The Path Ahead
Every so often I like to browse through the forums at mmorpg.com ... yes, I know it's Trollville, but some subforums are better than others and you quickly see past the sea of trollery to find the core members that are actually intelligent and fun to interact with. Plus, sometimes when I am not in the mood to play it is the only way to really get my MMO fix.
A few days ago, I came across this post: Having an "adventure" again?
Right away I was intrigued, as it hit upon one of the major problems with post-WoW MMORPGs - community. I tend to think that for all my or anyone else's musings on What is Wrong with the design of these games, a lot of it can all come back to the lack of quality community.
Are people who are part of a community that they enjoy and take part in less likely to complain about the little things that irk them in a game? Are they more likely to blow those little things up into huge things?
It seems like I wasn't the only intrigued as the thread quickly became a hot topic and a mere few days later it was featured as a mmorpg.com Community Spotlight. Now there is a Guild Portal site set up for our cause and we are in the process of choosing a game to play.
It seems like a phenomenon I have heard mentioned more than once is that back in the "old days" bugs, exploits and all manner of "game-breaking" issues were rife ... but people put up with them. Most often this accounted for by the assertion that there were far fewer choices of different games, occasionally it is said that we were more "innocent" back then.
Those two assertions may (and at least to some degree are) true. But there could also be another explanation - the general communities were just better.
Sure there were trolls and loud, foul-mouthed children playing back then. But were there as many? Was the signal-to-noise ratio quite the same now that literally millions of new MMORPG players have been introduced to the genre?
It's funny, and maybe I don't get around as much anymore, but it seems like these days you don't hear a fraction of of the complaints about maturity level (quite low) of the Counter Strike community like you might have five years ago. Now you hear the exact same complaints but about it is the World of Warcraft community.
For me personally, I would relate my experience in LOTRO. I subbed on opening day and thought the game was a lot of fun. Except for the fact that the community out of the gate was pretty awful. I was just coming off of playing nothing but WoW for about two years or so (literally, I can't believe how many quality non-WoW games I missed between 2005-2007 that I am still finding out about) and was quite sensitive to anything having to do with player2player interaction. If I could have put the global population on /ignore I would have happily done it.
When I quit LOTRO the straw that broke this camel's back was being chased around Breeland by a player named, and I shitteth thee not, "Iclubbabyseals." I couldn't take it, I unsubbed, uninstalled and didn't look back until almost a year later. And ironically went back to WoW ... there had to be some element of abuse psychology at work there.
If you know me, then you know that I am also a Tolkien nerd and so of course I couldn't stay away. So I resubscribed and made the server Landroval my home (it was/is the unofficial RP server). Lo and behold the experience was amazing. Landroval had (has) one of the best MMORPG communities I have ever experienced in an online game. That is why I am still subscribed even though I rarely play anymore. Even if I am not terribly fond of LOTRO anymore, the exceptional Landroval community keeps me coming back.
So Why do MMORPG Communities Suck?
I really hate being a WoW hater, but as the years are turning the more and more I am convinced that it has had an extremely negative impact not only on the MMORPG genre but on PC gaming in general. I know that is a stretch and it's nothing I am going to stake my life on, but it is worth considering.
To me it seems like the older games were meant to be more like a typical PnP game, where you and your friends hang out for a few hours and have fun battling some orcs, slaying a dragon and saving a princess (or prince) or two. The allure of the MMORPG over the PnP game of course is that the online video game could connect friends living on separate continents and unlike those Saturday afternoon games, MMOs are going 24/7/365.
But if you look at the technological innovations in general, you almost always find that they do not live up to all the promises they make about making life better. So for instance, now the modern worker has more work and obligations and lives a much more harried and less satisfying life than a medieval peasant. Even as productivity of a worker increases, he or she must work even more and continue to be more and more productive. Hey, at least it makes anti-depressant manufacturers big bucks.
Now I'm sure there is a lot of controversy over that example, as there are other factors at play aside from mere technological process (I'm looking at you, you Calvinist bastards), but it illustrates what I think has happened to online video games.
An MMORPG these days seems to be less about casual (not speaking in the current and popular sense of that word) fun and more about working on achieving goals and being productive as a player. And all the focus seems to be on achieving those goals as an individual player - the group only exists to get you as an individual to where you want to be; there are no communal goals. The individual is the only thing that matters; selfishness is a virtue.
Again, I hate the fashionable trend of disparaging WoW simply because it is WoW, but I can't help but feel that World of Warcraft, more than any other individual game, has inculcated this behavior in the greater mass of players.
But these behaviors are not new since WoW, you can see them everyday. Just look around you at the people going into debt for fancy houses and cars, committing every sort of privation on their lives to "make it." To live the corrupted fantasy of a life that currently passes for the American Dream. Greed is good, right? He who dies with the most toys wins.
I think that WoW tapped into these memes and put them into its core design is precisely the reason it is as popular as it is - it addresses the same lusts and character defects in general society inside the game. It has nothing to do with it being "casual" or that it is a game for "non-gamers." The sad thing to me is that it has seemingly has trained a generation of gamer to expect that in all games.
And what is the result? Turn on CNN or Fox News and you see the real-life equivalent of the WoW player. By focusing only on the needs of the individual - to the point of exalting them - the general community has become diseased, like a rotted piece of wood. So you experience phenomena like a large upswing in the troll population - those who resist the unnatural condition of hyper-individualism and try (usually subconsciously) to wreck the system almost always without realizing why (explained as being for the "lulz" or some similar example of infantilized behavior).
You have players who retreat from the community and focus solely on the "solo game." You have the smarter jackals who set up "professional" guilds to make sure they achieve all they can often at the expense of its members and the non-pro guilds whose members will quit at the drop of a hat to be in the pro guild. You have the phenomenon of entitlement - those who think that because someone is not "hard core" they should not have the chance to experience all the game (e.g. endgame raids) has to offer.
Essentially you have all the real-world bullshit we have to put up with, consciously or not, invading one of the last sacred spaces of lackadaisical dreamers of the world. And the community becomes more like the real world in the sense it is fractured, cut-throat and dysfunctional.
So you can see now why I am very interested in this new group of players from mmorpg.com who are banding together to fight both virtual fantasy evil as well as the real evils of misanthropic behavior and alienation. The thing I think we share in common is the same thing that made older MMORPGs so much fun, despite the bugs, lag and other nasty fubars and glitches. We want fulfillment from playing together as a group of people - learning from and enjoying each other. What in today's games seems to have been superseded by achieving goals set by the game developers and the all-important goal (in both PvP as well as PvE) of competing against each other. Maybe The Path Ahead can learn what it is like to have fun again and leave the "work" behind.
Back from the Trollshaws
Well, I just got back from an extended vacation out in the wilds of Northern California. There is really nothing quite like crapping in a bucket and dodging feral pigs out in the wilderness to really bring you back to down to earth.
I also once again personally proved the effectiveness of FPS games as firearm trainers, despite barely ever firing a handgun I was pleasingly accurate. With more real-life practice I could be a fair shot. Thanks, Counter Strike.
The funniest thing was the terrain - I could have sworn up and down I was in the Trollshaws of Eriador. Minus the beech trees and adding madrone, among others of course. The cattle country on the way in also reminded me precisely of the Barrow Downs - if I were going to film a theatrical scene in the Barrow Downs, it would make a really good location.
So for the past few weeks, I have been living without the Internet but with electricity thanks to Honda and their handy generators. So I spent at least some of my off-time playing through Torchlight on my trusty laptop. And I'm still playing it now that I am back. I was never a huge Diablo/Rogue fan, but something in Torchlight really caught me.
Yesterday I logged back in to LOTRO, after roughly a two-month break. I think with the fresh perspective I understand the major drawback that game has for me - quests. WoW-style quests, I mean. I can handle "kill ten rats" to a certain degree, but elaborate quest chains and travel quests friggin' kill me.
On the same topic this is ultimately why I'm not playing Fallen Earth and why I have no plans to do so in the near future. I played through the first 10 levels or so and had my fill of the exact same style of advancement I was (subconsciously) fleeing in basically every other MMORPG I have played. Dealing with quest logs full of largely unrelated quests is enough to turn me off completely to a game these days - regardless whether I can solo them or not.
So for now I am satisfying my MMORPG cravings with DDO, which does not suffer from quite the same problems as the traditional model descended from DikuMUD. I may resubscribe to LOTRO simply out of love for Tolkien and to hang with my Landroval kinship Tirn en Taur. Money is only getting tighter in the coming months, though, so we'll see - fortunately $10/month is doable.
One thing I am still not doing is buying/playing Dragon Age. Which is strange considering that I've been waiting forever for it to come out. Basically it comes down to an EA issue for me. I don't want to be nickel-and-dimed and I especially do not want to be forced into marketing channels like Games For Windows Live. So I am going to wait and see and do more research before I start laying out nearly $100 for a semi-static single-player game I may never even have the time to really play. Oh well.
GAMING ROOOOUNDUPPPP!!!
The older I get, the more and more amazed I am at how time flies. Combined with my penchant for history it is easy to see what people mean when they say tempus fugit.
In the past two weeks I have been doing naught more than usual, with one exception - I decided to give Fallen Earth a shot. Sorry Ryzom, I'm sure I'll return someday (because you are a genuinely good game) but there is just too much going on right now. On top of Fallen Earth, Torchlight is coming out in 10 days and Dragon Age not long after that. And of course, most of my free time is being spent working on my own RPG project, WOTAN.
Fallen Earth
What can I say? If I was going to spend $50 on an MMO I should have got Darkfall. Seriously, though, Fallen Earth is a great game so far despite its warts. I am currently level 9 and doing my obsessive compulsive rounds of all the starter towns looking for the bonus AP missions. If you are not familiar with FE, that is I am trying to complete all the missions (quests) that award bonus skill points which are used to raise my character's skills.
FE has no classes, only skills, and so far that is my favorite aspect of the game. It is a marvelous antidote to the cookie-cutter EQ/WoW/etc. model where customization is done secondarily through "talents" or "traits" or whatever semi-arbitrary label they are assigned. I am focusing predominantly on crafting, which basically means I am by default a melee character, as melee and crafting have stats that overlap the best.
And that is fine with me as future wasteland ninja. Or, well, maybe. I am already fidgeting around with the cancel subscription button. But it is not because of any problem I have with the game, though the game does need some work - in my opinion it should have a more advanced economy, free-for-all zones like EVE's 0.0 space and there are lots of glitchy little bugs that need to be squashed.
But I, perhaps oddly, am not worried about any of those things. So far Icarus has been one of the more communicative studios I have seen, even going so far as to have a GM active on their global help chat channel all hours of the day. Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where that was considered normal? I also like that at least one more game has come out that isn't a generic class-based themepark grinder.
This is going to likely be the only time you ever see me mention the game Aion on this site. I don't bear it any animosity, but I also have absolutely zero interest in that game. It is practically by definition a themepark grinder. I have no desire to even participate in a free trial of that game, were it available.
This is maybe why even though I am not sure FE will hold my fickle and buffeted-from-all-sides attention, I have no regret at least giving it a shot. If the Aion bug had crawled up my butt, I think I would be singing a different tune, however.
Torchlight
I am not a huge ARPG fan, but when the 'ol repetitive-stress-injury isn't agonizingly inflamed I enjoy a little Diablo/Titan Quest action. Of course my tendons are soon fire within minutes reminding me why I play those games only very rarely.
Tennis elbow aside, I was really, really, really looking forward to Mythos. So much so I was practically on an Internet candle-light vigil trying to get into the beta. Of course, that game was canceled around the same time flagshipped became a verb. So it wasn't meant to be.
Now imagine my joy at hearing about Torchlight, which is essentially Mythos reborn. And it's a single-player game priced under $20? I am so on this it isn't even funny, to use a favored turn-of-phrase of an adolescent Fortuente. If you read the link, apparently the Torchlight single-player will also be released with full modding tools intact.
Dragon Age
I have considered this a must-buy for quite some time now. Like since 2003. That said, the more I have been thinking about it, the stronger I feel that I am actually going to take a pass on this one for now.
WHAT?!? YOU ARE GOING TO MISS OUT ON THE BIGGEST FANTASY RPG GANGBANG SINCE BALDUR'S GATE 2????
Yes, I actually am. I have my reasons, and they all revolve around perception.
Perception 1: Money. It's expensive. Is it going to break my bank? No, but is $60 still a sizeable chunk when I am already throwing around $20 here and $30 there and even that $50 on Fallen Earth? Yes. It is going to be Christmas soon, after all and I have a child as well as utility bills.
Perception 2: Electronic Arts. Do I really need to elaborate on this? Bioware may be good 'ol same as always (which is doubtful regardless as both they and the industry have grown a lot in the past 12-odd years), but it's a simple fact that they are now an EA brand. And EA is on a weekend bender of a downloadable-content binge the likes of which might make Charles Bukowski proud.
Which means probably having to deal with some sort of asinine EA download manager or even having to use the wretched EA online store. No thanks.
So I am adopting a wait-and-see approach, perhaps even a wait-and-yarrr approach if I have the extra time. If I yo-ho-ho and the game turns out to be a genuine work of genius, I would probably feel compelled to fork over the cash out of respect, even if I continued to use the swashbuckled edition. More than likely, I will probably just pass until it has been out a few months or so.
DDO
OK. I had some issues with DDO. Namely, the Turbine customer service department could not service their way out of a wet paper bag. Or something like that. Whatever the reason, be it drastic overwork, incompetent management, utter lack of morale, plain laziness or all those things (can you tell I have worked in customer service in the past?), they are not getting the job done.
Basically I had a ticket on hold for about a month. All I wanted was for the points I purchased during the summer beta to be applied to my original account. I mean, really. No response for a month. If it wasn't for my increasingly incessant bitching, I can guarantee you I would still be waiting.
In true comedic fashion, the first time they "resolved" this issue also, I was not awarded the points I paid for but rather a large number of points - for being a founder account or somesuch reason - which I had no idea I was entitled to. Alas, in my hasty reply was elicited the mighty F-bomb. However I am confident the reason my actual purchased store points were alotted to my account was due to my having the original transaction IDs. PayPal +1.
All of that being said, it is partly DDO's fault I am considering leaving Fallen Earth. Damn Dungeons and Dragons with your complex, gamist character system, marvelously atmospheric dungeons and interesting, semi-twitch combat.
Wait, Fallen Earth has all of that too (after some fashion)! Oh the conflicting emotions! Wait, no. Fallen Earth has a $15/month subscription and DDO no longer does. I guess we have found out together the mystery of why I'm willing to cast Fallen Earth to the side though I basically enjoy it.
Grand Ages Rome
Ah, City Builders, my true (and truly nerdy) love.
Grand Ages Rome continues to prove itself to me as an interesting side-track from the traditional city-builder formula while still keeping a lot of that formula intact. The thing I enjoy the most by far is the horde-less resource system. What I mean is that the lack of warehouse or stockpile which is in virtually every historic city builder, at least every one I can name off the top of my head.
Managing resources as a streaming figure changes the game up in a refreshing way, though it's not necessarily something I would studios other than Haemimont try to copy. Because I do find myself missing the need to manage roads and resource transportation. But it's OK.
I never mentioned it before, but I play the game at the highest graphic settings and the textures they use are friggin' exquisite. I sat with my three year-old today for a while zoomed in on the city I was working on (Cyrene free-build). I invented dialogue and little stories to go with the various citizens going about their virtual lives and he ate it up.
LOTRO
I basically unsubscribed in a fit of pique relating to the DDO debacle related above. I thought I had uninstalled it as well, but it was still on my computer. Strange, as I am certain I didn't imagine that. Perhaps Gandalf snuck into my interwebs.
I am not sure what my future with LOTRO holds. On one hand I am not excited with the themepark structure of the game - and increasingly so - and I am just not of the mind with all this subscription stuff. In addition, I am yet more fearful of the potential introduction of a "LOTRO Store." While I think the RMT business model naturally works out well in DDO, I really do not think it would work in LOTRO (or many other games like LOTRO).
I'm also not terribly taken with the idea of the Adventurer's Pack. It bears the hallmark of crappy marketing. Plus the Mirkwood "expansion" sounds thoroughly underwhelming. But that is all my opinion. More objectively speaking, they are doing what they have always done which is to make WoW for a different crowd. They did it well and I have no doubt Mirkwood will continue that trend.
I myself am just past that style of game for the most part. Of course this saddens me a bit, because I have a really big boner for J.R.R. Tolkien just like any other fantasy nerd with plastic pointy ears. More internal conflict ... all these emotions over ridiculously abstract things like online video games. Well, no matter. My subscription runs out on December 18th, so we shall have to see what the next two months hold in store for yours truly.
That sounded ominous for some reason.
Blogs I Read
- Brian Psychochild Green
- Combat Archaeology
- Elder Game
- Hardcore Casual
- Kill Ten Rats
- Killed In A Smiling Accident
- LOTRO Combo Blog
- Open Bracket
- OSG1 – Online Strategy Games
- Pumping Irony
- Ralph Koster
- Stylish Corpse
- The Core Mechanic
- Tish Tosh Tesh
- Troll in the Corner
Browser Games I Play
Fortuente Pages
Game Sites I Like
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