Posts Tagged ‘Aion Online’

Among the many jobs I have worked at, one of them was in a factory. There is an old expression that stuck with me from those days – no matter how tired you are, come quitting time on Friday, everyone has energy.  It’s Friday, welcome to the road to the weekend edition.

The Road to the Stars…

If you haven’t read the running conversation under this week’s “Game You Wish You Could Love” article, it’s all about Eve Online. But there is one game that we here at No Prisoners, No Mercy love even before it hits the shelves: Star Trek Online. Now mind you, these days we take anything that comes out of Eurogamer with about a truckload of salt. They are reporting, however, that Cryptic Studios has announced the official release date for Star Trek Online, which they are saying is February 5, 2010. Now mind you we are well aware that if there is anywhere that Murphy’s Law rears its ugly head it is producing games; and so that date may not be set in stone. However, at the risk of jumping the gun (for even in the world of interviews things change) we have the perfect source to ask…

Mr. Bill Roper who has kindly agreed to an interview about one of our favorite games  – Champions Online. The accompanying article prepared by our own Fran has been completed but we are going to make you wait until the audio portion is recorded.  While Fran and I are busy winging (or in my case teleporting) our way across the skies of Millennium City it occurred to us that while CCP is still talking about “walking in stations” everything we have seen from Star Trek Online so far (and that is only what we read) tells us that players in Star Trek are already footloose and fancy free instead of floating around in a pod full of primordial goo.  We only have one question left…

Who do we have to bribe to get a beta code (we missed out on the lifetime offer for Champions Online)

Dragons Age…

Dragon Age Origins has finally arrived and with it, an article over at arstechnica.com entitled “Dragon Age Launch Fails” (available here). If the article is to be believed, there are problems – here is a quote:

 “The problem? EA and Bioware require you to sign into their own websites, with their own accounts and login information, to allow you to access the bonus content from your purchase. That process, it seems, is broken for many users.” – Ben Kuchera, Arstechnica.com

I am not sure why the good folks at Arstechnica are having problems but no one at the modding group I belong to called “The Engineering Guild” (available here)  seems to be troubled at all. In fact everyone at The Engineering Guild has been planning their mods for Dragon Age Origins since long before the game came out.  And one thing is for sure, no one can say the devs at Bioware are not on the ball where the modding community is concerned – the tool set was released with the game and is available here.

Getting Hammered…

It was not that long ago that my goblin shaman finally retired from Warhammer Online for good…but maybe someone might follow in his place. Why? Here’s why..

Werit had an article this week  (and if you don’t read Werits blog why not? It’s good.) reporting that the new 10 day trial for Warhammer Online has been extended – indefinitely. In other words, while players are still limited to Tier one they can now play longer than 10 days. In fact they can play as long as they want.  Here is the article. Let’s hope that this is not only true, but that those who participate will max out at the top of the Tier One levels. After all, Tier One is where I had the most fun; especially in the Empire RvR lake. Either way, another one of our favorite sites, The Ancient Gaming Noob, has an interesting post this week about the possible consequences of the new trial (available here) entitled “a mass of Tier One Twinks”

Meanwhile back at the (post apocalyptic) corral:

Meanwhile the Wandering Goblin is reporting that Interplay and Bethesda (makers of Fallout 3, one of my favorite stand alone games) are still fighting it out in court for the rights to produce a Fallout MMO (which I read is set to expire this month for Interplay). The article is available here.  So while Interplay and Bethesda have been busy playing dueling lawyers I have been busy in the post apocalyptic world of FALLEN EARTH.  And if you want to know a bit more about how things have been going for the dev team over at Icarus there is nothing like hearing it straight from the “horses mouth” as it were – or in this case the project managers mouth.  Yes, Mr. Colin Dwan, project manager for Fallen Earth was kind enough to share some time with us earlier this week. The interview has been through the editing process and will be the top half of show number 48.

The folks over at Wizard 101 have been asking the No Prisoners No Mercy team to come back and play in their world again. As for me, I will be spending time buzzing through the skies of Millennium City faster than a speeding pullet and learning my way around the post apocalyptic Fallen Earth. However, I will not be playing any more Aion Online. For me I believe it is finally time to hang up my wings. I will be in good company, however as Werit appears to being hanging up a similar pair of wings and talks about it in an article here called Farewell Aion.

The last straw…

Werit’s article touched on a couple of points that, for me, were the last straw. Here are the quotes:

“Abyss.  The Abyss sounded interesting on paper, but in reality it was one big gank fest.  Allowing ranks 25 through 50 to fight in the same space, without a bolster, just was not fun.” – Werit

 ”Leveling.  It’s a long way to the top if you want to PvP.  I am a big fan of PvP leveling and Aion just does support that style of gameplay.” – Werit

“Guild.  There are quite a few CoW’s [presumably his guild] who play Aion and I will miss grouping with them.” – Werit

Pvp is  one place that place that Warhammer did it right and NCSoft  still hasn’t learned. If you are going to make a game where the focus is primarily on pvp make sure you can easily level with pvp. The interesting thing about pvp is that everyone talks about balance but what most people really mean is they want the scales tipped in their favor.  As far as balance is concerned I still like the approach Warhammer took (every class is strong against some and weak against others) as opposed to World of Warcraft’s approach (Micromanage all the classes until you manage to tick off just about everyone but rogues). And while Werit said he will miss some of his guild mates, the best thing about organizations that cross multiple games like The Older Gamers is that you will still see the same people in other games.

Stinking out loud…

There is little doubt that anyone who surfs the waves of the blogsphere has not heard about the ‘Blizzard Cash Shop” by now. Earlier this week Fran wrote about this at the end of her “Homey doesn’t like pugs” article.  John Woods echoes our (that’s the royal we) opinion in his article over at www.mmorpg.com.

“By raising a gigantic stink about this particular move on Blizzard’spart, the only thing that is going to happen is that next time, when a company actually does do something offensive like charge a subscription and offer game-enhancing items within a store, is that no one is going to listen to the horde of people that are crying foul.

By reacting and over-reacting negatively every time even the slightest thing is done that might possibly be controversial, the voices of the fans get easier and easier for game companies to ignore. This, my friends, is not good for our genre and opens the door to truly unscrupulous actions by others.” – John Wood, MMORPG.com ( available here )

Now on to the next section…

Lets start with a bit of fiction about Fallen Earth Lore.  Enjoy the story. See you on the other side of Friday.

- The No Prisoners No Mercy team

Most people have memories of their past: playing with childhood friends (or a lack thereof), parents, perhaps a sister or two. People often look back on times spent with families (and not necessarily fondly).  Her memories didn’t extend past the last half hour. In fact the only thing she could remember was her name, and that was only because it was tattooed across her upper left arm, that and a mass of Celtic scroll work. A similar tattoo adorned her right forearm, with two matching tattoos on each of her right and left leg, that went all the way up to her thigh.

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It has been one month since Aion Online has hit the shelves and about the same for Champions Online.   This is right about the time where a gamers mind turns to “virtual tourism”  – the end of the first free month. The following was in the recent release of the “October Community Address” from Aion Community Team:

“You’ve told us that it’s difficult to advance within certain level ranges. To address this issue, we’re planning to raise quest experience, in addition to reevaluating the experience rewards characters gain for individual kills. We understand how frustrating it can be to repetitively kill enemies. Our goal is to limit the need to mindlessly ‘grind.’” – The Aion Community Team (full address is here)

Both gamers and those who make the games expect potential customers to come and take a tour of the new game world. And it is certainly expected that not all those who arrive in that first free month of a games life cycle will make the virtual world one of their new homes.  The question still arises, however, what happens when a game fails to turn a “virtual tourist” into a new “virtual resident”.

This was one of the questions that My Co-host Fran, and I will be discussing with Tipa from West Karana and JMO from MMO Voices on an upcoming No Prisoners, No Mercy (NPNM) show.

When Paul Barnett discussed the matter with us, he likened the process to someone who leaves a girlfriend, hoping to find someone better, but always ends up yearning for the “love of their life” – whatever that first game or mmo happened to be.  There certainly must be something to that; for the “first love” of many players is World of Warcraft (WoW) and that is the game against which all others seem measured. Yet while investors and “triple AAA” developers alike hesitate to do anything other than what is expected, that can be one root causes of virtual  tourism.

What exactly do games “expect”?

Take 1 million gamers and ask them what they are looking for in a game and you are likely to get one million different answers. In the end analysis, no doubt the gamers themselves aren’t sure what they are looking for but will merely know it when they find it.  If the product you create is “approachable” as Scott Hartsman told us on an earlier there will be any one of a number of players who view themselves as the “core” of your customers and say “its too easy” (as happened in WoW after the Northrend expansion).  If it takes too long to level, for whatever reason (see Aion Online comments above) there will be yet another sector of gamers that will react as if you shot their dog. To paraphrase the great U.S. President Lincoln…

You can’t please all of the people some of the time so you had best please a few of the people most of the time.

As you will hear TIPA point out on a future show, many players take a tour of a new game world hoping to find something different and end up finding the same game they just left.  After all, who needs another WoW when you still have the WoW icon on your desktop? Mythic Entertainment started with a tabletop game named Warhammer where a great battle will often find three armies pitted against another, the survor always ready to pounce on the weakened victor. What they gave us (all considerations of art style aside) was  a game with one side pitted against the other…more of the same game mechanics used in just about every game that hits the shelves.

Aion Online, on the other hand, can’t seem to decide what it is. Yes, they have called it a PvPvE game.  An interesting approach but it is still a two sided game because the third side is controlled by the AI (the “E” in PvPvE).  If a gamer, such as myself, joins looking forward to new and innovative pvp I end up dieing on the vine as I try and wade through 25 levels until I get to pvp (Yes, I know about rifts but that isn’t pvp, that’s a slaughter).

This is why I will always applaud the independent game developer who dares to do something different.  There may be those in the gaming community who, in their ignorance, will sneer and call such games  a “niche of a niche”. What such games present to the mmo community are something that is desperately needed – someone who marches to the beat of a different drummer.  When a developer finally breaks out of the mold of game mechanics that are tried and true, we can finally go out looking for something different and find it.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather*

*Brought to  you from a bed in a convent, somewhere in Illinois.

Because I said so…

There is no more presumptuous a pundit than a blogger who perceives themselves to be profound. That’s my story and I ‘m sticking to it…

Why?

After a brief trek around the “blogosphere” lately I have been left feeling as if I had a rubdown with coarse grade sandpaper – in other words just irritated beyond words. (well almost beyond words or I wouldn’t be writing this would I?)  Now I appreciate that a blog and even a column is a given person’s opinion. That after all is what, generally speaking, brings you to a web site.   What is not acceptable, in any way, shape or form, is when an individual – and often it is someone with all the perception of a box of hammers – presumes to speak for all gamers.  Just think of it.  World of Warcraft has more subscribers than Switzerland has residents. Farmville, the flash based browser game has five times more than that.

To my knowledge (and I may indeed have it wrong), neither NCSoft, nor Cryptic Studios has announced how many subscribers they currently have for their respective games, Aion Online and Champions Online.  If I were to hazard a guess, it would no doubt be safe to say that neither game has one million subscribers or their marketing departments would be screaming it from the rooftops.  Even when Funcom just shipped  1 million Age of Conan boxes (not sold) they started shouting it. To which my response was, of course, shipped? Shipped where? Down the hall? Across the street? To the other side of town? Still, both games are likely to have at least several hundred thousand subscribers in their first month.

So here we are, a scant few weeks out for both Champions Online and Aion Online, and already we have seen bloggers pronounce edicts directed at both games along the lines of “The Honeymoon is over”. 

Quite frankly I haven’t seen such a load of crap since I was the caretaker for 1,000 rabbits (and that’s A LOT of rabbit crap).

It doesn’t matter if I don’t like a game. In the long run, it doesn’t even matter if columnists for places like PCGamer like a game. No one, no matter who they are, has the ability to speak for everyone. Consider movies such as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.   Time and again reviewers plagued us all with their considered and self described “expert opinion.”  Yet when first weekend sales were counted up, the educated opinion of those reviewers who hated the movie may as well have been blown out their rectum as set in print. The movie, as well all know, was a financial success.

So if you enjoy playing a game, or are considering purchasing the game, don’t put it off just because some nebulous voice cries out in the streets of the global village that is the internet that a game “stinks” or that people no longer enjoy it any more. Or that players are quitting the game.  Tell the reviewer, columnist or blogger to blow it out their posterior and try it out for yourself.

After all, when it comes to the games that you, the reader, play, there is only one opinion that counts…

Yours.

 See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

The Easy Road or the Hard Road

There is a moment, at the end of the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the version with Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka) where Willy Wonka turns to Charlie and says, “Do you know what happened to the little boy who suddenly got everything he ever wanted?” In response to Charlie’s quizzical look, the famous chocolate maker replies with a smile and says…

“He lived happily ever after.”

That’s the question we ask ourselves today – would we be happy if we had it all handed to us on a silver platter?  Players across the myriad mmo gaming worlds strive to have the best armor or the fastest spaceship.  But does the attaining of the object of a desire matter more than the struggle to achieve it? Some of the unhappiest people I have known are living in four story mansions and driving BMW’s. 

But what if you could have literally anything in a gaming world you wanted? What would you do? Would it make it you happy?

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Polishing the polish by Julie Whitefeather

There was a time when if anyone this side of the Pacific Rim had admitted to playing an “import” game they would have received a quizzical look normally reserved for people who extolled the virtues of Bill Clinton at the Republican National Convention.  Back then, reactions to an enthusiastic support of the Micro-transaction business model would have been garnered right along with the same sort of reactions reserved for people who intended to marry their sister.

Yet what a difference a year or two can make.

Here we are and an import game named “Aion Online” is the talk of the town (and most blogs) and the “it” place to be for many a gamer.  There are a few blogs creeping up here and there, with sometimes proud announcements that they have un-subscribed to Aion Online.  There have even been the occasional well thought and long considered reviews that announced simply “it sucks.”

For all that, however, Aion Online has been out for at least a year in Korea, and to my understanding is quite a success there.  Yet the increasing popularity of import games has created a new phenomenon in gaming hasn’t it?  Aion Online, and other imports as well, may have been out in other countries for quite some time. In fact, the games in question may even be so polished that their glow would provide significant candle power. But just let audiences in the U.S. have access to the game and all bets seem to be off.  The good devs at NCSoft have to start polishing their game all over again.

Pity the poor developer, who works their fingers to tiny little nubs. As the announced release date approaches the developer will expect to spend so much time working on the game that their own families will start to look unfamiliar.   The day of open beta finally arrives, and some blogger, who has spent less time playing the beta than they did on the crapper that same day, promptly announces the game “sucks”. The release date comes and goes and blogs all over the internet begin to announce the short comings of the game, nearly always conflicting, and sometimes within the body of the same article.   Some bloggers decide to enlighten us as to what buying Aion means about us (wow I’m glad that debate is over), while still others try and tell us that Aion Online is nothing more than another version of WoW: two games that are about alike as pigs and eagles (they both have feet and that’s about it).

While gamers debate amongst themselves whether games move too fast, too slow, are too easy, too hard and a myriad of other perceived “problems” it isn’t just the game developers who are listening to and reading the comments across the internet – investors are listening as well.  As we recently discussed with Dr. Richard Bartle on the No Prisoners, No Mercy show, rather than spend so much time complaining about games, we should spend some time praising developers who are willing to try something new, even if we don’t agree with their reason for doing so. When economic times worsen, investors are always far more cautious. Few will be willing to invest in anything that is not already “tried and true” and western gamers by and large are not doing anything to change that.  

In the end, I pity the poor developer who has to spend part of their day trying to beat down the reputation for success attained by companies like Activision/Blizzard and Electronic arts, while they spend the rest of their days trying to please a fickle western gaming audience.  All the while they also have to deal with some imbecile who thinks one game is like another simply because they share some of the same basic game mechanics.  It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if occasionally, just occassionally, some producers of mmos threw up their hands in disgust, flipped U.S. gamers the proverbial “bird” and said go buy a console game and “play with yourself”.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

 

What do Medieval Europe and Aion Online have in common?

They are both beset by a plague spread by rats – only in the case of Aion Online the rats are called Gold Sellers. As we discussed earlier in our virtual pub (“Methinks thou dost protest too much”)  gaming forums are full to the brim with players complaining about gold sellers. Bring up the subject at any gathering of gamers and you will soon have a room full of gamers screaming about the evils of RMT (Real Money Trading).  And as we all know they wouldn’t exist if no one ever used their services.

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Not long ago I listened to an interview with Dr. Richard Bartle as the guest. He spoke of when he and Roy Trubshaw created MUD, the multiuser text based game that was to serve as one of the bases of all that would come later in the world of MMOs.  Dr. Bartle spoke of how he “saw the power” in what they had created. What stood out to me the most where the following words:

 “We had a way to make places where people could go and become themselves. For me it was always a thing about freedom. I always wanted people to be able to be free to be themselves.” – Dr.Richard Bartle on the creation of MUD

The monkey wrench that we have all, as gamers, thrown into this particular utopia is a little thing called a global village.  It is a concept engendered by author Marshal McLuhan describing how the world has become small village, brought about by electronic media, facilitated by the instantaneous movement of  information about the globe. Now consider that he made the concept popular back in 1962, long before the internet, and you have a man who was a bit of a prophet.  Yet, as with any case where you bring people in to close proximity to one another for any length of time, even if it is virtually, you will end up with a classic case of “familiarity breeds contempt.”  Add in the perceived anonymity of the internet (and here I say perceived because much of our lives is on the internet) and you have a situation where that contempt will come much sooner than it normally would have. We have stepped out of the mud and simply “stepped in it”.

Enter the “asshats.”

If Diogenes’ “Hermit” was looking for an American retailer that enforced the ESRB rating instead of an honest man, he would still be looking. In an era when the internet has replaced the television as an “electronic babysitter” the age restriction of who should be allowed to play a game has little to do with reality.

Unfortunately the ESRB rating for Aion Online is only “teen” – barely a week into the game and I would pay real money for NCSoft to have thrown enough violence into the game to have it merit a higher rating. The unfortunate side effect of the aging of generation that was around at the birth of the mmo (mine) is that a younger generation has moved in behind us. Now I am not saying that it is unfortunate in all cases; far from it in fact.  But put together enough virtual citizens of enough virtual countries and you will have a great big barrel that will hold more than just a few bad apples. 

I may be free to be myself – free of judgments based on race (other than ones in game faction of course), nationality, religion and what have you.  However, at the same time, others are free to be themselves. This means they are free to have guilds named “We crap on children” and fulfill juvenile fantasies by naming their characters “yourwhore” and “Grabmyrod” (all too common during these, Aion Online’s opening weeks). It’s a bit hard to enjoy a game developer’s well crafted lore, when someone’s 14 year old is crafting names for their character that belong on the stall of a men’s room and not flashed across my computer screen.

Still, any utopian society, virtual or no, is likely to have its problems.  As much as I enjoy Aion Online (especially the visceral, as NCSoft describes it, combat animations) I can only hope the second month of the game holds true to the course of that of most other mmos.  Once the first free month is up my great hope is that the virtual tourists will have moved on to whatever the next “it” game out there will be.  And that, my friends, really will be freedom. 

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

“The lady doest protest too much, methinks” – Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act III, Scene 2

I am sure there are myriad reasons the Government of China had for banning the sale of virtual goods for real money, but it is a law that will be incredibly difficult to enforce in the first place.  And to throw yet another wrench into the works, China is far from being the only country that has gold sellers.

Now I am sure those who where there on opening day, right along with me, will point to the long ques to get on to the popular servers.  In fact, at one point I heard a voice from the other side of the room cry “TWO THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY!”

But it is not the ques that filled me with angst. Oh no. As we have spoken about before, my friends, any time a company releases a new game, the number of servers available at start is just a crap shoot. Add to that the number of people who purchase the game just for the thirty free days that is pro-forma in the industry and you have one perplexing problem.

But it is not the number of servers that has me perplexed.

Nope.

As Mr. Hartsman pointed out to us on the NPNM show, time and again his forums were filled with players who were not just aggravated with gold sellers, but despised them.   Yet for all that, gold selling continued to be a problem in Everquest.  Such is the way it is with all games.  As gamers we  have all come to expect that. Still, it must certainly be a case of one hand not knowing what the other is doing – for while one hand is typing out a message of protest on a video-game forum the other is reaching for a credit card to buy gold.

While some players have been busy complaining about waiting ques (and long ques are not always a bad thing as we discussed earlier) others where finding that there accounts have already been banned…or so it seems.   Over at a game site I happened upon this morning called Gamer Limit there is an interesting article by one Colin Robinson, entitled “joking about selling gold earns a ban“.  Here is an excerpt from the article by a perplexed player who emailed Gamer Limit after finding himself banned “allegedly” (as they say in legal circles) for “joking about selling gold”:

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