Peaceful

With the 1.7 patch of Minecraft out, I decided to start a new single player map. The one that I’ve been playing on was generated before dyes were added to the game or sandstone started to occur naturally, and I really wanted to find some lapis lazuli blocks. I’m sure you can guess why.

I did decide to do something different this time, I set the difficulty level on peacefully. While playing survival is fun, it causes me to play much much more conservatively. So much so that I very rarely die from monsters (falling in lava is another story). Still having monsters turned on makes exploring caves nerve wracking, and this time around I just want to focus on building and checking out the new features.

It’s been very strange not worrying about building a secure base, or placing torches every half dozen blocks, or keeping an eye on the sun so I don’t get caught outside at night.

Strange but liberating.

I don’t plan to play like this all the time. I’m sure at some point I’ll get bored of building and exploring the world and decide to turn the difficulty back up to normal, but for now it’s a nice change of pace. When I break into a new cavern, I’m just excited for what resources I might find and not worried of what might be lurking in the dark.

City of F2P

I just saw the news via PC Gamer that City of Heroes is going free-to-play. I can’t say I’m surprised. I’m sure that NCSoft and Paragon Studios have been looking for ways to renew interest in the game and saw Champions Online’s renewed success. I’m just glad that NCSoft didn’t shutdown the game as they’ve never been shy about that before, although admittedly for much younger games.

Free or not, I’m not planning on going to go back to the game. Just like with Age of Conan, the subscription isn’t what keeps me from playing. It’s time.

Unlike Conan though, I do like the Paragon City setting and lore. I played back when a comic came in the mail every month and I enjoyed the two books that were released. But the lore doesn’t offset the aging character models and combat system. I prefer the combat pacing and mechanics better in Champions Online, as well as the open power system and newer graphics. The only reasons I’ve gone back to CoH in recent months have been for nostalgia during free reactivation weekends.

The F2P plan itself is a pretty standard hybrid subscription model with an in-game store, VIP members getting point stipends monthly, and separate tiers for free players, those who’ve spent some money in the store and subscribers. The most interesting feature is that they are creating a VIP only server and giving VIPs one free transfer a month.

Hopefully the new model works just as well for Paragon Studios and NCSoft as it has for Cryptic and Turbine.

Distracted

I seem to have taken an extended, unintentional break from gaming. I did get some time in STO last Tuesday to check out the coming Season 4 changes on Tribble, but that’s been it.

Instead, I’ve been up to my eye-balls learning the Android OS. I finally got tired of waiting on the Bionic to come out and instead picked up the Thunderbolt. I’m actually pretty impressed with my self-control as my contract was up in early April and I managed to wait until mid-June. In the end, I realized that specs aside I’d rather patronize HTC than Motorola. HTC’s shown more willingness recently to serve their customers, plus I realized I preferred the HTC’s Sense UI over Moto’s Blur and I can lock in an unlimited 4G LTE data plan now, just in case.

So instead of logging into any MMO’s or firing up the Xbox 360, I’ve been playing with my newest toy. Learning the OS, checking out tons of apps, and learning the programming APIs. I’m still working up the courage to root it, but seeing half a dozen apps I can’t uninstall is helping.

It may seem odd, since I’m a Java developer professionally, to also spend my time doing the same thing all weekend. But after working on ten year old websites all week, getting to play around with a brand new platform is pretty fun. Besides, I have a couple of utilities I wrote for my old BlackBerry Storm that I want to have on the new phone.

Regardless, I’m sure my odd combination of OCD/ADD will have me back in Telara and the Alpha Quadrant soon.

Ground Combat Video

As promised yesterday, I’ve uploaded a couple of videos to Youtube.

Not ground combat related, but here’s a quick peek at the new animated loading screen. It’s a minor thing, but I like that it adds a bit more Trek feel of the game.

Next, here’s two quick snippets and one longer one of the new ground combat. The first is from Stranded in Space, the remastered mission where you rescue the crew of the Azura. The second and third are from Collateral Damage,a Borg mission on Hotep IV in Gamma Orionis.

Finally, I cut together a series of clips showing the new FX for the different weapon types. I didn’t try to rotate through all of the different damage types, so most of the clips are for Tetryon and there’s two Antiproton, but it does show all of the new primary and secondary attacks.

Ground Combat Feedback

Something I don’t think I was clear about yesterday is that the new aiming mode is not the reason for the change in pacing of the combat. It just makes ground combat more engaging. The speed of fights is from the revamp of weapon damages as well as a change to how shielding and health works. From Daniel Stahl on the forums:

Also note that we have changed the difficulty of all enemies in the game. Most basic mobs are 2 shot simple now. Lieutenants and above get more challenging. A captain is expected to be a challenging encounter that can take tactics to deal with. A captain + sub lieutenants is expected to be difficult.

If you are one shotting Captains – then that is a bug and we want to adjust – so post details if you run into this situation.

This is also the very first build of the ground combat upgrade on Tribble, and the STO team is looking for as much feedback as possible on the new mechanics. So take a little time and try it out. Directions for signing up for Tribble and copying your character over are on the forums.

Ground Combat Update is on Tribble

The first Season 4 build is up on Tribble (see the patch notes here and here). There are a lot of improvements, but the biggest one is the new ground combat update.

My expectations for ground combat have gone through a complete cycle from apathy to excitement. At first, I didn’t really care that it was being revamped. I’ve preferred space combat since the very first time I played the game and always treated ground combat as just a delay before getting back to my ship. As I started to get an idea of what Cryptic was doing from listening to interviews, reading the forums, and seeing sneak peaks on Twitter, I started to get more and more excited. The duty roster is still the main feature I’m looking forward to in Season 4, but ground combat has become a close second.

So I’ve spent a couple of hours playing on Tribble tonight, and I have to say that ground combat is a lot of fun now. Switching from RPG mode to FPS mode is smooth and easy to do. Opening my crew screen automatically switches to RPG mode so I can use my mouse to switch equipment around, I can tell this is a beta feature though since opening the map doesn’t do the same. The FPS aiming takes a little bit to adjust to, and it’s a little weird that your beam doesn’t hit exactly where you point since really what the aiming is doing is selecting a target not actually pinpointing where you’re firing. But it is a vast improvement over the current system.

Combat is much much faster and more exciting. Changes to shield and health stats as well as weapons, mean that battles are over in one or two minutes instead of five or ten. There’s also much less of the goofy backpedaling to deal with melee enemies.

The guns are also much more interesting and varied. In taking my main to Vice Admiral 1, I only ever used two weapons: a stun pistol and a sniper rifle. The only variation was what beam type I used. The new weapons are really fun though and I forsee a lot of swapping between the different rilfes, pistols, and assault weapons.

The only downside is, I don’t think I’ll be able to tolerate ground combat on the live server anymore.

Besides the big combat update, there’s also a neat new animated loading screen as well as a really cool new interface for ship requisition (not the C-store).

I took a few Fraps videos while playing tonight, I should have some up tomorrow to share for anyone who doesn’t have an active sub right now or doesn’t like to mess with the test server.

Distracted

After catching up on the Champions comic series, I took a bit of a vacation from MMOs over the weekend. I’m not burned out, but I was much more interested in playing some Minecraft and doing some reading.

Speaking of Minecraft, I was catching up in the Mojang Twitter list I caught this impressive piece of news from Notch:

2.5 million sales! That’s as much as Diablo 1 and FarCry, according to Wikipedia.

Pretty incredible for a game that’s not even finished yet.

E3 2011: Day 3

LotRO – I caught an exciting bit of news yesterday: phasing is coming to LotRO. Why this wasn’t mentioned at all in the Isengard announcement I can’t imagine. Possibly it’s not marketable enough or a common enough term, but I kind of doubt that given WoW’s popularization of it. These are the kinds of details that I mentioned I was going to wait for yesterday, but I hadn’t expected them to come out so quickly.

E3 Sidenote: That’s it? Seems like the E3 news really faded quickly this year. I didn’t see anything else in the news feeds yesterday that caught my attention. That could be a good thing I guess, it’s not like I don’t have a stack of games I want to play already.

E3 2011: Day 2

Nintendo – I haven’t played a Nintendo game since the NES, so yesterday’s E3 held very little of interest for me as far as the big console announcements. I did keep an eye on Twitter though and caught a couple of articles. While I’m impressed that Nintendo is finally paying some attention to graphics, I’m not sold on their new controller. It looks too large to hold comfortably for any length of time.

LotRO – Turbine announced Rise of Isengard and released a cool trailer. Unfortunately there’s not much real information yet. The level cap is going up to 75 (which we already knew) and they’re adding one new raid and three new regions: Dunland, Gap of Rohan, and Isengard. The biggest news is that you can pre-order and get an in-game mount and some cosmetics now.

My first instinct was to get the Legendary version. Then I thought about it a bit. I haven’t played in months, aside from some quick logins to make sure my housing maintenance was paid up. So, since I have until September 26th, I am going to wait a bit and see what additional information comes out. As good as the cosmetics look, I’m curious how my points the expansion would cost. Is it possible I could get it for free using my accumulated lifetime stipend? Do I really want to pay $10 extra for three colors instead of $40 for just one? I may end up spending the money, but not yet.