missions posts

If you took part in the recent City of Heroes double XP weekend, as a long-standing customer or a returning visitor, you most likely had a chance to take part in one of the game's Safeguard/Mayhem missions. Heroes are tasked with preventing a bank robbery, while villains are instead given the job of robbing said bank. Unfortunately for villains, their robbery is faced with several enemy groups that spawn without warning and will follow you all over if you happen to miss them. Worse yet, death puts you in prison, forcing you to fight your way out and possibly condemning you to another swift death.

There are a lot of little things that can add up in a game, little choices in design that wind up making the whole play experience more tedious and unpleasant than seems reasonable. As a result, the whole experience can wind up going straight down the tubes. What part of a game proved to be annoying when it really didn't need to be? Was it a quest with more travel or fighting than seemed necessary, an area with some particularly obnoxious geographical feature, or just something that was a whole lot of effort for very little reward?

After a month of heavy anticipation from the fans, VanaFest 2010 finally has come and given us all the information that we could want about where the game is heading from here. And the show did stay focused upon Final Fantasy XI -- the only mention of Final Fantasy XIV was the announcement that its first wave of beta testing will start on March 11th with a limited number of participants. That left quite a bit of show left to detail all of the changes coming to the game.

And there was certainly a lot of news to be shared. An increase in level cap, new add-on zones, job reviews, conclusions to existing content, server merges, new seasonal gear -- there was no shortage of surprising announcements. Continue on past the cut for the short version of what came out during the show and what players can expect.

If you play City of Heroes, you're looking forward to the upcoming Issue 17. We've heard some of what can be expected from the big pre-expansion drop, but much of it was cloaked in vague terms -- improvements that didn't have any hard data attached to them, like the promise of new missions and UI revisions. But the official site has put up a page on the coming features for the update, and it helps clarify some things we didn't know about, as well as offering some excellent news besides. And it promises the end of Positron's dreaded unending task force! (It'll still be there, but it will be split into two parts and improved all around.)

A literal bang, actually. Not only has Planet Calypso updated to version 2010|01 (their new system uses the year and update number, rather than version number) but they've also had a small volcanic eruption that's changed part of the map. Blizzard, eat your cataclysmic heart out.

While the newly re-terraformed area of Cyclops has been visually improved by the team and patched in under the 'guise of a volcanic explosion, the version update also brings the anticipated mission system to Calypso.

The mission system, which is in a public beta, more or less, is only currently offering 5 tutorial missions to newbies landing on Calypso for the first time. Once you complete those five missions, be sure to offer your feedback in the survey that pops up at the end. That information will be used to make more missions for higher level players, so don't be stingy!

Also, there's fish. Remember those fish we showed last time? Yeah, those fish. If you value your ankles, you'll watch where you swim.

The team over at First Planet Company, the minds behind the MMO/Second Life hybrid Planet Calypso, have recently welcomed a brand new community manager onto their staff -- Hanne Einan Gulbrandsen. Gulbrandsen is the game's first dedicated community manager, bringing the virtual world in line with the company practices of other MMO companies.

But, while Gulbrandsen settles into his new office and title, First Planet Company has also detailed their development roadmap for this year -- going over future additions such as vehicles, a new questing/mission system, and the addition of fish to the world (as shown above.) The mission system will finally give Calypso MMO style storyline quests, offering players a new way to play the game and experience the planet's lore. How these new quests will impact the game's real money-based economy will be interesting, especially if doing them offers in-game rewards.

Massively has been following the development of the sci-fi MMO Black Prophecy very closely, and was pleased that the title's developer Reakktor Media wanted to do a series of focused Q&As with us on several aspects of the game. Our last such Q&A started at the beginning with character creation, but in our second installment of the Black Prophecy interview series we discussed the game's mission design. To that end, we posed some questions to Lorenz Dames, the Lead Game Designer on Black Prophecy.

Lorenz explained a great deal about how Reakktor is approaching solo content vs. group-oriented gameplay. He also told us how Reakktor Media is merging the completion of mission objectives with dogfighting your fellow players through PvP missions, where other players will try to counter your efforts to complete goals. Our interview should provide Black Prophecy fans with a solid overview of the game's mission design, which will be an essential aspect of the sci-fi MMO's gameplay.

When EVE Online players think of what's changed in the game with the recent Dominion expansion release, the game's PvE content may not be the first thing that comes to mind. (Although Dominion introduced Epic Mission Arcs -- branching storylines -- for both the Guristas and Angel Cartel pirate factions.) The Atlanta-based content team at CCP Games has put a lot of work into Epic Mission Arcs for this expansion, though, which is the subject of the latest EVE dev blog. Developer CCP Big Dumb Object walks readers through the changes in game mechanics with the Epic Arcs and gives a breakdown of their adjusted rewards (plus the introduction of faction standings rewards), while paying homage to Led Zeppelin throughout the blog.

New mission content is also beginning to reflect how player actions in factional warfare affect the game's setting, specifically the Caldari militia's overwhelming victory over the Gallente. CCP Big Dumb Object mentions two new Gallente storyline missions, adding that "each mission stems from the past year's Faction Warfare results, Heth's resultant sale of key Gallente systems to the Caldari megacorps, and the Federation's reaction."

One of the new content additions coming to EVE Online this December are Epic Mission Arcs for two of New Eden's pirate factions -- the Guristas and the Angel Cartel. Scott Holden (aka CCP Molock) is the Lead Content Creator at CCP Games who has overseen the inclusion of the new pirate missions into EVE. Holden recently discussed some of the specifics of pirate mission running with Mondes Persistants.

The epic arcs for the Guristas and Angel Cartel will offer up roughly 10-12 branching missions, says Holden. The Guristas arc will largely be based in nullsec space in Venal, but players will be able to begin in Orvolle (high security) or low security starting points like Taisy. The Angel Cartel epic mission arcs will mostly be based in the Curse region, the stomping grounds of the Cartel. Would-be devotees to the Angel cause (of sabotage, extortion, and general mayhem) will be able to embark on the faction's mission arc from solar systems like Sendaya or Konora in low sec. Surprisingly, it seems that a player doesn't need high pirate faction standings to access either the Guristas or Angel Cartel epic mission arcs. Players with good standings with empire factions will be able to jump into the pirate mission arcs via mission agents found in low security space.

As MMOs become more and more complex, there's an increasing need for information regarding the game at a player's fingertips. Especially since most of them are being played while on the computer, so a quick search of information is just an alt-tab away, no matter what the situation. Champions Online has stepped up to the plate with their own official offering: the Champedia, a database of every superpower, mission, super group, and character currently in the game. It's fully searchable at this point, although it's still in beta.

There have been debates in the community about adding on currently-played characters into a publicly accessible database, but Champions Online also includes the feature for guild masters to manage their organization directly from the site. A quick log-in allows the group leader to do everything from changing the message of the day to handling promotions without ever having to enter the game. It's not perfect yet, of course -- the Mission section, for instance, includes nothing but the basic mission text -- but if properly managed it could be a great asset to the community looking for information straight from the official source. Now if only it included wiki functionality...

The term "corporation" in EVE Online is something of a misnomer. While a corp can be run as a full-on business entity, most are just like guilds or clans in other MMOs. It's a group of pilots that join together under one banner for mutual benefit, organised operations or even just to have some nice people to chat to while you mine. For those that can't find a good player-run corporation that's compatible with their aims and goals, there are a few options. One option is to stay in one of the many NPC-run corps but perhaps the most interesting choice is to start your own corp. With the upcoming 11% tax being applied to NPC corps, some of the people currently in those corps may even want to start their own one-man corps to evade the tax.

Running your own corporation provides you with additional tools like corporate hangers and the ability to set up starbases or declare war on other corps. It also opens the opportunity to recruit like-minded individuals and friends into your group so you can work together on anything from mining and mission-running to full-on PvP and piracy. EVE is one of those games that really starts to take off once you start working together with people. Starting your own corp can, however, be a daunting task that carries with it responsibilities and risks.

For all those that have ever wanted to run their own corporation, in this article I explain how to the process of starting a corp, recruiting and keeping the corp secure against threats. I also go into detail on some of the corp operations you can hope to enjoy with friends.

October is here and with it comes Champions Online's first month of heavy content updates. There's all sorts of improvements and additions hitting in the coming weeks to discuss, let alone what to expect for November and beyond. Plus, the Blood Moon update sounds like a whole lot of seasonal fun. I'd be lying if I said I didn't wish there was a repeatable mission where I got to kill moping vampires.

It's been about a couple weeks since Champions Online launched, and I've been enjoying the game through the good and the bad. Yes, there have been some rough patches – particularly for early start players whose characters were designed before the big launch-day patch. So let's talk about a few of the issues some people are having with the game. Namely, I want to address the difficulty complaints that some people have been voicing, because they're not entirely wrong.

There are so many reasons we love to play MMOs, but for most of us, repetition isn't one of them. Although EVE Online differs from most other MMOs on the market in a number of ways, it still has some of those PvE pitfalls that have long been part of massively multiplayer online games -- specifically, repetitive missions (quests). As with any game where there are only so many quests that NPCs can give out, a mission runner in EVE will play through the same stories multiple times.

Granted, many players who run Level 4s all week are doing so for the ISK, not to enjoy the story. There are only so many times you can rescue The Damsel or blow up another Zor before you've stopped paying attention to the story that's presumably taking place around you. Although this issue of quest repetition in MMOs certainly isn't limited to EVE Online, the developers at CCP Games want to address this problem in their game, and their solution to creating more engaging PvE content is the Epic Mission Arc.

Tomorrow, EVE Online will launch Apocrypha 1.5, which CCP Games has dubbed a "mini-expansion." The Apocrypha expansion was released in March and introduced a slew of new features to the game, but there were more changes in the works that didn't make it into that first release. The 1.5 changes slated to roll out tomorrow are numerous and will introduce a few new aspects to EVE Online, more than a typical patch would, but cannot be considered a full expansion release either.

[UPDATED]: The maintenance window has been extended "due to delays earlier in the deployment process" per CCP. Tranquility is expected to come online at 16:30 GMT (12:30 PM Eastern).

Read on for Massively's highlights of what Apocrypha 1.5 will bring.