Scott of Pumping Irony was chiding me and other bloggers today on Twitter for getting totally excited about a game, writing loads about it, then dropping that game the moment something new came by. I was all defensive, pointing to my long-term coverage of W101, STO, DDO and, when I played them, EVE, EQ and EQ2 when — I remembered Fantasy Earth Zero, Dragonica, Dream of Mirror Online, Dragon Oath and so many other games I played heavily for a few weeks, then totally forgot.
I can fix this! So I logged into FEZ tonight. Couldn’t figure out how to rest — sitting, which used to work, no longer seems to. A guy in red started teabagging me. His friend apologized for his behavior. I went to a beginner field and killed some stuff… meh. Just can’t go back.
Will I be the same with Rift? I dunno. I guess it depends on if I can find a good bunch of people, get in a nice guild. I have really good friends who hate guilds, but me, I think they shape and define your experience with an MMO. My best MMO memories have always been shared with friends.
Big news today is, of course, the dropping of the Rift NDA. Read about that and more, after the break. No, this post isn’t going to be JUST about Rift.
MMOs
Massively Multiplayer Online games – our first step into the Metaverse.
Rift: The Realm of the Faerie
The Rift beta NDA has just been lifted, and there’s so much I want to write about. I want to tell why this makes me feel like I felt when playing EverQuest, even though it really is nothing like EQ. And in fact, EQ did certain things better. So maybe I’ll work something about that into this article, more in others. For now, this is just going to be a stream of consciousness ramble through the second Beta event, the fantasy-based Guardians.
Two sides — the technomagical Defiants and the fantastical Guardians. They come from the opposite ends of time to defeat the otherworldy threat of Rifts spawned by extradimensional dragons. And if they can give each other a few knocks, so be it.
Likely starting most clearly with WoW and even more so in the latest crop of F2P games out of Asia, battle lines in fantasy MMOs seem more often based on the forces of technology facing off against the magical forces of nature. That’s roughly the division here. At the end of the world, right before the final destruction of the patchwork world of Telara, the Defiants resurrect heroes from the past, ensoul them with the souls of their enemies, and send them into the past to defeat the evil before it has had a chance to shatter the world. You’ll have a chance to remove a second soul from another fallen enemy before your trip backward in time, though. The Defiants are the “evil” side, the side that puts results above means, and living creatures are just more machinery. You, the resurrected hero from the past, are an “Ascended”, a literal god from the machine.
The opposite faction, the Guardians, consider the Defiants the worst abominations against the gods that could possibly be imagined, and the Defiant “Ascendeds” parodies of the real things. The Guardian Ascendeds are resurrected heroes from a battle in their more recent past, against a vile fire dragon. They have the souls they had before — their calling — but can acquire new ones through magical means.
DDO: The Wight at the End of the Tunnel
Delera’s Tomb has some sort of unhealthy obsession with dead girls. You have the “Dead Girl’s Notebook” one-off. Then you have the whole Delera questline proper, where you free the spirit of the dead girl and then hunt down the evil necromancer what did it to her.
It’s as if Turbine’s quest scripters had come off a weekend binge that included a half dozen Japanese horror movies, stumbled into work on a Monday with their brain cells still crackling, and wrote what they saw when they closed their eyes.
There’s an undercurrent of despair to most of DDO’s quests. Having children means living your life worrying that something bad will happen to them. In Stormreach, something bad ALWAYS happens to them. But then again, pretty much everyone in the DDO universe is living on borrowed time. No matter who you are or how much good you’ve done, somewhere someone has just given a bunch of wisecracking adventurers the quest to kill you.
Last week, we freed Delera’s shade from its eternal torment, but even released, she could find no peace. There could never be a rest for her while her tormentor still lived his unlife. Sunday, then, we took on the evil power of the graveyard, Dreadlord Giddeon.
W101: Celestia finished!
I SHOULD be playing the BTCNBM… oh what the heck, I should be playing in this weekend’s Rift beta event. And I have, but … past few days, I’ve been getting closer and closer to finishing Celestia. The turning point was getting Ra and the Forest Lord. With a one-two AE punch that could clear … Read more
Daily Blogroll 12/17 — Titan-ic Edition
While the above isn’t a real photo from Titan’s surface, such photos DO EXIST. (You can even hear the actual winds from another world). We can DO stuff like that. When reality is so amazing, how can mere games possibly compete?
That’s the dilemma Blizzard faces as it ramps up the publicity machine for its next MMO, code named Titan. Leaked in a not-so-secret memo last month, Destructoid cornered a Blizzard exec who admitted that Titan would be the long expected follow-up to the world’s most successful MMO ever, World of Warcraft.
Four possible outcomes that I can see. The best case scenario for Blizzard is that Titan does for space-based MMOs, let’s say, what WoW did for fantasy MMOs — utterly dominate the field, and bring in zillions of new players who have never heard of EVE or Jumpgate Evolution or Star Wars Galaxies or Star Trek Online and after playing Titan, wonder why anyone would ever want to play anything else? Additionally, EVE & co would lose most of their players.
Failing that, by the time Titan comes out five or six years from now, it will be well positioned to take up the slack as WoW nears the end of its popularity.
Bad news for Blizzard would be if WoW continued to be insanely popular, and Titan is only a modest success. A million players would be wildly amazingly fantastically super with any other MMO. For Blizzard, only a million players would be seen as an abject, utter failure.
Worst case scenario is that WoW declines in popularity, and since the MMO genre has become synonymous with WoW to most people, nobody really has much interest in Titan. That’s unlikely, to be sure, but it would kill the company.
Click through for more stuff!