Waking Dead

First of all, a hearty Fighting Cocks welcome to all our new players: Andreas, Saugrum, Flexius, Theresa, Chasgar, Kestrel, Ulfnir and Gwenael. We had a bunch of fun last night racking up RvR kills against the Greenskins, and I for one hope that continues.

Secondly, I’m thinking about clearing up the forum, making it a lot smaller and easier to navigate, and making it accessible to everyone with a WordPress login. It’ll take me some time to sort it out, but I thought that we probably still need somewhere to discuss guild stuff that doesn’t really sit on the blog.

So, here’s the plan: the blog will remain primarily my own personal blog, but I’ll post any guild announcements on the front page for everyone to see. Because we also have a tabletop RPG and wargaming group that uses the blog, it still makes sense to keep it mixed-use, but I can transfer some of those discussions to the forums. What I propose is that the forums have an ‘online’ and an ‘offline’ section, but with far less sub-forums than we currently have. I’ll also be moving across all the old data so nobody loses out! It may be tricky tying your posts back to your new user accounts, but I’ll figure it out.

If anyone has any suggestions, or if you simply don’t want the forums back at all, post a comment here and I’ll answer it as soon as I can. Otherwise, in the next couple of days, there’ll be a new forum up for everyone to use. Sigmar willing, at least…

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Well, the updates keep coming thick and fast, don’t they?

First off the bat is some major changes to the way user accounts are handled. You will now have to register an account at Waking Dead in order to post comments. But that’s not all! I’ve tied the two authorisation systems together so an account on the blog will now grant you user access to WakingWiki!

The downside to this is that I’ve had to remove all existing user accounts, so you’ll need to re-register here to gain access to the wiki. Specifically for Mike and Si, if you use the same user name you’ve used to comment on the blog previously (Monroe and Kerriam respectively) your comments will get tied into your new profile.

Secondly, I’ve now added user-defined avatars to your Waking Dead account. These can either be an externally-linked image, or a Gravatar if you have one. This functionality is available on your profile page once you become a registered user.

If anybody finds any bugs with anything mentioned above, please let me know.

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Well, my worst fears have come true; of the two Core-RP servers available at launch, only Burlok will be opened for the headstart. That means we won’t be able to roll on Makaisson until next Friday, which leaves us in something of a dilemna. However, despite my affection towards the mighty Malakai Makaisson, I’ve just done some reading on Burlok Greysteel and he sounds like a fine chap indeed. So, contrary to what I might have mentioned on the forums, the server choice for the Fighting Cocks will be Burlok. I’ll be on tomorrow as soon as the server’s up, and in the meantime I’ll post about on a few forums and try and drum up some support for the guild. Our official server forums are located here on Warhammer Alliance.

See you all in-game!

Update: Just registered my headstart code and got my confirmation email… I’m off to bed

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As is my want, I’ve decided to make some rather fundamental changes to the site over the coming weeks, starting this weekend. The first thing you’ll have noticed is the new lick of paint; although Contaminated was a fantastic theme, I needed something a bit more robust for the new features I’m adding. First of all, here’s a list of things that are going to be disappearing:

Community Forums

They didn’t get much love really, did they? Seeing as there’s only about 20 of us in this online community, there’s not really much call for such a verbose set of forums. Besides, it was becoming more of a sounding board for me anyway, and I have the blog I’ll be transferring the static content across to the Wiki over the next few days before removing the forums entirely. Anything guild-related will now appear on the front page blog; the only downside to this that only I can post stuff, but anybody can comment so we’ll see how it pans out for now. I’ll be taking a backup of the forum database should there be a need to reinstate it later on, but for now we’ll make do with the blog.

Additional Pages

This has been on the cards for a while, really. I’ll be moving the info on the additional pages to the Wiki over the coming week or so, and removing the page links. The biggest job will be to move the Collections page over, so that might take me a little longer. Either way I think it’s prudent to make better use of the Wiki, particularly as I can set up additional user accounts to edit it. I’ll be setting these up once the content has been moved across.

OK, so that’s what’s disappearing; here’s a list of new features I’m adding to the site:

Sub-Categories

Seeing as the blog is now the central resource for everything community-related, I’ll be adding a bunch of new categories to make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for.

Events Calendar

No community is worth it’s salt without a decent calendar of events, and I’ll be adding one to this very site. Primarily it will serve to highlight any upcoming events, both in-game for our MMO guilds, and also out of game so we’re all aware of what’s going on. Big Apocalypse game planned for the Bank Holiday? We’ll stick it on the calendar.

Slimbox

It’s a tiny, lightweight version of Lightbox. What’s Lightbox? Well, you know on other blogs you get nice pop-up images when you click on them in a post? That’s Lightbox. Functionality should be up today, and hopefully get retroactively applied to all previous posts.

Wiki

OK, so the Wiki already exists (bet you didn’t know anything about it, right?) but I’m planning on making much greater use of it. Initially I’ll be moving all our static guild information from the forum over to it, giving each in-game guild it’s own set of pages. We can put up charters, member lists and other snippets of info on the Wiki, making it a bit easier for people to find what they’re looking for.

And that’s about it for now. I have a few other things lined up but I’m still undecided about them so I’ll keep them to myself for now. Really though, there’s a lot for me to be getting on with – especially as the WAR headstart is tomorrow – so I’m trying not to take on too much for now. As usual, post away with your comments and I’ll try to take on board any critiscism in a mature way… by completely ignoring you

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I’m going to put aside the furore surrounding GOA’s handling of the European Open Beta – you can read Mark Jacbos’ thoughts on his blog – and focus primarily on the game itself. Thankfully my wife was out last night so I got a good 4-5 hours of play in and, despite a brief dalliance with an Empire Bright Wizard, these thoughts will be from the perspective of a High Elf Swordmaster. I’ve taken a few screenshots to illustrate my points, but unfortunately they all feature the UI; for some reason the ‘Hide UI’ option is a modifier rather than a toggle, so it’s awkward to hold it down and take the picture whilst playing. Hopefully Mythic will change this for launch.

Right, onwards with the review.

Character Creation

The GUI is very pretty, well thought out, and the music suitably atmospheric. Your characters, once created, are arranged in the background in full 3D, and clicking on one brings it to the foreground. The actual creation side of things is a bit of a let-down though, being no more complex than World of WarCraft. After the masses of control Age of Conan gives you, this feels a little light. Still, the choices on offer are different enough and you can create some pretty cool looking avatars. Glad I get some extra options with my Collector’s Edition, though.

User Interface

The first thing that hits you is the sheer amount of stuff to look at. WAR features not one, but three experience tracks. The first at the top of the screen is your standard Experience bar; the one to the left and below is your Renown bar; the one to the far right is your Influence bar. There’s also the usual features like a Quest Tracker, Minimap, Hot Keys and so on.

The biggest and most welcome change is the Tome of Knowledge. This is a stroke of genius – and not the only one I encountered – as it combines all the disparate bits of information you get in an MMO into one easily-accessed database. It serves as your quest log, bestiary, reward and achievements list, history book, and plenty more besides. You’ll spend a lot of time looking at this, even if it’s just to read up the history of some beast you’ve just encountered for the first time.

One minor point about the interface: the GCD is listed as 1.5 seconds, but it’s more like 1.2 which is actually faster than WoW. This makes a massive difference to combat which I’ll talk about a bit later on.

Questing and Progression

Experience is gained through questing and mob killing and is tracked on your main Experience bar at the top of the screen. There are 40 Ranks to progress through – what WAR calls levels – and progress is at least comparable with other MMOs, at least to begin with. Quest icons are displayed as little books floating above the NPC’s head. They’re colour-coded to show whether quests are available or not, or whether you can hand anything in. The basic questing is pretty much standard fare for an MMO, which is no bad thing really, but it does do a few clever things with it. If you’ve been out in the woods killing Dark Sprites and you find an NPC that has a quest for you to kill Dark Sprites, they’ll already know what you’ve been doing and so grant you the quest completion rewards. It’s a simple touch, but it feels natural and cuts down on a lot of backtracking.

So far, so predictable. The real draw in terms of questing are the Public Quests. These are another stroke of genius; like the Tome of Knowledge they don’t really do anything revolutionary, but they really work well and serve again to cut down on the frustrations most people have with MMOs. Public Quests are scattered throughout each zone and bring the battles across each racial pairing to the fore. As a High Elf starting off in the Blighted Isle, my racial enemies are the Dark Elves. The first PQ I took part in involved storming a Dark Elf fortress, clearing the way for the High Elf army to set up Bolt Throwers, and then helping them take down an enormous War Hydra at the end.

You can take part in PQs at any point throughout the scenario, simply by being in the right area. Every time you enter a PQ area you get a little message to tell you so, and the current quest objective gets added to your Quest Tracker. The one I took part in came in three parts and is probably suitable for somewhere between 10 and 20 players. You all work together towards the objectives, gaining Influence as you progress. Once the quest has been completed you get a results table showing how everyone performed, with bonus points for the top three places. Then there’s a random roll out of 1000 which your score is added to, and this final total determines what rewards you get. A golden chest will spawn in the centre of the PQ area, and you get to loot different items from it depending on where you finished in the leaderboard. Pretty cool, really.

One other nice touch that helps with PQs, and questing in general, is that every party is created open with the option of locking it. What this means is that you can enter an area, click the Party button underneath your portrait, and browse the list of open parties to join. No need to spam the LFG channel or wait for an invite, just join the party and get stuck in.

The last part of progression I want to talk about is Renown. Basically, WAR is a PvP orientated game. You’re always in conflict with your racial enemy, whether NPC or player. There are open-world RvR areas which I’ve yet to encounter, but what I can talk about is PvP Scenarios. Basically, there’s a little Scenario button attached to your mini-map that you can click on at any time and view which Scenarios are available in your area. You can join the queue for one, then carry on questing, and when the time comes you get a little pop-up telling you the Scenario is about to start. You can choose to join it right away, join it in a bit (if you just want to hand in a quest first) or wait for another one to start.

The Scenarios are short PvP mini-games, a bit like Battlefield, where you have to hold control points in order to increase your score. The Scenario I played had a little twist, where the side who controlled all the points for at least 10 seconds unleashed the Fury of Khaine – a massive explosion that took out your opponents. Not played any other Scenarios yet, but this was good fun, and a pretty gentle introduction to PvP for newbies.

Combat and Abilities

Combat sits somewhere between the pointing and clicking of WoW and the visceral hands-on approach of AoC. Each Career in the game has it’s own mechanic, which basically involves a combo system of some description. For example, the Sword Master has Balances – each ability you activate requires a certain Balance and leads on to a different Balance. So, you’re creating combos by stringing together different abilities and planning a path through them so there’s as little downtime between attacks as possible. The Bright Wizard uses Combustion, were each spell you cast builds a certain amount of Combustion points, and the Meltdown ability ‘cashes in’ your Combustion for additional damage – a bit like a finisher.

As I mentioned above, the GCD is about 1.2 seconds, which is pretty quick. This means that combos can be strung together fairly rapidly and combat feels nice and immediate. The only downside I had was that the Sword Master’s Greatsword has a swing time of about 3 seconds, but that’s only for the standard auto-attack, so it’s not a big deal.

Summary

It’s hard not to get wrapped up in the world of Warhammer. Mythic have filled every second of the game with cool stuff. After the barren wasteland of Age of Conan, WAR feels refreshingly alive – you’re never short of something to do, and being thrust into the conflict from the moment you log in only reinforces this. My only critiscism of this is that it’s sometimes too much choice, but I know I’ll forgive it when I don’t have to grind another level just to open up a handful more quests.

In short, it’s everything I hoped it would be and more besides. Even in Open Beta it’s still way more polished and way more complete than AoC was when I stopped playing. They’ve taken all the good bits that Blizzard introduced with World of WarCraft, tweaked them were necesssary, added their own features, and really embraced everything that the license offered them.

In the words of Eurogamer: ladies and gentlemen, we have a contender.

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I figured this was big enough for a front page update.

As I’ve probably said to you all individually, my love affair with Conan is over. The only thing now is to transfer guild leadership over to somone who’s likely to be sticking with the game, or we disolve the Bride Burners for now and let people join up with other guilds. My current preference is to keep the Bride Burners exactly as they are, and if anyone else is still playing they can join another guild.

On a personal note, I’ll be devoting my time to WoW and eventually WAR when the Beta rolls around. If anyone feels like joining me, you know what to do

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This is something I’ve been working on for a while, and with me already maintaining the Bride Burners forums I decided to merge the two sites. So, what we have now is a set of forums for both our MMO guilds and also for our tabletop gaming as well. The address for the new site is http://community.wakingdead.co.uk/. Please sign up and get posting!

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With the Age of Conan launch only a day away, it’s probably about time to mention our new guild. Risen from the ashes of the Wives of Lazarou, the Bride Burners are set to make a name for themselves on the Aquilonia server.

At the moment it’s just the same people from WoW – plus a few new faces – but I’m hoping to open up recruitment once we get going. The guild forums are hosted right here, so if you want to join the guild please keep your eye on the Recruitment forum.

I hope to see you all in-game!

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I finally finished off the second part of my Destiny quest yesterday, and with it hit the level cap for the Open Beta. It had been a rocky road littered with intermittent crashes, graphical errors, one massive crippling disk access bug, and the bane of all MMORPGs – lag. But despite these problems, Age of Conan for the most part delivered on its promises. I felt part of the world, immersed in the brutal and often-times devastatingly beautiful land of Hyborea.

The Open Beta takes characters up to level 13, enough to see the opening single player section of the game and the first half of your Destiny quest in Tortage. Opening with your character washed up on the shore, you get the first 5 or so levels to yourself, getting to grips with your character class and the unique combat system.

The first thing you’ll need to be aware of is that all attacks are triggered; there’s no targeting an enemy and auto-attacking until they’re dead here. Each time you click a directional attack or cast a spell, you’ll do one hit. After a few levels you’ll get to play with combos which are special attacks that allow you to string together several swings with a proc at the end of it. As I was playing a Barbarian, most of my combos revolved around either stunning the opponent or opening up wounds (a DoT that makes your opponent bleed over time).

After escaping the jungle I finally got to enter the first multiplayer section of the game, the port of Tortage. The first thing that hits you is how detailed this world is – easily surpassing World of WarCraft, and this isn’t even a capital city. I filled my quest log and started exploring, taking in the dense jungle that surrounds the port, and the island of White Sands that lies just over the water.

Quests in Age of Conan are interesting, if not in structure then at least in flavour; I don’t think WoW would ever let you con a whore into deviant sexual activity so you can fill a vial with her blood. The dialogues are all fully voiced as well, and play out in mini cut-scenes that serve to focus the action around you, rather than the other players wandering about.

I’ll talk briefly about the Destiny quest line as well. This is the main single-player quest that opens up at level 5 and concludes at level 20. By speaking to your class trainer in Tortage, you can choose to uproot the corruption in the city by venturing out on your own at night. This spawns an instanced version of Tortage at night, and features much tighter quests with cut-scenes and scripted events – impossible in a multiplayer zone. The quest has a real epic feel to it, and because you’re on your own, you feel like you’re the first one to succeed rather than the endless queue of winners you get in other MMORPGs.

I think overall, Age of Conan is shaping up to be a fine way to spend the next 3-6 months. Despite the technical problems it has done enough for me to keep my pre-order open, and that’s without spellweaving, capital cities, raids, crafting, sieges, battle keeps… if it’s all as well thought-out as these first few levels, I’ll be a happy man.

Next for me is to try out the other class archetypes before launch so I can settle on my main for the full game. Barbarian has been fun, if a little one-dimensional, but I’m itching to try out a magic-user. Necromancer next I think, and then maybe Guardian. I’ll write up some additional thoughts on these classes, plus a comparison with the Rogue archetype, some time next week.

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Now that the NDA has been lifted I can talk about my experiences during the Age of Conan PvP beta weekend. First of all, let me say that this wasn’t a full PvP beta client, but rather a handful of Deathmatch and Capture the Flag arenas to play around in. After downloading (6.9GB) and installing (26GB!) I set to work on creating my character.

The character creation screen is excellent, giving you a massive amount of control over how your character looks and sounds. I decided I wanted to start with a Stygian Herald of Xotli, and after finally settling on her looks I hit the Play button.

Even though this was a PvP beta, FunCom decided to include a short tutorial to take you from level 1 to 5; this is ostensibly the opening single player section of the game. Short though it was, it was enough to introduce me to some of the subtleties of Age of Conan, in particular the real-time combat system.

Combat in Age of Conan uses full collision detection between characters and weapons, so you have to line your strikes up or you won’t connect. You can string combos together, either using the special combo abilities, or simply by manually chaining attack directions. You also get to dodge and block, and combining all of these together makes for a very intense fight.

I should point out that, even using DirectX9 (the DirectX10 client didn’t come with the beta), the game looks lovely. Its certainly leaps and bounds ahead of the competition – World of WarCraft included. Audio is also of a similar high standard, with plenty of bespoke incidental effects and a fantastic musical score.

Back to the game. After completing the tutorial, I was warped to the PvP lobby in the city of Tortage, and upgraded to level 20. From here you have a choice of which minigame to take part in, from a choice of 1 Deathmatch arena or 3 Capture the Flag maps. Both game types are fairly straightforward, and if anything a little limited, but it does give you a fair overview of the combat mechanics.

After a few games with my Herald, I decided it wasn’t quite what I was after and decided to roll up a close approximation to my old WarCraft Frost Mage. I decided to pick Tempest of Set, and had a much happier time staying out of combat and nuking from a distance. Complete with snares and burst damage, the Tempest is a pretty good match for the Mage, and plays similarly. There isn’t as much variety in spells, certainly at level 20, but you also get to wear medium armour and wave a polearm about.

Lastly, and itching to get a taste for proper melee combat, I decided to go for a Conqueror. This is where I had the most fun – whether through the class or simply because I understood more of the subtleties in the game mechanics. Either way, this class really clicked with me. The Conqueror is your classic off-tank, with two fighting stances (and attached Feat trees) to spec Defensive or Frenzy. You can really take a lot of punishment, particularly when you augment this with some of the buffs you get. Most of these buffs are command abilities which let you temporarily boost you and your allies’ abilities, although I found the cooldown a little harsh for their usefulness.

Although these were the only classes I played, I did get to have a look at the others as I fought. Your main tank seems to be the Gaurdian, with heavy armour and lots of hit points. Dark Templars seemed quite underpowered in the beta, but they look to be the main DPS warrior class, with magic-enhanced abilities.

The weakest class seemed to be the Priest of Mitra, largely because there are no point-and-click heals in this game. Whilst I’m on the subject of that, I should point out that healing works very differently in Age of Conan. Basically, healing isn’t some “get out of jail free” card; it isn’t powerful enough to change the course of a fight, but what it can do is keep your party alive long enough to out-DPS the enemy. Basically, the game seems less focused on having to have a healer in your party to succeed, but having one keeps you upright for longer. I quite like this approach in principle, but I need more PvE time with it.

The other priest classes are Tempest of Set, and the extremely popular Bear Shaman. These are arguably better all-rounders than the Priest of Mitra, with similar healing spells but better armour and DPS. The rogue classes round it out, with your traditional dual-wielding Assassin (no snares in Age of Conan though!), over-powered Ranger (which is getting a nerf – I got fed up of being 1-shotted) and the obvious Barbarian. Barbarians are DPS machines if spec’ed right, although they can only wear medium armour. Still, dual wielding a pair of axes whilst in Frenzy pumps out the damage, so hopefully you’ll get them before they get you.

All in all, I had great fun, and I’m eagerly awaiting the full release. Despite some niggles with the combat initially, it really started to click towards the end of the weekend, and I think I can start to understand how it all works. Having said that, PvE is always going to be my favourite way to play, so hopefully I’ll get accepted onto the open beta. See you in Hyborea!

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