I realise that I haven’t captured any video of the game during my time playing, but then I struggle just to run the game so aim on taking some screen-shots tonight. I don’t plan to write about why thing are, like they are, there are other people that have far more knowledge and do a better job explaining things than I ever could.

Through-out the last month it’s seemed that not only the gamers players but the global gaming community has held it’s breathe following the news about RealTime worlds. As with things of this natures there were countless questions asked and as “stories” started to surface there came a realisation that things were rather bleak for the company and game.

I was reminded of those MMO titles  have come and gone in recent years and there is no denying that the impact of the events around RTW and APB are going to impact the MMO and maybe to a lesser extent the Gaming arena for some time.

So, good bye APB, you were a game that delivered a truly amazing environment and unparalleled character customisation. I hope lessons are learnt from your demise.

Thought i’d capure the Patchers text today, It’s below

APB has been a fantastic journey, but unfortunately that journey has come to a premature end. Today we are sad to announce that despite everyone’s best efforts to keep the service running; APB is coming to a close. It’s been a pleasure working on APB and with all its players. Together we were building an absolutely amazing game, and for that, we thank you. You guys are awesome! From all of the Realtime World staff we thank you for your continued support. The servers are still up, so join the party and say goodbye! – Ben ‘APBMonkey’ Bateman (Community Officer)

“I truly wish we had the chance to continue to craft APB into the vision we had for it. It has been a long & difficult journey but ultimately rewarding to have had the chance to try something bold and different. APB holds some great memories, from the last night of the beta, to the clans and individuals who amazed us with their creativity and sense of community. I am so sorry it had to end so quickly but hopefully the good memories will stay with us all for a long time. Thanks to all the team for the years of hard work, and to the players who contributed so much.” – Dave Jones

Please spare a thought to all the thousands of brave men and women of San Paro who despite knowing the odds, still dared to cross the street. They will be sorely missed.. – Johann van der Walt (Software Engineer: Living City)

Thanks for sticking with us through the hard times guys, we put a huge amount of our lives into APB, but unfortunately we.re not going to get the chance to make it the game we all knew it had the potential to be. Thanks.” – Rob ‘bobbyd’ Anderberg (Technical Lead).

“Thanks for being a creative and imaginative community, the cookies, feedback and ideas were appreciated.” . Ben ‘ Giefster ‘ Skelly

“Working on APB was rewarding, frustrating, amazing, depressing, exciting, and overall, surreal. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it, but I.ve enjoyed it all the way. I hope the players enjoyed the time they had despite the short comings, and will remember the game in a good light for what it was meant to be, not quite what it turned out to be. Now just to get started on that Xbox version…” – Jon McKellan (the guy who did the loading screens)

I had the great pleasure of working with some extremely talented people in both the Dundee and Boulder office, and for the longest time APB was our lives. It is truly sad that it ended this way … but when you aim for the stars, you sometimes fall on your face.. – Ben Abbott, Live Producer.

“Press F to apply for Jobseekers Allowance.”- Ben Hall (Development QA)

“In every way APB was a dichotomy. I have witnessed the project alter from a fragile and delicate entity used to show the world the depth of our vision through to the sturdy beast we released to the public. There were the unusual errors and crashes which are to be expected but it worked. Once in the hands of our community I have never seen something elicit such a polarisation of people. It was dismissed as overhyped and broken or else taken to heart to be loved and cherished, buoyed on by a fanaticism I was proud to have played a part in bringing to the world. Although still again among our players APB brought out both the poles in human behaviour. I bore witness to raw hatred and fury, arrogance and mean spirits but I was also delighted to experience the kindest side of human nature as players came to the aid of others when in a tight spot or they created works of art with the tools provided.

In all APB was a fantastic experience with an incredible team and it is one that I will always cherish and has added to who I am. Thank you everyone involved from our excellent players to our incredible dev team.”- Conor Crowley (Senior QA, System design assistant, Tech support, in-game support, Overall CS, 1 man Publishing QA team, Tea Boy, Morale Officer)

“I’m sad to see the project go. Of all the games I.ve worked on, APB was probably the one with the most potential. I genuinely believe that given more time, we could have turned APB into the game we all wanted it to be. I.d like to thank the community for all their support, the good times I.ve had playing against them, and for the amazing (and often hilarious) user-generated content that they.ve created.

I’d also like to thank the rest of the team for all of their hard-work, and for generally being great people to work with. ” -Bryan Robertson (Gameplay Programmer)

The track list is as follows:

1. Welcome To Nova Praetoria
2. Just Another Day In Utopia
3. Run Resistance, Run
4. Chasing The Dream
5. Beyond The Horizon
6. Shadow Of Doubt
7. Building A Better Tomorrow
8. Very Dark Places
9. The Dark Side Of A Perfect World
10. The Tempest
11. Stepping Into The Void
12. Ghost In The Machine
13. The Hamidon Wars

As you can see the titles have some reflection of the new content and how it is going to feel, Well sound (music-wise), to us players.

If you are fan or just interested I’d head over to Amazon and sample the previews. And don’t worry the second song isn’t a Phil Collins cover.

For those of you that don’t play MMOs, they tend to have continuous updates released for the game, which automatically patch your files to the latest version when you start-up the game client. At times it can be frustrating but if you regularly playing a game, patches are normally small.

But my main annoyance isn’t at the patches nor at the patchers, it’s more where within the games start-up sequence they sit.

Example 1

I recently tried to start playing Planetside again, (flocking with my old outfit), the only issue is that SOEs method of patching won’t allow you to update the game files without an active subscription (or free-play if they have one running). This means unless I subscribe I can’t get the latest version of the game.

Example 2

I received an email from CCP to re-activate my account for 5 days. Great stuff, I boot up the game, which announces a patch is needed and it downloads the files and my client is update.
All of this occurs with-out me even going near a login box and infact the 5 days hasn’t even been activated yet because I would prefer to use it when I have time available.

I can’t understand why anyone would employ such a old style system any more and indeed recent MMO titles have taken this on board and understand that players don’t want to sit staring at a loading bar for hours of their subscription, welcome-back or even free trail time.

Deciding to get the download going so that once I was ready I could just install get started, this plan appeared to be working just fine. The Steam download was activated and spent most of the morning and half the afternoon obtaining the game data. Once completed I kicked off the installer and the game was all set-up and ready. Well nearly.

Stand-alone patcher?

On the scale of being a pain in the arse, Cryptic is way up there with SOE in deciding to not allow players to patch the game without first logging on.
I battled with the accounts system for a good 40 minutes until it informed me that me trial was active and I could log-on. I was fast losing patience with the game but decided to stick it out and that it would be worth it in the long run.

That was until we came to the patching.

The method of how MMO’s are released via Digtal Distrubutors rather that directly results in a problem of the DD version of the game client and the official version becoming out of sync.
This is understandable and I’d experienced the same thing with Fallen Earth, so i wasn’t a big surprise that a patch was needed for updates that had been added since the last DD release.

Boldly going nowhere

Only things weren’t that that clear cut, it appeared that the game was many patches behind the official version and I needed to download another massive patch before I could play. This wouldn’t have been so bad if the transfer speed was good, but as you can sense it wasn’t good, it was dire.
It was another 2 hours before I could click the funky “Engage” button to kick everything off and finally play the game.

To compound my frustrations even further it seemed that the STO launcher button labelled “Engage” was launching the demo for Champions Online that I also had installed. I turns out it was linked to the STO test server being offline and rather than display an error message Cryptic just opened up another game. Naughty.

Gameplay

After the best part of a day I finally get to get to play the demo.

I’d expected the character customisation to be in depth and with alot of options to style your avatar as you wish. I can say I wasn’t disappointed by the system, rather that have so many options that your brain hurts due to choice (Champions) this was well designed and thought out, allowing you to step through and focus on one area at a time.

The demo is designed to give you a glimpse of the various gameplay elements that exist in this MMO. It’s a rather diverse combo of tasks, nicely designed to allow the games to handhold you through some of the basic away team and ship actions.

Wrap up

If you are remotely interested in Star Trek, I’d get the trail downloaded and give it a whirl I doubt you’ll be disappointed by the experience. But can it drawn you in?

I’d need alot more convincing before I could consider playing this game and currently I have these bugbears

• The price of the game is still rather costly for an MMO with a monthly subscription too. For the Cost I’d expect more than 30 days.
• In Away missions the controls and skill slots system was pretty similar to that in Champions online.
• I thought the trail was OK but didn’t really give me a WOW factor that made me want to run out and purchase the game.

If you made it this far, Thanks for reading.

Ok so it may not be a huge thing to everyone, but us EU gamers frequently feel left out of various game bonuses that are offered at the State-side based conventions. So a big thank you Melissa “War Witch” Bianco (who can also be found in those zones too)  for adding these.

After flying around for a little while I stumbled across the NPCs named after Rachy and I, also I spotted a couple of other names that sounded familiar.

Now I’m in a game, am I like immortal now or something?

One of the annoying elements about Planetside was that it had no rivals, the game didn’t have to fight  it was the only one of it’s kind, it stagnated due to this and the players suffered. The idea of more SuperHero themed MMOs in the world is a very appealing one to me as it encourages enhancement development of each game and of the whole genre.

I grabbed an open beta key from Fileplanet, who appear to be the hottest place for open betas at the moment, yet they have the slowest download queues in the world. Grrr.

Happily I set my download off before bed and it was ready when I woke up on Saturday, My chance had arrived and here are my thoughts on the game.

# This post may contain spoilers, cease reading you are avoiding them #
# Please remember this is Open beta and the game could change before launch #

Like a war zone

I’ll be honest from the start this game really reminds me of my first encounter with Tabula Rasa, with some rather similarities between the game mechanics.

• The inflexible interface – If there was one element of TR I disliked the most, it was the way the interfaces weren’t movable on the fly or how they were stuck in stone. I’ll be the first to admit that Champions has a superior system to one one that was in TR but it still feels lacking in some areas. Melmoth pointed out to me that F12 allowed access to the layout screen, which is a step in the right direction, I had a rather interesting time trying to compare the elements of two in-game screens that both closed the other one down.
• Gank lottery quests – Many games have this ‘feature’, you may know it as the “take out target before the other 10 people doing the same quest” style of mission. Of course with each shard limited to 100 players it’s not a massive issue as each zone is large enough your not steeping on each other toes. Yes I know it is(was) a rather common feature in EQ / EQ2 games too, not a system that I tend to enjoy.
• Multiperson world – Single player game – Much of Tabula Rasa I was able to complete solo and when I wasn’t soloing my team would run around attempting to be the first at taking down a boss etc, it was a rather competitive gameplay style. I teamed a couple of  time with folks to get certain tasks done, but frequently it was a case of “Care to help with XYZ”, “Sure”, BAM, “See you around”.

Of course there are more things different between the games, it just had a familiar feeling to it.

It was nice to see that the plan is for no location limitations nor any server shards in the live game, so you should be able to enjoy decent populations no matter what time of day you play. I truly hope more MMOs move towards this type of arrangement in the future, us EU player may stick around longer then.

A quick breakdown of the game elements:

• Graphics
  • There isn’t much I can add to the topic that hasn’t been mentioned a thousand times over. It is unique and works for some people and not for others. I found it rather enjoyable but also could imagine it getting a little irritating if this was your primary MMO, the black outline appeared to kick in at a greater range at times resulting in a black blob appearing until i got much closer.
  • I was without my normal graphics card at the start of this testing. I used a temporary replacement that only just met the requirements of the game specs. Those playing with older machines may find the graphics lack detail and the gameplay jumpy when busy and the costume creator gets laggy.
  • Those with advanced graphical option will see the costumes in full, those without may find their character looks different to other players.
• Costumes
  • The costumes was always going to be the life & sole of this games genre. I have had a good play about with the creator and there are many options to pick from in some areas, other I feel had a token two options in there to keep them on par.
• Crafting
  • I managed to get a little crafting done in the game and reached ARMS level 100, where I then get presented with the option to buy an unlock for the next 100 levels. The crafting seemed decent and allowed me to salvage resource from unwanted equipment and purchase recipes for crafting new items.
  • I briefly seen the Auction house, but there was nothing happening on there and it require that I know the name of what I wanted. Or i could have just been inactive.
• Inventory
  • The inventory system works like Guild Wars you get your first bag to start with, then you can craft additional bags with X number of slots depending on the recipes you know.
  • Powers
    • To be frank I wasn’t that impressed by the powers-sets that were on offer, of course this will all expand in the future but for now there wasn’t much and they all felt samey at least in the levels  to 10. As there are no classes in the game you either get to choose a role or pick ones you prefer, there isn’t much awareness of what each set had to offer later on so it became a mixed bag, though you can respec for for cost whenever you liked, which was rather nice.
    • The travel powers were interesting and offered a few different modes of transport, some could be grouped: Flight, flight on object, Superjump, Acrobatics, swinging and tunneling. I found alot of this powers awkward to use and preferred not to use them. I found acrobatics was a good all around power as it allowed for decent jump height plus allowed for a fast run in general while active (I missed sprint!)
    • I levelled a few characters and the tutorial area feels a little long with you having a block power, a energy increasing attack power and finally a larger attack power. This was the combination for the various power-sets I tried out and each felt identical with only the melee powers needing me to get that bit closer.
    • The power acquisition I found confusing, I’ve had a read and still didn’t completely understand how it fitted together. Every time you level up you get a point to spent at the powerhouse, but these points don’t all result in direct powers. So by level 12 I had 4 powers plus my block and travel power with some statistics builder powers too, but it felt like enough for me to handle at that stage.

Conclusion
Champions Online looks like it going to be a rather fun game for those that prefer the style of gameplay offered by City of Heroes/Villains, I found the options for powers to be very limited and had expected a few more, but then it could open up in the later levels.

I was glad to have this chance to give Champions a bash, admittedly the vast outdoor style of the gameplay has put me off more than anything else*, but those that plan on playing the game are going to have alot of fun.

* A rather annoying bug caused my powers to continually vanish from my powerbar, this was irritating and was linked to having to hold a power down to charge it up. This bug appeared to have vanished after a patch that seen the powers become unmovable unless the power window was open.

Other Screenshots
For this trial I created numerous characters  the most memorable were:

Forphine

little ms violent

I know you!

And you!

We’re not in Nerva any more

Northern Lights

underwater and no SCUBA?

I’ll be happy to play my (once were) Max level characters again, I really doubt that I’ll re-activate my account once the trail is over. It’s rather sad to see this once proud game reduced down to one solitary server, containing the remnants of the whole player-base.

Through-out the last few years it was made very clear that the EU and US servers weren’t scheduled to be merged. There aren’t many reasons to perform such a feat. unless you are looking to reduce the overheads of the game. The EU server Werner has barely seen any users since the US servers merged and this latest move just looks to delay the eventual closure of Planetside, a move that after Matrix online SOE is willing to make if needed.

It pains me to say that the game is littered with hackers that blatantly exploit the client-side coding without fear of punishment from the company. Excluding the older-school FPS games that drew cheaters in droves, MMOs are normally free from exploits, of course this is the exception to the rule.

The game still continues to be advertised on the SOE site and receives subscriptions from honest and cheating players alike. Frankly I’m disappointed that Sony Online Entertainment do nothing to stop cheaters from ruining one of the most unique games of the MMO genre, not to mention that they still back a product that is known to have exploits.

At the end of the day SOE don’t appear to care who is paying them and cheaters money is as good as an honest players, sadly at some-point the only ones left playing the game will be the cheats.

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.

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.

You play a MMO, You are weak!

Smashing the first misplaced statement, I play MMOs, I also play RTS games an FPS games, and I quite enjoy adventure games too. Me and my friends play simulated musical instruments for enjoyment, it doesn’t achieve anything, there are no goals or final bosses to defeat, yet we still play. Many of my gaming friends play MMOs and many other non-MMO PC games and generally they own a console too.

Speaking of consoles, when GTA4 was released, it sold a massive 3.8 million copies on the first day, I dread to think how many people sat down a played that game until they couldn’t keep their eyes open. And I can guess that they did the same for a few days following too. I think I wouldn’t be too wrong in say that the above example is a good demonstration of  peoples generally addictive nature

And I’ll not deny there are those that have tendencies to become addicted to games, and yes it can lead to self-destructive behaviour in the real world. I have see first hand how a gamers innocent habit can spiral out of control but these case are quite rare. Are these the social rejects mentioned in the article or aren’t they just the gaming equivalent of fanatical sports fans?

Milking the life from our bones

Around the world there are people that sit down every weekday to enjoy their favourite sport, TV show or  Soap-opera, the 9.7 million viewers that sat down on January 26th to watch EastEnders on BBC1, are these people “useless, socially inept sacks of shit“? No they are doing something they enjoy.

Even talking into consideration the fact they sit down multiple times a week to watch the same program or few programs, labelling people solely based on their past-time isn’t going to win you any friends and certainly avoids having to dig deeper into the reasons and facts behind these habits. Why bother to examine the social elements or enjoyment of these hobbies when you can just label the patrons addicts.

I would rather spend my hard earned money on one months MMO subscription for £8.99 than pay out £8 on Lottery tickets for a months worth of draws. I know which one feels like throwing my money away and which I find fun and enjoyable.

Underhanded tricks and other things

I’d like to focus on one item of the “List” of underhanded tricks:

“Constantly update and patch the game with arbitrary bug fixes and class changes that will throw gameplay completely off balance.  Just for the hell of it.  Players will complain on the forums but for whatever reason, they still refuse to quit.”

Now I took alot of the other comments with a pinch of salt, someone else’s opinion on various topics, but really the above statement just doesn’t make any fucking sense. During my entire gaming history I can’t say I recall a time when a patch was released “just for the hell of it” and class changes will generally be to balance overall game play not because the developers wanted to play a joke. Do you get the feel someone is bitter about a class nerf from along time ago?

I know we think the MMO gaming scene is still relatively small compared to other gaming types, but with completely trashy journalism likes this is it any wonder? It all reminds me of the scare tactics employed by the informational films of the 50′s, They might as well have gone with the title “Playing MMOs will turn you into an addict, just say no!”.

It’s truly sad that the misconceptions regarding MMOs are so rife, hopefully as more MMOs make the jump onto console platforms and into mainstream console gaming, the mists shrouding MMO games will lift and open peoples eyes to the true facts about the games that we enjoy and play.