Get it? Get it? Because, it’s like, a personal story, rather than an epic fantasy quest?

If you have even a passing interest in Dragon Age, you’ve probably already read 50 million reviews, forum threads, and blog posts about how awful this game is. I’m going to say it, straight up: pretty much everything everyone has to say is justified. There’s no plot, all the dungeons are reused, Anders is barely recognisable as the same character from Awakening, and the whole thing just feels rushed. Really, let’s look at the facts: Dragon Age: Origins was out in November 2009. Awakening came out March 2009. Anyone who expected an Origins-quality game to be done in one year is fooling themselves.

However, not every single thing about the game is bad. As per usual, I’ll cut for story spoilers, but everything else is fair game. You’ve been warned.

Character Creation

While you’d think this would take place at the beginning of the game, it doesn’t; it takes place about five minutes in, which is really annoying if you messed something up and OCD demands you re-roll. Of course, if you bought the game new, you get the Black Emporium shop that includes a way to change your appearance, but really, who makes sure they’ve downloaded everything?

… Anyone? No? Just me? Okay.

Either way, I wasn’t too impressed with character creation. Besides the fact that you always have to be human, it’s mostly better than Origins, though I wasn’t too impressed with the range of skin tones and hair styles. At least your family actually looks like you this time around, matching their skin colour to whatever you chose for Hawke, and changing their facial feature depending on what pre-set you picked to mess around with. Anyone who played a black city elf in Origins will be able to tell you just how poorly this worked in Origins versus now.

Or a brown dwarf.

Also, on the subject of pre-sets: why the hell is Lady Hawke’s default hair not available if you want to change your appearance? It’s like BioWare created this beautiful default character for you, and then when you say “No thanks,” they get pissy and decide that if you don’t like, then fuck you, they’re taking their toys and going home. Why should I need a mod to get the default hair? This pisses me off way more than it should.

Either way, I was able to get something moderately good-looking out of it once I realised all my ideas weren’t possible and had to make something up.

Presenting Adela Hawke in her natural state. You couldn’t turn off blood splatter for some reason.

New art style

While we’re on the subject of how things look… what the fuck is with everyone’s problem with the new art style? For the most part, it looks fantastic. This is a great looking game, and it looks a hell of a lot better than Origins. Flemeth’s new look is awesome (though I have to wonder why we see cleavage), the Qunari look great (even if it’s a bit weird that everyone acts like they always had horns and grey skin), and the environments look beautiful and vibrant. Really, the only problems with it are:

What.jpg

Who thought it was a good idea to make them look like bobble heads? Seriously? I can see wanting elves and humans to look distinct from each other, but come on. The fact that two of the possible love interests are elves implies they want them to be a little attractive, at least. Giant heads are not attractive.

The Dalish have the cutest Welsh accents, though, so I suppose it can be forgiven. Maybe.

Combat mechanics

Combat has changed a bit since Origins, which is another thing that’s been very divisive in the fan community. For the most part, I barely noticed the changes. Making combat faster is a noble goal, but I’d argue it didn’t work. Most of the bosses have such hilariously high levels of health that unless you’ve found out what your perfect party is, they’ll take just as long, if not longer, than the more challenging Origins bosses. The obligatory optional high dragon is especially bad for this.

When you’re not fighting bosses, though, you’ll be fighting waves and waves of mooks. And I do mean waves. For some stupid fucking reason, someone decided it was a good idea to make every single encounter spawn back-up when you’ve killed off most of them. Every. Single. One. All this does is pad gameplay and create artificial difficulty. The mooks aren’t hard, it’s just about staying alive long enough to deal with them, while working around the long cooldowns on potions and healing spells, that can be difficult.

While I’m on the subject: why are healing spells on such long cooldowns? All that made me do was stock up on Not-Phoenix Downs because resurrecting people was easier than keeping them alive. Fighting cooldowns isn’t a particularly interesting way of making combat difficult, but in some cases, it works. Poorly.

And where the fuck is my isometric view? I don’t see the logic in its removal, at all. They wanted it to be more action-y, okay, but how the hell does making me pause the game and search for 30 flow-breaking seconds for the dead party member I need to resurrect make things more action-oriented? So many of the fights I found annoying would have been improved if I could actually see what I was fucking doing. Then I wouldn’t have needed to pause all the time and might have actually noticed the “action-oriented” combat.

The new skill selection window is also a vast improvement as far as I’m concerned. Non-combat skills are removed, and good riddance to bad rubbish. Letting me focus on making my backstabs more stabby rather than having to up my Coersion or Lockpicking is a very welcome change, and makes roleplaying more interesting than just picking the “I Win” persuade option.

“Dungeons”

Holy fuck the dungeons are bad. There’s one cave layout, that they use over and over again. Even worse: we have to go to the same area multiple times and clear out the monsters. Not even a “just reuse the same map, no one will notice” decision, but an honest-to-God “just make them do the same shit over again” decision. Who the fuck thought this was a good idea? Who thought releasing this game quickly was more important than making it actually good?

There’s an especially blatant copypasta’d boss that you’re given no reason for why you’re fighting it again, other than Hawke asking “Didn’t we kill this already?” Lampshade hanging does not excuse shitty design choices, BioWare.

The caves are at least nice looking.

Story, for lack of a better term

All right, I’ve stalled long enough. From now on out, this will contain assloads of spoilers.
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In case you’re either unfamiliar with EverQuest or have been living under the rock for the last, oh, yearish, in the 10th Anniversary EverQuest Book, SOE announced they were looking to make a new EQ installment. Since then, development has been officially announced, but we still know next to nothing about the project. Other than the little blurb in the book, one video on Facebook and a couple Q&A questions from ZAM, there’s really no information out there. Regardless, here’s what we do know:

A very colourful concept for maybe-Kelethin.

Despite not knowing much, and despite my hatred of sequels, I find myself rather excited to get scraps of data here and there, especially since the last very-very-pre-development MMO I followed seems to be looking for new ways to disappoint me. (Dark Millennium will have only two factions? I hope THQ doesn’t think that’s a good idea.) With nothing else worth a fuck coming out in the foreseeable future, speculating and hoping for future games has become a favourite pass time of mine, and this is one I sincerely hope is worth all the anticipation.

Some background: I never played EQ, but I did play EQ2 for a while. I was sort of introduced to EQ classic through osmosis, since it’s all anyone ever talks about in EQ2, my guildies and my husband especially. EQ2 I had something of a love-hate relationship with, as long-time readers (ha, ha) know. It might seem like mostly “hate”, but there is some love in there. There were very good elements to the game: the roleplay support is amazing, with things like guild housing and the “roleplaying” tag that hid your class and level from view and /who; customisation and lore/RP fusions, like worshippable deities that provided extra abilities, was an incredibly cool touch; crafting was better than any other game I’ve ever seen, though I never did play Vanguard. Too many of the core mechanics, though, like the classes, were shit for me to really call it a good game. But hell, even since I played in 2009 it’s changed quite a bit, adding some thing I really wanted to see (PvP battlegrounds yeeeeeessss). However, I don’t think it’s really enough to make me go back.

So, without further ado, here’s the list of things I, someone who hasn’t played much EverQuest, would like to see in EQ Next.

Don’t just re-hash the same shit over again

This is a problem WoW has been suffering with ever since the beginning of Wrath, when someone decided making Naxxramas the entry-level 80 raid wasn’t a terrible idea. I can’t really say if EQ2 suffers from it or not; I know a lot of the areas are the same, but I don’t know how many bosses etc are repeats. I really hope that with this, they can find a nice middle ground where they’re catering to fans by showing familiar bosses, while having them do completely different things. Mostly, though I hope they take the reboot as free reign to do basically anything, and do some really unexpected things. New zones between familiar ones? New towns where nothing was before? New races, complete with giant capital cities and large swaths of territory? Why not?

This is actually why I understand, and actually appreciate why they’re making a new EQ instead of making a new franchise. There’s so much history there, why make a new fantasy world with all the same crap if they just want to make another fantasy MMO? However, if it’s too much like the last two games there’s no point in making it. I can only hope they know that very well by now, with their own experience and watching what other companies have done.

Even with definite roles, classes need to be customisable

One thing SOE has said over and over again is that there will be fewer classes than EQ2, making them more in line with EQ1′s classes, and each class will have a very definite role. After playing a game like Rift where every class only has the role you want it to have, that seems like a massive step backwards. I also worry about how much like EQ1 classes they want to make it; will there really be 15 classes? That seems like a hell of a lot to balance. Even combining EQ2′s subclass system into real classes, you’d get 12, which is more than most games offer. Most games make up for this talent trees, that change what a class can do. Take WoW’s shaman class; it can either be a healer, melee DPS, or ranged spell DPS, depending on how you spec it.

EQ2 has a talent system called Achievement Experience that everyone calls Alternate Advancement points (or AAs) because that’s what they were called in EQ1. It was an interesting, but ultimately flawed take on talent points. Skills and such where divided into trees, but these were separated rather arbitrarily into stat-based lines. So, if you played an Inquisitor, which was a type of Cleric, you had your Cleric tree divided into the Agility line, Wisdom line, etc. Then you had even more AAs added with expansions, etc… It was quite the nightmare.

Now, I say this was flawed because it was trying to change what you did when every class had a very narrowly defined role. If clerics are healers, why would anyone serious about the game spec for damage? I’m sure all the AAs were useful in some situations, but I doubt it was frequent enough to justify the existence of the system. Most people want AAs in EQ Next because they like the customisation, but when there’s only one spec worth a fuck, all it’s doing is making people feel better without actually improving the game.

Googling “class customisation” gave fuck all, so have some Antonia Bayle booth babe/cosplay.

What I would do: Make AAs not change what a character can do, but how you can do it. Say they go with the standard three-tree model (OHMIGAW it’s just like WoW get the pitchforks!). I doubt they will, but let’s just assume for a minute, shall we? Using a cleric again because I don’t know shit about anything but healing, you could easily do three healing trees. But instead of doing, say, a direct, HoT, and ward (shield) tree, which would eliminate the need for other healing classes, you could have three direct trees: one with big, single-target heals for tank healing; one with AoE heals for group healing; and either one with short casts and survivability for PvP, or one with some reactive heals that don’t eliminate the need for druids the way they do in EQ2.

I’m just spit-balling here, I’m sure real devs could figure out how to make that work while still making the classes feel different. If everyone has the same single target and AoE spells, it’s still a failure. Changing how a class uses it role, instead of what its role is would be a nice spin on an old system and keep class roles easily defined.

Open-world PvP should be the PvP focus, and present on all server types

Open world PvP is the blood in the veins of a successful and happy PvP server community. However, there are a lot of people who enjoy PvP who don’t want to do it full-time. There are plenty of people on PvE servers who would rather not have to deal with people killing them while they quest, but will still queue up for a battleground while doing that questing.

Now, Smedley has said that if they can, they won’t instance anything but dungeons. While he was talking about guild housing when he said it, this is something that shows some promise on the open PvP front.

I like battlegrounds as much as the next person. I’d say I probably like them more than most people on the servers I usually play on, actually. However, I think they create some of the same problems that arenas do, only on a lesser scale. They eliminate world PvP as they’re easier to get into and more convenient, and they usually provide very easily recognised, tangible rewards. PvP points are easier to get in a box canyon, especially when you win your capture the flag game or whatever the map type is, than they are wandering around looking for people to kill, with no real objective in mind.

No one wants open PvP to feel pointless or be tedious, though. Battlegrounds exist and are popular for a good reason, so if you want to make an open-only game, you need to make that both enjoyable, and easy to get into and out of quickly.

What I would do: PvP lakes with PvP objectives — not PvP lakes with PvE objectives, Warhammer. They’d provide a place for people to PvP regardless of server type, with keeps and other such points to control, and, hopefully, zone-wide faction rewards for controlling them. It would also be an easily accessible place to get your fix, and then leave to quest without fear of being spawncamped, on PvE servers.

Oh, and for those of you who never played any games by Mythic: a “PvP lake” is a PvP zone surrounded by PvE zones. For example, if there were 3 level 20-30 zones in one area, for three different races/factions, there could be a “lake” in between them. Upon entering the zone, you’d be auto-flagged for PvP, be given objectives, and possibly — hopefully — able to pick up PvP-related quests. It would be easily accessible to people in the level range of the questing zones, while not actually getting in the way of anyone in those zones. Basically, they’re like Wintergrasp, only not shitty.

I don’t really know if this is the direction they’ll go with it, but I think it’s the best one. They could feasibly put PvP objectives in PvE zones, but I don’t know how well that would go. There’s also a distressingly vocal minority for hardcore EQ fans who think the game is better being PvE-only; forcing them to run through a warzone to get to their next quest wouldn’t really endear them to the idea that PvP can be added to a game without making it worse.

Also, three factions. At least. More than that would probably be too many, though, so three factions.

MAKE IT SO.

Sadly I expect they’ll just use battlegrounds as a cop-out to keep people on PvE servers happy, possibly destroying open PvP on PvP servers, too. But hey, I can dream.

So you want it to feel like a real world?

Something I’ve noticed in looking around at other blogs and forums discussing what they want to see in EQ Next is that people don’t want to see quest hubs. At first I was like “How the fuck can they do this and not make it annoying?” and then I thought about it.

Oblivion.

What I would do: Have you ever played Oblivion? You should, if for no other reason than to see an incredibly open world done reasonably well. I say “reasonably”, because the main quest — you know, that thing called the “plot” — is completely lost under a sea of quests that have no bearing on it. This is kinda the point of the game, but I don’t think it works as well as it could in a single-player game. However, in an MMO, where what story is there is built primarily by exploring the large, open world, this would work amazingly.

Other than the quests, Oblivion feels like a world because the NPCs don’t seem to exist simply to give you said quests. “Quest hubs” are not random collections of NPCs surrounding a campfire. They’re towns, in which the people go about their daily lives. They have schedules. It may sound stupid, but having the NPCs walk around is a very good way of creating immersion. There are NPCs in Oblivion who wake up at the crack of dawn to go work the fields of vineyards outside town, and don’t come home till sundown. Others get up at noon, and spend their days reading in the park, unless it’s raining. While I don’t think weather effects changing the world is necessary to make the game world feel real, it would certainly help.

Another point SOE, and really any MMO company, could take from Oblivion: there are plenty of quests in town that stay in-town. In most MMOs, it seems like city quests only exist in capitals, making towns just feel like quest hubs where people sometimes have roofs over their heads. (Unless you’re in Rift, then they don’t even have that.) However, there are still plenty of quests that would require you to go into the open world, which would be great for the people who want the old EQ1 feel of exploration. I know I didn’t play EQ, but I still wish exploration actually mattered — or even happened — in modern MMOs. You might as well be on rails for how much exploration there is in games like WoW and Rift.

Imagine getting a quest to go from one town to another. You haven’t been to this new town, so you can’t fast-travel yet. On the way, you pass a cave, and a quest pops up asking you to check it out. Perhaps in the cave you notice some monsters, and get a quest to kill them. Or you can ignore it and keep on to the town. Or maybe, the people in the town tell you about areas nearby without giving you quests to go to them, making exploration completely optional. You’ll get more quests if you explore, but won’t be punished for not doing it.

I don’t really have any Oblivion shots that scream “open world”, just some lake.

The main thing they’d need to do is make sure there are enough quests to level you in a zone that you don’t feel like you have to explore every square inch or be forced to grind, and making sure that there’s enough variety in what towns and zones you go to to not make you feel like you’re on rails. Oblivion quests and monsters are scaled to your level, whereas EverQuest won’t have that luxury. Still, if a company could pull this off — whether it be SOE or anyone else — it’d be amazing.

As an aside: making something feel like a real world, and then not allowing free-for-all PvP will always have its problems, but to make a good game you have to do some things that look bad on paper but make the game playable. FFA is just as bad as arena for removing every cooperative aspect of PvP in a game, so I’d rather see unrealistic, arbitrary faction lines that prevent me from killing someone I would have otherwise, than a shitty PvP community.

Good versus evil is retarded, don’t do it

While we’re on the subject of world-building, am I the only one who thought the good/evil dynamic in EQ2 was boring as fuck? I can’t be. Someone else must have thought the story would have been improved if there were soup kitchens in Freeport and organised crime in Qeynos.

I mean, even just calling the factions “Freeport” and “Qeynos”, without actually changing anything, would be a step up. The problem with calling it “good” and “evil” is that it makes implications about the entirety of the society that are blatantly impossible. There is no way every single person in Kelethin is altruistic to the core. There’s no way everyone in Neriak cares about Innoruuk, the god of hate. Even if your upbringing and society predisposes you to being a dick, or to being a saint, not everyone fits neatly into the guidelines their societies set for them. The ability to betray your home city and move to another doesn’t cut it. There have got to be people who refuse to betray, for whatever reason, and go against their cities’ supposed alignment.

It also seems even stupider when you take into account that the dungeons are all the same, even if the quests are different. Plus, what are exiles? Are they neutral? If so, why are they more like every-man-for-himself pirates than they are like Switzerland?

What I would do: First things first: fire Lucan D’Lere, he’s boring as shit. Giving Freeport an evil overlord is way less cool than its backstory of basically being Tortuga. If it went back to being a literal free port, it would serve well as a “neutral” city, in that it could hate everyone equally. This would work especially well if they keep the EQ2 PvP mechanics of exiles (aka neutrals) being able to attack anyone, even their own faction. How well that would work with the faction-based PvP objectives I mentioned earlier is debatable, though. I have no idea what they plan to bring over from EQ2 in terms of faction lines and they function, so I’m working with what I’ve got.

Maybe-Freep.

If we’re going with the “neutral means free for all” theme, Felwithe could possibly serve as another neutral city. High elves are assholes who believe themselves better than everyone else, so it’d be nice to see them take that to the logical conclusion instead of deciding that being a dickbag still makes you “good”. God I hate good vs evil. Otherwise, I guess it could be aligned with Qeynos and Kelethin. The third team could be Neriak and anyone stupid enough to ally with them.

If it seems like it’s still basically good vs evil with people in the middle, that’s because it is. The distinction between the blue team and “good” would have to come from the story, and characters present there. Making the cities feel like real places, with many differing ideologies, is a writing problem, not a game mechanic problem, and one they’d have to be damn careful in addressing, lest they piss off their legions of fans.

While it might seem like a good idea to make like five cities and make them all unique factions, this sounds terrible in terms of organising anything. Will you be able to talk to and group with people from other cities? If not, how big will the servers be? Because I highly doubt you’d be able to get a group for anything, and PvP would just be a clusterfuck.

The problem with guild housing…

… is that it causes guilds to stick to themselves and never see other people in the open world. However, guild and player housing is something people like, so it’d be a tricky balance to give them houses, and then convince them to leave them. They could make it so you can’t do things like tradeskills while inside your house, forcing you to go out into the world to get things done, but then the house mostly becomes a pointless place to gather furniture. However, even it is pointless, roleplayers would still use it to get their cyber on, or at least to avoid harassment. This creates the problem where no one sees open world RP.

What I would do: I think the idea of non-instanced player housing is interesting, but I don’t know how they’d do it. Apparently Vanguard did it, though, so I guess it’s possible, but it’s not like Vanguard is really something they should want to emulate in most places. As much as people love it, it failed for a reason. However, I doubt this was the reason.

Wrapping up

Am I the only one who likes instanced dungeons more than open ones? As far as EverQuest nerds go, at least, I seem to be. Hopefully there’s a good mix of the two.

Why are flying mounts all the rage, lately? It’s like WoW has them, so now everyone else does too. If battlegrounds and arena hadn’t made open world PvP impossible to find in WoW, flying mounts certainly did. Remember in BC, when there were PvP objectives in all the questing zones, yet nothing was ever done with them? Being able to fly over them didn’t help them, at all.

And for the love of God, don’t add a cross-realm dungeon finder. If you think I’m too stupid to know how to create a group on my own, I think you’re not worth my $15 a month. That’s how this works.

TL;DR: This is seriously 5100 words. I tried to keep organised so you can skip shit you don’t care about.

Today, I come back from the grave to talk about Rift.

Sadly, no.

For a game I’d never heard of before a few weeks ago, by a development company with no previous titles, this game has a suspiciously large budget. And that money all seems to be going towards one thing: taking World of Warcraft’s subscribers. I’d hesitate to say it’s set itself up as a WoW-killer, because you’d have to be painfully stupid to even try to make a WoW-killer, but the advertising slogan “We’re not in Azeroth anymore” leaves me in an uncomfortable spot. Which is pretty hilarious, seeing as they’re the same damn game. Rift’s main selling point is that while it does very few new things, no game necessarily does it better.

Before people get their panties too tightly knotted, yes, there are two major things that Rift has provided in terms of innovation: the titular rifts, and the class system. However, in an effort to at least try to be organised for once, I’m not going to talk about that yet. I’m going to go in something resembling an order and fuck you if you don’t like it. I’m also going to offer my extremely helpful, expert advice on how to make this game less generic, because that’s how I roll.

Also, please keep in mind that this is all my take on the game since open beta. I was in part of beta 5, all of beta 6, and the open beta (7). I haven’t played since release. I’ve tried to keep abreast (heh, heh, breast) of changes to the game but there’s only so much I can do while doing other things, like not giving a fuck. So if some of the information is a bit dated I apologise. The game’s only been out for like, what, two weeks? So it isn’t too horribly out of date, I’m hoping.

Character Creation

The first thing you probably notice upon loading up Rift is that this crazy “innovation” everyone’s been talking about really isn’t present in character creation. You get three generic fantasy races split into red faction and blue faction, and your class choices are the horribly generic warrior, cleric, mage, or rogue. The character creation isn’t on par with recent games like Aion or All Points Bulletin, but to say those games didn’t do so great would be putting it mildly, so maybe devs think there’s some voodoo magic link between the two. Whatever, it’s better than WoW’s, which is about all they seem to care about.

An interesting side note: in beta, there was some controversy on the forums over the race selection. Basically, the blue team is called the “Guardians” this time and are all lily-white humans, elves, and dwarves. The red team are the “Defiant”, being brown humans, purple elves, and purple human hybrids. Seems pretty bad, but their thoughts were along the lines of “lol geography”, which is at least a respectable reason, right?

I picked a purple elf, primarily because the racials sucked for my class.

Oh, did I mention that the Guardians are hand-picked by the gods and the Defiants are named that because they turned their backs on them?

Queue over 9000 posts about how all the white races are “godly” and all the dark races are “heretics”, and you have a shitstorm that I’m frankly surprised hasn’t spilled outside of the forums and a couple reviews here and there. It’s especially noteworthy because most of the people complaining are looking at it from a Guardian-positive side; if you look at it the other way, you’ve got religious fanatics vs. a secular society. Which would be a lot worse if the Guardians were the brown ones.

However, I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of racial equality, and hope Trion makes good on its promise to add more colour options to Mathosian (i.e. Guardian) humans. I just hope they don’t add it and never talk about it again, like the black humans in WoW. WHERE DID THEY COME FROM? All the human kingdoms are basically European! Shit pisses me off. Doing something half-assed, in this case, is better than not at all, but doing it whole-assed is truly the way to my heart.

How to make this better: How the fuck can you make a game in 2011 and not have any body sliders other than height? More skin tones, more hair styles, more everything. A couple races that haven’t been in every game ever created would be nice, too. You know, innovation.

Callings and Souls

After you’ve done a few stupidly boring starter quests, you’ll get a choice for your first soul, based on your calling. Think of your calling as your class (such as cleric), and your souls as sub-classes. The soul system is Rift’s equivalent of both talents and skill-selection. The more points you dump into a soul, the more abilities you unlock, and since you can have three souls active at any given time, that’s a lot of potential abilities. Most skills overlap or cancel each other out; for example, a friend of mine was annoyed that with his cleric, he was advised to take healing souls (which use only ranged spell attacks for DPS) with his melee-focused druid soul. While this can be annoying if you have no clue what you’re doing, it lets you make some pretty interesting combinations (for example, he could have been a melee healer, completely ignoring his ranged spells but using the heals he picked up from those souls).

I spent most of my beta-time on a Kelari mage: main soul chloromancer, others whatever I needed (generally archon/dominator or warlock/dominator). Chloromancer is an incredibly interesting class. It’s a healer that heals through damage. I know, not exactly unique — lots of classes have done this before, from Warhammer’s warpriest to World of Warcraft’s shadow priest. However, this is the first one I’ve seen really do it properly. Warpriests eventually got such good not-mana regen that they no longer needed to hit people for the extra regen, turning them into back-of-the-line spambots at max level, and shadow priests are primarily DPS with some support healing capability. Chloromancers are a true main healer that works as intended, at least as far as I could tell from my own experience and the million threads about it on the forums. However, it sucked at PvP, which I’ll get more into in a moment.

Another note: I had basically infinite mana regen. If WoW taught us anything, it’s that Wrath of the Lich King was fucking terrible and healer mana regen was one of the core problems. If I have infinite mana, raids will have to be balanced around that, and that may cause problems. However, chloromancers are fairly spammy as-is, being that they’re DPS-healers. So whether this will actually be a problem remains to be seen.

How to make this better: Why do callings exist if classes are completely customisable? Is it just to give altoholics something to do, since having 1 character with the capacity to do literally anything would be bad? If they want to be innovative, I think doing away with the traditional class system entirely would be a good way to start. Also, giving me my skills for free with my talent points is cool, yet I still have to purchase new ranks. What is this, 2004? WTB scalable skills.

PvP

This is going to be a short one because my PvP experience was limited to one class in one warfront (Rift’s name for battlegrounds). The warfront system is functionally identical to WoW’s, though it includes the level upgrade thing WAR had; namely, if you enter a warfront below a level ending in 7, your stats are bumped up to that of an x7 character (so 17, 27, etc) so you don’t get instantly one-shot by every 19 twink around.

The only warfront available to me was Black Garden, which you can start grinding at level 10 if that’s your thing. For those of you familiar with WAR, it’s a muderball map. Those of you who’ve only played WoW might not know what that is, because Blizzard is retarded and after six years has decided re-making the old maps is more important than adding new game types.

Basically, you hold an item — the murderball — and the longer you hold it the more points your team gets. You take damage though, and when you die, you drop it. In Black Garden, the closer you are the centre of the map, the more points you get, but the harder you are to defend.

Unsurprisingly I played the fuck out of this. Sadly, chloromancers suck balls at PvP. We require enemies to damage in order to heal, which isn’t always the case when you’re defending a ball-carrier in some out of the way location. We can also only heal one person for significant amounts at a time; which works pretty well in murderball (just put your Synthesis buff on the ball-carrier, durr), but won’t work so great on, say, point capture maps. There’s also the fact that mages sucked, at least as recently as open beta.

With all the classes flying around, balance issues are going to happen, but right now mages really get the short end of the stick. Our survivability sucks, our damage output sucks, we’re comparatively easy to lock down… blah blah. Maybe Trion has fixed some of those issues since open beta a couple weeks ago, I can’t say, but I know I sure wouldn’t play a mage on a PvP server if they haven’t. If the forums are any indication, balance issues are still running rampant.

One interesting thing is that Trion has been extremely good about listening to people’s concerns with open world PvP. First they made it harder to grief people in questing towns, then they reversed the changes — but only for PvP servers. Their commitment to making open world part of the endgame for PvPers is very promising. If they keep this up, Rift may be a viable location for all the PvP MMO refugees who have no where else to go. However, major problems still exist; complaints that the ancient wardstones – one of the main open PvP objectives/games/things to do – are completely useless, and favour gain from open PvP is a fraction of that from warfronts. When warfronts provide better rewards more quickly, why would anyone do anything else? The same thing happened with WoW and arenas in BC. Blizzard added a bunch of incentives to world PvP – almost every zone had some sort of PvP objective – and a new battleground, and then negated it all by making arenas the end-game.

Speaking of arenas, they could fuck it up completely by adding rated warfronts. Basically, Trion has simultaneously said they will not add arenas while also saying they want to add things like leaderboards. Sigh.

How they can fix this: Look more into balance issues, stay the fuck away from e-sports.

Questing

All right, let’s get this out of the way: yes, questing in Rift is linear. Maybe it’s just me, but I never really saw this as a problem. I mean, questing in Aion – in levels quests existed, anyway – was linear. Questing in Cataclysm is extremely linear as well. The only real problem I have with it is when there’s no options to go to different zones, which Rift seemed to have, but then, I never got super high. I can’t say if the world opens up a bit more later.

There hasn’t been a picture in a while, so have one of this sorta-bugged NPC.

Anyway, linear questing is good because it’s the easiest way to tell a story. However, the quests in Rift don’t seem to tell much of a story, or if they do, it’s a pretty bad one. The starting zone for Defiants is especially bad in this respect, since you’re told as you load in that the world’s about to end and you need to go back in time (yes, seriously), but you have to get to level 6 before you can actually do this. Level 6! I mean, it makes some sense when the quests say that shit is broken and you have to fix it, but six levels worth just feels like padding. Fortunately, leveling to six isn’t all that time-consuming, even reading all the quest text, so you should be back in the past within a couple hours, tops.

I might have let it slip earlier, but questing in Rift if boring. Now, you could probably point out that it’s basically the same thing every other MMO’s been doing for years, but that’s exactly the problem. If this is your first MMO, you might think it’s amazing, but after playing them for a while, it’s hard to be impressed by dreary collect quests. Especially after playing Cataclysm! The goblin starting zone comes to mind as an example of a well-done, fun zone. One of the main things that it did right was the plethora of quests that break up the monotony; the dance party quest and the footbomb ones come to mind especially. Even as someone who hates vehicle quests, if they’d had a well-done, small vehicle quest once in a while – like the shark-killing in the Lost Isles – I would have been much more engaged.

Another thing Warcraft’s goblins have that Rift lacks is humour. If they did everything the same as they were now, but took the piss out of the whole thing instead of taking themselves so damn seriously, it’d have been a much more enjoyable experience. I mean, we’re already half-way there: it’s impossible to take most of the NPC’s dialogue seriously, they might as well go all the way.

Zing!

How they can fix this: As I already said, more humour, more non-combat/roleplaying quests, anything to break up the monotony without resorting to “do some rifts for a change or pace!” Sometimes I don’t want to do rifts, or other people don’t so there aren’t enough of us to take it on. Rifts and invasions are not an excuse for bland, samey questing content.

Rifts and Invasions

Of course, no one really cares about quests, they care about this much-touted dynamic content. So you probably want to know how it is, eh?

Well, rifts are definitely the best improvement of WAR’s public quest system I’ve seen so far, I’ll give them that. Public quests that can pop up anywhere enough people are gathered is a pretty good idea, and it’s been implemented fairly well. And they really did pop up everywhere – I did dozens in the Freemarch alone, the first zone you get to in the present of the Defiant storyline. My main criticism is that they were all basically the same, i.e. mobs pour out and you kill them until the next wave comes along. It was the Killing Floor of MMO quests. Apparently they get more complicated as levels increase, which is to be expected and beneficial to noobs, but it was pretty damn annoying to me as a veteran MMO player. Whatever, though, I guess they want to ease you into them slowly.

Invasions, however, were just not fun at all. Mobs running around ganking quest givers sounds good on paper until you realise that you will inevitably be in a part of the zone where no one else is, standing just outside the aggro radius of a foothold that’s completely taken over a quest hub, with no way to proceed. Because the quests are so linear you can’t just go quest somewhere else, and you can’t take the invasion on by yourself. It’s like being on a PvP server without the satisfaction of making the enemy ragequit after spawncamping him for fifteen minutes. Plus invasion forces have less potential for interesting mechanics: unlike how rifts can evolve at high levels, invasions will always basically be just elite mobs running around. Except, perhaps, the zone-wide invasions, which are kind of hit-or-miss.

If you like regular invasions and rifts, you’re in for a treat with zone-wides. If you don’t, prepare to log out for about twenty minutes every time the zone is full so that you can avoid it, because there is truly no other way around them. Basically every quest hub will be overrun, leading you to have to drop everything to either deal with the invasion force or go find some rifts to close – and they’re extremely easy to find during an invasion. If nothing else, they bring people together, but they do so in the most annoying way possible, since you have no choice in the matter. I mean, you could go to another zone… Oh wait, no you can’t, because there’s only one place to quest in each level range! My bad.

One thing that I find strange is that it’s possible to fail zone-wides, yet there didn’t seem to be any penalty for doing so. For that matter, there didn’t seem to be any penalties for not closing a rift before it “collapses”, closing itself. I’m all for not punishing people, but if you won’t, shouldn’t you provide more incentive to get it done, like a reward? There didn’t appear to be any sort of zone-wide buff after completing a zone-wide invasion, like you’d think there would be. Perhaps I just didn’t notice it, but you’d think something like that would stand out.

How they could fix this: I’m not really sure, to be honest. Perhaps make players in certain areas not count towards zone totals for figuring out where and when rifts should spawn – like people who are in hubs or somesuch. Other than completely removing zone-wide invasions I can’t think of how to make them better either. They’re also an extremely popular part of the game, so I doubt they’d want to remove them, anyway.

Story, Lore, and Writing

First things first: the story is pretty shitty. Red team and blue team have to learn how to put aside their mutual hatred to deal with a black dragon who wants to destroy the world.

That sounds familiar…

Okay, okay, maybe that’s not fair. Red team and blue team are content to ignore the real threat to their lives while fighting a war using god-chosen, magic-infused warriors. However, neither side can win as long as the dragons still exist to eye up the large quantity of magical unobtanium that the world is made of.

It really doesn’t help that the blue team’s city is named “Sanctum”, either.

In case you hadn’t figured it out, this story has been told before, numerous times, and unlike with the mechanics related ripoffs, this is one place Trion hasn’t done it better. The characters are as two-dimensional and boring as you’d expect from an MMO, the dialogue and voice acting is so over-the-top terrible you almost think they might be joking around after all, and not one thing is original. The most interesting parts of the story are the dragon gods (who aren’t really dragons) and their cults. I don’t know about you, but finding the bad guys to be the most interesting people in a story is usually a bad sign to me.

There are interesting elements amongst the mundane, don’t get me entirely wrong. The elves being religious zealots has good roleplaying potential, even if the game itself seemed to be going down a lighter, less zealous path with people like their faction leader. The technomagic of the Eth and the other Defiant races had a definite Final Fantasy feel that I wish had been built on a bit more. A train would have been cool, for one, but I guess if you can build teleporters you have no need for anything else.

As I mentioned, the dragons are pretty cool. They’re less dragon-like and more like the Chaos Gods from Warhammer and 40k. So, of course, they’re not entirely original, but at least it’s something of a spin on dragons. One of the dragons is basically the Borg Queen, too.

Now one place a lot of people think the lore is the worst is with the Defiant starting zone, which I only partially agree with. Yes, you start in the future, and yes, this future sucks, basically saying “Guardians lose, thanks for playing”. However, this may be a timeline where the Guardian player character was never sent forward in time – it’s very possible that the Defiant time travel is what convinced the angel things you send you forward. Who knows? Time travel as a plot device in MMOs is something I’ve thought about in the past, and something I think could be implemented to very fun and good effect. This isn’t the best implementation, though, but perhaps it isn’t the worst. I can’t think of any games that did it worse, but I’m in a generous sort of mood.

While I’m going to go over it more in the roleplaying section, I actually don’t think the Ascended soul system is stupid. Coming back to life and collecting the souls of fallen warriors like some sort of Valkyrie/Pokémon trainer hybrid is pretty sweet, bro.

How they could fix this: Hiring good writers, for starts? I’m sure that’s not the only problem, however – it feels like they wrote themselves into a corner from the things that they needed to do for gameplay purposes, which is basically always the case with video games. Two player factions who somehow can’t get along, an evil NPC dragon, the whole derivative fantasy setting… Perhaps if the creative team was given more leeway with such things, the lore would be better off. I don’t know exactly how they could salvage it, at this point. As long as they avoid doing what Blizzard’s done by going “Lore? We don’t need lore!” while lighting a giant bonfire fueled by copies of Warcraft 3, they’ll at least keep enough coherence to keep their fans satisfied. Everyone else, though, will continue to look on and shake their heads every time someone defends this shitty story on the official forums. Especially when their only praise is “At least it’s not WoW”.

Roleplaying Potential

Now, this section is called roleplaying “potential” because I didn’t bother doing any actual roleplaying during beta. I mean, why would I? I needed to test the game to see how buggy it was and secondarily to see if it was worth buying. However, there are a few things I noticed. This also assumes you can RP within the painfully awful story of the world, but 90% of you either RPed in WoW and are already pros at this, or will ignore the lore anyway to make yourself a vampire, so whatever.

The soul system has interesting potential for RP. The idea of playing a character that has multiple personalities isn’t new, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Perhaps the other souls are simply background noise, giving opinions but having no actual impact on anything. Perhaps it’s an intangible connection; they know they’re changed, but they couldn’t really tell you how. A character might realise they’re more religious than they were before, but not that it was the Purifier soul they picked up that made the change. Maybe they know they’re losing themselves to the forceful personality of the Necromancer, but they don’t care. Or they do, and have to struggle constantly for control over their own actions. It has potential, but I get the feeling most people will just use it to RP crazies. I don’t know, I have little faith in roleplayers these days.

Unfortunately, the soul system is really the only positive thing I can say here. It isn’t possible to enter most buildings; even shops tend to be just merchants chilling out in the open. While this might make sense if it was pointed out in-game, say, with merchants saying they’ll have to pack up and leave the second a rift opens up above them anyway, this is never mentioned. Also, it would ring false since buildings exist, you just can’t go in. They’re nothing but decorations. Even in the Defiant capital, Meridian, there were only a couple main areas you could go into; it felt less like a city, and more like a fortress. While this makes some sense, having it be a fortress around a city would make the most sense, especially since all the NPCs refer to it as a city. I have to wonder if any of them have ever seen a city in their lives.

None of these buildings actually serve a purpose.

Once in a while, though, you will find a nice place to RP outside of Meridian. But remember that invasion problem I mentioned earlier? If you have a large enough event going on, rifts will spawn over you, the NPCs will die, and you will have to drop everything to go deal with it. While many people who hate tavern RP probably don’t mind, a lot of people like just relaxing for a few hours at a bar, and having to throw on your real gear to deal with marauding NPCs can get very annoying very quickly. I’d probably not mind and react perfectly in character the first one or two times it happens, but invasions happen all the damn time. At some point you’re going to have people ragequitting and saying “Fuck it, back to Meridian” because they don’t want to stop RPing every 20 minutes to deal with mobs.

Aion had better RP support than this, and they didn’t even have any RP servers! What the fuck, Trion.

How they can fix this: The quickest, simplest fix (other than completely changing the lore, trolololol) would be to make instanced player and/or guild housing. The main downside to this is that it keeps roleplay out of the open and can make the community very insular – or at least, more insular than it already is. It’s my experience that most RP communities aren’t that open as it is. Making open buildings is a lot more effort than I’d bet they’re willing to put into an already released game for such a small fraction of the population, so I won’t even bother asking for it. A way to flag yourself for RP, as you could in EQ2, could go to great lengths to addressing rifting and invasion concerns; if you’re not counted toward zone populations, you’re less likely to have to deal with either of those. Of course, this could cause too many people to do this and thus make them never spawn, so there’d have to some way around this. I’m just spit balling, here, I’m sure they could think of something if they wanted to.

Other Shit

Uh, what about instances? Raiding?

I didn’t do any. Gasp, shock, I know. I had intended to do the first Defiant instance, but never really got around to it because my play hours were weird (the middle of the night, mostly, because my old PC couldn’t really run it and I had to use Josh’s) and I didn’t have the time to search for groups. In order to fix this predicament for myself and many others, Trion plans to add a dungeon finder.

Now, I could write another 5000+ word post saying why random dungeon finders are fucking awful, so I’ll just say this:

Trion, if you have to add a dungeon finder, do not make it cross-realm. You would kill the barely established server communities in your still new game. People will bitch, people will moan, but how will people find guilds or friends otherwise? You have to assume the majority of your players didn’t come over with guilds. Sure, the more proactive ones will apply on websites and do premades with potential recruits, but what about the noobs you want to help with this measure? This does the exact opposite of helping anyone, least of all them. Impatient people have plenty of options other than instancing.

Oh, and all the instanced raids will be 20-mans, while the 10-mans will be raid rifts in the open world. Potentially interesting? I don’t know if that’ll be cool or epically horrible, we’ll probably see in a couple months.

UI/Mods

The UI is pretty fucking hideous. My friends told me it’s the same as WoW’s, but at least WoW allows addons. Rift is supposed to allow addons eventually, unlike certain other addon-free games. I’m looking at you, Aion. Healing is hurt the most by the shitty UI; at least in open beta, there was no way to filter buffs and debuffs and no way to show health deficits. Those are kind of important. At least mouseover macros were present.

Really, the whole thing would be improved by just allowing addons, even if only cosmetic UI improvements were allowed. I understand the people against DPS metres and boss warnings, though I don’t agree.

Crafting

Rift’s crafting has got to be it’s biggest selling point, after the souls and rifts. It’s a very innovative way of making the player involved with the crafting process, that’s both easy to pick up and still engaging after hours of pumping out burlap bolts.

HAHAHA just kidding, it’s exactly the same as WoW’s. Go take a piss while your shit is being automagically generated.

Last Thoughts

Is SOE seriously the only company who will make MMOs with appearance gear tabs? For fuck’s sake.

I was quite impressed with Trion’s turnaround time on fixing things the community didn’t like during beta, but they seem to have slowed down a bit since release. Either way, still very quick relative to most other developers, though it’d be a bigger accomplishment if Blizzard hadn’t finally gotten their act together with Cataclysm just recently.

Should I buy it?

I don’t know. In case you hadn’t noticed, I didn’t. However, I think it has potential. Perhaps I only think that because nothing else has come out in a while that wasn’t bogged down by either so many bugs it was unplayable, or so little content you didn’t want to play it. It’s stable and has lots to do, it’s just not particularly unique. The only other drawback is the class balance problem that will probably plague its entire life cycle, though I doubt it’ll be as bad as EQ2. If innovation doesn’t really matter to you, and you just want to play a fairly good-looking, polished MMO, go for it. Rift is nothing if not safe. If you want to play something different, something that takes risks that may or may not pan out, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

Me, I’m going to check out the community and such 3-6 months from now. If the game’s still going, I might see what’s changed and if it’s started to actually make a name for itself as something different. If it’s still the same bland regurgitated MMO, I’ll just keep waiting for Dark Millennium.

Provided THQ doesn’t fuck it up, that is.

No, really.

I THINK I NEED MORE DUCKFACE

So… Where have I been? Well, playing WoW, tbh.

You see, when I made this blog with the intention of talking about Aion. Since I stopped playing Aion pretty much immediately after it was made, I decided to talk about other games, which mostly meant reviewing them. That put me in an awkward place — did I want to bore the people who enjoyed my reviews to death by talking about nothing but one shitty MMO, or did I want to just talk about it anyway? Because really, if I’m playing WoW, chances are good I’m not playing anything else. And if I had nothing to say about WoW, which was often the case, should I branch out into other geek culture phenomena? Would that be “betraying” the idea of the website in the first place?

Naturally I was paralyzed by choice. And by paralyzed, I mean I couldn’t give a shit enough to do this. It’s not like anyone would have read like 7 months of bitching about the shitty Wrath content and another few months of bitching about the awful RP community and how people need to nut up or shut up about Cataclysm healing.

Anyway, I’m not really playing WoW so much at the moment for a lot of reasons that aren’t really important. What is important is that I decided I’d get this piece of shit back on its feet once I could find a new layout. See, the Classholes stole my layout — yes, a free, “best of” layout from right inside WordPress was stolen from me specifically — and I’ve wanted a replacement ever since, but I’ve been too lazy to deliver. So, here it is. It even has an RSS feed that I don’t understand how to use!

And yes, I know the images in old posts clip into the sidebar. I either need to get the stylesheet to cooperate in making the post area larger (unlikely), or resize every single one of my old images by hand (also unlikely). So you can live with it for now. The text under the Twitter thing is also extremely tacky, but it looked weird as fuck with nothing under there. Maybe I’ll add more stalking methods, or maybe I’ll summarise the About and Contact pages and stick them there. It’s a mystery! Fun times.

Anyway, here’s some of the shit I have planned besides fixing the layout:

And that’s just in the immediate future. EXPECT GREAT THINGS.

Or, you know, expect nothing. Then you can never be disappointed.