Month: October 2008

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Near Personal Experience

One thing that is really hard to get with pre-created content (as opposed to procedural, personal content of Spore or most roguelikes) is the feeling that you were given a personal experience. That the personal experience you just received was not ground to dust by the masses and posted about on every guidebook and wiki. It was yours.

Mythic Entertainment came awfully close the other night to giving me this experience in an MMO, and the happening definitely through me for a loop. I was running around Talabecland and grinding out quests for Chapter 11 Chaos, when I stumbled around the huge cathedral-building for the public quest Army of Faith. Off in the distance I saw what I thought was a chaos troll fall to the ground. I had seen no trolls of any kind in Talabecland, and was excited with the prospect of taking down a named mob by myself.

As I ran towards the body I saw an out of the way quest icon on my mini-map. It seemed that the NPC hiding behind one of the cathedral pillars knew about the troll… and a young marauder with “a new pair of boots” that was trying to take the chaos troll down. It all came together, and I ran towards the chaos troll to find another corpse underneath. Lord Tzeentch was full of pride when I took the ‘Liberated’ Boots.

The best part was that I saw the chaos troll die. It made no sense at the time, but I didn’t just come upon a corpse that every other player passing through the zone can see. It felt neat that the event happened for me, even if every other player has the ability to experience the same thing.  I hope I come across more chunks of these near-personal experiences.
–Ravious

Exit Survey

I was reminded recently about exit surveys. When you cancel a subscription, some game companies will ask you why, what was missing, etc. This makes sense to me, although it needs to be in the format “Your account has been canceled. Would you please tell us why you are going?” rather than making it seem like the exit survey is a requirement of the process (or worse, actually making it required).

I was surprised that Warhammer had no such survey, but then…

City of Heroes has a survey that was good but has become particularly inapt over time. There is a section asking if various things would help lure you back. About half the list has been implemented, but the question set remains the same. Nothing says “your feedback is important” quite like a survey that is more than a year out of date.

: Zubon

Are you worried that the upcoming Marvel game will distract Cryptic’s attention from City of Heroes? Yes / No / Undecided (Not an actual question.)

Guild Wars Halloween 2008

For a non-subscription game, Guild Wars has some fantastic holiday-like events that run through the year.  My favorite is by far the Guild Wars Halloween festival ith the runner up being the Dragon Festival.

Two of the cities, Lion’s Arch and Kamadan, are completely outfitted with tombstones, skeletons, and other Halloween-themed graphics. The circle of glowing mushrooms by a 2-story witch’s cauldron is a player-favorite meeting place/ dance zone. Farmers kill thousands of the denizens of Tyria (read: raptor babies) for Halloween candy and absinthe drops.

There are two jewels that make this festival rise above the others. First is the appearance of Mad King Thorn and his candy corn soldiers. The Mad King comes every few hours (this year on October 31) to play a deadly game of Simon Says, and hand out a festival hat. For a game that is often criticized as lacking community, this is a great time to meet hundreds of festival goers in the “persistent” cities.

The second jewel, is the one I am most looking forward to: Costume Brawl. Costume Brawl is a random 5v5 PvP game which is an amalgamation of capture point and deathmatch (it most closely resembles Guild Wars Hero Battles without the Heroes). The catch is that each class has a set skillbar. So if you enter as a Paragon, you will share the same skillbar with every other Paragon on the field. It is a great change of pace in a game where the player’s build can be so critical. This year they are adding a new map to the Costume Brawl game.

It will be another great Guild Wars festival, and I fully recommend dusting off your copy of the subscription-free MMO for the fun-filled weekend.
–Ravious

The Weekend in Warhammer

Is that magnet ability everywhere in tier 4? The Magus and Engineer can get a magnet at level 29, if they put all their mastery points towards it, so you see a bit in tier 3. The magnet, for those who have not seen it, pulls every enemy in 65 feet (“medium range”) to the caster and snares them for 4 seconds. The caster can also hit his AE root immediately, making the snare redundant. 0 casting time with a 20-second cooldown. Have teammates cast AE spells (or location-based AE DoTs before you cast it): 5-10 kills in about 5 seconds. This is awesome if it is on your team. If it is not your team, and the enemy team has two level 30 Magi with the ability… It works through keep walls in open RvR. The only defense is to stay at long range or have high Willpower and hope for a resist.

My Engineer is ~27.5 right now. I get an AE knockback ability at 28, from mastery points, which will only take ~3 hours. I have not had any interesting new abilities except from my mastery tree since level 20, and that one was at 22, so in one sense I am looking forward to that. In another sense, I gave up grinding, so it is a matter of how long it will take me to get around to that. If I am enjoying scenarios, rather than being magnet bait, I could do it in a night. I can get that Electromagnet ability at 29, another 6-10 hours, if I give up my Grenadier tree.

Spam: none.

Mail: I wrote this post while getting items from 4 letters on an alt. According to the State of Game, the mail system was designed to work well as long as very few people used it.

: Zubon

Guild Wars Mission Melting Pot

After a long hiatus from playing GW PvE (before WAR I signed on for some quick PvP action now and then), I decided to jump back in. Specifically, I wanted to try out the much heralded quest chain called Zinn’s Task, which requires players owning all three campaigns to hunt down some rogue golems.  The first thing you need to do to start the quest chain is get a new hero named M.O.X. and the Golem Training Guide.  The Golem Training Guide works as a book, which you open up and read, and you can enter a training mission by further using the book.  This led me to reminisce on all the different mission mechanics Guild Wars used throughout its nearly complete lifetime.

Guild Wars Prophecies gave us the mission mechanic for Guild Wars, where you entered an instanced story event with objectives and a definite endpoint. These were unlike the vanilla MMO quests that occured in a sandbox-style zone (persistent or not). Missions were vignettes of story, objective, and activity where if you failed a restart was required. For Prophecies, the mission had its own outpost to start from and the mission area was completely designed and used only for that mission.

The later products of ArenaNet slowly shifted the mechanics and definition of a “mission.” In Factions, missions were nearly identicaly to Prophecies, but you could return and explore the area later on without having to enter the mission. In Nightfall, the missions started from an NPC in an outpost instead of being outpost-wide, and although some content was gated by mission completion, much of the time you could explore the zone prior to the mission.

The Guild Wars expansion, Eye of the North, had probably the biggest change in mission mechanics, which were nearly the same as Nightfall, except that you couldn’t fail by merely dying and some missions started in explorable areas instead of outposts. If you died you would resurrect at a rez point without the whole mission-story resetting. NPCs were also “unkillable” in that regard (no instant fail from NPC death), but they gained death penalty the same as the players. Then, the Bonus Mission Pack brought us full circle back to Prophecies, where each mission had its own separate zone and if you failed (by dying or an NPC dying) you had to restart completely.

It is interesting how one of their core storytelling mechanics evolved and changed at every step of the way, and leaves the answer wide open as to what Guild War 2’s mission mechanics will be.  Personally, I preferred the Eye of the North style missions the best where there was no insta-fail, but for mission outposts I would prefer something more similar to Prophecies/Factions.—Ravious

Massive Traffic

One complaint about Warhammer has more comments than anything else I have written in months. This must be what it feels like to blog about WoW: people care about the popular games, while I can say anything I want about the lower tiers of games and get three comments.

To make this perfectly general (and have some fun Monday morning excitement), I hereby hate your game. Whatever you are playing, I hate it. Come, rage against me or agree and talk about how much your devs suck. They’re intentionally trying to ruin the game! Because context also sucks, please make up whatever you like about me and use it as an element of your comment.

No, I know what really drives our traffic: Asheron’s Call 2. This will shock some of you, but this post on Asheron’s Call 2 is the most popular thing on the site, rivaling the front page. When it hits 100 comments, I may bake it a cake or something. An AC2 reference in a Warhammer post got more comments than the content of the post itself. This is now the first post in two years in the Asheron’s Call 2 category, and I expect to reap the benefits. Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

: Zubon

Our biggest traffic spikes were driven by sites like Reddit or StumbledUpon, so we added the plug-in you might have noticed.

Warhammer After a Month

The RvR is good. The PvE is unexceptional, not particularly inspired or poor. The classes are fun. The US servers and subscription systems seem fine. Bugs, incomplete features, and imbalances still abound. It is a good game that is improving quickly, but it offers little new to the jaded MMO veteran.

I stand by my earlier opinion that Warhammer was the most ready-to-release Yet Another Fantasy MMORPG out there. I then spent the first week of release ranting that good for a YAFMMORPG is still not good. In the sense of polish, that remains true: the game is missing features so basic I never thought to test for them, some things are imbalanced, and others do not work at all.

But what impresses me most about the release of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is the speed with which Mythic has addressed problems. They are working from a relatively solid base, they have a clear understanding of priorities, and they are addressing problems as they come up. Patches are frequent and meaningful. It is still frequently frustrating to be a first-month player, but Mythic is putting together a game that deserves to compete for your gaming dollar. Assuming you like DikuMUD with graphics.

Continue reading Warhammer After a Month