Travian First Impressions – You’ve got some Gaul!

By Steve Boyd, OnRPG Journalist

The world of Travian is rocked with conflict. Three tribes; The Romans, The Teutons and the Gauls struggle for land and resources as they attempt to conquer their world. As I write this there are 16, 700 players battling it out on my server. They form the 300 or so alliances currently active. Me? I am all on my own.

Almost.

When you enter the game world of Travian, you only have two things going for you. You are shielded from attacks by enemy players for three days and you have an ally in the form of the Taskmaster.

The Taskmaster is your mentor and tutor as you take your first steps on the way to establishing an Empire. He will advise you on gathering resources, exploring and adventuring and even renaming your settlement.

You also have the protection of your Hero unit. Your hero will carry the bulk of your burden in the early going and will explore nearby adventure spots in the hope of finding hidden resources and even troops for your nascent military forces.

As with all games of this type, the key to success is thoroughly investigating the function of items and troops before deploying them. As I leapt headlong into the game without really doing my homework, certain tasks took a lot longer than they should have. Upgrading your Main Building at the start of the game reduces your build time by four per cent. Upgrading it to level 3 brings the build time down by another six. And as you only have limited workers to begin with, getting jobs done and moving on to the next one is important.

And to complete these tasks you need resources. Resources in the world of Travian come in three flavours; crops, iron, clay and lumber.

All tasks cost a certain amount of each so having diverse resource gatherers is also important. A quick spoiler or hint here-remember your workers need food, so focus on your cropland at the start. Once you have claimed your resource spots, you can also upgrade your production facilities there. These upgrades take time, but can be completed instantly if you spend a little gold. Gold will be awarded to you once you complete the missions assigned to you by the taskmaster and can be earned later by trading with your neighbours or by auctioning loot discovered by your Hero on his adventures.

I don’t normally enjoy resource based strategy games, but something about Travian clicked with me. The interface is clean and easy to navigate and the built in tutorial in the form of the Taskmaster led me by the hand from the very beginning. If you are familiar with this type of game, you may find it a little too simple for your taste but, if you are like me and have not played a huge amount of strategy style adventures, Travian may well be the one to introduce you to a new genre.

Open Letter to Trion Worlds: Please Don’t Do What WAR Did!

By Nic van ‘t Schip, OnRPG Admin

On the day of the head start launch of RIFT I want to take a moment and reflect on something that has been bothering me about the last big MMO launch that I was really excited about: The Warhammer Online launch.

I don’t want to get into the nitty-gritty of what was and is wrong with that game and instead want to focus on one single phenomenon that has haunted many MMO launches in the past couple of years. The very quick rise of the game population just after launch, inevitably followed by a sharp decline. And how MMO companies react to this effect.

I think a lot of people confuse the drop of population in an MMO with that game being “bad” but this is simply not true. It is completely normal and utterly predictable that an MMO will spike in population right after launch. People have been eager to play it, sometimes for years, and now they finally can. It’s not unheard of for people to take time off so they can focus their full attention on it those first couple of days. Others may have just gotten swept up by the hype and started playing the game to be with their friends.

Some of these people will inevitably not continue playing after the first couple of weeks. Add to that the fact that people may settle into their normal routine of only playing a couple of hours per week and all of this results into what the community will perceive as a decline in the game’s population.

But let’s take a step back and look at what happened shortly after the launch of Warhammer Online. The game was extremely popular and sold a lot more boxes than anyone really expected. Queue times to get into the servers were long and the community demanded more servers.

Mythic and GOA listened to them and added a LOT of extra servers. Queue times went down and for a little while the situation was much improved. However shortly after that the population declined slightly because of the reasons mentioned above. As there were way now too many servers players were spread too thin. The result of this was that the game was doing great in terms of how many players were online at the same time, but because every server had about 90% of the population it needed to feel “healthy” people were complaining and started claiming the game was dying.

This is the single worst thing for an MMO to happen. People are flock animals and if they get the idea that an MMO is suffering they start looking for their next game. The painful thing was that at this stage WAR was doing fantastic. The number of concurrent users online as well as the number of people subscribing were nothing short of phenomenal. But none of this mattered to the community. When they queued for a battleground in-game it took a couple of minutes too long to find enough players and when they went roaming for RvR they found some of the zones weren’t packed with enemies to farm. As this was happening across 90% of the servers any players on those servers were having a bad experience. And this is where things started to go really wrong.

There was no plan in place for the merging of servers. In fact, because of a certain quote from a certain CEO of Mythic the merging and subsequent shutting down of servers was a big taboo and even suggesting it would cost someone some evil stares from management. (“If we are opening up new servers six months from now, I consider the game a success. If we are closing servers down, we have done something wrong “- Mark Jacobs)

If Mythic and GOA had swallowed their pride and admitted they were too aggressive in opening servers after launch, and if they would have been more on the ball with the merging of servers to give the players that remained in the game full servers to enjoy I believe WAR would have been in a much better state.

And this brings me back to RIFT. In some ways their situation is now comparable to that of Warhammer Online. They are enjoying some awesome momentum and this is bringing many players into the game that will quite likely not continue to play their game after the first month. A mere two hours after the head start of the game Trion has already added quite a large number of servers and queues on some servers are up to three (!) hours already. Not all of these servers may still be required in a couple of months.

As long as they realize that this is perfectly normal and act accordingly and work diligently on both adding but sometimes also closing servers, RIFT can become very, very successful. Because as we already discussed here, the game is just very very good.

DC Universe Online February Update – The Cat that got the Cream

By Stephen Boyd, OnRPG Journalist.

It was hard to go into work this morning. Not because I had to get up at six in the morning and walk the dog first, but because I knew that the *ahem* Valentine’s Day update for DC Universe was finally coming.

One fidgety work day later and I was on my way home. I raced through the door and checked the PC. Yes, update complete!! Excited, I logged in and instantly noticed things were different. Logging in took about 10 seconds and my communicator had tasty new missions to run.

The first? Oracle had news that Catwoman had been spotted in Gotham and Willy the Snitch had the lowdown on her movements. And so the game was afoot. My first task was to track down the Feline Fatale herself; apparently Willy had heard she was seen in the Otisburg district of Gotham.

So off I flew to Otisburg and suddenly, my minimap lit up with dozens of green diamonds, signifying the presence of a vast battalion of heroes all searching for Ms Selina Kyle.

While it was fantastic to see the zone so busy with players, the only drawback was every time I got within a whisker of Catwoman, she had already spoken to a hero and then disappeared. After a few close calls, I managed to corner her and progress to the next stage of the mission.

Catwoman then tells you that the Gotham Museum has taken possession of some rare Egyptian Gems. Rare Egyptian Cat themed Gems at that. What is a girl to do? She promptly vanishes into the Gotham night and you are left to track her to the Museum and attempt to retrieve these cursed gems and rescue the hapless curators and guards that have been transformed by the artefacts.

These four gems have to be restored to the statues they belong to in order to break the curse and lift the spell. Queue four miniboss encounters and an army of Jaguar Warriors, Tiger Lords and Cheetah Ladies. Each of the bosses has their own gimmick; one releasing a vicious stun/knockdown, one with a nasty area of effect blast, and so on. One cute little touch was upon battling the Lion bestiamorphs you free a pack of Lion Cubs that then follow you around and assist as much as they can. If the adult cat people are guards and curators, I can only assume that there was a school field trip visiting the museum that got changed into the cubs. I certainly hope the parents red the waiver they signed to go on that field trip!

These fights do not really deviate much from the norm in DC Universe Online and I found them fairly easy to run through solo. Once you have defeated the bosses and restored the gems, Catwoman becomes possessed by the Cat spirits and, in a nice little touch, you must defeat her nine times to complete the encounter.

Finishing the battle and releasing Gotham’s premier cat-burglar from the thrall of the cat demons nets you a couple of Marks of Allegiance to purchase your Tier One armour and a few nice loot drops along the way.

There are also two new Collections to complete during this mission. One is an audio log from Catwoman describing some of the finest ‘trinkets’ she has purloined in the past. The other is by the Museum Director describing the history of the cursed gems. Completing both of these Collections nets you enough Feat reward points to get you well on the way to an additional Skill Point for your character.

Along with new content, two new armour types are also available for players. While I did not see any of this new armour drop in the missions and instances I ran today, I did hear from a League member (Guildy for you old school MMOers out there) That he had received to parts of the Cat Burglar outfit while roaming Gotham. While two new armour sets may not be a lot, all new clothing items are great to see and will help to add a little more personalisation and individuality to the populous of Dc Universe Online.

While the new content is more than welcome, I would have liked to see some more group specific missions added in this update. As I mentioned in one of my earlier features on DCUO, once you reach level 30, all the missions you have run previously in the game open up with higher level enemies and thus a ramped up difficulty curve. These level 30 missions are solo only and can be quite testing. Allowing groups to enter them would perhaps have given the game a little more of an MMO flavour, something DC Universe is still lacking, in my opinion.

There have been a few multiplayer additions in the February Issue of Content.
Booster Gold, that lovable rogue and the voice of the exploration missions early in the game, has fallen for the embodiment of love herself, the goddess Aphrodite.

He implores you to travel to The Temple of Aphrodite and involve yourself and three teammates in the battle between two avatars of Aphrodite; Scorn and Devotion.

Here you must collect hearts and defeat the enemy cherubs that will try to stop you. And for little fat guys in nappies, they are kinda tough.

Along with this four player mission a new Duo has been introduced as you and your sidekick take on the Venom enhanced monster that broke the Batman’s back, Bane.

Along with content, this update carried with it a hefty patch that has resolved many of the issues that plagued the heroes and villains battling it out on the streets of Gotham and Metropolis.

While the game certainly seemed to be running better after patching, I think I will withhold judgement on the effectiveness of the fixes until I have been in a few more successful instances.

RIFT: The Melting Pot MMO

By Nic van ‘t Schip, OnRPG Admin

A couple of weeks ago our very own Bryan spoke to Simon Ffinch, Design Director at Trion Worlds about RIFT. It’s a very informative interview with some solid information and I highly recommend you read it all but there is one particular topic I want to focus on in this preview:

OnRPG: As I’m sure your team is aware, some gamers are drawing upon similarities between your games and some of the other P2P MMOs out there, sometimes in a positive fashion, and sometimes not. Would you like to address these?

Rift is a fantasy MMO so comparisons are inevitable. Some of the designs we came up with are specifically tailored to be familiar to anyone who has played any number of MMOs out there. There are a lot of systems that players expect to see in MMOs these days, many of which are not particularly innovative but are required, a Bank, an Auction House and Vendors to name just a few. I know that I as a player, who has played a lot of MMOs in the past, appreciate it if when I need to interact with one of these systems I do not have to spend time learning a whole new method of interacting. I just want to do my business and move on to exploring the systems that are new and unique. Why make the player learn a whole new keyboard layout for well established functions for example. Sure we could have made it so you use T,F,G and H to move but we went with W,A,S,D. Why? Because it works and it works well, sure when you do this sort of thing players will make comparison and this is no surprise. But we think we have achieved a solid balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Using tried and true designs that go back a very long way for some of the more standard systems, polishing and improving a little if we felt it needed it. But keeping the main focus of our energies on what was new, the soul systems and the planar invasions.

After having played the Beta extensively over the past couple of days I can only agree wholeheartedly with mister Ffinch. Not only did they make the bold design decision to go with WASD for movement but they went a lot, and I do mean A LOT, further than that.

RIFT:  The Melting Pot MMO

Game options, in game windows such as tech trees, abilities, and in a sense the entire interface and the way you can configure it are all carbon copies from games like WoW, WAR and a ton of other games making it a melting pot of features. Want to drag a spell or ability to another spot on your quickbar? Hold shift and drag it. Want to find where the mailbox or your class trainer is hiding on the minimap? Use the very familiar tracker to display them. You get the point right?

In fact the macro system in RIFT goes a step further. As you would expect you type /macro and you’ll be presented with a very familiar interface that works exactly like the one in WoW. However the syntax of the macro scripting language is not entirely similar to that of World of Warcraft it will recognize the syntax and translate it to the proper one RIFT uses. So in other words: the game is so unapologetic about how similar it is to WoW that it will accept, and translate, your macros on the fly.

“Imitation is the sincerest of flattery” But improving is better!

The result of all this is after playing the game for a couple of hours and running into all of these familiar interfaces I realized I simply came to expect that other things would be familiar as well. At some point I decided to turn on auto-looting. Rather than wonder IF the game had such an option and where it would be I navigated through the options menu and flawlessly found the auto loot option exactly where I expected it to be.

But then something magical happened. After successfully fending off a ganking attempt by a couple of monsters I right clicked one of the corpses and instantly looted ALL the bodies at once. While borrowing these standard conventions from other MMOs Trion managed to not just blindly copy them, but vastly improve them on them in the process. Having to right click on a bunch of corpses after killing them to grab their loot is boring and RIFT lets me spend more time killing stuff, and less time clicking them after they died. Awesome!

Public Que… I mean RIFTS

The same can be said for the namesakes of the game, the RIFTS. Warhammer Online invented this particular wheel and called it Public Quests. We all remember them: quests that are shared with everyone in the same area that require a group to beat. While very clever and innovative there were a lot of issues with them in WAR. It turned out that you always had way too many people for them, making it so only a small part of the contributors would benefit from the rewards, or you didn’t have enough people for it, in which case no-one benefited.

RIFTs and the Planar Invasions are different: They only seem to appear if there are enough people in the area to beat them. And because everyone gets rewarded for beating them they are much more attractive to join up for. Trion saw what was good about Public Quests, and then improved upon them in every single way.

Originality is overrated

It’s a bold move by Trion. In an environment where innovation has been heralded as the only way to beat World of Warcraft they have dared to create a solid game with very little true innovation. Instead of trying to re-invent the wheel they picked the best wheels that the industry has created in the last couple of years and make them… eh… rounder.

What does this mean for the industry at large? WAR was bold, it wanted to take on WoW by doing things dramatically different and we all know how that worked out for them. The Old Republic seems to be on the same “We’re going to do things different” path and the same can certainly be said for Guild Wars 2.

RIFT isn’t different because Trion knows an MMO doesn’t need to be different to be successful. It needs to be good and polished. And let me tell you, RIFT is very good… and extremely polished!

The only thing that can go wrong with it at this stage is the endgame. As with all MMOs this is where us players will end up spending most of our time.

We’ll have a review of RIFT up shortly after it goes live next week.