West Karana

I’ve had my level 75 cleric on Luclin for about… four months now. The level cap on EverQuest is 80. There have been three expansions since I last played her, The Serpent’s Spine, The Buried Sea and Secrets of Faydwer (I played TSS just long enough to get to level 75). A new expansion, Seeds of Destruction is about to come out.

And I don’t care. I haven’t even joined one group her level. Because I know what my job will be — sitting on my ass watching other people have fun while I press the heal button occasionally. Doesn’t matter what level or what expansion, my job was the same. Same as when I was a rogue. Druid was a little different; when the druid was my main, I could solo well, or be bad at stuff in a group. They’ve since made druids better in groups and given clerics the ability to solo somewhat, but really, my complete frustration at the mindless repetition of playing EverQuest, combined with the difficulty of finding a group, drove me to quit. I only came back for the Nostalgia group, but once again, I find I have zero interest in leveling, except insofar as I get to see areas of the game one last time. SoD may well raise the level cap to 100 and promise pie, but there is absolutely nothing that will get me to willingly join the grind again.

I almost quit EQ when I heard TSS would raise the cap to 75, but I enjoyed the people I raided with enough that I (with their help, of course), grinded out the levels. When I heard about SoF raising it to 80, that was when I quit EQ.

I played WoW enough in beta that I had no interest in playing it after release, but I eventually did, and started and finished the game in six months and quit before anything was known about the expansion. I was actually glad that there was a game out there (WoW) which was fun all the way through, and that you could actually *finish*. Naturally, they had to add a lot of grind to it but I was already gone by then. There was nothing they could really add to WoW to make it worth grinding for anyway.

I don’t have any interest in grinding levels in Vanguard, EverQuest 2, Lord of the Rings Online or any of the other WoW-likes out there. Zero, zilch, none. I log into EQ2 once every few weeks to say hi to my stuff. My alts sit before the RoK quest grind level and I see no reason whatsoever to do that twice (my troub and inq did it simultaneously so they only count at once). If Shadow of Odyssey raises the level cap, I’ll probably quit EQ2.

Just counting my main characters, I figure I have heard the ding 2270 times (counting AAs in the EQa). And that’s really low, since I have bunches of alts in every game I didn’t count. Also that doesn’t count DAoC, FFXI, LotRO or the others. Call it 3000 times counting everything.

That’s enough to become immune to ding. This old rat is no longer pushing the lever that sometimes but always longer than before, drops a sunflower seed into my salivating mouth.

I look at upcoming WoW-likes and wonder why they have to be that way. If the focus of Warhammer Online is city sieges and mass battles, then why level? Why not just get in on the city sieging from Day 1? If WoW’s raids are so great, why have all that cruft before you get to them? If EQ2’s lore is so terrific, why do we have to fight at all? Guild Wars lets you start a character at max level if you just want to do arena combat. That sounds like an EXCELLENT idea. Why doesn’t every game do that?

I’ve spent a few hours trying to figure out what could bring me to strap myself to the grinding wheel once more and I can’t think of anything. Not even friends or family.

I do know why I play MMOs, I’ve always known it. I play MMOs to tell stories, with myself as the main character. That Wizard 101 comic is part of the story I tell myself when I play (and there’s a lot more to that which will unfortunately have to wait until I unlock Marleybone). I had a story for leveling Dina and Dera through the RoK quest grind. I had a story for Etha as I went through EQ for the first time.

But the less WoW-likes let you tell your own stories and the more they force you to do whatever little evil treadmill schemes they’ve decided upon, the less I am interested. I play Wizard 101 a lot because, though it has levels, they don’t matter so much. A level 1 wizard could teleport right into Mooshu, the level 35+ world, and still contribute to the fight, because fighting isn’t based on your level, it’s based on your deck of cards, and being higher level just gives you more options. When i DO port into those fights, though being way lower level, I DO contribute.

It’s astonishing.

This is why I have started trolling the free-to-plays. Because WoW-likes don’t interest me any more. Not even the ones I play right now. I’m glad Cameron and others aren’t tired of them, but geez. These games are like punishments to me now. Punishments I pay for.

PvP? If, in Warhammer, I could make it so that every member of the opposing faction died, without hope of resurrection, if I could destroy all they had ever made, if I could make it so that not one brick of their homes rested upon another brick and all memory of their civilization was stamped out forever, I’d probably play. But instead they just reset things after awhile. Zzzzz. If I really wanted to PvP, I’d play a game that didn’t require you to level to do it. Like Call of Duty or Halo or TF2 something. WoW-likes and PvP will always be shaky partners, since levels and gear ensure few fights are purely about skill.

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 :)

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.

Keen made a post decrying the “dumbing down” of MMOs — people head for easy mode at every opportunity, and seeing that, more, even easier, games are made. A vicious spiral that ends in “Hello Kitty Adventure Island“.

I thought I rather reasonably suggested that there were hard(er) MMOs out there — FFXI Online, EverQuest, and Lineage 2 among them — and that they weren’t exactly burning up the charts. Keen replied that the whole point of his post was that games are getting easier, not that old games were harder (and in fact, that tended to support his point).

So… okay, time to prove Keen wrong, that there is a market for hard — and yet still fun — MMOs, and that in fact they were still being made.

What makes a hard MMO, hard? Let’s look at Final Fantasy XI Online, the hardest MMO I have ever personally played.

• Groups mandatory for progression.
• Dual-class system requires leveling your character at least twice.
• Some classes can only be unlocked past a certain level, requiring you to level your character three or four times to get your desired job/subjob.
• As well as needing gear for at least two jobs…
• Combat requires teamwork and precise timing.
• Level caps require a significant quest to move beyond.
• Unchangeable choices made at character creation significantly impact your play forever.
• If the difference in levels between your highest and lowest character in a group is greater than three, the entire group’s experience is significantly reduced.
• Crafting requires camping merchants with a limited supply of materials, as well as uncommon drops and a fair amount of gil.
• Fast travel (ie, via Chocobo) requires a lengthy quest and once a chocobo is tamed, costs money proportional to the popularity of your starting point. Really.
• Death carries penalties — you can lose your level.

Okay, I guess that explains why I don’t play FFXI Online anymore. But the fact remains, it is a hard game with a dedicated playbase. Oh yeah, monsters and pirates attack you during boat rides. And it can take *days* to find a group. And farmers perma-camp NMs (Notorious Monsters — ie, nameds) for gear you would like to get for yourself. And also the gil sellers are everywhere.

Well, let’s compare that to EverQuest, another hard game I played extensively.

• Groups required for current content.
• Unchangeable choices made at the start can have a lasting effect on your gameplay.
• Death carries extreme penalties (you can lose your level), though corpse summoning NPCs and experience restore AAs soften this quite a bit.
• Groups require a tank, healer, slower and snarer, making it hard to find a group if you cannot perform one of these essential tasks. Or if a group already has someone who can do it.
• Crafting requires extensive rare and costly components to master.

I could list more — if this were five years ago, but EQ has become much easier over the years. They have taken away travel times, the need to rest, monster camping, provided an alternate path to raid-level gear through high level (and incredibly expensive but still…) crafting. So while EQ is considered a hard game, it isn’t as hard as, say, FFXI Online.

I haven’t played L2, so I can’t comment on it from experience. But relentless grinding, random roving death squads, and yet more grinding (repetitive activities for little reward) are what I hear.

What makes these hard games, hard?

High on the list is a requirement to have a group. For all the positive social or virtual rewards of being in a group, having to find and join a group doing content you would enjoy with people who play well, is hard.

That right there, is the key. If a game’s primary focus is group content, it will be considered hard.

Second, possibly uninformed decisions made at character creation time can haunt you for a long time. I wanted to be a Mithra white mage, but I was always a reluctant choice for a group because my magic points were so much lower than a comparable Tarutaru’s MP. I did all I could to boost that by choosing a compatible subjob once I turned 30 (summoner) and investing heavily in +MP gear, but it was always a losing battle.

In EQ1, I didn’t know what stats were important for a druid, so I focused on wisdom and agility, thinking it would help me avoid getting hit. That character was low on mana compared to other druids until she was geared well enough to hit the cap, sometime in her 50s. And I was distressed to find out at about level 40 that a druid no longer had the healing ability to be a group’s sole healer (this was later corrected, but was true at the time).

In WoW, the only significant choice you make about your character at creation is its class. (Racial abilities matter slightly but have been revamped since I played). Outside of instances, grouping is a tremendously BAD idea, with experience penalties and fights over collection quest drops, harvesting nodes and the random loot necessary to pay for consumables. There is essentially no death penalty, all zones are pretty safe (I once walked a level 10 rogue from Westfall to Gadgetzan with only a couple bad spots), quests lead you through the content — WoW took EQ and slid the difficulty control all the way to the left.

To prove Keen wrong, then, my mission is to find a new MMO out recently or coming soon, where grouping is recommended, there is a death penalty, travel times are a factor, soloing is possible but difficult, and decisions made at character creation have repercussions throughout your career in the game.

Haven’t I just described Vanguard, Saga of Heroes?

This game was advertised as EverQuest’s spiritual successor, designed by many of the same people. Unfortunately, a tainted launch and an unfinished product meant many of its natural audience, wouldn’t or couldn’t play it.

So anyway, I won my little bet with myself. I found a “hard” MMO. VG is undergoing massive changes to make it viable while not, hopefully, making it easy. VG could well become the game it was promised to be, and maybe its future explains why SOE bought the game when it already had a few EverQuests.

Still, will VG’s disastrous launch kill plans for other, more challenging MMOs?

EverQuest, at its peak, had 550,000 subscribers. FFXI had more, but since EQ was not widely available in Asia, it’s not a fair comparison. As near as I can estimate from Wikipedia and a Google search, FFXI Online had about 200,000 English-speaking players at its peak.

500,000 subscribers is a lot of people. Even 200,000 is pretty darn good, and is likely about what EQ2 (a game which is not hard) does today (I see estimates of 150,000 for EQ1, so it’s still going well).

So, setting Vanguard aside for a moment, which upcoming MMOs will be “hard”? We can certainly assume Warhammer will not be hard. There is no way their hype machine can support merely 200,000 players.

The number one complaint I hear about LotRO and EQ2 is that after a certain point, a group is recommended. So there’s two games that people leave when it becomes slightly harder. Age of Conan — the first twenty levels are solo. This is not a game that is going to suddenly become a group-required game at level 21.

Times aren’t looking good for hard MMOs. Keen was likely, in the end, entirely correct. Will upcoming titles like Chronicles of Spellborn reverse this trend? Is anyone interested in catering to the niche market of gamers who prefer to group?

Me, I’ll probably be giving Vanguard another look.

I got a little sidetracked with two things I’m working on for this blog (”Music” and “A Day in the Life”), but I came across this article about FFXI fandom that I found very interesting. Not so much for FFXI, a game I enjoyed to the point of frustration, but what it says about all of us who play MMOs. A very good read.

Ways I Am Evil #56127

I was at Fry’s buying a hard drive for work. And OMG they had Guitar Hero set up! It’s a weird demo, without all the songs, so I’m just getting used to it and making a few mistakes when this young guy comes up… Pressure is on… I get through the Judas Priest song I’m on, do a Franz Ferdinand and offer him the controller. Pretty easy, eh? He takes it, completely loses it on White Zombie. I finish it up perfectly.

Zing!

Couple of months ago, these teenage boys at Fry’s thought they were gonna challenge me to Dance Dance Revolution. They were even gonna let me do it on Easy. But no, no, lemme try it on the same level you play on.

Pwned them.

Bwahahaha.

Challenge me to a game I DON’T own at home, sometime…

I also tried Donkey Kong bongo game while I was there. Quick reaction: it sucks. The song selection is bizarre; some soft rock, some Nintendo game songs (Pokemon theme, DK rap, Kirby Back Atcha, etc). But what bugged me more than the lightweight song selection was how unmusical the bongos were. They didn’t fit musically into the songs at all. Not impressed.

The Japanese taiko game I saw last year was much better.