M.U.L.E. - Massive Universes and Limited Editions

My 20 most favourite games ever

2011-12-15T12:09:00.002+01:00

- M.U.L.E. - Ozark Softscape - C64 - 1983

- Utopia - Don Daglow - Intellivision - 1982

- NHL 94 - EA Sports - GEN - 1993

- Ultima Online - Origin Systems - PC - 1997

- Bard's Tale III - Interplay - C64 - 1988

- Mars Saga - Westwood Associates - C64 - 1988

- John Madden Football 93 - EA Sports - GEN - 1992

- Wasteland - Interplay - C64 - 1988

- AD&D Treasures of Tarmin - Tom Loughry - Intellivision - 1983

- Championship Manager - Collyer Bros - Amiga - 1992

- Portal - Valve - PC - 2007

- Laser Squad - Julian Gollop - C64 - 1988

- Disgaea - Nippon Ichi Software - PS2 - 2003

- Pirates! - Sid Meier/Microprose - C64/Amiga - 1987

- Half Life - Valve - PC - 1998

- Archon - Free Fall Associates - C64 - 1983

- Phantasy Star 2 - Rieko Kodama/SEGA - GEN - 1989

- Demon's Souls - From Software - PS3 - 2009

- Kick Off - Dino Dini - Amiga - 1989

Star Wars: The Old Republic

2011-12-15T12:07:00.000+01:00

I know you don't want to hear people unhappy with SWTOR, but let me vent my frustration here just one more final time. If possible I'm liking it even less than the beta. Republic Trooper story is horrible so far compared to Empire Bounty Hunter, and having played Mass Effect a lot in the last 2 weeks only made things worse. All my other qualms stay, clunky interface, bland combat, horrible encounters, poor dungeons, pathetic itemization, sad ugly empty and cardboardy world, utterly subpar questing, lack of customization, poor visuals, terrible pvp, ...but at least the storytelling was great. While now, I feel that once again we set our bar so very low just because "it's an MMO", cause what we have here, storytelling-wise, is a cheap version of stuff that this same software house was doing about 5 years ago.

Also, this is certainly me, but the whole design of the game makes it hard for me to play it with people considering that I want to follow the story and listen to the dialogues but everyone chattering in TeamSpeak/Ventrilo inevitably take away from the cinematic (?) mood of it. As a result, either we quest together and everyone pressures you into clicking as fast as possible (or they just talk over stuff, see above), or I turn voice chat off and play it as a single player which doesn't hold a candle to much much older titles.

This game could have been awesome, epic, great. They had the tools, the people and the money to make it. It's depressing to see how generally disappointing the final product is.

I was wrong about Vanguard (march 23, 2007)

2010-04-09T18:10:00.001+02:00

Reply #77 on: March 23, 2007, 05:47:37 am

I wanted to do this since a couple of weeks. I stopped playing Vanguard. And I have to admit that I was wrong about lots of things.

So yes, I was wrong, you all (not you Geldon) were right and yeah I'll stay grounded for the rest of the week.

I think it would be too long to list them all and explain why Vanguard ended up boring me to death, especially because many of the reasons already came up on these boards million of times turned out to be true.

I just want to point out what really killed me: the world.

Again, I was wrong: this game is NOT the explorer heaven I thought and preached it was. Because yes, as many of you said back in the days, it looks too much of the same wherever you go. It's huge, and there are for sure Points of Interests, but what really lacks is a "change of pace". I mean, you know in other games when you are bored of a certain zone/theme and you decide to go elsewhere just to have a completely different colour palette, theme, mobs, atmosphere? This basically can't happen in Vanguard. If you are in Thestra, that is the largest continent and it is VERY large, you will be in Thestra for the rest of your life! It doesn't matter if you'll go to the elven city or the dwarf/human/whatever city... it'll be more of the same! Don't get me wrong, New Targonor has beautiful buildings and architecture and I still thinks it's a beautiful world after all, but it completely lacks variations.

The game has slow progression so you are forced to stay in a single place for a long time anyway, but as soon as you learn that in 10 or 20 levels it will be basically more of the same, than your will to live starts crumbling to pieces.

Hiding and going into dungeons is the only way to save yourself from the attack of the too-real world but of course you can't go in there unless you have a good group (crappy group means endless Corpse Runs and usually some delevelling is involved too), so you are stuck to live in the usual green/brown hills killing the same old mobs for days hoping that maybe one day they'll patch in I don't know what maybe an alien world with some different colour or theme.

But I already wrote too much, and I'll sum it up:

- The seamless world idea turned out to be bad to me. I enjoyed gazing to the horizon but in the end it's best to have more foggy shortsighted old kind of worlds and more different places to visit. And I mean really different. The EQ2, EQ1, WoW.. well.. every other game's way.

- The graphics are bad in a not-fascinating way. So after 6 weeks of playing you are not so curious anymore about what will come, because apparently nothing will come. Not in a human sized time-frame. Mobs are just awful, seriously awful. Some of them are uglier than EQ1 ones. It's just uncanny.

- The dungeons that should give that "different theme" feeling are just, in most cases, pretty ugly. I tried all the dungeon I could try hoping that the next one could refresh my will to play and expectations of good things to come, but it basically never happened. Dungeons are ugly. To understand what I am saying just consider Befallen in EQ1 and you'll have a dungeon that is 10 times better of any of the dungeons I visited in Vanguard in 6 weeks. Not to mention places like Unrest or Mistmoore, and I am talking about the original EQ, not EQ2 (that has incredibly good dungeons too, especially compared to VG ones). *sigh*

- It completely fails to recreate the EQ1 kind of magic in all aspects. I remember a Freeport where you could be slain by a NPC in an inn just because of some nasty ill faction stuff or just being the follower of the "wrong" god, or amazing "secret" places like the sewers with high level sunken corpses. Nothing like that is here apparently. I know it wasn't fun to be killed at level 5 in your city by a crazy NPC, but it made for a creepy gaming experience. So far, Vanguard couldn't surprise me save for a couple of starter quests (showing that they gave their best for the first introductory quests, and the rests is plain dull, and duller as you progress).

- The supposedly neat stuff like Diplomacy and Crafting is actually there, houses, boats.. it's all good, but it's not even remotely close to the "worldly" feeling of Ultima Online (an example that I guess will be fixed is the lack of a function to recall to your house. I am sure they'll add it later, but it's not in now) so part of their appeal is missing and the funnever really kicks in. Plus, if the world is boring you are not compelled to "live" in it.

My final note:

The game is good for a diku, and I am sure it will be even better in a couple of years thanks to improvements in all areas and especially addition of features on an already pretty solid base. But unless they put in some new ZONES with COMPLETELY DIFFERENT themes I doubt it'll be ever able to lure me back. I don't care how good are the special moves or combat animations in a MMO if it is unable to give me the illusion of visiting many different places or have me interested in exploring its dungeons.

I want to conclude with something I scavenged from my memory and my hard disk and I feel this is very important given that I am now convinced that it's the "seamless" world that killed it for me, especially thinking about all the goodness you can still have in zone-based games, even better when zones borders are of the soft kind like in WoW. It's a 2002 interview to Brad McQuaid mostly about EverQuest 1 where he said something that makes me want to kill him with a 9-iron. It's 2002 so I guess the design documents for VG were already inked on paper and preproduction was supposedly already started:

Quote from: Brad McQuaid

Another very important aspect of the game and a goal from day one is how immersive and vast the world is. EQ has been criticized for being zone-based (as opposed to seamless), but look at what it allowed us to do. Whereas seamless worlds, at least with today's technology, require less detail, texture variation, and variety of objects and other points of interest, having a zone based engine allowed EQ's world builders to create well over a hundred unique and interesting places to explore. And then it's not just the detail in the world, but also the content in terms of NPC models, quests, items, etc. I think EQ really set the high bar there and also proved just how important depth and detail really is.

WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU BRAD? ARE YOU DISCONNECTED FROM YOURSELF?! YOU TWO GO SEE A FUCKING DOCTOR, NOW!

But it's too late I guess. I am stuck with my mistakes and the time I wasted saying stupid good things about Vanguard, a game that, as for now, is about 5 times less interesting than its predecessor.

Once again I was wrong, you were right and I am sorry. Just thought it was fair to let you know about it.

Age of Conan - What went wrong?

2008-07-04T09:55:00.004+02:00

What went wrong?

1. Performance issues, especially at launch. Things are way better now but many have left already. Stuttering, crashes, game not starting at all wear people's patience down.

2. Too much soloing. Too much power to the loners, as in the chance to play all the way solo to 80. That, in the post WoW era (when a solo-viable MMORPG was very much needed), isn't such a good idea cause everyone is a little more burnout on the genre than they were pre-wow and need solo-viability coupled with gentle and easy group-content. ie: dungeons (see below). Otherwise they'll rejoice for the solo play capabilities only to feel utterly lonely and bored after forty levels or something. As someone else said, there are better single player games around, so they shouldn't abuse of solo-friendliness in multplayer games. That backfires.

3. Lack of rewarding group-casual dungeons. Dungeons aren't fulfilling enough and they fail to provide both a social-enhancing and a gamistic-rewarding experience. They are too hard hence need full commitment, a good group with a much coveted guardian and 6 players. They force you in there after spoiling you to play alone at a relaxed pace for 40 levels. No one wants that, unless it rains rare stuff and the effort is minimal. Which is the opposite of what is required (unless you do them at a higher level). And itemization (see below) for many dungeons came too late.

4. Itemization. Itemization was so stupid in the first 3 weeks that I think the game retained more player than expected. Everything was SO brown that, realism or not, you felt nauseous about it. Now things are slightly better, but a level 30-ish player is stuck in brown mode and he has no way to think things will get any better. Nausea, disappointment, quit. Also, stats and bonus are so moronic they don't make items cool at all, not even in the numbers dept. People like big numbers, +50 Defense Bonus, so there's nothing more depressing than getting a +0.1% defense bonus jacket at level 1 and a +0.2% defense bonus shirt at level 30. Even numbers are brown in AoC, and the UI (see below) doesn't help.

5. User Interface. Totally uninspired. Icons are great honestly, but the inventory/character sheet are WAY uglier than 7 years old Anarchy Online ones just to mention something Funcom. Fonts are ugly, "rolling 3d item thumbs" are SWG ugly, inventory pages is just IDIOT and numbers are once again too sparse, too small and too brown/white. This game needed a little more coloring for item descriptions, better fonts, better icons for items (skills/spells/combo ones are fine). When you get a blue/purple item you don't want a smallish dull list of 0.6 bonus, you want some noticeable figures that stands out when mousing over it.
Non existant Guild management tools, ugly and buggy friend lists and all around plain or lacking menus stink bad in 2008. Big mistake here (yes, better one is in the works. Who cares about tomorrow? Things went wrong here YESTERDAY).

6. Lacking features. For a PvP oriented game, the total lack of incentives is depressing both for hardcore killers and casual battlegrounders. No reasons to play leads to empty battlegrounds, or empty wins in the open areas. As much as it can be fun, too many couldn't start a single minigame due to the lack of players, and the few they participated in felt useless, confusing and not-rewarding (especially because they very much likely died in a matter of seconds). The lack of features could have been less blatant if it wasn't all about the most new/interesting/publicized aspects of AoC: player cities (not working or useless) and PvP (useless, or as we like to say "not-meaningful"). Hell, they even stopped mentioning border kingdom's Towers for smaller guilds. That's backstabbing all the smaller guilds who will never be able to fight for a BK or even just gather the shittons of required resources to go T3.

7. Bugs, so many. Playerbase will forgive you if you feed them with solutions and other things to keep them busy. It doesn't matter how fast they patch, there's a strong perception that something is lacking from the game and it wasn't patched in soon enough. Not to mention the perception that bugs weren't all squashed soon enough. Many are being forgiving with Funcom because they are neglecting the 6 afore-mentioned reasons anyway. But whoever sooner or later got hit by one of those, simply had no reason nor will to cut Funcom some slack, especially since they were paying for it.

8. Finally, Players' burnout. In 2008 no one is fresh enough to accept troubled gaming experiences, and that coupled with that old feeling of "been there, done that already, thousand times" doesn't help a game that, despite being very well crafted on some aspects, lacks some of the features that could make it [i]different enough[/i]. In the end Age of Conan felt "old" too soon to experienced MMORPG players, especially because of one or all the 7 aforementioned reasons, and while I don't really know how new MMORPG (read Warhammer) will do in the future, I am now even more sure than I was that you really need: 1. A cool interface, 2. great itemization, 3. smoother performances and 4. a couple of SERIOUSLY new features. Conan, while being the game I am loving much more than I expected, lacks so far 3 and a half of these elements.

It all sounds like a fiasco. I think it is definitely not. Something went wrong if everyone was SO hyped up despite all the bugs in the first 2 weeks and simply let it fall after 14 days. But all the points I made up there are fixable in a few months and I am confident they will. I wonder if it will ever be enough to gain back all the escaped players. First impression rules everything, the buzz, the hype, and the cool smart kids are pretty much done with it. The game needs ironing out point 1 to 7 so bad. It can be fixed, now they just need to stand out with what they promised and that is not just blood 'n boobs.

( Posted on f13, and on the stupid AoC official boards too: )

A (brief) ode to EVE

2008-02-07T09:38:00.001+01:00

I remember back in 2002 when me and some friends were waiting for EVE drooling on our keyboards and worshipping every single bits of news we could get about it, one day while looking for info on combat (because we and many other didn't have a clue about how it was supposed to work) I stumbled on a comment which was like this:

"EVE's combat will be much more like Magic the Gathering than Tie Fighter or Wing Commander. It will be all about strategy, customization and countering"

That shocked me, as I was definitely waiting for twitch massive combat, but what's not to like in Strategy, Customization and Countering if done the right way?

Well, you may not be into M:tG but in so many ways EVE is a miracle of a game, if nothing else because you can play the most stylish card game ever, without having to pay for booster packs, and you got to do it online with friends while smelling adrenaline and sipping bile. Glorious.

More on Lineage 2 - The secret

2008-01-12T02:30:00.000+01:00

Originally posted as a random post on f13.net - This is 16 months after the previous post.

--

I finally completed the Class Change (a joke, a joke! that should be illegal! It's dehumanizing to do three stupid LONG quests like those to just get your final class... at level 40.. after DAYS of /played!!!) and I am now a level 42 Gladiator, so while still lightyears away from the coregame, I know a few things more about this monstruosity called Lineage 2.

I could talk, again, about what works and what not, what's peculiar and should be cloned (Olympiad, Manor system) and what has just been cloned in (Instances, Keeps) from other games. Anyone cares? Everyone knows that. And everyone knows that Lineage 2, no matter what, isn't by no means a great MMORPG.

But I think that beyond its merits and demerits there's some kind of bizarre originality in L2 that makes it quite unique and hypnotic.
The ridicolous speed at which you mow through mobs, the flashing lights of clashing swords and soulshots, the incredible (still unsurpassed 4 years later) characters graphics and the amazing weapons and clothing arts, the robotic, metallic, essential interface, the unearthly background and animal sounds, the enigmatically smiling and beautifully painted NPCs, the looping bits of music...

I'd say L2 is the coldest and more subtly original online world I've ever touched, it can make you feel lonely like nothing else while you mechanically whack for hours in the dangerous (xp loss) deeps of a dungeon, and there's something unsettling and addictive in it that keeps vibrating in your bowels like a subsonic bassline on a frequency too low to be clearly perceived.

Don't get me wrong. It's not healthy and most people are luckily and totally immune to it, but I can't stop to find L2 totally fascinating in a morbid way.
Everyone in Asia cloned it thousands of times, but no one cloned its extraterrestrial nature.

Lineage 2, one year ago

2008-01-11T21:43:00.000+01:00

Posted on f13 September 29th 2006, I copypaste it here cause I was looking for it and couldn't find it. Next time it'll be easier.

--

Out of masochism I recently started playing Lineage 2 with some of my rl friends.
We were looking for some evil PvP action and checked Shadowbane. Uh.. no.. my eyes... (did they downgraded the engine and the UI since 2002?)

So we derailed on L2 with the "excuse" of the new server.

Falconeer's short-range perspective on Lineage 2 in September 2006 - Chronicle 5 era:

The CONS:

- The grind is as bad as you think
- The grind is actually way badder than you think
- The grind is insane
- Quests are a joke
- The colour palette, except for player characters, is a little too medieval (green, brown, gray. That's it)
- The world could use some more points of interest. Or just some without the more.
- You move so slowly. Oh soooo slowly. And there are no mounts for players with a life. Although you could get one if you are a cultist of the Lineage 2 church and live your life along. To meet your friends or go to dungeons and so on you have to walk for hours or pay some VERY expensive (at least at lower levels) teleports. You are "invited" to explore the world in a first generation of mmorpg fashion. Actually I like that, but I am pretty sure no one else does.
- Point and click could be bearable, while targeting is an electronic nightmare, especially during raids or when mobs chase your healer.
- The interface is close to useless. Another joke.
- TO get your "final" class you have to level to 40 (forty). That will take you between 15 and 60 days. Before that you are a close to a generic dummy. Sword, dagger or cast. Not much more than that, no matter the 16 subclasses. That hurt replayabilty. Who in hell would reroll a char when you have to play for more than a month just to get to the first level of your true class? (and that's where the grind gets REALLY evil...)
- There's close to no loot. Mobs drop money and some crafting materials. Anything else is as rare as Magnolia-like frograin.
- Money are EVERYTHING. THey are actually more important than level to a certain degree. And that means BOTS and lots of ubertwinked players that you know bought money on eBay.
- Bots
- Farmers
- Bots
- Farmers
- Bots
- Bots
- Farmers
- FarmerBots
- more Bots
- more Bots
- ok stop Bots...

The PROS:

- It's PvP oriented, definitely. When you die you lose XP and CAN LOSE one of your item. Equipped too, uber super fabled epic too. There's no insurance here. And you can loot that stuff too, of course.
- The character visuals are still unbeaten in my opinion. Gorgeous. Little stiff, a bit robotic, but you'll get great screenshots :)
- The world, although bland and empty for the most part, sports some nice vistas and the whole thing really looks medieval, not fantasy. Cities, shops, buildings and everything it's not bland empty forest looks great. Score for me.
- Sieges look fun (too soon for me tho)
- 31 classes are the higher number in any mmorpg for all I know, and they fill their roles very well. Plus all the classes got some rebalancing after Chronicle 5 so now they "are supposed" to beat each other according to a Rock-Paper-Scissor mechanic. Has to be verified. Oh, you can't walk through players and mobs. They are all, mmh, very solid. Griefers love to corner you.
- Servers are always full, in a positive way. The world, actally all of them, feels alive. And I especially love the no-auction house policy. That's not user friendly but it's fun. You have to browse the market stalls and looks for the best deals. Again, UO nostalgia. VENDOR BUY!
- Clan structure has just been revamped. The Clan management is fascinating and the whole "politics" part of the game is apparently well served by the clan system, clan wars mechanics and new alliance rules.
- Fighting other guilds over a (unique) Guild Hall can't be boring.
- The interface is useless, as stated before, but elegant.
- The mechanic surrounding the "enchantment" of weapons and armours is EVIL to the core (everytime you try an enchantment your weapon could get stronger and gain a glow, or get broken and trashed), but addictive. It's like Russian Roulette in a videogame. Too bad people who buy eBay money screw this.
- That "old mean feeling" from preTrammel UO. You go out, you watch your shoulders, you get chased, you get ganked, you gank back.. you lose your uber Armor, you loot back a Super Staff of looting. All that eclosed in a "political setting" where you can wage war on opposing guilds, threaten them to give your mercenary support to their enemies on the next siege, exact tributes from nearby villages and things like that. Some of us love that.
- Franz, a new server, just started. We are there, and we get into this just for that. a "new world" with castles still to be taken and economy still to be screwed.

Bottom line:

This game requires friends. RL friends are even better.
If you manage to play with Teamspeak, chatting and joking while doing the grind part, then you can survive L2 to the point where things *can get* interesting. Another good tip is to use the phone. I recently discovered that I love to grind while I am on the phone. It's just like drawing mindlessly or simply dangling my slippers... it's so automatic and catatonic that it's a perfect subconscious activity. So whenever you pick up the phone, start L2 and grind. It works, really.

It helps the fact that about 6 "expansions" are out for this game. Every chronicle added lots of things and they are definitely there. Lots of "minigames" and other special mechanics introduced with every update (the Manor syste, although often exploited, is a very interesting and unique one) definitely add to the content side of Lineage 2. So maybe they are not so honest when they say "6 expansions", but those 6 chronicles could count easily as 3 EQ2 retail ones.

But that said, Lineage 2 is too grindy and too money driven (meaning too bot infested and eBay friendly) for being seriously considered as fun. It has "aspects" that are unique and very fun. I am just not sure that there's actually room to see those if you are not really into it with a bunch of friends to ease the pain.

Pirates of the burning CRAP!

2008-01-08T11:24:00.000+01:00

"I am DEPRESSED. That thing I just read reeks as the decaying body of an old EQ-era MMORPG.

I gave Pirates of the B. another spin today and it struck me (again) for its resemblance with the old Sid Meier's masterpiece with just 1/10 of the fun in it.
My biggest gripes are easy and simple: this is a wasted chance. The old Pirates! by using randomized events made the world feel much more alive than it will ever be here, where it IS supposed to be (a)live. While in Pirates! the scrawny traveler in taverns provided everchanging infos from distant places, the governor had daughters to marry (or not) and the encounters at sea had stories to tell, here more than 20 years later you are stuck with thousands of players but a dead PREDICTABLE world.

I am not advocating the goodness of randomized events per se, just saying that the 16th century has never felt LESS exotic and mysterious to me. It's all scripted, all well-balanced. NPCs are stuck there as lampposts ready to hand you out the same identical piece of gossip over and over, forever. Events, in Pirates! fooled you into feeling that the world was real. Crew threatening to mutiny, long lost sisters to retrieve. Years passing and real historic events going on. You aged, you got sick, you died. Here the tavern is as fascinating as a Nativity scene or a wax museum. Neat!.

Yes, some of those things can't happen here. Time can't go on forever so that rules out historical events, and there can't be permadeath. Some other things are supposedly there, in slightly different forms. And it wouldn't be fair to blame something that is still the norm for MMORPGs or was text-based 20 years ago. But shouldn't I expect significant improvements in 20 years? I think they had large shoes to fill and they failed. And today when I was sailing towards Port Royal (it's like 30 minutes without doing nothing... I could call it "point and forget" as I watched my schooner sloooowly approaching the Port Royal waypoint. I actually went to the store to get some milk and when I came back I was closer.. but not there yet) I wondered why I was playing a less satisfying version of the old classic? Couldn't help it and I quit.

Once again the levels fuck it up (They didn't learn anything from the original Pirates! or just EVE), the people fuck it up and the industry fucks it up!
And back to that long rant from the Lead Designer, it's depressing. They bring up excuses for having you zone in and zone out 25 times (count them) in 10 minutes for the economy tutorial before the game is out. They bring up excuses for not having an endgame (repeatable high end quests? HAHAHA) and they bring up excuses for slowing your fun down and adding to the grind to stop you as you would probably cancel the subscription should you get to max level (and notice there's nothing to do there) too early.

This game had TONS of Potential. Now it's officially crap in my book. EVE for infants with a piratey tone. File under: boo hiss."

Vanguard, a review

2007-02-14T00:33:00.000+01:00

Quite an achievement for a game to be one of the most expensive ever produced and an underdog at the same time. That’s how things work out in the everchanging and hardly persistent MMO industry.

Here comes Vanguard, the gigantic second child of the man who brought you EverQuest and thanks to that wrote “MMORPG” in the pop culture dictionary back in the late 90s. Claiming to be the second most expensive persistent world ever produced (though leagues away from THE most expensive one) and with a developing team boasting since forever about its next-generation features and engine, this beast fell short on more than one account, to the point of getting the dubious merit of being one of the most negative-hyped game ever. How’s that?

The old sage always told me not to write about an MMO until you played its release build for at least a month, as this kind of games are tricky and often hide diamonds under the rough (or shit under the chocolate coating). Whatever it is, there’s a lot that can already be said about Vanguard, but be prepared, cause you are in for lots of contradictions.

The first thing you’ll see upon entering the world of Vanguard will be the character creation screen. And you’ll probably have a scoff. Maaan, it’s ugly! The characters are ugly, the buttons are ugly, the backdrop is ugly, oh even the fonts are ugly (The music is fine but you’ll probably won’t notice it in this mess). A jagged washed out EverQuest-like character stands in the middle of the screen. Buttons on both sides allow you to choose a race among the 19 available and a class out of 15, but while classes have nice icons and some useful information listed, the small race portraits are as ugly as the models and close to no lore infos are offered at all. Next is customization, with lots of sliders to play with, increasing and decreasing details from feet size (?!) to boob stiffness. Sounds interesting? It is so not. The whole thing is plagued with poor implementation, lack of any kind of polish and a layer of “Are you kidding me?” on top of it. It’s not that features aren’t there, but Sigil should understand that this is the very first contact players (customers) are having with their 5 years of Next-Gen development MMORPG. And instead of any kind of splash screen, intro movie or just a perfectly polished lore-full character creation process, you are presented with this awful looking late 90s interface asking for you to get excited about some malfunctioning sliders and shell out a monthly fee to play. Ugh!

Then, you are finally in. What’s the second thing you’ll notice? Performance.

This has been discussed a lot, and there’s no way to settle the argument. Is the engine an untamable beast or just a heavy but scalable one that works well on pretty but not necessarily top of the line machines? It’s no mistery that you’ll need horsepower to handle it and to actually enjoy the experience without being forced to turn off all the eyecandy (or to stubbornly choose to go the “5 frames per second” way), but this is by no means a mess like the EQ2 one was at launch, whereas a popup used to come up everytime you tried to switch to high quality visuals saying “Be warned that the computer needed to run at this settings still have to be invented”. Still, it’s demanding. It’s scalable too, but unless you are fine with 20^th century graphics, you’ll need the vitamins under your hood. Is it worth it?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I have to admit that I like it for the most part. But it’s a mixed bag to say the least. The most stunning feature, and actually the only thing close to Next-Gen in Vanguard is the uncanny draw distance. You can climb a mountain, look to the horizon and you’ll be able to see buildings, trees and point of interest for miles, and there’s no screenshot that can give it justice, you have to see it in motion. It’s beautiful, seriously. Still, the clouds, the sky, grass and lights are all beautifully rendered. The day/night cycle is wonderful and you’ll have to lit torches at night to find your way around and the dynamic shadows cast by lanterns and other light source are truly evocative. Unfortunately, other than that, and no matter how much on the left you set the render quality slider, this is definitely a sub-standard MMORPG on the graphical department. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that it’s ugly, but some poorly implemented details kill the immersion, as textures are for the most part dull or good looking only from a distance, objects seem artificially placed without any kind of smooth blending with the environment, and the mobs and the player models are, all in all, pretty awful. Or better, not so ugly, but stinkin’ old! Too often you’ll have the feeling that you are not playing a bad looking MMO from 2007, just a very nice looking one from 2004. Got that?

And this “old school” feeling that permeates the visuals is the core of the Vanguard experience. More than once, given that you played this kind of games for a while, you’ll notice the incredible resemblance between Vanguard and the original EverQuest. That had to be expected since Brad McQuaid is behind both projects and he purposedly created Vanguard trying to recapture the feeling of his firstborn, but still you’ll often have the distinct impression that he’s gone too far. From the questionable graphics to the lifeless stuck-on-the-ground NPCs everything resembles EverQuest much more than it should be for the self proclaimed first Next-Gen MMOs. The utter lack of polish, trademark of the pre-WoW era, strikes back with furious anger, and while the UI is functional and moddable, in its default form reeks of EverQuest expansion more than anything else.

But sooner or later you are supposed to start play, move your bad looking avatar around, start messing up with MOBs and eventually gaining some levels. Everything is where you expect it to be. Autoattack, check. Hotbars, check. Special attacks, check. Wandering mobs, quests, dungeons, levels, xp, drops, everything is there. Seriously, what did you expect? It’s a diku, it’s the spawn of EverQuest. These games haven’t changed much in the last 9 years and Vanguard pays homage to its digital parent. But as blasphemous as it may sounds to younglings, World of Warcraft and Vanguard have different mothers but share the same father, so surprisingly enough, the game plays stunningly similar to WoW too! Maybe it’s the UI, that although bad looking is a ripoff of the WoW one, or the default keybinding, with right mouse click to attack and the B key (in place of the originally more popular I key) to open bags and so on, but as soon as you start whacking foozles, and provided that you can run the game at an acceptable framerate, you’ll probably have a WoW deja-vu right after your first attack. It’s obvious that the combat engine has been tweaked to make it familiar to burnout believers of the Ruler of all MMORPGs, and questionable and retro as it may sound, the whole thing flows pretty smooth. Still, the golden formula of whacking, levelling and get new spells/attacks every two levels has been slightly enhanced. While everything that is in WoW is in Vanguard’s combat too, it’s worth mentioning that the ancient art of exchanging blows is slightly more interactive here, as your character has some nifty semi-hidden skills like “spell detection” or “tactics” that permit you to unleash, under certain conditions, powerful moves or more interesting counter spells. Basically, every time an enemy (Playing or non-playing, as there are a few PvP servers with both FFA or Team Based rulesets) attacks you or your party there’s a chance your character will recognize a pattern in its attacks or identify a spell it is casting that will unlock a button to “counter” that action. This works well in conjunction with “finisher” moves, “bridge” attacks and other feats that can be performed in the way of spicing up combat. It adds to that the significative class diversity, whereas the four archetypes of tank, healer, magical dps and physical dps are split in 15 more specialized and meaningful classes, some of which thoughtfully reinvented, like healers finally able to do their part in groups other than just chain healing (Disciples are monk-healers who heal while swinging fists, and Blood Mages draw their healing power from pummelling and leeching enemies).

But you are not limited to fighting, of course. Vanguard is proud to introduce a third sphere beyond adventuring and crafting (Which is a deep and turn-based thing, in between the EQ2 and the SWG models), and that is Diplomacy. Many overlook this feature, that is unique and definitely innovative, but I would like to show my respect for it, as it’s a clear example that even in the most conservative of the MMORPG models, there’s room for some out of the box thinking. Some labelled it as an unimpressing and forgettable minigame, but believe it not as diplomacy is so intertwined to Vanguard’s fabric that sooner or later you’ll have to deal with it, and that’s definitely a good thing. It is true that Diplomacy is played through a turn based game of cards where you confront various NPCs trying to score more points than your opponent, but this is the mechanic that moves the dialogues, letting players access the huge lore of the game and, by gaining diplomatic ranks and levels, unlock quests, items and content otherwise unavailable. More! Enhancing the common MMO concept of factions, every city has NPCs groups (The merchants, the soldiers, the commonpeople, the sages, the crafters, etc) that can be “diplomatized”, meaning you can pull the levers of those group through diplomatic parleys to the point of actually giving buffs to all players in the city according to the factions you strenghtened or weakened. No need to say that players can work accordingly, pulling a lever of the city in a combined effort, or work against each others, in some sort of subtle politic game where everyone tries to obtain the favour of a faction dishing disgrace over the followers of another. On top of it all, diplomatic questlines are the most engaging and sometimes hilarious I ever completed in any persistent world, as developers really had the chance to write stuff that doesn’t simply revolves around killing beats or gathering hallucynogen mushooms, but it’s focused on plots, stories and dialogues. Expect your morals to be seriously tested.

Alas, too many more things could be said about this huge (seriously, the client is almost 17 gigabytes large), enormous new iteration of a ten year old formula. But there’s a point where you have to stop and let go as the line between neutral observation and biased judgement starts to fade away. It’s undeniable that Vanguard it’s NOT what it should have been. Too ambitious, too expensive, too out of its time, it just falls short on the excitement factor you should get for a new world right out of the box (and after you paid for it). I started this write up calling Vanguard the most negative-hyped game ever, and that is the direct result of all the claims Sigil and Brad McQuaid made in this 5 years of development. They promised so much that there was no way they could deliver it all, so people made up their mind that it would have been an half baked mess between the masochistic lines of the original EverQuest and some of the unique features of Ultima Online. Spice that up with a Second Coming named World of Warcraft and the overly annoying “We are Next-Gen” mantra and you’ll end up with some millions of unimpressed and genuinely skeptical gamers armed wit pop-corn and ready to witness the flop of the century. With a cynical grin.

But Vanguard is far from being a trainwreck. 8 months ago former publisher Microsoft dropped the ball and Vanguard faced a crisis averted with the new deal with SOE, which injected enough cash to launch the game but not enough to finish it.

So here we are, with the usual paid beta shit you all know very well, bugs everywhere, graphical glitches, broken quests, balance issues, pathing problems, missing arts, rough UI, and a massload of post-launch features coming in some future updates, including post launch tails for the futty races (my personal pet peeves being the lack of chatbubbles and the horrible fonts. Both soon® to be fixed issues). All these reasons, as they are actually the first things you’ll notice upon logging into the game and what probably drove away in disdain lots of betatesters so far, forced me to wear my negative glasses and speak in blue tones about it, and that’s what I did so far.

Still, there’s a lot to enjoy in it. I tried to keep the best for the part where you usually get your coat and head for the door, in the effort of being the more objective I could given that I am enjoying it a lot.

How’s that? Because what I forgot to mention so far is that the world is truly beautiful, enormous, immense, it’s every virtual explorer’s heaven as it is so big and so diverse that it’ll take you months to visit it all even with one of the numerous land, sea or air mounts. I forgot to mention how compelling and engaging some of the quests are, and that even if the lore could be a little more in your face, it’s definitely there to be discovered proven that you have interest in doing so. I forgot to say how huge (and how many) are the dungeons and how much content is in each one of those, how sweet is to pilot a player boat, fly through mountain peaks with flying mounts and settle yourself with non-instanced and higly customizable player houses, or how nice is to have 5 different paperdolls holding your equipment for adventuring, crafting, harvesting, diplomacy and your mount, letting you change your outfit on the fly. Almost forgot to tell how nice is to harvest trees actually chopping them down and see them falling on the ground, or how fun is to be a spy for a noblehouse in a complex plot of politics and intrigue played out through word fights and the entertaining game of cards. And still, I forgot to say how good itemization is, or how great the ten different starting cities are and how interesting are new concepts like Equipment Expertise, reactive combat, defensive target, rescues. How nice is to play in a world without instances and with dungeons to share with everyone still knowing that the quest named mob you are looking for will be triggered for you and just for you when you’ll reach its spawn point. So far I didn’t have to camp a single mob or grind a single xp, as quests perfectly led me from a zone to another and from a level to the next. As I said, it plays scarily similar to World of Warcraft, with 80% less polish but 30% more meat. Yes, it’s dirty, very rough, but I am enjoying it.

I know these are all mere and stupid little dumb diku achievements, and they are obsolete and conservative in 2007. But go tell that to the Borg-like 10 million monster, and let poor failed Vanguard be. It doesn’t eat so much, it doesn’t poop around and eventually, with time, it’d be able to bloom as the “uber-diku” it was supposed to be. Now with 30% more features!

Vanguard, SOE, Brad & Smed

2006-05-06T21:42:00.000+02:00

Notizia di stamattina, anzi di ieri: Vanguard sara' pubblicato dalla SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) e non piu' dalla Microsoft. Che succede e cosa significa questo?

Vanguard e' la creatura di quel Brad McQuaid che tanti anni fa, insieme a Jeff Butler e altri, creo' EverQuest.
La storia e' lunga: nel 1996 McQuaid fu contattato e assunto da John Smedley, che lavorava a una divisione giochi della Sony, per creare un gioco di ruolo massivo e online, e quel gioco si sarebbe chiamato EverQuest, e avrebbe modificato il panorama dei videogiochi per i 10 anni a venire. Se e' vero che McQuaid e' universalmente considerato il padre di EverQuest, bisogna riconoscere un ruolo fondamentale anche a John Smedley. Fu lui a convincere la Sony che era il momento giusto per creare un gioco di quel genere, fu lui a notare McQuaid e Butler, autori fino a quel momento solo di un gioco shareware e un demo (WarWizard 1 e 2) e fu lui a credere in EverQuest anche di fronte alle infinite difficolta' tecniche che come pionieri del settore si trovarono ad affrontare. Il successo, come sappiamo, ando' molto oltre le loro piu' rosee aspettative, e EverQuest e' diventato una leggenda. McQuaid ebbe modo di godersi parecchi soldi col successo di EQ, ma con la sparizione dell'etichetta Verant come sviluppatrice del gioco, assorbita dalla SOE, si ritrovo' a essere un alto dirigente senza pero' piu' le mani nel processo di sviluppo del gioco, senza le stesse competenze e soprattutto senza lo stesso controllo creativo di cui disponeva quando la baracca era sua. Presto Brad si stanco' del nuovo ruolo dirigenzial/prestigioso e in seguito ad alcune decisioni prese in merito al futuro di EverQuest da Smedley (diventato intanto presidente della SOE) e il resto della dirigenza, decise di lasciare il suo incarico nel 2001, all'indomani della terza (mi pare) espansione di EQ. Adesso siamo alla undicesima.

Di tempo ne e' passato parecchio e di speculazioni ne sono state fatte molte. Brad lascio' da miliardario (lo ha ribadito anche oggi nel forum di Vanguard) un posto caldo e sicuro nella piu' importante societa' sviluppatrice di MMORPG del mondo (al tempo oltre a EQ che era ancora sul tetto del mondo, avevano in cantiere anche Star Wars Galaxies che si profilava come unico gioco in grado di detronizzarlo, e Planetside) per iniziare un'altra avventura. Giusto qualche mese, il tempo necessario perche' Jeff Butler finisse di lavorare a una espansione di EQ, e quando questi si licenzio' a sua volta fondarono insieme la Sigil Games Online.

Non vi tedio oltre con particolari che si possono trovare ovunque in rete, ma la storia prosegue con l'annuncio del loro nuovo gioco, Vanguard Saga of Heroes, e di un ritorno alle radici di EverQuest con un gameplay "cattivo", lungo, faticoso, dove le ricompense devono essere sudate e dove i fallimenti vengono puniti. Chiunque abbia giocato al primo Everquest sa a cosa McQuaid si riferisce (e se non lo sa, legga un po' qui dagli appunti personali del sito Brad. Preoccupante.): perdita di XP in caso di morte, lunghe corse per recuperare il cadavere su cui rimane l'equipaggiamento, interminabili "camp" in attesa dello spawn ultra-raro, viaggi in barche che portano piu' ritardi dei treni regionali. Aspetti videoludici che a molti e molte oggi non suonano affatto apprezzabili, ma che hanno accompagnato centinaia di migliaia di persone nei loro primi passi in un mondo virtuale. Brad mira ad accontentare tutti gli orfani di EQ, insoddisfatti della "accessibilita'" di World of Warcraft, della misericordia di EverQuest 2 (giudicato "troppo facile" dai/dalle veterani/e) e di tutti quei giochi che offrono esperienze considerate a breve termine per via della loro facilita'.

Ma esistono giocatori/trici di Vanguard? Voglio dire, i potenzialmente numerosissimi giocatori e giocatrici di cui parla Brad, saranno in quantita' sufficiente a giustificare i lunghissimi tempi e le notevoli risorse investite per sviluppare questo gioco? Esiste davvero un pubblico desideroso di popolare il mondo ostile pensato da Mr. EverQuest, come descritto negli appunti linkati poco sopra ("My thought is that it should take a person working exp hardcore for 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, about 3 years to max out to the top level.") ?

McQuaid ha amato veramente EverQuest, la sua prima incarnazione, quel bambino che lui e Butler avevano pensato e cullato per tanti anni. A lui manca quel gioco ostico, senza margini di errore, che ti fa sentire bene quando ottieni qualche cosa perche' SAI quanto ti e' costata. E' un concetto questo, quello delle ricompense che facciano sentire di aver davvero faticato per ottenerle, che ha ripetuto decine di volte nelle sue descrizioni di Vanguard. Egli e' convinto che ogni giocatore e giocatrice di EverQuest sia dentro di se' senza saperlo anche un giocatore di Vanguard. Che SARA' un giocatore o una giocatrice desideroso/a di partecipare alla sua "Vision" (giuro, la chiama cosi'). E' convinto che non importa quanti siano i giocatori di WoW, di Lineage o di EQ2, che ci sia uno zoccolo duro di giocatori e giocatrici ansiosi di rimettersi seduti/e ad aspettar la barca, di andare a letto alle 6 del mattino nel tentativo di recuperare un cadavere lasciato nelle profondita' di un dungeon, o di fare un gruppo di quattro persone per andare a tagliare un albero che servira' a produrre la gamba di una sedia che servira' per costruire una sedia, uhm.. per sedersi immagino (ammettendo che non serva una quest anche per quello). Ne e' cosi' convinto che e' stato disposto a rompere il suo contratto con la Microsoft (no dico, la Microsoft) e andare a cercare l'aiuto del suo vecchio amico Smed e della SOE da cui era andato via proprio per creare il SUO gioco. Verrebbe da obiettare a McQuaid che se anche la sua previsione fosse giusta, anche se egli riuscisse a portare a Vanguard tutti i 4-500 mila storici giocatori/trici di EverQuest non si tratterebbe comunque di un risultato particolarmente incredibile a fronte dei 6 milioni di Warcrafters, ma e' un'obiezione che potrei permettermi di fare solo se conoscessi il budget di Vanguard, ed e' giusto ritenere la gente della Sigil e della SOE sufficientemente sana di mente per sapere che non sono quelle le cifre a cui aspirare.
Il punto e' se sara' in grado di arrivare 'almeno' alle cifre previste internamente.

Cosa succederebbe infatti se arrivati al lancio le scatole vendute fossero meno di quelle rimaste sugli scaffali, le recensioni sulle riviste specializzate pessime e il passa parola negativo come quello di EQ2? La SOE c'e' gia' passata, e sebbene EQ2 fosse molto meno difficile di EQ1, l'accoglienza fu pessima (soprattutto aggiungo io per via della fama del predecessore, non per reali demeriti) ed e' solo grazie a infiniti cambiamenti "wow-izzanti" che negli ultimi 18 mesi c'e' stato un lento recupero quanto meno sul piano della reputazione.
Non c'e' quindi il pericolo che la storia si ripeta?
Cosi' come EQ2 ha dovuto subire l'onta del cambiamento di rotta imposto dal mercato, cosa puo' tranquillizzare Brad McQuaid e i suoi fans che cio' che e' gia' accaduto una volta, sia con EQ1 (anche se non per motivi srettamente economici, che al tempo non erano un problema, ma probabilmente per eccesso di ambizione) che con EQ2 non capiti anche a Vanguard?
In realta', leggendo ogni singolo messaggio personale che McQuaid ha scritto nelle ultime 24 ore sul forum di Vanguard, si legge che ("proprio per evitare questo", sembra voler dire in ogni risposta, pur senza poterlo scrivere apertamente) la Sigil rimarra' indipendente e Vanguard sara' completato dalla Sigil SENZA alcuna ingerenza SOE, e che questa fara' solo da Publisher, ovvero si occupera' della propaganda e del marketing, nonche' della distribuzione del prodotto finito. Brad specifica piu' volte che SOE e Smedley non avranno alcuna voce in capitolo nello sviluppo del gioco.
Ma l'intera vicenda ha l'aria di una soap opera. Sigil trovo' (ricordo ancora la press release, ahah) il patrocinio di Microsoft per il finanziamento di Vanguard circa due anni fa, o forse tre. Tutti sanno quanto Microsoft non ci sappia fare con i MMORPG cosi' non mancarono le polemiche, ma Brad assicuro' che Microsoft avrebbe fatto solo da finanziatore/publisher. Indovinate? Ora che la rottura e' arrivata, arriva anche la notizia che Microsoft aveva cominciato a nutrire "idee divergenti". Su cosa? Sul gameplay? Sui tempi di consegna del prodotto finito? Probabilmente su entrambi dato che Vanguard e' ancora lontanissimo dal lancio e che molte delle voci che fuoriescono dalla segretissima beta parlano di un gioco incredibilmente noioso.
Cosi' Brad riesce, con capitali esterni NON appartenenti alla SOE, a ricomprare dalla Microsoft tutto cio' che riguarda Vanguard (mi pare si parli di Intellectual Property anche se su questo giurerei che BMQ si contraddice almeno una volta nella miriade di risposte, e di Publishing Rights) e a ridiventare di nuovo padrone completo di se stesso (ma non lo era gia'? E' qui che il capitalismo ti frega sempre. Non sai mai un cazzo). Ora pero' gli manca un publisher. Senza il nome Microsoft, chi lo manda nei negozi questo gioco? E allora una telefonata qui, un accordo la', ed ecco che Brad e Smed ci mettono una pietra o due sopra, si stringono la mano, e vanno all'E3 sorridenti come ai bei tempi quando EQ era la gallina dalle uova d'oro e nessuno dei due riusciva a spendere tutti i soldi che gli stavano piovendo addosso.

C'e' una morale a quesa storia?
Ho passato circa 2 ore a leggere tutti i messaggi che McQuaid, col nickname di Aradune Mithara, ha scritto e sta in questo preciso momento continuando a scrivere sul forum ufficiale di Vanguard per spiegare e giustificare questo gesto. I Vanbois (i fanboys di Vanguard) sono terrorizzati e anche un po' incazzati, e lui diligentemente risponde a tutti ma proprio tutti anche solo due righe per dire, spiegare, ribadire e rispiegare ancora. Non fa che ripetere che e' una vittoria per tutti. Microsoft e' contenta perche' avra' un prodotto che (dice) fara' risaltare le qualita' di Windows Vista quando uscira' (e non rischiano una lira in un gioco in cui non credono piu'). SOE e' contenta perche' puo' aggiungere Vanguard alla sua scuderia di giochi e al suo Station Pass, che per 25 dollari al mese permette di giocare senza costi aggiuntivi a EQ1, EQ2, Planetside, Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Vanguard e a quanto pare anche Gods & Heroes (Nota personale: ricordarsi di parlare di Garriott, NC Soft, e della sua magica intervista in cui ci spiega che il futuro sta nei bouquet di MMORPG. Con buona pace di Blizzard).
E Brad e' felice perche' ora Vanguard e' di nuovo completamente nelle sue mani, l'accordo con la SOE riguarda solo la distribuzione e il marketing del prodotto, puo' perderci tutto il tempo che vuole compatibilmente con le riserve di soldi messegli a disposizione dal nuovo misterioso investitore (ne fa menzione, quando spiega che i soldi per "ricomprarsi" da Microsoft non arrivano da SOE) e completare la "vision" senza ingerenze o pressioni esterne.

E' davvero cosi'? E' una vittoria per tutti?
Probabilmente bisognerebbe essere economisti e avere il naso nei libri contabili di queste societa' per avere la risposta. Le mie considerazioni piu' che superifciali e da osservatore poco competente sono positive. La SOE arricchisce lo Station Pass trasformando una mossa suicida (l'aumento di sette giorni fa del costo dell'abbonamento da 22 dollari a 25 al mese) in qualcosa a cui guardare con grande interesse (Un massivo costa 15 dollari al mese, con Station Pass te ne becchi 6 a meno del doppio...). Sigil si taglia i capelli, e esce di casa la mattina fresca di doccia lasciandosi dietro quei brutti signori che insistevano a voler mettere il naso nella "visione" per correr dietro ai numeroni di WoW. Magari Vanguard fa ancora schifo ai betatester, ma di certo se davvero c'erano pressioni dall'alto, la possibilita' di poter ricominciare a lavorare in un ambiente indipendente dara' nuovi stimoli all'intero gruppo. Sicuramente, ottimismi da press release a parte, e prendendo con beneficio di inventario le emo-considerazioni di McQuaid nel numero infinito di post che e' stato capace di inanellare nelle ultime 24 ore (giuro, sembra che si senta in colpa per quante risposte sta dando :) ), non credo si possa intuire cosa succedera' a Vanguard nei prossimi 12 mesi. Il gioco e' stato anunciato per questo inverno, che stando al calendario significa tra i 7 e i 10 mesi da ora. Quella che era partita come una operazione che era troppo pulita e perfetta per essere vera (Sigil che mette su un all-star team di sviluppatori, Microsoft che offre i suoi NON pochi soldi dopo aver cancellato Mythica APPOSTA per finanziare Vanguard...) e' diventata la piu' grossa, anche in termini economici, incognita dell'intero panorama massivo.
Addirittura, romantico come sono, mi sono creato una fantasia, secondo la quale McQuaid e Smedley sentono la mancanza dei bei tempi andati e delle reciproche facce da schiaffi. Brad alle prese con la SUA cosa ma lontano da casa, in esilio, incerto sulla possibilita' di farcela senza il vecchio Smed a tener su il baraccone del marketing come ai vecchi tempi. Smedley incastrato in un gioco a lui ormai alieno, EverQuest 2, che partito col piede sbagliato (capace di far incazzare gli EverQuester incalliti ancora prima di uscire) e' cresciuto peggio, correndo dietro a WoW come un cavallo azzoppato, dovendo subire l'onta di un makeup costante mirato a scimmiottare il concorrente di successo.
Magari i due si sono incontrati per una birra, hanno ricordato quei mitici giorni del 1997 in cui hanno scritto la storia dei videogiochi, hanno sentito di voler essere vicini nel giorno della nascita del vero figlio di EverQuest (EverQuest e' entrato nella Hall of Fame dei videogiochi quest'anno).
Qualcuno, altrove, suggeriva che questo gesto rappresenta il disconoscimento da parte di Smed di EverQuest 2. Non so se questo sia vero, ma come ho detto mi piace pensare che senta la mancanza di Brad e che la rincorsa a WoW l'abbia cosi' frustrato da fargli dire: < Brad, ci ho pensato. Si', avevi ragione tu. Si fottano i loro 6 milioni di utenti. Facciamo le cose a modo nostro, come ai vecchi tempi. Tu con le Corpse Run e io con i Trains to Zone. Facciamolo!>>

Magari non e' andata cosi', ma Brad parla di Smed come di un amicone ("one of my best friends") nei suoi recenti messaggi, e molti sanno come le cose non stessero esattamente cosi' fino a poco tempo fa. I soldi in passato hanno chiarito piu' di una divergenza, ma a me piace pensare che la nostalgia colpisca anche gli sviluppatori di MMORPG. Soprattutto quando compatibile con le reciproche prospettive economiche.

Come sara' Vanguard, alla fine?
Se c'e' una cosa di cui sono certo e' che non ci si puo' fidare di nessuno a questo punto. Non di McQuaid e della sua visione, che fino a quando e' solo dentro la sua testa e' autentica quanto Team Fortress 2 (vapor!). Non dei betatesters, che sono alle prese con una versione incerta del gioco e sulla quale anche gli stessi devs non sembrano avere le idee chiare. Tra un po' vedrete che cominceranno pure a dare colpa a Microsoft per quel che s'e' visto fino ad ora.
E non ci si puo' fidare dei Vanbois, cosi' orfani dei tempi d'oro di EverQuest 1 che aspettano solo che il Creatore ripeta il miracolo originale, impermeabili a ogni critica e con gli scudi ben alzati a difesa del territorio.

Io faccio parte della schiera degli Affascinati. Sono tra quelli che si sono persi i primi tempi di EverQuest perche' troppo coinvolto con un'altra visione, quella di Richard Garriott e del suo Ultima Online. Questo non mi ha impedito di approdare a EverQuest quando ormai se n'erano andati tutti e aver nonostante cio' capito come mai cosi' tante persone lo avevano amato.
Anche io desidero che McQuaid compia il miracolo, tiri fuori un gioco a cui magari non giochero' mai (sheeeesh, ma chi ce l'ha piu' tutto quel tempo libero) ma da tenere installato per i momenti di massimo masochismo.

Una Corpse Run o un Treno non si negano a nessuno. E chi non sa cosa sono, mmmm, lo scopra perche' vuol dire che s'e' perso qualcosa di bello e importante :)

Universi Massivi e Edizioni Limitate

2006-05-05T09:21:00.000+02:00

Trovarsi all'eta che ho, e scoprire che s'aspetta solo il prossimo mondo massivo e persistente e la prossima Limited Collector Edition da mettere sulla mensola e' inizialmente spiacevole.

Poi, ci si rassegna all'idea di essere passati dall'altra parte. Nemmeno piu' la soddisfazione di essere Personaggi Giocanti. Si diventa NPC. Deal with it.

Speriamo almeno mi scrivano un dialogo decente e mi facciano assegnare quest carine.