August 7, 2008

After a wait that seemed to drag on and on, Bioware has finally released the last patch for NWN! Unfortunately, they ran out of money for translation into other languages, so only the English version of the patch has been released. Because of this, Higher Ground held off from updating until we worked out a process for our non-English players to update to the English version, so that they could update to 1.69 and continue playing on HG. We finally worked that out, however, so we are now running 1.69, along with the matching new version of the Community Expansion Pack, 2.1c! If you need help updating, or changing from a non-English version to an English version, there are complete instructions here, in as many different languages as we could manage:
http://www.hgweb.org/169.html

With the advent of 1.69, we're now able to tackle some projects we've been sitting on. First off, we converted most cloaks back to visible, craftable versions. Because 1.69 fixed the animation bug, the override causing the cloaks to appear stiff and cardboard-like is no longer necessary, and even more armor appearances are now available, making for an unprecedented number of new looks. We're also revisiting weapon statistics, in order to ensure that all weapons have a niche, because 1.69 fixed multiple damage types on weapons so that the best damage type is always applied. There are also an array of new creature appearances for us to draw on, as we continue to expand the server and create new areas.

Speaking of new areas, we've just completed the latest legendary area, Elysium. Evil characters are able to trek down through the 4 layers of this good-aligned plane, and confront Pelor, the Sun God, himself! A huge number of new foes, pulled from pen and paper sources, stand in the characters' paths, including devas, planetars, and the godlike solars! And, of course, there are dozens of new powerful items to be found, for those intrepid enough to brave the perils.

There are also a host of new areas on the horizon, including the soon-to-be-released Aboleth areas, filled with some of the deadliest foes yet seen on the server. They will eventually serve as a bridge to the Elder Evil areas, the ultimate challenge of the server, eclipsing even the hells! Again, you'll see dozens of foes, most pulled directly from pen and paper sourcebooks, and all designed to offer serious challenge to even the dedicated player. That's just the tip of the iceberg, however, when it comes to new areas waiting in the wings. Soon after the Aboleths are released, the Pit of Moliation will be completed (areas and monsters have already been roughed in, though not finalized), chock full of nasty foes intent on inflicting grievous suffering on all who enter their domain. Other areas looming near include the Hive, chock full of insectoid horrors, the Maze expansion, another as-yet-unnamed underwater area, and a couple more artifact areas. In other words, players will not want for new areas to explore!

We're also continuing to flesh out and balance classes, with continuing edits. Soon, shifters will have many new forms, including Atomie, Troll, Wyvern, Xorn, Beholder, Gelatinous Cube, Avariel, Sahuagin, Crystal Golem, Marut, Modron, Sword Archon, Baelnorn, Banshee, and Silver and White Dragon forms, along with all new abilities and enhancements to old forms! We're also adding an onslaught of new spells. Bards, for example, will get Illusory Pit, Needle Point, Gembomb, and Otto's Irresistable Dance, to name just a few. Some of the new cleric spells include Blistering Radiance, Death Pact, and True Resurrection, while Druids are getting spells like Essence of the Raptor, Desert Sirocco, and Spectral Stampede. There are a host of arcane spells in the works as well, like Avasculate, Greymantle, Polar Ray, Skull Trap, Spell Enhancer, and Reverse Gravity. Even the less spell-oriented classes are getting new spells, like Break Enchantment (paladin), Foebane (ranger), Fire Shuriken (assassin), and Corrupt Weapon (blackguard). Not only that, but cleric domains are being reworked, so that each domain grants additional spells. Meleers classes aren't being left out in the cold either. We'll be adding an array of new feats like Power Critical, to allow them to further refine and hone their abilities.

All that, and much more, is in store for the future. In other words, we're keeping busy, doing what we've always done. We look forward to seeing you all on the servers!

The HG DM Team

In the three years I've been playing on Higher Ground, in my opinion, no feature is as groundbreaking and fun as reincarnation. Reincarnation allows you to re-level your favorite characters from level 1, but still maintains server balance with a few easy to follow restrictions

This appeals to both the long-time players, and the new players equally. The long-time players can rebuild their old, dated, and sometimes broken characters, and fast forward past the low level area areas they have done to death. The new players can use reincarnation to fix mistakes they made in their first characters' builds, allowing them to participate in high level runs while being able to contribute to the party. It even allows you to upgrade your character's subrace to a secret, more powerful subrace that has to be found in-game before you can use it, negating the need to abandoning first characters.

The restrictions on reincarnation are minor, and generally only require you to maintain the same control class, (the class you have the most levels in, in 20/20 builds it is the class you took first.) or maintain the same class combination. For example, you could turn 38 bard/1 paladin/1monk into a 40 bard, into a 38 paladin/1 bard/1 monk, or even into a 35 monk/4 paladin/1 bard. The other restriction is you have to wait 1 month after reincarnating before you can do it again with that character, 3 months if your character was immortal (an accomplishment you can earn).

The reason why reincarnation is good for Higher Ground is because its keeps the old players interested in the game, and it keeps the new players from getting frustrated with having to start over after making a mistake on their build.

April 11, 2008

Greetings from the land of Higher Ground! We haven't put up an update since last September, so we figured one was about due. We've been extremely busy of late updating the servers, so there's a great deal to update you on if you haven't been on recently. If you HAVE been on recently, you'll still want to take a look at the UPCOMING CHANGES section below. :)

First off, reincarnation is now back for good! There are a few limits, to keep some problems that result from reincarnation in check, but you can now reincarnate every one of your characters every three months, so that updates to classes, subraces, skills, and the like will not force you to waste time making new characters.

We've also expanded once again! Servers 117 and 118 are now available! Player limit per server has been reduced to 27, to spread the load more, but we can handle more players than ever before! We are expecting to add a 9th server at some point in the future, to help spread the load and combat lag to an even greater extent.

We've made many more changes to class abilities in our continuing effort to keep them both balanced and diverse. All classes have seen changes to one degree or another, but some of them really stand out. You can now choose to become a dragon disciple of ANY prismatic color, for example. And sorcerers now have the ability to 'channel', expending extra spell slots for increased dc and penetration, which has proven very popular.

To complement the class changes, we made tweaks to many base races, in an effort to bring them more into balance with each other. All the races but humans received some changes. Elves, for example, now receive the ability to raise cross-class skills higher in legendary levels. Gnomes now receive 2 additional skill points per level, and halflings now qualify for Legendary Luck without the Luck of Heroes feat. In addition, we've added many new subraces, and added new Favored classes to subraces, which override the base race favored classes, creating a much greater variety. The Aleithian Dwarf, for example, has Bard as a favored class, and receives bonus xp if the character has dwarven defender levels.

We've also introduced some new areas to adventure in. First, we brought back a classic from the great Gygax himself, the Myconids. The Myconid Depths are irradiated caverns, home to a group of ancient and powerful mushroom-men, and meant for levels 42-48. We also expanded the arctic, having decided that the Spawn of Uroboros needed a daddy. Hence, Uroboros Peak! This mountain in the Northern Wastes is home to the mighty dragon Uroboros. It is intended for parties of level 47 to 53.

The addition of Acaos to the development team has opened up whole new horizons for us. He's delved deep into the NWN engine to make modifications that have been impossible until now, and can be found on no other server. He has, for example, developed tweaks to the combat engine, both to fix some irritating Bioware bugs, and to give us a whole new host of possibilities. Katanas, for example, are now finessable by medium characters, and we now have the ability to make club weapons feats work for cep weapons, creating a much broader range of useable arms, with 14 new weapon types!

Also, we've utilized Acaos' engine hacks to make many more skills more useful. Craft Armor, for example, now grants 1 point of AC per 40 ranks, up to +3 at 120. This AC stacks with everything. And Craft Weapon now grants 1 point ab per 40 ranks, up to +3 at 120. This ab also stacks with everything. We've also used those engine hacks to eliminate some of the more problematic bugs in the bioware engine, including immunity stacking, and the crash that was caused by having too many spell slots.

Yet more engine hacks have given us the ability to create a host of new useful SIMTools commands. Take, for example, !qb and !sb. These commands allow you to save and restore quickbars, and speed up altering your spellbook. Typing !sb fill automatically fills your remaining empty spell book slots with the last spell in them, making changing spells memorized much less tedious. Combat messages now have SIMTools-controlled filtering, with the !filter command, to help cut down on combat log spam and the lag resulting from it. There are a whole host of new and convenient commands, like !afk, !autocast, !pcscry, !unafk, and !voicebind.

We've made use of those commands to take interserver communications to a new level, as well. Interserver tells, run messages, and DM assistance requests have been moved to SIMTools, with the !tell, !runmsg, and !dmcall commands. Other commands make finding and communicating with people on other servers a snap, like !finger, !time, !reply, and !tell. The !guild, and /g SIMTools commands also allow cross-server guild channels.

We've also been updating our HG Enhanced Hak on a regular basis - it's now on Beta version 12! For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it's a purely optional hak download that greatly enhances gameplay experience, adding around 1000 new visual effects. By use of engine hacks, acaos was able to make alternate visuals display for those without the hak, making it completely optional. This means that new players can try out HG without the hassle of a download. And if they decide to stick around, they can get the benefits of custom content that would ordinarily only be available on servers requiring haks!

We completed the transition away from documenting changes in item shop books, and you can instead now find all the documentation of changes on HG in journals, which automatically update with your class info when you log in, and with which you can opt to view any and all of HG's modifications.

Of course, with all the new and interesting class abilities, we had to do something to keep the players on their toes. So we added new paragon-class creatures to the hells! A paragon is a rare and more powerful version of a normal fiend, with different and more potent abilities. We also added Hellgate Arena, so that players could test themselves in a safe environment, or experiment with differing tactics. Naturally, with increased challenge comes increased rewards, so we added a host of them, including a new Hells store, hells random useables loot, and Hells secret loot, including some very potent and sought-after items.

And, if the increased challenge of the Hells isn't enough for you, we introduced Hardcore mode! Players are now able to opt to play as a hardcore (or softcore) character. Hardcore characters are deleted on death, and the experience tallys of the top 50 are tracked for all to see. Softcore characters merely lose their status when they die, instead of being deleted, and no longer accrue experience on their tally.

And as always, we're always looking for ways to improve the play experience, or to make tiresome and repetitive tasks less so, and to reduce lag at every opportunity. To that end, the bank is now able to store charged and stackable items. We dropped the item limit from 200 to 50, because it was causing lag spikes, but players can now name their own chests with the !bankchest command, meaning they can have as many 50 item chests as they want! Midway points were put in the longer runs like Rona, Cania, and Nessus, so that those with less free time could still take a crack at them. We also gave those playing in off-hours a helping hand with experience and loot. For every 20 players or fraction thereof less than 81 players, a 'phantom member' is added to all parties to increase experience and loot earned. We also increased the stack size of scrolls, potions, and some other stackables, to cut down on inventory clutter.


UPCOMING CHANGES:

As always, we have a great deal of new content on the horizon. For starters, HG Enhanced is getting yet more capability, courtesy of Acaos. Soon we will have alternate Skyboxes and monster appearances, just as we have alternate vfx for HG users. We've already selected a number of skyboxes from the Community Skybox Project and created lower-resolution versions that maintain the quality but require much less in terms of download time. You can find the CSP here, if you want a sneak peak at the icy cavern that will soon encapsulate the Pit in Cania, or the volcanic interior that will surround Abriymoch in Phlegethos.

More areas are also in the offing, many more! Areas coming in the near future include Elysium, the Pit of Moliation (featuring yugoloths), and the Aboleths! And further down the line is a much larger project, on par with the Hells in size and even more challenging. Before the gods and devils of today, there existed much more ancient and mighty beings, known as the Elder Evils...

We aren't stopping there, either. We will also be adding many more options for characters, including new spells and feats! See below for a partial listing.

In any event, there's a ton of things in the works here at HG. Hope to see you ingame! :)

The HG DM Team

September 6, 2006

We are pleased to announce the addition of a 5th server! HG continues to gain in popularity, and when the four servers we had filled up for the third day in a row, we decided it was time for a fifth! You can find it listed in Action with the others, or direct connect to 64.237.35.115:5121.

This was a proud moment for us, but was not the only one in the last few weeks. Bioware recently featured us in a two-week Bioware Wednesday segment! You can view  the articles from both weeks here and here.

We still have some big projects ahead, before the release of NWN2. With the release of the Community Expansion Pack 2.0 just around the corner, we will soon be able to finish the Nine Hells areas, the highest-level and most challenging areas slated for creation, and hopefully the most visually stunning! They will encompass around 30 areas in total, and will allow the characters to complete the final step in their ascent to power!

We've also received numerous inquiries about our plans for HG1 after NWN2 releases. At this time we have no plans to shut down the servers, and will continue to operate them so long as we have sufficient funds and our host is willing. With any luck, the NWN1 servers will be around for a long time yet!

September 7, 2007

I know it's been a long time since we've posted an update, but that's mainly because we've been so busy making improvements to the server. We're nearly done with a major overhaul and rebalancing of class abilities, and because of the scope of the changes, we are allowing players to redo their old characters, from the ground up! For the entire month of September players will be able to take their characters to the Reincarnation Light in the Docks, and reincarnate them, making a brand new character from the ground up, with only a few limitations. This is to help ensure that the recent changes do not render too many recently-made characters obsolete, but it is also an excellent opportunity to breath new life into much older characters. Just what changes have we been making? A list of the current changes in progress can be found here.

And that's just the changes that we've made since August. After this last major round of changes, we have other changes in store as well, including improved summons (around 1000 scaling summons) and expanded metamagic (adding metamagic feats from Pen and Paper not normally found in vanilla NWN.

Of course, since the last update, far more than that has changed. Beautiful new areas like Rona have been added, and more are on the way. New artifacts, more random loot, and a host of other expansions, improvements, and timesavers have been added. Our goal is to make this a vibrant mod to stand the test of time, even after we start investing major energy into HG2 for NWN2.

In any event, we look forward to seeing you all on the servers!