Since leaving the world of Middle Earth, (LORTO) I’ve been 0-2 in my quest for a new MMORPG to play.  I first tried Tabula Rasa which was actually fun for the first month, but didn’t really do it for me and boredom quickly set in.  Up next was Age of Conan and we all know how that turned out.  To be honest I had more fun playing the Mythos beta than I did with either one of these games, too bad that a finished Mythos will never see the light of day.  Which brings me to Warhammer Online, which is set to be released in about a week.

Now, with the resent disaster that is AoC, I’m not sure I want to jump in there on day one.  We all know that 99% of MMORPGs are pretty much fucked on opening day with people unable to activate their games, last min patches, server crashes, lag and whatever else, so I definitely will be waiting at least 2-3 days before picking up my copy.  Not being in the open beta, I don’t have any impressions on how polished the game is.  I remember in the AoC beta I was waiting for another announcement saying they were going to delay the game cause it was so messed up, but to my suprise there was none.  I just assumed there was another build of the game that was better than beta, guess not.  Good call Failcom.  But from what I’ve read about War Online, it seems to be on the right track.  Who knows, the game might actually be ok to play on day one.  Here’s to hoping.

Rant: Potential

How many times have you seen a forum post or an article comparing MMO vs MMO.  If you have been around this genre for any length of time you have no doubt seen it time and time again.  One of the most common arguments used to try to justify the failings of an MMO debacle is the argument of potential, which I mentioned in my very first article about Unfinished MMOs.

I wanted to take some time and finally try to put this word to rest once and for all when it comes to this genre.   Potential is defined as the following by dictionary.com:

1) possible, as opposed to actual
2) capable of being or becoming
3) a latent excellence or ability that may or may not be developed

All of these definitions have one commonality, a separation from what could be compared to the reality. This is key to countering the potential argument that desperate fanbois will cling to like a life-preserver on a sinking ship.   Am I the only one to notice that when the word potential shows up next to an MMO, that the MMO in question always turns into a debacle?   Look at some of the biggest disasters in the industry and think about it.

Asheron’s Call 2 was the sequel to one of the most innovative games, yet Turbine practically threw away everything from Asheron’s Call 1 except the names on the world.   Dark and Light had potential to change the way we look at games, and that it did as the accusations of unethical business practices became rampant.   Brad McQuaid “vision” and “next-gen” MMO baby Vanguard culminated with its developers being taken into the parking lot and fired just in time for SoE to come in and rummage through the debris.   Funcom will forever be known to many as Failcom (go to www.failcom.com for a laugh) after giving us a game with the best graphics and music, but a side order of mismanagement, poor customer service, Exploits, and Undocumented Patch Notes.

3 Facts about the Fiction

1) Potential swings both ways.  If things have the potential to get better, they also have potential to be a debacle.   The history of this genre has shown us that games will try to justify their subscription to a game on the chance it could get better, when more often then not the potential they cling to favors the chance it will yield copious amounts of fail.

2) Potential comes with a cost.  Most of these games require you to pay money every month to play.  How much are you willing to pay to see the game get where it could be, or should have been at release?  Let’s face the facts here folks, potential is a mythical promised land that you hear is out there but nobody has ever found.  It is not a valid argument or a legitimate justification for paying some assclown devs for a hot steaming pile of shit.  It is no more real than the Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause, Brad McQuaids “vision”, or Funcom’s state of the game letters from the director.

3) Potential also comes with an expiration date.  Look at some of few exceptions where a game actually did pull its act together.  Anarchy Online was so bad when it came out, that the review should have been posted on ratemypoo.com (do not go to!).  Today it remains one of the complex MMO’s ever created, but after hitting the expiration date.  The expiration date is when people are tired of paying for hope, and if that hope ever does come, there aren’t enough people left playing to matter.  We see the same thing now with Age of Conan.  At a certain point, any headway made will be meaningless when players find themselves standing in empty servers, and with MMO’s on the horizon that actually have what is advertised, it may be very soon.

We need to stop using potential as an argument. It is the first nail in a failing game’s coffin, and something a fanboi clings to like a life-preserver to try to justify the belly full of bullshit they willingly swallowed. We as subscribers need to stop paying for what simply isn’t there. When we stop paying for hope, and start paying with reality, they will be forced to deliver what they promised or fail.

Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com

David over at Trembling Hand makes a very good case that, out there in the MMORPG community, there are actually two flavours of the gamers we have come to term as fanboi’s. He dubs these two flavours, “The Fan” and “The Apologist” – and I think he’s pretty spot on.

The Fan I can live with. They are, on the whole, pretty decent individuals and are described, in part, with the following lines:

…a good Fan will balance praise and feedback (the carrot) with the threat of leaving (the stick), and they’re driven by the desire to make their favourite game even better.

Meanwhile, it’s The Apologist that, personally, I can’t stand and, if you’re a relaxed kind of individual, with a sense of balance, you probably can’t stand them, either. They are described, in part:

They’re trolls, but not in the traditional sense. They tend to lurk on the official forums, and they’ll pounce when someone makes a criticism. In fact, in the twisted mind of the Apologist, the critic is the troll.

This is a very savvy analysis, and perhaps something that we should all be thinking of, next time we go to write someone off as a mere fanboi. Stop. Wait. Ask youself, “Is this fanboi just a Fan, or is he actually an Apologist?” In the case of the former, hey, try and cut them a little slack. Fans are, ultimately, a good thing. If it’s the latter, meanwhile, let it rip. Both barrels. Unleash hell. No mercy.

The great Sun Tzu, father of modern journalism, once said in his treasured writings: start with a Mime and you can’t go wrong. Of course I just made that up, and I assure you that the WoW-killing Mime is not yet with us. We’ll leave mimes and memes to rest for a moment, and venture over into the underworld of Hype.

Hype in the MMO industry isn’t all unlike hype in other industries like Music and Cinema. People anxiously await the latest release from their favorite artist, film-maker or actor with some level of anticipation, and this “anticipation” can be roughly translated into “Hype”. Measuring hype over a large fan base isn’t an exact science, of course, so what it comes down to really is a persons impression of the level of hype via various mediums.

I speak for many people when I say that the hype for Age of Conan was absolutely insane. Of course, this could have been one of the reasons for its ultimate demise, a point I actually didn’t cover in my “Post Mortem Analysis” – to put it lightly, the game “didn’t live up to the hype“. People were writing and posting and going nuts over the prospect of finally getting to enter into the Hyborean frontier, possibly under the false impression that the entire game of Age of Conan was as polished and “fun” as the open beta area, and possibly because they hadn’t experienced major MMO released since the failure of Vanguard a year before.

People can debate the reason that Age of Conan was hyped so much all day: whether it was the possibility for a revolutionary “Next Gen” MMO to finally be released, a mainstream MMO that was built around the promise of PVP combat, or people longing for a game that catered more towards a mature, adult audience. Funcom even took the phrase “There is no such thing as bad publicity” to a whole new level by trying to piss off and alienate the majority of their loyal playerbase by trying to make a buck or two out of the Open Beta. Even trying to scam 5 bucks out of people to play a beta wasn’t enough to scare most people away.

New domains were registered, new blogs were created, and people spent countless hours pouring over beta videos, deciding what classes to play, and trying to get a “feel” for the game. People started throwing terms around like “Wow Killer” and “Finally, a PVP based MMO!”. Theory-crafting was rampant, alliances and guilds formed, and at release, roughly 800,000 people rushed into the world, satisfying this primal urge to experience something they’ve truly anticipated.

Needless to say, Age of Conan let down the majority of players, on a larger scale than Tabula Rasa or even Vanguard: Saga of Brad McQuaid. Age of Conan was marketed towards a somewhat niche set of MMO demographics: adult content and a PVP oriented game. Without argument, the game has completely failed on the latter point, though it somewhat succeeded on the first – it kept its “M” rating, you get to see breasts, and the level of violence is unparalleled in any MMO on the market.

This brings us to Mythics upcoming beast Warhammer Online. It is my personal opinion that the hype level of Warhammer is less than Age of Conan, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. People were so aching for some new MMO blood on the market, especially PVPers, that Conan had a distinct advantage of being “first”. In general, it seems people are much more cautious when considering Warhammer. Not that the internets has any shortage of fan sites or ongoing blogs about WAR – there are far more of these than there were for Conan. Warhammer has a clear advantage of using a very established Intellectual Property, meaning the amount of information and fan interest is already, by default, higher than Conan.

This might change once Warhammer Open Beta hits this weekend. Things really took off for Conan once the open beta disaster was underway – while the previews for the game itself were positive, the methods that Funcom used to both distribute and charge for access to the Open Beta caused a huge uproar in the collective MMO sphere, thus generating even more attention and/or interest to the game. Warhammer has taken a far more professional and less controversial route by not charging for Open Beta access, distributing the beta client on their dime (or via partner and fan sites) and generally being very open and forthcoming discussing problems and issues with their upcoming game. It’s not easy to tell players that 1/8 of their playable classes won’t make release, and only 1/3 of the proposed major cities will be there.

Conan might have had the upper hand with this “first MMO excitement” – but Mythic was clearly happy letting Funcom “pave the way” and learn from their mistakes. In fact, Mark Jacobs and crew have done almost the polar opposite of Funcom in many regards: calculated delays, cancellation instead of inclusion of sub-par game content, and overall a very professional and stable open beta platform.

Without a doubt, the hype level for Warhammer Online is about to peak next week once the Open Beta is up and running. And, while any game is susceptible to being over-hyped or “not living up to the hype” – I think that for the most part, due to the failure of Age of Conan, people will expect less overall from the Mythic team and from Warhammer Online. Using this logic, the failure of Age of Conan will be directly tied to the success of Warhammer Online in the first few months due to players overall caution and lower expectations going into a game.

I don’t want to try and downplay Warhammer Online potentially being a good, epic, long lasting game: for a PVP wacko like myself who got tired of killing sad AI MOBS 10 years ago in Everquest, WAR could offer a PVP MMO experience that could rival the fun factor of DAoC many years ago. Sure, it might just be WoW 2.0: PVP Reloaded, but it still beats Blizzards joke of an “e-sport” (emphasis on quotes) even if Warhammer PVP/RVR ends up being a frontier zerg fest. As long as there is an Emain Macha in Warhammer, people will want to PVP, and PVP in any open environment is highly preferable to the controlled and instanced PVP battlegrounds of both WoW and AoC.

So, what do my readers think? Is the Warhammer hype less or more than Conan? Has Mythic done well in their attempts to hype the game? Are people really going crazy and I’m just missing it? Do tell.

Review: Warhammer Preview Weekend

For this entry I am going to try something new and take a break from ranting about the usual MMO debacles. Instead, I am going to give my impressions of the Warhammer Preview Weekend from the perspective of an MMO veteran, guild leader, and a gamer coming off the of the AoC disaster.

As a guild leader, I and my members were recently burned badly by the Funcom bullshit.  I approach Warhammer Online with heavy scrutiny while trying to recover from the burns Funcom gave me and my members.

Character creation is nothing to write home about honestly.   I found it to be quite lackluster, and I could see where this could give people a negative first impression.   I wasn’t thrilled about my option, but like most MMO’s, my armor covered me up after a few levels and it became a non-issue to me at least.   I guess it could be justified that a lack of options helps performance in large scale PvP, I am not going to speculate to the validity of this theory, but after AoC’s performance I could see it having merit.

The user interface is probably one of most glaring similarities to World of Warcraft that will catch your eye.  It literally shares an almost identical positioning and style to WoW, which could be viewed as a positive if you liked this interface.  The good news is the user interface is fairly customizable, and Mythic has left the door open to 3rd party UI mods which will surely be in abundance.

As a guild leader, I am extremely thrilled to see a real Guild Interface akin to that of Everquest 2.  Guild Functionality has always been important to me, and Age of Conan’s left a lot to be desired.  The Warhammer Guild UI offers multiple tabs showing roster that is sortable, and gives me the ability to make notes next to each name to labels alts and such.   It also gives me the ability to rename all my ranks, set their permissions, an unlockable calender, a log showing me recent events, and guild battle standard options.  Guilds level up through the members PvPing and new functionality becomes unlocked.

The graphics in this game have been the subject of a lot of debate among the community.  Obviously no one will contest that Age of Conan has far better graphics, but these graphics are a lot better then WoW IMO.   Are they cutting edge?  Not be any means, but they get the job done.   Again I think some will argue that the games graphics will make it accessible to a wider audience, and help performance in RvR.  I do think some people are giving this game a lot more heat than it deserves in this department, once I turned the resolution up, it looked good, and in large scale PvP I ran smooth as a baby’s ass.

Character Customization comes to you in a variety of ways.  While I found the creation process lacking, as you progress through the game will you see that there are some ways for you to tweak your looks and skills to fit your playstyle.  First you will be able to tailor your “Tactics Abilities” to suit your needs.  These are basically passive abilities that you can put into the bottom right of the screen to enhance your character.  They deliberately limit the number you can use at a given time to force you to decide what to best use in a situation.   These can be changed at any time however, and I think you can cycle through layouts of these as easy as you cycle your hotbars depending on your situation.

There are also “Moral Abilities” which remind me of TP moves from FFXI.   The longer you fight and stay alive, the more jacked up your character gets.   He is able to then perform super moves that get stronger as he gets more moral built up.  These can be interchanged again to fit your playstyle, and add another layer of tactics to the combat.

The RvR rewards come in the ways of both gear and points.  The gear is strong enough to make it a viable alternative to gear earned through PvE, and better in some cases.  The points are spent much like talent points or AA points.  If you played DAOC, you are very familiar with their PvP reward system, which is fully functional and in the game unlike a certain rival game which still has yet to give an ETA on their system.

One other aspect of this game in regards to customizing your appearance in the use of armor Dyes.  This was one of the better features of DAOC that I am shocked was never stolen by more recent MMOs.  It gives you the ability to make yourself look a little different and it gives guilds a chance to add uniformity to their members.  Changing your armor colors can be done very easily by visiting a merchant.   A nice dressing room screen comes up where you will be able to see the colors before you buy them.

The PvE aspect of the game is pretty run of the mill from what we have seen in recent MMOs.  The game follows the same lame quest format of collecting X amount of dingleberries, killing Y amount of orcs.  Nothing to write home about honestly.  The game does break Quest mold from recent games by adding public quests.   Doing these will get you rep in that local area, and this rep can be used to claim rewards, which are usually very good if your rep gets maxed.   Luckily, maxing out your rep in a given area does not seem to take very long at all, and the public quests are always fun as long as other people are there.   They can be compared to the Besieged Mode found in FFXI where you are rewarded for your contribution, and acts a nice diversion from the collection quests.  At the end of the day, the PvE is just a means to an end, and that end is the RvR.

The RvR is where this game really shines.  Finally I feel like I am getting the RvR that World of Warcraft promised me but never delivered on.  You can PvP from level 1.  You get exp from PvP, and quests to kill people in PvP.   This helps makes PvP a viable way of leveling if you so chose.  The games does have a battleground type system called Scenarios, which honestly I am not a fan of being an overworld guy myself.   To their credit though, they are well thought out and usually contain some sort of interesting twist instead of the makeshift deathmatches we got in AoC.  I hope Mythic will make world PvP enticing enough to minimize the desire to play in these.  On the flip side, if you play on a server where the population is imbalanced, these do provide a level playing field somewhat.  If you are under leveled, the game gives you a buff to your level to help you remain useful, but a true level 10 is stronger than a buffed level 10 because he has better gear and new spells that a level 5 won’t have.

The castle sieges are very well done.   Finally we have real capturable objectives to fight over, and they are meaningful in the struggle to push your enemy back to the city gates.   Siege weapons are easy to get and funner to use.  Giant cannons that put you in an FPS view with a crosshair to bark fire on the oceans of enemies inside the castle or outside.  Rocks can be seen flying through the air from catapults, and it really adds a wildcard to the battle as well as making things a bit more chaotic in a good way.  It also helps give melee something to do in situations where enemies are out of reach.  After playing these sieges, I have no desire to go into the scenarios, and hopefully the population who plays will see it the same way.

Most of the PvP is group on group.  Do not expect to be some WoW superhero 1 shotting people like a God.  Combat in this game takes a bit longer, and as such I think a bit more skill.   If I wanted to 1 shot everyone I would stick with Call of Duty 4.  You feel like you are a unit in an RTS game, no one person is so superpowerful.   This makes it a very team oriented game, and hopefully the Community will be good.  Some have complained about the combat speed and a global cool down, but honestly it never occurred to me until I started reading whining on the forums.  The combat to me felt interesting, tactical, and I was not spamming the same ability over and over like other games.

In conclusion, the game is fun even though it lacks major Innovation.   First and foremost I think that fun is why we play.  The game delivers on its promises.  Mark Jacobs at Mythic has been honest about talking about flaws and problems with the game and I appreciate his straight talk.   It upset a lot of us with AoC that they were in denial about the game’s missing features and short comings.

This game will live and die by the RvR and the endgame.  The RvR looks amazing, the endgame we won’t know until we get there.  If it is anything like DAOC, then hopefully we will have a good RvR MMO that will last us a long time, made by a company that seems to be honest and competent.  I am hoping this game will help heal the burns Funcom gave me, my guild, and so many others like me.  Only time will tell.

Paragus

Co-Leader of Inquisition

inqguild.dkpsystem.com

The whole Age of Conan debacle did more than just highlight that the entire staff at Funcom probably shouldn’t be entrusted to mail a letter, let alone produce a multi-million dollar MMORPG. It also resurrected an old MMORPG community meme that has been repeated 1000s of times in forums, blogs and podcasts. What is this meme? You’ll probably find that you start nodding sagely as you start reading the next few words, “MMORPGs have never been any good in their first six months…” For added emphasis, some forumites/bloggers/podcasters will also slip in a knowing, “… even WoW.”

Now, far be it for me to don my Captain Obvious outfit but there is a vast difference between calling a situation for what it is, and actually being happy with it. In other words, yes, there are definitely many MMORPGs which got better over their first six months of release. But does that make things OK? Is that an acceptable situation for us as consumers? The resigned way in which people parrot the line whenever a bad game launches is rather disturbing. It’s like people have given up hoping for an MMORPG to release with minimal issues. As if it’s somehow impossible. Oh God, it is still possible, isn’t it?

Do I need to start slapping folks around the head at this juncture? This is so wrong, people! You certainly never see an automobile company produce a car which breaks down every few kilometres and have people standing on the footpath nodding and telling you, “Yes, cars are always unreliable for the first six months. But stick with it, mate…” And you never buy an electrical product which fails to work reliably or, worse, tries to electrocute you, only to have someone suggest that this is situation normal, pesky electrocutions be damned. It’s actually your fault for wanting to use that toaster so soon!

Seriously, why is this tolerated in the MMORPG community? Nay, not just tolerated, but celebrated by some? Just because a game can be patched and upgraded on the fly, doesn’t mean it should be released in a terrible state and fixed on the fly as the days, weeks and months go by. Age of Conan has proven, if such a thing was even necessary, that trying to fix an unfinished and buggy game on the fly is a recipe for disaster. Even Funcom fanboi’s are horrified at how the company’s game patches seem to break more than they fix and, worryingly, the company doesn’t even try to fix the worst issues in the first place.

Can anyone suggest why this situation exists? I’m at a loss. It wouldn’t be tolerated in so many other industries, yet we just sit here and collectively eat it up. Things have to change. Thankfully, over 400,000 people walking out on Funcom during the first three months of Age of Conan might be a start. A step in the right direction, if you will, that even though the new car smell has yet to wear off a new game, that people are becoming more willing to take their $50 investment and flush it down the toilet, rather than labor with a flawed game and a never-ending selection of developer lies.

I can only hope that this situation inspires all developers, currently working on games, to take quality assurance a lot more seriously. And, you know, rather than better graphics, more levels, more quests and all the other measures of e-peen that games try and compete on, why not pull your current projects back to manageable levels, employ excellent QA people, run more in-house testing with respected guilds and gamers in the community and basically hash out your problems in advance of beta testing, let alone the actual game launch?

It’s almost embarrassing to have to tell people who call themselves professionals how to launch a good product, but the truth is a good PC game is no different to a good car or good electrical appliance. It simply needs to be as good as it can be when the consumer buys it otherwise your reputation could be sunk quicker than you can say, “What’s Quality Assurance?” Save those extra ideas, or classes, or quests, or zones, for the game’s first update in a year’s time. Concentrate on the core, and get that right, first. You can always continue to build in the future off a solid base, after all.