Quit Age of Wushu, Playing Dragon's Prophet, and more

So, I recently quit Age of Wushu (again). This time, it was due to getting bored with the game and not wanting to invest much more into it, as the plan was to quit once ArcheAge was available from the start. It still has most of the issues - poor customer support, bad translations, bugs, lag, etc... However, Earthquake, one of the community managers, has begun taking player input to help improve the translations of the game. I even helped contribute by posting the correct translations for some of the Shen Family Golden Needle faction. So, that is a step in the right direction!

Since then, I've been playing a few games I got from the Steam Summer Sale, as well as Dragon's Prophet to pass the time. I've also been playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 here and there. However, a bulk of my time has been spent playing games for OnRPG.com. This week that was Skara - The Blade Remains and HEX: Shards of Fate. Of the two, I've got to say HEX was the more fun. I enjoyed Skara, but I've been getting my fighting fix from Chivalry: Medieval Combat/Deadliest Warrior.


Steam Summer Sale
Oddly enough, I've only bought a few games from this years Summer Sale (so far). Usually I end up buying a lot more than I would ever play, like most normal people. It's not so much because there was nothing more I wanted, just that I've forced myself to realize I probably wouldn't play most of what I got and the money is better saved for when ArcheAge rolls around. Anyways, the games I got were Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior, Contagion, and one other I can't remember the name of at the moment.

I've been spending a lot of time in Deadliest Warrior - about ten hours since I got it the other day. It's been quite refreshing and is a great way to recharge my batteries when I'm starting to get bored of other games. So far, my favorite classes to play are the ninja and Samurai (hey, I may not be a super Japanophile, but  still love it). I've been getting quite frustrated the past day or so, though. It seems like a majority of the servers are full (and stay full), forcing me to play on a server with only 5-6 other people which often time leads to stacked teams. I much prefer playing on a full or almost full server, where it's a lot harder for the teams to become stacked.

Contagion I got because my cousin (who has been staying with me) has become addicted to L4D2 and I figured he would enjoy it. Surprisingly I was right and now I'm lucky if I can go half an hour without him asking to get on my computer. I've played the game myself a few times, and it's quite decent. I enjoy how it looks and feels a bit more realistic than the L4D series. The only negative I've found is that, in some of the servers/game modes, both the survivors and zombies are trying to kill you. I much prefer the modes where you're working with others to accomplish a goal, rather than trying to backstab each other.


Dragon's Prophet
The day before yesterday I decided to check out Dragon's Prophet after a thread on OnRPG made me feel a bit of nostalgia for the game. I enjoyed the game a decent amount, and the only reason I quit last year (about 7-8 months ago) is because the game is definitely a bit pay-to-win. Trying to play the game without investing at least a few hundred dollars to unlock more inventory/bank/dragon slots and help you along with improving your gear and whatnot is akin to playing Entropia Universe with nothing but sweating for income. Simply click on the link to see how fun that can be.

I do love the dragons in the game, though. And the housing. Heck, I even enjoy the combat a decent bit. I grew up on point-and-click for MMOs and Dragon's Prophet has the perfect (in my opinion) blend of point-and-click and action for its combat. However, the grindy nature of the game ended up making me bored of the game and so I quit. But now I'm back and I'm having some fun trying to re-figure everything and doing my best to make sure I don't screw up anything progress I made before I quit.

My main character, Jizzybell - a level 65 (now 66) mage.

So far, I've been sticking to Wintertide, doing the public events and soloing dungeons. I also joined a new level 100 guild, and I've been working on getting guild points in there so I can get into the guild base and start using some of the flutes I have saved up. It's bearable, but it's not quite as fun as when I was playing with a couple of friends. I'm hoping I can pull one of them back into the game and play with me for a while, but most of them are busy with other games so I doubt they'll feel like it. Oh well.

I've also been taking part in a couple of the festival events. One of the things I enjoyed the most in my time with Dragon's Prophet are the various events. The content is usually fun, rewarding (if you have a house or like costumes), and it gives you a bit of experience. The Halloween event has been my favorite to date, partially because I started the game right as it was starting but also because I feel like it had the best content and rewards without being to grindy. My Chaotic Terror is still my favorite dragon and I got it from the Halloween Pack (along with my pumpkin house and a bunch of decorations). 

In the screenshot above, I'm fighting Pinatas with a special sword that has "Dragon's Prophet" written along the blade. I thought that was pretty neat. Basically, each time you hit the Pinata, it spews candy which you then collect. Each piece you collect gives a satisfying "Ding!" as well (if you played the Sonic games as a kid, you'll feel nostalgic as it's almost exactly the same as the sound from collecting rings). The event is quite grindy, however. You need 100 candy to get just one candy coin. And the furniture stuff costs in the hundreds of coins and the weapon skins costs 1,500 coins (I think). Which is 150,000 candy you have to collect. That takes a hell of a long time, unless there's a better way to collect candy that I haven't found. Apparently there's also a dragon you can capture, too, but I haven't figured it out yet. And there's a dance event that happens every couple of hours, too. 

There's a few new features that have been added since I last played. Like the Dragon's Compendium, which is almost like a dragon pokedex and achievement system rolled into one. You get various rewards by collecting eight of a dragon or winning a certain number of fights in the arena using it. The rewards are Dragon Runes and Dragon Elements, which are used in another new feature - Dragon Skill Evolution. I honestly have no idea how that works yet, but plan to do some research tomorrow. Looks pretty neat, though.

That's about all I have to talk about for now. I am thinking about investing in getting a new house, but don't know how well that will work for me. Last I remember, house spots costs a few million gold and I have just over 800,000 to my name. Plus, the items used to purchase house slots on the Marketplace/cash shop don't seem to be there anymore. I could just be looking in the wrong places, though. Anyways, thanks for reading.

Oh, and I'm planning to start up another blog where I talk about anime and manga. It can be found here if you're interested.

Wurm Online & Dragon's Prophet

I knew this would eventually happen, and I've mentioned it in past posts. I've gotten a bit bored of Dragon's Prophet. Not because the game is bad, not at all. The game is fantastic and I still log on daily to work on my dragons. It's just that I've been reduced to repeating Public Events each day to level up because there's no quests. It's quite annoying and almost ruins the game for me. I still log on whenever there's events, and I try to log on enough to set up my dragon processes and let the guild know I still exist.

Other than that, I've been playing Wurm Online lately. I started with Xycrone and Nargato and we've been having a bit of fun. It's been going a bit slow, but that's to be expected as it's Wurm. I'm not sure if they'll stick with the game, they seem to like it though. We're part of a village called Minowick at the moment, but we went off on our own so I could introduce them to the game more easily. I'm not sure if we'll continue to live off on our own or just stick with Minowick. The cool thing about Wurm is that there's so many options.

Soon, Wurm should have bridges. Not sure if that will affect me, but it seems quite cool. I'm kind of torn between wanting to start my own village, or just sitting back and being apart of one. The issue is I have my own ideas of what I think would be cool or interesting, so it makes it hard to sit back and follow the plans of someone else. On the other hand, I don't feel like dealing with the stress of running a deed on Epic, I've done it once already and it was annoying to say the least. And it's not because of raiders or anything, it's dealing with neighbors and villagers that gets annoying, as there always seems to be an never ending source of drama.


Other than Wurm and Dragon's Prophet, I've been playing a lot of Gotham City Imposters, World of Warplanes (review link) and World of Tanks. That's about all I have for this update.

Still Playing Dragon's Prophet

So I've been playing Dragon's Prophet for about two weeks now. I've been putting in 4-6 hours a day. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So far, things have been going great and I haven't gotten bored of the game at all. I'm truly surprised at this. I figured by now I'd be long gone and looking for a new game. Mostly because I really hate quest grinding.

As I've said in the past, I'm guessing it's the housing, the dragons, and now the guild features that are keeping me hooked. It's taken quite a while, but I'm finally able to say that the $40 Dragon Pack I bought for the game months and months ago was worth the money! So far, I've spent about $100 on the game (including the $40 for the Dragon Pack so long ago), and I haven't regretted a dime of it. About $30 of that $100 is going towards helping out guildies and buying a $15 SC card for a contest I'm holding for my guild.

So far I've reached level 48. I would be higher,but as with the past couple of days, I got a bit distracted with other things in the game and didn't get a chance to level. Tonight I went dragon hunting, trying to find dragons with great abilities that I can transfer over to my Chaotic Terror ancient dragon that I got from the Halloween event. So far I've given him Tough Hide, which will give him a nice boost to his defense stats once it's leveled up all the way, but now I'm trying to find nice healing abilities for him. I found one, but I'm going to keep searching just in case I can find something better.

Amitabha should reach level 4 tomorrow, which is nice. We're picking up the pace in leveling as we get more active members. I'm hoping to keep the guild a bit small, as I don't want to be a random zerg. However, we're also doing our best to accept newbies  to give them a hand. Introducing people to this game is a blast, just as much fun as it was in Age of Wushu. Both games are a lot more deep and complex than they initially seem, so there's a lot to learn and I feel like I've only just scratched the surface myself.

Since we reached guild level 3 and unlocked the flute gathering process for our dragons, we've been having a blast trying to get something good. Setting up 6 5-hour flute gathering processes and then getting on the next day to see if you got anything good is great, but nothing beats the excitement of seeing what you summon when actually using a good flute. We've been gathering in our Sanctuary whenever one of us has flutes to open, so it's become a pretty big deal within our guild which makes it all the more exciting. So far we've got one ancient out of all of us, but then again we've only had the ability to gather the flutes for two days.

That's it for now. I'll continue to update the blog with what I'm up too in Dragon's Prophet up until I get bored of and quit the game. And even after that I'll continue to update the blog still. I should be making an OnRPG update on what I'm reviewing/have reviewed in the next couple of days. So far this month it's been nothing but browser games, none of which haven't kept be interested enough to stick with them for long. Anyways, thanks for reading.

Dragon's Prophet

Lately I've been playing a game called Dragon's Prophet. I've covered it a few times in the past, doing a couple of press previews and writing a "First Look" article. I've got to say I've always been fascinated with the concept with the game, ever since I first heard of it. I even purchased a $40 Dragon Pack in anticipation of the great dragon-backed adventures I would have.

My first introductions to the game was through the Taiwanese version. Plenty of times in the past I've played the foreign versions of games before their North American release to get idea of what they were like. I've done it with ArcheAge, Swordsman Online, Age of Wushu, and many others. So, I did the same with Dragon's Prophet and I have to admit I had a lot of fun playing this early version of the game. There were some bugs, of course, and some things I wasn't a big fan of. But I did enjoy it.

When it came time for the press previews, things seemed to be going well. I noticed that some things had been improved since my time in the Taiwan closed beta version of the game. I was still excited. Unfortunately, by time the closed and open betas came around, which was when I wrote my First Look, things were looking grim. Promised features were months and months away from being implemented, the starting areas of the game felt way too cramped for a game that focused on riding on the back of dragons (often flying). And overall it just felt like another quest grinder that wouldn't amount to anything, but I still optimistic and decided I would just forget about the game for a bit and then come back at a later time.

Well, almost two weeks ago I decided it was time to come back to the game. Or should I say, I logged into Team Speak to find that several of my guildmates had downloaded the game and I decided to join in on the fun. The first two days were great, we had a blast and it seemed like a great game. Unfortunately, after that we found out (via a friend of mine that is a vet of the game) that Dragon's Prophet was a bit "pay to win." This put a damper on our moods, and in the end resulted in two of us quitting. However, two of us decided to remain and we've been having a blast.

We know we probably wont be so optimistic later on down the line, but for now we're having fun capturing dragons, completing epic boss battles, and seeing how far we can get before the "Pay to win" aspect ruins it for us. Neither of us are afraid to put a bit of money into the game, so we've unlocked dragon slots, extra inventory/bank space and some other convenience features.  We've both bought houses and have found that we quite enjoy the housing system available in the game.

So, lately this is what I've been playing. I'll write a few more in-depth posts over the next week or so, probably include a lot of screenshots as well. Till then, see ya later!

Dragon's Prophet

Today I purchased the $40 Founders Pack for Dragon Prophet NA (by SOE). Had a nice discussion over at OnRPG before I decided which pack to go with. I was on the fence between the $90 and $40. At the time, it appeared that there really wasn't much bonus (at least for me) to getting the $90 pack over the other two. Unfortunately, later on after I had already purchased my pack, the buy page was updated and it was clarified that you also got a house with the top two packs. This sucks for me, because I would have bought the $90 pack if I had known I would get a large house with it, rather than the small house with the $40 pack.

I might contact SOE and see if I can upgrade, but to be honest, I don't really feel like it anymore. Oh well, I start with a small house. I should have the ability to upgrade to something nicer later on. And if I join a guild, I will probably do what I always do when I join a guild: Focus on the guild rather than my own stuff. It took me years before I finally decided to build my own house in Wurm, and I still have yet to have my own house in Mortal Online (tho I did briefly a year or two ago, didn't last long however). I only had a small house and a bunker (gotten from the Mustafar expansion) in SWG.

Anyways, when I do get into the NA beta for Dragon's Prophet (should be on the 29th), I have a pretty good idea of what I should be doing. I plan to play it semi-hard, even if everything will be wiped. I am hoping the closed beta wont last long, though. The Taiwanese closed beta is supposed to last for two more closed beta events and then transition to Open Beta right after. SOE will probably do the same. Though there is a disclaimer at the bottom of the buy page that says that it could take up until December 2013 for the Open Beta to come out, and we don't get the Founder's Pack items until the Open Beta.

Until the 29th, I will probably be playing mostly Neverwinter, as I just got a beta key for it from Geforce.co.uk. Click here to see if there are any keys left. It doesn't start until tomorrow (the 22nd), though. I'll be splitting my time between Neverwinter, Smite, and sometimes Tera until Dragon's Prophet on the 29th (or later, if things get delayed). Anyways, thanks for reading.