We Fly Spitfires – MMORPG Blog

Any Everquest 2 player who’s ever betrayed from Qeynos to Freeport will know exactly what I’m referring to with this post’s title. For those of you who don’t, let me explain.

Players in EQ2 can choose to betray their resident city and join the opposing faction and, in order to do so, they must complete a series of laborious quests that in total take several hours. Yep, it harks back to the days of the original Everquest and that thing called faction (which Vanguard tried to resurrect and failed miserably in). So, once you’ve completed a series of quests to leave your city, you then have to farm faction quests in order to become ‘amiable’ with your new city and then finally complete another series of quests to gain your new citizenship.

Although repetitive and massively unnecessary this entire process isn’t actually too bad (even though it will consume at least 2 hours of your life which you will never get back) because at least you’re actively doing something the entire time. That is, however, until you encounter one of the final quests called ‘Learning Your Place In Freeport‘.

This quest sees your EVIL character challenged with petting and feeding a stray dog. Yep, you really are that EVIL. Not only does it really make no sense whatsoever in the context of game world, it’s probably the worst designed quest I ever encountered in any MMORPG ever. Here’s what you have to do:

• Summon the dog
• Right click on the dog and select either ‘feed’ or ‘pet’
• Pause
• Right click on the dog and select either ‘feed’ or ‘pet’
• Repeat for 10 minutes
• Right click on the dog and select either ’sit’ or ‘play dead’
• Pause
• Right click on the dog and select either ’sit’ or ‘play dead’
• Repeat for 10 minutes

I shit you not.

The entire process takes about 20 minutes. That’s 20 minutes of right clicking on a fricking dog and either feeding or petting it or commanding it to play dead or sit.

Here’s what your screen will look like:

This is only a fraction of the actual clicks I had to do

And just when you think it has to finish sometime soon (oh God please let it finish), it just keeps going.

Screaming out of frustration is an often occurance during this quest

Eventually, after smashing your face against the monitor, you get a small sense of satisfaction.

Buddy, my now loyal and obedient pet dog, gets introduced to Mr Stomp, my right boot

Even though I’ve done this quest several times before, it never, ever gets any less frustrating or repetitive. It’s terrible quest design and whoever designed it should be strapped to a chair and forced to do it once a day for the rest of their lives…. heck, I’d settle for forcing them to do it once because they clearly never have.

Anyone else got any tails of misery at the hands of poor quest design? I’m pretty sure this one takes the biscuit.

World of Warcraft is a fantastic game, no doubt about it, but I’ve always had one major bugbear with it – grouping sucks. OK, let me qualify that statement – grouping sucks at lower levels. Seriously, for a Massively Multiplayer world it’s a pretty unsociable game until you get into the higher tiers. Ironically enough, it’s got nothing to do with lack of players either because I see hundreds of people running around from levels 1-60 every day.

I love socialising in MMORPGs. Sure, maybe I don’t want to just sit around a campfire and swamp stories – I need direction and a point – but I want to experience teamwork and commradary. If you contrast WoW’s grouping with games like EQ2, you’ll see that these others place much more emphasis on the group experience.

World of Warcraft’s major issues are that it rewards soloing questing too much and grouping too little and also that the player base as a whole is just genuinely less mature and sociable (I know it’s a cliché but, lets face it, it’s true, it’s the nature of the game). We can’t do much about the second point (and would we even want to?) but we can certainly address the first.

Ogrebears had an absolutely fantastic idea for encouraging grouping in WoW, so great I had to write this article about it. He proposed the elegant idea of simply introducing social achievements such as grouping with new people and doing different things with them. I think this is a wonderful idea. Players love achievements so lets give them a carrot to get out of their stubborn ways and try grouping with new people. It honestly inspires me to run a campaign called ‘Embrace PUGs Today’ (-> a light bulb just went off over my head).

There’s definitely other things Blizzard could do to improve grouping and socialising but social achievements would be a start.

Oddly enough, whilst writing this article I’ve started to have the nervous thought that everyone is going to come back and comment on this and say that the grouping experience in WoW is tremendous and the social experience couldn’t be better thus rendering me with the sole thought that I can’t get any groups because I’m an asshole…

Cast your mind back to 2003. Everquest was middle aged and in it’s prime, World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 were still deep in development and Warhammer Online was just a twinkle in Paul Barnett’s eye. SoE ruled all MMOs and was king of the world. They were arrogant and brash and they released the most ambitious MMORPG anyone had seen so far – Star Wars: Galaxies.

Following on from my article yesterday, I thought it would be interesting to explain exactly why I felt nostalgic about SW:G. Sure, it was a heap of fun and it was a Star Wars MMORPG but there was something else. See, six years ago MMOs were rather rare and exotic, unlike today where pretty much any and every franchise seems to be getting turned into one. It was relatively new territory – new enough to excite people and inspire them, yet established enough to prove it was a lucrative market and SOE wanted to stake their claim.

I really admire the fact that SOE pushed the boat out with SW:G. They could’ve just made another Everquest or Dark Age of Camelot but they didn’t. They decided to really go for it and introduced concepts we had never seen in MMORPGs before – an entire player driven manufacturing and resource based economy, player housing and cities, pure entertainment and fluff professions – and tried to radically move away from the standard level and hp/mana gameplay. Remember HAM (Health/Action/Mind) and absolutely no adventuring levels? Sure, SW:G wasn’t the greatest game in the world but boy, it sure did try and I honestly feel that it could’ve been so much more.

I played SW:G for 10 weeks in the summer of 2003 and have never touched it since. Sometimes, just sometimes, when I’m sitting at home with my motherly EQ2 or wifely World of Warcraft, I cast my mind back to that holiday fling and smile to myself.

I’d bet that almost everyone answers Everquest to the above question. I’m very tempted to say the same however I’m not going to. I’m going to say Star Wars: Galaxies.

Yeah, I know, I’m just plain crazy. But I’m talking about the original, unadulterated, pre-NGE SW:G. Unfortunately, I’ve lost all of my old screenshots but here’s some of my top moments:

1. Spending an entire summer playing Cromwell, my Zabrak Pikeman/Chef/Dancer, with Salinger, a Trandosian Swordsman who also happened to be my flat mate (room mate for US readers – not actually a friend who was physically flat) at the time.

2. Deciding to rework my body image and finding an Image Designer to make me hugely obese.

3. Further reworking my body image so I wore a headdress and a blue open jacket, revealing my voluptuous belly.

4. Inspiring my comrades by dancing around campfires in the desert of Tatooine with said reworked body image.

5. Gathering together giantic 20 man groups (usually full of complete noobs eager for adventure) and taking them off to the Tusken Raider fortress on Tatooine, getting them slaughtered and repeating the process over and over again.

6. Being thoroughly impressed when my Bio-Engineer buddy turned up with an AT-ST and blew the hell out of everything single-handedly.

See, you don’t need to just feel nostalgic about Everquest

Interestingly enough, I did a little digging on the net when writing this article and found a few pre-NGE emulator projects. True Galaxies seems to cover them all and then there’s also SWGEmu and SWG:ANH. I guess I’m not the only one who misses the original Star Wars: Galaxies.

So what MMORPG do you feel most nostalgic about?

I was excited about Age of Conan. In fact, I was so excited about it that, almost exactly one year ago, I decided to buy a new PC for pretty much the sole reason of playing it. Sure, my old PC could just about chug it along but the performance wasn’t good enough to ‘enjoy’ the game properly. I remember PC specs and frame rates being the hot topic at the time – seemed to be that everyone in my guild and local chat was comparing their frame rates and settings, talking about how well or badly it ran and what they could do improve it. AoC had been highly sold on its superb graphics and getting the best visuals and performance seemed to be on everyone’s mind.

AoC has a lot of good things going for it

Ironically, I only lasted a few months in Conan and about six months later I found myself totally hooked on World of Warcraft for which performance isn’t even an issue. In fact, there’s people out who can run the bloody thing on their Netbook. I don’t have a Netbook but I do have a laptop and I actually really like the fact that I can run WoW on it… and know that wherever I go, I can score my gaming crack (which is either very sad… or very awesome).

I’ve got to hand it to Blizzard. They managed to create a game that’s totally accessible and runs really well on a huge variety of PCs, so much so that most people don’t even consider the performance of it. Whereas on the contrary games like Everquest 2 (which still runs terribly by the way) and Age of Conan which really sold themselves on their graphics have always been the ones that have caused people to obsess about it. Not only does that create another barrier for entry but it is also takes people out of the immersion of the online environment if they’re constantly watching their frame rate.

At the end of the day, the awe of great graphics eventually wears off and you’re left with the core underneath. It’s like dating a supermodel (yeah, cause I’ve got SO much experience with that) – make sure there’s more going on underneath the hood before you get engaged.

So what’s the important of performance? Absolutely nothing if you never even notice it, yet absolutely everything if you do.

Mantooth - EQ2

About three years ago I created an Ogre on the Everquest 2 Nagafen server called ‘Mantooth’ (Dorothy Mantooth is a saint) and ever since then I’ve stuck with the name across every single MMORPG I’ve played. Occasionally it doesn’t suit my character (not a very Tolkieny name in LotRO for instance) but seeing as I usually pick the biggest, meanest and ugliest (I enjoy the irony of the contract to my real life handsomeness) race along with a melee class it’s normally pretty appropriate.

Having a common character name is also an easy way for my peers to recognise me on any new MMORPGs I try. Plus, I guess I’ve become quite attached to the handle. I associate the name ‘Mantooth’ with myself. Weird, I know, but considering I have a self confessed Ogre fetish what exactly did you expect?

So, what’s your Internet handle?

The Question

When most people think of MMORPGs they immediately think of the fantasy genre rather than science fiction. I don’t find that at all surprising considering that not only did MMOs start with fantasy RPGs but also that the most successful and popular of them belong to the same genre. We only need to compare the subscription rates and success of games like WoW, Everquest and Lineage over in Korea to their sci-fi counterparts and there’s a huge discrepancy. It made me start to wonder – is fantasy just an intrinsically better and more suitable theme for a MMORPG than sci-fi?

My Thoughts

I can’t speak for others but, personally, I have no problems with the sci-fi theme and, in fact, I actually like the idea of seeing more online RPGs in it. I can definitely say, however, that most of the sci-fi MMORPGs we’ve seen so far have been pretty lacking. Look up reviews for games like Star Wars: Galaxies, Tabula Rasa, Planetside, RF Online and the Matrix Online and you won’t exactly find glowing recommendations. In fact, the two most highly praised sci-fi MMOs are Anarchy Online and Eve and they are both six years old.

Miles Mantooth - Tabula Rasa hippie

MMORPGs all exist around a standard framework. They’re about a huge worlds, character progression and customisation, socialising, trading and combat. All of those qualities are easy to replicate and suitable for any genre… apart from combat. MMO combat mechanics tend to be based around the principle that the thing you’re trying to kill will attempt to get close to you in order to fight back. That’s fine for a fantasy setting but breaks down a bit when applied to science fiction and those pesky things called guns.

You see, in a sci-fi world, the idea of fighting toe-to-toe with something just doesn’t hold up. Maybe I’m just used to playing too many fast paced sci-fi shooters and strategy games but re-skinning the fantasy based MMO combat system for a futuristic setting just doesn’t do it for me. Cloning a fantasy MMORPG and throwing in some guns just isn’t enough.

Conclusion

Quality and polish aside, I think one of the major problems with sci-fi MMORPGs is that they don’t try to develop their own combat systems and instead try to poach mechanics from games from a completely different genre. It just doesn’t work and, unfortunately, as we see games which do try to something a little different flop (Tabula Rasa springs to mind) the more I’m betting games companies will want to play it safe.

I’d like to see a science fiction MMORPG come out that tries something new and redefines the mechanics of sci-fi MMO combat, updating it for the different genre, and being successful at it. It’s a tall order but I think only then will we see science fiction pick up in popularity and start to compete a little better against it’s fantasy brother. Here’s hoping the forthcoming Star Wars and Star Trek games will be the ones to do it.