the only haven you can trust

One of the perks of my job is that I get to play MMOs on the company dime. This means that I can play marginal MMOs — games I would never play if I had to pay for them myself — just for the sake of seeing the systems and UI in action.

Yesterday, after returning from E3, I was inspired to pick up two new games. The first, Lineage II, is the flagship NCSoft game. The second, D&D Online, is what Turbine hopes will be their flagship game, since the closure of Asheron’s Call 2. I played both games yesterday for a couple of hours each, and came away with this revelation: They are diametric opposites.

DDO has, somewhere buried inside it, a game. There’s content, and that content seems like it would be fun. Between me and the content is a lack of polish so profound I can barely see the vaguest outlines of what I should be doing. When I’m not fighting with an inconsistent, buggy, and fragile UI, I’m fighting with counterintuitive mechanics, poorly-explained systems, and an environment that could charitably be described as ‘claustrophobic’. I learned to ‘tumble’, but still have no sense of why I would want to. I’m never told, except that it will help me to avoid attacks (it didn’t). And, breaking with every other MMO ever, looking around is bound to the left mouse button — but god forbid you remap it, because you cannot independently remap mouselook and target selection/action. So now I’m right clicking on everything, because the left button is now my attack button. No, not auto-attack — it’s the button I can click if I want to swing my weapon once. There is an auto-attack button, of course, and naturally I’m using that, which means the left mouse button is now… totally useless. Oh, except for looting, when suddenly the functionality of my mouse buttons reverts. And for the love of god, why doesn’t the game auto-target attackers? I’m autoattacking, and nothing’s happening. Why? Because I’m not targeting the spider that’s attacking me. I dread learning how I’m supposed to fight and heal at the same time, as a cleric.

On a somewhat unrelated note: WotC, you’re a bunch of idiots. Eberron? What the fuck? Look, I know you want to push this as your new setting, because you think it will move a shit-ton of units. But old-school people like me don’t give a shit about Eberron. And everyone else? They would have bought it, or not, without reference to whether it was in your new setting. Look, what we wanted was Forgotten Realms Online, for christ’s sake. I’d play that, despite all the complaints I just made.

I seem to be cursed: if I’m accepted into the beta for a game, I’ll have a laundry list of complaints, but reassure myself that it’s still beta, they’re still fixing — and then they release two weeks later, all the bugs still present and unfixed. It’s why I never played SWG; I assumed, in the beta, they were 3 months from launching. They were 3 weeks from launching. Ditto DDO.

After that, I played L2. I should mention that L2 wins in one respect: the package I bought contained all their content ‘episodes’, so there was minimal patching, which is a nice bonus for a 2 year old game. DDO, on the other hand, patched for hours, and it’s been out, what, a month? two?

L2 convinced me immediately of one thing: SquareEnix localization is goddamn amazing. It’s not that L2 is bad, exactly. I mean, we’re not talking VCR-instructions bad. It’s just… awkward. Poor phrasing, missing words, stilted diction. It reads like a translated game, where FFXI never did.

But on to the main point: if DDO is a game hidden by lack of polish, L2 is obsessive polish behind which is… nothing at all. The art is more attractive than perhaps any other game I’ve played except Guild Wars (my new gold standard for game art). The UI is, once you accept the weird click-to-move limitations, straightforward and relatively transparent. The environments were interesting to look at. The systems seemed to have some degree of complexity, though as a noob it’s hard to tell. And yet… in 2006, I do not expect to be told to farm noob monsters to level up. Seriously, the ‘newbie helper’ NPC told me to grind to 5.

And it’s grinding, let me tell you. It’s like jumping into a cold lake after a hot sauna, playing L2 after playing PotBS all week long at E3. Target. Autoattack. Loot. Repeat. Every 4-5 fights, sit and wait for a few minutes while reading a book. Guys, I was doing this in 1999, playing Everquest fucking 1. Prettier graphics doesn’t make this gameplay any more compelling.

Baffled, I looked online for explanations. I found a post by someone who was level 17, bored, and wondering if the game became any more interesting. At level 17, he had nothing to do in combat aside from just stand there auto-attacking. Christ, even EQ1 had ‘Kick’. There was only one answer, and that answer was ‘If you think it’s boring now, wait until you get to 30th level.’

This was not a good sign.

On top of that, I’ve heard horror stories about how the game is full of exploiters and farmers. I figured, yeah, they said that about FFXI, and while the farmers sucked, it was a long time before they really impacted my gameplay. I wasn’t bitching about them until I was level 60+, and paying through the nose for a gluttony sword. So what, farmers. I’m a permanoob.

But, in the dwarf starter town, I saw the oddest thing. These dwarves, all identical in appearance, were respawning in the middle of town, running along identical paths to the guards, attacking them, and dying.  Every one of them had a name comprised of random letters and numbers.

I have no idea what they were doing (although if you know, please tell me; I’m curious).  All I know is that they were clearly bots, they were clearly running some kind of exploit or scam, and aside from the bots, there was no-one else in town.  I did not see a single non-bot character the whole time I was playing.

I seem to have confirmed my basic good taste in MMOs.  The games I never bought because I didn’t think they’d be any good?  I was right.  And it really puts into perspective my complaints about WoW and Guild Wars.  Compared to L2 and DDO, that’s like complaining that the beauty queen could stand to lose 2 or 3 pounds.

So I guess it’s back to waiting for the Next Big Thing.  I saw several candidates at E3, but my skepticism about the industry has risen right along with the ad budgets for the Next Big Thing.