sidekick posts

WAR producer's letter details major 1.3.1 changes and lays out plan for near future

by Brooke Pilley Aug 18th 2009 at 11:00AM

Filed under: Fantasy, Patches, Warhammer Online, News items

The newest Warhammer Online producer's letter starts off by detailing all the major changes coming with patch 1.3.1, including revamped city siege, open RvR enhancements, and social improvements. Basically, it's a lot of stuff we've heard about already. However, things get really interesting when Jeff Skalski starts talking about what is on the horizon for patch 1.3.2. There are some gems.

It sounds like Mythic is planning on uncoupling the fortresses from zone capture. This is a major RvR campaign design shift but the details are pretty vague at this stage. They will also be reworking the earlier tiers of the game in an effort to retain newbies and make alting more pleasurable. This could work quite nicely with the sidekick/buddy system they are working on as well. Finally, they're continuing to tweak crowd control and hint at a potential new Live Event tied to the "Daemon Moon." Maybe it will involve the Khorne Daemon Prince in the image above.

Tags: buddy-system, city-siege, crowd-ontrol, daemon, fortress-siege, jeff-skalski, khorne, mythic-entertainment, RvR, sidekick, war, war-patch-1.3.1, war-patch-1.3.2, warhammer-online

Cryptic's Bill Roper on balancing powers in Champions Online

by James Egan Jul 8th 2009 at 8:00PM

Filed under: Super-hero, Game mechanics, Interviews, Champions Online

When news came in of the Champions Online launch being delayed to September, a few of the writers at Massively were despondent. It's always better for a game to launch once it's solid rather than release in a buggy state, though. While we wait for the re-scheduled September 1st launch, we're keeping up with the news and interviews surrounding the upcoming superhero title. In fact, we've just come across an MMOCrunch interview with Bill Roper, executive producer of Champions Online you might be interested in.

Roper gets into how some of the game mechanics in Champions Online will play out, and explains a bit about how travel powers like flight and teleportation can be countered by those without such capabilities. (For example, how does a ground-based melee character engage a kiting opponent in flight?) He also touches upon the game's sidekick system, which will allow newer players to temporarily boost their powers to keep up with higher level friends. Alternately, the sidekick system will give advanced characters the ability to tone their powers down to the level of their appallingly weak lower level buddies.

Tags: bill-roper, champions-online, cryptic-studios, executive-producer, game-mechanics, mmocrunch, nemesis, nemesis-system, producer, sidekick, sidekicks, super-hero, superhero, travel-powers, villain, villains

Rohan: Blood Feud gets new dungeon and more in latest patch

by William Dobson Jan 19th 2009 at 1:00PM

Filed under: Betas, Fantasy, Patches, Free-to-play

It's been a couple of months since we last checked in on Rohan: Blood Feud, and it was doing pretty well back then. The latest big news from YNK Interactive's free-to-play MMO is a decent-sized patch that was released last week, which featured a brand new dungeon called the Fire Temple Garden, among other things. The Fire Temple Garden is intended to be a pretty dangerous area for level 80s, and has four separate sections within: Kasa's Tower, The Blazing Temple, The Ring of Flames, and the Lamp of Flames. Starting to pick the common theme here? The selection of screenshots that came with the dungeon's announcement confirm that there will be some firey foes to contend with.

16 new quests were added to the game in the patch, and all of these are found in the new dungeon. A system to fuse Option Stones was also introduced, allowing players to fuse multiple stones of the same grade to form a better one. The other main update is a new sidekick called Molly that can be purchased from the Item Mall. Molly can be used to heal your character every two minutes, and she can be leveled up a bit to increase her healing powers. If you haven't tried Rohan yet, you can do so by downloading the client and making an account at the official site.

Tags: fire-temple-garden, free-to-play, item-mall, kasas-tower, molly, patch, patches, rohan, rohan-blood-feud, sidekick, the-blazing-temple, the-lamp-of-flames, the-ring-of-flames, ynk, ynk-interactive

MMO features that haven't made it into Warhammer Online

by James Egan Sep 3rd 2008 at 5:00PM

Filed under: Fantasy, Game mechanics, Warhammer Online, Opinion

Among the legions of fortunate Warhammer Online fans that have played through beta and the preview weekend is Syp from the Waaagh! blog. He's always entertaining and it's clear he's passionate about Warhammer Online. So when he writes about features in other MMOs that he'd like to see in WAR, you know he's not bashing a game that's not even out of the gate yet. Rather, he's genuinely looking at ways the game could be better.

Syp puts forth his ideal WAR feature set, which includes capturable and trainable pets similar to World of Warcraft's system and the player-created content and sidekicks of City of Heroes. Syp would also like to see WAR include an in-game music player like EVE Online, and other features drawn from Everquest 2 and Lord of the Rings Online. Have a look at the Waaagh! "10 features" post and see if you agree with him on what could make Warhammer Online a better title.

Did you enjoy this? Make sure to check out all of our previous Warhammer Online features, and don't miss any of our ongoing coverage as Massively goes to WAR!

Tags: ccp, ccp-games, city-of-heroes, dungeon, dungeons, eve, eve-online, everquest-2, fantasy, features, game-features, lord-of-the-rings-online, lotro, music, music-player, mythic, mythic-entertainment, ncsoft, opinion, pets, player-created, player-created-content, sidekick, sidekicks, soe, sony, sony-online-entertainment, syp, turbine, waaagh, war, warhammer-online, world-of-warcraft

Gonna try with a little help from my friends...

by Chris Chester May 28th 2008 at 4:00PM

Filed under: Age of Conan, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Culture, Game mechanics, Grouping, Opinion

As much as players and designers have lauded the Massively Multiplayer genre for being the social future of gaming, allowing players from disparate geographic and sociological backgrounds to come together in a virtual space to accomplish goals together, they're often still very anti-social experiences. As Van Hemlock explored in a blog post recently, the City of Heroes series is really one of the few games out there that let players of disparate levels play together in a meaningful experience.

In some ways, its strange that more games don't offer the same kind of Sidekick/Exemplar system, where players can have their attributes raised or lowered to an appropriate level to be able to play with friend. As Van Hemlock discusses, part of it has to do with the way the CoX battle systems work. By working with relative percentages instead of absolute values, it's easier to tweak content difficulty by level. But some of it also just seems like willful disregard for how much more difficult keeping up in-game friendships is when you level at different rates. In any case, we were delighted to see that Age of Conan has its own sort of apprentice system already in place, and we hope it becomes the trend in the future.

Tags: age-of-conan, apprentice, city-of-heroes, cox, exemplar, friends, friendship, sidekick, social

Player vs. Everything: Frustrated by levels

by Cameron Sorden May 24th 2008 at 1:00PM

Filed under: Game mechanics, Leveling, Opinion, Player vs. Everything

I was reading through my usual round-up of blogs and news items this morning when I found an interesting post by Van Hemlock on the topic of levels in MMORPGs. More specifically, it was about how levels in games keep players from playing with each other. He discusses how ever since he started gaming in 1999, being a different level than the people he wants to play with has kept him from playing with them. Whether you're too high for the content to be challenging or too low to be effective, playing with your friends at different levels just never seems to work very well.

Van Hemlock makes an excellent point, and it's a problem in almost every single MMOG out there with two notable exceptions: EverQuest 2 and City of Heroes/Villains. Both of these games recognize the problem and attempt to circumvent it, but they do it in very different ways. In City of Heroes, you can move either up or down in level so that you can see high level content at low levels or go back and do low level content as a high level player and still advance. In EverQuest 2, it's strictly one-way. You can bring yourself down to your friend's level and adventure with them for alternate advancement experience. Is this really as big of a problem as people make it out to be, and if it is, why don't more games have systems like these?

Tags: city-of-heroes, city-of-villains, everquest-2, everquest-ii, featured, friends, joystiqfeatures, leveling, levels, mentoring-system, player-vs-everything, power-leveling, sidekick, treadmill, world-of-warcraft

Ask Massively: Now that World of Warcraft is perfect...

by Kevin Stallard Mar 28th 2008 at 9:30PM

Filed under: Opinion, Ask Massively

Just when you thought you couldn't get any sicker of news surrounding the 2.4 patch for World of Warcraft, here we are again with another edition of Ask Massively. Here at Ask Massively, we like to consider ourselves the "Anti-Trendy" crowd, not because we all shop at Hot Topic or put bumper stickers that preach non-conformity on our SUV's (Mass produced non-conformity? I digress...), but because we like to take stories that have been beaten to death and take a look at them from a slightly more skewed perspective.

This week's inspiration comes from a young lady named Tara.

Dear Massively Massive Guy,

I've been playing World of Warcraft for quite some time, but I wonder what other games do that WoW doesn't. What games offer features that may someday be implemented by Blizzard? Surely, Blizzard doesn't innovate everything that is popular in MMORPGs.

Curiously Yours,

Tara

If you would like to be immortalized in electronic print, send us a question via our tipline, or by email at ask AT Massively DOT com. To the nice Nigerian gentleman who wants to enter into a business arrangement, the check is in the mail. For more on this topic, feel free to read on after the jump.

Tags: age-of-conan, city-of-heroes, combat, economy, eve-online, featured, lord-of-the-rings-online, pirates-pf-the-burning-sea, sidekick, world-of-warcraft