Crimson's 2009 top games

Favourite game for 2009:
DEMIGOD

I didn't jump on this game when it was initially released, because it had an incredibly shaky start. To be truthful, it didn't sound the kind of game I would want to play. The screen shots looked a bit boring and I didn't want another RTS on the pile...

Around about July, Melf started telling me on vent that he had downloaded the Demigod demo. He said the game play wasn't what he thought and that the game had some good PvP elements to it. Well, the sweet talk payed off. I downloaded the demo and gave it a go. So glad I did! Demigod is an awesome little PvP game. Each game is incredibly tactical and requires a lot of teamwork and skill to win. It's exactly what PvP junkies need to survive ;) The game cost me around $40 US to buy, but it's been on special so many times that you should be able to pick it up for under $20 US now. Stardock and Gas Powered Games still seem to be releasing new content for it, so it's definitely worth buying in my opinion.

Next up:
TEAM FORTRESS 2

With all the updates Valve have been releasing, how can you not play this game? What I love about TF2 is that you can jump into a game and get a high speed action PvP fix within seconds. You can also leave without making too much of an impact on your team mates, which makes this the perfect casual PvP game.

CITY OF HEORES/VILLAINS

Oddly I didn't really play a lot of MMOs this year, however I did play City of Heroes/Villains for 4 months. I really enjoyed this game initially because, well it feels good to be a super hero. My girlfriend even played it for a couple of months, which says a lot (she doesn't play games usually). I stopped playing for two reasons; The PvP was crap and the Mission Architect patch took the fun out of the game.

Other games of note that I felt I got my money's well worth:

• Left 4 Dead
• Plants vs Zombies
• Defense Grid: The Awakening

I'm reluctant to put Dragon Age on this list because I still haven't completed it yet and have no motivation to do so. In my opinion Baldurs Gate 2 is better.

What game sucked the most? AION

I was severely let down by Aion. At some point when building an MMO, you need to stop and ask yourself, is this game fun? If the answer is no, then please take it back to the drawing board until it is. In short, Aion was not fun to play.

So in summary 2009 sucked for MMOs, but it wasn't all bad. Demigod was a surprise and TF2 held strong. Fingers crossed that Guild Wars 2 will release this year. I feel like I've been waiting for that game forever.

Micro events idea

One thing that really bothers me in City of Heroes is the static groups of enemies that stand at certain locations around map. When I first started playing CoX, I was running along in the streets of Paragon City with my level 1 hero and I saw a lady's handbag being stolen by some thugs. I instantly jumped in, defeated the thugs and saved the handbag. The lady thanked me and I went on my way feeling as though I had done a good deed. A short time later, I was running past the same location and I saw exactly the same crime happening again???

This is where the realism dramatically dropped out for me...

I decided to just watch and see what would happen to the lady and her handbag if I stood by and did nothing. Well, the handbag snatching animation continued over and over and over and over...

After that point, I decided not to bother helping the citizens of Paragon City, since it obviously didn't matter.

Now for my idea about micro events. Let just say there are 200 micro events per map. One of them could be the lady and her handbag. The server knows that you haven't completed this event before, and so it auto spawns it slightly ahead of your path. You are running along, and you hear a scream:

"Help me! He stole my handbag!!"

You choose to stop and help by apprehending the criminal and returning the handbag. The lady thanks you, and you get a small reward (an event token or something). The event is classified as complete and you never see it again. If you choose not to help, the criminal gets away and the lady weeps. You receive no reward, but you don't get penalised for not helping. The server remembers that you haven't completed the micro event and thus puts it back into the pool of random events that could occur in your path.

With micro events, the player would essentially be given a new experience in the persistent world each time and in different locations to everyone else. The event would be relative to your level. This would make the gaming world seem as though it belongs to you, but at the same time everyone else. If you are in a group when a micro event triggers, the event difficulty would scale. In the case of our handbag snatcher, he could have a bunch of pals around the corner waiting. The event would be completed for all players that participated.

Although I'm sure such a system would be rather complex to implement in an MMO, I think it would add that extra touch of realism, making the persistent world ever so slightly better. It would also make questing feel more sporadic and less static.

Mission Architect woes

I'd been really looking forward to the release of the City of Heroes/Villains mission architect update, but since it's release I've started to get a bit worried. Two days ago I joined a mission team with my hero defender and the leader took us through a mission he had designed specifically for one purpose, farming XP. It didn't take me long to figure what was going on, as the mission had no plot or story line and the enemy groups were designed to be practically useless. It took less than 15 minutes to complete the mission with a team of 8 and in that time I gained three levels with my level 27 character (granted I was on double XP). Now if I had of been doing non MA missions, it would have taken 2-4 hours to get those three levels.

I'm not a big fan of grinding, so I often look for the easy path, but only so far as it doesn't ruin the gaming experience for myself or others. This definitely seems like an exploit to me.

For a long time now I've been asking for tools to allow MMO gamers to build their own content, but the reality doesn't seem to be quiet what I had in mind. Mission Architect has a few fundamental flaws. Players can easily build 'XP farm' type missions. If their mission gets taken down (reported for content), they can build another one in minutes. Also now that there is an easy way to get missions, why would players actually leave the mission architect complex? What happens to the rest of the game content and story arc? Surely the game designers/devs saw this coming...

History has taught us that MMO players will always abuse any power they are given. It seems odd that NCSoft would overlook such an obvious exploit. Either way, update 14 was meant to enhance the CoX gaming experience, but I fear it may be doing the opposite.

Meet my Hero and Villain

Hudson recently did a post on his Heroes in City of Heroes and I thought I might follow suit. Over the last five weeks I've been working on two main characters in City of Heroes. One hero and one villain. Here are their details:

THE VILLAIN

Meet Lady Xaphan:


I named her after Xaphan the fallen angel, who was cast out of heaven for trying to set it on fire. The name works well since she is a magical Brute with Fire/Fire powers. What I love about this character is the awesome wings that flap automatically when you fly around. Her first costume is that of a succubus, and her second is meant to be a Gothic looking vampire:


I've set up key binds to make her look like she is in agony when changing costumes. The role players seem to love it ;)

THE HERO

Meet The Avatar of Virtue:


There was no way I was going to go through an MMORPG without making a character with a sword and shield. That's when 'Avatar of Virtue' was created. She is a technology Scrapper with Sword/Shield powers. I gave her the Teleportation power set to get around, and I have to admit that it is very cool. I'd like to say that teleporting is better than flight, but it's major draw back is that it uses up enormous amounts of endurance, which makes traveling long distances tricky. It's definitely good for getting out of sticky situations though.

Out of both character, I'd have to say I enjoy being the villain more. There is just something about being evil that really appeals to me... muh ha ha ha...

I'm still enjoying City of Heroes, but I'm really starting to feel the grind. My highest level character is Lady Xaphan and she is only level 26. I'm not sure I want to do the crazy amount of grinding required to get her to level 50. I may end up hanging around only long enough to see how the Mission Architect expansion pans out. I'm not a big fan of grinding.

My first CoX PvP experience

I've being playing City of Heroes/Villains for a little under a month now and have been loving every minute of it. I'm a huge PvP fan (no secrets there), and so I was eager to get to the PvP areas of the game. You cannot truly judge a game, until you've experienced it's PvP content in full ;)

Last night I discovered Bloody Bay, which is apparently the lowest level PvP zone in the game. Everyone who enters the area is scaled up/down to level 25, which keeps the battles fair. For those who haven't played CoX before, the PvP zone maps are huge. I'm talking 5+ minutes of in game travel to get from one side of the map to the other. It's not like your standard arena battles either. It can take considerable time to find an opponent and they usually travel in pacts, which makes it difficult to have a good old 1v1. Also the map is full of NPCs, that will attack you if aggro'd. This makes choosing your battle ground crucial.

I have many alts in CoX, but my highest is a level 25 Villain Brute with Fire/Fire (melee tank/dps class). I'd decked the char out with a bunch of level 25 single origin enhancements, which are supposedly the best cost to benift choice, and so I was pretty confident that my first PvP encounter would go smoothly...

Man was I wrong...

To put it bluntly I had my ass handed to me on a plate with a side order of chips and salad. No joke, the guy came out of no where and owned me in four seconds flat. After re-spawning, I brushed off the noob embarrassment and headed back into the battle zone. After about fifteen minutes of flying around I finally found someone else to fight. He/she was fighting some NPCs, and so I thought I'd take advantage of the situation and execute a perfect gank. I know that ganking is frowned upon in all MMOs, but sometimes you need to get a little dirty in order to extinguish the noob flames... :P

I jumped in and successively unleashed four of my most powerful attacks on the poor unsuspecting player. Their health dropped by about 10 percent. The player continued to finish off the NPCs and then turned and killed me in five or six moves. WTF?? At this point I realized that I must seriously be missing something. Is there like some aura of leetness that I was supposed to buy before going into the PvP zone?

Attempt number three: I decided to play it smart this time and wait for another villain to spawn and then follow them and let them choose the battle. The villain went about 30 seconds away from the base and landed on a rooftop full of heroes and villains. Ahhhh... I'd finally found the place where the battles were taking place... or were they? For some reason everyone was standing around watching two guys duke it out in the center. I figured it was some kind of organized battle, so I just stood back and tried not to look like a noob. I watched the extremely boring battle for about 4 minutes with still no victor and so decided to mix things up a bit. I jumped in and started attacking the hero as well. Holy crap, that definitely livened up the party. Another hero jumped on me, and then another villain jumped on him. The next thing both sides were in a full scale battle. As it should be... Unfortunately I was killed about eight seconds into it, which I think is my highest survival record to date. After I re-spawned, I decided not to go back into the fray. I was a little tired I getting slaughtered, so I logged off.

I think the next time I do some CoX PvP, I might take someone with me who knows what they are doing. The PvP zones are extremely noob unfriendly. I'm also going to have to hit the forums and find out what the hell I was missing to prevent insta-death.

All in all I was a little disappointed by my first CoX PvP experience, but it hasn't completely deterred me. I'll be giving it another shot, once I figure out the recipe for leetness ;)

Avatar sex selection...

I fall into the rather large category of male gamers that prefer to play an MMO with a female avatar. I do it mainly because I'd much rather spend my 500+ hours of MMO play time watching some hot chick beat up bad guys than an over-pumped dude with a penchant for lycra.

So anyway, when it came time to creating a leveling pact duo in City of Heroes with my girlfriend, I had to ask myself the question:

Is it weird to play as a female avatar when you are playing with your girlfriend?

Since we would be spending a lot of time in the game together, I imagined that it would be a little odd having her introduce me to another player as her boyfriend if I looked like a woman... or is it these days? (lol)

I decided to ask her how she felt about me playing as a female avatar. Her reply was:

"I think that would be a little weird, don't you?".

My initial response was:

"Pfft... no.. it would be hot!..",

but I ended up agreeing with her. It was definitely an interesting experience creating a male avatar... kind of a first for me. I wasn't sure if I should be making him look attractive or deadly or scruffy (apparently girls like scruffy) or something else entirely. The CoX character creator definitely didn't help much. There are about a billion different options to choose from. I tried a few combinations, but I just couldn't get comfortable with what I was seeing. In the end I just went with a cross between what I looked like, Han Solo and Superman. It seemed to work... although I don't think it did me justice ;)

In other news, Saylah has written an interesting article about how in gaming, gender sometimes matters. Maybe I should have created a female avatar...

The leveling pact!

One of the things I like about swapping MMOs is discovering new little innovative ideas that make the game better. City of Heroes has a cool little built in feature called a 'leveling pact'. It's easy to set up, you just right click on the person you want to create a pact with and activate it. From there on in, all experience gained on either character is shared between the two, even if the other person is logged off. If the pact was enabled when both characters are first created (i.e. level 1), they will remain the same level all the way to end game, unless the pact is removed or significant death penalty is incurred.

Now, why would I be so excited about sharing my hard earned XP with someone else?

My girlfriend and I have two different types of play styles. In simple terms... I'm a little bit more hardcore than she is (just a tad). This means that I'm most likely going to hit level 20 around the same time she hit's level 14. Unfortunately this creates a bit of a level gap, which kinda ruins the fun of playing together. My only choices up to now were to either play slowly (which is fine, but destroys a bit of the fun for me), or to have an alt which I only use when playing with her.

But not any more!!!

Thank you Mr Leveling Pact!

What an awesome example of a simple game design idea, that solves the leveling gap problem when playing with friends or family. It also means that a utility class has a way of gaining equal XP to a DPS class. This makes it's easier to concentrate on healing people, and not having worry about making kills just to get XP.

It would be nice to see some other leveling based MMOs incorporate this feature. I think it absolutely rocks! ;)

When is an MMO old enough to reduce it's sub fee?

A lot of the single player games that were made back in 2004 have long since passed through the bargain bin and are now occupying space in the landfill, so why the hell should I be paying the release sub fee cost for an MMO that is 4-5 years old? Are MMOs exempt from price reduction over time? Surely there must be a point where the MMO becomes obsoleted by the new kid on the block and thus must lower it's sub fee to compete...

I recently downloaded the trial of City of Heroes and was keen to sign up, but their sub fee is still $15 US a month? The same price it was when it launched.

I'm not a fan of the subscription based payment model, but am willing to pay if the game is worth it. I like CoH, it's a good game... you just need you brush the necrosis off it's graphics and physics engine. With new trailers of Champions Online coming out every week, CoH is looking pretty old...

This raises the question, is an MMO like a fine wine? Does it get better with age?

I guess the older they are the more content they have and the less bugs, but does that compete price wise with shiny new graphics and a potentially better game play experience?

My girlfriend who is very new to MMOs has shown significant interest in CoH, but I don't want her getting too far into a game that is about to be obsoleted unless I'm being financially compensated. That may sound a bit tightass, but I think I make a fair point!

Yeah... this became a rant...

It's finally happened!

I spent the entire weekend playing an MMO with my girlfriend!

If you're wondering why that's such a big deal, then perhaps I need to fill you in on a little history. My girlfriend very rarely plays video games. I'm talking maybe 20 hours of gaming every 6 months. The only way I've managed to get her interested in games in the past, was by appealing to her love for fantasy and sci-fi (i.e. Star Wars). KOTOR on Xbox and Pokemon on GBA were winners, but almost everything else failed miserably.

There was a period nearly two and a half years ago, where I managed to get her playing WoW. She loved the game, but she stopped playing after about 20 hours online. It was completely my fault. I'm a min-maxer by nature and so I tend to rush through MMO games in order to have the most awesome PvP character available. My gf had no interest in PvP. She was having fun picking herbs and using emotes in the Evermoon fountain. I tried to push my min-maxing style of game play on her in order to improve her character, and it consequently destroyed her entire WoW experience.

If I had of just let her do her own thing, we'd probably have spent the last two and a bit years playing MMOs together. Lesson definitely learned. You cannot try and push 6+ years of MMO gaming experience onto someone completely new to gaming and expect them to understand, or even enjoy it. You have to let them take things at their own pace. This includes learning about the dynamics of the game through VERY slow PvE exploration.

So how did I manage to get her interested in an MMO again after the scare I gave her with WoW?

Friday night, I downloaded the trial version of City of Heroes. I'd been reading about it for quiet some time through various blogs, and I thought that it was a good idea to check it out before Champions Online hit the shelves. I installed the trial and created a female Scrapper (melee DPS). I got to the screen where you create your super hero costume and my gf walked into the room:

GF: "Wow, that looks interesting! What game is that?"

ME: "Just some super hero MMO that lets you design your own costume and then go around beating up baddies"

GF: "Your hero looks like a slut! You should give her some more clothes. Bad guys are more likely to ask 'how much?', than actually run in fear."

ME: "If you think you can design a better costume, you are welcome to try..."
(how good was the bait?)

Ten minutes later, I had a trial account set and the game running on her computer (my old beast). We spent the next 3 hours or so having a blast designing super hero costumes. It's amazing how many combinations there are. Then came the big silent breath hold for me... did she want to play her newly designed super hero? Luckily she instinctively pressed the next button before I even had to ask. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it certainly did me a favor.

Learning from my previous mistake, I took things very very slow. We did the tutorial together, but I made sure I was always 2 steps behind her. She was the expert and I was the novice. She loved thinking she was teaching me and I loved pretending she was as well...

We spent the rest of the weekend leveling our characters in the City of Heroes. We even ordered pizza and ate it in a LAN party style fashion. I couldn't have asked for a better weekend.

A big thank you to NCSoft/Cryptic for City of Heroes and to the bloggers that got me interested in the game to begin with: Sente, Tipa and Syp.