Some might wonder why the single most popular science fiction franchise in the history of media has taken so long to be turned into an MMO, myself included — But I think it’s a better use of our efforts to instead not speculate too much on the why of it but rather to channel that raw emotion and energy into the heart felt desire for STO to not suck.

Let’s be honest here, Cryptic Studios is very good at bringing out games that look kinda keen, but have zero long term playability.   City of Heroes and City of Villains suffered from this, and the successor Champions Online (City of Champions?) was even worse.   They looked great, but for whatever reason they just didn’t have the sticking power to keep players interested.

Will STO be the same thing?  Look good initially and maybe be fun for a week or two, but rapidly drag down into a grind-tastic mess?  God I hope not..

I can’t actually put my finger on what it is about CoH/CoV and CO that make them lose their fun.  I will say that of the three, I think City of Villains was the best with regards to game play but that was primarily due to the controller character architecture.  What can I say; I enjoyed having a pack of zombies at my disposal..

Game play wise though, all of them got very boring and repeatative very very quickly.

One of the main cool points about the game was the ability to make all your characters 100% unique, but at the same time I can’t help but wonder if that was part of it’s downfall too..  When you look at games that have a more ridgid class structure you end up having a sort of community around that class, and with that community you have competition.  “Oh yeah? Well I’m a better Warlock than you are.. and I’ll prove it!!”  etc..

Players end up putting a lot of time and effort in to trying to make their cookie cutter class stand out from all the other cookie cutter classes.  That in and of itself forces a person to form a bond or an identity with their character making them want to keep playing..

When you can start your characters virtual life as being 100% unique, you have one less thing to strive for..  So while it’s really cool I can go out of my way to make my character look completely different.. it doesn’t lend itself to longevity..

This also completely ruins the whole sense of community around a given class which is a problem.. What’s more community is completely thrashed by the total lack of classes where group play happens..  The open architecture of characters, while initially cool, makes group forming painful because suddenly you can’t say “We need a healer” and know that there are only 3 or 4 basic classes that heal..

STO appears to have classes with regards to ships; tanks, dps, and support ships.  So that’s a damn good sign.  I’m hoping the realize the issues I described above and are working to correct the issue.. But I still have fears about the game as a whole..

For example; I absolutely cringe at the notion of wandering around a space station and having random NPC’s run up and yell about how awesome I am like they did in CoH/CoV and CO..  Please rip that page out of the CoH/CoV/CO hand book and burn it..

I also worry that the game’s look (read: graphics) are dated even before the game has been released.  Cryptic has always intentionally made their games sort of “middle of the road” with regards to hardware requirements so it’s very likely that the game will not be super high quality, but even so they screen shots look very lack-luster.   These could all be beta shots with poor textures or something, but I doubt it.

I’m the first to admit that gameplay comes over graphics every time though, so if the game play is good then I can forgive just about any graphics decisions.. But then they aren’t known for their game play so its easy to jump to conclusions..

I guess my greatest fear is that Star Trek Online will end up being “City of Star Trek” and will be to Star Trek, what the original Star Wars MMO was to Star Wars. (Read: Horrible)

Aion Online

I have played a lot of MMO’s in my time.. I feel I have a pretty good handle on the genre and have a very good idea of what makes a game good, and what makes a game bad.  Both in terms of what I personally feel, and as well as taking a broader view as a whole.  I can readily recognize why one game or another may not appeal to me, but be appealing to others.

What’s interesting is that I find that as time has gone on I have had to lower my expectations because none of contemporary games are ever as good as the now lofty memories of the games of old..

I fully realize that it’s not fair of me to compare a modern game to the memory of a previous game.  A memory full of good times, good people and fun events.  Memories that I generally cherish in some way, oh and there was a game involved too..

Aion Online is the first game in a long time that actually holds up under this scrutiny..  I was shocked..

Generally I use three games as my virtual yard sticks;  Ultima Online, because it was basically the first and implemented many things correctly, and many more incorrectly.  Everquest, again because it was ground breaking and a first but also because many of the things that made it most memorable are absolutely horrible by todays standards.  Ah memories.  And finally World of Warcraft because it’s everything that Everquest wasn’t — including good in some cases.  I played all three of those games for at least more than 2 years.. Five in the case of EQ, and am still playing WoW as I type this though I can honestly say that I dread it at times..

Aion Online might find itself added to that yardstick for comparison to future games..

Initially I was a bit horrified by the notion of a JRPG style game.. The very thought of a game in which the women were high pitch voiced busty school girls with bobbed hair and the men where androgynous she-males wielding swords you would otherwise need a forklift to move didn’t exactly excite me.. Still doesn’t to be honest, but that’s not what Aion is..

While I have seen a few extremely improbable swords the rest of the game isn’t bad at all..   The JRPG aspect is fairly minor all things considered and the game itself is beautiful and full of depth.

The game itself isn’t super innovative in that they really have only one thing that other games don’t have and thats flight..  Their flight model is really great and does a lot for the game once you figure it out.  Flight has two modes;  Flying and Gliding.  When you glide, you have a chance of finding thermals and can soar just like a bird!   The only down side to flight is that no matter how you go about it you can only do it for so long bfeore you have to rest..

Everything else is what you would expect, but done very well.. The game engine works well, if maybe a tad laggy from time to time and of course looks fantastic as it’s based on the crysis engine..

My only true concern at this point is the end game.. It touts a brand new end game that they are calling PVPVE.. which is code for PVE while some one ganks you..  I’m not fooled..  But at the same time I havent’ experienced it yet.. Maybe its good..

I’ll have to wait and see..

Champions Online

Okay I know I’m not supposed to talk about this yet, but it’s near enough to open beta that I feel I can safely talk about the game without giving anything important away — or at the very least I think I’m safe from being sued..  (Please don’t sue me..)

I have been in the Champions Online closed beta pretty much since day one and I can say without much hesitation that the game is not horrible. In fact I would go as far as to say its pretty good and appears to be getting better with each patch..

I certainly can say that as the beta has progressed the game has gotten Waaaaayy better and will very likely continue to do so for a good while yet..  And I can further say that it’s good enough for me to actually purchase and play the game after release, but there are issues I hope get solved..

From day 1 when I started in the beta I had extremely high hopes.   Extremely high..  Like.. Too high.. heh

I wanted Champions online to be exactly what Champions is;  a “sky is the limit” paper and pencil role playing game where the player can create any kind of hero they want and effectively play within the realm of the GM’s imagination..   If you as a player could imagine it,  then you could do it!  Booyah baby!

I pretty much had the same hopes for City of Heroes previously and of course was let down for many of the same reasons which I’ll get to..  (Note;  I liked City of Heroes and played it for a good long time but it never had the freedom and versatility that it had originally promised. )

Champions Online suffers from this exact same issue — our expectations are too high.  It’s completely unrealistic to think that they could create a game where players could be ANYTHING..  I mean how do you even create the framework that can encompass a whole generation of players imaginations?!  Powers, Abilities, Costumes.. etc   You can’t.. Period.. There’s just no way..

This problem isn’t really a problem, it’s a matter of the player needing to lower their expectations a tad..   But they did call their game “Champions” online so of course that makes people hope for just such a thing..

So instead of trying they went the same route that they had used with City of Heroes, which is a good thing to be honest.

What they did was to limit everything down to a set or subset of powers that you can choose from when building your super hero.  They do the same thing with costumes in that there are a finite number of elements you can choose from.

In City of Heroes you could spend days just playing with the character creator designing your hero.. Not powers or attributes, but just creating what your hero looks like.  Multiply that by a factor of 4 and you have the new character creator.  It’s quite nice in that you can create just about anything.    I had a lot of fun tooling around in the character generator and made all manner of silly to serious characters.  The creator had some bugs of course, its still early in development, but it was still pretty neat.

The power sets right now seem somewhat limited..  I wish/want there to be way more powers.. I also was under the impression that we would have more control over what powers looked like..  I swear I read somewhere that you could have the same “blast” power that someone else had, but you could control what it graphically looks like or what color it was etc.. and that’s not the case..  In some cases you can control where the power originates (hands, head, chest..etc) but that seems to be it..

Maybe later in the game you can control how powers appear but for now I don’t see that ability..

The game play is sort of what you’d expect from “City of Heroes’ 2″ which is all Champions Online is.  Its fun, but don’t expect anything super awesome like..

My major complaint with the game at this point was a graphic setting that defaulted to on, and made the game look horrible..   They had “Depth of Field” turned on, which meant that the farther away from the camera an object/item/scene was, the blurier it was.  It got so blurry during one scene it was hard to look at.. it actually made me a little ill..  I had to turn DOF off completely..

I’m not sure I fully appreciate the cell shading thing to be honest.. I understand why they went that way, and I believe in the long run it will stand the test of time better than a more “realistic” theme..  I just don’t really like it yet..   I have the same issue with the stylistic graphics of World of Warcraft.. its just a personal opinion thing really..

All in all I think the game is good..

I very much recommend it.. and if you liked City of Heroes I think you’ll really like Champions Online..

Wow versus War

I love the Warhammer universe.  I have been an avid player of the various table top miniature games as well as the couple RPG games in the same universe.   So when Warhammer Online came out a year ago, I was stoked!

I figured it would be pure liquid awesome and finally give me a computer version of the game world I have enjoyed playing in for so long.

Of course I was let down quite a bit in that the game was lacking..  but I get ahead of myself.

When I learned that Warhammer online was licensed to Mythic Entertainment, I was less than thrilled. Their only other game of note is Dark Age of Camelot which was a one trick pony (realm versus realm combat) that has no long term play associated with it.. And while the game is still around, it’s just not fun. There is nothing there to keep players like me playing the game.. I just don’t enjoy it nor does it have the massive fan base that it could have if they had bothered to keep innovating.

WoW on the other hand has gobs and gobs of things to do long term as well as lots of mindless achievements and other end game elements to keep players attention.  They are adding new content and new fun things to the game all the time and this is from a guy who really doesn’t like WoW..

When it comes to long term play, WoW is the clear winner. I play it still today and have for a while now. My guild has killed the end game boss (Yogg) many times at this point and is starting to work on getting to the next guy..

I’m playing WAR too at this point, but it’s just not that fun and my interest is waning.. As I played WAR originally (and as I am relearning more recently), I realize it is exactly the same game as DAoC just in a slightly different universe. It suffers the same issues that DAoC did and really brings very little new to the table..

What WAR does wrong:

• The PVE aspects of the game are absolutely horrible.. The questing is painfully linear and just about always forces you to venture into PVP areas even if you don’t want to.
• The zone’s are confusing and poorly laid out which makes navigation with out the flight system near impossible.
• The flight mechanic from zone to zone is long loading and lame — considering that you must use it, it needs an overhaul.
• The models are pretty bad, but the animations are down right dreadful…
• I can go on and on but will leave it be as otherwise this list will be too long…

What WAR does right:

PQ’s, SC’s and PVP.

The public quest system is neat and I wouldn’t be surprised if blizzard “adopts” such a system in the near future.. It’s well thought out and works quite nicely. This I think is likely to be the single innovation that folks will remember WAR for in several years..

So far the majority of the scenarios (SC’s.. Think battlegrounds for you WoW players) are a lot of fun. Again way more so than any of the BG’s in WoW which I find to be tedious and boring.

DAoC’s big plus was the Realm versus Realm thing.. Mythic of course followed that same model in producing WAR and as such their PVP model is excellent. The realm versus realm thing is a lot of fun.. for a while.. it becomes tedious and boring fairly quickly, but still the PVP is very good.

The PVP in WAR is far far far better than what is offered by WoW. Period. Full stop.

The reason for that is how the classes are balanced as well as the fact that blocking is turned on. In WoW it’s perfectly reasonable for a frail clothy to stand toe to toe with a fella in full plate and win. Generally in WoW PVP any one class well played, can defeat any one other class.. What’s the point?

In War, this is unreasonable and usually punished harshly. As a bright wizard (weak clothy) I know that if a tank (guy in plate) charges me I have only a few seconds to react before death.. I better make them count! Each class in the game has a specific function and is only really good at that function!

With blocking turned on (collision detection) the tanks can stand in front of the more frail classes and prevent them from being slaughtered..

The only place that this fails WAR is you have a lot of WoW players playing WAR who don’t realize their place and as such just charge in and die, or refuse to block, or simply wont heal..etc. I can’t fault War for the players being stupid..

The problem here is that the game somewhat encourages players to play stupidly in that even if they don’t work together in a SC the losing team still gets’ a lot of experience for it.. but that’s an aside.. again I really can’t fault Mythic for morons..

What I can do though is fault Mythic for producing a game that is so completely unrefined. There are so many little things about War that is a complete fail..

The Macro system is bad.. The map system sucks.. The models are lame.. The animations are really bad.. The PVE content is tedious.. Some of the classes seem out of balance.. The crafting system is horrible and pointless.. etc.. It’s just not that fun of a game and a lot of that is due to these little things..

Let me be perfectly clear.  I don’t like World of Warcraft.  I don’t enjoy the universe at all, the stylistic game play, the mindless grinding, the life sucking raiding..etc..    I play it solely because my wife enjoys it..  Fine I’ll play for her..  But I don’t really like it.   I do however have to say that Blizzard has made a good game.   It’s very refined in that stuff works.  It has it’s own problems too.. (the inability to launch more dungeon instances is a big one.. )   But over all WoW is a good game.

Mythic with WAR however isn’t all that good.  It really seems like they doggedly stuck to their one trick (realm vs realm) in the hopes that it would make a WoW Killer and not bother to innovate.  Okay fine, PQ’s.. but that’s ONE thing..   And of course just as DAoC’s one trick failed to make the game a success, the exact same trick on WAR also failed..

The real issue I have is, it’s been a year..  the game has done nothing in that time and at this point it doesn’t look like its going to do anything..  If they don’t care enough to fix their game, or innovate and make it better.. then I don’t care enough to play it..

Can’t fix stupid.

Or is it? The more I play it the more I find super secret hidden stuff that is in the background. I’m discovering that there is a lot of depth in the game that I never realized was there.

It made me realize that CoH/CoV took the EQ1 style of game play to heart, instead of the WoW style. Meaning that in World of Warcraft if the guy standing there doesn’t have an exclamation or question mark over his head — you don’t need to talk to him, ever..

In EQ1 that wasn’t the case at all.. In fact if you didn’t talk to just about everyone, you missed all the good quests. I think it added a lot to the sense of accomplishment, but the cost of having to run around and talk to everyone was pretty high and kinda sucked.

City of Heroes has both methods employed. You have a list of contacts which you can talk to or even call in order to do quests.. but there are also super secret ninja monkey heroes in the world that you have to go find.. This means that there are levels of depth to the game — you don’t have to do the super secret stuff.. or you can.. You choose.

That’s pretty cool. Plus with the invention system and the set powers they have going now, you can further refine your characters abilities. You don’t have to..but you can if you want to.. The neat thing about the set inventions is that they get stupidly powerful..

I recently got my toon fully outfitted with the “Blizzard” power with a complete set on it. Aim + Build up + Ice Storm + Blizzard… wow.. lots of shit dies very quickly. Suddenly that pack of 20 orange mobs isn’t a problem, and I’m just one guy.

It’s a fun game.. but eventually I’ll get tired of it and cancel my account… until I need something new and reactivate it.. haha.. I have done this like 5 times at this point..

Currently I am trying to get City of Heroes to work under Ubuntu. I’m going through another cycle where windows has pissed me off, so back to Ubuntu. I’ve already replaced my secondary computer with a mac mini (formerly an old windows box), if windows doesn’t knock it off I’ll just stay Ubuntu.

Either way it shouldn’t be too hard — I’ll keep you posted. Right now its downloading. 2.5 gigs takes a little while. I tried the “move it from the windows partition” trick but the patcher just didn’t understand. So fine.. download the thing again.. whatever..

Ps. Whatever you do — don’t install Vista. And don’t install IE8 on XP. Wine runs most windows programs better than windows. As soon as I get a couple more of them working I may not go back.

Update: Well it works. I don’t know why it surprises me but it always does.. I guess I’m still programmed to think that you have to have the OS printed on the box in order to run the application..

I had to completely reinstall it from the updater which confused me because it was replacing the exact same files with brand new files.. in the same place.. *shrug* Oh well it took an hour longer than I had anticipated.. wooptie do..

It works very smoothly and so far I can’t tell that I’m not in windows.. Wine, rocks.

The only bug is that the mouse cursor looks like its been “de-interlaced”.. After doing some looking, this is a known issue and one I care less about.  It still works just fine, it just looks like the mouse has been sliced up horizontally..

It’s a good game, and a good starter game for those who aren’t really sure about the whole MMO scene. It’s very simple to play and enjoy, and doesn’t bog you down with many of the more complex MMO aspects. For new comers to the market, its perfect. It’s how I got my wife into MMO’s and now I can’t get her away from the computer.. heh (“I just have this one last quest to do..” “Uh huh.. sure honey.. ” heh)

After a while I moved on to other games, but found myself reactivating my account from time to time to give it a try. For a while I played my City of Villains character almost exclusively until it once again just tired and I moved on.

Well I’m back at it. They have added a lot of content and depth to the game that really is interesting. Firstly its not like your more modern / typical MMO in that there aren’t characters standing around with question marks over their head letting you know there is something to do. Lets be honest here, World of Warcraft is a good game but its seriously “dumbed down” in that it almost holds your hand while it plays itself.

City of Heroes hearkens back to the days of EverQuest 1 whereby you didn’t know if someone had a quest or something for you unless you talked to them. Accomplishments were hidden from you, and thereby meant more to you when you actually accomplished it.

Death in CoH means something too compared to modern day MMO’s. CoH has debt! Now I played Ultima Online and EverQuest 1 for years, so extremely painful death was the norm for me. In UO each time some naked PK ran up and killed you, you lost EVERYTHING! It sucked. In EQ1 though they changed that a lot in that you just had to make a corpse run and lost exp. But you didn’t lose your stuff.. When CoH came out and they made it so you just got a little bit of debt, I was stunned. They made death meaningless.

HA! Look at what modern games do. In the most recent MMO, Age of Conan, death means absolutely nothing. You just get shot back to a respawn point.

But I get side tracked — the CoH is a good game and I’m finding I really enjoy the new Rikti invasion stuff and I hope they will let us “counter invade” at some point. It’d be really cool to go to the Rikit homeworld or whatever and attack them back!! (maybe you can do this already and I just havent gotten to that content.. I dunno)

Something else they have added to the game is a pretty thorough marketplace and crafting system. I like that — thats pretty darn cool. Well, one of the tricks of old is to watch your prices on that market. I mean I dont understand why players, in game after game, will put stuff on the market below what they could sell them to the merchant for!!

I spent about 4 hours last night just running goods from the market to the local merchant to sell. People would put stuff on the market for 10INF, that they could sell to the merchants for 4500+INF. Seriously.

In 4 hours I made 2 million INF which just goes to show you, super heroes is st00pid. Or lazy. I prefer to think of them as stupid.

My main character is a ranger — and as with all games that have a ranger class, he’s broken.  Primarily when it comes to damage output. 

I understand that a range, being a subset of the rogue class, can’t tank.  I’m there.  In EQ1 rangers were made of paper.. I’m cool with that.. But the ranger should be able to put out some damage, and since they can’t tank, they should be able to put out damage at range.  If they can’t for any reason do ranged damage, what’s the point of a ranger?   

In AoC the ranger can melee, use a bow, or use a crossbow.   Melee with an AoC ranger is a joke — don’t waste your time.  Crossbow has some nice damage, but its slow damage — and the majority of the skills are for bow not crossbow.  You’re really best using a bow.

Okay fine. I’ll use a bow — which is what I wanted in the first place.  The issue is with the various attack abilities with a bow, most of them are broken.

Salvo
The number one issue, and the number one skill used by a bow ranger is “Salvo”.  Salvo pisses me off to no end.

Salvo is a 3 key combo  – Meaning you poke the “Salvo” hot key, then you have to do two directional attacks in order to get the full combo (and thus the full damage) to fire off.  The problem is that salvo, as the name implies, fires more shots than you press keys for.

The first salvo hot key fires one shot usually straight initiating the combo.  The second key fires one shot either left or lower left, to try to get them to refocus their shields. And the third key fires 3 shots straight — but it does 3 individual attacks, its not like you knock up 3 arrows and fire them all at once.

It’s this third key that is the problem in that if anything interrupts your third key and those 3 attacks, the mob gets all the health back that he lost due to the combo.   This could be over a thousand points of health he just suddenly gets back.. *pop*  Insta-heal.

Further more, if you kill him on the first shot of the salvo, he still does damage to you until the entire combo finishes.  It takes about 8 seconds for the entire combo to resolve itself and I have died many times during that 8 seconds to a mob that was DEAD but still swinging.. 

And of course if they kill you this way, they are suddenly full health and back standing there!!

If the mob dodges or you “miss” with the first shot of the salvo, ALL shots of the salvo miss. Time well spent.

Salvo needs to be fixed.. But so far they wont even acknowledge that it’s a bug.

Some shots don’t register at all
Sometimes you will go through the combo keys and nothing happens on the final key.  No “Miss” text, no “Mob is too far away” text, nothing.. just.. nothing.  You’re left standing there wondering why the hell the mob didn’t just take damage.  Time well spent.  

No Range
The ranger also has ZERO RANGE!  It kills me how short ranged the bow is.. A bow in AoC has about a 50 foot range.  (Hard to say how many “feet” it actually is, but it aint far.)  I’m not saying the bow should have a 300 yard range, but it should have a longer range than it does.  It’s down right silly how short it is, and makes a rangers life suck as you basically have to get into melee range to shoot.

Give us some room to shoot folks!

Different Range First Person to Third Person
What?!  I want to know who the smacktard was that thought it was a good idea to give the bow and crossbow a different range based on first person or third person shooting.  What bone head thought this was a good idea?

Why does my bow have a range half again as long when in first person?  Why does my bow’s combo’s have a very short range, yet I can key up an arrow to fire at any range? etc..  This is just stupid.. 

Shooting from a ledge
One of the missions early on tells you that you need to go stop the mobs from shooting their bows from a ledge high up, because it’s killing the good guys.  SO you rush up there, kill them, only to realize that .. hey, this is a good spot to snipe back at the bad guys too!

So, you target up a mob and let fly.. Only to see them constantly evade..  You have line of sight, you have range.. you are above them though and they “can’t get to you” so instead of letting you murder them fair and square, they just evade,evade,evade like a broken mob.  

This is fucked up.. The whole point of the mission was to stop them from doing this, only to find out that YOU can’t do this.   WHY?!  If I can get up on this ledge, so can they — as proven by the fact that THEY WERE UP HERE FIRST!  This is just down right stupid and breaks the game to me.  You say you want players to be clever and try new things, then break the new things we try.  What bullshit.   If mobs are getting shot from someone they can’t get to, RUN OUT OF RANGE.  It’s short enough… 

I can go on, but you get the point by now..  This game is very beautiful.. More over, the 1 to 20 game is awe inspiring, and should be a lesson to other games as to how a game should be made.  

At 21 though (or when you get off the island) the polish comes crashing down.  It’s sad really.  I know for a fact it’s driving players away.  Several of my friends have already left due to these annoying bugs.. Above are just the ones that the ranger suffers.. each class has their own set just like this.. 

I do like the new combat system, but it isn’t enough to support a game.  You need to get the rest of this crap working.. 

In six or eight months this game will likely be awesome.. but for now it’s annoying and upsets me.  Time will tell, but I dunno if I will stick it out.

Firstly let me say, funcom has done a wonderful job capturing and portraying the world of Conan.. I’m having a lot of fun.

However, I was initially worried.   I beta tested and played Anarchy Online and by all accounts it’s initial release was a nightmare. It was truly, truly bad.  Funcom, and all other game companies for that matter, learned that day that to release a broken game dooms the game forever.  I had assumed that funcom learned its lesson and would release a stable game, in fact I had visions of board meetings in which the members all chanted, “please not like AO”… So you can imagine my shock when at 12pm my time, when the doors were to open.. Nothing happened.

I refreshed the game a couple times and found out that it got pushed back to 3pm.  Fine fine.. understandable.. these things are complex..  So I played some Call of Duty 4 for a couple hours and dreamed of headchopping..   3pm came along and…   Nothing.  Plus, now the funcom forums have crashed due to a database error..

“Oh god..” I cried, “funcom is doing it again! Its Anarchy Online all over.. ”

Now before you get disappointed, at 3:30pm the servers came online and I played for 12 hours straight.. but I get ahead of myself..

At this point the forums are coming up and down and having all manner of issues.  People are yammering away about lawsuits and making immature pointless complains.. (Seriously folks.. build a bridge and get over it.. )  Constant cries about how funcom has screwed the pooch!  About how players are going to sue, and about boycotting them, how this is the worse release ever (I WAY disagree)..etc.  (it was really lame.. I hope funcom knows that the vocal and annoying minority are just a bunch of douche bags that don’t represent the rest of us.)

The game isn’t actually to be released until the 20th.. so at this point the game isn’t much more than a paid beta..  I’m not sure what people were/are complaining about.

Once the game did finally go live for those of us in the Early Access program at around 3:30 I jumped in and made 4 characters to get my commonly used names.  I then played the game as my ranger for the next 12 hours!

Seriously.. 12 hours.. straight..   I got my character to level 17, and at around 4 am I went to bed..

I had my graphics set to max and played without a hiccup or a glitch until around 6 hours in when my frame rate went into the toilet.   I relogged, and went right back at it. So they have a very minor memory leak most likely.. but hell if thats the worst of it.. YAY US!

Seriously, what a fantastic game.  Funcom has done a marvelous job here folks.  Those who are saying this release was a bad one.. A) You’re retarded — the game isn’t out yet.  That happens on the 20th in the US and the 23rd in Europe (Sucks.. sorry about that guys)..  B) this has been the cleanest deployment I’ve ever seen and I have played a lot of games of this nature.

I think funcom has done a very good job.  Now I’ll admit there is still ample time for them to screw it up between now and release, but so far so good.

Major game issues:

• In the 14 or so hours total that I have played the game at this point, I have only had one blue screen of death.  The game was running smoothly then the sound locks up, BSoD and auto-reboot.  No idea why it happened.  *shrug*  Could have been anything, so I am not even sure if it was the game.  It could have just as easily been the Microsoft auto updater which has caused me issues before and was demanding I install something upon reboot.

Minor game issues:

• After 8 hours of game play my frame rate tanked — which of course just required me to re-log and all was well.  I class this as a minor issue because there was an easy fix.  Most likely it was a memory leak issue somewhere..
• Climbing interface needs work — you just kind of pop onto a ladder and then pop off of it.  Plus if you have multiple climbable surfaces near one another the game often gets confused as to which one you actually want to climb.
• Mob AI is kinda weak — when sneaking through the keep to steal the phoenix medallion often you must dispatch some troublesome guards.  Typically I wait for one to be alone, then kill him.  Wait for the next one to path along, then kill him.  Etc..  It amuses me that often one mob will path over the body of his fallen comrade without a care in the world.  I expect this behavour out of unintelligent mobs.. but not guards..
• Grouping Colors — by default player names are turned off..  To include those in your group!  I want to be able to see my group mates easily and can’t do that in a pack of mobs.  Give us an option to show just our group mate names and make the icons for group members bigger on the mini map please.
• First Person Shooting — why does it take me from first person shooting to an over the shoulder view then back after combat?  this confuses me.. and frankly I hate it.
• Range First/Third Person difference — why does my bow have a different range depending on my view?  that’s retarded.

Requests:

• I want a way to set a view preset for each of my weapon sets.  You have two weapon sets that you can swap between, I want my view to be able to swap too!  First person for bows, third person for swords.  Should be simple.
• My bows range should be the same no matter what view I’m in.  Its really lame that they are different.  Both third person and first person should work as first person currently does.  If I miss, then I miss.  Don’t tell me I’m out of range though.. thats really dumb.

more as I think of them…

My goal was not to grief or be a jerk, but rather to learn what can be done and the best way to go about it. That way when someone is doing it to me, I know. The irony of it so far is, I am enjoying it quite a lot. Probably more than I should to be honest. My main has very expensive ships and implants that I don’t want to risk, plus he is entirely skilled towards industry and production. When I created the new alt, I said that I would never fear risking him. If he dies.. so be it. No big deal.

That different mindset has really opened my eyes to the game and brought about a lot of enjoyment. So any advice I would give at this point is don’t fear dying. Fuck it.. Death means nothing, its part of the game. If you keep that in mind you’ll have a lot more fun! And engaging people you have no business engaging can actually be quite a lot of fun, and you might surprise yourself. I was able to take out a number of larger ships with a little T1 Frigate.. I was stunned. Much of that might be my knowledge as a player versus the knowledge of my target but still. A frigate can take out a cruiser.. It might take a while, but you can do it. (I dunno about a BS though, probably cant out dps the recharge amounts)

I find that playing this part of the game has really forced me to pay close attention to what all those little numbers mean when you look at any bit of equipment. Suddenly signature radii and transversal velocity is very important.. hehe

I also find it amusing that my baby combat alt makes money hand over fist through missions and PVP’ing alone. (I love having sold someones gear back to them after I pop’d their ship.. heh) Where as my main does nothing but mining and industry related activities, and probably doesn’t do as well in the long run. He makes money too, but there is a lot more work involved in mining and producing items versus just killing things and doing missions. In the grand scheme of things my main has a lot more money, but the new character seems to be making it faster.. this may just be due to my playing it more.

Its also nice having two fully rigged out battlecruisers and higher to do missions, versus only one. Here soon, my “baby combat alt” wont be so baby like any more and will actually fit a larger ship than my main.. which is fine by me! My main will happily stay in his T2 Fitted Drake and stand off launching missiles.. =)

Either way I’m having a lot of fun… To that end, I have started creating tools that I find useful that will work both in-game in the mini-browser and out of game in a browser with no loss of functionality. This means no javascript what so ever — ouch.

For now it lives here: http://info.rsow.com/eve/

It’s very much underconstruction so bear with me on that point. If you do have a suggestion though I’m more than happy to hear it.

Having said that, I think PotBS could be a good game, but right now it’s really really rough. I fear it’s gonna be yet another example of a game released before it was ready. Sony is at the helm so of course this is to be expected.

The download of the game installer was simple and went without a hitch, however the darn thing took over 24 hours to patch!! This was due to the patcher being completely broken and SOE blaming everyone but themselves.

So for the first 24 hours (it actually was more like 27) I wasn’t able to play the game — I wasn’t even able to patch the game. This did nothing but put a sour taste in my mouth.

Once installed, I went to the character creation screen.. Tooled up an avatar, only to have the server crash before I could click play – which means the character wasn’t actually created.. Grrrr. I logged back in, created the character again only to have it pop up a window with “Generic_Character_Error” each time I clicked play! For fuck sake..

Long story short, there are some issues. They certainly need to be worked out and I hope they have the good sense to not rush the game out the door — however, seeing as who the producer is I can just about assure you they will push it out and run with it in the name of the bottom line. Even though in the end nothing hurts the bottom line more than shoving a broken game out the door.. *coughVanguardcough* Why can’t they learn this lesson? Game publishers seem doomed to repeat this over and over again and I just don’t get it. But that’s for another time.
I was eventually able to get in game and play for a couple hours. The game has promise. I very much like the attention to detail regarding ship to ship combat, the graphics of the ships look great. The ships behave as you would expect and have had some nice physics applied to make things seem more realistic.

The first person game play was a lot less impressive. The world is crowded with what appear to be low-poly poorly textured mediocre avatars with very little true character. I was completely underwhelmed on this front. I’m hoping these are the low-poly models they are using for beta and they will sport new stuff for release — I fear that isn’t the case though.

The game itself seems to have quite a lot of PVE content, however there needs to be more variety. Right now you basically have two types; ship to ship PVE in which you do traditional sea combat versus usually 3 to 4 times your number of ships and character to character PVE in which you show up on some beach where hordes of “pirates” are standing around waiting for you to murder them.

Fun the first couple of times, it gets old quickly — a little more variety with PVE will make this game a lot of fun. One of the PVE “missions” was what seemed like an interrupt, I was tooling along doing another missing when suddenly the town I was at was under attack. When I left the building the entire town was now an instance within which I was the sole hero. A little unrealistic considering the number of players that I had previously seen, but they pulled it off nicely.. I really liked this.. More of this sort of thing!
The “end game” or at least the long term game appears to be all PVP Realm vs Realm style. Since there are four factions; French, British, Spanish, and Pirates I assume you’ll be able to duke it out at some point. I don’t know this for sure, but it seems that way — Which is cool. I wonder if one faction could take over the world?
It also appears that you have to pass some sort of “captain” test which then opens up your “PVP Flag”? Not sure yet. But what I get from this is, if you don’t want to PVP you can’t get ganked EVE Style — All PVP is Opt-in. Which is cool I guess for those players who play games to have fun, and don’t want to be bothered by others. However, I do see how playing it more “EVE” style would also be fun and add a level of challenge to the world.. I wonder if they will have some non-carebear servers? (I hate that term but it works here.)

It should be interesting to see where this game goes. I like that it’s not your traditional fantasy style MMO with Elves and Magic. I’m seriously hoping that this game will open developers eyes to the fact that you don’t need “Magic” and “Elves” to make a game work. Of course if they release the game early and unfinished SoE and likely other developers will say that the reason it didn’t work was the obvious lack of magic and elves..
The irony is, evidently Disney is going to be creating a Pirates of the Caribbean MMO — which has (rumor mill) different playable races, zombies/undead and magic in the form of “voodoo”..etc.. So, yet another formulaic replication of World of Warcraft but with a wash on the graphics. *sigh* Come on folks.. Think OUTSIDE the box.