Sweet sweet devil

This morning I had around 9k gold in my bank and I was only thinking about farming gold. This afternoon I was lucky enough to be online when Orkula gathered a few luxers to go and take the Devil. As I hadn't seen the Devil before (and I needed the gold), I joined the group and we managed to kill two Devils before going back to Andruk to split the loot. The Devil is a hard sucker but a group of 9 took him down quite easily. The coordination needed to kill it is nothing espectacular but if each one doesn't do his part, I'm sure it can take a very long time. Despite that, I think the Devil needs a couple of unique and awesome skills so he can rock accordingly. The two hellfiends took us around 30 minutes and the reward was aprox. 35k gold plus some extras, including three maps, one of each, we haven't claimed yet. So, once again, grouping is the way to go!! I'm not completely poor anymore!
For now.

Toad's Tongue: ForumFall never changes...

The Fallout quote works really good with ForumFall and today I'm presenting a new chapter of said soapopera. Apparently, Get Good has joined The Chickens Club, an alliance founded by I Know My Chickes and Foggen, SG of zZzZz has started this thread to "discuss the epic nutcup alliance". If you read this blog from time to time, you'll know that I won't say a bad word against someone because he wants to ally with someone else. After all, that's what this game is about. Zagenda members don't like that and the thread goes on for 30 pages already and I gotta say it's pretty amazing, famous Ninogan declaring he's leaving Get Good included. My personal comment on this situation has already been explained by someone else, but I haven't found the post in a quick revisit so I can't say who did. The thing is that now, The Chickens Club has become even a greater force in Agon and that is a good thing.
According to Urme, Sun has joined Zagenda but I'm pretty sure that's the work of some useless and bored troll so I'm not taking that into account. So, now we got Zagenda, Sun, The Chickens Cub and Shadowlords as the four biggest alliances out there ("biggest" as overall, not only numbers) and I hope that 312-Alliance, Pandora and Lux Arcana can grow enough to take some of the pie from them. Having 7 big forces fighting for Agon supremacy would be awesome!! Much better that two or three, where stagnation is much easier to happen.

Tasos keeps it up!

Lately, Dev communication has increased and players can't be happier about it. In the last blog post from Tasos himself, he talks about some interesting stuff.

All quests are being rewritten, more dynamic quests are going to be added, faction quests will be more helpful towards newbies and there will be more advanced quests added to the game. The events team is also preparing epic dynamic events and more lore driven events.

Quests are good because they give the player an objective when you don't have anything else to do. Of course, Tasos also hypes once more the dynamic events and lore driven events. Hopefully, they'll come soon.

The meditation feature was demonstrated to us today, it’s almost complete and should be added to the game in the next patch or shortly after that.

The meditation features is the offline skilling system for those living under a rock and it "should be added" very soon. I'm surely waiting for this new feature and hoping it will reduce the grind or at least the perception of it.

A new dynamic lighting is now working properly, we were shown a test of this in-game and it was very impressive. We expect this to be added in the next expansion after it is implemented.

Very few players have shadows on in Darkfall, at least I  don't, so this new dynamic lighting systemis not really important to me. What I'd like to hear is some like Server Optimization or whatever makes Darkfall run better on my computer. Some time ago, I was fascinated with Half Life 2 because it was a GREAT game and you couldn run it on a damn Gameboy! I'd like to see something like that in Darkfall too.

We have a sophisticated political map in the works which makes clan associations easy to explore, also it features locations for vendors, banks and other in-game resources. We saw a small demonstration of this in action and it looks really good.

About time...

Finally, we were given a demonstration of the new environmental sound system and we got to see the entire functionality of it which has so much more than a demo we had shared with the community a while back. This is a high-end, next gen, real-time surround-sound environmental sound generator which also integrates with the game music system.  Very few other games have something similar to this. During its demonstration we had a very immersive experience and we can’t wait to see this feature in-game.

I don't know what to think about it but I guess it's good news. Anyway, the really important thing about the post is the post itself. Aventurine has increased the level of communication and that's a very good thing. Hopefully, we'll never be back into the dark cave where we can only hear the Forumfall screams.

Siege Report: Banagar / Eslingar 21-11-2010

Yesterday, we had a double siege! And we won it! In the beginning, I was in the Junk tasked with destroying the Siegestones around Eslingar and keeping the enemies occupied while our main force was doing something else. The first stone went down with no problem at all but 20 enemies (or so) came to defend the second siegestone. Despite the odds, we manage to survive, ship included, until the cavalry appeared. Then we took down the second stone and, thanks to some enemy cannon we looted, we destroyed the third and last Siegestone. Eslingar, our beloved colony, was saved and so, we all moved back to Andruk to go for the second part of the siege: Banagar. After some short and very low-fps battles, my group had to go back to Andruk, take some repair shards and tools, go back to Banagar and repair the bank to take out the cannons. Some explosions later, Banagar was ours!!! Unfortunately for me, my FPS are not good enough and yesterday, there was no time to try some new tweaks.
On the bright side, Maejohl finally announced The Protectorate of Lux Arcana, a kingdom style of holding managing that  I've personally been waiting for some time now and that might bring some freshness to our gameplay. You can check the official announcemente here.

Dynamic Quests FTW!

In the latest post from Darkfall official blog, Laenih has uncovered a bit more the awaited Dynamic Quests. Apparently, dynamic quests will be given by NPCs and you'll have to do something depending on your race and probably other variables. The example given is about the Vargashi, a new addition to the Darkfall Lore. That race used to slave mahirims back in the day and so, while other races might help them in a certain quest, mahirim will attack them instead. It would be nice if an Alfar and a Mahirim can fight eachother while doing the same Quest from different sides.
As usual, Laenih teases us with upcoming Dynamic Quests and Dynamic Events and I sure hope we don't have to wait to long before we can see them. A dynamic world is just what Darkfall needs just as I said in my previous post about Starcraft 2. The world needs to change and those changes must affect players as they must be able to affect the world.

OT: Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty

I'm quite a gamer and so, after the first Darkfall fever was gone, I've played other games that I haven't commented in here yet because of the blog title but I've decided to start doing it, under the Off-Topic tag.
Recently, I've finished Starcraft 2 first campaign and I've enjoyed a lot but not as much as I expected. First of all, I only play RTS for their campaigns; I enjoy RTS gameplay but it's not my favourite and multiplayer RTS are not for me. I like stories and Warcraft 3 campaing was great, so I was hoping for some more of it. Unfortunately, Wings of Liberty doesn't deliver. Maybe the campaign is too long for its own sake or maybe their saving their best moments for the Protoss and Zerg campaign but it's not as good as it could be. The lack of heroe presence in the battlefield might have something to do aswell because you could get into Arthas skin very easily but it's hard to enter Reynor's.
Despite all that, Wings of Liberty is a nice and polished game with a very nice "campaing navigator" in the Hyperion and full of different misions. Actually, it's probably my fault, you know hype is very bad.
So, what could Darkfall do to improve it's storytelling? MMORPG narrative is a hard concept but I think its basis should be: Players can influence the state of the world and the state of the world does influence the player's experience. Darkfall already does that but not a lot. Hopefully that will change with more events. We shall see.

Siege Report: Quarendel 14-11-2010

Yesterday, Lux Arcana sieged Quarendel and won. Despite the big groups of roamers, something that is kinda becoming a trend lately, we had quite a big group to confront them and whipe Acheron, previous owners of Quarendel. Again, the amount of players in a small area made my FPS drop til 10 or less and that was not nice. I guess I'll have to start thinking again about buying a new CPU.
SirTL KYE from Acheron made a thread in fourms complaining about we, being a big clan, sieging them, being a small one. As Maejohl said, we sieged Quarendel because we wanted it. I have already talked about this nutcup nonsense and the usual cries about fair fights in a game that is not about them. I've particularly like the contributions of noizex who seems to think like me and writes with sense and calm.
After this siege, I've decided to look for some small scale PvP this week, we'll see how that goes.