MMOs

Massively Multiplayer Online games – our first step into the Metaverse.

Daily Blogroll 12/23 — Christmas Eve Eve edition

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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.

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Rift: The Realm of the Faerie

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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.

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DDO: The Wight at the End of the Tunnel

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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.

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