Technophile Monkey

I did my own little MMO shootout these last few weeks. I can afford it because there’s a break between modules in my Master’s program, and when I come home after work I’m so completely dead that I can’t concentrate on anything but a few games anyhow. I discovered you can try out a surprising number of games when you don’t have to study I tried to limit my search to the higher-quality ones; there’s lots of Asia-trash out there as well, but I’ll leave it to you to dig that up if you have the time for it.

Here goes. I’ve bolded the favorites. And remember, these are all opinions, not facts:

• Jade Dynasty: Surprisingly innovative martial arts based Chinese MMO. The translation is weird in places, but the game mechanics are all there. Very quick fights (about ten trillion times faster than EverQuest 2) and a lot of convenient features (auto-walk, auto-find-quest, even auto-play-while-I’m-on-the-toilet). Lots of scheduled events in-game. I could get to like this, will certainly keep playing since it’s free anyhow.
• Runes of Magic: Another free-to-play favorite. Some people call this a WoW clone, but they are ignorant. Battle mechanics, class structure etc. are all very different, and it has a lot more convenience features (teleport, auto-walk, NPC-finder etc.) than Blizzards big old dreadnought. Very nice, and now that they hired the Dungeons & Dragons artist to oversee art direction a bit, it will probably get more beautiful. Right now it’s very pretty, but bland.
• Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited: Now also free to play, at least it’s in beta. I’m not allowed to even say whether this product exists, I guess, but let’s talk about the DDO community and technology a bit. The community’s full of very very vocal and seemingly intelligent people. This is scary. Everyone you run into in this game is a total nerd and/or multiple-degree-holder. Well, that’s to be expected with a game based on D&D. Note that I use “nerd” in a warm, loving way. DDO itself seems to have a billion possibilities for character customization and a ton of classes. If you’re a D&D pro, you can also customize and craft your own class. Technically, the game runs very well and doesn’t look too shabby for such an old title. Give it a try if you discover the nerd in you and need an online action-RPG.
• Luminary: A social, economy-based anime MMO. Very simplistic combat system, but quite a deep market/trading scene. Tobold likes it, but it’s a bit too markety for me. The people seemed nice, but there weren’t too many reasons to talk as the whole economy is abstracted for you in the form of market houses that take care of managing sales and purchases.
• DOMO: Another social MMO, but more on the chatty side. Very anime-ish graphics, standard battle system. The engine had huge trouble doing proper collision detection even for simple things like walking, so I switched this abomination off after ten minutes and torched it off my hard drive, never to be seen again.
• Twelve Sky 2: An ugly grindfest. But some people swear by such things, so if you like grinding and cutting the heads off of monsters, this is for you. Also, the NPCs are still voiced in Chinese.
• MegaTen: Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine: This game runs under several names, but all you have to know is that it’s developed by some of Japan’s top development houses and it plays in the Shin Megami Tensei universe. I found it confusing, but production values are quite high and I suppose if you’re a fan of SMT, you’ll be right at home. People in the game were quite nice as well.
• Dragonica: A 3D MMO-brawler. A new idea, that. Quite entertaining to play for a while — if you always thought “Wow, would I like to play Final Fight with a persistent world, levels and an inventory”, here’s your chance. Doesn’t have Haggar in it, though. Instead, you smack black-headed sheep and schizophrenic spider-bees around the place. I’m not kidding.
• EverQuest 2: You need a subscription to play this one. Scary graphics, completely confused art direction but very nice special effects. Large selection of classes, but you’ll have to be happy with your character looking like it’s made of porcelain, because that’s the only thing the engine can render. The game itself seems reasonably balanced and comes with all the standard MMO features, plus a few extra (like the 3D wisp that directs you to points of interest). Still, Asian F2P games offer more conveniences to players. Can’t really say anything good or bad about the game — the community seemed nice, so I might actually play this at some point. Combat seemed very slow, but I’d been playing Jade Dynasty and DDO before, so this might be expected.

  Nothing in the game immediately yelled “subscribe to me!”, but if I were forced to decide on a pay-to-play MMO, I’d probably pick this anyhow.

• Vanguard: The first thing I’ve noticed: The character models look breathtakingly ugly and it’s hard to make a character that doesn’t look like something from a 12 year old’s D&D character sheet. These guys look worse even than the Tom Selleck-mustachioed humans from the original EverQuest, and that was in 1999. It all turned better once I entered the game. It seems quite a capable game and it has an air of depth that you notice when you look at all the menus (diplomacy? yikes), but the whole package looked horrid and the mechanics (at least in the beginning) felt a bit too EverQuest to me. If I want EQ done properly, I play Shards of Dalaya.

I’m truly sorry to say such mean things about the graphics people’s efforts in EQ, Vanguard and EQ2, but those games badly lack art direction. Someone needs to at least unify the teams. The games look like the people who design the placeables never spoke to the people who make the terrain, and the terrain artists live on a different continent than the people doing the textures. It’s a shame, technologically EQ2 seems quite okay, even though there’s no anti-aliasing due to technical limitations and the CPU-based shadow implementation can make a quad-core melt.

Phew! That was work!

I hope I listed some games you didn’t know yet, and I hope you don’t trust my word at all and try them out on your own. They’re all free or have trials available.

Disclaimer: Don’t see any of this as a “review”. It’s just a “list of games that didn’t make me vomit (much) after ten minutes of play”. Basically, I just provide a bunch of links and some half-assed opinions while you should go and check those things out for yourself. I’m a jaded old gamer, so I’m entitled to half-assed opinions, and I can usually smell a game’s crappiness level after a few hours with enough accuracy to know whether I should keep playing.

I just heard Brad McQuaid’s voice for the first time in the Vanguard Director’s Cut video. Wow, he has a slow and unexcited way of talking. Sounds just like Strong Sad. Now I know why Brad’s games all have such slow player advancement

The excellent Heroes of Might and Magic line as well as the underappreciated Dark Messiah of Might and Magic action-RPG are 50% off this weekend on Steam.

Also, the very creative and entertaining indie first-person brawler Zeno Clash is dirt cheap as well.

Meanwhile at GOG.com, The Guild and Spellforce Platinum come at the extra-cheap set price of USD 13.99 instead of 18.90 (or something) for the whole weekend.

If you like good deals, this combination gives you a whole bunch great games from diverse genres. Go grab them!

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with GOG or Valve in any way, except that I give them some of my money sometimes, in exchange for data.

Since the last time I spent ten minutes in Jade Dynasty, I spent another half hour and am now level 9. I also got a little esper thing that floats around me. This is somehow like a pet, but it also allows you to use the “Invigorate” skill, which makes Jade Dynasty play itself. After charging the ability for a while, you pick what your character should do while you’re AFK via these settings and filters:

You can even specify what your character should attack and what to loot! This surely makes it easier to gather crafting components or specific loot items you’re looking for.

I passed control of my character to my esper and went for a shower this morning. When I returned, my guy had been killed. It seems that either the “Recover” feature doesn’t work or I misunderstand the settings (which I had left at their defaults). The way I understand it, the game should check HP/MP every 2 seconds and if either is below 50%, the game should initiate recovery until full. It just never seems to recover!

So I ran my character around town to the easier mobs, set him on Invigorate, grabbed a coffee and read the news. By the time I was finished with that, my character was still alive and had made three quarters of a level’s exp, even on easy green monsters. He’d also run out of MP completely, so that he could only strangle butterflies with his bare hands instead of using heavy blows.

It’s an extremely interesting feature, if it gets fixed. You have to question the validity of the whole genre if companies can innovate by giving you the ability to not play the game, however. I do wonder where all of this will lead.

Jade Dynasty will be the last free-to-play I looke at, I tried a good dozen now and only Runes of Magic and Jade Dynasty seem truly interesting (this is opinion, not fact). I know I said that I wouldn’t look at any subscription-based games in these articles, but I’ll make one exception due to nostalgia: EverQuest II. I never played EQ2 before but I had an EQ addiction, and while everyone in EverQuest II looks like a waxen corpse, Tipa from West Karana always makes the game sound so juicy. The art style is horrible, particularly compared to WoW, but the gameplay is rumored to be polished like a ball of mud.

I’ll start by trying. With a free trial.

I’ve been a fan of GOG.com ever since they started. GOG stands for “good old games”, and you get exactly what it says on the can. The company re-releases old favorites, patches them up to run on newer operating systems and then makes them purchasable for ridiculously low prices, via download. It’s all DRM-free.

Now they’ve started publishing a series of affiliate spotlight articles, and today it’s about DOSbox. DOSbox is a Free Software DOS emulator that can run many of the old games, and GOG themselves use it in their products. While most other companies in gaming are afraid of Free Software and even big names like id software don’t always use the Free Software licenses correctly, GOG is all nonchalant about it and Does The Right Thing(tm) by default.

This is amazing. I’ve already bought four games from them, and if I could I would buy their whole catalog. Their website is super-slick, the products they sell are great, downloads are fast, you get bonus content like soundtracks free with your purchase and they’re a good citizen in the Free Software community. What more could you want?

As I threatened to do in the last posting, I’m looking at Jade Dynasty. With Asian MMORPGs like this, the western MMOs really need to start innovating soon, otherwise they’ll be history in a while. There are a lot of very convenient but straightforward new ideas in this game that American and European developers apparently ignored or simply didn’t think of for years. And this is a free-to-play game.

First off, my very creatively named character starts next to a smoking box labeled “Fume of Sin”. That’s a bit confusing. But the first quest NPC is nearby, so all’s fine. The music is nice and Classical Chinese sounding, without being too cheesy. Lovely.

I love the pick up button! When you kill something and it drops loot, just press this button (which you can hotkey) to pick things up. Beats anything except e.g. Dragonica’s “walk over to pick up” feature. That’d make a good addition to WoW, EverQuest and Runes of Magic.

Here we have the quest tracker. It not only tells you who gave you which quest, you can also click on any quest NPC name to auto-walk to that location (somewhat like Runes of Magic). Bonus feature: don’t know what to do? Press the quest suggestion button and you receive the (clickable) name of an NPC to find. Extra bonus feature: if you don’t know where the mobs you’re supposed to grind are, click the mob name. You’ll auto-walk to their area. Just like in Runes of Magic.

Also, click anywhere on the mini-map and you auto-walk there. Western MMOs are in dire need of this feature.

The translation is quite good, technically, but quest text so far is rather boring. The translation does produce some bizarre things, however, like quest NPCs who say “I won’t talk to you!” and then hand you quest rewards, or this guard giving me the “smelly feet” quest.

And finally, a combat screenshot. Combat is your usual happy fare, but attacks feel strong and beefy from the start. After all, you’re supposed to be some martial arts dude. You can kill these wolves and toads with a single hit, by the way. This makes combat feel very quick without being twitchy.

All in all, the game (after ten minutes, mind) feels on par with Runes of Magic, which I’d already class above WoW in terms of player convenience. I’ve tried meditating in town (to gain experience while AFK), and that seems to work as well, though I can’t judge if it’s really enough to make an exp difference.

I have a whole world to explore still, such as all the crazy shit you can do with pets. There are a lot more options than just riding some mount. You get to fuse with your pet, use pets to raise stats and even let the pet fight in your place while AFK.

Fun times, and the west is no longer innovative in this genre!

People complain about grinding. You can even find hints for what to do while grinding, because it seems that the game alone isn’t fun enough during grinding sessions to require your whole attention.

Still, MMOs without grind rarely exist. There are now examples of grind-reduced games like Jade Dynasty, or games where you can buy experience potions to speed up your levelling, such as Runes of Magic. Grinding is something that players seem to hate, yet there’s barely anything the industry is doing to change this, as grinding is cheaply and easily implemented and keeps players subscribed.

So what are the alternatives?

• Long and involved quests, but they cost a lot (for the MMO developer) to design and implement.
• Minigames (as presumably used in Free Realms), but what if someone writes a bot to play them?
• Concepts like dreaming, meditating and invigorating in Jade Dynasty. With the Invigorate skill, the game even plays itself for some time while you’re away from the keyboard. The problem here is that everyone gets to meditate (and at any time), so the perceived exp gain might be offset by comparably longer exp bars to fill up. It could be that the game only gives you exp to keep you quiet, but if done well, this feature could be a grind alternative to some degree.
• Racing systems and other non-RPG elements, but would it still be an MMORPG? Ah heck, with all the stuff they throw into MMOs these days, I think the “RPG” element has been dead and smelly for a long time already.

The other question is whether people would want any such alternative. Perhaps man has some desire for punishment, and grinding in an MMO seems to satisfy. Are there any completely grind-free MMOs? Are they still MMOs? I’m curious.

I’ve been on an MMO rampage recently and have tried upwards of a dozen titles. Jade Dynasty is next. I’ll see if the non-grind exp system really makes a difference, how much grind there is in the game and how people respond to it — I’m curious. If it’s true that grinding ties players to a certain title, it should be a F2P game that finally gets rid of the grind.

It looks like some key speakers at the World Copyright Summit have a temper problem and don’t like to stick to the facts.

It’s interesting that this “creative industry” claims that even stronger copyright is the only way to defend artists’ freedom and let them make money, while the artists themselves have found better ways of defending their rights quite some time ago, and continue to explore new business models that the creative industry would never have thought of.

Now it’s my turn to sound like a dick: In 40 years, most of the old farts in top positions at the Copyright Mafia will be either retired or dead. That forces new blood into the heads of these organizations. Maybe then they will finally understand what their customers have already understood since, oh, let’s say 1991, when MP2 (MPEG Layer 2 audio) came along.

PS: Why is it that every time you hear about the Copyright Mafia, they have told a lie, bribed a judge, corrupted a court case or done something else that is dishonest or illegal? You’d think they’d be the shining knights of honesty, but instead…

PPS: Poor music industry, it seems people buy games more than they buy music these days. But that’s surely P2P’s fault, isn’t it? Magnificent reasoning.

No, not manpages, but men. Real men. Real, furry men (or muscular and bold women) use UNIX. I didn’t know why that impression is out there, but now I read a little sentence in Linus Torvalds’ blog that reminded me why it’s there.

To quote a slightly different version to the one Linus used:

UNIX gives you just enough rope to hang yourself — and then a couple more feet, just to be sure.
– Eric Allman

And it’s true. UNIXlike systems give you extremely powerful tools, and with that power comes responsibility. Just look at what sudo tells you the first time you run it. Probably the same thing I just told you.

You need to be a proper man (or woman, or both) to wield that power, and perhaps that’s what makes people afraid of the system, and that in turn makes those using the system appear manlier (or womanlier) than they are.