MMO cold-turkey period ends

Posted on by Nimgimli

In the middle of last month I announced that I was taking a breather from MMOs. I had a pretty nice break, playing The Witcher, reading more than I usually do, screwing around with fun games like Battleheart on my iPad.

But I’m ready to jump back in and live an imaginary life to escape from this real one a bit. I just don’t seem to lose myself as much in single player games as I do in MMOs.

I’m such a screwball though… Rift early-launches next week, but this past weekend I kept running into positive talk about DC Universe Online, plus I watched a couple of episodes of Smallville which put me in a pro-DC kind of place. Saturday night, the day’s chores done, my head fraught with worry about my mom and finances. A cocktail or two to take the edge off and my willpower fading, fading… and BLAMMO! I purchased DC Universe Onlive via Steam. That damned Steam should be a controlled substance, I tell you!

Of course I still had to d/l it, and it was getting late and I still wanted to play something so… I’d installed Star Trek Online a while back (I’m a Lifetime Subscriber…I love me some Lifetime Subscriptions!) but hadn’t booted it up in ages. So I decided to play a bit of that and then d/l DCUO overnight.

I rolled a new Star Trek officer (a separated borg, ugly as sin) since I couldn’t remember how to play and jumped in. And wow, did I have fun!! It came back to me pretty quickly but it all seemed better than it used to be. I suspect a lot of the systems have been tweaked/polished/enhanced since launch.

So my borg (Hugh 342 – the 342nd Borg liberated since Data named the original Hugh) wants to return to being human more than anything. Via the cosmetic overhaul system in STO, he’ll be able to. But all those changes cost $$ of some kind that he still has none of. I’m looking forward to watching him dump all his earnings into getting Borg parts removed, his infected skin healed, his glowy eyes replaced with normal eyes. Part by part he’ll strive to become human once again.

I think the last time I played STO I mostly ran patrols, because I don’t remember having so much fun in these missions (they call them episodes in STO).

Last night, for instance, I did Hide & Seek (I think that was the name). If you’ve never played STO, here’s what this one episode entailed (going from memory here).
[spoilers for this very early episode]

I was sent to explore a nebula. I beam up to my ship, the USS Scintillate, and we zoom off to the nebula and find a Federation ship under attack by Gorn raiders. We make short work of these raiders, but the Federation ship is still in trouble; it needs dilithium crystals. So we fly around to dilithium mines to beam up crystals. Some of these are defended so we had to trade a few more broadsides. Bring the crystals back to the crippled ship, who now gives us the location of a refining facility where we can get the materials we need to explore deeper into the nebula. We head there, fight off the defenders of this facility, but can’t beam up the stuff we need because of the facility’s shields. To get rid of the shields we need to find the shield generator plant on an asteroid, and beam down bombs to disable the shields. The bombs are supposed to give the people in this shield generator plant time to escape (the Federation doesn’t blow up worker-bees, apparently). That taken care of, we head back and get the materials we need.

That lets us warp deeper into the nebular. There are “dense objects” that need to be scanned. More defenders pop up as we cruise through the dense gas. I’m loving the vortexes and eddies in the gas as we fly through it. We scan 5 objects and the last (of course) is a massive asteroid totally enveloped in mines, and with Klingons defending it. Battle ensues and soon there’s one less Klingon ship threatening Federation space. We use our phasers to target the mine fields until we can get close enough to beam down to the facility on the asteroid.

Once we get dirtside, we have to fight our way through Klingon defenders to get to a computer console. We start downloading data crucial for Starfleet, but that’s going to take time. While the computers talk to each other my team spreads out to defend the console from Klingons and their alien wardogs who’re beaming down to stop us.

Finally we get the data, beam out and then get the heck out of there. Episode complete! We get our just rewards from Starfleet.

All of that is ONE quest! And it told a neat bit of story along the way. I can’t wait to follow up the leads we got from that computer and learn what those dastardly Klingons are up to!

Fun stuff. More fun than I remember it being the first time I played. I think the difference is that I’m in no rush; STO will definitely be my ‘side MMO’ for a while now.

In the meanwhile DC Universe Online beckons.

Getting old FTL

Posted on by Nimgimli

This is a pretty personal post, so y’know, feel free to skip it. It isn’t anything to do with gaming but sometimes it just kind of helps me to throw things out into the ether…

I tell ya, I don’t want to get old(er). My mom (82) went to the hospital a week or so before Christmas because her back hurt and she couldn’t move (she had to use Life Alert since she couldn’t get out of bed). Since then she’s been bouncing from hospital to a physical rehab center for the elderly, and back again. Every visit to the hospital (the rehab center had to call 911 Tuesday night become mom couldn’t breathe) reveals a new ailment. Now it’s high potassium levels, to go along with her congestive heart failure, emphysema, pneumonia and of course the back trouble is still lingering.

Before this last trip to the hospital she could walk about 30 feet without having to rest, but needed an oxygen tank (and y’know, that loop thing that you see old people wearing). Now she’s bed-ridden again and needs a full oxygen mask to breath, so she can’t really talk very much.

She keeps on fighting though and her mind has been as sharp as it has ever been, until today. Today she asked my step-sister where the horses were. She was worried about the stables. (My mom is the daughter of a fisherman and she grew up on a family farm. When she was young – remember she was born in the 1920s – everyone still kept horses.) Now it’s hard to say if that was from the many drugs she’s on, or if her mind is finally going.

I mean, it isn’t like we can find a doctor to talk to. Two days she’s been in this new hospital and the doctors all continue to evade my step-sister (who is the only family member still living in the area). The nurses aren’t allowed to tell us anything. Mom might have hours to live and she might have something that they can clear up in a couple of days…we can’t nail down anyone who can answer questions.

In the meanwhile the family is running around in circles trying to find a way to pay for all this care. If she’s going to go home we’ll get a reverse mortgage (she’ll need 24/7 care even at home, at least for a while), if she’s going to wind up in a nursing home then we’ll have to sell the house to pay for it. Mom makes too much money to qualify for Medicaid, but far too little to pay for the care she needs.

Either way, getting the money takes time, and at-home care providers ($250/day) aren’t going to take care of her for free; in fact they require an advance deposit before they even consider it. So do we start rolling on the reverse mortgage, which mom would have to understand and sign (it’s a 96 page form!) and hope she’s going to come home? Will they even approve it without her living at home?

Next week we’re seeing a lawyer to help sort all this out… but damn, the not-knowing just drains you. And wondering if she’s even going to be alive by the time we meet with the lawyer (and next week was the earliest appointment we could get…we made it about a week ago).

And then of course you start feeling guilty because you’re worried about money when your mom is fighting for her life… but without money she won’t get the care she needs, so… it’s a big circle.

But man, nothing prepares you for this stuff. No one teaches you the skills of dealing with the health system, y’know? Much of what we’ve learned has come from word of mouth from other people who’ve gone through this same process, and it’s a process that most often ends with funeral expenses.

It’s like death and dying is a dirty little secret in our society.

Now there’s me, my older brother, my younger step-sister, and then a 2nd remote step-sister who I rarely talk to. NONE of us have kids except the distant step-sister. And I keep thinking “Who is going to be our advocate when we’re getting shunted from hospital to hospital? While we’re all alive, we can take care of each other, but one of us will be the last..”

To quote The Who: I hope I die before I get old.

I wish I had the choice for a peaceful, pain-free death at some time of my choosing, when I can start to see the end and feel like life isn’t really worth the pain any more. I’d estimate that’s at 75 or so, depending on health. I really, really don’t want to be so old I can’t feed myself or move around. Let me die with dignity. Maybe I need to move to Sweden.

But for now, I just wish my poor mom would slip away, or come back to us. Her hovering in this twilight place where she “wakes up” and is in some strange hospital room, over and over… I hate that she has to go through that.

And there’s a point to this post besides me being a whiny bitch again.

PLEASE, if you have a single parent who is elderly, have a talk with them about situations like this. We should have done this; we should have bought the house from my mom and let her live in it for free. That would’ve protected some of her assets. It’s worth talking to a lawyer who specializes in elderly law, too; they can suggest other ways to both protect assets and be prepared for a situation like this. If you don’t handle things the right way, the health care system in the US will just bleed you dry of all your assets then toss you in the cheapest nursing home that is available.

My brother and I talked about taking these steps many times but we were always too squeamish about bringing the topic up with my mother. And now she’s paying the price. Don’t make the same mistake we did. I know this isn’t an issue for many of my readers (most of your parents are probably still quite young) but do keep it in mind when the time comes. Hell, maybe make sure your parents have had these kinds of talks with THEIR parents, if your grandparents are still around.

Remember this?

Posted on by Nimgimli

OK this is going to be my last Rift post for a while. I know I’m straining the patience of my friends and I’ve clearly over-taxed the patience of other people. (If you think Jennifer was rude here you should read some of her tweets about me. She confirmed to Petter that she was talking about me. Such a mean thing to say.) The funny thing is, when I was “up” on Rift people were mad at me, now I’m feeling a more moderate reaction to it and people are still mad at me. Some people just enjoy being mad, I think.

The problem is that it’s really hard for me to convey the differences in the game that I’m seeing, but let me re-post this image:

Click on it to enlarge it, please. You see how many invasions were crawling all over the zone at one time? And back then each invasion was a linked set of elite mobs. It’s hard to say for sure but I count about 42 invasions roaming the zone at one time. 14 earth rifts open and a lone fire rift. 10 friendly defense forces deployed. It was EPIC! And maybe the servers are still hitting this kind of numbers in other zones or at other times and I’ve just been missing them; that’s entirely possible. I hope that’s the case, in fact.

And y’know, maybe that was too many. People were complaining that they couldn’t get anything done BUT dodge invasions. If you didn’t like the game that way, you’re absolutely entitled to your opinion and, at least from what I’ve seen, Trion has heard your concerns and acted on them.

Me, I liked it that way. I’m probably in a minority. But if you can imagine what it was like “on the ground” during these invasions maybe you can start to understand the differences I’ve been talking about.

And that’s it. I’ve worn out my Rift welcome and then some. For those of you who’ve engaged in lively debate over these past posts, thank you very much. It’s nice when we can have different opinions and still be civil to each other.

See you in release.

Scaling back the Rift hype

Posted on by Nimgimli

So another Beta Event is behind us, or nearly so. I played a bunch Friday and Saturday this time around.

Mostly this beta event just depressed me. The Rift I’ve been hyping is almost totally gone at this point. The actual rifts spawn very infrequently in the periods of time between invasions. Invasions, when they happen, do spawn a lot of rifts but they don’t last very long any more. I’m unsure if that’s because the rifts and invasions are getting easier or if it’s because the players are bored of doing typical PvE questing and so they throw themselves into invasions to see what those systems are like. Whatever the case, if you want to take part in an invasion you better make a beeline when it begins or you’re gonna miss out.

Listen, Rift is still a solid MMORPG and I don’t mean to imply otherwise. But the “old” Rift was, to me, something really special and unique. The current Rift is a polished, good MMORPG but it isn’t that much different than so many other games out there, really. It has been homogenized into a cookie-cutter game. There’s no longer a sense of danger or chaos to the world. I never found myself banding together with a couple of random strangers to try to overcome the odds and drive an invasion force away from a quest hub. The Era of the Zerg Public Group has arrived.

Public Groups do seem to be working a bit better. Or maybe the players are getting smarter. I was the leader of one public group this weekend and I made a point of ejecting people who’d wandered far away from the fight we were in, which freed up space for local players to join. So maybe other public group leaders are doing the same thing?

Anyway now if you play Rift you pretty much have to join a Public Zerg Group if you’re expecting any help from the people around you. You might get lucky outside of one but I found when I stayed solo no one paid any attention to me unless I was fighting the last mob in a wave. Or if the Zerg horde just rolled over the mob I was fighing because I was in its path.

I’m really glad I got into the early beta events; they rekindled my love of MMOs. Now I just need to find a game that scratches that itch the way early-Rift did.

I pre-ordered Rift from Trion and was already charged for it, so I’m going to play at launch. Maybe things get a lot better at higher levels and that sense of fun and chaos and danger will return. I’ve been self-capping at level 20 just to keep some things “fresh” for launch. So maybe I’m being totally unfair to the game. But as of right now I’m very unsure about that 6-month sub I’d been planning to get. The Rift I played last weekend would not hold my attention for that long. Heck, by Sunday I was bored of playing.

I’d like to run 1 character to cap on each side just to experience the Lore though, which I continue to really enjoy. I hope the game is successful enough that it spawns novels based in Telara, in fact. I enjoy it that much. And playing both sides makes it even more enjoyable, when you see characters from one side appear in a different form on the other (thinking of Shyla).

I shudder to think what Open Beta, Beta 7, will be like. Maybe Invasions will pause to ask if you’d like to be attacked because the invasion leader is sensitive to the issue of being inconvenienced by unexpected things happening in an adventure. That seems like the direction they’re headed, at least. (Yes, I exaggerate!)

Can I ask Trion for a “Classic” Rift server yet? A launch with the rules and systems that we say in Betas 2-4? Because I was head-over-heels in love with THAT version of Rift.

Thoughts on Rift beta 6 patch notes

Posted on by Nimgimli

Another beta is about to begin. I spent some time this morning reading the patch notes and sadly it seems like Trion is continuing to make the game easier. (Will know better once I actually try the changes.)

I get where they’re going… WoW has really lowered the bar when it comes to the difficulty in early levels of a game, and it stands to reason that by dumping goodies and rewards on players ASAP (“3 souls by level 5! Best offer in the ‘verse!”) they’re liable to draw in more short-term players. So I don’t hold these changes against them; I just miss the challenging Rift game we all played in the first few betas. You used to die in the first 10 levels. Crazy right?

This time out, they’ve redone the racial abilities to make them much less unique than they were (a balance change, I believe…people thought the old racial abilities varied widely in usefulness), and they’ve removed the level requirement on previously level-20 mounts:

* Level requirements have been removed from the previously-level 20 mounts. If you can get to them, and can afford them, you can use them. This includes the Collector’s Edition turtle mount.

I’m assuming this is in response to the complaint that there’s too much running around in the game. Honestly I feel like the Defiants have some legitimacy to this complaint since there isn’t a teleport bind point aside from Meridian, but I’d rather have seen them add a teleport point in King’s Retreat rather than offering level 1 players a mount. Not that having a mount is that big a deal, but must we be given everything at level 1? MMO’s are turning into games like pee-wee soccer matches where everyone gets a trophy.

Expect the complaints of “The world is too small” to increase after this beta, now that people are zipping around on turtle mounts.

Other changes that caught my eye (and I don’t see these as making the game easier…switching topics here):

More consumable reward items have been turned into skills rather than taking up inventory space. No longer will you use items to spawn forces to fight invasions or to buff wardstones; these activities fall under Ascended Powers now. Our bags (and hot bars) get emptier with every patch.

There are LOTS of soul changes, and early release is getting near. I’m getting a little concerned about how much testing these changes will get.

The Ancient Wardstones system sounds very interesting… I’m looking forward to getting a taste of that.

Rift Beta 5 feedback

Posted on by Nimgimli

The extension of Beta 5 into the weekend lured me back into the game. I really wanted to experience more of the new public group systems, and changes to invasions.

I didn’t really get to thoroughly test invasions because I honestly didn’t see that many. Or rather, the ones I did see didn’t survive nearly as long as they used to. So the despawn issue, with the way things are now, doesn’t seem to be much of an issue. The frequency of rifts, outside of invasions, seemed to be toned down quite a bit, and with the ability to pull single mobs from an invasion they got taken apart piecemeal pretty frequently.

The good news about this change is that a solo player can complete the “Kill X Rift Creatures” quests really easily now. The “support mobs” of an invasion do respawn so you can just follow an invasion, pulling singles and killing them, and quickly farm enough mobs to knock out your daily rift-kill quests. If you never kill the invasion leader you can do this until they reach their destination and fight the wardstone (and even after, but they tend to die quickly once they hit the wardstone).

I mean, I guess that’s good news. It definitely make things easier. Though I don’t think easier is better.

The bad news is that I didn’t see many (any?) friendly wardstones in serious trouble. So never saw what happened after an invasion succeeded (which is when invasions despawn). Also players seem to have finally figured out how to use the Rift Loot that heals and levels up Wardstones and most stones are leveled up enough to have turrets, at least on Faeblight/Guardian.

As to these public groups, I’m still not a fan. This isn’t a huge deal because they’re easy enough to ignore, but I gave it the old college try and joined them whenever I had the opportunity to do so, and left myself open to starting public groups.

Typically what happened to me is I’d run up to a rift that had, say, 10 people fighting and I’d get the Join Public Group pop-up. I’d join and find myself in a raid of 3-4 partial groups. Of the 10 people fighting the rift I was at, maybe 2 would actually be part of the same raid I was in. The rest of my raid would be all over the map.

I found the whole experience more distracting than anything. I’d be watching the Raid UI trying to figure out who was here and who wasn’t (a player’s name is brighter if they’re in range, as far as I could tell, but there are also color tints that indicate something) and not watching the combat. Because of this, I let plenty of people right in front of me die because I was paying attention to the health bars of the raid members who were over the hill somewhere.

That’s just me; I’m a total newb at being a healer. But I found that when I left the public groups I was more of an asset to the people fighting the rift I was fighting.

I also found it distracting having people constantly joining and leaving groups. When I was the ‘starter’ of a public group things would go better since only people near me could join. So then we’d have a nice little group of 3 or 4 people fighting and doing well. And then they’d all be gone and I’d have 4 mobs beating me into the mud. Maybe I suck so bad people need to get clear of me!! 🙂

By the end of beta I got much better about just rejecting groups. I’d join a public group and if it was a raid with people all over the map I’d just immediately leave it. If it was a smaller group of people in the immediate area (and sometimes that does happen) I’d stay in it and try to fight as a group (though had mixed success there, too).

So why aren’t public groups working (IMO) in Rift when they did so in Warhammer? Because in Warhammer they’d form at Public Quests. Public Quests always happened in the same place, on a schedule. So people would go to a specific area to do a specific quest and join the group there. They’d stay in that group until they were done with whatever they set out to accomplish. Then they’d leave, sometimes as a Group (head off to another Public Quest) or as individuals.

In Rift, rifts happen everywhere. You chase one down, or stumble upon it. Join the group. Rifts don’t last very long usually and once a rift is sealed there’s no single obvious next place to go. There might be 2-3 other rifts nearby, plus an invasion running past. Which one to go to? Even if you decide as a group to go to another rift, things get confused because you’re not going to “The Windmill” you’re going to “that fire rift east of here” and invariably people get side tracked or confuse east for west or end up going to the life rift to the east or whatever. And so the group gets scattered over time. You wouldn’t believe how often I see in chat someone /shout “Another rift over here!” as it we could hear the direction he was calling from.

Now again, you can just ignore public groups, to be sure. The only downside there is that you never know. If you’re at a rift with 10 people and they all really ARE in a public group then you probably want to get in on it because otherwise no one is going to help you (people naturally focus on characters in their own group/raid). So really, you have to at least try. But constantly joining/leaving groups in the chaos of a rift battle can be dangerous. I died more than once because I was focusing on getting into or out of a group rather than on combat.

I think Trion needs to keep working on this system. There needs to be some way to keep a group focused. I’m not sure what it is. At the least, don’t put a player who clicks “Join Public Group” in a raid where most of the players are far, far away. Maybe groups need to auto-split out from raids when the group leaders get too far apart? Just thinking out loud here…

I don’t want to end on a negative note though, because jumping back into beta reminded me of how much I enjoy the game. I snuck in a bit on Tuesday or Wednesday night and the community was pretty bad. With all the VIP keys being given out, the servers were horribly laggy and I got the sense there were a lot of people playing who were committed to other games, and who were just trying Rift out of curiosity and looking to re-affirm their decision not to leave their current game for Rift.

By Friday night and Saturday morning, things seemed much better. Lag was much reduced and the community was more upbeat. Those “tourists” were probably back in their “home” game doing raids or something.

There’s something about combat in Rift that just brings me joy. I’m sure it’s too fast for some people and too slow for others but for me it just feels good. I fight constantly because I find fighting fun. When I’m going to get or turn in a quest I don’t go around mobs, I go through them for the joy of doing so (not so much with Rifts since I’m up against a time limit with them).

Popping back into Beta 5 re-affirmed my decision to pre-order and to commit to Rift for a 6-month stint. I do reserve the right to change my mind, of course, and I hope Trion stops making the game easier. I have faith in them that they’ll do the right thing.

Listening to player feedback: a double-edged sword?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Trion Worlds has gotten a lot of good press from the fact that, throughout their beta process (we’re up to Beta 5 at the time of this writing) they’ve listened to player feedback and made changes accordingly. This feels like a real breath of fresh air to disgruntled MMO players who never feel as though they’re being heard by the devs of whatever game they’re playing.

But is this always a good thing? When does “We respond to player feedback” become “Ours is a game designed by committee”?

I’m not saying the sky is falling and I don’t think Trion has gotten to that point yet, but I have been vocal about my enthusiasm for playing these beta sessions because I fully expect Rift to continually move closer and closer to “Generic Fantasy MMO #78” as the signature system of the game, rifts and invasions, get modified in response to player feedback.

Let’s face it. Players, or at least vocal players, taken as a unified voice, generally tend to want things easier (and then complain when a game ceases to be challenging). Rifts and Invasions can be damned inconvenient. To me, that’s what makes them so freakin’ awesome. For once the world doesn’t carefully operate around you so as not to get in your way. Quite the contrary.

But of course this inconvenience isn’t always popular with players, who expect Things to Work The Way They Did In That Other Game I Played.

I haven’t played Beta 5 yet, but I was concerned by these lines in the patch notes:

* Invasions which succeed will now despawn after 10 minutes, or 3 minutes if left out of combat.
* Invasions no longer aggro as a group and can be split.

Both of these changes appear to be ‘nerfs’ to invasions (I’ll be delighted if we discover that I’m totally wrong about that). I’m not entirely sure what they mean by “succeed” in that first line. Does that mean take down a Wardstone? I’ll assume it does since I can’t think what else marks ‘success’ on the part of an NPC driven invasion.

Combine that with the ability to ‘pull’ invasion members one at a time, and no longer will players have to self-organize into groups to drive off invasions and restore quest hubs to their working state. Instead, players will avoid the invasion force and let it kill the Wardstone asap so it’ll then despawn in 3 minutes. Pity the player who initiates combat with the invasion, thinking he can pull a single and defeat it, as s/he will be shouted down by those impatient for the invasion to go away.

I see this as another step towards the game I played in early Betas going away and Rift becoming much more generic. These changes appear to ease the pressure to join forces with your fellow player, and that’s a shame. (And this coming from a confirmed Soloist.)

I’m also on the fence about the new public group system. I understand how healers struggled to see who needed healing (though I generally healed ‘through’ mobs when I played a healer) and I understand the benefits of the system, but now you’re really going to have to join these public groups when rifting. In early betas, everyone helped everyone since no one was grouped. Once we’re in a group, though, we all tend to have tunnel vision and only help fellow group members. The player who chooses not to join the public group will be ostracized, whether deliberately or by circumstance. Honestly if they’re going to have public groups at all, they ought to just make them totally automatic. (As I said, I’m still on the fence about this system since the benefits to healers might outweigh the downside of the end of solo rifting.)

While I’m on a roll, I’ll also voice my disagreement with giving everyone all 8 souls so early in a character’s development. I’m not sure any character should have access to the entire palette of souls available for their class. I think the game would be much more interesting if Cleric A had access to souls 1, 2, 7, & 8 and Cleric B had access to 1, 4, 5 & 7. With everyone having access to all 8 souls, “flavor of the month” builds will blossom even more swiftly than they would have with limited souls. If you’re playing a level 20 Cleric and aren’t specced just so, expect to be shouted at. I’ve already seen a bit of this in earlier betas.

Don’t read this and think I’ve given up on Rift; that’s certainly not the case. But I hope somewhere in Trion there’s a core group of developers with a vision that they’ll hold true to, regardless of what the players want. Players don’t always want what’s best for them in the long run. I really hope they don’t nerf the rift system and keep the world dangerous forever. Yeah, you might log in and be in the midst of an invasion… tough. Life is hard and chaotic (and let’s face it, death penalties in Rift are pretty light) in the world of Telara. I hope that never changes.

Salem: Permadeath and open PvP

Posted on by Nimgimli

I saw a trailer for Paradox’s Salem over on Arislyn’s Tumblr page. I’d only heard a tiny bit about this upcoming MMO: basically that it took place in Colonial New England, was a sandbox game and so lots of crafting and what-not.

Now I’ve learned that it features permadeath and open PvP. The creative director, “Brother Bean” says he believes the player population will police itself and find its own balance. It’s a brave direction to take and I enthusiastically support the plan while at the same time doubt it can succeed. I’m glad I’m not investing in it, but I’m happy it is being made.

Here’s the problem with punishment in MMOs, in my opinion: it’s binary. When someone commits a crime against you, your options are: ignore the character or kill the character. There’s no other law or recourse beyond slaughter. I think for a system like Salem’s to work there needs to be the potential for some kind of (player run) police force. If you steal a chicken from your neighbor, someone should be able to forcibly take that chicken back and then make you pay some kind of fine. As it stands now the only way of doing that is to kill you and loot the chicken and fine from your corpse, which seems pretty extreme.

I’m not sure how to handle punishment in any other way. If you put a character in some kind of prison, the player is just going to log off and go do something else. Maybe some kind of tax system where a % of any wealth you pick up magically goes to whomever you’ve mistreated?

Maybe Salem will work; I’d love to be proven wrong. But there are just so many bored gamers out there who’d happily spend time to strengthen a new character just so he can then go and grief someone else. Sure, the ‘community’ will then kill him in turn, but that’s small comfort for that character’s initial victim, who now has to start over.

Hmm, maybe a semi-permadeath system where you only stay dead if the person who killed you manages to stay alive for 24 hours after the killing? And the dead has the ability to speak to the living and plead his case…

I dunno, just a random thought. What do you think? Could permadeath and open PvP ever work together?

What MMO devs can learn from The Witcher (and other SP RPGs)

Posted on by Nimgimli

So as mentioned in my last post, I’ve been playing my $5 copy of The Witcher and really enjoying myself. In a lot of ways I’m playing it almost like an MMO. I spend a lot of time wandering around harvesting herbs, or “grinding mobs” by hunting at night for experience and loot I can sell for Orens (the game’s currency).

One of the problems I often face when stepping away from MMOs and into single player games is that I forget to save. Years of MMOing has driven the “Quick Save” concept from my brain. Luckily The Witcher autosaves every time you enter or exit a building. So that’s something single player devs can learn from MMO developers: don’t make the player have to worry about bookkeeping tasks like saving.

But this post is about the teaching the MMO devs. The world of The Witcher feels more alive than just about any MMO feels, assuming you take the PCs out of the MMO. Obviously a SP game is never going to have the odd and weird interactions you’ll have with other people in an MMO, but the NPCs in The Witcher seem so much more alive.

Imagine Stormwind or Qeynos with no other players in it. What do you see? NPCs that either stand in one place or patrol along a set path, day or night, rain or shine, saying the same thing over and over again. They act like what they are: automatons. In The Witcher when it starts to rain, all the townsfolk scurry for cover. Not only that, but they’ll grumble or joke about the weather. I did a double take when an old codger ducked under the eave of a house and looked out and cackled “Ha! The neighbor’s laundry is getting soaking wet!”

To be fair, I won’t be playing The Witcher for years and years; if 3 years from now the same codger was saying the same thing every time it rained, it wouldn’t seem as amazing.

Now I know WoW has started to dabble in this kind of behavior via phasing, but generally you have to do something to trigger phasing. In The Witcher, even quest NPCs will move. At night they’ll be in their homes, during the day on the streets or at their place of business. Now the devs weren’t a slave to this ‘realism’ and you can barge into an NPC’s house in the middle of the night and talk to them about a quest and they won’t freak out. Having to wait until morning to talk to them would probably be too much realism.

Last is point-of-view. In The Witcher you play Geralt, the titular Witcher. And you always play the game as him. But when there are cut scenes, you’ll sometimes see the world through another character’s eyes. This can add richness to the overall experience.

[Trivial spoiler ahead]
Fairly early on in the game you meet a barmaid and save her from thugs. She is so grateful, and you so exotic and charming, that she agrees to meet you to “reward” you. She chooses the place: a (supposedly) haunted abandoned mill beside the river. You won’t be disturbed there. Assuming you make the appointment, you and she head into the mill for a bit of non-interactive nookie. At that moment the point of view changes to some folks who make their home across the river from the mill. They hear these faint moans coming across the water and assume it’s the ghost. One comments that there’s never a witcher around when you need one. The scene cuts back to the doorway of the mill where you can clearly hear the young lady’s cries of passion. (Yes, The Witcher is an M-rated game).
[End spoiler]

Now that moment took longer to read about than it did to experience and it might not translate to a blog post very well, but in the moment, playing the game, I found it really funny. We’re always playing these heroes charging through scene after scene but rarely do we get to see the repercussions of our actions. I know most MMO players are notoriously impatient and I’m not urging devs to stick in a bunch of video cut-scenes and their accompanying loading times, but the odd quick in-game cut scene showing your character from someone else’s point of view could really help to flesh out your adventure.

Story is a whole ‘nother blog post. I’ve actually been surprised in The Witcher, and have stayed up too late playing not because I wanted to make the next level, but because I wanted to see what happened next. Your average single player RPG doesn’t have a plot that could rival even a very pedestrian novel, but these stories are still better than those in most MMOs. As a best case scenario an MMO might have an interesting story that it takes you weeks of play and lots of groups to unravel, and spreading it over that much time tends to diminish things.

Anyway, that’s my mutterings for tonight. It sounds silly but the first time the NPCs in this game reacted to weather I kind of stopped and stared. And that was when I realized I’d been away from SP RPGs for a little bit too long. 🙂

Taking a breather

Posted on by Nimgimli

I am excited about Rift. Or at least, I was excited about it. I think I still am. We’ll see.

But Rift isn’t out for another month or so. After the last beta I found myself a bit adrift. I’d been playing Aion and was entertained by it, but I knew it wasn’t something I was going to play long-term so it started feeling a bit pointless. My renewed enthusiasm for WoW had wilted away. I thought about Guild Wars, Star Trek Online, Champions Online, LOTRO, EQ2, FF XIV… but in every case playing felt like a waste of time because I knew come Feb 24th I was headed to Rift.

So finally I decided to just take a break from MMOs. I do this from time to time. This time out I picked up The Witcher, a game I own on DVD but which I’d repurchased on Steam for $5 during the holiday sale. I’ve tried to play The Witcher several times but it never really stuck, but this time it has (so far). I think the Enhanced Version that Steam sells is more enhanced than my DVD version with all patches (including the ‘enhanced’ patch) or something. It just plays better for me now.

The funny thing about me and MMOs. When I start spending time away from them, they start to seem a little bit silly. I get progressively more dismissive about the genre the longer I’m away. I see arguments raging over builds or classes and I start feeling like people put an inordinate amount of somewhat negative energy into something that ought to be fun (negative from my point of view; I’m sure they’re not feeling it in the same way). The pinnacle of my “MMO withdrawal” is when I get to this obnoxious “holier than thou” place of sneering condescension towards anyone who is wasting their time playing an MMO when they could be enjoying other things like, oh, beer can collecting or shoe-lace repair.

Then invariably I wake up one morning with a burning desire to log into an MMO and my love for the genre re-ignites and I sheepishly resubscribe to something.

But until that happens I’m kind of bastard to be around, if you’re an MMO player. At least at this point I’m self-aware of the process.

Since Twitter is the place I most often talk about MMOs, I’ve stepped away from there too. I’ve been feeling frustrated with Twitter anyway; I felt like conversations kept devolving into rather pointless arguments that were ultimately caused by the 140 character limit. I’m still using Buzz and I have some automated tweets hitting Twitter, plus my daily ITworld post promotion. And I bop in now and then to make sure no one has @ed a tweet at me that I need to respond to. But time-on-site for Twitter has gone from probably 12 hours a day (I mean time a twitter client is open, not time I’m actively paying attention to it, of course) to maybe 12 minutes.

This has freed up a lot of time and in some ways life feels a lot more relaxed. I also accepted, without really thinking about it, the Goodreads.com “Reading Challenge” for the year. My goal is to read 30 books (2.5/month) which I thought was somewhat ambitious until I saw my friends setting goals of 100 or more! But for me 30 books is a reasonable challenge (I’m already behind) so I’ve been devoted some of this Twitter-freed time to reading.

I’ve also got some personal stuff going on with my mom being sick and my brother and I trying to figure out how we’re going to pay for her care, so that’s put a full stop on spending money on gaming. I already paid for Rift and I’ll still spend the cash for a 6-month sub (assuming I bounce back to being an MMO fan by then) but it has meant not being tempted by titles like DCUO and sales on single-player games. Resisting the temptation of buying a new MMO always feels pretty good; so often in the past my curiosity has driven me to purchase games I almost knew I wouldn’t like all that much. And actually looking at my huge backlog of unplayed or barely-played single player games makes me feel pretty silly about feeling a ‘need’ for new games (games that I know will be available for a fraction of their new cost in 4-6 months).

So that’s where I am right now. Playing The Witcher (and dabbling in other SP games), waiting for Rift and trying to decide what I’ll do there (the guild I had lined up is turning out to be not as good a fit as I’d thought it would) and staying away from Twitter and the too-frequent aggravation I allow it to cause me. And learning a lot about Power of Attorney, reverse mortgages, early withdrawal of life insurance and all the unpleasant ways that the health system you spend your life paying into will turn its back on you when you really need it.

I’ll be back my socializing self when I’ve gotten past this miserable bastard phase I’m going through. 🙂