Its a Group Thing

Been spending a bit more time in post-cataclysm Norrath of late.  Sony Online Entertainments “Legends of Norrath” promotion got Mrs. P and me sucked back in in large part due to Gaff’s urging.  So far, I can’t say I have any regrets.

As I mentioned before, I had bailed out before when EQ2 was the 3d game for me.  3d game means that’s the one I don’t play.

I like to explore and I like to play with a few select friends.  And, from time to time, I enjoy crafting.  All of these takes a fair amount of time.  Exploration is its own reward.

Group play is its own challenge– time wise its no where near as “efficient” as well-studied solo play or  some kind of Machiavellian minmax group play but its infinitely more rewarding.  Of course with current game design, sharing content and experiences with others requires an almost herculean effort.

In games like EQ2 and City of Heroes/Villains, there are mechanism that allow players of different levels to play together, but lets face it, the higher level player is mostly playing with the lowbie as a charitable act.  Chances are they have already experienced the shared content.

Mrs. P and I have been exploring the evil side of Norrath and generally having a good time.  Gaff has about 87 characters on no less than 34 accounts of all races, genders, classes and levels, and is quite adept at multiboxing so I think he’s hoping we stick with things long enough to plug into one of his multi box groups.  We’re actually looking forward to replicating on a much smaller scale some of our WoW group experiences.

As no doubt Wilhelm will report this week, we had a challenging weekend foray with our WoW group.  As Mrs. P and I retired in the wee hours Saturday/Sunday, I prattled on in my usual Monday morning quarterback fashion about the night’s efforts.

While we were not altogether successful in our primary goals, I was reminded of the extremely rarefied space our little band of adventurers occupies.  Three of us have been playing as a regular group since WoW’s release in December 2004.  Four of us have been playing together since about April or May 2005.   The latest incarnation of our group has been playing together since September 2006.

In a few short months our current group will have been at it nearly two extremely casual years.  In WoW terms, we are finally nearing the current level cap (70).  Until last week when we lifted the self-imposed soft level cap, we had managed to stay within about 1/3 of a level of each other after nearly two years of play with wildly divergent play budgets.  Not too bad I’d say.

As Mrs. P and I were doing the post-instance night post-mortem, it occurred yet again to me what an amazing accomplishment we’ve achieved irrespective of the night’s outcome.  One of us had a baby, four of us moved, one about 800 miles in the same time zone, one about 3000 miles two time zones away, one of us a few dozen miles and one of us twice in that period of time.  One of us lived out of a suitcase for more than a year and still managed to make our Saturday night runs and when they moved to their new permanent abode not miss the Saturday night event after the move.

No thanks to any game mechanic, through heroic efforts of self restraint and self auto regulation, we have shared collectively extraordinary experiences.  Indeed the chronicles of the group that Wilhelm has recorded has created that singular heroic fantastical narrative of shared experience that MMOs should strive to provide for their subscribers.

When I look back on it, we have a single shared narrative which should be the essence of the MMO experience IMHO.  If you read Wil’s amusing and insightful reportage of our collective adventures, you are in fact largely seeing all the data points of the collective narrative.  Except for perhaps crafting, there is no other narrative.  What you see is pretty much our five individual and collective stories in the game universe.

As we’re getting a bit more immersed into the EQ2 scene and frankly a bit bored with everything else currently out there, I’m struck by fundamentally different character of the experience we’ve been having in WoW and Tipa and the Nostalgia the Guild folks have been having back in EQ.  I’m hoping we might replicate at least a shred of the same thing in EQ2.

Maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety but I’m not seeing any of the current crop of games make this kind of gameplay easier.  The “all solo” MMO is a function of the reality that we all have different play budgets and asynchronous progression is the new norm.  I can’t help but think that we’ve lost something by turning the dial completely to solo and not to provide mechanisms whereby different folks with different play budgets can still play together and create the shared experiences that are the most rarified that MMOs have to offer.

I’m not sure there’s a eureka moment buried here as its late, but I gotta think the devs might have a few better ideas than mine to facilitate this kind of gameplay.  Capping XP generation would be a start, but many more aspects would also need to be managed in order to accommodate different play styles and still support the unique squad-based objective.  Thats different from a guild, that’s different from “i have friends who also play the game”.

Then again, maybe I’m over thinking it.  Maybe all it takes is a group of people committed to coloring within the lines and being selfless enough to recognize that a greater good comes out of self restraint and “staying with the group” as they adventure through a virtual world.  I sure wish a few devs would bend their brains to make it a bit easier for us though…

Weekend Update

Well, it settled down a bit this weekend work wise, so I did get a chance to engage in real life for a change.  The WoW instance group convened and undertook Mana Tombs (See the Ancient Gaming Noob for details on how that went on Thursday).  In RL, I actually got caught up on a number of RL personal projects which mostly include getting our vegetable garden boxes built and planted.   So far we have 2 4′ x 4′ boxes and one gigantic 12′ by 4′ box.

At the risk of going all political, Mrs. P and I intend to reduce our consumption of both food and petroleum products by growing our own.  Fortunately, I had the help of our Warlock, Bungholio, to assist in wheel barrowing 2+ yards of soil for gardening into our newly constructed raised beds.

In the virtual world, I found myself searching searching searching for the Next Thing(tm).   My spider sense is telling me that WoW, despite our commitment since release, is starting to get a bit long in the tooth.  TBC is feeling more an more gamey rather than worldly.  I’m sure many of you probably have figure this out a long time ago.

After a few different iterations, our instance group is on the verge of capping out and will likely exhaust the content of TBC and Sunwell before the next expansion.  Quite frankly, it really hasn’t felt like a “world” since Azeroth.

Maybe Wrath off the Lich King will  bring back the mojo, but I’m pessimistic.  So the task begins, what is the next thing to offer before our group of intrepid (and somewhat time limited) adventurers?

Age of Conan?  I don’t think so.  I actually logged in this weekend to my surprise to find that the beta servers were still live.  I actually patched and continued one of my toons destiny quest with a view to finally getting out of Tortage.  I can’t say my impressions have changed since my beta impressions, but I think I’ll give it a go at least until I’m in the real world to see what I can see.  Unless they pull the plug on beta.

Lotro?  Mines of Moria is due out SOMETIME, maybe by the end of the year.  I can’t imagine that our full group will want to transition to LotRO.   When our WoW group was on hiatus, our LotRO foursome made some progress, but ultimately decided on returning to WoW.  I’m still playing but I don’t think its a good fit for our group.

Warhammer?  Might be a possibility if the game could live up to even half the official hype and one quarter of the unofficial hype.  I suspect Warhammer will be confronted with the difficult decision of releasing either in the third quarter (pre-WotLK) or basically year-end on top of Lich King.  If Conan is any lesson, EA will choose to push out Warhammer anytime when WoW doesn’t have an expansion ready for release.  I have no idea whether Warhammer will be a replacement for our WoW group.

So I find myself in search of the new or at least different.  Vanguard?  Conan? Guild Wars?  Tabula Rasa? What about old Everquest? (thanks Tipa).  I feel like I’m seriously on the lookout for the Next Thing(tm) at least as far as our group in concerned…

Looks to be a loooong summer.

Being a Place Matters

A number of bloggers, including myself, have ragged on Age of Conan for the extensive use of zoning and instancing. Too much use of these design elements leaves you with the feeling of the “world” being merely a series of rooms connected by jumps rather than the impression of a contiguous world. In a word, it doesn’t feel like a “place.”

I got waylaid this (U.S. 3-day holiday) weekend by a last minute work project and got almost no decent gaming in, but I made time to soak up some of the Mars Phoenix mission events. Being a total space dork, how could I not? One of my earliest memories was watching Neil Armstrong step on to the surface of the Moon.

The images returned of the Moon returned by the Apollo program transformed the Moon in people’s consciousness from being effectively a 2d small floating disk to a bona fide three dimensional world of its own. As Carl Sagan would say, the Moon became a “place.” A place where we could imagine that we could go and explore and see ourselves walking over a distant horizon.

A similar transformation occurred in 1976 when the Viking missions successfully landed on Mars and began returning pictures like these:

I’d been to places like that. I could see myself in that landscape and wanted more than anything to sprint off toward the horizon to see what was over that next ridge or hill. For me Mars became a “place”. Even though the Viking landers were totally stationary, they managed to convey the impression of a complete new world. Not bad with just a few static images.

Seeing the latest today from the Mars HIRISE observer, those feelings are rekindled. This is my new favorite picture (the first of a spacecraft in the process of landing on another world). Click for the full width shot. Its really breathtaking.

With images like this, Mars is more than a place. More importantly, space travel and planetary exploration is made more real in our minds. We’ve seen the NASA animations about how these landings are supposed to look, but we’ve never seen them happening until now. I can almost see the lander drifting across the Martian landscape in its last few minutes of descent not unlike so many other similar images or scenes we’ve actually witnessed back here on Earth. Its like we were there.

No human has yet visited Mars, so these images in effect create merely a virtual Mars in our collective minds (like the virtual Moon). With each new mission and new set of images brought back, the impression is created that Mars as a world has become larger and more unbounded. Its an illusion, but a compelling one.

To create a compelling game world, for me at least, the designers have to similarly stitch together their resources to create that illusion. Simply having zoning doesn’t mean that’s broken. In EQ, zoning, while a necessary evil, didn’t seem to break the illusion of a continuous world. A few seams, maybe, but if you’ve ever stitched a few side by side vacation snapshots together to create a panorama, you know that the resultant composite image says so much more than the individual ones that the borders between pictures don’t really matter. They match up, there’s a small hiccup going from one to another, but leaving from the left of one, you enter from the right of the next.

Even with zoning, EQ was able to create that sense of place which persists into EQ2. Likewise, environments like WoW and LotRO’s seamless outdoor worlds are indeed places in my mind. I never got that impression from games like PotBS and certainly didn’t from AoC. I felt boxed in like there was no horizon over which to travel. Neither in my mind’s eye, nor in the game did I ever get that same feeling I get just by looking at those few pictures from Mars.

Miner Rant

So there I was running around this weekend in LotRO and a little bit in WoW. Each of my characters in each game had their craft node radar on so they could see the nodes pop and run to mine them when convenient. Typical MMO fare at this point.

Wait a minute. Ore which can be refined into metal just randomly pops out of the earth (and then dissapears)? I mean, this isn’t Bog Iron or meteorites. You don’t just find them laying around FFS.

I appreciate the effort and the “concession” to game play, but lets face it. Someone phoned it in on the mining. Consider leather or hides. Better hides come from more extraordinary beasts that you encounter in your travels through the virtual world. Kill it. Skin it. ‘Nuff said.

Herbalism. The paradigm works for that. Specific plants found in different climes randomly occurring sure, I’ll buy that.

So why is it so hard to adapt mining or wood collection (”Forestry” in LotRO-speak) to something other than the random node model? If I’m a forester and I’ve got an axe, damn sure I’m headed to the woods, not running across the barren expanses of the North Downs or Lone Lands looking for branches that SOMEONE must have dropped (because I don’t see no damned trees). Nor do I see some geologic uplift that accompanies that Rich Iron node that popped in the middle of the farmer’s field…

Now I’m all for balance in gameplay, but part of fantasy (and sci fi too for that matter) is some relationship to the reality we are familiar with. A sword is a sword, a bear is a bear. It reinforces the immersion.

So why not start out as a novice minor and go work The Man(tm)’s mines to get crafting experience? Doesn’t Ironforge or Thorin’s Halls have some full fledged industrial mining operation going on nearby?   The area around Goldshire is chock full of mines (you no take candle, though).  Likewise how many times do you run through Silverdeep Mine outside Thorin’s Halls.   Why not adopt a sharecropper model for working these mines (i.e., the player would keep a percentage of what they produced with the rest going to the owner of the mine)?  Why not learn into the true prospecting skill where you learn to detect likely mineral concentrations and ultimately how to build your own hardrock mine–in a place that made sense.

Sure, it wouldn’t be instant, but if you had to build a mine and mine it for a while (as long as you could haul all the ore) it would sure make mining feel a lot more like mining rather than say, herbalism.  Or maybe the better paradigm is fishing in most MMOs or perhaps farming in LotRO, or asteroid mining in Eve– go to a specific location, perform a series of skill based acts and you are rewarded with a harvest of useable ore which you can then refine.

Panning for rare metals in streams, hardrock mining, gem finding and yes, even perhaps locating Bog Iron.

Likewise, why not grow into the fine art off silviculture.  Need lumber? go find a forest of the type you’re looking for, set up a lumber camp and mill.  Certainly not inexhaustible supplies, but all kinds of rate limiting devices can be used– tool repair, hired labor that must be paid, etc.

Quite frankly, I’m amazed that LotRO (home of the farming profession) didn’t implement something like this. Somebody do this… Please.

LotRO Weekend Fun

Had of a lot of RL projects going on of late, so with Age of Conan Beta rolling the last week or so, my LotRO progress took a back seat. Seems I have about room for two MMOs in my life at any given time, and that’s still not devoting a lot of time to either.

So having decided to pass on Conan, that left me free to return to LotRO when not occupied with our static WoW group. The contrast in returning to LotRO after Conan was a bit jarring. There are the obvious things like the setting, but the pace in LotRO is different. I noticed some of the not-quite-seamless animations again which I had gotten used to and a few other things that Conan did well. I also reconfirmed that LotRO’s big seamless open world feels vastly superior to Conan’s world in an instance box. Bartle explorer FTW.

The avowed goal was to get Wilifred my hobbit mistrel to level 25 so he could take advantage of the Founder’s horse, or in his case, pony which makes travel much less painful. Still slower than a real mount, but much better than walking.

Wilifred had completed most of the Lone Lands quests and shifted to the North Downs. Running through the Trestlebridge and Amon Raith solo quests with a visit to Othrikar pretty much got him there.

There were a few incidents Friday night where for SOME reason he seemed to be doing quite poorly against at-level or even slightly lower level mobs. Turns out that at some point while screwing around with the appearance tab, I managed to de-equip his shield. Now, granted, as a minstrel (with the appropriate trait slotted) he can wear only medium armor and normal-not-heavy shield, but that shield makes a pretty big difference when you’re soloing.

I took the opportunity to have my Captain tailor do up some sturdy leather gear to help with mitigation and when coupled with the restored shield, problem solved. He still can’t take on too many at level mobs, but generally an at-level two mob pull with fear kiting will get him through.

I need to work on “stance dancing” with the minstrel while soloing. Most of the time he’s in “War Speech” mode which is basically an enhanced damage/reduced healing state. Good for DPS, but a 50% penalty on healing. The time to remember that is NOT when you have two mobs resisting fear and less than 25% health.

All in all a reasonably productive weekend. Wilifred got almost 2 full levels in about 3 hours of play and with the rested XP bonus end in sight, I decided to switch to my dwarf Guardian who was sitting at level 29 in the North Downs as well.

After a long day in the sun (early heatwave), I only managed to put about 1 1/2 hours in on him, but managed to get about 75% of a level. I was hoping to get him to 30 to see what the Guardian class quest was like.

A short while back, my Captain passed 30 and the class quest was fairly trivial (unless precision jumping is not your forte). I’m curious what they might throw at the guardian.

Group quests are starting to pile up again on my various alts– all but one of which are sitting between 25-31. Going to have to start pestering Gaff and Wilhelm to start rolling through the backlog of epic quests pretty soon.

Otherwise, a very enjoyable Conan–free weekend, though I hear the early access launch went fairly well. Go them. Still sitting on the sidelines, but might be convinced to try it again in a few months after the next Warhammer delay is announced….;)