10/10 Blogging project: One game a Day

courtesy of ggftw.com

In order to get out of his gaming rut, Syp from the popular BioBreak blog has been involved in a new project where he plays a different free-to-play mmorpg game every evening. He has challenged other bloggers to join him and I thought this was a magnificent idea to try out new games and to try and break out of my own gaming rut. I thought long and hard about how to participate and I have a few limitations which prevent me from going full throttle with this intriguing blogging project, but before I enumerate them, I will say that I have been having fun playing DDO, leveling my orc warrior in wow to take into b.g.s, and anticipating my eventual return to the mmorpg game I truly love (Dark Age of Camelot) this summer.

Limitations:
-My ancient gaming rig, though I have finally saved up to upgrade my ancient computer probably by summer, other personal investments may necessitate me to push that upgrade to fall, so I am still limited by the games I can choose and run on my machine

-Time! Grad school projects and research sap almost all my free time away when I am not at work
-preference for genres, I favor fantasy over shooters, in fact, there are very few fps games I like.
-money! That's always a big one, with so many f2p options out there, it's hard to justify p2p games like wow and others of its ilk, and more go f2p every day. Gone are the days when f2p games meant low quality, just late last year and this year alone we have TERA, The Secret World, SWTOR and Vanguard, STO and a few others go free to play, these are not exactly bad games at all!

So what games should I play keeping in mind those limitations? Well since the game nights don't have to be consecutive, it will take me longer than most to get through even 5 games, let alone 10, so I have limited my list to five for the time being. I have placed a poll on the side panel, so feel free to vote dear readers and I will choose one next week.

Here are the ones which made the cut and why:

-Aion (NC Soft) I actually dabbled with this game a long time ago, but it was so brief that playing the game again will feel entirely new and fresh, given my time on it was so limited. I remember essentially getting inpatient with the grind, but having experienced the grind in other games, Aion is suddenly looking a lot more tempting and primed for a return trip. It is one of the most polished of the f2p games of a few years back.

- Runescape (Jagex) This venerable game is so legendary, and so dated, I could not resist checking it out. It's browser based from what I understand so the idea of not having to sit through a long download appeals to me, as did the combat training tutorial. Runescape should provide an mmo experience like no other, or at least I am hoping a few hours of entertainment on a given evening.

-Torch Light 2 (Runic) OK so technically this one isn't even an mmo, in the true sense, but its Diabloesque motif and action RPG design makes it an appealing choice for a light evening of dungeon crawling. I actually played the original Torch Light and found it lacking, and I uninstalled after playing the trial, but now I feel I probably should have given it more of a chance. My only concern is will the sequel run on my old computer?

-Blood Line Champions (Fun Com) What? An on line PVP arena game a la LOL? I know I suck at LOL and I truly don't enjoy playing that game, so why on Earth would I put another MOBA on the list of games I want to try? Maybe I am a masochist, or maybe I just want to see if the problem is with the MOBA genre, or with LOL itself, as everyone else seems to love it, but I just can't play it worth a damn.

-Age of Conan (Fun Com) The most savage Online Game Ever. With a tag line like that, you gotta give it a try, though I am not much for savage violent games, this one looks like it may not be too bad and at least it is a mmorpg unlike the previous two. To be honest, I saw a video of the game play for this awhile back and it did not appeal to me, but in the spirit of the 10/10 I am willing to give it a shot.

So there you have them! Please vote on one and the one with most votes I will pick and play.
Let the mmorpg revolution continue! See you in the catacombs :-)

Camelot Unchained First of the Kickstarter MMOs??

My inbox has been blowing up lately with news of Camelot Unchained's Kickstarter progress. For those of you that are not that pvp-centric, or regular followers of Mark Jacobs' exploits like myself, CU is Jacobs' bid to develop an mmorpg that is strictly pvp oriented but which promises a brand new mmo experience. So far, to date the project has raised more than $600,000 of its intended $2M goal. We have to wait an entire year and a half to see the fruits of the developer's labors, but the reason this mmo project seems to be getting more press is because it is a big name usually associated with big name developers like Mythic Entertainment going the indie route and funding strictly through crowdfunding methods. Personally, even though Jacob and his team are quick to deny the fact they are trying to make a rehash of Dark Age of Camelot, they have obviously taken the 3-faction pvp model made famous by DAoC and are banking on the nostalgic appeal of that masterpiece to drum up interest in an updated version of that game. 3 factions, Arthurian Scandanavian, and Irish mythological influences, these are some of the features that harken back to the days of Albion, Midgard and Hybernia.

 Personally, anyone who knows me and who follows this blogs knows what a huge fan I was and have always been of Dark Age of Camelot, unlike Warhammer Online, which was a good game but structurally flawed because it wanted to be too much like World of Warcraft, DAoC has always had its own flavor and distinct back story and no other mmo has come close to it in terms of pvp combat, until now? It would be exciting to get into a game from the ground floor, but I for one don't think it is necessary to pledge our souls to City State's project, that is unless you want to for the reasons stated above. I will definitely play Camelot Unchained once it comes out, but I seriously doubt that you can catch lightning in a bottle twice, call it the skeptic in me.

MMORPG Kickstarter projects I would have funded

wow I am back blogging on my original blog after nearly a year of being AWOL!

Well, it has been a while but I think the reason I decided to get back into blogging about mmorpgs here at my original blog is mainly because I already have a built in audience on blogger and I want to take advantage. So for my return post I decided to follow up on a blogging project that I have been kicking around in my head for a while, now that I am on spring break from grad school, I decided it might be a good time to work on it. It dawned on me while hanging out with my gaming group this spring that a lot of interesting projects are going the crowdfunding route these days. One phrase I heard a lot was, "I kickstarted so and so, or I really like this game project and I am kickstarting x or y." It got me thinking, What exactly makes for a successful indie project and  conversely, what factors help to make a failed project? I will be exploring this topic in a series of posts with an emphasis on mmorpgs and mmo-related projects.

I ask myself, if these indie projects were available now would I play these games? why or why not? and are they innovative, or more of the same old same old? I started with a successfully funded comic book based on a mmorpg called "Meatspace" A sci-fi comic book by NY based comic book author Josh Gorfain.

As described by Gorfain, this is a cyberpunk story that is one part mega-multiplayer online roleplaying game, one part revenge thriller and one part story about a man re-entering society from his own self-exile partly from his own doing and also from someone bringing him back. Sounds like something I would dig reading and wish I had written myself, and it has been developed into an Amazon Kindle book. Check out the promotional video in the kickstarter campaign which was funded in the fall of 2011. This was supposed to be a 5 part series so is Gorfain working on the second edition? Seems like a long time in between editions, but that is the thing about these indie projects, some take a while to see fruition. More on this later!

I should probably note that this particular project was funded after a first attempt which failed, and the writing and editing team had to modify the specific to make a successful run of it. 

Misadventures in Gaheris

I have been absent from the blogging scene too long. This has been due to heavy work hours this spring, but I suspect with my summer vacation fast approaching, I will be logging in more frequently and updating all of you on what I have been doing mmo-wise. Do you play DAoC? Chances are that you are not playing it, perhaps busy sampling Tera or some of the other shiny new mmorpgs out there, maybe even indulging in some Diablo 3.

For me, I have had the most fun playing Camelot the past few weeks, first leveling up my Midgard Berzerker to 50, then I switched over to doing "glass" questing on TOA, but to be honest, I did not like it as much as running b.g.s, and I dreamed of leveling another class altogether to see how the pve side matched up to the pvp.

Well, I rolled a Bonedancer on the Gaheris co-op server. For those of you not in the know, Gaheris is DAoC's co-op sever, meaning there is no pvp. The battleground NPCs are all there, but I don't think they port you anywhere, and the factions can all work together towards defeating bosses and doing pve questing. Even though I am not big on raiding, I just wanted to try it out and found it lacking, that is until I found the great Gaheris forum. An entire forum dedicated to a specific DAoC server in 2012? And not even one dedicated to pvp! Go figure! (click on graphic above to check it out)

This should convince EA Mythic to continue developing resources for the game, the population may never be what it once was, but there are still dedicated members and subscribers alive and well in this forum.   

So how's it been leveling the bonedancer on Gaheris so far? Well pretty slow going to be honest, and not as much fun as leveling in the pvp servers. The xp gained from doing b.g.s is actually substantial and fun, but here on the pve side of things apparently you gotta join a guild, find a friendly soul to pl you, or take hours to level up on your own. It can be a daunting task if you have a caster or a squishy class, and it can get pretty lonely as you may feel you are playing an RPG, because most won't group with you until you are closer to max level. Is it as much of a grind as wow? No, but in some respects, wow might be  better because with the Dungeon finder, you can pretty much get a lot of xp by running instances as soon as you hit level 15.

So the jury is still out on how far I can go leveling my BD. As much as I love the atmosphere and old school feel of DAoC, wow has a bigger advantage at the moment: more of my mmorpg loving friends are running through Azeroth still and  I know I won't have problems joining the PUGs. It may all be academic anyhow, as summer rolls by and I have less disposable income to spend on games, I may be playing DDO's new expac or LOTRO, or even LOL and Dragon Age 2 as they say, stay tuned!

The battle for Gilneas vs. fun in the Dark Age of Camelot b.gs.

Remember when choosing a game to play was easy? I remember when I would play pac-man, or a game I was fond of as a youth: an isometric 3d combat RPG named Realms of Arkania.

Back in those days, I had to qualms grabbing a game and playing through it without making many choices at any conscious level, it was a visceral private experience and there didn't have to be any association with the dot chomping pacman. I felt no ties to him, nor did I wonder why he had to race around a maze chomping down the ghosts, that was just the way things were. Not so with a game like World of Warcraft. In wow, you have to choose a side, there's a raging conflict between the two factions in the game, the horde and alliance. I think if you read this blog fairly regularly, you know which side I tend to group with.

Recently, a friend presented me with a resurrection scroll for wow, and I started playing my neglected fire mage once again. However, the scroll allowed me a free upgrade to cataclysm, an expansion I never played before, so I had the chance to play the two races I had never played before, the goblins of kezan on the horde side, and the Worgen on Alliance. When I first heard about Cata back in 2010, (or was it 2009? I can't remember) I thought the horde got robbed. The Goblin are a joke race, they are mostly there for comic relief, who would not want to play a werewolf in a fantasy game? But why did the Alliance get the cool race? The more I tried to reconcile it, with being OK with the Goblin in the horde, the more I resented Blizzard for giving them to us. Then I heard about MOP and the stupid monk pandas, but that's a whole other story....

I learned to hate the Worgen as I mowed them down with my mage. I found it easy to hate them as they camped around Alliance zones and sprung out at the most inopportune times in instanced dungeons. Then something weird happened, I started to get the urge to roll Alliance, so that I could play one! I think it was after seeing the intro video with the Gilneans. The Gilneans were members of the Alliance once, until their wall cut them off from the horde, but now in the Cataclysm reality, they had to defend their land against the foresaken, while concurrently trying to deal with the Worgen curse. Suddenly they weren't the twits of the Alliance anymore, but they were a people resisting being conquered, and I always side with the underdogs. Like the Liliputians they have an irresistible allure Why does Garrash Hellscream want to take over Gilneas in the first place? Because it's a strategic foothold in the war against the Alliance? Because he is a power hungry bastard? Maybe both?

The Gilneans don't shout "For the Alliance" like those humans do in Stormwind, at least in the early part of their campaign, and at least they have a valid reason for joining, but still I shudder to play one and watch that horrid Alliance flag fly. I am horde, how can I turn against my own virtual faction? So I played DAoC instead and had a blast leveling up my berskerer in the Molvik b.g.s.

Welcome to the Chronicles- a new era in MMORPG commentary begins

Welcome to the MMORPG Chronicles. Over the coming months this blog will provide you with information on the most popular games out there on cyberspace in the MMO genre. If you are a gamer we invite you to bookmark us and come back frequently. Wow's Cataclysm and upcoming MMOs like Star Trek online and Champions Online only serve to underscore the popularity of this genre for hard-core gamers and casual gamers alike. For now, enjoy Felicia Day's Do You Want to Date My Avatar video from the popular web show The Guild. but be warned, repeated viewings of this video may result in getting it stuck in your head, it's quite catchy.