The Allods Online Upcoming Financial Crisis

Allods Online did look like it was shaping up to be a pretty good MMORPG. While I haven’t spent any time in the game myself, for the last little while all I’ve been hearing about Allods has been positive.

Even Syncaine who despises all things WoW and Themepark in the MMO world has been looking forward to Allods Online. Although, I understand that’s mostly for love. (Oh, the things we do.)

Unfortunately it looks like gPotato has dropped the ball when it comes to the cash store and is charging some ten to twenty times for items for US/Western players than it is for Russian players. (Even though cost of living is  a lot lower in the former USSR, that’s a huge jump!) What’s worse, a recent post-soft-release patch has changed the game so that it’s now necessary for players to use the shop to progress where previously it was not. And that has put a lot of noses out of joint.

There’s a few calculations flying around the old interweb. Some are estimating that players will need to pony up around $75 a month for non hardcore play.

All in all, a PR nightmare for a company with an anticipated game.

Here’s what I think will happen.

gPotato has forgotten the cardinal rule of pricing. You can only charge a price that the market will bear.

Charge too much and no-one will buy your stuff. Too little and even though a lot buy it, you won’t make enough to break even.

If gPotato has misunderstood the market and are overcharging, they’ll very quickly find that no-one will buy from their game shop. If 20 USD for an extra six bag slots is too much no-one will buy the extra six slots. If the amount they want to charge players for perfumes to remove harsh death penalties is too much, no-one will buy them. (What’s worse with the DP perfumes is that people may just log out and not come back.)

gPotato will, if their prices are too high, quickly find themselves with no or few sales. They will then be forced to lower the prices to that which the market will bear. Otherwise they’ll go broke, quickly depending on cash or investment reserves.

They’ll need to act quickly too. If they don’t they could find themselves with few Western customers. It’s hard to see how they’d survive that, unless the Russian market can support them. (Now that’s another thought. It’s possible Allods will make a decent income just from the Russian market. The gouging of the Western/US market could be for cream.)

So… my guess. Expect to see the cash shop prices drop dramatically in the first month or two.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Gods and Heroes Re-Rising

Massively is reporting that Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising the previously defunct game being developed by the still defunct Perpertual Entertainment has been rezzed. Well, at least the development has been given the once over by a friendly shaman.

A company called Heatwave Interactive has purchased all the IP rights to the game, and what’s more they’ve also bought all the assets.

At the time Perpertual were pretty darn close to getting the game finished, or so they were saying. (In fact they were in beta testing at the time.) If that’s true, Gods and Heroes may not be all that far off, although there is no mention of a release date. Not that I’d expect one at this stage, Heatwave will have something of a learning curve to get up to speed, at least six months I’d expect.

And since Perpetual dropped the game in 2008, there may be some updating of graphics and other assets to square with current tech.

Good news for everyone who was looking forward to the game originally. I’m sure there will be some happy gamers out there after having heard this news.

It also generates some hope for other games that have been cancelled due to a company closure. CME and the Stargate MMORPG spring to mind. Who knows, perhaps some other company will obtain the IP and assets from the bankruptcy firesale and complete that game too.

We can only hope.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Ubisoft Clarifies DRM. Oh Yeah. That’s Better.

The folks over at Ars Technica managed to get an official explanation of Ubisoft’s new customer screwing DRM scheme. (Not just for Assassins Creed 2, but for all new Ubisoft PC games it seems.)

It seems that Ubisoft doesn’t kick a customer out of the game that they legally purchased, just dumps them back to their last checkpoint (in the case of AC2) and pauses the game until they get a connection again.

Oh yeah. That’s better. They still treat their customers like criminals, but at least they don’t have to reload the game.

My suggestion is that anyone who doesn’t want to be treated like a criminal, heads over to Amazon or any other supplier that allows customer reviews, and make your opinion count. Don’t lie about the game or the company, just let potential buyers know that Ubisoft is treating them like criminals and that a game like this isn’t worth buying. This tactic worked when EA tried the same crap over Spore (I think) with the DRM that limited activations. Ubisofts DRM is worse.

Make yourself heard.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Mass Effect 2

I checked my achievements on my XBox 360 the other day and noticed that the last time I played Mass Effect (1) was September 2007. That was shortly after Mass Effect was released, and I played it through fairly quickly.

In fact I did miss a whole lot of stuff in Mass Effect. I simply played the side quests as they came up and followed the story line, and before I knew it — woosh, game over. I think I completed it in around 20 hours.

So it happened I was out on Sunday about ten days ago and on my way home dropped in to my local game store and picked up the sequel, Mass Effect 2.

That afternoon, and over a few evenings and the following weekend I picked up the story of Commander Shepherd where I left off. I finished it up late on Sunday afternoon a week after I bought it. This time I was determined to do most of the side quests, and while I still didn’t I think, I did quite a few (and all of the loyalty quests.) I didn’t really explore outside of the main systems except where I had to. This time I ended up somewhere near 35 hours of played time according to the save game timestamps.

(While I’m not going to reveal any spoilers other than the first minutes of story for Mass Effect 2, I’ve got a couple of tips that while helpful might be considered spoilers. )

First a recap.

Mass Effect 1 introduced humanity as a recent addition to the galactic community. We are just starting to take steps in exploring both the stars and the politics of the galaxy, and just like the introduction of the new rich to old money, humanity is barely tolerated.

But there’s a threat, which is where Shepherd comes in. It seems that every 50,000 years or so an ancient species of machines called Reapers sweeps through the galaxy purging it of the species that have risen to the stars. (This is actually very reminiscent of the Revelation Space trilogy by Alastair Reynolds.) And guess what… it’s been nearly 50,000 years since the last purge when the supremely powerful Protheans were wiped out.

The Protheans left the Citadel space station by the way. That’s where the Council meets. They are representatives of all the major alien species, except humanity.

So anyway, Shepherd assembles a team and heads off to investigate some strange happenings, works out that the Reapers (actually just one called Sovereign) have coopted a machine hive-mind species called the Geth to do some nasty stuff. Shepherd fights his way through a bunch of scenarios and ends up defeating Sovereign and his representative, Saren. In a nutshell.

Mass Effect starts shortly after that when Shepherd’s ship, the Normandy, is attacked and Shepherd is killed.

He’s okay by the way. His frozen dessicated corpse is found and through the marvels of modern medicine and a rogue shadow organisation called Cerberus is brought back to life two years later. Not many like Cerberus by the way. They’re considered a racist human supremacist group, and noone really trusts them.

Cerberus then send you out to recruit a team and get to the bottom of a mystery, all the humans on a number colonies are being abducted and noone is doing anything about it. Now, through Shepherd, you are.

For the most part I really enjoyed Mass Effect 2. The missions to recruit the team members were interesting, and once recruited each team member had a mission available to unlock his or her loyalty power. (TIP: It turns out that loyalty is really important later in the game, if you aren’t able to gain a team members loyalty for some reason, don’t use them on the final critical mission or you’ll lose team members.) These were great. Not only were the missions well thought out, the loyalty missions especially gave marvellous insights into the characters. Jack’s loyalty mission was especially poignant.

The gameplay has been simplified a lot too. That has both good and bad points. Personally, I like heavier RPG tropes in my RPGs. I like the numbers and stats and putting together a streamlined character. Mass Effect 2 forgoes that, but it still works. It plays more like a shooter, but has an emphasis on story.

The other bit of greatness is the voice acting. I had to pause the game a couple of times and check the credits to be sure, and true enough, there is some great voice talent. Martin Sheen voices the Illusive Man, there’s Claudia Black (SG1 and Dragon Age), Seth Green, and a bunch of other well known names. And it’s really well done voice acting too. This isn’t a one take good enough job that plagued earlier games.

There were a couple of downsides though.

First, I have a standard def plasma TV. For the most part games look pretty good. Mass Effect 2 not so much. The graphics weren’t crisp and it was bloody difficult to read any of the popup messages (or any on screen text for that matter) while sitting only six or seven feet away. ME1 the graphics were gorgious and crisp. ME2 bleh. And there were no real options to adjust other than brightness and some blur mechanism that didn’t seem to make any difference.

Some reviews of Mass Effect 2 didn’t like the hacking mini-games. I didn’t mind them, and it was easy to upgrade to make them trivial, but once that was done there wasn’t any challenge. They just sort of wasted time. Sort of pointless really.

But the big bad of the game, and I put this last because it was really attrocious was the scanning mini game.

Scanning has two reasons. First, you can scan for anomalies. These lead to missions, but there aren’t all that many of these. However, you also scan for resources, paladium, platinum, iridium, and element zero. These elements are required to research upgrade to your weapons, armor, ship, and prototypes. (TIP: Make sure you upgrade the Normandy’s defensive and offence systems to the max. I didn’t and lost a useful team member on the final mission.)

The problem is that scanning is the most boring chore ever to be put in a video game. It involves (on the XBox) going into scan mode, holding down the left trigger, and dragging a reticule over every inch of a planets surface. When the sensors start pinging, you launch a probe (The ship has a capacity of 30 probes initially upgradable to 60) which collects the minerals detected. You then continue to scan until you have probed all the resources of the planet. It takes maybe ten to fifteen minutes to scan an entire planet. The worst thing about scanning is that upgrading everything as much as possible is essential to complete the game, and to do that you have to scan/mine.

Really, the game designer who thought of this rediculous exercise in boredom should be demoted and forced to test other stupidly designed game systems every day for five years while listening to elevator music until he or she learns how to recognise good gameplay from bad. Bad game developer. No twinkie.

I honestly can’t believe that this got past Biowares quality control processes. I found myself yearning for the horrible driving experience of the first Mass Effect.

However, while that part of the gameplay was significantly bad, Mass Effect 2 has enough good points going for it to make it an overall enjoyable experience.

After the release of Mass Effect, it’s taken around two years for ME 2 to come along. I really hope ME3 gets here well before another two years pass. I want to see what happens.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Is It Time To Make Levelling Hard Again?

Once upon a time it was standard procedure for a MMORPG developer to make it tough to level.

The games not only didn’t give players much experience for a kill, or for completing a quest, they put obstacles in the form of tough death penalties in the gamers way as well. Everquest, the original, deducted experience upon death that could even drop a players level if he died enough times. EQ also had huge wait times for mana and health regeneration which added to the time it took to level. Asheron’s Call added a penalty called Vitae that weaked a player and had to be worked off before tackling the tough mobs again.

These penalties meant that it took a lot of time to reach the level cap in those games. I’m not sure how long it took from go to whoa in EQ, but it took over two years for the first player to reach the level cap in Asheron’s Call. And that was when the cap was 80, it’s now something like 270.

Contrast that to todays games.

Today, on the STO forums I read that there are some players in Star Trek Online who have already reached the level cap of that game. That’s getting to the cap in about a week of play.

The question I have to ask… is that too fast?

Some folks will answer in the affirmative, and will claim the best way to enjoy a new game (especially one without much end game content) is to take it slowly. And, there is a lot to be said for that viewpoint. I tend to be one of those kind of players. I can level quickly if I want to, but I tend to take my time and look around or do silly and pointless things like swim around the continents in WoW looking for ways to get into high level areas from the back. (Unfortunately, there are none I’ve ever been able to find!)

But that viewpoint isn’t the only valid viewpoint.

The thing is that there will always be players who really enjoy quickly racing to the top. The person who does this might have a competitive nature, or simply just be in a hurry. It doesn’t matter what a developer does, or how much lower level content is in the game, there is a percentage of players (possibly significant) who will not stop to smell the flowers, and will just race through.

And if a player enjoys playing the game that way, there’s nothing wrong with that. To say otherwise is the same as having hardcore players complain about casual players, or adventurers complain about crafters. One persons grind is anothers fun.

So. Is it time for MMORPG developers to make levelling hard once again?

Perhaps a better way to phrase that question is should MMORPGs be implemented in ways that it takes months to reach the cap, not days?

I’m not suggesting that we go back to the bad old days of huge level killing death penalties, or hours of play sessions spent sitting around medding or waiting for boats, it’s a good thing those ideas have fallen by the wayside.  What I am suggesting is that developers find a way to slow the levelling process while still allowing players to be active in the game.

Currently though the only real way to do this is by grinding, either kills or quests, and that’s not all that acceptable these days either.

Or maybe, the solution is to look somewhere other than the classic class/level system for player progression. Eve Online relies on a real time based approach. So long as a player keeps skills in training, it doesn’t matter how much time they actually spend in the game, and it will always take years to reach the skill cap. A player is then encouraged to enjoy the game rather than racing through.

Something that I’d like to see is to give a game more horizontal progression. EQ2 has tradeskilling, player housing, and collections to keep players busy. It’s entirely valid to spend entire sessions combing low level areas for harvests or shinies needed to complete collections. Expanding on this could be as simple as providing new systems. Allowing players to have more say in the game’s economy, or perhaps introducing a system for player and guild politics (ATITD with it’s voting systems, and Eve with its alliances) would give players more options, and would have the added benefit of more interaction and player dependency.

In any case, I believe that MMORPGs are going entirely in the wrong direction when it comes to the speed of levelling by making the level cap achievable in the first few days of play. By doing so they’re just ensuring that subscriptions are cancelled when the player runs out of things to do. If a player exhausts the content in the free month, is there any reason to subscribe?

Popularity: 1% [?]

Jean-Luc Picard Is A Big Wuss

I’ve been meaning to write this article for a while now, but life decided to come by and slap me silly. (More on that shortly.)

Anyhoo. Star Trek Online. Oh, and please note this is not a review, I have spent in no way enough time in the beta to work up a review. This is simply an impressions and thoughts piece.

It sounds like the dream IP for a MMORPG developer. A huge pre-existing and completely obsessed with anything Star Trek fan base. An IP that is all about exploration, seeking out new life, and boldly going where no one has gone before. The TV series, all of them, have drama, diplomacy, puzzle-solving, space combat, ground combat, humour, and a hopeful outlook on the future.

It should be a MMORPG goldmine.

But, from what I’ve seen so far, I doubt that it will be.

Now to be fair, I haven’t spent all that much time playing the beta. I was invited to the closed beta just before Christmas and spent a single session of a game that seemed woefully incomplete. Since then I’ve patched to the open beta client and have found a much more complete version of the game. Lots of missing text and graphics is now in the game. There’s certainly been a lot of work done over the last few weeks, and a lot of improvements made.

To a certain extent, I’ve had fun playing the open beta of STO. The space combat is much more tactical than most MMORPG combat systems, except perhaps Eve.

But ultimately, Star Trek Online offers nothing of what made the television series(s) special.

There is space and ground combat to be sure, but there is no diplomacy game, the missions are all canned in that there are no real choices or consequences for the decisions you make. I haven’t seen anything that I have to figure out — do I kill that silicon lifeform rock-creature, or get Bones down to heal it? Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor not a bricklayer. — And the exploration seems inconsequential. There’s no relationship with my bridge crew, they just add stats and beam down with me on away missions.

In a nutshell, the game lacks content.

It’s odd because it feels like STO has less going for it (gameplay wise) than Tabula Rasa did at the same stage of development, and look how badly TR got caned for lack of content.

What Cryptic have with Star Trek Online is a great foundation for a MMORPG based on the Star Trek franchise. What they need to do is to take another six months for development and add in those elements that made Star Trek special.

• Choices. Jim Kirk made his own decisions based on what he encountered. So did Picard and Sisko. (Janeway just parroted the company line.) He didn’t have a bunch of mission text leading him from one step to the next with no room to improvise. And maybe that’s what ST was all about. Improvisation. Can a Star Trek game, really be a Star Trek game without improvisation?
• Real Exploration. While I’m travelling shouldn’t I come across the unexpected. A new lifeform perhaps a space jellyfish or some such thing? And it should have an associated story. See next point.
• Solving Mysteries. If I’m sent to a star system to rescue a stranded freighter, don’t give me a damn slow escort mission that’s just a timesink, give me a mystery to solve. Or evolve the scenario into something interesting. Sure, Star Trek was in a “planet of the week” format, but each episode at least attempted to have an interesting story. So far the missions I’ve seen have been not much more that the kill ten rats or escort variety. It’s worse than that, it’s boring Jim.
• Missions need to be Episodes. Following on from the previous point. Each mission really ought to be the equivalent of a weekly TV episode of ST. How many stories started with, “Starfleet has sent us to… ?”
• Klingons. Don’t make them Monster Play only, unlockable at whatever level. The Klingon’s in the TV series, TNG onwards, were interesting. They had the best parties, and the Klingons seemed to laugh more than any other species. (Except for that stick-in-the-mud, Worf.) The Klingon’s also had the best ships in the first two series. TNG started developing a rich culture for the Klingon’s that was continued by DS9. There’s a wealth of content there for STO. Use it.
• Away Team/Ground Combat. This needs to be sorted. It’s not very good and needs improvement. For one thing I have an away team, yet I can’t figure out how to operate them like a squad. I always end up leading the team into a room and get shot first. I need to be able to send my red-shirt in to danger first!

I think the real clincher for me is that when I think I should login to Star Trek Online and spend some time with it, I don’t really have much of a desire to do so. I end up opening up Everquest 2, or just sit down and read a book. It doesn’t give me any inclination to buy and subscribe to STO (let alone buy a lifetime sub — what a ripoff that is!)

From what I’ve read, Champions Online has become a virtual ghost town only a few months after release, due at least in part (in my opinion) to being released too early without enough content. I fully expect Star Trek Online to suffer the same fate. The only thing that may help is that die hard Trek fans could hang in there for a while longer than most.

My overall impression is that STO will be on life support within a year of release.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tiger Tiger Burning Bright

I recently tried out the two week free return visit of Age of Conan and decided against resubscribing despite a renewed sense of fun playing the Barbarian class and a huge improvement in the game that has occurred since release. That decision hasn’t changed, but dang! The new mounts that are to be released with the Rise of the Godslayer expansion are something to behold!

Age of Conan always has been one of the more graphically gorgeous games around, and Funcom keep upping the ante with content like this. Giving players a tiger to ride around on is awesome (and fairly tempting I might add) and a great concept to get players back into the game.

With their recent trials and promotions, it looks like Funcom are finally turning things around. They might not win back all the lost subscribers from the release, but it’s looking like Age of Conan will be around for the long haul.

Popularity: 1% [?]

A Cautionary Tale: The Sad Case Of Duke Nukem

There’s a particularly good analysis up on Wired on how the development of Duke Nukem Forever ended up living up to its name by taking forever to develop, and finally getting canceled. (Be aware, some of the article is NSFW.)

DNF was the major game release that I had been quietly waiting for since it was announced back in 1997. Having thoroughly enjoyed Duke Nukem 3D, and seeing some of the early screenshots, it was disappointing when they finally announced that the game had been killed. It seemed all those jokes about the DNF release date being a few days short of the heat death of the universe weren’t all that far off the mark.

Still, if you read the Wired article you’ll see the biggest failure was that of perfectionism.

That’s something that every game studio and developer has to be careful with. Actually, it’s the bane of an awful lot of creative individuals. The slightest flaw or shortcoming has to be addressed, and nothing ever gets completed. Here’s one of the key points of the Wired article.

Broussard simply couldn’t tolerate the idea of Duke Nukem Forever coming out with anything other than the latest and greatest technology and awe-inspiring gameplay. He didn’t just want it to be good. It had to surpass every other game that had ever existed, the same way the original Duke Nukem 3D had.

In the sad case of DNF, this meant that the team had to scrap a ton of work a number of times in order to cater to the whims of the so-called visionary.

The irony of the whole situation is that Broussard could have completed the game on the original Quake II engine and, if the gameplay was done right, would have had a huge hit on his hands. It would have been at least as big as the original DN3D and would have made 3D Realms hundreds of millions of dollars and paved the way for the franchise to continue for years to come.

Instead, we see a potentially great game cancelled and the developers, many of whom had worked on the same game for 12 years, shown the door.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Trying Conan

So here I am at the end of the two week reactivation trial from Funcom for Age of Conan.

For the first couple of days I replayed old characters, primarily Stropp the Aquilonian Dark Templar, and to be honest with you I didn’t find that character very engaging. I didn’t feel invested in the quests, and perhaps it was the area, those quests seemed to be a little disjointed and a bit boring.

So I decided to create a new character. Bargarse the Barbarian, a Cimmerian.

The Barbarian class in Age of Conan is effectively a rogue archetype. He’s able to stealth and do most everything a rogue does. At first blush this seemed a bit of a stretch for me, I’d never have pegged Arnie’s portrayal of Conan as anything but a warrior. But, I’ve never read any of the Conan books so I don’t know how Howard portrayed him. And at least for part of the film he’s involved in somewhat roguish behavior.

Anyway, I took Bargarse through all the Tortage quests, getting him up to level 20 over three nights, before heading out to Conarch Village and Conal Valley over Saturday and Sunday. With the help of an experience potion claimable throughout November, I took my Barbarian through most of the quests and nearly to level 27. I figure there may be enough quests left to get to level 30.

Some things I noticed:

• Tortage works like a charm now. It seems the bugs introduced throughout the release period have been fixed. Not that I expected they wouldn’t be.
• There is still an occasional crash to desktop. I had it happen once.
• There appears to still be a memory leak, but it’s nowhere near as bad as when I first played. Some of the map textures disappeared from time to time as before, but only happened once. I don’t know if it’s related, but every time I exited the game, a dialog popped up asking me to report a bug (and then the Microsoft one immediately after.)
• Funcom has some of the post-Tortage quest givers talking now. At release that was one of the big complaints. Tortage set everything up beautifully with fully voiced quest givers, and as soon as I left Tortage, no-one spoke anymore. Now, not every quest giver does, but there are some.
• There are still huge gaps in the destiny quests. I met up with the destiny guy in Conarch Village and he said, “Hi! Come back at 30.” Funcom needs to fill out these quests with at least a quest chain every 5 levels. Otherwise the destiny quests are nothing but an interruption.
• The combo’s are useful now. At release, it really didn’t matter if I used a combo or not. Just swinging my weapon did as much damage. Now, swinging wildly doesn’t do much damage at all. But using the combos correctly can really knock a mob down.

The biggest difference though was that I began to enjoy the game. I reckon it was the Barbarian class coupled with the usefulness of combos. The rogue aspects added to the gameplay since I could sneak up behind a mob and sneak attack which was kinda fun, especially when using one handers.

Perhaps the quests in Cimmeria were more fun too. It seemed to be a fairly logical chain of quests that were presented, and even though they ended up being kill x bad guys for the most part, they made sense. And there was the whole bloodlust thing too. Grrr.

Having said all that, I have unsubscribed before the trial period was up and my credit card charged.

I did seriously consider keeping the subscription going. but there were a couple of reasons for cancelling.

First, I’ve got too many games on the go now and, while a 2 week trial doesn’t hurt too much, I really don’t have time for AoC. The other is that I am now officially out of work (finished my contract at 5pm this afternoon.) That means some belt-tightening is required, and I don’t need the cost of another subscription.

But for you my friends, I think that if you played Age of Conan at release but left out of frustration at the time, then you might find the game has improved sufficiently to warrant resubscribing. That’s especially the case if you wanted to like the game and found it hard to leave.

If you want to do the trial, you had better be quick since it expires on the 27th, today.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Professor Syp’s Homework Assignment

Professor Syp over at the Biobreak School of MMOGenomics and Appliance Repair has set all of us bloggers who also play Everquest 2 a little homework assignment. And just before the Thanksgiving holidays* too. Hrmph. What a killjoy!

The work he is asking us to do is to list five features of EQ2 that are better than those in World of Warcraft. Fortunately he didn’t set a word requirement.

1. Housing. Everquest 2 has the best housing system in any MMORPG I’ve played. WoW doesn’t have housing.
2. Guild Amenities. Guilds in WoW are simply a group of like minded players. It’s the same in EQ2 except that guilds can level up. At certain levels various amenities become available to the guild such as trade quest givers, guards, crafting component storage, and mail boxes. Not to mention at certain levels guilds can move into bigger and better guild halls.
3. Crafting. I really don’t consider World of Warcraft’s crafting system to be a real crafting system. All you do is have the required components and hit a button. That’s not crafting, that’s mass production, Jetsons style. However, while EQ2 requires more involvement while crafting, it’s still not the best system I’ve seen. ATITD is the gold standard as far as I’m concerned, even if it does require a PHD to work out. Still EQ2 crafting beats WoW Crafting hands down. Not to mention crafting is not tied to adventure level. A player can just be a crafter if he wishes, and never step into the wilderness.
4. Quest Variety. While EQ2 still has much of the same quest structure of WoW, they have a bigger variety of quest types. You can do heritage quests, epic quests, heroic quests, and a couple of other quest types as well. The rewards also include furniture and trophies that can be put in your house or guild hall.
5. Collections. These are a kind of sub-quest where a player must find shiny objects around the world to complete collections. Completing these collections often offer a reward. Collections are not critical to the game, but they do offer a nice diversion.
6. Alternate Achievement Points. Can I add a sixth point? WoW has Talents, but I like the way EQ2 uses AA points (which is a similar system), and how I can acumulate them faster than I level. It’s also optional to do this, so players can choose to race to the level cap, or to accumulate AAs for a stronger character before moving to the next level. Nice little feature.
7. Flexibility in Appearance. Can I have Extra Credit, Professor Syp? In EQ2 you’re not restricted to the look of your armor. After a certain level, players can equip gear in appearance slots. These don’t provide stats, but only affect the look of your character.

So there you go. Not five, but seven features in Everquest 2 that I consider to be better that the equivalent features (if they exist) in World of Warcraft.

While I believe that WoW does parts of the MMORPG experience better than other games, and while the bits it does do better are the ones that count, it’s my opinion that Everquest 2 is a superior game to World of Warcraft. The points I listed above are only some of the reasons I believe that.

* BTW, Thanksgiving is not celebrated in Australia, so Professor Syp hasn’t interrupted our vacation with this homework after all.

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