eldergoth

One must queue to simply walk into Mordor

2010-09-11T07:17:00.003+10:00

Something I have never seen before in LOTRO:

This was on the new server Crickhollow I chose – there was also queues on a number of other servers. Looks like I’m not the only one enjoying the free-to-play relaunch!

LOTRO Free Middle Earth arrives

2010-09-09T09:34:00.002+10:00

So, Turbine’s new “Free Middle Earth” free-to-play version of Lord of the Rings Online has landed, hot on the heels of EverQuest II Extended. I jumped on briefly last night, creating a new character on one of the four new servers, to see what was happening.

First of all, the game is buzzing just as crazily as EQ2X. The server was packed with players, and from the conversations in chat, quite a lot of them are entirely new to the game. I think there is definitely potential for this to replicate the success Turbine had with D&D Online when they relaunched that as free-to-play.

Secondly, LOTRO was always an attractive game, but since I last played, I’ve replaced my PC with a new rig. The patch that accompanied the free launch added DirectX 11 support, and by happy coincidence, my new machine has a Radeon 5770. So I enabled the new DirectX 11 stuff, cranked all the settings up to high and turned on anti-aliasing, and now we are talking a seriously attractive game.

Those looks, running at a rock solid 60 fps, definitely put a smile on my face. It’s hard to believe that this game is well over three years old and has had its graphics kept up-to-date like this.

I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about LOTRO’s free-to-play / subscription hybrid model yet, but I have to say, I expect it to be much better suited to my playstyle than EQ2X’s “subscribe or bust” approach.

EverQuest II Extended – does it hit the mark?

2010-09-01T17:50:00.001+10:00

So, it’s of course old news by now that Sony are launching a free-to-play version of EverQuest II, known as EverQuest II Extended. It is technically still in beta, but there will be no character wipe between now and “launch”, so effectively, it is launched.

I played EQ2 a while ago. Can’t remember exactly when, probably mid-2008 when the pre-Lich King ennui made me suspend my WoW account. There was a lot to like about it, but ultimately, I didn’t feel it distinguished itself enough to keep my interest, as well as suffering from a few key issues like boring combat and a low server population.

But certainly my memories aren’t entirely negative, so I decided to check out the new F2P incarnation of the game. I’ve played a few sessions this week, getting my Barbarian Inquisitor to level 16, and have some opinions about the hybrid F2P/subscription model that Sony have come up with.

The hybrid model

We saw this idea when D&D Online went free-to-play – there is still the option of a traditional $15/month subscription, but it is supplemented by a greatly restricted free option, with microtransactions to unlock various restrictions. Turbine have also announced a similar model for the upcoming free-to-play change to Lord of the Rings Online.

EQ2X is similar – you can play for free (“bronze” membership), you can make a one-time $10.00 purchase to remove some of the restrictions (“silver” membership), or you can pay a monthly or yearly subscription (“gold” and “platinum” membership). And I get a strong feeling that Sony’s goal is to push people, not towards casual play and microtransaction purchases, but towards the subscription plans.

What do you only get with a subscription? There is a membership plan matrix here, but some highlights include:

Access to all classes - only 8 are available without subscription. You can’t even buy them individually, although I believe Sony have said that are planning to add that to the shop.
Access to the highest levels of ability upgrades.
Access to the highest grades of equipment, Legendary and Fabled.
Access to the broker system – although, again, this is to be added to the non-subscription accounts in the form of tokens on the cash shop, i.e. a cash fee for every item you wish to buy or sell on auction.

To me, that is starting to feel more like the bronze and silver memberships are an extremely generous free trial, rather than a genuine free game.

What I don’t think will work well

Class and race restrictions. The free game only allows access to 8 out of 24 classes, and 4 out of 19 races. On the face of it, selling access to classes and races might seem a good model, but the problem is: you need to get F2P players hooked in order to get them to spend money. And once they’re hooked, do they want to buy access to a new class and race, and then ditch their existing character to reroll from level one? I wouldn’t be terribly inclined to do so.

Chat restrictions. Bronze members cannot use “broadcast” channels, such as /auction, /level, /shout, or any other chat option that broadcasts to a large amount of other players. Many people feel that this both makes the game feel rather empty, compared to the buzzing chat channels people are used to; and also that it makes it rather hard for new players who are still getting the hang of the game to actually ask questions or seek help! This feels more like a restriction you’d put on a free trial account to discourage spammers than something you would inflict on people who see as genuine customers.

The broker restrictions. I love to see a vibrant economy in a game. I’ll reserve judgement on this one until I’ve properly checked it out for myself, but I’m worried that banning non-subscription players from buying and selling at auction will seriously hurt the economy – and that this will hurt the subscription players as well as the free players.

Legendary and Fabled item restrictions. I’m not enough of an EQ2 vet to know how restrictive this is, but I’ve already read of the disappointment of finishing an epic quest chain and receiving a reward that you’re not even allowed to use! It has also been suggested that this renders group dungeon runs pretty pointless for free players since the loot will be unusable. But this is also an opportunity for Sony: why not sell consumable “legendary and fabled attunement” tokens in the cash shop, so each such item you get your hands on requires a nominal real-money spend to use?

But we’ll see

Look, certainly the game is drawing a crowd. Certainly, comparing the starter zone I’ve been playing in this week to my experiences of two years ago, it’s chalk and cheese. There are a lot of players running around. And this is playing in Australian evening time, not prime time. I’m having some fun, and I’ll certainly carry on giving EQ2X a chance to see how it goes this time around for me.

Community through labour

2010-06-08T08:56:00.003+10:00

Back when I was involved in an ill-fated startup company, I used to share an office with our partner company, a games studio. The guys there were a convivial bunch, all pretty young, all male, united by making games at a place that was, frankly, something of a sweatshop. They had a bit of a regular thing going where they would generally go out drinking at the local pub on Thursday nights - and then often shamble into work on Friday morning rather the worse for wear.

One day, one of the newer guys asked one of the old-timers, "Why do we do this to ourselves? Why don't we go out for a drink on Friday night so we don't have to get up and come to work the next morning?"

The response? "Because on Friday night we go out with our real friends."

What's the point of this anecdote? Keen from Keen & Graev's has been writing a series of blog posts on "Old MMO Mechanics I Love and You Probably Hate," and this morning I read part three in the series. He's talking largely about mechanics from the original EverQuest here, and the common theme of group camping, rare spawn camping, dungeon camping etc. seems to be the community this engendered.

Hanging around with a group of other players while one person goes and pulls mobs back to the camp to be killed? To the current MMO generation that probably sounds like a bad thing, that would happen if people ran out of content and were forced to grind XP. To Keen, this was "the most fun [way to level] because it allowed me to socialize with people and form a connection with others playing the game. This was a catalyst for a very, very close-knit community later."

And this is what made me think of socializing with workmates. I've worked for eight different companies in my career as a programmer and I have really enjoyed the camaraderie at all of them. When you spend a lot of time with people, working in a common cause to do something that can often be boring or frustrating, you make friends. But you know what? I've made friends doing things I enjoyed doing too, friends that I shared interests with, not just an employer. Making friends while doing something boring is a consolation prize, not a reason to do something boring.

And that's why Keen is right to predict that I would probably hate these mechanics.

How quickly is it OK to judge an MMORPG?

2010-04-18T19:55:00.004+10:00

So I got into the closed beta of Battle of the Immortals, an isometric style MMO being translated from the Chinese by Perfect World Entertainment. I wrote a moderately lengthy post about it on the mmorpg.com forums which I may fatten up into a blog post, but the quick summary is, I played for a few hours, got to level 24, and didn't like it, concluding that it was (a) a confusing, poorly translated mess and (b) considerably less fun to play than Diablo II (my main point of reference for isometric action RPGs), despite that game being almost ten years old.

Anyway, I was taken to task by one of the regular posters there, who reckons that my opinion is not going to be taken very seriously when I've only seen the early game, and not tried PvP (which, apparently, becomes accessible at level 31). Basically, he said, all games are the same from level 1-20, and not a single one is any good.

Needless to say, I disagree with this. If there was not a single MMORPG which was any good for the early hours of play, this hobby would have been dead in the water a decade ago, and it certainly wouldn't have been my main leisure activity these last six years. But it got me thinking: just how quickly can I judge an MMORPG without being unreasonable?

My thinking is, as someone who has tried an awful lot of MMOs, that I can judge pretty quickly if a game is no good. Every MMO that I have spent any significant amount of time playing - Horizons, WoW, EVE Online, LOTRO, EQ2, Runes of Magic, Atlantica Online - has had something to it that hooked me right from the start. Whether it was immediately fun gameplay, intriguing mechanics, story, or just plain being different from the crowd, they all made me want to log back in and play more.

Battle of the Immortals did not. I played a couple of sessions and had to force myself to even log in to play a third to get as far as I did.

So, while I can conclude that every game I have enjoyed had some hook right from the start, I can't necessarily argue that no game which did not have that hook would be entertaining. It's very possible that there are games that I've tried for a couple of hours and ditched, which would have opened up and become genuinely entertaining if I'd given them a better chance.

But, you know what? I don't care. I'm not starved for games to play. If a developer can't manage to build an early game which isn't boring, I don't feel bad about denying them the chance to wow me with their endgame. I think possibly the biggest blight on this genre is that developers have learned that Achiever-type personalities can be lured into playing games which simply aren't fun in order to achieve in-game goals, and for that reason feel they can avoid making gameplay their number one priority.

Imagine playing an arcade shoot-em-up which isn't very good. Endless waves of similar enemies, no variety, a single slow-firing gun on your ship. You're about to walk away with your pocket still half full of change, when someone tells you how awesome the final boss battle is.

Do you bang your head against an un-fun game for hours (spending a bunch of change in the process) to try to get to this supposedly fun boss battle? Or do you say, "screw that, I'm playing 1942 instead, that game rules."

I'm of the latter school of thought. If you can't make your game fun to play from the start, there are other developers who can.

Turbine makes me an offer I can't refuse

2010-03-27T16:20:00.004+11:00

All the LOTRO expansions you don't already have, plus a month's play time, all for only $9.99? Now that's an offer too good to refuse. I jumped onto LOTRO's latest free weekend this morning, knocked over a couple more stages of the now-soloable epic questline (finally, Dori, you are free, after a year or so on my quest log!), and then found this deal being advertised.

I haven't actually applied the key to my account yet, since hey, I'm playing for free this weekend, might as well make the most of it! And I have to say, I'm not sure that the Mirkwood expansion offers a whole lot for my puny level 39 self. But $9.99 to lock in a month's playtime, and getting my account fully up to date with the latest expansion in the process - that, I had to say "yes" to.

News of the fortnight

2010-03-18T13:28:00.004+11:00

I never ended up posting a second post about Darkfall. This isn't because I fail at blogging (although I do!), it's because I hardly played any more after my first couple of sessions. I tried, I tried a couple of times, but it always ended up with the world spinning wildly as I tried to clicky-click-click on a tiny little goblin with a tiny little cursor, until I decided that if the FPS-style combat was entertaining me a lot less than FPS games I played more than twelve years ago - like Quake II - that this probably wasn't the game for me.

Having said that, I've posted on a few forum threads and blog comments that if you have any interest in MMORPGs as a genre, and you don't check out Darkfall, you're a fool. It stands boldly apart in doing many things in a very different manner to other MMOs, and while maybe those differences will suit you and maybe they won't, you owe it to yourself to spend a buck and some torrent time to find out.

In other news, it's somewhat old news by now that there has been a night of the long knives over at Alganon, with lead visionary David Allen repeating his achievements with Horizons by being fired and replaced. This time, by controversial industry figure Derek Smart. There have been a number of news articles about the affair, but if you read only one, it must be this piece at Gamasutra, where you can witness the unique spectacle of Derek Smart and a couple of former employees ripping into each other. And damn, this is no-holds-barred stuff, rich with allegations of incompetence, deception, insubordination and flat-out embezzlement and fraud - to the extent that I'm not going to be surprised if I look back later and find that Gamasutra have taken the whole lot down for fear of legal ramifications. I've saved a copy just in case!

In gaming news, I have continued to play Atlantica Online pretty heavily. Heavily enough, indeed, that I've not taken any time to blog about it because I've been playing so much. It's been about a month and half now since I first installed the game, and I actually think I have to say that there has been no MMO since World of Warcraft that has enthralled me to this extent over this initial span of time. I'm level 76 now, in a nice guild, and have spent some money in the item mall. I will definitely try to write more.

And finally, I got an email this morning with a key for the latest round of closed beta for upcoming fantasy sandbox Dawntide. It was a while ago I put my name down for this one, and I haven't been following development closely, but I'll be very interested to see the state of it! Additionally, one of the things that has distinguished Dawntide is their NDA-free beta process, so I'm free to post about it. Don't worry guys, I know this one is still a fair way from release, so I won't be reviewing it as I did Alganon, just posting thoughts and impressions.

Fellowship of One

2010-03-02T11:42:00.002+11:00

So, Lord of the Rings Online has just had it's first major content patch since the Mirkwood expansion came out: "Volume III, Book I: Oath of the Rangers". Although, as the name suggests, this moves the epic storyline forward into volume III, the patch also includes "massive changes to the first Volume of The Lord of the Rings Online Epic Story."

There's a developer diary about these changes, but basically, they acknowledge that the steps of the epic questline which require a group can be frustrating to do these days, since LOTRO is a mature game with a predominantly max-level player base, making it often difficult to find a group to do these quest steps with. So, they have reworked all of volume I, apparently, so that every step which previously required a group can now be done either in its original state, or in a solo version where you are heartily buffed to make it possible.

I've written before about being frustrated when looking for a group for the epic questline, and how I was looking forward to this change. This definitely makes me want to re-subscribe to LOTRO for a spell. Well done, Turbine! Now I just need more hours in the day to fit this in alongside Atlantica (still having lots of fun there), WoW (my guild is now up to the Lich King in 10-man, and only a few bosses short in 25-man) and everything else (like spending more time on my Darkfall trial).

Darkfall (cue ominous music)

2010-02-27T18:18:00.003+11:00

So, the infamous harder-core-than-thou PvP sandbox Darkfall has celebrated its first birthday by giving the curious their first opportunity at a, well.. almost free trial.

Years of slings and arrows and cries of "vapourware!" meant that I didn't expect much when Darkfall launched, but its resilience has surprised me, it has seemed to be a genuine quiet achiever, with the word being steady growth and improvement over its first year. And, I have to say, rarely have I seen anyone make any game sound as good as SynCaine over at "Hardcore Casual" makes Darkfall sound. So this was not something I was going to miss.

First of all: "almost" free? Yes, it costs a buck to activate an account for the 7-day trial. This is novel: we've seen games selling trial CDs in shops for a tiny fee before, but have we seen a fee like this for no physical media? Not that I know of. It's caused a bit of debate, with both supporters and detractors. My take on it? A buck is nothing. It's meaningless as a sum of money. It's clear that the purpose of the nominal fee is to give Aventurine the means to exert some control of any abuse of trial accounts that might occur.

Because, as many have pointed out: Darkfall is not a game where you can stick trial players off on their own island, and have it be any sort of trial of the game. It's not a game where you can impose significant restrictions on chat and trade and interaction (as most MMORPGs do with their free trials), and have it be any sort of trial of the game. You have to put them in it as if they were real players, and if that means taking a credit card number to enable the blacklisting of people who want to use trial accounts to spam, or test out hacks, so be it.

And so, one extremely fast 7 gig torrent download later, on with the game!

Zitron-meter™: 2 hours 10 minutes played

So, in my opening couple of hours of Darkfall, I have killed some goblins (as you do), been killed by goblins once, fled from goblins like a scared little girl several times, fled from goblins that I couldn't see but which were shooting me with bows from somewhere several times, done some mining, logging, herbing, caught some fish, cooked some fish, and killed a deer with a bow and arrows.

The recently introduced "New Player Protection" system is surely a blessing. It's true what everyone says about the interface and controls being rather different and feeling rather strange at first, for anyone who has played a bunch of other MMOs with their similar controls. I'm willing to brave PvP but if I got ravaged by another player when I was five minutes into the game and had just switched into UI mode again by instinctively right-clicking to try to turn my character, I'd be peeved.

But, I've got no argument with the explanations I've heard for the interface decisions: when they feel like they're getting in your way, I can see that there are solid gameplay reasons why. Can't freely spin your camera around? PvP decision - it's to make you actually turn around if you want to check if anyone's behind you. Can't autoloot, but rather have to sheathe your weapon and drag items one by one to your backpack? Looting is intended to expose you to vulnerability, not something that is a mere quick shift-right-click in the middle of a fight.

I have to say, I don't enjoy aim and click melee combat, though. I've never played a game where it was enjoyable. Trying to whack a goblin with a sword was a frustrating mess of spinning around as this tiny little thing scuttled around me, not helped by the fact that frankly I'm not getting a particularly great frame rate out my somewhat-elderly PC. I think I would definitely prefer to specialize in ranged combat or magic in Darkfall.

My few attempts at shooting at goblins with a bow, I never hit a damn thing. I did, as I said, kill a deer though - deer don't fight back, so you can creep up close to one, shoot it, watch it run around in a panic for a bit, and then when it settles down, creep up and shoot it again! I actually got a real zing of realism from this: shooting a moving target with a bow is hard. You need to practice on easy targets first. I'll do more of this.

Resource gathering reminded me very much of EVE Online. Park your ship (yourself) next to an asteroid (tree, boulder or shrub), turn on gathering, and relax while every 10 seconds or so, another unit of material appears in your inventory. Or in Darkfall's case, fails to do so, because I'm a noob with skill level 1 out of 100 in mining, logging and herbalism. But don't relax too much - this is an area where I can see that the "no spinning the camera" restriction is going to bite hard. You practically have to push your nose up against the node you're harvesting, leaving you in a very vulnerable state indeed. It's not like EVE where keeping an eye on your scanner will alert you the instant potential trouble arrives.

As for the use-it-to-skill-up skill-based character advancement: playing a game that worked like that really brought home how rarely you see that these days. There have been plenty of CRPGs that worked that way over the 25 years of so I've been gaming, but MMORPGs? So few and far between. They all followed the Dungeons & Dragons level-based model rather than the RuneQuest based skill model. I didn't play Ultima Online, so this might actually be the first time I've hit it in an MMO.

Obviously I'm way too new to say how well it works in Darkfall long-term, but there's no doubt that it brings a level of feedback-excitement over a level-based system. Rather than a regular rhythm of that bar filling up, ding!, and then filling up again, skill-ups are all over the place. As a total noob almost every fight was dinging something. Even just heading back to town was dinging my running skill. Dings all over the place! It would clearly give you a lot of choices in how to work on your character, too. Do I kill tough monsters with my sword, since that's what I'm good at? Or do I go and kill weak monsters with an axe, which I'm useless at, to build up my skills there.

My grand overall reaction on the game is still a bit unsure. My time so far has been spread over a couple of sessions, but then this afternoon I played some Atlantica rather than firing up Darkfall again, so it hasn't really grabbed me yet, as such. I'll see how it goes and post more (along with the updated Zitron-meter™!) as the week progresses.

Alganon to go free-to-play, it seems

2010-02-18T09:42:00.002+11:00

So Alganon finally launched, to a reaction of pretty much universal apathy. I've glanced at some news and discussions every now and then, my vague interest mostly due to the fact that my impressions of the beta were the most popular thing I've ever written. Anyway, things haven't looked good - unconfirmed forum reports have claimed that there were less than 100 people online during prime time, even straight after launch, and even the few enthusiasts I've seen on forums seem to have mostly abandoned the game.

But now, news emerges that they are planning to adopt "a new subscription-free pricing model." And, according to the usual Alganon rules of quality control, this news has emerged not through an official announcement, or interview, or anything like that, but a post regarding some arcane changes to the addon API made by one of their programmers.

As you have probably already seen elsewhere on the site, The new subscription-free pricing model that Alganon is adopting introduces the concept of Tribute. This is what part of the new API for the last patch includes.

Upon the realization that this info was not meant to be announced yet, he added:

please be patient and wait until the information that this post refers to is made available before jumping to too many conclusions about it's meaning. I'm sure that said information will be released soon™

Link: New Tribute And Logging Api Functions For 1.1.11 Patch

"Howdy, y'all!" from the lost city of Atlantica

2010-02-04T15:31:00.009+11:00

Howdy,y'all!

There was one phrase I'd always heard used to describe Atlantica Online: "free-to-play turn-based MMORPG".

And that always made me think "what the hell??" How can an MMORPG, which by definition, you would think involved a bunch of people doing a bunch of stuff all at the same time, be turn-based? Well, I finally got around to having a play with it, and now I know the compromises involved. But the end result is a game which definitely has some charm, and, importantly to me, passes the test of being genuinely different to the other MMORPGs I have played.

First of all, in an element reminiscent of non-MMO CRPGs, in Atlantica, you control your "main" character, and a team of "mercenaries". Apparently at endgame you can have eight mercenaries, but it builds up gradually - my level 34 character is allowed to have six. Selecting an effective combination of classes for your team is a big part of the game - the options to customize individual members are not that extensive, but picking a good "formation" with a good combination of offence and defence and healing is key. Looking at the website, there are 23 different classes of mercenary (many of them have a level requirement and require a quest to unlock, I believe), so obviously the number of possible combinations is absolutely enormous.

Combat may be turn-based, but this is certainly not a game where you can plan your strategy in a leisurely fashion. You have 30 seconds to take your turn, and can move up to five characters in that time, so while we're not talking Starcraft levels of clicks-per-minute, you need to be fairly sharpish with your decision-making, and should probably adopt the attitude that a suboptimal move is better than no move at all because you ran out of time.

The complexity curve of combat starts off quite gently. As I said, the number of mercenaries you control grows as you gain levels, and also, each individual mercenary will not have a lot of moves available - initially, it's "attack" or "use magic" (although later, some mercenaries will have up to three different magic spells rather than just one). "Attack" varies by type: some mercs, like a Swordsman, make a single-target attack on an enemy in the front row. An Archer, however, can target any enemy, even if they're standing behind someone else. And then some hit multiple targets - a Spearman hits a target, and whoever is standing behind him. A Viking hits a target and anyone standing directly next to him. So you want to pick the appropriate target to maximize the number of enemies hit by these multi-target attacks.

Plus, you want to arrange your own formation so your softer characters are standing behind more robust melee types. This is especially true for your main character - if they die, it's a wipe, no matter how many of your mercs are still standing. So you'll seldom want to put them anywhere near the frontline.

Magic effects include more powerful attacks (like a Swordsman's "Flame Sword"), crowd control (like a Viking's "Frozen Axe", which freezes up to three enemies and renders them unable to act for a couple of turns, or an Archer's "Silence", which prevents its targets from using magic themselves for a couple of turns), healing (always vital of course!), buffs, etc. Spells have cooldowns which prevent you from using them every turn, as well as consuming mana from a traditional blue mana bar, so you'll want to pick the right moment to cut loose with them, especially in PvP.

As you get a larger party, you run into the "no more than five characters can act per turn" limitation. Now you have to consider which mercs you want to use each turn, as well as what you want to do with them. Sometimes the choice is easy (no point using your healer to do a weak magical attack if nobody needs healing), sometimes not so much, as you really really want to use everyone.

But anyway, how do all of these thirty second turns fit into a persistent multi-player world? Well, that's where it gets a bit dodgy. When you're out and about in the world of Atlantica, you'll see other players running hither and thither, and wandering mobs shuffling about, much like every other MMO. It's just a single human figure, though, representing each player, even though it's really a group of up to nine. And a single monster figure represents a group of monsters, generally three to six or thereabouts in my experience. And, when a player engages a monster, both figures just stand there with a little sword icons over them to indicate that they're fighting. If you stood nearby, you'd see the monster keel over dead a few minutes later (actually, I think you can right-click on the mob and choose to observe the battle, haven't done that myself though). Additionally, I haven't seen any aggressive hostile monsters yet - they all just wander around and wait for you to attack them. At first I thought this might be because I was low-level (given that many MMOs don't make you deal with aggressive enemies at first), but I'm 34 now and no sign of any change!

This adds up to a somewhat less than immersive world. It feels very game-y, moving from zone to zone, ignoring the hordes of monsters that you're not interested in fighting, and then activating the turn-based combat against those that you do want to kill.

Still to come: my thoughts on how Atlantica approaches some other standard MMO tropes, also its PvP, and the deal with the interaction between free-to-play and the item mall.

Next post in this series: More on Atlantica Online

More on Atlantica Online

2010-02-09T08:54:00.014+11:00

Previous post in this series: "Howdy, y'all!" from the lost city of Atlantica

In my first entry on Atlantica Online, I got so carried away writing about the turn-based, party-based combat system, that before I said much else, I decided the post was quite long enough already and hit "publish."

Now, I have complained in the past about being bored of "race/class/level quest-to-endgame-and-then-PvP sword & sorcery themepark MMOs". Does Atlantica fit into that category? Well, it is class/level based - however, the class system is mitigated by the fact that it is party-based. My character is an Archer. But there are Archer mercenaries available. If I was playing, say, a Swordsman, and had an Archer merc as part of my formation, I don't think it would feel significantly different to my current situation of playing an Archer and having a Swordsman merc.

If I want to experiment with some different classes, I don't need to roll an alt of a different class, I can get a merc of a different class into my party. My main frustration with the class/level paradigm is that once you're established in a game, trying another class means leaving behind your levels and starting from scratch, so it's nice to not have to do this - sure, my new merc will be level one, but at least the rest of my party is still strong and can continue adventuring while I raise him up.

(note: storage space for unpartied mercs does need to be purchased, either at the item mall or for in-game currency, otherwise you won't be able to keep your old merc in reserve while you play a new one)

Quest to endgame and then PvP? Well, I'm level 36 now, and while I have indeed been supplied with quests the whole time, never needing to grind, the bulk of this questing has been in a single massive chain leading me around. There haven't been that many side quests, really, so gameplay has been a bit lacking in that "which of these quests shall I do next?" feeling.

The quests are mostly pretty standard "kill ten rats" and fedex style things, as with many MMOs they really just provide a structure to the gameplay rather than truly standing out for their own merits. If I wasn't taken by the turn and party based play, I'd certainly be bored by the quests. Although the quest dialogue does have a "subtitles from a Chinese martial arts movie" feel to it, which has some charm. And it's also interesting that a lot of the tutorial elements of the game are integrated into the main quest chain - e.g., you get questgivers giving you a quests to do such things as use a scroll in battle, equip an item, buy and sell items from vendors, even open your world map and look at it! It's a nice way of making sure a new player doesn't miss any of the basics, whilst giving more experienced gamers a little gold and xp for nothing.

But one thing which Atlantica has certainly gotten right which so many MMOs do not is that PvP is by no means an activity solely for the endgame. There are various competitions which run regularly in game, the main one being the "Free League". I believe you have to be level 20 to participate in this competition, which realistically means that by the time you've learned the ropes of gameplay, you can start PvP'ing. Entering involves merely clicking a button, and sees you matched against an opponent, using a division ranking system so you should get a relatively fair fight. My record is currently standing at nine wins and eight losses so I'd say the matchmaking works pretty well!

PvP certainly challenges your formation-building and tactical skills far more than PvE - in PvE, mobs tend to whack away at random members of your party, and have few special abilities, but in PvP you can expect to be confronted by a broad mix of classes and thus many different abilities, with your opponent (if they're any good!) doing their best to hammer you with stuns and silences and heavy focus-fire on your most important party members. I was planning to write more about it in a separate post, but I'll finish off by saying that I think that Warhammer Online is the only MMORPG I have played which offered this much PvP entertainment so soon after you started playing - and lord knows that game had enough problems to counterbalance that quality.

Crafting? Atlantica has a lot of crafting skills - literally dozens of them. Every type of weapon and every armour slot it its own crafting skill. And you can learn all of them on one character. Needless to say, to do so would require such effort and expense that you won't be doing it any time soon!

The system is fixed recipes, e.g. sword crafting skill level 1 will allow you make a Spirit Sword for 5 Copper Flakes and 4 Maple. There are no gathering skills, by the way, raw materials are all monster drops, also all the ones I have seen so far can be purchased from NPC vendors for a fixed price.

However, unlike most games, it's not a "click a button, watch the progress bar, and bam! you now have a sword" process - after clicking the button, you need to accumulate a certain amount of "workload", which you get by fighting monsters. At my low level, crafting one item seems to require maybe one or two fights, so it's pretty quick. And you can get books of "crafting secrets", which are consumables that give you workload. I've gotten a bunch of these as rewards for competing in the PvP league, so if I want to craft something quickly, I can use them to do so.

There are a few other wrinkles, like being able to dismantle an item that you are capable of crafting to learn extra crafting xp, but you can only do this once per day. On the whole though, crafting seems pretty grindy, even to keep a single skill up to pace with your level (say, to make crafted weapons for your main character) looks like it would take quite a lot of money, materials and effort. I'm not sure that I'm particularly gripped by this aspect of the game.

Many people are enjoying Allods. Me, not so much.

2010-02-01T13:38:00.009+11:00

So Keen, from Keen & Graev's, wrote a nice piece entitled “Max Level in Allods Online: The Adventure is just beginning...” He has been hitting the Allods Online beta pretty hard, and has written a number of interesting posts about it - and as that title suggests, he's pretty impressed by the game. So I was maybe a little impolitic in saying:

..I’ve spent quite some hours in the various phases of closed beta, and while it’s all very competently done, I find it absolutely 100% bland, derivative and boring. I’m struggling to say there’s even a single element that I have seen in Allods which is in any way interesting to me, given that I’ve already played WoW, LOTRO, EQ2, WAR and various other fantasy MMORPGs. I certainly can’t imagine ever playing through Allods long enough to get anywhere near its endgame. Maybe the world needs another race/class/level quest-to-endgame-and-then-PvP sword & sorcery themepark MMO. But I don’t.

Back when I first mentioned Allods in passing, my feelings were reasonably positive. And when a number of commenters on Keen's post suggested that the Empire faction was the one to play if you wanted a change from the standard sword & sorcery setting, I was reminded that I did indeed play Empire on my first spell of closed beta.

When I came back for closed beta round 4, though, I played the League faction (an Elf Demonologist, to be precise), and if the Empire is "a far cry from the usual small village in a lightly forested, lightly hilly piece of Olde Englishe countryside," the League certainly is not. Once I was out of the introductory zone and approaching the city of Novograd, I was deep in cod-medieval "kill ten wolves .. kill ten bears .. kill ten boars" territory.

And I think that without the steampunk gloss of the Empire faction to distract me, I was really struck by just how uninteresting the game itself was, to me. I put in a day of pretty solid play on CB#4, and I just don't think there was anything in the gameplay that made me think "wow, that's fresh."

Select from two factions - same as WoW, WAR, EQ2, etc. Select a race. Select a class. Same as pretty much every MMO in history. You've got a button bar with a few abilities. You've got a health bar and a mana bar. Same as everything else. There's a guy standing in front of you offering a quest. You do quests, and the combat they entail involves targeting monsters and tapping your ability buttons until they die. You level up. Levelling up allows you to pick a stat to increase and a talent point to spend - a system which, although it isn't the same as any recent MMO I've played, is much the same as Diablo II. Add in some rep grinds with items to buy at various rep levels - just like WoW and LOTRO - and I was yawning.

Crafting I didn't really get to test out. I intended to try tailoring on my Demonologist, so I took dismantling first, in order to get some cloth to tailor with.. and then discovered that you only get one tradeskill unless you spend hundreds of gold to get access to a second. So I can't comment on that area of the game.

Look, it's all very slick and polished - and it's free to play - so I'm sure a lot of people will enjoy it. The endgame of astral ship combat does sound fresh, if you can get that far. But I've probably played ten or more sword & sorcery MMOs, to various degrees, and I really need something different if it's to stand any chance of luring me away.

Coming up next - a game which probably won't capture me long-term, but which is undeniably different from the competition: Atlantica Online.

Intercontinental Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

2010-01-27T09:23:00.008+11:00

Gordon over at We Fly Spitfires has written a piece about "Enforced Localization" in MMOs, and his experiences as a Scot playing MMOs both nocturnally and in more normal hours.

I had my own slice of localization chaos in World of Warcraft. I'm in Australia, and when I started playing at release, there were no Oceanic timezone servers, just the US west/central/east ones. So I started up on Blackrock, a US west server that was adopted as the "unofficial Aussie server" by a number of large forums.

There was heaps of activity there, indeed so much that Blackrock became horribly overcrowded and had free transfers off the server opened up in one of the first rounds of server transfers Blizzard offered.

My friends and I jumped ship to Daggerspine, which would prove to be my WoW home for a number of years. Our social guild merged with a few others to form a cross-timezone raiding guild, <TDA>. We raided serious 40-man on Friday and Saturday evening server time, which was Saturday and Sunday afternoon Australian-time. And with Daggerspine having quite a large Australian, New Zealander and Singaporean population, there was no shortage of recruits in both timezones.

However, roughly a year after WoW's release (October 22nd, 2005, according to WoWWiki), Blizzard launched the first of the Oceanic servers. A few of us rolled Horde characters on Frostmourne to see what it was like but didn't stick around beyond the mid-20's.

But while our raiding on Daggerspine continued quite well throughout 2006, we should have known that the writing was on the wall. When The Burning Crusade landed, with its switch to 25-man raids as the largest PvE group, we thought "OK, let's have separate US and Aussie raid teams, and we can raid weeknights, rather than just the small slice of the week that works for both sides."

What actually followed was a slow slide into fail for the Aussie side. It was great at first - 10-man Karazhan being the first raid content of the expansion, we had no trouble assembling 10 top Aussie players and as I recall, we left the guild's US raid team in our dust when it came to clearing Kara. But we simply never managed to get 25-man raids up and running seriously.

With Wrath of the Lich King, the Aussie arm of the guild split off to form a fresh separate guild, <Rule Thirty Four>, to seriously reboot and make a big push at it. It worked well at first - the renewed focus and enthusiasm was great, and we cleared all 25-man content in 3.0. Downing Sarth+3D, in particular, was one of the most satisfying kills of my raiding career. But moving forward, the ever-increasing shortage of Oceanic players on Daggerspine began to bite. We did clear Ulduar, but it was a chore, with raids cancelled due to lack of players not being uncommon, and when we came to look at hardmodes, it was apparent we simply did not have 25 skilled, geared and dedicated players, nor any real prospect of recruiting them.

At this point, a bunch of our most serious players said "screw this" and transferred to Oceanic servers to join more hardcore guilds. I resigned myself to the fact that "the band had broken up," so to speak, because I pretty much felt that I'd rather not raid at all, than raid with a bunch of strangers, after playing with the same team for so many years. Seems everyone else came to the same conclusion, though, because it wasn't long until they all said "let's reform on Frostmourne."

So there I was. On Frostmourne, the original Oceanic server. I transferred just one character over, my priest main - and, being drunk when I did it, I forgot to load up with cash, so I only had about 2000g of my bankroll with me. We formed <Rule Thirty Four> anew, started 10-man raiding while we waited for the 3.3 patch to arrive, and the moved into 10-man Icecrown Citadel.

And a few weeks ago now, we had recruited enough people to get back up into 25-mans. Now? Six bosses down in ICC-25. All-guild 25-man runs. Good new people, who are both good players and fun people to game with. Damn, I really wish we had jumped ship back when the Oceanic servers first launched. That's all I can say.

Marchomir the Undying

2009-11-29T22:49:00.006+11:00

Well, I said my LOTRO Warden was getting close to the tricky "Undying" title..

..made it, no problems.

This thread on the LOTRO forums was helpful, although I didn't follow all the advice there. In particular, I did a lot of lower level quests, simply because I was questing through The Shire for the first time (my other two characters are a dwarf and a man), and wanted to enjoy all the content. Doing quests below your level is obviously quite a safe way to level, but also slow, and for many people, the Undying attempt goes wrong not due to trying to do something difficult, but simply bad luck like a network dropout or game crash while in combat. So the slower you level, the more risk there is of that happening.

But yeah, I just ground it out, solo'd all the group quests in The Shire (although outlevelling them when I did), went to Bree-land at about level 17, and popped out quests there until I hit 20. Oh, and I had top-quality crafted weapons all the way due to my Champion being a weaponsmith, upgrading to a new crit crafted weapon every two levels. So my damage output was pretty high. That went a long way towards reducing the risk of multi-enemy fights.

Runes of Magic: what I didn't like

2009-11-12T09:48:00.002+11:00

Previous posts in this series: Enter the strange world of F2P: Runes of Magic, Runes of Magic: what I liked

Following on from my earlier post about what I liked about Runes of Magic, here are my thoughts about what I didn't like so much.

Crafting - the grind, it burns

Crafting is something that I'm always quick to check out in any game, but I'm still waiting for one to truly blow me away. RoM got an initial nod of approval from me for the fact that they let you start off by learning all ten of their tradeskills. However, you can only learn the second tier of six of them, the third tier of only three, and the fourth and final tier of just one. Reminded me of EverQuest 2 in the concept of learning the basics of everything, and not having to decide what to focus on until you've had a fair chance to see what you like.

However, the actual crafting appears rather mediocre. Like most fantasy MMOs (unfortunately), it's a basic fixed-recipe system - two zinc sand and one ash timber makes a studded wooden club, etc. - with your skill rising as you gather or craft, in an experience point system like LOTRO or EQ2, as opposed to a "chance of skillup" system like WoW.

Gathering nodes (ore, wood, herbs) are ever-present. Rather than being a matter of hunting for nodes, gathering is more about running from node to node, with there almost always being another one on your minimap. However, the actual gathering is slooooow.. 5 seconds to gather one piece, and a node can have up to six pieces in it, I believe. That's 30 seconds of just sitting there watching your character fiddling with a node.

I can't say I've been inspired to push very far with crafting, but the word on the forums is that as you get up towards the higher levels the grind is excruciating, and the crafted items uninspiring.

Free to play, expensive to win

I've often heard the free-to-play model described as "play for free, pay for convenience." And RoM certainly offers a number of conveniences that can be bought from the cash shop. Extra bag space. Extra bank space. Mounts of various speeds. Teleportation runes to take you back home. And of course there are many cosmetic items for sale too: costumes, pets, fireworks, etc.

But, as I mentioned in my "What I liked" post, there are also a lot of things you can buy for diamonds (RoM's standard currency for cash shop purchases) that will materially increase the power of your character quite a lot. And frankly, they're not cheap.

The main thing that frightens me is the number of ways in which you can upgrade gear, with cash shop purchases, to make it considerably more powerful than it could be without spending diamonds. A few bucks on refining jewels to increase the pluses on an item: apparently getting to +2 is feasible with jewels purchased from vendors for in-game gold, but the cash shop will get you up to +5 or +6. A few bucks more to drill rune slots into items - and each one is more expensive than the last. And even more money for purified fusion stones if you want to transmute the perfect set of six stats of your choice onto an items. And then you end up with some uber-item like this:

Now, it can certainly be pointed out that there is a brisk trade in diamonds for in-game gold on the auction house. Theoretically, there's no reason why you couldn't grind a pile of gold in-game, buy diamonds at the AH, and buy all these upgrades without spending a dime of real money. And I'd be lying if I said I had any idea how great a grind that would be - my character is level 16/16, and while the price of diamonds (something like 18,000 gold per diamond) looks enormous to me now, I have no idea how much gold a max level character can generate.

But it's ominous when you read on the forums that without well-upgraded gear, you shouldn't expect to be welcome in endgame group content. Especially if you want to tank (and did I mention that my character, which I like, is a Knight/Priest?). That doesn't really encourage me to keep playing and hope that it becomes possible to participate without either hundreds of hours of grinding or spending rather more than a standard MMORPG subscription on cash shop purchases.

Ultimately

Look, this is not a bad game. It definitely has some charm, there doesn't seem to be any shortage of quest content, and combat is quite fast-paced and as fun as any MMO at my current low level. I can't see myself getting excited about getting to endgame given the situation I described above, but I have no doubt that I'll dip in and out of it now and then, when I'm in the mood for something different - because, hey, it's free! No reason not to!

Aion - haven't played it

2009-12-06T14:07:00.002+11:00

I've been meaning to write something since a commenter asked if I'd tried out Aion. The answer is"no, I haven't."

When NCsoft were doing their "pre-order the game and get access to the beta" thing, I seriously intended to do so - with the cynical intention of cancelling my pre-order if I didn't like what I saw in the beta, of course. But.. I just never got around to it. I'm not sure why not. The time leading up to Aion's launch was right when my WoW guild scattered, so I certainly wasn't doing much in WoW. I think I might have just been grumpy with MMORPGs in general.

Anyway, some of my WoW guildmates went off to try Aion at launch, as did a guy I work with. Everyone spoke well of it initially. And then, after a couple of weeks.. they just stopped talking about it. I asked my workmate how it was going a few times, the answer always seemed to be "haven't actually played any since last time you asked." Before writing this I asked "what happened?" on my guild forums, the one serious answer I got was:

“Lots of people i talked to leveled a gazillion alts to 20 then got bored and quit.

The few that went all the way quit because there was nothing to do and no one to do it with.”

So there you go, I guess. I'm not sure if I know a single person who bought the game and actually maintained their subscription beyond the free first month. To be honest, that squares up with the feeling I've gotten all over the internets. Aion just seems like a game that promised a lot but ultimately didn't really deliver anything that anyone wanted enough to make them stick around.

Turbine finally got me to open my wallet

2009-11-25T16:06:00.003+11:00

Well, Turbine's second free "welcome back to Lord of the Rings Online" week did the trick and got me to open my wallet. I found I spent the week pretty much playing LOTRO to the exclusion of other MMOs, and the $9.95 "buy Mines of Moria including a free month's subscription" deal was finally too good to pass up.

So, now, with the Moria expansion installed, I was able to check out the two new (OK, they're not new any more, but new to me!) classes, Warden and Rune-Keeper. Inspired by this post on Dub's Diatribe, I decided to try a Warden, and I'm quite glad I did - I'm finding the "gambit" system quite fun, and it certainly seems to be a unique mechanic amongst the many MMOs I've played.

The super-quick summary is that it extends the "combo point / finisher" system used by WoW's rogues, LOTRO's champions and WAR's witch-hunters by having three different colours of combo points. Different colour combinations lead to different finishers, starting off with simple two-colour combinations (e.g. green-red is "Persevere", an attack that also places a mild heal-over-time on me) and apparently builds up to mighty five-colour combos like green-yellow-green-yellow-green, "Conviction", which places a heal-over-time on your entire group and also transfers threat from every group member to you. So far the most complex ones I have are a couple of three-colour combos, it does a good job of gradually increasing your options, with a new gambit being available every couple of levels.

I'm currently level 17 on Marchomir the Warden, and have not yet died. So I'm closing in on the apparently fairly challenging "the Undying" title which is awarded for reaching level 20 without dying. Once I hit, I think, level 10, I decided this might be fun to focus on. I'll be happy to get it, but I will confess that as I get closer and it feels like more is at stake, it is sucking some of the joy out of the gameplay. I'm not about to flex my muscles trying to solo a fellowship quest with a risk like that. Oh well, it'll be over soon one way or the other, then I can cut loose!

So much gaming going on #2

2009-11-13T22:06:00.005+11:00

Over at Player Versus Developer, Green Armadillo posts about having too much gaming to do and not enough hours in the week. I know the feeling! I'm no less busy than I was last time I posted about so much gaming going on.

I landed in the closed beta of Allods Online, a new free-to-play MMO coming out of Russia. That runs for two weeks. I've only played one session last night, not enough to put any real thoughts together, but it's a slick and polished looking game, with a pleasingly different feel to its setting - it starts you off on board a flying ship locked in a cannon battle with another from the opposite faction, a far cry from the usual small village in a lightly forested, lightly hilly piece of Olde Englishe countryside.

Mechanically, I didn't see anything particularly original in my brief play so far - probably the most novel thing is that the combat doesn't seem to have any auto-attacks, it's purely the usage of special attacks. My biggest criticism so far? I have to say, it takes a tediously long time to beat a lower level enemy to death. The actual pace of the cut and thrust of combat feels fine - it just takes a. lot. of. hits. to take down an enemy - even one that poses no particular threat to you.

And now Lord of the Rings Online has just kicked off another free week. I kind of feel like the last one ran out before I made a conscious decision about whether to resubscribe or not, so I'll give it another chance. Especially since I read over at Keen & Graev's blog that Turbine are looking at re-working the epic questline to make it much more solo-friendly, to combat the problem that in a mature game with most of the players sitting at the level cap, it's not so easy for new players to find people to group with while levelling. This was something that bummed me during my last free week, as my quest log filled up with fellowship quests and I didn't see a lot of people to try to do them with.

On top of that, things are working out nicely on Frostmourne, my new WoW server. I hadn't raided since mid-July, but my freshly reassembled guild has run Trial of the Crusader 10-man the last two weeks. It's a fun little raid, for sure. No trash, five fights which are all pretty fresh and fun. Not very hard (talking normal mode here of course, not hard mode). And it's great to be raiding with the guys again, with all the trash talk on Vent and so on. I'm also (finally!) levelling a death knight, just so I have an alt on the new server, and it is definitely a fun class. I should have tried it sooner! Halfway through level 74 at the moment.

So, the stuff I was up to last time? Obviously I got my Alganon thoughts posted when the NDA dropped - and some links sent my way by Tobold and Lum the Mad gave me some rather unexpected traffic. I doubt half a dozen people had ever read anything I posted prior to that, and suddenly there were thousands of hits. Not to mention that it was very nice to get linked up from two blogs that I've been reading and enjoying for quite a long time!

Fallen Earth, to be honest, I didn't get a whole lot of play in during their free trial. Some, and it certainly felt better than it did when I tried it during beta. Didn't quite grab me though, and I can't exactly put my finger on why not. I think the hybrid of regular MMO combat with more shooter-style action was a big part of it. I'm sure a lot of people like it, but it just doesn't hit the spot for me.

So, plenty to do! And so few hours in the week! Between WoW, LOTRO, more of the Allods beta, taking another look at Alganon as it gets closer to its next release date, and who knows what else (WAR's endless trial maybe?), I see myself glued to the screen for a while!

Enter the strange world of F2P: Runes of Magic

2009-10-24T09:17:00.004+11:00

There's been plenty of talk around the internets this last year or so about the wave of "free to play" MMORPGs which is apparently poised to swoop in from Asia and become the next big thing in the West. It's a simple enough concept as an alternative to the traditional Western monthly subscription feee: let people play the game for free, and sell "stuff" through an online store. Make it attractive enough that the people who enjoy the game spend cash.

The closest I'd gotten to the concept was checking out Dungeons & Dragons Online, formerly subscription-based game that went free-to-play as something of a last-gasp attempt to save a game with poor subscriber numbers. Their model is based not so much around an item store as a content store: basically, if you play for free, there are only a handful of dungeons you can access, so you'll need to grind them repeatedly. But for a few bucks each, you can buy access to others, giving a much less repetitive experience.

But recently I decided to check out Runes of Magic, a Taiwanese game, translated and managed in the West by a German company, and apparently a very representative example of the free-to-play plus item store model. They have recently released their first expansion, The Elven Prophecy, have boasted more than two million players (although I take this to mean more than two million accounts created, who knows how many stuck around), and generally seem to be going pretty well. And hey, it's free! Let's see what it's like!!

The first first impression was not great. After installing and firing up the game, it naturally wanted to download a patch. The patching process failed due to lack of disk space - OK, my fault. But the error message had two spelling mistakes in it, and after I had cleared up some disk space, the loader still insisted on re-downloading the entire patch (couple of hundred megabytes) before trying again.

Anyway, that out of the way, once I was in-game the first impression was much more positive. Very familiar in style, with the usual MMORPG second person perspective, unit frames top left, minimap top right, action bars at the bottom, etc. One ultra-brief tutorial later, I was given a goodie bag and a temporary horse and sent on my merry way.

The world is colourful and the sound effects are very gamey rather than realistic - I'm assuming this is the Asian aesthetic showing, as the atmosphere was more like a console platformer than medieval Europe.

Following posts in this series: Runes of Magic: what I liked, Runes of Magic: what I didn't like

Runes of Magic: what I liked

2009-10-26T09:56:00.011+11:00

Previous post in this series: Enter the strange world of F2P: Runes of Magic

So I've spent some time playing Runes of Magic over the last two weeks - enough time to get a character up to level 15/15. And so far, here's what I've found likable about the game.

My general impression of RoM before I ever played it was that it was regarded as "a free-to-play game that was polished enough to be a subscription game". Interestingly, though, googling for reviews just now in the hope of finding some pithy quotes, it seems that most reviewers slammed it for it's overall lack of polish. Maybe they've gotten a lot of work done in the seven months since its initial Western release, because I didn't find it lacking at all. The general feel of the interface, the graphics, the sounds, the game mechanics, stability, etc., was indeed all good enough that I would not have found it out of place for this to be a pay-to-play title.

Class system

Getting into the mechanics, I'd heard a lot of "WoW clone" talk, and I guess I was expecting it to be a lot more WoW-like than it actually is. Sure, it's a race-class-level system, but if you stand it next to other race-class-level games I've played in recent years, such as Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer Online and EverQuest 2, it is no more similar to WoW than it is to any of the others - they're all different takes on the general concept that dates back to pen & paper Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s. And personally, I found RoM's "primary class / secondary class" system quite interesting.

Basically, RoM has eight classes, generally pretty standard fantasy archetypes like warrior and mage and priest. But once you've hit level 10, you can select a secondary class, which allows you to use some of the abilities of that class as well as those of your main. I started off as a priest and took knight as my secondary. This allows me to use some holy melee skills (whereas as a plain priest I couldn't do anything useful in melee), an armour buff and debuff, etc.

To be honest, knight as a secondary class doesn't feel terribly useful for a priest. But! When I'm in town, I can switch it around to become a knight with priest as my secondary class. In this fashion, characters have two distinct choices to switch between, much like WoW's dual talent specs. So I can be a priest/knight, and heal, or I can be a knight/priest, and be a tank with some healing abilities. This seems like a particularly powerful combination, having priest as a secondary grants my knight several healing spells, including a fairly powerful instacast heal over time, which combined with the knight's ability to regain mana using a melee move makes me feel almost immortal.

I'm not sure how many combinations are possible (it's not the full 8 x 7 = 56 since some classes are human-only or elf-only), but it's quite a few - certainly more than the number of classes offered by any single-class game, even WAR with it's 24 classes.

Item upgrading

We're all accustomed to the search for better and better gear being a huge part of any fantasy MMO. What really caught my interest about RoM is that customizing and upgrading your gear is at least as big a part of the game as obtaining it in the first place.

In WoW, for instance, weapons and most types of armour can be enchanted, with there being generally a handful of endgame-quality enchants to choose between. And some items have sockets that you can put a gem of your choice into, to enhance a particular stat. RoM, on the other hand, has no less than four different ways in which you can customize and upgrade items.

It can all get as complicated as hell, here's a thread on the RoM forums covering the various processes, but basically you're looking at stripping stats from unwanted items to put them onto your gear, breaking down other unwanted items and using the results to increase the "tier" of your gear, using refining jewels to add "pluses" to your gear, and finally drilling sockets in your gear in order to fit runes. It seems like an absolute mini-maxer or theorycrafter's delight.

And it really appeals to my opinion that crafting in MMOs should be all about customization, not just about making your own items but about making them exactly the way you want them. RoM's actual crafting system is nothing special - a pretty standard fixed-recipe system, not much different from a bunch of other games - but the item upgrading really forms a crafting metagame.

The downside is, to do a lot of this fun stuff, you need to spend money at the item store. Perhaps a lot of money. Using components purchased in game, you can put three or maybe four desirable stats onto your item - using purified fusion stones from the cash shop, you can get six. Using refining jewels purchased in game, you can realistically upgrade an item to +1 or +2 - using refining jewels from the cash shop, you can get +6. And as for rune sockets, if your item doesn't have any to start with, drillers from the cash shop are the only way to add them.

Needless to say, this flies in the face of the "play for free, pay for convenience" model of f2p MMOs, and will form a big part of my "what I didn't like" post.

Next post in this series: Runes of Magic: what I didn't like

Alganon launch pushed back a month

2009-10-28T08:50:00.004+11:00

Update on the Alganon front.

“After taking time to process player feedback, work with our strategic partners, and present options to our investment team, we have decided to move the release date for Alganon from October 31st to December 1st...”
- source

No doubt the extra time is sorely needed, and I certainly hope that this enables them to do a good cleanup of the UI and hammer down some bugs and glitches. I still fear far too much of the design is unimaginative and derivative though, and that won't be fixed in a month.

LOTRO: The moral of morale

2009-10-20T10:48:00.008+11:00

As I was walking to work this morning, something that occurred to me about Lord of the Rings Online. A tiny change of terminology takes a mechanic that is common to basically every MMORPG in existence, and makes it make a lot more sense.

So you have this green bar. When bad people hit you, it gets shorter. When you use healing spells or bandages or such things, it gets longer. If it gets down to nothing, you're dead and have to respawn at a graveyard, or run back to your body as a ghost, or some such thing. Some games call it "life", some call it "health", some hark back to D&D and call it "hit points."

LOTRO calls it "morale," and their take on the concept is a clever one.

When your morale falls to zero, you're not dead - you've been defeated. And you don't respawn at a graveyard - you find yourself back at a safe spot to which you have retreated. So there's no suspension of disbelief about dying and dying and dying again.

Similarly, on the healing front, instead of magically "healing wounds", various means exist to "rally your morale". This works well, because while Middle Earth is certainly a world of magic, the magic in the world is ancient and powerful, and not really the domain of player characters. There are no low level priests and mages running around. So "healing" is the domain of minstrels and their inspiring tunes, or captains and their rallying cries.

Mechanically, scarcely a difference from WoW or any other fantasy MMO. But just that little tweak to the terminology makes such a difference to the feel.

Alganon NDA lifted, here are my thoughts

2009-10-27T09:53:00.001+11:00

Disclaimer: This will probably read somewhat like a review. And some might say that reviewing a pre-release beta of a game is unfair. But this NDA lift comes only five days before Alganon's planned release date, and I am confident that version 1.0.3, which I have been testing, is not going to be far removed from what they are selling next week.

The first I heard of Alganon was when Tobold was giving away some beta keys over on his blog. I didn't win one from him, but I did win one from Massively a few days later.

Alganon bills itself as "A Unique Fantasy MMORPG," but in reality there is little unique about it, it's a very standard DikuMUD-influenced race/class/level/quest fantasy MMORPG. It is being developed by Quest Online, a company formed by David Allen, the original designer of Horizons: Empire of Istaria, after he was rolled out of Artifact Entertainment. It has a strong following amongst the loyalists who will tell you even now that Horizons would have been the best MMO ever (instead of, as it is widely regarded, perhaps the worst), if only Allen's vision for the game had come to fruition.

Character Creation

Pretty standard looking stuff. There are two races in game at launch, which also seem to represent two factions - Asharr humans (human-looking humans) and Talrok Kujix (funny-coloured tattooed humans). Four classes are available - soldier, ranger, healer and magus. I go for a ranger - the description talks about their animal companions but apparently that design has been abandoned and they are basically just archers now, I think. Appearance customization is minimal, and cycling through the face, hair, etc. options takes several seconds per click, making it an exercise in frustration. I hit "randomize" and accept my bald greybeard.

Entering the game

First thing I tried to do for this article is take a screenshot upon entering the game. It threw a LUA error. Luckily I was able to get a shot by switching to windowed mode and using standard Windows "alt-printscreen and paste".

Pretty standard looking interface. But.. wow, so ugly. Yes, that font really is Arial. Yes, that bottom bar is WoW's apart from the startling innovation of putting the backpacks on the left. That key icon on the far left? It's only there because WoW has a keyring with that button. Alganon doesn't have a keyring but they forgot to remove the icon when they copied the UI design.

I speak to Woss Jordan, the obligatory first questgiver. He gives me a quest to.. talk to his brother Tass Jordan, standing all of three feet away. The reward, +100 Ardonya Guard rep. Nice! Let's see how much rep I need to go up in the estimation of the Ardonya Guard!

Whoops looks like they haven't implemented the rep pane yet.

Tass Jordan puts me to work, demanding 8 Andar Wolf Pelts, and offering the princely sum of five copper pieces.. and another +100 Ardonya Guard rep! So off to kill the wolves I go.

But how does it feel?

Combat is dire even for a genre not exactly known for its interactivity, especially for level one characters. It involves lobbing off a "Power Shot" (a 10-second cooldown shot that seems to do roughly 1 more damage than my autoshot), maybe one or two autoshots, and then trading poorly-animated blows with my axe for fifteen seconds or so, watching the enormous Arial text float above us, until the wolf lies dead - and I'm on 80/80 health because he was doing less damage to me than I could naturally recover.

It's some ugly stuff, too. My arrow shots are slow-moving brightly-coloured blobs. Animations are very poor, not surprising for a low-budget title. Good-looking human animations are about the hardest thing for artists to get right. It's not helped by some seriously jerky movement. Mobs don't react immediately when you attack them, and when they did come for me, they often went straight through me and then rubberbanded back. Other times, my character would start swinging his axe (and, according to the combat log, connecting) when the target still seemed about twenty feet away.

Between the general quality of the graphics, the horribly ugly UI, and poor animations, I'm struggling to think of the last time I saw a game this unattractive. We'd definitely be going back to early this decade, to the days before WoW and EQ2 really raised the bar, in two very different styles.

The strangely familiar

Unlike WoW, where you don't get your first talent point to customize your character until level 10, Alganon starts you off with one talent, sorry, "ability" point, and you earn one more a level right from the start. Only problem is, what to spend it on? Seven of the nine lowest tier talents available provide boosts to abilities I don't have yet. I decide that 1% reduction in the cost of Power Shot sounds pretty minor, and go for +1% parry instead. The parry chance on my character sheet remains obstinately stuck on 5% despite my talent.

But speaking of talents, let's take a look at the talent window, comparing it to WoW.

..and the skills window..

OK, come on. I've heard a lot of excuses about how all fantasy games have various tropes in common, about how all MMOs have similar UIs, and so on. This is not a similar UI. This is outright plagiarism. Already I've seen mutterings about how Quest Online could be setting themselves up for a lawsuit with such rampant copy'n'pasting - my favourite comment from the beta forums:

“this Alganon interface is so close to the WoW interface that either it has been somehow sublicensed from WoW, or else it truly opens itself to massive lawsuits (if WoW should think it's worth it, but the way it look Alganon would be dying a quick death if it were to face the reviewers next week, and so it would hardly be worth the cost of Blizzard's lawyers).”
- Involution

Some game mechanics are frighteningly derivative, too, like the warrior (sorry, "soldier") and his rage (sorry, "anger") bar that grows during combat, and is spent to use combat moves. I'm much more inclined to give this a pass, though, since duplicated game mechanics do fall rather more into the "everyone does it" area.

Crafting

Crafting is, as far as I can see, entirely derivative of WoW also. You can learn all tradeskills in the beta, but for release, apparently the limit is two. Same as WoW. Tradeskills are mining, blacksmithing, herbalism, alchemy, skinning, leatherworking, tailoring and.. salvaging? What's this? One of the eight tradeskills is not the same as in WoW? "Salvaging allows players to break down crafted and enchanted items into raw materials. An increased skill in Salvaging allows the breakdown of more powerful items." Aha, so it's disenchanting.

The actual mechanics are also appear identical. Fixed recipes, difficulties starting at orange for guaranteed skillups, then becoming yellow. I'm guessing green and then grey will follow, but I didn't have the stamina to grind that far.

What makes Alganon unique?

Alganon's "About Alganon" and "Features" pages talk about a lot of unique features which supposedly make the game stand out from the crowd. Just one problem: virtually none of these features have actually yet been implemented in game. A community rep has stated on the beta testers' forum that the website should be updated "soon," but it hasn't happened yet, and to my mind it is just unethical to be soliciting pre-orders whilst advertising these features in such a way as to make it seem that they are already implemented and will be in-game at launch time.

The kudos system, the consignment system, deities and crusades, custom dynamic quests, pets, appearance changing as you level up, instances, UI customization, battlegrounds, indeed PvP of any sort: all of these features are described on those two pages with no mention whatsoever of the fact that they are not yet in game.

About the only distinguishing feature which is present is the "studies" system. This can best be described as the skill training system from Eve Online, bolted on top of the class/level system. Various studies - some combat related, some magical, some crafting related, etc. - can be queued up to train real-time. The intention being that all players, regardless of whether they can dedicate heavy or light amounts of time to playing, will advance at the same rate in at least this area of character development.

My initial dabblings found studies taking times ranging from 10 minutes to 1 day to complete. There are combat-related ones which do things like "increases your accuracy when using swords and daggers", stat-boosting ones, and crafting ones which apparently grant access to new recipes.

They're not massively interesting, and I have to wonder how well the real-time advancement is going to interact with Quest Online's decision to cut all but two races and four classes from the initial launch. Assuming more races and classes are added at a later date, anyone who wants to play one of them is going to be put in a position where they have to abandon all of their study advancement and start from scratch to do so.

So much missing

Interestingly, a lot of elements not yet in game are able to be accessed through the keybindings menu. Some, like Kudos and Pets, bring up mostly laid-out windows with placeholder text. Others simply throw LUA errors. The "achievements" window keybind brings up an empty window. I haven't seen any mention of achievements on the website, so this was interesting, almost an easter egg!

One does wonder when they plan to clean out all this half-finished stuff, though, given that the game is supposed to officially launch in five days time, and headstart access for people who pre-order is supposed to start in three days!

What's the conclusion?

Alganon, as it stands now, is unattractive, unoriginal, uninspired and unfinished. It is being plugged as some sort of niche title, but I'll be damned if I can figure what niche it is trying to target. To me, a niche game is something like Eve Online or Darkfall which very consciously features design decisions that will only appeal to a subset of gamers. The design goal behind Alganon, as far as I can tell, is "slavishly imitate WoW, and then add a couple of new features that we think would be cool." The only problem is, the imitation is of the poorest imaginable quality, and hardly any of the new features have been added.

Why is Alganon launching in such an unfinished state? One can only assume that the money has run out, and they need to shift some boxes in order to keep paying the bills. Talking the big talk about features and selling pre-orders while the game is still under NDA is one way to try to raise some cash.

I can't imagine it's going to lead to anything other than a trainwreck though. Games like Age of Conan and Warhammer Online have demonstrated how remarkably little tolerance the gaming public has for games launching in a poor state - and both those games were in much, much better shape than Alganon. I've probably played 15 or so MMORPGs over the last six years, and I cannot see any way that three more days work by Quest Online is going to make Alganon anything other than the poorest title I have ever seen on the market.

So much gaming going on

2009-10-24T09:04:00.002+11:00

So many MMORPGs, so few hours in the day.

My Lord of the Rings Online welcome back week ran out - I haven't taken up the $9.99 Mines of Moria + a month's play offer yet and don't plan to in the immediate future. It may still happen though.

I have been beta-testing Alganon and working on a long blog piece about it, which I need to finish up ready for when the NDA drops on October 26th.

I have also been playing some Runes of Magic these last few weeks and working on a blog piece about that. It's not nearly finished but I probably should drop it out there as part one, and write a second part at a later date.

And Massively just gave me a key good for a 15-day free trial of Fallen Earth. I beta-tested that one a few months back and thought it had real quality issues and some serious design flaws, so I never even considered buying it, but since launching it has attracted a fair bit of praise from bloggers whose opinions I quite respect, so I'll take another look - if only I can find the time!

Because on top of all that, a bunch of guys from my World of Warcraft guild (which scattered so completely a few months ago) have reassembled on Frostmourne, an Oceanic server. They have formed a new guild with an eye to getting 10-man raiding back in action and maybe recruiting back up to 25's. So I transferred one of my characters (my main, a dwarf priest) over there to see how things go. I would really like to see Icecrown Citadel when patch 3.3 lands, and see it with my friends, not trying to pug it months after it's old news.

Unfortunately, in a moment of Friday beers induced foolishness, I completely forgot to stack my character with money before transferring him. I intended to take the maximum, 20,000 gold, with me, since I'd be on a strange server without all my tradeskill alts and supporting infrastructure, but no. As soon as I arrived I realized I only had what I'd been carrying, just over 2,000 gold.

Well, it will have to do!