Assassin's Creed was very enjoyable. The graphics were outstanding and the environment well crafted. Combat in the game was a lot of fun and the variety of enemies created varying degrees of challenge. The game had a few downsides though. It is fairly repetitious. For every mission you are given you can follow the exact same formula of activities to complete it. You locate towers that you climb to get an overview of the area, complete the requisite task for the area, once you do three of these you can proceed to the final assassination. The game allows you to pursue these tasks at your leisure for the most part. Making your way through the objectives in most any order you want. Right up to the very last ten minutes of game play I would have given Assassin's Creed 10/10. It was as close to perfect as any game I have played in a long time. Unfortunately the last ten minutes (which occurs after you defeat the final enemy) is a giant turd burger of poor design and horrible implementation that will leave most players wondering if they have actually finished the game at all or just gotten stuck.

The good news this month is that Age of Conan is less than 6 weeks away. The game launches on May 20th and open beta starts up May 1. I've already pre-ordered my copy of the game and I hope it turns out well. Pre-orders are able to download the game 6 days before launch and start playing 3 days before it goes on sale in stores. Any characters you create or progress you make will be carried over to through the official launch.

Shortly after AoC comes out Mass Effect will be released for the PC on May 28th. The PC version reputedly has many enhancements and improvements over the console version which include improved inventory management and a more sophisticated lockpicking mini-game.

Sorry I was so late on this one but things have been hectic. (Hell, I'm finishing this up while waiting for a flight out of Chicago.) Hope to see you in AoC!

Since I have had little time lately my gaming has been confined to things I can pick up and play for an hour or so at a time. Given those restrictions I have had no desire to play World of Warcraft. Logging on for 20 minutes to do a daily quest is to me the gaming equivalent of remembering to take out the garbage or making sure to mow the lawn. Another chore to be crossed off a list rather than a mode of entertainment.

One of the games I have played and enjoyed was S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Stalker is a first person shooter set in the area around Chernobyl after the accident. In this storyline the radiation released has created mutated animals and people that you will encounter as well as valuable artifacts which can be collected and sold. The people who enter the restricted area in spite of the military presence have formed small communities and strongholds. There are several factions which you can choose to support, join, or ignore as you wish. Each offers access to jobs that can be undertaken for money and stores where equipment can be purchased. Which jobs you perform is not without consequences. Working for one group may put you at odds with another and turn potential allies into enemies who will shoot you on sight.

The game is great for letting you go about your business exploring the world while avoiding anomalies (radiation hazards that can kill you in horrible ways), killing mutants, and collecting precious artifacts and loot. The combat model is fairly good and the graphics are well done. The story is adequate for providing you reason to visit certain areas and take on certain jobs while not being so overdone that it cannot be avoided or comes off as excessively melodramatic.

There are a few downsides though. The game can be unforgiving. You will want to remember the old gamers Axiom: Save Often. In a single careless moment you may turn a corner and walk straight into both barrels of a shotgun or find yourself stuck in a situation from which you cannot escape. Another potential annoyance is the weight limit imposed on your character. While it adds a certain amount of depth and strategy to the game many people may find that being unable to carry more ammunition or a wider variety of weapons and armor too restrictive. Weapons and armor also wear out over time as you use them. The body armor you just bought before starting a mission may offer about as much protection as a cardboard box before you're halfway through.

Another downside is the difficulty curve. Everything moves along smoothly right up until the final mission to enter the power plant. As soon as you enter the map region where the reactor can be found you are being chased by helicopters, snipers, and riflemen through highly radiated areas while under a time limit. Entering the plant itself things get even harder. Suddenly the enemies seem less flesh and blood and more like heavily armored, semi-mobile gun turrets. These soldiers will stand in complete darkness at the end of blind corners just waiting for you to poke your head out to burn you down in a hail of automatic gun fire. You will find it takes three or four times as much ammunition to stop one of these opponents as it does to kill any other enemy in the game not to mention the gauntlet you had to run through to reach this point has likely left you rather short on bullets and with your armor in tatters.

All that aside I played the game for about twenty hours before setting it aside and had a very enjoyable experience even up to the end where I was forced to quit w/o completing the mission. Considering you can get the game from Steam for only $19.95 I figure it was money well spent.

The other game I have found myself playing again recently has been City of Heroes. It's been over three years since I last played and the game hasn't changed all that much. There are new powers to choose from as well as the ability to play villains now. There are new costume pieces, new character appearance options, and a new (to me) invention system that creates an economy in the game for buying and selling craft-able power enhancers and the components to make them. There are new types of missions, new task forces, and areas where players can engage in either arena style, or open world pvp with set objectives. The game also allows players to increase or decrease the game difficulty to better suit their abilities and style.

Character creation is as compelling as ever if not more so. It is easy to spend hours planning out your hero or villain and there always seems to be just one more archetype or power combination to experiment with. The game play is as good as ever. Players can jump into the action quickly and start feeling heroic (or villainous) within minutes of entering the game world. Maximum level is still 50 after all this time but there is no shortage of people playing at the lower levels to team with. Because the character system is so enticing people are constantly creating new avatars.

In many ways I think CoH is every bit as good as, if not superior to, World of Warcraft. The player interaction and game mechanics are better as is the dynamic pace of group combat. The areas where it falls short are not insignificant however. The game still uses an xp debt system for charaters over level 10 that will turn a lot of players off and encourages people to play within their 'safe' zone rather than take on riskier encounters and test their limits. When it comes to the end game CoH still has nothing to offer. You can spend as much time as you like tweaking your skills and enhancements but new challenges are few and far between. Content updates occur roughly every 6 months and not all will have new material for old players. Fortunately the early game is good enough that if you enjoy leveling superheroes and just playing the game it can keep you entertained indefinitely.

City of Heroes is now fully in the hands of NCSoft. Cryptic handed over control of the game and has been working on a new superhero game of their own. the new title will be called Champions Online and is based on the pen and paper superhero game called 'Champions' published by Hero Games. Champions Online builds on many of the features that makes City of Heroes so compelling. Players can expect a huge array of options for customizing their character's appearance right down to their style of walk and combat. Characters will still be categorized by the class they choose but now all powers will be available to every player. The difference being that some powers will be less expensive for some classes than for others. The game is being developed for simultaneous release on consoles and PC. The interface is designed with that in mind so that there are few UI elements and combat can be carried out using just the buttons on a standard controller.

Champions Online promises to deliver the next generation of superhero MMO incorporating and expanding on all the best parts of City of Heroes while updating the graphics for even better visuals. The game is projected to be released sometime in 2009 so the wait may not be unbearably long. It is definitely something I'll be keeping an eye out for in the future.

We are redirecting the project at the moment and there are a number of courses of action we are evaluating. The game is not cancelled, nor is it on hold. We want the best possible execution so it is probably fair to say that it will not make the original date of "Winter". As we complete our evaluation of our options, we will eventually formulate a new release date.

The original release date was Winter 2008 :/

The most recent update (yesterday) made it sound like they are having serious issues with the game, and personally I would not be surprised if it were scrapped. I was pretty astounded that it was in development in the first place :p

One limiting factor is range of sight. Let's use WoW for example. In nagrand you can stand on the road between the alliance town and the ethereal outpost and look south over a large open plain marked with crop circles around a giant hunk of crystal. What you see from there is maybe 10-20 feet of grass and maybe a handful of critters. From experience we know there are teams of ethereals working at the smaller crystal formations, a ring of patrolling voidwalkers, a couple herds of bantha, and a 5 story tall giant demon all wandering around the area before the zone drops off into the edge of the nether. But all of that is invisible. What you see is a giant empty plane with some grey-brown grafitti around a fairly featureless crystal stone. None of the detail or activity makes it into visual range.

LotRo was a bit better, they have some reasonable but crude methods of scaling distant scenery so that it can still be represented on screen w/o requiring a lot of graphical horsepower. Go out to the region north of weathertop and head north out of the hills toward the plains. Watch the horizon as you keep going north and you will see flat panels of trees begin to appear. As you get closer those will be resolved into an actual forest.

Another example of LoTRo falling short is in the Ettenmoors. I love the themes and the eternally brilliant autum colors there but so little of the area is actually usable and even the complete zone in its entirety is small enough to be virtually claustrophobic. Hardly a good example of a vast primeval forest as the books described. Take scenes from the LoTRo movies for example, any of the bits of forest that appeared in the movie were of higher quality than what is in the game. Yeah, sure that was a movie but I'm not talking about the quality of the image, I'm trying to separate that from the quality of the design. The set designer for the movie was much more skillful than the world designer for the game.

last one: I can't find an image of it online right now but one of the most impressive scenes from the film for me was where the river turned into a waterfall with a giant statue standing on either side, arms outstretched to warn travellers to stop. If done in most games the player wouldn't even see the statues till they were right on top of him and even then would be unlikely to see above their knees. hell, they would be lucky to be able to see the river bank to either side if the developers didn't shrink it to a ditch.

In WoW you can hardly tell the difference between day or night anyway. In contrast, everquest nights were really dark, as in you had to have a light and could barely see 10 feet in front of your face. It was part annoyance and part ambience. I think it added quite a bit to the game but it was also really frustrating when you couldn't see and didn't have a light.

I honestly think that a LOT of the scenery in WoW is pretty amazing. I do know that when I happen to be playing the game in front of others they are generally impressed with the look of the scenery (IF the first time I ever walked into it was awesome). Anyway, I too am hopeful that these new games will offer more than WoW does currently, but I have become quite the pessimist in that regard. So far nothing has even come close to being as fun as WoW for me, though I really did like the idea of DDOs dungeons.

The thing that annoys me more than anything about some of the new games is the Day/Night cycle. Why do they insist on making it non realistic? I want a day to last a DAY! Not 2 hours. That, above all else kills immersion in the MMOs that I have tried outside of WoW.

Meh… I'll certainly not be jumping into the next MMO right away. If it gets lots of love from Keggers I'll check it out, but for now I'm pretty happy blowing time playing WoW.

AoC looks awesome, I'm definitely picking it up but I need to upgrade my system because I need to enjoy that in all it's graphical glory.

By the way, as far as scenery went, that Lord of the Rings Online game you all were playing looked pretty good. The only reason I couldn't get into it was because the combat mechanics seemed… weird to me.

And before I post them, I don't necessarily think that all of the landscapes are boring, just sometimes they're more background and you can't go explore the mountains, its just a perimeter or boundary of the next zone. I think that is lame. If you are going to make it, let people run around it (which AoC does - told you I'm totally biased…)

Anyway to the pics:
Some are thumbnails because I don't know why. Here is the link to all of them since I don't want to get the links to work.
Screenshots from Age of Conan

Hills leading into mountains
Different mountain range
Inside a jungle
Mountainous coastline
City Harbor
Valley
Swamp
Mountain in the distance
Jungle ruins

There are lots of others, they are just more focused on the combat, characters, etc. so they aren't as scenic since they are zoomed in a lot. So I do think good environments exist, but they can be hard to find depending on the game.

Pirates of the Burning Sea came out in January but word is that they have had extensive stability problems. There hasn't been a whole lot of community interest in the game despite it having a reputation for a sophisticated economic model and engaging ship-to-ship combat. The buzz-level for PotBS is somewhere between Tabula Rasa and Lord of the Rings Online. I would have tried the game myself just to see how it was but I started a new job this month which has confiscated all of my free time for a while so I don't have any personal opinions to offer.

Star Trek Online has been transferred to a new developer w/o any of the existing code. This means to me that the game is either completely dead with no chance of revival or that it will be 2-3 years before we see any further signs of life from it. Lesson learned here I believe is if there is one company you do NOT want working on your MMO it has to be Perpetual.

I have added a second section to the Watchlist just to track the development of interesting MMO's. When they get closer to release I'll promote them to the top half of the page. In the meantime it makes a convenient spot for me to remember what to look for when I troll for MMO news.

Since there are no new announcements or releases worth mentioning I'm going to talk about what I would like to see instead.

What I would like to see in an MMO is a return to the sandbox game. Every major game released or in development since Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft has been more and more an example of a 'theme park' game. A theme park world is one where players are lead from one activity to the next like a tourist in Disneyland. Each activity (quests, dungeons, pvp, pve) can be thought of as a ride and players as the customers. This gives the player the illusion of being able to travel freely around the world while the designer subtly leads them by the nose from place to place ensuring that players always know what they are supposed to do. Each quest leads to the next as players are pointed, even pushed, towards content tailor made for characters with their background and experience. This sounds like it should be a good thing, and in truth, it does a fine job of presenting the MMO newbie with a very directed and controlled game experience that can create a sort of protected comfort zone for them to play in.

Where the Theme Park game focuses on creating a series of interesting rides to carry players from start to finish the sandbox game on the other hand focuses on creating the game world as a whole. Another way to look at it is the Theme Park world is designed one ride at a time and these rides are then connected to form the world in the same way puzzle pieces form a picture with specific paths for players to follow from one piece to the next. The sandbox game focuses on the picture itself rather than the individual pieces. Unfortunately, in past sandbox games, this left finding interesting things to do in the hands of the player. If the player was new to the genre they could easily feel lost, without purpose or direction, become bored and quit. Even experienced players often dislike not being explicitly told what they should do as well as when and where they should do it. For my taste though, I hate being lead around. I greatly prefer to find my own way through a game. Exploration and discovery is at least half the reason I play these types of games to begin with.

What I really want is a huge world that I can wander around in finding interesting things to see and to do. I want it to be so big that I could easily spend an entire year playing the game and still not have seen every location, completed every quest, or encountered every type of content in the game. Related to that I want the world to change and evolve over time. I want places I visited months ago to have grown or been altered in some way based upon game events and player actions. I want the world to be a living, organic thing that is continually molded by the players who populate it.

The second big change I want is in appearance. I'm not referring to poly counts or graphics quality here. I mean I want the world's terrain and topography to be interesting. So often game worlds are bland and mundane, their landscapes dull and unimaginative. It seems ironic that so called 'fantasy' game worlds are often more deprived of interesting detail and depth than what can easily be found in the real one. Game designers really need to get out from behind their computer screens and take a look at the world around them. There are so many profoundly awe inspiring places out there that put anything ever done digitally to shame. The mountains, rivers and forests of places like Yosemite or Yellowstone, the giant sequioas of California, the deserts and canyons of the American Southwest. Amazing places like this exist all around the world yet when game designers undertake the creation of a fantasy setting they are so mired down in the dull and uninspired I have to wonder if they have ever even left their mother's basement. Part of their problem is one of scale. Their worlds are so compressed that they could easily be misplaced if translated meter for meter to the real one. I suppose it's hard to find room for something like Utah's Monument Valley or China's Soaring Dragon Cave when your entire world is no larger than a dozen or so city blocks.

To summarize: I want my next MMO to be huge, larger than all other game worlds combined and able to house anywhere from 10,000 - 100,000 players without becoming crowded. I want it to be a living, organic entity that changes over time. I want it to be at least as beautiful and interesting as anything I'm likely to see on the Travel Channel or in National Geographic. And lastly, I want it to be so stuffed full of dynamically generated content that there is no chance I will ever encounter every single thing that the game has to offer. While doing all that I want to maintain much of the hand tailored content of traditional worlds. Carefully crafted dungeons, castles, pvp battlegrounds and quest lines still have a place in my perfect game but only as further enhancement to the vast virtual world that houses them.

Oh well, it gives me more time to finish the books.

Official Announcement

Around September Perpetual postponed the release of Gods and Heroes and laid off ~40 developers saying that the game would be undergoing further beta testing to focus on "quality and polish". -gamasutra

In October Gods and Heroes was put on 'indefinite hold' so that Perpetual could focus on Star Trek Online. -gamasutra

Then in November news leaked out that Perpetual was liquidating assets to pay off creditors and that Gravity, one of its investors, expected to loose the entirety of its 9 million dollar investment. -gamasutra

In December Perpetual's PR firm Kohnke Communications filed suit claiming fraudulent business practices in the transfer of the Star Trek License during the liquidation which went to another Perpetual entity, P2 entertainment. -gamasutra -TTH lawsuit info

Now (January) it has been announced that Perpetual is no longer working on Star Trek Online and that development has been transferred to an undisclosed developer -wired

Troubled times for the game at the very least. It seems extremely probable that this game will die in development before ever being released.

PvP and PvE instances on farm status is a fair comparison for they are of equal difficulty. However there is still a greater penalty for pvE than for PvP. lesser instances may have lower requirements but the lowest of any PvE instance will still require more than what PvP demands.

If you are unable to read skill descriptions to determine what abilities other players possess there isn't really anything I can do to help you 'see the future'.

The fact remains nothing you have posted has said anything to refute the basic point of my first post: PvP rewards players for doing nothing. PvE does not. Because there are equivalent rewards from both systems players will gravitate toward the one which requires less effort. In the current state of WoW that is PvP.

2) Well, in about an hour to an hour and a half of daily quests I can make up my raiding expenses for the next 3 raids. I usually spend about 20 - 40 gold in repairs on new content nights and consumable costs have been drastically reduced, to the point where there's a near-free alternative available in the instances I've seen:

Kara - Flasks not really needed, mana/health pots would have to be farmed I suppose.
Gruul - Extremely cheap flasks, health potions, and mana pots available.
Mag - I don't know what's available here.
SSC/TK - Trash mobs drop tokens for flasks; health and mana pots obtained through coilfang armaments.
BT/MH - I don't know what's available here.

This is comparable to how PvP consumables are obtained… no free flasks available, but mana/health pots can be bought with honour.

Also, while not nearly as high as PvE, there are repair costs in PvP. Not so much in arenas, but if you run any AV you'll see that you need to repair, and if you run it all day like a lot of people do (you actually have to play it), those add up quick. Again, try serious PvP for a while… it seems you pretty much have to experience it before you believe me anyways.

3) I wasn't aware that you were a tactical genius with the ability to see the future. Man, must be nice. For the rest of us "normal folks", we have to do things the hard way. I know I certainly can't tell when someone else is going to do something, or what tactics the other team is going to use against me and when. Or what class makeup the other team will have and with what specs, all before the fight starts given that they're behind a couple doors and across a map.

Good talk, but as I said in the other thread, I'm done. You're so far off the mark here and you're there without really having spent much time actually playing PvP. How can I compete with what you've made up in your mind and convinced yourself is true? Really, I can't even figure out where you got half that stuff from in that second last paragraph; it's laughable. Certainly, if it were that way I'd have seen Koal, or one of your alts at Grand Marshal long ago, or in a 2000+ rated team now, but I don't.

By the way, I have no doubts you can get there, especially given you are a dedicated and intelligent (if pig-headed) individual and the two 70's that you have (to my knowledge) fit in very well in the PvP system; however, if and when you do, I'm willing to bet that you'll revise your opinions, at least a little. Lets talk then.

2) and what is the penalty for loosing in PvP? Nothing at all. As much as you try to brush off the expense of raiding you know better and so do I. Individuals frequently spend hundreds of gold a night in consumables and repairs to make little to no progress at all vs difficult encounters. Maybe that expense plus the time required to gear up is trivial to you but it is still greater than the zero investment made by the PvP'er.

Although it has nothing to do with this discussion by pointing out the lack of reward for being the first to kill a boss only serves to make my point for me regarding the disparity of PvP and PvE in Warcraft. If players come out of PvP at the top of the ladder they receive unique rewards and move on to a tournament where they can win real world cash. This happens 3 times a year. What do raiders get for being the best in the world at their game? Jack Squat.

3) No I wasn't surprised the first time I got MC'ed, kited, or anything else. I am clever enough to pay attention to what other classes can do, to learn who and what I am fighting before I set foot on the battlefield. I try every class and learn at least the basics of how they work and what tactics they employ. Nothing that has happened in PvP has ever surprised me with the exception of what series of digits the random number generator can produce. From the sounds of things you are far more naive regarding PvP and ignorant of the capabilities of other classes than I ever was.

The variety of PvE so far outstrips anything you can encounter in PvP the two are virtually incomparable. Wow, that rogues used Sap on me instead of Cheap Shot! I am so amazed? vs That 60 foot titan just rose up out of the pool of lava and tossed a bomb into the group that exploded for 10,000 damage and sent everyone flying around the room! The only times I have ever had jaw dropping, adrenaline pumping experiences in an MMO has been fighting raid bosses. I have never felt more tension in any of the thousands of PvP matches I have played than in the last seconds of a guild first boss kill. When was the last time you heard your entire PvP team stand up and cheer on vent for 10 minutes because they won a game? Which will be more memorable to you 20 years from now, the time you ran that flag back to the base to win WSG or the first (or second or third) time you beat C'Thun or Vaelestraz or Illidan?

A player can do both, but you never have and never will gear in PvP to be a top raider, and you will never gear in PvE to be a top PvP'er.

Maybe more later :)

Response to your edit… I'll go by your numbers.

1) That's not entirely accurate… sure you might have a rudimentary understanding of what each class is capable of, but you don't know what spec they are, what gear they are wearing, or how they play their class. Players can, and do, pull tricks on you because you generally don't know what to expect. The players who do the best in PvP have tactics that other players haven't planned for, and they are also capable of reacting fast enough to counter the other team's tactics. By contrast, in PvE it's a comparatively more simple matter of throwing yourself at a boss until you do learn that encounter. What makes it easier is that things aren't going to change. Whatever caused your wipe last fight is generally static and once you see it, you can figure out how to counter it and you now know it's coming. Almost every boss in WoW is completely predictable… to the point where scripted mods are written to tell you exactly what is happening when. The only exception is a few small cases where it is random for drop placement… the first example I can think of that most people will have seen is prince.

In a PvP match, you generally get one shot. You win, or you lose, then you move on to another match up. The only way PvE could compare to this is if every time you wiped on a boss, the next time you fought it there would be something else quite different that you face. This isn't the case.

2) No, the boss will never grow lazy or complacent, or have an off day, but that's my point. It never changes, it's the same every time. You have to remember that in PvP, there are two thinking and reasoning entities against eachother, so if one has an off-day, another wins. If you wipe on a boss, there is only a loser… the boss doesn't win, it doesn't care. It gains nothing, doesn't progress, it's the same. If you're to say that you can't overwhelm a boss with sheer numbers, the same applies to PvP (not counting world-pvp) as matchups are equal. If you disagree, then it's a valid statement to say that individual components of a boss are overwhelmed with sheer numbers, which degrades the argument entirely. You can also outgear encounters… bosses are often skipped to be done later when people are better geared. Many new instances aren't completely linear and contain difficult, yet optional bosses. Naxx is an example of this… you're free to start and complete wing you like. It's quite possible to farm certain wings until gear is bloated and it is much easier to fight other bosses in another wing. I'll admit that's kind of a skewed point because that's pretty much how raid progression works, but I find your comparison to PvP equally as skewed so I figured I'd toss it out there.

With regards to penalty… what's the death penalty in PvE? You pay a bit of gold, then you get right back on the horse and try again. No real loss, and given the nature of a PvE encounter, sheer perseverance and gear will surmount 90% of the odds against you. In PvP, failure results in low standing. Consistent failure results in falling behind, which means further failure. If you fail at PvE and take a year to down one boss, the next boss is still one small step above the one you just beat. If you fail at PvP and take a year to complete your first set, you are much farther behind as the rest of the competition has surpassed you greatly in gear and your encounters only become more difficult. I guess what I'm trying to say is, in PvE you have control over what you face, in PvP you don't.

Last point on this one… falling behind other players in PvE generally means nothing. Yea if you're the first to down something world-wide, people might, maybe, possibly, remember your guild name. If you're the second, a much smaller group knows, or even cares. If you're third? Nobody has any clue who you are. Past that it doesn't matter. You aren't going to have a harder time in PvE because someone else is doing better than you. If someone else does better than you in PvP, you suffer directly because you have to face those teams who are now better geared and more skilled.

3) PvE is static, predictable progression with unpredictable rewards. PvP is predictable rewards but unpredictable progression. However, in PvP you can catch up to the competition in comparatively little time to PvE. I see this as a gigantic flaw in PvE far more than any issue with the PvP system. There was too big a gap between new players coming in and Naxx players, to the point where anybody who didn't start raiding at day one found it extremely difficult to catch up. Most Naxx guilds wouldn't accept anybody without at least a good portion of AQ40 gear. It simply doesn't make sense to design a game this way… at least not if you want to attract new players. Again, a flaw in the PvE system.

What do you mean players never surprise you? Have you even PvP'd? You weren't surprised the first time a priest mind controlled you and threw you off a cliff, or zoned you out of the battleground? You weren't surprised when you were guarding a flag and 5 rogues popped out of stealth, destroyed you, and capped the flag? You weren't surprised when just as you were about to kill someone a healer who was heading in at full speed mounted just got there in time to heal them? You weren't surprised when some warrior quickly switched on a shield and spell-reflected that pyroblast? You weren't surprised (and utterly amazed) when a frost mage kited you into oblivion after you got them down to 10% health and you just couldn't quite get there for the finisher?

Those are just a small subset of the things I've experienced in PvP that I never would have seen coming or expected, and even if I've seen them you never know when they are coming again. PvP is full of variety. The only time you get variety in PvE is when Blizzard finally gets around to designing a new instance, and then it's just a matter of throwing yourself at the content until you learn that and get bored with it too.

Please note, that last comment is pretty much the negative end of the spectrum… I actually do enjoy PvE and it is fun learning the new encounters. However, once you learn them they get stale, whereas I'm finding myself being pulled more and more towards PvP simply because of the unpredictability.

http://www.wowhead.com/?items&filter=qu=4;cr=79;crs=1;crv=0

Hopefully that works… if not go to wowhead and search items for epics with resilience > 0. There's definitely a few there and some are even craftable. I know the PvP cloak comes from badge rewards and there's a pretty good ring which comes from spirit shards. Certainly enough to get you started and working towards your PvP gear, similar to how PvP gear can be used to get you started in PvE as you work towards your PvE gear.

I think loot is getting out of hand to begin with, but it's happening equally between PvE items and PvP. Notice that PvP items always lag behind PvE. Season 1 came out at launch with T4 and T5 epics already available. Season 2 was later added and thus became "tied" with t5, then BT/MH was released providing t6 gear with no season equivalent. Now season 3 is out which "catches up" to t6. 2.4 is on the horizon and I don't know what is planned for loot, but I would have to assume it's better than t6 and I'm willing to bet that Season 4 will come out a good while after that.

Also, there is a kind of progression… you have to remember that while you can cheese your way through arenas to get gear, it doesn't really do you a lot of good. Sure you can take 5 months to get yourself geared up in full season 2. Meanwhile, the rest of the PvP world has gone on to get Season 3 (or even 4) and the PvE world has moved up to t6. You're still at a disadvantage. Those who put in the time and effort in PvP still get the reward, and to be honest, it takes much more skill to be good at PvP than it does to go read a strat someone else posted on the internet and duplicate it in a scripted battle. Yea it takes a bit of practice, but for the most part once you've done it you're pretty much set.

Here's something else to think about… I disagree that arena gear is "welfare" but I'll concede that battleground gear is, especially because you can afk day in and out and get them at the same rate as the person who played their ass off. However, is easily obtaining this gear so bad? One of the biggest issues WoW was suffering from was the gigantic gap between new players just coming into the game and players who had been playing for a long time. If you're new to the game it's pretty damn hard to catch up to those players because good luck finding someone willing to accept a player in blues into a guild running Naxx, and that's how it was for 6 months before TBC. There were very few guilds running MC and BWL… most of the rest were in AQ40 and upwards and were recruiting players at that level. There was absolutely no way, short of PvP, to catch up. In TBC, this isn't the case… you can pretty quickly gear yourself up in arena gear if you try. Now you don't have to sit at the bottom until the next expansion, you can catch up to others and contribute.

This doesn't seem unfair at all… it seems like a good way to get players involved and a sound business strategy to keep subscriptions. Also, since PvP gear still isn't as good as PvE gear for PvE at the comparable level, once you catch up to that level underneath you still have something to work towards.

Could you say the same of PvE gear? No. In PvE the amount of support statistics is relatively low. Only a few points of +hit are needed to negate a boss's resistance and power regen is supplemented not only by spirit but by mp5 items, skills and consumables. What options do PvE players have for obtaining resilience, the now critical stat of PvP?

When preparing my initial write up I did a attempt a comparison of the sets. I couldn't make direct comparisons because PvP sets have 8 pieces while the PvE sets have only 5. Even then there are 17 character slots to populate so attempting a direct comparison of what was possible and relating it to specific classes, talent builds and situations is more work than I am willing to undertake. So what I ended up doing was going to wowjutsu and searching through till I found guilds still working on Black Temple now. What I found was that in many cases rather than wear tier 5 items, many players were choosing to wear arena gear and use arena weapons. Although I can't be sure they were wearing this during a raid it indirectly at least suggests that PvP gear is preferred to readily available raid gear by people who have access to both and are attempting to progress through PvE.

This will only become more exacerbated over time as arena seasons progress resulting in ever escalating levels of gear. Perhaps Blizzard will begin to make more use of the rating requirements, perhaps not. The fact remains that there is no progression required for PvP gear, and outside of a limited number of items, it makes no difference weather you win or lose, the rewards are obtained regardless. This very much puts PvP gear in the category of "programs which seek to provide a minimum level of income, service or other support for disadvantaged peoples" which happens to be the definition of Welfare.

Lets assume, for a moment, that your statements are true. Then why do we see end-game PvE raiders almost entirely using PvE gear and not PvP gear, even when they are in 2000+ rating teams? Why do those same arena teams wear combinations of t5/t6/s2/s3 (when they clearly can wear pure PvP gear), along with non-arena PvP pieces for resilience, show successful seasons? As I've said, PvP gear can be used in PvE, but it is not optimal and likewise, PvE gear can be used in PvP, but it is not optimal.

Now, I didn't do any huge amount of in depth research with spreadsheets and whatnot, but I did head over to this link…
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/items/armorsets/
… and checked out a few pieces between t4 and s2. It seemed pretty apparent that the PvE gear focused on lasting damage (high AP/spell dmg and intel) whereas the PvP gear focused on burst damage and survivability (high crit and resil/stam). I'll definitely agree that the extra stam (and to some extent resil) will help you learn encounters, but when you're going for the kill it'll be the folks in t4 who come out on top on the damage meters. Again, were this not the case all the MT/BH guilds would be in full PvP gear, not the t6/misc epics they are currently wearing.

Sorry, Koal, I'm just not buying it.

I'll have to do the other topics later, outta time :D

Let's compare 25 people /dancing through every arena match and 25 people working on an instance such as Black Temple or Mt Hyjal. By your own calculations doing nothing in an arena for 5 weeks will earn every participant an item, each of which is exactly the item they wanted. To earn these items, no preparation, teamwork, or skill was required. There was no investment in potions, repairs, or other consumables and there was no build up for keys, attunements, or progression. In contrast the 25 raiders working on BT or MT Hyjal can expect to spend weeks or months raiding for 4+ hours per day 5-7 days a week to obtain randomly generated loot. Over the course of 5 weeks, assuming a blazingly fast progression rate of one boss every other week the raiders will have earned roughly 10 items from the first few bosses not counting the possibility of random epics dropped from trash.

Having earned half the items of the pvp'ers over the same period, you must also take into consideration that these items were determined largely at random and at no time were the raiders awarded anything for failure. No boss has ever dropped loot because you 'almost' killed him.

Once the raiders have mastered the instance the number of items they can acquire per week will greatly increase but nothing will ever offset the random factor, the skill requirement, or the time and resource investment required to obtain them. Since Arena seasons last roughly 3 months and historically it takes much longer to beat raid instances the arena players will also acquire upgrades much faster than raiders will even if raid instances are beaten very quickly.

As far as the pvp gear being limited to PvP that isn't really true at all now is it? Not every class set will be useful to every character in PvE (no tanking gear in the arena sets for instance) but for those classes whose main job is to do DPS arena gear is perfectly viable. While it is very difficult to do direct comparison due to the large number of stats, different number of items in each type of set, and the complexity of game mechanics involved it is fairly obvious that a character decked out in arena gear would be quite comfortable in any dungeon or instance and only have to do some minor fiddling with 'off stats' such as spirit, mp5, hit rating etc to be every bit as good, and in some cases better, than the raiding equivalent without even taking weapons into consideration. Your comparison of Season three gear to Tier four is mortally flawed just by casual comparison of statistics. If you had full season three gear your raw DPS will be higher than anyone in the very best raid gear and, more importantly, your survivability will be far greater than a character in Tier 3, which is an enormous advantage when learning new encounters as we have seen demonstrated first hand in old school instances such as AQ and Naxx. So it becomes not a matter of skipping the lowest tier of raid instances and more one of skipping ahead to the end of the highest instance.

Turn the situation around however and the result is much different. Because of the introduction of the resilience stat PvE gear is now somewhat inadequate for competitive PvP which is exactly what Blizzard intended. Despite the greater amount of effort required to obtain it PvE gear has been rendered inferior to what can be obtained for doing literally nothing in PvP. On one side there is an extreme investment required in both time, resources and skill while on the other side, players are given items for doing nothing more than queuing up and watching TV. This is the disparity which is undermining the PvE side of the game.

My point stands quite clearly: Areana/PvP gear is far easier to obtain, and of equal or greater benefit to the character in many cases than PvE gear. PvP gear is not limited in usefullness to PvP alone, however PvE gear, despite being much harder to acquire, is a poor replacement for PvP gear in battlegrounds and arenas and in some situations may even be inferior in PvE to what can be obtained through PvP. And when your done reading all of this recall that we are comparing losing pvp teams with winning pve guilds and the disparity is magnified that much more .

Now, when you talk about the core of the PvP/PvE conflict you touch on player's perceptions that PvP is 'harder' because you play against a live (presumably) thinking opponent rather than a scripted encounter. This is the common, and flawed, assumption that can be easily disproved (for the case of WoW) by the fact that you can lose consistently in PvP yet still be rewarded but only absolute success is rewarded in PvE.

In more general terms, dissassociated with any particular game, high end PvE is still on equal or greater terms than PvP. First we have to define what areas we are talking about. When I say PvE I don't mean killing greens or running 5 mans. We are talking about raiding here and not snooze-through instance farming. We are talking about competitive, progression oriented instance advancement which works on an intrinsic system comparable to a traditional competitive gaming ladder. In these terms you are not only competing against the scripted AI of the boss encounter but also against other players and guilds attempting to clear the same content and be among the first to defeat it.

But, we don't have to consider the competitive side of PvE to show that the scripted encounters alone are a challenge equal to PvP.

1) The first time you encounter any boss you have no way of knowing what it can do (without resorting to external sources of information which will not be available if you are at the front of the progression curve.) On the other hand, in PvP, you always know well ahead of time, what each and every class is capable of. Players can pull no tricks you haven't seen before, have no unknown tools or abilities to throw at you, and are restricted to the same, mundane, rules of interaction that apply to all players in every encounter. The hallmark of a good raid encounter on the other hand is how it breaks the rules, throws things at you that have never been seen before and requires players to think and react differently than what is customary.

2) Once encountered it is true that boss fights rarely pull any new surprises once their secrets have been learned. However, unlike fighting other players, the boss will never grow lazy or complacent, and never have an off day, and can never be taken off guard. When instanced you can never overwhelm a boss with sheer numbers and as long as it is on the progression curve you can never 'outgear' the encounter either. In order to pass the boss you must defeat it, you cannot (in most cases) bypass it, hide from it, or otherwise proceed until it has been beaten.

Things get a little murky in comparison here. In a PvP ladder situation not being able to defeat an opponent may very well remove you from the competition entirely, whereas failing to beat a raid encounter only costs you time and resources directly, causing you a delay that may allow other teams to surpass you. In a non ladder situation however, failing to win a PvP encounter (depending on the game) is usually meaningless. In some cases players do face a certain degree of risk, keeps or cities can be lost, vast amounts of resources could be taken, and even permanent death of the character is possible depending on the rules of the game you play. In the vast majority however there is no penalty at all for a PvP loss yet no MMO that I am aware of fails to penalize players who lose in PvE.

3) Demands and Rewards: (Again this varies somewhat based on the game chosen) PvP competition places very little burden on players in terms of what it takes to participate. The best designs are those that enable brand new players to be nearly equal at least in terms of raw statistics and abilities to those who have played for much longer. In PvE there is always a progression path that must be run. Gear from earlier encounters must be obtained in order to have any chance at defeating higher tier encounters. Often there are additional items such as consumables or gimic gear required to overcome key encounters. In PvP rewards are uniformly obtained, often predictable far in advance of any actual encounter. In PvE the rewards are, with equal uniformity, randomly determined. Since progress in PvE is extremely dependent on the rewards obtained from earlier encounters having a 'bad' series of random drops will greatly penalize any team trying to defeat key enemies. In these ways PvE is generally far more difficult then PvP.

The bottom line is players cannot surprise you, human intellect is vastly overrated. Although PvE encounters are (mostly) static and unchanging so too are the abilities of any player you ever face. Unlike PvP however you face something entirely new every time you reach a new boss. Defeating that boss will require gear, coordination, skill and lots and lots of practice. Winning or losing in PvE means everything. No reward is earned or progress achieved without defeating the enemy in front of you. Outside of elimination ladders in PvP losing rarely has any consequences at all. Nothing is risked and even less is lost.

Trying to equate PvP to PvE isn't really very logical. It is akin to comparing boxing to a marathon. It would make no sense at all for a boxer to tell a sprinter his sport is easier or vice versa. They are equally competitive and governed by similar rules but conducted in an entirely different manner. In the real world both sports are duly recognized and respected and I think it is high time the same due was paid to both types of gamers in an MMO.

To start, I pretty much agree with most of your observations on battlegrounds so I won't spend much time on it. The afk'ing is a huge problem and no amount of adding reporting is going to fix the issue. The root cause needs to be addressed and that is what you've already pointed out. Faction differences and map imbalance. This has existed since the very beginning and the only reason we've seen any shift in who wins what is due to player apathy. This is an attitude problem on the part of the player, not Blizzard; however, Blizzard can make players more interested in trying by fixing the problem! Anyways, on to arenas…

The first thing to note is that you can't afk in arenas… well, you can, but it's a very slow way to get gear. The easiest way to show this is with the numbers… so here goes. Arena teams all start at 1500 rating and you must play a minimum of 10 games a week in order to have your rating converted to points. For the sake of argument lets just say that an average win nets you 15 rating in gain and an average loss nets you 15 rating in loss. If you lose 10 games a week, you will go down roughly 150 rating per week. Using an arena calculator, we can see how many points that gives you each week in a 5v5 team. The format is (week) rating [points]…

 (0) 1500 [---] // no points at 1500 rating as no games have been played (1) 1350 [311] (2) 1200 [278] (3) 1050 [245] (4) 900 [212] (5) 750 [179] 

Total points: 1225

I'm not 100% sure but I believe the cheapest piece of top season gear is the gloves for somewhere around 1100. The shoulders are 1500 and the rest is around 1850. So to get the cheapest piece of arena gear for the current season is 5 weeks of afk'ing. This is not a quick route… I suppose if you wanted gear for doing nothing and didn't mind that everybody else would quickly outgear you it works, but what's the point at all here? You're gaining nothing by afk'ing in arenas. In terms of net time, it's actually quicker to PvE for your gear as once you learn the boss fight, nothing else changes and gear pretty much just falls to you. You show up, go through the same old motions and bam, epics.

You also need to consider that PvP gear is designed for PvP and not PvE. All the arena sets put a larger focus on stamina and resilience, which takes away from the item budget and reduces PvE related stats. From my personal perspective, I do a mix of PvE and PvP. I'm a feral druid though and don't fit into the "preferrable class balance" for arena teams so I usually stay around the 1500 - 1600 mark. It took me a good while but I ended up gearing myself as follows: 1/5 s1, 3/5 s2, 1/5 s3, belt, bracers, trinket, neck. As I said, this took me a good while to do as my mediocre team (which I actually try on by the way, not afk :P) and I found that I replace the vast majority of that gear with epics from Kara and with tier 4 because it's better suited to PvE.

I should also point out that with season 3 personal rating and rating requirement additions, you must have 1900 rating to buy any main arena weapon (not for wands and hunter axes) and 2000 rating to buy the shoulders. This is not the case for previous seasons, but given the current timeline trend this will be phased out within a year.

Now, it's important to note that the net time is roughly the same, if not larger for PvP, but the gross time is much, much less. You can do 10 games of arena to get your points and given queue times for each bracket, this can take anywhere from 1.5 hours to 3 hours per week, whereas raiding requires time to learn the encounter and once an instance is on farm, it still takes maybe 3 - 6 hours to clear an instance. You play more in PvE as opposed to PvP (if you desire it) but you still effectively gear up at the same rate. This makes PvP more desirable for those who can't put in very much time per week… the casual players. It allows them to obtain gear and exist in a competitive game situation, yet still keep their priorities away from the game. Also, these players exist in a different area than PvE players, and as I said the PvP gear doesn't directly translate to PvE. It's helpful, but far from optimal.

Since I'm getting a little long in the post here I'll try to wrap it up. Basically, making the PvP system work for you takes a lot more work than you think. It's definitely not welfare epics, not in the sense of competition relating to PvP. There have been many arguments thrown the other way across the fence that PvE is welfare epics, attributing this to the fact that a PvE encounter is static and unchanging, fighting against a scripted, unintelligent event that never really changes once you learn it. PvP is a more dynamic encounter requiring you to effectively strategize on the fly as you face different players and different class make ups. Without opening a whole new can of worms, I'll just say that this is a valid viewpoint and shouldn't simply be disregarded because a person favours one style over the other.

PvE is still the same old PvE it has always been (well, for the most part… in essence anyways :D). You still have to follow a progression line and if you do, you still experience game content much as you did before. I suppose if the only thing you care about is "zomg epix" and your e-peen factor, yea PvP is the way to go because you spend much less time in game and can gear up in purples, nevermind the fact that it will take you a long time and those purples won't let you really do anything compared to the players who actually play. However, from my experience with you and in EK I know this isn't the case. EK never played the game because they wanted phat lewtz, they did it to experience game content and from that perspective, nothing has changed. The encounters are still interesting and challenging, and there's still a good amount of if to keep you busy with more coming on the horizon.

PvP gear does enter into the mix, but not that much. I suppose if you were to compare it to pre-TBC, getting full s3 gear would be like magically getting full t1 and skipping MC to go to BWL, and you'd still have BWL, AQ40, and Naxx ahead of you. Bringing that to now, if you get full s3 you could probably skip Kara entirely and go straight to SSC/TK, but you'd still have SSC/TK and MH/BT ahead of you, with that new Sunwell thing coming up.

I hope that all makes sense :)

I do hope that blizzard gets some legit competition soon :)

A PC version of Talisman is supposed to be out "winter 2007" to coincide with the release of a new version of the board game but I haven't seen any sign of a demo or release so it would appear to be in Limbo for the moment. Space Siege, a sci-fi successor to the Dungeon Siege series will be out around February, Age of Conan will hopefully be released around March, and Warhammer Online sometime this spring.

So, it seems things are going to be a little thin for a while. Luckily(?) for me I've started playing World of Warcraft again so my game time is fairly well occupied. Coming back to WoW after a long break has been an interesting experience. It only superficially resembles the game I first played over three years ago. With the accelerated leveling curve people scoot through the first 60 levels of the game in just a couple weeks. The expansion content makes the game more gear centric than ever and the best gear is obtained not through raiding and teamwork, but by going AFKin battlegrounds and arena PvP matches. The new emphasis on arena PvP pervades the game. Although new raid instances are scheduled for release the ease with which better gear can be obtained through PvP has greatly diminished the importance raiding and extinguished the motivation to raid for many. After all, why would anyone bother to spend hundreds of hours over weeks or months trying to down a raid boss for the slim chance at one or even two inferior, randomly determined items, when spending a couple hours AFK in PvP each week grants you your choice of equal or greater reward?

PvE isn't the only aspect of the game to suffer from Blizzard's new infatuation with arenas. The battlegrounds have deteriorated as well. Ongoing problems of racial advantages and map imbalance have turned the Alliance into sacrificial lambs in many battlegroups. Many people still queue up to join the battles, but rather than join because they want to play, they join because they require marks or honor to buy new gear with. Because both marks and honor are awarded for losing as well as winning many people don't even bother to fight. They join the games and collect their reward for having done little or nothing at all to earn them. This policy of 'Welfare Epics' as it has been christened by the community, although well intentioned, is undermining PvP throughout the game. It has become sufficiently widespread that on some servers people are starting 'AFK Teams' with the specific intention of losing games as rapidly as possible so that they can collect their free points with greater efficiency.

The reason (in my opinion) Blizzard gives rewards to people who lose games seems to be two fold. On one hand they don't want the game to be split into 'haves' and 'have nots' creating an imbalance of older, better geared characters teamed up against those who are horribly under-geared by comparison. This would make the strong stronger and ensure those who play less often, or are new to the game, never have a fighting chance becoming locked into the lowest tier of competitors. By giving people something just for showing up they ensure that everyone can advance regardless of how well, or how poorly, they perform or who they are matched up against.

The second reason, related to the first, is that people who lost often and gained nothing would soon stop playing at all resulting in one side or the other not queuing up for PvP which would cause the battleground system to grind to a halt. This also serves as an easy out for Blizzard. Because the system they built requires participation to advance it doesn't matter to them how badly they screw things up or how imbalanced they become. People will continue to queue, even if they have absolutely no chance of winning, because it is the only way they can obtain upgrades, thus ensuring that there will always be a stable of opponents no matter which side has the advantage or how overwhelming that advantage might be. If they did not reward people for losing then, because players would stop joining games when the system got out of whack, they would be forced to address the underlying problems rather than continue to ignore them.

It seems clear then that Blizzard has no motivation to correct the problems at all. In fact, it would be very much in their interest to see that things continued in this way indefinitely. To correct the system would require that they correct class, racial, and faction balance issues which have eluded them for years. This would require not only a great deal of work, but careful assessment of the principles of balance which it seems unlikely they have ever addressed and result in significant disruption to the game when they failed to keep things in check. If they continue doing things the way they have in the past the game will be largely unaffected despite the many complaints of the community. The system they have developed, much as their PvP system rewards players who do nothing, rewards the developers for doing nothing as well. If they do little or nothing the game suffers but proceeds. If they tried to fix the problems they could create a better game but only through great expense and substantial risk. So, like many of their players, Blizzard prefers to be AFK as the game rolls on around them.

In my opinion, although still better than its competitors, WoW has deteriorated greatly since the expansion was released. Although they continue to claim larger and larger subscriber numbers I wonder if that's due more to the game becoming more widely available rather than because it retains and attracts more people in regions where it has been available for some time. I await the release of Warhammer Online and Age of Conan with keen anticipation hoping that someone can give Blizzard a decent bite in the ass so they stop being so damned complacent and re-asses the direction they have taken the game.

Tabula Rasa was released though relatively few people took any interest. There have been indications that most people involved in the beta did not purchase the game or subscribe to it. There has been an interview with Richard Garriott floating around recently where he notes the fact that they have had to take extraordinary steps to try to convince former beta testers to come back and try the game again. In his opinion the game wasn't 'fun enough' in the last two months when many testers were brought on but, in his opinion, things are better now. In my opinion, which seems to be shared by many of the people who post about the game, Tabula Rasa was fun about 4-6 months prior to release and it was only the slew of ill considered changes thrown in at the end of beta that ruined it. Either way the popular opinion is it is a reasonably fun game until the newness wears off. After that it feels far too repetitive and 'grindy' to be enjoyable. It is widely being lumped in with Korean developed games which, by American standards, are long on tedium and short on content.

The Witcher turned out to be an excellent RPG. One which I think every enthusiast of the genre will enjoy. The story is engaging, the scenery is gorgeous, and although you are somewhat restricted in where you can travel, the game allows the player enough freedom to feel that they are making their own way through the world. It is clear that as the game progresses the player will make many decisions which will have at least a subtle effect on the way the story develops. I think it may well be worth a second play through just to see how much difference those choices make. For some combat will feel a bit awkward or perhaps too simplified but I found that once I got used to it combat flowed very well. The pace was fast enough to be interesting but not frenetic. Simple enough to be easily grasped but still retained enough depth to make you think about how you approached a fight from time to time.

Gears of War for the PC has been released though I have played very little of it. I did play enough to discover that combat in the game revolves around finding and using cover in order to survive. I don't think the translation from consoles to PC was done very well. The controls feel awkward for a PC game and doesn't have the familiar feel of other FPS style games.

Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect were both released as scheduled. I still haven't broken down and gotten a 360 yet so I haven't played either but both have gotten good reviews. Assassin's Creed has received some criticism for being a little too repetitive. It appears many of the tasks are too transparently the same so you feel as if you are repeating the same actions over and over again. the second criticism is that the fun parts are separated by lengthy periods of rather boring bits. These include long winded, unskippable, monologue's given by the people you assassinate before and after you kill them.

Warhammer beta should be starting up again sometime soon. During the downtime a number of announcements were made public. The first is that there will be at least two server types for the game. One which has limited PvP in which outside of the RvR regions enemy players are legal targets for attack but may not initiate an attack themselves. This appears to be a ruleset identical to WoW's pvp servers. Players are safe from attack in areas controlled by their factions and open to attack in areas that are contested. The second server type allows players to attack each other everywhere in the game except for the initial starting areas which will remain safe from pvp.

Once the beta reopens the final racial pairing will be available: High Elves and Dark Elves. In addition to the new race there will be some new enhancements. Players will have more options that will let them customize their character's skills and abilities. There will be a trophy system that lets you place honors you have received in very visible locations on your character to show off your accomplishments and player's will be able to dye their armor.

Lately I have found myself playing World of Warcraft again. This time on a pvp server just to see what it's like. I've nearly reached 60 and the experience has just about cemented my opinion of both pvp servers and players. I have never seen a more immature, shit talking, pre-pubescent group of players than those I have encountered on Mal'Ganis. I doubt that the majority of player's would fall into that category, but the few that are most vocal, most visible, are all miserable excuses for human beings. They are petty, crude, and, in the literal sense, quite ignorant. In general they are the worst sort of over-privileged, loud-mouthed, half-wits that you could possibly imagine being scraped up from the bottom of the gene pool. I had thought that the players whose posts I read on the public forums or overheard in general chat on other servers were as low as humanity could go but the PvP community appears to have some very 'special' members whose social inadequacies far exceed anything I have encountered elsewhere.

I have found that in general the ganking and abuse I was concerned about is not all that prevalent. In the entire time I have played I have been attacked perhaps 10 times and nearly half of those I was able to either kill the attacker or escape. Still, I have witnessed level 70's tricking level 10's into flagging for pvp in safe zones by exploiting game mechanics, killing flight masters or quest givers for no reason other than to grief the other side, and on occasion, abusively corpse camping people half their level or less just for the fun of it. I have also seen that contrary to popular opinion or the company line, higher level players have no concern for any of this. No one will come to rescue the newbs from the gankers. If the Tarren Mill flightmaster is being camped by a handful of 70's, players who could drive them off couldn't care less. They prefer to sit outside Orgrimmar dueling or chatting in general while they wait for their next BG or Arena queue to come up. This experience more than anything else has utterly convinced me not to play on WAR's full pvp server and instead create my eventual characters on the restricted server. PvP seems to inevitably attract the most childish of players, those particularly inclined to engage in the most base behaviors of both speech and act. I wouldn't go so far as to say these types of people would ruin the game or the server they play on, they are far too few in number for that. As an analogy I would compare it to someone tossing a few dead bugs onto your pizza. There aren't many of them and there is an awful lot of pizza but, given an alternative, I would prefer to have my pizza without bugs thank you.

There aren't any new games lined up for December or January so it could turn into quite the dry spell. Still there are plenty of games from November I haven't really gotten to play much of yet and others I will want to return to and try a little bit more. Maybe I'll even finally give in and buy myself a 360 or Wii if the WAR beta isn't good enough to hold my interest.

To get an idea of what MMO's are coming in the future here's what I have on my radar:
Pirates of the Burning Sea in Late January/Early February
Age of Conan: March/April
Warhammer Online: April-June
Chronicles of Spellborn: 2008
Aion: 2008

In addition there are a bunch of unnamed MMO's being developed by various studios that wont be out for years yet.
Bioware: Rumored to be a star wars themed MMO possibly similar to Kinghts of the Old republic
Blizzard: A new, non-warcraft MMO.
Interplay: Fallout MMO
Cryptic: Looks like Indiana Jones meets HP Lovecraft
Sqaure Enix: A new non-final fantasy MMO
38 Studios: Unknown MMO (division of NCSoft)
THQ: Warhammer 40k MMO
Zenimax: Unknown MMO
Bethesda: recently received significant funding for MMO development
John Romero/Sigil Works: Unknown MMO

There appears to be a great deal of choice offered to players regarding what side of things they want to be on. Only a second play through will reveal if those choices are meaningful or not.

Skill advancement is somewhat unimportant. As you level up you will learn nearly every skill available in the game so there aren't really different character types to try or different paths for development. The only difference between one character and another in the end is the order in which they learned their skills.

The world is gorgeous and although you can't travel anywhere you want as you would in a sandbox game the sections of the world that open up as you progress are large enough to let you do some exploring.

I would have probably rated the game the best RPG I had ever played right up until chapter 4 or 5. At this point some flaws in the game began to appear. Several times I managed to lock the game up during combat. My character would be pinned between a monster and an obstacle and I would be unable to move or attack. I would get locked into an attack animation that would never finish or let me abort it. So my character would sit there twitching until he died and I would have to reload the game.

There are a lot of loading screens and they are not brief. Every time you travel into/out of a building or to another map region there is a long delay as the next section is loaded. This load screen can take anywhere from 10-15 seconds to a minute or more. Fortunately most of the time you can play on a single map for hours so the loading screens are not encountered so often that they drive you insane.

My final issue with the game has been the real heartbreaker. At the point I have reached in the game I have found that I cannot advance any further in the story until I speak to a particular NPC. Every other task has been completed and all other areas explored but I need an item from this particular person to wrap up one of the main quests. This person has gone MIA. I have searched where he is supposed to be and all around the surrounding area, and I have done so at all hours of day and night (npc's follow schedules where they appear in certain areas at specific times) but I cannot find him. It has been more than a week in game time and he still hasn't turned up.

This would be enough for me to axe a game and start spewing hellfire and brimstone if it weren't for one nagging doubt… I think, it just might be possible, that I killed the NPC I am looking for… The NPC in question is a frogman called a Vodyanoi. In the area where he appears there also sometimes appear hostile vodyanoi who look very similar. I remember running into a pack of the hostile variety while exploring the beach near his shrine one night. I also remember that one of the vodyanoi I fought acted strangely. He kept running away as I tried to kill him. Naturally I didn't let a little thing like that stop me and I chased him down until he was dead. Now, after searching for this guy for a while now I wonder if maybe I didn't manage to kill him unintentionally because he showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sooner or later I'll have to load an old save of the game and see if that was the case or not but for the moment I've set the game aside out of frustration. I will come back to it eventually though and possibly start over at the beginning to see what happens if I make different choices.

I've been using the low camera (forget the name) which gives you the option of using WASD or clicking to move. Moving the mouse doesn't move the camera either so I've been happy with it.

Single player games are more likely to have quests with multiple options, and quests that will cause different outcomes depending on if you do it or not since an average single player RPG will take 50-100 hours. An MMO is ongoing with thousands of quests. They have to have filler quests for people to keep people busy since it would probably double their development time if for every one of their thousands of quests, they had to have multiple solutions.

I think a cool idea in the meantime would be to have quests available for a certain period of time only. Similar to the WoW seasonal quests, where it was available for a few weeks only. Have some quests to defend a town from attack - and actually have the enemies show up in the town. If you don't help, oops the innkeeper just died, go rest somewhere else. If you (as a server) are successful, then the town will be saved and returned to normal. Could have some individual quests, and then a server wide 'must kill 5,000 invading enemies to free the town'. If the server doesn't defend it in time, then the town crumbles and you need to wait a while for the town to be rebuilt. This way there would constantly be new quests, and you could see the results of your actions.

My 2 cents.

Tabula Rasa finally releases November 2nd but I have lost interest. Over time I watched the game become more and more watered down. Considering the game at its core is a fairly tedious, repetitive grind the dilution of the classes and combat mechanics sucked the last ounce of life out of it for me. The game had its moments early on but it wont take most people more than a week or two to realize that the game falls far short of the hype and fails to live up to any of the promises made during its overextended development. This is one of the very few MMO's that has earned a 'pass' from me. I wont be buying it at release.

Gods and Heroes has been put on 'indefinite hold' by Perpetual Entertainment (the developer). Initially a delay was announced to allow them to polish a few things before the release but later that was dropped and the game left in limbo so that they could focus on Star Trek Online. Ultimately this can only mean that someone at the studio didn't feel the game was going to measure up. It is futile to try to guess why but the problems with either the game or the companies finances had to run deep for it to be canceled so late in the development cycle.

November is going to be a busy month game-wise. Hellgate and The Witcher come out on October 31st. The PC port of Gears of War should be out on November 6th. If you have an XBox 360 both Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect will be out around the middle of the month and should be groundbreaking 'must have' titles. These may be the games that finally get me to break down and buy one of the new generation of consoles. There is a PC port of Assassin's Creed expected sometime in the future but exactly when isn't clear. Hints have been dropped that it wont be until next year at the earliest.

The Warhammer Online beta was shut down in October with plans to reopen sometime in December. This is an unprecedented move for any beta test I have ever been a part of and I'm not sure what to make of it. The official story is that they want to use the time to implement changes based on feedback they have received but that feels pretty contrived. I still hope the game turns out well but these unusual moves and lengthy delays make me concerned about it's future.

I'd love to share something about Age of Conan but I still haven't been fortunate enough to land a spot in that beta. My mojo isn't working for me this time and I may actually miss out on the game entirely until the official release.

After November things are looking pretty dry. The next releases up on the watchlist wont start rolling in until February at the earliest. Hopefully the games coming out in November will keep us entertained until then. I should have a lot to talk about next month in the meantime don't forget to stop by the site now and then to keep up with the news or just give me your $0.02.

The game is a true spiritual successor to the diablo series although the storyline is not nearly as strong or predominant. The game features a decent number of missions and pseudo random areas to keep players busy. At max level, whatever that turns out to be, you can still anticipate spending many hours perfecting your gear if that's what you're into. The game is fun, and easy to get into. It should be a fairly successful. I wouldn't want to try to predict how many people will want to go all in with a monthly subscription fee though.

A full review and details on what your subscription dollars entitles you to can be found here.

Of course this is just a rumor and it could be about something else entirely.

From a behaviorist standpoint, end game content is actually better at retaining players than the levelling of the pre-end-game. Raiding, and the upgrading of a character through random drops relies on what is known as variable ratio renforcement, while levelling uses variable interval renforcement. Variable ratio renforcement works by giving a reward after a varying number of succesful actions - in the case of most end game raids, that means you get a reward in the form of an item upgrade at a variable rate due to the random nature of drops. This sort of a reward system is proven to keep people coming back and making attempt after attempt. Levelling, on the other hand, occurs after you get a fixed amount of experience, but the interval between levels varies based on how quickly you accumulate the necessary experience. So, the end game as it currently stands in games like WoW and EQ2 is actually quite profitable in that it is very well designed to retain customers.

The first is Nerfbat by Ryan Shwayder who has worked for SOE in the past on EQ2 and is now a "Game Designer/Community Relations Manager" at 38 Studios. I ran across this blog through an article he wrote for The Escapist called How to become a game designer and some posts he made called 'MMO Rants' and 'MMO Development Lessons'.

The second is the blog of Scott Hartsman who, coincidentally, also works(worked?) for SOE on EQ2. I came across this blog because he had a post up about beta communities which is something I've been thinking about lately. (article)

The third blog is at Moorgard.com. The name caught my eye when I saw it because way back when I played Legends of Future Past that was the name of a good friend of mine in game. This Moorgard's real name is Steve Danuser who also happens to work at 38 Studios and also did work on EQ2.

All of them are worth more than a casual read.

Gods and Heroes has been pushed back to February. There has been some troubled news about the game. The developer keeps laying off more and more people. Now it could be that the game is nearly done and just requires a little fine tuning so they don't need a full staff anymore but it could also be that the game isn't measuring up to what it should be and the studio is starting to cut its losses early. If this were going to be a major MMO I would expect them to keep most of their employees around to continue to work on the game and its expansions after the launch.

Looks like my fears were correct. Gamespot has a news item up stating the game has been put on indefinite hold. This almost certainly means the game will be canceled. It is so late in the game's development that if it were going to be viable they would just push it out the door and make back what they could. So something about the game must have caused the company to decide it was better to take the loss and shut it down. They might still push it out later but it seems unlikely.

The ultimate effect of these changes is that the game no longer bears much resemblance to what was promised or what was presented to players in beta up till now. It shows that the developers really have no idea what they are doing with the game and are incapable of managing it or providing a clear vision for how they want it to play.

Till now I would have said the game was worth a try to see if you liked it or not but now I would label this one 'Avoid at all costs'. It is a total and complete waste of time and money.

Leveling all players at the exact same rate (ed: capping max level based on real time) is somewhat better but if you have finished all the content of a particular area but cant move ahead because you aren't high enough level yet it is also a problem. That could also present an opportunity though. It may create new incentives to group up. People at the front end of the leveling curve may be motivated to join forces and work through more advanced regions. It would create an interesting community. Casual players could group or solo as they wanted since their level would meet or exceed the difficulty of the regions they were in. The more focused players would be compelled to group up to advance into more difficult zones. You would need to avoid level restrictions on loot or else the higher level content wouldn't be of much use.

I think ultimately someone will have to come up with a system that doesn't rely on levels or at least one where the content is consistent from the earliest levels to the highest. No sudden changes in game content or opportunities for game play based on reaching a certain level of advancement. One idea that has been talked about was a system where the only difference between new players and veterans would be veterans have more skills and abilities available for use than the new players but there wouldn't be vast differences in health or dps.

No matter what sort of system a game uses developers must be prepared to serve up a constant stream of new content to keep players interested. I've talked before about using a system that would bring new regions/content into a game while cycling old regions out for a facelift to be re-introduced later. If you ever heard of the old D&D game Ravenloft it could work like that. In Ravenloft each part of the world existed in it's own isolated region fenced off from the rest by a cloud of fog. Now and then paths would appear in the fog that let people move to new places and old ones would disappear in the mist. Regions that were well used and familiar could be taken out of the game when new content was added. While it was unavailable developers could re-use that content to create new experiences for players so that when the area was put back in further down the road players would have places that were both familiar and different. They would create a sense of continuity and a sense of change or evolution at the same time. Something like this would make it easier to create new material for the game while simultaneously allow the developer to keep the world small enough to feel populated as new zones are added w/o becoming overcrowded. The physical size of the world could expand or contract as player populations rose and fell.

Having the option to level up or not is an idea whose time has come. If you've read up on WAR on their website or listened to the podcasts you know that they have split RvR content into different tiers spanning different level ranges. There will undoubtedly be players who find themselves at the maximum level for their tier who don't want to advance to the minimum level for the next. We get a glimpse of that when someone threatens to apply xp rewards to WoW pvp. To some people that means the end of the world since they would end up being pushed out of their BG bracket and have to level up and reequip for the next one.

Nearly all MMORPG's are based around the holy trinity of tank, healer and dps but I think it's time to slaughter that sacred cow. It's a good, reliable vehicle for providing players with a tangible mechanic for working together but it also pigeon holes people into very narrow and restrictive roles. How many times were we stuck because we didn't have x amount of a certain class? or were forced to tell people they had to sit out because we had to many x,y, or z already? How often are players unable to find groups because they can't find a tank, healer, or whatever the game's "bitch" class happens to be. You know the one. It's the class you can't get by without but hardly anyone wants to play because it just isn't any fun.

The next really great MMO will be the one that finds a way to eliminate the 'bitch' class and let people play how they want to play w/o being restricted by clichéd archtypes. You worry about loosing the familiar structure of combat but other mechanics can be provided that will create new structures. Instead of one person tanking the boss while five others play whack-a-mole with health bars everyone should be involved in the fight. In books and movies the battles don't work the way they do in games. What happens is everyone tries to fight while at the same time covering each other's ass. Give all players some ability that works like taunt to distract an enemy from killing their buddy and others should get a guard ability to shield each other form damage. Another mechanic that could work is the 'save' where one player pushes/pulls another out of harm's way. Combat in such a game would be much different than we are used to. There would be no such thing as 'tank and spank' and everyone would be responsible for everyone else not just a handful of dedicated healers. Healing could still have a place in the game but not the endless health pumps that are in use now. Instead healing could be used to recover after a fight or prevent people from dying from wounds they had received. It could also be a way of helping injured comrades back on their feet and into the fight or escape the fight entirely.

There are a fair number of games that don't use the tank/healer/dps model or don't rely on it as heavily. Anarchy Online, Asheron's Call, SWG (at least the version I beta tested), and Tabula Rasa are all examples. That kind of model can provide game play just as fun and entertaining as the trinity model but is more difficult to tune to the 99th percentile the way WoW and EQ raid encounters are. Even games like Diablo managed to have very fun group oriented play without relying on those old stereotypes. In fact, that I think is the key. Diablo worked because it was designed to be fun as both a single player game and as a multiplayer game. All content worked for both types of play with no distinction or separation between them. Games like EQ and WoW talk about creating single player content on one hand and providing group content on the other as completely distinct entities and I think that's where they ultimately begin to fail. In the end developers need to provide two or three types of content all based around different, often conflicting, concepts with little or no crossover between them. This means they have to devote two or three times the resources to keeping players entertained than if they only had to work on one type of content that fulfilled the needs of all types of players.

The old models are pretty heavily entrenched but there are still lots of ways the genre can be improved. WoW changed the way people approached an MMO and altered player's expectations. Hopefully it will motivate developers to look for new ways to innovate when designing games to compete with it and not create a monolithic standard that everyone is too scared to break free of.

I just picked up final fantasy xi for 20 bucks to try out since i just beat bioshock (sweet by the way!). I can already tell that it will not keep me entertained for very long. The graphics suck ass since its 4 years old and it took me 90 minutes of playing to find my first quest, which was to backtrack 10 minutes to where I just came from. so i turned it off. ill still play around with it some more to get my 20 bucks worth, but its definitely not going to keep me for a while.

while AoC seems very pvp focused, i'm thinking there is enough to do other than the siege warfares and bar fights (duels) that would keep me entertained, especially playing at a slower pace. it will be updated graphics which will help make it more immersive for me. and i think i said above somewhere, that Funcom is designing the dungeons and raids to be casual friendly with a completion time of 2.5 hours or less for most of them. So they have casual players in mind and are hoping to improve on some shortcomings of other mmo's.

One poster said that MMO's are too focused on end game - people fly through the game missing a lot, just to get to end game and then complain that there isn't enough to do.
My thoughts, which all have flaws but deal with it:

1. Force players to slow down. It would piss people off if it was too extreme, but put a cap on the number of levels you gain based on /played time, or real time. So 10 levels in a week max or something. It forces players to actually look around and explore, they'll actually do the dungeons appropriate for their level instead of grinding on to the next level and not grouping ever. Casual players it wouldn't really affect at all other than having more people at their level to group with. Hardcore would probably bitch, whine, and moan, but they would get over it - would alleviate the nothing to do cries too soon. But like I said you couldn't make the restriction too extreme.

2. Allow players the option of leveling up. I like leveling characters up and doing all the dungeons along the way, having mediocre groups but working through it. End game everyone is max level so there isn't a level challenge in dungeons. But when you try and do gnomer with a bunch of level 25's (smart ones….) it can be a fun challenge. The problem is if you want to stay at the level to explore the region more, you can't. I hated it when I would out level a region before finishing the quests there. Why not allow a player the option of "Hey you could level up to 24 now if you want, or you can wait a while, and then go to 24." One issue I thought of is twinking - since you could do <insert instance here> for <uber weapon of death> 500 times until you got it and not worry about hitting level 20. But once they reach the level 20 option, give them a certain period of time to stay at that level if they choose, and after say a week, force them to the next level if they haven't moved on (Told you my ideas were flawed!).

Somebody else was complaining about mmo's being 'tank - dps - healers' which it is, but what else are you going to do? You need healers - if you had no healing in the game, then the fights would be no strategy at all - it would be "lets all hit this dragon and hope that we hit harder than he does." If you had a smart dragon that ignored a tank and went for the healers (as a smart dragon would do!) then everyone would complain that the encounters were too hard blah blah. They need the 'tank dps healer' system, but with more creative encounters. Like a boss that focused on the tank, but had an ability to tail swipe the healers when they pissed him off (not pulling aggro, just like an interrupt).

Essentially you engage in ship to ship combat, fencing, capture ports and harbors and what appears to be a complex mission system with dynamic story elements. The game provides opportunities for both PvE and PvP. I haven't heard much about this one and my attempts to get into the beta have so far failed. What little I have picked up so far has been fairly positive.

The official release date is January 22nd. If you pre-order the game you can start playing on January 7th and your character will carry over through launch. Pre-orders go on sale Oct 23rd and include an in-game parrot to keep you company.

The panel was made up of Kevin Maginn – Lead Designer for Pirates of the Burning Sea, Matt Miller – Lead Designer for City of Heroes and City of Villains, Ed Stark – the former Lead Designer for Dungeons & Dragons and now the World Designer for an unannounced MMO, Chris McKibbin – Executive Producer on Gods and Heroes, and Noah Ward – Lead Designer for EVE Online. The discussion was technically moderated by Jason Justice from Ntreev USA

PAX Writeup at mmo-gamer.

Cryptic is also working on a couple of other titles that they are being just a but mysterious about. You can get some inkling of what the projects are about here. One game appears to have a mix of fantasy and modern elements. There are screenshots showing a mix of men with rifles, ancient ruins and evil beasts.

They are estimating a budget of $75,000,000 the largest I have ever heard of for an MMO. These games usually take 3-5 years to develop so I wouldn't start holding your breath just yet. The earliest we are likely to hear much more about it would be 2010. It will be a little late to capitalize on the release of Fallout 3 from Bethesda which is expected to come out next fall but maybe there will be other expansions for the game or perhaps Fallout 4 by the time the MMO is ready to hit beta.

SEC Filing

IGN Preview
official website Virtually useless.

From the Warcry Article:

The Agency is a fast-paced, online persistent shooter in a modern setting of bullets, bomb blasts, and betrayal. Live the life of an elite agent in a world of super spies and rugged mercenaries, who use both the highest technology and the lowest tactics to accomplish their goals. Featuring cooperative and competitive play, The Agency is designed to provide instant action and long-term strategy for all fans of espionage, intrigue, and explosive gameplay.

Features

• Become An Elite Agent: The Agency offers hundreds of unique missions with varied end-goals requiring combat, stealth, and style. With gameplay ranging from sneaky assassinations to all out assaults, from vehicle challenges to casinos loaded with mini-games, there's something for every aspiring agent.
• Build Your Own Agency: As players advance through the ranks of their faction, they'll also begin building their own Agencies. Players will increase their power even further by creating Joint Agencies with others.
• Mercenary or spy, the choice is yours: In the Agency, collect the right weaponry, gadgets, vehicles, gear, attire and aliases to gain access to various locales and influence over the people within them.
• Put Operatives to work: Operatives are collectible non-player characters who provide the goods player's desire, the services to keep them alive, and allow them to concentrate on the mission at hand. Operatives work 24/7, regardless of whether players are logged in, and they can even keep them up-to-date through email and instant messages.
• Fun Now, No Waiting: The Agency is not about waiting for the fun to start. At any point, players can take a break from their high-flying career to engage in a number of other activities. Veterans and new players alike can take on other players at the card tables, the shooting range, or in head-to-head combat.

Time for another quick, or not so quick update. Right now, the team is working hard getting the game ready for the next patch. I think balance has greatly improved, and a lot of the features that have been implemented are excellent additions to the game. You will see those on Tuesday and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

As we move closer to launch, some may think that now would be a good time to finally relax after months of crunch, but that’s not what making am MMO is about. So the question “what’s in store for the upper level player?” has come up, and I thought I would share a sneak peek of some of our plans. Some of these will come sooner rather than later and as with any development, nothing is set in stone and our plans could and will invariably change. Still, here are just a few of the features we are working on:

• Personal Armor Units (PAU’s): When players get to level 40, they won’t just get a pony! Promotion to Level 40 comes with the option to train for certification in the PAU. Each PAU will have bonuses such as movement, more firepower, and different abilities per type. Each type is unique to the military career the player has selected. When visualizing the PAU, visualize the AFS Mech, although each will be very different… and may not necessarily be a mech.

Sneak peek: PAU for the Grenadier: Grendel – The surprisingly nimble Grendel, has two machine gun turrets on each arm, providing a cone of doom a short distance in front of the Grendel. More impressive is the Hornet’s Nest capability of the Grendel, which when unleashed uses the remaining power of the user to determine the number of rockets unleashed on the opposing forces but does massive damage to surrounding units.

• Command Opportunity: When you climb the ranks to level 50, you need someone to order around. Command Opportunity is the privilege the AFS commander has to control their own subordinate squad of NPCs. Teach them, outfit them, and give them commands on the battlefield. The more successful you are with your squad, the bigger and better your squad will become, granting you Command Points.

• Flashpoints: The Neph generals aren’t happy with the setbacks in their bid to rid the universe of Eloh manipulation, therefore they have begun attacks on various worlds. Each Flashpoint will require multiple squads to solve. Certain objectives will need to be done simultaneously to fight back the Bane and each objective will require a dedicated squad that is at their best. Conquer flashpoints with squads formed of all players, or have a few players that have NPC squads at their command.

• Clan Warfare: Clans will gain their own abilities for their members over time, meaning the leader will be able to select a passive buff that all members of the clan will have. This buff will grow in strength the larger the clan. Clans who go to war can wager these buffs and loot in clan wars. Eventually, clans will be able to lay claim to Control Points fighting off rival clans, and earning bonuses while they control them. There will even be AFS sanctioned Rivalry Zones where players have strategic objectives to fight over such as Capture the Flag, and Hold the Location.

These are just a few of the things that the team will start working on after ship. (Which essentially means we are working on them now.) It is going to be an exciting next few months as we launch the game and watch how the game grows. As always your feedback is very welcome and encouraged via our feedback form.

Paul Sage
Lead Developer

Of course none of these things are in the game yet and probably haven't even begun to be coded much less tested so what actually makes it to the game and when is a matter of speculation. At least they realized starting over and playing the game again wasn't going to be a viable option.

Age of Conan has stated they will be using it, FunCom has already used it in Anarchy Online
Some game worlds are created procedurally now before being edited and shipped.

Most recently I read a forum post about another game using procedural algorithms to create very detailed city layouts.

If design ideas were stocks that you could buy on speculation this is one I would sink a lot of money into.

Official Announcement

Nothing new for the watchlist. The only change to release dates was for Gods and Heroes which has been pushed back to February. There has been some troubled news about the game. The developer keeps laying off more and more people. Now it could be that the game is nearly done and just requires a little fine tuning so they don't need a full staff anymore but it could also be that the game isn't measuring up to what it should be and the studio is starting to cut its losses early. If this were going to be a major MMO I would expect them to keep most of their employees around to continue to work on the game and its expansions after the launch.

I put two new articles up on the website this month. The first was a bit about how software has been written that can create fiction. These programs can construct (very) short stories that are indistinguishable from what might be written by your average human author. Another program, called Facade, goes a step further and stages the story in a single scene with two characters and you. The player talks with the NPC's in a perfectly natural way and they are able to respond with surprising subtlety within the confines of the plot. It will be a very long time before anything like that finds its way into mainstream games or MMO's but the implications are staggering. At some point in the future it may be possible for each player of a game to have their own personal story custom created for them on the fly creating a truly unique experience for every person every time they play.

The second article I posted discusses the beta community. The interest for me there is identifying the different groups of players who have the most influence on how a game turns out. If you can gain some understanding of these factions you can see which direction a game is likely to go and what sort of games will be popular in the future. Right now it should come as no surprise that people are still looking for games that can be played quickly ad easily ala World of Warcraft. I also think some of the audience may be outgrowing WoW and looking for something more. The same old quests don't seem to be entertaining anyone anymore and people often complain about being sent on pointless errands or tasked with generic jobs such as kill x mobs or collect x items.

I didn't play any new games last month and it doesn't look like I'll play anything new this one either so I don't have any reviews for you. Nothing new has popped up on the horizon either so there aren't any previews or additions to the watchlist. I wish I could tell you more about Warhammer Online but for now I'm sticking to the NDA. I'm hoping that Age of Conan turns out really well. The next MMO's that might be good are The Chronicles of Spellborn and Aion. I'll see if I can't get some decent write ups of those games posted on the website.

That's all for this month. Have fun.

Even though I was quite excited for it a few weeks ago, I have to admit I think you are more than likely very right about TR and I was pretty wrong. Truth is the game just doesnt have anything special as I was hoping it would. I had to just think that the dev's would be holding something up their sleeves, simply not true, and at this rate its just going to be generic mmo#4556. It's too bad becasue I really truly do enjoy the actual combat and setting, but so many little things keep adding up. I have changed my plans and dont think im going to buy it now, it will probably be good in 6 months to the 1st expansion but I cant wait that long.