My Gender is gamer.
I want an outlet to focus the maelstrom of thoughts i have about past, present and future games and put them up for like - minded people to experience. Some will agree with what i say, A lot more will not. I am excited about doing this already.

With all the new MMOs coming out in the next year, there seems to be a pattern set in stone. Write a story, announce it to the public, and make certain the game revolves around some existing IP, if it doesn’t, make sure it has dragons and buildings made of stone. MMOs just can’t seem to stray from the fantasy genre, nor can an original title seem to make its way onto the market. All the planned big mmos seems to be based off another game or story that was either a movie or an existing game and turned into an MMO. Which is fine, it worked for WoW, no reason it can’t work for everything else.

I don’t mind playing existing IPs, I will admit, I am looking forward to the KOTOR MMO, id also play the Dragonball MMO, and if it every surfaced, a Pokemon MMO. Its not the fact that they are existing IPs that bother me, it’s the fact that they offer nothing new to the genre. Developers think it is enough to take the IP and basically drag and drop their lore over existing mechanics and figure it should be enough to start siphoning money from their fanbase.

I remember the days when the only MMOs were EQ, DAoC , Ultima and a  few others. MMO gaming was so esoteric that the concept of paying a monthly sub was laughable to some people. And then with the success of World of Warcraft, it seems a lot of companies want to jump into the untapped market of making MMORPGs, but they all seem to be going about it the same way. Taking an existing IP and following as closely to World of Warcraft’s mechanics as they can, hoping if they can get it in sync they can take some of that blizzard cash for themselves. Its painfully obvious that developers or publishers don’t want to stray too far from that formula because they seem to be afraid to fail.

Another thing they are afraid to stray from is the sword and magic fantasy era, take Warhammer for example, now when I play Warhammer I only play the 40k version, and it is based in the very distant future, which is awesome. But of course when they decide to go MMO, they decide to base it in the time of sword and magic, why; Gamers need another fantasy MMO like they need a hole in the head.  Same goes for Aion, now Aion is different, it is being built from the ground up, but of course it is stuck in the fantasy era.

Are developers afraid to take the genre elsewhere? Why are there no modern MMO being planned, or Future, or steam punk, there are a few sci-fi but of course, that’s only because starwars and star gate are sci-fi, if they could find a reason in the lore to go fantasy I’m sure they would. I was really disappointed in final fantasy with this regard as well, now, when you think final fantasy you think Cloud, Sephiroth, Squal, or Tidus, and all of final fantasy worlds I remember were a unique mix of sword and magic and futuristic touch. I love the fact that you could run into a guy with a machine gun while you are using swords and staff, it didn’t have to make sense it was just enjoyable. So of course I was disappointed when the final fantasy mmo was another pure fantasy based MMO.

There are a few new IP out there, like Darkfall, but again they are stuck in the sword and magic era. My thoughts are, with total freedom to create whatever you want, why limit yourself to the rules of dungeons and dragons, why choose a genre? Why not, we have flying cars and dragons, and there is no explanation for why dragons exist alongside flying cars, who cares? Why is it, the only MMOs being produces in the future are riding off current IPs with established lore, do the developers not realize that existing lore is just an unnecessary shackle? And they could do so much more, and have so much more freedom if they just started creating their own games, with their own story from the ground up?

It’s not just the genre; it seems developers all follow the same set of contrived rules when it comes to class creation. Now I am not talking about the archetype system, i firmly believe every class needs to fit somewhere, and the 4 main and only archetypes are Tank, Close range Damage dealer, Long range damage dealer, and Support which includes healers and buffers. But why these pointless rules, why is it that every tank must be weak in terms of strength, every damage dealer must be a glass cannon, every support character must be supremely weak and inept, totally in capable of managing on their own? Why is it that, if someone uses magic they must be a mage, therefore must be long range and in robes? Why is the only way to be a tank, is to have a shield and heavy armor and standing up in the frontlines getting bashed around.

I really don’t know what to expect in the future for MMO, nothing seems too particularly inspiring, or next gen. Just the same things re-hashed over and over again. It seems like developers make a new game, and offer 1 new feature and it is enough for people to hop on and follow it for 3 years.

Take a serious look at the upcoming MMO and, if you like make a list of all the new things they are bringing and really gauge whether or not this mmo is worth your time, or even worth you dropping your current mmo.

I will start with Warhammer; the only new feature it is bringing to the genre is public quests. It originally had the level diversity system, where every time you gain a level your character would change in a way that would make you look unique, so by level 40 orcs would be bigger in actual size,  chosen would be darker and more sinister, and.. That’s all I can think of, the feature was dropped so Warhammer went from 2 new features, to 1. Age of Conan, new combat system, that is pretty big, not my cup of tea but impressive none the less, now before you say Warhammer has a new combat system too, I assure you, once you play it, you will be able to associate every combat mechanic with something found in another existing MMO with W-A-R in the title. Age of Conan also offered Nudity and sex, which I something not done in mmos, but they backed down from that and went partial nudity, so they added 1 and a half new features.

There isn’t much inspiration and I often ask myself why I still follow MMOs, it seems that nobody who enjoys MMOs actually makes them, otherwise they would realize it is time for something new, and no gamer wants to play the same re-hashed shit over and over again. Time to go wait for the next mmo, with another, solo-party- raid/pvp system.

                After downloading all of these f2p games, and getting bored of every one of them, and having nothing better to do, I decided to go to the other side and check out the foreign titles. Now, I usually don’t mess around with MMORPGS I don’t understand, and for good reason, they are confusing and kind of defeat the purpose of an MMORPG when you can’t tell what the story is, but I decided to make an exception to my own rule when I came across the fact that Huxley was in open beta and the sign up process was rather simple.

                Now, anyone who has tried to play a Korean FPS knows that you can’t play them without access to a KSSN, but once you get past that hurdle you are off to the races.

                I didn’t know what to expect when I started to download this game, after all the current developer ideas of an MMOFPS contains an Item mall, a lobby and a 16 man room. The game’s client size is pretty big, 3.2gigs so it took a good amount of time to download, and after it finished it took another hour and a half to patch, but after that the game was ready to go.

                Before I start on the game, I have to mention the intro movie is absolutely amazing. Even without a single grain of knowledge of the Korean language, the emotion of the story was easily conveyed by just watching the CG Clip.

The clip was about 10 minutes in length, but after it was done I was excited about getting into the game. Choosing a server was rather easy, despite the language barrier, and the character selection as well. Now, anyone who has followed the game knows there are two races, the Humans and the Alteraver, the website will have you believe there is 4, but they just consider the female counterpart to be another race, which we all know it isn’t.

Now the character creation process was ok, it wasn’t really deep, but it wasn’t shallow either. There was just enough depth to ensure that I would be able to have a relatively unique face and the ability to move around the facial tattoos and scars helped widen that gap a bit more, but the slider variation weren’t all that different so in essence there is about 20-30 facial variations you could come up with for each race and gender, which is still quite a bit.

The initial cutscene after getting into the game is also pretty cool, if I understood what they were saying it would help a lot but it was still enough to give you some fairly decent immersion, but it loses points because it is the exact same sequence for both races. After the cutscene you are tossed into the training mission, which is also the same for both races.  If you ever played an fps game, then you know what this mission is, the usually walk, look around, jump pointlessly, crouch under debris, jump on the air geyser to clear the gaps…. Well maybe that last one isn’t common. Then a quick run through of the combat.

Everyone starts off with the same 3 basic weapons, which basically show the strengths of all 3 classes. A machine gun, small rounds, good for killing monsters medium to close range, has very little accuracy at long range and with the iron sights, makes it easy to bang those running headshots. A grenade launcher, slow, but good for groups of monsters, and a sniper rifle, which is obvious what it is used for.

Now the game plays like an fps, but more specifically, the game plays like unreal tournament. And that is not because of the engine it is built on, it has no ammo system, and it uses a series of nodes interspersed around the world to refill ammo, I will go on record saying I don’t like this ammo system, while it is great that it removes the need to stock pile bullets, since you go through rounds pretty quick, it makes no sense to have these things floating around the world.

But that was my only real dislike of the game, once you get out of the first town and into the first mission the game is freakin’ sweet. The missions are done in a way that basically focuses around solo to small teams. You get a nice feel because it plays like the story is focused around your team. You should know that both humans and Alteraver have the EXACT same missions, so besides looks and higher level gear, there is no advantage to either race; this is a smart move in my opinion, people can make their character based on what they like and not based on racial advantages.

Before you guys go into this game, I will try to paint a picture so you know what to expect. This game is not a persistent world. The game would be better compared to Guild wars then WoW, it has towns that function as a lobby, and massive world maps that are just solo instances for you or your team. But you can immediately see the unreal engine in effect, the game uses the stream loading system, and if you aren’t familiar with that it basically loads the game first, and then streamlines the textures in as you are running around the world. The load times are pretty impressive, especially since the game is so beautiful.

I only did the first two missions and I enjoyed them. But I must say, if you are a hardcore fps player like myself, you wont really be challenged by this combat system. Headshots are really effective, so if you have even a little bit of skill you can just rampage through all the monsters, and you aren’t allowed to change your gear or skills on a mission map so you have to return to town if you find a new piece of gear you might want to use. Items drop on the map and looting them just requires you to run through them, and the maps have home warps scattered around the world so getting back to town is really quick and easy. But like guild wars, every time you close the mission map the mobs all respawn and you have to kill them all again.

I only made it to level 5 on my first day, and I made a new character just to create a video to demonstrate the game from the beginning. I plan on going back into it today, and I will add more to this review the farther I get into the game. But so far, I really enjoy it, it actually feels like an MMOFPS, unlike the current games like Combat Arms and Warrock, the game actually has some element that extends past getting into a room and killing other people.

I think all those fps gamers looking for a good mix between story, fps and online interaction will enjoy this, but it may be too early to say, from what I read, the pvp zones don’t start until level 20 so I will get up there and get some footage of that to include in the next write up.

The Video will be a while, but when it is ready I will include a link to it in this write up.

www.youtube.com/watch - Video 1

www.youtube.com/watch - Video 2

www.youtube.com/watch - Video 3