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What you missed in The Matrix Online
Yes, The Matrix Online sucked. Its gameplay was an abhorrent pile of repetitive garbage that offered no real direction other than doing storyline-less missions until you hit 50, in which there was no endgame. The combat was interesting, as it offered scripted camera shots for insane kung-fu flips and hits, but it wasn't enough to "save" the game. I hear you.But if you think the above paragraph is all The Matrix Online had to offer, then you are sadly mistaken. You missed out on storyline events, PvPvE, amazing roleplayers, writers, and graphic artists. You missed out on philosophy, politics, memorable characters, and puzzles. You actually missed out on the bulk of what The Matrix Online had to offer, all of which makes the game's passing more painful.MxO wasn't World of Warcraft, and it certainly had enough dark spots in the game design. But the game and its developers brought a very different style of play to the MMO scene -- one that should be commemorated with a few looks back on some of the best events the game had to offer.
EVE Evolved: Finding the perfect corporation in five easy steps
It's said that sandbox MMO EVE Online doesn't really begin to shine until you join a good player-run corporation. There's only so much a lone pilot can accomplish and a lot of the game's most rewarding experiences are based around groups and collaboration. Wormhole expeditions, PvP, territorial wars, politics and much of EVE's other emergent gameplay routes rely heavily on forming groups and friendships in-game. In fact, I think you'd be hard pressed to find an MMO which doesn't have its game experience improved by group activities and forming friendships. But just as choosing the right corporation for your play style can make the game a lot better, choosing the wrong one or not joining one at all can ruin a new player's experience of the game. Over the past few weeks, I've had several emails from readers looking for advice on how to find a good corporation. In this article aimed at new and prospective EVE players, I introduce a simple five-step approach for finding that perfect corporation who can turn playing EVE from a potentially boring experience into a very rewarding one. (UPDATE: I had accidentally disabled comments, comments are now enabled on page 2)
Anti-Aliased: Microtransaction mayhem
You know, I would be quite amiss if I didn't take the time to weigh in on the microtransaction and subscription argument that has been going around town lately. It seems to be the buzz on everybody's lips.For those of you not in the know as to what I'm talking about, here's the deal. With the upcoming release of Champions Online, Cryptic is taking a double-edged approach to generating revenue. The game is going to run on a standard subscription package, but it will also let players have the option of buying extra "account options" and costume pieces via Cryptic Points.Now, some people feel as if this is a perfectly fine way to conduct business, while others find this system to be nothing more than price gouging and unnecessary. How do I feel? Well, jump the break and I'll give you my feelings on both sides of the argument.
Massively webcomic: Grinders - A Backup Plan
Looks like the Matrix Online is taking it's last breath today, which is just the way these things go sometimes. It was a niche game, but the idea of playing a video game inside a computer world is still a nifty hall of mirrors. Personally I hope the new TRON movie revitalizes the franchise and puts an MMO on the table. I sure would like to take on the Master Control Program myself someday.Have a funny story of your own? Submit your tale complete with a screenshot to lemuel@massively.com. The best will be allowed to hack into your brain. Or just put in the comic.%Gallery-63060%Lemuel Pew is a webcomic artist and MMO player with the attention span of a guppy. Between sketching gamers in cartoon form and inventing a paint-drying MMO, he draws an online comic called Blank It. Feel free to watch his Twitter at your own risk.
The Daze of Darkfall Week 3: Keep rollin', rollin', rollin', yeah
Hey there avid Darkfall readers! It's week three of The Daze of Darkfall, and that means we only have one week left in our feature! Time sure does fly when you're getting your butt kicked in defense of your city!And that is totally what I did this week! Yes, that's right, it's time for a real look into "hardcore" PvP and raiding! I was out in the PvE sections killing skeletons, I was defending our city against enemy invaders, and I was working with others in harvesting camps.So this is it. This is the cream of the Darkfall crop. This is what people say is the most amazing part of this game. Is it? Will it live up to the hype? Skip along with me after the break, and we'll go through week three, step by step.
EVE Evolved: Just another week in the Sleeper's den
Following last week's reassuringly popular article "Untangling the mystery of the Sleepers", our little expeditionary alliance has had an extremely action-packed week. In addition to several PvP encounters with roaming gangs, there's been a POS siege, a system invasion and a lot of drama. At the end of it all, I'm left with a renewed sense of awe for the unique experiences EVE Online can deliver if you're just willing to seek them out and actively involve yourself. At times I can truly immerse myself in EVE and feel like I'm taking an actor's part in a kind of intergalactic play scene, an experience I've never come close to in any other MMO. Taking part in these events is almost like being painted into an illustrative chapter of some historic record. In this article, I hope to solidify that record and share a glimpse of what it's like to immerse yourself in this part of EVE. What follows is a storytold account of Total Comfort alliance's deadly week in the Sleeper's den.
Anti-Aliased: Things that make you go kweh
So this week wasn't an easy week for me. Darkfall seems to be slowly consuming all of my free time, because I sure as heck don't want to have Tasos Flambouras kicking down my door with his server logs and curses of inappropriate reporting. (Although at this point I'd love to see my server logs because they're probably long enough to trip him when he carries them down hallways.)Anyway, that's not my point. My point is that I just couldn't think of anything to write about. Nothing would come into my head no matter how hard I tried. Then, last night, when I was munching on some Milano cookies, it finally hit me. (I'm totally being paid for that Milano cookies reference, by the way. The truth is coming out -- I'm rolling in Pepperidge Farm bribe money and I don't care who knows how corrupt I am!)I should write a column on things that drive me batty about MMOs! Things that just, well, never quite made sense to me, yet we do them. There are lots of examples of this, of course, but let me show you some of the things that make it to the top of my list.
Massively webcomic: Grinders - See, It's a Metaphor
Especially during press and publicity events like San Diego's Comic Con, we are teased with what future games are to come, and lament the games that we cling to yet so desperately yearn to abandon. Grinders understands your pain. We're also pretty entertained by all the silly acronyms.Have a funny story of your own? Submit your tale complete with a screenshot to lemuel@massively.com. The best will be allowed to ripen on the vine. Or just put in the comic.%Gallery-63060%Lemuel Pew is a webcomic artist and MMO player with the attention span of a guppy. Between sketching gamers in cartoon form and inventing a paint-drying MMO, he draws an online comic called Blank It. Feel free to watch his Twitter at your own risk.
Meet the Sparkplay Media team: Part One
Here at Massively we recently got the chance to sit down with a couple members of the Sparkplay Media team and pick their brains about their upcoming MMO, Earth Eternal. However, these guys had a lot to say to us! So much so that we couldn't fit it into one of our standard interviews!So that's why we're bringing you "Meet the Sparkplay Media Team," a two part feature article with all of the info and answers that we've been exposed to. Today and tomorrow you're going to get to know the lead designer, a concept artist, lead writer (and moonlighting CEO), and one of the programmers behind Earth Eternal.Today we're sitting down with Greg Chapman, the lead designer, and Alex Madrigal, one of the concept artists. If you wish to comment on today's interviews, please do so on page two of our interviews. Otherwise, hit that continue reading button and come on in!
The Daze of Darkfall week 2: AFK your way to fame and fortune
Confused as to why this isn't in Anti-Aliased? Well, "The Daze of Darkfall" month long feature has moved to a new home as a standalone feature! Isn't that grand? Now I can talk about my adventures in Darkfall while still unleashing my biased opinions upon you in Anti-Aliased. It's a win/win situation, if you ask me.So what's in the picture above? Well that's me AFKing my way to hardcore status in Darkfall. All you need is an old college textbook and a comb cleverly placed on your left arrow key and you too can get to max run skill with just a few nights of AFKing! Forget running into walls, this is the future! I like to call it "hardware macroing."But this isn't all, dear readers! I have lots more fun inside of this week's Darkfall report! Come, continue reading and enjoy the insanity of Agon, where AFKing is better than playing and naked is the new armored!
Shifting Perspectives: Getting started and leveling 1-9
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, we begin at the beginning, and we will go on until the end. Then we will stop. Then we will ask ourselves why we are taking advice from 19th century children's literature rather than the books that are relevant to our interests, like Why Buying a House You Have No Idea How To Renovate Is Probably a Bad Idea, or Smoked Salmon and You: A Guide To Not Eating Yourself Into a Coma.Greetings, Druids. I took the liberty of rolling a few new Druids to test out the improved leveling process, and if possible I'm going to level a brand-new one all the way to 80 to make sure everything in the guide's been personally tested and accurate as of the 3.1/3.2 game world. Today we'll start off with a baby Tauren Druid on the PTR who's now level 9; later I'll be switching between a Night Elf and a Tauren.Level Feral.This is the single best thing you can do for yourself, at least for leveling in classic content. As we've previously discussed, the Druid is still hobbled by its initial design as an endgame secondary healer, but you can skip a certain portion of this early weakness by leveling feral. Piggybacking off all of the DPS leather that went into the game to support the billions of people who rolled Rogues is a nice advantage, but the real attraction of leveling Feral lies in the ability to DPS in forms that don't require mana. Being able to save your mana bar for healing and buffing decreases downtime enormously (more so as you gain levels, as our mana efficiency and damage aren't that great early on).
All the World's a Stage: Guild themes
All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one man in his time plays many roles.Every guild tries to make itself unique in one way or another, and yet much of the time it's hard to tell many guilds apart. Most guilds say something like "we are a group of friends" who "focus on casual play" or "on raiding progression" or something which can make clear its priorities in the game, whether in PvP, PvE, or RP.Roleplaying guilds have a special opportunity to distinguish themselves with all these elements and then some. In addition to raiding schedules, loot distribution rules, and whatnot, they also have a story -- some idea of where the people in this guild come from, and what binds them together. The story theme that binds them may be something as simple as striving to fight against all evil threats to their homeland, or it could be as involved as running a weekly faire, full of trading, performance, and all manner of festivities. Most roleplayers seem to just drift into an RP guild based on who they happen to meet in the course of their travels and what sorts of friendships they are able to develop. I worked this way for a long time, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, and in the end I gave up, feeling increasingly frustrated that I wasn't drifting into guilds that could really meet my needs. Finally I decided to steer my own ship and I realized that the theme of any particular guild could make a big difference as to whether or not I enjoyed being in it.
EVE Evolved: Untangling the mystery of the Sleepers
When EVE Online's Apocrypha expansion was released, details on how wormholes and the 2500 new systems that came with them worked were sketchy. The advanced Sleeper AI found protecting these systems were a force to be feared, unknown and mysterious. There were no guides, no stories of encounters on the forums and anyone that had mounted a successful expedition was keeping their closely guarded secrets to themselves and raking in the ISK.My corporation (Pillowsoft) were among the first to launch their expedition, having previously prepared an Orca with a medium POS, fuel, equipment and everything else we thought we'd need. We set up in an unknown system and explored this new frontier with a cautious optimism. Over the months that followed, we learned a great deal about EVE's new wormhole systems and the Sleepers that lived in them. After striking gold many times and making each of our expedition members over a billion ISK richer, we began telling our story and giving up those secrets we had been so careful to protect. Today, a great deal is now known about the "unknown" wormhole systems and with ever more corporations launching their own expeditions, it's now more important than ever to research the Sleeper menace before venturing into the abyss.Join me for this extensive three-page article where I dole out the fruits of my research on wormholes and begin to untangle the mystery of the Sleepers.
Massively webcomic: Grinders - Cronyism Cronies
The Grinders gag today is from our own James Egan, who made a critical typo while working on an All Points Bulletin article. Swapping words in the title gave us a whole different game concept, the gritty underground world of white collar crime. Which reminds me, time to check my Swiss bank account, I'm sure Realtime Worlds' check has cleared by now.Have a funny story of your own? Submit your tale complete with a screenshot to lemuel@massively.com. The best will be held over the shredder until they talk. Or just put in the comic.%Gallery-63060%Lemuel Pew is a webcomic artist and MMO player with the attention span of a guppy. Between sketching gamers in cartoon form and inventing a paint-drying MMO, he draws an online comic called Blank It. Feel free to watch his Twitter at your own risk.
Anti-Aliased: The Daze of Darkfall
I'm still not exactly sure what I've done. I remember pressing a few buttons on the Darkfall website, a really long download, and then a very large splash screen appearing on my desktop with the Darkfall logo emblazoned across it.I think I downloaded and installed Darkfall. The North American version, in fact. I thought it was just going to be a one night stand between the two of us, but I guess I was wrong. Looks like I'm back in with the game and I'm going in-depth. This time around though, I'm going to do some things differently. There's going to be no reviewing and less critiquing. It's just going to be a straight up re-telling of my experience in the "PvP experience of a lifetime" with a little snark added in, of course. You guys be the judges of Darkfall this time.This week's events include jumping in with a brand new clan, getting the newbie experience all over again, and the capturing of a city. Exciting stuff, right? Come with me, I'll tell ya all about it.
All the World's a Stage: Out of Character
All the World's a Stage. It really is. All the World of Warcraft is a actually a stage -- and all its orcs and humans merely players, each one with a role to play.When people hear about roleplayers in WoW for the first time, some get the impression that we take our little game of "let's pretend" way too seriously, that everything we do in the game has to be some sort of mind-blowing expression of our innermost true feelings. But the truth of the matter is that only a portion of what we do in the game involves stories and character -- a lot of what we do and say to other players is not "in character" at all. In fact, our out-of-character (OOC) communication is essential in order to properly enjoy the in-character (IC) elements, and good roleplayers do a lot of cool things to help make both sides complement each other.Much of what roleplayer does is out of character, and rightly so. Even just pushing buttons in order to activate abilities could be considered "OOC" -- in a way, the only character you can ever totally immerse yourself in is... yourself. Any time you play a role that isn't yourself, there's always some part you which is there in the background, knowing that it's all just a show. You can't really ignore your true self -- you have to let it guide and inform every part of the role you play.The same is true when roleplaying in WoW. Roleplay is strengthened when you open up and accept OOC communication with others, establish real relationships in addition to those your characters create. Actors in a play have to support each other as real people or their play will fail, and in the same way, the honest communication we open up with our roleplaying friends can sometimes be what defines our roleplaying experience and gives it true meaning.
EVE Evolved: Mission-running top five tips
In the first two parts of this guide on mission-running in EVE Online, I explained the basics of mission-running and went on to give a race-by-race breakdown of the most popular mission-running ships. In this final instalment of the EVE Evolved mission-running guide, I dig up my top five tips and tricks for improving your standings, mission-running speed and general mission income in EVE. Tip #1 - Gaining faction standing As high faction standing unlocks the agents of every corp in an entire faction rather than just from one corp, faction standing gains are very desirable and often the ultimate goal of early mission-running. In addition to a few other methods discussed later in this article, faction standing gains can be had from COSMOS missions. These are special once-only missions, like quests in the standard MMO paradigm. They are given out by special agents-in-space located within EVE's COSMOS constellations, some at designated agent sites and some hidden away at moons or sites only able to be found with probes. Each of these missions counts as an important mission for the purposes of faction standing gains and their rewards can be extremely good. Using COSMOS missions, it's possible to boost your faction standings from around 4 to up to 6 or 8 in some of these areas. Read on as I give my top five mission-running tips to maximise your income from mission-running.
Massively webcomic: Grinders - Leave the Vase, Take the Cannoli
Every MMO with a floating economy seems to have problems with gold farming, but Final Fantasy XI makes the issue even more peculiar by having actual plant cultivation involved in the process. With Grinders I'd prefer to imagine some angry moogle mafioso running an underground botanical operation for money and power.Have a funny story of your own? Submit your tale complete with a screenshot to lemuel@massively.com. The best will be ruthlessly sold by moogles for fun an profit. Or just put in the comic.%Gallery-63060%Lemuel Pew is a webcomic artist and MMO player with the attention span of a guppy. Between sketching gamers in cartoon form and inventing a paint-drying MMO, he draws an online comic called Blank It. Feel free to watch his Twitter at your own risk.
Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a Druid
Every week (sort of), Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, in the anticipation of a patch likely to bring many new players into the fold, we descend into the depths of an ancient library in pursuit of Druidic history, lean back in our chair considering the modern form of the class, cast a gimlet eye toward the future, and then wonder how many more clichés we can shove into a sentence before readers start writing angry letters to our editor.Dear new Druids,Welcome to the class -- and for some of you, welcome back. I've observed a flood of players rolling premade Druids on the PTR to try out with the new bear and cat forms, and with the promise of new moonkin and tree forms arriving at some point in the future, I think it's reasonable to expect lots of you trying (or rediscovering) the class on the live realms. You are most welcome, and we are glad to have you. This is the best class in the game.Now, I'll grant I'm prejudiced, because I have loved this class since the first day I started playing. I love it so much that it's difficult for me to remember that there are 5...or 8...or...however many other classes there are. I don't know. I haven't checked lately. I'm told Blizzard added another one, but I can't be expected to keep up with every little thing.So.It is possible that we have changed more than any other class between the beginning of the game and July 2009 as I write this. I want you to know what the Druid is all about, why it might be a good choice for you, and why (as much as I find this difficult to write) you may wish to steer clear before we start a series on leveling a Druid.
Star Wars Galaxies Dev Diary: Let the PvP battles begin
Even while the Star Wars Galaxies team is plugging away on their newest game update, the staff still has some time to give us some of their thought process behind their work on the game.Today on Massively we're happy to have Thomas 'Hanse' Eidson, one of SWG's system designers, dropping by to give us his thoughts on creating the brand new PvP battlefields for Update 10. The new battlefields are areas for team based PvP, where teams accomplish objectives in addition to annhilating one another to win the map. Think of it like Battlefield 2, where both teams have a set reinforcement count and will lose should that number ever drop to zero.Thomas has much to say on their efforts to make sure teams were always balanced, to the creation of new rewards for the battefields, to finding plots of land to even make these new areas! Hit the continue reading button below, and grab yourself an insider's view of the development of Star Wars Galaxies.
