Opportunities abound!

Well readers, I'm just making a brief post to give you an update about a great opportunity to take advantage of!

Mythic Entertainment, the force behind Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer online appears to have reactivated all accounts for two weeks. If you're a potential player or former player of these games you may have found your golden opportunity to try before you buy! You can bet this is what I'll be doing for the next two weeks.

Play to your hearts content with the "Return of Legends!"

• Warhammer: Age of Reckoning details.
• Dark Age of Camelot details
• Ultima Online details
  

Of Beasts and Bullies

Nintendo has been busy lately, apparently bullying websites into removing their images from the latest Pokemon game. Below is a copy of the letter that was sent to Pokébeach and was subsequently posted on their site:

Dear Sir or Madam:

We are legal counsel to Nintendo of America Inc. (referred to here, with its parent and affiliated

companies, as “Nintendo”). As you are no doubt well aware, Nintendo is one of the world’s

leading developers and distributors of video game products. The Pokémon franchise is one of

Nintendo’s most popular game series, and the upcoming release of the Pokémon Black and

Pokémon White video games has garnered significant media attention. The intellectual property

associated with the games, including the copyright in the underlying software code, visual

depictions of the games, and characters found within the games, is the subject of copyright

protection in the United States and abroad.

We recently learned that you have posted screenshots and other protected content from the

Pokémon Black and Pokémon White games to your website at http://pokebeach.com. While

Nintendo appreciates your interest in and support of the Pokémon game series, your publication

of this content infringes Nintendo’s copyrights in violation of federal law. Your activity also and

has the potential to cause substantial damage to Nintendo, and leaves Nintendo with no choice

but to take steps to protect its intellectual property rights.

We have accordingly submitted a copyright infringement notice to your domain registrar under

the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and anticipate that your website will be taken down shortly.

We encourage you to immediately remove from your website all graphics, screenshots, and

other protected content taken from the Pokémon Black and Pokémon White games. Going

forward, you must also refrain from posting any screenshots, videos, or other content that

infringes Nintendo’s rights in the Pokémon series or any other game.

Your full and immediate compliance with the foregoing should render further action on

Nintendo’s part unnecessary. It is essential that we receive your written response confirming

that you have taken these necessary actions by Sunday, September 19, 12:00 p.m. PDT,

however, or Nintendo will have no choice but to consider its alternative legal remedies.

PokeBeach.com

September 18, 2010

Page Two

Please contact me if you would like to discuss this matter in further detail. Nothing stated herein

shall constitute a waiver of any rights or remedies of Nintendo of America Inc., its parent or

affiliated companies, all of which are expressly reserved.

Very truly yours,

X

You may be wondering what it was that all these websites did to arise the ire of Nintendo. They simply posted pictures of Pokemon Black & White. This strikes a nerve with me because as a journalist I always like to have images to illustrate my points. When someone tries to put restrictions on the reviews of their game after it's been released it feels like trying to suppress information. This suppression of imagery feels the same way.

What really baffles my mind is that these websites are blatantly advertising their game for free. There's been speculation that the memos were sent out because the websites used emulators to get high quality images of the game since they can just screen capture. This idea doesn't make sense to me, taking a picture of the DS screen doesn't come out well. Case in point take a look at this picture I took of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles on my D S of a character I made to look like Edward Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist.

As a result, Nintendo has a lot of negative PR now amongst the hardcore fans. So much so that I'm actually having second thoughts about whether or not I want to buy the game. In fact I'm actually hesitant to write about Monster Hunter Tri because Nintendo could come after me.

A dirge for the fallen

At the time of writing this, I have learned that All Points Bulletin is being shut down, and find myself unable to connect to the server. I am assuming the worst, as they said it would be within 24 hours, making this the fastest failing MMO at 80 days.

This is one of the few things in the game industry that actually makes me physically angry. Shutting down APB in it's entirety is like taking good book with grammatical errors and burning it rather than fixing it. During beta APB had some glaring issues that doomed it from the start, issues that would have been hard to fix but were still very fixable.

If I were a developer for APB, here is a list of what I would have done:

1. Free to Play. It was failing, they knew it was failing, they could have converted the game to free to play by making the billboards all around the city have actual ads to generate revenue until the game got to a point where people would want to pay for it. A classic postponing tactic that can save a game.
2. Communicate your issues. Acknowledge your community and what's wrong with the game, players can give you great suggestions. If you want an example on how to do this properly, look at Global Agenda. They send out polls to all their players and former players, great way to find what your player base wants.
   
3. Delete all the upgrades. This was seriously the most infuriating part of APB. Upgrades made way too much of a difference, they essentially removed the element of player skill. The SHAW loaded with Savage 3 (A damage upgrade) and Spray and Pray 3 (A firing rate upgrade) allowed you to essentially destroy any car in less than two seconds.
4. Remove the grind. There was no reason to have a grind for weapons, cosmetic stuff I don't mind, but rewarding players for time played and not skill is not a good model for a game that is first and foremost a shooter.
5. New matchmaking. Four vs Four battles were alright, but when the matches got bigger it was a lot more fun. This is assuming of course that you didn't get a mission that was impossible for a large team.

In summary, APB was a MMOTPS that borrowed all the wrong features from MMOs. Many of us looked upon it as Grand Theft Auto IV in MMO form. The sad truth was that GTA was a far better game.

GTA IV did not have the grind in multiplayer to unlock new weapons, the battles were larger than 8 people if you wanted them to be and all the players were on equal footing. APB should have been GTA in a persistent world but obviously with a different system for weapons. The locker system they had in place would still work great in the new model.

The comparison to GTA is what doomed APB. GTA doesn't charge you a fee to play online, and as my comparison shows had better game play. What APB would need to keep would be it's cosmetic customization, it's array of vehicles, and persistent world.

And so we say goodbye to something that really could have been amazing but instead fell flat on it's face in a puddle of the disappointment of those who had followed it for years. We can only hope some necromancer amongst studios somehow acquires the rights to APB, fixes it and gets it to the glorious vision we all had in mind.

Marching on in Warhammer Online

Warhammer Online is a game that from the start has been plagued with numerous problems. Ever since release the developers have been working hard on fixes and balance however and as time progresses the game just keeps getting better. As I'm writing this my wee (both literally and in terms of levels!) Squig Herder is sitting in Mandred's Hold, waiting for my share of the treasure for successfully defending the keep.

For those who don't know, Warhammer Online is a game whose main focus is Realm vs. Realm. Realm vs. Realm is a way of saying that players choose one of two factions at the beginning of the game and fight for them throughout their stay. This may sound identical to PvP but there is a key difference. Your success in PvP depends upon your "realm-mates" because if they're not strong enough to face the enemy then your army will crumble.

Overall while there is still drama and problems in a community like any other game, games in this style seem to have drastic improvements over games not of this style. An example would be in World of Warcraft people belonging to the same faction of you are going to have very little effect on your experience, so why help them?

The game had an immense amount of players at release, with a tremendous amount of servers. This number has dwindled drastically, with a large chunk of the playerbase leaving with the release of World of Warcraft's "Wrath of the Lich King." More players bled away over time as problems persisted but many of these problems are gone, a few persist but pale in comparison to the good points of the game now.

It's a simple matter to level up your friends with the right tools. If your realm has fought hard enough you'll have access to a place called "Land of the Dead," with a summoning stone to bring lower level players in you can level them up extremely quick and get them right into the war. My personal recommendation is to RvR your way all the way through "Tier 2" which is the second set of zones in the game. Tier 3 is quite inactive, this may be because everyone seems to go to Land of the Dead to level quickly when they get to that point.

They've overhauled the city sieges to make them much more of a player vs. player affair with the recent patch and this is a very welcome change to me. As it used to be, the system was like rewarding an epic build-up of player vs. player combat with a large battle against a computer. Large battle against the computer is what I got fed up with when I quit WoW so I didn't want it to be the ultimate goal yet again. It seems Mythic has been listening and turned it into an experience that is truly fun. Now you're fighting players every step of the way.

City sieges are incredibly common now, which means that almost every player can experience it and win loot on top of experiencing it!

Pros:

• Interesting PvP that is active almost all hours of the day.
• Collision detection on all players in PvP combat, leading to more strategy than the norm.
• With recent changes much easier to get "the good gear" to have more interesting battles.
• For the most part a good community willing to answer questions and help, moreso than the average mmo.
• Crafting is easy to hop into and can help you drastically.
• Pioneered the "Public Quest" system which many games are now borrowing from.

Cons:

• Terrain bugs: This has been haunting the game since launch. Sometimes you'll get stuck on the tiniest of objects. Sometimes you'll get stuck so bad that you'll take fall damage and -die.-
• Rewarding loot for public quests: I got first in contribution for the keep defense I wrote about at the beginning of the post. Probably because I killed a great deal of enemies, aiming for healers to slow their progress to their crawl. However because of the rolling system I didn't win anything.
• Rewards in City Sieges: There's a lockout timer for rewards in Sieges which I can understand but the length on them seems a bit excessive. I successfully defended "The Inevitable City" earlier and didn't win my roll and yet I found myself with the lockout timer much to my dismay.
• Population: While not as bad as some older games it's declined drastically. However things seem to be getting much better as the game gets better.

My final verdict on would I recommend it:

Yes. Try the trial, there's an infinite trial but you can't level past level 10 with the trial. You may run into "twinks" which are characters built specifically to be really strong at this level but they're easy to combat by twinking yourself. The secret is stack armor talismans, at low levels they make all the difference in the world. If you played the game at launch and quit try the free trial, there's a streaming client so the download for the game is not that large at all.

Oops!

I've been quiet for a while and I do apologize! Summer is finally upon me and I have much more time to play, consider and write about games. I've been playing some games since I finished my finals and I have a lot to write about. Some of it I can't write about because of NDAs, but those will be held onto until the NDA is lifted so I can discuss what I've seen.

This summer I'll be going into overdrive and trying all sorts of games. Here's a list of games I hope to try (or return to) and write about this summer.

• Warhammer Online
• Dark Age of Camelot
• Asheron's Call
• Lord of the Rings Online
• Global Agenda
• APB
• World of Warcraft
• Aion
• Darkfall
• Mortal Online
• Dungeons & Dragons Online
• EVE Online
• Fallen Earth
• Guild Wars
• Monster Hunter Tri
• Pirates of the Burning Sea
• Planetside
• Everquest 2

These are all games that have caught my attention and really need to be evaluated. A lot of these games I have already played at some point in time but deserve a recent chance with a critical eye.

Next week will be the first review, likely on Global Agenda or Warhammer Online, both games I have been playing recently.

Anticipation abounds!

It always seems like at least once a year I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for some game or another. However it's been slow for me for a long time. There's been no mmo's upcoming where the concept just blows my mind and I have to have it ASAP for the longest time. The last game I can think of that had this effect on me was Darkfall Online which was a tremendous disappointment to me because of the rampant cheating going unpunished but that's another story.

However my excitement is born anew with the news about a game that has flown under my radar until this year: APB, also known as All Points Bulletin. With GDC 2010 having just wrapped up in San Francisco some new details about this game have been released and I like what I'm hearing. The game has in-game leagues and ladders so people know who the most bad-ass players are because statues of league-toppers are in the social area of the city of San Paro where the game takes place.

If I had to describe the game to someone who wasn't familiar with it I would say that it is essentially an MMO version of Grand Theft Auto. Players can choose to be criminals or enforcers (essentially police or bounty hunters) and their gameplay depends on that choice. For example criminals may get a job from someone to commit some horrible crime, and once word gets out enforcers in the area are assigned to stop this crime.

To say I love this concept would be a huge understatement because the idea of forcing players into direct conflict which is such a breath of fresh air from: "kill a bunch of these monsters which are so ridiculously weak that it's no challenge at all but you'll level so deal with it." Warhammer Online came close and while I love it I do not think it went far enough for a game toted as a PvP-centric game. When I say Warhammer came close this is because it had public quests that brought you into direct conflict with the enemy in competition which was an absolutely amazing thing at the time of it's release and still something I don't see often at all.

The sad thing is that we'll all have to wait for a while for APB to come out, there's mixed reports about what the release dates are and it's been pushed back several times. I can only hope that APB is exactly what I've been waiting for and that Realtime Worlds, the company who makes the game, doesn't make any terrible decisions near the beginning that can doom a game in the current climate.

And now for some related material!
A video I made of some GTA IV shenanigans
Youtube channel for APB Videos

Battle of the Heroes.

Statesman of City of Heroes and Defender of Champions Online

One question that I get a lot as someone who has played both City of Heroes and Champions Online is which game is better and believe me it is a very difficult choice.

The two games are direct competitors, both vying for a very niche (albeit large) market of a super hero MMO. The target audience is obviously people who grew up reading comics and I would say both capture that quite well.

When one has to compare these two games there are several things you need to keep in mind. Champions Online was released recently as opposed to City of Heroes which came out in 2004. These games when compared have some very typical arguments that come from comparing a new and old game.

Champions Online boasts an impressive engine that allows you to do things you would expect from a super hero console game like lift objects off the street and throw them or use them as a weapon. There's nothing quite like having a super-strong hero capable of lifting up a semi truck and beating a common crook in the face with it. Champions Online youth also allows it to have an interesting graphical style, cel shaded to be more specific like a comic book which is a cool effect.

City of Heroes' age lets it lord a tremendous amount of content over Champions Online and can make Champions' seem puny in comparison in terms of content alone. In fact City of Heroes content grows at an exponential rate because of the amazing and revolutionary system known as the "Mission Architect."

The Mission Architect is by far my most favorite feature of any MMO ever. This system allows the player to create their own storylines and quests for friends or even complete strangers to play. This makes it so any time you make a new character you can play through something completely new all the way to max level every single time, even if you make a thousand characters.

Champions boasts a very interesting and interactive combat system and better customization for player powers, letting you create a character exactly the way you want and not restricting you nearly as much as City of Heroes does. However being so young there feels like a general lack of content, a problem which Cryptic seems intimately aware of and is attempting to fix with it's new free expansion: Revelation.

The nemesis system in Champions while very cool could have been a whole lot better. For example my nemesis in concept is an insane demon who's only goal is to kill me. I don't think he would steal high-tech devices and chemicals, that isn't his style. But with the current system it's random what your nemesis is doing so it doesn't really feel like I'm fighting the person I envisioned.

City of Heroes trumps these flaws in the nemesis system as you can just create your own missions with your own nemesis with the mission architect. If you're lazy you could always just look one up as well.

My final verdict: City of Heroes is the winner... for now. Champions to me has more interesting combat and this leads to more interesting fights but City of Heroes is so far ahead with content for now that I would say I enjoy playing it more. If Champions were to implement something like the mission architect then I would say City of Heroes would be in trouble.

But really, I'm just some guy on the internet who plays way too many MMOs to think that he's the foremost expert on what makes a game. You should really try both games for yourself if you're interested. Both have free trials available and I recommend you give them both a shot.

City of Heroes
Champions Online