The 10/10 project: Champions of Regnum (Day 5)

My fifth day of the 10/10 project brought me to “Champions of Regnum“. This is a free to play MMORPG with a focus on RvR (open world PvP, so to say) with three factions. It was originally released in 2007 according to the Wikipedia entry. I noticed it some time after it was released on Steam on February 27, 2013. It features open world PvP in specific (open) areas of the map with three different factions. This, of course, reminded me of Warhammer Online. I know that Dark Age of Camelot was earlier with 3-faction PvP and Champions of Regnum is actually older than WAR, but WAR is the only one of those three that I ever really played. And I loved the idea and lots of their concepts (not the execution, though). So I was excited to try out Champions of Regnum.

Let me tell you that I have not tried the PvP in CoR yet. So if you’re looking for information about that, you need to go elsewhere. A few hours were not enough to dip my toes into PvP. One thing that I think isn’t as good as WAR which let you enter PvP as soon as you were done creating your character. But maybe it’s the same in CoR and I just didn’t get to do it because I had no idea it works. ;) The region that I was in at the beginning, however, was a safe zone. But let’s start at the beginning…

The installation was fast and smooth, just as most game installations are that go through Steam. I created an account and noticed the little “Gamigo” icon on the game’s launcher. I don’t know if I could have logged on with a regular Gamigo account, I didn’t try that. After registering a new account, I logged on and saw that there was exactly one server, Valhalla, with “(Germany)” at the end. Some Googling followed and I learned that apparently, the game is IP-locking you to a certain region. Since I’m in Germany, I only saw Gamigo’s German server. They also have a French one. Without changing anything in the game’s client settings, I could not change my server. There is some information about how to do that in this thread on Steam’s forum. Anyway, I played on the German server. It was nice to see people greet each other in the chat – or rather, greet the faction. It seemed cozy.

As I mentioned, there are three factions. One, Alsius, had a bonus of 25% extra XP and extra gold earned. Ignis gave a 10% bonus to XP gain. Syrtis has no bonus. I assume that’s because Syrtis has the highest population, but it wasn’t explained anywhere. I would have liked to get more information than that. I would also have loved to be able to change the resolution before continuing. The graphics settings can only be changed after entering the game. Also, if you do change the graphic settings and it’s something that requires a restart, my client tried to restart but crashed. Those were the only crashed I encountered, though.

Back to the factions: I googled once more and found this forum post. Alsius has dwarfs, so I really wanted to play those! The wiki entry also mentioned that Syrtis start in a forest area. I did not want to play Syrtis, though, because it looked like they already were the biggest faction and even for just trying out the game, I did not want to do that. Also, elves. No, thank you. Alsius start in a snowy area, but since it was still freezing here in real life last weekend, I really did not want to see any more snow, even if just in a game. So, Ignis with their desert region was my choice. All three factions’ race choices can be previewed, by the way. Only when you have created a character, you are locked to this faction unless you delete all your characters which then makes you able to choose a different faction (at least, I assume you can re-choose your faction then). All three factions have the “Lamai” race (which can be seen in the screenshots below). They reminded me a bit of asura from Guild Wars 2, so I chose one of them.

One weird thing I noticed in quest hubs was some “clicking” noise that appeared irregularly. It was definitely annoying especially when you can’t figure out where it’s coming from and how to stop it. I realized what it was after a while: It can be heard whenever the NPCs have a bunny-ears-helmet appear. Yes, a bunny-ears-helmet. It disappeared again after a few seconds with no noise. This is, of course, not relevant to the gameplay, but it was very strange and distracted me from the game quite a bit. ;)

The game does a good-enough job at introducing you to the movement controls, how to accept, do and finish a quest, what the NPCs are for, etc. What I did not see was an explanation about the discipline points, etc. that you get for earning a level. Maybe I missed it, though. It was at my warrior trainer (I chose a warrior which shouldn’t really surprise my regular readers as some kind of heavy melee fighter is usually my first choice) and I remember that I did have a quest that introduced me to the warrior trainer.

If you want to know more, there is a “how to play the game” section in the options which gives you information about several topics including PvP. I only got to level 6 or so and up till then, there was no mentioning of PvP in the basic tutorial quests. It’s nice that there is the option, though, and that you can read about aspects of the game whenever you need this information.

The controls were explained quite well, but there wasn’t that much to explain anyway. W and S for moving forwards and backwards. You can also click on the ground to move. A and D are for strafing left and right which was nice, because I always re-bind my keys to do exactly that. I’m a mouse- and not a key-turner. You can jump in this game unless you are on a mount. Also, when you are on a mount and get any kind of damage (like falling damage), you are dismounted immediately. I assume this was done with a focus on PvP balance. Mounts make you faster, but they limit the terrain you can move on by now allowing you to jump and if you’re hit, you’re without a mount immediately.

The user interface doesn’t give you a lot of choices. I want my character portrait at the lower part of the screen and close to the centre. Especially in PvP, I look at my character most of the time and I appreciate not having to move my eyes away from my character to spot how much life I have left. But as far as I know, I was not able to move any of the windows to any other positions.

The gameplay itself was standard questing. If you’ve played World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online or any other MMO that features quests, you know the deal. As I said in the beginning, I have not tried any of the PvP. Since this game is mostly about PvP, I guess this “first impression piece” is missing an essential part. ;) But as the project says, devote a few hours to the game and report about it. Now it’s time to move on to the next MMO.

I can say, however, that taken everything together, the game did not impress me. The graphics aren’t good or up-to-date (the game is from 2007, after all), but I liked the reflections in the water and all in all, it set a good desert-y atmosphere. The movement and controls seemed a little off at times. The UI is a bit too restricted when it comes to letting you move windows. The quests aren’t anything special either. And yet… I can’t bring myself to say it’s a bad or even a boring game. There was something about the game that drew me in. I can’t even say what it was. Maybe it is because I haven’t had the chance yet to test any of the RvR or PvP. This is what made me interested in the game in the first place and this is what I still haven’t seen. The map and the conversations in the faction chat made me curious, though. I’m certain this wasn’t the last time I logged in.

I’ll end this blog post with a few screenshots I took which give a pretty good picture of the region I played in. And I tried to find some good videos about the game on YouTube, but I wasn’t able to find many.

Here’s a video that was uploaded by the developers. It shows a mage (I think? I didn’t play that class) in RvR. Ignore the bad music choice. I have no idea why they added this song, as in my opinion, it just doesn’t fit to RvR combat action. Also, the animations/movements of the character “freeze” during combat. I didn’t experience that when I played, but maybe it’s different when there are more characters on the screen.

Here’s another YouTube video, this time not by the developers. I only watched the beginning, so I have no idea what they’re saying later on. But I liked the beginning (cute laughs there).

Part of the “How to play” section that explains the RvR

UI: Buy/sell window, inventory and character panel

Achievements tab

Discipline and power points to specialize your character.

Ignis. One of the three factions in the game.

Cute and a bit like asura.

World map… I think?

The 10/10 project: Dark Age of Camelot (Day 4)

I chose Dark Age of Camelot which was released in 2001 to be the 4th game I would play for the 10/10 project. I played Warhammer Online for a full year when it got released and I’d heard so many good things about Dark Age of Camelot from WAR players. I guess just as much as current Guild Wars 2 players hear about Guild Wars. Warhammer was thought to be DAoC’s successor, at least in spirit. But WAR only has 2 realms whereas DAoC has three. Well, there are many differences between those two games, but the debate of 3 factions vs. 2 factions was and still is pretty popular. I think it’s better with three factions, but unfortunately, a lot of game designers prefer two factions. But well, this isn’t about the question how many factions a game should have, after all. This is about DAoC and that game has three.

Even though it’s a very old game, DAoC still has a sub. You can sign up for the 14 day trial which I did to try out the game. I knew from the beginning that no matter how good the game is, I would not sub to it in the end. There are so many other good games out there where I don’t need to pay every month if I don’t want to, so it’d be a waste of my money.

The installation process was fast and smooth. There were no issues at all. After launching the game, the first thing I did was rejoice that it lets me play in windowed mode. I use two monitors and alt-tabbing out and in is annoying. I like to use the second monitor for chatting with friends who don’t happen to be playing the same games (or any games) at the same time. Unfortunately, I soon realized that the window was tiiiiny. And no matter what I tried, I couldn’t resize the window to the size of my screen. I’m going to go ahead a bit and tell you that this is only a problem for the very beginning until you’re finished with character creation. Once you log in with your character, the window changes and had the size of my screen. If I had known that before, it would have saved me 10 minutes of playing around and googling. ;)

The character creation is nice. The graphics show the age of the game, of course. There are lots of races (who belong to three different realms: Albion, Hibernia and Midgard) and classes to choose from. As the game has female dwarves, that’s what I tried out. I just can’t resist. ;)

Within less than 10 minutes of playing, I had encountered a few bugs and problems and that’s when I decided to quit playing. The tutorial is good enough to get you started, but something about the controls and movement was weird. I am not a key-turner and prefer turning with the mouse. Unfortunately, when I tried to do so, I kept looking at one direction and moving to another. At one point, my character got stuck and I couldn’t move at all, no matter what I did. I don’t remember how it got fixed… I think I relogged, but I’m not sure.It was weird, though, as it just happened without me doing anything or moving somewhere and it’s never good if that happens to a player within the first few minutes after starting the game.

I also wanted to move the different parts of the UI around on my screen and ended up with every single window at the same place – right next to my character at the center of the screen (see the screenshot on the left for an early stage with lots of windows stuck there while I tried to figure out what’s wrong). It took me quite a while and I even installed the game on bookahnerk’s PC to test what’s wrong. We finally figured out the source of the problems. I am a left-hander and I have the Razer DeathAdder left-hand edition. This is an ergonomic mouse for left-hander which, unfortunately, comes with the left and right mouse buttons switched. While I do need to use the mouse with my left hand (trying to use it with my right hand results in very slow movements and a headache plus concentration problems), I do not want to have the buttons switched. I grab a mouse, move it from the right side of the keyboard to the left and use it with my left hand. But that’s about the only thing I change when I’m using the PC of a right-hander.

Now in order to do that with the DeathAdder, I have to use the Windows controls to switch the left and right buttons back. Confusing? Yeah. ;) Most of the games do not have any issues with that. League of Legends is one that blatantly ignores the Windows settings which means that my mouse buttons stay switched. I think Torchlight 2 does that as well. Games like Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, Lord of the Rings Online don’t do it and just go along with the settings I chose in Windows. That means that the mouse is in my left hand. I use the physical left button with my middle finger to left-click and the physical right button to right-click with my index finger.

DAoC is special. Most of the controls, movements, etc. listen to the Windows settings (like right-clicking an NPC to talk to them), some ignore it (like moving the camera view with the mouse) and… the UI windows apparently listen to both. I left-click and I can kind of move the window but instead of… moving it, it gets repositioned at the center of the screen as the second command it listens to is “hide the cursor in the middle of the screen and look around with the camera”. – That’s probably a very bad explanation. Bookahnerk explained it a lot better to me once he had realized what went wrong. The bottom line, however, is that whenever I accidentally click on a window, it gets repositioned to the center of the screen and the only way to reliably get it away from there again is to go to the Windows controls, switch the mouse buttons, move the window away again, switch the mouse buttons back and continue playing.

That’s a very long-winded and, as I said, probably confusing explanation for: No, thank you. ;)

The good news about this game is that the starter zone wasn’t empty at all. So it seems that there are still people playing the game (you never know with such old games). But the monthly fee as well as the issues with my mouse mean that I am not interested in this game.

Recipe: Tiramisu-Cheesecake

My interests have shifted lately and instead of games, I thought I may write about cooking and baking and share recipes in this blog from now on. For example, I made a tiramisu cheesecake for Easter and this one is so good, I just have to share it with you! Games are boring. Cheesecake is better. :oD

Or, yeah, no. I do like baking and cooking, though and the cake up there is real. I shared that picture on Twitter yesterday and got a few responses from people who said that it looked good and as it’s a really easy recipe, I said I would translate it and hey, there’s a blog here and I can share the recipe very easily through it. I will, of course, not be changing the content of the blog for good. If baking isn’t your thing at all, check back again later as I’m planning to publish a first impression piece of “Dark Age of Camelot”. :)

As I’m not sure how the measurements work in the USA, here’s a conversion chart that looked quite helpful.

You’ll need:
- Ladyfingers (I usually need about 16)
- coffee (preferably espresso and not filter coffee as that is too watery with not enough coffee-taste)
- 400 grams of cream cheese
- 350 grams of mascarpone
- 120 grams of sugar
- 3 eggs
- dark chocolate or dark cocoa powder

Pre-heat the oven (140°C with a convection oven/fan oven – that’s 284°F).

If you have one, use a square baking pan. I used a round one which worked just as well in general, but you need to break some of the ladyfingers then, so the whole base of the baking pan is covered. I’ve used a round springform pan with a flat base. Ideally, you can cover the base with baking paper (which I didn’t do, so the base is still on the base. I can’t get it off without breaking the cake apart… ^^).

Whatever you choose, take the ladyfingers and put them on the base of the pan. Break them to fit them into holes. Then pour the coffee over them. I always use quite a lot of coffee, but they can usually soak a lot of it. The more, the better if you ask me. ;) If you don’t like the coffee flavour too much, use less of it. Alternatively, you could also use cocoa instead.

Mix the cream cheese, the mascarpone, the eggs and the sugar. Stir until it’s without lumps. You can also add a bit of Amaretto or whatever alcohol you usually like in your Tiramisu into the mix. As bookahnerk doesn’t like that, I usually don’t add any alcohol in there. Instead, I used a bit of the leftover coffee to add to the mix. Not too much or it gets too fluid. Then pour that mix over the ladyfingers.

Now it’s for you to decide: Cocoa powder of chocolate bits? I’ve put dark chocolate bits on top (or rather, as the cream-mix was really fluid, they sank right in… ^^) or you can leave it like that and put cocoa powder on top once it’s finished baking. I’d just suggest using dark chocolate with a higher percentage of cocoa than sugar or it’d get too sweet.

Put the baking pan into the oven for 50 – 60 minutes. Take it out if it’s getting too dark. I’ve had it in there for 60 minutes. At the end, it looked rather fluid still, but that’s okay. Leave it to cool for about an hour at least. Once the fat in the cake gets cold, it won’t be fluid anymore.

For optimal taste, do not eat it right out of the fridge. It should be at room temperature!

Guten Appetit! :)

The 10/10 project: Pirate101 (Day 3)

I have played (well, tried out, rather) Wizard101 before and expected Pirate101 to be more or less the same just in a pirate setting instead of the wizarding school. I was mostly right, it seems. The graphics reminded me a bit of Torchlight 2 – and of Wizard101, of course.

My first impression of the game was: “Awww, that’s cute!” It does give you the impression of being a game that’s primarily aimed at young gamers, though, especially with the security settings. You cannot create a character and give it any name you like. You get three parts and a wheel of choices for each part. My character’s name is “Practical Sonia W…something”. I forgot the last part. And that’s the bad thing about a naming system like that: I just chose anything because what I would have loved to create was a “Paeroka”, but that wasn’t possible. So there’s very little attachment to the name on my side. On the other hand, it also means that you won’t see any ridiculous or offensive names.

No free naming and the option to disallow chat are two things that I’ve seen in Pirate101 which probably only exist to make it a kid-friendly game. I’ve seen both in Wizard101 as well. When the chat option is active, you cannot chat and you cannot see anybody else chatting. You can use preset text like “Thanks”, etc. Others see a chat bubble that’s striked through next to your character’s name, so they know you can’t converse with them. As I’ve told bookahnerk, I could see myself play this game with a young sibling, my kid, etc. – if I had any. ;)

In general, I like the pirate setting. It’s definitely different from the usual fantasy stuff, but not that different in the end. You can only play as a human, but the game world has lots of races like froggies, foxes, and so on. So there’s definitely fantasy in there. The story was interesting enough, nothing too special or ground-breaking, but solid I’d say. At least, I did actually read what it’s all about. They mentioned “when you get your own ship” a few times. I haven’t gotten one yet, but I assume sooner or later, that would be the case. And the shop clearly shows items for your ship. Yes, it’s a free to play game with an item shop and the possibility to pay for a monthly sub. There are also weapons, etc. in the shop, but I’ve no idea if it’s “pay to win” or just “pay to avoid the item-grind”. What the shop website shows you is the there are regions/extra content you can unlock (a bit like they do it in Lord of the Rings Online, I guess, where you buy regions with their quests) or you can buy a membership starting at $9.95 a month. The good news is that after playing the game for the limited time that I have, I did not see one single advertisement for or nudging towards the shop. Yes, the shop icon is there and I did click on it to see what they have. But I did not notice any tooltip informing me of something like “this is restricted for free players, please subscribe or buy X unlock to use this”.

Speaking of the story, a nice little feature I saw was that after logging back into the game, I got a short recap of the quest chain’s story so far. That was neat. All in all, the tutorial (I assume it’s still part of the tutorial) has a nice flow. You’re told everything you need to know to get around in the game as it comes and you slowly get in touch with all the game’s features. I don’t like games that overwhelm you with information within the first few minutes on the game and that doesn’t happen here. On the other hand, it also doesn’t feel too slow. You’re playing the game, you’re advancing in your story and little by little, you get more information on how everything works.

The combat in the game is not your usual combat. You freeze in place and the camera moves until a game board appears with you and your companions on them as well as any other players and their companions who may walk into the combat area. Then you choose which field you move onto or, if you’re close enough, which foe to attack. The fighting scenes are animated, but you have no control over what happens. It makes it quite strategic. You also have a special ability (only one in the beginning, but it looks like there’ll be more when you level up higher) that you can use once during such a fight. Your companions also have special abilities and you can also tell them to use them once in a fight. Each fighting round, there’s a timer counting down. You need to decide for your moves while the timer counts down. If you haven’t done so in the end, the combat moves into the next round and you’re just not doing anything at all. That happened once when I got distracted and forgot that there’s a timer. The foes, however, still attack you in that round. ;)

You can level up your own character as well as your companions. You can decide for those special combat abilities as well as choose them for your companions (I think). And then you need to choose which of your companions is “first mate” which means that this companion is the one you see walking by your side through the game world. This companion will also be the one who fights by your side in every combat. Sometimes, you get more than one companion, though. I’ve only had two so far, so I don’t know how many you can have by your side. In my case, it was obviously a maximum of two. ;)

When you’ve lost hit points during a fight, you do not just regenerate health afterwards. There are flying red thingies (are they supposed to be fruit?) that you walk into and they regenerate a bit of your health. They’re around everywhere but they’re not so common that you can just mindlessly walk anywhere without a worry. And during a combat, you don’t regenerate health. But the fox companion has a heal that you can use once during a fight. That’s saved me before. ;)

The game’s refreshingly different, but a tad too kid-like for my taste. That is just my first impression, though, and a lot of things hint at the game being more complex. I’ve enjoyed my time in the game, but at the same time, I’m not too sad to move on. Maybe I’ll have a look at it again later on, maybe not. If I did, I probably wouldn’t bother with the membership fee and just play the game for free.

This was the third game for this project. The fourth is already installed and calling for me: Dark Age of Camelot! :)

Edit: Syp has written about Pirate101 as well now. Hop over there if you want to read about his experiences in the game.

The 10/10 Project: Everquest (Day 2)

Everquest is the second game for Syp’s 10/10 project. This will not be a long post, however. As you can probably guess from this, I did not play it long.

But let me tell you a bit more about what I did. The installation was easy enough thanks to Steam. I don’t know if ProSiebenSat1 has already taken over Everquest as well or not, but I logged on with my SOE-account and had no issues doing so. I also don’t follow that whole deal closely enough, so I’m not sure if we have to use P7S1 or not or if we can just stay with SOE. During the last few months, I’ve read several different information and it seemed to change faster than the weather. ;)

Either way, SOE it was. I rolled dice when it came to deciding for a race and class. 16 races and 16 classes – that’s a lot! The results gave me a gnome necromancer. Having played a little bit of Everquest 2, I guess I’ve set my “anchor” at EQ2 as basis for the graphics. The characters looked so similar to EQ2, that I was constantly reminded of EQ2 and the graphics just look much better in that game. So, compared to that, EQ just looked bland and boring.

Yeah, I didn’t get much further than that…

The main problem was that I felt I really needed to read all the tutorials. You need to type an answer to an NPC in order to advance in a quest. Don’t get me wrong, I am not criticizing the fact that you need to do it. I actually like the idea. But that does not make it easy to get settled into the game and start playing. The tutorials come as quests with lots of quest text. I worked through a few, but then realized that I would have to spend the gaming hours I had set aside for Everquest reading through the tutorials only. At that point, I decided to give up and left the game.

Poor Everquest. I’m sure it was great – and maybe even still is, this is not for me to judge – but I couldn’t get into it. I’ll leave the game to those that have or still do enjoy it and will instead rather listen to them when they share the great stories about their adventures. But if I ever feel the “Everquest itch” again, I will log into Everquest 2 instead.

Everquest is one of three “classic MMOs” on my list, by the way. I’m curious what the other two will be like, but they’re not the next ones on my list. ;)