A Quick Peak at DC Universe Online

So I joined another MMORPG. The last one I joined was Star Trek Online about a year ago.  This year I started DC Universe Online.

The bottom line is that DC Universe is a very different MMO than any of the ones I have played before.  The underlying mechanics for all the previous MMOs I have played were based on “turn based” combat. This one is more in sync with old FPS game play, even though it is not an FPS game.  The upshot is that the battles are fierce, fast and epic.  While I am not an expert, I’d say the combat in DCUO is the best I have ever seen in an MMO.  That plus excellent graphics, great voice work from real famous actors, great enemy AI, and a wide variety of mission types, makes DCUO a fantastic experience.

That being said, it is not perfect.  The last super hero themed MMORPG I played was City of Heroes, where I played an Assault Rifle / Device character up through level 50.  I decided to continue the tradition as a Dual Pistols / Gadgets hero in DCUO.  In comparing the two games, you quickly find the strengths and weaknesses of the two.

In CoH, player roles were well defined.  Tanks were tanks, controllers were controllers, Defenders defended.  In DCUO, no one really has a defined role.  They say there are defined roles but I don’t see it: Tank characters absorb a little bit more damage than others, Controllers avoid a little bit more damage than others, and healers can heal a little bit of the damage away.  The powers exist among all three types to handle any role you want.

The reason for all this is PvP.  In an effort to make sure there are no uber powerful builds that can dominate, everyone is essentially the same.  Most characters have ranged weapons that shoot, throw, fire out of your hands, or your mouth, or your eyes, or your head.  While they all look different, they all do more or less the same damage.  Every character can fight, and while pure melee characters have some additional area of effect tricks when taking on multiple enemies, in one-on-one combat, no one has an advantage.

The negative of all of this sameness is that there is little replay value. I may complete all missions with my dual pistol / gadgets / athletic hero, and turn around with a character that is the exact opposite, say a wand wielding sorcerer villain that flies, and will ultimately have the same experiences, employ the same fight strategies, etc.

Another thing CoH did right was make it easy to form teams for missions. They did this through a very flexible communication system and team finder system.  By comparison DCUO has an annoyingly weak comm system, and no team finder system. As a result, almost everybody plays solo, which is kind of sad for an MMO.

Controlling your character is also a weakness to DCUO, especially if you play on a PC. Many power moves are accessed by button pressing combos on a controller. On a PC, this is done with the left and right mouse button, for example:  hold right, hold right, tap left for a move.  This gets confusing, and if you are a person that creates many characters to play, remembering the key combos from character to character is confusing. Pressing F1 will give you a list of what you have, but this is impractical in the fast action combat in this game.  After getting 4 key dual pistol powers, I collect passive powers that boost my stats instead.  Despite this very bizarre way of controlling your character, it beats all to hell the monotonous button pressing I did in CoH and other Cryptic games like Star Trek Online (where I only played for about 2 months.)

Those complaints aside, none of which are bad enough to make me not want to play, I’m having a lot of fun battling villains in Gotham City and Metropolis, meeting all the great DC heroes and battling all the great DC Villains.

CoH: You can't always go back home again

This past week NCSoft celebrated the 5th anniversary of City of Heroes/Villains, Lineage II, and the 4th anniversary of Guild Wars by holding some events and allowing old players to come back for a free week of play.  I have played all three at one time or another, I decided to focus the free time on City of Heroes.

From May 2004-May 2005 I spent something like 900 hours moving my Assault rifle/Tactics hero (ArianeB) from level 1 to 50.  It was my first MMORPG and I really had a lot a fun and made a lot of friends.

After level 50, there was not much to do, I had a few other characters, but never got any past level 25.  Eventually, I got distracted by Guild Wars, and did not play CoH enough to justify the $15 a month fee and dropped it, reactivating from time to time when urges came back, but mostly I have not played much at all in over two years.

I thought I’d try it again during this free week. Paragon City brought back a lot of memories. Despite the lack of play in two years, I still know my way around the freeway system in Skyway  – like going back to a city you used to live in years ago.

But is it still as good as I remember it? Unfortunately no.

It is still a game about mashing keys in a certain order over and over again.  Team play is still a lot of fun, but individual play is no where near as fun as Guid Wars. Both CoH and GW have constantly added content, but the game play in CoH has not changed significantly in 5 years. The new content plays more or less like the old content.

The new content on Guild Wars has changed the game making it a lot more fun. Nightfall added Heroes, Eye of the North added global powers. There is a lot of variety in the missions and many of the best missions are replayable. There is also a lot of strategy built into succeeding in the game, not just repetitive key mashing.

Bottom line: Guild Wars has aged better than City of Heroes.

I think it is time to make a clean break and hang up the tights. CoH and CoV were fun adventures, but its time to retire and move on. Cryptic Studios, those responsible for the content of CoH, is working on Star Trek Online, while Arenanet is working on Guild Wars 2.  Both are a year or two away from release. I’m looking forward to both!

Dark Times for 3DVWs Part 1: Worlds Collide With NCSoft

This is the first of three “opinion” pieces I am writing about the future of 3D Virtual Worlds. I believe that ultimately the future looks bright, but we are at the beginning of a long overdue “shake up” that should finally separate myth from reality. Lets start with legal realities:

So one of the oldest but least successful MMO providers Worlds.com filed for patents of their 3D online technology back in 1995 and were awarded the patent finally in 2007. The two patents obtained were Scalable virtual world chat client-server system, and System and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space

During those intervening 12 years a multi billion dollar MMO industry has grown. Some of it based around the same technology patented by Worlds.com.

So earlier this year I saw an announcement that Worlds.com has retained a major patent rights law firm to represent them, and on Christmas Eve they filed their first suit against NCSoft, founded in 1997 two years after the original patent application.

According to Wired, NCSoft’s official statement in response: “We can’t comment on potential litigation except to say that NCsoft takes all legal action seriously — even if the company believes a lawsuit has no merit. We intend to defend ourselves vigorously.” (emphasis mine because it is funny)

I have not studied the patents, and do not know how broad or narrow they are or what they actually cover. I do know that in worlds.com programs, you pre-load all the shapes, textures, etc. and there is virtually no way to do custom textures and buildings etc. MMORPGs work just like worlds.com programs, hence they seem to be the first target.

NCSoft is the largest MMORPG producer in the world (yes bigger than Blizzard), producing Guild Wars, City of Heroes/Villains, Lineage 2, and the upcoming Aion. They were part of a landmark suit before. Marvel sued them over the ability of players in City of Heroes to create custom heroes that look like Marvel heroes. The suit ended amicably, with CoH game runners creating “Generic Heroes” of characters that potentially violate copyright.

Worlds.com lawsuit has far reaching implications. If Worlds.com wins, they could theoretically go after every producer of 3D online games, potentially killing the whole industry. You can bet there is a lot of support building for NCSoft to do everything in their power to invalidate the patents.

Two things can kill a patent: Prior art, and obviousness. The other defense is that the burden of proof of patent violation is on the patent holder.

Prior art can come in the form of older patents. Like this one. Or it could come in the form of 3D online games that existed prior to Worlds.com development. Obviousness is also an obstacle as the whole concept of 3D online games is a combination of Habitat (a 2D virtual world built by Lucasarts in 1985) and Doom (a 3D game that included multiplayer network play in 1993).

Then there is the burden of proof problem. The patents were based on technology developed in 1995. The technology around online game playing has changed radically in the 14 years since, and there are many ways to do the same thing. In a future posting I plan to compare the underlying structure of Second Life, There.com, Guild Wars, and World of Warcraft. The technology behind these four games is so radically different there is no way they can be compared as using the same technology except in a “look and feel” way.

While I do not know the ins and outs of patent law I do know technology. The whole paradigm of online game play changed radically in 1997 with Diablo. Blizzard offered online play for the successful desktop game and ran into a huge problem: cheaters.

Before 1997, the only thing online programs dealt with was communicating between players was position, movement, and chat. Everything else was handled by the player’s own computer. People soon figured out that by modding the game on their hard drive, they could do things that other players without the hacks could not.

The fix implemented by every online game that followed was for the game servers to keep track of everything. Hit a beast with a sword, the damage is calculated on the game server and the info is relayed to your computer to display the damage. Swing the sword again and another exchange between your game and the game servers is made. This keeps the game fair for all players. It also requires a very different conrol structure for online play, different than anything worlds.com has ever developed.

This lawsuit is do or die for worlds.com. Once the star of online gaming they have watched dozens of upstarts fly right past them. They have announced two new virtual world projects, but I bet they do not have the money to actually do them. They are counting on winning lawsuits to get them the capital to go on. Losing is likely a death sentence.

Good riddance I say.

I believe that all software patents are an abomination and should end!! Copyrights are fine, if another company is using art or code without permission, go after them. But NCSoft has built all of their games from the ground up. They are mirroring what everyone else is doing true, but they are doing their own thing. For Worlds.com to profit off the work of others because it is “similar” to what they did first, seems to me to be immoral.

But since when has law been equivalent to morality?

A trio of articles about legalities of virtual worlds:
The Rocky Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds, Part 1: Trademarks
The Rocky Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds, Part 2: Patents
The Rocky Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds, Part 3: Copyrights

Note: While Red Light Center was built by worlds.com, it is a seperate entity, and not part of the litigation.

Update: Case Has Been Settled!

Winter Solstice in the Metaverse

Twas the Day of Solstice and all through the net

Snow Colored Pixels on MMOGs they did set

Old Ascalon Covered in Wintry Delight

Inspired many to engage in a snowball fight

Then skating in SL at the Winterfest Inn

An axel, a flip, and even a spin

Then on to the ski lift, a ride to the top

For Heroes and Villains ski down the big drop

Lets do it again! Once is never enough!

But this time we’ll skinny ski in the buff

Laguna Beach winter looks more like Australia

But Christmas in There, hey what can I tell ya?

For Winter Solstice comes a visit from Santa

Who warms me up with a Flaming Banana

The daytime is short and so is this verse

Happy Holidays to all in the 3D Metaverse!

Bar Hopping in the Metaverse

Everybody needs a break now and then.

I mentioned a few posts before that the metaverse is becoming for many people the new “third place” where you can relax and unwind from home and work. Like the real world, it seems that bars and clubs are often the most popular venues.

So I decided to stop by a few of the virtual bars and clubs and just hang.

The virtual club experience consists of going to an area of the 3D world decorated like a club. You dress up your avatar, do sexy dance animation moves that are physically impossible in the real world, and everybody listens to the same streaming audio. This usually spurs conversation. The drinks are free but virtual.

Virtual clubs first started in Active Worlds. My first experiences were in The Sims Online where streaming audio didn’t exist so you had to open winamp and go to a URL that the DJ provided. They have become a requirement for any social game. Even the newest, Virtual Laguna Beach, has four of them.

Above is a bar scene in IMVU. Because there are no physical locations or events in IMVU it is tough to fill a bar with people. I’m hoping this changes once they get the bugs in chat cast ironed out.

Basically, The Lounge, consists of one big club. This game still has yet to really find any kind of an audience. Their last update though improved some animations and graphics. The fact that most all the avatars look like young teenagers tells you right away where the target audience is. Probably not my scene.

Red Light Center is a more mature audience, and for me anyways, the ONLY place worth visiting is Club Blu (sorry, I’m not into the porn theaters or sex palace scene). There is usually a small group of players here hanging out and dancing. It’s usually a friendly atmosphere, but the ratio of men to women is very lopsided right now.

I dont play City of Heroes much these days, but here is a file photo of a party on Pocket D. If you want to know what is going on these days here, just imagine the above picture without the people. Sometimes you can find stuff going on in Pocket Zero (the only neutral place where City of Heroes meets City of Villains), but the biggest party atmosphere location in City of Heroes is probably right outside Atlas Hall.

Almost every MMORPG has its places to hang out, and it is usually where the newbies hang out, or in front of some big quest starting place where people try and get on a good team. Every single one of them have dance animations that people like to play when they are just hanging around waiting on the rest of the team.

Back at my old stomping grounds There.com. It has a lot of great club settings: The Inferno, Club Bali, Oro Lounge, The Cannery, Aero Lounge, etc. They are unfortunately rarely used. Best bet here is to go and see when and where events are scheduled. House parties are still a regular activity in There.

Welcome to Bad Girls, the most popular club in Second Life. Always a big crowd, and always a live DJ, 24 hours a day every day. Second life has many popular clubs, and the best ones are the ones on private sims: Bad Girls, The Edge, Hot Licks, Studio 54, Club Vixens. The atmosphere in each is different, and when the crowds get big, they get very laggy.

I guess like real life, sometimes the bar scene is great, sometimes it is just boring and sad. It all depends on your attitude and friends you tag along with.

Couple Meets in Paragon City

A couple of friends of mine from City of Heroes got married on Tuesday June 6th and the odd way they met got a good write up in the Wall Street Journal. http://tinyurl.com/kqyxf