I think that in the reason we don’t experience any wonder in MMOs anymore is because its a numbers game. Its human nature to figure out numbers and to find what will get you a reward the most efficiently. There is no mystery to be had nor any thinking involved its a game of efficiency that rewards best use of number with better numbers and quite frankly that’s all we are trained to do in theses games. That’s all we can do because that feature by our nature takes precedence over all else. If it weren’t so we wouldn’t be living in this amazing modern world. That’s it plain and simple.

One way to get out of the numbers game is for a game to never show you numbers. It would be great! have all the gear and crafting etc but have no numerical value attached to them. Have no numbers flying over a mobs head. Because if there is numbers and a way to see it, it is also human nature to figure those numbers out and find whats most efficient. You can’t have it both ways. This is part of the reason why I at lest feel more immersed in single player games.

I think in old Pen and Paper games that modern MMOs are based on you can have those numbers both because they are needed for the game systems and die rolls to actually play. Where as on a PC you can hide all rolls and still play; but even more it’s that you are not asked to use your imagination in an MMO. MMOs present you with everything you need and no reason for your mind to create anything. You already see the landscape and your characters face on the screen and not in your mind’s eye. That’s great! But after an initial reveal coupled with the fact that everything is already created for you, your choices have zero impact on the world of other players what is there to draw you in? Quests I suppose but there goes the numbers again “Kill X wolves for 100xp and 2 silver coins”. This is not wondrous and ties into the numbers game. MMOs are not RPGs they are a numbers game. I recall with AoC they did a review of the gear and called it their “RPG system”.

role-play
   /ˈroʊlˌpleɪ/ Show Spelled[rohl-pley] Show IPA
–verb (used with object)
1.
to assume the attitudes, actions, and discourse of (another), especially in a make-believe situation in an effort to understand a differing point of view or social interaction: Management trainees were given a chance to role-play labor negotiators.
2.
to experiment with or experience (a situation or viewpoint) by playing a role: trainees role-playing management positions.

OK so now that we have a definition of Role Play we can ask; how the hell is upgrading gear and forever increasing skill numbers as a mean of character progression considered the role-playing? Yes traditionally RPGs have a means of progression and this is done with numbers but it wasn’t the sole point of the game. In MMOs you are not asked to make-believe anything, and you are certainly not asked to see another point of view, you in most cases aren’t even ask to interact socially anymore.

Imagine if you will sitting around a table with your friends playing AD&D talking and telling each other what you are doing and why in combat, speaking to NPCs as if you were that person to resolve situations, imagining the environment and how you can interact with it dynamically changing with every word your friends and your DM speak.

Now imagine the same scenario but if it were played like an MMO. Instead your DM holds up a picture of a grassy meadow with some wolves and a boy at the other side and you are told to kill X number of them to rescue the boy on the other side of this picture and that’s your only option to resolve the situation. (No descriptions are given no questions are asked no dilemmas to solve other that rolling a die to get a number.) You must kill the wolves to same the boy by whacking them over and over or you and all your friends might as well go home because that’s all your DM will let you do. You all then proceed to rolling dice for to hit and damage calculations without speaking and afterwords given loot and your XP to record on your character sheet.

Man that sounds boring restrictive and immersive; that’s what MMOS are.

The reason we all loved our first MMOs is no mystery. We were fresh to the technology and the systems involved. We still wondered at being able to interact with other people and kill wolves together online. We didn’t need any stimulation besides that because your first MMO at least for a bit has your imagination engaged by all this cool new stuff and technology etc. The newness was there; we had never killed a digital dragon before.

But the dragon after we first kill it ceases to become real because after that we aren’t amazed and we see it for what it really is. Its a just symbol for a dragon and we realize if we hit the number pad we have a skill that does damage maybe even a few of them with different graphics but all they really are, are numbers. We end up seeing that all we are doing is smashing a key for a random number generator to kill a symbol representing a dragon with no thought or care for it besides the fact that we get a few numbers on our character sheets.

Man that sounds boring restrictive and immersive; that’s what MMOS are.

If we were able remove the numbers from the game so we can no longer see them we make players have to ask questions and engage them at least a small bit more. Instead of killing those wolves for so much xp and a sword that does an extra 10 dps why are we killing them? To save the boy i guess, for all we know it gives no XP we cant see it! Why do i need this sword is it better than my other one? Maybe maybe not you have to try it out it’s a mystery; at least it might look cooler. If the numbers hid everything we would have to respond only to the way our characters in these games felt and looked with no regard to what gives XP or what does the best dps. That would add a sense of connection to the game again instead of seeing at numbers and pixellated symbols for objects that have yet another number values connected to them. It would force us at least a small bit more to make-believe and ask why we do things in a game and occupy our minds with stories and the environment.

It’s not a full solution but its a start. It sounds a little less boring and slightly more immersive; That’s where MMOs can go.

Take for instance playing a Mass Effect game. We do missions and we know there numbers and that doing things increases them but that isn’t the goal (at least not for me) I’m enjoying it for being in another world and seeing the story. If i could see the numbers and given lists of tasks to complete just to get those numbers in a repetitive fashion i think i wouldn’t care where I was I would be thinking that i needed to get the number because that’s what the point of the game was.

Anyhow by this point I’m rambling and you get the point…

I used to visit The Huffington Post quite a bit a while back. While it has news and opinions its meat and potatoes are the comments on the stories it posts. That’s after all really the only main fresh content they have seeing as all they really do is act as an aggregator and sometimes have one of their bloggers write and opinion piece. The comments thread will go on for a day and have thousands comments some good, some bad, some trolling and some sad. However the trolling ones got a bit too much for me and the same commentors would write the same crap all the time . I got really tired of arguing and reading pointless comments on on things I could read straight from the source elsewhere and not a blurb with a link back to a real story attached and I haven’t gone back to comment often. At least there you had to log in to comment so when I saw certian names I knew who to skip over and who to look for … it was a community of sorts and people knew each other as terrible of a community it was. Furthermore at least the content of the comments was somewhat substantive and was based off of real issues that had the merit to argue over.

Now today I was looking at Massively as I often do out of shear boredom on lunch break or when i get tired of whatever I’m doing at work (shame on me). Ugh…. I as I learned on the Huffington Post Massively is all about the comments and less about the articles because all they are most of the time is a link to a press release someone put out or an opinion piece as was the case in what I read and again, the comments are really where any entertainment or value the site has. But with Massively there is no substance to argue about and little fact to back up opinions of anyone myself included. The comments are just a giant troll fest with what has to be the worst community ever.

I have been guilty of being an ass there myself and I trolled comments about Free Realms when it came out. I knew it was wrong but as a 32 year old man i tend to assume (and demographics will back me up) that most mmo gamers are men in their 20s to 30s. about 25% are teens and with a game clearly targeted at children in the single digits it found it very disturbing at the level of interest in this game. Only half jokingly I tossed out accusations that Pedo Bear must be on the loose at the site.

Anyhow now back to the point.. I am as I am known in most game related places asThac0 and I am not afraid to be know and have people call me out on my idiocy. But registration at Massively is optional to comment leading to tons of idiotic posts and rants. I might add that some of those who are logged in do the same and are even worse. But c’mon at least let us know who you are instead of just making a mass of things. Are you not man or woman enough to be held accountable for your speech…. not we know who you are anyway.

I’m not even going to go into the dumb that had been rattled off about Trion you can read it Here suffice it to say its nothing new or exciting but the sheer negativity and and ignorance makes me want to block Massively every time I go nowadays. The opinion articles are decent and they are devoid of most actual news that hasn’t been released anywhere else. Massively you need a community or your doomed.. because it just gets worse over time.

Also by the statistics i linked to earlier that means most of these mildly retarded posters are adults… very sad.

My Take on a River of souls

My take is that it was just anticlimactic and they should have anticipated the queues which were very bad. But everyone needs to grow up. having a disappointing first event doesn’t make the game doomed or worse than FFXIV etc. They immediately apologized and threw out a bone to people for the let down and thats all they can do. Honestly I’d rather have a game that aims high and makes a few mistakes along that way than an underachiever. Also i might point out that all you missed out on if you couldnt log in was that screenshot above where NPCs talked and the ones below where there were a lot of rifts at the same time.. no so exciting. Thats all I hope we can move one now.

oooh rifts

Stage 2: Looks Framilliar

FIN

So without Further ados let me commence in the introductions:

Phentara is my warrior. The charge in headlong into a swarm of enemies with a big sword type of play has always appealed me. Winning a battle of attrition against a horde of evil is always a good way to go as long as things don’t go too slowly. She was my first character in RIFT and thus far I do enjoy her very much. However I find that the souls for a warrior are more limited than most other callings in that warriors can only tank, mele dps, and buff and lets face it buffing is not really very exciting.

Machui is my mage. Casters have never been my favorite in any game. I tend to need the more visceral experience of close combat to hear and feel my cold steel ripping into my foes flesh tearing away their layers. However I have enjoyed the speed at which I can dispatch peoples souls from Telara and the pets have been very good to have tank for me offering more survivability than Phentara in most cases. Although ranged DPS is a mages bread and butter I have found that the variety of spells is engaging and the fact that a mage can also heal has been a boon for the class as the act of filling up the green bar instead of making is drop is actually a good change of pace for me sometimes. RIFT is the first game where i feel I have truly enjoyed a mage.

Samehdi is my cleric. In most games I tend to prefer hybrid classes and this is the most hybrid of all the callings in RIFT. I like the ranged DPS with her but its not as fun as my mage. I like the tanking she offers though and she stays up and alive far far longer than Phentara but even with the build i have that has tanking ability but with some of it traded for what should be really good DPS... I am finding it painfully boring to kill mobs. The healing is great though; well its great when i heal. When i felt like I was really starting to love this character it was on a night I was doing tons of rifts and most people were my level. I had been using an Inquisitor build with some extra healing and was getting good amounts of damage and was also being useful healing for a lot .. now that there are so many higher levels doing rifts I can neither heal or DPS before everything is dead. So for grouping she is great and terribly fun but not so much solo... I think im going to have to spend some time yet playing with builds before i say my interest in Samehdi is over. In fact sometimes the struggle to experiment and find what I like will drive me to level a character even more than ones I have fallen into a routine with.

Thactari is my rogue. Honestly as you can tell by the starter gear in this picture I just made her before I started typing this post. I have high hopes for her. Almost as often as I find myself playing a hybrid class i find myself playing a rogue. In this case thactari could be the golden ticket because rogues in RIFT have more roles than both Warriors and Mages and just as many as the cleric but with added swirling daggers glinting in the sun. Rogues are great and everyone loves them and thats why I left her for last. Its always my fear in an MMO that if i play a rogue I will be forever alone because of the shear numbers of other rogues out there. Being a unique and precious snowflake that gets group invites is always very appealing. Oddly enough some of the few times I have even gotten random invites were on rogues… go figure! At any rate I’ll have to come back and give my thoughts on this character later when shes at least 16/17 like everyone else.

Looking over Freemarch starting area.

So all in all I’m having a blast in RIFT and now that my last Alt is rolled i look forward to progressing out of Freemarch where I have been the last few weeks. Burnout on a game from repeating zones is always and issues but with all the options to explore its not an issue. I’m still not sold on the crafting on this game too but thats not too bad.

I hope i have given a good reference to my in game friends on who they are talking to when seemingly random folks send them /tells. Not that I expect anyone to keep track of this crap. But I always feel guilty because i feel like people do and its not fair to think people have that good of a memory or need to keep a cheat sheet of all their guildies names LOL

Ok thats enough for not I need to go play RIFT!   XD

So it will be tonight that I embark on my RIFT journey and I’m sure to blog about it. While the STO feature episodes are spectacular that leads them to get quite the large amount of coverage from my fellow mmo bloggers. Hopefully I will have something be it good or bad to say about the game in the coming days. Probably not bad seeing as how the worst I have ever heard from it was that it was more or less “average” .

If starting a new game doesn’t get my juices flowing I think modifying content and format of this little blog could be in order. However I’m not sure what to write about except my personal trials and tribulations with what I’ve been dealing with and perhaps books if i ever make time away from mmos

So… is there anyone out there that wants me to play RIFT with them or am I going in on a solo venture? Also please let me know if there is anything you’d like to hear me write about in specific i think its a good time to review requests

We were on a mission to drop down to the surface of of a jungle plant to find out why communications had been lost.  The camp below was under mortar fire and the camps leader Mr. McDoogle was mysteriously ill. Seeing as how he was dying anyway I demanded that I be allowed to eat him which broke out into a fire fight between my and the rest of my party. There was a Ram Python lizard trying to learn to drive and half track and all sorts of other hilariousness  .

The link to the Review is at: http://io9.com/5567182/going-mercenary-in-the-23rd-century-with-battlelords

If anyone is looking for a Sci-Fi PnP RPG that is fun to play has an in depth rule set but doesn’t take itself too seriously. I’d download a PDF of the rules and give it a shot.

The Phentari

“The Phentari race is the most mistrusted, disliked, and feared of all the known races. They are bipedal squid-like beings with generally nasty dispositions toward life and are sometimes called names like Grim Reaper, Cold Death, Demon Spawn, and Soul Sucker. Phentari are indigenous to the methane planet Phena in the Tau Ceti star system. They are typically evil, but a few have been known to be good. Phentari have four sinuous arms, each of which is capable of independent action. This allows the squid to target and fire multiple weapons, or perform multiple independent actions simultaneously. When using edged weapons, the squid attacks like a mobile cuisinart. Multiple tentacles also allow the squid to climb quite well. Phentari possess stump like legs which offer little balance. They have long since adopted prosthetic gear to facilitate running. Phena has a 20% methane atmosphere and like the Eridani, the Phentari must wear an atmospheric processor when operating outside of a methane environment. They are not liked by most other races who view them as evil and treacherous. This suits the Phentari just fine for he holds all weaker beings in utter contempt anyway. Many Phentari follow the philosophy that, “All fear me. Those who don’t, I have already disposed of!” The squids understand their own version of persuasion which is coercion. Why would there be any other method of getting someone to do something for you? The only races that the Phentari actually like are Orions and Tza Zen Rigeln. Phentari do respect those who are powerful, but they deplore cowardice.”

The customization was brilliant. You are allowed to change every detail of your character right down to the freckles, moles and length of you eyelashes. As a multimedia designer I have to say Real Time Worlds has a great, intuitive and robust graphics editor for you to change your Avatar and its items for countless hours. A good deal of my play time was dedicated to modifying and re-modifying my character as money allowed. Obviously editing items and your character will cost a fee from you pool of chase that you earn through running missions as is standard fare for MMOs.

The editors seem to be the carrot on the stick for you to keep playing and the only goal I could clearly define during my time.   Which is fine and dandy for me for quite some time. As an MMO player my tendency is to find unique gear and items and more or less dress up my avatar to look cool most of the time; I find a lot of fun in that because i like to have my characters look the part of who I imagine them to be. I detest how most games have you run around in mis matched pastel pajamas or burlap sacks for a good portion of a game even after you have pulled yourself up from being a common gutter snipe and molded yourself into a hero. This is a conundrum that  APB does not have and for that I am happy.

So i just told you how great the editor was and I really mean that but once you get out of the editor there is an issue. It seems as if once you physically enter the game outside of the editing suite the richness of your creations are dumbed down presumably to make the game playable. I would think that having such high detail rendered on every character would  cause peoples computers to slow to a crawl and in that lies a huge question to me; what is the point in having such a wonderful tool to create and share content in such detail when no one but you will ever see it the way its meant to be seen? Not even you as the player will see your own character in game the way you see it as a paper doll in the editor. All the time and effort to flesh out the details of your character from the subtle lines of your eye shadow, the size of your iris and pupils, the length of your eyelashes, the moles on your chest all of that is is “blurred” and “dumbed down” for everyone to see. So i keep asking myself… “self, what is this carrot worth?” The editor is still amazing in light of this fact but I can’t help but start to see some of it as a gimmick when it has no place in the game outside of a menu that you see. It’s as if the editor was made for those videos we saw of the customization jut for Hype and the game you spend your time playing has CoH quality models and skins.

I’m going to post 4 pictures now one In Game picture and one In Editor picture of both my criminal and my enforcer. You will really see difference I am talking about.

Carmalina my enforcer in Game

Carmaline my Enforcer In the Editor

Kumiko my criminal in game

Kumiko my Criminal in the Editor

Seeing the editor and its limitless ability for player customized (not created except for music) content as being a driving force to get player to complete adventures in San Paro we will have to see what game play is like. The game was presented as a GTA MMO  and for all intensive purposes it plays and feels like that to me.

When you enter the game world you will pledge to a contact that will at times radio to you and give you quests. This contact has a short bio that is well written but lacks much relevance to the missions and world and general. Quests pop up in a box with a short descriptor of the type be it a “capture and hold a spot”  or a “chase down X” or a “go tag X spots”. While generic the quests are  easy to read and understand on the fly when you are running around the city fighting or committing crimes. When you accept (Y) not (N) you get the area for your objective as a marker displaying as a way point when you look around. This worked very well. Missions are easy to pick up and hop in and were mostly fun.

I say mostly fun because this is the entirety of the content in APB. You will run the same  5 types or so of missions over and over to unlock items to buy and cash to customize. This being the only type of content is fairly shallow game play. Ideally I would have hoped to at least see that gangs could capture and hold real estate in zones to earn money from extorting citizens and selling drugs and enforcers could likewise get taxes and fees to charge for protection. There is no persistence and no goal to the PvP besides to be used as a cash cow.   This also leads me to ask about how a community will form in a game that is entirely instanced with 100 players a map, 100000 players a server but only a maximum of about 8 random players at a time in a mission. The point of the game is to be known for your  unique style  but chances are you will never meet or speak with most people. I found that everyone feels like a stranger you are thrown into a group with never to see again nor during your action packed adventures do you have time to see their style. It will be interesting to see how this will work out after release with a persistent player base. I would bet the forums are the only way to form a community in-game.

That reminds me of another gripe I had with the missions in the world: There is no death penalty and you re spawn about 60 yards away from where you died within seconds. That means you are gunning down the same jerk over and over again when you have to complete an objective. I would much prefer you to have to respawn somewhere across the map or perhaps by whomever you pledged to so that there would be a feeling of meaning and consequence to game play. Personally while I am not a huge FPS fan I do like to play them sometimes and My favorite games are the ones where everyone on both teams has one life and the last man standing wins for his/her team. I usually choose a sniper kit and hide and see how many headshots i can get and how high and accuracy score i can get doing it.  (by the way there are no headshots in APB and all the hit boxes are the same ) I would love to see this in APB where you would have to strategic and careful other wise you loose your Quest. The constant fagging and respawning belittles the FPS experience for me personally by making it unrealistic, hectic and meaningless , its one thing that really keeps me away from a lot of games like COD etc.

Anyhow moving on…  after you pledge to your contact to get quests you can summon a car by hitting a button on a parking garage wall. Then by Crom! the car is materialized and you can drive on out. You can also choose to carjack anyone driving by whether or not you are a criminal or an enforcer. I found the cars I stole were better than the player owned car i had which really made me question why they give us cars at all? Even if the car was better its a real pain in the ass to do a mission where you have to run around on foot all over and then remember where you parked your car? Pssh I ended up just stealing a car even when i took my own because of that. That or it blew up too quickly because the driving controls aren’t exactly realistic and I tended to crash a lot. Also I did enjoy ripping people out of their cars by their legs and driving off while they swear, you can’t get that with your car!

The above pretty much sums up what there is in the game and when i sit down and look at it I can’t find much that doesn’t need improvement or that bothers me in one way or another but at the same time i loved playing the game and am craving more. The question remains though of how much more will I crave; will the think broth of this soup leave me craving something more substantial after more play time? It feels to me like APB was an attempt at giving players a “sandbox” MMOFPS but the devs forgot the box. The basic tools to create are there and they amount to quite a bit of sand but what you do with all that sand and where you put it is lacking. What i mean by that is that APB’s world is shallow and not interactive and doesn’t support a place the creations to call home much beyond personal clothing  items  and cars and there is no way to affect the world in a meaningful way. When things are so fleeting and temporary and fast paced it doesn’t breed attachment to characters and places that an MMO needs to retain players and give it that special quality that makes you talk about it years after playing in a sentimental way.  MMOs need to have meaning to have power and to hold peoples imagination and that can only be found in my experience through persistence, though a great and immersive story or lastly but not least through a great tight-knit community, none of which it looks like APB can cultivate with the way it is structured. Only time after release can tell us what will happen. I’m still on the edge about weather or not I will be buying and playing this game myself. On one had its easy and fun and light and it avoids grinding which I hate and then there is all that other stuff….

Knowing my impulse spending and cravings for casual games I’ll no doubt cave

Khitten Dancing

First we have Khitten:

Khitten at the Thirsty Dog

And then we have Minjee:

Minjee Dancing

Minjee in the Thirsty Dog

I think I’m honestly leaning tword Minjee for the more traditional Chinese /Korean look. I guess I’ll say Korean as she has a Korean name. I’ve also used Min in Eve Online before so I guess this would be a continuation of that Moniker. Except for the fact Min Seong was in Eve and Min as first name in AoC is a bit too short. Feel free to add in your two cents on the battle of the avatars  for my heart and mind.

Anyway moving on… I am really stunned by how great Tortage looks in DX10. I haven’t taken a character through there since before they added the DX10. I know; a long time right?

With no photoshopping at all the screenshots coem out great. The advanced lighting while it kills my frame rate (drops it from 34 FPS to 15!) Is worth the suffering at slower frame rates outdoors. Look at the lighting and filed of depth it creates. It was totally not this way before:

Khitten and the Giant Ape

Minjee leading the way for Castilda

Khitten wading on White Sands beach

As you can see the game look better than ever.

I have been pleasantly surprised that returning to Tortage has not been painful after having had run so many alts through it on various servers when the game came out. My friends at that time made me hop servers many times. Instead its like seeing and old friend whom you may have had a fight with in the past. All is forgiven and its nice to see their familiar face again. Welcome back Tortage I’m sorry we had such a bad break up.

I’ve also noticed that my club wielding skills are taking on a unique form. My wrists and the way I hold it are very odd.

Strange way to hold a club!

And I;ll give you one more Fatality just for Kicks although its not as strange as the first

BooM!

I have to say I’m having a grand time in AoC and I’m excited to have found a few people to play with now. AoC is much better as a shared experience. I’ve been saying it for a long time now but its perhaps one of the best MMOs on the market and is very underrated.

I downloaded the full game and again with the expansion induced last night and re-installed. Humbug!

However on the brighter side I did seem to have won a custom Avatar on the AoC forums today! I have yet to see them change it though. It will look like this:

Yay I won!

I thought it a fitting tribute to both the expansion and the passing of its artist Frank Frazetta. If the Servers get up and I can play before bed It will indeed have been a good day.