Singilized Experiences - My first MMORPG main character (World of Warcraft - Introduction)

I'll start off with some clarification on the title of this post, my first MMORPG was not actually World of Warcraft, instead I've played games such as Runescape, Everquest, and a PS2 version of Everquest before that, both of which I never really played a lot or enjoyed much at all. I played Runescape quite a bit but I never enjoyed it fully as I did with other games from the start, it was more like a time sink for me with some neat features; whereas Everquest's subscriptions never lasted for more than a month, because while I liked the idea, I just didn't enjoy playing the games themselves, and I was also very uncomfortable paying monthly for something that I didn't like completely. All of that turned me off from MMORPGs for awhile, at least until World of Warcraft released.

The first time I witnessed World of Warcraft was from watching a trailer that came with Warcraft 3, I was very excited for the game after that because I liked the idea of being down in the maps with units which made Warcraft more actionlike than being a RTS. When I first saw the trailer, Warcraft 3 : The Frozen Throne wasn't even out, meaning it was quite some time before I actually got my hands on the game. I didn't even know what kind of game World of Warcraft was going to be other than it didn't look like much of a RTS and with new types of gameplay plus Warcraft's lore, I knew for sure that I wanted to try it. I can't remember when but I did find out it was a MMORPG sometime, around the time when it started to near it's release date, and finally fast forwarding to it's launch, about a week after it finally released I went out and purchased it. I never knew I would be buying the longest lasting and one of the games that provided me with the most fun in my life, plus a whole new experience beyond anything that I could have imagined or expected.

I quickly went onto creating an account and setting up my subscription which wasn't as painful as it was for Everquest as I was much more optimistic for World of Warcraft than I ever was for any other game I've had to purchase something else for. After that I got started, for some reason I didn't really look at the races much and decided to go with Human, as I like fairly standard things and I didn't really want to be any of the races on the Horde. As much as I liked Thrall and the Orcs in general in WC3 when given the choice I usually pick the thing that's the most simple (at least in the past, I've changed abit since then) and Humans were definitely the most standard thing in the game, with Dwarves and Orcs being next. As for a class I personally like melee classes with minimal magical power but I still like having the magic element there instead of being a pure swordsman or something similar, so since I was on the Alliance I ended up choosing a Paladin. Since I played WC3 I knew that the Warcraft Paladins were fairly standard in fantasy lore, being protectors of people while using holy magic, however I was surprised immediately at how similar it was to controlling a Paladin hero character in WC3, from having only autoattacks to providing auras, and later on being able to turn invincible for a few seconds. Besides all of that it was also my first revelation that World of Warcraft was amazing, it was simply fun to play in the Warcraft universe while being basically one of the units that you would normally have controlled from a RTS perspective in previous games.

Despite the good start of a Paladin however, I was kind of turned off by the fact I wasn't doing as much damage as other classes, so I decided to recreate my character before too long. After deciding that I still wanted to be a melee character I decided to go with a Warrior because I felt like I didn't like the play style that the Rogue description said it to be, which is Stealthy, and I would rather rush into battle headfirst. Luckily for me, that's what the World of Warcraft Warrior is all about, I had a blast being able to charge into enemies and start fights that way instead of just running in. I also was glad to find out that I had actual attacks that I could press instead of just auto attacking, and later on, the thing that really solidified my decision to level my Warrior up was the fact that I saw dual wielding in the training menu when I got to Goldshire.

Going back a little bit, besides having a fun time playing my Warrior in general, I also really liked roaming around the environment in Northshire Abbey and doing various quests for the NPCs around there. Right from the first zone it really felt like being in the Warcraft universe even without the involvement of iconic characters like Thrall or Jania Proudmoore. In any case besides admiring the environment it was fun to explore the game in general, after I left the abbey I was greeted to the sight of dozens of players roaming around Goldshire, I minded my own business for the most part while looking for things like profession trainers, and trying to restock on supplies for going out into the wilderness, but watching a bunch of people grinding around the town was quite memorable.

Professions were somewhat of a iffy spot for me, I could never be happy with just two and I wanted to do everything, but at that moment started off with skinning because it felt more new than things like mining or herbalism, and I forgot the other profession I took but I believe it was leather working.

With that I set out to quest and quickly found out things were much more difficult out here than in the abbey, I remember struggling considerably actually forcing me to go to a armor and weapon vendor to purchase some of those, as a Warrior I did notice the difference in difficulty afterwards and it was much easier. Despite that when I had two or more enemies on me I usually would end up running away or dying and this point was especially true when I got over to the Murlocs who not only were hard to kill, but also fled too quickly for me to kill them before they got to another Murloc and started attacking me again. In the end though, I managed to complete my quest I also saw a island in the middle of the murloc area that I decided to check out, and I found Defias casters there. The casters were fairly easy to kill which was like a dream after taking on the Murlocs, so much that I ended up grinding the casters for some XP, and I later went back just to farm them some more, even now however I still don't know what the island is for, I believe I remember going there for a Rogue quest once.

Other than simply exploring the gameplay aspect of World of Warcraft, I delved into the social aspect as well. More than a few times I would be questing in the same area as someone else and they would ask me if I'd like to join up, for the sake of politeness I usually did accept their invitation and ended up having a fun time grouping with them. A few of the people that came to mind were Vedelken who was a Priest that I enjoyed talking to, a Mage who's name I've forgotten but she went onto leading one of the endgame guilds, and a Paladin who liked to RP for fun. While I didn't interact with the Mage much, I did quite abit of things with Vedelken and the Paladin, from questing to instances to even alittle bit of PvP. I'll go more into those events in a future post. In any case, there were more people who I grouped with to aid in questing such as someone who's name I forgot who I farmed Gnolls with for awhile as the Gnolls were hard on their own but they went down easily against both of us. A Dwarf Warrior who was fun to talk to, and others that unfortunately don't come to mind at the moment.

That about wraps up my experience from the first area of World of Warcraft for me, it was a fun experience that was mostly fun and some challenge, the real challenge came later on which I will post about when I went onto the next zone, went into the Dead Mines, and of course explored Stormwind City.

League of Legends / Defense of the Ancients : History of ups and downs

I have or had a casual history with League of Legends and the Defense of the Ancients and it's successors (or spin offs) in general but that has recently changed thanks to Alice. I first heard about DotA in one of the World of Warcraft guilds I was a member of where it was somewhat mentioned, and after listening to talk about it, it made somewhat more sense but it was still fairly haze. Furthermore, I was surprised to find out that it had something to do with Warcraft 3. It wasn't until a magazine article (I think) that I found out what kind of gameplay Defense of the Ancients actually had, and even then I didn't try it out until my World of Warcraft subscription had expired and it came up to mind on things I could try out.

So, with that situation I ended up looking it up and I at first was immediately turned off by the fact that the search result that came up for it was called something like “Defense of the Ancients Championship edition” and anything under that were past releases, so I ended up just downloading that. I didn't like the fact that it had the words “Championship” in it because it meant that I would need other people to play it fully rather than having some sort of bot system. Even knowing that I decided to start it up and try it out, I immediately thought it was fun being able to choose a hero and control literally no one but that, and I set out to explore the map a little bit. It wasn't too long until I discovered the enemy minions and decided to farm them, leading up to me messing around with the towers which were fairly easy to take down without any player interference. Since I wasn't really playing with anyone the main purpose of my exploration was to just see what it was like, I ended up really liking the hero I chose because it was a Fel Guard, and I thought they were neat from having spent so many hours in World of Warcraft. The Fel Guard's abilities were also a blast to mess with, I immediately drew the comparison to how it was similar to playing a hero in the normal Warcraft game modes, and that ideal without the addition of having to control things like units, research, and buildings at the same time was really appealing to me, since I loved the hero character aspect of Warcraft, but I was never really good at the normal RTS parts.

Regardless of all of that however, my exploration came to a close after I completely roamed the map and leveled my character out, with giving him the most expensive items. I didn't really feel like going onto the multiplayer aspect of it and that single incursion basically while fun, ended my DotA experience, until somewhat recently.

As someone who follows video game releases fairly frequently, it was very hard to miss the release and launch of titles such as Demigod, League of Legends, and Heroes of Newerth. At least two of them distinctly aim to be the “Defense of the Ancients 2” and those are League of Legends, and Heroes of Newrth. I can't speak on Demigod's behalf as I didn't really look into much information about it, I do know that it's multiplayer oriented with the same style of as DotA though, however the other two titles overshadow it in popularity and how similar they are to the DotA formula. With all of that in mind, the only one I've actually had experience with is League of Legends and that's because a friend of mine Adam also played it and I decided to give it a try.

Actually playing League of Legends was interesting, I was able to draw a lot of similarities right off the bat to how DotA was from the 3 lanes, stores in bases, and of course things like controlling one hero, and uncontrollable minions going down lanes at will. The main difference was actually playing the game with other players be they human or bot, playing as it was meant to be played completely changed my experience with it, and perception of the series in general.

When I first started playing League of Legends the literal only two ways to play were against basic bots which didn't really prove much of a problem to the extent of being unfun, or against players. As a generally antisocial person the first thing I didn't like was the fact that it was a small team based game where coordinating with other people is for the most part very essential, or so I had thought at the time. The next was that because of the item shop and the game had experience and levels, I thought the game was very cut and paste from the start to the finish, to the extent of if someone out levels you, you might as well surrender. That part is probably more of me being a sore loser myself, but it's also true to an extent as I learned later, but it was one of the main deterrences of the game. I also did not like that simply choosing a character that you like would possibly not be the best one for you, because all of the characters have set roles and abilites. With things like item building, and skill orders there is a minimal amount of character customization to an extent, but it's simply not efficient to play a character a less than optimal way. That leads to my final dislike of League of Legends in that right from the start it is a very competitive game not un-similar to World of Warcraft's arenas which I also didn't like. The last reason combined with all of the other reasons brought a quick halt to my playing in the League of Legends, until recently anyways.

Alice and I had been playing Warcraft 3 lately and playing a bunch of the skirmish mode against bots which I found fun, it also reminded me that I really liked the hero units of WC3 and it gave me the idea that maybe we could try League of Legends out, to at least so we could experience it together. So of course, we went on to try it out; after doing a few things to set up like tutorials, looking up the free champions and so on, we ended up inviting Adam and then we got started. Since the last time I played, and something I'm thankful for, is that the developers decided to create a Coop mode where it's 5 players, no more no less which I thought was kind of lame but I got used to it, it sets you up with random players of course if you don't have enough, against 5 bots which even on the lowest difficulty level are much smarter than basic bots you can use in custom games. We started out on the highest difficulty of which there are only two so there's not much of a choice, but we ended up doing that because Adam made the game and he decided that was a better choice.

In any case, I started off as Maokai simply because I wanted a character who could go into a lane with Alice, and she was forced to start off with Annie even though her first choice was Lux but someone took that before her and she wasn't familiar with the lock in process. In the actual game we ended up not doing fantastic but we started off fairly well which surprised me, not in that we couldn't do it, in that it happened that way on it's own. However the thing that really messed us up was when a bot from another lane came to assist the ones in our lane and we didn't expect that, resulting in us quickly getting wiped out in our lane. The bot that did this in particular was also a much higher level than us. This particular event is something that I found out happens in every game, but back onto the main topic, despite being underleveled after having our lane wiped out, we ended up pushing two lanes and assisting the middle one mainly where by then I had gotten used to using Maokai as a fight starter and using him to root enemies who are in a good position for all of my teammates to quickly turn and burn them down. At the same time however, I was disappointed in being killed instantly by a single champion such as Ryze or Annie, I'm still unsure of the cause of that especially as a tank character, but it doesn't bother me so much anymore. We ended up winning the match even though we personally didn't do as good as we normally could do when first stepping into different types of games such as Call of Duty, or Left 4 dead, which was new for us, and kind of a disappointment for me because again, I'm a sore loser.

Like I said I was somewhat disappointed in our performance but I was encouraged with Alice being with me too, I enjoyed most of the game except towards the end where things seemed too powerful to even hurt because of being underleveled, but overall, I enjoyed it a lot more than I would alone that's for sure. Alice also had similar thoughts on the game, and wanted to learn more about it, leading up to me agreeing with her, it's been a few days since then, while we haven't been playing League of Legends constantly because of other matters to attend to in our lives, we do play it quite a bit.

I've learned a few things since then the main thing is that Adam showed us a website where we could see guides of characters which I normally don't like doing, and I still don't but I realize that a lot like with World of Warcraft reading, as the game is very copy and paste from game to game, it's important to have a general idea of what your character's role is, and what items to get. I know I could probably get the same information from looking up literally all of the items and knowing what a specific character could use more of or is good at and then improving those ways, but I personally don't really want to spend the time to do that, nor do I enjoy the game as much as I do as opposed to something like World of Warcraft where I did do tests, and experiments with different items and specs (which cost tons of gold) to see what works out the best. That isn't to say I don't enjoy League of Legends, I'm still in the process of getting to the point where I would really like it, here's a few things I've noticed about the four characters I've played so far :

Maokai

-Good at using saplings like greandes to mess the enemy up

-Good at rooting

-Not good at everything else

-Former main champion, stopped using because I don't know how to play him even with guides because no guide is very specific and I wanted to be a better supporter

-Because I like Maokai as a character, I possibly will go back to him someday and by then I should know more about the game

Warwick

-Good 1v1

-Very high regenerative ability

-Very good movement

-I would probably play him some more just for fun to see how he can be in a lane without jungling

Zilean

-Good passive

-Good at setting up kills

-Ultimate seems useful in theory but because it completely immobilizes the champion who dies and then raises them without full health at which point unless they're in a situation where they won't be focused they will die, in most cases except for team fights it seems to have very limited uses

Soraka

-My new main champion

-Good at healing

-Bad at damage

-Bad at escaping without summoner abilities

-I've only just started playing Soraka yesterday but with Alice as an Ashe I feel like as long as we're good at the start and we don't let the enemy outfarm us we'll do good in the end

With all of that said my general view of League of Legends has changed dramatically from playing with Alice, and while my dislike of it did come up now and then, it hasn't ever completely shut me out of wanting to play the game, and I do feel like I could enjoy the game more as I learn more about it. So in the end, I want to learn more about it, and from what I've seen, that'll make the game us better at the game, and in general it'll remove the idea that something we don't know is causing us to not do as well as we could be doing.

Singular Thoughts - What I would include if I made a MMORPG : Final Part

Finally, for the PvP section of what I would include in my MMORPG if I were to make one.

Previous parts can be found here Part One  Part Two

Player vs Player (PvP) Main Points

-World PvP : The two main forms of “World PvP” I've seen that aren't completely random occurrences that also have developer involvement in some form, are the World of Warcraft way and the Warhammer Online (or Dark Age of Camelot supposingly) way, I'm sure there's more but I haven't really played enough MMOs to be a judge on that. While both ways segregate world PvP into one area, there are a few main differences. WAR's way gives players an incentive to go to them regardless of their level due to the way they balance PvP, it also helps that WAR is very much more known for it's PvP content rather than PvE content. WoW puts it's world PvP zone on a timer between “rounds” that starts at the end of a round as well as timing the amount of time a round lasts. That is mainly because WAR's world PvP can be whatever, it's just secluded in a small area whereas WoW's world PvP is always a form of attack and defend with players either on the attacking or defending side for a round depending on what faction controls the area from winning the previous round.

I personally like both forms of world PvP as both are successful and fun in their own right, so I would include both along with reward and balance systems that would encourage players to participate in the PvP.

-Focus on large scale PvP or medium sized group PvP : This point mainly means there would be no small organized battles of things like 2v2, or 3v3, or at least none that would give rewards. The reason for this is because I'm in favor of pugs in PvP as mentioned in one of my previous posts and I would like to keep my game along those lines. With that said, I wouldn't completely neglect small group battles and implement dueling grounds for people who would want to do that sort of PvP against others. The system for finding others would be a randomized system without matchmaking as including matchmaking would lean it towards the system being too standardized which is what I'm trying to avoid. If manual matchups are requested they would be possible as well.

With that said, I want to focus on large scale PvP because it somewhat causes the balance issues that are more apparent in smaller scale conflicts to disappear. That isn't to say things wouldn't be as balanced as possible, however I would balance things to be as balanced as possible for the minimum of 10v10 areas, but anything below that for things like dueling or small scaled PvP encounters would be somewhat sacrificed (if need be) in order to obtain that balance. However balance in the greater numbers would hopefully also bring things down to reasonable levels for smaller scaled PvP encounters as well. In the end, I would try to balance things but I still would want to get away from small incentive given PvP encounters in favor of more PuG friendly large battles.

-Group queuing system : When I thought WoW's rated battlegrounds would allow and limit players to join random groups in group of 1-5 I was really excited for it, you can imagine how let down I was when I found out that it had no random matchmaking system and it was purely a full group against another full group. I'll admit that there is a certain degree of MMORPG players who enjoy things that are more like tournaments rather than actual “just for fun” games, but I don't believe that style of play should be that widely and specifically introduced. The rated batteground (RBG) system was definitely geared towards the tournament liking players rather than the other way around. To resolve that, I would like to actually have what I thought would be the original way RBGs would work as my main system of queuing for any sort of rated instanced PvP. This system would allow people who are both confident that they are prepared enough to put a rating on the line to get in there and start fighting, but also allow people who want to queue as a group the ability to do that.

There are of course ways to work around that system that people have done or tried in the past such as getting multiple groups of 5 together and queuing together. To prevent a similar occurance, when joining, the system should ensure that at least 3 different servers are in one team or two or more depending on how large the PvP instance would be. If there is noone eligible to meet the requirements then the team that is already in the queue will be forced to wait until there is. This change would make it highly unlikely that two or more organized groups would be able to join the battle together and would result in a less coordinated but at the same time because of that, more balanced experience.

Types of PvP – World PvP (WoW and WAR style), Skirmish, Rated Skirmish, Dueling area

All of the types of PvP except dueling grounds would contribute towards rewards, and the only difference between rated skirmishes and skirmishes would be that involvement in rated skirmishes would affect a matchmaking rating.

-Reward System : Like the PvE rewards I would have enhancement conditions on items gained through PvP, unlike PvE all of the types of PvP would contribute towards being able to buy items, however the main source of progression would be through the enhancements. Besides needing certain conditions fulfilled to upgrade, the player would also require additional points.

A general idea of how the rewards would upgrade would be :

Level 1 (bought with points alone) → Level 2 (Fufilled the required conditions, and spent 2x as much points as the first level) → Level 3 (fulfilled the conditions and spent 4x as much points as the first level)

At the third level item enhancement would cease until further updates.

-Balance : I like the way WAR levels all players involved in a PvP area up to a certain level but still keeps their actual level and gear a beneficial factor and to facilitate world PvP areas I would also include this.

That about sums up how the PvP systems in my MMORPG would work, after writing about all of this I found out it was quite an experience to think about how to balance one thing or work in another thing, and this is simply all just concept ideas without any programming. I'm sure many of the things I would want to do would require a extremely high amount of programming. In any case, while it was a little bit iffy in places and it wasn't organized very coherently because I couldn't figure out a way to do that, I'm pretty happy with my list of ideas and I know a lot of them are borrowed from other MMORPGs. So while no single MMORPG has everything that I want, there are plenty of MMOs that come close.

Singular Thoughts - What I would include if I made a MMORPG : Part Two

Continuing off from yesterday's post, here are more things I would have in my MMORPG if I could make one.

Player vs Environment (PvE)

Besides classes, one of the main things I look for in a MMORPG right off the bat is it's PvE, and usually for the most part the PvE experience is summed up within the first few minutes or at least in the very first zone, with only the first group PvE experience being left out, and that can be experienced within a few zones, preferably only 1 or 2 zones. So, with that said, the initial PvE experience is very important for the staying power of a MMORPG, and of course you have to usually do a great deal of PvE to ever get to the PvP (if that's your thing) to begin with, making PvE a very important part of any MMORPG. Here's a few things off the top of my head that I would include in my MMORPG.

-Adventure Style Questing : This means that the player moves with the quests rather than going out like a mercenary, doing something, then coming back to complete the quest by turning it in. Instead Adventure style would mean that in someway the player is moved with the quests either by having the quest giver's positions always moving to different places in the zone or to not stay in one area for every long before moving onto the next. While I personally don't mind the mercenary type of questing especially for grinding fast, having an adventure while questing makes questing in general so much more interesting.

-Scaling Areas : I think if some areas scaled to group size as in the amount of enemies that spawn or the enemy's strength, it would make group questing more appealing while still limiting and balancing the gains of grouping with more challenge. In order to prevent pure chaos with other group interference the areas would only be in instanced zones or in areas that a lot of players would be at, at any given time such as even a regular assault on a friendly town. With that said however, I still would keep regular spawns and areas unaffected by scaling in the game as that's a surefire way to make sure nothing becomes too imbalanced for a soloing player.

-Bosses : This section is a bit too long to have as a bullet point so instead I will be putting multiple points into this part about bosses. There are two main types of ideals that bosses I think should be designed by, either highly scripted and challenging, or having a random element in it, both of which have been done in the past but are few and far in between more standard bosses.

Highly scripted and challenging bosses not only are the most interesting to fight and beat the first time, they're often the most common for endbosses, however I don't believe they should be limited to be endboss fights either. Instead they should be more numerous through out the instance and always give players a run for their money even if they know the strategies for the boss (more on this later).

Another thing that has been done as often as highly scripted bosses are bosses with a few random abilities or some sort of random element thrown in with them. These bosses usually aren't as challenging as highly scripted ones however fighting them has a longer duration of surprise as it's rare to get repeated elements one after the other.

So with that said, I would like to have more of these boss fights around, and replacing the more standard “loot pinata” bosses with indepth ones. To also further increase the challenge of bosses, a system could be in place that scans the entire party for their registered boss kills of a boss and increase the difficulty based on that, maybe by a small margin. This would allow players to continuously have a challenge while getting better as players to defeat the said challenge, and as it is basically rinse and repeat, as long as the margin of challenge only increases by a small amount, there should rarely be any major problems.

-Different Difficulty Levels : I like the idea of a difficulty level adjuster for dungeons and raids as it lets people do pretty much whatever they want. If they want to do harder encounters they should have that choice. I would also have this aspect work in synch with the system of automatically difficulty increasing by having a normal difficulty which is what it would start out at, a recommended difficulty which is affected by automatic difficulty increases, and finally advanced difficulty which is the hardest it can get. The recommended difficulty is able to place players in situations that would be mostly in the middle between the two.

-Reward System : The main incentive for players is of course items, and I would like to have a form of direct item drops as well as various tokens and factional points that would also be on the same level as the item drops. The main difference between the two methods of acquisition would be the different types of items even if they have the same stats, and in general, acquiring a item through tokens or factional points should be much slower than getting it by a drop to encourage dungeon farming. The item drops would also be in multiple smaller pieces requiring more than one drop to make a single item, this would expand the lifetime of dungeons and give players more of an incentive to continue on their quest for items.

Finally, when a player has assembled a piece of their final tier armor (which would be split up into three tiers, the dungeon tier, the raiding tier, and lastly, the advanced raiding tier) they unlock a series of conditions that would allow it to power up into the next tier of armor once the conditions are met. These conditions would be akin to normal achievements such as kill 1000 beasts rather than spawn a bunch of adds even though you aren't suppose to in a normal boss fight then defeat them along with the boss, and these conditions would power up something like a dungeon tier to a raiding tier item, however it would not allow for further enhancing into an advanced raiding tier unless it started off as a raiding item. The conditions would also be unique to the origins of the item, for example a dungeon to raiding enhancement would always ask for something that could be done in a dungeon. This system would allow players who only did dungeons to gain a raid item for example but it would still keep raiders who raided in their own set of gear. The conditions should average at least 3 days of total playtime (72 hours) to fully upgrade.

Besides that there would be a standard achievement system which would reward noncombat items such as mounts, titles, and pets which seems fairly regular now.

Difficulty advancement would ideally be (or gear quality)

Solo Gear → Regular Dungeon → Regular Raid → Advanced Dungeon = Advanced Raid

The reason for advanced dungeons being higher than regular raids is that advanced dungeons should be extremely hard and should rival the challenge of any advanced raid but scaled down to a smaller amount of people. So to that end, it shouldn't be possible to complete an advanced dungeon without raid armor.

Advanced Dungeon rewards would consist of raid items as well as contributing towards raid and advanced raid item enhancement. Lastly at the end of both the advanced dungeons and advanced raids should be a boss that can only be defeated by having fully powered up items from the advanced raid.

I liked the idea of difficulty tuning that MMORPGs are starting to have, however a lot of them implement them oddly, although my way would also be odd as well, but mine would be primary built on player progression and dungeon replayability. Adding to those aspects, especially replayability would give players more things to do in general, adding up to a longer time before people start to get bored of things, and are ready to move onto the next expansion, which isn't always a bad thing, but with how long an average expansion takes to create, it's important to have players happy for as long as possible.

That concludes the PvE section, I'll finish up with PvP tomorrow, so again, look forward to that if you've enjoyed this section.

Singular Thoughts - What I would include if I made a MMORPG : Part One

Many gamers are asked or have ask themselves what would they put in a video game at some point. However, not a lot of those gamers ask the question “what would you put in a MMORPG?” well, I'm sure a few people have asked and answered that question but Alice and I recently brought it up and I decided to present my answer to the question.

I will be dividing this post into a few main parts that are mostly parts of any MMORPGs but still have my opinions on them.

General Concepts

-Races : I mostly like standard fantasy races such as Humans, Dwarves, Elves and so on, so in my MMORPG I would have those same races.

Besides the standard “good” races I personally like what Warcraft did with the “evil” races such as Orcs and Trolls, basically humanizing them. I know other games have also done this such as the Elder Scrolls series where Orcs are simply more barbaric humans but still Orcish looking, and to a lesser extent, Dungeons and Dragons where while Orcs themselves, are pure savages for the most part but their half-human offspring (if they mate with a human) can be much more civilized. In any case, I would like to have somewhat civilized Orcs, Trolls, and Gnolls (Dungeons and Dragons' Gnolls). Since writing down all of the reasons and types of races would be too long for just an overview, I'll list them off.

Races I would like to have in my MMORPG : Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, Trolls, Gnolls, Minotaurs, Spider people, Dragons (both friendly and hostile), Demons, Angels, Treants, Kobolds (Dungeons and Dragons again) and other standard Fantasy races that didn't come to mind but I still would like them around in my game.

While a lot of it copies World of Warcraft, I would alter their origin backrunds to still have the same appeal that the races of WoW do but also to separate it from their series they came from.

-Factions : I personally really like the idea of two factions that are primarily enemies, rather than three or more factions, or 2 factions and 1 neutral faction. Two factions separates the player-base into one or the other ideally which makes for even conflicts most of the time, however that statement in general is of course is very hard to control, and most of the time the balance between the two factions is somewhat in one faction's favor rather than being half and half. However, on the other hand, adding a third faction in there would further increase the player imbalance as even the most balanced situation would lead to an imbalance, such as 30/30/30 leaving 10% undecided, or 35/35/30 which puts two factions ahead of one, and again, this is assuming the most ideal results, which are never the case. More realistically three factions would possibly result in 30/50/20 or something along those lines.

Adding in a neutral faction would also result in the same sort of problems, with a lot of people probably preferring neutrality rather than dedicating themselves to one faction. World of Warcraft has somewhat created neutrality amongst the factions by adding a paid faction transfer system which created a group of people who faction transfer almost as soon as it's time limitation before using it again is finished. I again, don't really like that idea but it did allow players to switch factions at will which in the end is what a neutral faction would be able to do. That or it would limit players from interaction at all with the other factions making it undesirable except by a small group of players to begin with.

In the end, my MMORPG would have two main factions, and a bunch of non-player factions that the player would be able to interact with.

-Classes : One of the very first things I look at when I first hear about a MMORPG is probably the classes. I like classes in RPG games because they make each character feel and play differently unless you're comparing two characters of the same class, but onto the main point.

Another thing I really like is the idea of advanced classes after reaching a certain point in a player's class and I would definitely have those around, but the general classes would be :

Fighter

Mage

Priest

Archer

Rogue

These five would cover basically every type of standard class in a fantasy MMORPG which is fine with me, as each class covers a role that would be desired by someone when they pick up a fantasy based MMORPG. Instead, to further enhance the experience of choosing a class or simply playing as what would be a basic class, I would add class specific quests and factions where each class would have one in that regard but be limited from another classes' quests or factions. In any case, here are the names of the advanced classes, and a general idea of the way they would function.

Fighter

Weapon Expert – Focuses on using one weapon type to do damage, excels in this weapon type above all melee classes, uses expertise stances to provide self buffs that allow a few skills to be used, whereas another would allow different skills to be used. Cannot specialize in ranged weapons. May carry a shield and tank at the expense of offensive stances. 

Berserker – Uses rage gained in battle by being hit or hitting enemies to do damage. As rage increases new skills open up that exhaust rage, and damage increases as rage increases. Finally at maximum rage, the player loses control of being able to choose their attacks and instead attacks wildly, all attacks turning into rage filled attacks where they cause the player to lose health with every strike but do massive damage.

Mage

Evoker – Specializes in offensive magic, uses standard mana as a resource. Is able to sacrifice damage for a set amount of time for additional mana regeneration. Under 20% health, may use desperate casting to cause random harmful effects to enemies and allies around the Evoker, such as sheeping random targets, or burning them, ceases after 3 casts.

Conjurer – Specializes in defensive magic, uses standard mana as a resource. Conjures Support Pillars in order to aid party members, also able to turn those pillars into offensive turrets when needed.

Priest

Cleric – Defensive Healer, is allowed to wear heavy armor. May also melee to regenerate mana with below average melee skills.

Purifier – Offensive Healer , wears light armor. Deals holy ranged damage which also transfers damage into healing to nearby party members. May sacrifice healing power for damage if desired.

Archer

Ranger – Gains a offensive pet as well as minor melee skills, and normal archery skills. Being near the pet or with it attacking a target provides buffs to the Ranger.

Marksman – Improves Archery skills, increases armor penetration of arrows fired, and has a chance to instantly kill a target with low health if fired at from afar.

Rogue

Assassin – Specializes in quick and disabling attacks, allows the player to choose between poisons for disabling opponents further, or enhanced melee training allowing the player to stand up to an opponent in melee better.

Spy – Balanced rogue, specializes in traps, and ambushes. Allows the player to mark a player that has been out of combat for at least 30 seconds at which point if the spy engages him with the mark, all allies around the spy will gain damage buffs, and all enemies around the target will be stunned for a second, and gain minor debuffs, if there are no enemies around the marked target then only the marked person will receive the debuff. Finally, if the spy is engaged before then and engaged by the marked person, the spy will lose all ambush benefits, and the person will be unmarked.

Besides all of the small details I put down, there is a endless amount of things I could also add to each class. Generally however, I would like all of the classes to be balanced, and provide a fun experience that mainly aims for large scaled PvP content, and all types of PvE content, leaving only small scaled PvP encounters such as 1v1s to 10v10s, unaccounted for.

-Story/Adventure based

-Character alignments and decisions

-Cosmetic Outfits

-Story Setup : I haven't thought too much about this part especially since for the most part I like the World of Warcraft universe, I don't exactly like the way it's story progressed as of World of Warcraft but it's definitely going places, and I'm not a Blizzard employee so I can't really change it. Overall however, the story that World of Warcraft has so far is not that bad. If I were to simply change it to make it more unique to what I wanted then I probably would make it a darker world, and change the motivations of the two factions on why they want to fight each other. Giving other unrelated races more involvement with story lines would also be a nice touch. With that, I would also have more character (NPC) involvement in the player's experience in both PvE and PvP, and finally I would progress the general story faster than it is now.

With that aside, if I was going to make a completely original story I would try to make it darker but not suffocatingly dark. While a lot of the Horde's current characters fit that role fine, the Alliance somewhat lacks in the dark department, in general I think changing the motivations and rewriting the what a character's personality is, would be the quickest way to darken the universe. So to that extent, I think I might just completely create new characters, make both factions still feel at peace within each other but hate the other faction passionately with good reasons, thus resulting in a conflict. I would also try to make the story more about the internal conflicts within the factions as well as the external ones with their opposing faction. While there definitely is some of that in WoW, I believe there could be more.

While this section was a bit iffy, in the end I would try to separate my MMORPG from simply following WoW's story by completely setting it up differently in a darker world with more player involvement with the story.

In any case due to the length of this section and my inability to think of anything else at the moment, I will be breaking the post up and continuing it in the next post, so if you liked this sprawl of ideas, look forward to the next post.

Singular Thoughts - Hackers

Let me first start off by saying that I normally wouldn't post things as highly controversial as this but I feel like there's a few things that need to be said about them. This comes up from the recent article I read on Gamespot stating that a hacker group called Lulzsec has ended their “50 hacking spree”.

The full article can be found here : http://www.gamespot.com/wii-u/hardware/wii-u/news/6321251/lulzsec-disbands-following-battlefield-heroes-breach

I take no credit for the article of course, however I would like to give credit to Tor Thorsen who wrote the article because considering it's implications. It takes a lot of willpower or professionalism to write something that is mostly impartial for people who threaten the same industry one works in.

With that said I think there's nothing wrong with hacking in general. It's entire purpose is to intrusively retrieve, or access information in something that doesn't belong to oneself which by itself is extremely against the law, but there are cases where hacking can beneficial, such as hacking a corrupt government's defenses, or information or so on, but that's being too accrediting towards most hackers.

While there are hackers who do it for a good cause, those are more than rare, and the majority are made up of people with ill intent; Lulzsec happens to fall into this category. The first thing they breached is the law itself by hacking into systems that aren't their own, and often belonged to businesses who had no qualms with the group to begin with. This turns it an unprovoked and intrusive attack on someone else's property, that is already more than enough to label them as criminals by law definition, as the Supreme Court's stance on privacy is that it is a basic human right protected by the 9^th amendment, and to me, protected by the 4^th amendment.

From my experience in Criminal Justice classes there is a lawful counter to the amendments in that someone has all of their rights and is protected by the law of the land, as long as they don't prevent someone else from having the same rights. As for the amendments themselves, since Lulzsec were intruders to begin with, the invasion of privacy is clearly there. In terms of the 4^th amendment, while it's pretty much impossible for Lulzsec to have gotten a normal warrant to search and seize any sort of property, they have also broken this amendment by not following it.

So by a lawful standard at least in my terms, Lulzsec are criminals, but from what I've seen there's much more of a reaction to their actions through unlawful standards.

The first thing I've seen a lot of posters talk about is if Lulzsec had any sort of good intentions. I personally don't believe that is the case, as their farewell statement clearly pointed out that they did their actions “because they could”, that already doesn't leave a lot of room for arguing for a rational good intention. Next I saw a comment about how if they were good intentioned they wouldn't have released personal information out to the public, this is also true, as there is nothing to be gained from doing so. Finally there's my view of hackers in general, they did not direct their efforts to a good cause, as hacking a gaming company or the government's databases really doesn't help them at all.

There is however one saving grace for Lulzsec that people who argue on their behalf talk about, that is stating that they were “testing the defenses” of everyone they hacked. While I don't read minds, and I can't actually confirm or deny that is what their actual intention is, according to their public statement that is anything but what their goal was. Finally I read that there is a belief going on that people that have participated in groups such as Lulzsec are hired to work for anti-virus companies. This definitely make sense as what better people to hire than the own people you're trying to fight against? But at the same time this is unlikely to me, after all what's stopping the same hacker from just opening the company site up to their friends and and possibly ruining the company for good. Again while I wouldn't deny it happening, hiring a hacker to work for a anti-virus company seems akin to “having the inmates run the prison”.

Cancelation of Tiberium

I was recently looking through a few old On The Spot videos by Gamespot and one of them had a developer commentary of a unreleased game called Tiberium. The game was suppose to be a First Person Shooter developed in the Command and Conquer universe that features tactical gameplay as well as the more standard FPS game play.

A few of the main points that the developers stressed in the video were the inclusion of commandable AI units that were of course part of the C&C universe like the Orca or the more standard footsoldier, all of them being on the GDI side because as I found out later, the entire game was about the invasion of the Scrin from the perspective of a GDI commando. Another point was having a transforming gun that took the form of 4 weapons including something that seemed like a railgun, a machine gun, shotgun, and while I don't remember if this was mentioned, or I might be guessing it, the last one was a rocket launcher. The final last point was that the game used audio technology (Adaptive Surround Experience) that the developers emphasized on that it would continuously alter the sound by looking at the player's actions and perspective moment to moment where it would affect the sound mix to give the player the best possible sound effects.

All of that sounds very interesting, but even the fact alone that it's a command and conquer FPS game is appealing and new enough (especially considering the low reception of the first and only other C&C FPS) that even if it didn't have any of those unique features in it, it would still pretty much appeal to a certain audience; or so I thought. That trailer was about 4 years ago and since then the game has been completely canceled, the reason provided was that “the game's level of quality was not high enough to meet EA standards, and that a low quality game was not suitable for consumers and would not survive in this market”.

Judging from the trailer alone and nothing else, everything in the trailer looked great, it's graphics easily rivaled many of today's games, and there haven't been many squad based shooters at all since then and now. It was also a chance to find out how well the technology of Adaptive Surround Experience actually worked, to me it sounds like the AI director of audio technology and if it works out as well as labeled, then it would be a great thing to have for the game. Finally on the transforming gun, that's probably just flavor for the game rather than a actual selling point, for most people anyway, but regardless based off footage in the game, it looked pretty good, and while I personally prefer the 2 weapon load out swap system, I wouldn't mind the transforming gun.

Of course, the reason why it was canceled was the only official word, and again, all of my opinions are solely based off the trailer. I did not see how the NPC AI functioned, or even how well the story played out. However on technical basis (except for judgment on the AI), the game looked fine, and it is somewhat of a disappointment it never saw light.

Singular Thoughts - Neutrality of the Jedi Code

Just a quick post for today, something that I've been thinking about quite abit lately was the Jedi Code, and or why Jedis are more like Paladins rather than Monks. The reason I think this is because Monks (both in reality and in fantasy) in general are seen more of being more neutral maybe even pacifistic followers of a chosen path. Paladins on the other hand, while they also follow a path religiously like monks, they also serve as the offensive side of that chosen path, fighting or at least protesting against people who would oppose or threaten the Paladin's path.

Of course, all of those thoughts come from the Jedi Code, I first ever heard it in Star Wars : Knights of the Old Republic but it has apparently been a apart of literature even before then. In any case, here is the Jedi Code as it is or at least the code of the Old Republic, and not the one rewritten by Luke Skywalker.

There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no death, there is the Force.

I believe that following the Jedi Code word by word would not make one a (stereotypical lawful good) Paladin and more of a Monk instead as nothing in it really states that one has to be kind, good hearted, or even nice. Instead, it states that one has to be calm, wise, and believe that after someone dies they “become one with the force”, a lot of this does directly oppose the Sith code however which is more about anger and dominance over the force rather than respect and harmony with the force, so to that end, yes the Jedis with the mindset of Paladins fully have reasons to oppose the Sith from their code alone. Yet at the same time the code does not state at all that Jedis have to have a good hearted personality and be kind, or even protect anyone, instead it states neutrality rather than opposition of some thing, the conflict with the Sith Code just happens to be a turn of events that happened, and even then there's nothing that says Jedis have to fight the Sith.

Another thing that made me think of this is the Jedi Consular video where his internal monologue clearly states that he's fighting for justice, and the older Jedi Knight introduction video also states that they're fighting for the Republic. These definitely fall into the more Paladin types than Monks, and probably what a standard Jedi Knight or Consular would be like, however I think that there should be some reference in The Old Republic to how the Jedi Code isn't exactly a code of ethics or honor like it's largely portrayed to be through the image of a Jedi.

Anyways, that's the end of the post today, I'll be writing more about this more in-depth in the future possibly and I'll definitely have larger posts.

Singular Thoughts - Limited Cooperative Play

It has recently come to my attention that there is a strong possibility of a game that I was really looking forward to both for it's story and coop gameplay, may not actually have full cooperative gameplay. The game is Warhammer 40k : Space Marine and it inspired me to write about how it's not the only title that would have done this, and the possible reasons why the developers decided against full coop gameplay. A few of the more well known titles that have featured a limited coop mode in someway or another are :

-Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2 – Spec Ops mode

-Call of Duty : Black Ops – Nazi Zombies

-Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon : Advanced Warfighter – Multiplayer player vs AI modes

-Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six : Vegas (redeemed in Vegas 2) – Limied campaign*

-Company of Heroes – Coop multiplayer game modes in Tales of Valor

-Red Dead Redemption – Coop multiplayer short scenarios with the DLC “Outlaws To the End”

-Grand Theft Auto 4 – Coop multiplayer short scenarios vs AI

-Saints Row – Coop multiplayer short scenarios vs AI

-Portal 2 – Separate campaign

*Campaign with no cutscenes or voices, removal of allied squad mates as well

In my own terms and definition, possibly many others; “limited coop” is any sort of cooperative play against AI that is implemented into the game but doesn't carry over either the entire or the near entirety of the single player experience. This would include things like not having cutscenes or events that the normal campaign would like in Rainbow Six : Vegas unless of course a different cutscene or event is substituted in for coop gameplay to give players a even more different experience from single player.

With that said, there's been quite a few coop games around lately, mainly on consoles, a lot more than in the past in any case with games like Left 4 Dead, and Borderlands around whom completely dedicating themselves to coop almost. However even in this day and age there are a few games that many people would love coop for but the development team doesn't agree for one reason or another, one of the most popular recent cases of this is Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 3.

According to a few articles I've read about the lack of coop play in MW2 and the issue of it in MW3, the developers are aiming to separate the single player and coop story with the reason that there's many things that happen in the single player campaign that having another player around would hinder, however, would it really?

Based off playing Modern Warfare 2 myself there's more than a few things that would take a great deal (or maybe just a bit more, I'm unsure personally) of extra work to have the things in question work with cooperative play such as any of the vehicle sequences in MW2 which weren't exactly the most stable and smooth things in the campaign to begin with, but they are tied in with the story in a way that it makes sense which either leaves the developers the choice of going with it and sticking with single player, or altering the story alittle bit and removing the sequence in favor of coop.

There's also the point that many levels of Modern Warfare 2 have allied soldiers with the player, pretty much all of them have at least 1 friendly character I believe actually. In any case however, usually these characters are highly scripted and while it would be a neat thing to put those scripted events under player control, the NPCs do things that players never actually did in MW2 such as a silent take down on a guard that looked much more indepth than anything the player is capable of. At the same time however, Black Ops showed that doing elaborate scripted events are also possible for the player, but still in Modern Warfare 2's case, adding coop would probably mean that one player gets to do more neat things than the other rather than having a balance between both players.

Essentially there's two main philosophies with cooperative play in campaigns, one is to simply have the additional player(s) as nothing more than hired guns and have no interaction with them at all during story sequences, or to fully design the game with cooperative play in mind, which works well with cooperative play all of the time, but it falls short usually when there isn't someone else around to play the game with. The developers that opted not to have any sort of cooperative campaign probably also thought of that as well as simply having the additional players there without any meaningful placement of them is not exactly the highest level of quality even though usually so long as everything else remains in the game such as story, and cutscenes, it doesn't bother people that much, and it works out in the end, however with standards of quality as they are today, perhaps there's a thought around that having that is too similar to the past, and instead having a high quality single player experience and a limited but also high quality cooperative experience is a better thing to do.

In the end, there's a main reason or another for why developers don't implement coop into the campaign. I personally enjoy playing cooperatively with Alice a lot and we enjoy stories in games as well as the game play itself, which essentially turns us against limited cooperative play, even though those gameplay modes are usually not bad things at all, they're simply design decisions, yet while I say I don't mind it that much, in a perfect world, all of my favorite games would have at least the “hired gun with no interaction” way of cooperative gameplay.

Singular Experiences - Brink

I really liked the development team Splash Damage in general, I played Return to Wolfenstien : Enemy Territory online probably more than any other shooter in my life. I really enjoyed the game's mixture of FPS gameplay (also before ET I did not actually play Return to Castle Wolfenstien's campaign or multiplayer) and class based systems along with being set in a WW2 environment that had nothing to do with the story. While I probably don't think too much of the last point, the rest of the points pretty much added up to every shooter I've enjoyed extensively, I love WW2 games, and I definitely love class based games, so with those two combined ET was easily one of my favorite games that I ever played. Which is probably a big factor in why I was let down by Brink. Since Brink had a limited day trial on Steam, Alice and I decided to check it out.

Conceptually, Enemy Territory and Brink are the exact same games with different feels, art styles, stories, and mechanics. However in terms of classes, and being objective based which were the core fundamentals of ET, all of that carries on over to Brink, and while that was basically being summed up to me in the very lengthy tutorial video, more on that later, I was very excited to jump into what I thought would basically be the current generation Enemy Territory, it isn't exactly.

The first thing that I noticed was immediately different was how different the game feels from Enemy Territory in general, movement felt much clunkier and slower than it was in ET, it also adopted the Iron Sights method of shooters instead of completely by the hip. I personally didn't mind the iron sights and it probably was the best addition to the series although at the same time it still felt way different than original ET which did fine without iron sights. The idea of iron sights and slow movement without aiming down the sights at all in the first place seemed very very contradictory as the first tip I was given from the loading screen I think (or maybe it was something else) is that movement is very important in Brink, and you always want to be moving, but I found movement being more of a hassle than anything else and I didn’t end up doing it much.

Next thing I'll talk about is the tutorial video, I generally don't like videos in substitution for actual tutorial levels but hardly any games actually do that, but Brink did. So, mainly because the video was straight to the point and did give you important information that was useful, also maybe somewhat unique in having a tutorial video in video games at all, I'll say that the video wasn't that bad. On the other hand, there's a video that plays while you're being given voiced instructions, that video that plays gives a very bad misrepresentation of what the actual game play in Brink feels like. As I mentioned before, it's movement is clunky, and it's gunplay isn't the fastest thing in the world, but the videos do a very good job at making it look like it's in-fact, the fastest thing in the world thanks to camera angles and short recordings of gameplay. Yet even then, I never found the gameplay as fast paced as any single one of the recordings in the tutorial. Lastly, while I said the tutorial is effective, if you've ever played a first person shooter before, you can probably skip maybe a third of the information in the video such as HUD indicators of where your ammo and health is at, or even some information like when you're a medic you can see other team member's health bars, but knowing that ahead of time can be useful too. With that said, the rest of the video is useful if you've never played a Splash Damage game before, but as a ET fan it was pretty much review for me.

Finally there's a few things that the game did that are similar to ET, the first is the multiple objectives structure. Using a ET map called Gold Rush as an example, the objectives for the Allied team were to escort a tank to a bank (which took most of the game most likely), then the tank would blow the bank open, from then on Allied soldiers would steal gold from the bank, and put it on a nearby truck, and finally they would have to escort the truck away while it escaped with the gold. On the other hand,the Axis forces simply have to defend from the Allies, they only lose when the truck leaves, if the round ends before then, then it's assumed that they successfully defended and they win. In Brink, using a Air Port level as an example, the multiple objectives were a lot more human based rather than waiting for a tank and were able to be accomplished quicker, if I remember right, the first for the Security Team was to hack into a security console, from then on they had to open a vault, and finally escape with a card key. The Rebels on the other hand simply like the Axis, had to defend from them. The main difference between these two maps is that one has more escort objectives while the other doesn't, in Brink time is also added to the attacking team before they fail and have to retreat rather than having a total amount of time to complete their objectives, while they aren't bad decisions and are simply design decisions, this gives an idea of how similar but different Brink is to ET.

Brink also lets you select your class at a command post whereas ET only let you select your class if you weren't in the game yet, so either by dying, or just joining the game. A few classes have different things as well, besides having one different name the classes in ET have their obvious brink counterparts such as Soldier is Soldier, Operative is Covert Ops, Medic is Medic, Engineer is Engineer, and there is no Field Ops in Brink. They also primarily serve the same function as well, except their functions were arguably more useful in ET than Brink, an Engineer and a Covert Ops could win a game on a map called Fuel Depot in seconds (where the objective is to blow up the fuel depot) by ignoring the main way to breach the Depot, which is again a tank, and just sneaking past everyone to blow it up with dynamite. No class really has a difference making ability like that in Brink, instead they all have additional abilities that help them in combat, and certain objectives only they can fulfill, such as only a engineer can repair a console, and only a soldier can set explosive charges to blow something up. It makes the entire game feel like a heist pretty much rather than a war zone. Like I said before though, these details just separate Brink from ET a little bit while keeping it's main points and continuing along the developer’s legacy.

Finally the last bad thing about Brink is it's campaign, while it has a very interesting set up for a story in that there really isn't any good or evil faction, instead it's two factions who want to do what they think is the best for their city, the Arc. One side wants to protect the Arc even though there isn't much left of the Arc to protect, and the other wants to leave the Arc to save themselves. While it's not explained into too much depth other than that, it's hard to find any real good or evil in the factions as both factions have their share of it, and their original goals are pretty much both good. You can't fault people for wanting to escape a dying place, but you also can't fault others for wanting to keep them there to make it better, so instead that results in a conflict (which is somewhat questionable considering how things are). The actual good and evil factors are found within the cut scenes where some characters don't show any regret for wanting to take lives to get what they want while others do. In short the story sets up to be very good but I didn't get far enough in our test run of it to see how far it develops, according to other reviews that I read, it doesn't take advantage of it's plot and doesn't delve much deeper than that.

The other part of the campaign is of course playing the game itself, it is primarily the player(s) with allied bots against enemy bots rather than a scripted campaign. As someone who doesn't really like bot matches as a campaign, this was a immediate turn off for me, as I personally would love to have something more like Halo rather than Unreal Tournament as a campaign, especially with the story as a set up. I understand that Brink is a primarily multiplayer game and the campaign further pushes towards that ideal as being “practice” matches, but even then and even with the bots still around the game presents almost no source of interest for players with no story events happening during the missions, and the only challenge occurring when the mission is about over, at which point the normally cannon fodder bots become much smarter and dangerous.

Well in any case, while Brink wasn't the game I was hoping it to be, it at least brought back memories about ET, and considering how popular ET was there still might be quite a few servers around to play on. So in short, Brink does enough things to deviate itself from Enemy Territory but at the same time it also tries to change too far from the actual game play mechanics resulting in a clunky shooter with neat concepts. This more encourages people to play the game that they created that was the aged but smooth shooter with as equal of interesting concepts more than anything, but I'm glad to see things from one of my favorite developers around and while it wasn't exactly the most popular or great thing around, I hope that it was popular enough for them to take that into advice, continue, and make a better game because of it.

Singular Experiences : First Achievements (Xbox 360)

When achievements were integrated and added into the Xbox 360 system through gamer points and the achievements that granted those points, I was very excited as I loved doing things that added to a total lifetime score. I bought one of the systems about when Elder Scrolls 4 : Oblivion was released because that was the single game that I wanted a Xbox 360 for. While it was very expensive, I ended up spending a very long time in Oblivion and I loved every moment of it. Besides enjoying the game, buying a 360 also introduced me to the achievement system, and while I consider myself a long time gamer, I hadn't really seen a similar system ever except for maybe on a few web pages, making it quite revolutionary for me, and it was something that I ended up really enjoying. From the first achievement I got in Oblivion I was pretty much hooked on the system, at the same time I was enjoying the game far too much to actually care too much about achievements until I bought a few other 360 release titles, Call of Duty 2 if I remember right. From then on I alternated between spending time exploring Oblivion and playing Call of Duty 2.

In CoD2 while I pretty much ignored achievements save for being excited when I got one for simply playing the game, it wasn't too long (well, it was longer than most games nowdays anyway) until I had actually completed the game at which point I still wanted to play it, which led to me looking through the achievements. I noticed there were a few that required me to play and beat the game on the higher difficulties, so with maybe alittle bit of hesitation but not much mainly because I hardly ever played games above the normal difficulty before the Xbox 360, I set out to try the harder difficulties. I can't exactly remember the name of the difficulty before Veteran but I don't remember it being too difficult and it took almost the same amount of time as it did for me to complete the game on normal, probably due to my previous knowledge of where all of the enemies would spawn and such. So with that, I ended up getting my achievement and still loving the game, that's when I had the idea to go onto Veteran mode to get the final achievements, however as I found out, Veteran was the most punishing experience I did then, and it still probably is.

I specifically remember the start of one mission where the player and their allies gets ambushed, unfortunately the time between getting out of the ambush zone to safe cover isn't scripted or a safe zone, and enemies could definitely shoot you, that fact paired with the fact that on Veteran the enemy AI seemed to almost miss and instantly fire at you when you got out of cover, as well as throw grenades at you constantly when you weren't able to be shot made getting out of that first area probably the most repetitive, annoying, and frustrating experiences of my life. I would pretty much take 3 steps and then die, and then try different things and then die, and I even tried to fire back once and then died anyway, but eventually I managed to get to a check point and thanked goodness for it. In the end however, no matter how frustrating it actually was, I managed to beat the campaign on Veteran and above all of the other times I played through Call of Duty 2 that playthrough was probably the most satisfying.

In the Elder Scrolls part of the story, there weren't that many achievements that I wasn't able to get mainly because I did wanted to do pretty much everything from the start, even the Dark Brotherhood quests which were clearly evil and I normally don't do evil things in games but I decided to do it first so I could get it out of the way and think of the rest of the game as my character redeeming themselves. The main part however is that all of the achievements were tied to getting to either ranking up in a faction which you do simply by completing the particular faction's quests, or gotten from progressing to a certain point in the main story, the game itself was very compelling for me to play and Elder Scrolls 4 : Oblivion probably remains the most pleasant and easiest game to get all of the achievements for.

That also gave me kind of a wrong mindset about achievements however, and while this was after I already completed Call of Duty 2 on Veteran I had thought that achievements couldn't get much harder, so I went onto playing and renting other games to see if I could max them out. The first game that I had problems getting all of the achievements on was Perfect Dark Zero mainly because I never could get used to how the gun play was, it felt too floaty compared to what I was used to in like Call of Duty or even Oblivion, infact I think I prefer Oblivion's bow mechanics to PDZ's gunning. That isn't to say that it was bad however , I still managed to put up with it to get through the story on normal, I tried it on harder difficulties but I just didn't like the game enough. On the other hand, there were also achievements that could be gained through playing multiplayer matches with bots, but those achievements also asked for a great deal of things such as 1000 flag captures or 1000 kills with a gun, it made getting those achievements very repetitive, and I never was able to finish it as my first 360 broke before then, and I lost all of my progress with the achievements, so I just sold the game and moved on.

The real breaker of achievement hunting for me was Ghost Recon : Advanced Warfighter, where it had an achievement to be ranked on the top of the global leader boards for various game modes. I knew that I never would be able to do that even when I heard about people who would trade boosting their scores to get that high, I simply didn't want to bother with it, and it didn't take much thought to just forget about GRAW's achievements in general. Since then there have been a few other games that have had similar achievements, as well as even more achievements that I don't like such as in Team Fortress 2 where you have to kill a enemy doing a taunt, normally no one will ever taunt in a position that allows them to be killed, I've played the game about 30 hours so far according to Steam Stats and not once did I kill a enemy while they were doing their taunt.

Despite all of that I still enjoy achievement hunting quite a bit. When I went back to WoW during Wrath of the Lich King I was very pleased to find out that WoW had adapted an achievement system at well, in fact a lot of my time at level 80 involved me doing achievements. So while there are some achievements and I don't try to complete a entire game's achievements often anymore, achievements are still fairly enjoyable and I do them when I can.

Singular Thoughts - Effective Game Demos

Something that I used to be a lot more excited and looked forward to until I shifted my attention towards more long lasting games (like World of Warcraft) were game demos. I primarily got my demos from Xbox magazine when their magazines came with a disc full of demos and I was always excited to play them simply because there was no advantage to not playing them especially if the game is at least somewhat interesting. If I remember right, one of my favorite games ever , Metal Arms : Glitch in the System came on a demo that I played, I first heard of it in the magazine before reading it where it was given a reward for being really good but hardly anyone heard of it or played it (including myself) and with that, I decided to give that a try. I remember the demo being excellent, and more importantly it showed that the game itself was pretty good and while it could only present one level, it gave me enough of an incentive to buy the game itself which I didn't regret at all. I ended up playing through the entire game and I loved it, while I don't remember much about playing it, I do remember that it was really fun and I was hoping that they would make a sequel to it sometime, but unfortunately that was years ago and nothing has been heard about the Metal Arms series since then.

In any case, I felt like the Metal Arms demo was what a effective demo should be , it definitely sold the game to me and I was happy to play it, in fact I replayed the demo a few times before that and still enjoyed it. Game demos have improved since then but they still carry the same goal to people : to provide a small taste to the player so that they will want more and end up buying the full game. This fact can be broken up into smaller features that a demo could have that will also increase the likability of the game and even the demo itself. Here's a few demos that I've played and then I also bought the full version of, thanks to the game's demo.

-Time Splinters 2

-Psi-ops The Mind Gate Conspiracy

-The Suffering 2 (which I didn't actually buy but I liked the demo)

-Geometry Wars

-Feeding Frenzy

-Puzzle Quest

-Dead Rising

-Time Spliters : Future Perfect (I think)

-Red Faction : Guerilla

All of which I had fun in the full game, however all of these demos were released at different time periods and demoing has evolved quite a bit since the discs on Xbox magazine. Demos nowdays are primarily (at least for me) downloaded through Xbox Live, Playstation Network, or on the PC, various sites like Steam or Fileplanet. the easy accessibility led to a lot of variety as well and that caused somewhat of a backfire, now looking for demos is almost similar to shopping for a actual game. While you still can download anything you want at no cost, I found myself not wanting to try out most demos because of their description, title, or cover or a number of reasons along the lines where as I would try pretty much everything on the Xbox magazine demo disc. With that said, the advancement of technology is still there, and it has give demos even more power.

A very good cliff hanger ending of a demo I've played although I forget what demo it was at the moment was at the end of the level and the end of level cut scene it transitioned from a good camera pan of the action to a barrel of a gun, leading to a trailer of “buy the full game”(basically). While that might be annoying to some, I thought it was definitely a great transition rather than a black out and then putting the player back onto the start up screen. That same demo also had a problem with that however as it played the exact same trailer when you actually quit the game to go back to the Xbox “home”, I believe that it was skippable however.

Another benefit that demos can have is the inclusion of full game benefits. The main one that comes to most people's minds when it comes to benefits such as those are demo saves that carry onto the full game. It's been a problem for demos for a very long time, and it even persists now that no matter how much fun you've had in the demo, chances are the demo was the first or second level in the game, and when you play the actual game you'll end up repeating it. To that end, a few games have created a way to allow demo saves to carry onto the full game, allowing you to keep all of the progress that you've made without having to rehash any of it in the actual game, this is probably more of a convenience addition rather than a true hindrance but every sprinkle of additions help make demos more appealing to players.

Finally, and while this isn't only including new demos, a very effective way that doesn't require any of the things stated before at all would be to have the demo set in a completely different setting that is unique to the demo that serves the purpose to give people a taste of gameplay mechanics, and if the developer is up to it, even a taste of the game's story by adding in small bits of story that would be part of the main story. I've only played one game “demo” that has done this which is Dead Rising 2 : Case Zero, and it also was priced. However I believe it very much fit all of the criterias for a demo in that it let the player get their hands on the game before it was released setting up for players to buy the game on release, it allowed players to actually play and see pretty much every general game mechanic and even allowed the player a small taste of the workbench system that it had, but it kept many things you would normally be able to create with the work bench in the full game only. Lastly, it had a save system that allowed you to take your character onto the full game, you had a low level limitation of course, but you kept all of your levels up to that point and money that you've obtained. While Case Zero was priced, it still my ideal of a demo maybe even too well to actually be considered a small game especially since it had a price tag, but with that aside, it is probably one of the best game demos I've played in my life.

With all of that said, I believe game demos are still very interesting, and they remain a free (mostly) way to try out a game before you actually buy it, and even with that small minor point in mind, developers strive to make their demos better and better.

Singular Thoughts - Machinima

I'm going to try writing from the Blogger word processor instead of OpenOffice for once. In any case, I just wanted to say that and with that out of the way I recently visited Oxhorn's website who is a well known creator of World of Warcraft machinima and I realized I've done a lot of machinima watching in my life but mostly for World of Warcraft. Regardless of that, after thinking about that and my experience with machinima in general, I became curious and looked into it further, I discovered a few things with that curiosity. The term (machinima) itself (at least according to Wikipedia) comes from using "3D graphics rendering engines" to create a cinematic production. So to that end, pretty much everything related to video games that results in creating some sort of visual production can be technically considered a machinima, Wikipedia even lists Quake speed runs as a form of machinima, I guess what it comes down to is as long as it's more like a video than a game, it's considered a machinima, even a cut scene in a game would fall in that category in that case, unless it's an interactive cut scene anyway.



However at the same time machinima is generally more closely associated to user videos than it is to in game cut scenes, bringing it more close to fan fiction more than anything else (except it's a video of course). Despite that, machinima is still very popular, and while it takes quite a bit of practice and effort to truly become a expert at, it's requirements are probably the lowest in the field of computer video production making it somewhat easy to pick up and get started at.

From what I've learned about machinima even though I've never actually created one myself is that you need to first have a capturing software such as FRAPS, or wegame's client (which was suggested by Oxhorn in a tutorial video that he made and I even recorded one thing with it, however at the same time it also seemed to crash WoW constantly), after that is a engine or game to work with, as well as a way to import and tamper with the models, in WoW's case the game is WoW, and WoW model viewer would allow you to alter and edit models, you also need a movie editor like Windows Movie Maker or Adobe Creative Suite , and finally you need a way to mix and add sound effects. While all of that seems like a lot program-wise, if you're looking to make movies out of a game then it's much easier as the only external equipment it requires is a PC pretty much, unless you go the Adobe Creative Studios way, then that's also buying something that can be very pricey, but other than that all of the other programs can be downloaded from their home sites.



While I'm sure different people use tools differently, many people have gone into the machinima field and came out with at the very least a greater understanding of everything that goes on in making machinimas but some have also become fairly popular. A few of those teams or people are the Red vs Blue team that created the Blood Gultch Chronicles using Halo games, Oxhorn of course who created his own story universe using World of Warcraft, Myndflame who did the Illegal Danish series, and many others. So with that, I believe that machinima makers definitely have a big enough footprint to at least possibly become more of a widespread profession.



The main thing keeping most machinima makers from doing it professionally is probably their limit of license if they use a game to film their footage, while it definitely would get them popularity they are still within the agreement that they won't sell things created using the game's property unless they talk to a sales representative about it otherwise, or unless the game doesn't include that in it's signed agreements. As the agreement is pretty much part of all games, machinima makers don't really get to expand very far. However if they would be able to get the right to sell their works while still using a game's engine they probably could get very far and do well especially since many works of machinina makers are either very entertaining to watch, or expands on the game's world somehow, either way if the game is large and popular enough word of their works will probably get around quickly, and like a lot of the machinima creators I listed, they'll be able to have a good amount of fans and traffic.



So in the end, while I think the state of machinima is currently only as a hobby that people do if they want to, I believe that it has plenty of potential to either lead to more beneficial positions or to even possibly become a business in itself if companies become generous.