Month: December 2009

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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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The Ultimate Sandbox MMO

What if I told you there’s a MMO that had the following features:

  • Open-world player housing with the best decoration system of any MMO ever made.
  • A crafting system more powerful and advanced than any MMO out there
  • Player run stores and casinos
  • Player run economy
  • The ability to stream music from internet radio stations directly into the game to play at your player-run dance clubs
  • Mature areas where kiddies are not allowed to hang out.
  • A game where over 40% of the player base is female. (as opposed to 19% in WOW)
  • No Level Grinding.
  • No Loot Camping
  • Free to download and play
  • No Monthly fee unless you purchase land

    • What would you say?
    Continue reading The Ultimate Sandbox MMO

    Muscle March

    I don’t know that I can top Woot’s description: “All I want for Christmas is some frantic digital homoeroticism.” You know, the MMO blogosphere was burning up all week with discussion of solo versus group and instances versus shared worlds and all kinds of things. Here we have a small group game that is certainly not set in ersatz Tolkien-land. If playing Rock Band feels a bit awkward for you, why not Muscle March at your next (office?) party?

    : Zubon

    A Request From Your Fellow LotRO Players

    Please run a few skirmishes solo. Please read the little page the tutorial gave you about traiting your soldier.

    We are all very excited about the new toy, and I understand that you want to jump right in with the skirmishes. And big groups are better, right? But when we have a full raid and two-thirds of the soldiers are fresh from the tutorial, those are effectively level 30-40 players in our level 60+ group. That is not a problem on the normal fights, but for anything hard, you’ll notice that the raid is getting crushed.

    This is an issue that will work itself out in a few weeks. You can help work it out faster by doing your part. Thank you.

    : Zubon

    Three Truths…

    Three truths have become false this week:

    1) I hold a very principled stance firmly against the Micro Transaction based MMO business model.   It is the root of all MMO evil et. cetera…

    2) I have played DDO, and it sucks.  It was crappy in Beta and it never improved.   Poor implementation of some decent concepts, coupled with extensive poor choices for the balance of the design, resulted in an overall dry and uninspired game with little good to write about and quite a bit bad.   DDO is doomed to fail, and will never recover.   Period.  De Facto and all that…

    3) I have become so disillusioned with MMOs in general, and the diku model in particular, that I am doomed to watch reruns of Two and a Half Men and Mash for the rest of my life.   Until I die.  Old and bored…

    Continue reading Three Truths…

    City of Skirmishes

    I know that I see everything through the prism of City of Heroes lately, but can you look at the new LotRO skirmishes and NOT see City of Heroes missions? City of Heroes was not the first to make the randomized, instanced content on a standard template, but I think they did it most whole-heartedly, and I am going with this because it is the one I know best.

    Skirmishes are instanced quests that have a standard template with some randomized elements. They are a series of encounters that you could think of as fight units. One unit of combat for a solo character is two normal enemies or one normal and two swarm-class. Scale that up for larger groups as you add signatures, elites, and more of them. You select these enemies from a standard menu, say a dozen groups and a few enemy variations in each group, attaching a prefix to designate how tough each one is. So your first fight is against one hale wolf and two weak wolves, then two hale bandit captains, then one hale bandit captain and one hale bandit archer, etc. The skirmish sends random fight units against you until it reaches the appropriate number of them for that fight, then sends the boss.

    Continue reading City of Skirmishes

    Guild Wars 2 Trailer – Take Two (Races)

    And now on a lighter, less philosophical note, ArenaNet has just released a second trailer for Guild Wars 2 on the Races of Tyria!  Such a beautiful thing (HD link).  What a great treat right before the weekend.  I really like the mechani-Spartan Charr, but all the races seem very cool.  In other games, there are definitely ones that feel less cool.  Cold, if you will.  This game might make me a racial altoholic, in the best sense.

    –Ravious
    most adaptable to change

    EDIT: Oh, and Felicia Day voices Zojja the Asuran. That’s pretty cool. I like their voice actors.

    Get Your Party Off Of My MMO

    It seems that a recent Bioware interview for Star Wars: The Old Republic has caused quite a stir of echoes about allowing people to play the MMO solo.  It’s not too hard to stereotype the two camps.  On one hand we have Keen, a single male in college, and Tobold, who is sure to let readers know that he has plenty of liesurely time as he and his lady don’t have kids.  On the other hand we have the hardcore father-blogger-student-worker Syp, whose time is precious.  I fall in Syp’s crowd because my game time is very precious, and I agree with his assessment the most. Continue reading Get Your Party Off Of My MMO

    Dungeon Love

    I am addicted to Dungeons and Dragons Online.  There, I said it.  Even with Siege of Mirkwood just having launched, I want to play more quick hits of Dungeons and Dragons Online.  Last night I chose to spend the 20 minutes I had to murder a tribe of kobolds rather than log in to Lord of the Rings Online for a skirmish or so.  For me, that’s the beauty of Dungeons and Dragons Online: quick flavorful bites of MMO play.

    Continue reading Dungeon Love

    Super-Sidekicking

    Phedre reminded me that City of Heroes continues to be far more awesome than whatever it is the rest of us are playing, not only having five years of experience with features that too few games are stealing, but also continuing to create solutions to problems in the basic MMO model that work.

    Issue 16 added “Super-Sidekicking.” You are probably familiar with City of Heroes as the trend-setter that has driven other games to implement some version of side-kicking: let one player function as if he were the same level as his friend, keeping his current suite of abilities but with level-appropriate numbers attached. City of Heroes has taken this to the next level: everyone on the team is now always the same level. Levels are no longer any barrier to playing with your friends. Join up, pick a mission, and you are all the right level for that mission. This also solves the old problem of power-leveling, because you cannot soak up experience at the minimum level: you are now the same level as everyone else, so might as well pitch in. Your level 2 character still has just the few powers with no enhancements, but your base numbers are just as good as the big boys, or you can get them to all visit your level for some newbie missions.

    The particulars of this solution are tied to CoH’s heavily instanced structure, which makes this function more easily. Still, very few MMOs have no instancing these days, and there must be something more your game could be doing to bring you closer to where your friends are playing. The next step for Turbine’s new skirmishes?

    : Zubon