July 2013 - Page 8 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Original Norrath

July 4, 2013 by Belghast

The big hullabaloo at work ended up going far better than expected… however since the meeting time was at 1 pm I spent most of the morning in an overall sense of dread. I am a “rip the band-aid off” person, not peel it back slowly… as a result I detest suspense. I want to get the pain over with so I can get on with my life. In class I usually volunteered to give my speech or presentation first so I could get it out of the way and relax. But I survived… and now I am on vacation for awhile.

Original Norrath

Thanks to my Everquest 2 account and having station access I have had the ability to play the original Everquest for some time now. For whatever reason I never really took advantage of this. From time to time I would boot up a copy of the game playing one my favorite emulator server, but I had no real interest in ever returning to the real thing. On a whim I decided to fire up the game client and see if the game experience had improved as a while. A few months back I did the same for Dark Age of Camelot, and was surprised at how well the game actually stood up against modern titles.

The Good

Honestly many of the features of the game have been drastically improved since I last played it on an older emulated copy. Firstly most of the NPC models I encountered had been drastically improved, but honestly I never had an issue with graphics… I play minecraft afterall. The problems I always had with the game were just how bad the user interface was. Luckily this has been improved a lot, and they seem to have fixed the horrible mouse look system from the early days. For the most part it controls out of the box like you would expect any modern MMO to control.

Additionally they have completely gotten rid of the corpse recovery aspect of the game. This was the biggest sticking point with me, and the cause of lots of marital strife for myself and my friends. The inability to simply disconnect without dire consequences caused many a fight, and I can still remember getting a call one Sunday afternoon begging me to come home right away and resurrect someone because they got stuck in a bad place and were about to lose all the gear on their corpse. All in all there was nothing positive about that system.

What happens now is if you die you respawn back in a safe area with all your gear just like modern MMOs. After level 10 you begin to lose experience just like you used to in the old game. From my understanding you still can lose levels through death, but this is acceptable I suppose. Temporarily losing progress on death is something you can deal with, permanently losing everything you have spent years acquiring on your characters… that is not something you can deal with.

Additionally they have added in a return to bindpoint functionality that lets players rapidly get out of an area. This was another huge problem with the game as a whole, the inability to safely leave the game at a moments notice. Things happen, and you cannot always plan when you might need to leave a game. Modern MMOs have taken this into account, but it is nice to see they have gone back through and added this functionality into what was always the most painful game on players.

The Interesting

The thing that I find most interesting is all of the ways that they have essentially “hacked” modern features into an extremely old and limiting engine. The name Everquest used to always be a joke, since for the most part the game itself had very few “quests”. They have remedied this by adding in a full quest journal system, and through some clever scripting given you an overarching quest for each area that essentially leads you by the hand to the other quest givers. This way players at least know who to /hail to get the quests in a given area.

Additionally they have incorporated new features, like treasure chests that are commonplace in other games. They had no real way to do this in the traditional sense… but instead creatively created ground spawn stationary mobs that look like chests but don’t fight back. So by destroying this “chest” the player can then loot the contents. I have to applaud the devs for coming up with extremely creative solutions around complex problems and limitations of their game engine.

Additionally I find it interesting that they have come to a point where they expect mudflat ion to occur and that players need certain stats to be able to survive. Through the tutorial quests you manage to get a really nice set of gear, probably better than I had in my 50s in the original game… and include with it the ever important 10% haste item. This was a must have item, and I remember hours spent farming various drops for the guild to make sure that every dps player had at least the most basic of haste items.

The Bad

Today’s post was essentially spurred on by one of my friends blog post yesterday. Over on West Karana, my friend Tipa posted an article called “Why I Stopped Playing Everquest”. Her commentary could almost exactly double for whatever I am about to say, because the same things that do not appeal to her… are what I noticed indulging this whim. Ultimately it is honestly the same problem I had with Dark Age of Camelot as well. The game play is to slow and prodding… and quite frankly boring after being used to today’s MMO standards.

I played a Cleric in the original game, and my little circle of healers used to joking refer to the game as AFKquest, in that we spent far more time alt-tabbed or talking than actually doing anything active on our characters. Unfortunately playing a melee is not much better. I have reached a point where I just cannot handle passive and slow combat, and literally doing nothing as your character auto attacks down a monster. The above golem took a good 15 minutes of waiting on my character to slowly chew down its health. I alt-tabbed and caught up on my news feed, tabbing back between articles to see if it was over yet.

This is not what fun game play looks like anymore for me. At one time it was, but more so it was because it was the only thing that gave us online character development and progression. The game holds up on many levels, but the slow pace of the game and the absolute passivity of combat guarantees that it will never be more than a passing novelty for me again. Sure I got the tingles of nostalgia as I heard the opening theme again, but I have the same nostalgia playing Everquest II, which for me at least is a much better game in every possible way.

I feel like I have always looked at my time playing Everquest through rose colored lenses… but after playing it again for a short period of time… I started to think about all the things I didn’t remember. All of the hours spent standing around doing nothing, while other players drug mobs back to the party and killed them… somehow never taking enough damage to make it worth casting a heal. Quite honestly the game involved way more waiting around than I would like to remember. Waiting to break fear, waiting for everyone to log in and show up for an event, waiting to get enough faction to turn in a specific quest item, waiting for that one magical super rare monster to spawn needed for someone’s epic. I simply don’t have the patience for that much waiting, or at least I have come to value my time a bit more and I am simply not willing to squander it.

Wrapping Up

Overall I was surprised at just how well Everquest had updated itself to compete with modern games. However after playing for a very short period of time… I remembered all the bad things about the game and they pretty much toppled the nostalgic good things. I am going to file the game in the “not for me anymore” category. I might visit occasionally since it is free for me to do so, out of sheer nostalgia, but it isn’t something I could ever really get into again. The gameplay overall is just not what I am looking for out of an MMO.

Since this is the big holiday weekend in the United States, I wish all my fellow Americans a happy Independence Day. For my dear friends in the rest of the world… I apologize… because for the next 24 hours you will hear about nothing but our Fourth of July celebrations. I still hope you all have a great weekend. We have a bunch of stuff to do to prepare for our vacation and a bunch of cleaning to do for our house sitter. Guess I need to get up and be productive.

Other MMO Wants

July 3, 2013 by Belghast

This morning is going to be pure hell on wheels for me. Not only is this my last day before our vacation… but also about 10:30 last night I got a nasty surprise when I checked work email. Apparently there is a big impromptu meeting going on today, at which I have to represent the department and speak intelligibly about everything we do. How do you cram a million things into a quick talk that doesn’t bore all the non-technical people. Also as a result I had to scramble around the house to find a pair of slacks that actually fits me. Dropping 8-10 pants sizes in a few months tends to deplete the stock of clothing you don’t wear often.

Basically this morning I need to bang out this post as soon as possible so I can get into work and prepare for the event. As a result I got up and around this morning at 5 am rather than my normal 5:30… here is hoping the time can be spent wisely. I would normally just skip posting on a morning like this… but I am afraid that if I skip a day my routine will unravel and usher in yet another one of my 4-6 month lapses in posting.

Other MMO Wants

On Monday I made my Ten MMO Must Haves post and it kind blew up… as in it seemed to get far more traction than most of my posts do. The only bad thing about it all… is as soon as I posted I thought of a few more items that I should have put on the list. Listing Beards in the final slot was maybe not the most well thought out thing I have ever done… but in reality it is a metaphor. Every player I know has one feature that they look for in the character creator. My friend for example is always hunting for actual blonde hair… instead of the orange mess that most MMOs have. That is one of the most important things to her, and just like me and beards… if it is not there she does not feel as close to the character. Here goes a quick stab at the rest of a list.

1 – Mentoring

This one is huge, and I have no clue why I left it off the list. I did the list as a whole on the fly Monday morning as I thought of things that I really want in every MMO. Essentially those who are not familiar with the term, it is the practice of allowing higher level players to drop down to the same level as lower level characters. The first game I ever experienced in was City of Heroes… and I felt it was absolutely revolutionary. Eventually Everquest 2 added it in, and now Rift and Guild Wars 2 also have similar systems that have improved upon the base concept. Essentially I want a way to be able to play with my friends… no matter how high above them I am. I have a mantra that “anything that keeps you from playing with your friends is bad”.

2 – Single Server / Cross Server Architecture

Back to the mantra of “anything that keeps you from playing with your friends is bad”.. the traditional server structure is way too restricting. If you have a small group of friends that all organize at exactly the same time… and pick one server ahead of time.. it is no big deal. However if you have many different pools of friends, that you feel constantly torn between.. servers are pure hell. This is the case with me… at any given point I have groups of friends playing a dozen or more games and on each roughly a half dozen different servers. I have to unfairly pick and choose between who I play with. Stop making me choose. Let players communicate and group freely with any player who is playing your game.

3 – Single Account ID

This one has been massively controversial, but I have warmed to it over time. If you scroll back far enough, there are even posts of me rallying against RealID, but again I got used to it. The thing I want is the ability to create a single account id, like the later BattleTag system that is not connected to your real world identity. Then let me choose which players to give that ID out to… and in doing so they magically get to see every character I have regardless of where I am playing. Additionally it would be amazing if the system also allowed for friending single character names… for those individuals you need to have communication with… but don’t want to give them everything. It is such a pain in the but to send your friends a long list of a dozen alts for them to add to their friends list each time someone new joins the game.

4 – Multiple Paths of Advancement / Endgame

The answer to the endgame should not always be Raid or PVP. There should be something else… something a player who does not have the time to raid, or does not have the penchant for pvp can do to constantly better their character in game. This could be something like the Alternate Advancement and Planar Advancement systems in Everquest 2 and Rift… or could be a series of epic quests that allow your character to obtain very slowly raid like gear like TSW has implemented. There needs to be a way for players to feel like they are constantly evolving their characters. It is when characters start to feel stagnant that players lose interest with a game and leave. Help me not get bored with your game, by giving me lots of things to do when I hit maximum level. Daily Quests are fine… but they are not a solution to anything.

5 – Alternate Leveling Paths

This is something that has mutated over the years, and I really wish there was a way to undo it. When Everquest launched it had a distinct leveling path for each race in the game. While some of them quickly merged together once you hit the second or third zone… they still started out as unique experiences. When World of Warcraft launched, you had roughly three leveling tracks per race… and this still ended up giving you a fresh way to level your alts. Now in games like Rift and SWTOR… there is a single track for every member of a faction… and as a result by the time you level your alts… you have nothing really to look forward to. Give us multiple ways to get to the end of your game… do not penalize players for wanting to jump around and try new content paths. I realize multiple paths of content takes more development time… but it also improves the quality of your game for players in the long run and makes alting far more sticky.

6 – No Faction Wall

This is a concept that needs die in a huge inferno. This is without a doubt probably the worst seemingly permanent lineage of World of Warcraft. The concept of setting up a red and a blue faction that are diametrically opposed and can in no way communicate is just a shitty way to create a game. Again back to the mantra of… “anything that keeps you from playing with your friends is bad”. If your friend has to sacrifice what he wants to play… for the greater good.. he will always regret at least somewhat the path not taken. Additionally it is very easy for two friends who joined the game at different times to end up on opposite sides of the battle field.

Everquest and Everquest 2 had the best faction systems in the game… in that no only could you communicate with any player freely, but if you so chose to… and with copious amounts of work.. you could raise your faction and be able to function as a member of those societies. Additionally in Everquest 2 they gave the option of betraying your faction through a serious of quests and permanently changing your allegiance. Faction Walls are just a non-creative solution to the problem of setting up PVP. Rift probably did the best decision it ever did when it released the “Faction as Fiction” patch, making it so that both Defiant and Guardian could group, communicate, and guild freely. Additionally they set up 3 new factions that were not connected to either of the original… which recruit players to fight battles for them. This gave you three way pvp without having to make life restricting to your players.

Wrapping Up

This one is going to be extra short today. I’ve spent thirty minutes digging into six more items on the cutting room floor that MMOs should have. I need to finish getting ready and get into work so I can prep for the event. I hope you all have a great day, and maybe this will jiggle loose some other ideas you have about what a “best of breed” MMO needs to have. Tomorrow I am off, so my intent is to try and finish up the second part of the “How To Rift” series.

Microsoft’s Turn to Troll

July 2, 2013 by Belghast

Last night ended up nothing like I had expected. Since it was extremely nice out here in Oklahoma, we ended up batching up a bunch of errands we needed running. As a result I did not end up getting home until well after 8 pm, and when I did get home… I was too out of it to really get into much of anything. I seem to have acquired a need for sleep over the last few days. For now I am indulging this insane fancy and going to bed at a decent hour.

Dendrome

I am well behind the curve content wise in Rift, as last night was the first night I really spent roaming around the Dendrome. I have had this vision quest of sorts and have been hell bent on finishing leveling fishing. At this point I am around 340 and the rest of the journey is extremely slow and painful. I have been setting my goal on completing the fish exchange in Tulan each day… which ends up giving me several levels in the process of fishing up 12 rare fish. Unfortunately I do not yet have the patterns, for the lures that speed up each variety of rare fish.

I have to say I really like Dendrome so far. It reminds me a lot of Ember Isle… but far less brutal for players to break into. Everywhere I look there is another piece of a quest, so it feels like it would take me ages just to reach a point where I felt like I could do dailies here. Once I start a carnage quest… I tend to get distracted and have to complete it while I am in the area. I would not want to try and do the repeatable quests until I had cleared a good deal of these shiny objects from my view.

While I was out in the zone, I managed to get in on an Air Invasion. The first stages went by so quickly that I cannot even tell you what the objectives were… but I managed to make it to the final boss fight when it was around 80% health. It was one of the nastier zone bosses I have encountered… in that it spawned 3 of those flashing red bubbles that have become so ubiquitous with instant death in Rift. These bubbles then proceeded to path randomly through the group knocking players back and dealing large amounts of damage.

I actually got insta-gibbed as I rolled up on the fight as not all of the effects had loaded in for me yet. The completely insane part was that for killing one zone boss I managed to get 330 Infinity Stones. Granted at this point I am struggling to find things to spend them on, and I would have far rather had Empyreal Slayers Marks… it was cool nonetheless and would help out someone needing gear badly. So far I think I am going to like Dendrome as a whole, and I look forward to exploring it in time.

Microsoft’s Turn to Troll

Yesterday one of the big stories that caught my attention is that Microsoft Announced the first months title for the XBox Gold free games program. In the conference that I have linked above… Microsoft said… to kick off that program I’d like to share just two of the titles we’re going to offer over the next few months – Assassin’s Creed 2, and Halo 3. So obviously… players… media outlets.. essentially everyone was expecting the title announced to be well… either Assassins Creed 2 or Halo 3. Instead they dropped the bomb on us that it would be Defense Grid: The Awakening.

This is the equivalent of saying you get a .99 app store title for free. No offense meant to the makers of the game, I am sure it is a perfectly fine title. Tower Defense games however are a dime a dozen, they are the new Bejeweled… everyone and their brother has created a “priced to own” clone. So there is absolutely nothing exciting about this announcement. Even if you like Tower Defense titles, which I do not… no one in their right mind can put this title in the league of Assassins Creed 2 and Halo 3 as far as player appeal.

What I don’t really understand… is how Microsoft can not think these are bad moves. They keep doing it over and over again… and then doing the equivalent of standing there with a shocked face as people rage around them. I am just flabbergasted as to how they could ever think most of the calls they have been making would play well with the gamers. Essentially Microsoft Gold is a horrible deal… it has always been a horrible deal… and giving away appstore titles is not going to change the fact that it will likely always be a horrible deal.

If Microsoft Gold existed in a vacuum it might be considered a good thing… but when you compare it against Playstation+ it is a phenomenally bad deal. Gold costs roughly $60 per year and Plus costs roughly $50, so pretty comparable what you get there. However with Plus you end up getting instantly a dozen ps3 titles ready for download… and they cycle in new titles and cycle out old ones on a monthly basis. Additionally you get the ability to demo the full version of any game in the PS3 library… that means if you purchase it.. your save games still apply. Additionally you get a significant discount on any games you purchase through PlayStation plus, and they are currently running some crazy steam like sales. In the first year… they gave away 64 titles through the PlayStation plus subscription.

So as I sit back and look at this… I cannot fathom how Microsoft feels like Gold is a deal… and that they are somehow sweetening the pot by giving away a single game a month. All the service really does is give you access to features that should have been included in the console in the first place… like Netflix. The whole bait and switch over talking about AAA titles and giving players an AppStore title instead only serves to make the deal even worse. I feel like Microsoft needs to re-evaluate their entire stance on gaming… and collectively “pull their heads out” for lack of a better term. Feinting ignorance only works as long as you are willing to stop doing stupid things… at this point they need to completely rethink their strategy.

Wrapping Up

Well today is trash day and I need to finish gathering it. I hope you all have a great day… and I hope my tone has not been too ranty lately. I’ve just had various things that I feel passionate about on my mind. When I start talking about them… I tend to come out a bit more harsh than I intend to. I am sure that lately I have come off as a PlayStation fanboy… but I am just supporting what I feel like is the better deal. I own both an Xbox and a PS3 and have games I play on both regularly.

Ten MMO Must Haves

July 1, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I got up roughly 15 minutes before the alarm went off… and decided to that rather than be groggy later… I would go ahead and get up and around. Right now I am kind of questioning that decision, since the bed seems like a really amazing idea. I had a really spastic yesterday as I never could really decide on a game to play. Since Final Fantasy beta was closed by the time I got up and around I ended up cycling through Everquest, Rift, Vanguard, and Defiance never quite sticking in any of them. As a result I don’t have much excitement to talk about… and I am nowhere near finished with my second part of How To Rift… so I am going off in a completely different direction.

Ten MMO Must Haves

Basically over the years I have noticed several features that I expect most MMOs to have, and when they are not there it greatly harms my enjoyment for the long run. I keep cycling back to the ones that do have most of the list. Granted this is in no way a complete list, as I am sure there are things I have omitted for the sake of a clean number, but these are definitely all things I would prefer to see in an upcoming title. These are not necessarily in order of importance… but more the order in which I thought of them.

1 – Random Events

Nothing breaks up the monotony of questing and killing mobs like a random army invading the countryside. I have always liked when random things happen in games, I even like random loot so long as it is not something I need to progress forwards. In the post Rift MMO world, I feel like random things happening in your world is an absolute must have. When it is missing, the game feels extremely stale to me. When it is done well, you forget what you are doing and follow along the flow of what is happening in a specific zone. This should be events chosen from a long list of potential ones… not the same event happening over and over like in Guild Wars 2. Their implementation did not serve to make the world feel alive, but instead made it feel even more like a carnival ride resetting itself every so often.

2 – Passive Grouping

I should be able to help other players out, and they help me without having to worry about whether or not I tagged the mob first. Grouping should be something you do to hang out with people, not something you feel obligated to do constantly just to get through game content. I feel as though simply touching a mob should give me credit for whatever that mob is required for. Rift and Guild Wars definitely do this extremely well… but when I go back to a game that does not have it… I become a kill stealing asshole. I just forget that mob tagging is an actual thing that is still in games. If you do not have passive mob tagging… you are bad and should feel bad.

3 – Puzzles and Collectibles

I have the tendencies in me to power level myself to the cap and then get bored feeling there is nothing left to do. If your game has little puzzles and collectible bits it helps to make me stop and smell the roses. I feel for other players this becomes a meta game all in itself. These systems all seem relatively simple to implement, but it seems like there is a greater return on investment as far as gluing a player to your game. Rift and GW2 both have amazing examples of puzzles, and EQ2 has probably the most extensive collection system I have seen in a game. I greatly prefer there to be something for me to always be on the lookout for, that offers interesting gameplay and forces me to stop quest grinding.

4 – Moveable UI Elements

This one is huge to me. Essentially I will if given the option set my UI to look the same from game to game. I like certain windows in certain locations because it helps me not have to think about where things are. When you play lots of different MMOs this becomes something extremely important. Additionally I find myself setting up all my hotbars the same… 0 is the interrupt key, 7 is my combo point dump, 5 is charge/deathgrip, etc. As a result I really hate your game when you force me to play with your idea of how the UI should look. No matter how much research you have put into your UI, it is not ideal for everyone… and as a result you should never force players into your chosen UI design box. Make the windows unlock able and moveable either through the default UI like Rift or through Addons like WoW.

5 – Map with User Defined Waypoints

This is another big one for me. Navigating your world should be easy for the players. I should be able to open my map, click a point that I want to travel to and then get some kind of directions as to how to get there. This can be as simple as an Icon on the edge of the mini-map showing you the direction of your destination, or as complex as some sort of golden path or arrow pointing the way. Additionally it would be really amazing if your system allowed player defined permanent waypoints. That way we could actively mark whenever we found something cool in your world. TSW does an amazing job of this.. and I have tons of little markers scattered through all my maps pointing to nifty things I found. This is definitely something all games should emulate.

6 – Sortable/Searchable Bank and Inventory

First off let me say.. that the concept of physical bags with limited storage is something no one should ever do again. I greatly prefer one big inventory space because usually with that comes the ability to sort, filter, and search the contents of your inventory. Rift does an interesting hybrid model, in that they still have physical bags, but they have a sort and search functionality that makes up for the fact of having to juggle multiple containers rather than just one. Trying to find things in your bags should not be considered a meta game… and you should help players out so they have to spend as little time doing this as possible. There have been times I have logged into EQ2… looked at the state of my bags and logged out immediately because I did not want to spend the next 30 minutes clearing them out. That game is the worst case scenario… but I have had similar happen in many other games as well. Make your inventory system help the player rather than hinder them.

7 – Sell All Junk Button

If your game drops junk items from mobs aka “Greys” and you do not have a sell all junk button… you are a horrible person and should be drug out into the street and shot. Nothing is more frustrating than going through your inventory and having to manually sell a bunch of trash items that have no real purpose for existing other than to give you some cash. Better yet, don’t even drop the trash items and give us additional gold instead. I think the running theme of the last two should be that Inventory Maintenance is not a fun meta game. No one enjoys it, and all it does is make the player feel like they have just completely wasted their time. I am completely fine with getting additional cash in lieu of junk, but if you do have junk… for the love of god make a sell all crap button.

8 – AOE Looting

Thank you Rift for creating this construct… and thank you modern MMO developers for having the common sense to say “damn, why didn’t we have this” and adding it to your games. Nothing is more annoying than trying to select that one corpse from a pile of corpses that still has loot on it. My OCD will not let me go without searching all the bodies… it is like I knew that if I missed one… that would be the one that dropped some rare epic item. Again this is a cousin of the whole inventory maintenance is not a fun meta game… neither is looting. Better yet… all corpse interactions should be AOE as well… where the hell is my AOE skinning. The first company to give me AOE skinning, herbing, and mining of corpses… will be a god in my eyes.

9 – Full Character Appearance System

Now when I say this… I am not talking about Transmogrification. I could go on an hour long rant about how horrible that system is and how it is a half assed version of the good appearance systems. What I am talking about is additional sets of character doll slots that allow you to directly override the appearance of an item with another item. Rift has probably the best implementation overall right now, since you can have something like 12 wardrobe slots with ready to switch to outfits on the fly. The only gotcha there is due to their own constraints they had to implement a shitty “transmog” like system for doing the weapons. Players should never have to run back to a vendor to change their appearance… stop making them do busy work. I would love to see developers emulate the way the system works in EQ2, because you can literally change your appearance to anything in the game… no class restrictions.

10 – Facial Hair

I had a few other items I considered putting on the list… but honestly to me personally this one has to be here. If your game does not have the ability for me to give my character a nice beard, especially a moustache and goatee combo… I will hate your character creator and likely not play your game. I have no clue why this is so important to me… but it is. Namely I have seen the lack of facial hair in the Asian MMOs… but I struggled to find a look I could stomach in Guild Wars 2 as well. Additionally I cannot stand the “pretty boy” appearance that some games have… but I won’t go into that right now. Please for the love of god when you design your character creator… make Facial Hair a slider… not something that is attached to another attribute like hairstyle.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it… my ten must haves for a modern MMO. Like I said, I am sure that it is not a complete list at all… and as soon as I post this… I will think of another 10 things that should have been on the list. These however are the things that immediately came to mind when being frustrated with MMOs that do not have them. I would be curious to hear about what your list is, and whether or not I have hit your key frustration points. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope I manage to stay fully conscious all day long since I got up so early.