I sometimes get a bit listless; the regular games, through no specific fault of their own, sometimes pall. Its a momentary thing usually, and most Normal People tend to go outside for some fresh air at this point. Me? I hit the free-trial circuit instead and just find a different slant on the same ongoing obsession.
Anyway, after reading this article a little while back:
Massively: First Impressions: Last Chaos
...and deciding that "Yes! I would really prefer to run through this dungeon in a leather miniskirt and some fishnet stockings!", I downloaded it and gave it a go. On reflection, I'm rather glad I did because its been ages since I had a really good rant, and I do worry old-age is bringing me a certain sense of tranquility and calm, which while good for blood pressure, can really hamper MMO blogging.
Despite being free, I'll go with the old Op. Cheapseats format, because I'm all about recycling here!
Last Chaos is available as part of the Aeria Games network, which you can sign up for free here:
Aeria Games
Once a member, which appears to want no credit card info, you can then navigate their rather busy website and download any of their games, of which Last Chaos is one. Payment is entirely microtrasnaction based, and done by paying roughly one U.S. Cent per 'Aeria Point', which you can then spend using special windows built into the UI of their games. This seems entirely optional, at first glance anyway...
In the Land of Medieval-topia, in the City of Trope, a Great Evil of Indeterminate Nature has probably arisen or something! Fortunately, Trope is home to an itinerant and large population of, like, adventures and stuff! Incapable of the skills necessary to land productive jobs in Investment Banking or Central Heating Installation, our brave Heroes pick up sticks and magic missiles and things, and set out to Do Battle! I expect!
I'm sorry... it probably does have a plot, but I couldn't find it. I must admit, I didn't look very hard though. You pick from a staggering list of SIX whole classes, each of one gender each, with almost four different faces and more than two hairstyles, and then are dropped in a tutorial dungeon containing nearly three rooms, and a corridor with a bend in it! There are also zombies! Adventure awaits!
Three Bad Things
- Primitive:
While the character models aren't actually awful, (just excruciatingly limited), much of the rest of the game world is, and resembles the kinds of dizzying graphical delights seen on launch-day Asheron's Call...ONE! The city buildings are decidedly cardboard-looking and generic, but not in that cute World of Warcraft way, and once outside, the surrounding world is essentially a slightly bumpy and most unbroken expanse of ropey mid-res grass texture, relieved only by the very occasional low-poly tree, and an inexplicably large assortment of mostly static animals and monsters.
At one point, I fell in what looked roughly like a river. I must have been mistaken however, as I simply carried on walking along the bottom, unconcerned about trivialities like oxygen. It didn't even do that blue fog thing; the Universal Gaming Signal for Being Underwater! I can only conclude that this game is actually fifteen years old and that I'd just never heard of it before, which is entirely possible, I guess. It also does not support wide-screen aspect ratios, which was annoying.
- Unbalanced:
I started life at level four, (for some reason I was never quite able to work out), with enough skill points to completely max out my starting Magic Missile skill, (once I'd worked out where the skill trainer was; they don't just advertise you know!) This seemed a quite powerful attack, and progressively testing it against more and more powerful monsters eventually had me delivering a fairly efficient and consistently repeatable arcane smackdown on these werewolf things twenty-four levels higher than me, by the simple expedient of Moving Away whenever they Moved Toward Me. I'm not sure if this game's designers had actually encountered the concept of Kiting before. Perhaps I just got lucky and accidentally picked on the one mob with no spell resistance, ranged attacks or movement debuffs; who can say?
On the other hand, upon dinging level five (w00t!), I was told that I was now eligible for my first 'Personal Dungeon' (a.k.a. Instance), a feature they seem inordinately proud of having thought up. I headed in, mostly to relieve the monotony of outdoor hunting, to be dumped in a room which looked identical to the initial tutorial place, only this time had an epic cut-scene of almost Guild Wars-esque proportions, consisting of just having the camera fly down the Corridor With A Bend In It, a little way. Tension mounts! I entered said corridor, mind filled with burning questions. Who is this mysterious flying cameraman? What is he looking for? Haven't I already cleared this Corridor With A Bend In It out in the tutorial? Turns out the answer to that last one is 'No',and I was immediately mobbed by six undead, ranging up to level 12. Group content I guess? No place for a Level 5 anyway, no matter how powerful my Magic Missile! God only knows what trying any of this as a 'Healer' class is like - I couldn't face trying any of it a second time through!
- Engrish:
I've nothing against Foreigners, you understand; some of my best friends aren't British, and they seem to lead full and rich lives, despite this crippling disability! But for the love...of...god... if you're going to try and sell a game with text in it, to the US/UK market, have at least one native speaker take a look at the quest text before you go gold! Its not rocket science, and while English grammar and spelling is apparently one of the harder and less logical things to pick up as a second language, I'm sure that having, say, a pretentiously verbose blogger, for example, do a 'second pass' on the translation, (for a very reasonable and no-questions-asked cash-in-hand remuneration!) would do wonders to preserve what little immersion exists in the game.
I mean I'm not even talking 'their' and 'they're' stuff here, or spelling Colour incorrectly, or 'it's' and 'its', (One I must admit being crap at myself!), although those kinds of slip do detract from the professionalism of a finished product. No, I found it quite hard work making meaningful and whole sentences out of the quest journal much of the time, and while worth a giggle initially, it soon gets irritating, and unlike something like WoW, where people just look for 'Kill' and 'Ten Rats' in the fluff and ignore the rest, out of laziness, here, its about the only way to get any sense out it.
It isn't as if it would be that big a job either; I only found two quest givers in the entire city.
Three MORE Bad Things:
- Stupid:
Such monsters that do exist are equipped with a pitifully inadequate AI. No linked/social aggro, proximity aggro of less than five feet in many cases, and they seem to have almost nothing in the way of special attacks or abilities. You just get near one, it turns and shuffles toward you, you wave arms at each other and eventually one of you dies, (Or you just kite the bejeesus out of them, at first giggling like a manic, and then after a while, almost crying in sympathy for the wretched thing.)
The monsters don't interact with each other in the slightest, as seen in the starting area where werewolves, wolves and foxes and deer live in apparent harmony, and while in all games there is a hidden understanding that monsters merely exist to cause fights and Adventure, nowhere is it more apparent than here, and these 'creatures' really are little more than mobile bags of improvement. They're not even especially mobile, thinking about it.
I only (ha!) fought monsters up of levels up to about thirty or so - its possible things get more elaborate further in - I couldn't say, or indeed, muster the will to find out.
- Grind:
Covered comprehensively in the Massively piece above, I can only agree. The thought of kiting werewolves over and over for the next four months gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. With this in mind, I went looking, as I do when the grind hits in any game, for Alternative Gameplay. (This process generally does not happen in my first, and as it turned out, only, session!)
There seems to be a rather involved, and quite expensive crafting side to the game, most of which hinges on harvesting resources from static ground nodes; Power Crystals, Shrubberies and the like, with expensive tools. I gave it a go on the crystals, harvesting chunks of Theta Wave Energy ("Kirk to Enterprise; Bollocks Sci-Fi Jargon Detected!"), and also some Yellow Leaf Herb things, or whatever they hell it was. Trouble is, unlike WoW, the nodes are permanently in place, and in reality, your haul is determined by a quite low percentage success dice-roll carried out every minute or so, leading to some very surreal scenes where several adventurers of varying types all standing stock still in a small fenced garden plot of 'Magic Herbs', silent but for the occasional rustling leaf sound effect. Meanwhile, a L15 Werewolf stands not ten feet away, ignoring us totally, probably out of an awkward, sympathetic and embarrassed awareness of the farce of it all.
Suffice to say that harvesting in Last Chaos makes Asteroid Mining in EVE Online look like a Snort-All-You-Can Buffet on Blackjack Night in a Strip Club with no 'No-Touching Rule'.
Apparently there is a dragon pet in there somewhere, but Reptilian Husbandry is a poor substitute of Engaging Gameplay, and anyway, I never saw one of the eggs you need to get started on all that.
Perhaps the most entertaining (this is still all relative, mind you) thing I came across was the slot machine Shrine of the Moon; architecturally the hub of the City of Trope. Sometimes, if you're really lucky, a recently butchered fox will drop a Moonstone, which can then be used in this shine as a token, which will let you press Start! and watch as a series of icons shuffle. If some of them match, (or something - the win-line combos were never made clear), you get a potion or other consumable, most of which I never worked out what did. The icons were quite pretty though, I guess!
- AFK:
In matters of inter-player economics, Last Chaos has opted for the 'Player Avatar as AFK Merchant' mechanic, a ridiculous idea that encourages wasted electricity, and the eventual destruction of the planet Earth thereby. If I knew what the antonym of Nifty! was, I'd start a new series, and this pathetic excuse for a mechanic would be #1. I first saw this in EQ1 (Luclin Bazaar), and hated it with a vehemence usually reserved for TV Talent Shows even then. EQ2 started with it too, but then at some point thought 'Hang on, this is a stupid idea, worthy of hatred reserved only for TV Talent Shows!', and put in a proper auction house broker system, like what WoW (and all other sane and right-thinking games) uses.
Basically, you put a load of loot in a separate part of your inventory, set some prices for it, go to The Selling Place, sit down, toggle 'Merchant Mode' on, then go down the pub/to bed/to saw your own head off. You then become effectively, an NPC merchant, with similar functionality. All very creepy as a customer too - the lights are on, but is anyone actually at home, peering at you as you rummage through their overpriced junkloot?
In this case The Selling Place is also the central plaza of Trope, which also has all the trainers and the slot machine on it, and....genius!....is the place where new players arrive for the first time after the tutorial instance thing. This almost killed my PC outright, as it seized up for the requisite three minutes it took to render all the AFK merchant-players, with accompanying wall of hover-text shop 'signs' so dense that I had trouble seeing one side of the plaza form the other. Probably trod on a lot of people lagging my way out of there to the city exit. Good.
My main problem with this crappy excuse for a mechanic is that unlike a more rational and sane Auction House variant, all these players still have to be connected, consuming vital bandwidth at the server end, even though they aren't actually playing in the slightest. It also looks a mess! Astonishingly, the game seems to have about fifteen servers, although I have no idea why. Perhaps simply to accommodate such a stunning amount of people logged in, but not actually there?
All in all, it was a funny few hours, although almost certainly not in any way the game's designers intended. It was also refreshing to have the opportunity to get really cross at something again. I'm generally far too mellow these days.
While an Aeria game in name, I gather that they are more in the line of importing MMOs, most likely from the far east, to the US/EU market, so this travesty of an online game is probably not entirely their fault, per se, but it is quite difficult to find out who is actually responsible for it; development and initial design-wise. Even Mobygames hasn't heard of it before.
A sterling testament to the importance of the quality of the newbie experience, and the first two hours of gameplay, and an experience I stumbled away from thinking 'Come back Project Entropia, all is forgiven!' While the allure of fishnets and leather miniskirts is strong indeed, those kinds of urges are far better catered for by Second Life™©®³ª^@έњⁿ, which despite having no gameplay at all, still does a better job of it than this nightmare of a MMO.
(No, really...look for 'Dark Life', if it still exists - an admittedly quite clunky, but surprisingly functional MMO, built inside SL™©®³ª^@έњⁿ itself.)
Final Verdict: You really do get what you pay for!
Ahh...catharsis... I feel cleansed! But don't despair, because morbidly curious as to whether all their games are quite so awful, I also tried out Aeria's 'Shaiya: Light and Darkness', and was pleasantly surprised, finding a game quite worthy of actually being taken seriously! More on that another time!
(Also, is it just me, or...
Separated at birth?)
Going to be one of those Nifty! bits where I'm in the minority this time, I think. The Age of Conan approacheth, and all up and down the Interwebs, fierce battles are being waged as we speak, with the Fanbois and Haters out in full force, all pitching in with their "Reasons Why I Think You Should/Shouldn't Buy Age of Conan", come May 20th. Quite emotive stuff in many cases, and Crom would be proud of the verbal bloodshed being carried out in his name. Me? I'm more ambivalent, and anyway, as a mater of principle, never touch any MMO, no matter how good or bad, until at least four months have passed since launch-day. Listeners to the podcast will have already heard me rambling about why that is, so I'll say no more.
But the debates and viewpoints themselves are fascinating, even if I have no first-hand experience of the matters of which they speak. One particular battleground upon which many mighty posting and commenting deeds are carried out, appears to be the matter of multple-key combos, and their importance to the game, and the basic business of actually swinging an axe at some poor monster's head, which sounds like its to be something a little more than merely standing next to the monster, pressing 'A' and watching your little Barbarian wave his arms up and down until the nemesis dies from deadly mime skills.
The matter of Player Skill looks to be being tested again with AoC's new approach to MMO Melee; Lern2Play indeed. How much skill should be expected of us in our pastimes? How much do we want to have to put in? Questions with as many answers as there are MMO gamers, I expect. My own answer is probably something like "A different amount, and different type, in every game I play," (only less pretentious!) After all, it would be a poor state of affairs if all the games I play asked exactly the same things from me; I'd only ever need one game! One game in particular I remember with fondness, for the sheer uniqueness of the demands it placed on me:
Nifty! #8; Planetside's Cone of Fire System
Launching in 2003, Planetside was, and indeed still is, an odd duck. It was a brave attempt to bring the fast-paced action gameplay of the traditional single-player and LAN-Deathmatch First Person Shooter, and the large-scale community and persistence of the MMO, together in one single game. So quirky was this concept that even today, Planetside exists in its own genre, (of one); the 'MMOFPS'. A rather experimental game, the above merging of concepts must have presented a number of technical challenges, sufficient to have put anyone else off trying a similar endeavour since, with any real enthusiasm.
It also presented us, the players, with a much more gritty, and perhaps fairer, approach to the traditional Deathmatch. I remember a brief spell of office-based LAN gaming, back in the day, and Alien Vs Predator 2 became our game of choice for a while. In that game, like many others of its type, the guns were just point and click, and I spent quite a while doing much better than I ought, by the simple expedient of using the sniper rifle as a shotgun, only with a vast range and insta-kill hits. Literally running around, firing from the hip and not even bothering with the scope, one-shoting humans, aliens and predators alike. I'm not bragging, you understand - it was cheap, easy-mode and almost entirely not how I imagine a real sniper rifle would work.
Most FPS games have a similar weapon; some kind of rifle, laser, railgun, or other high-powered, very low rate-of-fire, but very high damage-per-shot type of weapon, usually with a near-instant travel-time and flat trajectory, whose only real balancing factor is that if you miss with the first shot, you're in trouble while it reloads. If then, you never miss, you become invincible, and to be seen at all, is to die instantly.
I've no problem with that as a gamestyle, of course. If that's you, well done! But it is quite ruthlessly Darwinian, and eventually, it becomes a game only about the sniper rifle, and that was clearly not what SOE had in mind for Planetside; a large-scale combined arms war, rather than the "blink and you'll die" four-player duelling in an abandoned warehouse somewhere, of the FPS that had gone before.
So to help inject a touch of realism to it all, and at the same time, give us MMO Munckins, who aren't Counterstrike Grandmasters a fighting chance, they went with their Cone of Fire System.
With a gun equipped, the HUD reticule gains a crosshair. The outer marks of this move in and out in response to various conditions, actions, and equipped weapon types, and these mark out the edges of a cone. When the shot is fired, it will fly out randomly somewhere inside that cone. If part the enemy is inside that cone, (which looks like a circle to you), it might hit him. If the entire circle is filled with the enemy's body, you will hit him for sure. Things like taking damage and being on the move made the circle larger, and things like using a rifle instead of a shotgun, standing still, or crouching, made the circle smaller, effectively simulating things like concentration, stability and helping make the weapons all quite situationally different to each other.
Planetside's sniper rifle; the Bolt Driver, had the most floatey circle in the game, requiring you to be crouched, zoomed in, and not to move at all, to get the best accuracy. Even something like turning a few degrees left to follow a target in the scope, would cause the circle to flare up and require utter stillness for it to settle again. And even after all that, it still took two shots to kill a full health enemy outright. Instakill Distance Weapons are especially galling in PvP, I think, as they offer no positive action for the victim. In other words, you're being punished simply for being there at all, and not provided any opportunity to exercise any kind of personal skills of your own in your own defence. With PS's two-shot sniper rifle, you at least get the chance to leg it for cover after the first one hits, and with the floatey reticule, above, being on the run makes it very hard for the distant speck of a sniper to actually make that second shot land.
Skill still plays a significant part, of course, and the really good snipers understand their weapon enough to be able to still land that second hit on a wounded enemy going sideways at a sprint. I used to be able to do it myself, once, but it took a while to learn, and I doubt I could do it anymore. Meanwhile, I've often been killed by standard rifle users because of the Cone of Fire. I'd land the first hit, and then while reloading and waiting for the circle to contract a second time, their shorter range and less powerful gun has zeroed-in much faster and now they're hitting me; not for a lot per shot, but enough to make my own accuracy fly out the window, and while my desperate shots are going all over the place, he's steadily whittling me away and kills me.
I liked it, but I'm not sure a vast number of other people did, and I suspect one of the reasons for Planetside's lack of huge success is a result of trying to please too many people. On the one hand, the traditional MMO player is just not used to dying that much, which can be dispiriting. They're also not used to having so much dexterity based learning put in front of them, coming from a genre which is generally a lot more about Theorycraft and Timers. It can be a lot to learn, and requires a lot more practice than most MMOs to get good at, and stay good at. On the other hand, the FPS crowd must have found the Cone of Fire quite hobbling; an artificial mechanism aimed at clipping their rocket-jumping head-shotting wings somewhat. (Also, $X/month, when Counterstrike is free? WTF!?)
I was perhaps one of the few people who found it a good compromise between the genres, and a way to make various different guns useful for various different situations. Specialising in a particular weapon helped dictate where I should be in the overall engagements in progress, and helped me find a useful purpose in the average base assault or defence. Seeing a massive push on a base, with air, tanks, power armours, and scores of troopers all moving in, was a heady sight, but often a confusing one, and knowing my own gun, and how it worked differently to others, helped me find a place in it all. (Typically, hiding behind a rock on a ridge, half a mile away!)
Other MMOs continually flirt with the addition of twitch-based skills to the more traditional dice-rolling of our genre, and it sometimes seems that a move to something more Planetside-like is an eventual inevitability for our MMO future, and perhaps when people talk of 'Evolution in MMOs', it is exactly this kind of thing that they mean? If so, that does make Planetside extremely ahead of it's time, for a 2003 game. It does seem quite a difficult thing to make stick though, to gain acceptance.
Neocron and Tabula Rasa both require some degree FPS skills to do well at, although neither is quite the roaring success of the more usual mainstays of MMO; the WoWs, the EQs, the LotRs, and there will always be popular and successful MMOs of the more recognised sort, with their stats and dicerolls and timers. A fair bit of the current AoC fuss seems to be about this very thing, but I think there is room for both types of game.
As for the Cone of Fire itself, I've no idea if this kind of mechanic exists in the modern day Offline/Peer-to-Peer FPS PC or Console title as well, but Tabula Rasa has a limited similar kind of thing, which is very noticeable with the Rocket Launcher in particular. Upon targeting a monster, you do need to hold your horses until the little reticule closes in fully, for best damage, while a Rifle does this much quicker, and a Shotgun doesn't need to do it at all. The upcoming Huxley seems to be a game designed along similar lines to the mechanics of Planetside, so perhaps the Cone will live on there too. Neocron also requires a bit of patience to get the best shot, in a similar manner, and perhaps this kind of implementation is about the only way FPS can be made to work with 200+ players all going at it at once in close proximity?
So anyway, for levelling the playing-field a bit by making everyone Lern2Play again, and adding a touch of realism to our rocket launchers, Planetside's Cone of Fire; Nifty!
Planetside is still going, just about, although is far from a massive success at present (see previous post). It doesn't seem to be offering any free trials in the accepted sense just now, but apparently, if you just download the thing and install anyway, it'll give you the option of a 14-day trial, during signup. It will want to see some Credit Card details though!
Past players can currently play for free, until May 21st - just reinstall and go, although you're likely to already know about the Cone of Fire thing by now!
The Cone of Fire system is evident throughout the game, in almost all the weapons, although for an exaggerated look at what it does and how it works, I'd recommend certing Medium Assault, and then Sniping, and the comparing how your Empire's MA Weapon (Cycler/Gauss/Pulsar) and the Sweeper shotgun handle in comparison to the Bolt Driver. Use the VR shooting range for this!
Bringing you the Planetside news that no-one else can be bothered to, I found this in my inbox just now:
Greetings Soldiers of Auraxis!
With the goal of maintaining a high level of battle between the three Empires of PlanetSide, the two North American servers, Markov and Emerald, will be merged into one server, Gemini, on May 20, 2008.
Starting today, as a part of a select group of past PlanetSide players, you will be able to log in for free until May 21, 2008.
Preserve your Legacy! After the merge, many character names will be duplicated and priority will be given to players who have logged in most recently and to those who created their names first. (See below for name change details.)
As an added bonus, special merits will be given to native Markov and Emerald players to represent your loyalty to your past server. Characters will receive their merits upon logging into Gemini for the first time after the server merger is complete.
If you haven’t played in a while come check out what’s new in PlanetSide! Experience elevated battles and more competitive play!
[plus more about renaming specifics...]
No mention of Werner (The EU Server) up there, but that'll be next I imagine. Planetside is a game where ping actually matters a damn, so forcing all the EU folks to suck up an average additional 100ms will probably kill off Werner for good. This move brings the game down to two servers, out of an original five, and given the typical duplicate name troubles this kind of thing can cause, they're giving past players a chance to pop back in for free. Those that do so, will get first priority on keeping their name after the merge.
I'd imagine that they also hope some of us will stay and pay them some money too. I suspect I already know the answer to that, in my own case, but I'm not too proud to install up and dip in over the next fortnight, assuming the above applies to Werner also. Don't know if it's a blanket offer or just to me cos I'm speshal; check your own inboxes if you hope to take advantage of it all.
Always a distressing thing for any game, and no matter how you talk it up, a server merge is never a good sign. It can be good for the existing players of course - increased density and so on, but it still says that the game has more spare server capacity than was desired or designed. Mind you, by the time the Server Merge becomes an option, the damage is likely to have already been done, and this kind of thing is more often a kindness than a time to panic; an amputation, of sorts.
Time for (yet another) last look at a fond past stomping ground. I just hope Tabula Rasa hasn't made me soft!