The game looks particularly interesting (to me anyway!) with one person playing a spy trying to blend in with a crowd of computer controlled characters at a party while at the same time attempting to carry out a mission and another person playing a sniper across the street observing the party trying to deduce who is the human controlled spy, so he can end the espionage mission with a bullet to the head. Check it out in more detail at the web site: http://www.spyparty.com/

I am hoping to get my beta invite soon!
Creator video interview after the jump…

1. No more corpse runs.

Now, when you die, you simply respawn with all of your gear feeling pretty tired for a bit of time. Of course, you are still penalized some experience points and still need to have a resurrect spell cast on your body if you want to get a portion of that experience back. I am probably the only one who, kind of, sort of misses the naked corpse run. I met a lot of really cool people because they either a) needed help to get their body, or b) were willing to help myself/friends recover ours. The naked corpse run was a community building vehicle which made people be somewhat reliant upon each other from time to time. It was one of those things which I felt defined EQ (for better or worse). The change was such a shock, such a reality twisting event that I was inspired to break out my litle drawing tablet and draw a cartoon memorializing it.

(you can click this for a slightly bigger version)

2. Mercenaries are another new addition to the game.

If you like to solo, these guys (and gals) are great. Simply pay some money to have a partner in your group. You may choose either a tank, or healer of most any race you wish. They come pre-geared with all their spells and level up with you. Each fifteen minutes of use, you pay an upkeep fee for your rent-a-friend. At lower levels, the mercenaries are almost over-powered. I am wondering how people who have chosen clerics and warriors to play as their class feel about the mercenaries, but when I asked in the general chat channel no one answered. So, I am guessing they are indifferent?

3. OR the lack of response might be because the game population is incredibly low.

On the Luclin server, most times our group is completely alone in whatever zone we have chosen to stomp around in. It is like playing on our own personal server. Without having to deal with other players in the way of what we want, it makes the game much less stressful. We kill lots of named monsters. We don’t even think about sitting in one camp waiting for respawns. The level “grind” doesn’t seem so grind-y. But then again, we are playing the game with a full group ready to go each time we log on. It probably isn’t the same thing for most people who still log in and have watched their friends gradually move on to newer, shinier games. I imagine that the two changes I mentioned above are directly related to this reality. Few people means no help getting corpses. Few people means no groups. Few people who can’t get groups and can’t get corpses means even fewer people who are going to remain interested in paying every month for a frustrating decade old game.

For now, I’m having a lot of fun, more than I have had in any MMO since leaving EQ four years ago. It’s probably 50% my nostalgia, 25% my insanity and 25% the actual game. Hopefully it’ll last a while before the shine of this old game starts to wear off again.

In the meantime, any ideas for a cool guild name?

When the Optimus was announced, back in July of 2005, it made a pretty big splash. I can recall thinking that it was a must have item for me. The designer, Art Lebedev, originally said that he figured the keyboard would cost “less than a good mobile phone.”

The product was delayed time and time again. Eventually the company released a mini 3-button version in August 2006.

So now the full-size version is scheduled to finally arrive, supposedly in December of this year. If I had enough money (which I don’t) and nothing else to spend it on (which I do) and I DID pre-order (which I didn’t), I don’t think I would be holding my breath for it to arrive in time for Christmas.

That’s just a hunch.

Of course, if someone wanted to get one for me, I wouldn’t say no.

If you are deeply intrigued by the story of the Optimus, you should read the project official blog.

I had already canceled my subscription because Sony decided to hike up the rates on their Station Pass, which I was a subscriber to despite only playing Vanguard at the time. I hadn’t even thought about it since then, I can’t believe that was only back in March, it seems like such a long time ago that I played it.

But to finally un-install it made me just a touch melancholic. Maybe it’s the rainy New Hampshire evening that’s got me a bit down already, or maybe it’s the idea of “the Vision” which could have been, but never quite materialized from the murkiness of the wonderful daydream that it must have been and that many of us at one time shared.

I can still remember how excited I was when Sigil Games was formed. At the time, I had even sent Brad McQuaid, the CEO, an exuberant email inquiring about possible employment, which he took the time to respond to personally.

I was excited for this game from the beginning, although I didn’t much care for the title. I heard the wonderful ideas and plans and I imagined great things to come.

Of course, I knew the reality would never live up to the utopian game I had imagined Vanguard would become, just as a movie seldom plays out exactly like you imagine it would from reading the book. There is always a lot which gets lost in translation. But even as I was ready to acknowledge that in my head, I still was waiting for something great.

When Sony took over the publishing role for the game, there was such a hue and cry among those who were excited about the game, and there was much hand-wringing done in the forums over the switch. It would be the death of “the Vision,” some said. And looking back, maybe it was. But personally, I didn’t see Sony as that much worse of a partner than Microsoft. After all, what wonderful Microsoft published MMOs have there been? Asheron’s Call? Sony almost seemed like an upgrade to me.

By the time I was selected for the beta on August 29, 2006, my anticipation was still running high. I spent nearly 2 days downloading the client and I completely quit playing Lineage 2. Once I had it downloaded, I found that my system couldn’t really run Vanguard all that well. I was using a AMD Athlon 3000+ and an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro in an AGP slot. I was disappointed in the performance and although I desperately wanted to play, the horrible frame rates made it nearly impossible.

So, I upgraded my system. Did I upgrade solely for Vanguard? No, but it was a factor. I bought a brand new Core 2 Duo 6600 to put in a 680i chip-set motherboard and GTX 8800 video card on the day they were released (November 8, 2006).

On my new system, the textures rendered incorrectly on the 8800 video card, but after a couple weeks it got sorted out and the game ran very well in 1600×1200 resolution. But although Vanguard was pretty, the game wasn’t compelling enough for me to stay interested in to test. The combat mechanics felt like a step backwards from EQ2 and other games, the world felt flat and lifeless and I just couldn’t get into it. I did like the diplomacy part of the game, but it didn’t feel integrated enough. I felt like a bolt on extra time-killer rather than a real path of advancement. I was pretty disappointed. So, I more or less dropped out of the beta a few weeks later and I imagined that there would have been plenty of angry folks on the forums to know that one of those coveted slots had pretty much gone to waste.

When the announcement came from Sigil in early January that the game would be released on January 30, I logged back into the beta to see what kind of progress had been made. What I found is that it was still a very buggy game. Even in the last stage of beta, each game session could be counted on to have a) a crash and b) at least one falling through the world episode. The forums were full of posts wondering what the heck Sigil was thinking rushing the release of a product destined to piss off people who purchased it and Brad McQuaid posted that the launch was driven by financial concerns and major work on game bugs could continue after that point.

I wasn’t going to bother with Vanguard, I knew it would be a mess, but against my better judgment, I bought it on release day anyway through direct2drive.com.

On my system, the released game was still unstable and would crash randomly or crash as a result of certain repeatable circumstances (like if I received two pieces of mail in my character’s mailbox… crash), but most of those bugs started disappearing by the end of the first month.

It took me longer to stop playing than it should have, I think I quit in mid-March. Ultimately, there wasn’t all that much which was new, different, better or whatever. I guess that realization came to me at a little earlier than it did to Sigil, but they soon learned that the wheels were off the wagon themselves a month or so later.

Then there was the announcement by Brad McQuaid which read more or less like an obituary for Sigil where he admitted that in retrospect, things should have been done better and that Sigil would need significant help from the Sony partnership in the future.

It really came as no surprise to hear today that Sony has acquired them outright.

I imagine that Vanguard fans out there will be hoping that Sony will attempt to right the ship, improve the playability of the game and make it relevant in the currently crowded MMO space. Someone let me know if they do.

After surfing over to Nerfbat’s page, I noticed that he recently updated his own MMO Lexicon page, which is a wiki format page allowing the community to stock it with content. Well heck, if someone out there is already getting the community involved in defining the various MMO terminology, I might as well just link to that instead.

And I believe they even have more than 6 terms defined already!

I am a masochistic gamer.

Of course, I should have realized this long ago. After all, when playing games of any kind, I routinely ratchet up the difficulty until it becomes impossible to win without me turning in a near-perfect performance. I don’t get put off by losing, penalties, being flung back to checkpoints or even complete restarts.

But now I understand that this may make me different from many other gamers. It is probably hard for many to imagine that there is anything “fun” about playing games on maximum difficulty when they could be played and beaten on “normal.” Some people probably think that losing over and over could not possibly be as much fun as winning. But for some reason, that doesn’t seem to be true for me.

For example, I realize that playing Civ IV on emperor level against 17 opponents is a no win scenario for me, but despite losing game after game where my cutting edge longbowmen are overrun by my opponents’ infantry and modern armor, you won’t find me lowering the difficulty settings any.

When I play Europa Universalis 3, do I take Spain, England, or even Sweden? No, I prefer to play nations like Iroquois, Kongo, or Dai Viet, which have no chance of ever becoming serious world players.

In Everquest each time a new server would come up, I would quit whatever character I was playing and jump to the new server and try to finish all the available content as quickly as possible, staying ahead of the majority and tackling the content with gear I had earned myself or with guild-mates, rather than bought from a high-level player merchant.

Recently, I have been playing Guild Wars and I have been singularly focused on obtaining the “Survivor” title for my character. In order to achieve it, I need to get to level 20 without dying. However, I am unwilling to change my aggressive play-style of soloing without henchmen . After 8 re-rolls of this character, the highest deathless level I have achieved is 11. But that’s okay. For me, that’s what makes it fun.

After all, I also played Pitfall on the Atari for years.

I have friends who are content to grab a game and play through it at a lower difficulty setting. They have fun “beating” the game. Getting to the end is what matters for them.
But for me, I like “playing” the game. Getting to the end means the game is over; that there is no challenge left.

Back in the day, it seemed like most games were designed to be pretty darn difficult to beat. It took me forever to beat games like Adventure (Atari), Zork (C-64), Ultima and X-Com (PC). Those were games I played and worked at for long periods of time and the possibility of having to start all over from the beginning was around every corner. There was no hand-holding and no sympathy treatment. Screw up and you go home.

But lately, I have been getting the feeling that game designers are designing games so that nobody loses. Anyone who simply puts enough time in (and saves frequently enough) will eventually get through the game. It’s sort of like that feel-good style of little league they were pushing some years back. No one loses, we’re all winners. Yay!

I think that philosophy sucks.

I think this is what disappoints me most about MMOs now. There is no barrier for completion, there is no minimum standard for competency of players. There is nothing which stops anyone who creates an account from achieving nigh god-like status in the world. Permanent death, grievous injury, character age and obsolescence, gear destruction, and systems by which players have to pass difficult trials unaided to advance are all mechanisms which the current crop of MMOs ignore in the pursuit of the “casual” gamer, the “goal-oriented” gamer, or the “social” gamer.

So instead, I find myself on single player games mashing the difficulty setting all the way to “Insane” or “Oh my God. you’ve got to be kidding” level, or imposing artificial challenges on myself within the framework of online games, just to make it tougher and see what kind of teeth each game really has. And I don’t want to see the end of the game, unless I’ve had to bleed for it.

Which reminds me of one more thing I really dislike, which is game designers who try to force “replayability” into their games by only letting you unlock higher levels of difficulty if you complete the game. Seriously, who (without severe OCD) wants to replay some linear style game just to see what it would have been like if it was actually tougher to play? Certainly not me (my OCD notwithstanding).

Now after all that rambling, I want to qualify what I am saying. Although I do not mind losing or negative game reinforcement for poor play, that doesn’t mean I am willing to tolerate poor game design and ill-conceived mechanics which make it painful to play – perfectly or not. For example, I find nothing redeeming about Lineage 2 which certainly is torturous to play, but only by virtue of being totally devoid of anything resembling fun and requiring a monumental time commitment to the tedium to be able to advance to even more mind-numbingly boring time sinks.

No, I simply want games to be fun, and challenging nearly to the point of impossibility and then I want to win in spite of it. Is that really too much to ask?

I’ll leave you to ponder that while I go put my perfect Pogo Free Cell record on the line…

Everything is better now that I found the flamethrower and the chainsaw.
I promise.