Tad Williams' Otherland as MMO

Apparently, there's to be an MMO made from Tad Williams' Otherland books. I find this absolutely mind-boggling, as the books are already set in not just an MMO, but a whole series of virtual worlds. I'm developing a healthy scepticism about any game making it from concept to market, but the ideas they're looking into for this one are really fascinating. Go take a look.

WAR: First Impressions

My entire household spent Sunday afternoon and evening playing WAR. Together with some other friends, we have a guild together, and I can see us diving headlong into the game. GOA may have messed up the Open Beta (and the PR around it) in a spectacular manner, but to be fair, the Head Start was very, very smooth, and I was impressed.

My very first impression was that the game is already very polished. Some of this is familiarity with the genre, certainly - I didn't need a manual to know that I could move with WASD or the arrow keys, use space to jump, or the like.

But it was also true that the shard was handling smoothly with dozens of people in the starting area, that the starting quests were well-written, that having quest areas marked on the map is genius, and that having an arrow on the ground indicator on your character pointing at your target is incredibly helpful. I'm still not used to having my character turn by himself to keep facing an opponent while he casts a spell, but I really like it. There are a lot of small features like these that really make playing enjoyable - here are a few more.

• You can join a queue for a "scenario" (instanced RvR area) from anywhere in the game; no need to go to a particular NPC or location.
• Your starting bag has plenty of space
• Your hotbar populates itself in a sensible manner as you level
• At least for the initial levels, you get one new power with each.
• RvR is easy to enter, not frustrating when you lose, and rewarding.

Public Quests are something I really like. I participated in a few, and came in on the loot table in one. The loot wasn't earth-shattering, but still an upgrade for an item I had, and even if it wasn't, there's a cash option. And they're fun, in the same way that battleground zergs in Dark Age of Camelot were fun, and the Omen event in the Chinese New Year celebrations in WoW is fun.

Levelling happens at a speed that seems to be just right. By the time I logged off on Sunday, I had hit level 6, and renown level 5. Just as I had got to the stage where I knew what to do with the power I got at the last level, and was looking for something else - the new level and new power came in.

I can't praise the RvR highly enough. I really enjoyed charging straight in with my Bright Wizard (Weyland) and shooting off Scorched Earth repeatedly - an area of effect spell that ripples a ring of fire out from you, damaging all opponents in a given radius. The fact that there's collision detection is also interesting; it means that in some cases, a tank class can actually tank in PvP - by just plain standing in the way and not letting the opponent get by. Not that Weyland is anything like a tank, mind - as a Bright Wizard, he's high DPS, and very low durability.

I'm only just getting started on the crafting, and I haven't even looked at the auction system yet - but they'll get a look this evening - assuming I can resist the lure of the scenarios.

Nuclear Decay and Distance from Sun

There's a fascinating post up at the physics arXiv blog detailing some research on a variation in the rate of nuclear decay, depending on the distance of the Earth from the Sun when the measurements are taken. Obviously, there are going to be knock-on effects for a lot of science fiction here; you can measure distance from stars by the changes, for one thing, but there's also the problem that your nuclear-powered spacecraft is going to behave rather oddly when the rate of decay changes.

The one thing they don't say is whether it gets slower or faster as distance increases, which is the real meat of the subject!

Warhammer Online News Sources

As a followup to Warhammer Online: The Very Basics, here's a list of places to keep an eye on for news concerning the game.

The Greenskin is an excellent WAR blog - I reckon you could get all the relevant news and lore from that one source, to be honest.Recent topics have included the lore concerning the gods, Greenskin name generators, and the kind of machine you'll need to run Warhammer.

Waaagh! is another blog, with more views than news. It's also well worth reading. Recent posts there concern machine specs, who's in the Beta, and a well-wwritten comparison and contrast between WAR and WoW.

Keen and Graev have been following Warhammer news for longer than anyone, really. They've recently looked at the Road To War site, expectations concerning the endgame, and their own future plans with regard to the game, and posting about it.

And finally, The Warhammer Online Herald is a more official source of news, coming as it does from EA Mythic.

PDF Previews

At some point in the recent past, it seems to have become standard for tabletop RPGs to do a preview release, or even an alpha release, of a PDF some time before the full game is released. I think this is a great idea, and I'd therefore like to direct your attention to the Starblazer Preview (PDF) and the Pathfinder RPG Alpha Release (which is also a PDF, but I've linked to the download page, not directly to the PDF).

These are two games I think I'll be acquiring.

Missions in EVE Online

Much as I love EVE Online - now that Empyrean Age has killed off the weird stargates issue that was rendering it impossible for me to play - there is one aspect of it that really bugs me: time limits on missions.

An EVE session goes like this: I log in, do some trading, poke at various skills, decide they're not high enough yet for me to do worthwhile production, and go to do a mission or two. Midway through a mission, something comes up - a friend arrives, I need to go eat, the cat has a conniption fit, whatever. The net result is that I need to leave the machine, potentially for some hours, and probably will have more needful things than EVE to attend to when I come back.

But if I leave the mission there, I'll miss, at the least, the time bonus, and possibly fail the whole thing if I leave it for a few days. And that will do damage to my standings - damage that will take a large number of missions to make up for. Sure, it's realistic that the agents want things done before a certain time. But it means that very often, I wind up sitting in front of the machine, calling, "I'll be there in a minute!" into the next room at three-minute intervals for fifteen minutes or half an hour.

The sensible thing to do, of course, is not take on missions until I'm sure I can finish them, and/or to play more often. Possibly in wintertime, when I'm in and online more, this will be less of a problem.

Warhammer Online: The Very Basics

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR) is now in Beta. There are a lot of people out there who like the look of the game, but know next to nothing about the setting or the game itself. So here are the very basics:

There are two factions in WAR, Destruction and Order. There's a sharp good/evil dichotomy here: Destruction is evil. No messing around with "just misunderstood". Mind you, it's a dark setting, and a lot of what passes for good in Warhammer wouldn't do so in any other game. The map has rough analogies to Europe, and some of the human kingdoms are a bit like Germany and France. Very, very vaguely, mind.

So, Order has three races: Humans (Empire), High Elves and Dwarfs. Likewise, Destruction has three: Greenskins, Chaos, and Dark Elves. Each race has four classes, so there are 3 x 4 x 2 = 24 different classes in the game. The classes don't divide, generally speaking, quite as strictly into the tank/healer/DPS categories of other games, and the roles I've listed below are more a rough stab than a definitive listing.

The Empire are humans. They're very approximately German. Their classes are Bright Wizard (DPS, runs a risk of blowing himself up), Warrior Priest (healer/buffer/debuffer, must be in melee), Witch Hunter (Positioned DPS), and Knight of the Blazing Sun (Tank/buffer).

The High Elves are like Tolkien's elves, although they're also militant and aggressive. Their classes are Swordmaster (Multi-target melee DPS/Tank - I think) , Archmage (Ranged DPS/Healer), Shadow Warrior (Ranged DPS/Stealth) , and White Lion (Melee DPS/Pet).

The Dwarfs are Norse-style. Their classes are: Hammerer (Melee DPS), Ironbreaker (Tank), Rune Priest (Tank/Healer), and Engineer (Short-Ranged DPS).

On the Destruction side... the Greenskins are orcs and goblins. Technically, they're neuter plant-creatures, but they look male to most people. Their classes are: Black Orc (Single-target Tank), Choppa (Melee DPS), Shaman (Ranged DPS/Support), and Squig Herder (Ranged DPS/Pets).

Chaos are basically humans who serve the god Tzeentch. Their career options are: Chosen (Tank), Magus (Ranged DPS), Zealot (Healer/buffer/debuffer), or Marauder (Melee DPS).

And finally, the Dark Elves are corrupted High Elves. They can be: Witch Elves (Melee DPS), Disciples of Khaine, (Melee DPS), Sorceresses (Ranged DPS, may injure herself with too much power), or Black Guards (Unknown, as yet).

The basic premise of the game is, well, war. You can advance through PvE just as well, but the whole story focus of the game is on the conflict with the other side. There will be a crafting system, which will involve putting together stuff from things you kill into useful stuff.

The backstory pretty much comes down to: The forces of Destruction attack the Empire, who call in their Elven and Dwarven allies. Each race has its principle opponents: Dwarfs vs. Greenskins, Empire vs. Chaos, and High Elves vs. Dark Elves.

It looks, from initial impressions, as though a majority of people will be playing Destruction. I'll be going for the Order side, probably either a Bright Wizard or an Archmage. Yes, I likes my DPS.

For further information, check out the WAR site. The "Game Overview" section is a good place to start.

Darkfall: Fantasy Sandbox?

The Warcry network is hosting a new developer journal concerning Darkfall. Darkfall has been in development for a long, long time, and many people think it's firmly in the realm of vapourware.

More than anything else, Darkfall is selling full freedom gameplay. The game and the technology have been designed and implemented from the ground up for to be a full sandbox PvP game.

Even if it never comes out, I'm made hopeful by the gap in the market for such a game being recognised.

Steven Moffat to Produce Doctor Who

A BBC press release and a Guardian article herald the long-awaited news that Steven Moffat is taking over from Russell T Davies as lead writer and executive producer of Doctor Who for the series broadcasting in 2010.

I am really, really glad to see this. Davies has done plenty of good stuff in getting the series up and running, and running well, but his writing is variable, often awful, and the level of repetition has been silly. Moffat is an excellent, excellent writer, and based on that, I'll be far happier to have the overall direction of the show in his hands.

Thoughts On Crafting In WoW and WAR

I've been thinking a lot about crafting lately, as Wormson chases down the last few non-bind-on-pickup tailoring recipes and has finally made his awesome frost-and-shadow robe. I'm also looking for jewelcrafting recipes for him, and seeing the number of items appearing in the auction house search for "usable items" decreasing is a great pleasure. It's becoming apparent that crafting skills have to be chosen carefully, and I'm keeping a close eye on the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning news to see what way things will play out there.

In WoW, you can take up any two "professions" - main line crafting skills. These are divided into gathering and crafting skills, which do pretty much what they say. However, there are other, less evident divisions within the crafting skills. Some of them are useful to every class, and some are only useful to particular ones.

For instance, blacksmithing is simply not useful for a caster class. Leatherworking is useless for cloth-wearers, and tailoring is equally useless for plate classes. Sure, you can theoretically make stuff for other people, but your customers are again limited by class, and it's often the case that raid and PvP drops outclass anything you can make that's not bind-on-pickup.

But if you're an alchemist, a jewelcrafter, or an enchanter, your products can be used by anyone, and they're rarely if ever surpassed by other sources. So there's more interest in those tradeskills than in the more limited ones. Inscription may be even better in this respect, when it appears.

So far, we know of Butchering, Scavenging, Cultivating, and an Alchemy-type skill, called Apothecary in WAR. The first three are gathering skills, the last a crafting skills, and you can take one gathering and one crafting skill. Butchering is like skinning in WoW, to some degree; it allows you get extra loot from "unintelligent" mobs - skins, meat, and so on. Scavenging is the same thing for intelligent creatures, allowing you to retrieve things like gold teeth, extra hidden coins, and also things like leeches (ewww). Cultivating lets you retrieve seeds and spores from the kills, and grow them into plants.

There are no recipes, as such, in WAR. Apothecary is the only crafting skill we know of yet, and there, the idea is that you have a base ingredient, which is "unstable" - as I understand it, this means that if you try to use it on its own, it'll probably fail. You can add other ingredients, first to stabilise, and then to improve or add extra effects to your base ingredient. The output is potions of varying degrees of usefulness.

Apothecary looks like it's going to be generally useful, and so far, all three of the gathering skills feed into it. So really, we need to wait until we see the other crafting skills before I can start deciding what I want my characters there to do. Still, it's all good info...

WoW: Am I still casual?

I'm starting to wonder if I can call myself a casual player in World of Warcraft any more. After all, Wormson traded in his last green item on Saturday evening for an epic belt, and is now clad entirely in rare and epic items. Indeed, out of seventeen slots for items that have bonuses, his PvE outfit has epic items in thirteen. PvP drops to only eleven, as I replace epics with higher-resilience "welfare" rare items.

And yet, I don't think of myself as being any more than a casual player. I'm certainly enjoying the endgame at the 70 cap a lot more than I did at the 60 cap, but I've been on about ten raids, and they're not a priority for me. I spend more time wandering around Silvermoon and poking at the auction house than anything else. I haven't a chance of getting anywhere near the epic flying mount, unless I stop spending money on pleasing shiny jewlecrafting recipes, and with the new vendor opening up in the harbour soon, I can expect to hand her about 1700 gold over several weeks.

I'm having difficulty pinning down where the border is between casual and non-casual players, and I think that's probably a good thing. For some time, it's been a case of either you were or weren't one or other, and now it's becoming more of a spectrum - and the casual player can get some of the benefits that only the hardcore players could ever see before.

I'm unlikely to see the inside of the Black Temple or the Sunwell before the next expansion. I still haven't seen any heroic dungeons, and I've never been in an arena. That's fine - I'm not too pushed on the big raids, and the latter two, I'll get to in due course. The fact that I'm playing frequently and not doing them indicates that there's more than enough content in the game for me at the moment.

So I conclude that while I'm not as casual as I used to be, I'm probably still on that end of the spectrum.

Multiple Group Membership in MMOs

The World of Warcraft guild I'm in is part of a larger group of three guilds, the Hillsbrad Pact, in-character, and ARCORB, out of character. Between us, we can muster a decent raiding group, a good chat channel, and a fair chance that you can find someone to help you with group quests. This isn't something any of the guilds could manage on its own. The trouble is that there is no mechanical way in WoW to support this concept.

The way to handle it under the mechanics is to have everyone join one guild. Where the group overflows into other games, this tends to happen - the Fellowship I joined in my brief foray into LotRO was composed of people from the Pact. But in WoW, everyone is fond of their own guilds, and each guild has its own slightly different culture, origins, and traditions. The guildmaster position in my own guild, The Red Branch, is periodically decided by voting, whereas the Oathforged have their Founders and that's that. I'm not sure how the Ashen Rose Conspiracy decide who's in charge at all; they've had two GMs while I've known them, and the transition I was around for was a simple handover, I think.

This works fine a lot of the time. It does mean, however, that moving stuff around between people in the Pact is a little less smooth than it might be. We can't dump stuff into the guild bank for people in the other guild banks, and it's starting to be a little impractical to scoot across the world to hand over an item. Mage teleports, the five-hearthstones-an-hour trick that shamans do, and the Shattrath-to-anywhere portals, can help with this, but it's right on the threshold where organising a courier takes nearly as long as dropping something in the post - which takes exactly an hour to arrive.

It also means that there's no visible connection between the members of the Pact. Another player may have good experiences with the Oathforged, and be looking out for the <Oathforged> tag, not realising that the people running around with <The Red Branch> over their heads are nearly in the same guild.

Both Dark Age of Camelot and EVE Online have mechanisms to address this last, at least - alliances are groups of guilds or corporations who can share a standard channel, some resources, and in EVE, meaningful "standings" with respect to other player groups.

Ideally, I would like an in-game mechanism where I can belong to The Red Branch and The Hillsbrad Pact.

But... I want more as well. There's an interdependency among crafters in World of Warcraft. It's not as definite as that in other games, but it does mean that as a jewelcrafter, Wormson can't get his uncut gems directly from the environment unless he's also a miner - and he's not. So I want a Trade Guild as well, whereby the short supply chains that WoW has can be facilitated, where my miner guildmates can drop off a pile of ore for me to prospect, without jamming up the PvE guild's storage - which indeed, is already jammed with trade goods.

And further to that, few enough of the Pact are much interested in PvP, so I'd like to have a PvP organisation as well. It'd be nice if that one could be cross-server across the battlegroup, actually, while I'm asking for unlikely things.

State of the Games

I'm currently playing two MMOs, and running two tabletop games. I'm soon (all going to plan) going to be playing in another tabletop.

World of Warcraft: The Shattered Sun dailies are still entertaining, and I fully expect Argent Dawn to go to Phase 3 tonight, if it hasn't already. Wormson is levelling fishing (now at 295, and with the Master level book bought and used), and I'm enjoying it greatly. The raid group that my guild belongs to has Karazhan on farm, has had an attempt at Magtheridon, and is going hunting in the Serpentshrine Caverns this week. I have 11 epics, and am starting to work on getting hold of enchantments, good gems, and possibly even dedicated sets of PvP and raiding gear. My bank is pretty nearly full, due in large part to my obstinate tendency to hang onto RP-oriented clothing.

EVE Online: I'm training long skills in EVE, and logging in occasionally to do some trading or manufacturing. The weird bug that makes the game freeze on me for 30-90 seconds every time I go near a jump gate makes it essentially impossible to run missions - a mission that happens two systems away will involve between four and fifteen minutes of looking at a frozen screen, and that's just for the mission-running battleship. By the time I get the salvage destroyer out and back, it's a complete waste of time. Missioning will have to wait until I have a new machine (or a new videocard, or some other upgrade or update), or until a fix appears in the game itself. This is annoying, but the pleasure I'm getting from WoW makes up for it.

Tabletop: My two tabletop games are going well. I can't really say much more without giving away details that I don't want the players to see, but all of them seem to be enjoying themselves, and that's really the main aim of the games.

I'm doing a good bit of world-building (a lot of it purely in my head) at the moment, and narrowing down possibilities for future events and games. There are, I think, too many possibilities for one world, especially since about six of the ideas I have would amount to full setting reboots, or singularities. There's an inherent problem in being a simulationist who likes huge, epic narratives - they leave the world in tatters, and two or more in a row would get very, very messy.

I'm looking forward to the release of D&D's 4th Edition, even if I won't be playing it for some time, and am also following with interest the appearance of the Pathfinder game from Paizo, commonly known as 3.75. This is a splintering in D&D that might actually amount to something on both sides.

Doctor Who: Partners In Crime

I've had some time to mull over the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who, Partners in Crime, and I've come to the careful and considered conclusion that my initial impression was entirely correct: it was crap.

Contrary to my fears, Catherine Tate was fine. She and David Tennant did very well with what was, I think, the worst script I have ever seen. RTD has some issues he needs to work out, but the main one is the notion that some juvenile jokes, some "cute" monsters, and some references to previous episodes constitute a plot, and that dialogue hacked together in the back seat of a taxi on the way to the shoot can make it hang together. I know it's a series which is for kids, but that doesn't mean it's ok to have it be bad

And then, hey, we'll include Billie Piper for a gratuitous shot at the end.

I have a lot of respect for RTD for being at the helm of the new Doctor Who, but for gods sakes, take his crayons away and let some of the far better writers - Moffat and Cornell being favourites - do the writing. The series, really, can only get better.

WoW: Sunwell Isle and the Power to Change

The new Sunwell Isle daily quests have a compelling aspect like none I've seen in an MMO before. I'm usually ambivalent about dailies in World of Warcraft. On the one hand, they allow me to do something productive in a short amount of time, which is useful when I have a limited period online. On the other, they're the ultimate in repetitive tasks, which I abhor. But the Shattered Sun Offensive quests are making me consider putting dailies on my calendar.

The Quel'Danas ones, though, have another aspect - you feel that you're changing the game world. It's not true, strictly speaking - the new phases of the reclamation of the island will proceed automatically after a while, even if nobody does the quests. And your individual contribution is tiny - there are hundreds of turn-ins required for each percentage change. But there's a feeling of progress in seeing that percentage rise, and a feeling of real victory as the next phase starts. And the change will not go backwards - or if Blizzard do something really strange and sections of the Island do get retaken by the Dawnblade and the Wretched, it'll be accounted for in the storyline. It's not the instance situation where you bring down a boss, and they're back tomorrow.

I think that these change-the-world dailies are a great new way to approach both patch changes and player motivation. I'd be very pleased to see a few of these attached to any patch, even if it's something as simple as rebuilding some of the ruins in Lordaeron so a new vendor can take up residence, or as large as a Scarlet Crusade-type group that actually can be permanently defeated in a series of minor victories worldwide, perhaps over a couple of months.

Some that don't happen automatically, even if they're purely cosmetic, would also be interesting. A daily quest contributing to the repair of the cemetery fences in Brill, say - it would make no difference to gameplay, apart from something like small reputation or cash rewards - but it would be something you'd help to permanently change in the world.