I started the game almost blind. I basically went to the allods website, downloaded the game, installed it and started playing. Compared to other MMO’s I’ve played, there is more of a sense of urgency immediately. I won’t spoil it by going into detail, but expect the cast to look to you for salvation. Pay attention and read all of the text during the crisis. It’s pretty enlightening and provides a lot of info on the history of Allods.

Mechanically, Allods is a leveling game. There is a progressive talent “tree”. As you level, you pick talents, though the only prerequisite to later talents is that you have some number of talent points. This isn’t a real tree. The mechanism that looks more like a tree is the talent grid. You buy “rubies” as you level up to fill out the grid. Take a look at a talent calculator to see what I mean. Each character has a pile of stats like strength, intelligence, faith, etc. The general consensus now is that one should keep fairly balanced stats. I suspect that is because the game is young enough that no one has done the math on stats to see which is better.

Itemization is pretty interesting. Quest rewards don’t seem to be limited to one class. Each reward will have stats for several completely different class. It is rare to find an item which is completely useless. Maybe that changes later in the game. I guess this would cause more people to roll on any particular gear, but then there is more gear which is available to roll on and less gear will be completely useless to any particular party. Stats seem to be immensely important. Small changes to stats seem to have a huge impact on everything you do, so be sure to keep your gear up to date. If you don’t, leveling becomes difficult.

Since I like to heal, I’ve become keenly aware of an interesting mechanic in the game called “wound complexity”. You not only have straight hit point damage, you also have a variable wound complexity scale which is measured in percent. The higher the wound complexity, the more chance that your heal spell will heal less then the optimal amount. The stat faith effects how much wound complexity you can ignore when you cast a heal spell. this means you can’t just stack intelligence to get better healing. It looks like many game mechanics have similar tradeoffs which promote a more balanced stats list.

As far as leveling goes, it’s pretty slow going although not boring. Currently, the group quests at the lower levels are pretty easy to knock off. There are always people waiting around to do them. Just give a shout in zone chat and start inviting people. Higher level players seem to help noobs a lot too. Apparently, around level 23 or so, you are required to do some questing in a PVP area called “The Holy Lands”. There is no way around this as far as I know. The end game seems to be a mix of raids and PVP in “Astral Ships”.

The auction house is easy to use, but the economy is not well developed. Prices vary wildly, so it’s hard for me to price my items at this point. Since bag and bank space is limited, I feel obligated to sell stuff on AH. I’ll probably end up using the mailbox as extra temporary bag space assuming the game will let me.

Give Allods Online a go if you’re looking for a change from WoW. It’s free aside from your time, and it’s different enough to be refreshing.

• They seem to be more epic. You are usually the focus of the whole world. It’s hard to do that effectively in an MMO I think.
• I can save and stop at almost any time without losing any time.
• No scheduling conflicts for raids or fleet actions.
• No asshats.

MMO’s are fun too. If I want to casually socialize with people, or if I want to complete some epic task with other people, there really isn’t a way to do that in a single player game. MMO’s are a great place to virtually people-watch without anyone knowing who you are.

Back to dragon age now. As I said, it’s a fun game. I’m currently working on my last treaty in the deep roads. I’ve made some mistakes along the way. Here are some tips based on those mistakes:

• Do *everything* you need to in lothering before you move on. Lothering becomes unavailable soon after you leave.
• Work on approval of your most common companions early. They get buffs which are useful in combat if their approval is high.
• If you have any DLC’s, do them early. The loot can really help out in your travels. If you have all three DLC’s (soldier’s peak, stone prisoner, and return to Ostagar), you can gain several levels too.
• If you want to be the highest level possible, explore everywhere and kill everything which is killable.
• Money is hard to come by early on. Loot all containers. There seem to be no consequences to looting. If you’re so inclined, steal from everyone.
• It almost feels like cheating, but you can also get herbalism to its highest level and make potent lyrium potions for profit.
• If there is an enemy magic user (or several) kill it first. I haven’t found a case where I wouldn’t do this. Player and enemy mages are powerful.
• Area effect spells seem to be situational. I probably should have waited on getting these until late in the game.
• Go for the eyes!

The good news is that there is a solution that seems to work. I tested this with a custom compiled wine-1.1.35 and it worked fine. Find the detailed instructions here. If you prefer Ubuntu compatible packages, follow the instructions here. My audio in wine works ok now. It may be a long time before the pulseaudio driver for wine is integrated into the official wine as there is talk of rewriting the sound system in wine, so the developers don’t want to add more devices.

• Wifi
• Suspend to memory
• Proprietary drivers for the Nvidia video card
• The media panel
• The nice volume control
• The CDRom/DVD. I assume the blueray portion doesn’t work.
• The USB, VGA, and HDMI ports.

Here are the problem areas that I’ve run into. I haven’t had time to sort them out. When I address the issues, I’ll probably write a new post.

• Sound works, but only from two of the five speakers.
• If you place two fingers on the track pad, the pointer flakes out.
• The wifi button is too close to the ctl key. I need to find a way to disable it.

There is plenty I haven’t tested too. Here are the unknown components:

• Finger print scanner. I’ve read that this won’t work with linux.
• Webcam. This is supposed to work fine.
• Firewire, eSATA, and “Display” ports. I’ve read that these work fine.
• SD card/Memory Stick slot.
• ExpressCard slot.

Overall, I am very pleased with this laptop. My wife did a great job picking it out and getting it for a good price (thank you honey). Since this was a fresh install, I decided to go for a new install of wine for all of those games that I like. Here is what I got running and what was required to get it running.

Wine 1.1.35 itself wouldn’t compile initially. This seems to be a known bug when compiling on 64 bit platforms. One solution is to remove the libmpg123 package. I preferred to keep the package, so I edited the file dlls/winemp3.acm/mpegl3.c. I changed line 642 from:

mpg123_feedseek(aad->mh, 0, SEEK_SET, NULL);

to:

mpg123_feedseek_64(aad->mh, 0, SEEK_SET, NULL);

Wine compiled fine after that.

Civilization required the installation of winetricks and the packages: msxml3 and d3dx9.

EVE just required adding allfonts with winetricks.

Runes of Magic runs without a hitch. Perfect World runs without a problem. Fallout 3 won’t even install. I will post when I figure out the problem there. I haven’t installed Oblivion, but I don’t expect any problems there.

The item shop will be completely new to WoW players. It includes several subsections. There is a “token shop” where you can use up your tokens which are collected by doing daily quests. I buy furniture for my house here. There is the diamond shop, where you can buy various equipment upgrades, permanent mounts, consumables, and other things. Diamonds usually cost real world money, but you can buy diamonds on the auction house. 200 diamonds (enough to buy a permanent mount) currently cost either $10, or about 2.8 million gold. To give you some context, in the 2 weeks I’ve spent in the game, I have made about a million gold, but I’ve spent about 500k. I will probably avoid spending real money until I max my level.

Housing is really just an instance where you can put some stuff. The major cities and many towns have direct access to your house. The mechanical benefit to a house is that you can put various pieces of furniture in it which can give you bonuses to experience, training points, and crafting XP. You can also buy inventory space like chests and cabinets. There is also the aesthetic and psychological appeal of a home in the game. Blizzard really needs to get some of this player housing stuff. If a 1 year old game can do it, and other games which have been around a long time can do it, then Blizzard can.

The equipment upgrade system is an order of magnitude more complex then WoW. Any item can be “tiered” from +1 to +6. Depending on the runes and stones you use to upgrade the item, it can have almost any combination of statistics. Some of the upgrade process involves chance if you want to pay a reasonable amount. Once I explore this aspect of the game more, I’ll write a dedicated article on it. There is a beginner’s guide to the arcane transmutor which touches on a major aspect of equipment upgrades. There are other aspects like upgrading stat runes (which are like gems in WoW) and using sun/moon/star jewels to tier your equipment.

There are eight base classes in RoM, but really, there are more like 40+ classes since each dual class combination plays differently and has different elite skills. All of this variety would drive an altoholic crazy. I’m not an altoholic so sadly, I won’t ever experience most of the combinations out there. I’ll probably end up with a healer/dps and a tank/dps and that’s about it. Any more alts will be used for their bag space.

The people in Rom seem more helpful then in WoW. If I happen to be in an area where a group quest is, I almost always get ninja invited. If the fight is strange, then the tank usually explains it before starting. I don’t recall seeing a lot of this behavior in WoW. In EvE, the only reason you get a ninja invite is so that a pirate can kill you.

Much like WoW, if you want to be loved, play a tank or a healer. Pugs are always looking for one or the other. The ideal combination would be a priest/knight, but it looks like they’re hard to level. The developers seem to be coming up with an alternative in the druid/warden but right now not all of the details seem to be worked out on this combination, so it’s a little gimped and unfocused.

One strange difference between WoW and RoM is the chat. The mechanics of chat are similar, but the zone/world chat is usually pretty quiet. I believe world channel can cost money to broadcast on, so there is an explanation.

Overall, I am having a lot of fun. I’m beginning to find out who the good people and guilds are. There is still a lot of world for me to explore and development is very active. Class and world balancing can happen every day. Some folks complain about the lack of stability but I think the rapid change makes things exciting. It also speaks to the developers’ desire to make the game better.