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The Daily Grind: Do you follow MMOs because of their designers?
An interesting Kill Ten Rats article a few weeks ago pondered the idea that gamers purchase games because those games are "by the makers of" some other game -- to their doom. Much ado, for example, was made over WildStar's dev team because of its members' work on World of Warcraft, and names like Jake Song, Brad McQuaid, and Mark Jacobs carry a lot of weight when attached to a new MMO title. Yet star power doesn't necessarily make for a good or successful game, especially if that famous designer wasn't directly responsible for whatever it was that made an old game great. Akaneiro is still a mess with or without American McGee's tag. What about you? Do you buy MMOs based on the past work of individual developers? 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!
Ten days with Mines of Moria
Last week, Zubon at Kill Ten Rats had taken a comprehensive look at Lord of the Rings Online's Mines of Moria as more and more people are rediscovering the Turbine fantasy MMO. This 10-day exploration touches on many aspects of the game beyond simple back-of-the-box facts and features. It's an experienced and opinionated journal that points out the good and bad, which may be quite helpful to those looking to spend the extra cash for that expansion.Not only does Zubon touch on the experiences with Book quests, his impressions of the Rune-keeper and the mines themselves, but there's also a helpful "Seven Favorites" post which gives a no-nonsense look at what he enjoys most from the game. Check back through the entire series of posts, and take heed to his closing thought: "I have not nearly seen it all."
Are you ready for EVE Offline?
Zubon over at Kill Ten Rats has written a bit of commentary about skill training in EVE Online. As players subbing multiple accounts used for different purposes know (particularly when training up initial skills), a fair amount of time is spent logging in and switching skill training, and not always so much actual gameplay seen with those characters. So, he suggests the idea of "EVE Offline" -- an extension of the game, played via a website or accessible with a mobile phone. The point of EVE Offline would be to turn skill training into its own game, not a peripheral activity related to EVE's standard (client) gameplay. He presents this idea in the form of a CCP deal announcement, laying out the conditions and terms of the fictional EVE Offline. Tongue-in-cheek or is there a serious point? You decide. The post is ultimately a way of asking: How many EVE players essentially do this anyway with their characters, paying the full subscription price but not getting enough play time on those alts?
On MMOs, cakes, and sand castles
Most MMO blogs that we read are very upfront about the immediacy of their concerns. Are Druids getting nerfed in the next patch or not? How soon will it be before we can finally use a Personal Armor Unit? Is Warhammer Online going to ship before it's complete? It's not every day that we scroll through our RSS reader and see a blog entry that really attempts to approach higher thinking. While we have always had a tremendous amount of respect for the bloggers over at Kill Ten Rats, we were still a tad surprised to see a post Zubon made a little over a week ago where he waxes philosophic on the illusion of permanence in the MMO genre.He questions whether accomplishing things in an MMO is like baking a cake (not a lie) or building a sand castle; they're fun enterprises, and can be very fulfilling accomplishments for their time, but their very existence is fleeting. Are our nightly accomplishments in MMOs any less transient? The ultimate answer, if you were to ask this blogger, is that everything in life is ultimately ephemeral, it's just a question of shelf-life. But then, this is the sort of talk that we'd expect to hear from somebody on the verge of quitting MMOs, which we sincerely hope isn't the case. Ephemeral or not, MMOs still let us meet and keep in touch with friends and unwind after a long day's work. There's an undeniable value in that.
The 'proud nails' of City of Heroes design
Zubon, of the award-winning Kill Ten Rats cooperative blog, has a great design discussion up on on the site concerning the 'proud nails' of City of Heroes' elder game. The term 'proud nail' is one that Zubon and I both enjoy from the design discussions on the official Wizards of the Coast website. Wizards makes the tabletop RPG Dungeons and Dragons, and many of the observations they make there are easily transposable to Massively Multiplayer games.Proud nails are 'design snags', problems that screw up the smooth movement of design mechanics. On the D&D site, examples include 'ten foot square' horses, crazily random lists of special abilities for monsters, and the strange way that bow ranges are calculated. Zubon's 'proud nail' list for City of Heroes focuses on the insanity of pitting high-level heroes primarily against a single villain group called the Carnival of Shadows. The Carnival has some serious issues, primarily stemming from their annoying attack moves and the famously weak amount of content at CoH's highest levels.I think 'proud nail' is a really useful term ... can anyone else point out a proud nail from any other games that immediately spring to mind?
KillTenRats' Zubon on the state of the genre at WorldIV
WorldIV continues their MMO blogger interview series with an interview with Zubon of KillTenRats, which is not only a great MMO blog, but also a one-of-a-kind "blogomerate"-- they're a group of people who blog as a group without actually grouping together. As the Interview at WorldIV notes, the KTR folks are off in their own separate worlds, and yet somehow all of their posting feels like it all belongs in the same place.So Zubon is just one part of the blog, but he still shares some interesting opinions about the state of the MMO world. One thing that draws him to these games, he says, is the fact that for all of their "persistent" gameplay, they're not actually persistent at all-- all the servers we're playing on now will be turned off someday, just as our sun, he says, will eventually run out of energy. Even he jokes that that sentiment strays into pretentious-ville, but it's an interesting thought: using the impermanence of virtual worlds to figure out own our impermanence and mortality.He also labels himself a fan of "niche MMOs", and then defines those as anything that strays away from the elves and orcs type of world. He specifically mentions Tale in the Desert and the upcoming Chronicles of Spellborn as two MMOs to watch in terms of bringing new innovations to the genre. All in all, a good interview with a smart guy.
