Massively has an article describing how Funcom has a new MMO in development, Board with the World, a free-to-play social MMO focusing on the world of extreme sports. I’m not entirely sure that a pun on ‘bored’ is the optimum way to market your MMO product. And then, of course, there’s:
First and foremost we will be focusing on snowboarding, with the possibility of adding different sports later.
So, starting off with the extreme sport well known for its grinds, then.
A quick comedy catch up: saw Stewart Lee a couple of weeks back, on his “If you prefer a milder comedian please ask for one” tour. Opener Henning Wehn, the German Comedy Ambassador to the UK, was pretty good, and Lee himself was fantastic. Covering the heinous crime of coffee shop loyalty card stamp faking, the joy of moving to the country or indeed another country for the quality of life (particularly with respect to prawns) and his admiration and respect for the Top Gear team, the high point was the finale, a brilliantly crafted, slowly building epic, beginning in a doctor’s surgery before moving into pear cider, the magpie culture of advertisers and the internet, and finishing with a song. Yup, a song.
Last night was Boffoonery at the Bloomsbury Theatre, a comedy benefit for Bletchley Park. Both informative, with Simon Singh doing a bit on the bible “code” before giving a live demonstration of an Enigma machine in action, and entertaining, with stand up from Robin Ince, Dave Gorman and Richard Herring and skits, spoofs and humorous vignettes from Punt & Dennis, Laurence & Gus, John Finnemore, Margaret Cabourn-Smith and the voice of Stephen Fry. All most excellent, but particularly most excellent was Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party, a Bletchley-themed panel game chaired by Robert Llewelyn featuring Maggie Philbin and Richard Herring against Johnny Ball and Robin Ince. Ince deployed fearsome, if ultimately futile, lateral thinking that put even Ted Rogers on 3-2-1 to shame, Herring dropped in deft asides, Maggie Philbin, having read up on the subject, actually knew the answers to the questions in great detail, and Johnny Ball is a legend. At the age of 71 he’s as full of passion and enthusiasm as ever, with that vital hint of lunacy, as several questions fortuitously allowed him to launch into a whistle stop tour of binary and Egyptian multiplication, Euler and the seven bridges of Koenigsberg and finding square roots with Euclidean geometry, demonstrated with a string of beads that have hopefully given Richard Herring another half hour of material.
The empty wrapper flips and somersaults its way down the high street towards me, ducking in and out of the shadows between the downcast gaze of the streetlights. It’s the only thing moving in that once congested thoroughfare. The shops stand empty, the street silent but for the faint sound of the wind as it plays its mournful symphony, the percussion of the windows shutters above me and the reedy crescendo of letterboxes stuffed full of unopened mail.
Everything is in order. It’s not the dramatic apocalyptic scene that we’d always envisioned. Cars are parked neatly in their spaces at the side of the road; doors are closed and windows remain unbroken. That’s how it was when the Event happened: nothing really changed in the world, no big bang, no screams of pain and panic, and no news stories with rolling tickers at the bottom of the screen spelling out our impending doom. People just went home, kissed their husbands or wives, played with their kids and put them to bed, and then… were never seen again.
Hands in my pockets and coat collar drawn up under my chin, I wander aimlessly down the middle of the road. I turn into a side street, walk between rows of town houses, neon lightning flickering from behind the windows. Amber eyes watch me from behind a half-licked paw as I walk past. It feels strange to be observed now; I work hard to resist the urge to hold my hand up and shield my face from that haughty glare, the eyes hold questions and accusations “What you doing here two-legs, don’t you know that we rule the world now?” I want to turn and shout that we’re still here, all of us… here and yet not here, but my accuser has already closed its eyes and gone back to cleaning its face.
Everyone is here, yet no one is.
Except me, alone. All alone. I wander the dark streets and listen to the sounds coming from the houses, brought to me on a wind that sings the song of the end of all things.
Maybe one day, if I keep moving on, I’ll find someone else who isn’t stuck inside playing Dragon Age: Origins.
So, Lord of the Rings Online, Volume 1, Book 11? Pretty much the same as before.
In particular I’m impressed with my prescience with regards to the Hunt For The Key.
The sad thing is that, as mentioned by Van Hemlock in his post lambasting chapter ten, the only real problem with books ten and eleven is that so few parts of them are marked for a fellowship or small fellowship; if the one or two chapters that required any sort of group were adjusted to be soloable, these would be perfectly pleasant preambles before the meaty main thrust of the remaining few books.
As it stands, several members of this long standing kinship – of which I have only recently become a part – are swearing off of the rest of volume one, and seem utterly demoralised when considering the tasks that we’re currently being asked to undertake as compared to the glory days of books past. My own theory is that this is a more pronounced issue for those of us coming to the content a long time after its initial release; back when there wasn’t much else to do, I imagine most LotRO players were at least moderately content to have something, anything, to do that advanced the story a little more. Following on immediately from the epic conclusion to the original set of book content, and with the delectable depths of Moria’s domain easily within our capability and calling to us, it’s that much more disheartening to be asked to run Fed Ex mission number five.
Of fifteen.
For myself, I’m not so fussed. I enjoy the company of the others too much to worry overly about what I’m doing, and although I gripe with the best of them, it’s only because I know how great Lord of the Rings can be, and it’s a shame to see Turbine fall short of the high bar that they set in the previous books.
Ultimately I’m still happy with the overall image of an epic journey that has been imprinted on my mind; the image of a horse’s rump that’s now burned indelibly on my retina – not so much.
Careful now.
I’ve really been enjoying Dungeons and Dragons Online since going back to the free-to-play Unlimited version, it’s a far better game than when I played for a month or so at launch. The fundamentals are the same (run around and hit stuff with swords), I always liked the way it captures the old pen and paper feeling of going on a dungeon crawl, but many little tweaks have improved the overall experience. Starting at the beginning, with character creation, templates make life much easier for anyone who hasn’t memorised the comparative benefits of all the D&D feats. Emerging from character creation into the game the tutorial is a distinct improvement on the original, which forced you to solo a few dungeons culminating in a bunch of kobolds and a cultist under a pub as I recall. Trivial for a fighter or barbarian, who’d merrily splatter their way through, tougher for a rogue, especially if specced more for dealing with traps than fighting, and potentially impossible for a wizard if they got their spell selection wrong (though who wouldn’t take magic missile?)
A major problem for me at launch was the way solo/duo content dried up almost immediately after finishing the tutorial. Not an entirely illogical design, in keeping with trying to preserve the ethos of group adventures, but led to much frustration in attempts to get groups together, find quests that everybody had etc., and there wasn’t much to do while pottering around waiting for some action to start. I believe one of the very early updates was the addition of some solo adventures, or “solo mode” for some existing adventures, so it was obviously an issue they were working on, and now there are plenty of options without having to form up a big old group. As well as the wider range of available quests that you’d expect, gradually added over time, the hireling system allows you to pad your group out with an NPC rather than spamming “LF healer” on all available chat channels for hours at a time.
The other main problem I had was grind. DDO is unique (or at least very unusual) in that it doesn’t give out XP for individual mob kills, I haven’t yet been sent to collect a random assortment of animal body parts that only a small fraction of beasts seem to possess, and it’s completely free of “kill ONE MEEEEELEON monster” type quests. Actually, that’s not strictly true: there is one quest where the only objective is to kill 200 kobolds, but that’s not so much a grind as comic relief; you decide to have a crack at it solo, just for a laugh, and you’re butchering kobolds with a single blow, laughing maniacally as you do, thinking you might have a good chance, but they just keep attacking, wave after wave, and you can’t kill them quick enough, and even though they’re only doing a couple of points of damage here and there it’s chipping away, and you’re trying to back off and use a healing potion but there’s so many of them, and… that’s when you realise you’re a rare giant monster spawn in an open world MMO. If you could somehow add the kobold “General” channel to your chat tab, I swear you’d see something like:
“GIANT MOB SPAWN AT THE RUINED CASTLE!”
“Where’s the ruined castle?”
“Centre of the map, noob”
“Let’s take it down!”
“ZOMGZ it just one-shotted me WTF?”
“Need more shaman, come on!”
“LFM Giant Mob team”
“It’s self healing, no way”
“Need to wear down its spell points”
“COME ON MORE DPS”
“It’s going down!”
“WOOOOO!”
“YEAH, WE RULE!”
“What did it drop, what did it drop?”
“Who got the lewt?”
“There’s nothing on the body!! NOTHING!”
“OMFG, I’m so writing a blog post about this…”
Anyway. Everything’s quests off in their own instances (dungeons and outdoor areas), which avoids the “kill ONE MEEEEEELEON monsters” grind, but potentially replaces it with doing the same instances over and over again. First of all there was the Waterworks; originally to go from the Harbour to the Marketplace you had to complete the Waterworks quest(s), a fairly tough and long series. Not so bad if you were a static group and all blasted through it at the same time, but if you were in a casual guild it was a right pain with everyone at different stages, and some people got thoroughly sick of going through the Waterworks several times to help out others as they reached it (and then again with an alt or re-rolled character). Having made it through to the Marketplace, there was another series that finally did for me. I can’t remember the precise details, but I think it was off from one of the Houses; a guild group formed up and we toddled off for a quest, through an outdoor area, which was a bit pointless as I recall, but did offer some opportunities for people to wander off on their own and get lost if they weren’t paying attention then run into big groups of mobs, or plummet down a cliff to certain doom, just to make sure it took about half an hour just to get everybody assembled at the start of the actual quest. In we went to this dungeon, I forget what the exact objective was, rescue some prisoners or find a key or something, and it was pretty neat; I was sneaking around searching for traps, we dispensed steely justice to whatever kobolds, gnolls or other beasties were hanging around, secured our objective, hurrah! That led to chapter two of the quest, which involved… going back into the exact same dungeon, with the exact same traps, and the same spawns, but winding up in a slightly different bit, or going slightly further than the first time. OK, fine, completed that objective, and chapter three of the quest was… to go back into the same dungeon! Again! And that still wasn’t the end of the quest series, but I had to head off after finishing that chapter.
Next time I logged in I shouted around to see if anybody fancied finishing off that quest series, and we ended up with a group with me on chapter four, somebody who’d finished the whole thing the previous night, someone else who’d had to bail out after chapter five, and a couple who hadn’t done it at all. So it was back to chapter one; into the dungeon, out of the dungeon, back into the dungeon, out of the dungeon, back into the dungeon (sixth time in pretty much the same instance now…) Things improved very slightly, as later in the quest chain either the early part of the dungeon was free from traps and mobs, or we went straight in to a later point in the dungeon, but I think it was a seven chapter quest that basically involved going back in to the same dungeon seven times, finally completing the thing hours later.
Next time I logged in I joined a guild group of similar level and we chatted about what quests to do. “Anything but (House Wherever)!” said I, cheerily. And of course once we worked out what level characters we had, what prerequisite quests were needed, what everyone else was thoroughly bored of etc, there remained only one possible choice for us: House Wherever. So I went back into that dungeon another seven times (would’ve been bad form to leave them rogue-less after all), and didn’t log in to the game for another three and a half years.
I’m hoping they’ve sorted that out now, certainly there seems to be a wider array of quest choices (albeit some of them requiring a purchase, but they have to make their money somehow); I don’t mind doing a dungeon a couple of times, or leaving it a couple of weeks between attempts, but 15+ runs of more-or-less the same dungeon within three sessions is taking the piss.
Trouble is, of course, MMOGs need content, and to satisfy voracious players they need lots of it. It takes far longer to create the content than to play it (reasons not to work on MMOGs part MMCIXV: spending days or weeks as a team perfecting a dungeon, adding quests and flavour text, placing the traps and spawns, testing it carefully and adjusting accordingly, then watching a bunch of munchkins steam through it in seven minutes flat shouting “LAWL!” and “PEWPEW!” as they go), so obviously it’s a temptation: if a dungeon’s good for one chapter, it’s good for seven! It’s something Champions Online seem to be suffering at the moment, with their Blood Moon event. Part of the event, the PvE side, is pure, unvarnished grind (though in fairness, apparently each crypt isn’t exactly the same, there are some minor changes in layout, but one run through of one crypt was quite enough for me.) One the plus side, the PvP side of the event is much better, I really enjoyed the zombie-survival mode (a team of five or six have to fight off waves of NPC zombie attackers plus one zombie-fied player, as each hero dies they get zombie-nated and join the undead; sort of British Zombie Bulldog), and I haven’t had a chance to try the hunters vs werewolves yet, but it sounds fun too. Let’s hope Champions can keep going for three years or so and keep improving like DDO.
Having survived Halloween – or the Chocapocalypse as I like to dub it – for another year, where one is faced with not only wave upon wave of those small bipedal bacteria distribution units cunningly disguised as sentient bed sheets, but also the temptation of a ginormous unguarded bowl full of chocolate sat only a few feet away beside the front door, I had cause to ponder on the whole curious ritual and wondered what a holiday event to celebrate MMOs would entail.
The first stumbling block was to decide what the main loot would be for the holiday, loot being a staple of many holidays and splendidly apt for inclusion in a holiday celebrating MMOs. For Halloween the loot constitutes various forms of confectionary, often candy or chocolate, undisguised and presented in a large bowl into which the participants can dip their hands. It should be noted that it is considered bad form to hide a loaded mouse trap within the sweet bowl as a simulation of a critical fail on the loot roll. Christmas, on the other hand, has the generic wrapped present as its loot of choice; our lord and saviour Jesus Christ died on the cross to give mankind the gift of redemption, and to celebrate his birth each year we, in turn, give each other the gift of a hastily purchased pair of socks or a cheap FM radio alarm clock in the oh so amusing shape of a pair of breasts. For Easter we find the improbable and oft-euphemised chocolate egg as the gift of choice; our lord and saviour Jesus Christ died on the cross to give mankind the gift of redemption, and to celebrate his death and rebirth each year we, in turn, pretend that a sentient invisible rabbit steals the unfertilised young of chocolate chickens and then, despite two thousand years or more of practise, proceeds to hide them around the average garden in such a manner that they are easily discovered by any two year old child with a basket and a sweet tooth.
After thinking upon all of that, I was fairly certain that I wouldn’t be able to come up with anything more ridiculous for my fictional MMO holiday. My mind had other plans though. So the primary goal of any MMO is to get phat loots in order to lord it over other players by swinging around your massive e-peen. I’m not quite sure how this works for the female players among us: e-clit doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, as it were, and the thought of someone swinging a massive one around is probably trespassing on the territory of some of the more specialist websites out there. We’ll just assume that the obnoxious female show-offs out there have an e-peen too, but that theirs is plastic with straps. Transgender players will just have to work out their own terminology based on their specific system specifications. So we need something to represent the e-peen which is the core concept of the MMO and the basis for all the drama, hatred, misery and general ill will that such games generate, grossly disproportionate to the actual worth of the reward on offer. My idea: the chocolate coated chilli pepper (CCCP). I think it works pretty well: it’s moderately phallic, has a sweet outer layer representing the desire of phat loots which, after you have attained it and taken your first taste, becomes more and more painful with each progressive bite, and yet the endorphin rush is enough to keep you coming back for more, despite the fact that you know how much it will hurt and how utterly pointless and temporarily rewarding it is to do so. On top of that there’s the ‘manliness’ factor of eating raw chilli, because as we all know, it’s something that’s undertaken only by real men, with real hair on their real chests, the sort of men who wrestle ladies and help old lions across the road, or something.
Perfect.
Next we need the means of distribution for our MMO holiday. This proved less tricky, because it obviously needs to involve some sort of quest; preferably repeatable; almost certainly mundane; ideally involving boars; absolutely dependant on chance. My first idea was to have adults dress as giant boars and for the questing children to hit them with sticks until unconscious, at which point the children would skin the adult from their costume and there would be a one in seventy two chance that the adult possessed any CCCPs to loot. The main problem with this was the potential for the children to attempt to brute-force the event, forming impossibly large raids and thus trivialising the beating of the boar-costumed adults. On the plus side there wouldn’t be enough loot to go around from each adult defeated, and so the potential for drama would be high and thus very much in the spirit of things.
It seemed more appropriate, and involved far less getting hit with blunt objects on the part of the adults, if said adults were quest givers who rewarded the children with loot for performing a task. Children should be in a group of no more than six, otherwise the quest giver will not answer the door. The tasks could be up to the adults, but should generally be quite tedious although occasionally interspersed with moments fraught with terror. One example is to send the children to speak with Mr Johnsson at number 67 at the end of the street who, in turn, sends the children to speak to Mr and Mrs Grundle at number 17 at the other end of the street. To add to the experience, everyone in the street lets loose any animals that they have which are of a troublesome disposition – small yappy dogs that are prone to attack strangers on sight are especially valued; likewise teenage boys – thus providing a gauntlet of random aggro for the children to negotiate as they make their way up and down the street. Upon finally returning to the original quest giver the children are rewarded with a random number of CCCPs, the only condition being that the random number is never high enough to grant every child in the group a reward.
Finally there needed to be some sort of customary costume for the children to be dressed in. This initially seemed simple enough – the children would dress as adventurers from any standard MMO – but quickly proved fraught with danger when one considered the legal ramifications of an event that encouraged children to run around in chainmail bikinis. Some hasty re-thinking settled on the fact that the children would dress only in Tier 10 armour from World of Warcraft, something so hideously embarrassing that they we would be sure to cover themselves up entirely with a large sheet or plastic sack rather than be seen dead wearing it.
One final consideration was to the congregation of people to celebrate the event, such as Guy Fawkes night here in England; Guy Fawkes was killed in multiple horrid ways after attempting to destroy the Houses of Parliament whilst trying to overthrow the regime of the time, and we celebrate this by gathering around a large fire upon which his poor effigy is burned, and generally using it as an excuse to make a lot of noise by blowing shit up – or ‘launch fireworks’ as some call it. I like the idea of people gathering together to celebrate something of which the original meaning has all but been forgotten, so the MMO holiday will have a similar tradition, whereupon children who have collected and eaten enough CCCPs to be considered a high priority case in Accident and Emergency, are placed on top of the local village post-box and forced to dance for the gathered crowd as it drinks and makes merry.
So there you have it, my initial thoughts on an MMO holiday, steeped in tradition and celebrating all that is great and good in our hobby of choice. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a mouse trap to carefully extract from a rather tempting looking bowl of chocolates.
“Fear not Ranger; Barbarian; Magician; Thief; Cavalier and Acrobat!”
So says the Dungeon Master in the title sequence for Dungeons & Dragons the animated TV series.
Of course anyone who has played an MMO will instantly recognise that the appearance of the short, wizened and kindly old man festooned in his rich red robes was merely an illusion and that he was evidently a sick and vicious sadist who got off on the pain and suffering of children; it’s probably a fair guess that he and his son, Venger, were actually working together all along, and that the realm in which they dwelled was merely a labyrinthine torture chamber for the young.
I mean, one tank, five DPS and no healer? It’s a party composition straight out of Hideously Doomed To Fail PuGs 101.
No wonder those poor kids never made it home.
