FFXIV: First Impressions

I hope everyone had a happy holiday! I spent the day with some of my gaming friends and received a copy of FFXIV that a friend had ordered for me.

First off this is a gorgeous game! So gorgeous in fact that even on the lowest settings I had a hard time getting more than 15 frames per second. I really hope this doesn't cause problems during battle scenes. 

I decided to play as a Miqo'te hunter, similar to the Khajiit character I once played in Skyrim.

Also like Skyrim, this game starts off in the back of a wagon, though your character is not a prisoner. Instead, the player is an adventurer, answering the call of a country called Eorzea to aid them against invaders from the north. A chatty merchant fills the player in on the situation, along with an ambush that stops the wagon. So far I think it's been one of the better ways of getting the player into the story I've seen in an MMO.

Because I play so many different MMOs for this blog, one of the first things I do now is go through the settings and keybindings. One problem I'm beginning to notice more and more is the fact that many MMOs like to assign keys to the number pad, along with numlock, scroll lock, home, and end keys. This isn't so good for laptop players like me who need to press a key combination in order to access those keys. I think future MMOs would be better if there was a laptop keyboard setting under the keybindings.

A nice little feature I found while reassigning some of the key bindings was the ability to make your character turn his head face the camera, which is how I took the first screenshot. It's pretty nice for players who enjoy taking screenshots.

After playing around with the emotes for a bit, I started questing and found the way quests are given out to be a much needed breath of fresh air. Instead of clicking on a questgiver and encountering a wall of text in a box, FFXIV gives you the basic objective and rewards in a box.  After clicking accept, the NPC begins talking to you in the style of classic console RPGs. A few sentences at a time that appear to be coming directly from the character feels so much more immersive, and actually makes me want to read what the character is saying.

Turning in quests is slightly different as well. Instead of automatically handing over the quest items, the player is presented with a trade window where they must place the quest items.  Weather or not this is a good feature remains to be seen.  While I found it to enhance immersion, I also found myself looking for a button to hand over all the items at once rather than one at a time. Only time will tell if this feature grows on me.

Finally, the starting village feels more like a maze than an open world. To get around, you follow paths, hemmed in by tall rock formations. A series of crystals allow you to warp quickly from one area to another, and after a few levels you get a spell that allows you to warp from anywhere in the world for a fee.  All and all, I found my first few hours of FFXIV to be more fun than RIFT.

Champions Online: Guild finder and locked out of a boss battle

Today was a good day to keep playing Champions Online. This was actually the first MMO I started playing after quitting WoW 4 years ago. In that time, I mostly played single player FPRPG games like the Thief series, Fallout 3, and Skyrim.  I started playing CO with a single player mindset, and spent a few months just playing solo. It also didn't help matters that I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to the people I play with. The main thing that got me into WoW was the fact that it had RP servers to keep the non-RP folk (mostly) separate. I felt more confidant approaching other players in that game; something that I didn't feel logging on CO due to the different server architecture. I would speak up in zone chat occasionally, but I never really pushed to make any connections. When I actually did join a guild, (supergroups in CO) I found I had joined one where there was never anyone around, just a big roster of inactive players with one or two logging in occasionally.

Today I felt like pushing a little harder, so I called up COs guild finder on the social panel, and had a look for social, RP lite guilds. A bunch came up, with names and recruiting info, complete with hyperlinks to their websites.  Problem is, none of them are clickable.  It would really be nice if I could click on a hyperlink within an MMO, and have the game safely minimize and launch my browser.  Also sorely missing is an indication of how active that guild is.  The average number of players from the guild who logged in over the past 24 hours alongside the average number of hours logged in by each player, would make choosing an active guild so much easier.

But the worst flaw in the guild finder was the fact that I can't just click a button to see a list of currently online players from that guild.  I had to click on the player finder tab, type the name of the guild as a search parameter and hope someone was online.  When I went back to the guild finder tab, it had cleared itself, and clicking search again with the same exact settings I used before (social, RP lite) showed NOTHING!  The list of guilds I was looking at was just gone.  I had to clear the settings, search (which gave me a list of every guild in the game), enter my parameters again, and search again in order to get the original list back, though it wasn't exactly in the same order.  I don't know how problems like this got past quality control for so many years..... it boggles the mind.

The good news is that I eventually found a nice guild which allowed me to get a bit further in one of the games Adventure Packs.  APs are standalone storylines that lead the player to some exotic location beyond the city and culminate in a huge boss battle.  This one was called Resistance and it takes the player into an alternate dimension where the city is a war zone ruled over by a madman. It had a very nice storyline and I enjoyed the fact that the player gets to pilot a giant robot at one point. There's something very satisfying about being surrounded by hundreds of tiny soldiers and watching them go flying when you kick.

Then we got o the final boss battle and it was a doozy.  There was just me and another player up to that point, and we got clobbered.  Now here's where terrible game design reared it's ugly head.  For some odd reason, the designers decided to lock players from returning to the battle unless everyone died.  It wasn't so bad when there was just two of us dying relatively close to each other, but it got really annoying when we finally recruited a 3rd player with buffed out healing abilities who couldn't seem to get herself killed!

So I sat there, staring at an impenetrable shield, unable to do anything for almost 10 minutes. It brought my enjoyment of the game to a screeching halt, and made me wonder why the designers thought that was a good idea. A much better solution would be to have the player fight some lower level monsters and maybe disable a shield generator in order to earn their way back into the battle. There's nothing fun about being locked out with nothing to do while the rest of your party continue to fight for their lives.

RIFT: First Impressions

Yesterday I decided to try RIFT.  This decision was influenced by the fact that RIFT seems to be the only MMO I've tried so far that has working social media integration.  LOTRO had a Facebook app at one point around 2010, but development of it appears to have stopped with no announcement as to why.

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?320632-LOTRO-Player-Feed-Fedback/page4

CO also had a /socialmedia menu at one point, but this too was removed without any notification.

http://co-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=205331

I find this puzzling considering the fact that some players enjoy telling their friends what they are up to in virtual worlds.  While some players on the above links are worried about friends and family being annoyed by alerts, I think there are lots of players who might want to share things about their alternate lives.  Better still, it might expose their friends and family to something they haven't seen before....especially in the case of LOTRO, where there are many people who have seen the films or read the novels that may have no clue that a game like it exists.

While searching for information about social media integration, I also looked into smartphone integration.  The idea seems pretty simple, a smartphone app that allows you to chat with your game friends when you are away from the computer. LOTRO doesn't have one, but I found that RIFT does. Further research showed that RIFT also has different F2P model that supposedly gives you all of the content for free.  So, to a plate already full of MMOs, I broke down and added another to my list.

Right away, the first thing I noticed was that RIFT has built in Twitter, Tumblr, and Youtube integration.  It has a built in ability to record up to 10 minutes of game footage and send it directly to your Youtube account without leaving the game.  Very impressive.

Gameplay feels similar to games like LOTRO and WoW, though mobs of equal level seem to take much longer to die than they do in LOTRO.  It also took me a bit to get used to manually looting bodies again.  Due to the mounted combat added in the Riders of Rohan expansion for LOTRO, remote looting was added and proved to be so popular that it was added to the whole game.  It's one of those features you get so used to that I find myself sometimes leaving a trail of shimmering bodies behind in a game that doesn't have remote looting.

I also found myself a little frustrated when I reached the point where I was given player housing, which exists as pocket dimensions in RIFT.  You get the house from completing a quest, and once I clicked on the object, a new menu popped up.  I must have clicked on the wrong button because the menu window was closed I hadn't warped to my house.  The quest said "Go to your house", but neglected to mention how to open up that window again, or even what menu I was looking for.  I finally found it after searching through the in-game help.

The pocket dimension is a nice idea, but it's marred by the dreaded invisible walls that I hate so much in CO.  In a situation like this, I think an island surrounded by a void of stars would have been better than trying to create the illusion that there's more around you and then breaking that illusion with an invisible wall.

Finally, I got a chance to try out the smartphone app which allows you to chat with your in game friends and guild, along with local alerts.  You are also given credits with which you can play scratch cards for in-game loot.  You have a maximum of 6 credits, and you get 1 every hour until you hit the maximum.  It's not a bad idea, but I think a mini-game that teaches you more about the world of the game would be an even better one. Games based on existing properties like LOTRO have the advantage of lore that has existed in other media first, so entering the game feels like seeing that world come to life.

RIFT doesn't have that. I haven't the foggiest idea about the world of the game other than the fact that rifts open there a lot. There seemed to be so much lore related information in the introduction that it made me feel like I was joining a story already in progress rather than starting out from the first episode.  Too many names, places, and events that I know nothing about yet being thrown at me as if I have been reading books about RIFT for a long time.

LOTRO: Friday in The Green Dragon

Ah, The Green Dragon.  Mentioned in both the original novels and the films, this pub is commonly used for RP (Role Play) events among hobbit players.  I've been doing RP since before the internet went mainstream, and one of my quirks is that I like taking songs from our world and rewriting the lyrics a bit to make them fit the world of my character.

My friend Lina playing the lute
while the gathered crowd dances.

Evidently, I'm not the only one, because LOTRO is the first MMO I've played that has a music system.  You equip an instrument, type a slash command, and your character animates playing the instrument.  You can play freestyle by hitting the number keys like a piano, or you can load up an ABC file which contains musical notation similar to a MIDI file.  An add-on called Songbook makes it even easier, by turning the slash commands into buttons.

Playing with my band, the Brandywine Badgers.

Where the music system really shines is in the ability to synchronize songs with multiple parts. This allows players to form bands and adds a whole new dimension to RP.  Turbine really put a lot of thought into keeping RP players happy, yet another reason why I feel compelled to fork over a bit of money for VIP membership.  Players actually organize concerts and music festivals that draw huge crowds.

LOTRO: The Forsaken Inn and some MMO ideas.

I had a rather pleasant experience in the game yesterday that I thought I would share. I was in the Lone lands and I stumbled across an instance for VIP players involving a secret cave below the Forsaken Inn.  I recruited a friend from my Kinship, and we started down.  I'm currently playing as a hunter, and my friend was a burglar, so we're of similar class types.  We found traps in the cave that both of us could disable for a short period of time.  We also found plaques on the walls that neither of us could read.  They required a Lore-Keeper, Rune-Master, or Minstrel to read them, so we pressed on, hoping that the plaques were optional.  The first puzzle we had to solve was a riddle door that required a specific /emote in order to open.

LOTRO is the first game I've experienced where the /emotes are actually part of the gameplay.  I first noticed it during the recent Harvest Festival where I could play a daily game called Troves and Trickery.  After accepting the quest, you are given a limited time to find 4 different NPCs in the area with an info ring over their heads.  When you talk to them, they say something to you which is a bit like a riddle.  One farmer might tell you how bugs and spiders make his skin crawl.  You solve the riddle by targeting the NPC and using an /emote that sounds apropriate based on what the character said, and their race.  So in the case of the farmer, you use the /shiver emote and get a message that you solved it.  Solve all 4 and you complete the quest.

So there I was in this dungeon, using the same system on a door.  It's a clever system that almost brings to mind the old text adventures of the early computer days, and it's a feature I would like to see more often in MMOs.  Moving on, we ran into a series of Gauntlet style enemy generators made out of large bone piles.  Undeads just keep spawning until you destroy the pile, and ranged attacks are weak against it, forcing me to get up close and personal with them while my friend kept the undeads busy.  To make matters worse, the room was also full of spike traps that had to be navigated in order to reach the bone piles.  It made for a very exciting encounter.

Then we reached the blade traps; giant pillars with sweeping blades that do massive damage on each hit.  In all my years playing WoW, I never encountered anything like it.  The first set required slowly navigating a series of pressure plates, stopping to fight enemies along the way.  We soon realized that the best strategy was to let them come to you or hit them from range, because once you hit one of those plates, you get sliced to bits.  It took us a few tries, and we breathed a short sigh of relief when we finally made it through.  Along the way, we picked up pages from a pirate's journal that filled us in a bit on the history of the cave.  The second set of blade traps made us pause, because they were on a timer.  The only advantage was the fact that we had the ability to disabled the trap for a short period.

In the final room we came to, we found more of those rune plaques, along an ancient letter on the floor and coffins that had levers in them.  Problem was, neither the letter or the levers seemed to be working properly when we clicked on them.  We read through the journal pages closely, looking for a clue that would help us open the next gate, but we couldn't figure it out. So I called in a Minstrel player from our Kinship to help us read the plaques.  That first plaque we had passed back at the beginning told us of a hidden door in the room, so we walked up to it and found that it required a class with more emphasis on strength!  So we pressed on again, and back in the last room, we found that the plaques were all names of the deceased, mentioned in the journal pages.

It turns out that the instance was bugged.  The Minstrel player had done it before, and realized it when the ancient letter wasn't working.  So we gave up, but the experience still lingered in my mind.  I loved the idea of an instance that while possible to solo, actually rewards the player for bringing along friends with different latent abilities by opening up extra content within the instance.  In all of the other MMOs I've played so far, I don't think I've seen one that requires teamwork to do more than just kill mobs, and I hope to see more games like this in the future.

Earlier this evening, I was playing Champions Online and trying to understand what incentives there were to becoming a subscriber.  The biggest answer I got from other players was Free Form, where you can customize your character from scratch rather than using a pre-made Archetype.  It seems to me that this idea of playing without classes conflicts with the idea of different classes working together to solve a puzzle.  I spent some time mulling over how the two ideas could peacefully coexist and I came up with a solution.

Backstory.  Have the player pick from a list what the character did before the events of the game. This is what the character knows, and can be used to interact with specific objects within the game world in order to solve puzzles. If CO actually had something like that, I'd probably enjoy playing it a lot more.  Being a superhero isn't just about fighting enemies.  Sometimes it's about playing detective, and that's an area that CO is sorely lacking.

LOTRO: Why must crafting take so long?

I spent this afternoon questing in the Lone Lands, and after a while I had accumulated lots of gems to polish. I went back to a nearby encampment to polish them and found that I had 25 rubies, so I pressed the make all button and spent the next few minutes watching a bar fill up 25 times. It got me wondering why MMOs do this as part of the crafting. I can understand it maybe taking a little time to craft a finished product, but it seems totally unnecessary and time consuming for raw materials that the player might have a lot of. Nothing is really gained by making a player wait.

Champions Online: Perks are worthless

Another thing that occurred to me as I started playing CO again is the fact that there is no real reward for being an explorer/completionist. The designers put a lot of thought into creating a perks system for the game, but after a bit of poking around, I found that the vendor who actually accepts these perk points was removed. I did a bit more research online and found that even when it was in use, the perks only unlocked certain things from the vendor. The perk points I have accumulated here are absolutely worthless.

LOTRO handles this a bit differently, and I think does a much better job at it. In LOTRO, the perks are called deeds, and you get them for all kinds of things in the game.  You get them for using abilities, like the Quick-Shot shown here. The reward is 5 Turbine Points, which is the currency of the Store.

You can also get them for solving puzzles in the game, like these riddle doors I found in an instance recently.  Here, you get points, medallions, a title, and faction reputation.

Turbine is even generous enough to hand out points for completing lots of quests, with multiple tiers and increasing rewards.  Note the (Advanced) tag on the deed and the reward of 10 Points.  The 3rd tier is called (Final) and the reward is 15 Points.

Finally, you get even more rewards for completing sets of deeds!  They even give you a lockbox and a key to open it.

Knowing there's a tangible reward for completing the deed makes a player more likely invest their time in completing it.  Especially if they are a F2P player, since it gives them the feeling that it's possible to unlock more content without actually paying for it.  It's entirely possible to do just that, but with single zone quest pack in the 595 - 795 Point price range and expansion packs in the thousands, it will take a long time spent completing deeds in order to afford it.  Removing the currency cap alone was 395, and required me to complete all of the low level quests in another race's starting zone.  It took a few days, and while I was doing it, I found myself learning more about the world's history and lore. The experience made me feel more connected to the world and by the time I finally reached my goal I was ready to fork over some money for VIP membership.

CO does have a way to earn store currency from playing in there somewhere or so I've been told.  But at Level 27, I've still yet to find it.