EVE: Fanfest, Dust bombing

March 22, 2012

Watched some of the EVE Fanfest stream. CCP showed off Dust orbital bombardment from within EVE, which was a bit unexpected. I’m still trying to figure out how the pacing is all going to work out. I mean by the time you setup a bombardment, get the EVE pilot to fire, is it even going to matter on the ground anymore where people are running around so fast? That’s the biggest question I have.

The other more general question is; will Dust actually be a fun shooter? Hard to tell just from videos. It looks good, but then most shooters do. I think the model, F2P, is a smart move since the game will rely on critical mass to really work, and F2P allows more people in than you would otherwise get.

The lack of a PC version is somewhat of a big miss, but I’m guessing Sony paid a good chunk of money to get Dust as an exclusive (for now). Assuming the ‘for now’ part ends at some point, Dust might be a nice side game for EVE players to jump into. It would make for a good Corp event, to have everyone log into Dust for a night and blast away.

Tomorrow Fanfest focuses on EVE itself, and I’m guessing we will hear some interesting stuff.

As for INQ-E, tonight is our first attempt at fielding an all-Corp Incursion fleet, which should be fun. Last night we had our in-Corp cheap-frig PvP event, which went very well and people learned a few tricks. I plan to expand on that concept, either moving up to Cruisers, or perhaps going on a cheap-frig roam to get blown up. Either way the goal is to get people working together, and to get us more PvP-ready for whatever future plans we act on.

3 Comments | beta, Console Gaming, EVE Online, Inquisition Clan, Mass Media | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

GW2: Microtransactions, fantasy PLEX

March 20, 2012

Full post here. Key line:

it’s never OK for players who spend money to have an unfair advantage over players who spend time.

This is good, and hopefully ArenaNet sticks to this. Unlike most devs, I currently have no reason to believe they won’t, or that they might try to pull a Turbine and twist the statement around once things get rough.

Finally, I’m happy to see ArenaNet ‘borrowing’ from the right source in the genre, and using CCP’s PLEX system. The fact that the dev blog outright admits it’s the PLEX system is also something I appreciate; there is no shame in borrowing a good idea, and there is no need to pretend you invented the wheel when you do (Hi EAWare). It will be interesting to see what kind of economic balance GW2 has, since PLEX in part works because the economy in EVE works.

15 Comments | beta, EVE Online, Guild Wars, MMO design, RMT | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

GW2′s perfect storm

February 24, 2012

Ah back to blogging. Odd how even a few days away gets me twitching.

I have an EVE update post coming, but wanted to get these GW2-based thoughts out first.

Queues in GW2 WvW: Honestly it’s the second best solution, and the best (be CCP) is technically impossible for the rest of the industry. If one assumes GW2 will actually perform like an MMO, and not die after the first 1-3 months, populations should stabilize and people can move around until the odds of hitting a queue are low, or the queue itself is short. I would much rather sit in a 5 minute queue during prime time to get into WvW than get in instantly to some pre-packaged 10v10 or 40v40 instance of non-factorism. That said queue rage will be epic the first week of release, and the tears will be delicious.

As for the rest of the info/videos released from the press beta weekend, none of it really changes my mind about GW2. I’m still looking forward to it, and I still expect it to be decent. I think GW2 will be a fun 3-6 months, and then something to wander back to during slow gaming times, but I just don’t see it raising the MMO bar going forward or becoming a stand-out, must-play MMO long-term (unless the WvW ranking/competition aspect takes off, then the game might be somewhat of a massive-scale arena PvP hybrid game, which would be interesting).

With that said, I do think ArenaNet is going to benefit from a bit of a perfect storm situation. The last year+ in the MMO genre has been one failed release after another, and the latest and biggest, SW:TOR, is even more disappointing than even I had expected. Along with new failures, WoW itself has not stagnated, but gotten noticeably worse (linear idiot-proof questing + ‘hard’ raiding; good job interns). On top of all that, shockingly, the themepark model does not have the legs more traditional MMOs have, and so whether you are playing a failure themepark or not, the whole formula has grown stale for many/most.

So here comes GW2, the first AAA MMO in a while that is not a direct copy/paste job of WoW. For many ‘casual’ players, it will be the first MMO in a long time/ever that is not a hotbar smashfest, that has PvP as a feature rather than an afterthought, and that is more massive than a four-person insta-queue silent loot collecting trip (sorry, silent but fully voiced loot collecting trip). That alone will make GW2 special to MMO players that just don’t know a whole lot about the genre (but oh god prepare for the forum idiocy as WoWbies ask for a DF and welfare epics), much like WoW was special for so many because even the most basic stuff, like seeing another player in a city, was something new for them.

The bitter-vet in me knows GW2 ‘active’ combat is semi-active compared to Darkfall, or that their ‘massive’ maps are blips in EVE’s scope, but I fully understand that bitter-vet status is rare in the grand scheme of things, and that it’s not the AAA space that is really going to push the genre forward in significant ways. Hell, I’m just happy GW2 is not a copy/paste WoW. That alone is (sadly) worth celebrating in the AAA MMO space.

17 Comments | beta, Darkfall Online, EVE Online, Guild Wars, Mass Media, MMO design, World of Warcraft | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

GW2 WvWvW – The new Alterac Valley!

February 16, 2012

This looks familiar.

Three-way Alterac Valley that persists for two weeks, with an ELO system and DAoC relics/keeps. Not that the above is bad. God knows we have seen far worse attempts at MMO PvP (Hi WAR/AoC/Aion).

Maxing out at about 300 players fighting it out is pretty good. Impossible if you ask Blizzard or BioWare. And sure, Darkfall has had bigger battles, and 300 people is a small skirmish in EVE (lulz but it’s in space so it’s ez to do right guyz!?), but overall, 300 is still decent by ‘genre norms’. I’m curious to hear what happens to the 301st person who tries to enter WvWvW though. Do they go into a queue, are WvWvW areas going to be sharded, or are GW2 servers going to be so small as to make this a non-issue?

The level/gear aspect is disappointing, but not exactly unexpected. Hopefully your iLvL = I-Win for PvP, and player-skill plays an important aspect, but I have my doubts. I also doubt low level characters will be of much real value. Remember how ‘valuable’ non-60s were in AV? Want to guess how much help they will be in GW2 when my guild of 100 raid-geared 80s is on the field? I get the ‘you don’t have to grind to cap’ sales pitch, but if you are attempting to not force people to grind to 80, don’t have 80 levels. Funny enough, that’s exactly what GW1 did, but hey.

There are also some “I don’t know shit about MMO PvP History” parts in there as well. The whole “small groups can capture smaller objectives” crap. If you have played a PvP MMO, you know how that’s going to work out. You know how players dropping gear is going to work out for smart/good guilds. You know how keep/relic raids are going to go (unless relic/keep timers were simply not mentioned in the post, but I doubt it).

Again, does this mean GW2 WvWvW is going to suck as bad as most themepark PvP does? Nope. Is it going to be god’s gift like the rest of GW2 and solve all MMO problems forever? Not by the sounds of that blog.

Still, come open beta, GW2 at least sound good enough to bother downloading, which is more than I can say for most of 2011.

37 Comments | Age of Conan, beta, Combat Systems, Dark Age of Camelot, Darkfall Online, EVE Online, Guild Wars, MMO design, PvP, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

Getting back to the source

January 11, 2012

Jester has a post up about how Sovereignty works in EVE, and how the game might benefit from borrowing some ideas from Perpetuum in that area. A good read as always, and it brings up a larger point: competition amongst MMOs can be a good thing, and ultimately if the devs are smart the real winners are the players.

Devs being smart is something that seems to be lacking in the genre of late.

Take for instance Rift. In beta, when Rift was limited to only one large zone (the 1-20 game), it was a great game. Players quickly learned which areas were the elite ‘tough’ areas, which parts were easier, and the different hubs truly felt like hubs given the player activity and uses. Combine this setup with how the invasion system worked back then (far more active, more impact to hubs), and while the ‘world’ back then was still a zone, it felt much larger and grander than the typical themepark zone.

The day-before-release nerf to invasions happened. The after-20 zone layout happened. And finally 1.2 happened.

And while this is just me speculating, IMO Trion tried to WoWify Rift. More speculating; they did it because WoWbies tried Rift and wanted it to be, well, WoW. It’s what the locust do after all. How’s that working out for Rift now? It’s one thing to ask your community for suggestions and such. It’s another to just blindly give the players exactly what they are asking for, regardless of how it fits into your game or what you originally set out to do.

What if Rift, start to finish, was like the beta version of the game? The one that was near-universally praised. The version that, for those how tried it, saw a game that, while still firmly themepark, at least felt a little different. Had a little more… MMO to it?

What if Rift borrowed from Guild Wars? 1-20 level game just to teach you the basics, and then all zones tuned to level 20, each one different based on theme and setting rather than level range. Make invasions really matter, allow them to dominate a zone to the point the players are ‘locked out’ until they rally together and fight back. At worst, one of the ten zones you can visit as a lvl 20 is blocked, big deal. Expand the game in that area, horizontally, rather than just repeating the same world event every few months, tacking on raids, and having everyone wait for the inevitable level increase and total content reset/replacement.

But, because while Rift was still cooking, WoW had its 11m ‘subs’, Trion borrowed from Blizzard rather than a different source. Same can be said for Mythic and WAR, Funcom and AoC, and today BioWare and SW:TOR. The results are in for WAR/AoC/Rift, and it’s not rocket science to predict what SW is going to look like in 5 months.

What’s amusing about all of this is that, because EQ1 had 500k subs and UO/AC ‘only’ had 100-250k, the big suit copy/paste monkeys looked at EQ1. And it works for a while, because for all its faults, at least EQ1 was still an MMO. And so was WoW origin. And… well we all know how things went, and what the ultimate result is.

So now, does the genre gravitate back towards EQ1-style design, or does it go full-circle to its roots, where we start seeing teams create worlds and make them work, rather than settling on a theme and tossing in some MMO concepts to calling it a day?

Is it 6 months yet?

45 Comments | Age of Conan, Asheron's Call, beta, EQ2, EVE Online, Guild Wars, MMO design, Rant, Rift, SW:TOR, Ultima Online, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

Battlefield 3 Open Beta

September 30, 2011

Battlefield 3 open beta is now live and I got the chance to play it a bit last night. It’s a gorgeous game. Flat out the best looking game I’ve played to date. And it runs well, with none of this “Ultra settings choke even a NASA computer” crap you get sometimes. Same goes for the audio; it sounds great and really pulls you into the game.

I’m not the biggest FPS fan, so tiny details are basically lost on me, at least from an ultra-competitive perspective. I don’t know/care which weapons are slightly more powerful than others, the number of milliseconds it takes to jump/sprint/whatever. Maybe Battlefield 3 is great in this respect, maybe worse. I’m not the person to say one way or the other. To me Battlefield 3 plays like a shooter. It plays similar-enough to Bad Company 2. That’s not bad per-se, but the first hour with the game felt like playing another hour of BC2, just with better visuals and a different map.

If I was hurting for titles to play, I’d pick up Battlefield 3 to kill some time with. ‘Unfortunately’, I have more than enough games to play right now, and a bunch of titles waiting in the wings. The price point is also tough to justify. While $60 itself is not a big deal, the fact that I can pick up games for $5-$10 off Steam makes dropping the money tougher to justify. Knowing that the game will go on sale for half the price or less at some point is also a factor.

My plan is to enjoy the beta until it ends, and then pick the game up on sale to at least play the single player game, and perhaps mess around with multi-player, although having to unlock all the guns and accessories (again) somewhat sours that aspect. Funny statement coming from an MMO player, but there you go.

 

6 Comments | beta | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

This is what happens when the MMO genre sucks and I have ‘nothing to play’

September 6, 2011

Random thoughts blog incoming.

Played a little more Heroes 6 beta 2. Huge improvement from beta 1. All the little UI errors are gone, skills and spells make a lot more sense now, and the multiplayer is much better. I was a little worried Heroes 6 would ship like other Heroes games before it; a solid core that lacked polish, so hats off to the Heroes 6 devs for delaying the game, holding this extended beta testing, and really taking the time to get the game right. Very happy with Heroes 6 right now.

Actually, I see no reason at all not to have free QA work (beta testing) done for an upcoming game, MMO or otherwise. Why pay for something when you can ‘grant’ fans early access and have them do it for you? Only reason I can come up with is if your game sucks and you are worried about negative word of mouth, but that’s easily solved by not having your game suck.

Still playing Global Agenda, still having fun with it. Highly recommended to anyone looking for a quick pick-up-and-queue game with some FPS-flavor. The level 30+ ‘raid’ content (10 man PvE missions that take 15min or so) is a nice change of pace, and the once-every-hour timer on it makes it seem a little special when you catch it. GA might not be an MMO, but it is a solid game.

Also still playing Borderlands with three others (thanks Steam sale). Another solid game, very Diablo-ish in many ways; kill stuff, find chests, get loot, level up, repeat. What is nice here is that usually in a shooter the weapons are all pre-determined and balanced (boring). Borderlands says screw it and randomizes it all, leading to some very interesting combos. Bit different to have a shotgun that shoots acid or missiles, verses say a sword that happens to be on fire or frozen. You still swing the sword, and while the fire is nice, it’s not game-changing. Going from one shotgun to another is (nevermind different gun types).

Also playing the game with three others means the mob difficulty is jacked up, which makes things interesting and a little more memorable. In my solo game, while I’m more into the lore (inside joke that is quickly not becoming inside) I blaze through areas without trouble, and it just feels a little… cheap? Anyway just another example of challenge = good. When you work for something it leaves a more lasting image.

Oh and Final Fantasy Tactics is CRUSHING me. Reloading almost every battle at least once and loving it. Fun to play a game somewhat balanced around min/maxing without min/maxing.

 

15 Comments | beta, Combat Systems, Global Agenda, Random | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

Rift: Happy half-birthday, welcome to Azeroth!

September 1, 2011

Prompted by Tobold (its Thursday blog noob, not Friday), let’s talk about Rift 6 months after release.

Pre-release, Trion was hyping Rift with “You’re not in Azeroth anymore”. Yes, Rift was never pitched as more than yet another fantasy themepark, but themepark does not always equal solo-hero shiny-vacuum ala current-day WoW.

And in beta, Rift was certainly not Azeroth. Most of the content focus was around open zones rather than closed-off instances, balance was aimed at allowing anyone to group with anyone to succeed, and the general lore was around two factions that had a common enemy but conflicted about how to deal with it. Actually, it was very much Azeroth, just circa 2004. You had group quests, elite mobs in zones, quest chains of increasing difficulty, etc. The game was in no way ‘hard’, but it was not a faceroll either.

Right at release, zone events were nerfed, and lost most of the impact they had in beta. They could now be easily ignored, and a zone would no longer feel ‘dangerous’ during an invasion. They in effect became a side-option rather than a focus.

The first world event was a dud. From a design standpoint it had some major flaws, the game could not handle it technically, and worst of all most players came away feeling very ‘meh’ about the whole thing. The second world event was more of the same, minus the initial novelty of “hey it’s the first world event!”

Patch 1.2 was a massive nerf to the games overall difficulty; buffing now easily-acquirable gear while at the same time nerfing mob difficulty will do that. The justification for this nerf was that random PUG groups collected with the very-2011-Azeroth dungeon finder were lower skilled, and in order to ensure everyone walked away with a shiny, the bar had to be lowered. Later patches continued this trend, nerfing any reasonable difficult quests, rifts, or events.

The game pitched as “not Azeroth” very quickly started to mirror exactly that, with a focus on random PUG groups, collecting tokens, and getting to the cap so you could queue up for instanced whatever.

Rift does have a few quality features, ones that will no doubt be cloned going forward much like WAR’s PQs have been cloned. The soul system is a solid progression of the talent-tree setup, and makes the old “one way up” style feel very dated. Trion should also be commended on their rate of updates; as of this date they have been steadily delivering new content and changes, along with being very active on their forums. Like the game or not, it’s hard not to admire Trion in this area, and hopefully it continues going forward and pressures other studios to try and keep up.

Right now, Rift is doing exactly what Trion wants it to do; offer a similar experience to WoW players who are tired of waiting on Blizzard. It’s not hard to see where most of those million+ subs from WoW have gone. It’s not the sales pitch they were promoting pre-release, but with a million “customers”, so far it seems to be working out for them.

19 Comments | beta, MMO design, Rift, World of Warcraft | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

Third faction finally added to Warhammer Online!

August 16, 2011

The F2P knockoff game that is.

If you are still playing WAR, how much does this kick in the nuts hurt?

“Oh hi, we screwed WAR by making it two faction like WoW, but we made the knockoff a threeway. AHAHHAHAHHAHAHA suck it WAR/DoAC fans!” – Mythic

On the ‘plus’ side, it’s nice that the WAR team has moved on from failing to clone WoW to failing to clone LoL.

Poor Games Workshop and their IP, they really do deserve better.

16 Comments | beta, League of Legends, PvP, Rant, Warhammer Online | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

Dawntide: A little more time

August 9, 2011

I played a little more Dawntide (I can’t explain why, other than that I’m a sucker for sandboxes I guess), and while I still would not recommend it to most people, I have seen a few noteworthy things.

The combat is still terrible, but at least now I have figured out that it’s terrible because it’s an unresponsive button-mash system rather than an unresponsive, super slow, wtf-do-something system. That overhaul better be good…

Graphically the game is also meh. It’s like playing Darkfall on low settings, and Darkfall is not exactly setting the world on fire in terms of visuals (although personally I think DF looks pretty damn good for what it does and who made it). That said, there are some nice graphical touches. For instance, when you are out harvesting lumber, you actually turn a tree into a stump, and when that tree disappears (no falling animation, which is pretty weak) the lighting around the area is altered based on the loss of the tree. It’s actually fun to clear out a small forest and turn the area into a large patch of stumps.

Speaking of harvesting, along with the tree chopping, mining is also better than other games. You first must find an area with a resource using a search skill, and once you find a resource, you can mine right there for however long that resource holds (it gives you a quantity when you first find it). The closer you search to the source, the larger the pool. One of the first bits of advice I got was to head to a cave to mine some copper, and this whole system felt better than chasing from shiny node to shiny node over and over.

Crafting itself is solid. Nothing that really jumps out at me, but solid.

Character progression also has a small tweak. It’s a skill-based system, so the more you use a skill, the higher it goes, up to 100, and there is a total skill cap of 700. The tweak is that as you use a skill, you also gain XP in that skill, which slowly over time (16hrs I believe) converts into skill points. This is significant because it puts somewhat of a soft-cap on how hard you can grind out a skill in a day, while on the other hand it allows for smoother, more gradual gains for more casual players. I like it.

Ultimately I still think Dawntide has a ways to go, but it does have some interesting things going for it, and might be something to keep an eye on. I don’t think it will be where it needs to be come its planned October release, but you never know when that ‘miracle’ patch might hit.

 

1 Comment | beta, Combat Systems, crafting, MMO design, Random | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

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