APB et al.

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

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...

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

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

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

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 Lightsabers, stormtroopers and X-Wings will never go out of date.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Games You Should Have Played Already

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

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

So, in no particular order I give you:

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

Just savin' the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The MMO difficulty curve...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Computer now upgraded...

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

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

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

How Guildhalls SHOULD have been done

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?

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)

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?

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.