West Karana

Another week, another truckload of gaming press releases.

Bioware announces their new downloadable content for their Dragon Age RPG, “The Darkspawn Chronicles“. Meant as an alternate story — one where your character from Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening dies during the Grey Warden initiation — here you command the forces of the Darkspawn against the remnants of the forces of Light, led by the man who wouldn’t be king, Alistair.

Complete the module, unlock an item in the main games. And hey, you can buy some replica swords with which to terrorize your friends, family and co-workers. THAT won’t get you arrested. Perfect for slaying any stray Darkspawn you happen to meet on the bus.

Jolt Online announces a new toolbar for their Legends of Zork browser game. The toolbar will let you keep track of your character when you aren’t playing the game, but are in your browser (IE and FF only, folks. Sorry, Safari and Chrome users) where… you could just load the game up if you wanted to see this information. I wondered idly on Twitter if this apparently useless add-on had some nefarious purpose. And I got a reply!

@JoltOnline went on to explain:

We get happier players, and happier players are more likely to keep playing our game (and buying stuff). It’s that simple :P

If you’re a Legends of Zork player, and want to install this toolbar, well, Jolt will give you 60 extra action points per character on your account. My gameplay these days is pretty much limited to seeing how my Accountant sidekick is doing with my stash.

I found out that there was ALSO a toolbar for XFire that can detect you playing browser games, but it only works in IE, so sorry everyone who prefers another browser. It also optionally loads plugins, like music players and stuff, which you likely don’t need. I use Chrome, so toolbar authors hate me. Or something.

Swords and ships MMO Florensia wants us to know about all their new and fancy outfits. Outfits are nice, but I always liked the sea game better than the rather standard land game.

I doubt I need to mention EverQuest II’s new $25 mounts. The uproar has been amazing, especially since Blizzard’s own quarter Benjamin horsey of last month was hailed by millions as manna from heaven. Fools and their money are soon parted and all that. Can’t use the cash cats in most dungeons and on most raids. I wonder if they can be used in the battlegrounds? Anyway, if you have a fin and a couple sawbucks to spare, here’s a place to spend it.

I think everyone should only refer to money with slang. I’ll go first.

KingsIsle uncovers another shadowy figure from their forthcoming Wizard101 expansion, Celestia. The huge crab, dressed in shell armor and carrying a wicked polearm, looks menacing enough. If Celestia continues the trend of new Wizard101 worlds, we’ll have to kill approximately a million of these critters at half an hour per fight.

Dragonspyre is SO TEDIOUS.

Anyway, that’s all the barely relevant stuff from this last week. If you’re a game developer and want to send me press releases, please do! I love getting mail!

I was a little surprised to see that my character from Florensia’s open beta last year was still around, though naturally I’d entirely forgotten how to play her.

To get back up to speed, I put my Saint (healer) aside and started a new character, an Explorer (ranged dps specializing in guns). The very detailed tutorial took me through setting skills, inventory management, ship construction and combat, and I was just about to set out on my new life as an Explorer when I read in chat that people were desperate for Saints in their higher-level groups.

So I went back to Tipa and went my merry way… killing ten (strong dodos, weak fungi, wild boars, devil’s scarecrows, etc). Now as back last year, I was struck by just how similar quests and combat were to Dream of Mirror Online. I finished up my quests in the area (leveling from 7 to 9) and headed back to town, because you can be an adventurer in ANY game. I wanted to be a pirate.

The port master of Roxbury took great pains to inform me that pirates aren’t bad people — in fact, most of them consider themselves “gentleman pirates” who would never harm an honest sailor.

Ah, but some have sailed into a more troubled sea — and them — THEM — you must destroy.

Ten of this sort, a dozen of that, and collect banners from these and those if you could, please!

Ships — which you build, crew and outfit, more or less like you do in Pirates of the Burning Sea — come in several types which are roughly analogous to adventuring classes — you have the tanks, the rammers (mine), the gunners (but no healers, unless I missed it). Sailing the seas is a matter of adjusting your sails and course for the best wind, tacking as necessary to ensure you have the upper hand when meeting the enemy. You want to be, as much as possible, out of their firing arc while they stay in yours.

As a land-based MMO, Florensia travels a well-trodden road. There’s little there to set it apart from dozens of similar Asian imports. On the sea, though, is where Florensia shines. The sailing mini-game is fun and strategic, and as far as I have seen, doesn’t require you to ever set foot on land. The game even goes so far as to put floating save points and merchants out in the open sea, and that would be my recommendation: Dabble in the land game, but head as soon as you can for the deep water. You’ll find a sea game far more approachable than PotBS’ slowness.

Yup, back in Florensia for a second try at it. Because, hey, be a pirate on the sea and an adventurer on the land, build your own ship, hire a (NPC) crew, two separate career paths, and it costs nuttin’. The cash shop only has some potions… I dunno how they make money in this game. The general chat is about what you’d expect, though.

Big news today was that ex-EverQuest and Vanguard helmer Brad McQuaid was ending his self-imposed exile of idyllic days spent racing cars and playing games to jump back into the spotlight with his very own blog. Or did he? Genda believes the whole thing is a hoax, someone (possibly drummer Keith Sharward) just having a bit of fun. The actual Brad McQuaid doesn’t seem to have taken the steps of building up his LinkedIn profile in awhile, anyway.

And would he really have started off a blog by writing to all the folks who lost their jobs and perhaps careers that he’d been wiling away the past three years living an idyllic life of leisure? I think not.

So use your own judgment, there. But I wouldn’t go gushing to “Brad” about how much you liked/hated EverQuest/Vanguard *just* yet.

With EQ2′s update 52 coming today and bringing loads and loads of goodies, and the recent absolutely cheap price Steam charged for the full game — everything — for $20, there’s been lots of interest lately in EverQuest’s sequel.

Ogrebears is betting that Velious will bring another ten levels with it, which would bring the total to 90 — for a new record among the WoW-likes. He likes the idea, I don’t, but I guess if you don’t flush everyone’s current gear and spells down the toilet every couple of years, what are people going to strive for? Me, I’m off that particular treadmill. I might level a char or two to 90, if that’s what happens, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend another hundred nights sitting in this chair doing the same damned thing over and over again just because some yokel in San Diego plinked a counter from 8 to 9. Life is too short.

Angry Raider ignores the cries of the so-called hardcore denouncing the dumbing down of EQ2 with the latest update. Spell ranks — simplified. Research assistants who will get you the spells you need for nothing. And so on. Ogre and Angry have a point. If you’re gonna toss 90 levels in the face of a new player, with the uncomfortable truth that they won’t be seeing a group for the first fifty or sixty levels unless they brought it with them, you better make sure you coddle them until they get where the people are.

WoW learned that lesson.

I’m just being a contrarian here, I know, but I DON’T think pumping levels up all the time is the answer. That may make the grind-loving achievers happy, but it just turns me off. Someone commented today that the base stats for a raider in EQ these days is level 85 and about 3000 AAs. That’s madness. That’s actually making it impossible to start the game new.

Somehow, WoW has managed to both keep pumping up the requirements and yet keep getting people. Saylah writes about a cousin that wanted to try “Worldcraft” because (in unintended irony) she liked Free Realms and wanted to play something LIKE Free Realms, but more serious, like they talked about at work.

The Evil Theurgist’s Wizard 101 account was hacked recently. I hope it’s resolved quickly. He says hacked, but in almost every case I came across when I was an EverQuest guide, it turned out that the victim had given their account information to someone they trusted. Or they had shared it with their guild because everyone did. I don’t know if this was the case with E.T., but just a word to the wise: your hacker is usually someone you know.

And we leave you now with Aggro Me’s “Teen Vogue Confidential: Your Most Embarrassing Gaming Moments (plus fifty rad fashion tips)”.

Sleep well, or stay awake — it’s a free country — but keep gaming!

2008 has been an absolutely amazing year for MMOs, and my personal progress through them.

Last year at this time, I’d just found the absolutely most perfect EQ2 guild — they were great raiders, loved grouping, and were fantastic people besides. With Clan of Shadows, I managed to do every flagging raid for Ruins of Kunark and was ready to step in and do my best to help the guild as they conquered Veeshan’s Peak. It wasn’t to be; I didn’t make the full membership vote. It wasn’t even close. That disappointment, along with other things to fill my evenings, eventually led to the end of raiding. Without raiding, though, I didn’t have much incentive to log in anymore. I tried to make things work with another guild, Delusions of Grandeur, but it just wasn’t CoS. I guess if I couldn’t make it in CoS, I didn’t want to settle for a lesser guild.

I started poking around back on EverQuest. I really missed my characters there. Not raiding, so much, but the friends, community and camaraderie that makes EQ unique. A lot of people commented that they’d love to play through EQ again, if they didn’t have to do it alone. So I thought we might do together what we’d never do alone, and along with ten or so fellow former EQ players, started Nostalgia the Guild on the Luclin server. NtG peaked in mid-summer when we got to dragon killing level and put the hurt on two of the three bosses of the original EQ, Lord Nagafen and Lady Vox. (We never killed the third, Phinegal Atropos, as a guild). SOE’s summer Living Legacy program had the unexpected side effect of boosting the power of our armor and weapons to raid levels, and a lot of things became possible with very few people. Although fairly diminished, NtG still meets Fridays to explore Old Norrath.

Stargrace took the Nostalgia idea and brought it forward 500 years to the devastated Norrath of EverQuest II. I eventually transferred half my characters from Befallen to Najena to join the guild there. I’m getting the urge to raid and group again, so I may be moving some of them back to Befallen… the loneliness of a server I have no history with dooms me to pickup groups with players I have never met and will never meet again. Nostalgia EQ2′s two active members aren’t enough to build a group or a raid… so there’s not much to do unless I want to do it alone. I hate playing by myself.

In February, I restarted my Neopets account with the sole goal of reaching and beating level 100 of their Shapeshifter mini-game. Shapeshifter starts out as the kind of brain twister that is fun to solve, but quickly goes well beyond the bounds of anything that can be solved by unaided humans in a normal lifetime. So this supposed kids game is really a test of your ability to develop an algorithm that can solve an enormous non-directed decision tree before the Sun goes nova. With help and encouragement from other solvers, I developed a Python program I called Shifter that could solve the hardest levels in no more than a day, and often far faster. On April 1st, 2008, I solved the last puzzle and was the Neopets Shapeshifter Champion for the entire month.

February also started my short-lived affair with Pirates of the Burning Sea. My son wanted to give it a try, so I bought a copy for him, intending to buy a copy for myself if I liked it. He grew bored with it. I liked it a lot, and made a character on his account, got up to a fairly decent level and was getting my free trading skills up, working through the storyline, and getting involved in some really exciting battles at sea.

It was on Station Pass, too! This was somewhat of a killer, actually. My son is not on the Station Pass, so I would have had to start paying for one or pay the PotBS subscription fee to keep playing, all the time I could be playing it for nothing extra if I just had my own account.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to start all over again, or pay to buy another copy of the game, so I just let it lapse. There were plenty of issues, but the game had amazing character and ship customization, absolutely gorgeous and tense battles, and I even liked the story. Sailing back and forth on the Caribbean though, not so much. Having to depend on a wide variety of people to make goods, definitely not so much. I wanted to play, but I just didn’t have the time or the money.

I felt sure that by the end of the year, I’d be totally engulfed in the one sure-fire hit MMO of the year, Flagship Studio’s Mythos. I’ve played a lot of Diablo clones, and even some, like Cronous, that try and take the action RPG into the MMO realm, but none had nailed it like Mythos. Even before they expanded the heavily instanced Overworld into a more world-like map with zoning only for cities and dungeons, I felt they had made perhaps the ultimate casual MMO… Rumors of money trouble inside Flagship turned out to be truth, and over a tumultuous weekend, Hellgate: London, their other title, was taken by their Asian publishing partner, and Mythos was dead.

I would like to be playing Mythos right now.

In March, a major new chapter of my life began when I was hired to blog about breaking MMO news for Massively.com. The pressure of writing so many articles, keeping a full time job, trying to keep Nostalgia rolling, and raiding in EQ2 eventually left me unable to do any of these things well. I put my full time job first, where it had to be, and focused on real life issues, like getting my son enrolled in college and figuring out how to pay for it (answer: I didn’t. I am broke all the time now :( ). My Massively adventure ended after an ill-fated trip to the SOE Fan Faire put me in massive (sorry) debt, and my job was cut down to doing EQ2 guides, a task for which I was incredibly unsuited, since I was hardly playing EQ2 at all at that point (which continues to this day), and I’d never written a guide to anything in my life :P Massively and I parted ways in September.

I went back to writing just for West Karana, where I planned to change the direction of the blog from just chronicling my adventures in mainstream MMOs to seeking out, playing and being an advocate for lesser known MMOs.

It’s not that I don’t like the AAA, high budget, huge marketing department MMOs. I just find them too similar to each other. So many players look eagerly to a new MMO to banish the blahs they feel with the game they currently play. They play the new MMO for awhile, discover that it’s essentially the same as the game they already played, and pronounce the entire genre dead.

I was looking through MMORPG.com’s list of games, and some of them looked totally, wildly different from anything I had ever played. Somewhere in those hundreds of games would have to be dozens that went in a new direction.

Oh yeah, there were. BUNCHES!

In early July, I discovered Wizard 101, probably via Massively. This was an entire MMO built around a wildly kooky collectible card game. I was absolutely and utterly hooked. This was the sort of thing I’d been looking for — an MMO that was just entirely out of left field. It was superficially a kid’s game but quickly turned into a game requiring strategy and teamwork and great skill in deck building. I played until they turned out the beta lights, took a couple week’s break, then started right in on the live game.

If anyone wanted to dip their toes into MMO gaming, I wouldn’t give them a copy of EverQuest II or World of Warcraft. I’d sit them down in front of Wizard 101, right where the Headmaster of Ravenwood School of Wizardry is giving a test to see what sort of wizard you are. It’s not Hogwart’s by another name. It’s something new, unique and fun. Wizard 101 was one of the breakout hits of 2008, and I expect wonderful things from it in 2009.

My on-again, off-again relationship with City of Villains flipped “on” again for awhile in July and August. I love the idea of a super-hero, comic book game, and I like what NCsoft has done with the game since they acquired it from Cryptic, and the character creator is unparalleled, but… the repetitive gameplay just can’t keep me for long. I started to get into their crafting system, but after awhile I just stopped logging in. I’m still subscribed, for now, because I am waiting for the mission designer coming in Issue 14 or 15. I want to see what that is like.

Spore owned my gaming time for a few weeks in September. I really wanted to like the game and very much enjoyed building new creatures, vehicles and space ships. I just didn’t get into the space game that is the majority of the time spent playing — you breeze through the other portions in an hour or less. It still has a place on my hard drive.

Recently, I’ve chucked pretty much every game into the back seat in order to play Dream of Mirror Online. I played this game briefly earlier in the year, and it made a very good impression, but the huge number of games out at that time pushed it away before I’d gotten to level 10, where the jobs, and the game itself, open up. As I played it, I couldn’t help remembering the last game that made me feel this way — the original EverQuest. I began to notice a lot of similarities between the games — death penalties, slow leveling, an emphasis on community over leveling, wide open zones and dungeons — it was EverQuest! A Taiwanese game company had managed, somehow, to meld EQ’s gameplay and community with the Asian anime-flavored, cinematic games. Absolutely stunned me, and I am having a lot of fun playing it.

Honorable mentions: Guild Wars — I want to play this more. Why don’t I? I don’t know! Probably because I hate playing alone. Florensia — another Asian import. I loved the fact that it had a cool land game AND a pirate-themed sea game, but it reminded me of DOMO so much, I figured I’d just play DOMO (good call). Vanguard — even though it runs crappy on my machine, I still pick it up now and again, and it still has a spot on my hard drive. Spellborn — this was intended to be a major part of my fall gaming, but it has been pushed to next year. I still have high hopes for the game, if not for the publisher’s commitment to the title.

2008 was a very intense year for MMO gaming, full of tales of intrigue and adventure — and that’s just the marketing departments! Some of this year’s biggest releases — WoW’s expansion, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online — I just could not find time for. 2009 isn’t looking as intense as 2008, but it might well be SOE’s time to shine if they can get The Agency and Free Realms out the door. Champions Online is also scheduled for the year, and perhaps DC Universe Online as well, giving NCsoft’s City of Heroes a run for its money and market share. News of Star Trek Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic should keep people thirsting for more space-themed adventure in 2010. And, Spellborn!

Happy holidays, fellow gamers :)