Oh, the Hu-Meme-ity...

Bad title? I got nothing. Anyway, Pete from Dragonchasers meme-tagged me. It's like the whole MMO blogosphere has decided to emulate Facebook or something.

The idea of this particular meme is to post your sixth screenshot from your games. Unfortunately, I have never been very attached to my screenshots, so I've lost them over time when rebuilding my computer, or shuffling files around. My most recent purge occurred as I shuffled things around so the OS is on one drive, the swap file on a second, and the games on a third. Load times? What load times? Ah, but my historical record from the various games I've inhabited was sadly not one of my priorities.

That isn't to say I don't have screenshots, it's just they are all very recent. I never thought about it before, but I do kind of wish now that I had preserved some of them, especially from Final Fantasy XI, a game I have very fond memories of that I would love to reminisce over, but I would never, ever, ever go back to playing again.

Here's a screenshot from EverQuest II. It's not too exciting, it's basically just my Defiler posing with her faction window open. I had finally moved Synod Reet faction up to ally, and I was excited because I was moving closer to obtaining my epic weapon.



And here's an all-too-common scene from Warhammer Online, where my Bright Wizard was standing over his own corpse. Seconds before dying again.



I'm going to be anti-social and refuse to tag anyone, so, dear reader(s), you get a reprieve. Mostly because everyone I would have tagged have been tagged already.

I Have Ruined Someone's Life And Want To Ruin More

I managed to convince my brother to try out an MMORPG. I wanted him to try EverQuest II, but he doesn't seem to be very fond of fantasy. So I got him to try City of Heroes. He managed to become super addicted to it in no time. I feel evil. I may have ruined his life.

However, he quickly realized that the world simply doesn't change. And many of the missions in City of Heroes are simply frustrating. Why is it when I am given a mission to steal some museum piece from the Snakes or whoever, AND I steal it, the mission continues until I manage to kill the 20 different spawns in every nook in cranny in the multi-level room the item was in? It doesn't become MORE stolen because they are dead. I suppose they do this to try to prevent people with invisibility powers from having an "unfair advantage," but it sort of makes those powers less meaningful. Some of the other missions require clearing a large, sprawling zone with nooks and crannies that mobs hide in that are hard to see. You end up spending more time looking around for that one last mob than you do fighting. That's not a challenge, that's just tedium.

I have only put in six months of play time in City of Heroes since launch, and no two months were consecutive. It's largely because of missions like that. It's a terrifically fun game with a great pick up group scene, but the missions and the random nature of the maps leave a lot to be desired.

So his fun starts to taper off and he starts complaining that he wants to play a game where he can truly change the world. I mention Eve Online. He is more of a sci-fi nerd anyway. Now my brother has moved on there and developed an OCD addiction. I haven't decided if I want to return to New Eden, but if he sticks around I just may have to do so. If only to monitor his addiction and make sure he's ok.

Now I'd like to ruin more people's lives.

If you would like to try EverQuest II, let me know at festivewombat-eq2invites [at] yahoo.com. I'll reply with an invite. If you convert to a subscriber, you will get some exclusive goodies, such as a cloak that increases run speed, some potions to help you level up, and a starter deck and booster pack for Legends of Norrath. You won't even have to buy the game, since Rise of Kunark and all previous expansion packs would be given to you free!

Recruit a Friend FAQ

Recruit an Original Thought Already

Sony just announced a recruit a friend program for EverQuest II, which they describe as a "unique" promotion that gives you free game time, an exclusive mount, bonus experience when grouping with your friend, and the ability to help your friend catch up in levels (in the case of EverQuest II, through mentoring experience.) I wonder where they got the idea?

Sigh.

EverQuest 2 is a much better game, but at the rate they are trying to copy World of Warcraft I can't help but wonder if it will be much longer. If I wanted to play WoW, I would be. Granted, this is just a promotion I can easily ignore (except for the implications it has: the Recruit a Friend was widely abused by dual boxers to help power level their alts...), so it's not as bad as the in-game copying such as the tiered raid progression and solo quest arcs we got in Kunark, which we most certainly could NOT ignore.

Not that I won't try to take advantage of this. Anyone want to help me get an exclusive mount???

Miscellanea

Not much has happened lately. As of a month ago, I am now a father, so I haven't had much time for gaming. But even when I have had time, I haven't been too interested in MMORPGs. It's not just that single player games are more convenient (after all, you can't pause an MMORPG, though I wish you could), it's mainly that I've been more interested in story driven games. So I've been playing Fable 2, STALKER, and the recently released Fallout 3 DLC.

I finished Fable 2, which was fun. One of the most interesting parts of the game for me was when I came back to Bowerstone after adventuring for quite some time and found out my wife left me. That was powerful for me because in most RPGs, nothing happens that the player does not themselves initiate. Granted, I could have kept my wife if I had visited more frequently, but typically RPGs react to action more than inaction.

I think MMORPGs could learn a thing or two from Fable 2. While MMORPGs are necessarily static affairs, because of the shared world, they could at least introduce NPCs into the affair and our relationship with THEM could change over time. We should be able to make friends, make enemies, even an arch-nemesis. The very static quest lines we all have to follow wouldn't seem so bad if there were little bits here and there that were CUSTOMIZED for each character. I wouldn't mind doing a quest line multiple times if each time I did it I was fighting a different arch nemesis, who lived to thwart only that one character.

The Fallout 3 DLC was a mixed bag. It was fun to revisit the post apocalyptic world, but there was nothing in the DLC that really felt like Fallout. It was a purely shooter driven experience, with no opportunity for roleplay or alternate progression, and the shooting aspect of Fallout isn't really one of its strengths. Still, I think what they are trying to do is offer up little slices emphasizing different forms of gameplay, and the story was quite enjoyable, so I am not disappointed that I purchased it.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a game I don't often have the urge to play. It's a first person shooter but its very clunky and bug ridden, with poor voice dialogue and scripting. The story is somewhat interesting: you are investigating an area outside Chernobyl that is infested with radiation and anomalies and right now I'm in an area where people have been turned into zombies because of some kind of radiowaves emitting from some place nearby. It's just the bugs and clunky game play are a huge turn off.

One of the things I like about the game is that you can fail missions. The problem is often these "protect the rebel camp" missions end up ending in failure before I even have a chance to run to the camp because the key NPC I'm supposed to protect dies immediately. Then I reload, get to the camp, and fight off the bandits but after the fight the bandits attacking keep respawning, perpetually, even though I've satisfied the victory condition. So then I reload again, and finally everything plays through correctly and the script executes fine. Talk about frustrating. I'm not sure why I even keep trying to play the game.

I did manage to get a few hours in EverQuest II. I worked it out so I could get one raid night a weekend. And I hate Venril Sathir so much now for making those nights a series of disappointments. Still, getting my mythical (even if it takes half a year of playing only one or two nights a week), before the next expansion pack comes out, is my goal now, at least for one character. If I don't burn out on the game first. With my time constraints, I haven't been able to grind for TSO shards, and I haven't had much interest in the solo quest arcs in Moors. So we'll see.

Alganon

I noticed Aspendawn talking about Alganon on Veni, Vidi, Bloggi, so I went and checked it out. This appears to be the new name for what was once called Crusade Online, by one of the original designers of Horizons. It seems to have some ambitious ideas; the primary goal of the game appears to be immersion.

Some of the ideas that it has that I am looking forward to:

It has a hybrid progression system that involves both skill-ups based on usage, but caps those skills based on real time that keeps hardcore players from gaining too much of an advantage over more time constrained players. I think real-time-based progression works well in Eve Online; it's probably a good feature for these games because it helps shift the focus from playing to level up to simply playing to play.

The game appears to also plan various "Domain Objectives," which give a shared goal to all players in a zone, whether they are grouped or not. If done properly, this could be a good community building feature.

The main thing I like about it is the promise that they will have customized quests. Some quests will be customized for your character so on multiple playthroughs you won't just be doing the same exact thing over and over again.

This game has been surprisingly under most people's radar. After all the exaggerated hype of the last batch of MMOs (Vanguard, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online), that's probably a good thing. Whether this game becomes a success or not, it seems they are trying several good, new ideas. This is one reason why I'm cautiously optimistic about 2009 MMOs. Even if we don't get a hit on our hands, we've got lots of games that are actually trying something new.

Invisible Walls ENHANCE Immersion

There is an interesting discussion on Terminally Incoherent about invisible walls. Luke seems to feel that they kill immersion. Apparently, so do everyone else that commented on his blog.

Always the contrarian, I have to defend the opposite position: invisible walls enhance immersion.

One of the irritating things I find in many RPGs that have "open worlds" where you can interact with everything is that everything is so damn small. You walk into the mining village and there's like five people who live there and three houses. Obviously the game developers have limited time and it doesn't make sense to design the game world with realistically sized mining villages with hundreds of NPCs and fully interactive homes because it would take them forever to do just that and then there'd be no time to actually make the damn game. So I understand that. But they have a choice:

- put in fake backdrops of "the rest of the village" but make it so the player can't go there, OR
- make the world unrealistically small so the developers have time to implement every facet of the game world and therefore won't need to upset player's illusion of interactivity and control

I prefer the former. I find it curious that people insist on the latter. Last time I checked, few RPGs put bathrooms anywhere in game, and I can't remember the last one that made me use one. So obviously as consumers we all draw the line at how much immersion we require somewhere.

When you get to the edge of a map, the game developers could put in an invisible wall to demonstrate that the game world continues, OR they can go out of their way to put in all sorts of natural barriers so you simply can't continue. Again, I prefer the former. Wrapping the entire game world with barriers just exaggerates how unreal the game environment is and ruins the illusion. Who builds nations in the middle of impenetrable valleys that you can't get goods in and out of?

I prefer the game world to feel realistically consistent. And that means having the maps appear to continue even if they don't. After all, if your RPG consists of a map of a nation, they probably do trade with other nations. That's not very plausible if you can't get an individual outside the borders of the nation, let alone a caravan. With an invisible wall, you can see that the world goes on, but from a role-playing standpoint, your character just doesn't want to go there.

In other words, I prefer the illusion of a continuous world even if it means sacrificing the player's control at certain points.

I do think that perhaps games could implement the invisible walls better. Instead of having you continue to run in place once you hit the wall, as most do, just have the player stop running and say "I don't want/need to go there," and/or turn them around. That way you can maintain narrative immersion (that the world continues but your purpose is so important you can't go wandering off yet) without violating the immersion of control.

There's no right or wrong here. It's all a matter of opinion. In Grand Theft Auto the city is big, big, big. It's a city after all. That's narrative immersion. But because it's so big, obviously the developers can't make every indoor area. That means some doors can't be opened (they are simply fake backdrops). That violates the illusion of control, which for many makes the game less immersive. You now have a game world where you can kick down SOME doors but not others, arbitrarily.

So what do you prefer your games focus on? Narrative immersion (if they say it's a city, it should LOOK like a city), or illusion of control (if there's a door, I should be able to open it)?

A Distinct Lack of Class

One of the interesting things I've noticed in the design of several upcoming MMOs is that several seem to be moving away from the traditional "character class" game mechanic. Once upon a time, each character picked a class, which could not be changed, and that choice defined their role.

This approach has drawbacks. One of the most frustrating aspects of traditional MMOs is finding a group of players to play with that fill all the requisite roles. Its quite common to see people with almost full groups, unable to continue, shouting that they are looking for a tank, healer, or mezzer, over and over again, until they find one. This results in a lot of sitting around, not playing the game, just because you need ONE more person on a server with thousands of people on it and the group can't work without them.

In DC Universe Online, each powerset comes with three modes: offensive, defensive, or utility. You can change your role depending on your mood, what you want to do, and what is needed. The Agency likewise has a "you are what you wear" system of defining roles, meaning you can similarly change your role depending on what people need at the time.

Brilliant! Swapping out the "class" mechanic for "stances" removes one of the major impediments in grouping. Removing the types of obstacles that make grouping a pain is a great step forward for the genre.