Posts Tagged ‘Icarus’

A bit later than usual today dear readers…believe it or not I actually went outside today.  It seems that it was the perfect day for sucking a yard full of leaves. It reached the point where the neighbors called and said, “Gee you seem to have all the leaves from the neighborhood on your lawn!”   And in case you haven’t guessed, that is “neighborese” for “When are you going to rake the leaves?” However it was a good day for it – after all it was Caucasian summer…I mean “Indian summer”…I mean a warm fall day.

So if you saw the title on your reader and expected to find an article about a Cole Porter song you are, as you can tell from the picture above, mistaken.   Instead this is about a time in the not too distant future (150 years to be exact) as a rough character named “Auntie Maim” rides across a plateau somewhere in the vicinity of the Grand Canyon (that’s a great big hole in the ground in the south west area of the U.S. for all of you  out of the country readers).

So why the night and day title?

Quite simply I have had the pleasure of sampling Fallen Earth since early closed beta thanks to the kind folks at Icarus Studios. Yes, I will be the first to admit that some of the early days were rough.  But things have changed since then, and even since the opening days of the game.  And as the title of the article suggests I have found it to be a change of “night and day” by comparison. 

Lag?

Not a bit of it – and we are running it on a desk top that is a far cry from being a “top end” machine.  Even when I rode in to town with all the other post apocolyptic residents of Depot 66 around me there wasn’t so much as a sputter.

What about that tutorial?

One of the regulars that writes in the our little corner of the blogosphere (no names please – except to say it isn’t anyone from the Virgin Worlds collective) faulted Fallen Earth’s tutorial.  They said that they felt dumped out into the world by a tutorial that had no resemblance to the rest of the game.   Before the changes to the new player experience I still thought that it was a great way to introduce the game mechanics to the players.   I always appreciate devs who try and make the new player experience interesting and involve me in a story right from the get go. After all, consider the alternative from some of the games that have been around awhile – in those “other” games a dwarf hands you a rusty axe and tells you to go kill ten wolves.  Exciting eh?

Even though all that was added to the tutorial was a series of optional quests once you hit your first town (where you first appear in the game after the tutorial and you have selected your starting town) they made a big difference.  Before I still felt a bit lost after the tutorial but not this time.  The beginning quests showed me around town, introduced me to how the various systems work like crafting and combat. I even ended up with a horse from square one, rather than having to take half of forever to earn the darn thing in those “other” games.  O.K. so the horse was an “old nag” but by the end of the second play session, as you can see above I sat astride a much higher priced model.

And speaking of horses…

One of the things I am sure you all heard us talk about  with Keen on show number 47 was games that have a bit more “virtual world” in their “game world” (for a difference between the two see our earlier articles about our discussions with Dr. Richard Bartle).  One of those nice touches that really impressed me was the fact that horses don’t “disappear” like the mounts in so many other games.  In every other game I have ever played you get off your horse, turn around and say “who the heck stole my horse”?  In this game you get off your horse, walk into the local store, and when you come out your horse is still waiting there. (no worries, no one can steal it),

So when I am online the rest of the weekend, most of it will be riding across the plateau of post apocalyptic Arizona.

If you see Auntie Maim say hello!

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

 

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.

There isn’t alot that I will put my faith in “right off the bat” – sight unseen (well, not unseen in the case), without being “tried and true.”   Anyone who knows me knows that I am the sort of woman who would make someone from Missouri, the “show me state”, prove the issue in question even after their doubts had been satisfied.

I don’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster (there is more than one heavy drinkin’ Scotsman in my family tree)

I don’t believe in bigfoot (unless of course you are referring to the size of the gunboats I wear)

I do, however, believe in Fallen Earth and Icarus Studios.

Now I am not about to sit here and tell you that anyone else in the  mmo community that happens to disagree agree with me has somehow suddenly and magically lost their mind the second they sat down to write about this issue. (On the other hand, there were those writers in the  mmo community who where out of their collective minds to start with – it has nothing to do with Fallen Earth).   I am also not about to tell you to “ignore that man behind the curtain” – that patches to the game mean nothing. 

But lets face a few realities here shall we friends?

As we spoke about earlier in the week, the success of companies like Activision/Blizzard often has an adverse affect on the industry as a whole, especially where bean counting executives, who have never played a game that didn’t involve a deck of cards or set of ball and jacks are concerned.  Not every studio (Thank God) has a slave driver at the helm who pinches the nickle until the buffalo farts and demands a profit margin that would pay off the national debt.  Couple the fact that there are a goodly number of such bean counting, buffalo farting executives out there with a downturned economy and you have an extremely competitive market.

And an extremely competitive market means that fewer people with their hands on the money are willing to put said money into something that is not tried and true. Fewer people are willing to go where no game developer has gone before. We are in an era when most games are busy telling us to take out our wands, spread our wings, or dance around with bunnies hurling toilet paper hither – thither – and yon. Few developers these days (unless you count Bethesda and Interplay who are still busy duking it out in court) seem to want to address those of us who simply want to whip out grenade launcher and put one up the next persons nose over the remaining acre of earth that is not irradiated with nuclear fallout.

“Wow is that woman a nun?”

Such are the comments that I often get here at No Prisoners, No Mercy, whether written to the podcast, the site or whispered to one another in game.  But the fact is I enjoy a bit of post apocalyptic mayhem as well as the next person and I get a bit tired of waving wands around. I get tired of cutsie graphics (as our readers can tell from my opinions on Teletubbies). And I get REALLY, REALLY tired of the same old garbage pumped out at the mmo community because some bean counter somewhere said this is what everyone wants.

Toady-like yes man X:  “So what game shall we work on this year sir?”

Bean Counting Slave Driver X:“Give them more swords and wands – if it works for Bobby Kotick it will work for us.”

(Toady-Like Yes Man X looks nervous)

Toady-Like Yes Man X: “But, um…ah…sir. Begging sir’s pardon, but if everyone else in the market is busy doing the same thing shouldn’t we at least consider the remote possibility that we should be addressing a sector of the market that isn’t already being addressed…I mean…maybe?”

Bean Counting Slave Driver X:“Are you INSANE? Stack those fantasy genre games high man! I want to see a stack so high it would take a team of climbers and sherpa guides 15 weeks to scale to the summit. Let ‘er rip man!”

Toady-Like Yes Man X:  “YES SIR!!!”

Do I believe in Icarus Studios? You bet, I am more than willing to give a smaller studio a bigger break. Lets face it friends, these days games are released early with more bugs than an Orkin-Man and if a game has a glitch or two that’s par for the course.  Do I believe in the post apocalyptic genre? You bet. Despite the fact that Heartless Gamer left me a comment calling  it a “niche of a niche” that is still ONE HELL OF A BIG NICHE.

So yes, I believe in Fallen Earth.

I believe in Icarus Studios.

Why? That one is easy to answer. For once a game developer is doing something different. For once someone is breaking the mold and trying to bring us something that would have been brought to us earlier if we were able to magically get rid of World of Warcraft. And that, my friends, is something worth believing in.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather