Worlds.com. Ever heard of them? Me either. But apparently back in the day, they filed a certain patent that is so broad, it appears to be able to cover every MMORPG and most MMO’s to date. For those who don’t want to read the wall of text, the patent covers every and any “System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space”. Worlds.com decided it was time to act on this on Decemeber 24th, (come on, where’s your christmas spirit guys..?) and threw the proverbial gauntlet at the feet of NCSoft. And they didn’t just go for one of their games either, oh no. Worlds.com claims it infringes on every MMO NCSoft has released to date. And if you look over the patent, it would appear they can actually do this.

This one is going to turn into a hurricane, first NCSoft, then SOE, Blizzard, the sky is the limit. I wonder if Sony are regretting having released HOME about now…

World of Warcraft is one of today’s largest online games, with over 11 million subscribers, each one paying $11 to $15 a month on fees. And yet, the game itself plays like a generic action RPG – You run around, cast spells, and fight the same monsters over and over, with some varying tactics based on whether you get additional creatures attacking you, or if the enemy is resistant to an element. For the most part, you use the same moveset over and over again, repeating a set – For example, a battle in Warcraft can go as such: You run up to an enemy while attacking, cast a beneficial spell which heals you for every swing, then do an offensive move, and then recast the healing spell once it wears off, and then repeat from there – means that for the most part, the game is a monotonous grind of whittling away one monster’s health down to nothing only to go to the next, with the occasional new monster type thrown in.

With such an obvious grind in a game, why does it have so many subscribers?
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I recently started playing the American open beta of a game called Runes of Magic. And it looks like the game will be a big hit.

Runes of Magic is an MMORPG that is free to play, and the American open beta was recently opened. There was already a European open beta going on, so most of  the bugs have already been taken care of.

You start out with one of six classes in the Pioneer’s Colony of Taborea, where you’ll quickly become familiar with Runes of Magic (RoM). After a mini-tutorial, which explains the bare basics of the game, like movement and camera control, you’re thrown into the world. And boy,was I surprised. On my skill bar, I found 4 skills waiting for me! At level 1!

While other games are scarce with giving you skills, RoM is definitely not. A common complaint about MMOs is that you have so little skills to use, that you just end up spamming the same skill over and over again, making the game very boring. But not in RoM. You start out with a couple of skills that have synergy with each other, and every level you get to upgrade them as you wish. You also gain a new skills every level or two. And this makes the combat really enjoyable.

The other thing that really surprised me, is how the game kept throwing quest after quest at me. There are so many, especially with the daily quests that you can repeat, that it’s not odd to still have quests of levels far below yours! So you’ll never be forced to grind on your own, but instead you’ll be questing.

However, these quests don’t have a lot of variety. Most of them are simple “Kill x wolves” or “Collect 10 fangs”, though there’s also some quests that ask you to scavenge for items or kill bosses (that are way too strong for their level, I might add- you definitely need a group of multiple people to kill them).

Aside from the combat there’s also a foraging and crafting system. While the foraging system is straight-forward (though it’s annoying how you cannot chop down certain trees or pick flowers until your skill level is high enough), the crafting system is not. I didn’t find out until level 10 how I could create new items, because you have to initiate the crafting from your skill window. Because of this, I accidentally sold a lot of materials that I could have instead used to create new items.

A unique feature in Runes of Magic is that, like Guild Wars, you can gain a secondary class. At level 10 you can choose one of the remaining classes as your secondary, and you get to use some of its skills. However, unlike Guild Wars, you separately have to level this class. I’m a big fan of the dual class system, as it allows for a lot more variety.

For now, I’m really enjoying Runes of Magic, and I hope this game stays as good as it is in the lower levels. If you’re looking for a free MMO, definitely try this game.

Recently, Atlas launched a beta of their first attempt in the growing field of online games, with the help of Aria Entertainment, which puts out various free online games. Imagine Online also comes with no subscription cost required, though it’s unsure if additional services will be available that will have a fee or not.

Imagine Online is unique in one way, because it’s actually not a WoW ripoff, as many other developers have attempted to do in the past (see Lord of the Rings Online and Warhammer). Players have almost complete free reign over how they want to progress their character. If you want to be a physical type, then you’ll need to use those kinds of attacks to skill up, and unlock new skills. Want to be a caster? Then you’ll want to use spells a lot. Want to specialize in demon recruitment? Well, there’s a skill tree for that as well. The level of customization in regards to player type is very high.

The game also keeps true to Megaten tradition. Players have the ability to recruit their very own demons, and can work with them either alone, or with other players and their own demons. The game also keeps a strong emphasis on exploiting weaknesses, and if you’re using a demon that uses spells that another is resistant to, you’ll end up taking a dirt nap quickly. The level of difficulty is higher than that of many other MMOs out there, and the learning curve is equally high. Thankfully, there’s a training area you can go to shortly after the beginning events to hone your skills.

The game looks to be coming along nicely, though some things, such as players attacking demons you’re trying to recruit, are annoyances that should hopefully be addressed soon. Players looking for something different, along with Megaten fans, will want to keep an eye out on this one.

You all know them: Ragnarok Online, Maple Story, World of Warcraft, these are practically household names for anyone that considers themselves a gamer, from the casual to the hardcore. Millions of people play them, but why? Because they are progress simulators, and people love easily-gotten gains, no matter how insubstantial they are. However, these gains also have to have some challenge behind them. Nothing in life comes for free, not even imaginary demon slaying swords.

So here we have the root of the problem; somewhere along the line some wires got crossed and everybody decided MMO = grind (now with added social interaction!).

It’s time for “Cooking with Kintak”. Today I’ll be teaching you how to make your very own money farm. It’s quite easy, really! Take Diablo, stretch out the content as thinly as possible, host it on your own servers so you have an excuse to charge $15 a month, and watch as the money flows in (or wait to go bankrupt, as the case may be. See: Every WoW knockoff). To make the monthly fees really convincing, release a half-finished game with the promise of additional content maybe being added at some point. To make even more money, charge for any additional content that you plan to add, and call it an expansion pack! (continue reading…)

Everybody who has played any online game and has visited its forums, knows the problem. Whiners. There is always a group that whines about how something is too strong, this skill is too weak, this quest is too hard, this gun is too accurate. No matter how much you enjoy the game, they will always find something to whine about. In reality, these whiners deal more damage than you may think.

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My friends say that I like weird games. And it’s true. But, do you think a 3rd person shooter with football elements is weird? …  Well, I think it is.

S4 League is the “acronym” for Stylish eSper Shooting Sports. Yeah, I don’t really get it either.

About S4 League

This game is like football (you get the ball and try get it to the goal with the other team trying to stop you) but it has guns, swords and a bat.

The teams are split in two teams of 6 members each (they can be less or even one member): Alpha and Beta.

The rules are the same as football: take the Fumbi (a doll-like item that takes the place of the ball) and place it in the enemy base. The other team must use any weapon or tactic to stop you, get the ball and place it in your base.

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Let’s face it. PC gaming is a dying culture. The days of Quake, DOOM, and Duke Nukem are over and the scene will never be the same again. MMORPGs have taken over PC gaming as the major genre and revenue puller. So what really happened? Here’s what I think:

1. DRM and Piracy - DRM has always been a huge taboo in gaming and it’s becoming more and more common in PC games these days. This is mainly due to the rising of piracy among PC games and now even consoles are suffering from it. X-Box 360 games are out sometimes even a month in advance of it’s street date. PC games have their copy protection cracked within days of its release, sometimes hours. But while DRM will help save their games the companies are taking it to an extreme, an example and probably the most recent case is EA’s blunder that is Spore. Even Steam games these days are not safe from piracy.

2. Consoles – From the moment consoles started to become a household thing was when PC gaming began it’s decline. What do kids ask for their birthday and Christmas? The newest console or the newest handheld so they can play it with their friends. Now a days people don’t build PCs, they buy a desktop or laptop pre-built and go with it not even worrying about gaming on it. Consoles these days have started to have more of a community feel to them than ever before. X-Box Live has become a huge success with the Playstation Network not far behind. The Wii’s online support is trash but since when has Nintendo ever been good at online gaming.

3. Exclusive Titles – Games don’t come out on one platform these days. It’s almost unheard of and usually considered a bad move depending on the company. Companies like Valve, who have been primarily a PC developer, has started putting it’s games on the 360 (without the same sort of support it’s PC counterpart gets) and now companies are even developing MMORPGs for consoles.

4. Competition – One thing PC games still have going for it is the tournament scene. People still play Counterstrike: Source or Unreal Tournament for cash every year, but how long is that going to last? Major League Gaming just recently closed shop and who knows how soon the rest of the scene will fold. Cons will always be a place for gaming tournaments but Cons don’t have a unlimited life-span and it all rests on the founder’s shoulders to keep it running.

5. MMORPGs – World of Warcraft, Warhammer, Guild Wars, Age of Conan, EVE Online. The list goes on and on and on but why does it? Because developing an MMORPG is like asking for free cash. Everyone is doing it, but because of that we have to wade through tons and tons of crap to get to even one shining gem of a game that probably won’t take off due to it being developed by some no-name company from Korea.

Like the arcades of the past, PC gaming is slowly becoming less and less what people what to do. Why pay a couple thousand dollars on a decent gaming PC when you could go to the store, buy a console for 200~300 dollars, a couple games, and start playing as soon as you unpackage the thing? Why pay 15 dollars a month for an MMORPG when you could pay about 10 for X-Box Live and have almost every title on the console supported somehow? Personally, PC gaming will always have that special place in my heart and seeing it die off makes a part of me just feel sad.

To pretend to be someone one is not, or is unable to be in real life, has always been a favored process to release stress and forget about most life’s problems ever since the ancient Greeks created the Tragedy as a form of entertainment. Playing a role, a projection of one’s personality under ficticious/imagined circumstances, possibilizes the experience of feelings and situations that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
Generally seen as a healthy sublimation of one’s aggressive impulses, in a Freudian manner, role playing shows its dark side when sometimes the actors become consumed by their own characters, inverting the transfer process, which may result in severe personality conflicts within the actor’s mind.

Ever since the dawn of the gaming industry, developers have spent a lot of their time creating games based on magical fantasy worlds where knights, wizards, dragons and damsels in distress were more than mere possibilities. There was a will to interact with these stories in reaction to centuries of spectating them. After years of toying with the limitations of A.I scripting, the bread and butter of the RPG genre, the Internet finally provided the necessary tools to connect role players worldwide and make them mutually interact inside virtual dynamic worlds, huge online theaters where every actor played an independent and unique role while affecting others at the same time. Thus MMORPG genre was born from the RPG and proceeded to replace its predecessor gradually, while not completely, attracting a considerably larger and more diversed fanbase and spawning an unusual amount of success and response.

However, what game developers failed to predict was how seriously some people would take this form of entertainment. Even though an excess of dedication of a player over a video game is taken as a benefit for software companies, since it usually translates on a larger income, growing obsessive behaviors towards a video game can generate hazardous effects, both game and real life based that will consequentially damage both players and developers.

Over the last few years we have heard of people who ruined their lives, commited suicide and even murdered others over MMORPG-related issues. Now, it is absurd to think or claim that this game genre carries some kind of curse or that its a threat to public health, but these facts clearly illustrate that something is indeed wrong with the way some players face it. What was initially intended to be a way to relax people is becoming more of a new source of problems and worries for those who use it. Though this social phenomenon might be a shadow on the role video games have started to play in our society, it is quite a fact that the MMORPG genre, with its so called “freedom” and “social interaction” has given birth to some of the most controversial cases and situations ever spawned by the game industry.