Yesterday I “completed” another game of Crusader Kings II, this time playing as the Count of Dublin. By “completed” I mean that I made my in-game goal, the unification of Ireland. I still need considerable practice at realm management, however, as Ireland promptly fell apart upon my death. Next time I may play a nation […]

In theory, the kind of historical simulations pioneered by SPI should feel right at home as computer games. As wargames evolved, there was a trend toward great and greater scope and complexity, culmination in things like Campaign for North Africa, where you kept track of individual fighter pilots and jerrycans of fuel, and wound up […]

With the windup to Origins and all the other stuff I have going on, there’s been very little gaming happening. I haven’t played Neverwinter (or indeed anything else) since before the recent exploit/rollback flap. What I have been doing, here and there, is digging board and war games out of the closet. There’s a decent […]

Wargames were my doorway into gaming. Not this Warhammer crap that passes as such these days, or even the historcal minis, but the old school, counter-and-hexgrid wagames in the style of SPI and Avalon Hill. This kind of wargame has seen better days. SPI got itself seized by TSR, Avalon Hill sold out to Hasbro, […]

One of these days I will try to clarify exactly what Ardwulf Presents is supposed to be; either quick overviews, feature showcases, or playalongs. But not today. Here we have a look at Neverwinter’s Neverdeath Graveyard, a zone you’ll hit in the high 20s. Still having fun with the game, although the desire to make [...]

Neverwinter might turn out to be the surprise MMO hit of 2013. It wasn’t even supposed to be an MMO, until it was pulled back by the newly-purchased Cryptic to be developed into one. I think few were taking it seriously, and yet now it seems to be liked by almost everyone that I’m paying [...]

The Neverwinter servers may still be down, but yuou can get more goodies right here! This time around we take a look at the game’s first group dungeon, the Cloak Tower, and have a crack at Foundry content for the first time.

Day two of Neverwinter’s Launch, like day one, wasn’t without issues. Some server stability problems and issues doing things in-game like queueing for instances, and the return of a little bit of lag — and not at prime time, either. I personally didn’t see a single login queue. Today saw me running skirmishes and PvP [...]

April 30 marked the start of the “open beta” for Cryptic Studios’ Neverwinter, an MMORPG based loosely upon D&D 4th edition and set in a corner of the Forgotten Realms. This is, of course, a de facto launch — they’re taking your money and not wiping your characters, so it’s a launch, despite being lavbeled [...]

The new, long-delayed episode of Ardwulf Presents covers the charcater creation system from Star Trek Online. Just getting back into the swing of things… but there will be new episodes each week!

A code from Trion, courtesy of Raptr, has come my way. The code includes the Rift base game plus the Storm Legion expansion plus 30 days of game time — and word is you can use to to claim the expansion and the 30 days even if you have a lapsed Rift account. Due to [...]

With the semester winding down I played a chunk of Age of Wushu the Martial Arts MMO that released on April 10. It has a lot to recommend it, including what appears to be significant depth, a big world, very nice graphics and some significant sandbox elements. Its learning curve is very steep, and understanding [...]

Based on no particular impetus aside from a vague desire to get back to it at some point now that it’s free to play, I reinstalled SWTOR, picked up a new Smuggler character and am having a surprisingly good time with it. Without the added overhead of a subscription, I’m finding it generally more fun [...]

Blizzard had one of those periodic “come back and play free for a week” things, so I signed up for that and did a bit of dabbling in Azeroth for the first time in a while. The Pandaria content, as far as I got in it, struck me as rather dull and plodding. When the [...]

A while back, as part of the drive to take the free to play, Vanguard’s many starting areas were consolidated into just four. Now, I have my issues with that, but the idea that you only need a few starting areas appears to be institutional at SOE, and in any case I did see the [...]

Toady’s EQ2 game update will roll some significant changes into the game. In addition to a smattering of fixes and tweaks, the big changes are the recently announced changes to the game’s money model. These boil down to the removal of a bunch of restrictions on Free and Silver players. All classes (except Beastlord) and [...]

I tried Cryptic’s Neverwinter, currently in pseudo-open beta, over the weekend. It is both markedly different and weirdly similar to Turbine’s D&D Online, but far less deep and robust. Where DDO is an attempt to bring the D&D experience to the MMO space, Neverwinter is an attempt to create an MMO, using the Cryptic model, [...]

One of the problematic design decisions that went into AD&D 2nd Edition was the loss of the Monk. It was admittedly a problematic class in 1E, pitifully weak at 1st level but quite powerful later on, and it was, as we say, not quite as thoroughly baked as most of the rest of the classes. [...]

Wizards of the Coast’s upcoming release schedule has, slated for May 21 2013, premium reprint versions of the AD&D 2nd edition Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monstrous Manual… much as last year they released fancy editions of the earlier 1st edition books. Relative newcomers and those nostalgic for the old days ought to be [...]

Over the last several weeks the stress has been grinding on me to the point where I’ve been incredibly on edge and have not held it together 100% of the time. There are about a dozen sources of this stress that I won’t go into, but one of the big ones — the mounting pressure [...]

Tolkien’s book is a tight little novel of less than 100,000 words. So there was, at a glance, reason to be suspicious when Peter Jackson declared that he was going to blow it up into three 2+ hour epic films. Thankfully, the worst of those fears are unrealized. Part of this is due to the [...]

So it appears, with some encouragement from the massive Triple Station Cash sale from a couple of weekends ago and the fact that I am in fact still subscribed, I’ve been spending my limited free time in EverQuest II, working my way up in the levels, finally getting my glider mount (which takes some getting [...]

Getting back to the leveling discussion and the idea for an RPG without a level cap, I’m putting some numbers together just to see how they feel and to get an idea for the scope of a level range using WoW-style advancement. Let us make the following stipulations: We have a leveling system with no [...]

In a sense, playing MMOs impairs our judgement. We can’t stand back and be impartial anymore, judging from on high. We can look back to the Elder Days but our vision is clouded by the fog of years and the memories of many, many man-hours in the trenches. Sometimes it takes an outsider to come [...]

Old issues of Dragon magazine used to have ads for a product called Hârn, by the obscure Columbia Games, on the inside front cover. Even though I saw those ads back in the days of my gaming youth and even recall products on the shelves of the local hobby store, it wasn’t until about 1991 [...]