Photoshop Saturday: Flowery desktop (#4)

Sorry for lack of posts/excess amount of pictures but exams....
Just an experimental background I made myself while bored :P

Im dying inside

I'm sorry, but in any balanced game should you see a guy 10 levels below the mobs lvl 2-shotting them? And should that one person be able to 1-shot a toon 14 levels above them? Class balancing in RoM is so obscenely wack its gone from funny to not funny and has been bouncing between mindbogglingly fail to Alt+F4 for some time now. RoM makes WoW's PvP look like class perfection and ti doesn't look like its going to get better any time soon.

Photoshop Saturday: Bit Creepy (#3)

Aim was to get a skull which had a skin-like texture. Anyway, just finished studying Ancient History and about to write up a practice essay for English Lit...FUN!

Twinking in RoM

The other day I was running back to a large town in RoM just to see whether I could pick up any more quests when I ran into a big PvP fight. I jumped into the fray and at first only saw one PKer a 31/31 knight/priest, and naturally I thought there would be at least one more PKer running back or skulking around somewhere. About 4-5 other players were attacking this one toon and so I thought we would easily take him down. But the longer we kept hammering on him we began to realize that this guy wasn't just some random trying out PKing for the first time. With around 6 guys whaling on him he would never die. I checked out his gear and lo and behold he had insane gear, gear that I didn't even know was possible at that level. He obviously knew how to play his class as well as he never ran out of mana despite my mana draining shot, and his health kept on being replenished. As he got kill after kill after kill I decided that this really was a waste of time but it really killed me a little inside. You shouldn't be able to be that good.

In WoW I played numerous twinks, and even though I could take down absolutely anyone with ridiculous ease but that didn't stop me from being vulnerable, I could still easily die. With the two class system in RoM this prevents this from happening, and the gear plays an even greater part in your survivability. This guy able to tank and kill 6 other players at least his own level without a doubt spent real dollars to get his toon to that level but it still disappointing that you can be that powerful at that level. The balance between the classes is wildly out of line. Rogues have no competition in PKing for the most part while few can beat a mage in the endgame instances. The Scout used to be one of the top damage dealers but after a major nerf a few months ago, they are probably the lowest. PvP is completely wrecked with stuns playing a huge part, most of the time you will have no real chance to do anything before you die. However, I do still enjoy the game, so I'll keep on playing but when I hit the end game I might change my mind. Hopefully this stuff gets fixed in the near future.

Forget it: its nothing

Well I fixed it, turns out I didn't have third party cookies enabled which was causing the problem.

Commenting problems

I seem to be having trouble commenting on various blogs...maybe its just blogger blogs. Has anyone else had this problem and know how to fix it?

Photoshop Saturday (#2) MonsterTruck

This was just a bit of ridiculous fun.

Warrior Epic Closed Beta

I mentioned this game a while back but I just got an email saying I got into the closed beta, will play a little bit, if study allows, and see how it goes from there.

Powerleveled by new 'content'

Despite the fact that I should honestly be doing nothing fun and/or interesting at all at the moment besides studying for the exams I have been playing a tiny amount of RoM. I went through one of those stages where I lacked a lot of motivation to play but funnily enough, now that I have no time to play my interest in the game has shot up. A little while ago I was sitting at 36/26 which I had been at for some time, when I decided to level up my secondary class the Priest. I did this through daily quests which I would collect and complete on my Scout before changing to the Priest and handing it in. This worked out fantastically as there was one daily which everyone does where you need to kill 15 ferrets. Its generally really easy to get a group for this daily and the time it takes to complete it with a couple of people is very small. One time I ran back after just finishing a quest and getting a new one and probably within 1-2 minutes I had finished the quest really without doing anything. However there is the problem of other people going AFK while you kill the ferrets and then handing the quest in without doing anything at all.

So very quickly I was able to get my Priest up to level 30 before the daily quests were contributing less and less. After a couple of days I went back to RoM and tried out my Scout, desperately trying to level him a bit more. Luckily I did have a bunch of quests to do and so was easily able to hit level 37. Then the best thing is the world happened to me. A while ago it was announced that the devs had released a whole bunch of new content for the 30-40 bracket, and just today I was able to experience it first hand. I received a quest where I had to simply run to someone close nearby and I received a very nice amount of xp. Turns out this simple quest turned into an epic chain where all I had to do was run around gathering experience. Obscenely quickly I rushed to 38 before those quests finally run out, but it was incredible to just be powerleveled through that. I mean, its nice to just be able to do nothing and get an insane amount of experience for it, but surely they could have just adjusted the amount of experience needed rather then have added a ton of quests which require no effort and give the world.

Hacks

Hax man

Photoshop Saturday

So continuing with the idea I had last week, I'll be trying to post something I did on photoshop every week on Saturday.

Exponential Storytelling

A friend commented the other day on how hard it must be to get a good storyline going in games. Because, by interaction, the player can change the story and create an alternative ending. This means that the writers then have to create not just one great story to play through but numerous ones. Of course in such games as Call of Duty the developers decided that freedom of choice wasn't going to be a feature of their games so the player can only play through one story. Replayability is a pretty big thing nowadays with players expecting to get a lot out of their games, and if there is only one way to play through the game then the player won't feel much incentive to play.

In my earlier years (It makes me sound much older) I played Neopets, and Neopets had this one game which I think was called Adventure Generator. In this 'game' you were able to write your own 'Choose Your Own Adventure' type story. Other players could read your story and vote on it. Not too surprisingly, the most popular stories were simple 'take care of this obscenely cute neopet' stories which all sounded and ended the same. However, I was not deterred, I went crazy because I loved to write stories at the time and began. Some time later I came out and admired my handiwork. Originally I had planned to make an epic story with a crazily good ending by the time I thought I had achieved that I realized that the person reading it would probably lose interest, because it would be like reading a book; having no impact on the story whatsoever. The truth was that the story would get exponentially more complicated the more decisions you gave the reader. And the same is certainly true for most games.

Gamers praised Crysis for having a sandbox type layout, where you were generally free to complete your mission however way you wish, but that sort of choice is easy. No matter how you kill the guy, you are still killing the guy, giving you no real choice or freedom. So lets encourage those games which give you real options in impacting upon the story. Its incredibly hard to create a great storyline that branches out into equally good resolutions with the player driving the story forward. So for those games that try and fail in this regard lets give them full points for effort, and for those games that succeed, well, give the devs your money and enjoy truly great gaming.

Rhinoxer

MOAR photoshopping. Main problem with this one was I hadn't picked a great rhino head so it was kind of off balanced on the guy's arm.

Updates

Exams in just a few weeks now so starting to get frantic with the study. Right now I'm spending almost no time at all playing any games at all except for an hour or so on the weekend. I've been languishing at the same level on RoM for a couple of weeks now and really feel that I'm not getting anywhere. Even why I do find the time to jump on I often get a ridiculous amount of lag and waste a lot of time when I'm killed by lag: it just makes the entire process a lot harder. On the other hand, I have started working more in photoshop as its easier to jump on that for a while and try and make something to relax. Speaking of which I have decided to most at least one of my photoshop efforts every week probably on a Saturday, just to track my process and hopefully motivate me to think up new things and improve my skills.


Time to go and do some study. *sad face*

New ping high score!

It hit 7 million ping before I got tired of waiting to be disconnected and thus exited.

Photoshopping a signiture (Continued)

...Continuing on form last post.


Cartoonised it, if you can call it that. This was to blend both the ingame screenshots and the real fire and sun. Added some outglow (??) to the dwarf as well as the cliffs. Moved the sun down a bit so it would fit inside the signature.


Final image. Cropped, added text, black outline, border, bit more outglow (???) and darkening around the corners.

So I'm pretty happy with the result for a first time. Not sure exactly how long it took me but it was around 1 hour. Feedback would be awesome. Cheers.

Photshopping a signiture

To set myself a challenge, and to do something fun I went out to make my own signature. You know the images that users stick at the bottom of their posts on forums? I thought this would test me in a lot of different ways, and every once in a while I pressed 'print-screen' to show my progress.


First picture, just a basic screenshot I took in WAR.


Positioning all the parts of the shot that I want to use with very basic edges.


After some time of trimming edges I got a more refined view of the picture. The colour still needs work amoung other things.


Adjusted colours of the various layers, now I thought it was too red, and overbearing.

Will continue in next post as it seems that blogger doesn't like more then four images.