SONY COMMITS FRAUD TO INCREASE SALES

On Decdember 26th, 2010, SOE (Sony Online Entertainment)advertised on their main webpage for DC Universe Online that, if you hurry and buy today, you will be given a beta key. Many people took the bait and pre-purchased the game, only to be told the key wouldn't get sent to them until Jan 4th. By the 5th, when no keys arrived, they contacted SOE only to be told beta was over, there were no keys and there would be absolutely no recompense made for renegging on the fraudulent deal. This unscrupulous tactic of bait and switch, common among SOE products, was perhaps the most blatant in recent years. You are urged to be very wary of all dealings with the entertainment company.

With Cryptic's refusal to make the Star Trek MMO much of the fan base asked for, there is truly a void in the sci-fi MMO department. It seems only EVE Online currently attempts to capture this audience but falls very short of the mark. ---- what many sci-fi fans are looking for is more of a sim than a shoot em up. They want a vast galaxy to explore, ply and plunder in ships they can move about in, expand, and control as though they truly were aboard. Crpytic is giving you the "you are the ship" experience already seen in games ranging from Star Trek Armada all the way back to Asteroids. Earth and Beyond sort of tried it, albeit the ground portion of this sim fanstasy was constrained to a starbase experience with precious little to do. Their in-space portion was beautiful, graphically, but small and alarmingly static. For a game that promised its players a "dynamic and ever-changing universe and storyline" they delivered an unchanging, unalterable world. ----- Perpetual's very first concept for their version of STO really got it right, albeit a year or so later the company begged forgiveness that they somehow couldn't figure out how to do it -which frankly displayed a plentiful lack of inventiveness on their part. But in their original design (and the first dev interview can still be found on youtube) was as follows: --------- you would begin in the academy, learning the basics of how to control your ship, upgrade it, fight on the ground, explore and so on. Once finished, you would be given a small, 1 person craft that you could manage and pilot and get immediately out into the galaxy. From there, the galaxy was free-form: go where you want, when you want and engage in exploration, discovery, combat, commerce or whatever struck your interest. As you developed your character's wealth and reputation, you would upgrade to larger craft within which other players might work. Eventually you would have a large starship, a player crew working the controls, sitting at the consoles, being in every room of the ship and exploring, fighting, etc together in a vast galaxy. ------- Eve's simplistic design, heavy grinding and offline-levelling make it too far from this concept to be given much consideration. Couple that with the total lack of planetside content and you have a very bland experience. Now, as cryptic prepares to launch what is sure to be a speedy failure, there is really no one making this game. There IS a market for this, it just has to be handled properly, managed well, and developed with intrepidity and creativity. If a dev company wants to simply crank another trinity game with farming and grinding, this sim layout is not for them. But if a truly adventurous company could take this idea and run with it, they would surely be creating something new and lucrative.

A curiosity, and I really haven't looked it into but have the conservatives attacked our wargames? Every so often, members of the far right pop out of the woodwork to condemn violence in our videogames (usually gang violence) telling us its making us into killers, forcing us to have age restriction labelling, and generally bellyaching about the current generation. But ever since they thought it was a good idea to ask 18 year olds to kill hundreds of thousands of people for their oil profits, have they condemned any of the hyper realistic war games? Food for thought...

Adobe atmosphere not only tanked, it never made it out of beta, hacking and bug issues clouded NWN's meager success, Second Life's alarmingly high costs and less-than-robust software make it more the environment of chinese money farmers than anything else and games that once claimed they would add a world-building aspect to their MMOs have since renegged. So does this mean that create-your-own content is dead? Well, as I write this there are no games whose major plans include this ability but should we all give up hope? The vast majority of gamers who have played city of heroes or champions online will be quick to tell you that, while there might have been issues with content or bugs or myriad other aspects of the games, character creation is by far the most robust...and interesting aspect to both of them. Do you need to be a 3d modeller? Do you need a background in Poser, Maya or Lightwave? Heck no, both games supplied you boxloads of Mr Potato-head-like pieces which you simply snapped together in seemingly infinite combinations. A lot of players said making toons was their favorite part of the game and would make dozens and dozen, often not even playing them. While the gameplay of Spore is diverse and fun, the novelty tended to wear off fairly quickly -but the creature creator seemed to capture everyone's imagination. There are hordes of players who crank out endless ranks of unique and fascinating creatures, replete with clever backstories, only to rarely -if ever, play them. The Sims games very often ended up the same way. Sure, lots of people enjoyed maxing their Sims' skills, marrying them off, producing endless generations or even, disturbingly enough, found joy in locking them in a doorless house full of stoves. But what seemed the number one attraction to the Sims games? The websites, including the Sims2 own site, was chock full of custom skins made by, you guessed it, the player base. So popular was this that Maxis very quickly released the tools to package and upload your customs to your game and to their website. And houses? People seemed to very often build the most elaborate and fascinating homes... and rarely play in them at all. None of this is to say that the games themselves weren't good or fun or robust, nor is it imply that the gameplay should've been secondary to the creative content, but it does tell us that while being a passenger in the dev's car can be fun, making the car yourself can be even more fun. What the market needs is a click-together MMO, more detailed, robust and safe) than NWN that has the freedom of Second Life, the ease of the Sims and the robustness of Spore. Want to play with your friends on a spaceship? Make one! Click the parts together and make it as simple or detailed as you wish. Prefer a legendary forest of elves and sprite? Do it! The servers should be maintained like Blizzard maintain's WoW's servers, keeping it safe for everyone, stable and... lucrative for the gaming company. If, unlike Second Life, I could have a huge chunk of workable space for the same fee I pay for WoW, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Sure, I'd pay extra to expand the size of my lot but for god's sake not thousands of dollars, and upkeep fees etc. Nor would I like to be in a vast, unending ghetto of shops, RP structures, sex parlors and what-not like SL gave us. I could simply log into the game, select my "world" and go to it.. and only it. Yes, we'd LOVE a dropdown menu that would let us visit other people's worlds, if they've left the door open for us and not made it private (which should be their choice) but to stand on the outside of my "spaceship" and see the sex parlor next door and the shop beyond that..and the lag that comes with it, is neither immersive or fun. Some day, some big company might just latch onto the idea. Imagine the dev teams getting to dream up more click-together parts, more tools to create your own parts and more drop-downs and radial menu options to add dynamic gameplay to your world, rather than spending a year thinking up a single-genre storyline and thousands of quests that, after a month, players complain has been exhausted. Some day... it sure would be nice.

In stark contrast to my angst over the poorly handled star trek online, I continue to be amazed and won over by those clever folks at Bioware. Star Wars: The Old Republic not only looks to be a spectacular MMORPG but perhaps the first true next-generation-MMO. Sure, lots of games have made that claim (and oddly, this game has never uttered that phrase) but by the looks of it they have taken standard MMO practices and developed them beyond expectation into true next-generation conventions. If their developer walkthrough is as good as its word, gone are the days of quests that are walls of text with an "accept" button and a laundry list of foes to kill to get your 5 copper. Now you, and your team, enter into engaging dramatic scenes that explain your quests and those quests are shaped by your replies to the NPC participants. The outcome of the quest is determined not only by your abilities in combat but also the ethical and moral choices you make along the way (very reminiscent of KOTOR). There has never been an MMO like this. In addition to the novel and absorbing quest methodology, the graphics and combat system seem to have raised the bar as well. I have yet to encounter anything that I don't like. Kudos to the people at Bioware for all their hard work and painstaking attention to detail.

This week, my rant (and pet peeve) is Cryptic's butchery of Star Trek Online. I've played (heavily) : Everquest 1 and 2, Asheron's call, Anarchy Online (my toon was on the first expansion box), Earth and Beyond, Star Wars Galaxies, URU, World of Warcraft (in a very-heavy raiding guild I have run for 4 years), Neocron, Dark Age of Camelot, Lord of the Rings, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Champions Online, as well as numerous others for shorter periods of time. I am, by no means, an expert on MMOs nor have I "played every MMO," but I consider myself a hardcore MMO gamer and, as a member of the gaming community, feel I have a valid opinion. ---------------- Having watched the development of STO from its days at Perpetual to its current status with Cryptic, I find myself utterly nonplussed at its present state. If it wasn't bad enough that Perpetual did an about-face on the fans changing every facet of the game to its polar opposite halfway through development, Cryptic has taken up the mantle and made the very game the fans voted down on perpetual's flame-ridden dev boards. What really astonishes me, however, is how hard Cryptic seems to be working at changing the Star Trek-iness into something else. I can't help but feel that they never really wanted to make Star Trek, and think Star Trek is lame, and are trying to rid the property of anything Trek so it can become the different game they'd have rather made. One example is the monetary unit they have elected to employ. The dev's have said the unit of money will be "energy" because "Star Trek's economy does not use money." Yeah, they have said that in Trek episodes and films. Of course, they also have said they use "Credits" as money within the federation and "Gold-Pressed Latiunum" is used among the many non-aligned worlds as universal currency but why would use THOSE?? This way, instead of carrying a credit chit or a few strips of GPL, you can ferry a starship full of energy to pay for that donut! Why replace the convention already put into place within the property? There are so many examples of this within the development of this game that it has truly begun to take on a sort of video-game alchemy, transforming one product into another. For their next trick, they're going to turn gold into lead! yeah, i know, makes more money the other way around but the devs at Cryptic ignore things like that. happy trails.