EQ Emulator server list

EQ Emulator now works with versions of EverQuest *I actually have* now!

So anyway I still have some configuring to do before I can regress back to 1999. And I’m playing it through my LAN to where the files are stored on my Linux server because I had some crazy idea that I could play it in Wine. That wasn’t happening.

More later. Sleep now.

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All anyone is talking about these days is Winds of Pandaria. I desperately want to join in, but how? I don’t play WoW any more. I’m feeling a little left out.

But hey, why let that stop me.

I may not play WoW much any more, but I have played another game that was desperately trying to attract new players while keeping old ones — EverQuest. A game that is still going strong. At this stage in its life, where WoW finds itself today, EQ added a race of dragon people, a whole new accelerated leveling path. Later came mercenaries that allowed almost any class to easily solo. All this kind of stuff.

So, World of Warcraft is offering a kid-friendly expansion. This is — and I’m being entirely serious about this — a genius move. Many of the hardcore raiders of today are about to take on responsibilities, get families of their own, take jobs that require their attention and enthusiasm and so on. The kids of today need to be ready to take on the guild leadership and raid management that the previous generation is leaving behind. The Winds of Pandaria is Blizzard reaching out to kids just coming into the hardcore scene.

It doesn’t matter WHAT the new expansion was, people would pan it. Add a kid friendly expansion, then Blizzard is making WoW sillier. Just make another new high end raiding expansion and five extra levels, and Blizzard isn’t reaching out to new players. Completely revamp the leveling path, and Blizzard is ruining everything that was great about WoW in 2004. Everyone is a critic. Everyone could do it better.

Melmoth over at KiaSA thinks the whole “buy a year of WoW, get a new mount and Diablo 3″ promotion might be a prelude to introducing some sort of free-to-play plan. That’s a cool idea, but I don’t see Blizzard letting people pay nothing instead of something anytime soon. Maybe when Titan is announced.

Asheron’s Call 2

Stropp has been enjoying the recent series of articles over at Massively about Asheron’s Call 2, the abandoned sequel to the early MMO pioneer Asheron’s Call. Stropp wonders if someone were to bring back AC2, or any other game that had been cancelled (Tabula Rasa, anyone?), would people would really play them? Aside from some hardcore fans, I’d really doubt it. People don’t wax nostalgic about game mechanics or leveling systems or whatever. They remember the community. And the death of a game has a chilling effect on the game’s community. What’s lost can’t be regained. Sure, a NEW community could form — but how likely is that?

EverQuest

TAGN has been keeping an eye on the EverQuest progression server, Fippy Darkpaw. FD is the first server in years and years to get their own dedicated GM. GMs used to be standard equipment for servers; they were an integral part of the server community, running events, mediating between raiding guilds, forming new guilds, officiating at player weddings and so on. When they got outsourced and became little more than call center personnel, something bright and wonderful was lost. Anyway, FD has a GM and the rowdy raid guilds have been forced into a raid target rotation. FD is up to the Velious expansion, and to earn the right to take down a mob, they have to kill Sontikar (the dragon outside the Temple of Veeshan) or Lord Vyemm (the gatekeeper of the North Temple of Veeshan, where all the cool mobs are).

The reason these raid guilds have to have a rotation is because there are no instanced raid mobs in Velious — nor in Luclin and originally, not in the Planes of Power, either. Guilds looking to raid had to race to every raid target, usually with a guild or two on their heels, waiting for them to fail so they could pick up the pieces. Instancing was eventually added to the Plane of Time, and from then on, raid targets were increasingly instanced. Nowadays, no guild progress affects any other guild, so there’s no competition.

Seriously? This is all you got?

Sorry :( Should have done this last night, but it’s morning now and I have to go to work. I’ll do better tomorrow!!!! Promise!

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Ophiga and friend

The big news yesterday was the dropping of the Press NDA for Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. I read all the press reviews I could find; I’ll point to some of those later on, but almost all of them credited the storyline for pulling them deeper into the game. The game mechanics may be old hat, and the standard roles, dungeons and raids are present, but the story, by all accounts, is worth the price of admission.

I still fondly remember the story from the original Knights of the Old Republic. I played the game twice, once good and once evil, and the story didn’t change that much, but that was okay because it was a good story.

That’s really the job of an MMO, isn’t it? To give you something that gets you to log in again each day, and then when you shut the game down one last time, to leave you with some memories.

I don’t HAVE a screenshot of SWTOR, so up there is a shot of my DDO rogue with a Favored Soul hireling. We’ve destroyed a generation of kobolds and I made two new discoveries in the Sands of Menechtarum, but in a few minutes, I and my hireling would be dead. Stupid swarm of revenge-minded kobolds and their named chief…

News? We have that.

SWTOR vs WoW

Well, there’s just not going to be any way of getting around SWTOR for awhile. Not until June, anyway.

After reading all the SWTOR articles, Google Plusser Tasha Schmidt had this to say (unfortunately, I can’t link to it because it wasn’t public (until now)):

Going through all the new SWTOR articles after the embargo drop, I kept seeing the same question in the comments: “Why should I pay $15 a month for essentially a single player game?”

Simply, for a persistent world. Even if you play it mostly single player there is still something to be gained just from it being a persistent world. It can stop being just a game and start to feel like a real RPG where your character matters to you. Even if you decide not to participate in any group content, you will still have experiences with other characters who are not NPCs. This brings a certain level of unpredictability into the game that is just not possible with actual single player games. You can find a social guild and meet other people to share your experiences with even if you choose not to PVP or raid. People who can help you find that last elusive datacron, or suggest a fun path for your next alt.

She’s not wrong. Most MMOs these days are single player games played with other people. Especially toward the beginning. But I just imagine how boring the original Star Wars movie would be if Luke had to do everything alone. (Well, in SWTOR, everyone but Luke would be a scripted NPC).

Over at Player vs Developer, the Chartreuse Cingulata notes the suspiciously suspicious timing that puts Blizzcon just a couple days after SWTOR makes its grab for publicity. Will Blizzard announce their next-gen MMO, Titan, and push SWTOR news back to the dusty digital archives?

The Ancient Gaming Noob hopes so. He’s still reeling from the Cataclysm that killed his interest in WoW. A new expansion might do it… a new MMO, definitely.

Syp over at Bio Break has a good roundup of the SWTOR press coverage.

Lingering Malaise

Tobold has done SCIENCE! to discover just exactly at what rate the global interest in MMORPGs has declined. But we must always remember that there are not “MMORPGs” to most people, there is only “WoW” and “games that just want to be WoW”. The genre went mainstream with WoW, and will become niche again as WoW fades away.

Then again, people are paying up to $180 on eBay for a single Blizzcon ticket… It can’t be doing that bad.

Millions and Millions

SOE announced that 20 million accounts have been created in Free Realms, which is by any measure pretty damn impressive. For comparison, Wizard101 made that milestone in July, which is cool, too. RuneScape, on the other hand, hit the 156 million account mark way back in 2009.

I appreciate that these are great milestones, but the only figure I’m really interested in, in a free to play game, is how much money they take in per user. Subscription games make $10-$15/month/user. We know F2P players pay MUCH less. If they can get away with it, they pay nothing at all. It’s the “Whales” that splurge on F2P games that keep these games running.

So, F2P games — how many whales swim in your oceans?

The Secret World

Funcom has been teasing us with news and forum games about their conspiracy-laden MMO, “The Secret World”. Ars Technica got a chance to see it in action at the New York Comic Con last week. People have been begging for a horror-themed MMO for years; will Funcom be able to deliver? High-profile misses like Anarchy Online and Age of Conan have made people understandably wary of Funcom’s ability to make a game as good as the hype. Ars thinks the lore might possibly be enough to make people overlook the wooden characterizations.

Well, people said that about Age of Conan, too.

Bless

MMOSite blurbs forthcoming Korean MMO “Bless”. According to the article,

“BLESS” aims to surpass not just the limits of current MMORPGs, but games as a whole.

Judge for yourself. Included in the “Bless” trailer, which in the grand old MMO tradition, contains no hint of what the actual game is like.

In this as in so many other things, EverQuest was a leader. After seeing the opening video below, people loudly wondered in Verant’s hearing why the GAME wasn’t like this?

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West Freeport

North Freeport

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The awe-inspiring Harbinger of Regulos

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.

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Dragon Age Legends

One thing you gotta say about Dragon Age Legends: like the single player games upon which its based, in Dragon Age Legends you Get. To. Kill. DRAGONS. (Warning: link goes to Facebook). Unlike, say, Dungeons and Dragons Online, where I have yet to kill a dragon. The one you see in the tutorial is little more than a tease. It’s fighting a mind flayer, though, and we HAVE started killing those in our static group, but the name of the game isn’t Mazes and Mind Flayers Online now, is it?

Mazes, though — we’ve had more than our share of those.

Facebook RPGs like DAL (“The first real game on Facebook“) and Treasure Abyss (“Hey, we were here ages before those guys!”) have kept me sane when I haven’t been able to play any deeper games.

More game stuff after the break.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Here we see a good long look at 38 Studios’ forthcoming single player action RPG set in their Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning universe. The combat seems stripped down, fluid and well-suited to a game controller; clearly the game designers for Bioware’s Dragon Age 2 and KoA:R have been drinking the same secret sauce in regards to making combat cinematic. DA2 tends to focus on setting up team abilities, where in KoA:R, it’s all you. Very much in the flavor of Devil May Cry and God of War series, except, as the narrator points out, the fights here aren’t scripted.

Can we expect the eventual MMO set in this universe to have the same sort of stripped down but graphically intense combat? From Ixobelle’s comments about the sad result of his interview with 38 Studios, we see that they are planning for story to be an important part of the game. Story implies a more relaxed pace in which to enjoy the story. And unless the KoA MMO is a single player leveling experience as in World of Warcraft, that probably means a good deal less self-reliance. Your MMO character will worship your single player character as some sort of god.

Now THAT would be a fun thing to put into a game…

Looking for Group Tool

Rift

Rift’s latest patch is out, bringing with it appearance slots and the looking for group tool, among other things. It’s all very WoW-like, except for the appearance slots. I think Blizzard is missing a bet by not offering appearance slots in World of Warcraft; SOE is presumably making piles of money by selling appearance armor and weapons in their cash shop. If the games were running, that is.

As Ogrebears points out, though, the looking for dungeon tool isn’t guaranteed to get you a group. It’s an all-in kind of thing; if not many people are using it, not many groups are getting formed. On my level 24 cleric, a character who can take on all four roles (tank, healer, dps and support) and has access to two dungeons, Iron Tombs and Deepstrike Mines, I got zero groups after an hour of waiting. I finally left the queue so I could join in an invasion of Stonefields by the Plane of Earth, which in the end was far more fun and lucrative, anyway. Rift Junkies has more on the problems people have been having with the LFG tool.

I did try the tool on my 50 rogue, where after about fifteen minutes I got a group for Expert Foul Cascade. I’d never done the expert version of this dungeon, but the fact that I never needed to go bard for it probably points out just how hard these instances were nerfed. Thanks to a lucky epic necklace I won, I now have enough +HIT to qualify for T2 dungeons, so we’ll soon see how those work out. I had enough Plaques of Achievement to upgrade my level 43 green belt with a level 50 purple one, so I was pretty happy about that progress.

To Quest or not to Quest?

Wolfshead of Wolfshead Online stirred up a bit of controversy by quest-ioning the need for quests in MMOs. He argues that the quest hub mechanic World of Warcraft introduced has essentially turned those games that rely on this mechanic — most modern MMOs — into an automated leveling mechanic devoid of adventure, risk or any lasting reward, and so on-rails that a simple mechanism could just do the whole thing for you.

We can decry the dumbing down of modern games all we like, but in the end, WoW has 12 million 11.4 million players, Darkfall has like 5-50k players, and grand old dame EverQuest has ZERO players. People love quest hubs. It’s not that without them, they would play differently. Without quest hubs, they wouldn’t play AT ALL.

So if you WANT a lot of people to play your game, you will put quest hubs in. If you’re smart, you’ll put parallel mechanisms in there for the other people, but you can’t skimp on the quest hubs if popularity is one of your goals.

I have to admit that watching a bunch of soloers come together organically to form a raid in Rift is a joy. Tanks step up, healers step up, stuff gets done. Give people a chance and they WILL form a community. The real trick is hiding the fact that you’re doing it.

I type so slowly!

Time to head to work. Game safe!

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The SOE sheep live in danger

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

So, news comes that WoW has lost a small percentage of their user-base, a marginal number of players that would total more than the active base of any other subscription MMO in the world.

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 :(

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Fippy Darkpaw isn’t quite live yet, but he’s in the server list. And as I scrolled — yes, this list is so long that it scrolls — through the list, it struck me how a near-twelve year old MMORPG has fifteen servers, one opening this very day, while far newer games like Vanguard and Warhammer Online are down to one or two far fewer.

The game designers for every new MMO can probably recite page after page of EverQuest’s flaws. And yet EQ is still going strong while new games come and go.

Maybe they’re doing something right?

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Busybusybusy mandatory overtime, working at home each night, crunch time blahblahblah but you know what, I have a good job and I like what I do. It cuts into the game playing and into the game writing, though.

But I couldn’t pass up today’s excitement! EverQuest today opens its new progression server, Fippy Darkpaw, and Trion sends their MMO, Rift, into Open Beta! I haven’t been playing in any of the recent Rift betas and I have been studiously ignoring any news about the game to preserve at least a little of the sense of wonder of experiencing a new game fresh.

But, you know, well… I’ve been playing EQ2 lately, spending the Fortune League prizes, and the general chat was all about the Rift.

So, after the fold — news about these stories and many others.

Ultima Online-ville

Richard Garriott is back from decompression with news about what his company, Portalarium, has been producing in a lake house he wasn’t really using for much. After the epic smash success of his poker and blackjack games, Portalarium has developed the infrastructure to build something a little closer to our hearts. Garriott gives us a hint in an interview in GameIndustry.biz:

As soon as we have a game where you can have an avatar with a house and a room to display the cool things you’ve collected we can ship it. And then tomorrow you can fight monsters, and a month after than you can have some weapons and armour, and a month after that you can build swords… That will still allow us to come out with a full in-depth Lord British experience, but begin the journey as light as makes a confident, interactive game.

Social game… housing to display cool things… fighting monsters… weapons and armor… OMG, he’s inventing Maple Story! I really hate to be the wet blanket around here, but making browser-based social spaces with custom avatars, housing and so on has been a staple of web gaming since Neopets and Habbo Hotel. Not to mention the several fully featured MMOs already on Facebook.

Just sounds to me like this is a boat that has already sailed, but I wish him well. I do love me some isometric pixellated ganking.

EverQuest’s Fippy Darkpaw server

The server named after one of EverQuest’s most enduring folk heroes, Fippy Darkpaw, opens today. And like every great folk hero, there’s a song about him, courtesy of Jethal Silverwing of Kithicor.org. I kinda wondered where the lyric about moss snakes that kick was…

With Rift coming up, I can’t really devote a lot of time to leveling up a new character in EverQuest, but I’m sure I’ll stop by, if only to check out the people in their full rubicite. If the server is anything like Fippy, everything will work fine for half an hour, then the server will start to whine and crash into a wall.

Or maybe not. Arkenor of Ark’s Ark has the full details on what to expect when you play on the newest server. I was disappointed to read that the new uglified zones will remain in place.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

The story rebounded off Twitter yesterday about Bioware sending scary letters to SWTOR fansite owners warning them that Bioware could not make them an “official” fan site if they ran ads or in any other way made money from the site.

Now, apparently the fan sites that applied for official status had agreed not to make money from their sites up front, but you know, none of these fansite operators are getting rich off the deal. David at SWTOR fansite TOROZ was kinda upset about losing his official fansite status, but did manage to get in touch with someone at Bioware who explained the situation.

Personally, I feel if someone wants to monetize their fansite, they should go right ahead and make as much money as they can. Unless they signed a binding legal contract not to do so with Bioware.

World of Warcraft

Tobold once felt that WoW raiding had become little more than Simon Says adventures with some brainless button mashing. Cataclysm brought back the strategy and tactics behind knowing which buttons to press when, but kept the Simon Says mechanic, so now you have to watch what you’re doing and also know where to stand and when.

It astonishes me just how far raiding has come from its roots. It started out as a storybook kind of adventure. Now it’s… well, I guess it’s like Dragon’s Lair. In fact it’s EXACTLY like Dragon’s Lair.

It isn’t just WoW. All the games are like that now. Step here, step there, press that, cast this, learn your part, play your role, you are a cog in a machine and there are no heroes any more.

Perpetuum

I find it hard to believe the designers of Perpetuum were not EVE Online players. Just look at this latest controversy surrounding the robot world game — insurance fraud. Making robots and then blowing them up for the insurance money. This is ILLEGAL in perpetuum? I think they teach insurance fraud in the EVE Online tutorial now.

Video Killed the Radio Star

Gordon at We Fly Spitfires wonders if today’s MMO mega hits like World of Warcraft killed off single player games. Meh, I think the Internet killed off single player games, if you can even consider them killed off. Or single player. Sure, Dragon Age: Origins was a single player RPG, but I played it with friends on Twitter just the same.

The idea that someone would play a game, any game, and not want to share it with friends seems so foreign now.

—

Well, there were a zillion other things happening since last I wrote a blogroll, and that’s a mixed blessing since that makes them take so long to write! I’m going to end this one here. If I can manage to bring them in under an hour, I can do them… I think.

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Yeah, I’ve been MIA for a couple weeks now. Work time is creeping into home time. It’s so cold when I get home that I find myself cuddling up with blankets and a cat on the couch, watching Netflix (tonight: the Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows“, season 1). I’m not wild about this “winter” thing in general. I haven’t been able to get on the bicycle for a few weeks now, and it’s really making me antsy.

Anyway, Rift beta 5 is underway. I logged in last night and made a warrior on the Belmont server and met my guild, Black Company. Played up through level 9, got caught up in some rift fights, had a little fun, but you know… I’m losing enthusiasm for the game.

Does that sound bad? I vowed to play Rift up to the level cap in the company of a guild and see all there was to see. Shouldn’t I be really excited?

I was really excited when it was me discovering a world of mystery. I was pretty damn pleased to try out different souls and make my own unique class. I was jumping for joy when I realized one didn’t need to grind quests with the rifts opening everywhere, just handing out adventure and experience.

But now, you can get a dozen decent build suggestions everywhere you look. There are guides for all the dungeons, all the quests, all the warfronts. By the time the game ships, the game will be completely known and over-examined. It will be SPOILED.

I’m still going to play Rift, and enjoy it. I just see that it’s going to become the same damn thing as with WoW, where my refusal to learn anything about the game other than what I discover for myself makes me look like a raw clueless newbie to everyone unfortunate enough to group with me. I really hate that feeling.

Rift

Lots of people writing about the Rift beta 5 event, but why help ruin the game? I’ll be writing about it when I play through it when it goes live. But, I DO want to point out what must be the most underwhelming rendered official movie for Rift that I’ve seen so far:

Courtesy IGN via Rift Junkies. Poorly animated and really, it reminds me a little too much of EverQuest II’s pre-release trailer — and not in a good way. Perhaps because the EverQuest II launch trailer was SO MUCH BETTER at setting up the world.

So, yeah. Yank that video, Trion, and put up a better one.

The Superblogger known as Elementalistly has been expanding his MMO tracking from just XFire to Raptr and beyond. He’s stopped trying to guess sub numbers from the XFire/Raptr figures and so it’s much cooler now. New this week: Rift and the newly F2P Champions Online.

And a note for Rift bloggers: You don’t have to paste the patch notes on your blog. We get it, you see the patch notes and figure, hey, free post. Just post a link to them on the official site if you must, but it would be better if you took some time to explain the impact of the changes.

The Blogosphere implodes

A bunch of bloggers and other interesting people are getting together for breakfast outside of Pax*East this spring. So much geekery in one place could suck Boston itself into a black hole of awesome :)

Quest Hubbing

Way back when, the ever ironically-named EverQuest actively made it difficult, if not flatly impossible, to do and complete quests. It could take MONTHS to solve some of the epic quests — to even figure out what the steps were, much less finish it.

When World of Warcraft introduced the whole concept of quest-oriented adventure, where NPCs would tell you with no hesitation all about their quests and exactly what they required with no puzzle solving needed, it was seen as a revolution in gaming. Continuing on with that tradition, WoW now often will provide you transport to the area to save on having to spend any time not focused on fulfilling the quest instructions.

Melmoth of KiaSA thinks that, maybe, the whole quest hub thing has just gotten out of hand, and that now, games seem entirely unable to conceive of a method of in-game storytelling which doesn’t involve clicking through a quest, killing stuff, and returning for a reward. Unfortunately, his proposed solution is essentially the Warhammer Online kill collectors, famously described in Paul Barnett’s “Bears Bears Bears” video.

The Death of the MMORPG Genre as We Know It

Sure, everyone knows what an MMORPG is. It’s a game like WoW, right? But then, some people consider Second Life, a virtual world, an MMORPG. It’s been claimed that game portals like Clone Wars Adventures are MMORPGs. It’s gotten to the point that any online game in which you might encounter another player is called an MMORPG. Ardwulf laments the blurred focus of the term, but doesn’t offer any suggestions.

Here’s mine. For me, an MMORPG allows me to create a unique character in an online, shared world. There is a story of some sort which my character experiences through adventures which gradually make my initially weak character powerful enough to take on advanced challenges. Unique character, shared online space, progression through a story, and some variation of the “Hero’s Journey“.

Outspark’s Fists of Fu! requires me to choose one of the four pre-made characters. NOT an MMORPG. Second Life has no story or character progression — NOT an MMORPG. DDO has story told through “modules”. It IS an MMORPG, likewise Guild Wars. The only advancement in Clone Wars Adventures is paying for a subscription to become a Jedi. NOT an MMORPG. EVE Online definitely has character progression and a story, though most people are only vaguely aware of what that story might be. It IS an MMORPG.

Now if I can just get everyone else in the world to agree with me…

Keen was wondering a few days back if short MMOs can be good MMOs. Which is kinda weird because one of the shortest MMOs I have ever played is the most popular MMO on the planet. One of the things I really liked about WoW back in the day was that I could finish it — new character through to clearing Molten Core — in just a couple of months. Compare that to the year to 18 months in EverQuest to go from new character to end game raider.

So — an MMO even shorter than WoW? That’s pretty hard to imagine. Maybe DCUO is shorter than WoW, somehow, but as far as the time taken to get to all the content, I’m thinking it’s pretty much the same.

EverQuest $$

KayJay at The Banhammer has some strong words for SOE regarding the collector’s edition of the upcoming Destiny of Velious expansion. After Feb 22nd, SOE will be charging $90 for the digital collector’s edition. Most collector’s editions for that price come with maps, art books, CDs and the like, and SOE has even been known to include little pewter keepsakes in the box. This times, it’s house items, fluff pets, appearance items and mount illusions. Nothing for the mantle!

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Bunch of news about this title. First, the folks at Gamespy have an extended look at the current state of the SWTOR beta — they really like it, though they admit it’s WoW with lightsabers, but not in a bad way.

MCVUK.com is reporting that the game should be out in September, which is about what I was expecting. A lot of people were thinking it would be out in April because EA said at a tech conference that they release the game in the financial year that started in April. Didn’t mean April, but plenty of people made that leap.

Lastly, investors are feeling quite paranoid about SWTOR’s chances. Suspected costs of $300 MILLION dollars, a subscription fee in an increasingly F2P world, large percentage of profits funneled straight to LucasArts, and EA’s dismal track record with MMOs (Warhammer Online being the issue here). Also given the recent failure of other hideously expensive MMOs such as APB, which cost a mere $100 million. A pittance!

I just did a little back-of-the-envelope scribbling. Let’s say SWTOR is wildly successful and gets a million players to pay $15/month essentially forever, the game is that good. Let’s further say that after paying salaries, facilities, the LucasArts tax and so on that EA makes $5 clear profit of that monthly subscription. Steady one million subscribers all paying full subscription price gets them to pay off their initial investment in just five years. Then add in the expansions, one a year, and their development costs… there’s almost no way they can possibly make back development costs.

Well, there IS a way, only one way — and that one way is a CASH SHOP. I’ve said this before and will again — this game is gonna be CASH SHOP’D seven ways from Sunday.

You thought EQ2 was bad.

Lucent Heart

Gaming Blend has earned my undying enmity by getting into the preview beta for the NA launch of dating sim/MMO Lucent Heart.

The combat is designed for casual gamers in mind (mainly female gamers) so twitch skills aren’t required the way it is in games like Fallen Earth, Tabula Rasa or Allods Online

Well, I’d have thought TR stopped twitching YEARS ago…

Hey, don’t be a stranger and I’ll try not to be. Keep warm and keep gaming!

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