MMO Fallout

For the one or two of you who have followed my Star Wars Galaxies articles, you’ll notice I’ve stopped doing them. The short end of the story is that I have nothing more to talk about with the game, while writing up the fifth week article realizing that from a few weeks in my articles were nothing more than “I’m having the same problems, there are these bugs, and I’m traveling far for the missions.” I know all three of the people I saw over the month and a half that I played will be angry at me for saying this, but at this juncture (with the shutdown coming) Star Wars Galaxies is like a museum. You go in an see the exhibits, how the cavemen lived years ago, and you walk out. The game hasn’t aged well and if Sony and Lucas Arts had anything to say about it, the massive size of the game (You truly have to experience Star Wars Galaxies to understand how enormous this game is) made a free to play transition simply unfeasible.

I will be covering Galaxies in the final days, however.

1. When You’re Phasing: Important Quest NPCs.

I’ve recently re-subscribed to World of Warcraft after being offered seven free days, and one of the more impressive features I’ve seen so far is the phasing technology. Now, I’ve commended the story telling in Runescape as allowing moderately world changing events to take place in the player’s own vision, but Blizzard takes this a step further by introducing far more story moments, cutscenes, and the aforementioned phasing. To the unfamiliar, phasing is a system where players can see different versions of the same area, depending on the completion of quests. So if I lead the invasion into the Worgen territory, I will see an empty battlefield afterward. A player just entering the area would still have hostile NPCs and a war raging around him.

For the complaints players have of being in the same area yet not seeing one another, this relieves one of my biggest gripes with MMO quests: The “Kill the leader of the Centaur,” quest only to have the leader respawn after a predetermined time. Or being given a quest to eradicate rats from an area, only to have them still be in that area. The quests feel far less superficial, as you have the visual feedback that you’ve actually accomplished something.

My main issue is that the quests were clearly not co-written. All of these quests were written specifically when Cataclysm released, but clearly not with any overlap. Thus, I’ve had to abandon three or four quests because the phasing caused the NPC I needed to turn the quest into to die, turn hostile, or simply leave. My research on the forums shows these quests bugged with reports dating back to around Cataclysm’s release, meaning I can chalk off those low level rewards.

2. North Korea…Isn’t Gold Farming?

Believe what you will. Following last week’s news that North Korea is funding hackers to bring in a few million dollars by breaking into South Korean MMOs to set up bots to farm gold, the North Korean state-run propaganda machine has come out to state that all claims are false, and made up by their South Korean neighbors. Granted, we won’t know for sure who is telling the truth, as either side could be using this as a propaganda machine against the other.

3. Nintendo Patents Massively Singleplayer Online Games

Say hello to the future additions to MMO Fallout, perhaps. In a bizarre move, Nintendo has patented the concept of the MSO, or Massively Singleplayer Online game.

“A method and apparatus that allows a player to play a massively single-player online game without directly interacting with other players, while affecting and being affected by other players playing the online game.”

An idea for this would be a Diablo-esque game where players can play in a single player or multiplayer environment, but with a global auction house (similar to Diablo 3). Granted: This is a Nintendo patent, and generally when Nintendo patents something weird, we never see that idea again. So this may be the last you hear of the MSORPG.

4. The Tree People Have Breasts

I saw an interesting thread on Guild Wars 2 this past week detailing two things the MMORPG.com forums can’t seem to get enough of: The Sylvari and breasts. The poster went on a rather impressive explanation as to how the Sylvari join with other races and must thus make themselves more attractive to that specific species. The Charr are easily satisfied, but the humans are more xenophobic and likely to become hostile to an overly different species, IE: The Charr. So in order to be more attractive, the Sylvari took on traits attractive to humans, ie: big mammary glands.

It’s a very detailed way to say “because we know what percentage of our players are heterosexual men, therefore boobs. Breasts, melons, headlights, creampuffs.” You know the recipe.

5. I May Be Right About Darkfall’s “Wipe.”

I’ve revised my speculation on Darkfall’s wipes a few times, after revelations that the wipe may not be a wipe in the sense of “characters deleted, starting fresh.” The more Aventurine talks, the more a better image begins to come into focus, and after their latest blog I think it’s safe to say that the “wipe” refers to new skills that will replace old skills (but start at 0) and redundant skills being removed completely, which Aventurine has confirmed as true. Such a system isn’t really a wipe in the traditional sense, and regaining the few new skills will be far less enduring than a full wipe.

But who knows? I know I don’t.