A Matter of Protection

Rasping her tongue against the bow string, to slightly whet the nocking point, Fayde's keen eye could sense approaching humans. The air shimmered liked a still rock pool that had just been defiled by rampant pond skaters. Human odour also betrayed their stealthy tricks and tactics. She could visualise the airplay of their bulky forms writhing back and forth, attempting to remain in the shadows. Before her next thought, an arrow whipped from the arched weapon, almost singing as it clipped the shimmer just above his elbow. This winged ruffian dropped his crude dagger to the floor in surprise, and as the pain registered on his face, realised his stealth play was over.

Scooping his iron blade from the floor with his other hand, he made a charge at Fayde. No time for another arrow. Fayde whipped her bow updwards and slapped the horned tip against the brigands face, it carved a small trough across his already maddened features. She slammed her elbow into the bridge of his nose, sounding a satisfying 'crack', upon which she performed a tumble into the corner of the room and leaped from a crouching position up onto a high stack of crates. In desperation the brigand threw his dagger at her, it lodged moments away from her in the wooden wall behind her. A quick lick of the hair string, and she nocked another arrow. Stumbling forward spraying the floor with facial blood, the hairy rogue managed to claw at her feet before she loosed the feathered stake. He yanked both of her feet suddenly and she fell backwards, hitting her head against the wall and dropping her bow to her side. She kicked one foot free, and tried to pry him off her. But with every movement she made in this prone position, brought him closer to her as he climbed her body like a lizard on an ivy encrusted tree. Fayde struggled for her Rapier, but it was splayed out to the side, and she had most of her weight on the scabbard. His hands curled around her neck as his heavy blood saturated body entombed her arms in a heavyweight hold. Gasping for air, as his grip tightened, she spat in his broken face. A last act of defiance. Before the encroaching darkness took her away to peaceful eternal sleep.

He smiled visciously, his teeth jagged with half broken crowns. Blood endlessly gurgling from his mouth and his fat purple nostrils. He was almost laughing at her demise. As his head came cleanly off. A shining gauntlet grasped the twitching neck stump and yanked the decapitated carcass off her. A rather regal gentleman stood before her clad in the most noble suits of armour she had ever seen. "Caldovan, at your service my lady". He winked. And smiled. And turned to swing his sword and cull another of these rogues in the process of silently creeping up on him.

Fayde grabbed at her bow to steady herself. She used it as a crutch to heave her gasping body back up onto the crate. A burst of flame spouted from the left, she only just caught it in her peripheral vision. She crouched instinctively to avoid being singed. "Saphina, at your service sister". A small halfling sorceress grinned at her momentarily, before focussing on controlling more flames exuding from her slight but nimble fingers. Fayde felt she was amongst friends, ones who could protect her, so she smiled inwardly, and licked her bow string before letting loose a hail of arrows.

Dungeons & Dragons Online BETA

http://www.ddo-europe.com

As a quick sound bite, I can sum up DDO in one sentance. "Neverwinter Nights with better graphics".

Each quest is a crafted storied instance, with varying lengths (short, medium and long) and difficulties (normal, hard and elite). Nothing in the game allows "free form" hunting, theres no experience gained from killing more or less monsters. Finishing the quest is where you reap your rewards. The emphasis is heavily placed onto the goal and sub-goals of the current dungeon, rather than falling back on the xp grind of slaying endless spawns. Even in the dungeon instance, the quantity of kills is irrelevant to your rewards. Loot is rarely dropped from kills made in the dungeon, the little that is dropped is usually a collectable 'turn in' item, that equates to very little worth really. The majority of your questing loot will be gained from treasure chests, usually found after a quest goal has been acheived, or rewarded to you by the quest giver.

Real time combat interaction (your positioning affects the damage done). The combat relies on you to keep the monster in front of you, for attacks to be successful. Shifting position during combat can modify the chance of you being hit. Turn your back on an enemy and you'll no doubt suffer a critical hit. You can force a direct swing of your weapon by right clicking the mouse, or you can initiate auto-attack and swing automatically. Positioning still plays a part even with auto-attack toggled on. You can also react to the monsters attacks and try to block, using the shift key. Combat can become quite an intense session of keyplay, and to truly do it justice requires your attention and concentration. I enjoy the dynamic it adds to the gameplay, it makes it more real to me, more important to control my avatar as an efficient combatant. Encircling an opponent, to swipe at their side or back becomes a viable tactic, as does trading blows with blocks and counterattacks. It takes some getting used to, especially in third person. But I think it does give a more organic, less predictive flavour to the combat and its outcome.

To complete a quest, quite a bit of thought and planning is often required. There are stages where you just can't throw everything in and to hell with it. You often find yourself having to conserve Health and Mana because once you're in the dungeon, you have limited resources available to you in terms of Healing abilities and Mana regeneration. All casters have a finite amount of mana when they enter, and the only place you can regenerate that mana is at a resting shrine. Even then its a one shot deal. Once you've used it, no more. Your only other option is to stock up on health and mana potions. However, these items are incredibly expensive and are difficult to find a vendor with them available. Perhaps you'll buy one or two and use them in extreme emergencies. Since all casters have to prepare their spells before entering the dungeon, spell selection and spell/feat conservation (eg. level 1 clerics can only Turn Undead 5 times before they need to rest to regenerate) are also issues that need to be decided on.

Overall, the party requires a lot of co-operation to get through the quest. Since the players are quite interdependant on each other, you have to 'care' more about the other players. If the party splits and charges off in different directions theres sure to be a death or two. Since your reward (xp and loot) are dependant on completing the quest and its sub-quests. If you have a death, the party has to take the responsibility to get all their players back into the dungeon so they can continue, and so that the downed player gets his reward. This opens up a method by which gung-ho players can leave their comrades in the lurch, if they're about to complete the quest, and you have two or three other people dead and waiting to get back in for the completion update to their quests. By and large, I have been fortunate enough to have been in groups where everyone looked after everyone else. If a death occurs, we would try to heal/repair them back to life, if not, you'd try and carry their soulstone to the last resurrection shrine, and if not, they'd recall to a tavern and everyone would wait for them to run it back. If you die and recall and then re-enter the active quest dungeon, the overall XP you will get is dimished by a percentage.

The game does seem to promote the need for a slow and methodical way to exploring and questing in the dungeon. Take your time, conserve your skills, use the right person for the job, look after each other, and get the job done. I like this. As I said above, it reminds me very much of my time playing on a Neverwinter Nights Persistant World Server. The 3rd edition D&D ruleset sits perfectly with my idea of how dungeon exploring should go. The more I play this game, the more I seem to fall in love with it.

My greatest concern for the game is whether it will have enough storied quest content to justify the subscription fee? Guild Wars already provides similar storied instance questing (plus a very complete team PvP experience, PvE "free form" hunting with a rudimentary crafting mechanism) for only the box fee - no subscriptions. Repeating the quested content for diminishing returns on XP rewarded will only push the progressing characters forward into the new content, will there be enough of it? They haven't released information on subscription fees, or how that would relate to content provision. I hope they strike a balance that makes it affordable enough for people who like adventuring in the D&D ruleset online, and also provide enough regular new quested content.

RF Online

http://www.codemasters.com/rfonline


First thoughts, "Ah, just a prettier version of Lineage II then". I rolled a Cora "elf" ranger and shot a few arrows at some cute dinosaurs. Didn't inspire me at all. Graphics were really nice, detailed models, very sharp impressive landmarks, environment and terrain a bit bland. Since you are forced to be one of the three races and you can't mix and match them on the same account (for PvP purposes, like DAoC), I trashed the elf and rolled an Accretia "robot" ranger instead. Time to get some guns out.

The Accretian starting zone is very much more impressive, a large nexus that is not a million miles away from having been styled by the people who did the interiors for Phantasy Star Online. Only better. The Accretian robot style is very much japanese killing machine, think 'cool as fook'. The character models are very well done, so much effort going into the detail on them. However, they are all very similar, apart from a few slight modifications to the starting armour, every Accretian looks like every other Accretian out there. So you're more of a soldier pawn in a massive android army, than a deadly unique armour plated assassin.', 'Out you go from the nexus, the Accretian HQ, with your standard issue training gun and a couple of clips of ammo. Your first quest is to kill some cute dinosaurs (that could have starred in several episodes of Barney) with the laughably named the 'Flem' and in addition to frazzle some flying baubel guns known as the 'Wing'. The control mechanism is typically awkward. Holding down the Left mouse button, runs/walks you forward. The Right Mouse button and mouse movement turns you left and right. Forget using WSAD here, but fortunately you can couple directional movement with the cursor keys and rotational movement with the mouse. The interface is minimal and basic, like most other Korean MMO's. You have skills associated with your chosen profession, they seem to be set in stone, and have experience bars by the side of them. So you can choose which skills out of your skill set you want to use and level up. I dragged the fast shot ranged skill onto the quick bar, along with the aiming boost skill. You can start combat by double clicking on the target, or by selecting the target with a left click and then performing a skill on it. You can toggle auto combat on and off.

The whole zone seemed well paced out, by level 2 you'll be in amongst lots of similarly levelled monsters. The dense groups of monsters were easy to find, and the respawn rate was astonishingly fast. Good thing too, since most areas had many many people equally searching for the same things to kill. Monsters dropped weapons, armour, and hunting loot (for crafting with). Loot seemed to drop generously. Your experience seemed to raise with each shot, rather than with each kill. Every successful hit would yield some experience, both in your overall xp gain, and in your skillset (both active skills, such as the fast shot special and passive skills such as defense etc). There was a fair bit of diversity in the monsters you encountered. The quests seemed to be given to you at key times in your development, such as after you've levelled. You didn't visit a quest giver, once the quest was over, you'd be contacted and rewarded, and then given the next quest. The next quest usually being, kill 20 of th next set of monsters you're likely to stumbled upon.

You run around a fair bit, and this is controlled by your stamina bar. You toggle between the very slow walk, or the slowish run. Running uses more stamina, and subsequently you can't run for really long periods of time, unless you have stamina potions. However, most of my gameplay seemed to consist of a run, then plenty of battle, then a run to the next pocket of quest monsters, more battling. So I never really saw the stamina pool affect my play. The only time it became apparent, was when I died a long way away from the nexus and had to leg it back to the area I was in, that long a run, sapped my stamina about three quarters of the way there, so I had to pop a stamina potion to continue running.

In order to use your skills (specials) you need Force power, each special having a force cost, so you had to use them sparingly. Each fight would only allow approximately one or two specials at these low levels. The force pool grows when you level, and so you can then start to fit more specials in. Or there are force potions. Healing out of combat is slow, unless you sit down, which makes you vulnerable to attack. Health potions seemed to be essential if you wanted to keep up a constant rate of combat and not spend lots of downtime sat down regenerating. Healing potions could be used whenever you want, they didn't seem to have any associated cool down period, so when I had the money, I stacked up 99 heal potions and could more or less ensure my saftey, even when fighting quite tough mobs, as long as I could chug potions and the amount healed was bigger than the damage taken I would be ok.

I found as a gun toting ranger, my damage ability was impaired quite a bit, so I also dabbled in swords, axes etc, and started to make much faster progress. So I used my melee abilities quite heavily to finish quests and level up swiftly, and only when I started to find better guns, could I return to levelling my ranged skills. Even though I was a ranger, it seemed as if I could chose to live the life of a melee warrior almost. Dual wielding some rather nice looking swords, I was one cool robot assassin at one point. The specials have enough 'cool value' to make you want to do them again and again. Enchanced effects and really cool acrobatics were the order of the day. All japanese kill style.

There were some high level (named 'Ace') monsters kicking around even in the newbie yard, and you had to be careful not to draw their aggro. They would sometimes notice you attacking a newbie dino, and join in, pursuing you quite a way. This pursuit also meant it was easy enough for someone to train the nasty onto you. The chat channels were thick with people shouting about kill stealing. That went on all night. The game doesn't protect you from Kill stealing whatsoever. In fact with the servers and kill areas chock full of players, you had to ensure you'd do enough damage on a monster as you grabbed its attention, or someone would swoop in and hit it hard and then the kill credit would go to them. As I levelled towards 12, there was an area that was so full of players you'd end up getting one in five of the kills you'd started. That was a bit ridiculous. But I put it down to the gamut of beta players levelling at approximately the same pace as me, and hitting a monster bottleneck.

Parts of the game I didn't manage to sample where the ore collecting, and the PvP. Some determined players already had reached the level limit of 30, and had amassed a PvP force at the appropriate PvP area, and any new players who stumbled out there were being executed by them. Many heated comments about joining the wrong side etc were littered throughout the chat channels. As well as mention of the fact that sometimes PvP come down to who had more health potions. Which didn't sound encouraging.

Weapons and armour seemed to be graded according to level, with certain levels opening up new types of armour and weapons. Such as level 15 being the gateway to the launcher style guns, big heavy duty grenade and rocket launchers which seemed very popular with the robotic rangers. Some armour was tailored with certain skills in mind, such as the Accretia "launcher" armour, which had stats to boost your launcher skill. You also had yellow special weapons with boosted stats (known as the 'intense' weapons), or even purple weapons that were rare and more powerful. A bug existed with the purple ranged weapons at the time (where the stats didn't kick in, or something like that), so the general vibe was go intense weapons if you are a ranger for now.

The musical accompaniment to the whole process was rather splendid, from the wistful login page to the battle chants and emotive racial scores. In fact I liked the music so much, the mp3 score is sitting on a memstick awaiting my attention.

All in all, it was straightforward and stylish. Limited interface and very simplified quest mechanics. Cannot comment on how the PvP will pan out, but the PvE game seems only geared to making a level 30 PvP player out of you. very little in the way of story. However, since I started it at about 8pm, and didn't surface until I had a level 12 Accretian Ranger at 2am, I was embroiled in the experience, and the combat remained satisfyingly exciting.