Chimps in Space

I have what is probably an overly large game collection. I tend to but a game at least every two weeks and I never sell them on because I frequently get an urge to go back and play old games. I buy so many because I know the sort of games I like and so I tend to grab them when they’re released knowing that I’ll get to them later, or I’ll see them really cheap a few months after they come out and grab them then depending on if I think they’ll plummet in cost quickly.

360voice thinks that I’ve played 192 games. That’s a lot of games on one console, even if it does include arcade games from back in the days when the arcade demos would count on that list and you could tell your console to automatically download them when they were released.

The upshot is that I have a large stack of games, more than a couple of which I’ve not played as much as I would like. I’ve recently found a way that works for me to remind me that I should play them. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just I need a slight kick to do it. That way is through trueachievements.com. One of the clever things about that site is the fact that it takes everybody who is registered and records their achievements for each game. For each person who has played each game it then goes through and works out how many of them have each achievement and applies a weight to the score based on that ratio. This means that achievements that you can’t fail to get are highlighted by the fact that they’ve been scored close to their actual achievement values and in fact there’s a nice list of your easy achievements that’s meant to be used to point out the low hanging fruit to get your score up. When you have a large number of games it also serves to highlight that, say, you never finished the first mission in Brothers in Arms: Hells Highway. Which I have now done, although I’m not sure how happy I am about that milestone being passed.

Now there’s a good use for achievements. My current one that is at the top of the list of easy is this one from Overlord 2, which reminds me that I put it down the other day and I need to go back to playing it.

The latest Van Hemlock Podcast has us commenting on the Sony and Microsoft press wotsits and the insane number of sequels that they both announced. I’ve not got a lot to say about that as I said it all in the show, but for the record I’m pro-Natal and think it’s a good idea that isn’t going to replace controllers in the long term.

There’s some twitter stuff as well, and a recommendation for trueachievements.com, which I think is a good topic for a post another day.

The MMOs that I have really gotten on with over the years have always had a certain lack of level progression. Ultima Online, (old, real) Star Wars Galaxies, Eve Online. Not a level grind between them, or rather carefully hidden level grinds of a different kind.  This is why last night something strange happened. I mentioned it over the weekend, but my anxiety over levels increased massively last nigh in LOTRO when I traveled to Bree on the way to help out a lower level Kin-member. After a quick swift-travel from Rivendell to Bree I rode in through the gate and the guard was different. The gard was red to me instead of purple.

This has never happened to me before in a level based game. The original level cap is in sight. All I did was ding level 43 after a productive evening of running around Angmar laughing at people getting killed trying to get through magical electric fences and now I can taste the (old) level cap. I know I can make it. I know I can beat this game if I pretend the expansion didn’t happen. I could be there by the end of the week if I didn’t bother going to work.

That’s when the dread set in. This is really going to end in 17 levels. I can’t see us sticking around for the raiding, and with the slow trickle of new content every two months we can continue hanging around but the weekly thing will probably go away. We might have to become a real guild. And that scares me to death!

There was some talk of moving on to another game next but I think I’m done with fantasy MMOs after this one. Unless something new comes along I don’t feel the need to try any more out.

My MMO funk hasn’t abated yet, not helped by me being crazy busy during the week while a bunch of really good console games have come out recently. When given the choice of playing an MMO or Burnout Paradise to unwind I’m afraid I’m off to the new island they released this week without thinking.

Still, LOTRO this week was really fun as we zipped through Book 5. Well we zipped until a Nazgûl without the required fifteen pints of beer to counter the crippling fear that he creates. By crippling I do indeed mean “cowering while not being able to do anything” crippling. Needless to say we all died, but next time we’ll be prepared and he’s toast.

Console Club (the name is so daft I think it stuck) on Tuesday was good as we had another full house of eight people. I’ve said it before and will say it again, but Burnout is one of the best exeriences a bunch of friends can have. Even the challenges aren’t that stressful when eight of you are trying to achieve the same daft jump (usually involving a big hoop at the airfield) and people can’t quite get their car through it. This time you may be first, but next time you might just not be able to get it to mesh and be last. The new island came out this week as well, with yet another 1Gb patch. Luckily being able to actually buy the island and set the patch downloading from the xbox website meant that it was all ready for me when I got in from work. Sometimes technology actually works to make things better! So far I think the island is really well designed. It’s quite small, but the insane number of shortcuts and routes on it mean that it’s actually a lot more technical than the rest of the content and requires more skill and better memory than most of the rest of the game. I can’t wait to try some marked man on there with the others.

I’m not ashamed to say I’ve also been playing Wallace and Gromit Episode 1 this week as well. I’m a massive fan of point and click adventures and mourn their passing out of mainstream. Lucky for the world Telltale Games still make them, and Season 1 of Sam and Max is coming this week so I really can’t wait for that. I played the first few episodes of season 1 when they first came out but never got around to playing the later ones. Having it on a big TV will be a lot more useful and encourage me to play more. I can’t wait.

I got two new games this week. Prototype is sending me mixed signals, but that’s mainly because I’m looking at it from a “I’m going to write something about this kind of game soon” angle and comparing it to every game that’s come before. I will say it’s more enjoyable than inFamous in places, but there are some things from there that I’m missing. The powers are certainly more interesting in Prototype and everything feels a lot more connected in combat. The other new game I got was Red Faction: Guerrilla, which I haven’t played enough to know if it’s good but I can say I’ve had fun blowing things up so far.

This is a week of people missing on various days of game playing mean we’re probably not making progress in LOTRO towards the book. I’m actually eyeing the rapidly approaching level 50 and the fact that most of the books were aimed at that level with some trepidation as it’ll usher in a period of being able to do the books constantly (except for any artificial barriers the game throws at us). Once we’re past that then it’s onto the expansion and before we know it we’re having to wait for Turbine to write new content! OK, that’s worrying about something that I really shouldn’t do, but I’m enjoying LOTRO more than I’ve ever enjoyed a fantasy MMO before and I don’t want it to end when I know it must. In about a years time probably knowing us.

Last time I went all emo and declared I was burnt out on lots of MMOs. I may have burnt out them, but only on the old-school level based ones. I honestly can’t believe that they are the future and for the first time ever I can see World of Warcraft being beaten by another game. I’m not sure we’ll be able to call whichever game it is an MMO in the strictest sense, but I think the term MMO is dangerous, restrictive and really holding us back. Is Playstation Home an MMO? The furniture you place persists and there are things to do in there beyond chat. Technically you can’t call Planetside an MMO because the world resets when one side wins, but it’s classed as one while something like MAG which is very similar (although slightly less) isn’t. Is Darkfall an MMO if it’s total subscriber base (according to what I read on their forums, but this being true isn’t as important as the point) is less than the maximum concurrent number of players in Eve on a Sunday night? Why do nearly all MMOs have less concurrent players than Halo 3 (seems to peak at 170k nowadays). How does that make them massively multiplayer?

MMO is a rubbish term, somebody should kill it. What is Massive anyway? Are games that cater for specific interest groups like Darkfall or A Tale in the Desert massive compared to WoW? Is any one of those three games any less worthy to exist because of it? Massive is a useless term, drop it. Halo is more massive than your game (probably, I don’t know which game you play so you might play WoW and I’m wrong there).

The term MMO is holding us back.

The crop of games coming this just such as The Agency and Global Agenda have common areas where you can hang out, but the fun bits are heavily instanced. All Points Bulletin, I believe, is heavily instanced as well. These games are going to gain more than they lose I believe because they allow more of a focused experience. I can hear the screams of people who don’t agree from here.

Let’s examine the fact that Halo is pushing 200k concurrent players whenever I check at peak time. Halo 3 was released in 2007 so isn’t exactly new. What is it about Halo that makes it so big? It’s fun. It’s drop-in fun. And that makes it bigger than most MMOs. That is why we’re seeing a whole batch of new games that look like FPS MMOs with heavy instancing, it’s a known market. Why was the Halo MMO canned? Probably because it lost the core of what Halo is and so wouldn’t attract the players. Put a communal area into Halo 3 where your actions persist and you’d have one of the biggest western MMOs with next to no effort at all. Nobody would use the odd communal bit that somebody had stapled on the side of the game, but but you’d have ticked a box. You could adapt Halo into being what Global Agenda, for instance, is without losing what makes Halo so popular as long as you don’t add a barrier for entering into fights. People want to drop into a fight when they want and have ten minutes of fun.

Sorry, they’re MMOs aren’t they? They aren’t meant to be quick fun, they’re meant to have grind to stop us reaching max level in minutes. If we didn’t have the grind then we’d never play because what would there be to do once we hit max level? Eve and Darkfall understand this trap and get it right, as I hope this new crop of games do as well. I also hope you don’t have to rely on PvP in order to do this as there must be a place for a good story as well. I’m looking at you Star Wars: The Old Republic with your fancy story that scares people so, because it by definition has to have an end.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so depressed with MMOs. Developers are trying new things, I just hope players are ready to try them.

Lately things have been nudging me towards the realisation that I don’t actually like MMOs. I seem to like playing them sure, but as games they’re mostly severely lacking.

Now there’s a bold statement to open up with, I’d better qualify it. As some of you might know I actually have a quite structured start of my week game time wise. On Mondays I play LOTRO with some friends, on Tuesdays I play xbox with mostly other friends and I have an admission to make: I find Tuesdays a lot more fun. It’s nothing about the people on Mondays, it’s the game itself as although LOTRO one of the best examples of what it is, it’s not as good a game as those we play on Tuesdays.

One problem with LOTRO is that I’m not getting into the greater community. I have a character who I’m levelling up with some friends so that we can all do content together once a week. If I play this character too much then I’m too powerful. If I don’t play it enough then I hold everybody else back. There is no room for negotiation, I must be within a certain level range if I’m going to enjoy playing with my friends. This isn’t a problem except for the fact that I can’t be bothered to have any alts going. This means that I only play with those friends and so I’m excluded from the greater community. I can’t toggle off XP gain and anything meaningful I do that isn’t crafting will level me. This can’t be good game design can it? I’m being punished for playing too much just because I want to play with a certain group of friends each Monday.

It gets worse than that. We have more than seven friends who want to play together. Group size in LOTRO is seven people so I can only directly play with 7 at a time. Sure I can chat to the others but they’re not effecting what’s going on. Nothing too strange there, but on Tuesday this week we had a full 8 player game of Burnout Paradise going. Yes, out of the MMO and the console game the wrong one has the largest group size. When you add the fact that Burnout is actually more enjoyable to play than LOTRO; it has far more moment that make you laugh together, far more unpredictable events that happen and far more things that you’d want to talk about after you’ve stopped playing and you get to the point where I’m questioning if I actually like MMOs at all.

That’s not totally fair, Eve sits there mocking me about that attitude. In that game it really is the people who make it what it is and it seems that you have much more scope for interrating with other players. I might be missing something about games like LOTRO, but in Eve we all have a common goal that we are working together, which is the corporation. There’s also no artificial barriers stopping me from doing things with anybody in my corp irrespctive of how long they have been playing.

When it comes down to it my problem is that LOTRO is very restrictive. I can’t play it how I want to play, I have to play how Turbine think it should be played and it’s crushing my enthusiasm. I think I may have come to a point where an MMO needs to be a sandbox for me to really enjoy. The story is never as good as a non-MMO and although LOTRO probably has the best story out of all the MMOs I’m having more fun playing Gears of War on co-op after we finish recording the podcast. The story may be thin, predictable and in (well OK, most) places lazy but at least you feel that you’re part of it. LOTRO is turning into a running gag of the fact that you’re doing all the heavy lifting for the fellowship without them knowing so that they think that they’re better than they really are. It feels like we’re babysitting the fellowship, which is funny I’ll admit but somewhat forced at the same time.

When I started LOTRO with the guys I really wanted to reach Moria and see the end of the game. Now I don’t really care, I just want to hang out with my friends while playing and see how we get shoe-horned into the story this week so I can have a smile to myself. I’m bored of the games getting in the way of me having fun. Levels and the grind are a real turnoff for me now. Can I just have fun when I want, how I want?

People look at Global Agenda and The Agency and MAG and question if they’re MMOs. I don’t care, they look like steps in the right direction to me.

It’s topic show time and this week on the Van Hemlock (and Jon)  podcast we’re talking about DRM because silly Van Hemlock uses a PC for his game playing and got hit by SecuROM punishing him for changing his graphics card. Apparently I should stop telling him that he wouldn’t have that problem with a console or I’ll have a little accident when crossing the road so I went light on him in the show and didn’t tell him that every ten minutes. Fear not though as I’ve been doing that all week over the phone, messenger and to his face so I think he might be getting my subtle hints about the supremacy of consoles.

You can grab the show over at virginworlds.com.

Tune in next week (earlier I hope, I really need to edit faster) to find out what we thought about E3.

My games blog has been something of a neglected wasted opportunity for a long time now. I rarely write on it and when I do it’s always just a quick ramble and nothing of any note. I do actually have things I want to say though, but never take the time to actually write.

The real reason is, of course, that I got fed up with not having a snappy domain on my blog. I get so few readers on the old one that I thought I’d just bite the bullet and start from scratch with the new location and, this is the shocking bit, actually tell people I have a blog so that people read it.

So consider this an announcement that you should come read my new blog. Which you are already doing. Oh, never mind. As you were.