Gorgeous models, and some great info to go with them. Paolo told my wife that they’re planning on releasing an all-female unit for the Soviets, and my discussions with everyone involved seem to point to aircraft becoming a major support unit for Dust: Warfare.

Also, the Organized Play campaign system for Dust is going to include some really awesome perks just for participating. While they wouldn’t say what exactly, their enthusiasm for it was huge! I’m definitely keeping my eye on this one.

The full spread. The two walkers are the equivalent of the Axis’ Lothars.

Here’s a better shot of the Soviet walkers. I love how beefy they are!

These five guys up front are Chinese volunteers, and they come with the new helicopter model.

Definitely a fat little transport, this. Not sure about the aesthetic, but I love its tactical usage – rapid delivery of units directly where you need them!

I’ve been playing since mid-to-late beta, and was among those lucky ones to be invited on day one of early access. I tried a number of classes both on the Imperial and Republic sides, and ended up choosing to play as a Sith Inquisitor. It seems that it’s a popular choice, since several times when I entered a Warzone, my entire side was Inquisitors.

As I played the first few missions, I made the decision to take my Inquisitor, Scin, fully to the Dark Side. As far as I’ve been able to tell, all this really affects is the kind of gear you can get at endgame. Since Scin is a fully heal-speced Sorcerer now, it seems odd to make him a Dark Sider, but I don’t want to have to grind Light Side points to overcome my Level 3 Dark Side corruption.

Though my guild, the Imperial Army, chose a PVE-RP server for its home, I’ve been doing a lot of PvP in Warzones. They’re similar to WoW’s Battlegrounds in concept. One of them, the Voidstar, reminds me of Storm of the Ancients – one side attacks, the other defends, and the attacker must make their way through several gates to the final artifact. It’s faster than SotA, though. One of the oddities of Warzones is that players of all levels can be found in the same instance – while stats are normalized, the levels are very unequal due to the number of tools and level of player experience involved. Right now it’s not so bad because most people are new to the game, but I can see this becoming a major problem as the game ages. I’ve read on TORWars that the developers are testing several potential fixes for this, so we’ll see how it turns out.

Playing a Sorcerer-healer, there are a few things I’ve noticed that seem odd to me. We don’t get a burst heal until level 20, and even then, it’s very weak – a small burst, with a small HoT attached. Scin still doesn’t have an AoE heal, and this seems odd since a Talent for AoE healing is available early in the healing tree for Sorcerers.

As an aside, a great tune to listen to while frying enemies of the Empire is the newly-released Binary Suns by Coyote Kisses. It’s a great electronic remix of the song of the same name from the Episode IV soundtrack. Heavy on the bass, with some nice bass drops and a great melody.

It’s this last bit that I found intriguing as a concept, but unfortunately too lightly implemented.

One of the things I loved about Breath of Fire II way back in the day was the ability to create and run your own village, complete with NPCs that would join you based on completion of certain quests or plot points. Terraria reminded me of that.

The late Star Wars Galaxies allowed players to build just about anywhere. Wurm Online similarly does this, although to a greater degree of freedom and with a better abstraction of physics.

To date, though, there has yet to be a single player sandbox game which allows the player to build a full world with a living, breathing community. Dwarf Fortress is the closest to attempt this, but its archaic interface and steep learning curve prevent it from being easily adopted.

The success criteria for a “living world” sandbox game would be as follows:

• NPCs react to the player’s actions
• The player can deform terrain
• NPCs can deform terrain
• NPCs build complex relationships based on simple rules
• Death is permanent for NPCs
• GUI is intuitive and incrementally complex
• World events are dynamic and part random, part evolutionary
• The world models “extra” bits like weather and natural disasters

I’m not sure if the computational power exists to do all of this for a desktop-based game, but the success of games like Minecraft, Terraria, and to a lesser degree Wurm Online and Istaria certainly give me hope.

I’ve heard rumor that SOE is working on a new sandbox MMORPG. I both hope and dread that this is true; SOE destroyed the sandbox nature of Galaxies, but they also gave birth to Galaxies, too, so they’re not hopeless. Time will tell.

I stopped playing World of Warcraft when I got laid off in order to save some money. With Star Wars: the Old Republic looming, I’m not going to resub any time soon. However, that doesn’t mean my efforts into WoW plugin development for WordPress are at an end.

WoW Guild Retrieve’s current version will be its last. The code that went into the 2.0 version has been repurposed, though, for a new project:

World of Warcraft for WordPress!

This new plugin has all the features of WoW Guild Retrieve, but also includes support for a number of other WoW-related features. All of them will be widgets that can be included in any widget-ready theme. W3, as I’m calling it, also will have support for other developers to add their own modules to it.

v1.1.0, then, is just a small release. It adds Achievement Point tracking (which is a little buggy at the moment on Blizzard’s end) and Guild Level, and now uses the latest guild data. It also fixes an issue with apostrophes in realm names.

I got laid off last month, and I’ve been working hard to find a new job. In the mean time, though, I continue to work on v2.0 of WGR. If all goes as planned, v2.0 will be released next week (on or around July 26).

Blizzard is in the process of releasing their new WoW Community API that lets developers hook into various info sources. The first part they’ve put out is a Realm Status check, and it’s pretty slick. Character info and guild info are next up.

In light of that, I’m holding off on WGR 2.0 so that I can make use of the new API to add even more awesome features to the plugin. Further news will be forthcoming in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

Slated for an April 30th release, WGR 2 brings a host of new features.

* Caching – The plugin will only retrieve data from the Armory every 4/12/24 hours, depending on what you set the frequency to. This means high traffic sites will no longer experience temporary blacklisting.

* New data source – Instead of pulling from the old XML service, v2.0 will parse the new Armory. This means new information will be available for display, including (but not limited to) Achievement Points.

* More flexible limit options – The new version lets you set a specific level limit instead of just the option of 85-only. You will also be able to limit the players displayed by rank.

* New styling options – Visual control is back! Instead of just “dark” and “light” themes, you will be able to control the colors of each of the fields through the plugin settings page.

* Column display toggling – Now you will be able to toggle individual columns on or off. Everything but the name column will now be optional.

In addition, there will be some behind-the-scenes changes to make the plugin play nicer with other plugins and generally be easier to use.

See, invasions are important. Not “I need to grind out a few invasions to get my next level/gear/etc.” important – they’re “dozens of elite mobs are roaming the entire region intent on killing any player they find” important. Now, this would be really irritating if I wasn’t having so much fun with them. There’s nothing quite like the descent of hordes of minions of the Plane of Death on you and everyone else in the vicinity to alleviate the boredom of node-grinding.

In World of Warcraft, the process of grinding out a gathering profession is mind-numbing. I’ll spend hours flying (or riding) around, hunting for nodes in known areas and avoiding mobs too tough to just run past. In Rift, however, mobs can’t be ignored – oh, sure, the normal world mobs can, but once an invasion starts, all bets are off. For someone who is truly dedicated to crafting this may be an issue, but as someone who plays Rift to have fun, I have to say it’s a refreshing change of pace. I LIKE being interrupted when the interruption is a heavy dose of awesome.

If you don’t mind the occasional unplanned excitement that gathering in Rift can bring, I highly recommend trying it out. If you like nice, safe, boring gathering as a means to a crafting end… you should still try it out. There are some truly gorgeous crafted items in the game, and it’s easy enough to acquire the resources you need to make them, even if you get soundly thumped occasionally by an extraplanar beastie.

The future holds some interesting things for WGR. Planned new features that I’m working on are:

1. Use whatever Blizzard’s new XML scheme for the backend is
2. Support custom styles without using code
3. Cache Armory data to reduce the number of hits your site has on the Armory, and have options to control this
4. Track Achievement points
5. Track average item level
6. Have mouseover character snapshots (like Wowhead’s item snapshots on mouseover)

These are just a few things I’m working on for the next few versions of WGR. Expect to see all of this before v1.1.0 of the plugin, except maybe the Blizzard XML update.

Doing a special solo achievement for an instance

Recently, after two months of horrendous packetloss, my internet was finally fixed. So, I finished patching Vindictus, a game I’d downloaded just before the problems started.

I have never before played such a fantastic free-to-play MMO.

The Basics

The game is from Nexon, the company behind the sandboxy free-to-play MMO Mabinogi. The graphics are gorgeous, with a high-resolution 3D anime look reminiscent of Final Fantasy XIV. The 300-esque credits segment was a well done homage, and very art-y besides. The user interface is very well thought out, with a natural feel and intuitive controls. Any veteran of a first-person shooter will feel right at home. The musical score and sound effects are good without being distracting.

With Vindictus Nexon continues its trend of avoiding the usual Asian MMO problems. While the gameplay never really changes, it’s hardly the grindfest of a traditional Asian MMORPG. The game is very casual-friendly, being more of an action game than a traditional RPG. While leveling is present in the game, it’s not terribly important. When running dungeons as a level 10, more than a few times I spotted players over level 30 running with me, and their abilities didn’t seem particularly overpowered compared to mine.

The Core Gameplay

Most “battles” – the Vindictus version of an instanced dungeon – consist of a series of trash mob encounters with a boss fight at the end. These battles rarely last more than 30 minutes so far. Generally speaking, the fights are pretty easy. However, there are a few where the boss fight is tough enough that it takes down one or two of the players (out of the five max). Like Final Fantasy, in Vindictus any player with a phoenix feather can resurrect a downed player. Items are critical for these big boss fights, since your equipment gets trashed pretty quickly, and you’ll need to repair it in the field while your party mates keep the boss’s attention on them. This boils down to all the players playing the roles of damage dealer, tank, and healer, which makes for a really fun fight. No one stayed “dead” for longer than the few seconds it took for someone else with a feather to resurrect them, so no one was out of the action for long.

Another interesting thing about Vindictus battles is that much of the game world is destructible. Numerous times I destroyed a stone column, then took a chunk of the debris and hurled it at a monster. A couple times I wasn’t paying attention, got knocked into a column, destroyed the column, and had whatever it was holding up land on me. This hurts. With an environment this interactive, you really need to pay attention to your surroundings.

Another boss fight, this time from the victory sequence

Crafting and fishing are handled in a unique way, too. I’ll get to them in a future post. As I write this, in fact, I’m sitting on a fishing boat waiting for another school to appear…