Tag Archives: MMO

A Hero for a day

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The bad news is I’ve still yet to receive my copy of Grand Theft Auto IV, so no new game for me. The good news is that since I’m leaving on holiday on Thursday anyway, I probably shouldn’t start a new game for real just yet, so I decided to download a free trial for yet another MMO. The game I picked was City of Heroes, one of the more unique MMOs out there and one that I’ve often wondered about.

Until Champions Online launches later this year, CoH is still the only MMO that lets you play as a superhero (or a supervillain if you so choose). This means that it has an extremely powerful and versatile character creation system and is set in a contemporary cityscape, the so-called Paragon City. Unusually for an MMO, it has no auto-attacks. All attacks are essentially powers that must be manually activated. Furthermore, characters in CoH can physically obstruct one another and a crude physics system allows characters to be knocked down or even blown away a fair distance when hit by the appropriate power.

A few things were apparent from the first moment I started up the game. This game is old and looks it. Not only is the graphics engine terribly dated by now, but its interface, user friendliness and general game design all mark it as very much a pre-World of Warcraft MMO. What’s surprising is that even though CoH launched only a few months earlier than WOW, it looks a lot older, with plain textures and blocky polygons and is far less polished.

The character creation system is indeed as powerful as advertised and to me was probably the most fun part of my short trial. While the combat system felt suitably visceral compared to other MMOs, I was bothered by the fact that although characters use their powers on each other, there’s next to nothing that they can do with their powers to the environment. This felt silly to me and detracted from the experience. You’re not superpowered unless you can throw cars around and blow buildings up in my book. I was annoyed that gameplay seemed to consist mostly of grinding on random mobs or running missions in buildings with the same layouts over and over again. It reminded me unpleasantly of my very first MMO experience with Anarchy Online.

One nice thing that I noticed was that players were generally serious about their character and took the time to design a cool costume and picking an appropriate name. People who are already used to the multitude of dumb and meaningless names in MMOs should know how significant this is. Unfortunately, this game is still too dated and too clunky to warrant any extended interest on my part. I am however looking forward to Champions Online.

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An interlude in Middle Earth

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Since I’m done with Empire for a while, I’ve been looking for something a bit more action-oriented. I’d already decided that it would either be Grand Theft Auto IV or Saint’s Row 2, and I’m slightly embarrassed that I ended up choosing GTA after having written this post. It seems that the PC ports of both of these games are awful, but Saint’s Row 2 is an order of magnitude worse, so GTA it is.

It’s going to take some time to get to me however because it’s backordered over at Pcgame.com.my so in the meantime, I thought I’d take advantage of the free trial of Lord of the Rings Online, one of the MMOs I’ve always been curious about. I’d always pictured LotRO as a sort of World of Warcraft 2.0 set in Middle Earth and I’ve heard good things about the Shire starting area for hobbits so I went ahead and downloaded the client and made myself a trial account.

No surprise that the game looks and feels a lot like WOW. Yes, instead of exclamation and question marks on top of the heads of quest givers, you have rings instead. Cute. What was surprising to me was that despite being able to copy so much from WOW, how unpolished it still is. Everything from the launcher, to the little icons for skills and abilities to how the UI doesn’t scale to your resolution, just reminds of how much better WOW does things. Of course, LotRO has a leg up on WOW in that its graphical engine is visibly superior, especially when looking at the landscape, but I found myself missing WOW‘s art direction.

As for world building, while I can agree that the Shire does indeed look superbly realized, I can’t help but roll my eyes at how the game breaks the lore in so many ways. Hobbits fighting men and even dwarves in the Shire? Traders in Michel Delving selling weapons to hobbits? I know that all this is pretty much necessary in an MMO, but it still induces severe nerd rage in me.

Anyway, I enjoyed my brief stay in Middle Earth and made it a point to visit some particular places of interest that I remember from the books, such as the Party Tree, but I don’t really see the long-term appeal in playing this. It actually made me WOW for a while. Still, it was free so I can’t complain too much and I got a good couple of days’ entertainment out of it.

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Ships of Eve Online

This familiar side-by-side comparison of the different ship types in Eve Online was updated not too long ago to include the Titans, the largest ships available in the game. You can download a full size 4.65 mb version of the image here. Seeing it really rams home the breathtaking scale that this game works on.

I don’t have time for an MMO because playing one would mean having to skip all other games, but I did, the game I’d play would be Eve. It’s easily the most unique and ambitious of all the MMOs and really the only one that hands the power to shape the universe into the hands of the players.

I note that the game has had plenty of problems lately, what with the uncovering of a conspiracy that might have enabled some of the more powerful corporations in the game to exploit a glitch to create some 3 trillion ISK of goods in the economy and the current financial problems in Iceland, where Eve is based. The latest rumour is that CCP might move out of Iceland to make things easier for itself since most of its revenues come from outside the country anyway.

I might not play Eve, but I always enjoy reading the news and war reports coming out of the game and there’s no other MMO that I’d wish more to have a long and healthy life.