Category: MMO

MMO Soloing: A bedtime story

Posted on by Nimgimli

As a confirmed soloer, I get subjected to a certain amount of bs from the grouping contingent. One of the most frequent quips these people fling at me is “If you’re going to solo, go play a single player game.”

Now no amount to logical explanation has been able to push these folks off-message. As far as their concerned, people who solo are a) stupid for paying a monthly fee if we’re not going to group, and b) ruining the games.

So instead of logic, I’m going to tell a quick little story before I put the weekend to bed and start another long work week.

I was exploring the western shore of Lake Evendim tonight. It’s a place I’ve never been before. I wasn’t hunting for anything more dangerous than the boat back to the eastern shore, which I’d been told existed somewhere. I was staying along the water’s edge, dodging anything mean looking up on the slopes above. Then I saw a large white boulder behind some bushes. An outcropping of platinum! As a jeweler, I need platinum, so without thinking I charged straight through the bush and tried right-clicking on the platinum to harvest it.

Only it wasn’t an outcropping of platinum at all, it was a huge bear. It hit me a few times as I parsed what was going on (the bush was still obstructing my view). By the time I got my wits about me and starting fighting back I was at 50% health, and the bear was yellow to me. I hadn’t eaten anything, had no consumable buffs up; as I said, I wasn’t looking to fight. I knew this was going to be mighty close.

Then a shaft of light came flying over my shoulder. Another attacker! I shuffled around the bear so I could see and… no, not another attacker! A dwarf named Grain, and he was hitting the bear with some kind of magic. Next thing I know, my morale was surging upwards, and the bear lay dead at my feet. I turned to Grain, bowed low. He bowed back, then opened a book, read from it…and vanished.

This kind of totally random and unexpected encounter is why I played MMOs even though I mostly solo (it should be noted, Grain was soloing too). A few moments later he sent me a tell, and we chatted a bit about our adventures in Evendim — it was his first time there too, as best I could tell.

Anyway, so that’s my answer to a) and why I’m happy to pay $15/month to play in a living, breathing, ever-changing world, instead of some static single-player RPG. As to us ruining the games…I can’t help you there. If you want to group a lot, make some friends and group with them. Best way to make friends? Stop trying to shove your world-view down other peoples’ throats.

Now I’m off to bed. Hope you all had a fun weekend of gaming!
bog_guardian

Worlds that end, worlds that change

Posted on by Nimgimli

After the Matrix Online crashed for the last time, some bloggers talked a bit about the death of an MMO, and what it means to the players.

What about worlds that don’t die, but undergo radical changes?

I haven’t lived through one of these, to be honest, so all I’m going to do is ask questions.

What do the die-hard fans of DDO think about their beloved game going free-to-play? There they are at their picnic enjoying themselves, and they look up to see a tidal wave of noobs about to crash down on them. Let’s face it, free-to-play games are going to pull in a younger demographic, which could impact the culture quite a bit.

Spellborn players are faced with this too, but Spellborn wasn’t nearly as established.

And now there’s this Cataclysm expansion for WoW. I haven’t studied the info coming out of Blizzcon (I don’t pay much attention to games until they’re near-future events), but I watched the trailer, and it made me feel a little sad. I spent so many hours romping around those “old” zones in WoW. To see them shattered and broken… it was a little like visiting your hometown and finding the park you used to hang out in after school was now a Wal-Mart.

Don’t go twisting my words. I actually think Blizzard is pulling off something pretty brilliant and pretty ballsy, shaking up their old content so drastically — look how many people are excited to go revisit those old lands in their new iterations.

I’m a little excited, too. Put it this way, I’ve never felt any desire to purchase or play Lich King, but I can see myself visiting the post-Cataclysm world. But I’m saying my excitement is tempered a bit by the knowledge that the places that hold so many fond memories will be gone forever (at least as I remember them).

Honestly, maybe Blizzard is doubly brilliant, because it just struck me that I might re-visit WoW *before* Cataclysm (like, a week before), just to take one last stroll through the old zones and think back on all the friends I made and all the adventures I had there. And I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking about doing that.

I guess the moral of the story is that we should enjoy what we have now, because it won’t be there forever. This applies to both the virtual and the real world.

New Champion: Maynard

Posted on by Nimgimli

Poor Maynard. Born horribly deformed. His left hand has only two fingers, his left foot, two thick toes. A fleshy fin sprouts from his upper back and below that, a writhing tail with a arrowhead tip. And what’s under that mask? You don’t want to know.

His mother arrived on the steps of a small country church in the throes of labor. Why she sought out a church rather than a hospital would never be known, as she died giving birth to Maynard. Who (or what) his father is remains a mystery that will probably never be uncovered. The priest at the church, seeing the baby’s disfigurements, hid him from the members of his congregation. He told them the baby had been stillborn and that he was buried with his mother.
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The old priest raised Maynard in secret. He educated the boy and was kindly towards him, but Maynard’s total seclusion heavily influenced his upbringing. He lived in the basement of the church, never able to walk in the sun, or to play with other children.

When he was ten years old, the priest took a spill. His head caught the corner of a table. The impact cracked his skull and he started to bleed heavily. Maynard had no idea how to cope. He tried to staunch the flow of blood and in the process became covered in it. Finally in desperation he ran from the church, screaming for help. Help came, but when the villagers saw a blood-smeared creature hovering over their beloved parish priest, they jumped to conclusions. They attacked Maynard, thinking they need to drive him away from the priest. He fled to his basement, where he was cornered.

And that was the first time his powers manifested. With no understanding of what they were or how to control them, his force lashed out, and several villagers were killed before Maynard broke free and fled into the night.

Maynard’s remorse over the incident twisted him further, but he has pledged to use his powers to try to do good in the world. To try in some small way to make up for the lives he took. And so he became an unlikely Champion, with his withered shoulders and sinewy tail. Shunned even in the diverse world of the Champions, Maynard follows a solitary path, fleeing from the demons of his past.

* * *
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Eh, it’s a work in progress.

Maynard is a “Sorcerer” template character. The builder says his primary stats are Intelligence and Presence. Hmm. Presence helps reduce threat level. Intelligence reduces the energy cost of powers. Turns out the Sorcerer framework has some healing powers in it.

What I’ve taken to doing, at level 5, is heading to The Powerhouse and stripping my Champions of all their powers, then building them back up (it sounds like you won’t be able to do this for much longer, though). When you pick (ugh, I hate that I can’t remember the terminology) a Trait (I think — 0ne of the customizations that heavily impacts your base stats). Anyway, when you pick them in the Powerhouse you get a much better idea of what each stat does than you get just from rolling over the stats on your character sheet.

Since I mostly solo, Presence does very little for me, so I rebuilt Maynard with high Intelligence and Endurance. Endurance impacts max power points. During the tutorial, Maynard couldn’t fully power up his main attack because he didn’t have enough energy to do so, even when is bar was full. Hopefully the extra Endurance will help with that.

For his third power I took one of the Sigil powers. I expected this to be a kind of ‘belt’ of rotating doo-dads that did damage to attackers, but instead it throws out sigils in a rather large circle around him. So it’s more of a skill for when you’re going to stand in one place and fight. It reminds me of Shaman Totems in WoW, or healing Runekeeper Runes in LOTRO.

I didn’t get too much farther than the 1st tutorial and then Powerhouse. I spent a long time making this deformed Champion… Oh! And just to reinforce his creepy weirdness, I gave him tunneling as his travel power.

Champions Online Corrections

Posted on by Nimgimli

I have to correct two errors tonight.

The first one is mine. I said you could unlearn all your skills and powers at any point. Apparently that is not correct; I just never got high enough to where I had more than you’re able to unlearn. So sadly, at some point you’re stuck with powers you’ve been using for a while (you unlearn in reverse of the order you learned them in…think of it like ‘unstacking’ your powers).

drifter_burning

The second correction is something I’ve heard as a criticism of CO: small zone sizes. In the screenshot below, I’m maybe one third of the way across the zone, looking back at where I started. The structure you see is Project Greenskin, the 2nd Tutorial Zone. Note how small it looks. These are not small zones. I think there were 150 people in this zone when I entered it.
zone_size

Targeting & Skill Types in Champions Online

Posted on by Nimgimli

Someone on my forums asked about targeting in Champions Online — how it worked. As strange a question as it seems, the answer is somewhat interesting (I think, anyway).

So how to target a mob? Well you can click on it, of course. Or hit whatever key you have bound to “Select Enemy” and toggle through mobs in the vicinity. But there are choices beyond that. You can set an option that will have you auto-target anything that attacks you (provided, of course, you have nothing currently targeted — this option won’t switch targets on you). You can set an option that lets you target a friend, and instead of attacking your friend, you’ll attack whatever he has targeted (kind of a dynamic assist). Or you can set an option where hitting an attack key will automatically target the nearest enemy. I can’t recall seeing that last option in any other MMORPG, but I may be wrong. The other options are common enough, but it’s nice to have them all available, and all optional, in Champions Online.

Now let’s talk types of skills. I’ve found four so far.

First is the Energy Builder. This is a rapid fire, low damage attack that builds up your character’s energy (used to perform other skills). You can choose how to access this skill. You can require a key to be held down constantly while it fires, or you can choose from two ‘toggle’ variations. In the first, the skill will continue to auto-fire until you turn it off; this is a great way to draw lots of aggro if you have the ‘auto-target’ option on. Or you can choose a toggle that gets canceled when you change targets. I suggest that last option. Your energy builder will continue to fire on your current target whenever you’re not using another skill — basically it’ll work like a default auto-attack in other games.

Next skill type is what I call a standard MMO skill. You hit a button, the skills sucks down some of your energy and fires off, then a cooldown timer starts and you have to wait to use the skill again.

Skill type three is the charge up. This kind of skill gets more powerful the longer you hold down its hotkey, and only fires when you let the key back up. There’s an onscreen meter that fills up to indicate how charged the skill is. I believe some of these skills have some extra effect if you charge them to the max. With a little practice you get a feeling of how much you have to charge a skill in order to kill off a wounded baddie, without wasting the time of over-charging it.

The last skill type is what I call the Charge Down. These skills start firing as soon as you press the hotkey, and will continue to fire as long as you hold it down, or until an onscreen meter empties (essentially the charge-up meter in reverse). If you manage to get off a full ‘clip’ you’ll get some bonus effect at the end of using the skill.

I’m no CO expert, so there may be more skill types I haven’t discovered yet.

Playing different characters that use different types of skills feels a lot, well, different, and I think it’ll give some legs to Champions Online in terms of alts (or re-speccing). This is even without looking at the “Power pools” and damage types of the specific skills.

I hope anyone who knows more about the game that I do will jump in and correct anything I get wrong in these posts!

Creepy crawlies in LOTRO

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you’ve ever played LOTRO, even for the first few levels, you’ve probably encountered a neeker of some kind. These are rather over-grown bugs that are a staple baddie in the game. You fight small ones at low levels, and bigger ones at higher levels.

Thing is, those little bastards are *creepy* when they get bigger. I never realized how creepy until the other day.

Aethgar was riding north out of the Shire, headed for the lake in Evendim. He was roaming along the banks of the river where there’s a broad sandy beach. It’d be a lovely spot, if not for the native wildlife. Salamanders roam the area, and he was collecting teeth and scales from them, and at the same time cutting down on the neeker population (in Evendim the locals call neekers ‘norbogs’ but trust me, they’re just big fat neekers).

It wasn’t too bad until he came upon a spot called, descriptively enough, the Sand-Mounds. This is where the neekers breed, and the place was *crawling* with the wretched things. To the point where I started feeling all itchy and creeped out. The hairs on the back of my neck actually stood up as I watched all these insectile appendages waving back and forth at me.

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I took some screenshots (click to enlarge), but when the things aren’t moving they don’t look like much (plus Aethgar was killing them right and left before I thought to take screen shots. I wasn’t even controlling him, it seemed. He’d totally taken control away from me while I just averted my eyes and shuddered). Huge kudos to the animators at Turbine who managed to so expertly capture that… insectness… of their movements that people tend to have a very instinctual aversion to.

I was nothing but relieved when Aethgar had finished killing enough neekers to placate the healer up at Evendim lake. He rode away from the Sand Mounds as quickly as his horse would carry him, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

It was a beautiful day at the lake. Shortly after this shot, Aethgar leaped in for a swim, and I swear I could feel the cool waters washing all that insectoid filth off of me.
evendim2

I really do love LOTRO. I love that I have a lifetime subscription so I never feel the slightest bit pressure to play it. I play it when I want to experience Middle Earth, which for me happens fairly often. I love the art-style…the same one that so many people hate. IMO people who hate the art in LOTRO are…well, crazy. OK, the avatars aren’t the best, but the world is lush and beautiful and I never get tired of gazing up at the sky.

I joined a Kinship the other day. I’m still not sure it was the right move. I kind of hate the intrusion of Kinship chat. I tend to just lose myself in idle wanderings through the world; I don’t often use fast travel, preferring to ride hither and yon, seeing what’s over the next rise, gathering cabbages and taters for dinner, mining a bit of ore, helping the odd adventurer out. It’s a total escape for me — a place to decompress. I always come away smiling.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled ranting

Posted on by Nimgimli

OK so I’ve tried to leave the negative attitude at the door, but the pressure’s building up inside of me and I’m going to blow my top if I don’t rant soon.

So here goes!!!

Why can’t people just accept MMORPGs as a defined genre and stop trying to change them?

You don’t see FPS players complaining because the newest FPS has lots of guns and a targeting reticule. You don’t see driving game fans bitch because they can’t get out of their in-game cars and walk around. You don’t see sports game afficionados requesting an option to turn down the gravity in their games.

But MMORPG devs…they can’t catch a break. A new game comes out and people complain about some or all of the following:

  • The game has (too many) quests
  • The game has too much grinding [though grinding is almost never defined but seems to boil down to “there were moments I wasn’t riveted by what I was doing”]
  • The characters have levels or skills that require too much time to attain
  • The game world is too large and requires too much travel
  • The game world is too small and doesn’t feel immersive
  • The characters have the same old boring stats
  • There’s no player skill because success of actions depend on character stats, not player hand-to-eye coordination
  • The game is too shallow
  • The game is too complex & I don’t want to read all those scary words that tell me how to play

The list goes on and on and on, but many of the things people complain about are exactly the aspects that make these games MMORPGs (questing, stats, a big world to explore, stat-based actions).

May I not-so-humbly suggest that the people who are so tired with the staple aspects of MMORPGs…. STOP PLAYING THEM! There’re a ton of different game genres out there to play. If you’re sick of questing and exploring and planning out character progressions… go play a different kind of game. Play an online shooter, or one of the new MMORTS-type games. Dig out Planetside and play that. Get involved with one of the browser-based empire-building games. Jump into Burnout: Paradise and have a hoot driving around with your buddies.

Go somewhere, but just, please, stop peeing in our pool, because there are literally millions of gamers who like MMORPGs the way they are.

This rant was triggered by someone talking about Dust, the new console-based FPS announced by CCP. The comment said something like “Wow, this really makes Aion and Champions Online look like tired old retreads.”

WTF??? So a new *shooter* makes a couple of MMORPGs look old and tired? That’s like saying “My new BMW sure makes our living room couch look old and tired.” How are the two even remotely related, aside from being things you sit in or on? Dust and Aion are both games, and that’s about where their similarities end. Dust is a player-skill based shooter played on a gaming console, and Aion is a MMORPG played on a PC. They could hardly be less similar, so I see no value in comparing them.

MMORPG burnout does happen. Have the class to recognize it for what it is, and go play something else for a while, rather than miserably sticking around MMORPGs crapping all over everything that comes along.

Hey Cryptic: Give us better clothes next, kthxbye

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yesterday an acquaintance said on Twitter: “I’m pretty unimpressed with the graphics of CO. Jackets and other items look like crap. Only good costume is a sleek one.” (I’m not linking because this person has protected her updates.)

Y’know, she’s absolutely right. In the midst of having great fun making truly outlandish costumes for my Champions, I’d overlooked that the basics are so bad. Look at the Drifter pics in my last post. Look at how his pants drape around his shins. They look bloody awful. His shirt is totally nondescript and boring, too. There weren’t any ‘normal’ looking shirts — he’s wearing (iirc) a t-shirt with a ‘creased’ texture applied. No hats to speak of, either. Doh! Silly me, see comments for how badly I mangled this point.

Cryptic has done a great job with things like wings and other accessories, and if you’re making a spandex-clad Super you’re going to be fine. But if you’re trying to make someone more ‘normal’ looking, you’ll find your options are both limited and pretty bad.

I don’t know if Cryptic can fix this easily: my guess is that there’s more to it than just creating new art assets — there’re physics involved with cloth, after all. But I hope they can.

Day 2 of Champions OB much better

Posted on by Nimgimli

After all the nonsense of yesterday and this morning, I’m happy to report that the Champions Online “open” beta was performing much better tonight, at least for me and for friends on Twitter.

I was hoping to try an experiment. One of the neat features that CO has is the ability to save a character ‘template’ and then use it again, or even share it with friends. Normally for open beta I’d just create a total throw-away character, but since I figured I could save it, I opted to spend some time and try to create a champion I might re-use in beta (ultimately I failed, but that’s beside the point for the purposes of this experiment).

My idea was originally for a basically human cowboy-type hero. He’d use pistols as his energy builder/ranged attack, but then Ego melee weapons for his close range.

The character creator wouldn’t really stretch far enough to accommodate my vision, so the character morphed as I made him. I stuck with drab colors, but his ears and eyes got very alien, and his hands grew claws. His proportions are off, with huge forearms and calves, but thinner biceps and upper thighs. His nose is flat-ish. I wanted to give him a slight muzzle but couldn’t manage it. I wanted to give him a cowboy hat, too, but couldn’t find one. There was no duster, but there was a trenchcoat.

His name is Drifter and he’s deliberately ugly and is meant to be creepy. He looked creepy in the character creator but (as others have noted) characters never look as good in-game, sadly.

Anyway, I saved his template and was delighted to find that they save as a jpg!! Here it is:
Costume_Owner__CC_Comic_Page_Blue_303963064
In theory, if someone downloads this and sticks it in their screenshots folder, they ought to be able to load it in the character creator and make a clone of Drifter. Actually note that character isn’t quite complete. My ‘finishing touch’ of Drifter was to give him the Bestial attitude. I ended up deleting that version because running on all fourss he just looked silly. But here’s the full version, ready to launch, version, complete with running on all fours like a beast:
Costume_Owner_Drifter_CC_Comic_Page_Blue_303963158

I’d love for someone to try this out; see if you can really load a character template from a jpg. I assume the data is really in the file name: that 303963158 number. But who knows? If anyone tries it, can you leave a comment and let me know if it worked? If so, I can see a cottage industry springing up around people doing character design for others (not me, obviously…I’d be a customer!)

Back to poor fugly Drifter. Here’s a couple reference shots, from the launcher. I spent so much time messing about in the character creator that I didn’t even get out of the tutorial area!

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And this one is gamma corrected like mad so you can see what few details there are on the costume:
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