Idle Musings of the Active Mind

For the uninitiated, go to AION Online and check it out…then come back and read this.

It was a dark time for the gaming masses. Although World of Warcraft continues unabated, a few brave souls have driven the fog of insanity from their hidden footholds in the cerebral cortex and pursued a new course toward gaming freedum. Evading countless would-be critics and their lunatic fanatacism for Blizzard’s games, a group of stalwart gamers led by a strong conscience has established a new stronghold in the Abyss of Aion’s realms. The evil lords at Blizzard, obsessed with squashing this young upstart of a game, have promised new quests and envisioned new lands for its zombie subscribers to explore…

No doubt about it, World of Warcraft has and will continue to hold a solid place in gamers’ wallets. As smurfy as it is, the game is casual enough to be played by a LOT of people (and admittedly hardcore enough for the raiding crowd…though anyone with EQ–the original!–raid experience will likely scoff at the thought of WoW “raids”).

AION, though, has a chance I think. I’ve played it for a few days now off and on. I’m slowly discovering some of the nuances of the game that may give it a fighting chance. So far, the PvE parts of the game are engaging and the quests are challenging. As long as they don’t nerf the shit out of it in the coming months and make it all smurfy like Blizzard did to WoW, it may be able to compete. There are still EQ and EQ2 players out there looking for an MMO alternative, though, and I’m not sure AION will fill the bill.

Even so, there is another crowd of players who are bored stiff with WoW and want another reasonably casual game…something different…something… 

AION might be it. I know it has piqued my interest enough to dedicate some time to continuing to explore and discover. So far I can only see 2 things worth bitching about:

1) the gold spammers are ruining chat for anyone new who creates a character and logs in. You’ve only got a half dozen lines of chat per “screenful” and there is enough spam going on that you have little or no chance of reading anything meaningful as the spam spews on forever…or until you figure out how to right clik on the names and block them.

2) The “feel” of the game is lighter in atmosphere than Warhammer, but so far it also feels almost as linear. I can’t tell if it really IS that linear, but so far it seems like there is one road and you follow it from one leveling area to the next. If you want to strike off on your own and get off the beaten path, you find mountains are in your way and you can’t go any farther. Bummer. I wanted to explore and take my chances with the repetitive death roulette wheel.

In the final analysis, though, only time (time spent gaming in AION’s world) will tell the tale of the tape. Will it’s gamine rubber meet the proverbial road to success? Or will it just drift around like so much hot air in a balloon, only die a certain death from the pellet gun of the people’s fickle fancies?

As for me, I’ll be gaming a bit to see for myself.

What the hell happened?

I mean, from where I sit, MMO’s are under siege. The 800 pound gorilla in the room, World of Warcraft (WoW), came in and showed what kind of money could be made if the game were really, really successful. Unfortunately, what seems to also have happened is that it has be come the gold standard of what all games should be; that its game content is so far and away superior to anything else out ther that game development companies have a hard time getting financed to the extent necessary to put out a really, really good competing product.

Now, let’s be clear here. What I’m talking about is content, not popularity. And oddly, if you ask the veteran gamers who play MMO’s, many of them will tell you flat out that WoW is rife with its own share and flavor of problems. And topping the that list is the lack innovative content. Wrath of the Lich King, WoW’s latest expansion (I don’t count Ulduar, it was free) is the poster child for WoW’s no-innovation-here approach to marketing and development.

EverQuest, hands down and bar none, was the best game that was ever released. The nay-sayers on this point will say, “But WoW has 11 million or more subscribers. EQ never had that, so how can you say it was the best game?!” Remember, I’m not talking about popularity of the game. And if you want some insight into how that game rocketed to the top of the popularity charts, read “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. It will give you a whole new perspective on how products gain popularity on the scale WoW has been able to achieve.

Don’t get me wrong. I like WoW. I’ve been playing that damn game since it was in open beta. *sigh* But I’d still be playing EQ if Sony hadn’t tried to market the crap out of it by introducing new content that ruined the ambiance of the game. Planes of Power was the final nail in the coffin. The expansion itself was pretty good, but adding the knowledge books that let level 1 characters go from one end of the world to the other without risk in a matter of just a couple minutes slit the game’s wrists soundly. The final cut across the jugular was adding the Bazaar and giving players an easy way to buy and sell stuff in a way that did not require social interaction. East Commonlands used to be BUZZING with activity and people, but once the bazaar went in, people no longer had a reason to be social outside of grouping for instance/dungeon runs.

It is a travesty against the Internet culture that WoW does not require any real social engagement. Many would argue this point, but I’d bet a parrot to a pirate those same people were not EQ players. EQ forced people to socialize, at least in the early days. You had to haggle face to face (well, avatar to avatar, at least) if you wanted to buy, sell, or trade things with another player. If you wanted to hunt monsters, complete quests, even work on acquiring items for tradeskills, you needed to seek out a companion or two to hunt, harvest, and quest with.

In WoW you can go from level 1 to level 80 without ever needing to group even once. You might not be able to see all of the content, but that much is no different than EQ. In both games if you want to see every zone and instance in the game, you need to join a raiding guild. If you don’t like to raid like its a second job, then you won’t see all of what either game has to see.

We’ve seen a few games come and go that had promise, but failed in their execution. Arguably, those failures are not entirely the fault of the company who developed the game. The games’ producers push like hell to get the game to market and seemingly never once realize that when the game fails it is largely due to their rush to get the game out the door. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is an excellent example of this.

It had all of the pre-release marketing hype and popularity to be the next great game. The designers created the core of what could have become one helluva great game. But once again the producers and financiers of the game pushed to get the game on the shelves before it was ready. Gamers will not stick with a game that only has promise, it has to deliver. They might hang tough for a month or two–maybe even three–but if the game’s bugs, glitches, and overall game design doesn’t get worked out and meet the expectation set by all the pre-release hype, they will drop it altogether without any hesitation. People will not pay a monthly fee for a promise of something good to come. They’ll go play something that’s mediocre, but playable without glitches and bugs.

So we are stuck with the 800 pound gorilla and it’s lack of innovative content. Blizzard is doing themselves no favors by continuing to regurgitate the same old content over and over again. Oh sure, it might look a little prettier, but once you’ve done a quest in WoW, you’ve done a quest in WoW. The tradeskills have no real depth to them and can be maxed out with relative ease. There really isn’t much challenge to it. Leveling requires no assistance. Killing monsters can be done without any fear of getting punished with any substantive penalties. And unless you’re a complete dweeb, PvE combat is a guaranteed success in every battle. The only way my mage dies these days is if he tries to kill more than 4 mobs at once. Killing 1-4 at a time is guaranteed outcome. Killing 5 at a time is dicey at best, and usually ends badly.

So what’s the draw? Why play WoW?

Well, it’s combat “feel” is good. The game runs smoothly (most of the time). Customer service isn’t horrible. The world is asthetically pleasing to look at–lots of pretty colors and artistic detail. The quests are entertaining, if not especially challenging. And if you’re in a decent guild, you can sit in Stormwind (or Orgrimmar, if you prefer) and chat to your heart’s content with your buddies until something interesting to do presents itself.

Every few months or so I go back to the other games–EQ, EQ2, Vanguard, LOTR, DAoC, et al…and see what changes have been implemented. At this point, EQ2 is an extremely playable game. The challenge is a bit greater than WoW, but it is such a poor shadow of what its predecessor had that after a few hours (or days, if you’re really persistent) you find yourself waxing nostalgic for EQ (the original).

I keep waiting and hoping someone will create what EQ2 should have been–a challenging game that required social interaction and had good graphics, innovative content, tradeskills with depth, and a storyline that just kills.

*sigh*

I’ll just continue to dream…