West Karana

Hey, welcome back to the second in our exclusive series about the exciting innovative gameplay of Mythic’s Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.

Public quests, open groups, the excitement of the Tome of Knowledge, all things never seen before the evil geniuses at Mythic brewed them up in charmed cauldrons on some fog-shrouded Scottish moor, with the witch-goddess Hecate shrieking over it.

It’s a well-known fact that the color red in the game packaging is made from blood.

It’s true. Look it up. Because that’s just how hardcore they are. They do it for YOU.

Simulated Warhammer screenshot

What IS Realm vs Realm and how is it different from PvP?

How about seventeen factions, any of which would happily crush the throats of the others? You can only trust your own kind. Maybe. That’s war everywhere. That’s Warhammer… the miniatures game. Oops. Wrong one.

Well, imagine FOUR factions, at each other’s throats. In their own lands they are only somewhat safe, but step outside or into a contested zone and BAM! Constantly shifting alliances, places you just can’t go and… oh wait, that was EverQuest. Evil vs Humans vs Elves vs Shorties.

Okay, but with four factions you get stalemate, so that’s pretty boring. Three factions, though — the two weaker against the strong one so nobody can ever rest at the top, never able to rest, that’s… oh, never mind. That’s Dark Age of Camelot — or Planetside.

Well, how about two sides? Good vs Evil? Horde vs Alliance? That’s the Realm vs Realm difference. That’s why it’s not simply “Player vs Player”. That’s what you can only find in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Along with public quests, the Tome of Knowledge, and open groups, the fight of good vs evil, free people vs the minions of Mordor, it’s your realm against the other realm.

And the stakes are incredibly high. Everything you do moves the battle to one side or another. And when you finally have done enough to tip the balance forever to your side — that’s when the whole thing resets because it’s WAR FOREVER! WAAAAAGH!!!!

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Thanks for stopping by for our second exclusive look at Mythic’s Warhammer Online: The Age of Reckoning. No game has ever done PvP, er, RvR, in quite the same way. Not exactly.

I have nothing against old MMOs. In fact, I spend most of my time in one of the oldest. But I know that EQ is old, and I play it now not to see new things, but just to reminisce about all the good times I had in it.

People have been going off to World of Warcraft for years, and starting their adventures in Azeroth. I’ve even done it (and my gosh, has it been three years already?). But I’ve been reading the adventures of Cownose, who recently starting in WoW, and Ogrebears, who is just starting, any my first thought for them both was, why would they want to start out with that old game?

And I startled myself thinking that, because it was the first time I had even thought of World of Warcraft as being old. And yet, it is. It’s no longer the young upstart, it’s something they market to older people. When your spokesmen are a 60s scifi television star and a 70s action show star, you have to wonder, who are they targeting with WoW? My PARENTS?

At this time in EverQuest’s history, it was just about to release its fifth expansion “The Legacy of Ykesha”, which was widely seen as a shrewd move to reposition the aging game toward more casual players. WoW’s *second* expansion will likely release around its fourth anniversary. *cough* But this isn’t about the pace of expansions. It’s that by 2004, EQ was the market leader, but it was showing some cracks, cracks that WoW’s release later that year would widen and split entirely apart.

WoW was the better game, but more than that, it was the newer game. People had done everything in EQ — many, many times — and unless you were in one of the top raid guilds, you probably were still angry that Planes of Power had been mostly a raid-guild-only expansion (and though the casual player-focused LDoN was just about to come out, the expansion after that, Gates of Discord, would cement that raid-only mentality). In short, many EQ players were looking for a change, and with the news that many raid guilds would be jumping over to WoW en masse based on the phenomenally popular beta, it was clear the torch had been passed. EQ was now the “old” game, and WoW was the fresh young debutante, flirting with her suitors.

WoW is now where EQ was then. It’s old, people have done everything there is to do in WoW, many zillions of times, and the game itself is being marketed toward an increasingly older population. It’s still as great a game as ever, but will that matter when someone is looking for a new fresh game, and WoW becomes the game their parents play?

WoW may weather WAR and AoC, but it can’t escape time. With AoC and WAR being so similar to WoW and being marketed to the same aging demographic, those games entirely skipped the demographic of upcoming, new MMO players (especially WAR — fans who have played the tabletop game for a half dozen years and people who played the equally aged Dark Age of Camelot form the bulk of the people who aren’t just looking for a WoW-like to play in general).

Unlike fine wine, games do not improve with age. Instead, they narrow themselves to focus on the players they already have in a struggle to keep them from leaving. I find the same freshness and energy in Wizard101 that I remember from the WoW beta, though W101 is in no way attempting to be a huge, expansive game like EQ or WoW. But the energy is there. And that energy, or the lack of it, is what dooms all older games and is what will doom WoW.

I just had a thought, while writing the Mythos article. We all know where Mythos came from. Diablo II game play with a Warcraft art style. Diablo II came from Diablo, and Diablo was heavily influenced by the rogue-likes Moria and Angband, I think? Both those games were inspired by Hack, which was inspired by Rogue, which was heavily influenced by Temple of Apshai (I’m guessing), which took its inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons.

Now, World of Warcraft was inspired by the Warcraft RTS games, EverQuest, and Dark Age of Camelot. EverQuest took its inspiration from Toril MUD, which was based on other MUDs back to Diku, which was itself based on D&D and earlier MUDs which were inspired by Infocom’s Dungeon/Zork, which was inspired by Crowther and Woods’ Colossal Cave Adventure, which was based on real spelunking. Dark Age of Camelot took its inspiration EverQuest, so there’s some inbreeding going on there. Warcraft polished earlier RTS games, which draw heavily from those old Avalon-Hill war games, which likely got their start as variants of the board game Risk (total speculation for purposes of illustration only).

See where this is going? All these games take certain ideas — call them genes — and mix them up to form new games. What if we could, to push the analogy, sequence these genes, and directly diagram the rise and fall of genetic markers over the years. We would have a new handle on how to judge games. Point and click vs WASD? XP grind or quest grind? Group or solo preferred?

When someone says WAR is like WoW, we could say well, it’s 75% like WoW, 10% like DAoC (and since both games draw from EverQuest) can trace half its heritage all the way back to 1999. Now this 25% here, this was never in WoW, and there’s our difference.

And more importantly, we would be able to really focus on truly new and innovative ideas. “Whoa, in this game, your character loses levels if the player doesn’t log in. Is that new? Will it spread to other games?”

Virology and genetics can tell us a lot about gaming evolution, I’m guessing. Evolution? Yeah, I went there. I think we all can see these games are not a product of Intelligent Design… (Sigh. Devs, forgive me. I had to take the shot. You understand, don’t you?)

I don’t know how many people come looking for EverQuest blogs, but there are darn few in the blogosphere that actually cover events in EQ from a player’s perspective. Aside from those bloggers in Nostalgia, and the occasional EQ-oriented post from Loral at Mobhunter.com, I can’t find any.

For that matter, where are the DAoC blogs? The Asheron’s Call blogs? The Ultima Online blogs?

Come ON. I played DAoC but not those other games. I would LOVE to hear about current play in these older games, but never anything in blogs. It has been explained to me that “back in the day”, discussion of these games was done via official or community forums, cuz blogs did not exist.

Well. They exist NOW.

Is there nobody working through Shadowbane since the reboot that blogs about it? Anyone restarting on DAoC’s “Old Frontier” server who is giving the world a play-by-play?

I mean, come on. I’m talking to you people who still play the Elder Games, the ones from BW — Before World of Warcraft. (and as an aside, we should mark game release dates like that — EQ1 would be released 5BW, Ultima Online 6BW, EQ2 0AW, etc). You UO fans, would it kill you to take a screenshot of your adventures on a day and paste it into a free Wordpress or Blogger page?

I LOVE hearing players talk about games I don’t play, since I only have time for a couple but have a huge interest in MMOs in general. I never even got to play UO because I thought it looked so ancient next to EQ.

So anyway, all ye Players of the Elder Games… let’s have some blogs, cuz I want to read your adventures.

And hey, fellow EQ players… I know NOTHING about what it’s like to play in The Buried Sea or Secrets of Faydwer expansions. Cough up some blog posts about them, please. I ask as a fellow player who hopes one day to see these wonders :)

I admit it. I was wrong about AoC.

I said it would be a blip that would quickly fall to the high system requirements and the World of Warcraft juggernaut. I said that WoW would be entirely unchallenged by AoC, and was only mildly worried about Warhammer Online.

I think I was wrong about every thing I said. Those people who called me clueless were right.

AoC is having the most successful launch I think I have ever seen, maybe even better than WoW back in 2004. Back then, of course, the market was a lot smaller, and WoW’s launch turned then-MMO champ EverQuest into a niche game, something Asheron’s Call and Dark Age of Camelot had not been able to do. So I don’t see AoC booting WoW to the curb.

It sure looks like WoW is weaker than I thought. Since all this interest *must* be largely coming from WoW (nobody else has that kind of presence), great crowds of people must have just been waiting for a new game to come out which wasn’t trying to be a WoW competitor but was just trying to be the best game possible. And with the welcome news of a very smooth launch and very playable game, more and more people will decide to take the plunge and join their friends.

I thought WoW had at least another year or two of unchallenged superiority. Maybe when people saw the next expansion would be nothing to really inspire passion, they became more willing to roll the dice and take the chance on something new?

Going to Warhammer Online, I expected. That is a game that I thought would appeal to WoW players (and probably will). AoC I disregarded as a blip, a quick MMO to play before choosing sides in the WoW vs WAR megashowdown at the end of the year — a battle I still expected to be won ultimately by WoW. Now, I am not so sure.

WoW is this giant walking around crushing villages and causing devastation wherever it turns, and all other MMOs are like people attacking the massive toes of the giant with clubs and pitchforks. Maybe the giant has finally met his Jack.

Blizzard acts like a leader in the MMO world, magnanimously hoping for decent competition. You can say that when you’re ahead. But Blizzard has shareholders to appease, and they can’t be liking the thought that another company would steal any of WoW’s thunder before they had a suitable replacement ready.

Is it time for Blizzard to pull back the curtain and show what they have planned for WoW’s second act? We’ve all seen how fast market leaders can become yesterday’s news.

So yeah, I was wrong and I admit I was wrong. Way to go, Funcom. I hope Age of Conan surprises and shocks EVERYONE by its wild success.

A feature of mine about good games that DON’T have Warcraft in their names and could use some well-deserved love is up on Massively. Check it out, let me know what you think :)

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.

Shut Up, We’re Talking! #12 is up. I had the pleasure of being part of it, along with Grimwell (SOE EQ2 Community Manager) and Tom-Tom from Gamer’s Mind.

Thanks, Darren, for being such an awesome host! Darren really knows how to keep the discussion going and moving to interesting places. I was positive I’d have nothing to say :P