Posts Tagged ‘Ultima Online’

First confession…

My name is Molly.  Inside my dog house I have 5, 284 slippers – none of them matching. I am a slipper thief.  I just happen to like slippers and hey, the people I own already have alot of slippers. In fact they also have 5,284 slippers, and incredibly none of them are matching either.

Back when I was studying television directing they always told us that two things really sells a commercial – baby animals and children.  Now not everyone likes children but nearly everyone likes four legged babies.  And so we start out today’s article with the confession of a slipper thief.

Second confession…

Broken Toys calls the move by EA pictured above as “Exploit that IP my lord…discreetly” (read it here)  If I may be so presumptious as to defend EA for the Briefest of moments by assuming their role..

We confess – we are just trying to make a living here.

As much as I love Broken Toys and everything that Scott Jennings writes, and as humorous as the observation is I found myself saying, “Come on Scott,  the people at EA are just trying to make a living you know?”  Now I might sound suspiciously like a Ferengi when I say “What’s wrong with a little profit?”  However, too often people forget that before anything else a video game be it console or mmo, is about making a profit.   J. Paul Getty once said “Money is only dirty when it is someone else’s”.  It used to be that if you had told the average game designer or gamer that Free to Play would be not just accepted but welcome, that you would be looked at suspiciously in the least and more probably taken behind the barn and shot.  Now Free to play seems to be the wave of the future, at least for the immediate future.   The first mmo I ever played was Ultima Online back when you could say “What is World of Warcraft” and have people reply “I don’t know” without laughing afterwards.   I think the concept of  a strategy game set in Britannia could be a lot of fun…and if it keeps some game designers and publishers in business I am all for it.  After all, the more games that are out there to choose from the better off gamers are.

Third Confession…

First Bill Roper is a nice guy and anyone who doesn’t like that I say so can kiss my posterior.  Cryptic, in the form of Chronomancer issues a State of the Game on February 9, 2010 (you can read it here) Champions Online, ask Cryptic. Cryptic says, “O.K. we confess. We’re not perfect we made a mistake. We are listening to the community. You asked for the next Champions Online expansion free and we are giving it to you.” The “Community” (those not actually playing the game and who have likely never played it because “it’s Cryptic”)  basically say “We don’t care you are still a jerk.” (those still playing the game) say “Thank you for listening.”  The simple fact of the matter is that when Cryptic had problems with their “kitchen sink patch” they explained it.  Players wanted the Revelations expansion fee, and Cryptic said here it is…free.  Like it or not Cryptic is listening to the gaming community.

Fourth Confession…

When Tobold is right, he’s right.  Here is an excerpt from his recent article entitled “Working in Eve for $2 per hour” (you can read the whole article here).

“I would say that EVE has two major gameplay parts, one being a PvP game, and the other being an economic game. With me not being interested in the PvP part, I’m looking mostly at the economic part. And I would say that legal RMT makes the economic part look a lot less attractive. At the start of the game, when your character is still very weak and has no capital to work with, you will earn a lot less than $2 equivalent per hour. Thus the temptation will be great to jump-start yourself with the 300 million ISK or so you get in exchange for one PLEX. Thus if you think of your power in EVE depending on your skill points and your virtual wealth, you end up having bought both for real money. Skills don’t go up from gameplay, but go up with the length of your subscription, thus there is a direct skill points to dollars correlation too.” – Tobold

As much as it may irk Tobold, I couldn’t agree more – he has that part of the game “sussed”.   Hard Core Casual (whom the No Prisoners No Mercy team has admittedly run afoul of on a  previous occasion) had this to say:“The major problem about Tobold writing about EVE is the same one I get accused of when writing about WoW; not playing the game.”  He called this, as you will see “How awfully Keen of you Tobold” and followed that up with, “It’s the Keen kind of entertaining if you know what I mean.”

Oh yes we know exactly what you mean when you say “keen” entertaining as in “Keen” from “Keen and Graevs gaming blog.”

The sort of entertaining that’s interesting, witty, well thought out and all around entertaining.  If I may be so bold, the major problem that Hard Core Casual has about Tobold writing about Eve is the same thing he has about anyone writing about anything…they aren’t him.  In the mean time, dear readers, feel free to jump into the Tobold vs. Hardcore Casual fray – if nothing else it is always entertaining. And to quote someone we once read, when ever we read Hardcore Casual we just have to shake our collective No Prisoners, No Mercy team heads.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

Have some of our games been in the oven too long?

Late last night Fran tried out the character creation process for Champions online. – it is so versatile that it truly is a “mini-game” all by itself. As we sat there, engrossed in the process as a burgeoning superhero formed before our very eyes the cookies in the nearby oven went entirely forgotten. Well not ENTIRELY forgotten…not at least until the cookies were burnt beyond recognition. Mind you, Fran’s culinary expertise normally rivals the proverbial “great chefs of Europe” (or at least the great down home chefs of America). As I sat there staring at the charred remains of what was once a cookie a thought went through my mind…

I wonder if it was left in the oven too long…

Now mind you it wasn’t the cookie I had in mind when I thought this. I simply thought of the cookie as being served “Cajun Style”…like blackened catfish, only this was a cookie. I sat there chewing the cookie, putting my carefully honed mental powers to work as I ignored the charred cookie bottom. And two words went through my mind:

Ultima Online

With it’s isometric view and less than spectacular animation there are those who would say that the game has “been in the oven a bit too long” (or a “getting long in the tooth” as grandma used to put it). But I don’t think that is the case, and here is why…

Mind you, I haven’t played the game in years, but like the first love of your life, it was my first mmo. One of the greatest pleasures of doing the No Prisoners, No Mercy show is the opportunity to sit down and have a good conversation about videogames with members of the mmo community. As it did during the recording of he last show (not out yet), the conversation often turns to Ultima Online when the topic changes game mechanics.

As anyone who has ever played an mmo is all too painfully aware, everyone everywhere compares games to the 800 pound Blizzard Gorilla – if only because of it’s sheer number of subscribers. When that factor is set aside, however, there always seem to be two games that come up during the conversation, and one of them is Ultima Online (UO).

UO is skill based, which some bloggers and reviewers will try and convince you is a disadvantage (it isn’t). It does have quests now, but at one time it did not. At one time it was entirely a sand box game with the players left to make the world in whatever image they saw fit. With its non-instanced player housing, for better or for worse the players could actually affect the face of the virtual world. It doesn’t have a first person perspective like so many shooters. It barely has a three dimensional perspective (you can’t actually look behind a wall – the system has to remove part of the wall for you to do so). Yet all these years later the game still has an active community. Not only is it being supported by EA, they just came out with another expansion for the game.

Before you dismiss games like Ultima Online, consider the success of many of the flash based face book applications. Farmville, which is in the news today because of money it’s creators donated, has 60 million players. Now as anyone will tell you, in any free to play situation, the number of subscribers doesn’t translate directly into gross income for the games producers.

Still, it certainly does give one pause for thought doesn’t it?

With the advent of so many successful games for social applications like face book with names like “Mafia Wars” and “Farmville” perhaps something is missing in the way games are being developed for the mmo market. Perhaps that part of the market that adds “role playing game” after its title is moving in the wrong direction. I would put forth that when Richard Garriott was known as “Lord British” he had a lot more going on than some people give him credit for – and perhaps NCSoft shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss there association with him. Like the rest of life, perhaps the game development industry is like a circle – and we just may be headed back toward where the circle started.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather