All anyone is talking about these days is Winds of Pandaria. I desperately want to join in, but how? I don’t play WoW any more. I’m feeling a little left out.

But hey, why let that stop me.

I may not play WoW much any more, but I have played another game that was desperately trying to attract new players while keeping old ones — EverQuest. A game that is still going strong. At this stage in its life, where WoW finds itself today, EQ added a race of dragon people, a whole new accelerated leveling path. Later came mercenaries that allowed almost any class to easily solo. All this kind of stuff.

So, World of Warcraft is offering a kid-friendly expansion. This is — and I’m being entirely serious about this — a genius move. Many of the hardcore raiders of today are about to take on responsibilities, get families of their own, take jobs that require their attention and enthusiasm and so on. The kids of today need to be ready to take on the guild leadership and raid management that the previous generation is leaving behind. The Winds of Pandaria is Blizzard reaching out to kids just coming into the hardcore scene.

It doesn’t matter WHAT the new expansion was, people would pan it. Add a kid friendly expansion, then Blizzard is making WoW sillier. Just make another new high end raiding expansion and five extra levels, and Blizzard isn’t reaching out to new players. Completely revamp the leveling path, and Blizzard is ruining everything that was great about WoW in 2004. Everyone is a critic. Everyone could do it better.

Melmoth over at KiaSA thinks the whole “buy a year of WoW, get a new mount and Diablo 3″ promotion might be a prelude to introducing some sort of free-to-play plan. That’s a cool idea, but I don’t see Blizzard letting people pay nothing instead of something anytime soon. Maybe when Titan is announced.

Asheron’s Call 2

Stropp has been enjoying the recent series of articles over at Massively about Asheron’s Call 2, the abandoned sequel to the early MMO pioneer Asheron’s Call. Stropp wonders if someone were to bring back AC2, or any other game that had been cancelled (Tabula Rasa, anyone?), would people would really play them? Aside from some hardcore fans, I’d really doubt it. People don’t wax nostalgic about game mechanics or leveling systems or whatever. They remember the community. And the death of a game has a chilling effect on the game’s community. What’s lost can’t be regained. Sure, a NEW community could form — but how likely is that?

EverQuest

TAGN has been keeping an eye on the EverQuest progression server, Fippy Darkpaw. FD is the first server in years and years to get their own dedicated GM. GMs used to be standard equipment for servers; they were an integral part of the server community, running events, mediating between raiding guilds, forming new guilds, officiating at player weddings and so on. When they got outsourced and became little more than call center personnel, something bright and wonderful was lost. Anyway, FD has a GM and the rowdy raid guilds have been forced into a raid target rotation. FD is up to the Velious expansion, and to earn the right to take down a mob, they have to kill Sontikar (the dragon outside the Temple of Veeshan) or Lord Vyemm (the gatekeeper of the North Temple of Veeshan, where all the cool mobs are).

The reason these raid guilds have to have a rotation is because there are no instanced raid mobs in Velious — nor in Luclin and originally, not in the Planes of Power, either. Guilds looking to raid had to race to every raid target, usually with a guild or two on their heels, waiting for them to fail so they could pick up the pieces. Instancing was eventually added to the Plane of Time, and from then on, raid targets were increasingly instanced. Nowadays, no guild progress affects any other guild, so there’s no competition.

Seriously? This is all you got?

Sorry :( Should have done this last night, but it’s morning now and I have to go to work. I’ll do better tomorrow!!!! Promise!

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Ophiga and friend

The big news yesterday was the dropping of the Press NDA for Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. I read all the press reviews I could find; I’ll point to some of those later on, but almost all of them credited the storyline for pulling them deeper into the game. The game mechanics may be old hat, and the standard roles, dungeons and raids are present, but the story, by all accounts, is worth the price of admission.

I still fondly remember the story from the original Knights of the Old Republic. I played the game twice, once good and once evil, and the story didn’t change that much, but that was okay because it was a good story.

That’s really the job of an MMO, isn’t it? To give you something that gets you to log in again each day, and then when you shut the game down one last time, to leave you with some memories.

I don’t HAVE a screenshot of SWTOR, so up there is a shot of my DDO rogue with a Favored Soul hireling. We’ve destroyed a generation of kobolds and I made two new discoveries in the Sands of Menechtarum, but in a few minutes, I and my hireling would be dead. Stupid swarm of revenge-minded kobolds and their named chief…

News? We have that.

SWTOR vs WoW

Well, there’s just not going to be any way of getting around SWTOR for awhile. Not until June, anyway.

After reading all the SWTOR articles, Google Plusser Tasha Schmidt had this to say (unfortunately, I can’t link to it because it wasn’t public (until now)):

Going through all the new SWTOR articles after the embargo drop, I kept seeing the same question in the comments: “Why should I pay $15 a month for essentially a single player game?”

Simply, for a persistent world. Even if you play it mostly single player there is still something to be gained just from it being a persistent world. It can stop being just a game and start to feel like a real RPG where your character matters to you. Even if you decide not to participate in any group content, you will still have experiences with other characters who are not NPCs. This brings a certain level of unpredictability into the game that is just not possible with actual single player games. You can find a social guild and meet other people to share your experiences with even if you choose not to PVP or raid. People who can help you find that last elusive datacron, or suggest a fun path for your next alt.

She’s not wrong. Most MMOs these days are single player games played with other people. Especially toward the beginning. But I just imagine how boring the original Star Wars movie would be if Luke had to do everything alone. (Well, in SWTOR, everyone but Luke would be a scripted NPC).

Over at Player vs Developer, the Chartreuse Cingulata notes the suspiciously suspicious timing that puts Blizzcon just a couple days after SWTOR makes its grab for publicity. Will Blizzard announce their next-gen MMO, Titan, and push SWTOR news back to the dusty digital archives?

The Ancient Gaming Noob hopes so. He’s still reeling from the Cataclysm that killed his interest in WoW. A new expansion might do it… a new MMO, definitely.

Syp over at Bio Break has a good roundup of the SWTOR press coverage.

Lingering Malaise

Tobold has done SCIENCE! to discover just exactly at what rate the global interest in MMORPGs has declined. But we must always remember that there are not “MMORPGs” to most people, there is only “WoW” and “games that just want to be WoW”. The genre went mainstream with WoW, and will become niche again as WoW fades away.

Then again, people are paying up to $180 on eBay for a single Blizzcon ticket… It can’t be doing that bad.

Millions and Millions

SOE announced that 20 million accounts have been created in Free Realms, which is by any measure pretty damn impressive. For comparison, Wizard101 made that milestone in July, which is cool, too. RuneScape, on the other hand, hit the 156 million account mark way back in 2009.

I appreciate that these are great milestones, but the only figure I’m really interested in, in a free to play game, is how much money they take in per user. Subscription games make $10-$15/month/user. We know F2P players pay MUCH less. If they can get away with it, they pay nothing at all. It’s the “Whales” that splurge on F2P games that keep these games running.

So, F2P games — how many whales swim in your oceans?

The Secret World

Funcom has been teasing us with news and forum games about their conspiracy-laden MMO, “The Secret World”. Ars Technica got a chance to see it in action at the New York Comic Con last week. People have been begging for a horror-themed MMO for years; will Funcom be able to deliver? High-profile misses like Anarchy Online and Age of Conan have made people understandably wary of Funcom’s ability to make a game as good as the hype. Ars thinks the lore might possibly be enough to make people overlook the wooden characterizations.

Well, people said that about Age of Conan, too.

Bless

MMOSite blurbs forthcoming Korean MMO “Bless”. According to the article,

“BLESS” aims to surpass not just the limits of current MMORPGs, but games as a whole.

Judge for yourself. Included in the “Bless” trailer, which in the grand old MMO tradition, contains no hint of what the actual game is like.

In this as in so many other things, EverQuest was a leader. After seeing the opening video below, people loudly wondered in Verant’s hearing why the GAME wasn’t like this?

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If you were given six months to live, you wouldn’t spend it leveling up a new character in some MMORPG. You’d want to do something that gave your life meaning. Six months at the end of your life isn’t more valuable than six months right now. In fact, six months right now is way better. Truth is, your friends and family don’t care that you leveled a character. They care about the time you spent with them. (Fact is, it’s almost certain nobody in the world cares about your achievements in video games, and in a couple of years, neither will you).

People all around me are getting older — old! An old friend died (ten years ago! some friend, eh? but I just found out!). Another friend had a heart attack last week, nearly died. Yet another friend is getting radiation treatment on the west coast.

I discovered recently that I love life and that the world is a beautiful and wonderful place. Years ago, in the depths of my EverQuest addiction, a warm sunny Saturday just meant I’d have to keep the blinds closed so the sun wouldn’t wash out my display (maybe I would type to the guild, “Beautiful day out today!”). Now I bike, I hike, I do things. I don’t play many MMOs, and when I do, I play casually. I want desperately to live in the real world.

It was with some trepidation that I read about Damion Schubert (lead systems designer for SWTOR) and his talk at the recent Game Developer’s Conference about turning casual players into hardcore addicts. From the capsule description:

Hardcore gaming isn’t dead — all of the big ‘mainstream’ successes (WoW, Starcraft, Wizards 101, Facebook games) have a hardcore path, and work hard to convert their casual gamers into hardcore gamers. But doing so may require rethinking your definition of ‘hardcore’, and what it means in your particular game.

I still love games and I still love MMOs and I still plan to write about them — but I’ll have to enjoy the sixteen hour raids and repeated nights after nights of failures against a big boss until eventual victory makes it all worthwhile in other people’s writings.

Time for the blogroll? Sure, why not!

The Winter of Our Discontent

I guess I’m not the only one feeling a little malaise at the current state of online gaming. Spinks of Spinksville tells a story from the spring of her gaming career, as a member of a Spring covenant in Ars Magicka. Nowadays, even though every month brings dozens of new MMOs to market, she notes that bloggers are pinning their hopes on just SWTOR and Guild Wars 2 to bring them back to hardcore-ness; otherwise losing interest in the genre.

I have believed and still believe that it’s a conscious *choice* to become immersed in an MMO. No MMO is going to force you to play it or seduce you into spending time there against your will. If bloggers are turning away from MMOs, it’s not the fault of the slate of MMOs. People are just not so willing to be seduced by a new game (unless, apparently, it is SWTOR or GW2). (And I predict GW2 will still end up as a fringe game).

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Via Corellian Run Radio comes news that the *press* embargo for articles about SWTOR will be lifted this morning, so we’ll finally be through the drought of articles about Bioware’s new RPG. Regular non-press players still have to keep their stories to themselves, but they can feel free to pump their fists and yell “YES!!!!” as they read the press stuff.

Syp of Biobreak really, REALLY wanted to play Admiral Ackbar in SWTOR. CLEARLY it is a travesty that only fairly human appearing races will be available at game launch, notwithstanding its MMO predecessor, Star Wars Galaxies, offered many less human races.

Well, even if you can’t BE a Wookie, you can at least KISS one. Is sex with a Wookie legal in the Republic? Or is that a Sith thing?

World of Warcraft

Wilhelm of The Ancient Gaming Noob is still trying to give away a sparkle pony for the best travel poster urging people to spend their vacation in beautiful Azeroth! Don’t you WANT a sparkle pony? I’m here to tell you now that you are good enough and special enough to get a celestial steed for your very own. All you need to do is take a screenshot, splash some text on it, then e-mail it to Wilhelm. Easy peasy!

Mythos

Via Rock Paper Shotgun, we learned yesterday that Mythos, the improbable action MMO that went from a tech demo to a breakout fantasy game to oblivion to resurrection in Asia and Europe to North America, is now well and truly dead. Redbana had the rights to bring it to the US, but they’ve not had a word about that for years. The death of Mythos Europe likely seals that deal forever.

It was definitely a cute and quirky game, and it lives on in its close cousin Torchlight and its more distant relative, Diablo III.

Real reason it died? All those passwords. Luckily the second one was the same as the combination on my luggage or I’d never have gotten in twice.

EVE Online

Professional MMO gadfly Syncaine spins the recent CCP layoffs and the shift of focus off MMO-in-development World of Darkness as a GOOD thing… and I suppose it is if you’re an EVE pilot. Not so much if you were one of the 120 CCP employees laid off.

With EVE Online, CCP has all their eggs in one basket. Clearly this isn’t sustainable forever. This news brings the focus back to their main egg and doubles down on the PS3-exclusive shooter Dust514, a ground-based tactical FPS in the Halo vein that ties seamlessly to the space game.

“PS3 exclusive” is a code phrase that means “Sony is paying us to make this game”. Seriously. That is what ‘exclusive’ MEANS. Look it up. So they really couldn’t drop THAT one — it must already be making them some money even in development. World of Darkness is the real gamble — another MMO in a market crowded with them. It’s not at all clear if the high-profile crime, corruption and diplomacy that keeps EVE in the news is even possible in WoD.

Star Corsairs

Brian “Psychochild” Green wrote up a fantastic interview with indie MMO developer Dave Toulouse of “Golemizer” and “Star Corsairs” fame. It’s just fascinating what you can do if you just have a dream and the fortitude to make it happen no matter what gets in the way. Well worth the read.

On the same theme, Ars Technica is running a three part “insider” story on a 48 hour game development contest run recently in Australia on the theme “Badgers, Suits and Keys”. 20 teams — 10 pro and 10 indie — make a finished, polished game in just two days.

(I am definitely going to take a week off for the next 7DRL competition… the one game jam I ever participated in!)

More tomorrow? Sure! Sorry for the delay here, but I had to finish Vernor Vinge’s “The Children of the Sky“. Can only do one thing at a time :( Look for another drought when I pick up Neal Stephenson’s “REAMDE”…

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Magic Castle for Sale: Sold!

A few days ago I was trying to define what I thought of as an MMO. I started off thinking it was just a realtime, online game with other players, but as the day went on, thinking about it more, I felt it had to include a persistent avatar representing the player that could be named and customized. I was pretty confident that nailed the essential nature of an MMORPG.

Well, Zynga’s newest semi-interactive “Ville” game is going to bring MMO gaming to Facebook. Via Massively,

You can build your castle, show it to your friends, and craft things like potions or armor. You can follow the game’s story and its characters. You can trade and barter with friends by visiting their towns. And you have to defend your town against beasts who are outside the walls. The game has more personalized storytelling; players explore the world around them. You meet characters and make them happy and unlock new characters as you progress.

“In short, Zynga is bringing massively multiplayer role-playing games to the mass market,” Jackson said.

If this sort of non-realtime probable clickfest is the future of MMOs, then the genre is dead. It does sound like, after CityVille and Empires & Allies nudged into SimCity and Civilization territory, that it will be returning to the avatar-based gameplay of Farmville and Frontierville. Of Frontierville, the NY Times writes:

Cityville, its biggest game, has picked up a little steam recently with 13.5 million daily users, according to AppData. FrontierVille, however, has been sliding faster than a pioneer bitten by a varmint. Introduced in June 2010, FrontierVille peaked with nine million daily players but now has about 5 percent of that.

So there’s a winning strategy right there, I guess. Zynga has to keep pumping out the games ever faster because people tire of them ever faster. How fast Zynga can shovel new games at us now? They have 2500 people writing them!

But there’s more stuff to talk about than Sims Medieval clones! After the break!

Like, let’s talk about Kitty Kash! The blogs lit up yesterday on the news that a new WoW pet, bought with real money, could be sold to other players in-game — the first time something bought with cash could be transferred to anyone else. ]

Tobold thinks this could possibly kill the gold black market, but color me dubious. I buy the Guardian Cub for $10, put it on the auction house for 10,000gp, hoping to get a 1000:1 gold to dollar conversion going. But there’s hundreds of Guardian Cubs being sold on the AH! So I keep dropping the price to get a sale. 5000gp. 2500gp. 1000gp, and it sells for that. I could have gotten a lot more gold from a gold seller for my $10. Not only that, since a Guardian Cub has no in-game function, it’s a commodity that can only fall in price, since more enter the system than leave through owners binding them, which instantly drops their value to zero.

On this tenth anniversary of the launch of Dark Age of Camelot, one of the first of the “second wave” MMOs, former Mythic head Mark Jacobs allows that he was never opposed to the free to play business model, it was gold sellers he couldn’t take.

“I’ve never been against F2P,” he continues. “What I was, and still remain strongly opposed to, is gold farming in games, especially MMOs, that weren’t designed from the beginning to handle those kind of transactions, and also to the groups that seek to profit from such transactions. What I really dislike isn’t so much the gold farming / selling itself, but certain behaviors that occur in games where this happens.”

I guess the real question is, who said he was against F2P in the first place? I’m missing something here. Maybe it’s because DAoC was a subscription game? But back then, they ALL were.

Chris of Levelcapped is back with a rant against the people who would minmax all the RP out of the G in MMOs. He references a Wizards of the Coast blog which argues that any dungeon party — in D&D, anyway — should have room for people who want to play to help their fellows, or just to have fun or play out their own kind of story without being hyper focused on damage and performance.

I’m not sure if that has ever been tried in a MMO, to be honest. Not since EverQuest defined the Holy Trinity (well, we must remember the EQ group would typically include a general support character of some sort. This was dispensed with in WoW.)

I’d write more, but I have an early, all-day leadership training meeting tomorrow. Maybe I’ll talk more about that tomorrow, but for today, here’s nerd goddess Felicia Day being an action hero.

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Star Wars: The Crayon Republic

So yeah. I’d have a better screenshot, but somehow I’m the only person who did NOT get into the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta weekend. But I have MS Paint, and I’m not afraid to use it. Doesn’t matter. Game is going to be a hit — that’s not even in doubt. You can kill stuff with light sabers. Kiss a wookie. Visit Alderaan before it went to hell. And even though the game is set three thousand years before the events of the movies, everyone still wears the same frickin’ clothes.

That vest and farm boy shirt? Smugglers don’t mess with something that works! Seriously! Three thousand years pass, the galaxy convulses through light and darkness a dozen times over, and almost nothing has changed. By the time Han hooked up with Chewbacca, wookies and Corellians probably get paired for life at birth or something.

Well. On to the blogroll.

Speaking of NDAs, Wasdstomp wonders if NDAs are a good idea at all. Because once in beta, everyone knows everything ANYWAY, but they can’t TALK about it. There’s probably half a dozen Google+ hangouts going on RIGHT NOW where people are buzzing about their newest light saber and the color of their snow speeder.

The reason for NDAs in late-stage products? To make players feel like they have something special, lure them into actually spending a lot of time in the game in the few hours they have, and then they are hooked. The first taste is free. Plenty of MMOs in open beta, you can go download them and be playing months before official release (case in point: recently released Dragon Nest, until last week). Since it was open to ANYONE, nobody cared that much.

MMO Symposium’s Ffaffner continues his chronicles in Wurm Online. In this episode, he walks to the coast to meet up with some friends. Wurm Online doesn’t have “safe paths” or “fast travel” or “maps”. As if Lewis told Clark to meet him in Oregon by saying “just keep walking west till you hit the ocean, then go north a bit”. And no Sacagewa.

This is a game, after all, where walking a hundred miles and then being put to hard labor IS the gameplay.

Chris of Levelcapped wonders if it’s easier to kill if you don’t think of your enemy as human. Well, he’s talking about the various bugs musclebound space marines are always killing, but it could be Nazis, Commies, Vikings, Terrorists or whatever the enemy of the people happens to be. The whole POINT of war is to dehumanize your opponent until he is easy to kill. And it’s no surprise the default way to defuse a tense situation in any given video game is to kill everything that moves.

Is that all games are? Genocide by the numbers?

The Ancient Gaming Noob has a WoW Sparkle Pony to give away! Amaze and astonish your friends with the ultimate in hazy horseflesh! All you have to do is make a travel poster of your favorite place in Azeroth and send it in to him. I guess the Burning Crusade expansion is right out. And can you have travel posters to locations that don’t exist since Cataclysm destroyed them?

I don’t know! Read the rules for yourself!

Dust514

If nothing else, Dust514 is going to be the world’s number one MMOFPS screen shot generator… Playstation.Blog’s James Gallagher talked to CCP Executive producer Brandon Laurino about the persistent-world shooter that’s going to dovetail seamlessly with the space game of EVE Online.

So what’s the gameplay like?

Essentially it’s a vehicular combat game on an extremely large scale, and then when you move into installations and outposts, it’s more infantry based. We’re using Unreal Engine 3 and we’ve incorporated a Mega Terrain engine into it that lets us create huge levels with varied terrain, with a vast array of vehicles ranging from buggies to tanks to aircraft. Typically, you would use vehicles to traverse the landscape and engage in closer combat when you deploy into outposts, but there is a huge amount of tactical freedom, way outside of those broad examples.

So…. Halo?

And to help drive up page views, a Taiwan gamer ten-boxing Pit Lord Argaloth in Baradin Hold. His boxen include a paladin, seven elemental shaman, a priest and a resto shaman. So you know, if you want to raid, be a shaman I think is the lesson here.

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Creativity can be deadly

I realized today that I have no clue whatsoever what the term “MMO” means anymore. I gave it some thought and came up with “An MMO is an online, real-time game where other people affect can your game.” That’s pretty vague. Clearly there are games which call themselves MMOs and can be played as if they were MMOs, or as if they were solo RPGs. I don’t know. I just know the old definitions don’t work.

Take World of Warcraft and the current flavor of the month, Tiny Speck’s Glitch. One is the most popular MMO in the world (well, if you don’t include World of Tanks, though the developer does). The other is a super casual browser-based game where you can’t even kill stuff. The two games share almost no features, yet both are MMOs. I give up. If you can play your game and can see another player when you do so, it’s a MMO.

Which is going to make writing these Daily Blogrolls SO EASY. Checkers? Is it online? MMO.

The blogging world has changed quite a lot since the last time I was doing these (and work crushed my free time). People are leaving drops of content all over the Internet, on Tumblr blogs, on Google+, on Twitter. I’ll still be pointing out great posts by the bloggers in my blogroll, but I’ll be trying to collect some of these other far-flung bits of wisdom as well.

Before I get started, an update on my MMO gaming: DDO on Sunday nights, D&D fourth edition on Thursday nights, and Glitch. Driver issues have killed EQ2 — I can’t play it. I’ve been poking around in Rift. I’ve started working on the Saint’s Haven quests in Dragon Nest. Mostly Glitch for MMOs, though.

Beau Turkey has done a heck of a write-up on Glitch, btw.

Fighting giants in DAoC beta

It’s been ten years since Dark Age of Camelot went live? Wow. I remember calling it “EQ Lite” based solely on the screenshots they released in the early rounds of beta. When I got into the beta myself, I realized just how impressive an achievement the game was. Yes, it clearly had been influenced by EverQuest, but it was its own game and would become one of the influences that would form the mechanics behind World of Warcraft.

It would be physically impossible for anyone to spend more time in a game than I spent in DAoC. Scott Jennings, Mythic’s one time DBA, has a wonderful post from Matt Firor, DAoC’s original producer, one what it was like to ship an MMO before the market was crowded with hundreds of them.

It was a different world.

Star Corsairs

After taking the world by storm with his sandbox browser MMO Golemizer, indie MMO dev Dave Toulouse is set to unleash his second game, Star Corsairs. It’s an updated take on the old space exploration / trading games of the 80s (most notably SunDog) combined with the mining, ship construction and PvP of EVE Online. And maybe a smidgen of Star Castle. Explore, take on missions to protect the Federation, construct your own starship, blow stuff up, free to play. I’ll have more on Star Corsairs when I’ve played it more.

Donate, and he’ll name a star after you.

Speaking of indie MMO development, Andorov posted an excellent list of 15 important steps to wild success in indie MMO development.

Rule 4: Create a good company and MMO name. Recruiting for Joe Schmoe’s Awesome MMORPG is going to be a lot more difficult than Excelsior Games’ Islandia: The Re-Islanding. Most non-visionaries (which I may also refer to as dumb f**ks or DFs), though talented, are simple folk and easily impressed.

Lucent Heart, the “zodiac-inspired” dating MMO, not content with merely connecting up guys playing guys and guys playing scantily-clad girls, is about to unleash dance battles upon the world, says Anjel Syndicate.

Create your dance from dozens of dance steps, re-create music videos, and .. well, if a collection of Minstrels can do System of a Down in LotRO, I suppose a bunch of angel-winged schoolgirls can do Thriller in Lucent Heart!

See ya tomorrow!

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Dragon Age Legends

One thing you gotta say about Dragon Age Legends: like the single player games upon which its based, in Dragon Age Legends you Get. To. Kill. DRAGONS. (Warning: link goes to Facebook). Unlike, say, Dungeons and Dragons Online, where I have yet to kill a dragon. The one you see in the tutorial is little more than a tease. It’s fighting a mind flayer, though, and we HAVE started killing those in our static group, but the name of the game isn’t Mazes and Mind Flayers Online now, is it?

Mazes, though — we’ve had more than our share of those.

Facebook RPGs like DAL (“The first real game on Facebook“) and Treasure Abyss (“Hey, we were here ages before those guys!”) have kept me sane when I haven’t been able to play any deeper games.

More game stuff after the break.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Here we see a good long look at 38 Studios’ forthcoming single player action RPG set in their Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning universe. The combat seems stripped down, fluid and well-suited to a game controller; clearly the game designers for Bioware’s Dragon Age 2 and KoA:R have been drinking the same secret sauce in regards to making combat cinematic. DA2 tends to focus on setting up team abilities, where in KoA:R, it’s all you. Very much in the flavor of Devil May Cry and God of War series, except, as the narrator points out, the fights here aren’t scripted.

Can we expect the eventual MMO set in this universe to have the same sort of stripped down but graphically intense combat? From Ixobelle’s comments about the sad result of his interview with 38 Studios, we see that they are planning for story to be an important part of the game. Story implies a more relaxed pace in which to enjoy the story. And unless the KoA MMO is a single player leveling experience as in World of Warcraft, that probably means a good deal less self-reliance. Your MMO character will worship your single player character as some sort of god.

Now THAT would be a fun thing to put into a game…

Looking for Group Tool

Rift

Rift’s latest patch is out, bringing with it appearance slots and the looking for group tool, among other things. It’s all very WoW-like, except for the appearance slots. I think Blizzard is missing a bet by not offering appearance slots in World of Warcraft; SOE is presumably making piles of money by selling appearance armor and weapons in their cash shop. If the games were running, that is.

As Ogrebears points out, though, the looking for dungeon tool isn’t guaranteed to get you a group. It’s an all-in kind of thing; if not many people are using it, not many groups are getting formed. On my level 24 cleric, a character who can take on all four roles (tank, healer, dps and support) and has access to two dungeons, Iron Tombs and Deepstrike Mines, I got zero groups after an hour of waiting. I finally left the queue so I could join in an invasion of Stonefields by the Plane of Earth, which in the end was far more fun and lucrative, anyway. Rift Junkies has more on the problems people have been having with the LFG tool.

I did try the tool on my 50 rogue, where after about fifteen minutes I got a group for Expert Foul Cascade. I’d never done the expert version of this dungeon, but the fact that I never needed to go bard for it probably points out just how hard these instances were nerfed. Thanks to a lucky epic necklace I won, I now have enough +HIT to qualify for T2 dungeons, so we’ll soon see how those work out. I had enough Plaques of Achievement to upgrade my level 43 green belt with a level 50 purple one, so I was pretty happy about that progress.

To Quest or not to Quest?

Wolfshead of Wolfshead Online stirred up a bit of controversy by quest-ioning the need for quests in MMOs. He argues that the quest hub mechanic World of Warcraft introduced has essentially turned those games that rely on this mechanic — most modern MMOs — into an automated leveling mechanic devoid of adventure, risk or any lasting reward, and so on-rails that a simple mechanism could just do the whole thing for you.

We can decry the dumbing down of modern games all we like, but in the end, WoW has 12 million 11.4 million players, Darkfall has like 5-50k players, and grand old dame EverQuest has ZERO players. People love quest hubs. It’s not that without them, they would play differently. Without quest hubs, they wouldn’t play AT ALL.

So if you WANT a lot of people to play your game, you will put quest hubs in. If you’re smart, you’ll put parallel mechanisms in there for the other people, but you can’t skimp on the quest hubs if popularity is one of your goals.

I have to admit that watching a bunch of soloers come together organically to form a raid in Rift is a joy. Tanks step up, healers step up, stuff gets done. Give people a chance and they WILL form a community. The real trick is hiding the fact that you’re doing it.

I type so slowly!

Time to head to work. Game safe!

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The SOE sheep live in danger

I work a full day in the office, then strap my laptop to my back, pedal home and work a full night as well. It’s called crunch time, this is the third month of it, and work people pay me to do is taking priority over writing which nobody pays me anything to do. If I were working on a game, I could excitedly drop hints about it, but the only way you’ll see what I’m writing is if you need to be bonded. Or you happened to be a bond agent. BUT! If you ARE, well, we’ve got something pretty amazing for you this summer :)

On the plus side, that picture is part of my commute. One of the bennies about biking to work is that it’s more acceptable to just stop by the side of the road, outside someone’s house, and start taking pictures. If someone popped out of a CAR and started snapping shots, well, people would stare.

The Great Sony Hack of 2011

Big news these last couple of months has been the hack attack upon Sony’s PlayStation Network as well as Sony Online Entertainment’s customer data servers. This was a crime, perpetrated upon Sony and SOE by criminals, and they have essentially turned my PS3 into a brick, made them the object of a million rants and they are costing themselves and their partners thousands of dollars each minute the service is unavailable. It’s just a tragedy.

I feel Sony, though, is drawing this out needlessly. Sony has the best engineers in the world. I can’t believe that they couldn’t have saved their forensic data and plugged whatever security holes were used to break in in more than a couple of days. I don’t think anyone on the outside has any idea why Sony has floated May 31st as a “go live” date. I just don’t know.

But I worry. I worry about SOE and their games. SOE just recently had some pretty massive layoffs. After a strong start, their latest MMO, DC Universe Online, tanked on the PC. That can’t be good with such an expensive IP. Now that game is looking at a month and a half of nobody being able to play it. PC players have already abandoned it, and PS3 players will be playing some other game. So, DCUO is likely dead now. Vanguard’s handful of players can’t be expected to stick around, so that game is dead. SWG only had until SWTOR came out to live, anyway; ironically, pre-NGE SWG might have been different enough from SWTOR to co-exist. Anyway, SWG – dead.

Free Realms — unknown. I played it for awhile, but the constant money grubbing turned me off. I think kids will be happy to return to it after a delay, where adults might find something better to do. Plus, it had only barely launched on the PS3, so it’s ripe for a relaunch. Clone Wars Adventures – minigame portals like CWA can survive global thermonuclear war. They are the cockroaches of gaming.

Anyone who plays EQ is there because of all the games available to them, EQ is the one they want. It will survive. EQ2… and its F2P cousin, EQ2X… will survive, but look for massive server mergers; perhaps EQ2 will finally fold into EQ2X.

For the games in development, Planetside Next and EverQuest Next… I can’t imagine SOE will have enough revenue to continue serious work on these games. They have to focus on rebuilding their money properties right now. I feel SOE’s best hope is to separate from Sony, lose the mandate to put their MMOs on the PS3, and focus their efforts on a couple of really high performing games. I think it’s long past time for SOE to become Verant once again.

Skype is Microsoft’s new MMO!

The US Navy, via a program at the Naval Postgraduate School which I have totally visited (yay Monterey!), is soon to launch an online, collaborative brainstorming tool called MMOWGLI, which stands for “I Bet I Can Come Up With A Silly Acronym, Leveraging the Internet”. Anyway, “players” will be presented with some real world scenarios and will be able to collaborate with others on possible solutions using a graphical tool. Which is great; all the armchair admirals will finally be able to make their voices heard. Someone at work, when I mentioned this, said in response to the initial scenario of dealing with the Somali pirates that are harassing shipping off the coast of Africa, “shoot them all”. That could be an option!

I think it’s a great idea. I just hate that the term “MMO”, which we’ve come to use as shorthand for MMORPG – massively multiplayer online role playing game – being applied to any online activity involving more than two people. And what I hate more is the professional gaming press jumping on that same bandwagon, when they should really know better.

The worst are those places which try and explain that MMOs are games like WoW, except for this one. Kudos to that writer for also trying to compare it to a MUD, which it isn’t.

My old WoW guild

WoW loses half a million players, attributes it to a rounding error

So, news comes that WoW has lost a small percentage of their user-base, a marginal number of players that would total more than the active base of any other subscription MMO in the world.

Upshot is, their two year expansion cycle just isn’t working for them any more. People chew through all the new content in a few months (if that), and then drift off to other games, like Rift.

All these years, Blizzard has told us that this is how long it takes to come up with an expansion’s worth of quality content. It can’t be rushed, hurried or scheduled. It’s done when it’s done. But, now Blizz feels it actually could churn the stuff out a lot faster than that if it wanted to. It’s vowed to push Diablo 3 out the door sometime this year, instead of somewhere in this decade, their previous estimate. There’s a new sense of urgency coming out of Irvine, and I feel it’s long overdue. World of Warcraft IS the elder game now, and it has to move fast to keep relevant.

It’s not about the money — they have record profits, and if they ever feel they need more cash, they can add some more mounts to the cash shop and make an achievement for buying them all. For Blizzard, it’s about remaining the game that people think of when they think “MMO”.

We Heart Lucent Heart!

Masively Multiplayer dating sim Lucent Heart’s latest North American beta, “B.F.F.”, starts today. So here’s your chance to find your best guy or girl online, team up and kick some bully butt. I can’t say enough about this game. Everyone should play it. WoW-killer.

A fan who won a contest will be cosplaying at E3. So if you’re there, get a picture taken with her. Remember, if you’re lucky enough, you too could someday grow up to be a booth babe. It can happen!

Argh, so soon?

Time to hit the road and go to work. I miss blogging :(

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Busybusybusy mandatory overtime, working at home each night, crunch time blahblahblah but you know what, I have a good job and I like what I do. It cuts into the game playing and into the game writing, though.

But I couldn’t pass up today’s excitement! EverQuest today opens its new progression server, Fippy Darkpaw, and Trion sends their MMO, Rift, into Open Beta! I haven’t been playing in any of the recent Rift betas and I have been studiously ignoring any news about the game to preserve at least a little of the sense of wonder of experiencing a new game fresh.

But, you know, well… I’ve been playing EQ2 lately, spending the Fortune League prizes, and the general chat was all about the Rift.

So, after the fold — news about these stories and many others.

Ultima Online-ville

Richard Garriott is back from decompression with news about what his company, Portalarium, has been producing in a lake house he wasn’t really using for much. After the epic smash success of his poker and blackjack games, Portalarium has developed the infrastructure to build something a little closer to our hearts. Garriott gives us a hint in an interview in GameIndustry.biz:

As soon as we have a game where you can have an avatar with a house and a room to display the cool things you’ve collected we can ship it. And then tomorrow you can fight monsters, and a month after than you can have some weapons and armour, and a month after that you can build swords… That will still allow us to come out with a full in-depth Lord British experience, but begin the journey as light as makes a confident, interactive game.

Social game… housing to display cool things… fighting monsters… weapons and armor… OMG, he’s inventing Maple Story! I really hate to be the wet blanket around here, but making browser-based social spaces with custom avatars, housing and so on has been a staple of web gaming since Neopets and Habbo Hotel. Not to mention the several fully featured MMOs already on Facebook.

Just sounds to me like this is a boat that has already sailed, but I wish him well. I do love me some isometric pixellated ganking.

EverQuest’s Fippy Darkpaw server

The server named after one of EverQuest’s most enduring folk heroes, Fippy Darkpaw, opens today. And like every great folk hero, there’s a song about him, courtesy of Jethal Silverwing of Kithicor.org. I kinda wondered where the lyric about moss snakes that kick was…

With Rift coming up, I can’t really devote a lot of time to leveling up a new character in EverQuest, but I’m sure I’ll stop by, if only to check out the people in their full rubicite. If the server is anything like Fippy, everything will work fine for half an hour, then the server will start to whine and crash into a wall.

Or maybe not. Arkenor of Ark’s Ark has the full details on what to expect when you play on the newest server. I was disappointed to read that the new uglified zones will remain in place.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

The story rebounded off Twitter yesterday about Bioware sending scary letters to SWTOR fansite owners warning them that Bioware could not make them an “official” fan site if they ran ads or in any other way made money from the site.

Now, apparently the fan sites that applied for official status had agreed not to make money from their sites up front, but you know, none of these fansite operators are getting rich off the deal. David at SWTOR fansite TOROZ was kinda upset about losing his official fansite status, but did manage to get in touch with someone at Bioware who explained the situation.

Personally, I feel if someone wants to monetize their fansite, they should go right ahead and make as much money as they can. Unless they signed a binding legal contract not to do so with Bioware.

World of Warcraft

Tobold once felt that WoW raiding had become little more than Simon Says adventures with some brainless button mashing. Cataclysm brought back the strategy and tactics behind knowing which buttons to press when, but kept the Simon Says mechanic, so now you have to watch what you’re doing and also know where to stand and when.

It astonishes me just how far raiding has come from its roots. It started out as a storybook kind of adventure. Now it’s… well, I guess it’s like Dragon’s Lair. In fact it’s EXACTLY like Dragon’s Lair.

It isn’t just WoW. All the games are like that now. Step here, step there, press that, cast this, learn your part, play your role, you are a cog in a machine and there are no heroes any more.

Perpetuum

I find it hard to believe the designers of Perpetuum were not EVE Online players. Just look at this latest controversy surrounding the robot world game — insurance fraud. Making robots and then blowing them up for the insurance money. This is ILLEGAL in perpetuum? I think they teach insurance fraud in the EVE Online tutorial now.

Video Killed the Radio Star

Gordon at We Fly Spitfires wonders if today’s MMO mega hits like World of Warcraft killed off single player games. Meh, I think the Internet killed off single player games, if you can even consider them killed off. Or single player. Sure, Dragon Age: Origins was a single player RPG, but I played it with friends on Twitter just the same.

The idea that someone would play a game, any game, and not want to share it with friends seems so foreign now.

—

Well, there were a zillion other things happening since last I wrote a blogroll, and that’s a mixed blessing since that makes them take so long to write! I’m going to end this one here. If I can manage to bring them in under an hour, I can do them… I think.

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Yeah, I’ve been MIA for a couple weeks now. Work time is creeping into home time. It’s so cold when I get home that I find myself cuddling up with blankets and a cat on the couch, watching Netflix (tonight: the Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows“, season 1). I’m not wild about this “winter” thing in general. I haven’t been able to get on the bicycle for a few weeks now, and it’s really making me antsy.

Anyway, Rift beta 5 is underway. I logged in last night and made a warrior on the Belmont server and met my guild, Black Company. Played up through level 9, got caught up in some rift fights, had a little fun, but you know… I’m losing enthusiasm for the game.

Does that sound bad? I vowed to play Rift up to the level cap in the company of a guild and see all there was to see. Shouldn’t I be really excited?

I was really excited when it was me discovering a world of mystery. I was pretty damn pleased to try out different souls and make my own unique class. I was jumping for joy when I realized one didn’t need to grind quests with the rifts opening everywhere, just handing out adventure and experience.

But now, you can get a dozen decent build suggestions everywhere you look. There are guides for all the dungeons, all the quests, all the warfronts. By the time the game ships, the game will be completely known and over-examined. It will be SPOILED.

I’m still going to play Rift, and enjoy it. I just see that it’s going to become the same damn thing as with WoW, where my refusal to learn anything about the game other than what I discover for myself makes me look like a raw clueless newbie to everyone unfortunate enough to group with me. I really hate that feeling.

Rift

Lots of people writing about the Rift beta 5 event, but why help ruin the game? I’ll be writing about it when I play through it when it goes live. But, I DO want to point out what must be the most underwhelming rendered official movie for Rift that I’ve seen so far:

Courtesy IGN via Rift Junkies. Poorly animated and really, it reminds me a little too much of EverQuest II’s pre-release trailer — and not in a good way. Perhaps because the EverQuest II launch trailer was SO MUCH BETTER at setting up the world.

So, yeah. Yank that video, Trion, and put up a better one.

The Superblogger known as Elementalistly has been expanding his MMO tracking from just XFire to Raptr and beyond. He’s stopped trying to guess sub numbers from the XFire/Raptr figures and so it’s much cooler now. New this week: Rift and the newly F2P Champions Online.

And a note for Rift bloggers: You don’t have to paste the patch notes on your blog. We get it, you see the patch notes and figure, hey, free post. Just post a link to them on the official site if you must, but it would be better if you took some time to explain the impact of the changes.

The Blogosphere implodes

A bunch of bloggers and other interesting people are getting together for breakfast outside of Pax*East this spring. So much geekery in one place could suck Boston itself into a black hole of awesome :)

Quest Hubbing

Way back when, the ever ironically-named EverQuest actively made it difficult, if not flatly impossible, to do and complete quests. It could take MONTHS to solve some of the epic quests — to even figure out what the steps were, much less finish it.

When World of Warcraft introduced the whole concept of quest-oriented adventure, where NPCs would tell you with no hesitation all about their quests and exactly what they required with no puzzle solving needed, it was seen as a revolution in gaming. Continuing on with that tradition, WoW now often will provide you transport to the area to save on having to spend any time not focused on fulfilling the quest instructions.

Melmoth of KiaSA thinks that, maybe, the whole quest hub thing has just gotten out of hand, and that now, games seem entirely unable to conceive of a method of in-game storytelling which doesn’t involve clicking through a quest, killing stuff, and returning for a reward. Unfortunately, his proposed solution is essentially the Warhammer Online kill collectors, famously described in Paul Barnett’s “Bears Bears Bears” video.

The Death of the MMORPG Genre as We Know It

Sure, everyone knows what an MMORPG is. It’s a game like WoW, right? But then, some people consider Second Life, a virtual world, an MMORPG. It’s been claimed that game portals like Clone Wars Adventures are MMORPGs. It’s gotten to the point that any online game in which you might encounter another player is called an MMORPG. Ardwulf laments the blurred focus of the term, but doesn’t offer any suggestions.

Here’s mine. For me, an MMORPG allows me to create a unique character in an online, shared world. There is a story of some sort which my character experiences through adventures which gradually make my initially weak character powerful enough to take on advanced challenges. Unique character, shared online space, progression through a story, and some variation of the “Hero’s Journey“.

Outspark’s Fists of Fu! requires me to choose one of the four pre-made characters. NOT an MMORPG. Second Life has no story or character progression — NOT an MMORPG. DDO has story told through “modules”. It IS an MMORPG, likewise Guild Wars. The only advancement in Clone Wars Adventures is paying for a subscription to become a Jedi. NOT an MMORPG. EVE Online definitely has character progression and a story, though most people are only vaguely aware of what that story might be. It IS an MMORPG.

Now if I can just get everyone else in the world to agree with me…

Keen was wondering a few days back if short MMOs can be good MMOs. Which is kinda weird because one of the shortest MMOs I have ever played is the most popular MMO on the planet. One of the things I really liked about WoW back in the day was that I could finish it — new character through to clearing Molten Core — in just a couple of months. Compare that to the year to 18 months in EverQuest to go from new character to end game raider.

So — an MMO even shorter than WoW? That’s pretty hard to imagine. Maybe DCUO is shorter than WoW, somehow, but as far as the time taken to get to all the content, I’m thinking it’s pretty much the same.

EverQuest $$

KayJay at The Banhammer has some strong words for SOE regarding the collector’s edition of the upcoming Destiny of Velious expansion. After Feb 22nd, SOE will be charging $90 for the digital collector’s edition. Most collector’s editions for that price come with maps, art books, CDs and the like, and SOE has even been known to include little pewter keepsakes in the box. This times, it’s house items, fluff pets, appearance items and mount illusions. Nothing for the mantle!

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Bunch of news about this title. First, the folks at Gamespy have an extended look at the current state of the SWTOR beta — they really like it, though they admit it’s WoW with lightsabers, but not in a bad way.

MCVUK.com is reporting that the game should be out in September, which is about what I was expecting. A lot of people were thinking it would be out in April because EA said at a tech conference that they release the game in the financial year that started in April. Didn’t mean April, but plenty of people made that leap.

Lastly, investors are feeling quite paranoid about SWTOR’s chances. Suspected costs of $300 MILLION dollars, a subscription fee in an increasingly F2P world, large percentage of profits funneled straight to LucasArts, and EA’s dismal track record with MMOs (Warhammer Online being the issue here). Also given the recent failure of other hideously expensive MMOs such as APB, which cost a mere $100 million. A pittance!

I just did a little back-of-the-envelope scribbling. Let’s say SWTOR is wildly successful and gets a million players to pay $15/month essentially forever, the game is that good. Let’s further say that after paying salaries, facilities, the LucasArts tax and so on that EA makes $5 clear profit of that monthly subscription. Steady one million subscribers all paying full subscription price gets them to pay off their initial investment in just five years. Then add in the expansions, one a year, and their development costs… there’s almost no way they can possibly make back development costs.

Well, there IS a way, only one way — and that one way is a CASH SHOP. I’ve said this before and will again — this game is gonna be CASH SHOP’D seven ways from Sunday.

You thought EQ2 was bad.

Lucent Heart

Gaming Blend has earned my undying enmity by getting into the preview beta for the NA launch of dating sim/MMO Lucent Heart.

The combat is designed for casual gamers in mind (mainly female gamers) so twitch skills aren’t required the way it is in games like Fallen Earth, Tabula Rasa or Allods Online

Well, I’d have thought TR stopped twitching YEARS ago…

Hey, don’t be a stranger and I’ll try not to be. Keep warm and keep gaming!

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