Nasty Explody Guild Drama of Doom

I'm preoccupied with some massive guild drama (yes, it only takes 10 to Dramatize, apparently), so I don't think I'll be able to write anything about games that doesn't end up being an angry, un-fun rant. So posting will be a bit sparse here until it clears up. If you don't like it, feel free to take it up with the National Association of Girls Who Can't Play But Whine To Be Carried, and their sibling association, the White Knighting Alliance of Guys with Terrible Judgement.

Champions Online: Beta Impressions

Champions Online is an upcoming superhero MMO developed by Cryptic, the same company that originally designed City of Heroes, and has since split off from the CoH team (now part of the game's publisher, NCSoft). So it's no surprise that the game looks and feels like a sequel to City of Heroes. Essentially, it is. But it also used to be a Marvel MMO before the House of Ideas pulled out and left Cryptic with a half-finished game and no license. They picked up the rights to the Champions tabletop RPG universe to replace Spidey and friends.

I was granted access to the beta by pure luck, so I have no special treatment as press. They didn't give me a free account so I could write about their game. In fact, if not for this implied consent (still no further response as of 6/12/09), I'd be bound by an NDA to not even reveal I am in the beta, let alone provide my impressions. As it stands, I am only allowed to talk about what the press has seen: the character creator, the tutorial levels, and bit of content beyond. I'm not allowed to talk about the promised features from the later levels, such as the Millenium City zone or the Nemesis system (which lets you design a personalized nemesis NPC for your hero to fight throughout your career).

As you'd expect from a CoH sequel, the character creator is a cut above the rest. It's not even yet fully implemented, and still it blows everything else currently available out of the water. You can choose from an overwhelming number of sliders to change the size of everything on your character's body, from hand-width to brow-depth. There are an unbelievable number of options for every body part. It builds on the CoH creator by adding even more options, including the highly-requested capes, trench coats, and wings (right from the start!) and convenience by allowing you to choose "key" colors at the start and remembering which colors you have previously chosen, making the entire process of color-coordinating more user friendly.

The coolest addition to the character creator is the use of "stances", which change your hero's posture and demeanor, and each come with their own full suite of separate animation sets. For example, you can choose "heroic" to have your character walk around with his chest puffed out, legs spread, and hands in fists. Or you can go for a more casual look, or choose "bestial" to have your hero run around on all fours.

Once your look is to your liking, you get to move on and choose powers. These are also unfinished at time of writing, with the promised "custom" templates not yet available, and the power descriptions confusing and incomplete. What is there looks very promising, however. There are nearly 2 dozen power sets, ranging from Telepathy to Dual Blades to an Iron-man style Power Suit.

There are no classes in CO. Instead, you select whichever powers you think fit your character. The power sets are arranged into tiers, with the more powerful abilities at the top. You can stay in one tree and climb the tiers faster, but you can also climb the tiers, albeit more slowly, by taking powers from other trees. It's entirely possible to make a force-fielded character who breaths fire and swings a giant sword, if that's the kind of thing you want. You are left with the choice of either specializing to reach that tier faster, or picking from a broad range of powers to be versatile, but get your uber-moves more slowly. This could turn out to be a beauty or a disaster, depending on the balance, but it looks like a great idea on the surface.

Every hero starts out as a simple damage-dealer, which at first glance seems like a poor recipe for MMO teamwork. This is where another nice innovation comes in: dual spec (well, multi-spec) is essentially built-in. As you level, you naturally gain the ability to change your role amongst offensive, defensive, balanced, and support with the click of a button. So if you join a group that needs a tank, you just pop into defensive mode and tank it. There are no simple "healers", and no power set that focuses on healing or defense the way CoH's Empathy tree did. Instead, each power set has a few support abilities, such as group buffs, minor heals, or force-fields. Any player can pick up a few of these while leveling up, and play a support role in any group that needs it. It remains to be seen how this will hold up in the long run, as I didn't really get to test it.

The other thing you do before creating a character is pick a type for your character, such as "the professor" or "the intimidator". These allow you to select which stats your character is strong in, and thus which you should focus on. To make a simplified analogy: in WoW, a rogue wants Agility and Attack Power, while a DK wants Strength and Critical Strike Rating. The stats you want in WoWare determined by your class/spec. In CO, you can choose to focus on Dexterity and Constitution if you want, or Ego and Strength, or any combination, regardless of what type of character you play. You can use the brute-force "Might" powerset but choose to focus on the Intelligence stat, if you want. This is very confusing at first blush, though I suspect that they simply haven't yet integrated the final explanation into the game yet. CO also does a neat twist on each stat in that they all provide some secondary benefit, like making you harder to put in CC or increasing your potential knockback. This adds a nice extra dimension to picking which stats to focus on, and keeps non-focused stats from being useless.

As you level, you'll alternate between stat boosts, new powers, and Advantages. Advantage Points can be invested in any powers to augment them in much the same way a glyph in WoW or an enhancement in CoH would. For instance, you can use 2 Advantage Points to increase your main nuke by a rank, upping its damage and effects. Or you could spend one point to give it a 10% chance to return endurance on use, and the other point to slightly increase your flight speed. This ends up working a lot like talent points, as a way to customize your character toward your playstyle. You can sink your Advantage points into offensive, defensive, or support powers to make yourself better at your preferred role, or take a more balanced approach.

After finally completing your character (honestly, my beta sessions tended to involve more time in the character creator than out, and I never even noticed the time passing), you're dropped into a tutorial zone. Insectoid aliens have invaded a small section of Millenium City, and there has been a forcefield conveniently erected around the area to contain them (another concept taken directly from CoH).

Visually, the game uses a cell-shaded comic book style (which you can turn off in the options menu if you don't like it). It can be a little blocky or plain at times, but overall it's up to par with what you would expect in this day and age. The animations are where the game really shines. They all look great and have a ton of personality. I was especially impressed with the martial arts and sword animations, which are far from the boring swings you see in WoW. Instead, each strike is lightning-fast and dynamic, with your character leaping, twisting, and spinning. The powers are visually exciting and look quite cool. Though the art style itself is plain, the animations have so much personality that they help the game stand out, just as Blizzard's unique art style helped make WoW a success. And in a praiseworthy move, you can customize the color of every single ability, as well as it's emanation point. For instance, I can shoot a laser beam from my eyes, chest, palms, or fists, and that beam can be any color of the rainbow.

Cryptic has said that they aim for a more action-oriented approach to MMOs with CO. The entire game can be played on a control pad, and an eventual Xbox 360 port is expected.

The game controls much like CoH or WoW before it. I found the transition between my daily WoW playing and this new environment to be very smooth.

Combat is simultaneous simpler and more interesting than CoH or WoW. Since the game is meant to be played on a control pad, your action bar and hotkeys are limited to just 9 abilities. CO's heroes don't have mana bars. Instead, they all have an "endurance" bar that starts out empty. Every powerset starts with a low-damage auto attack called an "endurance builder". Using this ability fills up your end bar, which you can then spend on other, more powerful abilities. It reminded me a lot of playing a Death Knight, where you use abilities to build up runic power for other moves.

Many of moves that use end are chargeable, meaning you can decide, by holding down the button, how much damage you want it to do and how much end you want to spend. For instance, my energy character could fire off a quick force blast for 20 damage and 10 end, or he could charge it up for 3 seconds and deal 55 damage for 20 end and have a better chance at a knockback. This system also works for holds, as I found I could encase my foes in a force field for a longer time if I held down the button first. This adds a fun little tactical element to what would otherwise be button-mashing.

A system like this has some nice balancing mechanisms baked-in. You prevent the Paladin alpha-strike syndrome that plagues WoW pvp at the moment (just like rogues must build combo points, or DKs RP and set up their diseases, before unleashing their strongest attacks). It also helps reduce downtime, since you don't need to drink to refill mana. Health regeneration is also streamlined, requiring only that you stand still out of combat for a few seconds to wait for your health bar to refill. Don't even need to purchase or click on food.

Combat is further enlivened by a natural "block" ability bound to the Shift key. You can use it to strategically reduce damage of incoming attacks. It adds a nice action-gamey element to the combat, and raises the skill cap considerably. It's especially helpful when you see a stronger foe have a Batman-style bubble appear over their head with the word "POW" or some such in it, signifying that they are about to unleash a big attack (another aspect that adds depth and tactical interest to the combat).

I can't help but think the combat system took a few pages from the excellent Penny Arcade: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (if you haven't played it, download both episodes NOW!), which made extensive use of blocking and mini-game-based attacks to liven up the tired old Final Fantasy-style JRPG turn-based combat.

I've only just started, and I already can say that I think I prefer this combat style to that of WoW. Cryptic has obviously taken as many lessons as they can from WoW and built upon them.

And though that's a great strength of what I've seen so far, it's also where the game gets derivative.

From the very start, you are taking "missions" from NPCs with yellow "!" over their heads. The questing is fun enough, but still mostly of the "defeat 10 aliens" or "collect 5 first aid kits" variety. You pick up gear from quests and from random drops that you can equip for stats. Enemies still stand off in small groups waiting for you to come beat them up. It plays like a super-streamlined version of WoW with superheroes.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. CO's greatest leap may be the level to which they've borrowed ideas from other MMOs and combined and streamlined them. Beyond quests and gear from WoW, you'll see public quests in the WAR style, and your quest objectives will automatically be marked on your minimap with big orange circles signifying the area you need to be in to do the quest (I think this came from WAR as well?). All of this is done automatically, and much of the complication is taken out. You have only a few gear slots (3 primary, 6 secondary), and each piece of gear only has few stats. You have relatively few powers. You get your travel power as soon as you complete the tutorial, at level 6 (HURRAH!!!!). The death penalty is as minor as WoW's (begone, XP debt from CoH!). And yet, those parts of the game are still no less fun, and in fact you can get to the fun more easily because there are fewer impediments in your way.

Welcome to the enlightened next generation of MMOs, where the failed Everquest "vision" of tedious, unrewarding grinding in an unforgiving environment is thrown away, and only the fun kernel in the center is left. I, for one, am a fan so far.


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Champions Online is both a sequel to City of Heroes, and a complete reinvention. It's not yoked to the name or the expectations of the CoH fanbase, and thus is free to make choices and take the game in a new direction, while also finally providing many of the fan-favorite improvements that CoH still hasn't seen.

If we were to sketch a rough history of MMOs, starting from MuDs, we'd see a few generations. To oversimplify, Gen 1 was Ultima Online, Gen 2 was Everquest and its ilk (I'd include CoH in this generation, and possibly one of the last of its generation), Gen 3 was WoW, WAR, and others, and CO (as well as KOTOR, Free Realms, and others) constitute the new Gen 4. Each generation took the lessons from the previous ones, integrated their best ideas as a base, and then shed things that weren't working and built something new.

But it's difficult to call CO "something new". In my limited experience with the beta, I encountered countless game mechanics and features that were clearly ripped wholesale from other games. But this may actually be a good thing, because they were all good ideas. Isn't it better to combine them all in one place, instead of leaving some out because they aren't "original"?

The thing that really heartens me about the CO beta is seeing that even though many of the ideas are borrowed, they are all well-executed and pleasantly streamlined. And isn't that a lot of what WoW did? Just steal EQ while making it more fun, and doing everything well and with a big coat of polish?

The beta is making me even more excited for the game, and I can't wait to see what it looks like when it releases in September. Hopefully the new release date gives the team plenty of time to up the presentation and make the systems more understandable. It has the potential to be a great MMO, but there are still a lot of places where things could go wrong.

A note from the Shaman Q & A

• Q. When itemizing for the shaman class, what are the aspects that are looked at, and are there plans to make additional improvements to the way itemization is done for the class or for specific talent specs?
• A: One of the problems we have with dropping one-handed weapons is the overlap. If we drop axes, rogues can't use them. If we drop swords, shamans can't use them. If we drop fists, death knights can't use them. We are looking at changing one of these restrictions in 3.2, though it likely won't be for shamans to use swords.

It will be Axes for Rogues. Matthew Rossi, you are wrongity-wrong-wrong-wrong.

They'll integrate axes into the mace talent too.

Wednesday Laziness?

Work has been a bitch the past few days, and I've been working on a beta impressions piece that is turning out quite long. So instead of the usual Wednesday post, you get a double-big post on Friday. See ya then.

APB

A few posts ago I mentioned All Points Bulletin (APB) as one of the upcoming MMOs that I am most excited about. It takes a bit to get me excited about an MMO. I've slept through articles about WAR (oh hey, it's WoW only with all of the sense of humor sucked out), trying to play Eve Online actually conjures visible Z's over my head, and just can't bring myself to get excited about Free Realms (even as I applaud their courage in letting you play a fairy). But APB got my attention but good when it was announced last year, and after reading some previews about it from last week's E3, I'm getting genuinely excited.

At first glance, it looks like Grand Theft Auto: the MMO. Player characters roam a cityscape, armed and dangerous, having gang gunfights and carjacking everything in sight. But it's becoming more and more clear that the GTA similarities are just the tip of the iceberg: they share a setting, and maybe an aesthetic, but little else.

The first thing that's striking about this game, and makes me think it will be a runaway success, is the character creator. No, scratch that, the entire creativity suite. You don't just create a character. You control their physical features, clothing, and other accoutrements so completely that it puts the CoX creator to shame. There was a video from last year's E3 where the demonstrators used the character creator to make startlingly-accurate likenesses of famous game developers, such as Mario's daddy Shigeru Miyamoto.

APB 'Character Creation' video

It takes every detail to the next level: in CoX, you could put a lightning design on your legs, and change the color. In APB, you'll be able to resize the lightning, move it to and location on your body or clothing, and overlap it with other designs. I didn't really understand just how good this thing was until I watched this other video from last week.

I call it a "creativity suite" not just because of the overwhelming number of options, or the level of control (you can click and drag to change the length of different segments of your avatar's hair!), but because you can create your own tatoos or designs in a tool that appears to rival photoshop in its control, and then place it anywhere on your body or clothes or your car, and it will fit wherever you want, at any size and angle. Once you are done with that, why don't you follow it up by - I shit you not - composing a brief musical riff that your opponents will hear whenever you kill them.

The level of customizability makes me wonder if this is just a developer tool, or we'll actually see this thing go live. I actually think it will make release this way, mainly because the developers have said they intend to allow a community to build around using these tools better than other people do. The devs want every player to be "famous for something", and for some people that will be tatoo design or music composition. "Sure, xXK1ll3rXx may have the most headshots on the server, but everyone buys my tatoos."

And the customization feeds into the game itself. Servers will be limited to 100 players at a time, leaving room for everyone to be a celebrity, and everyone to be recognizable. Everyone's avatar should, in theory at least, look so unique that the game won't even bother displaying names over the player's heads. You should know on sight what player you are looking at. What remains to be seen is how they'll avoid having an entire server full of Neos chatting with half-naked Angelina Jolies.


The gameplay itself sounds pretty fun as well, with a very interesting organic matchmaking system driving PvP encounters. Players can choose to be Enforcers or Criminals. The example mission being batted around: as an Enforcer, you accept a job to guard an armored car full of cash. However, a few groups of Criminals in the area also hear about the car. They'll show up and try to steal the money, while you attempt to fend them off.

The key to making this work is a sort or ranked matchmaking algorithm for who gets notified. Maybe you have a ton of individual combat skill and a high-level character. Maybe it will send one or two other skilled players at you, or maybe it will notify a dozen lower-level characters, or a gang of 4-5 people who aren't very good players.

The whole thing sounds awesome, and the devs seem to have their hands on the pulse of what makes MMO's exciting for some audiences: being able to show off to other people how special/good/powerful you are. The game is all about creating a unique look and identity, and becoming notorious for something. It taps into a lot of common needs to feel special and recognized in front of others, and concentrates that experience. And to top it all off, it's undeniably cool. No Dungeons & Dragons references or geeky comic books here. Just good, old fashioned, mass-marketable crime and mayhem. More than anything else, I'd liken it to the Sims, and I think it will take off with aggressive people (mostly males) in the same stratspheric level that the Sims achieved with women.

If they can pull it off, that is. The game is still over a year out at least, so there's no telling how much of what we see now will actually make release. But here's hoping they keep going in this direction.

Friday Laziness: Itemization Philosophy

Itemization in Ulduar is wonky. It's so off that it's led many players to think the devs don't know their own game, or at least that the itemization people don't talk to the class design or raid design people. For example, our Holy Paladin hasn't taken a single plate piece because they are loaded with mp5, which is functionally useless to him (because crit and int are better regen stats for him aside from also increasing healing throughput). Every 2-handed weapon in Uld 10, including hard modes, is itemized the same, with either arPen or Hit on top of Strength and Crit. Don't even get me started on caster leather, elemental shaman gear, the lack of MP5 on resto shaman offset gear, or all the spirit on every piece of caster cloth. I recently respecced Blood from Unholy on my DK because there are virtually no upgrades in Ulduar without Armor Penetration (which is awesome for Blood and terrible for Unholy).

What I'm saying is, there are no choices. Every piece is equally poorly itemized. So the devs say they want us to play a "game" with our gear where we make interesting choices about what's an upgrade and what's not. But they don't offer interesting choices, just bad stat after bad stat. Things in Ulduar, despite higher ilevels, are turning out to not be upgrades over Naxx pieces because of how poorly itemized Ulduar gear is. And it's not just a few bad pieces, it's virtually every piece in every slot. Like I said: no choice. Where's the fun in that?

It's a real problem because 1) gear is a part of the "fun" of raiding, and 2) the hard modes were tuned for a raid wearing upgrades over our Naxx gear (upgrades we can't find for many slots in Ulduar). The hard modes were tested with shirts of uber, and I seriously doubt the drops in Ulduar constitute a full 8% increase in stats and 130 increase in all ratings, especially when we are DEing most of these ilevel "upgrades".

And the explanation, as you can see in this thread (I recommend you read every post GC makes in that thread by clicking the "Blizz" icon at the top of each post to go to the next one), is that they made the gear shitty on purpose so they could make the next tier more attractive than this one without raising it's ilevel very much.

Seriously. That is insulting. The thread specifically tries to avoid insulting the devs, and they turn around and insult us. If you are going to reduce the fun by taking choice away, the least you could do is not reduce the fun further by making the items we don't have a choice about suck.

I was going to write something about how, you know, it's really OK if we are excited about gear in Ulduar and actually know we are getting upgrades. But BBB just summed it up so perfectly that you should just read his post on it. :)

But enough angry ranting. The bottom line is that I am very happy with Ulduar, just like BBB is. This is more a nitpick. The devs deserve a lot of credit for delivering an awesome instance. I am thankful for what I have, but I also feel compelled to point out problems when I see them. I just don't want people to get the impression that I'm a total Negative Nancy. I am having a lot of fun in Ulduar.

And anyway, cheer up, it's the weekend! Viva la alcoholism!

My Server is Down - Rediscovering WoW

Yesterday, in the midst of the summer slowdown, the 4-year itch, raid burnout, and daily quest fatigue ad infinitum, we looked at WoW with fresh wonder and joy once again.

And all it took was the End of the World (of warcraft).

In the "real world" something went very, very wrong at Blizzard's server farms. Perhaps they were trying a new system of powering the servers with Mountain Dew Game Fuel instead of the hamster wheel they had been using. Regardless, the upshot was that the virtual world of Azeroth ceased to be for nearly an entire day yesterday. At least for the most part.

Small fragments of the universe still existed, in the form of parallel versions of the world. With the vast majority of the servers down, my guild's main tank found solace by rolling a level 1 gnome warrior on one of the few remaining servers. He posted his location and new name on the guild forums, and as we all returned from school and work, one by one we joined his merry band of under-equipped, height-challenged adventurers through the snows of Dun Morough, both in-game and in-Vent.

It started as a simple goof, but quickly escalated into a bigger and grander goof. Our enthusiasm reflected off of each other and amplified. Soon, our dwarf hunter was pulling everything in sight so his four "pets" could more easily kill them. We were all working together to help our warlock learn to summon a simple imp, and facing down level 10 rare spawns with delirious determination. We were trading our meager findings - tattered rags, bits of leather and chain mail, old, rusted hammers - to try to put together some rudimentary kits to protect us from the elements and the vicious Winnebagos. I mean, Wendigos.

A white (much better than grey!) cape dropped from a treasure chest, sporting an as-yet-unheard-of armor value of 8! What a sense of adventure there was, exploring a new cave and discovering a treasure hidden deep within! The warrior asked if anyone wanted it, and our hunter ruined the moment by asking us to hold on while he "checked his spreadsheet to see if it's an upgrade".

We formed a guild called My Server Is Down(not very original, I know, not my idea), and wiled away the evening cracking jokes and killing ice trolls and gathering bear spleens. I refused to equip a mail chestpiece, exclaiming that "Paladins don't deserve to wear pants!" while keeping on my grey tattered cloth robe. I learned Hammer of Justice, challenged my guildies to duels, and then danced in front of them while they were stunned saying "ha ha I just stunned you from ranged and I wear plate" and then when it wore off, I would bubble and start dancing again.

I had forgotten how much more you appreciate a beautiful vista and an artfully-positioned reveal of a new area when you have to hike to it rather than flying past it at 280 miles per hour. I had forgotten how fun it was to wear whatever you found in a pig's belly, and just shoot the shit with your friends while you quested together and goofed off. No epics or strats or hard modes or calendar invites to AH or enchants to worry about. It made the game fresh for me, and reminded me why we started playing in the first place.

When our server came back up, we all promised to come back here between raids, to our tranquil little pool of fun. But I know from experience it's unlikely. Those epics and raids and dailies attracted us in the first place for a reason. But I hope we don't let go of the sense of wonder, joy and (OK cheesiness overload here) friendship that we got from it.

Maybe temporary armageddons aren't so bad after all.