West Karana

I thought I would never find a game on Facebook that tied together social gaming and RPGs. This whole experiment with Facebook games has typically been one spam-filled sim game after another. Frontierville, City of Wonder, My Empire, Virtual Villagers — all share the same half-hearted copying of better single player games combined with a financial urge to turn the player into a whining beggar who is a burden on their friends.

If that’s all “social gaming” is, then I don’t care how much money Zynga is making, it’s a dead genre before it’s even fully born. Creatively dead, anyway. Even the most patient and enthusiastic player has to get bored with yet another sim at some point.

I asked Twitter if there were any actual, honest to God RPGs on Facebook, and @Caffo sent me a link to Namco Bandai’s Treasure Abyss.

If you’ve ever tried to get a guild group together in a traditional MMO, you know how tough it is to get all your friends online at the same time, and also wanting to do the dungeons you need. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if you could just hire their offline characters as NPC hirelings?

That’s the concept behind Treasure Abyss. You form a four person party from you and three friends, then head into dungeons, kill everything you see, loot treasure, repeat. Every fight, the character with the most kills gets a “MVP” award, which gives them gold the next time they log in.

You start out as a generic warrior. After a short tutorial, you come to the main party selection screen, where you can customize your character as often as you like. You also can choose among the friends who play. There doesn’t seem to be any penalty at the moment for grouping your level 1 character with level 30 friends, so go for it.

Your profession — warrior, wizard, thief or monk — is determined by the weapon you wield. Everyone starts out as a warrior. In the first dungeon, you will find the materials with which to make wizard staffs. In the second, you’ll find hand stones; you’ll make thief knives from those. The third dungeon hides fist stones that make certain monk weapons.

Alchemy is crafting in Treasure Abyss. All items looted are alchemy components. You can only make weapons and bits of candle at the moment, though. Armor, shields and headgear are bought at the store for in-game gold. The only cash item so far are candles.

Candles are the resource that keeps you from playing as much as you like. Each step you take in a dungeon reduces your candlepower by three. When it reaches zero, the dungeon goes dark, and any monsters you stumble into will become nearly impossible to hit. You, though, will become much easier to hit. Sufficiently strong characters will be able to continue on even in the dark, though you’ll need at least a smidgen of candle in order to descend to deeper levels.

The game is in beta, and it must be an early beta at that. There’s only three dungeons; some of the crafted weapons are apparently impossible to craft; the cash shop isn’t open; it takes far too long for beginning players to earn enough gold to buy even the most basic armor. The game isn’t 100% there yet.

But even in this early stage, Treasure Abyss has given me more RPG-style enjoyment than I’d any right to expect on Facebook.

“Cold Call” is the first of Star Trek Online’s “Feature Episodes“. The first series deal with those cryo-suited Alpha Quadrant villains, the Breen. Staying more or less out of galactic affairs after their defeat along with the rest of their allies at the close of the Dominion War, they have returned.

Those Federation diplomats who negotiated a treaty between the Ferengi, the Rigelians and the Deferans in the Starbase 39/Sierra diplomacy mission may remember Ambassador Surah as the Deferen Ambassador. Klingons will be reminded of an ancient pact between the Klingons and the Deferens where the Klingons promised aid when asked — that time has come. Though simply knowing that they would face the Breen would be reason enough for the Klingons to show.

A few years back, the orbital Hubble telescope pointed itself at a very small portion of the sky where there were no visible stars. In just that narrow slice of space’s darkest sky, it found clear pictures of 1500 galaxies.

Yesterday, gathered outside the Orellian Sector Block in Beta Ursae, you could see dozens of Galaxy-class cruisers any direction you looked. From the number of 50 person instances created at least 600 Federation captains were waiting to take part, along with an unknown number of Klingons.

The Federation News Service was there, along with some new allies; five Vice Admirals with the mission difficulty set to “elite”. We’d come to regret that.

The episode was delayed a few minutes, much to the jeers of the people on the test channel. The call finally came; each ship received a transmission giving us permission to warp. Warp we did, and we descended upon the Deferan system like pigeons to a stale crust of bread.

Ambassador Surah greeted us from aboard his ship, the Jeska. He thanked us kindly for coming to his call; reports of unusual ships had made him uneasy about returning to Defera, and wondered if we might escort him to his home world.

Five Federation ships of the line accompanied him from the fringes of the system to orbit around the planet. Just at the end, sensors picked up the momentary traces of an alien ship — a Breen ship. It warped away before we could respond, and its warp trail was masked so we couldn’t follow.

Surah beamed down to the surface, and invited us to enjoy the hospitality of the capital city, at our convenience.

Defera is a beautiful world, full of life and activity. The Deferan people welcomed the unexpected transport of five of the Federation’s finest. We even found a Ferengi selling odds and ends. For a peoples that had only recently started venturing beyond their home planet, Defera was remarkably high tech. They seem to have found a perfect balance between technology and nature.

We joined the ambassador in the main square. He began to tell us of the recently excavated ruins nearby, which showed signs of being artifacts of the Preservers, an ancient race which distributed humanoid life throughout the galaxy and may have been the distant ancestors of us all.

His story was interrupted by a surprise Breen attack on the city. (Since this was on elite mode, I died instantly). We regrouped and fought the Breen throughout the city, finally pinning them down in the ruins outside the city, where we fought and defeated the Breen commander atop an ancient pyramid.

The pyramid is also the site of an ancient Preserver puzzle, which was puzzled out by FNS Senior Editor Longasc, and described in his separate pull-out photo section. The puzzle appears to be part of a longer holographic message; perhaps the other pieces will be found on other episodes in this series.

Ambassador Surah realizes it is not safe for him to remain on the planet, and returns to the Jeska to make his way to a better location. Before he leaves, he calls the fleet captains together and explains to us that he knows he should have told us about the Preserver artifacts ahead of time, so we could have become better prepared. He gives us the freedom of the planet and offers daily missions in the area if we have the time or inclination.

(The Klingons don’t get this last scene).

We took our leave and went to do the new Deferan dailies. Unsurprisingly, they all dealt with protecting the sector against Breen attacks. Their cryo-based attacks were particularly devastating, leading many Federation captains wondering when they’d get cryo weapons for their own ships.

My ship, the USS Monterey, is furthest in the screenshot. Longasc’s Excelsior-class ship, the USS Amgarrak, is next; Thumupp’s escort, the USS Columbia, is closest.

The mission was so much fun, Longasc and I logged to our Klingon characters and did the whole thing over again!

“Cold Call” was a fantastic success. Player reaction on the forums has been very positive, aside from the usual trolls who don’t like anything. I am very much looking forward to next week’s episode, “Out in the Cold”.

While searching for a lost ship, the crew uncovers a plot to enslave the Deferi people.

Well, we can’t allow that, now, can we?

Cryptic starts their new weekly episode tomorrow, with “Cold Call”. I’m pretty excited to see what they’ve come up with! I’m not sure any subscription MMO has ever done weekly content updates before.

All players level 10 or higher will be able to access the Featured Episode: Cold Call starting at 11:00am PDT (6:00pm GMT) on Saturday, August 28.

Once the Episode is live, you may begin the new mission by traveling to the Defera Sector and contacting Deferi Ambassador Surah. (K, Surah, Surah?)

For more information about the Featured Episodes, go to http://www.startrekonline.com/feature_episodes/, and if that just points to this message, I’m going to feel stupid for re-typing it.

I quit Frontierville tonight. No big deal. I ended up playing it a lot longer than I thought I would, actually. I got to a point in FV where I’d just log in once in the morning and once again at night, harvest stuff, visit neighbors, see what folks were up to. Some people arranged their homesteads so that they just had mass herds of animals that they’d tend to; otherwise made gigantic farms; some folks just tried to make their homestead a pleasant looking place. There clearly could be a lot of creativity in the way the farms were laid out, and Zynga holds frequent contests to find the most innovative designs.

I was surprised to discover just how like an MMO Frontierville was. You level. You do quests. You group together with friends to do large tasks, but there’s plenty to do on your own. And it never, ever ends. I’d like to say the only real difference would be the begging from your friends for help, but … go listen to the general chat of any MMO out there. You’ll hear that same thing.

It’s not a mystery to me now why Richard Garriott is looking toward social gaming as the future. If a decent social game can keep someone hooked for a couple months, and a great one perhaps half a year, then you can make an entirely new game from scratch every six months and just ride the money wave. Such a quick develop/release cycle means you really have the chance to innovate and iterate — a potent combination that could quickly move social gaming in directions we wouldn’t expect from the glut of Farmville clones and city building sims that glut the genre.

Likely the most odious thing about these social games is the implied requirement to get lots of people helping you. I’ve seen people who must have fifty or a hundred people helping them; the forums for these games are jam packed with people begging for additional friends to help them along.

Play a few games that had you adding a couple hundred strangers to your friends list in order to progress, and Facebook will be useless for anything else, to you. Having quit Frontierville, I need to go through and unfriend people I only friended for that. But, they all seem like such NICE people, and why can’t we be friends? And so I probably won’t.

The example of All Points Bulletin, which blew $100 million on a game that lasted a month, shows only that when you fail on an MMO, you fail HARD. You could make hundreds of social games for that much money, and turn them out much faster.

With so many MMOs coming out these days, I’m feeling a little numb. Assaulted by screen shots; I can’t remember the details from one to the other. I cling to a few high profile releases and no longer blithely install every F2P that comes my way.

A sheer overload of social games will do the same for the Facebook generation. There’s only so many farms you can build, after all, and your friends won’t follow you to every game you’d like to try.

So. I finished with Frontierville, Kingdoms of Camelot, Virtual Villagers and My Empire. Office Heroes will hit the paper shredder once I see if anything special happens when I hit max rep. City of Wonders has the rest of the weekend while I write an article about it. Then I’ll be looking for something new, an RPG, perhaps.

If this is the future, I want to be a part of it.

To answer my own question: Nothing special happens when you get to max rep in Office Heroes.