emptying my brain onto the internet since 1998…
I’m a gamer. I game.
With Monkey Island getting a remake/update/new episodes, I can only hope that Zombies Ate My Neighbors, another classic LucasArts game, gets the same treatment. Sadly, I don’t think it will. However, thanks to Tom Chick, I now know I can get the old game on my Wii.
It is something I suppose… but a man can dream…
I recently finished reading a book that had a good thirty or more pages after the climactic fight scene. It shook out the ramifications of the fight over a few encounters on a couple different days and let you know the status of all the people involved who had survived and even gave a hint at the direction future books might take without actually dangling a cliffhanger on the reader. Movies are often like this too. The climax hits and then you get anywhere from five to twenty minutes of tying up the story and letting you know what the climax means to the world this story has inhabited.
Games aren’t often like that. Many games practically end with the climax. Boss monster dies, “You win!!” flashes on the screen and the credits roll. Other times, games slide in a movie ending, a pre-rendered cut scene that ties up the story and maybe lets you know what the climax means to the world the game took place in. But that is sort of a cop-out. That isn’t really a game ending, its a movie ending tacked on to a game.
This months Round Table tasks us…
How can the denouement be incorporated into gameplay? In literary forms, it is most often the events that take place after the plot’s climax that form your lasting opinion of the story. A well constructed denouement acts almost as a payoff, where protagonists and antagonists alike realize and adjust to the consequences of their actions. Serial media often ignored the denouement in favor of the cliffhanger, in order to entice viewers to return. Television has further diluted the denouement by turning it into a quick resolution that tidily fits into the time after the final commercial break.
But the denouement is most neglected in video games where it is often relegated to a short congratulatory cut scene, or at most–a slide show of consequences. This month’s topic challenges you to explore how the denouement can be expressed as gameplay.
So, how can the denouement be expressed through game play?
The simplest answer is just to continue the game mechanics into an interactive version of the cut scene. If the game included NPCs throughout that you would talk to or exchange items with, continue that. After the fight, put the player back in the game and make them take the sword they took off the demon lord back to the town and see it destroyed (try, of course, to avoid cramming in another boss battle or cliffhanger by making a town elder or someone grab the sword and fight you or run off with it).
A slight twist on that is to leave the actual end of the game up to the player. Maybe during the game several people expressed interest in the sword, either for destroying or using, and let the player take it to whom he thinks deserves it most, let them pick the ending they want to see. After the final boss battle, let the player go finish up some quests or other elements that give them story pieces concerning their actions and the other characters in the game world.
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance did this in a way. The game could be completed without actually winning every level and side quest, and one level in particular required you to choose between two characters which one to save. While the end of the game was nothing more than a series of cut scenes, it was a series that was built on the actions you did or did not take throughout the game. The denouement of the game changed depending on the player’s performance. The only failure here is that during the playing of the game, the player has no idea that this denouement will happen, they just play through so the choices they make don’t have the weight they might because the player isn’t really aware those choices are going to matter.
In the future, I’d love to see more games go at least as far as Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, but would really love it to see them go further and let me explore and control the end of the game a bit more. The worst thing I think that could happen is to have a single player game climax and then roll into an MMO where you’ll meet up with other players who experienced the same single player game, where each of you was the hero and fought alone against the same bad guy boss. That, in my opinion, would just render the entire single player game story irrelevant. I suppose that’s why I tend to dislike most MMO tutorials.
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I first heard about it back in June. But apparently it has recently been ruled on by the FTC that bloggers must disclose when they get free stuff. Personally, I’ve never gotten a free game, and while I’ve gotten free movie passes they’ve never been sent to me specifically for review, I obtain them in other ways (more on that tomorrow). But, other bloggers do get free games sometimes, or at least offers of free games, so there has been some discussion on the subject.
Being that free games are often sent out by marketing departments, and the goal of marketing departments is to try and get favorable review out in the wild where potential buyers can see them, the concern is that bloggers given free games might give a undeserved favorable review in order to continue getting free games. Sadly, in part, this is why most game review magazines and sites tend to use the “7 to 9” scale of rating, reserving 10’s for truly astounding games and anything less than 7 for unmitigated pieces of crap, letting even a mildly entertaining game with numerous flaws still get a 7 out of 10. Of course, the reality is that these places are actually reviewing on a 5 point scale: 6 or less, 7, 8, 9, and 10. So getting a 7 there is kinda like getting a 2 out of 5. Do you normally go see movies that get 2 out of 5 stars?
Now, while no game company really wants to get poor ratings, not all poor ratings are created equal. Rather than trying to seek out favorable ratings, what they should be seeking is “fair” reviews. By fair I simply mean that the game will be reviewed on its own merits, in detail, and then given a score intended to reflect the value of the game to that reviewer. THEN companies should encourage people to read reviews instead of just viewing ratings. Metacritic is the devil because it does the opposite, placing all the focus on the score and the reasons behind the score disappear.  The result is publishers pushing for higher ratings when what they should be pushing for is the abolishment of numerical ratings.  But players seem to demand “at a glance” ratings systems because its easier on them, even though in the end they are mostly being lied to.  Its all counter-intuitive and somehow self-reinforcing at the same time.
Personally, when I am trying to decide if I want to purchase something, I actually seek out poor reviews. For example, on Amazon.com I may skim through the 5 star reviews, but I will read every single word of every 1 and 2 star review. The reason is simple: people tend to more specifically describe their dislike of something than they do their like of something. I’ve written about this before. The main reason for this is that the only thing I can guarantee about a reviewer is that they are not me.
Take movie reviews for example. Let’s say I was going to review Zombieland. On a 10 point scale, I’d give the movie a 9, on a 5 star scale it would get a 4.5 or maybe even a 5 (I’m not a fan of the .5 in a rating scale). But if you were looking for a movie to go see, the fact that I gave the movie a 9 out of 10 is less important than if you like zombie movies, gory movies, or comedies. Even if you like zombie movies, Zombieland isn’t Dawn of the Dead, it is more like Shaun of the Dead, and that’s more important than my rating. On the flip side, suppose I had given Zombieland a 2 out 10 and said, “This movie was just as dumb as Shaun of the Dead. If you liked that piece of crap, I guess you’ll like this too.” And if you loved Shaun of the Dead, then despite my rating of a 2, you should probably see Zombieland. When I get in to the idea of the value of bad press, well, I’ve already seen many dozens of reviews for Zombieland that were little more than “This was awesome! Must see!” But all the negative reviews I’ve read have been very descriptive, and I think would actually be more helpful to people not sure about the film decide whether the film is something they’d enjoy or not.
In the end, though, I suppose I do agree with the FTC that people should disclose if they have gotten freebies, especially if they are going to comment on the value, like saying a game is or isn’t worth the $60 box price. I’m not sure it should be a law with fines though. At the same time, I don’t think people should discount a review just because the reviewer got a free copy, and I think marketing departments should push for quality reviews and not worry so much about just getting favorable ones. They should reward reviewers who clearly spend time with the games and write well, not just those who blow smoke and tell them what they want to hear.
About two months ago, a friend sent me a link to Elements. I played around with it for a few days to see if it would be something I was interested in, and it was. So I backed away from it and then came at it fresh for 30 days.
If you’ve ever played and enjoyed collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, then this is probably right up your alley. When you begin you pick an element from Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Light, Darkness, Entropy, Gravity, Time, Aether, Life and Death. Don’t worry about picking wrong, you can change later if you like, or just make a new account. You’ll be given a starter deck and your first Quest: to defeat a Level 0 foe. This first quest works like a tutorial, explaining how to play the game. A coin is flipped to see who goes first, on your turn, if you aren’t first you draw a card, then you can play any resource cards you have and any cards you have the resources to play, and then you end your turn where any monsters you have will attack, any effects you have will process, and you’ll collect a round of resources. The goal is to reduce your opponent to zero hit points before he does the same to you.
There are too many cards to spend any time talking about there here, but you can go to the bazaar and see them all. You’ll earn money from winning duels, and sometimes even win cards in bonus spins after a win which you can use or sell, and you buy cards to continue constructing your deck. If you are worried about spending money on the wrong cards, go play in the trainer that lets you have unlimited money but you can’t save your deck.
I started the game with a Death deck, built mostly on poisons and infections and boneyards (that produce skeletons when monsters die). If you can survive long enough with this deck, you can kill just about anyone… its the surviving that is the trick. After a while, I switched to playing Darkness, which I enjoyed more as it was definitely more active. Basing the deck around Drains (a card that sucks life out of the opponent and gives it to you) I started regularly ending matches with 100 health and earning double the winnings. I really ended up liking this slim deadly deck, but I felt I should also try out some others. I played in the trainer and eventually I decided to build a deck based entirely on quantum pillars/towers (random 3 resources instead of 1 specific) and drawn resources (1 of each resource), and even went so far as to look up the ultimate god killing deck which was similar to but much better constructed than my rainbow deck. Now I take turns playing my god killer for cash and my darkness for fun.
To be honest, this would never be a game that I played “seriously”, as in “for hours straight a day”. But it is a very nice throwaway game to keep running in the background while you work (if your work doesn’t mind you playing games and they don’t block the site). As a programmer, I know I occasionally need a momentary distraction from work in order to let my brain wander away from a problem so I can approach it from a new angle later, and Elements is perfect for that. The only negative I would say exists in the game is that it is very grindy in that it takes quite a lot of time to be able to upgrade cards and build a better deck unless you play a certain way (Google “elements god killing deck”). One “would be nice” thing is I would love to be able to build multiple decks and switch them out easily instead of having to rebuild them every time.
Overall, the game is very well constructed, it doesn’t appear to have any game breaking balance issues, and since it is free to play there is no harm in giving it a shot. And if you enjoy playing it, feel free to throw a few dollars at the developers via their PayPal donation link.
If you spend any time over on the Fallen Earth forums, you might notice that a large number of threads, regardless of where they begin, end up with someone mentioning “respec” and derailing the thread into the same old arguments. On one side you have people who think there should be no way to respend points and that a poorly made character should be deleted and the player have to start over from scratch. On the polar opposite you have people who think there should be a way to respend points at any time, or with a very minimal cost (the joke is, they suggest a cost, but unless a game has sufficient money sinks, eventually everyone is rich, just look at a game like WoW where money sinks of 1 gold were put in early in the game but new money sinks are much higher). In between you have all sorts of ideas, like allowing people to respec once a year or other time frames, or attaching a huge cost to it, or requiring people to re-earn their points, essentially de-leveling to respec.
Where I fall in the argument is that given the design choices they made with the game, there does need to be some option to change your point spending. Every time you spend a point in Fallen Earth, you are closing a door. Most games are actually built on closed doors. In WoW, if you make a warrior, you have closed a door — you can’t be a priest, or a rogue, or a shaman, you are a warrior, forever. In a game like Fallen Earth, the closing of doors is more subtle. A point spent at level five may not seem like its doing anything, but when you get to level 45 and you are one point short of being able to buy that one skill you need to complete your character, now you’ve hit a brick wall, one you cannot climb or break through or go around — delete and start over is your only option. The result is that in order to not screw up a player needs to spend time researching choices, spoiling the game in order to make sure they aren’t gimping themselves by just playing and having fun.
Where I fall in the argument is that the game shouldn’t have been designed this way to begin with.
Anything, not Everything
A player in a game should have the capability to do anything they want. People, specifically the hardcore players who demand that choices be permanent, will tell you that hard decisions are “just like real life” but they are only partly correct. Yes, real life is full of things you can’t undo, but in real life you also do not have to lose your entire identity to choose another path. If you spent the first 25 years of your life going to school, to college and working hard to become an accountant, you are not required to be an accountant forever. You can go back to school, or pick a new career, and you can do this without changing your name or losing your friends.
Of all the game systems I’ve seen over the years, in my opinion, EVE Online is the only game that has done it right. I’m not talking about the real time based training system. I’m talking about the fact that you can start a character and decide that you want to fly Amarr frigates that fire missiles. You train your skills and fly your frigates and shoot your missiles. Later, however, if you decide you’d like to fly Caldari Cruisers, you simply start training those skills, eventually buy yourself a Caldari Cruiser and there you go. The limitation in EVE is that you can learn and do anything, but you can’t do everything at once. When you step outside the starport in your Caldari Cruiser, your Amarr frigate skills mean absolutely zero. If your cruiser is armed with cannons, your missile skills mean absolutely zero. In a sense, in EVE, you are what you drive.
Guild Wars also works somewhat like this. Yes, you do have to pick classes to level, but for each class you have you can learn tons of skills, but when you leave town you can only have so many of those skills equipped.
I would love to have seen Fallen Earth follow those models. Let you grind and train an unlimited number of skills, but limit your character’s carrying capacity and make him be what he wears. Right now in FE you can carry kits for all the trade skills at once, but I’d prefer it if there was no limit to the training of your skills, but you could only carry two “active” kits at any time, so you’d have to choose what tasks you were planning on before you left town. Rather than force you to pick one kind of combat to specialize in, I’d prefer letting you learn them all, but having to choose primary and secondary weapons before leaving town.
The main thing here is that if I spend the next six months playing this game and making friends and joining a guild only to learn that while I was having fun leveling I was making decisions that would make the game totally un-fun later with no chance at all of correcting those decisions without starting over, that point, the point where my character isn’t fun because of misspent points is where they will lose me as a customer.
I really hope that Fallen Earth can come up with a solution to let players salvage “broken” characters, and I hope more games in the future consider implementing more dynamic character creation paths that don’t so heavily utilize closing doors.
EverQuest was, as I’ve described before, really just a bunch of chat rooms with this mini-game of fighting monsters strapped to it. In each room, or zone, there were several chat channels. Local or say was distance limited, get too far from someone, twenty or thirty virtual feet, and you wouldn’t see their chat messages. Then you had shout which was zone wide, and ooc (out of character) which was also zone wide, and auction which again was zone wide. You might wonder why they had three channels that were essentially functionally the same. The answer is in the second channel, out of character. Shout was intended to be for things you wanted to say to the whole zone which was in character, or role playing. OOC was for talking about min/maxing and last night’s baseball game. Auction was for trade chat, selling items or offering to buy items.
The best thing about EQ was that the players did a fairly good job (on my server anyway) of policing that. People talking about baseball in shout were asked to move to ooc, and they usually did. This let players have control over how they interacted with the game. If you wanted to role play, you simply turned off ooc and all the other players could chat about baseball and you’d never see it.
In recent years, as the MMO genre has grown, with millions of people playing games like WoW, and games dropping the in character/out of character conventions, the boundaries of chat are gone. Every channel in most games is full of every kind of chat (except role play, which is getting pretty well crushed under the boot of “fun” which an ever growing segment of game populations appear to equate entirely with playing whack-a-mole and collecting loot). Take Fallen Earth for example. I love playing the game, but only after I filtered out both the New Player and Region chats to tabs I could hide because it was non-stop streams of spoilers and data and whining.
Of course, I’m not just lamenting lack of channel etiquette, but the loss of the RP in the MMORPG. Many people these days appear to approach MMORPGs like they are just another way to spend some time. They log in, they fight some monsters, they complete some quests, they level, and they log out. Somewhere in there, perhaps, they chat with some other people. Though with the increasing emphasis on solo game play in modern MMOs, playing or chatting with other people isn’t something most people are doing. For me, at least, I’d love to see the return of the “out of character” channel, if only as an acknowledgment by the developers that there is a dividing line between in and out of character.
So, you’ve decided to sign up and play Fallen Earth. Â Allow me to impart to you my tips for making your life there enjoyable.
1) The only forum you should bother going to is the Technical Support forum on the Fallen Earth website, and only if you are having a problem with running the game. Â Pretty much every other forum on the Internet, even on the Fallen Earth site, is posting spoiler information about build trees and maximizing advancement and lists of which quests are “worth doing” and so on and so on. Â Look, unless you are the type of person who only enjoys a game when they reach the max level and go grind end game content, unless you are the type of person who spends their time running their EVE Online galactic empire, you need to stay away from all that information because it is going to do nothing but spoil the game. Â You’ll end up racing through with the “perfect” build and you’ll get to the end and wonder why you bothered… Â Just ignore all that and play the game. Â You might be saying to yourself that you want to read up on those builds so you don’t “gimp” yourself, and I understand that. Â But remember that this month’s perfect builds won’t be next month’s perfect builds, you should just feel out the game and play it the way you want to play it.
2) One of the cool things you can do in Fallen Earth is make tabs on your chat window. Â So, right after you get in to game, even before you take one step out of the pod in the tutorial, click the small tab right next to the tab labeled “All” to create a new tab, check the “New Players” box, uncheck the “Local” and “Flash on New Message” boxes, name the tab “New Players” and save it. Â Now right click the original “All” tab, choose Edit, uncheck the “New Players” box and save. Â What you have just done is to move the “New Players” channel to its own tab where it can be largely ignored. Â The reason you have done this is because, while that channel is good for asking a question when you get stuck, 99% of the time it is nothing but people spamming questions and spoiler info. Â Have you played WoW? Â Did you play on the Horde side? Â Remember Barrens chat? Â Its like that, only every question is “Where is Mankirk’s wife?” and it is always followed by complete directions to her and people giving their opinions on if you should even bother to find her. Â If you do find yourself in need of help, you just click that tab, make sure your chat is set to go to that channel, ask, get your answer, then go back to your other tab. Â You might find yourself needing to do this for the “Region” channel also as people tend to treat it the same. Â (In fact, people pretty much treat every channel in game like a Q&A spoiler channel because people don’t even try to play games for themselves anymore, but that is a rant for another post.)
3) Down in the bottom left corner of your screen is the menu bar, all the way at the right end of this bar is an icon that expands and contracts this bar, just to the left of that is one called “Filter”. Â Click “Filter” and then check all the items on this list, then click “Filter” again to make the list go away. Â One thing Fallen Earth’s tutorial is not good at is teaching you anything beyond moving and fighting and navigating dialog boxes. Â Take a few minutes and click each and every icon on the menu bar and learn what it opens and play around with each window. Â Of great importance is the “Actions” item as this is where the game hides all your abilities you need to put on your hotkey bar. Â By the way, while the hotkey bar appears to have only 12 buttons (“1” through “=” on the top of your keyboard), if you resize the window you’ll find that there are actually 36 buttons, the regular, shift+ and alt+.
Once you’ve done these three things, follow your quests, through the tutorial and in your first town, they really will explain how most of the game works. Â And have fun, because, I hope, that’s why you are there. Â Feel free to look me up, Jhaer Buegren.
Of all the IPs to be licensed, Dungeons & Dragons is actually the one where real money transactions (RMT, or microtransactions) make the most sense. Â Why? Â Because D&D has been doing microtransactions for decades. Â In fact, of all the games on the market, Wizard101 is the game that currently mirrors the pen & paper D&D model the closest.
Think about it… to start playing D&D, you need to buy a couple of rule books, namely the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbook. Â With those two books and some dice, in theory, you never need to buy anything else to play. Â You can make all your characters, make your own dungeons and monsters, you can even make your own loot. Â Of course, not everyone is as skilled or as imaginative as everyone else, so D&D sells gaming modules which include a dungeon, monsters, loot, and perhaps even a city or town, story lines and quests and events. Â You need to buy each module to play each module (or at least someone in your gaming group needs to). Â This is pretty close to how Wizard101 functions, only the DMG and PH are free. Â Create an account, download and log in. Â You can play the first few areas of their world for free, and then you have to pay a small fee for additional areas. Â Of course, there are other things you can buy in the game, items and houses and whatnot, but if you just want to play the game, I believe currently you can get everything for around $80. Â For many MMOs you’ll pay $50 just for the game box and the first month, and at $15 a month, just three months in and you’ll have spent $80, and you can’t really finish all of most MMOs’ content in 90 days, so you’ll pay more.
Money amounts aside, however, DDO should have been built this way to start. Â The base game with a small number of dungeons, the base classes and whatnot should have been a fixed price, or even free. Â Then, much like games release expansions on Xbox Live, put out new dungeons, new modules, for a small fee every month or two. Â New classes could even be released for a small fee, much like how D&D puts out expanded books to introduce new classes. Â Perhaps they could have even run a hybrid model, charging players $1.99 or $2.99 a month for access to the game, and then $5-$20 per module (amount based on size of content).
Anyway, that’s just my thoughts. Â If they’d started with that design, perhaps they wouldn’t have had to switch to their new Free-to-Play/Pay-to-Advance model.
Tobold has a great series of posts up called “Why Do We Play?” (that link goes to the summary, which links to the earlier parts because Tobold didn’t go back and put links in his introduction post) wherein he examines several aspects of gaming and how those aspect are realized. Â Of course, its mostly great if you aren’t a big gaming blog reader. Â Nothing in there is revolutionary, and most of it has been talked before in many places, but its not a bad read. Â Here is my rebuttal, of sorts…
I’m there for the social. I want to play with other people, and if I’m not going to play with other people, then I want a strong narrative which I am unlikely to find in an MMO and will more easily find in a single player game. One of the things I loved about EverQuest, and I’ve talked about it before, is that the game wasn’t quest driven. Yes, there were quests, and yes, I’ve said before that there was not a single day of playing EQ where I was not working on a quest of some sort. However, quests are personal. It is in their design to be so. A quest is started by you, it is on your quest tracker, and you will complete it. Someone can help you kill raptors and collect hides, but in the end, even if you both have the quest, you both need your own hides (whether the item is shared or not) and you will both talk to the NPC separately to complete the quest. The reason EverQuest worked so much better as a social game than WoW or other modern games is that while a player could always be questing, the bulk of the game was in fighting monsters, and fighting monsters is something you actually do together. When the monster dies, it may drop an item that is lootable by all group members, but still each of them loots the item for their own quest, they don’t complete the quest together, but they do kill the monster as a team. Especially in games like WoW, when you’ve collected all your items, you are best off running back to the NPC and doing the turn in as soon as possible because the next quest he gives may very well be in the same area you are already fighting in to kill monsters you are already killing but are getting no credit for since you don’t yet have the quest.  And quests reward the player better than the killing.
To that end, I was very excited about Warhammer Online’s public quest system, where a quest wasn’t assigned to you but just happened in a specific area and to be a part of it you only needed to be there. Â Of course, that game also had a ton of traditional quests and the heavy PvE and quest focus of the game, plus it being level based like most every other MMO, lead pretty quickly to people not socializing, racing through content on the traditional quests. Â The saving grace of the game was supposed to be the PvP aspects, but with so much focus on PvE, and trying a bunch of PvP elements to PvE sieges, it didn’t really work too well. Â Honestly, I hope they keep plugging away at the game and don’t close it down any time soon. Â If they just accept that they are not going to defeat WoW at the PvE game and work on making the PvP game fun and rewarding, they might manage to carve themselves out a very nice niche, and I might go back to the game.
Despite my distaste for the gameplay of EVE Online, I am repeatedly drawn to the game because the social aspects of the game carry so much weight. And by “social” I don’t just mean hanging around chatting with people, though I do mean that too, but in how the player economy involves interaction with other players, even when done through an auction/buy/sell interface there are still other players on the other side of those transactions. Similarly, its why I am drawn toward Fallen Earth and why I’m so disappointed that I experience so much lag in towns. Hopefully they’ll resolve that, or I’ll be able to buy a super PC (when I win the lottery), and I can join in.
But that’s it in a nutshell. Of all the reasons to play an MMO, the reason I’m there is for the social interactions, and not just between me and my friends from previous games talking on our private chat server while playing in guild groups, but for the random happenstance of playing with and around other people, whoever they may be.
This isn’t exactly zombie news, but…
Over the past few months, I’ve been participating in the beta for Fallen Earth, an upcoming post apocalyptic MMO. Before I get to the good stuff, let me just get the bad stuff out of the way.
The graphics. And I don’t mean the style, but the performance. My PC isn’t exactly new or top of the line, but I beat out their required specs and I play a great number of games released in the last couple years very well. When I venture off by myself or in a small group, this game plays great. But when I get to town or any large gathering of people, the game turns into a slide show. Unplayable. Obviously, I could buy a new PC, but my PC should be enough to play if I turn all the effects off… it doesn’t help though. Even with minimal settings, low resolution and playing in a window, the game gets better, but never what I would call good in busy areas. To make matters more confusing, if I stand still in town, I can sit and watch everything run great, but the instant I try to move or turn, slide show.
That aside… Fallen Earth captures the post apocalyptic world perfectly. First off, the world is huge, so when you run off into the wilderness, you are literally running off into the wilderness. One day I just picked a direction and started running. Two hours later I was still running… I’d seen one other person and some critters, some salvage and ruins, but little else. The best part of this… I started to get worried. Am I lost? Where is everyone? I’m gonna die out here… This is what a world after Armageddon is supposed to feel like. In other MMOs I would complain about all the empty space, because those games are littered with NPCs and stuff and are supposed to be full of people, but Fallen Earth is supposed to feel empty, and it does, and it works.
The combat is a little different from your standard MMO. Ranged weapons require aiming, and melee weapons have standard swings but need you to be facing the target. There is no auto attack or auto aiming, you don’t automatically hit something just because you have it targeted and hit your attack button. This makes fighting moving targets more difficult, and it makes movement matter in combat. Speaking of movement… you know how in real life if you are running and then jump, you pause when you land? You know how strafing is slower than turning and running? Both are true in this game. So, if you are looking for typical First Person Shooter mechanics of jumping around like a coked up jackrabbit all while running sideways at full speed in a circle perfectly nailing your opponent all the while, you won’t find it. Personally, I love it.
Another aspect of the game that I really enjoyed is the crafting. Not because crafting is so awesomely fun to play, but because so much in the game can be crafted. If you are familiar with EVE Online, it works like that. People go out and scavenge from the wilderness, then craft items (and the crafting is all done “offline”, meaning you don’t sit at a bench and make stuff, you just set it to be made and it will be done in time).
In fact, the EVE comparison is important, because, to me at least, this game plays a lot like a ground based version of EVE. While I could never really get into flying around space in a ship mining materials and joining corporations, I could easily get lost in walking the Earth, surviving.
I’ll make another post later with some screen shots, but to close off this post I’ll just say that if they can get the graphics issues sorted out, or if I win the lottery and can buy a new PC, I’m definitely on board for this game. If I could take this game’s design and put in zombies, I think I’d have my perfect MMO.