Archive for the ‘Featured’ Category

This weekend, I went to a friend’s place and saw him playing Runescape. I wondered to myself why a 25-years-old adult would play a web-based, notably dated MMOG? I mean, he played the well-known World of Warcraft for years, and then he switched to Runescape? I found this surprisingly odd, so I asked him about his reasons.

Runescape does not required a subscription fee in order to play. There is no installation at all and instant access to play in anywhere. And best of all, the game has offered numerous impressive features since its launch in 2001.

Even though the graphics of Runescape cannot compete with many installation-based MMOGs, it has millions of users whom you can play with, over 150 quests for fun, and 24 diverse skills to practice. Runescape sure is dedicated to their users with new content updates when many other FREE to play MMOGs could care less and would rather focus more on cash items for their own benefits.

“So, M.Knight, what are we writing about tonight?” I asked myself this morning. It took me quite a while to come across it, but then I realized: we here at Bunch of Gamers aren’t just here to tell you about the latest and greatest news that every other site pounces upon. We are quite literally a bunch of gamers, and with that comes all the discussion that a bunch of gamers might have.

Once I was hit with that revelation, it was pretty simple to come up with something to write about: There are just some things that I’ve always wanted to share with others. Which brings us to Red Moon Rising.

Red Moon Rising is set in a world more than a bit steampunk-esque in nature, filled with intrigue, mystery, and a nice, hefty dose of dry wit. Well…I use the term “dry” loosely. It’s quite rainy in Ashul, the opening location of RMR, and it’s from the beautiful dreariness of that weather that the webcomic gets its first chapter’s title.

The visuals are stunning, and the dedication that Rose Loughran, the creator of Red Moon Rising, has to this artistic endeavor equals that, going above and beyond merely presenting her tale. She takes an active part in her community, answering questions in the comments section of almost every page, occasionally posting up art tutorials, and hosting Livestreams where her fans can watch her work on the next page.

Meanwhile, each of those pages maintain that beautiful quality throughout this well-thought out plot, with a very regular delivery that perseveres through hard drive, laptop, and tablet failures, blue screens of death. With grace and determination, Ms. Loughran one-ups even her story’s heroine it seems.

Red Moon Rising can be found at http://www.redmoonrising.org – with all the airships, gorgeous vistas, and kickass heroines a growing gamer needs to fulfill this part of a healthy diet of awesome.

Another week has passed, and it is time once more to talk about Love. Since we began this little experiment, we’ve seen this game through the eyes of the Explorer and the Team Player, and the gaming conventions Love throws out the window has cast an interesting light on these playstyles. I expected to experience the same as I played as the Loner this week, and I was not disappointed.

We’ve all encountered soloers in MMOs, and most of us have even taken on this role at one point or another. And yet, despite how common the Loner is, the greater MMO community always seems ready to condemn him when he complains about a part of an MMO being too difficult to solo. “Why are you playing an MMO if you don’t want to play with anyone else?” comes the battle cry, and on the surface, this argument does seem perfectly reasonable. The truth is, there are plenty of reasons to solo, ranging from the difficulty in finding a group/guild to run a dungeon/raid, to the extreme pressure a “serious” group of gamers can put on each other, to pure and simple shyness.

Besides, isn’t there something of a romantic air about the lone wolf who wanders from challenge to challenge? Without the community an MMO provides, who would bear witness to your exploits?

So, how does this apply to Love? Again, Love presents a unique challenge. It is presented as extremely open, a world that the players create with their friends (or so the about page claims). However, the game revolves wholly around community, and if you don’t have a settlement, you find yourself alone in a dangerous world armed with nothing but a mere laser gun. And infinite lives. And no death penalty. Oh, and of this week’s patch, the enemy AI seems to have lost its ambition to aggressively hunt down players or build up any advanced weaponry.

Sure, hopping around blowing up AI bases was entertaining the first couple of times. However, without sustained challenge, there wasn’t much to keep me entertained. The worlds of Love are beautiful, but aside from their value as a simulated nature walk, there’s not much to discover.

It is worth mentioning that, in Love, there is no region chat. There is no community chat, or economy chat, or any easily accessible channel with which to communicate to far-flung players. What there is is the radio, a tool that works like, well, a radio.  To get your hands on a radio, you must be part of a settlement, which was against the Loner playstyle I was going for this week. And I discovered something interesting: I may enjoy soloing for a fair portion of my playtime, but I certainly don’t like to be alone. With absolutely no one to interact with, I found myself begin to walk in circles, hitting the same groups of AI over and over again, purposeless and lost.

As a one-week soloer, I imagine that, at least in my case, I don’t solo because I want to play by myself. Rather, I play MMOs for the possibility of interaction, and the possibility of experiencing a new story with my fellow players. It just so happens that it’s easier to fall into soloing, especially when so many games don’t present immediately accessible venues through which to build the connections needed to build up a strong community.

Civilization fans who use Facebook can soon rejoice: Sid Meier’s iconic game is coming to the social networking site in the form of Civilization Network. On Wednesday, at 8:56am Pacific, Sid Meier posted the following note on their Facebook fanpage:

Hello Civ Fans!

I wanted to let you know we’ll soon be looking for beta testers to help us develop a unique new way to play Civilization. Ever since we finished Civilization® Revolution™ last year, I’ve been looking at ways of expanding the Civ gameplay experience to include solo, competitive and cooperative play to take advantage of the uniqueness of social networks. We’re calling this project Civilization® Network™ and the full game will be available next year on Facebook. Civilization Network will allow you to join together with your friends to create the world’s most powerful, richest, smartest, or just plain coolest civilization. You can coordinate your strategy to win great battles, share your technology to jump ahead of your rivals, lobby your family and friends to form your own government and win vital elections, manage and grow your cities to maximize production and happiness, spy on your enemies, and work with your friends to create the great Wonders of the World. The game will offer everything you enjoy in Civ in a fully persistent environment – you can play as much as you like, whenever you like, and it’ll be free to play.

We’ll offer a closed beta of the game soon, so stay tuned for details on how you can sign-up to participate. The full game will launch in 2010. For more information about Civilization Network, including development updates and behind-the-scenes posts from me and the Firaxis team, join our Facebook fanpage here.

Thanks and Stay Civilized!

Sid Meier
Director of Creative Development
Firaxis Games

The newly opened fanpage also contains a link to their freshly minted Twitter account.

Bunch of Gamers will continue to follow this story as it develops.

For the past 2 weeks, I’ve been exploring the alpha MMO Love, and the different ways we play games. After a brief introduction, I spent my first week playing the role of the Explorer, a player who simply wants to experience new things and discover new gameplay. This last week, I’ve tried on the shoes of the Team Player, someone who does everything to further the group. This playstyle is perhaps the intended way to play Love, which centers around building up player settlements and defending it from enemy AI incursions.

Several excellent settlements have sprung up through the efforts of players cooperating with each other in-game and over Ventrillo, such as The Waygate Tree and the curiously named Treedong Settlement. Sadly, no single settlement can last for long under the combined threat of the AI and regular server resets, and the truly great settlements require the attention of care of at least a dozen players to thrive. Poor communication tools and a spread-out server population have made these difficult to achieve, but all the more rewarding when you can pull it off.

One point I’d like to address in this writing is the motivation of a community-centric player. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m more of an explorer myself, though I have been an active member of the occasional guild in the past. MMOs are, theoretically at least, communal games by their very nature. I’ve seen it often enough: someone laments MMO content that requires them to group with other players, or something they can’t solo, and someone else tells them to screw off and play a single player game. For most MMOs, though, finding a group of reliable partners or being active in a guild can be a major time commitment, and some don’t have the time or desire to turn their leisure time into a chore. So, what motivates the Team Player to do exactly that?

To my thinking, there are two primary drivers at work here. First, and perhaps most obvious, are those who want to receive renown or praise. By rising up the ranks of a guild, you have a build-in audience to watch you in all of your glory. Guild leaders are often the most revered players, particularly in politic and war-heavy games like EVE Online and Darkfall, and if you play your cards right you may even find yourself interviewed by the likes of online gaming magazines. The second reason, more abstract than the first, is the desire to be part of something greater than yourself. For the player driven by this desire, stacking one’s own, small contribution upon the contributions of others until they’ve created something grand is enough.

Love caters to exactly one of these drivers, and I’ll leave it to you to guess which one. Here are some hints: when you log into your server for the first time, you are assigned a random name, your avatar is indistinguishable from anyone else’s avatar, and there’s no way of tracking who made what structures, who gathered what resources, or who destroyed what AI base.

In a time when customization is king, this can be a hard pill to swallow for some. Games have been feeding our egos and sense of self for so long, to come across this game that asks us to give anonymously, play nice with each other, and build something pretty will take some adjustment. In trying this playstyle in Love, the lack of glory has illuminated one of the major reasons we play this way.

Now that I’ve played nice, it’s time for me to strike out on my own. For the next week, I will be playing the part of the Loner, hunting AI and gathering resources for my own selfish purposes. In this game meant for co-op, let’s see how it likes getting a handful of solo crammed down its throat.

Next week is here, and so is Part 4 of Love and Gaming: The Loner!

The last few months of 2009 is looking rather dim for the world of PC Strategy games, unless of course you’re looking forward to Burger Rush or Dinertown Tycoon. So with that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of games that we would actually want to play AND will be out sometime in 2010.

5. Kingdom under Fire II

Developed by Blueside, Kingdom under Fire II will make its début on the PC sometime next year. Details are still lacking but what we’ve seen of it so far is compelling enough to give it a nod here. The game is slated to have both a single play campaign and MMO mode and will fuse third person action style game play, ala Dynasty Warriors, with a unique command mode in which players can give orders, direct units of troops and call for reinforcements. The MMO side of the game it really what will set this title apart, if it’s done well.

4. Victoria 2

The sequel to Paradox Interactive’s enormously complex title by the same name, Victoria 2 will put players in command of just about any nation on earth. Real-time Grand Strategy would be an apt term for most of Paradox’s RTS titles in case you’re unfamiliar with them. In Victoria 2, players will lead there nation through the 19th and 20th centuries, dealing with political movements, angry colonists, industrialization, world wars and a whole lot else. One of the great development strategies that Paradox has adopted is to work very closely with their player base, in development, to make sure they get the functions and features right in the eyes of their base. So, if you haven’t done so already, check out their forums and get ready to lose untold hours of sleep when this title hits in early 2010.

3. Society

Arguably the first F2P MMORTS (I won’t do that again, I promise) to be developed by a major western developer, Society will fuse all the staples of a RTS with massive competition from up to 30,000 other players. The games developer, Stardock, is promising deep military, resource and political management mixed in with city building simulation. Players will be able to form Empires (ie Guilds) and help each other defend their territory. Stardock has also promised solutions for players defending their territory while they are offline. Best part of Society however is that it will not cost the player a dime to get on and play.

2. Supreme Commander 2

Not much is known about Supreme Commander 2 yet and it seems that Square Enix will be keeping a lid on the details until at least later this year but as the sequel to one of the most legendary RTS games of all time, Supreme Commander 2 has to be mentioned on this list. All the factions of the original title will be present and at least one unknown faction will be introduced. So until we know more, we will have to sit, wait and dream about what’s coming with Supreme Commander 2.

1. Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty

I know, not very original for a list of titles to look forward to in 2010 but common, it’s STARCRAFT 2 (OMGOMGOMG!!?one!). Over a decade since the release of the original, the world is ready for the sequel and at least another decade of Zerg smashing mayhem. Wings of Lberty will focus primarily on the Terrans and specifically on Jim Raynor and his rag tag bunch of mercenaries who find themselves searching the galaxy for artifacts of the Xel’Naga. Blizzard has already made it clear that the game will have at least two expansions which will center around the Zerg and Protoss campaigns. The game will also introduce a slew of new units, heroes and locations for us to collectively drool over. With no official release date yet, other then a very general 2010, we will have to contain ourselves just a little bit longer.

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.

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.

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.