MECHABLOGZILLA

I won't waste your time today with a lot of clever remarks or personal stories about Ultima Online. I'll save that for future stories when I need to fill space.

No, right now we're here to talk about Elder Scrolls Online. They just finished up with another beta, and while I only dipped my toes in this one, I did play the last one quite a bit. I don't know if the NDA is still in effect or not, but who cares! MechaBZ is small enough to skirt by the law anyway. That's how we get away with obvious copyright infringement and our award winning whiskey distillery!

Before we get started, who wants some hooch?

So I started playing the last beta thanks to Chris from our LoL Zone affiliate. He scored invites when even I could not. I guess the developers are unaware of my reputation, because as you all know I'm kind of a big deal.

The first thing I noticed upon logging in was the way the races were all tied into three different factions. That's fine by me, as the three way PVP is one of the biggest draws of the game for me. I've always loved open world PVP, from the intense life and death battles in UO to the grand battles in Warhammer Online. A three way dance sounded right up my alley, as I hadn't experienced an epic three way since the No Mercy ladder match between myself, Chaps, and Justin.

Hope you weren't expecting something more scandalous. I'm really quite boring. But that match was an hour and half long and we all became best friends after that. Show me a tryst that can create the kind of bond that steel on skeleton can make!

From what I've read, the whole faction thing can be avoided through either preorder or by buying the collectors edition, I forget which. It seems to be a hot button topic for a lot of gamers, but the ability to play any race in any faction makes sense to me. I hate when games like WoW force you to be a certain race on a certain side with no way to cross factions. Yet, at the same time, members of the enemy races are constantly seen in your towns and as allies. Gah!

Character customization is pretty good. You have your basics here - sliders, a handful of hair styles, and even voice options. I've never been a big fan of my online characters having voices. It was cool in The Old Republic, because even though you didn't have a choice in the way you sounded, the well written script made everything your character had to say seem interesting ad pivotal. Here it's mostly grunts and yells. Not very exciting. Plus, you only get a sample of what the character sounds like, and it's not always indicative of how it'll be when you're actually in game. When I played Aion I thought I picked a great voice for my female archer, but once I started playing I quickly discovered she had the most obnoxious voice I had ever heard and I honestly did not play her because of how annoying she came across as.

The meat and potatoes of an Elder Scrolls game is the story. That's a no brainer, right? After all, this is a series built on some classic single player RPG traditions. A lot of people wondered how they would handle the kind of personal narrative of an Elder Scrolls game in a massive multiplayer setting. Well, in my opinion at least, it works about as well as you could imagine.

The introduction quest has you escaping a sort of prison and rescuing an important individual. While I originally thought this to be instanced, I soon found myself surrounded by other adventurers all on the same quest to rescue him. Succeeding did not recognize it as a group effort though. Much like your other theme park style MMO's, you're the hero of the story, even if there another hundred right behind you with the same heroic aspirations.

You wind up in a desert town, look around, fight some pirates, meet new people, etc etc. If it doesn't sound like it's terribly thrilling, it's because it isn't. It really is your standard MMO fare just wrapped in a more attractive package. Yes, ESO is a beautiful game and seems to run well on most systems. Thanks to all the money I sunk into my PC and not into paying my bills, I was able to run the game on max settings and I was very impressed by the visuals. Some of the animations still need work, and the scenery is a bit generic fantasy, but otherwise it's a fine specimen.

The class system is surprisingly robust. I picked a mage but was able to use a two handed sword proficiently. I'm sure there will be limitations and reasons to pick one weapon or another later on, but at least in the beginning I felt like I had some control over what kind of character I wanted to build. The same goes for the abilities, which at first felt foreign to me. An Elder Scrolls game with slotted hotbar abilities? It doesn't seem right, but you quickly adapt. It works very well, and I never felt like I had a screen full of abilities and little room to actually see the game, like when I play World of Warcraft.

The combat system plays almost identically to the single player games, except with the added hotbar. For some people this will be awesome, and that's including myself. I love the twitch style MMO's like this and Tera, as it makes you feel like personal skill can triumph over higher levels and better equipment. For someone like my girlfriend though, this would be a deal breaker. She much prefers the tab targeting and auto attacks of your basic MMO.

Really, the only problem with the game is how by the book it is. I can't keep doing the same thing in these games. Fetch quests, kill X amount of X, talk to this person and return, blah blah blah. It's not an inferior game, it just doesn't bring anything new to the genre.

And for an Elder Scrolls game, it feels surprisingly apathetic from a player perspective. I'm used to being immersed in a world that I've helped mold, but it's hard to do that in an MMO. One of the early quests has you either giving a pirate a potion to save her life or letting her die a horrible death on the floor of her ship. In any single player ES game I would feel like her life is in my hands, but when there are 20 other people standing around me making the same decision, I could really care less what happens to her. I feel no connection with the world, and that's the worst possible thing that could happen to an Elder Scrolls game.

It actually made me realize something kind of depressing about the series as a whole. I don't really give a damn about the world of any Elder Scrolls game. The only reason I enjoy them as much as I do is because I'm a PC (master race) gamer and I take much joy in modding them. My Fallout 3 game had so many mods in it you wouldn't even realize it was a Fallout game anymore. I had terminators, Highlander swords, anime companions, Warhammer 40k skins for the different factions, floating fortresses, and so much unnecessary nudity that you would think it was sponsored by Larry Flynt.

Part of the fun of a Bethesda RPG is to dismantle it any way possible and rebuild it as something completely different. Despite being a solid and beautiful MMORPG, can Elder Scrolls Online keep my interest without the ability to alter it any way I see fit?

I reserve complete judgment on this game until it is released. For the most part I've chosen to ignore the beta, as too many times in the past I've poured days into a beta only to repeat the same steps once the game is released and lose interest. I've yet to experience the PVP, and perhaps over time I'll warm to my character and the world will open up for me. There have been plenty of other MMO's that I was on the fence on and ended up enjoying immensely - Aion, Tera, Defiance to just name a few. And, to be fair, there have been some games I was absolutely hyped about that ended up leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm looking at you, Guild Wars 2.

For now I'm putting Elder Scrolls Online on my list of games to pick up, but I have serious reservations about it's long term appeal. So many MMO's now crash and burn within the first few months, and despite having unlimited potential I'm worried this one will follow the same path.

We'll all find out in June, when Elder Scrolls Online launches. Until then, I'm crossing my fingers for the ability to become a vampire or a werewolf. Or a vampire werewolf. A werepyre!

Wait, didn't Underworld try that once? How did that turn out?



*shudder*

What better way to christen the new MECHABLOGZILLA ship than with an article about the MMO that is most near and dear to me very own heart? No, I'm not talking about Ultima Online.

But I will be in a few paragraphs.

The official World of Warcraft site released pictures of the new female Orc models that will be implemented some time around the new "Warlords of Draenor" expansion. Like the previous releases, this one is both familiar enough to the characters you've grown attached to over the past ten years, while being clearly superior to the point that you don't want to play as your avatar until they upgrade her.

Assuming anyone even plays as a female Orc. Seriously, do they? Male Orcs are impressive for their huge muscles and fearsome look that gives credence to the notion that they are war mongering beast men.

But female Orcs? Gussy that lass up all you want Blizzard, no one is buying it as beautiful or intimidating. To be fair, I feel the same way about female Worgen. Male Worgens are jacked and look like fearsome werewolves, while the female variety kind of look like something your douchebag high school girlfriend would carry in her purse. Seeing these races brings to mind a quote by our president Barrack Obama. Something about lipstick on a pig, which I think was referencing the election but might have just been about Rosie O'Donnell.

Actually, she kind of looks like an 80's punk rocker, but she certainly is not Linnea Quigley in Return of the Living Dead. My advice is to NOT Google that unless you're ready for a lot of nudity and awesomeness from one of the greatest zombie movies ever made.

However, this is all just based on my own prejudice against Horde races. I'm an Alliance player, not because I like losing or having RP sex in Goldshire, but because I'd rather play an honorable underdog knight than a power hungry monster who enrolled in a free course at the Kratos School of Character Development.

RAWR RAWR VIOLENCE ANGER BLOOD BLOOD!

So my own personal racism aside, it looks really good. It retains the overall look, but you can really see the improvements they're making to the aging client. The changes are great so far, and when you combine this with the new expansion dropping later this year and the increase in subscriptions, it looks like it will be a very big year for WoW.

And that brings us to the new elephant in the room.

I saw this leaked on WoWInsider.com first, but I'm pretty sure it's making the rounds on most of the major sites. When the servers went up recently someone noticed and snagged a picture of what appears to be a new service option that lets you instantly upgrade a character to level ninety for a staggering price tag of sixty dollars.

And soon, the darkness.

Players were livid. It didn't matter that this was an apparent accident that wasn't supposed to go live yet. When "Warlords of Draenor" releases, players will be able to upgrade one character to level ninety for free and it seems like this service goes hand in hand with that. I've gone incognegro in some of the forums and listened to an overwhelmingly negative response to the service. To be honest, I kind of jumped on the fury bandwagon at first but soon found myself conflicted and hungry.

On one hand, how dare Blizzard offer up a paid service that basically renders a players time and progress pointless when they can just click click click and become an insta-hero? It's bad enough that Blizzard offers microtransactions on top of being a strictly pay to play service, and as far as my memory goes I believe they're the one of the few companies with the hearthstones to do so. You can play for fifteen dollars a month, and for just ten to twenty five more you can purchase some great pets or uber mounts. It really gives off the impression of "why work yourself to death when you just swipe a card and receive instant gratification?"

That dog won't hunt, monsignor.

The very essence of an MMORPG is the time and love you put into your character. It may be an online game, and the player base of an online game may have devolved into an arena zergfest filled with entitled assholes with inferiority complexes, but it's still an RPG. The reason to play an RPG is to build your character, go on adventures, and create a memory of living as another person in another world far from the sad existence you call your life.

It's an escape, but now we're looking for shortcuts to help escape the escape. Do players really want to just upgrade instead of experience? What about when that player upgrades to level ninety on a class he's inexperienced with, and you're running a raid with him and he doesn't know what the hell he's doing.

Blizzard is running the risk of destroying all the positive attention they've been getting this year.

Once I started to think about it though, and ate some pizza, I reconsidered my stance. Yeah it does belittle the entire point of playing an online role playing game, but it won't change my life at all. In fact, if anything, it would greatly improve my lifespan as a player.

I'll tell you why. I'm going to let you in on a secret. I've been playing WoW since launch, and I don't even have one character at level cap. I did once, before Cataclysm came out, but once they raised it again and I had to drag my feet underwater for what felt like fucking forever I gave up and stopped playing. My warrior, who I've been going to war against the Horde with for years, sits at an embarrassing level 84 while day in and day out I hear the simplest idiots in gaming brag about how many level nineties they have. Rednecks, grandmas, meth addicts, douchebag college kids, you name the stereotype and I can tell you how often they dangle their superiority in WoW in front of my very unimpressed face.

The free level nineties I get from the new expansion will allow me to play the new content without devoting all of my busy time to leveling my proud warrior. Managing two game stores, a dying father, a fiancee, a violent cat, and the other trials and tribulations that always seem to pop up in my life leaves little time for hardcore gaming.

And there are WAY more people out there with rougher lives than me. Do you think parents, college students, religious snake handlers, and other like minded individuals have the time to devote to virtual characters when real life is so demanding? They shouldn't be punished for not having the same time to put into a game they love that your asshole friends who mooch off of their parents money and contribute nothing of their own to society do.

It isn't the first game to offer this kind of service, either. Even my beloved Ultima Online, now a hollow shell of its former self, offers the ability to buy an advanced character instead of, you know, earning one.

I'm going to try to reserve judgment on this service until I see how it plays out. I feel like it won't reflect me at all, and people are just looking for a reason to bitch because that's what gamers are conditioned to do now. It's really a reflection on the industry, where DLC and paid services are all the rage now. It's a sign of the times, and as long as the money is there so too will there be a market for it. I hate it, I always have, but I let go of that lie about one person making a difference a long time ago.

If you disagree with WoW's direction, you could always try FFXIV. It's a nice throwback to an old style with just enough new car smell to feel different. You could bore yourself to tears with Guild Wars 2, or try one of the upcoming titles - ESO, EQNext, Wildstar, and a plethora of Asian F2P titles that seem to come out despite the fact that no one cares.

Kind of like Michelle Rodriguez.

Keep your goddamn hands off of my sweet Cara.

If you know me, congratulations!

No, seriously, if you know me, I'm not doing my job very well.

Alright, for real this time!

If you know me, you know that out of all the great games I've played in my many years as a gaming enthusiast, none have changed my life as much as Ultima Online. We had J.P. Harrod on the site a couple of months ago talking about his time with Electronic Arts and the role he played on the Ultima Online dev team, and I found him to be both humble and amazing at the same time. To work on such a legendary game that shaped an entire genre must have been a daunting task, but J.P. is a Cadillac of a man.

You should all know by now that I spent almost all of my time from age 16 to 20 braving the wilds of Sosaria in a never ending quest for adventure and coin. I had a damn good time with it, too, as a lifetime of red eyes and all night Orc-a-thons will attest to.

It's not that I love Ultima Online because it is the single greatest game of all time. I mean, it is, but I suppose the argument could also be made that it was my first MMO and I see it through the rose colored glasses. I can definitely admit that the game has lost its luster over fifteen years later. I blame that more on EA's inability to keep alive what made UO so great in the first place, along with the inevitable passing of the player base that made the world feel alive. Gamers today aren't the same class of gamers that we had in "my day," and I might get in trouble for saying that but it's my column so go play Halo and don't fornicate yourself on your way out.

You know why I loved Ultima so much? Because it was a sandbox game, and until recently it felt like that term was a four letter word.

It's obviously seven!

In its original form, Ultima Online had no quests. It had no levels. It relied upon the player to make items to sell, create adventures for themselves, and it didn't hold your hand through any of it. You made your character, picked some skills, and it dropped you right in the middle of a city and said "fuck you, make your own destiny!"

And we did. Sandbox games are designed as entirely open experiences where you can do whatever you want. Imagine Skyrim, with its skill based system and freedom to go wherever you want, but as an MMO with less story and more social interactions.

It's not that games haven't attempted to recreate the sandbox feel that Ultima had. Mortal Online, Darkfall, and even something as different as Eve Online have all labeled themselves, or been labeled by others, to be the "next UO." They may be decent games in their own right, but all of them failed miserably as the next Ultima. They were more akin to massive online arenas where players could grief each other, or in Eve Online's case, it missed the Ultima mark but still grew into a classic title on its own.

But those were your choices for sandbox games. Sure, you could go back to UO, but why bother? It wasn't the same beast anymore. Returning players will find items with stats, gear grinding, and a very lonely world that barely resembles the sacred lands of our youth.

So we hung our heads and forced ourselves into the world of the theme park MMORPG, where games like World of Warcraft satisfied the craving while leaving us hungry for something more. Apparently, back when UO and Everquest were the big two, all of the game developers decided to clone EQ and leave UO to die a lonely death as the greatest that should have been. Guided adventures became the norm in both Eastern and Western MMO's, and the success of the juggernaut that is WoW cemented the theme parks domination in this industry we all love.

Companies attempted to copy the success of WoW year after year, but always failed to live up to the gargantuan numbers that Blizzard's beast brought to the table. Still, there was success to be had, so the MMO Machine churned out clone after clone that over saturated the market and would probably kill off the entire genre eventually. Warcraft's numbers have fallen hard over the past year, and recently they admitted to losing over 600,000 subscribers in a matter of months.

Just when it looked like the industry had reached its low point in terms of both creativity and popularity, a small beacon of hope appeared somewhere in the distance. Like a heroic knight rising up to destroy the darkness that has claimed these lands, he stands on the edge of the horizon waiting for the opportunity to strike.

Kingdom of MMORPG's, meet your unlikely savior - The Sandbox!

Everything that is old is new again. While the clones fight for scraps among themselves, the sandbox MMO is ready to make its presence felt once more in a slew of new games coming soon. Richard Garriott and his UO team has reunited to bring us quite possibly a very revolutionary title called Shroud of the Avatar, while team Everquest will finally show off EQ Next this friday.

That's right, the two games that started it all are coming back to reclaim their industry, and I couldn't be more excited. I've never been a huge EQ fan, but the hype behind Next is so incredible that even I feel like an anxious kid at Christmas waiting to see what's in the damn box.

As for Lord British and his Shroud of the Avatar, well... I've said it before, and I'll say it again - I would follow that man into hell and back.

And it's not just those two vying for your attention. Eve Online is still alive and kicking very well, while upstart titles like Revival, Archeage, and Salem are going to offer a wide range of sandboxy goodness for the MMO player who is sick and tired of this theme park nonsense!

I started Blogzilla 1985 years ago as an outlet for me to bitch about MMORPG's. Back then it was called "Blogs THEY Don't Want You to Know About," and I spent most of my time waxing poetic about Warcraft, Champions Online, and Aion, just to name a few. BZ85 evolved from that simple idea, but I've never lost my love or interest for the genre that has most impacted my life as a gamer.

I'm damn proud to say that we are going to bear witness the revival of the sandbox MMO, and I'd like to take some credit for that.

Somehow.

My next mission? Get AKI involved with WWE games again.


This might take a while.