Massively ran this. It seemed timely given recent discussions. Urge you to go full screen and HD.
Choice, game design, and MMOs
Once more into the breach, my friends…
In my last post I talked about Rift and groups and solo play. An interesting theme seemed to arise from some of the comments, and one that I found curious.
Today I want to talk about player choice and game design. I’m going to keep using Rift as an example but this could equally well apply to certain other games.
At the risk of over-simplifying things enormously, when you log into an MMO you have some broad decisions to make: the first is what style of gameplay you’re about to undertake. Are you going to putter around & craft? Just logging in to visit friends? Are you planning to solo? Are you planning to Group and go after content that way? For the purpose of this post I’m looking, once again, at Solo vs Group.
Say you’ve decided to Group. Now you’re going to pick a role. Do you want to be the Healer? A Tank? DPS? Buffing/support?
Let’s say for the sake of argument that you want to be a Group Healer. So here’s your character; a blank slate. Since you want to be a Healer, you pick Souls & Skills (in another game this could be Talent trees or whatever) that are heavy in healing capabilities. If you want to be a Healer and you take a bunch of skills that are focused on Taunting, you’d be a pretty poor Healer, right?
Can we all agree so far? Healers should take skills that help them heal. If a Healer takes skills that emphasize taunting over healing, you’re probably not going to be a great healer. Does this illustrate an example of bad game design? Does anyone think that?
Now let’s back up the decision tree a bit. Back up to the Solo vs Group decision. Here’s where my opinion seems to diverge with some others. When I decide I’m going to Solo I use a build that emphasizes that play style. I don’t take a bunch of group buffs: I won’t be in a group! I will look at self heals, or self shields, or perhaps a pet. I will probably set up a hotbar full of various consumable items that will help me to either survive or reduce down time between fights. Conversely if I’m going to Group I’m going to skip the self heals and instead take, maybe, a group-based stat buff or an AOE taunt or something else that works best in groups.
When I suggested that this was the best way to play Rift solo (specifically I said that if you’re going to solo a lot, some kind of self heal or pet will make life easier), some people suggested back that if playing Solo required using certain (Solo friendly) skills, it was an example of bad game design.
I don’t understand the difference: Healers need to take healing skills, Tanks need to take tanking skills. Everyone seems to agree on this and no one seems bothered by it. But when Soloers need to take solo skills, suddenly its bad game design?
It is essential to keep in mind that the only permanent decision you make in Rift is your archetype. That you’re stuck with, but within it, you can have several (at least 3 and maybe 4) Roles and each Role can use any 3 of your 8 souls, and each Role can have its own distribution of skill points and skills. You can switch Roles anytime except in mid-battle. And if a Role isn’t working out, fr a few virtual coins spent at a trainer you can reset it and build it anew as something else. So if you’re playing Solo and someone throws you a Group invite, you tap on Hotkey and now your Grouping Role is active.
To me this is the opposite of bad game design. I find it to be kind of awesome in fact. But it *seems* not everyone agrees.
Twitter Brawl: Grouping and Rift
I got into a bit of a tussle on Twitter today with @arkenor and @scopique over the question of Rift and grouping. Ark said “I don’t think you’ll get terribly far in Rift without grouping.” and I took exception to that. I mostly solo and do fine.
But there’s all kinds of nuance here. What does “fine” mean? Did Ark mean Grouping (as in joining into one of those artificial constructs that MMOs offer) or did he mean grouping as in, working with others? If he meant “You won’t get far in rift if you insist on doing everything by yourself” then in fact I’d agree with him and the whole discussion was a big Twitter misunderstanding. Scopique pointed out that as a Tank he didn’t do well soloing when it came to fighting rifts and again I do understand some builds aren’t built for solo play.
I just wanted to elaborate here where I’m not limited to 140 characters. I’ve played 3 characters so far: a Warrior build to 17, a Mage build to 20 and a Cleric build to 16. I’ve spent most of my time outside of dungeons solo, by which I mean not Grouped. I feel like I did fine, by which I mean “I was having fun, making steady progress and never feeling overly frustrated for any length of time.” I haven’t played a Scout so maybe you can’t solo as a Scout; I don’t know one way or the other. And maybe things change past level 20, so I can’t speak to that either, but I’m pretty sure Ark isn’t past 20 and can’t speak to it either.
Now that said:
1) Dungeons absolutely require Grouping, I agree. You won’t be able to solo a dungeon until you’re horribly over level, and you won’t be running into random other people in there.
2) I also agree that you can’t get very far fighting rifts without playing cooperatively with other characters. I spent a LOT of time fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with other players, but very little of it Grouped. I consider this Solo play: your definition might be different.
3) Warfronts don’t give you a choice: when you enter one you get put in a Raid (though I never tried /leaving it)
4) Some builds are going to be more forgiving than others. If you play a pure tank then you’re going to look at a lot of dying or a lot of downtime. I suggest being an Apothecary if you’re going to go pure tank and want to solo. Mathosians have a great racial shield that turns damage into heals too. That helps.
But:
4a) You have more points than you can spend on 1 soul. So (making numbers up) at level 15 you might have 20 points to spend, but you can only put 15 into a single soul so unless you’re just going to throw away those extra points, you have to take at least 1 other soul. If you plan on soloing I urge you to pick a soul with either a pet or self heals. Both will keep you upright longer.
(And remember that you can have several Roles, which essentially are character builds, so if you enjoy Solo some times and Grouping others, you can easily do both on 1 character by having a Role for each playstyle. Each Role can use a different set of souls and point expenditures. You can switch Roles any time except in the middle of combat. So if you’re Soloing at a rift and someone throws you a Group invite and you accept it, a tap of a key will put you into your Group build.)
Solo players will probably die more often than people who’re always grouped. That’s true of most games. The death penalty in Rift is very light though. I do die a lot when I’m not being careful. But see above: re frustration (or rather, lack thereof).
Quest content is intended, for the most part, to be solo content. That’s true up to level 20 (except for Dungeon quests) and I could swear I’ve read an official source saying that’s an intentional design decision but I can’t find a citation now. So maybe we’ll have to wait and see.
The rift reward system is built to accommodate solo players. The one flaw with this is that you have to ‘tap’ a rift mob to get kill credit for it (for daily quests). I’m hoping they can change that. But you’ll get plenty of experience and rewards remaining solo while fighting rifts, and you’ll get quest rewards for Invasion Quests even if you spend the entire invasion solo (assuming the good guys win, of course).
It’s no secret I’ve been having a huge amount of fun playing Rift and I really want other players to give it a chance and hopefully wind up having as much fun as I am. Will Rift be fun at 30? 40? 50? I have no idea, but when it comes to games I’m an optimist. I know I’ll get my $60 (Digital Collector’s Edition for me) worth of fun out of it in the first month — in console gaming that can mean 10-12 hours of gameplay. After that, it’s anyone’s call.
But when I see something that I perceive as misinformation (based on my experience playing) that might turn potential players away, I’m always going to challenge it. Sometimes I’m wrong, and sometimes I’m right, but the discussion that results is often enlightening.
Fighting fanboyism: times when Rift disappoints
Well, now that the rest of you lot (well, not ALL of you) are finally discovering what I’ve been shouting about since Beta 1 — that Rift is damned fun — I can tone down the fanboyism a bit.
This last Beta brought some disappointments to my attention. Some little things and some that were bigger. Let’s start with the smallest first.
The tiniest unit of Planar Goods currency is the Mote of Sourcestone. Then comes the Emblem of Champions (I think…it’s a blue currency item that you get sometimes from fighting rifts). I get lots of Motes but very few Emblems, presumably because I solo all the time (though I do get plenty of gear). I’m not honestly sure if the drops are random or based on something you’re doing or some score or what.
Anyway in previous betas you could trade in a big chunk of Motes (50, iirc) for an Emblem of Champions. That meant that solo players could grind out the means to get the good Planar Goods gear (which generally will cost a couple of Emblems and a handful of Motes) (and oddly getting an Orb of Heroes, the biggest currency, isn’t a problem for soloers… everyone in the zone who takes part in beating back an Invasion gets one). Now that won’t be possible and frankly the amount of stuff you can get with Motes is pretty limited. I see Motes quickly becoming vendor trash (if they have value) unless the trade-up to Emblems is replaced. Yeah, I feedbacked it.
Next up, builds and groups and instances. I’ve been playing builds that are fun to me. I want my character to do interesting things, and being a self-made hybrid works ok in the open world. This weekend I finally went to the Garden of the Fae (I’m horrible with names…the first Guardian instance) and quickly found that I was useless. I couldn’t heal well enough to be a healer, I didn’t damage fast enough to be a DPS and I certainly wasn’t up to the task of tanking (though that may have been more level-based than anything… I was 14 and the group went as high as 26).
Once in an instance Rift reverts to a Typical Diku MMO (Talyn will be so proud of me!) that only embraces the Trinity of Tank/Healer/DPS (and maybe some CC). This is the 4th beta and people were being scolded for not having the right build, and players were bailing on the group when we died too many times. Because beta is no time to be learning the game, dammit!!
The good news, of course, is that you can dedicate one of your Roles to being a cookie-cutter clone of whatever the “approved” build for your archetype is, and still use your other roles to play the game the way you enjoy. But still, I was delighted to return to my life as a solo player.
Next up, the Warfronts. Now I don’t really like the Warfronts because I never like PvP set up as a sport. I enjoy open world PvP though, but I’m not all that clear on what Trion’s plan is for open world PvP. My concern with Warfronts is that they’ll be too popular. People seemed to enjoy them this past weekend. I watched all the fun get sucked out of Warhammer as everyone (it seemed) except me stopped roaming the world and questing and just stood in one place queuing for Scenario after Scenario. Rift offers some nice shiny rewards for partaking in Battlefronts but I can’t but hope they’ll be a bust. I want the population of my server out fighting off invasions, not chain-queuing for Battlefronts (which, btw, were popping almost instantly in the evenings…I did do a few just to check ’em out).
None of these issues have dampened my enthusiasm for playing Rift; I’m still eager for the next Beta Test and more so for Headstart on Feb. 24th. But after all my gushing it seemed… balanced… to do a post on the things I *didn’t* like for a change.
Once more into the Rift!
With beta 4, I’m changing servers on the Guardian side in order to join some old friends. That meant a new character for the first time since beta 2, and the first time since the skill point/soul distribution revamp.
I tried to look at the game with fresh eyes, to try to understand some of the common complaints. Obviously this is really hard to do and I didn’t have a lot of luck.
By level 6 I had 3 souls already (used to be you had to be 18) and I almost wonder if this is asking too much of new players. Level 6 is maybe an hour of relaxed play, unless you’re a total MMO noob who doesn’t understand how to move, attack, loot and interact with NPCs (Rift uses standard MMO systems for all these things).
I’ve heard some players wishing they could test new souls before committing to them. Some other games (which one escapes me) offers this and it sounds like a great idea. Rift doesn’t let you do this, but it does (now) at least allow you to examine a soul’s skill tree before choosing it. This is a new feature and it’s a bit hidden.
You get new souls as quest rewards. Before picking which soul you want, you can control-click on their icons to get shunted over to a copy of the skill tree for that soul. It feels a little weird to be using a quest reward window to do research. I mean I guess it’s the same as examining a piece of gear but it feels odd to me. Before they revamped the system you had only 4 souls to pick as your first one, and there were 4 NPCs you had to talk to as part of the quest; these NPCs told you a bit about that soul. I guess visiting 8 NPCs would be a bit dull. Anyway I think Trion needs to polish this system as well as publishing a nice big chart of the souls and what they’re best at.
Do keep in mind that while there are 4 archetypes (Warrior/Cleric/Scout/Mage) by mixing and matching souls you can really take on any role you want within your archetype. Tank cleric? Sure. DPS warrior? Yup. The archetypes are almost used as a character theme more than anything else.
Another common complaint is that you feel rushed through the tutorial. I’m not seeing this at all. Yeah there’s a lot of activity going on around you; battles and all that. But none of the mobs are aggro before level 5 or so. Yes, there’s a rushed ‘vibe’ but nothing is really rushing you. You can take as much time as you like to mess around with your UI, set up your friends list, or whatever.
Next, the “On Rails” complaint. Guilty as charged for the first 8-9 levels (1.5-2 hours). But if you’re lauding the new WoW newbie experience and criticizing this one, you’re being a total hypocrite. Both games shunt you from hub to hub pretty quickly in the first few levels.
I’ve heard complaints that the world is too small. This kind of dovetails in with the last point. Your journey from 1-9 is essentially along a corridor of quest hubs. But please, hit M, look at how much of the world, or even the starter zone, that you’ve explored, then zoom out. I don’t think the world is small at all. I’ve spent 3 beta events in 1 zone without getting bored.
Last, Rift is just another quest grind. Well by level 9 I was in Argent Glade fighting off rift invasions with a bunch of other players. In fact I dinged 9 in the midst of an invasion. Yup, you can play Rift as a quest grinder if you choose to, but there’s rifting and now PvP (though that doesn’t open up until level 10, at least not the Warfronts, so I can’t address that aspect yet, but I’m told you do get exp from PvP). If you choose to play it as a quest grinder then you’re missing out on some of the best features of the game.
In a comment to one of my earlier posts Green Armadillo of Player vs Developer criticized Trion for not exposing players to everything the game has to offer in the first hour. While in theory I agree that a game should hook you as quickly as possible, I don’t think it’s a practical option for Rift. Rift invasions are disruptive to the player experience. That’s kind of the point of the design of the game (see the recent Dev Diary for more details). But disrupting things during the tutorial phase of the game would (rightfully) draw the ire of many players. Can you imagine being in the midst of reading the tutorial pop-up windows and being steam-rolled by an invasion force? You do get to experience a rift in the first hour, but it’s carefully tucked away and always in the same place. Nor does it spawn invasion forces. It’s a pale reflection of the full experience.
So, surprising almost no one, I don’t see a lot of the complaints people are having. I didn’t get to play a lot last night. I wish I’d made note of my /played time. I’m guessing 2 hours over a few sessions. And I hit level 9 and Argent Glade (Guardian side) which feels to me like the end of the tutorial experience. I’m seeing “real” rifts now, the world is no longer a long narrow corridor, I’ve already got 3 hotbars (due in part to having 3 souls, and in fact that might be too many this early) set up; 1 for combat skills, 1 for utility skills (call pet, track plants, teleport back home, etc) and 1 for the myriad of consumables I’m getting from combating rifts.
My biggest gripe once again is inventory space! I’m spending all my cash on bags. More space, Trion. Please!
Also to anyone who has gotten this far. When you’re picking your souls, even if you’re a melee character, try to get at least one ranged attack (or a rush attack). One other complaint I have about fighting rifts: while you don’t have to tap a mob to get rewards at the end of the rift fight, there are daily quests to “Kill 10 Rift Creatures” which are basically free exp (since you’ll be killing them anyway) but to get credit for those kills you need to tap the critter. If you have to run up to a rift creature to tap it, you’re never going to get there before someone with an insta-cast ranged ability gets to it.
That’s my 2nd biggest gripe. It’d be nice if you got credit just for being in on the attack or even healing someone who’s taking damage from a rift critter.
That’s all for now. Beta beckons!
Oh, right now I’m playing a Druid/Warden/Justicar. I meant to be mostly Druid with some Warden and just the ‘freebie’ Justicar skill, but now I’m getting intrigued by the Justicar tree. My have to set up some new Roles for this guy…
Shouldering the weight of your words
So in the bright sunshine of the morning after the Massively/Rift controversy, I wanted to open the topic up a bit more. Clearly I found it wrong for a pro-blogger to dismiss a soon-to-ship product without giving it a fair shake. Others, like Tipa and Arkenor, thought I was off my rocker. Ark voiced the opinion that anything goes in gaming coverage as long as it’s an honest opinion. Tipa just didn’t care one way or the other.
So I wanted to elaborate on my feelings a bit, setting aside the specifics of this situation.
First and most importantly, we have to ask the question of whether or not (presumably, see below) high-traffic sites like Massively influence buying decisions. If they don’t, then none of what I’m about to say matters. I’m assuming that some percentage of readers come to these sites in order to determine if a product is worth their buying consideration.
Next is the issue of scale. The higher the pulpit, the more carefully you need to weigh your words. Some guy on a street corner preaching about the end of days won’t have much impact, but if a TV network starts saying the same thing it could cause a panic. My assumption here is that Massively has significant traffic. If they don’t, then again, my arguments (and concerns) are invalidated.
So we’re talking then, about a site that has the ability to significantly move the needle when it comes to a game’s sales.
And we’re talking about a game still in beta and still being changed. This is not the game that customers will be paying for. We don’t know what that game will be.
With all these conditions met, I believe it is irresponsible for an author to off-handedly trash a game (and thereby influence sales of the game) in a post on the site. It isn’t irresponsible to say “This type of game isn’t of interest to me.” and it isn’t irresponsible to say “After 1 hour of playing my interest wasn’t captured enough to inspire me to dig deeper into this title” but it is irresponsible to say “This game is just like every other game” when you haven’t played enough to know if this statement is true or not.
As a blogger on a high-traffic site, you need to consider the impact of your words more carefully than, say, I do here on my dinky little blog.
Consider the situation from the other side of the fence. Imagine you’re working for a game developer. You’ve been helping the team make a game for the past several years and finally it’s coming to fruition and then some pundit posts untrue things about your game. Not out of malice but out of ignorance because said pundit never really looked closely at your product. Now you’re taking a hit (however small) on sales because of an off-hand comment.
Consider the situation from the point of view of your audience. They (presumably) trust you. They come to you to learn about a game. Don’t you owe it to them to know what you’re talking about? By stating what you perceive as (but what in fact isn’t) a fact based on incomplete data does an injustice to your audience.
Finally, consider the impact on your own career. By flippantly dismissing a title for reasons that aren’t accurate, you’re blowing your credibility with readers who have played the game and know that you’re stating things that aren’t true. Credibility that is very, very difficult to regain.
I’ve seen potentially good games canceled due to mishandled press coverage. Granted that was back when print magazines existed and the lag time for ‘corrections’ was very long. But damage can still be done, and if you’re a gaming enthusiast, that should matter to you. New games should be given a fair chance to prove themselves, and not be slagged prior to launch because a particular journalist wasn’t interested enough to really look at the game, and instead just made assumptions that ultimately aren’t accurate.
I firmly believe the writers at high-traffic sites need to be held to higher standards than they currently are. They should write about what they’ve experienced, and not what they assume to be true. If they’re writing about things they’ve only heard about, they should cite sources. I’m not saying they should sugar-coat issues, just that they should report accurately, even if what they’re reporting is just their opinion. Opinions based on assumptions need to be described as such.
Rift – the hook is in the name
First, I’m sure you’ve heard it a dozen times by now, but we now have a Rift release date of March 1, 2011 for North America and March 4th for EU. Pre-order and get into the beta as well as the headstart which begins February 24th.
Anyway, on to the business at hand. After reading a post about the Massively staff’s Rift beta impressions I tweeted:
Reading this post @Massively http://bit.ly/h7bYAg and LOLing at how much Jef Reahard doesn’t get it. Yeah, an hour into Rift it is familiar
I wanted to go into a bit more detail here. Now we’re supposed to accept Reahard as a knowledgeable MMO player, right? He gets paid to share his informed opinion with us. We pay his salary by reading his posts. Here’s what his beta impressions were:
I rolled a Pyromancer in the Defiant beta and spent about an hour running around the initial zone (and fiddling with the UI). That probably doesn’t seem like a lot of time to form an accurate impression, but it was more than enough for me to realize I’ve played this game about a hundred times over the last few years.
That’s not to say Trion doesn’t have a serviceable title on its hands. It’s very pretty and runs well compared to most betas, but I’m already slogging through a couple of on-rails quest grinders and don’t really have the patience for another one. Wake me up when (or actually, if) someone dares to spend this kind of money on a sandbox.
Now I’m not saying Reahard has to like Rift and I’m not saying he isn’t entitled to his opinion. But y’know what? After an hour of playing an MMO you generally aren’t entitled to an informed opinion yet. How could you be? And in the case where a game is named after a significant gameplay feature, and you don’t play enough to even experience that feature, you’re really on thin ice. (In Rift, you can pretty much ignore quests and level up by fighting rifts if you want to. In fact fighting rifts levels you faster if you’re in the midst of an invasion.)
The fact is… fact, not opinion, Reahard hasn’t played this game about a hundred times because there haven’t been that many games that feature large scale open world PvE events. Warhammer has it’s public quests but they don’t even approach the scale of Rift’s rifts. A few games have offered very rare GM run events where an epic mob storms into town and all the players have to cooperate to take it down, but few games have that sort of gameplay as a central system.
If Reahard played only Beta 1 of the game for an hour (he apparently didn’t even get to where he could choose a 2nd soul, which used to be level 5 iirc, though that’s changed now), he should have been professional enough to opt out of the article or, if that wasn’t an option, just admitted that he wasn’t interested enough to play into the main parts of the game. Dismissing Rift after an hour of tutorial quests and a few of the newbie proto-rifts is like dismissing WoW after only experiencing the crafting system. You just haven’t seen the main point of the game.
In general I think this was an ill-advised article overall. These experts are complaining about systems that are being tweaked and improved with every beta. When Krystalle Voecks says “Certain things I experienced on the Rogue drove me nuts (only 30 seconds’ worth of stealth, mobs’ seeming ability to see through stealth anyway, the odd ability to shoot fireballs with my daggers, poor-to-meh gear-availability) and utterly killed the fun for me.” how many of her readers are savvy enough to stop and think “Well, it is beta, maybe those issues will be addressed.”
Read the comments on the article and you’ll see people who’ve opted not to play based on the problems the Massively staff encountered during beta.
Here’s the thing. I’ve been in all three betas. These are not “stress tests” and they aren’t just marketing events (and I know, this is what we expect betas to be these days). Trion has adjusted things in response to player reaction between beta 1 & 2 and radically between beta 2 & 3.
Aside from Reahard, I can’t really fault the rest of the staff. This is the problem with game journalism in general. Players are stupid. They’re not savvy enough to differentiate between a preview and a review. Film critiques don’t go watch a movie before the special effects are done and then post previews talking about how shoddy the special effects are, but game players have this need for game journalists to report what they see, but then don’t take personal responsibility for understanding what the journalists are reporting about.
Put another way, if the journalists don’t report on bugs they see, then the players accuse them of being on the payroll of the game developers. But if the journalists DO report on bugs they see, then the players seize on these reports as a reason to slag on the game, swear off buying it and tell their friends how much the game sucks, never mind that those bugs might be fixed already.
The only solution, IMO, is to avoid this kind of article when a game is in flux.
A visit to Aion
Back before launch I played in the beta of Aion. At the time I didn’t find the experience compelling enough to pay full price for the client at launch (and, correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t it come out somewhere around the same time as Warhammer, which I did get at launch?) but I always meant to check the game out when I could get a good deal on it.
During the big holiday sale, Steam offered Aion for $10, so I finally took the plunge. I have to say after all I’d heard (or not heard) about Aion since it launched, my expectations were pretty low.
The first (potential) challenge facing new Aion players is NCSoft’s byzantine support system. After installing I found I couldn’t log in. Their knowledge base had no answers and while I did open a support ticket, in an attempt to get faster help I headed to the official forums. I got some ideas there but when I tried to post a message I was told I couldn’t post unless I linked my forum account with a character name. Well since I couldn’t log in, I didn’t have any character names, ergo I couldn’t ask for help on the forums.
This is a small thing but generally speaking I’ve had terrible luck with NCSoft’s account management. In my support ticket I included a ton of information, including my ISP, my router name and model, the name of my anti-virus program and the information that I had turned it off as well as shutting down my firewall for testing. The next day I got a response (so points for timeliness) and the first questions they asked me were who my ISP was, had I tried turning off my anti-virus, etc, etc. It’s so frustrating when it becomes clear that support people can’t take the time to read your support request.
Anyway, this is a blog post about Aion, isn’t it? Sorry for the sidetrack.
It turns out the problem was with their servers or something. (A tracert to their authorization servers was dying about 15 hops down the line from me.) Since then I’ve had no problems.
I’d been playing my pet-using mage in Rift and having fun with it so I decided to go Mage in Aion too. I’d go with the Spiritmaster class when I hit 10. Aion’s leveling progression has you as a base class for the first 9 levels, then at level 10 you “ascend” and get your wings (literally) and pick a final class.
Levels 1-9 were familiar to me from the beta; that’s the problem with tightly scripted quest lines that have to be run through on more than one character. However they were a bit more challenging and interesting (at least towards the end) when there weren’t crowds of people doing them.
I’d forgotten how lovely the art style of Aion is (well to me at least). Screenshots can’t capture the whole experience; animals make some really interesting sounds too. And sometimes silly ones, like the patter of their feet. This is very much an Eastern game. When a mob notices you, there’s a Metal-Gear like “plink!” sound accompanied by a ! over the mob’s head.
That said, the gameplay in these levels really isn’t anything special. It isn’t bad, just very familiar. The one interesting mechanic are spell chains; cast Ice Spell 1 followed by Ice Spell 2 and get a bonus effect. Unfortunately this happens automatically. When you case Ice Spell 1 the icon then changes to that of Ice Spell 2. There’s no way to cast Ice Spell 1 twice in a row and then Ice Spell 2 (unless there’s a setting somewhere). If part 2 of a chain is off cool-down, that’s what’ll fire.
I’d been playing Rift before I jumped into Aion, and ironically enough, Rift felt more polished than Aion did, just in tiny details. Aion was a bit laggy and I saw other players rubber-banding around a few times. Jumping feels clunky. You can get hung up on the terrain pretty easily when you’re just trying to jump over a small obstacle. There’re places with invisible walls between an object and a geometry wall (for instance when trying to hug the wall of a canyon, if there’s a tree growing a few feet from the wall, you can’t go between the tree and the canyon wall) and some sloppy combat feedback at times (if a mob is slowed by a spell, when it dies you get feedback that its speed has returned to normal). None of these are deal breakers but they just seem like issues that should’ve been ironed out in the time since release.
Finally at level 9 I Ascended and remembered why I hadn’t played Aion at launch. After a semi-epic battle at the end of the 1-9 quest chains you get your wings and…become an errand boy. You’ll spend the next hour or so running around the Sanctum (or whatever the other side’s main city is called) doing FedEx quests which are, I suspect, intended to force you to learn how to get around the city. In general the city is too big and too empty. I find myself jumping from one end to the other and having nothing at all to do in the middle except run through it. I was already frustrated by this when I noticed something that wasn’t in beta: a teleport system to jump you across the city. If you play, find it and use it!
Just to give you a feel for how Eastern and grind-happy the game is, there’s one quest to take an item from 1 NPC to another that can be repeated 100 times for some special reward. I did it 3 times and never wanted to look at these NPCs again.
Another problem is this:
The word “Mythrazil” is my character name floating in space. But in amongst that mass of player names and guild tags are 3 NPCs in a different shade of bluish-green (or greenish-blue?). If you know where you’re going this isn’t a problem but for a noob looking for a specific NPC this is a real PITA. Aion also uses character item shops so in some places all you’ll see is a mass of characters sitting around with sales pitches floating over their heads. Thanks to Aion’s dwindling population this isn’t as bad as it was in beta but I still dislike these schemes.
When you finally beam down to the planet to go back to adventuring, you’ll realize just how low on the Ascended totem pole you are now. Your first tasks will be to kill crustaceans and turtles and even inert blocks of rock. IIRC this was where I bailed in beta. This time out I pushed on and once you get past those first few quests things start getting a little more interesting.
One of Aion’s big hooks was the ability to fly. So far I haven’t done a lot of that so I can’t comment much on it. It’s fun though. 🙂
The last thing I wanted to talk about is the community. When you first enter an established and potentially struggling game like Aion, you tend to feel like a real stranger. There’re all kinds of vernacular and game systems that I still don’t really understand, and listening to the chat going back and forth is like listening to another language. It’s like crashing a party or something.
There’s clearly some kind of appearance armor system in play since I saw tons of different ‘styles’ of outfit. Everything from typical fantasy gear with huge glowy weapons, to characters in very mundane gear that look liked they just walked in off the set of The Sims or something. Doing all my FedEx quests in the Sanctum was made somewhat more interesting just via people watching.
One thing I haven’t noticed is a lot of spam. In fact I haven’t noticed a General channel at all (maybe its off by default) but there are Trade and LFG channels that get plenty of traffic and it seems fairly ‘orderly.’ I’ve had invitations to Duel a few times but so far no whispers to buy gold or anything like that.
All in all, my time in Aion has been pleasant. Is that damning with faint praise? The world and creatures in it are interesting even if the combat system is (so far) fairly average. I don’t think I’ll stick around long enough to get to the PvPvE stuff that kicks in at level 25, but for my $10 I’m having fun. If you can get a similar deal and feel the urge to be an MMO tourist for a week or so, I’d say go for it.
Rift Beta 3
So on Thursday morning, the 3rd day of beta 3, I dejectedly ran the Rift Patcher that I’d spent the previous two days pulling my hair out over. And /facepalm it worked. I hadn’t changed anything since the previous day, but miracles do happen I guess. Of course then I had to “patch” 7 GB since I’d uninstalled the game (though honestly that didn’t take long at all).
Anyway since I got such a late start I decided to just keep playing Grima and get him to level 20, which I did about an hour before the beta ended. Betas 1 & 2 ended while I was at work, so this was the first time I got to see an end and it was pretty crazy. Huge invasions were spawned and kept on spawning. Tons of fun but the next time I play I’m going to be really puzzled by all the stuff in my inventory. At one point I had almost 30 of those Rift gift-pack thingies!
Hey, I don’t usually play a mage so maybe this is common, but one thing I found really helpful was how my debuffs, dots and stuff were show at the top of the mob’s list of bad things happening to him. Since I have some skills that pair nicely (thunderbolts to electrify the mob followed up by a water attack that does bonus when the enemy is electrified, and things like that) being able to easily see the countdown timers on my debuffs and effects was really handy.
One last thing then I’ll fling some pics at you. I had to respend all my skill points and I put Humpty Grima Dumpty back together differently this time around, and he played a lot differently. That’s probably obvious but it was nice having the 1st hand experience that says using the same 2 souls and allocating points different leads to a very different feel to the character.
I don’t take great videos, but here’re a couple I grabbed.
The first just showcases the animation of a particular mob. I love the animations in Rift. Heck my Recall spell is amazing to watch. Anyway this is an ent moseying along until he sees me.
And here’s the passing of an invasion force from The Great Hunt.
This one just gives you an idea of how massive the battles were getting during the major invasions.
And last, part of a fight against an epic mob (better pictures of him below). Oh yes, and my dying. I die a LOT in Rift…it’s kind of refreshing to be challenged in an MMO. Maybe that’s just because I’m not used to being a cloth-wearing mage, though.
Next up, a few still shots. Two of that big boss critter from the video (well actually, two different ones). I left the interface and everything intact so you can see how many various dots, debuffs and other effects he has on him!
One of my strange looking mount (though “George” is the name of my earth elemental tank buddy…the mount has no name, poor creature):
Here’s a shot of the map during the big invasion. All those little markers are another battle in the making:
And lastly, another “Holy smokes that’s a lot of players!” shots (and this is why Rift will be a Day 1 purchase for me…I want to be in those early crowds of players…I had boatloads of fun roaming around in random mobs. I got a ton of experience (a level and a half this afternoon), more loot than I could manage (more inventory space please) and an Orb of Heroes which is used to buy really nice gear once you collect a few of them. And all this without ever joining a Group.
Now then… what does Beta 4 start!? LOL
Seriously, I’m so delighted that that damned patcher finally started working. Apparently there was a big reboot on Trion’s end the night before so maybe that cleared something up. I’m convinced they were blocking my IP for some reason. And from what I’ve heard, everyone else with the error #2005 had theirs clear up at the same time.
So now I can go back to being a breathless Rift fanboy again. 🙂
Rift & me
This will be a redundant post for my Twitter friends. Sorry for the rehash.
But to other regular readers, you know how excited I’ve been for Rift and might be wondering why I’m not posting about Beta 3.
Unfortunately I’ve been unable to participate in Beta 3 due to an error I keep getting when I try to patch. Last week, before Christmas, I ran the patcher in anticipation of Beta 3 and all was well. Then Monday night, the night before the new beta phase started, I ran it again and got an error #2005 – Couldn’t connect to the Authentication Servers. I figured the servers were just offline but when I heard other folk had been patching I grew concerned.
As well I should have. The problem persists. Trion’s Tech Support was unable to help me (though bless them, they tried). It seems to have something to do with my network connection. I tried Rift on 3 different computers in the house, using two different Rift accounts. When that didn’t help I focused on the modem/router that FiOS supplies. I hadn’t changed any settings so it was odd that it’d suddenly become a problem but you never know. I called FiOS support (they were spectacularly unhelpful) and finally reset the modem back to its factory settings. No joy.
I literally spent all of Tuesday working on the problem and have now accepted that, for now at least, Rift doesn’t work in my house. Even though it worked flawlessly during Beta 1, Beta 2 and the patcher worked fine last week.
I’ve found a few kindred spirits who’re encountering the same problem, but it’s hard to get attention since there are other problems with the patcher being slow and an authorization error (#2002 I think) and people get confused and think we’re having the same problem.
I can ping the patcher, traceroute to it, but of course the problem isn’t the patch servers, it’s contacting the authentication servers, and I don’t know what those IP addresses are.
The saddest part is that since it seems to be a low frequency error, and one that Trion Tech Support couldn’t fix, I’m not convinced it’ll ever be fixed. At this point I’m assuming that I won’t be able to play Rift again. Which makes me sad… it really rekindled my love for MMOs, to the point where I’d kind of planned my holiday break around playing the third beta like mad.
Anyway, so that’s why no Rift posts from me. Technological issues have me shut out.