This week, two main news stories made their way out of EA. The first one is that they bought Playfish, the social/ facebook gaming developer, for a eye-bleeding $300 million plus change.

And the second is that EA laid off a lot of staff, including 40% of Mythic, developers of Warhammer Online. I think it’s fair to say that WAR’s days are numbered, and there’s not going to be any magical expansion on the way to introduce a third realm and save the game.

This is not a post of doom though, the MMO genre isn’t dead. And no big game publisher can really ignore the massive success that social games have seen for the low cost to make. But MMOs have been going through a process of experimentation and refinement over the last few years. A lot of big budget games haven’t been as successful as they might have been expected to be on paper.

2010 may see the last gasp of the AAA big budget MMOs. It’s going to be a fantastic year for MMO gamers. It will see Star Trek Online, Final Fantasy whatever (14?), Guild Wars 2, Jumpgate Evolution, Cataclysm (I don’t really count this as a new game but it’ll be big) and SWTOR.

CCP still have to announce what they’re doing with Vampire even though it’s an open secret that they are working on a Vampire MMO. Blizzard haven’t yet announced their next MMO although they’re known to be working on it. But I doubt anyone else will start working on any new MMOs with that sort of budget and scope any time soon. It’s time now to wait, and see, and find out what players actually want.

As to where social gaming is going, Mashable makes 5 predictions here — of all of those, the one I have most confidence in is that EA will find new ways to monetize.

2010 is going to be an amazing year for MMO gaming, but will it just be the beginning of the end?

If you want to get out of the city map and back to the world map, then get to the city map page and select the icon at the bottom of the map, in the middle.

Trust me, I’m a dwarf

Dragon Age is the game I’ve been waiting for ever since I started to play CRPGs, and I hadn’t even realised. In fact, I’d all but given up on ever having a computer based RPG that came anywhere near the nuances of a tabletop game. But I was wrong.

Bioware have learned a lot since the days of Baldurs Gate and Knights of the Old Republic – BG had a large game world and lots to do but never really grabbed me as a story. KOTOR leapt for the jugular with a character based storyline but made the player so much front and centre that it was almost embarrassing to play. I felt awkward knowing that the game was so blatently all about me.

In Dragon Age, you are the hero. You will do great and terrifying things, but there’s a whole world in this game and a lot of other people too. You will affect them, they will affect you.

The game is a solid blend of CRPG sections where you can explore the scenery, talk to other characters, do quests, and take everything that isn’t nailed down; and party based combat. Both sides of the game seem exceptional to me from what I have played so far. But the story and the immersion is where the game really shines.

The origins of the title are long intro sections for each combination of race/social background which ease you into your character and flesh it out a bit before the main storyline kicks off and you are taken away from everything and everyone you once knew. I’ve played through a few origins and thought they were all effective – although I can see how some might appeal more to different players. The mage background, for example, offers an insight into a life lived entirely inside the mage tower, with some moral and ethical dilemmas thrown in. But because of the moral choices, it doesn’t feel as streamlined as the city elf background where you’re given a fairly arse kicking revenge fantasy (no moral dilemma there!). The dwarf commoner is my favourite so far but none of the ones I tried were clunkers. They all worked at getting me to like my character and connect with it, and offering some long term character  based goals as well as purely quest based ones.

Voice work is great, although there do seem to be a lot of people who talk with posh English accents around the place. I’m a convert to voice work in CRPGs now, although I can’t imagine what sort of resources Bioware must have at their disposal. As others have commented, it is a little jarring that everyone except your character is chatting away – it makes them come across a bit grim, like the man with no name. But appealing voice work brings even the least convincing character models to life. The animation is also pretty good. I especially loved watching my city elf warrior heft a two handed sword around. I’ve seen people do real life swordplay with those and the moves looked right to me (none of this swinging it around your head like a rhythmic gymnast).

The heart and soul of the CRPG is in the companion characters who will join you along the way, and how your main character develops a relationship with them. There is always a danger in CRPGs that because the player is in the driving seat, all the other characters feel weak – they are always deferring to your opinions and letting you make the decisions. That does exist here, but they will also step up and challenge you when they think you are making a mistake. It’s not like having a full AI on board, but they do feel convincing to me as 3 dimensional characters.

For example,  as my dwarf rogue, I was commenting to my husband that I liked Alistair but thought he was naive and a bit of a tit. He said that as his mage, he liked him because he felt that they had a lot in common – they’d both been taken from their parents at a young age and sent off to an institution to be raised. So the character and conversation options were there to support both of those experiences.

The fighting sequences are fast paced, although you can pause the action as often as you need to, and can be as tactically deep as you care to go. Easy mode is a lot easier – you won’t need to pause the game too much and area effects won’t harm your party through friendly fire. Normal mode (which is quite hard in places, even after the last patch) requires more thought and hands on interaction. Although you can set programmable tactics for each character, mages need a bit more babysitting to get the best out of them. If one particular fight is kicking your butt and you get frustrated, you can change the difficulty to easy for that, and then back again afterwards.

Or just play it through in easy mode if you’re more about the story and the character than the tactical combat. That’s just as valid a way to play and I enjoy that the game gives me those options.

And really the one flaw with the character classes is that mages feel as though they have many more options. As a mage, you can have crowd control, you can nuke, you can have AE, you can heal, you can buff. Fighters and rogues are a little more one sided, although my rogue has some stuns and can set traps and throw bombs so I don’t feel restricted with her at all. The game is not set up to assume you always have a healer along, but if you don’t, take a lot of healing poultices and have one of the party train in herbalism (to make more cheaply).

And about the maturity? They’re not joking. Even if you ignore the blood and the entertainment on offer at the brothel (it’s all fade to black) or the options to romance your party (I can’t report on that since I’m having enough trouble getting them to stay with me at all, let alone anything more), the issues and moral dilemmas raised in the game are a step beyond most fantasy fare. How do you feel about casual in game racism? Would you kill a child if you knew for a fact that doing so would also destroy a demon? Free the condemned prisoner, even if you know he might kill again? This is a game where you will be facing those types of choices, and you’ll have to take responsibility for where they lead.

As if all that wasn’t enough, there are also achievements to unlock and lore to discover – Bioware have used something similar to WAR’s tome of knowledge where new pages open up to inform you of what you have learned about characters, items, gameplay, lore, and so on. Lore entries may also be expanded later as you find out more. I found that worked very well, although indexing it by number doesn’t make it easy to search.

My dwarf just hit level 10 with *cough* a fair amount of hours played and I feel as though I’ve barely touched the surface of the game. I’m thoroughly enjoying it, as you can probably tell. In fact,  I absolutely love it and will plan to spring for the warden’s keep DLC at some point, if only because I’m happy to have the chance to throw more money at Bioware for content of this quality.

Tell me about your character

Let me tell you about my character in Dragon Age. She’s a feisty dwarf rogue who began her life as a casteless commoner. She doesn’t take nonsense from anyone, she hates rules, and wants to do the right thing but doesn’t see why she should do it for free because that made you a sucker where she came from. Her story is of someone who came from nowhere and is struggling to learn what ‘doing the right thing’ really means.

When I compare notes with my husband, he keeps saying, “You’re horrid,” or “You’re evil” when I tell him about my dwarf girl’s exploits. But I’m not playing as evil, just as someone who doesn’t know any better and really really wants to try anyway.

Her companions aren’t very happy with her (except for Morrigan who she gets on with very well), and I think being motivated to try to stay friendly with them is probably having a good effect on her. I feel like I actually have a character that could change and grow through the game – it may not be Oscar winning material but it could be a solid fantasy pot boiler! To me, that lifts the whole game up another dimension because I actually feel as though I’m role playing.

So, tell me about your character?

The holidays are almost upon us again and this year the MMO Blogging Alliance wants to help ensure a good season for all! We’ve decide to pull together and encourage our readers to donate to those less fortunate. It has been a tough year for many families across the world and a little boost can go a long way. Please consider donating to one of the many charities that we recommend or one you select on your own. If you’re a blogger and would like to participate in our drive it is as easy as writing a post, including this at the top, linking to the other posts, and picking a charity to donate to. Let’s show everyone that in 2009 the MMO community can make a positive difference in the world!

Kids studying in bad housing

Many gamers in 2009 followed the poignant tale of Alice and Kev, the Sims 3 homeless father and daughter, which showed all too clearly the issues that homeless people face, and the barriers that prevent them from getting back on their feet.

The charity I’ve picked to support this year is Shelter,  a UK based charity  that works to alleviate the distress caused by homelessness and poor housing.

The charity’s mission is to help anyone in need of housing to access and keep a home, by offering free advice on anything from trouble with the landlord to handling mortgage arrears or finding a place to sleep. This year, hundreds of thousands more families are struggling to keep up with the rent or mortgage payments due to the credit crunch. Many more people currently keeping their heads above water are only one or two missed paycheques away from the specture of repossession.

Charities like Shelter operate throughout the world, trying to help people to help themselves: Robin Burkinshaw at Alice and Kev has listed a lot of them here, perhaps one operates near you.

Click here to donate to Shelter.

If you’re interested in volunteering over the Christmas period in the UK, Crisis is another homeless charity which offers Christmas Centres for the homeless, where they can find company, a hot meal, and a wide range of other essential services — they need a lot of volunteers and it’s fun and rewarding work, which was my first experience of volunteering. Again, wherever you are, there are likely to be similar organisations, charities and hospitals which have use for volunteers over Christmas if you prefer to give time rather than money. (If you’re alone at Christmas and feeling down, it’s better than sitting at home feeling sorry for yourself.)

If you’d like to donate to multiple charities or a different one, why not check out these posts by the other MBA Charity Drive members (links might not be active until later on today):

Epic Slant

Stylish Corpse

Psychochild

Multiplaying

Nerf the Cat

Stabbed Up

Bio Break

Echoes of Nonsense

It took a bit of searching to find the most recent 1.01 patch for Dragon Age Origins yesterday, but Bioware have swiftly updated their social site to make the patch much easier to locate.

And because a picture says a thousand words, the screenshot below shows how to find and download it.

1. Log into the bioware dragonage social site at: social.bioware.com

2. Select My Games –> Game Patches as shown above

3. If you don’t want to log in or don’t have an account, you can go directly to the patch page using the URL  http://social.bioware.com/game_patches.php

3. The patch page (pictured above)  has a big blue download button that you can click to get the patch.

Happy Patching!

1. Tarsus explains why we should always blame the tanks and gives a reason for just about every situation.
2. Blizzard’s new petshop has inspired KIASA to sing. Katy Perry had nothing on this.
3. We’ve seen a lot of other blog reactions to the petstore. The majority accept that the pets aren’t a big deal, but there’s a pervasive sense of sadness – as if we’d seen the future and people aren’t sure if they like it (ultimately if it’s more profitable for devs to make social games and sell pretty pets than make big expansive virtual worlds with complex teamplay, then well …). Green Armadillo sums this up, asking if RMT is the third Trammel. Copra also expresses sadness at how the game is changing, philosophically.
4. The Rampant Coyote wonders if too much choice is a good thing in games. Or is it too easy to get lost or distracted and actually miss the game’s goal. I’ve recently started playing both Uncharted 2 and Dragon Age Origins and sometimes being on tracks is awesome fun as long as the view (and, more importantly, the gameplay) is that good.
5. Naissa (welcome back, by the way) has extensive lists of things she misses about WoW from times gone by, but also things she loves about the new content.
6. Speaking of Uncharted 2, Kotaku posts an interview with one of the designers, discussing how achievements (trophies) can actually add to the gameplay of a game and how they deliberately structure them. It’s so much more directed than the random ‘lets make an achievement out of everything’ scattergun approach we see in MMOs.
7. It’s not just zillions of people in the western world who are hooked on farmville. Farming Games are extraordinarily popular in China too (probably where Zynga nicked the idea from).
8. Game By Night analyses some of the problems with guilds as a concept, especially in games which have levels. And suggests some possible solutions.
9. It’s much easier for people interested in WoW raiding these days to just run a PUG for the Coliseum. Altadin discusses the problems this raises for raid guilds – if you ask someone to be on reserve for your raid, you’re actually asking them to save their locks and not to even go grab some badges in a PUG. Matticus takes another angle and notes that it’s much easier to recruit and gear up a newbie now, so why not widen the recruitment net?
10. So your guild is breaking up, everyone is all out of enthusiasm, and even the officers are wishing they could just quit. Ferrel discusses how to neatly put the guild to sleep – not a situation anyone likes but these things happen.

And my wtf of the week is wow.com’s post this morning about paladins which notes:

paladins are forced to pay the hybrid tax three times over — because they can do it all without limiting themselves, they can’t do anything as well as other classes

Does anyone seriously think that paladins can’t heal or tank as well as other classes (hint: they’re probably ahead on both right now).? Or that their dps is way behind … e.g. warriors? It’s not. Everyone whines, but that was a silly thing to say with any editorial weight behind it.

Also, I’ve seen a lot of rather tedious tank and healer questionnaires going around? Who the hell cares what your favourite spell is? *facepalm* It’s the whole package you should be looking at and how they fit together.

But for the record, my favourite tank type to team up with are bears. Warrior/druid is just a nice combo with a lot of finesse, I find. Or maybe I just know good bear tanks.

I’m much more likely to want to buy a single player game when it comes out when I know that a lot of my friends will be chatting about it online. The pressure to be part of that ‘first wave’ is higher than it used to be. Even being three days late on Dragon Age due to later European release dates felt like an absolute age to me. And I’m sure I used to be much more relaxed about waiting 6 months until the game was in the reduced pile.

This is the same reason that a lot of people here download TV shows or films illegally. Not because they can’t afford to buy it, but because they don’t have the option.

When will distributors realise that we want to read, watch, listen, or play these things at the same time as the rest of the world because we TALK to them about it?

This is a great (non)news story in the games sphere. Yesterday gaming sites were reporting that Valve’s Chet Faliszek complained that my fellow brits are too quiet on voice chat.

“You guys are notorious non-talkers on both 360 and PC. Americans are just chattering away, working together as a team. If you want to work together as a team you’ve got to talk!”

So assuming this is the case, it’s either that Brits hate voice chat and never talk even to each other, or else there’s something else going on across the cultural divide.

I’ve never been big into shooters or the crowd who play them on consoles, but from MMO experiences I’d say we talk plenty. It’s quite likely that we’re  more reticent about talking to strangers than the average American, but Europeans in general  have a good reputation for being strong on teamwork.

But that doesn’t quite cover ‘notorious non-talker’. What could the issue be?

Chet added, helpfully:

You can go into a random 360 game on US servers and it’s crazy talk. It’s fun.

Right, there’s the answer. Crazy talk. Why do I want to log into a server to play a co-op shooter and be bombarded with some teenage american’s idea of crazy talk? Does that sound like fun? No. It does not. Especially when you take into account that American culture has a greater propensity to smack talk than we do here, particularly in competitive sports or games. It’s not that Brits aren’t just as racist, homophobic, or bigoted in other ways as their US counterparts (present company excepted), but there’s stuff we don’t say that they do.

If you check out the comments to the original post, you’ll see the predictable amount of UK vs US posturing, but in amongst it are a few more clues as to why the Brits might be wary of opening their mouths.

Getting told to ’shut up limey’ followed by insults towards my family and/or any of the above, well, that’s just not fun, sorry.

I’m a female gamer in the UK and I barely ever use headphones and chat to random people when playing online because I know I’m going to get some stupid American kid spouting sexist (and racist and homophobic) nonsense at me.

I don’t bother talking to Americans ‘cuz everytime I do, they can’t understand a word I’m saying… I’m a brummie

You probably need to hear a Black Country accent to understand where he’s coming from with this. I had a mate at University who was from Birmingham (brummie), we all mocked him relentlessly. I’m not proud but I can see why the Americans might not understand this guy.

I will say that, all trash talking aside, the Americans I play with have the edge over any Brit gamers I’ve ever had the pleasure to play with. Many of the best l4d american gamers stick to tournament(gamebattles)and friends only games.These are the ADULT gamers that most Brits playing online will never run into. See, we hate playing with homophobic 13 year olds too.

So maybe the nicer US players are also playing with friends and not talking in random games. So they exist, but you’ll never run into them.

I’m more than happy to get on the mic & have a bit of banter. But more often than not there is either an abusive, American kid spouting crap, or some tool who thinks everyone wants to listen to his generic dance music down the headset.

I don’t mind playing americans but they do grate sometimes. Seems that alot of our banter goes right over the top of thier heads aswell.

problem is, is if you try to have a laugh with americans they don’t understand the humour, why? simple thy’re american, they only know they’re own culture

(and vice versa)

well i rarely speak ingame, unless i feel i need to tell someone why they are a muppet.

As a British gamer myself, I always wished my fellow Brits would speak up more during online games of Left 4 Dead.

this was one of my personal reasons why I switched my 360 for a PS3. Because on the PS3 your not obliged to talk as much if at all, you don’t feel like your missing the point if you never buy a mic.

I have come across some very nice US players. However these are often the quiet ones.

Now that’s some cultural bias showing right there. Being nice in UK culture is associated with being quiet and polite and cooperative.

Right at the end of the game (no spoilers here!) they all decide to start talking so it was impossible to hear the voice over and understand what the hell was going on. Why talk then!? Surely that’s the prime point to SHUT THE F**K UP!?

Americans talk, but they just talk about general crap. Usually nothing to do with the game in which they’re in.

So maybe we really are more reluctant to open up with strangers and just chat.

I suspect this is actually what Chet was getting at. And perhaps game devs need to consider how they can encourage strangers to bond in a game to build up that level of trust when there are cultural barriers involved.

Or just give us regional servers, age limited servers, or another way of team matching to increase the chance that you’ll end up in a game with people you feel comfortable chatting with.

We are approaching the time of year when for many people in the western world, Christian or not, thoughts turn to charity. How can we use our hard earned money to help other people and make the world a better place?

Among the many good causes who’d like a slice of that pie, this week sees a couple more game companies throwing their hats into the ring. (I feel like it’s RMT week or something.)

Say you love her, buy her a minipet (on WoW)

There were a couple of big(ish) WoW news items that came up yesterday. People seem to be mostly ignoring the fact that you’ll soon be able to earn arena points from winning battlegrounds which is a pretty big climbdown on Blizzard’s part, in favour of the minipets added to the Blizzard shop.

So, for $10/£9 (this is an extortionate exchange rate for us, by the way) you can now buy yourself a funky minipet with special moves to add to your collection. Or, smartly, they have made it very easy to buy one as a gift for someone else who plays Warcraft. Is letting people buy minipets going to break the game? Nope. It’s not functionally all that different than giving them away with rare cards in the CCG. It is, however, another step towards a fully fledged item store. Maybe they just weren’t making enough money. I think they are smart enough to avoid selling items that will affect gameplay but the temptation to see if they could push their players just a little further is always going to be there.

It also raises questions along the lines of “How much is a minipet worth anyway?” For the price of both minipets you could snag yourself a copy of Torchlight, for example. The answer of course is that it’s worth whatever people are willing to pay and from forums I frequent, I see a lot of people enthusiastically buying the new pets either for themselves or for partners/friends. The pets themselves are undoubtedly high quality, as such things go, with their special emotes and animations.

They plan to add more pets to the shop as time goes on. I wonder if they’ll go as far as a ‘pet of the month’ club where you just increase your sub to cover the monthly minipet too. I suspect a lot of players would spring for that.

Free Realms not so free after all

Player vs Developer spotted an announcement buried deep in an interview about Free Realms about a shift in philosophy for that game also. Previously, a large part of the game was free to play. If you picked up a monthly sub you got access to more powerful and interesting classes to play, and access to extra quests and activities. In addition they had an item shop selling many of the usual suspects (pets, cosmetic items, potions, equipment).

In early November (ie. nowish, I guess) that’s all set to change. The game is now only free to play up to level 5 in any career, although that now includes the jobs which had previously been locked to subscribers. But if you want to keep playing after that, you have to subscribe. Naturally the cash shop will remain available. Pre-existing characters will still be allowed to level up to 20 on the previously free jobs.

I can only assume that they feel they’ll make more money from switching to a full subscription game. Maybe the free to play wasn’t working out as well as they’d hoped? (I suspect the issue is to do with targetting kids as their main audience, they’re just not a market with much disposable income to spend on cosmetic gear and pets.)

Why choose between subscriptions and RMT when you can have both?

What both of these announcements have in common is that they show that the big western AAA MMOs are playing around with different payment methods and seem to be settling on the one which is least advantageous to players.

To whit: they’re going with a mandatory subscription, possibly a mandatory box sale for the initial game and expansions, and also throwing in an item store.

We’ve seen it in Champions Online, we’ve seen it in EQ2, we’ve seen it in WoW (they’re just more explicitly selling cosmetic items now), and if the model sticks, they probably won’t be the last ones down the line.

It’s widely held that some of the indie games have more favourable RMT schemes, such as Wizard 101 and Puzzle Pirates. Ultimately, I think they’re going to be the outliers though. STO is likely to use a similar scheme to Champions given that it’s coming from the same company. And who knows yet what Bioware will decide to do with their Star Wars game?

And that leaves Dungeons and Dragons Online, where the free to play model seems so far to be working for them very well (unless you’re in Europe). So well, in fact, that they’ve just opened another server. Have they just monetized better by charging for instances? Will anyone else follow their lead?

There’s something about shields. It is not only a piece of armour that marks you out as a defensive fighter but also one that is traditionally decorated to identify the user. Is it any wonder that shield using fighters in games feel attached to their shields? More than that, even though offensive fighters and gladiators in real life did use shields, in MMOs the shield has become associated with tanks.

It is the armour piece that says ‘I’m here to protect other characters’, and ‘this is not my PvP spec’. It’s strange how bound up your online identity can be with one item. Often players like to show off their weapons (sic), and compare the glows, the stats, the size. And you’ll find the tanks in a corner eyeing up each other’s shields instead. Even in a game like WoW which has tanking druids and death knights, there’s always a sneaking feeling that you can’t be a real tank without a shield.

Shields have always been decorative as well as useful, even when the decoration was mainly to mark you out as friend or foe on the battlefield. Graphics guys have really come home for us with shields, even in games that don’t massively feature glowing, speaking, skull-laden equipment. On Spinks, I love that my shield is big and solid and unsubtle. No one could mistake it for anything other than a tank’s shield. And somehow it isn’t as aggressively butch as a glowy weapon. But still, my character feels badass when she picks up a shield. She’s not just getting ready for a bit of light self defence before running off and screaming, she’s a defensive warrior, gearing for action. When a badass monster turns up, she’s going to grit her teeth, find solid footing and stand her ground. She’s the first person into a fight and the last (wo)man out.

I imagine the shield being heavy and unwieldy enough that if any other type of character was to pick it up and heft the weight, they’d wonder at how it could be used in battle and look at our tanks with grudging respect because they shoulder the weight daily.

So, I love shields. I love blocking attacks, I love hitting people in the face with a shield slam,  and I wanted to show off a few of the cooler ones I have come across during my time in WoW.

Draconian Deflector and Red Dragonscale Protector, from UBRS and BWL respectively.

Bulwark of Azzinoth, also known as the fridge door.

Hero’s Surrender (Naxx).