We Fly Spitfires – MMORPG Blog

Sins of a Solar Empire. Meaningless title. Brilliant game.

I’ve been playing a bit of Sins of a Solar Empire again and boy oh boy, is it a damn fine game. It’s your usual real-time strategy sci-fi affair in the same vein as Star Wars: Empire at War and Homefront and if you’ve never played it before then I’d highly recommend that you give it a shot (and find yourself saying “damn, what a fine game” in the process). Although MMORPGs are my favourite gaming genre, RTS’ are up near the top of my list too and recently I’ve been pondering what would happen if they both were to combine and produce some sort of crazy mutated MMORTS offspring.

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Inspired by all of the talk about death penalities in MMOs and the risk and difficulty it brings, I wanted to share an idea about about a type of failure that hurts like hell but doesn’t actually kill you…

The Backstory

When I first started work, over half a decade ago, I used to have terrible trouble sleeping at night. Not because of any health problems or disturbances but just because, one night, I wasn’t tired and couldn’t fall asleep. That single incident kicked off a vicious cycle in my head and I spent the next several months not sleeping simply because I used to lie awake at night worrying about not sleeping. See, I’m the latest in a long line of cronic worriers. My parents worry and their parents before them worried and their parents before them worried and so-on and so-forth for many hundreds and thousands of generations all the way back to Caveman Gor of clan We Fly Pterodactyls who used to lie awake at night worrying about which sabertooth tiger skin would go best with his loincloth for impressing the cave ladies.

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One day we'll be able to experience true immersion in our living rooms just by sacrificing our dignity and sense of style

I know I harp on a lot about immersion in MMOs and how I want to feel my character (figuratively speaking) and escape from my every day worries when I play but I don’t think I’ve ever stopped to talk about exactly why it’s important. Truth be told, I’m not sure I could’ve given you a very eloquent explanation and probably would’ve just mumbled something about roleplay before distracting you with a photo of a cute dog trying to hump a chair leg and then made a run for the nearest exit. That was until today when Dàchéng (blogger of The Dàchéng Diaries) made a very poignant and powerful comment on the subject in my post moaning about Real ID:

“…It is your sense of immersion in the game world that lets you believe that you’re killing things…That suspension of disbelief is what immersion brings, and when it ceases, you are just clicking buttons in a dark room while the sun shines outside.”

Perfectly said.

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I don't know whether to feel disturbed or aroused by this image

The Internet notoriously polarises opinion and reflects everything in either black or white, often with little or no room for the grey in-between. We see this a lot in how MMOs are reported and commented on by fans and it’s why we have those big debates such as “casual vs hardcore” or “WoW does/doesn’t suck”. The games themselves also try for one strong audience in particular and we end up with either ultra-hardcore, better-off-punching-yourself-in-the-face, games like Darkfall or super-easy-breezy, I-heart-carebears casual ones like World of Warcraft. It’s all very strange though because real life isn’t a single extreme but rather a combination of lots of factors , good and band, all mixed together. So why can’t our MMOs be more like that?

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A few dozen reasons why crowd control was a necessity in Everquest

A lot of gamers new to the MMO genre will probably have no idea what crowd control is, other than it being something that police do at football matches. So, I shall take it upon myself to pop on my slippers, sip my tea, stroke my handsomely chiseled chin and explain what it is and why, oh why, we’ll never ever see it again in another MMO…

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Take a long, last look at these talents before they're obliterated

[Warning: contains mild spoilers about Priest talents in Cataclysm]

Leveling up healers in MMOs is usually pretty tough going. They are, after all, designed to heal which is not a very helpful mechanic for trying to solo and I’ve often wondered why so many designers insist on flooding healers with dozens of heals at low levels but few ways of defending themselves and inflicting damage. Surely it would make more sense to start off with fewer heals and more damage and then slowly acquire more and more healing abilities as one progresses?

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Unless you’ve got no interest in MMORPGs (which begs the question why you’re reading this blog) or have been living in some sort of lesser developed country during wartime, you’ll probably have heard about the changes coming to World of Warcraft with the Cataclysm expansion later on in the year. I’ve been following the drips of information we’ve been getting with great interest, not because I particularly care about my favourite class getting some exciting new ability but rather because I find it fascinating to see how the Blizzard developers are evaluating the worth of mechanics and abilities.

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