Tiluvar

It's been 17 years since my last blog post. Some things have changed, and some things have stayed the same.

I still have an on again/off again relationship with World of Warcraft, but it's more in the off position these days. I still love games but have found that the older I get, the more I seem to value "real life" experiences.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to suggest that online experiences and relationships can't be every bit as fulfilling as real life ones - I've just found that games have lost their luster in recent years (recent being used pretty loosely here).

I still want to enjoy them, and on occasion I do - I pop into Darkest Dungeon every once in a while, to "climb" the ladders

I pop on WoW to try on new outfits? and every once in a while I play the universally disliked SimCity (2013) and while I do understand the criticisms, the first 30 or so minutes of building out the city is quite fun - and locking yourself into odd challenges like my city "POLICE STATE" which was mostly police just arresting themselves and paying their own salaries through taxes, or "Al Casino" - for a time the top earning casino city in the world, was pretty enjoyable.

Unfortunately, if you play too long the flaws become pretty apparent, so it has become a cyclical game for me. I play a lot, get frustrated and remember why it eventually gets boring, quit for a long while, forget why it got boring... play a lot... etc.

I'm still going to try out Monsters and Memories, I'm still going to pop on and play Fellowship from time to time - but games just feel either too transactional, or alternatively too demanding - and so my desire to play anything just collapses in on itself. I'd love to play the Witcher III now that I have a computer capable of doing so - but do I really want to spend 2 weeks (?) doing that?

I'd also love to become a StarCraft II Grand Champion but I mean, maybe I should just learn to play piano instead.

I'm a gamer, through and through, it will always be a part of me and a part of what I do - It's just been so long since I was excited for a game, or "enthusiastic" about (addicted to?) a game - that getting back into it feels like a waste of time?

I don't want to seem completely defeated. There have been a few games I've played over the years that have been phenomenal - but I'll save them for future posts. I just wanted to post something honest, because what else is there?

As a result, I've found myself trying to create games instead. It has been something I have always wanted to do and to me, it's just about as enjoyable as playing them. The problem is that as anyone who has tried to make a game has learned, it's a very Sisyphean thing. In the same way I struggle to find a game I want to play - I find I struggle a lot more to direct my effort into a game I want to make - not because I don't enjoy it, but because there are just so many options, and many different things I want to do. If there's at least one thing I can bring over from experience in developing other kinds of software it's that not having a clear scope when you set out, and the discipline to stick with it - just dooms you to a life of frustration and refactoring.

Ever since the Internet has existed, I have wanted to make an MMO. I'm sure there's some psychological reason why I want to create a world that I define and control and that people (hopefully) want to be a part of that pushes me in this direction, or perhaps it was just my experiences with EverQuest in my formative years? - who knows. I just know that all the half-finished mobile "catchy" games I've tried to make have fizzled out - not because they were bad but because my motivation is a tenuous thing. The more time I spend working on something, the more I expect from it. I feel like I'm playing Jenga against myself - no matter how well I play, I eventually lose.

That brings me to the actual title and leading image of this post. My game playing time has been replaced with game... attempting? I've experimented with Unity, Unreal, Godot - as well as less "Engine" and more "Renderer" things like BabylonJS and Filament over the years and have become fairly capable in each. Playing around in Unreal and Unity was fun, but I felt more like I was learning how to use a tool instead of understanding exactly what that tool was really doing behind the scenes. I often felt like I had to jump through hoops just to get them to play nicely with the way I wanted to implement things.

Working closer to the hardware helped me understand how 3D rendering works at a low level, and how what you see on screen maps to the CPU and GPU. It also sparked a brief obsession with implementing Conway’s Game of Life in a GPU shader, an experience that confirmed how much I hate writing shaders.

I have made decent progress, but I always seem to lose motivation because part of me knows that to even make a relatively simple game and polish it takes a lot of consistent effort - and since my real dream game is an open world, infinite world MMO - any time I'm making less than that, I feel like I'm stealing time from doing what I really want. Maybe I'll get into the more technical details of what building something like that entails in another post, or on my more technical blog, but at this point I have a stable, scalable, modular (though admittedly still fairly immature) back end for my MMO that is agnostic when it comes to the front end - which is great because although it still needs a lot of work, at least with the proof of concept established I know that it's feasible, and more importantly I know largely how it will work - which allows me to focus more on the actual client side for a while without constantly context switching every time I have to make a decision.

But then I found myself with a new hill to push my rock over - I still can't seem to settle on a lot of fundamental decisions about the game itself. Isometric with click to move? third person, first person? art style, sounds, music, GUI... I keep flip flopping back and forth. The only part I'm fairly set on is the actual combat and game mechanics, because that's the part I've been thinking about off and on for the past 30 years. I find I get stuck polishing the timing of a random animation or start thinking about what it would be like to make audio procedural instead of recorded. I end up spending two weeks learning about it until I finally know enough to understand why everyone said it was a bad idea in the first place - or at least, a terrible thing to be focusing on before I've even laid my first brick.

All this experimenting has also made me acutely aware that things that seem like great gameplay ideas often just don't land well when you actually use them in game. Here I am worrying about shadows and real time global wind simulations swaying my trees just right, and persistent grass that accurately tracks footprints and vegetation trampling for bipeds vs. quadrupeds - but then when I actually start running around in it, I realize maybe it doesn't even make a difference. Sometimes the ideas seem so correct in my mind but just aren’t noticeable enough while playing that they just don’t make sense to implement. There is a reason so many games use "work arounds" to make things seem a certain way, and it's not always about performance - sometimes it's just about preventing the scope from creeping into infinity.

With some exceptions, if you can implement a complex technical system to make something accurate, but a simple approximation gets you 80% of the result, no one will notice. My rule lately has been to let people see something, and if I have to explain to them why it’s cool – it’s probably something I implemented because I was interested in the technical side, not because it made any difference to the player.

More recently I've just accepted that there's no way to rush it - so I have taken the approach of breaking parts of it out into standalone projects.

That way I can focus on them without worrying about the cleanliness of the implementation or having to deal with changing the payload structure or server handling when I change my mind about how something is implemented. In keeping with that strategy, in my latest sandbox I am trying my best to think about nothing but combat. Using some of the things I learned in half implemented combat from the larger project, I made a fresh, simple, persistent world and a basic editor so I can place objects into it - a test area for combat related gameplay elements only so that I can try out new ideas without having to fully build them out. I have already had to stop myself from the old "I'll just add this in first..." loop that I always get into, that ends up turning each sandbox into an entire new project.

The refresh of this site itself is another example of this. I wanted to experiment with dynamic vegetation generation, but instead of building it into the full client/server pipeline I just made a messy version, and ended up liking it enough that I didn't want to just throw it away. I decided to use it as the background of this site (which then snowballed into refreshing the entire site - but it was long overdue anyways). It doesn't run very well on mobile or low end GPUs, but if you want to see what it looks like you can "opt-in" by clicking the little mountain icon at the bottom of the page.

So far this has been a somewhat sustainable approach, and has even allowed me to spend time on some long-lost projects without feeling like I'm abandoning my long-term goals. Instead of trying to brute force the long term project and burning out over and over while adding more and more complexity to it, I can continue to break things away into finishable independent chunks and get a little bit of satisfaction for finishing them - or realize that maybe they weren't great ideas to begin with, and move on without refactoring anything. Maybe when I'm ready to implement some of them into the larger project for real sometime in the year 2346, I'll have a better idea how to do that.

In the meantime, hopefully I can use the refresh of this site for its new intended purpose. To allow me to share and get feedback on some of the different concepts, and other random things I made along the way - rather than have them just slowly fill up my projects folder and never see the light of day, and of course to complain about video games, from time to time.

How many clicks does it take to get to the gates of Hell? I don't know, many! But you can start counting in a few hours.

I'm not quite dedicated enough to the franchise to be in line at midnight tonight, and if you notice anyone at your work place who is mysteriously ill tomorrow you can safely blame the demons of hell and actually have a pretty good chance of being correct for once.

Though PvP has been removed (for now) and the game appears to have been watered down for the shareholders, in the end Diablo 3 still promises to be a very entertaining co-op experience, and being the glutton for punishment that I am, hardcore mode is calling my name.

I'm sure I'll see some of you there. I haven't spent much time looking at all the info that Blizzard has made available, and although I'm not expecting War and Peace, I'm going to do my best to avoid spoilers and see the plot through as I progress through the game as it should be enjoyable. So far all I really know is that I'm leaning towards a Witchdoctor, but who knows!

See you in hell.

The Guild Wars 2 Beta weekend is finally here. Will it be the saviour of the genre? just another WoW clone? Crash to desktop before I can log in?

We're about to find out.

While I've spent a fair amount of time reading about Guild Wars 2 I haven't spent any time at all reading about the lore or the land, so if nothing else it should be fun to spend some time exploring.

There's no NDR anymore, so I'll post some screenshots and general impressions later in the weekend.

For anyone else that's in the Beta, I'm staring off on the Eternal Grove server. I would imagine you can guess my character's name.

See you there!

As I've mentioned several times before, part of the draw of these online worlds that now have millions of inhabitants is that you don't always know what's around the next corner, behind the next asteroid, or uh... well whatever you get the point.

I realize that in this day and age we're simply used to being able to look up everything about everything and then immediately consider ourselves experts on every topic even though we've never actually done any of these things ourselves, and while this may be more of a societal problem than anything else - it's ruining my virtual day!

I used to like new EverQuest expansions, or even whole new games because I would be surprised from time to time, or even excited to find out what would be coming next.

It seems that these days the only things that still have any degree of secrecy about upcoming events are television dramas and the occasional movie.

I don't need to know exactly which items I will be wearing and exactly what they will look like as well as where and what percentage chance I have of finding them.

I'm not blaming sites like mmo-champion or wowhead, or the whole Curse network for that matter, when the information for all of the possible events in the game is already there on your computer, someone is going to extract it at some point so we may as well be efficient and consistent about doing it, I guess.

Sure there's the argument that I could just not read it, and to be honest I do my best to give these things only a cursory glance. I'm not one to run to the forums and discuss the implications of a 5% increase in Seal of Righteousness' attack power scaling, but I'm competitive, I don't particularely want to be behind the curve and surprised by things that will set me back - and so I read at least a bit about them to make sure I'm at least on par with the average player; but I feel dissapointed every time I do. Not so much because of what they're doing, but because it would have been fun to find out while I was actually playing the game.

Remember in EverQuest's beta when spells didn't tell you how much damage they did? It would just say "a gnoll pup's skin ignites" and you would see the bar decrease by some amount.

It didn't matter that you didn't know specifically what percentage damage you were doing, you didn't need to parse it out to determine the theoretical maximum DPS you could extract from your abilities, you just played the game by feel, and learned about it by talking to other players about their experiences.

There's really no way this will ever change, and I guess I'm just being a cranky old purest, but I would love to have to actually figure something out once in awhile. It wouldn't even be quite so irritating if it wasn't compounded by the fact that most games seem to go out of their way during gameplay to ensure you don't have to figure anything out on your own.

The pipes you could warp through in Mario weren't a different colour, you figured out which ones worked just by trying it. You were able to discover things by playing the game, instead of reading about them on Google, or even worse have the game interrupt you while playing to tell you what to do.

In regards to WoW specifically there actually is this sort of challenge at only one point - If you try to do dungeon and raid achievements immediately after leveling to the maximum level - before someone has figured out the optimal strategy for completing them and posted it all over the Internet as well as before you're able to just throw overpowered equipment at the problem.

I will always remember the rush to Heroic Dungeon Master achievements with some of my old guildmates as one of the few truly entertaining parts of Warcraft.

Pointless rant completed.

Despite my better judgement, I've decided to join a small, slowly growing movement in World of Warcraft; the Ironman Challenge.

The basic premise of the traditional WoW Ironman is that you level from 1 to 85 without ever learning any talents, tradeskills or equipping any items that are better than white (common) in quality.

The most important part of the Ironman criteria being that your character cannot ever be killed.

Needless to say this makes things significantly more difficult.

I'm always complaining that WoW is too easy, so I decided to see for myself how different it would be if it was actually as hard and unforgiving as I would sometimes like it to be.

While the traditional WoW Ironman is already incredibly painful, I just wouldn't feel like myself unless I added some of my own stipulations:

My criteria is as follows:

• Character can never be killed.
• Character cannot complete any quests.
• Character cannot receive any items or money from any source.

Now, at first glance this doesn't seem to be too different than the normal Ironman challenge, but when you realize that without money I can't use mounts, take flight paths - I can't even repair my equipement. In fact as I write this I have no idea what I'm going to do when my starter axe finally breaks.

I can however make use of class specialization and talents, one of the few things in Azeroth that are completely free. The obvious caveat being that most talents rely on class skills that I don't have, so I have to spec creatively.

The life of a WoW ascetic is probably not for everyone, but I am committed.

Who knows, maybe sleeping under the stars, starving myself and running for dear life every couple of days will lead me to some sort of MMO apiphany, or maybe I'm just going to waste a lot of time.

Either way, if you want to keep track, here is Sevalak.

Steamwheelde Cartel - Sevalak

ArenaNet has decided to open up Guild Wars 2 beta signups for the next 48 hours only.

While the reasonable, mature part of myself knows that getting excited about an MMO before release leads down only one of two roads - dissapointment or addiction - and is currently sitting on the sidelines, considering if it's worth taking either... the MMO nerd part of me is already bounding happily down the road screaming CHARR WARRIOR while filling out the signup form.

If you happen to read this before the 24th, maybe I'll see you there.

Guild Wars 2 Beta Signup

I promised myself I wouldn't do it agian.

After playing Final Fantasy X and loving every minute of it (Except Blitzball but that goes without saying) I eargerly anticipated the arrival of Final Fantasy X-2, hoping that it would continue the sombre storyline of the original. I was interested in learning more about the characters and seeing where life had taken them since the end of the previous storyline - I bought it on the day of release, powered up my PS3 and sat silently for the next four minutes feeling the expression on my face slowly change from excitement to disgust.

You might think I'm being dramatic, or possibly just exaggerating, but watch the intro for yourself and tell me how you feel about it.

Being the fan boy that I am, I still gave it a good shot, but the whole game was completely filled with this flowery, girl power fuelled flirtiness that you just couldn't avoid. When did Final Fantasy become a sci-fi franchise anyways? Where's the Wizards, why aren't there any Moogles anywhere? I don't know if they were trying to make it appeal more to girls or if they were just horribly drunk.

I chalked it up to Square having an off year, but when Final Fantasy XII was announced, I approached it cautiously.

It wasn't a bad game really, it was just too much like an MMO. Forcing players to grind experience from easy mobs in leiu of content might work in MMOs but it's not suitable for a single player game, and so my opinion of the franchise started to change.

When Final Fantasy XIII was announced, I was nonplussed. When they spent more than they ever had before on marketing it I was even more skeptical, but part of me thought - Hey, maybe they know they made the past few games bad, so they're trying to show people that they're really confident about this one - my mistake I guess.

The rule of marketing held true, and it seems that for every dollar spent on marketing, the game was dumbed down an additional 1% for the mainstream, and yes that is accurate math.

Needless to say I didn't enjoy FFXIII either. Not many people did.

Yet somehow it still has a direct sequel.

Logic would tell me that if I didn't like the direct sequel to a game I loved, I probably wouldn't like a direct sequel to a game that I hated, but I'm a fan boy, logic has no place in this discussion.

So now I find myself with nothing to do on a Saturday, Final Fantasy XIII-2 having been released just this week and even though I know that I'm probably going to hate it - I'm just going to go buy it.

But I'm serious this time - no more excuses - if this one is bad I'm going to write off the whole franchise for all of eternity.

Probably.

I'm not sure what it is about this weekend, I suppose playing EverQuest yesterday has brought a lot of old gaming memories to the surface. In this case one game in particular.

After a quick youtube check to make sure I wasn't just imaginging it, I downloaded an emulator, tracked down the ROM and prepared myself for the "...full throttle thrill of Cobra Triangle!"

I had played the game quite a bit when I was young, I'm pretty sure I finished it but honestly can't remember. The stages will load in a different sequence each time you play so it's hard to tell sometimes.

Cobra Triangle is one of the more unique games for the NES. Granted, it's more or less just a one player RC Pro-Am on water but that's not really a bad thing. It's an isometric boat racing/shooting game with some bonus levels and boss fights thrown in, as well as the odd stationary level that feels almost like a game of Asteroids at times.

If you've got nothing to do today, give it a try. It's not too hard to find the Rom and there are plenty of good emulators out there. It's one of those rare games (no pun intended) that makes you want to keep hitting continue just to prove you can beat it. Those evil monochrome enemy boats are just so smug in their silence. I also find it curious how the situation you're in is completely ridiculous, and devoid of any logical plot, but somehow you're still happy to just go with it.

It's also a good opportunity to see where the studio that brought you games like Donkey Kong Country, Battle Toads and of course - Goldeneye on N64 - had it's beginnings.

Rare is one of the oldest game developers whose doors are still open and while unfortunately the founders have long gone, and Rare has become what sometimes feels like a studio that just develops tech demos for the Xbox 360 (Kinect Sports: Season Two!) I guess that's just a sign of the times.

So I'll take my Sunday morning to play one for Rare, the once great development studio that brought me one of my favorite games of all time - Killer Instinct - and hope that the Stamper Brothers who in my ten minutes of Internet research seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth are out there enjoying themselves, and just incase they Google themselves and somehow find their way here - I thought Perfect Dark was great, and I'll always have fond memories of Marble Madness but I'll probably never forgive you for Killer Instinct Gold :)

Thanks guys!

It's a quiet Saturday night, and as I'm currently on call for work and it's starting to dip into the negatives these days, I'm even less inclined than normal to venture out in search of alcohol.

So while I'm normally quite content to pass the time with the usual distractions of League of Legends, Left 4 Dead or whatever dreadful thing the Canadian version of Netflix has managed to consider a "New arrival" I found myself craving something new, but ended up rediscovering something old.

Behold, Osoi, my Iksar Necromancer.

I've had project 1999 up and running for a while now, but never really gave it much thought until the other day when an old EQ friend posted about it on my forums.

I figured, why not.

So I updated it, booted it up, started an Iksar Necromancer, and very quickly realized just how pampered I've been with WoW.

Although most of my memory of EverQuest has faded, the names of NPCs and the different areas in the Iksar starting city seemed vaguely familiar. Didn't I kill that guy once? Isn't this where the Monk Epic quest chain leads?

I found myself wandering through a passageway that was hidden under a waterfall and through an invisible wall, somehow navigating through the maze as if I knew exactly where I was going, even though I honestly couldn't even begin to tell you where I was.

After another twenty minutes or so of wandering around trying to find the newbie zone I did what I have come to feel of as the unthinkable in an MMO.

I asked another player for help.

As a slightly higher level fellow Iksar happened by, I hailed him, he stopped to return my hail and then stood waiting while I expressed my embarassement, but asked if he could tell me what the name of the starting zone was.

I expected at best, a monotone "Field of Bone" before he ran off, and at worst a WoW-esque /sigh in my direction, before he continued on his way exclaiming to his guild about the stupid newb that interrupted him while he was extremely busy being awesome - But what actually happened immediately reminded me why I enjoyed this game so much in the first place. He asked me to follow, showed me the zone line, and even took the time to show me a quest giver that would be useful in turning in items I was likely to loot from the mobs there before wishing me well and going on his way.

Thanks to the assistance of my new friend, I made my way out into the Field of Bone and started cautiously killing anything that looked pathetic enough to not give me too much trouble, quickly remembering how annoying it was when spells would fizzle, and use up just enough mana that you wouldn't have enough to re-cast, or when a guard would steal your kill because you were too afraid to fight any further from the road.

While there is a part of me that would like it to be easier, so that I could speed up the process, when I hit level two an hour later I realized that I actually felt as though I had accomplished something, something that I've rarely felt in any more recent MMO.

As I write this I'm still only level two, and realistically I doubt I have the time to make a serious attempt at leveling a character in EverQuest but there was one point, even in these two early levels that made me feel like I needed to share, as I felt like it demonstrated what made EQ so memorable to so many people.

Forgiving all the horrbile design decisions, questionable UI, and all the other things about EverQuest that could truly be done so much better, as I was killing a skeleton I looked into the distance, but couldn't see past the top of a small hill.

While I looked out at the horizon my mind immediately started to wander and imagine what could be out there. Now, I know what is out there because in another life I have been there many times, but that feeling of wonder, of not knowing exactly what's out there and not simply being able to pull up a map, or run there and look is really what made Norrath so intriguing.

It was inaccessible not because I hadn't purchased the proper skills to explore it, not because there was a UI element telling me I wasn't allowed to go there, or I wasn't high enough level, but because if I tried to go literally anywhere in the world at level 2 I would be killed and likely would not be able to get my items back without help from other players.

Even with only the first expansion, Norrath is a massive place, and to this day contains items that have never been found, and quests that have never been completed.

It's that feeling of being able to explore the unknown and figure out the world for yourself instead of just having NPCs show you exactly where to go that drives you to level and want to become more powerful. This isn't just a script you're following, it's not just content you're consuming, it's a virtual world that exists whether you're there or not. EverQuest never goes out of it's way to pat you on the back and make you feel like a hero, that part is up to you. While it's often frustraing, and challenging, it is in overcoming the challenges that you really feel a sense of accomplishment. You never need the game to tell you that you've achieved something, because you will feel it for yourself.

Maybe I'm reading into it a little much, I do tend to get pretty nostalgic when I talk about EverQuest, all I know is that I just played a 12 year old game for an hour and not only enjoyed it but really felt like it was a step up from what I've been playing over the past few months, which only affirms my belief that we're headed in the wrong direction.

Whether or not I end up continuing with it, if you want to give classic EverQuest (and Kunark) a try, pick up a copy of EverQuest: Titanium edition, follow the instructions here and come join me.

Oh, and just for a little added nostalgia for those of you that were around in the beginning:

Finally the incessant whining of thousands of jaded gamers has been heard. We're the ones that cringe when we cross a check point, moan endlessly about button mashing, and are simply bored by beating high-definition bosses with the pattern based intelligence of Bowser.

No longer will we be forced to fight through linear content, with carefully crafted bosses that are designed to be killed, instead of to kill, or to fight perfectly placed groups of goblins, always in manageable mobs. It's once again time to enjoy a game not because it's a cinematic "experience" but because it forces us to ask ourselves that age old question - "How the fuck is anyone supposed to beat this?" - and answer silently through skilled play and determination, not by switching an option to "easy".

For far too long now difficulty and depth in mainstream games has been decreasing... what? I died? This is bullshit. I paid $70 for this game, I should be it's master and it should make me feel like a hero. Now I just feel discouraged, even angry that a mere game - something that's supposed to be fun - is causing me to feel... challenged. Quickly, to the Internet! This injustice must be documented... Unfortunately, the crybaby crowd pays the bills, so to speak.

But now it's our chance to show developers that we want games that are challenging by design, not by artificial switch. We want games that frustrate us sometimes or have to be figured out. We want games that allow us to actually feel the confusion and frustration of being thrown into a world without always knowing exactly what to do or where to go, instead of just watching it play out in front of us.

Whether or not I end up having the time and patience to finish it, I am glad that it's here. It's time for me to dust off my Xbox controller before smashing it to pieces in frustration, and hopefully for a younger generation of gamers, time for them not only to experience exactly what we mean when we say that games used to be hard, but also to find out for themselves how rewarding it can be to complete them.

...

I am of course referring to today's launch of Dark Souls. The follow up to 2009's Demon's Souls. Let's see if we can get this one a little further up the sales charts, so that From Software isn't the only developer that gets the message.

Every once in a while I reconnect with an old friend from EverQuest or another online game, occasionally someone from high school or even earlier and as a testament to just how much of a video game nerd I've been over the years the same question always comes up; "What are you playing these days?".

It's quite likely that I'm steering the conversation in the direction of games, I just can't help myself sometimes, but the fact remains that I never have a good answer. There is the ever present World of Warcraft which I would compare to a caffeine addiction - it's annoying and would be nice to be done with but it's just so wonderful having a coffee sometimes and it's not like the heroine that was EverQuest, it's quite possible to lead a normal life and still enjoy it. In fact to further this horrible analogy, much like coffee if you play World of Warcraft too much you just end up feeling awful and not enjoying it at all. I guess that would apply to heroin too, but whatever I think I've made my point, or something.

Outside of that I've found games to be uninteresting lately. I'm not really suggesting that I've outgrown them, I think it's actually the other way around. Games have become this mass media entertainment "thing" that I just don't understand anymore. Something that was explained quite nicely by this video...

The only real exceptions to this rule are the few and far between interesting unique games like Portal or Left 4 Dead. Games that don't really go out of their way to convince you that they're exciting and dramatic, and let the gameplay speak for itself, but other than the odd round of Left 4 Dead 2, I'm not really playing those either.

I would honestly love to have another interesting new game pop up unexpectedly that isn't the same been there done that garbage that has been coming out lately. People are trying to get me to play Civilization V, and Game Dev Story for the iPhone but I just know it's going to be the same old progress bar here, tech tree there, build order blah blah blah. I'm not even saying I wouldn't enjoy it, I'm just saying it would be nice to be surprised by a game instead of simply satiated.

Maybe I'm just too old and jaded. Maybe I'm a video game hipster of sorts that can't enjoy any big budget games because they're just all so formulaic. Just like a real hipster it's like I know I would enjoy most of these things if I took the time to actually try them but instead of seeing a flock of birds fly into the air as I walk by I see birdAnimation001_Start() when playerCharacter(exists) within radius$v and get annoyed.

So to make this really long unintelligible answer a little more to the point... I'm not really actively playing anything. I have played many games in the past few months, but have any games really made me want to go back and play through them again? to tell people they should go buy it? made me genuinely laugh or be surprised and not just sigh and be amused at how ridiculous they are?

Unfortunately the answer is no, not really. Anything that has, has worked it's way onto my blog here. Dragon Age, Lords of Ultima briefly... there's not much. There are a lot of promising titles on the horizon but the longer they stay in development the more skeptical I become that they're not just going to be trimmed down for mainstream appeal into another Call of Duty or World of Warcraft clone. It's as if the more money they spend on a game, the more they need to make so the more mass market appeal they have to give it which in my opinion just ends up making it boring. Wonderfully profitable to be sure, but boring none the less.

And yes I realize that complaining about this while still playing World of Warcraft occasionally is horribly hypocritical of me and I have no real come back for that except to say that my Paladin is awesome and hope that somehow that derails the conversation long enough for you to forget what you were accusing me of.

So I'm back at the start here, wondering how to answer that dreaded question and I guess my real answer is that the question is flawed. We, as gamers, shouldn't just be asking each other what we're playing, we should be asking each other what we're enjoying? I think we would be surprised to find that they're often not the same thing.

I haven't posted anything since I left, and since I returned I've been feeling a little... unmotivated?

I had all these grand plans of things I would do when I got back, but so far the only one I've managed to accomplish was eating an entire pizza.

I suppose I needed some time to take it all in, and now, having done that... I'm going to tell you about Japan. Not about my trip really, as all of that is covered in our trip blog, but about the video game scene in Japan from the viewpoint of a visitor.

I'll start by saying that it really is everything you have been told. Arcades packed with people, everyone playing DS, and being able to talk about playing games or working in the computer industry without spawning an immediate smirk on the face of the listener.

Having been all over the country I can safely say that this is not a country-wide theme. The nerds are securely nested in the major metropolises, as you would expect.

The definitive center of the culture lies in Akihabara, a part of Tokyo where you literally cannot go ten feet without running into a video game store. I'm not sure a place like this could exist in any other city as it must be due to Tokyo's ridiculously large population that each store can still turn a profit. There's also Den Den town in Osaka, which is sort of like Akihabara's little brother.

I spent hours just wandering from store to store, each stocked with all the usual titles as well as harboring a healthy number of used games. Many stores also have a vintage section where you can pick up everything from Super Nintendo to Dreamcast or Virtual Boy games and while in this age of emulation it seems a little strange to spend money on old systems, it's still a lot of fun to dig through the piles of old games to see what you can find.

Then of course there are the arcades. Japan is really the last line of defense in the war between home consoles and arcades, and while I don't think that arcades are going to be making a real comeback in North America any time soon, I was quite happy to see that they're still alive and well in Japan. Even in some of the smaller cities I visited you could usually find an arcade full of people.

These aren't the arcades you're probably imagining either. My idea of an arcade after growing up in Canada was a grimey, poorly maintained hole in the wall that someone haphazardly placed a bunch of run down ciggarette stained machines in and then hired an equally grimey, poorly maintained guy to give you change for the overpriced machines.

In comparison the arcades in Japan are immaculate. It's comparable to the difference between one of those no-name donut shops that sells stale coffee, and a Starbucks. The machines are reasonably priced, the arcade is well stocked, and the employees are friendly and extremely helpful (as they are in every store in Japan).

What I found most interesting was the games themselves. I had imagined that arcade gaming more or less died out along with arcades in North America but that's not the case at all. New cabinets are being released constantly, and all the old stalwart Fighters and Shmups are still there. I wont get into the specifics about games, if you really are curious to know what the arcade industry is all about these days I would highly recommend the book Arcade Mania by Brian Ashcraft of Kotaku fame. It details all the different genres of games and how they came to be. It's quite interesting and if nothing else it will explain what all those booths constantly surrounded by teenage girls are, as well as how my arch nemesis, rythm games came into existence.

Socially, arcades are somewhat of a grey area. It's not like going out to a bar or a club, but it's easily more respectable than playing over the Internet. As someone who craves competition in games, I can tell you that it's a much better feeling playing that faceless person on the opposite side of the cabinet than it is playing the faceless person hundreds of miles away. There's still some level of apprehension, it's not like you'll be best friends after killing eachother over and over, but no one's going to scream profanities in your face as is the case on the Internet.

Having been ruthlessly dominated by several people in Japan while playing Street Fighter IV, I would get up, give the guy a wave and leave feeling like we both enjoyed our time, where as with an entirely online experience I would just quit in frustration. While the competition itself is still there online, the personal connection is more or less non-existant and it changes the experience into something negative.

The Japanese arcades also managed to change my perception about a certain type of game that I had always dismissed in the same way I do rythm games - the crane game. You've all seen them, those machines packed with stuffed animals with the claw hanging down from the ceiling and painfully simple controls - left right, back forward and go! Then you watch as the claw slowly descends, seemingly right on target, closes right as you had hoped around the object that you want now more than ever - and then raises up with the grip of a 95 year old arthritic grandmother, leaving your object of desire firmly in place.

Japanese arcades usually have a floor or two dedicated to these machines, and while the prizes are often of questionable quality, there's something surprisingly fun about browsing through the aisles of machines. In fact at one point, I went to an arcade just as it was opening at 10am and there were several other people there waiting - all of us immediately flocking to the rows of crane games peering from different angles looking for something the claw could hook on to - an easy grab. The hunt for easy prizes is part of the game and it's actually kind of fun.

A lot of the reason it's more fun in Japan than in other places is because the staff in the arcades frequently shuffle up the prizes. While in North America the machines have been sitting unattended to for years, the Japanese crane games are restocked every day and the employees are devious, knowing just how to position things to make them look easy to get even though it's borderline impossible.

There is however the conundrum of the medal games. Usually one of the upper floors is dedicated to them and I cannot figure out what the draw is. Basically, you buy medals, which are effectively worthless coins, for real money - but the medals only work in the medal machines in the arcade. So you take the medals, play the medal games and you win... more medals?

You can't cash the medals back in for money, you simply keep playing the game with the extra medals you win, until you're out. These aren't typical games either, most medal games are just glorified slot machines. Sure some have extravagent cabinets with all sorts of screens and whatnot, and it's fun to look at for a few minutes but how people can continually play for no real payoff I don't understand.

I suppose a large part of the reason I don't understand is because I never understood the big brother of the medal game either - Pachinko.

Similarly to Akihabara where you cannot move ten feet without hitting a video game store, you cannot go more than 10km in any direction in Japan without passing a Pachinko parlour. That may be a slight exaggeration... actually no, I think that's accurate. While not really arcades in the way we know them, Pachinko parlours are much more common especially in rural areas and while they are referred to as "game centers" don't be fooled as they are much closer to casinos. Especially in the small towns we passed through there were at least one or two Wal-Mart sized Pachinko parlours with a giant neon signs and massive parking lots.

The game of Pachinko itself - and I hesitate to use the word game, is similar to the medal games in that you buy Pachinko balls with money and then play Pachinko for hours on end in an effort to win more pachinko balls that you can then cash in for money or prizes. Much like the medal machines it's really just a more extravagent slot machine for the most part. While I can understand the draw of winning money, what I don't understand is how there are so many of these massive places, and they are always full of people!

There are people waiting for them to open in the morning, people leaving as they close at night, the parking lots are always at least somewhat full and the most curious thing of all is that they're probably the most uncomfortable places in Japan. As you approach a Pachinko parlour it looks interesting enough, plastered with pictures of cute anime girls and advertisments for new machines, it looks like a really fun place to go - and then the doors open.

As soon as you're close enough the sliding doors open up and you're immediately blasted with impossibly loud pachinko machines all blaring their various sound effects. It's like a casino mixed with a club mixed with an arcade mixed with some gino blaring his car stereo overtop of it all. Add to that the air, or should I say, the smoke with some air near the floor somewhere and you have a wholly unrelaxing atmosphere in which to throw your money away.

I've never been much for gambling in general, maybe if I was I would understand it a little more, but even if I fully supported gabling I would still never understand how there are so many of these massive places all equally loud and full of people at all hours of the day.

To each their own I suppose!

Getting somewhat back on topic, I'll answer the question that some people are probably dying to ask - yes there are lots of adult games. In fact, it seems that the entire PC gaming scene in Japan is practically dedicated to them.

Through all the video game stores I visited I rarely would see PC games on the first floor unless they were a really well known franchise like Final Fantasy or Call of Duty. Even the almighty World of Warcraft is nowhere to be seen. Usually I'd have to go up a floor or two to find them and when I finally got to the PC games floor it was completely dominated by adult games. I forget which store I was in but it was literally an entire floor of adult PC games in which I managed to find one corner with some copies of Starcraft II. PC gaming has been having some troubles as of late to be sure, but in Japan it seems even less represented.

I suppose it's possible that I just didn't know the best places to look, but my impression is that PC gaming in Japan is primarily MMOs. As someone who plays far too many MMOs already and spends far too much time reading about them I was really surprised to see so many quality titles that I had never even heard of before.

There's the obvious ones like Lineage, Lineage II, Monster Hunter etc. that are somewhat known in North America, but then there are ten or more titles that all seem pretty popular and are often free to play micro transaction games. At one point waiting for a ferry to Tokyo we spent the night in an Internet cafe, so I took the chance to load up a game called Dragon's Nest. Stumbling through the account creation process with my limited Japanese I finally managed to get into the game itself and I was quite impressed.

While it's nothing groundbreaking it had nice graphics, a clean UI, respectable Japanese voice acting and a seemingly high populatation (granted their were only two servers to choose from). So while it's no World of Warcraft competitor, it was just one of the many games we tried and was drastically better than the majority of free to play games I've tried at home. I would be curious to talk to someone who is more in tune with the Japanese game scene to find out what people there are playing in lieu of World of Warcraft.

In the end it's pretty safe to say that in my experience, Japan is the most video game oriented society there is. While games are becoming more and more popular in North America it's a different mentality over here. To the average North American gamer, games are just like movies while to the average Japanese gamer, games are more of a hobby. Personally I've always considered gaming to be a hobby, so being surrounded by people that seem to feel the same way was a nice feeling.

I find I miss being able to go to an arcade, I miss the country-wide competition and leaderboards of the networked machines, and I really miss the lack of a social stigma associated with games. It's a nice experience for a North American nerd to see cute girls playing Tekken in an arcade, or taking rythm games to such an extreme level of skill that even through my hatred for them, I can appreciate.

So while I'm back in the comfort of home working through the Starcraft II campaign and thoroughly enjoying being able to communicate with no effort, I've pretty much decided at this point that I will be going back to Japan at some point in the future. Not even so much for the games, but for the culture in general which I haven't spoken of much as this isn't really the place for it. But you know, while I'm there... I might visit an arcade or two.

Tomorrow morning I leave for Japan and since I never set up a proper way to write updates to this page, this will probably be the last one until I return at the beginning of October.

I'll be touring around by bicycle for the next 88 days so if you feel like keeping up with my progress, I have another blog set up specifically for this trip:

The Eggplant Curse

Bonus nerd points if you know where the name comes from without having to Google it. For those only interested in the topic at hand, I'll be sure to take advantage of Tokyo as best I can as a hardcore video gamer. I will not return until I've visited at least one video game themed bar/restaurant, and been mercilessly defeated at Street Fighter IV in an actual Japanese arcade.

I'll see what else I can think of while I'm there and be sure to get some decent pictures. If you have any suggestions, let me know!

Hopefully when I come back I wont be too far behind in Starcraft II. I haven't even finished packing yet, and my Starcraft II ladder performance is what's worrying me. This is going to end well I'm sure.

I can't help but continue to be impressed by what I read about Guild Wars 2. If you haven't had a chance to look into it in detail there is lots of good information at guildwars2.com.

The latest video popped up on Kotaku a couple of days ago showcasing the Warrior class, you can see it below:

Not only is it quite impressive graphically, but the sound effects and animations are spot on and the art direction is fantastic. But as good as it looks there are some things that are cause for concern.

Maybe I'm looking into this in too much detail, but judging by the flow of combat it seems that they may have done away with auto attack, which is a welcome change and something I said before needed to be trashed in any self respecting next generation MMO. Unfortunately the skill chain system they describe that seems to be replacing it isn't quite what I had hoped for:

Kotaku
Fighting is made even more convenient using chains, series of skills that use the same hotkey and fire off in sequence, sort of like the roulette system used in Spellborn. For instance, the sword chain Sever Artery, Gash, and Final Thrust all reside on one key. Hitting that key once kicks off Sever Artery. The next press activates Gash. The third invokes Final Thrust, and then the whole thing resets. Neat and tidy.

I think they're missing the point of skill chains entirely. Chain attacks are supposed to make combat more varied and encourage the player to pay attention to the fight instead of just repeatedly pressing one button. Sure it will be fun to watch your player execute the combo, the first hundred times, but once you're over that you'll realize that nothing has actually changed.

Attacks in MMOs should be more tree than chain where the player has to make decisions about what to do next based on what the mob, or even better what his allies are doing, and not just be God of War style attacks - press X three times to do something awesome.

I'm also a bit concerned about how easily the mobs were dying. Even though they were probably very low level for the purposes of the video, I'm still worried that WoW's all powerful influence has managed to spread it's corruption to Guild Wars 2, removing every challenge and replacing it with shiny effects and free epics. I guess we'll have to just wait and see.

In my ideal MMO if the Warrior in the video didn't block that fire breath it would have killed him outright, and possibly burned you in real life. Maybe that's a bit much, I just seems like it has been far too long that MMO combat has been more like a war of attrition than the gladiatorial combat that it should be.

Combat should be about choices and tactics, not just having enough hit points or doing enough damage to cover for your mistakes, even while fighting a baby goblin.

I'm off topic as usual, and none of this really matters anyways. As with any MMO, content is king and no combat system, quest system or character customization can save you from a lack of it. So far Guild Wars 2 seems to have the basics down at least, we'll just have to see what they're able to build on top of that. I'm not expecting the Mariana Trench here, but something deeper than WoW's wading pool would be a welcome change.

I'm in a sort of video game limbo. Since I'll be leaving for a few months, in less than a month, it feels pointless to be working on (working on seemed more appropriate than playing) an MMO or trying to climb any of the various FPS/RTS/Fighting Game ladders that are around.

Without this distraction I haven't been too sure what to do with myself. So after announcing my boredom to several people on MSN/Google Talk, refreshing Kotaku several times and seriously considering maybe doing some actual work, I decided to write something. I'm now about two paragraphs in and I still don't actually know what I'm writing about..

I let my mind drift to the topic of video games, and immediately there are a few that stand out, and so I think I've found my topic. The most memorable games of my gaming life (so far).

This isn't about graphics, innovation, game play mechanics or even popularity really, it's simply a list of the first games that come to mind when I let my mind wander, and why I think they were so memorable. I'll attempt to list these in reverse order, but the order is more or less random!

Super Mario Bros.

The original Super Mario Brothers was in many ways responsible for making home console gaming what it is today.

The music, the sound effects, watching less video game inclined relatives instinctively thrust the controller from side to side as they jumped. Mario was an unlikely mascot and an unexpected hit. I suspect this one would be on many people's lists.

My personal reason though, is that the original Super Mario Brothers was the first, and last game that my dad ever finished before I did, and so it will always be a game that sticks in my memory more than most.

Kings Quest V

Adventure games were a dime a dozen in 1990, and at the time they were my genre of choice. Having not played any more traditional role playing games at this point, these were the first games in which the story really meant something. Understanding the story, and the world you were living in was really what the game was all about.

King's Quest V didn't have flashy graphics or even really interesting game play, but it had characters that I cared about and wanted to help, a story that I wanted to see through to the end, and for anyone who has ever played it, a song that will forever haunt your dreams. I'm not sure what emotion it evokes whether it be disgust, terror, happiness or sadness. But everyone that has played through this game will remember the ant song for the rest of their lives both for the ridiculousness of it, and because it is that wonderful moment in an RPG when you realize that your previous actions will have an impact on what happens in the game later on.

In case you're curious, somehow there's a video of it. The ants are about one minute in.

Kings Quest V: Part 7

Lemmings

If you haven't played Lemmings, which is entirely possible, do yourself a favour and play it online since trying to get an old MS-DOS game to run now may be a terrible experience.

Note: Sounds seems to only work in Internet Explorer, and I highly recommend playing with sound, it has some great MIDI music.

Lemmings is at it's core a puzzle game, but it's wrapped up so well in the hearts of each of the tiny green haired inhabitants that you really want them to survive. Solving the puzzle is secondary to saving your Lemmings, and it's part of what made the game so fun.

Although there were a number of sequels, I don't recall any of them being interesting except possibly Lemmings 2: The Tribes.

I'll always have a soft spot for Lemmings because it allowed me to see puzzle games in a new light, and because there's something strangely endearing about those little blue guys. I remember my grandmother watching me play Lemmings for hours on end, just as happy as I was to see them reach their destination at the end of each level.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

While there are those that would bring up Ocarina of Time, or Wind Walker, there will never be a better Zelda game for me than A Link to the Past. The iconic Zelda theme song is the version from A Link to the Past, and in a time when you weren't able to simply look things up on the Internet, it was a wonderful exercise in exploration.

Zelda made exploration and discovery fun, opening a chest was like Christmas, getting new items felt like obtaining super powers, and the character advancement was based on progress so there was never a desire to simply grind experience; a problem that somehow still plagues modern RPGs. Beating A Link to the Past without looking up spoilers in Nintendo Power was a testament to your patience, and memory.

Looking back on the hours it took to complete the game plays out like a silent film. There was a story, there was mystery and suspense and everything else in almost every area you explored, but outside of a few paragraphs of text at key points it never really had to be explained. Even though everyone that played through this game took almost the same path, it always made each player feel like this was their own personal story and so beating this game still gave me more of a sense of satisfaction than almost any other. At one point I even tried to record myself playing through it on VHS in an attempt to allow others to experience the game as I did.

Doom

It would be hard to complete a list like this without Doom. While my trusty 386DX 66Mhz computer was good enough for everything I had thrown at it so far, Doom was another thing entirely. Many nights were spent across the street at a friends house, playing Doom on his blazing fast 486dx2 66Mhz with 8mb of RAM. The silky smooth way the walls bobbed up and down as you ran from grey corridor to grey corridor, the snarl of imps and demons in full stereo sound. Doom was the Crysis of the x86 generation, bringing most computers to their knees, and the game that not only validated PCs as legitimate gaming platforms, but changed the way games were made across the board.

Of course I didn't know any of that at the time, but what I did know and what made the game so memorable to me was that it was the first really atmospheric game that I had played. In side scrollers and the like, nothing was really a surprise. Being in first person and fighting demons from Hell no less made the whole experience truly frightening at times. At one point I remember being so startled by something that I slammed on the down arrow key with enough force to push it into the keyboard permanently.

Doom was the first game that made me realize that games too can draw you into their world just as much, if not more than a movie could. It was Doom more than any other game that solidified video games as my preferred form of entertainment. Even though today's first person shooters are much more advanced, there's still something special about playing through a few levels of Doom. If first person shooters were ice cream Doom would be vanilla, and current games would be Chunky Monkey - vanilla with a bunch of extra crap mixed in.

Diablo

Diablo was like Warcraft III on a more personal level, you were an army of one. While Warcraft III kept me indoors during the summer, Diablo kept me awake until it was light out with the soothing sounds of acoustic guitar. In true Blizzard style Diablo took someone else's concept and mastered it on their first try. Just like no one remembers that Warcraft was a Dune II clone, no one remembers Rogue or Mystery Dungeon which were the real inspiration for Diablo.

Diablo really wasn't a very complex game. Most of it was randomly generated and the combat was the now commonplace click, click, loot formula that I've talked about before but at the time it was revolutionary. Traditionally games like this had been in turn based territory and so transforming a dungeon crawler into a real time game somewhat reminiscent of Zelda, only with a much darker and more mature theme turned out to be a winning formula.

As fun as it was there was really one thing that made Diablo truly memorable and really contributed to it's success; Battle.net. Blizzard's online gaming platform was easy to use and more stable than anything else out there. The fun factor in Diablo increased exponentially while playing online with friends.. or enemies. My current addiction to all things MMO can be traced quite easily back to Diablo and the sense of progression you felt when killing a notorious PK, or obtaining a coveted item.

Diablo had it's issues, but it was really one of the pioneers of online gaming. It's rare for a game to come out now without online play, and at least some of that is due to the success of Diablo.

Now with the release of Diablo III looming, some of the most rabid fans on the Internet are foaming at the mouth. I'm so jaded that I'm able to avoid getting too excited, but I have a confession to make... I almost responded to a forum post expressing my excitement for it's release. I was almost one of "those people" on the Internet, even more than I already am and it's all because of Diablo.

Killer Instinct

This is probably an odd one for most people. Killer Instinct never became truly mainstream and so I would expect that most people probably never cared about it. Allow me to read your mind, you're probably thinking "That game sucks, you just press one button and do a million hit combo".

If that's what you were thinking... remind me to slap you the next time I see you, partially because you're judging a book by it's cover and also because you just insulted my religion.

Killer Instinct, yes even more than Street Fighter II was what gave me a new respect for fighting games. To me the problem with most fighters is that as good as you may be, it's still possible to be beaten by a drunken hamster with it's feet taped to the buttons. Killer Instinct on the other hand required knowledge of different openers, combos, combo breakers etc. and most importantly the only people I would lose to are people that actually knew what they were doing.

Enough about the game for now though, as I could write pages and pages about that and if you didn't like it then I'm not going to convince you now. The real reason it ended up being such a memorable game for me was because of the fact that there was really only one arcade in Toronto that had it, which meant that twice a week I would take the hour long trip just to get to the arcade with a pocket full of quarters and hone my skill. Even though that arcade is now long gone and been replaced with a Sporting Life, I still look towards that corner of the mall and remember playing for hours on end. Killer Instinct was a crowd pleaser in arcades, the announcer screaming about huge combos and the iconic "c-c-c-comboooooooooo breaker!" often brought people over to watch. When two good players went at it there was always a crowd, and sometimes even some gambling.

I loved playing that game in arcades and was obviously one of the first people to pick up the game when it made the transition to the small screen on Super Nintendo. Sadly the SNES version was really nowhere near as epic as the arcade version and while I spent many nights intensely fighting with my friend Malcolm who was the only other person I knew that appreciated the game the same way I did, it was never the same as when I played in the arcade. If I ever settle down I'm not going to have a room for a baby, or an office, I'm going to have a shrine for my Killer Instinct arcade cabinet.

To this day whenever I happen past an arcade in bowling alleys or other cities, I always look for a Killer Instinct machine and even though all I can really still pull off is an ultra combo with Glacius, it's still music to my ears and enough nostalgia to last me until the next time.

Chrono Trigger

If there was one game that enthralled me more than any other it was Chrono Trigger, and I still spread the gospel wherever I go. In fact as we speak my Nintendo DS is in the hands of a friend's ex-girlfriend as I convinced her that she absolutely had to play through Chrono Trigger.

Technically speaking the game is nothing special, it's a mostly typical JRPG that was released for SNES in 1995 with the standard Active Time Battle system popularized by most earlier Final Fantasy games. But Chrono Trigger stands way above the crowd and is forever remembered by anyone that played it for several reasons.

Chrono Trigger remains the bar to which I raise every RPG I play, and even some movies and books because it remains the only story that I've experienced that was able to introduce time travel without getting ridiculous. Even with the ability to travel through time, Chrono Trigger never felt confusing and was never plagued with those "But why can't I just go back and kill this guy when he's a baby?" questions that inevitabely crop up in every game or movie that involves different timelines. Time travel in Chrono Trigger was mysterious, fun and added a sense of urgency and purpose to everything you did in the game, as if time really was ticking away as the story came to a close. Your attachment to all the people in different timelines always left you considering the effect your actions would have not only on your party, but on entire civilizations that may be affected by a change in the timeline.

The characters in Chrono Trigger are interesting not because they are extremely deep but because they are not your stereo typical RPG characters. There's no chosen one with a hidden power, there's no evil empire to be vanquished by a poor boy from the slums, and the main character has no deep seeded psychological issues that he has to work through over the course of the game.

You're not just filling the shoes of one character and experiencing the game from his point of view but watching a story unfold with characters that meet, interact and care for each other realistically, all while allowing for your actions to change the direction it takes. Once you really get into the game your interest is held not only by the individual characters but by the overarching storyline and the amazing world in which it takes place. No one playing through the game could predict where the plot is going or how it would end because it's as well written and complex as any that you would find it more traditional media.

In the past few years the term role playing game has come to mean simply that the characters in the game have statistics and attribute points instead of what it originally meant which was that you were playing the role of a character in the game. In Chrono Trigger you feel as though you are playing the role of a silent member of the party, never involved with dialogue and never seen on screen but an important part of the world none the less, a feeling that no RPG I have played since has been able to replicate. With several different endings, all of which are satisfying and completely reasonable, Chrono Trigger is an RPG that will leave you wondering what would have happened to this world and these characters if you hadn't been a part of it.

There is one last aspect of Chrono Trigger that cannot be overlooked; the music.

Chrono Trigger continued Square's tradition of composing exceptional, emotional music for it's games. In my opinion Chrono Trigger to this day has the best sound track of any video game. Not only was it one of the largest sound tracks developed for a game, and despite the eerie similarity of one of the tracks to a song we all love to hate (You can listen here if you're curious) the Chrono Trigger music is adored by every fan of the game, it even has it's own separate wikipedia entry to cover all of the different versions and covers that have been released over the years.

I still regularly listen through the Chrono Trigger soundtrack and am amazed to find that it doesn't remind me of any specific part of the game, but of how I was feeling when I first heard it. Playing through the soundtrack takes me through a range of emotions that are so intense, I quietly laugh at myself when I realize it's all because of a game I played fifteen years ago. If you think it sounds ridiculous, play through Chrono Trigger on an emulator or on the DS and when you're finished with it we'll see how you feel about it.

Chrono Trigger is not my most memorable game of all time, but over all these years it has remained my favorite gaming experience.

Everquest

I'm sure this one is a big surprise. Everquest was for better or for worse the game that shaped my attitude towards every game after it, and in many ways my attitude towards real life and the people I interact with. It is rare for more than a day or two to go by without some memory of EQ popping up.

I've written up a far more detailed (and more lengthy) synopsis of my time in Everquest here so I'll do my best to keep this short.

To the video game world at large Everquest was the first 3D massively multiplayer game, a game that inspired many copycats none of which were more successful than EQ itself until World of Warcraft some five years later. At it's peak EQ had roughly 300k subscribers, for a time when many people still used modems this was a huge number. It is currently still running, and spans eleven expansions that unfortunately get progressively worse. In it's glory days Everquest was more of a hobby than a game to me and most of the three hundred thousand people that played it.

Technically speaking the game was a mess. It wouldn't run in a window, the UI was terrible, the graphics were mediocre at best but really none of that mattered. Everquest was one of the first games to require an Internet connection to play and experiencing something like that in 1999 was incredible. I remember my friend Zack playing at my house, grouped with a party of other players from across the globe running through The Greater Faydark when it began to rain. "This is wild..." he remarked, and I smiled and nodded in the nerdiest way possible. It was at that point that I realized how special this game was, and could really see the potential it had.

Everquest has been the topic of social studies, essays and blogs all over the Internet, magazines and television and was largely responsible for spawning the Gold Selling Industry as we know it. It consumed eight years of my life and although that may sound insane to someone who didn't play, I don't have even a small amount of regret about spending that time in Norrath.

I could go on and on about the game but in an attempt to stay on topic; EQ was memorable to me because it was a part of my life - no, it was my life for several years and because even though I haven't actually played for about ten years I still regularely talk to many of the friends I made in EQ. It was the game that taught me to stop seeing people online as nameless avatars and see them as actual people, with actual emotions invested in what they're doing online. It changed my perception of online interaction and allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of people and their motivations in real life as well.

As a game it was memorable to a degree, and even if it weren't for the people it would have been on this list, but only because it was a precursor to the online gaming revolution. The only reason it is solidly number one here is because of the people I met, and the experiences I had with them in game. I know now why it was so hard for me to understand why my grandfather always told stories about when he was young, since none of them seemed particularly cheerful to me. It was because for him it was never about where he was, or what he was doing, it was about remembering the people he was with and how they made him feel, and since I didn't have that connection to the people in my grandfather's stories I could never understand why they were so fun for him to talk about. Similarly to how you probably don't understand why I look back on sitting in front of a computer in my basement, playing a poorly designed game for five years so fondly, it's because you don't have the same connection with the people that I do and without that it's just not something that can be fully understood.

From time to time I feel like I miss playing Everquest but when I look back at it objectively I realize that it was really never very fun, and that what I am really missing is the time I was able to spend with my friends, and the opportunity that the game allowed to make new ones every time you logged on. Everquest was a role playing game like no other, a role playing game in reverse. I was not playing the role of Tiluvar the Druid, but Tiluvar was striving every day to be the Matt that I wanted to be in real life. Through Everquest I was able to discover a lot about people, especially myself.

Brain Empty

When I started writing this I really had no idea where it was going, but looking back over the list I have come to realize that what makes a game truly memorable has nothing to do with game play mechanics, sound effects or graphics. Sure a game that excels in all of these areas will be fun to play, but what makes any video game something you will always look back on fondly is how it made you feel while you were playing it.

Far too often these days games are made to be distractions. They are built around the idea that a game should never pause to allow you to reflect on what is going on, it should be completely immersive and offer non-stop excitement, so much so that the emotional element is often completely forgotten.

I played through God of War III on the weekend and while it was a lot of fun while I was playing it, looking back on it I don't care about Kratos or anyone else in that world. God of War never made me question myself or ponder anything outside of exactly what was on the screen. In fact the only reason I was able to play as much as I did was because I enjoyed the company of the people I was playing it with. Had it not been for them I would have stopped playing an hour into it simply because it wasn't a memorable game, it was fun but that's not what it's all about - at least not for me.

To real gamers there is no question that video games can be an art form but to the mainstream that idea is laughable. It seems that maybe part of the problem is that they're trying to evaluate games like they would hand out awards - best graphics, best story, best music - if it gets a 10 in all of them then maybe it's art?

Some time ago on a trip to Russia I saw a painting by Henri Matisse named The Dance and took a poorly lit picture of it. Every time I look at this painting I can't help but wonder what it's doing in an art gallery? Unlike some other paintings I feel absolutely nothing when I look at it yet it is widely agreed upon by professionals as true art. I imagine this is how the general public looks at games; they see the graphics and hear the sounds and the music but they feel nothing and so the idea that games could be art is ridiculous to them. It's not because games can't be art, and not because The Dance is a bad painting, it's because I don't know enough about the painter, the method, the time period etc. to really understand the whole impact of the painting and similarly people who are just casually observing a game don't understand the story, the characters, the setting etc. well enough to allow it to have an impact on them, and the odd time they attempt to try it's with something like Modern Warfare 2 or Halo and not ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, or Chrono Trigger.

So what am I even getting at here? I guess the point I'm attempting to make is that games need to take a step back and realize that it's not realistic explosions and ragdoll physics that make good games - sure they can make fun games but don't fool yourselves into thinking that just because you shipped three million copies you're somehow furthering the art. It's only an attempt to dig us further into this hole in which we've already dug as deep as we can (There was a chest full of Rock Band instruments at the bottom).

Currently it's my biggest fear that developers mistakenly attribute the community and emotional attachment people develop for games as somehow their doing, without realizing that it's not the games, but the fact that these days they're all online with real people that makes people enjoy them as much as they do.

Taking a game online is an easy way to create the kind of emotion that makes games memorable without having to actually make your game interesting enough to do it itself. I would be amazed to see something as deep as ICO be transformed into a multiplayer game. The online revolution is good for games, but only when developers use it to make the games themselves more emotionally involving and not just as an excuse for only having five maps and no story and then expecting the gamers to fill in the rest.

Video games are in a unique position as an art form. I know for a fact - especially after making this list - that they can bring about the same amount of emotion and reflection as any other form of art and on top of that, they are interactive and have the ability to let people experience them co-operatively or competitively. There is no reason for games to be stuck in this rut, churning out mindless games year after year with only a small handful able to actually capture people's imagination.

I have no doubt that at some point in the future games will be seen as a true form of art, but right now there are precious few developers who set out to make games intended to make you actually think about what you're doing in a way that can impact not only what button you press next but how you feel and what decisions you make in your real life. At the same time we the audience have to stop evaluating games as if their ultimate achievement is to be able to detach us from reality, and instead by what they should be doing - building on top of it.

I don't have a point

In the end I believe a list like this would be completely different for anyone that attempted to make one, and maybe that's why the question of whether or not video games are art is not easily answered. Especially when you consider online games, the experience from one person to the next is so vastly different that what is an emotional experience for one may be boring and uninteresting to another.

I suppose like any art form, people have their tastes and opinions and you can't really argue with that, so what is it that makes the Mona Lisa so widely agreed upon as a masterpiece? or Final Fantasy VII so adamantly defended as JRPG perfection? I think the answer to that question would take another twenty pages or however long this has been to think about, or maybe it's just our innate ability to tell when an artist or in the case of video games, a team of artists fully devote themselves to something and through that devotion we are able to derive emotion from whatever it is we're viewing. I guess that could make anything art, even what I'm writing - but probably not, it needs more realistic explosions.

For a while there I was worried I would miss the chance again this year. I'm going to be out of the country (and largely away from technology) for three months starting at the end of June, and as an example of how devoid of responsibility my life currently is the only thing I could think of that may be affected by that was that I may miss the opportunity to buy tickets to Blizzcon.

Let me make clear that I'm going as a fan of Blizzard, and not a fan of WoW. This is the gaming equivalent of going to a party knowing that your ex-girlfriend will be there, only to ignore her and try your best to act like you didn't even know she was going. Cataclysm? I didn't know you would be here! What a nice surprise, it's so good to see you!

So in keeping with my avoidance of WoW, I wont be wearing Nightelf ears, Tauren Horns or anything of the sort, but I will most definitely be checking out Diablo III and seeing if I can weasel my way into any Starcraft II tournaments.

Really I've just been a fan of so many Blizzard games that I think it's one of those things I should go to at least once. Either way I'm sure I'll have a good time.

Let me know if anyone out there is planning to attend. We can go out for a drink, or several. I know of at least a few old EQ friends who will be there.

This is all assuming I can beat the queue and actually buy the tickets. Last time I didn't even get that far.

I haven't posted much lately, summer is here (mostly) which means I make my yearly effort to be outside more often than inside. I'm still working my way through Final Fantasy XIII but find I'm not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I still intend to finish it, but it's not quite good enough to win the daily battle against drinks on a patio in the sun.

Dragon Age: Awakening was also a bit of a dissapointment according to several people, so I'm going to hold off on that one until I can pick it up for cheap. There are a few games I'm eager to play now that I have a PS3... God of War III, Demon Souls etc. but I've decided not to pick them up until I'm done with FFXIII.

So, long story short... the gaming scene is a bit dull right now, something that seems to happens every summer.

There is however one game that has captured some amount of my attention. Largely because I can play it at work, and in spite of my infinite rage at micro transactions and gated gameplay.. Lord of Ultima is actually pretty interesting.

It's in open Beta now, and I'd encourage anyone who likes upgrade buttons and progress bars to try it out. I would normally dismiss this as a farmville-esque money grab/waste of time, but the fact that it is technically an MMO, where everyone's cities exist in the same game world, and you can plunder them or take them over makes it interesting enough to be worthwhile.

After about a two hour time investement there isn't much of a time commitement required to remain competitive (at least as far as I've played) so it's a nice distraction now and then.

It's certainly not going to become anyone's favorite game, but for the summer season it's perfect. I could see it becoming quite popular when it goes live as long as they don't immediately cripple the gameplay to force use of the item store.

I'm playing with a few friends on World 3, and spawned on continent 24. If anyone gives it a try, feel free to find me. I'm playing as Nemui. I have a city as Tiluvar as well, but I've mostly abandoned it!

Lord of Ultima

Looks like it's going to be a busy few weeks. Dragon Age Origins: Awakening, God of War III, and most importantly (at least for today) Final Fantasy XIII.

I have purposefully avoided reading any reviews, or looking into the features of the game as much as I could manage because I feel that these games are best learned as you go, instead of simply played.

The one thing I do know is that this Final Fantasy is supposed to be very streamlined. No more going back to town to sell, no boring back and forth and very linear, movie-like progression.

I think it will work. The Final Fantasy games have been leaning more and more towards "interactive movie with combat sequences" with each iteration, so to simply accept that fact and build a game around it instead of constantly interrupting that flow for the sake of nostalgia is probably a good thing.

Sure as a classic gamer I'll miss going to town, exploring, and actually having to figure out where to go next, but if the streamlining means I'll never have to experience anything like FFx's Blitzball again, I support it 100%.

Also, while I'm blabbering. Don't buy Alien Vs. Predator. It's fun, but it's not feature complete, you're better off waiting for it to be $10 on Steam, hopefully by then it will have more than 5 maps, and less than 5000 bugs.

The terms casual and hardcore get thrown around a lot when both insulting and promoting different play styles. To the hardcore crowd the word casual is nothing short of an insult. Calling someone a casual gamer throws their dedication and skill into question, while for the casual crowd calling someone hardcore is implying that they have no life and no social skills.

The annoying thing about this rivalry between the gaming world's equivalents of political parties is that the terms casual and hardcore are entirely fluid; completely defined by the person using them in relation to their own position.

So what is it that actually makes someone a hardcore, or casual gamer?

Most people's initial response would be playtime - If you spend more than say... 20 hours a week playing games, you're hardcore. While casuals would only play when the kids are asleep and the wife "has a headache".

I'm not really sure that this is the case. For example I have a friend, who rarely plays games, and they're borderline games like Civilization, but I would still consider him to be a somewhat hardcore gamer. What makes him hardcore in my mind is that when he does play games, he plays to win. Sure we all play for fun on some level, but to the hardcore gamers I believe that the fun comes with the victory while for casuals the fun is simply the act of playing.

That's not to say that the hardcore gamers don't enjoy the act of playing, but if there's no end game that allows them to really put their skills to the test, they will lose interest.

I have another friend who plays quite often, easily more than 20 hours per week, but I would consider her to be a casual gamer. She has no interest in the stress of direct competition or playing a level in a game over and over until she is able to complete it, she simply enjoys playing the game, and if it gets too challenging or frustrating she will move on to something else.

For a long time these two play styles could exist alongside each other with no real problems. If the casual gamer couldn't speed run through Mega-man, none of the hardcore players posting YouTube videos of them beating the game without taking any damage were annoyed by that. Both groups were able to enjoy themselves within the exact same game, and everyone was satisfied.

As games became more prevalent they had to start catering to both types of gamers, and this is where the gap started getting wider.

It was inevitable really, the hardcore gamers got better at games and so to give them a challenge that would allow them to enjoy themselves, games had to get more challenging. This was fine for a while but at a certain point games became so challenging that they started to require more time to complete. Hardcore gamers had to play more often because they had to in order to get good enough at a game that they could get satisfaction out of completing it. At the same time the casual players were feeling left out. If the game was too hard they wouldn't bother putting in the extra hours to learn and improve, they would simply go play something else that allowed them to have fun immediately, which for obvious reasons wasn't good for the developers of the harder game.

I can't really pinpoint when it started, I don't think any of us can, but this was around when we started to see difficulty levels in games. Mario or Altered Beast didn't have difficulty levels; there was no easy mode in Space Invaders, but somewhere along the way without anyone really noticing it, every game suddenly had options to decrease or increase the challenge. It seems like a decent enough solution really; the casuals can play on easy and enjoy their game, while the hardcore can play on hard and enjoy the challenge.

It is a system that is still in us in almost every modern game except for a few, like Demon Souls that are designed to cater specifically to the hardcore.

It was difficulty levels that really separated the casual and the hardcore. If you beat a game on hard, and your friend beat it on easy you would immediately feel superior, while at the same time your friend would wonder why you would bother wasting your time to have the exact same experience they had. Neither one could understand the other, but we all still managed to get along. That is until the Internet arrived.

The Internet really changed everything about games. I won’t go into too much detail here because that's another topic entirely, but as it relates to difficulty there are a few important points.

For starters, it immediately made games easier across the board because if you were ever stuck at any point, chances are you could simply look up the solution or strategy online, and continue on your way. This one fact really exasperated the hardcore/casual rivalry because now the casuals could keep up with the hardcore by simply looking up solutions online for the problems that the hardcore would spend several hours trying to solve on their own.

As games started to integrate Internet connectivity to share high scores and progress the dynamic changed again. For the hardcore it was no longer about simply being able to overcome the challenge of beating games on the highest difficulty setting, but about being able to do it better or faster than anyone else. Suddenly it wasn't so easy to define who was casual and who was hardcore. If you finished the game on hard the first week it was released, and I finished it on hard a week later, you would still consider me casual compared to you, and the actual casual gamers would be completely dismissed for being noobs.

Because the hardcore gamers were now effectively only competing with each other, the actual casual gamers who were still only interested in playing the game and didn't much care for getting the highest scores were able to band together and laugh as the hardcore burned themselves out in competition. It's sort of a tortoise and the hare story, because the casual gamers were still winning by getting exactly what they want, but on a world stage it was almost impossible for any hardcore gamer to really ever win, due to constant one-upmanship in the hardcore community online.

And now I find myself back at the topic I always seem to be rambling about, massively multiplayer games.

MMOs entered the scene when the hardcore/casual dynamic was at this point, and they made it so much worse. We were almost at a point where the hardcore and the casual had completely separated and were competing in entirely different arenas, but in MMOs everyone was playing the same game - we were back to square one. There were no difficulty settings, the information online was rarely up to date, and to make things worse the two groups were now directly competing with each other.

Initially it wasn't so bad, as usually the hardcore players were so far ahead of the casuals that it didn't matter too much, but the same things that forced games to change before would come up again. As MMOs became more prevalent, the hardcore players were clamoring for more challenging and competitive content, but since all of the content existed in the same world, developers hesitated to make things too challenging for fear of alienating the casual players. MMOs are a weird genre because there are many more measures of success than simply completing all the available content; having the most money, having the best equipment, being in the best guild. It's as if there are ten different high scores and you have to be competitive in all of them - this takes a lot of time.

The hardcore players had no problem committing hours and hours to getting the job done, that's just what they did, and in games that were built to reward time invested they excelled, leaving the casual players far behind. So in this case, the hardcore’s were able to compete and enjoy the game the way they wanted and the casuals were left out in the cold. Sure they were able to just enjoy playing the game as they always did, but there were so many different avenues of progression in an MMO that they did not have the desire to put in the time to "play through" all of them. They were effectively locked out of completing all parts of the game due to the time requirement to get there, and since they couldn't just switch it to easy to lessen that time requirement and allow them to "finish" the game, they were just going to play something else.

What ultimately changed things, as before, was money. Since video games were created, the casual segment of the audience has grown much faster than the more hardcore, and at this point in time the casuals made up around eighty percent of the population of these games. Realizing this, the developers were effectively forced to do what they had done before and create difficulty levels in their games in an attempt to cater to both segments of the gaming population. It had worked for single player games for many years, why not MMOs? I can understand the logic, but it just doesn't work out the same way.

What most people consider to be the real measure of your progress in an MMO is your equipment - if you have better gear than anyone else, you are winning.

In order to make it easier for casual players to win, the developers just had to make the best equipment easier to obtain. The obvious downside of this is that it removed the challenge for the more hardcore players. Trying to create a game that was both challenging and easy at the same time has proven to be nearly impossible and so we're left with the current state of MMOs - a constant fight between hardcore and casual.

The more hardcore an online game gets, the less friendly it is to casual players. The more casual a game gets, the less rewarding it is to the hardcore. This is what has segregated the casual/hardcore population more than anything else. Both sides feel entitled to their own enjoyment of their game, and take it as a personal attack when the other side is catered to and still neither side has developed the ability to understand the opinion of the other.

If a new area is added to the game that only the best equipped players can complete, the casuals will cry foul. If an alternate method is introduced to allow more casual players to obtain the same rewards as the hardcore players with less challenge, the hardcore players kick and scream. It is a non-stop back and forth but it's at the point now where the scales are consistently tilted towards one side.

Hardcore gaming is dead, and Farmville killed it.

The bottom line is that casual friendly games make more money, and the video game industry has become so close to being Hollywood that nothing else matters. Maybe I'm just being naive and it never did? MMOs have proven that if you leave hardcore gamers with no option but casual games, they will still play them, sure they'll completely dominate them, but the casual players never cared about that to begin with. So when you're trying to make a financially successful online game and have a choice between making a challenging game that 10% of the gaming population will absolutely love and play every day, or a casual friendly game that 90% of people will play now and then - the choice is obvious.

If it hasn't become apparent thus far, I consider myself to be one of the hardcore gamers and casual gamers annoy me. I have tried to explain the situation as honestly as I could but as I said a few times myself - I really just don't understand their point of view. I am incapable of enjoying a game just for enjoyment's sake. If I don't have to push myself to win, or if I'm not challenged I just won't enjoy it. In the end I can't help but feel like hardcore gamers are getting the short end of the stick.

When games were a new technology they were made for gamers - because there was no one else playing them. But thanks to Farmville and the Nintendo Wii, gaming is now well within the main stream. Hardcore gamers are now the definite minority and I can't help but wonder if this is just a phase that the industry is going through, or if we're actually becoming obsolete. Are we really doomed to a future where the best we can hope for is the video game equivalent of High School Musical 3, with Facebook games being the dominant source of revenue for publishers?

Lately it certainly seems that way, and while I still have some hope that this trend will stall, that casual gamers will get tired of being hand fed and join the hardcore in rallying for more challenging games, I can't help but be skeptical about the ability of the industry to turn it's back on the money associated with casual games.

Ultimately only time will tell, but no matter what happens, even if hardcore gamers are pushed out of gaming entirely, everyone stops caring about Starcraft and Street Fighter competitions and we're left with only the Farmville World Championship to watch - you'll all still be noobs to me.

These days you cannot log in to any MMO without being spammed in one way or another with offers to sell you gold for real world cash. It is now considered commonplace in massively multiplayer games, but it wasn't always that way.

This post was written a few years back when the gold selling industry really started to take off. It's a pretty interesting read, explaining how these people and companies made inroads into our games, and how even now most of the sites we visit are generating money for the same people who are stealing our accounts, and selling the gold back to us.

The Truth About IGE and the Gold Industry

The question of whether or not gold selling should be against the game's rules is a tough one that ultimately is up to the developers to decide. Unfortunately it's becoming more and more obvious that the developers aren't against it in principle, only against it because they want exclusive rights.

After all, even if money did grow on trees, creating it by typing numbers into a database is probably more profitable.

There are two reigning schools of thought in MMO design. We have the more common amusement park style of game, and the long sought after, but notoriously hard to successfully implement sandbox style MMO.

In a sandbox game the idea is that the world is your sandbox and what occurs is up to the people playing in the sandbox, more than the designers that created it. Want to kill that guard? Go for it. Decide you want to chop trees for a living and kill anyone else who tries to get into the lumber market? Sounds like a plan.

Some of you may be back in town saying "All I was doing was trying to cut down a tree and some asshole killed me for no reason! Why should he get all the lumber?!" and as a supporter of sandbox style games I'd reply with a fireball to the face and the theft of all your remaining money.

It's a fantastic dream, but so far there have been very few successful sandbox MMOs due in large part to just how hard they are to create without being tough to get into, unbalanced or just completely unfair.

But don't worry! Some developers heard your cries and realized that the QQ crowd had no interest in this world full of murderers and just wanted to "play the game".

Enter the amusement park style of game where what you can and cannot do is pretty strictly defined. Full of "You cannot do that here" and "You cannot attack that" messages, it is a world where you are forced to play the role of the productive member of society. Everyone is equal and everyone gets their turn. There are no thieves lurking in the shadows, wandering groups of murderers or long lost caves that may or may not be discovered.

Everything that is in an amusement park game is put there for a specific purpose, and if you use it for any purpose that it was not intended, or benefit from it more than other people, you are cheating and it will be removed/buffed/changed/nerfed.

This is still a role playing game in purely mechanical terms, but the role you play is not up to you, it's up to the people that designed the ride.

Now that my bias is clear, let me say that there is nothing necessarily wrong with amusement park MMOs, I just personally don't see the point. Every game has limitations but things have gotten so out of control lately that I wonder why I'm even playing?

Luckily for me I do almost nothing but raid, so I am able to ignore most of this stupidity so that it doesn't send me into a massive nerd rage when I can't kill someone that just "abbreviated" fail using a ph.

However, the most recent raid zone in World of Warcraft, my current vice and the ultimate amusement park MMO has started to horn in on my only remaining sanctuary of choice.

Without getting into the details of raid design and how it advanced in WoW, I'll just jump right to the point.

Raids are becoming more and more scripted as the game advances. We are now dangerously close to (and in some encounters already way past) the point where the strategy in raids is unimportant and it's all about repetition.

There is very little room with current raids to do anything but follow the script. Where once sandbox rules applied and you could use different abilities, positioning or strategies to take down a new boss we have started to move more towards a game where there are no strategies. The bosses are no longer designed to kill the raid; they're designed to be beaten by it.

The amusement park mentality of allowing players to do only what you intended for both ease of design and to promote equality between players and classes is starting to bleed into raiding, and it's making it worse.

Obviously there has to be some scripting, there have to be limitations and there have to be some abilities that are meant to be countered by specific player abilities. It just makes sense for the health of the game, but there should always be room for outside of the box thinking.

Don't get me wrong, I like Icecrown and honestly believe that it is a really well designed instance with plenty of fun encounters, but in many fights you are so limited in your choices and guided in your actions that it starts to feel a bit stale. I'm starting to feel less like I'm fighting an epic battle against an ancient evil being and more like I'm playing Simon Says.

Anyone who has played an MMO or really any game for that matter knows that the most exhilarating wins are the ones that you pull off by the skin of your teeth. It's not close because you're playing badly but because the monster you're fighting against is a little unpredictable, your role in the fight is not exactly the same each time. You have to adjust on the fly and mistakes are made but when it comes down to the wire, when people start dropping left and right and the boss is at 1%. You push as much as you can and with your dying breath you get him down. Then quickly throw your headset off to avoid the screams of nerdy joy.

Its fights like these that we all remember, but the more scripted and predictable the fights become the less it happens. It might be tough the first time, but any secondary kills become laughably easy since you've already memorized your role in the script, and so the close calls never happen again.

Walking that fine line between challenging and impossible can be extremely tough, so I can see how the amusement park style of raid design can be appealing. I just really hope that the developers haven't given up entirely, and that in the next raid zone we see there will be a better balance of sandbox and amusement park elements.

Most raids are already too rewarding of repetition and practice, as opposed to actual ability, and if we aren't able to come up with more creative ways to make encounters more interesting then we're all doomed to just be pressing buttons when the game tells us to, and have reduced one of the genres with the most potential for memorable experiences to nothing more than Rock Band: Azeroth Edition.

I'll be honest. I completely forgot about this. Even after posting about it I was busy wiping to the Lich King over and over and it just slipped my mind.

Looks like it may have ended up being for the best though, glad I managed to avoid this craziness posted by someone who has actually been into the game for a while:

Bringing you up to speed on Allods Online's Launch Debacle

Trying to avoid any speculation, as I really don't know anything about either company, and I'm sure they have their reasons for doing whatever they're doing but it seems utterly ridiculous to break an MMO that is getting favorable reviews.

It's so very rare for an MMO in WoW's shadow to have reviews that say anything other than "It's like WoW, but worse!" that I can't help but feel like gPotato and their Russian developers made a bit of a miscalculation.

If you want to turn a profit making MMO's you have to get people addicted and then gouge them for profits, not the other way around! There's a Soviet Russia joke in there somewhere.

Allods Online has been in closed beta for several months, and is apparently quite polished, which is a nice change from usual state of MMOs. It's entering open beta this coming Tuesday and might be worth a download.

I'm not really a fan of the item shop system in MMOs (where you can purchase items with real world currency) but as long as there isn't anything in the game that forces you to buy items to continue, I can probably live with it.

I really have no idea if it's any good or not but the initial poking around I've been doing has come up with a lot of surprisingly positive feedback from people who can actually speak and type in full words with proper english, which is quite rare these days.

As always, it's almost impossible to tell if an MMO will be worthwhile from screenshots and forum posts, but I've been looking for something new, so I'll have to give it a try for myself.

Whenever I try a new MMO I approach it like this; I have an annoyance meter, and a satisfaction meter. When the game does something stupid it fills part of my annoyance meter. When I enjoy part of the game it fills my satisfaction meter. If the annoyance meter fills up before the satisfaction meter, I quit and uninstall it. If not.. well, I'm not sure, that hasn't happened in five years.

Allods Online

One of the topics posted in the forums about the possibility of an EverQuest sequel got me thinking; what exactly would a new MMO need in order for me to really consider it a new and interesting experience?

Hopefully some time later I'll have a chance to go into more detail about what I think would be the best way to address some of these things, but for now I just want to give an overview of the components of MMOs that are long overdue for a change. I've tried to only include things that are universally agreed upon. For example I was dying to add instancing to this list, but some strange people like it, so I left it out. This also leans slightly more games in a fantasy setting, but really applies to all different types of MMOs.

For now I'm just going to talk about what needs to go, since what should be added will probably end up getting pretty long!

Main Tanking

Suggesting that tanking be removed is practically blasphemy, especially in a fantasy style game. It's really unfortunate though to see games like Borderlands, or Eve Online still adopting the same model of using a decked out defensive unit to take blows while the rest of the team deals damage, it flat out just doesn't make sense. Part of it relates to the lack of any sort of AI, as with proper AI mobs would hopefully not be dumb enough to attack the most heavily guarded unit all the time, but AI or not - main tanking needs to go. Defensive stats are something that every player should have to be conscious of, and balance against offense.

Auto attack

Some developers seem to be starting to clue in to this one already, but I feel obligated to mention it. Auto attack is useless, it's not even fun. You could remove auto attacking from any game and decrease the hit points of all the mobs by an amount comparable to the decrease in damage dealt by players and nothing would change. Auto attack is what we used when we had 14.4 modems and MMOs were just muds with a graphical interface. This is no longer the case, and so there's just no reason to even consider it anymore.

Quests

No, I don't think quests should be removed - but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who is sick of collecting random animal parts for random NPCs that I don't care about, will never see again, and have nothing interesting to offer me other than experience. I don't know about you, but after killing 1000 blue Orcs I'm really just not sure I should still gain experience for killing 1000 green ones. Experience should be granted for learning something new, or contributing to the game world, not for washing an NPCs dishes or taking their dog for a walk. If we wanted to do useless tasks all day we would be playing Farmville. Stop mixing my MMO's with Animal Crossing and give me a persistent story with interesting quest lines that relate to the overall feel, and direction that the game is taking. Stop giving me totally unrelated side quests that offer me nothing but aggravation. No one likes doing these quests, we like the experience, or we do them because of the rewards, but they're not fun.

I've killed dragons and gods. I save the world once a week after work. If you want me to go pick flowers you can probably fuck off.

Faction

While faction standings are an important part of MMOs, the way they are handled needs to be changed. Faction shouldn't simply be a grind - kill 10000 Orcs and the Elves will like you. While it may please the Elves that you're killing Orcs, your faction standing with different groups should be based on the choices you make in the various story arcs in the game. Single player games often do this very well, so that it isn't endless slaughter or item turn-ins but grand gestures and important choices that determine who likes you and who doesn't.

The faction grind needs to go, and along with it the cut-and-dry system of faction levels. NPCs all over the world shouldn't automatically be able to identify you as an enemy or friend from 100 meters away when you run by on a horse just because you killed some Orcs on another part of the continent. Notoriety or fame has to be incorporated into faction, and even then the individual members of a faction should be able to make their own choices based on your actions. Hey! You! Stop killing those babies! oh.. I see, you have collected 10000 Gnoll Scalps for our castle carpeting project. Carry on then!

Artificial Limitations

Ask any EverQuest player about the first time they died, and probably eight out of ten people will tell you it's when they accidentally hit space with their class trainer targeted, which turns on attack - and promptly gets you decapitated. Annoying? Maybe slightly, but these kind of events are what make MMOs more memorable than single player games. I still recall just how awesome I thought that Druid was when he was running around in Wolf Form killing the Dwarven guards. Sure it was annoying when I ran to the guards to save me, only to realize that they had been killed, but it made me feel like I was playing a game where the world could be manipulated by players, and wasn't just a glorified version of Simon Says where the only unexpected thing that can happen is that someone can answer a question without calling me a fag.

I should never be prevented from doing something by the game, I should only be prevented by the inhabitants of the game world, or the repercussions my character will suffer for doing something I shouldn't. We're getting way too comfortable with allowing artificial limitations to limit intelligent design. If games don't start going in the other direction we're going to end up with MMO's that are nothing more than a series of quicktime button pressing events that take place while your character is automatically following a predetermined path from quest hub to quest hub.

I could probably go on for weeks, but I think those are the things that are quickly becoming a staple of MMOs when they really have no business still being included, and are only there because no one has bothered to come up with a better alternative. So I'll leave it at that, like I said I plan to go into detail with each one at some point in the future, but before I stop writing this there is one final thing that absolutely needs to go - and it's not up to the developers at all.

Bullshit Sense of Entitlement

Note: This isn't directed at anyone who is likely to be reading this here, except possibly myself!

Just because you pay a monthly fee to play a game, doesn't mean that you have any say in how the game is made. If you were playing Halo 34: We actually gave Masterchief an udder so we can milk this franchise more easily or whatever it is you morons play when you're not in my general chat being annoying, and you came across a boss that you couldn't kill would you immediately log on Bungie's forums and complain that the boss is too hard? No, because that would make you look at best stupid, or more likely both stupid and terrible at the game. Yet for some reason in an MMO this is acceptable behavior.

If an ability you were using in a single player game was bad, you just wouldn't use it. You wouldn't go around demanding that it be fixed or you will - let's face it - continue to pay your monthly subscription but silently brood about it until you are nothing but a horrible shell of a human being, your insides having been eaten away by the terrible things that the malicious developers did to your beloved Battle Mage.

Why is it that MMO players all assume that they're really good at whatever MMO it is that they're playing? and therefore if they can't do something on the first or second try, it must be because the game is broken. You people whine and whine until the game is nerfed into the ground, then beat all the content in a week and start complaining that you're bored and there's nothing to do.

We, as the players of whatever MMO we're playing are entitled to nothing but the servers being accessible. No one promised us new content or class updates, no where does it say that your monthly fee also grants you the title of "Company Gameplay Advisor" and really, no one listens to 90% of what you have to say anyways.

Do you really want to know why every single MMO gets worse as it goes instead of better? It's because they start listening to us. I'm sure that individually there are a lot of people out there who have some really fantastic ideas about how whatever game they play could be improved, and when the developers combine those ideas with their vision for the game things start to improve. But when the developers try to make a game that caters to every complaint in an effort to make a game that everyone will enjoy, they end up with a game that no one is completely happy with, which then causes more complaints - and the downward spiral of MMO death begins.

To make a long story short. Make your suggestions, make your complaints, get as angry as you want about the game you're choosing to play - but lose the attitude, because no one owes you anything.

I was going to just write something about Ensidia being banned, but I think that their banning is also part of a larger question. Where exactly is the line between exploit and strategy?

It's a complicated question, one which is up to the game developer staff to decide, which unfortunately leaves it open to the judgement of one or a small group of people and therefore is subject to opinion.

So what exactly is an exploit?

Let's start from the top. The following in an obvious exploit where there is no room for misinterperetation, and while a permanent ban may have been extreme I don't really disagree with that decision.

This is a quote from one of Overrated's members in response to their banning for an AQ40 exploit:

Quote
Let me explain. We are the only US Horde guild that clears Naxx [the most challenging area of the game], been like that for a few weeks. People found that the pre-C'thun trash was so painful, that they decided to install some stupid thing that deletes walls or something, and you can just run there after Skeram [the first boss]. I know, we had it coming, blah blah whatever, we know we deserve it...I'm sure they'll try and get it rescinded because it's kind of a steep punishment with no recourse or whatever.

Another good example is Exodus' world first kill of Yogg-Sargon (0 Keepers). The guild leader of Exodus explained it as such:

Quote
The bug is when someone is left inside the brain room of Yogg-Saron, they can still get aggro on the adds that spawn in phase 3. That means if you have someone getting healing aggro in the brain room, they will get aggro on the adds, which cause them to evade in place and allows for all of your raids dps to be focused on Yogg.

The above is still clearly an exploit as it allows you to effectively despawn mobs that are integral to the challenge of the encounter, and it is something has to be done intentionally (as there is really no reason for anyone to be inside the brain room in phase 3) but at the same time - no external programs were used. No game code was changed. So while this one still lands well within the boundaries of an exploit, we're starting to cross over into "clever use of game mechanics" territory.

Further down the exploit ladder we come to EverQuest and the Statue of Rallos Zek. This was a mob that was once thought unkillable due to the sheer amount of damage that it would dish out on the tanks. This extreme damage was a part of the encounter and ironically, it was Tigole's EverQuest guild (Legacy of Steel) that first killed it - by tanking it with other NPC giants who were Mind Controlled by the guild's Enchanters.

We're now well into the area of strategy, instead of exploit. While a major part of the encounter is still being intentionally negated, players are using the abilities available to them in order to complete an encounter, sure there is some outside of the box thinking going on, but nothing they are doing is interfering with the encounters normal mechanics, they are simply dealing with it in an unintended way.

At the bottom of our exploit ladder, landing safely into something that even the most aggresive banners (Blizzard) do not consider an exploit, you have something like the three drake rush style of completing Sarthation. The idea is to go in with 1 tank, 1 healer, and 8 DPS. Use Heroism/Bloodlust and throw everything you can at Sartharion while someone kites the first of the three drakes away, and you kill her before the second one joins the fight.

This effectively allows you to ignore a very large part of the encounter, but at no time are you preventing the encounter from following it's script, and more importantly, you're not doing anything you wouldn't normally do.

So what's the take away? How does this help us understand what an exploit is in comparison to the oft-used phrase clever use of game mechanics, and does it shed any light on who is actually right in Ensidia's recent banning?

While finding these four examples, I read over many stories of guild bannings both large and small, and the common factor in deciding whether or not something is an exploit seems to be whether or not you can do what you did outside of the encounter in question, and whether or not you are actively preventing the script of an encounter to follow it's natural course.

Enchanters in EverQuest could always charm mobs, and use them to tank. It was a generally accepted strategy for a handful of fights or for experience grinding. The Statue of Rallos Zek "exploit" ultimately caused the developers to change how charmed mobs act game-wide, but no one was banned for it as the players were just doing what they normally did it just so happened that this made the encounter in question much easier. Additionally, at no point was anyone interfering with the mobs ability to do what it would have done anyways. It didn't act any differently while fighting giants than it would a player.

Similarly in the three drake rush, players aren't doing anything they wouldn't normally do. Kiting instead of tanking is a fully valid tactic for many encounters, and having a lot of DPS is not an exploit in any situation. The three drake script is not being interfered with in any way.

So now let's look at Ensidia.

They were banned for killing the Lich King due to the following:

I'll let MMO-Champion's Boubouille explain rather than reword it myself.

Quote
First, it seems that the bug was caused by a single rogue (always blame it on the rogues!) who used Saronite Bombs throughout the fight. Apparently the siege damage caused by the bombs bugged the encounter's mechanics and respawned the platform destroyed by the Lich King during the encounter.

It results in the fight being fairly easier because you end up with more room to move and more importantly, you do not have to care about Valkyrs taking away your raid members anymore. (They will just land on the rebuilt platform when they fall down)

The problem with the Saronite Bombs is simple, a lot of rogues have been using them for the past months (and it's been documented on ElitistJerks for quite some time now) and a lot of high-end rogues who like to maximize their DPS just consider it part of their normal DPS rotation.

Initially, this looks like a no brainer - Ensidia has proven through combat logs from previous fights (and really, for most high end rogues this is common knowledge) that Saronite Bombs are used all the time. The Rogue was not doing anything that he wouldn't normally do in any other situation - so it's not an exploit, right? Unfortunately, they are interfering with the script of the encounter. So it seems that this is sort of a grey area, left up to a question of intent, which is why it is getting so much attention.

My personal opinion, for what it's worth, is that Ensidia did not intend to abuse this bug. They had no way of knowing that Saronite bombs were causing the platform to respawn, and so they went on to complete the bugged encounter assuming that it was simply broken in some way they could not control.

There is no way for Blizzard to prove malicious intent, and they should have had enough understanding and knowledge of their own game, and the way people play it to know how likely it was that this was simply an accident on Ensidia's part.

When Blizzard realized what had happened, they should have removed their achievements and titles, fixed the encounter, apologized and allowed them to try again. Banning them was really just a slap in the face, and I'm not really surprised that a handful of them are quitting.

In the end it seems that while you can safely determine what is and is not an exploit based on a handful of criteria, there is still a grey area somewhere in the middle that can only be decided by determining the intent of the accused, and unfortunately that is something that may never be known.

I have this bad habit with consoles. I buy them, get them all set up, buy a few of the trendy games, and then proceed to never play them at all.

For example, I own a xbox 360 but it currently lives with my sister and her husband because he/they use it way more than I ever would. I even bought Gears of War, Gears of War 2 and Halo 3 - and never played any of them for more than five minutes, while my sister's husband finished both of the Gears games. No one has bothered to play Halo for more than three minutes though. I'm still totally confused as to how it's so popular.

It's not that I don't enjoy console gaming.. I just find the games shallow. It's really hard for me to get into a console game the same way I can on PC. Consoles are great for local multiplayer, but single player games just feel lonely. Maybe it's psychological.. I don't know, but the end result is that the only console games I've fully completed since the Super Nintendo days have been games in the Final Fantasy series.

But now is my chance! This Friday is the start of a four day weekend for me, and I am determined to do at least the following two things:

• Not be hung over all weekend.
• Finish a console game that isn't Final Fantasy!

Luckily for me, these two things go hand in hand - unless the game I choose to finish is Nascar 2009 in which case getting ridiculously drunk would likely be the only way I could bring myself to play it.

After some poking around on the Internet I've made my choice. I have decided to purchase Assassin's Creed II and make a concerted effort to actually play it through to completion. As impossible as it sounds, I think I can do it!

The pressure to quit and have a nap will be immense. My daily quests in WoW will go unfinished! I may have to order pizza! But I will prevail!

With Final Fantasy XIII coming out in March, that may actually push the total number of console games I finish this year to two. That's right TWO! I can already feel the urge to scream homophobic remarks into my microphone rising as I become more of a console fanboy. I'll be sure to get into an argument about why my 360 is better than the other guy's whatever system when I go to buy the game as well. I'm so hardcore I'll say, that I bought Halo 3 and I don't even play it! and then leave before he has time to realize that what I just said doesn't even make sense.

That's the plan anyways. This may all be thwarted by an attractive female, or a lazy me, as is usually the case! (More so the lazy part).

So what's this game all about anyways? Which castle is the princess in?

I remember when I was young, a trip to Blockbuster was like Christmas. I would spend an hour looking through the hundreds of games available, eagerly reading every word on the back of the box, trying to find one that looked interesting.

I was rarely dissapointed, as almost every single game I took home would end up being enjoyable to some degree (except Base Wars, to this day I remember how bad that game was. I think it might be why I still don't like baseball). The real test of a game was which ones you were willing to pay late fees for in order to finish.

Contrast that with how I feel today, and I just can't help but think we've lost the plot. I currently believe that either games have gone in the wrong direction entirely, or I'm just old and jaded. It's likely a combination of the two.

It seems there are two seperate issues here. There's the actual quality of games themselves compared to what I expect from games in this day and age, and there's the overabundance of information available to us now.

Before the Internet was so widely used, my only source of information about upcoming games would be grainy screenshots in Nintendo Power, or brief glimpses on video game related TV shows that were as a rule, horrible things to watch. They were generally so painfully uninformed that you would be tempted to watch them muted just to see the game without having to listen to some moron try to fake an italian accent whenever a new Mario game came out. I always remember being embarassed about liking video games when gamers were represented to the general public so poorly, something that is only now starting to slowly change.

These days, I can now know what every character is, their background story, their voice, their models, their outfits. I can read the whole plot, listen to the music and probably play either a demo or even a flash mockup of the whole game. I can't help but feel like it's the equivalent of a Sixth Sense trailer that tells you Bruce Willis is dead, plays a video clip of him dying, and then gives you a link to a flash game where you get to shoot him and watch him come to life as a ghost. It's kind of hard to be excited about the movie at that point. (sorry if I just ruined that for anyone, buf if you hadn't seen it yet it was your own fault.)

The other issue that comes into play is just how much more advanced games have become. It was hard to fault a game for having poor graphics when every game had poor graphics, or to write a serious critique of a game's music when it was based on 8 bits of bleeps and bloops. There were games that were better than others but overall most games were created technically equal, allowing us to only differentiate them through gameplay, which is how it should be.

In current games one of two things happens. Either the technical design is so good, and so smooth that we're distracted from the inherently bad, or repetative/overused gameplay (I'm looking at you CoD), or the technical parts of the game are so bad that it no longer matters how good the game is, as unless you're focusing entirely on gameplay, it's just not clean enough to get any serious attention.

By knowing so much about the game design process and having such a huge number of AAA titles available to us each year we have become such snobs, and have such a sense of entitlement that we have made it almost imposisble for developers to try anything new in a big budget title. We have forced them to walk a fine line between creating gameplay that is new and interesting, without making it too different that it is immediately dismissed as being gimmicky or convoluted. Then even if they get that right, when there are no real time shadows or high enough resolution textures we'll complain about that. Ontop of that there is still interface design and multiplayer to work out, both of which can make or break a title, as well as cross platform development and any number of other issues that can crop up. In order for anyone to get all of this right on the first release the development takes forever - something we love to complain about, but when something is released on schedule with more than a few bugs we will complain that it was released as a beta version even though half of the people saying that probably don't even know what a beta is.

I guess what I'm getting at, is that we're jerks, and it's primarily our fault that games have become the equivalent of big budget summer blockbuster movies - all fun and special effects, with no depth or artistic value, because distracting us with finishing moves and fancy explosions is easier than creating a fully enthralling game that draws you in enough that you can forgive it for it's poor collision detection.

There is the odd exception to this rule, but then we fall back to problem number one. Even when a fantastic, interesting, well made and fun game comes out, we will still know so much about it that we almost feel like we don't need to play it at all, and if we do, we will never have that same wide eyed excitement we had when we were kids and that statue grabbed Samus when she was in Morph Ball form, or you fell down a pit in Donkey Kong Country only to discover a secret area. It costs so much and takes so much time to create content for games now that spending time on something that people only might see is not acceptable.

When I was young, games were meant to be learned, and playing through them was a process of discovery. I didn't need to be told that pressing A makes me jump, and down makes me crouch. I didn't need to be told not to run face first into goombas, and most importantly I didn't even know what a Metroid was, but it was interesting to learn as I played, and the game was paced as such that I could. The sense of exploration and discovery was what kept things interesting. Playing a game was more about playing through the world that was created for the game and completing whatever epic quest you were on to see what happens. Pushing the buttons at the right time was just a means to an end, while most modern games mistake the actual button pushing to be the fun part (Rock band!) and end up having the complexity and depth of a potato.

I have generalized a lot in the past few paragraphs. When I say we, I don't literally mean everyone. I just mean the majority of the community who unfortunately act as the voice of gamers, and when I say modern games I don't mean games like World of Goo, I mean games like Call of Duty, Rockband or almost anything for the Nintendo Wii.

In recent memory the only game that has recaptured what I felt way back when was Portal. I had only a vauge idea what it was from the one trailer that was released, but it came more or less out of nowhere, with such limited information about what the game actually entailed that it was fun to discover. It walked that fine line of gameplay we were familiar with, and gameplay that is new and interesting perfectly and the fantastically crafted storyline caught just about everyone that played it completely off guard, and really encouranged you to keep going. The gameplay was great, but you were still interested because of the game world itself, and not just the buttons you were pressing and the fancy effects.

The whole reason I started writing this was due to a feeling of dissapointment at the fact that I just don't feel excited when new games come out anymore. Games have been around long enough that they seem to have settled into their little rut and are quite comfortable throwing out Final Fantasy 700, Street Fighter Alpha Omega 42 Super Special Edition and World of Warcraft clones.

I'll still be first in line for Final Fantasy XIII, and I'll still be killing you when I see you in Diablo III, but part of me would rather be playing The Adventurs of Lolo, and wondering how it will all end. Video games need their revolution, we need the video game equivalent of Elvis. I can safely say that it's not going to come from the big budget developers either, as it is just too risky.

A few years from now we're going to look back and realize how stale games were. They looked great and every once in a while there was a fantastic game, but overall it was just boring.

I really believe that games are not going to recapture that same atmosphere that they had when we were young until independant developers are able to cheaply and quickly make the games that they want to make, regardless of whether or not they are well received in focus groups. It's already starting, with digital distribution quickly becoming the primary mode of delivery, and content creation tools becoming more and more intuitive I think it is only a matter of a few years before we have hundreds of wildly creative indie titles available, and it forces the big developers to rethink the tried and true and try to follow suit by allowing their staff to really think outside the box, and bring us back to the amazing worlds that we want to explore.

I suppose it's also possible that games are currently great and I really am just old and jaded.

Either way, I'm placing my bet on independant games taking the industry in the right direction long before Blizzard or EA Sports.

I came across this the other day, and as much as I hate to admit it, this pretty much explains the WoW community perfectly.

The full article is quite funny, from cracked.com

Understanding the World of Warcraft Using Super Mario Brothers

Last night a discussion popped up in guild chat, about Paladin specializations, which as you can imagine I have an annoying, argumentative opinion on.

It wasn't even the relative stupidity of the information that bothered me though, because from a purely objective point of view it really wasn't that dumb. What I was really bothered by was all the people chiming in on the topic, as if they were experts, because they read it on some Paladin Blog.

WoW more than any other MMO I've played, I guess largely due to it's massive player base seems to suffer from this information overload. No one actually bothers to learn how to play their class, to think about the situation they're in and react appropriately, they simply google "Hunter DPS rotation" and press those buttons until someone specifically asks them to do something different.

In some ways it's not the worst thing, as learning from more experienced people is simply how we improve. The problem arises when people mistake knowledge, for skill. Too often will players focus on sticking stricktly to what they read or watched in a video and forget that what is more important is being situationally aware, and reacting accordingly.

Far too many times do I see Holy Paladins only use Holy Light, because they read somewhere that flash sucks, or Ret Paladins tunnel on their "rotation" because they don't see it as their job to Freedom/BoP/Sac as required.

A recent ICC10 run comes to mind. We were on Deathwhisper, and during the add phase I repented one of the undead adds until we were done with the first two. It started a brief discussion about whether or not you even could repent Undead, but more importantly, it was really helpful.

The following week I was running as Prot, and had to ask a few times to get our Ret friend to repent one. It's not that he was bad, and it's not that I'm amazing, it's simply that from leveling myself, trying and failing myself, and bothering to try things outside of the googled "rotation" or things that I watched on youtube, I was able to see an opportunity to make things run a little smoother.

It is not hard to be an average WoW player. To follow your rotation properly, to not stand in dumb things and to follow the "script" of an encounter is really very easy. It's being able to compensate for mistakes, to cover other people who miss something, and to use all of your abilities to their full potential that will make you a truly exceptional player. Unfortunately since these sorts of things aren't generally documented, and people usually only bother to prepare for what they know will happen, instead of what might happen, no one really improves.

I've made a point over the course of my WoW life to not watch any encounter videos, and I feel that I am a better player as a result. Sure I may have made more mistakes initially, but they were integral in allowing me to understand exactly what can go wrong during the course of a fight. Often you'll hear people say "Ok, the DPS stands over here" but if you ask them why, they have no idea. It's just something they read.

By winging it the first few times through a fight, I now know not only what to do, but exactly why I have to, and what will happen if I don't, so that if someone else is about to make that mistake I can give them a heads up, or if they already have, I know how to help them recover.

The ability to quickly learn an encounter is akin to sight reading music. You may be able to play a song beautifully when you have studied it and memorized all the notes as well as which keys on the piano they correspond to, but to be able to pick up a song you have never heard before and play through it with minimal mistakes on the first time is a skill that has to be practiced and learned. Playing the piano is one skill, but sight reading music is another - and the same applies to MMO raiding. Playing your class is one thing, but being able to identify situations and react appropriately on the fly is another thing entirely, and it is something that you will never be able to learn purely through technical knowledge.

There are still many times when pure knowledge is helpful. While we were progressing in Ulduar I was concerned with threat generation on Hodir's hard mode. I did some research on what I could do to improve, I learned a few tricks, and I improved as a player as a result, but I would never mistake this knowledge for actually being skilled at raiding with my class, as they are not always the same thing.

To sum it all up, there is a big difference between being a knowledgable player, who knows all the encounters and knows which buttons to press at which parts of the encounters, and being a good player that has the same knowledge, but also enough insight and comfort with their class to be able to compensate when things don't go exactly according to plan, and fight through a new encounter without knowing anything, and with few mistakes - this is the kind of player that is required for progression raiding, and it's one that is becoming increasingly rare in WoW, thanks in large part to the Eliteist jerks, and techno laden youtube videos.

Who will finish first? My money is on whoever is not blastme, since he's already restarted three times.

Although, my only real suggestion is to take your time. Like most RPGs it gets rather stale the second time through, so enjoy it this time around and try to fight against that MMO rush to max level mentality!

Why does one of them not have a colon?

Oh EverQuest, how you ruined me for other games. I was so involved with you that I was blind to your faults, I knew you were taking over my life but I liked it. Then you betrayed me! You started acting like WoW, you started... instancing.. and things were just never the same.

err.. anyways.. WoW's expansion is coming out blizzardsoon and while I'm fairly excited about it I'm a little confused as to how WoW players aren't feeling a bit cheated?

While the semi-frequent content updates that give us new dungeons, new raids and new items certainly are a fun distraction.. they're really just a copy and paste of current content, with every stat increased by two. Maybe a slight oversimplification but not too far off from the truth.

I am really hoping that in the next expansion they try some new things, allow some player choice.. but I'm not going to get my hopes up that I'll be doing anything other than collecting random animal parts for NPCs who I'm sure have some incredible story about why they need whatever they're asking for but one that I couldn't be bothered to read because really, it all just amounts to a mark on my map in the end.

What I find most curious is the total lack of effort to do anything new and interesting. I feel like the developers would want to try new things and try to push the genre forward in some way, but it seems that WoW has settled on a formula that obviously works, and they're just running with it all the way to the bank. I don't even know if they have developers anymore, sort of just a skeleton staff that keeps chewing on the same piece of meat and pooping out new content.

It's effectively become an EA sports game. WoW 2010, just like 2009 but with a new particle effect and updated NPC textures! It may look and feel like a new game in an open world, but you're really just walking along an extremely linear progression path of quests and instances with perfectly planned item statistics, mob damage numbers and time requirements. You can also be very sure that there is no chance you will be able to find or accomplish anything that will give you any sort of advantage over anyone else, or ever be forced to make a choice that you cannot later go back on with no consequence. Oh, and anything an NPC asks you to do is totally legitimate, no matter who you are killing while doing it.

The only role you will be playing in this RPG is that of a North American 16 to 24 year old with disposable income. It's all just so mathmatical. Would it really ruin the game to allow some deviance from the strict rule of item levels, drop rates and, the worst offence of all - equivalence! not every item/instance/quest/class needs to be exactly as good/challenging/rewarding/balanced as every other. Some variety.. some reward for travelling off of the beaten path would be warmly welcomed. As Dostoevsky said, "The formula 'two plus two equals five' is not without its attractions."

Holy crap. I rambled on for pages and I haven't even gotten to the point I had intended to make when I started. Let's see if I can make this part brief.

WoW has been out for five years, and has had two expansions. It is the most profitable and popular game in history. So why is it that Blizzard, with all their money and talent, can't even slightly match the amount of content that was created for the original EverQuest?

In EverQuests' first five years it had seven expansions, which were at worst as small as Northrend and at best twice the size of Outland. Sure all the mobs looked the same, half the quests were broken and you still couldn't run it in a window, but they were trying! We weren't getting bored, and that is what's important. When a new EverQuest expansion was looming I was more interested in playing because I wanted to be prepared for the expansion and because I knew that the existing world would still matter, yet with a new WoW expansion I just want to give up because I know that as soon as my feet hit the floor in whatever new continent (or in this case old continent) we're provided with, I will get upraded items from homeless Gnolls that I can one shot, just because they're new, and I'll never have any reason to go back to where I was before, other than to solo old raid instances to stave off boredom since there are no new raid instances until the next content patch!

I hope I'm proven wrong. I hope Cataclysm will be amazingly engaging with new abilities, new mechanics, new challenges that deviate from the - five mobs per pull, 1 boss per 10 pulls, 3 bosses per instance - stand in this, don't stand in that - formula that I have come to despise.

As far as I'm concerned it pretty much has to be, because if you're only going to release an expansion every two and a half years, it better make up for the $360 we spent in your online content waiting room. People have already caught on to the stupidity of it, the endless class changes, the homogenization of everything, and the illusion of content provided by our initial distraction by shiny new item models. The only reason the mass exodus has not yet begun is because there's just really no better option at the moment.

If Budweiser were the only beer ever made I would still drink it. You could even say that it's the best beer in the world, but that doesn't actually mean it's good - let's not try to convince ourselves otherwise. We just wouldn't have known any better.

I was failed by Vanguard, Mortal Online and many others, so now I sit, drinking my Bud and seething at the fact that I've actually started to think I enjoy it now and then, until the release of the next big MMO that I can love - one in which chasing the carrot on the stick is the fun part, not being hand fed stale pies and then rewarded for being fat.

For reasons unkown, I never got into Final Fantasy III. I've tried to play through it a handful of times, always quitting after fifteen minutes and never going back.

I decided to give it another shot today, and even though it's availble on DS, I started it up through an emulator.

Sadly it seems that my friend Edgar, isn't quite so friendly through emulation.

There are arguments for and against, and while camping Golden Efreeti Boots I probably could have been convinced that instancing is a good thing, but when I am able to take a step back and look at both systems objectively I become convinced that instancing is nothing but bad for MMOs except in very small doses.

There are many reasons, but one that has become particularely obvious to me lately is the loot problem. Ignore for a moment that by instancing content you're immediately inflating the number of available items well beyond where they should be if you want to bolster realm competition and community, as I'm not talking about that loot problem just yet. Let's focus on how it allows people to effectively rely on future loot, instead of striving for realistically available loot.

In an uninstanced game where there is no gaurantee that you will get the Silver Boots of Awesomeness from General Awesome that every guild on the server is waiting for, so you resign yourself to picking up lesser boots from the Newbie Orc Captain or a soloable questline. You do this not only because you realize that you will likely not get the boots you want any time soon, but because you want to ensure that if you ever are in a position to take out your highly contested nemesis that you are up to the challenge and able to do so with minimal complications as to increase your chances of success.

Contrast this with an instanced game where there is no such thing as a contested boss. Your boss waits for you, in fact you schedule a time and a place for him to show up and he's there. No fuss, no angry whispers, you smack him around a bit and he hands over your boots. Now you're awesome! Sounds good?

Well, yes.. but what about our friend the Newbie Orc Captain? He still has boots, he's just standing around bored in his own instance, maybe shining his boots every once in a while to make them more appealing but the bottom line remains the same - with instanced content people have no reason to obtain lesser loot unless it is obtained in passing. If you're furiously AEing Orcs to death in an effort to stave off boredom and some boots fly out.. hey, grats! But when you already know that not only can you kill General Awesome, but exactly what day and time you will, why bother with the stop-gap solution? Even if you're a little undergeared, it's not as if someone else can take the General from you, so it's ok if you take a few tries.

It's this mentality that all items in the game are always available to you or your guild if have the ability to kill the boss that drops them that negates so much of the other content. Crafted items? Quests? Who needs them, just plan out your DKP, and you can tell that in 14.5 days you will have your boots, so you might as well just log off until then. Really the only unknown variable is the drop rate, and so we've managed to turn the whole process into another aspect of the game that is based more on RNG than on other players as it should be in a massively multiplayer game.

Maybe I'm being biased, I admit I tend to lean much more heavily away from WoW no matter what that means I'm leaning towards, so let's look at the worst case scenario of an uninstanced game. You never get a shot at your boss, not once. Some guild of unemployed elitest jerks who live with their parents and have never kissed a girl has wasted their lives (as you tell it) in order to ensure you and your friends never had a chance to even see General Awesome in the flesh.

And so you move on into the next expansion, with your Shiny Captains Boots. Maybe you're feeling a little bit defeated, or frustrated, and sure that's a negative thing in a way, so that means instancing is good right?

I guess you could say that, as certainly people don't play games to be frustrated, but I don't think you can deny that if you saw someone run by wearing Silver Boots of Awesomeness that you would smirk a little bit at your nerdy desires, and maybe try a little harder to make sure that in this expansion you will be the one with the shiniest shoes, and it is that kind of healthy competition that makes an MMO truly memorable.

I've been messing around with patch 3.3 a bit lately, and while there is some interesting lore, and some fun scripted dungeon events, after playing through them all once I've noticed one glaring problem.

It's way too easy.

I'm not even talking about my own personal definition of easy which probably differs from the norm, but about the fact that I can join an entirely random group of players from completely seperate realms with the new PUG dungeon tool and still run downhill through an instance and not only complete it flawlessly but get some of the "achievements" without even trying makes no sense at all.

The whole point of heroic dungons in the first place was to give people something challenging to do outside of raids, but instead of creating another tier of difficulty in heroics they have simply made heroics normal, and normal easy. We're still lacking an actual hard mode for five man instances.

Ideally they would make heroic instances actually challenging even for end game players but as I don't see that happening I have another suggestion.

I'm sure many people wont like the idea, but I propose the permadeath difficulty setting for 5 man dungeons, or even 10 and 25 if you're feeling particularely bold.

It wouldn't simply be if you die, you're gone, but if your entire party wiped... you would be done. No more characters, and instead of simply increasing the quality of loot slightly from each boss or giving you items that, with WoW's ridiculous itemlevel system you would end up replacing in three months, you could gain permanent stat increases, or even an extra talent point? Maybe unbalancing, but it would have to be a reward that truly lasted as otherwise it just wouldn't be worthwhile.

If they wanted to really make things interesting.. release a new dungeon that can only be completed once across all realms, and only on the permadeath setting. The question at that point wouldn't be whether or not WoW has challenging content, but if their web servers can handle the torrential downpour of tear-filled posts.

Well, it's done. I finished the Dragon Age campaign and I find myself feeling rather sad that it's over.

About DLC

Before I continue I want to briefly say that although for some games I can see the value of DLC, far too often it's just a cash grab. Unfortunately for Origins, the DLC just feels completely out of place. It has been implemented in such a way that all of the DLC campaigns are set to take place before the final events of the game, so that after finishing it.. you can go back to before the end and complete additional dungeon crawls with your characters having no idea of some of the events that occurred during the main story? I suppose that's fine if you really have a desire to kill more things for loot you obviously don't need but without the story to back it up I just don't think the game is that compelling, and because they have no way of guaranteeing that everyone will play the DLC, any events that take place during the DLC content cannot be referenced in the main plot and therefore cannot have a meaningful impact on the story.

I would be immensely interested if they released DLC as episodic updates to the game, allowing you to advance the storyline from the point you left off bit by bit every few months, but adding what are effectively "filler" episodes to the game really doesn't entice me. Maybe some will feel differently, but I just don't see the point.

Also, I have kept this spoiler free, as I know how annoying that can be.

Overview

Dragon Age: Origins is the first game in what will no doubt be a successful new franchise for Bioware. While it borrows design elements heavily from the Baldur's Gate series, they really have gone to great lengths to make sure that Origins is it's own game. Similar to Baldur's Gate, it is at heart a squad based semi-real time RPG with an emphasis on story, but at the same time it allows itself to be played more like a third person adventure game at times. In the end it ends up accomplishing exactly what it set out to do, draw the player into the world of Ferelden in such an engaging way that it leaves them eagerly awaiting more games in the Dragon Age series so that they can uncover more of Ferelden's rich history, and discover how the story they helped tell in Origins will influence the world in the future.

Mechanics & Design

Dragon Age takes places mostly in the third person, but if you're playing it on the PC you have the option to zoom out to a more overhead view during combat to direct your party's actions and positioning. I found this view to be invaluable in some of the harder encounters and I think I would have a hard time playing without it on XBOX or PS3.

You can control any of the characters in your party directly by switching to them/clicking on them, with the unselected characters then being controlled by a set of rules that you can define. The rule system is quite good, and if you so desire you can set up your other characters to be completely automated. I personally found it to be most effective/fun to set up their base functions to be completely automated, leaving me to direct their more situational abilities as needed. There are some annoying quirks with the system here and there, but overall it works quite well and allows enough customization that you can play it however you want to.

Outside of combat you will generally be running around in third person speaking with NPCs or Merchants and the like with the bulk of the game being based around the dialogue system. You can initiate conversations with your party members or other NPCs and you will be prompted to choose from a list of canned responses usually somewhere in the vague range of good, neutral, or evil. The system works well enough but it feels a little chatty at points where asking a simple question will result in a minute long response, after which you input two words and receive another annoyingly long explanation. This is fine when discussing issues that affect the main plot line, or at least are complicated enough that you're interested in what the character has to say, but there are times when you know that it is just flavor text, or can already see what the character is trying to say but they're just being long winded about it. I feel it would have been preferable to decrease the dialogue options, and make the responses more straight forward as opposed to having a huge number of dialogue trees that all result in vague answers as they are required to end up in the same place regardless of what you originally asked. Don't get me wrong, there are some major plot elements you can affect with your choices, but outside of those your choices seem to mostly just affect the tone of the game or conversation, rather than the actual events.

Long winded NPCs and having only the illusion of choice a lot of the time aside, the game is well designed and very well paced. There was only one part that I found boring and it was brief, the rest of the game remained fun and interesting the whole way through.

Controls and Interface

The controls in Origins will depend on whether you're playing on a console or a PC so I wont go into too much detail here. On PC They are well configured by default, and customizable which is about all you can ask. When controlling one character, it is just like playing an MMO, and when you zoom out to control multiple characters, it's sort of like an RTS/MMO hybrid. Imagine controlling a group of EverQuest players as if they were Warcraft 3 Heroes, and you have Dragon Age.

The interface is clean, and well designed. Skill icons are descriptive and detailed which is nice when you are often juggling many different abilities.

Something I really liked about the interface was the radial menu, instead of picking up an item and trying to drop it, throw it away, or drag it onto a character you simply hold down the left button and a menu pops up, each direction on the menu is another option: equip, view, destroy, use etc. so managing items is extremely quick and easy.

The inventory as a whole is just a giant list of your items, which can grow as you buy extra backpacks so there's no opening and closing bags endlessly searching for items. This is made even easier by a filter system that reminds me of gmail. You can choose to view all items, quest items, armor, weapons etc.

It's really nice to see a game make such a well thought out UI, especially one that is made for both consoles and PC, as these multi-platform games often have horrible interfaces (see borderlands).

Character Advancement

The character customization is typical of fantasy role playing games with no big surprises. You level up and earn attribute and ability points to spend on your attributes and abilities. You also have the option as you get to higher levels to train two specializations throughout your lifetime that open up new skill trees. I found it an odd choice with specializations however to associate them with the game, rather than the character. What I mean is that if you knew that making an evil choice would unlock a new specialization, you can save, unlock it, reload the save game and make the good choice but still have access to the specialization on any of your characters. I suppose this was done for re-playability purposes, but seems a little clunky.

The characters also have access to different skills, some being the standard trade skills like weapon training and herbalism, while others like trap making and poison making effectively give your characters additional abilities through items to help during fights. There are also a few that advance your ability to persuade people in conversation, or add additional rule slots for the character automation. They can be useful and you don't really have to ever put work into leveling them, sort of just a bonus to gaining a level that sometimes open up skill specific side quests for you to complete. I managed to go through the whole game without ever buying any of the upgraded recipes though, so take that for what you will.

The abilities themselves are well designed with each tree having it's own feel, allowing you to really turn each of your characters into exactly the type of character that you want and not being pigeonholed into the typical Warrior, Rogue or Mage. You are required as well to create a very strong party of players, rather than just one main character that can solo everything, and a bunch of moronic AI characters that make witty commentary, as happens in many other games.

As you can only have four active players in your party, but can have many more available to you at camp, the players not gaining exp with you will automatically level up to the current level of the main character once they're taken into the active party again. It's not a perfect solution, but it is a necessary mechanic as otherwise you would be stuck with characters trying to catch up or be forced to take characters you don't like just to keep them up to date, so it works.

Equipment choices are a little bland, but that actually makes the times that good items drop much more exciting. The upgrades are also not always obvious choices so that you are often forced to choose which item you think is best for that specific character or situation, rather than one simply being better in every single way than the last. In addition to items that drop from mobs, or are rewarded for quests, there are also a lot of chests. The majority of the chests have nothing useful inside them and are mostly just a monetary bonus for having someone with you who can pick locks, which is fine really but I think it would have been more interesting if it were handled in such a way where chests were more heavily protected by mobs, and had better rewards instead of just being easily picked and full of vendor trash.

It would have also been nice to see NPC's react to you going into their house picking all the locks on their doors, rummaging through their drawers and stealing their items, but at this point I think that's an accepted oversight in RPGs. The only other issue with loot is more of a technical one, in that mobs often don't become lootable until ten or more seconds after they were killed, leaving you standing around waiting for the sparklies to show up so that you can check the corpse.

Combat

I played through on hard, and for RPG veterans I would recommend no less. If you want to simply blow through the game you could probably take it down a little, but I feel like hard was a well balanced difficulty for me. It was frustrating at times, but still fun and perhaps more importantly it was truly challenging. Good tactics (crowd control, target selection, cooldown management) and a proper group makeup are required for the harder fights, and equipping/speccing characters so that they're well suited for their role is quite enjoyable if you're into that sort of thing (which I assume you are if you're playing an RPG in the first place).

There was really never a point at which I was bored of the combat. Even though many "trash" fights were more or less the same thing time after time, they would be tough enough and paced so well that I never felt like I was just grinding, or killing time until I reached the boss. The boss fights themselves are fairly straight forward, but still required you to learn and adapt. I could live with a little more complexity in the mechanics of some of the boss encounters themselves, but overall the combat remains fun and interesting throughout.

Story

The story is really where Origins shines, and is what will keep you playing more than anything else. I don't want to give anything away so I wont say too much, but what is interesting about the game is that I found myself more interested in the characters and how they would react to the story than with the story itself. The main plot is standard fare, there is an evil that is going to destroy the world and you have to unite the world to destroy it. I'm over-simplifying it of course, but that's the basic premise. As the story develops, so do your relationships with the characters you meet, as well as the characters in your party and it's really interesting to see how they react to different events, and where their input or background story leads the main plot.

In addition to their involvement in the main storyline, they often banter back and forth with each other while you're running around, which in my experience in other games has only ever been for comic relief, but in Origins you will find them discussing religion, politics or getting into arguments all perfectly in line with their personalities. There were times that I stopped what I was doing just to listen to them talk.

Over time I found I actually started to like or dislike the different characters based on their personalities, so much so that often I would take a character who was worse for the fight I was going into simply because I liked them more which really speaks volumes not only towards how well their personalities were designed, but how much they are integrated into the game play.

The world of Ferelden has been beautifully created through lore, second only to the character personalities this is definitely one of the most impressive parts of the game. They really have created a living world with interesting history, not just a continent filled with quest hubs and main cities. There are books and statues all over that add entries into your journal of events in history, religion, legends and myths. Sometimes these elements bleed into the main storyline or lead you in the direction of a secret area or side quest so it is often not only interesting to read them, but useful as well.

The lore comes in small chunks so that it rarely feels like a chore to read, and as it is added to your journal you can usually spend some time reading through the new entries when you feel like it, rather than being forced to do so right when it pops up.

The world truly feels alive more than any RPG I have played before. Not only do the characters and places have background stories, but some special items do as well that explain the history of the item and how it came to be in the place you found it, which adds a definite sense of wonder. Instead of the world being your playground, you are just a small part of the massive history of Ferelden which really makes you feel as though you are on an epic quest taking you to places long forgotten by the world at large.

The only real problem I had with it from a storyline point of view was the ending. Again, in an effort to not give anything away I can't say too much. Suffice it to say that with a game this large and varied I'm not sure that it would be possible to have an ending that truly left things feeling fully resolved, but even so I would have liked to know more.

Technical

The technical aspect of the game is perhaps it's worst attribute. To put it simply, performance is bad. On a high end system you will be fine, but if you have anything less than a current generation gaming system, expect low frame rates and regardless of your computer, horrific loading times (made worse over time by an apparent memory leak problem that has yet to be fixed).

Once you have the game running, you'll run into a lot of graphical issues where characters seem to be unable to naturally interact with each other or objects around them. Whenever characters hand items from one to another it's almost always off camera, leading me to believe that the developers were well aware of this shortcoming and tried to hide it as best they could.

There are also a number of areas where the dialogue of certain NPCs seems to have not been updated to reflect current events. Especially if you miss something, and come back to it later, the NPC will be unaware of a major plot change, or a quest that they offer will still be marked as available but you will have no way of triggering the dialogue to accept it. Oddly enough, earlier in the game these issues were often resolved by marking a quest inactive and adding "The person is still missing but your travels have taken you elsewhere" or something along those lines to the quest journal indicating that you can no longer complete the quest, but as the game progresses it seems more and more of these little mistakes start to pop up.

During combat there is a curious feature where at certain times your character will do a non-standard "finishing move" leaping onto an ogre to impale him through the throat, or knocking back a goblin to take a massive swing and decapitate it. I'm not entirely sure if there is a specific cause for this, and it is definitely a fun feature but can cause your character to be stuck completing this finishing animation, while the battle is still taking place without them, and more than once caused one of my other characters to be killed. It also created this amusing bug where I had a conversation with a decapitated NPC. It's really a non issue on easier fights and doesn't happen enough to be worried about but felt a little sloppy, as if it was added as an afterthought, and not fully integrated.

None of these issues really cause major problems, but they are distracting enough that the game would feel a lot more polished and immersive if they were resolved, or at least improved. The overall quality of the graphics is good, but really nothing to write home about, and for a game with as much dialogue as this the facial animation and lip syncing are extremely poor. Now and then there will be some great character animations, but overall it's decidedly average at best in this department.

As you can see it has more than it's fair share of technical issues but there are some redeeming qualities. The sound and music is quite good and the voice acting is excellent, and downright creepy at times. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly in a game like this, your characters never get stuck, or lost and are always quick to carry out your commands.

The best way to sum it up is this: Origins has fantastic technical design, but poor technical implementation. There are many great ideas and features they are just integrated into the game poorly. It's unfortunate, but thankfully not game breaking.

Conclusion

In the end, Origins really is a fantastic RPG. The characters and story are interesting, the world feels large and alive, and the combat is fun and challenging. It does an amazing job of setting the scene for future Dragon Age games, so if you're an RPG fan and you don't mind the odd technical issue you really shouldn't miss this opportunity to get in on the ground level of what will no doubt be a great franchise. I am sad to see it end, I miss my party members and find myself wondering about the possibilities of what could come next, and daydreaming about the alternate choices I could have made throughout the campaign. I'm sad that I can no longer see how my party members develop, but still hoping that future games will continue from where we left off, rather than with an entirely new set of characters. Either way, I'll be first in line for the next Dragon Age game, unless it's useless DLC!

Loved

• The characters!
• Challenging game play
• The lore
• Voice acting

Hated

• Loading times
• Some annoying technical issues

Would have liked to see

• More complex boss encounters
• More involved ending

TL, DR

• Dragon Age: Origins is a fantastic RPG, if you're an RPG fan you will love it, and if you're not you will probably still end up enjoying yourself but might want to turn the difficulty down.

I've started up my Dragon Age campaign again after a little break, and have finally come to a point that I knew was coming, giant spiders.

It happens in every RPG I can think of.. you start to notice more and more webbing in the cavern/dungeon/forest, possibly a scurrying sound mixed into the ambient noises here and there and then, bam! giant spider.

Why are spiders in every RPG? I'll tell you - because they're terrifying. They're basically the closest thing we have in real life to actual demons, what with their black eyes, long skinny limbs and supernatural speed and agility.

If you are playing your RPG and suspect a spider attack, be prepared for the following: poison and/or some sort of immobilizing web attack. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Other than spiders though, the game is still coming along nicely. I wont go into too much detail because I'll probably end up writing fifty pages at some point, but it's good (if a little chatty) you should get it.

I was also forced to upgrade my video card after the old one died somehow, and now Dragon Age is silky smooth with everything maxed out, which as I suspected earlier is making the whole thing much more enjoyable.

I noticed an odd thing though, and maybe it's just me.. but once I was able to turn on all the fancy effects without worrying about frame rate I discovered that the "frame buffer effects" as they're called actually make the game look worse in my opinion. Sure it looks more technically advanced.. shiny, sparkly, glowy.. but somehow.. worse.

I'll probably keep playing with it off, just feels a little more realistic.

Another one from Twiceborn. Next time I'll have to use a different source, don't want to inflate his ego too much ;)

Shorty after Wrath of the Lich King was released I set out furiously grinding experience, in an epic race to be the first person to sit in Dalaran complaining about having nothing to do.

Around level 75, I found myself in Grizzly Hills (a level 75 or so area) blindly running towards floating punctuation and/or sparkly things and came across a level 70 Warrior just about out of health, frantically trying to dispatch a harmless looking moth. It was clear that this wasn't going well for my Warrior friend, so despite my WoW training of ignoring everyone, assuming they're probably someone annoying, I dismounted squashed the moth and continued on my way.

A few moments later I got a tell, a simple thanks. No problem I replied, and considered the matter closed. My Warrior friend however, seizing upon my random act of kindness saw a potential leveling assistant, and proceeded to try to convice me to help him further, as follows:

Now I didn't edit out my replies or anything. I remained silent that whole time while he typed away, and I never actually did reply. I would have loved to make some witty remark but I feel like it probably would have been lost on him, and I had a suspicion, based on how eager he was to spam me for help based on a single "np" that I would probably regret it.

Now, almost a year later, where is my friend the Warrior Lboogie?

He's still playing, he's made it to 80 without my help it seems, and most startling of all he is fully decked out in epics even one from Naxrammas, which explains better than I ever could why I would never join a pick up group on Steamwheedle, and how horribly easy WoW has become.

Oh, and judging from his achievements, it looks like he never did finish that quest in Grizzly Hills.

Although I have largely stopped playing WoW, I still log on from time to time just to see what's going on, which I guess makes me an ideal customer. I take up no resources but still pay every month.

This week I logged on to find the Pilgrims Bounty Thanksgiving event going on, and while chatting with a few people started doing some of the achievements. But while I was studiously looking through the meta achievement, to ensure I did them all in the proper order as to minimize the time it would take I suddenly realized (and yes you can call me stupid for not coming to this conclusion a lot earlier) that this is utterly pointless.

When did achievements become a farm instead of an achievement? Originally we had high scores, rewarding you for being better than everyone else, and now we are rewarded just for playing? It's like getting a "Participant!" ribbon at a school race but we're not even doing something fun. We are effectively being rewarded for completing parts of the game that are so boring that we would otherwise never want to bother.

Shouldn't developers be focusing on making content that we want to complete? and shouldn't we, as gamers be demanding it?

Achievements started out as a good idea, but it has just gotten so completely out of hand in WoW. There's nothing wrong with achievements, but that's not what we have now.

From web dictionary:

Quote
Achievement - something that has been accomplished, especially by hard work, ability, or heroism.

Now tell me, where in the following do you see hard work, ability or heroism?

Unless the ability is breathing, and you consider logging into WoW to be hard work, I see no reason for achievements like this to exist other than to artificially inflate the amount of time you spend playing.

I'm not against true achievements. Server first boss kills? That's an achievement. Completing the Trial of the Grand Crusader without a single person dying at any point? Pushing it (as it's largely luck sometimes) but still an achievement. Clicking the Turkey/Christmas Present/logging in on the right day - Not achievements.

I think the reason this gets to me so much is not only because it's so obviously an attempt to entice us to keep our subscriptions active, but because for so many of us, it works.

I'm tempted to make a "True Achievements" site that parses out the armory and removes all the achievements that only require pointless grinding/clicking/running around and not actual playing ability, so people can see who's really on top. But it seems more and more each patch that pointless grinding/clicking/running around is what WoW is all about.

I sometimes get stuck working on Saturdays and feeling nostalgic, so what better time to dig through old screenshots and bring them back from the dead.

I'm not even sure how to express my annoyance anymore.

I checked my email to find the following from the Alganon pushers:

Quote
Why settle for being a nobody? Nobody is who you are without a trusty, buck-toothed, pig-nosed, cross-eyed, flea-ridden, stinky steed. The Mount represents life, love and companionship. A strong pinnacle icon to the truth of your online gaming experience.

Log in to Alganon anytime this weekend starting Friday, November 20th and in the Developer Channel, yell "MOOLE ME!" (for Asharr) or "WAGGER ME!" (for Kujix) and wait for the magic.

"A strong pinnacle icon to the truth of your online gaming experience." I don't think whoever wrote this intended for it to be sarcastic.. I can't help but agree though. This is the sad sad truth of your online gaming experience in 2009.

I understand that publishers need to make their money, it's just upsetting to see it all converge on this point so quickly - mostly because of how willing we all are to open our wallets for the chance at meaningless (Not worked for) virtual items.

Do you think Space Invaders would have become so popular if it looked like this?

Most likely not, but these days it seems people can't wait to buy their way to the top.

I'll be the "sucker" farming my mount from rare spawns for eight hours. But I can assure you when I ride it around, I'll be riding it with pride.

Dragon Age has, to some degree, restored my faith in the ability of developers to make good single player games.

I'm not talking about storyline, although that is very important, I'm talking about the challenge.

It seems that somewhere along the way single player games started becoming more movie, and less game. Something you're supposed to just sit through and idly press buttons when required. Upon eventually reaching the end you're rewarded with downloadable premium content to prolong the game you already bought. They're all about "Epic Fights!" and "Realistic Enemies!" but what about difficulty that slowly ramps up as you get further into the game? This is how video games started, and it's what made them so fun in the first place.

Lately only online games have been able to provide these challenges, because they're built around steadily increasing difficulty (Unless we're talking about WoW, where the opposite is true).

Now I'm not looking for a challenge like "Find this obscure item that's almost impossible to see and use your camera!" - "Great! Now find 5 more!" style of challenges that have been popping up lately, or the "PUSH X NOW-YOU FAILED! too slow.." that is, on some level what almost every game is about, but I mean actual tactics, use of proper abilities at the right times, thinking ahead, and preparing before hand, and having the encounters that require these tactics get more complex as you progress.

It is so refreshing to summon a Dragon in Dragon age and watch it completely rip my party to shreds, but know that if I play just right, and with the right character classes, I might be able to do it. Sure I could have just come back five levels later, but what's the fun in that?

Beating my head against this wall of fire and scales I came to realize that it's this sort of challenge where when I lose it was because of a poor decision and not a failed reaction or a "You're not supposed to do this yet" artificial limitation, is what I really enjoy in games and something that sadly, isn't around much any more.

Well, here's hoping that more developers follow in the footsteps of Demon Souls and Dragon Age, and make games that are balanced around being hard, and cheapen at "normal" difficulty, instead of the reverse that is true of the majority.

And yes, this is also because I'm proud of myself for killing a Dragon. I'll upload the video later.

BioWare really needs to sort out their "login" system. You have the BioWare Social site, EA's site, and apparently I made a KotOR account at some point, and somewhere in between all those I've managed to log into my Dragon Age Profile which for some reason hasn't updated yet. Don't even ask which account actually ended up working, because I have no idea.

Setting that topic aside for another time, the game itself so far (I'm about 8 hours in) is very good. The storyline is interesting and well paced, with solid enough voice acting that I want to continue to see how it progresses, and the game is fun enough that I'm not rushing through it to advance the storyline. It's a nice balance.

Playing through on hard as always, I'm having a lot of fun learning the ins and outs of the combat system. You can customize the AI of your party members so specifically, it's like leading a raid in an MMO, but everyone does exactly what you tell them to! My only complaint would be that the "trash" fights feel a little bit zergy, thankfully so far the only boss fight I've had was quite challenging, tactically.

All in all, I'm really enjoying it and am already getting attached to the characters and their individual personalities. I think the last RPG that I was this enthralled by was Final Fantasy X, so it's been a while. The world seems very much alive, and the flavour NPCs are helpful and interesting, not just there to take up space. It is clear that an immense amount of effort was put into making each area feel unique, and arousing curiosity, not just being another quest hub.

The one glaring negative in all this is the technical aspect of the game - performance is bad. On a really high end PC it's acceptable, the graphics are quite nice, but not quite nice enough to justify the shabby performance. There's also a fairly large number of graphical glitches. Mobs/Players just seem.. fragile.. as if they could fall apart at any time, combat animations are frequently very poorly timed, and they can't seem to properly interact with objects, or each other. There's a lot of hands through, or floating above tables - stuff like that.

It's certainly not game breaking, but it's a bit distracting at times. I feel like if the graphics/engine were more solid it would drastically improve the experience.

If the game manages to stay this interesting throughout, I think it may end up being one of best RPGs in a very long time. It's hard for a single player game to hold my interest, but so far there is so much to do that it never feels boring, and thankfully it doesn't make you feel like you missed parts if you don't do every single little side-quest, so the completionist in me is happy I wont be stuck killing rats for 4 hours just because a random peasant asked me to. Definitely worth your money if you're an RPG fan and have a PC that can handle it.

Preloading it now.

In the days before Steam, a launch day like this would mean me frantically calling the stores nearest me to find one that had a copy I could pick up.

These days though, I just download everything.

Part of me misses the trip to the store. Reading the manual I know would be useless while the game installs, and actually having the physical discs. But Steam is just so easy.

And to think, several years ago all I knew about Steam was that it was "Some crap that Half-Life installed".

I think from this point on, MMO expansions are the only games I'm going to physically buy, and only for the entertainment of seeing all the cave dwellers as they make their annual trip out into the real world. Also so that I can try to find reasons to convince myself that I'm not as much of a nerd as any of them... but inevitabely get drawn into talking to strangers about Paladin class mechanics..

Click, Click, Loot!

So I decided to pick up Runic Game's Torchlight last night. To be honest I hadn't heard much about it until one of Kotaku's commenters mentioned it in another post.

Since first hearing of it, I checked out the site briefly, read a couple interviews and after finding out that it would only be $20 I figured I couldn't really go wrong. I was a little skeptical at first - open source engine, small team, limited budget - but I'm happy to say now that it exceeded my expectations in many ways.

For those who don't know, Torchlight is what we all lovingly refer to as a Diablo clone (Maybe FATE clone is more appropriate here), but Runic took it a few steps further. Building upon what the designers no doubt learned from the design of the FATE series, there are a handful of interesting features included that I would not be suprised to see Blizzard poach for Diablo III, and a few that could teach the problem child MMO genre a thing or two as well.

It's not all epics and lulz though, as there are some questionable design decisions that left me wondering, and the lower budget of the game shows through a little too clearly in some areas.

Overview

I bought the game on Steam, which as always was easy, simple and at only ~800MB, extremely fast. After starting it up I went straight through to creating my character.

You can choose to play as one of three classes (Destroyer, Vanquisher and Alchemist) with one of two pets (Dog, Cat). On my first play through I chose to play as a Destroyer which is your typical melee Warrior/Berserker type and chose a Dog for a pet.

After a brief dialogue to set the mood, you're in Torchlight with some starter equipment. The town itself is more or less your standard every day RPG town consisting of some merchants, some flavour NPCs and some shiny exclamation points to guide you in the right direction. For anyone even slightly familiar with this type of game, you'll feel right at home. (unfortunately for me I hate living in the house that WoW built).

After discovering that evil_force_001 is corrupting the town's main source of livelihood, the "Ember Mine", the plan is fairly simple - take on quests that send you further and further into the mine to discover the source and save the tiny little world of Torchlight. There are some twists and turns here and there but I don't want to spoil anything. Suffice it so say that if you're looking for epic storytelling and hoping to cry like you did when Aeris died, you'll have to look elsewhere. This isn't necessarily a bad thing for a game like this, but it wouldn't have hurt to have leaned a little more in that direction since the game is single player only.

Controls and Interface

The game is largely mouse-driven. Click to move, click to attack, click to loot. There are also various function keys that allow you to augment your clicks; ctrl-click to have your pet loot something for you, shift-click to stand in place while you attack etc. This brings me however to one large oversight in the design - there is no way to change your key bindings! In a console game it could be forgiven to some degree, and the controls are adequate as is other than some odd choices (left clicking a hotkey attempts to change the ability instead of using it?) but with how much PC controls can change, and in a game with many different abilities/items such as this, not allowing players to adjust their key bindings is just lazy.

You are able to choose which of the 1 through 9 keys do what (by left clicking them!) and you can assign skills to the left and right mouse buttons, but it ends there.

Key mapping issues aside, the interface is quite nice, right up there with Blizzard's UI design. There are a few things that feel like they were rushed, or just not thought through completely - for example after being trained to right click the hotbar buttons, I often right clicked merchants which simply triggers whatever action you have bound to right click (in my case charging through the merchant face first into the wall behind them) but overall it is very clean, and easy to navigate.

One area that could definitely use some improvement though is enemy health bars. The bar itself is at the very top of the screen, which is generally not where you're looking. It's hard to determine when they will show up and when they won't. Mousing over an enemy sometimes shows his health, other times it doesn't depending on what specific part of the mob you mouseover, and where they are on the screen and trying to pick out a specific mob in a pack and see how much heath it has is also very difficult. Ideally I'd have liked to see an option to toggle the name plates for all the monsters off and on at once, or allow the health bar's position to be changed to somewhere more comfortable.

This problem is compounded by the clipping distance. The environment renders perfectly as far as you can see, but mobs phase in and out of existence around the edges of the screen. It's not a big enough problem to really detract from gameplay, but as the game has very low system requirements in general I don't see why we aren't offered an option to increase this if our system has no problems running the game.

One last little gripe I had with the UI was the lack of defensive buff icons. Many class abilities, or defensive skills will last a certain amount of time before needing to be refreshed, granted they generally have particle effects so that you can visually see when a buff has worn off, but when you're in the middle of thirty skeletons, it can be hard to see. A simple buff bar showing the defensive spells currently active on you would work wonders.

Mechanics & Design

Once you get used to the controls, Torchlight plays like most other games of the genre. Slay monsters, gain levels, fame and items... LOTS of items. In fact the number of items is somewhat ridiculous. I think you spend as much time looting and identifying magical items as you do fighting which seems a little bit off, and if it weren't for your pet's ability to run back to town and sell trash items for you this would be cause for nerd-rage. In an entirely single player game there's really no reason for it, no one will be using grey items past the first level of the dungeon and if you're trying to ensure that players have enough gold, just make more gold drop from monsters. Even the low end magical items become useless relatively early on and you're left sifting through a sea of items for purple or orange names. It seems almost as if someone came up with the idea that your pet could run to town to sell for you and they wanted to make sure you used it. I would prefer if he could dig up potions for me.

The pet is your typical RPG pet - constantly getting stuck and frequently trying to solo things that it clearly can't. To be fair it's usually pretty good at keeping up with you, and not getting into TOO much trouble but on some of the more complex levels it does gets stuck a fair bit. In addition to the aforementioned ability to load up its inventory with things you don't need, and have it run to town to sell it for you, it can even learn spells and use certain items which adds a little bit of extra character customization. The pet uses a system of control like WoW's where you can set it to be Defensive, Passive or Aggressive and it will act accordingly. As far as pets go it's not too bad. It walks that ever so fine line of being useful without being too annoying, a line that most RPG pets sprint across into a pack of mobs on the other side of the map and run back to you screaming for assistance. That or they just die, constantly. In Torchlight if your pet gets too low on health it will flee, running to safety and saving it's life until you can feed it a potion or some fish. Potion for health, or fish for random effects - different fish cause it to look differently and gain certain strengths and weaknesses, although this is more of a novelty than anything else as I never really found a point in time where it was needed.

The fact that fish aren't very useful though, is probably a good thing because if I found myself requiring fish at any point I would lose it. Fishing itself is ridiculously boring. I suppose there are some sick individuals out there who may enjoy it, but it's basically like playing Rock Band one note at a time, on easy - with no music, and I hate Rock Band.

Character Advancement

The character advancement system is fairly standard. Gain levels, earn attribute points to buff your Strength, Dexterity etc. and skill points to put into learning new abilities, or buffing existing ones. There is also a secondary leveling resource, Fame, which increases as you complete quests or slay random named bosses. When you earn a level in fame you earn an additional ability point and a new title, but no attribute points.

The two systems work well together, and it would be interesting to see something similar implemented in MMOs to provide another progression path to the raiding crowd in addition to standard experience. My only real complaints about the character advancement is in the skills themselves which I'll cover in more detail later on, and that fame doesn't really do anything for you. It would be nice if higher levels of fame opened up additional quest NPCs, or special merchants, something to make it feel like fame and not just half a level.

Combat

The combat itself is more or less what you would expect from this type of game, constant clicking, and some keypresses thrown in. The abilities are a little bit lacking (keeping in mind I've only spent time with the Destroyer). There are a couple that are interesting and fun to use, but other than those few, the trees seem filled out with flavour skills that don't really change the way you play but simply add damage, a pet, or grant passive buffs (like one that decreases the death penalty?) they just feel a little bit thrown together. Each tree lacks it's own distinct feel, and they're really more a collection of leaves on the ground than they are trees. You are only required to be a certain level to put points into a certain ability, there are no pre-requisite skills or point requirements.

In spite of these issues, the combat remains fairly entertaining initially. Smashing through groups of mobs and watching their bodies fly through the air is amusing for some time but I felt that it started to get a bit repetitive around the 20th level of the main dungeon. One of only four quest NPC's started repeating quest descriptions at that point which just seems lazy (should at least have had enough to complete the main storyline without repeating). The quests they offer aren't really sidequests so much as additional rewards for going to dungeons you had to go to anyways, which is fine really, but the rewards seem a little bit off. It seems to almost just randomize the rewards which is a little silly because chances are you received a better item while clearing the dungeon than what you will get for completing the quest. I would have liked to see a unique resource used as quest rewards to make them more useful, perhaps buffs that would last for the next thirty minutes, or potions that provided a unique buff. Something to make completing the "sidequests" feel more like additional advancement, and less like exp/fame padding.

The main issue I have with the combat, is more of a genre problem than a problem with Torchlight itself, but I was still disappointed to see no attempt at resolving the issue through design - health pots.

What is it with these games and health pots? I personally enjoy trying to play without using potions, and am frustrated when a game seems designed for you to just gulp down potions at the first sign of trouble. Using potions doesn't feel fun, it feels like cheating. There should at least be some damage penalty or something to encourage me to use my abilities to survive and not just stand in the middle of everything, spamming area attacks and gulping down potions, which, by the way seems to be the best strategy for every boss.

And that brings me to my next point - boss encounters. I am typically an MMO nerd where boss encounters can be complex, scripted events where you have to use coordination, timing and the proper equipment and skills to win, but every boss in Torchlight seems more limited by how many health pots you have than anything else. Sure I could win with no pots, and maybe it would require some skill and proper play, but why would you when you can just brute force the whole thing with potions? Allowing potions to exist in this form negates so many of the enemy attack mechanics that it's just ridiculous to leave it as is.

In fact I think the only time potions failed me were around level 22, where some of the Goblins shoot explosive arrows at your feet. If you just stand there, you would die and that made it exciting when you lived. Charging out of the way of the arrows before they exploded was fun! pushing "3" over and over while spamming cleave, was not. This is the kind of ability that needs to be included more often. Especially during boss fights. There needs to be areas where if you make mistakes, you will die. Potions should be a last resort, not a rolling buff.

I was playing through on hard, and it wasn't until the final 3 floors of the main dungeon that I actually felt I had to use my abilities properly in addition to using potions in order to survive. I recall one fight specifically where three bosses spawn at once, with some dialogue from each announcing their awesomeness. My initial thought is that there's going to be some sort of strategy, maybe I have to kill them all at once? Maybe they will resurrect each other? - Nope! Round em up, get your finger over the potion hotkey and go to town. I am a skilled Destroyer.

Overall I feel that the combat and character skills design was probably the weakest part of the game. Luckily for Torchlight there is something inherently fun about the click, click, loot formula, so as long as it's presented nicely it almost doesn't matter - It was fun, which is the main point, but as far as combat design goes it really is somewhat lacking.

Technical

This is an area where I was surprised to see so much polish. Often with lower budget games the graphics, sound and music suffer a lot. I was especially surprised in the case of Torchlight where an open source engine was used (Ogre 3D). The game's graphics have a slightly cartoonish feel which works well with the less advanced graphics engine, but still manages to feel realistic enough to take seriously. The animations are very well done, and through the whole game I didn't notice more than a handful of minor graphical problems.

The music and audio are certainly above average. The music will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played Diablo as the music was done by Diablo's composer, Matt Uelmen and is in the same vein. The voice acting is decent, but if it were a game with more focus on the plot I would expect a little more. Sound effects are solid, never feeling repetitive and always giving a satisfying crunch, or slice where you would expect it.

The are only a couple of real technical issues. The first and most noticeable of which is loading times. For a game as relatively simple as this the loading times seem extremely long. I'm not sure if this is a coding problem, an engine problem or what, but I hope it's worked out. The only other issue is pathing. Mobs give up chase pretty quickly you if you run away, but if you had the desire, it's extremely easy to catch mobs on ledges or behind gates and shoot at them while they stand there awkwardly trying to reach you. Things like this would need to be resolved for the upcoming online version of Torchlight as it would be far too easy to exploit.

Conclusion

The main "storyline" is decently lengthy, and once you're done with that there is an endless, randomly generated dungeon for you to continue leveling/looting.. but as the main plot comes to an end, I can't help but feel that it's unlikely for me to continue playing too much afterwords. I may play through as one of the other classes, but ultimately as a single player only game there just isn't enough depth to keep you interested for more than one or two plays through. Don't get me wrong, I had a great time doing it, and for the asking price it is completely worthwhile, just don't expect it to take up a standard rotation in your game playing after the first week or two of your purchase.

Torchlight is a fun game, with some great features that take a little baby step forward for the genre. It's not going win any best in class awards, but it is solidly above average in every aspect. If you're looking to pass some time while waiting for Diablo III, or just kill some time in general and are tired of sitting around in Dalaran, Torchlight is a good option and it's a fantastic start for Runic Games.

Loved

• It's just pure fun
• Art direction
• Music/Sound

Hated

• Loading times
• Too much trash loot
• Reliance on potions
• No control setup options

Would have liked to see

• More heavily scripted/complex encounters that actually required tactics.
• More interesting skill trees. Many abilities felt useless, or out of place.
• Skills that build off of each other, or are intended to be used in tandem would add a lot of depth to the combat.
• Increased difficulty - I played through on Hard and felt like it was too easy up until the final section.

TL, DR

• Torchlight is pretty good, for the low price I would definitely recommend it if you're looking to kill some time.

This was originally a post on my guild's fourms, about my departure from the raiding scene, but since it pretty much voices exactly how I feel about the failure of WoW's end game, I thought I would put it here as well.

There is no progression in WoW. I have fun working on the hard encounters with you all, but at the end of the day it feels to me that we're really just killing time until the next content patch. The carrot on the stick that was once the next tier of raids, is now the next content patch, and it's not even so much of a carrot on a stick anymore as it is a pie on a silver platter.

Instead of making progressively harder content, they just throw arbitrary obstacles in your way like "Defeat this encounter with one arm tied behind your back!" or weekly encounter lockdowns and it just seems like a disingenuous way of keeping people playing.

If each new patch required you to have nearly the best items from each previous patch, that would even be acceptable, it would turn the farm into the progression - but the unfortunate bottom line is that there's no reason to strive for best in slot anymore, because they aim all the content at the lowest common denominator.

Alright, it's starting to get long again. I think you get what I'm saying, I just feel like the few moments in WoW that provide a tangible feeling of accomplishment are drastically outweighed by the number of moments that feel like a pointless farm, or useless grind.

I don't mean to belittle anyone's accomplishments. If you can enjoy this type of atmosphere, I think that's awesome, because at a low level WoW is a really fun game, but it's just not for me anymore.

WoW's popularity is not going to greatly decline because for the vast majority of the players, there is progression. When you can't manage to run heroics, let alone the latest and greatest raid content, you are constantly working to better your character, stock up on potions or increase your DPS/Threat etc.

The unfortunate truth though is that even at the highest end, WoW is still not as challenging as most other games out there, and that's the reason that for the real hardcore gamer, WoW is really never going to be what it could have been.

Every once in a while a game comes around that manages to not only perfect a genre, but add something new to the recipe without giving the feeling that it's trying too hard to be "different".

Killer Instinct was one of these games. It took influences from many different fighting games and included just enough of what we were familiar with, and loved, that we all felt comfortable with it. Then Nintendo/Rare took the standard formula and eased us into a more coherent system of attack combos. Killer Instinct made combos a more notable part of the game, without going so far as to change it into something else entirely. Starting with the standard Ryu/Ken Jumpkick -> Footsweep, fighting games have always had combos to some degree, but this was different.

It was this relatively small change that helped shape the genre into what it is today. Without ever claiming credit as being (incoming buzzword) "revolutionary", Killer Instinct changed the fighting game genre forever. While some didn't take it as far, and some took it even further, and whether you personally like it or not, tangible combo systems are now a permanent part of the fighting game landscape.

In some ways the concept of the "Ultra Combo" which can only be performed when the opponent is low on health can be followed back to Mortal Kombat's creation of "Fatalities" only toned down so that it feels more like an added feature to an existing game, rather than a mini-game that takes place outside of the traditional combat.

At any rate, this isn't supposed to be about Killer Instinct, I am only using it to make a point; that while it may seem that popularity is what determines how influential something is to a genre, it is not influential because it is popular, but because it was one of those rare games that got the mix of ingredients from previous games of the same genre exactly right, and added features that build on top of the established recipe rather than trying to start from scratch. Features that once implimented make us seem to wonder - why didn't someone think of this before?

Popularity may spawn many copycat games, but true genre changing influence comes from giving us just the right amount of what we already know we love, and adding something just a little bit different to the recipe to make us love it even more - something that can come from blockbusters and bargain bin games alike.

One such title that I've been enjoying lately is Left 4 Dead..

Left 4 Dead may seem to new players, or casual observers like a relatively simple, mostly mindless, team based co-operative shooter, but that's largely because it so subtly includes elements from many different shooters that at first glance you don't even draw the comparison.

The overall gameplay borrows from Counterstrike as it is two small squads of people, playing against eachother. One trying to prevent the others from completing an objective. I can practically hear the Counterstrike announcer saying "Survivor's win.." whenever the survivor's reach the saferoom. It is integrated into the game so well though, that you never really feel as though you failed. Unless you get utterly destroyed, you generally feel as if you accomplished something whether your team wins or loses in any specific round. The core combat of the game helps amplify this feeling as well, as it's rare that you can get taken out in only one or two attacks.

The infected side seem to have taken an influence from class based shooters like team fortress, where each specific type of infected has abilities that while damaging on their own, are greater when combined with those of their teammates. Where L4D improves upon this though is by making your "class" of infected random. One large downside to class based games is that you often get too comfortable with one specific class, and feel that you are unable to play the others effectively. As such your abilities start to feel somewhat limited due to only having a couple of attacks.

L4D really nailed this incognito class system by almost creating a meta-game out of the infected class. Each type of infected truly only has one active, and one passive ability and can be mastered rather quickly. While this seems somewhat boring on paper, it is your timing, your placement, and your co-operation with your teammates that allows you to be more effective, and that is something that you get better at while playing any of the 5 classes of infected without even really realizing it. The Infected become a Voltron of zombie parts, where you cannot simply throw Thresh the controls to a hunter and expect to win, it is more important to be an experienced teammate.

Hop over to the Survivor side of things and the meta-game gets a little more complex. Again, akin to Counter Strike you are forced to make a choice on the type of weapon you want at the start of each round. There are points at which you can change it but it's not the typical wide array of weapons to switch between from more traditional first person shooters. Other than weapon choices, the Survivor characters themselves are all exactly the same in terms of abilities. On the Survivor side more traditional first person shooter skills can definately play a larger role in your success, but teamwork and communication are still paramount to your team's victory. Even more important than that, however is your knowledge of the Infected, their abilities, their strategies and weaknesses. It is these "external" skills that truly improve your gameplay, so that even though you only have two weapons and a melee attack the combat never seems boring, slow or repetative because most of the game takes place between you and your teammates, rather than your characters and the infected characters.

One of the least noticed, but most influential features of Left 4 Dead is the audio. It is definately not the first game to use audio cues to alert the player to in game hazards, but it is done so extremely well that you could practically play without being able to see the enemies at all.

More importantly, and the feature that spurred me to write all of this in the first place is the character dialogue. I don't simply mean their banter back and forth, but the mouse driven system in which you can make your character say anything you may normally be inclined to say over voicechat.

Voicechat is still borderline required for more in depth planning, but when your character sees a Boomer, or extra ammo for example, they will just say "Boomer!" or "There's some ammo over here!" without requiring any input from you. If however you want to force your character to look at something, simply hit "Z" and whatever is under their crosshairs will be announced to the team "There's a pipebomb over here!".

Not only can they see things, but hear and, for lack of a better word feel things as well. They will whisper when they (and therefore you) hear a Hunter or Smoker nearby, they will cough when running through smoke, or distinctively yell when ambushed.

Such a feature could have been a disaster. It could have been at best, useless or at worst extremely annoying, but Valve got it exactly right. The frequency of alerts is perfect, your team members rarely speak over one another and the information is almost always very useful. I often find my character announcing something to my teammates just before I got the chance to over voicechat.

I would be very surpised if this feature wasn't picked up and used in all other co-operative online games going forward. As I said, this is the feature that was the inspiration for all this rambling. It is the type of feature that is overlooked in many more formal reviews, and so unobtrusive that no one gives it much thought - yet so utterly useful, and fun, that it will influence most games made after L4D was released, and mature the genre just a little bit more.

Left 4 Dead has managed to take a pretty simple formula, gently sprinkle in some of what made many of the games before it so memorable while still mangaging to mix in it's own unique features and flavour and got the recipe perfectly on the first try. It is a great example of a game that is "revolutionary" without ever trying to be, and one that never would have been possible earlier on in the evolution of the genre.

Many games can copy the recipe line by line from the book of genres, and make a delicious cake. But games like Killer Instinct, God of War and Left 4 Dead are the ones that force us to go back and add new ingredients to the book. The cake wasn't a lie, we just never guessed that zombies would be the perfect ingredient.

Over the past few weeks I've been preparing to move. I hate moving so much that I've tried to make it as gradual a process as possible. Moving a small portion of my belongings every chance I got so as to avoid a real "moving day". The plan seems to be going well so far, except that my place looks like it was robbed by someone with no concept of the value of computers, as that's about all that's left.

In any case, over the course of my "packing" I've come across some rather amusing things, but something I felt I definitely had to share was this stack of games that formed itself against the wall.

Some will see an addiction, some will see dedication, and more still will see... a bunch of boxes that mean nothing. My eyes though, see hundreds of friends, thousands of hours and despite the fact that I have nothing to show for most of it, time well spent.

Crazy? Probably..

Maybe it's just me, me and my trusty MMO snob hat, but I feel like Blizzard is taking WoW in the wrong direction.

Don't get me wrong, all the information that's been pouring out about the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion today has me more excited than ever to play it, and I already foresee many sleepless nights mindlessly killing monsters, and playing courier for the unsleeping masses of NPCs. Unfortunately though, the overall design of the game seems to be heading in a direction that makes me uneasy.

What I am referring to exactly, is the amount of self sufficiency they are giving to each class. Self sufficiency is generally a good thing in real life, but that is only the case because there is a limit to how much you can do on your own. No matter how self sufficient you are, you inevitably need to rely on other people to get through your life. Unless you're a crazy shoe bomber and/or cat lady, you generally need assistance or guidance from other people, or even just need to socialize sometimes.

In WoW however, you can go from "birth" through to the "end" without ever speaking to a single person if you so desire. That's fine, that's what made WoW what it is. I justified this to myself by thinking "well at least these newbs wont be able to get the five man loot" unfortunately five mans were dumbed down so much that this just isn't really the case anymore, a trend that has continued through all but the newest, most challenging content.

Heading back somewhere in the direction of making my point, the new talents and spell changes in WoTLK seem aimed at making each class completely self-reliant. Blizzard is making some very interesting abilities, things that really will make the game more fun and interactive to play, in this sense I think the expansion is going to be a marked improvement over what we have now.

What I don't understand though, is why not make them span between classes? Why not allow Rogues to stack some sort of ability that "increases the threat of a Warrior's XYZ" or "Causes the next Magical attack to deal 25% bonus damage". These are just off the top of my head, so probably don't make much sense, what I am getting at is that I would like to see more interaction between classes. Sure there are things that decrease armor, there's Innervates and resistance debuffs etc. but there are no specific "combo" attacks for lack of a better word.

It's gotten to the point where you pretty much just play your class as well as you can, and hope everyone else does the same. If everyone plays their class properly, you win. In the 25 man raids this changes, slightly. Warlocks have to co-ordinate their curses, Paladins need to co-ordinate their judgments etc. This is the type of interaction that bolsters socialization and which ultimately makes MMOs a different experience than most other games.

Back in the EverQuest days you couldn't even bind yourself somewhere (the rough equivalent of talking to an innkeeper and setting your hearth in WoW) without finding someone to group with you, come meet you, and cast the binding spell on you. This was annoying to say the least, but without the small, forced interactions like this the whole world seems much colder.

So what could Blizzard have done to warm my heart? Make inter-class abilities that enable you to drastically increase your effectiveness based not only on your own play, but directly by the play of those around you. There should be strong attacks chained between classes, effectively creating mini games within each pull, or each encounter. They would be able to create encounters tuned so that you had to use such abilities so that they could get away from the current trend of raids which seem to be going the same way they did in EverQuest. Make bosses hit hard, throw around a lot of AE damage, and heavily penalize for you not wacking the mole fast enough.

An example of something like this would be a mob which has a phase that requires high DPS, and a phase that requires high healing. Instead of where it is now where the healers just slack off a little in the DPS phase to conserve mana, and the DPS just stops potting and focuses on avoiding damage in the healing phases, they could make it so that a proper sequence of events could trigger certain effects - for example - a Rogue ability that causes the Rogue to do bonus damage if he is hit with four critical heals within 3 seconds. This would require quite a bit of coordination, and maybe a bit of luck on the part of the healers, even though the focus of the phase is on the DPS. The healers would still be a large part of the fight, and have something interesting to do that required communication that wasn’t the standard “make green bars go up”.

This is just one example, and it was just off the top of my head but it serves its purpose which is to provide an example of how Blizzard could have made the game more of a team effort. Small interactions like this one small example are a way that you can put more emphasis on the players behind the characters; and put more control into the player’s hands, instead of just making the game about using the optimal DPS rotation, and not standing in any particle effects.

Long story short, I would really like to see Blizzard take WoW back in the direction of being a "team" game. It's starting to feel more and more like a single player experience with a chat room overlapped on top of it, and while it's still, obviously, much more social than a single player game, it is one area in which I feel WoW could really use some improvement. Not just for the MMO snob in me, but for the logical gamer as well.

I'm not entirely sold on this episodic content business, but as long as they keep up the pace and release Episode 3 in about a year, and with some decent extras like they did with the Orange Box I can live with it.

When big name developers like Valve tackle episodic content it's also a lot easier to swallow. I suppose I am more against the inevitable episodic content coming from lower budget studios just looking to boost their available capital by releasing half finished games as "Episode 1".

Back on topic though, Half-Life 2: Episode 2 certainly does not fit into the category of half finished.

It gets you into the action right from the start which is a nice change from Episode 1 where one of my main complaints was how bland the beginning of the game was (can I have a real gun yet please?). While you still start off, as usual with only your gravity gun, you quickly fill out your arsenal with the usual array of weapons.

Unlike E1, a lot of E2 takes place out in the open. Trees, mountains, and giant expanses of land all around. It's not really the Source engine's forte to render massive outdoor areas, but it's done quite well. The graphics definitely are starting to show their age, but not so much that it detracts from the game in any major fashion.

After a brief refresher video of what happened in E1, you start E2 right where you left off and in no time you're on your way to White Forest, the main base of the resistance and the final destination for the data packet that the combine have been hunting you so relentlessly to retrieve.

As always you are guided/narrated by the ever present Alex Vance whose voice acting and AI are pretty much as natural as it's going to get. She is rarely in the way, and usually helpful and informative, and I still get a kick out of shining the flashlight in her eyes. The shotgun she ended E1 with seems to have been turned into a rapid fire pistol during the course of the train crash somehow as well.

You plod your way through the same tried and true formula fighting random bad guys on a fairly linear path with Alex at your side until you come to one of the following: Locked Gate, Gate with No Power, Barricaded Door or toxic waste at which point you have to separate from Alex and take the long way around to open the door for her like a real gentleman. While the frequency of these and the - "How are we going to get through?" - Solve a puzzle with the gravity gun - sequences gets a little bit amusing, it really never gets frustrating which is a testament to the excellent level design. These repetitive obstacles could have easily gotten annoying but they are varied enough that they remain enjoyable.

Throughout your travels there are various plot devices that keep you interested in the story, and even a few pretty shocking moments and scripted events that really give it that "interactive movie" kind of feel. At one point you are teamed up with a Vortigon whose comments remind me ever so slightly of the dry humor that I had become accustomed to after playing through Portal. While normally I expect to cringe and sigh at jokes in video games, I found myself chuckling slightly while chopping up zombies which was a nice change.

I don't want to spoil too much so wont go into a lot of detail, but I feel the need to comment on the driving portion of the game. Unlike in HL2, there is not just a driving section and then you're back on your feet. Once you get the vehicle it becomes a part of how you play and is usually accessible to you for the most part. The vehicle control is spot on, exactly as it was in the original HL2. I particularly enjoyed how they successfully merged the driving and running down zombies with hoping out of the car to investigate run down buildings and get into fire fights or solve puzzles.

Towards the end of the game though, the one glaring problem I have with episode 2 becomes more obvious. Up until the end you have been blissfully playing along and enjoying every minute of it. The pacing, the cut scenes, everything is exactly where it should be and leaves you in a constant transition from a state of relief to suspense to panic and back again and that is what I love about Half-Life, however, I can't help but realize that as the game draws to a close that I really didn't see anything new.

Killing Head Crabs, Zombies, Storm Troopers, Striders etc. is all good fun, but I think the game really could have been improved with the inclusion of one or two big boss mobs that haven't already made an appearance in the Half-Life universe to truly keep things fresh. It would have taken the game that one little step further than E1 to make it really feel like the series was building to an ultimate conclusion.

If you are a fan of the series, or have yet to play any of the Half-Life games I highly recommend starting from Half-Life 2 and playing through them all in order. While the story doesn't have a huge impact on your choices while playing, it does help to immerse you in your role as the indestructible Gordon Freeman.

All in all, despite the lack of truly new enemies and encounters it is still a fantastic first person shooter and a more than adequate sequel to Episode 1. I, along with many others am already eagerly awaiting the arrival of Episode 3.

It's been quite some time since I purchased a game and didn't have even a hint of regret. There are so many other colored boxes on my shelf that will likely remain there until an unsuspecting friend is lured in by the box art, borrows it, and I never ask for it back.

The Orange Box however is going under lock and key along with my copies of Warcraft III. Not only because of the level of enjoyment that I have so far found in playing the three games that make up the Orange Box, but because of the selflessness so uncharacteristic from publishers these days that is displayed by such a release.

Let's be honest, they could have beefed up Portal and TF2 somewhat and sold each of them alone for the price of the Orange Box. That's enough about that though, the point is it's a fantastic deal on three games that you will have an immense amount of fun playing. If you happen to be a fan of first person games in almost any capacity, just go buy it, you wont regret it.

The Games

The presentation, packaging and value aside, let's see how the games stand up on their own. I mean it's easy to lean on Half Life 2: Episode 2 and sell a million copies, they could have bundled the Barbie Fashion Show with Episode 2 and it would probably get good reviews purely by association.

Don't be skeptical though, these two "add-on" games are well worth your time.

Portal

Like many others, all I had seen of Portal was a 2 minute video that was released some years ago giving you a basic idea of what the game was all about. I knew what to expect when I loaded it up but I was pleasantly surprised to see that they took what could have so easily become a very gimmicky game and turned it into an interesting and fun campaign through the games various levels.

The basic premise of the game is that you're a lab rat in an experiment run by a corporation named Aperture Laboratories overseen by some sort of artificial intelligence that gives you tips, hints and witty commentary throughout your testing.

You have nothing but a single weapon, the primary fire shoots a bolt that opens a blue portal on whatever wall, ceiling, floor etc. that it hits (With the exception of some materials) and the alternate fire opens an orange portal. You can then walk through the blue portal and you'll come right out the orange side. For example, if you open a portal on the floor in front of you, and an alternate portal on the ceiling behind you, you will fall through the floor and come out of the ceiling. Portal's can be used in either direction.

You traverse through the games levels using your portals in increasingly complex ways to place boxes on pressure switches, avoid hazards, knock out turrets and numerous other obstacles.

It sounds simple, and it is. It could have easily been this and nothing more and it would have been a decent game that got decent reviews. What ends up making Portal truly great though (without giving too much away - small spoiler ahead) is that it actually has a storyline. The artificial intelligence that is guiding you hints at things along the way, you find clues by peering through broken panels in the testing chambers as you go, and just when you think you're nearing the end is when you find out the game has just started.

It's not a long game by any stretch. I finished it in one 4 hour session, but it was quite honestly the most refreshing game I have played in a long time. It's the first time since Warcraft: Orcs & Humans that I have played a game and really felt like I was playing something new not just playing a rehashed, recolored version of something else with some new models and a new button to press thrown in. If it were any longer it likely would have been a little repetitive, so I'm glad it ended where it did.

Once you complete the main campaign, several "advanced" levels are unlocked which are basically just single levels from the campaign that have been tweaked to be quite a bit more difficult. I am still working through these. There are also a few Time-trial levels but I haven't yet had a chance to give those a go. I am also very eager to see what kinds of custom levels people can come up with, I feel like this is where Portal will find it's replay value.

When all is said and done Portal is like a good made for TV movie. It doesn't have the flashy special effects, Orchestral Soundtrack or epic battles that a Hollywood movie would have, but what it does have it paces and presents perfectly. It leaves you with a sense of accomplishment, a smirk on your face and a desire for more. Bonus points for the ending song.

Team Fortress 2 and Episde 2 are equally interesting. Will get to them later!

The heat was overwhelming. I was plodding along the path to Camp Taurijo, my mane and fur a matted mess from the sticky concoction of sweat and blood caused by a brief run in with some wandering centaur scouts. I was injured but I knew it was not serious because all I could think about under the heavy heat of the mid day sun was how much I would have enjoyed being offered another task that took me to one of the Oasis.

There was no such luck that day though, I had been offered a modest reward from a middle aged orc named Gazrog whom I found outside the Inn at the crossroads with barely enough money to eat. Apparently his cash had been stolen, by Raptors of all things. I didn't bother asking him how he managed to get mugged by animals, I didn't really care. Unfortunately he detected my skepticism and began to swear that they are intelligent creatures and that it was a coordinated attack. I guess he could be right, but every time I have encountered one it seems to act alone and generally doesn't put up too much of a fight.

In any case, I accepted his offer and started asking around. My limited tracking abilities were useful, but ultimately there were just too many of the beasts wandering about to get a real bearing on where a pack of three could have gone. I decided to head south to Camp Taurijo to ask around.

After visiting the inn to pack up and gather a few items I may need I headed for the town's exit. The defenses at the Crossroads were a sign of it's dwindling popularity with only two lonely guards lazily eying the people coming and going. They seemed uninterested as I passed between them and through the wooden pikes that made up the towns walls.

The air was hot and dry, and there was almost constantly the slightly crunchy texture of sand in my mouth which made the rather short journey seem excruciatingly lengthy. I hadn't noticed any other travelers on the road for the past mile and just as I was contemplating why it was so isolated I spotted a few Centaur running parallel to the road. Their tendency to attack anyone outside of the safety of the towns on sight made me a little cautious but they were keeping their distance, just scouting I suspected. Due to the unprovoked Centaur attacks lately, most travelers used Wyverns to get from town to town which is what I probably should have done. I had chosen to ignore safety however in the hope that I would see some clue of the Raptors whereabouts by traveling on foot.

I watched the pack of Centaurs gallop into the distance ahead of me, I stopped walking and squinted in the sunlight to try and make out where they had gone. They seemed to have stopped a few hundred yards up the path. I turned to judge how far the Crossroads were, I would never make it. I realized then that they were not simply scouting, they were ensuring that there was no one else on the path that was close enough to help. I swung my pack off of my shoulder and started digging through my things for my Hearthstone but as usual it was too weak to use when I really needed it. I stopped there for a moment staring at the dull glow of the stone and listening to the pounding of the centaurs hooves get louder and louder. I could not think of any way to escape, I would have to fight.

I left my bag on the ground, stood up and closed my eyes. Concentrating hard on the faint whispers of nature over the rough laughter of the approaching centaurs. I could feel the strength of nature dormant all around me, waiting to be unleashed at my command. I opened my eyes to see the centaurs no more than 20 yards away and closing fast. Using the words that are now second nature to me I focused on one of the three centaurs and began to speak. Immediately thick vines started growing out of the desert ground and tugging at the centaurs legs. He tore through the initial vines but they quickly became too many and too thick for him to pull through. He was trapped but already hacking at the vines with his sword in an effort to break free.

I turned to another centaur and quickly started channeling another spell. Seconds later hundreds of vicious insects swarmed the beast stinging furiously and bringing him to his knees. I turned to the third centaur but it was too late, I barely had time to raise my staff in defense before he had knocked me to the ground. I got to my feet as he was turning to make another pass and yelled out towards the pale moon, barely visible in the mid day sun. The sky darkened above us briefly and blue flames ignited the skin of my charging foe, but he kept running towards me. I dodged the initial charge and slammed my staff into his ankle as he passed. The centaur yelled in pain and limped closer to me swinging his sword carelessly. His smoldering fur was taking its toll, he was in far too much pain to put up a serious fight. I let him get as close as I dared and used both hands to smash the end of my staff into his neck. He gasped for breath and dropped his sworn. I hammered at his neck again with my staff and he let out a pathetic squeal before collapsing onto the ground in a smoking heap.

I righted myself and turned to my two remaining enemies. The smoke from the now burning centaur corpse to my right had driven off the swarm of insects and the second centaur jumped towards me and smashed into my with his shield. I stumbled backwards and toppled over the corpse of his fallen friend. Before I could get up the centaurs two front hooves ground into my leg likely shattering the bone. I screamed in pain while the centaur smirked and reared up to stomp on me a second time.

I am a Tauren and I am by no means frail, but this body could not stand up to the strength of a centaur. I rolled out of the way as his hooves pounded the ground only inches away kicking up a cloud of dust into my face. I closed my eyes and called to the Great Bear Spirit for aid. Immediately I felt the rage building inside me. My mortal body was whisked away accompanied by a brief feeling that I was falling very fast. I shook off the dizziness to find myself in a new body, the body of a bear.

I stood on my hind legs and roar furiously at the centaur causing him to stagger backwards in fear. The tables had turned and I was now the stronger of the two of us. I tackled the centaur to the ground and mauled repeatedly at his belly, biting and riping any limbs that got in the way. I could barely control the desire to eat the raw flesh, it took everything I had to control the rage of the bear spirit. The centaur had died, it's guts spilled and spreading a growing pool of bloody mud but I was still biting and clawing at the corpse.. I was losing control. I released the bear spirit and found myself back in my own body, my leg too damaged to stand. I whispered to the voices of nature who nourished my wounds. The bones righted themselves and the cuts began to slowly heal.

Mind mind was numb. I had trouble forming any thoughts at all let alone a spell with any sort of power. The entwined the legs of the last remaining centaur were breaking free and I was running out of options. I sloshed the centaurs guts out of the way of my pack and found my medicine bag. It had been given to me by my mentor, he had told me that the dust inside would give me the power to channel my most powerful spells beyond all fatigue. I found the bag and eagerly poured the dust into my hand. It had replenished itself again and probably saved my life. I threw the dust up wind and felt it tingle as it washed over me, each grain refreshed my mind like a drop of water on the tongue. I spun back around to see the last remaining centaur pull free, with my newly found energy I screamed at the voices of nature to give me their vengeance. I formed a ball of energy and threw it at the charging centaur. it slammed into his chest slowing him temporarily but he kept coming. I threw two more and he was seriously burned but still staggering towards me screaming about the deaths of his friends to a ridiculous biped. I looked skyward to the stars and began to speak their names. My hands lit with the same blue flame that had dispatched the first attacker but it did not burn. The flames grew larger and larger until they had engulfed both of my arms. I looked into the centaurs eyes just as he closed into melee range and unleashed the flames towards him. There was a high pitched wail as the flames leaped from my arms and wholly surrounded my target. He screamed in agony as his skin blistered and bones started to splinter. Abruptly the sound stopped, the flames that I had summoned from the stars had returned from where they came and I was once again standing alone on the path to Camp Taurijo.

Although not much time has passed, it feels like years since I first set foot in this realm. A journey that started with a few simple tasks has lead me outside of the valley I now know as Mulgore, the place I call home.

Unfortunately the bordering region is completely baron, which is where it earns it's name; The Barrens. The more time I spend here the more I miss the long, soft grass of Mulgore. I am often eager for the few times each year that I return to my homeland to visit with my elders and see what new knowledge they have for me to gain.

While I have learned much about nature and how I can control and siphon it's energy into my own spells, it is my practical experience with the few inhabitants of the Barrens that has taught me the most. My desire to help these people gave me the conviction to do things I would normally consider too dangerous. Stealing back supplies from packs of well trained Quillboar, collecting bounties on notoriously vicious predators, and aiding many local researchers with their work to name a few. The people that live in this area are determined to heal the land. I am told that long ago the Barrens was a lush jungle that was heavily populated and there are many people here working to return it to that state. If Mulgore was ever to suffer the same fate I know that I would be in their position, begging passers through to help heal the land. Needless to say I am only too happy to do what I can.

While I have many more stories to tell, tales of my travel to Moonglade and the Great Bear Spirit, details about the spells I have learned and the ever present centaur threat. I will leave these stories for another day as I have a new focus for the coming weeks. My work in the Barrens seems to have led me to one place from a number of sources. Multiple people now have asked me for help infiltrating a place named the Wailing Caverns. I scouted out the area and I can only tell one thing for sure; this place is much too dangerous to go to alone, I can see now why so many people are afraid to go themselves.

I will spend the next few days traveling, to Orgrimmar and throughout the Barrens to try and find a handful of experienced people that can help me complete these tasks. I do not know what creatures dwell in the depths of this cavern, but there are too many people relying on my promise of help to turn away.

Introduction

I started playing EverQuest on the day it was released to retail. The concept of the game was something that really intrigued me. Had I known what this game would become I'm not sure I would have started in the first place.

I played now and then on the Tunare server, made a few friends that I would regularly group with and had a pretty good time. For reasons I'm not entirely sure of I never really got into it. But the seed was planted, so to speak.

Slowly I logged on less and less until I lost interest completely and cancelled my account. I didn't play for almost a year after that, until the Christmas holidays of what year I cannot seem to recall. There was a new EverQuest server opening up, promising a fun environment for players looking for a fresh start to a new game, or a game that they had forgotten. A feeling I had not felt in almost a year came over me, I wasn't sure why.. but I couldn't resist.

The Beginning

It was then that the game really started for me. I created a Druid named Tiluvar, and for the next 8 years EverQuest consumed a good portion of my life.

There's a simple reason that this time I got hooked, and her name is Drudori. Before your imagination starts running off, this is not a story about love lost over the Internet. Drudori is a happily married woman, to a man named, as I knew him, Troy. Drudori and Troy started on the Luclin server as new players to EverQuest. While I had a few weeks of experience with the game we were all very much "newbies".

I came across the two of them around level 5 or 6 doing their best to kill Orcs outside of Crushbone in the Greater Faydark. This was a simpler time in EverQuest. In later years I would run past anyone below the maximum level without giving them a second thought. But to Tiluvar the level 5 Druid this friendly Enchanter and Cleric duo seemed like decent, trustworthy people to group with.

We had a great time grouping with each other, and it was the first time in an online game that I was really able to see the people I was with as real people, not just players. There is one night in Crushbone that always brings a smile to my face. Troy and I were both after the coveted "Shiny Brass Shield" from an orc known as the Trainer. We spent hours upon hours waiting for the Trainer to appear, killing orcs over and over hoping that the next one to spawn would be the Trainer himself. Finally it did, in the early hours of the morning and in a random roll Troy won the shield. What happened next, even though we were unaware, was the epitome of the guild we would form together. Half asleep Troy stayed with me on a virtual hill until it was light outside, keeping me company and lending me a hand until the Trainer spawned again so that I could get the shield as well. None of these things are more than numbers in a database in California, but the acts that people carry out because of them are what cause me to find Everquest fascinating. I will never forget that.

Over the next few days we grouped together almost exclusively and we were quite the proficient little group, killing many orcs and gaining levels quickly (what I thought was quickly, at the time).

During our groups we got to know several other people. While some were rude, impatient or just not very pleasant we became quite fond of a small Warrior named Tiboutte, and a Ranger named Sylvane. I have no idea how many weeks past, but we played together constantly, often waiting for every member of our small group to log on before beginning on the nights adventures. I started to find myself logging on not to play, but to chat with my friends and although I didn't realize it at the time the fact that I was playing a game started slipping away, I started to consider Everquest a sort of second social life.

Glorious Rising

There are a few months between meeting Tiboutte and Sylvane and the forming of our guild, during which we met several more people who really fit in with the atmosphere we were trying to create. We wanted our guild to be known for being friendly, helpful, and respectful of other players. This may not seem too complicated, but EverQuest has an eerie ability to bring out the greed in people.

I am somewhat surprised as I write this that I have forgotten the names of some of the people that were once so close to me. If you should be in here let me know I would like this to be accurate, and I would love to hear from any of you. I could not forget though, Zeldoran and Graal. To this day I have more respect for these six people I have mentioned than I do for most of the people I have met in real life. So much so that when I needed a shoulder to cry on or advice about something, I found myself logging on Everquest to see who was around instead of reaching out for people in the real world.

Suffice it to say that we were a very tightly knit group, and together we formed a guild named Glorious Rising. It was not a large guild, comprising of the 6 of us as well as a few names I am sure I have forgotten. But it was home.

Drudori was our kind and gentle guild mistress, while Troy, myself, and I believe Graal were Officers. We spent our time grouping together, chatting, and having a great time being in an atmosphere full of friends. It was a memorable occasion when Glorious Rising first killed a Hill Giant as a guild.

The next couple years are a blur. We added many members, always being sure to put them through their paces, making sure that they are the kind of person we want in the guild before inviting them. Because we were so strict about who could join and who could not we ended up with an extremely well known guild on the Luclin server. One anecdote I recall was being asked to hold several thousand platinum worth of items for someone I didn't know so that they could transfer it to their other character. I did so without a second thought, and when the player returned and I gave him the items I asked why he had trusted me with all that money? His answer was simply "Because you're in GR". It was that spotless reputation that we became quite proud of.

Before any of us really realized it, Glorious Rising had transformed from a small group of friends into one of the largest guilds on the Luclin server yet somehow, amazingly, never lost that "family" feeling. We had new applicants almost daily, were holding guild events all the time and everyone was having fun.

Nothing Lasts Forever

GR was a very strong guild. It was one of the oldest and most respected guilds on the Luclin server. Along with the guild Heroes, we helped make the Luclin server a very fun place for the casual players. However, there is more to Everquest than gaining levels.

Although GR was skilled enough to hold small raids, get people epic quest items, and compete with the other casual guilds on the server many members found themselves wanting more out of the game. We started to see people leaving the guild for "Raiding" guilds. While it was sad to lose friends, we went about our business not giving much thought to the raiding scene.

It became painful for me to watch people join GR, come to our small raids, get their epic items and then pack up and leave for raiding guilds. These were people that we spent our time helping and getting to know, only to see them say "Thanks, bye!" the instant they got bored. It started to drain the fun out of the game, not to mention make it harder to become stronger as a guild because just as soon as members would hit the maximum level, they would leave for greener pastures so to speak.

While many of the lower level members didn't mind, and waved fond farewells to the people leaving, I was conflicted. On the one hand I loved my guild and wanted to stick with them no matter what, but on the other hand I was getting tired of putting effort into helping new members achieve their goals only to watch them leave. I was one of only a handful of max level players that were actually sticking around. I couldn't help but feel like a doormat for the raiding guilds. I wanted it to stop, I wanted to quit this game that was causing me to feel frustrated. I didn't even have fun playing anymore I just logged on, helped people get what they wanted, then logged off. I had been a part of something great in the forming of GR and I wanted to leave the game before I turned completely bitter. But I wanted to "finish" before I quit, and that was a fatal mistake.

Although it caused even more tension between me and the people in the guild who I considered my online family, I wanted to see the rest of the game before finally leaving it. I wanted to see the dangerous areas that only the high end raiding guilds could get to. After all I had played this game for years, I might as well see it all before I quit.

With tears in my eyes, and a heavy heart, I met with Drudori and Troy in a secluded location and quietly removed myself from the guild. They were angry that I was leaving, I know now that they didn't hate me, but they hated that I left them.

The next week was dramatic. Angry tells and accusatory conversations were commonplace. For the second time since I started I came to a new level of realization about the game. It wasn't the guild name over your characters head, or the items that mattered. Even though I was still right here and nothing physically had changed, the fact that I would be spending my time with others was what hurt people. It was just a game but these were real emotions, we were all still sitting right where we were the day before, but there was a distance between us now and no matter how many times someone tells themselves "it's just a game" anyone who has been in a similar situation knows very well that it is not. I was missed, and I couldn't help but wonder if this sense of family was found in every EverQuest guild or if it was in fact the atmosphere in Glorious Rising that created it.

A Raider is Born

I wandered guild less for a while. Evaluating my options, chatting with various people who had previously left GR to see how they were doing and after a few weeks I decided to apply to what was then the strongest guild on the Luclin server, Legacy of Sorrow.

Legacy of Sorrow was a stark contrast to GR. They were hated by many players on the server, known for their "us or them" attitude and domination of all things raid related. As many people would tell it they were heartless bastards who compensated for their pitiful real lives by ruining the virtual lives of people in Everquest. Needless to say, I was fairly apprehensive about joining.

I submitted my application shortly after the Velious expansion was released. I don't remember the exact date however a few days after submitting it I was invited to raid with them.

My first raid was in Kael. I remember being so eager to impress and completely new to the high end raiding scene. Mobs were running all over while Neku, the leader of LoS was shouting instructions to the raid in guild chat. I remember struggling to keep up with the pace, it was hard to follow what was going on. Everyone seemed to know exactly what they were doing, in the chaos somehow people were co-operating, people were following the constant stream of instruction and we were winning. I was impressed.

The mobs were coming in non-stop, I barely had time to target things before they were dead, and we were on to the next.

The next thing I know three giants are coming towards us, Neku is screaming detailed instructions and people are carrying them out. There is no delay, no discussion, he is seeing through the disorder of it all and streamlining it for everyone to understand. They trust his direction and the 50 people following one leader become a force to be reckoned with, I remember thinking "This.. is a guild".

Within the next two minutes, we were all dead. I'm not even sure what happened, all I know is that I was summoned and killed before I could even react. Before my feet even hit the floor at my bind spot, people were moving, getting a cleric in to rez us, everyone was headed back without discussion, they had obviously done this many times before. Even in corpse recovery they were coordinated. We got ourselves on our feet, went over a new strategy in guild chat, and attempted the trio of giants a second time. This time, and for the first time on the Luclin server, Derakor the Vindicator was killed. It was a rush, to be one of the first people to see something happen. I knew this was something I wanted to be a part of. My desire to quit the game quickly evaporated as I came to see the game from a completely new angle. Specific people did not matter, what mattered was the guild. It was by understanding this that I began to understand the LoS mentality that caused most of the server to hate them. They weren't bad people, they just put the guild's accomplishments above all else.

I did my best to learn and I learned quickly. I learned to trust Neku even though I didn't really know him. I learned to respect him even though he was cruel. There was a time during preparation for a dragon where we were asked to use junk buffs. I cast a regeneration spell on my group with the intention of using it as a junk buff and was quickly slammed by Neku for putting a useful buff up as junk. I was embarrassed, but I learned.

After a few weeks of constant raiding with LoS, I was invited to the guild after killing Cazic-Thule in the Plane of Fear. It had been a long night, a lot of the guild had logged off to sleep, but some of us stuck it out and took him down. It was that dedication for the good of the guild that they had been looking for.

Shortly after I was invited, I gained an ever greater respect and understanding of how LoS operated. I remember asking in guild chat for help with part of my epic quest and having 4 members of LoS show up no questions asked. After we completed it I thanked each of them profusely to which Deris told me "you've got the tag". The understanding that helping each other indirectly helps everyone in the guild was what made LoS a powerful raiding guild. It was not the same sense of family that I had felt in GR, but it was a strong feeling of camaraderie that made me just as eager to log on, and my thoughts of quitting the game were forgotten.

Raider With a Conscience!?

I raided with LoS night and day through many server firsts, and it was a whole lot of fun. Some very nice equipment was mine, and I felt like I was part of something larger than the individual. Unfortunately, my past life and my current were on a collision course and it would change my path in EverQuest forever.

It was about half a year after I became a member of LoS, I was by no means an old timer but I had earned the respect and friendship of a number of members. I should mention that friendship in a raiding sense is not the same as it was in GR. When you run into an old raiding buddy it is as if you're running into someone you used to work with.. all you really talk about is work (or in this case EverQuest). The conversation never gets much more personal than that. In any event, I was enjoying my time in LoS until we decided to call a Hate raid.

Raiding Hate was nothing new, and certainly not a challenge for us. We could go just about any time we wanted with minimal people and accomplish what we were after. Unfortunately, the day and time we chose to clear Hate would mean that anyone else trying to raid that zone later in the day would find it completely empty. As you have probably guessed, the guild that had a raid planned later that day was Glorious Rising.

To LoS, Hate is just something to do until the real raid, not a big deal at all. I tried my best to get Large (an officer of LoS) to listen as I explained to him that Hate was a huge deal for GR, it was a monthly event and if it was interfered with they would be really disappointed. We could go any other day, did we really have to go now? and I was told something rather typical of Large "I don't give a fuck about your opinion". I'm not a saint, the language didn't bother me. What got to me was that my opinion seemingly meant nothing to Large. As I have stated the opinion of LoS is that the guild is more important than anything and all my experience with that philosophy up until that point had been mostly positive because I was getting what I wanted, we were progressing and things were going well. It was this event that caused me to realize that the guild was indeed greater than everything, greater even than it's own members. I always knew this but having it put to me so bluntly made me see the problem, and see why LoS never had that family feeling.. because to LoS we were not people, we were characters and we were expendable.

The conversation went back and forth and involved several other people. My loyalties were questioned, I was insulted by some and supported by others but in the end LoS went ahead with the raid and I removed myself from the guild right there in the Plate of Hate. Despite what many people said it was not a hasty decision, I was not just looking for an excuse to do it, I loved being part of LoS and it was the last thing I wanted but it was the right thing to do. I returned all my droppable items to the guild and explained my actions on the forums. I am still friends with some members of LoS to this day, and bitter enemies of others.

When the members of Glorious Rising started logging on for their raid only to find the zone mostly empty I was subject to a slew of angry tells. The only reason for which as far as I can tell is that to them I was the face of LoS. It's much easier for them to yell at me than for them to yell at an entire guild. It broke me heart seeing my former guild so angry with me, they were completely unaware that had removed myself from LoS in an attempt to stop it from happening.

A few days passed, the drama subsided and the story of what happened came out. Much of LoS was supportive of my actions (albeit privately). But a lot of them felt I had betrayed them. On the other hand a lot of GR was happy with what I had tried to do for them and apologized for their harsh words. The kindness of my former guild mates reminded me of that place I used to call home, where I was Tiluvar, not just a Druid. Fully aware of how bad it may look to some of the people in LoS, I rejoined Glorious Rising a few days later.

Not So Glorious?

GR was good to me. They welcomed me back with opened arms and I got right back into the swing of things. My upgraded gear allowed me to be even more helpful to many of the lower level members in the guild and I enjoyed it immensely. Something was missing though.. that co-ordination, the machine-like efficiency and thrill of taking down a challenging mob for the first time was nowhere to be found and I missed it a lot more than I thought I would.

Having been promoted to Officer a month or so after returning I set my sights on teaching GR to raid. Sure we had done very small scale raids for some epic quests, or attempted to kill some dragons but for the most part the guild was completely new to it.

Some people took to it like fish to water and enjoyed it just as much as I did. Others however weren't too keen on it and preferred to stay in their small groups or on alternate characters going about their business.

As we got better and better at the various concepts I had learned largely from LoS (Main tanking, Proper Positioning, Aggro Control, Healing Efficiency etc. etc.) we were able to do more and more and before we knew it we were raiding quite regularly. The problem though, was that only half the guild really enjoyed it while the other half just sort of joined raids when they felt like it and did their own thing when they didn't.

Slowly but surely a rift started to form in the guild between the people that wanted to raid bigger and badder mobs, and the people that didn't want to turn EQ into a job and preferred to play casually. Even loot started to become an issue. While we were at heart a guild of friends, it started to become impossible to decide who should get an item when multiple people wanted it. It really did show me that even out of love and with the best of intentions, how easy it is to be misunderstood and end up hurting people's feelings. Loot was a source of constant strife in the officer channel with almost nightly outbursts about favoritism or ignorance because two officers disagreed on who should or should not get an item.

Me and Troy started to despise each other due to the constant "casual vs. raider" arguments we would get into, each claiming we had the support of the guild on our side when in fact it was a nearly even split. Our constant arguing was very painful for Drudori who often had to mediate between the two of us and with her being right next to Troy in real life while sometimes siding with me added immensely to her stress. My eagerness to share the fun of raiding with GR had inadvertently started a feud between the people who enjoyed raiding and the ones that hated me for ruining their casual game. There was not a night in months that someone wasn't furious with me for pestering them about attending a raid or where the raiders weren't annoyed at the lack of effort put into the guilds progression from a lot of it's members.

It was becoming obvious that something had to change. The raiders wanted mandatory raiding and the non-raiders wanted optional raiding. Both sides had their arguments but in the end it was obvious that we were not going to find much common ground. Drudori was exhausted, the casual people were sick of being made to feel guilty for not raiding, and the raiders were tired of what they described as "carrying" the rest of the guild.

We tried many alternatives.. having a separate chat channel for the raiders, joining with other similar "family" guilds to find fellow raiders so we didn't have to rely on the non-raiders of GR, but nothing seemed to solve the problems we were experiencing.

After talking extensively with Drudori, Troy and the other officers, we decided it would be best for me to leave Glorious Rising again, and with a large portion of the pro-raiding members, form a new raiding guild. Even as I write this I feel sad. I always wonder where I would be in game, and in life if I had not twisted GR into two pieces. I set many of it's members on a completely different path in EverQuest and I have always wondered how it would have played out if I had never returned to GR.

You Are the Leader of Sheep

When I said my goodbyes and removed myself from GR, three or four people immediately followed. We tried to leave on the best terms possible but some people were still angry with us for going, which was unfortunate but expected.

Over the next couple of weeks we spent most of our time leveling up (this was shortly after PoP was released) and brainstorming in the "GRaiders" channel about the name for the new guild for which several names were proposed. The only proposals I remember were "The Fallen" and "Black Sheep". We were sort of looking for a name that signified our departure from Glorious Rising and how, unfortunately, we were always made out to be the bad guys when we pushed for raids. Annoyingly, every name we finally agreed on ended up being rejected by the GMs. Largely due to frustration we ended up deciding on Sheep instead of Black Sheep, which much to our surprise was accepted.

The guild was formed on November 16th, 2002 in the Plane of Nightmare. I quickly invited the people who had left GR with me as well as the several people that had left GR a few weeks after I had in order to join us. When all was said and done there were about 15 people in the guild and we were expecting a handful more from GR.

The end of an Era

About one week after the formation of Sheep, Drudori decided to disband GR (or as Troy would tell it, I destroyed GR ;). All the anger and frustration the officers had towards each other was mostly forgotten because at some point we realized how inevitable it was. The vast majority of all the "family" guilds on the server were already gone or had reputations so tainted with drama that they were no longer desirable. Drudori did not want to see our guild dissolve into something we were no longer proud of or just slowly wither and die. She wanted to disband GR on a high note and have it remembered as one of the most respected, longest running guilds on the server. I cannot seem to remember the exact date, but towards the end of November, 2002, There was a farewell party for GR in the West Commonlands which over 200 people attended. It was a time for everyone to put their differences aside, say goodbye, and remember how great of a guild we had all been a part of. I have no doubt that everyone who was a part of GR still remembers how fun it had been.

Most of the remaining founders of GR formed a new guild, Code of Silence which was intended to be an extremely casual raiding guild. The story of Code of Silence is not one I can tell though, as even though I am still in contact with many of it's members, I only know bits and pieces of it's history.

With GR disbanded Sheep saw another influx of members. People that had wanted to join Sheep but did not want to leave GR had the choice made for them. Some others went to various other guilds on Luclin. Five Rings, Endorean, Heroes, Triad Continuum etc.

It really was around the time when the focus of EverQuest shifted from grouping and exping to raiding. GR dissolving into varying degrees of raiding guilds really echoed what was happening game-wide. I missed knowing GR was there making the Luclin server a better place to be, and I will never forget that guild or the people I founded it with.

Back to the Grind

Our gear was not so great, and we didn't have the numbers for anything amazing but we were happy. Raiding nightly, Killing things in the most efficient manner was what we lived for. Flawless kills were the order of the day, every death raised the question "What can we do better?" until we had such a solid group that we could pull off seemingly impossible wins.

The problem was that even though the skill was there, we were still only killing things like Vhaksiz the Shade, The Va'Dyn and Derakor the Vindicator which on paper, wasn't very impressive.

Slowly but surely we grew. Our reputation of being a skilled raiding guild with the atmosphere of a family guild was something that appealed to many players. Many of these players had little to no raiding experience which was a bit of a blessing and a curse. It caused several wipes because they simply didn't know what they should be doing but it also allowed us to teach them our way of raiding which deviated somewhat from the norm.

We were always sure to treat people as people, evaluating their personality and ability to learn just as much or more than their current ability to raid and never by their equipment. We had to reject one Wizard because he was simply too negative. Sheep was founded on a "why not?" attitude meaning whenever we doubted we could do something we still gave it our best shot. Having people in the guild that gave up before even attempting something was not what we needed. To this day I have a screenshot of that Wizard sending me a tell, mocking me for having "17 people on at once! a new record!". I wonder where he is now.

We were steadily growing and getting our hands on every small upgrade we could hoping for a chance at one of the more "important" mobs. The problem was that racing against guilds with three times the members was not easy. We were killing dragons in WToV, the Ring of Slime, and various minor mobs in Luclin as often as we could while hoping for a break. What I consider our first "big" kill was Ikatiar the Venom. While ITV is not anything to brag about it marked our first foray into the Northern Halls of the Temple of Veeshan and did a lot to show Luclin that we weren't just messing around. ITV became part of our usual rotation in between minor mobs like Vaniki for Willsappers, Epic raids and easier Velious mobs like Vindi and Woushi.

Sheep was by no means a serious force on the Luclin server, but we had enough to keep us busy, adding quality members and honing our skills. Another aspect of Sheep that was a both good and bad was that we rarely had more than two or three clerics. In fact we were lucky if we had three. While this is mostly a bad thing it really forced people to do their absolute best to avoid taking extra damage. We simply didn't have the healing to make mistakes and as a result we stopped making them. On the odd occasion that a couple clerics would log on things seemed almost laughably easy because we were so used to doing them with only the Druid army (back then Druids were not half the healers they are today).

We kept pushing, advancing, learning. We got our first few Sleepers Tomb keys and were excited to be making progress towards Primal Weapons. We started bumping heads with some of the "big" guilds on Luclin like Five Rings and Veil of Shadows which brought on it's own set of challenges (I could probably write an additional 20 pages entirely about our issues with VoS).

Our dedication was second only to Endoran (Then the top guild on the server) we would frequently spend entire nights attempting Sontalak or Shei Vintraas over and over until we got them down, and there were never any complaints or drama, people were eager to try again and again. We were tearing through Velious adding new kills to our growing list almost every other night. Some of our Luclin favorites like Doomshade, Rumblecrush, THO etc. were also getting trampled. We basically took every single opportunity to kill anything that might drop an upgrade as soon as one of the "big" guilds looked the other way.

Then something happened that caused a blood feud that lasted for years. All the other guilds were busy elsewhere, we were in Kael killing Derakor the Vindicator and.. POP! The Statue of Rallos Zek.

While screaming "NOT A WORD TO ANYONE!" we moved for the Statue, knowing full well that if other guilds heard about it they would run right over us for the Avatar of War. We were prepping for the Statue when VoS and 5R members started showing up in the zone. 5R gracefully backed down as we were there in force, before either of them. Granted our force was half what the other guilds could muster, but we had our shot, and we killed the Statue (with some minor interference from VoS monks).

We were excited about the death of the statue, but even more excited knowing that as per the unspoken rules, if you kill the statue, you get first shot at the Avatar of War. VoS however didn't agree. They didn't believe that we could kill AoW with ~32 people and in a vicious back and forth between myself and the leaders of VoS they effectively told me that they could not kill AoW with the numbers that we have, and so they would not consider us to be there "in force". Despite a GM showing up in zone, 5R siding with us and the fact that we had killed the Statue, VoS pulled and killed the AoW with 50 players (and about 4 left standing when it died).

People were angry, the Luclin forums lit up with flames and accusations, but I am happy to say that all Sheep members kept it civil. No strings of vulgar language, threats or screaming. We stated our case and the vast majority of the server sided with us. After all it is up to us to decide what adequate force to kill something is, it is not up to VoS to tell us. Although eventually it blew over, VoS and Sheep never got along after this incident and as hard as it was we always respected their first in force, and gave them the benefit of the doubt. Although people would sometimes get annoyed that we were treating them so respectfully after what they had done and continued to do to us (AoW was not the only thing), in the end it is that attitude that made Sheep different.

We went back to our daily routine and a few weeks later found ourselves with enough keys to field a raid force for Sleepers Tomb. It was a long night. If you have ever looked at a map of Sleepers, it doesn't seem that large because it's mostly vertical. I must have said "It's just around this corner" 20 times while Hullk was screaming "It's light out I have to go to work!". Although we never made it all the way down to the Final Arbiter (Which was our goal) we made it very very close and it was fun to experience ST from top to bottom with 18 of the best that Sheep had to offer.

Sleepers became yet another target on our rotation and we were getting people Primal weapons as fast as we were getting them keyed. The increase in DPS (especially in places like SSRA where a lot of the bosses have massive armor) was rather large.

There were several notable kills around this time but getting everyone Primals before really pushing for Luclin progression was our focus, and so we faded from the main raiding scene for a little while in order to make a big push to gear up for Luclin.

Sheep is a Raiding Guild?

Although most of our competition knew we were competent, the server at large viewed Sheep as kind of a joke. Unable to gather enough people for the most coveted mobs or really compete with the top guilds, anyone who was interested in a "serious" raiding guild opted to join Endorean, Five Rings, Veil of Shadows or Insidious Blood.

However one evening we managed to change that perception. Even though we had only 6 more people than we did when VoS told us we did not have adequate force, we cleared to and killed the Avatar of War (38 people). It was then that people stopped laughing at the guild with the silly name, and started adding Sheep to the many "Top Guilds?" posts on the Luclin forums. I remember about 10 seconds after AoW died getting a tell from Dinian (Endorean's main tank) "NOW I'm impressed ;)".

The apps came flooding in and although we were eager to get some new members we were adamant about keeping our standards high, and our numbers low to ensure that our members were people we enjoyed, not just classes we needed.

As a side note, the Avatar or War kill remains one of my favorite raids. The timing, pulling positioning etc. was perfect. I could not have asked for a more skillful kill, I was so proud of my guild that day and the thrill I got from that kill was something that no mere "game" could ever provide. EverQuest is much more than a game.

With our new members, new reputation and extremely high moral we had a downhill run through NToV, Tunare, and then to something that surprised even us..

To the Moon!

The Luclin expansion was much more technically advanced than any before it, and was quite different in design than Velious. Even today it is surrounded by much of controversy and remains the definitive example of painful, key based progression. It has a reputation for being one of the most inaccessible expansions. Needless to say we were eager to get started.

Luclin was planned as a "future" goal for Sheep. We had much more gearing up to do in Velious before moving on, or so we thought. One evening when the call for target status went out, the infamous Twiceborn let me know that VoS was attempting the Arch Lich in SSRA. Meanwhile another of our trackers informed me know that King Tormax was up in Kael. We moved for Tormax seeing as VoS was already in SSRA and had already killed Rhag1 and Rhag2.

For reasons I don't fully understand, VoS abandoned their Arch Lich kill, ported to Kael and attempted to pull King Tormax before we did. It was a mess. I spoke quickly to the leadership of VoS and told them that they could have Tormax if they would give us the night to work on the Arch Lich, since they left it up in SSRA. They agreed, so we left.

We arrived in SSRA with the intention of learning, learning the zone, learning the encounters, just getting our feet wet and didn't really expect to kill anything. Our previous attempts at any named were met with heavy resistance from VoS so we were happy to have the place all to ourselves for once. We didn't even have a key to the Arch Lich area but one was provided for us by Alfonse, a Five Rings member and also one of the original members of Glorious Rising.

We eventually made our way to the Arch Lich area, and after a few near wipes while clering his room, he stood before us. We knew the basic strategy but largely had no idea what to expect.

Much to my annoyance, while we were preparing for an attempt on the life of the Arch Lich, VoS started showing up in the zone. Apparently the fact that we had to ask Five Rings to open the door for us, nullified their agreement to give us the night alone with the Arch Lich. They were kind enough though to give us one attempt.

Any long time Sheep knows, Arch Lich became one of the most killed mobs on our list. Second only to Plane of Time kills, the Arch Lich was killed over 50 times by Sheep and it all started that night. On our first attempt, with VoS right behind us, Rhag'Zadune was killed. We were ecstatic, we had not planned SSRA progression for another month or two yet here we were with the corpse of one of the harder bosses in the zone at our feet and it was all thanks to VoS! The irony was so sweet.

For the next few months we started abandoning some of our older targets and focusing more and more on SSRA. When the spawns weren't on Euro time we were dominating the zone, especially the Arch Lich. These were great times for Sheep. People were working together for keys to the Emperor's Chamber, farming ore for Emperor Bane weapons, and continuing to gear up and get everyone any item they wanted pre-Luclin to give us that edge.

The Luclin Era

SSRA was full of loot. The items we had access to from SSRA were significantly better than what we were getting from NToV and low tier PoP. Unfortunately, we weren't the only ones that wanted them. SSRA was a hotbed for inter-guild drama. We would be continually taunted in OOC and Shout, mobs would be stolen and stolen back, players would be trained, GM's were involved more than a few times. There's one specific example I remember where VoS attempted to take the Cursed spawn from us, I petitioned a GM and the GM had me roll against the representative from VoS. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I won the role and the GM made VoS leave the zone for the duration of our fight. Despite the 30 odd tells I got from VoS members insulting every aspect of my life, my guild, my family, my dog etc. Killing Cursed that time was a little more fun than usual ;).

We made progress in SSRA with Emperor Keys, Banes, Vex Thal Key shards (just incase!) and after a while we made the decision to shift our focus entirely to the Emperor and Seru. Raids were cancelled across the board. If you were online, get in SSRA and finish your keys.

It was painful to say the least. SSRA all day every day. The loot was pouring it but we were having nightmares about snakes. Occasionally we would see stronger guilds than us wiping to the Emperor with 50 people, and wonder how we planned to do it with 40 but we never lost hope, and kept pushing.

Then the day finally came, more than 80% of the guild had their Emperor key, almost all the melee players had Emperor Bane weapons, Insidious Blood had moved on to Planes of Power leaving only Sheep and VoS to fight for Emperor in the EST time zone. It didn't take long before we got our first chance.

It was a mess. I think we went through about 8 tanks and even the Clerics must have died once or twice each but we had pushed for this moment for so long, we could not loose now! and we didn't. Emperor Ssraeshza was killed by Sheep on July 18th, 2003. It was the first time we had even been in the same room as him and somehow we pulled it off with 47 people. This fight was second only to the Avatar of War in the effect it had on the guild. Moral shot through the roof, applicants came in by the dozens, and our focus was shifted almost entirely to Vex Thal Shard farming. While we still killed anything that moved in SSRA, our goal was now Vex Thal.

What goes up..

I'll be blunt, the Vex Thal key farm burnt us out. People were getting keyed but Vex Thal was such a massive pain that we were starting to wonder why we had bothered. With every guild ahead of us CoHing in and taking all the decent mobs we were left to go on three hour clears to get any loot at all. Sure the loot wasn't bad but it came slowly, and with a steep learning curve. In Vex Thal if you turn the wrong corner you will find yourself in a sea of black robes with arms flailing and large red numbers spamming your chat box. It hurt.

People got frustrated, bored, some people quit, and the guild slowed to a halt. I have to admit I was one of these people. Pushing so hard through SSRA, dealing with VoS and sometimes Chaos Justice (a Euro guild) on a nightly basis was exhausting, but I was focused on killing the Emperor. With another long process so soon after the Emperor's death it was as if we were running a race, and as soon as we got to the finish line we were forced to run back to the start in order to claim our prize.

We lost a handful of people, but many stayed knowing that things would pick up as they always seemed to eventually. Five Rings and Insidious Blood largely abandoned Vex Thal in favor of Planes of Power, while Endorean skipped it completely. Due to the mechanics of Vex Thal, it was almost always on Euro time which meant Chaos Justice had it all to themselves more often than not. We did get our foot in the door though, when we managed to get a mage into the room with the first real named mob so that next time it spawned we could quickly get moving without clearing much. While the best mobs were still being taken by other guilds we were getting some loot from Vex Thal, still doing SSRA and other Luclin mobs as well as some low end PoP mobs. Thanks largely to the efforts of one of our bards, Gypo, things were picking up.

We had killed a lot of the lower tier PoP mobs. Knowing full well that we would have to go back and kill them several times to get everyone flagged we tried to get a head start. Not having completely cleared Vex Thal though was something that always hung over the guild, thankfully with IB and 5R moving on we only had VoS to compete with.

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!

With Vex Thal a little less contested, we were able to really dig in, completing our first full clear in early November 2003, almost exactly one year after the guild had been formed.

Our gearing continued for quite some time. We were generally on earlier than VoS so whenever Chaos Justice didn't take Vex Thal, it was ours. Thankfully Vex Thal is not all that challenging, it really is just a loot farm once you have it down, and we did.

The only time our dominance of Vex Thal was not assured was when it was on Euro time, whenever it was on our time we had it. VoS would occasionally make an attempt to get in ahead of us but would rarely succeed. There was one incident where we both CoH'd in on top of each other, desperately trying to get the first named kill so that we could claim the rest of the zone. It was complete chaos, people dying left and right, mobs running all over, both guilds trying to kill Thal Va Kelum in order to claim the cycle as their own. I saw it wasn't going to go anywhere and called my entire guild back into the previous room, and asked the Wizards to send everyone home. People were a bit angry that I gave in to VoS so easily but they listened. It was never my intention to give in to VoS, to me it was obvious that everyone in the room with TVK was going to die. My plan was to have us ported out so that we could run back in without having to rez, rebuff etc. so that when VoS stubbornly wiped to the mob, we would be ahead of them.. and it worked. We hit the ground running after the TL and made it back into Vex Thal in time to see the last few members of VoS die. We offered them our assistance in recovering their corpses (after we killed TVK ;) in exchange for them leaving the zone, they agreed and actually held to their end of the bargain this time (with no lack of complaining in OOC). It was a great feeling to have out-witted VoS, and something all this instanced content lately is really preventing.. ah the good old days ;).

The gearing continued at a decent pace, and was kicked into high gear one weekend over the Christmas holidays that is burned into everyone’s memories. There was a patch, I don't remember exactly what it was supposed to fix, but the servers didn't like it. They were restarting the servers almost every 12 hours, and we made good use of it. In that one weekend, we completely cleared Vex Thal three times, Killed the Emperor and Seru four times each, as well as a few other SSRA bosses. Between the 30-40 people that were online it was somewhere around 200 items, and was a noticeable boost in our power. In fact it geared people up so well that it helped shift our focus yet again, this time from Luclin to PoP.

While there are many anecdotes I could mention about our Luclin days, I will have to save that for another time. Luclin was my personal favorite expansion not only in terms of the content, but in terms of how amazingly well everyone pulled together to get through it. I really felt like I had accomplished what I set out to do. Sheep was a skilled, efficient raiding machine and at the same time we were a family. Luclin was the peak of my interest. If it wasn't for the people who stepped up to lead through a lot of PoP and beyond the guild would have faltered then and there as my level of effort dropped off considerably. Thankfully, it was already out of my hands. Sheep was no longer my guild, it had become it's own entity with people following the rules and policies of the guild whether I was there to enforce them or not. I don't know that I could ever put that much effort into the game again, but if I could do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing.

We're going to need more people...

The Planes of Power. Easy travel, linear progression, and trash mobs that hit harder than some of the bosses we had killed. PoP was really a change in mentality. Luclin was all about endurance with long fights that tested your ability to concentrate and keep people alive long enough to finish the job. PoP was largely about damage, it didn't matter how skilled you were, if you didn't have enough people you wouldn't win. This was not a welcome philosophy to me.

I always enjoyed doing things with minimal numbers, and in Luclin you were rewarded for it because loot wasn't spread so thin. In PoP however you were basically punished by not having a full raid because you would have to come back to get flags later anyways. Filling up your raid just to ensure everyone got flagged was the most efficient way to progress. Since loot wasn't much better than what we already had until around the middle of PoP progression, it was pointless to try and do things with low numbers and that took a lot of the fun out of it for me.

My playtime started to decline more and more due to both the annoyance of PoP and a new person in my real life. Thankfully Sebbi was there to pick up the slack.

Once again the push for progression started. Terris Thule, The Manaetic Behemoth, The Zek Brothers and all the other minor PoP bosses fell before the flock. Before we knew it we were in the Temple of Solusek Ro.

PoP was fun, but it was zergy. Many of us really wanted to go back to some content that was a good old fashioned challenge. Having attempted the Ring of Vulak long, long ago when we were raiding NToV regularly we decided to go back and give it a shot with our massively upgraded gear. Before anyone looks down on Velious kills with level 65 and PoP gear, I should mention that the Ring of Vulak was upgraded significantly around the time PoP was released. It made no sense that Vex Thal quality loot was dropping from such a ridiculously easy dragon and so the dragon was changed into a ring event, and became quite difficult. So difficult in fact that it had never been completed on the Luclin server.

The Ring of Vulak is a complicated event, and if you fail you generally have to wait at least a few days before you can attempt it again. We had a lot of practice with it previously so we had a pretty good handle on it. Considering Sheep has never yet been the number one guild, accomplishing a server first is something we are all quite proud of. For the first time on the Luclin server the Ring of Vulak V2.0 was completed by Sheep. The loot was decent but not spectacular, but it was never about loot, it was about overcoming a challenge.

With our vision tunneled entirely the Planar progression, me playing less and less, I'm afraid this section will get somewhat sparse. Although I have a general idea of how it went. I really don't know any specifics as Sebbi was mostly in charge. I was still actively raiding and leading when I could, but it was Sebbi's show now.

The Elemental Planes

Over the next few months we worked hard to get everyone flagged for The Tower of Solusek Ro, and we were making good progress. Most of the bosses that stood in our way were dispatched quickly although I do remember some issues with Bertoxx. Due to my lack of playtime as well as our rapid pace through lower tier PoP you'll notice the news updates around that time were almost non-existent.

Sadly, another large reason for the lack of updates was that we were busy bashing our heads against the wall that is Rallos Zek the Warlord. He was the only thing standing between us and the Elemental planes, and our friends in VoS did NOT want us to get there. Most of our attempts were at strange hours with a fraction of our normal force and a plethora of boxed alts just to try to learn the encounter. Thanks largely to Ainthek, Sebbi and all the other people that never lost faith in the ability of Sheep, Rallos Zek was killed on February 10th, 2004 and was even nice enough to donate a Blade of War for each of our primary tanks.

This was a huge kill for Sheep because it finally caught us up with the game, so to speak. Biting at the heels of the "uber" guilds we were still the small guild with the funny name, but no one was laughing anymore, it was a good time to be a Sheep. The good news kept pouring in as Solusek Ro died two weeks later giving us complete access to the Elemental Planes and we wasted no time.

The loot came in massive piles, massively upgrading the bulk of our raiding force. There was a learning curve but we were adapting quickly. The elemental minis were dying daily, our trackers were performing excellently and we were regularly the first people to get to spawns. Our focus began to shift yet again to our first Elemental God, Fennin Ro.

Fennin was a pain, to say the least. It was extremely hard to get to him before other guilds and even when we did, we had to put up with the lag in PoFire and the massive clerical dependency of the encounter. We pushed, made our best attempts, and we failed.

The Second Crash

Coming so close to our goal and failing caused a massive fallout. Similar to the post Emperor fallout towards the end of Luclin, people stopped logging on. We didn't need the Elemental loot anymore, we didn't need anything but the elemental bosses and we could not seem to get a decent shot at any of them. Everyone was getting frustrated and Sebbi was gone, which hurt, a lot. I don't even recall where where Sebbi was.. he is seemingly immune to burn out.. exams maybe? I really don't remember, all I know is that we went from having 50 people on every night to about 20. People were unhappy, people were leaving and there were no signs of anything changing. Seeing so many people that worked so hard to get this far just give up killed me inside, we had pulled through tougher situations and we would not stop here, not right on the edge of the Plane of Time which would have a Vex Thal like impact on the guild.

I started logging on regularly and running raids. Nothing major, some Cursed, some Emperor, back flagging some new members in low tier PoP. It was not very exciting for those of us that had done it all before but it was something more than sitting in the Bazaar and slowly people started to log on again. Many still left, but we re-opened recruiting and stayed on our proven path of only inviting quality players who knew how to listen to one another. I admit it was tempting to take the path so many other guilds had, and lower our standards in an effort to quickly bolster our ranks but thankfully we did not give in to temptation. We went a bit backwards working hard back flagging our members with other guilds because we could barely get enough people to have elemental raids anymore.

We spent almost a full two months re-doing content, re-gearing new members and learning once again how to make the most out of a small raid. After a long process we were finally ready to take another shot at the mob that pushed us two months back. We attempted Fennin Ro yet again, and killed him flawlessly on May 14th, 2004. As I was beginning to come accustomed to, moral and applications shot up once again and not two weeks later we had Xegony down as well, in addition to a number of minor bosses in the newly released and painfully buggy Gates of Discord.

With nightly attendance up again, a new raid leader in Rynwan, and some enthusiastic new members, we pushed hard for elemental gear as we destroyed the minis and various minor GoD bosses. One month later we had Coirnav down and the only thing that stood in our way was the notoriously unforgiving Rathe Council. Sebbi was away on his yearly summer disappearance and my playtime was dropping again but Rynwan was extremely capable of covering for both of us with an army of dedicated people like Kasyu, Luvile, Hullk and the other 40 names it will take too long to mention.

The Rathe Council was ridiculous. It required a massive amount of co-ordination, ability and a little luck. We heard of guilds with 13 clerics failing, and we generally had only 5 or 6. We were worried to say the least but the long time members of Sheep were starting to develop a bit of that well known "old school - we can do ANYTHING" attitude and it really was the kind of positive reinforcement we needed. Surprisingly, the Rathe council really played to our strengths.. when you hear Sheep talk about "Sheep fights" for example "This is a Sheep fight" the rathe council is a good way to explain that. Sheep fights are fights that favor co-ordination, communication and determination over DPS and spam healing, they were fights that we excelled at. The rathe council was probably the hardest encounter I have ever personally lead, and it was the third most fun raid I have ever lead in EverQuest.

When I say Rathe played to our strengths, I am not exaggerating. We complete the Rathe event less than 24 hours after killing Coirnav, surprising most of the server. Sheep had entered the Plane of Time.

Wait a minute!

As you may have noticed, the feel of this writing changed somewhat from a story about me and my life in Everquest to a story about Sheep. I have barely paused to mention how the game was effecting my emotions and my real life as I often did earlier while describing Glorious Rising or Legacy of Sorrow. It is not because Sheep didn't effect my emotions in the same way, or because raiding removed the emotional attachment of EQ, it is because in the time I was 100% into pushing the guild much of my real life was neglected. I still had friends, family, school etc. but it was all secondary to Everquest. In fact up until the end of Luclin the only time I was really pulled away on an important night was when we killed Terris Thule because it was my Birthday. I remember getting 2 phone calls when Terris died letting me know she was down, what dropped and how many people died. Looking back on the situation it is fairly amusing how, I hesitate to use the term because of all the imagery it's associated with but, addicted I was to Everquest. I do not see it in a negative CNN style "I'm going to kill myself because I lost a level" kind of way, I was addicted to the people and to achieving things with them. People that want to spend every minute of their time hanging out with their friends are considered normal but just because a lot of the people I had come to know as friends could only communicate with me over the Internet I was considered anti-social? it seems somewhat absurd.

In any case, my involvement in Sheep was declining and my iron grip on leadership had pretty much permanently been loosened as Sebbi, Rynwan, Ainthek and others took over more and more. As grateful as I was to not have to log on nightly just for something to happen, part of me was upset. After all with new leadership comes new attitude and I was not that happy with the new attitude I was seeing. There was nothing wrong with the way anyone else was leading it just wasn't my way and for selfish reasons I was angry about that. Because of all this, my involvement in the guild became borderline detrimental. I tried to force people to raid my way on the raids I was leading even though they had been doing things differently on the raids I was not. The guild was changing and instead of adapting to the guild I was trying to force the guild to adapt to me which obviously was not going to happen, not when I couldn't commit all my time to the guild anymore. This behavior continued and I grew more and more upset with the way the guild was being run in my absence up until Quarm. I was half the leader I was after the Luclin expansion and Quarm killed the other half. I put every remaining ounce of effort I had into strategizing and taking down Quarm within days of the Omens of War release, and I was done with EQ.

Even though I tried to level up to 70, help with GoD leadership and hold on to the scraps of enjoyment I got out of the game and the guild it just didn't happen. The stupidity of GoD encounters and the annoyance of having to level up yet again were making me hate the game, and then World of Warcraft was released.

From Norrath to Azeroth

I will keep this short, as my adventures in Azeroth are told elsewhere. I spent 5 or 6 months playing WoW and my attendance in Everquest dropped to zero. Even though I remained the guild leader in title for some time after I stopped playing it was 100% in the hands of Sebbi now. Even Rynwan who maintained solid raid leadership through most of GoD eventually succumbed to the lures of WoW, along with quite a few other Sheep members.

WoW was, and is a great game however much of what people hate about Everquest is what gives it it's never-ending appeal. Missing the challenge and dedication required in Everquest, Rynwan returned to EQ and to Sheep. While I stayed on the WoW side of the fence with a number of friends from Sheep for quite some time.

Eventually though, the same things that brought Rynwan back brought me back too.

Grompy!

While Grompy was more of a footnote up until this point, he took on a much larger role when I returned to EQ. Catching up with the progress Sheep had made in my absence was difficult, but I was determined to do it. I felt that it was time for a change though and instead of my tried and true Druid I now considered Grompy the level 65 Berserker to be my main. I raided with Sheep off and on while gaining levels and equipment. Largely due to the support of old friends I managed to catch up on all my flags, keys, spells etc.

I had a good time on Grompy but it wasn't the same. Melee classes in WoW were extremely fun and I suppose I had forgotten how dull they can be in Everquest and so my interest in Grompy started to falter. Additionally, it was extremely hard for me to come back and be just a member, Sheep had changed. Nearly half the guild was gone and replaced with new faces. The battle hardened, tough as nails crew I had known was replaced by a gentler more relaxed version of the guild.. after all an organization's attitudes reflect it's leadership, and Sebbi was always "the nice one". I found it hard to adjust to this new mentality and more than that people found it hard to understand my actions since I was still acting in a way the old Sheep would have responded to. I knew I was causing issues and annoying people and I knew people were whispering behind my back, expecting me to go back to WoW. Eventually the hostility towards me, and what some people seemed to feel I represented became so obvious that I just decided to disappear.

Many people assumed I jumped right back into WoW and left EQ behind, but that was not the case. I didn't really play much of anything for quite some time. While I did eventually get back into WoW it was only for a lack of anything else to do, I was still not really enjoying it for all the reasons I stopped enjoying it the first time. Over time WoW managed to get less and less interesting and while it was a fun game to play there was really just nothing interesting to do. Even the new content was so easy I never really felt like I was accomplishing anything. I missed that feeling of accomplishment that so far only EQ seemed able to provide.

I meandered around in WoW, spending time with the members of Sheep who had chosen to make Azeroth their permanent home, but grew steadily less interested yet again.

Where to From Here

Now I find myself back in Everquest, enjoying raids, enjoying groups even enjoying the penalty of death somehow. Actually having to worry about dying and pay attention to my mana use are the kind of stressors that always made these games fun to me. The graphics, sound and mechanics of Everquest are noticeably ancient compared to WoW and some of the other more recent MMO's I have tried but the community and co-operation and required dedication are still there.

While Sheep may not be exactly as I remember it, it is still exactly what I tried to turn GR into, exactly what I had always wanted it to be.. a combination of the values of LoS and GR, a raiding guild I will always be proud of, a raiding guild with a heart.

What the game will become to me this time around, is yet to be seen.

Conclusion

When I started writing this I had intended it to be a paragraph about myself. As you can see though, it got considerably more detailed than that. Remembering the people and the feelings that Everquest introduced me to makes me realize once again how foolish it is to even compare it to WoW. WoW after all is a game while Everquest is more of a hobby. I will always be an EQ player even long after the servers are shut down. The profound effect this game had on my life will be felt until the end of my days. The items, keys and levels may just be numbers in a database in California, but the years I have spent with my friends in this fictional place are real, and I will never forget them.

There is so much that I have left out, so many details skipped. Maybe I will go back through it again in the future and add some things. If you have any suggestions, or memorable events that I'm forgetting please let me know!

The game is different now. With so much of the content instanced, the race against other guilds is almost non-existant. Veil of Shadows and Insidious Blood disbanded at some point while I was in WoW, servers merged and new guilds populated Luclin.. it's a whole new world and while I am cautious about the state of the game, it was never about the game, it has always been about the people.

Thanks

There are many, many.. MANY people that I have not mentioned here that are very important to me, especially all the members of the various guilds I have been a part of. Many stories I have left untold and anecdotes that have been forgotten.. I will not attempt to remember them all because it is inevitable that I will leave just as many out. To all the people that I have spent time with in Norrath, I thank you for making my time in this game what it was, and I look forward to the challenges this game will bring in the future. The next time anyone condemns you for spending time playing "that game" remember that it is not just a game, it is a community that you are an important part of, and while it may be hard for people to understand that, everyone who has been a part of it even for a brief time will find it impossible to deny.

Addendum

While between my last comments, and this end there are countless stories to be told, drama to wince at and accomplishments to remind you why you used to play, those stories are best told by someone else as I have not been a member of Sheep for some time. I did however, feel it was my responsibility to give us all some closure in the form of a post on Sheepofluclin.com which I will include here.

Cas-ewe-al

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I feel somewhat awkward writing this myself as I haven't had much of a hand in the guild in close to 2 years now, but I feel that something needs to be said.

After 4 years and about 5 months, Sheep has finally retired as a raiding guild. While our progress and prestige waxed and waned over the years, Sheep was always a respected and top tier guild on the Luclin server thanks entirely to the quality of membership that we upheld.

With somewhere around 325 unique encounters completed, and a total of 4,781 raids to date by the 486 people that have been on Sheep's raids during our lifetime it has been an extremely frustrating, tiring and painful run.. but one that I don't think any of us are ever going to forget.

It is not my intent to sound overly sentimental, while I am saddened that Sheep is finally taking a back seat in the raiding scene it was inevitable as EverQuests popularity declines.

There are so many people, stories, events that helped shape the guild into what it is now, far too many to mention. To anyone that cares enough about the guild to even be reading this right now, take a momment and think back to your most memorable accomplishment while you were in the guild. Think about how that made you feel and how it still makes you feel when you reminisce about past events. That feeling is what Sheep was, and what it will always remain for many of us.

While the guild may be largely closing its doors, and while to outsiders reading this it may seem that I am being very dramatic, the effect that this guild has had and will still have on our lives and friendships is undeniable.

To everyone out there that helped me build this guild from an idea in my mind about what a raiding guild should be, into something tangible that we will always be able to look back on fondly, thank you.

Whether the guild raids or not, or where it's members that have come and gone end up, Sheep remains not only the best guild I have ever been a part of but the best group of people that I have ever had the pleasure of sharing my time with.

Good luck to you all past and present Sheep, and thank you for everything.

Sheep for life,

Tiluvar

Massively Misrepresented Online Games

I have been involved in and played almost every main stream and underground MMO since the very first day of EverQuest way back in April 1999.

While many massively multiplayer role-playing games refer to themselves as second, or even third generation titles, I think it is very premature for anyone to claim to have created anything but a first generation title. I look at the development of the first person shooter genre as a model.

When Wolfenstien 3D was released, many geeks and computer enthusiasts found a large amount of pleasure spraying large red pixels of nasi blood all over their screens. Wolfenstien was really not a very good game when you break it down piece by piece but the way in which it was conveyed and the fact that until then there really had never been a game quite like it made it extremely enjoyable, it was something new.

What's a Polygon?

Doom took things to a new level. No longer was this a pass time for computer programmers with nothing to do on Friday nights, it was a technologically advanced game that had plently of mainstream appeal. Doom really brought action gaming on the PC to the masses in a way no other game had managed to before.

Doom's success spawned a plethora of copycat games. Games like Rise of the Triad, Heretic and Hexen were decent games in their own right, but really were just conversions of Doom with new content and storyline. There were many differences, and many innovative features, but when it came down to it the gameplay was almost identical.

This is where I get back to my origional point. No one claimed that Rise of the Triad, Heretic, Hexen etc. were second generation first person shooters as it was obvious that they were not. Most avid fans would agree that the true second generation of FPS games were those few based on 3D Realms' Build engine.

If you compare this to the rather short history of 3D MMORPGs, you can think of EverQuest as Wolfenstien 3D. It was buggy, did not have very many features, and was not much of a technical achievement. Much like Wolfenstien when you break it down it really was not a very good game. EverQuest did have a purpose though and similar to Wolfenstein it demonstrated potential, the potential to make a great game and for better or worse, the potential to make a massive amount of money.

Imagine Wolfenstien Had Lasted 6 Years...

This is where the similarities between the genres get a little blurred. They are still there, but you have to know the whole story in order to be able to see them. Largely due to massive growth in the PC games industry compared to the state of things when Doom was released, a number of designers were able to start up their own massively multiplayer games shortly after the release of EverQuest. The industry learned from Doom and everyone was eager to make a game in EQ's mold that had mass market appeal, just like Doom did after Wolftenstien.

Many designers tried, and most of them failed. While there were some moderately successful games such as Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot and even EverQuest II, none of these titles were able to gain as much support as the original tried and true EverQuest. Online only games were still an emerging concept and overcoming the design issues, content creation demands and potential for exploits and bugs to ruin your game was a colossal undertaking for small to mid size teams. In the end the effort to design the "Doom" of massively multiplayer games would not be successful. For almost six years no MMO surpassed EverQuest's subscribed player base.

The fact that EverQuest remained number one through this many years and after the release of many self proclaimed "second generation" MMOs is quite a feat in today's technology driven market. The code has passed through so many hands at this point that the engine is dated, buggy, and slow. I would hate to have to work with it.

Standing on the Corpses of Giants

The numerous failed MMOs weren't without a purpose though, they quite undeniably proved to developers that massively multiplayer games weigh very heavily on factors other than graphics, frame rate or brand names – content is king.

It was after this series of quick release "EQ Killers" that most developers smartened up and stopped trying to make rehashes of EverQuest with better graphics and a handful of quick fixes to EQ's problems. The development on many titles was either halted or delayed as the design houses rethought their processes in order to capture what EverQuest had, and give the players the content, challenge and forward thinking design that they want from an MMO.

One of these oft delayed projects was Blizzard's World of Warcraft, and while the jury is still out on whether or not we can truly call this the successor to EverQuest there is absolutely no denying that it is the most commercially successful MMO to date. With over 5 million active subscriptions and counting, WoW is a huge success, or is it?

Now, I'm not completely crazy, I am not about to claim that WoW is not a success commercially, but as an avid fan of MMO's do I really consider WoW a success? Am I really comfortable calling it the successor to the almighty EQ? As of this writing I would have to say no, however that is a debate in itself which I will have to save for some other time.

MMOs Get Their Poster Child

To get back once again to the original comparison between FPS games and MMOs, World of Warcraft is for all intents and purposes the "Doom" of the massively multiplayer genre and I am willing to bet my level 60 Paladin that we will see multiple titles released within the next year or two that are nothing more than WoW clones with different graphics and more recognized brand names (Lord of the Rings anyone?) trying to cash in on the current MMO craze.

The MMO market as it stands really isn't that bad. Much like it was for first person shooters, a new game means new content and it will interest a large number of people for a couple months even though it is, on a low level just a copy of the original. When the inevitable WoW clones make their way to market there's no doubt that they will turn a decent profit just like Hexen and Heretic did after Doom.

What Lies Ahead?

The question that remains though is which of the upcoming titles will be considered the "Duke Nukem 3D" of MMOs, a game that players unanimously agree upon as new, and unique. While Vanguard is quickly gaining support in this area, my personal belief is that we can learn a lot from the history of the first person shooter, and that it will not be until a MMO allows players to not only play with the sand in the sandbox, but build the sandbox and fill it with whatever they want as well.

What I mean is that just as Duke 3D encompassed new levels of interactivity in a FPS, the true next generation of MMOs will be in games that allow a new level of interactivity and influence on the world around them. No matter how revolutionary skills or classes are in an MMO, or how clean the UI is and detailed the environment becomes; you are still just killing NPCs or completing connect-the-dots quests and earning items. Exactly how you go about doing that changes and sure one method (and therefore one game) can be better than another, but none of these games will be truly revolutionary until what you are doing changes, not just how you are doing it.

Unfortunately with the extremely high cost and long development cycle of massively multiplayer games, I am afraid that we are doomed to a couple years of low risk cookie cutter endeavors that will only be a brief break from our social and professional lives. It will not be until a company is brave enough to create a MMO around a concept of an evolving world, a world that players can shape with their actions, and change with their decisions that we will feel truly refreshed with the genre again.

It Feels Like the First Time, for a Second Time

There are those that claim that it is only my opinion, and that it is really WoW or DAoC that are the current pinnacle of online play. I admit that there is a certain amount of bias in this towards EverQuest because it was the first game that introduced me to the world of MMOs, and I would expect that anyone would have the same nostalgic connection to the game that provided them their first foray into the massively multiplayer gaming world. In any case, the bottom line remains that no matter how you were introduced to these games they are all effectively copies of EverQuest with a plethora of technological changes, but only a handful of game play changes and I expect that to remain the case for some time.

The Blizzard Effect

Unfortunately the effect that WoW has had on the MMO genre is not nearly as positive as the effect Doom had. Where Doom showed people that PCs were a viable game platform rivaling or surpassing the power of any current console, and acted, rightfully so as the face of PC gaming for quite some time, as a representative of MMO games WoW's effect is nothing but detrimental.

Whether it is due to the cartoon style graphics, Blizzard's sense of humor or simply a direct reflection of the age of Blizzard's main fan base, the players of WoW have a significantly lower average age than any other MMO currently out there. The effects of this are hard to explain to someone who has not spent a lot of time playing MMOs, this is the closest analogy I can think of:

Pretend that you were back in school playing baseball with your friends, now it is just a friendly game but you take it pretty seriously and want to practice, improve your game, learn from your mistakes and make you and your friends into a skilled team.

Now imagine that out of the ten teams you can play against, nine of them just goof around, ignore the ethical rules of play, and sacrifice any semblance of teamwork under the guise of "just having fun".

That is basically the atmosphere in WoW, and needless to say it is very frustrating. Sure it is meant to be a fun game, it doesn't have to be serious all the time but when in every group and on every raid there is someone who is acting like a spoiled child, complaining about things being too hard, or that they are unable to get this or that item easily and quickly, it really takes a lot of fun out of the game for people like me who are more "serious" about it.

Couple that with WoW's gameplay, which consists of extremely addictive leveling, and a self-admittedly boring end game and now we have these "B.Net kids" out in search of a new game to overwhelm and probably ruin after WoW's four month grasp on the player's attention has released.

Projects I mentioned earlier like Sigil's Vanguard: Saga of Heroes which was once a beacon of hope for the "MMOs as a hobby" crowd are now being swarmed by bored WoW players just looking for a new arena in which to sling homophobic remarks at each other. It's not that they are unskilled in their gameplay, it is that there is nothing in WoW that hampers a player's advancement based on their social or cooperative ability, and they have come to expect that from future titles.

My fear is that there will be pressure from publishers on their design houses to cater to the demands of the masses. There is no doubt that making a WoW-like game with easy, shallow game play and minimal required time commitment is the best way to attract the largest number of subscribers, as it translates directly into larger profits. Because of this fact and with each new post I see on the forums of upcoming MMOs arguing for easier and easier advancement, I cannot help but become very skeptical of the ability of these designers to go against majority demands and create a truly ground breaking, interesting and challenging online game.

I truly hope that I am proved incorrect, and that designers like Sigil and Red 5 hold true to their original design goals despite possible pressure from their publishers, and the majority of the public to create another arcade style MMO.

Looking Foreward

Considering the lengthy development and lifetime of your average MMO I am not expecting anyone to come out with a true "next generation" MMO just yet, but I would be extremely disappointed to see the success of WoW mistakenly believed by new developers to prove that Blizzard did things right. WoW is a great game there is no doubt about that, but it is not a great MMO. While the interface and premise behind Duke Nukem 3D was not very original, it was considered a ground breaking FPS due largely to the fact that it approached the genre from a new angle. It allowed the player to really get into the role of Duke and interact with the environment in a way never before seen in a FPS game, with weapons that went beyond the simple point and shoot of previous games, not to mention the ability to look up and down which may seem commonplace today but was a huge change in those days.

The true "EQ killer" will never come from a game with game play based on WoW, but from a game play that is not based on any previous MMO, a game that breaks away from the D&D roots and approaches the genre from a new angle to truly make the MMO a unique genre of its own and one that offers players an interesting, challenging and at the risk of sounding cliché, innovative experience. While I am definitely skeptical, I can't help but be excited about the possibilities.

Ok, it's a pointless reference to a terrible song, but it gets the point across.

Whether you're young or old, you have probably heard or said something similar to one of the following:

"Why don't you go outside, it's a beatutiful day!"

or

"You're going to go blind from staring at that screen."

I'm sure for a lot of you it brings back some memory. What I'm talking about of course is the endless hours today's youth spends playing video games, watching movies, or doing other technology related activities out of direct sunlight and the issue many parents have with it.

Lately I have been seeing an increasing number of articles relating to violence or even suicides as a result of game playing followed by blanket statements about the corruption of our youth en mass by the video game industry.

No matter how many studies prove that youth violence is actually declining, that violence in music, movies and games will not cause violent acts (but can act as a catalyst for some already troubled individuals) parents and politicians have taken a much more agressive stance on the topic recently. Many parents have the impression that their children are wasting away infront of video games, their brains are becomming jello, and they will turn into the typical overweight 30 year old, addicted to Jolt Cola and living in the basement that is often depicted on television if they allow this behaviour to continue. While that can be true in some cases it is more often the fact that parents are completely clueless about the video games their kids are playing that allows them to become harmful.

Most kids aren't playing games because they're bored, or because they're lazy or anti-social, they play games because they really do enjoy them. Parents belief that children choose to play games instead of doing many other things because they are "addicted" is a huge misconception. In order for parents to really connect with a kid who is seemingly "addicted" to their games, they have to become interested in, and understand the games themselves. For example, I can tell you what kind of person someone is based on the type of games they play, I could tell you how someone thinks after watching how they play those games, and the choices they make within each game.

It is extremely frustrating for kids when their parents shun every game the moment it is turned on simply due to the fact that it is just "a game" and not "real life". More often than not there are more challenges, puzzles and goals to reach for in a game than you will find over the course of a day in the park. There are games that are mindless, and spending hours upon hours playing them would be about as useful as spending those hours watching TV however the majority of game players would not be playing them for those exact reasons. It's the challenge, and the ability to set and reach goals that makes a game fun.

There are of course exceptions, people who are actually addicted or allowing their games to consume them, but consider this. If your son was really into sports, and spent every minute of his free time in the park practicing or playing with his friends would you tell him he should be doing something else? or complain that you think he is addicted to playing with his friends? of course not. Why then should parents make their children feel guilty for playing video games?. You may not understand why your children find video games fun, but that does not mean they should automatically treated as something harmful.

The times are changing, and whether people like it or not we are becoming significantly more reliant on technology for day to day life and for entertainment. So next time you see your child spending a sunny day inside with a friend playing a game, instead of complaining or sighing and walking away why don't you have a seat and try to understand exactly what it is about the game that your kid enjoys, before you decide whether or not it is a waste of time. You might even end up enjoying yourself.

From the very first minute you spend in WoW you are put into a world that was created for you. Saying that may sound somewhat foolish I mean, of course the world was created for you, who else would it be for?

But after playing many different MMOs I have come to realise that the sense that you are invading uncharted territory, long forgotten crypts and ancient ruins is what makes these game fun. Enhanced by lore, simply gaining access to one of these areas is something lower level players aspire to. That's not to say that World of Warcraft does not have these areas, however they do not give the impression that they are pre-existing societies that you are attacking, it's as if they're just sitting in their lairs waiting to give you their loot.

Most of the problem has to do with the level of difficulty in WoW. You can level to 60 in a couple months the first time you play, after doing it once you can level to 60 in mere weeks the second time. I am a hardcore raider and I live for the high level game so being able to get to 60 so quickly is nice for me however when it doesn't require any real effort, social ability, or actual skill it really loses something.

When people don't have to put months or even years of their lives into achieving things those achievements become worthless. It's just like anything else in life, the more common it is the less valuable it becomes. Because gaining access to Onyxia's Lair, The Molten Core or even Blackwing Lair (the current hardest area) is so easy, easy enough that anyone with an afternoon and an ability to click "accept" to a group invite can obtain it; World of Warcarft is not a place where players are measured by their accomplishments. It is so easy to accomplish everything that it doesn't matter if you can kill Onyxia flawlessly with 25 or if it takes you 40 people and you have only 5 standing when she dies, all that people are measured by are the items that they have.

At the same time, when a group of adventurers who have gone from killing rabits to being able to kill gods and entities that have nearly dominated the entire world in only a couple of months, it really makes the entire game world seem trivial. Ragnaros, Onyxia and others that have usurped Stormwind and threatained the peace of all of Azeroth, beaten by forty young players who have barely had time to become attached to their characters just makes it all seem so fake.

It's really unfortunate that this is the case because WoW has the best gameplay mechanics I have seen in a MMO and to have the experience ruined for these two reasons is a huge letdown. When players no longer have anything to work towards the game gets boring. The reason EverQuest forged so many lasting friendships for so many players was because you could not accomplish anything for yourself without helping your guildmates or friends accomplish it too. Even if you have the best possible items and a key to every zone, there was not much you could do if you weren't willing to help others get the same.

EverQuest created an atmosphere where the guilds that were most co-operative and had the most selfless members flourished. In WoW the only thing that requires actual time and effort is obtaining faction, which is an entirely solo goal. Imagine playing a first person shooter where instead of playing through level to level until you reach the end and defeat the boss, you just play the same three levels over and over and after beating that level 200 times you will get a new weapon - doesn't sound like much fun does it? that is WoW.

There are many other issues that are causing high end players to leave the game almost as fast as they're joining, but that is what is on my mind. Speaking from experience with EverQuest, if loot is what drives you, you will get bored. In WoW there is nothing BUT loot to drive players, simply because everything else is so easy, everyone has it and it is therefore worthless.

When it comes down to it, it is all about the level of difficulty. It doesn't require the best possible items, months of gathering experience and keys, and making sure you, as a guild, have everything you need to take out a new mob it just requires 40 people who listen to instructions, and even the unskilled guilds can do that. Why would anyone play 10+ hours a day to get all the best items and potions, if you can do things without them? Why would anyone put in the time and effort required to raid every night and get items for people when those items are not even needed to "beat the game".

Blizzard tried to remove the gap between the casual and hardcore players, so that there wouldn't be so much content casual players could not access as in EverQuest, and they succeeded. What they neglected to realise is that it is the hardcore players that give the casual players something to aspire to, something to look forward to being, and when any casual player can get into the same areas, get better items purely by luck, and take out the same monsters sometimes without even fully understanding how they did it, the hardcore players are no longer hardcore, they're just a week ahead of everyone else, and that is not really worth the effort.