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I got Lineage 2 to work for me!! Yay!
Before you bask in the awesomeness that is me, consider that I did it by downgrading my OS to Windows Vista Ultimate. I know, shame on me for using this pos OS, but Windows 7 Release Candidate was fsking up on me repeatedly. That could, in part I guess, be because I used the Ghetto hack upgrade method.
So I logged on to my Lineage 2 account, and checked out my character! I pimped myself out.
Again, orble.com sucks, so I can't upload any pics.... Sorry.
Apparently I cannot upload any pics... i'll get some up soon.
I've been playing The Chronicles of Spellborn for the majority of the time, but have also been attempting to get Lineage 2 working on my computer.
Lineage 2 attempts
As you may already know I am using Windows 7 Release Client. When I try to get Lineage 2 to start up, I run into a number of errors. The most common is "l2.exe has stopped working and needs to close." I get the initial splash screen and then it closes. When I have gotten it to work, I get the GameGuard has failed to launch and the application must close. I have tried a number of things to correct this.
1) nogg. I tried installing this. It is a file that you load into your system folder in the base Lineage 2 folder.
2) I've tried deleting the system folder, putting a clean downloaded system folder in.
3) Getting an old version of GameGuard and replacing it into the system folder.
4) Using an old GameGuard file from a different compatible game.
All these attempts were met with failure. I cannot get the game to start.
TCoS!
I spent the most time playing The Chronicles of Spellborn. I'm initially blown away by it. It is beautiful, different, and more what I think every MMO should have in gameplay. I am totally drawn to the fps style combat, and the rotating skilldeck. The group play is incredible.
1) Every zone I go into shows me how good of a job the artists did in creating this game. It bursts with great lighting, excellent ambiance, and exciting flora. The swirling of energies and objects in the Void Storm are breathtaking.
You can see how these images capture some of the stunning visuals. Be aware though that they are single moments captured in time. The motion that permeates each scene can only be experienced in game.
2) FPS Skilldeck combat is the most different thing I've encountered in the MMO arena. It is crazy new and different. A lot of the planning is how you are going to set up your deck. As you use a skill in a row, that row becomes unavailable until it comes around again. IT takes planning and innovation to choose which skills you'll use in a chain, and then which you'll use if you need to adjust your tactics. My Void Seer has 3 main lines, and a forth utility line. My first is my Melee line, hack, spirit strike, Rising Gust, Slash. My second line is my magic / heal line; Tap Magic, Pounding Shards, Shell Shock, then Rightous Hunt. My third line is the ranged attack line. you can find the full spell lists available HERE.
3) Group Play is simply amazing. When I grouped with some guild mates, I had an incredible blast. It was fast, fun, and compelling. It moved quickly. My role seemed to be to execute the most dmg to as many mobs as possible. I focused on doing ranged AoE dmg, then running in with Rising gust primed with my Cyclone Sphere bodyslot updated and unload massive dmg from ae melee. This in turn upped all the dmg from my spells where I would drop all the AE dmg I could, usually doubled what my normal spell damage could be.
Overall, i recommend TCoS completely. My only hesitence is that at the moment it is underpopulated. There are not enough people playing the game at the moment. I know that the game has increased its advertising in an attempt to draw in more players. I would like to see as many as possible join. I've heard rumblings about no end game content, perhaps they could add some raiding or something to the game. I've not been up that high yet, but I can tell that there would be some loss of interest once getting to 50. Though, really, its about the journey, not the end, i guess...
Over the weekend I saw an add on MMORPG.COM for The Chronicles of Spellborn being free to play, and downloaded the game. I quickly created a new account and logged in to the game. I ran into a few difficulties at first.
I run the beta client of WIndows 7 on my gaming computer. I'm a sucker for flashy new things, and couldn't resist giving it a whirl. I have been very happy with it, but I cannot play Lineage 2, and any other game that uses nProtect. It is ridiculous that they don't have a work through for it, but as its in beta, so be it.
In order to play Spellborn, I needed to "patch" the nProtect or GameGuard files in the Spellborn folder. If you are interested in how to do this, see HERE (the file is not infected or virus from what i can tell)to get a guide to it; be warned though, it may cause some issues, and doesn't work for all games, like Lineage 2 which i still can't play.
That done, I was able to log in and begin my journey.
Starting Out
You are immediately given an interesting character creation sequence. You can pick our your clothes, your armor, and your weapons. Aside from the pre-loaded outfits, you can choose your primary color and secondary color. I felt that I have a fairly unique character and still look at it pleasingly.
After you've chosen your look and archtype, mine is a Spellcaster, you are thrust into the tutorial. It gave me a good sense of how the game is played; walking you through character controls, combat, ranged combat, and questing interfaces. Being a mmo player across multiple games, I felt it was a bit pedantic. I didn't need the whole walkthrough, and would have been happy just being tossed into the game.
Once in-game with everyone else, I was a little lost. What was I to do? I was reminded of the early days of EQ where you could go anywhere and do anything, but takes a while to get your bearings and not just waste time running in circles.
I eventually found some quests, and began running around the Hawksmouth zone killing random things. It is a truly DIFFERENT game. I'm very very drawn to it.
Completing a Quest
Combat is controlled by using the right and left mouse buttons to activate your skills which scroll through a revolving 'deck' of skills. Each level of the dial has 3 slots at the low levels to load skills into. I began with two melee attacks, a magic attack, and a ranged attack.
Fighting a Bear or something
As I gained new skills from leveling, it was interesting tweaking the skill deck to minimize switching buttons, and delivering quick dmg.
Skill deck explained more:
You have 6 skills, 2 levels on the dial, and 3 spaces on each level for skills. In slot 1, where you can press the 1 key or mousewheel to it, I had a melee attack on level 1. In level 2 slot 1 I had another melee attack. I would use my level 1 slot 1 skill, the deck rolls up a level, and I would use my level 2 slot 1 skill at which point the dial spins back to the beginning. Once I got my 3rd level on the dial, It spins from level 1, level 2, level 3, and back to level 1. The trick is finding skills that recharge quickly all in a verticle row, so you don't have to constantly change which slot you're using. If you choose slot 2, as you increase in the dial levels, your slot choice remains. It was deciding which skills to place where for the fastest easiest combat that made me very interested in the game.
Combat
I feel a strong affinity for this game, though it is relatively dead of players. Combat is VERY different and refreshingly so. It is SOOO unlike EQ2 combat. I feel like it actually requires some skill to engage and enemy and defeat it. I'm very curious on how PvP will be.
Thoughts overall
I think that ultimately this game will hang on by a small group of dedicated players; i'll be surprised if subscription numbers even reach that of EQ's. As of now they have 2 servers, PvP and non-PvP. In the pvp server there were only a few people running around. At $14.99/ mo. I'm having difficulties spending my limited funds on it. I've played for about 4 hours and have not grouped once, or been asked to group. I'm thinking this isn't a very good sign.
However, I think this is a game all should try out. It has a very new different combat system, the visuals are quite stimulating and exciting to experience, and Group play looks like its a blast ( I saw a few groups killing stuff). Plus, it is moving in the right direction and FPS skill driven game where Gear is not the priority.
I encourage you all to give it a try! I'll post more on my experiences. I'm still playing EQ2, but The Chronicles of Spellborn are drawing me more away from Norrath.
My Void Seer
It has been some time since I've posted and for good reason. Surprising to some, I've maintained playing Everquest 2 consistently for the last week. During that time I've managed to level my Dirge, Mystic, and Illusionist (all on separate accounts) to lvl 30 ish. IN addition to this, I've leveled my Dirge to a 28 Weaponcrafter and my Troubador (on the Illusionist's account) to a lvl 30 Jeweler.
In the last few days I've made about 3 plat over 2 characters. Here is a screenie for my Troub.
Notice the Gold amount at the bottom open window
You'll notice also from the screenshot that I made about 25 gold in one day. How did I do this? I'm a basic n00b at eq2, but I'm making enough money to support full imbued gear on my mains, and maintain two healthy crafting ventures
[ Click here to read more ]
MMORPG.com has an interview with Senior Game Designer Ryan Barker where they discuss the new 51/50 ruleset server. This new server will allow anyone who creates a character to instantly start at level 51 with 50 AAs.
The first thing that jumps to my mind is Dark Age of Camelot's /level command. In DAoC if you had a character on your account on any server you could create a new character and type /level and upon visiting your trainer instantly level up to 20. This was quite the reward for me, as I was constantly starting alts and burning out on the n00b content. I thought it was an excellent carrot on the stick encouraging me to level up to the end game
[ Click here to read more ]
Some major updates today!
1) As you may have noticed I have taken over the Gamerbard blog. I hope that I live up to the tradition of quality postings and information already presented here
[ Click here to read more ]
I really wasn't joking around when I said that I jump all over the place when it comes to gaming. True, i've been whoring out the SOE all access station pass, but I have been making full use of my gaming monies. This weekend I logged in to EQ2 and started a few Fae characters.
I started with a warlock and a warden. I found this to be a very powerful combination. It allowed me to duo almost anything i could come across. The warlock is a great class to take on multiple targets provided that you have heals. Thanks to the warden's regen heals i could quickly tab over to her and cue up a few regens, then tab back to the warlock and nuke the mobs. I found that pulling multiples were easiest. Unfortunately I don't have any screenies of this as I was focused on not dying. I'll get a few up soon
[ Click here to read more ]
I've had in my mind a desire to play something beautiful. Naturally with my SoE game pass, I installed Vanguard and logged into my Druid; lvl 22. I turned the settings to max quality, and just sighed a breath of pleasure. The game is BEAUTIFUL! Grass swayed with the wind, texture and realism burst into my eyes. WOW! I remember why i started playing the game in the first place.
Freshly ported and set to Max Quality
I ported to an area that was supposed to be near my level; 17-24 and started grabbing the local quests (a side note here; i can't stand quest grinding. My biggest peeve about WoW, EQ2, and Vanguard is the focus on crappy collection and kill quests. They've all been done 10 billion times. I'm SICK of them). As I was grabbing the quests i got a group invite and moved off to the huge castle nearby. We promptly began killing spiders for a quest.
Groupmate and me killing some spiders
[ Click here to read more ]
For a long while now I've had only one or two accounts active across all games. Recently, I have been running two EQ accounts and letting the time run down on my Warhammer Online account. For some reason the other day, I decided to upgrade my SOE account to the all-access pass. I figured for a few extra dollars I could check out Vanguard, again, and EQ 2. The opportunity to play more than one game sparked a need in me to find something new so I logged in to my WAR account last night, and took a few screenines.
DoK killing a random trash mob
What I noticed most about WAR is how crappy of a game it is. Sure it looks pretty, I seems to be fun. But you get down to it, and its just like WOW. Redundant killing of trash mobs constantly. Oh! You say "The RvR makes up for it?" It is okay, if you can play it. My experience with the game tells that you need to have a pretty rocking system if you're going to even enjoy RvR. I was running an E6400 Overclocked, 2 gigs of DDR2533 RAM, and an nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS. I got choppy graphical lag, couldn't even participate in RvR, and had a really difficult time moving in areas with lots of people. It wasn't until I bought a new system that I could play with any degree of fluidity or smoothness.
Thankfully that same system allows me to play eq with 2 clients. Here are a few screenies of my latest jaunt through the game.
Performing for all to see
Hunting
I've been played Massiviely Multiplayer Online Role Playing games for about 9 years. Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Shadowbane (now dying I think as Ubisoft gets ready to shut it down), Everquest 2, World of Warcraft. God, the list continues. Name some of the big named games out there today and I've played them. Hell, I'll even admit that I played Horizons, and bought it!
In each of the said games, I've always had this desire to play every class, explore every spell, and to have every gameplay available to me. While my friends and guildmates would rush up the levels to max, I was always left tinkering in a sea of Alts, or characters created and played other than my "main." I'm the guy that has the wizard, the enchanter, the warrior, the paladin, the druid, the mentalist, the nightshade, the assassin, the magician, etc. I've got them all. My character slots are MAXED in about 2 weeks
[ Click here to read more ]
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20 Posts dating from June 2008
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