If you took all the bullet-point features of Rift and compared them against all the bullet-point features of World of Warcraft as it was before its first expansion — Rift comes out fairly well. The appearance armor and dye systems which lets my rogue look like I want her to look STILL haven’t made it to WoW. And the rift system itself is a real game-changer, and there still seems to be plenty of room to experiment when building a role from souls.
But, I have my vanity pets. There’s the mount collecting. There’s the warfronts I’m grinding for PvP gear because I can’t queue for T2 expert dungeons for reasons unknown to me. There’s grinding dailies in high level zones in order to build some faction whose only purpose is to let me buy better stuff. Crafting is the usual AFK system. Macros simplify combat and healing. If add-on support is added on, we can expect Rift to instantly become just as agonizingly simple as WoW, not that either game is all that challenging to begin with.
I have no problem with that. MMOs are really intended to be social games first, and since you can’t ship an MMO these days that doesn’t cater to solo players of all abilities, challenge had to be left out of the equation.
Lord Soptyvr in the Beholder Maze
This last weekend I took a nostalgia trip, in EverQuest, from Qeynos to Freeport, walking the entire way. I wasn’t level five like the FIRST time I did the run, back in 1999. I brought my level 58 shadow knight along for the trip. It was a fun romp, took a couple of hours (stopping to see all the sights along the way), and I even died once, in Kithicor, because I just didn’t expect anything to be able to harm me. I was wrong, so very, very wrong. In keeping with the theme, and being bound in the Nexus, I took the Nexus portal down to Antonica and retraced my steps for a corpse run. This time I kept to Kithicor’s edges.
Look, I was just wondering if the dark elf camp in the middle of the zone would like my character, since she was ALSO a dark elf and a shadow knight besides? Short answer: No. They chased me back to Rivervale and I apparently died while zoning into the city.
While documenting this journey on Twitter, Justin Sanchez and I were discussing how Rift failed in capturing the EverQuest feel. EQ had meaningful faction, unique starting cities for every race (Erudites had two — Paineel and Erudin!), and starting experiences that soaked you in the lore of your particular race before you would ever come to meet someone of another race. The starting zones were built to naturally guide you up through level ten or so, but after that, the whole world opened up. Pick a direction and see what you could find. The first thing you would want to find would be friends.
Rift has taken enough from WoW. If it plans to be inspired further by another MMO, it should turn back to EQ.
Factions. The two faction system is particularly artificial. I know the lore — the pantheon of the Vigil brings back Guardian players, while the technomagic of the Defiants resurrects Defiant players. But both sides have the same roles and abilities and armor and everything else; it’s an entirely artificial distinction, especially considering the game lore states that both sides were equally at fault in bringing about the current state of the world, and if the sides sat down and worked things out, they could probably get an understanding, resolve their differences and, you know, save the world.
Properly, players should be able to switch sides or even join a neutral side. EverQuest allowed this through factioning (on the non-race based PvP servers, anyway). EverQuest 2 even has a formal system for betraying your faction, including the addition of a neutral faction AND a neutral faction city. Well, more of a hideout.
Cities. On the heels of objections to the two party system comes amazement that there are only two major cities, Sanctum and Meridian. This could (and hopefully, will) be solved in expansions. Even WoW only started with four cities, Orgrimmar, Undercity, Stormwind and Ironforge. EverQuest, started with how many? Felwithe, Kelethin, Ak’Anon, Kaladim, Freeport, Neriak, Oggok, Grobb, Rivervale, Erudin, Qeynos, Surefall Glade, Halas — I feel I am missing some. To those were added Shar’vahl, Crescent Reach, Cabilis, Thurgadin, Kael, Skyshrine, Plane of Knowledge, Katta Castellum, Sanctum Seru, Shadow Haven, and I know I am missing some. Does the castle in Twilight Sea count? The Outpost at Firiona Vie and the matching one in The Overthere. You could even bank and do some other business in Runnyeye if you built up your goblin faction.
It was these wide-ranging cities that gave the world of Norrath much of its charm. You’d leave your racial home, and the beasts would get more dangerous, the world a little darker. Eventually your cheery mood would turn to caution and terror — and then after a long time, the monsters would get manageable, and you knew you were coming back to civilized lands. If the locals liked you, you could have a new home for awhile — and if they didn’t, you could decide to start helping them and earn admittance and their grudging respect.
Rift’s world is torn apart by the intersection of the planes. There are no truly safe places. But as players push back against the darkness, couldn’t more cities be uncovered from newly recovered lands? Rift is enough like WoW already. It needs to open up and become a world, with meaningful factions, and varied starting experiences.
I work a full day in the office, then strap my laptop to my back, pedal home and work a full night as well. It’s called crunch time, this is the third month of it, and work people pay me to do is taking priority over writing which nobody pays me anything to do. If I were working on a game, I could excitedly drop hints about it, but the only way you’ll see what I’m writing is if you need to be bonded. Or you happened to be a bond agent. BUT! If you ARE, well, we’ve got something pretty amazing for you this summer :)
On the plus side, that picture is part of my commute. One of the bennies about biking to work is that it’s more acceptable to just stop by the side of the road, outside someone’s house, and start taking pictures. If someone popped out of a CAR and started snapping shots, well, people would stare.
The Great Sony Hack of 2011
Big news these last couple of months has been the hack attack upon Sony’s PlayStation Network as well as Sony Online Entertainment’s customer data servers. This was a crime, perpetrated upon Sony and SOE by criminals, and they have essentially turned my PS3 into a brick, made them the object of a million rants and they are costing themselves and their partners thousands of dollars each minute the service is unavailable. It’s just a tragedy.
I feel Sony, though, is drawing this out needlessly. Sony has the best engineers in the world. I can’t believe that they couldn’t have saved their forensic data and plugged whatever security holes were used to break in in more than a couple of days. I don’t think anyone on the outside has any idea why Sony has floated May 31st as a “go live” date. I just don’t know.
But I worry. I worry about SOE and their games. SOE just recently had some pretty massive layoffs. After a strong start, their latest MMO, DC Universe Online, tanked on the PC. That can’t be good with such an expensive IP. Now that game is looking at a month and a half of nobody being able to play it. PC players have already abandoned it, and PS3 players will be playing some other game. So, DCUO is likely dead now. Vanguard’s handful of players can’t be expected to stick around, so that game is dead. SWG only had until SWTOR came out to live, anyway; ironically, pre-NGE SWG might have been different enough from SWTOR to co-exist. Anyway, SWG – dead.
Free Realms — unknown. I played it for awhile, but the constant money grubbing turned me off. I think kids will be happy to return to it after a delay, where adults might find something better to do. Plus, it had only barely launched on the PS3, so it’s ripe for a relaunch. Clone Wars Adventures – minigame portals like CWA can survive global thermonuclear war. They are the cockroaches of gaming.
Anyone who plays EQ is there because of all the games available to them, EQ is the one they want. It will survive. EQ2… and its F2P cousin, EQ2X… will survive, but look for massive server mergers; perhaps EQ2 will finally fold into EQ2X.
For the games in development, Planetside Next and EverQuest Next… I can’t imagine SOE will have enough revenue to continue serious work on these games. They have to focus on rebuilding their money properties right now. I feel SOE’s best hope is to separate from Sony, lose the mandate to put their MMOs on the PS3, and focus their efforts on a couple of really high performing games. I think it’s long past time for SOE to become Verant once again.
Skype is Microsoft’s new MMO!
The US Navy, via a program at the Naval Postgraduate School which I have totally visited (yay Monterey!), is soon to launch an online, collaborative brainstorming tool called MMOWGLI, which stands for “I Bet I Can Come Up With A Silly Acronym, Leveraging the Internet”. Anyway, “players” will be presented with some real world scenarios and will be able to collaborate with others on possible solutions using a graphical tool. Which is great; all the armchair admirals will finally be able to make their voices heard. Someone at work, when I mentioned this, said in response to the initial scenario of dealing with the Somali pirates that are harassing shipping off the coast of Africa, “shoot them all”. That could be an option!
I think it’s a great idea. I just hate that the term “MMO”, which we’ve come to use as shorthand for MMORPG – massively multiplayer online role playing game – being applied to any online activity involving more than two people. And what I hate more is the professional gaming press jumping on that same bandwagon, when they should really know better.
The worst are those places which try and explain that MMOs are games like WoW, except for this one. Kudos to that writer for also trying to compare it to a MUD, which it isn’t.
My old WoW guild
WoW loses half a million players, attributes it to a rounding error
Upshot is, their two year expansion cycle just isn’t working for them any more. People chew through all the new content in a few months (if that), and then drift off to other games, like Rift.
All these years, Blizzard has told us that this is how long it takes to come up with an expansion’s worth of quality content. It can’t be rushed, hurried or scheduled. It’s done when it’s done. But, now Blizz feels it actually could churn the stuff out a lot faster than that if it wanted to. It’s vowed to push Diablo 3 out the door sometime this year, instead of somewhere in this decade, their previous estimate. There’s a new sense of urgency coming out of Irvine, and I feel it’s long overdue. World of Warcraft IS the elder game now, and it has to move fast to keep relevant.
It’s not about the money — they have record profits, and if they ever feel they need more cash, they can add some more mounts to the cash shop and make an achievement for buying them all. For Blizzard, it’s about remaining the game that people think of when they think “MMO”.
We Heart Lucent Heart!
Masively Multiplayer dating sim Lucent Heart’s latest North American beta, “B.F.F.”, starts today. So here’s your chance to find your best guy or girl online, team up and kick some bully butt. I can’t say enough about this game. Everyone should play it. WoW-killer.
A fan who won a contest will be cosplaying at E3. So if you’re there, get a picture taken with her. Remember, if you’re lucky enough, you too could someday grow up to be a booth babe. It can happen!
Argh, so soon?
Time to hit the road and go to work. I miss blogging :(
Being the only player in the Outpost of the Overlord is like being the only kid at Disneyland. Rides aren’t as fun without someone else there! But at level 10, there’s absolutely nothing that gives my little coercer any experience.
Once she leaves the Outpost, though, it’s gone forever. No characters can start there any more, and this beautiful little island will never see a new struggling newbie, nobody will plead for help with the cave or the pirate or the graveyard, and one of the most wonderful starting experiences I’ve ever had will be forgotten.
Remember when you got to the island in a boat after being fished out of the water by passing traders, thus starting your long association with the Far Seas Traders to whom you literally owed your life? Remember when you’d just figured out how to move around on the ship when drakes attacked? When you finally came safely ashore, someone demanded of you your class — fighter, mage, scout or priest. The original Four Archetypes of EverQuest 2. The same four you see in Rift, today. As in Rift, you soon specialized — and then again, finally choosing your subclass at level 20 after having been given a brief look at every choice along the way.
I wasn’t one of the ones who hated the archetype-class-subclass system. I liked the tests and challenges, made leveling a new character fun. But, like the Outpost of the Overlord and the Queen’s Colony. those little bits of adventure are gone forever, like the Glory of the Empire, the song my Freeport Bard had to sing to some orcs to earn her Troubadour stripes.
I do log in to EverQuest 2 now and again. Mostly for two things — to keep Scatter’s spell research going and to redeem the AA scrolls I win by playing Fortune League on Facebook.
Every three and a half days, Scatter gets a new spell level. Every week, she gets another couple AA. It’s like EVE Online. Actually, though, Fortune League has a hard limit of 21 prizes you can win before your prizes no longer show on your Fortune League prize wall. I’d figured out a way to show the additional prizes, redeemed them, and hurried into EQ2 to claim and apply them.
It’s such a homey place, Scatter’s inn room in Qeynos Harbor. She moved from Kelethin a few weeks back because the acorn rooms just weren’t exciting me, and I could never find anything in Kelethin.
Anyway. Homey place. Front room is the bar, where all my critters are drinking and holding polite conversation. In back is my bedroom, made up to look like a forest glade. And to the right as you come in, the trophy room, with my three Fortune League trophies beaming beatifically, front and center. I wanted to bring my inn room to my blog. But how?
This is a blue/red anaglyph 3D image. Get your funky glasses on!
3D is all the rage, but not many people have the red/blue glasses to see it. WTF, right? But there ya go. Besides, with all the glowies and moving things in the apartment, it’s really hard to find a scene still enough that two screenshots would look identical except for position. It had to be animation.
And the price for this animation software would have to be “nothing”. I’m not paying six hundred bucks to Adobe for Photoshop to put images on my blog.
I gave up Photoshop a couple years back when my pirated version stopped working. I never felt good about using pirated software ANYWAY, and “everyone does it” really isn’t a persuasive argument to someone who might conceivably wish to sell her own software at some point. So I’ve been using GIMP as a replacement. GIMP is a free and open source photo/picture editor, roughly comparable to Photoshop for the things most people need. Its name is an acronym that stands for “GIMP Is The Stupidest Name For A Paint Program, Ever”.
Anyway, it’s free and has thousands of plugins. The plugin to make red/blue anaglyphs was free; I can make them with a single click now. With Photoshop, it was a long process (though I could have made a PS macro to do it, I know).
Animation is a built-in plugin. It’s under the Filter menu. Here’s how I made the trophy room animation at the top of the post.
First, I used FRAPS to take a half dozen screenshots a second apart. You could just take screenshots with the PRTSCRN key; I just happen to have FRAPS available.
I opened GIMP and dragged the screenshots, one at a time, into the drawing window, making a drawing with a half dozen layers, one screenshot to a layer. I then resized the image to 480 pixels wide — I knew it was going to be shown here, no need to make the file any larger than it had to be.
GIMP supports a few animation formats, but the one that browsers know to start animating when they load is called GIF animation. This is important.
From the Animation entry in the Filter menu, choose Blend. Just click OK to the dialog it shows. This turns the half dozen screenshots into a movie with frame interpolation to keep things running smoothly. The animation will be in a new window. Choose Filter > Animation > Playback to open a playback window, click the Play button, and if it looks good, close the playback window and return to the one with the animation in it.
Filter > Animation > GIF Optimization. This will select the minimum rectangle in your picture that contains changing information. If you were moving while taking screenshots, every frame will be 100% different from the previous frame and cannot be optimized. But in this case, there’s no need to redraw the floor and carpet every frame — it doesn’t change. This option displays the floor just once.
File > Save As. Save it as a GIF file by typing nameofyouranimation.gif. Since the GIF format does not support layers, GIMP will ask if you want to flatten it or save it as an animation. Save it as an animation. It will also note that it cannot save full color images, and needs to either index the colors or change it to grayscale. Choose to index the colors (the default).
Click the Export button, find it on disk, open it in your browser and go oooh and aaaah. You’ve got a cool animation, and you didn’t have to spend any money on it.
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