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A Quick Run Through Dungeon Runners

Dungeon Runners is Diablo II with humor instead of horror. How would you react if Blizzard announced ongoing support for Diablo II, with an update every month or two and a $5 monthly cost?

Dungeon Runners is better than Diablo II. It is colorful and tongue-in-cheek, family-friendly without being Disney. The graphics are large and rendered MMO-style, rather than Diablo’s perma-zoomed-out view. You pick up a variety of WoW-style quests that lead you through a variety of dungeons. The game is classless, so you can learn all the skills from all the trainers. It has much better connectivity than BattleNet. You can play for free with no box cost.

Dungeon Runners is the same as Diablo II. You click on monsters to swing or shoot. The same models keep returning with different colors. Sometimes they will be bosses with glowing auras. The inventory screen even looks the same.

Dungeon Runners is worse than Diablo II. It costs $5/month to use the bank and the best items. The range of abilities is small, with nothing like the necromancer, assassin, or druid. There will not be PvP until the next patch. You can have only one character per account until the next patch (and three thereafter). It has no slotted items or Horadric Cube function.

That is the quick version. I will have more comments over the coming week. I have already sent them $4.99.

: Zubon

A week in the dungeon: day 1 2 3 4 4.5 5 6 7

Ghost towns

What’s up with MMO developers creating isolated cities in their games?

It’s odd. In WoW, we’ve get Darnassus and Silvermoon City both in the middle of nowhere. There’s all this beautiful content that you pretty much never experience unless you’re a newbie, or have to go there for an occasional quest. And on those occasions, it’s a lonely, isolating experience.

It doesn’t seem to be a mistake — after all, this had clearly already happened with Darnassus when Blizzard devided to build Silvermoon out in the boonies. I hear that when the expansion first came out, Silvermoon was teeming with noobs. Now it’s pretty desolate.

I saw the same thing in Asheron’s Call. After the initial release, all player activity coalesced into a few cities. The rest were ghost towns — a bunch of NPC’s hanging out, staring at each other from their storefronts day to day.

Does this happen in most MMO’s, or are these exceptions? Are there reasons I’m missing for not making these cities more centrally located?

Get yer stickyfingers outta my pockets!

Stealing, Thieving, Pickpocketing, Robbing, Breaking and Entering… Should this sort of stuff be allowed in our MMORPGs? There is certainly a nice adrenaline rush to the process of robbing someone blind and getting away with it, but what about the victim? I had a car stolen once and I felt completely violated and helpless. For me though, it wasn’t that my car was stolen, it was that I didn’t know who did it and I couldn’t DO anything about it. All of my anger and venting was towards a ghost.

Anyway…does having these skills and abilities in a MMORPG make it better? If you remove the thieving bits from the classical rogue archetype, is sneaking, backstabbing, and picklock enough? Do they HAVE to be able to steal? I’m not asking about how to implement this, or rules and restrictions to keep things fair or not, but rather what do you think about having it as part of the game to start with?

Stealing, pickpocketing, corpse looting, robbing player homes…you get the idea.

Give me your arguments for or against and any personal anecdotes. Try to look at things from the other point of view as well. Some things are a necessary evil…and others are not at all.

Good news offline

To me, at least, but I suppose it’s also very good news to a few other crazy gamers like me out there.

Apparently, Mafia II is being made. By the same guys, even. Which is pretty much the gaming equivalent of Scorsese waking up one day and saying “Hey, you know what? I think ‘Goodfellas’ needs a part two”. The first one was a superb game, with incredibly yummy storytelling and ambiance. So if you haven’t played it, you can pick it up on the cheap nowadays and it’ll end up right up there in your list of best gaming dollars spent.

I’m a grown gamer, one that handles screenshots with a lot of care, but I’ll be damned if they don’t look good.

Plagueworlds

According to the BBC, scientists are suggesting that the outbreak of a deadly virtual disease might give an insight into the outbreak of epidemics in the real world. In particular, they are invesitgating player reactions to the “Corrupted Blood” plague that took place a couple of years ago.

Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: “Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour. The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game.”

So, next time your partner/parent/child/employer asks how you can be spending so much time playing a stupid game, tell them you’re taking part in a medical experiment.

Three-Sentence Game Reviews

If I am not playing City of Heroes, what have I been playing? A variety of games that each provide a few hours of entertainment. They are not necessarily bad games, just small ones. They might have a neat mechanic, a good idea, or interesting graphics.

The downside of them is usually the pricing issue. A free demo provides about an hour of entertainment, or you can buy all three hours of entertainment for $20. Given the competition, that is not a great pricing model. You can, of course, trade with your friends after you have had your fill.

So let’s flip through some games.

Continue reading Three-Sentence Game Reviews

Everybody dies

If you haven’t played DEFCON yet, you probably should. Can’t go wrong with a 60 megs demo and it’s tons of fun. Well, if you’re into genocide it’s fun (and who isn’t?). It’s from Introversion, the kind folks that made the also quite delicious Uplink a few years back.

If you like it, send them a few bucks. Support basement programming, save the whales, all that.

Let Us Play, Blizzard!

Yesterday I talked about how some friends and I on different servers who wanted to PvP together have had to level characters to 19 on a new server to do so. What’s more, we’re unlikely to ever level together far enough to play AV or Arena.

I suspect I’m not the first person to make the following suggestions. I suspect I’m probably more like the (hundred?) thousandth. But humor me… can someone explain to me why Blizzard erects such huge barriers to PvP participation?

If it were up to me, I’d tweak WoW PvP as follows:

Continue reading Let Us Play, Blizzard!

Heard in Game

Someone was explaining that his new “$5k lol” computer had “duel video cards and cpu.” Comment in global chat: “someone who can’t spell dual properly doesn’t deserve a friggen $5000 PC.”

Response: “hah it was actually spelled properly just not in the right context”
Also: “since when did mmo become grammer class”

The discussion went downhill from there. Being an MMO, people were more irritated with the grammar police than the mostly literate.

: Zubon