.brain

(Sorry no Italian translation, this time!)

WOTLK

The game is enjoyable and as much as streamlined as possible, I suppose (not really, I hope it won’t be more simplified by that). The old problems (seen as problems only by a minority of players, I guess) are the same old problems, problems like this one:

Thankfully, the road to 80 is completely soloable.

Yes, you read comments like that in forums and in reviews. Something that really beat me out is why people pay for a single player experience that is more a burden than a joy. Considering that Blizzard will start soon to ask for micropayments without dropping subscription fees, that’s still more strange. I wonder how they will deal with powerleveling and character trades when the game itself will start selling you the option to skip the useless classic content and let you start right at 55!

Sure, the game is adjusting even more to Eastern tastes and the ever-present grind, plus the huge not-expiring pay-by-time accounts shows that. If only Western realms will remain populated as in these late days!

The game remains a comfortable environment for (deluded) hardcore players and newbies of the genre (even if I started to prefer Wizard 101 to WOW when it comes to a fresh and interesting no-effort MMOG), but if you want to be challenged in anything else than investing lots of time, you may be baffled. It’s the same old grind for better items as before, with new unbalances and one of the most boring PVP out there.

What really drive me nut is why Blizzard is so passive-aggressive against communities, unless your community gaming of choice is a simple chatroom. The game is so single player/small group oriented that is really difficult to crack the shell of isolation that most players build around them. Thankfully, I have access to a lot of hardcore groups for instance runs, but most of the community is playing completely alone or grinding with a couple of friends.

One of the most concerning elements of WOTLK is the lack of original contents: WAR has PVP open zones? WOTLK too (that’s silly since PVP servers should be PVP-open zones, but nobody plays in the classic continents and most of the PVPers prefer to AFK farm in battlegrounds). LOTRO defined achievements in a MMOG? WOTLK invented them (yeah, they said that. The comparison is just embarassing, for WOW). There’s barely anything new inside WOTLK, it’s nice, it’s fun but it’s not very different from the usual grind as soon the shiny paint start to scratch.

My final gripe is the new Prestige Class system. Nice on paper but introducing a few class at time only made most of the people re-roll a 55 Death Knight creating lots of problems to players that really want to enjoy the Massively Multiplayer side of the game. At the moment I’m seeing thousands of players speedrunning a single class to endgame (with all the problems of that, like queueing for nameds and the like) in solo mode and I’m finding very difficult to find balanced groups with all those DKs around!

Mines of Moria

I hated a lot LOTRO when it first came out. Now I love it. The barely finished, ugly bastard has become one of the best around, and surely one of the most community driven around. Spontaneous player driven events are frequent, people play to enjoy the story and the game and to be successfull in epic quests you need people that knows how to play in a group. The new additions are amazing and the new epic gear system (the only true novelty of this rehash of old contents) is something that any hardcore grinder should try. It solves lots of gripes with tiered endgame items and the usual itemization problems that it carries over.

It’s a solid game ever than before, with maybe the best group system around (the quest log just screams to be used to coordinate group questing) and a very deep story-driven gameplay.

The Shadow Odyssey

EQ2 is one of my favourite PVE games. It’s difficult to beat something that can be as seamlessy enjoyable as a solo session and just more rewarding and fun when grouping. In reality nobody says that “Thankfully the game is soloable” because most of the player just groups, since the game itself rewards grouping with more XP, more AAs and generally better drops. Another unusual finding is seeing developers reitemize old contents to not create tier barrages and void any previous content present in the game. Here you still need to run the cap quest or do several labs run if you want to get to endgame with ease. There aren’t world drops better than older Epic Gears.

The new addition are simply rehash of a classic everquest system: dynamic zones that spawns quests and events according to the level of the party. Simple as that, most of the new contents are available from 50 to 80. The experience won’t be the same and even the maps won’t be exactly the same. Questlines will overlap, old enemies will resurface and so on, visiting the same zones from time to time just makes the world feel a bit more real than the classic tiered zone approach.

This year EQ2 proved to have one of the best in-game support, with tons of weekly events and storyline updates (real events, not scripted fairs or global farming endeavours) running regularly that really made the world alive and interesting even for jaded players. SOE did the right choice to invest in the community and the results are there to prove it. It’s nice to see power shifting, mobs changing places and zones evolving as soon major characters take stands in the political turmoils of EQ2. TSO will be the ending of the long story arc that was started this spring, and more will wait us as soon it’s done.

To be honest one of the best feature put later in the game is the new map: slick simple and useful, it makes third party solution in any game seems amteurish. Just imagine Google Maps and Yellow Pages meet your favourite map mod: a valuable addition since your quest log will have 75 entries most of the time and a mundane quest on EQ2 really do justice to the word, involving complex activities, lots of legwork and lots of NPCs in the process!

Conclusion

I’m sad! I have at least two major MMOGs to play to death (and the trusty WOW back-up as soon Wizard 101 will become stale) and I’ll move from my home in two weeks for two or three months! That’s poetic justice!

I’m salivating for the game, but…

• Bots. Check (Guild Wars, Everquest, others)
• Branching dialogues\questlines. Check (Guild Wars, Everquest, COX, a few others)
• Telling a worthwhile story. Check (Guild Wars, Everquest, a very few others)

Now, let’s assume it won’t be the NWN2 engine with a much higher multiplayer limit fitted on a revamped KOTOR theme and made MMO just because the old RPG achronim will not sell that well on PC. Please Bioware, don’t go the Blizzard way and stop bullshitting about things are already there: playing arrogant won’t sell you more copies. It’s sufficient to see how Mythic ridiculed Blizzard over and over in the last weeks.

It’s difficult to not consider a game dead when it is based on RvR and you see no more than several dozens of players logged in… I heard that the game is still faring well in the US, but for the European servers… Judge yourself: sometimes being German or French pays up, but only a little.

Sadly, today I was informed that Jeff Freeman died of suicide. He was one of the most unpopular guys at SOE due to his own New Game Enhanchements addition to Star Wars Galaxies, one of the most controversial (but effective) SWG redesign decision in the game history. The game is still online today only for the courage and determination of Jeff, that confronted with an elitist crowd of Star Wars fans just to keep the ball rolling.

Speaking of elitist fans, despite what many (evil) people said, he didn’t committed suicide because of the unpopularity of NGE (it was true that he was target of menaces, ire and other stupid actions for years, though), so the selfish squatters that left the game without ever coming back and are still publicly criticising it after all these years can continue to ridicule themselves without any remorse.

Sorry for the flame but I can’t stand people that use the Internet only to state that they are unfit for sociality.

Well, seems like the digital download servers for the European Beta of Warhammer Online are exploding, so here’s where I’m going to download the client I paid money to play early.

Peer to peer FTW!

Oh and BTW nice move EA, you screwed up, again. A file server for a hugely popular online game. That’s so 1999ish!

After several weeks of absence (mostly due to RoK burnout, man that expansion was as big as boring, leveling-wise), I’m back to EQ2 to prepare for the November expansion.

Behold the portal to the Shard of Fear, a monument to Innoruk!

I found the game in really good shape, with lots of new players and additions from the Living Legacy promotion and events, a complete reitemization for levels 1-59 to keep old contents viable even with the new level branch of RoK (70-80). Once RoK got live, the chance your old raid gear would be useful in the new continent was very very slim. Now the item progression is more organic and there aren’t dramatic changes between old legendaries and new uncommons-rares.

How i’d like to see something similar in WOW, to get the seam between classic and TBC more organic.

As soon I logged, I was instantly invited to a Shard of Fear group. I needed about an hour to readjust to the game with my Defiler!

Killing purple demons, a matter of pride!

Well, sometimes it just feels so odd: an heroic paladin sent to kill demons, that are pink, violet or purple.

It’s a matter of justice or… fashion?

Last night, me and Morhan decided to try to sort out the Book 1, Chapter 11 of Lord Of The Rings Online with a party of two. Needless to say, confronting the Witch King with such a small party was a suicide. The trip let me appreciate more the cure of details level and quest designers put in the game, even if the Lord Of The Rings is not my favourite fantasy setting.

At the end of the dungeon, there are a lots of Elite Wights, most of them completely dismembered, just like the Deadly Tomb Wight depicted here. The Wight was accompained by its own dismembered arm, that was flailing aimlessy during combat.

That’s the right touch of realism you can’t safely expect by today quest-design standards on other MMOGs, but when it happens, it’s always more than appreciated since it increases the realism and coherence of the quest set-ups.

Age Of Conan it’s a design and usability mess. Don’t even get me started, I won’t. As I won’t even tell you anything about the huge amount of technical issues and bugs that a modern MMOG should not have anymore.

So I decided to dump the game for now, maybe returning in a 4-6 months to see if something is changed, while the morons the early adopters do the beta-test for me. There’s no reason to end my trial period before deciding: leveling in general is simply too easy to justify the waste of time and the endgame at the moment is not even playable, so why I should care? The game has not even set clear the objectives a player should be willing to achieve at the moment, everything is a very moving target, with several radical redesign decision that will need to be taken in the next few months, shuffling priorities and player interests in the process.

I still need to decide where to settle seriously, since my EQ2 guild is on “play what you like” mode for the summer and I started to feel a bit bored even back there.

Speaking of a less hardcore interest, The Lord Of The Rings Online is doing a better job to keep me interested: very well written quests, where “exploration” has a meaning and it’s not just the end of following on-screen arrows. I really like the Epic quest lines, sure they stole a lot of ideas from Guild Wars, but who didn’t? And frankly, LOTRO does Epics better than how GW does Coops.

I also went back to Asheron’s Call for a while. Damn, that game aged so well it could be a viable option if you could bare blocky models with hi-res textures, no wonder they still have a strong community. Speaking of communities, I also found several odd players, like the one who insulted me because I used the word “Vendor” while asking for advices. He said I should return to play Ultima, mixing insults with lots of “Vendor Sell”, “Kal Vas Flam” jokes I frankly don’t get anymore. Does he even know that Ultima is almost forgotten as well as Asheron’s Call, nowadays?

Does he even log off anymore?

The next EVE Online Expansion, Empyrean Age, is late, tremendously late.

Factional Warfare was expected almost two years ago when missions, factions and bounty hunting were left broken just because the next big thing was behind the corner. Of course CCP decided to not scare the alliances right away and then suspended it, just to update the eye candy in the game. After milking the thousands in the ranks of the most popular and big alliances and transforming the universe in a huge war of attrition, multi-boxing, botting and boredom, CCP is now realizing that it’s time for a change.

Despite it’s completely PVP-centric and alliance-centric gameplay, EVE will sign alliances off from the coming soon factional warfare: only corporations will be allowed to get credit for factional control of systems, creating a huge shift in the balance of power of the EVE forces: even the smallest corporations can battle for their own systems and choosing a base will be no more a matter of just having an office and docking permissions.

Alliances are expressing their scorn and, as usual, menacing strikes. This time seems that CCP will not bend to the requests of its most reliable source of income, probably because if the game will continue to be so focused on multiboxes, patrols and bubbles, they may become the only source of income, making the game die a silent death.

To me it’s not a coincidence that CCP announced Empyrean Age when some of the older and bigger Alliances started to collapse due to mass defections from the boring shifts (yes, shifts, in a game you pay for) players are required to cover to defend their borders at every hour of the day.

A courageous decision to bring real gameplay back to the players!