What wonders does the in box of mystery hold for us today?
Cryptic announces veteran rewards for players who keep an active subscription to Star Trek Online. Saith Cryptic: “Skill point bonuses, titles, costume pieces, character slots… Veterans will be rewarded every 100 days! Rewards will be retroactive, too!” Nice of them!
They’ve also announced a “Come back to STO” weekend and a “Recruit a Friend” program; all these kick off May 7.
*I* don’t think it’s too early for a “Come back to STO” free weekend, do you?
Funcom’s new expansion to their Age of Conan MMO, “Rise of the Godslayer“, kicks off a week from Tuesday, and if you pre-order, you’ll get an exclusive battle pet. “‘Pre-order today and receive the Loyal Kappa, a unique in-game pet that will aid you on the battlefield already from level 20.”
Clumsy language aside, Age of Conan has a history on relying upon pre-orders as an important source of income. If I remember right, AoC almost paid for the cost of its development with pre-orders and launch day box sales.
From now until a week from Tuesday, if you buy at least 5,000 of Wizard101‘s cash shop currency, Crowns, you can be the owner of a super-rare Lightning Bat pet. This pet drops from Wavebringer in Shatataki Temple, but few have ever seen one tamed. Now you can buy one!
Spacetime Studios has announced their new 1.1 patch to their mobile MMO Pocket Legends which adds new dungeons, item trading, shared banks, armor and so on. I just made level 20 in PL last night, so I’m kinda pumped about all these new toys :)
CCP has a new tease page for their upcoming Tyrannis expansion for EVE Online. Aside from the planet mining, they will be releasing a new web-based way to interact within EVE Online — EVE Gate, now available for testing. You’ll be able to chat with players in game, manage your contacts and so on. It doesn’t appear to allow you to actually buy/sell in the Marketplace or start production jobs, but it’s a start.
LotRO is having another free weekend — THIS weekend — as they kick off their 3rd anniversary celebration. Patch up the client and say hello to your old characters; I know I will!
Yesterday through tomorrow, Aeria Games is holding a 2x/3x No Death Penalty leveling bonanza to celebrate the launch of their latest expansion to Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine — Nocturne. If you think you have what it takes to be a demon hunter in a post-apocalyptic world, now’s your chance to grind some of those levels out.
And…. that’s about it for this week’s edition of Assault on the Inbox!
If you’re ever in the position where you’d want to tell a non-gamer about your hobby, you can either try to explain WHAT the game is (like, you’re a dwarf or an elf, and you go out hunting Meezle Monsters, except if you come across the Grand Meezle, you better have some friends with you or you’ll get smooshed with the Meezle Blaster, and that can hurt if you’re not in the Stance of Unmeezlement, but of course, you can’t use the Meezle Tooth Rot Ointment then). MUCH easier to just say, “oh, I’m playing that Star Wars game” or “yeah, I hung out with Bilbo in Rivendell the other day”. Because people UNDERSTAND when you’re playing in IP-based game. They can meet you halfway.
In response to what he saw as a very naive vision of a future where scientific progress would turn the Earth into a utopia, Aldous Huxley wrote “Brave New World”, a novel of a “negative utopia”. In Huxley’s brave new world, technology has turned the human race stagnant, with people genetically engineered to be suited for their jobs. Drugs and sleep conditioning keep people happy in their roles as mindless consumers and workers. Films as diverse as Blade Runner, Gattaca and George Lucas’ THX-1138 have all explored the themes Brave New World set forth. The issues Huxley saw 80 years ago loom ever closer today.
What has all this got to do with Huxley: the Dystopia, the MMOFPS coming ‘soon’ for the PC? Well, the title. Huxley is the last name of a person who wrote a novel about a dystopia. And … that’s about as much as this game is based on that IP. Huxley is set after a global war that leaves humanity divided into two subraces, the sapiens and the alternatives. They both fight monstrous hybrids for control of the powerful mineral lunarite. Characters can be one of three classes — tank, ranged, or melee dps, no surprises there. Innovative battleground maps such as “Part Pickup”, where the two sides struggle to be the first to complete a giant mecha, add flavor to the game.
Huxley initially was going to support 5,000 players per shard, with battles being as large as 100v100. Since then, they have upped the max players per shard to 10,000, but lowered the maximum map size to 32v32. Announced in 2006, Huxley had a public beta last summer, but there’s been no recent word on a launch date.
From their initial design in in 1949 to their modern form released in 1958, LEGO bricks have been keeping kids’ hands busy for more than fifty years. The LEGO empire, ruled from Denmark, encompasses not only their trademark plastic bricks, but amusement parks, robotics kits, full kid-friendly CAD/CAM design software and, naturally, video games. With LEGO bricks, you can design and make nearly anything you can imagine.
In LEGO Universe, currently in closed beta and due out later this year, the power of your imagination (which is a stat in game) is used to construct not only your character, but your equipment, transportation, the city in which you live and so on. Carefully moderated in the same way as other kid-focused titles such as Toontown and Wizard101, kids have the freedom to build whatever they imagine and see it come to life in the game world. Players band together to take on the evil Stromlings and bring peace and happiness to plastic brick people everywhere. Building your own rocket ship and using it to travel to other worlds? Genius!
J.R.R.Tolkein’s epic-length follow-up to his children’s book “The Hobbit” tells the story of a world where peaceful people would have to learn to master the darkness in their own hearts in order to defeat the darkness that threatens to engulf the world — or, like the fallen leader of the Council of Wizards, Saruman, embrace it. Informed by memories of the lost, bucolic English countryside of his childhood and his experiences in World War I, Tolkein combined Nordic legends, his academic philological research and the tropes of heroic fantasy into the famous tale of an unassuming Hobbit and his eight companions who struggle against impossible odds to defeat an evil whose power they cannot imagine.
Before Turbine’s “Lord of the Rings Online”, Tolkein’s works had been the subject of an earlier effort by 90s computer RPG giant, Sierra Online. In the frontier days before EverQuest arrived to restart the MMO field, Sierra Online struggled to bring Tolkein’s story to life with Middle-Earth (later: Middle-Earth Online, because you just can’t NOT have the word “Online” in the title!) A game with little or no magic, permadeath, with an emphasis on story and roleplaying and a de-emphasis on quests and combat, MEO was a victim of mismanagement, technical complexity, and EverQuest.
Years later, Turbine acquired the “Lord of the Rings” license. Unlike MEO, which would have been set in a time after the events of the books, in the Fourth Age, Lord of the Rings Online would be set during the time of the books themselves. Players would meet and aid the Fellowship of the Ring in their struggles against the evils of Sauron and the armies of Mordor and take on missions and battles to hold back the tide of darkness to give the Fellowship time and opportunity to do their tasks.
Thought at launch to have the most realistic chance of topping World of Warcraft from its leadership position, LotRO has settled into the comfortable position as the #2 subscription-based MMO in the Western world. Players have followed the Fellowship through the Mines of Mordor, the golden forests of Lothlorien, the evils of Mirkwood and soon, rumor has it, the plains of Rohan.
Pirates of the Caribbean was the last ride Walt Disney himself had a hand in creating. Originally intended to be a wax museum filled with static representations of pirates, advances in animatronic technology made it possible to build a water ride through stunningly animated tableaux depicting life as it might have been for a fictional pirate in the 1850s. At the end, a sudden drop down a waterfall brings riders back to the present day. Inspired by the attraction, Disney has to date produced three movies building on the theme of the pirate life. Starring Johnny Depp as the iconic Captain Jack Sparrow, the movies were such a hit that the ride itself has been changed to incorporate characters and scenes from the movie in an incestuous pas de deux.
Originally intended to launch alongside the second movie in the series but continually delayed, Pirates of the Caribbean Online launched in October of 2007. Like Wizard101, PotCO embraces a free to play model at the start that eases into a subscription as the player progresses. Players meet and interact with characters from the movies, visit the movie locations, sail their own ships, participate in invasions and ship battles, and in general have a grand old time saying “yarrrr” and “yohoho”. The true number of subscribers are unknown, but XFire has it lagging behind Pirates of the Burning Sea, the other player in the “1800s Caribbean Pirate MMO” genre.
I can only imagine the kind of spam I’m going to be getting after this article…. Sigh. The things I do for my readers!
Playboy was launched in late 1953 as a “thinking man’s” girlie magazine. Along with pictures of nearly-naked women, Playboy was one of the premier outlets for fiction in its day, publishing novels such as Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″ in its pages. Playboy was also noted for its long, in-depth, sometimes rambling interviews with the leading figures of the day — renowned novelist Alex Haley once interviewed Martin Luther King, Jr. for the magazine. Since the availability of easy and anonymous porn on the Internet, the fortunes of Playboy and its competitors have sunk, but the brand and its bowtie-rabbit logo remains instantly recognizable the world over.
Jolt Online Gaming, a division of Activision and publishers of the browser-based casual games “Legends of Zork” and Utopia Kingdoms, announced last May that they were planning on doing to Playboy what they had done to Zork. From their press release: “In Playboy Manager, you play a crack talent agent managing the career of some of Playboy’s hottest up-and-coming models. Competing against thousands of other players, you will guide your model’s career toward her ultimate goal: Becoming a world-renowned Playmate with a permanent room in the Playboy Mansion!”
Game play is said to be based on trading cards, and almost certainly features the same sort of turn-based, semi-interactive action featured in its other titles. The game is currently taking names for its closed beta test. AND, they promise, THEY WON’T TELL YOUR GIRLFRIEND!
Tipa, what game would you consider for a person who is just breaking into the world of mmo’s? One of my friends, has been wanting to try one, but I need to suggest a game that has basic quests, but is still fun, colorful, and immersive. I was hoping you could help me out! Thanks!
This is a really great question. With new MMOs coming out every day and hundreds to choose from, it can be crazy trying to find the perfect game. Fact is, maybe you can’t find the perfect game first try, or maybe after playing an MMO a bit, you find yourself ready for something new.
The most important question to ask when looking for a MMO is, are my friends playing this game? MMOs are all meant to be played with other people; otherwise, single player RPGs like Bioware’s excellent Dragon Age: Origins will give the adventure, quests and party building without worrying about finding other players.
The second consideration is, will this game work on my machine? If you have a MacBook and don’t want to use Boot Camp to boot into Windows, your choices are very limited (but there are some options). If you have an older machine, you may not have a great experience with some of the later games.
I haven’t played every MMO out there, but I’d like to go through some of the games I have played with an eye toward the things (aside from friends playing) that would be most inviting to a new player. I’d look for interesting game play, games that start off easy and gradually show their depth, great graphics, great character customization, and active new player communities.
World of Warcraft must be mentioned first; it’s the MMO so popular that when most people think of the genre, they think of WoW. WoW’s content is famously easy, with the changes made to the game over the past few years making it one of the easiest MMOs to play, ever. It is colorful and runs on most any computer, even the Macs. Character customization isn’t the best — you will find your character’s face on lots of other people’s characters — and the community at this point is expert at WoW and unforgiving of new players. The newbie areas are also largely empty, though that should change when the next expansion adds two new races and completely redesigned newbie areas. Also, the Looking For Dungeon (LFD) tool makes finding groups automatic, but you will find that most dungeon groups expect every member to be extremely familiar with each dungeon and able to handle each encounter with little or no discussion. WoW does so many things right, that it’s easy to overlook the very few things it does wrong.
Lord of the Rings Online started out playing much like WoW, but in the years since has found its own niche. LotRO is deeply based on the lore of J.R.R. Tolkein’s books, and your character will follow, lead and meet the Fellowship and together you fight the evil legions of Mordor and restore peace to Middle Earth. Your character is far more customizable, and you can equip gear just for show to give you complete control over your character’s appearance. With housing, frequent festivals and celebrations and a variety of non-combat skills like playing actual music on in-game instruments, LotRO has built itself a strong and newbie-friendly community. Its high system requirements are the only blemish on this excellent game.
The sequel to the grandfather of 3D MMORPGs, EverQuest 2 takes customizability to an entirely new level. Its housing and massive guild halls make interior decorating a popular player occupation, supported by many trade skills. Crafting is a respected career path, with no combat at all required if you want to pursue that path (although most crafters mix adventuring in with their knitting). EQ2 boasts several stellar newbie experiences deep with plot and lore, so you are immediately immersed in the world. From the faerie-like Fae to the dark and manipulative dark elves to the wandering frogloks to the conniving ratonga, no other MMO gives you the number of classes, races and individuality of EQ2. This does mean that EQ2 can seem daunting to a new player. Like many older MMOs, the newbie areas will be largely desolate and the groups you do find will assume you know the game well. The game also requires a fairly hefty computer, and few would call EQ2 colorful.
Wizard101 is one of my favorites. The game is colorful, features a unique combat mechanic involving playing cards and building decks that starts out simple but leads to great depth, and has a variety of non-combat activities like home decoration and crafting. Though the game is nominally a subscription game, you can play the first several areas for free to get a taste, and have the option of purchasing access to new areas instead of subscribing. The characters, though colorful, have little individuality — you’ll see many copies of your character in the world. The game is also targeted for children and young teens, though many adults do play. The chat censoring and other kid-friendly features may be off-putting to older players. The game runs well on low system requirements, and I considered W101 to be the best new MMO of 2008.
Free Realms is an odd little nugget of an MMO. The developers couldn’t decide upon just one theme to the game, so they put in everything they could think of to make a game where the only goal is to make sure you are never more than ten seconds from doing something new. Characters can have one or many jobs, evenly split between combat jobs like brawler and ninja and non combat jobs like miner and postman. Each non-combat job opens mini-games, often themed for the area, based on some of the most famous casual games ever made. Add in player housing, pet training, the occasional live band performance, everywhere a new game to play, and a player population recently reported to be 10 million strong, and you have an unmatched new player experience. You will find clones of your character everywhere, and the highly stylized player characters may not be to everyone’s tastes. The game is free to play, though the cash shop is heavily promoted.
Out of all the Asian imports I’ve played, Dream of Mirror Online was probably for me the most successful. Your character is drawn from the real world into a mirror world full of Mirror Kings and only you (naturally) can save the world. Follow the plot through cut scenes, mysteries, and bizarre and over-the-top boss battles in various parallel universes, or discover and breed rare pets and hang out in town socializing, it’s up to you. The fairly unique class system lets your character take on any role and mix and match the abilities from any two classes to make your character your own. (This system is somewhat similar to FFXI Online’s, and Free Realms has echoes of it as well). Since each new class means going back through the newbie areas, even a couple of years into the game’s Western launch, the newbie areas are still full of players. The real-time harvesting is a way to get some of the drudgery of harvesting done without having to be physically present at the computer. If you don’t mind a strong anime/manga bend to the graphics, this might be the game for you.
Any of these would, I think, be an excellent introduction to the world of MMOs, and perhaps a permanent home for a new player. Other games, like Dungeons and Dragons Online, EVE Online, the original EverQuest, Aion, Warhammer, Age of Conan, Darkfall and Allods Online would appeal more to the experienced gamer. Most of these games have demos or free trials, and I’d urge a new player to give a couple of them a try to find out which appeals to them most. If you aren’t having fun in a game, it’s best to just move on. There’s so many choices available these days that there’s bound to be a fit for everyone.
If someone is looking for a deep game full of story and lore and “worldness”, and their computer can handle it, I’d recommend Lord of the Rings Online. For sheer casual fun, Free Realms. For kids or adults looking for a more strategic but always fun game, Wizard101. For the most freedom and individuality, EQ2. For the best social tools, DoMO. For the easiest game that can run on anything, WoW. Whatever you are looking for, one of these games likely has it.
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 :)
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. 
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