The Hawksmouth Chronicle

Main Cities

Tragthul — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 01:00:09 +0000

The main city of Hawksmouth and the Quarterstone Fountain, Statue and Pit District all share a common architecture and I’m quite satisfied with the appearance of Hawksmouth with its market, the back alley next to High House Torque and the intimidating statue of a tamed Vhelgar at its centre. The whole city has a dense atmosphere and looks finished and well thought out. Quarter Stone on the other hand, capital for that matter has been disappointing and couldn’t stand a chance comparing it to Hawksmouth. The first time you’ll set foot on Quarterstone you will do so entering it by the docks next to the palace. The palace as seen on early screen shots as a collection of the High Houses built around a round plaza with a fountain is no more. At some point someone had the strange idea to replace it with some sort of building that looks like its been taken right from the East German hinterland. Not only does it give the Palace some sort of rather prison-like, I’d almost say boring look, it fails to create easily distinguishable wings for each of the High Houses. The only superficial recognisable difference between the five wings, besides their location are the banners in front of them. Excuse me, but I don’t think this is enough. People can hardly distinguish between them the first time they’ll need to find a specific wing, the difference of the banner is to small. In my opinion, if a complete redesign of the area is out of the question to at least dye the cladding of each house in a different colour. Personally I’d prefer a redesign, giving each wing a look that seems represent the nature and personality of each High House. Like adding blue crystals and floating stairs to the Rune wing, menacingly looking statues of battle fame to the one of Maul and so on. The interior of each wing should be changed accordingly.

About the Oracle District. While like the look of the Oracle – the temple like structure with a beam of light/magic – I’m rather irritated by two details. First, even if maximise the view distance in the game options. The top and the tip of the oracle building start to blur out because apparently they’re to far away even if you’re standing right in front of it. I’d like to see this being disabled for at least some of these important buildings like the Oracle or the High Houses. I’m not concerned about realism, this is about the looks only. Second issue I got with the oracle are its worshippers. No, I don’t have a problem with their religious believes but I do have a problem with short lock ups because they start to cheer. In addition I really don’t like the way they’re displayed in their worship. It doesn’t look natural, it doesn’t look very spiritual and a little to static. A possible solution? I’m not sure, maybe not placing them in clean rows will do the trick.

The before mentioned fact that Hawksmouth shares a common architecture with most of Quarterstone – namely the Fountain, Statue and Pit District isn’t an issue in the sense that I think they should differ under any circumstances which I do not. The issue is that they don’t seem to differ at all. Let me explain it using the Pit District as an example. The Pit District is the waste dump of Quarterstone, literally. Low income population, a trouble hot-spot, a place of crime where nobody likes to live. There are eviction notices on several doors for example. And yet, the district looks as clean as the high income neighbourhood of the Fountain District. The buildings, while maintaining the architecture should look like they’re going to collapse, maybe some wooden cabin should be placed on the ground of collapsed buildings. The streets should look dirty and be cracking open because nobody cares about the people living there. If you have ever been to the urban part of the Green District you have probably seen the narrow streets and backyards. This is how a city would look, this is how the pit district should look. I don’t have specific ideas or proposals in mind for the Fountain or Statue District. But just as the Pit District they apparently seem to lack the soul of a city. They seem dead, artificial and sterile. If you happen to own the art book that came with the premium box you may want to take a look at what Quarterstone could have looked like starting on page 49.

Acclaim release soon?

Tragthul — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:43:38 +0000

According to the official Acclaim forums they sorted out the game guard issues and the Acclaim version of TCoS is finally on it’s way. I wonder if we’re still going to see a closed beta in their territories or if they’re going to start with the real deal right away. It’d probably a good idea to start with a CB to sort out possible server or client issues and I expect hope they know what they’re doing.

Hi Players,

The game guard and server side implementation has been done, We have received the Acclaim version of the test client also.

We are in process of setting up the servers and testing the client for any bugs which need to fixed before the close beta release.

So keep your fingers crossed that we don’t come across any critical issues.

Thanks

_________________
GM and Support Lead
Acclaim Games Inc.

Rumour: Banshee to call it quits

Tragthul — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:31:39 +0000

Next big content update being two weeks away I’m sad to hear rumours of Banshee, English Community Manager leaving TCoS for personal reasons in march not prolonging her contract. It’s sad to see her quit being a valuable member of the community for some time now.

So for that matter my best wishes to Banshee and a great thank you for all that she did for the community. We sure are going to miss you!

Patch by the end of January? / Acclaim updates

Tragthul — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:26:55 +0000

I’m still alive, I just wasn’t in the mood to blog and now I’m back and this time I bring some good news, kinda.

The community managers announced that a new content patch is on its way that will bring new content, yet to be announced content and bugfixes. Here’s what Banshee had to say:

A content patch is planned for end of January, containing, again, truckloads of bugfixes, some new content and game improvements. More info and news about it will be released in the coming weeks.

Personally, I’m not quite sure if some new content is gonna cut it. I for one, my main toon being a Wrathguard have quite a hard time to grind from fame lvl26 to 27 and from 27 to 28. I can only hope they’re going to release some additional hotfixes soon.

It’s probably just because accidentally chose the only class without self heals and no damage output whatsoever, dunno. Maybe I should start playing my lvl7 Trickster.

Other than that there is finally a new update by acclaim:

Hi Everyone,

We will be using this thread to post the status and progress. There will be no ETA mentioned until we are done with the server and client build / testing. Please be aware that there are some things which are beyond Acclaim or the TCoS team’s control which can cause delays.

Currently TCoS Team and Acclaim are waiting for additional files from a third-party vendor.

Thanks for your patience and co operation.

Phew
GM and Support Lead.

The third-party vendor in question is INCA GameGuard. Apparently there were some problems concerning getting rid of GameGuard version of the versions that’s live in Europe right now.

Christmas days summed up

Tragthul — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 13:31:57 +0000

Christmas time is over, people are going back to work and TCoS is still well alive, or is it? I’m going to to summarise what happened in the last couple of days while that guy with the funny hat and bear flew around the world. Unscheduled server downtimes and failed advertisement in Germany.

On December 23, German high-circulation PC gaming magazine Gamestar featured the F2P-client/trial on one of its two DVDs, mentioning it right on its cover and with a somewhat positive double-sided review inside. One would have hoped this would have brought some new souls to try or to subscribe to the game. Apparently the amount of new players that has been generated by this so for isn’t worth mentioning. OK, there not a big studio producing this game, granted, but I can’t understand why even with this, no one seems to stick once they tried. My theory is people are scared off by the horrible start you this game has. There’s no CGI intro, there is only a badly voiced cut scene when you first enter the world showing you the empty regions of Hawk’s landing and Hawksmouth and a lot of people are already overstrained with the task to find the NPC mentioned in your first quest. They should seriously consider tweaking the starting areas so it’s a little more appealing and a little less frustrating.

Talking about frustration. Servers went to down on both December 25 and 26 in the morning hours and were unreachable for at least a couple of hours without any notice to the community whatsoever. They told us that there was a some broken hardware that now has been replaced after everything was working again. Bur for all that I care this isn’t enough. I’m a paying customer and if something is wrong I want to be informed about it yesterday.

Avatar and Signature Builder

Tragthul — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:47:28 +0000

Forum member Hinx just announced a new updated version of his popular Avatar and Signature Builder. This nifty piece of software it’s a breeze giving any of your avatar pictures a little more of a TCoS themed look. It’s easy to use and it’s free!

Only drawback in my opinion is that you can’t create avatars with a transparent background, no PNG files so they currently only fit into the official forums with their purple background.

Anyway, here’s what the creator had to say about the update:

Hi!

I’ve updated the TCoS Avatar and Signature Builder to fit to the new forum colour theme. You can find it here.

For those of you that do not yet know what the TCoS Avatar and Signature Builder is: with this tool you can create good looking avatar and signature images without any image-editing knowledge of software! Both by avatar image and the one in my signature where created with it.

Avatar Builder
With this tool you can make a nice TCoS themed frame around your avatar picture. Just select the frame-style you want, upload an image and the builder will create the avatar for you. You can then upload it in your forum profile.

Signature Builder
This tool lets you choose from a variety of TCoS themed border styles and background images (you can of cause upload your own custom background image) and add several lines of text with a variety of styles. It will then create a signature image for you. You will also not have to look for a place to host your signature since we do that for you aswell. If you want to make changes to your signature there’s no need to redo the whole thing: just log in, change the line of text (or border style, or background image) and the signature image automatically updates itself!

If you want to thank him please do so on the forums —> link

Fix those resetting mobs, they’re driving me nuts.

Tragthul — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:31:15 +0000

If you aren’t a skin shifter and aren’t inside a town or a city you’re probably just being attacked by one of the gazillions of mobs or denizens of one of the various regions of TCoS. Killing them doesn’t give you as much experience points, or fame, like you’re used to other games. So you’re doing your very best to avoid as much of them as you can while they’re doing their best exactly doing the opposite and they got help…

While the overall experience fighting mobs, especially in group game is rather sublime some of them most notably on board shard ships or inside dungeons are often affected by what I refer to as the aggro reset bug. You probably encountered this on several occasions yourself and know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, then well, imagine this:

Your fighting a bunch of whatevermanes or dunnoyenas already having killed entire populations of them and just as you are about to kill the last one of them off, jumping and dodging its attacks is suddenly turns around and runs away, regenerating their entire hp pool in an instant. No, this isn’t some fancy AI, this is a bug. While dodging you moved over one specific area of the map which for some reason is unreachable for mobs making resetting the aggro, taking them out of combat and hence making them regenerate all of their hp.

It’s basically what you do when you’re trying to get rid of mobs by jumping on a rock, crates or any place they can’t reach. Only this time it’s probably not what you intended because this time, they decided to regain their aggro the moment you leave the spot and they’re taking some of their, probably already respawned friends with them again still trying to eat you.

Citadel of Ail, already bugged?

Tragthul — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:50:40 +0000

I know people don’t like to get spoiled so I’m trying to keep this as spoiler free as possible. The first and apparently the second boss encounter in the new group dungeon are bugged. Well we assume they’re because there was no official statement concerning possible bugs in the Citadel of Ail at this point.

So what problem does this bug cause? You can’t really kill the first boss, he remain alive at 1% even after he made his last words. Maybe it’s part of the encounter, I doubt that personally but who knows what the Devs came up with this time. There might still be a slight as at least one person claimed to have killed the boss on the forums, further claiming the second encounter suffers from exactly the same problem. However, there is no proof for this to be found and the only thing I’d like to hear is an official statement by the community managers or one of the Devs whether or not this or these encounters are working as intended.

It’s the uncertainty that troubles me the most but as they’ve shown in the past albeit some silence they’re quick to fix and solve problems. Not all of them though. I’m still waiting to be able to finish my HH Rune quest without having to exploit a bug…

Spellborn Community Sites

Tragthul — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:19:08 +0000

Just as for any other out there, there are communities build around The Chronicles of Spellborn. And every now and then you might actually stumble across one of them where people gather in discussion outside the rigid rule set of the official forums. But to be honest I’m not that kind of guy to regularly engage in discussion on community sites. I might end up reading them though.

Anyway on TCoS community site in particular attracted my attention, not only because on of them ended up commenting on this blog. No, I already knew about this site because they started posting about it on the official forums and curious as I am I clicked the link and I’ve to admit I was pleasantly surprised. Just like me, they’re not sticking to press releases or official news as their only content. So in my opinion it’s a real community site and not just a mere extension of tcos.com. I like that.

The site I’m talking about is: http://www.thedeadspell.com/

Maybe just take a look for yourself, and I know even if they start flaming me now, the header with the text all over it is horrible. But then again, who cares? It’s about content.

If you think this is advertisement, than you’re right. It’s all part of my TCoS Advertisement 2.0 Initiative to be honest. The more sites are talking about TCoS, the more players it will attract.

Does anyone else know about some sweet little TCoS community sites? Post some links in the comments. And I’ll add them to my list of sites of the Ad 2.0 Initiative.

TCoS Advertisement 2.0 Initiative

Tragthul — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:49:44 +0000

People paying some attention to the forums lately have probably noticed it getting rough about the publishers’ marketing strategy and advertisement campaign which seemed non-existent. It wasn’t all that bad in the end with some TV time in Germany and being one of the Christmas gift reccomendations of Der Spiegel, Europe’s biggest and most influential weekly magazine. But nonetheless, all of this doesn’t change a fact and whether we like it or not, we need more advertisement, we need more players and in order to accomplish that we need to take the advertisement into our own hands.

I doubt there isn’t anyone who never heard of the web2.0, social sites, social news and thousands of communities living of user generated content and recommendations. Youtube, Digg.com, StumbleUpon, FaceBook, StudiVZ, Twitter, Identi.ca. The contemporary world wide web is full of these sites and we can use them to get people to know TCoS.

Nobody expects you doing the publisher’s job, nobody expects you to pay a lot of money to make our favourite game more popular. Just mention it to people you know, blog about it or just release a short tweet into the wild.

If you got a digg.com or StumbleUpon account digg or vote news and announcement of TCoS up and leave a review or short comment.

Here’s a list of a couple of TCoS related items, if you want to contribute just create groups for TCoS on social networks and post the link in the comments and I will add it to this list.

The Hawksmouth Chronicle

Main Cities

Acclaim release soon?

Rumour: Banshee to call it quits

Patch by the end of January? / Acclaim updates

Christmas days summed up

Avatar and Signature Builder

Fix those resetting mobs, they’re driving me nuts.

Citadel of Ail, already bugged?

Spellborn Community Sites

TCoS Advertisement 2.0 Initiative

Digg.com

StumbleUpon

Votes

Groups

Community Sites