/con mmob

E3 wishlist

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 16:22:00 +0200

This is my E3 wishlist, let’s see how many of my wishes will be granted next week!

SOE shows an alpha version of Everquest Next
EQ2 is getting a graphics update
Minecraft is also getting a graphics update
ArcheAge has found a European publisher and the game will be released here in a couple of months
Blizzard announces a Diablo 3 expansion. It will include offline single player, and the option to play D3 with D2 graphics.
Blizzard announces Warcraft IV. It will be done when it’s done, fortunately it’s almost done!
Sacred III is playable on E3 and will also be released in a couple of months

Console to Closet is a great blog, providing nice outfits every...

Wed, 30 May 2012 20:31:45 +0200

Console to Closet is a great blog, providing nice outfits every day inspired by games or game characters. I have almost 100 blogs on my Netvibes page (yes, I still use Netvibes!), and this is the only fashion blog that I follow.

As a little tribute to it, I made an outfit inspired by Firiona Vie from Everquest. Forgot to save the designers and prices though… Oh well. Blue is not my color anyway ;-)

Yay! It’s Diablo launch week! I bought the game...

Thu, 17 May 2012 08:24:00 +0200

Yay! It’s Diablo launch week! I bought the game (hasn’t everybody?), played it for a couple of hours already, and had lots of fun. It’s a good game, of course it’s a good game, it’s Diablo! There is one thing that bothers me a bit about it and that’s the graphics. I liked the Diablo II graphics much better: darker, less cartoony, much more fitting with the theme of the game. Diablo III looks like WoW. Meh.

But let’s talk about something else! Path of Exile, a Diablo clone held its second open beta weekend and I’m so impressed by this game! The gameplay is fun, the story is good, the areas are well-designed. The graphics are perfect. And I really love the huge skill tree: it makes you feel like you can try out dozens of builds with the same class.

The game is free to download and free to play with a cosmetic cash shop. I have never heard of a co-op dungeon crawler with this business model so it should be interesting to see how well they do. I like the game, so I wouldn’t mind spending some Euros for a pretty dress for my character, if only to support this awesome indie game.

The industry is changing so fast. I remember how just a couple...

Tue, 15 May 2012 06:46:43 +0200

The industry is changing so fast. I remember how just a couple of years ago, lots of people just hated the free-to-play model. It stood for low-quality, asian, grind and pay-to-win. The big MMO forums were full of posts stating that people would NEVER play a F2P game.

And now Tera has launched and all I’m hearing is: “It’s a great game, but WHY did they not make it free-to-play like all the other games?”

I would actually love it if Tera were free-to-play. I only want to pay for one subscription at a time and at the moment, that’s EQ2 (which ironically is positioned as a F2P game).

Oh well, I’m sure that Tera will change its payment model in a year or so. I’ll just try it then.

A little too hardcore?

Wed, 09 May 2012 19:33:00 +0200

The Iron Realms games are quite controversial. I’ve never played one myself, even though they seem like a lot of fun.

One reason is that they have the image of being pay-to-win. The second reason however is a much more important barrier for me, namely that if you want to be at least a bit competitive in combat, you need to have a “system”, which is basically a whole bunch of triggers and scripts that cure afflictions automatically and help you fight, because everything just happens too fast for a normal person to read and react to.

Now you could try to create your own system, with some basic knowledge of scripting and coding, but it’s a neverending task. Some players have worked on their systems for hundreds and even thousands of hours. There are people who make their systems available for other players to download, but if you want to get a good one, you’ll have to pay for it.

Ultimately, it’s not that expensive to buy a good system from another player, and it even could be fun to start writing you own, but that’s not the point. It’s a matter of principle. If developers don’t even bother to make the game accessible enough to play without a 3rd-party-system, I don’t think the game deserves to be played - no matter how awesome the gameplay, lore and roleplaying is.

In a time where text-based games are dying, accessibility is more important than ever. No MUD can afford to miss out on players because the entry barrier is just to high. There’s quite some discussion on the Iron Realms forums about whether combat should be made easier in order to attract more new players, and I think this would be a great move.

On User-Generated Content

Sun, 06 May 2012 01:57:00 +0200

SOE announced their May update plans for Everquest 2 and it includes one feature that I have been waiting for since the Age of Discovery expansion was released: the ability to play your own character in user-created dungeons. Finally!

Currently, if you want to run a user-created dungeon in EQ2, you have to choose from a number of pre-made characters. I wouldn’t mind this system if those characters were interesting and fun to play, but the problem is that they only have a couple of abilities. So basically, running a player-created dungeon means spamming the same two buttons over and over again until all the mobs are dead. It’s incredibly boring.

I love user-generated content in MMOs, and see plenty of opportunities for the Dungeon Maker system to become amazing. Here’s some thoughts:

Everquest 2 has the best housing system in any MMO ever. Creating a dungeon is already very similar to decorating a house: any house item that’s in your inventory can be put in a dungeon. The layout and interior of the dungeons is however pretty limited. Why not add an open, outdoor area to Dungeon Maker, so you can build anything you want?
Dungeon Creators should definitely be able to incorporate stories into their dungeons. Being able to add non-fighting NPCs, scripts, quests and dialogues is a basic requirement.
The most interesting and challenging mobs are the one that require a specific strategy. Why not add some scripting possibilities to boss mobs? For example, getting a boss mob down to x% health could trigger an event or a special ability.

To this day, the best system for user-created content in MMOs is the Ryzom Ring. Anything is possible with that system, and I have played through some amazing, fun and creative scenarios in the Ring. A system like this, combined with the Dungeon Marks that reward players for running user-created dungeons, would (imho) make the Dungeon Maker a huge success.

Why do I like these oldschool graphics so much? I have no idea....

Wed, 02 May 2012 18:00:00 +0200

Why do I like these oldschool graphics so much? I have no idea. The shiny graphics of SWTOR, GW2 or Tera do nothing for me. But this… this looks sooo cool.

The video is a trailer of the Polish mmorpg Taern. I had never heard of it, but it seems like they just released an English version. Definitely trying this out soon.

I’m one of those oldfashioned people that still loves to play...

Wed, 02 May 2012 01:03:00 +0200

I’m one of those oldfashioned people that still loves to play MUDs. Some of you may not know this, but the MUD scene is still pretty big! However, the whole community is spread out over hundreds of really small games with just a dozen of players. But this is not what I wanted to discuss today.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, a MUD is just like an MMO, but without graphics. Instead of graphics, the whole game world is described with text. Actually, the first MMOs were called “graphical MUDs”, because they were exactly the same, only with a layer of graphics on top. Lots of concepts that we use in MMOs nowadays are concepts that came from MUDs. But some standard MUD features are only occasionally implemented in modern MMOs.

So let’s discuss a couple of pretty standard MUD features that I would love to see in an MMO:

1. Multi-classing

Lots of MUDs offer multi-classing. After reaching a certain level on your first class, you get to choose a second one. And then a third one. And so on! Often, a special ‘hero’ class unlocks for those who have reached the highest level in all the standard classes. I love this system because it allows for a lot of variety within the same character. Also, in some MUDs your level is reset with each class, so you get to revisit lowbie areas. One MMO that has a great multi-classing system is Runes of Magic, but I don’t really know of any other MMO… do you?

2. A donation room

Imagine there was a special place in your favorite MMO where you could go and find awesome gear on the floor. MUDs often have a donation room where people drop items that they do not need anymore, and pick up items that were left there by others. You would think this is an easily abused system, but it’s not! Mostly, the items left in the donation room are low-level items which can be used by newbies. Isn’t that a nice welcome?

3. Multiple social groups

In most MMOs, you can only be a part of one guild. But in a lot of MUDs, you can belong to multiple social groups. Often, guilds are based on player class (e.g. if you’re a mage, you can be a part of the mages guild), and then you can join a clan of players, and multiple societies based on what you like to do in-game, interests that you have, etc. Again, this allows for varied gameplay with the same character, whereas otherwise you’d have to make an alt if you wanted to join a second social group.

4. Eating & Drinking

5. Movement points

I’ll talk about these last two features together. In a lot of MUDs, you’ll start to feel weak if you haven’t had enough to eat or drink. You’ll also start to feel tired if you’ve travelled too far without resting. It’s clear why both these concepts aren’t used in ‘modern’ MMOs. I can imagine that lots of people would be frustrated if they had to interrupt their dungeon run for a rest, or to go find a sandwich and some water, but on the other hand, I think eating, drinking and movement restrictions allow for more immersion.

MMOs come in all colours and flavours, but the only real...

Tue, 01 May 2012 16:51:00 +0200

MMOs come in all colours and flavours, but the only real ‘horror-themed’ MMO is (to my knowledge) Requiem Memento Mori. I love the art style of this game. Sadly, I’ve never been able to play it because their patcher is a piece of crap, and I’ve never even been able to manually patch the game. Dear game publishers, is it so hard to upload the latest version of your game to your website, so I don’t have to spend hours patching your game after the initial download?

So finally, this week, Requiem released a browser client. They have worked together with Kalydo to port the whole game to a nice, small web client. No downloads, no installation, no patches!

I’ve played the Kalydo browser version of Runes Of Magic and it works like a charm. The browser version of Requiem however, worked on my computer (for some reason, not on my laptop), but it has a fixed resolution of 1024x768. (Yes, that’s right, a fixed resolution of 1024x768! Took me right back to the nineties…) So in the end, no Requiem for me…

I’d still love to play a horror-themed MMO, so if you have any suggestions, let me know!