A Typical MMO Gaming Session

I haven't been posting on here much, in between school work, regular work, and trying to squeeze in time for gaming and writing. However, I've been playing a ton of Elder Scrolls Online lately and was searching for a topic, finding no posts about it whatsoever. My question was this: What does your typical MMO gaming session look like?

Maybe this has to do with my long-held fascination with organization, but I think that it originates from the same drive min-maxers have to get the most out of their time and their character. (It has also led to me developing a book of spreadsheets devoted to quest tracking, researching, hunting, looting, and delving: I am a firm believer in tracking information.)

My typical weekend gaming session is thus: Log in to my alt Riade Wolfrider, who is a crafting alt; choose new traits to research in her three areas of Woodworking, Blacksmithing, and Carpentry. I'll update my spreadsheets with my new choices, then swing by the stables to develop my riding skill, then log out.

Next, I'll probably switch immediately to my main character Keah and choose a quest to work on if I'm not in the city. If I am in the city, I'll spend a few minutes deconstructing equipment too high level for Riade, and go to the Outlaw's Refuge for fencing my stolen goods and banking, then swing by the stables before fast traveling out. I'll spend anywhere between 1/2 an hour to 3-4 hours on Keah, then log out. I might log back in sporadically for 30 minute play times.

If I've gotten a ton of recipes and glyphs, I'll log in to my enchanting alt, Lyn Sparrowheart, and deconstruct, read the recipe, then log out. By the end of the day, I'll usually log in for a couple minutes to Riade to switch what she's researching if I know the timer will be up and I can reassign.

Inventory/resource management probably takes about half an hour for me, and then I'll usually spend another half an hour to-- more likely-- an hour or more with Keah on questing. If I can pull myself away from her, I'll work on leveling up an alt, usually Riade.

Gaming sessions during the week are more likely to just be upkeep: researching armor/weapon traits and riding skill on as many characters as I can, then logging out. I might slip in a quest here or there depending on my schedule and how attached I am to fixing dinner that night.

I wonder what other players sessions look like. Do you spend a lot of time in inventory/resource? Questing? Raiding? Delving? Crafting?

[First Impressions] Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited (Xbox One)

I've been playing a lot of Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited. It's strange to play on Xbox One, which is what I'm currently doing-- it obviously works much better as a PC game, and not having a hot key for a map is driving me insane. And makes it hard to explore, I'm just saying.

I've naturally gone the route of a Dark Elf named Keah (again). In sort of vague story-telling terms, I've decided she's the ancestress of my Keah in Skyrim, and the family line was transported there due to the events in ESOTU.  My gamertag is grohiik07, so for the purposes of simplicity, I'm probably going to end up referring to my gamertag and character names together at some point.

The map has to be my biggest complaint about the game, though, since it's so very hard to navigate it on Xbox One. A mini-map would 100% help, even if they didn't want to "clutter" the UI. (I am very tired of their belief in a lack of clutter disrupting my ability to play their game.) Beyond that, the differences between ESO and Skyrim are very interesting. Making money in ESO is hard, a full-time job. Any gold drops or found gold are only in small amounts. You have to really have a profession to make any money. Or, you could do as a Nightblade sneak-thief does and steal everything that's not nailed down from houses... pockets... the market.... You can gather materials-- which themselves are only slightly more common than gold sometimes-- and craft them through an extensive and interesting crafting system to make money. Not being that committed, and with a character that can actually become invisible when necessary, I generally steal, and sometimes make potions. So do a lot of other people. The marketplaces are literally crawling with thieves, crouching behind the stalls, stealing whenever the stall merchant isn't looking their way. I've been playing for several hours and still only have a bit less than 3000 gold-- and it was hard won let me tell you. The cheapest horse is 14K unless you buy it in the Crown Store, which feels a bit like cheating. And I should probably start playing every night to make money if nothing else, if I want to get a horse.

Nightblade is an interesting class, especially when you combine the abilities with your choice of any kind of weapon. The Nightblade abilities give you some magic daggers for close-up moves, and pairing it with my love of ranged weaponry works perfectly. Health-draining moves alleviate the need for heavy armor. I can shadow walk across the map if I can get a target to lock onto, making it so I can shortcut the map in interesting ways at times.  Outlaws refuges in most cities make it so I can fence my goods (limit of 50 per day) and launder any items I want to use myself, making switching up my weaponry a breeze. The vast crafting system makes it easy to change the way your bow looks as well. I have a nice Nordic style bow with curved dragon heads on the ends, as well as a lovely Altmer-style bow covered in gold wing patterns.

One complaint, which I think might end up fixed by the Imperial City DLC, is the lack of a Thieves' Guild. The only guilds as yet present in the game are the Mages and the Fighters. But I'm willing to wait for the Imperial City and see if it provides me with either Thieves' or Assassins' Guilds. OR BOTH. I would also like more of the different countries unlocked, if possible. Currently you can only get into Eastmarch and the Rift in Skyrim, for example, and after running all the way across Morrowind at level 7it was very disappointing that I couldn't reach Markarth. And it was already irritating enough to be level 7 in an area where the enemies are level 42. (Irritating/terrifying/holy shit what.)

I'm going to leave this here for now like this, in the hopes of adding another post today if I get a chance to play after work. Screenshots to come when I'm no longer hidden behind my work computer's firewall!

The Semi-Annual MMO Round-Up

Sadly, my lovely computer Seraphim died not too long after my last post. This meant that I was without gaming PC while I tried to figure out if I could a) fix Seraphim without too much muss or fuss, or b) find a decent new computer to buy.

I still have Seraphim kicking around, waiting for me to find the money and energy to fix the hard drive issues, but I now have a lovely new 8gb ram, 1tb hard drive laptop which I decided to name Garuda.

This of course means that I am now obligated to play only games I already have or have already pre-ordered (Bravely Default!), and check out Free-to-Play MMOs since I can't afford a subscription to FFXIV until I've paid myself back for my new laptop.

Thus begins my semi-annual MMO roundup!

The Neverwinter MMO: Somewhat boring. Though the story seemed interesting enough, if incredibly melodramatic, the player completely and totally lacking the desire to explore in an MMO seems like a fatal flaw.

Rift: Interesting, some very good concepts, but the starting areas at the very least were very generic. They were bleak, due to being wartorn, and visually, the game failed to appeal to me. I suspect that other areas are better, but it's tough to slog through hours of boring scenery, ye standard undead, ye standard savior (risen from the dead, if I'm remember correctly, as in, let's see, Elder Scrolls Online, Kingdoms of Amalur, and probably numerous others).

World of Warcraft: Holy WoW. You see what I did there? Ha. Haha. Ha. But really, started as a Goblin. Figured, oh hey, I'll play for a few hours. MORE THAN A FEW HOURS LATER. I only played four hours or so of the other two, but with WoW, I completed the entire Goblin starter questline and am currently in Orgrimmar. I've stopped there for a bit, since Orgrimmar is so confusing to navigate, and also I fear for my wallet since eventually it will stop being free to play. But WoW is a blast, completely worth the 5 million a day that the company nets. I do prefer FFXIV, but I think that's because Final Fantasy IS my childhood, my teenagerdom, and likely my future.

I'm probably going renew my FFXIV subscription next month, so watch out for that. In the meantime, I'll have some Far Cry 3 and Bravely Default upcoming.

[FFXIV] Crafting and Gathering Classes

My dear little cat looks smug, doesn't she?

Most of my time the last couple of days has been spent leveling up Conjurer. It is something of a grind, but so far, isn't horribly painful. Mixing FATEs, Hunting Logs, and Class Quests will get the player to level 15 on an alt class without any trouble. I am currently level 12 or 13 on Conjurer, I believe, so I officially have Raise. I do wish that Conjurer had better damage dealing attacks; alternatively, I would like a Necromancer class to be one of its branches. That would be awesome.

After I finished with Conjurer-- not yet done with the latest Hunting Log, and after that I should be able to get the level 15 Class Quest, but done for now, anyway-- I decided to work on the crafting and gathering classes to see what's the what. I tried out Leatherworking, Culinarian, and Fishing. Leatherworking and Culinarian are both crafting; they are fairly simple: press 1 to craft and repeat, using various components, etc. Culinarian costs more to buy the components of, which is actually the reason I decided to try Fishing, since I was hoping to fish up some components. Leatherworking and Culinarian both leave the player pretty much on their own to figure out what to do next. There is no guild questline or anything, really, though. Essentially, in the beginning at least, the questline goes: craft one item for the guildmaster to prove you can do it. Slog your way through your entire crafting log, and then you have another quest, which is similar to the first. It doesn't provide much space to actually level up while working on the Class Quest, which is unfortunate. It will be... a while... until I am able to actually craft something wearable on my main class. I am somewhat worried about how much all of the materials cost, and will have to look into the prices of everything to see if its worth it. Logically, it should be, but perhaps not for Culinarian, since so far, I don't often use food in-game.

My Harvest Moon playing soul adores fishing. As does my Pokémon playing soul. It works exactly like in those two games, more or less, except you can choose your bait. Bait, cast, reel: nice and easy. Different areas, baits, and probably rods, yield different fish. The quests given for this class are much better than Culinarian or Leatherworking. The goal for the first quest is to gather five of a certain kind of fish, similar to kill X amount of mob. That means that I had to spend a decent amount of time fishing, which seemed more productive than the time I spent Leatherworking or Culinarianing. I'm entirely certain that's the right verb, yes, Culinarianing.

Ivi'lea'hi Rhiki, Goblin.

P.S. Oh hey saw this lizard thing in Limsa Lominsa. New race sometime?

Bangaa?

[FFXIV] Magic, All the City-States, and the First Event

When a girl's too busy playing to actually post, that has to be a good sign, right?

My travels in-game led me out on airships to all three city-states, but before that, a last shot of one of my favorite spots in the Shroud (see above), as well as a brief discussion of FFXIV's first event. It's a summer event, so bikinis abound. The player takes part by entering FATEs that spawn specifically for purposes of getting ash from the Bombards and using that to buy event clothing. The FATEs don't spawn anywhere near enough, though, and don't spawn in enough places for me to get to one before its over. There's nothing more frustrating than FINALLY finding one of the FATEs and watching it fade before your eyes just as you arrive. The decorations in the towns are pretty, though. Hopefully I will manage to actually take part in the event, but I might have to park myself in one of the FATE spawning spots and wait, which will suck.

Ul'dah

That said, let's discuss the other two city states. After Gridania, WHOA. A little much. The other two cities are gigantic, very cosmopolitan, and make me feel like a country bumpkin, come out of the forest into a world much more alive than they ever knew. Ul'dah especially is extremely difficult to navigate. The map is very twisty, wit loads of alleys and close buildings. There are a lot of maps, and they're very dense. It seems to be packed with people as well, but that might be because everything isn't as spread out as it is in Gridania. Thanalan, though is so familiar and happy-making that it hurts. It reminds me of Fallout, which is why. Ul'dah is gigantic, with so any merchants and vendors, but it's surrounded by desert and tent cities and is just beautiful and desolate.

Limsa Lominsa

Limsa Lominsa is equally amazing. The landscape is all high spires, water, and sandy beaches. Both cities provide low-level quests for purposes of class-changing, as well as numerous new landscapes to explore. It makes me miss Gridania, where even though I haven't seen everything, I still now how to get from one place to the other. In Limsa Lominsa and Ul'dah, not so much.

New class = beginning outfit. Really, couldn't she wear shorts?

 Before continuing with the main questline, I joined the magic guilds in both cities and brought my character to at least level 5 (more like six or seven) in that class. Having played Conjurer, Thaumaturge, and Arcanist, I can safely say that Conjurer and Thaumaturge come out ahead of Arcanist for me, though Arcanist has its own rewards. Conjurer is probably my favorite because of the mix of elemental and healing spells. Thaumaturge battle just seems faster paced, which is amazing. The spells you use for fire and ice have effects that allow you to stack damage. Arcanist has Bio (one of my favorite effects, poison! but Conjurer also has a lingering damage attack, Aero). Arcanist's first attack, Ruin, is fairly weak compared to Conjurer's and Thaumaturge's, but to offset that is the summon creature Carbuncle, which provides help in battle. In short, Thaumaturge is a tank, Conjurer is more balanced, and I just don't get Arcanist. Crossing the Thaumaturge and Conjurer skill sets would probably create a pretty awesome mix. I want to level up Conjurer for a while to get Raise, but after that, we'll see. I think I want to level up Thaumaturge, since Archer and Thaumaturge cross a bit to create Black Mage later on, which is scads better than the Bard option. Blech.

Ivi'lea'hi Rhiki, Goblin, Miquo'te Archer, Level 18.

[FFXIV] Changing Classes/Cross-Training

This is the best armor for my level and class. This.

FFXIV continues to work and be awesome, with no server or loading issues. I've continued to work on quests. I've run out of sidequests around Gridania, besides Guildleves, but managed to successfully fill my level 2 hunting log and did an extremely frustrating Guildleve called The Transporter. In my travels, I ended up setting a new home point in the East Shroud, due to it being gorgeous. I swear I'll take some screenshots of it, but I keep accidentally pressing F12 instead of printscreen because I'm used to Steam. Sigh.

An update on switching classes: switching classes is very, very similar to 4 Heroes of Light. In 4 Heroes, the player would switch his or her "hat." Here, you just switch your main weapon. Saving gear sets (armor, etc) in the character profile screen enables classes to be switched on the fly without ending up naked, though skills have a powering up period after doing that, so its unwise to do in a battle situation. Leveling up a second class is a pain. There is an armory bonus which gives a percentage boost in XP the greater the discrepancy is between main class and alt class, and with hunting logs and class quests, I managed to muddle through to level 7 on Conjurer before getting bored. It's also possible for some quests to do them as your main class, then switch to your alt class before talking to the quest giver-- similar to switching out Pokémon for XP gain. I got a decent number of abilities in the time I put into Conjurer, however-- Conjuring is really fun, for the record, but the casting times and how easy interruptions are is a pain. I don't want it changed, because I think it's practical, but it requires a different kind of battle strategy than my normal bow routine does. Anyway, I can now Cure even when an Archer. WIN! FTW! Going to try Leatherworking next to see how the crafting classes work.

Went up a couple of levels and now based in the gorgeous East Shroud, where there are still monsters that can provide me with a challenge. Going to level up to 18 before continuing my main quests (storyline and class). Also, I've put on pants for decency. I don't care if it's not the best armor-- the Subligar/panties (first image this post) made absolutely no sense as armor. Ugh. At least the bra/"Leather Harness" gives me freedom of movement for bow work.

Ivi'lea'hi Rhiki, Goblin, Miqo'te Archer, Level 17.

[FFXIV] Server Update!

Today was the first day I was able the play since my last post. The servers were updated overnight, and the update is the most beautiful thing that has ever happened. Every time I log on, I get to go straight to my server-- I don't even have to deal with a queue! While trying to get a screenshot to properly express my joy, I had to look away for a second to see if I could find the hotkey I wanted to make the camera face my newly leveled character. In the meantime, it started storming. With realistic clouds, thunder, lightning, the whole shebang. Probably just as awesome as the weather was the chat's reaction to it: "Are you guys seeing this?" and endless iterations of how great it was, as well as the Lancer comment as in the chat of the screenshot. Goblin is full of some pretty great players, overall, and despite the occasional spammer or twelve-year-old boy style dirty joke (which, I admittedly, laughed at like I was also a twelve-year-old boy), everyone is just there to have fun.

As an update on FATEs, I think I've mastered the tab-targeting now that I know roughly what I should be doing in a FATE, and am getting a really good amount of XP since I can deal enough damage now to get a good 2000 XP or so each time around. Unfortunately, though, I am too high a level for most of the FATEs I stumble into, so it's time to move on to a new area of the Shroud.

Level 13 now, with only another two levels to go until the world opens up even more. I now have access to Guildleves, Inns, and the Recommended list.

Guildleves are essentially just new quests you can be assigned to now that the main quest has progressed past a certain level (10). There is a selection based on the character's class, level, and skills, and can gain access to restricted areas with a pass that's given for taking part in the quest. There are leves for battle, crafting, and gathering, so don't think only the battle classes can take part. Inns will give you a rested bonus, which will boost your XP earned, and the Recommended list pops up in the main menu, and lets the player know the available quests around them so they don't have to search it out. Two more levels will open up the airships and let me travel to new city-states. The chocobo porter is available at level 10, but only at level 22 will I be able to get my own chocobo mount. A chocobo porter is similar to how chocobos worked in... FFIII, I believe? Essentially, the player can rent a chocobo from a stable. The chocobo will only bring you to the one place, and if you dismount, it will run away. (In FFIII, the player would ride a chocobo from a ChocoboWood, anywhere, but only for a limited amount of time, and if you dismounted, it would run away.)

So far, the one thing I'm wishing is that there were more styles and kinds of armor for my class, but I believe that branches out as I go forward. I'm going to test out one of the other classes, probably Leatherworking and Conjuring, since both of those are in Gridania, and then get back to any readers I have about how that works!

Peace! <3 Ivi'lea'hi Rhiki, Goblin, Level 13.

FFXIV is great... when I actually get to play it.

No, but seriously, I shit you not. FFXIV is awesome. It's just that you have to manage to get into the game first.

The first time I wanted to play, it was in those early funtimes, the ones that somehow still keep happening, when it just says, "This World is currently full. Please wait until an opening is available and try again." Then the message is over and you have to click through three menus to get back to try again. Eventually, I got a queue, realized not all hope was lost, and could play.

I logged in about three more times over the next two days, waited a day, and then that horrible message happened again. "This World is currently full. Please wait until an opening is available and try again." Could not wait around for it to fix, and the next day I was busy, so THEN, today, I tried again. After realizing my early access key had expired and I needed to enter my real product code, I did so, and then HOLY SHIT my character wasn't loading and I had just reached level 10! After panicking, I realized that the NA/EU servers weren't loading. Proceeded to spam reload, because I had plans, damn it. Finally managed to log in. Played for maybe twenty minutes before getting ganged up on by Diremites and some sort of raging firefly; died by Diremites, and then the game crashed. Not entirely convinced that my death wasn't because the game was lagging due to the crashing. Tried to log back in. And then-- "This World is currently full. Please wait until an opening is available and try again." All I want is a few uninterrupted minutes of game time. I don't think it's exactly fair to buy a game which you like and genuinely want to play, and then not even be able to play it because the company won't get their shit together. *oldmangrumblegetoffmylawngrumblegrumble*

Once I am able to get into the game, in those rare times that it's possible, it is precisely the kind of MMORPG I have been looking for all my life. We might be soulmates. We're considering promise rings, and maybe in a few years, a July wedding.

Being Final Fantasy, it is by nature my kind of RPG, and in truth, Final Fantasy is well set-up for an MMO. The player is an adventurer. Being an adventurer and even part of an adventurer's guild, there is a legitimate reason for all of those little fetch-and-carry/kill x amount of monsters standard MMO quests that I always hated, so they don't bother me. The reason, of course, is that adventurer is an actual job, and doing the job is why the player is doing all of these quests. FFXIV MMO-standard quests are particularly well-done to boot-- they provide bits of lore in them, and make the player genuinely more immersed in the game. The characters that give the quests to the player have bits of personality, and the quests are enjoyable even if they are fetch-and-carry/insert-arrow-here. There is a mission, a quest, and a calling. Like in many of the Final Fantasy games, the player may need to recruit help, but since it is an MMO, you might also be the recruited help yourself. In many of the Final Fantasy games, my favorite part was the idea that I could craft my own army of warriors-- this is, of course, referring to the older games and the handhelds, since I view the new, non-handheld generation as something of cinematic showpieces from about X on. Maybe even VII on, but I liked VII-IX, so. Not to say that I didn't enjoy X and X-2, but who wants to admit that, really? FFXIV takes this to a whole new level because every player is one of those adventuring, hireable work-force warriors. Your character can be meticulously trained to be part of a guild or free assembly, and that is awesome because in the single-player games, that wasn't necessarily the case. Consider the system in Tactics Advance, and then compare it to what I'm trying, and probably failing, to explain here. In Tactics Advance, the player controlled Marche, who headed a guild. Marche recruited warriors or they approached him to recruit them. They would be a certain class and race, and have their own skills that they brought into the mix. The reason this is special in FFXIV is that so many doors are opened up. Every one of those warriors is another player. That blows my mind because even if it makes sense for an MMO, it doesn't for a Final Fantasy game.

Like in 4 Heroes of Light (DS game, excellent, everyone should play it), the player can change class freely, though it's better to specialize in one or two if you don't want to spend hundreds of hours leveling everything up. Well, who am I kidding? Of COURSE you want to spend hundreds of hours doing that. That's fun. Or maybe that's just me.

(Oh hey, it's letting me log on again. Back soon. No wait, the cake was a lie, never mind.)

There is a VERY detailed crafting system. I believe this is also a feature of 4 Heroes of Light, or at least 4 Heroes had something similar, but things like Botany, Weaving, Carpentry, etc. are actually legitimate classes that you can level up. The interface is generally good. The map is excellent, with nice convenient markers for every quest. Being able to highlight one quest at a time would be nice, and there is some annoyance with how you have to shift maps around for different areas, but it's all very manageable. Tab-selection is a bit awkward in FATEs which are events that occur spontaneously like a certain type of monster mobbing a town, etc. The tab-selection, paired with multiple people attacking, can create awkward situations where you barely have time to select something before it's dead and you're left experience point-less. Which is sad, since that's what FATEs are for-- experience building.

Being an Elder Scrolls girl, I was shocked to enter an area with a level 45 monster. Little, brand new, level 9 me walked in innocently, thinking, Oh hey, new area. Is that a guard? Why is it so high level?

It hefted a sword as big as my five foot one character.

OH SHIT, thought I, before death occurred. Thankfully, I was level 9 at that point and not over level 10, since after level 10 is when the real KO damage occurs: your equipment takes damage and you have to get things repaired, which is what I will be doing if I can ever log in.

(Are we there yet? Nope. "This World is currently full. Please wait until an opening is available and try again.")

We all know by now that I am not the girl to go to if you want someone who likes MMOs. I enjoy The Secret World, but to be honest, there aren't enough swords and arrows for my taste. (Medieval Cthulhu setting would be made of so much win!) I am willing to handle it because of the frankly killer story, dialogue, voice acting, and generalized awesome that is The Secret World, but Final Fantasy XIV rocks my socks, guys. Rocks 'em right off. In fact, the last time I saw the opening movie, I teared up it was so terrific.

(Seriously. Can I please play now? No? Well, at least I know I can complain with everyone else about it. Is that what people like so much about MMOs? You can all share your pain when the servers won't load and you go through withdrawal?)

But seriously, Ivi'lea'hi Rhiki, level 11 Miqo'te Archer, Goblin server. Look me up, if I can ever log on.

JRPG Party-Based Combat

About two or three months ago, I had been playing a lot of Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride. I'm a firm believer in handhelds, thus why I love my DS so much. Handhelds allow focus to be on gameplay rather than graphics, which is something that I value highly. Dragon Quest V sent me on a kind of retro journey into adoration. I've long preferred the Dragon Quest series to Final Fantasy because I like the gameplay and the stories better. I find the monsters charming; I adore Slime.

There are a lot of things I love about Dragon Quest V. The little things that count can be counted upon in this game. The Hero, who has extremely bad luck in game, has a very, very low Luck stat. The inn prices-- in Whealbrook, post-burning, the inn price is extremely cheap, due to no one wanting to stay in the town and the innkeeper needing to take what she can get. In Coburg, where the taxes are high, the inn is about eight times more expensive than in Whealbrook. You can actually talk to your party members. One thing I don't like is the combat system.

JRPG battle is almost always turn-based. It is always party-based. In the combat menu, selections are divided up into different types of combat. Usually, the rule is Attack (physical), Magic (either assault or supportive), Item (to access your inventory), and Flee (to flee battle). Different characters will have different abilities. Some will be powerful magic users, either combat or restorative, and some will be tanks (high attack, defense, or both). However, different variations can turn combat in a JRPG from a button-mashing mess into a fun time. I've broken it down into the two major things:

1) Lineup. Standard JRPG lineup is just who goes first-- one, two, three, four. Enemies tend to focus on the ones in the middle in my experience, for whatever reason. However, good JRPG lineup also has front and back positions that the characters can take. If a character is in a "back" position, their physical attacks are weaker, but enemies' attacks will hurt them less. That means that the back position is good for archers and those who are primarily magic-users. Ideally, this also means there are archers.

Why DQV Failed: They didn't include this, simple as that, even though there was distance weaponry (boomerangs) and magic.

2) Unbalanced party members to make up a balanced party. Yes, this makes sense. Just hear me out. Each character should have strengths and weaknesses. And they should be important and their weaknesses should be fatal if they aren't supplemented with other members of the party. This is why a JRPG is a party-based RPG. If the party itself doesn't matter, why do I need to have one? Why don't I just dump everyone off somewhere and journey alone. The hero always needs to be relatively balanced, since for at least some of his journey, he will be alone and need to fight alone. However, he will be fighting against groups of enemies and thus will be outnumbered. He needs his party. His party should also need him, and each other. If each member of the party is perfectly balanced, why bother? Having unbalanced party members (Stat-wise. Not mentally. Though that would be cool.) gives the player a resource to manage. That way, you need to figure out which party mix-up would work best in various situations, in addition to figuring out which attack to use.

Why DQV Failed: For many, many hours in the game, it's just you, the balanced hero, Harry, the balanced prince sidekick, and whatever monsters you recruit. Dragon Quest V could have done something awesome with this, since recruiting monsters gives you a gigantic party to work with, each (presumably) with different strengths and weaknesses.

Of course, given where my brain has been recently, I related this to MMOs. MMOs are, by nature, party-based, though some obviously emphasize PvP rather than cooperative play. One of the reasons I like Korean MMORPGs is actually because there is very little cooperative play, so I don't have to deal with other players if I don't want to.

Relating this to Elder Scrolls Online, how will a game famous for their single-player games, where you can be anything and need to be able to journey alone, manage party-based combat? Will even a fighter still be able to learn restorative magic? How will Elder Scrolls Online walk that line between self-sufficiency and cooperation? How will they deal with the hero mentality of their long-time fans and the MMO world's need to have a little army? As DQV shows, you can't really have both. To wait and see is the only thing I can think of to do, and even then, it bothers me. Because unless some friends decide to jump on the Elder Scrolls Online boat, I don't want to play with other people, necessarily. And I don't think the game will be a success as an MMO unless it makes parties a necessity.

Oh well. If Elder Scrolls Online fails, I can always immerse myself in Skyrim again. There's always that.

The Quest to Find the Perfect MMO

A few months ago, I downloaded Everquest II. Everquest was such a big thing, and it was F2P, so I figured, why not.

The interface defeated me within the first couple of minutes. 'Wow, this is really difficult to navigate all these freaking menus,' thought I as I clicked X numerous times as a consequence of opening my inventory. 'Also, why is it so hard to equip things and compare things? WTF is up with this,' my thoughts continued. After completing a couple of quests, I left the game, right-clicked on Steam, and told it to delete.

I am often defeated by MMOs. They offer many advantages. Their games are usually really interesting looking and I always want to play them, but then when I get them, I realize that it's kind of boring, a little bit of a pain, and I'm not that interested.

I downloaded Forsaken World and then I waited a while. I ended up deleting it without playing. I played a whole lot of Skyrim in the middle (let's say about 30 hours worth and leave it at that). It was also at this point that I first heard of Secret World and nearly had a heart attack trying to figure out whether a preorder needed to happen or whether I needed to wait, given how I dislike MMOs.

Then I got into The Secret World beta. The first thing you do in this game is choose a faction-- Illuminati, Templar, or Dragon. Each faction has its own recruiting video, so to speak. I chose Illuminati after a seriously badass video and proceeded to try to make a character that as looked as much like FemShep as possible. Because I could.

There's a lot about this game that appears to be like a standard MMO. But there's also a lot of this game that ISN'T like a standard MMO. The dialogue is witty, as if Joss Whedon decided to turn his hand to video games. There are lots of Cthulhu references and tentacled zombies. (No, I shit you not.) The landscape-- at least in the beta-- was a little bare. I don't know if that has changed since the game came out, but there it stands. I started off in Brooklyn and where I could go and what I could do was bleak and a little linear. However, since I played the beta, and how much of that stayed and how much went is something I'm not quite sure of. However, within the locations I could go to had people who were awesome. The voice acting in this game is killer. The people just-- shine. Sample dialogue: "We have stocks in hell, and compromising photos of angels." -- the line that made me choose Illuminati. "Roleplaying is the only avenue of control." -- multiple self-referential jokes are made of awesome.

The way to move from one area to the next is Yggdrasil. Yes, the World Tree, with branches that reach to heaven and roots in hell. This is the perfect reference for this game. It also has so many branches that it means, as an MMO, the game can evolve and spawn new branches whenever it wants.

A few cons, which I strongly suspect were worked out after release: character models were limited (only to be expected in beta status). Having several copies of yourself wandering around is freaky. I was also in the stress test for the server, and kept getting kicked off because of that. The first quest after you leave the Illuminati headquarters was also one of the standard "kill a bunch of x" quests, which I hate. However, it was kill a bunch of zombies and attract them by making car alarms go off. So. That was fun. However, the quest progressed weirdly. You were supposed to be figuring out how to attract the zombies, but apparently after you kill a certain number of zombies, the information is mysteriously beamed into your brain, since the quest objective changes to jumping on cars. That was irritating.

All told, though, The Secret World didn't grab my interest enough for me to actually buy it, especially given that it has monthly fees.

20 or 30 more hours of Skyrim passed.

Then we have the Korean F2P MMORPGs, e.g. Maple Story and Trickster Online. These are actually the only MMOs I have ever been able to get into and play continuously. The cute graphics, easy storylines, and Engrish have never disappointed me, largely because I don't expect more. With games like The Secret World, I do expect more. I expect the same level of detail and tight storylines as a single player game, and an MMO is too big-- it just can't deliver that, not that I've found. With the coming of Elder Scrolls Online, I only hope that I won't be disappointed-- I don't know that my heart can stand it.

Furthermore, a note on my quest for the "perfect" MMO. I think my largest problem with MMOs is that I always want an MMORPG to still identifiably be an RPG and it never is. I don't really LIKE the MMO genre, so the stronger the MMO elements are in a game, the more likely I am to dislike it. It has nothing to do whether MMOs are necessarily "good"; it's more that I personally need an MMO where the RPG elements overpower the multiplayer elements, and that is precisely what I'm looking for. So my quest to find the perfect MMO is not a quest to find one that is perfect for anyone other than me. Perfect is a term relative to the subject and can't subsequently be defined or transcribed to the object. My perfect MMO is essentially a single-player game expanded outward; my hopes for Elder Scrolls Online, which I sincerely doubt will be fulfilled, are that it will be as if a single-player character took a step sideways and suddenly became embroiled in a mess where all her fellows had as strong of a personality and ambition as her. I don't know if an MMO like this exists, but I hope that someday it will.