Stex Toys

I presently don’t play City of Heroes, and haven’t done since before Christmas. However as always I’m still actually paying my subscription fee

Now the Architect release, which for those not up on CoH news allows players themselves to create missions in the game, selecting locations, NPCs, and I believe awards, for other players to experiance, is out. I’m tempted to boot it back up, purely to look into this potentially important point in MMO development.

Of course opening up a game to user created content, as the likes of Little Big Planet has done, will always lead to a huge amount of crap, but amongst all this effluent you’ll inevitably find some complete gems. Making sure these gems can be sifted out of said crap is the real key to making any system such as this a success, so I’ll be interested to find out what rating system, or other method has been implemented. Gamasutra are already writing up articles on this but there’s nothing like experiencing it for yourself.

Gamasutra – News – City Of Heroes’s Mission Architect Births 20,000 Arcs In First Week

I was tidying up my Google Docs today and came across a file with an unidentifyable file name. Turned out to be an SQL dump of my old blog from a good time back. Skipping through the content I came across an old article that I spent a little while writing, so I thought I would bring it back to life, out-dated and dusty as it is. Anyway, what follows is provided as it was when written sometime back in 2007..

A Truly Satisfying MMO is an Unattainable Dream

Before I get into this I should make a couple of points clear. The first is that, despite what you might have thought when you first read the subject, I haven’t come here in a deliberate attempt to bash MMOs and start a flame war. I am an avid fan of MMOs and have been for some time. My XFire account will show some of my dedication (http://www.xfire.com/profile/countstex) although I should point out I haven’t been using it all that long, and so much of my MMO play time in unrecorded.
The second point I should bring up is that I was born before 1980, in 1974 to be more precise making me the grand age of one third of a century now. This means I’ve been playing computer games in their various incarnations for a long time. So hopefully I should have enough knowledge to make my points have some sort of credit.

So, to get to it, satisfying MMOs are an unattainable dream? What brings me to this conclusion? Well the germ of the idea formed whilst I was listening to Episode 51 [MOG Podcast], and in particular the talk of the free for all Vanguard server play, not that my thinking is specific to this game; it is a general feeling for all MMOs, in fact it’s probably mainly inspired by my on again off again relationship with my EVE Online subscription.
In order for it to make sense you need to understand how gaming has been for most of its history, and as there may be those who can’t remember the pre-internet days I will explain myself. All of our early gaming moments where had in solo play. Not because we chose to play solo games, but because in the vast majority this is all there was. Sure there where the odd arcade cabinets with two or four player controls, and some of the 16-bit home system had split screen gaming, but largely everything was about you. Think of it as the ‘Only you can save the world!’ idea, which is a common scenario for a whole deluge of games! We all grew up playing games where we were the number one guy (I say guy as female toons in games have always been under-represented) So it is somewhat ingrained into our psyche that we can be number one. Hell a whole genre of games sprung up where we weren’t just number one, we were god! And that is the whole point really, it was all about being the best, these worlds didn’t exist if we weren’t playing them, without us there where nothing.

So how does all this relate to MMOs? Well along they came and we all started playing them, and we all have some great times I’m sure. But we’re always left feeling that something isn’t quite as it should be. And I believe this is the back of our minds telling us something. We’re not the best. We’re not god. And worst of all.. this world goes on quite happily without us! We’ve all felt that pull when you’re not playing.. knowing that things are carrying on, and we’re missing it! In fact to be any good at all, you really have to be a part of a guild of some kind. And that means you’re going to be working with other people, and that means… you’ll never be the one who saves the world.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not on a downer about ‘hell is other people’ ! But this is a whole new way of gaming, and one that we didn’t grow up with. So in the same way that the new Star Wars films never quite hit that old childhood mark, MMOs will never quite leave us satisfied.

This is no reason to not play them of course! And I will continue to do so, and will continue to enjoy them. However I have to be ready to always have a small part of me disappointed by the game. Perhaps this is the part which makes me buy the new Zelda each incarnation. The part that still wants to build cities, and wipe evil from the face of the planet. The part that still wants to be GOD.

For those of you who have stuck with my outpouring of thoughts here, I thank you, and I hope there is enough truth in what I’ve said to make you have a think about it. If however it turns out I’m on my own and been speaking some of the hairiest of bollocks for the past few paragraphs then feel free to take me down.

We are, that is my Fiancee and I, approaching the final levels with our latest mains on City of Heroes. Neither of us have gotten this high before, that being level 41 out of 50 possible levels. We did once before obtain top ranking in World of Warcraft, although that was back when the top level there was 50 also.. or was it 60.. whatever it was originally.

Unlike in WoW however we are starting to actually experiance some of the End Game content. I chose my first ‘Epic’ powerset skill last night and we’ve been taking on some Arch Villians helping others in the Supergroup to ding 50. (I just went to look for a Wiki page on ‘Dinging’ in MMOs and there isn’t one, I am somewhat shocked!) This is helped by the wonderful SideKick/Exemplar feature in City of Heroes, allowing either players who’d levels are lower then the team to be boosted up to just one level below whoever they are sidekicked by, or Exemplar for someone and have their level reduced to that of the team. This makes it far easier than and other MMO I’ve played to get a team together, and especially from ones own Supergroup, or Guild/Clan to give it a more generic term.

As we start to get through some of the more interesting areas I’ll put down my thoughts on what NCSoft have gotten into the game for those that make it all the way to the top, besides unlocking the two new character classes, or Architypes as CoH calls them.