My Year in Online RPGs (Part Two)
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My first EQ2 character, Wascal
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The overriding impression
I had playing Everquest 2 was that of being in a Theme
Park where the park mangers are paid bonuses every
time they rearrange the rides.
This game has a lot of patches. Where City of Heroes
might have a major content patch every couple of months,
Everquest 2 has patches several times a week. And these
aren't
just small patches. Everything from new dungeons to combat
and spell changes are pushed down the pipe to EQ2 subscribers
on a near-continuous schedule. You'd think this would
be a good thing, and it would be if the quantity were
matched by quality.
It isn't. EQ2 is the
buggiest damn game I've played in a long while. Each
new patch introduces new bugs that lead to even newer
patches in a vicious catch-22 of job security for someone
who should have been fired long ago. One nasty bug
in particular trapped players in "combat mode" even
after combat had ended, handicapping health and
endurance recovery. This bug was particularly prevalent
among the pet classes, and as luck would have it I
was playing a pet-summoning Conjurer. Dismissing my
pet would sometimes clear the bug, otherwise I'd have
to
exit
the game
and log back in. Considering that combat is an activity
initiated with some regularity in a game of this nature,
fixing
such a bug would clearly have been
a high priority. Wrong. I just checked the message
boards three months after I quit EQ2, and the combat
lock bug still hasn't been fixed.
EQ2 is a textbook example
of the mission creep that leads developers to sacrifice
stability for new features. I really suspect there's
something in
the management model to
blame. (Who gets bonuses when nothing happens?)
New features should
simply
not be introduced unless all
bugs have
been fixed. A common retort to this complaint is that
the staff working on new features are a separate group
of developers from those working on bug fixes. Well reassign
them and get the bugs fixed
already.
The other big complaint
I have with EQ2 is the constant zoning. While EQ2 is
the most graphically-impressive game I've ever played,
as well as quite immersive (it broke my heart to leave)
there is a price to be paid. Whether in the quaint
center of Qeynos
City
or
in
the
shadowy depths
of Nektulos
forest,
you're likely to come upon conspicuous doors, bells
or other indications of the need to un-immerse yourself
and stare at a loading screen. Zoning is a constant
annoyance in this game, and it's a problem plaguing
more and more games as hard drive speed and RAM capacity
fails to keep pace
with
processor speed. All those
lovely textures and billions of polygons have to be
thrashed in and out of main memory with a frequency
that seems to match every few steps of my character's
stride. Or do they?
World of Warcraft
Bolting out of the gate
in November, 2004, Blizzard's much-anticipated
port of its popular strategy game has come to dominate
the online RPG genre. Currently topping out at over
two
million
subscribers,
the game has seen tremendous commercial success,
luring players with the promise of creating their own
Warcraft character. What lured me into the game was
the promise
of no zoning.
You can travel forever
in Warcraft without encountering an artificial zone
barrier. Whether traveling on foot or by air on one
the magnificent Gryphons, the game world just keeps
rambling on seamlessly. I don't know how they do it,
but I wish other games would take note and employ similar
technology.
The downside? There are
two. First, the graphics. The game simply makes my
eyes bleed. The oversaturated colors and low-detail
textures create a world that
does not appeal to me. Compare the water in the two
shots below. The Everquest screenshot shows
water
with transparent and reflective qualities. The World
of Warcraft water looks cartoonish in
comparison. It practically glows. Compounding the graphical
shortcomings is the lack of variety for character
models. While
City of Heroes boasts a powerful character creation
tool, World of Warcraft offers you a meager choice
for hair color, and that's about it. While many would
counter that gameplay trumps graphics, a virtual gaming
world is where I choose to spend much of my free time.
How it looks matters -- and I don't want to spend my
time in a world that looks like this. Subjective? You
bet.
Making matters worse is that
new characters spawn into racial villages, surrounded
by players of the same type. The result is to be drowned
in a sea of clones in a genre where immersion and individuality
are king. The easy answer is to blame it on the lack
of zoning, and that may largely be the case, but I find
it interesting to note the contrast between games in
their approach to graphical presentation. Maybe some
day I can have my cake and eat it, too, but until
then the choice is between great graphics and no zoning.
It's the Community, Stupid
Now for the second shortcoming I found
in World of Warcraft. As with anything tremendously appealing
to the masses, the problem of, well, the masses, arises.
WoW is not the place to hold a Mensa meeting. My first
memorable encounter with another player in this game
involved a flypaper-like Hunter who simply would not
leave me alone. Not only did he follow me around the
forest, into the shops and then to a cave, hopping about
and insisting that I team with him, but he did all this
without
me saying a single word. Not one. I was just
minding my own business, reading some quest text when
along comes Mr. Flypaper flapping his arms and making
bird noises. From my short experience in this game, its
bad rap for immaturity is well deserved. If only there
were an online RPG that looked great, didn't zone and
had a mature player base. My quest continues.
EVE Online
Way back in the nascent days
of computer games, back when
my computer
was a Commodore
64, one afternoon I was
browsing the latest games at a local shop when I spotted
a black
box with
the word, "Elite" on
the cover. I picked up the box and spied a space sim
- with 3D
graphics! We're talking my very own take-home copy of
my favorite
arcade game, the vector-graphics Starhawk.
I had to have it.
Continue to Part Three
Back to Part One
- Mike
Mangold - 09/25/2005
