Funcom’s The Secret World had an open beta over the weekend, and although I wasn’t personally invited I did have the opportunity to speak with a number of folks about their experiences. A lot of the stuff I heard about the gameplay was.. cautiously positive. People seem to enjoy some of the more unusual mechanics, like only having one active quest at a time, but I’ve seen a lot of dissatisfaction with the character choices and animation.

The most interesting feedback to me, though, were the folks who found the setting and content to be problematic. The Secret World is one of the few (the only?) large MMOs to be set in present day Earth. The factions are The Dragons, The Templars, and The Illuminati, and that theme of conspiracy theories and shadow governments permeates the whole game’s setting. In theory I’ve been pretty interested in (finally!) getting away from elves and dwarves and playing some modern stuff with blue jeans and handguns, and on the surface lizardmen and cults and contrails and the like seem like great material for a game world setting.

In practice though, the game content seems pretty problematic on a number of fronts. For example, let’s look at Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s description of the opening video for The Dragon faction:

“In Seoul, S. Korea, our heroine is kidnapped and dumped in a van, driven wildly through the streets, until she’s eventually dumped out. [...] In an extremely sexually charged scene, as the player lays helplessly on the bed as this mysterious lady crawls over us. [...] ‘When our minds are empty, we are receptive to the truth,’ she mutters, before slowly slinking down our body, until her head is just off screen, and rather close to our ladyparts. And then the cunnilingus begins. No, seriously.”

Huh. Now, to be fair the degree of any sexual assault or coersion in the video (note: slightly NSFW) is somewhat open to the interpretation of the viewer, but clearly there is enough to allow for a very unpleasant conclusion.

And that’s not the only problematic content. One friend felt pretty uncomfortable with the way churches and preachers were portrayed. Another talked about how they were saddened that their character joined what is basically a terrorist organization without any option for player agency or anything beyond “do as you’re told”. Yet another felt weird about the frequent appearance of the Iron Cross and other symbols that have taken on extremely unpleasant connotations in North American culture.

I’m not interested in addressing the validity of any of these statements. All these people genuinely felt uncomfortable, and that is authentic enough for me. Instead, what interested me was the idea that an MMO set in modern day Earth will by its very nature be problematic for much of the audience.

I think one of the benefits of fantasy / science fiction MMOs is that we can play them without necessarily bringing the burdens of modern life with us. By default, my wood elf does not worry about rape culture in Norrath. People can make a human with brown skin in SWTOR and not ever have to think about how it might affect the way other internal characters might treat them. To be sure, players themselves can bring in these real world issues, but they’re not inherent in the game world. (This is also why people can feel upset when these elements are introduced through mechanics, such as Ji Firepaw’s gender sorting.)

It’s harder to shut out undesirable elements in a fake world when it looks just like what’s outside your window. (Zombies and monsters aside, of course. Hopefully!) You’re not just killing the evil Archbishop Benedictus with your orc friend in the basement of a giant tower dedicated to dragons (as in WoW), you’re killing a dude who looks like your priest in a church that looks like your church for corruption that sadly puts you in mind of the ways real corruption happen.

Is it possible for an MMORPG to have a modern setting yet avoid making people uncomfortable with real life parallels? I don’t know the answer, although if I had to guess I’d say, “No”. And that isn’t always a bad thing — there are a lot of great artistic works based on modern times and modern problems. However, after a great deal of thought I think I have to confess that I don’t necessarily want games to push my boundaries on real life issues. Usually when I sit down with a game, it is specifically for fun and recreation.

For a couple of years now I’ve been griping about the stereotypical fantasy setting in MMOs, and just how over dwarves and such I am. However, after this weekend I’m thinking I should start being specific about futuristic or science-fiction settings. The modern world and all its problems are real enough for me offline, for now.

As we discussed at length in Episode 2 of the Cat Context Podcast, I have been playing Everquest II lately possibly because I hate myself. Well no, that’s not entirely true — I’ve been playing it because I’m having fun AND I hate myself. I’ll save talking about the details of EQ2 for another day, but it has caused me to have a revelation about my MMOs that I must share with you, and that revelation is: player housing is the bomb.

Everquest II is not the only MMO with housing, but it is one of the few current games to have it. LotRO, I believe, also has both player and guild homes, as does Asheron’s Call (hey, that’s still alive), Everquest classic, and of course poor now-offline Star Wars Galaxies. As you can probably tell by looking at that list, player housing seems to have been a thing of past. However, to be totally honest, I’m enjoying my house and house-related activities so much that it is literally and irrationally making me ANGRY that housing isn’t included in modern MMO design. What the hell, Blizzard/Arenanet/Bioware/Trion.

Weapons from friend's server-first raiding accomplishments.

In EQ2 a player can own up to 10 houses, starting with a small room at a city inn and moving up to big stone mansions. Certain professions can craft house items, but more importantly in my opinion characters earn items from doing quests or achievements or random drops. The result is a little space of your own (that friends can visit) where almost every item on display has some personal value. Even for me, a tiny level 12, my house is quickly filling up with memories. That ceremonial dagger on the wall? I killed a patch of orcs for 90 minutes for that. The four-poster bed? That’s from finishing a quest chain in the starting area.

Back in my prime WoW days I would occasionally spend some time going through my overstuffed bank and reminiscing about outdated tchotchkes like my Eternal Quintessence and classic Will of Arlokk. Imagine if instead of a solitary, cramped bag I could hang my staff collection on the wall of my house! You want a timesink in your games? How about endlessly redecorating when you get a new item? (I haven’t played The Sims in years, but once an addict always an addict.) Gear inflation out of control? Try giving a bonsai tree as a quest reward, or a giant wall hanging for a particular raid accomplishment. I got a rug last night as a quest reward and was way more thrilled than I would have been with a piece of gear.

My first home, with tables and chairs and a bonsai tree!

So what up, triple A MMOs? Blizzard has been fending off requests for player housing since the game launched, often replying with something like “we like the idea of seeing a lot of people in cities and don’t want to make main cities feel like ghost towns“, which is amusing because I’m pretty sure all people ever do in WoW now is hang out in the cities waiting for queues to pop. To be fair, over the years many WoW players have said they don’t care about player housing, often mocking those who do with accusations of being carebears or (even worse) girls. Frequently someone will ask what the purpose of player housing is, or why they should care.

Its purpose, of course, is fun. No, it doesn’t improve your combat stats. No, it won’t make you more badass in PvP or boost your item level. It’s not a feature that is ready made for Major League Gaming events like Arena.

And that’s the part that really infuriates me. I’ve dabbled in MMOs for 8 years, and it wasn’t until last week that I experienced player housing (and the associated furniture crafting and arrangement) for myself and it really hits the spot for me. I was missing this huge feature, and I didn’t even know it. Why don’t I have an option for housing in most modern MMOs? It feels like just part of the inevitable march of the genre towards single player, combat-centric design.

Anyway, I’m ruined now. I always kind of knew that games with player housing were out there, not to mention the better crafting systems that often go with it, but now it’s become a prerequisite of mine for PvE games. I suppose I’ve learned that for me an MMO can’t be a home without.. a home.

Folks who have been reading this blog for a while know that I took a measured approach to SWTOR, if by measured you mean “expected from the outset to hate it”. As it turns out I quite like SWTOR, but I don’t regret going into it with low expectations. People are so enthusiastic about new games, believing that each one will “fix” the MMO genre and create a perfect world, and if there’s anything I feel a need to stamp out it’s unbridled enthusiasm and positive thinking.

Enter: Guild Wars 2. My immediate reaction is to be sceptical, and that reaction has only been strengthened by a few unfortunate run-ins with Guild Wars 2 superfans. You know the ones. They shout about Bioware and “TORtanic” and how GW2 will be a REAL game for REAL PvPers (who, we can presume, are REAL men). It would be more frustrating if I didn’t know that they were wrong — GW2 certainly emphasizes PvP, but ArenaNET has definitely spent a lot of time creating a newbie-friendly combat style and lots of other varied content.

We are so far away from knowing much about this game that it seems baseless to do much speculating about it now, but that has never stopped me before. Apparently the first closed beta tests for players will be at the end of March, so hopefully we know more about it then. In the meantime:

One Good Thing About GW2 So Far

World vs. World (vs. World) battles look amazing. For actual footage of the fight I like this video from Yoggscast. The idea is that three servers will join in battle over a huge area that will last somewhere around two weeks. During the battle you can contribute a number of ways, such as working together to build siege trebuchets, or capturing a keep with your guild. Keeps can be reinforced and will fly the flag of your guild.

Over the past few years my playstyle has changed to encompass at leat 50% PvP, but beyond interesting gameplay ideas this screams “community building” to me. You will work together with your server and with your guild on medium-term plans. Allying with other trusted guilds on your server seems to make sense so they can keep an eye on your castle. And none of the action is limited to level-capped characters! There is the nub of a very cool feature in all this, and one that promises to organically build a community.

One Bad Thing About GW2 So Far

Many, many years ago, well before I ever played an MMO, my good friend started talking about this new game she was playing, called “Everquest”. It was a social experience, she explained, and went on to add, “I play a Cleric and they’re pretty rare so people always want me to help them!” I made a mental note that people like healers, and when it came time to make my first MMO character that is exactly what I gravitated towards.

As it turns out, I also love playing a healer! I have healed in every MMO I played. I have a small army of holy priest alts in WoW. I am born to heal, baby.

Unfortunately, there are no healers in GW2. No tanks, either. Instead from what I understand every character has a small heal or two, and otherwise you just dodge and look after yourself. Now look, I know that waiting around for a tank or healer to run your dungeon group is a pain in the butt for DPS, and I sympathize. However, on a completely selfish level I worry that I am not going to enjoy being one of infinite numbers of DPS now. Battlefield healing is my bag, man, and I am actually quite concerned if I will even enjoy the game if they just give me a stick and tell me to hit people with it.

Interestingly enough, the lack of a tank and healer means (from what I can tell) that PvE dungeons are basically just an aggro-bouncing mess. I’ve heard multiple reports of the dungeons being boring, and the fights being boring. Instead of having “tank and spank” bosses, Guild Wars 2 seems to be favoring a “just spank” approach.

Non-combat games and skipping content were hot topics this week, but I’m still kind of sorting out my own thoughts on the matter. An intense battle that we barely survive, even a virutal one, is an easy way to flood our brains with exciting chemicals. How do we simulate that without the fighting? And have designers already unknowingly created a solution by introducing stealth classes as the true “fast-forward” characters?

Anyway, I would like to know: what is your favorite non-combat game experience? It could be a game with no combat, or it could be a game with a peaceful flash of brilliance.

For my part I would probably point to watching this Let’s Play series about Yume Nikki, a Japanese art RPG. It’s gorgeous and disturbing, and there is almost not even a second of combat throughout the whole thing. To be fair there is no way I’d have the patience to play this myself. It’s as much a work of art, I think, as it is a game.

I’ve been going through a bit of a non-playing phase for the past week or two. Part of it is directly attributable to Supernatural appearing on Netflix Instant Watch — I heard the first five seasons are amazing and it really is quite addictive. Mostly, though, it’s just the natural cycle of things. Sometimes I don’t wanna MMO!

Honestly, I wish SWTOR had more fluff. It might in a few months, of course, and perhaps I am just misinformed about existing content, but I miss grinding pets and reputations and achievements. The newest RIFT event lets you work on currencies for a number of pets, including Rudi the Christmas Corgi, and while I certainly am not encouraging Bioware to introduce Space Christmas or Space Valentines or anything like that my Achiever nature would enjoy having similar projects to work on in SWTOR.

In retrospect one of the best things WoW ever added was also the simplest: seeing guildies’ achievements in guild chat. Yes, the Level 10 or 25 Fish Caught achievements were not great victories, but it helped connect us even when we weren’t grouped together. We could comment on the new alt, or mock a level 85 for finally levelling their professions. We could see and congratulate a character the first time they finished an instance or the raid group for killing a new boss.

In fact, the running list of achievements helped add a sense of action and bustle to guild chat even when we were all quiet and doing our separate thing on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

I appreciate that the SWTOR team is probably still putting out launch fires. They have bugs to squash and mechanics to nail down and big chunks of content to release, but I’m looking forward to the little things really. Give me pets, titles, and crazy mounts. Let me spend time working on something analogous to The Insane or classic Loremaster, titles/achievements that took months of effort done at an individual pace.

Many years ago in the days of TBC, one of my good friends decided that he didn’t care what his character was wearing as long as his stats were good. He infamously declared, “We’re not playing Dolly Dressup here!” And at the time, he was kinda right — our focus was raiding and preparing for raiding, and we liked it. In SWTOR, though, neither our guild now nor (I think) the developers are intending to focus on hardcore raiding. That void needs to be filled with something else beyond brown robes and identical speeders.

Basically what I’m saying is: tauntaun mount now, please. :)

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I was tagged by Logtar yesterday for the sixth image meme that’s been going around, and I cannot ignore a good meme. I cheated a bit though and included the sixth image in my folders for WoW, RIFT, and SWTOR.

Sadly my WoW screenshots folder has been ravaged multiple times by catastrophic hard drive failures, but I believe this is Machiavellis Cat’s Heroic Twin Valks kill from somewhere in 2009. This makes me downright nostalgic. Other games may have better features and developers who are less creepy than Blizzard has been lately, but they will probably not have a dancing ogre in a loincloth.

I cropped this one so you could see guild chat, which is why I took the screenie. This was moments after creating our RIFT branch. The Cats have a long and terrifying history of comedy guild kicks. We can’t help it. We’re kind of jerks.

This one was just serendipity. The sixth image happened to be an amazing shot of Panacea, cyborg Operative.

This meme started as a WoW-centric one, but I care not for tradition! I’m tossing it over to my fellow SWTOR peeps Shintar, Njessi, and a woman who has the distinction of taking a million screenshots AND being my awesome evil-er twin (in spirit), Arolaide at Dragonsworn. Let’s see your SWTOR images!

There has been a lot of armchair game design in the MMO blog community over the last week or two. Some folks have tried to figure out exactly what the “next generation” MMO will entail, while others just want to talk about their idea of a good game. However, despite the different inspirations for all this design talk everyone seems to have one thing in common: adding difficulty and removing transparency from MMOs. But is it possible for an MMO to add complexity and still be successful?

Earlier this week Blessing of Kings posited that a huge factor in making a virtual world more “real” is inconvenience. Your big name WoWlike MMOs have been moving away from inconvenience — automated group finders and teleports and what have you — and in turn a large number of people have become dissatisfied with the lack of story, player impact on the world, and immersiveness in recent games. In fact, there’s been a groundswell in the MMO navel-gazing community lately towards sandbox games like Wurm Online where livin’ ain’t easy and as a noob you are likely to be eaten almost immediately by a small woodland creature. (I tried Wurm once and after 45 minutes I was still in the tutorial trying to figure out how to rub two sticks together for fire. It is the definition of Serious Business!)

This kind of inconvenient game isn’t for everyone, of course. There is a reason that World of Warcraft hit 11 million subscribers, and it’s not because we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to keep from being eaten by a rabbit. People — arguably the majority of people, based on past industry analysis — shy away from inconvenience in their MMO. Putting aside whether this is yet another symptom of our impatient living and missing sense of community in the real world (hint: it is :P ) the fact is that thus far the subscriptions have demanded convenience.

So what if a game developer decides to go their own way and create a challenging sandbox that will appeal to 10% of the current MMO playerbase? I’ve spent most of my life arguing that “popular” does not equal “good”. I could talk all day about unpopular-yet-amazing indie games and movies and art. The hitch, though, is that these things are a single-player experience. The most perfectly designed MMO in the world would be an abject failure if only 10 people ever played it. The whole point of the genre is to be Massively Multiplayer!

The MMO industry is by its very nature beholden to popularity and getting the widest audience possible. More people = more multiplayer. It means a more lively economy, more community, and a larger collective experience. Even as an experienced MMO player I find myself gravitating towards whatever game has the most people, and I really should know better by now! (I hear that Vanguard, for example, is actually pretty cool for old school players but my first thought when considering it is always, “Yeah, but does anyone play that?”.)

For an MMO to be considered good by it must by its very nature be popular, and for it to be popular it (arguably) has to be convenient. Ultimate convenience, in turn, is considered by many to be the sign of a bad game. We can’t win!

The phrase “paradigm shift” is cliché by now but… it seems to me that the MMO industry and those who love it could use one right now.