As I mentioned in a previous post, I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic on an almost daily basis for the last few months, and only recently I stopped playing, focusing now on Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Since playing the latter game, I haven’t signed into SWTOR once. Which brings me to the point of this post, and that’s the realization that I’m probably going to be cancelling my subscription with them soon.
There interesting thing is how much email they send me, trying to convince me that GREAT things are still happening in the game. I still get endless emails from Lord of the Rings Online, even though I dropped that subscription nearly a year ago. They, and Guild Wars 2, are convinced all they have to do to get me back is somehow sound like their game is just as exciting as it was when I decided to start playing it.
What game designers don’t seem to understand is that if a player has left your game, he or she left for a reason, which means that continuous advertisements and announcements of doing the same things you’ve always been doing are probably not going to win back your former members. An example: Star Wars: The Old Republic decided at some point to integrate starship combat into the game. That sounded great. But in doing so, they decided it was only going to be added as player versus player. Now, a lot of people, like me, abhor online player versus player sort of play in our games. If we want that, we’ll sign onto a game that is designed specifically for that. But SWTOR was never about pvp. It was about player versus environment (pve), which means now having to get totally into the wrong kind of play means that the game has moved into a direction that is never going to attract me back. So that means they can stop sending me announcements about all of the great additions they’ve added to the game that are all designed to “enhance” the galactic starfighter part of the game (i.e., pvp). I don’t think they understand that. Oh well.
The other thing they do is keep announcing extra goodies they’ll give me just for staying with the game. The current one is some kind of land speeder that everyone gets as long as they’re activated members on some date in March. I don’t know exactly what date because honest, I don’t care. If I’m not signing into the game to play it, I’m probably not going to sign into it to get my new speeder to run around on a planet where I’m not playing on any way. Just saying.
If you want to win me back into a game that I’ve decided to leave, address some of the reason why I left in the first place. Star Wars Galaxies was notorious for not doing this in the old days. They’d get nonstop complaints about some problem, never fix it, and then beg you to come back because they added elves, or some other stupid shit that you didn’t ask for and really didn’t want in the first place. Everquest was a lot like that.
At least World of Warcraft didn’t promise you anything new. They just figured they were so freaking awesome that you’d come back regardless. And at least three times I did. Not a fourth. They’re currently on yet another expansion I’m going to miss. They haven’t done anything to make the game more interesting. It’s still about running the same big end game dungeons for better gear so you can run those same dungeons at harder difficulty. That got old the second time. The 90th time? Well, that’s why they don’t get money from me any longer.
So, I’ll be dumping SWTOR any day now, kind of like the many women over the years who have dumped me. Like those situations, it wasn’t the game. It was me. Please don’t take it personally.
But please stop calling. The new game is starting to get jealous.
Just recently, I went back to playing Star Wars The Old Republic again. I had played the game back when it first came out, got bored with it and then went onto something else. Recently, I was looking for a game to play, and someone recommended it, so I went back, subscribed for a couple of months of fun, and then a few weeks ago decided it just wasn’t my thing any more. This got me to thinking about all of the MMOs I’ve played over the years, and then it got me thinking as to why I’ve left those particular games. So, I thought I would give a bit of an abridged history of some of those games in my world of playing them.
Sometiimes you have to back up your words
Ultima Online was my first MMO, and I played it back in the day when it was basically the only one people had ever heard of. I started playing it because I was a fan of the Ultima series of computer games put out by Richard Garriott so many years back. For years, I would sign in and have fun there. At one point, I signed up for the Counselor program, and I became one of those players that worked with EA and actually helped other players. Then someone sued EA, claiming we were unpaid employees, and EA gutted the program so that we were now left with only being allowed to play the game and not help other players any more. Around this same time, a Christmas holiday season hit, and the new batch of players who came along were completely different than the ones who had played before. We encountered what has become known as the “grief” player, and they came in droves. Players I knew for years in the game started signing on less and less, and eventually they just left the game. EA tried to respond to this by building a “safer” game within the game, which was to basically clone the entire world and put it into a safer area so that people couldn’t do the sorts of griefer things that were being done before. But this was too little too late as the majority of the people who had made the game famous had already left. I, too, realizing that I was now logging in with so few of my friends playing it any more, left and went to find another game myself.
Everquest was the first “other” game I started playing after the whole UO experience. It was one of those unforgiving types of games that you might log in and do nothing productive for hours, yet you would still log in and try to get something accomplished. It was one of those games that was prior to the Internet explosion, which would kill so many of these types of games because when you needed to find something in the game, you pretty much had to rely on your network of friends and hope someone else knew where something was located, or what some item you received might actually be used for (and quite often they had no idea as well). Nowadays, if you find some obscure item in a game, there are ten web sites dedicated to that item so that you rarely have to do any work to figure out something mysterious in a game.
But I loved the game. I would sign in every day and try to do the things that made your character more powerful, or at least most significant. It was a game that made you very reliant on other characters, as you might have the greatest warrior of all time, but you needed that cleric for heals, that druid for buffs and speed increases, that necro to help you find your corpse after a bad run into very dangerous territory, and practically every other character that existed for some reason or another. The land was dangerous, and you had to be careful because you might be in an area where everything seems level 10 but for no reason some level 50 giant might be walking through the area. There were evil cities where evil characters could go, but good ones would be killed on sight (and the other way around as well). It really was a vibrant world for its time.
Why did I quit? The game just got old. At some point, you’ve done all of the things you’ve wanted to do, and their updates were only designed to do a lot more of the same but at higher levels. Because it was such a big world, the departing players made it that much emptier. And that’s probably what killed it the most.
Dark Age of Camelot came along as the “solution” to Everquest. It played a lot like Everquest, but its focus was on combat, specifically combat between three realms. It was the first of the RvR models (Realm versus Realm), and it did it really well.
The game was focused on player versus player (pvp), specifically working together with everyone in your own realm to fight another realm, which made it truly unique.
The problem for the game was that its content was really lacking. While it did a lot of things right that corrected things Everquest had done wrong (and the list is too vast to get into for this type of post), it didn’t make the game any more interesting over the long run. I’m one of those people who likes to explore a game to find unique things and discover the undiscoverable. DAOC focused on combat, and that was pretty much it. By the time they started releasing expansions, so many of us had already moved onto another game.
There’s really no way to get through an article like this without mentioning the elephant in the room, and that’s World of Warcraft. I played this game for almost as many years as I played each of Ultima Online and Everquest. No other game has actually come along that has replaced those three as the games I’ve played most, although I sure wish one would.
World of Warcraft came along at a time when a new game was needed and people were bored of the games they had been playing. What it did was take all of the models of previous games and did them better. Historically, that’s been the story of WoW. They haven’t done anything all that innovative, but they did what everyone else did, incorporated those ideas into their own, and then made them feel like they were brand new and fresh. That’s a pretty rare talent for a gaming company to do, and this isn’t a criticism against the game or its developers, but a straight out commendation. It also added humor to the mix, which was sorely lacking in previous titles. Sometimes, it even made fun of itself, which was a major part of its expansion Cataclysm, in which you started running across non player characters who were created to be very much like some of the really bad players who inhabit these types of games.
The problem with World of Warcraft is that it just got old. It’s been around for a decade or so now, and as many expansions as they’ve done, the world has never really gotten that much more interesting. The story line still makes little sense and appears to be written by amateur fantasy writers who read a couple of dungeon and dragons books, played a couple of games of Diablo (also by the same company) and then figured that really complicated story lines would totally fazzle the player base and then went with that. Every time the story line hits a point where I find myself having to pay attention, I want to throw my computer through the window, as they’ve had to doctor the story premise so many times to somehow make sense to the theme park they’ve created behind their original ideas.
As to why I left, well, you can only do the exact same thing so many times before you’re just not going to want to do it again. That’s the point I hit with WoW. It was a great game for its time, but instead of focusing on a new expansion to their overdone world, I wish they’d just develop a completely different world. But I get it that accountants run their business, not game developers, so the chances of that happen instead are slim to none.
A couple of other games that came in during this period of time that I played and didn’t give much more time than jump in and out were Earth & Beyond, a space exploration story that once you explored everything left absolutely no game to play beyond that. There was Wahammer Online (which was just an updated version of Dark Age of Camelot and not much more fun). Everquest 2 also came along at this time, and while it was interesting, nothing about it really caused me to want to dedicate much time to it. The grouping dynamic of mobs also really annoyed me, and I started to feel the game was designed for grouping only, cutting up the original world that housed Everquest and dumbed it down.
Then, of course, there was the albatross known as Star Wars Galaxies, which gave players the opportunity to explore the Star Wars universe, set during the time between Episode IV and Episode V. Why? I’m not really sure. Originally, it was hailed as between Episode 1 and 2 (before the prequels were announced), but even then it didn’t really make a whole lot of sense.
The game was original in that Everquest way, in that it had absolutely no story line whatsoever. Sure, you knew the Empire hated the rebels and all that, but there was absolutely nothing for you to contribute to the story whatsoever. Oh, Princess Leia might asked you to go kill a bunch of Empire dudes, but the reasons would be random, and the purpose behind it somewhat lacking. What was intriguing about it was to build entire towns and such in their universe. What sucked about it was that once you did, it didn’t really make any difference.
Over the years, the developers kept trying to figure out how to stop people from leaving the game. One of their horrible decisions was to completely change the interface of the game so that it was a lot more like a first person shooter. Really dumb idea. Then they decided to revamp the entire idea of the game, making it into a “you, too, can be a jedi” in a world where the jedi were now extinct, which made even less sense. The only thing they didn’t do (and I might be wrong on this) was add elves, which used to be my joke about how you know an MMO is about to close shop. In the end, they did close shop, and the experiment that was Star Wars Galaxies ended for good.
After this, there were all sorts of games that came out that were dedicated to specific intellectual properties, like Lord of the Rings Online, The Matrix Online, The Clone Wars Online, The Sims Online, and more others than I could possibly remember at this particular time. The problem with most of them was that they were very limited in their worlds, which made it very difficult to continue to wanting to play them. The former example, Lord of the Rings Online, actually was one of those universes I invested a lot of time in, before leaving it and then coming back to it again, but the second time around what mainly kept me invested in the game was that I had a lot of friends still in the game, so it seemed worth signing onto it. When they slowly left to other games, the game became less fun to want to sign into.
Which brings me to another Star Wars property, and that’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. Up until very recently, I was playing a lot of this game. I had subscribed to it when it first came out, but got bored with it and then went back to WoW. A few months back, someone recommended it based on all of its updates and changes. It had gone free to play (which means that you can play it for free but if you want some of the stellar features of a game, you end up having to shell out more money than you would have paid if it was never free to play in the first place). I had avoided SWTOR because of that model, having seen how greedy its developers were (and it being EA, I wasn’t all that surprised). But went back I did, and I had fun up until I got bored with it again. There’s only so many variations of “You’re a jedi who is going to save the universe” or “You’re an evil Sith who needs to kill your master and then become the most powerful bad guy in the universe” one can take before finally hanging up the lightsaber.
The current game I’m playing (for now) is Final Fantasy XIV, which is unique for me because to be honest, I’ve never been a fan of the Final Fantasy franchise, which I’ve found to be really corny writing. But that’s the one I’m playing right now and slowly the universe within the game is opening up to me. Who knows where I’ll be at the end of this journey, or even how long it might take me to get there?
Last year or so, EA/Maxis released the latest version of Sim City, the continued offspring of one of the originally wonderful games to come out on PC. Unfortunately, it had some things wrong with it. Okay, I’m being nice. It had a LOT wrong with it. So much that after a week of trying to play it, I deleted it from my hard drive. But that wasn’t enough. I then burned my hard drive, pulled it out of my computer, threw the hard drive out the window, installed a brand new hard drive and even replaced my operating system so that there would be no hint of that game ANYWHERE near my computer. Okay, not exactly the events that happened, although all of the events DID happen. But the rest of that had nothing to do with Sim City. My hard drive crashed for another reason, but I hated Sim City so much that I’m now blaming all of that on Sim City. It’s kind of like how I blame all of my bad relationships that I’ve had with women on Anne. Not because Anne did anything wrong, but she gets blamed and happened to be at the right place at the wrong time when it came time to forever blame every bad relationship on someone.
But I digress….
The problem with Sim City was that it was designed with great mechanics but horrible mathematics. Let me explain. Imagine a town where its population is made up of tens of thousands of people. And then you throw a big party so that lots of other people come to your town. Well, and then after the party was over, instead of leaving town and going back to their own towns, all the people stay and then move into any available house that happens to be located anywhere nearby. If someone already lives there, that’s okay. They’ll just stay there and the person who lived there before can drive around the town all day, making it impossible for fire trucks to get to fires because everyone’s on the road without an actual place where they actually live. Then add more people (cause they called everyone on their cell phones and told them about the grate party), and then you have a cluster**** of people driving around and walking down the streets all day long, and anyone can work in any job because education no longer is important. Just people.
And you get an idea of why the game kind of goes nuts once you start to actually get any decent population.
But the biggest complaint was that the game forced you to play online (on EA’s servers). And quite often, they’d crash. Or just stop working. Or whatever.
People demanded an offline mode (because that’s what every previous version of Sim City was), but EA said that was impossible. And then people abandoned the game. So EA has announced that is NOW going to allow offline play, which by the way I did mention they said was completely impossible, right? All along, I got the idea that EA was trying to sell us stuff in real money, and the only way to do that was to make sure everyone had to play online, kind of like Blizzard is doing with its current crap load of games, like Diablo III, another game I abandoned shortly after a few weeks of realizing it was a shadow of its original versions.
So, will this cause me to go back to Sim City? No. Not a bit. I own the game and haven’t reinstalled it on my computer mainly because they screwed it up enough that I saw no reason to ever do so again.
What I do know is that I will NEVER buy another Sim City game again. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: I used to work at Maxis and used to love everything about Sim City and the Sims. Not any longer.
Recently, I started playing Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) after a very long hiatus. A friend on a message board recommended getting back into the game (when I was looking for something new to play), and that’s exactly what I did. Thus, it has given me something to write about.
I should point out that I first started playing LOTRO nearly five years ago when it was in early release. I remember enjoying the game back then but around 25th level, my hunter became too difficult to play, so I quit. There were always so many other choices.
Now, the game is free to play with Turbine making its money from microtransactions and players who choose to pay regularly as VIP members. When I came back to LOTRO, I chose the VIP route, and here I am there today.
A couple of thoughts right after the start: The game is still very immersive, and you definitely feel like a part of Middle Earth. The Hobbit lands are very immersive as you feel as if you’re in one of the movies themselves. The game is also very early Everquest-like, meaning that unlike World of Warcraft, the game rarely holds your hand as you try to figure things out. And there’s a lot to the game, so you have to pay attention or you just might miss something important.
As for the story, that’s where I have mixed feelings. It’s definitely Lord of the Rings, which means it is quite epic. But at the same time, you know Frodo and the gang are the ones saving the day, so where does Argolwar (my elf hunter) fit in if the true quest involves only those people? Every now and then, a hero from the story will come along to recruit me for a mission, like Strider does in the beginning to help him fight bandits. But all I kept thinking was: “Strider, or may I call you Aragorn, good sir? Um, you have much more important things to do than recruit this lowly hunter to beat up bandits. Go stop Sauron. I’ll be fine here shooting arrows at nondescript bad guys who have absolutely no significance to the greater scheme of things.”
And then the game allows me to learn trade skills like farming and cooking. So, as I’m farming for either Shire taters or Shire apples, I’m thinking, “man, there must be more to life than just this.”
Which brings me back to my recognition that I’m in a game that les me be an unimportant cog in the wheel of a, well, a wheel of time of Tolkien perspective in a world where I should be contributing so much more than I’ll ever be capable.
But the game does have a certain amount of a catharsis purpose, as the characters in it appreciate you, even if you realize how insignificant you are. In the Shire, I joined the Bounders, which is the civilian problem solvers for Hobbits. The npcs recognize this and thank me every time I walk by them. If only I had that happen to me just once at work or in my regular life.
The one thing I really like about the game is how much there is that I still don’t know. With World of Warcraft, the game spoon feeds you through each and every stimulation. This game doesn’t do that. I’m always convinced that right around the corner is another needy soul who is going to ask for my help. And as the Hobbits discovered, all they have to do is ask, and I’m there with my bow, my sword, or my axe.
I recently bought the new release of Sim City (from Electronic Arts, using its subsidiary Maxis Software, which is bought some years back). Maxis used to be one of the greatest companies on the planet, creating Sim City, the Sims and then Spore (which was a little after they were bought by EA). However, Sim City has always been the bread and butter of Maxis, and most likely the reason EA bought the company in the first place (The Sims was released under EA’s ownership, even though it was the last project begun under the Maxis only name).
So what are my thoughts on Sim City? It’s a lot of fun, at least until you get really involved with the game. Let me explain. When you first start playing the game, you get overwhelmed by how much there is to do. You build a road from the highway through your patch of land, you then zone residential, then industrial and commercial. Soon after, someone complains they have no power or water, so you build some kind of power plant and a water pump. This goes on for awhile, until someone else complains that there aren’t enough people to work the zones (so you zone more residential), and then you start to realize your city is lacking in fire support (you build a fire house), police (you build a police station), health care (you enact Obamacare…oh wait, I mean you build a clinic), and you continue until your little patch of land starts to become a thriving city. There’s always something to do, so you’re never going to get bored with it.
And then, eventually, you start to build a major city. And unfortunately, that’s where you start to hate it. The reason you hate it isn’t because there’s not a lot of fun things to do, but because the game was designed badly, almost as if they realized they didn’t have the ability to handle AI as they needed to, so they dumbed down the simulation to be less of a simulation and be a compromise instead. Here’s an explanation of that:
Your Sims (the citizens) are disembodied people who don’t really have a specific place in your city. The people who work at the health care clinic are not doctors. They’re just arbitrary Sims, meaning that when people get up in the morning, they might be a doctor, a fireman, a ditch digger, or a protesting hippie who hates government. The way they find their jobs is through a process I like to call “first come, first serve”. A Sim wakes up in the morning, at the same time as every other Sim, and walks out the door of his apartment to find that there’s a business next door selling donuts (so he decides to work there). The next day, he’s not so quick to the donut shop, so he ends up being a neuro surgeon instead, because the clinic or hospital is located next door to the donut shop. He’ll work his entire day in whatever place he’s in, and then he’ll come home–to any home, because he doesn’t live anywhere; he just occupies the first building that’s built for housing. When visitors come to the city because of your tourism stuff you’ve added (like a building that holds mega super concerts), the Sims will fill up the buildings on their way out, or may or may not leave the city. There’s really no rhyme or reason for what different people end up doing when they’re in your city because they’re all interchangeable. Which brings up the problems that destroy your city.
If your traffic was bad before, it becomes a nightmare when everyone is out on the street trying to get to whatever place they need to go. Your firemen, stuck in traffic stops aren’t putting out fires, and your city starts to burn down, even if the buildings are across the street from the firehouse. Your police can’t stop crime, so you have Sims moving out of town because there’s too much crime (caused by cops not being able to maneuver through traffic (or by cops choosing to be donut makers that morning)).. You probably get the picture.
The city’s infrastructure works the same way. If you have water running through your city, it gets bogged down by the fact that the designers of the game didn’t design water (or electricity) any better. Your power gets clogged and randomly just kind of moves around the town so that you can end up with an important set of buildings just not getting power or water because the AI is too stupid to deliver it now that your city has become a lot more complicated. Even if your water pump is across the street from the building that needs water, it waits until the water fills in some cycle that makes no sense to common sense and has as much simulation value as whack a mole does to international diplomacy.
I had a great city that turned into ruins because these problems just blew up at one point where I became too big to fail, but failed miserably. All attempts to fix it were useless because nothing could move through the city. This wasn’t because I was using weak roads; it was because there was so much going on at one time that the Sims pretty much just sat in traffic, water wouldn’t flow, and the city kept complaining that I needed to provide more power, even though I had about 2x the capacity of power that just kept clogging itself up. Even putting a power plant next to the one building lacking power didn’t work because of the previously mentioned random traveling that everything in Sim City does.
This problem is now being noticed by a lot of players, needs to be fixed, or the game is going to be the most successful failure of all time (although it will compete with Diablo 3). EA has the ability to fix this, but I suspect that they’ll do the corporate thing and basically take the money and run, chalking it up to a good experience for the bottom line, even though it may provide the final nail in a coffin that doesn’t need to really happen.
The next move is for EA to do something. The question is: Will they do it or just screw over its player base?
On the third day of the release of the new Sim City by EA’s Maxis studio, things have gone from reviews of “best game ever” to “what a crappy piece of s4#&!”
The problem isn’t the game itself, although some complaints have started to come in on that level as well (like how small the cities are in comparison to any previous incarnation of Sim City). The problem is the servers because this was EA’s attempt at forcing every single player to have to play on EA’s servers, requiring an always on internet connection. Another company with a more stellar reputation, Blizzard, tried doing the same thing with Diablo 3, and let’s just say that the result was a lot of people claiming Diablo 3 to be the worst game put by Blizzard in a very long, esteemed career of putting out great games.
So everyone is complaining about EA right now because not only do they have to be online all the time, but EA doesn’t seem to know how to run their servers so that the servers are on all the time. 3 days in, players who paid for the game can’t even play the game. So people on numerous game boards are attempting to cash their games back into EA, complaining about how badly the game was implemented.
I should point out that I was working for Maxis when EA took over it. As we were moved from Walnut Creek to Redwood City, you could see the company of Maxis being gutted out by the new owners. The last project I worked on was The Sims, and you could see how things were slowly going downhill for those at Maxis. Working on Sim City 3000 was a pleasure. Seeing what was happening after The Sims was awful and I felt bad for anyone that was sticking around.
If anything, hopefully other companies will learn that just because a bigger company has money to buy you out doesn’t mean that they’re going to continue to make your quality product with actual…well, quality.
In my never-ending search for an online computer game to play, I ended up trying out Star Trek Online, a game I panned because I was much more interested in Star Wars Online: The Old Republic (SWOTOR). Having grown bored of that game, and recently grew bored of Guild Wars 2, I decided to take a spin on this game, just for the nostalgic factor of playing something involving a franchise I know way too much about.
And that’s probably why I like it as much as I do (right now). The gameplay is very basic. In space, it’s great, and you have great space battles. On land, it’s like playing a dorked down version of World of Warcraft, or Lord of the Rings Onlline, or any other variation of Everquest that has ever existed. Mostly, it seems like they added the ground stuff as an afterthought, even though it appears to be very much a part of the whole package.
So, here are some of the immediate thoughts I had after an entire weekend spent going where no man…I mean ONE…has gone before.
The GOOD:
1. It’s Star Trek. It is a universe that trekkies know well and love.
2. The lore seems to be very well catered to, meaning that important events in the Star Trek universe show up in the game. An example is the epic battle of Wolf 359, where the Federation’s fleet was decimated by the Borg in the movie, Star Trek: First Contact. There’s a memorial placed over the Wolf 359 system, constructed by Star Fleet engineers. As you fly through the system, you fly by the MANY starships that were destroyed in the battle. It’s kind of an impact-like experience to fly through there in a system that seems to have no other purpose in the game than to remind the players of the sacrifices that were made that day (in this make-believe universe).
Another example is the finding of important characters in the show’s history. The game is narrated by Leonard Nimoy, who I understand had a bit of history with Star Trek, although I don’t know what exactly that history is. Okay, obviously I’m being facetious here, but it’s kind of nice to hear Ambassador Spock telling us about all sorts of things in the Star Trek universe. At one point, however, while hearing a voice over from Nimoy, I remembered that his voice is also the voice over for Sid Meier’s Civilization series (think it was IV, although I could be wrong on that, and maybe it’s V). One of the first characters I came across (besides the voice of Spock) was Naomi Wildman, who in Star Trek history is the little girl who was born on the USS Voyager during Star Trek Voyager. She is now the commander of Starbase K-7. The grandson (think that’s what it was) of Lieutenant Sulu is a Starfleet leader in the new game and talks about how he spends most of his life having to live up to a lineage of Starfleet heroes. The nice thing is that I’ve just started the game, so I’m sure a lot of others will show up as well, considering the game takes place only about 30 years after our current knowledge of the Next Generation’s timeline. One thing they are hinting at is that the events that occurred in the reboot of the Star Trek movies is kind of on the edge of about to happen. The Romulans lost their homeworld, and the universe is in flux right at about that period of time.
3. It’s a space game. Too many MMOs are fantasy genre games, and they get really old after you’ve played yet another WOW clone, realizing that WOW was an Everquest/Dark Age of Camelot clone.
4. The Starships. My first starship was a light cruiser that didn’t really seem all that impressive. When I became a lieutenant commander (about level 10), I received an escort class fighter (my choice) that just seems so much cooler and more powerful. Although I was sucked into a battle once, and I died after one hit. So, it only seems powerful, I guess. There are so many different types of ships, and I’m looking forward to exploring that further.
5. There are a lot of players and ships flying around. That’s always cool. Of course, there’s only one server (that I know of), but that’s not a problem.
6. You can be a Klingon. After level 25. So that might take awhile as it takes forever to get levels in this game (my opinion). But when it happens, you can bet I’ll be starting up a Klingon and fighting for the empire! And honor! And all sorts of other geeky sorts of things!
7. It’s free to play (or you can do a membership at $14.99 a month). I went the membership route, although I can see how it mimics other free to play models in that it’s costly to add any extra features you’re going to want, so it ends up costing you a lot more, even if you subscribe. Oh well.
BAD
Nothing really. It didn’t sell well, so it’s lifetime might be limited, and that’s too bad.
So, I say give it a try, if you’re into Star Trek. If you’re not, chances are pretty good that you’re not going to understand the many geeky references that occur throughout the game. But for someone like me, it’s graet. And honestly, what’s more important than my personal needs being fulfilled? Ka’plah!
Lately, I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2, after having given up on The Secret World, which I kept hoping would be much better than it turned out to be.
The interesting thing about Guild Wars 2 is that it is essentially free to play, AFTER you buy the original game. So, $60 later, I was allowed to enter the game. This isn’t a complaint, but it’s a reality of how the game is designed. Fortunately, there are no $15/month charges for playing the game, so let’s just say that it makes things a lot easier.
The game is quite polished and fun. There are a couple of problems here and there, but no more than when I’ve played any other “recently” released game. The other day, I was stuck on a mission because a raging bull didn’t reset, but they quickly took care of the problem on the next maintenance cycle, and it was fixed. So, they’re looking at the problems that come along, and so far I haven’t been too concerned that they’re just going to abandon the game.
As for the game itself, it’s another one of those sword and sorcery kinds of games with a bit of today’s technology involved. One of my characters carries a rifle and creates all sorts of 19th century kinds of turrets and traps. Another character is a necromancer, which definitely hits the sorcery part of the mix. But both interact well in the environment, so it doesn’t matter what kind of character you create; they all seem to exist well within the storyline.
And the storyline is actually pretty decent. It has that same Tabula Rasa feel of “you’re the only hope, and this is your story” type of writing within the game. Unlike World of Warcraft, it’s not just a theme park of fedex missions or “go kill 30 of that monster you’ve been killing for the last 45 levels”. There’s a lot of diversity to the game, including crafting and exploration. My biggest learning curve is figuring out all of the different things to do in the game, because it is a huge world and it has so many choices of things you can do.
One of the nice things is that it scales down your character if you out level an area, so that you can interact with the environment as a level 5 (if it’s a level 5 area) instead of the level 80 you might be. Unfortunately, it doesn’t scale up, so you can’t run into a level 80 area if you’re a level 5. You’d die quite quickly.
Anyway, so far I’m finding it an interesting diversion. Not sure I’ll be with it for years to come, but if they work on the end game and work on making sure there are always things to do, I can see myself staying with it for awhile.
The expansion for Civilization V arrived a few weeks ago, and like any Civilization-obsessed geek, I had to go out and buy it. I should put forth a disclaimer right off the start: I was not a major fan of Civilization V when it released. There were a couple of problems inherent in that game, such as it required better graphics capabilities than I had when I first bought it, it dumbed down Civilization IV to the point that I thought they were just phoning this version in, and it just seemed way too easy for an empire building simulation. The graphics problem I solved by getting a much more powerful machine (it’s amazing how much that solution really solves). The dumbing down really hasn’t gotten that much better, and well, the game being too easy may have finally been addressed by the expansion.
The expansion does make the game a bit more complicated, and it does make it a lot harder to master and win. So both of those are great things.
The expansion brings in one of the left-out features that were present in Civilization IV, and by that I mean religion. Unlike Civ IV, you don’t just choose the name of a known religion and then treat it as some generic religion (in which all religions have the exact same characteristics). In Civ V, when you finally gain enough religion points, you can design your own religion from scratch, adding all sorts of different attributes that will benefit from all sorts of different things happening in the game (like population increases adding more religious points, money, culture, or any other number of possibilities). As you grow the religion, you can add more and more features to it so that it actually does something for your civilization, rather than act as some random number generator that does the same thing for everyone else.
The second thing they added was espionage. I’m still a bit underwhelmed by it, as it doesn’t add a lot of espionage, but a couple of agents that you can control to do espionage or to act as counter-intelligence agents. If you have a large empire, espionage will work against you because there’s little way to protect you against enemy agents when they can strike you at any one of your cities, and you only have enough counterintelligence agents to cover a couple of your cities. Towards the end game, you can build all sorts of counter-espionage elements, like police stations and that kind of thing, but for many years you will be vulnerable and that gets really frustrating when you invested all of your energy into technology and then some stupid country just keeps stealing it all from you, and there’s NOTHING you can do to stop them.
The other additions are new world wonders, new units, and several new empire leaders. Those, as expected, advance the game in numerous ways, and let’s just say that they’re all welcome additions.
For me, the expansion makes the original game a lot more playable than it was when I first bought it. But it still feels like this version of the game was dumbed down more than it ever should have been, and no expansion is really going to fix that. Having said that, it’s still one of the better games out there. And therefore, I give the expansion a 7.0/10.0, whereas the original was only about a 5.5/10.0.
As most people know (who know me), I’m a big fan of good computer games, especially ones that are deeply absorbed in roleplaying. I loved Fallout 3 (even with all of its flaws), and I’ve probably played most of the major online MMORPGs, although I’ve missed out on a few recent ones. Shortly before Skyrim, I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, which was a nice break from the whole World of Warcraft thing. I vowed I was done with WoW, and this time I’m pretty sure I am. However, a month or so into TOR, and I really didn’t feel like firing up the game again. I also knew there was a new game that was just released, and I was aching to give it a spin.
Years back, I played the greatest RPG of all time, in my opinion, and that was Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. That was the first real game that let you totally lose yourself in their world and have a great time with it. Their sequel Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion was also ground-breaking, but to be honest, it just never did it for me. However, Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim has reclaimed its throne as the king of computer rpgs.
I’ve been playing it for the last week or so (bought it last weekend), and after a few bad starts, I now find myself completely immersed in that world. What makes it so much fun is that there’s not a lot you can’t do in that world. You can buy property, get married, go on a murderous rampage, become a god amongst men, or just spend your time cooking food. Aside from fishing (which for some bizarre reason seems absent in this game), there’s not a lot you can’t do.
Last night, I bought special equipment for my new house and then took my trusty companion Uthgerd (or whatever her name is) with me to clean out a vampire’s lair. We got through to the very end, and then in an epic battle with the leader of the vampires, Uthgerd died. Unfortunately, you can’t resurrect a character in this game, so she was dead for good this time. I could have gone back to an earlier saved game, but it was such a battle to get to that last vampire that I decided her sacrifice would have to be worth it. I went back to the local town, hooked up with this warrior dude npc that was looking for adventure, and Uthgerd was “replaced” with somone new. I felt kind of bad about it, as she’d been with me since I was literally level one (I was level 11 now). That’s how immersive a game like that can be. I actually felt bad that I left her dead in that lair somewhere across the map. Not a lot of games can really leave you feeling that sense of loss.
And that’s what makes a game great. Or one of the things. It’s not just hacking and slashing that makes a great rpg. It’s losing yourself in that world. It’s when you have a conversation with an npc and then you remember that npc next time you run into him, and you actually have a feeling about that person when you remember the previous encounter (“weren’t you the guy that was a dick to me when I came here last time?“). Those are the sorts of things that evoke a sense of enjoyment when you play a game like this.
Over the years, very few games have ever reached that level of immersion with me. Every Fallout game I’ve ever played has succeeded at this. One of the earliest computer games, Phantasie I and then Wizard’s Crown (both by SSI), did this. Starflight 1 did this for me, where I actually cared about my crewmates on my ship. Each member of my team had a personality, even if the game didn’t advertise that they did (I kind of filled in their personalities just by the amount of time I was playing with them as part of my team). The Ultima series did this as well, to a point. And then games really started to develop complete storylines with characters, like with Neverwinter Nights.
And then things kind of went the wrong direction, where the games started filling in the interaction stories for you. One of the reasons I really didn’t like Dragon Age (by Bioware) was because they went through way too much work to fill in the interaction stories so that I wasn’t experiencing it…I was just watching it. The Witcher felt that way to me as well, almost to the point where I felt I was just clicking random buttons while the game was actually playing through the story.
Which is why a game like this is so welcome to a creative game player. They put in some of the story for you, but in the end, your imagination fills in the rest. And that’s what I consider to be really good storytelling. Sometimes they can do too much, but other times, like Skyrim, they seem to just get it right.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic on an almost daily basis for the last few months, and only recently I stopped playing, focusing now on Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Since playing the latter game, I haven’t signed into SWTOR once. Which brings me to the point of this post, and that’s the realization that I’m probably going to be cancelling my subscription with them soon.
