So in a completely crazy moment, I wonder if this problem couldn’t be partially eliminated by tiering the content into larger and, more or less, equally difficult chunks. Sort of like Time Pilot, where you completed a level and moved on to the next after beating a boss and the next level was a different era in time. By tiering the mobs, everything in the beginning tier would be accessible (ie. killable) to a player from their very first step in the world.

Rather than level up the player, the character would receive skills along multiple skill trees (like spells, or combat abilities).  The player would receive no additional “hit points” or “health”

Tier advancement, to some extent, could be up to the player to decide, “Hey, I’ve had enough of this tier, time to move on.”

Mobs in a tier would all have a rating, similar to the level based system now used, the difference being that it wouldn’t be a 3-5 level range that would yield experience, but a whole slew of baddies all geared towards a bracket of characters. Setting the difficulty of encounters would now be more manageable, since all the characters would be locked in to a much smaller range of expected parameters. I am explaining this poorly, I imagine. I guess the easiest way to describe this would be that it would be like making completely separate games, in the same game.

Characters become: noobs, citizens, adventurers, heroes, elite, chosen, etc. as tiers. The player chooses when to “move up” after a certain criteria is met, but can spend time in each of the tiers as long as they wish. Each tiers will have its own set of monsters, raids, loots, etc. The difference is, the monsters in that tier will all be of the same tier as the characters and suitably difficult. No more progression of rats to bigger rats to wimpy kobold to wimpy goblin, but now rats no longer give “xp”. The first tier monsters will all be legitimate content.

Games like ‘The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion’ do this by scaling the monster difficulty to be in line with your character level. The difference here is that instead of scaling the monsters as you level up, you freeze the player at the same “level” while allowing them to collect gear and abilities to complete all the content for that tier. The gear and abilities transfer to the next tier, but would be essentially useless compared to base items and abilities in the next tier (or possibly rare items, like tier raid loot, would scale somewhat).  Players can be motivated to remain in each tier rather than simply opting-up, by: a) increasing the content in lower level tiers, b) adding titles and achievements and next-tier bonuses for completing difficult tier content, c) epic quests and raid content at each tier level (I allude to something similar here), d) making some of the most “hardcore” or challenging content part of the “end-game” for the lower tiers and lastly, e) possibly allowing players to create characters in any tier, or move between tiers at will… I’m not sure about this one yet.

I am thinking that in fact each tier might be a complete world instance of only content related to that tier. Dungeons and zones which only exist in the appropriate tier instances all hooked together with large city hubs for all tiers to mingle.

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…

Really? What were you people thinking?

Still, it might not have been their fault per se, after all M.U.L.E. was released in 1983 for the Atari 400/800 and C64 (as well as a few other platforms) and reputedly only sold less than 50,000 copies. And today, if you tried to find a copy of M.U.L.E. you might be hard pressed to do so. Still, I find such excuses lacking for those who fancy themselves true gamers of moderate sophistication.

But, you ask, what about people who don’t want to scour the internet looking for it? What about people who can’t afford such an awesome program, even if they could find it on ebay, or craigslist or Bijan? What about people who get I.D. 10-t errors when they try to run all but the most basic programs? What about people who don’t want to use an emulator and try to mount virtual drives because that’s something they’d rather not ask for help doing as it sounds a little bit weird when you shout it in mixed company? And finally what about those people who just don’t think it’s going to be any good because… well, because it’s just soooo old and the graphics are just not pretty enough?

Well, I’ll tell you what you can say to those people… ready for it?

planetmule.com
The folks over at planetmule.com understand those concerns and better yet, they’ve addressed them. Check out this… checklist of M.U.L.E. awesomeness!

• Play M.U.L.E.!
• Runs on Windows! (any version)
• Runs on Mac
• Runs on Linux (don’t worry if you don’t know what this means, no one really does)
• Simple to run. (No mounting anything)
• Multi-player over the internet
• Updated graphics!
• Officially blessed by the Bunten family (Dani and Bill Bunten were part of the Ozark Softscape team that developed the original M.U.L.E.)
• It’s FREE!

So tell them all, M.U.L.E. is back, baby.

Now go get it!

*Editor’s note: Some people, if they looked really, really hard out there on the internet, might discover that this same post almost word for word appears on another website “straygamers.com”. Yes, I know. I wrote it there too.

On the very first day that the server came up, I had made a human character in Qeynos and was running around in Qeynos Hills happily bashing wolves and snakes and whatever I could get my level 5 sword on when a strange thing happened: I ended up on a 30 person raid.

You see, in Norrath’s Qeynos Hills, a Necromancer named Pyzjn will rarely spawn and occasionally drops a piece of rare loot which, back in the day, used to be worth a fair bit. Unfortunately, Pyzjn is about level 14 and the highest player in the zone at the time was level 8.  But since this was an expansion server full of people who had put aside higher level characters on other servers to “re-roll” as newbies, the call to arms went out across the zone and soon we had a good part of the zone organized into an impromptu raid force.

It was a bloody fight to be sure, but in the end Pyzjn was down and there was much rejoicing (no real loot to speak of) and then about 30 seconds later everyone went back to the business of trying to level up their little characters to get up to the “end-game” part where we could do this raid thing all over again.

—

I started writing this post a couple years back (timely updates are hard to come by on this blog) and at the time, I was prepared to propose some radical thinking: Why not have end game style content available at the beginning of the game? I mean, it seems as if a great majority of players try to rush through the “grind” to get to the “end game”, so I wonder if it wouldn’t be cool if instead of simply throwing chaff experience monsters in the path of otherwise brave raiding adventurers, games would present some kind of raid content (with raid level loots) throughout the course of the game instead of just all bunched up at the end?

Since having this notion, I have seen in several newer MMOs, that the impromptu raid idea has been incorporated to varying degrees of success. Warhammer and Champions Online both feature raid-style content for triggered zone events. This is a step in the right direction, I think, but they lack the intricacy of planning and strategy that dedicated raids tend to have. I know, I know… I haven’t played all MMOs out there exhaustively and I am sure this kind of thing is done on some kind of level somewhere, but I expect, at best, it is hardly the norm.

So I wonder, why not offer it as an alternative? Some reason not to simply rush through the levels to get somewhere because the somewhere to get to is right there all the time? Make the loot rewards you get at a low level scale with the character’s growth, so Bigblam’s Bow of Boffoness is a kick ass, cool-looking weapon at level 2 or 10 or 100. Just because you get it at level 2 doesn’t diminish it’s coolness, but maybe even enhances it, based on exclusivity. Imagine if many of the “best” end game weapons had to be acquired at the beginning of the game  Imagine if special titles, abilities or bonuses (like a fancy glow!) were only available at the beginning of the game. Then what kind of paradigm have you introduced?

This isn’t the same as making people jump through “advancement quests” or grab “zone keys” as hurdles to slow leveling. Getting cool loot, or titles is purely an optional exercise, but at some point in most MMOs, that’s what people are looking to do. Making it available at the beginning and middle could help reduce the over-emphasis on the whole rush to the “end-game” idea.

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?

Hopefully, I’ll be back here again soon.

And although later I might post a review of sorts for the game, this isn’t it.

This is a gripe which applies to Afterlight and a philosophy which pervades games everywhere.

My complaint is that the game will not let me be a part of it. Oh sure, I can play it. I can go through the missions and research the technology and fight the monsters and win, but it’s all according to the developer’s vision, not mine.

UFO:Afterlight is similar to a giant in the PC gaming pantheon: the X-Com franchise. In some respects, it may be a better game than any of the X-Com games, but there is one glaring, nearly unforgivable omission: I can’t put myself in the game. In the original series, you could name your soldiers, level them up and become attached to them. You could make yourself in the game and lead the charge, or cower in the base at your discretion. In Afterlight, you are stuck with the character names they thought up.

The rationale is (I imagine) that there is a story based around those characters, so they need to be the same to preserve the story structure. That’s fine. Some set characters are good, but if I want to have some fresh-faced, new, alien hunter recruit be named Shootja Indaface, where’s the harm? I think it would also be nice to be able to name my base, my spaceship, my weapons, my robots and whatever else I can. In a single player game, where my choices would impact only myself, what’s the difference to the developer?

The cause could be developer hubris, or perhaps laziness. There is also the possibility that they may feel it isn’t a significant point to address, but it is a gripe of mine nonetheless.

It extends beyond the non-ability to name the characters in Afterlight. It’s everywhere. In nearly all games, the developer’s craft a perfect little polyethylene bubble over their creations which won’t let the players “screw them up.” I’ve ranted similary in the past.

In an MMORPG if you want to name your +7 Sword “Death-Pain Slayer with Whipped Cream,” you can… but only in your head and only people you mention it to in passing will know. The game won’t let you enchant the name onto the sword, or engrave it into the blade, permanently marking it so for the rest of the world to see. You have to settle for whatever name the developers have given it like “Windbreaker” or whatever amazingly perfect name they have chosen and is, of course, exactly the same as every other sword of that type. The same applies even if you craft the sword yourself from a lump of iron and a twist of rawhide, mashing and folding the metal into perfection. Yet even before the blade is created, its fate has been determined.

Want to cast a spell you have dubbed “Great Ball of Fire?” Sorry, instead it will read Fireball III, but someday you can aspire to cast the much more creatively named Fireball IV. Some areas of MMORPGs are crying out for creative player additions. And I’m not even at the point where I am asking to record my own voice for a battle cry, put my own image as an insignia on my armor or introduce true user-created content. This is just about customizing things that already exist within the framework of the game.

People will argue that names provided by the game “fit” and player created ones might “ruin immersion,” which I think is a funny concept. Would being able to make the world you play in uniquely reflect the personality of the players in it ruin immersion or increase immersion? I suspect that opening the hermetically sealed cases to the unwashed masses might ruin the immersion of the store display version of the playscape, but it would begin the process of increasing immersion in the new world conceived by the players.

So in MMO space the question really becomes: Is the world the developers create “better” than one the players would create themselves?