My review of The Secret World

Well, I thought about it for a while, and considering that I haven’t actually written anything for this blog in like two months or so, I figured I should. Given that The Secret World has been out for over a month now, as they so proudly proclaimed in an email, that sounded like a desperate plea to me to get more people to sign up to their game, I figure it is about time to probably sit down and discuss why this game didn’t work with me like I hoped it would and why I never got it after having played it for a while during its beta. In fact, I came to despise the game so much that I actually uninstalled it twice during the beta life, only reinstalling it again after a friend got in beta and thought I could at least give them a familiar face to hang around with (until we discovered he was in those weekend betas which was completely different and builds behind the beta I was actually in).

Now, let me begin this by saying I wanted to like this game; I really did. You can’t believe how deep down I wanted this game to actually be the fresh faced, change of pace and offer something new that was sorely needed in the MMO space, especially given the stagnating nature of the genre. The idea of a modern setting place with the investigation missions sounded fresh and original, but even sounding fresh and original doesn’t mean it delivers exactly what was promised. So, when it comes to the break down I will try to point out exactly what I liked, but I will probably have a lot of things I absolutely despised about this game, and I am quite sure this will set off a few people who think that TSW is the second coming, just like people who believe GW2 is the second coming as well.

Now, first up let me talk about character creation. Needless to say, a few articles I’ve read have applauded the character creator and I have to keep asking myself one simple question; why? It’s atrocious in this game. Now, I will freely admit I might be spoiled from other games like City of Heroes, Champions Online and APB, but come on. The character editor makes games like SWTOR and WoW look positively deep and complex. At best you can do is choose a couple of faces and various slide positions that actually do nothing in the long run and despite TOR actually has a limited but at least an ability to change height and body mass on a character. This is just appalling.

Now, that’s not to say that the character art is bad; it isn’t. In fact, the character models are fairly detailed and animated (at least with emotes) fairly well, and with little tearing or stretching of the actual character model polygons; but if you were hoping for deep, or meaningful character generator, you might as well look someplace else. Clothing variations are limited, and anything you look for style which actually put you off because things like long coats or jackets still use that ancient taped to the back of your legs type of animation, thus it doesn’t look good at all.

Game world wise, this is a beautiful world; as long as you aren’t playing around in the three central hubs. London, Seoul, and New York are all cramped, tiny, not well built or well-planned out. The other locations in the game, however, are nicely sized and in some instances can feel too big at times, and quite beautiful to look at and very atmospheric. It’s almost a jarring contrast because the actual play areas feel like so much went into them, while the hub areas, the areas meant for socializing and getting together, feel like such an afterthought. Of the three hub locations, only London was the one thought about the most as it is the largest, and New York feels like the smallest. None of them feel like they offer the venue they were supposed to be for and feel completely superfluous to the actual game as the Argatha network provides all that basically.

That brings up the three factions; again totally superfluous. They aren’t required other than the once in a while faction story arc you might get. The three factions can be completely cut from the game and nothing would change. That is how tacked on they feel. I never really got to try out PvP, because every time I would try the actual thing would break, so I can’t say how any of the PvP maps are, but considering my past experience with games that base their PvP around skirmish maps, that would most likely suck anyways, especially given the fact it’s skirmish maps with 3 factions fighting instead of 2. 3 factions really don’t work well in a theme park environment. But down to the wire, other than a few lines of dialog here and there, there is no reason to have three factions in this game. Once you’ve passed your initial intro (which is the exact same for all three factions again) your contact with your faction is negligible at best and just completely pointless.

Speaking of superfluous systems, that brings me around to the entire skill system. Now, outside looking in, this sounds like a great and awesome concept; except, it’s not. There’s little to differentiate one skill set from another and there is even less reason to actually shoot for high level skills other than you have them. This is a game where the low skills are just as good, and in many cases better, than the higher skills you can actually get later on. The whole concept just seems like bad ideas, and instead of feeling like earning something new, you just get the same skill you were already using with a slightly different animation, sometimes, that can have a longer cast time or actually delivers less damage. It really did sound like a neat, and interesting concept, it’s just it was delivered poorly because each skill set does the exact same resource building as the other, offering no real variety other than a look when the wire is actually drawn out.

And that brings me to the other part of that equation the combat animations or skill animations. Take your pick. They are horrid. I am not going to mince words here. The combat animations are stiff, poorly animated and at times makes me just want to go play a game like City of Heroes at times just because I feel a game that is now 7 years old going on 8 has better animations, when I feel that most of the new animations in City of Heroes are atrocious now. The characters are stiff, very wooden and when it comes to actual attack animations barring a couple, look like they went the cheapest route possible for animation budget.

Next on that list is combat. And good God, was there entirely too much of it and it is very boring. Early on in the game, dealing with the zombies, you can probably plow through several of them without issue or problem. But as the game progresses, it has a habit of increasing the monster health factor substantially, but your damage stays relative. This is a very gear oriented game and if you are under geared even by a little bit, solo enemy fights will take a while to do. Combat is very repetitive, very boring, and it breaks up an otherwise immersive experience constantly. No matter how you try you can’t avoid it either, you will be fighting regardless of your intent just because of how the game was set up. The only way to avoid combat is to just avoid questing all together.

Now, missions themselves are… standard MMO tripe. Except they lead you by the nose as well as hold your hand to each of the next parts of the mission chains. What makes missions atrocious in TSW is they are so far apart from one part to the next, and are set up exactly like WoW style mission settings it makes you wonder what the developers were thinking. And the mission journal is the worst offender as it is purposely designed to limit how many missions you can actually have at a single time with you only able to have 3 side missions 1 main plot and 1 investigation type mission at any given moment. If you pick up more than that you have to choose to delete an older mission thus losing that progress. This would have been smart, if the missions in this game were not set up to be spoonfed like they are in other MMOs.

However, I will give props to the investigation missions. Now I said earlier that missions lead you by the nose, and for the most part that is right. They lead you by the nose going so far as to highlight and show you the object right down to the few meter area they are in, that you need to click. However, investigation missions actually make you have to do a bit of research and have no such hand holding going on. This is refreshing, to a point. The problem I have with the investigation missions was they sort of club you over the head with the clues that the in game browser became nearly pointless. I did several investigation missions and only a couple of times did I open the browser and sadly, when I entered keywords, it took me straight to the answers as they were already filled out on the game web site itself. While the theory was nice and sound that means that any investigation loses all-purpose thanks to any search engine more advanced than a pocket calculator being able to pick out any post or wiki with the answers you are seeking. This also has the fact that any replay value is set instantly to zero because the answers are always the exact same.

Story, voice acting and the like, I give this game prop’s for. I enjoyed it a lot better than TOR’s poor attempt and I certainly thought it was a lot better written and sounded better acted. I rather enjoyed the conspiracy over tone and that the NPCs actually moved around. However, no matter how good the story is, it is completely over shadowed by bad game play and game design at almost every turn for me. I gave it my all, and then during the last few beta weeks, FunCom started shoving out patches that would break entire systems just to get the patches out fast. My enjoyment factor kept plummeting and fast, especially after the 3^rd time I remade a character because of something that happened that forced me to rethink instead of having to try and go through the process of redoing missions and gaining skill points just to try a new skillset. I uninstalled this game twice from my hard drive. The first time I did it was out of pure frustration and boredom with the game. I reinstalled it again when a friend got in one of the betas and I thought I could join them, only to find out I couldn’t. I toughed it out and tried to keep testing, but with only a couple of weeks left till launch, I uninstalled it again.

The gear grind in this game was just awful as well, because gear is what defines the character, not the skill set regardless of what you are told. And though they try to say that you can have whatever look you want, it didn’t help that most people kept choosing the same face and hair styles because those were the only good ones. I couldn’t even walk around Kingsmouth because my preferred face, hairstyle, and clothing look was being used by several other players. This is a game with a bunch of good ideas but awful implementation. It sounded like it wanted to be a sandbox world, but instead decided to be a theme park instead, which is ironic since you spend a large portion of your game time in a theme park.

If I were to give this an overall, I would say wait until it goes Free to Play. I’ve heard they are adding more hairstyles and such, but hell, I hear a lot of things about MMOs that just launch that turn out to actually do very little. I really did want to like this game, as I said, but it just buried itself under the weight of a lot of things that just make it not very fun for me to play.

Classic Gaming: Retrospective on the Final Fantasy Series

So, I am going to do something in this blog I haven’t done before, and it’s not about MMOs, it’s actually a retrospective on one of my former favorite franchises back when I was a young little pup; the Final Fantasy series. Now, I know that some people talk about Final Fantasy, and many remember that abomination on the PlayStation, Final Fantasy 7, as their all-time favorite game. I can’t fault them for that, many of them had never played a Final Fantasy game until that point, and the PlayStation introduced many people to the Final Fantasy series. Hell, I won’t even lie, I bought a PlayStation myself just so I could play Final Fantasy 7, but I am getting way ahead of myself on that point. Needless to say, this is mostly nostalgia talking, and will most likely piss people off as I say it, but I do personally consider any PlayStation era game of Final Fantasy an absolute betrayal (to quote Spoony) of the core franchise most basic fundamentals.

Way back sooner, in ye old NES days (talking 8 bit here) I was reading my Nintendo Power, and there was a blurb about a game called Final Fantasy in it. I was big into the whole Dungeons and Dragons thing, but was wary of actually bothering to get involved, because I had played Dragon Warrior, and promptly thought it sucked hard. But, I decided I would go ahead and give it another go, because generally speaking, Nintendo Power’s reviews were fair and well thought out. Not to mention you could actually pick the classes of your party members. Hell, I even entered a contest for Final Fantasy through that magazine and won a crystal ball from it, that I still have to this day with the classic Final Fantasy logo emblazoned on the bottom of it. It’s a glorified paper weight but I felt so happy.

Needless to say, I went out and bought myself a copy of Final Fantasy. When I got home and plugged it in, the first thing that grabbed me was the music. Primitive by today’s standards in all its 8-bit glory, mind you, but wow, was it good for setting the tone and mood of the game. And most fascinating of all, it had a prologue of text for people to read and actually get a sense of where this game was coming from. In short, a prophecy foretold a coming darkness, and 4 warriors would appear heralding in the light to battle the darkness; The Light Warriors. As clichéd and basic as any type of intro as you could get today, but it was far better than most other RPGs on the NES at the time. And the gameplay, way, way better than that crappy Dragon Warrior game I absolutely despised.

Now, this was back in the day when I was too young and dumb to realize that these games were coming out of Japan and there were actually other games in the franchise. So, it wasn’t until the Super NES came along that I found out about the American Final Fantasy 2. I saw the blurb in the back of Nintendo Power, talking about the coming game articles for next issue, and I really got excited. Because I loved the story of Final Fantasy, even as shallow as one might consider it, but the gameplay, made me love it. Then I got that next issue and I saw the leaps in mechanics the new game would make. Active Time Battle (ATB) was a big thing, as you had to think on the fly. I was hooked just reading the article.

Then I got the game, and wow did the bar get raised for me personally. The sound score, that Final Fantasy prelude I love, got the ante upped and it sounded orchestral and really moving. Then the game opens up with a flyby and you see the prelude to the fall of the main character and begin his quest to rise up to be a better person. The music was top notch and the story was moving at times, and heart wrenching in others. I kept going and going, and even got my characters to such lofty heights that even the toughest normal enemies were nearly being one shotted regularly by me. Then the American Final Fantasy 3 was announced and all bets were off.

This was the first RPG, that I recall, that had ever gotten an actual TV commercial in America. Maybe it was where I lived, but I remember that little moogle on screen interviewing the monsters and such, and that just blew my mind. I was sitting on the edge of my seat, waiting for the launch day. Hell, I just happen to get into a local Wal-Mart and asked if they had a copy of Final Fantasy 3, and low and behold the guy went and got me a copy and there it was, the magnificent purple black box with the moogle on it and the golden logo reminding me of Final Fantasy 2. And I was still enamored by Final Fantasy 2 and its rather epic ending mind you to.

And Final Fantasy 3, to me is the pinnacle of the Final Fantasy series, the absolute best of the best. They took the bar and raised it so high that they’ve literally tried to recopy it in almost every PlayStation Final Fantasy since. They left the fantasy feel in but added in slight variations of a steam punk atmosphere and oppressive regime. It was absolutely brilliant, and the bad guy, Kefka (who is probably the best villain ever in a Final Fantasy game), could probably be the Joker’s brother. He is absolutely bat-shit insane, but his antics make him quite memorable and one of those types of bad guys you just love to hate.

And the main character you start as, unlike the previous Final Fantasy, was not the main focus of Final Fantasy 3. Terra was some strange girl with even stranger powers, and amnesia, but the plot actually didn’t revolve around her. In fact the plot shifts between multiple characters fleshing out their stories in the most beautiful and poignant way. You actually felt what these characters felt, even in the limitations of their 16 bit world. And when you saw the Opera scene when you, as Celes, had to sing the opera song to Oh My Hero, the melody and music was powerful. This was a game that was beautifully designed and orchestrated, and the best part, just when you think it’s the end, it isn’t.

This is how the bar was raised in Final Fantasy 3 for me. I had gotten to the point where I was going to the floating island, and we were out to stop the Emperor. Battle was going well, and of course, I thought the end of the game was near, which to me was just baffling because that would make the game the shortest in the series. But, low and behold, Kefka’s douchery rears its ugly head, and he usurps the Emperor and takes command of the ultimate power. Not only did we fail to stop the true threat, the world ends up destroyed in the process. Holy crap, the world is destroyed and forever changed. Talk about raising the bar to maximum at this point, but oh, the game isn’t over.

You wake up as Celes, and now your goal is to go out in the world and find your friends. But you can also screw up just on the waking up part as Cid is also with you (a character that has been in Final Fantasy almost since the beginning) and if you don’t do things just right, Cid could die.

The world itself is an obliterated mess with monsters everywhere and you are left with a sense of what are we going to fight for, until you start finding survivors and townships that have been rebuilding in the aftermath and you see the reason to continue fighting and surviving. The ending is just beautiful with emotional attachments as you finally take down the big bad at the end, brought your companions back from the brink of despair and the end result is the destruction of all magic in the world to save it. In short, at this point there was no higher the game could have gone, but hell, I was still too young to think about that.

Now, before I continue, at this point I was pretty much a Final Fantasy Fanatic. Final Fantasy 3 had left me wanting more, and of course I dug into every morsel I could find. Nintendo Power was talking about the N64 at this time, and I saw a bit that Square was looking to make a 3d version of Final Fantasy on the N64. I was all hyped, but then, nothing more came out about this. I kept wondering asking people if they heard anything, then I heard whispers that the next Final Fantasy would be on the PlayStation.

I found a magazine article about it in a Wal-Mart, and it showed that it was called Final Fantasy 7, and of course, again having not previously personally known about all the other Final Fantasy’s at the time, I kept wondering what happened to 4, 5 and 6. It wasn’t until later that I was informed that Final Fantasy 2 was actually 4 and Final Fantasy 3 was actually 6. So I kept wondering why 2, 3, and 5 were never ported to America, and discovered in another article that they never felt they would have sold well and wasn’t worth the translation at the time. Bah, let me make up my own damn mind please.

Needless to say, as I said before in this blog, Final Fantasy 7 is the whole reason I bought a PlayStation. I was eager and hyped for it. I couldn’t wait to try it. After all, after the balls to the wall storytelling that was done with Final Fantasy 3 (or 6) they couldn’t possibly start slowing down now. I don’t think my anxiety could have been any higher than waiting for that god awful Sony PlayStation load up title screen to pass than I was when loading the Final Fantasy disc into the console at that time.

And then I heard the music and I thought to myself, yes, this is going to be a Final Fantasy. They were using the traditional prelude that always let me know this was a Final Fantasy game. Then, I started playing it. Now admittedly, it took some time for me, but I started catching things early on that this wasn’t actually a Final Fantasy game. First up, of course, was all the heavy techno crap in the game world. Barring crappy polygonal graphics of the time, I couldn’t help but notice that the world felt lifeless, something that even the 8 bit games at least tried to convey back with its limited color palette. And I understood by now that none of the Final Fantasy games were ever really connected to one another, and I expected that most of the character tracks would be gone, but this was the most god awful music I had ever heard in a Final Fantasy. It was making the 8 bit game sound absolutely orchestral.

And then the first slap of the betrayal came at me with a knife; the battle music. Now, to this day, the battle music of Final Fantasy has been pretty much similar, espousing more heroic themes and a feeling of fighting. You were playing heroes in a game, and the music matched that. But in Final Fantasy 7, it didn’t feel heroic as much as bland and this is going to be tedious. It didn’t inspire as much as make me want to turn down my volume, contrary to what I did in the previous titles which was keep myself from actually turning the volume up and upsetting my parents.

And then the slap in the face that really got me the moment I noticed it from the get go; the victory fanfare music. Oh my God, how did you screw that up? That is perhaps one of the most remembered things about the Final Fantasy games for any nerd who has actually been playing the games since the NES days. It went from this sounding heroic courageous thing to sounding bland, and like someone went, oh, yea, you won, here’s crap. Jees, really? And believe me when you actually sit down the entire mood of Final Fantasy 7 was just a cluster of fricken fail after another, I still can’t believe people actually consider this crapfest the pinnacle of Final Fantasy.

The characters themselves were all stock and not very memorable. Hell the only reason people even remember some of the characters even that remotely is that two of them had over sized swords. Then of course comes the ultimate insult, the death of Aeris (Aerith) that every nerdgasming fan boi will sit there and say is the saddest thing evar, and I still scratch my head as to why. Aeris was the blandest, stupidest and most boring character in a Final Fantasy, and there had been previous characters who had been killed off and were way more memorable and had way more impact than that useless air head. And what’s worse, the game tries to convey she was integral to the whole plot line when the game could have moved on and she would never have been missed, not once.

And that’s not even getting into how bad the plot was to begin with, and how much it was an attempt to copy Final Fantasy 3 and fail utterly at it. Basically, you try to stop the end of the world, a common theme mind you, but in this game, you actually fail, like in 3, but unlike there, that is the actual ending. The world is destroyed and the only survivors we are shown is Red XIII and his pups. Yea, they retconned that later on given the fan outcry and such, and I am not raging over the ballsy ending, in fact I applaud it, but what I was disappointed over was the sheer utter destruction of the franchise and the absolute betrayal of what made Final Fantasy. They pushed so hard on the graphics that the plot and storyline and characters were all lame and less than stock. Their most memorable qualities were oversized things from Cloud’s sword, to Cait Sith’s body, to Tifa’s boobs (and you can probably find a lot of fan drawings of Tifa and her giant jugs that are weapons unto themselves).

But, no, the final nail in the coffin for me was Final Fantasy 8. Whereas it took me a while, because I was still a Final Fantasy Fanatic at the time, to realize how shit 7 was, but 8 utterly devastated me. 8 was a middle finger to the fans, and completely removed everything that was Final Fantasy. The prelude song that had been a tradition for 7 games before it, was gone. It was a techno wannabe world with impossible gun blades and S&M teachers who wanted to bone the main character, who was an unrelatable douche bag metrosexually confused character, and tried to cram so many plot points it was just an utter cluster of fail.

And it basically retread all the same grounds as Final Fantasy 3, again, including world destruction and you fighting on after the end of the world. But unlike in 3, this one the world is magically fixed because of time flux or something, and the destruction of the world never happened, and it’s all just a baffling mess. This doesn’t even include the awful, awful gameplay mechanics that required endless hours of grinding, more than usual, using the draw system, and the utter requirement of attuning characters to Guardian spirits or the fact that gear and upgrades were completely removed and required convoluted wannabe crafting system to get working. Final Fantasy 8 destroyed my love of Final Fantasy.

At this point I didn’t care. I bought Final Fantasy 9, and the roots were there, but I was so, utterly and hopelessly spiteful towards the series because of Fianl Fantasy 7 and 8, which I only ever got as far as disc 2 in Final Fantasy 9. I never completed that game, despite how Final Fantasy 9 did return to form, somewhat. And it makes me sad, because from what I heard, 9 was a beautifully done game as far as plot and story are concerned.

I’ve never played 10, 11, 12 or 13. I probably never will because just looking at the cover of 10 sickens me, and hearing all the scathing reviews of 13 just makes me laugh. 12 flew under the radar I didn’t even know it was made until 13 was being talked about, and 14 was just bad for an MMO. Needless to say, Final Fantasy was a franchise I started out loving, but when the series reached the PlayStation, and got Sony’s mitts on it, I knew things weren’t going to turn out well from a fan perspective. Sony had an already bad reputation at this time for me, and it makes me sad that my fears were confirmed. I do miss the old series, but like in my MMO blog from last week, it is something I don’t expect to ever return to its true roots because the game was killed off in favor of shiny instead of substance.

Would I ever consider a new Final Fantasy if they tried to return to form? I don't know. I know a lot of fans make me gag because they want Final Fantasy 7 remade, but if I ever had to pick a Final Fantasy to be remade for the common era, I would vote 3 (aka 6) because that game had a true story, substance and was basically the pinnacle of what made Final Fantasy truly a Final Fantasy.

Thoughts on the MMO market; Why I loved UO

Things are interesting when it concerns the landscape of the MMO world. In the current MMO age, everything is set to a level of hand holding and made so ridiculously easy that any sense of gratification one might feel for having accomplished anything is nearly lost almost as instantly as it is accomplished because things were just too easy. On the other hand, the concept of a living, breathing world that players could interact in and be a part of has been neatly swept under the rug and replaced with essentially single player games trying to pass themselves off as MMOs. The world we live in, as far as the gaming world is even concerned, is not an MMO world. It’s just businesses trying to cash in on the actual MMO genre without understanding what truly got people so interested in it in the first place.

I’ve been sitting back and just thinking, mostly. And so far I realize that I miss the young nature of the MMO industry. I don’t mean WoW; that pretty much heralded in the current generation of single player games disguising themselves as MMOs. No, I mean the games that came before, like UO, Dark Age of Camelot and so forth, where the world was more determined by the player than the players waiting on the actual world to get updated in expansion packs.

For me, the best world was always UO. This was a world that was determined by the players, and events and such were only small hallmarks. I wasn’t required to be a fighter of any kind. I could just spend my days being a crafter, making things for other players, and I know the things I made would actually be desired. Crafting in today’s MMOs is such an afterthought, I am left wondering why they even bother having crafting anymore, because it’s little more than lip service in the end instead of actually being something that players can aspire to or want to desire in the long run of the game.

I guess it might be nostalgia talking at times, but it really is something I do desire; a return to what an MMO was truly supposed to be about. Something more than just creating a specific character class and going out and bashing monsters continuously over the head until they relented, that has just never really struck a chord with me. And even as much as I love protecting the team, that role itself has been becoming less and less needed as developers continually push their MMOs to be more single player than ever before.

No, my best time ever that I can honestly say I’ve ever had was sitting, as a blacksmith, at the Britain forge in UO just talking with other players, repairing their goods and even making armor. You didn’t feel useless because the stuff a crafter made was actually on par with the stuff that could be found. Very little was actually needed to actually improve upon that, though they could have done so without destroying the actual integrity of the game. I don’t even think I could possibly describe how much I would love to go back to UO right now and engage in that world again. But, unfortunately, that world is gone.

If I were to show people UO now, they would probably just imagine it as another Diablo dungeon romper, as the crafting professions themselves are pretty much dead. Though socializing and such still exists, and from I’ve seen, a strong commitment of the RP community, in the long run what UO is now and what UO was just are two different entities and what I would desire just won’t ever come back. Not without basically a complete and drastic reboot of the entire franchise, and doing that to a 15 year old game would pretty much just require a new game at this point.

So what is it about this game that I always end up pining for in my mind? What keeps making me pine for it in ways that no modern MMO has been able to fill the void in? I don’t think the answer is simple. Parts of it can be describes as nostalgia, parts of it may be described as mechanics, and maybe even parts of it can be described as the community itself. But I think what really attracts me, and I think a lot of people actually remember, is that you truly could decide your own fate and how you actually wanted to spend your time in the game.

Ultima Online wasn’t just another game, and while the learning curve for getting into it was steep (nowhere near as steep as other games mind you, but it definitely was not newb friendly) once you got into it, the possibilities of what you could do became wide as all can be. There was a lot to do in UO, from owning your own house to being a tailor to exploring dungeons. And none of these activities, believe it or not, required the player to take up one offensive weapon or spell in defense. If you were skilled enough or planned yourself well, you could play the game without worry of ever having to cross swords with another player or monster in your gaming life.

Of course, if you were to look back on history, the one thing that would probably be noted as infamous about UO was the fact that player killers were rampant in the game. The original premise for UO was that it was a social experiment. Believe it or not, the grand-daddy of the modern MMO movement wasn’t expected to last 6 months when it launched. But when it did, it pretty much exploded onto the world. And what was remarkable about this simple looking game was actually how complex it turned out to be. I know people think that the 250,000 player subs at UO’s peak means it was a failure of an MMO, but most people are also too young to remember or even know that until WoW came along, the largest MMO on the market only peaked 500,000 once and quickly declined.

This is why I am disappointed on the announcement of Elder Scrolls Online. When I heard the rumors, I actually thought, Maybe they might make a sandbox game like classic UO, and of course I set myself up for disappointment. But I was using my knowledge I had from the fact of how the previous Elder Scrolls games had been created. But, instead, they flat out stated it’s going to be yet another theme park MMO, a single player game disguised as a multi-player game with classes locked in and such. So, players will not have choices and such. Now, one of the things they cite is the difficulty of balance in a freeform system, and I don’t disagree that can be hard, but that is just dumb to ignore the one core facet of your entire legacy, not to mention why can’t I be a bloody werewolf? Again something that was core since Morrowind.

I just don’t understand developers who want to jump into the MMO market, with their famous products, but not stick to the core fundamentals of the product that made it great. Elder Scrolls would have been perfect to usher the MMO back into the living, breathing world set up that MMOs use to espouse to. Giving players the ability to be whatever they wanted, play how they wanted, without forcing them into a set class. Let them be the blacksmith and forge weapons. But instead, we are given yet another theme park loot hunt game that will probably have yet another tacked on crafting system that means jack shit in the end, except for maybe the one that is all important (probably the potion maker) if they even bother with crafting at all.

In short, I believe Bethesda is making a big mistake. They are shunning the fans of their game to appease the lowest common denominator. They are looking at WoW and going, let’s be like them because they think copying them but changing the wallpaper is just going to be enough. It really isn’t. This was the perfect opportunity to take MMOs back to their roots at what they were all about, to allow people to actually be a part of a living, breathing world, and allow them to play it how they wanted to without always being forced to play some form of damage dealing character and always having to hunt and kill monsters, or other players.

So, what would I have done differently? Well, I would have incorporated a skill system. No levels. I would have looked at classic UO as the basis for the design. I would have then decided how I would have wanted it to pan out, how crafting should work, and built the world around the idea that crafters are important to the game. I would have let the player decide how they want to play, if they want to mine, or be a blacksmith and hang out and repair gear for the adventurer players, let them. Allow them to enjoy the game as they see fit.

How I would have handled crafting would have been done thusly; the skill of a crafter determines the quality of the items, with a highly skilled crafter making the nearly best items. I would have incorporated a type of enchantment system that would allow for prefixes and suffixes that give special boosts to items as well. Items found in the world could potentially be slightly better than what a crafter could make, but it would be very rare. A gatherer would be just as important as someone who goes out and slays the rampaging dragons that swoop down on the world. This would help to create an in game economy and such that would actually help promote trade and commerce and yes, items would have durability maybe even requiring replacement in the end.

Speaking of items, I would finally get rid of the stupid bind system. It was novel, but now it’s just a ridiculous control system that has done nothing but hurt community and promotes elitism in the worst ways. Elitism is not a bad thing, but the type of elitism that spawns around it is. Item loss from death is a bad thing to deal with, but I think some items lost from death should occur, but other things like weapons and armor can probably stay.

Death would be something that would need to be handled carefully, but I don’t think the game should be easy, and I do think that a death penalty of some kind is a necessary evil in an MMO. Otherwise you just end up with the death zerg. A loss a consumables on death, and possibly gold should be a good start with ways to get them back. Primary items like weapons and armor I would consider as well, since in order for an economy to thrive there needs to always be a constant demand for things. I know people would hate that, but economies don’t really thrive when there is no reason to repair, replace, or sell items.

I also probably would have pissed off a lot of people that enjoy their ranged classes by bringing ammo back and of course, with mages, having reagents again of some kind, just like in UO, for their spells. I know that’s probably not very Elder Scrolls, but it would have helped balance things out in the long run where the warrior types would have to constantly run in melee while the ranged can just plink away at range.

Another thing I would have brought back is limited pack space not based on arbitrary slots assigned by a bag type, but by actual carrying capacity. The weight in your pack and how much can be carried would, in the end, determine exactly how much you can carry. This limit could be determined by strength, of course, but wouldn’t restrict players based on a slot system but more on just how much they can actually physically carry.

And then there is the one thing that often gets brought up in every MMO but either not implemented or very poorly done in the modern MMO because there really isn’t a point to it, and that is housing. Housing was perhaps one of those features of UO that basically added icing to the cake of the fact that UO was a living, breathing world that people were a part of. You could own a slice of the land and decorate a house. You could have vendors to sell your goods for you while you were in town, and there were actual player towns that sprung up like this. Space was limited, but players could buy or sell houses as well, and later, were able to build the plot as they saw fit. If you want a theme to build an inn, you were capable of doing that. This is something I would do, but probably use a plot system similar to horizons, but not as convoluted or restricting as that. That way the players can build how they want.

And of course, the final part of the puzzle would be PvP. PvP is important in a living, breathing world of MMOs. But there would have to be some differences from the willy nilly gank style of old UO to today. Safe areas, maybe kings territories, and of course probably special rules for PvP. After all, today’s PvPers who’ve grown up in the safe world of WoW (yes, I am calling WoW PvPers carebears) would probably froth at the idea that their uber leet sword of pwn just got ganked from their corpse, but then again, I say the one thing about UO’s PvP is that it acted as its own kind of stat loss as a player went to regear. It was probably the biggest factor in helping control the battlefield and keeping people from zerg rushing. It was probably one of the biggest make people think things, the fact that dying could result in them losing all their stuff. But again, it’s something that most MMO gamers just wouldn’t accept.

In the end, I don’t expect much out of ESO, especially since they made it clear they are just going to copy the tried and true WoW formula. I can hope they will wake up in the end and realize that giving a finger to their fans is a bad idea, but who knows. I would hope they might actually experiment and try to make the MMO a true sandbox world instead of yet another bloody theme park that we have entirely too much of on the market. I think that’s what a lot of the angry posts are truly about in the long run. Who knows, I am still waiting and seeing, I guess.

If I could wave a magic wand, I would probably make a classic UO reboot with modern 3d graphics but keeping its classic gameplay albeit streamlined and the isometric viewpoint. Hell, if I could magically get it, I would use Blizzard’s graphics engine because that’s just about perfect for UO, make the entire world of Britannia, maybe double the size of the world and just go from there. But that’s a pipe dream, and currently while most developers think that more theme park games are magic dollar signs, my dream of seeing another game like UO just keeps becoming smaller and smaller.

But I keep holding onto hope. Maybe soon a developer will wake up.

Champions: On Alert!; Surprising Update

One thing I can say is that I have been pleasantly surprised with the turnaround in Champions Online. Now, this is not to say that everything is going smoothly or perfectly but the direction and the way they are working their designs has been pretty good. They’ve started implementing methods and such for Champions that has over all improved the game, honestly, and looks to be leading towards giving some good overall. It isn't all peaches and cream, but I am going to just discuss what has impressed me.

Now, I know there are people that believe the mod system is a bunch of hooey or some other thing like that, but just taking the new item and gear system into account, the overall improvement just on mid-range mods alone, is a staggering improvement over what we use to have. The vocal minority complaints have basically been coming from those people that can’t farm one critter over and over for the best of the best gear. In short, Cryptic has now given a foundation to keep playing instead of the former log in when the new content releases, complete it then log out for the next several months model that has currently been in the game as it stands. IE, they gave people reasons to play now, and for some odd reason, those vocal people find that a horrible idea. *boggle*

Old systems were removed because, frankly, they weren’t going anywhere. I know some people like to claim that the old crafting system was the “best of the bestest” out there, but really, it was crap. Having a useless system that was worthless from the minute you started messing with it, and even the interesting items only the crafter could actually use was a ridiculous idea to begin with. In short, they removed the mess of useless stacking components and just gave us ways to get the special stuff from vendors. And now can just combine items for the stats we want, and put them in the gear we desire. No more of the random stats that do very little for the character.

The Alerts themselves are actually pretty good, with a few quibbles. Over all though, they provide content and if you are hunting for some costume pieces you always wanted, the bosses can drop particular pieces that can be used or sold by you. In addition to that, each of the types can either help you level, give out a large amount of resources (money in the game) or even provide you with modifications. Then there are the special types which are generally week long variants of the other three but with a special villain or villain group to combat. It’s a good foundation start and I can see Alerts being used to introduce special event content that has more of the super hero flavor to it, such as moving the Undead Hero fights during the Blood Moon to Alerts instead of having them out in the world.

The biggest thing that I am actually interested in that was just announced as a contest that can be found here is create your own villain, which the Grand Prize is your villain will be featured in an EPIC 10 man encounter (ie raids). The game system already is set up to support raids now, you can see it through the team up window, and this actually makes me happy to see that large scale content like this is finally being considered for Champions. It has been needed to help with endgame and the new foundation for loot and such that was created gives the devs a large amount of leeway in creating unique items and upgrades for characters as Champions now pushes forward.

The follow up now is to wait and see when the lair review goes through, which is also supposed to include epic lairs (which are supposed to be very tough 5 man content, IE heroic dungeons basically). The dungeon finder is already in place, as it can be seen in the Instance Queues window with its own tab, but the dungeons themselves have not been hooked in. And after that, there is supposed to be new content with a level cap raise and talk of new zones. I can only hope that this will include increased support for new power sets as well for the game as well as reviewing what’s already out there.

The future is looking bright, and if in gam activity is any proof, this was just the type of thing that Champions needed to get the ball rolling again. Hopefully we will see more in the future.

Edit: Something else I forgot, the number of costume pieces that people have always wanted were also released with this update that you can find as random drops from the NPCs in the world or using new in game type currencies (similar to TOR) you can buy them from special vendors instead. It's a great way to flesh out characters now.

Being Casual is no Excuse for Being Incompetent

You know, it’s a growing thing I’ve been seeing lately. I have nothing against casual players. In fact I actively encourage people to play at their own time and put life before a game, in so much that I think the guilds I form in games have the most lax rules concerning actual attendance and so forth. However, there is an ever growing group of people that trumpet this casual banner and use it as an excuse to be utterly stupid or incompetent. These people aren’t exactly what I call casuals, so much as people using the casual banner to try and explain away their own ineptness or incompetence and try to make believe that the things they hate (that tend to expose their incompetence) is what other casual players hate. This is where I’ve come up with my latest saying of being casual is no excuse to be incompetent.

Really, I would rather say stupid, but I am being somewhat nice about it. But there is a lot of people lately that are using the casual banner as an excuse to be absolutely incompetent players, and they try to disguise this excuse behind things of such as “I don’t have time to learn everything about a game” or “It’s unfair I have to spend so much time doing these things” or “It’s my time and money, I can play however I like.” So we will examine some of these excuses.

Now, one of the biggest trumpets I’ve seen from these type of people that hide under the casual banner are the ones that play MMOs and multiplayer geared games and don’t like to interact with people or team. This is absolutely stupid. No, you can’t argue it. These are MMOs. They are designed to bring you to interact with other people. There are plethoras of single player games that do the exact thing you are looking for. If you ride the excuse that you hate interacting with other people in a mass media experience, then really, MMOs are not for you and you are already demonstrating the key malfunction of your argument.

But then people trumpet my money and time is my own, and thus you can’t tell me how to spend it. This is true, but then, so is the money and time of the people you are joining with and showing your utter incompetence towards. I don’t give two shits how you spend your time and screw up your character in the game. But when you join a team and start ruining everyone else’s time, no you are not helping. You are demonstrating that you are incompetent and you don’t deserve to do the content that those people are working towards. You are the reason people sit there and tell you to learn2play. It isn’t there fault you refuse to work as a team player. If you are so inconsiderate of other people’s time and energy they are devoting to what they enjoy, then why should they consider yours? Don’t complain when you refuse to be a team player in a team based activity and people don’t respect you when you are not respecting them. And don’t complain that you can’t get the new hotness because you refuse to be a team player.

Another common excuse is that they say they don’t have time to learn these things. This is so many ways of retarded and stupid I don’t know where to begin. Basic common sense doesn’t require time and much effort to apply. Secondly, it doesn’t take much to learn that 2 and 2 equals 4. Developers have made the games they create so easy to understand these days that it can feel insulting on many levels because they are catering to people that shouldn’t be catered to. If you can’t take the 2 minutes to look at read the description and understand the basics of your characters abilities and class and so forth, then no, it isn’t lack of time, it’s you’re being lazy. If you want to be in game activities that require teaming and being a team player, then take the time to learn your character, role and abilities.

Another common excuse is, I don’t want to play this way. Then why the hell did you play the class to begin with? There are classes obviously better suited to the role you wanted. Don’t sit there and try to pin excuses of game mechanics or flavor or any other non-sense on your ineptness to actually picking the class and role you wanted. This goes doubly so when you go in saying you will do something but aren’t. You are really wasting people’s times doing that.

Some people of course try to say that it's unfair they can't get the best stuff without needing a group. These are lazy people. In short they want everything handed to them instead of actually just going out and playing the game or learning to be a team player. Honestly, these are the type of people that MMOs just aren't for, and for whatever reason they keep playing them. It baffles me.

But really, there are a ton of excuses these days that people try to hide behind for their reason being incompetent. Some don’t even want to communicate; they stand there like a timid little mouse and act like everyone else is supposed to magically do things for them. And people that try to use the term casual to hide their own incompetence really irks me, because it insults the actual casual players that enjoy playing, and I know are damn good at playing when they can play. I don’t ever accept people telling me that just because they are casual means they are a bad player. No, you are a bad player because you refuse to actually improve yourself, so stop trying to hide behind being a casual and insulting people for it.

So in the end, I will say it this way. Being casual is no excuse for being incompetent or stupid. There are many people out there that are casual that are truly good despite limited time to play. So don’t even try to lump yourself in that group of casual. Most casuals actually take time to learn, but the few who don’t tend to give the casual group a bad name.