Pew-pew practice

Back home for the weekend and it was time for a bit of adventuring in space and Star Trek Online. Since the game has been released for real now also I went and picked up the box I had pre-ordered. There was only one choice available from the store, an edition with a T-shirt, some post cards and a map and some in-game items – a gun and some kind of uniform, I think.

Most of the content I have played through so far has been quite enjoyable, even the patrol missions, which sometimes are a bit light on the story side. The story focused missions have been pretty good though and I do like that there is a thread going through some of these missions with various plots orchesterated by ambassador B’Vat.

Taking U.S.S Spinal Tap for a spin, dazzling the Klingons with science

Trekking into space

So this weekend the headstart for all Star Trek Online pre-orders started and time to play the game for real. I had not played the game since closed beta, so was a bit eager to see if they had actually changed something or if it was similar to the end of closed beta. I think it has changed a bit, and most of it for the better, I am happy to say.

Zorian Zugy, science officer commanding U.S.S. Tactical Grace

My start in the game was to recreate one of the character from the beta period, Zorian Zugy.  Or at last as close as I could get. The standard races are all fine I am sure, but not being a Trekkie I did not have any preferences for the existing options. And if you have the option to make your own race, why not do that? Now, I have not figured out the details about Zorian’s background yet, but I will work on that.

Entering the tutorial I found that the STO world was a much busier place than in closed beta. There were over 1000 instances for the tutorial zone, judging by the chat channel indicators. Probably not too many players in each though. But certainly looks like a fair amount of people – that was European evening, so probably a lot of people on US side had not jumped into the game yet.

Cryptic language

Recently Cryptic’s State of the Game for Champions Online showed some good information about recent updates and alos a bit what was going to come in the near future. For me personally, the difficulty setting was actually what I might be looking forward to the most – that is a great feature of City of Villains/Heroes and it is nice to see that Cryptic continue to reintroduce good features that preferably should have been included from start. Better late than never. They also seem to re-introduce the flashback feature from their old game.

What has caused the most stir lately is that the announced new zone, Vibra Bay, might actually need to be paid for. People are a bit upset about this, given that the game has not had a huge amount of content to start with and the content additions so far has not been that much.

As a lifetime subscriber, am I upset about this announcement? No, not really – yet. Vibra Bay is said to be level 37-40 content. Currently I only have one character high enough to play such content and I have not played all of the content that is already there around these levels. My concern is rather that the content below those levels are quite limited so that most things have to be redone when leveling alts.

If they had said that Vibra Bay would have been a level 15-40 zone, 15-35 zone or something like that it would have been more interesting. Right now it will be an update I am simply not that interested in, free or paid for.

What do worry me more though is Cryptic seem to manage to upset people fairly regularly with statements that just make things worse. Daeke’s statement above is a prime example. Intended to remove speculation, but actually just causing more controversy and speculation, just of a different kind. A more proper approach would be to shut up until all information can be presented, for example:

• What the actual price for this new zone will be
• If it will be the same price for everyone, or differentiated
• Size of the zone, content-wise
• And also nice, the general policy to what kind of updates will be included in the subscription fee, and what can be expected to be paid for

Cryptic is perfectly free to set their own prices and policy and do not have to do it the same way as some other MMO game companies. But I really wish that they could be more upfront with what one can expect to get for the money. The same problem exists with many other MMOs, in particular the subscription-based ones. Cryptic is just a prime example right now, also since they seem to deviate from their past policies with City of Villains/Heroes.

I am actually positive about more differentiation in prices and payment models – but really, the companies should really be upfront with their customers or potential customers here.

Cosmic spanking

Yesterday my supergroup (or technically multiple supergroups) of The Older Gamers (The Omega Guard, The Omega Garrison supergroups) scheduled an event to go and beat up some of the cosmic class villains that roam around in the Champions universe. With people from all over the globe in the supergroup there was not a time that would suite everyone – this time the event suited primarily European and American people.

The plan was to start with the god Kigatillik in the frozen Canadian north, continue with the flaming giant gorilla Qwijibo and the giant dinosaur Teleiosaurus on Monster Island and round off with the hulk-like Grond in the Southwest desert.

A little bit late everyone interested gathered and we ended up with two teams, 8-9 characters in total.  In the northern part of the Canadian zone Mr Kigatillik hangs around. It must be a bit boring being a god in a place like this – hardly anyone visits and he does not seem to move around – just hang around in one spot with a couple of guard dogs (big things with big jaws). I am quite sure he was happy to see us to break the monotomy, even though he continued to try to insult us about being weak beings etc. That goes with job description of many gods, I think.

Kigatillik became green of envy of our fantastic outfits

What happens to the urge

In MMOs in particular the games are designed to make us do stuff, sometimes for a long time, to achieve some virtual goal or item. A Ysharros writes in her blog even if you are not really particularly interested in a certain achivement or activity, the game environment manages for us virtual mice to go for that virtual cheese, somewhere in the maze – and we get some satisfaction out of it.

In my work life I sometimes have to spend a fair amount of time out of the country, such as now when I am pretty much only in my home country during weekends. Being an MMO enthusiast, one thought would be that in those cases the gaming sessions when I am home would be more, longer etc to make up for that time. But instead I find that it is the other way around.

In these periods I am less inclined to run after the virtual cheese and I find gaming sessions can be even shorter or not as fun as when I can play more regularly, even though I may do the same type of activities in the games.

So I think that much the gameplay in MMOs work because they manage to condition us to play them regularly – without that there less urge to do the various activities presented to us. At least as many are created now. Being more casual friendly in the MMO world I think currently means that one need to spend less time each day, but the activities often still require some regularity to give us a virtual boost.

Releasing an MMO too late

Pretty much every time a new subscription-based MMO is released or is about to be released there is a lot of comments about “game is released too soon”, “it would need another X months”, “it is missing vital features”. These comments have been for many years – if the answers were that easy, one would think that would have picked up on that, right?

The issue here is of course that there are no easy answers like that – repeating comments like that hardly brings any new insight and may very well be wrong anyway.

Cryptic Trekking

So has the come time also for us mere mortals to comment on the first MMO venture into the Star Trek universe. Cryptic’s Star Trek Online (STO) is an interesting one for a few reasons – one is obviously the Star Trek universe itself and how it will be received by Trek fans.  Another interesting part is that the game have been in development a relatively short time; Cryptic acquired the Star Trek game license in January 2008. With 2 years of effort compared to 5+ years that some other big MMO titles have taken, it will be interesting to see how it works out.

Space - the final frontier. These are the voyages of the blogger Sente

So that was 2009, a glorious MMO year

I have seen a few posts from various bloggers about how bad 2009 was for MMOs. Personally I do not quite agree. For me personally there were more interesting new titles released in 2009 than in 2008. But also considerations for a good/bad year should include existing games as well – new expansions and changes, different price and payment models etc.

Thoughout 2009 I have played/tried a few different MMO or MMO-type games:

City of Heroes/Villains, Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings Online, Chronicles of Spellborn, Runes of Magic, Jade Dynasty, Project of Planets, Zero Online, Vendetta Online, Pirate Galaxy, Champions Online, Saga of Ryzom, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Fallen Earth, World of Kung Fu, Twelve Sky 2, Age of Conan, EVE Online, Shin Megami Tensei, FusionFall Online, GhostX – perhaps a few others also that I have forgotten about. Some of these would be an emphasis on tried rather than played though – for various reasons I barely completed the tutorial on some.

While otherwise limited in content updates, I loved when NCSoft/Paragon Studios released Mission Architect for City of Heroes/Villains. A really great feature! It was however plagued with being exploited by some and also in a sense too successful – too many story arcs and less than adequate search tools initially caused some trouble. While it is used by players today, it has perhaps not created the subscriber success that some may have hoped for. Still, it is an important step in making an innovative approach to MMO content a reality. I think that was one of the major milestones of 2009.

With the exception of Guild Wars, most of the fantasy titles I only played for short periods of time. Sometimes a bit grindy and with no special love for the fantasy genre, I gre tired of most of them quickly. Guild Wars has been lots of fun though – partially because it is a good game, but also very much due to the people of Tuesday Noob Club. Not played much lately though and the combination of real life schedule and lack of excitement for fantasy titles has contributed to that.

Just as I managed to totally avoid Warhammer Online last year I also totally avoided Aion this year, and World of Warcraft as usual. There simply has not been any compelling eason to consider playing either of the games.

Champions Online has received the bulk of my play time lately and for good reason – it is an excellent and fun game if you just want to mess around a bit, blow off some steam and get your mind of real life issues, just for a short bit. It is a good complement to other games or other activities.

I think most of the games I have played or tried I have not written much about – which is not to say that there are bad games. Sometimes it has just been bad timing, or some technical issue. I am glad that I have at least tried a fair number of games and see more of what is out there, rather than just focus on a few new Western subscription-based titles and live on the hope that the next big title with be it.

Unity and Nemesis

So with my character Ais Kreem at level 40 I started to have a look what this whole thing with UNITY missions were. This is something that is unlocked for a character when they reach level 40 (max level). Each day there are a few UNITY missions offered from the UNITY headquarter in Millenium City. These missions seem mostly to be a bit like the “Help a Citizen” missions – enter some location on the map and completed a few objectives in an instanced area. At least these missions seem to be slightly more interesting than the “Help a Citizen” missions inthat there are a few objectives in each mission. For those that have not played Champions it could also be compared a bit to the Newspaper/Police band missions of City of Heroes/Villains.

This is UNITY - freeze, punk!

Each mission gives UNITY mission point and UNITY intelligence points. The mission points are the “cash” in this system, which can be used to by items. More on that later. Doing all of the missions for one day seem to bring in 10 UNITY mission points. If enough UNITY intelligence points have been gathered one can use some of these points to get a “UNITY most wanted” mission. This mission then has a choice of 3 lair bosses – entering any of the three lairs (5-man instances) and complete them to defeat the boss there will also complete this mission, which then would give 40 UNITY mission points.

So essentially it seems that you can do 5 pretty easy daily missions + 1 lair per day for 50 mission points as the max per day. The UNITY headquarter also has a store where people can by purple level items (very rare) for their UNITY mission points. A primary item costs 1000 mission points and a secondary item 250 mission points. Since there are 3 primary item slots and 6 secondary item slots it mean that the theoretical minimum to get all purple items from UNITY missions are 90 days.

UNITY here to save the people...the animals...the manimals!

Since there seem to be 3 different lairs to choose from it also mean that one has to do each lair at least 30 times, or spend longer time on doing just the simple missions. While better than nothing I am not that thrilled about the options and it is not really important for me to get all this purple gear either, so I do not think I will do very much of the current UNITY stuff. Still I might do some of it, which is still more then what I usually do with a character at max level in other MMOs.

The Nemesis system in the game has a similar point system where one also can buy purple items for the same prices. But in this case it is Nemesis mission points. I have not kept a close look at how much one get for each of the Nemesis missions, but when I had reached level 40 I had about 275 Nemesis mission points gathered. So I guess it would take a while to collect through the Nemesis system also.

Standard equipment for an evil mastermind/Nemesis - a death ray

On the other hand, I find the Nemesis system to be more fun – it has really a few neat missions in there and are overall more enjoyable than what the UNITY missions seem to be. But there is a limit on how often the Nemesis missions are triggered.

For those that like to repeat dungeons/lairs/instances over and over again to get some better items I guess the system could be ok. But that is not me, so I will see how much of it I end up doing.

Ais Kreem’s final ding

My superheroine Ais Kreem has now reached the max level in Champions Online, level 40.  This is the first character for me to reach max level in this game and it has been a fun ride getting there! For a casual gameplay where I have played in mostly short sessions with a character it has worked out fine. Most of the time solo and sometimes in a team. Getting together a team with other supergroup members or a PUG has been quite straightforward also, most of the time.

Fighting evil, in all shapes and forms

Ais Kreem started out with some Ice powers, which has been the primary power choice, but then mixed in with a few other powers from Supernatural, Gadgeteering and Telepathy powersets. It has been fun playing around with different combinations.

One of the concerns has been that there has not been enough content if one does not want to grind mobs. Perhaps this has changed a bit during the course of the play and more content has been added, but at the time of reaching 40 I had a bunch of missions still in my mission log, a number of them I knew were around but I had not picked up yet and I have still some of the lairs (5-man instances) left to do. I have picked up a few of the “grind” oriented repeatable missions (kill 150 mobs of X in Y, collect 20 of Z from mobs in W), but generally only completed them if that happened automatically while doing other missions.

Lemuria is a neat zone to swim around in

I have no definite favourite of the five outdoor zones in the game – Southwest Desert, Canadian Wilderness, Millenium City, Monster Island and Lemuria. I liked the Stronghold prison area in the desert and it was nice to have the big green monster Grond jump around everywhere and wreck havoc. The Canadian terrorist group Hunter-Patriots,  VIPER, Teleois clones and other groups in Canada was also fun. Millenium City was a mixed bag I think, some good points, but also some less exciting parts. Monster Island has been pretty cool and the underwater world of Lemuria is quite neat also – I like the higher emphasis on playing around in 3 dimensions there.

Soviet submarine captain zombies can be a bit grumpy

Another fun part are the Nemesis encounters. My Nemesis which I created at level 25 is still going strong, plotting ways to take over the world and other matters that are typically something that is the day-to-day life of an evil mastermind.  So I have had to put him jail, stop various plans and deeds and sometimes also saved the world from evil, triggered but my dear Nemesis. Quite enjoyable and we are still going strong.

Dr Jadernij Vek, my nemesis, plotting to release an old evil creature

By reaching level 40 I have now joined UNITY, a group tasked with fighting crime hotspots all over the world (well, the 5 zones in the game at least). Instead of xp one receives some UNITY mission points, which can be used for various things – I have not checked this yet.

Who laid this egg?

Almost at the same time as reaching max level for my character, she also reached the max skill level in crafting, 400 in Science. The crafting has not been a huge part of the experience, but there has come out a few useful items and outfits from it. Cryptic has expanded a little bit on what you can make here also during the past months. It is a nice-to-have extra activity, but not something that would be the main attention in gameplay.

For those that wonder how long it took – my /played time was a bit more than 5 days and 5 hours I guess (did not check when I dinged), i.e. around 125 hours.

Onward towards new heroics