That Music Lost Its Taste So try Another Flavour

Mornin/ afternoon/ evenin folks (Please delete as appropriate.)

Firstly.. "Adam & the Ants", it's an "Adam & the Ants" reference and it's just struck me that as many of you are from across the pond and as many others might not even have been born, you might not have got it and so it might not be the best title choice. But it is a pertinent one as you shall see…

I've been getting together with CM for many years, to play weekly sessions of various MMO's. Over that time we've been to many strange and alien lands and seen things you people wouldn't believe! We've seen moonbeams dancing off…. no, sorry, I'm falling into quoting films now and that won't do at all!

Suffice to say that we've done all the major tours in that time. We've smoked dubious looking pipes with Elves in WoW, we've asked Frodo whether or not it's safe in LotRO. We've got thoroughly confused in the space lanes of Eve, danced next to the Wompa's of Anarchy and spat in the face of evil in D&DO.

We've followed the well trodden paths of loads of others, too many to think of off the top of my head really. But right now we're scrabbling for something new to play. This is where you might be able to help?

This is all my fault of course. Cursed with butterfly mind syndrome I have tended to be the driving force behind suggestions for new games to try, only to abandon them just as poor old CM is getting comfortable! She does well not to say bad things about me I think. (She isn't is she?…is she saying bad things about me?? you'd tell me right?)

Thing is… I want something different! Is that really so much to ask for? We're playing F2P MMO's at the moment because I don't really have the cash to spare for a monthly sub just now. But all I seem to be able to find are WoW clones and shed loads of these cheap and nasty far eastern affairs.

A couple of years back we tied "A Tale in the Desert". (I almost said "dessert" then. A Tale in the Dessert would be something quite different.) I'd never heard of it before and at the time I thought it was really refreshing! Here was a game which was all about creation instead of destruction. A game about cooperation with your neighbors instead of PvP.

True to form though I was soon getting itchy feet. I started to begrudge the lack of firearms on the list of things you could create in Ancient Egypt. I had no problem finding the blueprints for a Sheep pen or a spinning wheel, but hard as I tried I was completely unable to find the blueprint for a prototype Uzi! This was unfortunate as I was pretty fed up with visiting our next door neighbor and "borrowing" his Bees. I was increasingly getting the urge to shoot him, steal his Bees and generally run amok in his vegetable garden!

The thing with "ATinD" though, was that as a concept it was something I'd not seen before. I tried "WURM" (Any of you tried that?) which kind of had a similar crafting ethic to it, but with a little PvE (and I think some PvP) thrown in as well and on paper it sounded good. But in practice it was too glitchy, primitive and non newbie friendly for me to get anywhere with.

The thought I keep coming back to though, is that there HAS to be other titles like these out there that I've never heard of. Something a little different, something that will tick all the boxes, scratch the itch, stop my infernal wanderlust!

I can't be seeing all that there is to see, these tepid lists of clones and islands of tedium in a sea of mediocrity can't be all there are to find!

I hear it on the grapevine that the residents of MMOWatch, have to put baskets over their heads so that the sun can rise! So hopefully then you can dazzle me with whole lists of brilliant suggestions of places to which we can boldly go, where no Badger (or CM) has been before.

Badger

Hi Badge, Just join us in DDO and you'll enjoy yourself; at least Cm does and when you're as OLD as she is, that's saying something!! (Don't worry folks, she won't remember I said that 5 mins after reading it)

I understand completely Badger. I currently play WoW simply because it's the least crap MMO out there to use as a time filler between RPGs. I'd love some variety, but I haven't found any WoW alternatives that I wanted to play for more than a few weeks. The closest I got was Age of Conan, but it lacked content. I hear it's much better these days, but I just can't get myself to start playing it again.

I'm currently hoping SW: TOR might be the thing for me, but if it's not.. well, I'll probably pick up the next WoW expansion. Sigh.

DDO is SO much better than WoW!!

If you want something that is a bit different (at least in mmorpg terms) that you haven't played you should try Atlantica. Atlantica is an mmorpg with turn based combat where you have up to 9 characters in your party and is set in a fantasy/western/sci-fi/ect. version of earth. (most of earth) (You can check it out at http://atlantica.nexon.net/ )

Thanks for that guenthar, I'll have a look at a few gameplay videos and see how many boxes it ticks.

I'll be watching SW:TOR with interest Maylander. I enjoyed both KotOR one and two, although I never got around to finishing the second one. So it'll be really interesting to see what they manage to do with an MMO. I'm approaching it with an open mind (though sadly at the moment a closed wallet) and am ready and willing for Bioware to dazzle me, but am reluctant at this stage to buy into the hype.

Badger

Poor Badger. All he wants is a game that will Stand and Deliver solid gameplay, making him feel like a regular Prince Charming out there in his Place in the Country. It would be handy if the UI made it easy to determine Friend or Foe so that he could wield the Whip in His Valise to Kick some monster butt in that Dog Eat Dog gaming world. He might be a regular Goody Two Shoes, but when it comes down to it, he wants a game that has enough Room at the Top to crown him one of the Kings of the Wild Frontier. Something innovative, not just a Zerox of the same old recipes.

Don't spend too much time with the question, though, because he's Desperate but not Serious.

And I'm spent….

dteowner said:

Poor Badger. All he wants is a game that will Stand and Deliver solid gameplay, making him feel like a regular Prince Charming out there in his Place in the Country. It would be handy if the UI made it easy to determine Friend or Foe so that he could wield the Whip in His Valise to Kick some monster butt in that Dog Eat Dog gaming world. He might be a regular Goody Two Shoes, but when it comes down to it, he wants a game that has enough Room at the Top to crown him one of the Kings of the Wild Frontier. Something innovative, not just a Zerox of the same old recipes.

Don't spend too much time with the question, though, because he's Desperate but not Serious.

And I'm spent….

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Oh...very well played sir!

Badger

My girl had me playing Hello Kitty Online w/ her for about a week. It was kinda lame, kinda fun, cute and free. So bizarre, the Sanrio world is all so cartoony and surreal and everything's moving - it seriously looks like a huge LSD test. Monuments, natural structures, architecture everywhere in homage to the resident Diety Kitty. There's even little cute stone temples and stuff, it's wierd and kinda fun for a while.

Do lots of quests to collect things in the world, increase skills, level, get better loot, grow different plants on your personal farm and forge/tailor/cook to complete quest things..

Jess is a crafter, one of the things she likes about it is that it isnt a simple 'get me this object' fetch quest type grind, it instead forces you to craft a lot of quest items instead. It's a trippy little acid trip of a time waster game, but I cant say that it was entirely unpleasant to play. Just would have been better i think had I still been a pot smoker!

How about I keep that in reserve for now.

Badger

City of Heroes plugging time!! A word of warning - I stopped playing about a year ago (after something like 10,000 hours of play) so some of my info will be a bit dated. They just added a free-to-play server and I really don't know squat about how that works.

Right when you start the game you'll be dropped into the superhero creation system. I have yet to see a better system in any game, single or multi-player. You've got a bunch of sliders to govern your basic shape, truckloads of costume options, and you can even fine tune the colors of your powers or what sorts of weapon you've got.

You also get to customize powers as you go. You pick out a couple of power sets (primary and secondary) and, as you level up, more powers become available from these sets and from 'power pools' that all character types can access. Levelling up will also give you additional "enhancement slots" you can add to your powers. You get to pick which powers get these slots and you get to pick what goes in the slots. Some powers don't allow certain kinds of modifiers but, in general, you get to decide whether a power will do more damage, become more accurate, recharge faster, use less endurace, or whatever.

The travel powers are quite impressive, too. These let you move VERY quickly around town by flying/running/jumping/teleporting. Low level characters are stuck jogging around for awhile but you should be able to get that done in less than a week.

The UI is extremely customizable. You can grab any text window you want, resize it, pick what text it will display, and drag it anywhere you want. You can have up to 9 power bars and those can be shaped and placed, too. (Screenshot)

Missions (aka quests) come in two types: hunts and story missions. Hunt missions are the old "go kill 20 somethings" and take place out in the world. They are also almost universally ignored by most players and plenty easy to skip. The story missions are instanced maps where you and up to 7 other players on a team go in and beat up on enemies and/or click glowing objectives. Sometimes the story will just cover the one mission, sometimes there will be a series of a few missions, and occasionally you'll get a 'story arc' where several missions are strung together to tell a more complex story.

Mission difficulty can be customized if you find them to be too easy. You simply have a chat with one of the many NPCs that adjust such things and you can make the enemies in a mission higher level or more numerous.

One real nice thing about the game is enemy variety. When you start out, enemies are fairly generic and consist of mostly punks with guns and baseball bats with the occasional kamakazi mage tossed in just to make sure you're still awake. As you progress, though, enemies will start doing things that require a degree of tactics. Enemies will start putting you in holds, shooting area-of-effect powers at you, slowing you, draining your endurance, confusing you so you attack allies, healing each other, self-rezzing, speeding themselves up, teleporting around the battlefield, summoning additional allies, and other dastardly deeds that mess with your tactics. And I'm not talking about just end-of-mission bosses, either, I'm talking about all the enemies you're running into.

This plus the customization is what really made the game great, IMHO. You've got a wide variety of highly customizable powers and you are going up against a wide variety of enemies. That multiplies out to a heck of a lot of tactics to work out.

Of course, there are minuses. They recently updated the graphics engine which added some nice eye candy but the game still shows its age in polygon counts. Playing solo can be done but I find it gets pretty repetitive unless you have at least three people or perhaps two people with the difficulty turned up a tad. The instanced maps can get very repetitive even on your first playthrough.

There's tons I haven't touched on… creating custom missions for yourself and others, player bases, physics, the great humor… I'll just leave it with this:

Thank you Zloth, excellent review.

"City of Heroes" is one of our past visits as it turns out, together with "City of Villains" and also their younger sibling "Champions Online", or is that the other way around..

"CoH" (and co) is an interesting example I think as it has aspects, like the creation of your hero for example complete with the writing of your own back story, which really are done differently to anything else we've tried. It's here that I personally found the most fun in the game. Yet in other ways they are classic examples of everything I am bored with in the genre.

Under it's pretty pajamas (underpants on the outside or otherwise) I always felt that this series with it's check box style quests, was big on the grind and ideal for power levelers, but not so friendly for the casual player.

In fairness that particular criticism could easily be leveled at many of the more recent MMO's and I have to say I really did enjoy the character creation aspect.

Badger

Well, if you're looking for a change in questing, Guild Wars 2 should fit the bill. No quests. None! It's all done by zone events. I've got no clue if that's going to work but I'm planning on paying to find out!

Nuts to all this gaming nonsense! You'd think this is a gaming site or something. What's the next band that Badger shall use to test my Dick Clark-esque knowledge of 80s lyrics and song titles?

dteowner said:

Nuts to all this gaming nonsense! You'd think this is a gaming site or something. What's the next band that Badger shall use to test my Dick Clark-esque knowledge of 80s lyrics and song titles?

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Ah dte, strong in eighties Force you are, but derail my fact finding mission you would. That way leads to the dark side. Create another thread you must.

Badger

I'm tempted to recommend Fallen Earth.
http://www.gamersfirst.com/fallenearth/

The strong elements of FE is an enormous world mostly travelled on horseback or by vehicle. Heavy focus on crafting and scrounging. Quests/missions and atmosphere is great.

A Weaker point is the combat system which feels unpolished to me.

I hear it's going F2P, I don't know if that 's a good thing or a bad thing, but at least it makes for an inexpensive way to try it.

oooh...now that looks interesting Bostur! I'll have a peek at that.

Badger

Actually Fallen Earth is F2P and has been since Gamers First took over.