Sorry for almost a week of silence, but I had a friend visiting. I’ve been playing daily since the weekend, however, trying different races (mahirims are awesome), exploring, and helping a clan of alfars with town construction.
I’d like to make it clear that writing these updates isn’t a ten minute job where I talk breezily about whatever crosses my mind at that moment. Actually it takes a while as I check them again and again for accuracy, feeling just about as relaxed as if a cop had just read me my rights. Usually I finish at 3 am.
I could recite all the things that you would like me to confirm, describe, etc., and if I don’t talk about them the reason is not that I don’t care about what you’d like to know, but that I didn’t get clearance to do so - I am not free to disclose all kinds of information about the game.
On top of this, I have been very concerned every time that my comments were misunderstood, twisted, taken out of context and seen as a sign of the apocalypse. Please don’t draw general conclusions from specific snippets of information that may be out of date by the time you get the game - e.g., if I say that it requires gold to craft arrows, I have no idea if that’ll be the case in release, if it will be more or less expensive, if it’s the same for other crafted weapons, etc.
I’ve seen several requests to talk about PVP. I am not sure in which sense – the basic mechanics of magic and combat are those that I’ve already described in previous updates (how you are required to aim when you strike, load up a spell before you cast it, etc.), so that leaves my impressions, which are purely subjective. I’ll mention them here in no particular order but please take them with the benefit of doubt – they are purely personal impressions.
Speed of combat and twitch factor are more Oblivion than FPS:
Things where personal skill, or at least using your brain, come into play are using cover and terrain to your advantage, hitting your target while trying not to decimate any friends with splash damage, managing your stamina…
So, is it fun? I enjoy it, especially because the ability to fully loot each other makes it much more personal.
When I’d just started playing I fought a guy in a field of tall wheat, where I’d noticed how he’d just crouched to ambush me (it was tall enough to cover him when he crouched). At one point he ran off to recover, so I went looking for him in and out of some huts expecting him to jump me at any time… I couldn’t hit tab to see if I could acquire his target because there’s no such thing, I couldn’t mouselook to see if he was sneaking behind me while I looked into the houses, so it felt like a game of cat and mouse - where you don’t know who’s the mouse until the end, I guess… and I realised that for the first time in many years my heart was actually beating faster while pvping in an MMO. I wanted to kill that guy dead! I wanted his stuff! I was inordinately pleased when he died, even if a river in which he fell gave me a helping hand (my PVP stories are a bit lame, sorry).
Finally, some more game info. It currently takes two same (and friend?) race kills to be flagged red (i.e. a murderer). Once you are red you cannot bind in a starter town or capital any longer or use their services because you’re KOS to them. You must bind at either your clanstone if you have a clan who owns one, a neutral or chaos city (where you can use their services), or at a bindstone in the wilderness.
Whether you’re red or not you can use small trader camps that can be found here and there outside cities and that usually have a couple of vendors, a bank, and in some cases a crafting table of some sort.
That’s it for now. I plan to write about player cities in the next update.
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Additional: They're patching the beta server right now so while I wait I'll answer a few things that I've read on the general forum.
"Does going red last ten minutes?" - No. It's actually an alignment hit, you can see your alignment as a bar under your stats. It's permanent until you raise your alignment again, for example by killing racial enemies. There is a temporary change when you HIT someone of your race (as opposed to kill him), i.e. you go rogue (grey) and you are KOS to the towns etc like a red, and if anyone kills you and they are the same race they get no alignment hit, but it's a brief, temporary status.
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"I wonder what happens right after you become red and are no longer bound in your starter town... Are you bound nowhere?" - I don't know where you get re-bound. Until very recently you stayed bound at your starter town and had to get the hell out of there as fast as you could upon respawning. Now it's been changed but I don't know how, sorry.
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"I'm hoping they have abilities that you can trigger that perform special melee attacks." - There are lots of power attacks and abilities that have to be unlocked and bought. I haven't tried any personally but I saw someone rave in chat of how much he loved knockback, which he had just bought.
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"If this is the first time he heart was racing while PvPing in an MMO for years, I must ask what kids of MMOs she's used to PvPing in." - Games where my heart was racing were mostly UO and AC1, for two reasons - because of guild and personal rivalries and because you dropped everything when you died. At the other end of the spectrum, I have almost fallen asleep a few times in instanced pvp areas in a very popular MMO. I actually decided to quit that game for good when I fell asleep in 1v1 against a guy and killed him, because my pet owned him while I zzz'd.
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Finally, I have been told by a friend who's in beta as well and who just read the update that he's seen a better direct damage spell than Mana Missile in action, and that it travelled much faster, almost as fast as arrows. WOOT!
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"This obviously was made by the reds of old days to fill the niche void that Trammel left them with. [...] Good luck in getting regular players that want to stay because I don't see that happening." - I am not sure if this was posted as a joke (it's a bit like going crazy at Blizzard about too much endgame PVE in WOW or at Turbine about the prevalence of lore in LOTRO, when those are the things that define the games). Hasn't there been a lot of information about the game's vision posted over the years by the Dread Lord Clau... ahem... by the devs! I mean by the devs! Anyway, if it's anything like past games, there'll be some clans that only kill their enemies, so if they are strong enough to protect their areas there will be places where new players are relatively safe. I don't like to look into an imaginary crystal ball and make predictions, but I'd imagine that it's how it would work out in practice, at least after the dust has settled.
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P.S. 7 February 2009 - As release gets closer and thousands of people join beta, PVP in large numbers happens more and more often.. The image below shows an image from a fight between a dozen mahirim against about thirty humans and dwarves.
CLICK ON THE IMAGE BELOW TO SEE THE FULL SCREENSHOT.
