learned from the EQ days.
And this is a true beta, not a “buy the game and we’ll let you play while we keep developing” deal like some other games have tried. I’m downloading it right now. 4.77GB. Don’t think I’ll be logging in yet tonight. That’s huge!
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