Changing Categories

With the windup to Origins and all the other stuff I have going on, there’s been very little gaming happening. I haven’t played Neverwinter (or indeed anything else) since before the recent exploit/rollback flap. What I have been doing, here and there, is digging board and war games out of the closet. There’s a decent chance of playing some at Origins.

What strikes me, though, having been doing a great deal of poking around lately, is how board wargaming has managed to survive — by changing. There’s still plenty of the of hex-and-counter stuff getting produced, as it turns out. You just have to be paying attention in the right places. But there’s also stuff like The Napoleonic Wars, which even ten years ago (about when I started to drift away) would have been huffily declared by hardcore wargamers to be “not a wargame.”

Nobody thinks that now. Furthermore, the crop of “card-driven” games starting with We the People seem to have invigorated the hobby. They’re more game and less simulation than the old school stuff, but there’s a ton of them on a wide array of subjects from the Napoleonic Wars (duh) to World War II and the Second Punic War or the Protestant Reformation. (A lot, but not all, of these games are from GMT, and the system itself is tight and relatively simple in the examples I’ve seen.) The common definition of “wargame” has drifted, and while the old stuff is still around, there’s now more in the category that would have often been excluded years ago.

The definition of “MMORPG” is changing in the same way. the old category wasfairly narrow and the current one is much broader. Some folks are still stuck inside the old borders of the category. Which isn’t really profitable for them, although it’s perfectly fine to prefer one particular corner of the field over the rest.

The Wargaming Urge

Wargames were my doorway into gaming. Not this Warhammer crap that passes as such these days, or even the historcal minis, but the old school, counter-and-hexgrid wagames in the style of SPI and Avalon Hill.

This kind of wargame has seen better days. SPI got itself seized by TSR, Avalon Hill sold out to Hasbro, and waves of RPGs, CCGs, EuroGames and video games have all taken their toll. What’s left is a tiny nubbin of what used to be.

But what’s left is not nothing. There are still a few companies turning out cool and even remarkable games. Which maybe aren’t the same kind of games we would have seen ten or twenty years ago, but one could make an argument that the EuroGames trend in particular has had a big impact.

Thinking about this lately has encouraged me to go through my very small stock of remaining war (and related) games. I no longer own anything from SPI, thanks to many years of selloffs and the water damage that claimed my copy of the StarForce Trilogy. A lot of my Avalon Hill stuff is similarly gone. And my GDW titles, except for the science fiction ones that I still have as part of my Traveller collection. Truth be told, I’m not sure where half of this stuff went.

But from Avalon Hill I still own Titan, Advanced Civilization and Republic of Rome, a particular favorite. I still own World in Flames and a bunch of the addons (but I forget which ones, and everything is mixed together.) I still have the first several Panzer Grenadier items from Avalanche, and that’s a damn fine game. West End Games’ Imperium Romanum II will leave my collection only when pried from my cold, dead hands.

And I have a stack of GMT titles, not all of which are even old; they were the one company that I still kept up with a bit as I’ve drifted out of wargaming for the last ten years or so. Those guys are doing some great things even today, especially in eras that have seldom been touched by wargame designers, like the (pictured) Onward Christian Soldiers, an operational-level game about the first three Crusades. Oddly enough I lack of interest in anything they do with World War II or the American Civil War, two of the three traditionally most fertile eras for wargaming, but the third is Napoleonic era, in which is set their impressive-looking (but unplayed by me) The Napoleonic Wars. They also did a couple of really nice and very out of print operational-level Roman Republic games which I have played and adore.

I’m in the middle of an itch to do some of this stuff again. I opened up Onward Christian Soldiers yesterday and finished punching, clipping and organizing it so that it’s finally ready to play. Which I may or may not get the chance to do soon. There’s a local club but I’ve lived here for four years and have yet to make it to a meeting. There’s also Origins in less than a month, a show I’ll be attending and maybe even blogging from. So maybe there’ll be a chance to push some cardboard counters around then.

The Good Old Stuff in Neverwinter

Neverwinter might turn out to be the surprise MMO hit of 2013. It wasn’t even supposed to be an MMO, until it was pulled back by the newly-purchased Cryptic to be developed into one. I think few were taking it seriously, and yet now it seems to be liked by almost everyone that I’m paying attention to. It is, I think, the full flowering of Cyrptic’s freemium model, without the baggage that comes from having current or former subscribers that you have to be careful not to piss off.

Now, I do have concerns about the game’s staying power. The actual amount of dev-scripted content in the game is actually pretty lean… but there’s lots of repeatable stuff, and the Foundry. And we’re seeing signs that some remarkable stuff will be coming from that. Which brings me to today’s video.

This is a reproduction, using the Foundry, of the classic D&D module The Keep on the Borderlands, adapted within the confines of the engine and suitable for solo play. It’s not how I would personally have tried to do such an adaptation… but that such things are even remotely possible is very exciting. The Forgotten Realms setting along with the possibility of revisting the classic adventure sites of old school D&D might make Neverwinter very alluring indeed.

No video game can capture the openness of tabletop RPGs, of course, and MMOs in particular have been moving mostly in the opposite direction for several years. But there’s still a potent D&D nostalgia that can be tapped, and the brilliance of the Cryptic approach is that they don’t have to pay devs to do it. Said content won’t have the quality control of professionally-developed stuff, either, but enough of it will be good enough. And in principle as assets get added to the game the Foundry should become more and more capable. If we can get this kind of stuff a week into “open beta,” the user generated content we see a year or two from now should be genuinely amazing.

Also, personally, I am enjoying the game. Lots of respectable titles have bored me right out of my chair well before 20 hours in, and I hit that (and level 25 on my Control Wizard) in Neverwinter over the weekend and have no intention of stopping now.

Neverwinter Day 3 Vids

The Neverwinter servers may still be down, but yuou can get more goodies right here! This time around we take a look at the game’s first group dungeon, the Cloak Tower, and have a crack at Foundry content for the first time.

Neverwinter Day Two Vids

Day two of Neverwinter’s Launch, like day one, wasn’t without issues. Some server stability problems and issues doing things in-game like queueing for instances, and the return of a little bit of lag — and not at prime time, either. I personally didn’t see a single login queue.

Today saw me running skirmishes and PvP instances for the first time since the closed beta. The latter in particular yield pretty nice XP. I now have a companion and am delving into “professions,” which are Neverwinter’s idea of crafting. I also have a ton more videos either already posted or coming as fast as I can get YouTube to take them.

The more of this game I play, the more impressed I am with it. I’ll be giving it some more time before committing any (if any) money to it, but so far aside from lockbox keys I’m not terribly tempted by any of the store offerings.

Neverwinter Soft Launch Impressions

April 30 marked the start of the “open beta” for Cryptic Studios’ Neverwinter, an MMORPG based loosely upon D&D 4th edition and set in a corner of the Forgotten Realms. This is, of course, a de facto launch — they’re taking your money and not wiping your characters, so it’s a launch, despite being labeled a beta for marketing reasons and so that can be used as an excuse for any major issues.

And there was a major issue early in the day — lag. Which shouldn’t be and wasn’t surprising, but in a game that plays like Neverwinter, which is a bit twitchy and where timing and positioning are very important to one’s effectiveness, it was exceptionally harmful, to the point where anything remotely challenging may have been impossible. A mid-day backend patch solved the lag issue at the cost of introducing (rather lengthy) login queues. But if you ask me, dealing with a queue is preferable to a shitty experience in the game.

Neverwinter, though it cries out for more, has five launch classes. My selection was the Great Weapon Fighter, but due to the lag and that the character felt a bit clumsy and underpowered to me, after about seven levels (beyond which, for all I know, those issues would go away) I switched back to Control Wizard, which was the class I played the most back in the closed beta.

Neverwinter is a contemporary themepark MMO, which is to say that it’s got linear content along with scaling, instanced and one-off content that’s available to you at whatever level, so you have the ability to mix it up. This can give a game a bit of sandbox feel if you squint hard enough at it, but I’m not sure that’s really the case here. This content structure feels more or less like that of Star Trek Online and Champions Online, Cryptic’s other offerings. I find that generally agreeable.

And the game, too. Neverwinter is fun to play, with fast, fluid combat that manages not to be too twitchy for arthritic graybeards like myself. It’s set in a world (D&D’s Forgotten Realms) virtually unmatched in depth of lore and the game seems to have enough stuff to keep one busy for a little while. How well it will hold up over the long term… well, we’ll see, but if the login queues are any indication there’s lots of folks wanting to play right now.

A compare and contrast could and should be done with the other D&D MMO, Turbine’s D&D Online, but that’s beyond the scope of this opening day post. Offhand, DDO is far deeper but Neverwinter is slicker and more modern in just about every respect. I’m not sure there is a real need for there to be two D&D MMOs, but then, neither really captures the open-ended nature of a tabletop game. No video game does, of course, but titles like Skyrim or EVE Online can come tantalizingly close.

But anyway. Neverwinter is worth checking out. Nice graphics and good gameplay and if it’s a touch rough around the edges you can tell yourself that it’s technically still in beta. I have new episodes of Ardwulf Presents dealing with it and more on the way, so check those out as well.

Ardwulf Presents Returns! This time, STO

The new, long-delayed episode of Ardwulf Presents covers the charcater creation system from Star Trek Online. Just getting back into the swing of things… but there will be new episodes each week!

Wushu, Trek and Heroes and Commitment

With the semester winding down I played a chunk of Age of Wushu the Martial Arts MMO that released on April 10. It has a lot to recommend it, including what appears to be significant depth, a big world, very nice graphics and some significant sandbox elements. Its learning curve is very steep, and understanding the game is additionally hindered by sometimes dodgy translation, a lack of (English) online resources and a UI that is both complicated and not always intuitive (but well above the average for Asian MMOs.)

Westerners, at least the old, grumpy kind who are set in the ways they’ve been doing things forever and hate having to learn new stuff, may find they have a hard time with Age of Wushu — it is very significantly different from the western MMO play experience, both because it is an unconventional sandbox and because it’s from offshore. Nevertheless, I judge that while its appearance of great depth may be fooling me, it may also be worth the effort. I have already given it more time than I have any other Korean or Chinese MMO, and I haven’t written it off yet.

Weirdly, though, Age of Wushu reminds me of a game designed in North America but recently bought by the Chinese — Star Trek Online. Which is not a sandbox in any sense but is so complex that it sometimes looks like one in the right light. Both games are well above the MMO average in terms of complexity. STO is easier to get into by quite a bit, but that’s largely because it’s been out for a while and there are plenty of English-language guides out there if you get stuck or confused. Both have a baroque quest setup with different kinds of missions and objectives, some of them delivered like traditional quests and some of them not. Both are also rich in minigames, although AoW’s are, as far as I can see, better integrated into the virtual world.

Playing Age of Wushu made me want to play Star Trek Online, when I got a little frustrated with it. But Age of Wushu, while it does have crutches like fast travel on short cooldowns, does have the stronger and more atmospheric virtual world. Which in turn made me think, again, of Vanguard.

I haven’t been playing much of anything at all, but I currently have twelve MMOs — true MMOs, not stuff like World of Tanks — installed on my PC. Which to be honest is way too many, but I’m fickle. The issue that arises is when a game like Age of Wushu or EVE Online or Star Trek Online or Vanguard makes and appearance in my personal Weltanschauung, one that really demands, if one’s to even approach the game’s potential, greater dedication over an extended period than I have put into any single game for any length of time. With maybe one exeption for World of Warcraft, but that’s one of the (now) many MMOs that doesn’t require any dedication.

This is frustrating for me personally, and my life as it stands won’t let that change anytime soon. So I rejoice that there is such a deep-looking game as Age of Wushu, but I’m sad that I’ll never get as much out of it as those happy few who can commit themselves to it will.

Another Run at SWTOR

Based on no particular impetus aside from a vague desire to get back to it at some point now that it’s free to play, I reinstalled SWTOR, picked up a new Smuggler character and am having a surprisingly good time with it. Without the added overhead of a subscription, I’m finding it generally more fun than my two previous rounds with the game — but then, it may be that it just takes until level 7 or so to get attached to whichever “fourth pillar” applies to your class.

It seems like Bioware, despite some stumbles, is doing a halfway decent job of supporting the game post-launch. The new “expansion” is now launched and there seem to be plenty of players even in the lowbie zones and even at my weird hours. So hopefully it’s doing well.

On the downside, SWTOR has the most punitively restrictive free player package that I am seeing right now, bearing in mind recent changes that loosened things up a great deal in SOE’s EverQurest II and Vanguard. Some of the restrictions can be loosened by upgrading to a “Premium” membership, and most others can be bought off, but some of those restrictions are borderline insane.

For example, free players are limited to two hotbars. Selling UI elements for virtual currency. Free players are also limited to five field resurrecions. Not five over some cooldown period, or five per however many levels, but five field rezzes ever. Beyond that you get to rez at a regular rez point or buy more rezzes from the store. Free players also don’t get bank access, at all, unless they buy it.

None of this is a real impediment given my own involvement level, but the restrictions loom large and early and I can certainly see them turning waffling players off while providing a big disincentive for players looking to pay without a sub. Personally I spent five bucks to spring for the Premium deal, which is worth it for the four extra character slots and extra crew skill slot alone, but I am not inclined to spend any more at the moment (I didn’t say not tempted — I am after all having fun.)

I am planning to play until level 20 or so with the Smuggler and see how I feel about it then. Even if I keep in installed and continue to dabble, though, it is very likely my summer game will be EverQuest II or Vanguard.

A Wee Bit of MMO Action

Blizzard had one of those periodic “come back and play free for a week” things, so I signed up for that and did a bit of dabbling in Azeroth for the first time in a while. The Pandaria content, as far as I got in it, struck me as rather dull and plodding. When the second Pandaria zone turned out to feel much like the first Pandaria zone, that did it. The whole experience made me want to play EverQuest II.

It wasn’t that long ago that I hit level 60 for the first time in EQ2. After another six months of irregular and intermittent play I have hit 70. Obviously, leveling is a great deal easier these days, what with unavoidable ample AAs and Mercenaries and the like. I wouldn’t say that leveling content has become utterly trivialized, but it’s definitely fairly easy to get through without an excessive amount of attention.

That’s about all I’ve had time to do of late. I do have some other stuff cooking which may get talked about some time soon, but the real action will happen after the end of the month when school has wrapped up for the year.