Tag: Massively multiplayer online game

2444: Wondrous Tails and the Accursed Hoard

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Spent a bit more time with the non-story aspects of FFXIV’s 3.4 patch Soul Surrender today, so here’s a few thoughts with that in mind.

First up, I finished my first Wondrous Tails journal, albeit rather poorly, so I have a good handle of what that’s all about now.

Wondrous Tails is a new weekly quest where you acquire a journal from the adorable young Miqo’te Khloe Aliapoh. Khloe wants to hear all about your adventures, so you agree to help her out by filling in her journal with tales of some of your exploits. You are then presented with 16 different challenges for the week, nine of which you need to clear to complete the journal.

On the opposite page to the challenges you are to face is a 4×4 grid of blank spaces for stickers. You acquire these stickers by completing the challenges — one per challenge, though you don’t get to choose which sticker you get. Fill a line in the journal and there’s a reward separate from the one for completing 9 challenges. Fill two lines and there’s another reward. Fill three and there’s another still. These rewards are significant, at higher tiers consisting of Allagan Tomestones of Scripture, the current “top end” endgame currency, and even item level 250 armour which, while not the best in the game at the moment, is certainly pretty good.

They are not, however, easy to accomplish, as I’ve discovered this week. It’s not completely random chance as to whether or not you fill some lines — by helping new players complete duties for the first time, you earn “Second Chance” points, which can be used in one of two ways: firstly, to mark a completed challenge as incomplete while marking an incomplete one as complete. This effectively allows you to do something again while removing the need to do something you don’t want to do. You can choose the complete challenge to make incomplete, but not the incomplete challenge to make complete. Alternatively, you can spend two Second Chance points to shuffle the entire board of seals (including the ones you’ve already placed) in the hope that you will get a more advantageous arrangement. In order to make three lines with nine seals, you need their placement to be absolutely perfect — a horizontal, a vertical and a diagonal. As such, it’s a bit of a gamble that you can’t necessarily rely on.

I gambled and failed, ending up with no lines at all by the time I had nine seals — you can only use the shuffle option when you have between three and seven seals, so you can’t just shuffle a completed board around. Still, I at least got the reward for completing the journal for the week, which is meaningful in itself, and there’s always next week to try again.

Next up, I jumped in to the randomly generated Palace of the Dead in an attempt to finish my Aetherpool weapon and get something to take the place of my outdated i210 Anima weapon until I can finish the upgrade process. New to Palace of the Dead in this patch is the addition of the Accursed Hoard, a series of hidden treasures that can only be located by using Pomanders of Intuition, which last until you unearth a piece of the Accursed Hoard. Your party banks the pieces of the Hoard until you complete the tier of the Palace that you’re on, and like everything else, if you party wipes you lose them.

Assuming you successfully completed a tier, each piece of the Hoard the party acquired will reward you with a sealed sack which must be taken to a new NPC in Quarrymill to appraise. There then follows a gacha-style appraisal sequence, during which you can anticipate how good the item you’re about to get is via the animation that plays (or not!) during the appraisal sequence. There are some decent items available through this system — in my first batch of three sacks, I got a paissa minion, the expensive Thavnairian Bustier top and a firework. In the seven other sacks I acquired throughout the evening, I got more fireworks. It seems fireworks are the default “normal” draw, at least from the common bronze sacks, but there seems to be an above-zero chance of getting rare items from this, too, making Palace of the Dead a worthwhile activity for reasons other than acquiring the weapon.

There’s obviously a lot of RNG in both of these systems that I’ve described, and some people don’t like that, preferring a predictable goal that you can take aim for and always see your progress towards. Final Fantasy XIV has always been heavily RNG-driven, however, and so these two systems, while having the potential for enormous frustration, are firmly in keeping with what we’ve come to expect from the game to date!

2378: People Ruin Everything: FFXIV Edition

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I quit Final Fantasy XIV today.

I am sad about this. Really, genuinely sad. The game has been an important part of my life for quite some time now, and will always be special to me — hell, it’s where I proposed to my wife.

But I think I’m gone for good this time. I’ve just had enough.

Not of the game, mind you; the game itself remains one of my favourites, with an enjoyably rhythmic combat system, plenty of distinction between classes and some truly memorable encounters — not to mention an incredible soundtrack and a great story.

No, I’ve had enough of the people who infest it.

The community’s slide into unpleasantness has been a gradual but noticeable process. Whereas I described FFXIV’s player base in my USgamer review (circa 2.0-era A Realm Reborn) as one of the most helpful, supportive and friendly communities in gaming, these days I regrettably can’t say the same — though I find myself pondering whether or not it’s because at the time I wrote that review, I’d only been playing endgame content for a short period.

Let me talk a bit about the incident that drove me over the edge today, then I’ll talk a bit in more general terms about what I feel has gone wrong.

A short while back — like, earlier this week — FFXIV introduced a new type of content called Deep Dungeon. This was a completely new way to play the game, and involved descending into a 50-floor dungeon with up to three companions and clearing it out, one randomly generated floor at a time. The rewards on offer include tokens called “potsherds”, which can be exchanged for various valuable items, and if you fully upgrade the weapon and armour you use in the Deep Dungeon — these are separate from those which you use in the main game — you get a high-level weapon for a level 60 character that is not quite the very best in the game, but certainly very respectable and suitable for all levels of content.

Upgrading the weapon and armour requires that you find silver treasure chests in the Deep Dungeon. Opening one of these will do one of three things: upgrade your weapon, upgrade your armour or explode, dealing damage to you and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing nearby. The deeper you go into the dungeon, the more likely it seems you are to come across trapped chests, and your weapon’s upgrade level is also capped by your character’s level within the deep dungeon — also measured independently of progress in the main game. To put it another way: your weapon and armour can go up to level +30, and in order to upgrade them to this level your character must reach level 60 in the Deep Dungeon, though thankfully levelling up is considerably quicker than in the main game.

After completing all 50 floors once, it’s likely that your weapon and armour will be around the +10 to +15 mark, depending on how lucky you’ve been. This means you then have to challenge the dungeon again from floor 1 but with your upgraded gear, hoping you’ll get luckier on the deeper floors this time. As incentive to run it again, however, every 10 floors gives you a generous shot of gil as well as Allagan Tomestones of Poetics, Esoterics and Lore, all of which are used to purchase the best level 50 or 60 gear available, so it’s not as if running the upper floors again is a useless waste of time. Alternatively, if you enter the Deep Dungeon on a class you don’t yet have to level 60 in the main game, completing 10 floors awards you with a large chunk of XP for your character’s level in the main game, so it’s also a good means of levelling alternative classes.

You may have surmised from that description that this structure puts a lot of pressure on Floors 41-50 to get players up to the magical +30/+30 needed to take away a shiny new weapon into the main game. And indeed, this is where the problems arise, with players doing everything from skipping fights with monsters that they don’t feel the party “needs” to fight (despite some players not having reached level 60 at this point, and some enemies dropping treasure chests) to outright Vote Abandon-ing the whole dungeon if they don’t feel they got “enough” silver chests in the first couple of floors.

I ran into one of these people today: a white mage, which is to say, a healer, and so an important, useful part of any group. Deep Dungeon, unlike everything else in the game, doesn’t matchmake you into a party made up of one tank, one healer and two DPS, so it’s entirely possible you’ll find yourself running in a group with no healer at times, and as such having a healer in your group is something to be celebrated.

Unless it was this guy. Right from the very start of Floor 41, he ran off in completely the opposite direction to the rest of the party, leaving the remaining three of us to fight off monsters and get afflicted with various status effects that could have easily been cleansed if he had been there. But no; he had places to be, apparently, and finding those silver chests was more important than actually helping the other three people in there.

“Will you PLEASE stop running off?” piped up one of my companions halfway through Floor 42, obviously getting as impatient as I was with this git’s shenanigans.

“I’m skipping mobs,” replied our friend.

I then pointed out that not everyone in our party was level 60 yet — one was 56, one was 58 — and thus it would be in everyone’s interest to kill as many monsters as possible, particularly as it’s also necessary to kill a certain number to open the exit to the next floor anyway. He then complained about us being “slow” and “inefficient”, and took great umbrage at several of us accusing him of “speedrunning”.

Speedrunning is a bit of an issue in Final Fantasy XIV as a whole, particularly in dungeons, most of which are tuned more to the “casual” end of the difficulty spectrum, but nonetheless remain a good source of income for those valuable Tomestones. With a well-geared, confident party that knows what it is doing, most dungeons can be cleared in about 10 minutes or so, but this relies on everyone being both well-geared and confident in the speedrunning process, which usually involves the tank pulling as many enemies as possible at the same time, the healer working overtime to keep their HP topped up and the DPS doing area-effect attacks as much as possible.

It’s quick, sure. It’s also boring, because more often than not fighting like this means that you use maybe two or three of your complete suite of abilities, and fighting the monsters just becomes a case of standing in place hitting the same buttons over and over for ten minutes. Not interesting, and certainly not doing justice to the impressive encounters the Final Fantasy XIV team have created throughout the game. But no, at some point between 2.0 and 3.35, where we are now, someone somewhere decided that the de facto way to run dungeons was as quickly — sorry, “efficiently” — as possible, and woe betide anyone who slows it down for any reason, even if, say, the tank or healer say they don’t feel confident or geared enough to do it.

Now, the thing with Deep Dungeon is that speedrunning is largely pointless, because monsters respawn, everyone needs to level up, you need to kill a certain number of monsters to open the exit to the next floor and, as with any good role-playing game, if you split the party you’re probably asking for a bad time. With the levels being randomly generated, too, there’s no set route through each floor, either, so you can’t even work out a route that lets you avoid certain encounters as in certain fixed dungeons in the game, so it’s really more trouble than it’s worth.

That didn’t stop this obnoxious White Mage from arguing his case increasingly aggressively though, eventually descending to insults about his perception of the rest of the party’s skill levels. Hilariously, he even had a go at me on the grounds that I “wouldn’t last five minutes in Expert Roulette” (the current two highest difficulty level 60 dungeons, neither of which are very tough) — I chose not to engage with him by explaining that actually, I had been playing the game since its open beta and as such knew it pretty fucking well by this point. Instead, I just voted to dismiss him from the party; my companions silently agreed, and thankfully he was booted shortly afterwards, to be replaced by a much friendlier person who unfortunately wasn’t a healer.

This White Mage’s attitude is representative of a considerable proportion of Final Fantasy XIV’s player base as it stands today: the game, for these people, is about the relentless pursuit of “efficiency” so that they can acquire all the best gear, get all the achievements — achieve whatever they want to achieve, in other words — as quickly as possible then, in all likelihood, go on the official forums and Reddit to complain that three months is too long between content patches and that there’s “nothing to do”, despite smaller patches with additional features (such as Deep Dungeon, which was a significant addition) being added on a monthly basis.

I also saw this among a number of active Final Fantasy XIV players I used to follow on Twitter. There was a marked shift in their attitude over time; one person in particular that I started following as a result of attending an in-game “funeral” for a player who had sadly passed away in real life began as a very pleasant person to talk about the game with. But gradually over time he started caring more and more about parser figures — a parser being an external program you can run to see how much damage per second (DPS) everyone in the party is doing, a common means of harassing other players for “not pulling their weight” and technically against the game’s Terms of Service, though I don’t know of anyone who has been punished for it. He’d complain about parties he’d come across in Duty Finder; he’d post images of the parser figures; he’d shame people for not playing “well enough” or being “lazy”. That relentless pursuit of “efficiency”; your DPS must be this high to ride.

I just can’t stand it any more. It’s ruined the game for me. Dungeons that I used to love running, like A Realm Reborn’s final storyline dungeons Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium, lose all their drama by people skipping all cutscenes — and yelling at people who don’t — and speedrunning their way through as quickly as possible, even if someone in the group hasn’t seen this part of the story before. (Not coincidentally, those two dungeons were also the last to have lengthy cutscenes in the middle of the dungeon run.) If I decide I want a leisurely run through a dungeon rather than a stressful but boring speedrun, I get yelled at. If someone in the party makes a mistake and there’s a single death, everyone gets yelled at. And apparently not going fast enough in Deep Dungeon is now a cardinal sin, too.

Fuck all that. Fuck everyone who has ruined one of my favourite games of the last few years. And fuck this shitty behaviour being considered “normal” in all games, not just Final Fantasy XIV — indeed, I’m under no illusions, and am well aware that this sort of thing is a problem in all MMOs.

I just thought Final Fantasy XIV’s community was better than that. It certainly was once — at least, I think it was. But no longer. The buildup of this crappy behaviour and how not-fun this makes the game for me has led me to both cancel my subscription and uninstall the game completely for the first time ever since open beta. And I doubt I’m the only one who feels this way.

#oneaday Day 910: Continued Adventures in The Secret World

I’m still playing The Secret World and still enjoying it. Generally a pretty good sign for an MMO is if it can maintain my attention through the first month and convince me to continue paying the subscription fee (if applicable) past that point. The Secret World is certainly keeping me occupied and entertained, and I’m enjoying it a great deal.

I’ve progressed somewhat since the last time I discussed the game. I’m in the second of the game’s main “adventure” areas, which is another part of the Innsmouth-style Lovecraft town. Rather than the more “towny” area that you start in, the second part is more like a forested outskirts area. There are fewer houses, streets tend to wend their way into the depths of the woods, and there are creepy Twin Peaks-style lakes with mist rolling off them (and monsters lurking in the fog, of course).

The missions continue to display an excellent amount of variety. There are a few more “kill [x] of [y]” action missions than I’d perhaps prefer there to be, but they generally have more of a narrative incentive to progress than in other MMOs. For example, in one mission I completed tonight, I was tasked with killing a bunch of draugr and then burning their bodies. This attracted some more powerful draugr, which I then had to kill and impale on some spikes. This attracted a draugr queen, which I then had to kill and splay out on a pointy rock. This attracted a draugr berserker, which I… you get the idea. This process continued through several steps, with increasingly more difficult fights along the way. At the end of the quest, my “handler” and I reached the conclusion that the draugr had an organised hierarchy and chain of command that could potentially be exploited in the future. Much cooler than simply returning to a questgiver and them going “thanks for killing all those wolves”. (Praise should also be given to the fact that, this being the modern world, you turn in quests simply by phoning your handler rather than having to return to whoever gave you your quest.)

The fact that most missions incorporate something a little more than just plain killing is the best thing, though. In another one I completed today, I had to gather mushrooms from various areas around the map (guarded by horrible slobbering things from the depths of the ocean, natch) and then mix them together according to a recipe on a scrap of paper I had to remember I’d been handed at the start of the quest. The Secret World assumes a certain degree of intelligence on the part of the player, and doesn’t remind you that, say, the instructions you need to complete a quest are safely in your journal — or, indeed, that sometimes you have to use the crafting interface to complete an objective.

Speaking of the crafting interface, it’s a surprisingly cool approach somewhat reminiscent of Minecraft, of all things. Disassembling equipment you don’t need rewards you with raw materials, which can then be combined together to make various objects. The twist is, you have to arrange them into the correct formations to produce the things you’re after. You can then add things like glyphs to give them special abilities and bonuses and customize them.

I even tried a bit of PvP the other night. I normally hate PvP in MMOs because in most cases it’s a horribly unbalanced afterthought that simply isn’t any fun whatsoever. It is terrible in Star Wars: The Old Republic, for example, and I’ve never really been a fan of it in World of Warcraft, either. The Secret World has some interesting ideas, though, that make PvP well worth engaging in.

There are currently (I think) three PvP areas in the game. Two of these are instanced battlegrounds in which players take part in timed team-based matches according to whichever faction they’re on. The other, though, is a large map which has persistent PvP going on at all times. A number of facilities cover this map, and it’s up to each faction to capture (and, ideally, hold) each of these locations. There’s a strong incentive to do so, because all players of a given faction receive ongoing buffs according to how many facilities their secret society is in control of.

And people are playing it well. The chat channels in the PvP areas are full of people actually bothering to talk to each other, strategise and coordinate their efforts. The Templars appear to have a bit of a numbers advantage, but that certainly hasn’t stopped my faction, the Illuminati, from having a bit of fun — especially during quiet periods. Which is nice.

All in all, then, Funcom have done an excellent job in shaking up the very stale MMO space and creating something that it distinctive, entertaining and downright compelling. Its writing is good, its world is beautifully crafted and the whole experience is wrapped together with some unconventional but very effective game mechanics that successfully distinguish it from the million and one World of Warcraft clones out there. I strongly suggest you give it a try if you get the chance.

#oneaday Day 850: Diablolical

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My friends and I wasted many, many hours on both Diablo and its sequel over the years. We picked up cheap copies of the original game when we were in our first year of university and quickly figured out how to take advantage of our free phone calls between rooms to network our computers and play multiplayer. Later, we found ourselves enjoying the sequel a great deal — though I must confess, despite enjoying it a great deal, I only ever beat it once.

Fast forward a large number of years and we come to Diablo III. Does it still have the magic of its predecessors?

Simple answer? Yes.

Oh, you want a little more than that? All right.

First up, let’s address the Big Issue that people have been ranting and raving about: the supposed “DRM” that requires a persistent Internet connection. If you spend any time actually playing Diablo III, you’ll likely come to the same surprising realisation that I have, and that is this:

Diablo III is an MMO.

It’s not an MMO in the same way that its stablemate World of Warcraft is — there’s no open world and you don’t randomly bump into other players wandering around — but it is a game designed to be played online, and it is a game where hundreds, thousands, millions of people all log in at the same time and are able to communicate and play with one another. There is a persistent chat interface allowing conversation with both friends and strangers even if you’re not in the same game session with them, a persistent friends list (albeit one that isn’t cross-region, annoyingly) and the ability to sneak a peek at your friends’ equipment, achievements and other data. There is an auction house, allowing you to make some money (currently only in-game currency — the controversial “real money auction house” is due to launch later in the month) from those awesome items that your current characters can’t use. Your characters are saved “in the cloud”, allowing you to log in on any computer and pick up where you left off.

Most notably, there is the ability to immediately, instantly and seamlessly drop in and out of players’ games. Friends who are playing are shown on the main menu, and joining their game is a simple case of clicking their name. Joining a public game (or opening your own session up to the public) is just as straightforward. The only thing that would make it easier to play with friends would be Steamworks compatibility, but this is Blizzard; that ain’t going to happen.

Yes, you can play the game solo, but you can still chat to people while doing so. You can lock people out from auto-joining your game so you may only play solo if you want to, but you’re still soloing online like any other MMO. You have the option to invite people or open your session up at any time without having to come out of your game or make a character specifically to play online with.

In short, the “always-online” thing is actually a key part of the game’s design, and in execution really rather cool. While it may be frustrating to not be able to play “single player” offline, and the early server issues were a pain in the arse for a day (a single day, maybe two at a push — the game is running perfectly now) the fact that the game is, in fact, clearly an MMO makes it clear why this is the case. The entire game’s infrastructure is designed around playing online.

But let’s leave that aside for the moment, as it’s a concept you’ll either be on board with or you won’t. What about the actual game itself?

Diablo III has undergone some significant changes from its predecessors. Gone is Diablo I and II’s progression system, which allowed you to distribute stat points on every level up as you pleased, replaced with predefined stat increases. Gone is the “skill tree” system from Diablo II, which allowed you to “build” a character to your own specifications (or create a completely unworkable mess), replaced with a system where you unlock skills at predefined level boundaries and can only equip a limited number at once.

It takes some adjusting to, but Diablo III’s way of doing things is streamlined and efficient without taking away the element of player choice. Everyone always levelled up their stats the same way in Diablo and its sequel anyway, and despite the illusion of complete freedom of choice that the skill trees offered, it was all too easy to create an underpowered character that wasn’t particularly good at anything. What Diablo III lets you do is customise your character to work the way you want it to in any given situation, and then tweak it at any time. What you can’t do, however, is hot-swap skills while you’re in the middle of combat. You have to make some choices as to what skills you’re going to use before wading into the fray, and reevaluate your decisions after various demon hordes have stopped having their wicked way with you.

The presentation is good, though not stellar. The in-game visuals work well but seem to have surprisingly demanding system specifications for their quality. In-engine cutscenes are a bit crap and look like something out of a game made in the late ’90s. The special effects are great, however, with some wonderful physical modelling on bodies and objects around the game’s environments, and spell effects are appropriately ridiculous, particularly when you’re playing with several people all flinging pyrotechnics around the screen.

Sound design — always a strong point in Blizzard titles — is great, with some excellent voice actors and quality background music. Plus someone on the Diablo team has finally got wise to the fact that boss battles are infinitely more exciting with some boss music rather than the understated ambient rumbling of the previous games.

As with the rest of the series, it’s the gameplay where Diablo III shines. There’s a decent narrative running throughout the game, but the Diablo series has always been far more about killing thousands of monsters and stealing their stuff rather than paying much attention to the (surprisingly deep, if a bit po-faced) lore. And in that department it delivers in spades. Combat is straightforward, addictive and fun — particularly with friends. There is a huge variety of loot to collect, equip, sell, disenchant and craft. And a well-implemented achievement system actually makes you want to achievement whore because going after the challenges in question is so fun and satisfying.

I get the impression Diablo III is going to grow and change over time, too. We already know that a player-vs-player competitive element is coming, as is the real money auction house. But what then? Expansion packs? Content updates? New character classes? There are a ton of possibilities that Blizzard could incorporate into the game, and they could even use the patch process as a means of incorporating features which some are a little disappointed at the current lack of — things like voice chat. (Personally, I can take or leave voice chat — I suffer from telephobia when talking to people on the Internet almost as much as when I’m using the phone — but I accept that a lot of people expect it nowadays.)

In short, the future looks very bright for Blizzard’s latest title, and if the amount of support Diablo II got — even once World of Warcraft arrived on the scene — is anything to go by, then players can likely look forward to a game that will last them for years.

#oneaday Day 848: I Can’t Get Angry About Diablo III

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I know I have a track record of Getting Angry About Shit, particularly when it comes to things like DLC, DRM and other three-letter acronyms. But I’m finding it rather difficult to get riled up over the issues surrounding Diablo III.

For the uninitiated, Diablo III is the latest game from World of Warcraft creators Blizzard, who are part of Activision. Activision used to be gaming’s resident Empire Of Evil, but that mantle has since passed to EA, and Activision are now simply Those Guys Who Killed Bizarre Creations, Pump Out Call Of Duty Every Year And Have Something To Do With Blizzard. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that Diablo III was always going to be a massive seller and an immensely popular title. It’s the long-anticipated third entry in a series with a long history, and one which a lot of players have been looking forward to for a long time.

It’s also one which a lot of people are getting extremely angry about, largely due to what they describe as its “always-on Internet DRM”. Said “DRM” has had difficulties today due to overloading, leaving many players unable to log in and play the game.

Here’s how the system works. To play Diablo III, you have to log in to Blizzard’s online service Battle.net. Once logged in, you can then play the game. You have to stay connected in order to play, even if you’re playing solo. The benefits of playing in this kind of “always on” environment include the fact you can always see when your Diablo-playing friends are online, that you can jump in and out of each other’s cooperative multiplayer games, and that you can make use of the game’s auction house facility to trade items.

Some people are getting very upset about this — particularly the fact that you can’t play single player offline. And while that may seem a bit silly, I can’t help but thinking a lot of people are looking at this from the wrong angle — the “gamers are getting screwed” angle. This is perhaps understandable, given the amount of time gamers spend getting screwed nowadays, but I really find it difficult to agree with the people getting riled about this.

Here’s the thing, though: Diablo has pretty much always been designed as an online game to play with either friends or random strangers online. The classes are designed in such a way that it’s both desirable and fun to group up with other people and tackle the game’s challenges cooperatively. You can play solo, sure, but the game has always been designed with online in mind. With this latest iteration, including the auction house and other mechanics, Diablo is now closer in execution to a massively-multiplayer online title than a single-player dungeon crawler like Torchlight. Sure, it doesn’t charge a subscription fee or feature a truly massively-multiplayer open world to explore, but the game has been designed specifically to be an online title. People don’t complain about World of Warcraft, Guild Wars or the like having to be always online — what, really, is different here?

I think the issue is that Blizzard hasn’t appropriately set people’s expectations for the game being an online-only title. We have no problem with games like the aforementioned requiring us to stay online in order to play, despite the fact you can play them solo. (In the case of Guild Wars, you can even team up with computer-controlled partner characters if you really can’t stomach playing with real people.) So what, really, is different about Diablo III? Is it simply that the previous games had a discrete “Single Player” option that didn’t require you to be online? (I haven’t finished installing the new game yet so at the time of writing don’t know if this is still the case.)

The other issue is that people believe Blizzard, being the company who runs the world’s biggest massively-multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft, should have anticipated demand and made sure their servers were up to the job of dealing with the thousands (millions?) of people who were likely to be wanting to log in at the same time. This I sort of agree with, though there is no genuinely reliable way of predicting quite how much demand there is going to be for any given title. Blizzard underestimated demand, and it’s caused problems — much like has happened with the launch of many other online-only games. That doesn’t make this a “disaster” or a “debacle” or anything like that; it makes it an occurrence that we’ve seen before. An occurrence we should have figured out a solution for by now, yes, but one we shouldn’t really be surprised about any more.

Within a matter of days, the whole issue will be completely forgotten about as everyone starts playing and enjoying the game, which kind of makes the whole RAGE!!! thing seem rather pointless, really.

But I guess you could say the same thing about any sort of “controversy” — including the Mass Effect 3 issues I wrote about a while back.

The fact is, though, this is an issue I find it very difficult to get riled up and upset about. So far as I’m concerned, Diablo III is an online game, almost an MMO, therefore I accept the fact that an unavoidable part of its existence is downtime, during which you cannot play. It’s not as if I’m short of other stuff to try when that happens — and getting angry really won’t solve anything. I accept that others’ views may differ on this subject if Twitter today is anything to go by, but that’s how I feel personally.

If you’re getting upset, go play something else. Or, in the words of my good friend Jeff, GO OUTSIDE.

#oneaday Day 842: The Captain’s Chair

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I’ve started playing Star Trek Online again. It’s been a good couple of years since I last tried this game, as I played in the beta and subsequently for about 40-50 hours or so immediately after launch. I liked it a great deal back then, but wasn’t playing it enough to justify the monthly subscription fee so, like many other MMOs I’ve left in my wake, I set it aside, saying to myself that I might check it out again were it ever to go free-to-play.

The astute among you will be aware that Star Trek Online has, in fact, been free-to-play for some time now. I, too, am aware of this and have had the thing installed for quite a while but never got around to picking it up again. Until now.

It’s been so long since I last played I ditched my old character and recreated it to play from the start again. I was originally doing pretty well, but I can’t remember what the hell I was doing, so I figured it better to start again and re-learn the game mechanics — along with discovering what’s been added since I last played. (Quite a lot, as it happens.)

For those groaning at the prospect of yet another MMO with a hotbar, hold it right there. Star Trek Online is worthy of note for several reasons. Yes, it has a hotbar, but no it most certainly isn’t World of Warcraft in space. I remember thinking on its original release that, slightly rough edges aside, it’s the Star Trek game that I always wanted to play. And my opinion stands today — arguably even more so.

For the uninitiated, Star Trek Online starts with a bang. The Borg are attacking, and the player, a new Ensign serving aboard a fairly pathetic little ship, is tasked with helping out. This process conveniently introduces all the basics of play, including running around inside places, shooting things, talking to things and interacting with things. The player subsequently gets to join a bunch of other Federation vessels in taking down a crippled Borg ship and eventually, thanks to the rest of the crew ending up dead, gets a promotion to Lieutenant and the chance to take command of aforementioned pathetic little ship. Thus begins their grand adventure in the stars.

Once the player is out of the introductory tutorial series of missions, they’re able to explore the galaxy and take on a wide variety of missions, ranging from story-heavy “episodes” to exploration missions where uncharted sectors have to be, well, charted. Along the way, they’ll engage in space combat, beam down to places and investigate mysterious goings-on, reconfigure the tachyon pulse emitters to scramble the grub-nuts frequencies and generally do all the things that Star Trek people do.

It’s a deep game that has only grown and changed for the better since launch. There is always something for the player to do, be that pursuing a mission, participating in a multiplayer “Fleet Action” cooperative event, taking on the Klingon Empire in PvP combat, taking part in any of the nightly special events, exploring the stars looking for research material which may be used to develop better equipment or simply chilling out in some recognisable Trek locales like Deep Space Nine or Starfleet Academy.

The space combat is worthy of special note. It’s often said that the space combat genre is all but dead, but it’s most certainly alive and well in Star Trek Online, though X-Wing this ain’t. Since pretty much all the ships in Star Trek are what other games would refer to as “capital ships”, combat unfolds rather more like a naval skirmish than a fast-paced dogfight. It’s all about manoeuvring around your opponent, flying alongside them, then letting rip with a broadside of phaser fire from both arrays, punching a hole in their shields and filling them with hot torpedo death.

If it were just a basic space shooter, it would be quite fun, but there’s plenty of depth there, too. You can tweak the power systems to prioritise attack, defense, speed or whatever, rebalance the shields to provide more protection in a particular direction, use your three bridge officers’ special abilities to aid yourself or hamper the enemy, and use your character’s own personal specialisms to turn the tide of the battle in your favour. At times it’s like being in the middle of a battle from something like Homeworld, particularly when taking part in the cooperative “Fleet Action” events or flying with some companions.

As you progress through the game, you get new ships and equipment with which to customise them, including some recognisable models from the Trek series. Yes, you can essentially fly Voyager, Defiant or the Enterprise if you want to. A bunch of alternative ships are available for real-money purchases, including some absolutely hulking behemoths that look very impressive — particularly when you’re still in the pathetic little starting ship.

And this isn’t even getting into the flourishing user-generated content community. Star Trek Online features the ability for players to create their own missions using a tool called The Foundry (that will also be seen in Cryptic’s upcoming D&D MMO Neverwinter) and then publish them for the community to play at any time. I haven’t yet delved into this side of things, but it’s a big part of what drew me back in. The Architect facility in City of Heroes was a source of considerable entertainment for me, so I’m looking forward to something similar here.

Above all, Star Trek Online is a great example of how to get a free-to-play MMO right — and a truly excellent sci-fi game to boot. You can have a completely satisfying experience right up to the level cap without paying a single cent if you want to, or you can pick and choose how you want to customise your experience. So far as I can tell, none of it unbalances the game — always a big concern in titles like this — and is primarily there for bragging rights or visual customisation.

Check it out on Steam. No, there’s no Mac version. (Boo!)