A look at MMOs

You may or may not be familiar with the flash based MMO known as Dofus that was pretty popular for a good chunk of time, well the developers are back with their latest game, Wakfu.

Wakfu is an MMO that bases itself on a conflict between four nations vying for control of a flooded world. The gameplay is unique for an MMO as combat is actually based on a series of grids with turn based combat. It plays similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, Ogre Battle Tactics and Disgaea. It’s definitely a turn from the usual and adds a whole new level of strategy to MMO combat.

The game currently boasts 12 different classes that each have drastically different gameplay. Each of the classes has three different elements, each element has five spells and most players focus on a single element as the damage of those elements are boosted by different stats. For example I play an Iop, a very warrior looking character and I focused on Earth, which lets me do significant earth based damage, mostly in area of effect spells.

The game boasts LOTS of pop culture references and strange aesthetic styles, with a lot of my armor so far being absolutely ridiculous looking so far. My main character looks like a crab while my second character looks like a giant canary. I’ve been playing it for a few weeks and my thoughts on it are quite mixed.

The game is free to play but features a content gate. Meaning there’s a huge portion of the game that you won’t even see most of it unless you subscribe. Personally I don’t feel like this is a good business model, I think it could be a lot better if subscribers leveled faster. Not just character leveling but maybe crafting as well. Just double the time it takes to level for free players and let them access to the rest of the world instead of only being able to interact on the starting island.

If you’re looking to play this game by yourself you’d better find a good guild, because playing solo is unbelievably boring and takes forever. Or you could do what I did and join the game with a group of friends. Group combat is so entertaining with the amount of strategy involved and the friendly fire. There’s been plenty of times where my character has unloaded his abilities only to devastate not only my enemies but my friends.

While the pay to play business model has been the industry standard since inception it has changed quite a bit, especially as of late with conversions to free to play and free to play releases.

Free to play is often joked about how much you can actually spend because the item shop can be quite an addictive thing. Penny Arcade even did a strip where they were talking about how much they like League of Legends and how Gabe had spent $6000 on it. The pay to play model may not look so bad in comparison but it took some perfecting.

An intro screen for Legends of Kesmai.

A long time ago America Online had a number of multiplayer games that were free while they were in beta. But when they officially released they began charging a whopping $1.99 an hour. This crushed me because I was really young at a time and I dearly loved a game called Legends of Kesmai that was on AOL but there was no way I was willing to pay that. This is a stellar example of a time when pay-to-play failed, as many, if not all, of the games went under.

Many MMOs now boast a free to play model, and many of them I plan on reviewing or re-visiting and writing about on this blog. Some of the systems are horrible, others work well, and few seem to be perfect.

A screenshot from a particularly crazy battle in APB, which sadly is a rarity.

First I’ll quickly discuss what I view as a horrible free to play model: A competitive free to play game but you pay for access to more power, in some cases a huge edge over other players who don’t pay. One example that always strikes me immediately as a horrible free to play model that makes me really sad is APB: Reloaded. For a mere $50 you can have access to a single permanent gun that isn’t available any other way.

Secondly, there are some games that have a model that’s pretty good, I don’t feel like the game is giving me a competitive edge for paying, it’s giving me more options and more customization. I’d consider a game like Dungeons & Dragons Online to be one of these. I can pay for content to break up the monotony of grinding the same areas on alternate characters.

Finally there is an ideal model out there that seems to have it down perfect and it’s making them a lot of money. I myself have spent nearly $500 on the game and I have no qualms about it, in fact I’m happy because they keep producing a great game, they openly opposed SOPA and they’re just a genuinely cool crowd who’s very involved with their community. I’m talking, of course, about Riot Games with their hit game League of Legends.

League of Legends makes a point of not having the player pay for power. You can buy increased experience gain and increased IP gain but that does not inherently give you power. Levels in League of Legends do not serve the typical purpose of an MMO, a sense of progression to keep you hooked based on a goal oriented psyche. The leveling system of League of Legends serves as a way to separate veteran players from new players with match making. Of course one could always just make an alternate account but the fact of the matter is that a main account is going to have a lot more characters and runes.

To understand the system completely you need to understand the two currencies in League of Legends. There’s Riot Points which are bought with real money, and there’s Influence Points that are won at the completion of every match. With Riot Points you can buy cosmetic alternate appearances for characters, unlock characters (which can get pricey), buy temporary boosts that increase the speed at which you gain IP and Experience or buy “Rune Pages,” a convenience that helps you when you finally get to 30.

Everything but the alternate appearances and temporary speed bonuses can also be bought with IP, so in effect RP can only be used for cosmetics or to accommodate laziness.

Overall League of Legends has the best model I’ve seen thus far and I sincerely hope that other companies will use the model for their own games. In fact I recall seeing an interview with the people behind Planetside 2 and they referred to League of Legends as a great model for free to play. This makes me have immensely high hopes for Planetside 2, especially as someone who fell in love with the original Planetside later in its life and has been dying for something like it.

The login screen, which immediately shows the player the kind of aesthetic they're getting into.

Today I’m going to be talking about a new free game that just released, Age of Empires Online!

Age of Empires Online so far feels very true to the series, it felt like I was playing a sequel to Age of Empires 2. The controls are all very similar and it’s easy to pick up as a big time player of the original games. I used to love Age of Empires 1 & 2, the third game I had mixed feelings about but it was entertaining.

Age of Empires Online features a new aesthetic. In the original three they went for a realistic look but were limited by the graphics technology of the time. The new game features a cartoony plastic-like aesthetic that games like World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2 have popularized.

A loading screen in the unique aesthetic style of the game.

The game has some features very typical of an online game like persistence and leveling. Like Age of Empires 3 you have a capital city that levels up. Your capital city is where you collect the majority of your quests, which are similar to campaign levels. There’s a wide variety of missions, some of which are repeatable. It’s definitely akin to the original games in terms of naval warfare reliant levels, mixed levels, land reliant levels.

There are PvP matches which I’d assume are on randomly generated maps. However I haven’t played them yet and for one very good reason.

My capital city, Yezlofa.

The worst part of this game is the “cash shop” which is why I haven’t touched the PvP. The game has taken a startling approach to the cash shop where you can buy power. There are many things that are locked unless you have a premium civilization. These premium civilizations are $20 a pop which sounds reasonable, but you’d have to buy each civilization if you don’t want to play just one.

Right now there’s only two civilizations but there’s two more coming, leaving you at a whopping $80 to unlock them all. Or you could pay $100 and apparently unlock everything for the first 6 months. This leaves you at $16.67 a month which is more than most premium MMOs.

My character embarks on a quest in a fashion very typical to the gameplay of Age of Empires games.

Personally I feel like this is a bad business move as the whole point of having a free game with micro-transactions is the transactions are supposed to be small. If you’re charging $20 to unlock the full game for just one of the four factions you are likely alienating a lot of potential customers. The thing about a free game is that your target audience will come to you, if you want to sell a lot you should keep things cheap. The people who are going to buy a $20 civilization will buy a $5 civilization and a bunch of cosmetic crap that doesn’t make any difference. Whereas the people who won’t buy the $20 civilization likely won’t buy anything.

So as a person who is hesitant to buy a civilization, I likely won’t buy anything because I’ll feel like a second-class citizen because I don’t have the full civilization unlocked and will get my butt handed to me no matter what other things I get.

An example of the treasure scattered around quests, the treasure is persistant and stored in your city.

Not everything is calm in the Prison in Shimmersand.

Well I’ve been playing another week of RIFT with some distractions and am ready to write about my impressions.

Firstly, level 50 feels GOOD. I hit level 50 in RIFT on Tuesday at 12:20 a.m. This was great timing because it was at about 12:25 a.m. that Steam finally unlocked Dragon Age 2.  This gave time for other players to catch up to me so I could do some dungeons and not have queues for PvP.

So I’ve tried the new Warfront that becomes available at level 50, and it is by far the most confusing thing I have ever seen. It’s not explained to you at all before you jump in and players are in such a race to the middle that it’s never really explained in detail prior to starting.

I ride my shiny new mount through Silverwood.

On the bright side I’ve joined a guild, and my experiences on a PvP server have improved dramatically. Very seldom am I attacked in the middle of doing something else, they seem to fear retribution from guildmates. We road around Shimmersand closing rifts and killing players wherever we would find them, and overall I had a blast.

For the sake of leveling I had been playing a Riftblade/Reaver because they are tough to kill in PVE and able to kill large groups of enemies at once. But since I have hit 50 I’ve gone back to my tried and true, the souls I used in beta and have fallen in love with at 50… Champion/Warlord. Essentially I’m a monster of a man with a 2h sword who’s able to separate enemies from the pack.

The cairn hidden upon the top of a mesa in Scarlet Gorge

Overall I’m still having a blast of a time in the game and I haven’t even touched any raid or end-game dungeon content. There’s “expert” difficulty dungeons which are the low level dungeons revamped for level 50 players with harder encounters and equipment more relevant to players of that level.

Even while playing Dragon Age 2 I was having cravings to play RIFT and now that I’ve beaten the game it’s given me back my free time.

If you’d like to try building your own rift character, check out ZAM’s awesome Soul Calculator here: http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html