rant – Page 3 – MMO Fallout

[Rant] Monkey King Online Isn't A Game

This is my recollection of playing Monkey King Online by R2 Games.

After logging into the game and creating my character, I got up and walked out of the room. I nuked a frozen breakfast burrito: a mixture of jalapeno, egg, and cheese. My microwave has this annoying bug where it will occasionally register the same button twice. Luckily I never forget this little problem and managed to avoid cooking the burrito for 14:45 instead of 1:45. It says 1:30 on the instructions but I have a low wattage microwave. Hold on, I have to press “complete quest” and equip some more armor. My character is around level 30 by the time the burrito finishes cooling down.

Anyway, back to the burrito. El Monterey is a great brand if you like breakfast burritos. They have a fantastic egg & bacon breakfast burrito, and are fairly priced compared to the competition. Had to press “complete quest” there, sorry. What was I saying? Oh yea, they also have egg, sausage, and cheese as well as just an egg and sausage burrito. I have a very large-chested and scantily clad combat NPC following me that is marked as my “mount.” That can’t mean what I think it does.

I’m about halfway done with my burrito as my character hits level 41. My coffee has been depleted. If you don’t mind spending money on great coffee, I highly suggest Tonx. Twelve bucks for a six ounce bag of beans sounds high, but it comes out to about 70 cents per cup and it is more than worth it since you get coffee from new places every other week. The cup I’m drinking is from the Sumatra and contains a hint of dark chocolate and graham cracker. Fantastic. They send you new shipments every two weeks, shipped and roasted the same day.

As for the burrito, it’s rather laughable that the package brags 260 calories and 9 grams of protein. Great, until you notice the 510mg of sodium and 65mg of cholesterol. That is, granted, what you expect with any egg-based meal. Is it so much to ask for a breakfast burrito that is made with egg whites? Scratch that, I already know the answer.

It’s like those Guzzlers you get from the store. Now I enjoy these far more than an adult should, but you can’t deny that the Guzzler has a lot less sugar than soda (10g per serving compared to 39g in a can of coke), and also contains real juice. The strawberry kiwi has 20% Niacin (Vitamin B3), Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, Biotin, and Pantothenic Acid. Biotin can be used to help with neurological issues related to type 2 diabetes, making Guzzler quite a catch-22. They are cheap, though, at 3 for $2 at Tops.

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I’m in a guild now. I don’t remember ever joining one, but I am in a guild. Anyway, it’s time to take a shower. I mentioned the word shower to my friend and he said “shower? I barely know her.” I don’t get it. My character is level 50. I couldn’t decide between The Hobbit or Hunger Games sequel to watch on Amazon, so I went ahead and picked The Hobbit because it is more interesting. Two and a half hours, though.

I got about ten minutes into the film and then had to take a pause to change the air conditioning filter in the apartment. You are supposed to change the filter once every 90 days, and since it’s been slightly over a year since we last changed the filter, it was about time to fork up the $10 and buy a new one. You’d be amazed how dirty a small apartment’s filter can get after a year. Despite the multiple inch thick layer of dust and grime caked onto the filter, I felt a bit hungry and figured I’d go to Wendy’s. My character is still level 51 and questing.

Turns out Wendy’s does not make the Ciabatta Bacon Burger anymore, which is a disappointment. I loved that burger. There isn’t anything special going on at Wendy’s right now, so I settled on a #1: Dave’s Hot’n’Juicy. There is something about the square shape of the hamburger that just makes sense. After enjoying my burger, I figured I’d head home. Make sure the game was still going. I finished The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, which is a fantastic movie with a lot of suspense and action.

As for Monkey King Online, this game is mediocrity at its finest, to the point where I’d much rather talk about my breakfast burrito and AC filter than go into the finer details on just how bad it is. Mix a horrible user interface that is full to the saturation point with shiny buttons and a constant stream of rewards to keep your attention, and big numbers very early on for the kiddies. The game throws everything but the kitchen sink at you, a barrage of tasks that are exactly the same in all but name. Main quests, side quests, daily quests, Punish the Gods, Karma quests, guild quests, event quests, forbidden quests, safeguard quests, dharma quests, etc. Login rewards, play rewards, goddesses, conquests, multiplayer, challenges, server events, new server events, beta events, power up tasks, forced in under the idea that if you just overwhelm the player all at once, they won’t realize that there really is nothing going on.

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Monkey King Online falls into the lowest tier of MMOs in terms of quality. They are pumped out by the hundreds every year in China and Korea with a few making their way westward thanks to publishers like R2 Games. Isometric free to play games that are heavy on the cash shop and so self-aware of how mind numbingly boring, uncreative, and unintuitive they are, that the game revolves around mechanics that allow it to play itself. Your character will take quests, complete them, turn them in, and even buy his own flipping potions using the money picked up from mobs. I only had to lift a finger to equip new items and occasionally hit “complete quest” when the game wouldn’t turn it in automatically, and my character was raking in cash by the millions.

The whole genre is shovelware, developed by companies that make nothing but shovelware, and peddled by overseas publishers who only traffic in shovelware. Each successive game is a clone upon the last which improves absolutely nothing aside from devising more efficient ways to milk the “whales,” people with a lot of expendable cash and not a lot of good taste or sense in how to spend it. Thanks to the fact that this game cost roughly the video game equivalent of a dollar burger at Wendy’s to develop, it will coast on said whales.

Monkey King Online is mindless, it is boring, and with poorly animated characters that appear to be running on a giant green screen, it isn’t much to look at. It is unapologetic in its weight towards the cash shop, especially after level 50 when progress grinds to a halt, you run out of quests, and are forced to grind mobs to the tune of less than a hundredth of a percent of progress per kill. If you’re going to have your computer doing something while it’s idling, at least have it be something with higher odds of a productive outcome, like finding someone willing to make a second season of Firefly.

Otherwise I have no strong opinions on the matter.

[Rant] Monkey King Online Isn’t A Game

This is my recollection of playing Monkey King Online by R2 Games.

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Otherwise I have no strong opinions on the matter.

MMO Rants: Nitpicking Elder Scrolls Online

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.

Rant: Disappointment In Arkadia

Back when City of Steam launched its open beta, removing features, emphasizing the cash shop, increasing failure rates on modifications, and more. As someone who loved the game’s closed beta period enough that I not only loved enough to throw my own money into very early in closed beta, I partnered with Mechanist Games to share beta keys, I was particularly disappointed. After open beta on R2Games fell hard and we found out about City of Steam: Arkadia, I had hoped with every fiber of my being that the reason the game went so astray was because of publisher pressure.

How wrong I was. I opened Arkadia in hopes that it would bring back the special moments that I shared with closed beta, but instead I found that the game had fully made the transformation into every other Chinese free to play browser title. I apologize in advance if this rant jumps from topic to topic without a proper segue. I don’t know where to start, so let’s dive in.

Direct trading between players does not exist, still, rather you are forced to use the auction house which only deals in Electrum (real money currency). Previously instanced dungeons are now open world areas where players stumble over each other to complete intricate puzzles like killing twenty enemies and collecting five shillings. Luckily for you, and the other random people you’ll be sharing the dungeon with, groups of mobs respawn just as quickly as you can defeat them, often times faster.

And you will never be under-powered or outmatched. Thanks to fishing and mining, which serves no other purpose other than throwing mass quantities of ability and talent points at you, I probably have enough ability points at level 8 to sustain me to the level cap, and enough talent points that I never have to worry about running out. Even without these upgrades, I found myself constantly emptying my inventory of the hundreds upon hundreds of potions given during quests, as drops, and I haven’t had a reason to use any of them. I don’t think my health has dropped below 97% for the entire time I’ve been playing, and that includes solo’ing boss battles on the harder mode for that dungeon.

Apparently Mechanist Games realized that somewhere along the line, City of Steam had its soul stripped and churned into mulch, because they added the ability for the game to play itself. A built in goldfarming bot! Your character will walk himself through the dungeons, kill enemies with pinpoint precision, use abilities, pick up shillings and whatever else drops, use mana potions as they are needed, find his way to the boss, kill them, and the game will then log you out of the dungeon. I believe that experience and shillings are capped per run, because I hit the auto-attack button and went to sleep just to see what would happen, only to wake up to find my character still running around killing stuff but without any notable increase in experience or cash from the previous night. I haven’t checked my achievements, I probably have a good few thousand gun kills racked up over that seven hours.

Then I came across two of the game’s new mini-games. One game mode is a giant Pacman level, where you run around a maze with knee-high walls and the game throws experience at you. The other game mode has you smashing eggs that drop massive quantities of shillings. There-in lies the problem, that the game gives you everything and does everything for you. Arkadia feels like it is two degrees away from handing me a book and some crayons and telling me to color and stay quiet while it plays itself.

Now that I’ve finished shouting myself blue in the face, I want to end this rant as I normally try to do: On a positive note. The silver lining in all of this is the admission that the US version of Arkadia was essentially built up on short notice with a tiny crew. There are multiple versions of City of Steam, each meant to cater to their respective region, which hopefully means that the English game will be molded to better focus on American and European customers.

For COS English, unfortunately, we are very short of hand for now. The English version will be started from Dave, Ethan, and Shirley. I believe it will get better and better and we will have more resources to be invested, more localization, more specialized cosmetics, and more and more cool stuff which I don’t know.

One can dream.

MMO Rant: In Defiance Of Quality Assurance

I once read an editorial about the hardcore gaming scene that discussed how players could stand just about any form of loss as long as it was fair and the reason could be pointed to in an understandable way. Being perpetually stuck at a specific point in a game because the boss is too hard or a level is too difficult is frustrating, it can even cause you to quit, but at the end of the day you know that it was your own abilities that stopped your progress. On the other side of this idea, you have games that cannot be completed due to hard stops out of bugs or incomplete content. S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadows of Chernobyl is a game that can come to a hard stop when you reach the final area (the Chernobyl power plant) only to realize that you not only will not survive the radiation without the highest level suit, but the game does not allow you to go back at this point and get it. If you don’t have a save file from before entering Chernobyl, you are SOL.

But even that isn’t as infuriating as not being able to progress due to a bug, and when it comes to MMOs, I can think of no other game in recent memory than Defiance that I have wound up quitting temporarily due to bugs preventing progress. I still have not completed the levels in Defiance’s Castithan DLC pack, released back in August, because it is impossible. If you haven’t played through the content, the missions involve a series of arenas where you rack up points over several waves of enemies. There are five waves per level, and at any time the game can suffer a fatal bug where the round begins but the timer disappears and so does your score, forcing you to quit or be killed and try again.

And then you try again only to have the system break again, so you can try again to have the system break again, in an almost never ending loop. Only by sheer luck did I manage to get through the first four arenas after multiple forced reboots over the course of the past two and a half months, and finally after having to restart the last arena three times, I managed to get through all of the rounds without anything breaking. I did ultimately complete the Castithan content pack, but had I not already purchased the season pass, I likely wouldn’t purchase any further DLC. The fact that such bugs are going unfixed after two months time is unacceptable, especially in a game that is working double time just to retain its players, as Defiance is.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

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