Jade Dynasty Is A Very Addictive MMORPG

Posted on 10 July 2009 by FoxTwo

As luck would have it, just when I finally get my hands on Armed Assault 2 and planned to spend time making my own combat missions to play in it, I discover a new free-to-play MMORPG, called Jade Dynasty.

As the name implies, it’s a Chinese-themed MMORPG. Don’t worry, the language used is English. However if you roam around the starting city, you can find an NPC called “Unknown Scholar”. He is a vendor that sells cooking recipes, and his recipes are in Chinese.

If I understand it right, Jade Dynasty is known under different names for different markets, and it originated from China. Hence, when it made its way to the USA, they translated it.

Since I’ve never played it in its original Chinese form, I can’t tell you if anything has changed in terms of gameplay. However, one thing is for sure – it’s positively addictive. I get the same sense of “I need to complete 1 more quest” every single time I need to go to bed.

Graphics wise, they are clean and crisp. Demands on the PC isn’t very heavy. I can easily slide everything to max at 1280×720 and still get 30 FPS on it.

Watch more videos of Jade Dynasty

Levelling inside is pretty fast, and the thing that really got me chuckling is that, if you enter into the “meditative state” while in town, you actually earn xps! In fact, each time you earn xps, the amount is roughly the same as killing 2 mobs of your level. The time interval between xp gains is about the same as you going out into the wild and grinding mobs for xps. Levelling in this game is also different from most others – you pick ONE skill to upgrade or learn, and you pick a 2nd skill from a “Tome”. That’s all. Health and other attributes seem to be automatically adjusted and compensated for.

The second interesting thing is that there is a “bot” built right into your game client. You can actually put heals and spells into the relevant hotkey slots, and start the bot going among a group of mobs. You will automatically kill mobs and pick up loot. When your health runs low, the botting client will heal you with the potions you put into the heal slot (or with a heal spell you specified to be cast at a fixed interval).

It’s so sophisticated that you can tell the bot client to attack only specific mobs or to adjust intervals between spell casting, plus radius you want to detect and attack mobs in.

Yes I’ve used this function in the official game client to quickly kill quest mobs and get my quests done quicker.

This game is definitely noob-friendly. They have a list of NPCs you can call up at any time for you to click on, and you will automatically run there. Also, in the quest log, their names are hotlinked and once you click on the names you will run to them.

However, being noob-friendly doesn’t mean it’s not deep. It’s very deep. Even now at level 25 or so, I’m still figuring things out. For example, I still am not too sure about the difference between an “Esper” and a Skill. To me, they work the same. You cast it, it drains your mana. There are other stuff, too much to mention, that you will have to figure out how to do as you level up. Yes there’s in-game help but honestly, I haven’t actually read through it yet.

So as you can see, right now I’m kinda hooked on this MMO. I really wish I can split time between this and ArmA 2.

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Armed Assault 2 FTW!

Posted on 5 July 2009 by FoxTwo

I just managed to get my hands on the new Armed Assault 2. Back in 2001, I remember being engrossed in what was probably the best military simulator, called Operation Flashpoint. Since then I’ve bought every single release from the makers, from the expansions up to Armed Assault, and now, Armed Assault 2.

I must say, ArmA 2 is the best simulator yet from the company. I include a short video clip below to whet your appetite:

Watch more videos of ArmA 2

For one thing, you will notice that the placement of windows is different from ArmA and OFP. Fonts have been increased in size in some places, and the menu items “dumbed down”. If you’re a veteran OFP or ArmA player, you can still access the old menus the same way – keys 1 – 0 open the menus and the actions you can take within them are still in the same order. Hence, for example, to order your men to “fall back into formation” you can hit 1 -1 and issue the same command as you did before. Or, to fire at will, you hit 3 -5. They are all there. You don’t have to use just what you see on the menu in front of you.

I opened up the editor and had a go at it. It’s essentially the same editor as it was back in OFP through to ArmA. However, now there’s a new option called “modules”, which presented an interesting menu of adding ambient effects like animals and sounds. Should be interesting.

The biggest improvement, in my opinion, is larger portraits of your men on your squad bar. With larger portraits and hence, larger icons representing what they are (Grenadier, Machinegunner etc), it’s easier to locate and order your AT guy to take out the tank. In the past I sometimes just gave up and ordered the whole squad to take out the tank.

Right now I’m still having a blast in ArmA 2. You should too!

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Testing My New ATI 4650 On COD4

Posted on 16 March 2009 by FoxTwo

To recap, eversince I got my new ATI HD 4650, I have been re-playing old games just to get a “feel” of how much things might have improved.

One of these is Call Of Duty 4. Previously on my old rig, the P4 3.0Ghz Hyperthreading (single core), I get respectable framerates (about 20+ FPS) with “medium” settings. Resolution was at 1024×768, and certain graphic details were turned off (notably Anti-aliasing). When I got my new (current) rig, with the integrated ATI HD3200, performance was better. A few more graphic details were turned on, some were set to medium. Framerates were about the same, ie 20 odd.

With the new card, it auto-detected everything at High and whatever that was off, was turned on. Anti-aliasing was set to 4x. However, resolution was still at 1024×768. I manually turned the resolution up to 1280×1024, the maximum that my monitor can run on.

With FRAPS running to measure framerates, I started COD4. To my jaw-dropping amazement, COD4 clocked an average of 45 FPS! Even with FRAPS capturing video, it never went under 30 FPS, but hovering around mid to high 30’s.

Ok, yes I know I am pretty bad at COD4 after all these time. In fact I think I should re-play it again, because this Nikolai mission made me realise I forgot alot of the story (and hence, enemy placements and locations) to justify another run-through.

The next entry, I’ll probably bring you a video of the new Stalker game. I had a pretty rough time running it on the integrated HD3200 chip – many parts of the game were stuttering and jerky, and I estimate framerates to be about 5 to 10 in some places.

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