I am playing Runes of Magic now because, hey, WoW is coming out with a new expansion that I probably won’t play, so why not reminisce about good times in WoW by playing some other game? Runes of Magic only allowed me to pick from two races, Elf and Human. I thought they had some short folk in the character concept art, but I guess those were just meant to be children. It’d be kind of cool, by the way, to start of as a child in an MMO (optionally, anyway), and play children’s games of crafting, socialization, war and magic while slowly aging and learning more of the wider world and your place in it.
I’m a little late to the Runes of Magic scene, but I won’t let irrelevance slow me down. Expect a “first look” in a week or two.
Raph Koster is at the Austin Game Developer’s Conference this week (and I’d love to be there, too, to hear about all the new Wizard101 stuff!), and he’s been working his fingers to the knuckles transcribing various panels — he just posted a fascinating transcription of a panel about monetizing online games.
Because “Free to Play” doesn’t mean free. They expect between $5-$50 ARPU – average return per user per month (I believe it’s by month).
Speaking of modern gaming’s loose and liberal use of the word “free”, Free Realms is having a double Station Cash weekend Friday evening through Sunday night. Buy a Station Cash card, redeem it after 7PM PST Friday but before Sunday midnight, and they’ll match your donation. You have to redeem it within Free Realms, but you can use it in any SOE game that takes it. This puts a character transfer for your EQ2 characters at $12.50 each, effectively. Or you can spend it all on dressing your kitty like a pirate for International Talk Like a Pirate day.
Here’s a little Pirate Alphabet to get in the mood:
Ravious at Kill Ten Rats has a fantastic interview with some folks at ArenaNet, the people behind Guild Wars and its forthcoming sequel, Guild Wars 2: Electric Boogaloo. Find out how the Wizards of the Coast folks have it so easy balancing Magic: the Gathering compared to the way tougher card game of primary and secondary skills, what the purpose of all those different classes is anyway, and what they’re keeping in mind for GW2.
I used to twink my EQ alts by logging the alt in this little corner, dropping stuff there with my main, then logging in really quick and hope nobody had stolen it or it hadn’t just decayed. Was that cheating? *I* don’t think so. In EverQuest, that’s pretty much why people kept going to the old zones. Twinking — and farming stuff to sell — was the root of EQ’s social culture. It was the battery that kept the whole thing going. Gordon of We Fly Spitfires, alas, sees things differently. Is twinking just another form of cheating? Or is it a way to keep older zones active enough so that newer players can more easily find groups?
Syp thinks grinding has got a bad rap. In fact, it brings you to an almost zen-like state of relaxation. Seriously — grinding might be good for your health! So grind another rank of faction for your kids, because they love you.
If you’re gonna get that zen-like state going, what better reason than living through the apocalypse? Well, not quite living, not if you’re in Fallen Earth. You’re a clone of a DEAD person (oops, spoiler alert). Pete of Dragonchasers isn’t sweating the genetic stuff, he’s out scrabbling through the ruins looking for bits and pieces with which to make horrific weapons of destruction and finger-lickin’ fried chicken. Well, at least the fingers of one of those hands is lickable.
Spinks has words for those scallywags who pre-order a game just to get into the open beta, but then feel free to cancel it if they don’t like what they see. And those words are: go ahead! The game company gets good PR for all those pre-orders, and you got to see if you liked a game without shelling out big bucks.
Spinks is also liking what she hears about the new Captain’s Log in Star Trek Online. Yeah. The more I hear about that game, the more I like it. Please PLEASE I hope they take a cue from their Champions Online and make the STO universe a shared universe.
And Keen is agonizing over the server choice he must make for Aion. Every time it gets harder, whether for Pirates of the Burning Sea, or Warhammer, now this… at least Darkfall had just one server. Me, I just wait six months or a year these days. If the game still sounds like fun by then, I go for it. That’s what I did for WoW. Wizard101 lets you change servers at will. I don’t understand why more games don’t design their games around server pools. Dividing friends among different servers shouldn’t be a revenue stream. It’s a problem that needs fixing.
You know, if Lord of the Rings were anything like Lord of the Rings Online, Radagast the Brown might have had a little more trouble with the birds and beasts of the field than he let on…. and Melmoth of Killed in a Smiling Accident has the sad duty to write it all down. My problem with him, in LotRO, was — he was the one in charge of those annoying spying birds? When I met him in game, I wanted to ask him why he didn’t call those annoying pests OFF. But that wasn’t one of the conversation options.
The Teal Nine Ring Highway Hazard has gotten subscribing to several MMOs down to a finely honed science. Get out your spreadsheet and follow along and you, too, can play five MMOs and pay for only one sub at a time.
Ardwulf, he of the one word Aion review, bids a fad sarewell to NCsoft Austin’s Dungeon Runners. I liked the game fine, just got too repetitive, but I am sad to see it go. I remember when NCsoft Austin was started with bright hopes and magical moonbeams to work on a mysterious groundbreaking MMO by game royalty Lord “Richard Garriott” British. I remember it just like it was Sunday. Now, what’s left of it? Gone, along with all our dreams.
The Friendly Necromancer spills the beans about the special PvP armor you can earn in Wizard101. -100% mana? Sounds like winning stats to me. But it does look cool, though making plate armor and metal helms kinda stretches traditional wizard-wear, doesn’t it?
Keep gaming! I’ve had a pretty rough past couple of days IRL but I’m back now :)
Was there ever a mob that you really, REALLY hated as a low level, that you just HAD to go back later on and just kill, kill, kill? Well, old Dorn in North Ro was that mob for a lot of us EQ players. Seeing him CRINGE before me now in EQ2…. Worth the ride!
One of the things that made EQ so memorable was that there was really nothing like it at the time. They could pretty much try anything, because, what else was there? Not like these days, where there’s so MUCH choice, so MANY good games, that it’s hard to stick with just one, and so game devs do whatever they feel they must to grab and keep players.
It doesn’t help that so many really good MMOs are starting out this month.
Aion brings its lush, saturated graphics to our shores September 22 after a summer-long beta, following WoW’s lead in that as in so much else. And again, like WoW, Aion’s North American servers will be segregated by time zone, although not by RP/Non-RP servers. Naamah of Aionic Thoughts has the complete scoop on the server names and preferred time zones, as well as NCsoft’s reasoning behind not naming roleplay-preferred servers.
Post-apocalyptic MMO Fallen Earth went live for pre-order customers yesterday, though it goes live to regular players on September 22… same day as Aion! Weird. Pete of Dragonchasers jumped into the game and loved its old school feel, but had trouble finding a place to park his ATV. You think gas is cheap after the fall of civilization? Not so much.
Maybe he can chase a fuel-carrying tanker across a desert for it?
Autumn Duskhunter just can’t keep off the interwebs. After shuttering W101 blog Homework in a Graveyard last month, she pops up now on the Friendly Necromancer’s blog with an article about letting players control some of the monsters in the worlds of Wizard101. Friendly adds a postscript about EverQuest’s experiment with this when they did Monster Play a few years back. It wasn’t pretty :P
With Champions Online and Age of Conan rumored to be coming to consoles, DC Universe Online and The Agency almost certainly joining them, and as PC gaming continues its slow decline, what happens to the most common means of communicating with other players — text? Can voice chat really take over the load of communicating with hundreds or thousands of other players? Spinks thinks voice COULD work, if games contracted enough that you never had more than a few people to talk to, but leaving text behind entirely would be a terrible thing.
Level and achievement games rule the MMO roost these days, but it can make it difficult for new players to join more advanced friends when there’s 80 levels and tons of achievements and a truckload of gear separating them. What if it were possible to just play a game without huge barriers between new and experienced players? Syncaine tells how a new Darkfall player returned to the game and that very day was fighting alongside guildies and contributing in that game’s end-game content.
I’ve been thinking of swapping my sidekick in Legends of Zork from the Gent (who made me essentially immune to traps) to the Accountant (who earns interest on your stash) for awhile. It kinda disappointed me that they nerfed her — it used to be that having her in your base would soon make you rich as Croesus. Not so much anymore, but as each upgrade now costs well over a million zorkmids, I need all the help I can get. And I can switch back to the Gent later on, once I’ve reached my goals and seeded the clan bank with some good upgrades for others.
Hudson writes that WoW’s faction change service is now live — you can go from Alliance to Horde and back again, as long as you stay within your class, you get a race change as part of the transfer. This is fantastic for Forsaken and Humans, who actually can get a LOT of RP mileage out of shrugging off their curse — or being struck by the necrotic power of the Burning Legion. Night Elves can become swayed by arcane forces to become Blood Elves, or swear off their evil ways to veer closer to the Emerald Dream. But — Taurens and Night Elves? Dwarves and Trolls? I’d like to see how the lore explains that….
Lore, that wild, wonderful backstory to which games slavishly adhere* in order to give players a sense that they are part of a vast story that stretched endlessly behind and ahead — until the devs decide to change it when it’s convenient. Melmoth at KiaSA has a bit of fun with that legendary silent killer, the ninja-esque Hobbit Warden. Tolkein was probably going to write about the elite corps of Hobbit assassins in his NEXT book.
* this would have sounded more natural if I’d left the dangling preposition. IN.
Pushing back a little on the fannish fervor Champions Online’s launch, Spinks, a lover of comic-book superheroes, wonders why superhero MMOs only bring the dullest parts of comics to life. Well, Champions DOES have the Nemesis system, so that’s something new, right?
Okay, I don’t understand. Why not try to hit your intended target instead of swerving back and forth in the hopes you find it accidentally?
Green Armadillo sees a trend in modern MMOs — a sharp veering from the onerous grind of doing an instance a hundred times to get a chance at a rare drop. WoW, EQ2, Warhammer and LotRO have all added ways to slowly earn items you can’t get to drop. And THAT’S a good thing. When I think of all the stupid guild drama a token-oriented loot system could have saved back in EverQuest. Who needs DKP when you can earn upgrades just by showing up? We used to have people drop from raids left and right once they’d gotten all they wanted. Only to show up with their vast DKP when we entered a new dungeon.
Malistaire has been defeated, but the grandmasters of Wizard City keep honing their wizardly skills, certain of the arrival of some new threat that will stretch their skills. But who? KingsIsle hints that someone is on their way. The Friendly Necromancer hears mention of a mysterious Roberto… could this be the new Wizard101 villain?
Did ya think that onerous death penalties were a thing of the past? Not so fast. Werit finds that in Aion’s open PvP “Abyss” zone, dying in PvP can strip you of vast amounts of the PvP currency, Abyss Points, while killing someone in PvP brings far fewer. This apparently leads to people only doing the PvE quests in the zone and avoiding PvP entirely.
Ever come across a hardcore raider in an MMO and wonder what happened to them to make them that way? Suzina of Kill Ten Rats has the scoop on how she and her husband were just casual players playing SWG for laughs and getting bored when, one day, Something Happened… and after that, everything was different.
And lastly, this has nothing to do with MMOs, but I like it because having just watched Starblazers and its parody, The Irresponsible Captain Tylor, seafaring battleships fighting space battles just makes me smile. This is the trailer for the new Space Cruiser Yamato movie — Starblazers but done with modern animation techniques. This looks as if the Yamato crew meet up with the Comet Empire again…. I don’t know if I like the departure from the unmistakable Matsumoto drawing style, but everything else looks so cool.
I never watched Stargate: SG-1 while it was on (is it still on?), so when everyone was getting all excited about the prospect of Cheyenne Mountain’s Stargate Worlds MMO, it meant nothing to me. Now, thanks to Hulu, I’m catching up. A couple of episodes in to the second season and it’s clear the show is already chafing against its episodic “planet of the week” formula. Could Stargate Worlds make it work for them? Will it work for Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, or will people yearn for a less story-based, more personal play experience?
IGN has some SWTOR gameplay videos hosted by Bioware peeps and I have to admit, it looks really great, a lot better than I thought it would. So much like Knights of the Old Republic that I mostly am just hoping Bioware decides to release SWTOR as a single player game. I do like how party members swap out who gets to choose the canned responses. I just hope party members agree beforehand on how things are going to play out.
Player 1: The Emperor has commanded your death!
Hapless NPC: Then he can have my death! AND YOURS! *draws blaster*
Player 2: Hi, would you be my friend?
Hapless NPC: *puts blaster away* Yes, I think we can come to an understanding.
Player 1: Then DIE!
Hapless NPC: Huh? *confusedly draws blaster again*
Yesterday, Cryptic announced that it had reached the limit on the number of lifetime and six-month subscriptions it offered. This shocked a lot of people who weren’t aware that there wasn’t a limitless supply, especially after all the angst concerning the offer just a couple weeks back.
Syp sums up the controversy nicely. Cryptic had announced the offers would end September 1st, so people expected to hold off on the go/no go decision until August 31st, 11:59:59PM, California time. Now that the decision has been made for them, some potential players who were very much looking forward to the game have decided not to play. Did the game become less fun because of the ending of their pre-launch offer? Beau argues that you should have known ahead of time if it mattered that much. Warhammermer was just disappointed that the end of beta event was so geared toward North American players.
So which are those other MMOs with badly executed, suboptimal guild advancement systems? EverQuest 2, which more or less defined and refined the system in modern MMOs? Warhammer Online’s, whose guild levels are widely touted as one of its best features? Lord of the Rings Online? And both EQ2 and LotRO even have guild halls, based on guild advancement. Will WoW take these badly executed ideas and make them good? Or were they bad ideas simply because WoW hadn’t done them yet?
Speaking of WoW, Dusty Monk at “Of Course I’ll Play It” has embarked on a new exploration of World of Warcraft’s mysterious world of Azeroth. Let Delsenora guide you through the numberless mysteries of Elwynn and Goldshire. Before Blizzard destroys them forever, next year.
I used to twink my EQ alts by logging the alt in this little corner, dropping stuff there with my main, then logging in really quick and hope nobody had stolen it or it hadn’t just decayed. Was that cheating? *I* don’t think so. In EverQuest, that’s pretty much why people kept going to the old zones. Twinking — and farming stuff to sell — was the root of EQ’s social culture. It was the battery that kept the whole thing going. Gordon of We Fly Spitfires, alas, sees things differently. Is twinking just another form of cheating? Or is it a way to keep older zones active enough so that newer players can more easily find groups?
Entries (RSS)