Warhammer Online: Patch 1.2.1

Even though the title of this article might lead you to think otherwise, Warhammer Online’s latest patch(1.2.1) is actually wonderful. It’s yet another great step in the right direction for EA Mythic, and a good sign of things to come. So why the title? Well, it’s french – I like it. Plus, when the patch went live, it claimed to fix a lot of things it really didn’t. Additionally, it caused a ton of problems in the game for mostly every player. Some players experienced inhumane lag, many more were being randomly kicked off to the character selection screen, fewer were just simply crashed to the desktop. For a few days after the patch released, there was a lot of anger from the community. Needless to say EA Myhic reacted quickly and was able to solve most of the issues players were experiencing on a large scale. I’ve fallen victim to being kicked to the character selection screen every once in a while since then, but not as bad as when the patch first launched.

So what did they do with this patch?

They’ve been working on addressing some of the issues caused by having too many people in one area(sieges, mainly). As all of those who have been playing know, the servers were brought to their knees when too many people started sieging cities and fortresses. There’s still a limit on how many people can participate, but rather than crashing the whole damn server, people will now start being teleported out to another area. It still sucks that there’s a limit on how many people can participate in sieges, but teleporting people out is better than having the entire zone crash.

One of the more note-worthy changes, perhaps for the lower tiers(as they are now made slightly more interesting) is the addition of several other benefits for capturing a zone. Anyone who plays Warhammer Online knows how zone locking works. Basically you get points for doing certain things in a zone: winning scenarios, completing quests, killing people in the RvR lakes, taking objectives, and you also get some points toward zone control from the previous tier. Once a zone was locked, every player in the area, whether or not they participated in locking said zone would receive a decently-sized RP bonus.

Now, the system’s been changed slightly. Zone control still operates in the same way, however, you will now receive INF and XP depending on your participation in locking the zone. For example, let’s say I join a warband and we take every keep and BO in the pairing. If we have enough points in zone control from other things(PvE/Scenarios/etc), then the zone will lock, and I will receive a huge amount of influence, XP, and renown. Now, if I only help in taking one keep, or one BO, my INF/XP/Renown bonus will be much, much less. Additionally, based on your participation you will receive a certain number of bonus medallions.

What are medallions? Medallions are part of the new token system put into place to make obtaining set items “easier.” I say “easier,” because some pieces of the set items used to cost mere gold, and wouldn’t be really hard to get. By comparison, those same pieces cost roughly 50-65 tokens now. To help put things into perspective, you get 1 token for taking a keep. If you didn’t win a bag, you get an additional token for your participation. If you do get a bag, you can choose to pull out Entangled Medallions which will convert into two medallions. So, at most, you can get 3 medallions from a keep siege. If there’s a lot of keep swapping, zone lock swapping going on, you can build up medallions really fast. Unfortunately, if there’s no action going on, you no longer have the option of fetching yourself a few pieces of gold and just buying the set item from the vendor.

Overall, the changes are pleasant. Despite the few issues when the patch originally launched, it’s brought nothing but positive changes. Although I’m a bit angry about not being able to buy set pieces for gold anymore, it evens out; I can now buy gold bag loot for tokens, if I happen to not get lucky for enough keep sieges that I manage to build up 125 tokens to trade for it.

In the world of movies, music, in fact, all forms of media, it is often difficult to tell when something is deserving of a sequel. A lot of movies have open endings, and if their ultimate fate is not decided by a saturday morning cartoon, such as Godzilla, then…wait. What am I talking about? Sorry, I was spacing out for a minute. Moving on. This is the second part to my first impressions review on Aion: The Chinese Tower of Eternity, the Beta. There are some things that were not discussed in my previous post, which are an important part of gameplay. Since I did not want to completely obliterate any articles below mine with a humongous wall of text, I decided to add a second part on here describing combat, classes, and an actual description of the flying system(not a praise).

I. Classes:

Classes. Some people love them, some people hate them. It divides nations and destroys relationships. People want a class to blame when they’re losing in city sieges. Others want a class-less skill-based system. It’s a difficult choice for any company to make when developing an MMO. For the most part, a class system tends to be the more popular choice. Though not clearly defined in all of them, most RPGs have some form of class system. Aion is no different. In fact, it doesn’t seem like they were being very creative when it comes to creating classes. You have your four stereotypical archetypes: healer dude, heavy armor dude, agile dude, and caster dude.

I’m not going to lie, the classes are all really fun to play, despite their very archetypical stereotypes and cliché names. You start off either as a warrior, a mage, a priest, or a scout. At level 9, you can complete your ascension quest, and then by level 10 you’ll be able to choose your second class. Here’s the breakdown:

Warrior: Your standard sword/shield or giant bashy weapon guy. These guys hit things up close, and hit them hard. They can turn into a Gladiator, which is an offense-focused warrior, or a Templar; a defensive warrior.

Mage: Another stereotypical class. Gee, I wonder what they do. These guys cast spells. Fire, ice, earth, whatever. They hit really hard with said spells, and can often dispose of enemies(monsters, that is), without ever having the monster come into contact with them. Mages can turn into sorcerers or spiritmasters. Spiritmasters are a pet class, they can summon pets, and still use their ranged missile spells. Sorcerers get no pets. Instead, they get highly devastating ranged spells.

Priest: Equipped with a bow and arrow, the priest lunges from the shadows to drive their twisted blades into their enemy’s throat. They then – what? They don’t do that? Alright, so priests are actually healers. They can choose either Cleric or Chanter as their secondary class. Clerics heal gooder, and Chanters buff gooder.

Scout: The scout can turn into a ranger or an assassin. Rangers attack with a bow, and assassins are melee DPS. There. Done.

So the classes aren’t very innovative on paper, but they’re done so well, you won’t really care that you’re the 5,000,000,000th cleric in the world.

II. Combat

Aion brings skill combos back into the equation. You won’t be arrow-mashing like you were in Age of Conan, though. Skills activate as soon as you press them; you don’t need to press up, up, left, down, left, start, abc, up, select in order to fire off your salvo. Let’s say you have “Skill 1″ and “Skill 2″, when you mouse over a spell or ability it will tell you what place it holds in a skillchain. Now, let’s say “Skill 1″ and “Skill 2″ are both in the same skillchain. Skillchains have a whole window dedicated to them, so you can memorize or reference how your spells are going to chain and what the effects will be. Additionally, we’re going to say “Skill 1″ is hotkeyed to the number “1″ on your keyboard. When you press “1″ to fire off “Skill 1,” the button for the next skill will show up on your screen. From there, you can either click the button, or press “1″ again to fire off “Skill 2.”

I’m a fan of how skillchains were done in Final Fantasy XI, and I wished that if a spiritmaster used “stereotypical spirit master ability #1″ that I, as a sorcerer, could use “stereotypical firey thing #2″ and we could create an effect together. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works; you create your skillchains by yourself. It’s still really well done, though. Get the skill chain right and you’ll trigger an effect. For example purposes, we’ll say “Skill 1″ and “Skill 2″ create a knockback effect. If both spells hit, you’ll knock your enemy back. Effects can also be seen on the skillchain window. Some effects will trigger every time you complete the skillchain, others will have a certain chance of success.

Finally, to wrap up the combat section, we’ll discuss something melee need to worry about. The game encourages movement during combat. They have implemented certain bonuses that are trigged by moving in a certain direction. For example, if you move left or right(strafing), you will see arrows pointing left and right under your character. It means you have triggered that directional bonus. In this specific case, that bonus is increased dodge rate. Pushing forward on your enemies will increase the amount of damage you do, and pulling back will increase your block rate. You must be holding down the button for the effect to remain active. If at any point in time you stand still, or move in a different direction, you’ll remove your directional bonus or receive a different one, respectively.

III. Flying

I know, I discussed the wings in my previous post, but didn’t really mention how to use them. It’s actually pretty simple. I’ll use the default keybindings to explain it(these can be changed). First of all, you’ll notice right away when you’re in an area where you can take off. You’ll see a green ring surrounding your “fly” button. To take off, press PageUp on your keyboard. You’ll be hovering just a few inches above ground, at this point. In order to increase your altitude you would press “R” on your keyboard. To decrease altitude, you would either slowly glide down using the Space bar, or pressing “F”. Once you’re close to the ground, you can land by pressing PageDown.

That’s all there really is to it. Note that you can glide everywhere, even in areas where you’re not allowed to take off and fly around.

IV. Happy Ending

That’s all there really is to the first 10-15 levels of Aion. Again, I wish I could’ve seen the Abyss, but the beta was only about 6 days long, and I’ve had a hectic work schedule recently. Nevertheless, most of these things apply to all levels past ten. You’ll be using skillchains and directional bonuses often. Obviously, you’ll be flying a lot, too. Needless to say, I’m still looking forward to this title and hope to play it with all my friends, and the people who have posted comments on my previous post(I made new friends!).

The internet is a truly amazing place; a gathering of people from all cultures and ethnicities. It is a place where people hate you for your ideas, not what you look like. That said, it’s usually a good idea during your travels through the magnificent digital world to make as many friends as possible, which is something I attempted to do with one of my earliest reviews on Atlantica Online. During this mind-broadening journey,  you might want to consider picking yourself up a couple of asian friends. Tales of old tell of oriental heroism and perseve…yeah, whatever, they can get you into NCSoft betas. This is exactly what happened when one of my friends, born and currently located in China invited me to play AION: The Tower of Eternal Awesome with him. After I downloaded all the files, and he helped me register my account, I was ready to log into NCSoft’s latest virtual fantasy world.

I. Graphics/Art – 11/11

When it comes to graphics, art, armor and weapon design, NCSoft goes to eleven. It’s not about whether you like their style or not. That’s not it at all. NCSoft excels in this department because their animation is always top-notch, their spell effects(if a bit exaggerated at times) look wonderful, and everything moves at optimal speed the whole time you’re playing. I know, eastern MMO combat looks a bit anime’ish, and perhaps a bit fake to some people due of the over-exaggerated acrobatic feats that some games add to their melee classes, but damn it, it’s a fantasy game. I’d rather my guy smoothly somersault off the enemy, reach orbit at the height of the jump, and then come crashing down furiously in a well-animated sequence, than have my guy take awkward stabs at his opponent.

It makes it all seem that much more heroic. It makes you believe that your character fights with confidence, and it’s a lot better than having to look at the way some races held weapons in World of Warcraft; it made me wonder if they really had any combat training at all, or if they just bought an adventurer certificate in Chinatown for 1 dolla, 1 dolla.

Animations, and NCSoft’s artistic excellence aside: a lot of the beauty in AION comes from the heavily modified version of the Cry Engine they use. We’ve all seen what the Cry Engine can do in FPS’s like Crysis. To see that sort of graphical potential in an MMO is truly astounding. There is no better word than breathtaking to describe the environments, characters, and how it all comes together to create this outstanding virtual reality. It’s true, there have been other games with amazing(er) graphics, such as Age of Conan in DX10, but…It’s Age of Conan.

One can praise NCSoft for its artistic prowess all day, so let’s move on for a little bit. Let’s talk about character creation. We’ll keep it short since there’s nothing too innovative here, but then again, it’s just character creation. How innovative can you really get after a certain point? Character creation has pre-defined hairstyles, faces, body types, etc. It also includes an endless amount of possibilities for facial construction by way of sliders. Want to make your character look like Barack Obama? Go ahead. You can do it if you spend enough time messing with the sliders. Although there are no races other than “human,” you can move the ear slider up to have pointy ears and look like an elf. You can also be as tiny or as big as you want(within humanly limits). It’s refreshing. I don’t have to play a hideous gnome if I want to be tiny, and me being smaller doesn’t give me any special racial traits over the towering behemoth standing next to me.

II. Gameplay – 9/10

I’m the kind of person that’s never really impressed by flashy videos. Previews, trailers, video walkthroughs, all of that stuff bores me. You could be showing me the birth of Jesus Christ on video and I wouldn’t really be impressed, unless I witnessed it for myself. AION was one of those things. My friends constantly bombard me with videos from this game or that, saying “look at this game, it’s so cool!” but I always end up closing my YouTube tab dissatisfied and bored.

It wasn’t much better when I got into the game and was given my first quest. I sighed and said to myself “damn it, not this again.” After following the very linear path of fruit theft and insect killing that was laid in front of me, I started to wonder if I really wanted to take this game further. Then, I started getting missions. Missions are like quests, but they advance your own personal storyline. At first, they’re not much different from the other quests, you get some short 5 second cinematics showing you which mobs you have to kill, as if they were something special. However, as you progress they start getting more intricate, and by level 10, I was foaming at the mouth for more.  PvE is PvE, and I don’t think it will ever evolve past “fetch me ten fish” or “kill six wolves,” but I get the impression from NCSoft that they’re at least trying by giving you your own personal storyline to follow(in cinematics) in-between fish-fetching and wolf-killing.

Overall, gameplay is incredibly smooth. Everything loads quickly, and even though I was playing on Chinese servers, I hardly got serious lag. I keep a pillow handy by my desk, since I play Warhammer Online and even at 4GB of RAM I have to take naps every time I switch zones. AION didn’t even give me enough time to fluff my pillow before everything was done loading. Here’s a not-exaggerated re-enactment of how zone loading works in AION, following this format: hours:minutes:seconds:microseconds.

AION(9:10:57:48AM): Loading… here’s a tip for you.

Me(9:10:57:49AM): “Oh, c-”

AION(9:10:57:50AM): Done.

Switching zones is so quick, they’re going to have to include their loading screen tips on a separate manual. I can’t imagine anyone can get past the first word in any loading screen tip before the zone’s completely loaded.  This is good,  and it can even add a fun minigame to AION.  See if you’re quick enough to take a screenshot of the loading screen so you can read the tip it included. Impress your friends with your lightning-fast printscreen reflexes.

IIa. The Grind:

The very thing that keeps us playing MMOs is rapidly growing into a scary word: grind. How much of it is actually in AION? Well, I don’t know, and I don’t think we’ll be able to know for a while other than what people playing the Korean release tell us. Even then, it’s all a matter of how much time you have to play, how you manage that time, etc. Levels 1-10 go by pretty quick, which is good, because level 10 is really where the game starts. You get your wings, you get your real class, you get praise from your fellow realm-mates, and most importantly, you get a new emote. That’s right. This emote allows you to stand in lowbie areas and lord your wings over everyone who still doens’t have them.

From what I’ve seen though, and the fact that the level cap is 50, if you’re PvEing the entire way there, it’s going to feel quite grindy.

IIb. The wings:

You probably skipped the rest of this article so you could read about wings and flying in AION. Here’s the honest truth: It’s fucking awesome. Everyone loves flying. Even if you hate planes or heights. We all dream of having wings so we can drop things on unsuspecting people below. AION finally makes that dream a reality. Starting at level 10(after you complete your ascension mission) you will be able to fly. There are certain areas where you can’t take off, but you’ll always be able to show off your wings or at least glide down a ramp. You can only fly for a limited amount of time, but as you keep leveling, this amount of time increases. You’re also subject to a flight cooldown whenever you glide with your wings.

Once you get to one of the first areas where your flight is actually not restricted and you can go up as high or as low as you want, you’ll shed tears of awe. It sounds like something boring, right? Flying around. Druids could do it in World of Warcraft, gryphons could do it, you can fly in Perfect World. You’ve even seen videos of people flying in AION on YouTube. However, you’ve never experienced it for yourself… BUT I HAVE! NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH!

Honestly, until you get to fly around in AION, and do some combat or even some exploring up in the skies, I don’t think you can pass judgement on it. Watching birds fly is boring as hell. Watching other people fly on YouTube is not only boring as hell, but it usually also means having to stand the horrible background music people put in their videos. Try flying out for yourself when you get a chance, see how you like it.  Get some cardboard wings and jump off your rooftop, if you want.

Note: I will not be held responsible for any deaths that occur from my above comments, although if you suffer an accident you survive and develop psychic abilities, please contact me.

III. Overall impressions:

Overall I am very impressed by NCSoft’s latest MMO. I was obviously expecting the game to look truly amazing, no doubt, but the gameplay is really what exceeded my expectations. I haven’t even been to The Abyss yet, though I do plan on writing about that once I’ve experienced it. Still, even though I’ve been doing the same old questing stuff, there’s just something about the game that makes it all the more bearable than other recent MMOs. It could be the wings, I don’t know.  I can take a break every now and then from questing simply to soar into the skies and fly around a little bit. It’s really refreshing.

Even though it’s not a full loot sandbox, this game has an incredible sense of freedom. The game is still in beta, but it feels so finished. Other than issues caused by the eternal dark curse upon the earth, more commonly known as GameGuard(which I doubt will even be added for NA players), I never crashed, I rarely got lag spikes, and I was never once disconnected from the servers. Ever. No 10k latency, no 5k latency like some games had at release. I’m looking at you, Age of Conan. They could release this game tomorrow, in beta, and I’d buy it.

I can’t wait until the North American version is released, and I can play with all my friends(that’s right, all two of them).

Recently, I’ve been craving a little PvP action. Having been mostly playing Final Fantasy XI on my free time during the past few months, you can see why I would. Clearly, World of Warcraft was not an option; I dreaded the thought of ever laying my eyes upon Warsong Gulch again. Yet, for some reason, I was drawn back to Warhammer Online. I was curious as to what had happened to the ORvR lakes. You know, those places you went to when you wanted to do those scouting quests they give you in the warcamp before queueing for the next scenario? I had heard several changes had been put into place to make ORvR more appealing. Seeing as I had a 6 month subscription to Warhammer Online that was still active, I decided: what the hell? I already paid for it, I might as well see what they’ve added to the game.

You’ve no doubt read around MMOCrunch already, from posts made by Mike that several servers had been completely closed off. It saddens me to say that while this is a great step to keep the player base to high-population servers(I use the term loosely), instead of low-population servers it does little to solve the imbalance problem some servers experience. Volkmar, for example, suffers from a lack of Destruction(Tier 4). This makes the RvR experience for both sides very unpleasant. Destruction complains that Order only wins because they have greater numbers, and Order complains that Destruction never shows up to fight because of that reason. When Destruction players read about these problems, they are further discouraged from playing on that server, and so the problem seems to never fix itself. But, I digress. We are here to talk about ORvR! More importantly, non-T4 ORvR. Why should anyone care? Call me old-fashioned, but I like the journey to be as enjoyable as the destination. Much to my surprise, it seems many others feel the same way, recently.

It may be difficult to see exactly what’s going on in the image above, but it’s very clear what I’m trying to show. I started a new character, a Knight of the Blazing Sun, and no sooner had I stepped out to the ORvR area that I let out a loud high-school-girl-esque yelp of glee. To those with a keen eye, it may seem like an imbalanced fight. There’s roughly 50 million order killing a single Choppa. This was near the entrance to our warcamp, though. You don’t really see many Destruction characters venture that far. In this particular case, the fight was at Festenplatz, where Destruction awaited with inferior numbers, but still managed to put up an amazing fight. So how did Mythic achieve this? How did they convince people to stop queueing for Nordenwatch and get out to the ORvR lakes to fight? Well, the same way any game developer gets players to do anything in their game: they add a grind to it. Every ORvR lake has an influence bar now, and whenever you kill a player, capture or defend an objective, you get influence. The rewards are amazing for the level they are available at. Tier 1 offers an almost complete set of blue armor, weapons, and rings. Tier 2 offers purple items, etc. The grind for these items is not as long as you would expect. For example, Tier 1 has a total influence requirement of about 3.3k INF to reach Elite. If you have two warbands, one Order and one Destruction constantly killing and taking/defending objectives from each other(which is not a rare sight these days, even in Tier 1), you can reach full influence in a couple of hours.

Some concerns:

One of the first things I noticed when I created my new character and hopped back into the game was the Rally Call function. The first time I got one of those, I got up from my chair, and stood straight as  I valiantly declared: “My brothers need my help, I must answer their call for reinforcements!” When I got there, though, it was nothing more than a skirmish between a couple of Order and a few Destruction at the Harvest Shrine. Angered, and hurt that my role-playing act had been in vain, I promptly returned to questing. I later learned that these rally calls are automatically issued by the server, roughly every hour or so. Why? There are very few times when these rally calls will actually yield any amount of people, and a lot of times, it’s just a way to facilitate travel to the nearest warcamp. I can’t see any real solutions to the problem, but then again I can’t really see the purpose they were intended to serve, either. Everyone who wants to RvR is already at the warcamp in a warband or in the RvR lake itself; they’re not out questing. If someone’s doing PQs, it’s because that’s what they want to do; the likelihood that they will answer a rally call  is very slim.

The keep contribution system is still very random and unreliable. Not to mention, it’s always the same loot(non-T4). Why is that bad? Because people can get a gold bag more than once. For example, I’ve gotten two gold bags from keep sieges in Tier 2. I was happy the first time, because I got a pretty good set piece from it. I was not so happy the second time, because my choice was either the same set piece, some crafting items, or some silver. It’s not so much that I didn’t have any other loot to choose from(although that may have been nice), it’s that I took someone else’s gold bag, and pulled out silver from it. Someone who really needed their chest set piece would have made better use of it. The game is in desperate need of a “pass” function, both for keeps and PQs. Allow players to set their preferences for what kind of bags they want to roll on. I’d be afraid to keep doing keep sieges on my knight with my friends if one of them hasn’t gotten a gold bag and I get a third. This effectively prevents me from playing with my friends.

There’s still little incentive to attacking a heavily defended keep. In most cases, a warband that’s attacking a heavily-defended keep will give up after one try. The INF and XP you get from killing a few people inside their own keep is nothing compared to how much they got for wiping the entire warband. Not to mention, they will get “ticks” of influence everytime they defend the keep from an attack(which translates to: everytime a player dies near the keep). One possible solution could be to add “ticks” for sieging a keep. The longer you continue to assault a heavily-defended keep, the more influence both sides will get. In order for this to count, however, the warband must make considerable progress in taking the keep. If it’s just one destruction and order player killing each other near the keep, it shouldn’t count. Progress could be measured in several ways: amount of players killed during siege, damage dealt to the door or siege engines on the walls, etc.

Overall, I am quite happy with the changes made to ORvR lakes. While I’m still leveling up my new character and getting into Tier 3 now, so far the journey has been enjoyable. By defending keeps and turning in the “kill 15 players” quest there, I’ve been able to actually obtain a level or two this way. Leveling through ORvR is possible, although not as fast as questing, doing scenarios, or combining the two. Hopefully, they continue to provide changes to improve this area of the game. I, personally, can’t wait to see what the next 6 months will bring to the game.

Hello, everyone, and happy holidays! It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here, and most of you are probably thinking “thank god I haven’t had to read any hateful posts from this asshole,” but who couldn’t do with a little holiday negativity? No, no, I’m not here to bash the countless holiday events that game companies host in their virtual worlds. I’m not even here to post a subjective evaluation of a game I’ve played for only 10 minutes a la my Atlantica Online review. Today we’re going to take a look at Game Management Systems, and a couple in specific: PlayOnline, and Steam. If you’ve never heard of PlayOnline, all you need to know is that it currently stands as the best example of how to not build a game management system.

What the hell is a “Game Management System”?

Truth be told, it’s just a term I use to describe applications that handle digital content to make it easier for the users to obtain, play, and keep their virtual assets up-to-date; it’s a way to juggle many games at once. The most prominent example of such an utility is Steam. Like in the days of old, not every person had imaginary encounters with minotaurs, dragons, or angels but most people knew what they were; much in the same way everyone knows what Steam is supposed to do, even if they’ve never used it. These utilities promise a reliable, and most importantly, safe way to acquire games for yourself or others. Not only that, they’ll keep your games organized, so that all you really have to do is run that application, then pick whatever game you feel like playing. Wait, it gets even better. This tool will even keep track of your friends, what games they’re playing,  and even allow you to join your friend’s game through the utility’s friend interface. The application even provides you with an in-game overlay you can use to talk to your friends, change the application settings, etc. It promises the ability to use all your favorite applications while in-game. That is, unless PLAYXPERT beats them to it(hurry up with those 64-bit versions, slackers!). Sounds great so far, right?

Well, hold on, I’m not done yet.

Everyone benefits from the existence and support of these applications. Developers can make their games available to an international audience without having to ship boxes there, thanks to digital distribution.  Additionally, it promises the potential to reduce the price of games. How can it do this? Think of Wal-mart. They can sell goods at a much cheaper price because they sell a broader array of goods. Wal-mart also keeps low prices on goods by reducing the cost to make them; irrelevant when it comes to what we’re talking about, though, as there is virtually no cost in digital distribution(no box, CD, etc). By having so many games under one roof, and completely eliminating cost of shipping, cardboard, plastic, and media, games can be made available to the public much more cheaply. These companies can even bundle a bunch of games together, and sell them at a very affordable price. Hey, who wouldn’t want to buy over a dozen games for only $75USD[1]?

There’s more. These management systems can prevent piracy. By making game activation possible only to those who have the application, and only allowing people who have legit serial keys to play on legit servers, you can successfully prevent piracy. Arguably, anyone determined enough to crack a game will eventually find a way to play it for free. If the effort and time comes out to be worth less than the 50 bucks , then great. You must be some sort of game-cracking prodigy. Unfortunately, you’ll still miss out on having the most up-to-date version of the game, and any mod developed by communities of people who paid for the game.

So that’s it. This form of content delivery:

• Is user-friendly.
• Saves a ton of time spent on organizing games with your friends, and gives you more time to actually play with them.
• Allows more people to purchase the games and encourages more companies to offer digital distribution to reach an international audience.
• Can ultimately make games cheaper, as the companies running these applications have more games to sell, and can often bundle them for an amazing price.
• Prevents piracy.

Good night, everyone!

Wait. There’s more in this article?! Damn it.

I’m sorry. I can’t go an article without some negativity. If I skipped this next part, I might lose some “street cred” and then no one would like me anymore.  Corporate executives know that if you need to point out an employee’s shortcomings when speaking to them, you start with something good, then point out where that person can improve. I’m taking a similar approach. You’ve seen the benefits of such a system, now let’s take a look at a system that may not be as popular or well-known. For damn good reasons. Square-Enix manages and distributes some of their games digitally through a system called PlayOnline. The most popular game obtainable through the system is perhaps Final Fantasy XI. Some of the game’s expansions are even available for purchase through PlayOnline itself!

If PlayOnline had been the only system ever made to manage digital content, then it would have also been the last. It shits all over the idea of game evolution and progress. It makes it more difficult for players to get to the game they want to play, can cost you more money than buying the games at the store, and can drive you to set yourself on fire and jump off a bridge. The only thing it can do in comparison to the previously-mentioned system is prevent piracy. Seriously, though, who owns a cracked copy of Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft, or Lord of the Rings: Online? I don’t know why I even mentioned this point.

PlayOnline will assume from the moment you start your registration that you’re an idiot. It may be right, but it’s no reason to punish the rest of us. PlayOnline will assign you a username, consisting of four letters and four numbers. I guess it prevents people from exploiting the fact that some morons make their account name the same as their character name in-game. Of course, this safety measure can often prevent the same morons from accessing their own account, if they forgot to write down the random gibberish that is their user ID. You also get registered for a sweet e-mail address that you should give to all of your friends. Mine is x261610402427@pol.com. I’m not fucking kidding. There’s user-friendliness for you.

Note: Only e-mail me if you’re the chick with three boobs from Total Recall.

If you’re not a moron, but you move a lot like I do, and you lost the booklet where you kept your user ID, then good luck to you. Square-Enix’s customer service is the worst when it comes to account recovery. Well, actually, their customer service can’t even usually solve a simple problem. We’ll save that for another post, though.

The client offered potential. Five years ago.

I’m going to be fair here. I liked PlayOnline when I first started playing Final Fantasy XI, back in 2003. It seemed like a pretty cool way to organize your games, and keep all the people you play with on a separate friend list than the people you talk to on AIM, for example. So you could organize everything you wanted to do in-game with your friends without having to talk to them on AIM/MSN/TeamSpeak.

Its one downfall, perhaps, is that it is now limited by outdated technology. Because this system is used across two other platforms: the Xbox 360, and the PlayStation 2, it is limited by the technology of the latter. That means if they invented a PCI card to serve the purpose of telepathic communication online, then PlayOnline would never support it. Consoles like the PS2 are not updated. Ever. At least not anymore. So PlayOnline is stuck in the past. Maybe forever.

Let’s go back to hating it real quick.

We’ve talked about how these game management systems can help you keep your games up-to-date either through downloading patches or purchasing expansions. PlayOnline does that absolutely flawlessly. Wait, I think I used the wrong word. Yeah, I meant absolutely shittily. As far as keeping your game up-to-date through content patches, why even discuss that? Every MMO does it. It’s not complicated technology. Final Fantasy XI has four expansions, though. These are: Rise of the Zilart, Chains of Promathia, Treasures of Aht Urghan, and Wings of the Goddess.  Rise of the Zilart came bundled with FFXI as far as I can remember. I think the only place it wasn’t bundled with FFXI at release was probably in Japan. Still, they offer registration keys for Rise of the Zilart through PlayOnline for … $9.99? What the hell?! In fact, they offer every key except the one for their latest expansion[2].

Let’s pretend for a moment that some stores sell just Final Fantasy XI, no expansion. $9.99 would be a reasonable price, but let’s put it down to $4.99. You go home, install it, and you want to buy the expansions through PlayOnline since you weren’t even told at the store they existed. Possible scenario, happens with some games.

• Theoretical cost of Final Fantasy XI alone: $4.99
• Rise of the Zilart: $9.99
• Chains of Promathia: $9.99
• Treasures of Aht Urghan: $14.99
• Total: $39.96(no taxes)

So you get the game, and three expansions for about 40 bucks. You don’t get the last expansion, though. Sorry. Not available through PlayOnline.  On the other hand, they offer the game with all expansions at every store and Direct2Drive for…20 bucks? Wait, so the company sells keys for expansions that no one will ever buy, because they come bundled with the original game for a lot less money. Isn’t the purpose of digital distribution to save the users valuable time and money? And let’s remember, it’s Square-Enix selling their own games, through their own system, for more money than retailers. What is going on here?!

You might be thinking “man, you’re a dick,” but you’re also wondering “Wouldn’t returning players who didn’t purchase the third expansion want to buy it through PlayOnline? They don’t need a whole new copy of the game.” Actually, they don’t benefit, either. The third expansion(Aht Urghan) is sold through PlayOnline for $14.99. If you spend just 5 bucks more, you get that expansion, and the latest one. As well as a few extra keys you can burn or keep for when you lose your user ID and have to make a new account.

So, if you’re keeping score:

• PlayOnline is not user-friendly. You’re forced to write down or remember gibberish user IDs. You don’t need to type it in every time you log in, of course, but if you need account support(god forbid) or anything else, you’ll be asked for this information. Oh, you’ll also be asked for your registration keys. I guess the fact that you need support for their game is not enough proof that you bought it…What?
• PlayOnline does not save the user money. Buying just two of their expansions through PlayOnline would turn out as expensive as buying the original game and all four expansions at the store.
• PlayOnline stops running when a game launches. So you don’t get a sweet overlay, or anything like that to help you mess with settings while in-game.

Oh, and:

• PlayOnline helps prevent piracy.

It’s okay. I’m full of shit, too.

Look, my arguments are not that great. It’s possible that Square-Enix had no intention of producing a system to manage their games effectively, like Valve did with Steam. Maybe Square-Enix just wanted to have a way to handle billing for Final Fantasy XI without having to do it via browser. Wait. Shit, it doesn’t even do that better than paying via browser. My street address has a “.” character. You know, like “Apt. 4.” Couple of weeks ago, I wanted to renew my subscription and so I hop on, and put in my credit card information. It gets declined about 3 times before I contact customer service. Since in PlayOnline you cannot type special characters, like “.” their brilliant staff suggested I call my bank to tell them to remove the damn period from my address so I could pay for the game. I digress. Like I said, let’s leave their customer service for another post. We’re going to have fun with that one, too. There’ll be public notaries and calls to the FDIC…I know, I know. I can’t wait, either.

Getting back on track.

I have high hopes for game management systems. Even PlayOnline. With a few updates it could become the bullet-train of digital content and distribution systems.  I really think that in the right hands, utilities such as these can save users a ton of time and money. The video game industry rapidly advances. Some think it’s going down the wrong path, and that developers no longer care about gamers. According to these people, it’s all about the money. They may or may not be right, I mean, it is a business and they want to make money; game companies are not charities.

One thing I am sure of is that the future of video games, and MMOs lie within these systems. Much like retail has moved from tiny mom and pop stores to Wal-Mart, Target, and other big box retailers. Hell, no one can argue that you can’t find quality goods at any of those stores. I believe the same will happen with video games. How will it affect MMOs? Just look at the Station Pass SOE offers. You can play a ton of games for one monthly subscription fee. Sure, most of them suck, but you have to start somewhere. Eventually someone might bundle good games under one subscription fee. I don’t know why you’d want to, but maybe we’re not far off from paying one low monthly fee to play Lord of the Rings: Online, World of Warcraft, and Final Fantasy XI all together.

It’s been a while since a major online game has been completely packed up and taken away from the public. Auto Assault? It wasn’t really a major game, it was one of NCSoft’s many “side” games. The Sims Online? I’ll bet very few other than me knew the game even existed. Whether you experienced Hellgate: London for yourself or not, though, you knew it was out there. You weren’t sure exactly what kind of game it was, and that’s quite possibly largely in part to the fact that it couldn’t decide on a specific genre. I’m writing about it now, since the general opinion was that this game was an “MMOG” at the very least. Hellgate: London won’t leave any innovative gameplay features in its legacy, but it’ll serve as yet another example of how to not make an online game.

I. Release Date – Ooh, scary!

Hellgate: London was released just in time for Halloween last year.  No, the game wasn’t ready, but it was Halloween! It fit the “gloomy feel” of the game, and so it had to be released on that date. I did buy this game as soon as it was released, and so I’ll note some of its most redeeming features at the time of release(remember, it was Halloween, so it had to be scary!):

•  An awful patching process that didn’t really patch anything. When it launched, the patching process was absolute shit. I remember disconnecting a couple of times, and the patch would start over from 0%. Come on! This wouldn’t have been so bad if the client itself didn’t crash for no damn reason at all. Side note: I did try to play the game again recently. When I went to patch it, it asked me to manually download a multiplayer patch. I didn’t see a reason to, but did it anyway. I eventually gave up once I realized the game couldn’t decide on whether it wanted to be patched or not.
• An amazing introduction cinematic. Once you got to play the game, in-between crashes, you realized where they spent most of their budget. It wasn’t on developing the actual game, it was on creating that cinematic. Everything about that cinematic was great, but I sort of wished there had been more things in the game itself than an intro.
• A lot of crashes to the desktop for no reason whatsoever. Sometimes the patching process would halt randomly if you tabbed out, or failed to please the game client in some other way.
• OFFICIAL FORUMS!

I realize most of the times the deadline isn’t set by the development companies, but by the publisher, or the person putting all their money into the project. Either way, publishers and developers alike need to realize that if something isn’t ready, it’s sometimes better to spend a little bit more on it to ensure that the game has a healthy lifespan, than to release it two weeks early so that it will be shut down a year later.

II. You worked on Diablo, we get it.

The game itself wasn’t as hyped as the people that were working on it. The first thing I ever learned about the game a couple of years back was not that it had guns, or that it took place in a post-apocalyptic world. The first thing I even saw on their website was “We made/worked on Diablo. You should buy our game.” I’m paraphrasing, of course. Still, if the best thing you can come up with to hype your game is “we made a great game in the past” you’re not showing a lot of promise for the game you’re currently trying to hype.

Hellgate: London had the following things in common with Diablo:

• Zombies
• Items
• Wirt’s Leg. Real original, guys.

Other than that, they were two completely different beasts, and should’ve been treated as such. This is another thing game companies need to stop doing. I’ll even say this got Mythic into some trouble when hyping WAR, since a lot of players ended up thinking it would be DAoC2. I, as a gamer, don’t really care about your game development resume. Even the often-hated-for-no-reason SOE has released really good games, despite their bloodied past. Likewise, if you made a really good game in the past, you could end up making a terrible game now.

Just stop. Work on your game, hype its features, do what you want. Just make sure you’re always focusing on your current job, not on your past. Imagine you have a child, and it grows up to be a success. If you then have another child, would you ignore or skip certain parenting aspects just because you made “a really good one” before?

III. We have guns, swords, and everything you didn’t ask for.

Hellgate: London stuck to its vision from the beginning. They didn’t want you to be able to “respec” your mastery trees in the game, just like you couldn’t do it in Diablo. I, for one, was behind this one hundred percent. The problem in this particular case, was that you didn’t need any damn points in anything. You could go the whole game without spending a single point into anything. This was especially true for Hunter classes. Your survival depended on how well you could aim in FPS mode and how powerful your gun was. That was it. You had points to spend on things, but they weren’t any useful in helping you shoot things down better or faster. It’s cool that you wanted us to think carefully about what to specialize in, but when nothing was useful, it didn’t matter if you offered the option to “respec” or not.

This game had everything: rocket launchers, sniper rifles, automatic weapons, and…swords?! I didn’t get this bit. It makes sense in steampunk-type games: not every soldier wants to spend an eternity reloading a rifle manually after each shot, and as such some will favour melee weapons. In this setting, it didn’t make much sense, though. You had automatic weapons. There’s absolutely no incentive or benefit to using a sword, or a shield against zombies when you could be gunning down or blowing up the masses with little effort. I guess templars felt the need to be “stylish” and using rocket launchers was beneath them. The game doesn’t give you the impression that a catastrophe has occurred and everyone is doing their best to survive when you have assholes running around hunting zombies with a longsword for sport.

Another thing a lot of people were pissed off about was the lack of a LAN option for the game. I’m sure they’re even more pissed off now that the servers are shutting down and they’re going to be stuck with a single-player game they can’t return to the store. It seems Flagship wasn’t really interested in letting players play their games with friends unless it was on their server. They had reasons for this, and they were posted all over the official forums for time to time, but damn if I remember them. I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast.

IV. Parting is such sweet sorrow.

Rumors are going around that the game will live on. People still aren’t sure of the game’s fate in the US or EU, but for Asia, at least there has been an announcement that they will try to keep the game alive. You can read about it here. The servers for US, and EU, currently hosted by NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc. will issue their final breath on Jan 31st, 2009 at midnight.

Though we should never celebrate people losing their jobs, or someone’s dream shattering before them, we should at least try to learn from it. Game development companies need to learn to take the right steps in hyping their product, preparing it for release, and take feedback from their communities. At the same time, publishers should realize that if something isn’t ready, it isn’t ready. Waiting a couple of months without income can net you a lot more in the long run.

Happy Halloween, everybody! Yes, yes, I realize it’s a couple of days late, but better late than never, right? On that note, I wanted to take this opportunity to properly introduce myself. My name is Malcom, and I’m one of the newest writers here at MMOCrunch.com. If you’ve read some of my previous posts here, you’ll know that I mostly write about the world of Warhammer: Online, as well as some free-to-play MMORPGs that I happen to come by every now and then. Other than that, there’s very little about me to share, and since you’re here to read about MMORPGs, let’s move on! Today, I will be describing my experience with the Witching Night event added to the world of Warhammer: Online on October 29th to honor the real-life celebrations of Halloween. Not only are we going to look into the event itself, and the obtainable rewards, but Mythic’s ulterior motive behind this event. Was Witching Night Mythic’s way of pushing people to the open RvR areas? Was it the miraculous kick-start that we’ve all been hoping RvR would get, or simply yet another item-driven and soon forgotten event?

I. Content Additions

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thinking “oh god, here comes another holiday event,” but much to my surprise Mythic didn’t simply add two or three items, a quest in Altdorf/Inevitable City and called it a day. Witching Night included one important addition: the Live Events tab to the Tome of Knowledge. We could spend a lot of time speculating what it will be used for in the very distant future, but it does show promise. Mythic has already announced that they will have more live events during the Heavy Metal content update set to take place starting November 17th. The potential for this tool shouldn’t be underestimated in the right hands. For instance, if you were to have a team of people working on live events constantly, you could add a lot of flavour to the game. You could have daily, or weekly events to try to get people away from the daily scenario grind.

II. Influence and PvE

The main event included goals and rewards for both PvE and PvP. When accessing your Live Events tab on your Tome of Knowledge, you would see an influence bar and a “quest” showing your progress on the PvE aspect of the event. In order to complete the PvE side of the live event, you needed to kill: 50 Restless Spirits, 25 Withered Crones, and 10(?) Witching Lords. You would also get basic, advanced, and elite influence rewards as you would obtain from any regular PQ. To obtain influence during the event, you either had to kill the monsters listed on the live events tab, or players. Players seemed to give a minimal amount of influence, and from my experience they were not the best way to go about obtaining it. If anyone had a different experience, I’d love to hear how it worked for you. I would’ve preferred obtaining full influence by killing players than grinding mobs.

The PvE rewards included:

• Mask 4/4 – Obtained as the elite influence reward.
• Mask 3/4 – Obtained as drops from Restless Spirits, and Withered Crones.
• Gift of Dark Tidings – 4 cloaks in total you could choose from, one for each archetype. Each one had different bonuses: one for melee, one for ranged, one for healing, and one for offensive casting.
• Witching Potion – Obtained as the basic influence reward. This gives you an aura for 10 minutes and has a 60 minute cooldown. I don’t know if this was intended or not, but my charges kept resetting at random intervals allowing me to always be at 5/5. You could also obtain a title from using this potion.
• Witch King* Title – Obtained by killing all the required mobs on the Live Events tab.

*To obtain the Witch King title, you actually had to do some or keep track of the RvR PQ. The Witching Lords you needed to complete the “quest” appeared only after one side killed 100 players of the opposing faction. I don’t know if I was the only one this happened to, but whenever I killed a Witching Lord, it gave me credit for five. Not sure exactly how that was intended to work, or if Mythic originally intended for players to only have to kill two and the live events tab displayed ten.

As far as the PvE event, it wasn’t anything spectacular. You had to grind mobs to get items. The rewards weren’t really “rare” or difficult to obtain. It took me an hour and a half of grinding restless spirits to get full influence, and the result shown to the right. Man, I wish I was good enough to edit or manipulate pictures. That’s actually how many masks I ended up with in my quest to full influence. Anyone who did the same can tell you it’s a pretty accurate depiction of the drop rate for the gobbo masks. Now, I’m not going to complain; I plan to make a killing once the initial appeal of this holiday has passed and most everyone has sold their masks on the auction house. Still, it made me feel weird equipping this mask when I knew that everyone else on the planet was also wearing it. The mask model was actually my favourite out of the four, so you can imagine how disappointed I was when I realized how easy they were to obtain.

III. Get thee to the RvR area!

The RvR PQ was actually fun, and it looked like it could’ve been even more fun if it had been planned a little bit better. I’m on a medium population server, and the amount of people that showed up to the RvR areas for the event was absolutely staggering. I had to tinker with my settings for a few minutes to make sure that I wouldn’t miss a second of the plentiful action. It reminded me of why I wanted to play Warhammer: Online in the first place; this bloodshed is what I signed up for.

I sharpened my waraxe, polished my armour, and set myself on the path to combat. Leaving behind the makeshift defenses of the Troll Country warcamp, I steeled my nerve and prepared myself for battle. The land itself had been scarred by tools of war, and the marching of hundreds of heavily-armored soldiers. Bodies lay scattered across the war-torn field where each faction had planted their own seeds of enmity, in preparation for their harvest of death. In the distance, the fighting screams of elf and greenskin alike could be heard, many silenced half-way by arrow or blade. Ready for the coming bloodbath, I rushed to aid my fellow soldiers in battle. Arriving closer to the battle cries, I could now see the fight more clearly, and that’s when I witnessed the most horrifying event of my life.

Now that you get the basic idea, let me tell you what I witnessed without role-playing. What I saw in the coming minutes were the forces of Destruction sitting safely at the border to (in this case) Ostland/Troll Country shooting arrows or spells at our dim-witted melee classes who could not understand that we needed them to back up so we could get credit for the kills. Here’s the deal: The event consisted of both factions fighting to see which one could obtain 100 kills first, so that a Witching Lord could spawn. That sounds easy, right? There were, after all, at least one hundred people constantly respawning and showing up to the RvR area on my server. The problem was that most of the kills we got were outside of the designated PQ area. As such, about three quarters of the kills we got didn’t count towards our overall progress. This meant that we had to spend close to four hours completing stage I, constantly telling people to back up, so that one person could walk away with a gold bag, and the rest of us with suicidal thoughts. I’ll be honest, though. I didn’t really much care for the PQ itself. In my mind, I was happy that there were that many people in the open RvR areas, and that I was getting so much experience and enjoyment from doing open RvR. Early one morning, I was able to get 4140 experience for killing a single chosen solo. It made my day. Okay, that wasn’t in the RvR area, and it was a 1 on 1…but, still!

The rewards for the PvP side of the event were the following:

• Mask 2/4 – Obtained as random drops from players.
• Mask 1/4 – Obtained as a reward from a gold bag after the PQ ended.
• A large amount of satisfaction.

I had a lot of fun. Whether we were completing the PQ objective or not, it encouraged people to actually get to the RvR areas, and that was enough for me. If the PQ wasn’t happening, people would still show up, and we would take the area’s objectives, or a keep. I loved every minute of it.

IV. Conclusion – Success or flop?

Having witnessed the event first-hand, and spent many hours participating in both aspects(PvE and PvP) of the event, it made me wonder: Did Mythic really give a damn about Halloween, or were they just using that as an excuse to add a couple of items to convince people to get out to the RvR areas? If the event’s ultimate goal was to get people to do open RvR, then it’s safe to consider it a success. Who cares if you got a gold bag from the ORvR PQ or not? As mentioned previously, even when the PQ wasn’t happening, people would still show up, and we would then take objectives and keeps. It made organizing warbands a lot easier, since you knew where to find the people you needed. Normally, if you want to take a keep, you have to spend a staggering amount of time organizing a warband, and trying to find people in the right areas. With the event, you knew where people were, all the time. Even if you didn’t want to do the PQ, you could go poach people there, and off to another area you go!

If you are to judge the event’s organization, the way the PQ was laid out, and the originality and effort put forth to create a holiday event, then I would call it a flop. The ORvR PQ was poorly laid out, with people usually sitting away from the designated area shooting arrows or spells, or one faction chasing another one away from the area and refusing to back down resulting in hours and hours of lack of progress.

What did you guys think? Was the event entertaining or not? Are you looking at it from the PQ-completing perspective, or simply for the fun factor? I, for one, am looking forward to the Heavy Metal content update, and the events that it will bring.

We’ve been waiting for it, and at long last, two of the four classes removed from Warhammer: Online at release are going to be released this December. However, it seems Mythic is giving players the opportunity to complete several events which will allow them to play either class a full week before they are officially released and available to everyone. According to Mythic’s announcement, this reward will not be easy to obtain, and players who want to acquire it will more than likely have to log on every day to complete the daily events they are introducing with the content patch.

This content update dubbed “Heavy Metal” will begin on November 17th and will “set the mood” for the introduction of the long-awaited tank classes: Knight of the Blazing Sun, and the Black Guard. The Heavy Metal event will also introduce a new tab on the Tome of Knowledge, as well as a brand-new scenario available to players of all levels and tiers. It makes me wonder exactly if anyone will bother playing any of the other scenarios for the duration of the event. Then again, it might save people leveling through Tier 3 from the awful hell-spawned scenario that is Tor Anroc, if it does end up replacing the more “mainstream” scenarios.

Whether you liked the game or not, it can’t be argued that Mythic has been very prompt in answering player issues and updating their game. Although the classes were supposed to be introduced at release, there are many other companies that have promised features that a year later have no due date for going live. I noticed they have increased the renown healers get significantly, as well. I digress. Either way, for those of us enjoying the world of Warhammer: Online, we should be looking forward to this live event, and hope that Mythic continues down the road of improvement.

I had a chance to play Atlantica Online earlier this week in-between being sick and playing Warhammer: Online. For a game that is in beta, it seems to want to be treated as a game that has been already released, claiming in its advertisements: “Love it, or we’ll give cash for your character!” This caught my eye specifically and made me want to try the game, not because I wanted to love it; I figured I’d hate it, since I’m a bitter shell of a man, and could get some cash out of it. However, if you take a look at the details of the ‘offer’ it sounds more like they’re trying to get cheap power-leveling out of their players than actually convince you to play. Offers aside, we’re here to discuss my first impressions, so let’s get on with it!

Graphics/UI: 5/10 – ‘Meh’

The graphics are nothing innovative. They’re similar to most eastern games on the market. This game is particularly similar to Sword of the New World, a MMORTSRPG(?) I had the chance to try last year. I don’t normally review games at the login screen, but this one wants to be. I had never in all my years seen a login screen with so many, many random colors. I think it was depicting a large-scale battle, but to me it seemed like an orgy of fairies and daemons on a rainbow chessboard. Once I survived the seizure-inducing login screen, it was time to create my character. Character customization is very limited, not only at the character screen but in-game as well. I only had about five hairstyles to choose from, two outfit types, and a…weapon? Well, anyway, once in-game the graphics didn’t get that much better. After playing to about level 10(I think), I had gotten quite a few pieces of armor. Instead of evenly distributing them between myself and my mercenaries I figured I’d put them all on my “visible” character to upgrade his appearance. Where’s my helmet? Where are the new pants I got? The character looked exactly the same as it did before I equipped anything on him.

Now, let’s make something very clear. The game needs to have low system requirements in order to function properly, as battles will eventually become very, very large. This is not why the game’s graphics are ‘meh’.  World of Warcraft and Warhammer: Online both had relatively low system requirements when released as compared to the available technology at the time. However, the way they depicted their characters, the landscapes, the spell effects, was very original, and relevant to the world they were basing the game on. Atlantica Online just seems to have copied and pasted a combination of Lineage 2 graphics, with Sword of the New World graphics, and other eastern games. That’s harsh, perhaps, but it seems to be the way the game wants to be treated. “Old MMOs not ‘WOW’ing you?” it proudly boasts in its advertisements, suggesting that they have something new and refreshing to offer. It certainly isn’t in the graphics department.

Gameplay/Chat/Community: 5/10 – ‘Who’s my special little boy?’

This section of my first impressions review will not focus on the combat aspect of the game. That’s a separate aspect altogether as they seem to want it to be. As soon as you start playing, the game will assume that you don’t know how to use your mouse or keyboard and will simply ‘lock’ you to the tutorial NPC. It will explain the world to you a little bit, and how to get started on completing your first quest. This is where the game also makes another assumption: it seems to believe that you’re too dumb to find battles on your own, so it will go find them for you. That’s right, there’s an ‘auto-move’ option that will automatically move you to your active quest’s objective. From there, all you have to do is either talk to NPC X or kill monster Y.

Perhaps an aspect that the tutorial should have expanded on was how to use the chat interface. I kept seeing only one person in my chat log, and they seemed to be talking to themselves. Not in the sense that there was no one else for them to talk to, but in the sense that they seemed to be answering questions and holding a conversation while there was no one else in the chatroom talking. Maybe I didn’t know how to use the chat, or maybe the game packs an auto-ignore feature that will ignore people it knows you won’t like automatically.

Now, one feature I sort of liked is the player’s ability to post in-game advertisements that are displayed at the top of your screen for goods and services players are interested in trading or selling(some services which I didn’t understand, such as ‘teaching pants’). This automatically made me think that goldsellers would be filling these advertising spaces with goldselling links. At the same time, though, it’s much less intrusive than those long whispers we get on other games, or the huge chunks of text in public chatrooms. If the feature were to be moderated, goldselling advertisements could be removed almost immediately.

Battle system/leveling system: 6/10

At last we come to Atlantica Online’s innovative feature. Okay, now that we’ve had a good laugh, it’s serious time. Let’s talk about how the battle system works:

• When you right click a mob to attack, a Final Fantasy-esque transition will take you to a battle sequence.
• You select the character you want to ‘move.’
• You then choose what you want your character to do. There’s attack, use item, use magic, all the standards.
• You will have a time limit, after which the enemy will make their move.
• You are now taking turns hitting each other with random things until one group is dead.

This is supposed to be the best part about Atlantica Online. Strategic turn-based combat that makes you think carefully about what you’re going to use on your opponent for maximum efficiency. The timer was so short, however, that I found myself frantically clicking enemy monsters while hitting “q” over and over so that every now and then a magical ability would go off. I had 4 characters to move on a 15 second timer. It completely removed the ‘strategic’ part out of combat. Not to mention, it took me ten levels to figure out how to remove that annoying camera thing in battles where characters would take a ‘solo.’ A ‘solo’ is when your character decides he’s better than every other mercenary there and will take up the whole screen to show off his magical abilities in greater detail. Problem is: the timer is still running during this sequence, so if your guy decides to summon Knights of the Round or whatever, then by the time the sequence is over, so is your turn.

The combat system ended with me hitting two buttons over and over. I felt if I hooked up a Rock Band drum peripheral to my computer I could get through the battle easily by dropping some freestyle beats. My characters seemed to be a lot stronger than anything they encountered, so there was no need to think on anything. It’s a race to see how fast you can click enemy targets with a 15 second limit. Last thing, what’s up with the looting? When the mobs are dead, I have to loot them to claim my prize, but there’s usually 4-6 mobs to loot, and it uses up a character turn to loot a mob. So if all 4 of your mercenaries can move in a given turn you can loot 4 mobs, then you have to wait until the enemy corpses make a move before you can loot the remaining ones. What the hell?! Why even given corpses a turn?

The leveling system also had me a bit confused. I know each mercenary gains levels and they’re all displayed in the UI outside of combat. A lot of things required “level 20″ and it made me wonder what exactly that meant, though. An average of the levels of all your mercenaries? The level of your main character? Another thing was the random number in brackets next to my name. I saw it on every new player I ran into. I figured it wasn’t my level since it said “18″ and my character’s level at the bottom clearly said “Lv.1″. In the end, I decided it was my character’s age. A strapping young lad with a cannon on his back and a pocket full of dreams.

Overall: 5.5/10 – Nothing further, your honor.

Even though the game is still in beta, it seems to be advertising proudly things that it can’t really offer. If you hated the game, and want to take them up on their offer for cash, you have to get to level 50 first. “Old MMOs not ‘WOW’ing you” I see what you did there. Thanks, but I’d rather go back to World of Warcraft and endure the tedious scripted instances with several  people who didn’t know a giant beam or orb was coming right at them, and that it wasn’t a good thing.

In the end, if you like these types of games, you know, the free, eastern, copy-paste-insert-item-mall-instant-cash games, then you might have some fun with this one. It’s a little bit different than other released MMOs, even if it’s not innovative in  any way whatsoever.

A lot of us who play MMORPGs have been either playing video games online, or strictly MMORPGs for a long, long time. Take me, for example. I got my first computer when I was 7, and my biggest accomplishment by age 10 was that I could kick your ass in an Age of Empires DM Cho War. Before the days of games with dynamic content(i.e.: content that is constantly being patched, changed, or updated), there were only games with static content(i.e.: most RTS games, FPS, etc.). These games were designed by developers the way they wanted to, and the gamer either liked it as it was, or hated it. People didn’t stick around Warcraft III a year after release hoping that their experience would change; they knew whether the game appealed to them or not during initial gameplay. These days, most of us are spoiled. We play games that are constantly seeing new updates, and so it is not uncommon for us to stick to the mentality that there is only one game for us, and that we must fight the developers to the death to implement the changes that we want. This makes me wonder: are games owned by the developers, or is the direction of the game decided by the community? Who should decide where the game is going?

The Vision

Most game developers have a vision when creating a game. They decide what type of game they want to make, and where they want to go with it. This isn’t any different with MMORPGs, and we seem to forget that sometimes. When companies create and develop a game, they want to take it in a certain direction, they want to do what they think is best for the game. Let’s take World of Warcraft for example. World of Warcraft at this point is a game that is owned by the community. Blizzard implements things that the players want to see, completely overlooking their original intentions often forsaking their characters, and their lore to create a simplistic type of game-play that will earn them a ton of money

I believe game development to be an art. Not just the programming, but the graphic design, the music, the writing, etc. All of these components, when combined properly can create an overwhelming alternate reality for players to explore and enjoy for hundreds, or even thousands of hours. That said, the direction of this interactive art, and its ultimate goal should be decided by the creator, not by the ‘fans’. It’s fine to have an opinion, and it’s fine to hate something. However, when it comes to the MMO world, we seem to want to change everything in a game to our liking rather than hate it and go play something else. We pressure the artists, the creators, we threaten them with our money to create a world that we like, rather than follow their vision and see where they’re going with it.

Think about it. What if we went around altering the original intentions of every artist out there? We’d update the Sistine Chapel to feature tribal painting, or random Japanese characters. If we start altering art at the rate we want to alter video games, we’d end up living in a cultural wasteland where we eventually wouldn’t even be able to remember the great minds of the Renaissance.

Some clarification:

I’m not saying we need to go back to the days where games never saw any updates, or that we should simply learn to deal with what developers throw at us. We have choices as gamers, and we decide what to hate and what to like. There’s no point in sticking around in a MMORPG you say sucks,  when all you do is sit there on the official forums writing about how much it sucks. Try playing something else.

I’m also not saying that creators shouldn’t expand on their ideas. I always love learning more about a certain fictional world I enjoyed reading about or playing in; developers should release expansions that explain the history of the world we’re playing in, our role in it, etc. However, they should do so if they’re willing to put as much effort into their expansion as they have into their original work. For example, The Burning Crusade was a very different game from the original World of Warcraft. Many people felt they just added ten levels, and threw on more stats on everything and called it a day. The Burning Crusade caused many people to leave, in the same way The Wrath of the Lich King will cause many people who enjoyed The Burning Crusade to leave. Blizzard’s vision was altered by their community. They wanted more items, more levels, easier-to-obtain epics, etc.

To conclude:

We have a ton of choices when it comes to video games, much in the same way we have a lot of choices in real life as to where to eat, what ISP to use, etc. We don’t live in a world where you have to play one game, and I don’t think we’ll ever hear anyone say “There’s no Warhammer: Online coverage in my area, I have to play World of Warcraft.” We should be thankful for this. If you like sci-fi games, go play something with a Jedi. Don’t campaign to have Guild Wars include Jedis in the next expansion.

In my opinion, games belong to the creators. They share them with the community. We pay for a service, but said service includes constant content patches, server usage, and support within the game. We’re not paying to lead the game in the direction we want it to go in. In the end, we need to realize that just because we’re paying for a service, let’s say…a hamburger, doesn’t mean we have a right to decide that Burger King should suddenly start making pizza.