Tag Archive for mmorpg

Michael Salsbury | August 14, 2008
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The Entropia Universe

Today at Gen Con Indy 2008 I had the opportunity to learn about the Entropia Universe. To quote their marketing literature:

The Entropia Universe is more than a game. The Entropia Universe is for real. Real people, real activities, and a Real Cash Economy in a massive online universe.

Join people from around the globe who use the Entropia Universe currency, the PED, to develop their characters everyday on the untamed planet of Calypso. The unique and secure Real Cash Economy allows you to transfer your accumulated PED back into real world funds.

That’s the gist of the game. You play it like any other MMO. You wander around, killing monsters, and picking up loot. The loot you pick up can be sold to NPCs and other players for the in-game PED currency. You can also buy PED with real-world money if you want some.

Given that in-game money can be exchanged for something you can spend in the real world, you might expect the game to come with a hefty price tag and monthly fee. If that’s what you thought, you’d be wrong. The game can be downloaded and played without ever paying a cent of real-world money for it. The manufacturers make their money in a variety of creative ways. They sell advertising in the in-game cities. They sell virtual real estate. Recently, they received $400,000 to establish in-game banks that operate the same as banks in the real world, allowing players to deposit and borrow money.

I played a few minutes of the game this afternoon at Gen Con. The user interface is pretty straightforward, much like the interface in any of the other MMOs out there. The W,A,S, and D keys move the character around. The mouse allows the player to turn left and right. Left-clicking the mouse attacks an enemy.

The graphics are probably a notch or two below those you’d find in more-recent MMOs like Lord of the Rings Online. However, they aren’t “dated” or mediocre. Given that I was in a loud convention hall, I didn’t get a feel for the sound quality, though I would imagine that they are on par with the visuals.

As with most MMOs, there is a crafting system in Entropia Universe. Players loot item blueprints from the enemies they kill. They also loot raw materials and components. The raw material and components can be combined at crafting stations, using the blueprints, into items that can be used or sold to other players.

That’s as much as I can tell you about The Entropia Universe at the moment. I plan to load it up and spend a little time with it once I get back home to my desktop PC. The Asus Eee PC I have with me doesn’t have quite enough horsepower to run it.

Update 08/17/2008:  After returning home from Gen Con today, I decided to fire up Entropia Universe and see what I thought of it.  Unfortunately, they don’t support Windows Vista yet.  I haven’t been able to get the game installed and running on my main PC because of this. I’ll try on a Windows XP Pro laptop later and see how it goes.

entropia.JPG

Category: PC Strategy Games, Role-playing Games | Tags: , , ,
Michael Salsbury | August 2, 2008
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Pirates of the Burning Sea MMORPG – Initial Impressions

Flying Lab Software has been demonstrating Pirates of the Burning Sea at the last couple of Gen Cons in Indianapolis, and I’ve been right there each time expressing my interest in the game.  They finished up the beta test in January.  While I didn’t get an invite, my brother did. 

Matt, my brother, said that he really liked the combat model used and thought it was a good game overall, but he never really got his head around the crafting system it used.  He didn’t buy the game after the beta.  Since I didn’t get beta test it, I decided to buy it after it was released officially.

I’ve spent a few hours the last few evenings playing it.  The interface has much in common with every other MMO I’ve ever played.  If you’ve played City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, or a similar title, you’ll pick the Pirates interface up pretty easily.  If not, it’s still fairly similar to first-person shooters.

Because Matt had already analyzed the combat model in the game, I focused more on trying to understand how the in-game economy works.  It’s actually quite well done based on what I’ve seen so far, and what I’ve seen in other MMOs.  That deserves some explanation.

I was one of many people who played Electronic Arts’ “Earth and Beyond” MMO when it was still active.  That game had an almost insanely detailed crafting system.  Each character archetype could manufacture certain kinds of items (reactors, components, weapons, or shields).  One class could mine asteroids for raw materials.  One class could turn raw materials into components.  Different classes could take those components and assemble them into a finished item.   To be able to create a component or finished item, you needed to have the necessary recipe.  You could buy some recipes, but the more useful ones you got by looting an item of the type you were interested in, and analyzing it at an engineering terminal (which destroyed the item and didn’t result in a recipe 100% of the time).  Lots of rare in-game items were destroyed and hopelessly lost analyzing them for recipes, but there was a great reward waiting for you if you could figure out the recipe.

It was clear that EA put a lot of thought into that crafting system.  It was unfortunate that they’d put far less thought into the system players would use to sell those items to one another.  It consisted solely of a chat channel.  You had to advertise your item on the trade channel, hope someone online was interested in it at your price, that you could get to where they were (or vice-versa), and that they had the money.   When you figure that this game was supposedly set in a distant future where space travel is routine, you’d think they might have come up with something as rudimentary as an “eBay style” auction house.  They never implemented one and the game died a fairly early death.

The best crafting system and marketing model I’ve seen yet is the one in World of Warcraft.  Players can locate raw materials, create finished products, and offer them for sale at a central auction house for each faction in the game.  The unfortunate thing with WoW, in my experience, is that it’s rare you can sell a crafted item for more than the cost of the raw materials.

But I digress.  The crafting system in Pirates of the Burning Sea is almost as detailed as the one in Earth and Beyond.  It starts with a warehouse, which is simply a place for your “structures” to store their finished products.  Once you have a warehouse at a port, you can place additional structures there, such as Fishing Lodges, Lumber Mills, Gravel Pits, and the like.  To place a structure, you need a deed (which you purchase or loot) and the relevant raw materials to build that structure.  Once constructed, that structure will manufacture items for you even when you aren’t logged into the game and playing.  The items made by your structures can be sold as-is, or they can in some cases be combined with the output from other factories and turned into a more complex item.  For example, the wood from a lumber mill can be combined with iron from an iron mine to create a barrel, which can be used to store things.  I haven’t confirmed this, but it’s said that a single player can’t produce all the inputs necessary to create a ship.

In addition to the crafting system, Pirates of the Burning Sea contains an auction house that functions in a rational way, given the time period being simulated.  While the auctioneer in one port can take your money for an item at another port, you have to visit that port to pick up your purchase.

I agree with Matt that the ship combat system is a good one, and it can be fun to chip away at the enemy ship before sliding in close to board it.

Boarding battles are rather chaotic, with lots of NPCs running around almost randomly attacking one another.  It took me a while to decide if there was any real strategy to them, and there is, though not (to me) as much as for ship-to-ship combat.

I’ll share more of my experiences as my 30-day introductory period continues.

Category: PC Strategy Games | Tags: , , , ,
Michael Salsbury | August 2, 2008
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The Next-Generation MMORPG, Part 1

I’ve been playing MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) for several years now.  My MMORPG experience includes:

  • EA’s Ultima Online (from “The Second Age” through the Samurai expansion)
  • EA’s Earth and Beyond (from beta up until the plug was pulled)
  • Midway’s Lord of the Rings Online (for the trial period)
  • NCSoft’s City of Heroes (for a month or two)
  • NCSoft’s Auto Assault (for a month or two)
  • Flying Labs’ Pirates of the Burning Sea (account still active)
  • Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (account still active)

Each of these games has unique qualities that separate it from the others, while at the same time sharing many characteristics with them.

Of all of them, I found Ultima Online to be the most fun, owing to the sheer depth of options available to a player.  For example, there are no fixed character classes in Ultima Online.  If you want a character to be an expert healer, archer, and mage, you can work with those skills until your character is exactly what you wanted.  This is something you won’t find in any of the other games listed above.

Ultima Online also allowed players to own an in-game house, permitted them to custom-design that house, and to furnish and decorate it.  Your house also served as a guild meeting place, a storage location, a place to practice crafting, and museum for the trophies you collected during your exploits.  Again, this is something not found in most MMOs.

Earth and Beyond had an incredibly complex, but very cool, crafting system.  Explorer class characters could mine ore from asteroids.  Tradesmen class characters could turn that ore into components, which could in turn be fashioned into weapons, shields, engines, or reactors.  If you looted an interesting device or component, you could attempt to analyze it to obtain its blueprint.  If you were successful, you could create that device or component and sell it to other players.  Rare devices and components commanded a lot of in-game money.  It was the most interesting and challenging crafting system I’ve ever seen in an MMO.

NCSoft’s Auto Assault had a cool post-apocalyptic premise, and made you feel a bit like Mad Max as you drove around battling other vehicles and scavenging resources.  Unfortunately, its crafting system was incredibly frustrating to work with. 

World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online had some of the best graphics found in the MMOs I’ve played.  World of Warcraft also has a very impressive user interface, which can be expanded and extended with macros and addons.

Pirates of the Burning Sea has a great ship combat model, though hand-to-hand combat in the game feels pretty chaotic.

All of these games have one “tragic flaw” that I think will be remedied in what I’m calling “the next generation MMORPG”.  In all of the games, there are no permanent changes in the game world.  If you slaughter every monster in a dungeon, eventually those monsters will re-spawn so that someone else can come along and kill them again.  If you complete a series of quests, nothing permanent changes in the game world.  Someone else can come along later and complete those same quests.  The next-generation MMO will change all that.

In the next-generation MMO, the game world will have epic battles and quests which actually change the logical and physical landscape.  For example, there might be a key bridge which connects two land masses in the game world.  NPC forces might view this bridge as a target to be destroyed, while players view it as a key strategic point to be defended.  If the players fail to defend the bridge, it will be destroyed and they will be unable to access the land on the other side.  To regain access to that land, they would have to commit time and resources to rebuilding the bridge.  But this is a very small element of a much bigger picture.

The best way to illustrate what the next-generation MMO will be like is to describe a hypothetical one.  Let’s imagine an MMO based on the World War 2 conflict.  In this MMO, players could choose to be manufacturers, government leaders, or soldiers.  The manufacturers would supply munitions and other needs to the soldiers and governments.  The government leaders would handle diplomatic negotiations and oversee captured territories to prevent civilian uprising.  Soldiers, naturally, would fight to capture and defend territories.  As you’re probably guessing, the next-generation MMO won’t be open-ended like those of today.  It will have a beginning, middle, and end.  The hypothetical World War 2 MMO would end when either the Allies or the Axis control the game world. 

In other words, where today’s MMOs operate in what is largely a “static” world without any sort of global “campaign” or “storyline” the next-generation MMO will operate more like a real world with players’ actions having lasting consequences.  In the next-generation MMO, if you assassinate an enemy leader, that NPC is dead for the rest of the game.  If you destroy a building, it’s gone unless players work together to rebuild it.

To help “guide” or “structure” the conflict in the next-generation MMO, I predict that there will be human beings receiving wages from the game manufacturer to participate in the game.  For instance, in our hypothetical World War 2 MMO, Adolph Hitler might be played by a real person who works for the game company.  This real person would pick the targets players should attack, pitted against other game company employees working the other side of the battle. 

In the next installment of this series of articles, I’ll discuss how “leveling up” in the next-generation MMO will compare and contrast to current-generation games.

Category: PC Strategy Games | Tags: , , , ,