Bit of a special guild outing this week, as the Tuesday Noob Club hit Nightfall's Treasure Trail. We alternate PvP and PvE nights of a Tuesdays, and as a leader of sorts, I'm always on the look out for interesting and novel things to do each week.
The basic game is interesting enough of course, the very episodic nature of the main storylines providing any number of mini events. A typical GW Mission can take from fifteen minutes to an hour or more, and all have a very set define task, along with extra bonus objectives to carry out along the way, all in specially designed maps, so a good staple of our PvE adventuring is nothing more complicated than simply asking around for who needs what missions next.
With the recent addition of a large number of completable books to the game, even long standing veterans like me, who thought I'd finished it all, have new incentives to do them all again, and in any event, there's titles to be had for finishing all the bonus/masters completions, which I've still not got yet.
I'm continually surprised how long Guild Wars has lasted for me. Regular readers will know how flightily I can be, when it comes to MMOs, and I often hop about titles, but I've had Guild Wars on the go for a relatively long time now - years, and I don't think it's just that it had no monthly fee. The basic gameplay has a certain immediacy about it that I don't generally find elsewhere, and the whole skill system in use there brings out the deck-builder and theorycrafter in me, which I enjoy. Lately I think it's just being in a decent guild.
This week we saddled up for a grand tour of the Nightfall campaign, with the specific intention of hitting all of the 'Buried Treasure' world locations. Clicking on these gives you free loot and cash, which is always nice, but you have to get to them first. I must admit to cheating outrageously this time, and looked the locations up on the wiki, allowing me to put together a route for our big road trip. Turns out there are twelve of these, and they're dotted about the world in progressively harsher places, making for a great scaling odyssey for us to have a crack at.
The first couple, in the starter island of Istan, were simple enough, and a good warm up. Moving on to Kourna and Vabbi saw us having to take it a bit seriously, and by the time we got to The Desolation ones, we were working at it fairly hard. The last couple are in The Realm of Torment and were really quite taxing, and I'm sure we wiped once or twice.
I was on healing detail for the trip, assisting our regular monk with my previously detailed Me/Rt Restoration build. Having two healers in a party of eight seems to be an optimum, and it went pretty well, although quite hectic stuff. Spent most of the evening frantically clicking health bars and trying to use the right heal on the right person at the right time. nothing like practice in the field for this kind of thing though, and i think I'm really starting to get the hang of the support role, something I've never quite gotten right before.
The very last Treasure Chest is located at the far end of the nightmarish Domain of Pain (Explorable, not the Mission), and really did test us all. The place has a global 'Take 20 damages any time you use a skill' effect, a vigorous population of pretty large L28 Demon and Margonite groups, and a quite tortuous route to get to the goodies, but we got there in the end. I think our teamplay is really coming together, and our happy band of interested but largely soloist members are really getting the hang of full-player, no-Hero grouping, always a challenge in that game, and one of the main reasons it's PUGs are so awful.
A magnificent haul for all involved, something like 20pp and twelve gold-grade items of varying usefulness, each. I got somewhat less, as it turns out there is a diminishing returns kind of thing on the chests, and if you hit enough of them, often enough, the cash and items become less impressive.
I don't mind though; as a guild activity, it worked very well for a Tuesday's entertainment, taking about three to four hours all in all. Lots of skill, dye and elite armour buying all round, I shouldn't wonder, and we even managed to get quite a few of the astronomically expensive Guild Hall Vendors bought and paid for. Turing into quite the Proper Guild!
Back to PvP next week!
Thanks to a breakthrough in the Van Hemlock Acoustic Labs we've finally got with the program, and have managed to plug the right wires into the right sockets, and got a Guest on the show!
This week, Voice of America, Michael Zenke joins us to have a good old natter about recently announced Bioware MMO; Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Van Hemlock: Republic (Ep27); In which two ill-informed hacks are, er, informed! Join us for Sith, Stormtroopers, and Storytelling! Varied and Assorted ruminations about what a new Star Wars MMO might mean for us all!
Michael Zenke writes for Massively and MMOGNation, and is regular cohost of the Massively Speaking podcast, and was an excellent interviewer, sometimes allowing Jon to get more words in that I'd customarily like, and was very patient and understanding about my online transvestism!
You can find more scoops, gossip and speculation about SW:TOR over at Massively, and the ridiculous end music can be found here:
Moosebutter: Star Wars
Look out for more guests soon!
Found myself quite inspired by Zubon's challenge, over at Kill Ten Rats. Expressing some dissatisfaction with an awful lot of Wheel Reinventing in recent years, he's asking we, the Citizens of Blogsville, to try our hand at reviewing a game from before 2003, and in particular, one that has seen no updates since that time.
I thought about it a bit; EVE Online almost qualifies on the first, dating from 2003, but what with its monstrous ongoing free expansion schedule crashing on with Quantum Rise pretty much as I type, it fails on the second criteria. Anarchy Online, Ultima Online and Everquest as well; all old enough, but still being updated today. Very few MMOs are that old, and still stay alive without any updates in five years. So I thought further back. Planescape: Torment, my all time best game ever certainly qualifies, but has already been claimed, in the very first comment, damnit!
But then I remembered how I got into this online gaming nonsense in the first place...
X-Wing vs. Tie-Fighter (Totally Games/Lucasarts, 1997)
For me, computer gaming had always been a solitary affair; a grubby shameful activity, conducted in the privacy of my own bedroom; not something you generally mentioned at work, and the mere idea that I could play a computer game, AND play with others at the same time, was a bit weird, frankly. Of course there'd been the very rare head-to-head Populous game, when I'd lugged a Commodore Amiga and spare TV round a friend's house, and a bit of abortive proto-LAN gaming with Doom during my brief and equally abortive attempt at a degree, but mostly, it was a loner's hobby; appealing to loners, and making them moreso in the process.
When affordable home Internet arrived, things started to change, and the agent of change in my own case, was XvT, played via ye olde MSN Internet Gaming Zone. It wasn't that flashy; chat lobby, and DirectPlay peer-to-peer matchmaking, which then fired up everyone's copy of XvT and away we went, without having to fill in all that complex IP Address guff. My first baby steps into the online gaming scene...
The game itself was pretty cutting edge for it's time, played in a glorious 640x480 resolution, with advanced 65536-colour mode for those with really flashy hardware. Not bitmapping, normal-shading, anti-aliasing or any of that, but my memories of it at the time still remind me of how clean, crisp and sharp it looked, and how smoothly it played.
The game was the third in the series, following on from X-Wing (The game, along with Sim City 2000, which made me buy my first PC), and Tie Fighter, where you got to be evil, something only Dungeon Keeper had the guts to try back then. The story puts you as a plucky Rebel/dastardly Imperial pilot, in the cockpit of the most iconic spaceships of all time, and lets you head out into the inky black and shoot stuff with lasers until it goes bang. What's not to like? But they were also extremely well crafted products too; elaborate mission briefings, involved stories driving lengthy and heroic space campaigns. You weren't just in a spaceship blowing stuff up, you mattered; your prowess was directly responsible for whole swathes of the grand conflict between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire. And all this was conveyed without fancy cutscenes, elaborate FMV or lengthy exposition. For a small but significant part of my early life, I was there.
XvT was a bit of a departure from the previous format, and instead of a lengthy series of single-player story-driven cinematic campaigns, went for a more tournament-based feel, where the battles were more in the nature of sporting events, rather than chapters in a novel, and this caused a great deal of mixed opinion at the time. Many didn't like the move away from what we would later come to understand as 'PvE', and the game was very heavily biased toward PvP, before any of us even knew what the term meant. Advances in both the Internet, and Microsoft's DirectX line meaning that a whole new field of competitive head-to-head play became available, and Totally Games were very much at the forefront with XvT. Of course you want to fight other people! The technology just hasn't been there since Pong, that's all!
After some hesitant lurking, I soon found myself a member of a clan, which back then just meant making a new Zone Login with three letters and an underscore in front of your name. I can't even remember what I was called now, but it meant a lot to me at the time. We'd dial-up most nights, paying phone-bills by the minute to do so, and joust in the virtual depths of imaginary space. Mostly, it was one-on-one dogfighting in the very basic and very fragile Tie-Fighters; endless tight circling that never seemed to get old. Blink, twitch, sneeze and you were instantly wiped out. Four hits from the twin-linked lasers and paf! Game over. We dabbled with the bigger ships; the B-Wings, the Tie-Defenders, and the larger battle scenarios; the game was capable of 8v8 Star Destroyer assaults and the like, but alas, the Internet in general, and our own paltry 28k modems were not up to it, so we always returned to the true expression of naked skill; the dogfighting furballs. Kids today bitch about zOMG LAG!1!, but in my day, it was uphill both ways for my wheezing packets...
The game offered many innovations that are still extensively used today. In particular, I loved the medal case, a kind of proto-Achievement system that had me endlessly refining my performance, both in the single player missions, which were basically there as training, and the online matches. I was never the best, but I put in a respectable showing. Waiting out in the chat lobby with baited breath as two of our Experts fought it out in a game we couldn't even spectate was quite a tense way to spend an evening though.
XvT also employed the outstanding iMuse system to great effect. The music, all midi versions of the space battle bits of the actual films, was ingeniously re-mixed in realtime, to create an enormous sense of drama, as new ships entered and left, as hostiles grew nearer and further away. Many games of today use this kind of thing routinely, but even now, are rarely as alert and responsive as XvT was; if you're lucky you'll have three bits of music at work, the 'No Enemies About' track, the 'Enemy Somewhere Nearby' track and the 'In A Fight' track.
The basic flight model, pioneered in X-Wing (1993), has featured in almost every space combat game to date with little alteration. Dispensing with actual Newtonian Physics on the basis that 'it isn't fun', (See Frontier: Elite II), the ships instead acted much like atmospheric fighter jets. They'd come to a halt if the throttle was set to 0, tended to bank as they turned, and would turn fastest at 33% throttle. Basic micromanagement was required to balance the power of the ship, into guns, shields and speed, and the shields could be set to front, back or balanced. It even had tracking missiles; photon torpedoes and the like. (We tended to eschew those as the weapons of a coward. Also zOMG LAG!1!) The game also had a significant tactical aspect; you couldn't just go in guns blazing, but had to be aware of what your allies were up to; supply ships, boarding teams and the like.
It all felt very smooth and quite intuitive for us ground-dwelling two-dimensional humans, and it was indeed, a lot of fun. You could get good at it and exercise skill through practice, which is always important, but most of all, I'm in an X-Wing, shooting Tie-Fighters!
It was eventually superceeded by X-Wing Alliance (1999), which returned to the original format, offering a very involved epic tale of a family of neutral, but Rebel-leaning deep-space merchants and traders, thrown into the chaos of a galaxy at war. It also featured significant online play and out little clan swiftly adopted it, dogfighting as usual, but also enjoy the newly introduced race courses immensely. I did rather well at that and had the record time for getting a B-Wing through the insanely dangerous Asteroid Refinery course for quite some time! People change however, and interests wane. Nothing lasts forever and we drifted away. I ended up in Everquest, which is a whole other story...
While space combat games are generally much less prolific and popular than first person shooters, many have come and gone since, and very few have done much to further innovate this special and unique genre.
EVE Online is one exception; taking the whole scale of space combat up to a new level, basing the fights on much larger ships and bringing a greater tactical element to it all; Star Destroyer vs Star Destroyer stuff.
Raider Wars (a beta that seemed to vanish and never actually released) brought persistence to the genre, and may actually have technically been my first ever MMO, and Jumpgate (now Jumpgate Classic) further expanded on that theme, but was never very popular, for a variety of reasons. I missed Earth and Beyond entirely, so have no idea where that took the genre; by then I was knee-deep in Orcs and Dorks.
Freelancer brought a more user-friendly Mouse-Flying system to the table, which later appeared in DarkStar One, and looks to be available in the upcoming Jumpgate: Evolution. The "X" series of games brought a larger mercantile and pseudo-'Civilisation' aspect to the genre, and the Jump to Lightspeed add-on to Star Wars: Galaxies, completed the circle for me, offering very much the same game that I started it all in.
I played a lot, as a Neutral Privateer, and the thing was solid enough and very enjoyable, but it somehow lacked the spark of XvT, and the pure clean rush of lonely dogfighting. Perhaps I was only half playing it in the here and now, and half reliving the glorious, and far simpler, times of a decade ago...