DAW: Cryptic Studios

“MMO forums: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”

Okay, so that’s not quite how Obi Wan cautioned Luke, but it’s no less accurate. Of course that makes this thread all the more impressive. It is a 46 post, 5 page, (as of this writing) thread started by a community member asking the devs to post a surprising fact about themselves. Quite a few of the Cryptic staff have posted and nearly all the player posts are on topic and respectful. There’s one person asking about a problem but the they were very apologetic about derailing the thread, most surprisingly no one followed up to troll them for it.

So my thanks and today’s DAD go to the Cryptic Studios staff (community and dev), for their follow through on their promises of better communication with the community. It’s made the last two months of Champions Online much more enjoyable.

If you haven’t already, go checkout Scarybooster’s Developer Appreciation Week posts, and if you’re doing any yourself please send me and Scary a link.

DAW: Allan “Orion” Maki

For Developer Appreciation Week, I’d like to thank Allan “Orion” Maki, Senior Game Designer from Turbine.

I’ve enjoyed Lord of the Rings Online since it was released in 2007 and have always been impressed by the level of detail from the books that Turbine was able to include in the world. Yet, the game had some rough edges in the earlier zones that don’t exist in the later content (looking at you Lonelands).

This brings me to why I’m singling Allan out specifically, he’s done a lot of work to redesign and polish up the early game experience in Middle-earth. Most recently was a revamp of the Lonelands, which are much much improved, and making the Volume 1 epic quest line solo-able. Even better though, was the way he went about the epic quest change. Orion didn’t just nerf the quest line so that it is solo only. He implemented a character buff called Inspired Greatness that scales based on the size of the fellowship. It’s always a good thing to more options for completing quests, and this buff allows players to solo if they want or duo or still go with a full fellowship.

Head over to Orion’s My Lotro page and leave him a thank you if you’ve enjoyed any of the updated zones of the Volume 1 quest change.

If you haven’t already, go checkout Scarybooster’s DAW posts he’s doing a full week of them.

Great Idea: Dev Appreciation Week

Scarybooster had an excellent post yesterday where he thanked game developers for all their hard work and made an effort to look on the positive side of MMOs. Today, he had an even better idea and declared next week is Developer Appreciation Week. To join in, just pick a day and post something that a developer has done that you enjoyed.

CoH Revisited

City of Heroes recently offered a free weekend to former subscribers. Even though I don’t play any longer, I always like to take the opportunity to revisit my characters.

I loved this game when it first came out. I played from beta on for about three years before I cancelled. I didn’t quit because I hated the game or anything, I was just ready to move on to other things. I had always planned to return but somehow I never did. I just didn’t have an urge to revisit the superhero genre until Champions Online came out.

This was actually my second (free) retry of CoH since CO launched. The first time I really just revisited my characters and checked out the Mission Architect, but I didn’t really play. This second try, I spent a couple of hours playing my level 28 energy blaster, Silver Hunter, and my level 20 tank, Blue Ram.

I had a lot of fun, but I don’t plan to resubscribe because of the differences in the two combat systems. I prefer the combat mechanics and pacing in Champions over City of Heroes. The combat is faster paced, better incorporates positioning and movement, and is overall more action-oriented. City of Heroes is just less engaging for me. Blocking in Champions is a very simple mechanic, but it has really changed my mindset. Several times when fighting with gangs in Paragon City and I kept trying to block attacks.

The other thing that keeps me from resubscribing is the archetype system. This is something I’ve never been happy with. Back when CoH was originally being designed the skill system was going to be open. At some point that was changed because it was too easy for players to design an unplayable character. So they created the archetype system and locked different powersets into them. Unfortunately this limits on what kinds of heroes you can create. I enjoyed my tank character, but I always wanted him to be a bit more of a brute than he was. The Going Rogue expansion will make it possible to make a villain and then redeem them to become a hero, so I could get around that, but frankly that sounds like too much effort.

In Champions the powers are all open to you, there’s more freedom to build themed heroes. Of course you can still create an underpowered hero, but I’m willing to accept that risk. With the ability to undo recent powers or just completely retcon using either in-game resources or real money, I much prefer having more options and less structure.

As much as I loved being in Paragon City again, I’m not planning to move back.

Postscript: By the way, if you haven’t seen it yet, go over to Dusty’s blog and check out the excellent Dual Pistols video he made.

BSG the MMO

So Battlestar Galatica is coming to the MMO genre. I’m not surprised by that. The remake has been very popular and profitable for the SF network (that’s as close as I can bring myself to use their new name), so it makes sense that they’ll look for more ways to capitalize. I wasn’t a big fan of the show, so I’m not excited about the announcement. Besides that, though I wonder how successful they’ll be able make a game that appeals to fans of the show.

For people who loved the show, this is a pretty iconic image.

The characters, the relationships, and the drama were what made the show popular. These are not the kinds of things that MMOs have done well so far.

This is an image from the console game that was released a little while back.

I’m not referencing the game specifically, just pointing out that combat is primarily what MMOs focus on, and that is not what most fans of the show will be interested in.

Hopefully, I’m being overly critical and it’ll turn out well for the developer. Ironically, if it turns out to be a semi-realistic physics based space combat simulator, I’ll be more interested than if it is closer to what made BSG popular.

DRMed

Dear, Ubisoft, I heard your DRM servers are causing people a few issues.

Apparently people haven’t been able to play for most/all of Sunday. Of course the thread is only 7 pages long with a few hundred posts, so either not a lot of people are having problems or not a lot of people bought the PC version of your game.

I think this marks my last Ubisoft DRM post. At this point all of the bad things I assumed would happen have and I’m getting tired of feeling negative. I may change my mind if they do something monumentally stupid, but I’m not sure how they could top themselves.

Nvidia 196.75 Drivers Recalled

The More You KnowPicked up on this via Stropp (who got it from Engadget). If you are using the latest Nvidia drivers, 196.75, you’ll want to roll them back. Apparently there’s a problem related to the fan controllers which can cause the card to overheat and possibly kill your GPU.

I looked at Nvidia’s support site, and you can’t even download the 75’s now. The current driver release for the 200 series cards for Windows 7 64-bit is 196.21, which is what I’ve been using since the end of January with no problems.

Revisiting the Dúnedain

Volume 3 launched a few days ago. There’s lots of good info (and podcasts) at Casual Stroll to Mordor and LotRO Reporter as usual if you want details on the patch.

What I wanted to mention is how much more I enjoyed the new content than I expected to. When I first read how Volume 3: Book 1 was starting out, I was disappointed. It felt like a rehash of old content. Going back to old areas and talking to rangers that I had met before. In practice it was actually a good deal of fun. The quests were pretty quick for the most part. There were some interesting story tidbits which I won’t go into for spoiler reasons. Best of all several of the missions took place in pretty cool instances, one of the neatest was the ice cave in Forochel.

Book 1 was pretty quick, around three or four hours at most, and is entirely solo. There is one skirmish where you can group up but all of the instances are solo instances, and the rest is easy open world stuff.

I’m looking forward to continuing the story, although I could stand to wait a few months for the next book, I still haven’t finished Books 8 and 9 from Volume 2.

No Surprise, Ubisoft DRM Cracked Already

In what was surely only to Ubisoft, their shiny new DRM scheme has been cracked within 24 hours of the release of Silent Hunter V. There’s more details and links at Info Addict, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Destructoid if you’re interested. Ubisoft claims that it really isn’t cracked, but what else are they going to say.

I would say I predicted this, but really who couldn’t have. Regardless of the crack, I’m still not planning to buy any of their games PC or 360. Too bad, I hear Assassin’s Creed 2 is pretty good, but then again I have a literal pile of 360 and PC games I haven’t finished yet.