Category: MMO

The hypocrisy of gamers

Posted on by Nimgimli

So it looks like RealTime Worlds is going belly up. And everyone seems so sad about it. I’m sad about it. I really had fun playing APB and was looking forward to playing it some more once they got a few patches into it.

Sure, the game wasn’t perfect…what game is? But it was fun, which at the end of the day is all that matters to me.

Of course when it launched, gamers and gaming journalists were gleefully taking all kinds of dumps on it, treating it like some kind of Daikatana-style train wreck. Gamers, as a breed (there are of course exceptions) take an immense amount of joy from tearing a game apart, spreading it’s entrails all over the internet, then posting pics of the mayhem to Facebook.

So that’s cool and all. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, even if it’s a horribly uninformed opinion. Like all the people who bitched about the payment model without stopping to think about it. How many games do you spend $50-$60 dollars on and then play for 15-20 hours? APB gave you 50 game-play hours with the box. That’s not time spent socializing, that’s essentially time in combat. Imaging what your WoW character’s /played time would be if you didn’t count time spent traveling to quest locations, fiddling at the bank, searching the auction house, talking to your guildies, waiting for a raid to form… 50 hours of actual combat is probably 200 hours of playtime. The fact is, most users would never hit that 50 hour limit in APB. It never was a game you were going to play as a replacement for your MMO of choice. It was just a game, not a lifestyle.

Anyway I digress, but that’s an important point. So many people reviled the game, without even trying it, due to the payment model…it just seemed unfair to me.

“So yay! APB sucks! RealTime Worlds can’t make a game that isn’t total crap! We’ve hardly even played it but we know it sucks, and if someone tells you they had any fun playing, it’s just because there [sic] a noob who doesn’t know what’s good! Let’s kick its corpse all over the internet!”

And now RealTime Worlds is going under and what do we hear?

“Oh, what a shame!” “I feel bad for those affected.” “Hope those guys land of their feet!” “Wow, the gaming business sure is brutal!”

When the same person that was ‘piling on’ to the flaws in APB turns around and tries to act all sympathetic about these guys losing their jobs… wow, I just find it an unbelievable display of hypocrisy.

People need to learn that their words have consequences. If you hated APB that much then you should be glad these people won’t be making another game; you should be happy they’ll now get a chance to go into a line of work they’re better at.

Now if you tried APB and didn’t enjoy it and said as much, while listing real reasons that you didn’t like it… I’m not talking about you! Quite the opposite…constructive negative criticism can help a development team get better. You gave the game a fair shot, didn’t like it and moved on. I totally respect that and again, I’m not talking about you in this post!!

I’m talking about the people who played for 10-15 minutes, didn’t take any time to learn what was going on, and then used their influence with their friends, or worse, with their readers/listening audience, to trash the game to an extent that the people they have influence over were never going to even take a look at APB.

All I’m asking is for people to stand behind their words, and stop being so wishy-washy. When a developer has 1 current game out, trashing the game is trashing the developer. You helped put RTW where they are today. At least take ownership of that fact.

An expected non-adventure

Posted on by Nimgimli

So here’s another side of EQ2 (yeah, I’m on a bit of a kick). Last night, after a crappy day at work, I was able to get job #2 done pretty early and by 9 pm I was ready for some relaxing gaming. And when I say relaxing, I mean just that… I wasn’t in the mood for stress or excitement.

It was the last day of TinkerFest in EQ2 and I had an incomplete quest, so I logged in to finish it up. All I needed to do was collect some gnome grease and then craft a battle-bot, so no fighting. Finished the quest (my bot lost 🙁 ) and then wandered around GnomeLand Security picking up quests and taking the time to read the quest text (or listen to the NPCs) as I did so. There’s some amusing stuff there if you take the time to appreciate it.

Then we had a surprise visit from a GM in the guise of a semi-broken tinkered robot named Firstaidomatic. It was attempting to repair itself and needed spare parts. I hesitate to call this encounter a quest, but it was a fun diversion and after we satisfied the robot’s needs we each got a personal light and some level 100 food and drink for our troubles. One of the strengths of EQ2 is that they do a lot of these micro-events where a GM controlled character just appears at a focus point (ie, the last day of TinkerFest, at the hub of all TinkerFestivities) to interact with the players.

Having finished with TinkerFest for this year, I headed to Kelethin for the City Festival, and took a quest to harvest ingredients for the troll that was running things. Remember how I’d been intending to level up harvesting the other day? Yeah, I was getting back to that. I spent the next hour and a half or so just roaming around the outskirts of Greater Faydark. Everything was quiet; I never saw another player out there. But that was ok. I just kind of flowed into the world, letting real world stress drain away as I fished and chopped wood and got really good looks at the creatures that I’d always had to fight during prior visits. It’s amazing the detail you have time to notice when you aren’t swinging a sword. And the ambient sounds out there just kind of drew me in. It was all very soothing, and I got all my harvesting skills up to where I can go harvest Tier 3 next, as well as completing the harvesting quest a few times and getting tokens for Kelethin City Festival goods.

I played until midnight, never drew a weapon in anger, though I was tempted after a Fae played a practical joke on me in the guise of teaching me her language. I didn’t do any serious crafting. Basically I just roamed around while my real self unwound.

I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and for me to ‘go off’ EQ2 again. I always do eventually. But for right now I’m really enjoying the game a lot (again). I’m taking care to only do things that are fun and to not pressure myself. For instance Angela asked me if I wanted help in doing all the TinkerFest quests I hadn’t done, since it was the last night of the Festival until next summer. My first instinct was to say yes, not wanting to miss out on anything. But then I caught myself because I knew I wasn’t in the mood for trying to pound through quests, and just let that content go until next year. Basically the way I look at it is this: I have two real jobs. I don’t need my games to become a 3rd. Everything comes ’round again eventually, right? And if not… well there’s more than enough content to keep me happy for years at the pace I play.

An unexpected adventure

Posted on by Nimgimli

When New Halas hit the EQ2 servers I rolled a new character just to check out the starter area. I chose a Fury because I’ve never really played a healer in all my years of MMOing (or if I have, I’ve forgotten about it). He quickly sped to level 20 and finished the New Halas zone (Frostfang Sea) and moved to Butcherblock and kept going.

Somewhere around level 30 I realized this was no longer a throw-away character and he was here to stay. I decided he would be my Transmuter (a skill that turns magic items into raw materials to be used in Adornments) but in order to get his skill up I needed a lot of low-level magic items to practice on. Also I’d more or less ignored his harvesting skills since I’d been playing him like a disposable character.

Enter EQ2’s ChronoMagic. I set his level back to 5 and ran him through the Timorous Deep newbie zone, working on his harvesting and transmuting all his quest rewards. About halfway through I went to level 15 with him and eventually the Sarnacs also sent him on to Butcherblock. Most of my quests there I’d already done, of course, but there were a few faction-specific ones waiting.

So that’s where things stood Saturday night. I had some new level 22 quests I want to knock out but I’m level 35. Back to the Chronomage to be set back to level 25. But one of the quests is a harvesting quest and my lumberjacking skills weren’t quite up to snuff. I headed to the area of Greater Faydark near Crushbone to increase those skills, but soon wandered into Crushbone itself. The orcs there were easy prey for me and killing the odd orc broke up the constant hunt for harvesting nodes.

Then I saw an Orc with a quest feather. Turns out he had a job that needed to be done inside Crushbone Keep, a place I’ve never been. I went in there, found an elf who needed help too. The orcs near the entrance weren’t too bad but I knew this was a group zone and I’d need more firepower eventually.

So here I am, artificially level 25 and needing help. Chronomagic to the rescue again. Angela had a level 35 Berserker. She Chronomaged down to level 25 and we set out to conquer the Keep. As we delved deeper and deeper into the Keep it was clear we were getting in over hour heads. So we both canceled our chronomagic, leaving us at 35 & 38. 38 was high enough that our quests were gray, but then I mentored back down to 35; now we had a duo that was high enough to finish the Keep, but low enough that the quests didn’t go gray. And finish it we did.

But early on in the conquest of Crushbone I saw the flaw in my play style. I was gaining levels while doing lower-level content, which was going to leave my “unaltered” level quests going gray on me, which in turn would force me to chronomage back down again, setting up a viscous cycle. Then Angela let me on to a tip… you can choose to divert your combat experience to AA points rather than leveling.

So that’s what I did and instead of gaining levels I was earning AA points that let’s me tweak my character class to be something ‘just right’ for me. Sweet!

By this time it was late afternoon Sunday and we’d been playing all day, so we quit, but honestly I was left wanting more. I love all the options available in EQ2 between the parallel quest lines, using chronomagic and mentoring, and now my new favorite toy, deciding where you want to put your experience points to work. I loved that I’d logged in to do a level 22 harvesting quest and wound up going through a lowbie dungeon that I’d never seen before. That’s the kind of unexpected adventure that brings me back to a game time after time. I loved that we could tweak the difficulty to suit us doing it as a duo rather than having to wait for a guild member of appropriate level to log in, or turning our group into a PUG.

I’m definitely a game grazer and rotate through MMOs on a pretty constant basis, but everytime I re-visit EQ2 I find something new and fun to do. I never stay around very long, but I’m not sure that’s the game’s fault. It’s the one MMO I play where I’m in an active guild and I can only sustain that social aspect of my game playing for so long before I drift off to another MMO where I’ll solo for a while.

I’m not sure if EQ2 Extended is a good idea, but I hope it at least gets more people to try the game out. 5 years of additions and expansions and system tweaks has left a rather massive, wonderful game that’s overlooked by most MMO players.

Construction vs Destruction

Posted on by Nimgimli

Warning: Much pondering and thinking out loud ahead.

So for the past week or so I’ve been playing Frontierville on Facebook, and for part of that time Tipa of West Karana has been my neighbor. She reviewed the game today and I urge you to read what she had to say.

I don’t disagree with her at all, and yet I think I like the game more than she does, and I was going to post a comment explaining why when I realized I couldn’t exactly say why. So I’ve been pondering that, and then Scopique talked about crafting and process and minigames and that kind of got stirred into my thought process.

I’ve always loved crafting in MMOs. I remember when Ultima Online was the reigning king, some upstart (I think it was EQ but don’t quote me that) ran an ad campaign where they kind of jeered at UO saying, “Would you rather craft a chair or kill an orc.” And I was all like “RAWR! KILL THE ORC! KILL THE ORC!”

At least, that’s what I thought I wanted. But crafting in EQ was really frustrating and not a huge part of the game (at least back then) and I missed UO’s crafting system. I still miss it to an extent. There’re only a handful of MMOs with really rich crafting systems. UO, SWG, Vanguard… maybe I’ve missed some.

But the idea of harvesting materials and using them to make something is really appealing to me. Back when I lived in a rural area I had an interest in woodworking and gardening and constructing things, but that all sort of dropped away when I became an urban/suburban apartment dweller. Crafting scratches that construction itch, in some small way.

There are many, many games about Destruction (at the very simplest level…killing opponents) but not as many about Construction. Or at least I’m not familiar with as many. City-building games (and 4X games scratch both itches… you build up your empire and tear down the enemy’s). Most Construction in games is either in a kind of software toy (ie The Sims) or it means actually building assets for the game (Little Big Planet, or any game with a level editor).

Tipa says of Frontierville: “As a GAME game, well, theres really no point to the game.” and she’s right. Zynga’s #1 goal is that you never “finish” the game and stop paying for items, right?

But what I get from Frontierville is that same UO construction itch scratched. I take some odd satisfaction out of clearing the land (and in so doing harvesting wood for buildings) and then bringing order to my little plot. Technically I guess this is Destruction: I’m destroying trees and such. Maybe I should be using “increasing/decreasing entropy” rather than construction/destruction.

It’s true my options are limited, but they’re not fixed. I can start to build whatever building I feel the urge to build (though as you gain levels you gain more options) but then I have to rely on “Neighbors” for supplies.

Neighbors, though… they’re kind of important to me. Remember back when I talked about We Rule on the iPad? I didn’t have much good to say about it, but guess what? I still play it.

But Construction gaming is always more fun when you can show it off. No one really sees my We Rule kingdom anymore, but in Frontierville I have evidence of who has come to visit. Granted they don’t come to see what I’ve done…they come to get bonuses and materials…for gameplay reasons. But I know when I go visiting I make note of what my friends are up to. This one is all about function, that one is chaotic, and this third one has spent a lot of real $$ on special items…what a surprise. I feel like I get tiny glimpses into the personalities and minds of the players.

Going back to UO, once you built your house and furnished it, what was the next logical step? Throwing a party, of course. Have people come over to see what you’ve made.

Someone on my forums referred to a type of gamer they called a Decorator and I thought that was a very good term. It was in a discussion about “What is a real game” and he (I know him only as Bognor) said:

There is a class of gamer called a “collector” and another called a “decorator”. Farmville and its ilk appeals to these classes because they have opportunities to acquire “rares” and to build esthetically pleasing farm layouts. There exist choices in this context, and competition within these classes. To those of use who are not collectors or decorators, there is not much appeal in Farmville.

That made a ton of sense to me. That collector part of me, I’ve always known about, but the decorator is a new self-discovery. My We Rule kingdom is now laid out like a “real” kingdom would be, with the road to the castle literally paved in gold and surrounded by statuary and sparkly trees. Why? There’s no gameplay reason for it, but it was pleasing to me to do… although it took me weeks and weeks of playing before I started doing it.

I’m not an artist, although I’ve always wished I had some artistic talent. In some way these not-games like We Rule, Frontierville, or MMOs with rich crafting systems let me pretend to be an artist for a little while.

Does my Frontierville plot look unique? Honestly no…there isn’t that much variability between plots. But it is still mine, laid out as I wanted to lay it out. I’m pretty anal about pulling weeds that sprout up in cleared areas…I guess in some tiny sense I take some pride in my space. And I suspect when I get to the point where all the forest has been cleared and all the land tamed, I’ll probably lose interest (if not before).

My next project might be actually working on my character’s inn room in EQ2. I see the crazy things people build and while I’m impressed by them, I also find the range of options a bit daunting. Again, with these simple not-games, the limited choices are almost a blessing. There’s nothing intimidating about arranging your barn and cabin and apple trees in Frontierville, y’know?

I don’t know if I have a point here. Like I said at the top of the post, this is more stream-of-consciousness thinking about *why* I’m enjoying a game that is hardly a game (and which draws such ire from a large population of ‘core gamers’).

DC Universe Online trailer from Comic Con

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m sure you’ve seen this, but on the off chance you haven’t…

Now don’t go grumping at me in the comments. I fully realize a trailer like this has next to nothing to do with how the game will play; it just sets up the lore. But just forget there’s a game for a few minutes and enjoy some pretty great CGI mini-movie super-hero-ality.

I’m embedding it but I urge you to click through and watch it in HD.

When I played WoW…

Posted on by Nimgimli

Riffing on a quick back and forth I had on Twitter, I thought I’d wax nostalgic a little bit about my WoW phase.

When I played WoW, I lived alone. I was unemployed and in-between job interviews and freelance gigs I’d spend 20, 30 or even more hours playing each week. These days if I spend 10 hours gaming in a week, it’s a big gaming week.

Because I spent so much time playing, I was in an active guild and knew everyone else in it. We’d be on Vent with open mikes, laughing, talking, cursing, and laughing some more. I knew my guildie’s spouses and kids (tho as often as not, said spouses and kids were in the guild anyway). I knew when person X walked the dog at night, and what time person Y got home from work. These people were my social circle at the time. We weren’t big enough to be a raiding guild but back then doing 5 & 10 man instances had enough of an end-game feel that they felt very satisfying.

When I wasn’t doing something with the guild, I’d hang out in Stormwind. There was a strong role-play community at the time and I spent hours just sitting around in the taverns in Stormwind, chatting with people while drinking real beer in the real world. Not having a job to go to, I didn’t have to go to bed at a reasonable hour and so got to enjoy “late night WoW” which, at the time, was a period starting at 1 or 2 am and stretching until dawn when a lot of the ‘noise’ of the server went away and the people left felt like a real community. We’d chat until all hours. Azeroth became, effectively, my local bar to hang out in. With so much time to play, I never felt pressured to hurry through anything.

Then life changed. I got a job, got a girl, we all were sort of feeling like we’d done everything we could in-game and people started trying other titles. I didn’t have time to keep up. The guild kind of drifted apart and I left the game.

I’ve tried to go back a few times since, but it’s like going back to the places you spent your evenings-out at as a young person. There’re still people there, but you don’t know who they are, and the music they’re playing is different, and the decor is different, and the guy behind the bar sure doesn’t know you…he was probably in diapers that last time you hung out there. You just don’t fit in any longer and it just feels kind of depressing.

And yet today I bought Wrath of the Lich King and now I really don’t know why. I know I’ll log in, feel incredibly lonely because my old friends are no longer there, and log out again. Maybe Cataclysm will change things up enough that WoW will feel like a new place to me.

APB, Day 1

Posted on by Nimgimli

Today started “Early Access” in APB. I logged in this morning and spent some time making a character and a shirt that looks like it came from Woot and putting decals on a car. I didn’t get to actually play until later this evening.

APB is a pretty humbling experience, and I think Real Time Worlds is going to have trouble pulling in people once the initial sales taper off. The problem is that there’s no real way to balance things. When I started playing tonight, with my default gun and it’s very deliberate rate of fire, I was being cut down left and right by people with machine guns. I played for a while and earned enough cash to get a machine gun… and then started running into people with shot guns. Basically all night I felt like I was out-matched in the weapons department. And that’s after people I’m up against have been playing for 1 day. What’ll it be like for a newbie in 3 weeks?

There are only 2 combat zones in APB and there’s no sense of ‘levels’ in them, so you’re just thrown into the shark tank. In theory, I guess, the game will assign relatively equivalent firepower against you. Wait, let me back up…

Y’see, it’s full PvP (really it’s just a shooter). So I, as a Criminal, get a mission from a contact. Say it’s “Spray graffiti at these locations” and I get waypoints to head to. At this point there’s no opposition and no one can shoot me. But after the few seconds I’ll get a message that Enforcers (cops) have been dispatched to stop me. I *assume* the game is offering the mission of stopping me to someone relatively close to me in terms of gear, but I’m not sure.

Now what the game doesn’t know is that I suck at online shooters. It’d be nice to know there’s some kind of matchmaking that looks at my cumulative win/lose score and finds an opponent who’ll be an even match. It’s really too early to see if this exists or not. I hope it does.

My other concern is that defending seems a lot easier than attacking. So often, as a Criminal, I’ll be tasked with occupying a particular area. There’s a lit circle I have to stand in while a timer counts down. The Enforcers, if they get there first, will invariably get up on a roof. So in order to control this circle, I first have to get up onto the roof and kill the Enforcer. To get up onto a roof you climb ladders. To climb a ladder you hit a single key and your character ‘auto-pilots’ up the latter. And when you get to the top you immediately get a face full of shotgun or SMG before you’ve really reestablished control of your character.

I think the ‘right’ way of taking out someone on a roof is by getting up onto another roof and sniping him. If I had a sniper rifle. Long range gunplay is normally pretty ineffective in APB since if you start taking fire you just duck behind something and auto-heal back up. Of course while you do that, the other dude is healing back up as well.

Further on the ‘right’ way to play… get a team. That way while one of you is playing cat and mouse with the Enforcers, the other can occupy the target area.

Now for all that whining, there are moments when the game is really fun, too. And sometimes it’s fun just watching others play. You see these crazy firefights break out and can just spectate since you aren’t part of the mission, so their bullets won’t harm you (though explosions will still kill you, and anyone can shoot a car and make it explode).

So far my favorite missions have been those where I get called in as backup. If you accept one of these, you get stuck into a group with whomever is working on the mission you’re backing up. Then you can run in and help. Even if you suck (like I do) you can at least distract the other side.

I have a lot of fun just driving around causing chaos, too. The zones are pretty full today, which means you’ll get caught in the midst of plenty of chases and running firefights.

I’m liking APB so far, but mostly in short sessions. I get frustrated pretty quickly and need to learn to recognize that in myself and bail out before the game stops being fun.

APB Review Embargo: What kind of a message are they sending?

Posted on by Nimgimli

First, I should state that I’ve dabbled in the beta of APB. I got into the closed beta the night before it ended, and I’m in the current short-term beta, though haven’t had a lot of time to play. I’m under NDA (I think? RPS implies it has been lifted. I didn’t really play enough to speak intelligently about the game in any case.) so can’t get into specifics, but suffice to say that based on a total of maybe 1 hour of playing the beta, I was considering pre-ordering the game. I certainly hadn’t made up my mind to do it, but I was rolling the idea around in my head.

Then this news of a review embargo came out. According to Rock, Papers, Shotgun, Realtime Worlds is attempting to impose a review embargo until a week after launch. It’s a ludicrous thing to attempt, telling someone they can’t talk about a game they bought until a week later.

But besides being dumb and unenforceable, it’s horrible marketing. As soon as I read this I made up my mind NOT to pre-order APB. If Realtime Worlds has so little confidence in their product, I certainly am not going to risk my $50.

I have to assume they ran the numbers and decided that they’d lose more business to early bad reviews than to sending loss-of-confidence marketing messages, but I think in the end they’ll lose in both ways. There’s no reason for a publication to adhere to their request: this isn’t EA or Activision where the company can use other IPs as leverage to enforce their will (and even so, that’d be abhorrent behavior). So reviews are still going to come out when pubs have done due diligence in playing. If those reviews are bad, it’ll hurt sales. In addition to that, folks like me are going to shy away due to this marketing message.

I can’t understand what they were thinking.

I enjoyed my short time in APB. My reservations were built around trying to understand why there was a subscription model attached to it, and trying to decide if it was something I’d enjoy over a long period. But now I can only think I missed some major short-comings in my time playing. So I’ll wait and see what the reviews say.

[UPDATE: Realtime Worlds has responded to Rock, Paper, Shotgun with an explanation. Basically it boils down to them not wanting reviewers to review the game based on the current “Keys to the City” beta event. Fair enough, but if that’s what you’re asking, ask it. Don’t try to deliver an ultimatum in the form of an embargo. Thanks to Brent for bringing this to my attention!]

They’re handing out winter jackets in hell: I’m interested in SW:TOR

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m not a much of a Star Wars fan. Sure, I saw all the movies and I’ve read a few of the books, but I don’t obsess over either. I think I own, somewhere, the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD, still in the shrinkwrap. Bought because it seemed like something I ought to own.

I was the one person I know who didn’t like KOTOR when it came out. I played it, because it was an Important Game at the time, but I didn’t think much of it. I played Star Wars Galaxies too, because I try almost every MMO that comes out (well, I did back when only a few came out every year…I guess these days I can no longer claim to try them all).

Y’know, I love fantasy, and I love sci-fi. But sci-fantasy just doesn’t do too much for me. Take The Force out of Star Wars and make it pure space opera and I’d like it a lot more.

Anyway… because of all this, Star Wars: The Old Republic wasn’t an automatic win for me. I know for many, the IP is draw enough. Not for me. And all the fuss about full-voice to me is a detriment, if anything. EQ2 has more voice than any other MMO I play and I find it gets really tedious. I read the text and skip the voice.

And then there was the Bioware hype, implying that this was an MMO that broke all the molds and took the genre in a new direction. I’m not interested in the MMO genre going in a new direction. I like today’s MMOs.

So yeah, SW:TOR wasn’t on my radar.

Then yesterday I watched a lot of footage from the game, and suddenly I’m excited about it! And ironically the reason I’m excited is… it looks just like any other MMO! The HUD was understandable and the quests were pretty typical Kill Ten Rats (ok, Kill 10 Berserk Troopers). The combat looked really fun; more City of Heroes than Everquest (meaning it looked a bit more active than old-school MMOs). The graphics were a nice balance between realism and animation and seemed very clean. Lots of ranged combat, which I enjoy. You killed stuff and got look from their corpses… I love me some monster piatas!

So now I’m on-board, but I wonder if others who’re looking forward to Bioware’s MMO paradigm shift will wind up disappointed? Right now the Bio-dudes are saying Spring 2011 launch, so we’ll know before too long, I guess.

I couldn’t find real gameplay video, but here’s a ‘cinematic’ look at the game. No HUD, camera angles jumping around for dramatic effect. When talking to the NPC at the end, think about how long it takes him to say what he has to say, then imagine standing around like that for hundreds of quests…

Update: Gameplay! (Skip the first half or so)

PC Games – E3 2010 – Star Wars: The Old Republic