And the winner is…

Instead of jumping into Darkfall or Fallen Earth, I resubscribed to Eve Online last week. Three things influenced my decision. First, I already own Eve, and my wife and I went out on the $50 I would have dropped on a new game. Second, the videos from the Alliance Tournament on CCP’s Youtube site made me miss the game. Third, I kept saying to myself “I want a game that does what Eve does”, and, well, duh.

I’m still keeping an eye on Darkfall and Fallen Earth (leaning more toward Fallen Earth right now), but I might wait for a price drop, or at least wait out my rekindled desire to play Eve.

There’s also a pretty good chance LoTRO’s latest offer will get me to pay $30 to subscribe for three months and get the Siege of Mirkwood expansion for free when it’s released at the beginning of December. I have the client downloading in the background now, and I’ll play it this weekend, taking advantage of the 25% xp bonus on top of a couple months of rest xp. Free is good.

There’s plenty of competition in the MMO space these days, and Turbine and CCP pulled me in with a combination of good marketing, good value, and top-notch games. I have a couple stories to tell about my latest Eve experiences, and I’ll probably be back with a LoTRO update after the free weekend is over.

LoTRO: Good news, bad news

The good news is, my account issues cleared up on Monday evening, and I was able to get a couple nights of free Welcome Back LoTRO. With the experience boost they were offering, I went from level 23 to level 28, did quite a bit of crafting, and moved myself out of the Lonelands and over to North Downs.

I had such a good time that I decided to resub for a while. This is where the “bad news” part comes in. Apparently, Turbine is doing some major data center reorganization, and their servers fell down and went boom earlier today. They’re still hosed, in various states of not-working. I can’t log into my Turbine account to re-activate my account. The game isn’t launching for people right now, or if it does, the performance suffers. And this is after Turbine had to turn off the April Fool’s Day Chicken Run quest, because it was so popular that it was straining their servers.

That’s the kind of problem you want to have, I guess, people having so much fun that an area gets really, really crowded. The login and account management problems? Yeah, those aren’t the kind of problems you want to have, especially on the first day after a Welcome Back weekend, when people might be considering re-subscribing.

I completed the April Fool’s Day quest last night, earning my title “Fool”. Perfect.

I hadn’t tried Monster Play in the past (Turbine’s version of PvP, where you can play an NPC creature and attack the players who want to play on the human/elf/dwarf/hobbit side of the fence. The April Fool’s Day quest dropped you into the Monster Play zone as a level 1 chicken, and you had to safely navigate your way all the way across the zone, avoiding both player creeps (players playing monsters) and normal NPC’s.

Your chicken was given a Sprint skill, a Dodge skill, increased Stealth detection, and something else. I was killed by player creeps a number of times trying to run in a pretty straight line, from the NW corner of the map where the chickens spawned to the SE corner where the quest finished up.

The quest gave you 15 minutes to arrive at your goal, and I realized I had a lot more time than I was using. I started going in a circuitous, counter-clockwise route around the zone walls, more or less, and after getting killed by NPC’s twice, I managed to stay alive and complete a round on my fifth attempt. It was a lot of fun, and a great April Fool’s day quest. Hopefully, Turbine will sort out their server issues soon, and I can get back to Middle Earth and have some new adventures.

WAR vs. WoW, and DAoC vs. EQ

Think I could jam any more acronyms into the title?

This turned into quite a rant. Stick with me.

I just exceeded my tolerance for the term “WoW killer” in relation to Warhammer Online. The offending comment was actually delivered indirectly, from a post on Book of Grudges last Monday (catching up on my RSS feed after returning from Las Vegas, I’m behind!), called “Taking a Step Back“. arbitrary was checking reactions to the Mythic announcements about cutting classes and capital cities, and found this quote on Kotaku:

The so called wow killer is releasing half a product and expecting to compete?

I can’t take it any more. Who’s calling it a WoW killer? Who’s expecting it to compete directly with WoW? Mythic has already stated that they believe their game has different gameplay elements, will not outsell WoW, and they’re not directly competing with them. Has anyone at Mythic also stated that Warhammer will be a WoW killer, or is this giving forum blathering from burned out ex-WoW subscribers way too much credence?

I think some of us who follow MMO’s suffer from Compare-itis. Since there are relatively few MMO’s in the Western market, they inevitably get compared to one another, and I don’t think that’s healthy.

The first time I saw Compare-itis in action was when I started playing DAoC, when it first launched. I still had friends playing EQ, still visited message boards with EQ players, and there was far too much time spent talking about what each game lacked compared to the other game. It was like they had to be the same game somehow, and differences were bad. I’d try to tell my EQ friends what I liked about DAoC, and they’d sharpen their virtual pencils and tell me in detail why DAoC wasn’t like EQ, and hence, why DAoC was Bad.

The reverse was also true. There were plenty of people who liked DAoC who’d slam EQ for not having features like DAoC. Neither stance made much sense to me, but clearly, Compareitis is still alive when WAR’s being touted by forum posters as a WoW killer.

Saying WAR is like WoW, or DAoC was like EQ, is like saying Half-Life is like Quake, just because both games have weapons and multiplayer options. It’s like saying Company of Heroes is like Warcraft III because they’re both RTS games.

There are TONS of design decisions that go into making an MMO. You start with a massive world, either a level-based or skill-based system, put in PvE and maybe PvP combat, tradeskills, maybe housing…and it’s like those elements alone are suddenly enough to compare games like comparing apples to apples.

I think it’s time we start to look more at the differences between MMO’s, and the different design goals chosen by developers, instead of thinking that WAR and WoW are somehow wildly similar games. Or AoC and WoW, or LoTRO and WAR, or whatever you’re chosing to compare.

I played a ton of EQ, and a ton of DAoC. They had a common genre underpinning, but they were very different games. I’ve played a ton of WoW and quite a bit of the WAR beta. Mythic is shooting for a very different gaming experience with WAR than what I enjoyed in WoW.  Comparing them directly is bound to be inaccurate, because they have very different design goals. Yes, they share a common heritage, but I think the genre is maturing enough, especially with second and third generation MMO developers, to stop directly comparing games.

The paucity of choice in the MMO market contributes to the desire to compare games head-to-head. We probably have more triple-A MMO titles available right now than we’ve had at any point in MMO history, yet there are still only a handful of good choices for gamers. I guess it’s inevitable that the games are lumped together, but each developer puts their own spin on the genre, and comparing them directly just seems silly to me.

I don’t want to see any more WoW killer comments, or posts saying WAR ripped off WoW, or WoW ripped off the Warhammer IP before Mythic started developing the Warhammer IP, bla bla bla, yadda yadda. Mythic has their own design goals, and I think if you HAVE to directly compare it to any other MMO, it should be DAoC, and not WoW, or EQ2, or LoTRO. There’s a firm academic basis for comparison with DAoC; an evolution of development, ideas tried, evaluated, kept, or tossed aside. WoW, not so much.

It might be a little too early in the genre for an MMO cladogram, with each branch forking out different design choices, each game ending up as individual species with a particular evolutionary ancestry, but comparing MMO’s directly with each other is like bitching that a Stegosaurus isn’t just like an Ankylosaur, or that a 10 million Velociraptors must be superior to 1 million Allosaurs. It’s ok to be different. I learned that in high school. It’s ok to make different choices.

I’m not sure where this Highlander “There can be only one!” attitude regarding MMO’s comes from, but I do know that I’m tired of it. There are now quite a few companies making big profits from their first, second, or third MMO, and I’m glad that each game has its own personality, its own goals. We’ve got to get over the head-to-head, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots school of MMO fandom.

Listen to me. Suddenly I’m dipping into “Celebrate Diversity!” cheerleading. Well, hell, I like diversity. I like that Mythic decided to do things differently than Blizzard and Sony and Turbine. I’m glad that Turbine tried Monster Play and storyline quests. I like that EQ2 has housing and more developed crafting. I’m happy that WoW is so carefully crafted and detailed and refined. I like boobs in AoC. And elsewhere, for that matter.

I know it’s the nature of internet communication to square off in opinion-related cage matches, but I’m hoping for a little more nuanced appraisal of WAR when it’s released. It’s not WoW. It’s not trying to BE WoW. If you start your review of WAR with a comparison to WoW, you’re missing the point.

Do people dog R.A. Salvatore because his books are in the same section of the bookstore as the Dragonlance series? Do we have to sneer at Spiderman movies because there are already Batman movies, and they’re not the same movie? What is it about MMO’s that invites this type of comparison? Is it because the genre is still so young? Is it because it takes so long to make a triple-A title, and because we talk it to death while it’s being made and being tested? Is it because, unlike other computer games, you have to pay $15 a month for an MMO, and you want to believe that your $15 is going to the best game, and all the other games suck?

Maybe it’s a little of all of that. And I’m gettin’ tired of it

License to print money?

For years following the release of Everquest, the prospect of developing and releasing a massively multiplayer online game based on a licensed intellectual property (IP) was viewed as a project fraught with difficulty. Star Trek MMO’s were discussed, development was begun and stopped, a game was never released. Star Wars:Galaxies famously underperformed expectations (although I think they did have some great mmorpg ideas). The Matrix did poorly.

There was plenty of scuttlebutt on MMO forums about the reasons for the failures. People wouldn’t want to play in a licensed IP universe if they couldn’t play Han Solo or Boba Fett. Everyone would want to be Kirk (or Picard, preferably, Kirk’s corset looked uncomfortable in later years), no one wanted to be a red shirt ensign. With the successes of Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, and World of Warcraft, creating and developing your own milieu seemed a much safer endeavor.

The first MMO based on a licensed IP that didn’t seem a disappointment was (I think) Lord of the Rings Online. Turbine has quietly built a goddamn good MMO, and their method of having players shadow (get it? Shadow? I kill myself) the storyline through instanced quests was a great way to make the players feel involved in the unfolding events of the books.

Age of Conan, while not a game that grabbed me out of the gate, certainly has the potential to be another successful MMO based on a licensed IP. Warhammer seems like it also has a lot of potential for success. I know I’m enjoying the heck out of the beta lately. I wouldn’t be surprised if, by the end of 2008, we’ve got three successful AAA MMO’s based on licensed IP.

What’s the difference? Have MMO developers matured, and figured out how to offer players a compelling place in a known universe? This is the second or third trip around the MMO development block for Turbine (Asheron’s Call, AC2), Mythic (DAoC, Imperator…*cries*), and Funcom (Anarcy Online, plus they make great story-based adventure games). Of course, the “we’ve got experience, we can make a game based on licensed IP” argument breaks down with SOE and SW:G. And SOE and The Matrix.

Hmm, trend? Has Sony touched another licensed IP since those two disappointments? Did their failures lead them to only work with new IP, and are they going to miss the boat as three other experienced developers bring MMO gamers into familiar universes?

Another licensed IP that I’m very excited to see is the CCP/White Wolf World of Darkness project. Experienced MMO developer, cool universe…more win? God, I hope so. Someone get Ryan Verniere drunk and make him start talking on camera, please.

Anyway, I hope we’re over the “MMO’s based on licensed intellectual property can’t be successful” BS of a couple years ago. A good game is going to sell, regardless of whether you can actually be Darth Vader or Neo. A good developer is going to let you have fun in the universe you’ve come to love, even if you’re just being yourself

Shocking game announcements

Wow. No pun intended. Blizzard makes a ton of game announcements, and Turbine makes one as well. Why today, I wonder? Hmm.

First, a new hero class for the WoW Lich King expansion. The bard, with full Guitar Hero capability. Awesome.

Next up, Cows In Space. Introducing the Tauren Space Marine. Yes, there is a cow level!

And for the old school gaming crowd, you’ve got to check out the new Molten Core for consoles trailers. Epic win. Who says 40 man raids are PC-only? Has sound!

Not to be outdone by cow levels, Turbine announces the Battle of Amon Hen. I’ve done the chicken quests in LOTRO, but I can’t wait to actually level one up.

Well played.