MMOments – MMO Fallout

MMOments: Grabbing Free Costumes in Marvel Heroes Omega

I’ve been rolling through the latest event in Marvel Heroes on PC and Playstation 4, of which the latter is woefully outpaced by the amount of time and money I’ve placed in the former. While Marvel Heroes Omega on Playstation is by all means an inferior product at the moment, I have to hand it to Gazillion for having a better idea from the start as to how they want to take their product. Marvel Heroes on PC was a mess at launch, in fact it was a mess when I played it at New York Comic Con back in 2012, just a well disguised mess. It’s come a long way, but as I’ve said in previous articles there are things that the community has come to take for granted that aren’t exactly how Gazillion wants the game to go, but can’t remove because it would kill the community and likely the game itself.

One clear advantage, in this humble author’s opinion, that the console version has over PC is that it seems to be making up for the lack of fast experience by giving away loot boxes. Rather than through shared quests, console players receive daily missions that, upon completion, reward a Defenders loot box. The box is the same as the paid one, and it has a chance of containing costumes. Gazillion may not be handing out experience like it’s candy on the console version, but PC players aren’t getting their hands on new costumes at no charge.

In fact, I was able to get my hands on the Elektra Maskless costume just today (seen above). The boxes also hand out marvelous essence, the currency to buy general costumes from the store and eternity splinters to more quickly collect heroes. The quest itself is a pretty simple diversion, defeat 200 Hand members and a number of elites, you can complete it in one run of the Hand tower in Chapter 3 story mode.

Otherwise I can’t talk much about the gear other than to say that it is not the best in show, and therefore as an efficiency minded ARPG player, it is completely useless to me and not worth grinding the Hand currency to buy. If you’re on PC, the ongoing events are worth it if you’re looking to level up the related characters or get Spider Man to cosmic prestige to get ready for his Omega Prestige (coming soon). For those on console, it’s nice to be able to get your hands on something that Gazillion is normally pretty stingy with: Free lockboxes and free costumes.

MMOments: Secret World Legends and the Power Of Second Impressions

The Secret World will go down in history as one of the few games to put some of its executives in actual, physical prison, a strong connection considering that the game itself didn’t exactly leave much of a splash on the genre when it launched in 2012. It’s disappointing but true, while critics were praising the title for its intelligent missions and players were getting through the launch ARG, the game initially tanked Funcom’s stock value and never really garnered the kind of following it deserved or really needed. It was no failure by any means, don’t get me wrong, but five years later, the game is in some dire need of a reboot.

For those who haven’t given The Secret World a look, Secret World Legends is a not-exactly-horror game set on modern day Earth with a lore steeped in conspiracy. To picture the world you will inhabit, imagine that every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard is true. The Illuminati exist but they don’t really control everything, there is a town in Solomon Island, Maine that has been besieged by zombies, the Egyptian gods were real, and Transylvania actually does have vampires living in it. Who knows, Bigfoot probably also exists. You start the game by choosing one of three factions to join: The Illuminati, the Dragon, and the Templars. Who you join basically determines your faction quest line and your choice of faction specific outfits, otherwise you’re pretty much going through the same zones and missions.

The absolute strongest aspect of Secret World Legends carries over from The Secret World: Its story telling. While the animations are about as stiff and lifeless as you’d expect from a Funcom game, the missions themselves are quite a bit of fun to go on. Best of all are the investigation missions, bits that have you solving rather difficult puzzles that require outside reading and research. Normally this is where I’d joke and say “grab your bible, because you’re going to need it,” but you’re actually going to need access to a bible if you don’t want to cheat and look up the answers. A number of the puzzles in Secret World Legends involved cracking open a bible and reading passages to find clues. Crazy, right?

You won’t be doing any long division or physics problems for the puzzles, they’re more understanding references and taking a look at the scenery. Some are obscure, require you to really soak in the scenery, while others are simple “the answer is the length of this song.” Almost every mission starts and ends with a cutscene, and usually some sort of message from your faction offering some more information on the case.

Combat is the next big thing in Secret World Legends, because the one that existed in The Secret World wasn’t exactly what you’d call…well received. This time around, combat is more action oriented, with a reduced number of slots for actions along with each weapon having its own special ability. Combat isn’t great, but it is a step up from the floatiness of The Secret World.

I can appreciate that the game points out harder enemies on the map, not only because they are more engaging to fight than the random mobs roaming around but because this game is seriously stingy when it comes to drops. I imagine that Trond Aas must be getting more from his commissary than Funcom is willing to dole out in goods. The plus side is that you don’t have to spend much time comparing stats since your weapon/talisman drops will just be recycled to gear up your current weapon, so the lack of loot is sort of complimented by the fact that it is mostly useless for purposes other than feeding your current equipment regardless.

As someone who abandoned The Secret World early over its lack of players (understandably contributing to just that problem), I’m glad to see Funcom give the game another chance rather than letting it slide into a slow death. While you would be within your rights to be angry about having to start over,

More impressions to come.

MMOments: The Exiled, No Land For The Sheep

(Editor’s Note: MMO Fallout received a key from the developer for the purposes of reviewing. The opinions of this website cannot by swayed by anything short of a case of Orbitz drink)

I started playing The Exiled a few days before the actual launch, and my first thought was basically the same that I had with titles like Darkfall. “Yea, it’s fun, but I have a feeling it’s going to push a lot of people away very early.” It’ll be hard to move forward with an impressions piece without talking about the ten ton elephant in the room, so I’m going to get it out of the way now: The whole labeling as free to play is going to annoy people, and already has. The game has a seven day trial, after which you have to chalk down at least twenty bucks to keep playing. Overall it isn’t a huge deal, but I feel like not mentioning this would bring up issues later on.

The Exiled is a PvP sandbox MMO with nearly full loot and a considerable number of you just crossed this game off of your wishlists. You control your character with the WASD keys, attacking through a combination of mouse buttons and keyboard commands. Your character can make, equip, and use any weapon or armor in the game without having to deal with a class system.

The rules in The Exiled are that while you keep your gear on death from other players, your inventory is open for looting. There is some solace in the fact that you drop to the ground and start regaining health, after which you get back up and can continue whatever you were doing without having to trudge back from a spawn point, since most gankers are willing to loot your bag and leave you be. The game, as you might expect, instantly turned into a numbers game with gangs of clans roving the countryside and wiping out random solo’ers.

I’m not making any big discovery by saying that this is a niche game in a niche market, if you could take the perception that games like The Exiled has and give it a physical manifestation, it’d be somewhere in the realm of opening a store, locking the door, hiding the key under the doormat and standing at the window giving the middle finger to whichever carebear customer has the gall to ask “are you open?” And if the store owner himself isn’t enough to drive away customers, you can bet that the tiny vocal minority of obnoxious, mostly toxic cult followers of the genre will do their part to make the game as intolerable as possible, be it running train through the starting zone to harass new players, shouting “gg kill yourself” in chat, and generally operating “for the lulz” because the game lets them do whatever they want and they’re too busy telling people to go back to World of Warcraft to notice the population decaying around them.

And this is where The Exiled falls shortest, in that I don’t think that the developers at Fairytale Distillery looked at similar games when they were creating this, or if they did then they didn’t learn anything. There are zero repercussions to acting like a jackass in The Exiled because there are no safe zones and no reputation system. Like I said, you can just run train through the starting zone and nothing’s going to stop you, outside of there being nobody to kill. While it’d be nice to imagine clans going up against one another, we all know that isn’t happening. Instead you have the hardcore gank squads, some of the most risk averse gamers in existence, only going into fights where the odds aren’t even close to even.

The bulk of the game is pretty shallow at the moment, comprising mostly of activating nodes and fighting off waves of mobs that try to destroy said node, hoping that at no point during the five minute wait that a clan will come along and steal the node out from underneath you. The AI is incredibly basic at the moment, as mobs mindlessly make their way toward the node with no ability to navigate the terrain aside from a straight path, not bothering to move around whatever is blocking their way.

The farming technique perfectly encapsulates how The Exiled exists now: A long, arduous grind that can and likely will be stripped from you at any given moment. Some people love this, and I won’t vilify them for their tastes. But when it comes to the genre, there are other games that have long established themselves and managed to throw in some semblance of fairness, even though you are never 100% safe.

In a way I like and can appreciate how The Exiled handles its inventory management. You gain experience through killing mobs, however there is a wholly separate material called Flux that can be used in crafting new gear or it can be converted to straight experience, which also means that if you get attacked you can at least scuttle the flux, level up in the process, and not come out of the encounter completely empty handed. Even abilities are subject to looting, since you obtain abilities as scrolls and must bring them to a dojo in order to learn the associated skill. Each class relies on a specific reagent in order to level up said skills, so killing and looting players isn’t just about stealing their stuff, you can also gain some heavy leveling materials in the process.

I suppose what makes me reel in agony even more than the long grind splattered with setbacks due to ganking is that the game wants me to do this all over again every month when the servers reset. No thank you, if you’re going to give me a job then it can either be fun or you can pay me for it. At the very least, while the MMO genre is all about a continuous carrot on a stick, gearing up to where you can run dungeons with the best until the better dungeons requiring the better gear comes out, you’re always making progress. Stripping that away on a regular basis only ensures that The Exiled will appeal to a limited portion of an already limited audience.

Right now The Exiled suffers from long time to kill on basic creatures, a lack of diversity within weapon subsets, and motivation outside of grinding resources, among other problems. That being said, the game is still in early access and early on at that. I’d recommend holding off on your seven day free trial for the moment, but keep the game on your radar. It might become something one day.

MMOments: Blade & Soul

Blade & Soul is one of those games that we’ve been impatiently waiting to come westward for a few years now, and like any game that we are regularly told we can’t have, the hype train has gotten out of hand at one point or another. I think that the majority of gamers saw NCSoft’s “you can’t have this yet” attitude and recognized it as an issue of lengthy localization rather than an evil corporation withholding the greatest creation since sliced bread, but you know that there is someone out there that took the lengthy development delay as a sign that the game was being advertised as the second coming of Jesus.

If there is one thing you can expect from Korean MMOs it is that character features will be exaggerated and heavily sexualized, so naturally I created my character was created with the kind of booty you could rest a stereo on. I’m not entirely sure if the gliding and camera controls exist primarily to serve for gratuitous panty shots, but I’m not willing to rule it out at this time. Also, you should expect that all of the female characters have breasts that more closely resemble free hanging piles of Jello brand gelatin than actual human flesh, bouncing and bobbing with every small breeze.

That said, there are a lot of options for the character creator, honestly you could spend hours working on every little detail of your character’s physique.

The characters of Blade & Soul are rather charming, even though I can’t remember their names and they have a tendency to die ala Game of Thrones not long after you meet them. Still, the characters are drawn from the anime school of ridiculous features, like the grandpa dog, the obnoxious kid who takes credit for everything, and whatever this is. The world looks beautiful, even with the parade of very well oiled men and women running about, reminiscent of a higher quality TERA or a more polished looking ArcheAge.

Combat in Blade & Soul is well paced, relying equally on mouse clicks and key presses. Your left mouse button is tied to a resource building attack while the right mouse button uses said resources. As you level up, you start to be able to use combos like, in the case of my sword-wielding character, knocking your opponent to the ground and stomping them while they are down. The rate at which you learn new techniques is just slow enough that you’ve mastered the previous lesson by the time the game is ready to teach you something new. It’s spaced out enough so that the player doesn’t get overwhelmed but (at least in the opening acts) hopefully doesn’t feel like the combat is growing stagnant.

The game throws in little things that keep the game flowing, like enemies that randomly drop bombs that can be used to take out or stun another mob. Ultimately, however, this is your standard MMO fare: You go into a village, take a bunch of quests, complete those quests, then move on to the next village. In no sense does the game feel like an open world, with players being ushered down what is effectively a single hallway ala Final Fantasy XIII, with a few dungeons hanging off to the side.

What impressed me is how the game handles equipment. For starters, your beginner weapon is supposed to stay with you for most, if not all of the game. Imagine the upgradeable epic weapons you get during end-game raids in other MMOs, and then picture getting that weapon right from the start. The weapons that you pick up along the way are more useful as upgrade materials. In addition, there isn’t much of an equipment selection. Instead of grinding for your usual selection of gloves, boots, legs, chest, and head pieces, you’ll gather accessories and soul shards. Soul shards come in one shape and fit into a wheel, offering various stat bonuses. Complete a wheel with a single soul shard set and you’ll unlock even more powerful bonuses.

One small feature that I find myself appreciating is on logout, where the game tells you exactly what you’ve accomplished during that play session. It isn’t a major feature by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a handy tool nonetheless. You also have access to a “daily dash,” a board game of sorts where you spin a wheel and obtain items the further you get. It appears to reset every month, and falls into the Korean MMO trope of throwing shinies at the player to keep them going.

Now let’s get to some grievances. Blade & Soul is heavily instanced, with areas separated by portals that cause the game to hiccup whenever you pass through. While the drastic changes that some areas go through between and following quests are nice, it serves to highlight just how linear the game is, and how ultimately unimportant and forgettable each zone is, almost as if each one is an episode of a serialized anime.

The most obvious and present issue with Blade & Soul is the constant, endless, gold spam. The fact that it is insanely present on a Korean import title doesn’t surprise me, nor does NCSoft’s complete ineptitude at combating said spam despite operating MMOs for nearly twenty years. I would be less harsh were it not for the fact that Blade & Soul launched in 2012, yet still hasn’t figured out the most basic of bot protections. Let’s go over a few, shall we?

Severe limitations on chat for new/free accounts.
Level limitations on global chat channels.
A filter that can detect when the same message is being repeated across multiple accounts.
Safeguards at account creation that would prevent mass throwaway accounts.
A limitation on how often characters can be created/deleted.
A cooldown on sending messages to global chat channels.
Banning the use of proxies.
Banning Chinese IP addresses.
Making ignores account-wide instead of character-specific.
Having actual customer support.
The ability to easily report people in chat.

And finally, you need to squash the shit early, pardon my language, and start banning some Twitch streamers. Allowing popular streamers like Reckful to partner with illegal gold farming websites and make money off of a community form of cancer will do nothing but push away customers and make your company look feckless and corrupt. Generally I wouldn’t harp on gold spam in a game this close to launch, but Blade & Soul has had years to figure this stuff out and yet the spam is worse than pretty much any other MMO that I have ever played.

There is still a lot of ground to break in Blade & Soul, which I intend to do in the coming weeks. Despite the negative stuff I’ve said, the stuff that sets Blade & Soul apart, like how the game deals with loot and upgrading equipment, is keeping me playing.

Early Access: Szone – You Have Left The Zone

If gaming has suffered in any way from the MMO industry shift to free to play, it is through the saturation of what I’ve referred to as mass-market shovelware, MMOs that seem to exist for no other reason than to show up, exist for a while, and then hopefully leave with a little profit. These are games piled out by the thousands, mostly by devs in Russia, China, and Korea of no reputation and no discernible talent, throwing out games riddled with bugs, unfinished content, hackers, gold farmers, and a surprisingly filled out and functional cash shop.

The latest genre to be tied down and mercilessly tortured comes in the form of online clones of the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R, by GSC Game World, and while my patience with the developers of these games is growing thin, I will gladly admit that I have enjoyed one or two of their offerings. I genuinely enjoyed, and continue to play, Survarium.

You get an idea on just what kind of experience Szone Online is when you first load into the world and find that you are weaponless. The first NPC you meet, the blacksmith, tells you to come back later once you’ve gotten more experience and he’ll give you some stuff. Head inside the closest building, talk to an NPC, and he’ll give you some rusted weapons. Now the real frust-fun starts.

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Try to shoot the gun and you’ll get an error saying “no ammo.” Double click on the ammo and see the message “this ammo is already loaded.” What you need to do, and I figured this out through trial and error, is to unequip your gun and use a magazine on it in the inventory. Go through the long list of Steam reviews and you’ll see this issue pop up a lot, with new players put off by the simple lack of explanation on how to initially load your gun, disregarding a needlessly complex and convoluted method.

Szone Online is the first game I’ve seen where it is conceivable to “lose,” in that you’ll run out of ammunition and money, rendering you useless in combat and unable to make that money back. That being said, I don’t see myself playing long enough to fall into this trap because the game itself just isn’t fun.

The four hours of Szone that I managed to get in consisted mainly of me running from NPC to NPC, killing large swaths of dogs and rats, in what feels like bad fanfiction of the GSC STALKER universe. Just read a bit of the description.

This is a story of human pride. Time is at hand when, in their utter desire to study the world, people will start destroying it. Tests of high-energy heavy particles accelerators will result in billions of microscopic black hole rupturing the structure of time and space. This will become the point of no return. The Earth as we know it will cease to exist.

Szone isn’t a STALKER game, it just happens to be set in a post apocalypse, specifically in a “zone” in the Ukraine where players, or ‘stalkers’ seek out artifacts for the sake of science, glory, and profit.

The game plays about as poorly as it reads, likely owing to a combination of inexperienced programmers and a poor engine. Characters are clunky and will occasionally get stuck on geometry that they shouldn’t get stuck on. Jumping is a frustrating experience that will get you killed more than once since your character will simply not jump if you’re too close to whatever you’re jumping on. Animals seem to be able to reach you from distances they shouldn’t. Gun handling feels directly pulled from the numerous free to play shooters built partially to look and feel like Counter Strike 1.6, except without iron sights.

I don’t know which to blame for Szone’s combat, poor AI or bad netcode. Hit detection is horrible, with animals either often dying a few seconds after you shot them or just ignoring your bullets despite the splats of blood indicating a hit. Dogs are easy to pop off with one or two bullets, but once they start moving they become difficult to hit without spraying your automatic weapon everywhere. Shoddy netcode and poor hit detection often mean missing shots that should have hit, hitting with shots that should have missed, and dying because NPCs are warping around the map.

And don’t be confused by the fact that the game is in early access, Szone has been up and running for years. I originally played this game back in 2012 partially to aid in my Russian language courses, when the game was known as Stalker Online. Crucial issues like the netcode, lag, weapons, etc, haven’t had any noticeable change in three years.

If Szone is with us for the long haul, it’ll likely be because the game survives not off of massive income but by maintaining a cost of living that is near nothing, similar to Alganon. You won’t lose anything for playing it, other than your time, but I’d be willing to bet you won’t come out ready to dive back in.

Beta Perspective: RuneScape Death Mechanics

Now that Jagex has joined the rest of the MMO industry with the launch of a test server for major updates, I figured I’d use the opportunity to take a quick look at the upcoming new death mechanic as it currently stands. RuneScape’s death system has been a hot topic for years, as it started out with the player dropping everything except for their three most valuable items before moving on to a gravestone system that would eventually expire and make the player’s loot available for everyone.

It strikes of casual-izing, but it has more to do with the player base itself. Those who play RuneScape likely are aware that death for most has become a trivial affair, it’s rare to actually lose something when you have a half hour to get your stuff. Jagex realized that the only people who are losing things are people dying unfairly, whether it be from bugs, shoddy servers, or if someone hits your car backing out of the apartment parking lot while you’re fighting a boss and you have to go take down the license plate number before they drive off. But I digress.

RuneScape’s death changes have been a long time coming, and I say this as someone who never dies in the game.

For the purpose of seeing the new death interface, I made an exception.

I immediately grabbed my better gear and threw myself at the fires of one of RuneScape’s bosses. Death now teleports you to Death himself, who keeps hold of your items for 24 hours or until you can pay him off. My set of Bandos armor (the three cheapest pieces) plus an amulet of fury wound up costing me just over a hundred grand to replace, with my food and grand potions cutting a rather small fraction of the cost.

You can sacrifice some of the stuff you don’t want to cut a bit of the cost off, but by my figures it won’t do much. The addition of the 24 hour timer gives you the chance to hit the bank in case you don’t have any cash on you, or to go farm some stuff to sell if you don’t have the cash at all. The timer also allows players ample time to get their goods back, god forbid either your internet go down or the servers are unstable for multiple hours at a time.

The actual economic impact will have to be seen when the update goes live, but the goal is to introduce an item and gold sink through the cost of retaining items and the loss of those sacrificed or unable to retain. As someone who rarely dies, I don’t expect to see much of an impact from this update, but the knowledge that server disconnections are easier to deal with goes a long way to changing attitude while playing.

MMOments: Marvel Heroes

Marvel Heroes is a great game, in fact it always was. What launched as a superhero themed Diablo clone, it brought together mindless action, barrels of loot, and Marvel’s signature hero and villain roster. Since then, Marvel Heroes has grown to include more than 30 heroes and has even added in new missions and areas to coincide with the release of Marvel films. The problem, at launch, however was that Gazillion had clearly spent far too much time focusing on promoting the market rather than the actual game. The atmosphere wasn’t so much “play me” as it was “give me more money.”

Marvel Heroes was technically free, my favorite kind of free, in the sense that you chose one hero from a small list and could either purchase more or unlock them via random, extremely rare drops. Since then, Gazillion has made it much easier to obtain heroes and costumes through gameplay. Eternity Splinters drop at a small but steady pace throughout normal leveling and can be used to purchase heroes. I managed to get my hands on 175 splinters in the time it took me to level Hawkeye from 1 to 30 (current level cap 60). You can spend anywhere between 200 and 400 splinters to unlock specific heroes, or you can spend 175 and unlock one at random with the possibility of receiving a hero you already own.

You will still receive two or three random heroes as you progress through the game’s story mode and, by the time of this review, I had gotten my hands on Hawkeye, Captain America, Storm, Scarlet Witch, and then Cyclops via the eternity splinters. Five heroes and I’m not even close to hitting the level cap with the first. Not too shabby for not having spent any money.

If you played Marvel Heroes at launch and found yourself severely underwhelmed as I did, you are in for a surprise. Thanks to community response and countless patches, Gazillion Entertainment has managed to polish and refine Marvel Heroes into the masterpiece that it is today. Every hero is viable in solo play, even those who draw their powers from up close and personal attacks like the Hulk. There are no longer the “glass cannon” heroes who can push out large amounts of damage but can be killed in one or two hits by most villains and bosses. Content galore has been added to satiate players once they finish the very short campaign.

The story mode in Marvel Heroes is very short, with heroes finishing the latest addition (Asgard) before level 30 with a level cap of 60. Thanks to the new difficulty modes, however, you can go back and play through the campaign over and with higher level foes. Midtown Madness plays out as something of a boss rush, a giant city with just about every event and foe present in Marvel Heroes, with regular appearances by the game’s villain bosses and plenty of loot and experience to go around. Not only are heroes being added at a regular rate, Gazillion is going back to the early roster and tuning them down the the base level to make sure that none become obsolete.

If you have played Marvel Heroes in the past and got fed up with the cash shop or hero system, now is the best time to come back. If you haven’t given Marvel Heroes a try, what are you waiting for? You now have an increased pool of heroes to choose from on new accounts.

MMOments: Elder Scrolls Online Part 2

Despite some setbacks, my time spent playing The Elder Scrolls Online hasn’t exactly diminished over the past week or so. I find myself dropping the game for the day due to quest-breaking bugs quite often, but it always seems that they are fixed by the next time I log in. I keep going back to my newly purchased Playstation 4, but I find that experience even worse with Warframe and Blacklight Retribution both plagued with bugs of their own. With that in mind, I don’t think that I am even close to the burnout point with ESO.

At this point, Razum-Dar has easily become my favorite character in the game. If you don’t know who this guy is, Razum-Dar is a Khajiit and agent for Queen Ayreen, that players will interact with a lot in the Aldmeri Dominion quest chain. Whenever my character wakes up in Jail, Razum-Dar is no doubt not far behind and in the process of murdering every single guard to secure my freedom. The quests and their stories are, without a doubt, fantastic.

In one storyline, for instance, I wound up uncovering a training academy that was treating its trainees like slaves and, in some cases, murdering those who act out of line. In another, I uncovered the secret behind an entire village turned to stone. The conclusion will surprise you.

The more that I play The Elder Scrolls Online, the more I get used to the floaty, not-100%-accurate combat. You get used to the fact that the game provides some lenience for lag which results in wider hit cones, or how magic attacks are auto-aimed. The issue with bugs in Elder Scrolls is one that varies from day to day. Mostly the instances of broken quests, NPCs, or missing nodes is dwindling. It seems like whenever the game does break, now, the bugs are worse. The loading screen stuck in a never ending cycle, crashes to desktop, being thrown out of the world, falling under the map, etc. Items disappearing from banks, the works.

Keeping interest in the war in Cyrodil is difficult, and I will admit that this is my sore loser side talking. The Daggerfall Covenant on Skull Crusher has completely rolled both of the other factions to the point where you can see below that they are nearly one hundred thousand points ahead of both of us. Turns out that Zenimax’s prediction that balance would be kept by the two losing factions ganging up is complete bunk, at least as far as my campaign goes. My faction isn’t even showing up anymore. I can’t even get the 15,000 alliance points needed to change campaign.

It is rather disappointing because, for Elder Scrolls Online, a disappointing campaign lasts three months. The good thing is that there is so much to do in The Elder Scrolls Online that I can pretty much ignore the PvP for the time being, between questing and exploring, completing achievements and finding treasure chests.

Ever since the last MMOments article, I only had one instance where I was ready to throw my computer out the window, and it is a quest in the Aldmeri Dominion campaign where your companion turns into a werewolf. Some combination of bugs and lag resulted in the most frustrating fight I have ever experienced in this game, where he was hitting me from across the room, cone of fire attacks would simply auto-target me even if I was directly behind him and nowhere near the area of effect, blocking was not working, and I would randomly go from half-health to dead instantly. Frustrating, yes.

The next MMOments that I run for Elder Scrolls Online will be in about a month. For now, this will continue to be my primary MMO.

MMOments: Elder Scrolls Online Part 1

The Elder Scrolls Online is a game that, for all intent and purpose, should have launched and immediately crashed into the ground. Most of us will remember a couple of years back when pre-alpha footage leaked onto the net, showcasing a product that looked nothing like what we would expect out of an Elder Scrolls MMO. It looked like a shoddily built World of Warcraft clone, a cheap mockery that harkened back to the days where the MMO was a stick that companies used to beat their properties to death. With the impressions deep in everyone’s mind, and much of the media already declaring the game dead on arrival, Zenimax went back to the drawing board and reshaped the game to what it is today.

And frankly, we should be thanking every single person who overwhelmed Zenimax with feedback after that leak. We will likely never know for sure if that is how the game would have turned out had the leak never happened, but I’m willing to go ahead and say we should treat the scenario as Earth Prime and be thankful that Warhammer Online hasn’t been guaranteed a successor in post-launch exodus. The game as it is right now isn’t perfect, but it is indicative of a company that quickly pulled its head out and at some point since that pre-alpha footage was taken, started treating the game like more of an Elder Scrolls experience and less like a new World of Warcraft.

But what The Elder Scrolls Online fulfills is wholly based on your expectations. If you want Skyrim online, you’re out of luck. As with previous additions to the series, ESO is a new take on the Elder Scrolls formula that adds and removes features as it sees fit. There is certain to be a block of Elder Scrolls fans who want nothing to do with this title, as we saw with the releases of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, and undoubtedly those who never played earlier games in the series who will give the game a try.

Elder Scrolls Online brings to MMOs what has so woefully been lacking over the years: Exploration, and more importantly the desire to explore the world around you and tinker with the things that you find. What Zenimax brings to the table isn’t just a scavenger hunt disguised as exploration, either. Whether you find yourself in a dark cave or some alchemist’s house, there is always something to grab your interest. Resources dot the land, herbs require a keen eye and maybe a helpful perk in order to spot in the tall grasses and flowers. Treasure chests can be found and picked for loot, and one of the grandest features of the Elder Scrolls series is back in full force: The books. Those of you who have played Elder Scrolls games will be fully aware of the series’ signature massive library of hundreds of books of varying length, and Online does not disappoint at all.

I have a love hate relationship with the combat in Elder Scrolls Online, and admittedly most of my problems will likely be smoothed out in the next couple of months. Combat is a pretty straightforward system of using your mouse keys to attack and block, and the number keys to use special attacks. Enemies choreograph what they are about to do to give you ample time to defend or interrupt and get in a quick counterblow. Some foes pull off cool abilities, like freezing you in place or hopping over your head to get in an attack from behind. You won’t get very far standing still and spamming buttons.

The problem with Elder Scrolls Online right now is that combat is very clunky and occasionally completely unresponsive and deceptive. I can count several instances where my character simply refused to attack or defend himself, as well as others where he did attack but the animation did not play. In a game where visual cues are everything and bugs can be expected, it becomes frustrating when you can’t tell if your inability to move is because of lag, or because the NPC you are fighting cast a freezing spell but a bug is causing the ice not to show up. ESO also has a terrible habit of not conveying why you can’t do certain actions. Some enemies have the ability to momentarily stun you, but there is no visual cue on the player when they do. Again, no way of knowing if your inability to attack is due to a bug or intended game feature, because it could be either.

When I originally began writing this MMOments piece, I meant to talk about how the interrupt ability was completely broken. Turns out, after reading through a Reddit thread, that isn’t the case. The game tells you to press the left and right mouse buttons to interrupt certain attacks, when what you actually need to do is block and then hit attack. If you press both at the same time like the tutorial tells you, odds are you may accidentally stumble into the right formula ten percent of the time. You can also bind interrupt to a single button, apparently, which is much more convenient.

Leveling in Elder Scrolls Online continues the ongoing evolution of the series, sticking to its roots while branching into new areas. As was the case with Skyrim, leveling up offers points to invest in health, magic, or stamina. Gaining levels and obtaining Skyshards also awards skill points to invest in combat or crafting related skill lines. As with Skyrim, you will need to raise your levels in individual skills by bashing the skulls in of mudcrabs or making mudcrab stew in order to unlock related perks and abilities using your skill points. Those of you familiar with the series will be happy to know that the system of gaining levels by finding specific books has made its way in as well.

One of my peeves with Elder Scrolls Online has fermented in the form of provisioning recipes. Barring finding other players willing to sell them to you, your provisioning ability is tied one hundred percent to recipes that you find randomly in stashes or in mob loot. In the last beta period, I managed to finish the tutorial with four extra copies of all of the starting recipes. Once the game went live, I didn’t find a single recipe until several hours into the game when I managed to stumble upon a recipe for pork soup.

The Elder Scrolls Online looks great and sounds amazing. The world changes rather dramatically as you go through and complete multi-quest storylines which often revolve around liberating some village from a curse or group of bandits. It is a very sharp turnaround from the standard MMO fare where you are asked to kill twenty five wolves to cull overpopulation only for it to have no visible effect on the game. It also diverts away from The Old Republic, where phasing was mostly done in isolated chambers that only you could access.

Oh and did I mention that you get to talk to Sheogorath?

I expect to have a part 2 for MMOments as I go along, likely within the next week or so.

MMOments: Akaneiro Demon Hunters

Around eight months have passed since I last took a look at Akaneiro: Demon Hunters, and quite a bit has changed since we last ventured as Little Red Riding Hood in Feudal Japan. For the sake of not repeating myself, here is a basic rundown of the game itself. Akaneiro is a top-down hack and slash that should be familiar to fans of Diablo or Torchlight. You have a quest hub with associated vendors, and travel out into instanced dungeons to kill large quantities of mobs, in return for loot and experience, to find or buy better equipment to kill bigger things. Got it? Good.

In my early look at Akaneiro, I criticized the game for a lack of potions and how the game mechanics took the game down a path of “pay to live.” The combination of no potions and attacks that frequently stunned your character for far too long meant that death often came quickly and without any sort of grace or fairness. Death in Akaneiro also means forfeiting any experience you gained in said dungeon, however players were offered the convenience of resurrecting on the spot…for cash shop currency. The good news is that you may now find potions both in the hub store and in enemy drops. Resurrection is now paid for with in-game currency, allowing the player to resurrect on the spot using some of the gems they have collected.

A bunch of improvements have been made to the overall game since the last time we looked at it. Crafting currently allows you to upgrade weapons and armor using materials found while completing dungeons. The ability bar has been expanded to allow for six abilities as well as three consumable slots. The map has been improved from its previous iteration to better show off progression, and the whole thing overall just feels more responsive and less laggy. While the game hasn’t fundamentally changed, it is rather spectacular to see how much better a game can become by fixing a lot of little things.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out Akaneiro: Demon Hunters, I highly suggest you do so through Kongregate.

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