The world is just illusion
During our recent outing to London I was having a conversation with Mr Van Hemlock about element of games I find interesting. During this conversation it became very apparent that I favour games that offer me the chance to throw a little individuality to my gameplay. Shocking as it may seem I have never really been able to identify the forces that drive me in my gaming choices, especially those that drive my MMO habits.
In the three MMOs that I consider my favourite the ability to choose or customise skills in ways to suit my gameplay or mood is highly flexible and configurable.
- Planetside - The power to pick up and drop skills in any order brings unique benefits to your team play. Specializing in heavy assault or proving much needed support at the correct time.
- City of Heroes/Villains – The power selection may appear limited but you can choice
- Guild Wars – Limited to 8 skills at one time but with a bank of hundreds to choose from. GW certainly makes you question how you approach each challenge the game offers.
On the other hand, although I found it wonderfully detailed and immersive playing Lord of the Rings online, yet the skills offered to my character (providing you have the currency) made them the same as any other player of that class in the game.
Yes there are unique features that set you apart from the crowd, such as weapons, armour and traits, but these always seemed more like small modifiers to the wider picture. I admit that I’ve never made it to level 30 in the game and maybe it all changes in the end game I guess I’ll never know.
I feel rather silly that it’s taking so long to discover this rather simple fact is the one element I appear to yearn in MMOs, but now I can hopefully bring those elements to the forefront of my gaming experiences.
* Image source : http://www.sxc.hu/photo/492545The future is bright
I haven’t got my hopes up too much on the upcoming Sci-fi MMOs, yet despite the closure of Tabula Rasa this year and the “maybe/maybe not” status of Stargate worlds, there appears to be a strong selection of games in the pipeline. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not the greatest fan of Fantasy genre MMOs, I play them and enjoy them, but I still yearn for alternative genre games that take a step away from swords and spells.
So I’ve been keeping tabs on a few sci-fi MMOs and thought I’d start to cover them over a few weeks.
One of these games is Global Agenda which has been leading a courageous charge into the void that Tabula Rasa left in it’s wake, with it’s “No Elves” movement. This interesting game aims to mix PvE and PvP elements along side the persistence of a MMO, pitting two global agencies against each other. I like the idea of bringing PvP into the mix at an early level, rather than bolting in on like many MMOs have frequently done.
After having a browse around their website, news stories and FAQs, the game is certainly aiming to pack alot of features that they hope will draw players into the game, whether it’s the global Strategy or the Shooter element that will attract gamers to this title, only time will tell.
I have a few reservations about GA that I hope won’t weight to heavily on it’s overall game-play and appeal as it keeps up the drive to bring people on-board with a proposed stunner of a game.
- First up is the rather generic four classes, that could have been based on any number of FPS like Team Fortress 2, there are mentions of subclasses but the branded character classes are pretty straight forward. It appears that you progress and level a character effectively unlocking your path and group role. Will mimicking the classes that have been the backbone of fantasy MMOs work for a futuristic game setting? Is it too restrictive? Will having dedicated healers just make them the main target during PvP matches no matter the match type?
- My second issue was that the standard PVP matches sees groups up to 10 players (#faq). Really this game is gearing itself heavily for the console market with planned versions for the XBox,PS3 & Wii. The high level raids will have 60 Vs 60, which I think will really strain the limits of the current generation consoles having to display 120 characters all at once not including the landscape, gunfire and scenario.
- Will we be able to have Console and PC gamers fighting alongside each other? If not will we be able to at least fight toward the same global target?
- Currently descriptions of the game label it as a FPS or MMOFPS when in-fact the game-play will all be in third person perspective. This is saddening really as it seems to be a gimmick to attract FPS gamers into an MMO (#Ref)
- In the alliance Vs alliance global struggle, how many will care, how will things be coordinated? Planetside suffered from “too many cooks” problem, where everyone had their opinion and wanted to go to different locations. This meant splitting the fight and numerous and we’d end up no-where and with nothing to show for it. I’ll be watching this one closely to see how Hi-Rez plan on keeping focus on the objects that are required.
Of course these elements aren’t set in stone and may already be changed or altered from the original blurbs and information supplied, so I shall observe the games progress, and I hope that I start to set elements that make me want to pick this game up as a possible long term investment and enjoyable game.
Coincidence
On Thursday I was in work and ploughing through my work and enjoying some background noise of a batch of podcasts I had recently downloaded. One of these was Warp-drive active, which started with a rather fun “Boys are back in town” which made me chuckle.
Later that day on my bus journey home was listening to extended version of Anthrax’s Sound of white noise album which has a rather cool cover of Thin Lizzys Cowboy Song, two occurances
So during a late night game of Ryzom (that had just downloaded, more soon) I finally gave in and stuck on Dedication : The very best of Thin Lizzy, which suited the game rather well.
Sunday night Mr. Dok came around and with Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits and GH: Metallica both of which totally rocked. We rocked out to a awesome selection of different tunes, damn hard at times tho. Of course we finished the evening with a The boys are back in town again.
Continuing this list of linked occurrences I put the radio on while having a bath and happened upon Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds on radio 2. It wasn’t the original but a recently recorded version, but when I turned it on just happened to be at the section “Parson Nathaniel”, which in the original recording was performed by Phil Lynott.
I thought at the time, I should really get a re-mastered version of the musical. So I was well please when I tuned in to the Through the Aftermath podcast and heard a rather fantastic version of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast as performed by Jonathan.
