Nifty!
Neat Ideas that I quite liked!
All throughout my online gaming life, right back to 1999 and Everquest, my virtual monsterhunting existence has been shaped, defined, molded and even dictated, by one constant gripe, one eternal thorn in my otherwise happy-go-lucky side. Levels. In my EQ days, I came to know a number of other players, all decent, interesting and intelligent people. People who perhaps in other circumstances, I might have called friends. Being of a somewhat literary bent, many of these people I came to know via forums and websites, rather than the game itself; this was Rallos Zek - talking to...
Classes irritate me a bit. Of course you learn to get on with it soon enough, but there's always the nagging worry that someone else might be having more fun, or and easier time of it, than you. You know the kind of thing; you install, sign up, fire the game up and then are presented with a big old list of what 'job' you'd like to choose. Often you've no idea what a Jedi, or Bureaucrat or Shaman or Herald of Xotli actually is. You might have notions of what they might be historically, or mythologically,...
Going to be one of those Nifty! bits where I'm in the minority this time, I think. The Age of Conan approacheth, and all up and down the Interwebs, fierce battles are being waged as we speak, with the Fanbois and Haters out in full force, all pitching in with their "Reasons Why I Think You Should/Shouldn't Buy Age of Conan", come May 20th. Quite emotive stuff in many cases, and Crom would be proud of the verbal bloodshed being carried out in his name. Me? I'm more ambivalent, and anyway, as a mater of principle, never touch any...
In a world of thousands, all of whom by definition, have access to the Internet, it must be a very difficult thing keeping secrets. A level or quest designer might spend hours, or days, devising a fiendishly cunning labyrinth, or complex set of traps, or confounding conundrum of riddles, all of which are designed to ensure that the Adventurer has to work to achieve the prize.
More than that, in a genre where we can't stop bitching about repetitive auto-generated kill ten rats style quests and the dull legwork of the Fed Ex, these more unusual challenges are a well-meaning...
As the new adventurer makes their way in their world, they learn. This in turn increases their array of abilities, feats, skills, spells, perks, talents, etc, making them more powerful, and this makes them capable of facing greater challenges, which brings them new lessons and makes them learn further. Its probably all very Nietzsche, although the ultimate destination of this relentless, but often repeated, drive to perfection is perhaps less clear. At any rate, rather than overwhelm the new player with hundreds of abilities from the word go, it has become standard in these games to ration them...
Let me take you back...back...back... Its June 2001. Lady Marmalade by All Saints is topping the UK charts, there's just been a total eclipse of the sun in South America, and Shrek is probably still on at the cinema. I, being the stay-at-home type, probably missed all of those, and at the time was enduring the last stages of a crippling cycle of Rallos Zek related psychological self-harm in Everquest, which would eventually turn me into the online sociopath I am today. Still, in those days the MMO market, if you could even call it that, consisted...
Bit of a functional 'nuts and bolts' Nifty! today, rather than anything sexy or cool in the accepted sense. Its to do with vendors, and crafting. At this late stage in the day, we're all familiar with the standard Vendor interface that seems to have become de rigueur in most MMOs. I use WoW as the example, but variants can be found everywhere; the optimistic 'shopkeeper' stood idly in the last bastion of civilisation before the Mountains of Doom, offering three tabs. There's main 'standard' tab, offering consumables, reagents, ammo, bandages and for some bizarre reason mostly...
A Nifty! from the Periphery today, and a bit of a walk down memory lane. Pet classes are nothing new, and pretty much every MMO since Ultima Online has offered some mechanism whereby an Adventurer (of any epoch) need not have to rely on their own strength alone. From EQ's Magician and Necromancer, through AO's Metaphysicist, (Which wins a special Nifty! mention for being the single most abstract MMO Class Concept EVER! "I think, therefore I am...uber!"), Bureaucrat and Engineer, right up to Wow's Hunter and Warlock, CoV's Mastermind and LotR's Captain; almost all MMOs have something that'll let...
Continuing on with my somewhat presumptuous 'Nifty!' series, of Things I Saw In An MMO Once And Quite Liked. I've actually got quite a lot of these to get out, mostly because I am easily impressed with shiny objects! This week: Nifty! #2: Everquest 2's Heroic Opportunities Launching about the same time as World of Warcraft, Everquest 2 tried a lot of new things. SOE had had a long time running an MMO of the type (Everquest 1) and a lot of...er...opportunities to take on-board feedback, tweak and refine. Not everything new was an improvement...
I'm vaguely aware that as an MMO Blogger, I probably ought to do more in the 'Armchair Theorist' category. It's not that I don't think about these ideas and concepts, you understand; of course I do, far more than is healthy and pretty much all of the time. It's just that in this age of Entitlement, Guaranteed Success and the Easier Grind Getting The Subscription, I no longer trust my own opinions on what constitutes a good idea or a bad one in the broader gaming evolution going on around us all today. As a gamer, I...