West Karana

Photoshop stitched together four screenshots to make this, automatically. Pretty neat!

No, it’s true. We went to the Plane of Time tonight.

Once upon a ‘time’ (sorry), that meant you had completed all the raids in Planes of Power — lessee if I can remember them — Terris Thule & Saryrn, Grummus & Carprin & Bertoxxulous, the Manaetic Behemoth, any trial in the Plane of Justice (didn’t have to kill Seventh Hammer, though), Aerin’Dar & three Halls of Honor trials & Mithaniel Marr & Agnarr, Vallon Zek & Tallon Zek & Rallos Zek the Warlord, Solusek Ro, that alligator in Plane of Earth, and then the Elemental gods — Fennin Ro, Coirnav (entire raid — 14 minutes or you fail for three days), The Rathe Council (12 raid mobs — six mezzable, six not — need to die within 8 minutes of each other, IIRC), and Xegony (google ‘xegony boobie taunt’). After doing all that — and how many times for each raid before all of 72+ people were flagged? — you could zone in to the Plane of Time.

Now it’s about as hard as walking into a wall. Just hail this bozo and say “Got the time?” and *poof*, there you are. He’ll also send you if you say, “please make a year of determined effort instantly pointless”. Nah, kidding about that one. Maybe.

Honest truth is, I would so love to raid Plane of Time, one last time. In fact. I would run every one of the raids leading up to the Plane of Time again. Because they were SO. MUCH. FUN. If you were in a raiding guild, it was never better before and never got better after than it was in the Planes of Power. After PoP, *NO* MMO dared to ship their game without a full set of raids because how else could they EVER hope to compete with EVERQUEST?

That’s died down some lately. But how many games tried to copy the master? WoW for sure, but they flinched, made their max raid size 40, and then 25, and now 10. Devs give a nervous little laugh at the thought of MEGA RAIDS that required 72 people to accomplish — that needed raid leaders and sub leaders and team leaders and so on.

Anyway. So, Plane of Time. Big whoop :) Not like we could ever raid it.

The latest patch notes told of a mysterious wanderer last seen in the Dreadlands who seemed awfully concerned that the veil between the present and the past was being rent asunder by some dreadful force.

He sends people to check on reported disturbances in the Field of Bone, Warslick Woods, Commonlands, Qeynos Hills and the Rathe Mountains. So I’m thinking, Kaesora, Dalnir’s, Befallen, Blackburrow and … but that doesn’t work, there is no dungeon in the Rathe Mountains, unless they added one I don’t know about. Best check this out. I thought maybe I’d get an update just for zoning in, but no such luck.

Field of Bone was infested by dragons. These dragons were in a state of high dudgeon. They’d just be in a horrible fight over the Field of Bone against the Iksar emperor Ganak, and things were not going well. Next thing they know, they’re here, Jared’Dar’s bones are picked clean in the center of a mysteriously appeared crater, the entire area seems to have not seen war for centuries… it’s very confusing. One poor dragon was not only pulled through time, but universes as well — ripped right from World of Warcraft.

Mmm, yummy troll dinner snack!

Whaaa? Where’d that troll go? And why are my colors kinda dull? Mother?

With Warslick Woods being so near, I zoned over, had a quick look-see for Grachnist the Destroyer (nope, Mr. Shrunken Goblin Earring once again being a no-show), and then tracked a couple of bright red dragons in the area. I wondered how they were doing. Really. My only concern was for their health. As in, their percentage of health. As in, steadily declining toward zero.

This guy was doing fine, if somewhat bewildered. Cousin to Vishimitar, if I know my dragons. The color, anyway.

Now this guy grew tired, and more tired as I watched. In fact, I took out my bow, hit my Trueshot Discipline, and helped him become tired even more quickly as the bard kiting him did his thing. Bard had a gnome mask — those are RARE. Anyway, when he saw the adds that were following him die, and me plinking away, we grouped up, finished making the dragon very tired, and I got a quest update when it finally lay down for a good nap.

The bard grabbed the loot and logged. I felt happy to have helped out.

By that time we had a fairly full group of people online, so we headed off to Lavaspinner’s Lair once again to try out luck there. Three people needed drakes and two needed spiders; just because I wasn’t paying attention, we went to the drakes first. Seja and I finished our drake collection quests, Mantis made some progress, Coldheat hit 60, everyone else made between 2-3 AAs, it was all good.

There was a raid mob on track, and we kinda were heading toward it when sanity prevailed. We turned back and pulled another, easier named, killed that no trouble, then were ambushed by Crimsonwing once again. Crimsonwing took her death well, except near the end where she gated away and summoned people, one-by-one, to die far from the group and surrounded by adds.

I have to admit I’m not feeling the love for Crimsonwing that I probably should.

Since we aren’t getting enough people on to raid, we’re likely going to be leveling up again soon. If we’re just going to be doing group things, might as well get to level 65 so we can go to the Bastion of Thunder and just have a good time with the grouping. BoT is all sorts of fun. Good challenge, good xp, good loot, a LOT of different places to go. Looking forward to it.

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.

Hey, welcome back to the second in our exclusive series about the exciting innovative gameplay of Mythic’s Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.

Public quests, open groups, the excitement of the Tome of Knowledge, all things never seen before the evil geniuses at Mythic brewed them up in charmed cauldrons on some fog-shrouded Scottish moor, with the witch-goddess Hecate shrieking over it.

It’s a well-known fact that the color red in the game packaging is made from blood.

It’s true. Look it up. Because that’s just how hardcore they are. They do it for YOU.

Simulated Warhammer screenshot

What IS Realm vs Realm and how is it different from PvP?

How about seventeen factions, any of which would happily crush the throats of the others? You can only trust your own kind. Maybe. That’s war everywhere. That’s Warhammer… the miniatures game. Oops. Wrong one.

Well, imagine FOUR factions, at each other’s throats. In their own lands they are only somewhat safe, but step outside or into a contested zone and BAM! Constantly shifting alliances, places you just can’t go and… oh wait, that was EverQuest. Evil vs Humans vs Elves vs Shorties.

Okay, but with four factions you get stalemate, so that’s pretty boring. Three factions, though — the two weaker against the strong one so nobody can ever rest at the top, never able to rest, that’s… oh, never mind. That’s Dark Age of Camelot — or Planetside.

Well, how about two sides? Good vs Evil? Horde vs Alliance? That’s the Realm vs Realm difference. That’s why it’s not simply “Player vs Player”. That’s what you can only find in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Along with public quests, the Tome of Knowledge, and open groups, the fight of good vs evil, free people vs the minions of Mordor, it’s your realm against the other realm.

And the stakes are incredibly high. Everything you do moves the battle to one side or another. And when you finally have done enough to tip the balance forever to your side — that’s when the whole thing resets because it’s WAR FOREVER! WAAAAAGH!!!!

—

Thanks for stopping by for our second exclusive look at Mythic’s Warhammer Online: The Age of Reckoning. No game has ever done PvP, er, RvR, in quite the same way. Not exactly.

Warhammer Online. Warhammer. WAR. WAAAAGH. All ways to describe the game sweeping our interwebs in ways Google can easily find. More? Public quests? This game has public quests. Tome of Knowledge? This is the ONLY GAME with a Tome of Knowledge. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, coming this November, does not have public quests OR a Tome of Knowledge. Order. Destruction. War everywhere becomes WAR everywhere.

Public quests and the Tome of Knowledge and Order and Destruction and Realm vs Realm — things every game, such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, and its upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion, will soon have in abundance. Soon, EA Mythic’s Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning will no longer be able to call public quests, and the Tome of Knowledge, something exclusive only to WAR.

But we come here tonight not to talk about such things as public quests and the Tome of Knowledge, things exclusive to Warhammer Online, but about things you won’t find on many other blogs. Like information about the White Lion profession, a profession you won’t find in World of Warcraft, or Lord of the Rings Online’s Mines of Moria expansion, or in Star Wars: Galaxies’ Hoth expansion.

Well, maybe there. But Hoth won’t have Greenskins. WAAAAAGH! So that will be another thing not found in other games, except for World of Warcraft.

Simulated Warhammer Online screenshot.

Well, the White Lions are high elves, and they are so incredibly ferocious, that they hunt with white lions, and wear white lion clothes, and probably sleep with the damn things, I don’t know. Actually, let’s just get some things about them out in the open.

These are bad muthas. I mean it. The other high elves, they don’t want to be around White Lions that much. Because there’s this imaginary line, and the other high elves are on THIS side of it, and the White Lions are so far on the OTHER side of it, that they don’t even know there IS a line. While the other High Elves are sipping blood wine from crystal goblets in their high marble towers, the White Lion guys are running howling naked through the forest.

These are scary guys.

When a high elf kid says, “Ma, they had a White Lion guy come by Elf School and I kinda liked what he had to say,” there is no discussion. High Elf law is really clear on this. Once your kid starts talking about the White Lions, you have to drop them off at a big bin in front of the White Lion union hall, and some guy in a parka comes by and collects them each night just after sundown, and then if you ever see your kid again, you won’t recognize him. ‘Cause they’ll have that scary, wild look in their eyes, and you might want to say, “Honey? Is that you?” but you don’t, because you don’t want your throat ripped out by your own demon spawn.

Thinking about becoming a White Lion? Say hello to your girlfriend.

In battle, everyone just kinda backs away from the White Lion, and nobody dares look into his eye, because that will be the first one they come for. But while the White Lion is feeding on your buddy, that’s your chance to circle around back and take him down with a swift stroke. But save one for his lion girlfriend.

We hope you have enjoyed this exclusive peak at one of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning’s most exciting new classes, and that you’ll come back every day this week for more exclusive coverage of EA Mythic’s groundbreakingly innovative new MMO sensation.

I was reading Openedge’s comments about Lord of the Rings Online, and remembering claims by a Turbine exec that LotRO was destined to overtake and surpass WoW, which seems unlikely to me. A EA exec thinks WAR will be huge. Everyone thinks the magic formula is to copy WoW, then change something to make it different.

People claim other MMOs don’t get a lot of traction unless they more or less copy WoW.

Why not go all the way, and make an exact copy? Oh, change the names of the races and the models and anything that is copyrighted, trademarked or patented, but otherwise, make it identical. Identical enough so that all WoW add-ons work with it. Identical enough so that even if Hunter becomes Tracker, they still do all the same things.

Blatant, unashamed copying.

Happens in the real world, all the time. McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, all as identical as they can be, right down to the trays. The path to success is not by being different, but by being a 100% compatible drop-in replacement.

WoW players no longer have to wonder, with these games, if they will like it. It’s the same thing. They KNOW they will. Just with different looking toons, areas which are a little different (but not too different), lore which is pretty much what they are used to.

Maybe the problem with WoW-likes isn’t that they are similar to WoW, but that they aren’t similar ENOUGH.

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 have nothing against old MMOs. In fact, I spend most of my time in one of the oldest. But I know that EQ is old, and I play it now not to see new things, but just to reminisce about all the good times I had in it.

People have been going off to World of Warcraft for years, and starting their adventures in Azeroth. I’ve even done it (and my gosh, has it been three years already?). But I’ve been reading the adventures of Cownose, who recently starting in WoW, and Ogrebears, who is just starting, any my first thought for them both was, why would they want to start out with that old game?

And I startled myself thinking that, because it was the first time I had even thought of World of Warcraft as being old. And yet, it is. It’s no longer the young upstart, it’s something they market to older people. When your spokesmen are a 60s scifi television star and a 70s action show star, you have to wonder, who are they targeting with WoW? My PARENTS?

At this time in EverQuest’s history, it was just about to release its fifth expansion “The Legacy of Ykesha”, which was widely seen as a shrewd move to reposition the aging game toward more casual players. WoW’s *second* expansion will likely release around its fourth anniversary. *cough* But this isn’t about the pace of expansions. It’s that by 2004, EQ was the market leader, but it was showing some cracks, cracks that WoW’s release later that year would widen and split entirely apart.

WoW was the better game, but more than that, it was the newer game. People had done everything in EQ — many, many times — and unless you were in one of the top raid guilds, you probably were still angry that Planes of Power had been mostly a raid-guild-only expansion (and though the casual player-focused LDoN was just about to come out, the expansion after that, Gates of Discord, would cement that raid-only mentality). In short, many EQ players were looking for a change, and with the news that many raid guilds would be jumping over to WoW en masse based on the phenomenally popular beta, it was clear the torch had been passed. EQ was now the “old” game, and WoW was the fresh young debutante, flirting with her suitors.

WoW is now where EQ was then. It’s old, people have done everything there is to do in WoW, many zillions of times, and the game itself is being marketed toward an increasingly older population. It’s still as great a game as ever, but will that matter when someone is looking for a new fresh game, and WoW becomes the game their parents play?

WoW may weather WAR and AoC, but it can’t escape time. With AoC and WAR being so similar to WoW and being marketed to the same aging demographic, those games entirely skipped the demographic of upcoming, new MMO players (especially WAR — fans who have played the tabletop game for a half dozen years and people who played the equally aged Dark Age of Camelot form the bulk of the people who aren’t just looking for a WoW-like to play in general).

Unlike fine wine, games do not improve with age. Instead, they narrow themselves to focus on the players they already have in a struggle to keep them from leaving. I find the same freshness and energy in Wizard101 that I remember from the WoW beta, though W101 is in no way attempting to be a huge, expansive game like EQ or WoW. But the energy is there. And that energy, or the lack of it, is what dooms all older games and is what will doom WoW.

I just had a thought, while writing the Mythos article. We all know where Mythos came from. Diablo II game play with a Warcraft art style. Diablo II came from Diablo, and Diablo was heavily influenced by the rogue-likes Moria and Angband, I think? Both those games were inspired by Hack, which was inspired by Rogue, which was heavily influenced by Temple of Apshai (I’m guessing), which took its inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons.

Now, World of Warcraft was inspired by the Warcraft RTS games, EverQuest, and Dark Age of Camelot. EverQuest took its inspiration from Toril MUD, which was based on other MUDs back to Diku, which was itself based on D&D and earlier MUDs which were inspired by Infocom’s Dungeon/Zork, which was inspired by Crowther and Woods’ Colossal Cave Adventure, which was based on real spelunking. Dark Age of Camelot took its inspiration EverQuest, so there’s some inbreeding going on there. Warcraft polished earlier RTS games, which draw heavily from those old Avalon-Hill war games, which likely got their start as variants of the board game Risk (total speculation for purposes of illustration only).

See where this is going? All these games take certain ideas — call them genes — and mix them up to form new games. What if we could, to push the analogy, sequence these genes, and directly diagram the rise and fall of genetic markers over the years. We would have a new handle on how to judge games. Point and click vs WASD? XP grind or quest grind? Group or solo preferred?

When someone says WAR is like WoW, we could say well, it’s 75% like WoW, 10% like DAoC (and since both games draw from EverQuest) can trace half its heritage all the way back to 1999. Now this 25% here, this was never in WoW, and there’s our difference.

And more importantly, we would be able to really focus on truly new and innovative ideas. “Whoa, in this game, your character loses levels if the player doesn’t log in. Is that new? Will it spread to other games?”

Virology and genetics can tell us a lot about gaming evolution, I’m guessing. Evolution? Yeah, I went there. I think we all can see these games are not a product of Intelligent Design… (Sigh. Devs, forgive me. I had to take the shot. You understand, don’t you?)

Okay, get ready for some links.

Most people are pretty content to just remember EverQuest as some game they played once, years back, before WoW came along. Many people tried the new games and went back to EQ. Some never left.

Then there’s the odd sort of people who felt they couldn’t leave, even though they had absolutely zero interest in it any more. Such was the sad fate of Loral, the custodian of what was once the premier (only?) EverQuest blog, Mobhunter. From his writing, he seems to have wanted to quit the whole thing a couple years or more ago. Recently he started coving WoW instead. He recently quit to play D&D fourth edition instead of any MMO. Fantastic!

But he couldn’t leave it alone. When the Living Legacy promotion was announced, he took it as if it were a bullet aimed at his heart, and he wrote a creed best summarized as: People left EQ because they HATED YOUR STUPID AWFUL UGLY GAME. Your Living Legacy promotion is WORTHLESS. If you changed your game substantially and in every way — I STILL WOULDN’T COME BACK. STOP HOUNDING ME.

Well, that’s how I read it, anyway.

But that’s okay. Loral has been leaving EQ for a long time, and if that gives him the catharsis he needs to make a clean break — fantastic. You know, if you don’t like a game anymore, you don’t need to get upset or rewrite the fun times you had into miserable times — just walk away. If anyone asks, tell them you have played a long time, and now you want to try something new. You don’t have to demonize the game to leave it!

I responded at length on Michael Zenke’s write-up of the post over on Massively. I kinda accuse him of being complicit, but the post he made doesn’t (any longer?) support that. Mea culpa. Point I was making is, it’s okay to grow tired of a game. That does not make that game evil or bad, just… something you played, and then you moved on.

I was taking a break and catching up on my blogs, and noticed a post by Saylah over on Mystic Worlds about leaving WoW. See? That’s how you leave a game. By moving on, gracefully. She doesn’t go over and explain all of WoW’s ills, and that the game is in such poor shape that even if they tried to fix them all, the game would still be trash. She is just saying goodbye to a chapter of her gaming life as she and her family start another.

Hey, I left EQ for over a year. When I left, I couldn’t bring myself to even log in once more. But I knew it was me that had changed, not the game, and that the fun times I had there were still fun.

What is it about MMOs that inspire such deep feelings? You don’t see any dark screeds about how Tetris was a horrible, awful game because someone played it for a year and now plays Peggle.

I don’t know how many people come looking for EverQuest blogs, but there are darn few in the blogosphere that actually cover events in EQ from a player’s perspective. Aside from those bloggers in Nostalgia, and the occasional EQ-oriented post from Loral at Mobhunter.com, I can’t find any.

For that matter, where are the DAoC blogs? The Asheron’s Call blogs? The Ultima Online blogs?

Come ON. I played DAoC but not those other games. I would LOVE to hear about current play in these older games, but never anything in blogs. It has been explained to me that “back in the day”, discussion of these games was done via official or community forums, cuz blogs did not exist.

Well. They exist NOW.

Is there nobody working through Shadowbane since the reboot that blogs about it? Anyone restarting on DAoC’s “Old Frontier” server who is giving the world a play-by-play?

I mean, come on. I’m talking to you people who still play the Elder Games, the ones from BW — Before World of Warcraft. (and as an aside, we should mark game release dates like that — EQ1 would be released 5BW, Ultima Online 6BW, EQ2 0AW, etc). You UO fans, would it kill you to take a screenshot of your adventures on a day and paste it into a free Wordpress or Blogger page?

I LOVE hearing players talk about games I don’t play, since I only have time for a couple but have a huge interest in MMOs in general. I never even got to play UO because I thought it looked so ancient next to EQ.

So anyway, all ye Players of the Elder Games… let’s have some blogs, cuz I want to read your adventures.

And hey, fellow EQ players… I know NOTHING about what it’s like to play in The Buried Sea or Secrets of Faydwer expansions. Cough up some blog posts about them, please. I ask as a fellow player who hopes one day to see these wonders :)

I admit it. I was wrong about AoC.

I said it would be a blip that would quickly fall to the high system requirements and the World of Warcraft juggernaut. I said that WoW would be entirely unchallenged by AoC, and was only mildly worried about Warhammer Online.

I think I was wrong about every thing I said. Those people who called me clueless were right.

AoC is having the most successful launch I think I have ever seen, maybe even better than WoW back in 2004. Back then, of course, the market was a lot smaller, and WoW’s launch turned then-MMO champ EverQuest into a niche game, something Asheron’s Call and Dark Age of Camelot had not been able to do. So I don’t see AoC booting WoW to the curb.

It sure looks like WoW is weaker than I thought. Since all this interest *must* be largely coming from WoW (nobody else has that kind of presence), great crowds of people must have just been waiting for a new game to come out which wasn’t trying to be a WoW competitor but was just trying to be the best game possible. And with the welcome news of a very smooth launch and very playable game, more and more people will decide to take the plunge and join their friends.

I thought WoW had at least another year or two of unchallenged superiority. Maybe when people saw the next expansion would be nothing to really inspire passion, they became more willing to roll the dice and take the chance on something new?

Going to Warhammer Online, I expected. That is a game that I thought would appeal to WoW players (and probably will). AoC I disregarded as a blip, a quick MMO to play before choosing sides in the WoW vs WAR megashowdown at the end of the year — a battle I still expected to be won ultimately by WoW. Now, I am not so sure.

WoW is this giant walking around crushing villages and causing devastation wherever it turns, and all other MMOs are like people attacking the massive toes of the giant with clubs and pitchforks. Maybe the giant has finally met his Jack.

Blizzard acts like a leader in the MMO world, magnanimously hoping for decent competition. You can say that when you’re ahead. But Blizzard has shareholders to appease, and they can’t be liking the thought that another company would steal any of WoW’s thunder before they had a suitable replacement ready.

Is it time for Blizzard to pull back the curtain and show what they have planned for WoW’s second act? We’ve all seen how fast market leaders can become yesterday’s news.

So yeah, I was wrong and I admit I was wrong. Way to go, Funcom. I hope Age of Conan surprises and shocks EVERYONE by its wild success.

I feel a little like a relic at this moment. Everyone is talking about Age of Conan, Warhammer Online and Wrath of the Liche King, and I realized… I have no interest in any of them. I have a coworker in the AoC closed beta, but going around in gangs randomly ganking people wasn’t that fun in EQ2’s Nagafen from either end — seemed really pointless to me, though I did enjoy the feeling of danger and risk it brought to the game.

Still, they will rise or fall on their merits, and I’ll be watching from the sidelines. I have my EQ1 and EQ2. Mythos is coming out, Champions Online and Chronicles of Spellborn are on the horizon. I can spend my time anticipating those, while enjoying the good games I am already playing.

Flagship Studios is being incredibly responsive to its beta players, retooling Mythos at a fantastic rate to improve the game play and move it away from the “Diablo II”-clone label. It’s turning out to be something new to Western MMOs — a AAA-quality, Free to Play MMO with microtransactions. Dungeon Runners shares a lot of similar elements, and is released while Mythos is in beta, but it does not include microtransactions and has shown a greater reluctance to move in any significant away from the Diablo II model. Plus, I consider it rather dull. Mythos’ over the top, here’s a hundred mobs at once, edge-of-the-seat gameplay gets addicting after awhile.

Anyway, since I won’t be playing any of the current generation of MMOs as I wait for the next, here’s my quick takes on my hopes for them.

Age of Conan: This will be the EverQuest 2 of this generation. Few people will be able to play the game properly, but those who stick with it may find a fantastic game. It will follow the EQ2 arc. A quick burst of initial interest will give way to mass defections. AoC will fix the problems, get back on track, and in a year, the game will be where it should have been at launch and the players who stuck with them will be having fun.

Warhammer Online: The game can’t possibly match people’s expectations. EA Mythic may think that with enough money and marketing might that they can pull people away from WoW. Unfortunately, they are doing nearly nothing to lure non-WoW players to the game. They may think they can get a couple of million players without Blizzard noticing, but a lot of other companies have thought that in the past. It is impossible to drag WoW players away when they release a new expansion.

Wrath of the Liche King: I’ve seen the videos. This expansion is going to blow in the doors. AoC may struggle through because it is a significant departure from WoW, but Warhammer Online is going to be pounded. WoW will keep its crown for another year. By the time people finish the new content, Warhammer Online will seem like a has-been, and people will be more likely to wait for the next new shiny rather than give WAR a try. It’s all about the opening weekend — or free month. It is impossible to entice people to leave WoW unless Blizzard shoved them out the door first.

Why EA Mythic thought releasing against WoW would ever work… I dunno. Blizz was never going to give them an easy, uncontested launch. About the only thing EA Mythic can really do now is delay it a further six months and put in something so cool that the delay would be worth it.

There’s also SOE’s new MMOs, The Agency and Free Realms, coming out at some point, probably around the WAR and WotLK launches. The buzz on both these titles is so incredibly low, as are the expectations, that almost anything they can do will look like a success. If either game compromises the PC gameplay in favor of the PS3 gameplay, you might as well write them off right now. It won’t be these games that convince anyone to buy a PS3.

Anyway, I’m afraid all you’ll be seeing on the pages of this particular blog is more EQ, EQ2 and Mythos adventures for awhile. Mythos won the Mythos vs Dungeon Runners competition on my hard drive by virtue of not being boring. I am HOPING to get into the Spellborn beta (Spellborn devs, HINT HINT). I’m not sure I can talk about another beta I am in, but my high hopes for it were utterly crushed.

AoC, WAR and WotLK players — I’ll be looking forward to reading about your adventures :)

Today, the Age of Conan open beta opens. And people are fibrillating over it, slavering, EAGER to download a game most of them will have forgotten about in six months. But not today. Today, it brings meaning to their lives. Today the sun is shining right on them and the birds are singing because, today, they can play a new video game.

People are not only accepting of marketing, they willingly dive right in. Even though each and every one of them knows that if they really wanted a quality game experience, they’d pick up the game a month or two after it launches, when the rush is off, the game is stable, and it’s clear if the game is really awesome or just meh. Something you can’t really tell when ten thousand people are lagging the beta servers.

We computer fans have a long history of falling prey to hype. Remember the “Midnight Madness” spectacle Microsoft orchestrated around the release of Windows 95? Nothing was going to stop those people from buying an OPERATING SYSTEM at midnight. So they could be first to… what, exactly? Nobody really knew. They got over it pretty fast, waking up, wondering what all the fuss was about.

There was no fuss. Just hype. Software marketers have become masters at building hype. Age of Conan, Warhammer Online… If you can somehow get a player to make an emotional connection that can entirely bypass the rational part of their brains… well, you’ve made a SALE.

Because, you know what you’re going to do in AoC, and Warhammer Online? That’s right. You’re going to make a character, kill stuff, level, loot corpse, repeat. The same grind you see in every other MMO you ever played. It’s the *same game*.

If you were buying a car, you wouldn’t trade in your perfecly serviceable car for another just because it looked shiny and new.

Oh wait. Yeah, people do that all the time. Because Marketing WORKS. Marketing’s entire purpose is to make you WANT something. Build that emotional connection. You see that SUV rampaging through the mountains and fields and say — yeah, I’d like to be able to just drive around in mountains and fields and stuff instead of driving to work every day. And then drive their shiny new SUV into work every day. Dream realized. No change.

You won’t become an axe-swinging barbarian by playing Conan. We’re all just geeks behind keyboards, performing repetitive actions for no rewards, wasting time likely better spent doing something that would make a positive difference in our lives.

But hey, I guess if marketing can bring meaning to our lives and convince us that sitting for hours behind keyboards performing repetitive actions for no reward is actually something pretty fantastic, then who am I to say different?

Rock on, Conan dudes. You have six months to do it all over again for Warhammer and Wrath of the Lich King.

Marketers everywhere rejoice.

(Full disclosure: I waited two months after EQ launched in 1999 to buy it, a year after WoW launched to buy it, and I bought EQ2 the first day it was out. And I didn’t wait in line for Win95. That would have been silly.)

Bet you’re saying, “OMG! She’s back in WoW!” Well, no. Not yet, anyway.

I’ve been looking at Asus’ Eee super-portable computer for awhile, and have caught my son and sister admiring it at BJ’s. The Eee is a very, very small computer with a solid-state drive and amazing portability, and is really cute :) The screen size is a little small, but they are about to release the new Eee 900 series, which has a larger screen, multi-touch touch pad, and Linux or Windows XP.

Now, my main use would be for what my gaming laptop proved unsuited for; being portable. Sure, I can play EQ2 in the living room or in airports, but without my headset, my G15 gaming keyboard, my mouse, my drawing tablet, my entire freakin’ Linux computer sitting right next to it… well, it takes a long time to unhook it, move to new room, plug in the power supply, and make do without all the cool peripherals in the other room. So anyway. Wish I had a decent paint program. But basically, I would use it for the things that aren’t worth the hassle of moving my gaming laptop for — like shelling into my Linux box and having it transfer movies to my Windows laptop, which, running Vista, acts as a media source for my Xbox, which can play movies on the TV.

So: To watch a movie on the TV –

1. Connect to Baphomet from the Eee.
2. cp xxxxxx.avi laptop/
3. chmod aug+r laptop/* (probably not necessary or allowed)
4. (On Xbox) Media > Shared Videos
5. Watch movie!

This would also allow me to do some writing without having to be alone in the dark. And it’s small enough so that I could carry it with me — something that is difficult with my gaming laptop, and kind of scary, since that contains pretty much everything. Losing it would be a hardship.

Anyway, if I had such a computer — slow, small screen, but very portable — I wouldn’t necessarily want to run MMOs on it. But… could I if I wanted to?

Well, this guy has gotten World of Warcraft to run on it. Not well, not fast, definitely not uber — but running. Not sure if I would reactivate my account just to run the game on a non-gaming notebook, but given that it’s possible, what else might run?

Well, aside from WoW, which runs about as you’d expect (but it runs), there’s a whole thread in the Windows gaming forum about free-to-play MMOs that run on the Eee.

The downside to this of course is that it requires you to have Windows running instead of Linux. Which would change my movie watching; instead of pushing through the Linux machine, I’d have to Remote Desktop into the laptop and pull from the Linux machine. It could work but just… well, Windows… Is it worth that much to be able to play games poorly? Maybe not. But Kongregate has hundreds of Flash games that should run fine on the Eee under Linux…

Well, I am so glad my sister bought me a huge purse for Christmas. If I get this, I’ll need it :) What with my Reader, this, Nintendo DS…

After we cleared Protector’s Realm tonight, we said, hey, what the heck, let’s pop over to the Shard of Hate and see what we can pull from the place. Since the last time we went, a lot of the Epic x3 mobs have been changed to Epic x4. Why is this important? When an Epic x3 is fought by a four group raid… it drops no loot. This probably explained our abysmal drops the first time we we went. This time, it was fine. We got several chests, some masters, some nice pants — just from trash. The first boss dropped a VERY nice bow which could have been made specifically for a bard (and a bard did win it!), and Davic tells me that mob also drops the most perfect bard weapon in the world, Marrow’s Song; same delay as our epic, boosts our run speed song and our proc song; full of all the stats we love best…. But for some reason, this uber bard weapon which, let’s face it, is nearly as good as our epic, is usable by ALL scouts PLUS guardian and berserkers. Any non-bard who even so much as bids on this in jest… should be hung, feet first, outside the gates of Freeport or Qeynos, exposed to the ridicule of the crowds. I don’t have the DKP to even consider such a weapon, but I’ll bid what I can just so nobody gets the idea bards don’t want this for some reason :) Of course, when bards bid against bards the bids go up by ones or twos :)

Naturally, when bards THINK they’re gonna be bidding against other bards, they might make their first bid too high. I bid five points on Nox Noctis… and won it. The delay is too fast, but it will do until I get Marrow’s Song, I guess :) Could have more stats, but the boosts to double attack and dps make it a good replacement for my Jade Reaver, I hope. I’ll still have to woodshed it some to see if it really improves my dps.

We killed a lot more trash than normal for their random drops, but only attempted and defeated the two Tier 1 bosses.

Tobold noted that this is the eighth anniversary of the Ruins of Kunark, EverQuest’s first and (arguably) best expansion. The designers had somehow figured out all the things that were right about EverQuest, and made more of all that, while adding things we had never seen. That is what a game’s first expansion is for; it’s a letter to the players saying, we watched you play, we took notes, now here’s what you wanted. The game at launch and the game at first expansion provide the datapoints from which to plot the game’s ultimate direction. What sort of direction did the Burning Crusade give to WoW? A further emphasis on high level grouping and raiding? Anyway, happy birthday, EQ, and as a present, a screenshot from one of my first groups in Kunark, fighting goblins in the Lake of Ill Omen.

Massively’s Kyle Horner reports that Pirates of the Burning Sea is dropping 7 of its 11 servers, a merge of Vanguard-ian proportions. Liz Strickland’s server, Guadaloupe, is among those under the axe, so I’ll have to choose another server; leaning toward Antigua. This move should serve to concentrate the players and make PvP more fun. Personally, I always ran from PvP. PotBS is a decent game, but real life eats up a lot of my time, and if I could only have time to play one MMO, in the end, it wasn’t going to be PotBS. I don’t feel every MMO needs to address every kind of gameplay, but once I figured out how to win the NPC battles (board as soon as possible, defeat enemy crew in melee, loot ship, rinse and repeat), it became dull. I was nowhere near skilled enough to win the whole shooting at each other game, but boarding would always come through for me.

I have more, but it’s time to head to work :)