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.

Repurposed Vanguard Content

A while back, as part of the drive to take the free to play, Vanguard’s many starting areas were consolidated into just four. Now, I have my issues with that, but the idea that you only need a few starting areas appears to be institutional at SOE, and in any case I did see the point of concentrating the limited developer hours available. At the time, though, all of those old starting areas just sat idle — you could even still do the content there if you were inclined to travel, but most of them were rather off the riftway network.

In what may be a sign of the eventual fate of all of those areas, the old Varanthari starter area of Lomshir has been retuned to the level 10-15 range. The quests are mostly the same, and there’s now a riftstone that drops you right where new Varanthari characters used to enter Telon for the first time. It’s probably not such a bad way to handle it, actually — other currently-idle starting areas could be targeted at other level ranges, and this way the lore and other neat racial stuff that’s in those old starter areas stays in the game and visible.

My own Mordebi Psionicist is right in that level range, so I sent him down there and it appears to be a comprehensive job, with the quests hitting that range in all three spheres and with the Serpent of Sihari, one of my own favorite lowbie open-world dungeons, kicked up a couple of levels as well. For a game that’s spent much of the last five years apparently at death’s door there’s still a great deal of vitality left in the old girl.

Back From Break While I’m On Break

Over the last several weeks the stress has been grinding on me to the point where I’ve been incredibly on edge and have not held it together 100% of the time. There are about a dozen sources of this stress that I won’t go into, but one of the big ones — the mounting pressure as finals loom — is now over with, and I have a couple of weeks of only full time plus work in which to unwind. It’ll feel like a vacation in Hawaii.

That’s more or less the reason there’s been so little in this space for the last two months; I have gotten a little writing done but almost no gaming, and thus just haven’t had much to talk about on what is still predominantly a blog about MMOs.

Traditionally my main game during any extended break has been EverQuest II. This time around I’ve been fooling with Guild Wars 2 and Vanguard, plus I may hit the Age of Wushu Beta that opens up to basically everybody on the 20th. And more Planetside 2 is always a possibility.

I was tempted by the shocking news that Turbine has resurrected Asheron’s Call 2 on a single server, but trying that would be subbing to AC1, and watching a couple of videos of the revived game cured me of the impulse. It’s an interesting artifact and I wish it well (and wonder about Turbine’s motives) but I can do without it.

So yeah, I’m back for the time being.

One Last, and One More

I’ve been having trouble on the video front of late; my hour-long kickoff to the Vanguard Let’s Play series failed to render more than once, and I’ve been having trouble owing to limited upload bandwidth with uploads failing after 6+ hours of wasted time. So even though I have a few vids in the can already, I’m still pushing them out.

First up this week is, I promise, the very last pre-launch Guild Wars 2 video that I’ll be doing. Headstart begins tonight some time around midnight… possibly as late as 3 AM even of everything goes smoothly. Finally, working the night shift is good for something, as I can plan to be awake for the first hours of real play. The vid is my first (filmed) and longest look at the Charr starter instance and low-level zone, the Plains of Ashford. I do have a Charr character planned, but likely won’t play him right away — I’ll be doing the Norn first.

Up next is the new Vanguard Let’s Play, continuing on the Isle of Dawn with the Crafting questline. I have one more of these ready to go and should have it posted some time next week. It is very unlikely I will make another video before next weekend, but when I do I’ll try to knock a couple of them out.

More Vanguard Gameplay

Over the last couple of days I stocked up a bit on videos. I have two more Vanguard vids in the can plus a new one from the recent Guild Wars 2 stress test; it’s just a matter of getting them uploaded, which has been problematic of late. Nevertheless, they will appear as quickly as I can get them up, and then there’s the planned weekend orgy in Guild Wars 2, so I should have more next week as well.

This time around we start in on the Isle of Dawn’s crafting questline, with an eye to completing the quests in all three spheres before leaving the Isle.

One more minor leak out of the Vanguard forums, by the way: the issue with rendering rain in Windows 7 is getting fixed soon. As someone who has only played under Vista and Win7, it’s occurred to me that I have actually never seen the rain in Vanguard, which is depressing especially in a game with dynamic weather that actually moves across the world.

Word From the Vanguard Devs and Play From the Isle of Dawn

The new episode of Ardwulf Presents is up and available: Part 2 of my Let’s Play from the Isle of Dawn. The hour-long first episode proved pretty unweildy when it came to rendering and uploading, so I’m shooting for 30 minutes or a little less for the rest; I hope to have Part 3 available by Tuesday morning and to get to either Crafting or Diplomacy in it.

In further Vanguard news, there’s an interesting thread over of the game’s forums where lead developer “Silius” Grant talks a bit about what’s planned moving forward. Right now, plans are still in flux but what’s on the table includes:

• A small content update hitting in the next couple of weeks, featuring a new overland raid and “A new system that will benefit everyone and reinforce the idea of exploration in Telon.” No clue what this latter might be.
• Work on the next big update, City of Brass, has started. As I recall some work had already been done in the past, so this is presumably a resumption.
• More items should be showing up in the marketplace.
• Initial planning on the next big dungeon after CoB is underway. This place is not Stirrhad, the Nexus or the Cave of Wonders. The first two, when they do get worked on, will be a mix of group and raid content; the last may be 100% raid.
• The general priority is to utilize parts of the world that are currently empty before adding any wholly new areas. Which is cool by me — it’s not like there isn’t plenty of space.

A F2P Addendum and an Extended Look at Early Vanguard Gameplay

First up, we have a brief (for a change) addendum to the last epsiode concerning Vangurd’s free-to-play transition, with a couple of clarifications and corrections.

For today’s more substantial second course, I keep promising a look at Vanguard’s actual gameplay, and here it is — an hour-long look at one of the four current starter areas, the Isle of Dawn, on a free account.

I plan to do at least another video or two to follow up on this last one, which hopefully will make it up by early next week. After that, expect some Guild Wars 2 vids from me after the headstart begins.

Ardwulf Presents: Vanguard is Now Free to Play

One of the things I missed while out in the woods for more than a week was SOE’s soft launch of free to play Vanguard. So one of the first gaming things (really the only one) I did upon getting back was to go in and poke around. So here’s what I found in video form.

I expect additional wrinkles to be added in the Tuesday patch/official f2p launch, but as it stands now there are some interesting departures from the standard SOE f2p implementation, some of them very good and some of them fishy or problematic. We’ll see how things shake out, but for the next couple of weeks Vanguard will likely be the main thing I play, so I’ll have more thoughts later on.

Under F2P, Whither Goes Diplomacy?

While watching the SOE Vanguard vidcast today… well, let me first just emphasize that SOE did a Vanguard vidcast. But anyway. While watching it some mention was made of the unique features of Vanguard that make it more than just a cookie-cutter MMO. Brought up were the big open world, the rich crafting, and of course Diplomacy, which no other game has anything like.

But that’s not true, exactly. EQ2, for those who don’t know, has a built-in virtual collectable card game called Legends of Norrath, which you can play right from within the EQ2 client or from a standalone client that you can download by itself. LoN (which I have never managed to succeed at getting into despite two attempts) exists outside the world of the MMO, although some cards that you can get can be redeemed for loot in the game, mostly (if not entirely) vanity stuff like house items and titles and whatnot. You can buy packs and decks of the cards and amass a considerable library of them over time. There’s no way to know how much revenue this generates from the outside, but SOE is still doing expansions for it, so I would presume that it’s at least somewhat profitable.

But what if it was tied directly to the actual MMO world? And formed a part of that MMO’s suite of gameplay features? Like Vanguard’s Diplomacy does. This, then, is the great hidden opportunity in a cash shop-driven model for Vanguard. It could be the game’s sleeping giant made of money, if it were to me monetized in a similar way to how LoN is now. You’d get Diplomacy cards through play just as you do now (at one point LoN packs dropped in-game from mobs, but as far as I can tell that doesn’t happen anymore,) but you could also buy packs of them in the cash shop. It would require something of a retooling of the existing system, but you could probably keep all the current cards (and thus not take anybody’s cards away,) while adding new ones. Even people not otherwise bothering with Diplomacy might buy packs, as I suspect happens with LoN now, just on the chance of getting the loot cards.

Of course, this kind of arrangement might well sour Diplomacy for a lot of people. But it also has the potential to become a major revenue stream for the game — maybe even the primary one, considering how addictive collectible cards can get. In such a scenario we would have something very interesting: an online collectable card game with a full-featured MMO on the side.

What such a thing would do to the MMO could of course be argued over, much less what it could do to the Diplomacy system itself. I suspect that some would find the very idea unpalatable, although I also think it could be done without necessarily destroying the flavor of the MMO, or even Diplomacy, which I think is very approachable and robust as such things go. But it’s also potentially an important source of revenue for a game that appeared not very long ago to be dead weight on SOE’s roster.

Still More on the Vanguard Freemium Model

As mentioned in post #1000, SOE is asking for feedback with an eye toward tweaking Vanguard’s free-to-play matrix in several significant ways. None of this is firm yet and the discussion is ongoing, with many people including myself making additional suggestions. But here’s what appears to be on the table:

• The currency cap may be raised from 1 plat to 3 plat. I should make clear that this is an immense amount of money in Vanguard. While it will indeed be a hindrance at the level cap of 55, at any point up to then it’s unlikely to be an issue unless you’re doing a lot of playing with the market. Three plat represents roughly a character’s entire earnings from levels 1 to 55.
• The gearing limit for free players may be raised from “common only” to “uncommon and higher,” meaning that an additional level of gear will be available, plus some extra items of varying rarity. I confess that I don’t have a great handle on exactly what this will mean, but loosely, I take it that free players will have access to what in EQ2 would be Treasured and Legendary items, reserving the equalvalent of Fabled gear for subscribers and those who unlock the stuff with tokens from the store. I should also note that when EQ2 went f2p that process came with a gear revamp making Treasured gear much more worthwhile. This was good but unfortunately it left Handcrafted and even a lot of Mastercrafted items in the dust. I’d like to see crafting remain highly viable in Vanguard.
• The limits on mail and broker access for free players wmay be dropped, but the fees for using these services will be higher. This would turn the ruling on these features from being a dealbreaking shackle for some players to a mild inconvenience.
• Free players may get full access to chat. I think this is extremely important. Putting groups together with /tell is something Vanguard players have already adopted, but that won’t be as obvious to new players, and one of Vanguard’s great strengths is the group game.

All in all, this isn’t exactly how I would proceed, but these are definitely steps in the right direction for the Vanguard model, and address several of the most common complaints. Now, we have not yet seen exactly what’s going to be available in the in-game store. That may be something of a wild card, but I don’t think we have any real reason to expect that the selection will be dramatically different in scope from that in EQ2. So we’ll see how things shake out.