Timewaster's Guide Archive

Just got an email from Nexon a couple days ago. They're apparently starting a free play trial soon intended to get more people playing. I just checked out the gory details, and it sounds as though there's a couple drawbacks they didn't mention earlier, such as a 25% xp cut, a 10% firepower cut, and a wipe of your character every 3 months, and a somewhat more meaningless 100 attribute maximum. (instead of 120...not so bad)

At any rate, the 'little details' they didn't mention in the press release are a bit of a downer, but if anyone wants to try SG out, it just got a little easier to give it a shot. (And if you like it, there's only a $10/month fee to upgrade to a full account.)

When I went back in February after a several month hiatus, a lot of folks still remembered me.   Kinda cool.

Well, we're at the big crux of the entire process of card designing in Wizard's You Make the Card 2, and I was wondering what everybody thought might be a good mechanic for the artifact we're helping to design. Has anyone here submitted an idea yet?

So far I've got some general thoughts about what direction I'd like to see the card go. We've already had plenty of artifacts that generate creatures and counters, so that would be a fairly boring way to take things. A more interesting direction to go would be to create an artifact that changes the nature of the game, such as removing the graveyard from play, or changing the availability of mana. There's precedent for this already, but it has hardly been plumbed for its depth.

I've already got two rough concepts for things I'd like to suggest, but it's late and I don't feel like filling them out. I'll list the basics here so I won't forget them:

1. A non-creature artifact that can add component tokens to itself before activating and strengthening itself until end of turn via expense of the component tokens. (sort of an evolving robot)
2. An all-players mana generator that generates more and more mana with each successive use. (You can use the mana if you like, but more will be available for the next guy who activates it.)

Not too much else to say at this point. Take a look.

http://www.swordsorcery.com/swordsorcery/press/Warcraft.html

Get us a copy Fell.  

Last Friday, Blizzard released it's first new packet of information about World of Warcraft in months. I haven't been back to the bnet message boards yet, but I'm sure they're buzzing about it. I'll go over the highlights.

Skills:
Each character will have some class skills, those considered vital to your class, and secondary skills, those which will make your character unique from all the others. Your character level will determine the maximum potential your character has in those skills, but usage will determine the actual skill development. While some skills might have prerequisites, they won't have a Diablo II style skill tree.

Questing:
The plan is for quests to give meaningful amounts of experience and loot. A Quest Log will track your currently assigned quests and Blizzard intends to supply enough quests to ensure that it will never completely empty. To me this is a big factor, because it could potentially open up an entirely different style of play in MMORPGs. If you can level up just off doing quests, questing becomes something other than a breather between bouts of tedious leveling.

Mounts:
Mounts are in, including race specific mounts such as wolves for orcs and horses for humans with additional potential to gain the ability to ride the mounts of other races. Mounts are under player control, not like the town-to-town horse rides our staff experienced in DAoC.

Instancing:
Some areas of the world will be instanced, meaning that when your group enters, a new instance of that area of the game is created, allowing you to quest/fight privately and avoid other camping/PKing players. Much of the world won't be instanced so the game doesn't end up feeling single player, but you will always have somewhere to go if the other players of the game get too annoying.

Rituals:
Multi-User spells that require multiple characters to preform. No specifics.

Player Housing is in. No specifics.

Guns are in. No specifics but I'd guess it'd only be a class skill for dwarves given the Warcraft Universe we've come to know.

AI Behavior:
They didn't give many specifics, but they gave the example of a Gnoll Taskmaster devoting 4 troops to the fighter in a party, 1 to the healer, and 1 more to the wizard in back. Probably not the best we could ever hope for, but a big improvement on the 'Attack Nearest/Lowest HP' type AI MMORPGs have sported to date.

Not mentioned: (big things the community was hoping to hear about and didn't get info on)
PK rules
New races
New classes
Anything new about combat...there was a question on it, but we didn't hear anything we hadn't heard before.