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RuneScape debates auction halls on retro servers
The old school servers for RuneScape are something of a community experiment. Yes, the servers are meant to keep a classic feeling alive alongside the modern game, but they're also meant to be fun for the players. This is why the developers have opened up a thread for discussing whether or not to bring the Grand Exchange on to the old school servers, with a detailed explanation of the potential benefits and drawbacks. Some of the features available in the Grand Exchange on the "main" version of the game would not necessarily be available on the old school site due to technical limitations. It would, however, replace the Trading Post while still leaving the game's normal trade interface untouched. If you're an old school gamer who wants to sound off on the matter, take a look at the thread and figure out what would best serve the community. That's why it's up for discussion, after all.
Yes, people still play Meridian 59
Meridian 59 may not enjoy the population numbers it did almost 20 years ago, but there are still a handful of dedicated players playing every day. A recent article at The New Yorker takes a more personal look at a few of these remaining players. "I've tried to leave the game many times over the years," admits Tim Trude, a 33-year-old player from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Tim first started playing the MMO at the age of 15. "But I always return. Some of these people I've grown up with. We have been enemies or friends forever." The article goes on to quote other players and document a brief history of the game's development, including the source code release in 2012. Meridian 59 is looking to launch on Steam sometime this year, and its current code-maintainer is looking forward to the possibility of bringing in new players once again.
The sexiest Mac desk you'll ever see... from 1988
Everyone takes photos of their Mac desks these days, but rarely do we get a glimpse at setups from yesteryear. Ned Raggett was ahead of the game in 1988, snapping a photo of his computer desk way before it was the cool thing to do. His describes the setup as follows: "Let's see, dot-matrix printer on the left, my Mac 512K enhanced with the Kensington add-ons here and there (yes, including the little mouse pocket), extra disk drive on the right along with the disk holder itself, mouse pad...well well well. " In 1988, this was a respectable rig, and that rather ornate table is the perfect place for it all to sit. Great stuff. [Photo credit: Ned Raggett]
MMO Mechanics: Three old mechanics I want back
My column has typically heralded modern MMOs as superior advancements of the genre we all adore, but in this week's MMO Mechanics I want to share a small list of some old mechanics I still mourn today. Many older MMOs featured gameplay that could simultaneously exasperate and impress players, especially when the mechanics in question supported a real sense of immersion or realism in otherwise virtual worlds. Recent titles have aimed to open up the in-game world by making it more accessible and much less infuriating, but this has put some of my favourite mechanics and little touches on the development chopping block. I'm particularly fond of game mechanics that make real-world sense. Real life would not reward you for falling off cliffs, running headlong into a crowded room of enemies, or stumbling off the well-beaten track into the untamed wilderness. Consequences in real life can feel rather scary, so I really enjoyed the fear factor of some older MMOs because this allowed for a much more thrilling -- and ultimately rewarding -- gaming experience. I am going to talk about just three older mechanics I particularly enjoy that have fallen out of fashion, but feel free to lengthen my list by adding your favourites in the comments below.
Timewalk Games, creators of gold DuckTales NES cart, shuts down
Timewalk Games, a company that specialized in reproducing classic video games from the pre-HD era, has blown the dust off a cartridge for the last time. For those unfamiliar with Timewalk's work, you may remember them as the company that crafted the golden DuckTales NES cartridge. The Timewalk website has been all but cleared of any signs of inhabitance; a farewell message is all you'll find on the main page. It reads in part, "Unfortunately, we no longer have time to continue forward with the Timewalk Games project. Unfortunately those of us involved with Timewalk have very busy lives outside of Timewalk (Jobs, Family, etc.) and although we love doing what we do, we cannot keep up with it anymore." While Timewalk served a niche market, this nonetheless puts a damper on would-be old-school collectors, and we wish them the best in their future endeavors. [Thanks, Scott!] [Image: Capcom]
Pantheon interview offers glimpse of economy, housing, and more
With the imminent shut down of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes on the horizon, eyes are turning to the upcoming Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen project spearheaded by one of the earlier fantasy game's creators. Brad McQuaid, first known for his work on the original EverQuest, is looking to fill the niche for old-school games that focus on group content and slow progression. How much will Pantheon fit the bill as the go-to game for all those old-school gamers looking for a challenging new home? Before the weekend announcement caught everyone off-guard, we nabbed McQuaid and Director of Development Salim Grant to find out a few more details about the game and its economy (no bind-on-pickup!), crafting, housing, and classes and races.
The Soapbox: MMO 'nostalgia' isn't nostalgia
Here's the Merriam-Webster online dictionary definition of the word nostalgia. nos·tal·gia noun \nä-ˈstal-jə, nə- also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl-\ : pleasure and sadness that is caused by remembering something from the past and wishing that you could experience it again 1 : the state of being homesick : homesickness 2 : a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also : something that evokes nostalgia And here's where I tell you that nostalgia is the most misused, overused, and overly simplistic word in modern MMO discourse.
The Daily Grind: Do you still hang with your original MMO guild?
Next month marks the 10th anniversary of the formation of my favorite MMO gaming guild. It wasn't my first guild, mind you, but it was the one I enjoyed the most. It was one of those groups that transcended the original game and spilled over into other MMOs and ongoing meatspace relationships. Occasionally we still game together, too, but not as often as we did before adulthood and responsibility reared their annoying heads. What about you, Massively readers? Do you still hang with your old-school MMO buddies or your original guild, either in-game or out? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
'Old School' RuneScape grows to 1M players, opens God Wars dungeon
The "Old School" version of RuneScape has proven to be a hit with players, growing to over one million users. Jagex trumpeted the milestone along with a new update to the game bringing back the God Wars dungeon. Executive Producer Phil Mansell thinks that this shows classic servers have strong appeal for the community: "Seeing RuneScape Old School hit the million player mark so soon after launch is a great milestone for the game, and our players have joined the celebration by voting for the game's most epic update to date." Over 89% of the playerbase voted for the inclusion of the God Wars dungeon, in which groups will face-off against four bosses for a shot at a legendary Godsword and other shiny gear. You can check out the dungeon video after the break. [Source: Jagex press release]
The Daily Grind: How would you define 'massive'?
In our editorial Soapbox this week, a Massively writer suggested that MMO players have a difficult time agreeing on what constitutes an MMO at least in part because of fundamental confusion over the term "massive." I've always thought the word too relative to be useful; I like the idea of playing alongside thousands of fellow geeks, but very few of the MMOs and MMORPGs I've played since the dawn of the genre ever actually put more than a few dozen people on my screen at a time, and those that tried anyway usually lacked the tech to pull it off without extreme lag. Most MMOs, even single-shard EVE Online, are divided in some way, be it over shards or server boundaries or layered zone instancing or dungeon instances or phasing or even lobbies, and it just doesn't make much difference unless the economy is tanked as a result. A game that isn't massive but feels massive is more an MMO to me than one that's technically massive but plays like a single-player title -- "massive" seems a happy illusion at best and a double-standardish proxy for "old-school" at worst. But many gamers are convinced they know exactly where the line in the sand must be drawn between the massives and the nots. So today, let's assume you, the readers, get to decide for the genre what "massive" means. How many people does it entail -- and how and where and in what numbers precisely must they interact -- for a game to be "massive" enough to merit the term MMO? And how many old school MMORPGs would fit that definition? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Old-school RuneScape early access starts today
Those old-school RuneScape servers we told you about earlier this week are launching an early access period today. The shards will revisit the title as it was in late 2007, a window that Jagex says is "heralded as one of the defining periods of the game by its players." The firm is opening up a voting period through which players will decide how much developer investment should be devoted to old-school RuneScape going forward. The options range from a basic service with critical maintenance to a full dev team that will iterate based on player input. Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard notes that this isn't the first time his company has left major decisions in the hands of its users. In 2011, RuneScape's Free Trade and Wilderness mechanics were reintroduced to the game following a player poll. "Our players' dedication, passion, feedback, and enthusiasm all provide the compass, energy, and satisfaction that powers Jagex," he said. Jagex says that over 250,000 votes were cast in the old-school poll. [Source: Jagex press release]
RuneScape is bringing old-school back
There ain't no school like the old school. RuneScape players have spoken, and Jagex has listened: It's time to bring back a touch of nostalgia to the game in the form of pure old school servers, with the exact mix still to be determined. A recent announcement confirms that the servers will be coming back and reminds players to keep voting to determine the makeup of these servers. All voters will receive the first month on the throwback server for free. For those who want more hard information from the development team, a special live forum chat will be held on Wednesday at 3 p.m. EST. Players can also begin posting to a forum thread tomorrow to help give the developers some advance idea of what to expect. If you're one of the 160,000 players who wanted to party like it's 2007, it looks as if your wish is coming true.
Rise and Shiny revisit: Asheron's Call
Another week of this column makes me amazed at how yet another older title, this time Asheron's Call, got so much right and yet remains so under-appreciated. A lot of this dismissal of past MMOs comes from the simple fact that humans do not enjoy something they have seen before, at least not the same as they enjoyed it when they first found it. In other words, we loved games like Asheron's Call, but they have fallen out of favor because we have moved on to bigger, newer, shinier things. After all, most of us don't sit around a fire and swap stories for entertainment anymore; we watch television. Although, damn, a fire sounds nice doesn't it? The warm feeling that I might feel from an evening swapping tales in front of the hearth is the same one I get from older titles like Asheron's Call. These elder titles have a charm built in, thanks to dated graphics that remind us of younger years and times of discovery. But there's something else going on here. These older games, games like Asheron's Call, are still really good.
Fraunhofer develops extra-small 1Gbps infrared transceiver, recalls our PDA glory days
Our 1997-era selves would die with envy right about now. Fraunhofer has developed a new generation of infrared transceiver that can transfer data at 1Gbps, or well above anything that our vintage PDAs could manage. While the speed is nothing new by itself -- we saw such rates in 2010 Penn State experiments -- it's the size that makes the difference. The laser diode and processing are efficient enough to fit into a small module whose transceiver is as large as a "child's fingernail." In theory, the advancement makes infrared once more viable for mobile device syncing, with room to grow: even the current technology can scale to 3Gbps, lead researcher Frank Deicke says, and it might jump to 10Gbps with enough work. Along with the usual refinements, most of the challenge in getting production hardware rests in persuading the Infrared Data Association to adopt Deicke's work as a standard. If that ever comes to pass, we may just break out our PalmPilot's infrared adapter to try it for old time's sake.
Some Assembly Required: The newer-is-better fallacy
There's this idea that old-school MMO players don't know what they want. I've an inkling that the folks espousing this idea have little experience with the old-school games they purport to be evolving beyond. This doesn't stop them from claiming that old-schoolers are in love with a time period instead of a game, though, which in turn intimates that old-schoolers' minds are too muddled to know exactly what they do and do not prefer. Regardless of how you feel about old vs. new, sandbox vs. themepark, or world vs. game, it's easy to see that conflating someone's personal preference with nostalgia results in a perspective that's of limited usefulness at best.
The Soapbox: The classic Dungeons & Dragons problem
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. Older tabletop roleplaying games are a mess. I realize that some our readers may not have had the unique pleasure of getting introduced to gaming via a handful of dice and a pencil, but let me give you the very short version. A long time ago, a game called Dungeons & Dragons was written, and it was the first roleplaying game. Since then, we've seen a lot of other roleplaying games come out with different ideas and different themes. We've also seen a lot of other roleplaying games meant to intentionally hearken back to the days when Dungeons & Dragons was the only game in town. This is almost never a good idea. Nor is the idea unique to tabletop games. In fact, we're seeing the same thing in the MMO space. There are games that market themselves by promising to be a return to the days of Ultima Online or points related, a throwback to the old school of gaming. I'm pretty sure Vanguard was the first of that movement. And while I understand the sentiment, it pretty much always ends in tears for some very good reasons.
The Daily Grind: Have MMO standards changed for the better?
When Ultima Online launched in 1997, most of us were happy just to walk from one end of the city to the other without crashing. EverQuest didn't actually offer any quests in those early days. Star Wars Galaxies launched without vehicles, let alone starships, and World of Warcraft issued forth without any sort of formal PvP at all. But in 2012, our standards have changed. Now we complain when Star Wars: The Old Republic launches without a dungeon finder and when Guild Wars 2 dungeons feel a bit loose two weeks into the game. Our complaints are no longer about basic gameplay bugs and functionality, and so our discussions sound esoteric to all but the most die-hard MMO gamer. Does this mean our MMO standards have changed as our games have grown up -- and have they changed for the better? Or do we expect more from games than they can reasonably provide? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Gamestop CEO: Company could expand into vintage games business
Gamestop's brick and mortar locations may not stock gems from yesteryear, but that doesn't mean all those old trade-ins no longer exist. In fact, the resale giant has amassed such a large back catalogue of classics that its heavily considering an entrance into the vintage resale market, though when that will happen remains a mystery."If you go to eBay and look at all of the gaming stuff that's on there, it's unbelievable. Collector's stuff. We've got to be in that business. We will be," Gamestop CEO Paul Raines told Polygon. "We think there's a vintage sales opportunity, so we're accumulating some inventory. It's a big idea, and there's a few problems with it. The first one is sourcing the product, the condition, the refurbishment, all that stuff. But there's a customer for it. And we're working on some stuff we haven't announced yet."If/when it does enter the classic games business, Gamestop will do so through its website, rather than expanding the scope of its retail locations. How many priceless Atari 2600 carts would we have to trade in for a used iPad, do you think?
Bioshock custom rig is Big Daddy of pinball machines, gives players a taste of Rapture
If you're going to revisit a certain underwater dystopia, you might as well have a ball. At least that's the approach being taken by Sweden-based DIYer rasmadrak, who has decided to build a Bioshock-themed custom pinball machine just for kicks. The project is filled with lots of neat little touches from Rapture, including Little Sister vents and a few Big Daddy homages. The builder also does a pretty good job of drilling into the details and providing insight on the creation process -- like the challenge in using two different systems such as Arduino and chipKIT together, for example -- via detailed posts in the Poor Man's Pinball! blog. The project proved to be a pleasant shock to the system for fellow pinball aficionado Ben Heck, who gave the project a sprinkling of Heckendorn love via Twitter. Pinball geeks can also follow the saga, so to speak, by checking out the source link below.
Free for All: The old becomes new on Ragnarok's classic server
Ragnarok Online might seem very familiar to many of my readers. In fact, if you are from a certain age group, the group that grew up with the internet instead of watching it come into being while you were already living on your own, you might have played Ragnarok Online. I can often tell a Ragnarok fan as well. They're OK with the grind as long is it pays off in the end, and they usually have a pretty exact way of looking at MMOs. I have yet to find a Ragnarok player who is over 30 and who roleplays more than anything. In other words, Ragnarok has affected almost an entire generation of MMO gamers. Personally, I always enjoyed the graphics of the game when I got a few chances to play it, but the overwhelming world and gameplay was a bit too much, and I didn't really enjoy the entire experience. Well, good news for me! I can now roll on a brand-new, old-school server that promises to be more like something from the early days of the game. The best news? All players will start off on the same page. Want to know more? Keep reading because I sat in on a conference call with Ragnarok producer Jason Koerperich to talk about all of the changes.
