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Ancients are upon us!
Khoal
Member Posts: 84
Copy-n-Paste from the News Section of the Community Site:
"With the much-anticipated Ancient Rite of Passage now complete and patched to the live servers, the team here at Tulga would like to thank the community for their time and efforts during the design and testing of this epic quest series. The ARoP stands as a great example of the community working with the developers to make Istaria the best experience possible.
The team would like to recognize several members of the community who contributed lore to the Ancient Rite of Passage: Silowyi, of Chaos, for her invaluable assistance with the ARoP dialogue, encounters and storyline; Kanis, of Chaos, for contributing a portion of the quest dialogue and the newer short stories; and to Radzy, of Order, who also inspired several plot points and wrote several of the early short stories connected to the ARoP.
Without the terrific players in Horizons - dragons, as well as bi-peds (and yes, even gnomes!) - we wouldnt be here today, so a great big thanks to our players and a huge congrats to our first Ancients!"
Stayed up into the early morning hours to complete my ARoP, and Ascended with the dragon alt of our guildmistress. Good times!
Congratulations to all the other Ancients and soon-to-be Ancients out there!
Comments
Not to add fuel to the fire, so to speak, but I've been reading about the ancient dragon quest and its results. It seems that finishing the quest actually nerfs the dragon to some degree and the bonuses that the character receives are less than what are received when reaching adulthood. Lastly, they shrunk the size so that's not really visually discernible from an adult.
Unless there's been a massive change within about five days time, this has been a seriously anticlimatic ending.
For more details check their community message forum. Click here to go directly to their Dragon forum.
edit: I originally used HTML to make the link, which obviously didn't work. Oops. Habit.
Long. Tedious at some points. Thrilling at others.
The extended intermission between the first episode (where we got the Scale of the Ancients) and the conclusion made me become somewhat dependent upon that Scale, which really is a very nice piece of kit. The loss of it at the end came as something of an unwelcome shock. In its place I received a weapon crystal that offers the same general features, but not the armor boost of the scale. The passive armor boost "Drulkar's Scales" makes up for the loss of the Scale.
Overall, I'd say that the ARoP is satisfying. The new abilities we get are pretty cool, provided you're willing to burn hoard on them. The new breath weapon is a handy one, a short-range AoE nuke. The added flight ceiling and cargo capacity are also great to have. I won't call ARoP stellar, because I feel it isn't really over. There's still supposed to be post-Ancient Advancement, a kind of specialization within the dragons and the two factions.
TG kinda dropped the ball when it came to the Ancient size/model issue, though. Dragon players had become accustomed to seeing the original NPC Ancients (and they really were bad-ass looking). But when ARoP was complete, those Ancients who'd completed the quest soon discovered that, no, they would not be getting the "old model," because that model was broken in some way. (The reason was given, and it was full of technobabble, frustrums of cones and crap like that). The old models for the Ancient NPCs didn't move around or interact with people, so the problem wasn't noticed until it was too late.
The current Ancient Model looks quite similar to the Adult model, although it is bigger by a fair margin. The Old Model is available to download from the community site (kudos to Blue and Guaran for that!).
Those players who've switched back to the Old Model do not report any issues with it.