KevinBrill.com Your home for Kevin Brill on the Internet

I want to like The Chronicles of Spellborn, but the starting zone suffers from a serious lack of design when it comes to questing.  I've done five or six different quests, in different parts of chains, which have you kill the same three things--young wolves, young boars, and young bears.  I swear that all I've done is run around the woods whacking these things for 7 levels.  Couple that with the fact that the area is heavily populated, and the spawn rates are mediocre, and it makes for a less than ideal experience.

Something only someone whose formative years were spent in front of an Apple II and Atari could appreciate.

Saw a link to this article on the In the Press section on the main page of NCSoft's website.

Note to NC Soft: You probably want to remove links from your website to any games that you've cancelled...

A few weeks ago, I got utterly bored with multitude of games I have installed on my computer.  Work had been crazy, so I stopped my casual raiding in WoW, and then I stopped playing Vanguard too, even after joining up with the great folks of Save Haven.  I ordered the Tabula Rasa Collector's Edition last week from Amazon for a whopping $20, and spent a little bit of time playing that, but couldn't real get into it much either.  This weekend, I'll (hopefully) be able to spend a few hours doing some limited beta testing for an upcoming big name MMO--we'll see if that scratches any itches. 

As near as I can tell, after a long winter of gaming and football, I think I've just over-gamed myself.  I think it's coupled with the fact that I don't really enjoy having to coordinate to someone else's schedule to play--my free time is precious to me, so I want to spend it doing whatever I wan to do, not having to be online at specific time and time boxed in for 2+ hours.  More than likely, I'll cancel my Station Pass and drop it back to just a VG subscription, and probably let my WoW account lapse too.  And Tabula Rasa really hasn't grabbed me enough to fork over $15 for it a month.

The weather's turned nice here, NASCAR's racing again, and I can find other ways to spend my spare time on the weekends.  I suppose I'll see you online when winter rolls back around!

After getting semi-burned by Vanguards much hyped, then less than stellar release, I've tried to avoid getting caught up in the "next big thing" hoopla surrounding upcoming MMOs.  Age of Conan has been in the news lately for it's repeated delays (most recently moving from March to May of '08 release date), but this tech demo video from CES definitely has piqued my interest.  There's something refreshing about seeing someone take a fantasy setting that doesn't involve elfs, dwarves and orcs.  The visuals are great looking, and the animations looked killer too.  The moment that made me go "wow" was the shot of the character mounting his horse.  What a refreshing change from clicking a button and having your mount "poof" into existance!

Lately, I've noticed an interesting trend among all of my co-workers who are MMO players. Everyone has tried the latest, shiny thing, and decided to fall back to their old ways. One of my friends got to mid 30s in LOTRO, before giving up and going back to DOAC. Another gave up a level 70 in WoW and went back to SWG. Personally, after quitting WoW six months ago, I tried Vanguard, EQ2, and LOTRO. Over the weekend, I canceled my subscription to EQ2, stopped playing Vanguard and LOTRO, and went back to WoW. This makes me wonder if there's some sort of "Next Best Thing" phenomenon where people are chomping at the bit for the next big thing, buy it, play it for a while, get bored, and settle back into something familiar?

It should be interesting to see how next year's release fare. Will Tabula Rasa, Warhammer, Age of Conan, and Pirates of the Burning Sea be able to grab people enough to have them stick, or will they suffer the same fate as this year's releases (Vanguard, LOTRO)?

Warcry spoke with NetDevil CEO Scott Brown on the demise of Auto Assault, and it looks like the game is effectively toast. From the article:

"We talked about it and sort of left it where it is," Brown told WarCry in a phone interview late Thursday. "We just couldn't come to an agreement."

NCSoft owns the intellectual property that is Auto Assault. This means they own the name, the story, the idea, the art and anything that directly relates to the game. The code-base and engine that power the game remain the property of NetDevil.

Unfortunately, this is the position you don't want your favorite MMO to end up in--dead with no hope of resurrection from the original owners. The impetus will now lie in the community to develop some opensource version of the server software. But, with reports of the US server having around 100 people online at any one time (sorry, I read it in one of the multitude of posts over the last few days but haven't been able to locate the quote), it makes me wonder if the emulation software really has any chance of getting built. If you want to fill out a petition (which I don't see doing too much), I ran across the following link.

For everyone who is a player/fan of Auto Assault, you have my condolences. It's tough to see something that you've invested so much emotionally into die. Here's hoping I won't have to face the same thing with Vanguard... ;)

As reported lots of places, Auto Assault will be shutting down come August 31. I never gave the game serious consideration, but having played and beat Autoduel about 20 years ago, I had a passing interest in it, and even picked up the box a few times and thought about buying it.

Now that it's execution date has been set, it got me to thinking about the death of MMOs, and how it affects the players. Typically, the single player game that you bought but got tired of just goes up on the shelf ready to be pulled down at any time to be played again. As terrible as it was, I still have a copy of Outpost sitting in my bookcase. Granted, I'll probably never play it again, but it least I have the opportunity to do so. Which brings me to my point, when an MMO dies, what then? Sure, I have the box sitting on my shelf, but it basically worthless to me since I still need the servers online to be able to play. Personally, I'd like to see benevolent publishers still retaining the rights to the IP and source code but releasing the binaries for the server code, to allow independent groups to host their own servers and build a community even after the game is officially dead. Either that, or clear the rights to allow people to build server emulators (like is happening with Earth & Beyond, which admittedly I have never heard of).

This hasn't been a problem so far with early big games like Ultima Online and Everquest, they still have fairly healthy player populations and are making money. However, I'd have to think that sooner or later they're going to go away. Can they really continue to make money 10 more years? It will be especially interesting to see what happens when WoW meets its proverbial maker sometime in the future. Will people still want to get together on some emulated server and raid MC, if nothing more than for old times sake?