May 25th, 2009
The most frustrating thing about the average MMORPG is that almost nothing you do will make a difference to the game in the long-run. There are notable exceptions, the Sleeper in Everquest for instance, but there is generally no permanent change in the world.
The reason for this is no great secret; everybody wants to be the hero, so you cannot have one person out of the thousands who are playing kill the big bad-guy and rob everyone else of the chance. And thus we gained respawns; the player cannot permanently die (though that is a whole other conversation), so what makes you think that the Dark Lord Himself would stay dead?
We accept it. We have to really, since the alternative is arriving at numerous battlefields only to learn that the person you came to kill is already dead. It is bad enough when you have a six-hour respawn timer, imagine the chaos if the boss never came back! And yet…
World of Warcraft has phasing, where completing certain quests will change the way you see the world to make it look like you made a difference. Guild Wars makes your whole world change once you complete certain quests. EVE lets you battle great fleets and take control of star systems, but it is something of a niche game.
The best example, however, was a game called Shadowbane. Cities could be destroyed, legends could be made and crushed, but this was all PVP in the end and PVP without permadeath is a little hollow. In the end, what became of Shadowbane?
Maybe the truth is that players want to be able to do the things they have heard others talk about. While there will be a few Bartle-certified explorers, most players are happiest checking out Thottbot and Allakhazam, learning every step of the quest and avoiding any unpleasant surprises. I suppose I just wish that I could look back at some great battle in an MMO, tell people ‘I was there when the walls fell, I was the one who slew the Daemon Lord’ without a hundred people saying ‘me too’…
Tags: EVE, EVE Online, Guild Wars, GW, Lord of the Rings Online, LotRO, Permadeath, Shadowbane, World of Warcraft, WoW
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May 11th, 2009
Now here is a game that got me excited. It is not because it was D&D 3.5, because I think that there are better systems out there, nor even because I am a fan of Ebberron, even if I am one of the few people to remember Keith Baker’s hushed-up forays into PC gaming.
No, what got me was the feeling that everyone served a purpose and every class was true to its roots. You don’t get much more true to D&D than using the system. I played a rogue and I was suddenly not just a DPS-machine. I would see the odd idiot (Barbarian 9 times out of ten) who would declare that they had enough hit-points to ignore the traps instead of waiting the three or four seconds it took for me to disarm them, but then things like opening a door that nobody had ever seen a rogue manage before made up for it.
What killed it for me, of course, was the same thing that had made it so great; the game was balanced for groups. The same mechanic that made me useful also meant that I was nothing without at least a tank and a healer. I started out, back in beta, playing with my wife. After release, I quickly found a guild and specialised as just about the best trap-springer door-opener I could be. Life was great, but that post-beta honeymoon will always end. The guild started to fragment as people’s enthusiasm waned. I would log in some days and see no guild-mates on. One day, the guild was gone.
For a while, there were pick-up groups. I would get the odd ‘rouges suk! lol’ from people who thought that another barbarian was better than inviting a rogue, but there was enough call for me. I died a little more than average, since I was specced for rogue skills more than combat and PUG clerics don’t tend to think of healing the rogue while there is a tank to dump spells into.
I was spoilt as a D&D player, I suppose, by people who could spell ‘rogue’ and understood waiting for them to disarm traps rather than setting them off and killing everyone. The frustration became too much to bear and I left.
One day, I might go back. I think I would have to take a group with me rather than relying on strangers, but I want so badly to go back. It was everything I wanted from an MMO, D&D for the internet. I suppose I have Neverwinter Nights for that…
Tags: D&D, D&D Online, DDO, Dungeons and Dragons
Posted in Computer RPGs, MMORPGs | 1 Comment »
May 6th, 2009
My name is Anthony and I play D&D. I am not a geek, not according to the geeks I know. I tried calling myself a geek, but the real geeks disowned me. I was too cool to hang out in their world. I am not alone in this. Vin Diesel plays (or played) D&D and nobody would call him a geek. Not to his face, at any rate.
So why are people so scared to just admit it? I worked with a man who made Dwayne Dibley look cool and even he looked aghast at the implication that maybe playing Neverwinter Nights meant he might like to try D&D.
The game itself has a bad press, I think. Endless generations of grognards and assorted beardies have scared away normal players until the first thing that springs to my generation’s mind is the cartoon from the ’80s. Even the other designers I work with seem never to have played D&D or seen it played. I am half-tempted to suggest it, as the management have been saying that we should host some social activities at work… Of course, I would rather play paintball or go on a Grand Union Canal pub-crawl. (apparently, the trick is to have a well-stocked bar on the barge…)
Tags: D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, P&P RPG, RPGs
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May 4th, 2009
Recently, through sheer dumb luck and a POETS day, my wife and I acquired a pair of keys for Lord of the Rings Online. I had played its 14-day trial before and had fond memories of it, but I had never got around to upgrading my account to the full version.
I started downloading on Friday, I finished some time on Sunday. This is normal for us, we are lucky to get 60kB/s on our 8-Mb connection, so we just live with it. I think we might have been slightly negative-disposed toward it for this reason. I was happy to wait, because those good memories kept me going.
I finally got to play it and I started getting bored. Something just didn’t work for me. It was sort of fun, but not the exciting adventure that I remembered. I persisted, but it still wasn’t grabbing me. The abilities I had were not very intuitive, I hit them out of habit more than intent. The world was washed out and uninspiring, it lacked the immediacy and vibrancy that I had got used to.
I did it, I committed the cardinal sin; I started to compare it to World of Warcraft…
Every time I go back to an MMO, I play for a little while and then get bored or frustrated and start to crave World of Wacraft. I want to blame it on rose-tinted spectacles, but that is not it. I have left and then gone back to Everquest (one and two), Rappelz, Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies (pre and post ‘upgrade’), D&D Online and now Lord of the Rings Online. Some of them have big flaws, some have small ones, but I can come back to that later.
I keep going back to WoW and I love it every time. It is dumbed-down, it is mass market and it is cartoony. It has been enjoyed by more people than all the girls of the Moulin Rouge through history.
World of Warcraft is just not art, but I find that I still love it every time I come back. I surrender; take me back to Azeroth…
Tags: EQ, Everquest, Lord of the Rings Online, LotRO, Ultima Online, UO, World of Warcraft, WoW
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May 1st, 2009
Few people will have avoided the dreaded spectre of the Credit Crunch. It is one of those things that is damaging business all over the world and threatening the very livelihoods of some people.
Out of this pain, some sectors are gaining a certain foothold. Kentucky Fried Chicken reported great profits, as have some parts of the games industry. The trouble is, not all of the industry are winning. We have seen the fall of Eidos and of Empire, we have even seen Microsoft kill off studios.
This is the time when risk is bad. Publishers are desperate to play it safe, to push sequels and franchises before promoting fresh ideas and new thinking. Players are crying out for new ideas and nobody can give it to them. Even when innovation rears its head, there will be someone to push it back down. Spore was destroyed by EA’s choice of DRM, Braid and World of Goo did their best to bankrupt their developers.
And then there is me. I have big ideas, but I won’t pretend that they are Earth-shattering. The trouble is, even the least risky of them will likely never see the light of day for no better reason than the fact that they are not sequels or remakes or rip-offs of successful games. Worse than that in some ways, I am specifically and contractually banned from making commercial games in my spare time. Not that I have spare time, what with deadlines and kids, but you know what I mean.
Where are this generation’s Molyneux-types and Will Wright clones? Where are the spiritual successors to Cliffy B and American McGee? I think they are sitting in an office that has never seen sunlight, lying in that figurative gutter and dreaming of the stars…
Tags: Braid, Credit Crunch, DRM, EA, Eidos, Empire, Microsoft, sequel, World of Goo
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March 2nd, 2009
Barring the free month I received with a copy of Ultima Online, my first real experience of a modern MMO was Everquest, about a week prior to the release of the ‘Shadows of Luclin’ expansion.
The game had me enthralled; no wonder it was known to some as ‘Ever-crack’ for its ‘addictive’ nature. It was the immersion that got me, a well-defended immersion that was enforced by strict naming policies and strong encouragements. I spent much of my time with my RP tag turned on, being a Wood-Elf Ranger out in the wilderness. Later, I created a character on a roleplaying server to go that one step further.
Years passed, I moved on from Everquest to other games. I tried my best, by they didn’t grab me as Everquest once had. Cruelly though, something about these other games had ruined Everquest for me. Where once I saw miles of expansive plains and a huge game-world, now I simply saw a boring hour-long run to get from Freeport to Qeynos, or an expensive portal from the druids. I refused to use the Knowledge Portals or the Spires, perhaps out of some irrationally masochistic loyalty to the past. I only felt that sense of wonder once more; my Tier’Dal rogue betrayed Freeport and I remember the sense of wonder as I fled the city for the home of my one-time enemies.
Thought I had tried to put it off, I found myself trying World of Warcraft. I felt shamed, like a child who has learned to tie his own shoelaces, but chooses to wear shoes with velcro. No matter what I tried, I felt like a reader of the Sun newspaper; I felt soiled, but strangely comforted by the lack of effort it required.
To my shame, I was hooked. In time, I learned to find the nuances and discovered that World of Warcraft was not vacuous or low-brow unless I chose to play it that way. I learned to love the mass-market success. (I also learned to envy it, but that is another story)
I took the plunge and created a roleplaying character. I prepared for the immersive in-character experience and then saw that the world was still largely populated with ‘DaKilla’ and ‘HealU’ wherever I looked. I knew that it would not be Everquest’s approach to roleplaying, I knew it was roleplay-preferred rather than enforced, but…
I miss Everquest at times like this. I am an elistic snob, but it pains me to see names on a Roleplay server that would have been naming violations even on a non-RP Everquest server.
Tags: EQ, Everquest, Ultima Online, UO, World of Warcraft, WoW
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February 27th, 2009
It is an unpopular idea in most RPGs to let a character die in any permanent sense. Many CRPGs, even ones with a save functionality, include either a resurrection spell or even an ‘unconscious’ status that the character will recover from, meaning that the party dies as one or not at all.
Tabletop RPGs even tend toward this,giving the player spells to resurrect or some special status effects that remove them from the fight and then they can heal up again afterwards.
With this in mind, the average MMO has death without any real consequence. Everquest had an experience penalty and then the infamous corpse-run, which was later downgraded to only levels 10 and above. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, mildly dents your armour and charges you a few copper pieces to get the dings hammered out.
This is with good reason; the average newbie dies a few times before they finish the starting area’s quests. Back in my EQ days, I learnt the wonders of the corpse-run before I even found out what second level felt like. (Kelethin was no kind to newbies, nor were higher-level player handing out free beer in the aforementioned tree-top city)
And yet… this attitude is not universal… Shaiya (a free MMORPG) has Ultimate mode, where your character is deleted after three minutes if a cleric does not revive you. Blizzard themselves included Iron Man Mode for online Diablo.
For most players, dying is an inconvenience; you rez’, you repair, you return to battle. Some consider even this too harsh. So why add permadeath? The answer is that death means nothing to modern players. We fight mobs beyond out level just to see if it can be done, so we lose our sense of danger, of excitement. A permadeath game keeps you cautious and makes the healer even more valuable. Permadeath makes those big kills more special. Permadeath makes you fear for your character, it makes you care if your character survives each fight…
And in my opinion, it is no bad thing to care if your character will live or die…
Tags: D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, EQ, Everquest, Permadeath, Shaiya, World of Warcraft, WoW
Posted in Computer RPGs, MMORPGs | 1 Comment »
February 23rd, 2009
There is an E-Zine called Roleplaying Tips Weekly that I read, which I recommend to anyone who runs a tabletop game, and the latest edition has a great article on treasure siphons.
The idea is one that I am quite fond of;it gives the players a reason to care about the world and detracts very little. I will not go too far into it, as I recommend reading it, but the idea can boil down to ‘here is the chance to get 10% extra treasure that you much give away’ – rebuilding orphanages, paying off the rogue’s gambling debts, raising the dowry to offload your ditzy cleric to a nobleman…
You can find the E-Zine at http://www.roleplayingtips.com (link opens in a new window), but the E-mail version tends to be about a week ahead of the website, so try http://www.roleplayingtips.com/readissue.php?number=434 on Friday or so.
Tags: P&P RPG, RPGs
Posted in Tabletop RPGs | No Comments »
February 22nd, 2009
It is something of a ‘girly’ thing to many players, but I have grown to like romantic sub-plots in my RPGs. It is not so much the romance that I get into (though I do love films like The Princess Bride and I did like the Leia / Han Solo relationship in Star Wars) so much as the emotional connection it inspires.
The ones that stand out for me (playing as a man) have to be Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Knights – both by Bioware – because they forced me to care about someone. There are other tricks to make you care about a character – Minsc in Baldur’s gate was funny and endearing, which made me want to keep him alive – but romance is the most sure-fire way to make a player want to make a difference.
It is curious that I don’t really feel the same way about romance in tabletop RPGs, but that could just be the party I was in; at one point, the only women in the party were my girlfriend (now wife), my sister and a pregnant friend. Any romantic sub-plot I could have witnessed would have been a little strange. (none of the men were the kind to have romantic interests in characters of other men)
Tags: Baldur's Gate, CRPG, Knights of the Old Republic, KotOR, Neverwinter Nights, NWN, Romance
Posted in Computer RPGs | No Comments »
September 13th, 2007
Two impending events have made me stop and consider what it is to be a ‘grown up’ – impending fatherhood and Talk Like a Pirate Day. I mean, it is no longer ‘okay’ to sit in the living room with a toy castle and re-enact the capture of Rochester Castle or to make a fortress out of the cushions from the sofa and throw balled up socks or shoot Nerf darts at passing victims.
Why? How long has that been ‘wrong’ then?
I mean, one day we are riding our bikes with our coats done up by only the top button playing Batman and then, the next, we are dressed in a suit and tie de-bugging software. Where did the fun go?
Some people LARP. That is a good start. When I used to play Everquest, it was something akin to saying you read porn. These days, people admit to playing World of Warcraft and will happily discuss their level 56 Warlock over the water-cooler. This is not bad, but it is not enough.
We are adults now, not necessarily grown-ups. We can afford the stuff we always wished we could, but we no longer want it. So… why not? In all honesty, we need to remember how to have fun or we will go mad.
I propose that we celebrate Talk Like A Pirate Day properly. A 50p eye-patch and a plastic sword is all you need to get you going. Bring on the wenches and grog, hoist the Jolly Roger on your car-aerial and forget that you are a grown-up. Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning!
Anthony is a 27 year-old computer-games designer who still owns two pirate ships, a re-issue G1 Starscream, Force FX lightsabers and an army of Lego knights all called Norman. Growing up is obviously something that happens to other people.
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