Last post

Well I made to one more day of WoW posting. I can say with certain delight that I will continue to play this game and explore it as much as I can. I owe much to WoW for making me curious again about mmorpg's.

This time I was rather busy building up my experience points. I finished all my quests in Campo Santo (or Holy fields I guess...first level of the undead) and I also beat another quest in the Remol region. In Campo Santo I only had to find some missing cargo and in Remol I had to fight some nasty zombies. From my fights I discovered that I had but to hit the fight button often and I could hit my enemy much faster. I thought I'd try this because another classmate, Andrea I think, was repeatedly doing that in her fights the first time and I thought that was just a particularity of her race in the game.

Well I've had a good time playing this game and now it's time to pack and make my analysis paper. I feel that in closing this blog I close yet another chapter in my time making videogames. I think I still got it in me to play games and also continue an academic life while still being able to make games.

If there is one thing I've learned it's that there is certainly a lot I can give to the world, making games.

Here's to the future.

Possibly my last post

This is probably my last post as time is up on the analysis paper.

This time that I played I went back to playing with the intercontinental airship service (temporary name). I searched at least 2 other lands, and another one was inaccessible without a certain expansion pack (rise of the Licht king I think).

All the other lands were equally as difficult to roam about, beyond the towns. The easiest enemies were at level 10 and they still massacred me. I like at least that you could get to see new worlds and try out what was on the other side of the horizon.

In one of the new countries I decided to explore a reef so I tried my luck at swimming. Took me awhile to figure out that presenting the center button or both left and right buttons on the mouse made you go forwards. I was happily exploring a new submerged world until I was massacred yet again by underwater marauders...I guess there is no such thing as paradise in this game.

Upon reviving from this unfortunate encounter I found myself in a new cemetery, much closer to the beach, but I was surrounded by alligators. I vainly attempted to swim far beyond the beach but the alligators could swim too :( . Then I decided to wait and resuscitate in the water, but as soon as I thought I was home free I found myself again with those damned marauders. I gave up trying to walk my way back to the airship so I used the stone yet again to go back home.

I guess for now, completing quests on my continent is all I can do to really advance.

A whole new world

Seems this time I bit off more than I could chew. Having completed one more quest I decided to level-up by fighting some monsters that were slightly stronger than me. I successfully got to level 6 and decided to accept more missions from the Guards at Remol.

Utter disaster. I died 3 times trying to fight some dead guys under a bridge and I got killed by accident on the road while I was distracted (yes, another player massacred me).

I got sorta pissed after I became the laughing stock of the office, so I decided to venture off and kill some tough animals until, lo and behold, a funny tower was up a hill. I got to the top and discovered that this was some kind of airship port...

Being that I was hungry to explore more of the game, I happened to get on the blimp-ship (whatever) and before I knew I was taken to another continent altogether. I saw the sun for the first time in this game. Lush green jungles as far as the eye could see. Different People.

I went down to the beach of this new village, made an exchange of a few items (never done that before) and decided to see how tough the local fauna was...

Never before had I been killed 6 times in a row and next to the cemetary (which was far away from the village). My friend told me that the angry gorilla was just gonna keep killing me if I just moved, so he suggested I go back home using the home stone (or something like that). I was back in Remol in the blink of a loading screen and I decided to leave the game at that.

I accomplished little this time and I saw too much :P

Back from the dead (trial ended)

While the posts are getting a bit shorter, a lot has to do with my dwindling time to play.

I was able to successfully upgrade my account to further play WoW for another 30 days (and then some), I guess I am now a fully fledged world of warcraft player.

I decided to go back and finish some of the earlier quests. The way back was quite a long journey on foot and I remember my friend Phil once mentioning the use of horses in this game...sure could use one now. This gave me time to admire the world. When I first designed a 3D world for my game, I cheated using heightmaps and real satellite data of ireland, but whoever made the maps in WoW must have had quite a lot of time to venture of in woodlands and stuff...quite convincing scenery.

I got stumped on one quest that had to do with burying the remains of a guy I killed earlier. I decided to go hunting on google to see if they had any pointers on finding the blasted tomb. Seems this grave wasn't so obvious so it was a good thing I looked it up. If there is one thing I'm greatful about MMORPG is that everyone is online (not like the old days where you had to buy magazines and walkthroughs in Babbages)

One quest done, first on my new 30 day adventure. Time to go to sleep.

Shopping and upgrading (friday)

This post should've been made on friday (but I got too caught up in other social/work matters).

Basically on this day I met up with one of my buddies from the class, Phil, and he just talked to me how we could group, share items and go about fighting together. I was too concentrated on finishing up some other tasks in the initial world of the undead so I told him I'd meet him later at the second town.

I'm my way to the mines, I got lost and ventured way beyond the boundaries of my level. Needless to say I got my ass handed to me by some powerful enemies (who for no reason attacked me) and ended up dying twice (and I learned that not all clustered houses necesarrily represent a town or a safe haven). I decided to resurrect from the grave of the second town but I was still a few levels too low to participate in any quests there.

I went back to the first town to finish my errands and got myself acquainted with pawning a few items and getting new weapons and armor - I feel like I'm finally getting the hang of this MMORPG thing (at this point it feels like a normal RPG).

After getting a few missions done I was finally sent to the second town (Remol I think) to start doing some chores there. One thing let to another and I found myself in dire need of some level upgrading, but I was finally having some wholesome fun and I'm excited about what else I can find in this World of Warcraft.

One nice thing about my whole adventuring that day was that I caught the attention of one of my coworkers and she wanted to get in on the adventure (working for a videogame company has it's perks). Might as well convert the entire company to Warcraft fellows :P

humbly finished one quest

I didn't do much today. I felt very sick and slept most of the afternoon to recover a bit. I decided to just wrap up the mission to get wings and fangs for the mistress that heals other undead in town. I got my item pouch full so that hinted me that I could now sell my items for gold and cash in on some weapons.

I guess I'll do some of that tomorrow, shopping.

New character

So today I tried out a suggestion by one of my friends. Get together and form a team on World of Warcraft, but by creating a new character in one place.

We agreed upon the Undead. So I went out and made my new character, an undead warrior, called Azrhaeljp (just now I think I got the spelling wrong, as I meant to name myself after the Angel of Death, plus my initials).

I leveled up a bit and tried to complete a few quests (having been used to the whole initiation with the night elf character) and it was fun to play in this new setting. I played the quests for about an hour before I got to a new one which seems difficult...bats and other flying creatures don't let themselves get hit easily.

I noticed the effects of a bottlenecked connection with this new character. Everything was slow, even picking up items from dead enemies was slow. I'm starting to get hints about the underlying rules of the client-server structure. The game is starting to get interesting from a Computer Engineer's point of view.

Much later my friends added me and I was waiting for one of them to spawn from the grave...but that was just before class started and I also noticed I have a trojan running somewhere in my laptop.

(lucky for me I have this installed on my work computer)

Getting to know my surroundings

Today I didn't get to do very much. I did a lot of walking since my objective was to read a sygil (scroll I guess) and find a wise warrior trainer somewhere. While I was searching for said trainer, I killed a rabbit, a frog, went swimming (or tried to) and got myself killed from a great height.

Death is an unusual thing in this game. You seem to wake up as a spirit form and you have to find your body, wherever you left it. Fortunately I remembered I died somewhere around the trunk of the great big tree in the village and found my body rather quickly. I was mesmerized by this alternate form of existence...I wonder if I could've done more as a ghost. I guess I'll have to die more often to find out.

I eventually found this trainer and got 40 extra experience points and then I went on to a new objective, looking to gather the venom of some spiders. Alas I could not find them and so I decided to leave the game at that point. Till next time.

Back to adventuring

Recapping, my quest was to find evidence of evil growth in the forest. I had to find some mushroom like things (musgovil if I remember well) and show them to a Centaur called Tarindrella.

Upon resuming the game I found a small settlement of nasty looking imps (I'm supposing these were the creatures that were turning evil due to the effects of the shrooms). They were called Grellin and I saw mushrooms around their area and thought I had to pick them up but I couldn't.

At this time I gave up again on the quest and later resumed in the middle of class. It had ocurred to me that if I was in the right place then...where else could I get these musgovil shrooms? My mind reasoned "if you can't pick up the weed, then take it off any junkie". So I killed one of these Grellin and, as suspected, he had some musgovil on him. I went on a Grellin killing spree and got the 8 musgovils I needed to give back to Tarindrella. I learned a few new things about the gameplay, mostly picking up items and equipping boots.

Unfortunately that was all I could do for one day of play (and I've lost 2 or 3 days) so for today I guess this is it :(

First impression

I usually don't play mmorpg's (Final Fantasy XI is still burning a hole in my pocket) so I was very skeptical about starting world of warcraft, even after installing it and adjusting graphics settings.

First thing that caught me eye was the fact that, when you edit your character, you can choose how detailed you want to edit him (take the basic layout and change it mildly or change everything). I always had the nasty habit of seeing how far I could go in these editors, but seeing as it went really deep into details, I stopped at a point where the character just resembled me somewhat.

A lot of people tell me to RTFM, but years of experience in playing good games has shown me that an intuitive interface and very helpful characters in an RPG can help you master the menus rather easily. So far that does happen in WoW. I chose the night elf as my race so the basic premise was that I had to start out balancing the population of certain fauna in the forest.

Fighting:

Not unlike Final Fantasy XI, you select an enemy and choose an action from the action bar below on the screen. I found out that if you tap the secondary mouse button again, it will automatically choose attack for you (or, I take it, the most appropriate action to perform on a given object). I then went on to kill this animal, one out of 4 boars and 4 sabertooth 'something' (it was in spanish as sable). The fight sequence played out automatically. I still don't know if you can distance yourself to avoid hits or not but the character seems to randomly dodge hits.

Spoils:

Right about after the second sabretooth I killed, I noticed his body has not disappeared and was glowing, so I went to investigate. Seems that you have to pick up the spoils by yourself...I thought they had this standardized in the RPG world :(

I finished my first quest and got a prize...first inroad into WoW, woopee!!

Things started to get more complicated with the next quest and so I left it here. Stay tuned for the next journal entry...finding shrooms (or that's what I think forest-like drugs look like).