April Poll – Are You Looking Forward to Age of Conan?

With the release date of Age of Conan drawing closer, it's only around seven weeks away as I write this, there's been a bit more attention given to the game. It looks like Funcom lucked out too. EA Mythic pushing the release date out to Fall 2008 will give Age of Conan a nice bit of breathing room to get started.

As I wrote yesterday, I'm starting to build up an anticipation for Age of Conan myself. So I thought that I'd ask you guys the same question. Are you looking forward to playing Age of Conan?

I've given you a few options for the poll, but they essentially boil down to yes, no, or maybe. If  you don't see the option you'd like, or if you'd like to make a comment, please leave one below.

I suspect the poll is having some problems with RSS feed readers. If you are finding that you can't vote from your feed, come over to the site. The poll also lives in the sidebar. I'd also appreciate you letting me know if you're not able to vote in the feed. If that's the case, I might have to look at alternate poll software.

March Poll Results – What’s Your Favorite Class Style?

Wow. March is over already. It just seems like yesterday when I put this poll up... better get to the topic before I start reminiscing about getting up before I went to bed to go work in the mines and licking the road for breakfast... or something like that.

Ahem.

I asked the question at the beginning of the month what your favorite class style was. I tried to keep the classes MMO agnostic, giving the choice of Tank, DPS Melee, Hunter/Ranged DPS, Mage, or Priest. The results from 18 votes cast are as follows:

• Tank - 3 votes (16%)
• DPS Melee - 7 votes (39%)
• Hunter/Ranged - 2 votes (11%)
• Mage - 1 vote (6%)
• Priest - 5 votes (28%)

Overall the numbers didn't surprise me. I always figured there would be a decent number of DPS Melee and Healer players around. I was a little surprised at the Ranged and Mage classes though. I figured that there would be a lot more players that loved the DPS offered by Mages, Warlocks and Hunters. The poor old Mage only got voted for in the last couple of days.

Considering that the Mages, Wizards, Sorcerers and Warlocks don't appear to be under-represented in the games that we play - I always see a bunch of them in the game, and don't have trouble finding them in groups - why do you think we didn't see them represented in the poll?

Blizzards Lawsuit

I've been following this Blizzard versus MDY/Glider lawsuit recently, and I've come to a somewhat unsettling conclusion.

Law is strange.

There are a couple of big issues at stake in this lawsuit. One of them is Blizzards contention that Glider allows bots that ruin World of Warcraft on several levels (that's my non-lawyerly interpretation.) These bots essentially make hurt a players experience causing them to quit and thus damage Blizzards profits. Something like 20 million dollars worth of profit I understand.

The other is that Glider violates Blizzards EULA and Terms of Service (TOS).

Okay.

I think the contention that Glider is damaging Blizzards revenue is a novel approach. There are laws around that allow companies to sue based on interference with their business. If Glider does that, then Blizzard may have a case.

But didn't Blizzard just reach ten million subscribers? Didn't Blizzard make over a billion dollars in revenue last year, with a 500 million dollar profit?

It certainly doesn't look like Glider has done any damage to Blizzards revenues. In fact it almost looks like Blizzard is making similar claims to the music industry about piracy. We're making record profits, yet these bad guys are making us lose money. A 20 million dollar loss out of a 500 million dollar profit doesn't seem to be a sustainable argument for damage to me.

I wonder how Blizzard can prove that players are leaving because of Glider. Is there a question on the unsubscribe form to ask players if they are quitting because of Glider?

The violation of the terms of service and the EULA is also interesting.

In essence, a EULA is a sort of contract. It's an agreement. It's my understanding that both parties have to agree to a contract before it becomes enforceable. Did MDY agree to Blizzards EULA and TOS?

Well. It's pretty certain they did agree. After all, MDY would have to test their software. That requires a running copy of World of Warcraft, which requires the user to agree to the EULA and TOS before logging in. How enforceable this is, is another question.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not condoning the use or creation of the Glider program. MDYs claim that it is just for letting players avoid the level grind is somewhat bogus. There are plenty of players who want to do that, sure. But Glider has a lot more use with the gold selling industry, and that's where it is hurting the community.

The thing is though, that using bots for gold farming is really at the lower end of the evil scale. Yes, it's annoying to run into a bot that's clearing an area that you need to work, but it's much worse to be hacked with a keylogger, or to get your account stolen and characters cleaned out.

I'm sure that Blizzards lawyers believe that they have a case against MDY. It looks like MDYs lawyers believe the same thing since they are counter-suing Blizzard. It may be early, but it doesn't look like there is a settlement is sight.

Publisher vs Journalist

DM Osbon over at Sweet Flag is currently doing a journalism course during his, somewhat spare free time, and has an interesting post up about game journalism. It's a series of YouTube videos from an American TV show called GT. I'm not familiar with it, but it looks like it's from the G4 network.

I'm half way through watching, but so far seems pretty fair and balanced. The interviewer is talking to three people, one of them a journalist who writes for one of the bigger print magazines, and a couple of representatives from the big gaming companies. From what has been said so far, they're all in agreement about game reviews being fair and balanced, but there are some stories about the companies not appreciating low reviews, and the consequences of those reviews.

If you are at all interested in game journalism, perhaps you have dreams of writing for a game magazine one day, maybe even going so far as writing for Stropp's World - such a dream is rarely achieved - then have a look at the videos. All up you'll need around half an hour to run through them all.

You can find DMs article here.

Anticipating Age of Conan

I have to admit to feeling a little ambivalent about Age of Conan over the last couple of years.

While it's been on my radar, and I've posted a few items on it, I haven't really followed it with much more than a passing interest. Some of that has to do with my current game load. I'm already involved with a few MMORPGs. There's only so many that I can juggle and still get anywhere in. A bit like relationships really.

I reckon I'm also a little bored with the fantasy factor. Nearly every game out there is based on a medieval swords and sorcery archetype. There's not a lot new under the MMO sun lately. There's a crop of SciFi MMORPGs on the way, Jumgate Evolution, Stargate Worlds, and the post apocalyptic Fallen Earth and friends. I am looking forward to these, but they won't be out for some months (at least) yet.

I'd love to see some attempts at non-standard fantasy. Steampunk based on China Mievilles New Crobuzon from Perdido Street Station. Or perhaps Gothic fantasy based in an alternate Victorian era world.

So even with this slightly jaded feeling I'm experiencing at the moment, I'm beginning to get a sense of anticipation for Age of Conan.

Perhaps it's because the world that Howard built for Conan isn't based on Tolkiens world. JRR Tolkiens influence on fantasy fiction has been absolutely enormous. Much of the fantasy literature written since Lord of the Rings has borrowed much from Middle Earth. Howard however never borrowed from Lord of the Rings. Howard died in 1936 at the age of 30, nearly 20 years before Lord of the Rings was published.

As an aside, you could almost call Howard the Mozart of his time. By the time of his death at 30 years of age, he had written over three hundred stories and seven hundred poems and was an accomplished pulp fiction author. He is considered one of the seminal fantasy writers of the 20th century, along with JRR Tolkien.

I get the feeling that Age of Conan isn't just going to be a mature rated version of World of Warcraft. I think it could be that something different style of fantasy that I'd like to see.

I'm looking forward to Age of Conan. Are you?

Bioshock MMO

I caught the news on Ten Ton Hammer that EA is actively considering creating a Bioshock MMO.

Sigh.

While I enjoyed the game, where others thought it a little shallow, I don't really see it as a MMO property. What Bioshock has going for it was that it is a well paced, fairly linear FPS that told a decent story. That story presented a particular take on a certain philosophy, showing us the results of blindly following it.

Games like Bioshock, and especially games like Deus Ex and System Shock, let the player interact with and to some extent change the world. Deus Ex allowed the player to follow the story through to the conclusion and select from three possible endings. Each ending would have had completely different ramifications for a future world. Bioshock has two possible endings, depending on how the player dealt with the Little Sisters through the game.

I'm not entirely sure that this can be done in a MMO.

For one thing, the current crop of MMOs are fairly static worlds. Quests are the same each time they're done, no species become extinct after having been hunted so vigorously, and mining nodes respawn time after time. Nothing the players do has an effect on the world.

Take the dynamic world out of Bioshock, or any of these games for that matter, and you end up with a reasonably generic first person shooter.

How do you turn a game that carefully measures each action of the player on the game world, which is part of the fun of the game, and turn it into a MMO where each player has little or no effect on  the game world?

Not every single player game can or should be made into a Massively Multiplayer Online game. There is still a place in the gaming world for good single player PC games, despite what some of the industry bigwigs are saying.

MMOs take so much time to play, World of Warcraft is around 4 or 5 days to 70 now, despite the recent reductions in leveling time. Sometimes it's nice to be able to play a game that can be finished in ten to twenty hours.

Mythos Zone 3 Imminent

I just received the Mythos Newsletter in my inbox. It doesn't really have a lot to say, just lists some of the upcoming features and events happening with Mythos. These include a redesign of the Mythos website, the announcement that the Zone 3 release is imminent, and some changes in PvP and Crafting.

There's also a graphic of a new monster to fight, the Stagkin. The picture has a bipedal humanoid with a reindeer head carrying a nice big polearm. It's a bit like Rudolph on steriods. A very very angry Rudolph who had previously gone on a rampage slaughtering elves and the Claus family leaving a trail of carnage in his wake.... ooops. There goes my imagination again. Could be a SciFi movie of the week.

The newsletter also mentions that if the Zone 3 test works out well, Mythos may well go into an open beta phase. That's big news. Mythos has been in closed beta for a long time now. Opening it up will give this game a lot more recognition. Something it deserves.

Slippery When WAR

I think it's fair to say that Warhammer Online will be one of the bigger MMO launches this year, if not the biggest... if it makes a 08 launch that is.

The news dropped today that the release of Warhammer Online will pushed back to sometime in Fall. This is, what... the second or third time the release has been pushed back now?

All in all, this is good news on probably three fronts.

First up, time has been slipping away. May is getting closer and there is still no sign of an open beta. Companies also tend to like to give at least a couple of months notice for buyers to hit the marketing trail and really build up that anticipation. This is a pretty good sign that the game is still needing some work. A later release date lets the devs use that magical debugger of smashing to crush a few more bugs.

And as much as I'm keen to see the game, I'm even keener to see a bug free game. Looks like someone is learning from the Vanguard disaster.

This is also good news for Funcom. Age of Conan does have a firm release date, unless it gets shifted too, for late May. That's about the time Warhammer Online was going to be released. This will give Age of Conan a reasonable good window to release, gather subscribers, and firm up their content before the behemoths of Warhammer and Wrath of the Lich King hit the streets.

I reckon the other beneficiary of this delay is Blizzard. I've got a bit of a hunch that they are aiming the Wrath of the Lich King release to coincide with Warhammer's. It's clear that Blizzard see Warhammer Online as a threat. The fact that they are retooling World of Warcraft to be a more PvP oriented game lends credence to the idea that the PvP of Warhammer is worrying them. A strategic release for Wrath of the Lich King to do as much damage to Warhammer Online is a good bet.

The delay of WAR then gives Blizzard more time to polish up WotLK and add those features that might not have made it into a May release.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke 1917-2008

Earlier today Sir Arthur C. Clarke passed away at his Sri Lankan home at the age of 90.

Sir Arthur is best known as the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the first SciFi book that I ever read. At age eight I was on an outing with my Grandmother in the Rundle Mall in Adelaide, perhaps on an occasion when I wasn't switching off escalators in department stores, and we went into a bookstore. Standish books I think it was called. We browsed around for a while and she asked me which book I'd like to get.

Well there was this book with a picture of a wheeled space station on the cover. Good picture I thought, so I chose that.

And thus began my life long love affair with science fiction. Well, maybe not begun, I did already enjoy television shows like Lost in Space, and all the Saturday afternoon movies with aliens, giant Japanese-city-trashing monsters, and giant robots that fired missile out their fingertips. But as far as reading goes, I credit Sir Arthur for starting me on the journey of imagination that only books can give.

I still have that first book somewhere. I read it so much over the years that the covers have fallen off and a lot of pages are hanging loose. It's looking pretty tattered but I still have it.

Sir Arthur didn't just constrain himself to fiction. He was a scientist. Early in his career he wrote a paper outlining the feasibility of using Satellites as a communication tool. Later he wrote an article where he joked that by not patenting the idea he had given away a billion dollars.

He moved to Sri Lanka in 1956 and lived there until his passing. One of his final birthday wishes was that Sri Lanka would know peace.

Apart from authoring numerous novels and short stories, Sir Arthur is known for his three laws. The third you most likely are familiar with

1. "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
2. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
3. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Farewell, Sir Arthur.

Beat Up A Balrog

Oli Welsh of Eurogamer was lucky enough to get the chance to chat with the Jeffrey Steefel, the executive producer of Lord of the Rings Online.

Turbine have just announce their first paid expansion to LotRO, there have been a number of free expansions to date, which opens the door to the Mines of Moria. Players will be able to explore the mines as a single, continuous underground zone.

So what should we expect in the Mines of Moria?

For one thing, there are lots and lots of goblins to slay. There's likely a few Cave Trolls in there as well. And since the entire Dwarven population was slaughtered, I'd guess Saurons guys have employed the evil arts of necromancy to raise a few Dwarven dead to fight as their side as well. That's my educated guess at least.

But there is one big fella that players will get the chance to beat up on. Steefel has confirmed that the Balrog who fought, and was defeated by, Gandalf will be available on the line up.

That might raise a few eyebrows, especially since the early indications were that the developers were reluctant to allow player involvement with Balrogs. You see in the lore, Balrogs were immensely powerful beings, and I think that there were only three of them. It's been a while since I read the Silmarillion, and even longer since I spelled it, so correct me if I'm wrong.

It's my guess, there is no mention in the article, that the Balrog fight will require a raid. That's really not much of a longshot is it?

Aside from putting the beat down on the Balrog, players will have a new level cap - sixty. There will also be a bunch of mini-games that will unlock deeds and other content.

There will be Legendary items added to the mix, and get this, these items will have their own advancement paths. I guess that matches with the lore, after all Bilbo's blade, Sting, had it's own special history.

It's pretty cool really. It's always been one of the things about MMOs that I've been in two minds about. On the one hand, getting the fancy new weapon or armor is cool. It's fancy new after all. But I've always been loath to just vendor those old items. We've been through so much together, so many good times, it's a shame to get rid of them. Now, once I've got some Legendary gear, it will follow me through the game. Nifty.

The problem with all the press about the Mines of Moria expansion is is that I'm getting the urge to dust off my account and log back in. With Warhammer, Age of Conan, and umpteen other good looking games coming out in the next year it's looking increasingly difficult to focus on a single game.

Must. Resist. Urge.