Today’s MMOrning Shots comes to us from Wildstar, where my character is sporting quite a leafy mustache. You too can have such a mustache by joining the Wildstar open beta, going on now until the 18th.
Check out MMOrning Shots (eventually) every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Defiance, where a large group of players take on the Hellbug Matriarch. At 8:30am. The coffee must be spiked with something.
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Arktech Revolution is the fifth and final DLC installment for Defiance’s first season pass, and one that I welcome with open arms. It’s been a month since this DLC launched and a few people speculated that the sudden lack of a review here at MMO Fallout was me signaling that I was done with the game after my previous reviews. This is not the case. As it stands, Arktech Revolution is more about quality of life improvements over all else, I wanted to be completely sure that I took enough time to fully digest what had changed to understand how it affects day to day gameplay.
First off, let me thank Trion Worlds for fixing what I consider to be the most poorly executed update in Defiance’s short history. Several DLC’s ago, Trion introduced stims and spikes, as well as consumable grenades to Defiance. The concept was great, you had stims that boosted power/defense/healing as well as spikes that granted an area of effect boost that restored ammo, increased damage, etc. The implementation left a lot to be desired, as replenishing your stockpile of stims/spikes was entirely dependent on either going to a merchant or hoping that the correct type was dropped. With Arktech Revolution, enemies drop generic refills for stims, spikes, and grenades that make it much harder to run out in the middle of an invasion.
It is also possible to gain experience on weapons that have already been mastered. This sounds like a small update, but it means a lot when you previously would have to decide in the middle of a battle whether to switch to a new weapon or continue on at the cost of not making any progress. The armor nodes are interesting, but I haven’t noticed much of an effect on the overall experience.
The boost to both the EGO level cap and enemy abilities has made the game very difficult for new players and veterans alike. Where the game was often times far too easy before, has now become difficult to the point of impossible in certain settings. For instance, I took part in a Volge invasion that rather quickly capped out at the highest difficulty and began spawning top-tier Volge mobs. Many of us couldn’t even make a dent in their armor, which isn’t so much difficult as it is frustrating when you have ten of them spawning in the same area.
Looking back, Defiance is an infinitely better game than it was when it launched one year ago. Ignoring the fact that the game can be purchased for pennies on the dollar nowadays, Defiance is set to go free to play next month on PC with the console versions to follow. The game still has many more improvements to make, like how the world feels so cramped with all of the events going on at any given time. According to forum posts, Trion plans on increasing the size of the game world following the introduction of free to play.
Overall, though, if you were to bottle up all of the paid features from the first five DLC packages and put them up for $30, would it be worth it? I’d like to say so. With the second season of Defiance coming this summer and more tie-in missions on their way, I’m looking forward to what Defiance has to offer for the future.
With the Newbie Blogger Initiative fully underway, I want to talk about something that has been on my mind ever since I started MMO Fallout nearly five years ago. In the time that I have been running this show, I have had the fantastic opportunity to interview Derek Smart (multiple times), Mark Hill, Stephen Calender, and even Brian “Psychochild” Green himself, to name a few. That list doesn’t even come close to the number of developers that I have had the chance to talk to behind the scenes in a more informal manner. One of the biggest questions, one that I consider to be amongst the top most important for new writers, is how I manage to get these interviews. The answer is going to make you mad.
I asked. Seriously.
When I did my first interview back in 2010, I had a lot to be nervous about. Here I was, from an unknown website less than a year old, asking to take up some important person’s time to answer my petty questions. I certainly wasn’t important enough to demand answers, not that I am now five years later, but I hadn’t even considered directly emailing developers at this point. Eventually it took my dad asking the simple question that I still hold as one of my fundamental driving forces: What do you have to lose? What is the worst outcome that could come of asking for an interview? The person says no? They don’t respond? That’s it? What are you afraid of?
I realized that there wasn’t anything to be afraid of, and I sent the email. Around a week passed but I got a response back, not only did the developers know who I was, but expressed that they were fans of MMO Fallout and would be more than happy to do an interview. That is the lesson I want to impart on new bloggers: Ask and ye shall receive, or you won’t, but you won’t come out any worse off than when you started. You have to accept that, barring your sudden rise to stardom, you are going to receive nos or be ignored. A lot. When you ask, you either wind up one step ahead or where you started off.
Secondly, the best advice I can give is to not allow yourself to be intimidated or star-struck. These are very talented and professional people, yes, and some might even wear suits to work. But at the end of the day they are normal people who live lives just like you or me. The easiest method to reduce the intimidation factor is to watch a lot of behind the scenes videos or dev diaries, once you’re used to seeing desks covered in toys and developers goofing off and having a good time, the whole interview process becomes less like sitting in an office and more like a casual chat.
Oh and conduct an interview because you want to, not because you think it will get you hits. One of the factors that I get a lot of criticism for is that my interviews are often seen as unorganized because the questions don’t always follow a pattern. I request interviews because there is something very specific that I want to talk about with a person that I consider best qualified to answer, and that list of questions doesn’t always follow a traditional pattern. I personally prefer this method, and the people I interview find the style to be relaxed, more like a casual chat than a rigid interview.
Feel free to contact me at contact@mmofallout.com if you have any comments or questions, or drop a comment in the link below.
Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Eldevin, currently celebrating its recent Greenlighting on Steam.
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Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Nosgoth, the upcoming spinoff from Legacy of Kain. In Nosgoth, players take on the role of vampires vs humans in an all out struggle for survival. Check out the founders packs here and receive instant access to the closed beta.
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May has arrived, and that means another year and another Newbie Blogger Initiative. For those of you who don’t know, NBI is an annual event that hopes to bring more people into the big blogosphere that is the internet. In my case, it means hopefully populating the internet with writers who in all likelihood will far surpass my own abilities and leave me unemployed and homeless. The goal of the Newbie Blogger Initiative is promote new and upcoming game bloggers as well as for veteran bloggers to offer advice and mentor those who aren’t entirely sure what they are doing. I will also be present.
I wish there was an NBI when I started blogging…twelve years ago on Tripod websites. Over the course of May, I will be talking about various aspects of MMO Fallout’s creation and maintenance, as well as answering some of the more popular questions I have received over time. We’ll share some laughs, learn more about each other, and hopefully learn some lessons along the way. I will also likely be promoting some new blogs on the main page and sidebar from time to time, so check them out. These are good people.
If you have any questions or comments of your own for NBI, drop a comment in the box below or email me.
Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Heroes and Villains, one of the spiritual successor to City of Heroes. The game still has a long way to go, but now you can check out a laundry list of work in progress screenshots. Where? At this link.
Fight your way to MMOrning Shots every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, barring any supervillain attacks.
The Elder Scrolls Online is yet another lesson in the running line of recent MMORPGs that you can either have an immersive single player story-based experience or you can have a game that encourages cooperative play, but you can’t have both at the same time and expect that neither side will suffer from it. Elder Scrolls Online is at its core a fun game with a lot of great ideas, but it loses a lot of the Elder Scrolls charm in its transition from single player to massively multiplayer, and I’m not just talking about the ability to be an evil bastard.
We all knew that sacrifices had to be made in the transition to an online game, and for some the deal was over right off the bat. It’s hard to vilify either side in this argument because technically neither are wrong. You would be correct in surmising that an online game has to have more restrictions in place because it has more responsibility to a connected community. Responsibility to maintain an economy, to allow a certain level of fairness, to make sure that everyone can have fun and no one in particular is left out, etcetera ipso facto.
And then you apply it to the Elder Scrolls, and that means no pickpocketing, no killing sprees, no stealing. NPCs no longer drop everything when they die, no extensive book collections, no criminal status, a reliance on random number generators for your loot, lag, skills tied to your number bar, respawning baskets and mobs, and a complete intrusion of other players on your business.
If the sacrifices of other features are the death of immersion by a thousand cuts, then the publicly accessible dungeons and buildings are the hammer that causes a mortal wound, if not instant death. Nothing cuts immersion in half like sneaking into a building or uncovering a “secret passageway that hasn’t been touched in centuries” only to find a couple dozen players already inside. In other quests, I battled my way through a dungeon filled with spiders in order to kill their queen, only to find the spawn point being camped by at least twenty bots/players. They seemed to have it covered, so I left.
Public dungeons are also a mood killer if you prefer to play stealthy and avoid or silently take down mobs, only to have three or four people rush in and start slaughtering everything in your path. Even worse, when the dungeon just has a train of people going back and forth, killing everything in sight. Not that it matters, because there is no incentive to actually get behind your opponent and strike them with a bow. This is especially annoying with dungeon bosses/mini-bosses, who spawn about once in a never, assuming they aren’t completely broken, and only the player who delivers the final blow will receive credit for killing them.
Sit around for twenty minutes for a mini-boss to spawn only to have someone jump in at the last second and steal the kill? Please, sign me up. For cancellation that is.
I also have a hard time taking the quests seriously in Elder Scrolls Online. I feel like every city I come across follows the same pattern: the town is overrun with zombies/pirates/bandits/etc, as though the folks at Zenimax were so proud of their phasing technology that they had to shoehorn it into every crevice of the game. The formula is always the same: Go to [insert town], receive quest from [guard/citizen] telling you not to enter, enter anyway, rescue [citizens/guards], defeat [x number of enemy], enter building, defeat boss guy. Unlock rescued town with merchants and crafting spots, rinse, repeat.
Now I know why the Imperials don’t want any of the three factions in power, these guys are fighting over territory while allowing virtually 100% of their own land be taken over by every necromancer and bandit with access to a sword. At this rate, I think the Aldmeri Dominion should just go ahead and elect a corpse as supreme leader. The country would still be in shambles, but at least we’d have a decent excuse. Someone please read the Elder Scroll that we stole from the Ebonheart Pact, maybe there are instructions in it on how to competently run an empire.
I like the fact that content is gated behind levels, and I say this as one of “those people” who preferred when enemies didn’t scale with you in Morrowind and installed mods to achieve the same concept in Oblivion and Skyrim. The idea falls short when you consider that you are being ushered from one area to the next, rather than being given free reign to go where you want as with previous games in the series, but it isn’t surprising or particularly detrimental in an MMO frame of mind.
Otherwise I have no strong opinions on the matter.
Missing Worlds Media took to the news to announce that their flagship title, City of Titans, is nearing the end of pre-production. The short letter talks about crafting respawn systems, battling the new Unreal engine, as well as importing Learner’s Cove, the game’s planned tutorial area.
Named after noted pirate Captain James Edward Learner, Learner’s Cove sheltered him after his growing body count had his commission as a privateer stripped and all friendly ports, including the bustling new shipping hub of Clarkestown closed to him. There persist rumors of buried treasure hidden away in the network of caves on the island, but most chalk those up to tall tales and ghost stories.
Check out the entire announcement at the link below.
(Source: Missing Worlds Media)
MMO Fallout 