Filed under: Rise and Shiny

Here I am making myself crazy once again. Why? Why do I insist on visiting games that I know will provoke issues both physical and mental? I guess it's because lately I have been fascinated with MUDs, or multi-user-dungeons. They are better described as text-based MMOs or choose-your-own-adventure books written with thousands of other players. It's a fascinating concept, especially when you consider how dissimilar it is to today's modern, easy-to-play offerings. The ancient design of the MUD now feels fresh, so much so that I have decided to dedicate a future article about the possibility of MUDs' viability in today's three-dimensional world.

I have found some good and some very bad over the last several weeks. I've also stumbled across brand-new versions of the migraines that often bother me when I concentrate way, way too hard on PC text. I have to admit that my issues do not seem that common, but it is important to look at a game from all angles, even from the angle of someone who has specific issues. BatMUD has tested my patience over the last few weeks and several hours. It's also shown me some wonderful adventure and sparked my imagination.

Dark Legends, the new title from mobile MMO king Spacetime Studios, is already creating a buzz with its liberal use of an energy pool that is sapped as players go through standard gameplay. If this mechanic were packaged any differently and inside a sandbox, it's possible that people would call it "realistic" or "hardcore." Unfortunately, problems set in as soon as players realized that playing the game for hours on end would require some infusion of real-life funds or the ability to kill pretty large chunks of time in non-combat areas.

I would argue that the gameplay does not have to be designed for marathon gaming sessions. It's very possible that the "casual" part of the game's description actually means "casual." I still had issues with the mechanic; don't get me wrong. But if I was bothered by anything it would be Dark Legends' lack of borrowing features from Pocket Legends, Spacetime's flagship mobile MMO, which offers actual persistent areas and other MMO staples.

Of course, it's possible that Spacetime is simply trying something new. Heaven forbid it should attempt a new design!

This column will turn two years old on May 8th, 2012. I'm proud of not only the fact that I have been able keep up the column with a decent amount of content and writing that has slowly gotten better over that time but also the fact that I have introduced the readers of Massively to so many games that they wouldn't otherwise have known about. Recently, I have increased my efforts by streaming odd and indie games as well as writing about the relatively new world of mobile MMOs.

This might all seem like I am attempting to build some sort of indie hipster street cred, but the totally honest truth is that nothing thrills me more than exposing a new game to the world or giving an older game some much-needed sunlight. If someone posts, "This game is still around?" in the comments section, I call that a win.

From now on, I am going to tweak how I do things for Rise and Shiny in order to raise the quality of coverage. Let me explain how as well as give you a few figures to illustrate just how many titles I have covered.

This article was a long time coming. Not only have I avoided taking a look at any sort of pure MUD for many years, but I meant to write this up last week but real life interrupted my plans. I just didn't think it was fair to write up a first impressions based on only a few hours of play. I was quite hesitant to take a deeper look at Gemstone IV mainly because I knew that the non-stop reading would surely create more migraines that might derail my work again. I was very worried, actually.

Luckily, the Gemstone IV client is customizable enough to allow me to create a "book-style" experience: black text on a white background. I don't think I'm alone in my inability to view bright, colored text on a dark background comfortably. If I were, popular websites would still look like they were from 1996. We've moved past ugly fonts and horrible color combinations.

Unfortunately it took me most of the time with Gemstone IV just to learn how to play, make the text comfortable to read, and understand what my character was supposed to be doing. Once I got comfortable, though, I honestly had one of the most enchanting times in a game yet.

There are certain designs in the MMORTS genre that have frankly started to burn me out. I was a bit worried that I had reached my tolerance point and would not be able to stomach another city-builder until I had put some time between me and my latest preview or first impressions. It's an amazing genre, and as I have argued before, it's more MMO than most MMOs. As in many genres, successful design is copied. The ironic thing is that all of these copies often dilute the market, making it worse on everyone. As much as I love the genre, I am a bit sick of running into the same design, stereotypical settings, and mechanics. Of course, we cannot take these copies and paint the whole genre with a terrible brush; if we did that, all of MMOdom would be in trouble. Still, I'm sick of it.

Luckily Firefly Worlds, maker of Stronghold Kingdoms, has a very persistent "PR ninja" who made a point to poke at me on Twitter. Usually, we funnel all PR contact to our lead editors for organization purposes, but hey, I can't resist a nice voice and a lovely looking game... and I have a high tolerance for fun people.

Zandagort, a very independent browser-based MMORTS by Zanda Games, really holds a lot of promise. I want to get that out of the way first. Potential, unfortunately, has nothing to do with a player's current experience with the game. No one sits at his PC or laptop and says, "Man, I sure am excited about what this game could be, so I'll keep playing." But that very potential often makes me a little depressed. Potential for good also means potential for bad; if a game is unfinished and has the chance to grow, there's likewise a very real possibility that the game could fester, lose development love, or worse yet, die on the vine. There's no guarantee that even a "AAA" massive-budget game like Star Wars: The Old Republic or RIFT will last forever or even a good amount of time. Who knows?

Usually with an indie game, if it isn't shining and picking up an audience relatively quickly, it just might be in trouble. Zandagort has an audience; I can see players in the outer reaches of space. I am not going to pass judgment on the number of players simply because indie budgets are often easily supported by a smaller playerbase, but I wonder what type of audience it is. I am open-minded and enjoy the occasional slog through an intense "spreadsheets-in-space"-style game, but Zandagort really wore down my patience.

This week I was lucky enough to come across a pretty cool browser-based MMORTS that offers no combat whatsoever. That's right -- this game is all about trading, conquering your neighbors with prices, and building a reputation that is better than everybody else's. Remanum is brought to us by the makers of the famous Travian set of games. Slowly, but surely, the developers are trying out different styles of gameplay that all offer an art style that is obviously their own. I was thrilled to see them again try out something different with Remanum.

So how boring is a game that offers nothing but trade wars? Well, that all depends on how much you care for scratching your chin, sitting back, and plotting. It's a game of patience and working with others. I never pretend that most MMORTS titles are supposed to move at the same pace as Vindictus or Guild Wars; games just have different styles. Remanum is a great game to enjoy any place and any time, from a few minutes to a few hours a day.

I had a few issues with the game, so let's cover those as well.

In the past, I've made a few attempts at trying Realm of the Mad God, a "co-op fantasy MMO shooter" by Wild Shadow Studios. But I've been unsuccessful primarily because I couldn't find a way to get past the seemingly repetitive gameplay, horrible forum community and non-MMO status. Luckily a reader named Rick wrote to me and convinced me to give it one more go, saying that it was an MMO by showing me pictures and listing examples of how many players can be found in one area.

That settled it. I made a new account and jumped in, fully expecting to have an OK time but to come away knowing that this game was just for twitch-hooked kiddies. It turns out I was wrong, and now you know why it is a general rule of mine to always give a game a second chance. Or a third, of course.

Lime Odyssey is an Anime-themed free-to-play MMO brought to us from publisher Aeria Games. It features three unique races and... oh, forget it. You already know this probably. The game has a lot of buzz behind it, and Aeria is known to put out some great titles. I knew that when I was invited to check out the alpha for a first impression of Lime Odyssey, I would find a game that was high-quality and beautiful and ran well.

Sure enough, I did find that game. There's something magical about so many Korean titles. Many of them sport some of the most refreshing and original artwork and music, and the engines that many of those titles use is perfectly fit for almost any machine. Yes, there are the three races to choose from, the great Anime graphics, the neat crafting system, and combat systems and much more. My only regret is that I was able to spend only a few days in the game.

It's funny, being asked to take a look at a game like Spirit Tales, one in a preview-only state. As usual, I am excited any time a new game pops up in need of being checked out, but when I am alone on the server and surrounded only by soulless NPCs, I feel a bit like a kid lost in an amusement park. Sure, it's a blast to ride all of the rides, but after the fifth go-around on the ferris wheel, I would be missing some humanity.

I soldiered on, however, and luckily I had some of the most adorable graphics ever keeping me company. Not only that, but my gracious hosts stuffed my tiny widdle pockets with cash-shop money. I blew the bulk of it on costumes for my little avatar and had quite a bit of fun playing dress-up. At first, I thought the game was going to be nothing but a game of dress-up.

Luckily for me, my livestream audience seemed to know more than I did.

This week in Rise and Shiny, things did not go as planned. This sort of thing actually happens often enough to almost be a problem: I pick out a title or am tasked with taking a look at a certain game, but communication lines are crossed and the game I was supposed to give a first impressions-style look at closes down its beta in the middle of the week. Like I said, it does happen, enough to force me to plan out my articles on a month-long calendar. Even then, things can change.

So instead of talking about the game I said I was going to be this week, Seven Souls Online, I decided to go over the three games that I gleefully jumped into over the last few days. This will not be a typical first impression-style piece but instead will hint at the specific adventures I had while playing these games.

These wonderful, wonderful games.

Some games grab you from the moment you see them. Sure, I get grabbed a lot, but I know when a game appears to be different or interesting. As I watched Adventure Mike play Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds on MassivelyTV over the last few weeks, I knew that I had to play it. But wait! Mike was playing it himself and doing a good job of exploring the game for the viewers. I couldn't just take that first impression from him and claim it as mine!

So I looked up KRU Interactive, found out its cool history with Nexon games, and decided to try Dark Ages instead. It looks similar to Nexus, so I thought I would be in for a great time.

The very first thing that I came across after logging into the game was a description of waking up in an inn room. It was a mysterious beginning, and I loved how the moment reminded me of how often our characters are just thrown into a world without much of a cutscene or explanation.

Fiesta Online is getting pretty long in the tooth. Heck, it's a game I have played and returned to several times over the years, and I've never quite stuck with it. Don't get me wrong -- the game is quite nice-looking for its style and always seems to have a ton of players on, but there are a lot of titles I would love to be spending time with. Unfortunately, I have to pick and choose, and a game like Fiesta Online will normally land on the list of games that I play very infrequently. I had a great time recently when I toured some high-level content with the developers and was more excited to hear about a browser version of the game coming out soon.

Why would a browser version matter? I have predicted (and I am still sticking by this prediction) that most MMO content will be delivered via the browser within five years. The truth is that most MMO players probably play a browser game already, especially when you consider games like RuneScape, Dark Orbit, Battlestar Galactica Online, Club Penguin and scores of others, but I mean to say that the browser will become the accepted way to get your MMO content. Yes, one day we will look back, giggle, and say, "We used to download and install massive files just to play a game!"

So how does Fiesta Online's browser version perform, and what is the point of having one in the first place?

You know, I haven't been as head over heels in love with the graphics of a game in a long time as I am with Cloud Nine. As I get older, I find myself disliking more realistic graphics and tend to enjoy cartoony, or even better, stylized graphics that do not quite push into cartoony territory. It's not like I'm trying to relive my youth; I just take a game more "seriously" when it attempts to look less serious while actually being pretty serious. I'm talking about games like Free Realms or Ryzom or Glitch: games that are cartoony and not ultra-realistic but do boast some serious gameplay or even lore behind the art. I love that.

So when I first logged into Cloud Nine, you can imagine how I felt.

As with many of the games I choose for this column, I am a bit lost as to how long the game has been in existence, what sort of time has passed since the game first began to allow players into its world, and what the exact state of the game currently is. With PlaneShift, a game that seems to have existed since I was 12 years old and has remained in some sort of testing or beta phase since then, I am even more unclear. Really, it shouldn't matter, but I can see the importance of knowing whether the game you are about to play is in testing or has even been released yet.

Without those key words, a player can become confused. Is this quest broken, missing parts, or just poorly designed? Is the game world empty because it's midnight or because the testing crowd is on at different times? I've heard from developers who keep their games in a beta state for years and years, and it usually means that they simply want a sort of explanation as to why the game feels incomplete. I say release it already and perhaps you'd attract more players anyway.