West Karana

Maracas aren’t as good at warding off intergalactic invaders as I thought they would be.

While out gathering the day’s meals, my duckling tribespeople were startled by a huge contraption which WALKED on white, clanking legs down from the sky and sucked up the food animals that were being kept in the pen behind the main hut. It then buzzed the village twice and stalked back up into space.

It was Ogrebears‘ starship. Later, when my little ducklings had ascended to space, I was given a mission to suck up some of the Ogrebears creatures into *my* starship. Their terrified yelps couldn’t save them from the power of my abduction ray.

That was SPORE. As a game. it’s okay. As a way to get millions of people creating their own content and sharing it with their friends, of unleashing their creativity and playing games in a way that engaged people’s brains instead of numbed them, it was amazing.

In three weeks, LittleBigPlanet will play the same trick by giving kids and adults all the tools to make pretty much any arcade game they can imagine, along with all the awards and prizes, and share them with their friends (and anyone else).

Warhammer Online decided to vastly de-emphasize the scripted encounters common to older games in favor of boosting the PvP game. The PvP game — the part of the game where your opponents are other players and not computer-controlled automatons — is considered by Mythic to be very much more compelling than the part of the game where you find a clump of Wuzzits and press a key repeatedly until they are all gone.

It’s not that WoW is the only game that encourages repetitive and meaningless killing — its predecessor, EverQuest, was widely mocked for focusing on exactly that — but that it took such great delight in it. The Deadmines is a fantastic little story, but it always plays the exact same way. The fight against the dread dragon Onyxia was so scripted that a video where a raid leader berates his raid for not following the script exactly enough was one of the most widely circulated WoW videos I ever saw while I played reveals just how ingrained this has become.

The game devs have long assumed the path to big success was in leading the player to the rides, then letting them have their very tightly managed fun.

EverQuest 2 shares a lot of things with WoW. But, you can decorate your home limited only by your imagination. You can dress your character however you like (depending on your class). Lord of the Rings lets you also choose from among several outfits of your own design and build your own house. Likewise Vanguard. Star Wars Galaxies lets you design almost anything you like to your own specifications. Chronicles of Spellborn will let you from the start design your own look. City of Heroes will let you write your own missions — complete with a villain of your own design.

Yet in Warcraft, every character looks the same. There are no houses, no outlet for creativity. Only in the battlegrounds (and the upcoming open PvP zone) are the players set loose to be free.

There is a new generation of MMORPGs coming. It won’t be marked by super real graphics or ever-more elaborately scripted raid encounters. The new games will hand over some of the keys to the playground to the players. And, absolutely 100% guaranteed, what the players will do with them will astonish.

I’ve talked about this before, and people have said it’s impossible, but it’s not. It’s already happening. The days when you could log on to your MMO and depend upon a scripted experience, the same as everyone has, are nearly over. Within five years, the quests I run will be the quests YOU wrote. And FINALLY, a dozen years too late, 3D MMOs will be up to parity with the text-based MUDs that inspired them.

And once we’re up to date with the state of the art of a dozen years ago, we can move forward into something truly new.

WoW is a dinosaur, bigger than anything that came before it. A hundred feet long, tall as a tree, thundering footsteps and a trumpeting call proudly proclaiming it master of the prehistoric.

But we all know what happened to the dinosaurs.

They just couldn’t adapt.

I’ve played Vanguard before — but only up to 18. I still consider myself a Vanguad “noobie”. I felt more like a noob than ever after running through the new player experience, “The Isle of Dawn”. Almost everyone I met there had at least one max level character, and for those Vanguard experts, the noob island was easy and fun. To someone still fairly new to Vanguard, it was a somewhat frustrating experience. I crashed to desktop four times, got stuck in an elevator three times (being warned each time I typed /stuck yes that my usage was being logged and I could be banned), and drowned in the middle of an open room with no water in sight.

On the other hand, I learned more about Vanguard than I knew before, was spared the “plopped down in the middle of nowhere” feel of the original starting areas, got outfitted in decent gear and had an opportunity to group with some nice people.

I wanted to try out the disciple class — I’d picked that for my Stout Henry guy and I found I really liked the idea of a melee healer. Because I was just playing around, I chose the silliest race (a fox person) and name (Viveca Crevan). The entire night, little Viveca did high kicks to monster’s crotches. It was like being in the Will Ferrell version of Vanguard.

The Isle of Dawn puts you down right in front of a quest giver, who is in such a panic, she can’t bring herself to go on. It is up to you, the Hero of Dawn, to take those brave ten steps to talk to the next quest giver — if you dare.

The next trainer, dismissive of your skills (I don’t believe he actually SAYS “l2p, noob, u ned 2 kil n00b mobs yo”, but he strongly implies it), sends you off to kill some lizards who don’t fight back. They do, however, drop little bits of newbie gear, so I spent a fair amount making Gatora Podlings as extinct as pigs made dodos.

Having proved my prowess against defenseless creatures, I was sent to spray gatora repellent in the eyes of Mature Gatora, and to wipe out some marsh hunters, fishy looking guys who, significantly, were nowhere to be found in the actual marsh.

After that, it was into the swamp to take care of the hobgoblin problem.

This is where the Isle of Dawn very nearly lost me. I was REALLY UNCOMFORTABLE that the major enemy on the island was a race of often-naked black guys (with pointy ears). Couldn’t they have made the hobgoblins look like monsters? Judge for yourself.

“But mearly naked WHITE guys would have been okay?” you might ask. Well, actually, I dislike killing mobs that look like people in general. Monsters are fine. People is uncomfortable. But black guys dressed in nearly nothing, covered with tribal war paint (in later zones, they do wear clothing), with all attempts to talk to them met with violence, I mean, come on. Who thought that was a good idea?

I got random group invites every now and then. First group mate was an 11 year old who demanded to know my name, and told me right off about his level 38 death knight. A little later he admitted to having a level 50 paladin, except that he forgot the password to it. I asked him why he didn’t just call SOE to get the password reset, and he just laughed.

Together, we cleared out a village of hobgoblins who were being coerced from beyond to open up portals to the Fire Dimension and summon imps to come do their terrible bidding. The imps were most notable for being one-hit kills. If I were running the Fire Dimension, and I was looking to invade a world, I would pull out the big guns.

Later villages of hobgoblins, these that called forth elementals from the Rock Dimension, fared no better. I found a ring that makes an annoying sound in the Rock Dimension when you use it on a rock critter. I just kept using it until it annoyed a rock critter so much that he popped into the Isle of Dawn to make me stop. I just kept using the ring on him until he exploded. I guess he didn’t like the ring tone.

Like, from a cellphone. Never mind.

Turns out the hobgoblins are being riled up by some invaders from the Uvula Dimension, the Ulvari. Who are basically even blacker guys. After wiping out a village of them, we were sent (different group by this time; the 11 year old had to spend time with his cousin) to the Temple of Ancients! Which you get to via pegasus.

Stargrace took me on a griffon flight once, but I’d forgotten how to fly them, since after that one time, I could never find the flight masters again so just ran everywhere. (Use the map? HAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA yeah right). Anyway, for those who, like me, are fairly new to flying, here’s how you fly: Click on the flight master, choose your destination by clicking on a useful, clearly marked map, and you’re off. Oh wait, that’s World of Warcraft. I meant, click on the flight master, and choose your destination from a list. Oh damn sorry, that’s EverQuest 2. What I really meant was: Click on the flight master, buy a pegasus leash from him, find it in your inventory, open up your character window, choose the last tab, equip the leash, right click it to summon the pegasus, close the window, while moving forward hit the space button twice, line up the red mark in your compass, point upward while flapping with the space bar, and you’re off!

It’s as if the Vanguard devs went into a closed room and challenged themselves to come up with a game more annoying than EverQuest. “We want a game that is unforgiving and cruel,” they said, “because our players are HARDCORE. Clicking on a mount bridle like in EQ, EQ2 or WoW is too easy. We can do better.”

“I know!” exclaimed a brilliant dev. “We can make a tab for RIDING CLOTHES, and make you equip even temporary mounts THERE, and also make you collect special clothes… for RIDING!”

The room fell silent. And then someone clapped. And then another. And then the whole room was on its feet, cheering.

Anyway, off I eventually went to the Temple of the Ancients.

I don’t actually have any screen shots from the Temple. So you can’t see the rock elevator which slams you against some bars from which you are unable to move or escape. That had me and my group mate risking the ban hammer by typing /stuck yes a couple of times. Or the room right before the dungeon boss where you suddenly find yourself drowning while your groupmate yells at you to “use your protection”. My what? gurglegurle gaaaaaaah…. I crashed right after that and my groupmate was gone when I got back.

I went back and soloed the boss, but it was pretty tough. I couldn’t get any of the other people there to group. It was pretty close, but disciples are healers so it wasn’t that bad.

Afterward, I helped a rogue do it, and it went a whole lot better.

Then I got stuck in the elevator again. I decided not to bother with the quest to farm nameds for Death Poems because any more time spent in Temple of the Ancients and that stupid elevator would drive me mad, so I did the “find the pegasus master” quest for the fourth time (oh, isn’t he on the map? HAHAHAHAHAHA!), turned in the quest at ToA, finished up the quests I had back at the village, dinged ten, talked to the rift master about leaving the island, clicked on the rift and crashed.

As an intro to Vanguard, the Isle of Dawn is more focused and puts you together with a large number of other players, most of whom are Vanguard experts with a lot of experience in the game. It is far better to start with other people than to be dropped in the middle of nowhere with no other players in sight.

It also has more crashes and bugs than I ever experienced in the normal game. These will undoubtedly be fixed in the future.

Vanguard’s core philosophy has always seemed to be to take something other games have done, but to make it more tedious and less intuitive. In the spectrum of MMOs where World of Warcraft is at the casual, gamey end and EverQuest is at the hardcore end, Vanguard is proudly right near EQ, where it was always meant to be. But for those people who really want the EQ experience, I would recommend just playing the original game. Vanguard’s over-the-top system requirements and general instability don’t make for better gameplay, just prettier gameplay.

Make no mistake, Vanguard is a pretty game, and the new character models mean you can look at your fellow players without bursting into laughter. But with both EverQuest and EverQuest 2 in their game roster, I still don’t know what Vanguard brings to SOE’s table not served by the other games.

I was determined to get all the way through the Isle of Dawn, but in the end, I never was able to relax and just have fun and enjoy the experience. If Vanguard had managed to make the Isle as easy and fun and bulletproof as Blizzard did with all of their newbie experiences, they could have had a hit on their hands. As it is, it is as tedious and unforgiving as the game itself. Current Vanguard players will love it, but I can’t see new players coming out of this with a hot desire to buy the full game.

Vanguard offered its Game Update #6 yesterday, finally fixing and updating their character models, something promised pretty much from launch. Worth it? Definitely.

Prior to the fix, my halfling bard had had her eyelids removed, and further changes to the ambient lighting system had left her face perpetually in shadow. Here she is pre-patch and as she appears now; below is a closeup of her face.

Today I’m going to sing a serious song about love, commitment and OOOH LOOK AT THAT PRETTY BIRD!!!!

Her breasts are bigger, her armor is more detailed and seems made of more separate pieces, and she has a happier, livelier expression. Players don’t roll halflings because for their supermodel figures, so not sure what the reason was for that, but all in all, she looks far better than before.

Humans weren’t hit as hard with the ugly stick pre-patch, and aside from looking burlier and getting eyelids and a new haircut, Stout Henry doesn’t look all that different. Here’s the before-and-after to judge for yourself.

Damn, I’m good looking.

So, way to go, Vanguard team :) The game’s characters now look as fantastic as the landscapes.

Well, first of all, I’m not playing WAR because I’m at work.

But even when not working, I have a bunch of games I’m already playing. And its exciting stuff for all of them!

* EverQuest — Nostalgia FTW. You know, I don’t think we’ve ever had an official group xp night in the same zone twice. The only time we revisited a place was Sol B and Permafrost when we were farming the dragons. And we have still only seen a small fraction of the zones in the game. Friday, we grouped in Plane of Storms, Warslik Woods and Dagnor’s Cauldron for various things — all new zones for us on a group night. Small fraction of total zones. It’s wild how big EQ is.

* EverQuest II — Getting the guild ready for guild halls is going to take more time at the loom to get my level up to the point where I can go on crafting missions as either tailor or jeweler. Plus, the construction of the griffin towers and teleport spires happened while I was off in EQ and World of Warcraft respectively, so this is one world event I am determined not to miss. Also, I need to finish the Veksar quests. My group bailed out at the last mob for no good reason, even though I could easily keep the boss mob mezzed while the group killed the adds. They just decided to leave.

* Vanguard — Vanguard got a new game update yesterday, haven’t had a chance to see if Tipa the Startled Halfling Bard and Henry Stout the Astonished Disciple have gotten their eyelids back. Plus, I need to finish Stout Henry goes to War. Last week’s craziness pushed everything back a week.

* Guild Wars: Nightfall — I actually have played this some, though I didn’t write about it because it went terribly. So I have to go back and try the next mission again. It wasn’t the game’s fault. My head just wasn’t in gaming last week.

* Wizard 101 — I love this game. Meeting Gnewt and his wife, and then right after making a new friend and doing a VERY TOUGH instance together that took a LOT of teamwork, strategy and deck management, rekindled my love for the game. It’s an MMO which does things differently. That’s what we WANT, right? If only they had an adults-only server that drops the kid protection features.

* Metaplace — I was just offered the opportunity to be part of the beta test. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, and in fact if Spore hadn’t taken over my life this week, Metaplace surely would have.

* City of Heroes/Villains — When Issue 13 comes out. I am going to HAVE to take a few days and see if my dream of becoming a pro game designer could be more than a dream by WRITING some missions. Can I craft a great story and also design interesting levels and challenges? Here’s my chance to find out.

So which of these do I give up for WAR?

I don’t have time for the games I am ALREADY playing. I wanted to start writing a series on free-to-play games, but the three hours or so a night I have to myself are already overscheduled, so I have no chance to do more… even though I want to.

I was writing a new Stout Henry story last night, when I got the idea to try and model him with the character creators from all the MMOs I had which could actually make unique characters. That left out EverQuest and World of Warcraft right off the bat; neither one has many character choices and people generally look a lot like other people of their race and gender.

I started off with City of Heroes, because its character creator is legendary. Unfortunately, the options are not tuned so much for a medieval adventurer wearing simple clothes and wielding a staff. Still, after a couple of tries, it didn’t come out too bad… but it wasn’t Stout Henry.

Next up was EverQuest 2. Unlike EverQuest, EQ2’s character creator is pretty customizable. Stout Henry would be a bruiser in EQ2 terms, and I soon had a decent looking character, except that the clothes were entirely wrong. Also, he’s a little TOO clean cut. Personal hygiene is not at the top of Stout Henry’s priority list.

Given the discussion we were having yesterday about the Vanguard character models, I figured I’d have a go with theirs. When I saw the Qalian human disciple, I’d found Stout Henry. Nothing to be done but level him up to 3 and buy a staff, and there he was. My hero.

City of Villains

EverQuest II

Vanguard

Since I was in City of Heroes *anyway*, I decided to look in on my mastermind, the villainous Tara Mythcrafter. Next up on her mission list was a mayhem mission, where she would go to Paragon City and raise havoc and rob a bank and survive somehow. I failed the mission right at the end. But I had realized why I always fail these missions — I keep thinking the point of the mission is to rob a bank. That is NOT the case. The POINT of the mission is to cause MAYHEM — killing the good citizens of Paragon City, blowing up cars, breaking through barricades, defeating so-called heroes, and in general, making your mark on the world.

Next mission sent me to the PvP area, so I went to Booty Bay to look around. Some sort of player-run PvP battle was just ending, so I made a note to look them up when one was starting, and went to Pocket D, the CoX nightclub, to hang out with some fellow costumed adventurers.

There weren’t enough people there to make it interesting, so I accepted a team invite and as anyone who looked at Xfire saw, spent the night in CoV, doing missions and hitting level 19.

After the team broke up, I got a new mayhem mission from my contact, returned to Paragon City and played the mission how it was meant to be played. I blew up EVERYTHING. Cars, trucks, mailboxes, bus stops, phone booths, cardboard boxes… here’s me and my crew villainously attacking a dumpster.

We robbed the bank, too, and defeated the heroes they sent at us. Afterward I kept blowing up cars and cardboard boxes, working on badges, until the timer ran out.

I did get some writing done, but not enough, so that will be tonight’s job. I hope I don’t get sidetracked again….

I didn’t just play Guild Wars this weekend. I stopped into Wizard 101 a little, and, oh, finally got around to moving Dina from Befallen to Najena, where she happily joined Nostalgia. Almost as soon as I got transferred and reset my AAs, I got a group invite to Runnyeye 2. Who was going to be the enchanter for the run? Me. Yup, troub mezzes were going to be the only thing between us and total annihilation. It got a little nervewracking on the final epic x2 mob, since the usual strat is to mez all the adds, kill the boss, then kill the adds. Well, I can only keep two locked down. Three with no resists, but that’s iffy. The group leader figured out a strat where only two needed to be mezzed at a time, we did it, and we won.

Vindication for troubs in groups :) The main tank had actually never grouped with a troubadour before, and wanted to know what, if anything, troubs could do that was useful. Well, troubs can mez… that should be good for something. By the end of the run, everyone in the group had learned the pleasure of Song of Magic, Countersong, Perfection of the Maestro and Jester’s Cap as well.

I won a Brigand master in the group, Dispatched. I sold it within minutes for 400p. Unfortunately for me, troub masters on Najena are so expensive that even with 400p, I would only be able to buy a couple of the more useless ones. So I opted to not buy any of them. Unless I am planning on raiding, I don’t really need them if I have Adept 3 spells.

Today, before I started with Guild Wars, I took a couple of hours to rearrange my bank, get all my crafting materials set, put what I didn’t need on the broker, and get my tailoring from 52 to 56, taking advantage of the double xp weekend, a full bar of tradeskill vitality, and two Drafts of the Skilled.

Next time they have a double xp weekend, I’ll finish it up to 60. But Tier 6 tailoring is so mind-blowingly awful, that I want every possible benefit I can get before I put shuttle to loom.

I stopped into Vanguard a little because I’d heard they finally updated the character models. So on the left, you see my bard in EQ2. And on the right, my bard in Vanguard. It should be noted that both halflings are fair skinned. This is part of the reason I don’t play Vanguard much. My character creeps me out.

Played some wake-me-up Audiosurf. Since the last time I played, they have started adding new artists you can download and play to — today, “The Tunics”, a pretty good English indie-style band. You can send the songs you play to to Last.fm, and you can see a quick list of which songs you are the champion on. So, some nice new stuff.

I also finally joined Xfire. I’m tipadaknife there, if you want to add me. I’m Tipa on Last.fm if you want to friend me there, and if you want to add me on LinkedIn or Facebook, let me know :) Or if you know my real name (no huge secret, but that doesn’t mean I want it grabbed from here by a spambot), well, use that for LinkedIn and FB.

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.

I haven’t done a “what I’m playing” thing for awhile. So here’s my current roster of games, and I’ll start off with what I’m NOT playing. And that game would be Mythos.

MMOs:

Mythos had one of the strongest beta communities on record, with unparalleled access to devs. Community Manager Taylor Baldree would hold court in the #mythos IRC channel every night. Devs would respond daily on the forums. And all that was leading to a game that I very much wanted to play. With Hellgate: London’s reprieve by Namco Bandai, let’s hope there IS hope for Mythos as well.

Pi Story and Florensia — I played a few hours of Pi Story in closed beta, but it ended before I got too far in the game. Florensia, I didn’t get into the closed beta but has since gone open. Pi Story is a 2D side scroller MMO in the vein of Secret of Mana or Legend of Mana — a fast, action RPG MMO. Florensia is a Japanese pirate/fantasy adventure which has been compared to OnePiece. I like Japanese MMOs because they generally are closer to Western sensibilities than Chinese or Korean MMOs. I really want to get back to Pi Story, but will probably be on Florensia for a few days to check it out. Huge production values, I want to get a look at it.

Wizard 101 — W101 has been my addiction the past couple of weeks, but it is getting a little grindy and bugs in the Tomb of Storms in Krokotopia are making it difficult to progress. It IS beta, after all, so I am not too concerned. I am about at the point where I can write a decent first look at it, and then sit back and wait for release. This is one darn addictive game, but I begin to dread battles because as you move up in levels, each battle takes more and more time. Even with other people, the games have become so fantastically strategic that it’s hard to see how well their target audience does once they’re facing two rows of Rank 4 Elites and your deck contains only three 404 point heals…

City of Villains — love the game, love the characters, just don’t have time for the grind. I didn’t even actually intend on playing it last weekend, I just wanted to use the character creator. I just kept getting swallowed up into mission groups — random people would invite me all the time, and all but one of the groups were great.

EverQuest — Tuesday and Friday nights are for EQ. It took awhile to get used to the game again after so long away, but I am very comfortable there once again. Finding groups outside the Nostalgia nights is still a hassle, so, as when I played before, I don’t bother looking for groups. I just run around and explore or work on my epic. I don’t hold out the hope that the next expansion will bring anything for casual players; sounds like the whole faction grind, tiered high end raiding system they love so much now. But that’s okay. They already wrote MY EverQuest, and it’s still there to play.

EverQuest 2 — I haven’t logged on EQ2 again since I finished my storm armor quests. I hate soloing, and I only stuck it through the considerable soloing for that assassin armor because I wanted to take a screenshot of my character wearing it. My goals in EQ2 — getting my troubadour’s mythical epic, or finding a high level casual raiding guild — seem impossible. My level 80 troubadour and inquisitor are guildless, and it’s so depressing not having anyone to talk to when I log in that I don’t spend much time playing. I think my inquisitor might still be sitting in the bottom of RE2 where she was when she was kicked out of the group so they could bring someone else’s healer in. My troubadour has been unable to even get a RE2 group, and I have no idea how I am supposed to report on EQ2 happenings when I don’t even have a guild :/ It’s tough and depressing.

Vanguard — I’ve been spending some time in Vanguard, running around, doing quests, and hoping to get a good sense for the current state of the game. Again, being guildless and playing entirely solo are so crushingly soul-draining that I can’t play long before I just want to fill the emptiness with a game that has people I can talk to in it.

Looking back, it looks like I have been largely playing games with easy grouping and fast-paced gameplay. Not surprisingly, these are the two trends I think herald the forthcoming next wave of MMOs that will supplant the WoW-likes.

Not a lot of time here, but I did want to talk about some recent adventures in Vanguard. After completing the Veskal’s Keep quests (including a very nice, nearly epic one about purifying the Tree of Life), I thought, “Self, it’s time you started working on your racial mount. After all, what’s a halfling without a giant, carnivorous, ugly, smelly, dangerous, awful, disgusting, mutant, radioactive ant to ride upon?” Sure, other races get cool mounts. We get friggin’ ANTS. “Ma’am, your giant radioactive ant is eating the children. Could you please park it elsewhere?”

That meant a quick trip to Rindol Fields, but unfortunately, Rindol Fields is not on the increasingly unhelpful map, which seems to show and discard points of interest for no apparent reason. Here’s a paradigm-smashing idea: Why not show THEM ALL? Or at least the ones I have BEEN to?

I hate the Vanguard map so much. There’s good maps, then there are marginal maps, then there are maps that by their very presence make it HARDER to find things, MORE useless than having no map at all. Such are Vanguard maps. Put it this way. If I were using a VG-style map to get from here to Boston — Boston wouldn’t be on the map. Neither would any roads. There would be no towns on it except one named, oh, Millbury. There would be no indication that Millbury was anywhere near Boston, but it being the only town on the map, I would head my car in that general direction and hope for the best. However, every hill and river would be shown (but no, no roads).

THAT is the Vanguard map.

The rift from Veskal’s Exchange brought me to Renton Keep, and I picked up some quests there. I looked around for awhile for Rindol Fields, but no dice. Map, again, absolutely useless. Thrushk is not on it. Rindol Fields, my STARTING AREA. is not on it.

Vanguard has a lot of nice bits. It’s very beautiful. But that map ruins it all. I’m sorry. Even a blank piece of paper would be a better map, because at least it wouldn’t imply by its existence that it would be possible to find your way to something using it. I could be RIGHT OUTSIDE Veskal’s Exchange, looking up at it — and it wouldn’t be on the map, but a couple of other pointless PoIs would be.

SOE, just remove the map. You’re just promising something with it you have no intention of delivering.

NCSoft’s first quarter report came out, and they don’t want to talk about their space marine-fps-mmo, Tabula Rasa, except to say they are fairly disappointed bu its performance.

I should refer to it by its full name, Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa.

Richard Garriott, if you don’t know of him, is “the legendary video game programmer and designer, noted as one of the PC Gamer’s “Game Gods”. I found this little tidbit on a vanity web site called “Richard in Space“, where you can meet Richard Garriott as he prepares for his space tourist flight to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket.

Last year, Game God Brad McQuaid was likewise absent for the disappointment that was Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. I’m sure he was as well paid as Richard Garriott, AKA the sixth Earth human to go to the space station as a tourist. We could be next, gushes the “Richard in Space” site. Maybe if we can get someone to shovel money at us because our Game God status demands it.

I feel sad for the people who did their best to finish these games while the Gods got all the press and the limelight. All the real developers got were schedules, pressure, disappointment and exciting trips to the unemployment office.

Now Brad is in hiding, and Richard Garriott is going up to space (still unknown: did he leave a clone behind in case he wanted to respec? Or in case the Soyuz castle lands just a little *too* hard this time?).

Past success is no indicator of future success in this world. Maybe it makes a difference if you put as much as yourself into the next game as you did in the one that made you a Game God. I think you really have to step back and reassess your life if you find yourself being promoted as a Game God. Hey, you could say, don’t call me that. I’m no better than anyone else. I had a hit game but all I have to show for it is that I have to work twice as hard on the next one.

John Romero, American McGee, Brad McQuaid, Richard Garriott and many, many more; Game Gods all.

Last Thursday I did a huge interview with Vanguard developer Lenny “Tiraslee” Gullo, and as well as talking a LOT about the upcoming VG game update, he let me play with a lot of the new mounts and showed off some of the new spell graphics.

Well, after wrangling with Windows Movie Maker for a few days (the heat of a thousand exploding stars cannot come close to my frustration at that program’s limitations, but at least it’s free), I finally finished putting it in some sort of shape, and it’s being rolled out on Massively in three parts today.

The first post, where we show off the new mounts, is up now. Later today is a spell effects video, and this afternoon is the mega-interview where a lot of information about the quests to get the mounts is revealed… as well as other neat stuff.

Check it out! And let me know if you liked the videos… or if you have any suggestions for better cheap (or free) video editing software that can deal with the Fraps codec and 1680×1050 video.

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.

It’s been a little over a week since I started blogging over at Massively, and while I am really enjoying myself, I think I still have a lot to learn about story ideas. It’s all about the page views, right, and what brings in the eyeballs better than our dear old friend, porn. So I suggested this to the editors, and they pretty much informed me that they already had plenty of Second Life coverage, and maybe I could work on this piece about “Shoulder armor through the ages — how high is too high?”.

“No no no!” I cried. Well, typed. “What if I just go to various games, undress my own characters, and make a calendar from those pictures?”

Blank stares. Let me give you an idea: Concrete floors have more expression. So, grumbling beneath my breath, I vowed to do that article and show them just how good an idea it was. Here, then, for your enjoyment: Massively Multiplayer Women. (They didn’t like the title, either… hadn’t they ever seen Age of Conan!!!???)

City of Villains: Sometimes, it’s not what you wear, but how you wear it. Black Oyl was a petroleum researcher at Texxon when she fell into a tanker full of $110/barrel crude. This would have been fatal if the light of the brightest Gamma Ray Burst ever recorded hadn’t hit Earth at that precise moment. Black Oyl emerged from the tanker wearing a dollar’s worth of oil on a five dollar body and fights oil executives by seeing that their stretch limousines are detailed poorly in the Houston luxury car wash.

Dungeon Siege 2: “But DS2 isn’t even an MMO!” pointed out the editors. Always blocking my flow with details! You’ve heard Chalice Eversong’s story a thousand times, it’s the kind of growing-up story everyone can relate to. You and a friend get drunk one night and sign up as mercenaries for an evil army, and even though you really suck at fighting and get your butt kicked by tree branches, somehow, it turns out you’re a legendary hero and are the only one that can defeat your boss. And then your boyfriend dies, you get captured by tree people, forced to do menial labor all the time, blah blah blah, it’s happened to all of us. Chalice just wants to show that just because you’re prophesied to save the world doesn’t mean you can’t let your hair down with your party once in awhile. Hey, that’s why it’s called a PARTY!

EverQuest 2: “I’m NOT doing this!” yelled Nashuya. “Oh, yes you are,” I said, as I stowed her armor, bit by bit, in her pack. “This is a GREAT idea for an article, and you’re gonna just have to grin and bear it!” This was before my editors said that actually, it was a crappy idea for an article. Nashuya’s blue-tinged skin positively glows in the light of the corpse-flames of Fallen Gate. Nashuya protests too much. Way back when EQ2 first came out, player characters were assumed to be shipwreck survivors without a penny — or armor — to their names, and looked just like this until they did some quick armor quests. Now new characters come complete with armor, weapons, and a selection of promising spells and combat abilities. It’s just like being back on newbie island, Nash!

Sins of a Solar Empire: Yeah, I know. Don’t start with me, okay? The Kor Battleship “EDS Eliza” is two kilometers of the meanest hunk of ship in three systems. She appears here clad in nothing but ten meter thick electro-strong neutronium plating. She’ll give ya the ride of your life and then kick you back to that ice planet with the arctic research lab from which you came.

Dream of Mirror Online: No, this ISN’T my character. DOMO characters are CHILDREN. What kind of pervert ARE you? This is one of DOMO’s Mirror Kings. Yup. In DOMO, even the guys look hot. Boys and girls alike can look forward to what they can become. And, yeah, this may look like some high-end animated cartoon, but this is actually what DOMO looks like. Pretty cool, huh?

EverQuest: Relaxing in the guild hot tub, Vah Shir beastlord Shinai Oftheancients lets her guard down for this candid shot. Her name…. well, that’s a long story. See, we had this guy in the guild that wanted every single weapon that dropped that he could use. The weapon he wanted more than anything else in the world ever was one called the Shinai of the Ancients, which dropped in the Plane of Time. So prior to every PoT run, he’d send tells to every other person who could wield it and ask them to let him have it. He would also helpfully suggest to officers that he deserved to be given it outright, should it drop. So I made this beastlord, named her Shinai, got her to level twenty so she could have a last name, got an officer to invite her into the guild and proceeded to wonder, loudly, where my weapon dropped. Fun times!

Mythos: Wuvwy Angel is just a large cyclops in a small world. Since, in Mythos, player characters are monsters (gremlins, satyrs, cyclops and most monstrous of all, humans), Wuvwy can’t complain about not being understood. She just has trouble getting people to see her soft, feminine side. Me? I’ve never seen anyone prettier. Nobody can wear a torn nightshirt like she does! Now, put down the gun, please? Oh yeah — open beta soon, guys.

Vanguard: Huh? This IS undressed! In the Victorian-age sensibilities of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the best skin is covered skin. Tipa is a fantastic bard; you might even say she’s outstanding in her field. Get it? She’s actually out STANDING in her FIELD! *Cough* sorry. Am I done yet? Oh, one more?

Pirates of the Burning Sea: Liz Strickland is dressed for the Caribbean SUN, but what she likes best is the Caribbean FUN. Stepping off her Bermuda sloop, the first thing she asks the dockmaster is where the heck the disco is in this rat-infested excuse for an outpost of the glorious United Kingsom. When the sun goes down in the British Empire, baby, the lights come UP.

—

Well, anyway, you can see what a brilliant idea this was. The editors just don’t understand me. Tomorrow, another article they rejected: Implementing the I WIN! button in World of Warcraft.

I haven’t done even a tenth of the gaming I usually do in a given week. Between my sister Hillary getting hitched in Boston; my sister Genjer and niece Jazzmin coming up from NYC to spend Easter weekend here in Connecticut; and the siren’s call of Rock Band demanding the return of the (in)famous Buzzkillaz, well, that was pretty much it.

But though I didn’t get much gaming done, I did get a lot of writing done. I am absolutely delighted to announce that I’ve been hired on at Massively to do what I can to make Massively the number one destination for hot news and features about every single game in existence. I’ve patched Test and re-installed EQ1 because I can think immediately of three or four games which could use a lot more coverage, and I aim to see they get it.

I hope also to introduce Massively’s readers to all the amazing bloggers whose sites I read every day. If you have some news you want to share with the world, shoot me a note and I’ll do my best to see it on Massively.

Nobody was more shocked than I when my application was accepted :P I was giddy for hours…

This is such a rush :) You’ll notice a new “Me @ Massively” link on the sidebar; this will point to my latest posts there.

I had the pleasure of being on SUWT #22 this weekend. I was first on SUWT #12, so I guess I’ll get another chance to mix it up with the crew on SUWT #32!

The fights, the yelling, the smashed windows, the death threats and broken relationships that make podcasts fun, are all here. Our souls laid bare. Tune in and listen to the terror that inevitably occurs whenever someone lets me get too close to a microphone.

We talk about how many billions of dollars would be needed to compete with WoW (short answer by our guest presenter, the Ghost of Carl Sagan: BILLYUNS and BILLYUNS), what game we would unmake (my choice: hopscotch, because what is the POINT of that game anyway?), what we’re playing (um, my hopscotch team is first in the league, by the way) and all that drama last week about SOE making an EQ2 community leader into an EQ2 community wiener.

Check it out!