Star Wars: The Old Republic thoughts

Star Wars: The Old Republic is, apparently, going to be the definitive Star Wars MMO. The eagle-eyed among you will probably point out that there's already been one high-profile Star Wars MMO, Star Wars: Galaxies, but let's be honest here - this is the Star Wars franchise. You can expect a new Star Wars game to come out with every new generation of MMOs, simply because the entire franchise is a massive cash cow for everyone concerned.

Admittedly, it's a pretty damn cool franchise. Lightsabers, stormtroopers and X-Wings will never go out of date. But the risk is always there that some lazy developer will release something substandard, relying on the Star Wars branding to shift copies.

The standard-issue stormtrooper hairdryer developed a slightly concerning malfunction.

Thankfully, BioWare is highly unlikely to do this. You've probably heard of BioWare already - though their star has dimmed a little in recent times due to not having released anything absolutely groundbreaking for a while, they're still one of the most pedigree names in the business. One of their recent franchises was Knights of the Old Republic, the Star Wars RPG that no doubt led to them landing this gig in the first place. I played the original, and I must admit I was slightly underwhelmed with it all - it was pretty easy, didn't have a particularly great story and overall the whole thing seemed slightly disjointed. Still, for reasons I don't entirely understand, the game went on to become a classic. It had its moments, though, for example the inclusion of the homocidal droid HK-47 and a keyboard button used soley for twirling your lightsabers. Overall, it was pretty good, I just didn't think it was top-drawer.

The other big name BioWare was behind recently was Mass Effect, which I'm yet to play. Still, I don't overly care, because I still hold BioWare in the highest regard. The reason for this was a couple of games called Baldur's Gate I & II, which you may have heard of thanks to the fact that they pretty much defined the isometric D&D-style RPG for all of time. For hardcore RPG players, Baldur's Gate II is probably still the game of choice - it's huge, detailed and an unbelievable experience. It's even worth buying the game just to hear the voice acting of the main bad guy in the game, Irenicus - it's just that good. Overall, I probably prefered the lighter and more cheerful tone of the first game, but both are fantastic stories and gaming experiences.

And it's this storytelling (also apparently very good in Mass Effect) that leads me onto why Star Wars: The Old Republic might be something new and interesting - BioWare are firmly set on building the 'fourth pillar' of the MMO, the story, into the game. I'm not entirely sure how its going to work, though I'm not really sure of very much about the game thanks to BioWare staying pretty tight-lipped about it at their press conference, but I'd be interested in finding out. The switching between solo and multiplayer sections in Age of Conan was a bit of a pain in that ass that I'm glad ended after the first 20 levels, so I'm a little unconvinced as to how successfully you can work that kind of thing into an MMO, but if anyone can do it it'll be BioWare. Or Blizzard, maybe.

The droids reacted angrily to the suggestion they should work overtime.

Pedigree of developer and their ideas about storytelling, there's not a lot to talk about regarding this game yet. It's set in the KOTOR universe, many centuries before the events of Episodes IV, V and VI, which sadly means no X-Wings or TIE Fighters (but no doubt their precursors will be around). It's also apparently in a playable state, which is good to hear. Graphics wise, it looks pretty damn nice. The graphics are stylised and thus the colours are bright and vibrant, but not Clone Wars stylised (ie, rubbish), which is a good balance. There's currently two factions, the Jedi and the Sith, and this might work really well. Unlike in most MMOs, where one side is far more popular than the other, the Jedi and the Sith are both really cool and will no doubt attract plenty of players.

Oh, here's another talking point - NPC companions. BioWare games are well known for letting players build a party of five or six adventurers, only one of which is the player character. The others are recruited from the many in-game, each of them fully-fleshed out characters with storylines and likes and dislikes. If you group with the tree-hugging druid, expect her to leave the party or even attack you if you decide that it'd be a good idea to murder a bunch of defenceless children. Similarly, if you group with a bunch of brigands and outlaws, expect the same to happen if you DON'T murder children on a fairly regular basis. Party members would often chip with dialogue and banter on your travels, and some of the characters would even become potential romances.

Maybe it's just me, but I didn't remember seeing that much spandex in the films...

BioWare are apparently employing this idea in Star Wars: The Old Republic. This can only be a good thing - not only because it might make the game mechanics a little different to most MMOs, but because it might actually add some more character to the world and its inhabitants. The most interesting thing at the conference, though, was this little quote: "We did the calculations and we realised, a long time ago, we had passed the point where we would have more story content than every BioWare game made to date, combined. That's all the Baldur's Gates, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, all the expansion packs. All those combined do not touch our content amount."

If you've ever waded through Baldur's Gate 2, you'll understand why that sums up pretty much all of my hopes for this game.

5 Games You Should Have Played Already

I was having a chat to someone in the pub who played games, but wasn't exactly an avid gamer. There were a few games we had played in common, but I mentioned a few classics that he'd never even heard of, which surprised me a little. There are some games that are just so genre-defining that everyone should have played them at least once in their life, games that any seasoned gamer will have no choice but to nod reverently at the very mention of their name. I've put together a list of five games that you should have played by now.

(The list is PC only, so games like Final Fantasy 7 which would otherwise be pushing for inclusion have been turned away because they're merely console ports on the PC.)

So, in no particular order I give you:

1) UFO: Enemy Unknown - This game is often voted the best game of all time for a good reason. It quite possibly is. You take control of the forces of humanity fighting against alien invaders, fighting them in the skies and then on the ground. You manage your aircraft, you manage your budget and your research and your bases and your manufacturing, and then you take your men into combat in turn-based warfare. It's a truly sublime experience - many people have tried to copy it over nearly two decades, but nobody has come close to the experience that Microprose created with the original. The daddy of all strategy games, and quite possibly still the king.

Just savin' the world.

2) Fallout (2) - A franchise that will no doubt become better known now that a third installment in the series is about to hit the shelves, the original two Fallout games are two of my favourite games ever. They are both open-ended RPGs with awesome combat systems that allow you to target individual parts of an opponent's body, along with a superb post-apocalyptic setting and hugely varied character customisation. There is a lot to do in both games, a lot of it genuinely intelligent questing rather than just the standard fare you get in most RPGs. It's nice to play a game where you actually get treated like an adult, rather than some kind of retarded child.

Fallout therefore has a rock-solid foundation for a game, but what pushes it into the realms of a genre-defining classic is the tone of game, which is absolutely perfect. The post-apocalyptic setting allows a very tongue-in-cheek play on the culture of the 50's, and the wit is absolutely superb right the way through. I don't think any game has ever made me laugh out loud besides the Fallout series, but both have made me laugh on so many occasions it more than makes up for it. Both games are absolute gems and rightly enormous cult classics among seasoned gamers, which is why Bethesda were so keen to make the third one in the series. Let's hope they do it justice, eh?

The world of Fallout looks dull and grim in screenshots, but actually is anything but.

3) Starcraft - Any game that has become the national sport of an entire nation must be doing something right, and Starcraft did pretty much everything right. The single player campaigns are interesting and varied, with a fantastic storyline spread across three races, and they're reasonably challenging too. The superb story continued with the expansion pack, BroodWar, which turned the campaign into probably the best story ever told in an RTS. If you've not played it, grab the game before SC2 hits the shelves and spoils it all for you.

Online though, the game shone even more. The three sides provided far more varied gameplay than most RTS games offered, and they're not just copies of each other - each side plays vastly differently from the others. The phrase 'zerg' has even become common usage on the internet to denote a mass rush tactic, in honour of the standard tactics of the Zerg players when the game first came out. But with every unit having a counter, and endless variations on tactics available, the exquisite balance of online play in Starcraft has made it an enduring hit online. It's a game that defined a genre (and added no end more prestige to Blizzard's name) and you really need to play it, even if only the single player.

4) Half Life/Counterstrike - Perhaps this is cheating, but I'm including these two games together because I see CS as the online version of HL. To be clear, though, I'm talking about HL1 here, not HL2 - I still view the first as vastly superior (for reasons eloquently stated by Rock Paper Shotgun here). It's a genre-defining game, even if the storyline isn't too original. You're a scientist messing about with stuff you shouldn't, and then you open a portal to an alien dimension and everything goes horribly wrong. You've seen it all before, but not like this.

HL1 is a masterclass in storytelling and atmosphere. You progress through the game, fighting alien monsters, and every now and then the story is advanced by little flashes of dialogue you hear through air vents or suchlike. The gameworld feels alive, from the moment you press an elevator call button and promptly see it plummet past with a couple of scientists trapped inside, to the times you're talking to someone and they're dragged off into an airvent by some alien monstrosity. It's not a scary game, exactly, as it doesn't take itself too seriously, but it creates a superb atmosphere. The moment that the marines appear for the first time and start machinegunning the scientists that thought they'd just been rescued is brilliant too. Overall, it's a superb game. Half Life 2 is a good game too, but the two just seem completely disconnected to me. Go for the original if you had to choose one of the two.

What I loved about Half Life was that you didn't have to elaborately stack objects with a gravity gun to solve problems - you just shot at them.

Counterstrike is obviously still going strong, now in its Counterstrike:Source incarnation. When it was first made as a mod for the original HL, though, it truly took the world by storm. I remember playing it, having never played anything like it before, and the world truly changed for me. Maps like Aztec, Assault, Dust, Militia and Siege I can still remember like the back of my hand despite not having played them for nearly five years. Sure, the population of players are generally a bunch of preteen idiots, but the game itself is superb. It's been copied in pretty much every way since it came out, so I guess it's hardly revolutionary any more, but if we're talking about the history of online gaming its not so much a landmark as a towering monolith that easily rivals WoW in size and importance.

5) Civilization - If you've played this game in any incarnation, you'll know why its on the list. If not, go out and buy Civ 4, because that's a fantastic update of the series that keeps it at the forefront of what strategy games can achieve in modern times. In terms of destroying your weekend, there's nothing that can quite match it. Yeah, Tetris is an addictive game, but it has nothing on the sustained addiction of Civilisation. Building your nation from cavemen with clubs to rolling over your enemies in tanks and bombing them with nukes is an absolute joy. Playing Civilisation makes even the best RTS games feel shallow and inadequate afterwards.

And there we have it - my choices for the five greatest PC games ever. As ever, comments are welcome.

Is there are place for hardcore MMOs any more? (long post)

Everquest was a hardcore MMORPG, and it was very successful - nearly a decade ago now. Vanguard was by the same developer and was intended to be equally hardcore, but it was a bit of a flop. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, was designed with a more casual market in mind (and we all know how that one turned out). So does this mean that the hardcore MMORPG is a thing of the past?

The answer is up for debate, and as this is the 50th post on the blog I'll go into my views here in some (lots of) detail. My perspective has changed a little recently, for the simple reason that I've now started a full time job where I'm out of the house for around ten hours a day, and on top of that I have to revise for exams for the next three years so I can qualify as an accountant and get a big fat raise for my troubles (though technically I'm a consultant rather than an accountant). Before I went into gainful employment, I was either a lazy college or university student, with plenty of spare time. When I played MMOs, I would play at least two hours a day, with four as the minimum at weekends.

Right now, I'm thinking about renewing my EQ2 subscription in the near future - checking out Kunark, which I've yet to see in all of its glory. I'm also currently on mobile broadband rather than a landline, so this'll allow me to see how viable it is to play MMOs over the connection I currently have without having to splash out and buy the box for Warhammer Online. Thing is, though, it's about £10-12 a month to play an MMO for a month. That's a hell of a lot of money, given that I'll now be playing a max of an hour a day during the week and maybe 5-6 hours a day at weekends, if I decide to turn all my spare time over to the game.

And chances are, I won't. I have a gym membership I'm actually using at the moment. I have a social life, and I seem to lose half the weekend to hangovers anyway. So I'm not going to be playing an MMO for huge amounts of time, which means that suddenly the £10-12 that I didn't mind paying when I played EQ2 more often suddenly seems a bit excessive now.

If you look at any major MMO, though, there's PLENTY of hardcore powergamers out there. Maybe it's just because I didn't come into contact with too many people who didn't play for at least a couple of hours a day in my in-game social circles, but most people seemed to sink vast amounts of time into the game. Even WoW, famously casual-friendly, has become the ultimate super-hardcore powergamer haunt - so much so that Blizzard is always struggling to find new things to keep the endgame players entertained.

So in that way, you've got to say that there definitely is a place for the hardcore MMO in the modern genre. After all, if you're charging people a subscription fee to play the game, the logical result is that you're going to have a lot of people who put a lot of their time into the game.There's actually enough of these people around to mean that most MMOs will be sustainable. That's why games like Ultima Online and Everquest are still around nearly ten years after release - people still play them.

It's interesting, though, that the majority of them play the most casual friendly MMO out there. Why? Because it's the game with the most mainstream appeal, so it's the most acceptable for 'normal' people to play - people who aren't really interested in roleplaying, or the gameworld, etc. But invariably some will find that they do like the medium, and become interested in the gameworld, and maybe even find an online identity and start roleplaying.

Powergamers. I would imagine they don't have full-time jobs.

My view is that casual-friendly MMOs like World of Warcraft and now Warhammer are far more sustainable in today's market. I loved Everquest when it came out, truly loved it - but now I have a job, I wouldn't buy the game again if it was released tomorrow. I spent hours exploring the world, doing endless other things than just the grind that modern MMOs have become, but that was because there was a lot more to do. Lots of things I just don't have time for as a working man. So I'll turn my attention to the more casual-friendly games instead.

And its the casual-friendly games that actually breed the hardcore players in the first place. Some will get bored and move onto other pastures, but others will stay. And the problem with creating hardcore MMOs is that you're relying on stealing hardcore players from other MMOs, because you're not going to attract them from the more mainstream market. Your potential playerbase is therefore much smaller than casual-friendly MMOs, and it's also going to be very demanding and labour-intensive to look after. After all, who complains the loudest on the forums when something gets nerfed? Yeah, the hardcore raiders, the people who have invested huge amounts of time into the game. Jack who plays five hours a week pays just the same subscription fee as one of these raiders, but he doesn't have time to kick up a stink when something he doesn't like happens - he's too busy playing the game.

Hardcore MMOs are still viable, then - Vanguard was panned on release and has less than 50,000 subscribers, but you don't hear about them making a loss. They will be profitable, provided that too many games don't try and crowd the niche out. But that's exactly what they are - niche games. Players who have powergamed to the ends of Azeroth may want something a little more challenging than World of Warcraft and seek out a more hardcore alternative, but for every person who does that ten more will find WoW is perfectly adequate for their needs.

There's nothing wrong with hardcore games or casual-friendly MMOs and, in a sense, its barely worth comparing the two any more. They set out to do different things. One sets out to have mass market appeal by offering a shallower but more accessible experience, while the other does the opposite. Both have their own charms, so judge them on their own merits - just don't be afraid to jump the fence if you have to.

The MMO difficulty curve...

I'll admit it, I lied in my last post. I said I was going to do an article on casual MMORPGs vs the more hardcore ones, but I'm not. It'll be coming in a few days, don't worry, but a more burning issue caught my attention today.

As you might have gleaned from my last post, I've recently upgraded my PC and got a shiny new graphics card. As such, I've been testing it out by playing some pretty games - today's was Crysis. I could run that at Medium, provided I didn't mind jerkiness and my heat sensors wailing at me. The new card runs it on high settings at 1600x1050 resolution, with no jerkiness at all. I've been enjoying it so far, but one thing has struck me about it - the difficulty.

The same thing hit me with Halo 3 when I picked that up last Christmas, actually. The fact is, I'm a pretty good gamer now, mostly because I've had a lot of practice. Consequently I usually ramp the difficulty setting right up on whatever game I play, particularly if its an RTS, RPG or FPS. I played through Halo 3 on Legendary, completed HL2 and expansions on the max difficulty setting and I'm playing Crysis on Hard. Unfortunately, I've got to the point where the only way the game designers can make the game more challenging is to make the AI do more damage, rather than making them more clever.

This presents a problem, because on the hardest settings the AI can usually one-shot you if they're packing any kind of heavy weapon, or if they're up close with something like a shotgun. I find I'm killed by being one-shotted far more than I die to sustained fire from the AI, so I'm not being killed in firefights but usually being killed by a grenade exploding near me or a rocket hitting a wall nearby. The frantic battles where you're wildly fighting for your life as dozens of enemies attack you are cool, the ones where you're taking it slow and trying to dodge an arbitrary instant death really aren't. But because playing the lower difficulty settings is no challenge now, I've got no choice but to play the instant-death roulette instead. At the end of the day it just becomes frustrating to play, because you're not being killed by a lack of skill but instead by the enemy getting a lucky shot in.

Released a year ago now, Crysis makes me wonder why we accept such poor quality graphics in every MMO except AoC.

So that's why I think FPS designers are beating up the wrong tree with regards to difficulty curves. They don't need to ramp up the damage that enemies do, they need to make them cleverer and more numerous. A grenade going off nearby shouldn't instantly kill you, but it should flush you out of cover by giving you a fair warning that (unless you move) a second one will arrive pretty shortly and finish you off. Make it more challenging rather than more arbitrary.

But how does this compare to MMOs? How can MMO's become more challenging, to keep them interesting? It's easy enough to make them harder, but that's not necessarily the same thing. In Everquest, dying was a major thing - you spawned naked at the last area you bound yourself at, which could only be a town. It wasn't necessarily in the same zone, so if you'd bound yourself in Freeport and then taken the long journey over to the continent of Kunark to go adventuring, you'd wake up right back in Freeport if you died before you found a new bind zone. Worse, all your equipped weapons and armour would still be on your corpse, leaving you essentially helpless. Oh, and you got a significant experience penalty too, something like 5% of a level, and if you got enough you could un-ding and go down a level.

Everquest was a difficult game compared to modern MMOs, but this doesn't necessarily correlate with challenging. The combat in EQ wasn't necessarily any reliant on skill than in WoW, for example, just because the death penalty was harder. In the same vein (and perhaps a better example of what I'm driving at), if WoW doubled the amount of experience it took to level up, it wouldn't become a more challenging game because of it. It'd just take longer. A game doesn't have to be long and punishing to be a challenge, so just making an ulta-hardcore remake of EQ (like Vanguard) isn't necessarily the way forward here (certainly not if you want people with full-time jobs to play).

Adding a challenge to a game is often as simple as making players adapt their play style. In WoW, NPC's pretty much all went down the same way to my rogue. I adapted my playstyle slightly depending on the class of the mob, but not much. In PvP, however, I varied my playstyle immensely - not just depending on the class of my opponents, but due to group dynamics and the situation at hand. Sometimes I'd wade right into a battle, other times I'd wait for a straggler to break off to try and heal himself and then pounce on him, other times I'd just jump people as they travelled. Though my character's skills were the same, I had to adapt my playstyle pretty much every time I went into a battleground or was involved in world-pvp.

This hits on the most obvious way to make MMOs more challenging without just making them harder is then to make PvP more important in the game. Replace the dungeon crawls and raids with lots of battlegrounds and raid-level sieges. The industry and WAR in particular is one step ahead of me on this one, as you've probably noticed. But players are inherently more entertaining opponents than AI, so they're onto a winner there.

But that's not the only answer. I don't think PvE can be phased out entirely because, while players are good opponents, there generally has to be a level playing field. It'd be difficult to implement a raid system where one player got to be a raid boss and had to fight forty other players. It might actually be good fun in something like LOTR's monster PvP system, but there's something a lot of players enjoy about fighting raid NPCs - working with twenty or forty other people to go through a pre-arranged plan.

In this case, I think the dungeons need to be made more varied. Like if each dungeon had three middles, and three ends, which were chosen at random when you logged in. So every Molten Core raid wouldn't be the same every time. Bosses, too, should have maybe five different scripts. Developers are already pretty creative at making cool bossfights (Blizzard in particular), but having bosses do a different thing each time would keep it fresher. It wouldn't make it harder, exactly, but it'd make it more interesting because you'd have to adapt your playstyle a little.

Of course, an improved combat system that was far more skill-based than the current one would do wonders too, but that's an issue for another day (and also something a lot of people have puzzled in vain for a long time, so probably not something I'm going to solve any time soon). In the absence of that, though, the best bet is to make using the current one as varied as possible.

Computer now upgraded...

I know it's been a week or so since I last posted, but I've been very busy indeed. My next MMO-related post will probably be about how sustainable a genre I think MMOs are, given the time that needs to be invested in them. It's fine when you're a student, less so when you're a consultant working on the 2012 Olympic Games and you're having to work 10 hour days, as I've discovered over the last few weeks.

Anyway, onto the more important news. Due to the fact it wasn't working properly, my PC has recieved an upgrade. The monitor has improved since I broke the power switch on my old one two weeks ago, leaving me completely unable to use my desktop, and I've now got a nice widescreen jobby that is displying at 1680 x 1050, considerably better than the 1240 x 1048 my last screen had as its max setting. It's also got a new case and a decent PSU, as the old one sounded like a hovercraft when you turned it on. The new Corsair unit is much, much quieter, which is nice. It should be pretty reusable too, which justifies the £45 price tag somewhat.

Lastly (and most importantly) the graphics card has turned from a 256mb Radeon X1800 to a 512mb Radeon 4800, which is MUCH faster. My PC's not exactly state of the art now, but it's really not lagging behind the pack as much as it used to. I'm going to fire up a few games at the weekend and see what kind of effect it has - wish me well!