West Karana

Well, first of all, I’m not playing WAR because I’m at work.

But even when not working, I have a bunch of games I’m already playing. And its exciting stuff for all of them!

* EverQuest — Nostalgia FTW. You know, I don’t think we’ve ever had an official group xp night in the same zone twice. The only time we revisited a place was Sol B and Permafrost when we were farming the dragons. And we have still only seen a small fraction of the zones in the game. Friday, we grouped in Plane of Storms, Warslik Woods and Dagnor’s Cauldron for various things — all new zones for us on a group night. Small fraction of total zones. It’s wild how big EQ is.

* EverQuest II — Getting the guild ready for guild halls is going to take more time at the loom to get my level up to the point where I can go on crafting missions as either tailor or jeweler. Plus, the construction of the griffin towers and teleport spires happened while I was off in EQ and World of Warcraft respectively, so this is one world event I am determined not to miss. Also, I need to finish the Veksar quests. My group bailed out at the last mob for no good reason, even though I could easily keep the boss mob mezzed while the group killed the adds. They just decided to leave.

* Vanguard — Vanguard got a new game update yesterday, haven’t had a chance to see if Tipa the Startled Halfling Bard and Henry Stout the Astonished Disciple have gotten their eyelids back. Plus, I need to finish Stout Henry goes to War. Last week’s craziness pushed everything back a week.

* Guild Wars: Nightfall — I actually have played this some, though I didn’t write about it because it went terribly. So I have to go back and try the next mission again. It wasn’t the game’s fault. My head just wasn’t in gaming last week.

* Wizard 101 — I love this game. Meeting Gnewt and his wife, and then right after making a new friend and doing a VERY TOUGH instance together that took a LOT of teamwork, strategy and deck management, rekindled my love for the game. It’s an MMO which does things differently. That’s what we WANT, right? If only they had an adults-only server that drops the kid protection features.

* Metaplace — I was just offered the opportunity to be part of the beta test. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, and in fact if Spore hadn’t taken over my life this week, Metaplace surely would have.

* City of Heroes/Villains — When Issue 13 comes out. I am going to HAVE to take a few days and see if my dream of becoming a pro game designer could be more than a dream by WRITING some missions. Can I craft a great story and also design interesting levels and challenges? Here’s my chance to find out.

So which of these do I give up for WAR?

I don’t have time for the games I am ALREADY playing. I wanted to start writing a series on free-to-play games, but the three hours or so a night I have to myself are already overscheduled, so I have no chance to do more… even though I want to.

Fighting evil by moonlight	Filing papers by daylight
Always ready for a real fight, she is the one named… oops, sorry.

City of Heroes’ Issue 13 code name: Architect, is going to be introducing DAY JOBS!!! Because, staying up all night fighting good and evil alike just isn’t tiring enough, you have to put in your eight hours at a job. EVE Online has had offline progression from Day 1. Having your character progress in some way even while not logged in is genius, though this is more along the lines of The Sims’ day-job-you-never-actually-see than EVE’s skill training, which occurs whether you are logged in or not.

Where you log out determines your job for the day. Log out in a university, and you’re a Scholar, and you earn Salvage. Log out in a hospital, and you’re a Caregiver, and get Health Regeneration buffs. Any place of note you can log out, gives you SOME sort of job. As well as the stuff you get just for doing the job, there are badges and titles available if you do the job consistently enough, and they increase your earnings for the job. Do multiple jobs and get Accolades for even more rewards.

My ex-main that I haven’t logged in for a year or so would be Paragon City Mayor by now, I bet. Though I imagine they will cap the amount of rewards you can accrue while logged out.

But that isn’t the best thing. Issue 13 also brings along player-generated missions and story arcs. This is the sort of thing which will be the salvation of MMOs, in exactly the same way it’s been the salvation of FPS and RTS games for the past decade. Give the players the tools to make their own content, and a lot of it will be crap. But some of it will be an order of magnitude beyond what anyone else has done.

Write GOOD missions as determined by the community, and even more exclusive rewards open up.

This is VERY exciting stuff. CoX has the big advantage here in that their mission environments are procedurally generated, whereas games like World of Warcraft make theirs by hand. It’s good to see they are taking what I consider a weakness — bland, generic missions — and turning them into a strength.

I was writing a new Stout Henry story last night, when I got the idea to try and model him with the character creators from all the MMOs I had which could actually make unique characters. That left out EverQuest and World of Warcraft right off the bat; neither one has many character choices and people generally look a lot like other people of their race and gender.

I started off with City of Heroes, because its character creator is legendary. Unfortunately, the options are not tuned so much for a medieval adventurer wearing simple clothes and wielding a staff. Still, after a couple of tries, it didn’t come out too bad… but it wasn’t Stout Henry.

Next up was EverQuest 2. Unlike EverQuest, EQ2’s character creator is pretty customizable. Stout Henry would be a bruiser in EQ2 terms, and I soon had a decent looking character, except that the clothes were entirely wrong. Also, he’s a little TOO clean cut. Personal hygiene is not at the top of Stout Henry’s priority list.

Given the discussion we were having yesterday about the Vanguard character models, I figured I’d have a go with theirs. When I saw the Qalian human disciple, I’d found Stout Henry. Nothing to be done but level him up to 3 and buy a staff, and there he was. My hero.

City of Villains

EverQuest II

Vanguard

Since I was in City of Heroes *anyway*, I decided to look in on my mastermind, the villainous Tara Mythcrafter. Next up on her mission list was a mayhem mission, where she would go to Paragon City and raise havoc and rob a bank and survive somehow. I failed the mission right at the end. But I had realized why I always fail these missions — I keep thinking the point of the mission is to rob a bank. That is NOT the case. The POINT of the mission is to cause MAYHEM — killing the good citizens of Paragon City, blowing up cars, breaking through barricades, defeating so-called heroes, and in general, making your mark on the world.

Next mission sent me to the PvP area, so I went to Booty Bay to look around. Some sort of player-run PvP battle was just ending, so I made a note to look them up when one was starting, and went to Pocket D, the CoX nightclub, to hang out with some fellow costumed adventurers.

There weren’t enough people there to make it interesting, so I accepted a team invite and as anyone who looked at Xfire saw, spent the night in CoV, doing missions and hitting level 19.

After the team broke up, I got a new mayhem mission from my contact, returned to Paragon City and played the mission how it was meant to be played. I blew up EVERYTHING. Cars, trucks, mailboxes, bus stops, phone booths, cardboard boxes… here’s me and my crew villainously attacking a dumpster.

We robbed the bank, too, and defeated the heroes they sent at us. Afterward I kept blowing up cars and cardboard boxes, working on badges, until the timer ran out.

I did get some writing done, but not enough, so that will be tonight’s job. I hope I don’t get sidetracked again….

I haven’t done a “what I’m playing” thing for awhile. So here’s my current roster of games, and I’ll start off with what I’m NOT playing. And that game would be Mythos.

MMOs:

Mythos had one of the strongest beta communities on record, with unparalleled access to devs. Community Manager Taylor Baldree would hold court in the #mythos IRC channel every night. Devs would respond daily on the forums. And all that was leading to a game that I very much wanted to play. With Hellgate: London’s reprieve by Namco Bandai, let’s hope there IS hope for Mythos as well.

Pi Story and Florensia — I played a few hours of Pi Story in closed beta, but it ended before I got too far in the game. Florensia, I didn’t get into the closed beta but has since gone open. Pi Story is a 2D side scroller MMO in the vein of Secret of Mana or Legend of Mana — a fast, action RPG MMO. Florensia is a Japanese pirate/fantasy adventure which has been compared to OnePiece. I like Japanese MMOs because they generally are closer to Western sensibilities than Chinese or Korean MMOs. I really want to get back to Pi Story, but will probably be on Florensia for a few days to check it out. Huge production values, I want to get a look at it.

Wizard 101 — W101 has been my addiction the past couple of weeks, but it is getting a little grindy and bugs in the Tomb of Storms in Krokotopia are making it difficult to progress. It IS beta, after all, so I am not too concerned. I am about at the point where I can write a decent first look at it, and then sit back and wait for release. This is one darn addictive game, but I begin to dread battles because as you move up in levels, each battle takes more and more time. Even with other people, the games have become so fantastically strategic that it’s hard to see how well their target audience does once they’re facing two rows of Rank 4 Elites and your deck contains only three 404 point heals…

City of Villains — love the game, love the characters, just don’t have time for the grind. I didn’t even actually intend on playing it last weekend, I just wanted to use the character creator. I just kept getting swallowed up into mission groups — random people would invite me all the time, and all but one of the groups were great.

EverQuest — Tuesday and Friday nights are for EQ. It took awhile to get used to the game again after so long away, but I am very comfortable there once again. Finding groups outside the Nostalgia nights is still a hassle, so, as when I played before, I don’t bother looking for groups. I just run around and explore or work on my epic. I don’t hold out the hope that the next expansion will bring anything for casual players; sounds like the whole faction grind, tiered high end raiding system they love so much now. But that’s okay. They already wrote MY EverQuest, and it’s still there to play.

EverQuest 2 — I haven’t logged on EQ2 again since I finished my storm armor quests. I hate soloing, and I only stuck it through the considerable soloing for that assassin armor because I wanted to take a screenshot of my character wearing it. My goals in EQ2 — getting my troubadour’s mythical epic, or finding a high level casual raiding guild — seem impossible. My level 80 troubadour and inquisitor are guildless, and it’s so depressing not having anyone to talk to when I log in that I don’t spend much time playing. I think my inquisitor might still be sitting in the bottom of RE2 where she was when she was kicked out of the group so they could bring someone else’s healer in. My troubadour has been unable to even get a RE2 group, and I have no idea how I am supposed to report on EQ2 happenings when I don’t even have a guild :/ It’s tough and depressing.

Vanguard — I’ve been spending some time in Vanguard, running around, doing quests, and hoping to get a good sense for the current state of the game. Again, being guildless and playing entirely solo are so crushingly soul-draining that I can’t play long before I just want to fill the emptiness with a game that has people I can talk to in it.

Looking back, it looks like I have been largely playing games with easy grouping and fast-paced gameplay. Not surprisingly, these are the two trends I think herald the forthcoming next wave of MMOs that will supplant the WoW-likes.

I tend to play City of Heroes/Villains in spurts. Months will go buy without anything, and then I’ll play for eight hours straight.

I have lots of reasons not to play that much. Most of the game is in the character creator, which is justifiably awesome. Once I’ve made my character, she’s made and barring inventions and trips to the tailor shop, will look exactly the same at 50 as at 1.

Another thing that doesn’t change, is missions. When you’re soloing, missions can be challenging, but in a group of eight or so people, you just find a crowd of mobs, use every ability, rez, and move on. I’m so busy trying to keep up and not get lost that I don’t know the plot, if it even has one, or what we’re doing. It’s a frantic hairball of confusion until “MISSION COMPLETE!” displays, and we exit the mission and head to the next red star on the compass.

By making the game random, it becomes meaningless. I know there are task forces, at least on the good side, but at least on the evil side, nobody was doing them. And I’ve been on task forces; they are the same thing as random missions, except with a plot (which everyone ignores).

I guess that’s why I play in spurts. I play until my character gets her travel power. I know there is nothing to look forward to except variations on what I have already seen, so there’s no point to move on. I have three genin and one jounin ninja in my team, I do sabotage missions in Paragon City with ease, and in a team my ninjas do dps and keep crap off me while I ice storm the ground, snow storm them so they move slowly and gale them against walls with superstrength winds. I might grab some healing powers after I get my final ninja training power, but aside from that, what is there to look forward to but another sewer mission?

My love for the superhero genre beats itself against the iron barrier of CoX’s random mission design. Let’s hope Champions Online’s handcrafted missions bring on the perfect storm that brings the superhero MMO into the mainstream. DC Universe Online? I dunno, all I saw in the trailer was Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and that crowd, and since I know you can’t play as the DC superheroes, I’m not sure why they showed them. Who really cares what they do? You won’t be playing DCU to watch some NPC be the hero. You play because YOU are the hero.

Okay, DCU trailer bit: Wonder Woman. She can fly without her invisible jet? When did THAT happen? And can you imagine a worse flying suit than a bustier and panties? Everytime she lands, she must spend ten minutes picking bugs out of her cleavage, while the guys just brush the crud right off. I wonder how she keeps her skin looking good when she has been running around outside, mostly naked, for forty years.

I was dinking around on Wizard 101, when I thought it would be really cool to see if I could take Tara from Wizard 101, and put her in City of Villains. It’s supposed to let you make near any costume, right?

Well, turns out, first, CoV doesn’t do a great job of modeling children. Fine, so it would be a grown up Tara. And instead of the blue/blue outfit, one with that expensive purple I can’t really afford in W101. No peaked caps, so I went capless. And dragon wings because, well, they are neat. So say hello to Tara Mythcrafter — 23 Adept Conjurer in W101, 18 Magic Mastermind in City of Villains. Her minions are ninjas. She herself controls the wind and wields the power of storms.

Turns out it was a double xp weekend in CoV, so I joined a mission group and, well, levels in mission groups are crazy.

This photographer was taking pictures of me and my boys as we took out some flying bozos in the Cape district. So when I was through, I served him with a DMCA take down notice. I showed him the notice, and then I took him down.

The funny thing was, after I checked the pictures in the camera, they weren’t of me after all. Think I could get a good price for it on eBay?

PS. Sharp-eyed readers might wonder where Tara’s dragon went, and where the unicorn came from? Funny thing about that. Turns out its mating season, and Boomer went to the warm beach sands in the south to mate and lay her clutch. So I went to the pet store and asked if I could get something a little unusual. The storekeeper said, cute girl like you needs a UNICORN! And I said, no, no, everyone has those. Do you have a werewolf or a vampire or something? Maybe a basilisk or a venemous snake? Or even a spider? He said no, he didn’t sell those sorts of things. I pointed to the sign above the cash register, “Ask about our Vampires, Werewolves, Basilisks, Snakes and JUST IN, Jumping Spiders!”.

He said they were all out, and he gave me a unicorn. Oh, well. Lily is a nice companion, and she doesn’t bite, like Boomer did. Still, I miss the old girl and hope her mating season goes well.

Nostalgia the Guild took most of my time this last weekend. It’s supposed to just be a very casual, once-a-week grouping experience through EverQuest’s old world, and it shouldn’t really require as much work as I’ve put into it. However, I don’t see how it could have taken any less, either. If you have a static group, how do you keep everything arranged? Maybe I just want everything planned out.

I haven’t been getting a lot of cooperation from SOE. Their guild creation page appears to work but never gives any sort of confirmation, and a petition revealed that all the times I had filled out the form were pointless, as the request was not in their system. The guild creation page mentions that you might not hear anything from them for weeks or longer at the best of times. This is frankly unacceptable. I won’t be a nice consumer and silently wait weeks or longer without knowing that the request has been at least received. I’ll call SOE tech support this afternoon. Creating a guild for a small number of people who are returning to EQ for a time should NOT require petitioning and a call to tech support and weeks of time. Ever.

Aside from that, EQ is going well. I did the halfling ranger armor quests given out in Rivervale and made level 15 during the camps. Every time I have done these quests — I’ve done them for my Stromm cleric (and wore at least one piece into my 40s, the shoulders), I did them for my druid for looks, and I did them for my rogue — it’s been camping those stupid thorn drakelings, and this weekend was no exception. Most of the experience, though, came from camping the orc lumberjacks beyond the Wall. I wasn’t sure if they had placeholders, so I killed all the wandering goblins and orcs and anything else that conned blue to me. I dinged 15 before I’d gotten enough of the right kind of orc lumberjack, so I gave up because I didn’t want to get too far ahead of the rest of Nostalgia. The last I checked, we were spread out between 10 and 15, which is very good as we head to Kurn’s Tower basement this coming Friday.

There’s just something funny about seeing a flowering tree in the middle of Kor’Sha. Like, oh, this place is so dreary. Wouldn’t a tree right here brighten up the place? It just radiates health and good living! I hadn’t know about the warden tree before I was doing some sort of quest with my son (who played a warden) and a couple of other people, and was getting kind of annoyed because whenever I tried to fight something, it seemed there was always a tree in my way. I’d move a little ways off to get a clean shot and THERE WOULD BE THE TREE AGAIN! WTF??? I think Andy nearly killed himself laughing. He’d been summoning it, of course. Anyway, we cleared the Temple of Kor’Sha and killed the Overking all in a couple of hours, which was really a hopeful sign. We’ve been taking two nights to do it recently. Perhaps it was the addition of a couple of old friends from Eternal Chaos. I don’t know if they were just there for the progression kill or if they will be staying, but it was nice to do it all in one night. Maybe soon we can begin work on Leviathan again.

I spent a little time in Mythos this weekend. I have been leveling a satyr bloodletter on the FFA PvP “Shadowlands” server. Since towns are deadly places, people mostly stay out of them except for quick runs in to sell. There are no safe spots and as such, there is no chatter, no community, no nothing except tombstones and sudden death from above. Seconds after I snapped this screenshot, a gremlin pyromancer ported in, pinned me down with a pet and blasted me to bits. Even in FFA PvP, if you’re going to build any sort of community, you have to have some safe spots. Compared to the vibrant, active community on the PvE side, PvP seemed barren and dull.

Turns out a lot of Massively writers are MMO fans — who knew? And a lot of them play City of Heroes/Villains. So, take a bunch of people who work together and play the same MMO and pretty soon you have a supergroup. Ours is called Maliciously. I transferred Madame Scurry v1.0 from Virtue to Freedom and spent time running a few missions. EQ is hard to return to, but CoX welcomes the occasional player. You just mash the buttons for the win. Stalkers are particularly nice, since they cannot be seen by enemies and have a one-shot assassination from hiding attack. It’s the power of the cockroach not to be seen and to survive any disaster. Scurry lives!

It’s been a little over a week since I started blogging over at Massively, and while I am really enjoying myself, I think I still have a lot to learn about story ideas. It’s all about the page views, right, and what brings in the eyeballs better than our dear old friend, porn. So I suggested this to the editors, and they pretty much informed me that they already had plenty of Second Life coverage, and maybe I could work on this piece about “Shoulder armor through the ages — how high is too high?”.

“No no no!” I cried. Well, typed. “What if I just go to various games, undress my own characters, and make a calendar from those pictures?”

Blank stares. Let me give you an idea: Concrete floors have more expression. So, grumbling beneath my breath, I vowed to do that article and show them just how good an idea it was. Here, then, for your enjoyment: Massively Multiplayer Women. (They didn’t like the title, either… hadn’t they ever seen Age of Conan!!!???)

City of Villains: Sometimes, it’s not what you wear, but how you wear it. Black Oyl was a petroleum researcher at Texxon when she fell into a tanker full of $110/barrel crude. This would have been fatal if the light of the brightest Gamma Ray Burst ever recorded hadn’t hit Earth at that precise moment. Black Oyl emerged from the tanker wearing a dollar’s worth of oil on a five dollar body and fights oil executives by seeing that their stretch limousines are detailed poorly in the Houston luxury car wash.

Dungeon Siege 2: “But DS2 isn’t even an MMO!” pointed out the editors. Always blocking my flow with details! You’ve heard Chalice Eversong’s story a thousand times, it’s the kind of growing-up story everyone can relate to. You and a friend get drunk one night and sign up as mercenaries for an evil army, and even though you really suck at fighting and get your butt kicked by tree branches, somehow, it turns out you’re a legendary hero and are the only one that can defeat your boss. And then your boyfriend dies, you get captured by tree people, forced to do menial labor all the time, blah blah blah, it’s happened to all of us. Chalice just wants to show that just because you’re prophesied to save the world doesn’t mean you can’t let your hair down with your party once in awhile. Hey, that’s why it’s called a PARTY!

EverQuest 2: “I’m NOT doing this!” yelled Nashuya. “Oh, yes you are,” I said, as I stowed her armor, bit by bit, in her pack. “This is a GREAT idea for an article, and you’re gonna just have to grin and bear it!” This was before my editors said that actually, it was a crappy idea for an article. Nashuya’s blue-tinged skin positively glows in the light of the corpse-flames of Fallen Gate. Nashuya protests too much. Way back when EQ2 first came out, player characters were assumed to be shipwreck survivors without a penny — or armor — to their names, and looked just like this until they did some quick armor quests. Now new characters come complete with armor, weapons, and a selection of promising spells and combat abilities. It’s just like being back on newbie island, Nash!

Sins of a Solar Empire: Yeah, I know. Don’t start with me, okay? The Kor Battleship “EDS Eliza” is two kilometers of the meanest hunk of ship in three systems. She appears here clad in nothing but ten meter thick electro-strong neutronium plating. She’ll give ya the ride of your life and then kick you back to that ice planet with the arctic research lab from which you came.

Dream of Mirror Online: No, this ISN’T my character. DOMO characters are CHILDREN. What kind of pervert ARE you? This is one of DOMO’s Mirror Kings. Yup. In DOMO, even the guys look hot. Boys and girls alike can look forward to what they can become. And, yeah, this may look like some high-end animated cartoon, but this is actually what DOMO looks like. Pretty cool, huh?

EverQuest: Relaxing in the guild hot tub, Vah Shir beastlord Shinai Oftheancients lets her guard down for this candid shot. Her name…. well, that’s a long story. See, we had this guy in the guild that wanted every single weapon that dropped that he could use. The weapon he wanted more than anything else in the world ever was one called the Shinai of the Ancients, which dropped in the Plane of Time. So prior to every PoT run, he’d send tells to every other person who could wield it and ask them to let him have it. He would also helpfully suggest to officers that he deserved to be given it outright, should it drop. So I made this beastlord, named her Shinai, got her to level twenty so she could have a last name, got an officer to invite her into the guild and proceeded to wonder, loudly, where my weapon dropped. Fun times!

Mythos: Wuvwy Angel is just a large cyclops in a small world. Since, in Mythos, player characters are monsters (gremlins, satyrs, cyclops and most monstrous of all, humans), Wuvwy can’t complain about not being understood. She just has trouble getting people to see her soft, feminine side. Me? I’ve never seen anyone prettier. Nobody can wear a torn nightshirt like she does! Now, put down the gun, please? Oh yeah — open beta soon, guys.

Vanguard: Huh? This IS undressed! In the Victorian-age sensibilities of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the best skin is covered skin. Tipa is a fantastic bard; you might even say she’s outstanding in her field. Get it? She’s actually out STANDING in her FIELD! *Cough* sorry. Am I done yet? Oh, one more?

Pirates of the Burning Sea: Liz Strickland is dressed for the Caribbean SUN, but what she likes best is the Caribbean FUN. Stepping off her Bermuda sloop, the first thing she asks the dockmaster is where the heck the disco is in this rat-infested excuse for an outpost of the glorious United Kingsom. When the sun goes down in the British Empire, baby, the lights come UP.

—

Well, anyway, you can see what a brilliant idea this was. The editors just don’t understand me. Tomorrow, another article they rejected: Implementing the I WIN! button in World of Warcraft.

Dr. Destroyer in Champions Online

Champions Online is the new game from the developers of City of Heroes and the defunct Marvel Universe Online. When I first heard the name of their new game (and anyone who doesn’t believe we’re seeing the essence of what Marvel Universe Online would have looked like can just rest easy in their wrongness), I immediately slipped back twenty years to one of my favorite pencil and paper RPG campaigns ever.

Champions laughed at Dungeon’s and Dragons’ character creation. Roll DICE? Take a chance with your character? Heck, everyone I knew basically just made up their own stats, even if they had to reroll a dozen times to get them. In the end, we just had a point total for our new characters and we set their stats how we liked them.

In D&D, that was cheating. In Champions, that was the GAME.

Moonmist in City of Heroes

Levels? Who needs them? We had powers — we could make our own powers. One of my favorite characters was Moonmist, who could bend light and darkness to create illusions and misdirect; her power waxed and waned with the phase of the moon, were most powerful at night. She didn’t need to kill people. She could use illusions to lead people to bad ends, if need be.

See how it went? Her powers had disadvantages — and you could use those to make your powers more formidable. The powers were based on criteria that I made up. And Moonmist, and the others in her super group, solved crimes and battled villains in their own way, and they didn’t answer to NOBODY. I remember my team-mate Doctor Tachyon, who had the power of probability — he could choose from a selection of possible near futures to pick the best one for him — for instance, to dodge a gunshot — and also had a short-range quantum teleportation. You didn’t play dice with Dr. Tachyon. And there was no point in locking your door to him, either.

These are the things we had in Champions. We didn’t have to level up to get these powers. Just like in the comics, we had them from Day 1. As we completed missions, we could earn points to increase our powers or remove disadvantages (to make it possible for Moonmist to use her powers on moonless days at high noon, for instance, though she never did completely earn out that disadvantage if I remember right).

When I recreated her in City of Heroes, I was able to get her costume close to how I remembered it, but her powers were limited to those any illusion controller might have — illusory wounds and some light-based crowd control. Those are good, useful powers, but so common and don’t particularly reflect any sort of creativity on my part.

Fantasy Hero, another Hero Systems ruleset

I couldn’t find my Champions book on the spur of the moment, but I did dig up my old Fantasy Hero book. It was buried in with all the comics I used to read back then. I was way more interesting when I was younger.

After Champions, I turned to writing and running my own games, which I ran via email over the Internet as it existed in the mid-80s. The company I worked for, Digital Research, would phone up our link, Amdahl, a couple of times a day, and we’d get our email and news all in one lump. I called my game Timespan, and it was based on Michael Reaves’ “Shattered World” books, using the Fantasy Hero rules. I later moved it all to CompuServe and PeopleLink, and by the time I finished, it was three years later and five campaigns of ever increasing size and scope. (If you were a Timespan player, LET ME KNOW!!!)

All Hero Systems games, since they used the same rule set, could work together. So I could take a character from a Champions campaign and bring them (somehow) to a Fantasy Hero campaign and they would fit right in. Or take them both and put them in one of those super spy campaigns. The spies might wonder what those heroes and wizards were doing, but they could fight one another, team up or whatever.

So imagine if Cryptic is successful with Champions Online. It has an amazing character creator, a power builder that is based on a genre-independent rule set — and then they decide to make a follow-up fantasy MMO, based around the same engine.

And the same characters, because, they all have the same character generator at the core.

Now take this a step further. Let’s say they just release the character creator, alone, and allow them to be used in people’s OWN CAMPAIGNS. So, you make your SuperWallBuster Guy, and team up with some friends, and then you all group up and come to a world Joe IndependentDesigner created, adventure there for awhile, have fun. Another friend is playing in a Wild West world, and wants to come along. NO PROBLEM. Your next adventure finds you on a floating space hulk, find your way out before the aliens prowling the corridors get ya.

Given a fantastic character creation system, and a rule set that allows play in different genres, AND the ability to have a rival/arch-villain around to make things interesting, and add some sort of adventure creation system… and you have just made my dream game. THAT’S the one I want to play.

And version 1.0 of it is coming out next year… okay. That’s it. That’s the game that could get me to switch. City of Heroes was too repetitious and didn’t let me make unique characters (though they looked unique… they weren’t).

Cryptic, I already love your game and all I have are screenshots and memories of a game I enjoyed more than even D&D. I want to be a part of your game. Call me, write me…. :)

A couple of friends from EQ1 play casually on City of Heroes. They still play on EQ1; I moved to EQ2, but I miss playing with them. Turns out they occasionally play on City of Heroes, although, unfortunately, not on my server (Virtue). So I remade my “main” on Virtue, Madame Scurry, to play with them on Liberty.

I hadn’t been happy with Madame Scurry’s old look. Basically, well… she looked too *nice*, and not much like the cockroach from which she gets her powers of stealth and regeneration. And plus, c’mon… the original Madame Scurry looks more like a hero than a villain.

I’m all about the villains… so I took the opportunity of restarting to completely redesign the character.

First, her costume is far more chitinous. Antennae, of course… that should have been in the first one. A more interesting face, and a nicer looking hair color. All sorts of sharp things. I was trying to make v1’s shoulders look like beetle shell but that just didn’t work.

Now… she looks villainous.

Carlisle and Binxs had been powerleveling me, but that left me very low on enhancements, since many times they’d complete my missions before I even got to them. I’ve been doing a little soloing for more.

I’ve been reconsidering the whole Stalker class, anyway. I always seem to play stealth classes, or healers, in every game. It might be time to knock over the apple cart and try something new, like a tank or a blaster… Even a mastermind.

There’s been a lot of topics going around the blogosphere, and I’ve been holding off on them because, well, I don’t really have anything groundbreaking to say about them.

But, what the heck.

eBook Readers

First up is a non-MMO one, but something I’ve covered extensively in this blog — eBook readers. “Ask Slashdot” fielded a question from a reader who asked Which eBook Reader is Best? The comments fell predictably into the camps that felt nothing could come close to the experience of reading an actual book; PDAs, cell phones and laptop computers were more appropriate for the task; Sony’s Reader comes from Sony and nothing more needs to be said (these are people angry less for the SWG NGE than for Sony’s rootkit adventures and their role as a quarter of the allegedly evil* RIAA). I use my Sony Reader every day, and daily rediscover old friends — yesterday brought Fred Saberhagen’s “First Book of Swords” and Julian May’s “The Many-Colored Land” onto my Reader. I didn’t comment on Slashdot, though, because… well, commenting on Slashdot on matters of opinion is pretty pointless. I doubt many would be sympathetic to my “I use a Reader because it looks good and is REALLY EASY TO READ” stance anyway.

* Evil. What does evil mean in this day and age — and of course, by evil, I mean the Dungeons and Dragons definition. I’ve been categorizing people according to their D&D alignment. The killer in “No Country for Old Men”, strictly adhered to his moral code — that’s lawful. But then, he would kill random people. That’s chaotic. So in the end, he’s Neutral Evil. Sony is too large a company for one alignment, but I think Sony BMG’s anti-customer stance has to make them at least Lawful Evil.

Other MMO Genres

Next up: What other genres, besides Fantasy and Sci-Fi, could make a successful MMO? Well, I don’t know if a decent MMO in either genre has yet been made. I was watching Battlestar Galactica Razor last night and… wow… what I wouldn’t give to be part of that world, in a game. Or even Star Trek. Just… part of that world. Eve *perhaps* comes closest. Tabula Rasa is just a balls-out shoot ‘em up, SWG was the dullest game I ever played… I think there’s plenty of room in SF for a decent MMO. As for Fantasy… that genre is still waiting for the break-out game. World of Warcraft? It’s a well-refined distillation of those that came before.

Other genres, though. Cthulhu mythos? Well, almost nothing ever happens in those stories. A person finds things are not as they seem, and is then exposed to implacable, faceless horror. Same problem with horror, in general, as a genre. You can’t scare people all the time, because it loses its sting. But you have to show them the money at some point, or they get bored.

The spy genre we’re getting in “The Agency”. That looks like an arcadish shoot-em-up, but I don’t know much about it. I doubt it will explore every cranny of the spy genre, though. What if you had an MMO where you had a public persona, let’s say, newspaper reporter for the New Zork Times; and a private persona, let’s say, assassin. You would gain levels by doing missions on your private persona, but the more people outside your faction who knew what you really were, the more chance your public persona would be destroyed, and you’d have to start a new one? Dual advancement paths, secrets, distrust everyone… I think that could work!

War… war is well-understood. Of all the genres, I think this is the most widely played. From tactical games, to shoot-em-ups, RTSs, FPSs, we have endless games of people blowing each other up in interesting and exciting ways. How about… peace? A game built around negotiations and diplomacy? Probably be dull as dishes, but let’s explore it a little. You are a politician, or you are a member of a diplomatic envoy, or you are an ambassador. And so is everyone else. You have a variety of goals you must advance, other things you must not allow, and some things you can be flexible on. This is like those old high school Model United Nations of which, as a true geek even back then, I was a member. Politics and negotiation was *fun*.

And if that fails, well, there’s always war.

Truth is, I think the limitations of technology have been and are still blocking that first great MMO from being made. In the next ten years, I bet we see an MMO that completely changes the genre. Maybe then a game can finally approach the complexity of a movie or a TV show.

Favorite MMOs

Oh yes. If it’s the end of the year, it must be time for lists. Fine, I can play that game.

#1: Nothing. I have not yet played my favorite MMO. I can say that it will be a game where the players have a great measure of control and are active participants in the creation of the game, though talented game-masters and designers will still guide the game into fun paths.

#2: EverQuest. The game itself was just okay. But the community surrounding the game has never been matched. Almost nine years later, you can meet an EQ1 player, ask them their server, and launch into many, many stories about the guilds and people they knew. The game was never as strong as its players, and SOE is still making money from the bonds people formed.

#3: EverQuest 2. Game-wise, EQ2 is today the game EQ1 wanted to be. I think (this is opinion, folks) that it is the strongest MMO out there as regarding scope, variety, looks and gameplay. I haven’t played anywhere near all MMOs or even all fantasy MMOs, but I wouldn’t be playing EQ2 today if I didn’t think it was the best. But, you say, EQ1 is higher on the list? EQ1 still wins on community. I just can’t stand the game itself any more. It underscores, though, how important I feel community is that even after I stopped liking the game very much, I still played for a couple of years.

#4. World of Warcraft. The first thing I look for in one of these lists is, how high did they score the big giant of MMOs? The second things I look for is where EQ2 falls. It’s hard to overstate WoW’s impact. I was playing EQ1 when WoW beta came out. From the time I started in WoW beta to the time it released, I played no other game. It was that gripping. I also felt, when it released, that I had seen the entire game and had no interest in playing it again, having leveled a night elf druid and a human mage. A year later, I took another look, this time as the Horde, and was pulled in just as strongly a second time. And having brought that char to 60 and raided MC and Onyxia and ZG, once again, felt I’d finished WoW, and unsubscribed. I don’t look back fondly on WoW, a lot of it was really boring, but then, a lot of it was fun and it was always compelling until raiding turned it from a game into a job.

#5. Final Fantasy XI Online. Other games dabbled with requiring players to be skilled, but none made it as much a requirement as FFXI. With precise, to the second teamwork to pull off combos, and having to work together so well to get the experience multipliers, no game I have ever played before or since made such a wide chasm between the good and the bad players — or between the West and the East. This was a game made for a different culture, one that valued following directions and working as a team, a culture far different than the more laissez-faire Western culture that celebrates lone heroes. If you could make it in a Japanese group, and gain their respect, then you could get a glimpse of a different kind of gameplay. FFXI was wonderful in a good group. In a bad group, it was about as rewarding as chewing bricks. It was an experience I will always remember.

#6. Dark Age of Camelot. I derided this initially as “EQ-Lite”, but when I got into it, I found the PvE boring but the RvR portion extremely fun. Whether sneaking into enemy territories to take out some hapless newbs, or trying to do some PvE in the frontier while being stalked, or the massive keep battles, or the battle-lines at EM. The battlegrounds defined the casual PvP experience, and I enjoyed their re-imagining in WoW and look forward to it again in WAR. In the end, I went back to EQ1 when Luclin came out, but I always did enjoy myself in DAoC. I tried coming back a couple of times, but the game had changed too much.

#7. City of Heroes. I’m scraping the virtual bucket here, because I don’t really consider CoH an MMO. It has nothing of the scope of the other games on this list. But for casual beat-em-up action, it’s hard to beat. I just find myself playing it once or twice, then several months later, unsubscribing, as it just doesn’t have the pull to make me want to log into CoH vs some other game.

#8. Star Wars Galaxies. It’s hard to call this a game, or what I did when I logged in, playing. I was intrigued by unusual professions such as entertainer, and so after a brief fling as a combat-type going out and running around animal burrows firing guns into dirt and stumps, I decided to go into cantina life and find fame and fortune on the glittering stage. It turned out to be tough to make conversation with people who had largely programmed their avatars to repeat the same actions in perpetuity while they went off and did something else with their lives. I’ve always had a problem with games that you pay not to play, and so I eventually also did something else with my life.

#9. EvE Online. I did like this game. I just didn’t know anyone else who played, and I hate playing by myself in an MMO, and so I didn’t last past the 14 day free trial. Mining and running missions just didn’t do it for me, and while my occasional madcap runs through low security space were exciting, they weren’t compelling. I spent most of my time in EvE thinking of cool names for my ships.

#10. Lord of the Rings Online. Where WoW took all the good things from the MMOs that came before it and melded them into something unique, LotRO took all of the really boring things from MMOs and melded them into something boring. Grind? Oh yes. Killing the same mobs over and over and over and over? Yup, check that one off. The world has a well-known plot and it’s your job to not be a part of that plot? Huh. PvP limited to artificially contrained “Monster Play”? Durnit, I wanted to level a goblin! Newbie grounds in the roots of the Misty Mountains, maybe finally leveling enough to threaten the despicable bright lands of the Shire! The game I wanted to play was not the game they made, and so when my free month ran out and a billing error canceled my account, I couldn’t find it in me to fix it.

While browsing Massively and reading the excellent article about the recent City of Herollians Meet and Greet, I saw they mentioned “Willpower” and “Dual Blades” as very new, player-chosen powers, of which I knew nothing when I picked “Willpower” as the secondary power set for my Energy Stalker. The ability to never be seen by anything ever. I love “Hide”, the first power in the “Willpower” set. I’m all like, “OH HAI, I IN UR BANK TAKING UR MONIES” in the Paragon City heist I soloed — and I killed that stupid hero, Flambeau, after a couple of really minor deaths, but still failed the mission (and of course I got the money, too). Maybe I needed to get to an exit?

Anyway.

I guess that explains why there were so many dual-blade brutes running around. And it also explains why I couldn’t find any build guides for Energy/Will Stalkers. Or in fact any mention of the power whatsoever.

Hiding, damage resistance and self-heals. Totally yum.

I thought I’d say hello to my City of Heroes/Villains characters again. Now that I am not paying for a second Station Pass subscription, I can check back in on my older games, like City of Heroes and World of Warcraft. I never had played City of Villains, actually, and I’d entirely forgotten how to play these games, so I started a new character to get in the swing of things — Madame Scurry. Yeah, I know, she should have had a science origin with a name like that… I got a lot of group invites for her. Most of the people I saw were playing brutes. Is that such a wonderful class?

Madame Scurry - Magic Stalker

Madame Scurry is no longer a Kafka fan. Once a postgrad archaeologist, she fell asleep in an ancient burial ground while reading Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and woke up a half-woman, half-roach. Disgusted with herself and seething with an anger which could not be controlled, she used her roach powers — stealth, indestructibility. quickness, and ferocity — to ransack libraries and museums, searching for a way back. She now works for Arachnos, channeling her rage toward the cleansing of the rogue island as the powerful shadow organization researches a way to return her to a normal appearance while preserving her valuable powers.

Naru is my first character, and my highest level — a level 21 illusion/empathy controller. It’s a pretty subtle class, and of course I am terrible at it now. Her phanton army and wide array of travel powers, though, make her fun on the run. Just flying around, taking on green groups for fun, I got several group invites. Someone out there’s trying to get me back, I think…

Naru is named after a character in the anime, Love Hina. And that’s pretty much it. Her secret identiry is that of a college-bound schoolgirl; but when danger calls, she transforms into the Night Witch and uses her powers of mind control and her spectral warriors to incapacitate the villains and bring them down.

The FIRST time I returned to CoH, I ALSO had forgotten how to play, and so I ALSO made a new character — The Amoy Tiger, a natural scrapper.

There are only twenty five Amoy Tigers left in the wild. Once there were thirty — until poachers stole some away, killing others. Young Xian Lao, who had spent her life caring for the untouched jungle in which lived the noble, threatened beasts, came across the mangled body of one — its pelt hacked off, teeth and eyes cut out, the paws severed — and vowed not to rest until she had brought the poachers to jungle justice, and rescued what tigers remain alive.

Tracking the poachers to Paragon City, Lao adopted the persona of the Amoy Tiger, using her highly trained reflexes and unparalleled tiger-style fighting techniques to stop crime wherever she finds it as she looks for sign of her beloved tigers.

Listen, me droogs, it’s time for a little of the old “ultra-violence”

NCSoft kindly sent along a notice that they’re releasing next week a box containing both the City of Heroes and City of Villains games, for one subscription fee.

I’ve had World of Warcraft as my “couple of minutes free” game since I stopped playing it full time last spring. But I can’t play that game any more. I log in, do the same thing I did with every other character, and log out. Nobody I knew when I was playing still plays (or they have moved to another server). The WoW churn rate is incredible. And yet this is considered the best MMO ever.

But I digress.

With the new expansion coming out, I have to decide to go back to WoW and level my priestess there to 70, join a non-dead guild and spend another three or four months getting current and seeing the new content, or just saying goodbye to WoW and moving on.

I’m thinking seriously of punting WoW and getting this new CoH/CoV box. Now I was getting pretty bored with CoH after it released, but a lot of time has passed and unlike WoW, the newbie experience has changed substantially. I doubt I’ll ever see my heroes Narusegawa, Doujinshi Girl or Jade Tiger again (okay, I was in an anime phase at the time). (Naru was as close to an exact copy of Love Hina’s Naru Narusegawa as I could make (ill/emp controller); Doujinshi Girl was a black-and-white girl-with-guns manga come to life (blaster); and Jade Tiger was a ninja, naturally (scrapper)).