And now for something different

In this last year of lunacy I ended up spending a bunch of money and picking up a bunch of things. One of these has been my habit of long-term preorders. I generally stick to game-related stuff, but anime and manga stuff creeps in here and there. A couple boxes of things just came in today, and I feel like posting something. Above you see the hideous Excellent Model Amazon figure, from their Dragon’s Crown series. Really, I bought it for completionism’s sake, because I have the Sorceress figure, and a reprint of the Elf figure(which is probably the most amazing sculpt I’ve ever seen) on preorder. You can also see Tiki on the table there with her, but she’s not new.

Vanguard disappears into memory

Vanguard closed today. This is my last screenshot, taken on 2013-02-23 at 23:20:19 EST. I was working on a quest series involving Unicorns that culminated in a Unicorn mount at the end. The mount wasn’t statistically as good as mounts you could buy for small amounts of money in the game’s Station Cash store, but in my mind I never quite let go of Roleplaying in games like this. When I play by myself the effect is compounded, so there I was trying to help the Unicorns.

I know that I could have logged in for Vanguard’s last day and maybe seen some of the things I used to know, but it wouldn’t have been the same. The most important thing about Vanguard for me is that it’s going away. That the game remained open gave me this permanent feeling like I should play it again, and try to recapture some of that feeling I missed. That was not going to happen of course, because the game has been fundamentally different for a long time now compared to how it was back then.

There was the gang harvesting, the crafters chat channel on my server(I think the server was Gulgrethor before any merges), the strange personalities all coming together for a game that, in our minds, gave us a freedom to do things that we were unable to do in previous worlds. Climb atop a mountain and see for a huge distance with your jacked up clip plane(your frame rate would suck though), find a Travertine node and call for help and have a team of 6 from the crafters channel to help you within a few minutes in their ridiculous harvester uniforms, pick out your housing plots next to your friends, work feverishly on building or buying your house/boat/etc materials.

I didn’t craft because I wanted to have a tool to help me level better, I crafted because participating in the world and the crafting ecosystem was awesome. I discovered server and world firsts making jewelry and had an ongoing market presence in the auction house. Diplomacy felt the same way to me, although I didn’t personally go that route very far. Adventuring felt like I was writing my own story, even though some of the quests themselves were pretty generic.

For all of the game’s problems which led me to never get particularly far in it(my highest is that 35 cleric there), Vanguard captured a piece of my idealism regarding online gaming in a way that only the EverQuest line and perhaps Anarchy Online have. This idea that I was fairly free to do what I want, even if it was an illusion, was really powerful. Normally a game’s funnel inevitably ends in a min/max build(AC), PvP advancement(DAOC), endless missions/faction grinding(AO), a crushing grind to keep affording housing that really has no point except as a money sink(virtually every game with housing), or whatever else developers did to ‘keep you engaged’(keep you paying.) Although I never got to the ‘endgame’ level-wise, in my mind I feel like if I had seen every piece of the world I would still have a feeling like I could find something new just visiting places and being there in the world.

I think this is something my friends don’t understand about why I can do things in games over and over and it doesn’t bother me. If I am engaged with my character and the game world, the 32nd time I’m running a dungeon is perfectly different from the previous 31 times in much the same way that I still manage to get out of bed in the morning in real life even though every day is pretty much the same as the day before. This is my character’s life, and I am living it in the context of how their world operates.

One sad element of Vanguard’s removal is that it is probably the only game that got player boats remotely right(in a game not centered around boats, anyway.) It had lag and control issues and you couldn’t actually haul cargo or anything like that, but goddamn, it was great to bust out my blue Kojani sloop(named ‘The Missing Eye’ for a story I had crafted up in my mind) and sail up the river rather than running up the shore. I had harvested most of the wood and cut it into boards for that boat myself(I was a stone crafter so there was some crossover), and an orc crafter named Swampfist did the woodworking-specific stuff and final construction.

To Dareak(who made my stylized plate my cleric is probably still wearing as he rides into oblivion), and, goddamn, all the other awesome people who I missed and lost track of because the only way I knew them was in Vanguard, thanks for everything. I wish I could have done better, but the circumstances at the time(mostly bugs and progression frustration) broke it apart. I consider early Vanguard to be the kind of situation I want to experience again, where I feel like I am part of something, and there is a persistent community of people around me who share common goals and attitudes. In retrospect, it’s probably the best MMO experience I ever had, although AO and EQ might have been equivalent.

I still have the system requirements sticker for Vanguard on my monitor at work, as I have since January 2007 when I received the game box, with its ridiculous(at the time) recommended system specs. Naturally my computer met the specs because I am a gaming nerd, but fairly few did. It always struck me as a little funny that they were worried about being able to get shelf space with such high requirements, and I think they had to nerf things to lower them at one point. When the game came out I had to run it at 1152x864 on my 1600x1200 native monitor because my system just couldn’t handle it(and 1024x768 was just a bit too crowded UI-wise.) I also had to run in full-screen mode because Windowed would half your frame rate. I guess it’s pretty weird to look back on chunky performance issues with a bit of fondness, but I think the reason I made all those compromises is because I had such a strong feeling about getting in there and engaging with the game, which is definitely something I miss having.

I’ve kind of rambled all over the place here in no particular order, so I’ll just cap it off with: Farewell, Vanguard – you did well, but at least now I can stop being haunted by your memory.

Katawa Shoujo intro

It has been an age since the last entry, although much has happened in that time, it has not and most likely will not be recorded.

 

The new conquest comes in the form of Katawa Shoujo, a free game made in the style of Japanese visual novels(also h-games, dating games, is there even a difference?) I say ‘in the spirit of’ because as far as I know it was an essentially open source endeavor, developed in English, and by a team of people from all over the Internet. Its interesting alchemical origin is what makes the title interesting, moreso than the content.

I have not played since last week, but the story so far is the milksop main character has a heart defect that manifests when a girl confesses her feelings for him. He spends a bunch of time in the hospital until everyone, even the girl, forgets about him. He gets well enough(with a bunch of pills) to go back to school, but his parents send him to a school for people with disabilities instead.

Through all of this, you get very few choices. I have had 3 so far in about an hour of play. Two of them didn’t feel like they mattered at all, and the third was a trap, which I failed.

As a new student, you are being shown around be a girl who I have no idea if anything is wrong with her(the only thing that has manifested so far was her mis-pronunciation of something, and a hint at a speech impediment) and a deaf girl, for whom the ‘normal’ girl acts as a sign language interpreter. I was presented an opportunity to ask about something, so I asked about the deaf girl, instead of asking about the library. This is one of those Mass Effect style things, where there’s ‘the dialog you selected’ and ‘what really happens.’ I got something like ‘you don’t feel familiar enough to ask about that, so you bite your tongue and finish lunch in silence.’ Such fucking bullshit. I wanted to punch the monitor, however I realized that this was a fine indicator that they had captured the obscene frustration of the genre so I let it pass. Click next for 20 minutes, be given one choice and fuck it up. I was probably supposed to ask about the library, because while in the hospital I developed a habit of reading to pass the time.

I tried to take a screenshot or three to include via the game’s screenshot keybinding, but it seems not to have worked; the directory where the files should write out to lies barren. Maybe I will take some images by other means.

There is a save mechanic that I think you can use at any time, but I don’t really want to save/load to determine what the ‘right’ response was to any situation. I am not interested in winning, really. I heard before playing this game that there is a rather hilarious ‘bad ending’ if you don’t manage to find companionship wherein your character essentially dies of loneliness. I am sort of interested in seeing this happen.

The world died and I missed it

Starwars Galaxies ended service on December 15th 2011.  I really wanted to be there for it, but the initial communication about the shutdown was rather misleading.  It wasn’t the final shutdown that caught me out, but the deadline to re-subscribe.  The vague guess given was “end of september”, but in reality it was the middle, right when I was moving halfway across the country.
And no amount of favors or friends could fix it, and so I spent my evening in the newer, and yet older Starwars the Old Republic.  I’ll not even attempt comparisons as they are so vastly different.  Apples and oranges are at least both fruit.
What I will do is leave you with another’s eye-witness account of the end.  As a stranger to the game, he has a unique perspective, and doesn’t get mired in the years of history.
Paste Player - SWG End

Denc Wormington: A return to the depths of Befallen

Befallen has long been a gathering ground for evil, which also means it’s been a gathering ground for adventurers. I wonder what it was initially, on first glance a crypt seems apparent given the undead, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a coffin hereabouts.

 

You can’t get far in Befallen without opening a few locked doors, which usually means getting the key. Fortunately for me, I have no need for such things.

 

 

 

Every nook and corner of this place features either a necromancer or one of their undead servants. The fighting stays to a minimum and the sneaking to a maximum, as for those of us who can’t snap our fingers and appear back at a city, prospects of escape are dismal.

 

Curiously, the zombies in Befallen seem to have fared worse than those out in the world at large.

 

 

 

Strangely plain clothes for a necromancer here. I guess having phantasmal skulls perpetually falling away from your hands makes up for that sort of thing, though. Perhaps I shall leave him a note saying I enjoyed my visit, no time to say hello for now.

 

The residents remain polite and friendly when I do introduce myself however, this fine woman provided me with keys to go deeper when I found to my shame that my lockpicking was too rusty to continue.

 

 

Well, how about that. I’m guessing the Burning Dead won’t invite me back soon, and I might even be off their Frostfell card list, but all things considered the trip was worth taking. For now I long to be back out in the sun or at least the stars.

-Denc Wormington, ex-rogue

Denc Wormington: Raid at dawn, and the Oasis of Marr

Retracing my footsteps is hard when so much happened all jumbled together in a short period of time. I’ve decided to stage a raid on the Dervish camps in North Ro, but I’m not yet ready to cross Dorn B’Dynn and his foreign masters.

But there are other camps, and their occupants are well pleased to join me for a relaxing morning by the sea.

We discuss the finer points of weapon maintenance, and practice disarming.

 

 

 

They tire easily, however, so I let them have a much-needed rest.

 

 

 

Talking to the locals about the Oasis of Marr is confusing. The vendor-woman I approached earlier referred to it as ‘in South Ro’, which is strange to be, because South Ro was further south than the Oasis itself. Feeling invigorated by my morning with the Dervishes, I retrieved a second dagger for my use from their belongings and headed down towards Oasis to see things for myself.

Ahh, how refreshing. Although the locals refer to it as South Ro now, the Oasis still seems about as I remember it. Perhaps these things change in the years I have been away.

Starting from the bottom, I find caiman to be an adequate challenge.

Diving into the water to search for more, I swim around for a time before coming to a strange conclusion: There are no crocodiles in the water any longer. Suddenly I wonder if the water has gone poisonous, and immediately exit back to land.

 

I don’t recall exactly what the issue has been between the gypsies and I, but they have never liked me. Perhaps they’ve caught my furtive glances at their wagons full of belongings.. still, it’s quite inconvenient to have to find other vendors sometimes.

 

 

They’ve really built up the beach houses by the dock, and it appears as though they’ve got permanent occupants now as well. How far we’ve come!

 

 

 

The tower at the center of the oasis remains a dreary reminder of evil, with its spectre guardians menacing any who come near. Deathfist orcs patrol in the distance. With this image in mind I guess things have not come so far after all. The sand giants seem to have primarily holed up in the hills, so that’s something.

 

But I came here to train myself fighting the indigenous reptiles, not ponder creatures I cannot defeat. Perhaps someday I will return.

 

 

 

Until then I bid thee farewell, Desert of Ro.

 

-Denc Wormington, ex-rogue

Denc Wormington: The Commonlands await

The tunnel is quite refined now, perhaps from the footfalls of all who have come before. Trekking back into the Commonlands, this time to hunt, my mind goes back to the time with Uncle B, operating out of Freeport. I had to run errands to the bank for him, because the Knights of Truth were, in his words, ‘a bunch of racists.’



One way to cure them of their negative perception was, of course, murder. ‘Murder makes the world go ‘round,’ as Uncle B used to say. In this case we would murder Deathfist Orcs.

Under cover of darkness, I crept up to their camp, and loosed an arrow at one of their sentries.

 

 



Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite as planned. Rather than charging off into the darkness to face the threat, he actually alerted the rest of the camp. When did they give orcs brains? Could The Rathe’s curse be lifting?

I made a break for it, regardless.

 

 



After losing the orcs, I ended up near this tower. I recall it being much smaller, and less filled with skulls and circling bats. The same old undead stand guard, with the same old lack of apparent owner for the tower itself.

 

 

 



While seeking a less-well-patrolled orc camp, I came across this young lady. I had remembered the Dervish Cutthroats as being aggressive, but now that I think of it maybe that was only after Uncle B had sicked his spirit wolf on them a few dozen times. I had forgotten that they as a people had a camp here in the Commonlands, but now that I see them it tugs at the edges of my memory..

 



 

Right then. Sorry about that, miss, but it is the way of things. True to form, she had a Cutthroat Insignia ring, dandy.

 

 

 



Back to the business at hand, which is orcs. I managed to break one of the camps finally, and received some enlightening combat practice at the hands of the clumsy orcs.

 

 

 



Through the night and into day, I waged war upon the orcs. Unlike Uncle B, I’ve got nothing to prove to the Knights of Truth or anyone else right now, so no need to make this into an ongoing thing.

 

 

 



In the morning light I found remembrance that bear hunting is grand sport, and their hides can be used at times to make backpacks, of which I have need.

 

 

 

One last thing I found was a Broken Claw Bandit camp. I don’t remember it, but bandits tend to come and go. They didn’t seem to care about my presence, so I guess I’ll leave them to it..



..for killing them could only be construed as a favor.

-Denc Wormington, ex-rogue