Category Archives: mmo

With a whole lot of nothing on your way to nowhere.

One cannot easily express the joy of discovering that specific class in an MMO which just clicks. After time spent slogging along with the class which you think you ‘ought’ to be playing, or which you think would ‘make a nice change’, you reach that moment of despondency where you consider giving up the game. On a whim, you roll a class that you’d been avoiding, because it’s the flavour of the month perhaps, or a certain type of player is generally associated with the class, and you worry that you’ll be an accessory to that sort of reputation. Regardless of reason, you grudgingly roll a new character of that class. Like conciliatory sex, you’re not quite sure how you got started, and you’re determined not to enjoy yourself, but within five seconds you’re wondering what all the fuss was about, and five seconds after that you’re blissfully unaware of anything at all, utterly enraptured as you are by the endorphins of the event.

In the case of the MMO, you’re transformed in an instant from the unnamed father on Cormac McCarthy’s road, into Julie Andrews cresting a sunlight-dappled hill, grass rippling beneath the breeze’s gentle stroke.

‘And the hills are aliiiiiiiive, with the sound of slaughterrrrrrrr!’

And your partner stares in horror at you from their place on the sofa, as, with arms raised, you unleash this shrill falsetto, which threatens to shatter their teeth and your PC’s monitor, and sets half the cats in the neighbourhood into a frenzy of angry confused copulation.

Such was my pleasure at trying the Slayer class in Tera, where before I’d been busy grinding away with the Lancer, which is the game’s tanking class and, shock of shocks, also in short supply for dungeon runs towards the end-game.

Here’s a tale, tell me if you’ve heard it before:

Tera has issues with players trying to form groups for dungeons; the primary block is the fact that the game’s de facto tanking class, the Lancer, is in short supply. Lancers queue for only a few minutes before they’re assigned to a dungeon group, whereas it’s reported that every other class will face a wait of forty to sixty minutes. Why the shortage of tanks? Well, it doesn’t help that the Lancer is the only classic tank at the moment, whereas the other tanking class, the Warrior, is an evasion tank which is both a lot harder to play and a lot harder to heal, outside of expert hands. This is due to change in a future patch, but for the time being, the Lancer is *the* tank. One class, out of a pool of eight.

I think it’s also fair to say that the levelling game in Tera is an unabashed grind, with fights getting progressively longer as the players rise in level; Darwin’s great theory is alive and well in Tera, as evidenced by natural selection favouring those mobs who evolve extra zeros on the end of their hit points. And in the fine tradition of MMOs, the Lancer is a complete slug when it comes to the inevitable solo levelling grind. No DPS stance is granted because, one assumes, it would be considered unfair on the poor DPS classes, who don’t have an alternative role to switch to. So the Lancer class has the rougher responsibility of trying to be a tank in dungeons, and the tougher time of trying to level as a tank outside of dungeons. I mean, it seems fair to me, that’s why we see so many tanks at the end ga… oh wait, I think I might see a problem. I think I’ve got it… I… no. Wait! Yes. Wait! No. No. Yes. No… Hang on. Ye… Mmm. Yes! Got it! Now I could be wrong, but I think this could be one of those issues that’s been reported –here and elsewhere around the blogosphere– on and off, for the past six or more years.

Next up: Why do players solo in MMOs (when they can’t get a group as a DPS class, and tanking is a thankless tedious grind for ninety percent of the player’s time)? Gee, we’ll have to get our greatest experts of expertness on that one right away, Bob.

To my mind the MMO genre as a whole isn’t dying, but it does seem as though it has been floundering for some time. Pundits keep coming up with reasons as to why: ‘Games cost too much to develop’; ‘MMOs are too complicated’; ‘Players are fickle’; ‘The subscription model is outdated’; ‘The subscription model is the One True way to pay for an MMO and F2P is destroying everything’. And on and on. For me it’s this: for whatever reason, a staggering number of MMOs simply refuse to unlearn old falsehoods.

The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.

I’ve been trying to work out an interesting way I could support the New Blogger Initiative, taking into consideration that there are more sponsor blogs of Syp’s project than KiaSA has regular readers. Invariably any of our readers will read one or more of those bigger blogs, so what to do to show solidarity, other than post “YEAH! ME TOO!”, which seemed redundantly redundant.

I but briefly considered writing advice to new bloggers. There is, however, the inexorable fact that I am a terrible blogger as far as blogging goes, with infrequent updates, long unwieldy posts, and, as statistics clearly demonstrate, massively deficient marketing skills. Not to mention the fact that others have already written deeply splendid and detailed pieces, which I’d only be reiterating in part.

I did recall having once written something about blogging, however. After much protest and several kick starts, my two-stroke mind eventually clattered and thrummed into life, with a belch of smoke and just the one obstreperous backfiring. Back in the murky depths of time, in the year they later came to call ‘2009’, I wrote an interview piece for Randolph Carter’s Grinding to Valhalla where, amongst other topics, I discussed some thoughts about blogging. My one genuine piece of blogging advice can be found there, and is still true today.

One thought struck me, however, as I read ‘[in blogging] new members arrive, others leave’: I considered that it would be a shame if that blog and my interview disappeared, such that I was unable to view my piece of writing again in another three or more years, and see if it was still as applicable then as I find it to be today, three years after I wrote it.

So I’ve popped a copy here on the blog, and being that it has some modicum of advice about blogging, it gives me a good reason to tip my hat to the NBI, for whatever that’s worth. And if any of the few of you who read this have yet to hear of the initiative, do say so in the comments, and after I have regained consciousness, I’ll try to write up some sort of tutorial on how to use KiaSA’s blogroll.

Anyway: On with the show! As they’d say if this were a theatre, and not a blog.

Please take a minute and describe what your blog and podcast are about.

Killed in a Smiling Accident is a blog that myself and m’colleague Zoso decided to create because our own personal blogs were very MMO-centric and we weren’t sure we were going to be invested in MMOs for very much longer, but we were fairly sure we wanted to continue blogging. I’m also a terrible blogger with regards to frequency of updates and I feel the pressure of not providing content for the readers, so it’s very reassuring to have a reliable writer there to keep people coming back. I’d say my blogging style was akin to PvP: a huge burst of front-loaded effort, then nothing for ages because I’m all out of energy. The accusation that my posts are often deliberately verbose and lengthy in order to stun-lock the audience into not going anywhere are unfounded, however.

As you may gather from the title of the blog, we set out with a philosophy that we would try to inject humour into whatever we write, where possible, because there are plenty of serious pundits out there already. We favour the slightly surreal and peculiarly British styles of Fry and Laurie, Eddie Izzard and Monty Python, however, which is not to everyone’s taste but suits us just fine.

KiaSAcast is the pair of us generally being very silly and also discussing various topics mainly to do with gaming, a large part of which is dedicated to MMOs.

What was your first MMO and what was that experience like?

My first MMO was Dark Age of Camelot. I’d been eyeing-up Everquest for some time but wasn’t sure I wanted to make a financial commitment to these relatively new-fangled MMO things. When I saw the blurb for Dark Age of Camelot and saw the variety of races and classes on offer, I caved-in and subscribed. As to the experience? Looking back I probably didn’t get half of what I should have from the game. I certainly discovered my alt-a-holism pretty much straight away as I bounced around from class to class, race to race and faction to faction; I think my problem was that I wanted to experience everything at once, I suppose I was akin to the proverbial child in a sweetshop. I still have very fond feelings for that game, it treated me well, gave me some wonderful adventures and definitely fuelled my enthusiasm for MMOs.

For me the experience of my first MMO is very much like the experience of my first girlfriend; except that it wasn’t called Lisa, and it never confused the hell out of me by trying to touch tongues together while kissing when we were only seven years old.

Can you recall that first MMO “Wow!” moment?

Yes, that was in City of Heroes. If I can cheat a little, there were actually two ‘wow!’ moments in pretty quick succession. The first was the character creator, I was frankly astonished by the flexibility and scope for creating your hero. The second was a slightly strange thing: being able to jump above average height from the ground. I’m not talking about the Super Jump travel power here (that was more ‘giggle like a school kid in a whoopee cushion factory’ than ‘wow!’), I’m talking about the basic jump any character can perform as soon as you enter the game. I was so used to MMOs where jumping was either not allowed or was very restricted, yet here I was able to leap huge fences in a single bound, land in the middle of a bunch of street thugs and start pummelling them. It felt so comic-booky. I think that with City of Heroes Cryptic perfectly realised the idea of what it is to be heroic; I think I’ve spent more time grinning from ear-to-ear in that game than any other MMO.

At your peak, how much time per week would you say you spent gaming? How about now?

Let’s see, at my very peak possibly five hours a night each week night, and then ten hours over the weekend. I think in mathematical terms that is generally referred to as ‘a fair bit’. These days it’s slightly more modest, probably a couple of hours each week night and maybe five hours over the weekend, if I’m really into a game.

Do you tend to supplement your MMO gaming with other PC, console, or tabletop games?

I used to play pen and paper RPGs a great deal but have lost contact with my regular groups of yore. I play console games when I can, especially most Tuesdays when I get together with some fellow bloggers and online ne’er-do-wells to have fun in various co-operative games. I tend to buy PC and console games with every intention of playing them, and then go back to an MMO shortly afterwards. I blame the Internet, credit cards, and the fact that I didn’t take the Impulse Purchase Immunity feat at third level.

When did you first start blogging? How about podcasting? Please take us up to present with all of your projects.

My first blog post was in January 2007, on my old blog Melmoth’s Inferno. My first post on KiaSA was in March 2008. So if you link the two I’ve been blogging pretty consistently for about two and a half years. The first podcast was January 2009. So far those are my only projects, I’m always looking to expand my horizons but in all honesty I have enough trouble keeping up with just those two.

Did you find it difficult to go from blogging into podcasting?

Only in the fact that I’m quite a nervous person in real life, and it’s much easier to hide such traits behind text than audio. I’ve certainly enjoyed learning about how to put a podcast together, however, and we’re getting more adventurous with what we do with each successive show.

Do you have a schedule or some sort of routine you try and follow?

I understand that conventional wisdom states that a regular posting schedule is the only way to blog, otherwise you’re a terrible person akin to someone who waves a bag of sweets in front of small children and then eats them all yourself, but I’ve never been particularly fond of conventional wisdom, sitting there in the corner of the room, puffing on a pipe and looking all smug in its velvet smoking jacket. I couldn’t stick to a schedule even if I wanted to, however, because life is always getting under foot, tripping me up and making me spill my plans all over the kitchen floor such that they’re ruined, and the only thing to do is mop them up and throw them in the bin.

I do very much believe that I have a muse; when I write some of my posts I have no idea where they came from and so I attribute them to her, but she is very temperamental. In fact, I’m pretty sure that when they were giving out careers advice they got her mixed up with someone else, and in fact she should have been one of those gremlins that stops your TV remote control from working for no apparent reason, until you get off the sofa and walk up to the TV, at which point it starts working again even back where you were originally trying to use it, without you having touched a thing.

Would you say there is some grind involved in the process? If so, what is it and how do you cope with it?

I used to find it a bit of a grind when I was trying to post on a regular basis, because if inspiration hadn’t struck by the time I was due to post I felt I had to churn something out, and that made the whole thing unpleasant. Believe it or not, but I’m not one to talk for the sake of talking. If I don’t have something to say that I feel passionately about, or that I think is funny, then I really don’t enjoy the writing process. On the other hand, when I find something that inspires me I’m like Isaac Mendez from the TV show Heroes. Dead. No, hang on, before the dead bit – I just zone out for an hour or two, and when I come back to reality there’s a post ready and waiting for me that just needs checking for spelling, grammar and untoward predictions of the future.

By contrast, what do you find pleasurable about blogging and/or podcasting?

Hmm, that’s a tricky one. I’m not sure whether it’s the money or the incredibly attractive members of both sexes throwing their underwear at me. Ah wait, you see what I’ve done there is to confuse blogging with being a member of Take That. There are lots of pleasures to be had from blogging, it’s always a delight when someone leaves a comment saying that they enjoyed a post, and yet there’s also pleasure when someone rails against what you wrote, because then you know that you’ve touched a nerve, and written something that made people think, and that perhaps you stirred a little passion in them. Not the underwear throwing passion though, more’s the pity. Also I’ve met some genuinely fantastic people through blogging, and there are many others who I would like to meet one day.

At the end of the day, blogging is like being part of a huge family: new members arrive, others leave, there’s a strong bond between members and also the occasional bust-up, but generally it’s a good family. Of course there’re always a few strange cousins who live out in the countryside and are perhaps slightly too friendly with each other and their livestock but we try to ignore them as best we can.

Would you care to share a particularly memorable moment from your blogging days?

No one particular thing comes to mind, just lots of little moments. Those comments and posts where people have had kind things to say about my efforts are always a high point, of course.

Are you pleased with where your blog is in the blogosphere?

I’m slightly disappointed if I’m honest, because according to the schedule that we set out when we started the blog we should be ‘kings of the world’ by now, but perhaps that was slightly ambitious. Next year, maybe.

If you had a chance to do it all over again, would you do anything different?

I’d start blogging earlier in my life. Certainly with respect to MMOs I feel that I missed the golden age of blogging. Other than that, I’m pretty happy with the way things are. Apart from not being king of the world, of course.

What advice would you give someone who wanted to try their hand at blogging and podcasting?

What’s the worst that could happen?

Well ok, you could be so intensely in to your blogging that you forget you left a pan of chip oil on the stove, which subsequently catches fire and burns down your apartment building, killing fifty seven people including five children. At your trial you find out that because the fire department was busy putting out your blazing building and its neighbours, they couldn’t spare the resources to put out the fire at the local puppy, kitten and baby dolphin sanctuary. Due to the death of these cute creatures, animal rights protestors call for the death penalty to be applied to your sentence. The government cracks down heavily on the civil unrest, but the general populace, fraught and angry from the current pressures of the global economic climate, rise up and eventually attempt a coup. With the country weakened due to the government utilising all available military personnel to instate martial law, the enemies of the state take the opportunity to exploit the situation and launch thermonuclear strikes against the nation’s major cities. Scared that the fall of the country would inevitably lead to an attack on they themselves, various allied nations retaliate with nuclear strikes of their own, beginning the Third Great War and shepherding in the apocalypse of mankind.

But really, that’s probably the worst that could happen, so I shouldn’t worry too much, just give it a try.

Can you picture a future where you will hang up your keyboard and microphone and no longer blog or podcast?

Possibly the one where I cause the end of mankind due to letting a chip pan catch fire whilst I was busy blogging.

I’m certain there will come a time where I won’t be blogging any more, for any number of reasons. The one I’m most excited about is where I won’t need to blog anymore because technology will have advanced to such a state that there will be much more interesting ways to communicate with the global hive mind. Dream blogging perhaps, or Drogging as we’ll know it, which I’m now off to patent and trademark.

You wake up to a world where you are the head of a company developing an MMO. You have unlimited funds and resources available to you. Please describe the kind of game you would make.

I imagine I would make a really cheap 2.5D grindfest with graphics ripped-off from various other games, all the meanwhile siphoning off the majority of the company’s cash reserves into offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands.

Well, it serves them right for putting someone like me in charge of a company with unlimited funds.

So there you have it. I get to keep my interview post for posterity, and you get to receive the one tiny and infinitely pointless piece of wisdom I have to dispense with respect to blogging.

Just remember: blogging isn’t so terribly bad, and worse things happen at sea. So don’t update your blog while you’re on a boat, and I’m sure you’ll do just fine.

Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate.

I used to be in the habit of turning off General Chat upon first entering an MMO, or at the very least flinging it into a separate tab of the chat window marked ‘DANGER – MINDFIELD!’ to caution me against the volatile minds buried within. I performed the same operation upon first entering Tera, and thankfully the game remembers these settings between alts – because recently I’ve rolled a lot of alts. With limited time to play in past weeks, I’ve primarily taken to rolling a new race and class each time I login, and then blasting through as much of the starter area of the Island of Dawn as time will allow. This enables me to experience some of the flavour of each class, and at the same time inject a few delirious hits of Ding to keep my MMO cravings in check and leave me languorous, before I invariably have to dash off to take care of real life responsibilities.

In the early days of the game the global chat was an unending stream of drivel, as is often the way in MMOs, and it inexorably built up to the usual thundering churning deluge of froth and furore, as torrents of abuse dashed themselves on the unchangeable rocks of personal opinion, forming whirlpools of circular arguments that spun in upon themselves, drawing down to the suffocating depths of their unreason anything foolish enough to drift too close to the topic at its centre.

I diverted the river of global chat into a remote reservoir, which this time I labelled ‘Barrens’, and forgot about it for a good long while.

Nevertheless a lot of an MMO’s community is in its text chat, so I would occasionally flick back to Barrens to see if anything had changed. About a week or so later things started to calm down, and the global chat channel changed from frustrating to fascinating – now a fast but freely flowing expanse of diverse topics. I had rolled on an RP server, as I usually do, with the hope that a slightly more sensible subset of players would migrate there; I was quite surprised, however, at the dramatic change in the channel, and indeed one of the topics under discussion was that very fact. It transpires that the river of drivel had struck a tributary, and the LFG channel was where the rapids of rage now ran. So I left Barrens open by default, and flicked my attention to it every now and again while I repeatedly adventured across the Island of Dawn.

What was fascinating about the channel was that it had become a microcosm of the blogosphere: nearly every general topic that I’ve seen repeatedly touched upon over the past five or so years of blogging was mentioned in this one place, all in the fast forward nature of a back-and-forth conversation between people whose attention was invariably elsewhere. I quickly found myself privately playing Cassandra to any topic raised, knowing full well the future of each discussion, where the disagreements would come from, and the conclusions which would be drawn. It was at the same time amusing and saddening to see nearly all of the discussions follow disturbingly similar paths to those we’ve seen repeated amongst blogs over the years.

That the river of global chat drivel should break its banks and flood the fields of normality is no real surprise; it’s the fact that, upon receding, it left behind such a fertile field of rich discourse. I was tempted to turn the thing into an experiment – to start seeding topics into that fruitful soil, and harvest the bounteous crop of conclusions which grew there. And then I wondered –seeing as no idea in blogging is ever original– whether others had already done the same. Whether developers had already done the same.

An interesting topic perhaps, but whether I could raise the topic of ‘raising topics as an experiment in fast-forward blogging’ as an experiment in fast-forward blogging, without causing a segfault in the universe, I’m as yet undecided.

But, alas, to make me a fixed figure for the time of scorn.


Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….

            – Excerpt from High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

As it was when I wrote about my enjoyment of the small detail of a turning horse’s head in Lord of the Rings Online, there are elements to Tera which are just breathtaking. Contrails form from your mount’s wingtips as you fly between locations; I haven’t worked out if they’re random or based upon the environment being passed through, but it is a simple moment of delight when they appear.

I’ve deleted the two thousand or so words which I wrote next, because many people have already judged the game and those who play it, and I cannot bring myself to present a justification for my playing it to the MMO equivalent of Freud’s inner circle.

Suffice it to say that I feel this is a game which tried not to bridge the chasmal divide between Eastern and Western cultures, but launched itself wholly across in an attempt to forge a beachhead, and found itself firmly repelled.

My time with Tera will shortly be drawing to a close, but I don’t regret having played it, for I have had joyous encounters on my journeys within both the world and the game, where I discovered a different culture of design, all of which I happily feel has been a worthwhile expansion to the universality of my MMO experience.

Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons.

With the instigation of a stress test for Guild Wars 2 this past Monday, I was able to log-in and refresh my memory with regard to some of the game’s systems. As such it gave me a nice opportunity to compare and contrast some of the ideas realised within that game with those found in TERA, which I’m currently playing.

My first impression is that in the classroom of MMOs, TERA is that kid who was brilliant at one subject; in all else that kid was at best average, but in one subject they grew whiskers and a shock of white hair and positively shone, in the eyes of their peers becoming a cross between a Super Saiyan and Albert Einstein. TERA is really rather good at action combat. Guild Wars 2, however, seems like the kid who was never brilliant, but was pretty good at absolutely everything, irritatingly popular, and likely to become head pupil of the school upon reaching the sixth form.

Do feel free to carry the analogy wildly off on your own tangents. For example, I picture EVE to be the gruff kid who sits at the back of the class jeering at everyone else and occasionally flicking the ears of World of Warcraft, who used to be the popular rich kid until everyone finally tired of him always turning up with more complicated and expensive versions of other kids’ toys, which he’d invariably break by the end of the first day.

One difference between TERA and GW2 which I find Quite Interesting, but others may find somewhat more prosaic, is the role of weapons within the game. For TERA, each class has a single weapon set available to it. The Warrior dual wields swords, but the representation of these swords is one icon; the Lancer’s shield and lance are also represented by a single entity. Therefore there are no cross-class loot issues when it comes to weapons in TERA – every class has its own weapon set, and every set is self-contained, even if it is comprised of more than one functional item. I really like the system; it’s a simple and elegant way to eliminate the issue of dual wielding classes having to keep multiple weapons/shields/handbags upgraded in order to remain viable, compared to their single-weapon counterparts.

Speaking of maintaining multiple weapons brings up one of my minor concerns for Guild Wars 2: good grief if there aren’t a lot of weapons to maintain in that game, at least for certain classes. Take the Warrior in GW2, for example, who can wield a prodigious variety of weapons. The fact that certain skills –and thus certain styles of play– are intrinsically linked to a weapon type means that, in theory, the Warrior will need to keep two swords, two axes, two maces, a warhorn, a shield, a greatsword, a hammer, a longbow and a rifle all upgraded in order to be able to fulfill each and every play style. Now, perhaps this is not the intention, and a player will be encouraged to focus on one or two themes, but it certainly seems a little overwhelming to think that a Warrior might want (but hopefully not need) to maintain an up-to-date version of all these various items.

Until my knowledge of the game has matured, it’s hard to know how this will resolve itself – weapon level could be irrelevant when compared to the power of the skills which the weapon enables, for example. Suffice it to say that I remain as yet unconvinced where this linkage between skill system and weapon requirement is concerned, but I keep an open mind as always. However, I think that thematically it’s a fabulous idea, where each weapon offers its own distinct flavour of combat, rather than just a mechanical flip of a damage type stat.

And in our contemplation of damage-type-weapon-swapping shenanigans, let us bow our heads and take a moment to reflect upon the current king of weapon stockpiling: Dungeons & Dragons Online. For no DDO session can be complete without the party emptying out their backpacks into the middle of the dungeon floor, rummaging through the subsequent pile of weapons as though they were Lego, and trying to find the exact right piece to fit their current build requirements.

“Dang. If anyone finds a dark blue four-er, can they let me have it?”

“Is that a two-by-two four-er, or a four-by-one? And do you need it in piercing, bludgeoning, slashing, adamantine, byeshk, cold iron, crystal, mithral or alchemical silver?”

“Err…”

The Secret, Whirled.

Guild Wars 2 has reached 500,000 Facebook fans, and some of them are real too! As such they’ve released some new artwork for their fans to enjoy; you can view the original work and leave a comment here.

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Just as an exercise for the reader though, I’ve included a copy of the artwork within this post. Take a ruler, and mark yourself a trajectory by following the line of Eir’s aim along her arm.

Yes indeed, what ArenaNet have actually done here is to stealthily encode a reveal for the new Ranger Elite skill in Guild Wars 2: Dragon Nutshot.

Oh, I’m definitely playing a Ranger now.

P.S. Upon considering the above, I began to question what exactly is going on between the dragon’s legs. Is that a cosmos, or is he (just pleased to see us – Ed.) evacuating himself of chromatically distorted dragon pee after having been hit by an arrow? There definitely seems to be some sort of explosion of dark tendrils going on in the nether regions there. Further supporting evidence for my theory, if ever there was.

You can’t depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.

Due to quests in TERA being such a general irrelevance, I find myself filtering the order of quests I undertake by giving preference to those which offer equipment upgrades; although, I’m still not sure about the technical accuracy of ‘upgrade’ in the context of a game where your character wears less armour the more they grow in power. It was always something which intrigued me about Star Wars: The Old Republic, the fact that the quests never showed a preview of the reward you’d be getting, and –perhaps due to the generally excellent storytelling– I never cared to know.

It’s a simple distinction, but an interesting one. By having the carrot waved around in front of their nose, the player rarely cares about the path they take while pulling the developer’s cart of flow. The developer, guiding the player in this way, gains a great deal of control and can instil motivation in the player, all without the need for world building or story. In fact, the reward will detract from the story in most instances, and I think it’s another area where BioWare were clever and alert to the pitfalls of the genre they were entering. The last thing you need in the Regency era ballroom of storytelling, where players are invited to twirl elegantly through the carefully choreographed steps of the plot, is a DJ in the corner with the glitter ball of phat loot, spinning to the thumping rhythm of tracks from Depeche Mode’s Some Great Reward.

TERA is a curious beast in terms of how players are directed in their questing. There is a strong World-of-Warcraft-like impetus to click through the quest text and get on with adventuring, especially considering that the combat is the stronger pillar of the game’s foundation, along with the aforementioned carrot of the rewards being presented up-front. What’s more, clicking on any highlighted name in the quest text will place a marker on the player’s map as to where that mob can be found. In essence, the game seems to be using quests as an enabler to drive the players into combat, as per the standard MMO model. However, the game also marks any mobs for which the player currently has a quest by placing an exclamation mark above their head. Here we find the ubiquitous ‘quest marker’ being employed not only as a way for players to easily find quests, but the quest mobs themselves. What I find strange is that this would be a perfectly excellent way to remove some of the production line feel from an MMO, that of grabbing quests in an area and then slaughtering all the wildlife in the vicinity until the quest tracker was full of green ticks. Being able to wander freely, and have any Mobs of Interest highlighted to the player as they explore, seems a far more natural and immersive system than the current MMO standard – Lord of the Geocachings. I really like the idea, but it’s bizarrely extraneous in a game such as TERA, where there is no discernible reason to explore the world –outside of the potential for a screenshot opportunity (of which there is an opportunity roughly every four yards in this painfully pretty game)– and every quest mob can be found with pinpoint precision, each player a laser-guided bomb of mob obliteration.

It’s interesting how small adjustments in the presentation of quests, their rewards, and their objectives, can quite dramatically change the perspective from which a player approaches them. In a game where combat is its own reward, is the loot carrot really necessary? If a game wishes to encourage exploration and adventure, should it perhaps spend time finding ways to remove the unnatural geocaching of quests, rather than inventing new game-play mechanisms? Mechanisms which are layered on top of the already proven questing system, and thus often feel forced.

As the fundamental enabler of flow in MMOs for many years, it’s curious to see how little has changed in the design of quest presentation over the years, and fascinating to see just how little change is required to transform the way a player views the world through the questing lens, where slight adjustments to structure can alter the focus of a player’s attentions, blurring the boundary between mechanisms and mind-set, while throwing the game’s world into sharper relief.

Thought for the day.

Plus ça change: I remember how any new MMO that launched would have a General Chat channel filled with proclamations of how much better the game was than World of Warcraft. I’ve been in two new MMOs recently, and I’ve seen none of that usual banter.

Plus c’est la même chose: Now everyone is jabbering on about how much better the game is than Star Wars: The Old Republic.

A noble craft, and also a most lively!

One of the nifty![TM] features I’ve experienced in a couple of recent MMOs is the inclusion of crafting in other aspects of the game, outside of merely producing five million worthless trinkets to be sold to a vendor, before being able to finally produce the epic quality Toe Ring of Time, which gives your character a best-in-slot 0.01% boost in DPS over anything you can acquire in the levelling game, which nobody will ever be aware of, and which will be replaced by the first piece of end-game dungeon loot that drops.

The first of these is within Star Wars: The Old Republic. Crafting skills in SWTOR can be used to bypass areas of the game’s instanced dungeons – flashpoints. I love the idea of this, the fact that being a crafter of a certain type actually means something. What I particularly liked was that access to a shortcut or bonus area was themed towards the type of crafter who could negotiate that access. A set of tunnels which take the players around several corridors of heavily armed guards might be filled with a poisonous gas, and thus a Biochem specialist would be required to repair the filtration system which would neutralise the obstacle; someone versed in Cybertech might be able to reactivate a facility’s sentry droids, turning them against the mobstacles that litter the paths through the instance. It’s not essential to have a crafter of a certain type along, all the crafting activated events are usually bonuses and shortcuts which make the job easier, and not requisites for successfully completing the instance. I think BioWare struck a nice balance between players getting a bonus for having a certain crafting class, without it being compulsory to ‘bring along a crafter’. M’colleague informs me that, alas, this design featured less heavily in the later flashpoints he experienced.

It was whilst playing TERA that I was reminded of SWTOR’s subtle mechanic for craftily encouraging crafting. In TERA, each crafting node will grant a modest buff when harvested. It seems that these buffs are random, or perhaps tied to the type of node harvested, but by gathering from a number of nodes you can quickly find yourself with a considerable stack of buffs, which although modest in their own right, can result in quite a boost to your combat prowess when their effects are combined. I like this system better than that provided in World of Warcraft, where the gathering profession itself gives you a permanent boost to a stat, or a utility ability, because WoW’s system just becomes another item on the Great Min-Max List (‘Has optimal gathering profession to boost combat prowess?’), whereas TERA’s system temporarily rewards you for the act of gathering itself; for crafters or auction house wranglers this is a non-issue, but for everyone else there’s now a reason to get involved in gathering, and hey, if you have all those crafting materials in your inventory, why not try putting something together? Incidental crafting –which may in turn lead a player to discover a deeper love of crafting than they would have otherwise imagined– is a nice side benefit of such a system.

I really like this blending of boundaries, where consideration is given to the fact that gathering from crafting nodes doesn’t have to exclusively produce materials for crafting, and where crafting doesn’t have to correspond purely to churning out equipment. It draws those mechanics into the main combat-driven system, smudges the edges, blurs the demarcations, but does so by giving modest bonuses to those players who gave it a try, not by punishing those who didn’t.

I’d certainly like to see more features like these in future MMOs, because I feel that it’s very much this sort of parallel design that helps to make a game feel like a world, rather than a series of independent mechanical systems.

What you might see as depravity is, to me, just another aspect of the human condition.

Having reached level twelve and finished the quests on the introductory Island of Dawn, I took the Pegasus flight to the major city of Velika. Situated in Southern Arun, this is the seat of the Valkyon Federation, a coalition of all the civilised races of the land against the invading Argons. The flight into the city was stunning, as my mount ‘rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend’, wending its way around the blanket of countryside rolled-up around the city’s waist, I could only marvel at the exquisiteness of the environs. There’s no doubt that these worlds which we inhabit have developed, in graphical terms, to the point where it seems as though one could reach through that lambent mirror sat upon the desk, and grasp the infinite pixels of possibility which it reflects.

After exploring the city for a while, and claiming my mount (which is granted at level eleven and instant cast – huzzah!), I went to the main hall to speak to the commanders of the war effort there, whereupon after a brief “well done” from the leader, I was palmed off onto a rather brusque and patronising fellow who pointed his sword threateningly at me, and told me not to get cocky after my initial success on the Island of Dawn. I could only look at him in wondrous disbelief, before pointing at my outfit, raising an eyebrow, and querying just whereabouts he imagined I’d be hiding any cockiness. He was lucky he didn’t get an extending lance right in his.

Of course that wasn’t terribly likely to cause him any trouble, because all the men in TERA are pusillanimous braggarts, encased in armour so thick that they reach for a can opener every time they need to pee. Wrapped in their comforting cloak of cowardice, they had the audacity to stand there and tell me that I had no sense of proportion. I told them that my sense of proportion was just fine, and that I had ample evidence of such every time I had to look at myself in a mirror.

I still reckon I could take ’em in a fight.

Having left the Keg Brothers to pat each other on their well-armoured backs, I ventured around the city once more. When a world is as beautiful as this, it draws you into the environments and encourages you to observe your surroundings. For example: I met this lovely lady, Ciebel, a priestess, and I couldn’t help but stop to praise her on her choice of outfit. “Finally” I thought, “a place without overt sexualisation of women! Here is this fine young priestess, in a slender yet chaste dress, who clearly has rejected the more lascivious outfits of the warrior caste.” I wandered away in quiet satisfaction, exultant in finding this small sanctuary in the city, where an innocent priestess stands removed from the incessant sexuality prevalent elsewhere in the realm!

But wait, elation! Joy of joys! In my wanderings I stumbled upon the cosmetic armour vendor. TERA has many cosmetic armour slots, and here I had discovered the Equipment Remodeller, who could offer cosmetic armour items! For a considerable sum of gold, of course. A considerable sum, but one which will be worth every scraped-together-coin, for I had found a set of sensible armour for myself. I could go back to the Keg Brothers and point my lance at them, and say “Hah! Observe how I am appropriately attired for battle and weep, for I could beat you all when I wore but a piece of thin copper wire as a thong, and so now… now I shall be as to a goddess walking amongst mortals!”

So, thank you Equipment Remodeller, thank you from deep within my heavily armoured breast. You are a shining beacon in a world of depravity, and I praise the gods for your presence. In this land where women are forced to wear degrading outfits, you are here with your sense of decorum, your sense of reserve and your sense of dignity. You have fashioned outfits which are tasteful, sensible, and practical. You stand as an example to all, and I would hold you up to all the world as the way that things should really be. Come. Come Equipment Remodeller, come here and let me hold you up, literally upon my shoulder, and I will raise you toward the heavens and rent the air with a cry of exaltation. Come here and… ah. Oh dear. Oh dear me.