Yesterday the floodgates opened on a new game vying for our attention in the emerging Looter Shooter genre. This morning I am going to talk about my impressions of the almost four hours I ended up playing last night. This will be in no way an adequate representation of the game because I just haven’t spent enough time with it to be certain about how anything works yet. Since this demo is freely available to pretty much everyone at this point… I highly suggest you just skip this post and go make your own impressions. So as such I will lead off with download links so you can do just that. There will be spoilers for the story ahead, or at least some broad summarizations of plot points. Be warned.
I am going to be honest one of the biggest challenges with Outriders is that it is going to need to carve its own identity because out of the gate it feels like a remix of a bunch of concepts we have already seen before in various forms. I was jokingly referring to it as Gears of Destiny yesterday because it feels HEAVILY inspired by the Gears of War franchise. On top of that there is a heavy mix of Guerilla Faction, Defiance, Rage, Killzone and the Mass Effect multiplayer engine. Ultimately the question is does this blend work? Yeah I think it mostly does and the gameplay feels extremely fluid and enjoyable, enough that I went ahead and purchased the game after experiencing the demo.
Why did I go ahead and plunk my money down for this ride? The truth is that the game is telling me a story that is cohesive and understandable. I love the incomprehensible nonsense that is Destiny that has forced me to dig hard to get the little information that I have, but in a new franchise that I am not already sold on and that also seems like an assemblage of parts that I have seen before… they need to hook me on a narrative. So far it seems like legitimately this is a game you can play entirely for the single player story and it will be an enjoyable ride. The thumbnail for the story is that at some point in the future we have destroyed the Planet Earth. The story doesn’t really go into a lot of detail about this but I figure it will probably be something teased out over time.
In order to survive there are two colony ships loaded full of folks and sent towards what appears to be an inhabitable planet. While in transit something happens to one of the ships and it explodes leaving you as one of the last remaining members of what appears to be a law enforcement/expeditionary force type group called the Outriders. This seems significant but we aren’t given a lot of detail about what it means. You are part of the first group to make landfall and at first things seem to be just as idyllic as the postcards made it out to be. However the longer you are planet side the more things go south because apparently the planet is effected by giant storms of some sort of energy that straight up disintegrates some things that it touches… others it leaves changed but it will be awhile before the game elaborates on that fact.
Some events transpire that end up with you being stuck back in a Cryopod… and shocking to no one you wake up much later than originally intended. During the almost forty years that pass things have gone from bad to worse as the planet is essentially divided into two groups: The original expeditionary force that is dwindling in numbers and a group of separatists that appear to have gone full on Fallout raider and I strongly suspect are cannibals by what could only be described as “meat cages”. You wake up on the wrong side of the lines and in your attempt to escape you realize that you have become “altered” and with that comes special powers.
Queue the class selection screen. It was around this point that I alt tabbed out to YouTube and watched a few videos summarizing the classes. More specifically I watched the video that Ginger Prime put out some time back. Based on my limited understanding of the classes the break down goes a little something like this.
Technomancer – Ice based Long ranged support/gadgets lone wolf that almost has a pet class rhythm to it because I believe it can eventually drop turrets. Heals based on long ranged encounters.
Pyromancer – Fire based medium range engagements and lots of elemental damage synergy and crowd control abilities. Heals based on kills of things with its elemental debuffs on it.
Trickster – Time ability based short range assassin type character that gets in does a lot of damage and gets back out. Gets healed and shielded when killing something at close range.
Devastator – Earth based tanky short to medium range engagements that heals based on killing encounters that are in short range.
After looking at the various options I ended up going Devastator since I like being Tanky, but I also like a run and gun up close and personal style. I spent most of the night running around with an Assault Rifle and a Shotgun and shifting in and out of close and medium range using the abilities of the class that I will get into shortly.
Each class has a talent tree system that allows for further customization. From what I understand regardless of the class there is a tree that is a bit more tanky, so that everyone can tank in a pinch. The trees that are open to me with Devastator are Vanquisher, Warden and Seismic Shifter. From what I understand Warden is my very tanky, very focused on having more health and taking less damage tree. Vanquisher seems to be focused on piercing armor and interrupts so might be more team/support focused pending you are not taking the role as tank. Seismic Shifter appears to be about doing big AOE earthquake damage and taking out lots of stuff at the same time. Being who I am… I am probably going mostly down the Warden path.
In addition to talents that give more passive tweaks to your other abilities, there are some active class skills that unlock as you go through the game. You can have three of these equipped at one time and can mix and match them as you go. Right now I have unlocked exactly three, the first being Earthquake which sends out a field of rock in front of me and any mob that it touches causes spikes to shoot up from the ground dealing significant damage. The next is Golem which gives me a rock based overshield causing me to take 65% reduced damage for 8 seconds. Gravity leap is really interesting in that it causes me to jump up into the air… turn into floating rocks and then go slamming down on whatever I target with the left mouse button dealing a large amount of AOE damage when I come slamming down. I use that one a lot as a gap closer on whatever mob is giving me the most grief.
What I am finding most interesting about my class is that in reality… I am not a boss tank. Like bosses are the one thing that I seem to struggle with the most because most bosses punish you severely for close range encounters. What I want to do instead is draw the hate of all of the little guys because each time I kill one of those I heal myself back up significantly allowing me to sustain that action pretty much indefinitely being a roaming bullet sponge. I am hoping to get some time to test this theory over the weekend with some group play, but I am thinking that really is going to be the synergy. You have your dps focus on burning the boss from cover and your tank causes mayhem running around like mad picking up the ire of little packs that I then smash to pieces for health and profit.
Based one what I am seeing gear wise, it seems that when you pick up something blue or better you start getting ability modifiers. This leads me to believe that the end game of Outriders is going to involve some Diablo 3 style builds that abuse specific attributes on your gear to buff abilities and make them significantly more powerful. If I had to guess probably when you get purple gear they are going to start giving you more than one modifier at a time. What I don’t know however is if these modifiers are completely random or if it is fixed like Diablo so you can seek out specific items to fill specific slots. I am honestly hoping it is the later because fully randomized gear may present the same problem that Anthem did of giving you a bunch of items that are potentially useless.
So I have talked about a lot of positives, so we are going to throw out a negative. Sometimes character creation systems end up being unintentionally racist. I feel awkward saying this given that my skin tone can only accurately be represented by the pink crayon in the Crayola box… but like representation is really important in video games. While creating my character I noticed that the skin tone offerings were entirely dependent upon the face that you chose. This morning I pulled together an example of this where I selected the darkest available tone with every single face and then edited them all together. There is exactly one face type that is allowed to be dark brown, with a second being allowed to be more medium… and then everyone else looks like they have just been using bronzer. The folks at People Can Fly can do better and I hope they do as the game goes on. Thankfully it appears that cosmetic changes are free so if they do add in more options folks can re-customize.
Like I said above I enjoyed the game enough to go ahead and purchase it. I only did this because I wanted the cool skin for my vehicle, which I assume gets unlocked for usage later in the game. I think it is going to be enjoyable to at least play through the story and solo around a bit. I am hoping it will be enjoyable for group play because what I have seen so far makes me think that there is going to be a lot of party synergy going on. I hope to get some time in this weekend trying something group based, but it also appears that you can pretty much complete all of the game in co-op mode for those who are inclined to do so. So since this is an impression piece… other than the melanin slider woes… my impressions of the game is pretty solid.
So yesterday was a bit of a busy one for me. I ended up only working half a day as my wife and I got our first round of Covid-19 vaccinations yesterday. I am shocked and amazed that we have at least one round down after hearing all of the horror stories about family members trying to get theirs. It required a bit of a drive however and my phone battery was a little low so I mostly stayed off social media. When I get back home eventually and log into twitter I see a reply from a friend of mine stating that I sounded prophetic about Anthem Next yesterday morning. Of course this lead me to start googling and apparently there was an official announcement about the future of the revamp in BioWare Blog form. The most relevant bits are as follows:
In the spirit of transparency and closure we wanted to share that we’ve made the difficult decision to stop our new development work on Anthem (aka Anthem NEXT). We will, however, continue to keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today.
Christian Dailey – BioWare Blog
So I guess that is it and now the grieving can finally begin. So yesterday when I said I didn’t think it was actually going to happen, there was a part of me still holding out hope to be proven wrong. I liked the mess that was Anthem quite a bit, but ultimately reached a point where it didn’t feel like my time invested in the game was worth it. Even then if you go look at my Origin profile, I logged 214 hours of gameplay before I ultimately gave up on it. I was pretty damned invested in this game and I wanted it to succeed, but I think we all sorta saw the writing on the wall. Much like the other gut punch of the week, the closing of Fry’s Electronics… it wasn’t a surprise but it still really hurts to see it happen.
What Was Wrong?
So each player is going to ultimately have their own hit list for what went wrong with Anthem, but for me personally it boils down to two points. The first is that the game just needed more content simple as that. The story that you play through in the campaign felt like the opening chapter of a much larger tale. I believe that the intent was to do seasonal content drops that moved the story along and because they had to spend so much time triaging launch issues, this original plan was completely scrapped. The problem with this however is the base version of Anthem almost feels like a Demo for what the final product should have been.
Not only was it missing Story Content but it was missing activities for the players to participate. The game needed easily two to three times as many Strongholds as were available so that you could string together a good play list without it feeling like you were always getting the one you liked or the one you didn’t like. Ultimately the game in its current state has four multiplayer activities that matter:
Tyrant Mine – The Bug Hunt One
The Temple of Scar – The Protect the thing from the Scar One
Heart of Rage – Doesn’t Open Up Until You Beat Game
The Sunken Cell – Patched in Post Launch
There simply just needed to be more of these. If you had eight of them instead of four then I think that probably would have felt like a reasonable play list. Destiny for example has 15 Strikes in their current playlist and there were an additional 7 Strikes available prior to Beyond Light. At the launch of Destiny 2 they had 6 Strikes which seemed a bit tight but they rapidly patched in additional strikes with the first two content drops, which landed as planned without interruptions. Basically Anthem just needed more across the board of content to do at all levels because it very quickly became repetitive.
Misunderstanding Their Loot Model
The other major problem that Anthem had was that I do not think at a fundamental level they understood their own loot model. As an avid Diablo 3 player… I fully understood the type of loot that I was receiving. In D3 the loot is plentiful because it feels good to get shiny things, but any given item you get is usually deeply flawed in some way. D3 gives you ways of fixing this but makes it extremely expensive, so the alternative is to just keep doing content until a better version drops. The challenge there however is that in order for this flawed but plentiful loot model to work… the loot needs to flow like water. You need to be deluged with reasonable gear candidates so that from the dross you can piece together a few gems to make a reasonable gear set.
In Anthem there was a massive difference in functionality between a good item and a bad item and this felt awful especially considering how rare it was to get a Legendary item to drop. When that Legendary was something that you either didn’t need or couldn’t use it was extremely demoralizing. I think this was improved a little bit with the Cataclysm they introduced and the ability to target specific gear slots, but at that point the player base as a whole was largely gone. I attempted to play the Cataclysm several times but was never able to matchmake a full team and usually speaking it was just me and another player trying to make it work.
A Last Hurrah
So of those two problems… they cannot fix the first one because the team is being pulled off the project. There will be no more content trickling into the game and that sucks. However since loot setting should just be some server variables if they did things correctly… they could maybe tweak the generosity a bit. Were I BioWare, I would crank up the loot and let those who want to play the game at least do so in a method that fits the gear model that they ended up with. Let the magical 8 sided dice that aren’t called Engrams reign down from above and cover us in sub part loot options for the slim hope that maybe just maybe one of them will be useful! For me personally that would have gone a long ways towards keeping me engaged.
I enjoyed the core gameplay loop but I ended up in a place where it felt like I just could not move upwards because I wasn’t getting the gear needed to keep moving upwards. I was fine grinding the Hive Tyrant over and over and over again so long as there was a loot payout but when I could run for four hours and see a single hint of lime green… it seemed like my time was better spent doing literally anything else. Cranking up the drops would help to salve the community a bit, if there even is a community anymore. The few times they screwed up and accidentally turned the loot up to eleven were some of the most enjoyable periods in the game for me. I happened to catch a few of these lucky streaks and it felt AMAZING.
Damaged Faith
Game development is hard. Decisions like these are not easy. Moving forward, we need to laser focus our efforts as a studio and strengthen the next Dragon Age, and Mass Effect titles while continuing to provide quality updates to Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Christian Dailey – BioWare Blog
There is one more relevant quote from the BioWare blog that I want to talk about this morning. The theory is that they are abandoning Anthem to double their efforts on Dragon Age and Mass Effect projects, which is perfectly fine and probably the most reasonable option. That said I have no faith that BioWare in its current state is going to do anything to support those games either. This is the second big BioWare title in a row that they have abandoned support for prematurely. I was a huge fan of Mass Effect Andromeda and I am still pissed that we will never get any DLC content for that game or likely have much in the way of denouement for the loose ends that the game left. Once again it was a game that told a partial story because you could see them leaving the door open for follow up content that never actually came.
Sure this could be a bad streak for a good studio, or it could just be that the BioWare that we knew and loved is no more and whatever is left is no longer capable of the long-term stewardship of our hopes and dreams. Star Wars the Old Republic is mentioned but that game has more or less been in an extended maintenance mode since the wrap up of the Knights of the Eternal Throne storyline far as I am aware. As gamers we have this bad habit of latching onto a studio and viewing them as something different than the assemblage of the people that were in it. BioWare has been bleeding staff for years and thanks to the Dev Whisperer we have seen the pretty sorry state of their internal affairs. I am not sure at what point they stop being capable of supporting the franchise that we have loved for so long.
Grieving is Hard
Anthem was a wound that had never fully healed but I had managed to scab over a bit and put it out of my mind. Yesterdays news however ripped that scab off and I am once again bleeding a bit. So as such I am a bit touchy about it this morning, and with it comes a certain over dramatic melancholy with my writing. Now I am trying to decide if I want to reinstall the game and give it one last shot on the way out the door or just put the entire thing to bed as a failed experiment. Anthem was a good game and I enjoyed it greatly for as much as we actually got of it. I just wanted more or what was working and more generosity. Folks will claim that they have learned their lessons from Diablo 3, but those same folks seem to not actually understand why that game works. As a player that returns like clockwork every time a new Diablo 3 season opens… I can guarantee that Anthem did not learn that lesson.
This post is a bit disjointed but I also feel like I needed to get it out of my system. My blog often times is therapy for me and when I have written something I can finally start to put it out of my mind. I think this might be the case for Anthem. That said I will probably still be in mourning for a bit.
Well folks, we are here. We have made it to the end of this list thing… and I feel a little battered for it. Going through all of this has been a bit of a mental journey. I started out thinking that it would be super easy to list out all of the MMOs that I have played in the past but then you run into challenges of which ones deserve to be included and which were far too brief to even mention. Further compounded is the fact that as I sit down and list these out I am certainly going to miss a few in the process. My memory as I age has become terribly fallible. Hopefully you my fine readers have at least gotten some measure of enjoyment out of the process.
Destiny 2
I love Destiny and when I refer to the game I sorta blend together the gap between the first and second games… but there was most definitely a gap. When I first sat down and played Destiny 1, the only thing that I wanted more than anything was to be able to play it on my platform of choice with my gaming implements of choice… aka PC and Keyboard and Mouse. With Destiny 2 it seemed like that reality was finally going to come true… albeit with a significant lag between the console and PC versions. The problem with Destiny 2 at release is that it felt like a massive step backwards as far as content and functionality. The thing is when Destiny 1 finished its run it was in a really great place. Rise of Iron was a phenomenal expansion and improved so many things in the game and with the launch of Destiny 2… it was very clear that this was in progress for some time and completely missed the memo on a number of those changes. It wasn’t really until the Forsaken expansion that Destiny 2 saw the same sort of greatness that its predecessor did. The core problem with Destiny however is that they have landed on a seasonal model and it feels very much like I need to play ONLY Destiny in order to complete everything before the next season ticks around. Additionally I hate the model of a revolving door of content that we get some new activity and then a few months later it is removed in favor of something else. Finally more recently with Beyond Light they began the process of removing large chunks of the game for the sake of progress and I just cannot get on board with this. I love Destiny but I am in a frustrated state with the experience right now.
Anthem
Anthem had so damned much potential but launched in an incomplete state and never really got their feet back under them. I legitimately love what this game could have been, because it is hard to actually love the final product. I love the Javelins and I love the flow of content, but the games content was an exercise in trying to come up with the minimum viable product. Anthem feels like getting the first novel in a Wheel of Time style epic story… and then the Author walking away from it. The story was great, but it felt like we got only the first chapter and the thing that every single game like this seems to struggle with is nailing the release cadence because content is just harder to create than anyone plans for it to be. The team got mired in post release patching which was desperately needed and started missing windows and before long the entire roadmap was tossed out. Do I think Anthem Next will fix the problems and deliver the product we wanted all this time? I somehow doubt it… not everyone gets to be FFXIV or No Man’s Sky and have the comeback tale where everyone embraces it later and cheers it along. I want this to happen because there were so many phenomenal moments… but we just needed more of them and for someone to fucking learn the right lessons from the itemization failures of the past. You can’t be a game with diablo style randomized (often times useless) loot and then be stingy as hell with it.
Dauntless
Dauntless was a cool concept and it saw a niche that was not being served. Up until this point there really was no true Monster Hunter experience on the PC and when I first experienced it at Pax South I was intrigued… and also really damned bad at playing it. The monkey wrench thrown into this plan is the fact that I doubt the Dauntless team expected Monster Hunter World to be launching on the PC. Once that gauntlet was thrown down it became a race to market and Dauntless did not launch near fast enough for it to gain the sort of platform traction required to stave off the assault of the real deal. All of that said Dauntless has done a really good job of carving out their own niche. Platform agnostic cross play is a HUGE part of this equation, but for me personally it still feels like I am playing a clone of Monster Hunter with maybe not as many highly detailed systems. The monster design feels a bit more generic and the art style isn’t really my jam for this sort of gaming experience. I played quite a bit of the game when it first launched and then have not really touched it since apart from occasionally claiming Twitch Prime rewards.
Warframe
Warframe is the best game that I cannot stand at all. There are multiple layers that get in the way of me playing this game. The first is the uncanny combination of the POV, camera position, and the speed of movement ends up giving me motion sickness. That right there alone is a deal breaker and while it lessens a bit when I am on my 4K display it is still there. The other core problem I have with the game is the art style. I do not love the whole biomech Guyver thing going on with the suit design. If you had put them in Gundam/Robotech/G1 Transformer looking mecha bodies then I probably would have fought through the first problem to keep playing. When I look at Warframe suits I just see the dumb choices made with the Michael Bay movie Transformers. Lastly what I find I really want in the game is some sort of big open world leveling mission equivalent to a Destiny patrol. I am told this thing exists but every attempt I have made to play the game in this style has ended up with me feeling like I am forced down a mission path. All of this said… there is no team out there that supports a game quite in the way that Digital Extremes does and the product that they are delivering at least on paper is phenomenal. I am jealous of the folks who are super into this game much the same as me being jealous of the folks who enjoy Guild Wars 2, but similarly I just can’t get into it.
Genshin Impact
I was so damned into this game for a few months last year, but recently I have struggled to get back engaged. Genshin Impact is a weird mishmash of an Action MMO, Breath of the Wild and a loot box Gacha game. The combination can be super addicting and as such there are folks who have legitimately spent tens of thousands of dollars chasing characters from the loot box pulls. I spent a fair amount of money myself but nothing even vaguely close to that order of magnitude. I really need to get back into the pattern of logging in and at least doing my dailies, but the problem that I run up against is the artificial caps. Like everything that I seemed to need came from the weekly boss fights, so if I fought them and got bad luck I was locked out of meaningful progression for another week. Traditionally XP boosters in a game are a way of speeding things up… but in Genshin Impact there is no viable way to level characters without using them, meaning that you can’t even focus on leveling alternate characters when the things that give you meaningful progression are on cooldown. The game is constantly changing and evolving and I need to catch back up at least on story… but I would love to see them address the experience gain issue.
Devilian
In the “Games No One Remembers” column, I present to you Devilian. There was a period of time where Trion games was spending a lot of effort localizing a number of games. One of these was a Diablo clone from South Korea called Devilian. I honestly enjoyed it quite a bit but had some key problems with the game. I remember it suffering from the F2P MMO trope of having gender locked classes which always feel awful. I was super happy when I got into testing on the game because I am a huge fan of the Diablo ARPG genre. Going back through my posts about it I am remembering now that the community was sorta toxic. I liked playing the Berserker and apparently that was “casual mode” and anyone that wanted l to play that was trash that you shouldn’t ever invite to a group. The other challenge is that the game didn’t feel like it had any sort of a Sword and Board tanky character, which is another trope that I really enjoy in this sort of game. I love the Diablo 3 Crusader for example. The game had a lot of potential but ultimately was shuttered in January of 2018.
Animal Crossing: New Horizon
So I realize you are just about to say “But Bel, Animal Crossing isn’t an MMO” and I am going to say bullshit. The way that the community interacts with this game and the complex systems of player based trading that has evolved and visiting each others Islands… ABSOLUTELY makes this game an MMO. Animal Crossing New Horizon was my very first foray into the franchise and I was super freaking into it for a month… and it got me through the worst of getting adjusted to this post apocalyptic pandemic hell that we now live in. I bounced once I realized that I felt a sense of urgency to do all of the things each day for fear of losing imaginary progress. At some point I want to return but when I do I am going to time travel like a fiend and do things on my terms rather than the real world day/night cycle of this game.
Crowfall
Crowfall is a game that I keep periodically booting up and trying to play, but I can’t for certain tell you what in the hell the game is actually trying to do. There is a crafting system and then there is combat… but everything else about the game feels sorta wishy washy in between. The combat is vaguely interesting as is the crafting but the two of them combined do not necessarily add up to be a compelling gameplay experience. I have not followed the Crowfall community and as such I am largely viewing this game as an outsider and I can’t say I get it yet. This is a long time of games that I backed once upon a time and I keep poking my head into it. I would love someone to explain to me what Crowfall wants to be when it grows up, because right now at this very moment it feels like it is trying to be a chaotic mess.
Lineage II Revolution
You ever find yourself playing a game and you don’t really know why? This was me for a few months as I was poking my head into Lineage II Revolution each night on my phone. This is probably the first game that I tried to play from the “mobile mmo click a button to have the game do the thing for you” genre. It was pretty short lived because I rapidly realized that the gameplay itself wasn’t really anything worth completing on your own… which is why they give you the button that just makes the game do it for you. I am sorta glad though that I played through something like this so I at least feel like I understand this genre a bit more. I was trying to approach it as though it were a traditional game, when instead it is just a loot box with pretty graphics.
Moonrise
This is another in a long line of games that I remember fondly… but likely no one else does but the developers. When I met with the Undead Labs folks at Pax South, they were showing off two games… State of Decay: Year One Survivor Edition or YOSE and Moonrise which was intended to be the second game released from the studio. It was this amalgam of a Pokemon pet battler with an online MMO and I honestly found it really enjoyable. You were a Warden and something made the local fauna get angry and start attacking people so you used your trained pets to battle them and calm them back down. At least that is what I remember of the core story. The battles were really enjoyable though and it was targeting PC and mobile platforms with cross play. Had they managed to bring this to market I think it would have been a pretty big success. I have no clue what happened in the development process but it was ultimately canned in 2015.
Project Gorgon
If the Uncanny Valley were a video game it would be Project Gorgon. Gorgon is a game that I believe strives to play like your memories of Everquest and Asheron’s Call. What ends up causing the uncanny valley effect is the high fidelity rendering of the world with very low fidelity gameplay. The other challenge I had with the game is just how universally awful your characters gear always looks because you wear things out of availability, not because they look good. In fine art and music there is this concept of “Outsider Art“, or artists who are completely self taught without any mentorship or contemporaries and the end result often ends up both brilliant and wildly jarring at the same time. Project Gorgon feels like an Outsider Art video game.
TemTem
Have you ever found yourself uttering the phrase “There should really be a Pokémon MMO”? Grats it exists and it is called Tem Tem. This game is a love letter to the Pokémon Franchise delivered originally on the PC and in MMORPG format. I originally backed this game when I believe it was on Kickstarter and then played it off and on during Alpha and Beta tests. It evolved slowly from very much not a game to a fully fledged designer impostors Pokémon game. Tem Tem is the game that made me realize that I don’t ACTUALLY like Pokémon games that much. I didn’t grow up with Pokémon and I first played “Blue” on a Gameboy Emulator and then it wasn’t until X/Y that I picked up the series again. I enjoy the collection of new critters but I do not really like pet battles at all. That is not to say that I won’t get sucked into the hype of a Pokémon game at some point in the future, but I am realizing my own tastes a bit more.
Lego Minifigures Online
Did you know that Funcom created a Diablo Clone that involved you buying the collectable blind bags of Lego MiniFigures and then using the code inside to register new characters? It is okay, no one else did either and that is I guess why this game more or less just sort of faded away. One series of MiniFigures had the codes and the next didn’t and the project was never spoken of again. The entire thing officially closed in September of 2016, but I remember the game fondly. It was actually rather enjoyable and many of the characters had wildly different combat methods. You built a team of three characters and then could switch back and forth between them freely allowing you to focus on the strengths of each and rely on the team as a whole to solve any challenges you might encounter. This is yet another game that tried to ride in on Skylanders mania only to flop when the Physical Toys as DLC thing faded from the zeitgeist for everyone but diehard Amiibo collectors.
Diablo 3
Diablo 3 right now is probably my favorite MMORPG, but mostly because of the concept of seasons and the way we interact with them. Diablo 3 itself is a great gameplay experience and I have so much freaking love for this game. However the parts that I really love are the intangibles that come from the way that I play it. Namely my friend Grace and I and occasionally other folks have this tradition of staying up and playing Diablo 3 on the opening night of a season. As we have gotten older we have lasted shorter periods of time in this initial grind, but we more or less treat it like the launch of a new MMORPG, which for me is the most exciting period for a game. We have this condensed week or two of serious play and then get as far in the season as we care to get… and then walk away for three months until the next season starts. It ends up being this great cycle of intense activity that we can walk away from easily without feeling like we are missing something.
Monster Hunter Online
Sometimes I do some really dumb things and go through a lot of effort for very minimal enjoyment payout. When I get into something I have a bad habit of getting super obsessed with that thing for a period of time. When I was into Monster Hunter World I was trying to engage with as many Monster Hunter things as I could in a short period of time… and among those rabbit holes I found out that apparently there was a Monster Hunter MMORPG that only came out in China. This process involved me faking some sort of Citizen ID that is required to sign up for any sort of online game. The end result was a really poorly playing online MMORPG that was immediately forgettable, but I kept playing it because I felt like I needed to get something out of the effort I just went through. Sometimes I think I do these dumb things just so I will have a story to tell about it.
Sky Saga
Sky Saga was the first game that I remember playing that was very much “Minecraft but an MMO” that I played. It had its moment in the sun as the new hotness and so many of us played it for so brief a period of time. One of the great things about my blog is it serves as a journal of what I cared about at a specific time. I apparently cared about Sky Saga in February of 2015 when I got into the Alpha and then stopped caring about it when that phase of the alpha was over. I am sure I probably got invites to other phases but I can’t really remember playing it much other than that initial push. It did lead me to discover Creativerse as well which I played for a time. I am not sure what happened during the development of the game but it permanently halted in August of 2017.
Wolcen
Wolcen and I have this wild ride. I bought into the game when it first showed up on the Steam store and it was very much not really a game at that point. More recently it shaped up into what was a pretty solid adventure with a completely reasonable story. When it officially launched the first chapter of the story I played it hard and heavy for a month, got through the main story… survived its awkward bugs and then then just sorta wandered away because some other shiny object caught my attention. I need to return to it and see how it has progressed in the time I have been away from it.
The Division 1/2
I am going to largely lump the two games together because I have ended up with a very similar experience from them both. I really enjoyed Division when it first launched, in part because I was enthralled by just how detailed the world was. The world was completely miserable and joyless… which sort of ground on you as you played it and I think kept me from engaging much further. Division 2 improves on a lot of that giving you a reason to care about what you are doing in helping out the fledgling survivor communities. The thing I have learned about by playing both games however is that I am not really that into “Military Fantasy” as a genre. I like blowing up aliens and monsters far more than I like killing folks trying to survive in the burnt out husk of society. The other core problem I have had is that there are a very limited number of weapons that I enjoy using, and because of the way in which the drops work… it is somewhat hard trying to make sure I have a current and viable version of one of these weapons on me at all times. I do want to get back in and play some more Division 2 because I think I COULD like it… but I also don’t want to use the level boost and skip all of the story.
Marvel’s Avengers
Marvel’s Avengers has a delightful coming of age story featuring one of my favorite characters Ms. Marvel aka Kamala Khan. I had a lot of fun experiencing that story and that is pretty much the end of positive things I have to say about this game. The problem with that game is that the moment to moment gameplay of Avengers is just not enjoyable. It ends up being repetitive tedium as encounters are way tankier than they should be and the attacks land without feeling any gravity to them. Then there is the whole uncanny valley that is the facial models of this game. They are clearly going for a MCU feel but did not get the rights to the actual actors… leading to the game sorta feeling like you are playing as the stunt doubles. That eventually faded as I played more of the game, but the lack of enjoyable gameplay really was the thing that caused me to bounce. I leveled 2 characters to the level cap, geared out out pretty much to the max and then as I was leveling a third character I asked myself what the hell was the point.
Fallout 76
Fallout 76 has been lampooned by gamers, the press and influencers as this bug riddled money grab by Bethesda. However my personal experience was considerably different and I had a lot of fun running around with friends in the Fallout setting. The whole taking of territory and defending of a base was some of the most fun I have had in a game like this. My schedule did not align with the others and as a result I sorta faded away from the game, but I would love to return to it at some point soon. Since I did not really make significant progress, part of me wants to just start fresh so I can experience what the new player experience is now as compared to what it was previously before the introduction of NPCs. I think there is probably a compelling game here and I just need to sort out the time to really engage with it.
Tired of Typing
Well folks… I think that is it. Todays post ran considerably longer because as I was thinking about games… I remembered other games that I figured I should probably include. The second I create this it will immediately be out of date given that I am constantly engaging with new online games. For those wondering the final tally at the end… is 82 games. Now I am ready to not do this thing and talk about something else.
Hey Friends! I have been doing this thing where I run down the various MMORPGs that I have played in the past and talk a bit about each of them. We are on part 4 and up until this point we have covered 45 different games and today we tackle another fifteen. Why fifteen? I have no clue that jus sort of worked out to be where I lost steam and was unwilling to keep moving forward on that first day… and then after that the format stuck.
Runes of Magic
I knew once I started down this list I would think of some other games that I played quite a bit that I failed to throw on it. As such yesterdays discussion of Echo of Souls… made me remember the first soulless free to play WoW Clone that I ever played. I am talking about Runes of Magic which released by Taiwanese developer Runewalker and at the time was what felt to be one of the most shameless copies of World of Warcraft out there. Of course it didn’t actually feel anything like WoW, but that is sort of the charm of these low rent knockoffs and I remember it being extremely popular for a while among my friend who specifically were struggling to pay that monthly subscription fee. It too was what I would term as “aggressively mediocre” but I had some fun. It introduced me to the concept of temporary bag space and item rentals… which seems to be part and parcel with the RMT game nonsense. I’ve often wondered if the game ever improved.
Forsaken World
If Runes of Magic was the first for me… I think the one that FELT the most like World of Warcraft was Forsaken World from 2012. This was built by Perfect World which at the time was a nonsensical name that meant absolutely nothing to me… little did I know that they were just about to go on a buying spree and snap up a bunch of games that I actually cared about. What Forsaken World improved upon was the general feel and flow of combat and the art style. It felt significantly less asset flip and while completely copying the art style of World of Warcraft, the world felt cohesive. I was particular partial to the Stonemen… which was sort of a Granok before Wildstar kind of vibe. The key problem I had with the game is that each race was SEVERELY limited in the number of classes they could choose from… so for example as Stonemen I could be Protector… which admittedly is probably why I went with that race in the first place whereas my more traditional Dwarves could only be Marksmen. This game also suffered from another favorite from the free to play genre… gender locked classes. If you could look past all of that bullshit however the game itself wasn’t half bad.
Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
After that brief aperitif we get into the actually good games. However I have to admit when I first heard that Final Fantasy XIV was being re-released I threw that notion some significant side eye. Were it not for Ashgars insistence that he wanted to play it and ultimately dragging the rest of us into this nonsense I likely would have been a lot slower getting into the game than I was. Fundamentally Final Fantasy XIV is the greatest comeback story of all time as far as video games go. It went from being a game that I struggled to engage with back when I was testing 1.0 to a game that I cherish almost above all others due to the extremely Final Fantasy story. Now when someone asks what my favorite Final Fantasy game is I often times rattle off VI out of habit. In truth if I get to count the entire run of the story starting with A Realm Reborn, through an entire expansions worth of post patches, to Heavensward, Stormblood and now Shadowbringers… the story arc presented is the best Final Fantasy experience you will probably ever have. I just wish I was better about sticking around the game once the story is over, because I pretty much bounce immediately after hitting the level cap each expansion.
Marvel Heroes
I was admittedly late to this party, because I did not play Marvel Heroes by Gazillion until 2014 or so and didn’t really get heavily engaged until 2015. By that time the game had sorted out a lot of its early problems and had one of the best feeling free to play implementations I have experienced. The game had a nonsense number of heroes available and when I started you could play any of them through level 10 and then choose a single hero to unlock all of the way to level 60. I went with one of my perennial favorites Captain America… and thinking back that character might be the reason why I am so focused on tanking with a Sword and Shield. The loss of Marvel Heroes is still a tragedy that I feel all of the time and I had hoped that Marvels Avengers would replace that niche in a loot focused beat em up… but it very much did not. I want this game back so badly and I keep hoping at some point someone out there will leak the source code and maybe get some emulator servers.
Neverwinter
Neverwinter is a bit of a tragedy for me personally. It is a great game but it is a game that is shackled to a less than amazing free to play design. Had this come out during the heyday for World of Warcraft and the subscription model, I think it would have been a significantly better gaming experience. The thing that kills me about Neverwinter honestly is bag bloat. You end up with so many items of questionable usefulness that personally takes me out of what is otherwise a pretty great action MMO. The constant need to do bag triage as I sort through the countless items that drop but aren’t actually useful at all along with a handful of competing currencies and the shop interactions all take what would otherwise be a really fun experience and taint it a bit. That said I still poke my head in from time to time and it is very much an enjoyable experience other than these few frustrations. I really enjoyed all of the user created content that was once available for the game and it is sad that the system was removed.
Trove
When Trove released into alpha I was so completely on board. As I probably hinted at in my discussion of Rift, I had a lot of love for anything Trion. I mean you want your friends to do well in the world right? When they released this “Minecraft with a Purpose” game I was super on board because around the same time I was still poking my head regularly into Minecraft. The game still has one of my favorite concepts called the Cornerstone where you get a plot of land allowing you to build a base on the structure and then move that base to any available and unclaimed plot of land later. This really suited the adventure nature of the game allowing you to build up a functional base of operations and then move it around the world as you shifted up your adventures. Mine ended up being towers with exits and different levels because you ever knew for any certain what biomes might have interesting things going on underground. If you are curious what Trove looked like in Closed Alpha… I recorded a number of videos on it.
The Elder Scrolls Online
Oh god I have so much emotional attachment to The Elder Scrolls Online that it is going to be very hard for me to talk about it in any sort of a partial manner. ESO released in April of 2014, but at that point I had been regularly playing the game since February of 2013 when I was invited into the first wave of private testing. My good friend and AggroChat staff Tamrielo was a game designer on Elder Scrolls Online and as a result I got pretty attached to various aspects of the game. The experience of launching this game and the subsequent toxicity from the player base and literal death threats he received are also why he is no longer in the games industry. For me I had always wanted an MMORPG set in the Elder Scrolls universe and when this released I knew I wanted to take it seriously… and as such I organized some epic levels in that our day one guild had something like 140 people in it which was silly. I stuck around far longer than most of my friends and I still return pretty regularly to play some of the story since I am several content drops behind. This comes from an era when I was pretty regularly streaming so there are a lot of videos of me playing Elder Scrolls Online out there from the launch of the game.
Destiny
I will always carry a torch for Destiny 1 on the PlayStation 4, because this is the game that I wanted to play enough not only to buy a console…. but also to learn how to play an FPS game with a controller. You have to understand what a level of commitment that is because I am a diehard “Keyboard and Mouse for Get the Fuck Out” player when it come to video games. I will use a controller for platformers and “Nintendo” era games but if there is any sort of a 3D camera I want a Mouse and Keyboard. I purchased my PlayStation 4 and timed it to coincide with getting into the Alpha test for this game, and then desperately tried to catch up on twenty years of learning how to control a first person game with two thumbsticks. I have so many cherished memories but my favorite times were raiding Oryx with then Axioma Clan which eventually turned into Tequila Mockingbird that I am in today. My favorite thing in the game however was probably the Prison of Elders, which I used to have a reoccurring date with Jex and JazSquirrel on Thursday nights to do. God I wish I could get back in the habit of playing with other human beings again.
Wildstar
Oh Wildstar… you were such an interesting mess of a game. I wanted to love you so much but there was just something about the interface and combat design that always kept me bouncing. This will go down in history as having the single most interesting housing system in existence and even though I struggled to love you… I still did begrudgingly love you. I have several friends who were super into this game and admittedly a lot of why I kept trying to play was so that I could hang out with them in their native environment. I think in many ways this game is a victim of the hype and attitude that the marketing pushed in front of it… as being sort of the last best hope of achieving the “WoW Killer” status. As such we expected way too much out of this game and when it didn’t deliver on all of those hopes it was treated like a complete failure. Instead I view it as a bit of a beautiful and chaotic mess that was the first game in a long time to compete for the WoW space while evolving the genre in a bunch of meaningful directions. The soundtrack and art design were so damned good, but I think the combat was a little bit ahead of its time.
Landmark
Today’s remembrance is just going to be full of some twelve sads out of ten moments and I am sorry… it just sort of worked out that way. I loved Landmark and I miss it greatly, especially now that I am currently in a binge of playing games like Minecraft and Valheim. There are honestly so many times in Valheim recently that I wish I had the tools that were available in Landmark. Yes I realize that Landmark was less a game and more a development toolkit sold to the player base… but I don’t really give a shit to be honest. I enjoyed what it was for what it was… and the glimmer of hope that it might end up in a magical game called Everquest Next was just the cherry on top. Thinking about this whole situation and the death of Sony Online Entertainment always makes me nostalgic in the wrong direction that makes me want to go downstairs and fix a drink. I had so much fun playing around with these tools and I would love to see this game resurrected at some point…. even though I know it won’t. What I want more than anything is a modern game set in Norrath, which I also doubt is going to happen any time soon.
Skyforge
Such a great game with such a weird gameplay model. Skyforge is one of those games that I always enjoy when I am playing it, but also something that I never think about when I am not. I am not sure exactly what the pricing model for this game was designed to accomplish because I have never once had any desire to give them money for currency. There was never anything that I wanted to buy and I feel like they left so much of that money on the table. For all I know they may do this now, but once upon a time all I wanted was the ability to purchase class unlocks because the leveling system in this game was some grindy nonsense. I think this is also one of the games that plays better with a Controller than with a mouse and keyboard. The storyline is kinda nonsense but it doesn’t matter because the action combat is really fluid and enjoyable. I know Obsidian partnered with the Allods team to develop this game… but I have no clue WHAT they did because the story isn’t exactly a strong point. Well worth checking out however if you have never played it.
Albion Online
This is another game that dates back to that period of time when I was attempting to write gaming news. I got the key and I believe wrote a review of it and largely put the game to bed until it eventually released on steam. I feel like I lack the requisite nostalgia for Ultima Online to really enjoy this sort of game. It does a bunch of interesting things and the game world itself is charming enough, but I always sort of just felt like I was going through the paces. Eve Online is a game with a bunch of interesting things going on, but whenever I play it I just end up mining the Asteroids. Albion Online is similarly a game with apparently a bunch of interesting things going on… but when I play it I end up lugging stone and metal back to town to craft things and then repeating the process over and over until I get bored and leave.
Monster Hunter World
This friends was my first real Monster Hunter experience and I loved it so immensely… and then suddenly stopped playing it and I have no clue why. I was super hooked and I think the big problem that came between me and this game is that it split the game community into a bunch of different bubbles. Remember earlier when I said that I was ride or die for the Mouse and Keyboard? My platform of choice for MHW is the PC… but it released the better part of a year later than the PS4 so I started my adventures on console. The challenge there is that most of the people that I used to play with… also still play it on console but now that I have tasted the forbidden fruit of KbM I struggle going back to a controller. I’ve also been in hyper turtle mode since the pandemic started and other human beings are scary even when it is just playing a game with them online. I need to get over that mental block because I had a freaking blast with this game.
Pokémon Go
That is right friends… I just called Pokémon Go an MMO and there is nothing that you can do about it. You have friends and have the ability to play with other people in the real world and digitally trade things… so that seems like an MMO to me. Like most of the country I was super obsessed with this game starting in July of 2017 and continuing on for a few years of regular play. When the pandemic is abated I have considered picking it back up as a way of convincing myself to actually go out and walk the neighborhood. I remember those heady days after release of going all sorts of strange places in search of unique and interesting Pokémon. There was one specific shopping center that had a high concentration of Pokestops, and at lunch you would see folks parked in their cars doing the telltale motion of throwing a pokeball. I still from time to time launch the app and catch anything that happens to be around me… but I have to say playing in the suburbs always sucked because of lowered density problems.
Dragalia Lost
I am also going to blaspheme and call Dragalia Lost a MMO as well given that we had a guild and played with friends online through mobile phone. This is ultimately the “Gacha” that got me, because I was super into this game for a period of time. I still fire it up from time to time if I am bored in bed, but the magic has sort of faded. For awhile though this was a nightly occurrence of me at a minimum playing through my daily quests before falling asleep each night. I would still love to see this game ported to the Nintendo Switch where you could have significantly higher fidelity controls than a touch screen. If you think I am sassy about a controller… I really hate touch screen interfaces. Great game… interesting characters and just the right amount of friction. Shit… now I sorta want to fire it up and play it again… dammit.
Sixty Down
There we go folks… that is sixty MMOs down and in theory I should be able to wrap things up tomorrow. It is going to be a bit of a jumbo sized episode because I have more than fifteen games left to talk about. I started down this path and now am committed to finish it.
