Last night, I had the privilege of playing Guild Wars with the group put together by the Massively folks.  This was our third outing, and we had an absolute blast.  We began by forming into little two man groups and setting out to hunt Charr.  I have created a Mesmer for our get-togethers, thinking that Mesmer’s are not a popular choice, and perhaps might be filling a needed role.  Of course, apparently half the group thought similarly, and everywhere I looked I saw Mesmer’s.  Our group was in fact, two mesmers, and well, two mesmers fighting against Charr two levels above us – a lot of death was involved, and only a little of it was on behalf of the monsters. 

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Social Media games have introduced an entirely new solution to an age-old social gaming problem, and it’s as insidious as it is genius.  It’s also only a matter of time before you see it in your favorite MMO.  Read on after the break to hear what I’m talking about.

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I started this post off, thinking I would write a (typically) long winded diatribe on the recent blog fury that I’ve been reading in the wake of this year’s GDC.  So I started going over the different articles (yes I’m so old fashioned I still refer to blogs & news posts as “articles”) in this post, and I spent a much longer time re-reading over all of them than I certainly should have, by any right. 

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So this weekend I succumbed to the urge that had been growing over the last few weeks to give Champion’s Online another try.  And while most of the things that caused me to go “meh” the first time I played it are still there, this time around I’m actually having quite a bit of fun.  Read on after the break if you’re interested in my reasoning as to why I think this is, and why I think it’s a good idea in general to give just about every MMO two shots.

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I’ve been playing quite a bit Star Trek Online lately.  Well, I say quite a bit – I think I’ve logged maybe 10 to 12 total hours in the game of actual playtime, so I guess it’s not all that much.  But this post isn’t so much about Star Trek Online the game, which might be fun, as it is about what the game serves as only the latest example of – and that is Cryptic’s absolutely terrible new player experience.  Now when you use words like “absolutely terrible”, obviously you’re going a long ways down subjective road, and everyone has their own chocolate and vanilla.  But for me (and it’s my blog), each game Cryptic makes seems to only make the starting experience worse, until the point has come when I’ve got to say my piece.  Read on if you’d like to hear it..

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I never can tell about these things – whether it’s just that because I’m playing it, I have an increased awareness of news about the game, or whether I just happen to jump in at about the same time as the rest of the world seems to take notice, but it seems there’s been an awful lot of buzz lately about Dungeons & Dragons Online, and their “giving the game away” model.  The air quotes are there because that’s just exactly not what Turbine is doing, even though the press sure likes to talk about it that way.  But the business model they are employing is, I firmly believe, the future of MMO’s.

 
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So this post really fall alongs the lines of stream of consciousness thinking.  Which means that in as little as a few months from now I’m likely to look back at this and say “um WHAT were you thinking..”  But be that as it may, I spend a lot of time playing and thinking about MMO’s, and I’ve noticed a bit of a trend lately, and I thought it worth talking about.

 
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I still have, on my hard drive somewhere, my initial impressions of Guild Wars, which I wrote in 2005.  It is, in a word, scathing.  There was a lot I didn’t like about Guild Wars in the first fifteen minutes of playing it.  Guild Wars, eventually became one of my absolute favorite MMO’s, and is one that has earned a permanent place on my harddrive.  I still log in from time to time, and go through bouts of extreme activity around the holidays, or just when I get a hankering to travel with Koss, Mhenlo, and Cynn.  I keep my scathing first 15 minute review around to remind me that, quite often, especially where MMO’s are concerned, my initial impression does not end up being my lasting impression.  That often things drive me crazy in the first fifteen minutes I eventually overcome, get used to, and learn to look past, to enjoy the broader, much bigger picture.

And this is why I haven’t put up my overall impressions of Champions Online until now — nearly 3 weeks after launch  (Well this and the fact that I’ve been insanely busy, but lets pretend this is all carefully planned — indulge me).  But the closed beta has come and gone, which I participated in to some extent.  The open beta and head start have come and gone, and now, the game has launched for real.  So it’s time to talk about it for a bit.  Read on:

 
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Diamonds in the Rough

The mmo design landscape is littered with mechanics that I like to think of as uncut gems.  These are mechanics that, at first glance, appear to be plain ‘ol rocks – unwanted, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and for all intents and purposes best discarded without looking back.  But the thing about uncut gems, is that once you look closer, and you try out some games without them, you come to realize these mechanics are actually very valuable.  And that while a shorthand gain might be achieved by discarding them, over the long stretch you realize that the game is actually much better served, and players have more fun, by keeping them.   Recognizing an uncut gem over a plain ‘ol stone is, of course, an inexact science.  And there is much truth to the adage that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.  And to make things even more complex, players attitudes and perceptions change over time, so today’s uncut gem might end up being tomorrow’s worthless rock.  Enough analogies, let’s talk examples.

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By far and large, the design ideas I throw out over here at Of Course Ill Play It are iterations of existing concepts and notions within the classic MMO.  There is a reason for this.  I am a huge fan of give the players a lot of something they know, and a little of something new.  While I like as much as anyone the idea of revolution and innovation, the truth of the matter is if you throw something completely foreign and new to a playerbase that has preset expections, you are setting up a recipe for fail on an epic scale.  And the MMO landscape is littered with the corpses of those that have gone that path.  So much of my ramblings are about ways we can take things we know, and make them better.   This however, is not such a post.  This idea is so radical *I’m* not even sure it’s a good idea.  But it’s a notion that’s been kicking around in my head for some now, and hell they don’t pay us the big bucks to always sit around and play it safe (okay truthfully no one pays me at all), so let’s throw this out and think about it.

 
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