Tag: EverQuest

There had better be a 2fort map

Gaming

The news has been out for three days. How on Earth did I not know about this already?

The only game I ever played for longer than EverQuest was TeamFortress for Quake. It freaking owned. I really hated deathmatch games, and bland Capture the Flag wasn’t too much better. But TF… that was awesome. Nine classes, allowing a player to play to their strengths, made for incredible strategies. The leagues for TF were some of the most intense things I have ever experienced in gaming. But when TF Classic came out for Half-Life, well, it was a little disappointing to me. It just seemed like a straight port of the game into the new engine. It was fun, but I just didn’t get into it, in fact, I kept playing TF.

TeamFortress 2, as you can read in the article I linked, has been a long time coming. And I love the new style of graphics they have going. Lots of games have come out over the last couple of years, but nothing that made me want to upgrade my PC. This… this will do it. Now I just have to figure out a way to afford it.

A Focus on Graphics

Gaming

Over at Nerfbat, Blackguard has posted about the need for good graphics in games and its gotten me thinking…

I am one of those people who says that the graphics of a game shouldn’t matter. And to a point, its true. For a really good game, the gameplay should be compelling enough that enjoyment of the game shouldn’t be affected by the graphics. However, as Blackguard points out, graphics are how most people get their first glimps of the game, and advertising is based almost entirely around screenshots with game features coming later more through word of mouth than actual ads.

Where my issue comes in is that I feel that too often the graphics lead the game instead of suppliment or compliment the gameplay. Too many games spend so much time working on realism or fansy shaders and animations, and push the envelope on system requirements, that they lose track of making a game worth playing and that a large enough portion of the public can play. At the rate technology moves, and the fact that game developers keep right up on the bleeding edge most of the time, if you are at all serious about games you probably need to buy a new computer every year, or at least a few hefty upgrades. Of course, not everyone can afford that.

I think one of the major successes of World of Warcraft is that they game runs well on moderate, even low end machines. Personally, I’m running a 1.2GHz Althon with 1GB RAM and a 256MB ATI 9800 video card. It runs very well, except in Ironforge and in open PvP with a hundred or more people running around. I play Half-Life 2 on it also, another success. I tried to play EverQuest 2 on it, and it just died. I got the game to finally run smoothly by turning down the graphics so far that it wasn’t worth my time. 8-bit or Nintendo style graphics I can handle, but fuzzy blobs running around fuzzy blobby landscapes I can’t. City of Heroes ran fairly well. I didn’t have all the highend particles turned on, but not many people do. City of Villains upgraded the graphics engine just enough that I had to tune down the graphics just below the threshhold of “playable”. When the faces lose their eyes, its actually borderline disturbing.

And that leads into another issue I’ve got… why haven’t any companies made a game that actually tunes down? Why isn’t there a slider to reduce polygon counts and use “flatter” textures? Instead, as the sliders move toward the low end, you lose definition and the world begins to look like you forgot to put on your glasses, like a bad runny watercolor painting as things blend and smear into each other.

Perhaps I just need to accept the fact that I need to put in my budget a thousand bucks a year on computer upgrades… no wait, two thousand because I have to upgrade the wife’s PC as well. I can’t imagine having a family and needing to keep three, four, even five PCs up to date. Five grand a year just so the family can continue to game together. It makes you want to go buy some board games…

Death Penalties

Gaming

One thing every game has to deal with somewhere in its design is the penalty for losing. Some games have opted to have none, but in my opinion this leads to the “lemming effect” where player has absolutely no fear of losing and will repeatedly slam into a brick wall until the wall gives in. Other games have chosen to allow methods for the reduction of penalties, like clones, insurance, returning to your body, praying at your death site, etc… the list goes on forever.

Long ago, EverQuest had a very stiff penalty, depending on your level at the time, you would lose experience equal to ten to twenty percent of your level. On some levels, that was hard to earn back. To that end, players avoided death, and dying made them angry. Later, Sony reduced the death penalty enough that the last few groups I was in before I quit didn’t really seem to care about death at all. And of course, experience loss deaths mean very little when you are level capped and have a good buffer.

Other games, like City of Heroes, maintained the exp loss death, but also allowed you to continue forward progress, and you could never lose a level. You earn “debt”, and while you had it fifty percent of your experience went to pay it off and the other fifty percent went toward your next level. Sort of good, but it lead to people not minding defeat, which in a superhero game leads to a little more heroism (but a lot more stupidity). Of course, with CoH having a penalty actually helped because it forced you to level slowed, gain more influence (money), and be able to keep up to date on your power enhancements (store bought).

The one thing all of the games I’ve played have in common, and the thing I would like to see change, is they all have one kind of defeat. Just one. You die, you lose exp. You fall, you get debt. You are killed, you drop an item (Asheron’s Call). You lose, your equipment is damaged (World of Warcraft).

Why no variety?

What I’d love to see in games is multiple layers of defeat. Why must lose of hitpoints always equal death? Why must monsters you fight be relentless until they kill you? When a mugger attacks me in the city, why not have him beat me into unconsciousness, steal some money and then run away? If I enter hostile territory, why can’t they beat me down, then if they defeat the entire party, drag us to the edge of their land and leave us for dead? Why can’t I be disarmed, paralyzed, and laughed at?

I don’t see a reason for having so few options except that the more options you have, the more code it requires. Building a bigger box.

Personal Space in Games

Gaming

In MMORPGs, one of the decisions that gets made in their design is whether or not to give player characters personal space, or as I usually call it a “bounding box”.

EverQuest had a bounding box. Two people could not pass directly through one another. This caused issues when popular NPCs, like bankers, would get mobbed by players resulting in people who could not get close enough to interact. And sometimes this caused huge uproars when it came to doorways and other tight spaces. It was not uncommon to see an ogre in the Plane of Knowledge sitting in the bank doorway being an ass and demanding to be paid to move. It had other uses too, on my server there was at least one incident of using an orge to block a passage way into raid content, denying competition to a second group to a raced spawn.

Of course, going with no bounding box at all can cause just as much issue. In World of Warcraft players have no personal space. This is great when it comes to the auction house because there will commonly be fifty people trying to crowd around the one NPC. The drawback comes in PvP combat. A spell caster has to keep his target in his field of view to cast, so in order to interrupt casting all a melee player needs to do is run right up, step through the caster, then step back. In about a second the target goes from being in front, to 180 degrees behind, back to front again. Even with good reflexes and high speed mouse control, its very hard not to lose the spell cast, and for a melee player with a slow two handed weapon he won’t even miss a swing while he two-steps the caster’s blast into interruption.

What I would suggest is that instead of strictly making the bounding box a property of the character object, also make it modifiable by the surroundings. Make it so that in a defined area, around an NPC or doorways to buildings or narrow hallways in dungeons, the player becomes “intangible” and other players can pass right through them, and while not in those areas, players have a seeming mass and cannot be stepped through.

And with this, I kick off my section “The Game That Never Was“, which is going to be a collection of ideas that I have about what would make the perfect MMORPG.

Survey: Question Number Two

Gaming

Following the last question on stat systems: Would you prefer to play in a game where all the numbers are shown to you, or one where the numbers are hidden and values have to be inferred through experience, or some middle ground mix of numbers and inferences?

Several games in their Alphas or early Beta stages have toyed with removing numbers. If I remember correctly, EverQuest did this. You either “miss”ed or “hit” when fighting, and there are life bars, and there are descriptions for stats like “strong as an ox” or “slightly slow and dim-witted”. But in the end, and I believe usually from player/tester pressure, they put the numbers back in so that we can see that we hit for 8 points of damage and that we have 73 hit points remaining and that our strength is 18 and our intelligence is 9.

I’ve often thought I’d enjoy playing a game without the numbers, even though I’ve not played one like that yet outside the pen & paper gaming group on Saturdays. Mostly, its just because I’ve come to dislike the culture of numbers in games, where people judge you on your stats instead of your ability to play. It’s something I would like to try.

How about you? What system would you prefer?

The World of Warcraft

Gaming

It’s not often that a game really grabs me. I’d played computer games for a number of years, even hauling my PC around to other people’s houses to hook up to a co-ax ipx network to kill each other on an alien planet surrounded by monsters in DOOM. But the first game that really hooked me, that really sucked me in, was Team Fortress. It was a mod for the Quake game that expanded on the idea of deathmatch and capture the flag. Rather than give every person the same weapons, every player got a subset of them, and different health, armor and run speeds. It was capture the flag, but with real team play, because you needed the other players and classes to offset your weaknesses. I played it for 5 years.

I’d just set TF aside… the Quake version was rife with cheats and hacks, and the new version for Half-Life just wasn’t the same… and along came EverQuest. What initially drew me in was its similarity to Team Fortress. No single class was a god among mortals, they all had their strengths and weaknesses, they all had their place. People needed each other, and a great many friends came of it. I played it for 5 years.

Last year I finally closed the door on EverQuest. It had just become more of a chore than a joy. Like most people, I wish I’d quit about 6 months before I did, but then if not for those last 6 months, I wouldn’t have felt like quitting. Heh. So from EQ I went to City of Heroes. I still play. Frankly, I think I’ll always play. Never hardcore, but nothing really compares to being in your heroic spandex and wading in to a room of ten or more villains and emerging victorious by the skin of your teeth. There is a reason I read comic books for so long, and wish that I could still afford to collect. Superheroes fill a void of heroic impulse, stupidity and bravery all wrapped in one, that just can’t be filled anywhere else.

Blizzard created a world many years ago. Off and on, their Warcraft series has always held a place in my ‘frustrated distractions’ category… the games I would play when I was having an off day in my main game. The World of Warcraft, their MMO based in the same world is just… fascinating. The level of detail, the richness of color… its like a fantasy novel come to digital life. The one thing it lacks is that, for the most part, you don’t need other people… you can play solo from beginning to end. Sure you might miss some quests or dungeons, but one should never expect to explore 100% of a game world in an MMO. Heck, 5 years of EQ and I think there are still some places I never went to. But one of the things that it manages to capture so much better than EverQuest ever could, is the simple idea that while I don’t need other people, the things that can be accomplished in small groups, the way the classes compliment each other in so many varied ways… I don’t need other people, but I want other people. So here’s to the next 5 years of gaming.

Story of Heroes

Gaming

City of Heroes is about to do something that, unless I’m mistaken, is nearly unheard of in the world of MMOs. They are going to advance the story.

No, not just some expansion that tacks on a dozen new zones and makes an additional story you can explore, but actually taking the existing story and moving it forward. The only other game I know of that has done this is Asheron’s Call… and it makes sense once you know that some of the top guys at Cryptic were once the top guys at Turbine, makers of Asheron’s Call.

If you have been playing the game, or buy it right now and play, one of the villain groups you will fight are the 5th Column. These are a hold over from WWII, rooted in the Nazi Party but since separated into their own goals and headed by a man from another dimension, an alternate Earth when Germany won WWII. In a month or so (or less, I hope), you won’t be able to do this. In fact, if you join the test server now, you’ll find that the 5th Column are gone, and a new group, The Council, have risen up to take their place, destroying and devouring them from within. In a few months time, except for the odd plaque and the memories of older heroes, the 5th Column will vanish from the game.

One of the problems with other games on the market, is that they are, for all their lore and diversity, static. In EverQuest, if you buy an account right now and start from scratch, I can point you to quests and monster spawns that have remained unchanged for more than five years. The story in EverQuest has expanded, they’ve added new continents and worlds, alternate planes. They’ve added new lore and stories, new arcs of history and adventure, but they have remained reluctant to remove the old ones… The Paladins of Marr and the Freeport Militia are at the same tense standoff for control that they have had for five years. Wait, that’s five “real” years, but since 72 real minutes = a Norrath day, then you have 20 Norrath days per real day, which means that its been over 100 Norrath years. Beyond simple storytelling, EQ would have benefitted from adjusting its game in other ways… as time went on they developed more and more high level content, because thats where the bulk of people were, but they also took away none of the low level content, so the decreasing number of players turned into empty underpopulated zones and loss of social activity. In its beginning, people met in EQ because they were in the same places… now, until you get up to the later 50’s in level, there just simply aren’t enough people to fill the world to make for meaningful interaction between players.

This whole thing with City of Heroes gives me hope. I’ll be keeping my eye on the future of World of Warcraft to see if they follow suit, and even though I have no interest in playing EQ2, I’ll keep an eye on them to see if they have learned from their past. I’d love to see more worlds, more stories, instead of giant online gaming habitats.

A Return to the Trenches

Random Thoughts

Long ago, before the dawn of Everquest, in Quakeworld, in a land of two forts, a soldier stood. Logan5. His rockets fired true, his grenades landed squarely, his shotgun shells littered the ground, and his enemies laid dying at his feet. First of the proud Disciples of Syrinx, later of nobody’s heroes, and finally fading away to nothing…

Three nights ago, he returned.

I bought a video card a while back, and in the box was a coupon for a free copy of Half-Life 2. The coupon shuffled in with the other papers on the computer desk, and was almost lost. The release delays of HL2 seemed endless, but finally the game is here… and… Wow.

When I first played the original Half-Life, I’d been gaming for years. I’d battled my way through Doom 1 and 2, Quake 1 and 2, and dozens of other first person shooters. They all had one thing in common… sucky AI. In every game, you could exploit the AI flaws to trivialize the game. All the monsters reacted in certain ways, and you could predict their movement to the point of boredom. That’s why on-line play, the Quakeworld servers, were such a wonderful draw. It was on those servers that I found what would be the longest running game of my life (yes, it even beats EQ, which lasted 5 years)… Team Fortress for Quake.

Playing through the early versions, I saw John, Robin and Ian’s vision of the game develop. And when it solidified, it was awesome. The maps they made, and the ones players made, lead to a level of clan and tournament play that simple deathmatch just never got me excited enough for. I’d come home from work and play TF for hours, hopping server to server, hanging out with teammates and rivals. And in a game that ultimately lacked ‘tangible’ goals, any animosity was fleeting, friends were friends, enemies were friends, and for 30 minutes at a time, from map to map, the adreneline flowed.

When Team Fortress Software was purchased by Valve, I knew I needed to keep an eye on them. And when I met Robin and some of the Valve guys at E3 and they showed me Half-Life and the Team Fortress Classic mod for it, I was hooked. I bought the game when it came out, and something odd happened… I played the single player game, and I sucked… or rather, the AI didn’t. Soldiers flanked, drew fire, fled and laid traps. The tried and true methods of getting monsters stuck on corners or behind halfwalls didn’t work any more. Even Deathmatch for HL was fun and not like the rocketfest that Quake DM was.

TFC came out, and I played it for a while. But as much as I loved HL and TFC, I stopped playing after a while… EQ had come into my life, and that was it.

Now, EQ is done. I don’t think I will, ever again, play a game that requires that level of investment, or requires you to play a certain way to avoid that investment (when only some classes can solo, you have to play them to avoid getting stuck looking for a group). I play City of Heroes, and I love it… its very low key, I can solo as any character, groups are fun and easy to find, and while it does take some planning and game knowledge to pick powers and place slots, there is no gear hunting to keep up with the Joneses and the ever expanding difficulty of the game. I also play Eve Online, which is another low key game… I train my skills while I’m offline, and I hop on now and then to fly missions or kill pirates. I’m looking into World of Warcraft… still not totally sold on it, but my time in beta did show me that it could be played solo or duo without much difficulty, and that my game could remain fun even if I didn’t “raid” the “high end”, it holds promise for the low key gamer.

When I redeemed my coupon online for Half-Life 2, it came with a bundle… HL, TFC, Day of Defeat, Counter Strike, Counter Strike: Source (CS using the new HL2 game engine), and more. So after I loaded up HL2 and was blown away by the graphics and how well they ran on my years old PC (Doom3 runs like shit, and this game looks better than Doom3), I loaded up TFC and hopped on a server… It took about 15 minutes before my fingers were finding the right keys again, before I stopped kicking my own ass in sacrifice and started putting some of my foes in the dirt, but then it all came flooding back… The reason I loved TF, and it wasn’t just the classes and team fighting, it was that a game was 30 minutes or so… you jump on a server, dive in, play, then when the map recycles you can leave and no one says anything bad about you… the map was done.

Logan5 is back, sort of… turns out while I’ve been gone from the FPS world, someone has been using the name, so I’ll use something else… I’ll think up something while I play the original Half-Life through again.

EverQuest… What`s next?

Random Thoughts

I was going to originally post this in the EverQuest category, but that was really for my ideas for fixing EQ… seeing as I no longer play EQ, its a dead category but will remain as is… and this, this is just comedy.

Over on the message boards for Monkly-Business, someone asked, “Now that Omens of War is out, what do you think the next expansion will be?”

Seeing as the next expansion will come after World of Warcraft’s release, and there are a number of games on the horizon, as well as free content patches for City of Heroes, the following was my reply:

EverQuest: The Twenty Other Zones of Faydwer That You Just Never Happened to Notice During the Last Five Years of Playing.

Featuring zones like: Middle Faydark, Dagnor’s Other Cauldron, The Hidden Lair of Meldrath, The land of LXnmoptgWWjyr, The Brownie City, Randomly Generated Dungeon Zone with Poor Pathing and Randomly Placed Mobs 27, and at least three new Estates none of which will be restful!

With this expansion they will introduce new items contain the new NO LOOT tag – you can view the stats and take screenshots and have the items load to Lucy, but you can’t pick it up and equip it! These items are intended for all the people who like to make Magelo profiles for their non-existant characters by picking items that they’ve never seen for themselves and try to pass themselves off as uber!

Also in this expansion, we will be introducing female giants! Ever wonder where all the giants come from seeing as they are all male? Well, rather than fix class balance, we’ve decided to make a whole set of Lore including new zones, spells for mobs that you’ll never get, and new models (since we STILL aren’t going to do new player models no matter how much you beg) all about the story of the where the female giants have been for the past 6 years! All because we know you care!

And lets not forget that we will be introducing a new class! Following both the arcane and physical arts this player can nuke as well as a wizard, heal like a cleric, tank like a warrior, and dps like a rogue.. from ANY ANGLE! This new class, called the Tankmage is bound to turn grouping and raiding on its ear! Class balance? WE GIVE UP!!

The Future of the Game

Gaming

I’ve probably ranted about this before… but of course that won’t stop me from doing it again.

What’s wrong with EverQuest?

Honestly, if you enjoy the game as it is, nothing. Sony has laid out a path of developement for their virtual world that they are progressing down, and if you enjoy the places it goes then EverQuest is a happy fun place. If you don’t though, EverQuest is, as the popular phrase among other ranters goes, dying.

The Real World, you know, the one we live in, is huge. It has a vastness that most people never bother to try to comprehend. But if you are one of those people who try, you’ve looked at this planet and seen what the 6 billion or so people on it have done. Cities, towns, farms, roads… there are really very few places that are truely barren of human life. Places in the Arctic and Antarctic come to mind, as do a number of deserts and other places. Now consider that 70% of the planet is water and has, realistically, no population of humans.

In the world of EverQuest, much of the game is like the oceans. If you run from Qeynos to Freeport, which is 6 to 8 zones, you’ll likely run into maybe a dozen people. These are zones that at one time housed a hundred or more. 10 to 20 people per zone, and on many servers with the East Commanlands Bazaar, 100 people without breaking a sweat. The game is empty.. at least until you get to level 65 and start raiding, then you have 500 people vying for the same 3 to 4 zones and encounters.

EverQuest has become a land of raiding and high end gaming. There is little place for the truely casual player anymore, the slow and steady explorer, the quiet dreamer. If you try to play the game that way now, starting at level 1, you’ll quit in 3 months, guaranteed. Its just… lifeless. Now, if you powerlevel, and race to 65, you may play for much much longer. This is where the “game” exists. However, step away from the dozen zones built for the “high end” game, and you’ll find it just as empty.

Sony has nurtured a game that has expanded with its players, but it hasn’t grown. Arathur in Qeynos still says the same things he said 5 years ago. The same quests are still there, some are even still broken. Sony had lived under the impression that the game is better off going to new lands than to dare alter the existing game. Its true, players get angry when content they either remember fondly or have yet to experience disappears, but these angry players don’t quit. Verant understood this. While they did give up the Kunark expansion that nearly doubled the size of the world, they also gave us “Bloody Kithicor” as the once benign Kithicor Forest turned into a place of vile evil once the sun has settled beneath the hills, changing a zone for levels 1-10 into a place filled with wandering level 30-40 undead. Ask any player who played during that time, and they’ll recall it. Ask any player who started in the year or so after and they’ll have heard of it. Only 2 or more years later is it possible for a player to play the game and not hear of “Bloody Kithicor”. Verant developed player lore: stories that lasted long beyond their occurance. Sony hasn’t done that.

In the history of game expansions, EverQuest was always expanding. From Kunark, to Velious, to Luclin, to the Planes of Power, to Broken Skull Rock, to the Lost Dungeons of Norrath, to the Gates of Discord, and looking forward toward the Omens of War, only one expansion didn’t add new lands. The Lost Dungeons of Norrath added camps to existing zones, and dungeons off those and more existing lands. You didn’t need a port, or to ride a boat. It was the old world brought to life again.

Right now, there are zones in EverQuest sitting empty that are a part of storylines gathering dust. All they would need to do is resurrect those stories, revamp a zone or two, add a zone or two, add a dozen instanced dungeons, and the players would come back to the old worlds. The travel paths of old would be alive again with the footfalls of adventurers. Mayong Mistmoore could return to power and take his seat in Castle Mistmoore evoking the resurgance of evil in the Faydark. The frogloks of old Sebilis could begin to rebuild their armies in earnest, gathering strength from the growing darkness in their halls. The gnolls of splitpaw might stumble on to an enormous power, strengthening them and spilling out into the Karanas.

Everything that Sony needs to revitalize the world of Norrath is within their grasp… but the catch is, you can’t revamp a zone for only the players who pay. If Mayong returns to power in his castle, you can’t have the new Mistmoore available only to those who buy the new box down at Besy Buy or who order it online for digital download. Free content seems to be a bad word at Sony. But free content could save them.

EverQuest has peaked. At this point, the only thing they can do is retain customers. New customers (true new customers, not someone’s second or third account) will be few and far between. Players entering Norrath now are presented with an enormous empty world. The social aspect is gone at the lower levels. So eiher you suffer in a world of silence, or you have a friend who helps you catch up to the “real game”. And many new players, and players new to gaming, don’t want that… they want to experience the game, not have it handed to them. The only way EverQuest will ever gain customers again… free content. A revamping of the world so that it isn’t so empty and lifeless below level 65.

City of Heroes, World of Warcraft… there is blood in the water, and they smell it. These games are making large worlds that are vast beyond their borders, designing games to be enjoyable and populated at all levels. In City of Heroes, for example, even when you are level 43, from time to time doing missions you’ll be forced to travel back to Atlas Park, the lowest level zone in the game, for a door mission, or to talk to a contact, keeping you connected to the rest of the world.

EverQuest needs to change, or it will, as they say, “die”.