Just a really quick post before bed. Playing EVE and STO has me thinking a lot about space battles. I’m still looking for a Honor Harrington space combat simulation, y’know?

I just came across Flotilla from BlendoGames, an Indie game dev. I have *not* played the game yet. But based on this video, I’ll definitely be giving the game a try. I know some of my friends out there are also space grognards so I figured I’d better share the link asap. Besides posting about it is the best way to be sure I remember to try it myself!

Stargrace is the first one I heard use the term “Nomadic Gamer” and I’ve decided I like that a lot more than “MMO Tourist.” Tourist to me has a negative connotation. You can travel a lot, visit many places and as long as you show some respect for the people, places & cultures you’re visiting, you won’t be considered a tourist.

[I should point out that I grew up in a summer resort so I may have a more negative reaction to the word "tourists" (which in my family was *always* preceded by the word "damned") than most.]

Anyway, dissembling out of the way, I’ve decided to follow Stargrace and Petter into EVE. This is not technically my first visit; I played back when the game first launched, and once, very briefly, since. But I kept hearing about how the game had changed.

Now I was always an enthusiastic EVE Observer; I loved reading the stories about wars and scams and deals that went down in the game. But I assumed there was no place for someone like me; someone not willing to commit to playing a single MMO as his main leisure time activity. But Stargrace convinced me otherwise; or at least convinced me enough to give the game a try. A *generous* 21-day trial (as long as a current player invites you) really helped in this decision. I’d heard the horror stories of the steep learning curve and knew that if I tried to force myself to learn the basics of the game in a short time I’d walk away in disgust. [Darkfall's $1, 7-day trial leaves a bitter taste in my mouth after learning of EVE's free 21-day trial.]

I’ve been taking things very slowly indeed. Two challenges I face: 1) there’s a lot to learn that isn’t at all obvious (as Blue Kae pointed out to me…prior MMO know-how isn’t very useful here) and after a long day of coding and writing for my two jobs, it’s hard to get enthusiastic about stuffing more content into my tired brain. And 2) laugh if you will, but EVE is the only PC game I’ve played that makes me put on my reading glasses. Even with the on-screen font bumped up to 12 pt, wide (the max it will go), I can’t read it without glasses. Which means I have to lean forward to play so that the glasses will focus on the screen. Silly, but it means my eyes tire very quickly while playing. I’m hoping this eases up some when I’m not reading tutorials constantly.

But I started Thursday night, and this morning I hit that point that every EVE ultra-noob eventually comes to:

Yes, I’m doing the Mining Tutorial! With this new-found knowledge, the world galaxy is my oyster!

Kidding aside, figuring things out and learning a game that’s so markedly different is turning out to be a heck of a lot of fun, as long as I go at my own pace. It really, *really* helps to have a group of folks willing to offer help and advice when I get lost. Petter formed a little Corps that has a nice handful of Twitter/Buzz/Blogger types in it, and that helps a bunch too. Nice to have a channel where I can ask dumb questions and not be (maliciously, at least!) laughed at.

Now I guess I need to go track down the EVEMon program and see what that’s all about. Until the next green pasture of MMO goodness beckons, I’ll see you Nomads in EVE!

A week or so back I got an invite to a “secret Xbox beta” via Fileplanet. Turns out it was for Bizarre Creation’s Blur, the upcoming combat-racing game. I’ve spent the last few evenings playing and I’m surprised at how much fun I’m having in a multiplayer XBox Live game with a bunch of strangers (the beta is mp only).

Starting Monday, March 8th, the beta will open to a much bigger group of testers. You can get keys from a raft of different gaming blogs if you’re quick. They seem to run out fast once they put them up for grabs. Snag one if you can and if you have any interest at all in arcade racing.

So when you start the beta, you’re a level 1 racer with access to two lobbies. One of them is for races of 2-10 players and the other is for races of 4-20 players. The second one has been more or less deserted and there may be other differences besides number of players; different tracks perhaps? I’ve only been in there once (the beta is really small…last night when I was playing, there were 30 players logged into the beta, all of them in Lobby 1).

So you get into this lobby. As a level 1 racer you start with a couple of basic cars. Cars (all licensed, by the way) are divided in classes, A-D. IIRC you started with 1 class D and 1 class C car. Once the prior race is finished there’s a short voting session where players vote for which of two tracks to race on. Each track will allow a specific class of car.

After the voting there’s a 30 second countdown to the race; it’ll feel too long for you at level 1, but later you’ll use this time to switch out cars and mods. At level 1 you have no choices so just sit tight. Soon enough you’re transported to the track.

The actual racing is (so far at least) all done on tracks with several routes/shortcuts on them. There’re various power-ups scattered around. Shields, mines, missiles and the like. These all feel pretty good and many of them can be fired forward or backward. Honestly the racing feels a lot like a cart-racer with a more grown-up ambiance. As I said, cars are licensed and realistic looking. The driving model feels slightly more realistic than that of a cart racer but it is still very drifty with an emphasis on accessibility; this is not a racing sim!

Hitting other players with weapons tends to slow them down or turn them around. Each car has a health-bar and if you get hit too many times you’ll wreck. Wrecking just means you lose a couple seconds before you respawn. There are “Repair” powerups that will replenish your car’s “health.” Rather than having a “rubber band” effect in the game, there’s a lightning powerup that will drop columns of lightning in front of the race leaders, no matter where you are when you trigger it. If the leaders can’t avoid these it’ll slow them down and let the pack catch up. It’s a nice ‘fair’ mechanic aimed at keeping races tense.

The overall goal of the game is to gain Fans. Fans are the “experience points” of Blur. You get Fans from placing in the race, but you can also get them from hitting other players with weapons, clean laps, good drifting and a host of other things. If you’ve played Project Gotham Racing, swap in “Fans” for “Kudos” and you’ll get the idea.

After the race, you’ll learn how many Fans you’ve earned and see how far you’ve gone towards the next racing level. Then it’s back to the lobby to vote on the next track.

It won’t take you many races to level. In two nights (maybe two hours of playing) I’ve reached level 7. The beta has a cap of level 15 but the full game will go to 50. It looks like things slow down past 10. I’ve seen a lot of level 10 racers and not many beyond that.

What makes Blur so fun is that progress-quest itch that you can keep scratching. At level 1 you have a beginner car and beginner player skills. Chances of you placing in a race are pretty slim. But you can still earn a lot of Fans by driving well. I think it took me 2 races to get to level 2.

As you gain levels you’ll earn new cars with better capabilities and more advanced handling models. These are, in theory, harder to drive but much more competitive. Ideally you’ll match car to track… if a track has a lot of dirt you might take a car that’s build for off-road racing… somethink like an SUV. If that track is really twisty you might favor handling and acceleration over top-end speed. Only by learning the tracks will you be able to determine what car to use on which track.

After a few more levels you’ll unlock Mods. Mods come in sets of three and they tweak various things. Some mods give you a power-up at the start of the race. Some let you earn more Fans for good driving. Some improve defense and others improve offense. Sometimes you have to compromise since you can’t mix and match individual Mods; they all come 3-to-a-set.

It looks like the cars themselves can eventually be tweaked/upgraded but I haven’t got that far yet.

Blur feels pretty simple when you start playing it, and honestly it never gets overly complex, but as you learn the tracks and the power-ups you start picking up nuances to the gameplay. Just as an example, there’s a Shunt powerup that fires a relatively slow moving homing ‘missile’ at a player. If you’re targeted there’s a flashing indicator to let you know. You can try to out drive the Shunt by janking around a corner or something, or you can drive straight, let it get almost to you and drop a powerup, or fire one backwards, either of which will negate the Shunt. There’s a powerup that “pulses” around your car, pushing everyone away from you (and probably into an obstalce). The counter to a pulse is popping a Shield powerup. And if you have a Shield and the right mod equipped, the energy from the “pulse” gets turned into something beneficial to you; maybe a weapon that you can immediately fire at the dude who tried to Pulse you.

The game looks great, feels really fun to play, and seems like it’ll have enough “leveling up” to keep players occupied for a good while. Getting into a race is fast and earning Fans always leads to “One more race” syndrome as you try to hit the next milestone. (There are also Challenges to work towards, like “Shunt 50 players” or what-have-you. I haven’t earned any of these yet so not sure what you gain from completing them.)

I had zero interest in Blur and had I known this was what the secret beta was, I never would’ve applied for it. But once I was in it, I figured I should give it a try. Now I find myself budgeting money for the game when it comes out. It’s that fun.

As to other players, I don’t even have a headset hooked up to my XBox. So though I saw the ‘talking’ icons lighting up, I never heard anyone talking (maybe that’s a setting…not sure) and there’s really no reason you’d need to talk to other players. On XBox Live, that’s a huge selling point for me. OTOH, getting a group of friends together to chat and race would be awesome fun, because Blur is full of “Oh sh*t did you SEE THAT!!?” moments as racers pull off awesome moves or narrowly escape terrific crashes.

Here’s a rather long “quick look” from Giant Bomb:

Just announced via Twitter, Perfect World is bringing Forsaken World to NA.

You can read the announcement here, or visit the preview site to explore what this new (to us here in NA at least) MMO has to offer.

I’m going to go do my own exploring because, frankly, I’ve never heard of this one. But there’s a Vampire class so it can’t be all bad!

I just finished my first play-through of Heavy Rain and wanted to capture some thoughts while they were still fresh in my mind.

My inner cynic really wants to tear the game apart. The controls are clunky in that survival-horror kind of way (not that the game is survival horror, mind you). Walking a character around can be really cumbersome, the mostly-fixed cameras (somethings you can pan a bit, and there’s always an alternate views) can make navigating even an open space tricky (particularly when the camera view changes unexpectedly, leading to disorientation) and OMG six-axis controls FTL. I hate it when a game makes me tilt, shake or yank my controller around. In general, the mechanics of the game are kind of janky.

And had I written about the game after the first 30 minutes I wouldn’t have had a thing good to say about it. And y’know, I still don’t have much good to say about Heavy Rain, the Game. But I *loved* Heavy Rain, the Experience.

Quantic Dream has really nailed graphical interactive fiction in this product. The varied pacing can frustrate you in a good way. The first hour or two is actually pretty slow but then there’s a payoff. And that happens throughout the game. Deep into the plotline you’ll have to do some really mundane action that’ll be ‘boring.’ That’s kind of unheard of in a game where the intensity generally ramps up from start to end. But in a movie or a book, having quiet times in between high action points is basic plot development 101, and it works well here.

There’s something about the way they make you hit QTEs that really makes the whole story compelling. For example, I tend to semi-recline a lot while I’m playing a video game. And I did so in some parts of Heavy Rain but when the tension mounted I had to sit up to be ready to shake my controller around. I know that sounds dumb and/or annoying but it really added to the feel of the game. I was leaning forward, attentive, a bit tense, waiting to do whatever I had to do, and that make the whole experience feel different.

So it’s definitely a game that’s worth a play-through. But what about replayability? I definitely plan to play through it again, though not right away. I’m both interested to see what will change if I make different decisions, but also hesitant about how engaged I’ll be by making them. In my first play through I made the decisions that I felt were correct. To go through again and make different ones might weaken my connection to the narrative in that I’m doing things I don’t really believe in. We’ll see what happens when the time comes. I won’t be replaying it soon. Like a book or a movie, I’ll put it on the shelf to enjoy again sometime in the future after my memory of events have faded a bit.

I got up at 7:30 am on a Sunday to jump back into Heavy Rain. I can’t remember the last time a product had engaged me on that level. And after I finished, I just had to sit and think about it for a while. I had to ponder what I’d just experienced. Again, that’s a rare feeling.

Heavy Rain isn’t perfect; there were some plot connections that didn’t make sense (a few times a character referred to another character that, insofar as I know, s/he’d never met…maybe a branch of storyline I somehow skipped?) and the controls were frustrating at times. If the story had been in a movie it wouldn’t have been *that* special (and in fact someone just snapped up the movie rights to the game). But your interaction with the story gives it more power than it would have as a passive experience. There are decisions you have to make that are…disturbing, and you don’t have a lot of time to make them.

In spite of the flaws, Quantic Dream has created something pretty special here. If you decide to play it, just go with it. Set your skepticism and cynicism aside and just experience the ride. I think you’ll really enjoy it. I know I did.

I’m going to talk about SOE’s Sentinel’s Fate expansion for EQ2, but what I’m saying applies to pretty much every ‘boxed’ expansion (even if that box is virtual) for MMOs. Try to keep that in mind.

Yesterday I went to Best Buy and bought Sentinel’s Fate. It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment decision. I had been rolling the idea of returning to WoW around in my head, and Petter convinced me not to, but the ‘new MMO in my life’ seed had been planted. Not that I’m new to EQ2; I’ve played it on and off since it launched. But I haven’t played it for nearly a year at this point, and hey! New expansion. So why not?

There was a standard edition for $40 and a collector’s edition for $70. As far as I could tell, the difference was that the $70 version came with a mount. There were some physical gee-gaws too, but Angela has the collector’s edition so I figured I could play with her figurine if I really felt the need to do so. $30 for a mount sounded insane; maybe there were other differences that I didn’t pick up on. Frankly $70 was out of my price range so I didn’t look too closely.

So I pay my $40+ tax and get home. Don’t really need the disks, I’m told. I can just patch in Sentinel’s Fate once I activate it on my account. To do that I have to re-subscribe of course. $15 for a month. I start the patcher expecting it’ll run overnight or something. About 15 minutes later it was done.

And it struck me that I’d spent $55 to play this new content for a month. That seems steep to me; I could’ve bought a brand new MMO I’d never played for that much. Most new games cost $50 and give you a month to play for free. By deciding to return to EQ2 I’m actually paying $5 more than I would to play a game I’ve never played before.

And, from an emotional point of view, the fact that it could be patched in very quickly made it *feel* like a small expansion. I know that’s silly… basically I’m faulting a really efficient patcher and that’s no honest reflection of how big the content is. Or maybe something is fubar’d; I haven’t patched my client since maybe last summer at some point. How could it patch so quickly!? Is the new streaming technology built into Sentinel’s Fate?

But I digress. I think $55 is a lot to ask of people who’re returning to your game, and who represent potential sustained increased income if your content hooks them.

I was fine paying $40 to see what was new in EQ2, and this isn’t a case of bait-and-switch or anything. Sony is very above-board in letting you know you’ll need a sub and all that. But for some reason this time it just ‘clicked’ that I was paying $55, not $40, to try the new content, and that’s sort of soured the experience for me before I’ve even logged in.

The solution? Give a 30-day time credit with the purchase of a boxed expansion. When you activate that expansion, activate the account for 30 days (or extend the duration for already active accounts). Sure, that’s going to be a big dip in subscription income for a month, but think of the goodwill you’d generate and potential long-term increase in revenue. Alternatively, give the 30-day credit only to accounts that have been inactive for 3-months; then you’d just be covering people newly returned to the game (though that could be a real PR nightmare).

Anyway, I think next time an extension for an MMO I’m not currently playing comes out, I’ll wait for a sale or a price drop.

Free to play MMOs are a dime a dozen these days, so I’m not sure why Allods Online seems to have caught the attention of the group of bloggers and twitter people I fraternize with. Maybe it was the disgustingly cute “Gibberling” race that first drew their eye? Gibberlings are these short furry critters that travel in groups of three. My understanding is that you play all 3 as a single entity… in other words if you roll a gibberling your ‘character’ consists of 3 of the little buggers.

I wouldn’t know for sure. Y’see, I went Empire. Anybody who is anybody rolls Empire. To hell with little cute furballs and winged elves.

Meet Locust. He’s a Risen Savant. The Risen seem to be half undead, half robot. I know his pet is a robotic scorpion. So what’s a Savant? I dunno. I didn’t research this stuff. It sounded interesting so I picked it. Locust tosses spells around and swings a staff (pretty ineffectively). Poison seems to be his strength. He’s got a DoT and a Direct Damage spell. He’s got Vampirism which transfers health from the baddie to him. And he’s got his pet robot scorpion. Mind you, he’s only level 5 or so…I’m still fumbling along.

Allods Online won’t shock you with its originality, at least at first. Lots of gamers call it a WoW clone. I dunno how true that is. At the most basic and obvious levels I suppose. But the same can be said for many games. I don’t remember having a venom spewing half-undead half-robot mecha-scorpion-controlling vampire in WoW, but maybe that was in an expansion?

Kidding aside, you’ll feel very comfortable in Allods. See this paperdoll? Looks familiar enough, right? One nice thing, check the stats at the bottom. As far as I can figure, the ones with the green background and stars are the stats most important for your class. The ones with the blue font color are stats that are being enhanced by your gear. And yeah, there’re a lot of stats. Every level (at least up to 5) you get 1 measly point to put into one of those 14 stats. Tough calls.

Every so often you get a talent point too. Yeah, and you have a talent tree. Some talents give you new abilities (Locust’s scorpion buddy came from a talent), other times you just get new abilities automagically when you level up.

Oddly enough, Locust is called a Summoner in the paper doll. I just now noticed that. I’m thinking that’s his archetype. I *think* both the Empire and the Cuties (or whatever the other side is called… Cotton Candy Bandits? Oh wait, I think it’s The League) have the same archetypes (Scout, Healer, Warrior etc) but class names differ between the sides.

There’s a lot of “I thinks” in this post. Y’know why? Because Allods is free to download, free to play. I love that. I do my research by playing. (And I need to play more!) I don’t have to fret about whether or not it’s worth the price: there is no initial price!

The biggest downside of Allods Online, by the way, is that it is free. If you decide to play, the VERY FIRST THING to do is to click on the Chat Interface (bottom left corner of the chat window) and turn off all public channels. The community in Allods Online (most of whom, I assume, are 12 year old boys trying to figure out why they no longer think girls are gross) will have you down on your knees praying for the Zombie Apocalypse to come and wipe the stain of humanity off the face of the earth. So turn those idiots off, pronto!

Quests? There are quests! Here’s a Quest Window. Looks familiar, right? Yah.

Here’s the thing about quests in Allods. I know it isn’t fashionable to make your brain take all those little squiggles and recognize them as letters, and then bunch the letters into words, and smoosh the words into sentences, and then… y’know, READ the quest text. That’s a LOT of work and so 1995 after all. But just this once, you should take the time to read them. The quest text in F2P MMOs is usually amusing due to awful translation, but here the quests are well written and often subtly funny (no, this screen shot isn’t an example of a subtly funny quest; it’s just a random shot I had).

Here’s an example that you won’t find funny now that I’ve told you the quests are funny: Early on some NPC tells you this epic tale that ends with you having to kill some crows since they symbolize a big bad from back in the day. (Hey, I said they were funny; I didn’t say I was memorizing them word for word.) So you head off and dutifully kill the crows (talk to the dude with the captive Gibberlings first…he wants crow meat and you can double up) and head back to the NPC and she starts up again with an epic speech but then basically admits that she’s in charge of keeping the statue behind her clean and the crows were shitting all over it, and that’s why she wanted you to kill them.

I told you that you wouldn’t think it was funny. But if you’d read it in-game without me building it up so much, you would’ve chuckled. Or not. I chuckled. But then I have a refined sense of humor. You probably just want Chuck Norris jokes. Maybe you should leave the Community chat on after all. Maybe you are Part of the Problem!

Anyway, here’s a full-blown screen shot with interface and all that. You can click on it if you really want to see the 1680×1050 version. Point is, it all looks familiar, right? Comfortable even. I’m finding that’s actually a strength of Allods. I can just slip into it and play without any preparation to speak of. And yet the two classes I’ve tried (Savant and Psionist) play differently enough from classes in other games that I’m finding them pretty interesting.

I think its a pretty game too, and that helps. It runs nicely. It’s free. There’s some concern over item shop prices but let’s wait until the game is officially launched before we get too worked up over that (it’s in beta now, but characters will carry over to launch, we’re told). Apparently the shop was open and was showing the cost of a bump in inventory space from 18 to 24 slots for $20 US. Crazy! When I last played, the shop was closed. If they really run with that price, we can all just stop playing until they see some sense and reduce the cost, then we can go back. Because its free! Which is why you should give it a try.

But don’t just take my word for it. Petter at Don’t Fear the Mutant and Dickie at Rainbow MMO each have a nice “First Look” kind of post up (ergo the “My Turn” in the title of this post).

Maybe hyping a game like this really does it a disservice. There’s always that contingent of gamers who want to piss on anything that a group of folks is enjoying. I went into Allods Online with very, very modest expectations and maybe that was why I was so delighted with what I found. I wouldn’t suggest firing it up expecting it to be your main MMO for the next 2 years. Fire it up expecting it to be a distraction for the evening, and enjoy it for what it is, and for what you paid for it. Maybe it’ll last, maybe it won’t. I guess I’ll almost definitely be playing it until Monday. Maybe longer, but I don’t want to get too crazy about planning for the future. I’ll just live for today.

And yet, some part of me really wants to believe I’ll someday be fighting this guy:

If you’re using Google Buzz, you might want to link your blog to your Buzz account; doing so will let you automatically share new blog posts over at Buzz. For some people this will be almost automatic; just click on “Connected Sites” and your blog will be there.

But for the rest of us, here’s a step by step tutorial on connecting the two.

In the header of your blog, place a link that looks like this:
<link rel=”me” type=”text/html” href=”http://www.google.com/profiles/{your_username}”/>
For most blogging platforms you can do this by tweaking your template or theme. For Wordpress specifically, while in the Admin Control Panel click Editor under Appearance in the left nav. On the right side, look under Templates for a Header file; that most likely will be the file you want to edit. (I’m honestly not sure how consistent file naming conventions are across Wordpress themes; you might have to poke around until you find the file with the <head> section.) Add the new line under the existing <link rel=”me” lines then click Update File. Back on your blog’s display side of things, do a Shift-refresh and then view the source for the page and make sure our changes are there.

Hopefully that’s enough to get you going; if not you can search Google for how-to articles on modifying the themes or templates of whatever platform you are using.

You can find more details on this step in Google’s dev guide but obviously you want to replace {your_username} with your actual Buzz profile username.

[Update for Wordpress bloggers!: Here's an even easier way to get this link in your blog. Assuming your blog has some kind of links section powered by Wordpress itself, you can link to your Google Profile page via a Wordpress link. In the Control Panel, click Links, Add New, give it whatever name you like, put the link to your Profile as the Web Address, and then down under Link Relationship check the "identity" checkbox ("another web address of mine"). Click Add Link to safe it and, assuming the link to your Google profile is showing on the homepage of your blog now, you should be done.]

Now head to your Google profile. You can get there by clicking your own name in Buzz and on the Google Profile link on the resulting page. Now click Edit Profile and scroll down to the bottom of the page to the Links section. Add your blog as a custom link. It should pop up under My Links.

Now here’s the step I kept missing. Click the Edit button next to the link you just added and check the “This is a profile page about me” checkbox. If you don’t do this, Google won’t connect your blog! Here is Google’s documentation about this option.

Now you can either wait for Google to re-crawl your site, of if you’re in a hurry, go to the Social Graphs API page, log in with your Google account, and click the Recrawl button for the link you just added.

Finally go back to Buzz, to Connected Sites and your blog should now be there as an option. Click Add and then Save and you’re done.

At least in theory. If this blog post shows up in my Buzz-stream then it worked!

Here’s a neat story (or I thought so, at least). Jason from Perfect World Entertainment sent out a PR email about a mount design contest they held for Ether Saga Online. A player who goes by “Monaka” won with her design for a “Dark Nocturne,” aka My Little Pony from Hell.

Here’s a longish video of an artist doing the coloring on the mount (you’ll probably want to skip around through it):

And an image of it ingame:

You can read more about the contest and the winner on the Perfect World Entertainment blog.

I have to confess I don’t play Ether Saga Online, but I have kind of a soft spot for Perfect World Entertainment since they a) published Torchlight and b) hired all-around good guy Sam Houston after he got laid off from GamerDNA.

I bowed out of the Star Trek Online open beta pretty much as soon as I pre-ordered the game. I burn out pretty easily and didn’t want to grow a character only to have to start all over again.

So I haven’t been writing about the game, or even paying a lot of attention to it. Early access snuck up on me and I missed the initial rush and all the snark-inducing issues that launches always have. Tonight I finally got around to logging in. I spent some time making an “Unknown Race” and then ran through the tutorial. Then spent a lot more time messing with customizing the look of my ship.

Well, if I’m going to be totally honest, the very first thing I did was just sit and listen to the Star Trek intro music. That really takes me back.

I’m looking forward to playing STO at my own lackadaisical pace. I had been planning to play with a bunch of Twitter people, but honestly life right now (and for the indefinite future) doesn’t allow me to play any game seriously enough to ‘keep up’ with friends, and trying to would just be frustrating. Well, again, if I’m going to be totally honest I should say that gaming isn’t important enough to me right now that I’m willing to play that much. (And there’s a PS3 title coming out next week that’s going to distract me, too.)

I had fun tonight. The game ran great, tutorial wasn’t overly crowded. I’m a little disappointed on the options for head coverings for the Unknown Race options but otherwise creating my race was really fun. Wrote a little bio and everything. I’m paying attention to things more than I did in beta, and Leonard Nimoy’s narration blows away Zach Quinto’s, at least for someone who’s been watching Trek since the original series was in 1st run (granted I was really young, but I have a brother who was a teenager at the time).

Here’s my engineering officer. Full name: John Doe. Nickname: Chance. Species: Unknown. I was going for a vaguely reptilian feel, without making him an out and out lizard. And if you haven’t seen the game, don’t judge it too harshly from these shots. A lot of bump-mapping seems to be lost in the screen shot processing or something. In game his emblem and his belt gear look much more 3D.

I spent a lot of time playing LOTRO this weekend. For the first half I was playing my baby Rune Keeper (who hit 26) and having some fun but after a while I got the urge to see some new sights, so I switched back to my Champion “main” who, you’ll be amused to hear, is level 41. Yes, I’ve been playing since launch (though he wasn’t my first character), and yes, he is my highest level.

I’ve been avoiding playing him though. Every time I do, I feel like I’m treading water and not making any progress. I’d play for a few hours and it would seem like the exp bar hadn’t moved. I remembered my Champion being really fun, so what happened?

Finally tonight it dawned on me. I wasn’t playing LOTRO. LOTRO was playing me. When the Yule Festival hit I started hanging out around Bree to do daily quests to get tokens and my horse. After that I rode up to the North Downs and started chipping away at those quests. I have a ton of Fellowship Quests that were green or even gray, but I was trying to solo them. That meant they’d take a long time, and often I’d fail. Even if I didn’t, the experience I got for the quest wasn’t much, and the experience I got for killing baddies along the way was even less.

So why was I doing them? Because I have this freaky A-B-C personality. I don’t like jumping around in a sequence so I always find myself trying to complete my lowest level quests no matter what. Even though I was having no fun, I felt compelled to try to finish these quests. In effect, LOTRO was controlling me, rather than the other way around (OK really my own neuroses were controlling me, via the structure of LOTRO).

Tonight I finally shook myself loose from that mentality and headed to Evendim, an area that has lots of solo quests that are light blue. I immediately started finding the joy in LOTRO again, which is why I’m writing this post when I should be in bed.

I’m sharing this mostly for my future self. Maybe the next time I let a personality quirk start sucking the fun out of a game I’ll come back and re-read this post. These are games we’re playing. We should play them in such a way that they’re fun for us. Not the way someone says we’re “supposed” to play, nor should we approach them like they’re a chore to be dealt with. If you’re playing and not having fun, go find something else to do in your game. And if there isn’t anything else, then just take a break.

Now all that said, I’m really going to miss out on a lot of content if I skip all the Fellowship Quests (with the skirmish system we can all level to max without doing Fellowship Quests if we choose to). But I’m not a big fan of PUGs. So I’m thinking it might be time to find a Kinship on Landroval. But I’m not sure there’s a Kinship out there that I’d be comfortable in. Nor am I sure it’s the right time to be looking for a Kinship with Star Trek Online a few weeks out. I figure I’ll be playing that one pretty heavy when it launches, and LOTRO will go unplayed for a month or two (the beauty of a Lifetime Sub).

Side-tracking and late night blathering at this point so I’ll just stop. But future me (and dear readers), don’t make the mistake I made. Don’t do in-game things that you *should* do. Do in-game things that you *want* to do and that are fun!

So Cryptic announced its Lifetime Subscription offer for Star Trek Online. The cost is ~$240 USD and you have to pre-order to take advantage of it, and order the sub by Feb. 1st (prior to launch), or so I’ve heard. They’re also offering a 1-year sub for ~$120 USD and again, you have to pre-order if you want to go that route. Both deals give you 2 extra character slots, and the lifer lets you play as a Borg.

Now let me establish a baseline. I am someone who considers Lifetime Sub offers. I’ve done 3 so far. One was a disaster (Hellgate:London ~$140 USD), one was a very very smart decision (LOTRO ~$200 USD) and one the jury is still out on (Champions Online ~$200 USD). Yes, I do like Champions Online, but haven’t played it much recently due to health issues, then Dragon Age: Origins, then LOTRO Siege of Mirkwood, then health issues again, and now STO Open Beta. And yet that’s kind of the point of why I like Lifetime subs. I don’t feel any ‘guilt’ if I go for long periods without playing. I’m not saying that’s logical (in fact it’s quite the contrary) but it is how I feel. I can just log in without renewing a sub and then feeling committed to playing for 30 days.

Anyway, so now I have the Star Trek Online Lifetime Offer to consider. I have pre-ordered the game so I’m eligible, so that won’t factor into my decision.

PROS

• It fits in nicely with my other Lifetimes. 1 fantasy MMO, 1 superhero MMO, and 1 space MMO. That kinda feels like a nice distribution.
• ST:Online doesn’t feel like a game I’d play as my ‘main’ MMO. Lifetime subs are a good fit (to me) for casual games that I want to dip into on an ongoing basis.

CONS

• The eggs-in-on-basket issue. If Cryptic goes belly up, two of my Lifetimes go poof.
• The lack of appreciation for customer loyalty. I would’ve liked to see Cryptic give CO Lifers some kind of discount. All things being equal, a player with Lifetime subs to both CO and STO is going to be less of a resource drain than 2 individual players, one of whom had a Lifetime sub to CO and the other who has a Lifetime sub to STO. So why not give the loyal Cryptic customer a break?
• Price: Why is this more than the CO Lifetime Sub?
• Most importantly, the game itself. It isn’t clear to me how they’ll sustain interest in STO over the long term. Space combat is the most interesting aspect to the game (to me) but every battlefield is going to look pretty much the same. I guess they could add variety in away team missions, but I don’t see those as the strong point of STO.

So as much as I do like the ’security’ of having a Lifetime Sub to an MMO, I think I’ll be passing this time. I’d like to understand why Cryptic feels this sub has a higher value that the CO sub. And I’d like to have more of an idea of what the future plans for the game are. What will it look like in 16 months (assuming a $15/month sub fee, it’d take 16 months of being subscribed before the Lifetime started to pay off)? I have absolutely no clue what direction they want to take the game in (if anyone reading this can through me some links to educate me, I’d appreciate it).

And like so many others have said, the whole idea of having to buy a long term subscription before you’ve played the launched version of the game seems pretty sketchy.

We’ve come to a time in the MMO genre’s lifespan where players expect and anticipate an “open beta” period. If an MMO developer doesn’t hold an open beta, we assume they’ve got something to hide. If an open beta period is too short we snark about the developer not really caring about our opinions because they haven’t left time to react to them.

The problem is that most of us players aren’t really beta testing; we’re sampling. We want to get into the open beta so we can play for free for a few weeks in order to determine if we want to buy the game when it launches (in some cases we’re playing for free with no intention whatsoever of buying the game). And the problem that follows is that we’re judging the game when it isn’t at its best.

This post is of course a direct result of the Star Trek Online open beta debacle going on right now. Cryptic has invited lots and lots of players into the open beta and the game is really suffering for it. On the one hand, I’m sure Cryptic is gathering a ton of data about where the net-code needs more polish and how much hardware they’re going to have to have on-hand to ensure a smooth launch. So that’s good.

But the bad news is that players are trying to play and having a horrific experience. I was actually laughing at how awful the lag and rubber-banding was when I created my first open beta character, but I’d played in closed beta so didn’t really need the tutorials, and I know this behavior wasn’t typical for the game. It ran much better in closed beta and I, being ever the optimist (HA!), am assuming it’ll run much better after launch, too.

But Joe Gamer, for whom this is the only STO experience he’ll know before deciding whether or not to part with his cash, probably isn’t laughing. From the onerous process of downloading the client to troubles logging in to not being able to move once you get logged in, the open beta experience is strongly urging him to cancel his pre-order and give STO a pass. And he’s telling his friends, who aren’t in the open beta, how bad the experience has been, so they’re canceling their pre-orders as well.

Now I’m not here to defend STO. I have pre-ordered but almost against my better judgement. But my issues aren’t with lag and performance so much as they are with the design of the game. I will say that you shouldn’t base your final judgement of the game on the horrible, broken performance of the open beta.

So what can game developers do? I don’t think they can completely fix the problem, but what would help is to offer trial accounts from Day 1. Let people sample, for free, the final, launched game. That would cut down on the number of beta testers who treat open beta like a preview program. This solution comes with the downside of a less robust stress test, of course. I suppose designers have to weigh the benefits of a good stress test against the lost sales of people getting fed up with the performance of the game in a crowded open beta.

You only get one chance to make a first impression though. I’ll speak heresy and suggest that a really bad open beta might do more harm to a game than a rocky few days at launch. Once a customer has handed over his $50 he’s apt to put up with a rough patch and keep checking back in until things get better (assuming that happens in days, not weeks). There’s nothing to keep a beta-tester around and once they walk away from your game, they’re probably never going to come back.

Surprisingly exactly zero people who know me, I’ve caved and pre-ordered Star Trek Online.

So with all my doubts, why would I do this? Because people I like are pre-ordering and I’d like to play now when they’re playing rather then try it later when they’ve potentially moved on (even if the game is better 6-12 months after release, which I assume it will be). Classic peer pressure!

I’m generally (more non-news incoming) a solo player, but STO space combat is much more fun in groups, even if they’re auto-formed PUGs. So again, I’d rather play early while population is dense than fly around an empty low level universe a year on.

I still don’t think it’s the kind of game that’ll hook me long-term, but I’m just buying it like I would a single player game, assuming I’ll play for a month or two and then move on.

If you take a strand of spaghetti and boil it for an hour, it’ll still be more firm than my willpower when it comes to sampling MMOs. I really thought I was past that, but as soon as my order was placed I just started grinning. New adventures await!

And as a worst case situation, I’ll be able to bitch about the game from a place of hands-on experience. How’s that for making lemonade out of lemons?

Listen, I’m old enough that I watched Star Trek when it was in first run. I’m talking the original series, ok? And I’ve watched all the other series, even Enterprise (which I enjoyed very much, thank you).

I don’t give a flying fig about The Force… I want phasers set to stun and a full spread of photon torpedoes.

The very first computer game I *ever* played was a Star Trek game. It was played on a tty connected via an 110 bps acoustic modem (you dialed the other side, waited for the screech of the modem then jammed the phone’s handset into a couple of rubber cups on the back of the teletype) to a PDP-10 running at Stony Brook University. The tty at my high school had no display…everything was printed on paper.

In short, I LOVE ME SOME STAR TREK!

And yet when I played the Star Trek Online beta, I came away disappointed. The away missions felt pretty generic to me. The non-combat missions that some have really enjoyed were, to me, fun to play through once, but as an altaholic I can see them getting really tedious the 2nd, 3rd and 4th time you do them since they’re basically dialog trees.

Space combat was fun but felt extremely derivative of every other Star Trek computer game I’ve played. It’s about energy management (shifting power to a certain quadrant of shields, and concentrating fire on one quadrant of the enemy) and pumping as much firepower as you can into the enemy. It’s fun…for a few hours. But over the hundreds of hours one puts into an MMO? I just don’t see it staying fun.

So, as much as I really really want to love the game, I had pretty much written it off. But then people whose opinions I value started pre-ordering. And they have me second guessing myself.

Now that open beta is here, and the NDA has dropped, I’m really looking forward to hearing what these people have to say about Star Trek Online. I’m fervently hoping that I just missed something during closed beta, which is entirely possible since the beta was only open maybe twice a week and I didn’t get in very often due to my schedule.

One awesome feature I do want to point out though, is “Open Groups.” While in your ship, you spend a lot of time in ‘warp space’ where there’s no combat, but then you have to (of course) drop out of warp to do battle. When you do you essentially enter a public instance…it might just be a random sector of space but often it’ll be a star system. If someone else is there, you can kind of ‘auto-group’ with them to do whatever mission is going on in that system. Being the anti-social prick that I am, this means I can get into a battle with other players and enjoy that experience without ever saying a word to them.

And space battles are much, MUCH more interesting and fun when its more than just you in your single ship.

Anyway, let’s go bloggers! Tell us about your STO beta experience!

[Update: Tipa is blogging at Warp 9! Check out her Star Trek Online posts.]