Whoops! It’s Friday?

So, um yeah, I guess it’s Friday already. I had big plans for an AoC post and a few other things this week. Apparently this week had other plans for me. So instead, I present you with the following summary, excuses, and cuteness.

My Age of Conan retry was going very well up until Wednesday, that’s when UPS delivered my copy of Red Dead Redemption. I’d been waiting to post my thoughts until I’d escaped from Tortage, but, as a summary, my ranger Brynulf has reached level 19 and is near the end of his destiny quest.

My Xbox hasn’t gotten much use since I finished Mass Effect 2, but Red Dead Redemption has had me hooked the last few nights. This game was completely not on my radar. Scott from Pumping Irony asked my via Raptr a few days ago if I was getting it, so I took a look. Hmmm, a Rock Star open world shooter like GTA 4? Probably not something I’ll enjoy, I played the last GTA game for less than a day. I decided to check out a couple of game play videos anyway, and based on what I saw, I ordered it. So far, no regrets. Well except for a lack of sleep.

Besides RDR, I’ve had some real life stuff distracting me from writing. On Wednesday, my dad had his 62 birthday, and my sister also had her second child, both on the same day. Getting your third grandson, that’s a nice birthday present. Yesterday was my fourth wedding anniversary, and tonight we have a babysitter and dinner plans.

So, that’s that. I do have several drafts waiting for attention, so week should be a busy one.

Radiance Poll

There’s a poll up on the LotRO forums regarding radiance gear be sure to register your opinion or you don’t get to complain later. Thanks to Casual Stroll to Mordor for the heads-up.

I voted to remove radiance completely. Of course, I don’t think it’s likely that Turbine will really do that, but hope springs eternal. The second most popular choice (and there’s a large gap between second and third place) was to make radiance deed based. If radiance has to stay in the game, I would prefer deeds over gear. Partly, I think it is more in keeping with the spirit of the lore, after all the books were about the triumph of spirit than who had the coolest sword. Still, deeds will have their own issues, especially if are tied to some stupidly high kill count, but that’s an article for another day.

Try, Try, Try Again.

I’ve decided to give Age of Conan another shot. Again. The last time I tried resubscribing it was mostly just to see how the game looked on the new PC. That retry didn’t go very well:

I let Age of Conan expire last week, and this retry marks the least amount of progress I’ve ever made in the game.  Generally when I retry the game I create a new character and get about halfway through Tortage.  This time around, I barely got into Tortage.  I may go back if something huge changes with the game, but I’m not sure anything would make much of a difference.  The graphics are good and the combat is fun, but I just don’t have any interest in the world or the story.

But after reading about the recent adventures of GeeCee, Adventure Historian and Rowan, I decided to give it another shot. Honestly, my last try was pretty half-hearted anyway, I was mostly just interested in seeing what the DX10 graphics looked like, and I was interested in a lot of other games. The new expansion and the concept of accruing bonus levels (to used to boost content gaps in the leveling process) added two more reasons to give it another try.

So, I’ve ordered a copy of Rise of the Godslayer (UPS should be delivering it tomorrow), downloaded and patched up the current client, and committed myself to a six month subscription. At the very least, I’m going to hit level 20 and get out of Tortage.

I’ve already logged onto my old server, Wiccana, to see what characters I still had. I was thinking that Funcom had started purging characters under level 20, but all of my old characters were still listed on my login page and my highest was level 11. I didn’t try jumping into any of them though. I decided I wanted a completely clean slate, so I deleted all the characters from my account, and then I created a new Cimmerian Ranger named Brynulf. I ran through the initial quests from the beach to the gates of Tortage, mostly just to reacquaint myself with the UI and mess around a bit. I’m not quite happy with my character’s looks or positive about playing a Ranger, so I plan to reincarnate Brynulf tonight.

See you in Tortage.

Captain’s Log 87958.97

Captain’s Log, Stardate: 87958.97

Admiral Bryn Aev, Captain of the U.S.S. Nym Kae

We’ve just completed a patrol of the Arawath Sector. The crew and I are returning via transwarp conduit to Earth Spacedock to resupply before heading to the Gamma Orionis transwarp conduit near Risa. Since we’re going to be in the neighborhood, I thought it would be an excellent time to schedule shore leave for the crew. After spending months in Cardassian space dealing with Jem’Hadar, and now looking forward to months fighting the Borg, a few days on the beaches of Risa should be excellent for morale.

Out of Character…

Bryn made max level, Rear Admiral 5, in Star Trek Online on Sunday night. He still had several missions in his journal from RA1-4 and hadn’t even entered the end-game zone of Gamma Orionis. To celebrate Admirals Longasc and Tipa took Bryn to the Borg infested sector and tried to get him killed in elite-level exploration missions. They succeeded once, but Bryn and the crew of the Nym Kae did pretty well. It took a heavy attack of Undine battleships to trigger the first experience of the new death penalty. Fortunately the Nym Kae suffered only minor damage to it’s sick bay which slowed the pace at which crew men were cleared to return to duty stations.

While not a difficult accomplishment, this is another check mark on my goals for the year just like reaching the level cap in Champions Online.

Star Trek: the Novels

While I do read a lot, I don’t usually read much in the way of tie-ins to movies or TV. Oddly I have no problem watching and enjoying a movie or TV show that’s based (sometimes loosely) on a book I’ve read, but somehow the reverse never works out well. Recently, I’ve started to read some tie-ins though and for the most part been pleased, for example the excellent Mass Effect books. So when I saw there was a book tie-in for STO called Needs of the Many, I ordered it from Amazon.

I was late getting started on reading it, so I did end up reading Adventure Historian’s and MMO Gamer Chick’s reviews before I started. That might have caused me to drop my expectations a bit, but overall I enjoyed the book. I thought that the interviews with well known characters like Janeway, Seven of Nine, Quark, and Worf were done very well and stayed very true to their TV portrayals. The interviews with Maddox and La Forge alone were worth the read though. Data was my favorite character from Next Generation. I always wondered after watching Nemesis, if the foreshadowing that was done with Data and B-4 would ever be explored, so it was really good to see that finally happen. The timeline appendix included in the back was pretty nice too, but I think it’s more useful as a reference than entertainment.

Besides connecting the game to the TV and movie timeline, the other thing that reading Needs of the Many has done is generate some interest in reading more of the Trek novels. I recently discovered that there’s a series of novels that follow the Enterprise crew between Insurrection and Nemesis. Since there’s no Star Trek on television right now, this is the next best thing.

Star Trek Online Season 1.1 Update

The latest big update for STO is out. There’s the announcement on the main site and the patch notes in the forums. There’s some big things that some people have been waiting for and a lot of small things that are going to be great for fixing some small nit picks I have.

The big additions: Cryptic has added a death penalty and a difficulty slider. Neither of these things were anything I was looking forward to, beyond hoping that that wouldn’t affect me. The difficulty slider has three settings: normal, advanced, and elite. On normal difficulty the game remains the same as pre-1.1, no change to missions, and no death penalty. The higher difficulties include the death penalty and offer better rewards. I am more interested in exploring and experiencing the content, than in figuring out how to beat a tough encounter, so I’ll generally stay on the normal difficulty.

They’ve also done some balancing on Feedback Pulse, Subnucleonic Beam, and Viral Matrix. Of the three, Viral Matrix is one I use often and it’s switching from a straight hold to a power that knocks weapons, engines, and auxillary offline. The trick is they go offline in a random sequence and not all at once. This seems to me like a PvP related change, and I’m not quite sure how much it’ll impact me in PvE but it’ll definitely require some changes to my tactics.

Turn rate for ships has been switched from auxiliary to engines; now auxiliary is just for deflector, probe, and sensor powers.

The rest of the notes include some great quality of play improvements:

  • Players now get info about what types of commodities are needed in nearby clusters.
  • Commodity types needed within a cluster have been reduced from 5 to 3.
  • Commodities can now be replicated on-board ship, but they’re more expensive that way.
  • Commodity tool-tips now give information about where they can be purchased.
  • Commodity missions now provide a gift in addition to the normal rewards.
  • Exchange UI now allows sorting by price or item name.
  • Items on the Exchange now expire after 1 week.
  • You can drap and drop an item from inventory to the search box to look for similar items.
  • Starships will now adjust their heading on warp-out so they don’t warp through planets.
  • Removed some of the bas spawn points in Deep Space Encounters

I’m looking forward to getting patched up tonight and seeing how the changes play.

Poz on No Prisoners, No Mercy

I listen to a lot of podcasts. One of my favorites is No Prisoners, No Mercy hosted by two nuns (not kidding), Sr. Julie and Sr. Fran. The Sisters have had a lot of good interviews with MMO developers in the past, including Bill Roper, Paul Barnett, and Richard Bartle. Their most recent is with Champions Executive Producer Shannon Posniewski, Poz on the forums.

It’s a great listen if you want to figure out how to pronounce his name and find out a little more about him, which I did enjoy. There’s also some interesting information in the interview about the Revelation expanion and the communication issues from the first part of this year. Go check it out.

No Prisoners, No Mercy #59 – Meet “The Poz”

Evolution of the Silver Hunter

Making a character in City of Heroes and Champions Online is a creative endeavor for me, if I had any talent for art at all it would very much be like creating a comic book. I don’t just throw together a random set of costume pieces, pick an available name, and charge into the game. Sometimes, a hero name will spark my imagination, sometimes it’ll be a power, but usually it’s a specific costume piece.

Silver Hunter in the Paragon Age

The City of Heroes version of Silver Hunter was inspired by the head texture you see pictured below. The name, the powers, and the back-story all came afterwards. The texture made me think of a combination of the Vision, the Martian Manhunter, and the Silver Surfer.


click on the images above for larger versions

Silver Hunter in the Champion Age

When Champions Online launched, the Silver Hunter was the first hero I made. I originally tried to duplicate my CoH costume but couldn’t find any matching textures. Instead, I focused on the concept of an alien sentient android and started over. It took a few iterations, but I’m very happy with how the CO version turned out.


click on the images above for larger versions

Back-Story from CoH to CO

You can also see that the Silver Hunter’s back-story has changed quite a bit when you compare the short description I banged out for his Hero Registration card to the full story or the summary I’ve written for his Champions bio.

click on the images above for larger versions

Meet the Silver Hunter

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.

Captain’s Log 87919.84

Captain’s Log, Stardate: 87919.84

Captain Bryn Aen of the U.S.S. Auryn

We’d only just completed a mission to remove some True Way terrorist who were threatening shipping lanes into DS9 and notified Captain Kurland via subspace when I received a private communication from Admiral Quinn. I’ve been promoted to Admiral. Of course this means leaving the Cardassian front to return to Earth Spacedock for the ceremony. It also means I’ll be getting a new command.

I said the same thing when leaving the Lukas behind, but the Auryn has been an excellent ship. More than that, this was the first ship with a Kae name, something which has come to mean quite a bit more to me than I expected.

Regardless of my feelings for change, we’ve set a course for Sol System, and I’ve sent messages home with the news. There are so few Kaes in Starfleet yet that any news is a big deal, so being the first Kae reach Admiral will be huge.

Captain’s Log, Supplemental

Rear Admiral Bryn Aen, Captain of the U.S.S. Nym Kae

The ceremony was quite moving, and I was happy to have friends like Rear Admiral Longasc there to congratulate me.

Our new ship is an experimental hybrid of Luna and Sol class deep-space science vessels. It has been registered as NX-981031-B, in honor of the Auryn. I’ve christened her the Nym Kae, which means Pride of Kae in my native language. To be honest, I don’t think she’s quite as beautiful as the Auryn. Admittedly, I was pretty attached to the Lukas as well, so we shall see how I feel after we get a few hundred light years on her.

The bridge crew has settled into their new stations quickly; this command change is not nearly has big as the last one was. Moving from an escort to a science vessel required senior staff changes and quite a bit of retraining both for the crew and myself. This time most everyone has the same duties, we just have a larger crew compliment and some better equipment.

We’re planning a short shakedown cruise to Wolf 359, per our tradition, before returning to the Cardassian border. Hopefully the Nym Kae will live up to her name.

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