Jalia's AO Beta Journal page 4
Jalia in Anarchy Online! 6-23-01
I started yet another character. Actually I started several, just to try out the different looks. They have a lot of looks for you to choose from, especially the solitus breed. You want to be the black guy from Mod Squad? Okay. How about the Karate Kid's mentor? No problem. Or you can be a young noble samurai, a dude with a Dragonball Z hairdoo, a Johnny Rotten guy, a Marilyn Manson wannabe, a bald biker, or just someone who's a little slow and ugly.
And that's just scratching the surface, they've got dozens of choices. As you can see, there are some wildly different faces to choose from.
I made a nuetral agent with a fu manchu look, but in the end I didn't play him much. I spent a lot of time with cute little Keeka here, who is an Adventurer. They get travel spells, barbcoat-like spells, some heal spells (including group heals), and can change into various animals (and get group animal form spells and target other animal form spells too). In short, they are techno-dr00dz, although I don't know if you'll see them quad kiting across the face of Rubi-Ka.
I didn't like my wimpy pistol, and guns use way too much ammunition in my opinion, so I made Keeka into a fairly decent martial artist/melee expert. Actually Adventurers get bonuses in several melee weapons, so they're supposed to be up-close fighters, just not necessarily empty-hand fighters. But I found an Attack of the Snake early on and that was that -- Keeka became a pretend Martial Artist who could heal, and really that worked fairly well.
So I spent the week leveling up 3 characters (Jaqui, Nanoblade, and Keeka) and dealing with all the lag and disconnection issues. There are a lot of bugs in AO still, which I hope they can iron out quickly once the game is released. As I type this, tomorrow is the last day of Beta and the game comes out 3 days later, and naturally we're playing a more recent version (11.2) in Beta as opposed to what's being shipped (11.0). Once the new users patch, they'll be playing the same game as we are now, minus the bugreport programs running in the background and including a new patch to 11.3 (which was supposed to be out already).
Anyway, be that as it may, I'm here (on this page at least) to talk about missions. In AO, you can go out into the wilderness to kill monsters if you want, and you'll get good experience that way, but if you want to get items you have to do missions.
How does this work? Simply put, you find a mission booth an click on it. There are several different kinds of mission, and each kind has its own icon. You're offered 5 missions at a time, and if you don't like any of them you request 5 new ones. There are a bunch of slide bars to allow you to request a certain type of mission -- more cash or more experience, more "good" or more "bad", more physical or more metaphysical, more direct or more of a stealth approach. And, of course, "Easy" or "Hard". How you set the slides will affect what kind of missions you're offered. The mission describes where you need to go to do the mission and what reward you get for it, so typically you sort through missions looking for the item reward you really want.
Currently in Beta 11.2, several of the missions don't work (although they worked in previous versions). So after reading online, I concetrated on the missions where the goal was to find an object. There are also missions to retrieve an object and bring it back, but those aren't working because right now it's impossible to pick items up, period. There were also ones that worked where you find a person, but the rewards in those weren't very good.
After accepting a mission, you head for the coordinates given in the area given. Easy missions are generally closer -- some missions can send you across the planet into enemy territory, while simple (and less lucrative, in terms of exp or money) missions might lead to a door right next to the booth.
You are given a mission key, which only activates when you enter the right mission door (at the coordinates given). What happens then is a mission dungeon is generated for you. Your objective is to clean it out, fulfill the mission, and bring back all the loot to sell. ^_^
A typical mission dungeon has one large open area, with many doors leading off to various rooms. The main area can be empty or it can have 3 opponents (always seems to be 3 if any at all). This can be a problem if you can't find a way to fight them one at a time, or two at a time at most. After this, every room has no more than one opponent, so things can go pretty smoothly. You can finish up a mission in under an hour, which is nice for casual players.
I haven't tried a group mission yet, but presumably that would be more fun than solo. Assuming you don't crash as often as I have in Beta anyway. ^_^
As you can see from these two screenshots, by the end of the week I not only had Jaqui and Keeka up to 7th level each, but both were outfitted pretty well and looked not half-bad. ^_^
Next: Fashion, and my life as an exploiter!
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