This will be a short post, but hopefully an insightful one.

I think the first thing I noticed when I began playing Star Trek Online was that everything felt faithfully recreated, from the ship interiors to the sound of phaser fire. It’s actually quite cool how that plays out.

One thing I was interested in seeing however was how ship combat worked, and while I’m still getting the hang of it, I can imagine that a lumbering behemoth of a ship would necessarily be difficult to maneuver, and while it is easy to play ship combat skirmishes, you still get that feeling of, “WTH, I’m PILOTING A SPACESHIP!”  The only thing that really keeps me from feeling 100% ecstatic about ship combat is that it makes me dizzy sometimes, so I have to take a break.

That said, I have a Joined Trill by the name of Victor in-game, and the name of my ship? Well… it’s as if I acted like the good Doctor from Voyager and gave myself an otherwise bland name, but yeah… it’s the USS Victorian.

I’ve signed up with a super-nice casual fleet by the name of The 3rd Fleet, and if I pass their screening, I should have more fun talking to people from around the world.

Expect more thoughts on the game real soon.

In trying to come up with a worthwhile title for this post, I’d basically exhausted my mind thinking of a title that did not have overt references to this particular science fiction franchise.

I think using my name in reference to a portion of the canonical space in that universe fits the idea of an unorthodox title.

What’s this all about, you say?

Well, I still have a sub to Rift, and I was thinking of cancelling the sub and not letting it renew since it’s a three-monther, so I was trying to find a game with a sub that I could enjoy casually as an alternative to playing Final Fantasy XIV.

I had settled on two possibilities before bed: heading to the stars courtesy of Star Trek Online, or going dystopian with the help of Fallen Earth. While I had played Fallen Earth previously, my connection issues with the game made it rather unplayable and turned me off from purchasing the game this round. As such, Star Trek Online became the de facto winner in my mind for “next MMO to try” when I got out of bed.

I’m currently downloading a patch for the game, but I’ve settled on a course of action that should be quite interesting.

If you’re a long-time reader, you’ll know that my favorite Star Trek series has to be Voyager, and it’s not because of Jeri Ryan playing Seven of Nine. It was because I thought Captain Janeway was an awesome Captain who upheld the ideals of the Federation in the most trying of circumstances, and because Robert Picardo was an excellent Emergency Medical Hologram.

Well, because of this, I’ve decided to take the long road and play a Science Officer who uses a Science-based ship, working my way to get the equivalent of the Voyager spacecraft and eventually retrofitting said Voyager-class spacecraft into its final form by the end of the series.

As members of the game community come up with new, exciting stories on the Foundry, I’ll also be taking a look at them and hopefully reviewing them for you.  That said, I’m in no rush and, so long as I have FFXIV and STO to keep me company, it should be an interesting couple of weeks here over at Games and Geekery Headquarters.

There’s just one thing though.

What the heck do I name my first ship? SUGGESTIONS MOST WELCOME!

Let me say this to start: Crafting for 30 minutes without stopping can wear me out faster than a 14-hour marathon of general gaming. It is either due to the process of repeated crafting being boring or relaxing, but I have trouble telling which one it is when I manage to slump in my seat.

That said, I would like to begin this installment of my Extended Look at Final Fantasy XIV by talking about crafting and the economics of the game at present.

Final Fantasy XIV’s system is what I’d call an active crafting system rather than a passive one. In active crafting systems, the crafting process does not assure you of success, so you have to be vigilant during the crafting process so as to maintain success throughout the attempt to make something.

While I won’t go into the specifics of the crafting system here, as I just linked a basic crafting guide for you, it can be said that Final Fantasy XIV crafting is a very involving and time-consuming process, not only because each crafting attempt takes time to complete, but also because finding materials with which to complete usable tools, weapons, and armor can be rather daunting.

In the first case, each crafting attempt, whether it is successful or not, gives you skill points that eventually rank up your skill at the given craft. While the skill leveling process is the same for all character types, it’s only in the gathering and crafting classes that failed attempts to acquire a new product can give you some amount of progress. That said, however, it still takes a lot of crafting to get anywhere in this game, unless you use your local levequest allotment to offset the slow nature of the attempts.

Individual crafters are rarely able to produce items relative to their level. To make a spear, for example, you will not only need abilities in crafting the wooden shaft and the spear head (Carpenty and Blacksmithing, respectively). You will also have to procure items that can only be done by people who’ve surpassed that level in a different craft (such as armorcrafting or alchemy), as a higher level item from a seemingly unrelated profession is usually required in order to make the final product.

This ties in somewhat to the economy of Final Fantasy XIV. Whereas most gamers are probably used to auction house systems, Final Fantasy XIV has a bazaar and personal shop system that allows you to hire a retainer who will sell goods on the market for you in addition to selling items on your own personal bazaar. The game is designed to not be a soloist’s affair, because if you want to make something worth using, being in a linkshell (the equivalent of a guild) or rummaging through the packs of other players and their retainers in the Market Wards of capital cities is part of the game.

Recent developments have made the process easier , though still less convenient than what people are used to. You can now search for specific items available in Market Wards and can track down retainers who sell sell it the cheapest, but you’ll still need to go into individual wards to get the item from the retainer. It’s a bit disjointed, to be honest, but it’s not an insurmountable obstacle to playing the game.

The thing I like about all this running about and craft grinding though is that for a goal-oriented person like myself, I can actually see myself progress, and I can pace myself according to my own needs or desires. If the crafting is tiring me out but I am so close to leveling up, I can push myself a little harder. If I’ve used a guild hall’s facilities to get a boost to my crafting success rate, then I feel more inclined towards using that time dedicated to improving  a particular trade.

What this does mean, however, is that I have slow progression for any individual trade. On the other hand, I do have a ton of experience now in trying and mastering the synthesis process for different crafts,  as well as an increasing stock of knowledge acquired from referring to recipes for the various tradeskills. That, and I’m far more savvy now in finding bargains than I used to be seven days ago.

In any event, what I deem to be a relaxing and somewhat fulfilling experience can be seen by others as a bit of a pain, but in my opinion, the struggle to maintain your composure on a difficult synthesis attempt coupled with a rousing success gets the adrenaline pumping and brings a smile to my face.

Check back tomorrow for part three of this Extended Look at Final Fantasy XIV!

Victor Stillwater of Lindblum

In a couple of hours, I will have spent seven days playing Final Fantasy XIV. They were probably not the best-spent hours of my life, but they were fulfilling, relaxing hours, nevertheless.

I’m going to try writing this return to Final Fantasy XIV with fresh eyes, so I shall not be referencing my previous write-ups much. Needless to say though, I’m happy for one marked difference between my last time playing the game and my current stay in Eorzea: Exclamation Marks pointing to story quest givers and important people that need to be talked to for levequests.

Moving on…

Upon reactivating my account and logging into the game, I realized that playing the game in the manner I used to (mainly carpentering my butt off and doing more crafting than anything else) would not work, so I tried the other approach, which was to create a character that started off as a Disciple of War (in this case, a Lancer) and branched out from there.

This approach worked rather well, primarily because within the first few hours of my stay in the game, I had amassed 100,000 gil for basically talking to someone. As it so happened, I found out that my entry was rather well-timed, as they had just released a patch that introduced a new event for people to enjoy.

This new event, known as Hatching Tide, tasks players with talking to an NPC in one of the capital cities and getting an egg from that NPC every couple of hours (possibly 12). Collect a specific combination of four eggs (Lightning, Earth, Water, and Archon eggs), and turn them in to an NPC beside the egg-giver, and you would be rewarded with a spiffy egg cap that you could use as protective headgear.

I didn’t pay much heed to the quest text because I realized that I could sell the eggs for starter money, and so the first thing I did was put the first egg I got up for sale for (this is a pittance, but enough to purchase starter weapons and tools for every class) for 100,000 Gil.

A few hours later, I had enough starter money to get myself acquainted with all the classes.

Forgetting one of the quirks of the game, I attempted to alt-tab to read up on what I could do with the money and caused the game to forcibly shut down. Alt-Tabbing out of the full-screened version of the game shuts the game down, but using the configuration program to set it to windowed mode resolved that issue, though it’s a minor annoyance that I have to drag the window up a bit every time I want to see the XP values for my skills and physical level.

In any event, my stay in Eorzea included trying out every profession in the game save for the magic schools and the archer class, and I generally found my way without much trouble, since I could alt-tab and research on class skill synergy.

During this seven-day stay of mine, I contacted The Star Onions, a linkshell I was a part of during the pre-release phase, and found they were currently based on the Lindblum server. They let me into the linkshell, and I enjoyed asking questions a newcomer would normally ask, to which they would either answer promptly and politely, or remind me that there’s actually a database now for recipes and other information called Yellow Gremlin.

Combined with Eorzeapedia, a smattering of assorted guides created by players, and a gathering profession spreadsheet that outlined the actual use of notches in Disciple of the Land gathering procedures, I set out to become a strong warrior and a master item crafter.

Check back tomorrow for Part 2 of this Extended Look at Final Fantasy XIV.

So the Open Beta of Mythos is supposed to be today, and it’s either in Closed Beta or Open Beta right now.

I was looking forward to giving open beta a go, but after downloading and installing the client (a 1GB download, I might add), I found myself unable to play the game.

It seems that some folks, myself included, are unable to run the patcher or the client for the game. Despite reinstalling the game and changing the compatibility settings for it, the game appears to be stuck with nothing more than a horizontal off-white bar to indicate that it started doing something…

AND SOMETHING HAPPENED.

Apparently, waiting eight minutes for the patcher to actually load did the trick on my end after setting the compatibility to Windows XP SP3. Not exactly an ideal solution, but I’ll take it for now. Let’s see if we can patch this up and get to testing.

The Dungeon Siege III Bundle on Steam is theoretically awesome.

You get three games for the price of one, and can basically play out the (somewhat meager) story that comes through in the first and second games.

Of course, it’s never really that simple, as you’re playing two rather old games, and it’s been nearly six years since the  second Dungeon Siege game came out.

Here are some factoids on what you will not get if you go purchase the Dungeon Siege III bundle, like I did.

1. You will not get multiplayer. This is stated prior to anyone even thinking of purchasing the game.

2. You will not get the expansion for Dungeon Siege II.

3. You (possibly) will not get to play Dungeon Siege I on your brand spanking new computer, though this appears to have been remedied somewhat, if the Steam forums are any indication.

Personally, I want to see if Dungeon Siege 2  is any fun to play, but that’s just me.

Last night, after talking with people and thinking about what I wanted, I decided to purchase a month of game time for EQ2.

Seeing as the computer I’m using now is different, however, it also meant that I’d need to redownload the client from scratch, only this time, there’s more of the client that needs downloading. At 12.4 GB, it’s not a quick download for my connection speeds, and some issues with their new launcher system made things rather worse on my end.

You see, I originally used the Station Launcher for trying to download the client, and got around 400 MB downloaded. I stopped the download for a bit to check something, and when I ran it again to continue the download, it was stuck in an error loop about scanning the remote manifest.

Some digging on the forums revealed that there was an alternative, game-specific launcher, so I tried that, but after installing it, the damned thing wouldn’t load past a screen with the SOE logo in the middle. I deleted the cache and cookies on IE, Chrome, and Firefox, restarted my computer, and even tried bypassing the download through the streaming client (it didn’t work), until I tried restarting my computer again and waiting for the EQ2 Launchpad to run its course and get to a log-in screen.

Luckily, something I did must have worked, because it finally got past the loading screen and onto a log-in screen.

Right now, I’ve got 2.3 GB downloaded, and I’m hoping the other 10.1 GB gets downloaded sooner rather than later, as I’m itching to play. In the meantime, I’m trying to figure out if there are any games I can play while waiting, or if I should nap first for a few hours while downloading. Ah well.

Posing some questions to you folks before heading to work. Maybe you can add an answer or two here to echo any sentiments I’ve put up?

Question 1: What is the current recommended Black Garden PVP Spec for Clerics if you have the eight main souls? My current PVE setup is Justicar/Shaman/Purifier but I’m hoping to change that with a PVP role.

Question 2: How many of you folks have a bugged quest on the Guardian Silverwood zone called The Care and Imprisonment of Changelings? I can’t seem to pick up the quest items from invasion bosses, which is a bit annoying, and I’d love to complete it before I move out to the Gloamwood.

With the exception of really big main towns, I don’t think I’ve come across a MMORPG where you go back to a certain area to get new quests.

That said, Rift certainly got me a bit confused recently, as I followed the Guardian questline to the Highglade Lookout and completed some quests there. The only thing was that, after that point, there was no quest leading to the next hub as given by the folks near the area. Instead, I had to find my way back to Argent Glade, the secondary town of Silverwood, in order to find the next set of non-Realm of the Fae quests in order to proceed.

There are two ways of looking at such a happening. The first is that you look at it as a softening of your sharpened gaming senses that you actively look for the next breadcrumb quest to lead you to a new hub. The second is that Rift just wants you to explore the world, go back to the towns, and look for quests in the most logical of places: where there happen to be people, obviously.

Either way, my Cleric is having fun, and I certainly like the idea of revisiting content while powered up to steamroll through it.