What makes an MMO game social? It seems to me that there are a few ways to meet friends in games:
Meet them out in the world, and join up with them to accomplish shared goals in the open world.
Meet them waiting for, or matched for, an instance – dungeon or battleground – to accomplish the shared goal of that instance.
Join a Guild, or whatever the game calls a group larger and more permanent than a party, and meet other folks in the guild that share the above goals.
Meet them outside of the game, and come into the game together.
But once you bump into someone in the game, there are aspects of the game that encourage or discourage the formation of longer term Social Interactions in the game.
I give Aura Kingdom a big Thumbs Up. I’ve been playing for a few days now, and AK is a welcome relief from a lousy game like Allods. This is not an in-depth review, but some first interesting impressions that may cause you to seek a more in-depth review, of which there are plenty. One of the best reviews is the one on YouTube by MMO Grinder. But here are some of my thoughts. I may have covered some things that MMO Grinder didn’t talk about.
Low Stress Game to Play
First of all, AK is a low stress game to play. You level quite quickly. In an hour or so you’ll be at level 10, if you read all the text of the quests, of which there is a lot, but the story is interesting. If you are an AltaHolic [ addicted to many toons ] then the next times through you can click Skip, but the first time though it’s best to slow down and read the dialog. There is almost no voice acting. So put on your reading glasses and settle back. The story is worth it.
There is an interesting race that is unlike anything I’ve seen in other games. The Gibberlings are three characters, which you can design individually as you create them. But they act as one in the world. Here is a Gibberling family which are druids, with their pet squirrel.
Gibberlings are Three as One
Graphics
The graphics look better than Wow – at least better than the historic places of Wow. The character models are better than the old Wow models, but not as good as the new Wow character models.
Some shots taken in Skyforge. Click to see these on Flikr.
Skyforge is a Science Fiction based MMO. I’m not impressed. The graphics are pretty good, but don’t show much imagination. And the animations are stiff and clumsy.
Hurray. I’ve reached level 65 with a character. No surprise, it was a gunner.
But, to be honest, the end-game story content leaves much to be desired. There is a straightforward story line to discover the whereabouts of Dakuryon, the Archdevan lord, and to take him down. The whole story line takes only about two days to play through from the Airship Docks at Velika.
The end of the story line leads you to level 65 and gives you an almost complete set of Idoneal gear. This gear cannot be enchanted, but it has extra buffs as you have more of it equipped. And you get all but the belt and brooch. The belt is available for about 4200 Vanguard Points, and at this point you may have a little more than 2000 points. A very nice brooch is available for an easy quest line at the Nakatam Tower that introduces you to the Lightbringers who created the sky castles.
They make up for your class not being able to heal.
This is a warrior working Solo at level 59 in Tirkai Forest. As you can see, killing a few bears drops a ton of these orbs of two types, long term and instant heal.
As it turns out, I didn’t need them very often. But sometimes you get a ton of them, and sometimes you get none. So if you are working an area, and you don’t need them now, you might want to let them lie about on the ground in case you do need them.
But why do we need these random heal drops? In my view, it’s because BlueHole designed the Tera classes based on Dungeon activity and the Holy Trinity of Tank / DPS / Healer rather than designing balanced classes that could solo PvE and PVP.
Some of my toons have reached level 60 and so can participate in the new content of the “Fate of Arun” update that arrived in Tera recently. The content begins with story quests that you are given when you reach level 60. At this point these stories begin at a new Airship Platform just outside of Velika and you begin a series of rather simple quests that lead you to the new content to deal with the new threat posed by the Archdevans. Continue reading “Tera – Starting Fate of Arun”
Gunner armor is metal, but has a different look than the other classes. There are only a few styles – 3 or 4 – that you will see, but the colors differ. Here is the bare midriff style.
I subscribed to Wow for a couple years and had a nice time. I joined soon after Cataclysm which released Dec 2010, which destroyed much of the world, and played through until after Pandaria released in Sep 2012, with it’s new continent and new panda characters – Kung Fu Monk Pandas a little like the movie, but that’s another story.
I began to feel like I wasn’t getting my money’s worth. The Pandaria content was too hard. Unless you had spent a lot of time grinding the high level dungeons and raids for the high level gear, you were disadvantaged in the new content. I could make it through, but it felt like a slog, as the other content never was.
The changes they were making to Wow was increasingly about PvP, player vs player, rather than Player vs Environment, which is what I enjoy. Exploring and questing. Getting that rare hunter pet or mount.
So that’s why I left Wow. Since then I’ve played other games, all of them Free to Play, but they all seem to be going the same way. I guess the money and attraction is in PvP and harder content. I guess the game designers have done the math and the folks that play that content are the ones who pay. Of course Free to Play really means either Pay to Look Nice or Pay to Win, or a combination of both.
Tera Fate of Arun
Tera is a very beautiful, expansive and free to play game. But Tera in recent expansions went the way of Wow, with knuckle biting dungeons and expansions, and concentration on PvP at expense of PvE. Let’s remember that building a few dungeons or Arenas for PvP is much easier than building a large new areas of open world with hundreds of quests. The recent Tera Fate of Arun expansion added a modest amount of new land area, a minimal set of quests to get from 60 to 65, and then a few dungeons and PvP arenas.The 60 – 65 quests could be completed in a couple of days on most classes.
Brawler New Class
All of Tera’s new playable classes have been race / gender locked. This greatly reduces the work involved to build the classes, since the designers only have to do one set of animations, costumes etc, rather than six or more for all the races / genders. They are going for the big impact with the least amount of work. Seems greedy to me. Tera is very popular and is apparently making a ton of money.
A class defines the spells and play style of a character : magic or melee, does it have pets that help fight, does it summon helpers, does it heal other players.
The other thing we all noticed with the new classes is that they are overpowered compared with the previous classes. These new classes do more damage and take less damage in a fight than the previous classes.
In May 2016 they are adding a new Elin only class – the Ninja. This is the fourth Gender / race locked class after Reaper, Gunner and Brawler.
Guild Wars 2 – The Same Things Happened
GW2 – a World Boss Fight
I played Guild Wars 2 for quite a while. It is Buy to Play, no subscription but the game costs $40 – $50 to buy up front. I enjoyed it very much, but the new expansions have gone the same way as the other games.
The Jungle – Heart of Thorns Expansion
The new content is so difficult that you cannot be alone in the forest. If you are not in a group you will be killed. That’s all well and good, and quite fun if you are in a group of a dozen or so people. Some of the large events in GW2 seem to have 50 – 100 people playing. Much larger than any Raid in the other games. These are quite a lot of fun, but be prepared for an hour long event. But when they up and all disappear and leave you standing alone after a big fight, then you are in deep trouble.
I have built 14 characters in GW2, all to max level and explored the whole world – at least the whole first world – with most of them. But the new content is no fun if you are alone.
Hunter with Rare Pet and Tricked Out Gear
What’s Up with Old Versions of Wow?
So why go back to old versions of Wow? The expansion I’m having the most fun with was released in Nov 2008. Wrath of the Lich King. I’m also running a version of Cataclysm, but much of the game quests and other content are missing, although all the classes and world is there to explore.
It’s free. The servers are open source and the old clients are available, if a little difficult to find. The client are of course owned by Blizzard – makers of Wow – but the server was reverse engineered and is open source. Anybody can find the source up on Git. Blizzard can’t control that.
Blizzard has recently cracked down on public servers where folks have provided publicly available servers to play the old versions. One of these in particular, Nostalrius, is now in discussions with Blizzard over their existence. Of course, copyright law is such that if Blizzard does not protect their copyright, then future challenges will be lost. So they have to crack down on public servers to protect their copyright of the game.
But Blizzard cannot control running the client / server privately. They cannot control server code that was reverse engineered, and they cannot control the distribution of client code that has not been modified. The client is the same one that blizzard used to use, but the one file that points to the server is changed to point to the private server.
Not only is this a fun gaming experience, but it satisfies my curiosity. There is much to learn. How do these servers work? They are open source, so if you want to dig into the code, or build them for Linux you can. But in addition, without building them, you can learn how they work by looking at the database they run from. The server runs from a MySQL database which contains all the data about the quests, characters, NPCs and other information so that you can see how things are put together.
Recently the popular games have provided, usually for $50 – $100, an instant level up to max level feature. Well these private servers have that for free, of course. As a game manager, GM, there are dozens of commands, including levelup to increase your level.
A Tricked Out Warrior
You can level up and dress up without all the grinding. As a GM you can create any item in the game with a simple command, so you can look up that Epic gear on the Wowhead database site and then type in the numbers and have the gear. Since you are alone, or almost alone in the world, running dungeons is not the same kind of experience, although I have yet to try to kill the Lich King solo, but you can have any gear you want. You can certainly run lower level dungeons solo. I’ve run level 70 dungeons solo as an 80 and that’s fun.
So what’s the challenge? Well even with the best gear, and God Mode to remove the fear of death, the fights at high levels are challenging. Some of the critters are actually above the high level cap of 80 – we are talking the Lich King expansion with a level cap of 80. There are other choices for versions with other level caps, but this is most complete and most stable.
Storm Giant in Howling Fjord
I took this big guy, several stories tall, down, but it took several minutes.
With my trophy
In addition, I just love exploring and these worlds are very large.
Wow Wrath of the Lich King World
The old world is the two continents in the center, Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms. The Outland was added in Burning Crusades and contains many wonderful and varied environments and challenges and the Northrend area to the North was added with Wrath of the Lich King and that is where you find his fortress, Icecrown.
Icecrown Fortress
Icecrown is too large to fit into one picture.
Another View of Icecrown
Some of these bad boys guard the gates.
Level 81 World Boss
So bottom line, I’m having a great time exploring and learning on a private and free, older version of World of Warcraft
Windy Weather 