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.

While discussing the possibility of “classic” servers in World of Warcraft, Cameron waxes nostalgic about his own yearning for the simpler days of gnoll-pounding in the Karanas. I loved those days too — my blog is named after one of those old zones, and my header images are all from EQ1, so you know I’m standing right there with Cameron, casting SoW, shooting off careless lightning and healing as best an old-school druid can. I was so nostalgic at one point that I restarted on a new no-transfer server, Stromm, and went through the entire game from scratch (xping in East Commonlands and Permafrost and Oasis, seeing the world once again), so that helped sate that particular yearning.

Honestly, though, you can’t become the person you were, who didn’t know what was around the next corner. Not in a game you have already played. You have to move forward. And so this is my challenge. It is difficult, INCREDIBLY difficult, but will leave you with those same sorts of memories that you had when you first got into MMO gaming.

Pick a MMO — any MMO — and uninstall every other MMO from your hard drive. Additionally, pay no attention to any new MMOs that may be coming out. None of this trying it for a month to see how it goes. Just make it a game you have not played before. The game itself doesn’t have to be new — just you. It could be fun to pick up a really old game like Asheron’s Call and just jump into the deep end, or pick up Age of Conan and wade through blood for twelve months.

One player. One game. One year.

If you run out of content, bug the devs in the forums about expansions and run through the game again. Meet people like yourself. Form new friendships, see things and do things that dabblers will never see or do. You almost certainly did this once with another MMO and now you remember how much fun that was. So do it again. Here’s some suggestions.

Vanguard, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Mythos, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Chronicles of Spellborn (assuming it ever releases), EVE Online. I deliberately leave out EQ2, WoW and LotRO, since they are popular enough that there’s no mystery or chance of discovery to them at all (especially WoW, but then, you probably already played that game anyway). If you’re daying, you might even try Star Wars: Galaxies. Don’t believe the common wisdom about games. People absolutely thrive on trashing games they don’t like, even though other people may enjoy the game (in which case, they feel, those people are WRONG and should be playing a different game). It doesn’t matter what people say. You’re going to choose your game and through thick and thin, when you decide to sit down a spend a few hours in an MMO, that’s the one you will choose.

MMOs cannot be fully enjoyed by dabblers. Commitment is part of the attraction.

Second step to this is to blog about it. If you aren’t a blogger, Blogspot and Wordpress (West Karana runs on Wordpress) will set you up, for free, no cost to you, in about a minute. Day 1 of the new game: Create a character and just write about how that goes. Win or suck, this is your game for a year. So keep a journal online, and in five years when you look back upon this year fondly, you’ll remember everything that happened.

The question is — could you play a single MMO for an entire year in order to get that same sort of feeling for a new game that you did for the one you remember?

Me? Well, I’m still loving EQ2. But there will come a time, maybe this year, maybe next, when I *will* take this challenge. Currently, Chronicles of Spellborn and Champions Online (neither with any sort of release date) are at the top of my list. I expect AoC and WAR to be too dominated by griefers to be much fun, but I’ll be trying out both games just to see.

A feature of mine about good games that DON’T have Warcraft in their names and could use some well-deserved love is up on Massively. Check it out, let me know what you think :)

From a comment on Tobold’s excellent post about the tank shortage in the World of Warcraft (or more accurately, the Protection-spec’d Warrior shortage):

I’ve been playing WOW for 2+ years now and everytime I see pvp hurt pve, it makes me wish there was a viable pve alternative to WOW.

I happen to think there are plenty of viable PvE alternatives to WoW. Not least among them EQ2, but also LotRO (the breakout MMO of 2007, by anyone’s definition viable), Pirates of the Burning Sea, FFXI Online and literally hundreds of smaller MMOs, most of them free to play, most of them with very dedicated and helpful player bases. I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Vanguard these days.

It’s not that there aren’t viable alternatives to WoW. It’s that WoW has become a game so unusual and disconnected from normal gameplay that the MMOs that have proceeded among more normal paths seem bizarre to those who have played no other games.

Reading Tobold’s blog is like glimpsing an alien world (and I have played WoW). Grinding badges? Vending-machine epics? Honor as a currency? Doing highly repetitive activities for vague reasons? In essence and as far as I can see, removing the entire adventure component of the game?

WoW started as a very normal game — like EQ and DAoC with all the boring bits removed, and lots of help, no choices to make, very easy and casual and cartoony and really, nothing but fun. I really, really enjoyed my time in WoW, and I met a lot of really good people and a few jerks. So don’t call me a WoW-hater because I am not.

But somehow, somewhere, it got twisted. The fun bits were replaced with a race to the grind. Maybe because I haven’t played since before BC came out (I left when AQ was opening), that I just am not hearing about the fun, but I have several WoW blogs in my feed and am just distressed at what I read. People do this — voluntarily? The only ones who seem to be having fun are the ones that are going counter to the current direction of the game — the ones who are leveling slowly and hitting all the old content, as outdated as it may be.

What will they do when they finally hit the level cap?

It was these cries from WoW players for a viable alternative in the face of MANY real, viable alternatives that they blithely dismiss that was the basis for the post I made wondering if WAR would finally be the game that could wean people from their unhealthy obsession with WoW — a game that was supposed to be a haven for casual players who just wanted to have some quick fun, but has become exactly the sort of behemoth for which it was once the best alternative.

If there’s any overriding purpose to my blog, it’s to show that the other alternatives are damn fun in their own rights.

You CAN leave WoW. But you can’t go blindly into a game, kill ten rats and declare it boring. That won’t work. You can’t do any MMO truly alone. Seek out the community, join a guild and ask questions and get an idea of what the game means to those who love it. Then you’ll get a real sense for it. And then, maybe, you’ll find there are viable alternatives to WoW.

2007 opened with me splitting my time between EQ1 and EQ2. Through brief flings with LotRO, Dungeon Runners and Mythos, and even briefer flings with a half dozen more I played just once, I ended the year in pretty much the same place — playing EQ2 exclusively.

There’s these incredibly massive hype/PR machines and all they want to do is build up expectations for their ground-breaking, world-shaking title, or book, or movie, and then when it finally arrives, you go “meh” and wait for the next big thing. And the hype machine worked overtime this year. Burning Crusade, Vanguard, Warhammer, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Hellgate: London, Tabula Rasa; all have (or had) the hype machine promissing so much that almost anything that came (or will come) can only disappoint.

Not to say there aren’t some excellent games in the past year and coming soon. I just hope they can survive their hype machines. If you promise a carnival and bring only a pony ride, well, people are going to be disappointed, even if it’s a really good pony ride. Promise a walk in the park and it’s “Hey! They have a PONY RIDE!” Underpromise, overdeliver.

2008 will be a year of great expectations and diminished realities.

Personally, I expect to have EQ2 as my main game through the entire year. Because everyone needs a steady game to call home. You may wander, but you always come home. For a lot of people, this is WoW. For me, it’s EQ2.

It’s going to be hard for EQ2 to raise expectations, though. Out of all the games I’ll mention, it has the toughest road. The last couple of expansions have ridden on EQ1’s coattails, but I don’t know if they’ve noticed, but EQ1 no longer has such long coattails. Drawing from a subscriber base that has fond memories of EQ1 but doesn’t play that game, but want something both new and familiar to them… well, that doesn’t bring many new players in. EQ2 gets most of its new players from WoW, who appreciate EQ2 for its technical innovations but have nothing invested in EQ1 nostalgia.

Prediction #1: EQ2 will reinvent itself by the end of the year, either through some innovative new setting or a game mechanic that lets players have an impact on the world. I’m fairly confident about this one, because otherwise, the hits it will take when WoW’s next expansion and Warhammer come out will probably kill it. It has to respond strongly, and “Velious, EQ2’s Fourth Expansion!” or whatever won’t bring anyone new into the fold. Chasing EQ1 is a stupid strategy.

Prediction #2: Pirates of the Burning Sea will launch strongly, and settle into a role of being about massive clan-based fleet vs fleet battles. I don’t think people will do much solo PvPing, and the economic game will be used to fund the massive fleet battles. Ladder rankings will be an obsession with the players. I’ll try PotBS. I’m not that excited about it, but I think massive fleet battles will be the killer app for PotBS, and it seems from all signs that Flying Labs is positioning it precisely for that. Soloers and non-combatant types interested in the trading game, I think, will not be its final audience.

Prediction #3: Age of Conan will launch and sink without a trace. Come on. PvP with sex and boobies and lots of blood in an election year? The first politician who sees this game will tear it to shreds. ‘Sinking without a trace’ would be the best outcome. ‘Being used as a reason to crack down on MMOs’ would be the worst. Luckily, the teenage boys who make up its natural audience will balk at the subscription fees. Plus, who the heck even knows who Conan is? If the average player even remembers the old Schwarzenegger flick, that’d be amazing — the people who would want to play this game weren’t even born then.

Prediction #4: Warhammer: Age of Reckoning will sell two million boxes and take its place as the #2 MMO in North America. I think this is a slam dunk, being basically World of Warcraft with even more arena games. Those people who love the battlegrounds and arena battles in WoW will flock to the new shiny. This will be a relief to Blizzard, who can cede the battlegrounds market to EA-Mythic and focus more on their excellent PvE and raid experience.

Prediction #5: If WoW’s second expansion, Wrath of the Liche King. comes out this year, it will be disappointing. Given the presence of two and probably soon to be more WoW-alikes in 2008 (LotRO and WAR), almost anything Blizzard can come up with can only be thought of as ‘more of the same’.

Prediction #6: NCSoft will announce a Station Pass-like “pay one price, play all our games” payment plan. Because it’s about time they do that.

okay, those were the safe predictions. Now to get a little ‘out there’.

SOE: SOE will be bought out by a well-known games company, who will announce the development of a virtual world where players can take their characters from all SOE games and live and adventure together in a world they create. This brings hundreds of thousands of players back to SOE games as they take their Jedis and Code Jockeys and Rangers and Blood Mages out of cold storage and into an entirely new world that they create — sort of like Second Life for MMOs. This will be heralded as the birth of a new sort of MMO gaming, where your characters adventure in one world, but play in another.

Star Trek Online: After the new Star Trek movie loudly tanks, all development stops on the Star Trek Online license. EA then picks up Perpetual Entertainment (or what’s left of it) as a wholly owned division focusing on MMO middleware, its first internal customer being Bioware. Bioware in 2007 announced they were using PE’s middleware for their game, so this isn’t really all that out there. There’s a chance EA-Mythic may pick up the STO license along with the company.

MMOs and movies: At least one movie will launch day-and-date with a matching MMO. MMOs will be increasingly seen as commodities and part of the exploitation of a movie license. Tie-in figurines, pop-up picture books, props, Halloween costumes, video games… add an MMO to the list as something necessary to the launch of any new genre movie.

Guitar Hero: A MMO based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Memory of Whiteness” that lets musicians and musician wannabes play virtual instruments in player-created bands, quartets, symphonies — what have you — will be announced. Unlike Guitar Hero, players will be able to play both tunes available in the game, and tunes of their own composition. The MMO will usher in a revolution of musical creativity. Well, this is something I *want* to happen. And given the popularity of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, why not? I just threw in KSR because, you know, people should read his books.

Roleplaying & Machinima: An MMO that takes fan fiction and makes movies from it will be announced. Write a story and watch it acted out, or advance the plot in real time with friends. This will do for the craft of writing what the Guitar Hero MMO will do for the craft of composing: bring art to the masses at the cost of authenticity.

I want MMOs that make people SMARTER and INVITE CREATIVITY. And so I dream of a future where MMOs will open doors in your mind instead of seal them shut.

MMOs are still a young industry and there is still time to reinvent itself out of the circling spiral drain of cheap entertainment. Ten years on and they are still writing the same game. 2008 will be the year someone dares to show something truly new.

2007 has been an amazingly full year, considering some of the major games we were hoping to play (Gods & Heroes, Age of Conan) were canceled or delayed.

In January, I was still living in San Diego, still hoping that Sigil or SOE would finally read one of my resumes… on the 8th, the company in Carlsbad where I worked downsized their IT department from two people to one, and I was on the street. I found nearly immediately that spammers have taken over the job search websites as well as everything else on the Internet, and learned some hard lessons about telling real opportunities from spam opportunities (which aren’t opportunities at all, of course). Gaming suffered, since I had to spend all my time preparing cover letters, arranging interviews and so on. I was very much getting into the Star Trek Online community, and looking forward to Lord of the Rings Online, which I had pre-ordered.

February: SOE released the Estate of Unrest, which was a wild success; it’s still not hard to get groups for this zone. Simply an amazing place. They also announced that their next expansion would be the Rise of Kunark. Vanguard had come out, but compared to Lord of the Rings Online, it was a distant second. I’d gotten into the LotRO Stress Test, and was very impressed.

March: SOE raised the price of their Station Pass from $25 to $30/month, which has led directly to me dropping two of the three Station Pass accounts I’d been paying for. If PotBS isn’t compelling, I’ll drop the last one as well. It was widely believed they did this to subsidize the loss they took when they took Vanguard on. My feeling was, if you played three or more of their MMOs, fine, that would save you money. I only played two, EQ1 and EQ2, and I was leaving EQ1. I spent most of March moving to my new job in Connecticut.

April: Still pretty chilly in New England in April! Lord of the Rings Online came out, and I dropped every other game I was playing (EQ1, EQ2, FF12, everything) to throw myself into this wonderful game. I found a list of upcoming 2007 SF/Fantasy movies and did a snarky preview of them all and pretty much called them all, though “Sunshine” was supposedly a better movie than it sounded. I didn’t see it.

May: A chilly April became an absolutely glorious May in Connecticut. SOE released a new starter city, Neriak; the best newbie zone to date, Darklight Woods; and a new race, the evil Fae, Arasai. So much new stuff was happening in EQ2 that I was eager to finish up Lord of the Rings Online. A billing error canceled my LotRO account on me, so I returned to EQ2, found my guild had deguilded all my alts and demoted me while I’d been on LotRO, so I jumped ship to Eternal Chaos.

June: Raiding was fun again with Eternal Chaos, but I soon found I had joined the guild on a high point. I got into Neopets, specifically the Shapeshifter game. SOE announced that they would be publishing “Pirates of the Burning Sea”. and that it would become part of the Station Pass, which improved chances I would try it out. At the end of the month, my father passed away after a long fight with cancer. I’m glad I moved back to New England so I could be with him fairly often during his final months; I wish I’d come back sooner.

July: I realized that MMOs were wasting my life, so I resolved to spend less time playing them and more time doing other things, more productive things. Or at least, to make MMOs less repetitive and more challenging. I was still a little sore that LotRO had taken a beautiful newbie experience and turned it into a very standard grind down the line. Trying to find a better MMO experience, I tried the EvE 14 day free trial.

August: Perpetual confirms that SOE would not be publishing Gods & Heroes, no big surprise. Early reviews of G&H called it a subpar game, and with Vanguard draining the lifeblood from SOE, I can’t imagine they were too eager to take on another subpar MMO. My experiences playing DAoC, EvE and on the EQ2 PvP server Nagafen convinced me that PvP makes gaming more fun, even if you don’t do PvP. I saw Blue Oyster Cult for the first time in about ten years. Man, they got old.

September: The TV Fall Season starts off with a whimper. I started watching bunches of shows but ended up only watching Heroes. I should have taken my sister’s advice and gotten into Dancing With the Stars. SOE brought us Live Update 38, which brought the god Bristlebane back to Norrath, along with the “Appearance Tab”, the ability to have one set of armor for show, and another for stats, and more rumors of Kunark. RoK beta started, but I wasn’t in it. Curses!

October: Bildo tossed me a beta invite for Mythos! Take that, SOE! Syncaine ran a couple of articles complaining about how ugly EQ2 was. So I just had to respond to that. I have never considered EQ2 ugly, because it isn’t. Guitar Hero 3 came out, I caught the third Legendary Spirit on Pokemond Diamond, and fell into a Portal. At the end of the month, I had the joy of being a guest on “Shut Up, We’re Talking #12“.

November: Shady dealings at Perpetual had people wondering about the fate of Star Trek Online, a game which does not currently sound like the game people want to play. Rock Band came out, but everything else was swept away by the launching of EQ2’s third expansion, “Rise of Kunark”. My EQ2 guild pretty much died. I got into Dungeon Runners a little, but mostly I spent my gaming time working on leveling. I had some issues with how RoK was designed, which ended with his departure from SOE. Well, maybe these events weren’t *directly* related, but who knows?

December: Finally reached the level cap with a character! Once I stopped trying to get groups and stopped trying to solo, moved my cleric to her own account and swallowed the two-boxing Kool-ade, things went better. SOE buyout rumors turned out to be just rumors after all, but opened the door to speculation about what their price and future would be if they *were* to be let go by Sony. I bought a Sony Reader to bring back my joy of reading (with failing eyesight), and it has worked wonderfully (until I thought I had lost it; then I missed it terribly). I moved to the second half of my leveling curve and had a lot more fun with it.

2008 promises to be an even busier time for MMOs, with Pirates of the Burning Sea, Warhammer, Age of Conan and Chronicles of Spellborn all due to be released, plus an unannounced (yet) fourth expansion to EQ2 (my bet: Luclin).

See you on the battlefields :)

Over at Mind-Bending Puzzles, they’re concerned that the spike of players coming from the World of Warcraft have pretty much all left. Lord of the Rings Online was hailed as the PC MMO of the Year by Gamespy, and claims over four million characters and the second largest MMO in (presumably) the world since they mention “critial acclaim from around the globe”.

VOIG tells a slightly different story. They say LotRO is holding steady at about 300K subscribers, which would mean, hmm, 4 million divided by 300 thousand hmmm just over thirteen characters per active account. Talk about a bad case of alt-itis… there aren’t even thirteen character classes.

Still, that same market share data shows it somewhat ahead of runner’s up EverQuest 2 and EvE Online, though perhaps behind many free MMOs as well as the crocodile in the splash pool, World of Warcraft.

This is not a failure. EQ2 and EvE Online are widely regarded as successful entries in their genres (though why EvE is considered a niche game while EQ2 is considered one of the top active MMOs with similar subscription numbers is a mystery…), and LotRO has nothing to be ashamed of. Every new game has a subscriber spike as the curious check out the new experiences and decide what is right for them — and that spike always dwindles… well, unless your game has the word “Warcraft” in the title.

Why do people stick with a game? Or better, what makes a game fun? I think a lot of fun has to do with familiarity and community. Once you have found a place, you know the rules, you’re comfortable… it becomes very hard to move to a game where you know nothing, know nobody, and are starting over. You might try it for awhile, but the friendly beck and call of your old home always sings its siren call. It took two years before I left EQ1 for EQ2 permanently, and it was hard and I did backslide.

As LotRO and WoW both mature, I think we’ll see a steady increase in the subscription numbers of all non-WoW MMOs as subscribers finally decide to make a permanent switch.

By any measure, except perhaps from their PR department, Turbine’s Lord of the Rings Online is a rousing success, and far from seeing their WoW refugees return to the mother-game, I believe they’ve settled in and become the rock and foundation of Middle Earth.

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.

Shut Up, We’re Talking! #12 is up. I had the pleasure of being part of it, along with Grimwell (SOE EQ2 Community Manager) and Tom-Tom from Gamer’s Mind.

Thanks, Darren, for being such an awesome host! Darren really knows how to keep the discussion going and moving to interesting places. I was positive I’d have nothing to say :P

Yes, I am rushing through Lord of the Rings Online. There’s way too much exciting stuff happening in EverQuest 2 to stay away much longer; the release of Neriak and the dark Fae; Kunark coming in the fall; LotRO has to be done and finished by then.

Book 3 deals with the fight of the Dunadain — the Rangers — against the tide of evil creatures coming from the North. They have taken over the ancient city of Fornost and are spread throughout the plains of Dol Dinan.

(more…)

The Hobbits, we find at the end of Retake Weathertop, have made it safely to Rivendell.  With them out of harm’s way, for a time, it’s up to the numberless heroes of the world to do their part. In Book II, we find the source of the Red Marsh’s evil, the immortal Red Maid, and redeem some long-dead shades who broke an oath and must now be summoned for one final mission to save them all.

Making Aragorn look like a bit of a copycat when he does it in “Return of the King”.

(more…)

Lysistra and the Good Humor man at level 27, in Trestlebridge

I joined a group last night and we were amazing, we were on fire, we went around the North Downs killing… spiders, and wolves. And I think we may have killed one or two bears.

Seriously. Not since the original Dark Ages of Camelot has a MMO reused the same couple of models in so many different ways. I have three or four different titles from killing spiders. This isn’t an epic. It’s a spider-killing simulator.

(more…)

Young Frodo, to you has fallen the most perilous task. You must bring the Ring to Mordor. But first, kill twenty boars and bring me their tusks. I will also require their hooves, but I won’t tell you that until you get back with the tusks.

Oh! Young Lysistra is come out of the West,
Through all Ered Luin her blade was the best;
And save her good Halberd, she weapons had none.
She ran with good fellows and she ran alone
So faithful in love and so dauntless in War,
There ne’er was a Captain like brave Lysistra

She stayed not for wolf and she stayed not for crow;
She swam the Withywindle where river ran low.
But ere she alighted at Brandywine gate
The group was departing; the Captain came late
For a shifty elf Hunter they’d met at the bar
Had taken the spot promised good Lysistra.

So boldly she entered Brandybuck Hall;
‘mongst Guardians, and Minstrels, and Burglars and all;
Then spake the group leader, his hand on his sword;
For the craven elf Hunter said never a word,
“Oh! Come you to curse us, or come you to spar,
Or come you to bid us fare well, Lysistra?”

“I sent you five tells, my pleas you denied;
We leave in ten seconds, you brusquely replied.
And now I have come, with this herald of mine,
To eat roast crebain, to drink dwarven wine.
There are groups in the North Downs more able by far
That would gladly invite Captain Lysistra.”

The Hunter poured wine to a tall silver cup,
Lysistra smiled sadly as she took it up
And turned it over on the elf’s silver head
The elf gripped the table, his pale eyes turned red
“You’ve angered your better, you will meet Arultar
Or hast courage failed you, thy frail ‘Lysistra’?”

“I could never fight so unworthy a foe,”
She summoned her herald and started to go
“But in some far land should I see you draw nigh;
Do fear my Halberd for you will surely die”
“I have no need to wait, I need not travel far,
My arrows hunger for your blood, Lysistra.”

One cut to his hand and one slash to his ear,
The Hunter cowered and shook in his fear
He ran cross the room and he unslung his bow
And pulled back a grim Mordor-make arrow
“Braver I am when my enemy is far
Meet thou thy Maker, mortal Lysistra”

The fell shaft went flying, it hungered for blood
And flew unerring where Lysistra stood
The arrow found its mark and it burrowed deep
And sent its target to an unending sleep
An anguish-drenched cry could be heard from afar;
The doughty young herald died for his Lysistra.

She took up her banner, she took up her blade,
She took up the battle, and death there she made
She met Arultar’s sword with a terrible blow
Her steel cut through all and she brought down her foe
“Now shall I ne’er walk with the blessed Valar,
My spirit shall linger with the cursed Lysistra”

The courageous young Captain said never a word
She laid her herald to rest with his hands on his sword
The Captain rode West and was not see again
In the lands that cradled the corpse of her friend
Though travel you near or travel you far
Pray you ne’er draw the anger of young Lysistra.

* Gormabrand of Windfolia contributed “I will also require their hooves…” to the opening, which made it a dozen times funnier. My sincerest and most humble apologies to Sir Walter Scott for, um, “borrowing” a possibly recognizable bit of Marmion for my own evil purposes. And lastly, apologies to my friend Arultar for making him the villain of the piece. Good thing he doesn’t read my blog often.

* Pictures: (1) Elf village near Angmar in North Downs. (2) Fighting in the Great Barrows. (3) Battling the Wight-Lord in the Great Barrows. (4) Earthkin in the Lone-Lands. (5) Just… Lys on a horse…

Gandalf points a new player toward the next step in her Quest.

I logged my Champion in to Lord of the Rings Online last night, turned in the quests I had been saving, and then stopped along the bridge to Bree and asked myself if I shouldn’t just log out and forget about the entire game. The /ooc chat was infantile, my kinship is made largely out of grade school kids, Bree itself was as laggy as Stormhold on a bad memory day, and, let’s face it, the game has almost nothing to do with the books on which it is loosely based. In LotRO, everyone knows Tom Bombadil, pals with wizards, and ridicules dwarves. If the books had been based on the game rather than the other way around, Farmer Maggot’s hounds would have been picked off by a hunter hidden over the horizon.

But, yes, LotRO is very different from World of Warcraft. In WoW, you don’t get horses until 40. LotRO gives them to you at 35. And instead of costing 80 gold, they cost the LotRO-equivalent of about 30 gold. The game is so obviously meant for WoW players in every way — as if Turbine’s goal was to specifically make a better WoW instead of a better MMO.

That out of the way, there’s a lot of reasons to play. Like finding a pint-sized “Black Rider” terrorizing the residents of the Shire. THAT was a total shock. I was in Budgeford crafting when I hear a Black Rider outside saying things like “Today the Shire, tomorrow the world!”. I’m not feeling any of the dread that comes with a real Black Rider, so I run out and am confronted with… well, who the heck IS he?

The so-called “Chapter” quests, the storyline quests that advance your tale simultaneously with the more famous tale of the hobbits and the One Ring… vary. It’s fun to see what’s happening with the main story and how every single other person in the realm is working overtime to make things easier for the Fellowship. Blasting away a particularly nasty wight before the hobbits can run afoul of it… very thrilling, and the quest is perfect for teaching the ins and outs of grouping. The quest before it, picking flowers near Old Man Willow… not as much. That’s “Chapter Nine of the Epic Tale of the Fellowship: Picking Some Flowers.”

Dera (13 Guardian) relaxes at the Bree auction house.

For every “Defeat the Fallen Ranger before he turns evil” quest, though, there are ten “Kill six pigs and bring me their tusks” quests. At least you can gather several similar quests together and do them all at once for massive quest xp when you turn them in. Last night, I had Eraindiel (elf champion) in the Lone Lands along with a hundred other people working the ruins near the Forsaken Inn. Every goblin or wolf kill dinged 2-3 quests. Dinged 16 and am halfway to 17 just for an hour or so of work. So at least grinding is a little more worth it than in the competition.

Dina (15 minstrel) going all Aqualung on the patrons of the Prancing Pony.

Every reviewer talks about LotRO’s polish. Being able to play your own music on instruments — that’s polish. That one feature just blows me away… hearing a player lutist picking out Metallica’s “Unforgiven” in the shipyards of Celedorm is both right and wrong in so many ways :P

Some snarky people might say that they had plenty of room for polish since they ripped so much from WoW. The auction house, the way you can track resource nodes, all the little pieces and bits they didn’t have to design themselves, so they could put in the time they needed to make the game look utterly fantastic.

Tom Bombadil’s house in the Old Forest almost glows with warmth and magic.

Graphically, this game is so far beyond WoW and even EQ2… bloom, advanced lighting, great textures; LotRO uses the most advanced graphic engine I’ve seen so far (Vanguard’s might be as good, I don’t know). I and many others have mentioned before that the landscapes look more painted than rendered; almost any screenshot you could take could be a painstakingly painted book-cover.

Lysistra (15 captain), with friend, in Combe.

LotRO is not the game for everyone. I doubt people who come to the game purely because of love for the lore will find much to keep them; playing a side story that wasn’t even actually in the books is just odd to begin with. Why not set it in a previous Age, when deeds of heroism and danger were far more common than in the rather less dangerous Third Age? Or set it after the events in the book, when the agents of Mordor, freed from Sauron’s control, could still cause harm and must be dealt with by adventurers?

But those who come to the game looking for a familiar experience in a new setting with enough differences to keep things interesting will have a happy time in Middle Earth, and for them, I very much recommend it, especially if you bring some friends along with you.