Star Wars: The Old Republic – News from the Sith Empire

There are few things more frustrating than struggling to find a topic engaging enough to write about with limited free time, while something you'd really like to be able to review is restricted by a Non-Disclosure Agreement. I got into the SW:TOR Beta, but couldn't really talk about it until now that the NDA is lifted. For those who always skip to the end of this sort of article to get the verdict, I'll give your mouse wheel a break - Star Wars: The Old Republic is a very good game that successfully incorporates the Bioware RPG formula into a WoW-like MMORPG. I intend to purchase it several weeks after launch, and I'll certainly play, but I won't raid in it and certainly won't be quitting World of Warcraft in favor of it. My preferred way to play this game is to turn off most of the things that remind me I'm playing with other people until I want to play with those people, and enjoy the story as a single-player experience on a massive scale. When friends are on, doing an instanced encounter with them or trading items is cool, but I don't intend to randomly group with JEDIDOOD just because I can.

I played through the starting areas for two classes, both in the Sith Empire faction. Let me start by explaining something that I thought was fairly common knowledge, but I continue to surprise people with. "Republic" doesn't automatically mean "good guy" and "Sith" doesn't automatically mean "villain." Moral and ethical choices like those found in Mass Effect and Dragon Age will touch on every character's personal story and the starting areas are very reminiscent in some ways of the Origin chapters in the first Dragon Age. I played a Bounty Hunter who gained both Light and Dark Side points as a mercenary who adheres to the terms of his contract regardless of new information, and a Sith Warrior who is lost to the Dark Side. The two starting planets are split between pairs of classes with Hutta given to the Imperial Agent and Bounty Hunter and Korriban for the Sith Inquisitor and Sith Warrior.

Combat options and gear choices are rolled out with completed quests much as they are in any MMORPG, but the quests are anything but typical. First, no quest text. Everything is fully voiced, including your character and every one-off NPC. Second, many quests immediately draw you into some sort of interesting story, and even the "kill 10 blargs and college their whatzits" quests frequently have a twist, where you may find that turning the quest in to the original quest NPC may have consequences you'd prefer to avoid. From the Sith training grounds on Korriban to the streets of Hutta torn apart by a struggle between powerful underworld bosses for control, the environments are gorgeous and logically laid out with "rest/town" areas placed naturally, without seeming like they were spaced out at particular intervals because players need a new quest hub about here. Each classes' abilities are used when trained in different situations, with status conditions like knockdown sometimes being important, or area of effect damage, or a hard, sustained "channeled" attack depending on the foes encountered.

I was surprised to find that the effect your decisions have on NPC party members is retained in the MMO, with every class having an NPC companion with their own outlook and motivations. These characters act like combat pets, and the AI is surprisingly decent on them, with them acting about how you'd hope they would in fights. Conversations have the familiar Bioware "wheel of options" and choosing one over another may affect your companion's opinion of you as well as your personal Light Side/Dark Side points and storyline. I delighted in my evil Sith Warrior's tormenting of his companion, administering painful shocks when she forgot her place or spoke out of turn. People began to react to my tendencies to adhere to a peculiar form of arrogant honor that does not preclude killing those who annoy me with weakness or trivialities. Very quickly, I got to know who my characters were as individuals, which added something to the experience that WoW will never have.

I was less impressed with the stability and capacity on the technical side of things, with login errors, extremely long queues with no way to tell how long a wait for a server was, and no way to back out of a choice poorly made tarnishing the experience. I also found a series of graphical glitches and missing art and animation in some spots that I hope get some additional polish before launch. Aside from the bugs and technical difficulties, I found that the community of players I had access to in the beta detracted most significantly from the experience. Within minutes, I'd turned off the ability to see chat channels and hid the names floating above other players' heads. I suspect that this is a game I will mostly be playing solo or in small groups of friends, trying to interact with the server at large as little as possible. I enjoy the typical MMO experience, but I like my Star Wars gaming to maintain a certain mood, and that doesn't include racism, homophobia or Chuck Norris jokes.

By the end of my last beta weekend, I'd decided to pursue the Sith Warrior class story past the starting areas and I got my first taste of a major faction city as well as the wider world at my disposal. I chose that class because I intend to actually play as a Bounty Hunter come launch, and I'd like to have the rest of that class experience when the full game is released, rather than losing all of what I'd earned after a post-beta wipe. As the feared right hand of a Dark Lord of the Sith, I got into the opening stages of Empire Politics, and I can see the consequences of decisions made earlier already getting ready to come back to haunt me. I look forward to my next upcoming beta weekend, so I can try out the small-group instances and continue my reign of terror. I wield fear as well as a lightsaber in service to the Code: Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through Victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me.

A New Daily Grind, and Fitness Questing with Fitocracy.

Way back when I started falling into a routine based on habits and the goals I'd set for myself when I was out of work I talked a little bit about what a typical "day in the life" for me was like back here. Looking back on the last few weeks, as I do my best to adjust physically and mentally to a new daily grind, I've started to think about the differences and similarities between those schedules. I'll give a brief rundown on my new routine as a lead-in to talking about a website that has started to play a major part in helping me keep to a part of that schedule. (This post won't be entirely "OMG my daily rut is so interesting," so bear with me while I get it out and onto the page for a moment, and then I'll get into the details concerning Fitocracy.)

On a given day, I'm likely to wake up to two alarms, one on a clock radio and one on my phone, set for 4:59AM and 5:00AM, respectively. I manage to get out of bed before either triggers the first snooze alarm, most days at about 5:03. Then I start the morning routine, which is comprised of more ritual than most portions of the average Catholic Mass. Breakfast, e-mail and checking social networking sites, followed by a shower and getting dressed, at the approximate same times, clothes on by 6:00. I make my sack lunch for the day, pour a cup of coffee and allow myself time for some morning PC gaming until about 6:45 AM (this will drop back to about 6:25 when there is snow) and then I brush my teeth and get in the car. My commute is long, over an hour daily but with the help of my iPod and at least a few minutes daily of a vaguely amusing morning talk radio show, I manage.

My work day is highly structured as well, as work at a therapeutic day school must be. Every day, I clock in, get another cup of coffee and attend the morning meeting. I head to my classroom and prepare daily attendance and behavior tracking paperwork and wait for students to arrive. I'm going to vague it up a little here to avoid coming within even shouting range of confidentiality issues, but each day is broken up into standard high school periods including arrival/breakfast, Gym and Lunch. I can say that Gym and Lunch are together under the current schedule late enough in the day that by the time we survive the chaos of Physical Education, I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. Once the last student has left the building, I have enough time to finish any required paperwork before 3:00PM. The commute back is a solid 90 minutes or more on any given day unless I get really, really lucky with traffic.

Once I make it home, I have a little bit of time for decompression before dinner (working in writing a blog post where I can somewhere in here) and after dinner I need to get ready for either the night's Progression Raid in World of Warcraft or the trip to the YMCA for a workout. Either one of these activities takes me close enough to bedtime that maybe I can sneak in a few minutes of gaming before I have to sleep at 11:00PM to catch six hours of sleep before doing it all over again. This is, obviously, a far cry from what I'd adjusted to between the months of February and October of this year when I started this blog. I was used to sleeping when tired, eating when hungry, and being on the PC the rest of the time. The effects of that inactivity pushed my weight up higher than I like, which is the primary reason for gym workouts occupying three of the four nights I don't raid, giving me only Saturday nights free of commitment.

With all that, it is really, really easy to find excuses to skip the gym. I'm a master of that, as evidenced by the fact that I went to the gym all of a half dozen times in my entire term of unemployment. I allowed myself to get sidetracked by hobbies and, of course, any number of the various games I filled all that time with when not looking for work or blogging. The number of tagged articles with "video games" on them spell it out. I find myself too easily drawn into various games. Fortunately, I found a way to convert the addictive qualtities of questing, leveling and highly structured rewards found in the RPGs I play into a way to keep myself motivated in the gym. I'm playing another game. Fitocracy, as recently featured on Penny Arcade, combines the addictive qualities of social networking with the quests, achievements and levels of any MMORPG to focus the gamer's Obsessive/Compulsive qualities into a way to keep going to the gym.

The interface mostly looks like Facebook, or a similar social networking site, and there are plugins to link your Fitocracy account to both your Facebook and to your Twitter. You automatically follow the progress of whoever invited you, and you may choose to have the program find friends from your personal social networks. Excercise, record ytou workouts on the site and recieve experience points toward the next level. Bonus XP can be gained from completing quests which start out simple (do 20 crunches, or play sports for 30 mins) and get progressively harder. Quests also encourage the user to try excercises that they might not normally ever give a shot to in a normal workout, and the bonus experience is enough to maybe try a freeweight bench press instead of the standard half-hour or hour on the elliptical, bike or treadmill.

Your friends and members of groups you join can see your progress as you earn experience, levels and achievements, and give "props," which are essentially the same thing as upvotes on Reddit, likes on Facebook, +1s on Google+, etc. The site seems well laid out, though more variety in the specific types of exercises that can be tracked would be nice in some spots (There is, for example, an entry for "video game dancing" but nothing for, say, WiiFit, and many weight lifting exercises that use machines are absent.) The amount of experience required to gain the next level and the progressively more difficult quests do a good job of subtly encouraging more excercise, and I'll admit, I've gone out of my way to do a little extra on a non "Gym day" to knock out a quick quest for bonus experience. The amount of free content on the site is impressive, and if you want to support the developers, it is possible to subscribe to get access to titles and at least one bonus achievement when you become a "Fitocracy Hero." I'm only Level 3 at the moment, but I'm just getting started, and since I don't get to run back if I keel over, I'd like to be able to make it to endgame.

Blizzcon 2011: Demons and Costumes and (Panda) Bears, Oh, my!

So another annual convention from the developers of World of Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft is in the books, and there were a few highlights of interest to those of us who couldn't make the trek to the convention. There was the ever-popular costume contest, the announcement of the next WoW expansion, and a deal for people willing to sign up for a one-year "tour" for the popular MMORPG, that is seeing a decline in subscription numbers. Personally, I was excited by this year's announcements, and I'd like to talk a bit about them and address my feelings on the controversial elements, specifically about the next World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria. But before we get into any of that, let's take a look at the convention as a whole.

Outside of the WoW-Universe, there were a couple of major announcements with the debut of the trailer for Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm and the release of Blizzard DOTA. The Starcraft trailer gives us a bit of a teaser for next year's expansion, showing that even though Sarah Kerrigan has been rescued and looks human again, all is not well with the former Queen of Blades. We get a preview of a bunch of new units and a brief look at the continuation of the story from Wings of Liberty, with a gorgeous trailer rendered using in-game technology. On the DOTA front, it is exciting to see the original Action/RPG/Realtime Strategy mod Defense of the Ancients get an officially supported release, with many of Blizzard's greatest characters as champions. The original DOTA spawned a subgenre of games including League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth, and it'll be great to see the original game return with updated graphics and gameplay, and with Blizzard's official blessing and support.

This year's costume contest continues the tradition of moving away from "sexiest costume wins" and rewarding amazing craftsmanship. The top three this year included a great-looking Deathwing in human form, a decent representation of a WoW Paladin with Ashbringer, and the grand prize winner, one of the best costumes I've ever seen outside of a Hollywood movie. The costume, a note-perfect representation of a Starcraft Adjutant android was worn by Avery Faith of Los Angeles, CA. The combination of technical excellence in the fabrication of the costume pieces with the simultaneously creepy and beautiful aesthetic makes the piece something that really needs to be seen to be believed. (Which is why I picture it below.)

There wasn't a lot more that could be said about Diablo 3, aside from a new teaser trailer, since we've already seen a glut of preview videos and the news that it won't come out until 2012 broke before the convention. However, there was one thing they could do to make Diablo 3 news my personal favorite bit of the con. They made it free. Of course, there are strings attached to the deal. With the imminent release of Bioware's Star Wars MMORPG and some frustration with current raiding content, World of Warcraft is losing subscribers. The solution? Offer a free copy of Diablo 3 to anyone willing to commit to a 1-year subscription to WoW. The offer also comes with an automatic beta invite for the next WoW expansion and an exclusive in-game mount. For me, it was a no-brainer, since I hadn't planned on canceling my subscription this year anyway, and I was a guaranteed sale for Diablo 3, so reducing that game to my favorite price was a bonus.

Then we have the next WoW expansion, raising the level cap to 90, introducing a new zone, a new playable race and a new base class. Mists of Pandaria will be centered on the forgotten home of the reclusive masters of brewing strong spirits and practicing asian-style martial arts, the Pandaren. The race will be available to be played by either Horde or Alliance, and will have a strong connection to the new base class, the Monk. The developers are changing up the formula a bit, focusing on the conflict between Alliance and Horde instead of a single "last boss" like the last three expansions. The Pandaren will be drawn into the conflict, creating a brutal civil war in a land that once knew only peace and meditation, with the "main villain" as war itself. The announcement of a battle minigame system for non-combat pets, along with the "cutesy" look for the Pandaren has the neckbeards of the internet lighting their torches and sharpening their pitchforks, declaring WoW forever ruined.

...Really? We have talking walrus-men, cow-men, bird-men, fish-men, but pandas are somehow crossing the line? I get that none of those races has be the central character for an entire expansion, but people have been begging for Pandaren since the beginning of World of Warcraft. The accusations that the next expansion is "Kung-Fu Panda and Pokemon," and therefore is designed with small children in mind insults the intelligence of the average gamer. Pandaren have been present in the Warcraft lore for sixteen years, long before there was a Kung-Fu Panda, and gamers were outraged that they weren't a new race way back when The Burning Crusade was first released. I'm completely willing to check out the next expansion (and with my guaranteed beta access, I certainly will) before I declare it to be childish and stupid. If the game becomes something I no longer want to play, I'll stop. I don't see the point in being insulting and jumping to conclusions on the basis of a few videos and some sketchy details, however.

Champions Online: Free For All – Review

I'm a fan of a lot of things that are associated with Champions Online, developed by Cryptic Studios and published by Atari. It is a superhero MMORPG, it is on Steam with a TON of achievements, it is based on a tabletop roleplaying system, and it uses the Free-to-play model. This isn't my first superhero MMO, as I played City of Villains when it launched as a companion game to City of Heroes. There are a lot of places an MMO, particularly a Free-to-play one, can stumble and falter, ruining the experience. Any MMO can suffer from tepid character creation options, unsatisfying or sparse content, server/lag issues, overly harsh penalties for death and/or forced interaction with a community that may consist mainly of unpleasant people. “Free” MMOs have additional potential pitfalls. Every Free-to-Play game has content available for purchase with real money, that's the business model. Entice, and have players willingly pay through microtransactions for additional content. Having too many features locked away behind a “paywall” can easily create a situation where a player feels like they were promised a game and given a demo. So, how does Champions Online Hold up under these critera?

Can Champions succeed where City of Heroes (arguably) failed?

Character creation in Champions is, in a word, amazing. Free, or Silver members start by choosing one of several “Archetypes,” which behave like character classes. Additional Archetypes are available for a small fee, and Gold Members (the monthly subscription option) can create a completely custom hero archetype. The sheer amount of cosmetic options for character customization at creation is mind-boggling, even without purchasing additional costume pieces with Atari Tokens. Head/face and body can be tweaked with custom sliders for control over precisely how the person in the costume looks, and when creating a character's costume, I've never seen another MMORPG with as many different custom bits. Tights, capes, insignias, horns and helmets, weapons and accessories, jetpacks and mystical artifacts can be added, re-colored and moved around. Some costume parts are unlockable through gameplay, others are free for Gold members or a small fee for Silver.

The content available in the game has the advantage of almost three years of updates and refinement based on subscriber feedback. Normal missions are fun, usually tied to a larger plot involving supervillains who will be encountered at the end of a quest chain, and suitable for either solo or group play. Combat is dynamic and representative of the genre after one or two powers past the starting basics are earned, with a single hero taking on groups of minions with a whole lot of flash. With only a few levels under your utility belt, the combat makes you feel like a hero. In addition to basic missions, there are daily instanced missions, public missions tied to specific areas of the world (like a prison breakout that needs to be stopped) and PvP Arenas in the “Hero Games.” Of particular note is the “Zombie Apocalypse” PvP match where heroes fight waves of zombies until killed, and then return as zombie versions of themselves and join the other side, gaining points on each side for survival time and kills. Some of those matches are as good or better than any PvP experience I've had in an MMO.

Android, Samurai, Wizard, Beast, Soldier... If you can imagine it, you can probably make it.

The usual MMORPG features of Auction House, Bank and Crafting Systems are present, with the ability to store, sell or disassemble the different power enhancement objects dropped by villains based on need. Power sets are tied to origin, chosen at the beginning of the game based on your preference for Mystical (gods/spirits, spells and magic items,) Science (cybernetics, altered/mutated DNA and radiation or chemicals,) or Arms (Training, weapons and gadgets.) None of these features is particularly revolutionary, and some of them seem included just to sastify the expectations of the genre, but they perform their role adequately. Guilds are present as well, predictably as Superhero Groups/Teams.

On the technical/mechanical side, characters are randomly assigned to an instanced version of the city, mission location or zone each time they change from area to area. This controls lag and server load without the need for multiple servers, and you can always tell which instance you are in if you need to meet up with friends to form a group. Game mechanics allow for increasing or decreasing combat difficulty and the corresponding rewards from defeated foes. This difficulty adjustment can be important, as there is a penalty for being defeated in combat, though it is not overly harsh. A hero respawns without need to run back to a corpse, but as a penalty, a “hero point” is lost, which reduces damage and healing done for each of the 5 points, represented by stars that can be lost though “death.” Hero points are regained by completing missions, defeating foes, or donating resources (currency) to charity.

My hero, The Arcane Eye, bringing his Sorcerous might to the Gangs of WestSide.

In terms of how much “game” there is for someone who chooses to spend nothing at all to play, it is a LOT. Aside from three purchasable adventure packs, all of the content is playable by free players, and the level cap can be reached without paying a dime. Most of the features that can optionally be purchased with Atari credits (bought with real money) are things like additional character slots (you get two free,) more inventory space, costume change slots and specific costume pieces. The features that are locked away to free players are tempting, but there is a full game there without any of them. I really prefer and respect the riskier choice to provide most of the game for free, and hope that the players like it enough to support the company with a few piecemeal features here and there.

The world of Champions has a nicely diverse cast of foes from gang members and thugs to supervillains, many NPCs and missions paying respect to pop culture references. I've encountered missions paying homage to A Clockwork Orange, Big Trouble in Little China and even Anchorman. The NPC cast of other heroes as allies to your character is handled in such a way that even though they are famous and powerful, your character isn't overshadowed, as you hear citizens talking about you and your exploits. The single greatest feature in making you feel like your character's personal story is part of the world is the Nemesis system. At level 25, you can create your character's own personal Arch-enemy. You design your villain's look, theme and even the appearance of their henchmen, and start getting missions to oppose your own archenemy. In true comic-book style, your personal foe may take advantage of moments of weakness, sending agents to attack while you are busy fighting other villains on a mission. I've never seen anything quite like this, and am looking forward to fighting an archenemy of my own design, the Joker to my Batman.

The villain creation system is unique, and more in-depth than the character creation system in any other MMO.

By nearly every test I can come up with for “Is this good?” Champions Online passes with flying colors (no pun intended.) If I was forced to find a complaint, despite the PvP options presented being good, there aren't many of them, the community in general, as it is with many free games is often hostile and juvenile, but there is no forced interaction with them if you don't want to wade through the trolls, scammers and elitists to find other decent strangers to game with. I also haven't tried grouping much yet, but have heard that traditional tank/heal/dps strategy works, but not as well as say, in WoW. With the exception of single-target boss encounters, tank type characters can't expect to hold aggro on everything the way you can in fantasy MMOs and most of the best healing powers are only available at higher levels except to the dedicated support archetypes. Overall, these complaints are exceedingly minor as compared to all the good things found in this game. Definitely worth your time if you like superheroes or MMORPGs, and you can't beat the price.  

World of Warcraft Patch 4.2 – Rage of the Firelands

I've had a little bit of time to appreciate the material presented in the new content patch for World of Warcraft, and I think I'm ready to discuss a little bit about it. The release of a patch like this presents more content, new bosses, many of them are what would be a pricey bit of DLC or even a whole new expansion if released as part of many single-player or other non-MMO games. The story, for those who pay attention to it (as I do) is advanced with new cutscenes and quests, and a new Tier of raid content is introduced. The Tier 12 Raid picks up where the quests in Mount Hyjal left off, with Ragnaros the Firelord gathering his strength for another assault on Azeroth, and the war to enter the Firelands themselves to stop his return.

This patch brings back a lot of concepts not seen since the Vanilla WoW raid Molten Core, which also had Ragnaros as a final boss, and of course, flame and lava as the theme. Beyond those mostly cosmetic differences, this new content reminds me most of the Burning Crusade patch that introduced the Sunwell raid instance and the Isle that contained it. Both are lore-heavy, feature a new zone with an ongoing military conflict that is advanced through daily quests, and a wide-open raid instance that feels less confining than the traditional “Dungeon Rooms” of most raids. The patch also brings difficulty modifications (“nerfs”) to older raid content to enhance accessibility for more casual players, and introduces a new Legendary Weapon, a staff designed for DPS casters.

I like the new content overall, but currently I have mixed feelings about the environment that is currently present in WoW, and some of the burden of my lessened interest in certain aspects of the game falls at the feet of this patch. I feel that some elements were designed precisely as they should be for where Cataclysm is in its lifecycle as an expansion, but other aspects of this patch in particular feel somehow like

The Good:

The quests and raid encounters are rich with lore, tying into the Cataclysm plot well without having Deathwing turn up to cackle and twirl his evil mustache the way Arthas seemed to in every content patch in Wrath. The daily quests are combined with the phasing mechanic, which means the more you work personally on contributing to the war against the firelands, the more progress you will see. NPCs from many other quests and raids turn up to aid in the fight, I've seen Hemet Nesingwary, Argent Confessor Paletress and even Mankrik fighting alongside heroes in the war, it is nice to see these characters as people and citizens in a living world, rather than mannequins who stand around waiting to hand out quests or be killed in their own personal areas.

Fans of this guy will find a lot to love about 4.2.

The rewards for completing dailies and earning reputation are good, and the crafted items are some of the best I've seen in any patch since WoW launched. This means that good gear is attainable, but reasonable levels of effort are required, as even the crafted gear requires items that drop from raid bosses. The availability of epic gear is structured nicely for this stage of the game, with returning or new players able to play catch-up, but without it being so trivially easy that people who played since launch have grounds for serious complaint. (This, of course, won't stop many of them, but such is life.)

The Bad:

I personally enjoy raid encounters that ramp the difficulty up a bit, but some of the balancing between 10man and 25man raid bosses seems “off.” In certain encounters, the 10-man version is challenging but killable after a few night's practice, but the 25 man version seems insurmountably frustrating, with a single mistake by one raider to end the encounter with a wipe. This may be by design on its own, but it has some potentially unintended consequences.

What do you think he's been doing since Molten Core? Leveling up, same as you.

New raid gear can be obtained by killing bosses, earning reputation with the new faction, and using valor points. A side effect of 10-man raids being so much easier than 25-man raids is that if you are in a guild that wants to raid 25s, capping your valor points weekly is a brutal grind through old content. You might get a few hundred here and there for a boss kill, but you'll be spending many, many hours in heroic dungeons to rack up a few more valor points so that the week doesn't feel wasted. Personally, that grind sometimes makes it so I'd rather do something else, anything other than logging on to WoW.

The Ugly:

Players have developed some really bad habits since Wrath of the Lich King was released, and echoes of some of the development calls made in the name of greater content accessibility are still being felt. I'm all for WoW no longer only being playable at a certain level by elitist players and 95% of the subscriber base being locked out of content forever is a BAD THING. That said, when things are made easier, there is a certain class of player that isn't used to things being hard, and when presented with a challenge, they whine.

So you say the Legendary Staff of Dragons is actually powered by Noob Tears and Butthurt?

Nowhere else is the “whiner” factor more apparent than in any discussion regarding the new Legendary Item. Legendary Weapons aren't supposed to be something that eventually everyone in a guild gets. With a heroic amount of effort an cooperation, top guilds can expect to have one or two of these items in their entire raiding roster. New players (or those who learned the worst possible lessons from Wrath) aren't used to being challenged for the best gear. They only need to wait long enough, and it'll practically jump into their inventories. This isn't the case for the staff Dragonwrath, which is desired by every Mage, Warlock, Shadow Priest, Elemental Shaman and Boomkin Druid in the game.

The proliferation of the classes who might desire the item and the difficulty in obtaining even one for a whole guild is something that I am sure will create a lot of tension in many raiding guilds, and people will be kicked out of or quit guilds over it. This is the sort of weapon that characters will wait 5+ years to even be included in the game, and knowing they'll never get one upsets many, many people. (Hell, I'm 2^nd in line for one in my guild and I might never see it completed.)

Miscellany, and Overall:

The art style of the new items is cool, consistent with the theme, and overall the content feels very well put together, but the complaining that tiny spoonfuls of content are being stretched out over progressively longer periods of real time gains strength with every new patch, and cut features. I think that by the end of this expansion, people will be pleased with the way content was stretched out over the lifecycle of the product, for for now, we hear a new 5-man has been cancelled and we're disappointed and angry. We complain that encounters are too hard, but we called the game a “joke” back in Wrath for being too easy.

I like what I see in the Firelands, I just wish the grind of it all didn't feed the whiny, complainy voice inside me that wants to agree with all the gamers whose complaints I find annoying.  Sometimes, when faced with running another random dungeon, I'd just rather go play something else, and I wish that weren't so.  

Star Wars: Galaxies, Shuts Down, 2011 - The Old Republic takes over

Star Wars: Galaxies, an MMORPG set in the Star Wars universe, has been set to be shut down on December 15, 2011. This is an obvious decision seeing as how there is a newer and far better looking MMO game coming very soon from the awesome game designers at Bioware: Star Wars: The Old Republic.

The Old Republic is an MMO set a few thousand years before the Star Wars movies; it is technically a sequel to the games Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KotoR) and KotoR2. These two games were well received, but the second one had quite a few more flaws than the first and it was rushed out the door by its publisher, so the multiple endings that the game was supposed to have were never created.

Anyway, I can't wait until this awesome looking game is released, but it's still sad that Star Wars: Galaxies is going to be shut down because of it; not that I've played it or know anything about it, but it's sad for the people who play it and love it.





Source: http://www.gamespot.com/news/6321075/star-wars-galaxies-signing-off-dec-15

Free Games Profile - 5 Games I've Been Playing That Cost My Favorite Price.

Not so long ago, I posted on my Tumblr a list I'd seen somewhere else about awesome free games. I like awesome, and free is right in my price range at the moment, so I've checked out a few of these in the last week or so, to answer the question: Do you get what you pay for, or are there good free games out there? One of the games is a pretty complete alpha of an inexpensive project, one is a free-to-play, also known as “freemium”, where you get a feature set for free, but there are additional options/content available for purchase. Yet another takes the structure found in Mafia Wars-type games and turns it on its ear to produce something very interesting. The last two are complete, finished and free, no strings attached.

The first game I want to talk about is also the oldest. Cave Story, originally called Doukutsu Monogatari, was developed by one man over five years, a labor of love. The PC release is an old-school platform adventure that is most similar to Metroid, with weapons that level up when golden triangles are collected. The story follows a robotic (or maybe cyborg) soldier who wakes up in a cave with no memory and stumbles into a village of friendly creatures who are under assault by a mad scientist and his hench-things. The action is familiar in an old-school way, very difficult in spots and the story progresses in unexpectedly interesting directions. The version of the game translated from Japanese to English became so popular that a remake of the title with enhanced graphics was made for the Wii, and a 3D version is coming to the 3DS. This one is a lot of fun, and there are several endings and bonus levels to discover.

The surprised looking Lunchbox is named Balrog. I just wanted to type that.

In the same vein of free platforming action game is Spelunky, with retro graphics and random level generation, Spelunky is fun, but it makes no claim to be fair. The cave explorer is reminiscent of Indiana Jones, complete with hat and whip, and in the opening levels there is a golden idol which can be collected that triggers a rolling boulder trap when touched. You start with a limited supply of basic tools, 4 ropes which allow climbing up into areas that you can't jump to, and 4 bombs which allow blasting through floors and walls. Other items can randomly be found through the levels as you collect treasures, fight monsters and attempt to evade deadly traps. There's a lot to discover in this game as well, secret areas, occasional NPCs to interact with, and in a nod to Temple of Doom, even sacrificial altars to Kali.

Snakes... why did it have to be snakes...

The free Alpha release of Desktop Dungeons reminds me of a cross between Realm of the Mad God and classic roguelike dungeons, only on a smaller scale. Every dungeon is a single screen large, you start out with the possibility of four races and four basic classes to choose from with special abilities, and if you can level up enough to defeat the boss monster in the dungeon, more features unlock with every win. The game is random, very difficult, even less fair than Spelunky in some cases (sometimes it really isn't possible to do much of anything as every monster you can reach kills you in one hit.) However, individual tries at the randomly created dungeons don't take very long, so a lot of dying and restarting makes this one addictive. Also of note, this game has altars to various deities who your character can choose to worship. The gods give piety for completing certain actions, and penalize piety for others. For example, a warrior god might grant piety for every monster killed, but penalize for casting spells. After several days spending more time than I'd like to admit on this one, I've beaten the dungeon only three times, once each with a warrior, thief and cleric.

This game has no business being this addictive. I may drop the $10 for the finished game.

Another free game that I've actually been playing for a while now but only recently got back into is the fantastic Echo Bazaar. On its surface, Echo Bazaar looks like a Facebook game. You get a number of turns that refill slowly with time, you train skills by repeating actions over and over until a higher level of skill unlocks a new action to grind and train on. There are several things that separate Echo Bazaar from the pack of games released by Zynga for Facebook however. First, though you need to connect through Facebook or Twitter, Echo Bazaar is separate from the social networks aside from the ability to tweet short ads for the game for bonus actions once daily, and the ability to interact with friends and followers who also play. The setting is a Victorian London that fell deep beneath the Earth, claimed by the dark Masters of the Bazaar. Hell is literally so close they have an embassy, and demons and strange creatures walk alongside grubby urchins and gentlemen and ladies in a twisted and vaguely Lovecraftian setting dripping with mystery. Echo Bazaar also tracks decisions made in the course of telling your story, and makes those choices relevant enough that each player's experience is unique. My personal character is a debauched rake and hedonist, using a silver tongue and his wits to seduce, gamble and write poetry in society while searching for the Ultimate Game, a poker game with the Heart's Desire as the prize, and the Immortal Soul as the stake.

A game with secrets and souls as currency, be a thief, thug, scholar or some combination of all these.

The last of the free games I've been messing with recently is one of a category of games recently made available on Steam. I'm a big fan of free-to-play MMORPGs and multiplayer action games that make their money from a dedicated fanbase willing to part with a little cash in order to get something extra. I like the model a lot, in some ways this is the basis for Echo Bazaar. How much I like the structure, however, depends on how much content is behind a paywall. If the game has only a small amount of free content and makes me cough up cash for the full game, it isn't “Free to Play,” its a demo, and I feel cheated. A good way to get around this is to make most of the purchasable content earnable in-game over a long period of time. A few well-known games deserving of their own articles do this, including Dungeons and Dragons Online and League of Legends. Steam just put up access to Champions Online, Alliance of Valiant Arms, Forsaken World, Global Agenda: Free Agent and Spiral Knights.

I've been burned by F2P games before, this one seems worth the time investment.

I started on my “play to evaluate” on Spiral Knights, as I want to give each of these a fair shake on their own merits before judging them. Trying to play them all at once would ensure at least one game doesn't really get played nearly long enough to get a proper review. I started with Spiral Knights for two reasons, one, it was the most different of the five titles in presentation from other games I've been playing recently. The second reason lies with the developers. Three Rings is an independent studio that practically introduced me to the Free-to-play concept with their game Puzzle Pirates, that released in 2003. I wanted to see what these guys could do with a more ambitious project. Spiral Knights is best described as an Action-RPG like Legend of Zelda, but with a robotic, almost Lego, feel to the characters and multiplayer dungeons and towns. The game is very pretty, controls smoothly and is a lot of fun in party. The currency to enter a dungeon, resurrect when dead or craft items is “energy,” which can be refilled with time, real money, or tanks can be bought using in-game currency. Bonus! It passes my litmus test for “is this really free?” I looks forward to pushing into content and seeing where the content boundaries before it really makes sense to pay are.

I anticipate I'll revisit this topic many times as I do a LOT of gaming, and don't have a whole lot of budget for it, so finding my diversions without opening my wallet beyond WoW and Gamefly subscriptions takes up the time not spent writing, reading, looking for work or doing tabletop RPGs. I'll find the best and the worst that money doesn't have to buy, and come back and report on my findings.

Star Wars: The Old Republic, Cost $80,000,000 for EA!

Electronic Arts' company, Bioware, is responsible for making Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic series'. Now, Bioware is working on an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) that has already cost EA $80 million dollars to make!

Electronic Arts has also said that it will only take 350,000 subscribers to the game to make it profitable - however, with how amazing this game looks, I would expect it to garner far more subscribers than that. I really hope this game does well, someone needs to finally beat WoW!

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6312400/star-wars-the-old-republic-has-cost-ea-80-million-analyst

Back to the Grind – Repetitive Tasks in RPGs

Roleplaying Games, from a video gaming perspective, share a lot of features with their tabletop progenitors. There are experience points, levels, typically there is something like a character class (even if the “class” is unique to a character) and skills improve over time. Increasing the relative power of a character or group of characters is one of the primary motivations for roleplaying gamers in general, whether with friends around a table, at the controls of a console or keyboard of a PC, single player or MMORPG. Players love to level up.

But what about grinding? Most players talk about “level grind” or “money grind” as a distasteful part of the game that has to be endured in order to experience the “good stuff”. In single-player RPGs, grinding was once an overwhelming percentage of a game's entire content. The grind WAS the game, with story elements and even boss fights that seemed tacked on almost as an afterthought. As years went on, grinding in RPGs became less common in the single-player western and JRPGs on consoles and PCs. This is not, however, to suggest that it went away.

In this context "Epic RPG" means "killing lots of slimes."

In 1986, Western audiences got their first taste of the Japanese style of console RPG (JRPG) gaming with the release of Dragon Warrior for the NES. The story was very simplistic, save the princess, slay the dragon, marry the princess. Player choice is nonexistent, at one point the princess gives you a choice of whether or not you wish to have her accompany you, which leads you to marriage. Selecting “No” prompts the response “But Thou Must!” and sends you back to the Yes/No options until “Yes” is selected. The vast majority of the game, in fact, is walking back and forth in a field or forest until attacked randomly by a level-appropriate monster and then killing them, and repeating until you have to move on to find harder monsters to slay.

Long before the androgynous heroes
 with big swords.

A year later, the first game in the Final Fantasy series came out for the NES, and while it had more varied environments, and there was a lot of improvement with regard to story, there was still the grind. Each town had equipment and spells which needed to be purchased before moving on, so in order to level up and gain the gold coins needed to buy everything the group needed to move on... walk back and forth, looking for random battles. This trend continued to Super NES console games, but typically the experience/gold grind got shorter, and stories became more important and a larger part of the overall game experience.

In the PC world, single player RPGs tackled grinding more subtly, still requiring massive amounts of low level monsters to be killed, but eschewing the “walk back and forth for a random encounter” element of the JRPGs. Instead, low level dungeons filled with rats to be cleared out, endless fetch quests requiring travel through potentially dangerous places, and lots of filler “content” that served the same purpose as Final Fantasy's goblins or Dragon Warrior's slimes while providing more of a feeling that something was getting accomplished, despite the complete lack of advancement of a story in these areas beyond “the hero(es) found the monsters, killed them and took their stuff.”

Today, the single player RPG released by any major game publisher has all but eliminated the grind, though typically the first generation of this style of game for any new platform (mobile/smartphone, tablet PC, PDA) may use the technique to “pad” game length. The grind itself, however, has not died. It has found itself a new home where it thrives today and is more pervasive than ever. Grinding experience points, gold pieces, skills, crafting materials and any number of other in-game resources is the basis of the treadmill found in the MMORPG.

"Just another 10 miles and I can equip the Pants of Fitting."

Though different MMORPGs have easier or more difficult grinds to increase levels, skills and acquire the best possible equipment for a character, most of them follow the same formula. Repeat simple task for incremental reward, hit a milestone as those rewards accumulate, achieve specific new ability or item. Whatever the particular systems in building and preparing a character for whatever sort of “endgame” the developers have in mind for characters that are at or near the level cap (or with maximized skills,) it is safe to say that in most of these kinds of games some grinding was involved in getting there. This aspect of these games, “I don't want to kill 20 rats and bring back the tails” is often one of the reasons cited for players who find this style of gaming dull and/or tedious.

Why do we grind? The “perform task, get reward” cycle has been compared to the conditioning found in Pavlov's experiments with animals, and even gamers aware of this trained psychological response may not be immune to it. I personally fall into this category of gamer. Even if, intellectually, I know that I'm just ringing a bell to get a treat... I like treats. Some players find repetition with strictly defined rewards (i.e. “if I catch 12 fish, I gain a point in fishing skill”) relaxing. Grinding with an element of randomness, such as killing monsters for a particular rare item or crafting items that may on rare occasion produce something more valuable or powerful, has been shown to stimulate the same areas of the brain that are active while gambling. Many aspects of MMORPG grinding combine both strictly defined rewards with the possibility of a random “special” reward for a powerful psychological draw for a wide variety of players.

Almost every MMORPG has a fishing mini-game.
Every time I play them I fish, and I don't know why. I don't even like fishing.

How do you feel about grinding? Hate it when it pops up in games? Don't mind it because the reward for your efforts is typically satisfying? Refuse to play games that feature it? Some combination of these, or maybe something else entirely? Let me know.

MMORPGs, from Adventure to World of Warcraft. A brief historical summary.

I've mentioned several times before that I play World of Warcraft, but I haven't really gone into specifics, the hows and the whys. As a gamer, I grew up on tabletop RPGs, arcade games and the NES. Hobby gaming including wargames with miniatures and boardgames, PC Gaming from those early Sierra adventures to Dragon Age 2 and console gaming from the NES to the Xbox 360 have always occupied a lot of my leisure time. With the exception of Dungeons and Dragons, it is unlikely that any single game from any of those categories has taken a greater portion of that time than World of Warcraft. Before I can answer the questions of How, specifically I play, and what about WoW appeals to me as a gamer, I'd like to provide some background on it, and the genre it currently dominates.

Ah, Gold Box. We were so happy to have graphics, most of us didn't notice these were actually pretty dull.

Playing as a knight, wizard or elf in a dungeon on a computer was one of the very first things anyone ever tried to do with one that wasn't science, business or military-related (as far back as 1975, with “Adventure”.) From early text and ASCII adventures (the roguelikes) on through digital D&D from Pool of Radiance through Baldur's Gate and beyond, the single player dungeon crawl has always been popular. The multiplayer experience, trying to get something like the home D&D session on the computer was perhaps not in the specific design objectives of these titles, but it existed in the imaginations of many of those who played them.

Enter Ultima Online. There were few graphical games of its kind when UO first released, Meridian 59 in 1996, and earlier offerings on proprietary networks like CompuServe, GEnie, AOL and The Sierra Network. Many gamers interested in the concept of a persistent online fantasy world signed up for Ultima Online when it launched in 1997, partially on the strength of the Ultima license, which was one of the traditional PC RPG franchises at the time. People loved, and hated it. UO got to go first, and made mistakes other games would later learn from. Rampant player vs player murder and theft, since all items could be taken from a dead character... it was just more profitable to engage in antisocial play. Player housing sprouted up across the land, with wealthy players using cheaper houses as artificial fences to keep others out of large sections of the world. The economy was broken, people used the in-game macro system to automatically gain levels and skills others worked for, and rampant cheating or bug exploits made the game a huge mess. But it was a start.

Classic Moment. Player Killing and Theft were so out of control, this shows the moment that Lord British, leader of the world of Ultima, being played by the company president, was PK'ed during his speech... with a stolen scroll.

Many other MMORPGs launched in the wake of Ultima Online, most notably the Korean game Lineage, Asheron's Call and EverQuest. Many of these games adopted features that persist even into modern MMOs, and as popularity grew, the opinions of roleplaying gamers started to diverge. The novelty wore off for some and negative opinions grew into backlash against the genre, while other found that this emerging style of gameplay was precisely what they were looking for. Each world developed mostly in its own direction, with a few common features and assumptions in most of the new games being released, most of these solutions to actual or perceived problems with UO and other early games in the genre.

A few standouts in an era mostly dominated by EverQuest include Dark Age of Camelot, Final Fantasy XI, and Runescape. Dark Age of Camelot continued the process of refining the systems and gameplay elements of earlier games, and introducing faction-based world PvP combat. This innovation balanced somewhat the desire of players to have the risk associated with non-consensual PvP and its attendant thrill against antisocial grief play that can drive new players from a game. Final Fantasy XI took the popular Japanese console RPG into the world of the MMORPG with players from around the world able to play on PC, PlayStation 2, and later Xbox360. Runescape launched as a free-to-play, browser based MMORPG with optional content available for a small fee. This attracted many gamers who wanted to play this sort of game, but who refused to pay a monthly fee for the privilege.

This box brought more controversy to my gaming groups than anything since Magic Cards at the table.

The modern era of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game really started in November of 2004. World of Warcraft launched with a successful and familiar franchise from its Real Time Strategy Warcraft series, having learned from a lot of the games that came before it, and is still the undisputed heavyweight in the genre. WoW started with a design goal of examining every feature common to any MMORPG that came before and evaluating it. If a feature was popular and enjoyed by most players, a way to highlight or enhance that feature was implemented, Such as action bars and chat windows a la EverQuest, or faction based PvP from Dark Age of Camelot. If a feature or assumption was disliked by players, it was eliminated and replaced with something else. Most early MMOs started players in a field killing rats or bunnies, and these “newbie zones” didn't do much to make a new player feel heroic. WoW discarded the “fight rats and rabbits” trope, and focused on early content as an introduction to basics of the setting and a larger story. Continual adaptations from this philosophy, with gradual graphical improvements to make the game look and feel modern without becoming unplayable on the average subscriber's system has kept WoW on top for the last 6+ years.

Still on top... for now.

In a future article, I'll talk about my experience in particular with World of Warcraft, from beta tester before its release, to casual player, guild member, hardcore raider, guild officer and guild master of a successful mid/top-tier raiding guild. I understand the perspective of the gamer who hates this game, and in the years I've been playing... I've been there. My wife and I still play together as officers in the guild I once led, pushing along with a team to defeat the most difficult bosses in-game, but most of our involvement is now down to between four and five hours three or four nights a week. It is a hobby, and one that has proven to be a less expensive way to spend time as a couple than many others we could choose.