In ten years of playing MMOs, until TSO we had never had max-level characters. Clearly, while we won’t be the fastest levelers around, we’re going to max out again within a few months, which will leave a very long time at max this time around. Still, we have plenty of AAs to acquire and a ton of content left to explore (not to mention a stable of alts) so I’m not overly concerned.

First impressions: I loved that there is an extensive series of crafting quests. The first two to complete the initial lines (before the 4 daily crafting quests) made 2.5 levels each, which is awesome! The zones are huge, and a bit laggy due to the number of people, but that’s already improving. They are also really stunning — much brighter colors then EQ2 tended to use early on, and some fantastic artwork. The quests tend to involve an awful lot of running back and forth, which gets tedious, but also ensures you learn your way around. The coin is good, and the quest rewards were definite upgrades for Daena and Casis, whose gear was lagging, but not really for the others, who are in a mix of tier 1 shard armor (TSO) and Kunark quested. I love doing collections (ooh, shiny!) and there are a lot of them in this expansion — but there are also a ton of spawn points for the shinies it seems, so so far no difficulty in doing them. As a crafter, I appreciate that I can do my harvesting without much difficulty as well. I’m also looking forward to spending some time in the Hole once we’ve gotten a bit further along in our questing, and I like that so far everything has been manageable by our small group rather than requiring an optimized one (we never did do the missions in TSO for instance, getting all of our shards from the solo quest).

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.

Character Creation:

Character creation is much like that of CoX, you pick your starting power set and then you design your character. Unlike CoX you can either pick a pre-designed, I’ll call it template, character or you can go completely off on your own to choose your two starting powers. I like the idea of being able to build exactly the character I want but even in my short time messing about I saw a couple of ways to gimp yourself, though I have to admit I didn’t see any blatantly overpowered combos. The templates are nice as they give you a good starting point and pointers as to how to advance the character to create one of the standard MMO archetypes.

As you would expect from the team that brought us CoX the actual character creation choices are mind boggling. If you can’t find the look you’re looking for you probably missed a tab/drop down or you really need to seek professional help. Again, this is what I would expect the CoX character builder to look like if they were to re-design it from the ground up, nothing ground breaking but a nice evolution.

Tutorial:

Again much like CoX, once you’ve completed your hero you’re tossed into a tutorial zone with an emergency in progress complete with sirens wailing and fires raging. The evolution here is that it opens with a cut scene of a group of cops calling for backup and the response giving you a bit of the story of exactly what the heck is happening here.

The first parts of the tutorial are standard fare; how to move, quests, combat, loot, retrieve the item etc. All the stuff someone new to the genre would need to know but that us old fogey’s know by heart. Still it’s good to go through it so you can pick up on any quirks to the particular game. They even introduce you to the quest chain mechanic, talk to A and do his quests until he sends you to B etc. The best part of this was that there was actually a coherent story behind doing all of these quests, you even end up going to help the cop that was calling for backup in the opening scene.

The tutorial also introduces you to the first mechanic that isn’t an evolution of something from CoX, the “Public Quest” (PQ) pioneered by WAR. The one improvement that I noticed is that the PQ’s here run whether or not there are any PC’s around so if you come to the game 6 months from now you’ll still be able to complete the quest because the NPC’s in the area will help you. I’m not sure if that holds at higher levels but I truly hope it does.

After completing the first PQ you get sent into your first true instance (though I should point out that pretty much every zone is instanced so that they can control the number of players in a given zone – thank you EQ2 but most players won’t realize that). In this instance you hook up with Defender, who is one of the “named” NPC’s much like Statesman in CoX, and help him take out a boss mob which then allows you to put an end to the invasion that is the whole story of the tutorial zone.

When you exit the instance you have another cool moment where all the NPC’s and soldiers line up and salute you for helping save the city. Unfortunately a hero’s work is never done so there are two other NPC’s waiting for you to send you off to your next hotspot. Again, nice evolution here, you get to pick your second area from either a snowy Canada or a desert region. Having only played through the Canada version I can’t say for sure but I certainly hope that the story is much different for each area even if the results are the same.

From 5 to 10:

This leads me directly to the first big evolution from CoX for me – the story driven game play. Sure CoX had quest lines and story arcs but you could miss them or ignore them and, frankly, they weren’t all that inventive. I got to the Canadian area just after another disaster hit and everyone in the region that offered quests offered quests to do with this one story. Sure some of them were tangential but they were all caused by the story event. This is not just a quest hub with everyone having their own agenda of kill 10 X or fetch the foozle quests, they’re all related. This made the area feel more like a coherent whole. This whole thing is also why I ended up playing until 11:30 on Saturday night when I had intended to knock off around 10:00. I wanted to just finish this story real quick.

The other thing I noticed in getting through this first story arc was that leveling is extremely fast. I started the tutorial around 7:30 on Saturday night and had made 5 by the time I finished it about 45 minutes later (it took me this long because I ran the PQ about 5 times trying to get the high score). By the time I finished the second zone at around 11:30 I was already 10 and I had easily spent 30 minutes or more playing around with different travel powers trying to settle on one I liked. I’m not sure if the leveling will slow down post 10 but if it doesn’t I can see myself being capped within 6 months and I’m a notoriously slow leveler. Unless it slows down drastically I wouldn’t be surprised to see many people hitting the cap within the first 30 days. If it does slow down that drastically I can also see many others getting frustrated.

The next big evolution was the ability to respec at will, at least to a degree. Much like CoX every level brings with it some sort of points that you can spend at a trainer to purchase either new powers or abilities or improvements of some sort. The improvement is that you can go back to the trainer and unlearn skills then repurchase them. This means that if you want to try out something completely off the wall you can do so without fear of gimping yourself. Just buy it, take it out into the world and see how it plays, if it works cool if not, unlearn it and try something else. There is supposedly a limit as to how many things you can unlearn but I certainly hadn’t hit it by level 10.

As I said, you come out of the tutorial at level 5 and since you haven’t seen a trainer up until this point you’re encouraged to go see them right away, I should mention that the trainers are in their own instance. It’s important to see them, not only so you can pickup a new power but also because at level 5 you get your travel power. Again, in an evolution of travel in CoX you have your basic Flight, Super Speed, Super Jump and Teleport abilities but there are several variations of most of them so you can pick one that fits your view of your character. This is where I first found the respec ability the most handy. I was able to try out all of the different travel powers and see how they played and which worked best for how I played my character.

Again in this zone there is a PQ, though unlike in the tutorial this one isn’t required to advance the story. Still I think I helped on it about 3 times since I was in the area killing other stuff and they counted towards those quests as well. There was also a named fight that you had to trigger and I got crushed the first time I tried it solo, mainly because I wasn’t expecting him to spawn where he did. When I went back for my second try there were a couple of others there and I got a group invite almost as soon as I showed up. We took the named down in about 5 seconds, the leader made sure everyone got the update and then we all went our separate ways. I think he could have been soloed no problem but still killing him once and letting 5 people get their update is a much nicer way to go.

This area ended with another instance and another boss fight, this time solo, or grouped if you happen to bring one. It was a tough fight but I managed it and even while it was happening I could see ways I could make it easier which is important to me. I don’t mind losing a fight if I can easily see what I can do with MY character to improve my odds. I hate realizing that the only way to beat the encounter is to do it exactly like the devs want me to. Finishing off that instance dinged me to 10 and sent me back out into the same zone but with the previous emergency over, so it looked different, and some new bad guys moving in.

Final Impressions:

As I said, I don’t really see anything revolutionary here but you can see that this is the team that brought you CoX taking the lessons learned from that game and rolling in some features from some other games and creating a new and improved CoX. If you’re looking for a WoW killer, well you really need to just stop and realize that WoW was a perfect storm that will likely never be repeated and the only way it will die is if Blizzard kills it – and not by making a World of Starcraft but by just driving all their players away.

I didn’t really touch on the combat mechanics but there is some interesting stuff there as well and even the minimal amount of time I’ve spent with the skill tree system shows a lot of depth there. Replay-ability will come down to whether or not they can expand the offerings beyond the two current second areas. I’m not sure how many times I want to play through the tutorial or even the same quest series afterwards.

Will CO steal players from CoX? Some, those that are looking for the new shiny, but for those invested in the community and their characters there isn’t enough to overcome that.

Now the big questions:

Is it worth a pre-order? If you’re looking for a new comic book game that improves upon the CoX experience and throws in some stuff from other games it might be.

Is it worth the 6 month early subscriber? If the above applies and a superhero game is your cup of tea and you wouldn’t mind an early look at Star Trek then yes.

What about the lifetime? This one is tougher for me. I’m a big proponent of MMO’s trying different pricing models and I really like the idea of a lifetime subscription. I bit on the LoTRO lifetime and even though I haven’t played it a ton I haven’t regretted it. It’s nice know that it’s always there waiting for me. The problem I have with CO is first Bill Roper, I know he’s not the head honcho this time around but he’s done this before and that game died after a year. Secondly it’s actually Cryptic. I know they made CoX which is still going but lets face it they sold it off and walked away. What happens if they do that again, would my lifetime sub be honored by the new company? I don’t know all the details of why they walked away, maybe NCSoft pressured them or something but they have to partner with a publisher and who’s to say Atari won’t do the same thing in a year and then where would I be? Still, for me this is the perfect type of game for this model. It’s not a game that is likely to become my primary game, Lore isn’t really into the whole superhero thing and while there is crafting it’s not all that compelling for her and there’s really only so much of it I can play. Still, if I had the lifetime I can see myself dipping into it for a change of pace every now and then. My one piece of advice to Cryptic, and even to Turbine with LoTRO, is to make the lifetime available at anytime. Why wouldn’t you want to have a shot at that money 6 months from now just as much as you want it now.

Questions? I’ll be glad to answer them either in the comments or on Twitter – I’m Sisca there.

Next up was a session on how quests are built in EQ2. See Lore’s post below for most of the details. I will say that, having worked with Hero Engine – the engine being used in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic – their design tool looked extremely flexible but it’s that flexibility that can allow the bugs to creep in. This is especially true the more complex the quest gets. They showed the dialog tree for the tradeskill tutorial and it looked like a plate of spaghetti with all of the interconnections between the nodes.

Next up was the EQ2 game mechanics session. Again Lore talks about that below but I’ll rehash my notes. First up they announced Achievements. As part of the achievement system they’re revamping the journal window to be side by side to allow a better display of information. They’re also revamping the Persona window so that they can show he info from achievements. Achievements will be things like kill 10,000 rats – much like the slayer quests of today which will be retroactively added to your achievements. There will also be exploration and tradeskill based achievements as well as potentially Class specific achievements such as heal 100 people. Achievements can also be “meta”. The example given was a test one called “Love the Humans but hate the Goblins” which you got if you completed both the “Hug 100 Humans” and the “Kill 100 Goblins” achievements. None of these will give you anything game changing. They’ll mostly be titles if anything though I do think they might consider adding a house item for some things. They did say that there are no plans for giving a buff like rewards such as you get from the Lore & Legend series. These are supposed to be about bragging rights and not something that you feel you need to do to make your character better. Oh, and I’ve heard several people mention that EQ2 isn’t WoW or that they stole this from WoW etc. Remember WoW took this from XBox Live and they did it for a reason, players love it. The good news is if it’s not your cup of tea there’s nothing that say you have to participate other than by accidently completing an achievement. Oh, and the best news is that these are per account not per character since the idea is to show the achievements of the player. This means that if you get the kill 10,000 orcs achievement you only have to do it once. So, yes, it’s possible you’ll see a level 1 running around with a title that indicates he’s slain every raid boss in Kunark but so what, the player behind that level 1 earned that title.

The second big announcement was the Auto-Mentoring system that Lore described below. The interesting part was the idea of putting together a group of people and all auto-mentoring down to say 30 and doing one of the lower level raids. Since level 80′s mentored down to 30 are going to be way over powered that group could do 2x raid encounters and possibly even 4x. This will allow you to complete those encounters at the appropriate level.

Bullet points that I gathered from the keynote tonight:

• At launch the Station Cash system only had about 5% of the players use it in both EQ and EQ2. Now about 20% of EQ players make use of it and 30% of EQ2 players.
• A new Station Cash feature will be the partnership with HP to deliver art prints of the in game artwork to your home. They plan on having the ability to buy prints of many of the current in game paintings in July and in the near future add the ability for you to get a print of your character as well.
• Another addition to Station Cash will be the ability to do an automated server transfer for $25. This should go live in 2 weeks.
• They should announce 4 Million registered users for FreeRealms next week.
• FreeRealms is adding full progression for both Demolition Derby and Race driver professions. This will include quests and equipment. Also adding the ability to customize your car so putting in garages as well.
• New soccer mini game is coming as well. It’s no FIFA but it looked like a decent arcade soccer game.
• FreeRealms TCG is adding a Card Creator system that will allow you to create a card featuring your avatar. You’ll then be able to get 10 copies of he physical card, each with a claim code, that you can give away to your friends so they can use your card in the digital game as well as the physical game.
• SW:G will be adding some user generated content as well. The Star Wars chronicle system will allow you to create player quests that feature the Iconic characters such as Luke and Vader.
• Everyone was expecting the EQ2 expansion was going to be Vellious, boy were we off base. Looks like it’s going to be Odus instead. Hopefully they’ve done something to improve lighting in Tox Forrest but other than that I’m looking forward to checking out Stonebrunt again. Wonder if The Hole is still there.

Any questions please feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try and answer them.

They did make a few changes. The first one was one I’m not sure I like but it’s not huge. Instead of the big red and blue health and mana balls at the bottom sides of your UI they’ve got a little animated thumbnail of your character with a red and blue bar in the top left corner of the screen. For those of us that play MMO’s, and I guess those that play console RPG’s as well, this is an easy enough change to deal with but if, like me, you have a good sized, wide screen monitor it means having to move your eyes from the fight in the center of the screen to look at your health/mana. For an MMO game this isn’t a big deal since the combat tends to be click on enemy hit auto-attack and start cycling through your special attacks either by clicking the buttons or by pressing the number keys, the battles tend to take longer so a quick glance to the upper right corner and you probably haven’t missed anything important. For an action RPG though, part of the draw is the fast paced combat so even a quick glance away from the combat could result in you missing that the monster you were fighting is now dead and you need to change targets. In a frentic battle, with lots of enemies, this can cause the difference between a close victory and a defeat since you’re letting the monsters get a few free whacks in. As I said it’s not a huge deal but it’s annoying that I can’t at least move the icon and bars down to the bottom of my screen to be more in my view during combat.

The second change was more welcome. Like Diablo you attack by left clicking on your target, since left clicking on a spot also acts to move you to that spot it can be annoying to be a ranged attacker, clicking away like mad and as soon as the first target dies you go running right up next to the others, or worse yet run up to find yourself drawing aggro from a new batch of monsters. As a way to avoid this you can just left click and hold to attack the same target continuously so that when it dies you just stop firing and don’t go running off willy-nilly. Once you re-train yourself out of the Diablo clicking frenzy mode this works really well and has the added advantage of reducing your risk of a repetitive stress injury.

In another nod to standardization, NPC’s with a quest have an exclamation point over their head – yellow of course – while NPC’s with a yellow diamond over their head have information for you, either tutorial type information or just extra story line. I don’t know if it was because I was playing the demo or not but one slight annoyance was that these information NPC’s get reset every time you load the game so the first time you go back to town after starting play again you’ll see all of the tutorial NPC’s saying they want to talk to you even though they have nothing new to say. Another annoyance is that once you’ve completed a quest instead of the exclaimation point going away it just gets grayed out. If you go back and talk to the NPC they just give you the same old text they used when you completed the quest. For example, an early side quest has you clear out a bunch of monsters from the road leading through a mountain pass for a farmer who’s trying to get his cows to the next town, which is short on food and needs them desperatly. You kill the monsters and come back and he responds with basically “Oh good, now I can take my cows to town…” if you come back, even several days later he’s still standing there and he stills responds with the “now I can take my cows to town” line. I won’t call it immersion breaking because, be honest, how immersed into the story do you get in a game like this but I do see it as a flaw. How hard would it be to just make the man and his cows disappear or, better yet, just have them walk off up the path? Having them just poof and maybe be in the next town when you finally get there would be much more entertaining than just having them stuck standing there for all eternity and I know it’s not that complicated to do these days.

One final complaint, and this isn’t really leveled at Titan Quest specifically but the genre as a whole. I hate, and I mean I really hate, all the inventory management in these games. Having a limited number of “squares” of inventory and trying to maximize how you store the loot you pick up might be slightly realistic but it can get downright annoying. Especially if you have a knife that takes up 2 squares but you can’t even turn it sideways to fit in the 2 empty squares underneat the breastplate you picked up earlier. If you’re going to make me play the inventory puzzle game at least let me rotate the pieces. While you’re at it either give me more room or give me a way to expand the room I’ve got. Having to run back to town to unload your loot at least once on every map or at the end of every dungeon gets annoying and you end up doing that if you only pick up the better quality stuff. If you try and pick up every thing you’ll find yourself porting back and fort to town every 5 minutes.

Graphically speaking this game is definatly next generation, great lighting effects, realistic shadows, grass waving in the breeze. That is if you have a decent video card or if not can crank down the resolution, it’s no F.E.A.R or even Half-Life 2 but for an action RPG it’s damn good. They even had support for my wide screen LCD’s native resolution of 1680×1050.

I have to admit that I’ve never been a huge fan of the Diablo series of games, I found the single player to be mostly boring and repetitive and never really got into the multiplayer because of all of the rampant cheating and dealing with the l33t 16 year olds in the Battle Net lobby. I did enjoy Dungeon Siege, I think mostly because they were fairly short single player games so they didn’t get repetitive. So far I’m finding the story in Titan Quest entertaining, though if you check out the trailers you might expect more from the writer of Braveheart, and the fact that the dungeons and outdoor levels seem to be more hand crafted than randomly generated a la Diablo makes them much less repetitive.

In general, I’d say that if you’re a fan of Diablo games you’re going to find a lot to like here and if, like me, you’ve never been a huge fan of that series you still might want to check it out. Nit-picking aside I found the game a fun and entertaining experience and isn’t that what gaming is all about?

This was my first experience at E3 and while it was a lot of fun it was also very tiring, I think my feet started proceedings to disown me on Thursday, and loud. I understand that they had some strict noise policies in place and this year they were enforcing them but still, when you’ve got 100′s of games playing at even normal volume the din can be overwhelming. I heard that the NCSoft booth got fined for one of their bands being to loud and I can believe it, lets just say that watching someone playing Aion on a system 10 feet from the stage is NOT where you want to be when the drummers started up.

The demise of the booth babe was also overly exaggerated, they were still out in force and there were still lines of gamers lined up to get their picture taken with them…kind of sad really. There were also quite a few women gamers/developers there too which just goes to show it’s not strictly a “boy’s game” anymore – a good thing if you ask me.

And now on with the reviews…

I didn’t get to see the Wii or any of the games for it that were being shown in the Nintendo booth, I wasn’t going to stand in line for 3 hours for anything much less a console. I was also told that Spore was being shown behind closed doors to press only so I didn’t bother trying to see it, I’ve since found that anyone could get in if they were willing to wait in line…that one I might have waited for had I known.

So lets start with the console wars.

As I said didn’t get to see the Wii but I did see the lines and I did talk to several people that managed to get in. From all of the reports it looks like Nintendo might have a winner, especially for the “average” gamers and for attracting new people to the hobby. A lot of the gaming bloggers are kind of dismissing it saying it won’t compete with the XBox 360 or the PS3 but I think it has the potential to put Nintendo back on top, or at least near the top. There are only 2 flaws with it as far as I can tell. Lack of support for HD, especially a digital output, this is only going to be an issue long term and might be correctable by an add-on later. The bigger issue is no DVD play back, not HD-DVD or BluRay but plain old DVD’s. I think at the $200 price point being rumored they could throw in standard DVD playback no problem and it would help sell more units. If they can create some sort of add-on that will play DVD’s, or better yet an upscaling DVD player, then they’ll definatly have a winner. I don’t think that the whole HD revolution is that big a deal, but that’s for another article.

I did get a chance to see the PlayStation killer, and it’s the PS3, this console could end Sony’s domination of the console market, at least in the U.S. At $500 it’s a very expensive game console and Sony claiming that it’s cheap for a BluRay player doesn’t work for that unit since it’s missing the HDMI output that will allow you to play flagged movies at full 1080p. At $600 you get all the features but when you remember that you’re probably going to have to by at least 1 more controller, probably a video cable of some sort, and a couple of games you’re pushing $1000 which is a large chunk of change for most people. The price combined with only having 2 real exclusive franchises at launch, Final Fantasy 13 and the new Metal Gear, probably means poor sales. I’ve seen plenty of reports of people that had been waiting for Sony to announce pricing or launch titles before deciding whether to go for the 360 or the PS3 and many of them have already headed to the store to pickup the 360. It’s out now, it has most of the major titles they’re intrested in along with some nice exclusives coming and it’s cheaper. Sure it doesn’t play 1080p but I hate to break it to Sony, the average user can’t tell much difference, heck I’ve heard from numerous sources that the Gears of War demo that Microsoft had at their press conference was the most visually stunning game they’d seen and that wasn’t shown at HD resolutions. I had a look at Gran Tourismo HD – basically GT4 reworked to 1080p – and it looked good but it didn’t really better than the latest Project Gotham… especially not a $600 console worth of better. The other game I got to play with was Warhawks, which uses the new “DualShake” controllers motion sensor stuff. The controller made the game play slightly more immersive than using the dual analog sticks but it was still kind of clunky…not surprising since the devs said they added it in less than a week before the show. For all their touting “full HD” the game, to my unpracticed eyes at least, didn’t look that much better than a current gen XBox title and the gameplay was a typical 3rd person action flyer which isn’t a genre that screams launch title to me.

On the XBox front there wasn’t a lot of new info specific to the console, the Gears of War demo looked impressive as did a few of the other upcoming titles but nothing to make me want to rush out and buy one. The big news as far as I’m concerned was the Live Everywhere…or is it Anywhere, either way. Tying XBox live into the PC is going to be very cool and it might actually be a reason for a lot of us PC gamers to upgrade to Vista, something I hadn’t really seen a reason to do yet. I also liked the idea of tying it to cell phones so you could pay for a game like Zuma once and play it across all 3 systems. That and the idea of doing things like allowing you to customize a car on your cell phone or mobile device and then make that available in Forza on your console sounds really cool. The whole putting stuff that works well on the cell phone to keep people engaged in your game world is an interesting concept to me.

And now for the games.

I had a list I made before the show so I’ll just go down that list.

• Dark Messiah of Might & Magic - Still kind of rough but entertaining. It looked like a fairly typical first person RPG, similar to Oblivion. Graphically it was stunning, I liked it better than Oblivion but then it should look better being newer. Nothing made me want to rush out and pre-order it but for fans of the series it looks to at least take away some of the bad taste left by earlier versions.
• Hellgate: London - Just as I had imagined this looks to be the evolution of Diablo, not a complete surprise considering the developers, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s still a ways off but even so it plays really well with only a few camera glitches that I noticed and it looks amazing. If you’re a Diablo fan you’re going to want to pick this one up.
• Shadowrun - Probably the biggest disappointment of the show for me (other than not getting to see Spore). They took a pen & paper RPG license with a ton of potential for a wide variety of game styles and turned it into a generic sci-fi styled FPS. Sure they’ll call it an RPG because, since Diablo, anything that allows you to upgrade your character or weapons is called an RPG these days but it’s your typical FPS. From playing around with it, it’s not even all that great an FPS. All in all a depressing misuse of the license.
• Vanguard: Saga of Heros - Ok full disclosure time – I’m pre-disposed to not liking Vanguard because it’s my fervant belief that Brad McQuaid and his “Vision” did more to harm EQ than anything SoE could possibly have done. While I have some fond memories of EQ I also believe that what Sigil is doing, and the rabid fanboi’s seem to think they want, is taking all of the very worst aspects of a generation 1.5 MMO (if muds were 1st gen then UO, EQ and AC were just graphical updates) and giving them a prettier face. I will admit that the game looks good and the little bit of gameplay I got to watch, sorry no hands on, looked entertaining but then he didn’t die and have to do a naked corpse run to the bottom of some dungeon 5 zones away. See had they taken the combat portion of EQ, the long fights that were filled with opportunites to use your various skills to gain a tactical advantage, they might have had an interesting game. But no they had to take the corpse runs, the camping, the contested spawns, the grinding, in short the crap. When I asked about this they seemed proud they said that it made the game more challenging, making the mistake I see in a lot of MMO’s that time consuming and frustrating equals challenging. I do think there is a niche for the game and I think they’ll do very well in that niche, if they stick to their guns and don’t cave to the board whinners. It’s just not going to be the game for me.
• Dungeon Runners - I hadn’t heard a lot about this game before the show but it did sound interesting. Think an action RPG, a la Diablo, in MMO form using the Guild Wars system of cities as common areas but everything else instanced. That’s exactly what it plays like and, if you like Diablo, it’s a lot of fun. They haven’t finalized their pricing scheme yet but they’re wanting it to be free to download, free to play and maybe use micropayments for upgrades. A model that works well in Asia but may not do so hot here. The rep I spoke with also said they’re considering using the Guild Wars model as well. If they go that route then I can see this being at least as big a seller as Guild Wars and maybe bigger. Imagine Diablo without all the cheating you find on the public servers and big enough that you could find a game at just about any time.
• Tabula Rasa - The second biggest disappointment of the show for me. I had such high hopes when this game was first announced and was even still interested after the changes in direction before last years E3. Now, it’s basically a sci-fi based MMOFPS and we all know how well those tend to do. I will admit that I didn’t spend a ton of time playing the game, mainly because I was disgusted after less than 5 minutes, but I really didn’t see anything to set this game apart. It’s set in the future, you shoot things and you can upgrade your skills and equipment as you level. It was pretty but in the MMO world pretty just doesn’t cut it for me.
• Lord of the Rings Online - I didn’t get any time hands on with this one but I did at least get a chance to watch the game play. It looked a lot like D&D Online…I mean a LOT. I couldn’t snag a booth rep to get any specifics so I don’t know if it’s going to be as group oriented as DDO or if they’re going with the same quest to gain XP model though I tend to doubt it. The twitchy combat isn’t really my cup of tea but I can see this game attracting some new players if you made it more solo and casual friendly. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one
• Soul of the Ultimate Nation - Think console style action RPG game mechanics merged with an MMO. Everything is instanced but it’s kind of like setting up a multiplayer game of Halo2, you pick what type of instance you want, the number of players, teams etc. and then create your instance. If you’re in a group your group will be added to the instance otherwise it gets listed and others can join in. Once you’re in you’re playing your typical console style RPG, but with keyboard and mouse – and let me just say that the keyboard layout needs some serious work for me to use it. The graphics are stunning and the animations are extremely smooth and fluid, it really looks like a next gen console game. If I understood the booth rep it’s another game that’s looking at the micropayment model but don’t quote me on that, her English was better than my Korean but that’s not saying much.
• Huxley - Another one from Webzen (see S.U.N above) and yet another sci-fi themed MMOFPS – what is it with all of these things lately – this one at least has a hook. Supposedly both console and PC players will be able to play together. It’s supposed to be using the new Unreal 3 engine but if it is I couldn’t tell it. Maybe they decided not to use the cool new features of the engine so it could play on the original XBox or something but it didn’t look that much better than say Halo2 to me.
• Neverwinter Nights 2 - Simply put…amazing! The outdoors areas are much more flowing and natural than the original and the interiors, while still tile based, are leaps and bounds ahead of the current version. Other than a graphics update the game still plays very much like the first one but with a switch from the 3.0 rules to the new 3.5 rules. I didn’t see anything from Ebeeron but if it’s not in the base game I give it less than a month before it’s modded in. Speaking of mods, the new mod tool is a huge improvement over what I already considered one of the best mod toolsets on the market. The ability to use heightmaps for outdoor terrain is going to make for some very sweet outdoor mods. The new layout of the tool set with a tabbed style interface and the ability to only have the tabs you use open makes for a much more streamlined and professional layout. I can’t wait to get my hands on the tools…or the game.

All in all a very interesting and rewarding experience, now if only someone would hurry up and hire me .

The character classes/races are true to the D&D core rules, though there are a couple of notable core classes missing (namely the druid and the monk). The customization of appearance is lacking, but then most games are after seeing City of Heros . They did a decent job of implementing the D&D skills and feats to allow you to tailor your character but, at least at level 1 & 2 I didn’t really notice a big impact except for the more class specific skills like spot, disarm etc.

There is also a big disincentive to play and experiment with different race/class combos. The tutorial is basically the same for all classes, not a huge deal but you can’t skip it since it gets you your first “Action Point” – the mini levels between actual levels. Then you leave the tutorial area and you have to run the same series of about 5 quests to “unlock” the next area of the town. You can run the quests at various levels, easy, medium, hard, but you have to complete it on easy to unlock medium and then complete it again on medium to unlock hard. Who wants to do the same quests over and over again?

The doing quests to unlock the next area thing means that you can’t just go running around the common areas and explore the city, even though all of the actual combat areas appear to be instanced. For a game that was very quest focused it actually felt more like a grind than even EQ. You HAD to go do these quests to even be able to move around the town and in order to complete the quests you needed to level which meant doing more quests, sometimes the same ones over and over at higher difficulties.

One thing that was apparent was that they were trying to maintain the whole “D&D is a group based game” thing and they did an excellent job of providing you tools to locate a group that was working on the quests you were on. The problem is that it not only required a group but that group needed some specific classes. You had to have a tank, healer and rogue, the other three members could be anything you wanted but if you’re doing quests on harder levels you might want duplicates of some of those – it sucks to lose your rogue when there’s a trap between you and the rez stone to get him back.

Though to be honest you could probably get by without a rogue. Almost every trap is blatantly obvious or anyone with a decent spot skill will get a warning message just before it triggers and every one that I saw could be triggered without taking damage if you were careful. Once you knew the trigger point the game became a platformer, you just had to figure out the timing and you could run and jump your way past a lot of the traps.

Then we get to the combat system. I’ve played games of Unreal that had less jumping and strafing than this game does. To actually hit the mob you really need to control the swing, not just turn on auto-attack. That means moving around, keeping him in front of you, and hitting right click when you think he’s not blocking or casting. Then, if you were in position for your blow to actually have a chance at landing the skill system took over to determine the outcome. If the mob failed his block roll then you rolled to see if you hit (there’s a little 20 sider that appears on the screen), so I have the frustration of a twitch game but without the benefits of my actual mouse/keyboard skill determining if I really hit.

Like I said I really wanted to like this game but the more I played it the more it felt like a console game ported to the PC, even the interface reminded me of a console game. In fact if they were to port this to the XBox or the 360 they’d probably have a real hit on their hands, on the PC I think it misses the mark.