Massively^™

Three glorious years, over five million boxes sold. Guild Wars has come along way in that time, and it's no surprise that NCsoft's darling is still managing to stake out new players. Shamus from over on Twenty-Sided is one latest victim, in his post: Guild Wars: Massively Single Player, Shamus delves into Guild Wars with fresh eyes and posits about why it's a great single player experience. Of course, solo players use their own henchmen and heroes to help unfold that epic story.

When EverQuest reigned king long before WoW, soloist proponents were booed away with a common message: "Go play a single player game, MMORPGs focus around grouping and solo content has no place here." Today, most MMOGs offer solo play but in such a way that progression is meaningful, but grouping is still encouraged for the best rewards.

With all the hullabaloo over the last several months speculating about the elimination or possible convergence of traditional single player experiences into the new massively multiplayer model, the last thing we expected to turn up in our daily lap around the web is one of the most beloved MMOs to date transmogrified into a single player platformer/RPG. While it's hardly the robust single player experience of a commercial product, the aptly named WTF?! takes a look at what would happen if World of Warcraft were condensed into two dimensions.

You can play either a Blood Elf Priest or a Gnome Rogue, both of which play slightly differently even within the confines of two dimensions. The game is a little buggy (make sure you get the trinket from Hegemon before you try and take down Mary Daly!) and slightly misogynistic, but it's got a certain flare that is hard to not find endearing. Maybe it's the humor or maybe it's the Mario sound effects, it's hard to pin down. In any case, if you're bored at work this week but don't have the machine for WoW, check it out.

[Via Broken Toys]

Age of Conan has gotten an intense amount of exposure lately on virtually every site that covers games. You might have noticed. The influence of AoC is ever-present, burned into the retinas of most of the Massively team as they slash their way through Hyboria. The title seems to have breathed new life into massively multiplayer spheres, with people everywhere either talking about it, reading about it, or playing it. While the AoC launch went smoothly, this is not to say that the game itself is perfect.

Psychochild takes Age of Conan to task in his latest Weekend Design Challenge, for what he perceives to be a potential flaw in the game's design: much of the low-level experience, despite being a massively multiplayer title, is essentially a single-player game. He contends that the point of online games is to interact with people in one way or another, but the difference between instances in AoC is literally night and day. Night quests give personal instances that are wholly isolated from other players. This creates a split where daytime quests are multiplayer; night quests are single player. While a benefit is that players can opt for the night quests to take on their own spawns unchallenged by competitors, doesn't this defeat the purpose of AoC even being an MMO title?

Raph Koster certainly thinks so. He feels that single-player gaming is a phase we all went through, and that online, interconnected gaming is simply the next evolutionary step -- or, possibly, a return to form. 'People always play games together. All of you learned to play games with each other,' he said, citing a reason for shared gaming's return to prominence. The problem is, however, that MMOs don't exactly scratch the same itch that single-player games do, and ironically, that's an itch engendered by the mere existence of single-player games, a kind of weird self-fulfilling prophecy. We learned to like single-player games because we were offered single-player games.

So how does this affect the MMO experience? With a sophisticated enough platform, there's no reason to think that a fully-immersive single-player experience couldn't exist cheek-by-jowl with an MMO experience. People talk about soloing, but that's just a concession, a way around the issue. What if, for example, while playing Bioshock, you arrived at endgame and left Rapture, only to discover a world filled with other players who've gone through the same experience? Is the future of gaming synthesis, rather than exchanging one form of gameplay for another?

With MMOs springing up like weeds in every corner of the game industry, some are beginning to wonder if this recent trend isn't spelling the end for old-fashioned single-player RPGs. Just a decade ago, turn-based Japanese RPGs reigned supreme on consoles, and Western-style RPGs in the vein of Baldur's Gate were the big sellers on PCs. Nowadays, these titles are becoming few and far between. Sure, you've got your occasional Mass Effect and your Final Fantasy XIII, but for some, the writing is already on the wall.

At Massively, we think the landscape is considerably more complicated than that. For our part, we've noticed how MMOs are increasingly focusing on single player content, allowing the casual player to solo his way through entire games in some cases, if he so chooses. Instead of single-player games dying in the face of their multiplayer counterparts, it looks to us like the two are just learning from each other and moving towards some of homogeneous hybrid. There's room for debate (when isn't there, really), but we don't think it's time for doom and gloom just yet.

Hellgate: London players who've had their copy of the game sitting all alone on a shelf somewhere may want to dust off their discs, because the 1.2 patch for non-subscribers is heading their way. The big reason this matters is mostly because the last patch that single (re: non-subscribing) players got was the 0.6 patch back in December. Well, that's not the only reason, the other is that this patch will bring with it a metric ton of updates, including lots of bug fixes. We're glad to hear it, because the game looks like it could be pretty enjoyable -- if not for the amount of fun-ending issues.

Flagship Studios have the patch in their final Q&A state and are readying a beta version of it for players to try out sometime this week. The patch itself contains all the content and updates that the multiplayer version of the patch had -- so essentially it's the same patch as the one released on March 17th.

We sincerely hope these patches keep on coming, because with every improvement the game receives we're finding it harder to resist a summertime purchase out of sheer curiosity.

Listening to the Penny Arcade podcast, Downloadable Content, as I am wont to do when playing something, the topic of discussion turned to how World of Warcraft has ruined Mike for playing single-player-only games because no matter what treasure is received, or secret unlocked, it's an offering on display only for himself; it cannot be shared, and therefore lacks the proper cachet. At least, that was my understanding; I may be mistaken. Check it out yourself.

Regardless, the concept is sound. The rarity of your epic loot is rendered almost meaningless in a single-player venue. And perhaps the heady thrill of true PvP combat makes solo play less appealing. Being a Soloist myself, this is not too much of an issue to me, but what do you all think? Do single-player games have to work harder, innovate more, to deserve your dollar? Is the future of gaming, as Raph Koster seems to think, MMOs?

The term "solo friendly" is commonly cited as a virtue of newer MMO titles. Many MMO related forums have threads such as this one over at MMORPG.com which discuss the "soloability" of player classes within an MMORPG. In fact many of the elements of games such as Everquest which players have complained about over the years such as "forced grouping," "camping spawns," or "racing for non-instanced content" have all but been removed from the most recent MMORPG releases.

When was the last time you saw two guilds racing to kill the same mob in World of Warcraft? How many of you have spent more than 30 minutes on a corpse recovery in City of Heroes? (That is a trick question, since there is no need to recover your corpse in that game.)