Today is an interesting day, I have nowhere to be and nothing to do, you would think I would fire up an MMO and put my day to good use levelling a character or chatting to friends. But no. and here is why…

I cancelled my LotRO subscription because I just wasn’t enjoying it as much as I had been, mostly because I over indulged and got burnout. The plan was to both save some penny’s and to diversify my gaming interests, then to return to LotRO in six months all fired up.

This has worked, the £8.99 a month I have saved over the past three months or so has aided me in paying a nice chunk of my windows 7 pre-order, and because money is tight in my house (as is it everywhere I assume) I will probably wait another three months or so before subscribing again. I know that less than a tenner a month is good value for entertainment but at the moment, its money I would rather not spend.

So, what does one play when looking for some cheap or even better some free MMO fix? Well, when I first cancelled my LotRO subscription I had Guild wars to play but with all these free to play games things should be going well for me…

Runes of Magic: I really enjoy this game, its a quality WoW-Like experience but as it ages its becoming a beast of its own and with every patch it ‘feels’ less like a WoW experience, there’s some great lore and the community is wonderfully helpful.

BUT and here is the kicker. My ISP is British Telecom (BT Internet) and for some bizarre reason between the hours of 18:00 and 23:00 they do something that results in my ping hitting 15K.

So, a game I really like and would even spend some money on is not playable during ‘prime time’ its a known problem and BT don’t appear to care, and don’t feel like they have to answer to me (no email reply). But as I am stuck in an 18 month contract it does not look like I will be enjoying RoM any time soon.

Chronicles of Spellborn: It is free to play now, its a great game and has no micro transactions to worry about. But its got a major downside that people don’t tell you about… its hard to play. I mean that. I really like it and play it a lot but damn, its not very accessible. You get little to no help decipher the instructions in the quest log. The game would benefit greatly from a basic hotter-colder style quest helper. Maybe I have gotten lazy in my old age but it seams to be that the game too ‘hard core’ for its own good when it comes to quests.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not moaning and saying I’m too much of a baby to play it, I play it a lot, I like it. Its a great game, but at least the times I play its not particularly well populated, and the accessibility its probably the reason.

I also don’t want to get overly attached to the game because there’s a good chance that the re-development taking place will result in the game being closed rather than re-launched.

Guild Wars: now, I am a fan-boy, and as I already owned every Guild Wars campaign before I went on this money saving drive I have been diving back in. the problem is though that even though Guild Wars is a fantastic game it lacks that persistence that other MMO’s have, and other than raising a new character there’s little for me to do any more.

I find myself logging in, doing some PvP, a little title grinding then logging out again. The game is great but with no new content since Eye of the North its not one I can play as I used to.

The result is that I am lacking any motivation to play any of the games that should be firing me up, I want a community, I want guild to call my own. Unless a new game comes along that makes me tingle, it looks like I will be bored until I resubscribe to LotRO. In a few months, or I’ll buckle earlier and re-subscribe sooner than that.

Here’s what I want in a game at the moment.

Free To play, Micro Transactions are fine too.

Active Players, a good population is important to me.

Interesting, I need a world I can explore and get lost in.

Casual play, I have a real life and the Hardcore stuff just annoys me

Not bandwidth blocked by My ISP, the only reason I am not playing RoM More.

Am I asking for too much? If I wanted to play a subscription there would be stacks of games that fit my criteria, (WoW, LotRO, WAR, AoC, CO to name a few) so where are the F2P games that can scratch my itch?

Chronicles of Spellborn – Character creation

Spellborn is a pretty awesome game, to be honest. It’s got the makings of a great MMO. A nice looking world. Variety of classes. An innovative combat system. The choice of the High Houses. Yep, it’s got it all.

Then why is it having such a hard time keeping my interest?!

I waited so long for this game, to be honest. I remember watching it blossom into the beautiful little game it became. I can’t tell you how hyped I got. And now that it’s here.. feels like I’m having to fight to keep playing it. In short, I’m gonna give Spellborn the time it deserves, and hope it hooks me sometime in the near future.

You are on a ship sailing through a sea of stars. Abruptly, from the outer void, a sinister creature looms over you, a huge mouth in a gigantic, shapeless body. All around, his minions start appearing out of thin air, their hands like sickles. It’s up to you to fend them off with your weapon. As strange as it may sound, this is not a science-fiction game, but the Chronicles of Spellborn, the new fantasy MMORPG distributed by Acclaim.

Please read the Chronicles of Spellborn Preview

Been playing some Spellborn recently, and I’m enjoying the combat system. It’s challenging without being frustrating, and the way you cycle through available skills using the Skill Deck is worth mentioning in more detail.

The Skill Book window displays the skills you’ve learned, as well as information about what statistic they rely on and what type of damage they do. Tooltips are displayed when you mouseover an individual skill that gives you specific information about the effects of each skill. When setting up my skill deck I paid attention to what the skill’s effect was (buff, debuff, single or multiple target melee) and also to the rightmost item on each line, which is the cooldown for the skill.

My plan was to make a balanced skill deck where I had access to my main combat buff (Battle Cry), a fast melee attack (Hack) and a ranged attack for pulling (Shoot) all on the first tier. The skill deck is set up in rows (tiers) where you can select a skill in the first tier when combat begins, and then after using the first tier skill you can select one from the second tier and then the third. The window is large so I assume as you advance in levels you have access to more tiers than three and also more skills per tier. My goal with my setup for tiers two and three was to give myself a pattern of attacks and debuffs I could cycle through so that I would always be able to attack and not be stuck waiting on a cooldown to select a skill. In Spellborn there is no autoattack, so if you aren’t actively using skills you aren’t doing any damage.

With a little calculation it isn’t too difficult to avoid cooldown issues, and the nice thing about the setup I have now is that my opening buff Battle Cry is close to being available again when I’ve cycled through the three tiers three times. Battle Cry gives me melee resistance while it is active and keeping that up is important I’ve found for my damage mitigation. Something else I’ve done to make changing skills within a tier easier is bind those keys to the scroll wheel on my mouse, so I can select available skills just by scrolling instead of having to hit the number keys and take my hand off the movement keys.

Special treat for you, here’s a short video to show you how it works. Watch the highlighted skills as I use them and the cooldown timers as they recycle. Don’t forget too that at the same time you can be dodging enemy attacks by moving to avoid them, as well as aiming at the enemy you wish to attack using the mouse. The combat is quite tactical and feels very fluid once you’ve had a chance to plan out your strategy in detail.

My Bloodwarrior is now level 9, and the setup in these screenshots has changed very little since I took them when I was level 7. When things do change due to new skills I’ll make an update post.

The Chronicles of Spellborn

Well I finally sat down and gave the game a real chance, and so far I like it.  I subbed for a month to check it out and am now level 11.  That is not to say it’s not without problems.  While the combat system is interesting and I like the skill deck, I do not like that certain types of mobs are hit or miss for me.  Particularly hyenas, panthers and the like.  I just suck at them.  I can take out groups of 4 or 5 humanoids my level no problem, but more than one of these creatures and I’m running.  I had my PEP level up to 3, then fell to my death twice, then after an unfortunate death to stupidity I haven’t been able to regain PEP.

I’m somewhat frustrated, I feel a lot weaker at 11 than I did at 8.   Seriously, at level 8 I remember it being easier to fight the level 10 to 12 creatures I’m fighting right now.  I’m not sure if my response time has just been slow these last two days or what.  As such I’m taking a break for a few days to regroup.  In addition I find the client somewhat clunky so it’s hard for me to switch back and forth between the game and firefox to look up quest stuff, so I have to drag out a laptop, and setting all that up just kills my interest when I’m already frustrated.

Eve

Mostly just skilling this week.  I might try to have a goal of 50 million isk a week until I can fly a Raven, then we’ll see.  I have about a month of skills I need to train so that I can fly the fitting I am interested in, as well as another week or so to up my shield skills some more.  I may have terrible missile skills, but my shield skills are awesome.  But that being said, I knocked out my 50 million goal this week fairly quickly.

LOTRO

What, free weekend?  I logged in to check it out because the exp changes piqued my interest.  Excitedly my little elven hunter ran quickly out of the camp I had parked her in, killed a wolf and gained two levels.  Which brought me from level 33 to level 35.  I made my way to Bree and did the mount quests and soon had my horse.   I was happy because I remember when I played last year really wanting to hit 35 and get a mount (always my first goal in any game) and being so frustrated with the difficulties I was having finding quests my level.  Well those extra two levels REALLY helped.  I spent the next few hours doing various light blue and dark blue quests in North Downs.  I ended up playing again this evening and made it to 37.  I’m back in the Trollshaws at the moment and not quite having the same difficulties.  I discovered my gear was okay, upgraded a few pieces but the rest was fine.  I trap more, but not every fight.  I have died several times, once because I aggro;s a bunch of creatures on my mount then got knocked off and slaughtered.  The other time I accidentally pulled an extra mob or two and either died trying to escape or I just wasn’t paying attention, can’t quite remember.  However the new 1 hour self rez is awesome.  It saved me both times I died.  Well saved me from running back.

In Rivendell I had a new little lore quest that made me smile.  I’d been so caught up in leveling last year that I forgot why this game was so much fun.

I’m actually thinking of resubscribing, I’ll play the rest of the free weekend then decide.  I’m almost out of rested experience so we’ll see how I feel.  I’ll just have to focus on what I love about this game, the lore and atmosphere — not griding to level cap.  Spend sometime fishing in my Elven home…maybe even create another hobbit to farm with.

I also want to try out a Creep, I created a warg tonight but didn’t try any PvMP.  Too nervous to throw my poor little critter-warg into combat.

Very little gaming of consequence was done over the weekend. Mrs. Ardwulf and I did put a couple of hours into our characters, getting the Druids to level 18 and anbd establishing a new paring of Dwarves, Priest (she) and Hunter (me.) Both of these were characters we had laying around in the low teens – Saturday we just paired them up.

I also managed to get into the Chronicles of Spellborn, so I have some very initial thoughts on that. I only spent maybe half an hour playing, but it’s more than interesting enough to make me want to go back and dig further into it.

First of all, the world is artistically very lush, although the little tutorial starter area doesn’t much reflect that. The art style is fairly abstract, but it manages not to be abstract in a similar way to World of Warcraft. Between the visuals and the haunting voiceover at the beginning of the game, combined with the whole floating shards and etherships thing, I was reminded distinctly of Planescape, and that’s a good thing. The character models are not terribly compelling, but you do have a fair amount of customization available.

The controls are pretty radically diferent from most other MMOs, since attacks are aimed. I am very much stuck in my ways when it comes to control schemes, and I hate learning new ones, so I was a little surprised that I got the hang of this as quickly as I did, and not only that, but the combat struck me as really fluid and fun. I liked it well enough that I made a new character to specialize in physical combat, the original having been a mage.

I’ve only scratched the surface so far, but Spellborn certainly appears to be worth at least a look. The fact that the early levels are going to be free ensures the permanent presence of a de facto free trial right from the start, which is a pretty good way to approach things in comparison to the more typical practice of holding off for a year or two before offering one.

Eve

My trial account foray to try out the new features led to me resubbing on my main account.  After logging on  and checking out my characters skills and wallet I realized I was fairly close to getting my Drake Battlecrusier and trying out level 3 missions.  I debating crosstraining to Gallente or Amarr; I enjoy guns more then missiles.  In the end my desire to move up to level 3 won out.  Increased monetary gains sounded too tempting.  I want a lot of expensive skill books for invention.  I ran a mission or two everyday — until today when I was going to make the final push, according to my math I needed about 10m more isk for my ship & fittings.  I got on set to spend all day mission running, when I decided to go buy my fittings.  After finding some small bargains, I had 20m isk left.  I found a Drake 10 jumps away for 30m isk.  Too impatient to attempt missions, I decided to sell off some stuff.  First I traded in some LP, made 7m isk on that.  Stripped my Gallente Destroyer (I don’t need two salvage ships), sold it for .7 mil isk.  My Gallente Destroyer had about a million in fittings…sold it.  Went back to my home station and sold everything I could part with, including my beloved cruiser.  I ended up with 34m isk, purchased my new Drake, managed to have enough isk to insure it, fitted it and took a mission.

My first mission was the level 3 version of ‘Damsel in Distress.’  I’ve done the level 2 mission quite a few times, but not recently enough to know what I was in for.  I ended up having to warp out once because I dropped into armor and without an armor rep, I prefer to warp out, get my shields back up to 100% then warp back in.  After that I made some changes and had fewer problems, in all likelihood I was a little too excited when I first warped in.  Shields still took a beating though.

I had been running level two missions in my Caracal with absolutely no problems, HOWEVER, there was one mission I remember having to warp in and out of, but it was in February.  It MAY have been the level two Damsel, but I don’t know.

In the end my first level 3 mission was a success.  I ended up making a killing, at least in my level 2 eyes.

I did two more level 3’s.  Gone Berserk, which was entirely too easy.  I just sat their sniping the rats as they came in.  I put my drones on the frigs, maybe a missile launcher.  My shield rarely dropped below 75% and when it did I’d turn on my booster for a second or two.  The other was an unbelievably easy mission that I don’t remember the name of.  I had to kill a few rats but that was all.

By the end of the evening I was back up to 15 million, with a container full of more loot to sell when the rest of my orders sell.

Atlantica Online

I’ve been playing a bit this week, up to level 50, got a beast trainer, nothing more.

Spellborn

I’ve played this game for a short while.  Today when I logged on to the Acclaim Open Beta it was a little busy so I didn’t try to do anything, I was more interested in getting my Drake.  However I played about an hour yesterday on the European servers.  I am intrigued by the gameplay, but still unsure.  I like some aspects of the combat, but I’m not quite sure if I want to have to play an RPG where I have to dodge to avoid damage, er or do I even need to.  I just need to try it out a little more.  I really do like the style.

Keen is one of the bloggers into Darkfall, and yesterday he posted a video that was pretty amazing (I recommend watching it in HD if at all possible.) It really made me want to try the game out. Watching some of the earlier gameplay videos, however, reminded me way too much of early Vanguard, rife with graphical glitches. So I’m not quite sure what to think. At any rate Adventurine has been kind enough to make the decision for me, rationing game sales in such a way that serious effort is required to get in. As I’ve said before, I think this is a valid strategy in comparison to the retail-driven approach taken by Age of Conan and warhammer Online, as a means to avoid the gigantic launch spike and subsequent crash and resulting dispersed population. Frustrating or not, I believe that they’re taking the right approach here, but we’ll see if Adventurine is as good as CCP at making the post-launch development decisions needed to turn the game into a long-term indie MMO success.

The Chronicles of Spellborn is now in Open Beta, and I downloaded and installed the client last night. You have to activate your Acclaim ID in order to actually get into the game, however, and this is only possible during certain hours, so essentially Spellborn is rationing access in a similar way that Adventurine is. Hopefully I’ll be able to get in and try it out some time over the weekend.

The business model for Spellborn is for access to be free up to a certain (relatively low) character level, and limited to certain areas of the game world. If you want to go past that, you need to pay a subscription fee. Here’s where the problem enters: you don’t just pay your $14 a month and that’s the end of it. Instead, you havbe to buy “Acclaim Tokens” from the Acclaim store, and then redeem those tokens on a Spellborn subscription. The dirty secret of this kind of access mechanism is that the quantities in which one would prefer to buy tokens typically do not line up evenly with the number of tokens that desirable things cost. So you virtually always end up with leftover unspent tokens that you can’t spend on anything that you actually want. I have not yet looked at the numbers involved in Spellborn’s case, but if it’s true here, it’s the kind of shady practice that’ll make me not want to spend money to be a part of. So I may never dig into Spellborn past those early sample levels, but on the other hand, the net cost may, even so, work out favorably in the end. It very much depends on how much I think the game is worth.

The truth of the matter is that on the face of it, Spellborn’s gameplay seems less attractive than Darkfall’s, but its world seems more immersive, which is important to me as an MMO enthusiast. This is going on incomplete information, of course, as I have played neither title, and it may or may not be borne out by actual play.

Meanwhile I am still ignoring Warhammer, to which I will be subscribed until the middle of next month, but have been having plenty of fun with WoW, although I’ve been pushing so hard of late that I didn’t have it in me to play last night.

Also, GO CLEVELAND STATE! I am not a big sports guy, but I have to root for them, firstly because they’re a Cinderella team, and it’s always great to see that kind of story. Secondly because as much as I bitch about living in Ohio, Cleveland is still my hometown, and always will be wherever I am. And thirdly because Mrs. Ardwulf is a student at Cleveland State. She doesn’t much care for sports either, but I’m rooting enough for the both of us.

As you may have already seen elsewhere The Chronicles of Spellborn has entered open beta as of this morning! To get involved there are two links you need, first the activation page to activate your Acclaim account for Spellborn and then the download page to download the game client. I know I’m really excited about this, and I know what the remainder of my weekend will be spent doing when I get home!

Super-Spellborn Fan Tipa has been in the closed beta and has played the EU version of the game so for her experiences of the game and its classes go check out her Chronicles of Spellborn category. Promise I’ll have more useful info here too once I have a chance to play the game!