State of the MMO in late 2015: Five Things a Lapsed MMOer Can Do This Year

So what's going on in the MMOverse these days? A subject near and dear to me when I have nothing else to write about and no material planned for real (cough) gaming -- tabletop, that is -- is of course video games. I may be too tired on busy work weeks to write much at the end of the day, but an hour of Destiny, Halo or The Elder Scrolls Online is easy enough to fit in...and only one of those is (arguably) a real MMO.

Anyway, 2015 has been for many the year that the MMO bubble burst and pretty much sputtered out of existence....almost. We have an aging population of MMOs that many of us are burned out on, a smattering of titles that command loyalty across the years and pretty much three games I know of that are still brazen enough to demand a subscription fee (EVE Online, World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn). Virtually all other MMOs have moved to some sort of free-to-play or buy-to-play model.

Worse yet, there don't appear to be many --or any!-- new MMOs on the horizon. News revolves around modest expansions (The Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic having notable expansion packs this year) while the Big Daddy World of Warcraft continues to spew out news bits about a new expansion even as it has dwindling subscription numbers that look like a torrential loss to some --and yet still their surviving base is larger than any other MMO could dream of.

Of course, on the side we are now seeing a new breed of stealth MMO....games which are effectively MMOs in function but do so through other styles of play (Destiny) or other mediums (various Android titles) that eschew the traditional MMORPG model made so popular by Everquest, Ultima and later WoW.

So if you're an MMO fan, what do you do in this environment? Here are five suggestions:

5. Revisit old favorites
You can go home again it turns out, although home might smell weird and suffer from some low polygon counts. I did this recently with Dungeons & Dragons Online and enjoyed reminiscing about my grand mess of old characters before being brutally reminded of the many weird hoops one had to go through to play that game on its odd F2P model, with its elaborate henchmen system designed to suck money from you slowly, and its oppressively slow experience system which only serves the truly dedicated. I had more success with Rift, which I have since returned to playing regularly.

4. Go explore the Asian MMO market
You've seen those strange names and listings on MMORPG.com or in random ads on different sites, often using busty armored women as clickbait lures to get you to check out yet another oddball Korean MMO. While the US market is stagnant, the Asian market for MMOs is grinding them out like there's no tomorrow, and some of them are actually really interesting or even playable.

3. Return to WoW
I can't do this. I just can't.....I played too much, though compared to many I played hardly at all. WoW is a game that I will always fondly remember when it was new, and also remember with much pain as it morphed over the years into something that looks very much like the prettiest pig in lipstick on the market. It's still the default "I'm going back to...." game out there, though.

2. Explore New Horizons
As I mentioned earlier, games like Destiny are pushing the boundary on what you can blend with the MMO genre. It's not 100% like an MMO--yet--but it comes damn close. So does Defiance, and there are other games out there for which the medium is shaping into something entirely different. I am told that there's an entire wave of MMO-like games on Android and iOS which are functionally providing the same "experience" that many people crave in an MMO. For these specific iterations, if the desire is not to play an MMORPG in the traditional sense, then you've got a lot of options to explore.

1. Use this nebulous period for the industry to break free
That's right....while there are no significant new releases on the horizon, and the ex-packs for the current crop are mostly inclined to see if they can lure you back to the cult compound happy customer camp, you can use this lull in the industry to get the hell out of dodge. Go find a forest trail and hike down it. Just remember that in the real world wild pigs are probably gonna kick your ass.

Source

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.

More Neverwinter Observations

A few more observations about Neverwinter Online to accompany yesterday's post:

Class-Locked Gear

Further eroding the relationship between NWO and actual D&D rules is the fact that while great weapon fighters and guardian fighters should, technically, be able to wield any weapon....they can't. Great swords, for example, are locked to great weapon fighters for use. Likewise for other classes. Is the concept that any character should pick up any weapon and be able to fight with it so difficult? Sure, they may get penalized....but locking specific gear to specific classes is very not-D&D-like.

Gear is Very Uniform in Design

I haven't noticed this yet, I haven't played long enough...but my wife and others have. Gear is very limited in appearance for quite a while. Your customization choices boil down to buying dyes in the cash shop, apparently. My guess is that interesting gear is found closer to the end content levels and (naturally) in the item shops for zen. As my wife put it, this game reeks of "Korean MMO design." She's very, very gung-ho about this game, but at the same time she's never been able to stand Korean MMO ideology for very long in the past, so I'll be interested to see how much staying power it has. Luckily, the aesthetics of NWO are (to my eyes) fairly rooted in the D&D 4th edition design aesthetic, which (YMMV) means it looks decent enough and has a sufficiently western flair so far.

Of course, it still inevitably draws comparisons to Turbine's increasingly impressive-in-retrospect DDO, which let any character wear anything with penalties, and also allowed for a crazy level of customization even before looking in their cash shop (albeit with full suits instead of piecemeal).

Unfortunately, limited gear appearance is, while nothing new to the Korean MMO mindset, still a black eye even against the likes of Guild Wars 2 and WoW, which still offer a bit more variety, on average, in the lower levels (even if much of it is special stuff found in instances).

Although this is all quite negative, it still bears stressing that NWO stands up on its own merits, and also does quite well against other MMOs of like design...it just fails miserably as a proper D&D adaptation.

The Pathfinder Online Horse Race

I've been having fun watching this one. I have no stake in it--their design goal is a big step away from the sort of game concientous "casual" carebears like me want to participate in...i.e. fantasy Eve is not a selling point for me--but I still like the concept of Pathfinder and pretty much anyone succeeding at what they attempt. I admit to being skeptical of their business model....their manpower....their goals...and even why this game is called Pathfinder, a game which bears little actual resemblance to the thing PFO is described as setting out to be. But anyway....seven days left!




One bit I find interesting is that they've announced they are using the Unity Engine to design Pathfinder Online. This is an engine which I was unfamiliar with until literally a few days ago, after buying my Nexus 7 Tablet. It turns out a lot of Android/iOS and indie games are designed using Unity (including two recent new faves of mine, Dead Trigger and Shadowgun), which is a weird sort of deal, because it seems to me its a decent enough engine to design games that need to look good on small screens with tablet-level processing power, but not so sure it's going to look as good as...say...the next generation or two of MMOs that are going to be coming out between now and the prospective 2015 release date for PFO.

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.

Secret World is Suddenly B2P (not F2P)

Got the email today....with no fanfare or announcement I was aware of, The Secret World has opened its doors wide for everyone (announcement here) who buys the game with a one time purchase (correction from earlier, I did not realize this initially!) This is actually a very good game, even if I couldn't justify the expense of an extra sub for a game (with the limited time I have to spread between so many of them). In terms of "Secret World F2P vs. Star Wars: TOR F2P" The Secret World will win hands down.

The release info indicates that merely playing the game as-is is now totally free. You can buy the game before Expansion #5 and get all expansion content for free (so I guess further expansion content will be paywalled) and if you sub monthly you get perks, including $10 of cash shop money, a distint item, a cool-down XP bonus generator and a 10% discount (a membership discount, I guess) in the game store. Unlike SWTOR, this is, I feel, the smart way to run a F2P franchise: give them everything, then make them want to buy the extras.

I'll be reloading The Secret World tonight, I think! Guess I'll queue it up next to Rift, Guild Wars 2, Diablo III and my never-ending obsession with Fallout 3 and Mass Effect.

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:

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.

Cool Blog and Other Stray Bits

To keep up with my Monday-Wednesday-Friday regimen, I present...another post!

First off, go check out How to Succeed in RPGs or Die Trying by S.P.. I really like what he does there, it's full of useful stuff and inspires me to do more like it. He's also pushing out monsters you can use with 4E or Gamma World, which is pretty danged cool.



On the computer gaming front I have been playing lots of Rift, which is a weird way of responding to how much I liked Guild Wars 2.....you'd think I'd be playing more of that, right? The problem remains that GW2 is what everyone is playing right now, so the crowded mobs charging around from heart to heart have been crazy, especially for someone like myself who has an aversion to digital mobs. But you know, Mists of Pandaria just arrived, so maybe they'll go back home and I can enjoy GW2 more as a result. I have a serious aversion to the new World of Warcraft race: the pandaren look suspiciously like fat furrier cosplayers to me, and I loathe cutsey anthropomorphized things of all sorts, so this expansion effectively killed my interest in ever returning to WoW. They'll need to have the Lich King himself show up on Pandaria and slaughter every last one of the furries before I'll set foot on Azeroth again...

Anyway, Rift is pretty cool in its own right. I am planning to buy their deluxe expansion deal, which gets you the Storm Legion expack with a year's gameplay and some goodies. It's nice to be committed to a game again, to have one I'm happy with. Rift has many dynamic features that are just interesting to experience; it's gimmick, the perpetual battle against the invading elemental forces which try to blast their way into reality through Rift gates, is endlessly fascinating to me. The storyline's not half bad, either, and I like the look and feel of the game. I'm such a slow leveler though that it's hard to imagine I'll make level 50 by the time the expansion releases November...13th? I think that's when it hits. That's about seven weeks away. I have a level 26 human warrior and a level 24 Bahmi (half giant) rogue....I'd have to level each of them 3 levels a week, roughly, to make the level cap before then. That's assuming I ignore all my alts in the process. It seems like I can manage 1 to 1.5 levels for every 2-3 hours or so of gameplay. Assuming I can pull off 30 hours of game time in seven weeks....hmmm yeah, not gonna happen.



It's fun browsing all the blogs out there dedicated to MMOs. I get the feeling that to really play an MMO properly you need to sink 40-50 hours a week into these things. Not a month....a week. I once ran with a group in WoW that chastised me for playing only 20 hours a week a few years ago (at a time when I was unmarried and childless, though my soon-to-be-wife was also playing WoW at the pace of a full-time job). I was told that anything less than 30 hours a week was considered "casual" and I would never pass muster for the endgame. Well, showed them! I never even made level cap, let alone bother with the endgame.

Anyway, the MMO scene has already hit the one-month mark, if even that, in Guild Wars 2 and are already complaining about the game. Really, people? Doesn't anybody work anymore? I know a lot of kids play these games, but even kids have responsibilities outside of the internet, right?

 I get the feeling that there's a huge schism between what one might consider a reasonable amount of time to focus on hobbies (i.e. MMOs) and what's actually being funneled into those MMOs. Maybe not a lot of MMOers have kids, or are trust fund babies, or have no lives outside of gaming? I'd say my wife and I have fairly bland lives outside of raising our son and gaming and the idea of devoting full time hours to a game every week endlessly for months at a time strikes me as bordering on maniacal and obsessive.*



Anyhoo! This is old, well-trod ground and other people who have been through the culture of gaming addiction have written far more interesting stuff about it than I ever could.

So my weekend downard spiral into dismal discontent with life has already improved with the return of my wife and child from their two week vacation. Yay! My kid has 4 teeth and a fifth on the way. He's standing up from sitting on his own, and can walk--carefully--if he's holding my hand. He's making noises that sound less like a baby and more like a little boy. It's amazingly cool to watch him develop.

Either way tonight's our third wedding anniversary so no game for Wednesday, that shall resume next week. And yesterday was my son's ten-month milestone! Poor little guy came home with a cold, but he's holding up well. My wife is worried about it, as she came back from vacationing in an area with a West Nile Virus scare. She's going to call the pediatrician today for advice to help calm her, hopefully.

This Saturday my bi-weekly group is going to go retro with a 1E AD&D retro excursion. Next week my Wednesday group will resume one of its many Pathfinder games. I'm not that satisfied with Pathfinder, I think the system is a bit over-powered, but I don't run games for the system anymore, I do it for the camaraderie, the story telling, and the adventures. Good stuff.





*Maniacal and Obsessive were two traits that fit my wife's MMO obsession prior to the arrival of our child. She still makes a good show for it, but only fractionally that of pre-mom-era. Speaking of which, not that anyone ever looks at my Raptr card, but I actually haven't been playing Fallout 3 (well, maybe a couple hours) or even Dead Island. I was annoyed that two of my favorite games showed no hours logged and wanted to reflect that I actually had sunk a ridiculous level of play time into both, pre Raptr...well, not so much Dead Island (just a fews hours missing) but definitely Fallout 3, a game I have played more than any other except friggin' World of Warcraft, and continue to load up and play for an occasional hour or two every couple of weeks, just to see what else I can find in the wasteland; I have 74 hours on one character (I've played four characters in Fallout 3 now) and still haven't done two of the DLC packs on him, or found 20-odd locations that remain unexplored. Admittedly, he's like some sort of walking post-apocalyptic god with his winterized T51B power armor, his rail cannon and his seemingly bottomless gatling laser....not to mention his trusty supermutant sidekick and dog....but its still fun to wander around getting into scraps and finding entire chunks of game I've never seen before....

Anmyway, Raptr lets you do manual adjustments, but for some reason shows these hours as current playtime. Meh.....I just want the petty distinction of demonstrating my dedicated 200-odd hours in Fallout-Land.



You know you've played too much Fallout when you switch out your T51B armor for Hellfire armor for fun. You know you've played waaaaaay too much Fallout when you think going totally nude with a random knife and streaking through downtown Washington DC to see how long you live sounds like fun...

Oh, and FYI don't try searching for "streaking through Fallout 3" in google. At least, not at work.

War Z, Arma II, Blacklight: Retribution and More

Another episode of video game stuff!


The article here on Massively talks a bit about it, but a not-quite-MMO zombie survival game is on its way called War Z. It sounds like it will be more my cup of tea; I've been eyeballing videos of Day Z (the Arma 2 mod) while also playing Arma 2 to get familiar with it, but I am not sure I want to play a game where the player population is so aggresively into ganking. I once argued that a "permadeath" approach to some games would lead to a player population in which people were more circumspect about who they shot and why....as it turns out, not the case from the sound of it, people seem to become more psychotic instead, predating on their fellow players with wild abandon. At least, every Day Z tale I've read seems to indicate such. Apparently the nominal "I might die and lose all my work on this particular character" component is not as thrilling as the "I can kill another character and take all his stuff" element. Maybe the only way permadeath would work, then, is if the game proceeded to uninstall itself after death. Who knows....the idea does appeal, but being a person who's time is valuable, I rather prefer to keep the progress I've made in a given game, and not be subject to some 13 (or worse, 30) year old version of Gyges online.

So the Steam sale is about to conclude, and I get to look at my total casualty report. I added the Arma 2 series to my roster, along with a few other oddballs (namely the Prince of Persia series, which was too cheap to ignore) and got several games for my wife (including Skyrim and Kingdoms of Amalur which she wanted, and Gotham City Imposters which she took as a big hint that I would be delighted to play with her on that one).

So now for some more Capsule "First Impression" Reviews!

Actual game may not be as fun as screen shots suggest

Deep Black: Reloaded

Here's the deal. I liked the premise of this game, and I found a review online which made it look okay. Must have been a friend of the devs doing the review, or someone who doesn't play a lot of these games. There may be something worth investigating in Deep Black: Reloaded, bit its going to have to wait for a weekend when I am especially bored and desperate, because I barely got halfway through the tutorial before I realized I had potentially made a Huge Mistake.

Based on a tiny bit of playing, the game feels "off" and not in a good way, but in a stiff, unrefined way. It's visuals are okay, but the best way I can describe it is like this: did you ever, like me, play Half Life 2 and Doom 3 back in the day and then go try to play Chrome: Specs Ops? The Chrome games were based on the older version of the Chrome engine, which itself was not nearly as refined as the two genre-defining games of an older generation (Doom 3 and HL2, that is). As a result, Chrome just felt "off" and not in a good way. Plus, it had lots of annoying issues, such as uncanny AI that can shoot you from a mile away.

So Deep Black: Reloaded feels like that to me right now. Uninstalled, will investigate at a future date when I am bored and want to explore something of its kind with a lot of patience, because this game was testing my patience almost immediately...in the tutorial level no less.



Arma II

Okay, I admit I picked this one up with the idea that I might download the Day Z mod. However, I haven't found the time or interest to mess with what I understand is a buggy mod filled with gankers, to go by the internet talk. That's good though, because it turns out Arma II is a really amazing game all on its own.

Arma II is a tactical shooter, which means I guess that its keyboard arrangement does not precisely mimic Call of Duty and it has a great many more options available. Getting shot once or twice is usually fatal and engagements are almost always won by the astute person using their brains and taking advantage of the environment. I just completed Call of Duty: World at War (a few years late I admit, but it was fun) and it's a shockingly welcome contrast to jump into Arma II where the main goal is thoughtful strategic movement, contrasting with CoD's run and gun "bullet sponge must swarm the enemy lines to stop them from infinite respawns" approach to single player play.

Arma II looks pretty good for a game a few years old. I got the three expansions with it, and the graphics get better with later expansion, but the only "hmmm" moment I had was in the opening scene on the first campaign, which starts on a decidedly low-rez aircraft carrier. The on-island graphics are very nice, though.

It took me a replay on the first major mission before I got things "right," at least partially because the controls are complex. I remapped a few items to suit to taste, which insured I was not accidentally prematurely planting explosive charges deep in the woods that were needed for a later task.

Anyway, I'm getting that same "vibe" with Arma II that I got with Fallout 3 (my most played game, fyi, although Raptr doesn't know since I only started using that metric-tracking service about nine months ago). Looking forward to playing this one a lot more.



Blacklight: Retribution

I haven't had as much time to play this yet as I'd have liked but I thought I'd mention that it's been pretty good so far (barring a server maintenance shutdown in the middle of a match) and for a game that is F2P with microtransactions I have had some great success, implying that this is not another "pay to win" game. If you played its predecessor (Blacklight: Tango Down) do not try to compare the two; this is a much more polished and fun game. It also has mechs, and getting into one of those in the middle of a match was a real pleasure. I'll report more on this later as I find more time to play it; probably would have played more if Arma II hadn't distracted me!

ANY CRPGS?
If you wonder why I seem to talk so much about the shooter genre and don't touch as much on the CRPG genre, the answer is simple: as much as I enjoy Kingdoms of Amalur, Dragon Age, and Skyrim (among others), I tend to binge on those games at distinct moments, and otherwise find my "role playing game" quotient for entertainment is actually met by my weekly tabletop events (which are dominated entirely by Pathfinder right now, although Runequest 6 may rear its head soon for at least one bi-weekly game).

So yeah, shooters, survival horror, and competitive firefight-style games online are something that appeals to me precisely because its where the medium excells, I feel. By contrast, tabletop RPGs continue to have a corner on that market for me, so the CRPG descendants just don't get as much playtime as they otherwise should.

That said, I do feel a desire for a "binge" coming on soon, my preferred method for enjoying large scale CRPGs, although the reality of my situation is I don't have the kind of time blocks necessary to do that anymore. Its hard to binge the way I used to with my son now. He goes to bed fairly consistently at 8 PM these days--well, with an occasional recent exception; he's just about 8 months old now, and he's developing the "separation anxiety" phenomenon kids get, so he doesn't like going to sleep unless he knows mom and dad are present. Problem is, Dad is "the fun guy" who winds him up, and he doesn't want to sleep if I'm trying to put him to bed because he might miss dad doing something funny...I'm basically "Mr. playtime" now. So it's up to my wife to be the calming "time for bed" parent.

It's very nice to do this as a team....it insures we get things done, manage time for ourselves, and still manage to raise our child with as "interactive" an approach as possible. I sometimes worry we're overdoing it, but then I look at the giant family across the street from us with the ginormous, bellowing dad who appears to have only two settings ("pissed" and "domestic dispute") and his wife who ignores their children while slugging down tequila shots and yelling at the husband, and realize that we're doing fine.

The Secret World

My wife and I both jumped into The Secret World over the weekend. It wasn't planned that way. In fact, I hadn't planned to get TSW at all, but Green Man Gaming had a sale, I had some moolah sitting in paypal and the synergy sort of overwhelmed my common sense, and the next thing a knew I had TSW sitting on my desktop (along with Spec Ops: The Line, no thanks to an Amazon sale, and a few other odd balls). I personally blame Steam....I had been saving up some extra paypal money (it's real money, yet so easy to throw away on digital crap) specifically for an anticipated Steam July 4th sale and Steam let me down. I hear the sale will start this Thursday....we shall see. Don't disappoint me again Gabe!!!!

So anyway, The Secret World turned out to be a fascinating and welcome change from the usual MMO fare. Depending on how you approach this game you may find your experience varies, but I think that if you meet the following criteria you will find it an utterly fascinating game:

Six Criteria for Enjoying The Secret World:

1. Burned out on fantasy tropes in MMOs

2. Always felt that there was a gap in the MMO market for a setting heavily influenced by Clive Barker, H.P. Lovecraft, Steven King, Neil Gaiman, Brian Keene, Richard Mattheson, and others.

3. You have always loved Unknown Armies, Hunter, Call of Cthulhu, Conspiracy X or Kult from back in the day, also love MMOs, and would like to see how those flavors go together.

4. You have played and enjoyed the Silent Hill franchise and often thought to yourself, "the only thing I wish there was more of was lots of random players running all over this mist-shrouded town with me."

5. You would like to play the closest thing (outside of Day Z) that exists right now in the special genre of "zombie apocalypse survival MMO" (at least in the Kingsmouth starting zone).

6. The concept of a skill-based freeform leveling mechanic without handholding sounds appealing to you (but give it time, all MMOs that have tried any variant on this inevitably have to add in templates for guidance as a significant portion of the MMO crowd needs a certain amount of idiot-proofing to play).



TSW is an interesting game, and its one I am greatly enjoying right now because it does stuff just differently enough to have a distinct feel from the other MMOs out there. It's theme (a supernatural conflict in the modern world) is fresh, its writing is crisp, its voice acting is professional and engaging, and the multitude of stories that weave together as you play through the game is utterly fascinating. It's like Funcom paid attention to what went wrong with Age of Conan and actively worked to avoid the same situation here. Shocking, I know!

I won't talk specifics about TSW, but some generalities instead: the game focuses on some sort of mystical apex of conflict, in which three secret societies, each working both with and against each other (mostly against, but individual agents can work together in the field) seek to gain an edge in the cosmic scheme of things while repelling what appears to be an ongoing supernatural invasion from cthonic mythosesque forces drawn from myth and nightmares. The first key battle zone is in the town of Kingsmouth on a small New England island that is sufficiently remote that the besieged townsfolk are forced to deal with a zombie outbreak with no aid other than the outpouring of supernatural agents from the secret societies that have decided to intervene.

Your character is a sort of supernatural superhero who is gifted with powers through a strange dream ansd a visitation from a supernaturally charged bee (that later it becomes apparent comes from the benevolent Yggdrasil-like spirit of Agartha at the world's core). You are a free agent, albeit about to get recruited into the Secret War by one of the three factions that all rely on gifted agents to get their job done.

The three societies are the Illuminati (techno-information control freaks), the Templars (quasi religious militant order), and the Dragon (gamblers of fate and luck). I haven't messed with the Templar side of things yet but have dabbled in the Illuminati (my main, called Dadaist on the RP server) and made a Dragon character too (Futurity). My wife has a main on the Dragon side. One cool thing about this game: she's outstripping me for time, but in terms of leveling, there's no such thing so I've found it possible to group with her more often than would be feasible in other MMOs where she'd already have left me in her dust. Kinda cool.

The Secret World's strength lies in its story, its presentation, and its unrelenting willingness to make plots complex, thoughtful, and often puzzle-laden. Even crafting is a bit of a puzzle. The game lets you access a browser while playing (smart, that) and actively enourages you to lean on google to help solve puzzles. This probably will only be as effective as the time it takes for someone to construct a complex wiki or FAQ on all the puzzles, but the principle is really cool. I've run into at least one that my wife had no trouble solving but I was stumped on (until some random passerby showed up and solved it for me).



Graphically the game is impressive, and its one of only a small handful of games that challenges my PC. It seems to suffer from some similar issues as Age of Conan (being the same core engine, I think), such as not running well on DX11 for my PC despite the fact that every other DX11 game I have runs just fine (so just like with AoC I actually had to set it back to DX9 to run well; still looks good, though).

As with all MMOs combat is ubiquitous. You'll kill a lot of zombies, deep one-things, draugr and stranger in the opening area, and much more to come based on the many screen shots and trailers I have seen. It will take me a while to get through this opening area (it's HUGE!) at the rate I play, but I am looking forward to seeing what the game has to offer in the future.

TSW is a subscription-based MMO. I am fine with this. My experience so far has been that I tend to spend less money on average on monthly susbcription fees than I would if they were trying to gouge me with Freemium or purchaseable content as is normal for F2P games. However, TSW is trying to have its cake and eat it too with an in-game store that is loaded with all sorts of extras (mostly cosmetic) that you can buy. I'm not sufficiently vain that I feel the need to purchase such frivolities, but given that every single vanity item or mount World of Warcraft has ever pumped out has somehow ended up in my wife's account, I figure it's only a matter of time before she snags some items from the store.

Is there someone who should stay away from TSW? Maybe. I would not advise one to play if you just "don't get" the horror genre or the supernatural/paranormal genre of novels that have flooded the market in recent years. I would not play this game if you are uncomfortable with modern or adult themes (i.e. the Dragons use sex as a means of attaining the supernatural energy necessary for certain spells such as a vision in the intro area). If you have ever found WoW's talent trees to be a bit troublesome or annoying to figure out, then TSW is definitely not for you. If you ever read American Gods or Butcher's Dresden Files and didn't like it, then TSW is really not gonna appeal. If you find long voiced conversations in story plots to be a tedious thing you fast forward through to get to the pvp....then, well, they have pvp (haven't tried it yet) but this game is probably not for you. I've heard complaints from a few of my wife's cohorts in SWTOR that they thought the controls were too "sluggish" to play and enjoy (such complaints from a heavy pvp crowd btw)....if you're focused on the controls being sluggish as a key detraction, then you're sort of missing the point of this game. I would describe them as being slightly more realistic and less spazzy than a typical MMO; anyone who's ever played survival horror games will not notice anything wrong with the controls at all. My wife noticed it, but she quickly adjusted.

So anyway, I'll try not to neglect the blog too much, but I am planning on playing a lot of TSW in the next few weeks...it's got that compelling "want to play" quality that is hard to find in the jaded landscape of MMOs and burnt-out MMO players these days. I have to say that it's been a good year as an MMO fan for me, if only because Rift and The Secret World have both reinvigorated my interest in this type of game.

I will definitely provide more feedback on it as I play further along, and open up more regions. I'm very interested to see what else the game has in store, given just how impressive the Kingsmouth area is.

Tuesday Miscellany: Diablo III, DDO, Rift, Torchlight and more...

Diablo III

So my wife is playing Diablo III and enjoying it...."mindless fun for when she doesn't want to have to think too hard." It does look kind of fun, but I learned long ago that my track record with hack'n'slash RPGs is deplorable; I am averse to popping pinata monsters while running around looking for quest givers to wax philosophical on the plight their village. Of the many action-RPGs I have tried to get into the only one with real story/RPG elements* is Dungeon Siege III and that still wasn't very satisfactory. I've gotten reasonably far in Torchlight, though....of all these sorts of games, Torchlight is the best (followed by Titan Quest) but I've never finished any of them or even gotten more than 10-12 hours in, in most cases, before the inevitable "why the hell am I doing this???" effect sets in. Usually cured by loading up a Bioware title, mind you....!

Seeing her play Diablo III did motivate me to get back into Dungeons & Dragons Online, which is (imo) the kind of game all action RPGs should have morphed into by now, with real over-the-shoulder camera angles, more effort at plot (well, sort of....), traps, three dimensional environments and actual jump-around-position-matters combat. Hell, Tera got me back into DDO again, as well. Tera's getting kudos for its action-style combat and mixed views on its stripperific lingerie that they like to call armor, but DDO had both long before Tera showed up (to be fair most of the stripperific armor in DDO is purchase-only in the store, though. DDO's armor suits are otherwise notoriously functional, as Eberronian armor standards go).

Dungeons & Dragons Online

But all that aside, Diablo III is doing what it does best and my wife is enjoying it, along with her guildmates from WoW and SWTOR, so her experience, at least, is following the model track Blizzard wants everyone to be on. Me...I may try her account to see what it's like, but honestly just watching her play has given me a pretty good idea of what to expect. I only ever finished Diablo the First, anyway; I never made it past level 3 in Diablo II; I'm not kidding when I say I have a hard time slogging through isometric action RPGs. They are just not my thing. Torchlight is the rare exception. I also liked Sacred and it's sequel, but only long enough for the snappy one-liners of the various characters to wear thin.

I do plan to get Torchlight II when it comes out, though. For some reason that game is the solitary exception in the realm of action RPGs....the one version of it which makes me want to keep playing. I look forward to being able to hit that one co-op (or solo) at my liesure in a month or so.

Torchlight II

If you are among the rare breed of player like myself who find the endless smashing of pinata monsters (because they rain loot when you pop 'em, ya' see) to be painful without some DIM (deep inner meaning) then I would offer a couple alternatives....

Eschalon

First up, Eschalon (book 1 and 2, although I've only played one so far) is a quasi-turn-based isometric RPG in the old school fashion, available at Gamersgate, Steam and elsewhere. It's graphically old school, but it offers up a real story, real exploration, and a fairly steep difficulty curve. It's a lot more fun and develops a much more interesting story than anything you'll find in an action RPG like Diablo III. I'd love to see a game like this created with a budget closer to Diablo's....or even something akin to Legend of Grimrock.

Speaking of Legend of Grimrock, that's one you might find interesting. I don't personally like it. In fact I spent a bit of time with it and then delightfully deleted it from my hard drive, having been reminded of the fact that the reason I didn't play many PC games from 1989 through 1995 wasn't just because I was in college but because those games really did suck, hard. I was never fond of Eye of the Beholder, which I masochistically played long enough to realize one day that I was wasting precious life energy on an endeavour best substituted with either real tabletop gaming, or maybe something more apropo for the time (going out and getting drunk with my philosophy club buddies and picking up women). Gods I hated that game. And Legend of Grimrock reminded me why.

Legend of Grimrock

But I'm not saying its a bad game: I am saying that if you loved that style of game from the 90's and felt that it was exemplary of a lost style and format that didn't deserve to be cast aside, then you should absolutely check out Grimrock. But if you, like me, found those games as hollow, soulless and painful as a great many other games of that time period, then yeah this one's probably not for you.

There is also Avadon, which is on Steam as well. Avadon is closer to Baldur's Gate and other Black Isle games of old, and it evokes a similar feeling but with its own particular style of old school isometric graphics and an elaborate storyline. I have not found myself motivated to play it for long, but the premise is intriguing.



Avadon

So in the end I'm driven back to resume Dragon Age II. I'm still only a few hours in, but have yet to encounter or "feel" the issues so many people had with the game. Time will tell, I'm sure. There is also Rift, which continues to captivate me as the only MMO that continues to hold my attention. I don't know quite how to explain it: the storyline is just interesting enough, the game's look and feel is interesting, the level/territory design is interesting and encourages exploration, the quests are (while still typically MMOish) still fun to read and pursue, the game's full of options from all sorts of armor and loot to fun crafting, mounts galore and a general sense of "achievability" that looks actually attainable to me (while still managing to have fun in the process). I've even tried the pvp and found it fun. The rogue is an absolute terror to play in pvp, too....I've never been so successful at ganking in MMO-based pvp combat like I have in Rift, it's kind of unnerving, actually. I'm used to being the guy who has no pvp gear getting raked over the coals again and again until I call it quits and move on to more pve focused entertainment....Rift's pvp is actually something I seek out, which is weird.

Rift

*I use RPG here in the tabletop/story sense, not the world-of-computer-gaming "level up and acquire loot" sense.

Muh-Mor-Pee-Gee Madness: Or, What's up with this genre, anyway???

I've noticed that two genres/substrata of gaming at large that seem to engender fierce opinions and feelings, usually expressed as fact regardless of the subjective nature of such, are D&D and MMOs. I think the reason is simple: both D&D and MMOs in general require a great deal of personal investment and energy from the player to get something out of them, and both are sufficiently involved that its more or less impossible to not get a sense of personal ownership on the game. In D&D's case this leads to situations where people loudly and angrily state that their preferred edition of D&D is the ideal, almost biblical edition while the current iteration or all other iterations are heresy of the worst sort. Likewise, among MMOers I think this argument is typified by the average gamer who discovers MMOs through WoW and proceeds to harshly scrutinze all other RPGs in the context of how WoW-like (or not) they are. This is exacerbated by the old guard, who sourly blog about the good old days of Everquest, when community meant something, or Ultima Online, back when getting ganked every hour was a proud badge of honor you wore as you streaked to your (probably looted) gravesite.

So I preface what I am about to say with the above observations, because I'm about to do a bit of the same with Star Wars: The Old Republic. I've played this off and on now for (according to Raptr) about 50 hours. I've not gotten past level 15, but I have five characters running coterminously. Altitis, the term is. So I haven't even set foot in a starship yet that I then piloted, and I have yet to successfully tackle the first real multiplayer instance (the one on the fleet, where you have two options to get to Coruscant: go to the cityworld on shuttle A unmolested, or get on shuttle B for a serious Imperial Arse Kicking). Shuttle B make my poor Republic Trooper's bum hurt, every time.

But as I said, I've played for about 50 hours now. That's more than most single player games ever demand. And yet, I feel like I've barely done anything. Hmmmm.

So, my observations!

1. Huge ass corridors. Everywhere. And running. Endless, endless running. All MMOs require running, sure. All MMOs eventually give you mounts, but it feels like a good progression. Star Wars litters the landscsape with speederbikes and land speeders....they're everywhere, and you can't use any of them. What the hell. People complain that the game emulates WoW too much in terms of game mechanics. Well, this concept of a modern SF future in which everyone walks miles and miles to do anything...it's bat shit insane, I tell you!

SWTOR desperately needs to integrate vehicles, and not in a tiered reward fashion like WoW and other MMOs. I need a speeder bike I control from level 1, or the ability to rent/steal one.

2. So much story and yet SO LITTLE STORY. This hit me last night, while jumping between my bounty hunter, who at last escaped the Nooblet zone, and my freshly minted sith warrior, who promptly got lost multiple times in the confusing tombs of Corriban. There's not actually as much story going on as it might seem. Maybe the republic trooper section confused me (that has a bit of story and a decent continuity) but at some point I realized that most of these quests with voice over were starting to feel really inane. I imagine the same thing would happen in WoW or Tera if instead of getting a quest text box I got a fully interactive speech/conversation path. Then again, Age of Conan did this and I usually enjoyed the interaction a bit. But then, Age of Conan made no bones about player morality (or amorality, as the case may be). Unlike Star Wars, which leads me to...

3. I want to be evil but my buddy won't let me. The morality system is being tempered by the damned henchmen. I didn't notice this until I moved over to the dark side/imperial sith component of the game, because its generally pretty easy on the Republic side to just go, "Hey, I'm a good guy, and I'm going to make good choices." So when you make a bad, dark-side-point choice in the Republic side you'll be all, "whoa, that wasn't cool" and try to avoid making that decision in the future. 

Now, I tend to be a bit more involved when I play RPGs, in that I have a hard time playing the bad guy because for whatever reason I have a difficult time separating my personal moral compass as a human being from the virtual moral compass of my character. So for me, I like as GM to set up really evil characters because I know they will eventually get taken down by the PCs, or at least motivate the PCs (in theory) to excel at becoming good to stop the baddies. But as a player at best I play mildly amoral types with a heart of gold. So for me, I decided that after learning how to play a really bad, bad wastelander in my fourth Fallout 3 playthrough that I'd try to play a genuinely evil Sith or bounty hunter (or both, as it worked out) in SWTOR.

Not so with the dark side, as it turns out! You have plenty of dark side choices, yes. But you have mutliple problems, and its a subtlety that I am reasonably sure the writers of Bioware intended: you can often get rewarded with light side points for doing what is clearly regarded as the right thing even by Imperial standards. This is an interesting situation, because it means that being a good sith isn't the same as being a good imperial, apparently. Also, you get a naggy companion character, at least on the bounty hunter side, who frowns upon you if you get all evil and dark-sidey with her watching.

I tried to play my bounty hunter as utterly inimical and evil...a person who takes the first bounty and follows through, no matter the counter offer, no matter how often she is shown that the path she's being paid to follow is actually paved with babies and kittens being trod under her jackboots, and I have this whiny camp follower with me who ruins it every time by either disparagingly questioning my ethics or glowering while I rack up negative points with her friend-o-meter. Jeez!

Anyway, it was at this point that, rather weirdly, I realized that downside of fully voiced speech for a character that I supposedly had personal ownership on. My bounty hunter wasn't really MY bounty hunter, because if she was, I'd have shot the whiny henchman I was saddled with and also that big stupid hutt, then taken their stuff. Instead, I was one of three bounty hunters that Bioware allowed for: the "heart of gold bad guy secretly yearning to do good," the "neutral planet bad guy with no real opinions," and the "I am in ur houz eatin yur kittens" bounty hunter who liked having a whiny goody two shoes camp follower along only because it allows for a shocking contrast. Hmmmm.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that the game is good and thought provoking but damnit I still can't for the life of me figure out why I keep getting drowsy and start falling asleep while playing. What the hell????

Rift, to its credit, is standing up as my favorite MMORPG now, and is looking to have some serious legs. If I have to cut back, and I may, I'll stick with Rift. I think I can play that one for the long haul.

MMO Funtime with Dad

So I've figured out (so far) how to get some game time in here and there, which is good. Sometimes I can get some game time in with Marcus present, sometimes mom and dad swap duties to give each other a break, and sometimes I get lucky and he passes out for a few hours, giving me some uniterrupted time to blast geth, locusts, zombies, Covenant, or what-not.

One thing I've found really hard to do lately is keep up with MMOs. Part of it is that with limited time I think I prefer shorter normal games that offer a sense of direction, resolution, reward and progress over a tighter span of time. I really want to love Star Wars: The Old Republic, for example, and it wants me to as well, but its a MMO disguised as a CRPG, and I have a hard enough time finding the timeblocks necessary to play Skyrim or Mass Effect, let alone the insanely time-demanding environment of an MMO.

I'm also terrible with repetition, and when a game has me doing too much of the same thing over too long a period, I can burn out much more quickly than your typical hardcore modern MMOer (i.e. my wife). I don't know why, it's just that way for me. So thus am I stalled in Guild Wars and Dungeons & Dragons Online, where the ability to finish a character to max level (or end of story in GW's case) seems like a nigh impossible task due to the unending grind.

But I did notice one thing, which might explain some of the long term success of World of Warcraft: that game lets you play the entire thing one handed with a mouse. A few years ago I might have cracked jokes about one-handed gameplay on FeatherMoon server and the proliferation of stripper night elf chicks. No more! Today I realize that being able to play one handed while you bounce a baby on your lap and keep him propped up is a distinct "game play advantage" that WoW offers, and a pretty compelling one.

I'm tired of WoW, have been for a long time, but getting my character to level 85 seems like a laudable goal if I want a bit of random gametime that also lets me entertain the kid (who appears to be fascinated with WoW's simple but elegant cartoon graphics).

The Free To Play Conundrum

I just received an ad email letting me know that Star Trek Online had gone free to play and that it would very much like to see me come on back. In recent months I have received the same ads for many other games including Age of Conan, Fallen Earth, Everquest I and II, DC Universe Online, the Aion announcement that it will soon go F2P and many more. I kicked off last year with Chapions Online going F2P and pretty much spent most of February 2011 playing the hell out of that game (which I'd love to get back to some day but all these single player experiences kept clogging the pipes last year in my mad and futile dash to play All The Games before Marcus was born).

Anyway, when I received the notice about STO's F2P announcement (gotta love the truncated terminology of the MMO experience) I realized that in the long term, F2P has got to have a saturation point, one at which the value of a F2P game, no matter how cool and AAA a title it might be, is going to bump into the problem that it's only likely source of meaningful income is the dedicated and foolish consumer with money to burn on highly transient ephemera.

Now, one could argue that all gamers by definition are consumers of highly transient ephemera (at least in the realm of computer games) and that spending cash on a F2P game is no different than chucking $15/month on a pay to play experience like WoW, Rift or Star Wars: The Old Republic (are there any other P2P games left other than those three, anyway?) However, the truth is that in the end, ownership is a powerful tool, and I am really interested in seeing how the concept of ownership plays out in the F2P market.

To compare my own experiences: I played WoW from around February 2005 and subscribed for about 16 months straight before taking my first prolongued WoW break, after which my subscription pattern boiled down to, "subscribe for a few months after each new expansion arrives, or until the sight of Stormwind or Orgrimmar causes physical pain." Although I subscribed to and played many other MMOs after this point (noting that my acquisition of WoW was preceded immediately by my defection from Mac to a real PC that could actually play games), few held me for more than three months before I felt sated for the content offered. Ultimately I lacked the OCD or addictive personality necessary to stay with an MMO for the prolonged period it demanded. I have also found online social networks, another massively compelling feature of MMOs, to be lacking, so finding a big friendly guild was still not an incentive for me.



Okay, digressions aside, the first F2P game I dedicated myself to was Dungeons & Dragons Online (alias Eberron Unlimited). I was part of it when the game first released as a P2P model back in 2006, with a dearth of content, a grind singularly painful and an experience that was at once promising of a vastly more involved and complicated experience for an MMO type game while still being almost impenetrable to a single-player-hardcore, multiplayer-casual type gamer like me who enjoyed multiplayer elements mostly for the ambience and never for the actual pleasure of it all. Or in other words, I played DDO on and off with a great deal of frustration until early 2010 when I decided to give it another shot as a F2P experience, with a thought of "nothing ventured, nothing gained," about the matter.

Ultimately DDO grabbed me and held me thanks to some key improvements and changes in the gameplay experience that made it a fun package for the F2P player, and also made it more fun for the "single, with occasional rare group" style of gamer I was. It's still not perfect, and there are dungeons in DDO I can't hit without a group, which I always resent in this sort of game because, you know, if they want me and my "hardcore single player, casual multiplayer" ass to play the game then they might as well offer me some way to tackle that raid content that demands whole groups of live players (a "buy this dungeon in single player + bots" feature would earn my cash, for example). So DDO hasn't fixed that part entirely, but luckily a large chunk of the game is manageable for me.

Um....so anyway, with DDO free to play I realized that I could, if I wanted to, buy into the game, purchase its various scenario packs and expansions, character slots and so forth, and effectively "own" the whole of the game. I calculated out how much it would cost to buy everything I wanted, determined that if I played the game for ten months I would spend $150 in subscription costs anyway, so if I capped my spending at that amount, bought everything (timed for their sale events with 20% off discounts) and then got at least ten months' worth of game time out of it that I would basically come out ahead of the subscription model, all while effectively coming as close to ownership on a F2P online game as I could, at least until they turn the servers off one day far down the road.

As it turned out, this was a great idea: I have spent more than the $150 I originally alotted on DDO since then, but it was primarily upkeep (and for a short stint I was hooked on bonus XP potions) and occasional "gold seal" henchmen. I have purchased the additional races, classes and scenarios since released, which they admittedly keep up often enough to continue to get some money from me. Overall though the experience was such that I payed the equivalent of maybe 18 months' worth of subscription fees, but I garnered two+ years worth of play time out of DDO to date, and can continue to log in and and ejoy all of the game content I purchased into perpetuity without spending another dime (or again, the Heat Death of the Universe equivalent in the MMO-verse: server shut down--RIP Tabula Rasa).

I did the same thing (more or less) for Champions Online when it came out as F2P last year, with one caveat: I bought all the content I wanted within the first week it went F2P, and I did so with their super-deluxe one time sale. Champions Online offered a lot of superfluous content, as well; costumes and other cosmetics that frankly didn't interest me much, but nonetheless which I did buy particulars of, along with the remarkably cheap scenario packs and character builds (that are not so cheap if no sale is going on). In fact, it was a great deal then, but I never would have bothered if I hadn't caught the game on sale; since then, the core prices have been fairly fixed (I may have missed some holiday sales, though) and as a result, have been a huge deterrent, especially since unlike DDO I haven't gotten more than a few months' worth of play time out of Champions Online; my staying power hasn't been as great, and it's not as competitive for my time as the many other games I had been playing last year.

So then Age of Conan and many others all flooded through the gates of the F2P circus this year. Age of Conan was especially disappointing, as the prices set for items in the store demonstrated that Funcom didn't actually want you to buy their stuff (or at least, they didn't want people who value their hard earned money and have common sense to buy it), such that it was clear that subscribing was still a better way to play. On top of that they massively overpriced the new expansion content. I love Howard's Conan, but I don't love Age of Conan enough to spend hundreds of dollars on a game that I know has issues after level 22. Maybe if I knew all that money would go to actually finishing the voice overs and later dearth of content in the game (between levels 50-75 or so), I might consider it; but Age of Conan, like DDO, needs a lot more polish. I know Turbine got its act together and turned DDO into a good game, but I really don't trust Funcom to do the same.

So now, today, I see a sea of F2P games, and realize that while I might at some point download all of them on my PC, probably none of them are going to get my money, unless I find something absolutely, unbelievably compelling about the way they handle the F2P experience such that I feel compelled to give them my money (and get a good return). None of the F2P games out there now seem to be in the least bit concerned about the idea that F2P players like me will give them money for unlocked content if they make the return worth my while; they are all seemingly obsessed with the idea that F2P players are a painful aberration, like giant pinatas that when beaten shower down cash, if you can just hit them hard enough. Games like Age of Conan clearly think that they can use F2P as a way of conning you into subbing, and if you don't sub, then they figure maybe they can get money out of you equivalent to a lifetime subscription, if they just truss it up enough in shiny lipstick and make their dollar to funpoint to product relations obscure enough to scare away the "math is terrifying" types. Uuuugh.

There's also a new problem for MMOs on the horizon that I predict will have a major impact: Bioware popped out Star Wars: The Old Republic at last and demonstrated that it is perfectly feasible to do an MMO with an elaborate multi-pathing storyline that is at once filled with emotion, difficult decisions, role playing, voice overs and not a goddamn Kill Ten Rats quest in sight (or at least, showed how you can actually integrate such quests into the general flow of things without ever making it obvious or annoying; never have I seen a game handle "grind quests" so smoothly and efficiently that you don't even realize you're doing them until they're done). SWTOR has set the bar very high for the next generation of MMOs, and I don't think I'll ever be able to stomach paying (or not paying) to play a game that at any point obviously has me collecting ten dead rat bodies.

(I really, really wish that Bioware had gotten ahold of the Conan property and made Age of Conan now.)

Okay, that was a lot of text to basically say, "I will continue to play DDO and Champions Online at my liesure because they beat the rest of you F2Pers to market and made me an offer I couldn't refuse; and I am subscribing to Star Wars: The Old Republic for the next year, so suck it, Funcom." When all MMOs are F2P, no MMO is free....but as a consumer, faced with a nigh infinite number of choices for hooking me with the free h'orderves then hitting me with a major bill for the entree, I choose instead to eat at home.

Basically I guess that is the moral of my raving coluimn for the day!