The State of MMORPG Gaming as 2016 Closes

This year more even than last demonstrated that MMOs are in a weird space, where the conventional aerchetype set by Everquest and then World of Warcraft (yes, and others that no one really remembers prior to WoW) has --I think-- moved from being "the only way to do it" to being both something of an oddity and also a conscious style/design decision. Today if you make a game that functions on the traditional questing/leveling/pve/pvp structure set by the industry nearly two decades ago then you are doing so because you want to actually offer up that style of game, not because it is in any way the golden apple of design (or seen as such).

We had a time when MMOs were being cranked out constantly, and in Korea at least it seems this still goes on, with a fair number getting awkward ports over to the US. But in the US, new MMORPGs need to do stuff differently, and often don't look anything like a conventional MMO used to....to the point where the line between MMO and other game is often blurred considerably. As a result, some games (like The Division, Destiny or even GTA Online) might well have a valid claim to the MMO part of the name. But despite this, I want to look at how the "tried and true" MMORPGs are doing these days.

As usual, I look at these games with the following important caveat, because I am not a normal MMO Blogger: I probably am lucky to land 50 hours in a game per year, and if an MMO gets 200 hours out of me in a year I must really, really like it, enough to devote that much of my precious time to it. When some guy comments online about how you can level to 100 in game X in a couple weeks*, remember that I am not that guy, and I have played, for example, The Elder Scrolls online continuously since it's date of release and only just hit the level twenties....albeit with like 9 characters, but you get the idea: I am the player for whom all the pre-end-game content in an MMO matters. The End Game is not for me, and I find it a time sink anyway when I do miraculously get there. When I hit level cap in WoW, for example, and wrap the current story (as much as the solo quests allow me to see) then I am done with that game; I have no time, ability or interest in the End Game raids and other nonsense.

So, with that said....here's what I followed/played over this year:

The Elder Scrolls Online

This year Elder Scrolls Online upgraded to a "One Tamriel" edition which was basically a smoothing out of the leveling experience....you can now basically go anywhere and group with anyone and the game accommodates your level accordingly.  The net result was more freedom of play and a bigger focus on what you are doing now rather than where you need to go. TESO remains my favorite fantasy MMORPG on the market right now, with beautiful graphics, enough of the Elder Scrolls aesthetic to make it interesting, and for a casual MMOer like myself it's a great game to pick up and play on those odd Sundays when you have a four or five hour block of time for some serious gaming. It also remains one of the more affordable microtransaction experiences; the most expensive items remain vanity-based, but the game regularly has sales and reduced costs on its crown points which means you can make it quite cost effective if you are patient.

Verdict: will continue to play this most likely until I finally reach level cap. Someday. But sometimes I just can't get into the experience and have to put it aside for weeks at a time, only to come back to it randomly and suddenly totally dig it again. I think it's the fact that there are moments where it feels like 95% of my quests are being delivered by ghosts, about other ghosts. Why the obsession with the ghosts, Zenimax???? WHY???

Neverwinter Online

I jumped back in to this for a few weeks earlier this year and was pleased to see that it had grown quite a bit in content. I played long enough to start (not actually succeed....just start) comprehending the bizarre multi-tiered point structures of the cash shop, but ultimately grew annoyed with the whole mess once more when I took a month away from the game, came back, and found it too annoying to bother with re-learning all over again. That said, I think Neverwinter really doesn't require any purchasing for a casual MMOer to enjoy for a while, as the game feeds you pretty much the essentials as you go. Their hook is to offer you lots of cool stuff you want to buy, and hope you do exactly that. Restraint will make this a much cheaper game, since unfortunately the cost of store items remains too high for my tastes, and their sales often do little more than drag the outrageous costs down to "almost affordable but not quite."

Verdict: I really enjoyed the play of NWO once I figured it out and learned to ignore the weird currencies design to make you pay money in the cash shop. I was disappointed to see that leaving and coming back a few weeks later left me feeling a bit out annoyed with all of it again. When I feel the temerity to stab at it once more, I will.

Defiance

This game is getting older and older, but still has periodic new events, usually driven by cash shop sales items. It remains a fun shooter to mess around with, and ties in to the Defiance TV series, but I've never been able to really enjoy it as much as I feel I should these days, since Defiance itself delved into the "MMO shooter" genre first, laying the groundwork for much better games to come, games which knew the audience for this style of game much better than poor Trion did (The Division, GTA Online and Destiny, for example). I may give up and delete it, but not before I finish watching all the episodes of the TV show.

Verdict: I think I may be done with this one, but who knows, I thought I was last year, too.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

I honestly did not have this on my radar, but three things happened: first I got into White Star --a lot-- earlier this year which really put me in the mood for some good, pulpy Star Wars-adventure. Despite my interest, I didn't think of SWTOR as an outlet for this desire. Then a new expansion was announced, featuring a cool trailer (here) that reminded me of why Bioware is so cool. Finally Rogue One released, and I rediscovered my fluctuating, on-again, off-again love for all things Star Wars. On a lark I snagged the expansion and loaded the game.

Since then I've been hooked and it's dominated my December game time, more so than any other game except The Division. The cash shop is not annoying me like I remember when it first came out...the prices aren't spectacular, but they are more affordable on average...$40 in coins gives you enough to snag the key items and vanity crap you will no doubt want to decorate your PCs with. It's still not perfect, but the game also was overhauled with a faster, more story-focused leveling experience which has so far proven much smoother and more entertaining for the casual MMOer like me. People are bitching about this change online, I noticed.....but my guess is Bioware needs people who are playing the game and spending money, not end-gaming it and no spending money? I don't know.....but I do know I am currently quite obsessed with this game, and I honestly did not expect that I'd end the year stating that SWTOR is my darling MMORPG right now.

Verdict: I feel a strong desire to actually experience all of the story content in this game and can only assume EA and Bioware have found some form of mind control to hook me on the game. That or I'm just enjoying how even trivial quests are made entertaining with Bioware's live actors and cutscenes.

The Crew (Complete Edition)

I feel an obligation to include this game on the list, because it is absolutely an MMO and maybe even an RPG, due to the fact that you follow storylines in the game. When this first came out I was less than impressed, but several expansions later and The Crew is a pretty fulfilling and interesting experience, with some decent (but not perfect) car physics. You are totally playing online with other humans, but it is fairly easy to ignore them if you want, for most things anyway. That said.....unlike Horizon 3, where you have to choose to go online, The Crew is always online all the time. I've been enjoying touring it's rendition of the United States, which is a world filled with aggressive drivers attempting to perform ever more outrageous stunts and races with increasingly tricked out cars in various locales. The new expansion adds cops and chases in to the mix, making the overall experience feel pretty rounded.

Verdict: I'd like to play this to the "end," whatever that is for a car game but suspect Horizon 3 will beat it up and take it's stuff as that game steamrolls out more compelling content.

World of Warcraft: Legion

Legion is definitely a return to form for World of Warcraft, and I jumped back in entirely because my nostalgic love for this game was rekindled by the Warcraft movie earlier this year. I had left off somewhere in the middle of Warlords of Draenor on my alliance warrior, and enjoyed playing through WoD which I really think was a better expansion now than I previously gave it credit for. The Legion expansion is interesting....but it's the "newest" which means that once you hit the new content the leveling process slows down and the game's flaws (such as agonizingly painful quest lines, horrendous environment designs, generally dated graphics even after the recent attempts at improvement) start to stand out. Maintaing your garrison is fun, though....but I have to say, I am not sure I like the weird turn of events in Legion all that much....the weird pseudo-Norse stuff, the superhero feel with artifact level weapons and all that are just not really proving all that fun for me (yet, I's still persevering). My main gripe though is that as I play my horde warrior through Pandaria content to get to the good stuff in WoD, I am learning to REALLY HATE PANDARENS...and Pandaria...it's just so gimmicky and trite for the horde storyline so far, and the increased leveling pace makes it such a fragmented experience that I am basically just trying to find the will to level my orc warrior to get her the hell out of there as fast as possible.

Verdict: I wish Blizzard would cough up news of a WoW 2, one which looks and feels more like the movie. Leave the original WoW as a legacy title for gamers with older rigs.....we need something genuinely new for Warcraft's future, please! For now I will probably find myself leveling my one warrior to the level cap slowly and surely while enjoying the lower level content I find more palatable...and exploring more of WoD's territory, which I think is the best since BC.

Off the Radar

I have a few games I used to love which have all but dropped off the radar. These include:

Rift: despite releasing new content this year, I never did recover from when Rift went F2P; the cash shop is too messy and expensive, and the design decisions from level 50 content onward were just no fun, with a questing approach that worked great before the F2P experience but leads to a fragmented inability for casual MMOers to figue out what the hell is going on, where to go, or why to care. Rift still remains a great experience from level 1-50, approximately, with diminishing returns beyond that point. Verdict: I am done with it.

Guild Wars 2: I gave up on this game. Much like Rift I have no idea what the hell is going on, or why it took me so long to level up back when I was invested in the game. Leveling up seems much faster now, but the purpose of one's existence in the game is constantly called in to question due to a questing structure that seemed innovative back in the day proving to be boring and pointless now. It's basically a problem I describe as "invisible progress," in which the cycling of recurring events/themes doesn't give you much direction on where to go.....if you can adjust to the "fill the hearts" thematic of GW2's exploration process, and you can accept the almost (to me) incomprehensible math behind how damage in combat works, then GW2 is probably a better game for you than it is for me. Verdict: I am keeping it installed for now, but I think not for much longer. A damned shame.....I love the original GW, and so wanted this one to be a major innovator going forward.....so my frustration at not being able to grokk it is very annoying.

DC Universe Online and Marvel Heroes 2016: The DC Heroes MMORPG and the Marvel Heroes 2016 action RPG both are fun experiences, but from very different angles. I spent a bit of time in both, and came away from the experience realizing that the best moments I experienced in both games paled in comparison to taking 2 hours to watch the latest movie or read some comics. Verdict: Deleted and moved on. I do want to thank Marvel Heroes for letting me run around as Moon Knight, though....if only you were a real game, and not a Diablo knock-off, the most ill-suited design choice for Marvel characters imaginable. And as for DC Universe.....it helped clarify just how inappropriate the MMORPG classic format is when applied to a comic book superhero universe.


*The reason I make this distinction is because of an experience I had (often) best summarized by this story: sometime around mid 2008 I was gaming in WoW with my wife and her active guild when I was treated to a fascinating conversation explaining why I was a casual gamer because I could not devote more than 30 hours a week to the game. When I pointed out that that would mean I would have to devote a minimum of 4-5 hours per night, seven nights a week to meet the minimum, I was met with a sea of "yep, absolutely" type responses from the guild, who had no problem with this concept. I took a long break from WoW after that. 

Long Day - Rifts, Hasbro and DC's Convergence among other musings

Today is going to be a long day: 24 hours without sleep now. Long story, too much "other" for this blog but I am looking forward to crashing later for a few hours before game begins. Ai!!!! So a random medley post doay:

Rifts
The Savage Worlds edition of Rifts I mentioned really is a shocker. I still can't believe that Palladium consented to allow this. It won't quite feel the same though without a long monologue in each book from Kevin explaining that the original manuscript was amazing but he still had to rewrite it entirely to suit his vision of Book X.

Hasbro on D&D
Hasbro's news that D& D "on a real tear" was cool but I am still amused that it was also grouped with Clue, Candy Land and other games in the Hasbro inventory in terms of where it stands in the corporate report. This led me to wonder if maybe somewhere deep in Hasbro's corporate network is a division of 7 dedicated developers working furiously to make Candy Land new and innovative, all glaring over at the WotC team for setting the bar to a new high.

DC's Convergence
Anyone following DC's Convergence mini-epic running this month and next? No? I'm guessing a lot of older fans habitually dodge all newer iterations of an old product without compelling evidence to do otherwise, but I happen to be a fan of the New 52 DC universe and also still a fan of (most of) the pre-New-52 universe (I followed the post-Crisis DC from around 86 through to 2000 before I finally burned out). The Convergence event, which I am told is actually a cover for DC to move its headquarters to California and not worry about having their comic lineup interrupted, is a storyline about entire cities of various realms of the DC multiverse which have been kidnapped to a distant universe where Braniac is collecting "dead cities." This has been an recurring theme for several storylines now in DC's New 52, and pretty much most of the recent weeklies (New 52 Future's End and Earth2: Future's End) have been building up to it. Anyway, this frame gives the DC authors an excuse to revisit dozens of older DC universes and cancelled books. So far it's been a real menagerie, but an unusual number of their entries date to sometime in the mid 00's prior to the major universe-revisionism that went on or back to the late 80's, when I really got into DC. It's a fun trip down memory lane but in a modern context; the interesting thing is going to be seeing what changes, if any, this new approach has on other DC books going forward.

Marvel's doing something similar with its Secret Wars, which appears to be a muddy mess of various miniseries revisiting key moments in Marvel's history while using the end-of-the-universe event they've been building up to in the Avengers titles for years now as a frame. The end result, I predict, will look alarmingly close to the Marvel Cineverse, but I could be mistaken....still, I'm going to dodge most of the Secret Wars titles as it looks like a ridiculous mess and honestly I haven't been "back" to Marvel since the early 80's, so for most of these spin-off titles they are referencing events that took place during the decades that I was almost exclusively in to either DC, Image, or Jodorowksi comics.

Plus, there are a lot of comics for these two events coming out from Marvel and DC both. For the sake of my budget a decision had to be made: and I decided it was more fun to follow the Convergence.

The Elder Scrolls Online - Sinking its claws in deep after a second chance

So I've bounded back and forth a bit on Elder Scrolls Online.

First I decided pre-release that I wasn't going to get into it at all. Then I watched my wife playing in beta and decided it looked like it might be worth investigating, so I bought a copy on some credit a few weeks after release.

What I discovered initially was a lot of fun....and it felt very "Elder Scrolls" to me, having that "thing" that I can only define as what Bethesda --or in this case Zenimax-- can do to make an RPG fun.

Then I started to run into some problems. The first problem was ridiculously long load times. When a game takes 8 minutes from clicking on the shortcut to actually playing, and you only have 30 minutes to play that's a clear sign you need to play another game.

Then I would get in and find horrendous lag was leading to death constantly. Also, I was literally doing it wrong, I figured out later. I'd get in to TESO and forget this is a twitchy combat game, not one where you stand there trading blows.

I decided not to renew my sub at the end, but a few days later I recanted on this decision and decided instead to go back and try it another month. This was actually spurred on at least partially by my adoption of Wildstar, which had an open beta I could jump into. Wildstar is an interesting game and I think I will enjoy playing it, but in the course of messing around in the beta I realized that Wildstar had a lot of "MMOisms" that were actually styles of play I had really burned out on. Static storytelling....bubble balloon dialogue, cartoony WoWish graphics (I knew that in advance, it was not a selling point for me, but the look is actually very stylish and interesting), and a combat system that is a bit different but still much closer to its WoW DNA than...say....Elder Scrolls.

So after a bit of Wildstar I realized that I really ought to go give TESO a second chance. I did so, jumped back in, found some patches that seemed to dramatically improve lag issues (haven't had any lag problems in the last week of playing) and have been having a great time simultaneously leveling up three different characters. Hey, I also discovered that TESO lets you skip the intro sequence once you've done it. This has the unique effect of making TESO feel just like any other Elder Scrolls game where you're just another wanton criminal given an accidental reprieve.

At this point I've decided that for the foreseeable future I'm going to focus on TESO and will also give Wildstar a earnest chance. I'll continue to let Defiance and Guild Wars 2 linger as games I play when the mood strikes (and while it doesn't strike often I enjoy both a great deal when time and interest permit). I've deleted WoW and Rift completely now: I tried to level up in WoW in preparation for the next expansion, but I just can't muster the energy to care anymore. WoW, for me, is a fond memory of a great game from the old days, and the desire to stick with it is just gone. And as for Rift....I'll never reach level cap, and I don't quite know what went wrong with their 51-60 content that it's such a slog to get through, but I will always remember it fondly from the days before it went F2P. As F2P goes Rift is top notch, yes; but there are a lot things that become less important or even counter-productive to the design of a F2P MMO over a pay-to-play version. F2P for example benefits from slower advancement, and markets potions and perks you purchase to speed up experience gain; the older subscription model actively encouraged the designers to come up with bonus experience events for a contrast. The best time to play Rift was the eight weeks leading up to Storm Legion's release, when all sorts of craziness was going on and world events were popping everywhere that were designed to dump metric tons of XP on participants. The post F2P Rift is a painful slog that, if played the way it wants you to, will cost you more than $15 a month in purchases to stay relevant, and as always that means that the only people who benefit from F2P models are those who have no money at all but tons of time, or those with no time but tons of money (and no common sense).

Anyway....its now TESO and Wildstar for me until one or both go F2P!

State of the MMO Nation

2013 was a weak year for MMOs in my household. My wife, who plays MMOs almost exclusively, began to migrate to other titles with her online gang such as Borderlands 2, Saint's Row III and IV and even League of Legends. I played a few on and off....here's a recap:

Defiance

For me the highlight of 2013 was Defiance, which despite being a game you'd think I would love (open-world third-person SF themed shooter with MMO design) I didn't play nearly enough of. The fact that Trion Worlds seems to have forgotten about it (only one of the five promised expansion packs was released in 2013, a bad sign if I ever saw one) doesn't help. I will continue to play Defiance at my usual measured pace, but suggest to future developers working on shooter/MMO hybrids that they consider carefully what the audience of both games might expect out of such a merger. Defiance could use something....I'm not sure what, entirely, but something....more diversity in explorable areas, maybe, and a better hub setup for people who just want to jump into the action? I will defer to Warframe as an excellent way of handling a multiplayer shooter experience online. Defiance, with it's MMO trappings, is still a different beast, though. I expect it to hang on until Destiny arrives and squashes the competition like a tiny bug.

Status for 2014: I will continue to play it casually and hope we see some of the promised future content.

Rift

2013 was the year Rift went free to play, and in doing so it changed the core feel of the game from the comfortable subscription model I enjoyed to a typical overpriced freemium model which I have now abandoned. Despite getting an enormous number of in game credits for my lengthy subscription time I was disenchanted with the way they structured the game and how they priced the "subscription equivalent" option to continue to get leveling perks (there was no longer a discount for buying in volume, basically). Moreover, after buying all sorts of cool looking armor with my given points I realized I had once again made a serious error in my play style: I now had blinged out characters who had done nothing in-game to earn the gear. For someone like myself who plays for the story and experience this is an unforgivable tresspass.

Of second note is the Storm Legion expansion content, which suffered greatly for casuals like myself who found the story hard to follow, the quests insanely grindy, and the overall experience just plain tedious. The magic of Storm Legion shortly after launch did not stick, unfortunately.

Status for 2014: Rift is now on hiatus until further notice. I have even deleted it from my computer. I may return if the itch grabs me. This is a real shame as I loved this game a great deal pre-F2P.

Guild Wars 2

I have hardly played this one at all, and I don't know why. For reasons I can't explain at all GW2 did not grab me as consistently as I expected, or as it honestly should; non-MMO open world titles sort of stole the show in 2013 for me, so games like Sleeping Dogs and Saint's Row III dominated my time, and as a side effect structured and ironically "less involved" worlds offered by MMOs like GW2 were simply less intriguing as a result. For a sharply contrasting example on GW2 see here, though.

Status for 2014: I will continue to periodically fire it up and see if I can get motivated. Meanwhile I will continue to be enamored by much more interesting open-exploration titles like GTA V. Saint's Row IV and Skyrim. One approach I am going to take is to follow Zubion's advice on how to hit GW2 for an hour a day and still feel like you're making progress/doing something. Zubion seriously loves GW2, and I'd love to be into this game in the same way.

World of Warcraft

I reloaded it late in November, finally purchased Mists of Pandaria (like two days before it went on sale) and enjoyed it immensely for about a week before experiencing severe WoW fatigue again. I really want to have some characters ready to go at level cap for the forthcoming Warlords of Draenor, which on the surface appears to get WoW back to its roots somewhat while finally offering a graphical overhaul to the geriatric character models of the original races. But....I just can't muster enough interest to devote the time. It is a "been there, done that, can't stomach doing it for hundreds of hours again" problem. Sorry WoW.

Status for 2014: we'll see if Warlords of Draenor motivates me to slog through the game to get ready. I....think this may be the end of my relationship with WoW, however.

Neverwinter Online

Something about the whole Neverwinter experience is just off. It's got some fun gameplay, but the game keeps you on such a tight rail that the freedom of choice in character design it offers is purely illusion, the characters will all suffer from the same narrow pool of gear choices in terms of looks unless you pony up to the store, and Perfect World's method of handling freemium means you'll have to navigate a treacherous web of purchasing confusion on numerous levels. I am very done with Perfect World managed games, and even though I enjoy the gameplay....they're just too greedy for my tastes.

Status for 2014: I may try it again if they magically manage to add several more classes into the game.

Dungeons & Dragons Online

My burnout on DDO know know limits. The ability to reach the high level content where all their new expansion modules can be found is an onerous and soul wrenching task for one such as myself. I have given up on DDO entirely, the grind was just too much.

DC Universe Online

The surprise end-of-year discovery was DC Universe Online. I recall playing this a bit shortly after it went F2P and my wife and I were more into Champions then so we ignored it. When I got the PS4 I noticed DCUO was available on it, so I downloaded it. This game was meant to be played with a controller, for one thing. It's got very smooth, fluid and fun gameplay. My recent resurgence of interest in DC Comics has helped keep me interested in DCUO as well. I bought the expansion packs on sale over the holidays and have been enjoying leveling up my small gang of oddball characters, including Doc Futurity, Doctor Tachyon, Bowman Thirteen, Ladybot Moxietron and the Smouldering Demon.

Status for 2014: I expect to play a lot of DCUO as a place holder until Elder Scrolls Online arrives.

That's it for the 2013 wrap-up on MMOs and the projection for 2014....see you in the game!

Giving Neverwinter Online a Second Chance

In a series of amusing steps I went from being a little incensed at Perfect World's severely limited "why did you stop playing?" survey to curious about the game and suddenly I'm back to playing. The process worked sort of like this, and suggests some important reasons to consider why NWO is actually a decent game, despite some oddities that may or may not be deal breakers:

Step 1-get back into FR lore/books: I resumed reading Salvatore's Forgotten Realms novels again. Also started reading some other D&D novels that are now accessible on ebook. In this process I discovered that books which once offended my literary sensibilities when they were new (i.e. Avatars Trilogy) are suddenly kind of fun to read. So my reading tastes have shifted with age, apparently. 

Step 2-grow annoyed at useless survey: Got that survey, which prompted me to think about key issues I had with NWO. Truth is, I deleted NWO because I didn't have time to focus on it and didn't want to take the time to figure out if it was going to be a costly venture or not....a legitimate issue with all F2P model MMOs.

Step 3-play a medley of MMOs and go "waitasec...": Wife got back into Everquest II with some of her online cohorts this weekend. This prompted me to download EQII to try it out with them. End result: although I sense a really interesting story and background in EQII, it left me wondering why I was doing this when I had other games under my belt that still had lots of time, investment and life left in them (i.e. D&D Online, Rift, Guild Wars 2). So I stopped EQII and skipped over to some of the old mainstays to see if they would pique my interest again.

Step 4-go back to DDO and remember it's got problems: Quickly eliminated D&D Online after a few hours playing through only to lose all the XP again with a party wipe at the end of a dungeon, reminding me of why I never got very far in the game (highest PC I have through normal progression is level 13) and also why I found it so frustrating. Annoyed at beholders I met, wishing another game would let me engage with some iconic D&D critters and environments. Hey...waitasec....

Step 5-Acceptance that tabletop space and MMO space are different beasts (also, bribes): Realized that I ought to just get over the lack of "D&D-like design" in the char gen and just try NWO again. Accidentally discovered I had 200,000 astral diamonds and that these could be exchanged to purchase in-game zen. This got me enough zen to get four characters slots and an extra companion slot. Also discovered I had a code to redeem for an orc wolf buddy (mount?) at level 20. Cool.

Step 6-Scrub brain of expectations, resume game with fresh slate (also, drow!): With a fresh mind I approached NWO once again taking my own advice from my first overview of the game: to treat it as an experience in its own right and not as a D&D-simulator for the MMO-verse. Noticed drow had at last unlocked for everyone, made a rogue. Discovered the rogue is far more fun to play than either warrior class. Why, NWO devs, do you guys hate warriors so much?!?!? So drow rogue for me!

So long story short, here's four tips to properly enjoying NWO:

1. treat it as a lore-rich experience in the Forgotten Realms. Ignore the D&D part and get it out of your head that the game should be a simulation of the D&D tabletop experience in terms of rules and processes. If this is hard, go play DDO for a while; you'll either stay there or realize, "Yes, NWO is a better and more rounded experience, even if DDO has a lot of cool stuff...it also has a lot more frustrating stuff, too."

2. Make anything other than a warrior type character. I can say rogue is good, and have been told clerics kick butt. Will try a wizard soon.

3. Remember, even though NWO is ostensibly based on 4E mechanics, it's only superficially so. The similarities are enough for me to really miss my 4E gaming days, but should not be problematic for anyone who had issues with 4E.

4. Finally, and most importantly: don't let veteran MMO gamer jadedness dissuade you! It gets me all the time when I try new MMOs, and it's a real bummer when it does. NWO is better than I give it credit for, but MMO fans are suffering from a serious level of overload and choice these days. I think NWO deserves a bit more consideration than I was giving it previously....although they still need to get more classes in (warlock, ranger, paladin and warlord would be fantastic) and at least one more race (dragonborn).

Investing in NWO probably means less time with Guild Wars 2 for me....which is okay; GW2 is a game which commands time in a slower and more methodical way for me. I'm still keeping up with Rift when the mood arises, though. I will soon have my first level 50 defiant rogue over there, and look forward to someday getting her or my guardian warrior to level cap (60) in the laborious albeit interesting Storm Legion content.

Rift and the F2P Experience....A Veteran's Opening Perspective

Rift officially went free to play on June 12th. I've been playing less and less of Rift in recent months, due largely to limited time, which is always going to favor "games that are fun" over "games that are making me grind." I have a low tolerance for slow progression, and Storm Legion, unfortunately, was laboriously slow. Despite buying into a year long sub at a good discount, I barely made it to level 51 on my warrior before my "I care" quotient was overhwhelmed by my "what the hell is this dragging on so long for?!?!" sense.

Still, I like Rift, and have dropped in periodically to keep up, albeit slowly. Hoping, of course, that sooner or later they would make the XP gain at high levels somewhat quicker, to accomodate more than just those mad, mad players who live and breathe MMOs and disdain the casuals like me.

Well, the new F2P model seems to have done just that: it has provided XP bonuses and potions to "patron accounts," which is a fancy new name for what a monthly subscriber is. It rewarded players by how long they had subscribed, with ongoing "loyalty" rewards for keeping with the game. I netted around 12,000 credits in the game, the currency used to buy stuff in the shop, something around $70-80's worth of currency. Additionally, the loyalty rewards dumped 23 gifts on me, in addition to a couple dozen dimension house items. Some of the gifts were useful (XP gain potions) and others were just plain cool (mounts and pets).

The prices in the game store range from the reasonable (a new character slot is about 600 credits) to absurd (3000+ for high end ten-level suits of armor). I don't have the store up so these aren't exact numbers, but they give you an idea of what to expect. The core of the game experience is entirely free, however; they are aiming to generate revenue entirely from extras, which is an interesting approach and I really think it's the smartest way that Trion could do this.

Given that I got so much loot on my many characters, and even after spending a couple thousand credits on cool mounts, wardrobe slots, and even an armor suit for one of my low level characters, I still have around 10,000 credits to use and I have to admit, it's very nice to feel like I got a proper reward for my 18+ months of dedication to this game. I've seen other conversions to F2P riddled with greed (cough >Age of Conan< cough >SWTOR< cough) and then there's the way Trion did it. Very smart. Sometimes...treating your players with respect will make you more money. I hope this pays off for them.

Whole game's F2P now, so no reason not to check it out. Population has exploded, and I don't mind since I get preferential status in queue as a patron player. Check it out! Jump on the faeblight RP shard, it's got lots of good people on it.

Rift going Free to Play

So....wonder how much a Corgi pet will cost in the Rift market place?

Sigh....I think I, and everyone else who plays Rift, expected this to happen sooner or later. Rift will be moving to a F2P (alias "freemium") model effective June 12th. Existing subscribers (like myself) will get moved to a "premium member" status as paid subscribers. They are trying to make this sound more glorious than it probably is...my monthly payment has, after all, just been devalued from "actual game access" to "some XP perks and a few other oddities, many of which I bet I already get right now." We'll see. I picked up the one year subscription deal when Storm Legion was in preorder a while ago, so I'm stuck with this model (noting that converting paid subs to premium is a great way to allegedly offer benefits without refunds or handing out much --if any-- cash shop currency).

MMORPG.com has an interview with creative director Bill Fisher here.

My prediction: I'll let my sub run out, because "daily bonuses" don't work for an infrequent player like myself. If I find four or five chances a month to actually play, then non-cumulative bonuses are pointless, and free access becomes a lot more viable. Given that I've already sunk hundreds of hours into Rift and have more than gotten my share of entertainment out of it, though....if the game sours due to the migration to F2P, along with the ubiquitous arrival of the teeming, unwashed masses, then I'll still be content to close out on it. On the other hand, if they successfully dodge the sort of freemium model that Funcom went with for poor old Age of Conan (what I like to call the "pound of flesh" model) then Rift will still have me.

If, on the other hand, I find that the cost of getting even the most basic expansion content is equivalent in price to buying out a small third world country....looking at you, Funcom!....then yeah, I'm outta here.

MMOnday: The Grind Problem

It's been a few weeks since I talked MMOs, but since I need something for Monday...why not!

In the world of MMO land I've found a nebulous stand-off in my personal interest between Rift and ...of all things!... World of Warcraft. I recently fell back off the wagon, caving in and buying my wife a collector's edition copy of Mists of Pandaria and resubbing for a month myself. I didn't snag MoP for my account....I left my human warrior at level 82 and my horde warrior at 83, with the former stuck in the fishbowl world of Vasj'ir and the latter at the tail end of Mount Hyjal's never-ending quest chain. I'd love to see what an actual 3D topographical map of Azeroth looks like now....it must be rather ominously deep and tall in two distinct regions.

That said, I've apparently been playing Rift for so long that in a weird turnabout, WoW actually feels a bit "weird" to me. It also hammers home the subtle but persistent change in play style and feel over time in WoW, something made sharp in contrast with Rift, which for all its innovations still rests squarely in an older style of play....an older, slightly more brutal style which demands just a bit more of its players. Even when Rift shifts toward more "friendly" mechanics (or lack thereof) it still maintains a slightly more dangerous, sometimes grindy approach to play, something WoW only really embraces at the endgame level now.

When (probably a certainty) I do get Mists of Pandaria, it may be with the intent of powering through the newer game content once all of the grindy elements have been lifted by Blizzard in the wake of a new expansion. I've noticed that its with an absolute certainty that Blizzard will revamp the leveling pace of the previous expansion to accomodate getting people more quickly to the next new thing on the horizon. A person like me, who hates grinding and maximizes rest state health, finds it almost punishing to buy into a new expansion on day one, where the leveling process becomes a tedious lesson in slogging through what should be fun content, but instead is tainted by the need to pad it as much as possible. The irony of this padding process to slow players is it never, ever seems to work. There's always that French guy and his guild doing it in 24 hours, or my wife, who usually does it in one week (and even with a child to slow her down probably pulls it off in two).

Rift's Storm Legion expansion has the same problem, but lacks a certainty that Trion will, like Blizzard, eventually make the leveling process quicker. They actually did something akin to this prior to Storm Legion's release: they ramped up world events and instant adventures tied to the Storm Legion invasion, which in turn provided insane levels of XP, allowing for a fairly quick progression for most through level 30 at least.....probably beyond, although by then it was too mind numbing for me to want to keep up with. It's a tough issue for MMOs, where they can have plenty of great content that's fun and interesting, but is subsequently ruined by its own level and pacing mechanics.



I experienced a level of frustration of an entirely different sort in Champions Online Sunday morning as well. First, something I knew was a bad idea and still tried to attempt due to the eagerness of my wife to get me involved: a run through the Serpent Lantern Adventure Packs. My highest level character in Champions is 15th, because my experience with Champions is broad (12 characters) but shallow (all level 10-15ish). Champions is a lot of fun for me, but after a point it's combat mechanics and style start to feel weirdly button-mashing. There's a strategy and approach to it, I am aware....but the jargon and style of the game turns me off, becoming an impenetrable wash of gobbledigook mixed with quests that contain some of the most insultingly (albeit amusingly) retarded nonsense you'll ever see in an MMO.

Ummm....anyway, so the point was this:

1. Don't try to run an instance with a 14 month old in the house, especially one who's primary fascination right now is with Taking Things From Dad.

2. Don't try to run Serpent's Lantern unless you're unemployed and have no life. We were three hours in, I was getting ready to fake a D/C and tell my wife my computer had croaked...anything!...to get out of this endless grindy attack on a jungle base run by the incrdibly inept and near-sighted Venom organization when one of her guildies informed me that we were at the half way mark and maybe we should call it, restart again next week. "Restart?" one of the other players who, like me, may have been unwittingly suckered into this experience asked. "We can't pick up where we left off? How much is left?" We were just at the halfway mark, he was informed....and nope, the instance resets itself. No progress on this one.

Egads!

So I'm feeling a bit annoyed with Champions right now. Such a lovely character generator attached to such a weird and awkward game engine. Still, I've enjoyed it more than poor dead City of Heroes.

But back to Rift and WoW! I've been enjoying my return to WoW, but who knows for how long. It seems like they've cleaned up the graphics a bit more recently. Still ass-ugly an cartoony, but at least now it looks like an ugly ass in hi-def 1080p. Playing WoW made me realize just how much Blizzard keeps the older content on "speed run" mode, to both get players up in level as quickly as they can, and also I imagine to cater to the endless wave of slow casuals like myself who spend 95% of their play experience below level cap.

It has made me appreciate Rift (pre level 50 Rift, anyway) all the more. It has also made me wish Rift didn't employ the same grindy slow-pacing level process in its expansion. Here's some advice I learned, though: if you are in Storm Legion, avoid Pelladane unless grouping is your thing. Cape Jules is much friendlier to the solo player, I discovered.

Meanwhile, The Secret World languishes in its own darkness, a game with fascinating levels of content that do not belong in an MMO shell, thus delegating it to the backburner once more. Likewise with Guild Wars 2, which for all of its innovation and impressive graphics still feels to me like  a game about running around and filling up hearts on maps.

Anyway.....more later....

2012 RoC MMO Year in Review

Green Armadillo at Player vs. Developer did a sort of cost-analysis/overview of his 2012 MMO expenditures and time, and I thought it would be fun to do something similar, with more of a focus on my "year of MMOs" and what they amounted to (if anything). So, here goes...



Star Wars: The Old Republic
TOR may have come out in December 2011, but I didn't get my copy until late January. My wife played this game continually for close to a year, but it seems that her interest (and that of her highly dedicated RP guild) waned dramatically after the game went F2P, at least partially due to the over monetization of the game going forward (paying for content previously announced as free, for example, and the souring of the community due to the flood of F2P gamers who are sight-seers and gawkers, and presumably not very RP-friendly).

For my own purposes, TOR has a great single player experience wrapped in a world of MMO suck. It has padded regions (Coruscant, for example) that drag on and on, and feel very tedious and grindy to someone like me who approaches this game less as a new Star Wars MMO and more as the KOTOR 3 single player experience we really wanted. Still, the free to play option opened it back up to me, and I find that being able to jump in and play occasionally is making the game more accessible and fun, now that I don't have to worry about a monthly fee. If Bioware/EA could just realize that a person like me would prefer to pay for a couple extra character slots and not have to subscribe, then we'd all be a bit happier.

Conclusion: SWTOR moving F2P was a smart move for certain types of players, but the game still has problems. That said, it's a casual friendly MMO if you can avoid falling asleep during the long slog through boring padded areas like Coruscant.

Tera
Tera was billed for its action MMO combat and its unique revision to an otherwise very Korean style setting. The game was pretty compelling, initially....but some odd hiccups left me cold in the end. A major problem was its early billing snafus; I signed up for six months on a deal when it first came out, but after four weeks I realized this wasn't a game I was going to care for in six months, so I tried to cancel the subscription. Surprise....they didn't provide for a way to cancel! I did get my money back, and in a twist of irony that changed my opinion of the matter from "they are sleazy con artists" to "they or their billing service are merely incompetent" I still got my six months of play time. Which I barely used until the tail end, in a bid to revisit and see if my feelings had changed. They did not.

Conclusion: Tera is a weird action MMO that is fun to play but it has some unfortunately disturbing undertones, a bit too much of the Korean Cutesy for my tastes, an excess of BDSM inspired armor and for all it does offer it just doesn't seem to feel as satisfying as other, better games out there (among which I would include Rift, GW2 and TOR). And their crappy billing issues soured me from ever letting En Masse have credit card or paypal info again, period.

Guild Wars 2
Guild Wars 2 was heavily anticipated and I was ready for it on its first week or so of release. It's timing was atrocious, however (for me, at least), as I had gotten sucked into Rift and so found my precious game time seriously divided. GW2 is a fantastic game, but thanks to its Buy-to-Play model I have been able to safely play it just a bit, and othewrwise set it aside for now while I concentrate on the two other games worthy of my attention.

Conclusion: all MMOs should look at GW2 in the future, for both the payment model and for ideas on how to innovate. Not too closely...a future full of GW2 clones would be sad.



World of Warcraft
Blizzard sent me a 10 day "please come back" trial to Mists of Pandaria. I logged on, tried a pandaren monk, then jumped to the original Kalitherios who was still stuck in that god awful fhsibowl undersea region, was reminded why I left WoW during Catalyclysm and deleted the game, again.

Conclusion: WoW is getting very long in the tooth, and the only way to appreciate it these days is to be stuck with a low end PC, or otherwise avoid other games entirely.



Dungeons & Dragons Online
I was a HUGE proponent for DDO when it went F2P, and it was the first F2P game I also decided to invest in. I rationalized that if I spent $15 a month for a year, I'd have spent $180 in that time, and if I spent that (or less) on in-game purchases over time, then I'd be ahead.

In the end, I spent more than that (and in fact bought about $50 of turbine points plus the expansion pack at half off on a Steam sale this year) but I also played it heavily for more than two years, and only in the last year did I lag badly. DDO has a huge disadvantage over other MMOs, that outweighs (for me) it's advantages: it has a major grind component, and it's XP is (except for slayer/explorer missions) tethered to mission completion. You can spend a long time leveling in this game if you play in the way I do, which is slowly, mostly solo, and with a methodical pace in mind. I have friends who can blast through this game from level 1 to 20 in weeks. I envy them, because they have a system. The system necessary to earn XP at the fastest rate in DDO is beyond my time frame or network of friends, unfortunately.

Conclusion: DDO is still great, but my love for it has been replaced by Rift. Still, I like to revisit on occasion, even if I've given up hope of ever getting to max level.

The Secret World
The Secret World is everything I want in an MMORPG with a modern horror theme, short of it being a single player experience. It has immersive, thoughtful storylines (with key stories fully voiced), a mature theme that's not just "adult" (although it delves in that direction occasionally, too) and a smart world that really meshes well with the modern urban horror/fantasy trend in fiction these days. However, it was subscription based for a while, and so like GW2 it was something I didn't feel I had time for with my Rift obsession.

Now, of course, that has all changed and TSW moved to a Buy to Play model just like GW2. This was a very smart move, and it has revitalized my interest in the game....more so even than for GW2, because while GW2 is an innovative drwarf-and-elf free fantasy MMO, TSW is a modern horror MMO that ditches the Tolkienesque fantasy entirely.

Conclusion: I'll be playing a lot of TSW in the future and plan to focus my money on their planned future content.

Age of Conan
I've tried to get back into AoC a couple times. Unfortunately their cash shop was pricey, the play mechanics felt clunky if you stayed away too long, and the game can't survive its main crippling issue (one that TSW fixed) which was that 90% of its primo A game content was front-loaded in the first 20 or so levels, and everything after that right up to level 80 suffered from a "rushed to finish" conclusion. I recently tried it--again--in the wake of some changes that opened up previously gated instances to F2Pers and I was shocked at how empty the game was (okay not really) and how it just doesn't hold up to today's crop of games.

Conclusion: AoC is a game I want to play, badly. Just not the one that actually exists.

Champions Online
When this went F2P two years ago I was in on day one, took advantage of their first two weeks of excellent discounts, and basically absorbed this game (as did my wife). Then we burned out as the game dragged along; the momentum could not be sustained by the title itself, which still needed more...sometuing...to make it better.

Perfect World Entertainment came along and snapped Cryptic up. At first this was bad; a merge of accounts between Cryptic and PW made accessing their games problematic for a while, enough so I gave up on trying. Eventually they got their act together, and by the time I got back in Champions Online was sporting all sorts of impressive new features. It now remains, like DDO, a game I like to keep installed even if i only jump in once every couple of months or so. Unfortunately it's not really that exciting to play (for me) anymore, and I hate the crafting/equipment mechanics of the game with a passion, but the character generator is bar none the best there is (now that CoX is dead).

Conclusion: it's worth vacationing in Champions every now and then, and Perfect World made Cryptic respectable again...a miracle!

Rift
Rift snuck in toward the start of the year and snagged me first with its Lite F2P through level 20 and then with its mixture of interesting story content and compelling mix of traditional and innovative gameplay. It is officially the first game since 2005 when WoW and the original Guild Wars sucked me in to grab and keep me for the long haul. The core game is so good I continue to mainly play it while I occasionally log onto my level 50 guardian warrior and explore the new Storm Legion content at an excessively leisurely pace.

Anyway, I don't need to blab on about how great Rift is, as I've done that a lot already this year. Suffice to say it's my top dog in the kennel right now.

Conclusion: I bought a one year sub along with Storm Legion. That's about as dedicated as it gets for me in the world of MMOs.

Next Year
I'm looking forward to Elder Scrolls Online. I think some new titles like Firefall and Wildstar may be dark horses ready to sweep in and change everything up. I suspect more publishers will eyeball the B2P model just as much as the F2P model, and if industry analysts like Michael Pachter are right we may see a decline in the number of MMOs being pumped out as publishers grow wary of entering a saturated market.

Three hours into Rift: Storm Legion, and FF XIV Bites The Big One

As of Tuesday night, after waiting for servers to recover from the shock of upgrade and transition (or something) I managed to get in a few hours in Rift: Storm Legion. So far I have the following initial observations, based on my one level 50 guardian in the kingdom of Pelladane:

1. I'm getting an eerie deja vu sort of "like Burning Crusade but bigger" feeling. This is good, though; Burning Crusade was a real knock-out expansion for WoW and the only expansion where I was actively subscribed and waiting for content back in the day. The reason, I think, is because the new realms have distinct flavors which separate them from Mathosia and Eth.

2. There's a lot going on, and questing has been revamped a bit. Your character is considered sufficiently worldy to find and start quests on their own, a lot more often. Quests pop up spontaneously, or just by being in a certain area, or grouped...or who knows, but I kept acquiring quests through channels far more unusual than the "find guy with quest marker and talk to him" approach, which was good. Those quests appear to mostly be story quests now, which is pretty interesting.

3. There are a huge number of people playing, and for the first time in ages I had to get into queue. Rift, despite having a better focus on group and shared questing experiences that is effortless, is till prone to the occasional resource/quest object hog situation. You know....you're killing a mob of storm legionnaires, and someone runs up and takes the lighting rod you're trying to liberate while you're fighting? That sort of thing. On the other hand, I think Rift has found a fine balance between the "everybody is happy and shares everything" mode of Guild Wars 2 and the "everybody is in a vicious knife fight for quest resource" mode of WoW and older MMOs.

4. The graphics are impressive as always. The God Engine of Pelladane is incredibly cool, Crucia incredibly evil, and the entire area just begs to be explored....although not, preferably, at the breakneck pace of the current day-one crowd, which was head-spinningly fast as everyone seems determined to blast through the game's content in a week or less. Good luck with that, though. Three hours in and I think I moved my XP bar 15%.

More on Storm Legion later, as I get further along! For now, here's the end of the world video of Finfal Fantasy XIV as Square/Enix shuts it down for a rebirth in the near future. Taking out your game like this as an in-story reason for a major revamp (also known as going out of accidental open beta) is kinda cool, and I really hope the new version is worth checking out:



If only Squeenix could reconcile its status as a game company with its love affair with making CGI movies!

Storm Legion Starts

After months of waiting Rift: Storm Legion is here!

I have no idea what it looks like, however. Between updates downloading, this little thing called work and some internet issues at home that are requiring a technician...well, I look forward to checking it out tonight! Here's a video in the meantime:

Friday Blaaaaaaaaaghhhhhh! Rift and stuff

Well, I feel I earned a well-deserved break for a few days from the tumultuous October blog-o-thon I put myself through. This was a busy week for me, with work ramping up dramatically and calling for a lot of overtime, and of course that whole election thing (and regardless of party affiliation I think we can all comfortably be happy that the victories were decisive and that we won't spend weeks or months watching this get resolved in recounts, recalls and the courts. Yay for democracy!)

I've played Rift like a murderous fiend for the last six or so weeks. Raptr terrifies me with its numbers as I realize that it is still realistically possible to immerse one's self in a MMORPG even with huge work and family commitments, if you can keep yourself to a firm schedule. On the other hand a reasonable chunk of my play time is really "Kalitherios or Alidastra standing around in Sanctuary while their all-seeing god-controller CPU is AFK managing his 11 month old." Which is to say, I have sometimes logged on at 8 AM and then noticed I was still logged on a few hours later. Oddly, I rarely get kicked from the game for being AFK.

Rift has really sucked me in, though. I look forward to relaxing a bit on my playtime, as most of my effort was focused on getting one character to level 50....and by Jove I did! Kalitherios, ascended Guardian on the Faeblight RP server is now level 50. I was a bit nonplussed (and excited) to learn that there was an entirely new leveling system that kicks in then, involving souls, shards and an achievment point concept that is a bit reminiscent of what D&D Online's rank bonuses are like, except all end-loaded for the endgame. There's a ton of instanced content I have yet to scratch the surface on, and I will need to look to grouping to do much of it. Fortunately Rift makes this trivial and bearable.

Rift is one of the new generation of MMOs that tries to actively build easy grouping (or as I like to call it automatic grouping) into the play experience. It does not assume you must talk to people and be nice to them to get into a group....it does not assume you need to communicate at all; it just happens. This really is a good thing for those of us who like our MMOs like we like real life. Journey through your typical day and figure out how often you willingly engage random strangers in conversation, then proceed to invite them on your shopping or work quest (extroverts leave the room for this question, please!) Doesn't happen all that often, does it? I've always wondered why our MMOs naturally assumed we all wanted to talk to strangers voluntarily, when in truth much of your average MMO's content should be looked at as more like the kind of shared experience you get when you go to a theater, or drive a car on the freeway. We all are cooperating to get the job or experience done, and while we might have friends in the car or at the theater with us, 99.9% of the time we're not engaging total strangers in conversation while we're at it. And yes that does mean I'm equating bad PUGs to a car wreck or that talkative person in the theater!

In the meantime, since I suffer from alt-itis (and have 10 active characters in Rift) the Storm Legion prelude quests and instant adventures are happening all over the place and are clearly clever mechanisms by Trion to help aspiring or slow levelers boost their XP to level up characters. You can join an instant adventure in Sanctuary or Meridian and pretty much guarantee going from level 10 to 25 in about five hours. You can reasonably expect to jump 2 or 3 levels per hour afterward if you remain dedicated. Don't try to join a raid group and go AFK though (the temptation will be there, since you accrue raid group XP regardless of effort) or the "work for your share" crowd will kick you out. I've been more than working for my share, and all my alts are now somewhere in the mid to late 20's in level. I think these massive Storm Legion assault adventures won't end until next year, so there's a couple months yet to take advantage of them.



Rift is even creeping into my tabletop experience. My latest plot line (any of my players stop reading here!*) for the Wednesday group involves an eradariin (red elf-the bad elves in my setting) sorceress who intends to use an ancient fey relic called the Heart of the Wood to corrupt a planar gate to the realm of Arborea; she plans to force the gate open using an Astral Tether which will let the Heart of the Wood pass through. When this happens, Arborea will begin to transform into a new feywild.

The reason for this is simple: in the Realms of Chirak the feywild was destroyed, the entire faerie realm the first victim of the apocalypse that wiped out the gods and almost destroyed the world. The plane of the feywild was eaten entirely by Ga'thon the destroyer god, who shortly thereafter perished when he was slain by the protector gods in a Pyrrhic victory. Ga'Thon's corpse formed an entire mountain range, and within that range is the expulsion of detritus that was the feywild, a great wall of stone in which is frozen the terror-stricken, petrified remains of the feyfolk that were annihilated in this destruction. It had lasting ramifications, as many of the feyfolk that survived in the mortal plane were driven mad by the loss, and the feywild, a heaven-like place to which fey souls could travel for reincarnation after death, meant that there was no longer a fey afterworld, either; now, when elves and faeries and other kin die, they are likely to return as terrifying undead of different sorts if precautions are not taken.

Arborea: where the REAL eladrin roam

So this sorceress actually feels she is doing a good thing, but her motivations are cruel; she knows she can't just corrupt an entire godly plane like Arborea, but it has the "essence" necessary to jumpstart the process. So she intends to force the portal open, to allow her artifact to pass through, which will start a subtle change (thing magical strangelets) in Arborea; and while they will be stopped eventually in the planar realm by divine forces, will still channel unchecked** into the mortal world through the open portal, causing an inevitable shift in the mortal plane into a new feywild. Which may very well be bad for all sorts of odd reasons, not the least of which is the adverse effect the laws of the fey realms have on simple mortals, who cannot readily handle the weird time effects of the feywild, among other things.

So yes....some of this was brewing for a while as an idea for a future plot, but my obsession with Rift and the idea of planar invasions made it percolate into reality. I may toy more with the idea; Chirak has for many years now been assumed to be a world where reality is only loosely held together due to the severe damage of the near-apocalypse, and there are supposed to be many, many planar rifts across the land, caused by this fraying of reality. In the past the biggest rift tale I integrated into a campaign incolved the Abyssal Rift off the southwestern coast of Espanea, but I have only really focused on a few minor permanent rifts since then. This new campaign arc may well see an effort at expanding the concept.

Okay, I think I've blathered on enough. Maybe I'll finally do a review of the Leon Kennedy campaign from Resident Evil 6 next week (working on Chris Redfield's campaign now). I may also talk more about Tera soon, which I am slowly but surely playing more of (I love its combat, and its world has a different enough feel from Rift that I still want to explore it). Tera is going F2P through level 28 soon, for those interested and not keen to commit any money.

Impractical armor is impractical

* I don't normally post current game lore/plots on the blog to avoid spoilers, so this is a rare exception

** In Chirak all the old gods are dead and the young avatars and demiurges are too weak and still mortal, thus lacking the ability to protect the realm against such a catastrophe.

What's your (quest) line?

There are lots of bones people can pick with MMO design, but I have to say that the one I like gnawing on the most is quest text...or quest delivery, if you prefer. It's been common for a long time now to direct players in MMOs by way of quest givers, who usually have windows which pop up full of details about what they want you to do, why they want it done (maybe), and what you get out of agreeing to do it.

It wasn't always like this, of course! I'm a second generation MMORPGer (muh-mor-pee-gee-er, in the parlance of Yahtzee Crosshaw) who started in 2005 with the arrival of two very important elements to the process: a decent PC and a copy of World of Warcraft. WoW hooked me, being my first delve into the world of MMORPGs. I quickly got into Guild Wars, my first "day one" MMO experience and I also tried (and failed) to delve into Everquest 1 and 2. So most of my MMO experience started with games built from a premise of: "Wander landscape, look for guy with marker over his head, click on guy, read text (optional), accept, and go find ten orc spleens. Repeat until braindeath sets in."

And it's been this way for a long time now. The mythical pre-WoW era of which I knew little (having been a iMac user until late 2004, and not a very powerful iMac at that) sounded like a muddy place in which purpose and objectives in MMOs were left up to the players to define more often than not; the joy was in the novelty of playing with other humans online, and the idea that the game might provide meaningful organizational structure (in any form comparable to what we think of it now) was simply outside the scope of most MMOs back then. Or so it often seems. But the survivors of that Generation One era sure do have fond memories of it. My wife has a powerful necromancer in Everquest, which on rare occasion she goes back to visit for nostalgia purposes....but its never quite the same anymore, apparently.

Me? I tried the free-to-play Everquest recently and it was only slightly less traumatizing and annoying than my first effort in 2005 when entire waves of adventurers were killed by simple bats and skeletons for reasons unfathomable to me at the time.

Anyway, as I've been playing Rift I've been having a blast, and noticing that the game, while relying heavily on standardized WoW-like quest text boxes has managed to retain my interest, despite the fact that the incredibly bland, droll quest text info is just as physically painful to wade through as in any other MMO. This is ironic too, because I really like the world setting and story background in Rift....but just not delivered in tiny little quest text boxes devoid of character. Like I was saying yesterday, your character has no agency in quest text outside of "do this or not." You either accept or move on, simple as that. The wise ascended accepts, does the task, gets reward. The busy ascended moves on as his XP potions level him faster than local quests can account for. The smart ascended ignores them and attacks rifts, which are dlicious, juicy XP-filled planar fruit.

So how could quest text...the storyline, basically....be delivered in a coherent fashion that is engaging and not mind-numingly painful? How can this giant pink elephant get trusssed up in a pleasant dress so we at least find it palatable? Many people like myself really do play MMOs for the story, or wish they could. I barely had a clue what was going on in WoW until Northrend, for example...but not because I wasn't trying to figure it out! Here are some of the interesting ways different MMOs have tackled this issue that I felt are or were on the right track:



Age of Conan

Age of Conan had fully voiced cut scenes for the first 20ish levels of the game, and intermittend voiced cutscenes up to level 80 for the core storyline. It failed in that it stopped trying to offer the same (no doubt expensive) level of quality after the opening 20 levels, which was a shock for many people; it was almost like playing this awesomely interesting story driven game, and then suddenly it ends and dumps you into quasi-generic fantasy land, except with a Howard/Conan reskin.

Age of Conan failed mostly because it front-loaded the cool stuff. I wonder to this day why Funcom didn't try to spread out their voicing talent more evenly across the length of the game, or recognize that putting it all at the start was a bad idea. More likely they intended full voice acting all the way through, then deadlines and budgets ruined everything. Ah well.

The upside on this was it made for some extremely engaging storylines, and the idea of parallel group/public quest lines and the "night time" Tortage solo experience was a smart idea that they should have carried forward through the rest of the game. But this, of course, was one of many reasons AoC disappointed so many people.



Star Wars: The Old Republic

SWTOR did the fully-voiced cut scene thing, with the usual multiple choice range and even the light/dark side option, and unlike Funcom Bioware carried out through the length of the entire game. So if this was so innovative, then why did it fail? I mean, I've played SWTOR and personally gotten tired of it long before reaching level 20. I'm not entirely sure why, but playing this game actually made me narcoleptic. I tried...I really loved KOTOR 1 and 2, but the spirtual KOTOR 3 failed to grab me, despite having such a fantasic emphasis on storyline. So why?

There are a lot of reasons SWTOR didn't work for many people. My wife and her guild are not one of them (although apparently Bioware's breaking the game in patches as it preps for F2P, and that there might send her and her guildies away), so I really can only speak for myself, but it boils down to this: SWTOR's got the theatrics right, and I even really liked how each of my characters had distinct storylines. I actually really, really want to play SWTOR again to see some of these storylines come to fruitition. But! SWTOR is supposed to be Star Wars, and one thing I don't remember from Star Wars was that episode where Han Solo talks to some guy on some planet about how he needs to collect twenty mynock snouts before he can get to talk to this other guy who will then demand he collects 15 rancor copralites so he can get a part to fix a speeder bike so he can cut down the inerminable amount of time it takes to run everywhere.

Put another way: SWTOR did the quest-delivery right, but failed to make quest lines that delivered the Star Wars experience. That might change when you get high enough level, but tasking me with suffering through 30-60 hours of running around Coruscant wanting to blow myself up and end it all is bad. I remember my years on campus at the University of Arizona, glad that I had a bike to get from one class to the next as each class was all the way the hell across campus from the other, day in an day out. But hey, at least I had a bicycle to get around on back then. By level 18ish my republic trooper didn't even have a bike to traverse the city planet. Yeesh.

Plus, unfortunately, no matter how much makeup you put on a pig its still a pig. And call them mynocks or jawas or whatever: collecting rat tails and orc spleens by any other name is still just a lot of wasted voice acting for the same old retarded MMO quest lines.



Everquest 2

One thing I liked about Everquest 2 was how you had to talk and respond to quest givers and all NPCs in little cartoon bubbles. It was a nice touch, and while only some NPCs had voice acting, it led to a sense of engagement. I imagine if you'd played EQ2 to death then the conversational text got tedious to click through....but it was definitely a step in the right direction (until the quest turns out to be "collect 30 rat spleens," of course).



The Secret World

I haven't played this since launch, but I really liked TSW, which had far and away the most engaging quest-presentation with FMV and full voice acting I'd seen yet, and still provided a very dynamic environment in which all sorts of spontaneous stuff could happen. The fact that many quests felt more like something out of a point-and-click adventure was an added bonus. I need to get back into this game, and resolve Funcom's issue with Paypal (or the other way around). Hopefully it doesn't stop providing such a level of detail after X period of time in the game...I'll have to ask my wife, who is hopelessly addicted to this game as well.



Guild Wars 2

The 800 pound guerrilla for 2012, Guild Wars 2 is the one to trump all the rest, right? It has: highly unorthodox quest hubs, everything is public and shared, quests are more diverse than just fetch quests, fully voiced cutscenes and interactions, and an environment that actively discourages the need for elaborate quest text fetishistically there for its own sake. So does it work?

In part I love how GW2 does everything, because it really did go for a fresh take on things. I am surprised it doesn't have actual cut scenes, instead relying on two talking figures. I like that, as with the original GW your character has a voice. I like the custom storylines and the fact that many quests are much more elaborate than the typical MMO fare. It's really pretty innovative overall, although I think the "sharing" component of the game, built in from the get-go, is probably the actual innovation at work. It's actually kind of weird to play an MMO where you don't have to feel like you're in direct competition with others for resources and targets, and in fact the opposite is true. That said, there's still something to be said for a defined quest log with obvious goals, and so its the reason I've been enjoying Rift.

Rift

Rift doesn't do quest text differently. Like I said earlier, it's quest text, despite being full of the game background I really want, is so painfully bland I wish it really was delivered in a manner similar to one of the above-mentioned games. It does, however, do something unique with its rift events, world invasions and other public quest activities (instant adventures), and that is make the game world feel dynamic instead of static. I can actually log on to Rift and play for an hour, stopping invasions, closing rifts and maybe doing an occasional quest along the way, and feel like I was part of "something happening." It's a way of delivering content that generates spontaneous quests without ever calling it that, and it's why I've decided to focus so heavily on this game (and GW2, which does something similar).



In the end there's no answer to be had, as I am not a MMO developer and I don't play these games enough to qualify as a hardcore elite MMO specialist. I've never raided (and lived). I've never grouped an instance more than a handful of times, nor have I cared to grind for reputation points or gear. For me the entire point of playing an MMO is not the end game but the journey there, so for me how the questing works and how it engages me is what matters the most. If the game manages to make its world feel alive, I think it can call itself a success. Right now I think Rift and GW2 do that. SWTOR didn't do it (for me) but it does provide the necessary playground for my wife and her guild to have fun.

I think the future of MMOs will depend heavily on developers designing more dynamic environments, worlds which feel alive and spontaneous; if they pull that off, we'll never need another static baloon of quest text again.

Musing on the Nature of the Ascended in Rift

Rift employs a plot-specific reason for why it's world is full of powerful adventurers who seem able to defy death and return from the grave: basically you're playing ascended, a form of enheriar who is resurrected by the gods to do their bidding, and who will continue to be resurrected for as long as it takes to get the job done.

The game's quest text lines and story plots are very specific about the many things going on in Telara, but it uses the "neutral participant" approach to presenting them, which is to say your character is never given a voice or opinion on quests; you're only option is "accept or do not." This has the downside of making quest texts less involved. It has the upside of making you realize that it's entirely possible that the ascended aren't quite "alive" or human in thought, anymore. This becomes especially evident when you get quests with some fairly morally or ethically ambiguous rationales from various quest-givers. At some point I started to get the "Would you kindly...?" feel from Bioshock in Rift; the suspicion that a hidden subtext to the storyline is that the ascended are literally resurrection survivors who are compelled to do the bidding of mortals specifically because that's the only reason they've been let off of death's leash by the valkyrie-like servitors of the gods. Viewed from this angle, it gives Rift a kind of weird, creepy undertone.



It also makes the artificially-induced resurrection of the Defiant ascended that much more nebulous; they're manufacturing their ascended and sending them back in time; the defiant engineers know their creations are bound by contract to complete the jobs ahead of them, basically doomed to fight, die, and be reborn time and again. But then, the Defiant managed to damage the world with their dimensional tampering and they get to see what things look like at the very end, so I suppose one could forgive them for taking extreme measures to right wrongs.

Storm Legion is out in a few weeks (Nov. 13th). Looking forward to seeing what sort of new material it adds to the broad lore of Rift. I wish Trion would get its act together and write some novels...even some graphic novels (of which there is only one right now) or visual guides to this game. Anything! It's got a much tighter and more interesting web of lore than many other MMOs out there right now.

Then, maybe someone could explain to me how these guys fit in, along with the mysterious invasion portals of House Fluffington...

Week in Gaming: Rift Storm Legion, Pathfinder, AD&D and Grimtooth

I've been coasting on my "Thirty One Days of Horror" reviews so I thought I'd inject a more mundane blog post into the middle of it all, just a bit of a "me" update, I suppose...!

Partially because I was ready for it, and partially because my wife budgeted for it and encouraged me, I've taken the one year sub Storm Legion plunge with Rift. Trion Worlds has this deal where you spend $120 and get one year of playtime, the forthcoming Storm Legin expansion pack, and a variety of preorder goodies (although not the deluxe edition goodies, those are a separate "upgrade," alas). After thinking about it I decided this was worthwhile. Rift appears to be firmly rooted in its subscription model with no plans (beyond levels 1-20) to switch to a a F2P model. I really dig the background, lore and look of the game. I love the soulshard profession/class mechanic, which lets you play some very different characters within the same range of classes. And while most of my Raptr tracking represent phantom hours (my wife started it recently by updating her hours played on different games and I followed suit to reflect the actual pre-Raptr hours of many of my favorites) the Raptr hours for Rift are 100% actual play.

This is another way of saying I've sunk a lot of time into getting my character up in level before the expansion (my main is almost level 39 as of today) and surprisingly I'm not feeling burnout or distaste at the experience, which is a good thing. In contrast I can't even look at a WoW screenshot without feeling stomach churning disgust anymore! But them, over the course of many years I sank a lot of time into WoW. Fractionally that of the hardcore, but way more than a typical casual player, I suspect. Maybe. Hard to tell anymore...people have really got some skewed ideas on work/life/game balance ratios these days.

In tabletop gaming news not much to say other than that I'm enjoying my weekly Pathfinder campaign, which is the first new Realms of Chirak campaign I've run in a while and is the first lengthy Pathfinder-powered Chirak campaign, period. It's got me inspired to return to and finish the Chirak Pathfinder edition, which may eventually see the light of day. I stalled on the text blocks; I've never been a fan of 3.X edition stat block design, as its tedious, time consuming and I lack the obsessive pedantry necessary to enjoy the requisite minutiae of detail that the stat blocks require. That said, I would like to finish this sucker and get it out in PoD, so maybe I'll devote more time to the task soon.



The Saturday game has been having problems for a while now. No sooner did I get a large group together for the new 1st edition AD&D campaign (set in a fresh tailor-made retro setting) than did the next group two weeks later see too many cancellations for the game to continue that week. When you're on a bi-weekly run like that, missing a week turns it into a monthly game, and monthly games have problems with consistency and coherence, in my experience. We'll see what happens next week.

I keep pushing for non-D&Desque gaming but I can never get enough bites or commitments. Is this just exemplary of the contracting hobby, or unique to my region? I'd be very keen to run some BRP or Call of Cthulhu...some Legend or RQ6....but I can't get enough regulars to commit. I know some of it is due to the economy of time and money; people have limited amounts of both, and most of my cohorts don't buy many games, and like playing the few they do own (which, as it turns out, is mostly just Pathfinder). But still....it never used to be this hard to get alternate games going.

Outside of that, I've cut back severely on my game purchases. I decided to stop throwing money down the same pit; there are too many D&D-likes out there now, and not enough new RPGs. If there are new RPGs, I'd rather look at them instead of buying yet another D&D-like that will absorb shelf space and get no playtime. Likewise, with 1st edition AD&D and soon 2nd edition AD&D back in print, its hard to justify buying new retroclones and offshoots when the Real Deal is available and in print. There are some exceptions, of course. Plus, although I've never owned it in print I keep thinking I should grab Labyrinth Lord. Blood & Treasure, too. ACKS (Adventurer, Conqueror, King System) has also looked interesting. But....when would I ever get a chance to play? My main group of players are all thoroughly hooked on Pathfinder, and my alt-interest players are keen for non-D&D, should it ever happen, as opposed to D&D-likes.

I did grab Grimtooth's Traps and Traps Fore recently from the FLGS, which was able to snag them for me from their distributor. Nice to have those two books again, both of which I used heavily and often back in the 80's. Michael von Glahn was the illustrator in Traps Fore....I wonder what happened to him? He was a great guy, and his illustrations were hillarious. He did a lot of work for my fanzines back then, and it made my publications look so much better for it. He also did the first commissioned map art for one of my campaign settings (Keepers of Lingusia). Still my favorite map.