Massively^™

Ask any MMOG player about EverQuest, and you'll get one of three responses: either they loved it, they hated it, or they didn't play it (and don't want to). Nobody thinks that it was just a mediocre game, and a lot of people look back fondly on their time there, warts and all. There were a lot of warts. When I was chatting with Scott Hartsman at this year's IMGDC, he explained to me that EverQuest was rife with any number of "pain points" which later games were able to identify, fix, and build upon to make their own game better. Taking most of what was good about EverQuest and cutting most of what was bad was one of the things that helped World of Warcraft dethrone the game and take its seat as the number one MMORPG on the market.

However, not everyone agrees with all of the "improvements" that Blizzard made to the genre when they created WoW. The arguments over what should and shouldn't be left out of a great MMORPG continue to this day, and there's no quick and easy guide to what's MMOG gold. Plenty of companies are learning the hard way that cloning World of Warcraft isn't a winning strategy. It's a great game, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to play. My question for you all today is this: What if instead of EverQuest 2, Sony had given us EverQuest 2.0? EverQuest 2 was a spiritual successor at best to the original game (Vanguard is much closer to an actual sequel). If SOE had remade the DikuMUD-inspired world of Norrath, set in the same time period, with an updated graphics engine and the pain points fixed differently than WoW chose to do, what might it have looked like? More importantly, is it something you'd want to play?

When I was playing EverQuest in the Kunark-era days there was one item that stood head and shoulders above all the others for me: the Fungus Covered Scale Tunic (affectionately called "The Fungi"). It was the ultimate twink item, allowing you to regain your health at a rate unheard of in the days when long rest periods between each minor battle were the norm for solo players. The Fungi was something I lusted after, wished for, and dreamed of, but I was never able to actually lay hands on it during those days, due to the extreme difficulty of obtaining one. If you wanted one, you had to take a full party of maximum level characters into an exceedingly dangerous area, far from the reaches of civilization, and fight your way to a rare spawn deep in the ruined city of Old Sebilis. Very rarely, he would drop the prized Fungi, which you could then pass on to your low-level alts or sell on the open market for hundreds of thousands of platinum pieces.

Other than the fact that it was a fantastic twink item, what made the Fungi so compelling? It was that you really had to risk something to get it. EverQuest, with it's naked corpse runs, experience loss on death, and horribly dangerous dungeons, made adventuring into a real adventure. Getting to Old Sebilis required traveling across several dangerous and hostile jungle zones in the forgotten continent of Kunark, far from the nearest hub of civilization. Dying in the depths of Old Sebilis was a sickeningly punishing experience in those days -- something you avoided at all costs. When a battle started going sour, you could feel your hackles rising, panic setting in, and a real sense of fear that made victory that much sweeter and death a soul-crushing experience. Is that sense of fear something we're missing out on in the modern MMOG?

Our curiosity spiked last month when the Age of Conan team presented their Ask Kalanthes advice column concept. We have to admit that a chunk of our time was dedicated to wondering just what kinds of questions they were going to be answering -- and in what way. Thankfully, we no longer have to guess as the first round of answers have been posted today.

It turns out that the column is an interesting blend of straight-up game related answers and in-character Kalanthes-style answers. While the first column seems to focus heavily on Age of Conan questions, there are a couple of pretty interesting of-the-wall questions as well. We've always wondered what that little square hairdo was about, too.

There are many reasons why Cryptic Studios is awesome, one of those reasons is for letting us all live out our superhero fantasies -- the other is because of how involved they are with the community. When other developers are eschewing the very medium which subscribers and fans can get intimate with developers -- Cryptic is doing everything they can to make great use of it.

Recently, forum posters on the official Champions Online boards where given a stickied thread where they could hurl as many questions as they wanted at Cryptic. After the proper amount of question firing was complete (probably somewhere around or beyond the 100 range) select few questions were answered in length and the entire thing was posted to the main page on the official CO website. It's all very exciting!

mmolecule has an interview up with Chris Bernert, Lead Systems Designer for the upcoming Stargate Worlds. He ducks most of their questions pretty adeptly (newsflash: SGW has "exciting plans" for their PvP system!), but there are a few interesting tidbits in here, including the fact that players of different factions will be able to communicate with each other, a la Star Wars Galaxies rather than World of Warcraft.

The other big note is that players will have three ways of reviving in the game-- either at the nearest "hospital," by another player, or right at the site of death. But CME says they haven't figured out the penalties for each situation yet. Bernert also says they're still working on coming up with the UI design. There's no question the folks behind SGW are facing a lot of challenges in trying to make a great MMO game out of a cult IP, but considering that they're hoping to go live a year from now, maybe they should cool it a bit on the interviews and get to work on the game itself.

{Via Curse]

Ten Ton Hammer is reporting on a recent uproar on the Vanguard: Saga of Heroes forums surrounding many MMO players' least favorite subject: death. Few like to contemplate their own demise, and even those who do would agree that penalties for dying in an online game are annoying. The current controversy surrounds a certain Producer's Letter written by game producer Thom Terrazas wherein he mentioned the possibility of reducing the severity of the death penalties in Vanguard.

Now Dalmarus makes a valid point about all of this. Removing the loss of experience mechanic from death means removing the excitement. Essentially, the developers would be eliminating that extra thrill you get from tackling dangers and taking on challenges that might be a bit much for you; the thrill you get knowing you survived and saved your precious experience points. I would agree that a death penalty gives players a consequence, albeit a small one, for reckless actions in-game, and removing that penalty means changing the game experience for better or worse. My feeling is that the Vanguard team might be looking at their competition, titles like WoW, and noticing that the loss of experience might deter the casual player from sticking with the game. But then again, it doesn't deter Dalmarus, so should they really be worried?

This is one topic that never fails to wind up as a huge discussion any time we get together with gamer friends. Some of us who have been around since the early days of MMOs remember the harsh death penalties that many of these games included. If you died in EverQuest, you would lose experience -- lose too much, and you could lose levels. You also had to run back to your corpse either without any gear on unless you could find a friendly player to rez you. Ahh, the memories.

Nowadays, death is disposable in games like World of Warcraft. You get killed by another player in front of Karazhan? No big deal. Just rez and head back. In games like WoW, death is less of an impact than it is an annoyance. It represents a whole 30 seconds you're going to have to spend running back from the conveniently-placed graveyard. Of course, you also resurrect with all your gear on you.

And then there are they hybrids like City of Heroes; you don't ever lose enhancements or inspirations, but you do lose some experience when you die. Some people feel like this is a good solid trade-off. It teaches you to be less of a loose-cannon since death does have some impact on your character. On the other hand, it's fairly easy to work off debt in CoX, and you never have to chase down your corpse to either resurrect, or to retrieve your items; you just start in the hospital or your SuperGroup's base.

So what do you think? Are the newer no-guilt, no-penalty deaths best, or were the older ones the best? Do you think death penalties teach players to think over strategy before rushing in, or do you think they'd do that anyway? What do you think of the hybrid systems that cause you to lose experience, but not gear? Which game has the best system in your opinion?

So after being recommended it by a friend a long time ago, and being in a zombie mood, I finally rented Dead Rising last night for my Xbox 360, and while it was a lot of fun, I was really distraught to find that the save system is old school. To save, you had to go to a certain place, and press a button. Die before you saved, and all your progress was lost.

Why was this so shocking to me? For one, I've gotten used to the easy breezy, checkpoint saving system of most games nowadays-- hit a point in progress, and your game automatically saves for you, so that if you lose the game for any reason, you can simply load up the last checkpoint and keep going. But the other factor in my save-system shock was all those MMOs I've played. In persistent world online gaming, there is no longer such a thing as "saving" your game.

Is that good or bad?