So perhaps Last Chaos wasn’t quite my cup of tea, but I’m signed up with an Aeria account now anyway, so thought I’d have a poke about in the rest of their portfolio. I’m glad I did actually, and I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to judge the whole network by one unlucky first-play. Next on the list is Shaiya: Light and Darkness.

Also free-to-play, and as part of the greater Aeria experience, one account seems to cover it all, which is quite convenient – just download it and go.

Aeria Games: Shaiya Download

No further details necessary, and it’s a little under 1GB in size, so put the kettle on!

In the beginning, the goddess Etain created the world, the Dragons, the Nordein and the Dumianas. She didn’t like the Nordein and gave them the old heave-ho. The Dumianas began to have serious doubts about Ineffability at that point, (quite understandably), and their disbelief weakened her to the point where a successful assassination attempt by said Dumianas caused a bit of a pantheonistic ruck. The two halves of the slain goddesses’ soul eventually came out on top and promptly set about war with each other. This is largely conducted by proxy, via two new factions of Dumianas, the Elves and the Vail (Who look a lot like Drow to me), and these old sparring partners were later joined by the Humans and remaining Nordein (Surprisingly Ogre-y, if you ask me), respectively. These races allied and become the Alliance of Light and the Union of Fury, and now wage constant battle for the future of Teos, and ultimately, the extinction of one goddess.

Three Good Things:

* Avatars:

The various characters look and feel pretty well done. Being a somewhat superficial type, with mildly worrying misogynistic tendencies, I went right for the Dark Elf Hottie, but much of the character design and animation stands out as of a surprisingly higher quality than you’d expect from a free-to-play knockabout of an MMO. I particularly liked the double-tap left/right and backward flips and cartwheels, which seem to serve no obvious combat purpose, but do look damned cool.

Actual combat attacks look smooth and well crafted, and although all the Vail have a tendency to run about everywhere in a chiropractically improbable hunched over ‘skulk’, this is probably a design choice, rather than a balls-up in Poser! The Nordien on the other hand lumber about in a suitably massive way, which also works well.

This extends to the NPCs as well, and certainly what I saw of the initial Union of Fury lands seemed to have a unique and baroque style that made roaming the lands quite a distinctive experience, so much so that I didn’t even get that irritated to see that many of the monsters had been shopping in the Anne Summers Hand-To-Hand Combat Lingerie Department, again, a feature that normally just makes me start giggling, but which didn’t here. It fit, somehow.

* Battle:

PvP is very much a built-in factor in this game, and at all levels, you’ll have access to a portal that will take you to an appropriately levelled Borderlands map. These zones are less reminiscent of WoW’s Battlegrounds, and the rigidly structured Rugby Matches of those, and much more in the nature of the ‘good old days’, of Taren Mill and Crossroads battling, which I quite liked. The resulting battles can be a bit chaotic, and mirror those old zerg-games; two lines of enemies facing off, the edging forward, and the sudden cataclysmic discharge of mayhem. If you miss the type of PvP that was once had at Taren Mill, have a look here – it seems to live on.

It seems the PvP has a bit of a purpose too – victories contribute in some fashion to a big Goddess progress bar, which when filled, grants a hefty buff to all members of that side, wherever they are. A nice touch that gives it all a bit of meaning.

Those that want nothing to do with it need not fear, as the mayhem seems kept to it’s own special places, and large normal zones also exist in which to do the usual adventuring; an implementation I quite like, entirely consensual, and with some place else to go when you aren’t in the mood. (I’m not sure if at the top end, this distinction is maintained, mind you.)

An interesting and relevant feature is the treatment of Alts; upon creating your first character, you have to pick a side, Alliance of Light or Union of Fury. After that, you can only make an alt on the other side if you delete all your existing characters first, making it all a bit of a commitment, but preventing the scourge of alt spies, which is important in any kind of PvP-based game. On the other hand, it does mean that I have no idea what the Humans, Elves or their lands are like, having never seen them. Think carefully before choosing your side!

* Difficulty:

A novel idea; Shaiya asks you to pick a difficulty during character creation; Easy, Normal, Hard and Ultimate. Easy is capped at Lv30 and has some off-limits special abilites. Normal is capped at 50, and you have to unlock Hard by doing just that. Presumably Ultimate is Lv50 Hard to unlock. As the world itself is shared by all these different characters, I can only assume that the primarily difference here is rate of XP gain, and perhaps reduced stats. I’m a tourist, so went with Easy, and found that to be of a fairly comparable rate of XP gain to WoW, so Normal is probably harder work, and the other two are for masochists! These advanced levels seem to have floating icons above their players, allowing you to reap the appropriate kudos from those around you for picking a harder road to travel.

Related and worth mentioning, each class, when picked in character creation, shows a series of bars, allowing you to see how well suited that class is to Party work, Soloing, and how good at Attack and Defence it is. I wish more games would do this, allowing the player to make a somewhat informed choice right form the word go. I only remember seeing this kind of outright admission in Anarchy Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online previously; everyone else just lets you make critical playstyle blunders in the dark.

Three Bad Things:

* Engrish:

Like Last Chaos, it seems the localisation was a bit of a rush job, and most of the NPC dialogue, tutorial help and tooltips are quite painful to read. Perhaps it is just me, one of nature’s pedants, but while in Last Chaos, this kind of thing was just one more wave in a tsunami of mediocrity, it bugs me here as the rest of the game is quite good. “Liquid Medicine” Merchants? Green “Abels”? Being addressed by a stately pallorous waif-like fellow in very vampireish clothing with ‘What’s up yo?’ It all seems a bit of a shame really.

Mind you, the rudimentary quest journal does at least colour in ’5 Frost Breath Succubi’ in a different colour, allowing the casual reader to get right to it. It is unlikely that you are supposed to take tea with them…

Also, stop doing line-bre
aks mid-word in the con
versation windows! Grr!

* AFK:

As in Last Chaos, they’ve gone with the Player-As-AFK-NPC-Merchant thing again, which still winds me up. I’m not really in any position to comment on the finer economic aspects of Shaiya really – I’ve been getting by on quest rewards so far, but then again, I am quite litterally playing EZ-Mode. It probably is important for the more serious players to shop around for good gear, and at least here, they’ve designed The Selling Place to be some place on it’s own map, ala EQ’s Luclin Bazaar, rather than the spot where brand new players first wake up!

I still see no need for it at all, mind you, when countless other MMOs have shown how simple, convenient and useable, any kind of basic Auction House can be. Still, in this case, the main Union City where all the AFK people are, can happily double as a social space and if it all annoys you, as it does me, just don’t go there. Out in the main zones, this stuff is nicely out of sight and out of mind.

* Micropayments:

Quite unfair on my part, this one. The game is indeed free to play, but has extensive micropayment stuff built all the way in. There’s even an in-game button you can press to open up the RMT Shop window. As an example, 499 AP (Which costs approx $5 US, through the Aeria website), will buy you a potion that increases XP by 1.5x for seven days (Not sure if that’s online or realtime). This stuff is the pillar on which the game is built, and presumably, can afford to be run. Which is fine, but there are boosts to be bought in all manner of stats, and given the PvP nature of a large part of the game, well, draw your own conclusions. Suffice to say there were folks in the first borderlands on the opposing side, who seemed more or less invulnerable to me, even taking my innate suckage in to account! Highly suspicious.

It does rather seem possible to, if not precisely buy your way to the top, then certainly lubricate the wheels of progress a great deal with cold hard cash. Seeing GM Broadcasts that read like sales pitches is a bit disconcerting too, if you aren’t use to it. They’ll come on an announce some ‘event’, which largely seem more like limited edition ‘Buy now or miss your chance!’ once in a lifetime deals, to me.

Perhaps it is just me; I’m not used to this way of doing things, being a dyed in the wool Subscriber in my MMOs so far, and at the end of the day, it is a question of this ‘Self Discipline’ thing I’ve been banging on about of late. If I’m happy with the basics, then that’s fine, but given the very up-front business model of the Aeria network, perhaps it is a bit naive to expect to be the best without putting in a bit more, and financial, commitment in than simply downloading for free and scoffing at the lack of subscription. To be fair, I’ve not encountered any gameplay situations which absolutely required that I pay up to progress, but then again, I’ve not got that far in.

A matter of personal preference, clearly, and at the end of the day, the servers have to be paid for somehow. To it’s credit, at least there are no in-game ads to worry about – other than the ones broadcast by it’s own staff anyway.

After Last Chaos, I was pleasantly surprised by this one, proving to be a solid alternative to World of Warcraft, if a bit rougher round the edges and a touch more primitive. In this case, the term ‘WoW-clone’ seems to be a very accurate description, and players of that will find a lot of similarities here, but also a lot of interesting and unique takes on the same basic game. And it’s free, so that’s a bonus. (Well, as long as your willpower remains strong, anyway. Not that there is a lot of shame in chipping in toward the game’s continued existence, mind you.)

I can see myself keeping this one on and dipping in there now and then, and while not perhaps quite a strong contender for my time as a more mainstream MMO I pay monthly for, the whole thing does make for a nice change of scene on my off-nights.

Final Verdict: Not bad at all, and definitely worth a look. Probably not an ‘Only Game’ though.

Also on Aeria’s books are Twelve Sky, a “Martial Arts MMORPG” apparently, Project Torque, some kind of “Racing MMOG”, and Dream of Mirror Online, a “Social MMORPG”. I expect I’ll get to those soon enough.

(Except for the last one, DOMO, which apparently actively blocks EU IP addresses, probably for some draconian regional redistribution reasons. Either that, or they’ve seen me coming…)

There is certainly something compelling about free-to-play MMOs, I’m starting to find…

I sometimes get a bit listless; the regular games, through no specific fault of their own, sometimes pall. It’s a momentary thing usually, and most Normal People tend to go outside for some fresh air at this point. Me? I hit the free-trial circuit instead and just find a different slant on the same ongoing obsession.

Anyway, after reading this article a little while back:

Massively: First Impressions: Last Chaos

…and deciding that “Yes! I would really prefer to run through this dungeon in a leather miniskirt and some fishnet stockings!”, I downloaded it and gave it a go. On reflection, I’m rather glad I did because its been ages since I had a really good rant, and I do worry old-age is bringing me a certain sense of tranquillity and calm, which while good for blood pressure, can really hamper MMO blogging.

Despite being free, I’ll go with the old Op. Cheapseats format, because I’m all about recycling here!

Last Chaos is available as part of the Aeria Games network, which you can sign up for free here:

Aeria Games

Once a member, which appears to want no credit card info, you can then navigate their rather busy website and download any of their games, of which Last Chaos is one. Payment is entirely microtransaction based, and done by paying roughly one U.S. Cent per ‘Aeria Point’, which you can then spend using special windows built into the UI of their games. This seems entirely optional, at first glance anyway…

In the Land of Medieval-topia, in the City of Trope, a Great Evil of Indeterminate Nature has probably arisen or something! Fortunately, Trope is home to an itinerant and large population of, like, adventures and stuff! Incapable of the skills necessary to land productive jobs in Investment Banking or Central Heating Installation, our brave Heroes pick up sticks and magic missiles and things, and set out to Do Battle! I expect!

I’m sorry… it probably does have a plot, but I couldn’t find it. I must admit, I didn’t look very hard though. You pick from a staggering list of SIX whole classes, each of one gender each, with almost four different faces and more than two hairstyles, and then are dropped in a tutorial dungeon containing nearly three rooms, and a corridor with a bend in it! There are also zombies! Adventure awaits!

Three Bad Things:

• Primitive:
  While the character models aren’t actually awful, (just excruciatingly limited), much of the rest of the game world is, and resembles the kinds of dizzying graphical delights seen on launch-day Asheron’s Call…ONE! The city buildings are decidedly cardboard-looking and generic, but not in that cute World of Warcraft way, and once outside, the surrounding world is essentially a slightly bumpy and most unbroken expanse of ropey mid-res grass texture, relieved only by the very occasional low-poly tree, and an inexplicably large assortment of mostly static animals and monsters.

  At one point, I fell in what looked roughly like a river. I must have been mistaken however, as I simply carried on walking along the bottom, unconcerned about trivialities like oxygen. It didn’t even do that blue fog thing; the Universal Gaming Signal for Being Underwater! I can only conclude that this game is actually fifteen years old and that I’d just never heard of it before, which is entirely possible, I guess. It also does not support wide-screen aspect ratios, which was annoying.

• Unbalanced:
  I started life at level four, (for some reason I was never quite able to work out), with enough skill points to completely max out my starting Magic Missile skill, (once I’d worked out where the skill trainer was; they don’t just advertise you know!) This seemed a quite powerful attack, and progressively testing it against more and more powerful monsters eventually had me delivering a fairly efficient and consistently repeatable arcane smackdown on these werewolf things twenty-four levels higher than me, by the simple expedient of Moving Away whenever they Moved Toward Me. I’m not sure if this game’s designers had actually encountered the concept of Kiting before. Perhaps I just got lucky and accidentally picked on the one mob with no spell resistance, ranged attacks or movement debuffs; who can say?

  On the other hand, upon dinging level five (w00t!), I was told that I was now eligible for my first ‘Personal Dungeon’ (a.k.a. Instance), a feature they seem inordinately proud of having thought up. I headed in, mostly to relieve the monotony of outdoor hunting, to be dumped in a room which looked identical to the initial tutorial place, only this time had an epic cut-scene of almost Guild Wars-esque proportions, consisting of just having the camera fly down the Corridor With A Bend In It, a little way. Tension mounts! I entered said corridor, mind filled with burning questions. Who is this mysterious flying cameraman? What is he looking for? Haven’t I already cleared this Corridor With A Bend In It out in the tutorial? Turns out the answer to that last one is ‘No’,and I was immediately mobbed by six undead, ranging up to level 12. Group content I guess? No place for a Level 5 anyway, no matter how powerful my Magic Missile! God only knows what trying any of this as a ‘Healer’ class is like – I couldn’t face trying any of it a second time through!

• Engrish:
  I’ve nothing against Foreigners, you understand; some of my best friends aren’t British, and they seem to lead full and rich lives, despite this crippling disability! But for the love…of…god… if you’re going to try and sell a game with text in it, to the US/UK market, have at least one native speaker take a look at the quest text before you go gold! Its not rocket science, and while English grammar and spelling is apparently one of the harder and less logical things to pick up as a second language, I’m sure that having, say, a pretentiously verbose blogger, for example, do a ‘second pass’ on the translation, (for a very reasonable and no-questions-asked cash-in-hand remuneration!) would do wonders to preserve what little immersion exists in the game.

  I mean I’m not even talking ‘their’ and ‘they’re’ stuff here, or spelling Colour incorrectly, or ‘it’s’ and ‘its’, (One I must admit being crap at myself!), although those kinds of slip do detract from the professionalism of a finished product. No, I found it quite hard work making meaningful and whole sentences out of the quest journal much of the time, and while worth a giggle initially, it soon gets irritating, and unlike something like WoW, where people just look for ‘Kill’ and ‘Ten Rats’ in the fluff and ignore the rest, out of laziness, here, its about the only way to get any sense out it.

  It isn’t as if it would be that big a job either; I only found two quest givers in the entire city.

Three MORE Bad Things:

• Stupid:
  Such monsters that do exist are equipped with a pitifully inadequate AI. No linked/social aggro, proximity aggro of less than five feet in many cases, and they seem to have almost nothing in the way of special attacks or abilities. You just get near one, it turns and shuffles toward you, you wave arms at each other and eventually one of you dies, (Or you just kite the bejeesus out of them, at first giggling like a manic, and then after a ile, almost crying in sympathy for the wretched thing.)

  The monsters don’t interact with each other in the slightest, as seen in the starting area where werewolves, wolves and foxes and deer live in apparent harmony, and while in all games there is a hidden understanding that monsters merely exist to cause fights and Adventure, nowhere is it more apparent than here, and these ‘creatures’ really are little more than mobile bags of improvement. They’re not even especially mobile, thinking about it.

  I only (ha!) fought monsters up of levels up to about thirty or so – its possible things get more elaborate further in – I couldn’t say, or indeed, muster the will to find out.

• Grind:
  Covered comprehensively in the Massively piece above, I can only agree. The thought of kiting werewolves over and over for the next four months gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. With this in mind, I went looking, as I do when the grind hits in any game, for Alternative Gameplay. (This process generally does not happen in my first, and as it turned out, only, session!)

  There seems to be a rather involved, and quite expensive crafting side to the game, most of which hinges on harvesting resources from static ground nodes; Power Crystals, Shrubberies and the like, with expensive tools. I gave it a go on the crystals, harvesting chunks of Theta Wave Energy (“Kirk to Enterprise; Bollocks Sci-Fi Jargon Detected!”), and also some Yellow Leaf Herb things, or whatever they hell it was. Trouble is, unlike WoW, the nodes are permanently in place, and in reality, your haul is determined by a quite low percentage success dice-roll carried out every minute or so, leading to some very surreal scenes where several adventurers of varying types all standing stock still in a small fenced garden plot of ‘Magic Herbs’, silent but for the occasional rustling leaf sound effect. Meanwhile, a L15 Werewolf stands not ten feet away, ignoring us totally, probably out of an awkward, sympathetic and embarrassed awareness of the farce of it all.

  Suffice to say that harvesting in Last Chaos makes Asteroid Mining in EVE Online look like a Snort-All-You-Can Buffet on Blackjack Night in a Strip Club with no ‘No-Touching Rule’.

  Apparently there is a dragon pet in there somewhere, but Reptilian Husbandry is a poor substitute of Engaging Gameplay, and anyway, I never saw one of the eggs you need to get started on all that.

  Perhaps the most entertaining (this is still all relative, mind you) thing I came across was the slot machine Shrine of the Moon; architecturally the hub of the City of Trope. Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, a recently butchered fox will drop a Moonstone, which can then be used in this shine as a token, which will let you press Start! and watch as a series of icons shuffle. If some of them match, (or something – the win-line combos were never made clear), you get a potion or other consumable, most of which I never worked out what did. The icons were quite pretty though, I guess!

• AFK:
  In matters of inter-player economics, Last Chaos has opted for the ‘Player Avatar as AFK Merchant’ mechanic, a ridiculous idea that encourages wasted electricity, and the eventual destruction of the planet Earth thereby. If I knew what the antonym of Nifty! was, I’d start a new series, and this pathetic excuse for a mechanic would be #1. I first saw this in EQ1 (Luclin Bazaar), and hated it with a vehemence usually reserved for TV Talent Shows even then. EQ2 started with it too, but then at some point thought ‘Hang on, this is a stupid idea, worthy of hatred reserved only for TV Talent Shows!’, and put in a proper auction house broker system, like what WoW (and all other sane and right-thinking games) uses.

  Basically, you put a load of loot in a separate part of your inventory, set some prices for it, go to The Selling Place, sit down, toggle ‘Merchant Mode’ on, then go down the pub/to bed/to saw your own head off. You then become effectively, an NPC merchant, with similar functionality. All very creepy as a customer too – the lights are on, but is anyone actually at home, peering at you as you rummage through their overpriced junkloot?

  In this case The Selling Place is also the central plaza of Trope, which also has all the trainers and the slot machine on it, and….genius!….is the place where new players arrive for the first time after the tutorial instance thing. This almost killed my PC outright, as it seized up for the requisite three minutes it took to render all the AFK merchant-players, with accompanying wall of hover-text shop ‘signs’ so dense that I had trouble seeing one side of the plaza form the other. Probably trod on a lot of people lagging my way out of there to the city exit. Good.

  My main problem with this crappy excuse for a mechanic is that unlike a more rational and sane Auction House variant, all these players still have to be connected, consuming vital bandwidth at the server end, even though they aren’t actually playing in the slightest. It also looks a mess! Astonishingly, the game seems to have about fifteen servers, although I have no idea why. Perhaps simply to accommodate such a stunning amount of people logged in, but not actually there?

All in all, it was a funny few hours, although almost certainly not in any way the game’s designers intended. It was also refreshing to have the opportunity to get really cross at something again. I’m generally far too mellow these days.

While an Aeria game in name, I gather that they are more in the line of importing MMOs, most likely from the far east, to the US/EU market, so this travesty of an online game is probably not entirely their fault, per se, but it is quite difficult to find out who is actually responsible for it; development and initial design-wise. Even Mobygames hasn’t heard of it before.

A sterling testament to the importance of the quality of the newbie experience, and the first two hours of gameplay, and an experience I stumbled away from thinking ‘Come back Project Entropia, all is forgiven!’ While the allure of fishnets and leather miniskirts is strong indeed, those kinds of urges are far better catered for by Second Life™©®³ª^@έњⁿ, which despite having no gameplay at all, still does a better job of it than this nightmare of a MMO.

(No, really…look for ‘Dark Life’, if it still exists – an admittedly quite clunky, but surprisingly functional MMO, built inside SL™©®³ª^@έњⁿ itself.)

Final Verdict: You really do get what you pay for!

Ahh…catharsis… I feel cleansed! But don’t despair, because morbidly curious as to whether all their games are quite so awful, I also tried out Aeria’s ‘Shaiya: Light and Darkness’, and was pleasantly surprised, finding a game quite worthy of actually being taken seriously! More on that another time!

(Also, is it just me, or… Separated at birth?)

Wahey! Super lightning bonus Cheapseat here! Well, kind of. Basically, I was sat staring at the PlayNC online store thingey, brooding with indecision about which flavour of City of Heroes to actually go for; US or EU, and got a bit distracted, as I do. I’m still none the wiser in the regard by the way. All the cool people I met during my free trial CoH stint seem to actually play on US servers, despite most of them being on the Olde Worlde side of the Pond, like me. On the otherhand, it’s always helpful to be playing on a server that’s physically located nearer to me than further away, and in any event, I’m not entirely sure if a UK credit card billing address is even allowed to buy a US subscription. Then there’s peak playing hours to think of too, and trying to keep up with folks in California is probably quite detrimental to my sleeping patterns and health in general.

All quite confusing, but somewhat moot, as it turns out my credit card had expired without me noticing it, and I’ve still to get a new one sent to me, so I guess any kind of subscription at all is going to have to be put on hold for the time being.

Anyway, looking idly through NCSoft’s current portfolio, the word ‘FREE’ leapt out of the page at me, and magpie MMO collector that I am, I clicked on it without really thinking, and now have Dungeon Runners installed.

It’s a quirky little game, and although I’ve only given it a few hours so far, it seems to be an almost completely ‘borrowed’ version of Diablo, only in 3D, with a Neverwinter Nights-ish tileset. This being the case, it’s almost instantly familiar and takes very little learning to get going and play. There’s three classes, Fighter, Ranger and Mage, a bunch of simple quests, mana and health potions, town portal scrolls, various coloured rarities of magical equipment and a very familiar looking paperdoll/inventory screen.

As far as I can tell, it’s largely instanced, with lobby town areas, and only massively multiplayer in the sense that you can take some pother people out into an instance with you, and of course stand around in the towns showing others how fiery one’s sword is. All very Battlenet. The gameplay and action itself is almost identical to Diablo/Dungeon Siege/etc, with lots of clicking for the basic attack, along with a variety of talent-like skills and special powers you can drop into the fray, at the cost of mana.

Being a free-to-play game, with associated low barriers to entry, the seemingly mandatory world-chat can be a bit wearying. I didn’t manage to find a way to turn that off, which is a shame, because the two hour Considered Ethical Debate on “Eye-Rack: Motives, Means and Moral Standpoints”, was nothing I hadn’t seen a thousand times before on a hundred messageboards or chatrooms, and not particularly helpful in my crossbow-driven rat-slaying frenzy, out in the starting forest areas. I did manage to work out how to ignore individual players, but there were just so many of them that needed to Be Quiet Now and Get On And Play For A Bit.

Besides all that, it seems quite well done as far as it goes, and has a very sarcastic sense of humour to it, mercilessly mocking the more regular Diablo variants, but I must admit to not being particularly captivated by it all, and it definitely seems to be one of those online games that could just as easily be played offline, much like the original Diablo. It’s the sort of ‘game-lite’ I tend to play while waiting for big patches or clients to download, for proper MMOs, only this one uses bandwidth at the same time! Given the amount of general chat going on about World of Warcraft, rather than the game these people were actually playing at that moment, I doubt I’m alone in that thinking.

The numbers, shown on the server connect screen, showed about 200 people, spread across four or five servers, around midday (UK) on a Sunday, making this one perhaps less of a success than might have been hoped. Perhaps it merely exists to bulk out the PlayNC portfolio a bit, which presently only really contains Guild Wars, City of Heroes and Lineage as serious mainstream MMO games of note. Still, it’s a harmless bit of Something Else, and indeed, free to play indefinitely.

They would quite like some money though, I’d imagine, and signing up as a Member, ( £3.49/month, $4.99/month) allows you to use healing and mana potions that stack in inventory, and heal for more, and also to equip items of yellow ‘rarity’ and up, which those of us on the cheap seats have to get by without. I expect there are some more subtle perks in there too, but the game certainly seems playable enough without all that, at least well beyond the point I’m likely to lose interest at anyway. No ‘Three Good’ or ‘Three Bad’ for this one…simply haven’t played it enough for that, and it’s not a free trial anyway.

Still, it’s there now, on my desktop, and it’s often easier to fire up a game you already have, than go through the registration for a new one. All in all, not likely to become an obsession, or knock anyone’s socks off, but then you do get what you pay for, and it may entertain in small doses when your regular soma is down for maintenance.

Dungeon Runners is available here, weighs in at a modest 450MB or so, and as mentioned, doesn’t need to see your money before letting you in, although a free PlayNC account is probably necessary to get hold of it in the first place.

I’m turning into such an NCSoft minion these days. Hurry up with The Pirate Game, will ya, or it’ll be yet another NCSoft game next; Tabula Rasa!

(Some good interview stuff with The Pirate People on Virgin Worlds Podcast #82, by the way, including all sorts of clever ideas about ‘End Game’. Sounds good so far!)

Well, that’s probably enough free trial hopping for the time being, I’d say. Been an interesting month and a half though, and it’s always good to broaden one’s horizons, even if it is only ‘trying a different kind of computer game for a bit’. I quite enjoy the occassional change of scenery from time to time anyway, and tend to be a bit of a fickle with my Brand Loyalty to be honest, but this particular mini-run of Operation Cheapseats did have a kind of focus to it: looking for a ‘different’ MMO.

I’m sure the more perceptive of you have been silently adding the invisible ‘to World of Warcraft’ each time you read me ranting about ‘different’, and it seems you can’t throw a stone in the RSS reader these days without hitting someone who seems at once obsessed, and yet also irritated, with the big-ass Blizzard success these days. I hear there’s some kind of new expansion in the works for it? “Insurrection of the Undermine?” Something like that anyway.

(I still maintain that the best expansion for WoW would be one in which both the Horde and Alliance get goblins as a playable race, and a huge civil-war in their city. Goblins is the best part of WoW if you ask me!)

Everyone seems at best unimpressed with the details so far, in the same way that they aren’t that impressed with the other expansion that I’m also missing. I have no experience with any of it, having hung up WoW, contented, after reaching L60 with my first character. Job done, tick in the box, moving on! Don’t get me wrong mind you, I’m certainly not a ‘hater’. Thoroughly enjoyed the whole journey, and perhaps when enough years have passed, I might even like to try it a second time. Hopefully, as a goblin!

Many others aren’t so sanguine about WoW having, well, an end I suppose, and plough head first into a variety of unsatisfying ‘make-busy’ tasks and subsequently seem to get themselves in a terrible state, which is a shame. This kind of souring threatens to tarnish the memories of the good times that were had in there, and seems so avoidable too. Not my place to tell folks what they ought to be doing with their free time, of course, but it’s always seemed quite clear to me what one should do when a game stops being fun.

Anyway, I sometimes think I was never quite playing WoW ‘properly’, and my most scarey top-end dungeon was Lower Blackrock Spire, so treat my opinions with the dismissal they no doubt deserve! (I think that was what it was called anyway – the one with the evil dwarf town.) Still, when I get fed up with an MMO, I try different one, and that’s what Operation Cheapseats is all about. Any MMO worth playing at all has some kind of free trial these days – usually a 14 day romp around the low-end newbie content, letting prospective subscribers have a bit of a taste before doing anything drastic with credit cards, and despite what many people think there’s actually hundreds of the things out there. Here’s a list, if you don’t believe me! Granted, not all of them have quite the polish of WoW, but odds are there’s something in there that’ll entertain for a couple of months.

This particular go at the trials had a bit of a theme; the pursuit of this nebulous ‘different’ I keep carping on about, and the three games I saw all had that in spades. It was also a good chance to fill in some notable blanks in my otherwise broad canon of MMO gaming, which is always important if you hope to rant about MMOs and be taken seriously in any way at all. I still haven’t played Dark Age of Camelot or Merdian 59 yet either – glaring ommissions that will probably have to wait until the Cheapseats mood takes me again. I’m also morbidly curious about Matrix Online too – is it really all that bad?

Three very good examples of how else it can be done this time around though, with some surprises.

Auto Assault was a lot of fun, with a setting like no other, and yet surprised me by being perhaps the most WoW-like of the three, despite it all being fast cars, mutants and machine-guns. With the announcment of it’s mothballing, I kind of wished I’d tried it earlier really. Still, glad I actually got a look at all, now its soon to be no more. Maybe something similar will rise again. Exanimus sounds like it has shades of the post-apocalyptic about it, and Interplay continue to sit on the Fallout MMO licence. I suspect they’re just waiting for The Right Price, before turfing it over to someone more suited to putting the idea into practice – this new Zenimax MMO lot perhaps? Elsewhere in The Grim Future, there’s Tabula Rasa and Huxley to look forward to. I hope we’ll see more Sci-fi not too far ahead.

City of Heroes is one I’m glad I finally got round to. Lots of people say the grind is a bit of a nightmare, past 30, but I did love the early levels, and the fantastic travelling powers. Godforbid a jaded old hack like me even consider ‘RP’ anymore, but it was one of the few times in recent gaming where I’ve actually felt like the part. It’s also a refreshingly casual thing too – I can see myself just dipping in for a mission or two, rather than the five-hour slogs I’m more used to. After all these years of caving in orc, wolf, rat and skeleton heads, bouncing about a busy metropolis fighting Crime is going to take some wearing out, I think, so I think this’ll be one for a subscription, and should make a nice change of scene for when I’m in that vigilante mood. The surprise there was how much fun MMO gaming can be with the constant spectre of Stats looming over my shoulder.

Dungeons and Dragons Online was the biggest surprise though, showing me how utterly different modern day MMOs are to the dice-rolling group-play of Ye Olde Penne And Paper. Turbines go at making that style of thing into an MMO was solid enough and polished within itself, but at the same time, was almost an completely different gaming experience to any other MMO I’ve played, and for something that looks so similar to Everquest 2, plays in almost alien ways than I was used to. Hard to say which of us was at fault there really, but for me at least, things have changed a lot since I last picked up a pointy dice. Faced with something so completely different, I realise now that perhaps there can be such a thing as ‘too much change’. I’m glad I gave it a go though…very instructive, and perhaps one day, I’ll be able to return to it properly.

I guess there are two types of MMO gamer these days; those of us who are happy with our game of choice and willl keep on playing until they forcibly evict us, and those of us who are still in search of a game we can truly call home.

I started in on Anarchy Online just after it’s notorious release, (Which really wasn’t all that bad, if you ask me. Laggy for a month or two and a bit tempramental, but soon patched into acceptability.) I made a lot of friends there, and had a good year or two. Eventually, I moved on though. A good few years later, I popped back to check out Shadowlands, and one or two of my old compatriots were still there, on the same characters, doing the same levelling, hunting, missions, shopping, etc, four years in. On my occasional revists to Planetside, I see the same old names on Command Chat, and in the kill-spam. When Pirates of the Burning Sea is out, I expect I’ll go with the Access Pass again and take the opportunity to pick up the Bolt Driver once more, and I have no doubt it’ll be the same names again. Some folks are perfectly happy where they are, and I envy that in some ways. I expect there’s a significant number of folks in Star Wars: Galaxies, that have been there from the start, stayed through hell and high-upgrade, and still love it today.

We’re not all that lucky though, and for the rest of us nomads, myself included, it’s an ongoing oddessy; an ongoing Operation Cheapseats, of various ‘trial’ length and costs. I think the trick is not to give up, and to keep on looking. But we’ll never know for sure unless we give it a go. Next time you’re slumped there at the arse-end of an unsucessful raid, or your twenty-ninth farming trip on The Throne Of Dooooom, or just bogged down into level 48 and going nowhere fast, why not take a bit of a break and hunt down that free trial you never quite got round to? In the words of lisping potato-faced celebrity chef Jamie Oliver: “Try something new today!”

(And if you do, do pimp any blog ramblings about it here. There’s a lot of games I can’t free trial now, having subbed and seen them to death already. Always fascinated to read other people’s first impressions of them!)

Anyway, it’s back on the Tuesday N00b Club for me, (more on that tomorrow), and probably a few months of superpowered mayhem in CoX too.