October 2004
What The Hell

October, scariest month of the Year. Top story of October has probably been the Guild Wars World Preview Event. It started earlier than announced, on the 28th, and has ended yesterday. While the game and it's style do not attract me personally, there is a lot of hype surrounding NCSoft's newest creation. For one, this is because the game will be subscription free. You buy it once, and never have to pay a cent again. Unless, of course, you want to play one of the many expansions that will be released. This business model has not been successfully attempted in the massively multiplayer industry, and so we're awaiting the Guild Wars launch eagerly to see how it develops.

Focus has been on the game-play, though, not the business model. A lot of Guild Wars' fans would pay to play as well, I guess. The game-play of Guild Wars is following the excessively successful example Lineage 2: Point 'n Click, Hack 'n Slash and a good load of pretty graphics. It doesn't take you long to figure, and it has never been declined, that this game (just as Lineage 2) will be built around the competitive playing style. That means, that you can rest assured, that there is always someone crushing 30 abbreviations and numbers into a single phrase on the public channels. This phrase looks like absolute nonsense to a newbie, but shows the players' wealth and status to everyone else. And worst of all, for the type of player that I am – it signifies the impossibility of role-playing in this game.

Is role-playing dead, in role-playing games?

This is not going to be a rant about the beloved power gamer type, and how I choose to not avoid them just to be able to bitch about them. Role-playing, in the end, is a thing that varies in definition from person to person. For one, the simple act of playing in a role-playing game is role-playing, for the other, role-playing is the die-hard usage of medieval language. All definitions however have one thing in common: you are playing a role. With AOL making it easier to access the internet, and computer games becoming a mainstream "sport", there has been an extreme flood of people to the endless space of the internet. The effect of this has it's good and bad parts, like it is with everything. Specifically for massively multiplayer games, this is the growth in subscription numbers and therefore a steep rise in money that flows back into the development of new and the maintenance of already released massively multiplayer games. On the other hand, most of the new blood is not coming for the role-playing experience. Not for the glory involved with the slaying of a dragon, but for the ego boost involved when you climb up the ladder of Dark Age of Camelot. The kind of player that we knew from Counterstrike, has made it's way into MMORPGs, always trying to find the fastest way to the top in order to "pwn you". Of course, reason for this little drift away from the happenings of the month, is also the Guild Wars Preview Event. But enough of this.

You have resurrected Warhammer Online, you gain 40,000 experience points.

Might be what Climax has seen, but isn't. In reality, Warhammer Online has never been dead. The announcement of the cancelation a few months ago, now seems to have been more of a preemptive strike. Climax has announced that they have never stopped development of the title, and that even the original team still exists. The only thing that has changed, apparently, is the loss of financial backing from Games Workshop (who also own the rights to the whole Warhammer franchise).

This not only is good news to the fans of Warhammer (remember, it's Warhammer, not Warhammer 40,000) but also to the overall massively multiplayer landscape. One can only hope that Codemasters and Microsoft would announce that their titles Dragon Empires and Mythica are still in development, but from what we've heard from both sides, this is not going to happen. Codemasters made it clear that the technical difficulties (weak server architecture, impossible to launch Dragon Empires as a massively multiplayer game) can not be resolved, and hence development of Dragon Empires has been ceased. Microsoft on the other hand has not given any official statement as to why they have canceled their title Mythica. Our speculation is the lawsuit with Mythic Entertainment, creators of Dark Age of Camelot, over the Mythica name (which they have won).

I for one can live with this, and will jump in circles impatiently until I get my Warhammer Online E3 movie fix. Remember their trailer? It was great, I loved it.

"My girl left me, because we stopped talking to each other."
"Why is that?"
"She plays Horde, and I play Alliance.."

Tough luck, but the absolutely coolest thing that happened lately. Well, not this made up conversation, but the fact that the two factions in World of Warcraft can not communicate with each other. Not only that, they recently made it so you can not have both Horde and Alliance characters on your account. This will make for some very very ..very interesting Player versus Player situations.

While we have been facing the problem of "Spies" in the earlier beta, especially when we were about to raid into the lands of the Horde. This is not possible anymore. This, paired with the great naming policy, will probably make me play World of Warcraft at release. It effectively removes two of the things that I thought would ruin the game for me, partly. Most people shiver when they hear the name Blizzard paired with "massively multiplayer", especially those of us (which includes me) who have been playing Diablo 2 a lot. I have played Diablo 2 since it has been released, for about 2 years. While the first year was relatively good, the downward spiral soon jumped in (most people say this happened around the 1.06 patch). More and more of the so called "B.Net Kiddies" flooded our ranks. Korean smilies, broken english and general idiocy spread like a disease and people were forced to play in password protected games if they wanted to have fun. So, everyone naturally assumes that the same crowd will be present in any game that Blizzard let's loose on the public. While this might still happen in World of Warcraft, we will not be forced to deal with them the way we had to in Diablo 2. For one, the fact that World of Warcraft will have a monthly fee will keep away the cheap kind, and the naming policy and ability to leave public channels will also keep most of the annoyance from our eyes.

Boo!

Scared yet? No? Well, depending on what MMORPG you have been playing yesterday, you might have seen guest appearances of the spooky creatures. GMs in Saga of Ryzom have been holding storytellings, and the all famous backpack model replacement has happened in Planetside, again. For Christmas they had fancy packages, and for this Halloween they replaced the backpacks with Jack-o-Lanterns.

Jack-O-Lantern Backpack

This is it for October, enjoy the new week and stay loyal to Hell.