I’ve spent most of my winter holiday in Paragon City.  Pretty much every MMO drags out special content for the holidays, and City of Heroes/Villains is no exception.  And it’s actually that fresh content, those seasonal changes, that are one of the many things that keep me hooked to MMO’s as a genre.  Even if you play MMO’s largely as you would a single player game, the fact that it changes.. that it feels alive through the modifications that occur on regular intervals, makes it better than just another round of Oblivion.

City of Heroes has gone quite a bit for their winter holiday this year.  Just by loggin on, you got a new costume piece (a snazzy set of earmuffs), and a badge.  Additionally, you’re immediately told about a new mission in a new zone.  And that’s where the content shines.  They’ve created an entire ski-resort zone for both heroes and villains to play in.  You can jump on the slope and skate all the way down to the bottom of the ski run, and once at the bottom there are jet geysers that you step on, and are propelled, caterwauling like crazy, all the way back to the top  (Falling damage has been thoughtfully turned off in this zone).  Several large warming huts are in the area, complete with bars, bartenders, and roaring fires with large round benches around them.  The entire zone just feels so Aspen it’s pretty amazing.  There’s a mission you can do in which you rescue the worlds creepiest looking baby (The Baby New Year) from interdimenstional prankster Snaptooth, and return him to Father Time.  You can do the mission four times, to get four separate badges, as well as earning new costume parts, such as furry gloves and santa boots.  Additionally, each player gets two temporary powers when they log on.  One is a gift that you can give to any other player, and the other is a gift you give yourself — a one time self-activated 24 hour debt protection.  Kick that bad boy off just before taking on some Archvillains! 

The gifts you give are random, and can be a snowball power, the holiday jet-pack or santa hat from last year, a one-time giant snow-beast pet, or most likely, a small amount of influence.  The jet-pack is insanely useful for a low level toon, and the snowball power is just plain fun.   But besides all that, they’ve also enabled the random presents from last year.  All over every zone are sprinkled bright glowing presents.  Open one, and if you’ve been nice, you’ll get some random gift.  Naughty, and a handful of snowbeasts spawn.  And for the insanely completist out there, there’s another badge to be had by opening 200 of those presents.  So.. of course.. yeah.. for one of my characters I’ve gone and acquired all of the winter event badges, of which I think there are a total of eleven. 

In any event, unlike some live events (*cough cough Matrix Online*), which boil down to you running around killing nine million of one random spawn, there’s actually quite a LOT going on in Paragon City this winter, and plenty of stuff to do that everyone can participate in. 

If you need me, I’ll be running around the ski-resort in Pocket D.  Feel free to /t me.  But be warned.. I HAVE snowballs, and I’m not afraid to use them!

So.. you thought the time I spent in Lineage II was brief.  It was a lifetime compared to the amount of time I spend in DungeonRunner.

This weekend I got a referral, downloaded the client, and set out to make my character.  Premise seemed clear enough.  Create toon.  Kill monsters.  Get loot.  Rinse, repeat.  Now.. mind you, I’m not one of those people that play a game for five minutes, decides its a pile of crap, and then promptly uninstalls it.  Or.. at least.. I haven’t been up until now.

But from the incredibly unappealing choices at character selection, to the worn and overused heavily stylized look of their environments and settings, to the terribly abrasive voice-overs they decided to give each NPC, it was like this game was working *overtime* to get me to not like it.  I got my starter equipment.  A cardboard crossbow and some cardboard armor.  No.  I’m not kidding.  See?  It’s.. *cardboard*.. get it?  heh heh.. it’s.. FUNNY.. really.. ermm.. yeah.  Exactly.  So I got my starter stuff, found the entrance to the wilderness, and set out to kill things.

This game is Dungeon Seige.  Let me say it again.  This game is Dungeon Seidge.  If you’ve played Dungeon Seige, you’ve played this game.  Same camera controls, same isometric view.  And the haunting thing about it is, the monster AI is exactly the same.  So much so that  I wonder if some of the guys as Gas Powered Games found new work, or had something to do with the code for this game.  Cause the monsters behave exactly the same.   Shoot one.  Any one.  And they all run directly up to you, crowd around you in a circle, and beat on you until you are dead, or they are dead.  If they have a ranged attack, the all line up precisely at max range, again forming a nice half circle, and fire their attacks.

I think, if the game perhaps had been incredibly visually appealing, like Guild Wars, or even the Dark Alliance games, I might have stayed longer.  Or I think I could have gotten past the appearance if the game play wasn’t so completely and utterly done to death already.  But it’s a muddy brown and green game with blocky characters and blocky terrain and annoying attempts at humor, with gameplay thats 100% straight up out of a game thats ten years old.

I know there are people that this game will find some appeal in.  But it is even less of what I think of as an MMO than even instance-heavy games like Guild Wars and Dungeon and Dragons Online were.  And it is, unquestionably, not for me.

I only stayed the night, but by the next morning I was ready to pack up my bedroll and seek entertainment elsewhere..

Safeguard missions are cool. 

Recently, there’s been a bit of a push back against instancing in MMO design.  Spend any amount of time on the Vanguard forums, and you’ll hear all about the evils of instanced content, and how it flies in the face of MMO purity.  And while WoW certainly has plenty of instances, the fact that the majority of the world is in a common area has shown us in unmistakeable terms, that while people may not want to have to group together, they love playing around each other.  So the pendulum swings back the the other way, and a lot of new MMO games are being built around the notion of one world to bring them all together.

I want to caution against this.  I honestly believe the best MMO’s are going to have a mix of the two, and it’s in finding that right mix is going to be the secret sauce.  Because while over-instancing does serve to isolate players, and reduce the opportunities of casual social interraction out of which communities are born… there are still some chances for incredibly fun gameplay to be had in instances.

Safeguard missions in CoH are a great example of this.  City of Heroes just recently released Issue 8, and one of the things they brought to the Heroes side of the table is the newspaper “generate a mission” mechanic, and the associated bank robber missions.  Of course, on the Heroes side, its a police scanner, and you SAVE the bank from being robbed, as opposed to robbing it.  It goes something like this:

You step into the zone, which is an outdoor zone of roughly 40 or 50 city blocks.  Giant Floaty Text ™ floats up in front of you telling you the bank is being robbed, and you have 15 minutes before the mission is up.  And you only have about 5 minutes to stop the robbery.  A handy mark on the minimap tells you right where to go.  As soon as you step into the zone, some bank robbers are set in motion inside the bank.  The robbers make their way through the bank, down to the vault.  They open the vault, get some money, and make their way out of the bank, and down the street.  Where you find them depends entirely on how long it takes you to get to the bank and stop them.  Now, once the bank robbery is handled, the mission is technically over.  But you’ll immediately get some giant floaty text telling you that some vandals are destroying part of the city.  If you fly (run, leap) to the (again convenient) new mark on the map, you’ll find some bad guys doing something nefarious, like.. oh.. well, smashing a mailbox.  Yeah.. I know.  It doesn’t all make sense.  But you beat up the bad guys, and you get an extension of 2 more minutes.  And in that two minutes, another group of vandals will appear.

In this way, you can spend quite a bit of time in the mission running around, responding to various emergencies, and heroically stopping them.  There’s even an arson variation that has you running over to a building and trying to stop the thugs from setting it on fire. 

We ran through three of these things that night, my group and I, and had an absolute blast.  The thing is, it’s all done through a series of scripts and triggers, and would be virtually impossible to do in a common world.  When any schmuck around could run up and set off the trigger, or complete it before you do, or break the mission in any one of a thousand ways, you quickly realize why these things.. these kinds of single player content, are only available in instances.

Now that games like WoW and CoH and Everquest II are finally giving us quests and missions and reasons to kill all the wildlife, one of the biggest complaints levied against those games are the lack of variety in those missions.  There’s a very good reason for this.  In a common area world, there’s only so much complexity that you can put into a mission before you make it break wide open.  Even in WoW, the little things that they *do* put in  have their context totally broken by the common area nature of the world.  That is, when you give the stinky pinecombs to the satyr in teldrassil and he turns into a toad.. how fun is it to stand in line waiting for him to turn back into a satyr so you can have your turn to turn him into a toad. 

And those things are small.  It’s not even all that terrible that you have to wait for that to happen.  I still have fun with that quest.  But there is an extradinary opportunity to engage the character more in the world you are creating by providing more varied and interesting scenarios that are only available through an instance.  Of course, you can’t go crazy.  You still have to balance this with the fact that you have to give players opportunities to play together, even if they’re not playing with each other.  At one end of this spectrum lies Guild Wars and DDO –games that put too much of their world in isolated instances.  At the other end of this spectrum lies games like Vanguard and Lineage II — where you have exactly 3 kinds of mission in  the entire game, and spawn camping is still rampant. 

The sweet spot will lie somewhere in the middle.

Dusty

So I got the links working with the current theme, and spent all day Sunday putting together the title graphic.  There’s still some tweaks I want to do to the graphics, but for the most part the look and feel of the site is complete.  From this point forward, should just be content.  I’m going to start uploading various pieces of fan fiction as I get time.

Dusty

I spent a month last week in Lineage II. 

No seriously.  So MMORPG.com had a promotional deal running, where you could get a two week free pass into the venerable Korean MMO.  I’ve always wanted to try Lineage II, just to say I’d been there.  I have heard that it’s grindtastic, and wanted to see just how much so it was.

Wow.  My made up word doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Lineage II is very much an old school MMO.  Everything in it hearkens back to the kind of game play you experienced in Everquest I and Dark Age of Camelot.  You create a new character.  You are given a spoon.  You are told to go out and kill small furry animals around the newbie village with your spoon until you reach level five, at which point you will be given a fork.

And it is literally called the Newbie Village.  The guy in the town that helps you?  He’s call The Newbie Guide.  In game.  I get that I’m new to your MMO, but please, do you have to beat me about the head and shoulders with the knowledge? And there are quests in the game, but they seem to all be of the variety of “Go out and kill 100 monsters of this type.  Come back to me and I will give you some money.  Do this over and over again forever.”  Yes, they are exactly the same as WoW’s faction grinding quests.  Which tells you something about WoW’s faction grinding model.

Eventually, you find your first dungeon.  And I’d forgotten exactly how you work dungeons in old school MMO’s, but I quickly (and painfully) remembered.  And it was funny, but the experience made me incredibly nostalgic for DAoC.  Because it’s exactly the same.  It goes something like this.  You — and probably your group, as it’s incredily dangerous to solo in dungeons — find a nice safe corner or hallway out of the way of the mob spawn area.  You wait for mobs to spawn.  You attempt to pull one away from the group and kill it.  If you get the group, it’s exciting.  Sort of.  If not, it’s safe.  Kill said mob or group of mobs.  Wait for them to respawn.  Rinse and repeat until 2:00am.  The other fun bit of game play to this is where you ferociously protect your little camping spot from other would-be poachers, fighting them off with curses and threats of training the dungeon on them.

L2 also has a seriously hard-core death mechanic.  You die, you lose experience (including de-levelling, thankyouverymuch), you get punted back to the nearest town, and you could potentially lose one item from your inventory.  Take THAT mamby-pamby WoW death mechanic!  I know.. it was hard for me to believe too. 

Lineage II is certainly not without its redeaming qualities though.  The Dark-Elf females wear either bondage gear or corsets, depending on your class, and and bend at the waist when they run, in classic anime-style, giving you the impression they’re intentionally poking their thong-wearing behinds at you the entire time you play one.

Naturally, this was the class I played.   This is Hiacynth (my toon), and Elunara – played by one of my former WoW guildies I cajoled into playing with me – posing in aforementioned pulling dungeon.  I’m not sure what the gear looks like at the higher levels, though from the few level 40’s I did see running around, it would appear you get really nice bondage gear.  The entire time I played I ran across very few other humans, and lots of bots running around with names like “afkldfl”, and a fellow I grew almost to be fond of, “flkjsdsl”.  Botting is rampant in L2, and it makes the game sad and a little forelone to feel like you’re the only human running around in an immense world filled with computer controlled mobs being hunted by computer-controlled players.  It also shows, if you compare L2 to games like WoW and EQ2, that as a developer, your attitude and persistence in controlling botting makes a difference.  You may not ever be able to completely stamp it out, but if you do nothing, it will overtake your game. 

There were some interesting things coming out of Lineage II.  For a game that supports open PvP, I liked their notion of Karma, and of Combat Points.  Basically, the better your Karma is, the more combat points you have.  Combat Points are a Hit Point buffer that enemy players must damage through before they get down to your juicy real hitpoints.  If you run around ganking newbs, your karma gets lowered.  Low enough and town guards and NPC’s attack you on site.  But you can get your karma back up by going out and killing mobs.  This was pretty much exactly the system Eve Online had (at least it did when I played it), and yes there are a thousand problems with it.  But I do like the idea of a sort of protective armor that’s strength is based on how well-behaved you are in game.

My two weeks are up, and I’m sad to say I probably didn’t give Lineage II a completely fair shake.  I know there’s better stuff at the high end, like town ownership, and guild-based PvP, but my tolerance for wading through the muck to get to the goods isn’t what it used to be.  So see ya L2, perhaps we’ll be back when Release Six – Revenge of the Gankbot, comes out, but I doubt it.

D.

So this is the proverbial first post.  You know it’s the first, because I’ve already successfully managed to delete it once, and now I’m re-entering it.  Please allow me to direct you to the links to the right for information on what this site is all about, and who I am.  Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the site itself.

I’m still futzing about with themes.  I’m happy with this theme, and I love the look of it, but it doesn’t allow me to display my links.  And I’ve spent quite amount of time entering those links.  Seems like I should allow people to, I dunno, see them.  So either the entire look of this site may change soon if I go with a different theme, or I may edit the PHP itself and see if I can cajole chaoticsoul into doing what I want.  Also, the rather bland and generic looking title graphics will soon be replaced with something more MMO-ish and personal.  I’m thinking avatar montage.  Oh yes.

Also, I thought I would warn you, I’m going to be putting my fan fiction up here.  I know.  I promise to tuck it way out of the way so you won’t even know it exists if you don’t want.  But for a long time I’ve wanted a place — a central place — to put all of the myriad backgrounds and stories I’ve written about the characters I’ve played.  And this seems like a good place.  Consider yourself warned.  I’ll put that stuff up as I get time.

That’s enough for an intro.  Please make yourself comfortable, and welcome aboard!

D.