Category: Gaming

Wandering Through Wizard101

Well, she did it again. That’s right, the F word. Ringing through every post loud and clear. 

Fun. What did you think I was going to say? 

Tipa has been talking about Wizard101 for quite some time now, and I never got into it. Why? Am I not a dedicated stalker lemming friend? I just had too much on my plate. I’ve managed to lower that some what and found myself with a whole lot of time to actually game this weekend. I haven’t subscribed to W101, but I may do the “pay as you go” plan, and just pay for zones as I come up to them. I honestly can’t rationalize paying yet another subscription. That’s alright though, because so far the areas I’ve been exploring are FREE. That’s right, I created my account and less then three minutes later was in game and creating my character. My name is Angela Ravendust, and as of right now I’m a level 5 Theurgist, with some training points in storms I believe. That may or may not be an actual school, I’m still on information overload.

Edit: I forgot to mention some where – Tipa is SO uber in W101 that she actually boxes two accounts. There was some talk of her 3-boxing, where we all chuckled and joked nervously – KNOWING that it COULD actually happen with her. /Not Worthy.

 Pictured above is Tipa in the yellow / orange, myself in greens, and Cownose. We were all able to join in on the Nostalgia vent channel along with one of Tipa’s friends (I’m so sorry I’ve already forgotten your name! Remember information overload here). 

I loved doing the Halloween events. I’ve always loved card games, although I’ve never played that many. I played Pokemon (I know, I need to be done away with) and magic the gathering of course. I actually enjoy Legends of Norrath in EQ2 as well. 

We rushed off to do some.. I want to say.. tower.. things.. (yes that’s the technical term) where I spent most of the time accidentally walking backwards and out of the instance. Whoops. Of course me being a healer of sorts, didn’t have any but one single heal card and that was barely enough to keep anyone alive when it came to fighting the big’uns. I had a BLAST though. Almost literally. The spell effects are fun, it’s bright and colourful, the chatting with people sucks since it’s all protected and adding people to friends requires a bit of finesse. Plus Xfire does not recognize the game so I have it loaded on the laptop while I play in full screen (what do you mean you don’t have Xfire? You have friends in multiple games these days, get it so you can keep in touch with everyone no matter what game they play! Add me!) 

I looked at the clock and practically screamed into vent, a good 5 hours had passed (WHERE does the time go when you’re in W101?! That’s the quest I want to do!) and I had forgotten to get my NaNoWriMo portion out of the way. Jumped (quite literally) out of the game, did the dishes, sat down and managed to get to 15,098 words. Little behind where I wanted to be. 

I had a great time gaming, and actually got in some EQ2 time late last night / early this morning – and also got some Little Big Planet in last night / this afternoon. More about those two in the next post, W101 deserved it’s own space.

Better Homes and Hovels (One Room – Baubleshire)

Looking into the home from the doorway

You may remember not too long ago I re-designed Silhouette’s new one room home in Gorowyn. I had come to the conclusion that despite how much I absolutely LOVE housing there was no need for me to have a million 5-room homes to decorate. So I started downgrading, and working on a mission to have two 5-room homes (Arysh and Stargrace already own those) and then spread out some smaller homes. Speaking of smaller – without being able to scale furniture this house would not have been built at all. Thanks to some fancy inspiration on the Norrathian Homeshow, I decided to turn a one room Baubleshire home into a 5 room halfling sized home. I REALLY love it so far. I’ve just barely placed 100 items, which means I have room for 100 more. The rent is only 3s75c a week, and I’ve paid for the next 84 days. I can have three sales crates, which is more then enough for this alt. 

I apologize now for the huge abundance of pictures, and they don’t do it justice at all. So if you want to see the home in person please feel free. It’s in Baubleshire on the Najena server, under the name of Petites (which was a play on the word ‘small’ in french. It suits the halfling templar). 

The sales area, to the right hand side of the door. There’s three sales crates there as well as various knick nacks and other goodies. I want to add a few more things around the house still, work in progress remember!

Looking towards the bedroom and sales area 

An area to worship Tunare (good little Templar that she is) as well as a bedroom (still under construction).

Library area. Lots of room for more books still, a cozy fireplace to read by. 

Looking from the library into the kitchen / living room area. 

A little seating area. Still need to get some mugs and dishes for both this room and the kitchen. Petites is an alt I rarely play, so she doesn’t have a whole lot of stuff.

Looking from the sales area to the main door, library. A little couch and lots of things placed to make it feel more like home. 

So that’s two homes done out of the one room inns. With the vault expander and the item that lets you add 100 extra items to your home, 200 is plenty if you’re not looking for something huge. There’s no reason why smaller homes can’t look just as fantastic as the larger ones. I have to admit, I love working on the smaller scale (this is actually carried over into my art work too, go figure). I had a huge amount of fun designing this house and I’m looking forward to adding to it.

So what will I work on next? It should either be Goudia (ratonga dirge) or Misako (gnome necromancer). I’m thinking the necromancer, since there’s just so much fun I can have with a gnome to begin with, let alone one obsessed with death who talks to her creations. It will probably be a one room Freeport house, since I’ve done the Qeynos Inns and Gorowyn Inns now. We’ll just have to see!

Happy 4th Birthday EverQuestII

You may remember the cake pictured above from the celebrations last year, EQ2’s 3rd anniversary. This year of course Sony is celebrating it again and there’s a party that everyone can go to on every server throughout the month of November.

“It’s EverQuest II’s 4th Birthday and you’re invited to a party! Don your most festive attire and commemorate the event with us in the Community Lounge, where you can share celebratory food and drink, enjoy the confetti machine, dance along with the maestro, and even have a pillow fight. Plus, you never know who might pop in to join in the fun!”

“Kiara, Amnerys and Grimwell from SOE’s Community Relations team will be hosting these special events according to the schedule below. Just see what date and time they’ll be on your server, look out for one of them to log in, then send them a /tell saying, “I want to party!” and you’ll be summoned to the celebration.”

11.12.08 5pm PST Najena

Of course I’ll be going. I think this is a very awesome event they’re putting on, and as I look over all of the days planned with parties, I wonder how tired the three SOE employees will be by the end of it. I’m hoping Nostalgia will be able to put up a fairly good showing (all 5 of us) and have a good time. Yes, that means Tipa too, even if I have to drag her away from Little Big Planet. 

Want to stop by and say hello? Interested in taking a peek at Nostalgia’s guild hall while you’re there? This would be the perfect opportunity to get together!

A LBP World, and Me

It’s hard to tell by this picture (I can’t help it, I’m absolutely horrid at taking pictures of my tv, which is covered with a nice film of dust and cat footprints since Princess claims it as her own) but that’s Tipa and me hanging out in Little Big Planet together, in her Befallen level. I got to test some of it, sans lag. I’m not sure if the lag from 3+ people is fixed now, but things ran smoothly enough when it was just two people wandering through the zone. 

I haven’t had the chance to play since then aside from a brief romp through some zone that I can’t remember right now, things have just been that hectic. For my own sanity I decided to drop a few things from my schedule, I just had too much going on. It’s only the 6th of the month and I felt overwhelmed. 

NaNoWriMo is going well, I’m up to 11,759 words as of today. The story hits slumps here and there – I’ve never written anything so long before. I’m also working from straight creation. I have not planned this story out at all, I don’t know where it will go, I just had a vague idea of what I wanted to write about and took off with it (hey, it sort of resembles this blog some days). 

I want to create a zone in LBP, what’s more I want to create artistic projects in there for people to look at. If all goes well I should have time by the end of this month, I’ll have to see though, right around the corner is Christmas and I design and hand make most of my gifts. I’ve always disliked how commercial everything is. 

Anyhow. This is just a brief rambling update since I haven’t really posted too much lately. I’ll probably end up doing some rendering tonight to relax before bed, or maybe I’ll get lucky and play a little EQ2. We’ll see how it goes. Sorry this post doesn’t make much sense. Only a few more weeks to go!

Bring On the Alts – Er, Wait. Nope.

One thing I’ve always disliked about EQ2 (yes, there are actually things I dislike, I know, how odd!) is the lack of character slots. You’re restricted (currently, with a regular account) to 7 characters lots, not per server, but for the entire game. In a game where there are 9 crafting classes and you can only chose one per character, with 24 class types, 7 characters is a pretty small selection. Sure there are ways of obtaining more – if you subscribe to station access for example. This boosts your character count from 7 to 12 (number may be off by one or two, it’s been a little bit) almost doubling it. Of course the cost of the game also doubles from $14.99 to $29.99 American, and if you’re only playing the one Sony title it doesn’t quite seem worth it. If you play EverQuest-PC, and Pirates of the Burning Sea (yes, people still play that I hear), Vanguard, or any other number of games along with EverQuestII then I can see how you may want to subscribe. It’s almost better to just purchase a second account though and box, and get LoN rewards on both accounts. 

I am hoping that players gain one (or how about 3 to make it an even 10) character slot when TSO goes live. I’ve already got a level 80 warden, coercer, and dirge. A level 78 illusionist, 76 templar, 61 necromancer (pictured above) and a 50 monk. They all craft. That means that aside from the 40 new aa we’re being allotted, I have very little room for ‘new’ progression. Since the expansion focuses on 50+ content (scaling at that) I suppose I wouldn’t want a lower level character, but the ‘alt itch’ is always there just beneath the surface. I don’t have any T1 dps, a wizard, ranger, or assassin. I’ve been itching for another scout (the dirge doesn’t count) so much to the point of almost deleting that 61 necromancer I haven’t touched in ages. So why not just delete her and remove her from the picture? Well, she’s also an 80 sage which is harder for me to get rid of. I remember how many hours upon hours of work I put into her.

I’m not alone in this boat either. It’s quite common to see people with 1-4 level 80 characters, and a handful of crafters. In EQ-PC when people reached the max level they would work on their achievements since there are so many of them – in EQ2 there is a lack of things to do at end game aside from raid. So what does everyone do? They make alts. If they’re not making alts they’re bored and are typically taking a break until the new expansion gets here.

The character limit has been a debate for quite some time. Reasons where given for why it was so limiting when EQ2 first came out, wanting to reduce the number of names taken or some such, but it’s been almost 5 years now, and while the number of characters regular accounts can have HAS grown (it used to be 4  when the game first came out) it’s not enough. We really need at least one more character slots. If for no other reason then feeding my love of alts.