Monthly Fees, DLC, And Accountability

According to the FAQ on Gamefaqs (PVD disclaims responsibility for game spoilers behind the link), Assassin's Creed II consists of levels called "Sequence 1-11" followed by "Sequence 14". What happened to Sequences 12 and 13? The devs claim to have run out of time to finish them before the game's launch, but will be releasing them as paid downloadable addons. Sequence 12 will cost you $4 and Sequence 13 will set you back $5 on top of the $60 MSRP of the game.

Joystiq's glass half full take on this incident is that additional fees for downloadable content is "saving" content that otherwise would never have seen release (in this case, too small to be marketed as a sequel but probably not directly relevant to the plot of the third game in the series). This view has some merit, at least until Bobby Kotick at Acti-Blizzard and the paymasters at EA realize that they can shave a month off of every game's release date to ensure that there will be unfinished work to put in the DLC.

More interestingly, this type of move could potentially insert a greater level of accountability into single player games. For better or worse, the majority of an MMORPG's revenue comes from recurring fees. When players up and quit en masse, the developers almost certainly notice (though there might be a limited amount they can do about it when the core complaint is that the game needed another year in development to meet market standards for content and polish).

By contrast, pre-DLC console gamers have already paid the developer every cent they're going to pay for a game before they've even opened the disc. Perhaps the publisher has a limited interest in protecting their brand name from association with "shovelware", but such measures are aimed at customer satisfaction for the NEXT installment of the game (which might be years away). With DLC, console publishers have at least some limited interest in not having the game suck so badly that players won't pay for the add-ons.

Don't get me wrong, it's a limited silver lining to a business model that will encourage companies to cut more and more from the base game to save more and more for paid DLC. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like DLC is going anywhere, so I guess we'll take our silver linings where we can find them.

Blizzard Encourages EQ2 Marathon

My crowded December schedule made Lyriana's chances of hitting level 80 in 2009 pretty slim. Then Washington DC got hit with two feet of snow over the weekend, leaving me with nothing better to do than tackle those last few levels. As a bonus, Lyriana's milestone comes with the most misleading blog post title ever.



I first tried out EQ2 back in February, with my main concern being that I would finish the leveling game in a month or two. After all, the EQ2 forum trolls swear that the game is easier than WoW, and that the entire leveling game is irrelevant because you're at the cap in a week or two.

Instead, the game has lasted for nearly a year of part-time play to date, with more content remaining for ongoing work at level 80 (and/or on alts). I'm also at 127 out of 200 AA's (EQ2's version of talent points, distributed for exploration, quest completion, and killing named mobs), well shy of the current cap.

Overall, the game isn't perfect for the solo player. The Kunark expansion was tuned for players who raided at the previous level cap, and poor Lyriana has been a much different, more fragile combatant ever since. I might have chosen a class with a better reputation for solo ability (people say that bards are weak soloers, though see previous comment about the reliability of the forums) had I known what to expect.

Even so, there's plenty of meaty gameplay for the solo player to sink their teeth into. As this particular chapter in my adventures in Norrath draws to a close, I'm reasonably confident that there will be another. That's a win as far as MMORPG's go.

Half Off Torchlight This Weekend

Via Kotaku, Torchlight is on sale for 50% off - a final price of $10 - on Steam this weekend. I mentioned the Diablo-like game a bit over a week ago because it may become an MMORPG, but I hadn't been in any huge hurry to pick it up. At $10, I decided it was worth stashing away for later (though it actually might run on my graphics-card-less laptop, and therefore be usable over the holiday weekend).

I'm not getting any sort of deal for mentioning this, but I figured I'd point out the sale in case anyone else here was on the fence about this game.

Minor Victory of the Additional Horse, and the Ancestor of the Skirmish

Allarond's adventures in Lothlorien, trying to wrap up the last of the pre-Mirkwood content, left him with the majority of the rep and tokens required to get the rep reward mount. Unfortunately, with the game set in the Middle Earth, the exotic mount in question is another horse. That said, max rep horses come with 50% more health than the default mounts, so that upgrade alone was worth the 3-4 hours worth of daily quests it took to finish the grind.

The Moria Crafting Instance
As an aside, this journey took me into Moria's so-called crafting instances, which appear to be primitive prototypes for the modern skirmish system. Players zone into a solo instance with a fixed map but randomly generated foes, where they can earn tokens for a successful 10-20 minute clear. (The instances are referred to as crafting instances because they happen to contain large numbers of crafting material nodes to harvest, not because there is any actual crafting to do inside them.) Overall, players can expect crafting materials, reputation (and reputation items), and perhaps some legendary item exp for the brief, repeatable encounters.

My guess, having elected to skip Moria era repeatable content in its entirety, is that these instances proved highly popular with the playerbase. That popularity seems to have inspired the evolution of the feature into the current skirmish. Turbine proceeded to make this the major feature of the new expansion, complete with a more robust feature set (more maps, greater variety of random foes), scaleable group options, custom NPC soldiers, and a wider variety of rewards.

How long can random content last?
In some ways, my biggest complaint about LOTRO has generally been that there isn't enough LOTRO to go around. As Zubon observes, that crunch will be especially noticeable for the next few months, as Turbine chose to increase the level cap even though they would only have a single 6-man dungeon for level 65 players and a single relevant 12-man raid (which the login splash screen absurdly refers to as the most challenging 12-man raid EVER) ready to go.

With skirmishes, Turbine appears to be hoping that players will accept randomly generated content in place of the human-designed instances that Turbine apparently cannot supply in any reasonable quantity. Will it work? Time will tell, but the apparently popularity of this type of repeatable content in the game suggests that Turbine may have put all their eggs in this particular basket because they feel that it has the best chance of being accepted by players. So far, so good, but the expansion is young.

Snap Judgements of Age of Conan's Free Trial

Age of Conan isn't really anywhere on my list of games I want to play. However, they just rolled out an unlimited free trial, "valid for those that create an account and log into the game before January 1st 2010".

I don't see why a game that's trying to get more players would announce and then discontinue a free trial program during the busy final weeks of the year, so my guess is that it will become a permanent offer. That said, on the off chance that they're NOT bluffing, I decided that an unlimited trial was worth downloading the client and spending 20 minutes in game just so I'd have the option of revisiting it in the future.

Overall, it turned out about as I'd expected. The game's combat uses an interface where you click to swing and you hit whatever is in front of your weapon. I've never been a fan of that model in stat-driven RPG's - I'd rather just play an FPS or a 3rd person adventure game. The branching dialogue trees are an interesting addition to the single player story, but I could be playing Dragon's Age for that feature.

(I ended my brief session with an absurd "negotiation" with a slaver. He wanted me to kill a monster that had the key to the gate we were both trapped behind, and then surrender so he could sell me into slavery. Given that I had a quest that demanded his death for having enslaved me in the first place, my counter-offer was to kill and loot him instead. Somehow, it took another three dialogue steps to complete this conversation and get to the killing.)

Overall, I don't think I'll be in any hurry to get back to this game, if I ever do. Then again, the free trial was enough to win it at least a few minutes of my limited gaming time. I guess that the fact that I can now return to Tortage at will technically improves the odds of my visiting the game from zero to some small but non-zero number.

Does The Launch Rush Hurt Atmosphere?

The current episode of the Casual Stroll to Mordor podcast mentions how Moria is suddenly deserted and more challenging now that players have moved on to Mirkwood. There are many more mobs underfoot now that there aren't players killing them. Ironically, this is somewhat appropriate for the setting. Moria is not SUPPOSED to be a happy fun social place to hang out. It's supposed to be overrun with goblins, not hobbits.

I probably ran through the Mines in the middle ground because I started in on the expansion 9-10 months late. Many players were already at max level, but the place was not entirely deserted, and I was even able to find a partner for a few quests. Even so, I see a major drop-off in how populated the older areas are now that people are in Mirkwood (or instanced skirmishes).

Is this a situation where it is better NOT to have played the expansion when it was actually the most recent chunk of the game, to experience a more realistic atmosphere? Or does the lack of company - and groups for group content - hurt the gameplay experience? It's one of those questions that does not have an easy answer, though I'm just as happy to be spending time finishing Moria before I brave the Mirkwood masses.

LOTRO Skirmish Experiences

I've been spending a fair amount of time with LOTRO's new skirmish feature this weekend. This may seem strange in the context of my previous complaints about repeatable content in general, and in LOTRO in particular. What about randomized scenarios that differ only in the random bosses makes them any different?

The best answer I can come up with at the moment is the ability to customize soldiers. If you look at, say, running random dungeons in WoW for gear, you aren't really getting any fundamentally different rewards. Each upgrade adds an incrementally higher number onto your existing abilities. By contrast, LOTRO skirmish soldiers act very differently depending on how you have chosen to upgrade them.

Options for a Champion
As a melee DPS/off-tanking class, I immediately went for the healing specialist. After finishing a few skirmishes and upgrading my soldier's abilities, I suddenly found myself with a powerful ally, capable of keeping me alive as I waded into large packs of foes. On the downside, enemies do not necessarily die very quickly. Champions have a decent AOE rotation, but I'm still trying to beat down a pack of 3-5 mobs with one character's DPS.

Instead, perhaps I should go with a bannerguard, a soldier type that offers offensive buffs, melee DPS, and even a minor heal over time spell. Alternately, I might take one of the two ranged DPS soldier types. I don't know that I'd want to use the tanking soldier for lack of any way to keep them alive, but I guess I could imagine a scenario in which the tank could let me switch to my most offensive-based stance and wail away.

Finally, you can get cosmetic traits to determine the race and appearance of your soldier. This is more fun than you might expect, in that you can create characters who look like your present/future alts. (All of your LOTRO alts on a server share the same house, so it's fair to assume that they know each other, and would fill in the skirmish soldier role accordingly.)

Other skirmish incentive impressions
There are other perks to the skirmishes as well - instant, scale-able access, and the ability to purchase just about anything that you might be having trouble obtaining (such as rare random crafting materials, reputation tokens, or items from the group-only level 50 class quests).

There are also drawbacks to the system - soldiers become available at level 30 now that Mirkwood has arrived, but players who were already level 60+ when the expansion arrived can expect to find their new soldiers starting significantly behind the curve. Finally, the lore behind these things is singularly bizarre - in a game that doesn't like teleportation, I can instantly teleport to the Shire to fight off an orc invasion that never really happened in the lore.

Perhaps the system is going to start getting old once I've had the chance to take the other types of soldiers for a spin, especially if it turns out that the healer is far and away the most effective choice I can be using. Even so, it's an interesting way to re-customize your character and playing experience without actually starting over from scratch. Skirmish soldiers are a lot of fun, and I look forward to seeing what Turbine does with the system in the future.