A little bit of fun

Okay, I was messing with soundbooth having heard all those slow-down-songs-and-get-really-cool-sounding-tracks stuff that’s been going around. I decided to try one myself

Except I sped up Shine on you crazy diamond by 300%

 

Realtime Worlds goes into Administration

As you can guess from the title, Realtime Worlds has gone into Administration. Now, when you first hear about this news on National TV News you know it’s a big deal. In a news post on the official site, Realtime Worlds has stated that due to the Administration process it is possible to keep the servers up and running (and patches coming in) with the hopes that someone buys the game out.

Now I did pre-order the game, but due to mitigating circumstances (like the flakiness of mobile broadband) I’ve been unable to play it after the first week. However, during the beta I was mildly pleased with what was essentially the essence of Counter-strike, the driving of GTA and the customisation of… well… there really hasn’t been anything like it at all. Not unless you count Warhammer model painting, and even then you can’t dress them up in Pizza Delivery outfits, or Union Jack Punk wear, or Star Trek Uniforms.

The game itself was panned by reviewers as being unfinished, which I kind of agree with, complaining about the lack of gameplay modes and the poor quality of some that were there (Escape missions being the worst offender).

The game is mostly PvP, you get sent out on missions to hunt down and foil the plans of Criminals, or, if you’re a criminal yourself, go out and do crimes, or foil the Enforcers attempts at solving crimes. These manifest in a number of mission types. Area control  types (of which there are about 3 different sub types, like single area, 3 area, or best of 5 areas), Item control types like Deliver the package(s) or fight for the package (where whoever has the package has to drop it at their base, but has a big honking target on them), World McGuffin types, like arson, spray logos, defuse/detonate bombs. All of these are great game modes that encourage no-holds barred fighting on the streets. Where it falls down is the final (and most common, as they’re normally finalés) type: Chase/Kill missions where the objective is to take down x enemies. While this may be good on paper, what it actually encourages is camping or fleeing. Hiding in inaccessible places or getting in a car and running away (this also counts for grab and hold package missions that run on a timer rather than a drop off). Hiding and camping wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t a plethora of 1-entrance only rooftops. Like the top of City Hall in Financial (which normally has two or three groups hiding up there). They pop their heads out at their leisure and snipe down any oncomers, all the while watching the one way in, which is, essentially, a jumping puzzle.

Why is it a jumping puzzle? Because one type of customisation allows you to spray your logo on billboards, and part of the billboard thing is actually GETTING there. This means the city is full of difficult to manoeuvre terrain, like air vents, or boxes, or scafolding, many of which lead to rooftops holding billboards which can easilly double as camping spots. Solutions are many. My favourite is making every roof accessible, meaning if they camp one you can climb another and unload ten shades of hell from all directions.

The other problem is fleeing. There is a mission type that encourages fleeing. It’s escape missions, and it’s always enforcers doing the chasing. If the criminals can go long enough without causing any trouble (you know, shooting things, running over things, stealing things) they win, if the enforcers get the criminals to cause trouble and the time runs out. The other way to win is to kill x number of the enemy, but, in my experience in beta, 80-90% of the escape missions resulted in running.

The game is fun though, when you get a proper mission. The customisation is excellent, the weapon selection is fantastic and varied (including Less-than-lethal for the enforcers) and it has great potential.

It just needs someone to come, pick it up and run with it.

 

Cataclysm, Classes and Characters

Spinks is having a go at analysing various ways of choosing your next character, so I thought, for my first post in a long while, to write about the way I choose a class.

First off, I’m quite happy tanking, DPSing or healing. All roles are fun to play for me, however Healing and DPS will always be my favourites, and I love how in Cataclysm healers will be encouraged to DPS in their quiet moments by giving mana back on DPS spells.

Because I’m happy doing anything, I’m a big fan of classes that can do two or more things (not necessarily in the same spec mind). This should be clear as my main in WoW is a Balance druid with a Resto 2nd spec (of which I’m competent, but hardly spectacular at), my 2nd 80 was a Deathknight, Main tank, off DPS.

It mainly comes from the fact that when I played City of Heroes it was a game where one class did one thing, where while you could jiggle about with your powers and make offensive more powerful than defensive, actually playing an offensive defender (the ‘healing’ class) was nigh on impossible when I played it. You had to group, there was no other way, no soloing missions, I couldn’t even down a basic levelled mook, nothing. From then on I pretty much stuck with hybrids so I can flip-flop between as needed.

Not only that, but I’ve played both a Rogue and a Mage in WoW (two of the three single role classes) up to a decent level and I really just don’t find the prospect of end-gaming with them any fun. Warlocks, maybe, their trees play very  I like to bring lots of things to a group, not just DPS (and yes, mages bring nice buffs, but it’s hardly a major change in playstyle).

My second criteria after versatility is name. Either funny or meaningful. Crafting a character from the limited visual choices in most MMO’s is hard, but a name can bring it out (not that I intend even to RP, it just helps me better connect with the character). If I can’t think of a proper name for it I leave the creation until later.

Names like Wightknight for my DK, Bantam for my Warrior, Lurgielass my undead Rogue (Lurgie as in Disease and as a pastiche of all those Legolas alternatives out there), Gearheart for my Gnome Mage, Mitch Hellbringer for my Axe-wielding kilt wearing Scottish barbarian in Champions Online, or Leviticus for my Paladin (or indeed, my Empath Defender in CoH).

This brings me on to Cataclysm, and the character I’ll be creating when that comes out.

Firstly, it has to be something I’ve not created before to and raised to any significant level. So It has to be Priest (previously only up to about 20) as I’ve leveled every other class up to alteast 60 (yah yah, too much time blah blah… I lived in Berwick for 9 months, it gets boring down there)

Secondly, the character, as it’s the expansion, will have to be a Goblin (won’t catch me rolling a proper Alliance character any time soon ) and all that entails. Goblins are greedy, tech savvy and selfish. Not really things that go well with Priestly masters of the holy light. So doing a serious name (like Leviticus) wouldn’t really fit. It’ll have to have a comedy name for a comedy race.

As with many of my characters names they normally come when I least expect it. You get that feeling that you just know it’s right. It just clicks. This name clicked for me, and I’ve already reserved it on Khadgar EU. “Crucifixit”

 

Summertime Blues

There’s been alot of talk in the MMO world about the up and coming WoW Expansion Cataclysm. Now, I won’t be talking about that today. Frankly, Blizzard keep changing the goalposts with regards to it so I’m not going to start blubbing about stuff until we’re sure it’s going in. Also, RealID forum names was bad, I get it. Internet activism works. Hurrah!

You may (or may not) be wondering what the goddamn hell I’ve been doing these last months. Well, I’ve been dilligently working and frantically saving to buy a house and as such I’ve not had much time to try out any MMO’s since I left the APB Beta.

Incidently, APB is now out, and although I only got to play it for a day before I moved into a house with no internet connection (boo) It’s looking quite shapely and fun from the start. Luckilly you don’t have to set up a subscription and those 50 free hours I got for pre-ordering carry over so no big loss there.

What’s really got me posting again is the news that Star Trek Online is releasing season 2. Now, that game, for me, had two big bugbears. Zero end-game content (fixed somewhat in Season 1) and a bland, flat mission system of kill kill kill pew pew pew RARGH! I’m a Klingon and I’ll talk before shooting you, and outside some awesome moments of glory (The doomsday device, retaking DS9, hell, most of Cardassian space tbh) the random missions were all a little samey.

Now they’re adding in a new mission mode. Diplomacy! Going back to the old Picard way of doing things I believe. Meeting new civilisations, being diplomatic, gaining Star Fleet kudos and buying more gear. The rewards are the same but the method is new and shiny! They’re also adding in new mini-games for resource gathering and they’re adding ‘Dabo’ tables (you may remember it from DS9 as a kind of loud sparkly form of roulette) where you can win Latinum (another form of in-game currency, sheesh guys, for a post-capitalist utopia the Federation sure are focused on accumulating currencies. Although, if you could just replicate the best stuff right away it’d make for a boring MMO)

It’s the diplomacy I’m most interested in. From what I’ve seen on the forums it’s the most unforgiving part of the game yet. Before you actually make contact you have to research the species in the database (IE, Read the bloody Quest log). When you beam down you’ll be practically surrounded by glowing interaction items and switching the wrong one off will lead to a failure. It certainly seems more involved than before and it might add a bit of freshness and variety to what was becoming a slightly stale old game.

When I get the internet back it might be worth throwing out a few quid for another month of play

-edit, this also appears to be my 100th blog post. Go me…

 

FPS Doug sends his regards

Hurrah for Valve. They’ve finally updated Counter Strike Source and brought it into the new 2009 Source Engine!

They fixed the ludicrously random hit detection, they standardised the tick-rates (which affects Rate-of-fire, speed, reloading etc, ensuring a more even experience cross-server), they’ve also improved the netcode. They’ve included over 140 achievements to the game too

A number of people are not happy about it. Complaining about EVERY aspect of this update. However, the only two valid complaints I’ve heard so far are that 1) clamping everyone to a 66-tick will kill competitive play and 2) the engine update has ruined peoples FPS.

As 100-tick was the norm, and it was the only way to play without lagging so much that when you peeked your head out you’d get shot. Valve assure that the new netcode will offset these problems. However, logic never quelled a howling mob.

Also, since they’ve updated the game engine, and basically DirectX 7 is no longer supported, which means that people on really old PCs have experienced a slight FPS drop. This is a semi-serious issue. People with the same-spec PC are now jittering and juddering.

Remember though, that a computer that can’t handle Direct X 8 was likely created around the time when Windows 98/2k was the norm. Sure, they may have updated the OS to XP but come on, your FPS dropped a little, and you can still drop the quality slightly.

Most of the crying on the forums besides these technical issues are in the form of “I don’t like the interface” or “Achievements suck, this is a game for babies now”. Firstly, 90% of the new interface elements can be reverted to the old form (like the server browser, netgraph etc) and although there’s no option to revert the scoreboard, it CAN be reverted back using some magical hacks.

Now, normally I only play CS:S at lunchtimes, and so far I’ve found it to be just the same as when I played it the day before. Okay, a few mods hadn’t been updated, but by the evening the servers I usually play on were back to normal. There are a number of other bugs thrown up by the update too, but Valve are Valve, and I give them the benifit of the doubt that they’ll fix it in a few weeks.

 

A good friend

With 15 dead thanks to the actions of the Israeli Navy, and one of my best friends – Hassan Ghani – on the flotilla, with no information from him save his last Facebook post on Sunday, “ISRAELI SHIPS SIGHTED ON RADAR, APPROACHING”, we are hoping he is amongst the captured, and not among the dead.

 

Shoot it! With the gun! That’s what the bullets are for!

As APB careers inevitably towards release (29th June in the US, July 2nd for Europe) and the unannounced Open Beta looms even closer. While I don’t have any more Beta Keys to give away, I do have something to say about it.

It isn’t an MMO.

Honestly, this should be no surprise to anyone who’s read any of the FAQ, and it’s certainly not a bad thing. I really just want to clarify the points the FAQ brings up and point out what exactly they mean by some of it. Outside of customisation (which has little bearing on how you play), you buy weapons and guns, go on PvP Missions -and it is PvP only - to increase your standing and rating, with small but crucial differences between the two sides. Think of it like Counterstrike, or Battlefield, (in3rd Person) but instead of fixed small maps you have a huge 1.5km wide city map with hundreds of smaller set-pieces. Imagine having to drive a car between de_dust and de_aztec, passing through de_dust2 and de_cbble.

Because of it’s heavy instancing and focus on different mechanics than normal MMO’s Realtime Worlds, the creators of APB, have tried tried out a few acronyms to describe the game. Persistent Online Shooter was shot down due to the acronym, while Persistent Online World seems to be their favourite.

The mantra of APB is “The player is the content” – which basically means they’ve given us a big shiny sandbox to play in. New players will be at a slight disadvantage, but not much, as a Rating 10 person can hold their own against a 140 rating if they drop their guard. It won’t be a cakewalk, but this is a game where tactics can easily triumph over gear.

Again, if you want to know more about the game, check out the full FAQ on the official site or go to the homepage and watch some of the videos.

They’ve not updated their payment scheme on the main site yet, but as other sites have reported on it, I am confident it’s safe to talk about it.

They’re doing a dual payment scheme, you either pay a flat monthly rate like a normal MMO, or you can pay in 20 hour chunks for substantially less. What this will likely mean is that until you hit maximum rating, or just start to level off, or want to take a short hiatus, you can switch to the other payment scheme, pay for 20hrs and you could easily stretch that over a couple of months if you’re playing a couple of hours a week. (say, at the weekend) It’s a smart move, and will encourage new players to stick with the game and come back to it even if they only play for a few hours at a time.

It’s fair to say I am excited about the game. It’s not flawless. No game is. Until the NDA is removed I can say no more. If you like Multiplayer Shooters, you’ll like this game. If a more traditional MMO is what you’re looking for you might not.

I’ll keep a lookout for more Closed Beta Keys, but considering there’s a month till release and the Open Beta is likely to start in a couple of weeks I doubt they’ll be giving more away.

You can pre-order the game from most online stores, and from the APB website itself

 

WoW: Cataclysm Screenshots

So a bunch of details have been released about Cataclysm, including some preliminary talent trees, profession details, area maps and screenshots.

The MMO-champion page will take some time to fully load, so let me run down the basics for you. Note: This may be slightly spoilerific.

New zones include Kezan, the Goblin home city, which showcases some new Goblin architecture, and looks like a cross between Fallout 3 and Loony Tunes. Vashj’ir, home of  the Naga is entirely underwater. It looks like the two Gunships from Icecrown are set to make a return hovering over Deepholme. Gilneas is suitably creepy and gothic showing some new human/Worgen buildings. The Lost Isles (the Goblin starting area) look suitably lush and green, showing off the new water shaders to great effect. The Twilight Highlands with it’s massive hole, looks like where Deathwing erupts from deepholme and is most likely the staging area for invasion. Hyjal is back and looks to be the most varied landscape of the new areas, with lush green groves to burning fiery pits down to vast demonic wastelands. Tol Barad, the new Wintergrasp, looks… unfinished. Twin Peaks looks like a new Battleground. An armour plated Horde windmill versus a grassy-topped hobbit hole? Might be a capture-the-flag variant.

New Instances include the new Uldum instance, Halls of Origination which look like something out of Stargate. Lots of Egyptian themed heads on display too, expect some kind of conclusion or continuation of the Titans story chain here. Blackrock returns as Blackrock Caverns where it looks like Deathwing is screwing around with more dragons. Blackwing Descent looks like it might be in Blackrock, perhaps replacing Blackrock Depths. Throne of the Tides looks like the Vashj’ir instance, entirely underwater. The Deepholme instance looks to be where Deathwing spent his time brooding. Grim Batol looks suitably dwarven but obviously abused, expect Orcs and Dragons and quite possibly Deathwing himself to show up. Skywall, another elemental instance, again looks nice but unfinished.

As for the Old areas, well, there are some noticeable differences. Lots of places are flooded, many horde towns have been reinforced or destroyed (poor Camp Taurajo), Nessingwary’s camp has been expanded, Orgrimarr has been badassified, Azshara has… a Golf course?

All of the artwork shown so far has again been notched up from Wrath of the Lich King, and even then I’m certain we haven’t seen all the new effects, models, powers and environments they have to offer yet. Cataclysm looks to be, at the very least, a very pretty expansion.

Everywhere has some change, some more drastic than others, but it does look like the world has evolved slightly. However, the one thing, the one thing I’ve been asking for, using as an example of the stagnation of the world for the past three years still hasn’t been FIXED – lazy fat Humans.

 

APB – Release date and Payment Announced

Massivly revealed today All Point Bulletin’s release date and payment scheme – We’ll be playing it in North America on June 29 and on July 2 in Europe. Which is weird, because Real-time Worlds is a Scottish Developer, operating from Dundee. The City I called home for 5 years. Infact, I could take a 2 hour drive, bang on their doors and go “Oi, give us the game now!”.

Also, don’t count on it being like the STO, Champions or Fallen Earth release, where all the world go on the same servers, and thus those in Europe could get in after the head-start. No, as far as I’m aware Americans and Europeans will be seperated from the start, in a similar manner to WoW. I can’t go into much more detail as the NDA still holds, but that’s the way it’s looking.

The payment model however is a work of genius. You have two options. Standard MMO Sub, 30 days, £8, just like anything else. Option Two is the casual sub. You pay £5.59 for 20 in-game hours. That equates to 28p/hour. So if you’re going to play more than 29 hours a month (that is, atleast 1 hour every day) you go for the main sub. If not you go for the casual sub.

This means that you can pay for the game, play the game and if you love it, keep paying the monthly sub, or if you fancy playing it at lunchtime during work, or for a few hours at the weekend, then fine, switch to the pay-per-hour model. Likewise if you get MMO burnout. I know when I’ve burned out an MMO that there are those times I get the itch and I need to scratch it, the 20-hour is just what I’m looking for.

Hopefully this model will succeed and other MMO’s will pick it up too. It’s worked so far in the Far East, there’s little or no reason it shouldn’t work here too.

Here’s to little morsels of MMO’s. Here’s to the Sushi model. Or if we’re talking about Westernising it, should that be the Tapas model?

 

All Points Bulletin – Closed Beta Giveaway

If you’ve followed anything of what I’ve said over the last two months (which, I’ll be honest isn’t terribly much) then you’ll know I’ve been playing the All Points Bulletin Closed Beta.

It is a fantastically fun game, even though it’s still in Closed Beta. Problems are there, ofcourse, it’s still beta, and if anyone out there wants to get in on the act and help Realtime Worlds polish this game to a spit shine now is your chance. I have 1 extra European Closed Beta Key to give away to someone.

It’s Criminals Vs Enforcers, so, in order to win the key, I want to hear your favourite Gangster movie quotes. Just reply with your quote, the movie it’s from and why you think it should win and your E-mail Address. (Your Email Address will NOT be published)

Get Quoting. The Competition will run until Saturday 24th at 5pm BST, at which point I’ll choose and announce a winner.