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:

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.

 

False Leads, Pleasant Surprises and Dismal Failures

Just a few updates today (amidst the ongoing Thirty One Days of Night....I have 16 days of reviews preloaded so far, 14 more to go!).

First: two movies in a row that I thought would make good fodder for the "Thirty One Days of Horror" event did not pan out. I watched Whiteout first, a movie that was reccommended to me as a good horror flick that was "just like The Thing." Mhmmm. Somebody in my network just lost some credibility points! Whiteout was a good movie, but it was only like The Thing in the same way that District 9 was just like Hotel Rwanda. Whiteout was, in fact, a thriller and a sort of spy/suspense/mystery genre film, using Antarctica as its gimmick location. Fun movie, not suitable for the horror review fest I've got going.

The other movie was Super 8, which my wife really wanted to see and even sat down to watch with me. It was simultaneously good and bad, and the obvious effort to pander to the 80's adventure genre was actually off-putting to me. Yes, there's the spunky kid hero and his comedically distinct companions. There's the young female lead that swoons many hearts. There's the embittered dad who has a legacy to live down to while trying to repair the rift with his son. There's the 80's style E.T. monster upgrades for the 21st century and then clouded by so many J.J. Abrams-isms that if you're not intensely annoyed at this movie by the end then you have a stronger constitution than I. I think I liked J.J. Abrams better before I realized he was a one-trick pony.

Game tonight! I am working on generating excitement. I am trying to figure out why I have been less and less motivated to play RPGs lately. I think a chunk of it has to do with my son, honestly. The desire to play Pathfinder tonight is crippled by my much greater desire to go home and see my kid, help him learn and grow. Fatherhood seems to be turning into a much greater reward for me than anything else. It's nice when Real Life puts it all into perspective.

 
I got Resident Evil 6 last night. In a week or two you will see a review of RE 5, and I will hopefully follow up with a review of this one (or a review-in-progress, at least). I'll give you four tidbits for now:

1. If Capcom wants to make movies, they should just make movies, mkay? (Oh wait, they do!)

2. The Leon campaign so far is better than reviewers are giving the game credit for. In fairness to the reviewers I think most of them are saying the Leon campaign is good, and its the next two that have issues, though.

3. Many issues I had with RE 5 have been fixed or altered in RE 6.

4. RE 6 has split-screen co-op. That alone bumps it up a notch over other titles this year.

Aside from all that, there are a number of other new features in RE 6 that I like, but I'll talk more about it once I'm further in, only got a couple hours down so far.



Finally: still plowing through Rift but the game suddenly upped the ante on me with a more methodical gain to the XP pacing. This is massively impacting the odds I'll get anywhere near level 50 by the time Storm Legion arrives. GAAAAAAHHHHH!



That outfit looks really uncomfortable and not at all practical. Wouldn't it pinch?????