Archive for October, 2009

The Away Team has arrived on the planet's surface, Captain.

Last week, I expounded upon the conflict that has always existed between Star Trek and Star Wars. This week, I’ll continue onwards, getting you readers up to date  on Cryptic’s take on the legendary spacefaring odyssey.

Star Trek Online begins in the year 2409, roughly thirty years after the events of the movie “Star Trek: Nemesis”. The Federation and the Klingons are at the brink of war once more, as power plays within the Klingon Empire and well-intentioned-but-ill-advised responses to those power plays from Earth and her allies all but destroy the famous Khitomer Accords, which had granted peace between the two factions.

The Neutral Zone has therefore become a PvP battleground, with Starfleet and the Klingons duking it out for tactically advantageous planets and resources, revenge and justice. Defiant-class vessels swoop in amidst a trio of Birds-of-Prey pulse phasers firing while the Klingons in turn break off, only to turn back around, their disruptor cannons blazing menacingly. It’s a scene that we’ve seen through the TV series, and several Star Trek games have attempted to capture the essence of those moments. It is the method that they engage in those conflicts within this MMO that makes Cryptic’s Star Trek Online something special, not just among other Star Trek games, but among other science fiction offerings as well.

Star Trek Online’s space combat is very tactical, and consists of four main elements: shields, weapons arcs, engine output, and crew ability. The first two keep the action moving in space, with weapons arcs probably rather self-explanitory. Shields are displayed as a segmented ring around the ship, four in total, one each to cover the Port, Aft, Starboard, and Forward sections of the ship, each one with its own bank of hit points. Engine output allows you to reinforce the shields during a tough combat scenario, give phasers and disruptors more punch, increase the mobility of the ship, or other miscellaneous functions. Finally, what crew you have assigned to what station determines what abilities your ship has in this combat. One talented tactical officer might enable you to fire several torpedos all at once, for example.

Officers are quite the inspired game mechanic, once you understand what Cryptic has done. As each player is the captain of their own starship, officers function as something approaching a cross between World of Warcraft’s armor and weapons, and combat pets. Each starship has bridge stations, places you can slot your officers…much like a traditional MMO’s equipment slots. On away teams, up to four of your officers can accompany you, providing important skills down on the ground as well. Further, they can each be given equipment and gain experience. Did your Captain go down in that firefight? If you have a skilled doctor as part of your senior staff, they’ll be able to bring you right back up and ready to fight.

Obviously though, there’s more to a Star Trek game than fighting. Exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations has always been a core mission statement for Star Trek, and that tradition is carried forward utilizing Cryptic’s procedurally generated worlds. In essence, using the same technology that powered almost everything behind Spore, Cryptic has generated strange new worlds indeed. Cryptic’s leading man, Craig Zinkovich, has gone on record to state that this was his personal design goal…that the game be able to really deliver the experience of exploration.

Backing all this up is Cryptic’s vaunted avatar customizability, applied not only to your Captain, but to your officers and even to your Starship. Would you like to see your 24th century starship kitted out with hull plating straight from the era of Captain Kirk? It’s possible. Want your bridge officers to all come from alien races never seen in the series? Possible as well. Would you like your starship’s ship registry to be NCC-1337? Yes, you can designate even that detail.

Beta’s coming soon, should be within the next few weeks. Despite stiff competition from Bioware’s Star Wars and their all-out approach, Cryptic’s offering still shows a lot of promise. Let’s see if they can boldly go and create the compelling gameplay needed to win the hearts of rabid Star Trek fans everywhere.

Last week, I announced that I would begin my journey into the world of Love, and that I would be taking you all along with me.  Every week I will be experimenting a different playstyle, and for this week I played as the Explorer.

By explorer, I don’t necessarily mean someone who wanders around the world and sticks flags in the ground.  Rather, in my case, I mean utter newb, and so my goal was to simply experience as much varied content as possible. As I mentioned in the last post of Love and Gaming, this is my default approach, so while it served to help me familiarize myself with the game, it also let me do it in a way that came naturally.

It might be tempting to compare Love to sandbox games like Wurm Online, in which you create new settlements and alter the land in permanent, meaningful ways.  However, in my week of play, I have found Love to be more like building sand castles on the beach. You can build the grandest castle, with turrets and a moat and a front gate, but sooner or later the tide will come in and wash it all away. Aggressive AI settlements dot the landscape, and while a single AI enemy is no challenge, they come in great waves and often have access to advanced weaponry that it can take a long time for a player settlement to procure.

That said, the game cycle of building up a settlement from scratch and holding out as long as possible proved to be addictive. As it is still in alpha, the game is continually evolving, and with it we see more varied approaches to settlement. When I started, walls were all the rage, with the longest-lasting settlements surrounded by high, insurmountable bastions. In a recent patch, the AI wised up, and it seems aggressive counter-engagement and teamwork have become more of a necessity.

Love is not a game that is easy to grasp right away.  My first night, I found myself alone in the wilderness without a clue as to what I was doing.  In the spirit of the week’s theme, I set forth to see what I would discover, and what I discovered was death.  Lots of it.

The art of Love looks like an impressionistic painting, and in certain lighting, other characters will often look like mere shadows gliding along the landscape. That first night, all I remember is barrage upon barrage of laser fire all around me, then the tint of red telling me that I was dead. It was not a good night.

Thankfully, I was able to find settlements on most of my following sessions. Love does not lend itself well to traditional exploration, as by default you have no map and there is no objective compass, but as you build up your settlement you have access to greater and more varied tools, with which you can do all kinds of fun things. For instance, with the Config Tool, you can walk right up to certain objects in the games like teleporters, relay cables, and power lines, and reprogram them.  These objects appear all over the world, not just in settlements, so if you can get your hands on one of these you could in theory create massive transportation networks throughout the world.

In the coming week, I will continue to explore the game, but my primary focus will go to my next playstyle: the Team Player. Every time I log in, I will strive to help create the greatest settlement possible, alongside as many players as possible. My concerns will be what’s best for the settlement, and I will engage in no solo endeavors. I suspect Love will lend itself well to this approach, and I look forward to sharing my findings with you next week.

But wait, there’s more! Read AJ’s insights as he explores the world of the Team Player in Part 3 of Love and Gaming.

The big day has come! Both Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Brütal Legend have their North American release.  In the last months these games have received a lot of attention, and the building excitement has put me in the mood for art.  Please hold on for a second while I fire up the old MS Paint.

Ah, there we go.

Uncharted 2, the sequel to Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, features more action-adventure… action, as well as the much-touted multiplayer system, which will let players go head-to-head or cooperate to complete missions as the game’s major characters. If this sounds like your cup of tea, pick it up for PS3 today.

Brütal Legend is the rock-n-roll fantasy adventure featuring Jack Black as a roadie on an odyssey through a heavy metal world.  Star-studded and sure to be packed with irreverant comedy, this Xbox 360 title is for mature audiences only. If you want to rock on in an open world, this should be right up your alley.

Now that I’ve bored you with the boring details, here’s what you’ve been waiting for: the unveiling of my masterpiece!

Look out, Jack Black!  Behind you!

Take a look at this run of the mill promotional offer that brought to you by MMORPG.com and IAH Dragonica for a chance to enter the sweepstakes to win an Apple iPod Touch 8GB. If you are interested in this sweepstakes, click here to read more.

Even if you do not play Dragonica Online, you might want to give it a try to win this freebie.

Well, looks like Age of Conan’s making another go of it.  Whether you never tried the game in the first place, did try it and left with other portions of the community, or simply have some time to kill, this may be what you’re looking for. Since launch, a great deal of content has been added, new features included, and old systems revamped – it just might be worth checking out.

Are you strapped for cash and can’t seem to keep up with all the latest, coolest games? I know I can’t, so it’s our lucky day!

Everyone’s favorite toy store is holding a week long sale offering three games, for the price of two! That’s right–buy two and get the third free on all video games! The sale begins today, October 11, and will run until the 18th.

Unfortunately, this special excludes pre-orders, so it won’t work if you’re looking to score with Uncharted 2 or MW2. But for anything else, it’s free game, so I suggest you head on over to your nearest Toys R Us.

Did I mention this sale is also available online?

Buy 2 Get 3rd Free [Toys R Us]

There has always existed within the space between two iconic franchises a fight. A fight in which hardcore fans sally forth to prove the future their franchise espouses is more awesome than the other. In 2010, the fight will be brought to a new arena: the MMO, in the forms of Cryptic’s Star Trek Online, and Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Star Trek and Star Wars have been a part of gamer culture since the beginning, so it’s wonderful to see both having a significant presence within this upcoming generation of MMOs. Both contain living, breathing universes that fans have wanted to explore for quite literally generations. Both have exciting potential for gaming: epic conflicts, deep storytelling opportunities, and much-needed A-list sci-fi entries into a genre flooded with fantasy.

However, that’s about where the similarities end. Cryptic and Bioware, given the same basic amount of time so far in development, have gone in two entirely different directions and approaches to create their new properties. Cryptic’s Star Trek creates an experience that attempts to create gameplay within the framework of an episodic story. Your experience takes you from the bridge of a powerful starship, to planets’ surfaces and starbase interiors, back to the starship once again.

Cryptic’s starship game proves already to be something special. They’ve clearly taken inspiration from Activision’s Bridge Commander, going for a more tactical style taking into account weapons firing arcs, shield rotation, and resource allocation. Your bridge crew has a direct affect on the performance of your vessel, contributing their skills to squeeze out potential from the starship that could not be had without them. However, the current difficulty Cryptic appears to be facing is how to make their Away Team missions as inspired – and how to distance them from Cryptic’s other offering, Champions Online.

Bioware’s approach is much more non-traditional, their offering looking more and more akin to their single player titles than any MMO to date. Voice acting, a focus on immersion, and meaningful dialog choices are the main draws here. It appears the budget is higher here as well, as evidenced by the voice acting, and how much more polished the game looks than its counterpart at the moment. From beginning to end of their presentation, Bioware makes it clear that they’re here to deliver the player the best character and story driven immersive experience, all while developing innovative new MMO game mechanics, such as the smuggler’s ability to take cover.

So far, it seems of the two games, the Star Wars fans are in possession of the bragging rights. While Cryptic’s starship system looks incredible with screenshots easily being mistaken for polished concept art pieces, and while it also possesses inspired bridge crew game mechanics, the game suffers in the Away Team portion of the experience, looking very undeveloped thus far. Meanwhile, Bioware has an epic cinematic trailer and very polished, engaging gameplay already in place. The world your character inhabits looks lived in…and more than that, the world just feels right, like you’d stepped into a scene out of Star Wars Episode 2.

So what does the future hold? This columnist, who was cheering for Star Trek Online, believes that if Cryptic doesn’t hunker down and seriously develop their Away Team game, Star Wars will have won this round, and rightly so. If Bioware can deliver what they’re promising, they’ll have earned every subscription they get, including mine.

In one more piece of CCP news, the first trailer of their upcomming console FPS DUST 514 has just been released. Based on the EVE universe the game is promising to fuse FPS and RTS gameplay elements and somehow, interact with the existing EVE Online.

It looks promising to say the least.

Words can’t describe, so I’ll leave it at this CCP=WIN

Lyrics:
Intro
First off – let me make a short introduction
I’m the space 5.0, keeping EVE from destruction
Guard is the name, Lead master of the game
Top dog in the gamemaster hall of fame

Im chillin at my desk with two girls and one pimp cup
Sippin champagne, reading mails checkin what’s up
Isk spamming scum bags disturbing the peace?
WOOP WOOP its the sound of space police!

Every day is a fight, there’s no room for bloopers
Bugs coming at us like in Starship troopers
We help when we can, every child, every man
Treat the boogie man to a permanent ban!

CHORUS x2

We’re CCP! We march on fearlessly!
Excellent is what we strive to be!

If you’re going to follow us to the top

HARDEN THE FUCK UP!

You best watch out bitch if you’re an exploiting scammer
Guard will gank you in the face with his big ban hammer
Remove all your Isk , throw your ass in the slammer
Make you share a cell with a manic ISK spammer

Like a never ending spam thread on racist biking
This song has something for everyone’s liking
Holy shit I see local spiking

…ladies and gents, its techno Viking!

Chorus x2

Ever flowing – never standing still
We roll with the punches, move in for the kill
The competition ends up six feet in the ground
With fists full of awesome we go round after round

United we stand never ever growing weary
We cannot fall cause gravity is just a theory
We reach higher than the giants in operations
Patience soon well be crip walking in stations

We’re more agile than a president dodging a shoe
We need three continents for our massive crew
From Atlanta to Shanghai to the Icelandic nation
Throw your hands up for World Domination!

Chorus

Yesterday I stumbled upon the alpha of a one-man indie MMO project called Love.  I must admit I hadn’t heard of it before, but reading about it definitely piqued my interest: Love is experimental and free-form, in which you can explore the world and build as you see fit.  Players can work together to build settlements, defend their settlements from hostile NPC outsiders, or even sneak into other settlements and act as a saboteur.  Set in a painting-like world, the absolute freedom gives room for griefers to cause trouble, but presents a fascinating canvas upon which to express oneself.

Of late, I’ve been thinking about playstyles.  MMOs lend themselves naturally to community-centric players, but out of necessity most MMOs also have to accomodate those who would rather hunt alone.  There are those who thrill in competition with others, and yet even in a game like EVE Online we find a majority of players who engage solely in PvE.  As for myself, I tend to explore (My all-time most played game is probably Oblivion, in which I’ve clocked an easy 500 hours discovering player-developed content through mods), and I require dynamic, exciting adventure.

Most games hone in on a selection of playstyles and reward them, encourage them, or build core game mechanics around them. Love has no reward system. Love offers the ability to explore all of these approaches to gaming. And, most important, Love imposes almost no restrictions on what the players can do. So, for the next four weeks, I will be trying out different playstyles in this void. Please, join me on my adventure in Love and Gaming.

If this intrigues you, be sure to check out Part 2, in which AJ tries on the boots of the Explorer in Love and reports his findings.