I’ve made Gandalf, a character who can use staves, engages in fleshsmithing (no idea!), mathemagic, promethean magic, has good perception, is a lay walker (recovers mana more quickly) and is an alchemist! Sounds super effective if you ask me, and yes, I’ve got no idea what half those skills do.

First thing first – BURNINATION! It seems I have an awesome AOE spell that sets the floor on fire and does some damage to those damn Diggles. I burninate a few, but also catch the damn sickness one of the damn Diggles has. It gives me some negatives and I hope it goes away soon.

I also have a spell to speed up healing and… creepily, add more flesh (for ablative purposes) and a spell that will teleport me, if need be. Handy.

BURN DIGGLE, BURN!

After wandering around bashing Diggles and bats and NOT DYING, something amazing happens! I LEVEL UP!

I CAN HAZ DING!

I decide to level my staves skill (which adds a magical damage component) as I am still dealing most of my damage this way and am too low on mana or mana regen to focus entirely on my spell damage.

Gandalf has a big wand. Get it? Get it?!

The next time I cross a Diggle I decide to try a wand that has been hanging around in my inventory on the thing. ZAP! The Arcane Wand infects it with a magical DOT! Neat! I run away from the Diggle and it dies as it tries to chase me. I then breeze past and…. yes, I step on the infected corpse and pick up the damn infection myself! I eat some food to add some healing and the infection expires before I die, phew.

I also drank from a fountain and gained the Power of Plaid, which provides pretty neato magic and other sorts of protection for a few turns. Handy. I never knew plaid was so potent.

After some more adventures I discover the Goddess of Sidequests who tasks me with, well, finding a magical hammer?

I shall find the Magic Hammer!

A few creatures later I level again! This time I add another level to my mana regen power. I NEED MORE MAGICS!

I just took this shot to show the flames, FLAMES EVERYWHERE!

BURN THEM ALL!

I ding again and level up my fiery skill and get a fiery trap!

Anyway, more exploring and more looting leads me, eventually, to a terrible beast (that leapt out of a box labelled “Evil Chest”, go figure!)

A terrifying beast!

But don’t fear, dear reader, a combination of trap spells, wands and general bad-assery sees the beasty off!

Victollly!

And with the defeat of the evil AI-powered beasty, Level 1 of the dungeon is basically complete! How awesome!

I’ll continue onwards tomorrow in a new blog post.

]]> http://afteractionreporter.com/2011/06/09/live-blogaar-dungeons-of-dredmor-3rd-time-the-charm/feed/ 0 TinyPirate dredmortitle dredmor10 dredmor11 dredmor12 dredmor13 dredmor14 dredmor15 dredmor16 http://afteractionreporter.com/2011/06/08/live-blogaar-dungeons-of-dredmor-again/ http://afteractionreporter.com/2011/06/08/live-blogaar-dungeons-of-dredmor-again/#comments Wed, 08 Jun 2011 10:32:04 +0000 TinyPirate http://afteractionreporter.com/?p=1268 ]]> After my terrible performance in my first run through the Dungeons of Dredmor beta it is time I try again! This time, since it was traps that got me last time, I’m making some sneaky rogue type. I don’t want to die to traps again!

So, Bilbo Baggins is created! He has swords, archery, dual wielding, artful dodger, deadshot, burglary, and finally, perception. I’m not quite sure what all of these will do, but they sound pretty sneaky and that’s what I’m aiming for.

Within seconds the game intrigues. I have a Lutefisk Statue to which I can tithe lutefisk! My first quest shall be to seek and find lutefisk to receive the lutefisk blessing!

Lutefisk for the Lutefisk god!

I open a door to be faced with many nasty Diggles, and a bat-thing!

Die, Diggles, die!

I kill two before my health dips too low and I back out of the room, closing a door behind me giving me time to regen my health.

It is then I realise, after eating all my food, that I’ve got no idea how I can wait around and regen health. Faced with few choices, I open the door and charge the creatures.

I can’t say it ends well.

Dead in under 3 minutes. Oops!

Dredmor, unlike many roguelikes, eschews simple ASCII text representations of stuff for graphics and a good dose of humour. The game still has depth, like a lot of roguelikes, but also has a little of that graphical gravy we’ve all come to love. It’s also lethal, as a good roguelike should be, and I expect to die many times before I get to grips with it.

To share the fun of losing I’m going to liveblog my first game and share with you some observations!

Character Creation

Character creation is relatively simply. Chose seven skills from a list of 36. Being able to mix-and-match interesting combinations should make for a lot of variety. Oh, I’m also playing permadeath!

Dungeons of Dredmore character creation

Since I am made of sex and awesome I chose axes, dual wielding, berserker, master of arms, Viking magic, master of arms, assassination and finally, vampirism. The axes and dual wielding, assassination (crit strike) and berserker should synergize well and make me a killing machine. Viking magic, I don’t know, it sounds great! Who wouldn’t want to be a magical Viking! master of arms gives me some unknown defensive powers and vampirism lets me regain health from sucking on the dead. Hey, I plan for there to be a lot of the dead to suck on! My hero, who I shall name “Erik the Vikin” (not enough characters for a “g”. aww), is going to rock some dungeon!

Game Start

I’m trapped in a jail cell. Oh no! Someone did drop a ring of +a bit of armor (I think). So I add it to my character sheet. There’s a dispenser in the room, but I’m broke. I’m informed that this is the Wizardly Tower of Breakfast Cereals. Looks like I’ve been right all these years to never trust grain-based breakfast products.

Dungeons of Dredmor - the starting jail

I kick down a door to escape because that’s how hard I am. Egad, what is this! Small creatures awake and attack!

Dungeon of Dredmor - exploring

I kick them also!

With these pitiful creatures quickly dispatched I explore the dungeon and continue exploring, dispatching a few more critters before discovering a shop! Pity I am broke. Oh, I also discovered that, as I am a vampire, I can’t eat food to recover health, I can only recover health by bashing creatures. And maybe potions? Oh well. This could be tricky.

RPG fans love to shop!

Continuing onwards I bash another diggle (the creature thing) before something terrible happens! I step on a trap.

And die.

Hmm.

You R Dead

I did wonder why that dungeon tile looked a little different… and I was a bit low on health… Heck, better try again!

But for now, other duties call. Next time I’ll try and survive longer than five minutes.

Harvesting is a skill area like Crafting and Diplomacy but it doesn’t have levels, just skill ratings. You can chose to level two of: mining (hit rocks spawning about the world), digging for crystals (hit other sorts of rocks), cutting down trees (which looks great, by the way), skinning animals, or pulling up random plants to harvest their cotton or thread or whatever it is one makes bags and clothes out of.

As with the Crafting, Diplomacy and Adventure there are special clothes and whatnot one wears as one harvests, along with tool belts to stick tools in (surprise!). Fortunately, Vanguard automatically switches between all these sets of clothes as you engage in the various game elements, but you do still end up carrying and wearing more clothes than Lady GaGa’s costume crew.

Hey, lets check out some screenshots! Here’s Pus Pus chopping and whacking and stuff.

Environmental awareness, be damned!

Cat hit rock! Cat get crystals and stuff!

Harvesting, while not a barrel of laughs, does provide a little bit of fun in seeing what might pop out the other end. There seems to always be the chance that some rare resource or other will drop. But, on the downside, there is this odd complication whereby you must right click on stuff you harvest to turn it into more refined items. For example, you get lumps of basalt and ten turn these into chunks of basalt at at 5:1 ratio. Or something. I can’t say I paid much attention as it seemed pointlessly complicated and I worked through it by right clicking on any pile as soon as I was done harvesting.

Pointlessly complicated, it turns out, can be an accurate description of quite a lot of Vanguard.

Lets take a look at my adventuring outfit and some stats (although, not all of them by any means!)…

There are more skills stats than whiskers on my chin

In the chat window you can see some random combat skills that have gone up. On the right, the skills tab of the adventuring window (the crafting and diplomacy and other windows have a similar tab arrangement). Every time you do just about anything in this game some skill or other will go up. Sometimes skills I’ve never even seen before. If it were possible to poop in Vanguard there would probably be skills associated with it: “Your skill at metabolising food has increased to 47! Your skill at peristaltic movements has increased to 32!” Great! What do all these skills do for us? I’ve got no idea. Why is so much detail included? It’s never explained. It’s not like you’re going to boast about your skills in spell identification, are you? And if they all go up during normal gaming anyway, why bother with so much detail? I suspect that late game they might require some grinding, which makes me depressed every time I read the seductive yellow text.

Back to complexity: Have I mentioned that there are little buttons on your crafting skills sheet which, as far as I can tell, let you focus on increasing one sub-skill over another. As for which to chose? I’ve got no idea, I counted sixteen different skills associated with crafting and harvesting (only two of those are harvesting skills!). Rumour on Qt3 forum has it that certain tasks you engage in when crafting (the buttons you click on during the crafting process) require certain skills, so it can be useful to focus on building skills for the ones you use a lot.

Sure, there’s a lot of depth but I’m not really sure it would be a lot of fun to explore it. There seems to be a lot of detail that doesn’t really add much game play.

An area where the detail is appreciated is in the well constructed and quite entertaining questing system. Sure, there are your usual fetch and kill quests (and I’ve heard these feature on the mainland a lot more than they do newby island, and, yes, some of the quests even feature spawn tables!), but there are also a range of quite creative and interesting quest lines. What’s more, you do really need to read the quest text and pay attention to your surroundings – it does make a difference when it comes to getting through the stories without too much muddling around re-reading quest objectives. You can even discover quests through non-obvious general chat options with NPCs, it’s all quite a nice change from having everything up-front and obvious as it usually is in modern MMOs.

Nigh-killed by a rock!

A quest made me go fly this horsey thing! Wee! Meow!

I also really appreciate the fact that interesting quests are part of the crafting and diplomacy systems. Now, we’ve addressed crafting, but diplomacy is worth a bit of an explanation in its own right…

…except I’m not going to provide much of one because the system is damn complex. But, I will try and break it down a bit for you. In essence, diplomacy is a mini-game where you play cards against your “Parley” opponent trying to turn a conversation in your favour. Each player has a deck of cards to chose from and to build their “strategy” hand (in the screenshot I have 8 cards in my strategy hand. Hand size changes with level). New cards can be won through questing or diplomacy, bought, and even found on NPCs you kill.

All the bags, clothes, items, cards, deck and Parley windows associated with the diplomacy mini-game!

As for why you would do diplomacy, well, the rewards from diplomacy include special items, quests, regional buffs that help everyone in a zone, and tokens you can cash in for more special rewards. It’s a pretty fun system, and like crafting, levels independent of your adventurer level.

That covers the basics, but there’s a lot more to the system than this, and lots of it I don’t understand fully. For example: clothes give you status with various factions; you may need to build special strategy hands to combat certain opponents; there are higher-level interactions between questing and diplomacy; and so on. Regardless of the (perhaps excessive) detail, it’s quite interesting and I do enjoy the idea of working in an area of the game that is completely unrelated to bashing monsters and stealing their gold and XP.

Which, rather neatly, brings me to the topic of exploding creatures for fun and profit. Perhaps I can save us all some time by saying that if you’ve played EverQuest or World of Warcraft you’re going to be pretty familiar with the systems. Every couple of levels you gain spells/skills/whatever. Every few other levels you can increase some stats (these aren’t the same as the skills we discussed earlier. Stats are a whole pile of other meaningless words and numbers). Abilities are what you would expect – you click on them to explode monsters, usually in a fairly repetitive sequence. As with most fantasy MMOs, you tackle one creature after the other until enough are exploded to suit your needs.

Which reminds me, I wish to God that more games would lift a few ideas from the Superhero MMOs and let the player bash a half dozen or more bad guys all at once. It is so viscerally exciting to wade into a street gang in City of Heroes and with a few mouse clicks  and button presses send the bad guys flying across the screen. Taking on mobs one by one by one is getting very, very old!

But let me not make you think Vanguard’s combat is completely tedious, it isn’t. Yes, it does follow most of the formulas, but it does also try and do a few new things. For example, most healers, I was told by a fellow player “hit stuff to heal stuff”. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds awesome! While many casters rely on mana, some don’t use a mana system and several other classes employ various other methods of powering their abilities. I’m told that the classes play quite differently, and so I applaud the now-dissolved Sigil team for taking the time to try and come up with something new, even if the click-by-click play can get a bit samey.

A wild dungeon appears!

With Pus Pus level 9 and some way from hitting ten and not enough players on when I’m around to complete the final newby island dungeon I think I’m going to call this Last Chance to See here. I’m told other lands are exciting, but the effort required to grab a group or to grind out level 10 is beyond my interest.

My final message to you all is to consider giving Vanguard a go. You’ll have some fun for a few nights (hey, maybe more!) and enjoy some different takes on some standard gaming tropes. If you have gamer friends, I highly encourage you to get them all to sign up with you so you can take part in the “Brotherhood” system. Brotherhoods share experience between all members, whether they’re online or offline. It sounds like a pretty awesome way to explore the first 20-or-so levels of the game and I hope to hear of people giving this approach a go!

Until next time, toodle-pip!

Because I must.

I must explore dying worlds, I must go where no one goes any more and I must bring the story of these empty expanses of crushed developer dreams, of endless fan tears, to you, my dear readers, in the hope that when the money finally runs out and these worlds are switched off for good we may look back fondly on these adventures and say to ourselves “surely that game was worthy of a better write-up than what this hack produced?”.

Vanguard was released January 30, 2007 by Sigil Games Online. Sigil Games, co-founded by Brad McQaid, was supposed to be a next-generation MMO that built on the hard core style of EverQuest with added rich content and depth. Fan anticipation was high, but as the closed and then open betas rolled around in early 2007 whispers of discontent became shouts of panic as fans discovered a buggy game that barely ran on even brand new machines. The game initially sold 240,000 copies but after the first month subscriptions dropped to about 130,000, slumping to 40,000 within a few months. Shortly after the disastrous launch Sigil was entirely acquired by Sony Online and all Sigil staff were fired.

Since then there have been a few game updates, the last major one arriving in December 2009. The only beeps from the heart monitor since then have been hot fixes and server merges. For all intents and purposes Vanguard is legally dead, its assets divided among the shareholders of Sigil, with the Sony doctors and nurses keeping the life support machinery on so long as the odd visitor comes to pay their respects.

To help make sense of all this history I made this fantastic graph of fan anticipation and fan tears over time!

Vanguard - Fan anticipation graph

December 2006 marks the start of beta, January ’07 the launch, May the acquisition of Sigil by Sony (and cessation of major development work) and January 2008 the launch of “Trial Island”, the location of our story. Coincidentally, fan anticipation of Vanguard has led the performance of the S&P 500 by precisely 4 months! If you suddenly see Vanguard’s popularity rise, it’s probably time to go invest!

Grabbing Vanguard’s 14 Day Free Trial is painless enough and with the game installed you’ll be at the character creation screen before you know it. At this point you’re presented with a plethora of options. There are some 19 races and 15 classes to chose from. Races can broadly described as varieties of humans, a number of elves, and some greenskins and some animal people, so far, so Standard Fantasy Setting. But despite the fairly generic options there are some interesting features here. Each race has a special ability, and race choice also influences diplomacy (more on that some other time) and other game  features. Unfortunately, if you haven’t bothered to research what any of this means you’re left blindly choosing a combination that sounds good. Not necessarily a bad thing, perhaps, but a choice that makes completitionist min-maxers like myself a little nervous.

In the end I settle on a cat-person-thing and name her Pus Pus. She’s a psionist, which means she can mess with people’s brains! If you’ve ever had a cat you’ll understand this is a very natural race/class choice – I mean, check her out, daaaawwwwwww, so cute!

Dawwwwwww - Pus Pus is such a cutieeeee!

Character creation lets you mess around with your proportions and head shape, but as with most games of this type the changes feel fairly pointless. Once you slap on some armour and a magic hat you’re going to look pretty much like everyone else in the world and only the giant neon letters hanging over your head will serve to tell you apart. But, for the sake of it, I fiddle with the settings and marvel as Pus Pus slightly changes in height, colour and whatnot. I have to say that only the Superhero MMOs have ever made me really enjoy character creation. Who hasn’t spent thirty minutes perfecting a super hero in City of Heroes? In fantasy MMOs there never seems to be much point, and I have always thought that deep down the game developers know this too and simply tack on a few options to keep the RPG geeks happy.

And that’s it for character creation! Lets enter the land of Standard Fantasy World!

It’s night when Pus Pus arrives and clouds partially cover the night sky.

Pus Pus has arrived. Tremble, mortals!

It’s not long before I’m being sent on a quest from Generic Newby Town 1. Can you guess what Pus Pus has to do? Yes! She must bash some bugs!

Bug problem you say? I'm getting multi-world deja-vu

I feel strangely comforted that my first quest is to bash some small critters. It isn’t really a fantasy game if your first quest isn’t to kill some rats, bugs or spiders, is it? Clearly the Vanguard developers knew their roots and weren’t about to rock the boat in any way whatsoever.

So, as legions have before me in countless worlds and across decades of gaming, I head out of  town to unleash my fury on the generic pest du jour.

Bugs - I am the vengence of Newb Town!

I chose to ignore the fact that the bugs are endless and my slaughter does nothing to stem the tide. If I were a true roleplayer I would be stuck here for the rest of my time in Vanguard, valiantly trying to reduce bug numbers (as requested), but forever doomed to fail by the strictures of standard MMO systems. Fortunately, I’m anything but a true roleplayer, and quickly finish this and other quests of killing, visiting, collecting and clicking on things. One particularly amusing quest sees me almost die and teleported back to Newby Town 1 where I’m healed by the trainer. Good job, that NPC!

Save me, NPC, you're my only hope!

As I hit level four and leave Newby Town 1 for Newby Town 2 I meet my very first fellow player!  I figure they are a hard core roleplayer with a name like Elishcar Darkstorm, but my efforts to say hello are soundly ignored.

Meow, my good man, Meow!

It’s now that the visual style of newby island hits me like a gutshot from a five year old (surprisingly painful, believe me). It’s faux fantasy Asian mixed with Standard Fantasy Setting. The end result is surprisingly generic with a few oddities and uglies that stand out – even keeping in mind the fact that the game is four years old now.

First up, roads are lined with giant logs, but the tress in the forests are relatively small. This and other scale discrepancies really break any sense of scene immersion for me. Second, the names over players and NPCs are so bright and ugly that in moments of mental weakness I imagine for that I’m playing the original EverQuest.

When the cold sweat passes and the rasping moans from my now-dry mouth die out I realise that I’m not playing EverQuest, just its bastard offspring and I’m left unsure whether I should feel good about that or not. Then I notice the giant tree log path markers and the cycle begins anew.

On arrival in Newby Villge 2 I am presented with the irresistible temptation of slaughtering many innocent chickens, carelessly left out (and targetable!) by an NPC. The Great Chicken Masacre 2011 proceeds apace, with endless chickens replacing any I kill. And my effort wasn’t without reward, either! One of the chickens was carrying a bent shield! Thanks, chicken, I shall loot your delicious corpse!

A bent shield-flavoured chicken? Yum!

I have to admit I’m disappointed that not a single chicken drops any meat, feathers or even chicken feet (which really aren’t that bad, you should try them next time you’re having Dim Sum). Shields, yes! Meat, no! Disappointingly, you can’t even eat the shield. I checked.

In Newby Town 2 I engage in a few more quests – travelling, killing, talking, the usual fare of every fantasy story ever made since Agamemnon said to Achilles “yo dood, LFG 4 troy raid?”. Between the wanton massacres of assorted wildlife and Generic Orc Substitutes I discover crafting! This is thoughtfully introduced with a series of quests which only bugged-out twice (requiring a complete restart of the quest chain).

I like to make stuff. Help me help myself to make stuff!

Crafting in Vanguard falls into three categories: Artificing (making magic rings and staffs and whatnot),Outfitting (making armour etc), and Blacksmithing (making weapons). At least, I think that’s how it works out. Doesn’t matter really, I’m only going to be talking about Artificing here!

The basic crafting concept is that you take some raw material and have to hand some other components which get added in as you work through a recipe. You click through each step in turn, expending action points as you go. Sometimes you chose differing actions based on whether you want to hurry production along, or increase the item’s quality. All the while you’re using some of the extra resources you’ve bought as well as watching your available action points to make sure you don’t run out of either (which causes the build to fail).

Complicating things are, well, complications! It seems that as the quality goes up the chance of a complication increases. Complications cost action points to resolve, and if not resolved, reduce the quality of the item you’re working on (I think). Complications also may cost a resource (water to put out a fire, bandages to heal the gash in your hand, you clumsy oaf).

Help me! I have no opposible thumbs!

Overall, the system is pretty interesting and crafting stuff nets you experience that is used to give you crafting levels. It seems theoretically possible for a player to be a legendary crafter while still being a level 1 adventurer. Oh, it’s worth mentioning that everything you craft is based on a recipe. You gain recipes from NPC traders or, temporarily, from a quest (to make quest items). Additionally, players can request items be built through an auction house type system and if you accept the contract you are temporarily provided the recipe required. Pretty interesting all round! Pity there are nothing but NPC orders on Newby Island. These are great for levelling your skills, but not terribly interesting. There are, however, a ton of trade quests which are entertaining and provide a nice break from killing bugs.

It is probably a good time to talk about bags. Bags are everywhere in Vanguard. You have bags in your taskbar, bags in your bags, bags on your character paper doll (in fact, you can have multiple tool belts and bags on each of the various pages of your paper doll (one for adventuring, crafting, harvesting, diplomacy, your mount, and one (I think) just for looking good in). In the next screenshot I opened every bag I had available at level 9. Yes, it is easy to lose things inside your endless bags. Yes, you will sometimes spend a few minutes clicking around to find that quest reward (if your main bag is full, say). No, I have no idea why Vanguard was built like this. It does, however, make me think of an awesome new name for the game! Vanguard: Saga of Bags. What do you think? Perhaps we’ll chat more about it in the next episode of Last Chance to See.

Last Chance to See: Vanguard (Part 2)

Pus Pus - the cat bag lady of Generic Fantasy Setting!

In essence, Minecraft is Dwarf Fortress as a single-player 3D experience (though you can collaboratively build on multiplayer servers as well). It’s very much a sandbox game and one with enough charm and sense of discovery to make the game a real experience, even at this early stage of development (Notch considers it an Alpha).

If you want to learn more than the good folks over at RockPaperShotgun are here to help you. They have started a new player AAR that is well worth the read. Start at the bottom of that page and work your way up. It’s a good read and it’s a great wee game!