Guten
abend everyone, back with some more Minecraft Creations. During my recent
activities on the Ozgamerparty Minecraft server I had been planning to make a
great new undergound house, but alas with my previous faction Atomic‘s
“Psynapse“ not being set to ‘peaceful‘ unfortunately our underground mini
island home was ransacked and most of my resources were lost. SO I had to find
a new home with a new faction and I did with Rennz‘ “Aniki“ in which I quickly
set up as a house in a small crevasse I fondly named the “Slum District“. I had
wanted to create a slightly different version of my Jungle
Treehouse as this time it would be made of oak and this time it would
resemble a normal minecraft oak tree except be giant in size.
I managed to create this right on the edge of our claim, I mean literally the leaf blocks on the edge of the right side were on the edge of the claim, now thats precision craftsmanship.
Wide angle
I
also must mention that I am using a new texture pack, namely Faerielight
by Develsaa. I recently had to resert to finding a new 256x256 texture pack as
my beloved LB
Photorealism wasn’t up to date at the time (though I think it is now)
Though I think I’m going to stay with Fairielight as I quite like the look of
it although the text thatis used with
it is kind of difficult to work with and I can’t change it as I can’t get Optifine
to work with the new update for some reason. I looked through a few other packs
some of which looked terrible though I must admit not all 256x256 packs are
made with realism in mind.
Faerielight texture pack
So
I set off to cut some wood and man‘o‘man did I get a lot of wood and put it to
good use (snigger). I borrowed Rennz‘ efficiency II diamond axe which helped
immensely, I must have felled so many trees during that period that the
Minecraft Environmental Conservation Society (MECS) almost arrested me for
deforestation but of course I’d planted the saplings so they had nuthin, it’s
lucky that trees in MC respawn so fast. And so with my huge haul of oak logs I
started making the tree trunk, plan was simple, make the trunk wide enough to
live in, and have a tall enough trunk so that when I add the leaves it doesn’t
appear too short. I finished the trunk pretty quickly having needed to go back
for more logs once or twice, but man can I tell you that the new "stack logs sideways" feature brough in by patch 1.3.1 is fucking annoying. For example in order to stack logs upright now you have to be above them, which annoyed the fack out of me to no end since I was only placing logs upright on the tree and the amount of times I accidentally put the log sideways cause I apparently wasn't above it was alot I can tell you.
I Then started on the leaves at the top, and I was
going to need quite the shiteload of leaves in that regard. I must have gone
through about 15 shears running around that forest slicing foliage off the trees like
some kind of crazed farmer who had misplaced his sheep and needed to vent his
frustration, after realising that the trees don’t actually grow their leaves
back I had to cut all the bare trunks down and plant all the saplings for a
second time lest the MECS be on my ass again.
That I do.
I
started creating the leaves part of the treehouse and basically did it in 6x5
blocks, it wasn’t any specific size I just wanted it to resemble a giant
Minecraft tree which it ended up looking like a sort of sombrero, possibly becaise I had to shave a bit off the bottom of the rim to fit in the balcony.
Holaseñor!
I built a ladder all
the wall through the tree with atrapdoor up the top with some stairs cut in order to get up to the top
of the tree and walk around the edge. I then started on the bottom level where
I had to jut the double iron doorway out one block so I could put the stone
floor panel out of the way of the work area, I had a fair amount of brown wool
from my sheep shearing escapades so I decided to use that for the floor. I arranged
my chests and workbench and cut holes in the trunk for windows and put iron bars
on them for protection and soon realised that there wasn’t exactly much room
inside the trunk so I had to dig out a lower level for my furnaces. The space
issue was a bit more evident on the upper floors as I found I really didn’t
have much room for my usual bedroom furnishings on the 2nd level such as a bed,
bookshelves, flower pots, a chest and juke box and it ended up being quite
cramped, though this was remedied by adding glassed windows including a double
on one side.
Trapdoor at the top of the ladder
Hole and stairs at the top
Mah door be jutting.
The carpet does look a bit gritty with the texture pack, then again you can get kind of gritty in Minecraft
That'll hold off the Zomabies
Furnace room, not much room but then again I don't need much.
Usual Minecraft bedroom amenities
The
third level would be my alchemy/enchanting room although I eventually had to
split them into two, the alchemy room led out to the outer full-cricle balcony which I had
created with logs and leaves which goes against the “big Minecraft tree“ idea
but looks quite nice anyway. The enchanting room on the 4th level was kind of a
challenge as there wasn’t enough room to do the usual enchanting setup, not to
mention that books now need leather to be created which is a major pain in the
rear and has led to a major growth in cow poaching and farming for everyone to
supply their enchanting addictions. Anyway so there wasn’t enough room so I had
to put the enchanting table right next to the ladder so the bookshelves had
space to work their magic which wasn’t exactly preferable from an interior
design perspective but is manageable. After that all I had to do was arrange
windows (that showed basically nothing but foliage) and it seemed to be
complete though because of the multiple levels and the height of the roofs in the
enchanting and alchemy rooms only had wood floors and I preferred to always
have a layer of wood or something else under the wool carpet.
Alchemy Room with door to ringed balcony
Enchanting room
I’d
be lying if I said this will be last treehouse I make whether it‘s
house-in-a-tree or house-that-is-a-tree but next time I really think I will try
to do something different although it probably will still be a wacky style of house,
cause you know that’s how I roll. Though maybe I should try something
different, Da_Seano of our server has made a pretty nicelookingtavern, maybe
I could trump him with a luxury restaurant ,anyway full details of the recent
Ozgamerparty MC server will follow, lebewohl for now.
Diablo, possibly the only one of
Blizzard’s three greatest game
franchises that I had yet to fully experience, I remember delving into a
bit of Diablo 2 in the past but it really wasn’t much at all. I was far too
busy with Warcraft 2 & 3 and also Starcraft when the Diablo games came out
so I paid little attention to them as I was much more RTS focused in those
days. That said though Diablo has a lot in common with those games so much so
that it almost seems like an offshoot of some of the single player campaign
missions, the ones where you have no building units for the entire period and
you usually have one unit who is the “hero” or named unit which is usually a
different colour to the rest and you play through a semi-linear tunnel or
landscape triggering events. To be honest the style of gameplay I found it most
likely to be akin was none other than the Warcraft 3: The Founding
of Durotar campaign featuring the famous Rexxar which I managed to finish
for the first time awhile ago and do a quick
review. In this campaign you predominately played as Rexxar and a few other companions
while both completing quests, levelling up, obtaining new abilities and
collecting items in basically the same way as Diablo. Of course this style of
gameplay was also said to be introducing players to the WoW style of gameplay
which was to come out after it.
Diablo 2, never played it, but apparently it's still better than this one
I must admit I fell in to peer
pressure to get Diablo 3, but now that I do have it, it is a great game to play
with friends. So far in my singleplayer experience of the game I have had
sufficient fun, yes sufficient fun I may sound like I'm going into this with a
lot of negativity though I think I’m just trying to resist becoming a fan of
how awesome Diablo is which is kind of hypocritical since I went from not
fancying World of Warcraft then trying it and realising it was the best thing
ever in the space of 48 hours. So of course I decided to get Diablo 3 and try
it out in the end I had made the right decision to wait since during the initial
launch the game went through quite a few
problems with its long list of servers errors some of which getting famous
by their own accord. But still I wouldn’t have tied to play it on launch night
or even day for that matter, I think the rule of thumb is to just not play the
game until at least a couple of days after it came out, I personally wait
a week or more cause frankly I can wait. I don’t think there is any game
I’d be so excited to play that I’d stay up late into the night to play, maybe
if it was with friends and we were drinking but we’d still be just adding more
people to the number by all trying to log on at the same time with the same
Internet connection.
I wasn’t expecting much
personalisation in the character creation and there wasn’t, this isn’t a
Bioware RPG after all, there’s not much in the way of character storyline as
you just simply create your character, view the initial opening movie, then you
view your very generic character classes opening movie I started out as a Monk
as I thought they looked pretty cool and I liked the idea of using my fists and
feet martial arts style. I soon found that Diablo 3 has a limited number of
abilities that you can use at any one time, two abilities are bound to the left
and right mouse buttons and 4 other abilities are on your action bar, which
pale in comparison to MMORPG’s where sometimes you have enough abilities
displaying to make an on-screen keyboard. For example for my right mouse button
I started with “Fists of
thunder” then got “Lashing
tail kick” for my right mouse button, then a level after that I received “Deadly Reach”
as an alternate ability for my left mouse button and in turn you acquire
different ‘runes’ over time to make deadly reach more powerful this is how the
mouse button abilities work basically one is straightforward hitting a single
direction (most of the time) then the other is more AOE based. The action bar
abilities like “Blinding
Flash” and the Demon Hunter’s “Entangling
Shot” are basically all round utilities to use at the right time. It’s not
overly complicated to play but does require a bit of general rpg type common
sense in choosing your items (which to keep and which to use) and which
abilities to use at the correct time but of course that just comes with
learning the game.
Character screen and my Monk
The auction house is one thing I
myself could possibly do without, I’ve only dealt with auction houses in MMO’s
where they are obviously needed, but with a mostly singleplayer game such as
this, I don’t need the auction house whatsoever. I just think it’s an
unnecessary feature for people to wheel and deal, especially the ‘real money’
auction house which is basically a post similar to this
waiting to happen. I did feel a bit taken aback when my friends said that “you
buy most of your stuff from the auction house especially in the higher levels
as it’s so much better”I’d digress on
the higher levels but I really don’t think a primarily singleplayer game should
have to rely on an auction house to have the best gear and/or to compete with
other players.
I’m now up to the 3rd
act and to be honest I can’t really be bothered anymore, I’m sorry to say the
game was only really mildly fun, the story was the only thing that kept me
going. The first two acts were good enough and pretty suspenseful but now it’s
all action just defending some damn castle and it’s the same old mass killing
of monsters and demons and I just can’t bring myself to play it again so I
don’t know how this review is going to turn out. For the most part the controls
were fine, I didn’t really mind having fewer buttons to press. the graphics
were good, especially the effects, . I enjoyed the storyline for as far as I
played it, the difficulty curve... well it was easy enough, I didn’t really get
very far but to be honest I really wouldn’t have bothered trying it on the
higher level, I enjoyedhaving followers
and decking them out with the best items I could and I enjoyed killing hordes
enemies with super kicks and punches and special abilities. I’d hate to say
this though but the whole thing just felt a bit too linear and repetitive, and
I know your all going to scream at me “Well that’s what Diablo’s about and this
is the first time I’ve played it and I haven’t even finished it on normal difficulty
and how can I say that when I play MMO’s like WoW and SWTOR”.
Your followers are quite useful, not to mention good company
The fact that I haven’t finished
it on normal is because I couldn’t be bothered and have gotten bored and it
wouldn’t be any better at higher levels anyway cause it’d just be too hard and
also I’m not bored because of the easy difficulty, just running from one area
to the next killing demons getting loot, going back to drop off the loot etc.
The loot was also kind of a problem too, there was SO much loot and not just
white and grey crap there was heaps of magic blue stuff you had to sort
through, true it just meant a quick portal trip back to home but still I was
doing that about once every 20 minutes, maybe I just pick up too much I dunno.
I’m really trying to see the difference in my experience with this game
compared to The Old Republic, I mean they are MMO’s whereas Diablo is a Hack’n’Slash but you do
really the same thing in both of them. In both of the games you have a large continuous
storyline with multiple smaller storylines running through them, you fight and
kill enemies and bosses, you do quests, you get new spells and abilities, you
have followers/companions with you, you pick up new armor/weapons and upgrade
and enchant them or sell them, you have seemingly similar crafting skills and
interface’s and you level up throughout the game. Maybe what makes me prefer
MMO’s to this is the linearity and freedom of character. In Diablo you get to
choose what kind of fighting style/image your player is but you’re pretty much
stuck to going through semi-linear landscapes and caverns which really not much
choice of how you go about it, whereas in MMO’s you have a lot more freedom of
where you go and how you get there, you have more of a feel of being your own
character.
I think the main reason is that
Diablo as I said before isn’t an RPG it’s a Hack’n’Slash I mean it’s
got nothing in immersiveness, large gaming world, character detail and AI
compared to Skyrim,
and it hasn’t got quite the multiplayer element of MMO’s, that’s probably why
it doesn’t tick all the boxes in my list. It does somehow remind me of why I
didn’t like Magicka except that was even smaller still and plus everyone was
wizards, EVERYONE can’t all be wizards it’s just not right, agh it’s worse than
those games where everyone’s a Sniper, actually that’s not too much different
from the modern EA Battlefield games I guess ahah.. People tell me now that the
game isn’t as good as the 2nd one and I don’t doubt them. Maybe I
should have made the effort to play the second one more, I suppose I’ve never
played Sacred,
Titan quest or even
something like Dark
Souls, maybe If I did I would have known I didn’t like the genre, ah well I
needed to find out some way.
Sacred
Titan's Quest
All in all, despite my ranting
and whining about why I can’t enjoy it, Diablo 3 is still a solid game, it has
most of the things that good hack’n’slash game should for example:
Fast-paced combat, lots of
enemies of varying difficulties to plough though.
Rapidly draining, rapidly
regenerating stamina bar. Button mash and you get exhausted and leave yourself
vulnerable, but pull out for even a few seconds and you can regain enough
stamina to keep going. This further emphasises picking your spots well,
planning your attacks, and backing up or dodging when things get rough.
High stakes. Attacks are
extremely damaging relative to health, which means if you screw up it WILL
hurt. But unfortunately death doesn’t exactly have that much punishment to it
really you just spawn back at the last save point and most of the time you
don’t even have to defeat the enemies again.
3rd person view, with well
defined hitboxes, so that different weapon ranges are important. This makes
awareness of the battlefield, how close you are to your enemy and how rapidly
you or they can close the distance, very important.
Man did you feel that?
So for any fans of the genre I
would heartily recommend it, but unfortunately even playing with friends it’s
just not for me that’s all I can say.
You heard it from me last folks, update 1.3 “Allies” is
indeed here,
bringing with it the much needed “Group finder” to us
and I must say from the small amount of time I’ve used it, it’s worked quite
well. Also the legacy system with its new character and
legacy “perks” that are basically rewards for use with your main or lower
characters for having achieved certain milestones, which could be very useful
indeed, especially the ones that change levelling xp and speeder access. Apart
from that there was the usual small things like class
changes, adaptive
social gear and some changes
to crew skills which bring in the new option to add augment slots to items.
Augmentation is basically a sort of different version of the ‘enchanting’ or
‘jewelcrafting’ used in other games you have an augment slot and you can put
different augments in the slot in there to better the item. This is similar to
modifications though modifications change the base stats of orange modifiable
items while augments add to all other items. Though since they just introduced
it I don’t have any augments and I never did anyway their apparently obtained
through slicing so I’ve never
gotten any and never seen them apart from the freakishly expensive high level
ones on the trade network.
The Group finder, makes things much easier, especially with a declining population.
Well where was I when we left off?, oh yes quite happily
wearing my hood
with my headband thingy and then for some reason I could not, and now I can
again it looks like except that on my Sith Inquisitor. What I’m babbling about
is that you may have heard me mention before that while I was questing on Nar
Shadaa I for some reason could no longer wear both my helm and my hood on at
the same time this annoyed me cause I liked that look, the other reason is I’d
rather have my hood on when wearing those thing as they look pretty silly when
you don’t, their some sort of dorky looking headband/tiara thing. But I suppose now I'm wearing some kind of star wars version of shades yes shades or goggles, the game calls them "Rampage Assault Headgear" which makes them sound infinitely cooler than they actually are and absolutely ridiculous for what they actually look like. What's also interesting is when I look them up on ToRHead they actually look completely different, so I'm not sure what's going on there.
Don't mess with the "'Rampage Assault" shades yo
So anyway I was level 31 and was one Tatooine indeed yes, so
how do I sum up what’s happened?, well after finishing Tatooine and saving Kira’s master Bela Kiwiik from
that big vibrating thingo then heading to Alderaan to do all the
quests there and there’s some kind of family wars going on there and I have to
save my master whats-his-name from the ridiculous death mark machine seriously
whoever came up with that idea needed to think it through more. During Alderaan I found one of
the coolest methods of transport ever, in remote places Alderaan has these
things called Thranta’s
which a big flying Manta-ray like creatures which look awesome and make
cool sounds, Alderaan is definitely one of the best looking planets I’ve seen
along with Dromund
Kass but I’ll get into that later.
The very Majestic Thranta through a whole new wyurld.
After Alderaan there’s fairly big Jedi Knight plot section
which I won’t go into in order not to spoil the story as of course this is
apparently the end of act 1 of you storyline (yes there are different acts) but
I will say that after what happens now it goes pretty full scale and gets kind
of boring, though I suppose there’s going to be more than two acts as the game
goes on. The story on Balmorra
is reasonable I suppose, the sort of struggling resistance (Balmorrans)
resentfully accepting help from a major power (Republic) in order to fight off
their oppressors (Empire), but it’s a rather dull mucky toxic waste ridden
planet plagued by insect-like aliens.
Balmorra, not exactly the most serene place to visit
After the first act I sort of feel like I’m starting again
except I’m higher level and the storyline seems more boring now. The stories on
each planet don’t seem to be too engaging but what can you do? It’s something
else to occupy yourself with while you’re doing your main quest.
One a better note though I got a new hoverbike, the Gurian Hammer to be
precise which looks pretty awesome sort of like riding a jet engine with my
cape flowing behind. I was glad I moved away from the Ubrikkian style of
hoverbike as I was going to use them for the whole game, though to be honest
despite their cost the vehicle don’t really go much faster than each other, the
first one at level 20 goes 90% faster than running yes running not
sprinting and then it’s 100% then 110% so really not that much of a dramatic
change each time.
Yeehaw!
This isn't me but this guy probably does a better job at explaining it
Probably almost to the end of Balmorra for some reason I decided to create an Empire alt, yes I know I’m only 40 on
my Jedi Knight and yes I know I’m making an alt before I even get to 50 on one
character but I was eager to try out the Sith side. I went a Sith Inquisitor
which is the Sith equivalent of the Jedi Consular,
with the advanced class I chose to go Sith
Assassin, the shadowy double-bladed-lightsabre wielding ninja style Sith
(similar to the Jedi Shadow)
as I wanted to be a Jedi Consular Sage and
throw around force waves and telekinetic abilities rather than force Lightning
as the Sith
Sorcerer does. I also picked Sith pureblood as I didn’t really want to make
another human and didn’t really fancy any of the other races, plus the Sith
purebloods look pretty cool though they have this “punish companion” social
ability in which you give your companion a pretty intense smack in the face
which is kind of sad if you ask me.
I have been told by reliable sources that this thing on my Sith Inquisitor's head is indeed a "circlet" which is at least more manly then 'tiara'
That explains why I went the Sith Inquisitor class but the
other reason I wanted to make a Sith alt was that I wanted to be a “Good” Sith
so to speak I wanted to see what it was like when you chose the good options
even though you’re technically supposed to be evil aren’t you? I was finding it
fun at the start on Korriban picking all the
“good” and “Light Side” options that a Sith wouldn’t usually pick and feeling
good. Starting out was great, you start facing a gruff traditionalist Overseer
who does not hesitate to show their dissatisfaction that you have risen from
slavery to achieve entry to the Sith order, pitting you and you fellow hopefuls
against each other with one being particularly powerful. The whole storyline
was pretty fun and somewhat challenging especially the quest to seek out Khem Val who will
be your first companion, he is a huge monstrous Dashade who has reluctantly
agreed to serve me since his former master had died long ago.
You lookin at me, puny Sith?
Unfortunately once I had Khem Val with me I noticed that I
was going to have to change around my “nicey” responses. I should explain that
to gain “affection” (heh) with your companion you can both give them gifts and
interact with NPC’s during missions the way they prefer, for example some
companions may frown upon killing innocents while other companions may approve
as to them you are disposing of the weak and useless. I soon found that Khem
Val’s likes and dislikes weren’t exactly in sync with my “friendly and
compassionate Sith” character I had going for example he likes making foolish
people unhappy, of which I really don’t do I tend to take pity on them and
dislikes: Weakness in any form and not killing Force users, so technically most
of the responses I would usually take would mean I would lose rapport with him
(-1, 15 or even 30 affection for example), so I am forced to be a mean
and somewhat cocky bastard most of the time and I’m constantly losing affection
points for him because I always choose the light side options, cause I’m a good
guy, you know? even if I am Sith. This will change though once I get the next
companion Ashara
Zavros on Taris who by the looks of her likes/dislikes will be much easier
to please, plus she’s a DPS character with strength+endurance as primary stats
so should be a-ok to quest with, speaking of which, who doesn’t have
endurance listed as their primary stat? seems like every class does. I suppose I'll at least have to try being bad with another character.
He probably does too (note: you can change his skin colour with appearance modifications)
Also I (or I got my companion to rather) started doing the
Crafting skill Artifice
(Artification, Artificing however you say it) which is the creation of Jedi and
Sith artifacts which include things like lightsabre and armor upgrades and new
shields, offhand items and colour crystals. It was during this time that I
found that you could send mail and resources between the two allegiances.
So for example I could use my Republic side characters to aid my Empire alts
with items and crafting skills and vice-versa. This was one of the biggest if
not the biggest difference from WoW that SWTOR has, it seems now that I no
longer have the problem of having one crafting skill but not the other on
either side, could you imagine this in WoW? I’d be going crazy organising
resources. Though this leads to a different issue which I swear I don’t know
what I’m going to do about because without an Altoholic style mod for
the game, I might even go crazier trying to work out what each friggin
character has , I don’t know it’s just going to be difficult unless Bioware
miraculously allow modding and someone makes an Altoholic clone for SWTOR in
enough time but I doubt it. I’ve been ok so far recently I had to take
screenshots of every piece of armor
me and my companion had in order for me to view on my Jedi Knight and make
appropriate armor replacements and managed to juggle the resources fine, so
it’s works relatively ok for now.
The Artification screen
So anyway I’ve now finished the Imperial home planet of Dromund Kass and had quite a good time upgrading all my
gear using my commendations,it turns out that the stuff is still better then
what I make unless I happen to be lucky enough to be able to make a blue item.
My main storyline there ended with me obtaining yet another artifact and having
a pleasant conversation with a ghost of a Sith Lord who said we were related at
some point, I really don’t know what all of that meant but having the artifact
meant a lot to my master Darth Zash. She gave me my own starship
and instructed me to go to either Balmorra
or Nar Shadaa to get more
artifacts for this Sith thingemajigg, honestly I don’t really pay much
attention to names anymore as there’s areas of the many storylines in SWTOR
that are pretty much just “something, something Sith artifact/lord…” I guess
I’m just going to do the same thing and do both planets even if I’m too low for
them and I end up getting grey quests, I suppose I could skip the bonus serious
but I wouldn’t want to do that unless I’d already done it for a planet before. My first instance of space combat on this
character was fine, compared to the first time. I’m getting more comfortable
now as I actually worked out that in order to complete the escort missions
easily you just shot whatever was shooting the transport ship with no regard
for your own safety as you don’t need to cause there’s no-one shooting you.
I like this picture of me looking at the Holocron at the top of the hill on Dromund kass
Inside the Sith Temple on Dromund Kass
Once I got my Inquisitor to level 20 I decided I’d stop
there as the next planet I was up to is Balmorra and that was the same one I
was currently playing on my Jedi Knight, funnily enough when I stopped my Jedi
I’d just done a large group quest in Sobrik, the Imperial HQ of Balmorra. I
then found out that it’s the same place where you start out as an Imperial, on
a kind of lower level too so in theory there would have been Empire players around.
That’s if there were enough players around at all, SWTOR has unfortunately been
losing population ever since its release and only with the brilliant initiative by
Bioware to allow newcomers to play for free up to level 15 that the servers
have come back up to healthy level again though as you can see this hasn’t had
the same effect with Asia-Pacific but the servers do remain at a standard level
playerbase remains. I do admit I sometimes find it hard to find groups of people
to do heroic-level missions with that require 4 people, but usually there is
enough people around to help and the new group finder makes doing flashpoints
less of a hassle for finding the right classes.
The US server stats have been in a steady decline since the release but have shot back up to record numbers due to the new free to play up to 15 feature.
The Asia/Pacific servers haven't got that particular feature yet but are sill going steady, mainly do to the fact that there is only 3 of them while the US has about 40
I’m now back on my guardian and kicking ass, I need to
finish Balmorra and get on to the next part of the story though I’ve got to
take the supplies to Kira’s people on Nar Shadaa first, I must admit I’m a bit
too friendly towards other players often helping them and not getting my own
stuff done, oh well there’s always next time to let them down heh.
I’ve been unable to hold back the urge and have started
playing Skyrim again, this time as a Thief so basically I’m immersed again and
can’t really stop I’ve got to at least to try and play a bit of SWTOR for the
remainder of the pay period as the end of this month heralds a new Minecraft
patch.
