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 :)

It was a pretty slow weekend, considering. I meant to do a first look at Pi Story to complement the one I did for Florensia, but I didn’t get to it. Nor did I play Florensia any. I did play some EverQuest; Saturday I did all sorts of running around with my ranger, soloed Hate and Sky with my cleric, and Sunday morning met up with a guildie to do The Hole more or less legit, in that I actually played Tipa the entire time :) But I’ve talked about that in a previous post.

Since last week’s patch, some of the tougher fights in Wizard 101 have been eased up. I did a lot more of the Krok fights, cleared out the Djesserit tombs and working on the Anjit ones. The Emperor’s Retreat is still a little tough; I’m going to have to find some friends to help on that one. I have been exploring Marleybone, the next world, by looking up friends who are there and teleporting to them. I’ll have a post about Wizard 101 tonight, I didn’t have time this morning. With any luck, I’ll be able to piggyback to the fourth world, Mooshoo, soon.

I logged on to Dina in EQ2 for awhile; couldn’t find a group, but I chatted with a guy who wanted me to move to Butcherblock and return to raiding. Even if all my nights were free — which they aren’t — I will NEVER sign up for a six or seven day a week raiding commitment, unless I am being paid for my time. There are no rewards for raiding that are worth giving up half my life to obtain. None. Not even one. The fact that WoW, EQ, EQ2 and their clones encourage and require this to raid is proof enough as to how out of step these games are with the time most people have to spend on something like that.

How to bring the casual player into raiding? Guaranteed reward. Every time I complete a raid, I get a master spell or another piece to my set gear. I get it, it goes right into my inventory, same for everyone else. Having to raid something dozens of times for a chance to get something you need is the way things used to be.

Honestly, the only rewards worth working for are the ones that will remain even after I hit the UNSUBSCRIBE button. Friendships, or real-world loot.

I logged into my EQ2.Najena assassin, Brightknife, and headed over to Timorous Deep to work on some more gray quests that nonetheless would improve my armor while looking for a group, but lost interest quickly and logged off.

I see Cryptic has finally officially announced they are working on Star Trek Online, which probably comes close to being just as much a surprise as the fact that Bioware is working on a Knights of the Old Republic MMO. Which is to say, no surprise at all. Cryptic has not yet proven to me that they can make an MMO worth playing. City of Heroes/Villains comes close, but its grindy, repetitive gameplay is only worth doing if you are doing it with friends. Since nearly ANY MMO is worth playing if it’s with friends, this isn’t any sort of recommendation.

Looking at the screenshots, it looks like they didn’t use any of Perpetual’s code not because Perpetual didn’t want them to have it, but because they refused to buy it. The screenshots look entirely different from that of Perpetual’s game. There’s just one thing I want out of a STO game. And that is, my character, sitting in the captain’s seat, ordering the bridge crew around and talking with aliens on the viewscreen as we jockey for the best firing position. A tactical game that requires teamwork. And I’ll stand at the science station or whatever I have to do to earn those captain’s stripes.

If it’s friggin’ WoW-in-space like Perpetual’s seemed to be — forget it. No more WoW-likes, PLEASE. We have WoW already. Even though there were battles and stuff in Star Trek, that was NOT the point of the show. Most of the time the point was to AVOID killing. If Cryptic says I have to kill a thousand Gorn soldiers to LEVEL, they will have TRAMPLED the whole meaning of Star Trek. To seek out new life and new civilizations — and BRUTALLY MURDER THEM? NO. Star Trek Online had better be a game where you AVOID killing for the best score.

Somehow I have the feeling that the people at Cryptic, as able as they are, will not be able to make a Star Trek game that isn’t loaded with senseless killing. Maybe it will be a mirror universe Star Trek game, that universe where people delighted in senseless killing, and a universe far better suited to a WoW-like.

Ya know what? Star Trek Online shouldn’t be like an MMO at all. It should be more like — some sort of social web thing, where you could work on science projects or try to heal alien creatures, or experiment, or play on the holo-deck, or attend command school, or try to tune engines up to a better efficiency, or figure out a new way to use the deflector dish, or explore the ruins of ancient civilizations, or attend a peace conference as part of an ambassador’s retinue, or… see what I’m getting at? Having to assassinate just ten more Romulan Centurions to ding before you get your next Phaser upgrade goes against EVERYTHING ST STANDS FOR. You should be able to experience the breadth and depth of the Star Trek/Starfleet universe, which CAN INCLUDE space battles and dangerous away missions, but those would be a small part of everything you can do. And not necessary to level. Why even have levels?

Anyway, I’ve ranted about STO plenty in its last incarnation. Perpetual was going to cheapen it. Cryptic might not. I hope they don’t. But I don’t think they are daring enough to make a game that isn’t a grindy murderfest. It’s what’s easiest.

Adventure on land and sea? Lush, detailed world? Dual talent trees that let you mold your character however you like? How can it miss?

Florensia’s kinship with Dream of Mirror Online couldn’t be more unmistakable. That same sort of soft focus, cell-shaded look of the characters against backdrops so lush they seem to be almost painted. And these guys don’t just sit around and swing at each other… they put their bodies into it, jumping and swinging and spiking stuff at the enemy. The birth of the aerobic adventurer.

You start off in the port town of Roxbury on Cardiff Island — any relationship to actual cities is purely coincidental. This small fishing village is being assaulted from both land and sea by a variety of pests. On land, someone delved into a cave where no mortal was meant to tread, and a vile mist began corrupting the local wildlife. On the sea, the port is being harassed by gigantic lobster men who seem to be in league with some pirates.

The residents of Roxbury are going to need all your abilities on land AND on sea in order to survive. Also, you will need to fish.

Nothing says “hi, this game is from Japan” like hundreds of people all lined up against the water, fishing. And why not? Fish up some rare stuff and you can turn it in for upgrades.

The quests are thoroughly standard. Bring this thing to someone else. Go talk to that guy about something. Go kill ten of that and three of this and all the thoses you can find until you get ten wazzits from it.

The extensive tutorial leads you easily through battles on land, building and equipping a ship, and setting sail. It does fail a bit on how to actually kill stuff on the water; it took awhile before I figured out how to successfully join the fight against the Lobstermen from the Deep but yeah, I eventually got all Cloverfield on their butts.

I designed and built that ship, by the way. That ain’t no tutorial ship.

There’s only the one race — humans — and just four classes — explorer, noble, mercenary and saint. Explorers are the rangers and hunters of Florensia. Nobles, those people in silks who never got their hands dirty with real work, are the nukers. The mercenaries are the basic tanks, and the saints are the healers. My character is a Saint. Isn’t she JUST, though? Carrying a candle to show you how devout she is. A candle of FIERY DEATH she can HURL 50 FEET.

Those are just the templates. Similar to the late and lamented Mythos, you can build out your character anyway you like based on the talent trees. Each level, you buy a new skill. And each level, you get a point to put in a skill. The more points you allocate, the more powerful that skill becomes. All Saints get a basic heal, but that won’t do anything unless you point points into it — the more the better. But points in healing is points you can’t spend on nukes and dots. And that’s how that talent tree branches — a healing saint, a nuking saint, or a DoT saint? It’s up to you, and you can do a combination of, but you won’t ever be good at all of them.

I haven’t seen a respec NPC, but I can’t see how there would not be one.

But is the game any good? I can’t tell you that. I can tell you it isn’t BAD. It does need some work — for instance, the UI is not modifiable. These old eyes need text to be a little larger, and I’d like some of the other UI elements moved around. The movement keys are a little wacky; you can’t turn in place, you can only turn while moving forward, which is weird. And you can’t redefine them. The bouncy music plays continuously whether you are in battle or not, and it’s always the same tune. So yeah, there’s work to be done.

I feel it’s impossible to actually judge how good an MMO is unless you play it for a month. Getting to land level 6 and sea level 2 hasn’t taught me much about the higher level parts of the game. The animations are great, very over the top and entirely appropriate for the anime look. The talent trees are deep and it’s easy to see how you can make a character that plays out just as you like it. You can just buy one skill and every level pump it higher and higher and become fantastic at that one thing, or spread out your abilities and be more a generalist. That’s very nice. There’s even (ahem) a menu that lets you select among the several languages Florensia supports (be sure to set this to English if you’re an English speaker!)

If you can’t stand cute anime characters, you’re not going to like Florensia much. But if you liked Dream of Mirror Online but wanted something with a less Asian, more Western setting — Florensia might be worth a look. And hey, it’s free.