Dragon's Prophet Archives - Page 2 of 2

The Prophecy

I am still finding myself very much inexplicably drawn to this game. The more I play it, the more nuanced the combat becomes… but at the same time everything about it is deceptively simple. It is essentially all the same clicks and key presses, but when you do them in timing with what other abilities produces entirely new results. This feels extremely liberating in that I can get all the same warrior like abilities that I enjoy in other games with a handful of key presses just varying my timing for different results. This guy feels like I have always wanted a warrior to feel… brutal and imposing but also controlling the battlefield.

My biggest problem so far is the fact that I seem to always receive the quest to do something… moments after I have done it. The game has these public quest areas that are very reminiscent of Warhammer Online. They involve killing a bunch of things, and then finally an insanely difficult boss spawns and taking it down rewards treasure and completion of the public quest. In every single instance of a public quest in game… I have completed it, and then shortly thereafter gotten a quest to kill the final guy in the public quest.

Some of these were extremely difficult to solo… like the Subject 18 public quest area, and I have not been amped to try and do it again. So as a result these public quests kill tasks sit in my task list undone until I finally get frustrated enough to go over and repeat the process. This is the one thing I really wish they would change… instead of unlocking the public quest kill task at the end of a chain… just give it to players up front similar to the wanted posters were in World of Warcraft. That way if you are already in the area and are feeling your wheaties you can make a stab at the big boss.

The Rat Trap

The other aspect of the game that is quite literally killing me… is the fact that killing rats of ANY kind is a trap. Basically when I play any game I thoroughly believe in a scorched earth policy. If it is killable… it should probably die and die often to give me tasty tasty loot. I find myself ping ponging across most maps killing everything in my wake. The problem is… in Dragon’s Prophecy this is a brutal trap. Rats are generally non-aggro neutral mobs, that have a nasty habit of wandering into AOE attacks and adding onto whatever you happen to be fighting. They rarely have much hit points so the immediate thought is… this is no big deal.

The initial thought process… is so deadly wrong. While rats don’t do much attack damage and are fairly week… they pack the single strongest attack I have encountered in this game… Bacterial Infection. This appears to be a percentage based damage over time ability… that can take me from alive to dead in like 10 seconds. I have yet to really find a good way to counter this. Right now I take on of the strongest potions I have and pray I will survive. I would say that 90% of my deaths so far… have been to a damned stray rat.

This has lead me to play the game completely different than I normally would. I end up carefully picking my way through packs of mobs… drawing them around corners to try and fight in areas that are not so rat infested. It is so difficult for me to quell my “kill all the things” instinct and carefully pull my way through content. This basically has flipped me into dungeon tank mode… tanking an instance is the one time I am super cautious about my pulls. Everything about the guardian feels like the WoW Warrior on steroids, with more nuanced controls.

I am still not 100% sure why I am enjoying the game so much. It just feels like it is perfect for whatever state of mind I have been in. I am sure my enjoyment will fade over time, but right now the dragon taming aspect with some really amazing tanky gameplay has made this a real win for me. I always find it interesting when a game like this completely takes me by surprise. Everything about the setup for this game, sounds like something that would annoy me. I never really cared for runes of magic so the constant assertion that this was developed by the same people… was only taken as a negative by me. What we have instead is an extremely deep and subtle game, that I feel like I have just barely scratched the surface of its systems.

PK Comes through Again

Last week in response to a post talking about playing a Ranger again in Rift and farming cloth, PKDude99 the guy behind my favorite warrior solo build… posted a link to his favorite rogue build. This one is called the “Granpa said knock you out” build and is comprised of 41 Nightblade, 21 Riftstalker, and 4 Tactician. I have to say once again PK is completely right. The build works amazingly well, has extremely high damage output and next to no downtime. I can routinely take mobs 2 or more levels than me without any issue or added difficulty. I played with it quite a bit this weekend and was burning through the quests I worked on.

The funny thing is… as melee centric as I tend to be. This is the first time I have ever really seriously played a melee rogue in Rift. For whatever reason I was always drawn to the ranger/marksman builds that mimicked the WoW Hunter. I think it is mostly that traditionally I do not get along well with stealth classes. It always feels so tedious stealthing around and setting up the perfect moment to attack… then the combat itself is usually over in seconds. If you do not stealth around, usually you die horribly for your poor life choices.

Fortunately stealthing in Rift is completely different than my experience playing stealthers in the past. Stealth is a 30 second buff that you use only as a setup immediately before combat. Additionally you do not slow your movement speed, so combat still feels fast paced. Additionally it seems to not really matter if I open with a stealth attack or not… I can still chew through mobs just as effectively without a big opener. I feel like the Rift rogue is the “warriors” rogue… for someone who prefers fast paced combat to fiddly stealthy nonsense. I am sure most rogue types are ready to throttle me at this point… but I am enjoying it.

Wrapping Up

I need to wrap this up so we can get on the road. We need to get to the airport, and then me on to work. I hope you all have a great day, and hope that you all go as much sleep as needed… unlike me. Not really sure what this week will bring, I tend to completely vege out on video games during these periods. I am sure I will play a good deal more Rift and Dragon’s Prophet… and I would like to get back in to some more SWTOR as well. Hopefully the week goes quickly.

The bed felt extremely good this morning… and it took just about all effort I could muster to leave it, shower and go fetch some breakfast. As a result it is after 10 am and I am finally sitting down to blog. This morning I am listening to Red Hot Chilli Peppers as an attempt to block out the world and focus on my writing. So far it is having mixed results because at the same time I am downloading Dragons Prophet to my laptop… and I am getting the occasional cut out, as I am streaming the music from my network attached storage. Apparently I am flooding my wireless cards capacity with that 8 gig download.

The Dragod Comes

Last week this video was released about the new SOE game Dragon’s Prophet, and as silly as it sounds… this prompted me to download the game. Anyone who could create a video this awesome… had to be up to some good. I am a rather simple monkey, and if you give me a big dude in armor with an even bigger sword… and I am generally pretty happy. I figured this would be the kind of game that I play for a few hours and forget about forever. Funny thing is… the game is really good and is extremely fun to play. I expected the game to be a big dumb beat-em-up and what I found instead was a strangely nuanced game.

Belghast the Dragon Tamer

Belghast lives again as a Guardian… which is essentially the big heavy armored warrior type. My first issue with the game was the character creator. This is another one of those games that for whatever stupid reason links hair style with facial hair style. So essentially I got to choose between guy with mutton chops and handlebar moustache… or member of the duck dynasty cast with dreadlocks. I thought it was kind of bullshit that there was not an option for a nice clean goatee and moustache. Stupid as it might sound… this is almost always my major issue with Asian MMOs… they seem to have nothing but clean shaven options.

If you have been following me for long, you will notice that almost every single character I make in any game looks the same. Ultimately Belghast is an idealized version of myself with black hair, goatee and Adrian Paul ponytail if the game supports it. I get grumpy when I cannot look the way I want to look, so this was an initial major strike against the game. Luckily as I got into the game itself I quickly forgot about this woe… and after spending some of my stockpiled station cash on cosmetic armor… you can no longer see the lower part of my face anyway.

Smashing Things

The game itself reminds me of a mash-up of TERA, Neverwinter and Guild Wars 2, as it has aspects of all of the above with its own spin on each. Combat is pretty much controlled with left and mouse clicks and various combo abilities on Q, W, and Number keys. Your second mouse button varies based on how many times you have swung your main weapon. This produces some pretty interesting gameplay and offers a lot of variance of abilities without having to hit a lot of different buttons. For the guardian parry is R and charge is V… but I am sure some of these abilities change greatly based on your class.

There are various bugs with combat, namely the charge has a lot of issues. Sometimes you will charge directly to the mob you are wanting to attack, but other times you teleport across the screen… the screen freezes and when you get control again you have a bunch of friends on you. Essentially I have learned not to really rely on charging… and unfortunately that takes away some of my enjoyment. Instead of I have started using my Q ability which is a Guile like sonic boom attack. It travels a short distance and hits any mobs in the path, which I can then pull back and fight safely without aggroing other things.

The zone design reminds me a lot of Everquest 1. In that you have town hubs, with a ring of lower level mobs around it… but as you get further away from a town the mob levels increase. It is interesting to see zones designed specifically for early flying mounts, in that these mob level radius extend out from each little hub town. If you travel the path between towns you will see a progression of mobs that looks something like this… town 1, level 5, level 6, level 7, level 8, level 15, level 14, level 13, level 12, level 11 town 2. Essentially it seems like from ground up they are expecting players to charm a flying dragon and use it to hop back and forth between towns.

Poke-dragon

Another interesting concept with the game is the fact that you can charm a mount extremely early. I managed to get a flying mount at around level seven, pretty much as soon as I found a dragon out in the landscape. Essentially as soon as you get the “capture” ability unlocked you can whittle down a dragon in health and attempt to capture them. It might just be my imagination but it seems to get easier to capture them the more damage you have dealt to them before firing the command. At that point you mount the back of your dragon and have to play a mini-game in order to complete the capture. Essentially you have two bars… red meter that starts empty and fills, and a yellow meter that starts full. The goal of the mini-game is to keep your reins icon in the center of a circle on screen. If you get out of the circle, the yellow meter goes down rapidly… if it empties before the red bar fills you fail at the capture.

So the simple fact that you can capture a dragon is not as far as the Pokémon metaphor goes… you also inherit new abilities from the various dragons you capture. I am not 100% sure if I understand this all yet, there is a lot to figure out and not a ton of tutorial to do so. However it seems like every dragon you tame has new abilities, these range from attacks, to harvesting and crafting abilities. Eventually it seems like your dragon dictates whatever ability you have on the 1 key. My current dragon has this lightning leap attack which is extremely powerful. Additionally you seem to be able to stable your dragons and get them to learn new abilities. Obviously I need to figure more of this out… but the takeaway is… there is a lot of hidden depth in the game.

I seem to have won the lottery when I picked starting in Sibernia. I have been watching my friends talk about getting their first flying mount for a few weeks now… and the very first dragon I tamed had full flight. In fact it was not until I got into the level 12ish area that I found a pure ground mount. Having a wide array of flyers definitely has helped the enjoyment of this game, because seriously who doesn’t love riding a dragon? Two of the dragons I captured came from a dungeon and were somewhat akward to get to… so it seems like there are common and less common versions of the various dragons. My “emerald purple dragon”, definitely came with more abilities than any I had seen to that point… we will just ignore the fact that it has emerald in the name but has absolutely no green or yellow on it.

Station Cash Drain

One of the good things about this game is that it is by SOE, and uses the standard Station Cash system for micro transactions. As a result, I have a Station Access account, and have been accruing station cash for some time. The bad is that almost everything in this game has the option to spend SC in place of game money. This means not only cosmetic stuff, and stat boosts, but enchanting items, crafting etc. Everything has a slow money drain factored into it… but honestly I was expecting this from the company that brought us Runes of Magic. Most of my SC expenditures have been what I term quality of life. Essentially you can increase your bag and bank and stable space with station cash… all of which have made the game more enjoyable for me and less about micromanaging my inventory. The negative is I had about 7500 sc going into this and am sitting right at 3000 now.

The one thing I am surprised about is that so far I have not encountered the ubiquitous cash box, or anything even vaguely similar. Right now all of the station cash outlay seem to be on speeding up gameplay and buffing your character… but not necessarily direct money for items transactions. Those might be there… I may just not have encountered them. Additionally I have seemed to be able to live just fine off vendor and dropped gear, without need for anything more. I’ve decided that once again I prefer sword and board to two hander… but this is probably not a shocker to anyone. I look badass in my frosty/deathknighty armor… so I am completely happy running around and beating things down like a proper tank.

The Takeaway

Essentially my takeaway at the end of the day, is this is a game that I had essentially written off as something that I was not likely to enjoy. However upon playing it, I am really having a blast doing so. Basically if you liked TERA, but were turned off by just how horrible the questing experience was… then this is the game for you. The combat is fun and strangely nuanced… and the dragon taming aspect throws something fresh into the mix. This is definitely gaming junk food, but the experience is so worth the calories. The game reminds me of so many other games, that combined it becomes its own very unique experience. The game is pretty brutal at times as well… I have died an innumerable amount of times… but there seems to be no punishing effect of it other than the slow bleed of repair costs. Download the game and give it a try, I figure you will find something in it you like.