MMOdus Operandi MMORPG Blog

APB et al.

2009-07-18T04:01:00.000-07:00

There's been a few comments on my last post on Wurm regarding the inaccessibility of it. I have little doubt the posters are correct, and perhaps my respect for the detail and involvement and time requirement of the world would be somewhat lessened if I had actually played the game for any length of time. Maybe it'd be the same as my experience with Dwarf Fortress, for example, as much as I loved the concept even with a graphical pack installed I found the entire experience far too oblique to get anywhere with. Still, one has to respect the model that Wurm uses, the fact that it is breaking away from the traditional MMO where you are just a passenger in the world and leave no lasting effect on it.

The open-source Worldforge project is another example of this, though it is very much in an unfinished state at this point. The concept is to produce a living, breathing world where you control things in the same way you do in Wurm - you plant trees, build houses and all that. I'm on the mailing list for the project as I did some work modernising their website, and I've been following their progress over an extended period of time. It's coming along nicely, though as a platform more than a game - the best we can hope for really is that it can reach the level where a game development company comes in a picks up the framework to make a truly unique game. It'd be something to see.

Another game making waves in the MMO world is APB, largely due to its novel take on what an MMO should be. It's an interesting idea, because while games like World of Warcraft and its many imitators (and games like Wurm too) have gone for the concept that it is the grind that makes the game worthwhile, the developers of APB have worked from the basis that it is the social element of the game that is more important - the ability to create yourself an identity online.

Its worth noting here that I'm not particularly judging either model. 'Grind' is a very loaded word that seems to have negative connotations of endlessly doing the same thing over and over again, whereas in reality it also equates to the progress and journey that one experiences playing through a RPG. You 'grind' your way from a beetle-fighting newbie to a heroic aventurer who slays fearsome dragons and all that, and you feel like you've earned it. If done well, I actually very much enjoy that, at least the first time I play through a game. But the social side of a game is also very powerful. It's what makes people keep playing an MMO when it's not at its most enthralling. You become attached to your guild, your online friends, and you have shared experiences that are all the richer for it.

APB is very much about the latter. The team working on it, Realtime Worlds, was founded by Dave Jones, the bloke who came up with the original GTA, and his influence is readily apparent. It's a dystopian online game based on the fighting between criminals and lawmen across a large, breathing open city. How staggeringly original, I hear you say, but there's a lot of good ideas in it.

The trailer gives a good feel of what Realtime Worlds are going for.

The basic premise is that a player chooses to be either a Criminal or an Enforcer, and joins a server which contains up to a hundred players. Each server is a different 'city', though you are not tied to a server in the same way you are in conventional MMOs. You can go and find trouble by completing a mission dealt out by NPCs, like 'rob a bank', and the game then acts as a sort of matchmaking service. If there's a bank robbery going on, seveal Enforcers may be given the mission to go and stop the robbery. And that's the meat of the game. It sounds a lot like an advanced online FPS, but in some ways it sounds rather flimsy. Is it the kind of game I see myself playing for a whole year?

Well, no, not on paper. But I think I'm underestimating the lure of APB. The staying power of the game is based around the power to create an identity for yourself, and I think that will be a very powerful lure. I remember that on WoW there were a couple of 'celebrity' characters on my server, like the guy who was always grinding honour in the early BGs so he could be the first bloke to hit Grand Marshall and get his hands on the epic gear it got. But that was it. The reason was basically because it's very hard to get known as a very skillful player, because there's only so much better a player can be than another reasonably competent player of his same class. You're constrained by the numbers, basically.

Conversely, shooters are not constrained by numbers at all. A good player is infinitely better than another one. It remains to be seen whether APB will do enough to make itself a viable persistent world, but they've added in a limited progression system to attempt to do so. Players will advance as they play, but only to ever be about 20% more powerful than a new player. This means that the game world doesn't need to be segregated between players of different levels. That I like. You'll be free to make your name by being skillful.

But the biggest feature that people are raving about for APB is the character and vehicle customisation features. They are literally fantastic, good enough the players could recognise you based on your appearence rather than your name tag. I won't bother describing them, just look at this video instead:

Probably worth £30 in its own right. I imagine APB will be the new machinima game of choice.

APB is slated for an early 2010 release, and I for one look forward to it. I still have my doubts though; chiefly because I worry that in gameplay terms APB is not going to be light years ahead of the latest online shooter, be it CoD or Battlefield or whatever. Many of them have basic advancement systems now, so APB is essentially taking their ideas and adding better matchmaking, and more open world and better character customisation to it. The traditional lure of MMOs has been the massive timesink into the grinding, where it takes you months to max out your stats and then burn through all the content. Taking it out is risky, because it's a huge part of the traditional MMO model. Powerful though the social element of a game is, it often doesn't kick in to the later stages of the game when you're in a guild/clan. I just wonder if it'll be enough to sustain interest in a game long term.

I certainly hope it does well, though. We're not going to get anywhere just releasing endless WoW-clones with slightly improved graphics each time.

EDIT - edited the entry to actually some thoughts on the game, rather than just reporting the facts on it...

And service resumes...with Wurm

2009-06-09T15:26:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since my last post, about seven or eight months all things told. My internet connection is still dire and will be for at least a few months yet, so I'm not actually playing an MMO at the moment. However, what I've moved into recently has been game design. I’ve put my money where my mouth is and started to work on a Crysis mod project with an excellent team working with me (visible at www.dilogus.com). I've learned a lot about game design from it, and it's continuing to be a really great experience.

Recently, though, a couple of things have reignited my interest in the MMO genre - despite my crippling inability to take part in it. One is E3, and the new games that were demoed there. I'll speak of them in my future posts. The second is a real gem of a site called here. Let's get a few things straight, right off the bat. Wurm looks hideous, and appears to be time consuming in the extreme. These are two good reasons why I’ll never play it, barring the not-implausible eventuality where I get fired, but something about it really got me going nonetheless.

To me it is, in a nutshell, what MMORPGs were intended to be when they were first dreamed up. It’s debatable whether a year of not playing MMOs has taken the blinkers off my eyes, or just driven me batshit insane, but Wurm seems to be the logical destination of the road down which Ultima Online et al were pushing the genre before WoW turned up and started tampering with the signposts. Wurm strikes me as an enormous and somewhat broken game, yet one that is essentially beautiful because of it. Reading it brings back memories of playing the early MMOs and the limitless possibilities it seemed the genre once had. Though I'm very fond of World of Warcraft for proving that MMOs are most definitely a feasible business model (and that production values were a good idea), it was for all of its polish a very sanitised game. Just like in most MMOs nowadays, it was and still is essentially a slow-paced co-operative beat-em-up.

The kindliest screenshot I could find on the Wurm site in regards to the game's graphical prowess, or lack thereof.

I perhaps do the genre a disservice above by emphasising game mechanics over the vital and ever-present social element, but playing some of the more modern MMOs has made me wonder in hindsight if the genre had been taking steps sideways rather than forwards in recent times. Ultima Online had a world with things like persistent housing, which unsurprisingly has not been repeated in recent times because it essentially hid all the careful work of the level designers under an endless sprawl of real estate that was broken only by the occasional monster wondering why his swamp had been turned into a shopping centre. The one saving grace of the system was that it made you feel your actions in UO meant actually something in a small way – I mean, if you could get enough gold together, it could be YOU that owned the great big castle thoughtfully placed on top of the swamp where newbie players used to go hunting.

Everquest was admittedly also all about smacking bad people upside the head, but the true joy I found in the game was exploring the wonderfully creative, varied and expansive world of Norrath. Sometimes you'd stumble on a little camp or quest somewhere in an unpopular zone that probably only a handful of the players in the game had ever seen, which was a special feeling to me - something that would definitely never happen in WoW. For all of its accessibility and user-friendliness, WoW lost something by signposting every quest with giant yellow exclamation marks and steering the player through every major location through endless quest chains. Azeroth felt less like a real world than an enormous outdoor dungeon.

Wurm, on the other hand, is a completely persistent world where every one of your actions has a consequence. Want to build a fire? Then you've got to cut down a tree and make some kindling. But that tree ain’t gonna be coming back any time soon unless you replant it. There was one line in the RPS review that really grabbed me; "New players bent double over forges trying and failing to make fishing hooks over and over can look forward to making dragon scale armour one day (assuming they can find a dragon, which are believed by the playerbase to be hunted to extinction)."

Think about that concept for a second, because it's completely alien to any other MMO I've ever heard of - hunted to extinction. No more dragons for anyone, because they've been wiped out. You could probably argue quite persuasively that this is a monumentally bad idea, and I imagine many of you are. I mean, now no new player to Wurm will ever see a dragon, and that hardly seems fair, does it?. But this is an MMO and that's the nature of the beast - few new players to WoW will ever experience a 40-man Molten Core raid, because the game has changed in the meantime. The only difference is that it was changed from the top-down rather than the bottom up, stripping the players of any agency at all.

Part of the reason it reminds me of the original Everquest is the fact the UI is pretty much exactly the same colour and the graphics are pretty much on par. Difference is, EQ is about a decade old.

The beauty of what Wurm has achieved with the dragons is that suddenly there's a story, a legend, in the gameworld; “Hey guys, y’know, there used to be dragons around, but people hunted them to extinction. Probably that guild of powergames. What a bunch of bastards. I’m going to hate them forever now.”

There can be no stories, no legends, no evolution in a game world that is static, or one where change can only come from the developers. Empowering people the ability to change the world means that, yes, things can go horribly wrong - but that's part of the point. That’s the trade off you’re making. The fact there are consequences to your action means that every player is suddenly involved in the world, rather than just being a passenger.

I know that things can be abused, and that griefers could take advantage of the system and ruin things for everyone, and so some thought has to go into working out how to counterbalance that. No doubt the solution would vary from game to game, but I don't think the solution can ever be to have a world as static as those in the current crop of MMORPGs. You'd probably have a game that's less balanced and likely less polished than WoW, but at least you’d no longer be just another transitory figure acting his meaningless part on a stage that never changes.

MMOs and the credit crunch...

2008-11-19T10:34:00.001-08:00

Everyone here has probably heard of the credit crunch. It's part of the reason why this blog is being updated less frequently, firstly because I'll have a hard time getting a new job if I lose the one I already have and secondly because I'm actually trying to save the money the job earns me. However, a more interesting question is what effect the credit crunch might have on the MMORPG genre as a whole. My personal theory is that it will make the MMO-playing demographic swing away from casual playing and more towards hardcore powergaming, a reversal of the trend of recent years. Secondly, I think the proportion of immature WoW-kiddies is going to rise dramatically too.

The argument is fairly simple really. People are going to cut expenditure during the upcoming recession, and lesiure spending is going to get hit hard. People will spend less money drinking, eating out, watching sport, going to Disneyland etc because they simply can't afford it any more. MMOs will get hit thanks to the same thing, because they're actually getting quite expensive now. When I last fired up an MMO (Age of Conan), I was paying about £11-12 a month for the priviledge, tax inclusive. At the time, it was about $24 or 16 Euros. Plenty of cash then, approaching 40p a day. Given I'm now a fairly busy person and I might only play a couple of hours every couple of days during the week, I'd really have to pack the time in at weekends to make that worthwhile. At the end of the month, if I'd not played much, I'd probably pack my subscription in. I resent feeling forced to play a game simply because I'm paying for it, more than anything else. It shouldn't feel like a chore.

On the flip side, though, even £12 a month isn't much compared to a trip to a theme park or a night out on the town. Hell, it's barely even enough to cover a trip to the cinema if you include transport into the bargain. If you've got the time spare, MMO gaming is actually a very cost-effective method of entertainment. It was when I was a student, certainly. But that's the crux of the issue: the people who have less time to play are those most likely to quit their subscriptions. This is for two reasons - firstly, they're likely to be the ones who have jobs and thus other financial committments, so they'll have reason to be frightened of the credit crunch. Secondly, as the maths above has demonstrated, playing an MMO makes much less financial sense for them.

This means that we're likely to see the MMO-playing demographic swing towards people with a lot of time and few financial commitments, and that only suggests one stratum of society to me. Kids. They don't care about the credit crunch, so long as their pocket money still hits $15 a month. They don't care that they're paying out $0.50 a day, because to them it represents good value for money. And this is good news for the MMO developers out there, because it means we're highly unlikely to see many of the major MMOs fail.

It's less good news for the genre as a whole, because much of the interest in playing an MMO comes from the social aspect. I'm not saying all teenagers who play MMOs are illiterate douchebags, far from it (there were several 15-16 year olds in my WoW guild who seemed pretty switched on), but there is certainly a higher proportion of them in the population than in any other age range. The less mature people there are around to dilute them, the more unbearable they become and thus the less enjoyable playing an MMO will become.

I also think that the games hit hardest will not be the ageing games, apparently on their last legs but still somehow tottering along (EQ1, UO, perhaps EVE/Vanguard), but games like Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. The older, more hardcore games only have hardcore fans left, and those guys aren't likely to give up playing for anything short of armageddon. The newer games have a more diverse subscriber base and will take heavier losses because of it. WoW certainly has enough people to keep it chugging along happily, and I'd imagine WAR will be fine too. But a relatively new game like Age of Conan (where subscribers are still relatively thin on the ground but not yet whittled down to a truly devoted core) is probably going to find itself facing hard times, and I expect to see it marginalised in the next six months or so.

The problem with reviewing MMORPGS

2008-11-01T05:03:00.000-07:00

This article is on one of my pet hates - mainstream gaming websites like Gamespot and IGN reviewing MMORPGs. Some of you will instantly know why I find their reviews infuriating, others might need a few words of explanation. First out, I consider the idea of reviewing an MMORPG in a few pages as frankly ridiculous, and secondly I think the big websites serve to slow progress of the genre.

The first claim is easy enough to explain: MMORPGs are huge games. Now, I'm aware that MMORPGs tend to get reviews that run to five or six pages, much like high profile games like GTA4 or Metal Gear Solid or Half Life 2 all get, and I'm also aware that there are massive offline games too (the aforementioned GTA4 or Baldur's Gate 2, for example), but I refuse to believe and of the reviewers releasing a review a week after the release of an MMO have actually played up to max level and extensively tested raiding and PvP. Instead, they're just giving you their impressions of the game up to mid-level, during a period where the novelty value is still strong. In short, nothing that actually resembles what playing the game is actually like. Another part of the problem lays in the fluidity of all the content in an MMO. If I boot up Baldur's Gate 2 and have a play, it'll be exactly the same as it was five years ago. If I boot up World of Warcraft or Everquest and go to the newbie zones, the experience will be completely different now to how it used to be, so all the WoW reviews written even six months ago are probably outdated now.

This isn't just due to the endless tinkering with class skills and new zones/zone revamps, but it does play a big part. One of my favourite zones in the original Everquest was the Lake of Ill Omen, because it was huge, open, well populated and itemised, varied and simply beautiful. Lots of players felt the same, and in the Velious era that I primarily played in (often regarded as the golden age of EQ) it was always bustling. When the Shadows of Luclin expansion came out, it became faster to level up in the new zones, so the population dropped off sharply. Suddenly I couldn't group in my favourite zone so much, which made vast areas of it inaccessible and changed my playing experience a great deal.

It was usually MUCH busier than this, believe me.

Similarly, before Luclin came out there was a huge tunnel in the Western Commonlands where everyone used to gather and sell their wares (I'm not sure why all the world's traders congregated in that particular spot, but they did). Everyone would shout about their wares and prices in general chat, and business would be conducted by sending a tell to the person in question and then finding them and exchanging money for the item. Luclin brought with it the Bazaar, the first incarnation of the system that would later grow into WoW's Auction House, and predictably this instantly killed the informal market in the WC tunnel. It changed the game a great deal - trading became more convenient, but I did rather like the human interaction of the Commonlands tunnel. That's an aside, though - my point is that the market in the tunnel was a social phenomenon, and even if you went back to EQ now you wouldn't be able to experience it. An MMO is a game that's constantly in flux, a game where if you miss something then it is gone forever. A review will never be more than a snapshot, which is why it infuriates me that major sites treat them like normal games.

To compound matters, there is social churn. At its most basic, the same people won't be online all the time, so one person might really enjoy a dungeon run because they had a competent and entertaining group, while another person might find the same dungeon tests his patience because he tried it with a group of idiots. To an extent, guilds mollify this point, but the fact that a great deal of an MMO is the social experience is something that most reviewers seem to ignore. You can't really review a playerbase besides huge and somewhat useless generalisations (WoW is full of ten-year-old griefers, EQ2 has a friendly and grown up playerbase). There is some truth to them, but that doesn't guarantee that everyone will have the same experience - and, worse, the social side of an MMO changes even faster than the game world.

In a lot of ways, the idea of giving a game a score is ridiculous anyway. Sure, if a game has massive design flaws then it might be worse than a game that doesn't, but if you have two well-known games it just comes down to preference. Is Half Life 2 better than Crysis? I'd argue not, but plenty of people would disagree. It just depends what you like. Slapping a score of 9 on WoW and an 8 on EQ2 implies that WoW is objectively the better game, but that's far too simple a picture. If you like depth, you'd do much better with EQ2. If you're looking for a consistently designed game with good accessibility, play WoW. The best a review can ever do is give a feel for the game, to let you see if you think you'd like to play it or not. That's why I put together my play diary for EQ2 and started the one for AoC - a normal review just doesn't give a good enough indication of how a game actually works. So I wish everyone would stop doing them.

A much better use of the Source physics engine than the stupid gravity gun.

The second allegation in my post was that the mainstream gaming sites hold back innovation in the genre. My simple argument for this is the fact that they only cover the biggest names in the business, which is partly understandable given how many MMOs seem to be in development, but this naturally means that the games that get the most coverage will always big the huge-budget efforts by Blizzard or Funcom or SOE or BioWare. In my mind, these guys will always play a bit safe with their games because they're spending a fortune on them and (with the possible exception of SOE) they all have a good reputation they don't want to soil by releasing a game that gets critically panned. And therefore they're not too keen on taking risks, on breaking new ground - something every genre needs. Some of the best games I've played are distinctly quirky, like Portal for example. The game Portal was based on was made by a small group of students who were hired by Valve (who are pretty left-field anyway) in the same way they hired the creators of Counterstrike. I just don't see one of the big studios taking a risk and releasing something a little different, a little quirky.

And, in essence, that's why seeing Gamespot and IGN trying to cover the latest MMOs makes me angry.

Star Wars: The Old Republic thoughts

2008-10-26T04:07:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-17T16:01:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-10-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-10-12T08:32:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-10-08T15:33:00.000-07:00

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!

How Guildhalls SHOULD have been done

2008-09-28T04:49:00.000-07:00

Okay, guildhalls. As mentioned in the previous post, the EQ2 ones look lovely (though perhaps impractically large). They are, though, probably a little too functional for my liking.

Now, that sounds like a ridiculous statement when you first hear it. The thing is, though, you don't want guildhalls that have too much functionality in terms of game mechanics simply because its divisive in the community. Firstly, because it means that guilds will lock themselves away from the rest of the server. Secondly, because it alienates and disadvantages the players who don't want to be or who just aren't in a guild.

In my mind, guild halls should be a social thing, a manifestation of the guild's successes and achievements in the gameworld. A lot of a MMORPG is about social status, so I don't think this is actually entirely unreasonable. The trick is to do it properly, so the guilds see it as something to work toward. To do this, you'd have to make the guild hall something that was progressively unlocked through the guild's progress into the game. Perhaps each major raid boss downed would unlock a new room, or new furniture or a new NPC or something. Maybe each raid boss killed would appear as a head mounted on the wall in the main hall of the guildhall. There's plenty that could be done to show the status of the guild, and working together to unlock the various parts of the guildhall would probably bring the guild together a great deal.

Trashing some other guild's stuff is always fun.

The thing, then, is how to make it useful. Instanced guildhalls with no functionality could easily become as useful as the EQ2 player housing - not very, useful only for personal enjoyment. This is not a good thing, really. There's no point having a status symbol that nobody sees. Thus, you need to make them quite visible in-game, else they will only be used for guild meetings and rallying before a raid etc (these are quite important functions). You don't want to force people into them by making them more convenient to use than normal transport, so you'd only put transport to all the major continents there, which would mean it wouldn't be an inconvenience to use the guildhalls but it also there wouldn't be much of a advantage to doing so.

To make them visible in-game, you'd put them in the cities. If each guild hall was instanced, you'd have some kind of ranking for the guilds (perhaps in terms of who has been the most successful PvP guild, the most successful raid guild etc), and then you'd have a series of buildings in the cities. The most successful guilds in each category every week would occupy one of these buildings for that week (the more successful, the more prominent the location), with their heraldry being displayed on the walls and the front entrance being a direct entrance to their instanced guildhall. To see your banners flying across the capital cities shared by everyone would be quite something, and it'd encourage more inter-guild competition and provide the ultimate fix for those seeking social status.

Whether or not you think the high-end game needs more powergaming and competition between the ulta-hardcore players, the only practical use I can see for guildhalls (beyond roleplaying, which you could still do with my system) is to give guilds another prize to fight over. Anything else would involve the guildhalls being too useful in game mechanics terms, the knock-on effects of which would likely lead to the cities being abandoned.

Guild Halls and Player Housing - do we really need them?

2008-09-27T16:27:00.000-07:00

The next EQ2 Game Update has been somewhat eclipsed by all the fanfare surrounding the largely successful launch of WAR, but one thing it does include (besides much needed improvements in crafted armour models) is the eagerly-awaited guild halls. Though when I say 'eagerly-awaited', I mean by the community as a whole, rather than by me personally.This is largely due to the fact that I see little to no point to in-game housing in MMORPGs, whether they be personal houses or guild halls.

Now, I must admit that the EQ2 guild halls look amazing. The tier 3 ones are bigger than most in-game dungeons, and look like palaces. There's some poor-quality videos of them on Youtube that give you an idea of quite how stunning they look (if you don't mind the blue of the projector), which can be found here for the good guys and here for the bad guys. Despite their mighty impressive appearence (particularly of the Good side's hall), though, they all suffer from the same problem as the in-game housing - an ultimate lack of purpose.

That's a fairly liberal (but awesome) interpretaton of the word 'hall'.

The first MMO I played was UO, which had implemented in-game housing in the most logical and disastrous way possible. Basically, players could buy houses, and then place them anywhere in the game world where there was a flat, open space. Predictably, every square inch of the world was covered in player housing, which resulted in it being extremely ugly and laggy and impossible to hunt in. Thankfully when I began playing the game had been split into two facets, the green and pleasant Trammel and then Felucca, which was the same world but a lot darker and grimmer. PvP was enabled in Felucca, but I never really spent much time there because I just found the place so depressing.

Thankfully, housing was only allowed on Felucca, giving people some respite from the urban sprawl if they wanted it. Until, of course, the day that they made Trammel eligible for housing too, and the open space in UO became an endangered species. There were of course plus points to owning houses in UO, the main one being that you could place NPC vendors there to sell stuff. This was before the days of a centralised Auction House, remember, so a well-positioned house meant lots of customers for your wares. You could also only start a guild if you owned a house, and it provided immense amounts of storage space for your characters - which could often be important.

So in UO, there was some justification for owning property. It in no way excused the fact that allowing it turned the game world into a huge eyesore, but at least it was functional in some way. EQ2 added player housing when it was released, and many in WoW clamoured for the same thing, but the solution that they offered was personal instanced housing. As this has no phyiscal presence in the gameworld, other people won't find it unless they are specifically looking for it (and why would they?), which sort of defeats the entire point of owning real estate.

What it does do is serve the needs of the roleplaying population or the hardcore gamers who really just want a space of their own to show off. EQ2 has more of those than other games, and there's actually a lot of people who really enjoy decorating their houses and then posting on forums so other people who also like decorating houses can congratulate them on it. It doesn't really interest me (partly because I think the finished houses really don't look that good), but it's clear some part of the community does enjoy it even though few people will ever see their hard work.

The problem is giving housing an in-game reason to exist. Instanced housing isn't ever really going to have too much of a reason to exist, even if devs take the most obvious route and make the guild halls/houses transport hubs. EQ2 has done that with its guild halls, allowing people to pay to install Mariner's Bells and portals to the various areas in Norrath. I can see them being a good mustering point before raids/dungeon runs, which I suppose is an end in itself. The second thing that EQ2 has done is make the guildhalls a crafting resource, where you can add tradeskilling vendors and machines - but they've also added harvester NPCs who will go and harvest a hundred resource nodules every two hours. I suppose this makes it easier for everyone, but it does somewhat undercut the rest of the economy so I'm not sure if it's exactly appropriate. Time will tell, no doubt.

A view from the top of the Qeynos (good) guildhall. Inside, there's 30 or 40 rooms - check out the videos.

Player cities in Age of Conan were put in-game in special areas, to make them a hub of player interaction, but apparently they're hard to get to and not particularly useful, so they aren't used either. Perhaps the best bet would be to do a modified version of what WAR does at the moment, with the keeps that can be attacked and captured by both sides. If a guild captured one, they'd then be able to decorate it as they wanted and have it display their heraldry on the side. Maybe there could be a portal inside the keep to that guild's instanced guild hall?

The problem with that, of course, is that it restricts ownership of property to the end-game hardcore players, which is a shame as it'd just further widen the gulf between casual and hardcore players. Personally, too, I really can't see any use for instanced in-game housing at all. Sure, some people like decorating it, but that's not overly functional as a game mechanic and I don't think it's worth spending the dev time to amuse people whose primary objective in the game is nothing that you couldn't do better in Second Life. Guild halls I see more use for, mostly as rallying points before going on a big raid, or just for guild meetings and social events.

The problem there, though, is the fact that the entire guild is locking itself away where other people can't find them, away from the rest of the playerbase. To me, that just seems a bit wrong. It's an MMORPG, and I'm not sure I like the idea of all the guilds having a little haven from which they occasionally appear to go and kill something, and then return to. It'd serve to further divide the community into cliques, which is never good. Forcing players to do everything in the non-instanced world would retain a lot more interaction between the community. The last thing you want, after all, are for the main cities in a game to become underpopulated because all the endgame players have guild halls that do everything they need more quickly and conveniently than a city could.

You have to balance this off against a guild having a space to call their own, and to foster a sense of community within the group. While I don't see much point for player housing because it's inherently non-social, guild halls certainly ARE social - just within one particular clique. I think I am actually slightly pro-guildhalls on balance, I just don't think a guild hall should be too functional, rather that it should be a record of that guild's achievements and a show of status to other players. Quite how you can get other players to see a guild's guild hall without putting them in-game and then ruining the playworld (a la UO) is another puzzle in itself, though. I'm going to go off and give some more thought as to how I'd like to see them implemented.

Player housing, though, really isn't something I see any room for in the current MMO genre (besides possibly in EVE-style economic simulation games).

The art of crafting (making tradeskilling useful)

2008-09-27T02:23:00.000-07:00

Tradeskilling is very much secondary in most MMOs, something that people do either to make a bit of money or to enhance their character's stats a little to make them more effective at adventuring (which is obviously the primary role of the character). In almost all cases, the entire procedure is a huge grind that requires little or no skill and generates even less excitement. Much of it actually seems fairly superfluous, sometimes included just because developers feel they should.

It's a waste, really. Tradeskilling could add a whole extra dimension to the game world, moving it away from the realms of Diablo-style adventure games once and for all. One of the things most obviously missing from the WoW-esque games on the market at the moment is some kind of realistic economic simulation, something only offered by EVE in the current crop. I'm of the opinion that there needs to be a huge paradigm shift in the way we think about tradeskilling, and that we need to make it at least as important to the game as adventuring if we want the genre to continue to expand and improve.

Removing some of the more artificially restrictive aspects of MMO design and giving the function to players would be a good way to do this. There's a lot of them, actually - ideas that don't really make sense but are just so common in the genre that we've got used to them now. The first, and probably largest, is the idea that monsters should drop usable loot. It sort of makes sense if you're fighting a humanoid of the same size and gender as you, but other than that it's a bit ridiculous. It'd make more sense to have the mobs drop loot that then have to be taken to a craftsman to be modified into something useful. I think this is a great idea for several reasons.

Firstly, it makes crafters vital to the economy. If you add some kind of skill-based system where the more competent crafters can produce a better item, it might be quite interesting. Perhaps if they could customise the stats to an extent, or the appearance of the item?

Secondly, it means that you don't need to have loads of different drops in a dungeon for the various classes. If a boss drops a raw material that could then be turned into a class-specific item by the crafter, it means everyone in a group would be fully entitled to roll on drops and bad runs where no class-specific items drop for you would be done away with. Thirdly, it means you could have items that require several boss drops to make. Admittedly, these already exist, but they could be made far more common than they are now. It'd give people something to work for, and overall I think it'd be a good first step to making crafting useful.

The next thing that needs to be implemented is a system where component items can be mastercrafted, and crafted items have stats that are customisable to a degree. Appearance could also be customisable, allowing the more talented players to sell armour designs a little like as occurs in Second Life. But anyway, if a weapon or piece of armour needs half a dozen components (as it should), these should be able to be mastercrafted if the crafter is skillful enough, and the bonus stats carry over into the finished item. Thus, if you really pay out top buck and buy only the finest materials, a player could have an item mastercrafted at every stage of the development to get a truly superb piece of gear.

Additionally, group crafting should be implemented, where several crafters work on the same item at the same time, probably with different skills, and hopefully with some part of the minigame requiring co-operation to triumph in. The finished item would receive bonuses linked to how well the members of the group performed. Of course, the group-crafting items would be more powerful than those crafted by single players, and maybe it'd represent the final stages of assembling an epic weapon or something.

This would require a fairly robust system of accounting for what would happen when the item is sold, so all players would have to agree on how the profits would be shared and accept an appropriate contract before they started work.

Still, though, while all of this makes crafting a much more integral part of the MMO experience, it doesn't exactly make it fun, does it? Sure, some people just enjoy passing the time through crafting and the process of creation, but for the vast majority of us it's hardly going to become the focal part of the game. Therefore, you need to go beyond giving the crafters more control over the economy, you need to give them some action.

But what's the point of having someone in a group who doesn't fight? Under the current combat systems, not an awful lot. But I've been thinking about alternative forms of combat recently, and it occurred to me that if you burst into a castle, the battle almost certainly wouldn't unfold as it does in a current MMO. As is, the mobs stand around in small groups and the players beat them in small groups, systematically working through the dungeon/castle while the surviving mobs completely ignore the sounds of their comrades being murdered.

You are these guys. You are Chuck Norris with a bazooka.

Instead, the mobs should not be few in number and strong (too strong to solo), but they should be many in number and weak. After all, the players are meant to be great heroes, the Delta Force or SAS of the gameworld. It makes sense that they're tougher than the average guard, but it also makes sense that they'll be massively outnumbered. Therefore, I think weaker enemies on continuous spawn makes more sense, to represent the level of reinforcements that would be coming all the time.

Positioning and use of scenery would thus be highly important. A tank blocking a doorway would mean that the reinforcements from that area wouldn't overwhelm the group, while someone sealing up a door would temporarily hold off the enemies while the group did their work. And its here, in interacting with the environment, that the crafters could become non-combatant support classes that had a role in a group but didn't directly fight their enemies. For example, a trained smith would probably be the best person to bring with you if you're trying to loot a castle, because he'll know what's worth stealing and how to best remove it without damaging it. He could be grabbing the loot from the environment (using minigames) while everyone else buys him the time to do it.

The second use could be setting and disarming traps, or barring doors, or otherwise using the environment to help the fighters do their job. In effect, they'd be similar to a crowd control class. But the idea of the combat classes trying desperately to hold back the tides of incoming enemy NPCs while the support class(es) do their stuff and grab the loot is a cool one. It could play into the instance design, too, with them having to lay a bomb or sabotage something, so not only could it improve gameplay but also enhance the variety in dungeon crawls.

Overall, then, the 'support' professions need to be made more important. The MMORPG combat model is functional right now, but it could be much more realistic and exciting (I mean, it's not exactly white knuckle stuff when you're single-pulling mobs) if you added more non-combat roles. And that would add more variety to the game, and mean that there actually WAS an alternative to simply killing things. And that needs to be done if the genre wants to progress.

Expansions - are they a good idea?

2008-09-25T12:46:00.000-07:00

MMORPGs always seem to have expansions, almost without exception. The lure is perfectly understandable for developers - after all, it's not like you're already paying for the entire damn game every three months, is it? So the idea that you should splash out another thirty quid to continue playing the game is perfectly justifiable, isn't it?

Releasing an expansion has some plus points, aside from cynically milking even more money from the players. One of them is the opportunity to generate a load of publicity for free, which is probably why the devs release expansions as a whole rather than through regular game updates. For some of the more marginal MMOs, it's the only time they ever make the front (or second page) of any of the big games sites. It also allows the devs to make larger changes to the game mechanics that they wouldn't normally be able to do, and also to beta test the whole shebang so it works properly, so there are some plus points to go with the obvious negative points.

For the good of your sanity, don't work out how much it's cost you to play MMOs during your life. For me, the answer looks a bit like this.

Overall, though, they seem to encourage the wrong kind of thinking. There seems to be plenty of wrong thinking in the genre anyway, like the fact that development companies seem to think an MMO is finished on release day and reassign the vast majority of the dev team. Given that most companies will work on an offline game for a year or two and then sell it for £35, I don't see why a game that makes £35 out of its players every three months doesn't deserve a full-strength dev team (I can't see why it wouldn't be economically justifiable too).

More specifically, though, expansions always seem to entail a new continent appearing in the game world, with far more powerful creatures and amazing loot than the old world had to offer. The problem with this, in game terms, is that it leads to things being seriously disjointed. This is most obviously visible in EQ2, which is an utter train wreck in that particular respect, but WoW is starting to look much the same. These two examples will serve quite well, actually, because they've both fallen afoul of the same trap but done so in different ways.

EQ2 (unlike WoW) was a horrible game when it came out. The zone and quest design was atrocious, and while the standard has improved over time, the devs haven't gone back to improve the old zones - they've just released new ones. This leaves the game feeling very disjointed, with adjoining zones of similar level ranges often providing completely different levels of loot quality, quest experience and the toughness of mobs. In the older zones, my Shadowknight could easily solo a mob ten levels higher than him, whereas in the newest ones it's a genuine struggle to kill one a single level above. Similarly, the most recent starting zones have quest gear for levels 10-20 that's better than anything you'll find in the old world until after level 30.

To make matters even worse, to please the existing players, the expansions concentrate on the higher levels and the very earliest players, which means there's some excellent starting zones and some good high-end content, but then the middle-game is truly shocking. Geographically, too, it means that vast swathes of the game are completely abandoned. And leaving them in is stupid, really - it just makes the game overly bloated and, as well as being confusing for newbies, is a constant reminder about how crap the game used to be. I don't know about you, but that's not something I really want to be continually reminded of.

In World of Warcraft, the opposite has happened. World of Warcraft was an extremely polished game when it was released, with a great deal of truly superb zones in it. The second expansion is

coming out shortly (EQ2 will have pumped out five in the same period), and they probably provide better value than most MMO expansions do, so I really can't criticise Blizzard too much on that count. The problem with the way WoW's developed, though, is the fact that the new content is almost exclusively aimed at endgame. Raiders are generally the most vocal part of any community, so it's easy to be blinded by their views when devs try to talk to the community, but it's a mistake to concentrate soley on the raiders.

From what I hear, the zones that made up the original release WoW are essentially ghost towns now. With the Burning Crusade, the pre-60 levelling was dramatically sped up to rush people to max level more quickly. In WotLK, the Death Knight will be introduced, which can start at level 70, and that entirely cuts out any need to play any part of the game released before that expansion. This is a HUGE waste of the developer time spent on the pre-70 zones, and basically represents the fact that Blizzard has accepted that WoW has now reached critical mass and it is more important to keep hold of existing endgame players than to attract new players, since all the new content is so endgame-centric.

If you weren't playing WoW 3 years ago, you won't have seen this guy the way he was meant to be seen. And, sadly, you'l never have the chance.

It's a shame to think that all of the zones I played through when I was a WoW subscriber are now unused, even the big raid zones like Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, which can now be 5-10 manned. It does make me wonder whether raising the level cap is worth it, at the end of the day. Instead of this continual drive toward more loot and higher levels, I'd like to paint a picture of a different type of expansion. Admittedly, it's not ideally suited to WoW as that's a game where people are rushing to the endgame with more intensity than in any other MMO I've seen, so the 'journey' there is less than in other MMOs.

I'm a big fan of cohesiveness in MMOs. I don't think changing the world too much is a great idea. I think adding lots of new zones is a great idea, but I don't like the idea of separate new continents appearing in expansions. At least, not on their own. I think a lot of the new zones need to be mixed into the old world continents, to keep those areas busy. That means that new players will be able to enjoy them because there'll be other players there too. Devs need to get out of the mindset that because experienced players have played through all the lowbie zones, that part of the game is dead. New players coming into the game for the first time will find them just as engaging as older players did when they first played through them, so there's no point getting rid of a useful resource.

Instead, the expansion needs to add a new zone for every level range, thereby improving the experience for new players but also encouraging existing players to level another character up to endgame to experience all the new content. This also helps to keep the newbie zones busy. The second thing to keep the game fresh for newbies is to AVOID SCREWING UP THE ITEM PROGRESSION. Don't just create a new starting zone with uber quest rewards, because there's no point to that except unbalancing the game. By all means add new items, but they should be of similar quality to those of equal level already existing in the game world. You don't need to lure people into new zones with great items, they'll go there anyway just to experience the content. All in all, equal attention needs to be paid to the early to mid-game as to the endgame itself if the game wants to continue to attract new players and not become ridiculously top-heavy like WoW.

As far as endgame goes, raising the level cap is a poor idea. Why? Because it makes zones obsolete in a way that renders them even less useful than dated early/mid-game zones. Why? Dated newbie zones, for example, still provide some experience and entertainment. Obsolete dungeons and raid zones don't even do that, as they are designed to provide good loot and a challenge to keep endgame players occupied. As soon as the level range goes up, all the loot becomes completely worthless as there's now a whole tier of items above it, and the challenge becomes obsolete as the increased level cap makes the challenge laughable. So formerly great zones and loot become completely worthless and forgotten, which is not only sad but a tremendous waste of existing resources (so very, very bad management).

Instead, add more horizontal progression. After Molten Core came Blackwing Lair, for example. The level cap didn't go up, but the gear from MC allowed guilds to sink their teeth into BWL. Now, the argument against this is simply that raiding guilds who started later than other guilds can never really catch those ahead of them without a level cap increase (which equalises everyone again), and that only the elite players ever see the newest content. But again, that's a silly argument. If you're not one of the elite you won't be seeing the NEWEST content, but as you progress up the hierarchy of raid zones you'll still be seeing new content you've not played through before.

At the end of the day, though, giving the raiders endlessly more zones to grind through is somewhat missing the point. An MMO won't last forever, and eventually you have to realise you've done the vast majority of what's available and simply move on from it. New players coming in to experience all the content for the first time will replace them, and so it's far healthier for a game to devote equal attention to all level ranges in the game (albeit with a slight emphasis on the endgame). That way, it'll ensure a newbie friendly, well-balanced game where it actually will be worth creating a second character and levelling them, because you wouldn't be able to see all the content with one character.

And it'd create a memorable, large and above all unified world that would stick in your mind. Everquest 1 did it with its first three expansions, but that too fell foul of endlessly innovating and catering for its existing fanbase rather than trying to attract new ones. Just once, I'd like to see a MMO try and stick to its principles rather than its players.

Using NPCs to create a more believable gameworld

2008-09-25T09:48:00.000-07:00

One of the problems with MMORPGs is that, unlike their offline counterparts, you can’t actually have any lasting effect on the world. It’s rather ironic when you think about it – it’s almost the entire point of an RPG to play a hero who changes the world. You don’t play it for the combat, though of course that’s an important part – mostly you play it for the story. So, as I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, the RPG model isn’t exactly the ideal model for modern MMOs.

However, things could still be done to make players feel like they are achieving something in the gameworld without changing the fundamental game mechanics that prevent this from actually happening (a dragon like Onyxia can’t reasonably be expected to stay dead after one person on the server has killed her, for example). They key to this is probably in the social world, and the most obvious way of accomplishing this would be through use of NPCs.

Currently, NPCs just stand in one place and either give players quests or sell things to them. They’re just manifestations of the services available to players – the game needs a repair system, so they add in an NPC that repairs items. Even at the most basic level, players need something to kill to level up, so NPCs are drafted in to die for our levelling pleasure. The main thing that surprises me about how the current crop of MMOs handle NPCs is that they are all part of the persistent world.

Slay me ten cheeseburgers!

This means that it can be difficult to suspend disbelief. In terms of game mechanics, it makes sense, as (as mentioned above) most of the NPCs provide services to the game world in one way or another. The games are sufficiently advanced that the NPCs will interact with different players in different ways, generally their ‘faction’ or alignment, though the reactions tend to fall into one of three camps – normal behaviour, attacking the player, or standing around sulkily refusing to talk or provide any services.

The king of NPC interaction was, of course, the original Everquest. There were at least eight or nine starting cities, and you would be treated differently in all of them depending on what race you belonged to. It actually made your choice of race fairly important, as much of the world was policed by wandering guards and choosing an unpopular race (like the Iksar) was a definite disadvantage right through the game. Happily though, every NPC had both positive and negative factions, so killing them would increase your popularity with some groups while losing it with others.

This meant that you could actually be a dark elf who was welcome in the home city of the wood elves, provided you killed enough of the nearby Crushbone orcs (though you might not be welcome in certain areas of your own home city afterwards). I personally loved this feature, as it was a bit of a badge of honour to be able to stroll through the gates of an enemy city unmolested (though due to the game’s numerous factions, you might be acceptable to a city’s guards but still find that a few NPCs will still attack you on sight due to being on a completely different faction from the rest). WoW came along with a far more binary system, the Horde/Alliance divide, which wasn’t particularly advanced but fitted the game well, particularly on the PvP servers that I played on.

Anyway, tangent over and getting back on subject. While Everquest’s system was pretty cool (and probably the most advanced I know about), when you think about it, it’s not really much of a patch on most offline RPGs. Let’s take Fable as an example. It has a lot of features that MMOs would do well to copy. For example, the characters start as weedy children and as they progress through the game and level up, they first become strong and powerful young men and then eventually wizened and greying older men. I’d love to see an MMO where you start at level 1 with a scrawny teenager and become a huge bull of a man as you hit max level. It’d give you a sense of achievement. But I’ll probably cover that in another entry.

Three's a crowd. Technically.

Fable used NPCs that changed their reaction to you as you became more famous and achieved great things. Once you were a great and good hero, gleeful children would chase you around and crowds of men and women would cheer when you entered town. In MMOs (and even in some recent offline RPGs like Oblivion), NPCs treat you exactly the same whether you’re a level 5 hunter covered in rags or a hardened level 60 adventurer clad in flame-spewing armour and carrying the head of a dragon. I don’t know how difficult it would be to make the persistent NPCs appear with different animations on different player’s screen in a technical sense, but it would make a huge difference if they started off surly and uncaring and would wave or salute or something after you’d hit a certain level of faction or completed one of the epic quest chains that resulted in you saving the city.

Better yet, though, would be the use of non-persistent NPCs – ie, ones that didn’t appear on anyone else’s screens or interact with the actual game mechanics in any way. You’d have to make them graphical options, so people could turn them off if their PC wasn’t up to it performance-wise. It would certainly help to sort out the problems of having cities that are mostly empty and lifeless, without choking up the players with lower-end systems. The best bit, though, would be that you’d be able to give the NPCs appropriate behaviour depending on what reputation you have in that particular zone.

If you were unpopular in the city (or just starting out and a nobody), you could have people barging past you and making rude gestures. When you got a bit more respectable and powerful, the crowds might get out of your way as you walk through the town. When you become well known, you might get the occasional nods or waves or stares from the crowds. When you become really famous, you could have the whole hog, with cheering crowds and saluting guards and perhaps even a changed appearance of the city. As long as the zones are non-PvP I really can’t see this interfering with the gameplay at all. The collision detection for them would probably be turned off, so they wouldn’t impede your own character or any of the other player characters on your screen. Assuming they weren’t exploitable in any way, I think it’d add a huge amount of immersion to the game.

Overall, I think the MMO genre still has a lot to learn from the standard RPG genre (though it seems many MMO developers think they are a cut above offline games). One trick would be more advanced clients that display the same persistent world in different ways for different players. This would help hide the underlying fact that MMORPGs by definition can’t have a story or players who change the world in any great way. In itself, that’s not necessarily a huge problem, as long as you look at the genre the right way – MMOs aren’t games that will last forever, just a long time.

No updates?

2008-09-13T07:04:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to explain that the lack of updates over the last week is because I've just moved house, started a new job and haven't got the net at home yet. Expect to see normal service resume in the next couple of weeks.

Warhammer Online - the next big thing?

2008-09-05T15:29:00.000-07:00

In a previous post on this blog, made over a year ago, I dismissed Warhammer Online as a serious contender to World of Warcraft, instead putting my money on Age of Conan being the closest challenger. Despite the comparatively smaller coverage of Warhammer Online, though, I’ve changed my mind. Age of Conan was the perfect example of style over substance, a game that looked stunning but was strangely uncompelling for it. Warhammer looks like a game that might actually take the genre a step forwards (though you can see my previous post on 'why MMORPGs are dying as a game model' for a discussion on whether it truly is forwards or not) by producing a more compelling endgame based more on PvP than the nearest crop do.

Now, the NDA on WAR has just been lifted, so I’ve been able to find some stuff out about it. Bear in mind that I’ve never played the game, so this is just what I’ve picked up from forum lurking and so on. You’ll also have to pardon the lack of pictures in this post, because I’m on a 56k dialup modem tonight and I’m tired and in the middle of moving house – I’ll probably add some next week.

Anyway, why do I think PvP will make for a more compelling endgame? Because PvP always is more exciting than PvE, when it gets down to it. I happily played CS for many hours when I was younger on a selection of my favourite five or six maps (aztec, dust, militia, siege and assault), and remaining equally interested the whole time despite the identical surroundings and mission. Why was it fun? Because the other people playing made the experience slightly different each time. Thus, I think the PvE raiding endgame offered by WoW is probably the wrong avenue to go down these days, though of course it was logical enough at the time. Instead, we’ll see PvP raiding, likely guild-based at the real high end of play. And this is important, because guilds competing to be the first to down a boss is one thing, but actually fighting against each other is another.

So, the basics then. Warhammer Online is based on the popular Warhammer universe, the big daddy of tabletop gaming. It’s a world I’m pretty familiar with, though not to the point of fanboyism – I was an avid Warhammer 40,000 player when I was in my early teens, but I never played its fantasy equivalent. The game features six of the wargame’s most popular armies, around half of them, paired into antagonistic Good and Evil sides. The goodies include the Dwarves, the High Elves and the Empire, the latter being the main human presence in the game, very heavily influenced (read: lifted entirely) from the Germanic early-modern Holy Roman Empire. Their less altruistic adversaries are the Greenskins (combined race of orcs and goblins), the Dark Elves and the forces of Chaos.

The gameworld itself is quite large. Each level range will feature multiple zones in the lands of each antagonistic pair, of which there are obviously three. Some of these zones will be PvE and some will be PvP, allowing players to mix between the two as please. Of course, if you’re playing on a PvP server then all the zones will be PvP-able, so I know which type of server I’ll be playing on.

Ganking, thankfully, seems to have been addressed in some of its forms. If you’re too high a level for the particular PvP area you are entering, you will be warned of this and presented with a countdown. If you fail to leave the area before this countdown expires, you’ll be turned into a chicken and consequently become easy pickings for any of the correctly-levelled players in that zone. This doesn’t eliminate ganking in all of its forms (hunting in large groups, attacking players busy fighting mobs etc), but it eliminates the most annoying strain of it and this can only be good.

Speaking of which, the game’s Battlegrounds-equivalent comes in the form of PvP scenarios, and they’ve introduced a measure I’ve been telling people should have been introduced ages ago – low-level players are temporarily boosted up to near the top end of the level range to allow them to compete on a relatively even footing. I think they’re boosted to the 8th level in that level range, so level 18 or 28 etc – meaning you can still have a slight advantage if you’re at the very top of the level range, but it’s generally pretty fair. These instanced scenarios seem like a pretty good idea, as I always liked the Battlegrounds in WoW, and I think they offer a fairly large number of variants to keep you amused.

The main non-instanced PvP-areas, however, are part of a larger war. The Good and Evil sides perpetually fight over the zones between them, and players are able to capture various outposts and strategic locations along the way via sieges (high level guilds can ‘own’ these forts after capture, but they can be seized from them by other guilds via similar methods). Once sufficient zones have been captured, a faction’s racial city in that area becomes capturable, and turns into a massive battle as both factions fight in the streets to relieve the siege or torch the city and its inhabitants. If the city falls and wasn’t that faction’s capital city (the racial cities of the Empire and Chaos forces), then the capital city becomes siegeable at that point. Sounds like quite an interesting mechanism with a lot of potential, and I’ll be interested to see how effective it in practice.

The other major innovation of the game is the public quests, which are mostly on the PvE front. These are like casual raids that anyone in the zone can participate in and leave at any time, and serve to replace much of the strict entrance requirements of endgame raiding in games like WoW. These public quests have three stages. Firstly, someone kicks them off with a task that’s easily completable with one player, like collecting ten puppy ears. He can complete this on his own, or anyone else in the area of the public quest can help him. Once it has been completed, the harder second stage of the quest begins, which requires the efforts of more players to complete, such as getting a hundred puppy ears. At this point, the final raid stage of the quest commences, such as when the epic mommy dog returns and finds out that all her puppies no longer have any ears. People can join the quest at any stage, and leave at any stage too.

This means you don’t have to worry about being committed to a raid until it ends, but it also has the problems that pick-up raids have in World of Warcraft – the majority of players are idiots with either no playing ability or no spelling ability, and thus you’re unlikely to get anywhere. Hopefully the public quests will be suitably casual-friendly and thus minimise the requirement for actual teamwork, because otherwise they may be very difficult. I think the ease of getting involved for casual players probably outweighs the disadvantages of not being able to weed the retards out of your team as in the more formalised raids of World of Warcraft, but as always it’s a bit of a trade-off. I imagine the elite guilds will find it slightly irritating to have other players hanging on, to say the least.

The loot system won’t pacify them either, as when the loot is dropped every player involved in the public quest is eligible to win it. The game records your contribution to the quest, you see, and it gives you a bonus to your roll accordingly. If you contributed the most to the quest, you might get a +400 bonus to your roll out of 1000, while someone who joined in at the end of the last bossfight might only get +10. This means that people can still join in the late stages of the quest and have a chance to win something, but the people who have contributed the most are more likely to come out of it with a shiny new epic item. The system is somewhat exploitable, perhaps, but its an innovative new idea that certainly deserves a chance.

Finally, onto the combat itself. From what I’ve read, the game’s combat is somewhat slower than in other MMOs, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’d have to play it myself become I commented more on it, but don’t expect to be see casters being killed in two seconds flat like they can be in other MMOs I might mention.

The other main innovation in combat is the fact that there is collision detection, so you can’t just walk through other players (friend or foe). This is very interesting, particularly in siege warfare, as placement thus becomes far more important – particularly for tanks.

Speaking of classes, from what I’ve heard there are about twenty in the game. Each race has all or most of the four class archetypes in the game, Tanks, Melee DPS, Range DPS and Healers. However, unlike in other games, the classes play slightly differently depending on what race you are. A dwarf Ironbreaker and an Empire Swordsmaster are both tank classes, but they won’t play exactly the same. It remains to be seen how large the differences are, but the potential is certainly there for a bit of a breath of fresh air and some much-needed differentiation between the races.

Onto my one concern about the game, though – the graphics. Frankly, it looks quite seriously sub-par. Most of the existing promotional shots were from before the beta NDA was lifted, and thus don’t show the game’s new lighting engine or the improved draw distance, and even the most recent shots presently don’t show the highest texture quality (nor shadows), but they still don’t look great. Nor is there grass or bushes, or anything to liven up the flat open space between the buildings/scenery items in the zone. Currently, they’re worse then World of Warcraft, and that’s really not acceptable for a game that’s being released in 2008. I’m not expecting Age of Conan (I don’t actually want Age of Conan right now, because my graphics card can’t handle it), but I expect something of at least Everquest 2 standard. And really, it should be MUCH better than that, given how much things have advanced in the last five years.

I’ll be watching the game’s progress with interest, at least, and I’ll consider buying it at launch too. It just depends how much free time I have with this new job I’m starting…

EQ2 Diary updated - 8 months late

2008-09-03T08:57:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to say I found my EQ2 diary from level 60-65 sitting in my drafts folder, even though it looks pretty much complete. I've posted it up, though sadly it's without screenshots.

Should MMO players be able to freely choose the appearence of their characters, or should they have to earn it?

2008-09-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

Warhammer Online has piqued my interest, and I'll post a longer commentary on it tomorrow probably. But first, one particular minor feature caught me eye and brought back some memories of a discussion I had online with a friend recently.

It came about when EQ2 implemented 'appearence slots' in its inventory, which allowed a player to equip one set of armour for stats and another set of armour for appearence. I'm told that LOTRO has the same system, though I've not played it so I can't personally vouch for that. Essentially, it means I can equip the Badass Platemail of Face Shattering for its amazing stats, and then equip the Flowing Robes of Beauty in the 'appearence' slot and my character loks like he's wearing the robes, with no sign at all of the platemail. I had rather mixed feelings about this for several reasons, and I'm still not sure I've decided on whether I think it's a good idea to allow this. I'm going to examine some of the arguments on either side here.

First, there's the gameplay element. You obviously can't let players wear ANY armour in the 'appearence' slots, because you can't have a Warrior who looks like a mage. Not only does it makes no sense that someone's able to hide plate armour under cloth robes, but it's game unbalancing in PvP. When I was playing my WoW rogue, I would deal with a Warrior and a Mage differently in the battlegrounds (namely by leaving the former well alone and sticking a dagger in the back of the latter). The visual recognition of classes by their appearence is a vital part of PvP, and to muddy the waters unfairly weights the game towards the classes that don't have external markers to their identity - ie, no pets, no stealth, no obvious buffs etc.

WoW's epic gear is famed for the subtlety of its appearence.

Thankfully, EQ2 limited gear in the appearence slots to gear that your class can use, which is fair enough. It also used to have a limitation that you couldn't put armour of a lighter type than you had in your normal armour slots in your appearence slot, intended to solve the problem mentioned above. This meant that you couldn't wear robes over chainmail, for example, though I'm not entirely sure if that restriction is still in place or not. Presumably LOTRO also has similar restrictions, because I doubt the players would be too happy otherwise.

Lets set aside the game balance for now, as it's not really what I'm interested in discussing. What was more of a concern to me is that it somewhat devalued the achievements of the more hardcore players. When I was playing in WoW as my rogue, when I hit level 60 I quickly got my grubby mitts on my full Shadowcraft set, and it made me proud. I could stroll around Ironforge, and people knew that I was a level 60 with a respectable level of gear, because everyone knew what Shadowcraft looked like. When I started raiding and got my Nightslayer stuff, most players knew what that looked like too, so they could take one look at me and know that I was a high-level raider and I got correspondingly more respect. As your avatar's appearence is essentially the only representation of your achievements in-game, it struck me as a bit off to suddenly let everyone customise their appearence. I thought that players should have to EARN a good appearence.

I wasn't, of course, saying that all rogues irrespective of ability would automatically be able to look like they were wearing Nightslayer. I knew that if I wore the stuff, people would still identify me as a high-end player. But once everyone started customising their appearences to their likings, even the low-end players could look really cool, which diluted the prestige of my appearence somewhat. Snobbery, I suppose, not wanting to lose the status I felt I'd earned. But then status is what a lot of players play for, to be the best and to impress other people.

Yeah, there are people who have worked long and hard to earn this.

The other side of the coin is represented by a couple of arguments. Firstly (and especially relevent to EQ2), sometimes it's needed. EQ2's armour is frankly horrendous. Sets of armour, especially crafted ones, often don't match up properly in appearence terms. Individual looted armour is usually even worse. And very few pieces look any good at all, either, including the high-end raid gear. A fully-geared up raider doesn't look any cooler than the normal players, indeed often they look like complete muppets. Raid gear in WoW is distinctive in all of its kaleidoscopic, skull-covered, flame-spewing glory, while EQ2's stuff is just the same models as all the crafted stuff, tinted a vaguely different colour. So sometimes appearence slots are needed.

The more general argument is simply that, well, why shouldn't people be able to customise their appearence? Often a set you're wearing for stats looks a bit rubbish, like if you happened to be wearing your fire resistance set, and mine was horribly mismatched because it was taken from half a dozen different sets. Plonking my Nightslayer set in my appearence slot would allow me to keep my dignity while not simulatenously being burned to cinders. So, this gives players a measure of protection against a moment of madness on the part of the modellers. It also allows players to role-play without sacrificing too much of their character's power.

Can you blame the EQ2 devs for putting in the appearence slot when the class armour looks like this?

Also, why should looking cool be limited only to the endgame players? Shouldn't players just be able to look how they want to look, while only the stats are affected by the choice of gear? There's something in it, no? Surely even an incompetent soldier can dress up in a General's uniform, or a Duke's armour (provided he can get his hands on it somehow)?

Personally, I don't think that holds too much water for me. Part of the enjoyment of MMORPGs for me is finding new gear and seeing your character develop in appearence. Choosing an appearence right at the start of the game and sticking with it right the way though would take much of that away for me. Happily, though, there's a third way which Warhammer Online will be introducing.

It's actually been borrowed from both EQ1 and Ultima Online, so it predates the current crop of MMORPGs and thus I'm surprised that it's not more common - armour dyes. If I have it down correctly, each piece of armour has a foreground and a background colour that can freely be changed to one of something like a hundred colours. I like this a lot. You'll find guilds all wearing the same colours, which is always really cool. People will actually be able to look how they want, but at the same time you'll be able to look at their gear and recognise it from the armour's model. Good middle way, I think.

Personally, I've got a lot to say for letting people customise their appearence to a large degree. I think it adds a lot to the role-playing aspect of the game in that it makes you attatched to your character, gives you an identity, makes you a little bit special (I don't mean role-playing in the sense where you actually think you're an elf). But you also need to carefully control the armour models. There's nothing wrong with low-levels players not being able to wear adorned armour, for example. Maybe mid-level characters are allowed to have inlaid armour. High-level characters can have inlaid, enameled armour with adornments. That way you'll still be able to see what level a character is, and the high-end people can look more impressive than the low-end people and everyone can keep their individuality. I expect it to be a huge success in WAR, and I expect it to be much more common in the future.

RPGs just aren't Role-Playing Games any more...

2008-09-02T15:01:00.000-07:00

As promised in my previous post, I'm posting an updated vision of what the future holds for MMO players (you can see my original thoughts in my 'thoughts on Blizzard's next-gen MMO' post from over a year back). Firstly, it's probably important to discuss what I think is wrong with the current MMORPG model and why it'll become increasingly defunct in the future.

The problem is an inherent lack of skill-based gameplay. If you think about it, current FPS games are all about twitch, using your reflexes to line your weapon up with the most vulnerable parts (usually the head) of your opponent and firing at it. Also, you can use the scenery to your advantage by hiding, so when you do open fire on your enemy they'll have less chance to fire back and kill you before you kill them. This is not an overly advanced mechanic, but it's equally simple for everyone and so a jumped-up test of reflexes can actually become very engrossing.

A RTS is another genre of game that is very skillful - much like chess, you maneuver your pieces into a position where they can defeat a similarly-armed opponent by skillful use of tactics and battlefield positioning. An RPG, on the other hand, is not exactly a game that lends itself to skillful online competition. It is perfectly understandable why they were the first genre to go Massively Multiplayer, but the same things that made them the logical choice as pioneers of the genre also make them a poor choice to continue it.

Q. What's the difference between Italians and toast? A. You can make soldiers out of toast. Aha ha.

The key's actually in the name, Role-Playing Game. Everquest was heavily influenced by MUDs and Dungeons and Dragons, and it played on the social role of people wanting to adventure together. This was a good move, because the persistent characters and large world were perfectly suited to attracting those accustomed to D&D. It's understandable why it did so well - the target audience wanted to meet up with other people, and explore a world and vanquish some monstrous foes together. The game fitted the niche perfectly.

Of course, the genre has evolved a considerable amount since EQ was released (I'll leave out the pioneering contribution of games like Ultima Online for brevity's sake), most notable with the release of the monolithic World of Warcraft that still dominates the genre today. What WoW did is bust the genre wide open, attracting a huge range of fans that would never have played EQ or UO or Asheron's Call. And that's the problem.

The older games were aimed at role-players and people who were primarily interested in the world of the game, generally in a non-competitive way. Remember, you can't powergame in D&D - there's just no point. Now, of course I'm not trying to claim that min/maxing and powergaming are new to WoW and never existed in the likes of EQ1, but they were certainly less prolific. As a predominantly PvE game with a difficulty curve so high you needed crampons to climb it, most of the enjoyment of EQ was fighting your way to the max level, because it was a genuine achievement.

The WoW-generation of MMOs has changed this. In appealing to an audience of more mainstream players, Blizzard sanitised the world and made it much less punishing and much more logical. It's no longer a place to explore, it's a place to level up in. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, just that it is a different thing. The game is no longer about the world, it is about the player. But as it becomes more and more about the player, the relevence of the world decreases and the role-playing element of the game goes with it. Few people have any real empathy with their race or class in WoW, for example, or find any of the quests particularly interesting beyond the rewards and experience they yield. And when things like that happen, the 'Role-Playing' element is gone. Leaving you only with a 'Game'.

If you think about it, WoW is more of an adventure game than it is an RPG. It's just a more persistent and customisable version of Diablo II, with a few added bells and whistles. And what's wrong with that? Well, Diablo II wasn't the most skillful game in the world. You levelled your character up and found better gear, and that was that. Enjoyable, briefly, but not a model to build a long-lasting game on. World of Warcraft is on a much larger scale and so sustains the interest for longer, but the weak combat mechanics at its heart still hold it back just as they hold back all of the other MMORPGs on the market.

EQ had the same weak combat mechanics (weaker, in fact), but then it also had the role-playing element to support it. WoW is much more centred around PvP rather than PvE and exploring, so combat is that much more important in its world - and this highlights its weakness in the area. Additionally, the focus on combat means that the game becomes a race to max-level, and once you've reached it there's really not much else to do except collect increasingly more powerful weapons and armour just because you feel you should. It also ironic how that the game relies so much on combat, when there's so little skill involved in it - it's largely down to stats and equipment unless there's a truly enormous gap in how experienced a player is with their chosen class.

And another part of the reason WoW has been so successful is the sheer novelty of it, as it's the first MMO many people have played. But in many ways WoW was the pinnacle of what an MMORPG can do, aside from the obvious (prettier graphics, bigger world, more classes etc), and you have to question whether people will want to play another very similar MMO after three years of WoW, even if it is prettier, bigger and has more classes. Warhammer Online looks like it's taking the only logical step forwards for MMORPGs by becoming far more PvP centred, but this is simply taking an even bigger step away from the Role Playing element of the old MMORPGs and heading towards the mainstream online games. In what way really is my avatar in WoW or in WAR going to be any different from the guy I control in Counterstrike or Battlefield 2, except for the fact he's a little more customisable? At the end of the day, he's not. I'm not role-playing any more, I'm just using him as a tool to fight other players.

Which makes me wonder why we're bothering using an RPG model at all. Think of your single-player RPGs, like Baldur's Gate or Fallout or Final Fantasy. You don't play those purely for the combat, do you? No. You play them for the story, for the world, for the experience. In them, the combat is a means to an end rather than a means in itself. It's the FPS and RTS game models that are based around combat in itself, and consequently the fighting in them is much more rewarding (and the story and world is generally much less enthralling). So, as MMORPGs become increasingly combat-based and less and less about role-playing, I think it's only a matter of time before the lightbulb switches on above someone's head and they think "You know, we're barking up the wrong tree here -let's make a truly persistent online FPS or RTS."

And once they do that, there won't be any going back.

And now for something completely different... (Company of Heroes)

2008-09-01T14:57:00.000-07:00

What I'm going to talk about today is the game I've had more fun playing online than any other game I've played online, including the great Everquest 1. And it's called Company of Heroes, which you've probably heard of. It's a critically-aclaimed WW2 RTS by the fellers that brought us Dawn of War, and it is quite simply brilliant. It recieved unanimously good reviews from the major sites on release, so I went and picked it up and played through the single player campaign. It was pretty good, if somewhat easy (even on the hard settings) for an experienced gamer thanks to the inability of the AI to deal with armour, or to think outside the box when it comes to displacing you from defensive positions.

Online, though, it's brilliant. It's been diminished slightly due to the expansion pack adding two new armies (one for the Allies and one for the Axis), therefore meaning that each one has to be balanced against two potential opponents rather than just one, but its still excellent. The game has beautiful graphics even on a fairly average PC, and the destructable terrain is fantastic. You start off with a pristine battle map, and it quickly gets reduced to rubble when the tanks and artillery hit the field. And, speaking of artillery, this is the first game I've played where the awesome power of artillery is properly represented - not only is it visually spectacular, but it's an extremely important game mechanic that can kill pretty much any unit in the game if correctly utilised (and not properly countered).

The unit balance feels good too. Basic troops come in squads that can be reinforced and usually upgraded, and the early game is all about using them to outflank your opponent in conjuction with support weapons like machine-guns and mortars. There is a LOT of skill in this game, more so than in any other RTS I've played online. To make things even more interesting, the light vehicles in the game are pretty much invulnerable to all but the special abilities of the basic troops, so if a vehicle hits the field before the enemy has a hard counter to it, it's often got a game-turning effect. So you've got to balance early-game dominance against preparations for an armoured attack on your troops. And once the heavy armour hits the field, the light armour becomes largely obselete in a straight-up firefight.

But one of the great features of Company of Heroes is that it's definitely not a tankrush game. It's a game of combined arms - a couple of unsupported heavy tanks by themselves will be shredded in the late game. You have to think carefully, because it's a game very much about tactics. Tanks are weak from the side and rear armour and are generally fairly poor anti-infantry weapons, support weapons only have a limited angle of fire, troops can be supressed by special abilities or machinegun fire, grenades are superb against bunched troops - there's a lot of tactical decisions to make, and it's an extremely fluid game where the balance of power moves backwards and forwards extremely quickly. It's damn exciting stuff, particularly against the good players.

The fact that the online scenarios are 'take and hold' rather than annihilation makes it far better, too. It doesn't matter if you've shelled your enemy's base into oblivion if the victory points have been in their hands for too long, you still lose. It also means that there's rarely any times in the game where nothing is happening, there's usually a skirmish happening somewhere along the lines as one of the players tries to stop his VP counter ticking down - there's no massing troops in your base here. If you do that, you'll lose. Given the power of the game's artillery, you'd have to say the game certainly favours the attacker, which means it's relatively easier for a player who is losing to regain the initiative than in many other RTS games, and again this makes the game extremely exciting.

Needless to say, it's also not a game where you have to go harvesting resources. Basically, the amount of resources you get are linked to the amount of territory points on the map that you control, and how you spend your fuel and munition resources is a vital part of your strategy. It gives a huge element of strategy to the game, and needless to say you'll have to change your tactics on the fly to deal with what your opponent is throwing at you.

Overall, it's a truly superb online game. The game is extremely skillful, rewarding the player who can use his squads skillfully while manueving his vulnerable support weapons into positions where they can do the most damage to their opponent while simulatenously protecting them from harm. The game feels balanced, and the way you start with infantry skirmishes and end with heavy armour like Tiger tanks rolling across the battlefield is a brilliant progression that is generally timed to perfection, with the really powerful units only hitting the battlefield when the Victory counters are down to within a hair's breadth of zero. I've played countless brilliant games where I've managed to hold off a Tiger with a handful of half-dead infantry squads to snatch a victory, or had a certain victory snatched away from me by a masterstroke by my opponent (usually helped by the appearence of some particularly lethal unit I wasn't prepared for at just the wrong moment).

It certainly won't cost you much to pick up CoH nowadays, and it comes with the highest reccommendation from me. It also dovetails neatly into the subject for my next post, which was originally going to be part of this article, but I've since made it into an article of its own - where the MMO genre could be going next. MMORTS anyone? MMOFPS? I really don't think MMORPGs have a monopoly on the future of the genre, mostly due to the inherent lack of skill involved with them. Keep your eyes peeled for my next entry to see what I do think are possibilities.

EQ2 - The Shadow Odyssey expansion thoughts

2008-08-31T15:38:00.000-07:00

I've been keeping abreast of developments in the EQ2 world recently, though I do think the devs have somewhat lost the plot since the days when I started playing. I played between the release of two expansions, the first one bringing back one of the best-loved continents of original EQ1 and raising the level cap to 70, and providing a full levelling experience right from level 1 to level 70 on just that continent. The second one brought back probably the best loved continent from EQ1, raising the level cap from 70-80 and adding a HUGE amount of new content. In the meantime, the devs had added a new raid zone and a brand spanking new starting city and starting zone, which I thought was fantastic.

Recently, they've not added a great deal in the way of new or seriously revamped zones - and those are the lifeblood of an MMO. Adding new tradeskill recipes and balancing classes is vital too, but new content is THE single most important thing to an MMORPG. Recently, a proposed skeletal revamp that would allow new weapons and armour graphics to be created much faster (and therefore have modellers make each one higher quality) has fallen through, and no attempt has been made to revamp the old zones of EQ2 that are extremely dated and offer a poor gaming experience.

I could understand that if a new expansion was on the way, one that would offer a whole new path to level 80-90 on a wonderful new continent, but sadly that appears not to be the case. I was holding out high hopes for a combined return of the final two continents from the golden age of EQ2, Odus and Velious. Odus was a continent available in the original EQ1 on release, the starting zone of the Erudites, a race already in EQ2. It's certainly conceivable that Odus could be remade to offer a levelling experience from 1-70/80, while Velious could be added for higher level players from 80-90. For those of you unfamiliar with EQ1, Velious was the second expansion to EQ1 that provided content for levels 35+ when the level cap was 50, and it was awesome. Given the massive success of the returns of Faydwer and Kunark in the last two expansions, I'm disappointed that SOE did not continue along the same path. EQ2 hasn't got many years left in it, I'd have thought, so it's a shame that they haven't fully tapped the rich vein of history while EQ2 is still in its heyday.

Oh well, it's something I'll have to get over. It seems EQ1 veterans only make up a smallish proportion of the EQ2 population, so keeping us happy probably isn't the top priority. So I'll move onto the meat of the expansion, the content. In a nutshell, it offers no raise in level cap but a raise in the number of AA points that can be earned (like talent points in WoW) and some new trees to go with them, a new overland zone and a bunch of dungeons - many of them favourites from EQ1. Oh, and there's some new quests and the chance to earn 'shards' from running the dungeons, which can be traded in for high-level gear - making epic equipment grindable for non-raiders for the first time in EQ2.

That's it, though, and I find myself feeling fairly underwhelmed by it all when compared to the last two expansions. Sure, in terms of raw zone increase, the new expansion will have 20 and that's probably close to what Faydwer offered, but only one is an overland zone and so the world's not going to feel much bigger. The addition of new dungeons is going to be cool, but unfortunately it completely invalidates all the existing max-level dungeons, so the net gain of playable zones isn't really going to be that much. The new quests and AA trees are another bonus, but then the previous expansions had the former in spades and offered similar AA gains through raising the level cap.

Additionally, the choice to let players grind endgame gear is a bad one, I think. I'm all for giving the non-raiders more to do, but I don't think they should be rewarded with the very best gear for the simple reason that it just turns the endgame into a grind, after which there's literally nothing more to do. I remember the virtually compulsory faction grind in Alterac Valley in pre-BC WoW once you hit level 60, so you could get your epic ring, mount and weapon. I understand that a lot of players don't have the time to raid any more - I'm one of them - but I still think raiding has its place in MMORPGS, as they're the ultimate incarnation of teamwork and essentially teamwork is what an MMORPG is about. But I still understand non-raiders' concerns that they'll never be able to compete with raiders due to the gear advantage the latter have, for instance in PvP, but giving the non-raiders access to the same gear seems to wrong solution to me. I'd simply make raid gear unusuable in PvP, preserving the advantage of having it but still allowing the non-raiders to hold their own if it comes to a confrontation.

Okay, that aside, let's look at the zones. Innothule Swamp is the overland zone, in EQ1 the home of the trolls and an all-round cool zone that sat pretty close to the Feerott. I think the devs have missed a chance to introduce a new starting city by bringing Grobb back, but that's probably just me. Anyway, presumably Innothule will act as a hub for all the new dungeons, which include such familiar faces as Guk, Najena, Mistmoore and Befallen. Several of those names are very well-known among EQ1 players, but it just doesn't strike me as enough. I know the original EQ had the Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion, which in principle was very much like this one (sadly though I never played it) in the way it had a lot of dungeons and allowed the player to complete missions to earn high level gear, but the one thing that EQ1 had over the current iteration of EQ2 is that the gameworld at that point was MASSIVE. After only one expansion, EQ1 had some 80 full zones (and none of them instanced copies of other zones). LDoN was the 6th expansion of EQ1, so as you can imagine the gameworld was absolutely huge by then.

Really, I genuinely think the Shadow Odyssey sounds like a great idea for an endgame. But EQ2's not complete enough to warrant it yet. The game's just not big enough, and the progression is currently all shot to hell. The LDoN-style expansion is like a cherry on top of an ice-cream - it's a fantastic final touch, but it just looks silly if you put it on a half-finished ice cream. To me, the Shadow Odyssey is a step backwards from previous expansions. They've been getting steadily bigger and better up until now, but the proposed Shadow Odyssey plans just seem like a half-hearted attempt to make an expansion by bolting together a bunch of new zones (and not even outdooor zones) without bothering to connect them up properly and make them into a cohesive unit. Much like the original EQ2, in fact.

To me, the Shadow Odyssey seems like it should be released as one of the now-defunct Adventure Packs, rather than an expansion in its own right. And I'm disappointed that it's the best that SOE have to offer for this year's expansion, frankly. Not really doing a very good job of enticing me back.

Why I quit Age of Conan

2008-08-28T11:48:00.000-07:00

I've not updated the blog in a while now, and there's three main reasons for that. Firstly, my computer's graphics card is having a tantrum and is making it extremely difficult for me to perform such complex tasks as switching my PC on. Thankfully, I'm abroad at the moment on another PC that happens to function perfectly, but while this sounds good it actually only makes matters worse because the internet connection I have out here in South Africa doesn't allow me to game. The third reason why I've not updated the site is because I cancelled my Age of Conan subscription after a month.

You readers will be far more interested in the last of these reasons. Some of you will be puzzled, because I actually sounded quite positive when I was writing the first couple of entries of my Age of Conan blog - and I was feeling positive when I wrote them. Trouble was, as soon as I got off the newbie island (Tortage), the realities of the game hit me hard. So, a quick run down on why I quit AoC, at least in the short term.

1) The game is essentially unplayable in the main world with my machine. It sort of held up on the newbie island, but the more crowded full game world was much harder on it - particularly the cities. If I got 2 frames a second in the cities I considered myself lucky. The answer, of course, was a new graphics card - but I can't really afford one right now and it's rather annoying to have to buy one to play a MMO when I can run Crysis on medium settings with the one I've already got. Of course, this is a double edged sword - it means in three years time, AoC will be able to run perfectly well on most computers and it'll still look great, but right now it's just too demanding.

2) The gameworld is dull. True, I've only seen two of the starting cities and I've not gone to the Cimmeran starting city that sounds pretty cool and snowy and all (I was a big fan of Halas in EQ1), but the ones I saw were tedious and badly designed. The home city of the Aquilonians is very classically-inspired, but the problem is that it's not all stunning marble and the like, it's just white stone. I'm aware that the designers were trying to create a realistic city, but it just ends up boring instead of impressive. I feel they've hemmed themselves in creatively with the 'realistic' setting, even though they didn't need to. You can have beautiful cities that would never exist in real life and still maintain an aspect of realism, you just need to leave out flying houses and elves and stuff.

Worse, the actual zones are equally tedious. Lots of open plains and grassland and stuff, and it looks pretty realistic - but that absence of creativity strips the zones of the character they had in other MMOs. Darkshire in WoW or Darklight Woods in EQ2 were very stylised zones, but they were awesome for it because of the very distinct visual style. I'm not saying AoC can't do it - Tortage was beautiful because it was full of so many bright colours and spectacular scenery, but the full gameworld doesn't seem to deliver.

3) The game design is boring. The quest design is awful, much like in EQ2's poorest zones and measurably worse than anything that was in the pre-Burning Crusade WoW (I couldn't comment on what came in BC, as I quit well before it arrived). The quests are literally just "go to x, kill y" or, worse, just "go talk to x, then come back". But the zone designers have committed a cardinal sin in not really having quest hubs, just having quest givers and quest targets scattered all over the zone. Some of the "talk to x, come back" quests have NPCs who are several zones apart, for pete's sake. I can understand if it was an epic quest of some kind, but they're not. It just seems the quest writers were entirely devoid of inspiration when they plied their trade on AoC. Couple this with boring zones and the fact that literally everyone you meet may well attack you on sight, you haven't really got compelling game play.

Oh, and most of the world is blocked off from you until you reach a certain level, which is a truly TERRIBLE idea. I want to go exploring the world. I loved it in EQ1, and I'd spend hours exploring high level zones with low-level characters. WoW I'd try and scout out the high level zones with my stealthed rogue, and I loved it. You won't let me explore the world, I'll take my money elsewhere. Worse, too, most of the zones are linked via instant travel reached by talking to an NPC. Personally, I can't think of anything worse - it's like the griffon rides in WoW, except you don't have to walk there first and you don't get to see the world unfold below you as you travel. It all conspires to make it feel like AoC has a tiny world, even though it patently doesn't. But when you travel from one place to another instantly and can't visit most of the zones anyway, you get bored very quickly.

4) The combat is repetitive. Sure, it looks better than in most MMOs, but that's only due to the quality of the animation of the player characters. The actual combat system is average, from what I've seen of it. I'm not saying that the standard MMO combat model is particularly good, either, but I've found it actually provides a more varied combat experience. AoC combat is literally just me firing off my most powerful combo, which will one-shot most player characters and also most monsters too. If it doesn't, I just do it a second time.

In EQ2 my Shadowknight had two full hotbars of combat skills, and my rogue in WoW could alternate pretty well between flat-out DPSing or stunlock/backstabbing, but more importantly both had methods of crowd control. AoC probably has one-on-one combat on par with other MMORPGs, but fighting multiple enemies feels more uncontrolled and frankly less skilled. I could be fighting two enemies with my WoW rogue and I'd be DPSing one while keeping the other stunned with all my stun skills, for instance. Combat with multiple characters in AoC just seems to go down to killing them one at a time, as fast as possible (perhaps adding some extra damage to the group with AOE skills).

5) No grouping. I haven't done a dungeon in AoC yet, which is probably due to my low level, but might also have something to do with the fact that I either kill or hide from any other player I see in the world, and they do the same thing. However, I don't think the dungeons start till about level 35, which is somewhat above my level. Anyway, I mention this in combination with the combat system. I just don't think AoC's combat system will lend itself to group dungeon crawling as well as standard WoW-esque combat does. Just a hypothesis, but it's enough to put me off playing.

So, that's why I parted ways with AoC. I might consider coming back at some point in the future, but certainly only if I have a new graphics card. There was just something about the game that was slightly lifeless and devoid of character, and I'm sorry to say it didn't grab me in the same way that most MMOs generally do. I can't quite put my finger on it precisely, despite having listed the above reasons, and I've read the same from other bloggers. Shame, really.

As far as what happens next for this blog, I may consider picking up EQ2 again. I played all the way up to level 65 when I could go back to Kunark, and then I quit because more important things took over my life. It seems somewhat of a waste to leave it there. But the problem with all that is that I'm starting a full-time job in a week, and there's a new expansion pack coming out soon called the Shadow Odyssey, which means Kunark will be empty when that arrives. Also, my enthusiasm with EQ2 has dropped somewhat due to the fact the devs appear to have stalled somewhat, and refuse to address the important issues affecting the early-to-mid game where a lot of the zones date back to release EQ2 and are therefore unbelievably poor. I'll keep posting, though. Expect a post on the Shadow Odyssey and my updated views on EQ2 to come up soon. After that, I might broaden this blog out to all online gaming, or I might look at some more of the upcoming games.

Age of Conan Player Diary Level 1 - 20

2008-05-24T07:44:00.000-07:00

With the basics of the game explained in the previous entry, I can now move onto a more detailed account of my adventures in Age of Conan. As mentioned earlier, you first emerge from the water half-drowned and clutching only a broken oar. You then have a few moments to sit back and enjoy the graphics, and twiddle with the settings, before you speak to the quest NPC in front of you.

The area looks fantastic, and really needs to be seen firsthand - the screenshot really doesn't do it justice. Determined to try the combat that everyone had been talking about for ages, I picked up my broken oar and ran straight into the nearest group of pict savages I could find. The combat system really is excellent, and while it is easy enough to learn you can't help but feel it's going to be tricky to master. Essentially your 1, 2 and 3 keys are bound to directional attack buttons (it doesn't matter where you're standing relative to your opponent, so long as you're facing him and in range). Both you and your opponents also have directional shields, which reduce the amount of damage done by attacks from that particular direction, and those are shifted with the Ctrl button - though by level 20, I still haven't really learned to use them. You can also dodge in any direction with a quick double tap of the appropriate direction key, but as a ranger I have to stand still to use my bow and thus I don't do that much.

All this is made more complex by combos, which are like the class skills in any other MMO. They appear on your hotbar and you click them (or press the appropriate hotkey) to trigger them. Then a series of directional attacks that you have to complete comes up, after which your character will perform the selected attack. To start with, I was mostly just mashing the keyboard, but as I've got more into the game I've calmed down enough - but sometimes I can't help feeling I'm losing time on my autoattacks by not repeatedly spamming directional attacks in combat that often, especially if I'm using a fast-firing weapon. The combat noises and animations are both superb but, in the early stages of the game at least, the formula doesn't depart much from traditional MMOs. Instead of running up to an enemy with my shadowknight and pressing the same series of keys every battle, from level 6 upwards I just pressed 8, to select Pierce Shot, then 1 and 2 to set off the combo - which does enough damage to kill pretty much anything within a level or two of me instantly. However, there is more of an emphasis on fighting groups of creatures rather than single monsters, as individual ones go down quite easily, which makes things more exciting and more realistic too. So, while the formula is basically the same as in other MMOs so far, it's done much better and is much more enjoyable for it.

So, after battering half a dozen savages to death so I could learn the combat system, I actually got on with what I was meant to do. A conveniently-placed damsel in distress is in front of you, begging you to free her from her chains by forcibly taking the key off the slavemaster on the beach nearby. Getting quests is very much like it works in other MMOs, except the quest givers and the quest targets are marked on the map, which makes the whole process considerably more simple than in previous MMOs. Though I do somewhat miss the days of EQ1 where quests could be decidedly cryptic and could sometimes take hours, the genre has moved on since then and now quests are less about lore and entertainment and more a tool to steer players to various areas of the world so they don't miss out on content. Age of Conan has taken this to its logical conclusion and virtually holds your hand throughout the entire process, though in a convenient rather than patronising way. It proved suitably easy to free the girl, and then she agrees to follow you back to the nearby town, Tortage.

What follows is a linear fight down a long path to the city, designed to get you familiar with the controls of the game and to help you gain five or so levels. You also become familiar with the game's appalling voice acting, which is delivered in the conversational cut-scenes you have with NPCs. It's not quite as dire as the faux-Scottish accents of some of the dwarves in EQ2, but generally the NPCs sound like a borderline-retarded Russian putting on a silly voice (it makes you wonder if Blizzard actually own the only competent voice actors in the MMO industry). Thankfully the voice acting ends after Tortage, but it does make you wonder why they bothered with it in the first place.

Getting back on topic - once you complete your little journey to Tortage, you find yourself zoning into a communal multiplayer zone - it turns out the previous area was a single-player instance. Ahead of you is the city of Tortage, but at this point you'll have to twiddle your graphical settings again because the communal zones perform considerably worse than the single-player instances. Anyway, there's a couple of errands you have to do to get into the city, and then it's on to standard MMO fare - running about, questing and killing things, to level up. The city of Tortage is beautifully modelled and textured, and the entire zone looks like it's come straight out of Pirates of the Carribbean. However, there is a twist in the tale, as Tortage is actually two different zones. Bear with me, because this takes a little explaining.

The first twenty levels were initially intended to be a single-player tutorial that would be skippable by subsequent characters, but this has changed somewhat along the way. This is definitely a good thing. Initially you weren't even going to choose your class at the start of the game, but you'd specialise into an archetype at level ten and then into an actual class at level twenty. This will sound familiar to veterans of EQ2, as the launch edition of this game pioneered this approach before eventually (and wisely) dropping it in favour of the standard character creation method. This transition left some unresolved issues in the early game of EQ2, but happily Funcom have done a better job with Age of Conan on this count.

The relatively elegant solution they have come up with is to split the newbie town of Tortage into single-player story mode (nighttime), and the standard multiplayer mode (daytime). These can be switched between by speaking to one of the NPCs in the inn that will act as your base for your time in Tortage. For the first twenty levels, whether you play with other players or not is entirely up to you. The single player missions are actually pretty good, and there's a different set of quests depending on your archetype. Rangers are part of the Rogue archetype, so my quests involved quite a lot of sneaking about. This means there's actually four sets of quests, and as you'll presumably play a different type of class for your alt characters, it means Tortage won't be as repetitive as it could be. The quests also do quite a good job of subtly introducing you to your class skills, which can only be a good thing.

Overall, though, I still have a few gripes with the zone. There's a chronic shortage of vendors to sell your loot to, as well as no vendors who actually sell bags in the town. Worse, there's no vendors in the single-player nighttime missions, and I found myself switching to daytime just to sell things, and then having to come back. As you have to zone to change from one mode to another, and then zone out of the inn to find a vendor, and then zone back into the inn and then shift mode back to night-time again, this is a pain in the ass. They should put a vendor in the night-time version of the inn. If there's one there already, he needs to be made more obvious. The layout of the quest givers I also found a bit irritating. They were dotted all over the place, which meant you'd spend half your time running around the city to hand in various bits of quests. I much prefer quest 'hubs', with four or five NPCs in a little outpost with all the quests. Once you're done with that hub, the game steers you onto the next one. Tortage reminded me a little of Baldur's Gate II, in that after a couple of hours of play I had about 20 quests going at once and no idea which monsters and NPCs were involved in which quest chain. Also, sometimes NPCs standing right next to each other would give out quests of completely different level ranges, which just to me seemed a little odd.

The rest of the Tortage zone involves several other zones, some public and others instances that you will encounter in your single-player exploits, and they range from a volcano to a desert island. Generally all look very polished, and the monsters are all very well animated and there's a good variety of different types. The only I really had with the communal zones is the community. While I admit I'm pretty sheltered, having played EQ2 as my most recent MMO, the game with probably the most mature and helpful fanbase in the MMORPG universe, it seems like Age of Conan attracted an awful lot of the WoW-kiddies. It might be because I'm playing on a PvP-server, but the General chat was just an uninterrupted stream of newbies spamming questions that could be answered by spending ten seconds either reading the manual or the extensive in-game tutorials, or by people just generally being assholes.

This failed to improve when I left the immediate proximity or Tortage to do some quests on Whitesand Isle, at which point I became PvP eligible. While I'm used to playing on PvP servers and thus I'm quite used to occasionally getting picked off when I'm hunting, the amount of griefing in the game surprised me. One of the issues is that the respawn point is unprotected, and you only have ten seconds of invulnerability before you become fair game to everyone again - by which point you'll be on about 1/3 health. Higher-level people camping the graveyards and just insta-killing everyone that spawns is infuriating, because there's nothing you can do about it at all. Funcom need to make the areas around the graveyard PvP-ineligible, so people can at least gate back to town if they're getting ganked too much. On a similar note, people also like camping the entrance to zones and killing anyone who tries to zone in, over and over. There's no material gain to PvP yet, so the persistence of some of the griefers is remarkable.

Another issue is the rather steep increase in power between the levels (at level 16 I was attacked by three level 13s and managed to kill them all), which means that newbies really get shafted if they try to go hunting in the multiplayer zones. I imagine things will improve as the zones get less populated, but still. I much prefer the WoW system of PvP-realms, where you can kill anyone of the opposing side pretty much anywhere. There's no confusion there - if you see a red name, you try and kill them, and if it's a green name then they're friendly. In AoC everyone is potentially hostile and, as you can't really just attack everyone you meet if you ever want to level up, things are less clear cut. This is almost certainly the intention, but it makes stuff like grouping up is quite hard. Trying to talk to someone is as likely to leave you trying to pull a throwing axe out of your face as it is to find you a group. Generally you'll just find higher level players one-shotting you just because they can (I'm not complaining, I do it myself), but a few people seem to have made it their mission to ruin things for everyone by camping the graveyards and generally griefing.

Overall, though, the first twenty levels were really good. The single-player storyline is pretty cool, the zones look fantastic and the combat is superb. If you've got a good enough PC to run it, I wholly recommend it - and I'd recommend it even more if they put a vendor in the Tortage inn. It's also worth noting that playing on a PvP server is quite a commitment. If you found PvP servers too much to handle on WoW, I wouldn't touch the AoC ones with a barge pole.

Age of Conan Player Diary Introduction

2008-05-24T06:17:00.000-07:00

Age of Conan is probably the closest anyone will get to a WoW-killer at any point in the next couple of years. There are plenty of MMOs coming out, but few have garnered the attention and hype that Funcom (the company behind Anarchy Online) have with their latest effort - in fact, over a million people signed up for the beta. So I preordered it, and I'll share my experiences with you. I'll start with a general introduction to the game, which should explain the basics about what makes this game so different from the crowd, before I go into details about zones and my experiences.

First up, the install process takes AGES, which is not entirely surprising when you consider Age of Conan is taking up a grand total of 25 gigs of my hard drive. I think my CD-Rom drive is a bit slow because it took a good couple of hours to install for me, but most people report it finished in under one. After that, the obligatory patching process starts. Despite having the game installed and running before it actually hit store shelves, I was still subjected to a 700 meg download, at which point I just left my PC on and went to bed. When I woke up in the morning it was all done, but if you do run out to the shops and buy this game please be prepared for a wait of at least three or four hours before you can start playing. That being said, there was no drama with the downloads and after 48 hours of play I've experienced only minor server issues (a 3 minute queue last night, and the occasional random disconnect), which I think is quite impressive for a game on launch weekend. Well done Funcom.

Okay, so onto the game itself. Once you've logged in and chosen a server (I picked Wildsoul PVP) you get to the nitty-gritty of creating a character and your first look at the vaunted graphics of AoC. Mighty impressive they are, too.

I started by choosing a gender, race and class. I went for a male Aquilonian Ranger, mostly because I was interested in playing a range DPS class and, as AoC has optional first-person targeting, this seemed an ideal time to try a Ranger. There are a total of 12 classes to choose from, and this figure was initially higher before Funcom merged several of the classes. In my books, this is a good idea - Everquest 2 suffered from having too many classes, as many of them were too similar and PvP balance was a nightmare. The twelve in AoC seem quite distinct from one another and hopefully will have sufficiently different playstyles to keep people interested once they've got sick of playing their first class.

My only concern is over the fact that AoC contains three 'tank' classes. Judging from the experience of playing a tank class in EQ2 (which had 6), one class will be judged as the best tanks, and thus tanking will be exclusively done by them in high-end groups and raiding. This leaves the other two classes out in the cold, as they're taking up room in a group that could be better filled with devoted DPS classes. Funcom appear to have addressed this with at least one of the tank classes, the conqueror, by giving him a whole lot of group buffs. However, the Dark Templar, who is a sort of necro-tank much like the Shadowknights of EQ1 and 2, looks somewhat left out in the cold at this stage. But we'll see how it pans out.

The character creation interface is very detailed, much like the one in Everquest 2 except with far nicer graphics (needless to say, both are light years ahead of World of Warcraft), or at least it is once you click the 'Advanced Options' tab at the top of the screen. Prior to that you've only got a few sliders, and a series of preset heads and hair types to choose from. The advanced options lets you customise all areas of the face and body, allowing you to create a character who looks truly unique. I went with a fairly clean-cut young man, without too many scars or tattoos. Then I gave him his name, Markell, and then sent him off into the world of Hyboria. You get a little cut-scene of you semi-drowning, before you wash up on the shore of an island and start playing.

This is pretty much the first scene you see and, believe it or not, the screenshot doesn't do it justice. Age of Conan looks phenomenal, end of discussion. The water effects are simply beautiful, the texturing is superb and the modelling is fantastic. The trees and foliage in particular look as though a lot of attention has been spent on them, and it really pays off. Compare this to Stranglethorn Vale in World of Warcraft, and we can see exactly how far gaming has come in the last four years. The ambient sound is very good, as is the music and the sound effects, and the subtle things like the shadows all contribute to a stunning world. Funcom haven't so much moved the bar as propelled it into another field entirely. Bear in mind too that this game is shipping WITHOUT DirectX10 support - the dev team wanted more time with it to polish it or something, so it should be looking even better in the near future. And these screenshots are taken on Medium-High settings, so those with better PCs than mine will find the world looking better than this already.

Problem is, all of this comes at a price. For reference, I'm running an Intel Core 2 Duo 6300, 2gb of RAM and an ATI Radeon X1800XT 256mb graphics card. My PC isn't top of the range by any stretch of the imagination; it'll run Company of Heroes on Max settings, EQ2 on about medium and will just about handle Crysis on Medium. When I arrived in Hyboria, I had to turn a few settings down - I switched off the water reflections, and the shadows, which kept things running nicely. But it turns out the first five or six levels or so are an instance, and when you get into the real world performance drops off. And when you reach the first town, it drops off again. And when you get out of the newbie starting areas and into the real cities, it drops off even more. My machine was chugging along at about 2-3 FPS in the capital cities, on the lowest graphical settings. Alarmingly, turning down the texture settings and all that didn't seem to help a lot, so it was only by turning my monitor resolution down (which looks UGLY) that I could get around the city at a playable 5-8 FPS. And that was on off-peak times. On peak times, it is literally unplayable, no joke. If your computer is worse than mine, DO NOT EVEN CONSIDER buying this game. If it's about on par with mine and you're not willing to upgrade, I wouldn't bother. I'm looking at buying a new graphics card and CPU right as I type this.

Onto the gameplay - the major innovation of AoC is supposed to be the combat, so I eagerly sprinted up the beach and started cracking pirate skulls. Initially it was overly frantic and downright confusing not to have autoattack and instead having to manually aim every strike, but you quickly get into it and soon you're wondering why someone hadn't thought of this type of combat earlier. Of course, a player is not simply limited to his three directional attacks, as you quickly unlock combos as you level up. These are just like the special abilities in all other MMOs, except that when you select one it is not instantly activated. First of all, a series of moves you have to perform with your directional attacks pops up, and it's only one you've pulled those off (if you mess up the combo is lost) that the move actually takes place. The more powerful a move, the longer the required combos, so you can't simply run into combat and spam your most powerful ability to insta-kill everything any more. It's a nice touch, and I imagine it will have a great deal of ramifications for PvP combat. But, tactical considerations aside, the combat is great.

Most of this is due to the frankly awesome sound effects and animations of the characters, something that has been given remarkably little press in the light of the stylised fatalities that occasionally appear when you strike a killing blow. They are entertaining enough, but the meaty sounds when weapons meet bodies and the fact that people fly backwards when you shoot them with a powerful crossbow adds far more to the general experience. You actually feel like your attacks are powerful and they look like they're doing real damage, instead of the rather more detached combat of EQ2 and WoW, and I love it. There's little downtime, too, because any class is capable of resting and rapidly regaining HP and Stamina/Mana if they are out of combat. Fighting in AoC is exciting and satisfying, and I'm really not sure I'd be able to go back to WoW or EQ2 even after a mere 48 hours of AoC - it really is that much better...

The GUI was much less of a hit with me. It looks good, I'll grant Funcom that, but the functionality is poor even compared to WoW and far below what's offered by EQ2. Communicating is unnecessarily difficult, and the chat window is obtrusive and difficult to customise. I still haven't worked out how to add people not in the same zone as me to my friends list, or check if they are online. Inviting people to a party is cumbersome, and the group UI is poor at best. The inventory window looks nice, but when you try and check the stats of an item it often displays half of the stats window offscreen, and as you can't move the inventory windows you can't drag them away from the edge of the screen to rectify this. That been said, the map features are excellent, as they provide detailed and zoomable maps of the locations with quest NPCs and quest objectives clearly marked. It makes getting around and finding quest targets nice and easy, and essentially makes sites like Thottbott relatively obsolete now. But overall, the GUI is terrible, and I hope Funcom upgrade it soon.

Onto the player diary for levels 1-20.

Age of Conan, then...

2008-05-22T15:08:00.000-07:00

The escapade with Everquest 2 has ended for the time being. Other commitments in my life took over just as Choraz reached his homeland, somewhat ironically cutting short his journey just before I actually got to do what I'd been looking forward to for the entire time I was playing EQ2 - actually exploring Kunark again (I got as far as the dock, and the monsters immediately around that).

And now, with my finals at university passing in the next week and me having a little free time on my hands, I decided to pre-order Age of Conan. I figured that I'd end up buying it anyway, so I thought I may as well get the in-game Rhino mount that came with the pre-order from Play.com. And now I'm sitting at my desk, typing this while I revise for my exam tomorrow. Age of Conan is now installed on my computer, which took the best part of two hours, and it is now downloading a 95 meg patch which should take the best part of an hour. But the servers are down for the next four hours anyway, as the official release date is not until tomorrow. I can't play it until 5pm anyway, when my exam is done, but rest assured I'll be firing the game up pretty quickly after getting home.

You can expect an in-depth blog of my experiences in Age of Conan, much like what I posted for EQ2 over the last year or so. I will probably pop back to Everquest 2 and have a look around Kunark for a month at some point in the future, but for now I'm going to be concentrating on Funcom's latest effort. Let's just hope Conan proves to be all that it's cracked up to be.

Everquest II Player Diary Level 60-65

2007-11-30T04:03:00.000-08:00

Well, Choraz did eventually make it to level 65, though it was a beleaguered effort some two weeks after the release of the expansion.

Sanctum of the Scaleborn was my first port of call at 60. This is a dungeon in the Tenebrous Tangle, and it's superbly executed. It consists of two levels broken up into various rooms, each one containing a named (if he is up). There is quite a lot of trash mobs and the respawns can get annoying, but the zone is brilliant experience and has a lot of achievement experience for the named kills/exploration exp. The big plus, however, are the quests. There are a number of quests for the dungeon, all of which are found within the walls of the dungeon, and they provide a logical progression through the zone and lead you deeper and deeper with each step in the quest chains. They are reasonably interesting quests as well, but it certainly is a bonus to get the free quest exp and AA as well as the dungeon rewards. If a group of friends ran through the dungeon together right from the start, I can see them having a really good time doing it. If I had to pick a flaw, it'd be that the quests are usually multi-stage, so it can be hard to find people on the same part as you (and even rarer to find a whole group there), but really that's just a minor niggle. The Sanctum really isn't too hard for a decent group, but it's still a really well designed zone that gives an ideal place to level up from 60-67 or so.

After that it was onto the Barren Sky, the mid-level zone in the Kingdom of Sky that runs to about level 64. The quest lines weren't too hard there and provided me with about a level and a half, and I was able to complete the whole zone by level 63 despite some of the quests going up to level 69. As always, monsters from older expansions are easier, and KoS is considerably easier than Faydwer zones of the same level. The look of the zone is rather nice, mostly Arabic-inspired in architecture and generally pretty deserty, which makes a nice change after the jungle of Tenebrous Tangle but can leave you rather sick of deserts after you've fought through the Desert of Flames (particularly as some of the architecture is remarkably similar). There's not really much to talk about regarding the Barren Sky that wasn't already said about Tenebrous Tangle - the zone isl made up of tiny islands, which I don't like, but you do get used to it even if it is a pain to navigate. A few quibbles with the quests - the major quest line requires you to summon various NPCs at their 'listening posts' with your flute, but it took me ages to find the listening post in the first place...and why? Well, because it's less of a post and more of a stick in the ground that does not look even slightly important. Why not make it suitably impressive, or clickable, and then people won't walk straight past it when they're looking for it...

After Barren Sky, I decided to head down to the Isle of Mara. This was an adventure pack that formerly retailed at $4.99, but as the Kunark expansion comes with all previous EQ2 content I now had access to it. It basically consists of a rather oriental-style village populated by monks, and then a few group instances and some raid bosses. It's actually a very beautiful town, with some rather easy quests available in the town for those of level 55 and up. After completing them, I headed into the other outdoor zone of the adventure pack and explored it for the AA. Towards the end there were a lot of heroics to dodge, but there was some really cool stuff to see too. The big lake near the end of the zone features a flooded temple I had a good time exploring (it contains a dungeon), and there's a big tomb earlier in the zone that also contains another dungeon. Without a group I didn't bother exploring either, but I did very much like the look of the zone even if it was rather easy (pre-EoF monsters again). Whether or not it was worth $5, I don't know - I suppose at the time of release it probably would have been, as the dungeons would have been pretty busy, but I would have felt a bit ripped off paying for what is essentially two outdoor zones (one with no mobs in it) and a couple dungeons when I'm already paying $15 a month - I think SOE showed good sense in abandoning the Adventure Packs and concentrating on expansions and free updates.

Speaking of free updates, along with Kunark came the new racial abilities, which are pretty cool (if not game-breaking) and serve to differentiate between the races a lot more than before. My Iksar can now breathe underwater, for example, while Dark Elves can hover, Gnomes can summon clockwork pets, Kerra can pounce and Sarnark can breathe fire on unsuspecting enemies. The fact that all the races were the same used to annoy me a bit and, while this hasn't exactly brought back all the racial cities and racial tradeskilling of EQ1, it's certainly provided some kind of identity to the different races. Kudos to the dev team for doing so.

The other thing I decided to do post-Kunark release was check out the various mounts on sale. The Kunark rhinos were pretty cool, if perhaps not as outlandish as I expected, but I was struck by the sheer number of mounts that a player could buy if they wanted to. Believe me, there is a LOT of choice there, with the new level 80 guild mounts looking extremely cool (fiery breath, eyes and feet on the new wargs, for example, with your choice of orange or blue flame). The old armoured horse mounts still look fantastic too, but sadly I don't think many people will be using them now all their flame-spewing cousins are available. Still, it's just another testament to the depth of EQ2 in terms of character customisation available.

Anyway, back to the levelling. After Mara I went off to Bonemire, the highest-level outdoor zone in the Kingdom of Sky. This is pretty weird as it is set in space with bright pink rivers and a crashed gnomish spacecraft to get your quests from. The main bad guys here aren't the aviaks of the previous two zones, it's largely the Ravasect, praying-mantis style bad guys who look rather cool and go down quite easily. While the zone does feel a bit incongruous with the rest of EQ2, it's quite refreshing to see a zone that's entirely different from the rest of the world - it reminded me a little of Silithus, if you're a WoW player, except I prefer the Ravasect to the nasties in Silithus. The quest lines are not really anything to write home about, though they do their job, and Bonemire does provide a bit of variation from the standard EQ2 zones. I enjoyed playing through it, though I only got about a level out of it because the solo quests are so easy to do. I'm still not sure if I'm comfortable with spaceships and space stuff being in EQ2, but that's a debate for another day. Bonemire is an okay zone, but by now I was getting thorougly sick of flying between countless tiny little islands in the sky.

So it was back to the Loping Plains to finish the grind up to level 65. The step up from Bonemire was pretty noticeable, as the monsters are packed right in in the Loping Plains and so it's easy to get adds while you fight, but I was able to wrap up the rest of the solo quests without too much trouble. I've got to say that I do like the Loping Plains quite a lot as a zone, with the fog and undead and ruins everywhere making it rather distinctive, like Darkshire in WoW. The quests are quite well done too, so all in all the Loping Plains was a good place to level and felt dangerous and hostile, like a high-end zone should.

Level 60-65, for me, was just a means to an end. There were several zones involved, the best being Loping Plains and the Sanctum of the Scaleborn, but all of them served their purpose. I can't say that they gripped me in the same way as the Steamfont dungeons did, for example, but they raised me up to level 65. Once I hit 65 I went to Kunark immediately, which is probably a good thing. The KoS was fine for seven or eight levels, but the thought of having to find another five levels grinding in Bonemire or the Loping Plains (as I'd done all the quests) really did not excite me, so I was pretty happy that there was an expansion with new zones that I could run off to. And then circumstance (exams) took over and had to stop playing EQ2. Maybe I'll continue the journey in the future (it seems stupid to stop now), but we'll see what happens.

Everquest 2 Player Diary Level 55 - 60

2007-11-17T06:43:00.000-08:00

Level 55 to 60 provides players with their first chance to reach the content brought by the Kingdom of Sky expansion, though it is probably one best not to take immediately. The mobs there start at around level 57, so I thought I'd best wait until then before I headed up into the Overrealm. That meant I had to find two levels either in the Desert of Flames or in Faydwer; luckily I almost immediately found a group being put together for the Mines of Meldrath, an instance in the Steamfont Mountains.

Admittedly, I was probably a couple of levels too high for the Mines of Meldrath at 55, but the wonderful thing about Everquest 2 is that the Achievement Exp you get for running a dungeon the first time will make up for that. The Mines themselves turned out to be inside an extensive tunnel system in Steamfont, but thankfully all the monsters were grey to me until I actually got into the instance (which took a while, as I had no idea where I was going). Once inside, I realised that I would be mostly facing clockworks, and I probably should have done it before running Klak'Anon - it seems to be intended partly as an introduction to its bigger cousin.

Anyway, the basic setup of the dungeon is that you have to kill a number of bosses and harvest a power stone from each, which are then used to activate a clockwork robot that will build a bridge to the final boss. Along the way a ghostly gnome appears, telling you a small part of his story and luring you onwards, but sadly I did not really get to listen to what he had to say - the group seemed intent on getting through everything as quickly as possible. That was a bit of a shame, I thought, because I do enjoy those little touches that add some background to a dungeon. The final bossfight was relatively challenging and we actually wiped, though that was largely due to my own stupidity (I pulled aggro while AOEing the bodyguards, then I decided to Feign Death to clear the aggro while forgetting I was still assisting the tank - so I FDed him instead, which got everyone killed). In general the zone was actually surprisingly hard, with the monsters hitting much harder than their non-EoF counterparts, so if you're not on your toes you could quite easily wipe. But on the plus side, the Achievement Exp was good, the loot was excellent and it was a fun way to spend forty five minutes or so (it's a relatively short instance).

After that, I figured I'd give the Lesser Faydark another try. I always had quite liked the (admittedly very different) Lesser Faydark from back in Everquest 1, so I wasn't entirely happy leaving the updated version with my previous conclusions of 'worst zone ever'. In fact, at level 55 the zone turned out to be a lot more accessible and, remarkably enough, quite good fun. That's not to say that I don't think the zone is not still badly designed, because it is - frankly, it's like a maze. The wandering hostile heroics are also still a complete nightmare, particularly near the Butcherblock Mountains area. However, at level 55 or 56 you don't instantly die when you get an add while fighting, which makes the zone somewhat less frustrating. The fact that the horse stations have been added makes the zone MUCH easier to traverse too, though naturally you've got to have found each of the stations before you go there.

Once you get into it, though, you'll find the Lesser Faydark quite an interesting zone. The quest lines are plentiful and actually kept me more than interested as I played through them, and the fact that there's an outpost in the zone with a mender and broker there (along with lots of quests) made me very happy. There's also an area in the zone that's been overrun by otherworldly attackers like Shadowed Men, which I really enjoyed fighting in. The Shadowed Men look very impressive with decent graphics settings on (apparently they look similarly good in the Obelisk of Lost Souls, but I always turn my graphics right down in dungeons as you can't afford to lag while tanking), with really cool smoky effects around the edge of their portals. There's also some weird void creatures that look vaguely humanoid while standing still, but then split apart and become very distinctly alien when they move. I spent half a level soloing around there to hit 57 after I'd done the quest lines and I really quite enjoyed it. Thus, I've upgraded the Lesser Faydark to a mediocre zone - it's far from well designed or beginner-friendly, but it's a lot of fun when you get into it. I really wouldn't bother going there till 55+ though; stick to the easier DoF zones instead.

Once I hit 57 I headed up to the Kingdom of Sky using the wizard spires in the Commonlands, ending up in a zone called the Tenebrous Tangle. But even after extensive leveling there, I'm still not sure if I like it, as it is quite an odd design (like much of the KOS that I've seen). Basically, the Overrealm consists of several zones, each broken up into numerous small islands connected by teleporters. While this does allow each little area to have its own distinct theme, usually dictated by the type of monster that lives there, it does strike me as somewhat lazy. Much like the original release zones of Everquest 2, they appear to have come up with a few ideas and then not bothered filling in the blanks, the empty sea between the islands in this case being replaced by empty sky. The graphical style in each zone is generally similar between each island, too, the only difference (as mentioned above) being the monsters that reside there. Having said that, the Tenebrous Tangle and the neighbouring Barren Sky were visually very distinct from one another - it was just pretty monotonous within them.

Putting aside the structure of the zone, though, Kingdom of Sky has some neat ideas. To reach the friendly outpost in the Tenebrous Tangle, for example, you have to leap off a waterfall and fall about five hundred metres into a big pool of water. It's nothing too major, but it is quite a cool touch. The zone is also quite clearly designed as a 'newbie' zone, as it's packed full of repeatable quests that make leveling towards 60 a breeze. I picked up two levels in TT before the easy repeatable quests ran out, and I didn't get bored because it went by so quickly. In terms of monsters, there's a new dragonkin race called the Droag that make up the majority of the enemies, as well as the standard dragonflies/snakes/wasps/hostile plantlife. Some of the islands are quite good for grinding, too, though finding the right teleporter can be a nightmare. The other thing worth mentioning about TT is that it contains the Sanctum of the Scaleborne, a dungeon that starts at about level 60 that I'll cover in my next entry, but I'll say now that it's very well designed and a lot of fun to play though. Overall, Tenebrous is quite a good zone that gives good adventure and achievement experience, though I do find the fact it is literally a series of unconnected islands with different creatures on them rather underwhelming in terms of zone design - had I paid good money to buy the expansion separately, I might have felt a little shortchanged.

To get up to 60 after I had grown tired of soloing in Tenebrous, I returned to Faydwer and did some grouping. My first port of call was New Tunaria, formerly Felwithe from EQ1. This was the home city of the High Elves back in the day, but over the last 500 years they had become a little more insular and now the place is a level 60ish dungeon. First up, it's worth noting the zone's visual style, which is very striking with a lot of gold and white marble. Sadly the exteriors of the buildings are actually quite badly textured when you get close, but the interior areas of the zone look very nice. The creatures you will be fighting are just average looking elves, mixed in with the stone statue mob models that you'll have seen before in countless other dungeons, but it's in the EoF mold and therefore a pretty tough zone. The mobs hit hard compared to those of similar level in other expansions and drop slightly better loot, but the zone overall is pretty badly done despite the potential it had for being really good. I was honestly expecting something special once I'd seen the striking white towers, and I was really hoping that they had done Felwithe justice, but sadly it was not to be.

The main problem with New Tunaria is largely that there's nothing to do. There's not many nameds and almost no quests at all, coupled with little loot worth remarking about (unless you're particularly keen on repeating the word 'average' to yourself). There was one quest, but to get it we had to pray at an altar while being beaten on by four non-heroic mobs. This wasn't too much of a problem once we'd worked out what to do, but then it turned out we couldn't pray at the altar because it was nighttime. A quest that you can only get half of the time? Yeah, great idea...

After getting rather bored of New Tunaria, my group decided just to head to the Court of Innovation instead. This is an instance within Klak'Anon, aimed at those in their high 50s, and it was a complete contrast to New Tunaria. Though by this point I was getting thoroughly sick of fighting clockworks, I had a really good time in the Courts - fighting through the dungeon involves a series of puzzles as well as bossfights, and it was challenging but not impossible. It felt well-balanced in that the zone felt dangerous but doable, and it taxed your head a little more than just hammering your hotbar keys. It was also cool because there were no respawns as it was an instance, meaning that the clearing of trash mobs was not much of a chore - you knew you'd only have to do it once. The final bossfight was pretty climactic (you really felt like you were fighting a final boss) and the loot was excellent, as was both the adventure and achievement experience. Overall, a very polished instance that shouldn't be missed by anyone.

To wrap up, level 55-60 was fine. It took a while to do but, with the release of the Kunark expansion, the level progression pre-70 is being made easier and therefore this is somewhat of a non-issue. I get the impression that the trek would have been quite dull without Faydwer, but being able to alternate between zones in Faydwer and the Kingdom of Sky kept things fresh and meant I didn't have to spend so long anywhere that I became sick of it, and that can only be a good thing. Next time, the Loping Plains and the rest of the KOS.

Everquest II Player Diary Level 50 to 55

2007-11-06T03:13:00.000-08:00

Choraz continued his frenzied race through the levels once he had hit 50, hitting 55 with only six days left before the expansion is released (I don't think he's going to make it). That's not through want of effort, however - levelling beyond the big five zero seems to take much longer than it did before it. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, as there's a lot of content for you to explore (hence the long post), but it's not ideal when you're desperately trying to hit level 65. Also, as with the previous entry, screenshots will come once I've got to Kunark. Give it 2-3 weeks and this whole diary will look lovely from start to finish.

Anyway, as I'd already completed the Sinking Sands, I kicked off level 50 by going to the Lesser Faydark. Turns out that was a bit of a mistake - despite being advertised as a zone that ranged from 50 to 60, it's quite clearly impossible to do anything there when you're a level 50. Given that I can solo non-heroic monsters five or six levels higher than me, this is quite astounding. I thought perhaps the dev team had got past the stage where they made horrible zones, but as the Lesser Faydark is most definitely another terrible zone they clearly have not.

So what's terrible about it? Well, first up, it's really enclosed and it's very difficult to work out where you're going. There are very few wide open spaces, if any, and the zone itself is actually pretty small. On top of that, I had the audacity to try zoning in from the Butcherblock Mountains side, which is a level 20-30 zone that contains the docks from Antonica, and I promptly found myself surrounded by level 60 triple heroics intent on melting my face with whatever magic spells they had to hand. Thanks to the fact my class is blessed with all sorts of ways of getting out of trouble, I managed to dodge through them and head towards the outpost beyond them, thinking I was in the clear. But the monk outpost beyond is also surrounded by level 60 mobs and the only quest-giver has hostile triple heroics flying around near him, meaning that you'll usually get killed before you can accept the damn quest.

Seriously unamused by the fact I'd died twice and achieved nothing, I pressed on and went deeper into the zone. I found an outpost in the middle of the zone, but it didn't offer me any quests - it only had quests for the high 50s - so I continued on my way. I immediately was set upon by a level 60 single heroic just as I walked down the path, so I ran past it, only to find myself in a part of the zone surrounded by level 60s. Predictably, I died. I respawned back at that outpost, and took another path. This one turned out to be leading in the vague direction of the Greater Faydark entrance and so did not contain quite as much uberdeath, eventually leading me to an outpost with quests around my level. Sadly, the wandering high-level mobs made the zone impossible to solo in when I found the Thexians I was meant to be killing, so I threw the hat in and moved on. I really don't like saying this, but the Lesser Faydark was one of the worst zones I've played in the game - it's restrictive, very difficult to solo and packed full of heroic mobs that you can't avoid because it's so tight. I genuinely thought the dev team were past that, but obviously not...

After that I went to Maj'Dul, the city in the Desert of Flames. That didn't amuse me overly either, as I'd aligned myself with the Court of Truth and therefore found both the Court of Coin and the Court of Blades hostile to me. This meant their patrolling guards would attack me, cutting off access to the parts of the city that had heroics guarding them. I kinda blundered around there for a bit, not achieving very much, then left. The city was more like a dungeon than a city and was largely abandoned, which to me isn't entirely surprising. I like the concept they went for, but I don't think the execution was ideal. For example, the other two Courts had stairwells down to their Court buildings, whereas the stairway to the Court of Truth was guarded by Court of Coin guards. So I had to fight my way to my court building, where I discovered I couldn't get in anyway.

In the end, most players who want to fight will go to a proper adventure zone, so I think Maj'Dul suffers from trying to mix a city and a dungeon - it's not particularly good at being either. The other thing to mention was the Arena, which is intended to allow people to team PvP one another or fight using 'champions' that can be bought or won from quests. Only problem is, I've never seen or heard about anyone using it - to use it, you have to stand by the entrance while you wait for opponents, rather than being able to run about like the WoW battleground queueing, and once inside the arenas are hardly inspiring anyway. It's a shame, because god knows that EQ2 could do with some casual PvP just for an occasional change of pace.

After these two levels I was still only about 35% into level 50, so I headed to the Pillars of Flame, which is another large outdoor zone that borders the Sinking Sands. It's unfortunately not as well designed as the Sinking Sands, but it's still not bad to play though(particularly as you get towards the mid-fifties). The quests are quite interesting and the variation of mobs in the level is quite good, and it still looks rather good, but inexplicably the heroics are back. There's one area full of tigers that has linked tigers that are double undercons, meaning I could quite possibly solo five or six of them at once, mixed in with triple heroics who can kill me in less than ten seconds. As they both look exactly the same, this is ridiculous and just makes travelling that part of the zone an undue hazard. I mean, it's not like anyone's going to want to group up and hunt the heroic tigers as any quests involving them can be done by hunting the easier linked ones, so why bother at all? Not to mention that this area is right near the zone-in outpost, meaning that unless you want to be dodging heroic tigers you need to fight your way through an enormous goblin camp to see the rest of the zone. There were also similar wandering heroics among the harpies, again looking exactly the same as their brethren, which killed me on a couple of occasions.

The other thing that annoyed me about the zone is that there were three or four areas you could get quests, but they were spread to different corners of the zone. So you'd complete a couple of quests and find you'd have to run/fly the whole length of the zone just to hand both in. Given quests from both outposts were for the same level range (in fact, often the same monsters), it seems a little strange to do it that way. It would have been more logical to have all the quests for level 50-51 in the first outpost, then you get sent to the second one for the 52-53 quests and the like. That having been said, however, it's still an enjoyable zone to play - it just didn't bowl me over like Sinking Sands thanks to a few niggling design flaws.

After this I popped over to Permafrost for a bit, a dungeon in Everfrost that contains the ghost of Vox, a famous dragon boss from the original EQ. She's an epic mob so we didn't try and tackle her, but we did head around the rest of the place and clear it. While it looks quite impressive in places (in a kind of badly-textured release EQ2 kind of way), the zone was very little challenge and by the end we were three-manning the place with the swashbuckler (rogue class) tanking. The loot was horrible, as in most old world zones, and there was minimal quests on offer as well. I left having gained half a level but feeling a little let down. Permafrost is a zone that needs updating, as it's largely obsolete given that it was made for characters who were capped at level 50 and had none of the gear that came in the later expansions. It can barely count as a dungeon any more either; it's just so damn easy that there's no sense of risk any more.

That done, it was back to the Pillars of Flame, where I headed to a dungeon called the Clefts of Rujark that straddles both the Sinking Sands and the aforementioned Pillars. This is quite a neat zone for two reasons; firstly, the lower level is entirely soloable if you're of the right level. The exp is average and there's not too many named, but it's nice to have somewhere to go that's between Sinking Sands and Pillars of Flame in terms of levels. The upper levels, however, are full of heroic group content with several nameds. You have to use a lift to get between them, so there's no chance of running into a heroic when you're soloing, so I thought that was quite a cool change of pace. Having said that, there were numerous rooms that you could fight your way into only to find that there was nothing to speak of inside them; it would be nice to have some kind of named mob or questgiver/quest target at the end of most of the corridors. With a decent group we cleared most of the Heroics, then did the instance inside the zone. That had three nameds in it, none of whom dropped anything worthwhile, but the Achievement Exp meant it wasn't a complete waste of time. I got a valuable level fighting in Rujark and quite a bit of Achievement exp from exploring the place and killing named enemies, so it was well worth clearing at least once.

The Living Tombs was next, a mid-fifties dungeon accessed from the Sinking Sands. I didn't spend long enough there to do many quests but I got a bit of achievement experience from the few I did, as well as for exploration and killing a couple of nameds. Again, the loot was pretty unimpressive, but I still loved the zone. Why? Simply because it looks so damn cool, with great mausoleums lit up by eeire green lighting and filled with undead. It gives the feeling of a really unnatural zone and that you're somewhere you shouldn't be, which adds to the tension quite a lot. It's really a shame that the zone hasn't been re-itemised because it really looks that good. The screenshots don't even do it justice; everyone should go visit it even if just to look at how pretty all the lights are. Maybe that's just my personal tastes, but I really think it looks that good.

The final zone I spent a bit of time in was Klak'Anon. This is the homeland of the gnomes from Everquest I, Ak'Anon, having been taken over by the clockworks. This is actually only the second dungeon I had visited in Echoes of Faydwer, after Crushbone Keep, and the first thing to mention is that it is damn hard. The monsters hit like a ton of bricks and, even though I'm wearing largely mastercrafted gear, I nearly died on several occasions while fighting a couple of trash mobs. That may be due to questionable healing, of course, but getting more than a couple of triple heroic adds when you're fighting will spell doom in Klak, unless you've got a crowd control class to deal with them. The respawns in the zone are also rather quick, meaning you've got be on your toes and keep moving forward else you'll find yourself in all kinds of trouble.

That having been said, I thought this was really good (despite it being quite mentally draining to tank, given the endless stream of adds you seem to get in some of the rooms). It's nice to have a challenge, and the Echoes of Faydwer dungeons are certainly that. Despite being of similar level to Permafrost, if you tried to three-man Klak the only place you'd be going would be the graveyard. The place is well laid out and comes with an in-game map that allows you to see where you and all your groups are in the zone just like you could in outdoor zones, which is a fantastic touch and one I really appreciated. There are a lot of quests there, one of which took two runs to complete but gave me a very good reward indeed, and plenty of named mobs to keep everyone happy. There's also an instance and a raid zone inside Klak - we went to the instance but found it a little too tough for us, so I'll probably go back around level 60 and give it another go.

Overall, 50-55 was quite a good experience, particularly towards the end when I spent a couple of levels in Klak'Anon. Having said that, though, it took a LONG time to get there and I expect that to only get worse as I progress through the levels. Still, it's nice to see the high-end game content and it's particularly refreshing that the EOF zones are a challenge even to someone with relatively good gear and fair bit of MMORPG experience under their belt. I'm quite eager to see the Kingdom of the Sky after the surprisingly good Desert of Flames, so I plan to visit that in my next entry. Until then, it's adieu from me.

Everquest 2 Player Diary - Levels 45-50

2007-10-29T04:52:00.000-07:00

After my three month hiatus from EQ2, enforced by my internet connection, I returned with newfound enthusiasm for the game. Why? Well, because the Kunark expansion is due to come out on November the 13th, meaning that I had all of two and a half weeks to gain at least 20 levels (the proper Kunark content starting at 65). I burned through 45-50 in three days, mostly thanks to having rested (double) experience the whole way, and I actually really enjoyed it. This may be down to the break I'd had from the game, but I think it also had a lot to do with the zones I was in. Screenshots will come later, because I'm too busy trying to level to go and take them.

I kicked off in Steamfont, a zone I've mentioned before. I went from 45 to 47 there, hunting in the two high-level parts of the map I'd not explored before and refamiliarising myself with my character. Both had a few quests and were entertaining enough, helped by the fact that Steamfont is a very pretty zone. The water effects around the geysers are very well done too, as water effects in EQ2 generally are. Not much to say that hasn't already been said regarding Steamfont, though, so I'll move onto what came next.

At 47, I headed over to the Sinking Sands, the first zone in the first expansion pack - Desert of Flames. I thought it was a bit random at first to have an Arab-inspired continent in Everquest 2, given its high fantasy roots, but it quickly began to make sense when I discovered the continent was based on the Desert of Ro in the original EQ. It's a shame that it's a separate continent, really, as there aren't many desert zones in EQ2 and the fact they all seem to be on a continent of their own really serve to emphasise the fact that the in-game world is largely a series of unconnected zones, all surrounded by ocean. Faydwer and Kunark are entire continents and feel much better for it, so it seems a shame that Antonica is so disjointed. If it were joined together again (with the Desert of Flames re-integrated into it), the game would feel a hell of a lot more cohesive for it.

Previously, I had assumed the Desert of Flames would be crap. This was largely thanks to the fact it was released within a year of the original EQ2, so I assumed it would suffer from generally the same malaise as the rest of the release EQ2 zones. However, I'm glad to say that I was wrong - from what I've seen of it so far, the Desert of Flames is a superb expansion. Let's start with my old favourite, visual style. The vast expanses of sand are very striking, and the large numbers of undead and ruins with glowy green writing give a rather eerie feel that does bring back fond memories of the original Ro. The locals have also built their own structures in the classic Arabian style - brightly coloured spiralled towers are visible on the horizon, alongside fantastic palaces on floating islands in the sky and the like. It really does give the sensation of a land filled with powerful magic, and it gives you a very good feeling about the dungeons in the zone.

Onto zone design, and the Sinking Sands comes out pretty well. It's a large zone (though only one map page) and it's packed with content, so you get an awful lot of Achievement Experience for exploring it. The various areas are different from one another too, so it's not packed with content in the tedious sense of the Feerott - this is a proper zone in which you could happily spend three or four levels adventuring and exploring without getting bored. The number of quests is also pretty high and, if you do most of them (which you should do, as you get a lot of Achievement xp), you'll be sent everywhere in the zone. Some of them are quite interesting, too - treasure hunting and exploring, for example. The most intriguing one, however, was helping an armorer who needed intact scarab shells. To get them you would have to chase skittish scarabs into a valley of triple-heroic tarantulas, who would then kill them and let you steal the shell to return to them. Unfortunately, there's 9 quests in the line and to complete them all you'd have to herd well over a hundred scarabs to their doom, but certainly doing two or three is quite entertaining.

In terms of the old bugbear, wandering heroics, Sinking Sands doesn't do too badly. There are quite a lot of heroic monsters, such as the aforementioned tarantulas, but they generally stay in their valley and, besides, they're there for a quest. The only wandering double or triple heroics look like you should stay out of their way - the named heroic orcs have platemail on and the giants are, well, giant. As I mentioned in the last entry, I don't have a problem with a few wandering triple heroics in the zone, so long as they actually LOOK heroic and you can easily see them coming. Linked mobs are more common than in Faydwer, too, but they are confined to static camps in this zone (and only rarely are they linked heroics). Again, that's fine by me - I'd prefer if there weren't any linked mobs at all, but I'm not overly bothered by linked mobs if they don't wander and they're non heroic. Thus, in my book at least, the Sinking Sands has all the hallmarks of an excellent zone and it's left me looking forward to exploring the rest of the expansion.

The other thing I did between level 45 and 50 was go and visit Everfrost, one of my favourite zones from the original EQ. I didn't spend too long there (I earned perhaps 25% of level 48), but I went to level up my harvesting. Sinking Sands only has level 50 harvestables in it, which you need to be level 48 to have any chance to harvesting. Since I started in the SS at 47, I had to go back to Everfrost/Steamfont to get my harvesting up to the required level once I had hit 48. While I was there, I thought I'd have a peek around.

Overall, I have to say that I hated it in pretty much every way. The original Everfrost was mostly open tundra, with a mountain-based newbie zone for those fresh out of Halas, the barbarian city. The new one appears to be some kind of ice floe, and is frankly laughable in its design. You arrive on a dock which is not connected to the mainland, thus forcing you to jump off and swim. Sadly, there does not appear to be any way back up there once you have jumped, which is a bit of a shame if you happened to grab a quest or two off the NPC on the dock. That's pretty annoying and completely mystifying, but to make matters worse there's usually an epic x2 shark called Dreadwake swimming about in the water, ready to devour you when you try to swim for land. If not, the whole sea is filled with hostile and often heroic whales/sharks anyway, so your chances of actually making it to land are minimal anyway.

Fortunate as I am, though, I survived the water and found myself in a canyon. I fought through that, dying only when I was jumped by some linked triple heroic wolves that looked exactly like all the other wolves in the zone, and eventually found myself in some strange icy plateau. It was full of creatures, most non-hostile (except the wandering triple heroics), and eventually led me to a small dungeon filled with some ice spirit maiden things. As the journey had been rather dull, I was somewhat underwhelmed and wondered if there was anything else to the zone. Consulting my map, it appeared I had not even explored half of it, so I set about trying to find the rest of the zone. Turns out, to find the main part of the zone, you have to jump off the docks and swim through a couple of tiny, almost invisible tunnels that lead within the island (while trying not to get eaten by the sharks). Good luck finding that if you didn't already know about it...

When inside, the zone basically consists of (triple heroic) golems and skeletons with their models set to a transparent blue to represent ice. Beyond that there's finally a bit of tundra, filled with the familiar bears and mammoths of the original EQ. But there's few quests, and the mobs are all just milling around (often triple heroic), so it seems rather empty and pointless. Beyond that there's a load of giants guarding the entrance to Permafrost, another dungeon, and a sea filled with ice floes covered in goblins. I left the zone wondering why it had been made in the first place, as it seems only to exist to contain Permafrost. There are almost no quests, few interesting monsters and no friendly outposts to speak of, so overall it's a poor zone at best. Thank god we've got the Sinking Sands to get you to 50 then, eh?

EQ diary updated to level 45...

2007-07-30T14:37:00.001-07:00

As mentioned above, the diary now goes up to level 45 - access the new entry from the menu on the right. I've not added all the pictures yet, partly because I can't quite bring myself to go back into the Obelisk to get screenshots of that god-awful zone, and partly because I was too busy having fun in DFC to remember to take screenshots. They'll come shortly tho, don't worry. Witty comments (or my attempts thereof) will also be up soon. Keep tuned, anyway.

EQ2 Diary updated again...

2007-07-19T02:44:00.001-07:00

Okay, the diary now runs up to level 40. Choraz is only level 42 at the moment, so it might be a while before the next entry. I am, however, in the process of securing a friend's LOTRO account and install disc so I can add a player diary on that too. I've every intention of making this into a resource for those who want to play a (non-WoW) MMORPG, allowing them to compare the features of each game and maintaining reasonably up-to-date reviewsand rankings of each to help them decide on which one is for them. So stay with me.

EQ2 Player Diary Updated

2007-07-17T16:28:00.001-07:00

Just to let everyone know I've added two new entries to the EQ2 player diary, from level 30-35 and the first part of level 35-40. The rest of Level 35-40 will follow tomorrow, and I'll add the missing pictures of Zek and the Ruins of Varsoon ASAP. In the meantime, enjoy - the links are on the sidebar to the right of this page.

EDIT - Pictures now added. Enjoy.

Apparently, I'm a victim of piracy...

2007-06-26T13:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, my computer packed up. Wouldn't boot up at all, said the operating system needed reinstalling. Naturally, I spent about five hours searching for one, and when I found one I thought 'well, superb, the problems are solved'.

But they weren't. Oh no, because Windows won't install - apparently, I didn't have a hard drive installed. I started swearing to myself at this point, because I really didn't want to lose a 200 gig hard drive and everything on it, but I figured it was a bit too late to do anything about it. So I set off across the road to buy a replacement, costing a whacking £45, and then come back to install it.

But then my computer boots up fine. Completely fine, no problems with my hard drive nor my operating system. So I'm sitting there, Windows install disk in one hand and brand new £45 hard drive in the other, and my PC is working like a charm. This does not make me happy.

What makes me even less happy is that my PC keeps crashing, which I have surmised is down to it overheating. My CPU fan isn't spinning, which is probably the reason, though the heatsink is going quite nicely for hours at a time (allowing me to type this). Thing is, the fan IS working - it powers up for a good few seconds every time I start the PC, but then it just stops. I've twiddled the BIOS, I've downloaded programs to control it, but nothing works. It's all rather stupid, as I don't mind if my computer physically breaks but I get quite pissed off when it is capable of working but chooses not to.

Oh, and to make things better, Windows Update has downloaded a new patch that apparently thinks it is helpful to tell me I've been a victim of counterfeiting every 30 minutes. So that screws up whatever I'm doing every half an hour, as it alt-tabs games down, and I can't seem to dislodge that either. Even as I type this, it's done it again. Do they honestly think I don't KNOW I'm using a pirate version of Windows?

If I go quiet for a few days, either my computer has actually melted from the lack of fan action or I've thrown it out the window in a fit of rage. Either way, the computer loses. I hope it thinks about that carefully before it decides to fuck with me again.

Cross platform gaming? Xbox 360 and PC gamers set to collide over Team Fortress 2...

2007-06-23T03:00:00.000-07:00

Or at least, the option is there. Apparently the Team Fortress 2 coding allowing cross-platform play has been completed, but Valve are as yet unsure as to whether they will be implementing it.

I'm of the belief that within five years the majority of cross-platform releases will involve cross-platform play. However, I'm starting to wonder what this means for the evolution of the next-gen consoles - or even the current batch (and indirectly, for the future of the PC). MMORPGS play quite a big part in this, so if you're only interested in that aspect of the article then bear with me.

Currently, the only game out there that allows cross-platform gaming is Shadowrun - and I imagine most games will follow a similar model at first (basically, Xbox 360 players play on Xbox-Live, while PC players have to upgrade to Vista and then pay a fee for XBox-Live membership). With only Shadowrun available I don't see this as a particularly great idea, but if some flagship titles start to bridge the gap, we might see this become more popular. Team Fortress 2 is clearly going to be one of these titles, but it's going to be immensely popular anyway. When PC players are perfectly able to find a game of TF2 without upgrading to Vista or paying for it, there's no reason to pay for Xbox-Live. Thus, I think the logical progression will be to link Valve's servers (Steam) with the Xbox-Live ones, so the PC gamers don't have to jump through hoops to play against console players, while Microsoft still get their cut from the Xbox 360 players playing online. This solution isn't just applicable to Valve, of course, because the majority of gaming companies offer similar online support.

In a desperate attempt to break even, the Peruvian government finally allowed tourists to do what they had always wanted to do in the country's Inca ruins: sniper rifle duels.

The next issue, then, is balance. For FPS games, mouse and keyboard is king. Yeah, people who are really good on consoles might be able to stay in touch, but a mouse generally gives far more precision than an analogue stick. Shadowrun got around this by implementing a heavy auto-aim system for everyone, and giving PC gamers twice as much recoil on every gun. That's not an ideal solution, and don't expect to see many more like it. Instead, I expect to see a mouse and keyboard becoming increasingly common on consoles. But I don't expect to see that happen too quickly, because I think consoles are trying to resist the idea of being a computer that you can't upgrade.

Thus, I don't expect to see FPS games being the sparks that ignite the fire of cross-platform gaming. Instead, I fully expect it to be MMORPGS - specifically, Age of Conan. With an MMORPG, you don't have to worry about all the jazz with PC gamers having to pay - they have to pay a monthly fee anyway, they're used to it. Other MMORPG games also will always want more subscribers to earn more money, too, so the large markets of the Xbox 360 crowds will be tempting for them. But overall, the type of game is well suited to console gaming because the combat system is less based on instant reflexes - with the introduction of online voice chat, you probably wouldn't need a keyboard at all. Thus, I expect to see quite a lot of cross platform MMORPGs coming out after Age of Conan starts to capitalise on the market after it's Xbox 360 release. I think the Xbox will see more of them due to its close links with Microsoft, but I believe by the time the next gen of consoles comes around Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony will be bending over backwards to incorporate cross-platform play into their machines.

This leaves PCs in a slightly strange position, as the increases in chip power will obviously be utilised in servers, but with gamers possibly migrating to more inexpensive consoles instead, the desire for high-end graphics advances will fade. Perhaps they'll trudge along as media stations for a while, but I see the consoles eventually snapping up those markets too. But by that time they'll probably be very PC-like themselves, except they won't be upgradable. I must admit, I quite like the idea of just buying a new console every 4 years and knowing that the playing field is perfectly level between everyone - it's much less hassle than gearing out a new gaming PC every few years, only to realise most of your friends can't play the same games as you because they've not managed to buy a good enough machine yet.

Microsoft's ongoing problems with weight reached crisis point with the release of the Xbox 740.

Having said that, there are already two versions on the PS3 on the market. By the time of next-gen consoles, can we expect to see several different models available? I hope not, otherwise the point of the console - ease of use and less complexity when compared to a PC - will have been lost.

But we'll have to wait to see what'll happen, won't we? Keep your eyes on Age of Conan for Xbox 360, too. If it does well, expect to see others follow in its footsteps, and expect to see the MMORPG market get even bigger.

Hektor.

Blizzard's next-gen MMO?

2007-06-20T11:26:00.000-07:00

Before the announcement of Starcraft 2, there was some speculation that the title announced would be World of Starcraft. This was not entirely unsurprising, if a little hopeful - Blizzard had put up a couple of recruitment ads on their site a couple of weeks before, looking for designers to work on a 'next-gen MMORPG'. Now, we all know Starcraft 2 was the game announced, but that doesn't answer the question of what Blizzard are going to do next in the MMO market.

Let's look at the facts. World of Warcraft is hardly flagging (currently at 8.5 million subscribers and with a net taking of around $1.5 billion annually), but it is coming up three years old. It's not going to last forever, but even if 99% of the population left there would still be 85,000 subscribers left in the game - more than enough to warrant continuing to support the game. I also expect to see at least one more expansion, likely three more, the next of which will be Northrend (from the Frozen Throne), in an attempt to keep WoW going/growing for as long as possible. There's little argument that Blizzard WILL bring out another game, and I imagine we can expect it in about three years - some time in 2010, by which point WoW will be six years old and most certainly have had its day. And I imagine it'll completely dominate the market again, at least for a while, because at the end of the day Blizzard do make high-quality games. That, and their success automatically breeds a level of hype in the gaming world that is literally unparallelled by any other gaming company or franchise (maybe Halo and Half-Life come close, but not within touching distance).

WoW has a female night elf on the box cover. Half Life 2 has Gordon Freeman. I think I may just have solved this mystery.

Now, about the content. There's four options here, the first being a MMO set in an entirely new universe and the remaining three being a title set in one of Blizzard's established universes - Warcraft, Starcraft or Diablo. Diablo is a rich universe that could transfer well to a MMORPG universe, but it lacks the depth of the Warcraft universe - nevertheless, it could translate well. I can imagine the Evil side would have a lot of choice of monstrous races, while the Good side would have humans and angels (and they could probably think of some other ones too). The classes could be numerous, given that there were 7 in Diablo II alone if you include the expansion. Most people write off Diablo as being too WoW-like, but by the time the next MMO comes out I doubt that'll be an issue. Diablo is quite an adult world, but then a lot of the criticism aimed at WoW is that it's cartoony and seemingly geared towards kids. If Age of Conan's realistic style succeeds, Funcom may find Blizzard aggressively expanding into their territory.

A World of Warcraft II has a certain appeal, too. First up, it's a familiar world that might well lure old players back with a wave of nostalgia if they're thinking about giving up WoW around now. If the game is set in the future, you've got an excuse to change the world considerably, keeping the experience fresh. Having said that, my money is not on a WoW2. This is because, in order to change the world enough to create a different gaming experience, Blizzard would have to have a catastrophe strike Azeroth, or set it at least a century in the future. And remember that WoW is not the only game in the Warcraft Universe - I fully expect to see a Warcraft 4 in the future, continuing the storylines of WC3 and WoW. And revealing the future or wrecking the world would make this prohibitively difficult to achieve, so I don't expect to see a WoW2. Not until after a WC4, at least.

Starcraft. Now, this IS an interesting topic. With Starcraft being considered one of the finest games of all time and a universe that has the potential to be very cool indeed (though it's rather underdeveloped with only a single game and expansion pack to its name), it's definitely a fertile ground for MMO exploitation. What form this will take is debatable, though. Let's look at the facts. SC2 is looking to be very good indeed (see an explanation why Blizzard will make it amazing, regardless of budget), and will doubtless expand the universe of SC a great deal. I expect to see it hit the shelves in late 2008, given the state it appears to be in at the moment seems quite advanced - but given the slow speed at which Blizzard are currently releasing information. This would give between 18 months and 2 years to my supposed release date for the next-gen MMORPG. Currently, the universe isn't particularly suitable to a WoW-style MMORPG, for a series of reasons. Firstly, basically everyone except one unit per race uses ranged weapons. Secondly, there's a lot of vehicles. Thirdly, unlike Warcraft in which battle raged across Azeroth, SC takes place across a multitude of different planets and thus there's no real defined setting for it. There's a defined feel, true, but that's not quite the same thing. Now, I fully expect SC2 to flesh things out a bit, completely intentionally making the universe more easily ported in the MMO world. About what I think they'll do with it - well, I'll mention that in a moment.

The only thing likely to reunite Korea.

Firstly, I have to dismiss out of hand the idea that they'll do another MMORPG set outside their existing franchises. I don't see them doing that at this stage, because there's not really much for them to gain by doing it. WoW didn't actually bear much resemblance to the Warcraft games I've played, true, but at least it was a recognisable name that I subconsciously associate with quality even if the Blizzard label were not present. I, along with many others, would be very surprised (and disappointed) if Blizzard did not use their existing franchises for their next gen MMOs.

So, what do I see coming, Starcraft or Diablo? Well, here's the thing: I see both of them coming but, perhaps surprisingly, I see a Diablo MMORPG arriving first. Why do I think that, when most people predict a Starcraft game coming first? Well, because I can't see Blizzard releasing a SC MMORPG. Nope, I see them releasing an MMOFPS. I see an MMOFPS as a logical progression of the current trend in online shooters to have character progression and large scale battles, as demonstrated by Battlefield 2 (and no doubt soon Quake Wars and Unreal Whatever It's Called). I don't consider vehicles to be a good addition to the current system of timer-based fighting that exists in MMORPGs, but they sure as hell work in BF2 and the like. Whether or not the players would get to use vehicles/play as the heavy zerg units, I don't know, because it could work either way.

In my eyes, the game would be about 50% PvP and PvE. The PvP would take place between the different races, like a glorified game of BF2. PvE would involve levelling up and raiding, too - but how could you raid in an FPS game? Well, quite easily really. Get together the 40 people, split into groups of five, and then zone into a large instanced zone full of NPC bots. Certain parts of the map would need certain classes to get past, like getting around the perimeter walls might need snipers to take out turret gunners, while clearing a minefield might need a player with a shield generator to cover a class capable of minesweeping. If you have a series of objectives that had to be hit in a co-ordinated strike between different groups, it would be quite complex as well. One group might have to hold a computer terminal for 2 or 3 minutes against an enemy assault, while their hacker brought down the target base's shields - at which point, a group that had taken over an artillery turret would have 30 seconds to shell the defense systems to cover the advance of the rest of the units, who would then have say 5 minutes to fight their way inside and shut down the defences, so that the other two squads could join them. If it were like CS, where a dead player is out for the duration of the game, it'd be quite exciting (and there'd be a use for medics), and it were done well it'd be really good fun. You could gear up like in WoW, where you get armour that increases your survivability (or perhaps contains functionality like limited auto-aim or IR detection or something), while weapons could do more damage or have bigger clips or better scopes etc. This would be a game with far more player skill than WoW currently has, and it would actually be truly revolutionary (and people would use gear due to personal preference for its features as much as stats, which would be nice). Games have tried this kinda thing before, with limited success, but for this to work you would need tens of thousands of players, so it would seem like a proper war was raging. Blizzard's name would guarantee that, and an MMOFPS would open up a whole new market to Blizzard - FPS games. They'd make a LOT of money out of it, and it'd be another feather in their collective caps.

Huxley (named after the author of Brave New World) is probably the first real attempt at a MMOFPS, but I only heard about it today when I typed the term 'MMOFPS' into Google. If this was a Blizzard game, even my cat would be excited. Not that he'd be any good at it: lack of opposable digits, you see. That's why your pets never beat you at Halo. Unless they're monkeys. Or children.

Diablo, however, I see as the logical progression of the fantasy MMO genre. 2010 will be a decade after Diablo II came out, so it's more than possible that Blizzard will stick to what they know and will bring out Diablo III as their next MMO. I'd like to think a SC MMO would be the next one they release, but I have a sneaking suspicion it's going to be Diablo. So thats what I'm going to predict. A Diablo MMO coming out in 2010, with a SC MMOFPS following in about 2012.

Only five years to wait to see how right I've been, then. Comments enabled on this page, so you're welcome to post what YOU think too.

Hektor.

Everquest 2, suddenly a worthwhile choice again?

2007-06-19T03:10:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, I resubscribed my Everquest II account that I had played for one month upon release of Echoes of Faydwer about 4 months ago or so. I did it on a whim, I'll admit, but it has turned out to be quite interesting. Read my player diary for more information on that.

Anyway, the point of this post is not to talk about my experiences in EQ2, it is to talk about EQ2 in relation to the rest of the MMORPG market. Now, it is no secret that Everquest 2 was a bad game when it came out. Most of the players will freely acknowledge that, and in some ways the stigma of EQ2 appears not to have washed off even after nearly three years. However, the game has changed greatly since release. Some would argue it is for the worse, but the game has become much more solo friendly and casual-friendly, and the new development team have taken the game in a new direction after the relative success of Echoes of Faydwer. They are intentionally bringing back familiar EQ1 content (though usually with a fair few changes), and they've started to take longer over expansions to make them more polished. This can only be a good thing, as the new expansion recently announced brings back Kunark, probably the most distinctive and well-loved continent of the old Everquest. This isn't just good for nostalgic EQ1 players, because Kunark was well loved for a reason - it was awesome. If they can capture the forlorn grandeur of the original Kunark, this expansion will be an excellent experience for EQ2 players.

Everquest II - now officially not shit.

Now, that's slated for a November release, nearly six months away. In the meantime, however, the dev team are churning out monthly game updates. And, no, we're not talking little changes to balance and bugfixes in each update. Last Game Update saw the return of the Dark Elf city from EQ1, Neriak, and the starting zone Darklight Woods just outside it. This brings the number of starting cities up to 4, with at least another one slated for release in the expansion. And I have to say, I LOVE Neriak and the Darklight woods. They're both very characterful and well designed, with Darklight easily being my favourite starting zone in EQ2 so far. It's almost a shame when you zone out into the lvl 20+ zones around it (which have both been there since the start of EQ2), as it really shows how much the devs have improved since release. In the next Game Update, coming out four weeks later, the features include a complete revamps of AA trees (similar to talent trees in WoW), an addition of the 'dressing room' feature to allow you to preview what armour looks like when worn, as well as another entirely new zone - this one a high-level raid zone. Tradeskills are also being revamped.

Despite their hard work, the dev team have still not quite got around to implementing gravity.

Seeing this kind of workrate in the dev team is really something, and it really gives you a lot of hope for the future. If the Rise of Kunark turns out to be a really good expansion pack (and the devs keep working like this for the next 6 months), I imagine that EQ2 might honestly be a genuine challenger to WoW and AoC in terms of popularity. I'm not saying that the game is flawless, but I definitely think it is underrated. As said above, if you want a more detailed analysis of the game, read the first week of my play diary on the sidebar to the left.

Hektor.

Warhammer Online, eh?

2007-06-15T17:12:00.000-07:00

To be brutally honest, I'm not particularly excited by Warhammer Online. I used to play the miniature based game when I was about 13 (though I played the sci-fi equivalent), so I do actually know the world quite well. It's certainly quite a detailed world, and it has probably more premise than most of the MMOs today are gifted with. It's just what they're doing with it that doesn't really convince me. Mostly because I think it looks horrible. I don't want to play a game that looks crap, basically. The screenshots I've seen really don't impress me. The two below, at full screen, both have horrible texturing. If you're going to the trouble of making an MMORPG, you may as well make it look nice.

There were concerns among the beta testers that the dwarves had an unfair advantage.

I'm also not sure I want to play a game that's so heavily geared around PvP. For the uninitiated, the idea of the game is to sack your opponent's city. You choose from one of three races on each side, and one of four classes in each of them (presumably they all play differently, giving you a total of 12 classes per side). You then engage your opposing faction - Empire vs Chaos, Dwarves vs Greenskins and High Elves vs Dark Elves - though you are allowed to move fronts and fight in a different area to your starting city. It's kinda like a big campaign, and the lines off battle ebb and flow depending on how well the PvP battles go. You also have integrated PvP and PvE on the same maps (on all the maps, possibly - I'm not sure on this). The combat seems interesting enough, though, as it's quite tactical and involves a lot of blocking. You can't move through someone, friend or foe, so the big tanks literally do act as meatshields for the casters and archers behind them. It could work very well, if done well, but I'm not convinced.

Van Helsing gets ready to make another god-awful movie.

What doesn't convince me is not the combat, however. I can't predict how that'll turn out, it could go either way. What concerns me is what you'll do in Warhammer Online. I get the impression the game may be very shallow, as PvP might get old quite quickly. I'm not sure what they're doing in the way of raid content or tradeskilling, if there is any. Their site is not as comprehensive, informative or well designed as the site for Age of Conan, which annoys me too. I might revisit this game in more detail when I get some gameplay movies of it, or a more comprehensive FAQ, but right now I see it as a gigantic Alterac Valley. And while I loved the concept of Alterac Valley, I wouldn't buy it as a stand-alone game.

Let's hope I'm wrong.

Hektor.

Age of Conan? But I don't like Arnold Schwarzenegger...

2007-06-13T04:19:00.000-07:00

EDIT - As this page remains inexplicably popular on Google, I'm adding a link to my Age of Conan play diary and ongoing review here. (http://mmodusoperandi.blogspot.com/2008/05/age-of-conan-player-diary-level-1-20.html)

For those of you who aren't a fan of the Governator, his loincloth-clad form is officially not in this game. I can't speak for what he gets up to while ruling California, but one would hope that also does not involve him wearing a loincloth. I hope that gave you an unpleasant mental picture - if not, I've helpfully provided you with a physical one.

Scantily-clad Arnie NOT included in box. Probably the best advert for Age of Conan you will ever see.

But onto more pressing matters. My tip of the week is this - buy some shares in Funcom, because Age of Conan is going to be big. Why have I come to this conclusion? Well, these guys were behind Anarchy Online, which means that they're not new to this MMORPG malarkey. I'll admit, that's not a guarantee of success (just look at what EQ2 was like on release, followed by the rather abject failure of Vanguard - both made by the person who created the original EQ)They've also got some ideas that, while not revolutionary, certainly are a little different.

Realism = man in skirt shooting a bow at a bear. Apparently.

First up, it's meant to be fairly realistic. That's as in low fantasy rather than high fantasy. No elves and dwarves and stuff like that, just a lot of humans with sharp objects and anger management problems. Much like real ancient history, everyone seems to solve their problems by shooting them full of arrows or stabbing them through the face. This is a good thing, because it gives the game the grown-up feeling it is going for. There are scantily clad women in it, and lots of blood, and some quite impressive finishing moves and stuff. It's also meant to be quite morally grey, which is always slightly less patronising than:

'Help, I've lost my pet dog! Will you help me?'

A) Yes! I will risk life and limb to save your dog, for no reason other than the good of my pure pure heart!
B) No. Now I'm going to murder you and burn your village to the ground for asking. Then I'm going to eat your dog.

Probably the most unique feature of Age of Conan is the combat system, however, and it's here I'll stop mindlessly prattling away and actually voice my main concern about the game. It's going to be skill based in a big way. You actually aim your arrows, like in Oblivion. When you're fighting in melee, there's no auto-attack button, you kinda just hack around with your weapon and hopefully de-spleen some of your opponents. Or stab them through the face. I believe there is a low-end targeting system in there to make it bearable, but that unconfirmed at the moment. This might all sound hideously imprecise, but I've not seen it in action so I couldn't possibly comment. Fact is, though, for better or worse there will be a lot of player skill involved. The concept kinda reminds me of the combat in Fable, for some reason, though again I'll reiterate the fact I've never actually played it. Similarly, there's a spellweaving element for casters, which again is affected by the skill of the player involved.

I was going to say something funny, but instead I'm just going to gawk at how gorgeous Age of Conan actually looks.

Now this is either going to be awesome or completely rubbish. I don't see much in-between space with this game. If their combat system fails, it's going to be clunky and difficult to use, completely unplayable on any connection that isn't awesome, and generally a very-hit and miss affair open to a lot of exploitation. If it goes well, it'll be an exciting break from the norm that may well revolutionise how we play the genre. PvP will be nail biting and intense, and realistic to a new degree.

THIS IS SPAARTAAAAAA!

Oh, you're looking for Corinth? No problem. Three villages along, second on the right. No, don't worry about it, really. Happens all the time.

Time will tell which. Age of Conan is currently in beta testing, so hopefully it'll be a very polished game when it comes out. It has a lot of cool features I've not listed here, like player-made cities and siege PvP warfare between guilds, and PvP player levelling. If any of it catches your fancy, check out their FAQs on their website. Funcom are really aiming for the stars with this one, and if they deliver then they're going to have rewritten the genre. It's looking good so far, with impressive visuals and a lot of work going into animations, sound and armour suits too (as well as zone design), and it's definitely a game I'm going to buy on release. I'm tipping it to be the best MMORPG that will come out in the next twelve months, however, and I'm watching it very closely.

Hektor.

Age of Conan FAQ - http://community.ageofconan.com/wsp/conan/frontend.cgi?session=cwul1uhnwzgvtvfbw94v2ftd8m1gv3&func=publish.show&func_id=1029&table=PUBLISH&template=news_no_feature&selected=1029

The saga begins...

2007-06-12T15:04:00.000-07:00

$1.5 billion. Random figure, perhaps? Well, not really - in fact, it’s very relevant to MMORPGS today, because that’s how much money World of Warcraft is taking in annually (assuming a few less than 9 million players at $15 a month). Yeah, I’d always thought MMOs were nice little moneyspinners, but when I did the maths I couldn’t believe it. Blizzard are taking $1,500,000,000 - if you were earning $10 an hour and working a 40-hour week, that’d take you just shy of 80,000 years to match. Nice little moneyspinner? I’d say so.

With the current levels of WoW subscriptions, the money brought in could buy a space shuttle within 15 months. They cost $2.1 billion.

Now, I don’t play WoW any more, but I think it’s still a good game. It’s far from perfect, but I admire Blizzard for taking the bull by the horns and COMPLETELY rewriting the MMO genre. It’s quite interesting, because I was reading the book ‘No Logo’ the other day (an interesting read), which talks about companies like Nike simply selling themselves and an image, rather than actually selling clothes. Blizzard haven’t quite reached that stage yet, but I seriously doubt WoW would have got the attention it did had it not been made by Blizzard, with their outstanding pedigree. This has an upshot, if you think about it. Blizzard know their name is valuable, as they’ve canned duff games before, even when they’ve spent years making them. Warcraft Adventures, anyone? Why this is good is simple. Starcraft 2. Blizzard are going to make that game awesome even if only to protect their brand name, no matter how much money they need to spend. It’s fairly clear they’re also going to be priming the SC universe for a MMO set there, too - but that’s another story. See ‘Blizzard’s next-gen MMO’ for my thoughts on that.
So, back to more immediate concerns. What’s going on in the world of MMOs? Well, at this moment there’s a lot up in the air that, frankly, could come down anywhere. The Burning Crusade came out a while ago now and with no other expansion looming for at least six months, WoW is probably at it’s most vulnerable point yet. It’s a veritable pensioner by now, coming up three years old in November. A few weeks ago now, the lead guild downed the end boss of the most recently added expansion, Illidan. As far as I’m aware, at the time nobody else had even seen him - the nearest competitors were nine bosses behind. The 20-30th ranked guilds (in the world, we’re talking guilds that dominate their sever here) were entire instances behind them. I don’t see Blizzard adding any new high-end raid content for a while, so basically these kiddies have ‘completed’ WoW. All that’s left is farming the instances to gear up, and then butchering people with it in PvP. Woo. Whether or not this the raids being available from expansion launch is a good thing is debatable when contrasted with the previous mode of gradually releasing new content when a significant number of high-end guilds had existing content on farm (see my debate on ‘raid progression’), but it does seem like WoW might be starting to falter a little. Should Blizzard be worried? Well, possibly, if they scan the horizon.

Burning Crusade, already been completed. Is WoW starting to falter or is it only getting stronger?

Two big names are on their way in. Age of Conan should be hitting stores in late October, while Warhammer Online is also chugging steadily nearer, slated for an early 2008 release date. LOTRO seems to be doing well enough, but we’ll give it a few months to see what happens with it. Everquest II also seems to be quietly growing in popularity after the announcement of the upcoming Rise of Kunark expansion scheduled for November, which aims to bring back arguably the best loved continent of the big daddy of all MMORPGS, the original EQ. If they do that well, you do wonder if EQ2 might enjoy a mini-renaissance. Given what the devs currently seem to be churning out, it’s certainly a possibility. Next post, I’ll go into the upcoming games in more detail.

Hektor, over and out.

Everquest II Player Diary Levels 40-45

2007-06-01T20:27:00.000-07:00

In today's installment, Choraz marches past the level 40 mark and reaches the giddy heights of level 45, though the journey was not quite as rosy as it was from 30-40. To kick things off, I headed over to the Feerott to do a 'Heritage Quest' for the Stein of Moggok. A quick word of explanation here; Heritage Quests are multi-stage group/raid quests that reward you with a famous item from the original Everquest for completing them. The old Stein of Moggok was a powerful caster weapon which had the additional plus of making you look like you were an alcoholic. Sadly, the EQ2 version of the Stein (though still making you look like a drunkard) isn't a particularly good item given the level you need to be to earn it, but that didn't bother me too much - as a plate tank, I was hardly going to be using it anyway. No, I was doing the quest because you get an pretty respectable amount of valuable achievement experience for doing so.

In the end, though, I never managed to finish the quest. I'm not sure if my group had actually been formed from the ranks of the mentally disabled but, if not, they certainly fooled me. The first part of the quest involves killing 4 named ghostly ogres, who unfortunately are rare spawns. This in itself is nothing unusual, but the placeholder monsters roam as freely about the zone as do the actual quest mobs. So not only do you need to spend an eternity camping spawns, just like the old EQ1 days, you've actually got to track down the spawn every time you clear it. Now, despite knowing this, my group did not bother to recruit any scouts who could track the ogres. This meant that we were running about all over the place trying to find the placeholders (with half the group afk), and then when we did find them we had to get everyone together to actually fight the damn thing - the placeholders were triple heroic mobs, just like the actual quest mobs. Needless to say, the two hours of my life spent on that quest were wasted entirely. Thanks, SOE - I thought we were meant to have moved on from EQ1?

Despite this bad experience, however, I stayed in the Feerott until level 42 - while I do generally prefer the expansion zones over in Faydwer to the old-world zones, the level 40 Faydwer zone is still the Steamfont Mountains (and I'd spent quite a while there already). The visual style is okay, even quite good in places. Yes, it is just another forest twisted by evil forces, but I do quite like the tropical rainforest vibe. In the original EQ the zone was the starting area for the Ogres and some trolls, and it's the kind of place you could see them hailing from. Appropriately, there's quite a few troll/ogre type monsters running about alongside the infamous lizardmen and some quite cool plants. Beyond that, though, the choice of monsters is just like every other old-world EQ2 zone - bats, spiders and snakes. When compared to a game like World of Warcraft, the repetitiveness of the monsters you fight in the old-world zones is quite striking.

The quests, too, are the standard 'go kill x monsters' fare leave you feeling rather underwhelmed, seemingly no matter where you go in the zone. And there are a lot of areas to go - the Feerott another giant zone that stretches across two map pages, just like the Commonlands (and naturally you can't switch between the two halves of the map without physically walking there). The size of the zone does mean there's a lot of Achievement Experience up for grabs for exploring it, but it also leaves the place feeling a bit unfocused - it just seems like an endless series of monster-infested roads, trees and steams, all liberally dotted with ruined temples and lizardman camps. As there's no named creatures in most of the ruined temples/camps, there seems little gain to be had in bothering to clear them - it seems more sensible to have only put two or three into the zone, and actually made it worthwhile attacking them.

You also can't help but notice that the zone is PACKED with monsters, probably more densely than any other place I've seen in EQ2. Irritatingly, most of them are hostile. It's pretty much impossible to do anything in the zone without getting jumped by something, which is a real pain if you're harvesting or trying to run to one of the dungeons in the zone. What makes it worse is that many of the creatures in the zone are either linked, heroic, or both. A lot of the humanoid camps are linked heroics that would need 3-4 people to take on. Given the fact that there's little reward for clearing said camps, why would any group do it when they could just visit one of the two dungeons in the zone instead? All that the heroic content in the Feerott does is close off large areas of the map (and a lot of quest chains) to solo players, and result in incredibly annoying deaths when you're fighting/harvesting/walking and a triple heroic WHICH LOOKS EXACTLY THE SAME as all the other non-heroic monsters of that type. A lot of EQ2 veterans who played the original say the like the risk this brings, like in EQ1 where there were level 40 monsters wandering through level 20 zones, killing everyone that came near. I remember stuff like that well, like when I was crossing the Desert of Ro and I was killed by the Terrorantula. What's the difference between that and EQ2's version? The Terrorantula was FIFTY FEET TALL, that's the difference. You couldn't really miss it, and it was quite clearly something you wanted to avoid. In EQ2 triple heroics and non-heroic monsters share exactly the same name, level and model (and often spawn within a few feet of one another). By the time you realise your add was actually a triple heroic, you're dead.

Linked content, too, is badly utilised in that zone. You can quite easily accidentally aggro two mobs and suddenly find yourself fighting eight (and then die) because they were actually both parts of linked groups of four. You can't even escape from the spiders, thanks to their snare spells. But anyway, enough complaining. The zone has potential, but sadly it just demonstrates all the hallmarks of the appalling original EQ2 design philosophy that got this game lambasted on release. It needs a revamp, badly.

So, at 42, I headed to one of the two dungeons in the Feerott, the Obelisk of Lost Souls, whereupon things got even worse. You know how I said Fallen Gate was a rubbish dungeon? Well, this one is much worse. It's quite possibly the worst dungeon I've ever seen. It is HORRIBLE. Basically, when you zone in, everyone gets sent to different places in the zone. Obviously, split up, you can't do much because the monsters are Heroics. You can all end up in the same place by dying, or using an evac spell (sadly mine came at 44, not 42), because there's only one spawn point in the zone - right at the bottom. So I had to kill myself to meet up with the rest of my group, which is possibly the worst concept I've ever come across in my entire life. Believe it or not, though, things actually managed to go downhill from there.

So, from this spawn point at the base of the Obelisk, you have to do a quest to reach the dungeon proper. The quest involves killing five named monsters in the great big cavern you're in but, guess what? Yeah, they're not always up. Once again, you have to camp placeholders to get the quest target to spawn. As far as I'm aware, there is one other named monster in the cavern, but another group killed him before we could attack him ourselves. I spent the best part of an hour running around killing things, trying to make these 5 named mobs spawn, but at the end of it all I had one. Yes, that's ONE of the FIVE I needed. We saw a second one spawn, but another group got there first and killed him (naturally the dungeon isn't an instance). Thus, if you want to do the Obelisk, you have to spend two or three hours camping the cavern BEFORE YOU CAN EVEN START the dungeon. I can't even begin to imagine what the designers were thinking when they dreamed the Obelisk up, but I can't think of even one good thing to say about it. Even the visual style is awful, unless you really (and I mean REALLY) like purple. Seriously, if anybody was at all in the dark about why World of Warcraft completely destroyed EQ2 on release, all they need to do is to go and take a trip to the Obelisk.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, things picked up after I left the Feerott. I was Level 43 and I decided to go along with a Deathfist Citadel group searching for a plate tank in world chat. The Citadel is a very popular zone for the early forties, and it's easy to see why. It doesn't get to crowded, either, as it is an instance. I've been screaming out for instanced dungeons for a long time, and the Citadel simply reaffirms my opinions. Respawns are on long timers so, unless you mean to stay for hours, dead orcs will stay dead. Patrols will respawn fairly quickly, but they're only single mobs and easily dealt with. This is superb if you lose a party member and need a replacement, or if you need to go back and forth through the citadel for a quest (and you will). The amount of tedium it cuts out is unbelievable.

Secondly, the zone is a rather cool concept. When you first break in, you do a circle around the base of the keep and clear the orcs there. There's plenty of Achievement exp on grabs for exploring and killing named (expect 2-3 AA points if it's your first go), but while you do this you will find archers on the towers above shooting down at you. It's a nice touch, and leads logically to the next section where you head to the tops of the towers and clear the archers and siege operators from the catapult towers. Then once you've done that, you head into the interior of the castle proper. Overall, the design of the zone is excellent and the visual style is also good (I'm not sure if I prefer it to Crushbone, but it feels very orcy). The linear progression through the zone also helps keep it focused and exciting - there's no quibbling about where to go next, you just keep on fighting.

The third attractive feature is the challenge. Once inside the castle, the bosses are generally pretty hard. My first group wiped once on each of the first two bosses before wiping conclusively a little further in, and it's because the bosses aren't just the run-of-the-mill EQ2 bosses that act like tougher heroics. The first one were tackled was a Priest who will heal himself unless you interrupt him, and the second was an orcish Prince who had an AOE fear spell and a powerful melee attack. Both fights were far more interesting than any in the other EQ2 dungeons I'd visited, so I returned a second time with a better group later that day.

The rest of the bosses are equally cool and compelling, like the alchemist boss who mind controlled me and set me attacking the cloth-wearing caster classes in my group. There was also the Arena (the devs obviously having taken some inspiration from UBRS in WoW), where Emperor Fyst appears on a balcony to lecture you and then set his minion on you. The Arena Master was the penultimate boss and was great fun to fight, as he has an absolute ton of hitpoints and deals out a lot of damage. I'm pretty well geared for my level, but the priest was having to work overtime to keep me alive. Also, in addition to his punishing melee attacks the Arena Master has an AOE knockback attack that can knock players into the spikes mounted on the walls of the Arena and killing them instantly. That didn't come into the fight too much as we negated it by fighting him in a corner, but again it's treating the players with a bit more respect than most of the EQ2 dungeons do. The players aren't idiots, so it's just patronising to have the bosses as simple and straightforward as in most of the EQ2 dungeons I've played thus far.

The final boss in the instance was Emperor Fyst himself, back on his throne on the roof of the Citadel. He's surrounded by bodyguards, but the devs have not linked them together - thus, a skilled puller can get them one at a time. Once we'd cleared them, we took on Fyst himself. He turned out to be just as hard as the Arena Master was, with a similar knock-back attack. We had to pull him indoors, because if you fight him outside his knock-back attack will throw you off the roof of the castle, but even with his special attack negated he took an awful lot of punishment before he went down. When he did die, he dropped a frankly awesome sword that I had the good fortune to win. I left the zone extremely impressed, and not just because the previous dungeon had been the Obelisk of Lost Souls. Deathfist Citadel is a fun, well-designed zone with excellent exp, AA and drops, but best of all it's a zone that actually challenges your player skill. Well worth a visit for every EQ2 player.

Now, as DFC is in the original EQ2 zones, you're probably wondering how it can contrast so much with the Obelisk mentioned above. The answer is simple - DFC was revamped in a game update somewhere around the release of Echoes of Faydwer, turning an underused zone into an excellent and fun one. Thus, the zone is the work of the NEW dev team, rather than the old one. That's why it rocks. I only hope they continue to revamp the dungeons, starting with the Obelisk and then Fallen Gate. They also added new tradeskilling recipes using Blood Iron Ore that drops in DFC, giving crafted armour sets to all classes (and it's damn good stuff, too). So, full credit to the dev team for DFC as it's an excellent zone, and I'd particularly like to see the light respawns continued in other zones.

After I finished DFC I was about a third into level 44, so I headed to Lavastorm to hit 45. This zone is a mixed bag, to be honest. Visually, it's excellent. It's an island volcano, with fire raining from the sky and lava and heat haze everywhere. It all looks superb, and you genuinely feel that you've made progress from the newbie zone level 1 when you land there and take a look around. The zone itself, though, is much like I imagine Zek used to be. As the original level cap in EQ2 was level 50, both Lavastorm (and Everfrost) seem designed as outdoor dungeons for high end players to stomp about in. Most of the content is double or triple heroic, so you can't get far by yourself, and there's not many quests. Those that there are involve killing a LOT of goblins or whatever, with nothing interesting about them. The monsters are reasonably varied, though you'll have seen all the models before, but overall the zone does put across the feeling of raw and untamed energy brilliantly and I'm willing to forgive it a lot for that. At the very top sits a dungeon, Sol's Eye, another returning zone from EQ1, but I wasn't able to get near it (though I intend to return in five or ten levels or so). In the end, you have to conclude that Lavastorm suffers in the same way that the Feerott does - it's a product of the old-style EQ2 design school. It's intended to serve a purpose that's now defunct - nowadays level 50s just want to level on up to the new level cap, so they don't need a place to pass time and hunt level 50 heroics. EQ2 has changed with the new expansions, and Lavastorm (and the Feerott) need to be updated to reflect that.

All in all, level 40-45 was okay. It had its high points (Deathfist Citadel) and it's low points (Feerott and Obelisk of Lost Souls), but most was just average (everything else). At this point my internet connection went south as far as gaming goes, so I took a three month hiatus. In the next entry, exploring some of the content of the first expansion, Desert of Flames.

Everquest II Player Diary Level 35 - 40 (Part Two)

2007-06-01T19:15:00.000-07:00

Following on from my visit to Nektropos Castle, I headed back to Steamfont for a while. Continuing the pattern of the content from level 30-40 being excellent, Steamfont was a lot of fun. It's a zone from the original Faydwer of Everquest 1, the homeland of the gnomes and their city of Ak'Anon. Though I did quite like the old one, this version is far better. Right from the outset it hits you with bright colours and sunny landscapes, very much in the vein of the Enchanted Lands. The zone is reasonably large as well, which yields plenty of standard and Achievement exp for exploring it.

If only they'd released The Terminator in Norrath, the gnomes would have known this was going to happen.

While the quests are the standard fare, the setting really makes the zone impressive. There is a lot of green grass and impressive mountains, mixed in with geysers and enormous cogwheels and other machinery that suggest a certain untamed power to the landscape (much like the original Steamfont). The best part of all is the Gnomish outpost, though. It's called Gnomeland Security, which elicited a smile, but it's a very colourful and characteristic outpost that is far more memorable than most of the others in the game. The gnomes are also generally insane, which is both amusing and endearing. There's one particular quest where, if you make the right conversation choices, you can insist that a quest NPC squirts hot burning oil in both of your eyes - and he promptly obliges, blurring your vision for a couple of seconds and knocking a chunk of your health off. EQ2 generally isn't a particularly amusing game, but that bit nearly had me falling off my chair with laughter, simply because I couldn't believe they'd actually put it in.

Gnomeland Security headquarters, where you can insist on having flaming oil squirted into your eyes - a must for tourists or visitors alike.

The monsters in the zone are initially kobolds, minotaurs and the local wildlife, but later you get to tangle with the weaker renegade clockworks (who have taken over Ak'Anon and turned it into Klak'Anon), and finally some weird bird-man things that were quite high level and not something I wanted to tangle with pre-45. By this point you'll have seen most of the models in at least one place before, but they are still quite well animated and the rest of the zone makes up for the repetition of models. There's not really much else to say about it: it's well worth a visit.

'Your rock is leaking,' Choraz pointed out helpfully.

Anyways, I spent up until about mid-level 38 in Steamfont, only leaving because someone was recruiting a Runnyeye group. Steamfont is one of the best zones I've encountered thus far, so kudos to the dev team for making it - there's not much I'd change about it, which is rare.

Runnyeye is cool. 'Nuff said.

Runnyeye, too, was a lot of fun. Though people kept leaving and I literally spent upwards of four hours in there, I generally had a pretty good group in there and I thought the zone was reasonably well-designed too. It's located in the Enchanted Lands and is set into a mountain, and it has a good visual style right from the outset. It's nothing particularly special, but it has enough colour and consistency to make it effective. The fact the tunnels in the zone often head upwards and downwards also gives you a feel that you're actually working your way towards something, so even though the surroundings don't really change the dungeon manages to get around the problems of unclear progression that most other EQ2 dungeons seem to have. There's generally only one path to take, so it's a question of fighting through the place and that's actually quite fun.

Eyes are probably the most squishy and vulnerable part of a person, so being a giant eye must suck. Especially with a throne that spiky. If he's not careful, he'll have his eye out (ho ho ho...oh, I'll get my coat).

After you clear the main dungeon, there's two instances for you to do. There's some storyline about a rebellion in the Evil Eyes that I didn't really understand or care about, but the first instance involves killing the Runnyeye chieftain and the second one involves killing the big old Evil Eye in charge of the place. The fights were straightforward enough - the chieftain was a basic ring event with a couple of waves of monsters before he appeared, the evil eye boss was a straight fight - but the loot wasn't particularly good for us. Still, running the dungeon got me a lot of exp and AA, and I was basically level 40 when I'd finished it. And even after spending four hours in the place, I'd run it again. Much like the rest of the content from 30-40, it's very good.

This is a bridge. Sadly there's not much funny or interesting to say about it, beyond the fact you get ambushed by 5 goblins when you try and cross it (basically, this is as far as I could get into the instance solo when I went on my screenshot trip).

Naturally, it's not perfect though. Firstly, many of the quests would involve running the dungeon twice. Why do that? Because of the limited level range of each dungeon, you'd have to run the same place twice in about 48 hours, which is tedious. Secondly, there's a lot of named monsters that aren't up most of the time, instead with placeholders there. Just have them spawn every time, and turn down their loot drop frequency if you have to. I don't want to run the place twice with the same character, so I want to get the full experience on one run. And why not instance the entire thing and keep respawns to a minimum? In EQ2 it's very annoying if a groupie drops from the group, because it means you have to use an evac spell to get back to the entrance then fight right the way back to where you were. That can often take half an hour, and it's a real problem that can spoil things big time. Instancing would solve a lot of problems, and it really needs to be implemented.

Overall, though: level 35-40 was a very enjoyable experience with some excellent zones to play through. I just hope level 40+ maintains the same high standards.

Everquest 2 Player Diary Level 35-40 (Part 1)

2007-06-01T19:06:00.000-07:00

This entry is split into two sections as it includes a great deal of zones. The dungeons of Nektropos and Runnyeye are discussed in some detail, along with Zek and Steamfont, which is far too much for a single entry.

As an aside, at level 35 Choraz passed the point where his namesake in EQ1 called it a day. I decided to celebrate by giving myself a surname. You can do this from level 20+, and essentially it just adds a surname to your character name. The game also contains Prefix and Suffix titles, the former earned from Achievement Experience trees or from city status, the latter from killing a lot of one type of creature (Hunter of Undead etc). Nice to have that extra layer of customisation of your character, so I thought I'd mention it even though it doesn't directly affect the gameplay.

I popped over to Steamfont at level 35 and killed a few things, but I spent more time there around level 39 so I'll discuss it in Part 2 of this entry. I visited Zek for a level or so too, to see what it was like. Impressions were mixed, but probably on balance good. The zone is quite distinctive. You land in a little outpost that is under siege from the orcs, which gives it a very warlike feel, and the rest of the zone is all orcs (Deathfist Citadel is at the far side of the zone). There are a number of quests in the outpost, at least three of which involve killing orc grunts. This is fine if you get them all at once, downright annoying if you miss one and have to do it again. Most of the orcs were blue when I got there, so even the linked mobs were soloable in the early part of the zone. I finished a number quests, then moved on to other areas. This is when I began to experience some annoyance with the zone.

This is the 'newbie' area (the fort is the player outpost), but basically the entire zone looks like this. Except with more orcs - no idea where the blighters are hiding in this screenshot, because there's normally loads.

Firstly, there's a LOT of orcs here, often very close together and with patrols. You'll often get attacked by a second orc when you're fighting, which might spell doom. I don't mind that, personally, but often the wanderers are heroics and that is just irritating. The respawn point is also STUPID, as it's on one side of the map and you have to basically fight ALL the way around the map to get back to your original position if you die anywhere near Deathfist Citadel. That needs to be fixed, pronto. Generally, though, there's a lot of heroics about. You know my thoughts on group content - it should be in out of the way places, ideally dungeons/instances, and the outdoor zones should be 99% soloable content (if you're skilled enough to single-pull it). It's quite a frustrating zone to solo in, therefore, but there is good Achievement experience from exploring it. Visually, the zone is...well, red. Lots of reds. It doesn't look bad, though. It gets depressing after a while, but it is meant to be the Orcish Wastes. And it does look like a wasteland, and it does look unique. So while it can be a little ugly and depressing, I guess that's the point. It could just do with being made even more solo friendly (it used to be ridiculously hard before it was made easier, but they haven't gone far enough).

Deathfist Citadel. Complete with lovely pink fireworks towards the rear of the castle.

I hit level 36 in Zek, and halfway to 37 I found someone putting together a group for Nektropos Castle so jumped right in (despite hating basically everything about the zone it was situated in, Nektulos Forest). Turns it that this was a good move. Though Nek castle was also an EQ2 release zone, it's actually very good and contains most of the elements I've been moaning about when I covered Fallen Gate or Ruins of Varsoon (and Crushbone, to a lesser extent). It's frustrating to know that the team were clearly capable of making good instances, but they just didn't...well, most of the time.

Most important point first. Nektropos castle is an instance. You go up to the big, ruined castle looming up ahead and click on the door, then you're in your own private instance. Bam. It's that simple. Inside, the courtyard is full of ghostly dogs and some gargoyles, with several doors leading off it. The graphical direction is nice, as the creepy castle feel is well-done, though there's too many small and pointless rooms. A minor complaint is I think it should be more grand, but that's only a small thing.

Nektropos castle - usually dark and gloomy, but shown here with lovely ambient lighting from the fearsome spells of my companions. And who said fighting never solved anything?

However, the zone isn't perfect. One of the big problems is that you won't know where to go unless you've got someone who's been there before. We did a full run with a couple of people who had (and had EQ2 Atlas), but it still took us three hours to do. With an inexperienced group, it could literally take all day. Anyway, we went around and killed a load of ghosts and zombies, when we killed a named mob and a ghostly woman appeared in front of us. She told us the story of her father, Lord Everling, and how he had her trapped in eternal torment in the basement or something. Point is, it caught my attention and we were given some direction.

Off we went, looking for the keys to progress. It didn't take long, as we knew where they were. You have to click the head of a boar and take the eye out, then run across to the other side of the castle and put it in another boar head, which gives you a key. Then you find another eye in a box somewhere and run back to the first boar head, which lets you open secret passages in the wall. It's a lot of running about (and fighting through monsters), true, but you feel like you're solving a mystery and unlocking the secrets of the zone. It's quite rewarding, really. Having said that, a group of complete beginners would never know where to go - the directions of your ghostly guide need to be more specific to keep it enjoyable for those without the benefit of previous experience.

Even the undead need time to relax and chill out with some chess or a quick game of pool, so every good evil master villain will install games room for his faithful zombies. I mean, it's not like their medical insurance costs much, is it?

Once you get through the secret passageways you find yourself in one of five towers that lead to the ramparts and some very confusing passageways that run between them. By the point, the castle is looking far more warped than it did at the start. Everything is misshapen and there are some neat perspective tricks employed. Gives the zone lots of character and makes you feel like you're getting closer to your objective. The next part, you have to kill the five daughters of Everling and take their necklaces so you can progress onwards to the basement. I really liked this part of the zone, as there are diaries and stuff over the place that show the last few days of the sisters before they were murdered. Then you have to fight their ghosts/zombies, and it's quite effective at giving the zone an evil feel (as the bedrooms are still bedrooms and the girls were quite young). Only problem is, again, there's not much direction as you can go to any tower in any order. There should be a set order you do the towers in, with each of the sisters getting harder to beat. You can get lost rather easily here, and end up clearing a tower you've already cleared (which takes a while). Going round in circles is always frustrating and can break the interest that was building in the mystery story. A rather impressive Epic level 40 monster appears in one of the towers, too, but it's permarooted so it's not too dangerous. Dunno why it's there, but it's cool.

If you're leading a group through a dungeon, this is NOT what you want to see when you round a corner. Trust me on this.

And then down to the basement, to free the woman from Everling. There are some nice monsters in there, with some strange animated dolls and the weird manakin that controls them, then to your ghostly guide. Who promptly betrays you ('my father will reward me for bringing him fresh subjects for his experiments!'). I didn't see that coming, so I thought it was good. Anyway, you kill her and some other guy who was apparently possessing her, then go down to Everling. I was expecting something great, but Everling is just a bloke in a robe. Again, boss visual design sucks (and the fight was also quite easy), so sort it out please. Anyway, cool zone overall and well worth a visit. Gained a level and a half, lots of Achievement experience, and had a really good time. The zone just needs less freedom, as it's too easy to get lost.

Part 2, Steamfont and Runnyeye.

Everquest 2 Player Diary Level 30-35

2007-06-01T16:58:00.000-07:00

At level 30, I headed over to the Enchanted Lands. It's easy enough to get to - just like much of the EQ2 zones from release, you just run to either Nektulous or Thundering Steppes dock and click a Mariner's Bell. This is easy, but I'm really not a fan - I think there's something to be said for running your way across a zone, and having them blend together like a coherent landmass (like Faydwer is and hopefully Kunark will be). The original coders for EQ2 clearly just took the most memorable zones from EQ1 and didn't bother with the rest, having areas of water where interconnecting zones used to be. The Enchanted Lands used to be Rivervale and the surrounding area in EQ1, but they seem to have emerged from the Shattering quite well.

Enchanted Lands is a lovely, pleasant place that would be ideal for a picnic. I wouldn't leave the lid off the Coke bottle, though - the wasps here are not to be trifled with.

Overall, I have to say I liked the Enchanted Lands a lot. A lot of players I know say it's their favourite zone, and I'd rank it right up there with Darklight and Neriak. Why is it so good? Well, first up, it's a very bright and sunny zone. It's very pleasant to level there, even if it is infested with giant, hostile wildlife. It's got a very distinct visual style that's almost ripped straight out of the Lord of the Rings movies, perhaps understandably as Rivervale was the home of the halflings. So it looks nice, with some striking features like a huge wooden palisade wall and some beautiful lakes and mountains. Some of the monsters are quite cool and unique too, like weird half-raccoon half-scorpion things. The actual design of the zone is excellent, with long quest lines that are generally fun and varied, and keep you exploring the zone. Think Darklight, but twenty levels higher.

The local YMCA offered their help to the EQ2 art team, who promptly found the Enchanted Lands bathed in beautiful shades of pink that 'really brought out the feminine side of those rugged mountains'.

That's not to say it doesn't have flaws, though. While most of the monsters aren't linked, which makes it nice and solo friendly, there are some hostile triple heroics (read, 4-5 player content) wandering around in quest areas and in general travel areas. What's worse is that they look just like the normal half-raccoon half-scorpion monsters, so you can get attacked by one and not realise that it's the particularly dangerous variant. In that case, you're dead before you can get away. Similarly, the villagers and the goblins are also heroics - linked heroics at that. I never really understand the mentality behind that, because it means you need a full group to tackle them. I'm not a fan of full group quests in open-air zones, because most people tend only to group for dungeons. Content that needs to be duoed, perhaps. But not linked Heroic mobs, because it's instadeath for anyone who runs into them (and there's no skill involved in trying to single-pull individuals from the group). Also, there's a couple of quests to kill spearfish - I had to spend forty five minutes swimming up and down the coast to try and find the dozen or so I needed to kill, because they're rare spawns. Quest targets should not be rare spawns, or it just makes things frustrating. Not to mention the ocean floor has at least one named (heroic) foe who will attack you as you swim by in search of spearfish - and he isn't too far from the docks/outpost, either. Finally, a very small quibble: there's no mender in Enchanted Lands. To repair your gear you have to mariner's bell to Nektulos Docks and back again. It's not far, but it's just a bit silly to have to go through two loading screens for it.

"Don't leave your stuff around Hobbiton, friend. I once left a ring there by accident and by the time I came back for it the little bastards had thrown it in a volcano." - Sauron

I spent around three levels in the Enchanted Lands, then went to the Ruins of Varsoon. Varsoon is a dungeon in the Thundering Steppes, predictably enough the ruins of something or other ruled over by a chap called Varsoon. Level 33 was towards the upper limit of the dungeon, so it was quite an easy ride for me, though it might be a bit of a challenge to clear the entire zone and instance with a party of level 30s. Overall, I thought the zone was mediocre. It had some good points, and some bad points.

First up, visual style. The entrance is not particularly visible and I think a ruined outpost of the scale of Varsoon should have a more impressive entrance. Once inside the early parts of the zone, things don't really improve. You're in some tunnels and caves that are frankly ugly at best, fighting some bats and sludges and the like. There's also a big named spider we killed, but there's very little to comment on in the early part of the zone. It's ugly and the monsters are boring, despite a few named mobs dotted around. Having said that, if they made the place look a bit prettier I wouldn't mind it so much because it serves as a nice entrance zone that can be soloed by someone without a group, but then it should lead to an instance which would be the Ruins of Varsoon proper and the group content.

You want dull and dreary? Well, evidently SOE thought you did.

After fighting your way through the tedious entrance zone, you find yourselves in some man-made tunnels. The feel of Varsoon is very much an underground lair of an evil necromancer, which comes across quite well once you get to the middle part of the zone. Golems wander the halls, with factories for making the creatures dotted about, and there are plenty of undead and vicious books in the libraries to amuse yourselves with. I quite like the concept of Varsoon, I have to admit, but the execution is lacking. The monsters are all pretty samey. Like skeletons and featureless brown golems? Good, because you'll be seeing a lot of them, almost to the exclusion of all else. The zone looks dull too, because the walls are browny and look depressing and dreary, but not in a good way (like Nektulos castle). Instead, it seems like the textures for the zone basically couldn't be arsed. Yes, it is a dungeon from the release of EQ2, but it looks boring. You think Varsoon himself will look cool, once you get to the end of the instance? Nope, he's just a ghostly figure. In fact, he's an average sized, featureless ghostly character. It's such an anti-climax to reach him in his instance, because he looks EXACTLY like all the other ghosts you've been fighting since like level 5. Show me one WoW dungeon where the end boss is exactly the same model as common grind fodder and I'll give you a fiver.

Already smeared from head to toe, Choraz's ogre companion challenged him to a bout of mud wrestling.

Anyway, the zone is good exp and has some nice loot in it. I had a good group and I had fun there, gaining a level and a bit, but I wouldn't really want to go back. There are a lot of named mobs, but as there's no instances they aren't always up (and if they are you may have to compete for the kill with another group). This is stupid. Make it instanced, and have every named mob up in each instance. Then you don't have to mill about for ages, looking for a rare-spawn named quest mob that only one of your group needs. Reduce the frequency of their good loot drops if need be, but right now the system is infuriating. I feel Varsoon seriously needs a revamp because while it's good loot and exp (normal and Achievement), it's neither exciting nor atmospheric. And it's a shame, because it should be. If it was the first dungeon I ran in EQ2 and I had a bad group, it might put me off that game. And I say that honestly - really, the designers should pay at least as much attention to lower level instances than high-level ones.

The most colourful part of the zone. I shit you not.

And after Varsoon, I had passed level 35. Next entry, Zek and Nektropos Castle.

Everquest II Player Diary - Level 25-30

2007-06-01T14:21:00.000-07:00

After hitting level 25 with my adventures in Fallen Gate, I decided to broaden my horizons somewhat and travel to the new zones in the Echoes of Faydwer expansion. Though these zones range from levels 1-70 (you're perfectly able to hit max level without ever leaving the new continent, if you so desire), I'd already played a character to level 20 in Faydwer in the one month I played the game on release of EoF. I only decided to head back when there would be new content for me to discover, in this case, Crushbone Keep.

To get to Faydwer, you catch a boat from either the Thundering Steppes or Nektulous Forest. Unlike the zones in the original game, you can't simply click a Mariner's Bell - you actually have to catch the boat. However, the dev team have made this relatively painless and I feel it is actually a wise choice by them. The boat is on something like a five minute timer, which is enough not to inconvenience a player too much but is sufficiently long to give you a genuine sense of travel. I hope they continue the good work when Kunark is released, and bring back the enormous ships used to travel to Kunark in EQ1. At the end of the day, travel between continents should not be instantaneous (unless you have the wizard or druid teleport spells), because it takes away some of the sense of scale that a good world should enjoy.

Choraz broke out the popcorn and watched the ships playing chicken.

On arrival, you land in Butcherblock. This is a level 20-30 zone, so it's pretty dangerous to run through until you hit at least the minimum level. It's a nice introduction to Faydwer, as it is a real visual treat in some areas (the dock being one of them). I picked up level 26 by grinding blues here for half an hour after I finished Crushbone, and I'm also quite a fan of some of the monsters. The spiders here are different models to the ones in the original EQ2 zones, which is nice - especially as they look pretty damn unpleasant now. The gorillas are well detailed, with nice fighting and death animations. The rock elementals are the same models as before, but when you're fighting one that's ten feet tall you'll appreciate that they are quite impressive. There's also a lot of Kobolds, but they're generally linked groups or Heroics so I didn't attack them. The Aviaks (birdmen) were also nice to see, as they too were nicely animated. Only complaint I had about the zone as a whole were that some areas were far too grey and rocky. At least make the ground grassy, and then you have a very attractive zone indeed. Anyway, kudos to the developers for their work on Butcherblock. Nice zone.

In the grassy areas, Butcherblock is a very striking zone.

From Butcherblock I went to the Greater Faydark, a zone I'm pretty familiar with from playing my wizard there a few months ago. I'm not as big a fan of it as I was Butcherblock, because it's quite a dark zone and I'm not a fan of the design, which uses a lot of different levels. This makes the zone a nightmare to navigate, as you'll frequently run towards the place you're looking for, only to find your path blocked by a river or a cliff face. Then you'll have to follow it for two or three minutes until you find a way around it, then head back to your intended destination. It can get very frustrating indeed, which is a shame as the zone is well-designed in other aspect. The problem gets a little easier at higher levels where you can survive the damage entailed with falling off a cliff, but it's still rather irritating. Maybe the new minimap will cure some of the problems, but the current in-game maps really are totally inadequate to displaying multi-levelled terrain. Choraz also couldn't use Kelethin, as he was an evil character, but the city is okay. It's all one zone, which ranks it about Qeynos and Freeport, but it's not as well-designed as Neriak in terms of layout nor visual style. Currently still the best city for a good character to start in, though.

Clan Crushbone lies in one corner of the Greater Faydark, and contains an awful lot of orcs. The initial camps of orcs provide some decent soloing opportunities, despite being linked. Then there's some higher-level group content outside the castle, and finally the castle zone itself - Crushbone Keep, which is where I was heading. Inside the castle are three levels of orc-filled fun, the top level containing an instance for players in their late twenties. There is actually another instance for level 50+ people in the castle, but Choraz didn't fancy visiting that so I'm not going to cover it.

'That's one big tree', Choraz thought.

First thing to say about the zone is that I liked the look. It looked like it had been partially inspired by Blackrock Spire, with lots of fire dotted around, and it looks good. It's definitely darker than the original Crushbone of EQ1, but in a good way - it's grown up. However, I do have some quibbles. The orcs are too samey. Remember Blackrock Spire, with the robed caster orcs and the leather clad assassin orcs with hoods and daggers (actually dual-wielded Brutality Blades - nice!), as well as the warrior orcs? Well, there isn't that much variation here. It's a shame. Yes, not all the orcs fight in exactly the same way, but we could do with a lot more graphical differentiation between them. Secondly, I'm going to complain about the layout of the place again. Before I begin, I'd like to say that the zone is a step up from Fallen Gate and it doesn't annoy me anywhere near as much, but it could still have been done better.

Choraz started to wonder if he had taken a wrong turning on the way to the hairdressers.

First up, the zone isn't an instance. I don't see why not. There's plenty of content outside the castle for people to share, so the castle should be an instance (alternatively, make the upstairs an instance with an entrance right by the front door and keep the other two floors as is). I also think the progression isn't very logical. I'm all up for having a zone where you can choose to fight in different areas if you so desire, but it should be structured that you can choose a path from the entrance and then fight down it until it reaches its logical conclusion. The EQ2 dungeons are too open-ended, which makes them more like an outdoor zone except with a group - instances should be a different type of play to that.

Once you actually reach the instance (the D'Vinnian Throne), things get rather confusing. You've got to run all over and kill various Orcs to get keys to open various doors so you can challenge D'vinn at the end of it. This is a silly idea. Obviously, this means that there IS a logical progression in the way you do the zone, because you have to kill the orcs in a certain order. Thus, get rid of the puzzle element and make the zone a single straight line with a series of boss fights to unlock the doors the D'vinn. The visual style of the zone is, again, okay - but it doesn't get steadily more impressive as you approach D'vinn. You should be able to tell how far you are from the end by looking at the decoration of the room you're in. There's also no set-piece battles. Think of Blackrock Spire, with the little arena you have to endure before you fight the orc leader Blackhand. Given the way the zone ends, this would have been an ideal thing to implement.

Anyway, after all the messing around we finally reached D'vinn, who promptly buggered off after he called in Vindicator Crush, the final boss. Crush's pretty easy, really, but he does look pretty damn badass and he dropped some nice loot. I think it's a shame that the encounter wasn't done more to the tune of the UBRS encounter with Blackhand mentioned above, where Victor Nefarius looks on in a similar way to how D'vinn does. Only thing was that the room design was much more appropriate in World of Warcraft, whereas in EQ2 the final room is basically like all of the rest of the previous rooms. It makes the whole thing feel less cinematic and that much less of an achievement to do.

At the end of the day, I finished the Crushbone instance at level 30 after having spent about 5 hours in the zone - mostly because every time I managed to assemble a full group, someone dropped out and we had to replace them. I enjoyed it, but I do think that there is wasted potential there. I found the World of Warcraft dungeons far more fun to play, and while Crushbone was not unenjoyable I think it could have been excellent. I'd love to see Everquest 2 become the best MMORPG on the market in every way, so I really hope some of the designers upgrade it a bit.

I will say that Crushbone did not really feel like grinding, as I gained the levels without really thinking about it, and I enjoyed the grouping. I learned how to tank properly in the zone, and a couple of times I looked at my experience bar and realised I'd gained half a level without realising it. I'm also a fan of the new expansion zones, as they are much better designed than those from the original EQ2 lands. Playing the game on Extreme graphical settings (which I can do when I'm soloing), the game looks beautiful. It's just a shame there's still a few issues with the zones that stop EQ2 from being completely brilliant. Next entry, up to level 35 - Enchanted Lands and maybe Ruins of Varsoon. We'll see.

Everquest II Player Diary - Level 20-25

2007-06-01T12:38:00.000-07:00

At level 20, a character can start their armour quests (AQs). These involve a series of six quests, each giving you a single piece of class-specific armour. I had mine finished by level 25 - the first three quests were soloed, then I duoed with an assassin to do the remaining three (calling in a healer for the final one). My main complaint is that I really resent having to look up quests on sites like Allakhazam to know what I'm doing or where the monsters I'm meant to kill are, so I was disappointed that the quest descriptions just told me which zone to go to and the names of the monsters I had to slay. Some of the zones are pretty big and so you're unlikely to find your targets by blundering into them, so some directions would have been nice - I always feel like I'm cheating when I look something up online, and I feel it doesn't add to the immersion of the game. Frankly, I shouldn't have to do it. I don't mind spending 5 minutes finding a location 'in the East of Nektulos Forest', but these quests expect you to know where a small group of monsters spawn in a very large zone, without any directions whatsoever.

Choraz paused to wonder how exactly a wolf managed to get to level 23. Then he stabbed it to death, allowing him to pass an arbitrary experience value and somehow increase in power. Ah, the glamourous life of an adventurer.

The armour you receive is pretty good, particularly if you've got a horrible patchwork of armour on, but I found myself replacing it only five levels later. You see, even the basic player-made armour at 30 is better, and the mastercrafted player-made armour you get at level 22 is far superior to it. However, you're talking around 10pp for a set of mastercrafted gear, and I've only got about 5pp in the bank even at 35, so mastercrafted gear is more for rich players with a level 70 as their main character.

If I were a level 70 creating an alt, I'd not bother going through the hassle of doing it - but for a first-time player, they're pretty good. Having said that, if I was the EQ2 dev team I'd make the entire quest line soloable at level 22 or so. It's pretty gut-wrenching to throw away gear you spent a day questing for only 24 hours later. I also find it disappointing there's no more armour quests after the ones at 20 - I'd like to see a new set every ten levels to upgrade the old set, each time giving a reward better than normal tradeskilled armour but not as good as the mastercrafted stuff. And I'd make it look different, depending on what city I got the quests from (though with the same stats). I think it'd give the different cities some real character and give the game a real sense of advancement when compared to just going to the broker and buying the new set of player-made gear every ten levels.

Anyway, these quests took me all over. Firstly over to the commonlands, then down into the sewers below Freeport (I pity the man who tries that quest without a map), then a lot of killing stuff in Nektulos Forest. Nektulous is, again, not one of my favourite zones, though I do like the visual style of the zone (though I think I might get prtty sick of dark forests at this rate) - this time because you can't run across the zone in a straight line, as they've put a lot of pointless (and unclimbable) geography in to block your path. You can travel from one part of the zone to another from the griffon stations, but the griffon models are atrocious and the griffons stations aren't put by the zone entrances either, so you have to wade through the forest to get to them. The zone does a good job of making you feel like you're in a dangerous forest, but it almost feels too big and too crowded. There are monsters literally everywhere and the zone is massive, so I think it could take a leaf out of the book of WoW's design team and be built more along the lines of Darkshire. I'd have the zone a bit smaller, with two friendly outposts - one reachable by running for a couple of minutes through fairly non-dangerous parts of the zone from the Darklight and Commonlands zone lines, and the other at the docks. I'd make the first outpost a small town under siege by the nasties in the forest, then have Nektropos Castle at the far end of the zone(maybe on a high hill visible from the outpost), with the critters getting harder as you get nearer to it. Like a proper movie where you travel a dangerous, winding path to travel to the dark castle dominating the landscape.

Choraz began to regret accepting the 'Renovate my House' questline from the master of Nektropos Castle.

Aside from armour quests, the other notable thing I did between levels 20 - 25 is to run my first dungeon, the Fallen Gate. It was originally the outlying parts of a certain city called Neriak that has recently reappeared in the game, and it's packed with undead. Running it with a good group was fun, but I feel the place does suffer as it's not an instance. On several occasions we found bosses we wanted to kill had already been killed by someone else, so when we found bosses that were up we had to hurry in case someone else came up and stole them from us. Isn't too conducive to completing the zone at your own pace. In terms of overall character, the zone is a cool concept. It's full of rebel Dark Elves, with one quest line (given by a ghostly halfling) reliving the events five hundred years ago that caused the tunnel to collapse. It has quite a dark and unpleasant feel, with one quest being to find a missing halfling that ends when you find the unfortunate victim as a skeleton sitting in a pot after having fought through a legion of gruesome zombie feasters. The loot can be good too, which is always a nice bonus.

As always, though, that's not the full story. Guess what I'm going to complain about? Yeah, you got it first time, it's the zone design. Even the zone-in starts badly - it's just a gate, set into the the end of a sandy canyon in the Commonlands. Not much indication a major dungeon lies behind it. Come on - this was once the entrance to Neriak! You can see what the current entrance looks like in the diary entry on levels 1-10, so why is this one so crap? And why does it look so pristine after 500 years of wear and tear (and why does it look so ridiculously out of place)? I want to see something massive and imposing and dark and grim and ruined, surrounded by broken statues that showed signs of fighting five centuries ago. I want to see some low-level undead around the entrance, warning you of what you're going to be facing. Right now, the entrance looks like it was cobbled together by one graphic artist in his lunchbreak (just like the rest of the Commonlands).

In an interesting twist on traditional fantasy lore, the original EQ2 team set the Dark Elf city in the middle of a bright sunny zone, full of sand and savannah. Recently uncovered plans show they intended to continue this 'outside the box thinking' by setting the Wood Elf city underwater and moving the Coldain dwarves from frozen Velious to their new home in the middle of a volcano.

Inside, the zone is not at all intuitive. Once you've run it once or twice, you get a feel for it, which is okay - but the first time you run it, you're too busy trying to work out where you're going to have much fun. It's also not very linear (in a bad way), because the path through the zone that involves killing all of the bosses and getting all the quests sees you doubling back on yourself several times (additionally, there's not quite enough monsters to finish your Far Seas Requisition quests in one go, so you'd have to do it twice if you wanted them). The entire zone is quite long, then it is followed by a short instance where you kill a big demony thing. If you want to do all the quests and finish the instance, expect to spend at least four hours in there with a pick-up group. The visual style stays pretty much the same the entire way through (and there's not much grandeur, given that it's meant to be Neriak), too, which doesn't lead to much sense of progression - and I'd later have the same complaint with Crushbone.

A couple of bosses into Fallen Gate.

To contrast this with the Deadmines (I played Alliance in WoW), Fallen Gate comes off badly. Deadmines has a very logical progression, because there's nothing left behind you as you clear the zone. It has a very visual and obvious progression, too. You start off in some mines, then fight your way into a workshop, then you head into wood-processing plant, then you find yourself in a huge underground cavern with a hulking ship in the middle of it, which you fight your way to the top of and kill the end boss. You feel like you're unravelling the workings of the Defias as you go, whereas in Fallen Gate you kinda just know you're going forwards and you can't tell from looking around you how far you're in, or how far you've got left to go. As soon as you see the ship in Deadmines, you know what you have to do, and the final fight is cinematic and as much of a blast as the rest of the zone. You have to kill a fair few normal monsters between the bosses, but not too many. In Fallen Gate, the whole place is PACKED with monsters, and the bosses generally don't look very distinctive. If it wasn't for their names, you probably wouldn't realise they were bosses. They need to have noticeably more impressive armour, or if they're a type of monster they should look bigger and stronger than those around them. Again, I think the zone needs a graphical restyle to add some progression, then a bit of a trim - more isn't always better, particularly in low end dungeons. They should be short-ish and sweet, in my eyes.

A couple more bosses in. Note the frankly ridiculous number of monsters in the room (you kill them one at a time).

The last thing I want to mention is the mentoring system. After all of the above, slagging off EQ2 in comparison to WoW, the game does have one huge factor that I can't recommend enough - the mentoring system. If you need to find a group but all your friends/guildies are too high for the dungeon, you're not out of luck. They can mentor down to your level with a few clicks of the mouse (allowing them to gain Achievement exp, though they only earn 50% normal exp), which is a brilliant idea. I do feel that a level-70 player mentored down is still FAR too powerful - ideally, they should be LESS powerful than a player of the level they are mentoring, to make a genuine lower-levelled player more worthwhile to group with than one mentoring down, however that should not detract from the fact that the mentoring system is a brilliant concept, particularly when you're in a guild or just wanna see a zone you've outlevelled but never properly played.

A little further in - this room actually contains a boss, though he's been killed by a high level player farming the zone. When full this room contains twice as many monsters as you see here - and it still looks basically the same as the first screenshot. And it will stay like that all the way to the end.

It does make you wonder, though, why a team that can come up with that system is so poor at designing dungeons. It's not rocket science, people. Don't make a player's first dungeon an overly long and dull experience. I enjoyed mine, but it was only because I liked the company I was with when I did it - overall, the dungeon itself was average at best.

Hektor.