Pumping Irony

Cryptic recently pumped out their latest content — Borg Red Alerts — onto Star Trek Online‘s live server, Holodeck last week.

The official page I linked lists enough information to give the gist of how they can work, but I’ll go into a bit more detail here.

These Red Alerts are very similar to the Deep Space Encounters already in Star Trek Online but unlike a DSE, the Borg incursions are not stationary. Once per hour, the Borg send invasion forces into random sector blocks, and random instances of that sector block. For example, if there are enough players in the Regulus sector block to create three instances, the Borg might invade instance #2 but not #1 or #3. So in a sense, I could probably compare the Borg incursions to the random rift events in Rift, I think.

If you are in a sector block (and correct instance) that is being invaded, in the “low priority interaction” box on your UI (where the astrometrics toggle and other switches are found) a big flashing ALERT! Distress Call! button appears. If you click the button, your senior tactical officer will inform you of the situation and ask if you want to assist. An affirmative response will load you into the encounter instance, which has a maximum of five players.

First, and perhaps most importantly, any post-tutorial rank captain of either faction is eligible to participate in the Red Alerts! The battles themselves take place in instanced space, and the players and Borg NPCs are scaled — to an extent — to that encounter, so it makes for fantastic content for low-level players to rub elbows with the admiralty and still contribute. Not only do these battles scale to accommodate the full range of players, they are also cross-faction, as the Borg are a threat to both the Federation and the Klingon Defense Force so these Borg incursions are one of the few times Starfleet and KDF players can team up to fight a common enemy. Having said that, while I’ve been having a blast taking my Commander grade 4 tactical officer into these red alerts, it can get a little frustrating when you have captains joining who are still Ensigns flying their Miranda light frigates. Scaling or not, a Miranda simply doesn’t have enough weapons and console slots, and the other players have to make up for it or fail the encounter.

There are no incursions into the Eta Eridani, Gamma Orionis, or Pelia sector blocks. Every other sector block is fair game. Incursions are typically level 45. Players will be scaled up or down accordingly. However, there are two exceptions: encounters in the Zeta Andromeda sector block are level 51, but players less than level 45 will only be scaled up to 45. (I’ve heard joining a team with a Vice Admiral will scale you all the way to 51, though but have not tested to confirm this.) Players higher than 45 will maintain their level (unless they join a team and scale down to a lower level teammate). Encounters in the Orellius sector block are level 53 and again, lower level players will only be scaled up to level 45. So these two sector blocks will provide the highest level of challenge out of all the red alerts.

Once in the encounter, you’re in a wise space with a lot of Borg ships that are thankfully spaced apart enough to separate the battles. The first challenge is to defeat four Borg squadrons within 15 minutes. Succeeding at that will trigger the next phase: a huge Borg unimatrix command ship warps in, accompanied by various probes. The command ship itself is inspired by V’ger from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and apparently Gene Roddenberry hinted that the Borg created V’ger. Regardless, it’s becoming common to hear the command ship referred to in-game as “B’ger.” At the start of the battle with the Borg capital ship, it is imperative to eliminate its regeneration probes first, otherwise you can blast away ’til the cows come home, but those things will keep the command ship healed. The other probe types can safely be ignored. The command ship can also fire huge plasma energy blasts which need to be taken out before they hit another player (or a player runs into them) as one hit can destroy a player’s ship.

There are eleven sector blocks which get incursions, and each has its own accolade and daily mission, so chasing incursions nets you eleven dailies. The reward is either a level appropriate (random) item, or a level-appropriate badge. I choose the badge every time because I know those can be used to get new gear, whereas there’s a high chance I won’t be able (or won’t want) to use the random item awarded. In addition to the eleven sector accolades, there is a meta-accolade for defeating all the command ships, ten in all. The command ship in any given red alert is randomly chosen so you never know which one will show up. There’s also an accolade for destroying 2,000 (yes, you read that correctly, two thousand) Borg vessels plus the accolades that were already in the game for destroying Borg ships, taking plasma damage, and so on, so these Red Alerts certainly give the Accolade Hunters out there some goals to strive for.

The space incursions are Phase 1 of the Borg system update. Phase 2 will be ground incursions, which will be interesting since the Borg are tougher on the ground now and their shields adapt like we saw on the tv series. Phase 3 will be revamped versions of the Borg Special Task Force (STF) missions, which are end-game missions for only players, no bridge officer companions. Then Phase 4 which is the Into the Hive STF where players finally fight the Borg Queen. Phase 4 is hopefully scheduled by the end of the year, or at least prior to Season 5 launching, so take your best guess then work backwards from there to guesstimate when the other phases might arrive, at least until Cryptic makes the official announcements.

Final thoughts:

One one hand it’s almost difficult to say these Borg incursions are “new content” per se, since the basic tech for them has been in the game all along. They could be looked at as “merely” randomly placed cross-faction Deep Space Encounters (DSEs). Like anything else in an MMO, including STO, concentrating too much on a single activity gets old. Grinding exploration missions, or patrol missions, or chasing Borg Red Alerts all day can get old real fast. But for someone like myself who likes to switch up between various activities, a sudden Red Alert in my sector block is a welcome change of events. The randomness and overall presentation of the Red Alerts can make them feel like “new content,” though and I suppose perception matters a great deal in that context.

It’s a shame there is no global notification system for these incursions. One would think that if these were that big a deal and the Borg were that big a threat, that Starfleet and the Klingon High Command would be sending out fleet-wide alerts to all captains. Instead, we only see the alert if we are in the sector block (and correct instance of that sector block) being invaded. To alleviate that, two players created and run a custom global chat named REDALERT that is strictly for reporting incursions, so if you’re into chasing after them, for now that is the best way to find out where the Borg are invading at any given moment.

My only real negative point to Red Alerts is that, unlike DSEs, players are not auto-teamed. When it’s only a 5-player battle it would certainly be helpful to not only have everyone scaled to the same point (especially on the two higher-level incursions) but speaking as a science captain who flies a science vessel for buffs and heals and working on an assault cruiser for higher spot healing on shields, I have one helluva time targeting ships I’m not teamed with, or even having a clue what their ship status is unless that ship happens to have my target’s aggro. I, for one, enjoy being auto-teamed in DSEs and I think it would certainly be helpful in these Borg incursions.

Finally, these Borg Red Alerts have one goal above all else: to be FUN.

Mission Accomplished!

I am still on yet another of my MMO Malaise breaks, which tend to be rather lengthy, but I did login to Star Trek Online last night and got a couple very nice surprises!

First, as soon as Arwellyn loaded in, the following Accolade popped up:

That’s the 400 Day Accolade! A few other things scrolled by onscreen very quickly so I checked the Accolade tab in the Journal to see what exactly it is.

Free respec token? Nice! I don’t think I’ve used any yet (probably need to once I come back and attempt some of the Fleet Actions and Special Task Forces) so one more added to my stack is appreciated.

Captain’s Table? No clue what that is. Should I care?

Captain’s Yacht! Now we’re talkin’ baby! Arwellyn was already in Earth Spacedock so she strolled over to the shipyard and turned in her token to get the sleek new personal yacht shuttle.

Sweet, eh? As Arwellyn was flying around ESD and I was trying to line up camera angles for screen shots, I swung around and saw she had the Arkenstone flying towards Earth. I was about to suggest she alter course then remembered Cryptic was supposed to be working on Starfleet Academy. I haven’t been paying attention to MMO news, even for the ones I play, so I wasn’t sure if it was in-game yet or not. Sure enough, the control to beam down to the Academy appeared on the UI! Off to the transporter room we went, and…

Starfleet Academy is truly a gorgeous zone! Check the scenery! Shuttles zip by overhead and of course the ubiquitous San Francisco bridge in the backdrop. No, you can’t jump the fences and explore. That would be cool someday, though.

Arwellyn ran around the entire zone checking out the sights. There are several memorial plaques placed all over the Academy zone that give historical information about the Academy. Reading them all rewards another Accolade!

Finally, after exploring the outside zone, time to enter the Academy building itself. The interior reminds me of an airport almost. There are NPCs waiting in turnstiles as if to buy tickets, though the vendor NPC is the tailor variety to change up one’s costume. At the far end is a bar, the 602 Club with two bartender NPC vendors.

Arwellyn did some exploring and Starfleet Academy even has three Holodecks! Want one!

Mechanic-wise, the Holodeck simply lets players select previous missions to replay, the same as the terminal in the captain’s ready room on a starship does. But it’s a friggin’ Holodeck! What might be neat,though at the risk of being considered a mandatory content gate, would be to say, have players craft a Holodeck (whether that makes sense or not is immaterial, bear with me) in order to play specific Holodeck content such as the TNG episodes where Picard played 1940′s-era detective Dixon Hill, and other episodes on the series that took place in Holodeck environments. Sort of alternate adventures that don’t have anything to do with the overarching storylines occurring in STO’s space sectors. Of course, that could also allow for more environments, etc. available for Foundry authors to create their own content as well.

The 602 Club is apparently going to be another of STO’s role-player’s hangouts, just like Quark’s bar on Deep Space 9. Indeed, for the time being, the entirety of the Starfleet Academy is what Cryptic calls a “social gameplay” environment. I don’t think (could be mistaken; again, I haven’t kept up on MMO news) the new Federation tutorial that starts in the Academy is in-game yet, so there’s no actual content to play here yet. Just run around, enjoy the view, read the plaques for the accolade and perhaps role-play at the 602 Club. In the photo above, you can clearly make out two vendor NPCs who sell drinks. There are a couple other NPCs there too, the others were players role-playing. Even the bartender on the left facing the wall was a player! He was playing the chatty bartender role and even went through the motions of going to the wall there to mix the drinks while talking it up then walking back to the customer with their drink and a smile. Funny stuff.

In preparation for Skyrim, I’ve been dedicating myself to finishing Oblivion over the past month. I’ve had the game (GOTY version) for over a year but it just didn’t resonate with me at first. Neither did Fallout 3, for that matter.

But I buckled down, sucked it up, and pulled it off! I completed the Oblivion main story last week then immediately started the Shivering Isles expansion and Thursday night, I finished that as well, earning 100% completion for the game!

I’ve done my share of complaining about the game here, on Google+ and mumbling to myself the entire time playing the game, but I’ll admit the past few weeks where I was getting close to end of the main story then doing the expansion that the game had grown on me in a few ways. At the very least, I think I can see why, or at least some aspects of why, so many players hold it in such high esteem. So I’ll take this opportunity to share the two aspects of the game that stood out for me — the leveling system, and the world itself — and their pros and cons.

Leveling.

I’ve lost count how many times and for how many years I’ve griped about vertical leveling, primarily in multi-player RPGs. So, Oblivion “leveling the world” with you is right up my alley. Oh, I’ve read many complaints that Bethesda screwed up the algorithm in Oblivion and a gimped character would get to the point they could not continue. Honestly, I was expecting to be that person, but I never really had the slightest problem; quite the opposite, in fact.

Proponents of vertical leveling most often put forth the claim they enjoy going back to lower level zones and being more powerful or going back and thumping down a boss who defeated or frustrated them earlier in the game. Trust me, I’m all for that! But I want to defeat that boss not because I simply out-leveled him to the point where he’s grey and doesn’t even know I’m there like an MMO would do, but because I went out and increased my character’s knowledge and abilities beyond where they were. That boss still puts up a fight, he still fights the same way he did earlier, but now I have more to work with to defeat him which makes the victory so much more satisfying than waltzing up to a now-grey mob and one-shotting it with my auto-attack.

Where Oblivion falls flat is feedback. I finished the Oblivion story at level 19 and Shivering Isles at 21 — which could be considered low-level? No idea, really. At no point during leveling did I ever get any visual or otherwise feedback that my skills or abilities were increasing other than the drum beat and text notification saying they had. For me, a good part of leveling and acquiring new skills and increasing known skills is that I get to see the results of my character gradually becoming a badass. I like flashy moves, and I’m not going to apologize for it. One huge problem is that Oblivion is only really playable in first-person view, which is already cheesy as hell for a fantasy game, but makes it pretty much impossible to show off new melee moves. You’re stuck with stiff Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots melee the whole time.

So that leaves magic. Mages get some super-cool flashy spells, right? Again, I finished at level 21 so I had neither enough magicka (174 at level 21) nor high enough level in any particular school of magic to cast any of the spells that sounded cool. I hot-keyed a few spells that I used most, like Protection and Restore Health, but once I was able to cast Flash Bolt fairly early on, that was the most damaging spell I was ever able to use, and that’s not really saying much. The only skill I can look back on and perhaps see an improvement during game play is Sneak. I ended up doing pretty much every dungeon, etc. in Sneak mode so by the end of the game I could sneak by NPCs easily even relatively close to them what I would consider moderate or better lighting. If I was fast enough, I could jump out from behind a wall or pillar right in front of their face and still get the 6x damage surprise attack. So there was that, and it did come in handy a couple times, but in my book being able to stealth closer ranks considerably lower on the badass scale than, say, dodging an attack, counter-attacking by tossing them in the air then leaping into the air, blades twirling, and pounding them into the dungeon floor with my sword piercing their chest in a flashy (perhaps in slow-motion even, on occasion) critical finishing move. Just sayin’…

Finally I’ll talk about the leveling mechanic itself. It was a tremendous drag. I’m out adventuring, slinging spells, seeing notifications that my skill increased in Alteration or Destruction magic, or my Security (lockpicking) increased but… none of that mattered. Only the ones listed as Major Skills contributed to leveling. My Blade skill can determine my level? Block and Light Armor? The only way to increase those is to, respectively, block attacks (duh) or stand there and get smacked around. Hey, I stood still and let this monster beat the hell out of me and guess what? DING! Makes no sense at all. Growing my skills in magic does not help me level, but repairing my equipment does? Huh? The end result is that I ended up spending a lot of time grinding skills, in the worst sense of the phrase. I wanted a better healing spell but my Restoration magic wasn’t high enough so I stood around casting the only one I did know until my magicka was drained (three casts), let it recharge, then cast again until Restoration reached the minimum level for the next heal spell. I had to do that for any number of skills I wanted to increase for various reasons not to mention grinding the Major Skills just to level up. A couple weeks ago I was doing exactly that but also grinding Athletics so I ran laps in Bruma jumping and casting a heal spell. If I was going for “immersion” can you imagine how silly a so-called hero would look running in circles jumping while casting spells on himself?

Continuing with that theme, I remember last year I wanted to increase my Sneak fairly early on. Sneak only increases if there are other people around who could potentially see you and you have to be in motion, not standing still hiding. So I did the equivalent of “macroing” the skill: I put my character into Sneak facing a corner in Imperial City and wrapped a rubber band around the analog stick so he’d constantly walk into the corner. I left for an hour or so to get lunch and run some errands and when I came home, my Sneak skill was pretty much where I wanted it. Now that is some compelling and immersive gameplay right there! /snark

The World

I’ll start with “the world” in the larger scheme of things, and what most of us probably think about when someone says that anyway. I am reminded of the recent 40-minute dev video for Big Huge Games 38 Studios (sorry, I can never resist doing that) upcoming RPG, Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning where the developers said “open world” means different things to different people. In Oblivion, “open world” means there are no “zones” to load in and out of and seems to have the overall philosophy that “if you can see it, you can (most likely) go there.” In and of itself, it’s great to just “be” in an RPG world, see something off in the distance and say “hey, I wonder what’s there?” and lo and behold, you can go find out! My primary problem with the game is a near-total lack of diversity. Nearly all of Cyrodiil looks identical, covered in the same grass with the same trees, same rocks, same forts and ruins (re-use of limited assets is very noticeable here), and so forth. The two notable exceptions are Bruma, to the north near Skyrim, which is more bleak with some spotty, dirty snow on the ground, and there’s no mistaking Imperial City for any other town in the game. Otherwise, if I was blindfolded and someone loaded up a random area or town in Oblivion, I’d be extremely hard-pressed to open my eyes and know where I was. To accompany the visual lack of diversity, the audio is also lacking. Now, I love me some Jeremy Soule and what little music I did hear in Oblivion was good (though I’d consider it on the weaker end of his compositions) but there was so very little music. It seemed there was only one track that played in the world (there may have been two, but if so they sounded too similar), one for towns, one for dungeons, one for in-combat state. If there were more, the tracks certainly weren’t varied enough for me to notice and remember them. I love a lot of video game music, especially in RPGs, but if all I hear for hours and hours are the same few tracks, well, that’s why people eventually turn the music off and listen to their own choice of music instead.

I still haven’t quite decided if I would say that exploration is “rewarded” in Oblivion. There are a lot of POIs to discover on the map. While roaming the wilderness any POI within a certain distance will have an icon on your compass HUD so it’s easy to look at the map and notice you haven’t been there yet, and set off to discover that location. But the only reward is the text notification that “You discovered [insert POI here]” which is certainly a “micro-woot!” stimulus but that’s it, really. I think there are over a hundred dungeons in the game, but very few of them have a “point” within the game (ie. for the story, for side quests, or for my character) other than to loot stuff for gold or grind your skills to level. Indeed, I found the main use for discovering POIs was simply to have fast-travel points when I’d get a story quest so I wouldn’t have as far to run. Having said that, a fair number of those dungeons had quite intricate layouts so it was rewarding in a way to figure out how to progress through them; ie. how do I open this gate, what triggers this trap and can I disarm it, how do I get to a certain area, and so on.

What I did like is that dungeons don’t reset, per se. The monsters don’t just respawn. If I clear a dungeon (or not, even) then over time as the dungeon is not seeing use from us pesky adventurers (excuse me, pesky adventurer since there’s no co-op) monsters will gradually start moving back in.

Speaking of dungeons, they are way too dark. I had to maximize the brightness setting and even then had to use some form of light in the dungeons to see where I was going most of the time. My character was a khajiit so he had the racial Eye of Night ability but believe me, it got old real fast running through blue dungeon after blue dungeon. Of course, had I not been playing a stealthy character, I could have just used a torch or Starlight spell so that I could appreciate the natural look and feel to the dungeons at the cost of every monster charging me immediately. The dungeon crawler in me loves these things and I want to experience them as the designers built them, not coated in hues of blue. There should be some sort of middle ground where it can be dark but not so dark that I have to crank the brightness, close the curtains and turn off all the lights to play and then still end up having to use some sort of light or night-vision ability. There’s “immersion” and there’s “inconvenient pain in the ass.”

Finally, most non-guard and non-monster NPCs have their own little lives. No static MMO pez dispenser statue NPCs here, no sir! Many have their daily schedules such as from 8am to noon, she visits the chapel, then from noon to 2pm she’s at the local Inn for lunch, but not on this day of the week, and so on. Oblivion is also a “no punctuation marks over quest NPCs” game so that could be a nightmare without the POI pointer on your compass, but purely for the sake of “immersion” or attempting to create a “living” virtual world, I simply love this feature!

My last real beef with the game is that you end up becoming the “guild master” for every guild in the game. The Dark Brotherhood (assassins), Fighter’s Guild, Mages’ Guild, Thieves’ Guild plus the Imperial City Arena, too. That makes absolutely zero sense to me, but neither does being a “master adventurer” and a “master craftsman” in MMOs. However, since sadly my experience in Oblivion was weighed by more negative experiences than positives, I was in a purely Achievement Hunter mindset just to get it over with, complete 100% of the achievements and move on with life, so in that single context I was glad I was able to do them all in a single play-through. Unfortunate, but there it is.

Originally, I had planned to jump into Fallout 3 (which I last played in May, 2009) and start that over (ugh) to finish it before Skyrim but after Oblivion for a month or so, I think I just need a break from Bethesda instead so I’ll be fresh for Skyrim in November.

I was driving to work last week listening to Hair Nation (shush, just shush!) and the DJ mentioned that a hoped-for Dokken reunion fell through, with vocalist Don Dokken being the holdout. The other three original band members formed their own group called Tooth and Nail (also the title of Dokken’s 1984 album) and their first album is titled Dump the Chump. While I’m curious to see what Lynch, Pilson and Brown put together, it’s a shame to see one of my favorite 80’s bands still behaving like babies 25 years later. They’re all in their 50’s, Don being the oldest at 58. [Editing note: here we see a double-standard on my part, since one of my signature lines since high school, and one that I still live by today, is “Age is a state of mind.”] “Dump the Chump?” Really? Even back in the 80’s there were plenty of stories about their in-fighting. But you know what? Listen to the music and the performances, and I think that conflict is part of what made the songs so good. Everything had more “bite” to it, and I’ve always felt some of the internal conflict with the band also led to some of their best creativity and performances – when it was kept at a controlled level. Get out of control, as rock stars are prone to do, and you get antics like Guns ‘n Roses destroying hotels and urinating in the aisle on airplanes.

The first band that made me consider the value of conflict was Van Halen. Listening to the songs from the original lineup with David Lee Roth and you can again hear the music had more “bite” than it did after Diamond Dave left the group. Eddie’s guitar sound was certainly more raw and his soloing (and his overplaying and “noodling” as he called it) was more off-the-cuff, almost as if he was channeling his frustrations into a creative outlet. Again, plenty of stories over the DLR years of in-fighting. Once Sammy Hagar entered the picture, I got the impression Eddie was more confident as leader of the band and more into composing and arranging his music. The early years with Sammy was one big happy party with everyone getting along, and while they certainly did put out some great songs in the “Van Hagar” years, there was also something missing. The “bite” was gone.

Shifting forward in time, one example of a lack of conflict doing more harm than good was my appearance in Episode #30 of the Shut Up, We’re Talking! podcast. While I never thought the show was “bad” by any means, it was at the time the lowest-rated episode (and highest number of comments, if I recall) simply because there was no conflict at all between the guests. None. Nada. Zero. Zip. Zilch. I’m sure it was just purely coincidence, but every topic on the agenda Darren, Karen, John and myself all agreed upon. There wasn’t even the hint of a dissenting opinion, not even for the sake of playing Devil’s Advocate. The listener’s didn’t like it. And I have no choice to agree. I personally will not listen to a podcast with only one host, because there is no discussion and therefore no liveliness and no source for conflict to generate creativity. Even with podcasts with multiple hosts, I tend to not enjoy shows where all the hosts share the same background in whatever the topic is about (usually gaming). I’ve said before that in MMOs I personally prefer to be in guilds with a varied roster of personalities, not just a bunch of “gamer dudes” always having the same “gamer dude” discussions. Give me some non-gamers, some housewives, some CEO’s, some MMA fighters, anything but people who mimic my own background or interests. Similarly, I rank podcasts higher when hosts include both males and females. That discourse alone is plenty of entertainment value because you’re guaranteed to have different backgrounds influencing their opinions and preferences.

Paul (Oakstout) has brought up a few times recently that he thinks a gaming-oriented podcast hosted by himself, Aaron and me would be a good idea. I always burst into laughter, saying he just wants my blog bombed with hate mail when people hear me vocalizing just how opinionated I am. But he says he thinks it’s interesting because while the three of us often enjoy the same (or at least similar) games, nearly 100% of the time we enjoy them for completely different reasons and don’t always see eye-to-eye on the others’ preferences. For my two cents, while I have had some creative (and silly) ideas for podcasts before, there is no way I’m going to be co-hosting with my little punk-ass voice up against Mr. Guitarist/Songwriter Aaron and his deep babe-magnet voice. Yes, I am precisely that shallow! Not to mention, as stated above in my own personal listening preferences, it would be three dudes being dudes. An aural sausage-fest. That is not something I’d want to listen to, much less take the time to record, edit, and produce. Harry Potter wouldn’t have been as special if it were “The Adventures of Ron and Harry,” now would it? The addition of Hermione and her perspective was what solidified them as friends and an interesting band of adventurers. A few dudes waggling their wands is just that – it takes a woman to turn it into magic…

Sorry for the lack of updates the past couple weeks. I was very busy with work since I had vacation coming up and haven’t been taking my laptop either, so no gaming on the overnights.

Vacation ended up being more impromptu than we like, but it worked out fine.

Plan A was an Alaska cruise. I had an interline discount for a seven night cruise with an outside cabin for $300! Unfortunately, it required more time than I had for vacation when you count traveling to Anchorage, starting the cruise in Seward then getting home from Vancouver. We needed two more days off than I had. Maybe next time.

Plan B was flying to San Juan for a Caribbean cruise that hit all (or most) of the Virgin Islands. Unfortunately, that cruise ran the week prior to my vacation, then is running this week, but not during the week I had off.

Plan C was skipping the cruise and just going to a resort in the Caribbean. Destinations to choose from were Aruba, Grand Cayman or one of the Virgin Islands (St. Martin or St. Thomas). I ended up picking Grand Cayman since we’d spent a few hours there on a cruise excursion a few years ago.

If anyone’s interested, I can write about the trip and the island later. Getting ready to start a trip in a bit so no time to go into it now. Just wanted to check in and let my couple readers know I’m still out here.

The July 2011 edition of Ask Cryptic for Star Trek Online is up and once again, Executive Producer Dan Stahl does an excellent job of fielding player questions (50 this month) regarding the game. Considering how busy the team is on finishing up Season 4 for its launch in a couple days, I’m impressed Dan took the time out beforehand to do this.

Bits of revealed information that appeal to me include:

• The next Feature Episode will take place around Deep Space 9, and the team hopes to get the Federation DS9 Fleet Action fixed up and back on the queue as well. The FE will also open up some missions in the Gamma Quadrant!
• Season 4 adds a new starbase for both Federation and KDF!
• The team is definitely looking at adding more sector blocks but Stahl has his R&D team looking at whether or not they can remove all the sector block instances in favor of a single, massive open space. If the tech works, he hopes they can include that change for Season 5! How freakin’ cool would that be?
• Season 4 did a complete overhaul to Kits and ranged combat on the ground, but didn’t touch melee. Prior to Season 5, the team hopes to overhaul melee to finish out ground combat.
• End Game. Not that there is currently much of an end-game to STO but that is becoming a priority now that Season 4 is about ready. They’re working on rebalancing and overhauling the existing STF’s first, adding hourly Borg Incursions, four new Fleet Actions coming in Season 4, then hopefully continuing with more end-game content. Sweet! I hope to do some of these someday, though I’ll either have to PUG or join a fleet that’s more active than our little blogger fleet, I fear.
• The new Qo’nos should go live with Season 4, and Starfleet Academy is planned for the end of this month as well. Each will be used for new tutorials for Federation or Klingon characters, and each new area will ship with Foundry hooks so that UGC authors can build missions in those new settings. Sounds like they’re also working on a Kobiyashi Maru scenario for the Academy tutorial also.

Plenty more good questions and answers from Dan Stahl. Go read the whole thing! As always, he is a shining beacon of a good role model for communicating with players.

I had planned on asking a question too since Vivox just launched in Champions Online and should go live with Season 4 in a couple days so I wondered whether Cryptic would allow players to create custom Vivox channels that could be used out-of-game. They allow players to participate on custom chat channels with any XMPP chat client such as Pidgin, and Vivox had their standalone client, Voon. The operative word there is “had,” unfortunately. Before asking my question, I thought it would be wise to check if Voon was still around (I still have it installed on my system) but apparently Vivox stopped development. Oh well.

[Note: Apologies for being a week late posting this. Life and work, ya know? Issue 5 will also be a week late.]

Warning: Spoilers!

The web intro for Issue 4 reads:

Having defeated the Army of Horrors, the UNTIL troopers took shelter in a cave. But they’re not alone. Unable to resist the Horrors that followed, the soldiers are now being marched away in captivity. The heroes must pursue this group through a twisting cave that descends into the depths of the Qliphothic Realm where they find there is more than one reason to be afraid of the dark…

One strange thing with Issue 4 is the title. The web site calls it “Bad Dreams Are Made of This” (thumbs up for the Eurythmics’ nod) however when picking up the mission from UNTIL Liason Bradley, the mission itself is titled “Descent Into Darkness” while the “Bad Dreams” part merely gives a clue of the mission’s nature. Clear as mud? Anyway…

We left off last week after rescuing three groups of UNTIL survivors in the Qliphothic Realm. The third cave had some intense fighting at the end, though sacrificing the osprey helped quite a bit, as did having Ripper and his VIPER team — a tenuous alliance at best, however. Only a single survivor, a trooper named Schmidt emerged from the cave, however, delivering the news that horrors had entered the cave from tunnels within and taken the other survivors to one of the nearby towers. Drayvin is tasked with pursuing them into the cave and attempting to rescue the survivors.

Shortly into the cave, Drayvin defeats a few patrolling horrors then the cavern opens into a larger chamber. A cut-scene shows the UNTIL survivors being marched into a side tunnel. A demonic lady exuding dark energies gives order to a hulking brute demon to seal the tunnel after they make their escape. The brute, a Nightmare Demolisher, pounds the tunnel entrance until it caves in. The cut-scene ends just as he notices Drayvin. The brute is rated at weak master villain so just enough of a challenge that Drayvin needed to activate his force shield for extra protection and block a few times. Otherwise the Lock and Load buff boosted his concussor beam and mini-gun damage enough with that first extended blast to drain the Demolisher’s health most of the way before Drayvin had to start blocking and evading.

After defeating the brute, Drayvin finds another yet another tunnel that has been sealed, but looks like he can get through. Schmidt runs down to warn Drayvin that they had sent scouts down that tunnel and they never returned, so they sealed the tunnel themselves. Mumbling something about pansies, Drayvin locked his mini-gun and concussor beams onto the boulder and blasted it into gravel.

Another open cavern hosts a slew of demon types, including the classic large, red, winged type called a Bale, master villain rated, who does a running charge toward Drayvin then blasts the area with fire. What’s the rule here? Oh yes…

Defeating the Bale and other demons, Drayvin runs down the corridor at the opposite end where he meets a demonic trio. A Maleficia, with a Brother and Initiate behind her, warns Drayvin he has entered the domain of Demoisella Nocturne, Mistress of Nightmares. Scoffing at her suggestion of turning around or being destroyed, Drayvin (who has been playing Duke Nukem Forever at HQ…) replied with a husky “Come get some!” before opening up on the trio with all his weapons.

The next set of corridors is a three-way fork, but the middle is blocked my stalactites and stalagmites. At each end of the other two are demons surrounding a dark energy vortex with one of the UNTIL survivors inside. Defeating all the demons who are conducting the vortex rituals allows Drayvin to get close but the only way to break the vortex and rescue each survivor is to enter the deadly nightmare Demoisella Nocturne has them trapped in.

The first survivor Drayvin found was Elspeth “Ellie” Macalister. Nocturne has her trapped in a dream memory from her childhood. Her mother, Edna, had fallen ill to a degenerative brain disease and killed Ellie’s father, Agnus, in a fit of dementia then tried to kill Ellie. The disease is hereditary so Ellie fears she will also fall to the same madness someday. The dream opens with little Ellie trying to wake her dead father whose body lies on the living room couch. The entire house has been warped by Nocturne’s nightmare ritual and everything is bathed in a deep red hue. What appear to be tentacles line the floor and walls, which pulse and quiver in a creepy manner. Tiny bubbles of dark energy float about like ash. This dream sequence is a mini-game. Edna patrols, looking for Elspeth to kill her. Nocturne’s dreams are lethal so if Edna finds Ellie, she will die both in the dream and in reality. Edna seems oblivious to Drayvin’s presence so we simply have to lead Ellie to her room safely. Ellie will hide behind curtains or furniture while Drayvin has to find another spot for her to hide in while Edna patrols the room. When it’s safe, we call Ellie’s name (in local chat) and she runs to us and hides. Once in the hallway, Edna reappears with a new patrol path to figure out. After a few hallways and sneaking Ellie past Edna, Ellie arrives upstairs in her bedroom safely. Now Edna notices Drayvin! Ellie is out of the dream but Drayvin must defeat Edna to escape himself.

At the other nightmare vortex, Jarek Kovar is trapped in a shameful memory that occurred early in his UNTIL career. His sergeant, Thompson, had told Kovar to remain alert and not touch anything but he clumsily bumped into a control panel. Lights flickered, portals opened and he heard shooting as creatures began shambling out of the portals and attacked his squad-mates. Afraid and confused, Kovar hid instead of fighting with his unit, and now fears they are dead. It’s a… Zombie Nightmare!

This dream sequence is all black-and-white with a very mild “static interference” graphical effect, as if the dream were being viewed from security camera footage. No mini-game here, just fight the zombies and reach Sgt. Thompson. Drayvin and Kovar run through the laboratory complex, blasting reanimated zombies to bits then finally finding an injured Sgt. Thompson holed up in one of the larger labs. After Thompson and Kovar have a brief conversation, a zombie horde converges into the lab! The three of us blasted away until finally it became apparent that the reanimation formula was unstable; as we blew the final one in the lab to giblets, all the other zombies who were enroute to the lab disintegrated. Nightmare safely completed, allowing Drayvin and Kovar to return to reality.

The stalactites and stalagmites blocking the center cavern retract into the ceiling and floor, opening a large chamber. Demoisella Nocturne is here and she’s rather unhappy with Drayvin for interrupting her nightmare rituals. More threats of doom and everlasting torment, yada yada. Drayvin had one final one-liner quote in him, moving up the ladder to Duke Nukem’s original inspiration: Bruce Campbell! Looking Nocturne square in the eye, he purses his lips in a mock kiss and taunts “Yo, she-bitch! Let’s go!”

Oh, but Nocturne has another trick up her sleeve! Before Drayvin can defeat her, she stuns him then summons an altar-like portal into the cavern. Peering into Drayvin’s fears, she taunts him that it’s too late for the other UNTIL survivors; they are out of reach and being held in the tower of her master, Luther Black. Nocturne dares Drayvin to follow her…

To be continued…

Final thoughts: Issue 4 felt shorter overall. For the most part, the combat was pretty easy solo and every time a “boss-ish” rated mob came along, Lock and Load had cooled down. That being said, Drayvin did suffer one or two defeats over the course of Issue 4 so it wasn’t a total faceroll. Ellie’s dream sequence mini-game was neat, and the closer to her room we got, the more creepy the environment became. The floor and walls pulsed faster, and everything became gradually darker with each room or hallway. It did take me several minutes to figure out what I was supposed to do and how to make Ellie run to the next hiding spot. Some of the hiding spots were obvious and could be seen from a distance, others seemed like they could only be seen from certain angles. The other dream sequence was very straight-forward and I don’t remember any special mob types among the zombie horde, so other than the fact they were coming to us it was a fairly standard encounter.

The good news — I hope — is that we’re finally going into one of those towers in Issue 5! They look so cool from the outside, I just hope I’m not disappointed next week when I get inside. Only two Issues to go until Aftershock concludes (each Comic Series is six Issues in length), so I’d imagine the final confrontation will be defeating Luther Black, who I’d guess will be introduced in Issue 5.

As always, here’s a Picasa gallery of Issue 4 with additional screen shots.

I bought The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion last year because everyone raves about how great it is, or was. I didn’t think very highly of Fallout 3, which I still haven’t bothered to finish, and which is in some ways Oblivion 2.0, but got the game anyway in hopes that these two highly-rated Bethesda RPGs would finally "click" for me.

No luck yet, but I am slowly plodding forward inch by inch to finish the game. Mostly out of spite at this point, and to get all 1250 Gamerscore for it (I have the Game of the Year edition which includes the Shivering Isles expansion) so I can trade it and move on with life.

Oblivion starts you off escaping from a dungeon cell, meeting the Emperor (voiced by Sir Patrick Stewart) who dies shortly thereafter and you finally exit the dungeon into the world with the urgent mission to find the Emperor’s heir. Only, it turns out, the mission isn’t all that urgent after all because Oblivion is such an open-world game, it really doesn’t matter when, or if, you bother to do anything. In fact, it would prefer you didn’t, because there are Guilds to join, Arenas to fight in, and all manner of individual NPC who’d like you to do favors for them. I could almost submit that Oblivion is a single-player MMO in that "story" is very sparse and as an "adventurer" all you really do is act as a mercenary doing odd jobs for the NPC’s and/or find caves to "grind" for loot, usually with no real reason to be there other than that.

My initial reaction last year once entering the world is that everything looks the same, which diminishes my feeling of exploration. Since then, I have encountered a few areas that are different in appearance (snow-covered with constant snow weather effects, etc.) but otherwise I’ve traveled to every town on the map and my initial impression seems to hold true. With precious few exceptions, once you exit that first dungeon to begin your adventures, you’ve just seen everything the world has to offer.

Someone on Twitter last week described Oblivion as an "open world exploration RPG" and I’d be inclined to agree with that assessment, only it’s not quite the type of exploration I care for. Since so far, most of the world looks identical there is very little feel that any area is different from another. That limits the "exploration" to simply wandering the world waiting for "You discovered [insert POI here]!" to appear on the screen and a POI icon will appear permanently on your map. That’s enjoyable in its own small, shallow sense but there’s precious little else to "discover" that I’ve come across so far. Worse, it seems an awful lot of "exploration" is the type I don’t like: examining every pixel of the room or area I’m in to see what objects are there and whether they have enough value for me to bother taking them to sell. The only other "exploration" is speaking to every NPC you find to see if they have something for you to do or not. I’m not crazy about MMO Quest Dispensers who stand still 24/7 with glowing punctuation marks over their heads. But even worse is the very old-school CRPG method of being forced to speak to every NPC, not to mention having to waltz into everyone’s home as if you owned the place, to "discover" any "content" the game might have.

The quests themselves, for the most part, are standard fare you’d get in a fantasy RPG or MMO. Go kill someone; go talk to someone; go retrieve and/or deliver an item. Each quest has its own little backstory relating to the NPC delivering it and perhaps with the history or politics of the town or region. You know, the type of stuff you skip over to click the ‘OK’ button if it were an MMO. But since you’re forced to stare at the bobble-head people and listen to the voiceovers, it makes the presentation far superior to a simple quest text in an MMO. Technically, you can skip forward one statement at a time in the voiceovers, and I regularly do so if I already get the gist of the conversation. Nothing about the game has yet made me care enough about my character, the "main story" or the world, so I certainly don’t give a rat’s ass about some random bobble-head’s story. If the voiceover and story is interesting enough, I’ll watch and listen to the bobble-head, otherwise it’s "get to the point already" just like an MMO would be. This is something Star Wars: The Old Republic will have to contend with, as well, but that’s another story for another time.

During character creation, your choices determine your primary skills rather than simply selecting a "class" like you would in an MMO. The problem I’m seeing so far is that all the various skillsets are defined in a strict "fighter, thief, mage" system and you’ll need all three to continue through the game. What you end up with is despite the illusion of all the choices of how to create and play your character, every character is still a "fighter, thief, mage." It doesn’t matter if I play a goody-two-shoes or an "evil" character who sneaks around stealing and assassinating people. The quests can only be played out to a singular resolution so we never have any choices to make, therefore there’s really no "role playing" within the game itself, only to ourselves in the sense of "I’m playing a sneaky thief" or "I’m playing an archmage who throws fire and lightning." That’s a problem I’ve always had with so-called "sandbox" games and players raving about the ability to "tell their own story." I suppose it’s just my own particular perspective or definitions, but I don’t consider "this is how I killed the dude to finish the quest" to be anywhere near the league of "this is my character’s story."

The leveling also bothers me, but possibly not in the same sense it seems to bother many others. I’m not a fan of vertical levels in (massively-) multi-player RPG’s but in single-player RPG’s it doesn’t matter. Oblivion scales as you level, which I approve of in concept if not in execution. The "problem" with Oblivion’s particular leveling system is that I never have any incentive to actually bother leveling. At level 2 I reached Grand Champion rank in Imperial City’s fighting arena. I was the most fearsome fighter in the world and could easily thrash multiples of the worst opponents they sent at me. At level 2. Currently, I’ve done many a quest for many an NPC and have nearly topped out with the Mage’s Guild, getting busy with the Fighter’s Guild and just joined the Thieves’ Guild. I’m only level 7. I could easily finish the game without reaching level 8 unless it’s purely by accident, simply from incidentally raising enough skills to level. In fact, other than leveling would allow me to increase my Strength so I could carry more than two or three decent items to sell, or to increase my Magicka to cast some of the cool-sounding spells, I really have zero incentive to go out and level more because leveling in Oblivion is mindless grinding of skills, and that is not why I play RPGs. The loot also scales with level, so I’ll never see any cool gear unless I level, either, but again if the only way to ever see "cool stuff" is to "waste time" grinding, I guess I’ll just have to do without that cool stuff. I read people post of their high level characters and just boggle at how or why they bothered to get that high (level 20+) considering all the time you have to spend (unless you "macro" your skills… another pet peeve) doing it.

All in all, as I said early on, I am continuing Oblivion simply out of spite and to get all the achievements. But I feel that as an RPG it’s an exceptionally poor one. As an "open world exploration game" it’s great if one happens to enjoy the (in my opinion) limited means of exploration the game offers.

After completing all the Guilds, I will finish up the main story then Shivering Isles. I’m interested to see if my opinion changes once I’m doing full-on story content. But for now, while just grinding enough quests to have something to do while raising skills, I have to wonder why Oblivion is such a big deal to so many RPGers…

Warning: Spoilers!

The spoiler for Issue 3 reads:

The entire VIPER fortress, and everything in it, heroes included, has been physically transported to the Qliphothic Realm, a dimension of chaos and destruction. The heroes must protect their only link to Earth while searching for evidence of survivors of Operation Demonflame. Locating these poor souls may answer some questions, but the biggest one remains: How do they get home?

Fort Lantern has been violently transported into the Qliphothic realm, the damage causing the underground bunker to collapse. The radar antenna fell onto Ripper’s cell, releasing him though he is still damaged enough that UNTIL soldiers are holding him captive with his VIPER team. Major Okonkwo is able to see the structure where the portal used during Operation Demonflame is located to the south of the fort. Drayvin heads to check it out.

The spirit of Juan Ramirez meets Drayvin at the structure. He informs Drayvin that shortly after the final UNTIL troops retreated through the portal after Operation Demonflame, the portal was sealed, presumably by Witchcraft using her powers from Earth’s side of the portal. Turns out Ramirez is a psychic, which is why he was assigned to Major Boudreau’s unit during Operation Demonflame. He’s very much alive, and is projecting himself in order to communicate with us. Before being able to continue, someone approaches his cell, forcing him to break his psychic projection. Drayvin returns to Fort Lantern to report to Major Okonkwo, but is followed by several groups of flying horrors. Lookouts at each corner of the fort arm the defense turrets. Nice thing about having NPC’s at each turret is they are able to not only target individual mobs for maximum damage but also put the turrets into repair mode, like Drayvin had to manually do during Issue 1.

Ripper uses the distraction of the attack upon the fort to attempt an escape with his VIPER squad. There is a one transport vehicle that was undamaged in the fort’s transport to the Qliphothic realm, and they make their way toward it, grabbing weapons from fallen UNTIL soldiers and blasting any horrors who come near. Drayvin breaks off his attacks on the horrors to deal with VIPER. There are too many of them to fight single-handed so the remaining choice is to eliminate their escape route: destroy the transport before they reach it.

While blasting the transport with his concussor beams, Drayvin completed the “Sub-Atomic” perk for dealing out 1 million particle damage! Bonus! With the transport gone, VIPER has no escape and the horrors aren’t being picky who they attack so Ripper agrees to surrender again after the horrors have been dealt with.

Ramirez projects himself into the fort to speak with Okonkwo. A cut-scene plays as he tells his story of being captured a week ago by servants of the Kings of Edom. They were taken to one of the nearby towers and tortured. Ramirez explains he tried to use his psychic abilities to shield the minds of himself and the other survivors but was not strong enough. The torture finally broke Robinson; he went insane allowing his captors to further ravage his mind to use it as a conduit to his team on Earth in Fort Lantern, forcing Qliphothic energy to the other side where it drove those men insane as well and warped their physical appearance. Those were the tortured troops Drayvin fought in Issue 2 as he worked his way through the fort’s bunker.

Ramirez is both happy to see us and hopeful of a rescue but also terrified because the fort’s transport to the Qliphothic realm was caused by a ritual — the Kings of Edom want us here for some nefarious purpose, and have succeeded in bringing us to their dimension.

He continues to explain that the survivors were too weak to fight so decided to split up into three smaller groups to be able to hide better and also give the other groups a chance to survive should one group be captured. Major Okonkwo insists on an immediate rescue. Ramirez gives the location of two of the three caves the survivors are holed up in but is forced to break his psychic projection before he can divulge the third cave’s location. The Qliphothic energies are beginning to worm into Captain Urqhart, who is growing depressed and hopeless. Drayvin snaps him out of it for now, and Urqhart offers to fly the osprey for aerial support.

Urqhart tells Drayvin to grab a set of smoke grenades to signal him. Red smoke to attack, and blue smoke means it’s safe for the osprey to land to pick up the survivors. Drayvin and Urqhart fly together to the first waypoint. A horde of horrors is outside the mouth of the cave, so Drayvin tossed a red smoke grenade into their midst, signalling Urqhart to make a strafing run in the osprey then Drayvin went in and cleared out the remaining horrors. As the first survivor made his way out of the cave, Drayvin placed the blue smoke grenade in a clear area so Urqhart could land. Soon, however, more horrors showed up and began attacking the osprey and the survivors attempting to board it. After the final survivor was loaded, Drayvin and Urqhart flew to the next cave to repeat the rescue attempt then flew the survivors back to Fort Lantern. Additional bonus: Drayvin completed the “Unpronounceable” perk for defeating 100 Qliphothic horrors!

Back at Fort Lantern, Urqhart lands and drops off the survivors who are happily greeted by Major Okonkwo. Then Ramirez appears again. The reason he had to suddenly break contact earlier was that he was captured again in the tower and was tortured to reveal the location of the third group of survivors. An army of horrors is on their way now and Ramirez has been unable to psychically contact them to warn them of the horrors or even inform them that help is on the way.

Out-manned and out-gunned, Captain Urqhart suggests asking Ripper if he and his VIPER team will assist in the rescue. After all, they’re in the same boat as UNTIL as far as being at risk from the denizens and energies of this realm. Since we’d worked so well with Captain Jarvis in Issue 2, he’d told Ripper that Drayvin can be trusted so he agrees on the condition that he and his men will be freed afterward.

The osprey is low on fuel and ammo so we can’t use it as transport there and back, but Urqhart has an idea for the osprey to play a final role. All over the realm, geysers spew forth chaos energy. If we can load up enough into the osprey, she’d go out with one helluva bang! It was an optional objective but the chance to make things go BOOM in a big way? Are you kidding me? Drayvin isn’t armed with force bolts, concussor beams and a shoulder-mounted mini-gun for nothin’, ya know! Of course we’re going to blow stuff up! Drayvin grabs a set of canisters then flies to geysers, filling them with chaos energy before loading up all the canisters into the osprey.

The motley band of heroes and villains set off for the third cave, finally spying the horror army. There are more than we’d thought, so having the osprey will certainly help! Drayvin sets the coordinates and engages the osprey’s autopilot and watches as she goes down in a furious blaze of glory! More horrors still survive and make their way to the survivors so Urqhart signals to advance and engage!

We lost several UNTIL and VIPER soldiers while making our way to the cave but we succeeded. A sole survivor made his way out, telling us the horrors had entered the cave through a back passage, grabbed the other survivors and took them to one of the nearby towers.

A final cut-scene plays showing another portal opening and two VIPER members coming through. Ripper meets them — he apparently knew they were coming and where they’d be! — and the commander wants to reach that tower before UNTIL does. Back-stabbing villains…

Final thoughts: I still enjoyed Issue 2 more than this one. I just thought the pacing was better, even though the Qliphothic realm environment is cool with all the purple lighting and particle effects from the energies given off. Drayvin did suffer a defeat or two from some of the flying horrors. I’m thinking it may have been an incidental line of sight (LoS) issue because he seemed to completely stop attacking each time, while all 3 or so of the horrors were still able to nail him with their nasty damage over time (DoT) energy blasts. Next time, I had Drayvin use his jet boots to engage them in the air and that worked out much better. There were a few mobs of Master Villain level or so that could have been more of a problem, but I was careful to clear out any surrounding mobs so I could engage them solo. When Drayvin achieved level 20 last week, I chose Lock and Load as his new power, which is a major damage buff, so being able to activate that plus only having a single target to focus all Drayvin’s attacks on made the tough mobs go down pretty quickly. Big damage numbers and quick defeats has a way of making one see the fun in playing dps characters, no?

Once again, I really enjoyed the cut-scenes this week. I’m looking forward to seeing these towers up close. The one cut-scene that scrolled near one made it seem like a pretty large structure. Not as big or cool as the Vault from Star Trek Online‘s Series 3: Cloaked Intentions, but close enough to make me want to ogle it and beat up some Qliphothic bad guys, especially the archmage-looking ones who were torturing Ramirez’s team.

The plot twist at the end was not entirely unforeseen, though I wasn’t really thinking that far ahead when it happened so I’ll chalk it up with: “Ah! Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”

As always, here is the Picasa screenshot gallery for Issue 3.

[Note: I started this post last week. Reading it today, it seems a bit "train of thought" and perhaps rambles a bit; I'm not sure if it even gets to the point I set out to make. But I'm posting it anyway.]

It’s no secret that I’ve become a fan of, shall we say, alternate pricing arrangements for my entertainment. MMOs in particular, I find more and more difficult to justify a $15 monthly subscription simply on the basis that I know I won’t “get my money’s worth” out of any particular MMO in any given month. I’m in the travel industry, therefore I’m only home a couple days a week. Totaled, I am away from home roughly 8 months of the year.

The unfortunately-named “Free To Play” or F2P model is attractive to me at this point in time because, in theory, in allows me to play at my own pace and toss the devs a few bucks here and when I see fit if I decide their product is worthy of my dollars. I say “in theory” because we’re all-too-familiar with years of F2P systems that either routinely gate content behind a mandatory pay wall, or gouge players for mandatory consumables.

Guild Wars is my favorite model, and one which in another sense is similar to my experience on Xbox Live: buy the software once, play forever at no additional charge, and buy DLC for continued adventures. I am very interested to see how often Arena.net issues content updates for Guild Wars 2 which will also be using this model.

SiriusXM ran a promotion recently where they gave everyone two weeks of free satellite radio, along with a promotion to signup for $25 for 5 months, equating to $5/month compared to the normal $13/month. As I just mentioned above, I’m not home enough to justify $13/month for radio, no matter how many stations they offer. The longest I’m in my car is driving to and from the airport, twice a week, 30 minutes each. Otherwise nearly everything I need is within 10 minutes of my home. But for $5/month? That’s the cost of a Frappucino at Starbucks, so I can justify that to have a few months of new radio stations I couldn’t otherwise experience.

Bringing that back to MMOs, at this point in my life with not only limited time for gaming but so many gaming choices, both within and outside of the MMO genre, I feel developers or publishers need to continue their pricing experiments, perhaps offering a time-limited access for a substantially lower fee if they insist on subscriptions. I could foresee spending $5 to $7 (which is what a streaming-only Netflix subscription costs) per month for say, a block of 50 hours per month tops?

I look at everyone on Twitter playing RIFT and I can tell just from the scenery graphics I would enjoy the game (or at least the scenery) for awhile, but at the end of the day, it’s just another “level up, gear up” game that has and/or will have all the same problems every other vertical-progression MMO has. I may not have played RIFT‘s sub-systems but, to paraphrase Bartle, I’ve already played RIFT countless times and can’t justify $15/month on it when I consider the other MMO’s I’m already invested in plus all the other games I play in my limited time.

A lot of this falls in line not only with my limited gaming time but also the notion that the subscription is a “game as a service” which is where the unconscious “need” to get your money’s worth comes in. Currently, I don’t have any MMO subscriptions. I casually play three MMO’s — Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online, and Champions Online — all of which I have Lifetime Memberships for. Aside from the convenience of never having to update my account page doing the Re-sub/Un-sub dance, lifetime memberships allow me to change my outlook from “game as a service” back to the normal “game as a product” that I grew up with and continue to experience with non-MMO games. I can pick up or walk away from any of those three at any time, never having to concern myself with my account status, never worrying about getting value out of a single month. Are they a gamble? Certainly! One has to look no further than Hellgate: London to see how short a game’s lifetime can be. But I figure $200 is roughly equal to four full-price games for my Xbox 360, which would be $240 (plus taxes or shipping) or six PC games at the $50 that seems to be the average these days. I currently have a stack of 58 games for my 360, only a few of which are “finished,” and my Steam library shows 26 games installed. Add to that all the MMOs I’ve bought, the non-Steam PC games at home, and so forth. Even though a good chunk of those were pre-owned from Gamestop or purchased during a Steam sale, that’s still a large chunk of money set aside just for my gaming hobby. So when I look at the total gaming library I’ve already invested in, $200 doesn’t seem like that much of a worry anymore. The two Cryptic games are pretty much the only chance I have to play alongside certain people like Blue Kae, MMO Gamer Chick and a few others, so I can easily place the “reward” of that over the “risk” of the lifetime membership as part of my own justification process.

Similarly, I bought Call of Duty: Black Ops and both it’s map packs ($60 for the disc plus $15 for each map pack) strictly so I could play online with Aaron and Oakstout (even Genda jumped in twice as a bonus). I’m not sure if I’ve ever ranted here on PI.net about my utter frustration with Call of Duty games, though both Aaron and Oakstout are well-versed with my oft-profane-laden outbursts of vitriol towards the multi-player game. During my worst tirades, Oak usually breaks out into giggles and I have a suspicion Aaron mutes me momentarily if I enter territory that offends his Catholic upbringing. I’ve had a neighbor knock and ask if things were OK, so yeah, to say Call of Duty pisses me off is an understatement, but it’s also a testament to what I’m willing to put up with for the sake of having fun with online friends. I don’t necessarily approve of the steep price of the map packs, but in a sense the model itself falls in line with Guild Wars where I buy the game and play for free, then buy DLC on top of that to continue support. (Don’t even get me started on Call of Duty: Elite, however…) The only difference being that Call of Duty is a “game as a product” and will be replaced in twelve months with the next annual edition of the franchise as opposed to the continuing growth of something of the scale of Guild Wars 2.

Back in the pre-internet days of GEnie we had to pay hourly for the service itself then an additional hourly fee to play online games like Air Warrior or Islands of Kesmai. That adds up way faster than any F2P game that I have deigned to play, believe me. I don’t want to go back to those days, but I also feel that for myself and others who participate in the myriad gaming choices available, subscriptions just don’t cut the mustard any longer. I don’t want to feel psychologically “locked into” one game to the near-exclusion of others because of the full-price subscription.

Funny thing is, and perhaps this is a whole other aspect of psychology, even a few years ago I was all about the subscription games even as more viable choices began to appear, diluting my overall gaming value or perhaps making me spend more on multiple subscriptions. Money was tighter then, too. Now that I’m in a better financial position where I can easily pay for essentially three Frappucinos per month (roughly the same as an MMO subscription) I am more loathe to do so knowing I won’t get the same value from it as I did back in the earlier days where I had to consider the finances, but also had more time to devote to my one (or precious few) choice(s).