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Dragons


Pellape

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I toke a peek at DrakeTheDragon's (Drake) Dragons and I got reminded about what i did when I left Ultima 2001, 2 or 3, well as soon as we could get online day 1. I was among the first players online. I played this odd and very very old game. It is still available. Do not play it as it is not worth a single penny today.

 

Horizons Istaria was a player friendly game where you where able to play a Dragon, and trust me, playing the Dragon was nothing else than just hard and boring work, from a small Dragon puppy to a grown up Dragon and that did not take a day. it took forever. Flight was the goal, flying with your own grown up Dragon.

 

https://www.ign.com/games/horizons-empire-of-istaria

 

Drake, peek at this video.

 

 

My Dragon was yellow with a white/yeallowish light front, called Sourfang. Citrus is sour, and he looked like a walking lemon, a sour lemon and he was sour for sure. A bad boy. He acted like that too, provoking others, making them pissed. It was his way of having fun. He was not always friendly. Honestly: Is a dragon ever friendly?

Edited by Pellape
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I do not want to see that whole video. I get sucked back in time, seeing this again. It looks better than I remember even. No wonder with higher resolution and better monitors. Something tells me to test the game again. I better forget about it really. That is best.

 

Still it is a boring old game. The crafting for your own hoard is tedious, even if your pals adds all kind of crafted stuff to your hoard, it is never enough. You must maintain your hoard, that is the primary goal of the Dragon, not to fly around, well you do fly to the resource areas, as no normal dragon will walk that long way. Are you out of your mind? Walking???

 

You cannot buy armour nor weapons from NPC traders, maybe the simplest you wake up with. i think a 2-handed fighter wakes up with a 2-handed double sided simple axe and that's it. You must craft your own stuff or buy it from other players if you are a lazy sh't ar5e-hole. A Dragon that do not craft are out of his mind. he will die or stay puppy at least. It is not good to ignore crafting really. The whole game is built around the crafting, no matter if you see your self as a Lord or a beggar. You must craft. it is tedious and really boring. You need to make so much stuff to increase in levels and tiers. Much more then you need in WOW. I almost puked the last day i did play this game. i was bored to death.

 

i do love crafting but it can be fun, like it is with MOO or in Skyrim. You buy some ingots as you are rich as a troll or a Dragon and you click at the item you wanna make and it is done fast. Forget it in Istaria. Well you can buy resources but are they cheap? No way. The miner will know how much his resources are worth. The more iron, the cheaper it gets, as the one selling for the lowest prices wins.

 

The game is best played on a crowdwd server, to keep the prices of resources down. If there is to few players, the prices will go down as well, if you want to get anything sold. A Middle crowded server will be hell for the marker I guess. This is pure speculations. The tradings, and the auctions are extremely vital for survival. You will spend a lot of time at the trading centres. Trading is global if I recall right, in the same way WoW was. You add stuff at one auction I guess and the other auction traders will know about it. i do not recall exact.

 

In Ultima, if you added stuff to your trader, yes you hired a trader, other players had to visit each traders for business. if you did not pay your trader a fee, he would walk away or disappear.

Edited by Pellape
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I also remeber I did had a lot of contact with the Europeen support and management, specially Lugi, from Itally. We had a stable contact over email and chat. Debating the game and all around it. I was also hated persononally by one of the moderators who thought I was a piece of garbage. We did avoid each others. We where both RP:ers... Well he did claim he was RP at least... Sucker...

 

So what did I and Lugi debate? I wanted to control the game with the event engine for an evening, 1-2 hours RP event where i did control the monster spawning and the danger. Lugi who also played UO at the same server I was on liked the idea. The management did not dare to aloow me control over the game in Real Time. The event never took place, only in our imagination.

 

I could see what havoc and chaos I was able to create as a game master. Me a veteran RP:er, controlling the world like a god? I can understand that the management did not let me in to do this. :D I could break the entire world. :D It was not built for a player to control it as it would have also giving me admin access. Either you are a player or a hired admin. Not both. I did love the idea and so did Lugi in itally.

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Dragons can be friendly and loyal to the grave, but their psyche hardly handles any sort of criticism, even if you mean no harm. This make them often react over-sensitive or furiously. And don't even think to call them lizards, in that case the term "hot arguing" will have very special meaning. Because as pinnacle of all creation they are not only good, they are the best, right? So it's no wonder that only a few have nerves and patience to deal with them.

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Ah, yes, Horizons/Istaria really was a fun game. I went through the 1-week free trial, or what it was back then, when I was still able to play such games, and did enjoy it massively.

 

I would've probably gotten a paid account later, but when my free time died there was no use to it.

 

I did, however, take a lot of inspiration for future features of my mod from this game, too (hovering in place as an alternative to gliding flight at too low speeds for example). Sadly without free time nothing final ever came of it either.

 

Ah, the memories. :rolleyes:

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From what I see dragons are sometimes missused as the last attempt to thwart the decreasing popularity in online games. And offline games? I personally met only two which are fun to me and you really play as dragon or anthro-dragon as a character, not only riding it - Mage Knight: Apocalypse and Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon. Mage Knight is bugged as hell, but it became my guilty pleasure as I trained Draconum Mage to a maximum (all stats and skill tiers). Dawn of the Dragon is the third of Legend of Spyro series and after quite so-so first and second one I was really suprised. Completely from another team, the game was improved in every aspect. Two player cooperation, free flight, some exploration and also not so hard to finish (I'm sucker at action games). Even on Playstation 2 it looked nice. Not much originality of story, though. And now is quite rare to find and pricey.

 

Tips for other offline games running on Win7 and my GFX 960 running nicely are welcome. Thanks in advance. :happy:

Edited by RomanR
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Coool. :) Maybe they are missused. IDK... I did have fun at a period with my dragon. Cool Drake that it was that game that inspired you. After lvl 100, nothing was fun, nothing to do than running in the same Blighted area. End Game. That was really the end. No other games has such a clear ending...

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And Drake's Dragon Race inspired me to work on my very first project ... which didn't end well. Still great experience while I was working on it, as I learned so much about scripting for Oblivion.

Edited by RomanR
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Ironically I still use much shorter version of this project to this very day. But with some additions like (highly experimental) flying, a little better clean-up scripts and the like, it became completely different from Drake's original. It also contains some heavy compromises, which are OK to me, but most propably not to others. Like offering of dragon shapes (only full shape), compatibility with other mods is a big question (every other mod needs to be patched) etc. But hey, the mod is stable, flying enjoyable (I'm still battling with imprecise collisions though) and my statue in Bruma looks truly heroic. So at least personally I'm quite pleased. But as I know now, for the public it can't offer much and so the propability of releasing is zero.

Edited by RomanR
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