Umbral Echoes Blog

When I first heard about this game, I was somewhat excited, but the more development blogs I read, the more it seemed that it would be a money that Bioware pumped big bucks into in order to make a WoW clone with lightsabers, with some window dressing added on.

It turns out, that window dressing makes all the difference. I’ll get into that in a minute, but first I will go into the things that don’t impress me about the game.

Also, I will give the caveat that I am somewhat fresh to this game; I have not yet played all classes, and I have much more experience with the Empire (the “bad guys”) than the Republic. And I haven’t done space combat yet either, though I’ve seen it and it’s basically a Star Wars version of Star Fox (for those familiar with the old SNES game) — basically, a rails shooter.

Some downers

• Combat is mostly standard MMO fare. The combat really is like WoW with lightsabers instead of swords, blasters and force lightning instead of magic. You have a tank, a DPS role, a healer class, and some “trick” abilities (traps, bombs, etc.). There are some departures from this here and there.  For example: the Imperial Agent class does have a cool “take cover” ability that requires you to actually find some cover (and then use an ability to roll into that cover and take a position), from which you can use sniping and various other abilities.
• The dialog options are unclear. When talking to NPCs, you are given several options, sort of like a choose-your-own-adventure book.  However, the option presented does not actually reflect the exact words that you say, and sometimes the connotation of what is presented is different than what you end up saying. For example, “Intelligence can assist with that,” becomes, “I’ll let you know any information I find.” But, as you can see in the image here, you can at least tell beforehand which options will gain you light side points and which will gain you dark side points, however.
• Rough in-game help/tutorial system. I think this is an area that all MMOs are lacking in, but making good progress on.

Some awesome things

• The storylines are actually compelling. This is the biggest one for me. It makes the game fun, and not feel like a grind. At the very beginning of the game, you get the Star Wars fading-int-the-distance text, as if this is a movie and your character is persinally the center of it. Even though part of you knows that everyone else is going through the same stories, they are well-written enough that you feel unique in this universe. As a Sith Warrior, I feel like a supreme badass with far greater potential than everyone else. As a former slave-cum-Sith Inquisitor, I feel that I am being looked down on and really have to work hard to prove myself.
• Companion characters are awesome. This is the second biggest point of awesomeness for me. You get several companions over the course of your story. These are NPCs that can come along with you on missions and aid you.
• This allows for easier soloing — if you are a DPS class with a glass jaw, you can take along a tank companion to take the hits for you.
• Companions add a new dimension to the game. They are actively involved — sometimes they pipe in during your conversations with other NPCs, and you gain or lose affection points with them based on your dialog choices with other NPCs. Mostly, companions evoke actual emotions, ranging from pride to annoyance.
• Companions can take care of the minutiae like selling crap items. Just click and tell the companion to go sell your junk items, they disappear for a few minutes, them return with credits.
• You can equip your companions, which makes them feel a lot more like “real” characters and less like pets.
• There are even romance options, wherein you can become romantically involved with one of your companions. I have not explored this as of yet.
• Voice acting. I thought this would be really cheesy at first, but it actually does help the immersion, a lot.
• Waypoints show you exactly where to go.  Even down to which staircases you need to use. I suppose this may be downside for explorers, but damn do I hate running around wasting time trying to figure out where to go. Especially in a world like this, where one would presumably have a GPS type device. Speaking of which… why are places on the map greyed out until you go there? That seems a bit silly of an MMO troupe to carry over.
• Level 10 email. I got an email at level 10 congratulating me, and linking to some further information and tips on what to do from here, including maps on where to go and what options you will have. Here is an example for the Sith Inquisitor class. That was a very nice touch. This is the level that you choose your class specialization (tank, DPS, healer, whatever), so I think this would be helpful for new players.  Of course, it came days after I reached level 10, so… it would have been nice for that to have been more timely.
• The loading screen shows your story so far. Instead of showing random world lore or tip, the loading screen shows you what’s going on right now with your character. Not only does this make the game feel more “yours,” it’s great for me because I love alts, and tend to forget exactly what’s going on with each character, so it serves as a nice snippet for getting me back up to speed. Here’s an example:
  

Things I would like to see

• Low/high-level grouping. Some sort of apprenticeship system or something, wherein while a level 12 dude groups with a level 35 dude, he is brought up to par. So maybe artificially bumping him to level 35, and boosting gear stats accordingly, just not giving any of the extra abilities/talents.
• The ability to name companions. This is one of the breakers for suspension of disbelief for me. When I see 20 dudes running around with a helper that has the exact same name as mine, that feels a little silly. Just alter the dialog so that other NPCs don’t speak the name of your companions, and this could be pretty easily done.
• Single-server environment. This is a pipe dream, but already I have run into the issue of, “Oh, you’re playing TOR too?  What server?  Aww, I’m on a different server, so we can’t play together.” Why do MMOs insist on this? EVE Online has everyone on the same server, and so does Champions Online. Sharded servers are so early 2000’s, guys.
• Cross-server chatting. Since a single server is a pipe dream, it would at least be nice to be able to chat with friends on other servers.
• Choose your own voice. It would be cool if they had some choices for what voice you want. I know this isn’t realistic — it already took a lot of resources to get the voice acting done, and every other choice would require re-recording all of that dialog.

Overall Star Wars: the Old Republic is a great MMO, and I believe it has the potential to be even greater as time goes on. Will it be a WoW-killer? No, nothing will. If/when WoW declines, it will be because of several awesome new games like TOR coming out and chipping away its subscriber base, not one giant game to rule them all.

These are some of my thoughts on the bigger announcements made at the Q&A session at The Grand Masquerade 2011.

Related posts:

• World of Darkness Q&A at The Grand Masquerade 2011.  These are the announcements I’m reacting to.
• My thoughts on permadeath in MMOs.
• Why your gripes with the World of Darkness MMO are stupid

Permadeath

First, the biggest announcement (in my opinion) was that Final Death (aka permadeath) can happen.  This was a point of strong contention last year — some people absolutely wanted it, some absolutely did not.  I had my own reaction.  CCP stated that the input from last year informed their design decision going forward.

I believe that this can be done in a way that satisfies both people who love and hate the idea of permanent death. They also talked a bit about Humanity’s role in this game, which I think ties in here. So here are some ways I think that permadeath should be able to happen:

• If two players duel and choose that the loser dies for good. Chris McDonough raised this as a “question” to the audience, and there was resounding applause.
• If a player physically attacks someone else in Elysium.
• If a player breaks the Masquerade enough, they are flagged such that someone else can kill them (and possibly even diablerize them if they have that mechanic in game) without being thus flagged themselves, or suffering any other negative consequences.
• I’d even take it one step further, and say that if you kill someone this sort of Blood Hunt has been declared on, you get some influence/prestige/whatever.

This could be one of the defining elements of this game (and perhaps even the defining element). MMOs these days are about grind, netspeak, and generally everything but roleplaying.  Even on RP servers in WoW, you see very little roleplay.  It’s an afterthought — why waste my time doing something that doesn’t ultimately benefit me (mechanically)?

But the World of Darkness is not about killing the biggest badass dragon. It’s about creating a story, connecting with other characters and having social interactions, unveiling mysteries, and fighting the Beast within. The stated themes are: Power, Danger, Mystery, and Romance. So even if “power” is taken in the traditional MMO sense (which I’m pretty sure it’s not), that’s only a quarter of the game.

So what if we have a method using in-game mechanics to discourage people from doing things which break the feeling of the setting? Then the game will be self-policing, and that is the philosopher’s stone of MMO game design.

And as a note, ideally I’d like to see a carrot as well as the stick (to use the old metaphor) — some mechanical benefit to roleplaying in a way appropriate to the setting.

Sex and Violence

They said this will be an adult game, with nudity, violence, etc. This is awesome.  It just wouldn’t be the World of Darkness without tits and gore and mind-breaking fucked-up shit happening. Of course, they will have to figure out what to do in countries where certain types of sex and violence in games can simply get your game yanked, but they said they have a legal team researching and working on that.

Someone brought up the point that if you allow players to walk around naked, that breaks the game feeling.  In other words, you make it a more adult game by not allowing players to strip naked at will.  Chris’s response to that implied to me that they are well aware of this, and that full nudity would be allowed in havens (and hopefully other appropriate areas), but not necessarily in public.

Hellooooo cybersex havens!

I say that tongue-in-cheek, but sexuality is a huge part of the Vampire mythos, and I actually do think it would be damn cool to being able to lure a mortal (PC) to your haven with p[would be pretty damn cool.

Player-Run Political Structures

The Prince, Primogen, etc. in the cities will be PCs.  This is pretty frackin’ cool. I would expect it, based on EVE’s player-based focus, but it’s still nice to hear it confirmed. This will also be another defining characteristic of this game, I believe. The mechanics behind how one attains and keeps “office,” what it allows you to do, and other such details are yet to be revealed. What are your thoughts — how would you do a vampire political system?

Everyone Starts as a Mortal

Also very cool, in my opinion.  It was not mentioned whether one must necessarily find a PC sire, or if there is an option to be sired by an NPC.  I can see pros and cons to both. It was also stated that you cannot be embraced against your will, which is a good thing.  They did not mention the possibility of playing as a ghoul — I think that would be pretty neat, but really I don’t want them taking their focus away from creating an awesome vampire experience to create a cool vampire-lite experience.

One Server to Rule Them All

Okay, “sever” is a broad term since a server is really made up of many computers these days. But, this will be a semi-sharded game — everyone is in one game universe, but there will be different cities.  However, one can travel between cities, in a manner analogous to character server transfers in other games.  What is not clear is how easy or difficult that will be (though I imagine fairly easy and hopefully free).  It is also not clear whether your character’s name must be globally unique or not.  (Personally, I’d like it so that character names don’t even have to be unique on a given server like with Champions Online, but I somehow doubt that wish will be granted.)

It was also stated that the cities will all be large, but will not be clones of one another.  I imagine that they will be clones content-wise — I mean, dear Cthulhu it would take shit-tons of resources to make different maps for the different cities.  However, it was explicitly stated that cities will be different due to player controlled/originated things.  Taken in the mindset that this is from the same company that created EVE Online, I take this as a pretty big hint as to what could be planned, and I salivate over the possibilities.

External Access Via Web

No details were given, but if CCP is taking a page from Blizzard’s book with their World of Warcraft Remote, that will be pretty awesome. Even better if they make it capable of more things, and make it an included part of the game (as opposed to an add-on service). People are constantly on the move, and since they said that this will be very much like a Vampire LARP, being able to get notifications of events — and react to them — when you’re on the train to work will be a pretty huge thing.

Those are really the high points from the Q&A session. Let’s see what other news comes out in the following days!

The following notes were taken from the World of Darkness Q&A/suggestion panel at the Grand Masquerade 2011, lead by Reynir Harðarson and Chris McDonough.

Also see this post for my thoughts on some of this.

* Wants social interactions to “have some meaning” (perhaps implied mechanical consequences to social interactions?)
   – Yes, that will be a part of it.

* Microtransactions    – wants transparency, wants more info
   – Blame Chris McDonough; will release more info next year.
   – Chris says, “Pay attention to EVE Incarna.”

* Play as mortal from “scratch” vs playing “sleeper”; toggle sort of like pvp for being embrace-able
   – Everyone starts as mortal, but can never be embraced against your will.
   – Vampires can die permanently under some circumstances. (See item toward the bottom.)

* Gaining titles within own real life city, interact with higher-ups from other cities and travel to other cities
   – That’s exactly how it works.

* Have tiered dev system for brand new vs old players?
   – Game is as deep as you want it to be.
   – External access to game through web. (Editor’s note: no specifics were given, but I highly doubt you’ll be able to actually play the game from the web.)
   – You can gain Influence without ever fighting someone.

* Plan for caitiff? “Deck of many things”
   – Caitiff not part of original release, unlikely at this point.

* Day/night cycle?
   – When server goes down that’s when day breaks (in other words, it’s always night)
   – Looked at options like playing own ghoul, but this game is about playing a vampire, so you should be able to play a vampire at any time.

* Dementation suggestion    – screen goes crazy/dark, friend looks like monster
   – There is some stuff like that in the game.
   – Powers will work the same on humans, NPCs, and PCs.

* Majesty    – combat (you can’t attack me) and out of combat (you have selection of options to say)
   – Something like that but [social] PvP is more about breaking down your opponent’s will.

* Filter control to keep scrotemaster griefers out
   – Attacking other players lowers humanity, when goes low enough you are open for others to attack you.
   – As far as trolling, you can ignore someone.
   – “You will have ways of dealing with it through actual gameplay. You will have to behave in this world. But we also need enemies, assholes, someone to hate. But there is a ratio there.”
   – The game will have havens.

* Role-play is secondary in other mmos
   – Lot of game design around this, like political system. See EVE; wanted role-play to emerge naturally. “When your character’s goals align with your goals as a player, then roleplaying is natural.”

* Concerns: pvp, some people want to roleplay without getting fucked with. Guy jumping around in thong. Masquerade enforcement. Malks need extra tlc because of their uniqueness. Age of Conan adult scale-back, don’t want that to happen here last-minute.
   – Have staff lawyer looking into legal implications of adult stuff in all countries. Some countries will just shut you off if you break policies/laws on adult content.
   – It’s about doing it tastefully, not gratuitously.
   – Gotta be careful about giving players ability to be nude. Might be a more adult game without that. Possibly nudity in own haven but not public.
   – More similar to LARP than EVE.
   – PVP is very different than in other games. Both more free and more restrictive. Want the world to feel real; it’s a dangerous place. Have to make friends. If you go out of line we want the community to be able to punish you.

* Will Sabbat vs Camarilla PvP be player driven?
   – More structured than EVE but not as structured as the Masquerade.
   – Power structures are player run, like Princes and Primogen.

* Alternative paths? Like paths of enlightenment?
   – Right now no, but every intent of releasing that in expansions.

* V20 Europe wants game that is adult, with story, unique character that is not a clone (can tell on sight), and will run on lots of hardware.
* Planning on promoting in Europe, like at GamesCon next year?
   – Story is tangential to the game. There won’t be a story that drives the game
   – Unique characters are extremely important in this game design.
   – Reynir: “Does not run on iPad yet.” Mindful of required specs though, like laptop. Will have multiple visual settings/levels, but want it to look good no matter what setting. “It’s going to run on a laptop.”
   * Clarification: Story meaning background.
   – Editor’s note: There was no official answer — it was sort of lost in the shuffle — but I will go ahead and say yes to this.

* Actions should have consequences, including true death
   – True/permanent death can occur.
   – Chris: “Should players be able to duel each other with an option for permadeath?” Loud applause.

* Planning on incorporating other genres?
   – Stick to vampire initially.

* CoH veteran rewards style of opening up other WoD races?
   – Just focusing on vampires now, don’t want to even talk about other character types at this point.

* Overhead names in UI? Way to keep notes if not?
   – There will be an option to have names overhead, but it we be off by default (presumably to make the game more immersive).

* Standard char sheet?
   – Yes, and it looks very similar to the pen and paper RPG.

* Metaplot not solely driven by PCs
   – Yes metaplot, but hard to do that without disempowering players.
   – Again more similar to LARP.
   – Metaplot through expansions.
* This guy apparently absolutely hates PC-driven metaplot. Perhaps this is not the game for him, and he should instead simply read a book.

* Permanent consequences like blow up a building and it stays that way
   – Big in MMO world now. Phased instancing etc. It’s not about the graphics though. It’s about what happens in the world. See EVE as example.
   – Things open up and close down.
   – Reynir doesn’t like phased instancing. “We don’t want the game to lie to you.”

* Will there be a generation system, and cap? Will there be diablerie?
   – This is under heavy discussion now.

* Dynamically generated content? A la Guild Wars, e.g. garou attacking a part of the city, if you don’t defend it then they now have control over it.
   – Yes. And there will be world events.

* Single server?
   – Multiple cities that you can travel between, but all one world. So, sort of a single shard.

* How to determine how one player has praxis of something? Mechanical locking?
   – Yes there is a mechanism, but requires lots of human interaction.

* Different sized cities? Population controlled?
   – Populations can vary, but all cities will be large.
   – There will be differences between each city. Player controlled/originated differences. (Hint, hint.)

* Does your game have NPCs?
   – Yes.

* Justin Achilli asks: If you’re not lying to players, then why have fake people (i.e. NPCs)?
   – Essence of response: STFU, Justin

* Translation? E.g. Latin American?
   – Yes, via a newly developed “Cerberus” system.

* Will there be a system for torpor, like cool-down period?
   – Not in traditional sense. [Torpor] is an excuse for why your PC doesn’t die.

I have a Nostromo n52 gaming pad for use with World of Warcraft, and I both love it and hate it. Here’s why:

Love

• Macros. You can program it to do all sorts of macros that the WoW UI won’t let you.
• Convenient movement. This is really the biggest thing for me.  I can use my thumb to do all of my movement, instead of the standard — which is three fingers on WASD, which switch away from movement to press other buttons.
• Comfort.  It has a great ergonomic design (whoa, buzzword from the 90s), that just feels really comfortable.
• Design.  It just looks cool… though not nearly as cool as the n52te (tournament edition).  The astute may notice that the n52te is essentially the same as the n52, with some pretty lights added — they found the right formula, and they stuck with it.  Though some have issues with the software for that model, saying that the original is better.

Hate

• Reliance. I feel like I rely on it now; without it I can’t really play effectively. This isn’t a huge deal, but if I’m on someone else’s computer, it takes a while to get reacquainted with the keyboard.
• Chatting. It’s very hard to switch between playing and typing, and because I’m a lazy bastard this means I usually just don’t chat because it’s too much effort. Which is extra bad since I already tend to get focused on the game and not pay attention to messages, so I feel like I’m doubly ignoring friends and guild-mates.

I don’t know if these weren’t popular enough, or people started moving to mouse-based solutions (Razer, WoW mouse), or what, but there has only been the one update to this several years ago, and nothing further.  Which is disappointing — my perfectly functional gadget is old, so I need to replace it with something betternewer, damnit!  Ah well, maybe I’ll try out a Razer. Or… just stick with what I’ve got since I rarely play WoW anyway.

Permadeath. Permanent death in an MMO. Why in the world would you want such a thing? Simple:  emotion. The more you're risking, the greater the emotion — the greater the fear when you're risking it, the greater the sorrow if you lose it, and the greater the joy if you succeed. The World of Darkness Online will naturally have a horror element, which means sometimes you should be afraid in the game.  Also, "danger" is one of the four descriptors of what the game is trying to evoke (power, danger, mystery, romance).

Permanent death is something that just isn't done in MMOs. But it is explicitly on the table for (most) tabletop games. Why are people comfortable with it in the latter, but not in the former? And would it be possible to have permadeath done in a good way in MMOs?

I think the answer to the first question is, "Control." In a tabletop setting, the game master has control over the game, and if you're sitting down spending several hours with your group, you presumably trust the game master not to just gak your character willy-nilly. In an MMO there is no such control. In PvP games there are definitely griefers. But, I think such control could be added to MMOs. Which brings us to the second question.

To answer the second question, I do believe it could be done well in an MMO. I think that permanent death should only be able to happen under certain circumstances. In a tabletop game, your character generally only dies under a few circumstances:

1. You have really bad luck. And even then a good game master will give you an out.
2. You do something really dumb. Again, a good game master will generally try and give you some hints that this might not be the best plan of action.
3. You want your character to die. It does happen.
4. Your game master is a dick.

I think that these could be translated to MMOs quite nicely. So for each of the points above, here's how I would address it in an MMO.

1. Mechanics can be put in place to eliminate "bad luck" as a cause for permanent character death.
2. This is the area that has the most potential. Maybe if you kill and loot other characters enough, it flags you for permanent death.
3. No brainer, but again there's potential here. In most MMOs you just delete your character if you want them gone. But what if there were some way to go out that had a cool story, or that set up the story for your next character coming in?
4. In this case it would be the game mechanics themselves being the dick. Make it so that certain circumstances, which are within the player's control, must occur before a character can die permanently. As one example, maybe if you go on this certain storyline/quest, you risk permanent death — with great reward comes great risk.

To put this in terms of the World of Darkness MMO, I think permadeath is assuredly feasible. I would do it thusly:

• Overall, anyone can permanently kill anyone else, at any time. This requires not just putting them into torpor, but making a choice to take it one step further.
• If you permanently kill someone else who isn't the subject of a blood hunt, you yourself become subject of a blood hunt. Congratulations, now everyone is gunning for you because they'll gain prestige by killing you, and they won't have any negative consequences for it.
• In certain areas, have NPCs come to the aid of any character being attacked by another. Maybe a cop comes to arrest the offender. Maybe some gang bangers decide they don't want other people bringing attention to their area.

As a possible alternative to permanent death (or better yet, something that could be added on), perhaps the "fog of ages" from Requiem can be tweaked. This is the effect that causes vampires to forget things (and lose blood potency) as they grow ancient. Well perhaps when one is killed really good, they don't actually die but it puts this process into fast-forward, and you lose some blood potency, which could also cause you to lose some abilities. The only thing I don't like about this route is that it smacks of the bronze age of MMO days wherein you lost XP if you get killed. However, I think Vampire has a great built-in mechanic for this and it makes sense to use it.

This post is in relation to the World of Darkness Online MMO that was recently announced at The Grand Masquerade. I've heard a few gripes that seem to come up a lot in various forms and forums, and I would like to address them here. Most of my thoughts boil down to: stop making assumptions, and have patience.

They aren't adding in X supernatural type, so I'm not going to play this game!

So what have they said?

The top-level points below have been outright stated (mostly at The Grand Masquerade), sub-points are logical extensions that others have drawn.

• It will be a player-driven game with lots of social and political elements.
  • Giving power to the players is a double-edged sword. So while they might not have mechanics to stop someone from talking in netspeak and being a douche, other players will presumably have the power to smack that bitch down¹.
• The themes that the game explores will be: Mystery, Romance, Power, Danger.
• It will be an adult game, that aims to invoke emotion in you.
• Vampires will be the only supernatural player characters, but stuff from the other games will be present in some form. Also, there will be the option to play a human, though no specifics on that were given.
  •  Other supernaturals will most likely be environmental content, NPCs, that sort of thing.
  •  Humans will likely be ghouls or blood dolls, but maybe we could see some human vampire hunter PCs too.
• Character customizability and aesthetics will be big in this game. They have even hired a fashion consultant.
• They want to make the game as accessible as possible, and this is one of their criteria for success. So they want it to be fun for both hardcore and casual gamers.
• They also want to cater to an array of players by having three ways you can play the game: sandbox (open-ended like EVE), theme park (traditional MMOs like WoW), and coffee shop (social). These playstyles will be interconnected, with each one feeding to and from one of the others.
• The game will not be combat-intensive, unless you choose to play it that way.
  •  Being the biggest social/political mover and shaker will garner you far more power than being the strongest fighter.
• Factions and territories will be a big part of the game.
• The game will have gay clubs.
• The game will be fully PvP, but that's not to say that you can be attacked anywhere. If you don't want to get attacked, you might want to hang around Elysium a lot.
  • This will probably be like any LARP. If you go down a dark alleyway, you might get jumped by your enemies, or even some random person. On the other hand, if the person jumping you breaks the Masquerade, they're in for trouble.
• Some Disciplines will not be included because they're impossible to have in an MMO, like Temporis.

There are some other things, mostly other nitty-gritty stuff like they are using Scrum development methodologies, have already spent like 314 man-years (which equals one Shane DeFreest year)  in development, etc. But that's the core of what is publicly known about the game so far.

This is a post for MMO gamers (and possibly comic fans). The rest of you should probably feel free to skip it, lest your eyes glaze over.

At GenCon this year, I spent a fair amount of time at the Champions Online booth. This is a superhero MMO made by Cryptic. Yes, the same Cryptic that produced City of Heroes. This is, essentially, City of Heroes+++. It was both sad, but informative, that almost every question and comment I overheard was comparing CO to CoH.

There are cosmetic improvements. The game looks a lot more comic-book-like, with the thicker black outlines and cell shading. You can customize how your powers look. Do you want that power beam to come from a jewel in your forehead instead of your fists, or maybe from your chest? You can make it so.  There are even more character appearance customization options than in CoH (an almost overwhelming amount, in fact).  There are some cool gameplay improvements — you can mix and match powersets as you please, so there are no set archetypes, for example. You get 14 total powers at max level (if I recall), and you can mix and match them from different power sets as you please.

But what I really want to talk about are the more groundbreaking aspects of this game.


Perhaps the biggest is player-created arch-villains. At level 20, you start getting clues that someone is watching you. For example, you might find some pictures of yourself during the last mission. These develop into a storyline, and then at level 25, you actually design your own arch-villain. You choose their power set (though not specific powers), design their look, determine what sort of a villain they are (mastermind, mad genius, thuggish brute, etc.), and you even design the look of their minions. You proceed along a storyline that culminates in an epic battle, and your arch-nemesis being jailed.

And then, you get to make another one. Think Batman here, putting people away in Arkham Asylum. And just like that, sometimes your villains will escape and come after you. Sometimes several of them will escape. And if you group up with people, sometimes your arch-villains will also team up against you.

I haven’t seen this in action yet, but if the implementation is as cool as the idea, this could really go light-years forward in making an MMO feel more personalized. I’m very much looking forward to it.

On a technological level, everyone is on one server (just with different instances of zones). That’s right, no more, “Oh you play too? Awesome, what server are you on? … Oh, well I guess I could maybe make a toon on that server.” All MMOs should do this, and I think in the future, I think most will.

But this brings up another issue: it is (or, can be) sometimes difficult to find an unused name in an MMO when everyone is split between servers, much less with everyone on the same server. Well, you can use whatever name you want, even if someone else has used it. You’re uniquely identified by your account name + character name. So there can be fifteen Shadowbats, or Tits McGees. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this, but I think I will like it.

There are Open Missions, which I think have promise.  As you’re flying by somewhere, there is a bank robbery in process.  You, and other heroes, can intervene.  No creating a group necessary, you just jump in and do it, and get a mission reward at the end of it corresponding to how much you helped.  This I will have to see in action, but I love the idea.  Helps a lot in making the game more… well, open.

On the marketing side, they’re offering a lifetime subscription option for $200, but I believe this is only good until the release date of September 1st. It’s ingenious from a marketing perspective (City of Heroes was also very good when it came to marketing ploys). From a consumer perspective, I feel like I’m taking a $200 gamble though. Sure, in about 14 months it’s paid for itself. But what if, once the game goes live, I don’t like it after 6 months of play? I suppose I could always sell my lifetime membership to someone else, but I’m relatively sure that would be against the terms of use.  I will note that I’ve gone ahead and ordered a lifetime subscription, and am feeling a little unsure of it even though I think this game has a lot of promise.

Overall I’m pretty excited.  There are other cool features to this game that I haven’t even touched on, and it seems like CO is doing a better job of appealing to both casual players (like me) and hardcore gamers, though still with more of a focus on the casual player.  My preorder copy is on its way, and once I get that I’ll be able to delve deeper into this game.