[MUD-Dev] Total Annilation of Downtime

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

shren wrote :

> On the subject of new games, here's what penny arcade had to 
> say about Asheron's Call 2:
 
> -- Quote from penny-arcade.com --
> ...
> -- end quote --
 
> Wow.  MMORPGs and Monty Haul meet in a harmonious union that
> brings in new gamers to the field.  Have we been talking about
> this and I missed it?  It's very, very interesting.  In the
> average situation the average gamer finds an item and all he
> really wants to do is turn it into gold, but I never thought of
> letting him do it directly.  They are really gunning for mass
> appeal here, and they seem to have succeeded.

Well I bought the game yesterday. The first thing that struck me,
more than anything mentioned in the penny arcade extract, is that
they've removed player character stats completely. They've also put
a diablo-like skill tree system in, which does allow you to cancel
skill choices and reinvest the points elsewhere (moderated by a time
to transfer - I have no idea how long this takes yet). The skill
descriptions lack sufficient detail to allow you to make informed
descisions. As a power gamer, I really hate this, although I guess
its somewhat mitigated by being able to reinvest points elsewhere.
There are certain skills which can't be uninvested in though, so I'm
not certain how this may limit changes people wish to make later on.

Some of the skills that may be selected lead to a subtree
representing class specialisation type abilities. By investing in
these, other subtrees are closed to the player. They've also further
confused matters by awarding skill points each time you level. These
are used to buy a new skill. You can however improve a skill you
have already purchased by spending xp earnt on that skill.

There is an over-arching quest now. Once you select the quest
window, you can see a number of hollow circles corresponding to
quests on each continent. As you complete them, the circles are
filled. These quests tend to involve getting a key into a dungeon,
fighting your way through to the boss of the dungeon and killing
him. Once done, the quest is completed, you are rewarded and you
travel on your merry way to another dungeon. These dungeons are
shared, but the bosses respawn fairly quickly. Depending on your
level, you may or may not need to group to progress through it.

As well as the major quests, you can also get mini quests from
clicking on 'ancient idols' or receiving a potion that when consumed
starts a hunting quests. E.g. Kill 10 red wasps in 6 hours.

The item to gold conversion is actually fairly annoying, the UI
being pretty slow and clunky, especially as I've not found a way to
turn the confirmation box off each time you convert an item.

They've pretty much invalidated the use of any packet sniffing
cheats as you get a full radar and map display. The radar lets you
see monster/player level, so I can't see what benefit one would get
from packet sniffing.

The graphics are pretty stunning, but my PC isn't up to having them
at anything like full detail (athlon 850+geforce 3 ti500+512 meg
RAM).

Of particular note, there are no npcs in this game. Logging into the
Euro server, which had only 200 players last night was a pretty
lonely experience as a result. I know npcs barely count as company,
but its certainly a spartan world, with the off cluster of empty
outposts. Its actually quite nice in a post apocalyptic everyone but
me is dead sense, but I do wonder about bothering to have the
central server! I'm maybe being a little unkind to the game, as I
did in fact manage to get a group to complete one of the over
arching quests. It was an unspectatcular battle with a boss chap,
which I couldn't even loot due to incredible lag.

The crafting system sounds interesting, but I didn't spot any
details on how it worked in the manual, so haven't had a chance to
look at it yet.

They've definitely worked to eliminate down time, the death
penalties are fairly limited (although undoubtedly I'm too low level
to see how bad they get (only level 10)), and there is no corpse
retrieval etc. The absence of a requirement to get food or bank in
town has pretty much removed any incentive I had to
visit. Especially as there is no encumberance.

Since there are no npc vendors, if you want anything that a monster
doesn't drop, you have to buy it from a craftsman. I'm not really
sure how one is meant to meet up with one though - there are no
automatic trader bot type things and no reason to go to/hang around
town. This aspect is definitely under developed.

You can't inspect what another character is wearing. This is one of
Everquest's best features - whilst it doesn't let you see the name
of any item someone is wearing, you can see the thumbnails for each
one. That's a great balance as it gets people motivated to improve
their gear, and gets them talking to each other too. The only
mistake EQ made was the message the inspectee got in their chat
window that made far too many precious people feel violated ('x is
inspecting your equipment').

They've kept their allegiance system, whereby each player may have
upto 12 people pledged to them. Then when these pledges get xp, and
extra amount is generated for the liege. In theory this is in return
for advice+equipment, but I never much liked the system in the
original game. The main innovation is that they've added proper
allegiance chat, so you can talk to everyone in the hierarchy in a
more traditional guild type fashion. This is an innovation for AC
given that in the previous version, you could only talk to the
person you'd pledged to, and other people at the same tier as you
were hard to discover/converse with.

Another interesting phenomena I've noticed is the lack of community
web sites for the newer games. Neocron, Earth & Beyond and now AC2
seem to be suffering in this regard. I suspect this trend is set to
continue given the apparent unprofitability of running them. The
games that have a good web community seem to be the older ones
kicked off during the dot com boom.  Having said that, Microsoft
have done a fairly good job on running the developer supported one.

Continuing in the tradition of AC1, there is a plan for monthly plot
development which I'm led to believe will tie in with the
over-arching quest system. Decembers hasn't yet been delivered
though, so I can't comment on what its like.

I find myself wondering if they've stripped out so much because they
actually wanted to, or moreso because they ran out of time. There
are allegations that the game has been dumbed down, and I can't say
I disagree.  This undoubtedly the easiest game of this genre that
I've played so far in terms of combat difficulty. It was fun playing
last night, but I suspect once the novelty has worn off, I may be
quickly bored.

Playing AC2 really reminded me that it's going to become harder and
harder to launch new MMOs given that the old ones keep getting
polished and enhanced. Launching a sparse game and planning to pad
it out for two years is looking increasingly unviable.

Oh, and as to turning items directly into gold, they pinched that
idea from dungeon siege ;)

Dan
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