Do I miss MMOs? Maybe. Sort of. A little.

My ratonga character Bitesy, riding a dinosaur in EQ2, as one does

Back in the olden times of CRT monitors that weighed half as much as I did, I started playing MMOs1. Although several already existed, like EverQuest and Ultima Online, I didn’t dive in until I got into the beta for City of Heroes (CoH) in early 2004 (the game launched in April of that year). As I learned later, CoH actually broke convention with typical fantasy MMOs in several crucial ways, apart from the obvious theme of superheroes. I played and adored it and made many characters, usually themed around fruit or vegetables, because why not?

In the fall of 2004, two more MMOs launched, within two weeks of each other. The first was EverQuest 2, the other you may have heard of, something called World of Warcraft. Everyone I played CoH with pretty much abandoned it for the hamster wheel of WoW. Eventually, I did, too.

As the years went by, play ebbed and flowed across various games:

  • City of Heroes. I kept playing CoH until NCsoft suddenly decided to shut it down in November 2012. In recent years, the unofficial Homecoming servers have revived the game and it’s kind of trippy to return to what is more or less the same game I’d been playing over a decade ago. My original characters are long gone, but it’s been easy enough to remake them.
  • EverQuest 2: I played this with three others for awhile and we romped through a fair bit of content. I also played solo, leveling up several characters.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR). While it’s unfair to call this WoW with lightsabers, it’s what it was, to a certain extent.
  • Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). Very true to the material, I played this oslo or in small groups, but never got to a high level.
  • Vanguard. A somewhat generic fantasy MMO that Sony eventually shut down. I played a wolfman and don’t remember much about it now.
  • Guild Wars 2. I played so little of this, I don’t recall much of anything.
  • Final Fantasy 14. Same for this.
  • Tabula Rasa. Richard Garriott’s expensive sci-fi dud. NCsoft killed it after a year. I was there at the end, power-leveling my little soldier’s heart out.
  • Champions. Like CoH, but better in some ways (graphics, arguably) and worse in most of the others.
  • Probably others I’ve forgotten.

Eventually, every game, even the well-oiled hamster wheel of WoW, wore on me and I left them all behind, apart from occasional forays into CoH, which is completely free to play now (the servers run on donations). And I was fine with that.

But just lately I’ve had a slight urge to revisit an MMO, to level up a character and be part of a big stinky world filled with other players. But which one?

On the one hand, some of this has been decided for me, because the MMO is dead (Vanguard, Tabula Rasa) or because I have little interest in revisiting it (Champions).

But that still leaves more than a couple. I ponder.

  • WoW: Safe, reliable, yet also annoying due to constant changes, which dampens the rush of nostalgia in returning.
  • EQ2: I think without paying a sub, it would likely be a horrible experience and I’m not sure its charms would persist now.
  • LOTRO: The UI was always an ugly mess and I suspect it hasn’t changed.
  • FF14: No great yearning for this.
  • Guild Wars 2: I didn’t give it much of a chance, maybe it would click now?
  • SWTOR: I would probably spend a lot of time confused and then give up, but it’s not fantasy, so there is that.

I’ll probably just keep not playing any of them. Maybe I should dig up some old RPG from my Steam backlog and just pretend it’s massive.

  1. Massively Multiplayer Online games, sometimes also known as Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games if you want a real mouthful. ↩︎

The unexpected return of CoH

After reviving my new PC, I was casting about for a game to play, to take advantage of all its glorious 2019 power.

And I ended up playing a game from 2004, and it’s a game I never expected to play again—City of Heroes.

It turned out a community-run CoH server had been running stealthily for awhile now, but recent drama forced it into the open. Currently the team has moved servers (to Canada, woo), expanded their number and opened the whole thing up to the public. They are billing this version of the game Issue 26: Homecoming, incorporating the code that was on the test server and about to go live when the game development ended in August 2012, three months before shutting down entirely.

The experience of going back has been both weird and nostalgic. There are some necessary tweaks—all of the paid content has been moved to an in-game contact and is free to “buy.” Veteran Rewards essentially don’t exist. But for the most part, this is CoH as it was in 2012, with all of its improvements and similarly, all of its janky qualities faithfully preserved.

As I toodle around with new versions of old characters, I shift between the delight of playing a game I never imagined being able to play again, and being freshly irritated by its many original and questionable design decisions, like Council base maps, for example. The near-Escher design of the original office maps is worth highlighting, too. They feel like a social experiment that would end with all participants going mad and murdering each other.

At the same time, it’s still a refreshing take on the MMORPG formula. Released before WoW, it entirely ignored a lot of the familiar trappings, allowing you to take on vast groups of enemies and feel truly powerful—too powerful, in fact. The nerfs would come and this version of the game carefully preserves all of the game balance changes made over CoH’s eight year life. You can still be pretty powerful now, so it’s okay.

I have no idea how long the servers will last, so in the back of my mind I am always thinking “This could be the last chance I have to see these characters” but so far NCsoft has not applied its might in shutting it down, and efforts are underway to have them sanction an official community server. Stranger things have happened.

Finally, I will note that this unexpected appearance has definitely impacted the contributions I’ve made recently to this blog. And writing in general. Probably not a good thing. But if history repeats itself, I’ll ease up and go back to the usual excuses for not writing.

Revisting old games, Part 93: City of Heroes

I recently jumped back into City of Heroes as it’s gone free-to-play and my vet status meant most of the game’s features were unlocked right up front. CoH is an MMORPG that launched in April 2004 and as anyone who has played one of these games will tell you, MMOs are designed to be massive time sinks. It gets even worse because the typical $15 monthly fee makes you feel obligated to login and do something even if you don’t particularly feel like it because, dammit, you’re going to get your money’s worth! That’s what’s nice about free-to-play (F2P) — you can play as little or as much as you like and saunter along at your own pace. There are usually some things you can’t do without paying (obviously the publisher needs to generate revenue somehow) but it’s easier to fork over $5-10 whenever you feel like it instead of being on the hook for $15 every month or no super hero (or villain) for you!

The best part of the game is probably still the character creator. Here are a few I’ve made recently, as making endless alts is pretty much a required part of the CoH experience. I’ll elaborate a bit on the game’s current incarnation in another post.

Punch Bull

Punch Bull continues the fine tradition of names based on terrible puns. He’s a level 20 super strength/willpower brute. His specialty is punching things really hard. As you can see, his main costume is a boxing outfit, a raging bull, if you will. His tail wags.

Mint Laser

My latest in a series of robot-like characters, Mint Laser is a level 20 beam rifle/electric manipulation blaster. His specialty is shooting things with extremely loud beams of energy. If those things get up in his grill he can switch to punching them with glowing fists of electricity.

His second costume will be something delightfully retro (and extra minty).

Frank Lee Feathered

Finally (for the moment) there is Frank Lee Feathered, a level 14 plant control/earth assault dominator. I originally had given him wings but I found them a bit distracting, so while he looks like an eagle he acts more like an ostrich. Further underlining that is the fact that most of the earth powers require him to be on the ground to work. His second costume will probably have wings.

More on how these kooky characters play and what the game is like with the hybrid F2P/subscription model soon™.

Patches, we don’t need no stinking patches

Patches are an inevitable part of any MMORPG as the developers push out nerfs, buffs, additional or revised content and of course, fixes. This week two games had patches released that worked in reverse, seemingly breaking more than they fixed.

WoW Insider succintly sums up the latest patch to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft with The disaster of patch 3.0.8. Among the highlights: server-crashing bugs that forced them to shut off the entire PvP zone of Wintergrasp and access to the arenas. Major patches are something veteran WoW players have learned to anticipate with dread. On the plus side, lag-induced deaths are less painful now thanks to the addition of over 60 new graveyards and a buff to ghost run speed.

Meanwhile, the dev team for City of Heroes made the curious decision to push an 80 MB patch live the day before the twice-a-year and incredibly popular Double XP Weekend begins. This thread outlines the many things that weren’t fixed, error-riddled patch notes (a CoH tradition) notwithstanding. Unfixed powers, new features that aren’t actually there and the Virtue server having fits are among the highlights. Also, don’t wear our clothes!

Maintaining a sprawling and gigantic mess of ever-expanding code for a live game is not a simple task and any reasonable player will expect a few bumps along the way but these two examples seem to reflect a growing inability to just get the basics right without screwing something (or many things) up. This is why it’s best to have a diverse gaming library. when your favorite online game goes haywire, you can turn to the ever-reliable alternatives like Solitaire and Minesweeper. Oh Minesweeper, I’ll beat you this time!

Top 20 best-selling PC games of 2008

Here’s the Top 20 best-selling PC games of 2008. This doesn’t count digital distribution so the results are skewed. Let’s have a look!

1. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
No surprise here. World of Warcraft: Poop in a Box would sell a couple million copies. Fortunately the expansion turned out to be pretty good, even if it did actually contain poop (quests).

2. Spore
Incessant hype, lots of controversy (DRM, science vs. toy game design, penis creatures), that Sims-y vibe. No surprise it has sold so well. The Creature Creator probably played a big part in greasing sales.

3. World of Warcraft: Battle Chest
I guess everyone buying #1 would need something like #3 so this is inevitable.

4. Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
They recently merged over half the servers but this sold like crazy for a few months. A textbook example of launching an incomplete game and torpedoing your long-term efforts as a result.

5. Warhammer Online: Age Of Reckoning
Four of the top 5 games are MMOs. WAR stopped bragging about its numbers even sooner than Conan and Mythic has been stealthily working on server merges/closures. Will publishers look at box sales or subscription numbers when deciding whether or not to green-light future MMOs? The answer is: more money will be flushed down the drain on expensive persistent-world games that fail to deliver while everyone keeps buying extra copies of WoW (see below).

6. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
CoD is the new Quake. This game is a year old, which is actually kind of young for a PC title.

7. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe
Way down the list at #7. Shocking! The Sims 3 ships next month. Not so shocking.

8. World Of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Collector’s Edition
A lot of #1s were bought when #8 sold out. Probably going for $5000 on eBay now.

9. Fallout 3
Bethesda successfully revives a series that has been dormant for a decade, a neat trick. Name recognition still matters (or so 3D Realms hopes).

10. World Of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade
Yeah, okay, this has been out for two years now. Do people just buy some flavor of WoW every time they go down the PC game aisle?

11. Call Of Duty: World At War
See #6.

12. The Sims 2 FreeTime
Inevitable Sims 2 expansion, amazingly not in the top 10.

13. World Of Warcraft
There are three dozen SKUs for WoW. Buy all of them, people!

14. Sins Of A Solar Empire
The first RTS in the list (sorry, EA and Red Alert 3) and an impressive debut for Ironclad. Would place even higher if its Impulse sales were counted.

15. Warcraft III Battle Chest
“Hey, I thought it was World of Warcraft!”

16. The Sims 2 Apartment Life
My apartment life included a drunk landlord that tried to burn down the building. This will get recycled some time in the next year for Sims 3 (the expansion, not the torching ways of my ex-landlord).

17. Crysis
Despite murdering hardware, this game has done very well, sales-wise. PC gaming is still doomed though, right?

18. Left 4 Dead
Steam sales would place this a lot higher, I suspect.

19. Diablo Battle Chest
“I thought it was Diablo 3!” Diablo 2 was released in 2000. The most successful Diablo clone since then might be Titan Quest — and the developer shut down after its release. Advice to game companies: Don’t try to emulate Blizzard’s success. Even when your games are good, people will still choose a 10 year old Blizzard title instead. I recommend changing your company name to Blissard Entertainment as an alternate strategy.

20. The Orange Box
Again, Steam sales would lift this higher. Another 1+ year old game but it almost counts as brand new in comparison to some of the others.

A handful of FPSes, an RTS, the Blizzard catalog and the Sims. This was the state of (retail) PC gaming in 2008. I suppose it could be worse. Deer Hunter and Myst clones no longer make the list but it’s a bit scary that games that predate the original Xbox are still in the top 20.

Follow-up: Shacknews has an NPD report that PC retail sales dropped 14% in 2008 to $701 million. Considering that Blizzard generates over a billion dollars per year from WoW alone, I think it’s safe to say retail is providing a picture of revenue that is…less than accurate.

A post every day for the rest of the year

Fortunately there’s less than two weeks left in the year, so the forced inanity will end soon.

I don’t have anything to write about today so instead I offer a picture of my hobbit minstrel Beridoc being stalked by a chicken in Lord of the Rings Online: