Endgame Viable

In playing Aion again, I made a shocking* discovery: It’s open world PvP! I had no idea. I always thought the PvP was voluntary. But nope, I found out the hard way when I was out in Morheim. I got killed by some guy on a skateboard in like four shots. I didn’t even realize it was another player until I was almost dead. Well that sure puts a new spin on things. (262 words.)

When I last left LotRO (Lord of the Rings Online) a couple of years ago, my highest level character was only a level 38 Hunter. I stopped playing largely because of this one Epic quest that kept defeating me, and nothing will drive me away from a game faster than a required quest that keeps killing me and/or requires a group. I discussed that quest in another post. When I came back this time, I got past that quest, so progression could resume. (822 words.)

Has anyone seen Wizardry Online? It’s free-to-play, and another one of those hardcore old school MMORPGs that SOE seems to like. It’s clearly Asian in origin, but it’s weird because it’s an Asian vision of standard European medieval tropes like elves and dwarves. The graphics are odd as well. It looks a bit like everything is a low-contrast sepia-toned image. WO seems to be one of the “hard” MMOs that everyone clamors for (but never actually plays). Some games are hard now simply because the controls are foreign (like EQ and AC-playing those two now is like trying to type on a Dvorak keyboard). WO is hard even with a modernized input system. There are no (well, few) sparklies showing you where to go. Supposedly it is permanent death if you die. (I haven’t died yet to test that out.) Supposedly it is open world PvP and anyone can PK you. (I haven’t encountered any PKs yet.) It’s got an odd combat system where you lock onto targets to fight with them (it’s a bit like Dark Souls if you’ve played that). There’s no renewal of health or mana so you have to drink potions or cast spells to heal. It’s got very limited inventory so you have to really choose your equipment wisely (things that you wear still take up space in your backpack, a super old school concept). You can’t see how tough monsters are until you fight them. You have to identify magic items to see what they are, and you have to go back a place to level up after you’ve gained enough experience. It’s … you know, hard. (361 words.)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! No posts until Monday. Have a great weekend! (11 words.)

I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly what it is that I love(d?) about Rift, and I think I figured it out. It was perfect for an introvert like me who enjoys solo play, but also wants to do group activities without a lot of hassle. Rift’s dynamic rifts and zone events fulfilled that requirement perfectly. You’re out doing quests to level your character, enjoying the scenery. Then a zone event breaks out, and you rush to the spot marked on your map and find a big group of players there. Ten seconds ago you were by yourself in the middle of nowhere, then in a flash you’re part of a group working together toward the same objectives. You can heal if you want to, you can tank if you want to, or you can just sit back and pew-pew if you want to. You don’t have to spam a chat channel with “lfg” for an hour, you don’t have to sit in a dungeon finder queue, you don’t have to manage a bunch of personalities, you just run to a spot and you’re automatically part of a like-minded group working toward the same goal, without any sense of commitment. When you’re done, you just go back to your quest. It worked beautifully. (You could even ignore the event completely if you wanted to be left alone.) (388 words.)

I realize nobody wants to read about WoW, but historically I haven’t played it much, and about 90% of it is still new to me. Well “new” isn’t the right word exactly-it’s more that WoW’s implementation of familiar MMO tropes is new to me. For example, I’ve made a shocking observation in my low to mid-range dungeon runs: The tank almost always does the most damage in the group. Sometimes by a very large margin. (339 words.)

I thought it would be fun to write a series of posts talking about where my characters are in various games. Lately I have been bouncing back and forth between MMOs, so I’ve touched base with a lot of them recently. At the time of this writing, my main character in EQ2 is a level 43 Wood Elf Warden (one of the many classes of healer, if you don’t know). After a recent spate of playing, he moved from the clockwork-kobold-infested Steamfont Mountains to the icy island of Everfrost. (885 words.)

After a patching process that seemed to take hours (possibly because I was playing another game while I waited), I spent a couple of minutes in LotRO to see the class changes in Helm’s Deep. (I am only 45 so I am nowhere near seeing the content of Helm’s Deep.) It looks like all they did was integrate industry-standard “skill trees” into the game, so you have to choose one of three specializations for your character. For my Hunter, I got to pick from a Jack-of-all-Trades tree, a Ranged DPS tree, and a Traps-base tree. I don’t mind the change but I do think it makes LotRO gameplay a bit less unique. Not something I would rage quit over, though. Who knows, maybe it will bring in some new players. (130 words.)

With the announcement of Warlords of Draenor, there was a bit of buzz around the MMO-sphere about the role of the leveling process. I was struck by a post on Healing the Masses suggesting that it’s time to remove the leveling game entirely from MMOs so that we no longer segregate the players into groups that can’t play together. … an ideology that is slowly dying, an ideology that never really belonged much in the first place in this genre. (585 words.)

We all know that blockbuster MMOs EQ Next/Landmark (the minecraft one), WildStar (the cartoon one), and The Elder Scrolls Online (the D&D one) are “coming soon.” But a while back some posts I saw about a Korean-made MMO called Black Desert caught my eye. I hadn’t heard of it before, so I did some investigation. ( That means I went to Wikipedia .) Wikipedia says it’s a “sandbox-oriented” MMO, but I’m not entirely sure what that means. The Black Desert site itself says it will be “focused on Sandbox Features, PvP and PvE.” Again, that’s about as vague as it gets. I’m not even sure it’s going to be available in English-speaking countries. I’ve got to think that since they made an English web page, they’re planning an English version of the game. (160 words.)