A Tale of Two Combat Systems

As I’m sure everyone knows by now Funcom’s Age of Conan has gone F2P.  A good move, I approve.  Because of this I decided to give it another go.  I popped back onto my trial toon, a level 5 Dark Templar, and started mucking about.  After about 10 minutes I was ready to throw things at my monitor in frustration.  Why?  Because I play a Warden in LotRO.

LotRO’s Warden uses a system called Gambits.  You have 3 basic moves (Spear, Shield, Fist) which combine into special moves, Gambits.  Once you’ve built a Gambit you can fire it off with another button press.  So, for example, if I want to put a DoT on the mob I am fighting I would do Spear, Shield, Fist then fire off the Gambit.  I need to place a HoT on myself?  Shield, Spear, Shield, execute.  Taunt an enemy?  Fist, Spear, execute.  The system is very fluid, quite challenging and excellently tuned to a keyboard MMO player such as myself as I never need more than 5-6 keys to access all of my powers.  I just have to remember all the sequences.

In AoC they have combo moves.  In AoC you have 3 basic moves (at the start).  They correspond with the direction of your attacks.  Upper Left, Upper Right, Middle.  To execute a combo you need to chain those basic moves together.  Sounds like the Warden, right?  Slight difference, you have to choose the combo you want to execute ahead of time.  For a keyboarder like me this is horrible since 1-3 are taken up by the normal moves.  I have to mouse click the combos I want.  Clunky as hell once you’ve had any experience with LotRO’s Warden.

Now, if I’m wrong and there’s a way to do the LotRO style I’d love to be proven wrong.  I could probably go far in AoC if that’s the case.  But without that I can’t see AoC being something I could enjoy.  It saddles the worst aspect of traditional MMOs (tons of skills, limited keyboard space) with an additional system which doesn’t help in any way.

Rethinking Rift, Part 1

A confluence of factors have colluded to make me to revisit Rift.  First is the fact that I have been dedicating my LotRO playtime to my Warden which is level locked to my wife’s Minstrel.  After duoing for a while playing solo on my Hunter has become lackluster.  So rather than force myself to play I’ve been looking for another game to occupy my time.  Monday Night Combat has been kinda filling that niche but it’s a decidedly love/hate relationship.  So thanks to two people I follow regularly, Lord T. Hawkeye & MMO Gamer Chick, I have been debating either giving World of Warcraft: Cataclysm a spin or break down and try the release of Rift.

In the end it came down to knowing myself.  As my wife puts it, I’m an MMO slut.  If an MMO winks and gives me a come hither look I so fall for it.  Well, for a month or two.  Then I boot it to the curb for the next hot floozie to come along.  And since WoW’s had its claws in me before I knew even if I tried Cata I would eventually fall for Rift’s siren song.  So might as well get it out of the way now, right?

So a few nights ago I broke down and purchased Rift on Steam.  Download, update, patch and good to go.  Of course I had to look up which servers OTG decided to invade.  PvE?  Check.  Defiant?  Check.  Sweeet.

First up was to go with the calling I had tried in Beta, a Kelari Mage.  I decided to name her Athnamas after my Draenai mage in WoW.  However instead of going Warlock/Necro like in beta I decided to try to stay true to the original Athnamas and went Stormcaller/Chloro.  For the first few levels this was fine and I was having a decent time of things.  By 18 I was dying every 10-15 minutes.  Single mobs were hard to fight.  Any adds were the death of her.  On the occasions that I had someone else along she was fun to play but overall I figured a Mage was not for me.

My second choice for calling was Cleric.  This was largely because of MMOG’s enthusiasm for her cleric and, well, we hybrid, bear-tanking players need to stick together.  Again Kelari but this time named Avonavi after my WoW Draenai Shaman.  Decided to go Shaman/Druid/Justicar.  Within a few hours I had hit the areas that were killing Avonavi and just steam-rolling them.  What a difference chain mail makes.  That is even with no active healing since I’ve not unlocked any direct heals.  A melee class with passive heals?  Yes, please!  2-3 mobs, not a problem.  I even got to play my normal pet naming game.  The green faerie the Druids get?  Yeah, she’s Kylie.

I got to Avonavi to 21 and the 2nd zone and while she is a blast to play and may still be my main I couldn’t help but think that I might have given up on my Athnamas a bit too soon.  I really liked the Beta build so maybe toss the character concept out and go with a build that I know I enjoyed?  That’s just what I did today.  Respeced (Hmmm, 1 c or two there?) into Warlock/Necro/Chloro and gave it another go.  Headed out to the areas that gave Athnamas trouble before.  No trouble at all.  3 mobs?  No sweat.  5?  That all you got?

The synergy between those three souls is obscene.  Deep enough into Necro to get the pet tank.  Deep enough into Chloro to get the basic heals based on the targeted mob.  Then dive into Warlock to unlock as many DoTs as possible.  Send in the skellie tank, load up the mob with DoTs and just wait.  The pet gets healed by attacking.  If it is getting lots of mobs I can use my charge (which is always full) to heal it through 5 mobs beating on it at once.  If my mana gets low I can just swap health for mana.  With Essence Link (+2 Symbiote) from Necro my health pops right back up.  For times when I need even more personal healing I can drop a Life Leech on a mob.

So that is where I am.  Tomorrow, my refined impressions, I promise.

Oh, and for those wondering, yes, Athnamas is Samantha spelled (mostly) backwards.  Yes, that Samantha.  I was looking for a Draenai sounding name for a mage to go along with my first female Draenai, Avonavi.  Yes, Avonavi is Ivanova spelled backwards.  I was trying to find a name to fit a female toon with a quasi-russian accent.  Yes, that Ivanova.  In fact it was those two names that got me started on the series of posts on MMO names.  Yes, I need to finish it as I’ve now explained where Avonavi and Athnamas came from before doing so in that series.  Now shush.

Lackluster Zone – Enedwaith

With Teese finally capped at 65 I have been working on the two end zones of Lord of the Rings Online.  The first, Mirkwood, is as the name implies, mirky.  It is an annoying zone as it is constantly shrouded in darkness.  A stylistic choice I may not like but at least the zone itself appears solid.

Enedwaith, on the other hand, is absolutely gorgeous.  Rolling hills, steppes, great ambiant sounds and best of all, not dark! Once I found this zone I dropped Mirkwood like a hot ‘tater and starting cranking out the quests.

However as of late the zone has been grating on me.  Not because of the stylistic choices that Turbine made but because the zone feels poorly constructed.  The quests are all there, the hubs nicely laid out and the story lines are interesting.  But the mobs look like they were placed on a grid.  They’re all evenly spaced.  No chance of a multi-pull and they’re far enough apart that I can run from one end of the zone to the other and with minimal juking never aggro anything.  The front third of the zone might not have it but in the plains it is easy to see.

Secondly, since one of my toons is a woodworker I primarily track and collect wood.  The mallorn scattered throughout the zone is poorly placed.  At least a tenth of them are floating above the ground.  I’ve seen one where there was only the barest hint showing above ground.

I really do prefer Enedwaith’s atmosphere.  But the feeling that it was rushed, that the spawn of mobs and resources, was laid out with a simple algorithm breaks my immersion and really dampens any enthusiasm I have for the zone.  Hopefully Turbine will make adjustments to make the zone feel more organic.

Free to Play (F2P) or Free?

MMORPG.com is running a series of articles called “Bang for your Buck“.  In this series they are reviewing F2P games to see how free they are.  While I agree that this is a good metric to run for F2P games I think the start point of the series as well as the perception it feeds is flawed.

We old crusty MMO gamers are well aware that MMOs cost money for the companies to run on a monthly basis.  That means they need to recoup their investment somehow.  So in no sense of the word are F2P games ever truly free.  However some of the neophyte MMO players are seeing the word Free and presuming it means just that, free.  However Free in F2P suffers from the same fate as Role-Playing does in the term MMORPG.  The context of the phrase changes everything.

Any MMORPG player should know that the RPG portion harkens back to the old-school RPGs where the player guided a character through the story.  While they got to make some decisions and guide some conversation what defined these early RPGs was not the character the player was guiding but the statistics which defined what that character could/could not do, that governed interactions of that character and his/her equipment with the outside world, etc.  So thinking Role-Playing in MMORPG is about playing a role misses that it is part of a larger phrase which describes a style of game which nominally was about actually playing of a role.

So, too, does Free in Free to Play get modified accordingly.  We already have a term for games for which a player does not spend any money to purchase and or play.  It’s called Free.  One of my favorite free games is Angband.  An ASCII graphic dungeon crawler (early form RPG, really) which was originally released 20 years ago.  It was free then, remains free now.  Give it a whirl, you’ll never have to pay anything for it.  Clearly if Free means Free then attaching to Play means we’re intending a different meaning.

Free to Play is a revenue model which is intended to be the opposite of Pay to Play (P2P).  In the P2P model one must have an active subscription before being able to log into the game to play.  The F2P model does not require an active subscription before the player is able to log into the game to play.  That’s it.  At no time is the implication that all portions of the game, all content in the game, is free.  Again, we have a term for that.  Free.

In the article I linked the author points out that at some point you have to pay for content in LotRO.  While technically this isn’t true, for practical purposes he is correct.  But this in no way invalidates the F2P model.  Currently I subscribe to LotRO.  I simply find the subscription much easier to handle than the a la carte purchasing of content.  However if I cancelled my subscription tomorrow I would not be prevented from playing.  I could still log in, still progress my character, still group with my wife’s characters, still be in the same kinship, still be an active participant in the game.  I am still free to play the game.

Having a series which shows which portions of a F2P game are available for free and which aren’t is a laudable endeavor.  However, presenting some F2P games as more or less free than others is to feed a misconception that the games themselves are intended to be free in their entirety, not just the activity of being able to play the games.