The World of Cord

Man, where does the time go??
Work has been…well…insane to put it lightly!

I have, however, made my return to Norrath to find lots of friends around in my guild, Eternal Darkness.

I have only had a couple of casual evenings of play so far, but not a lot seems to have change game-wise…I’m trying to read up on LU52 which is due out in a week or so, and just trying to get back into the swing of things

If you’re in-game, shoot a “hello” to Cordanim on Antonia Bayle (or Coron, in case I’m on the Troubador).

I just updated the site to WordPress 2.7 and everything seems to be running flawlessly. As always, please let me know if you notice anything out of sorts!

So here’s Cord (the Elven Ranger) studying his map that ports him home to Celondim. There is one thing I really have to stress on about Lord of the Rings – the graphics! They are simply gorgeous. Now, my system has handled everything turned up full-blast, and I opted to use DirectX 10 since it also supported that, but you see those little floating letters around Cord? The animation on those was soooo smooth. Very impressive.

Now…gameplay…I’m not totally sold on that part of the game yet. It’s a little mundane with combat. I click and click and click. Gambits are more or less like EQ2’s Heroic Opportunities, where if you trigger actions in the right order, you’ll enable a special ability. I have my Warden gambits figured out so far, and you do learn more as you progress and level. I’ll have to see how the combat goes as I level up…just right now, there’s something “missing”…

The quests are another high point for me. I find them very enthralling, and instead of trying to knock a few off at a time, I am finding myself getting into the story more than EQ2 quests, and wanting to run back to town to complete one and see what the rewards are before moving on too quickly to the next one. High marks to Turbine for this implementation.

Crafting seems to be very simple in that you just have to have the right components, click the “Make” button and away goes your character, creating that item. I have not failed yet, so I don’t know if you can even. I would compare this crafting system very much to World of Warcraft’s in that it is very basic. I have made myself a few pieces of leather armour that have been good upgrades, however, so hopefully the crafting system is “useful” as the game progresses.

The odd question I have had in the “OOC” channel have been answered by players very politely and quickly, so I my first impression of the “community” aspect of the game is good. No attitude yet – in fact, in one quest, before attempting to kill a Signature named mob, I noticed another player character standing next to me. A quick “Hey, you looking to kill him for the update too?” to him had us quickly grouped up in a fellowship and we easily took him down and got our quest updates. If I had to compare that to some areas of the game in EQ2, you can very quickly get met with attitude there at times…

So far, it’s a pretty well-done game. I’m definitely not bored yet, as the lands seem massive with tons of exploration to be had!

Check in from time to time to see how the Warden is progressing.

Well, as I posted below, due to a superb price on the full package of Lord of the Rings Online with the new Mines of Moria expansion, I decided to give it a thirty-day workout. I rolled up an Elf Warden, since from everything I quickly perused, it looked like a good solo character. The game starts out in an introductory zone, which basically took me to about level 5 with no problems (in fact I earned a title for making it to level 5 with no deaths). Then to transition from the intro zone to the main world, you embark on one final quest that is pretty much scripted (I had to protect a dwarf friend as we made our way through a dungeon and then finally take down a couple of named mobs). It was a pretty neat experience – very eery and you were always wondering when the next encounter was going to be, so it kept me on the edge of my seat. After that quest was done, I went and did the final quest turn-in and the game warned me that if I accepted the “Finish Now” dialog box, I would not be able to return to complete other open “introductory” quests, so I quickly ran to a couple of NPCs and did my hand-ins and then traveled to my elven home city of Celondim. I have to say that I am very impressed with the graphics and how smooth everything seems to run. I had heard good and bad about LotRO in the past when it was released, and I even tried a trial but couldn’t get into it very much. This seems to be a bit different. The story is engaging to say the least. I don’t think I have ever played a game through (whoah) six levels and can honestly say I have actually read all the quest text! So here I am looking over what I assume is my “home city” of Celondim. Totally what I would picture an Elven city to look like!

I hope to play a bit more tonight and see how the character progresses…so far, I’m pretty impressed though…

(make sure to click the thumbnails to see the full 1900 x 1200 playing resolution)

So I’m at Wal-Mart this morning looking for a specific gift for the boys for Christmas, and I saw a few boxes of the Lord of the Rings: Mines of Moria expansion. Just wanting to check out the expansion screenshots on the box, I picked one up…that was my first mistake. It all looked pretty good, but I figured it was a $40-$50 game to try  – not interested. Then I looked at the box I had in my hand and it said $24.97. I looked at a few others and they all said $39.97 so I figured, let’s go up to the cashier and see what’s up. It rang up at $39.97 but she said “I guess this is a promotional SKU so I will mark it down to $24.97 for you.”

Now I’m sitting at this screen…LOL

Going to try the new Warden class I think. Not sure what race yet – can’t be a dwarf, which is what I typically lean towards when trying a new game, but maybe Elf…who knows…come back soon and you’ll be able to see what I decide on.

Last night did not see Cord in any world other than the real one. We surprised the boys last night with tickets to the Great Big Sea concert at the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium. I have had the tickets since September, and let me tell you, it was hard for both Lori and I to keep these a secret, but last night at dinner, it was all worthwhile! Lori had bought some fun Christmas cards and put the tickets in them. We gave them the cards after we ate, and after they realized what the tickets actually were, they were very excited! Great Big Sea is a favourite band around our house, especially with our youngest, Brandon, and myself. My family is from Newfoundland, and I grew up hearing a lot of the folk music around the house, and I think it has become part of my blood. Brandon has been taking guitar lessons for a couple of years, now, and genuinely just loves music. His favourite band right now is – you guessed it – Great Big Sea! He was definitely the most excited (although Kyle had a blast too) of the two boys, and we thought he was having a seizure when he finally realized that (a) he was going to see a concert of his favourite group, and (b) it was tonight!!! Lori and I couldn’t stop laughing at him as he got soooooo excited and just couldn’t stop laughing, he was so excited. I actually had to tell him to breathe LOL!

The guys put on a great show – very funny, casual guys. I would highly recommend seeing them if you have the chance and enjoy the “down-east” music style!

Definitely a great night had by all! See you in Norrath over the weekend!

Entrance to Miragul's: Lower

Well, the first evening in The Shadow Odyssey went relatively well. The server seemed stable enough, albeit a few bugs that seemed to pop up…but overall it went well. I popped on around 6:30PM and immediately had a group invite from some guildies that were running around exploring/ questing and doing some instances. We went to Everfrost and rounded up several quests there which had us going into some “Miragul’s” instances. The first picture you see to the left is at the entrance of Miragul’s Phylactery: Lower. The first thing I noticed was the awesome model in front of us. The devs definitely did some creative work with some of the new mobs. This large, umm…pincer-clawed golem-type thingy was an inactive epic mob…kinda glad we couldn’t get him activated. This zone was very puzzle-oriented, and we actually got stumped on the third named mob (Atrocious Amalgam) and ended up giving up and moving on after a while. If anyone knows how to handle the Atrocious Amalgam for the quest, Necromantic Neverwhere, please feel free to drop me a line or post in the comments. I would love to get back there and finish that off. This first instance of the evening did get Cord a server discovery, though, of which I have only had one or two previously. That was kind of nice, even if it was something that was so-so quality at our levels. Not a bad caster wrist item, but still by the time you can handle the stuff we were encountering in this instance, you would be pretty well-equipped from the Kunark zones in my opinon. That brings up a good point, actually…I was floored with the hit points the mobs have in these zones. The group I was in confirmed that the instance they were in just before I got on was the same, so it looks like Sony is making the mobs harder - at least in the group areas. I can hardly wait to see the raid zones LOL. So after we gave up in the Lower Phylactery, we moved on to Miragul’s Phylactery: Scion of Ice – another zone full of uber-hit-point trash mobs and puzzles galore. It was getting late, so we pretty much ran around killing trash and trying to figure out the traps and sequence of getting things done. We weren’t too concerned about finishing; more with just getting discovery and seeing what we could find. We did come across two groups of four valkyries standing around looking bored, so we took them out without much difficulty…but lo and behold, two more “bigger” ones spawned where they were…”RING EVENT” was the almost simultaneous chant in group voice chat! After those two were down, a short time later the named popped (as seen below). She also went down (be nice) easily and dropped some more crap from an ornate chest.

Named in Scion of Ice

All in all, TSO looks to have lots of promise. Lots of server-wide discoveries were getting linked in Level 70-79 and Level 80 channels, and lots of buzz. We even saw some very nice TSO raid zone loot linked to whet our appetites.

There will always be some bugs and issues the first few days after such a major update…hopefully everyone is just patient and lets things settle down!

Happy adventuring in TSO, everyone!

The Shadow Odyssey is now live!

You can visit EQ2Players.com to read news and articles about the latest EverQuest II expansion or you can dive right into game and visit the new airship near the Sinking Sands docks to visit the newly discovered Moors of Ykesha.

An all new map system has been added for all players.

Check out the rest after the jump!

Read the rest of this entry »

Just a reminder that with The Shadow Odyssey comes a brand new map system, so if you use EQ2Map (who doesn’t?) then make sure to click the link above and upgrade to version 1.1.1 which will support the new system. I am not positive if your custom UI needs to be updated, although with such a major change, I will assume it does. If you’re a ProfitUI user, I have not seen an update yet, but with how fast it’s usually “fixed” for major patches, I bet we’ll see it before the end of the day. We’re all still anxiously awaiting the patch notes of course, and unfortunately I didn’t log in to the beta server (even though I was in the beta) so I’m not sure of what the new maps entai, aside from looking pretty sweet if you go by the screenshot to the left. Apparently it will be much easier to find NPCs and such (some may say that’s a spoiler, so a bad thing). Time will tell, but I really just wanted to remind people that you will need EQ2Map 1.1.1 otherwise it will not work after the downtime!

Happy TSO adventuring later on!

Well servers have been down since 3AM EST and will be down for about 12 hours for the big expansion patch. I have not seen the official Update Notes yet, as I am just patching, but as soon as the notes are available, I will add them here. I’m actually looking forward to TSO, as I was getting kind of bored with the Kunark quests, etc. I’m only at 114 AA points on Cord, however, so now I have 86 to go instead of feeling like I was getting close to maxing out LOL. I am sure once people get into the new expansion, too, there will be plenty of re-specing going on as we all find out how the new AA tree works.

Watch here during the day for an update on the official notes! See you in the new zones!