West Karana

MMO devs fire broadside press releases at my inbox, and I inflict them on others. We’ll suffer together or not at all.

Actually, let’s start off with a non-MMO offer. The Humble Indie Bundle from Wolfire Games collects five acclaimed Indie games (including the addictive building game World of Goo, underwater fantasy Aquaria, innovative platformer Gish, rabbit beat’m'up Lugaru, and horror adventure game Penumbra Overture. Until Monday, you can get all of these games AND donate to Electronic Freedom Foundation AND Child’s Play … at any price you want, divided between charities and the developers any way you want. This is a can’t lose deal — I was up till 2AM last night playing World of Goo… on my Linux box.

Oh, yeah. Every one of these games works fine on your Windows PC, your Mac, or your Linux box. No DRM, you can install these games on every computer you own. (Unfortunately, not the iPad). So go to the site, pay a buck or fifty, get these great games.

If you’re tired of always having to seek out monsters for XP in Atlus’ Neo*Steam, relax! With the opening of their new Guild Magnusseum, the monsters will come to you. Take your high level characters and their friends and see how long you can last. Increased experience and unique weapon rewards await. Atlus has also added a new dragon mount for the kids, and are giving away another pair of steampunk goggles, so get in game and check it out. They have a calendar of all their in-game events. It’d be cool if more companies did the same.

Sony stats their full-court press to publicize their new Move controllers, super Wii-motes that will revolutionize gaming in much exactly the same way Nintendo did with the Wii. Some of the videos I’ve seen look impressive, but there are none of those videos here. This e-mail ends up being nothing but a tease that will likely only draw more comparisons to the cheaper Wii.

Dungeons & Dragons Online is having a sale on their 32 point builds, extra inventory space Veteran Status and more. If you’ve been waiting for a sale to snap up items in the DDO store, now’s your chance. Still waiting for Drow to go on sale….

JoltOnline, they of Legends of Zork and Playboy Manager fame, are moving into the Facebook gaming arena with their satirical take on Farmville, Farm Villain. You can do such family-friendly things as run a meth lab on your farm, discover dead hookers buried beneath the fields, spread mad cow disease and other hilarious hijinks. Head to Facebook to start distributing radioactive corn to your neighbor’s pigs today!

Runes of Magic announces their Patch 3.0.0 which raises the level cap to 60, adds a new adventure zone and a “Whack the CM!” event which will probably be over before you read this. Lots of new stuff, yadayadayada, full details here. Double diamonds in their cash store, so that infamous $10 mount is now only $5. Because paying more than $5 for a virtual horse is madness.

It’s Welcome Back Weekend time in Star Trek Online! If you’re an ex-subscriber and want to see if STO has earned your return, log in and check it out. They also are now offering a new free trial, and if you’re interested in subbing after that, see Longasc. He’s trying to earn Riker’s three-nacelle’d Enterprise by getting five folks to sub.

EVE Online has more information on their upcoming Tyrannis expansion, due on the 18th. Sure, they tell you all the facts about planet mining and so on, but they also include this trailer. Watch it. Would I watch a full length EVE movie? You bet. In 3D. I would SO BE THERE.

EQ2′s Halas Reborn patch is due out on the 25th; log in around then and you get a free supercute kitten pet. It’s an entirely new starter area, so this is really the best time to get in on the ground floor — it’s the one newbie zone in the entire game guaranteed to be full of people!

Wizard101′s May Newsletter is up (and has been for some time, I’m just lazy). It discusses the new advanced pet training (now on Test), some extra-curricular reading for fantasy-loving kids, and helpful tips on staying safe online.

Guess that’s it for this week! See ya next week for another Assault on the Inbox.

The “Amaryllis” edition stuff? Well, here it is, a warm Spring night, just started writing, and “Though Amaryllis dance in green” comes up on the playlist, and it just seemed to fit the mood so well…

And re: the banner, well, Atlus’ newly revamped MMO import NeoSteam closed its Open Beta today to relaunch soon as a real live game. Rumor has it that characters from both the closed and open betas will carry through to the live game, so if you’ve a yen to play a fairly standard fantasy grinder with PvP and a light industrial flair, give it a shot.

Aion had its first closed beta this last weekend, where players were invited to join the lighter side of Aion’s warring factions. Aion has been passing out beta keys like they were Reese’s Pieces at an ET convention and though absolutely thoroughly detailed information about the beta is easy to come by, only Ravious of Kill Ten Rats is Daeva enough to blog about it. But then, he got permission (and I am trying to!). His take? Highly polished but standard gameplay, with the ease of the first ten levels no indication that there is no grind to come.

I find it hard to disagree with anything he wrote.

It’s not so much that your game has standard classes, it’s what the players want. It’s what you do with them. Gordon at We Fly Spitfires (note: I would love to fly in a Spitfire) writes about his favorite MMO classes from games past and present. Beastlord? Yes, please!

Out of all the blog posts this weekend about people’s experiences with Sims 3, Ogrebears’ is my favorite. You just KNOW that he’s a rebel, in his leather jacket and emerald skin, sitting at the school lunch table without a care as the girls go crazy for him.

Lots of people agree that the biggest problem with playing MMOs is having to play them with other people. When you’re solo, you can start and stop when you like and you always get first roll on all the loot. And you don’t have to deal with other people’s problems. Melmoth from Killed in a Smiling Accident asks, with game after game turning to NPCs to fill out your groups — will there be something you miss, after all, when all the other players disappear?

A month or so ago, Mythic called ex-Warhammer players back to the fold with an email detailing the exciting changes available for your exact character, name included. Now they’ve sent out another letter which mines your friends list so you can see which of your friends is still “carrying the banner”.

Is it cool or creepy to get such personalized email? I can’t wait to get an email saying, “Wow, bummer that you lost your job. Did you know that these day-time guilds are recruiting your class?”

WAR may be war everywhere, all the time, killing and more killing, but not all games promise that as their sole focus. EverQuest 2, for instance, has separate paths for adventurers and crafters, and crafters even have dungeon instances of their own (hint: you defeat the enemy by crafting). Ysharros and her hubby have been spending a lot of time doing the harvesting and crafting quests and enjoying the uber rewards. Who needs to kill dragons when you could be mining feysteel?

With over two million players, you never know who you’ll find wandering around in Wizard 101. Thomas has an interview with Terry Dietz, a sculptor who is slowly cataloging the wizards and fauna of the game in polymer clay. Absolutely amazing work!

Now that SOE is axing underperforming MMOs, which is next to go? Ardwulf has been tipping his toe in the pool where Openedge1 usually swims, and is looking to see if XFire can answer which games are teetering on the edge. It’s not looking good for Pirates of the Burning Sea and Planetside, but Vanguard might just sneak through.

Syp takes a look at how adding a simple travel power like Super Jump to a hero in City of Heroes adds an entirely new dimension to the game, and wonders why other games don’t let you do truly heroic things like that? Could super jump (and stuff like that) be the missing ingredient to making ordinary adventurers into heroes?

And lastly, Anjin has a complete run-down of what we’ll see in Free Realms’ future. Soccer/football? Yes, please! Prestige classes? Sounds EXCELLENT! Here’s hoping SOE fixes my account so I can play again :)

See you tomorrow on the Tuesday Nightly Blogroll!

I’ve been staying away from talking about Darkfall and Free Realms lately because, what’s more to say about it?

Well, Darkfall is about to launch in the US, and we can only hope that makes more waves than Spellborn’s rather uneventful splash when it did the same a couple months back. Keen thinks Darkfall’s NA launch will give the game a chance to launch in the shape it should have been from the start. It’s kind of odd, really. Is Europe becoming a kind of live beta for US players? Spellborn, Runes of Magic, now Darkfall — the Europeans pay to make the game better for us.

How generous of them!

I’m not going to make a big deal over the amount of time it takes, anymore, before someone can review an MMO, or even give a first impressions. I gave EVE Online about twenty hours; NeoSteam about three, and I expect Mabinogi will take about twenty. Why should I, when Tobold is right there with his own experiences? He spent 40 hours playing for his Luminaire review. Dayum.

Spinks looks at the rather boring goals of MMO heroes (kill more rats, kill bears, deliver this package, talk to that guy) vs those of villains (destroy civilization, defeat the gods, rule the world) and wonders why villains always get the best plots? She suggests using other players as foils for villainous plots, because, well, game designers can’t seem to do the job, I guess.

Funcom advertised an Age of Conan in-game event without telling the players that THEY were supposed to provide the food, contests and entertainment (in their own defense, Funcom did provide a once-a-day sparkler to help get the party going). The community was not amused. Then they advertised a web page scavenger hunt that was not in game and caused language issues with players. The censors clamped down on the forums, and critical threads were deleted. Openedge1 looks at the mess and calls it launch day, all over again. Why is Funcom having so many problems with their community?

Some people want everything! Give them FedEx or Kill Ten Rats quests and they say they should be more creative. Give them a quest with a plot and that’s not right, either. Ysharros writes of a particular quest in EQ2′s Village of Shin that involves pumping monks for information they show no interest in telling. Spinks would suggest a villainous quest that would go something like “Kill the next monk that talks back to me — and then burn the village to the ground!”

Heartless_ looks at Free Realm’s press release bragging of two million players, and wonders why he never sees any of them in the game itself? Well, he sees them — running to the next minigame, but nobody is talking. I dunno, sometimes people talk to me and I just don’t see it because the chat window is always turning invisible. Then I look over the chat and see that at some point in the past, someone said something to me. Seriously. Chat in FR is broken and was broken in beta.

Scopique at Cedar Street (how do you pronounce that, anyway? Not Cedar Street — Scopique.) Anyway, Scopique examines change in MMOs. Not the kind of change where a weapon is adjusted or a monster’s abilities are tuned, but changes that change the very nature of the game. Good? Bad? Inevitable? But all games change. EQ went from social/casual to achiever/raid. WoW went from social/casual to achiever/raid. LotRO went from social/casual to… hey, is this what they call a ‘pattern’?

I don’t often link to commercial blogs, but this post on io9 decrying the Gawker Media editorial decision to masquerade advertising as actual articles is just full of win. Not the advertising, but I love the tips on how to separate their actual content with the secret ads. Very… subversive. If only every commercial site were that up-front about it.

And lastly, because it just wouldn’t be a blogroll without Syp, he notes that the number of blogs devoted to a game is a rough indicator of its popularity (makes sense), and then takes a look at a couple of really cool Lord of the Rings Online blogs.

Hey, imagine my shock when I didn’t find any other blogs devoted to a single zone in EverQuest. I thought I’d have to push my way through all the exciting South Karana stories to get my voice heard at all!

Anyway, see you tomorrow and until then, keep gaming!

See, this is exactly why you can’t do “first impressions” on an MMO. What does my couple hours of time in Atlus’ newly relaunched MMO NeoSteam tell me about the rest of the game? Not a lot.

On the face of it, it’s nothing more than a reskinned fantasy MMO with an anime style similar to Dream of Mirror Online and other games of that ilk (though without, thus far, DOMO’s strong story). You have two nations at war, one with a technology bent and the other magical, though at first glance, this doesn’t lead to much difference in game. Six races (four human or human-like, two monster), four professions, and not much avatar customization.

I made a Lyrell twinblade. Um, scout. Lyrell are humans with cute animal ears and a special connection with nature. Scouts are your melee dps class. And though the twin blades have hoses and bright puffs of steam coming from them, they are blades nonetheless, and nothing about the names of the weapons (dirks, swords, sabers, broadswords, bows, etc) hint at any sort of Steampunk connection.

I don’t want to harp on this too much, but in my first nine levels, the only signs of a Steampunk nature to the game were the huffing and puffing engines at which you do crafting — exactly the same as a forge in any other fantasy MMO.

You start off with one weak combat art, which you train up by spending the skill points you get when you level, and training points you earn by using your skill. A Level 3 sword attack, for instance, might require one SP and 1600 TP — OR you could choose to learn a small radius AE attack instead.

The newbie fields are full of hopping little doughy critters called piyos and puyos (hey, I LOVED Puyo Puyo! Now THERE was a game! Why can’t Free Realms or some other minigame portal copy THAT! With the characters and everything!). Anyway, these exact same critters are in Dream of Mirror Online, and you do the same thing here you did with those — whack them until they die. Also similar to DOMO, killing enough of the critters summons larger versions who are after revenge and their own certain dooms.

Leveling is fairly quick and painless, you get a combination pet/minder who advises you about leveling, skill training and so on as you wander.

But that’s not the POINT, none of this is, and this is why first impressions, including this one, are worthless.

From the in-game broadcasts, it was clear that the real game lived at the higher levels. Our side (the “good guys”) would attack the other side (the “other good guys”), or they would attack us in what seemed like a constantly shifting battlefield. Or special high level dungeons would suddenly open, perhaps based on the realm battle.

And these broadcasts about the goings-on in the wider world made me want to whack another puyo, get to 11, choose a subclass (at 10), craft myself some armor, and head out looking for trouble.

The point of the game is not and never has been about adventuring in the Steampunk milieu — that will still have to wait on Gatheryn’s eventual release. It’s a re-skinned fantasy MMO with lots of levels that go fairly fast and an RMT store you’ll recognize from any Asian F2P game. The point is to meet on the battlefield and gain access (I believe) to high end dungeons, and if you ever read something that pretends to be a full review of this game without delving deeper into these aspects than I have, well, you’ll know what it’s worth.