What’s this? A podcast? Surely not.

This episode: Arkham Asylum. Kapow! Bash! Punchification!

A startling newsbyte here, which woke me up from my summer gaming punditry torpor:

Ten Ton Hammer: Star Wars: The Old Republic Breaks EA Pre-Order Records

Making the immanent light sabre based high jinks of The Old Republic EA’s most anticipated game ever, if you take a pre-order as a concrete sign of committed intent. It doesn’t even have a release date or confirmed pricing model yet! You people really don’t care what is in that box, do you?

Still, it seems a bit curmudgeonly to be banging on about The Three Month Rule – again – in the face of that, and I really do begin to wonder just how out of touch with the whole computer games thing I’ve become. I don’t really like Star Wars, thought Knights of the Old Republic was “okay, but no Mass Effect,” and didn’t think much of Dragon Age. Despite not really doing a lot of research into promised features and the like, I get the hunch that TOR is probably Not Going To Be For Me, really.

Fair enough, ignore and move on, you might think, and I am trying, but I really do get a sense from news, blogs, podcasts and the like, of a kind of tension. There really does seem to be something pivotal about the upcoming release of SW:TOR, some sort of benchmark carved into a milestone. Made of barometers. Almost irrelevant to the game’s content itself, I do think the Future of MMOs 2012 And Beyond will very much turn on how well it does. If it can’t Beat World of Warcraft, is that it for the genre? If Star Wars can’t take the top spot, what can? Bearing in mind we’ve been here before with Galaxies, which did okay, but not brilliantly or nearly as well as we all though it should, and has recently been sacrificed to prevent competition and distractions away from the new Star Wars thing.

Maybe SW:TOR will be the last of the Big MMO Launches, and from here it becomes more of a cottage industry of smaller projects, more tight knit and involved communities (Darkfall, Wurm, Tale in the Desert and many others you won’t have heard of, but whose players really care), and the age of the MMO as Platforms in themselves, for expansion and internal development (DDO, LOTRO, EQ2, pretty much anything that isn’t World of Warcraft these days, etc), smorgasbord worlds build on firmly esablished, and paid-for, foundations.

Perhaps all this angst its just my own blinkered view which can’t see anything beyond SW:TOR, Guild Wars 2 and PlanetSide Next? I’m sure more new things will be along after we all see what SW:TOR’s mark on history was.

That last, by the way, is the next big thing I’m personally looking forward to. Guild Wars 2 has been hyping along for so long and so consistently that it’s become background noise for me now, but the sheer spectacle of a fully populated continental lock in PlanetSide is not merely a new world or venue, but an event, with a definite time-critical aspect. Hypocritically enough, I shall be breaking my own three month rule and jumping in on day one, mostly because the only PlanetSide worth playing is a busy PlanetSide. I expect I’ll be trying to organise some kind of Static Group Platoon type mayhem in due course. Hemlock’s Heroes will be heading behind enemy lines in search of gold buillion, and need YOU!

Anyway, in the spirit of potential pre-emptive I Told You So, here’s what I think will happen with Star Wars: The Old Republic, in true Michael ‘Real Men Crunch 24/7’ Pachter style;

SW:TOR sells over a million units in the first month or two, almost entirely to people who love the idea of KOTOR 3 with Enhanced Multiplayer Option. Within six months, it’ll probably be Doing Okay, sub-wise, but not sparkling, and certainly not Killing Warcraft, what with all that usual tourism effect taking a toll, but also a large number of single-player gamers having their fill of BioWare Story-Heavy Ripping Yarn and moving on contented, without really touching the MMO aspects of it all. I think it’ll suffer the DCUO Problem a fair bit; the difficulty of trying to sell non-MMO gamers on the idea of a regular monthly subscription. I also predict that a whole lot of people who love Star Wars Galaxies will almost certainly not find what they loved about SWG in the new game, (community and sandbox in a Star Wars World) and that’s a shame. I’ll be surprised if Bioware have much hands-on involvement after six months have gone, and probably by then the ongoings with be largely a Mythic run affair, whatever that will mean. TOR will probably beat SWG’s numbers, but not nearly by as much as they hope. I expect I’ll ‘discover it’ three years after it launches and be surprised that it isn’t more popular than it is! I imagine I’ll spend a lot of time patiently explaining basic feature on this here blog, to people who have long since end-gamed and moved on. I do that.

I say all this, because this is what usually seems to happen with most MMO launches in the past, and I’m not very imaginative! But regardless of what I think, it will be interesting to see what kind of MMO world we will be living in after the post-launch Old Republic dust settles…

When it comes to gaming I am, it has to be said, much like a shark. No, not in a “will bite your leg off as a playful hello to see if you are worth eating” kind of way but of a “if I stop moving then I die”. This always leaves me with something of a problem during this time of year, or as I like to call it “those summer months when the lazy games publishers ignore me!”

Retail releases are few and far between and so my back catalogue gets some love. This never seems like going forwards though so I get a bit on edge and start wondering what will happen if no more games are ever released. What if games publishers realise that in the two months of not releasing anything they haven’t had a single flop? What if they all realise that most games don’t make much money so they just all give up?

Luckily Microsoft have been doing their best to keep me occupied with a couple of Xbox Live Arcade games. In fact a whole month of what promise to be good games has just started with the excellent Bastion, a game with a constant and novel running narration that I haven’t yet played long enough to get bored of.

The other game of note is Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. Those of you who know me will know that this is one IP I will always run towards (in fact although I have decided that I am unlikely ever to start a newly released MMO again to play seriously, I will play the 40k MMO if it ever releases just so I can get annoyed with the liberties it will take with the IP). This is a twin stick shooter in which you play one of four Space Marines trying to stop a space hulk full of Orks reaching a Forgeworld. It’s a cheap-ish publicity game for the upcoming Space Marine 3rd person shooter and as a precursor does its job somewhat solidly without straying into anything other than “OK-ish” along the way. The big problem is the lack of online multiplayer that is preventing me from Ork killing with certain friends. It does fulfil its primary goal of getting me interested in the main game so that is nice. And making me paint 40k models so the secondary goal works too.

These have been two small games in the sea of nothingness caused by not quite clicking with the large big release, inFamous 2, though so I’ve had to dip back into the past pile in order to have things to play. Some rather long hours with DiRT 2 have resulted in the single player game being completed. Yes, I won every single single player event and that took a while. I can eye DiRT 3 now without feeling guilty and with a week or two rest between them I think I can get started on the herculean effort that will most likely entail.

There has actually been another game that I have been toying with: Alice: Madness Returns but I’m not quite ready to give an opinion on that. So far I’m enjoying it more than anybody else I know, or in fact any reviewer seems to have and so I’m wary of commenting until I’ve played more than the first couple of chapters. It seems very much to be a Sunday Afternoon game and I have trouble wanting to play it any other time.

I’m in my usual summer gaming lull at the moment, which is good as it means I’m nice and fresh by the autumn games blitz starts as there’s a hell of a lot of good games coming out later this year.

This means that I’m officially down to “pottering about” status in all my games. I haven’t actually turned on my 360 for a week, and the PS3 was only on because of the extended editions of Lord of the Rings being released in gorgeous high def. Well I say gorgeous, I have two problems. The first is that some of the special effects are beginning to look a bit dated and the other is that there’s a lot of orange and teal in places. I’m sorry if you hadn’t noticed the colour of films nowadays, if so I’ve probably just ruined nearly every film for you.

What I have been playing lots of are a couple of MMOs. Firstly there’s LOTRO, which I’ve been slowly picking away at my 65 minstrel trying to figure out what the best build is while coming to the conclusion I can be awesome in a group, or awesome solo but if I want to do both I’m going to have to respec my traits before every Monday night grouping session. Last night saw me grinding out unfinished class deeds because the gaps in my (useless to me) abilities was bugging me. I might spend the evening killing hundreds of grey mobs so that I can get some more useless traits filled in.

Incidentally while playing on Monday a few of us got the Master of Stairs deed, which you get for climbing a hill 20 times. I don’t remember doing it 20, or 10 if it counts going down as one as well and it really pointed out to me how used we are to the grind that I didn’t notice it was that many times! We also aced some 3man content due to the younger members of the group being away, and in the process demonstrated that we are really good if we have no real DPS or AOE as the game starts to run at a pace at which our aging brains can actually handle. Well until the point where we suddenly realise we need AOE or DPS to actually kill things of course.

The rest of my time in LOTRO is getting XP for about three-zillion legendary weapons that I am levelling up so that I can deconstruct them for useful bits and also farming skirmish marks for armour or, when I get annoyed, actually remembering that my soldier in skirmishes needs some skills in order to work. I’m currently running a Herbalist and going full out DPS with my Minstrel but I found I could actually die. After I actually put some points into her healing skills that soon got better though. I suspect I might have optimised the defence of the prancing pony beyond the difficulty level I’m playing it at. Time for tier 2 maybe.

The other game I’ve been playing is Star Trek Online. The upcoming release of Episode 4 this week has given me the push needed to start a static group from the start (Thursdays if anybody is interested) and I’m quite looking forwards to playing through the early content again with the changes that have been made. I’m also quite keen to actually try some of the group content as I’ve not done any before. This time through I’m going to try a science officer and use my inability to not buy ships from the cash shop to start in an Oberth. You know the ship, it’s the one that accidentally blows up in the 3rd film because it’s so weak you can’t even disable it without it exploding and making Klingon Doc Brown angry. Should be fun!

With all the kafuffle about Eve Online at the moment and the impending closure of Star Wars Galaxies I’ve been thinking a bit about innovation in games recently. Mainly about which companies are driving the genres forwards in the way in which Eve and Galaxies did so well at their start.

I don’t think Eve is any more. It may not be a popular opinion, but I think Eve has been stagnant for years now and the fact that the devs keep getting distracted by each new feature before finishing the last means that very little innovation is being done by CCP. In fact the very slow player number rise over the last three or four years really doesn’t sound much like a game that is doing much more than treading water. It’s the players that make that game and they are the gem, not CCP now.

Galaxies was a massive innovator and still has the best mechanic for gathering resources ever put into an MMO. Chasing over the deserts of Tatooine on a speeder bike while pinging your surveying tool looking for the highest concentration of a certain mineral made crafting into exploration gameplay, even if sometimes you find that perfect spot only to realise that it’s under a nest of monsters you can’t kill or, even worse, somebodies house. Still Galaxies stopped innovating a long, long time ago now.

But what of the recent games? Riff springs to mind, but that’s small refinements to the WoW model and I don’t see it being more than tweaks and improvements over what it’s trying to copy.Not to say that’s a bad thing, it’s just not really innovation.

The upcoming games may be good, but they are still out of reach for now. For all of The Old Republic’s samey looking combat I have to hope that they will bring real innovation with their storytelling. Guild Wars 2 is where my hopes really are though. There are still aspects of GW1 that games should consider copying and yet haven’t…

There are other games of course. EQ seems more caught up in progression servers than moving forwards from my view on the outside. LOTRO seems to have stalled somewhere and moved backwards with their release of content as there was a time when you would be promised more book content every couple of months. Now we wait a long time and I think that’s something important that has been lost. Of course being brought out followed by the move to free to play probably got in the way of a lot of this.

The game that I really think is doing the most for innovation at the moment is Star Trek Online. I know others think that they “promote stagnation” (to pick the obvious persons view about Cryptic) but having watched Trek Online go from it’s roots of a rushed release on a dangerously compressed development time scale to a game with really good communications with the community (something Eve really lacked this weekend), regular content releases with the weekly episodes (when they return after episode 4 is released) and a constant stream of actually sometimes quite good user generated content through the foundry. Sure the game still has problems but they do seem to be addressing them one by one (over a very long period of time to be sure). Of course there are still massive glaring flaws in the game of course, but this isn’t about what’s good and what isn’t. It’s about who pushing things forwards the most and I have to say that from here it looks like Cryptic have picked up the baton and are running with it in several areas nowadays.

I am, of course, most likely wrong. Which other companies still do a good job at innovating and pushing MMOs forwards? What cool new features haven’t I heard about in games?

SOE games are back, so this week we have games to talk about again!

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This week we have a what we’re not playing show thanks to Sony.

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This week we’re talking about user generated content in MMOs. Want to write your own quests in games? We take a look at a few of the options.

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It’s another what we’re playing show. Between the return of Monday nights for Hobbington Crescent and Gears of War 3 I think we have all sides covered.

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This week we are doing something different and have a lot of guests. As a post-mortem on the Hipster Battalion leaving Warhammer Online we get together to chat about what the game does right, what it does wrong and why everybody left. And amazingly only one bit of the recording didn’t work!

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