Does the World Need An Elder Scrolls Online?

Does the Elder Scrolls really need to be an MMO? Or better yet, does the world really need another generic fantasy MMO? So far, what little I have seen about The Elder Scrolls Online has me wonder what the team at Zenimax Online have been up to since 07; does it really take that long to make your standard tank/healer/dps MMO? For me, The Elder Scrolls series is not about joining up with four, or five, or forty other people to kill some monster so I can have a chance for that piece of gear I am looking for, I have WoW for that thank you very much. No, The Elder Scrolls for me is about being an adventurer in a foreign land with nothing but the open wilderness to guide you. I love the freedom Morrowind, Daggerfall, and Skyrim gives gamers, and that feeling you get when delving into a random crypt or tomb is very different and much more satisfying than trying to find a group or queue for that same dungeon I have finished time and time again. I play WoW and The Elder Scrolls for different reasons, and I don’t need or want one that is trying to be the other.

Now I can understand wanting to develop an MMO. Looking at how much money Blizzard makes because of WoW (or what we can assume they make) and it is not hard to see why everyone else is sticking to the same formula. But therein lays the biggest problem plaguing modern MMO design: everyone is trying to make WoW with a different skin, when gamers want something new and different. We already have WoW to play, why would people want to play the same game again? Is it really any different if I am healing you as my Priest in WoW or as a Jedi in The Old Republic, or as whatever in any other game?  Sure, I would love to explore the entirety of Tamriel in The Elder Scrolls Online, but with us already knowing that some of the provinces are off limits/not done so they can be included in futureexpansions I am left to wonder why I would ever play this game if my biggest draw is incomplete.

I love the idea of the MMO, and I love playing the MMO, but I am ready for a massive multiplayer experience that is new and exciting. I am ready for new ways of interacting with the world and the countless other players within these large digital realities, and I wonder how long it will be until something truly new and exciting will enter into the MMO space. Until that day comes and I am playing this new, unique, and exciting MMO, I am content to play WoW and patiently wait. Hell, I have pets to collect for Mists of Pandaria`s upcoming Pokémon Pet Battle mode anyway.

The Bodies of the Gods: Thoughts on Xenoblade: Chronicles

As the sun sets on the aging Wii, the system is set to experience one final blast of gaming goodness; the JRPG renaissance of Xenoblade, The Last Story, and Pandora’s Tower. The first game of this trilogy of games to finally reach North American shores, after an overly lengthy wait, is Monolith Soft’s excellent Xenoblade: Chronicles. After getting to what I am assuming to be the halfway point in the narrative, I thought it was high time I put some of my thoughts to words about this very unique game.

Xenoblade tells the story of a young man named Shulk, and his journey to exact revenge on the machine that killed his friend. Wielding the powerful sword known as the Monado, Shulk and his party set out on their quest across the dead titan, Bionis. While the game does not forge new JRPG story territory, the characters you experience this tale with are likeable and well written and while they may not break any stereotypical RPG tropes (the wise healer, the thick-headed tank, etc), they are decent enough. The characters and story are well development along predictable lines, but it is the setting and art style that really steal the show; the world where the people live in Xenoblade: Chronicles are actually the long dormant bodies of two massive titans (the Bionis and the Mechonis) standing in an endless ocean, locked into eternal combat. This unique setting gives the game a surrealist vibe, and I for one love how different it is.

The combat, unlike its turn based forefathers, is fast paced and all about managing your cool downs and positioning. One thing that may turn people off is that your AI controlled companions fight on their own (very well I might add) while you control your own character. Sure it would have been nice to have more control over your party, I don`t know how Monolith Soft could have done it within the confines of the current battle system; it feels more like a western MMO (think WoW) than a traditional JRPG. If you where a fan of Final Fantasy XII`s battle system, then you will feel right at home here.

The British voice acting is something that I find really neat about this game. I know some of the references may be lost on me, and I admit that I don’t know the inherent implications of the various regional accents and dialects of the UK, but the British voice talent adds another very unique layer onto an already unique gaming experience. It also helps that the voice work and localization is very well done, and helps to get me even more excited for The Last Story.

Xenoblade Chronicles is a game that is big in scope, content, and heart and is easily one of the better JRPGs I have ever played. It boggles my mind that it has taken this long for a modern JRPG to see the light of day, and for this game to finally be released over here in North America, but I am glad it is here. Xenoblade, with its excellent localization and voice work, has me excited for the North American release of The Last Story (June 19^th) and has me crossing my fingers for an eventual North American release of Pandora`s Tower.

A Few Reasons Why Skyward Sword Pisses Me Off

1.   Fi is easily one of the most irritating video game characters to come along in a long time. Not only does she constantly reiterate everything you are told seconds after reading it, as if the people playing the Zelda series for over twenty years have no idea how these games work. She also beeps along with the still annoying low heart beep, which does nothing but fill me with resent and a mind numbing irritation. I hate her, and I hate whoever thought she was a good idea.

2.  The over world is dull and empty. I thought the oceans in Wind Waker and Phantom Hour were lazy, and Skywards sky feels the exact same way. Flying around an empty expanse to get each level gets old fast, and the few things interspersed in the nothingness are uninteresting and not worth your time.

3.   The story has no real climax. Go and do this x3, go and do something else x3, travel through time and beat the game; it`s boring, repetitive, and lazy. It`s a real shame too, because the story in Skyward Sword was said to be such a prominent aspect of the game and is a lot more overt than in previous Zelda titles.

4.   It is the same Zelda game we have all been playing since Ocarina of Time, hell, since A Link to the Past and I for one am ready to see the series do something new. Sure the game is selling well (3.11 million globally according to VG charts), but compare that to Skyrim (10.30 million globally) or to the fact that only about 3% of the Wii`s 95.2 million consoles user base bought the game should say something to the top brass at Nintendo.

Super Mario 3D Land, Part 2: The Game

Now that a bit of history has been covered, it is time to see how Super Mario 3D Land stands as a game on its own. There may be spoilers in my following ramblings, so be warned. Yet at the same time, is anyone really expecting Mario to do anything other than save Princess Toadstool? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Just as Super Mario Galaxy 2 streamlined level design, so too does Super Mario 3D Land. The levels in 3D Land are streamlined and lineal affairs, with Mario running towards and away from the screen in the best 3D seen on the system yet. Each stage also has three golden coins for you to collect, and if you are on the ball you can collect all three of them in your first run. 3D Land’s stages follow the design we saw in Super Mario Galaxy 2, and this abstract level design gives the player a great variety of levels, challenges, and things to see. But this variety only persists through the first 8 worlds of the game (essentially play-through 1), and soon you find yourself playing through the same stages over and over again as you adventure through the special worlds (play-through 2). While the levels do get different groups of enemies, power-ups, and even time limits during this second jaunt, replaying them over and over again does become a drag after a while.

For me, music can make or break a game for me and it was a pleasant surprise that Super Mario 3D Land has some of the best Mario music yet. The plethora of Mario 3 remixes, and how the music changes based on whether you’re above ground (clear and boisterous), underground (muffled and reserved, or a great remix of the classic underground music), or in the water (think of the typical tropical vibe video games have used throughout the years) is a great way to provide the player with a surprisingly immersive soundscape. After a year of amazing music, 3D Land was a nice way to cap everything off. This is a soundtrack I would like to get my hands on.

Players will have to get used to how Mario controls in 3D Land. While the game is presented in the same vein as Mario 64 and Galaxy 1 and 2, Mario doesn’t move nearly as fast as you would expect him too. The inclusion of a run button (Y) obviously lets Mario run around the levels faster, and as you would expect, using the momentum from running is key to helping Mario make many of his death-defying jumps. The return of Tanooki suit is something fans have been wanting ever since Mario 3 (leaf and all), and it plays just as you would hope and expect: Mario can extend his jump distance by using the suit to glide for short distances, and the iconic racoon tail can smash blocks to reveal hidden areas and dispose of those incessant goombas who block your path to the Princess.

Overall, Super Mario 3D Land is a joy to play. While the repetition of levels does drag the experience down somewhat during play-through 2, the overall experience is solid. The inclusion of a second, harder game after the initial credits is great and is something I hope more and more developers do (see Irrational’s 1999 mode for Bioshock: Infinte), and helps to give the game longer legs. Super Mario 3D Land is easily worth the price of admission, and is a great show piece of what the 3DS can do in the hands of competent developers. If nothing else, this has me excited to see what else Nintendo does with their 3DS and to see where this evolution of Mario will take the world’s favourite plumber.

Super Mario 3D Land, Part 1: A Brief History Lesson

Super Mario 3D Land is one of the best games available for the 3DS. Not since Super Mario World and Super Mario 64 has a Mario adventure really drawn me in. While I loved what Nintendo did with Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, I could never really get into them (mostly due to having other games on the go: see World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2) despite them being amazing games. Yet here I am, on my way to having a perfect save file for Mario’s latest adventure. This is something which I have not done in a game in years, and why is that? What has Nintendo done to make this game draw me in so much, and keep me hooked for so long?

I view Super Mario 3D Land as the next natural step in Mario’s never-ending evolution. Over the next couple of posts I will try and justify why I feel Super Mario 3D Land is the most refined Mario experience yet, using more evidence that just how I feel about the game. But before I jump into what makes 3D Land such a great experience, I think a very brief look at Mario’s history in the polygon age is worthwhile. This brief history lesson will be used to help justify my love for the 3D Land, and help show the evolutionary process I have seen unfold with regards to Super Mario and my time as a person interested in games.

1996s Super Mario 64 was the game that showed the world not only how a 3D camera should be done, but more importantly, that it could be done in the new age of the polygon. It was a landmark title, and one that is still remembered fondly; hearing that music from Bomb-omb Battlefield still fills me with childlike glee. His adventure through the game’s huge sandbox world was what led the game industry’s charge into our modern polygonal age, and would give rise to the school of game design based around the idea of the collectable.

2002s Super Mario Sunshine for the GameCube iterated heavily on the 64’s sandbox world design: we got a large open hub world with Isle Delfino; 120 “Shine Sprites” to replace the 120 “Power Stars” from Super Mario 64; and we saw the triumphant return of everyone’s favourite dinosaur, Yoshi. Sunshine also saw the inclusion of the FLUDD, a water pack that augmented Mario’s powers and abilities. While the FLUDD added to the game by really increasing the scope of what Mario could do (allowing him to jump higher, hover in mid-air, and attack enemies from a distance without the help of a fire flower), Sunshine was much the same as 64. That is not to say it is a bad game, far from it, Super Mario Sunshine is one of the best GameCube games around, and is one I would highly recommend.

The DS then gave us the retro throwback of New Super Mario Bros in 2006 as well as a remake of Super Mario 64 that launched with the system in 2004. Aside from the inclusion of 3 other playable characters in Super Mario 64 DS (Luigi, Yoshi, and Wario), the remake was much the same game as its Nintendo 64 predecessor. New Super Mario Bros on the other hand brought many of us back to the days of the NES and the SNES, and was a window into the mechanical origins of one of gaming’s most recognized characters: gone were the sandbox levels seen in Mario’s recent console outings, replaced with the classic approach of individual side scrolling levels. I also think for a lot of people, New Super Mario Bros was a breath of fresh air. By the mid 2000s, the idea of in game collectables had reached its peak and a lot of us were tired of it (it was the original Assassin’s Creed that really turned me off the whole idea of collecting pointless crap), and with New Super Mario Bros focusing more on gameplay rather than collecting everything in sight, Nintendo brought Mario back to his roots.

Come 2007, we have Nintendo releasing the amazing Super Mario Galaxy and following it up 2010 with Super Mario Galaxy 2. We also saw the sequel to New Super Mario Bros, New Super Mario Bros Wii, get released in 2009. While Galaxy continued Mario’s evolution seen in 64 and Sunshine (large levels, tons of collectables, and a neat hub world with the space station) Galaxy 2 reduced and refined many of those tropes. The Space Station from Galaxy was reduced to a single ship (that you can explore if you want) that goes from level to level. The levels in Galaxy 2 are not meant to house six or seven stars like those seen in the original; instead we see levels build to challenge the player and the design shifting away from housing stars, and back to solid platforming. But arguably the biggest shift seen in the Galaxy series was the rise of the Nintendo EAD Group 2’s (the team who made Galaxy 2 and 3D land) “abstract” level design. Galaxy saw Mario race through the stars, run around tiny planets, and traverse a universe full of coins, blocks, stars, koopas, and goombas; all very Mario, but presented with a very different visual style.

While the Galaxy series was experimenting with what a Mario game could be, New Super Mario Bros Wii was as by the books as you could get; and people loved it. Sometimes there really is a reason why the classics are so revered, and the fact that the simple game play of classic Mario is still enough of a draw for people is testament to the quality of the original design of the Mario games (Super Mario Bros and Super Mario Bros 3).

It was this refinement of the levels seen in Galaxy 2, combined with the huge success of New Super Mario Bros Wii fundamental values, and the rise of the Mario Team’s abstract level design that paved the way for what would come to be Super Mario 3D Land.

The Intro to Deep Thought

For the second time during our tenure of World of Warcraft, my friend Thom and I have recently started a brand new guild. We transferred off the under populated Vashj, to be greeted with the hustle and bustle of Korgath, a server created to house the spill-over from the over populated Kil’Jaden server. It is interesting to note that Kil’Jaden was where we started our first, and only, successful guild: Freedom Fighters. We named our new guild Deep Thought, after the mighty computer from Douglas Adam’s classic novel series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

As of right now, the guild is being run by Thom on Onions the hunter; me on my priest, Satoira; and along with Thom’s girlfriend and few of his work buddies, we have managed to gather a small smattering of other random people into our ranks. The challenge now is to engage the people in those ranks in the hopes that they will stay, and become important members of the guild. We will also continue to recruit as many people as we can; the idea is to weed out the bad eggs later on, once personalities start to surface out of the current silence. I am also thinking that we should try and brand our guild as a place for the young and urban adults who play WoW. We should make it a place where it is assumed that WoW is not the end all and be all of life, because we all have other things going on in our lives, and this game is just a great way to unwind.

So after all was said and done, I have decided that I am going to chronicle this attempt of ours to start this guild from the ground up. I hope we will be raiding the first tier of content in WoW’s forthcoming expansion, Mists of Pandaria by the time I am done with this, and I hope we get to come across a bunch of interesting people as we continue with this social experiment called the MMO guild. It is always neat to meet the variety of people who play this game.

A Minecraft Review

Minecraft has finally gone gold, and with that the ever approaching release of version 1.0 rushes ever closer. Notch and the crew at Mojang recently released Release Candidate 2, and asked the gaming community to start reviewing the final build of the game and I am doing just that. But I want to try and take a step back, and try to imagine myself as someone who has never even heard of Minecraft let alone play it. I am trying to imagine myself as someone who is not going to hop onto the Minecraft wiki to figure out how to play the game after dying during their first night from a creeper’s suicidal explosion or a skeleton’s arrow; someone who has not been following the fascinating history of the game and its makers. Now I assume that the average gamer out there expects the game to teach them how to play using some kind of in game tutorial. Even if it is as rudimentary as a few texts boxes, they are still going to expect to be taught how to play. Sadly to say, this is not the case with Minecraft, and it is something I feel needs to be addressed.

Now before I go on, let me explain something. I realize Minecraft and its community is a sort of anomaly in the world of gaming. The types of gamers playing Minecraft (especially those like myself who have been playing the game for well over a year now) are the kinds of gamers who are going to jump on the net, and learn all the ins and outs of a game; we have a drive to figure out how it works. On the other hand, the gamer who is content with their Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Madden is not going to be content with a game that does nothing but the bare minimum (the achievement tab) to explain its mechanics. It is this glaring omission (a problem most of us ignored under the impression of the game was still being alpha and beta tested) that will limit the game from reaching an even wider audience than it already has. Also, with Minecraft coming to the Xbox 360 in the near future, this is a problem that has to be dealt with sooner rather than later. There is still a huge dichotomy between the types of gamers who are solely playing console gamers and the rest of us, and I think the people who download this over XBLA are going to demand more than online wikis.

Terraria fixed this problem with the inclusion of an NPC that you could talk to near your spawn point. This character would teach you the basics of the game, and help you situate yourself in the world of Terraria. With towns now spawning in the many worlds of Minecraft, and with the Adventure Mode getting the most attention, I think Notch and crew should just spawn you in a town. Have the NPCs talk to you, and have them teach you how to play. As of right now, this information vacuum is something that needs to be addressed in Minecraft. Mojang cannot rely on the community any longer to explain their game for them; they need to do it from within Minecraft. This massive barrier to entry is going to prevent people from feeling the thrill of getting lost underground only to find that diamond deposit; they will never be able to experience the terror of exploring the nether, always afraid of losing their items in that fiery waste; and they will never be able to battle the ender dragon, and get the dragon’s egg.

I think Minecraft is a fantastic game. Getting together with friends and exploring the endless world has been one of the highlights of my gaming life, yet the games lack of even a rudimentary tutorial is something that Notch and the team at Mojang have to address. While I had a fantastic time figuring the game out (and still do every time an update is released) I feel the average person who thinks Modern Warfare is the epitome of gaming will not feel the same way. Until this is solved, it is almost impossible to review this game. Even with the release of 1.0 only days away, Minecraft still feels very much like a game without direction, and I think myself and too many of us are giving them a free pass. But I’m not worried; the team at Mojang are talented guys, and I know they are going to continue improving Minecraft and continue change the face of what video games are and can be. It would just be a shame if this lack of information prevented people from experiencing one of gaming’s most rewarding experiences.