Blue Kae

The Silver Hunter appeared during the recent Qularr invasion in Millennium City and has since become a well known hero, culminating in his recent induction into UNITY.

Silver did not come to Earth to be a hero. His real name is Trissan Daan, and he is an alien known as a Nayrees. Nayrees are silicon-based lifeforms, sentient androids, native to the Andromeda Galaxy. Trissan is a Warden for the Precis Alliance, which function roughly similar to a United States Marshall. Wardens handle security for Alliance officials, protection of witnesses during Adjudication, and the tracking and retrieval of escaped prisoners. This last duty was the reason Trissan was passing through Earth orbit when the Qularr launched their invasion.

Daan was hunting an escaped scientist known as Dr. Mechan. Mechan was a radical scientist convicted of Crimes against Sentience for performing illegal and torturous experiments on hundreds of non-organic sentients. He had tracked Mechan to the Sol system where the scientist was hiding on the darkside of Earth’s moon. Mechan’s ship bolted from its orbit when Daan entered normal space and was lining up for a jump when the Qularr invasion fleet appeared. The Andromedan ships were assumed to be hostile and fired on by the Qularr, severely damaging both and forcing them to attempt emergency landings on the planet.

Daan landed in Millennium City and suffered only minor injuries, but his ship was completely unsalvageable. Even temporarily stranded, Daan’s first priority was to find and capture Mechan, but he could not ignore the Earthers plight during the Qularr attack on Millennium City, so he helped with the defense. The recognition Daan received for his heroics gave him the idea of becoming the Earth hero, Silver Hunter, both as a way to draw Mechan out of hiding and as a way to develop contacts and resources to assist in hunting the escaped scientist.

Mechan was less lucky and skillful in his landing. He was severely injured in the crash, his legs and arms crushed and most of his major organs damaged. He would have died except the automated systems he had rigged to conduct experiments while he fled Precis controlled space survived mostly intact. These automations allowed Mechan to rebuild his body with synthetic parts; his pathological obsession with artificial and non-biological life culminating in his transformation into the synthetic being known as Necromechan.

Since the defeat of the Qularr invasion, the Silver Hunter and Necromechan have met and fought several times. Each time, the battles have ended with Silver frustrating Necromechan’s plans and the villain either escaped or captured. Unfortunately for Silver Hunter, Necromechan always seems capable of escaping incarceration. By Precis law, Warden Daan must either be certain that Necromechan is permanently incarcerated or get permission to take him back to the Precis prison world before he can return home, so for now the Silver Hunter will remain a hero of Earth.

A few weeks later than some and much later than others, the Silver Hunter reached the level cap in Champions online last night. This is only the second game where I’ve hit the level cap, with LotRO being the other. Unfortunately Twitter sharing didn’t seem to be working so the level advancement wasn’t broadcast. Good thing I have a blog then.

I also finished the Vibora Bay crisis mission last night. Until now, the Monster Island crisis has been my favorite mission in the game, but Vibora Bay’s blown it away. This is one of the few times I’ve ever wanted to finish a mission arc just to see how the story comes out. I’m very much looking forward to exploring the zone proper now that I’ve completed the crisis.

Now that Silver is max level, I also have access  to the Unity missions and Nemesis Confrontation, and I’m looking forward to trying them both out. Plus, I really should finish up the character post about Silver that I’ve been working on forever.

“MMO forums: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”

Okay, so that’s not quite how Obi Wan cautioned Luke, but it’s no less accurate. Of course that makes this thread all the more impressive. It is a 46 post, 5 page, (as of this writing) thread started by a community member asking the devs to post a surprising fact about themselves. Quite a few of the Cryptic staff have posted and nearly all the player posts are on topic and respectful. There’s one person asking about a problem but the they were very apologetic about derailing the thread, most surprisingly no one followed up to troll them for it.

So my thanks and today’s DAD go to the Cryptic Studios staff (community and dev), for their follow through on their promises of better communication with the community. It’s made the last two months of Champions Online much more enjoyable.

If you haven’t already, go checkout Scarybooster’s Developer Appreciation Week posts, and if you’re doing any yourself please send me and Scary a link.

Why do game companies do this to me?

• Cryptic is releasing Revelation, which adds Vibora Bay to Champions Online.
• Turbine is releasing the Spring Festival for Lord of the Rings Online.
• Bioware is releasing the Firewalker DLC for Mass Effect 2.

City of Heroes recently offered a free weekend to former subscribers. Even though I don’t play any longer, I always like to take the opportunity to revisit my characters.

I loved this game when it first came out. I played from beta on for about three years before I cancelled. I didn’t quit because I hated the game or anything, I was just ready to move on to other things. I had always planned to return but somehow I never did. I just didn’t have an urge to revisit the superhero genre until Champions Online came out.

This was actually my second (free) retry of CoH since CO launched. The first time I really just revisited my characters and checked out the Mission Architect, but I didn’t really play. This second try, I spent a couple of hours playing my level 28 energy blaster, Silver Hunter, and my level 20 tank, Blue Ram.

I had a lot of fun, but I don’t plan to resubscribe because of the differences in the two combat systems. I prefer the combat mechanics and pacing in Champions over City of Heroes. The combat is faster paced, better incorporates positioning and movement, and is overall more action-oriented. City of Heroes is just less engaging for me. Blocking in Champions is a very simple mechanic, but it has really changed my mindset. Several times when fighting with gangs in Paragon City and I kept trying to block attacks.

The other thing that keeps me from resubscribing is the archetype system. This is something I’ve never been happy with. Back when CoH was originally being designed the skill system was going to be open. At some point that was changed because it was too easy for players to design an unplayable character. So they created the archetype system and locked different powersets into them. Unfortunately this limits on what kinds of heroes you can create. I enjoyed my tank character, but I always wanted him to be a bit more of a brute than he was. The Going Rogue expansion will make it possible to make a villain and then redeem them to become a hero, so I could get around that, but frankly that sounds like too much effort.

In Champions the powers are all open to you, there’s more freedom to build themed heroes. Of course you can still create an underpowered hero, but I’m willing to accept that risk. With the ability to undo recent powers or just completely retcon using either in-game resources or real money, I much prefer having more options and less structure.

As much as I loved being in Paragon City again, I’m not planning to move back.

Postscript: By the way, if you haven’t seen it yet, go over to Dusty’s blog and check out the excellent Dual Pistols video he made.

I mentioned yesterday that there was a new Ask Cryptic column where they started the process of fixing the mess caused by the Vibora Bay announcement. Well today Cryptic release a new State of the Game from Chronomancer as well as small news post from Rekhan with a bullet points summary of the coming expansion and two screen shots.

Here’s the highlights from the SotG message.

Kitchen Sink Patch

Roper starts off with a mea culpa regarding the all of the problems cause by the Kitchen Sink patch. Basically Cryptic admits to not having done sufficient testing, and has attempted to correct this by increasing the size of their QA team and instituting better internal controls to keep changes from STO and other projects from providing nasty surprises.

Communication Improvements

He also expands on what they stated in the previous day’s Ask Cryptic about how they’re intending to improve communication:

• bi-weekly columns for Ask Cryptic and State of the Game
• GM blog for a community channel to the support staff
• monthly chat via IRC with the devs
• an “all-company supergroup” to provide a more visible company presence in the game and additional PvP events
• website overhaul and additional web content: monthly fiction releases, screenshots, fan art, wallpaper, and developer special features (intended to provide the dev’s point of view on the game)

There is a lot of good stuff here. Most of this is specific enough that the community will be able to easily grade Cryptic’s follow through in the coming months, and I can guarantee that there are some heavy forum users keeping a keen eye on how well Cryptic does fulfilling these promises.

Vibora Bay Revelation Expansion

They’ve changed the name of the upcoming expansion from Vibora Bay to Revelation, supposedly this reflects the change from working name to release name. There’s a short mention of a new arch-villain Therakiel (half-angel/demon) who is the focus of the expansion. Then Chronomancer gets into the part most of the Champions player community was waiting for: the expansion will be free. There’s not much additional details beyond general promises of new powers, new play areas, etc. He repeated that the content is designed for the 37-40 range with a new level 40 repeatable lair. Roper was also very careful to emphasize that the change from paid to free doesn’t reflect the quality or size of the expansion in anyway, and closes out the post by promising additional details “very soon.”

Rekhan’s News

Most of the information here is a summary of what Bill already posted in the SotG message, with one new and important detail. Champions Online – Revelation will be released in mid-March of 2010.

Forum Followup

There’s a Chronomancer followup post in the SotG forum thread where he addresses a couple of additional player concerns.

First, they are looking at some technical issues to tie the PTS and Live server accounts together to provide testers with in-game rewards for helping out.

Second, he provides a clarification of his mention about the quality level of the expansion having nothing to do with the pricing change:

What I am saying is that we didn’t consider the expansion to be sub-par and so we’re just giving it to you, or that in some way you’re getting less than we always intended because we’re not charging for it. I am ecstatic that we can provide this level of content to you for the low, low price of nothing! We’re having an internal play test right now and it’s been great to see people that haven’t been through the zone before be blown away at how it looks and plays.

Third, Roper tries to address the whole “STO stole our developers” idea that a lot of players have used as a reason why the game are languished the last few months in regards to patches and communication, saying they’ve been focused solely on the upcoming Revelation expansion and not losing resources to STO.

For me, the best part is the last sentence of his post:

We don’t expect one post to fix everything, but it’s our first step of many in the right direction!

I’m happy to see that they’ve reconsidered the idea of a paid expansion six months after launch, and I like what they’re promising regarding increased communication with the community from all levels of the Cryptic Champions team. Two days of announcements are a good start, but they are only a start.

So like I said yesterday, now we just need to see if  the Cryptic Champions team can deliver on their promises.

There was a new Ask Cryptic yesterday. I couldn’t find a link, but I think this is the first one since before the game launched. Cryptic picked seven questions out of a 32 page, 320 post forum thread, and while that seems like a very small percentage I do think they picked all of the questions that the general community was most interested in finding out answers to.

Because of the recent uproar regarding the last State of the Game message, a lot of the questions were regarding future plans for the game both in terms of design and communication:

Jackalope: …you can expect to see new adventures every other month (roughly). The content will be far more story based and focused on the background of the game.

Chronomancer: …we’re going to be focusing more on creating content to provide multiple paths of advancement within Champions Online. The plan is to create more of what you want in smaller bites so we can do them on shorter timelines.

Arkayne: …We’re stepping up the communication. We’re going to do more Ask Cryptics, more Dev Chats, we’re going to be in-game, playing with you more, Our GMs are going to start letting you know the status on the current bugs, and the entire development team is going to start being more active on the forums.

As someone who enjoys theme based characters, I was especially happy to see this:

IchbinVol: Will there be any reason to have a theme based character in the future? Perhaps a synergy bonus for having a certain set of skills?

BigOtter: That’s actually one of the goals of our Tier 4 powers being introduced in our upcoming expansion – to provide high-end thematic meta-powers for each of the power groups.

Cryptic does seem to be making a start on their forum promises from last week about more and better communication. They also seem to have a proper sense of urgency:

Arkayne: …Oh, and that “soon” we’re talking about up there, that’s not a “soon(tm)” that’s a soon, as in as soon as humanly possible soon.

I do want to say, that I’m still enjoying the game. I’ve not yet reached the level cap and I’ve been leveling slowly enough that all of the content holes in the late game seem to be getting filled before I get there. My main hero, Silver Hunter, is level 35 and still has a full mission log. I’d not really been concerned about direction and communication issues, except peripherally, until the SotG announcement of Vibora Bay. While it is too soon to say for sure, it does seem that Cryptic is now genuinely aware of their PR issues and is starting to address them.

So now we just need to see if  Cryptic’s Champions team can follow through.

Couldn’t come up with a witty title, especially since this is a real ramble of a post. Lemme know if you have a title suggestion. So…

Lord of the Rings

Turbine has announced their next book release, Volume 3 Book 1: Oath of the Rangers. Aside from the advancement of the epic story quests, it seems to be all skirmishes and crafting recipes. I don’t know what I was hoping for but that wasn’t it. I did read a rumor that Volume 1 will be completely solo-able though which is nice, I only wish I remember where I’d heard that or how reliable the source was.

Star Trek and Champions

Despite what my Twitter says I didn’t actually play STO last night. If you look at my Raptr profile you’ll see I spent 3 minutes in the game because I launched the patcher last night and decided to click on Engage since the launcher said the server was up. I did get the game to launch to a “No logins authorized at this time,” which was enough for Raptr to think I was playing. The best part was a message I got from Blamefulgecko wanting to know how I got in so soon, was accidental but very funny.

No real news on the Champions front as far as the expansion controversy. I played a bit last night and had one disconnect early on but that was it. Crafting still seems to be a problem but only for some specific items (can’t remember which, sorry). The only major irritation from my play session was the camera spin bug. I’m not sure what causes it, but occasionally the camera would start to rotate wildly around my hero. It seemed to happen most often when I was flying. Fortunately, I’ve always been able to stop it by using the mouse look, but still I will be glad when it gets fixed.

Last thing I wanted to mention is there’s a follow up from the STO team regarding upcoming features. Lots of interesting stuff there, especially for Klingon players. For me, the IP location additions are the most interesting. All of the high level stuff is something I won’t be ready to see for quite a while. The most interesting bit though is the last paragraph under the Engage heading.

These updates are entirely free to Star Trek Online subscribers.

Obviously this was included in response to the Champions drama going on. I wonder how much communication is going on between the two teams, because PR-wise they don’t seem to be on the same page. I’m imagining Craig having a little hallway conversation with Bill about his timing.

I took the day off from work yesterday because it was my birthday and played video games all day. With a wife, a 16 month old son, a job, a home, and two dogs, this was a big deal to get a whole day (guilt free) and was very very fun. It isn’t often that you can give yourself time, but that’s what it feels like I did yesterday. I played a about 2 hours of of LotRO and and hour of EVE, but most of my time (nearly 7 hours) was in Champions Online. There also happened to be a big patch yesterday in Champions and it caused some issues.

Lag? Lag. Lag!

I started in Monster Island and was having a lot of problems with rubber banding, freezes, and stutters. I found Millennium City to be a lot smoother (which is counter to some peoples experiences based on the forums). I also did a little crafting and didn’t have any of the item loss some people were complaining about. I don’t remember the client patching anything, but the lag issues did seem to be mostly solved by yesterday evening. I’m planning to pop in tonight and see if Monster Island is still having issues.

As a side note, even in the middle of the day on a week day there were plenty of players on the server. I was able to group up several times for missions within minutes of asking in zone chat.

Paid Expansion Already?

Besides the patch and lag issues, there was also a State of the Game released two days ago. Most of it was interesting to me but not exciting until I got to the part about a new zone, Vibora Bay. I’m not at the cap yet, my main is at level 34, and I’m still doing Monster Island content. I haven’t done the crisis mission for Lemuria yet. Still, new content is always a good thing. The expansion wording that Roper used didn’t even click for me until I was reading through the forum follow-ups and say this one from Daeke. Paid expansion before the game has been out a full year?

Of course the nerd rage on the forums has gone super nova.

My initial reaction was disappointment. When I read the SoG message I assumed that this was a free update. I think partly because Champions now occupies the same position in my mind that City of Heroes used to and CoH always had a lot of free content updates. After some thought though, I’ve gone from disappointment to wait and see. First, I realized that I just paid $20 for a mini-expansion from Turbine. Second, I had skimmed Daeke’s post the first time and missed  a very important not that he used. This expansion is not going to be full box price. Third, there are way too many details still missing to have any kind of valid opinion. All we know right now is Vibora Bay has content for levels 37-40 and that it will cost some amount of money.

So, I’m just going to wait and see. The only thing I’ve really decided in the last few days is I need to not read forums for MMO’s, with the exception of the Dev Tracker, in order to preserver my sanity and positive outlook on life.

So back in October, I mentioned a problem I was having with my GeForce GTX 275 in Champions Online after updating to the (then) current drivers of 191.07 from 190.62. Since then I have kept an occasional eye on the Champions forums and gone to the Nvidia site once or twice to see if there were new drivers, but I’ve stayed at 190.62. At least until I caught this twitter status from Daeke. Even though I wasn’t having problems with the 190.62 version, I do like to stay up-to-date, and I’d had no problems rolling back the drivers before. So….

I downloaded the new 196.21 drivers, which were released on the 19th, and did an install. I haven’t had a chance to play Star Trek Online’s beta with them yet, but I did get into Champions Online and did some very informal testing (I’m a developer after all, not QA). So far, I’ve noticed none of the stuttering I’d been having with the old drivers and performance seemed just as good for me as always. We’ll see how it holds up this weekend when I get a chance to play more.