Hellgate Gets A Save – Will Mythos Too?

There was an announcement today that Hanbitsoft, the folks who now own the rights to Hellgate: London, and presumably Mythos, are going to make Hellgate a free to play game. That's pretty cool for the Hellgate: London players out there, and it's probably something that Flagship should have done when it became apparent that the game was tanking.

Mythos was a better game though. A well made massive Diablo clone in a world where the Diablo clones never really measured up to the original. Mythos was never really finished, being in a perpetual beta, but it was playable.

Here's hoping Hanbitsoft, or whoever the owners of the Mythos IP are, decide to do the same and get Mythos back on the air.

Long Weekend

Just a quick update since it's getting late and I have to go to work tomorrow. Sigh. Sometimes I think virtual Mondays are worse than real Mondays since you've had that extra day of freedom. And since the temperature tomorrow, in fact all this week, is predicted to be above 41 C, I'd rather be in air conditioning. Well, the office is air-conditioned, but it's the time between office and home in the heat, and the carpark is less than shady. When I get into my car, the temp approaches something like the inside of a nuclear reactor.

Anyway, enough weather ranting.

I had quite a bit of gaming time this Australia Day long weekend. I mentioned in a post on Saturday night that I spent all of Saturday board gaming with friends which was a blast. I didn't have any time to play any computer games.

On Sunday I started playing World of Warcraft and in just a few hours I leveled my Death Knight, EvilMo, up to 59.5. That's a pretty good rate of leveling. I remember my last run at 60 took a lot more time between 59 and 60 than it took from 58 to 59.5. 

I did most of that in Hellfire Peninsula. When I completed the DK area quests, I was directed to Stormwind and was given a quest there by the King that lead to the Western Plaguelands. Since I was already 58, I decided to dump the old world quests and go straight to Burning Crusade.

Once I got to 59.5, I felt I'd had enough and switched to playing Atlantica Online.

Atlantica Online is a free MMOG from a Korean publisher, and plays in many ways similar to a Japanese RPG, but thankfully without the 20 minute un-skippable cut-scenes. I'd started playing this game a couple of weeks ago, but decided to create a new character called ManChild to test out another 'class.'

Not that class seems to make much difference since you pick up mercenaries along the way. So if you choose to be a Swordsman, you can select a Gunner, Spearman, and Cannoneer as your mercenaries. If you choose to be an Archer, you can select a Swordsman and Axeman. As you level you get to have more and differnet types of mercenaries in your party. These all complement your strengths and weaknesses.

The play-style is turn based. You have a turn to attack your enemy's group, then they have a turn to attack yours. All turns must be completed in under 30 seconds, so the action is reasonable fast paced.

It's quite a different style of MMO gameplay, and while I don't think it will be my main MMORPG, it's a decent diversion when I'm feeling like I want to play something different.

Then it was off the computer to watch the Doctor Who Christmas special and Dexter S3.

Monday, public holiday, what else but WoW. I logged in to Stropp the Shaman, found the CoWs online and finagled a guild invite for EvilMo. Logged him on and, shazzam! EvilMo is now a Casualty of War. I then spent the next few hours leveling him up to 60.5 while reading guild chat. Ding!

Before I finish up this post, I have to say I'm pretty impressed with the Death Knight so far. EvilMo is pretty darn tough. I've been taking on mobs two to three levels above EvilMo's level and his health bar has barely registered a dent most times. On one occasion, I had him in a spot where wandering mobs kept coming into aggro range and at times he was fighting four or five at once (inc pets) and at the end of that, EvilMo had a third of health left. And I love the Magic Lasso of Doom. Nifty stuff.

Will this keep up. I hope so.

Board Games

This last Christmas, my friends and I all seemed to get the same idea, and a number of the gifts that were given -- a big percentage anyway -- were of the board game type. It was one of those moments of synchronicity because none of us discussed or mentioned the idea, and it wasn't until the last minute that I came up with the idea of giving some of these games myself.

I had mentioned a few months before Christmas of my fondness for Zombie movies and a passing comment became a gift of the Zombies!!! board game.

Zombies!!! has a fairly simple set of rules which makes it really easy to get into and to get started, but the game itself can take two to three hours.

The premise is pretty simple. You and your friends start off in the town square. At the start of each players turn, they draw a town tile and place it next to an existing tile. This tile might have a number of zombies on it, and/or some health and ammo. The player then rolls for movement and if a zombie is encountered, there's a combat roll. At the end of his turn the player rolls for the number of zombies to move a single space. The first player to kill 25 zombies, or reach the helipad tile, wins.

What's fun is the the cards you can draw and the backstabbing you can do. It's always a joy to double the number of zombies in a room that your friend is in.

We played another board game today. It's called Twilight Imperium and is a far more involved game than Zombies!!! It's basically a space conquest game on a board made up of hexes with different planets and the like. The goal is simple -- the only part that is -- just get 10 victory points to win. How you get those victory points is harder to work out.

I said it was complex, well it took my friend around six hours to remove all the different tokens, cards, and other pieces from the frames holding them together. And it took over an hour for five players to complete the first turn. After constantly checking the rules, and about six full hours of play, I figure it's going to take us a few sessions to get Twilight Imperium down pat.

And that's just two of the games that were given at Chrissie. There's a Starcraft board game, as well as another called Starfarers of Catarn. It looks like there will be quite a few Saturday nights rolling the dice over the next 11 months. And of course the common refrain, "Stupid game!"

A Day In The Life Of A Death Knight

With the lifting of the rule restricting Death Knight creation to servers already with 55+ characters, I took the plunge and created a Death Knight on the Rexxar server, and played through the DK starting area quest storyline.

Since I'm going to hook up with the WoW chapter of the Casualties of War guild, I needed to pick an Alliance race -- I think it's a pity they didn't allow the Death Knight's races to have a bit more freedom and cross faction lines -- so I chose the most ridiculous race for my DK.

Meet EvilMo, the Gnome Death Knight. And with a Dastardly Dan style moustache like that, how could he not be evil. See the resemblence?

So with moustache all ready to go, EvilMo set off on his journey of, well, evil.

On the way he encountered a bunch of nice pleasant folks who were, for some reason, slightly unhappy to see him.

This made EvilMo very unhappy. Especially the comment by the guy who pooped himself. So he killed them. This made EvilMo feel better.

After a little while EvilMo was asked to steal a horse, and for a reward he was given a wonderful little pony. EvilMo had always wanted a horse, so this was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream. Of course nothing in life, or death for that matter, is perfect and EvilMo immediately noticed the saddle's design flaw.

But having a pony was worth it. And being an undead horse, there was the side benefit of not having to feed it, which led to the even greater benefit of not having to own a shovel. Of course a Death Knight wouldn't clean up his horse's leavings anyway, and he'd laugh deeply when someone trod in it.

EvilMo went on to have many other adventures in the Lich King's service, including sitting atop a dragon while directing it to fire on the hapless humans of the Scarlet Crusade far below. Hiding in a mining cart to get behind enemy lines, and even dressing up as one of those humans and taking a stroll to meet one of their generals. All in a days work for an eager young Death Knight.

Of course all good things come to an end, and EvilMo was forced out of the Lich Kings service. He even suffered the indignity of having rotten fruit and vegetables chucked at him while he delivered a missive from the new leader of the freed Death Knights.

But now he's in tight with the Alliance.

Or is he? The moustache is still evil.

PC Gaming Will Disappear When PCs Do

Have you heard that tired refrain recently?

It usually goes along the lines that PC gaming is dying, stagnating, or in serious trouble. There's often a variation that console or mobile phone gaming will kill the PC game. I reckon I've seen comments like these from video game luminaries on and off for well over ten years now.

Just like Video killing the Radio Star, it hasn't happened, and nor will it. At least not until PCs -- and I'm not just referring to the x86/Windows class of personal computer -- no longer exist. Video has been around for decades, and Radio still manages to live comfortably and profitably beside it.

Even if all of the big game publishers: EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, and the like agree next week that PC gaming is dead and drop all plans to publish any new games for the PC, there are still a huge amount of so called independent game developers who develop small and generally fun games for the PC.

The thing is, despite a huge console market, a huge number of people own personal computers of varying varieties. That's a big market that will likely not disappear. So what happens if publishers stop making games for PCs?

It's said that nature abhors a vacuum, and I think this applies equally well to the PC gaming market. Just as those odd little mammals took advantage of the ecological gap left by the extinction of the dinosaurs, if the big boys disappear, the PC game ecological niche will be quickly filled by all sorts of evolutionary freaks.

In fact, I imagine the indie game development community would love nothing better than to see the extinction of big game publishers. It would open up the markets to a whole range of new game genres as well as evening out competition of the old favorites.

So I guess the question is: how long will the humble PC be around?

Wrath Patch Frees the Death Knight Within

I just finished replying to a comment by Super Ally telling me to move my lonely 56 Paladin and create a Death Knight on Rexxar, when lo and behold I see this item in Massively about the 3.08 patch for World of Warcraft.

Apparently the patch allows some important things like:

And by "important things" we mean changes like allowing players to create a Death Knight on any server, so long as they have a level 55+ character on at least one server.

I didn't really want to spring for $25US -- which with the Aussie dollar hovering around 66 US cents translates to around 40 AUD -- to transfer my Paladin. It seemed like an awful lot of money just for someone to hit an approve button on an admin screen somewhere.

I guess now I have no excuse!

RSS Feed Changes

I've used Feedburner to manage my RSS feed for a couple of years now. However, a couple of years ago Feedburner were bought out by Google and effectively joined the Google family of products. And... pretty much nothing happened. There were no changes to make, and everything operated as normal.

Nothing stays the same though, and Google have finally changed things up a bit and have begun migrating Feedburner and it's accounts into a new system. My account was migrated yesterday, and so far everything seems hunky dory, except that my number of subscribers dropped a bit. At least as far as I could tell.

I'd like to ask you all a favor. If you notice anything askew with the feed, could you please comment below, or send a message through the contact form.

Perspectives on the Demise of Tabula Rasa

Scott Jennings over at Broken Toys has posted a write-up of his experiences at NCSoft relating to his work on the un-named game that his team was working on and the goings-on with Tabula Rasa. Scott's post is in response to another post-mortem style post by Adam Martin who was a CTO at NCSoft Europe.

While neither of these guys were actually on the Tabula Rasa team, they both have a pretty good perspective of what was happening up until the times they left the company.

Both posts are pretty good reads, and even offer a reasonable explanation of why NCSoft chose to close down the game.

Go check them out.

2009 And Away

The cool thing about taking a little time off from blogging -- that's what I call it anyway, not slacking... nooo -- is that you get the chance to think over things a little and can view the blog from a different perspective.

I asked myself a few questions over the last couple of months. Some of them, aside from deciding what I wanted for lunch, were:

• Should I keep going, or just wrap this thing up?
• Is this blog successful, is it achieving what I'd like it too achieve?
• Where do I want to go with this thing?
• What's this thing growing on my face?

Okay. I didn't ask that last question, there's nothing hairy or warty as far as I can tell, but the other questions and variations of them were contemplated. As I said, nothing like a bit of down time for navel gazing.

So onto the answers.

Yes. I'll be keeping going for the time being, in this format. A few other fellow bloggers have recently, or in the past year, either called it quits or have made some serious changes in direction. DM Osbon re-tasked Sweet Flag into Construed for instance. I did consider doing the same myself, I even have the domain registered if I decide to go that direction, but if I did it would be less of a hobby/personal blog and more of a big project type thing, and it's probably something I'd like to partner with other bloggers. At the moment though, it will be business as usual.

One thing I think I will be doing though, is looking at upgrading the theme.

During the first year, Stropp's World had three themes. I was never really happy with any of them. Then at the end of December '07, I activated the current theme. I was happy, and still am to a certain extent. However, I'm feeling the theme has gotten a little tired, and today started looking into a new one. This time I might actually get one developed -- I did try that before with less than spectacular results -- it might be worth actually paying someone to do something well, that I'm only average at.

Success, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and Stropp's World is successful to a certain extent. Success in blogging is measure by the readers you attract, and I know that I have a decent readership. Blogging is also perhaps the domain of a show off, bloggers don't write for empty stadiums, they want crowds as a rule. So while I consider my blogging a success, I'd always like to be more successful.

Where I go from here, I hope will help grow Stropp's World, but as I said above: I'll be retaining the current writing format for a while.

Blogging year resolution #1 -- Post more regularly. Yep, I say this every year, but I think it's important to reaffirm from time to time. I'll try to get through the year without missing a three month block. But at the same time, if I find I'm in a period where I don't have anything to say, I may not say anything.

I'd also like to see if I can get the forums running this year. My attempt last year sort of failed, dare I say it, epically. Definitely needs some thought and planning to re-attempt. A good place to start would be to find a WP plugin that integrates Wordpress with the forum software to make a seamless experience. There's something like that for Twitter too I think.

Ultimately, by the end of the year I have the somewhat conservative goal of doubling my readership, and the number of RSS subscribers which is currently around 270.

More than anything else though, this year is going to revolve around enjoying the MMORPG experience. There are a lot of good games out there, and a lot of games on the horizon. I don't think we're in a MMOG golden age yet, but we're only a few years away.

Happy 2009.

Preserving Gaming History

The thing with events like the Wikipedia Threshold war is that they tend to kick up a lot of dust. Everyone is talking about them, and consequently, a meme is born and takes on a life of its own.

I was reading Rick's post about Quake Live and Gaming Nostalgia which referred to a previous post of his, and it gelled with something I was thinking about at work today regarding the preservation of knowledge.

The great Threshold beat down at Wikipedia really shows how fragile information is on the Internet. One small group or individual can easily remove or change something that is of a historic or notable nature to another group. The average guy on the street could care less about Threshold, or for that matter Wikipedia, but to the gaming community these bit of knowledge are as precious as the Klingon Bible is to a dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie; or the intricate details of troop movements at the Battle of Gettysburg are to a Civil War enthusiast. (Been to Gettysburg... very cool.)

I suggested in my post, Fear and Loathing at Wikipedia, yesterday that the decentralization of information on the web is the best way to preserve it. But it's still not perfect. Even with such devices as the wayback machine, digital information is still fragile.

Even now, people are still finding old movie reels containing films made in the early twentieth century. Data, if you like, lost in time is being recovered. Images on celluloid can be restored.

But when a collection of bits is gone, it's gone.

How do we preserve our gaming history?