MMO Archives - Page 32 of 48

Big worlds (EQ2)

Posted on February 7, 2009 by Nimgimli

I’m sitting here doing my thing, and Angela is doing hers. Of course, her thing on a lazy Saturday is EQ2. And I hear her say “Hmm, I’ve never been here before.”

It took a few moments for that to sink it. She just went somewhere she has never been.

Now, this girl is a walking, talking EQ2 encyclopedia. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve asked her where to find something in EQ2 and she’s not been able to answer without a second thought. She’s been playing the game since it launched, and she plays a LOT. It is rare indeed that a day goes by without her logging in. The /played on her main character is over 160 days. Think about that. That’s 3,840 hours spent playing that character. (Frightening, no?) And she has 12 characters, about 5 of which she plays very regularly.

Point being, she spends an incredible amount of time exploring the world.

And she’s still discovering places she hasn’t been to.

I just think that’s pretty astounding. Now granted, Sony keeps putting out expansions and new content, but still… I just find it really cool that a virtual world can be so expansive. The Explorer in me rejoices.

That is all. No real point. Just a ‘celebration of gaming’ post. 🙂

I Am SWG Legend

Posted on February 1, 2009 by Nimgimli

So I went to log into Star Wars Galaxies today and the world my new dude is on was down. Harumph. So I logged in one of my old characters. And I do mean old; I last played this character probably 4 years ago.

He woke up sitting on a hillside in some woods in the middle of nowhere. Why had I logged off in this spot? No idea. I had no clue what planet he was on, or where he was. I start walking aimlessly and as I came over a rise, I saw buildings in the distance, so I headed towards them. It was a decent sized city, player made. And all the homes were abandoned. I walked into a few of them, and all the former residents’ stuff was there, but no people. I fancied I heard the wind howling through the dusty streets as I entered building after building, but never met another soul.

It was kind of creepy, in a kind of cool way. I wondered who these people were, who had banded together to build this city in the wilderness. Had it been the home of a guild, or just an organic gathering of random adventurers? Things weren’t laid out in an orderly manner, so I don’t suppose the city had been laid out in advance, which makes me think random adventurers.

I found myself wishing that SWG modeled housing decay…these places shouldn’t have been so pristine. But at the same time, I’m really glad I logged that guy in. I wonder if he, and that city, will still be there in 4 more years.

Call to Arms “Live War Expansion” announced.

Posted on January 29, 2009 by Nimgimli

Today Mythic announced “Call to Arms” which they’re dubbing a “Live Expansion”. Whatever that means.

Details here, but what intrigues me most is the new dungeon called Land of the Dead, which is supposed to be similar to the mucho-fun “Darkness Falls” dungeon in DAoC.

Sorry so brief, but I’m at work. 🙂

Solo grouping for hermits

Posted on January 28, 2009 by Nimgimli

It’s always interesting to talk about solo mmo players since the concept seems oxymoronic to some, while absolutely normal to others (I fall into the latter category). The oft-heard comment from the former group is “You should just play a single player game.”

Last night, I was playing Warhammer. I’d just jumped to a new (to me) tier and was loading up on quests, and I had a couple that took me out into the oRvR Lakes. Now I’ve pretty much accepted the fact that PvP isn’t my thing, but I went out there anyway. I got to the first quest objective and there were a bunch of friendlies there, capturing a Battlefield Objective. So I hung out to help defend and get some Influence after the 3 minute timer counted down, then I headed to my next quest objective…and noticed that everyone else was running that way too.

Turns out they were headed off to take out the next Battlefield Objective, so I joined in the fight, helped them kill the guards (Destruction opted not to defend), hung out and got the capture after 3 minutes. Then I ran with them to the Keep, which was already under attack, and soon after we arrived it, too, fell.

Not once did I talk to these people. I wasn’t Grouped with a capital G with them, but I was working with them on a common goal.

So here’s my question. Was I, or wasn’t I, soloing last night? In my mind, I was because I was doing my own thing, which happened to coincide with what some other people were doing, and I never had to make any kind of social commitment to them. But you could argue that I wasn’t soloing because I was working with others, in which case I can somewhat see the “go play a single player game” argument. If you think of soloers as people who determinedly ignore other players, I can get behind your argument (to a limited degree). To me, a soloer is someone who resists making a formal commitment in terms of Joining a Group for the purpose of some united goal (but who will happily work alongside others for a common cause if the circumstances arise).

That kind of circumstance happened a lot more often in the old pre-everything-instanced days…I wonder if we’ve lost something there?

New MMO idea — shoot it down!

Posted on January 27, 2009 by Nimgimli

I was thinking about the differences between soloers and raiders, and how some games don’t put enough separation between crafters and adventurers, and I came up with an idea to building systems around these differences. Thought I’d throw it out for you folks to hack to pieces, and maybe together we can find the germ of a good idea.

So last night I was once again in the Lone Lands (LOTRO) with a level 13 character trying to grab a quest item he needed in order to advance in his chosen crafting profession (Scholar). I’d done the same kind of thing with a level 21 or so just a few days earlier (in that case, Weaponsmith). In both instances, I did complete the quests by being sneaky, but some professions require you to kill a mob to get the quest item; I never would have been able to finish those crafting quests with these characters. I’d need help.

Unrelated on the surface is the difference between solo/casual social players, and raiders. Raiders have the time and inclination to spend long hours in-game and get the best loot. Solo and casual social players never get this stuff, and normally it doesn’t really matter because they don’t need it. But what if they did?

What we need is a way to transfer bound loot and quest rewards from one player to another. Now we could just make them not bound and let players sell them on the Auction House, but that’s not very interesting and it’d really promote ‘farming’ items and would probably throw the in-game economy out of whack.

But what if we decided to treat *experience* as a form of currency that, under certain controlled circumstances, could be transferred from one character to another? How? By player-created quests. What if Character A could form a contract with Character B to go get the Fizzling Falchion of Foozle, currently hidden at the bottom of the Dungeon of Really Unpleasant Unpleasantries, which Character A needs to complete a quest. The terms of the contract are that Character A will give Character B 1000 experience points in exchange for the Falchion. That 1000 points is *not* negotiated by the players — that is the pre-defined value of the Fizzling Falchion as determined by the devs (all loot and quest rewards would have an “experience value” assigned at creation).

That’s the core of my idea. The experience value of items would have to be chosen pretty carefully — an item would definitely have to “cost” more than the quest it completes generates (otherwise it’d incent players to always “sub-contract” their quests). The solo/casual player would have to work on do-able quests or monster killing to earn the experience to pay for the quest reward, but at least they could complete these otherwise impossible (for them) quests. And the higher level player would have another type of quest they could do to keep things interesting. Or it could work the other way, too. A high level player could “pay” for lower tier crafting items with experience by contracting a lower level character to go collect them.

There’d need to be a lot of checks and balances to prevent exploiting the system (and the game would have to be built in such a way that there was a need for this kind of contracted questing). But I think it’d add an interesting new system. It isn’t the same as gold, because you’re not just selling a quest item to the highest bidder. Instead, you contract to complete the quest and now you essentially have the quest, until you collect the item, at which point the exchange is made automatically. And there’d have to be some kind of time limit, so the hiring player has some idea of when the quest would be completed (or, alternatively, either side can break the contract with 24 hours notice or something).

Like I said, this idea just came to me this morning and I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it or develop it, so I’m sure the idea is still full of holes, but I’d love to hear some feedback.

Goals and lack thereof (LOTRO)

Posted on January 24, 2009 by Nimgimli

Once again, a session of LOTRO has left me thinking about how different people approach these games in different ways. The most frequent complaints I see aimed at LOTRO are that there is too much running around, and too much grinding. I disagree with both of these complaints.

And granted “too much” is a very subjective number, but I felt like there had to be more to it than that. And then I thought about my session this morning, at the same time I was replying to Ysharro’s post about immersion.

I was having coffee, listening to some music and feeling pretty mellow. So I figured I’d take my 33 Champion to Ered Luin to start on some of the deeds there that I’d never done. For the uninitiated, this is the starter zone for Elves and Dwarves, I think the mob level caps out at 13 or so.

I arrived at Celondim and started my task. The next hour or so had me running around in Ered Luin, discovering locations, killing enough wolves, goblin and brigands to get those deeds going, mining lots of ore for my ‘younger cousins’ to practice on (or to sell), also got some good loot off the brigands and goblins for the youngsters. I chased deer around just to watch them run. Admired flocks of birds swirling through the skies. Climbed ruins to see how far I could see. Caught snowflakes on my tongue. Splashed through ponds full of lilly-pads. Picked some berries for cooking later.

At the end of the session, I’d completed a couple of deeds, earned a modicum of coin, and gained about 100 exp (less than I’d get from killing one mob of my level). And I was quite content; I’d had much fun.

And I think that’s pretty significant, particularly when you hook this experience into Ysh’s post. I was *in* Middle Earth. I wasn’t worried about what I was accomplishing…I was immersed. I was role-playing, even if it was only in my head. There’s no “catch snowflake on tongue” action in LOTRO.

At one point, a dwarf asked me if I’d make him some roast pork. I needed yellow onions for that recipe and the vendors were all out. So I switched over to my Captain, who is a farmer, and he grew some onions. While in the midst of this, he struck up a conversation with a minstrel about what a good life the farming life was. The minstrel took a break from his own farming to play a song to help pass the time, and my Captain gave him a round of applause for his efforts before wishing him well, but explaining that he needed to ship off his produce before it spoiled.

And that’s why I play MMORPGs even if I don’t often group; for people like that minstrel. I add this just to head-off the “why play an MMORPG solo” contingent. 🙂

Now if I played LOTRO to watch my experience bar move and get to the next level, today would’ve just been a huge waste of time. And if I played it to be “uber” and have every trait completed, so I felt like I *had* to go back and kill 60 wolves, I can see where that’d be pretty distasteful. And in fact I do sometimes play other games that way. When I played WOW originally, I played it the way I do LOTRO now (back then, people really *did* roleplay, and some nights I’d play for hours and never leave Stormwind), but after a few years of that, when I start a new character on a new server, as I did to join CoW last month, *all* I care about is leveling as fast as possible. So I do get it.

I think there are two significant facts to expose here. First, I grew up on Lord of the Rings. I first read it at 14 or so, and re-read it every few years. It influenced my life in many ways: specifically, it nurtured this sense of imaginative play that led me to become a fan of fantasy in all forms, and to gaming and RPGs in particular. So being in the world is its own reward, in a sense. Also, I have a Lifetime Membership. This means if it takes me 5 years to get to cap, I don’t care. As a solo player, cap is more or less Game Over in MMOs. Time to start a new character. A monthly fee would probably add some sense of urgency to the experience.

For me personally, these times of playing games just to “be in the world” are the best times I have playing, and I actually feel kind of sorry for people (including myself, when I get caught up in it) who are driven to push that experience bar, or accomplish some other explicit goal every time they log in. That to me seems too much like out-of-game life. Rush, rush, rush, push, push, push. Get ahead of the other guy. I have enough of that in real life; in an ideal world, games are about play and imagination and relaxation to me. (At the same time, I recognize that to many people, games are all about competition.)

This is getting long and less and less focused. But I wonder if the people who find LOTRO slow and grindy are more driven, accomplishment oriented players, and those of us who enjoy the game are more about the experience of being in a fantasy world?

LOTRO through fresh eyes

Posted on January 23, 2009 by Nimgimli

The other day Angela expressed an interest in giving Lord of the Rings Online a try. As I have a Lifetime Membership, I was delighted by the prospect of having her playing too, so immediately send off a Trial Key. She downloaded the client, created a character and got to level 2 while I was at work (so basically she was testing that the game would run). Tonight she decided to play again, and I had the chance to watch her.

Now, I really enjoy LOTRO a lot. Looking at the game through my eyes, it’s a thing of beauty. But the difference between Angela and I is that I play tons of games and feel compelled to at least try every major MMO that hits the market. And I’ll often randomly download and install a F2P MMO just to try something new. I’ve seen dozens and dozens of MMO HUDs and GUIs and I jump around from game to game very easily. Angela, on the other hand, has been playing EQ2 pretty much non-stop since it launched in 2004. She doesn’t play single player games on the PC and only very very rarely will she get into a console game.

So there I was, watching her play LOTRO. Problem one, of course, is the intro segment. I have all my character slots filled so I couldn’t roll a new character to play with her, but I did have a Rune-Keeper who’d just left the starter area (he was level 7), so I was waiting for her. But from the time she logged in at level 2 until the time she left the starter area at level 6, all I could do is watch and advise. I know she could have skipped the starter area, but that brings its own set of problems and let’s face it: the point of it is to teach you the game mechanics. Now it takes me almost no time to zoom through the starter areas, but I know all the quests and where to go when. I’d forgotten how long it can take when you don’t know that the rubble is actually in the cave under the town, not in town itself (for example).

None of the ‘big stuff’ was a problem for her. Getting quests, looting, fighting… all that is similar enough that she didn’t have to give it a second thought. What did bug her, a lot, was the sensitivity (or lack thereof) of the keyboard when it came to turning her character. As she ran across the world, she appeared to be a bit intoxicated, veering back and forth slightly as she kept under, than over, steering. After a bit of discussion we determined that LOTRO has a bit of an “acceleration” feature to turning. You press the Left key and you turn slowly, then faster the longer you hold it down. At least, that’s how it felt to her; I’ve never noticed it but again, I play skillions of games and I’m used to adjusting. But it drove her crazy.

Also, she didn’t like the constant location of the tooltips (though I think that might be tweakable); she prefers them to be right where the arrow is pointing. See what I mean? It’s the little details that make a new game feel strange and unfamiliar after a long time spent with an old favorite. I could tell that LOTRO just felt awkward to her.

One of my favorite aspects of LOTRO is the lore. I drink in every paragraph of text quest. I sit transfixed during the infrequent cut scenes between Chapters in the book quests. Angela was playing with the sound so low I don’t think she even heard the voice over during these, and when she got a new quest she’d immediately scroll down to see what the reward was and hit accept. Later she’d skim to figure out where to go, but she didn’t seem to care about the ‘color’ text one way or the other.

On the other hand, she seemed to like how you can hide or show you cloak or helm from the character panel, rather than digging into the options panels to toggle them. She stopped to stare at flocks of birds bursting out of trees to fly off into the distance, and asked me how to hide the UI so she could start taking snapshots. And once she finally got out of the starter area and we could group, she seemed to enjoy the actual gameplay. Deeds were something new to her, but I advised her to play like I do; to not really worry about doing them at first, and to get your kill counts up ‘naturally’ and then go back and top them off if you need to, before you leave an area.

It was a fun change of pace for us that she was playing a Guardian (Tank) and I was playing a Rune Keeper (hybrid healer). When we play EQ2 together, she’s almost always a healer and I’m always a Melee DPS class.

I still love LOTRO, but I’m not at all convinced the game is going to “stick” with Angela. We knocked out 5 quests or so (maybe 20 minutes of playing together), and then she’d had enough. And as a write this, she’s back in her beloved Everquest 2. But even if she decides not to continue, it was a neat experience seeing LOTRO though another person’s eyes. LOTRO seems to be the “Hater Flavor of the Week” now that everyone is done trashing Warhammer and my instinct is always to defend it since I feel its a great game. But seeing someone I care about play it and not being immediately enchanted really gives me perspective; we really are all different when it comes to these games. Knowing that on an intellectual level is a lot diferent from experiencing it on such a personal level. Here’s someone who I care deeply for, and share many, many interests with, and she’s seeing the game in a totally different light than I do. Hopefully from here on out I can be better about ignoring the haters (they’re entitled to their opinion and nothing I say is going to change their mind) and just enjoy talking about the game with my fellow enthusiasts.

Warhammer “Zone Domination” patch

Posted on January 18, 2009 by Nimgimli

Another wacky video from Paul Barnett. He teases multiple items in a mail, suggests that zone crashes are virtually abolished, and talks about “Zone Domination” in which the method by which you’d capture a zone would be “less rubbish.”

Probably too late for me, but good to see they continue to improve things. But the cynic in me wonders why things weren’t “less rubbish” at launch?

Switching channels

Posted on January 17, 2009January 17, 2009 by Nimgimli

So my EQ2 sub ran out, leaving both myself and Angela feeling a bit blue. We’d been adventuring together quite a bit; something we haven’t done all that much of in the past. I’ve left EQ2 so many times, and each time I come back I like it a bit more. This is the first time I’ve left wanting more. As soon as we get money stuff straightened out I’ll be re-subscribing.

Today I was MMO surfing a bit. I tried Warhammer again. Made a level but that didn’t really feel like it made much difference. Spent way too much time deleting gold spam from my mail box. Bleh. Did some more FusionFall, and honestly that game continues to be fun in a very cotton-candy sort of way. So easy to jump in, run around a bit, and jump out.

Then finally I fired up LOTRO. I’ve been exploring Evendim. Correction: I thought I’d been exploring Evendim but in fact I’d really been just on the fringe of it. Today I got into Evendim proper. One thing Turbine knows how to do is take your breath away as you explore Middle Earth. Remember in the movie version of Fellowship, when they’re paddling down river after leaving Lothlorien, and they come around a curve in the river and suddenly there’s the huge guardian king in front of them? While Turbine took that scene to heart. I don’t want to say more because the whole beauty is discovering this stuff for yourself.

I’ve said it ad nauseum, but I just adore exploring Middle Earth. It feels like almost a burden, though, that I have a quest log full of Fellowship quests at this point. I just can’t experience the world quite the same way when I’m in a group of people; can’t take time to stop and gawk at landscapes and ancient ruins and amazing creatures… I suppose I can always come back when I’ve out-leveled the content, right?

Fusion Fall First Foray

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Nimgimli

It seems almost silly to do a “first look” of a free, no active download game…after all, if you’re interested, go sign up and play! But I’m old school, eh?

I got about 90 minutes to play Fusion Fall tonight. It was gently amusing, but so far what I’ve seen has been *very* kid oriented, with little or no humor slipped in for the grownups (I’d hoped for some ‘dual layer’ humor similar to what the cartoons often have). The closest I’ve seen to “snuck in adult humor” so far was a quest name: Shock and Ow. But that’s ok; after all, kids *are* the intended audience, and it feels like they’ve gone to great lengths to make a safe game, right down to naming characters. During character creation, you can build a name by picking from lists of words (rather like Second Life) or you can request a custom name. I did the latter, and was told it would have to be approved first and that I’d be given a temporary name until my chosen name got approval. So all night I was Player43489342 or something. I’m guessing name approval goes in front of bonafide human eyeballs or something.

Dexter, of Dexter’s Lab, is the first Cartoon Network character you’ll meet, only its an adolescent Dexter, and he’s come to transport you into the future so you can help save the world from a gooey alien menace. Of course, Dee Dee gets involved and screws everything up and you get flung “too far” into the future. Now I have to admit my Cartoon Network knowledge is pretty out of date, so I didn’t recognize many of the characters, but presumably an age-appropriate player would.

Combat is fairly traditional action-RPG fare, with you basically holding down a mouse button to swing/fire. Targeting is similar to Tabula Rasa though. Normally you have no mouse pointer on screen and instead are in constant “mouse look” mode. There are no classes, at least at first, but you customize characters via the use of “Nanos”. These are tiny versions of CN characters that you collect as you quest. You have 3 “equip” slots for Nanos, and each Nano has 3 potential skills, of which 1 is active at any time. So basically you have 3 skills available at any time. You can hit a machine that lets you swap Nanos or activate different spells on your Nanos in the various “town” areas. (This system feels a bit like Guild Wars to me…lots of potential skills but limited slots to use them in.)

As an example, my first two Nanos were one of the Power Puff Girls and “Numbah two” from some current show that I didn’t recognize. The PPG’s active skill was a Stun, and Numbah 2 came with a run-speed buff. In both cases, their other skills were some kind of group buff, and some kind of collection buff (extra currency from kills).

The premise of this Planet Fusion which is trying to take over the earth means that you spend a lot of time in pretty banged up neighborhoods. Green goo is everywhere; walking on it causes you to take damage, and most of the monsters have some green goey bits on their bodies. Lots of cyborg looking amalgamations of goo and machine parts like some twisted Battle Bots arena. This goo-factor serves to lighten an otherwise potentially dismal motif. But there’s a LOT of green in this game!

There are some nods to arcade games. Every so often you’ll find an “egg” and running over it gets you a powerup buff (I’ve gotten run speed and jump duration buffs this way so far). There are also some light platforming aspects in certain areas, but you’d have to be really inept at platforming for these to give you any difficulty.

It isn’t clear at this point what the difference is between playing for free and paying for a sub. Presumably that comes a bit later, after they have you hooked.

Technically, the game ran very nicely, and did a lot of its downloading in the background; I was up and playing in no time. My browser (Firefox 3) did crash on quitting the game, but in all fairness FF3 on my Vista machine isn’t the most stable browser I’ve ever used. I do rather wish there was a desktop launcher, but maybe I can make one via a URL shortcut.

I think its natural to want to compare Fusion Fall to Free Realms. Both are bright, “lite” kid-friendly MMOs. I haven’t played Free Realms but from what I’ve seen it might be a bit more “different” than Fusion Fall (it seems to be heavy on mini-games?), which in most ways feels very ‘comfortable’ to an MMO player. Whether that’s a good or bad thing depends on what you’re looking for, I guess.

Will I keep playing Fusion Fall? Maybe a bit. It was amusing, but really for the little amount I played, it was *so* focused on being kid-friendly that I almost had an “I don’t belong here” feeling. I didn’t do any chatting and in fact didn’t *see* any chatting. So whether there was a channel I missed, or maybe you can only chat with friends, I’m not sure. For all I know everyone else running around was just as old as me. I can’t really put my finger on why I feel the way I do: I was quite comfortable in, for instance, Wizard 101. But I really felt kind of “out of place” in this world. We’ll see if that feeling continues. I want to at least get my name (Gillain Edgeward) rather than Player293r2342!

Dragonchasers

Category: MMO