MMOs I Have Played – Pass It On
Taken from Trembling Hand, I thought this would be an interesting retrospective on my gaming.
How many MMOs have you played? How long did you spend in each one? Which did you enjoy the most?
They're the questions I asked myself the other day, and it resulted in the interesting list below (remind me: why do I still play MMOs, when I haven't enjoyed any of the recent crop?). I figured I'd also throw it open to the MMO blogging community and ask what MMOs have you played?
MMO -- months played -- star rating out of five*
- A Tale In The Desert -- 1 -- ***
- Aion -- 3 -- *****
- Cabal Online -- .25 -- *
- Chronicles of Spellborn -- .5 -- *
- City of Heroes -- 6 -- ***
- Dungeons and Dragons Online -- 1 -- **
- Earth and Beyond -- 5 -- ***
- Free Realms -- .5 -- *
- Guild Wars -- 6 -- ****
- Kingdom of Loathing -- 4 -- ****
- Lord of the Rings Online -- 6 -- ****
- Maple Story -- 3 -- ****
- Megami Tensai Online: IMAGINE -- .5 -- **
- Planetside -- 2 -- ***
- Pirates of the Burning Sea -- .5 -- **
- RF Online -- .5 -- *
- Rose Online -- 1 -- **
- Runes of Magic -- 1 -- **
- Tabula Rasa -- .5 -- *
- Warhammer Online -- .5 -- **
- Wizard101 -- 3 -- *****
- World of Warcraft -- 60 -- *****
*Star rating is an entirely subjective measure of how much you liked it at the time, not how much you'd enjoy playing it today.
Back in the Saddle
So my month long classes are over and I am back to the normal work schedule. Hopefully I can get back to blogging regularly. After not blogging for over a month, it is going to take some getting used to again.
My last month has been filled mostly with work but I did get the chance to game a little bit. Almost all of that was done with Rynala and split between Aion, Guild Wars, and Wizard 101, with Wizard 101 taking over most of our gaming time of the past two weeks.
In Guild Wars, we finished up Nightfall last month and started in on Eye of the North. I cannot say I much care for Eye of the North compared to Nightfall. Nightfall seemed to be the highpoint in the storyline. But then again, I guess it is sort of hard to top the story of killing a god. It does not help that Eye of the North has a bunch of reputations to grind (UGH!) and is not as long as the other campaigns. We only have the last mission and the final boss left and we are not even that motivated to finish. I think it just disappointed me that the last major storyline in Guild Wars was not that exciting. At least it was still better than the terrible story that was Factions.
Aion has been an absolute blast. We initially went and leveled Elyos and Asmodian characters to level 10 on the NA open beta and then went and played on the Chinese servers since the US beta servers are only up every other weekend. We leveled another set of Elyos characters to 10 and then switched to Asmodian and played them to level 15 or so. At this point we stopped because we did not want to burn out on the game before the NA launch in late September. We probably will not touch it before then.
Aion does have me quite excited. A lot of people just shrug it off as a "WoW-like" but I think that is one of the beauties of the game. It feels a bit like WoW while still having new and foreign elements. Something old and something new. Makes it a lot easier to transition. Either way, I think it is a solid game and I hope it does well after launch. I do not want to speak too soon, but I almost think that it might beat WAR is subscription numbers. One of the big disadvantages WAR had (other than imbalances and broken endgame) was it launched two weeks before Wrath of the Lich King. I do not care how good your game is, it is hard to compete with the 800 pound gorilla. Aion will be launching two months after WoW's patch 3.2. By this time anyone who came back for 3.2 will be getting bored with the content and it will still be at least another three to four months until patch 3.3. It will be a perfect time to draw people away from WoW.
Wizard 101 surprised me. I had played earlier this year and got a character to level 8 before quitting. The lack of community tools, guilds, uncensored chat, or friends in the game pushed me to leave. Reflecting over my MMO time over the last few years showed me that as of recently I have become more and more of a social gamer and so it makes it hard for me to get into games like Wizard 101 if playing solo. To combat this, I talked Rynala into trying the game out with me. She might not like every MMO I try, but she is usually always open to at least trying them. Just like Guild Wars, I figured Wizard 101 would be a lot more fun playing it as a team the whole way through.
I created Seth Lifeweaver, the life wizard and she created Victoria Duskrider, the death wizard. For the first couple hours, she was skeptical and thought she might play it for a week or two but it had little to no long term potential. As we progressed further into the story of the game and deeper into the gameplay, she really started enjoying it. As of last night we both hit level 15 and are about ready to head into Krokotopia, the second world in game. Personally, I was surprised when I found out how fleshed out the story and world actually are. I may be a very social gamer, but I also need at least someone decent stories in my game. This is a reason Wizard 101 works for me and Free Realms does not. Wizard 101 is a realized world with an ongoing story. Free Realms is just a collection of minigames thrown into a hub world.
Anyway, it is great to be back to blogging. I just have so much catching up to do in my blog reading for the last month. >.<
Keeping Old Content Relevant
Tobold and Ravious today posted about WoW's old zones are of no importance to high level chartacters and how this will cause WoW to eat itself. Tobold talks about how Luminous has you go back to farm low level zones for materials you need while Ravious talks about how Turbine is constantly revamping the low level zones to better streamline them and give old players a reason to start new.
Both of them are essentially looking at the same problem from two ends of the spectrum. Tobold is coming from the viewpoint of someone who has played WoW for years upon years and has no reason to ever go back to those zones. Even if he had to go back to those zones to farm crafting materials, he would be doing it solo. Ravious is coming from a viewpoint of someone new to the game or returning after being gone since just after release. For him, those low level zones are ghost towns and the few people in them are just soloing by themselves and have no reason to group.
I cannot help but wonder if in some ways, Guild Wars got it right and maybe the style could be modified for a standard MMO. With the Factions and Nightfall campaigns in Guild Wars, it takes a player about 5-10 hours to reach the level cap of 20. From there, they have access to almost every single zone in that campaign (aside from the very final stages of the campaign unless they are grouped with someone who has access).
Instead of railroading players down one or two set leveling paths in a game with the game, why not remove levels all together and just make all zones the same level but with varying levels of difficulty? In Guild Wars, I can go to the later zones from the campaign from the start but they will just require a greater amount of focus and concentration than the earlier zones.
What I would like to see is a game have a two to three hour introduction area similar to the pre-Searing in Guild Wars Prophecies or the level 1-6 racial introduction areas from Lord of the Rings. This introduction areas would be your tutorial to teach you the basics of the game and your class and if you have already done the introduction on a previous character, you can skip it and go right into the game proper.
You could take your friend to an "end game" city siege, raid, or whatever activities are usually exclusive to people at the level cap within hours of them joining the game. Since there would be no levels, all instances and zones would remain valid.
Leveling and constant stat increases just cause mudflation so why not do away with those systems? I used to only see a goal as new purples but playing Guild Wars has shown me thousands upon thousands of people who play just to get new skins for their weapons and armor. There are many people who would go kill things for house and guild hall trophies or materials to craft an insane looking axe.
While the foundations of the RPG is a level based system, I think it is time for the genre to evolve.
Also, you still have time to get your name in to win one of the two extra Aion beta keys I have. Just make sure you get your post in before the end of the day. I am going to close the post tonight and announce the winners tomorrow.
Spoiled By WoW
After being out of WoW for almost a month, I realize now how spoiled I had become by the game. While there were a lot of spoiling in-game conveniences, that is not what I am talking about as many games do in-game just as well if not better. What I am speaking of is the access to information out of the game.
Things like WoWHead, Thottbot, WoWDB, WoWWiki, Elitist Jerks and even the official forums have completely spoiled me. Due to the millions upon millions of people playing the game, there is more information than you could ever need. It never takes too long to find out what you need to know if you have a question.
Still not able to find what you need for that quest? Checking on WoWHead probably shows fifty comments of people on any little aspect of the quest.
Wonder what gear or build is best for your class? The official forums and Elitist Jerks are going to be filled with threads and posts by people who have crunched the numbers and can tell you which avenue is best.
This ease of information is not available for most other games. There have been multiple times in Lord of the Rings Online or Runes of Magic that I have been frustrated due to not being able to find answers to questions. People in game do not know, there is nothing on the forums and the wikis on the games are incomplete.
I think the game with the most complete out-of-game info is Guild Wars. The two wikis for that game are amazing resources filled with maps, mission walkthroughs, and quest information.
While many people may blast the WoW community, at least having that many people makes getting information easier.
Storytelling and Hero Building in MMOs
Many people have talked on this subject before and I may just be beating a dead horse, but I have been thinking a lot lately about how stories are told in MMOs.
There are many different ways to split up the types of storytelling that happens in MMOS. The main ways are: who is the one telling the story (developer or player), the impact the story has on the world, and if it is a single event or part of a larger picture.
Games like Darkfall and EVE do not have a developer story. The story of the world(s) and the players of the game is shaped by the actions of the players. These games are often dominated by large guilds and many of the stories that come from the game are about political shifts, guild drama, and other player created events. An example of this is the recent destruction of BoB by betrayal.
The other stories that come out of games like this are just small isolated events such as you and your friend riding heroically into battle against a group many times your size and taken them down in a white knuckle match. While fun to reminisce about, "Hey remember that time...", very rarely do these small events have any lasting impact on the game world.
On the other hand, games like WoW, WAR, Guild Wars, LotRO, CoX, and others mainly have a focus on developer-told storylines. World of Warcraft has overall stories that go on through the quests of each zone, but there has never really been an overall storyline to the game. Lord of the Rings Online has the epic storyline quests that you follow. You know that history books will not tell of your actions but you do some heroics of your own.
The most guided storytelling in MMOs I think is Guild Wars. Each "expansion" is its own campaign with a distinct storyline. Each mission has cutscenes that your characters take part in and interact with other main storyline characters. While the developers wrote the story out and are railroading you, it does feel like you are part of the story.
Thinking of storytelling makes me think back to my days playing MUDs. The memories of significant events that happened in MUDs far surpasses any of my fond memories of MMOs. But on the flip side, these games would have a maximum of 15 to 100 people playing at any given time. Everyone knew everyone. The imms (immortals, or GMs as they are called nowadays) were often players too and would handcraft neat coded events.
I remember playing Achaea, Dream of Divine Lands and all the imms in that game played the role of the gods of the world. When one of the imms, Gaea, quit the game team, the forest in the world shriveled up in mourning of the death of a god. In CoreMUD, you were a miner on a colony on a distant planet and events like alien attacks and mine cave-ins happened often. Everyone would be a participant and everyone was affected.
I guess it just becomes harder to integrate meaningful storylines into games when you have thousands and tens of thousands players at any given time. Personally, I just love having the storyline cutscenes in Guild Wars and wish more games would do this.
What kind of storytelling would you prefer?
Guild Wars, Free Realms and RMT Talk
I am expecting this blog post to come off a bit soapbox-like so free to pass over it as I am just using it to vent a bit.
If you know anything about me, you would know that I have not been a big fan of RMT in the past as I feel it can be very easily screwed up. I feel that RMT and subscriptions do not mix.
My RMT Rules are:
- If you have a subscription fee, there should be NO RMT-only content. With a subscription fee, everything should be obtainable in game and RMT seen as just a path to unlock everything without the work.
- If your MMO is free-to-play, go RMT hog wild. When I play a FTP MMO, I expect that not all the content will be open to me. I want the company to be able to make money somehow, and enticing people to buy RMT is fully acceptable.
What really got me thinking about RMT lately is the difference in models between Guild Wars and Free Realms. On the surface, both are free-to-play MMOs that have some RMT attached, but the way each game handles RMT is different.
In Guild Wars, everything in the game is achievable without paying a cent. If you buy all the games, all the content is there for you to explore and unlock. If you have enough time, you can unlock every item and skill in the game. For those with disposable income, you can go through and buy "Skill Unlock Packs" and "PvP Unlock Packs" to unlock the items and abilities for characters on the account instead of having to work for them in game. I applaud Guild Wars for this because there is nothing you cannot do just by playing the game. I would gladly pay a subscription fee for Guild Wars because their RMT model is non-mandatory and something I would expect to see on a subscription game.
In Free Realms, I believe access to the game is free (no buying the initial game like there is in Guild Wars) and while you can play for free, about a third of the game will be forever locked from you. If you choose to subscribe to the game, the other areas and features will be unlocked to you, but there are still items that you can only get via RMT. So if you want to collect every single item/job/area/ability/whatever in the game, you have to subscribe AND do microtransactions and I have never liked this sort of double dipping.
I am trying to think progressively when it comes to RMT but maybe I am still too old school for this new school market.
Also, I do not understand why Free Realms is getting more MMO legitimacy than Guild Wars has. People talk about expectations of Free Realms breaking a million people in a post-WoW world as if it is something new and exciting when Guild Wars just broke six million games sold last week and does not seem to receive the same MMO legitimacy as Free Realms.
Instancing, Cities and Roleplaying
This post was inspired by Tobold and Spinks talking about "hang-out" spots though it is mostly on a complete tangent from that. I will probably talk more on this in a future post.
One thing that Guild Wars was originally criticised for was its overuse of instancing. After playing again for a while, I have decided that I like the instancing of cities at least though I think it would be better with some changes.
Personally, aside from dungeons, I think only cities should be instanced and they should use a district system like Guild Wars'. All the open instances of that city are listed and you can freely pick which one you get placed in. I mean when WoW was first released everyone always dreading going to Ironforge and Stormwind due to the insane amount of people and the lag it caused. With Shattrath and then Dalaran funneling people from both sides into the same city, it just made things worse. With instancing you could split that huge group of people across 5-10 different instances and remove most of the problem for people.
There are two prominent changes I would make from the city instancing system in Guild Wars. The first change is that trade chat would span all instances instead of just the one you are in. In Guild Wars, if you are in Lion's Arch District 2, you only see the trade chat from District 2 and will not see anything from District 1 or 3 or whatever others exist. Instead of "Rogue doing lockpicking on Org Bank" it would be "Rogue doing lockpicking on Org Bank in District 2". It does not seem too detrimental to players while it provides a huge benefit.
The other change I would make would be a static roleplaying district. For instance, you would always have at least "Trade District 1" and "Roleplaying District 1". If the first trade district started filling up, a 2nd district would open, then a 3rd, and so on. Roleplayers could just move themselves to the roleplaying district where there is no trade chat. Instance-wide chat channels would only be in the trade districts.
With this, traders could peddle their wares to everyone in the city, people could go through the cities without worries of lag, and roleplayers could go to their own districts to hang out and roleplay. Thoughts?
Weekend Gaming Update – April 13
I am getting really bad blogger ADD right now. I have a myriad of topics I want to talk about and I am finding it hard to focus and write on just one. Needless to say, there should not be much of a blogging drought here anytime soon.
This weekend was dominated by Guild Wars. A lot of Guild Wars. Rynala and I got our characters from level 12 to level 20 in Nightfall campaign and then ran all the way from Lion's Arch to Ascalon City in Tyria. Before we finish the Nightfall campaign, we are probably going to go through the entirety of the Prophecies and Factions campaigns. We are both really enjoying Nightfall, but we also want to go through the full story with these characters chronologically. Plus, the second to last mission in Nightfall makes a lot more sense if you play through Prophecies and Factions first. We would have played a lot more but Rynala had quite bit of homework to finish over the weekend too.
We ran 25man Naxx together on Thursday night. She got quite a few upgrades, but unfortunately only one holy paladin item dropped in the entire run and I already had it. Bad loot luck is really getting infuriating.
The herbs that I talked about last week are selling pretty well. I seem to have found a pretty good price point at about 25-28g per stack of herbs. I have made roughly 2500g already and if the rest of my herbs sell at the same price, I should make another 4500g from those. This will put me pretty close to 10k gold. I wish I had the patience to be a great businessman. There are so many things in the game I would buy, such as a motorcycle and the three-person mammoth mount.
This week my plan is to split my time between Guild Wars and some Xbox360 games I have been neglecting.
My immediate goal in Guild Wars is to create a 55 monk. 55 monks is a specific setup for a month that is based around farming. Monks have a base of about 480 health at level 20, so you equip yourself with runes so your health is reduced down to 55 health and then use an enchantment that does not allow you to take more than 10% of your life as damage per hit (so you suffer a max of 5 damage per hit). With a bunch of health regenerating enchantments on your character, you heal faster than you take damage since you take so little damage. It will be an interesting experience.
As for my 360 games, Culdcept Saga and Fable 2 are at the top of my list. I think I am about a third of the way through Culdcept Saga and I really am enjoying the gameplay so I am anxious to finish it. In Fable 2, I finally want to create a new character (I have not played any Fable 2 since my last Xbox was stolen) and finish getting all the achievements in the game. I think I may just return Grand Theft Auto 4. I am about three hours into it and the story and game just are not grabbing me. That is a little disappointing.
Also, I have a twitter now.
Observing in Guild Wars
I did not get to play too much time in Guild Wars last night since Rynala was bogged down with some homework from her classes. After watching the new episode of Chuck and the Daily Show, we sat down for about two hours of gaming. Even then we did not spend but maybe an hour of it actually doing quests. The other hour was spent reading up on what secondary professions were most complimentary to our primary professions and then spending a decent amount of time in Observer mode.
For now, I picked the Mesmer as my secondary to my Monk primary. Being a monk, I do not see myself actually using any secondary profession skills since my entire skill bar will be covered with heals, enchantments and dispels. One of the only skills that seemed like it might be useful was Meditation.
Meanwhile, Rynala picked out Paragon as a secondary for her Dervish primary. She does not really care about the secondary at the moment either as she plans on switching to the Assassin profession as a secondary once we get to the point in the story when it is available.
The big thing that I enjoyed out of playing last night was coming across the "Observe" feature. This is something that needs to be in every game. Basically, it records PvP matches when it happens between top teams (well, only one of the teams has to be a top team, the other can be a PUG). The matches are shown with a 15 minute time delay so that you cannot use them to cheat. You are even put into a chat channel with anyone else observing the match replay (up to a maximum of 100 people, then a new replay session is started). I found myself becoming addicted to watching these PvP matches. Even not knowing any of the teams, I was on the edge of my seat and cheering for whatever team interested me more. I would only imagine how exciting it would be in World of Warcraft, watching your friend's 2200+ team take on other top teams.
Over time, it does not seem like there have been many sweeping changes to Guild Wars. The new classes and content keep it from feeling stale and the lack of major changes keep everything familiar. It feels like the same game I played four years ago and I like that.
The Return to Guild Wars
There really is not that much more for me to do in WoW at the moment. It only takes one to two days to clear out all the raid content for the week, and while I could spend all my time gaining every little achievement out there, I cannot really find the drive to. Some days, I get the ache to farm achievements, but those days are few and far between. Once patch 3.1 comes out, I expect to be entertained a little bit more. Between raiding ramping up for Ulduar, farming out things in the Argent Tournament and the ability to spec retribution whenever I want via dual spec, I can see my options opening a little.
Either way, Rynala and I decided to leap back into Guild Wars. I first played Guild Wars when it first launched. I did not even get into WoW until about September 2005, almost a full year after that game had launched. Before then, I had played Guild Wars. I tried a variety of different characters, but I played a ranger all the way to level 20. This was back when Prophecies was the only campaign and Elona Reach was still the bane of all players. When her and I first moved in together, she tried the game and played a Necromancer all the way through Prophecies before she started playing WoW with me.
I spent the better part of yesterday going around to different stores to buy a second copy of Guild Wars (to see if I could get it cheaper than buying it directly from NC Soft). Of course the PC sections of Gamestop, Walmart and Best Buy are all lacking and aside from only finding the Prophecies campaign in most stores, I was able to pick up the Prophecies/Faction combined box for $30 (the same price as each one separately usually). When I got home, I bought Nightfall for both of us, so each account now has all three campaigns. I figure we will pick up Eye of the North sometime in the future after we finish the 3 campaigns together.
We decided to start with the Nightfall campaign since Rynala was interested in playing a Dervish and I was just going to play a Monk in whatever campaign she picked.
I have somewhat of a love/hate relationship with the character creation for Guild Wars. One of the nice things is that Nightfall has a great deal more options for hair color and other aesthetic options than the other campaigns, but I always find myself wanting to go with a hair style of another profession. On the other hand, I appreciate how each class has its own theme and the character models, hair styles and colors reflect that. Plus, Guild Wars still has a great deal more options to its character creation than games like WoW or WAR, even if WoW and WAR have more aesthetic options if you include all the different types of armor you could wear.
Either way, by the end of the afternoon, Mordiceius Isagirl and Rynala Raelynne were born.
We only got to level 4, but it was a fantastic return to the game. I have always enjoyed the experience Guild Wars has to offer and Nightfall does not disappoint. We are more taking the game as a co-op single player game than an MMO and that has made the experience great. While there may be an overwhelming number of minor quests at times, we do not let that bother us as the main storyline quests are what excite us. I have always loved being able to see my character walk around in the game's cutscenes. Also, the game still looks fantastic after all these years.