I saw in Massively.com today that there's a new massively multiplayer online game coming out of open beta and going officially online a week from tomorrow. And it's one that I feel some minor obligation to at least try out, because it does offer both the number one and the number two most important things I would ask from an MMO: (1) it's not a D&D ripoff, and (2) it's not an ugly and depressing post-apocalyptic world. The combination of those two traits is rare enough I feel like I owe any new game that meets them both a try. This one is called "World of Kung Fu," and it's set in an animé-inspired fantasy version of feudal China. The art direction looks interesting, the animations in the demo video I saw look interesting, and the character classes look at least somewhat original. I like that you can choose to either show your armor (showing off your loot) or pick your own "fashion" costume to go "over" it with no penalty, although I could live without some of the more immersion-breaking obviously modern costumes. I don't know how crazy I'm going to be about the quest structure, which looks suspiciously WoW-like (City of Heroes has spoiled me, I may never be able to tolerate another game's mission structure after CoH), and I won't know how the game play is until I try it.



It is, however, that awful misnomer in the MMO marketplace, "free to play (F2P)," as opposed to "pay to play (P2P)." To be more clear (and more honest), what that means is "supported by 'microtransactions'" versus "flat-rate subscription fee." As you defeat enemies and complete quests, you earn a certain amount of in-game gold that can be used to buy the armor, weapons, consumables, and crafting materials you need in order to keep playing the game. If you feel like you're not getting enough, you can go to the web page, plunk in your PayPal account*, and use the money in that account to buy in-game gold for your character. Expect to see a lot more games adopt this model, and not just because it's been so successful in Asia. Research firm Parks Associates just completed a survey of 2,000 people who self-identify as hard-core computer gamers who aren't currently subscribing to any massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. 98% of them said that there was no way to design any computer game, no matter what intellectual property or feature set, that could persuade them to pay a flat-rate monthly subscription fee. But 14% of them said that if the game looked interesting, they would consider a free-to-play game with micro-transaction support. (Eric Caoili, "Parks: More Free Games Needed to Grow MMORPG Market," WorldsInMotion.biz, 7/22/08. See also Samuel Axon, "Research: Subscription model unappealing to vast majority of users," Massively.com, 7/23/08.) There are talks about this very subject going on everywhere that game developers are talking with potential financiers, because even before Parks Associates' survey, they could see from the industry numbers that overall industry subscription growth rates have flattened over the last year. There may not be very many more potential customers out there to reach. And if that's true, then there are only two ways to make a new, profitable game: either remove barriers to entry, increasing the potential customer base, or wait for an existing MMO to falter and steal their customers.

And on one level, the difference is purely psychological, or at least potentially so. I can't know until I play the game, and talk to a lot of other people who've played the game, but let's assume the worst about World of Kung Fu. Let's assume that they have "balanced" the game so that items wear out, or need to be replaced because they've been out-leveled, faster than you can possibly replace them using free in-game gold that you earned by questing. Let's assume that it takes, say, $15/month worth of gold purchases for the average player to make up the difference. How is having them bill your credit card or PayPal account a flat $15 per month any more virtuous than you logging onto their web page and paying $15, after the first paycheck of every month, to buy your month's supply of in-game gold? Use up that $15 worth in less than a month? Then take some time off from playing, play more next month, when you can afford it. Same fixed rate, no difference ... if you can do it.

Because that's the problem, isn't it? I already see one potential "casino trap" designed into World of Kung Fu. There are items with far, far better stats than you are likely to ever get as free loot. It's not impossible, but the odds are thousands to one against you getting one that you actually need. You can go without. Or at least, I hope you can go without; if the game is dishonest and a trap, you may find out if you try to play it that no, big chunks of the game aren't playable without these top-quality items. If so, quit, because there are only two ways to get them: buy them on the auction house, at insanely high prices in in-game gold, or craft them. And the way you craft them is you buy an item that's expensive from the item store, then try to enhance it through the crafting system -- which has an unknown percentage chance to destroy the item, and an unknown but presumably higher percentage chance to burn through crafting supplies (faster than you get them as loot) without giving you the enhancement that you want/need. And guess what? Crafting supplies are for sale for cash, too. If you burn through however much you have budgeted for the month, and don't get the stats on an item that you need to progress, will you have the patience to log out and not play the game until next month when you're budgeted to pour in more cash? If not, don't play!

Because there's the rub, isn't it? On one level, this can be defended as being the exact kind of thing that brought increased efficiency and wider availability to a whole range of luxury-item markets: variable rate pricing. Pay more to get it earlier, more conveniently. Willing to wait longer, put up with more inconvenience? Pay less, still get it. If it's not evil when it comes to booking flights or paying for hotel rooms, why is it evil when we try to introduce it to computer games? You know, other than the fact that an extraordinarily large number of people of European ancestry are pathologically unable to turn down a bet. Especially when each additional bet is "only" a small sum of money.

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* Footnote: I should say this in their defense. They do offer a can't-increase-your-spending way to deal with the Item Mall, one that seems clearly designed for parents who don't want to give their kids their own bank-account-linked PayPal account. It's something developed by PayByCash.com called an Ultimate Game Card, purchasable at some convenience stores, drug stores, and Wal-Marts; give your kid (or yourself) a $15 Ultimate Game Card and when it runs out, that's that until you give them another one, unless they want to go down to 7-11 or whatever and buy themselves another one. It still offers the chance to tempt you into spending too much money, but at least it can't directly empty your bank account and you do have to leave the house to do it. Imperfectly virtuous, because it doesn't remove the underlying temptation. And PayByCash.com is not one of my favorite companies; I had to deal with them back when they were the only company that handled billing for Neocron, and their customer service sucks. But it could very easily be worse; they could require game accounts to be tied to a credit card or a checking account or a PayPal account and make it possible to automatically tap cash out from an in-game screen, something that even City of Heroes now does for a few of its micro-transaction based services.

I hardly ever log into any City of Heroes/City of Villains (usually abbreviated CoX, for "City of x," pronounced "sea oh ex") server except for Virtue, the semi-officially designated "roleplaying server." I get my 33 month veteran badge a week from Monday, and in those 33 months, I can count on the fingers of one hand all of the times I've seen actual role playing, like you'd do in an ordinary tabletop role playing game or live action role playing game, in my favorite "massively multiplayer online role playing game" (MMORPG, pronounced "muh-MORE-puh-guh" or "em em oh").

There are some game mechanical reasons for this. Hardly anybody can type as fast as they talk, and CoX doesn't support voice chat yet. (We're assuming the feature is coming at some point, the parent company licensed the tech a few months ago.) Nor do very many people want to stop playing the actual game long enough to stand around typing at each other. If nothing else, the 1/3rd or more of us who are achievement-oriented want to keep pushing on, on, on along the experience-point treadmill, without wasting time chatting, and they easily pull the rest of us along. But during some angst over this in the most popular cross-faction "out of character" channel, Virtue United (join "VU2008"), this evening someone explained that roleplaying sucks, since it consists of (in his words, as best as I can recall them) nothing but a bunch of people standing around a bar reading their character biographies to each other. It was an unfair cut, but it did raise an interesting and fundamental question that applies to attempts to roleplay in all MMOs: what do our characters have to talk about?

Well, let's say that you go to a happy hour in a bar on an "industry night," one where most of the people in the bar are in the same industry you are, but you only know one or two of them from Adam's off ox. What do you talk about? "Hi, what do you do?" Well, that's a problem. Because let's say that you're a superhero or a supervillain in CoX and you describe the last crime you committed or the last crime you foiled? The problem is that when you claim to have been the one to do it, you've created a roleplaying problem for everybody else, because roughly 1/3rd of them who are at or above your level have done it, too. So let's say you try to strike up a conversation with some people at the bar in Pocket D, or in the lobby of Wentworth's Fine Consignments. Somebody asks you what you've been up to lately, and you say, "Well, we just tracked down Frostfire, the leader of the Outcasts, and busted him. It was amazing what he'd done to his hideout with his mutant powers. Kind of cool, actually." Well, that's one of the most popular missions in the game, half the people there have busted Frostfire, too. What are they going to say, "Oh, yeah, we did that last week"? Kind of a put-down. Sure, it could be worked around. But then you have the other problem: not everybody in the bar is the same level. Some of the people there are a lot farther along in level than you. The last thing you want to hear is that from their perspective, Frostfire made bail months ago, that they've tracked down where he was getting the occult talismans his gang were selling to the Hellions, and oh, yeah, that's actually part of a sinister conspiracy by ... well, spoilers enough, you get the idea. And that's assuming that the people around you can even stay in character, and not say things like, "oh, yeah, I remember that one, cool mission."

Now we may get an alternative to this, at least somewhat, maybe in December. They've dropped a hint that there's a major announcement coming this summer about a planned (for later) upcoming feature: player-created content. It'll be your chance to be the game master to however many players find and play your hand-created story in the City of x universe. As best as we can tell from the few hints that have leaked, they hope to offer us the ability to create our own custom instance maps and upload them to the server, but even if they don't, by my estimate, the game already has about 600 or 700 custom instance maps to choose from. You then specify which faction occupies the map, name the end boss, write the beginning and end of mission briefing texts, and see if you can write content as compelling as, say, their stories "The Mysterious General Z," "Ubelmann the Unknown," "The Revenant Hero Project," or "Project: World Wide Red" on the hero side or "Oh Wretched Man," "The Aeon Conspiracy/Echo Down the Aeons," "The Cult of the Shaper," or "The TV Report/Video Killed the Radio/The TV Invasion" on the villain side. Anyway, these may at least offer the chance that you and your team might have something to brag about that nobody else in the bar has heard of. If, in fact, any of the players writing the missions are at all good at writing roleplaying missions, themselves.

But let's say that you're not going to talk about your own adventures, or express (or feign) interest in other people's adventures; Eris knows, there's nothing more boring than listening to someone narrate a gaming campaign you didn't play in. What else is there to talk about? Well, what else do you talk about at parties, with casual acquaintances? The weather? There is no weather in City of x. (So far, the development team is sticking to their belief that weather that did affect game play would be a pain in the backside, and weather that doesn't affect game play is a waste of development resources.)

Sports? In the City of x universe, the number one sport everybody follows is Superhero Arena League competition; that's why so many of the people you walk by on the street are so oddly familiar with your exploits, you're an actual or potential sports star. And the player-run Player versus Player Events Committee (PvPEC) does run a series of roughly bi-weekly, cross-server, ranked, rated tournament competitions on the "Training Room" test server, which people can copy their regular characters over to at any time. But those matches are not televised, not even on the web, let alone in-game where people could sit around and watch them in the bar later, nor does the technology to offer this exist. (It could be done. The tech is in-game for the referees to record matches as they watch them; all that would be necessary would be to build in the tech to convert that to streaming video and multi-cast stream it to certain textured spots in game. It'd be nice if it happened. I'm not holding my breath.) So what that leaves for in-character "sports" conversation, as far as Arena League is concerned, is for people to discuss whatever little they've heard about other people's arena-league fights on the web: sparse content, kind of boring. Other sporting events? Nobody has ever mentioned any other sport in the in-game canonical text. If Paragon City has a sports stadium for any other sport than Arena League superfights, we haven't seen it yet, unless you want to count a few neighborhood basketball courts, and we've never seen or heard of anybody playing on them. We have seen pretty much all of the Etoile Islands, and the Rogue Islanders don't even have so much as a single soccer pitch or a single basketball hoop.

Movies? TV? We know that people in-game watch TV; as I alluded to above, there's a great set of homages to television shows in a set of villain-side story arcs where your character (or team leader) has been brainwashed by Television into doing Television's bidding. The non-player characters mostly even seem to be watching the same TV shows we see in our world -- mostly. They do not, obviously, seem to watch the same superhero TV shows and superhero movies that we do. So while I guess it would be in-character to discuss what was on TV the night before, and what your character would have thought of it, you would run into a couple of problems: other than the superhero shows, what TV shows and movies can you assume the people you're hanging out with in City of x might have actually seen? Still, it's at least workable; I suppose I should remember to use that next time a lull in the conversation comes up in game. (God's miserable wooden dentures, am I going to have to start watching American Idol as roleplaying research? Gaaaagcccch.)

Politics? It drives me insane to point this out over and over again, but in the four and a half years the game has existed, Paragon City, Rhode Island hasn't seen a single election. We don't even know the name of the current mayor, governor, or President. And we've asked; apparently, it's not even in the official top-secret developer-eyes-only story bible. Celebrity news and gossip? We meet a few celebrities in missions, rescuing or kidnapping them. They are not the same celebrities as in our world, or even recognizable parodies mostly; we're never told what they're famous for, or anything that they've done lately. If we were, it would be a one-time thing built into the mission text that still won't have changed five years later, so unless it's a brand new mission in the last update, what players would still be talking about it? Books? Same problem as talking politics: something tells me that a world that's been dealing with real magic using villains openly and in public since 1930 doesn't have a Harry Potter series for the rest of you to talk about in-character, we're not told what the actual game-world best sellers are, and most of the rest of what I read, at least, is about history and politics and current events that are specific to our world's history, not the game world's.

But honestly, what the game needs is a developer-provided regular in-character newspaper. Because one thing that players do spend a lot of time discussing is "what's going to happen to the game world next?" A tiny amount of this information is provided in-game, and in-character. But the bulk of it is in out-of-character rumors by the development team on the official forums. And unsurprisingly, since they tend to have the preliminary features list locked down by about a week after each of the every-four-months major content releases comes out, there is someone at NCsoft Northern California who knows, already, what the story line for the next issue is going to be. They don't know every line of dialog, and they may end up dropping story arcs at deadline to put them off until later (the way that ancient Rome was dropped from the first time travel feature and implemented in the next major release). But they do know enough that if they were good game masters, they could take a couple of hours off every week from scanning the forums to write a couple of paragraphs' news story, giving hints and rumors of what might happen. That, plus the clues that people discover inside the new missions from the previous release, would give people stuff to speculate about in-character, especially if that newspaper was readable in game. (There is an in-game newspaper. But only on the villain side. It's called the Rogue Isles Protector, it shows up under your Contacts list or with the /newspaper command, and it shows you three randomly-generated crime stories related to the Rogue Isles zone you're in. They're missions. No two people will ever see the same newspaper at the same time. So much for that giving people something to talk about.) They used to at least post a single monthly newspaper story about recently released or about to be released content to their website, under the name The Paragon Times. But even then, it was only visible to people who read the forums or regularly checked the website. And even it hasn't been updated since September of last year, when the developer who had been doing it changed jobs. Bring it back, please? And pad it out with Arena League scores and sporting reports about the matches, and made-up book and TV and movie reviews and celebrity gossip from your world, please? And give us a command to bring it up inside the game, so we can refer to it while we're chatting with other players?

Seriously, my word to not just NC NorCal but to the whole industry is this: There are at least hundreds, probably thousands of us in every online role playing game (remember, you do advertise these as role playing games) would would love to keep paying our monthly fees to spend some time in non-combat spaces role playing, if we only had something to role play about. And seriously, we're not even talking about one person's full time job; aren't there enough of us as actual role players who play your game, aren't there enough customers who stopped paying the $15 a month for the lack of this, to pay one writer to work on it one day a week? For crying out loud, please find some way to spend a little bit of the money we're sending in to give us, as the lady sang, something to talk about!

OK, let me get a long list of caveats out of the way first, reasons why I shouldn't care about an announcement I saw today. First of all, I promised myself a long time ago not to get excited about vaporware any more. Nowhere is this more true than in computer gaming, where oft's the slip twixt the cup and the lip. (Duke Nukem Forever, anyone?) Furthermore, this particular announcement makes a promise that three or four well-funded (and a couple of less well funded) companies have tried to deliver on before, and failed; there exist solid technical and financial reasons why what they're proposing to do may not even be feasible. And finally, the announcement is missing some very very important details ... like the names of anybody involved in the actual creative side of it. So yeah, if what I needed was some cold water to dash all over any potential enthusiasm over this particular announcement, I've got buckets and buckets of cold water standing by.

I can't help myself, though. I had a nerdgasm: "Sci Fi Channel creating hybrid TV series and MMO" (James Egan, Massively.com, 6/2/08, based partially on Geoff Boucher, "Sci Fi Channel is game to join the virtual world," LA Times, 6/2/08). The announcement? A half-dozen wealthy companies have volunteered to put up at least 30 million dollars towards the simultaneous development of an original science fiction TV series for the SciFi channel and an MMO set in the same universe at the same time as the series; player characters will appear in the background of some episodes, and player characters' cumulative actions will have some kind of an effect on the how the storyline of the show plays out.

Holy frelling cats.

There are a ton of reasons why this may not work. We know nothing about the story, other than it's science fiction and set on Earth about 80 to 100 years from now. We know nothing about who's writing it, who's directing it, who's acting in it. We know nothing about the creative team behind the online game, either. $30 million sounds like a lot, but it's about enough to develop one half season of an SF TV show, or one very crappy half-done MMO; the actual budget to do both of those things well might well be ten times that, and nobody has said where any additional money for this is going to come from. Once the pilot episode is done, your average TV episode is done in about two weeks, maybe a month tops for a show that runs short 10 to 12 episode seasons; one "episode" of even the best-funded MMOs takes companies with maximum experience in the industry about three to five months to produce. And, as I hinted at the beginning, the ground is littered with the corpses of promises made by various MMO game developers that player actions would guide the storyline from episode to episode; there are really good reasons, if nothing else related to that minimum three to five month lag between player actions and seeing the results in the game world, why this never works. And even by vaporware standards, this is pretty vaporous vaporware, with a forecast earliest possible release date of two years from now.

Oh, and never forget: this is the Internet. There exist at least two or three large cliques of dozens of people each who exist specifically to grief any person or any company that invests any serious money in the Internet for the purposes of commerce or art, in order to make their very important political and artistic point, namely "lol internet." Consider the recent brouhaha between Funcom, makers of the new Age of Conan MMO that's been in the news lately. You didn't hear? Like all MMOs, there's an extraordinarily ill defined rule against "grief play," against playing the game in such a way as to deliberately keep other people from having fun or to intentionally try to make them quit the game. There is no industry standard definition of how to recognize "grief play," though, except via the intent of the griefer, which means that as long as the griefer doesn't outright say that they're griefing, they can usually lawyer their way out of it. As happened just the other day, when someone complained to Funcom that they accidentally offended some member of the Something Awful Goon Squad, who (according to the complainer) brought all 60 members of Goonheim, all of them suspiciously high level for how little time the game has been out, to slaughter this one low-level character, and then "camp" his corpse in shifts to guarantee that he can't actually continue playing at all today, or for however long the Goons decide it will take to prove their point ... whatever that ill-defined "point" may actually be. One of Funcom's game masters showed up to politely ask the Goons to keep it down to "only" 15 to 1, so they wouldn't be accused of grief play. The Goons pushed back, demanding Funcom show there where in the rules it says that 60 people can't camp one corpse for a week, if they want, and Funcom backed down. (See Girdox, "Hordes of Goonheim beats [sic] AoC," Goonheim.com, 5/30/08.) So what happens to this when the swarms on Something Awful, Fark, and 4Chan find out that if they make themselves ubiquitous enough and obnoxious enough they can personally wreck an umpty-million-dollar TV show?

But, good gorram, I can't help hoping and wishing this will work. This isn't something that customers have been clamoring for. This is several somethings that many thousands, maybe in the low millions of customers, all solidly neglected by the current market in both TV and game SF, have been clamoring for. Near-future SF, science fiction of actual predictions about a near-term forseeable future instead of hand-waved over-used cliché worlds and tech. And an MMO where the the players are actually involved in the storyline in ways that other players can see, a world where we're more than supporting roles and spectators as the great changes happen in the game world.

Issue 12, the next big software release of City of Heroes (and Villains) came out this week, arguably ahead of schedule. (Also, arguably, a little more buggy than I'd like, but there were some features here that were so hotly demanded that they were under a lot of pressure from players to ship it and deal with the minor annoyances after it went live. Users are like that.)

With this issue, we're beginning to see the important differences that came with getting the game away from half-control by the original company that wrote it, Cryptic Studios, and 100% under the control of one team, a "new" development company called NCsoft Northern California, abbreviated NC Squared or NC Norcal depending on who you ask. It's all the old team minus the boss, plus about a half dozen or so new hires. And I'll tell you what -- odds are, if there was some reason you left the game or didn't pick it up in the first place, it's turning out because they needed to get rid of that boss and they needed the new hires. You wouldn't believe how much of a difference it's made.

See, here's an open secret of the MMO industry, not exactly something they advertise to customers but something that everybody eventually admits under pressure: It takes about 50 to 100 people to develop a new MMO. That counts all the user interface designers, 3-D modelers, level designers, mission writers, game mechanics designers, animators, computer programmers and so forth who put everything on the screen, plus the managers to coordinate that crowd. It does not count the people who build-out the server farm and run it, the sales staff who will sell it, the billing department that collects the monthly subscription fees, or the customer service people who answer customer questions in-game and out; they work for the publisher, usually. But here's the deal: no publisher in history, no company in history, has kept that whole mob of 50 to 100 people on the payroll after the game has shipped. That's more of a scandal for the industry than you'd think, because no MMO has even shipped with all of the announced, advertised features complete, let alone bug-free. Every company promises players that it's okay if the game is only half done, that the programmers will finish it "soon." And then, quietly and without announcement, they lay off 50% to 75% of the development staff in the first month, whether it's done or not, and lean on the remainder to stay in "crunch mode" for their entire time at the company, asking 15 to 25 people to do the work of 50 to 100 without letting anybody know that the other 35 to 75 people aren't there any more. (Not that customers don't figure this out, eventually.)

And so it was for NCsoft and Cryptic Studios: NCsoft, who was putting up the money, slashed the budget of City of Heroes at about the 3 or 4 month mark, making them lay off 45 of the 60 people in the company. The remainder, whom players (now clued in to just how deep the cuts were, because the survivors are no longer under NDA) call the Freem Fifteen (for in-joke reasons), did a heroic job trying to finish, then continue to upgrade, the game. And they did amazing work, no more than they had to work with. But there was only so much they could do, they were burning out and turning less ambitious, and it was getting harder and harder to hide from the players that the game was getting stale. And that showed up in the subscriber numbers; while EVE Online has steadily continued to climb, CoH membership peaked shortly after the layoffs and has declined slowly since. But now? Now I think the game is actually well-positioned to potentially become a million-subscriber game, and the reasons have to do with something rather more important than the extra money NCsoft is willing to invest now (especially with their previous Great White Hope, Tabula Rasa, circling the drain), even more important than the rejuvenation of the superhero genre from Marvel having set up their own film studio and making the superhero movie a popular genre again. No, the biggest reason you should think about trying this game, or trying it again if you dropped out before, is cultural: the developers are taking time to play the game again.

You'd think that'd be the norm, but it wasn't, and it was beginning to show (at the very least) in the increasing difficulty we were having getting the developers to understand some of the problems we were having, some of the opportunities we were describing that they were passing over. Cryptic Studios had originally "strongly suggested" that their employees play the game in their off time, but then kept them on such long hours that they didn't have any time off to play it in, or hardly any. Now, it's official that they get one hour a day during the day, paid time, when practically the whole company puts down what they're working on, logs on together in teams and solo under secret anonymous character names, and plays the game. And in a recent interview, the new lead designer and the person in charge of game balance and powers design admitted something sheepishly. After almost every hour they spent online under the new policy, they'd drop by the office of the game's user interface designer and say, well, some of the same things we'd been trying to get them to do for years now: "Can you get it to do <x>?" And almost every time, he'd say, "Sure, gimme 15 minutes" or "gimme an hour." The result? Such an incredibly long list of Quality of Life features that the new user interface, chat system, and other minor tweaks to the new user experience are almost enough to qualify this as City of Heros 2.

There is, also, another demonstration we got of what was wrong with the old boss. Don't get me wrong about this part, because one thing I've always admired about Jack Emmert was that if he wasn't convinced that a change would be good for the game, it didn't matter worth a rat's hindquarters how many highly vocal complainers demanded it on the game's official forums. He would say, "sorry, not convinced," and that was that. That sounds pig-headed, and he took a lot of flack for it, but let me tell you what: I've played a game whose publisher was completely spineless about giving people on the official forums everything they whined for en masse, and they wrecked that game beyond all repair, because frankly, a lot of the time the customer just plain isn't right. But sometimes, Jack Emmert was wrong, too, and we learned to recognize when it was going to be when he would answer our requests by saying that there was no good reason, economic or game-balance, not to give us what we wanted, but it didn't "fit his vision of the game."

Well, "Jack Emmert's vision" no longer controls the game; he stayed behind at Cryptic to head-up Champions Online. (Don't get too excited; it's the same game Microsoft walked away from as a probable failure, Marvel Universe Online, repackaged with the classic Champions game setting but without the Hero System rules.) And in one formerly obnoxious area, we're seeing the wonderful results of the new regime: Powerset Proliferation, Round One. If you wanted to play a psychic before but didn't want to be a defender, you were out of luck. If you wanted to be a storm summoner but didn't want to be a hero, tough luck. If you wanted to be a brute but wanted to use weapons instead of bare hands, tough luck. If you wanted to be a fiery melee user but wanted to be a scrapper, not a tank, tough luck. And so forth, and so on; people like me came up with a list of around 100 sets of superpowers already implemented in the game that could be copied from one character class to another without changing the balance of the game, and without creating any substantial expense for the development team, that would have the benefit of tremendously increasing the number of sub-classes people can play. Jack Emmert didn't want it; he wanted the "flavor" of the powers in each character class to be "unique."

Well, the new lead designer and the new game balance manager said "screw that." At least every other issue from now on, they're going to open up tens or hundreds of new subclasses. This one, every main character class (but one) got at least two new powersets to combine with the new or existing powersets for their character class; the net effect was to add about 120 new character classes to the game, things like psi blast/mental domination blasters, battle axe/super reflexes brutes, dark aura/dark melee tankers, ninjas/storm summoning masterminds, plant control/thermal radiation controllers, ice/storm or electric/storm corruptors, earth control/electric assault dominators, and over a hundred more. (The new-user areas are completely over-run with veterans who'd been lusting after some of these combinations for up to four years.)

There's more to the new issue than that, and I will (probably) write about the other big changes to the game tomorrow, or soon at least. But what I think is fascinating about the above is that this time, boy, changing the guy at the top of the company really did make a huge difference, so much of a difference that it really is a whole new game, almost, certainly a much better game, over at City of Heroes.

(And yes, I have 14-day trial codes to hand out, if anybody wants. Just email me a request.)

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this article, ever since it made the rounds of the various gaming blogs and websites: Cao Yunwu (tr Joel Martinsen?), "The System," Southern Weekly, date unknown. (Translation appeared on danwei.org on 12/26/07 under the name "Gamble Your Life Away in ZT Online.") The article is very soap-opera-like in tone, and takes its time getting to the point, so let me summarize the issues for you first:

ZT Online is a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game, based on medieval Chinese martial arts legends, only open in China; despite this, it's one of the biggest in the world. ZT Online's claims to fame are that it supports great PvP, including city versus city diplomacy and siege warfare, that it charges no monthly fee, and that it skips all of the boring "grinding" required for almost every other MMO on the market. But taking those claims in order: the PvP is not consensual, and intentionally not balanced; you can be insta-gibbed by people far above you in level, and when your clan leader needs warm bodies to throw at invaders, you get summoned to the battlefield without your permission. It charges no monthly fee, but it charges cash for equipment. In theory, you can earn money to pay for your equipment, actual Chinese renmibi (RMB), by doing missions in game, but they never pay quite enough to pay for the equipment you out-level every five levels. And it skips the grind in no small part by offering to flat-out sell you the experience points you need to be any level you want.

The viewpoint character of the article got summoned to a battlefield for her side, and more or less accidentally got in the last shot that killed a rival side's king, thereby gaining credit, fame throughout the game ... and a long list of game-generated player character enemies, who took to insta-gibbing her to avenge the honor of their fallen king, as the game required them to do. She found out that she could buy her way up to level 145 (of 170), counting equipment, for about $150, and that'd be enough to more or less hold her own in 1-on-1 PvP. If you think about it, that's about 10 months' worth of ordinary game fees in most other MMOs, so she figured it was worth it. But that, combined with her fame, got her into clan politics with an ally who'd (presumably) also spent about what she had spent, which got her even bigger enemies. It ended up costing her $1500 over a scant few months just to keep up. Finally the game automatically recruited an even larger army to defeat her side, including a force lead by half a dozen level 170 characters. We're not told what they spent, but it's not unreasonable to assume (based on the progression to her level, and what we're told in the article about how equipment costs go up as you go up) that they'd spent closer to $15,000. Each. The article then goes on to deal with her unsuccessful attempt to find a way, within the game, to work around this "victory goes to the highest cash bidder" designed-in feature, and how the company's representatives cheated within the game to stop her before she quit for good over it.

And I've talked this over with a bunch of other gamers, as a pure hypothetical, leaving the China connection (with its own prejudices, because of a decade or more of bad blood between Chinese and American gamers in MMOs over language issues and, even more, over conflicting play-style issues) out of it, to avoid knee-jerk anti-Chinese bigotry. Think about how long it takes, in the MMO of your choice, to grind up a character to the level where they can count on holding their own in unlimited PvP on your server. Now imagine that the game company made it possible to just pay for it in cash up front, instead of paying months' worth of server fees and spending whatever time it was going to take you. How much would you pay for a minimally ready PvP-capable character? Surely not $15,000, people tell me, or even $1,500. Probably not $150. Most would very cheerfully pay $15. Some were willing to go $50 to $100. But no, the sticking point for every player I talked to is, they wouldn't even consider playing a game where you could buy levels and equipment for cash unless everybody who paid got a character of similar power-level. The idea that a person who's richer can flat-out buy victory over you by outbidding you generated a 100% unanimous response: who'd play that game? Sure, rich people might, but who'd volunteer to be beaten on, without any chance of winning, by people whose only "skill" was being able and willing to charge more on their credit cards that you can or will? How does ZT Online attract the million or so "peasants" that get slaughtered over and over again by the handful of rich people who paid for the highest level characters on the server?

But before you answer, consider this riposte, that showed up in the comments on danwei.org, one that I suspect came from one of the company's sales reps. In almost every game out there, the higher level character with the better equipment wins pretty nearly every fight anyway. In those games, the highest level character with the best equipment goes to the person with (a) the most free time and (b) the highest boredom threshold for repeating the same tasks over and over again. In other words, in those other games, victory goes automatically to the person who, in real life, is almost certainly the most worthless loser on the server. What's wrong with having a game where people who are actually successful in real life are also the ones who are successful in the game? Shouldn't the game reward real-life success, as yet another motivator for people who play the game to go out and get good-paying jobs?

(Postscript: And this is on the list of reasons why I stick with City of Heroes and City of Villains. Upon entering any PvP area, everybody gets raised or lowered to the same level. The person with the highest level character and the best equipment might have as much as a 5% or 10% edge, before skill and luck factor in, and it's never so much of an edge that a halfway-awake player who'd rather not stay and fight doesn't have at least a 75% chance of getting away if they try. Oh, and unlike in ZT Online or in half of the games out there, the player who defeats you doesn't actually hurt your character in any way, all they get is some in-game PvP reputation points and the satisfaction of winning a game; all you lose is the 60 seconds it takes to travel back from the hospital. But still, that's not how most of these games work, and it's not how most people seem to want them to work. But in a game where you gamble the fruits of real work you did on leveling your character in every fight, seriously, who volunteers to lose automatically to rich people? Or on the other hand, who volunteers to lose automatically to basement-dwelling unemployed teenagers with no job and no life?)

So, once again while looking for something completely unrelated, I stumbled across a 3+ minute trailer, and about 15 minutes of developer walk-through, of a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game that's under development called The Agency. (I am not going to link to the official web page for it. It's Flash-heavy and content-free.) And watching those videos, I'm struck by how many of the things that I wish were different about MMOs are things that they seem to be planning to include, how many of the things I've complained that other MMOs do wrong they seem to have figured out, too.

For example: no "gritty, realistic" MMO has ever broken through; the really successful MMOs are all set in almost cartoonish, fun-looking places to spend your time; the mass audience isn't looking for a depressing place to be depressed, they're looking for a fun place to have fun. For example: if your game doesn't have something to do that you can actually get done in 5 minutes or 15 minutes, that's as much of a problem for a lot of your potential customers as it is if you don't have something to do that they can get together with their friends and spend all evening on. For example: no matter how much fun you make it to run around shooting things, your customers want other things to do, too -- but those things have to be just as much fun, and they can't take the equivalent of a junior college course textbook to learn how to do.

For example: there's room to lure people away from existing MMOs, maybe, if instead of telling them that once you've ground your way through two weeks' of play to get to level 14, or 20, or 30, or whatever then you'll be having real fun, instead make your game something that's fun to start out. For example: there is no point in even trying to compete with Blizzard in the D&D-ripoff DikuMUD-style MMO business, because there's nothing you can do in a medieval fantasy setting with D&D-like character classes that level up by grinding that would be sufficiently different from, let alone better than, World of Warcraft to give people any incentive to leave World of Warcraft. (I saw a really good essay on this subject by Cameron Sorden over on Massively.com: "When will the players leave WoW?," April 17th, 2008.)

I'm also struck by how clever some of their systems are. For example, take their stealth system. Instead of rendering your character transparent, the characters you're trying to hide from build up evidence that you're there, as they get glimpses of you, as they hear your footprints, and you can make that take longer by using cover and keeping your distance. Or you can wear a disguise, an equipable costume, and it acts like ablative armor against being recognized as a spy: the longer they look at it, the more details that are wrong they notice, the more they notice how unfamiliar you are, the more they notice that you're not acting quite like the kind of person you're pretending to be. Very nice, very slick, almost nobody needs it explained to them: here, put on this biker costume before you go into the biker bar. See little green dots over the NPCs heads that mean they haven't noticed you're out of place as you try to sneak through the bar to the back room. Wait, there's some yellow dots, somebody thinks that you don't belong -- trigger a costume action that's in character, like going over to the bar and ordering a beer, recharge the ablative armor on your costume. Very intuitive, very cool, a nice alternative to having to shoot your way through everything in the instanced mission.

Although, as you see in the trailer, if that's more your style, and you can pull it off, go for it.

Trailer here, if I can get LJ to embed a video from GameTrailers.com (or if I come back after hitting Post Entry and edit in a cruddier copy of it I've found up on YouTube):



The walk-through's on GameTrailers.com's web page for The Agency ... but the default playlist has them in the wrong expletive-deleted order. Here, watch them in this order (standard definition, Flash format links provided, higher definition and/or other formats on the web page):

1. CES 2008 Developer Walkthrough Part 1
2. CES 2008 Developer Walkthrough Part 2
3. CES 2008 Developer Walkthrough Part 3
4. CES 2008 Developer Walkthrough Part 4

Now, aside from the standard disclaimers that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo, and that nobody in his right mind gets all excited about a game that isn't even in beta test, yet, there's one other reason to fear that this game is going to turn out to suck, and it's spelled S.O.E.

Sony Online Entertainment is putting up the money for this and planning to publish and run it, and they've had adventures with two other non-D&D MMOs with a cheerful, cartoonish graphical look and unique, entertaining-looking game mechanics already: Star Wars: Galaxies and The Matrix Online. And the same thing happened to both of them. In both cases, Sony did the same stupid thing to both of them. When they decided they'd spent enough money on them and waited long enough, they demanded the developers ship them, no matter how broken they were. In SWG's case, half the combat system hadn't been balance-tested; in MxO, it was still buggy as heck and 3/4ths of the missions weren't even done yet. It took players about 3 months to realize that Sony was no longer providing the Star Wars: Galaxies development team with enough manpower and resources to ever actually finish the game; it took The Matrix Online's customers less than a month. Will Sony turn out to have learned their lesson, or will the dog return to its vomit yet again? I can't shake the suspicion that it's the latter.

Which will be a shame, if true, because I could really enjoy an MMO based on a light-hearted cross between a Cubby Broccoli James Bond movie and an Erin Esurance commercial.

Yesterday, I wrote at painstaking length about why Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa sucks. Or, to be precise, I wrote at substantial and vituperative length about the parts of it that I think suck, almost all of which things it unimaginatively copied from earlier MMOs, things that I've seen done better. Plus, as it turns out, one whole new reason to hate it, namely a level of displayed contempt for its paying customers never before seen in the industry. So after all of that, it must have left you baffled, trying to imagine why I wrapped up by saying that I voluntarily paid full price for it and am going to pay $14.95 a month for it for as long as it lasts, even if (as I predict) this is "less than one year." But before I can explain that, first, I have to explain three things.

First: It's SF. One of which I mentioned in passing yesterday: despite Phil Foglio's famous observation roughly a quarter-century ago that (in gaming terms) there is no difference between science fiction and fantasy, I keep wishing devoutly for a science fiction MMO to play, a science fiction world to spend my spare time in instead of the same generic fantasy world that almost every MMO in the history of the industry has used. I prefer science fiction to fantasy in general, but my reasons go deeper than that. For one thing, it really is the same old world, only barely redressed. Different campaign settings, but the basic rules, races, character classes, economy, jargon, and setting have not changed since Gary Gygax wrote it all up as "Chainmail: Fantasy Supplement" way the hell back in 1971. See, here's the thing about that: I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1978. I could not possibly be more bored with the D&D universe, and could not be forced at gunpoint to play in one more D&D campaign, online or pen-and-paper, period. I got sick and tired of the D&D universe before half of you were born.

Nor does it improve my opinion of almost every MMO that one of the aspects of D&D they all rip off is that they are almost all, with so few exceptions as to be hardly note-worthy, set in a thinly redressed early medieval northern Europe. That is not merely a profoundly uninteresting time period for me, it's one I find actively unpleasant to be exposed to. (The real reason I dropped out of the SCA after too many years is that, after a certain amount of time, no amount of dressing up in funny clothes, getting drunk, and singing silly songs can make up for my sheer loathing for the idea of wanting to live in the 8th or 9th century.) So for the love of the Gods and all holy things, I pray almost daily for some 3D MMO universe that isn't set in some variation on the European dark ages. It's taken me years to come to terms with the fact that so many of you can only imagine a magical universe being set back then, to get it pounded through my head that since that's when all the fairy tales are set, that's what you all think of as the last magical time in human history. OK, OK. But if we have to play a fantasy game, can we just once in a rare while play in a world in which magic continued into the early industrial age, like Girl Genius? Or one in which it continued into the 1960s, like Lord Darcy? Or into the present, like Borderlands and War for the Oaks? Or into the far future, like Warhammer 40k?

Second: I hate getting personally shot at. That's a strange thing to say for someone who plays MMOs, but it's true: I pick my character class based on my ability to stay out of stabbity-stabbity range of rude people and nasty things that want to poke holes in me, at least as much as possible. That means one of two things, almost without exceptions: summoner, or sniper. Now, never ever ever in MMO history has any game done a summoner class as well as the Mastermind character class in City of Villains. That's one of the things that keeps me going, and that makes it so hard for me to consider going back over to the hero side of that game. But I've played a ton of MMOs, and no MMO, not even City of Whatever, not even my previous high-water mark for sniper action Neocron, has ever put snipers into the game so well. If you're going to send my character out to blow the enemy away, I can think of no better way to do it than with a really good rifle, a scope, a tall place to hide, a willingness to evacuate when the enemy figures out where am I, and a spot of patience. Heck, back when I was playing paintball, that's even how I played that. And even before getting to the specialty character class Sniper in Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, just with Firearms level 5 and an ordinary hunting rifle, I was having the time of my life blowing enemies away before they even knew where I was. More on that in a second. Because before I can give you any more about the good parts of RGTR, I can tell my personal stories with it a lot easier if I first explain a bit of the game's story, what the game's about.

Third: Here's their story. And I warn you, it's a bit of a cliché, itself, even beyond the requirements of the MMO genre. Don't judge it too harshly for being a cliché here, though. Focus groups and user surveys have made it clear that one of the things that keeps drawing people to the D&D ripoff games is that all they have to know is their character's species and character class and they instantly know everything they really need to know to get started. They know who they are, they know why they're there, they know who the enemy are, they know (well enough) why they have to kill the enemy, and they know how to act and how to talk while they're doing it. That's important in a roleplaying game, especially an online one. One of the things that really held back Anarchy Online is that, to understand who your character is and why you fight, you really do need to read an entire separately-published 330 page novel, game designer Ragnar Tørnquist's Prophet Without Honor. Which is, oddly enough, a very good book, but not one anybody other than AO purists has ever even heard of. City of Heroes suffers from some of the same problem on a lesser scale. Sure, it benefits from the fact that superheroes and supervillains need very little explanation, but to actually play in character and understand what's going on around you in that universe, you almost have to have read two whole separately-published novels' worth of backstory, or at the very least the roughly 30 or so page summary that's on the website. Most players just don't want to do that; they want to jump right in and play the game -- and yet still not feel lost and confused while they're doing it. So when I tell you up-front that the backstory all too closely resembles a dumbed-down version of Babylon 5 by way of Stargate the TV series, you may cringe, but sadly, it's an economic reality of the industry that it can't be too clever and still sell at all. So, to get things started, here's the cinematic trailer that you see when you launch the game, and that they use to advertise it:



Basically, before our race evolved sentience (and a few others), the only and original sentient race in our galaxy were a species called the Eloh. They set out to uplift other species as they evolved sentience, to teach them a skill we call Logos that would let them use the power of their minds to control the world and to control technology in powerful but environmentally friendly ways. But one faction of the Eloh, the Neph, have turned to evil, recruited an entire army that we call the Bane (mostly made up of an insectoid species called the Thrax) and are using them to exterminate the rest of the Eloh, and every member of the other three species that the Eloh intervened in: the Foreans, the Brann, and us. We only found out about this in time for our government to use Eloh technology to evacuate everybody the Foreans would take to the Forean homeworld before Earth got hit by a Bane shardship and rendered mostly uninhabitable, and probably mostly uninhabited. And the Foreans were only taking those who could help them fight their own fight against the Bane, soldiers and the Logos-receptive. There are in-game hints that maybe some people on Earth are still fighting, and we may go back to help them in some later expansion to the game, but for now we have to assume that the various military officers and recruits, and psi-sensitives, who evacuated to Foreas are all there is left of the human race, and that that few of us, unfortunately, is too many for the Bane. Join the Allied Free Sentients and fight, or the whole human race dies. (Yeah, I know. Elohim versus nephilim, how original. Bear with me here.)

Aside: One thing Richard Garriott and I have in common. Oh, and one more thing about the game world that will simplify my explanations to come: it will also help if you understand that Richard Garriott was born in 1961, and like me, he obviously grew up on a steady diet of murky, poorly lit, grubby, and morally ambiguous (at best) movies about the Vietnam War. It may be dressed up in microcircuitry, self-repairing armor, computers, heads-up-displays, anti-grav, and the occasional energy weapon, but the combat tactics of RGTR are pure Vietnam War. So are the characterizations and the combat psychology of the war, too. If you had any doubt of that, it goes away when you get to the main base for the human side, Foreas Base in Concordia Divide, and hear the loudspeaker system making sardonic announcements that are pure homage to that Vietnam-era classic TV show, the most popular TV show of his childhood and mine, M*A*S*H. (For example, "Attention, all personnel. Due to conditions beyond our control, we regret to announce that lunch is now being served.")

So, having explained all that, here's what's so cool about RGTR: It feels vividly, intensely real. The graphics are good. The character models range from okay to mostly good enough. The weapons tech and combat physics are very good. The sound effects are very, very good, far better than City of Heroes (which really only knows four noises: smack, bang, whoosh, and the grating of fingernails on a chalkboard). But what kept taking me into the game, that kept immersing me in it even against my will the whole time I was playing, was two things. First of all, the incredibly good use of 3D sound (this game begs to be played with headphones on and with a good 3D-capable sound card) makes the chaos of a Vietnam-like warzone really vivid. But even more than the sounds of the fighting, it's the amazingly good voice acting, something I've been begging for in MMOs since the genre began. I haven't heard voice acting this good, or sound effects this good either for that matter, since a "little" game called Starcraft. And I don't make that comparison lightly. In fact, I'll go further than that. Blizzard keeps saying over and over again that, no matter how much demand there is out there, they are probably never going to make World of Starcraft, a Starcraft MMO. And every time they say that, the world's vast Starcraft fan base, that vast majority of us who consider Starcraft to be the Casablanca of computer games, groan. Well, guess what? This game deserves to be called World of Starcraft. OK, the Eloh aren't the Protoss, and the Thrax aren't quite the Zerg, for all that comparisons to both could be fairly made. But boy, do you really end up feeling like you're surrounded by Terran Marines in this game!

Three examples, two short, one longer. The first short example: Very early, within minutes if you skip the tutorial, you get sent to a place the Foreans called Lower Eloh Creek. In an attempt to cut off Terran supply lines, the Thrax have airlifted in a ton of troops to a creek near Aria Das, one of the main drop-ship landing points. They were too badly surrounded to last long, but they held the ground well enough for their engineers to dig in, setting up fortifications, some kind of mineral extraction biotech facilities that keep self-repairing, and more importantly a series of bunkers for snipers that are uncomfortably close to Aria Das. You get sent in to help the troops on the front line clear the snipers out of that bunker. This is no small feat, not least of which because the determined Bane keep helicoptering in more Thrax troops, dropping fire teams wherever they can find a clear spot on the battlefield. Fortunately for you, there are also a ton of non-player-character Terran soldiers there, too, to help you. And as you're creeping along Eloh Creek, looking for a good spot to sneak up the bank on the Bane side to clear those bunkers, the air above you is constantly full of bullets and beams going both directions, and both banks echo with the angry shouts and pained yells of fighting men and women from both sides. And rotten game mechanics or not, I couldn't help feeling like I was really there. Honestly, the intensity of it and the realism of it can't be conveyed until you've played it with headphones on, even if you've seen gameplay demo video.

By the way, does it make me a bad person that I think it's endearing that the Terran forces already have an insulting ethnic name for the Thrax? They call every Thrax soldier "Crusty," and now, so do I.

The longer story: It's a bit later in my career, level 16ish, right after Ranger training and my first set of Stealth armor. About halfway between Foreas Base and Bane Forward Command, there's a bowl-shaped valley that's been fought over so long that no green thing lives there. One of the things that's disquieting our troops is a rumor that some humans have defected to the Bane. Fortunately, one of the research scientists in the area has read reports from us grunts about the Bane using cybernetic implants to reanimate Forean corpses, both as disposable ground troops and for psychological advantage like this. She wants proof, so she sends me to that spot on the front line, where at least a couple of times a day a popular sergeant shows up for the Bane, constantly coming back no matter how much worse for wear. This is that valley, as seen from a shallow creek bed that leads there from the Western Trenches waypoint:

( LJ-cut for image size, but seeing them will save me a ton of text description. )

That guy in the foreground of both pictures? That's me, Infamousbrad Hickson. (The last name "Hicks" was taken. As were "Brad" and "Bradley," more's the pity.) That tiny little figure in the center of the 2nd picture? That's a Thrax Infantry PFC who is about to have a really bad day. My armor gives me enough stealth, and that rocky outcropping gives me enough cover, that almost nobody on the valley floor can see me up there. I bring the gun up, check the targeting reticle in my HUD: about 60 yards, perfect for the lightning rifle I'm using. Breath, Aim, Slack, Shoot: 3 shots in, and the Thrax's personal force field is shredded, as is most of the Thrax. By the time Crusty has figured out where the shots are coming from, he has just barely enough time to fire one wild shot at me, mostly blocked by that rocky outcropping and way outside of his optimum firing range, or to run for cover, none of which is close enough to do him any good, before that 4th shot blows him to wherever dead Thrax go. If he even manages to hit, what gets past the cover of that rocky outcropping will be easily absorbed by my armor. Odds are, even other Thrax nearby won't see where the shot came from. So I move to another part of the top of the hill, pick another spot with a clear sight line to any solitary Thrax or small Thrax fire team trying to move up the valley. Periodically the Bane send in automated air cover to clear the valley floor. But it flies below my hilltop, and isn't looking up. So I switch the rifle from lightning to EMP. Breath, Aim, Slack, Shoot: six or 8 rounds later, while it's still struggling to find me, then climb above me, and before it can return fire, boom, one dead robot aircraft. Unfortunately for me, reanimated human soldiers' corpses (including eventually the guy I'm looking for) do appear on various spots along the hill, near enough to the top to see through my stealth. And are right on top of me. No problem: throw the rifle over my shoulder with my left hand, grab the pistol on my hip with my right hand, and blaze away. When the corpse falls, sneak down to where it is, pry the reanimation chip out of it, sneak back up to the top. And the whole time, keep my ears open for the random mortar shots that one or both sides periodically drop onto the hilltop. (As the old saying goes, "Incoming artillery has the right of way.") I'm having so much fun that I'm almost disappointed when one of the zombies does turn out to be Rotting Sal and it's time to go report in. But over the next couple of days, I come back a couple of more times to make Crusty's life miserable.

(Game mechanics note, about the mention of "cover" above: one of the things that RGTR does very, very well is factor in cover. The game instantly calculates what percentage of the target is visible to the shooter, and applies that percentage as a damage modifier. Sure, an accuracy modifier would be more realistic, but the randomness of that would make it a lot more frustrating to the players. It also gives substantial accuracy bonuses and damage bonuses for kneeling to steady the weapon, and for taking roughly a second to sight in before pulling the trigger the first time. I'm not going to say that there's never a time for spray-and-pray, suppressive fire, or blazing away from the hip. But if you have the forethought and skill to plan your shots like a sniper, it really pays off. However, the AI really is amazingly smart by computer-game standards, and NPCs will scramble for cover, or circle around to flank you to deny you cover.)

Third story: I'm at the hydroelectric plant in Concordia Divide, talking to an officer there. The hydro plant comes under frequent attack by anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen or so Bane at a time, usually no problem for the NPCs and turrets at all three force-field protected gates. But suddenly the siren goes off that tells me that one of the forcefields is down. I look up, and at the far end of the works from where I'm at sure enough the forcefield on that gate is down, and what looks remarkably like All The Bane In The World are pouring through. (This happens periodically, at least once a day or so.) Now, escape is an option for me. There's a teleporter pad 10 yards to my left, and another gate out onto the battlefield 5 yards behind me. But I also see at least two other player characters rushing toward the fight, and by good luck this happens to also be one of the times that the AFS are airlifting in NPC relief troops. So instead, I drop down behind a piece of equipment, about 50 or 60 yards from the far gate, and start sighting in. Standing head and shoulders above the other Bane is a Kael Private, a giant gorilla kind of thing, massively heavily armored and insanely deadly in hand to hand combat. I know it's going to make trouble for the troops at the gate, not a few of whom are using kinetic-kill rounds that are completely useless against a Kael. So I switch the rifle to laser, Breath, Aim, Slack, Shoot -- four shots later I hear cheering from the far side of the hydro plant as the Kael falls over. By this time, a Thrax Technician has deployed a Shield Drone, and now all of the Thrax down there are immune to most incoming fire. But I flip the rifle over to EMP again, sight in on the Shield Drone: 3 shots later, the battle tide turns in the AFS's favor again. Now, by now the Thrax have figured out that an awful lot of their troubles are coming from the far side of the plant, and I have a rough couple of minutes of sniper duels between me and a couple of Lightbender Private stealth snipers, picking them off as they try to find some place down there to flank me from and get in good shots. But we won. And the whole time, I felt like I really was there, in the middle of an immense army on an alien world, turning the tide for the human side, to the audible gratitude of my own side, against overwhelming odds, and won.

In conclusion? So here's the thing. When the 3-day free trial was over, I was determined to write a very negative review of this incredibly frustrating, horribly arrogant, and painfully unoriginal game and never look back. But those moments stuck with me, those moments where the insanely good over-the-top phenomenal quality voice acting and combat mechanics kept taking me there. And when push came to shove, even if it weren't a science fiction MMO in a field that needs more SF MMOs, I will pay good money for a game that's that vividly and intensely, and almost even exhaustingly, real.

I just finished up a 3-day free trial of NCsoft's newest MMO, Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, or RGTR as it calls itself. Why do they put a big emphasis on those 1st two initials? For those of you who don't know him, Richard Garriott claims to have all but invented the modern Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, via his original D&D ripoff Ultima Online. It was itself then ripped off by a "little" game called Everquest, which was itself ripped off by Blizzard for its own annoyingly inescapable and completely uninnovative D&D ripoff, World of Warcraft. Ah, said Garriott, but this was going to be a bold new re-envisioning of what an MMO could be, starting from nothing, a blank slate, a tabula rasa. Hardly. I've been hopelessly spoiled by one of NCsoft's other products, City of Heroes, but Tabula Rasa keeps almost every feature from World of Warcraft that I hate except for the medieval fantasy setting.

Which means, by all rights, I ought to hate it. But I'm oddly ambivalent, even though the things that I hate about RGTR are things that I really, really hate, with the fiery passion of a thousand exploding suns. First of all, I hate how little control you have over your character's appearance. Just as in WoW, the armor that you're wearing dictates your character's appearance, and what armor you can wear is entirely dictated by your character class, so by level 15 at the latest, every single character looks exactly alike. Armor paint is theoretically available, but since you swap out armor for slightly upgraded versions of the same armor several times a day, hardly anybody bothers. This is less out of character than it might be, though, because unfortunately, it's an adaptation of one of my least favorite tropes in science fiction, military SF. Yes, I know that writers like Glenn Cook and David Weber have proven that there's a substantial market for the stuff, but I mostly can't stand it. But if you play RGTR, well, "you're in the Army now, soldier," and yeah, among other things that really does mean uniforms. (Technically, you're a rank that doesn't exist in modern militaries, a solitary specialist with wide latitude as to which officers you report to and what jobs you take. But you still wear a uniform and call officers "sir.")

The mission structure is ripped right out of every other MMO except for City of Heroes, too. Scattered around the various towns military bases are quest givers officers and tech specialists (and merchants) who bribe you with cash bonuses and priority access to equipment in exchange for quests missions. It is entirely up to you to find these (frequently hidden) contacts, and to figure out what order to do their missions in in order to unlock later missions from other contacts, and at what level. Never having really played World of Warcraft (or its fantasy predecessors or later rip-offs) I had never run into this "feature" until I played NCsoft's ill-fated and short-lived SF MMO Auto Assault, and in Auto Assault I hated this "you figure out the contacts' sequence" feature with a grim rage that I usually reserve for corrupt police officers.

And just like in WoW or every other MMO except CoH, the overwhelming majority of those missions are to go out into the wilderness battlefield, kill n enemy of a specific type, loot their bodies for specific trophies, and bring them back for a reward. Once in a very rare while, you get sent out to defeat a named enemy that you have to find on your own, hoping that when it "spawns" you do enough damage (alongside everybody else with the same mission) to get at least partial credit for and loot rights to the kill. Oh, and of course there are plenty of "fedex" missions where you just run and play contact tag, despite the fact that theoretically everybody has secure radios, and the occasional very annoying escort mission where you have to guide a very fragile non-player character (NPC) through hostile territory far above their level. All of these are features that I enthusiastically left behind when I joined the first truly innovative MMO, City of Heroes, and it blows my mind to see someone have the guts to claim that their MMO is innovative, designed all new from the ground up from a blank slate, and copy all of these loathsome clichés of the genre.

Hey, at least you're not killing rats or spiders or dogs. I guess it's innovative in that. And it prioritizes ranged weapons over melee, that's unusual for the genre, too. Oh, and it copied my least favorite feature from Neocron, while showing no evidence whatsoever that RG knows that there was an earlier (and famously unsuccessful) game with the same feature: click targeting instead of tab targeting. At least in RGTR it's less annoying than it was in Neocron; in RGTR the game will "lock onto" a target if you click and hold down the mouse button to sustain fire, rather than automatically missing if the cursor drifts off of the target as it did in Neocron. But my point remains: not really even one single innovative feature.

I went into the free trial wanting very much to give it the benefit of the doubt because I really desperately want there to be a good character-based (not vehicle-based or ship-based but character-based) science fiction MMO, but every couple of minutes I got yet another reminder of how many things I was going to hate about this game. The list goes on and on, all of them things I hate about almost every other MMO except City of Heroes. For example, all too often the "difficulty" comes from artificially annoying huge maps where there's only one narrow, and mostly invisible, path that goes from point A to point B, and part of the "fun challenge" is supposed to be finding that entirely non-obvious path ... while under recurring attack. The most common way to funnel you from attack to attack is via that over-used cliché of the MMO field, unclimbable vertical cliffs and box canyons. On the list of ways that City of Heroes has spoiled me is that for over a year now, they've been liberally giving out timed jetpacks to characters at level 5, after a couple of hours of play, that allow you to fly quickly over terrain that you find too boring or too annoying, with permanent vertical travel powers showing up as early as level 14, after typically one to two weeks of play. Anarchy Online was almost as generous, making a summonable jet car something available at level 20, if admittedly expensive enough a luxury that you probably needed help from your clan to finance one. World of Warcraft thinks that it's being generous letting you buy an "epic mount" that may be able to fly at level 40, after months (or for some people, years) of play at ground level. Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa also waits until level 40 to offer you a vehicle, some of which may be able to fly -- I say "may" because vehicles aren't implemented yet, and very few details have leaked out. Nope, you're supposed to walk everywhere, that's part of the fun. Supposed fun.

Oh, but wait. RGTR even then went on to find a whole new way to offend me, one that no MMO in history has had the guts to do: there is no official forum, no company-run web-based bulletin board system for the players to share information with each other, no single source of information on upcoming company plans, no single place for players to discuss upcoming features or wish list items, no single place to go to find out what's going on when bugs show up or when the servers are acting oddly or when the servers are down without warning. This despite the fact that the Tabula Rasa team hired away from Auto Assault and City of Heroes two of the best damned customer service reps I've ever seen, two people with extraordinary skill at managing official forums, "Nomad" and "CuppaJo." When asked repeatedly about this, CuppaJo eventually told one of the fan-sites that this is a totally non-negotiable issue with Richard Garriott: there will never, ever, at least not on his watch, ever be an officially sponsored forum for Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa.

No explanation has been given. But none is needed. We know how the entire rest of the MMO industry feels about the official forums: they hate them, and wish they'd never opened theirs. Official forums give whiners and complainers a single place to congregate, where their whines and complaints are the first thing potential customers see, scaring some of them off. Official forums also give the whiners and complainers a political forum to engage in what has been roundly mocked as "Poster versus Poster warfare," to lobby the developers stridently for changes that are bad for the game overall, but good for their particular characters. And this is a not unreasonable thing to worry about. Sony Online Entertainment has given the industry some really vivid examples of this. Sony's corporate management saw the people organizing petition drives on the website as evidence that the games were going to lose customers, and made the developers implement some painfully stupid changes in some of Sony's online games. Most vividly, almost everything that went wrong with Star Wars: Galaxies has been blamed on successful lobbying campaigns by inter-game guilds of hard-core PvP griefers and by organized legions of Mary-Sue wanna-be fanficcers, with their shared interest in their characters being unstoppable killing machines capable of conquering the entire universe single handed without breaking a sweat and thereby humiliating everybody who isn't them and earning the undying gratitude of the franchise's big-name characters.

Richard Garriott rather obviously thinks that these are the only actual uses of online forums. As his own employees, hired away from some highly successful official forums elsewhere in the NCsoft corporate empire, ought to be able to tell him, he is 100% full of crap on this one. There is a reason why every other massively multiplayer game company puts up with those potential drawbacks, and that is this. Not having an official forum tells your cash-paying customers, actual and potential, two things. "One: We don't care what we think. And two: we think we're so smart that we don't have to explain anything to you, you should just accept that we're always right." So unless you want your customers to think that you hold them in total contempt, it is necessary.

It takes phenomenal talent at managing online communities, and real work, to run an official forum that gets it right. It takes having official moderators who actually have the ear of the senior designers and senior developers. It takes those moderators having the good listening skills and the familiarity with how the game is actually played by real players to understand what the customers are trying to explain. And it takes phenomenal tact to say to people, "We will listen to you, and if you're right, we will give you what you're asking for. But if after having listened we still think you're wrong, we're going to do it our way, watch the game, and see what happens." Yes, I understand that Richard Garriott's own prior game was a bad example of this, one where mistakes he made based on listening to the online forums pleased nobody and resulted in a substantial drop-off of customer revenues. So okay, he doesn't have the talent to manage an official forum. But he has people who do, and already enough has gone wrong, and little enough explanation has gotten out to the customers, and the customers are frustrated enough at not being perceptibly heard, that I know that this decision is going to come back to bite them, hard. It will significantly surprise me if this game makes it to its first anniversary before meeting the same fate as NCsoft's last SF MMO and getting its plug permanently pulled.

Yep. Learned all of those reasons to hate it within three days, working my way up to a level 16 Ranger with the help of one very helpful fan-run help web page, TaRapedia.com. Which leaves me at something of a loss to explain why I just upgraded to a permanent, paying account. Which I just did.

Hmm. This has already gone on way, way too long. I'll explain later why I did it. Don't bother speculating, I don't want to spread it out across a dozen or twenty comment reply fragments. For now, stick to MMO theory, whether or not you hate the things I mentioned above as much as I do, and why or why not. Tomorrow: the unexpected reason why, despite all it has going against it, Tabula Rasa sucks a whole lot less than it has any right to. Save your comments about Tabula Rasa itself, and about anything you like about it, for that entry, please. Thank you!

Nothing sinister or sad is going on. The super-secret project finished over a week ago, I'm not as busy as I once was although I do manage to stay busier than many retirees do. Mostly, I haven't felt even the slightest urge to write. Not for the first time, I'm beginning to wonder if I've run out of things to say.

I predicted with tremendous confidence that most of you would be bored to know what the super-secret project was, and I suspect I'm about to be proven right. As two of you guessed, I was invited into the closed round of beta-testing on the next release of City of Heroes. For those of you who don't know what this means: about a year ago, City of Heroes changed their testing procedures. They had gone straight from closed, in-house testing to public testing. The catch was that public testing didn't even begin until after a total code freeze. It didn't matter how good the users' feedback was; other than typos, bugs that can crash the software, or bugs that can be used to grief other players or exploited for free experience points or loot, nothing we complained about during public beta test was going to get fixed until there was time to re-open the code on those issues. Heck, here it is issue 11, almost two years later, and they're just getting around to addressing the last of the bugs I reported on the first day of open beta testing on issue 5. Well, about a year ago they finally realized that yes, we do have useful input in the design phase, at least some of us do. But to get any good out of it, they have to keep the numbers small. Issue 11 is the third time they've tried this. The first two, the invite-only tester pool was kept deliberately very tiny; this time, they expanded the list to not quite 2000 of the game's 140,000 or so subscribers, myself included.

The closed beta test comes with a mandatory non-disclosure agreement. I think they're making a mistake there, but I can argue their side of it. They don't want naysayers jumping to conclusions and quitting the game because of decisions that may yet be reversed, and they don't want to have to listen to all 140,000 subscribers arguing about the facets of the design that are open to discussion. And I know that I actively hate being under NDA, period. I handle it poorly, I don't like the stress, and in general I can think of almost nothing, not even "national security," that is actually successfully enhanced by human efforts to keep secrets. Keeping secrets is expensive, it's a drag on your productivity, it impairs your ability to receive valuable feedback from people outside of your secrecy loop, and for what? It never works, anyway. Or almost never, anyway; hardly anybody is willing to do what it really takes to keep a secret. Some time look up what Ian Fleming actually did during World War II, look up what it actually cost the British to keep the secret that Alan Turing's crew had cracked the Enigma cypher. I doubt any of those people ever slept a nightmare-free night to the day of their deaths.

Anyway, my politics aside, if I feel this way about secrecy, why put myself through the stress of working 60-hour weeks, for free for a huge multinational corporation, under onerous conditions? Lots of reasons, all of them dull to most of you. For one thing, going all the way back to when I first started playing tabletop roleplaying games back in the late 1970s, I've been a "systems geek," a rules nerd. Probability and Statistics was my favorite class in college; one of my decades-long minor crusades has been an on-again, off-again crusade to persuade educators to replace Trig with Prob&Stat in the high school curriculum, since only a tiny handful of people still use Trig but everybody in the world gets deluged in statistics every single day now. I knew I could make a difference. I was right, too; I was able to persuade them to make a couple of pretty major changes in the design of the Willpower melee defensive superpower that will make a huge quality of life difference for players. For another, I've concluded that I'm pretty much attached to this game, if for no other reason than this: every other game I've looked at in the last year or more, I've known exactly what feature from City of Heroes I'd miss the most if I switched. For example, I'd love it if Tabula Rasa turned out to be the big blockbuster SF MMO success that everybody knows is going to happen to somebody some day, but I'm not willing to give up City of Heroes' costume creator, or flight, to play it. For another, that Willpower melee defense power set that I just mentioned is one that matters to me a lot, as someone who wants to play Stalkers but hates all of the existing Stalker melee defense power sets; I really, really felt motivated to help them make sure that this one didn't suck. See? Boring.

Although speaking of Tabula Rasa, something weird happened right after the NDA was lifted, and although nobody at NCsoft will admit it, I think it's specifically because of Tabula Rasa. See, originally City of Heroes was split across two companies. One game programming company, Cryptic Studios, developed it under contract to another game programming company, NCsoft, the Korean company most known (elsewhere) for the only MMO to come even close to World of Warcraft's numbers, the Asian fantasy game Lineage. NCsoft cut a bunch of deals with a bunch of companies that wanted to write multiplayer games, whereby NCsoft puts up some or all of the development money, and when the game goes live they collect the monthly fees, they operate the server farms, they provide the customer service, and they split the profits with the outside developers. It gave them a much faster way to diversify than developing a bunch of games themselves. One of them, Auto Assault, lasted mere months before going belly-up. Some of them, like the shareware Diablo parody Dungeon Runners, it's too early to tell. Two of them, the free to play pseudo-trading-card fantasy MMO Guild Wars and the superhero MMO City of Heroes, have been moderately successful. That's important to them, and they've known they needed it for a long time now. Their flagship product, Lineage, competes head to head with World of Warcraft, and it's been announced in the Korean business press lately that they're losing a steady 15% of their revenue per year lately, all of it to players defecting to WoW. Hence their urgency to branch out into games that fit into niches other than generic fantasy MMOs.

But they really bet the farm on one project: Tabula Rasa. They diverted at least half of the profits from Lineage to Richard Garriott, the guy who designed the original highly successful fantasy MMO, Ultima Online. They gave him a huge budget, gave him a very long lead time (and forgave several schedule slips on top of that), and gave him very nearly absolute creative control, and told him that they wanted him to seek out the Holy Grail. That is to say, they wanted him to develop the first wildly successful break-through hit science fiction MMO, the first genuinely mass marketable science fiction MMO, the game that would be to science fiction readers and movie-goers what World of Warcraft has been to fantasy and D&D fans. I'm sure they thought that this was a safe bet, when they made it. They even avoided the pitfall that sunk two of Sony's SF MMO ideas, letting him develop his own creative property rather than sinking far too much money into, and ceding too much control to the owners of, some licensed SF franchise.

But I think they're getting cold feet. The reviews have been only modestly favorable. Even after several schedule slips, the game shipped with at least one major system, one the game was balanced around, unfinished and temporarily completely removed. The pseudo-first-person-shooter user interface (which they share, knowingly or not, with Reakktor GMBH's Neocron series of SF MMOs) may not turn out to be the selling point that they think it is, they may have over-estimated the willingness of console gamers to play an MMO and the willingness of potential MMO customers to play a game with a console-game-like interface; the decision to use tab-selected targets and queued attacks that every other MMO designer out there has made may not have been arbitrary or unimportant. And I wouldn't be surprised if lately they're starting to suspect that Garriott, whose Ultima Online is still controversial at best among old-time MMO players, may turn out to be more liability than asset, a prima donna who drags his own drama behind him wherever he goes. Maybe. So maybe this is going to be a huge breakthrough hit. It could happen. Everybody in the MMO industry agrees that SF outsells fantasy in most other media, and will eventually outsell fantasy in the MMO market when somebody gets the breakthrough hit. Maybe this will be the one. But if it isn't, with Lineage slowly deflating they have to have a fall-back position, a back-up plan.

But in the meantime, they already did own part of a game with a distinctly science fiction-ish universe, one that the MMO industry press lumps in with EVE Online and other science fiction games. And while it went through a brief struggle about a year ago to retain customers, it's been modestly growing almost every month since it launched 3 and a half years ago. In talks with the programmers on that project, they clearly found out that those programmers were starting to hit certain built-in limiting factors, certain "walls" in the game code, that were going to cost real money to punch through. And that's money that the other part-owner of City of Heroes, had no interest in matching, because they've bet their company's future (I think stupidly) on a licensed superhero MMO, Marvel Universe Online. What's more, I know from watching their representatives complain bitterly about it time and again that both companies were sick of City of Heroes players blaming the conflict of interest within Cryptic Studios, with them being invested in two competing superhero MMOs, for everything that went wrong with the game. So both companies stood to benefi