02/21/13

MMO Radio: Episode 09 – “Wildstar 2013: Lovely, Lovely Pigeons”

Adam is out this week gettin’ hitched, so Gavin Townsley and I hold down the fort! Thankfully, it was a big news week with Wildstar being confirmed for 2013! We break down why this game is worth paying attention to, even for someone like me who tries not to attend! What? I don’t like spoiling things for myself!

But hey, when you have a full-on paths to endgame based on exploring, lore finding, being social, and yes, killing, that’s worth noting. Plus, 40 man raiding, dynamically spawning quest hubs and dungeons, action combat, player housing, PvP, and content layered enough where a mining node could turn out to be a spot on the back of a giant raid boss… well, you can see where we’d be piqued.

A little later we talk about Mortal Kombat, TERA’s excellent combat and odd boob physics, and anime roleplay! I bet you thought you’d get out of tabletop this episode, didn’t you? Well, let that one drop of sweat stand out from your head now, because we go there!

A reminder: Our 5-star iTunes review contest is still going! Leave a written review for your chance to win a copy of Strike Suit Zero courtesy of Hooked Gamers!

Gavin’s Links: Massively, Dragon’s Tear Tavern RP Community
Chris’ Links: Hooked Gamers; Game By Night; Vagary.TV
Adam’s Links: Epic Slant Press

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09/22/10

Nostalgia and the Super Nintendo

With FFXIV launching tomorrow, I haven’t had much desire to play other MMOs. I’ve spent a little time working on Book 7 in LotRO but knowing that I’ll soon be have a new “main game” somehow makes the experience feel empty. With the blogosphere raging over the great nostalgia debate of 2010 (also known as the summer slump), I’ve been thinking about my own gaming past and, inevitably, I found myself thinking of the SNES.

The Super Nintendo was the system I cut my teeth on. Well, I was around for the late days of the Atari and enjoyed my share of Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt (remember having to blow on games to get them to work?), but the SNES came out right as I got old enough to really consider myself a “gamer.” Since my dad was a fisherman, I spent a lot of time playing Bassin’s Black Bass and Bass Pro. I knew nothing about the intricacies of fishing, but I loved participating in tournaments. That might have been where I began but I played lots more. Super Mario World was another old favorite. Remember the giant bullet? The goal post stage marker?

Later on I discovered Earthworm Jim. Those games will always stick with me. Before then, I’d never really seen humor done well in a video game before that. I think I laughed out loud the first time I saw a cow hanging from a crane waiting to be shot down. Everything about that game made it memorable, from the imaginative levels and enemies, to the cartoon sound effects.

The two that I’ve really been wanting to visit though are the original Donkey Kong Country and Super Metroid. Two examples of platforming done right.

Donkey Kong really epitomizes what the SNES was for me. Levels were simple but challenging. You had to rely on timing if you wanted to get by. Enemies were distinctly bad but in a non-threatening, cartoon kind of way. To kill things you’d either jump on their heads or throw barrels at them. As a kid living with a single father, having Diddy Kong and Donkey Kong team up was especially neat. I think I thought that if my dad and I were monkeys, that’s who we’d be. I especially loved the mine cart levels. All you had to do was jump but, jeez, your timing had to be spot on or you’d crash every time.

And then there was Super Metroid. It was the first game I ever remember beating. Back then, I think I had it down to just under three hours on a playthrough (and I played through it probably five or six times). Pretty different from nowadays. For being a game so short in comparison to today’s games, it had a lot of depth. You’d explore levels, beat lots of aliens with unique strengths and weaknesses, and upgrade your varia suit with new weapons and abilities. By the end when you’d face off against Mother Brain you were a badass. Then, old Brainy would just about kill you and make you even more of a badass.

A monkey riding a rhino killing beavers. Jungle beavers. Thank you, Nintendo.

I could go on but you probably don’t want to hear it all.

I spent the better part of tonight playing some of these again on the PC. I even plugged in an old gamepad so I could play them proper. While games have certainly come a long way, these old favorites are still just as fun as they were years back. What really got me though was just how different our take on gaming was back then. Platformer games had the thinnest veil of a story, an excuse to get you playing really. So much was innocent, too. It wasn’t about headshots or kill counts. It was about collecting coins, and rings, and extra lives. Bad guys were bad but they still seemed kind of snuggly– you wouldn’t expect them to actually hurt you anyways.

While I love where games are at today, tonight really reminded me of why I play games in the first place. High definition graphics and deep systems are nice, but, really, we could lose all that and I’d still be a gamer. Back then, I played because the enemies, levels, and challenges made me smile. It could be as simple as a timed button press, but if that press moved the screen just a little bit more to the right, gave me a funny noise or animation, or gave me some special power or attack, I was happy. That’s the kind of experience that made a gamer out of me. Games today do that in their own special way, but it was nice to get back to my 32-bit roots.

When it comes to MMOs, I think it’s the same thing. Games today do a lot of what their forebears did, they’re just different. It doesn’t mean they’re bad or “not as good” as those of yesteryear. And, just like with the Super Nintendo, as much as the vets look back on those old days and reminisce, not many would actually go back if they could. They play today’s games because, well, they’re today’s games. For consoles and MMOs alike, I think we can all agree that there are things to love past, present, and future.

How about you? Any golden oldies you’re especially fond of?

09/8/10

Vertically Challenged May Not Be So Bad.

With Chris being gone and the readers of Game By Night at the mercy of whomever stops in and posts, I have decided to make my move and subject you all to yet another rambling from the dark recesses of my skull. God Speed readers.

Recently, I have been reading a lot of posts about the coming of Cataclysm to World of Warcraft. That is, the expansion, not the downfall of the MMO giant. One of the things that I have come to realize over the years of bouncing between two personalities (the one that is a total fanboy and the other that is imagining what type of pitchfork to storm Blizzard HQ with) is that WoW is really boring just before expansions. Even with the recent additions of Ruby Sanctum and the relatively new ICC content, the game just slows to a halt. Something about knowing all of the work you put in now, will mean nothing in a few months time makes the experience… meh. This seems to be the nature of any game that increases its vertical game rather than it’s horizontal.

Cataclysm is going to revamp the 1-60 and provide new content post 80. It is arguably the best expansion, imo, they have come up with yet. Mainly because they are refocusing in on the leveling experience and not just the meta end game. And this is where my brain started spouting what ifs.

Cataclysm is adding both and endgame and the new content, so we know that it is possible for them to pump out content on both fronts. Yet the WoW path pushes you into only two valid options for extending your game time: Raiding and PvP. Everything else is just utilized to get you to these two end game goals. Where is the time spent on making the rest of the game enjoyable for non-raiders/pvpers? I can’t think of any.

As the industry giant, it surprised me to see that they have not been more innovative on this front. Sure they add new dungeons to explore, but most of the time it is more in line with a tool to get you into the next raid more efficiently (also read skip over older raids) rather than something to promote a longer more enjoyable game play scenario. Ive mentioned this to people before and have often been confronted with the option of, “Well do some of the older raids if you want a new experience.” The problem is the fact that I am trying to find something fun to do and it seems like the only option is a raid, be it old or new. Don’t get me wrong, I love raiding. However, when I need a break, doing an older version of the same thing feels like being handed a pencil when I am sick of my selection of crayon colors. Sure I can scribble away creating new varieties of the color gray, but in the end Im stuck with something dull and crappy colored that was more or less a watered down version of the initial experience.

This isn’t meant to be a slam on World of Warcraft, but AAA endgame focused games as a whole. I look at the games that I have the most fun playing and it tends to be the games that offer me a variety of experiences outside of the holy trinity. No not that holy trinity, the Raiding, PvP, Crafting holy trinity. Games that deviate and offer fun things to do like decorative housing, vehicle racing, music options (go lotro!), heck even gambling are largely more entertaining on a day to day basis. Call them mini games if you want, but I find that these can be great mini experiences that really add flavor to a game’s entrée.

If WoW continues on the same way it has the last two expansions, we will see minor innovations and large reskinnings of the same experience we have had the last few years. Exploring the changed lands of Azeroth will be AWESOME!… the first time through. Maybe even the second. And then we are right back where we started with content we have seen and nothing to do but level and get to cap so we can raid or pvp. Even that will eventually lose luster and we will be sitting in the same spot we are now. Unmotivated to take on content that will easily be erased by the next expansion.

If the expansions were more horizontal in nature, we would have so much more to do as a whole on just the raiding front. Say the game stayed with a 60 cap. All of those zones, raids, dungeons, experiences would be options for your end game rather than requirements to get there, or passed over unused content. Making alts wouldn’t be a chore as much as a new experience. One path would turn into 60. All that gear? Interchangeable adding new flexibilities to your personal looks and customizations. One raid wouldnt stand out at THEE raid. Players could enjoy what they thought was the most fun and still continue to participate in the newer content without taking a huge DPS/Healing/Tankage hit.

It may just be me but I really think this would improve how the game is played, not take away from it. I guess deep down I am just tired of seeing the ceiling get higher while the walls of boredom close in on me. Come on developers, let’s see some expansions that add to the game rather than trading old content for new. The funny part for me is that the most innovative titles in this area seem to be the in the “less quality” F2P market. Go figure.

What do you all think? What are your thoughts on the Horizontal/Vertical Expansion? Do you think a change like this would add or take away from your game experience? Would it increase the longevity of a games fun for you?

Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

Yogi

08/10/10

Let Me Die Already.

One of the many things that makes life so interesting is risk. Whether it is an investment, a proposal, or just jumping off a bridge with a giant rubber band attached to your leg, it is risk that makes the blood start pumping. For me, risk can be associated with some of the best and worst feelings of my life. The bad rarely outweigh the good.

Gaming is an interesting hobby as the risks associated with such are usually pretty low. When you wander through an enemy territory, you may get ganked. The result? A few added minutes while you collect your now beaten shell of a body. Then you are back to normal. Some games try to provide more risk such as letting enemy players take loot from you or requiring you to get back to the place you died to retrieve your gear. There are even options out there where death means character deletion. Now that is something to think about before pulling more than you can chew.

A few days ago Massively wrote up a piece about a player in EVE online that lost around $1200 due to being scanned, and destroyed by enemy players while transporting a ridiculous amount of PLEX. For those who are not familiar with PLEX, it is essentially the equivalent of in game play time currency. EVE set up a system that allows players to buy game time with real money and sell it for in game money via PLEX. It is an interesting system that seems to be working well. A few weeks ago, EVE online started allowing players to transport PLEX via their ships cargo holds. This led to the huge loss by the player massively mentioned.

Reading about the issue got me thinking about how awesome risk can make a game. When the risks are high, the rewards are all the sweeter. Risk has the ability to transform mindless mmo tasks into a decision of profit and loss, life and death. You suddenly are much more aware of your surroundings, the way you pull mobs, the prep work to ensure your greatest chance at victory. It can make the simple small everyday decisions feel much more important.

This obviously isn’t the type of environment we all like as gamers. Not everyone likes taking risks that could mean the last few days of quests amount to nothing cause all your rewards were stolen. Not everyone likes tip toeing around corners afraid that a surprise could mean character deletion. For me, it makes me appreciate the small things more. And for those who caught my write up on mmo atmosphere on Nomadic Gamer, you know that it is the small things that can really pull me into a game.

Im curious why more MMO’s don’t have the option of taking huge risks. I for one would be all over having a Hardcore mode in World of Warcraft. I would love to experience the game as an actual soldier of the war between alliance, horde and whatever third party is showing up in the latest expansion. Something about knowing that a slip up could mean death is just… awesome! I would never pull a murloc every again, but the exploration and gathering of crafting materials would be so much more exciting.

I don’t necessarily want a game fully dedicated to these risk style mechanics. I do think it would be nice to have the option once in awhile. Their are titles out there that provide it for their game, but I guess I am looking for it in my game. At the end of the day when World of Warcraft has become just another meta grind, it would be nice to take the challenge to the next level and roll on a hardcore server. Some place where courage, preparation, and intelligence dictate who will reign with a smile and die with tears.

What do you all think?

Thanks for reading

02/7/10

First Impressions: MAG (PS3 MMO – yes, it’s actually an MMO)

MAG is an interesting game. It’s part MMO, part RPG, and three parts FPS. It’s also the only game of it’s kind on the market, which makes it immediately interesting to a huge swath of players, myself included. I was able to playtest it for a few hours today and went from being disappointed to having a great time within the first hour. It’s one of those.

Let’s start with what MAG is, in specifics.

*NOTE*: Skip to the end of the article for my overall impressions. Right below the cut are the nuts and bolts of the game.

The Basics (or, how it works)

At it’s core, it’s a large scale first person shoot in the vein as the Battlefield series. It boasts the largest amount of concurrent players of any shooter, nay, any console game period, to come before it, up to a total of 256 in a single map.

There are four game modes, with only two available from the start. The first two, Suppression and Sabotage, each feature 32v32 battles. Suppression is large scale death match and is pretty much just for training, Sabotage is infiltrate and hold. The next two, Acquisition and Domination, are unlocked as you level and feature 128 and 256 players respectively, split into two teams. Acquisition is an attackers/defenders map that sees the defenders escorting a munitions truck to an extraction point. Domination has each team battling to capture certain areas of bases around the map, much like the battlefield series. This map allows you to use vehicles and destroy parts of the environment in order to succeed.

The game features three factions, each at war with one another in the “not-to-distant future” conflict known as the Shadow Wars. I won’t go any deeper into story than that, because it’s pretty much absent. In an “online only” FPS, that’s really not a big deal though. They give you the context and send you to war. Most shooter fans will be satisfied at that since, let’s face it, most are playing for the action more than the story.

MMO/RPG Stuff

What I really find interesting about this game is the way the character progression system works. You level up, like in other shooters, but the way you advance your character is totally non-linear. You can arrange your loadout as you see fit and switch after every death. That’s the boring stuff, though.

Click to enlarge

What’s cool is the way you earn skill points after every level to spend on new abilities and weapons. It’s a lot like a talent tree. If you enjoy machine gunning, you can put points in increasing accuracy with a new grip or special site. If you want a better sidearm, you can toss your points there.

It’s right in line as an MMO in this way, expect war-game specific. Well done.

Shooter Stuff

Going into each map requires strategy and coordination if you want to win. You’re not going to get far if you’re a fan of rushing in, guns blaring. But, more importantly, why is this the case?

There are two facts that will prevent you from being a solo hero:

One, the maps are big. Really big. If you go it alone, you’ll be shot down within seconds of breaking away from the pact. If you get lucky and get behind enemy lines, you might get a kill or two, but it’s a suicide mission at best, and calamitous at worse, since it may get any followers killed too.

Second, with this many players, it’s a little bit of a cluckpluck. There are people everywhere. One of the things that gets repeated about the game is that “you don’t matter.” Well, you do, but when 31-127 are on your team with you, replacements are all over the place. Since that also applies to the other team, you can see how it’d be hard to escape their line of sight.

It’s not uncommon to die with no idea of who shot you. It’s alright though. Death is a part of any shooter, you just get back up, go back out, and find better cover. If you’re lucky, you might be able to sneak around and pick of the sniper who just killed you. I love doing that. Payback’s a bitch, suckas.

Overall Impressions

Okay, so the meat and potatoes of what I think. The game is fun, yet, Call of Duty it is not.

“MAG is to CoD and Battlefield what Fallen Earth is to WoW”

The graphics aren’t as good (but they’re far from bad… think early PS3 release) but, then again, there’s no way CoD could support this many players without being unplayable with lag. It’s a necessary drop and one that you’ll only notice for a little bit.

Likewise, it’s rough around the edges. There’s no animation when you look down the barrel of your not-as-realistic-as-CoD gun. Sometimes you’ll run into weird terrain glitches where you won’t be able to hop over something you think you should be able to. Also like FE, these can largely be ignored for the sake of gameplay. Honestly, I stopped noticing them and got immersed in the action.

A lot of people doubt whether or not MAG should be considered an MMO. Most of those people haven’t played it because, if they had, they’d see the intrinsic connection the character progression system has with other, more mainstream MMOs. I had my doubts going in, I’ll admit, but it’s 100% MMO, although not an MMORPG in the traditional sense.

As for lasting appeal, I’d put it right up there with the other big shooters. There’s nothing separating it’s replayability from the big-boys and, as a plus, you can switch sides when you’re done and see what it’s like working with the other team.

As of this post, I’ve only played Suppression since I just got the game today. The learning curve is low enough where I went from getting trounced in the beginning to topping our my squad by the time I was done. I’m planning on sticking with this one (I find it more addictive than the other big shooters because of the progression system).

In short, if you’re an MMO fan that also likes competitive shooters, you’re probably going to love this game. If you’re just into MMOs, this may not be the game for you. At its core, MAG is a larger scale Battlefield with an MMO progression system. In my opinion, that’s pretty damn cool.

“MAG is to COD and Battlefield what Fallen Earth is to WoW”

08/30/09

Enough with this WoW Clone crap

These are clones. I call them WAR, Aion, and Lil LotRO

These are clones. I call them Warry, Aionia, and Lil' LotRO

I’ve heard this thought echoed across the internet for months now and it’s getting a little old. Aion Online is not a “WoW Clone.” By repeating that little bleet, all you’re doing is proclaiming your ignorance of what the game is even about.

What is it that makes a game a clone of WoW anyways? That is has quests? Classes? A UI? You’d might think that if you believe claims like these. Well, let’s get this straight, any MMO worth it’s merit has these things. Stop proclaiming any game that doesn’t re-imagine the UI is a clone of WoW. LotRO and WAR both got the same rap and, you know what, neither of them are clones of the golden god of 800-lb gorillas.

You know what I’ll cop to? The game is reminiscent of WoW in the questing/PvE progression model. The added truth behind that? That makes up less than half the game if you play it to max level, unless you explicitly choose to make it your main game.

At level 25 you get to the core of the Aion Online experience and that’s the Abyss. And, guess what, the Abyss is not Lake Wintergrasp.

If you’re going to grasp at straws the game has more in common with DAoC than WoW, but most of the people throwing these criticisms wouldn’t know that. These are the people that probably started and will finish their MMO careers with World of Warcraft. To those people, let me point this out, WoW is an Everquest clone dumbed way down. Every new fantasy game that comes out is a “WoW Clone.” Well, WoW didn’t reinvent the wheel anymore than other games out there.

You know the sad truth of the argument? At it’s core, Aion does have a big similarity to WoW. You know what it is? That it’s taken the ideas of other successful games and made them their own. It’s taken that melting plot philosophy to heart and added to it. The questing model is similar to WoW. The story delivery echoes of LotRO. The leveling grind echoes of Final Fantasy XI. The PvPvE takes the best parts of DAoC and WAR.

Tell me how combining all of these things together and polishing it to a gleam is a bad thing. Games forever have borrowed from one another. And, you know what? At this point, it’d be pretty hard to be totally unique anyways. Try to write a book or a song that hasn’t already been imagined some way before. You won’t be able to do it.

All of this WoW Clone crap just reeks of bitterness. WoW is a PvE game with a PvP option. Aion Online is a PvPvE game. They’re all tied. If you’re yelling about Aion being WoW in a new setting, you haven’t played it long enough or are reading the wrong sources. Leveling =/= clone.

- Chris

PS: If you’re looking for what’s similar and what’s not, check out these articles:

- Q&A: Aion vs. WoW – Keen and Graev
- Comparing Aion vs. WAR – Keen and Graev
- Extendable Weapons – Aionic Thoughts (this is just cool, does WoW have these too?)

07/31/09

Before there was WoW, there were MUDs

Depending on which definition you read, MUD stands for either Multi-User-Domain or Dungeon. Their origins go back to 1976 when Adventure which was programmed on a computer likely running with a Dorito processor. This was a dungeons and dragons themed (D&D) text based game where users played by entering commands into the game to perform actions and reading descriptions. The following year Zork came out on the ARPANET (great grand father of that thing we call the Internet) – this was the first Multi-User game that people could dial into the ARPANET and play together. Much like WoW of today MUDs also had a reputation of consuming people’s lives. At their height of their popularity some of them were even pay-to-play and made even more money than WoW in subscription fees. MUDs of more modern day are connected to via TELNET (built into all operating systems) or more sophisticated MUD clients which support an array of different things.

And now, here’s how I come into this:

In 1999 the Internet was still a relatively new and exciting thing to my friends and I. One of the people outside of my group of friends began playing a MUD – this gradually spread like wildfire and soon there were about 30 of us playing in our area. I spent the next 4 years playing it, ignoring other graphical online games just because I had so much fun and enjoyed it with all my friends. We always would tell stories of our exploits either killing other players or completeing quests, or our tragic down falls to some super NPC or even sometimes bitch to each other when one of us killed the other. I always look back at that period of my life fondly, you could no doubt about it label me a geek.

Sometime in 2002 – our beloved game went offline without much warning. We were all in shock – some of us began to bide our time, some of us went off to find new MUDs and then there was my friend Chris and I. Sometime in June 2002, we pushed off the shore in his dad’s canoe with a notebook and brains bursting with ideas. Together we drafted our initial idea for a game at that point we called “Mystic Shadows” – this was great and all but neither of us knew the first thing about creating one of these games or the language that was used to make them. It was later on in that summer I began to press myself to learn C, and after finding a suitable code base to build up from I began to slowly but surely make the changes to the code and add in the features we had discussed. In the fall, “Mystic Shadows” would occasionally go online from my Windows 98SE box for a few hours a night on the weekend and my friends would come in and play and give me feedback. Surprisingly, there was little bad feedback.

Around this time the game I mentioned that inspired me to work on this came back online – and is still online to this day, it is nearly 20 years old now!

I continued to write areas along with friends and put it all together until February 2002 we finally went online live as “Realm of Shadows”! Within the first few hours people began to pour in, I think it was one of the proudest moments of my life. Looking back on what the game was then compared to what it would be later after I continued to improve my skills, it was really not that impressive – I think one of our hugest successes was to have such a dedicated and friendly staff there to help people when they needed it.

From February 2003 – until January 2006 I spent thousands of hours working on making the game better and better. The game was doing fairly well, much better than several other games I had seen and before it was over I even inspired a spin-off which still is online today running large portions of my code.

The doors were closed in January 2006 due to my increasingly busy life. Being a firm supporter of the Open Source movement, I put my code where my mouth was and released it to the public.

3 years passed. I often would think back on those days very fondly and how exciting it was to run to the library to check in on my world and see how everything was going. I’ve made many friends, met many people and learned so much – and as I mentioned, spent thousands of hours on it. I literally have 5,440 hours in game alone.

On July 1st 2009, the code base for Realm of Shadows was dusted off, recompiled and fired up again after buying my old domain name back and tracking down a new host. It is open to the public and has been seeing steady amounts of new players coming in daily.

For those of you who used to play this type of game maybe when you were just a teen like me – or those who have no idea what it was like before WoW – I invite you to come over and play with me! I look forward to seeing you there!

Realm of Shadows

Edit: The date ROS went online was February 2002, not 2003.