Having read all of the uproar over Champions and their lifetime subscription plan, but only if you order now and not after you actually get a chance to play the game, I was glad to see that they had relented somewhat and actually opened up the beta to pretty much anyone before the deadline for making a decision. I was also curious since a lot of the bloggers seemed to be disappointed with what they had seen of it. I wondered if this was a fault of the game or just a case of the hardcore MMO fans looking for something, anything, to be the second coming and dethrone WoW.

So, first my overview of the game play experience. I know that much of this has been posted elsewhere but I think it’s important to put down what I saw while playing so you can see why I’ve formed the opinions that I have.

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Lately I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed in EQ2. There are so many different things I want to do that I find myself paralyzed by choice.

This weekend I decided that what I needed was a change of scenery and since both Champions Online and Fallen Earth had open “betas” I figured I’d give them look. I plan on writing a more detailed post on each of them later but here’s my one line review.

Champions: City of Heroes 2.0 or maybe CoX evolved and that’s not a bad thing.

Fallen Earth: The love child of Fallout 3 and Eve with a crafting system that I find very compelling.

More later – the iPhone is ok for short posts but not so much for longer writing.

I know a lot of this has been posted elsewhere by now but due to traveling and having to upgrade my main computer to Windows 7 when I got home – the beta build is expiring so I have to upgrade to the RC – I never managed to get this stuff posted. Still, I want to get it out there and I hope I can help clear up some of the confusion that I’ve seen here and there over the last couple of days.

The first session we attended on Saturday was the premier of EverCracked, the Jace Hall documentary about the creation of EQ. I can strongly recommend that you grab a copy of this when it comes available it as hilarious as well as an interesting look at the people behind the game.

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We only managed to take in a couple of sessions today but, between them and the announcements from the keynote tonight there’s going to be a lot of new stuff coming for SoE games. I’m just going to go through my note book and give you the stuff that I remembered to write down along with some impressions.
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Yesterday in my Twitter feed (@sisca if you want to follow me) and I saw this from @spouseaggro:

Silly Far-Stretched Comparison of the Week: “..Free Realms looks and feels like an overly cutesy, yet still grindy, version of WoW..”

To be clear this was a quote from some blogger and not the opinion of the fine folks over at Spouse Aggro

That got me thinking and then this morning I was reading through the comments over on Broken Toys post about the game and it kind of congealed.

For all of you out there that are trying to compare this to WoW – or whatever your favorite flavor of the month is – I just have one thing to say…

LEARN 2 PLAY!

You know like you did when you were a kid.

No, really. Put your achiever, must get to max level and get the uber gear mindset back on the shelf and just go out and learn how to play again.

I’ve got 2 young nieces, 7 & 9, their parents don’t really like them watching TV and they tend to regulate how much time and what they can do on the computer. They don’t seem to mind that much though because they have more dolls and horses and such than you can shake a stick at. They even have a small tent setup in an otherwise unusable area of their house that is filled with these dolls and such that they call their cloud castle. They spend hours playing together, making up stories or acting out stories from their books. They also spend time competing, racing each other, playing soccer etc.

I can see them playing Free Realms now and jumping from job to job, game to game, achiever to explorer to socializer.

If you really think that this is just a “overly cutesy, yet still grindy, version of WoW” then this game is not for you! This game is only for the truly hardcore PLAYer’s that really understand how to go into a world and make it their own and to do so for nothing more than the FUN of it.

FINALLY!

Almost 4 1/2 years after launch and I’ve got my first max level character. In fact this is my first max level character in 10 years of playing MMO’s.

Even scarier is that the next day:

Acsis only took me almost 3 years to cap.

Shortly after that Lore also managed to ding 80, I’m not sure what her played time is but I did manage to snag a screen shot of her ding

I also managed to get Sisca to 80 in Alchemy over the weekend so now I just need to get Acsis 10 more levels of Tailoring and I’ll go from 10 years of no characters at any level cap to 2 characters with both tradeskills and adventuring levels capped.

We also started doing the daily quest for Void Shards and managed to get the first 2 pieces and by the end of the week we’ll have the third. I think our next goal is to get Lore’s mage caught up and I wouldn’t mind getting my ranger leveled so we have a scout class to give us some versatility. I’d also like to spend some time mentoring guildies to see if we can put together a group and maybe start in on some of the TSO instances. I also want to get the crafting epic done with Sisca and Acsis is about halfway through the harvesting cloak so he’d like to finish that off as well.

So still plenty left to do and I haven’t even started in on my other 12 alts

I think it all started a couple of weeks back with Tom Chick explaining why MMO’s are Broken which was basically a re-hash of every “Why this game suxors” post on every MMO forum out there. The next day Trembling Hand jumped on the bandwagon. Scott Jennings over on Broken Toys tried to explain to both of them that first, MMO <> WoW, and secondly, while most MMO’s are fantasy based, they’re not developed in Fantasy Land.

As I said earlier, all of this is stuff that those of us that have been playing these games awhile have heard thousands of times and Scott pretty much nailed the response that we’ve all hashed out over the years. However, yesterday a friend of mine, Pentane, linked this Scientific American article on the Expert Mind. I highly recommend it for all you armchair game designers – even you real world designers will find it interesting but I’m guessing quite a few of you have already read it or some of the books that have been written from those studies. Also yesterday, Psychochild, posted the first in a series of articles on How to Replace Levels.

These two articles combined got me thinking about the whole levels in MMO’s debate again but in a slightly different way and I came up with a kind of challenge – design a multiplayer that doesn’t have levels of some sort.

The trick here is to think of a “level” as a game mechanic that meets the criteria in Psychochild’s post. In other words anything that is used to mark Achievement, provide others Information or help with Pacing through your game world is considered a level. So far I’ve only come up with one way that it can be done and while I think the game might have some interest it would be a decidedly niche game and I wouldn’t want to propose it in today’s market.

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Just after Thanksgiving I decided that my next EQ2 goal was to get Sisca and Acsis to 75. This would open up almost all of the game to me and put 80 well within reach. Last weekend Sisca, Acsis and Lore all managed to hit the target as well as ding their 100th AA. So, Sunday evening I was casting about for something new to focus on and for some strange reason I decided that I just had to start in on the quest for the Cloak of the Harvesters.

I knew that this was a long quest that involved harvesting in every tier but I actually enjoy harvesting and, being 75, only tier 8 would have me harvesting in zones with agro mobs. How hard can it be, right?

It started off simply enough, go to any tier 1 zone and bring me back 10 or so of multiple items from the various nodes. This took me longer than I thought it would mainly because shrubs were almost non-existent – right, who’d a thunk it since it wasn’t that long ago that you could zone into T1 or T2 and find nothing but shrubs up. Next up was T2, I had Acsis port us over to Antonica and we were able to complete everything but the fishing without even getting out of site of the spires.

Next up T3 and this is where it started to get complicated. He wanted you to harvest equal quantities of the same items from both Thundering Steppes and Nek Forest. TS was no big deal, I know several good harvesting spots for all of the various nodes there but Nek has never been one of my favorite zones so I haven’t spent a ton of time there. Still I managed to find an area that I could run back and forth through and get most of the harvests, except for dens. T4 was a repeat of T3 except he wanted stuff from Zek and Enchanted Lands. Again, easy enough and, being 75, I went deeper in to both zones to leave the easier to get to harvest for the lower levels.

For T5 it was off to Rivervale and Feerot. Much like Nek Forest, Feerot has never been one of my favorite zones so I decided to put that off. I know Rivervale, I’ve harvested in Rivervale even when it was still green, this should be a snap. Two hours later I was finished with everything except DENS. In that entire time I had seen maybe 10 dens tops and you didn’t just need 20 or so of the pelts but also 20 or so of EACH type of meat from the dens. Frustrated, I gave it up for the night and started thinking about finding something else to focus on.

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Friday night Lore had to babysit a server upgrade so she wasn’t really going to be able to devote her full attention to gaming but she did want to get some play time in. We decided this would be a perfect opportunity to check out the new tradeskill instances from TSO. She could craft and if something needed her attention it wouldn’t be a big deal for her to stop for a few minutes.

Since she hadn’t really gotten any of her other tradeskillers through the introductory quest line in the Moors she brought along Serrenial, her 80 Provisioner. This matched up well with Sisca, 67 Alchemist (Sage line), and Acsis, 52 Tailor (Outfitter line), giving us coverage of all 3 of the base skill lines. So off we went to isle of Mara.

Apparently the Gnomes in Steamfont were having an issue and could use the help of some skilled crafters so Acsis fired up a portal and we headed off to see what we could do to help. When we arrived at Gnomeland Security we spent several minutes running around looking for someone to direct us before we realized that there was a new doorway that led to an underground research workshop. Zoning in there we saw this giant dragonbot on a rampage tearing up the place. Talking to the foreman revealed that they had built the dragonbot to help defeat the bot that had gone haywire and driven them out of Ak’Anon all those years ago but, again, something had gone wrong and he was malfunctioning. Not to worry though, they had a cunning plan! They would just build a bigger and more powerful bot to beat up the bot that they had built to beat up the first bot. Gnomish logic. Oh well they were willing pay good money, they were providing all the raws and I had a druid to get me the hell out if it all went horribly pear shaped.

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Fair warning, this is likely to ramble a bit.

Tuesday saw the release of the fifth EQ2 expansion – yes kids there are other MMO’s out there that don’t have War in the title anywhere and they’re still going strong. From all accounts the launch went pretty smooth, to be honest this has become expected from the EQ2 dev team so hats off to them for raising the bar.

Some initial impressions:

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