A Quick Peek at Guild Wars 2

There are a lot of MMORPGs out there.  Three new major ones are coming out this summer Guild Wars 2, The Secret World, and TERA.  They all claim to be very different from the MMORPGs that came before.  I cannot tell you if that is true of the latter two, but with Guild Wars 2, it is very true.

I’m a long time player of Guild Wars, and have written about it some on this blog.  I wasn’t sure what to expect with GW2. I heard it was radically different from Guild Wars and it is.  Except for the lore, the beautiful scenery, and the fact you are only limited to a few powers at a time,  GW1 and GW2 have very little in common.  There are too many differences to discuss, and other people have already.  So I’ll just focus on my own experience.

This beta weekend, they only had 3 of the 5 races to choose from.  Humans (which is the only playable race in GW1), Narns (which are just taller and more tattooed versions of Humans), and Charr.  Looking for something completely different, the first character I created was a Charr.  The character creator part seems to be broken for the Charr, but I rolled a female Engineer. After a brief introductory cut scene, I was handed a pistol and thrown out on a mission with dozens of other players fighting off dozens of bad guys.  No wandering around looking for NPCs to give you tutorials before you finally get to kill some lowly level one skale, like the first few minutes of GW1.  In GW2, you are handed a weapon then thrown into a battle.

The thing I least like about most MMORPGs is the repetitive button pushing:  Push button 1 then 2 then 3 then 4, then back to 1 then 2 then 3 then 5 because 4 is still recharging, then heal yourself by pushing button 6, then repeat.  GW1 has a lot less of that because once a bad guy is targeted, your character will continue to fire the weapon until the creature is dead, or until you stop it. You only push buttons for additional skills.  GW2 does the same thing, only you push the 1 button instead of the space bar to fire (the space bar is now the jump button, there was no jumping in GW1).  Not only that GW2 allows you to fight while moving.  No more just standing there and firing like in some 19th century battlefield, you get to use guerrilla tactics, if you can figure out how.

Also gone are the old “Go to NPC, get mission, run a long ways to mission, do it, run along ways back to NPC” time sinks.  The mission giving NPCs are right where the mission takes place, and you get credit and rewarded upon completion immediately.  But that is not all.  As you travel from place to place, there are “event” missions randomly starting up around you.  These have big rewards, involve a lot of players in the area, and are usually a lot of fun.  Even though GW2 is mostly played in an open environment, things like kill stealing and reward grabbing do not happen. Everyone who helps in a kill or a mission gets credit and is similarly rewarded.

The level at which you play at also varies by where you are.  I was doing a neglected low level mission, and noticed my hard earned 700 hit points were reduced to around 500.  Because I was playing a level 3 mission, my character was lowered temporarily to a level 3 player.  That might seem bad, but it means you play all missions at the level they were designed for and everyone in the area who is doing the same mission is on a level playing field.  No more taking your level 20 Krytan character to Ascalon to do The Northern Wall mission designed for level 5 and having it feel way too easy.

Underwater combat is fun, though this weekend did not have much of it.  When the full game comes out there is supposed to be a whole continents of underwater content.  When I discovered the underwater stuff, I was playing a ranger with a cat for a companion.  The cat was not very happy with the underwater swimming, but I found an amphibious drake to train.  When I’m above ground, I can use my trusty bow and cat companion.  Underwater I have a harpoon and drake companion, and a breather so I can stay down as long as I don’t take too much damage.

Probably the biggest change between GW1 and GW2 is character development.  Like GW1, there are multiple professions, each with their own unique talents.  In GW2, there are no secondary professions.  Instead, character variation is done by choice of weapons.  I always liked the longbow, which is a Ranger weapon.  In GW1, any character could wield a longbow by taking ranger as a second profession, but they usually weren’t very good at it.  In GW2, Warriors can use longbows natively, and they have a unique skill set when they do.  I’m not a fan of melee combat, but now that I can build a Warrior with strong armor and give the Warrior a longbow (or a Rifle) and have it do ranged combat, well that is just awesome.  A thief can act like an assassin with two daggers, or like Lara Croft with two pistols.  However you want to play.

Beta weekend is all about trying stuff out and enjoying the beautiful scenery.  Knowing full well that any characters I create will just get erased after this weekend, I did not concentrate on building any up.  I’d play the early levels, then roll a new character, trying all the professions and races.  At the early levels, Ranger is the most fun, but I suspect that will change at the later levels.  Engineers are kind of boring until they get turret access, light armored professions are a bit squishy.

Death in GW2 still needs work.  You can try to revive yourself, but if you succeed, you are often one shot killed rather quickly.  Players can all revive each other, so if you do die where other players are, hopefully they will help you up.  If you don’t want to wait, you can teleport to any wayport you have been to before, but that costs in game gold.  Death penalty, like many other games, involves armor damage which costs game gold to repair (and if you don’t repair it, eventually your character will start running around in their underwear). In other words, dying will cost you.  The death penalty in GW1 was a reduction in max health and energy that went away at the next village you went to.  I kind of like the GW1 version better, but it will not work in GW2 because towns do not work the same way.

Beta bugs aside, Guild Wars 2 is an awesome new MMORPG that is perfect for the MMORPG fan who is tired of the same recycled D&D/WoW model of game play.  Looking forward to the full release.

Book Review: “Ready Player One”

So far I have only done one book review on this blog.  I read more than that of course, I just stick to talking about books that echo the themes of this blog.  The novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline does just that.

Ready Player One is one of the latest young adult dystopian books, though not as sick and twisted as the highly overrated Hunger Games.  It is set in the 2040′s when gas is so scarce that everyone abandons the suburbs for the big cities, but the cities don’t have room.  Oklahoma City comes up with the idea to build highrise trailer parks.  The books protagonist 17 year old Wade lives in the laundry room of a double wide, occupied by his aunt, her latest boyfriend, and two other families.

But Wade spends most of his time hiding in an abandoned van in a junk yard which he powers with a bicycle powered generator.  He jacks into a 3D Virtual World called OASIS, which thanks to technology allowing thousands of players to play in an area lag free, OASIS has become the 3D internet.  Wade attends a virtual high school, getting a better education than he would in an overcrowded school he lives in.

You can probably understand why I like this book so much.  The world is very similar to Snow Crash in that there are two worlds, a dystopian stink hole called the real world, and a utopian paradise everyone prefers to live in.  Ready Player One has a distinct advantage over Snow Crash, however, 20 years of hindsight.  Many of the conceptual ideas of the “Metaverse” in Snow Crash seem rather dumb with today’s technology.  OASIS, on the other hand, seems plausible if you take today’s technology and project it forward three decades.

A major theme of the book is the difference between the online world and the real world.  Our avatar personification vs. who we really are; Living in a fantasy world vs. dealing with the real world.  I have delved deeper than the novel has on these topics, but the novel does a good job dealing with them.

The central plot involves the creator of OASIS, a game designer turned multibillionaire  who upon his death wills nearly the entirety of his estate, including control of OASIS to whoever can solve the hidden puzzle he left behind hidden somewhere in the OASIS world.

With such a huge prize everyone goes out looking for it, but the puzzle is so well hidden, that 5 years go by before anyone manages to discover the beginning of the puzzle (which has 6 parts, 3 keys and 3 gates).  The person who discovers it is Wade.

I have mentioned a couple of times how different the world will get once energy starts to get scarce, and how gaming will become a welcome escape from that reality.  Here is a book that echoes that theme in a very entertaining way.

There is another interesting part I have yet to mention.  It seems that the mad gaming designer grew up during the 1980′s, and is obsessed with the books, games, comics, music and movies of that decade.  Solving the central puzzle requires expert knowledge of this material, and the players dedicated to solving the puzzle have to become experts on the 1980′s pop culture.  Lots of this novel is filled with references to  the ’80s.  Being someone who grew up in the 80′s as well, I got all the references and knew all the songs referenced in the novel.

This unfortunately may be the biggest negative of the book, there is too much 80′s references which are likely to get lost on kids who grew up in later decades.  Since this is a “young adult” novel aimed at teen audiences, I’m not sure how well it will go over with the target audience.  But it did go over well with me.  Ernest Cline created an “official soundtrack” here if you want to hear many of the songs referenced in the novel.  You might also want to familiarize yourself with the movies WarGames, Ladyhawke, Blade Runner, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail if you don’t already know them (If you don’t then shame on you, they are classics).  There are major references to the games Pac Man, Tempest, Joust, Adventure, Black Tiger, Dungeons of Daggorath and Zork, too.

Since this book seems like it was written specifically for me, I ran through it in a few days time.  General audiences may not be as well versed in these subjects as I am, though the author does spend a lot of time explaining things for the general reader’s benefit (mostly unnecessary in my case).

The book is currently available hard copy and e-book via links at the Official Site, paperback and cheaper e-books coming in June.

3D Virtual World News and a Quick Peak at NuVera

Time to look around the smaller 3D Virtual Worlds and see whats happening.

First up is news from back in January I failed to hear about until recently.  Blue Mars has apparently stopped development of the PC client, which essentially means the beginning of the end of that world.  As I pointed out before when I reviewed Blue Mars to begin with, the real promise of the world is a gaming platform in a common world.  What I believe really dragged the world down was the push to turn Blue Mars into another Second Life.  There was a lot more promise in making games on the CryEngine2 platform and allowing common avatars to jump from game to game, but somehow that direction never really got developed.

Instead what we got is an iphone app, and in the transition it lost its virtual worldliness.  Its a free app for avatar building and sharing your avatar with your friends, and 3D chatting.  Instead of chasing Second Life, they are now chasing IMVU.

I got the app for my ipod touch and discovered that my PC login worked, and my avatar moved to the ipod just fine.  I just do not find the app to be that interesting.  I’m not holding out a lot of hope for the new direction.  It works as a novelty, but I do not see any long term success.

The PC version still works, and the various cities are still open, but who knows for how long?  I would not be surprised if the plug is pulled on the PC virtual world by years end.  With CryEngine3 SDK being released for free, Blue Mars’s advantage as a game platform disappears.

Ah well, not all metaverse experiments are destined to succeed.

Onverse Marketing

And speaking of metaverse experiments, a booth at the local mall caught my eye.  I took a picture of it with my ipod.

Yes it is a booth promoting Onverse.com, one of the many 3D Virtual Worlds I have played around in.

To see a booth dedicated to promoting a virtual world at a gaming convention is not  uncommon, but to see one at a shopping mall, is very uncommon.  Onverse is based out of Tempe, Arizona where this booth happens to be.  Probably the only one around anywhere.  The few times I went by there was no one manning the booth, just a promotional video playing on a loop and four computers with the game running on them.  Interesting marketing strategy anyways.  I believe I mentioned in my Onverse review from a year ago, that the world is built by five guys working out of a garage.

A Quick Peak at Nuvera Online

NuVera Online can beat that, though.  The development team consists of a couple of people working in a bedroom.

I only recently found out that the program went open beta last fall.  (I used to be so up to date on these things, now months behind).  NuVera Online is marketing themselves as an adult oriented virtual world, but not in a porn way like Utherverse, more like in a no kids allowed so the adults can hang out kind of way.

Whenever I review a new 3D virtual world that still labeling itself as beta, I do not like to focus on glaring bugs that will likely get fixed eventually.  But the bug I encountered as I launched the world for the first time is too funny not to mention.

Just to show you there is still some work to be done on Nuvera, I signed up for an account (I’m Ariane there too), downloaded the client and logged in for the first time. As I was loading, I get a message “Asset not available” and it did not explain what asset.  Then when everything loads, I see this:

As you can see I loaded up not wearing pants (and yes the avatars are anatomically correct, at least the female ones), and when I attempted to put some pants on, I get “No owned products of this type”.  Yes that is one way to get me out of my pants… don’t give me any.

Luckily, I was in my free apartment where nudity is allowed.  I tried to get to “Tutorial Island” but it would not let me go to a public location without pants on.  A couple minutes passed before the freebie starter pants finally showed up.  Once I put them on, I was allowed to travel and try out the tutorial, where I learned how to change my avatars clothes. (Thanks guys, I think I figured that out on my own.)

NuVera Online is designed to be a player built world.  For $15 you can become a developer and submit textures or 3D models into the world, then sell them for profit.  With only two people building the program, they are likely going to rely heavily on player created content.  This was the founding philosophy of Second Life and it worked out for them eventually.  NuVera hopes to make money in the virtual real estate business.

I bet they at least do better than Blue Mars has.

Reality Is Broken: A Book Review

I have never actually done a book review before on this blog, but my previous two blogs I did them all the time.  After reading Reality is Broken, I felt compelled to write a full formal review, as its contents are perfect fodder for this blog.  In fact there is enough here to fill a good half a dozen blog posts, but then why would you need to read the book?  So for now here is a brief introduction to the themes and ideas contained.

Reality is Broken is a new book by first time author Jane McGonigal, a professional game designer.   She starts off quoting economist Edward Castronova, who said “We’re witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments.”, then goes on to quote some amazing stats like, the total amount time spent in World of Warcraft by all players adds up to 5.8 million years, and 500 million people spend at least an hour a day in online games for a total of 3 billion hours a week, and the average child will spend over 10,000 hours playing video games before the age of 21, the same amount of time they spend in school from 5th grade to 12th grade.

While many people react negatively to such huge numbers, considering it a waste of time.  McGonigal insists that it is not enough, that we should have more people playing online gaming.  She believes the world is better off with more gamers.  Being a fan of ideas that defy conventional wisdom (as my last two essays demonstrate), I had to find out more.  I have a hard time figuring out if Reality is Broken is a book about games disguised as a book about social issues, or a book about social issues disguised as a book about games.  I guess if you are librarian trying to figure out where to put the book, this would matter, but for us average readers it does not.

There are basically three themes to this book.  The first is the one that resonates the most for me:  Games make us happy.

The emotional impact of games is something game designers are very interested in, and spend a lot of money researching, so it is no surprise that many modern video games are designed with making players happy.  Consider what I wrote about last week in regards to “finding a purpose” to our lives. The four types of purposes that bring us meaning and lasting happiness:

• We crave “satisfying work” or being immersed in clearly defined, demanding activities that allow us to see the direct impact of our efforts.
• We crave the “hope of success”, which is more powerful than the actual success.  We want to be optimistic about our chances for success in our endeavors, and even if we fail, we at least want to improve over time.
• We crave social connections, share experiences and build bonds with others.  We most often accomplish this by doing things that matter together.
• We crave meaning, or the chance to be part of something larger than ourselves.  We want to feel curious, awe, and wonder about things that unfold on epic scales.

Now consider these four categories of “purpose” in the context of playing video games.  Almost all games can hit 2 or 3 of those, and the MMORPG can hit all four categories.  From a positive psychologists stand point, gamers are some of the happiest people on the planet.

I know what some of you are thinking.  Is the happiness you get playing in virtual worlds just virtual happiness? frivolous, fleeting and temporary?  No, not according positive psychologists.  Dan Gilbert himself says there is no discernible difference between synthesized happiness and real happiness.

Which leads to the second theme of the book: Gamers are escaping from a broken reality.  McGonigal list 14 ways that gaming worlds are superior to real worlds.  She is not talking specifically about online video games at this point, but many different kinds of games that help us deal with reality.  The majority of the book is about these 14 “Reality Fixes”, and as she goes through each one she discusses two or three different games or gaming systems that encourage these reality fixes.  She discusses dozens of different games, some I am familiar with, some I’d love to play, and some I do not.

Anyone looking into game design should read the book if nothing else than for the various ideas that are likely to come to mind while reading.  I came up with an idea myself while reading, and have gone as far as researching some special programming I would need to do to get it to work.  More on that later, maybe.

And finally the third theme: Games can save the world, and gamers are our best resource to do just that.

Games can, and have been designed to help us focus on real world issues.  McGonigal is a game designer who works primarily on a category of games know as Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, which are designed to form communities and tackle problems, primarily problems created by the game authors, but they can also tackle real world problems like “peak oil” which I discussed 2 posts ago.   In 2007, McGonigal was part of a design team for an experimental ARG called World Without Oil.  The original 1,900 players from all walks of life did not find any solutions, but came away mostly optimistic that people can come together in a crisis and adjust their lifestyles to fit new realities.  Since then McGonigal has been part of other socially conscious ARGs, and is confident that games like this can one day change the world.  But in order to make these world changing games to work, we need gifted people to play them.  Enter the “gamers”.

She discusses the fact that more than half of the students today spend 10,000 hours playing games before they turn 21.  That by definition, that makes them “virtuosos” at gaming.  The biggest question is what are all these “virtuosos” capable of?  She breaks down 4 qualities that long time gamers possess: 1. Blissful productivity — the understanding that happiness comes from hard work and not from passive activities like watching TV.  2. Urgent optimism — the desire to tackle an obstacle combined with the belief that there is a reasonable hope of success, or desiring the “epic win”.  3. Social fabric — the ability to form tight communities built on trust, like guilds.   4. Epic meaning — the desire to be part of something bigger than themselves, even if that bigger thing may just be fictional.  Notice that these four qualities correspond to the four “categories of purpose” listed above.

McGongal’s goal is to find a way to focus the talents inherent in gamers to tackle the problems the world face today and “fix reality”.

If you are interested in these ideas, but not up to spending $14 on the e-book, you can get a 20 minute summary from her speech at ted.com, or there is also a website realityisbroken.org you can read, or sign up to find out about the latest world changing ARG games.

Is it true?

I have not decided how true the thesis is.   Being a gamer, an amateur game designer, and a participant in ARGs, I at least understand the thesis.  I want to believe the thesis is true, but understanding the worlds problems and finding solutions is unfortunately a fraction of the problem.  Experience is that all new ideas that diverge from the “business as usual” tends to face overwhelming political opposition no matter how good or true they are.  The corporate powers that be seem to think that video games are a form of soma to pacify the masses into complacency, and I am not sure that they are wrong.

At the very least I accept the first theme: Games do make us happy, and I mostly accept the second theme: Games are an escape from reality.  I constantly hear complaints from politicians that video games are too violent and inspire more violence.  The evidence is not there to back that up.  As games have gotten more popular, violent crime has gone down, not up.  Places where sex games are common, like Japan, have actually seen a reduction of sex related crimes.  Maybe sex games should be more popular everywhere.  In these respects games have already changed the world for the better.

But there is another way that games can change the world and it is outlined in my last three blog posts.  From The Energy Situation, I pointed out that we are quickly running out of resources needed to grow the economy.  From Happiness 102 I pointed out that materialism, the driving force behind the running out of resources, does not really bring us happiness anyways.  And finally with Reality is Broken we learn one activity, gaming, can be a real source of happiness.  While gaming is not always a carbon neutral activity, it can be.  Thus gaming is a way to reduce our need for diminishing resources while still making life livable. Oddly, I previously posted this idea before.

But it is important to keep all of this in balance.  McGonigal concludes her book:

Reality is too easy. Reality is depressing. It is unproductive, and hopeless. It is disconnected, and trivial. It’s hard to get into. It’s pointless, unrewarding, lonely, and isolating. It’s hard to swallow. It’s unsustainable. it’s disorganized and divided. It’s stuck in the present.

Reality is all of these things. But in  at least one crucially important way, reality is also better. Reality is our destiny. This is why our single most urgent mission in life is to engage with reality, as fully and as deeply as we can.

That does not mean we can’t play games. It simply means that we have to stop thinking of games as only escapist entertainment.

Good games can play an important role in improving our real quality of life. They support social cooperation and civic participation at very big scales. And they help us lead more sustainable lives and become a more resilient species.

Games don’t distract us from our real lives. they fill our real lives: with positive emotions, positive activity, positive experiences, and positive strengths.

Games aren’t leading us to the downfall of human civilization. They are leading us to its reinvention.

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.

Open Sim Grids

In my last post, I decided to venture in to the untamed islands on the frontier of the Metaverse: The Open Sim Grids.  Today I introduce 4 good grids to start out on, and I will introduce others in the weeks ahead.

A few basics about Open Sim.  Open Sim is to Second Life, what Apache is to IIS.  Both are internet server software that work with a common client.  To the casual visitor they will seem to be the same, but there are underlying differences that will show up when you are building. Open Sim for example does not support vehicles, but does allows prims bigger than 10 meters per side.

If you are used to Second Life, you will find Open Sim grids to be very similar, and you can even use your Second Life program to connect to these Open Sim programs by adding ‘-loginuri’ and the grid web address on the client shortcut target.  The Second Life client was released as open source under the GPL, allowing programmers to play with the code.  The Second Life server was not released as open source, though it is for sale by Linden Labs.  Open Sim is a freeware open source program that works in tandem with the Second Life client. It was built from scratch and released under BSD, and shares no copyrighted code with the Second Life Server, meaning Linden Labs has no control over Open Sims.  So far Linden Labs has fully supported the Open Sim grids, but even if they stopped supporting them, Open Sims can still continue to operate legally.  The upshot is, if Second Life were to suddenly close down like There or Vivaty did in the last month, the Open Sim grids would still be around.  Its a safe bet that as long as there is an internet there will be Open Sim grids available to play in (in the same way that text based MUDs have been around for over 30 years).

Despite the number of grids being more then 300, the total combined regions, players, and traffic on these grids is considerably lower than Second Life.  Second Life is more than twice as big as all the Open Sim regions combined.  The people that run these grids do not always have the resources to make sure the grids are stable and always online, so sometimes logging in is a problem.  Inventory can suddenly disappear as well occasionally.  Luckily its all free.

Before you begin, you are probably going to want to get a dedicated client.  The Hippo Viewer is designed primarily for Open Sim use, and allows you to log in automatically to many different grids.  Decide on a name as well and use it on each grid.  I am Ariane Barnes on all of these grids. A common name makes switching grids easier.

You may notice that I am wearing nearly the same thing in each picture.  These are the nicest hair and clothes I have available in my Second Inventory program to upload.  When you first join these Open Sims, you will look like “Ruth”, as they call the default avatar.  All of these grids have freebie avatars available if you don’t have your own hair, skin, or clothing textures to upload.  Second Inventory allows you to move stuff that is free and full perm or stuff that you made yourself to other grids, but the program itself is not free. There are free and legal ways to move inventory between Open Sim grids by “hypergridding” but that is a topic for later.

The four Open Sim grids I have chosen to post about first are all free, all allow free uploads (textures, animations etc.),  have free sandboxes that allow Second Inventory uploads,  and all have English as a primary language.  These four also are representative of many different kinds of grids out there.

Inworldz
Website: http://inworldz.com/
Account Registration:  http://inworldz.com/register.php
Login URI:  http://inworldz.com:8002/ (in Hippo Viewer you will have to add this to the grid list)

Inworldz is the smallest of the grids I am visiting. I picked this one first as it is the most SL like. They host some mainland regions as well as offer private grids at considerably lower than SL costs. They also have their own in world currency the Iz exchangeable at $1 = 500 Iz.  Inworldz reminds me of SL as it once was: small, friendly, and very experimental. Its a place to build and play, and hang out in the welcome center and chat.  The picture above was taken at the Inworldz welcome center.

OSGrid
Website:  http://www.osgrid.org/elgg/
Account Registration: http://www.osgrid.org/elgg/account/register.php
Login URI: http://osgrid.org:8002/

OSGrid is by far the largest of the Open Sim grids, it is sort of the closest thing there is to an “official” Open Sim grid, though there really isn’t such a thing. OSGrid.org is a non-profit organization and maintains a small core of regions and the grids main asset servers via donations. They do not sell or rent space.  Instead, they provide a service where you can attach your own private region up to the  grid for free if you have your own web server.  I have seen hosting services offer your own private OS region hooked up to the OSGrid for as cheap as $15 a month.  Dedicated core regions with 15,000 prims can be obtained for $30 a month with no initial setup costs.  A real bargain!

The downside is that the OSGrid is made up of hundreds of different providers, including many regions hosted on home computers connected with home broadband.  No telling what regions are up or down at any given time, and no central authority to go to for troubleshooting, or reporting bad behavior of other players.  It is very close to a 3D internet in that regards.  No central authority also means no central economy. Sales of in world items are done through PayPal usually.

Reaction Grid
Website: http://reactiongrid.com/
Account Registration: http://reactiongrid.com/Register.aspx
Login URI: http://reactiongrid.com:8008/ (in Hippo Viewer you will have to add this to the grid list)

Reaction Grid is a PG rated business friendly grid designed to be a place to host company meetings and conferences.  It is also used by schools and colleges for online courses in a 3D environment, which means you can expect to run into student created builds as you explore.  Many companies and colleges that used to be in SL have moved here for budget reasons.  Like OSGrid, Reaction Grid allows independently hosted grids (meaning there is no in world economy), but unlike OSGrid, Reaction Grid maintains some control over the grid so they can troubleshoot problems.  Reaction Grid has a good reputation as a result and an impressive list of clients.

New World Grid
Website: http://www.newworldgrid.com/
Account Registration: http://www.newworldgrid.com/lang/en-us/register/account
Login URI:  http://grid.newworldgrid.com:8002/

New World Grid is an artistic community sponsored by multiple non profit charities based in England, France, and Canada.  The primary one being Virtus France.  The grid is completely bilingual, everything labeled in English and French.  There is no in world economy, but because it is primarily an artist community, there are lots of freebies to be found.  Some lands are rentable, but you can also petition for a free land grant if you have something worthwhile to build and share with the community.  The latest addition was a region dedicated to “Life After There” for former therians.  If you go there, an incomplete Saja like platform hovers in the sky.

I include this grid as a good example of the majority of the grids out there.  Most of the grids I researched have a primary language other than English, providing a 3D multiplayer environment for people that speak something other than English.  There are at least 4 grids for German speakers, and they are working out a common currency between them. I have also seen Spanish, Italian, Korean, Japanese, and Portuguese grids, probably others.

There are many more grids out there to explore.  The grid list maintained at OpenSimulator.org is unfortunately out of date, with a lot of closed grids.  I have a list of 30 grids known to work on my 3D Virtual Worlds page (under the RealXtend / Open Sim Project section). This page lists 40 grids, with a note that there are over 300.

The next few posts will also be about Open Sim.  Next, I will revisit setting up your own private grid (it keeps getting easier) with links to free content, then take a tour of a couple of really impressive private grids, then walk through the hypergrid process which shows promise to join all the grids together in a single 3D world wide web.

A Quick Peek at Onverse

With the collapse of There.com, a lot of former Thereans are now virtual homeless.  Many members of There avoid Second Life for various reasons, so they have been visiting many other worlds.  One that is getting a lot of buzz among the ex-There people is a little known virtual world called Onverse.  And for good reason, Onverse is probably the 3D virtual world most like There.  You won’t find vehicles, but you find cartoon avatars, houses to decorate, There like environments to explore, and social events with decent sized crowds to hang out in.  So I decided to take a closer look at Onverse.

There are basically two strategies in business. Go big, and try to be everything to everyone, or go small and cater to a small audience. Part of the go small strategy is to get by with as little overhead as possible, and rely on word of mouth advertising.

Onverse is definitely in that small category. The company consists of five guys working out of a garage in Tempe Arizona, a town I am very familiar with (Google Lively was also based out of Tempe before it closed down).  It also seems to have only a small advertising budget relying on word of mouth advertising.

They have been around almost a year and they have seen quite a bit of growth.  When I first logged in last June, there were very few people, a typical result with most new worlds I visit.  Since then the number of people I see keeps getting bigger, the environments have more and more instances, it has become a small and busy place.

Onverse is not limited to PC, it runs on Mac and even Linux.  The graphics are simple and cartoon like, designed to work on any computer.  Possibly even a phone app in the future.  Basically it can run on anything, and probably works just fine on a dialup modem, assuming you want to wait for the large download.  All the graphics in the game are pre-loaded in the client, meaning there is no graphics lag, but you will have to occasionally update your client whenever new items are added to the game.

The disadvantage is that there is no user created content.  You can customize your avatar and you can get a free apartment to customize too, but you can’t create your own clothes or items due to restrictions of the Torque engine.  This will no doubt limit the appeal of the virtual world to many.  Another limiting appeal might be the strange looking avatars.  They are definitely of the cartoon variety and the customization is a little limited.

On the upside, the virtual world is family friendly, and very easy to use.  Onverse has one of the best tutorial areas I have seen in a 3D virtual world.  By the end of the tutorial section you will know all that you need to know. The interface is simple and uses the normal keyboard and mouse controls you probably used in other programs.

Bottom line, Onverse is a small virtual world that won’t appeal to everybody, but it should find an audience that likes the cartoon look and feel.  Kids and young teens, especially young girls, will likely enjoy the environment and social activities the most, but it is appealing enough for all ages to check out.

A Quick Peek at Star Trek Online

Early next month the long awaited, much anticipated release of Star Trek Online will finally happen.

The good news is that this is probably the best Star Trek game ever, but as anyone who has played Star Trek games will tell you, that’s not saying much.

38 years ago there was a game of Star Trek that was played on big mainframe computers where you had your ship with x,y coordinates and star systems with their own x,y coordinates.  The object of the game was to jump from star system to star system using your warp drive to find Klingons.  In each star system you would use Phasers to do some damage, but photon torpedoes did the most damage,  You then has to use impulse engines and shields to avoid getting destroyed by the Klingons. This was all text based. To move and fire, you had to convert x,y coordinates to polar coordinates in your head. The game was hugely popular back in the 70′s with anyone who had access to a computer. Ports were made for pretty much every single computer out there.

10 years later the first arcade version came out. Gone was the figuring out cartesian coordinates to polar coordinate, replaced by a joystick. The object of the game was to jump from star system to star system using your warp drive to find Klingons.  In each star system you would use Phasers to do some damage, but photon torpedoes did the most damage,  You then has to use impulse engines and shields to avoid getting destroyed by the Klingons.

28 years later we have Star Trek Online.  The object of the game is to jump from star system to star system using your warp drive to find Klingons.  In each star system you use Phasers to do some damage, but photon torpedoes do the most damage,  You then have to use impulse engines and shields to avoid getting destroyed by the Klingons. Its a little more involved than that now actually, its not just the Klingons anymore.

So what has changed in 38 years?  The graphics are way better, though since it took so long for this game to come out, the graphics are not top of the line.  Five years ago when the game was originally drafted (about 2 owners ago), the graphics would be considered “cutting edge”, but today they are “decent enough”.

The game itself is interesting. There are various kinds of missions besides search and destroy, though in the end, they all kind of feel like search and destroy missions.  There are landing party missions, some in mapped out “dungeons” with enemies to fight along the way, some in open environments with non shooting things objectives.

Part of me wishes there was more of the latter. The biggest negative of the game is the monotonous combat, which unfortunately will take up around 70% of your play time.  Another 20% is sitting around watching your ship “warp” as it navigates a 3D star chart, which could just have easily been a 2D chart.  I almost wish I could go back to the days of typing in polar coordinates for this part if it would allow me to travel faster.

The last 10% is exploring new places, which is the part I most enjoy.

This being an MMORPG, a lot of the combat happens in groups.  There is a system in place to generate groups automatically if people just happen to be in the same system at the same time.  Group combat is less tedious than individual combat, but as you get further in the game these auto grouping events seem to happen less and less, and unless you are willing to spend a lot of time in group chat waiting for a team to form, you are probably going to be playing solo a lot.

So what can I say about the combat?  If you played City of Heroes, City of Villains or Champions Online, then you have seen the combat system of Star Trek Online.  It makes me want to tie Jack Emmert (the lead design guy at Cryptic Studios) to a chair and force him to play Guild Wars or better yet Dragon Age: Origins, and say:

“You see Jack, this is how combat should be done.  Repeatedly pressing a button over and over to fire a weapon, or swing a sword, is boring and monotonous.  What is a lot more fun is to select an enemy and let the computer handle the monotonous battle moves, while you engage special skills/talents/magic etc. to CONTROL the battle.  The battles become much more interesting this way, much more involving, and doesn’t ruin your keyboard or lead to wrist damage.”

It is because of this annoying combat system, that I have no desire to play this game long term.  I will not become a lifetime member, or subscribe a year in advance, despite good deals being offered.  I’ll probably just pay to play when I’m in the mood until I’m sick of it.

Or better yet, I’ll move to Mass Effect 2, until the new Star Wars Online shows up.

A Quick Peak at Dragon Age: Origins

With Guild Wars 2 looking at a 2011 date, I decided to quench my craving for new fantasy gaming content with a desktop based RPG game, the new Dragon Age Origins, which just launched last month.

I have played a few MMORPGs, but this is my first PC-RPG and it is quite the experience. There are advantages to desktop RPGs that you don’t get online. The obvious one is cheat codes, game mods, etc. If you get stuck somewhere these are options.

MMORPG requires eveything be balanced, while PC-RPGs actually thrive on imbalance. Finding power combos (like taunt and forcefield) that are way over powered aren’t going to get nerfed in the next update. It sets up a choice whether you want to go the easy way or the “pure” way, as nobody gets hurt from your “cheating”.

The biggest difference is the storytelling possibilities. MMORPGs have linear storylines which occasionally branch but eventually re-merge. PC-RPGs can be very complex, and because enemy difficulty can change along with the player there is no need for easy regions or hard regions. The path you take is fairly open.

The NPC’s have complex personalities, and keeping good relations with them is a part of the game. Some of them will even quit your group if you make decisions they are upset with. On the other hand, some can develop into sexual relationships. (One of the reasons why the game is rated M).

The first thing that amazed me was the first big battle cut scene. Hundreds of characters on the screen at the same time is something I have never seen in a video game before. Most “battles” I see are maybe 12 characters fighting 12 enemies, more of a skirmish than a battle. To see battles the size and scope you see in the movies is a new experience.

The world is immersive, the stories emotional and complex, the directions it could go are not open ended, but there is a lot of content here. Choices you make on the opening character creation screen can completely change the story that is told, making the game very replayable.  Many people in the know say this is the best RPG game ever made, and I see no evidence not to believe them.

What if you built an awesome 3D Virtual World and nobody came?

What if you built an awesome 3D Virtual World and nobody came? That seems to be the question facing the makers of a 3D virtual world that I recently discovered.

I was tinkering around with evolver.com a 3D avatar maker that hopes to create a common avatar for multiple web based 3D worlds. I was using it to create a new avatar for facebook, and I saw one of the “transport” options was something called

friendshangout.com

The name sounds atrociously lame. Sounds like a chat website for lonely emo teenagers. Who would want to go to a website like that? Curiosity, of course, got the better of me. The website was as lame as I thought it would be, featuring lots of pics of good looking college kids with dumb smiles on their face, and a video of some blonde chick reading marketing dribble from a teleprompter.

My first reaction was “I want no part of this”, my second was to see just how lame of a 3D chat this was going to be, like slowing down to look at an auto accident, or smelling expired milk before throwing it away.

So I create an account, go to the 3D chat page and pick a beach setting. My expectation dropped even further when I saw the 3D Chat runs in a web browser (remember Google Lively?). I was ready for the worst, and then…

OMG!!!

This was completely unexpected! A beautiful fully developed 3D world with awesome graphics, easy to use navigation, decent evolver avatars, that runs in a freaking web browser!

There are also vehicles to ride, and about a half dozen environments to explore. The only thing I didn’t try out was the chat feature as I could never find anyone else online. I pretty much had the place to myself, which was kind of sad.

This is a quality 3D Virtual World that impressed me way more than Blue Mars, and it is too bad it is buried behind crappy marketing.

Further reasearch indicates that the virtual world is based on the Unity game engine. The friends hangout “Island Paradise” is identical to the demo “Tropical Paradise” as seen on unity3d.com. Apparently some of the other places at friends hangout consist of other demos, or worlds created from arteria3d.com.

A little whois research indicates that friendshangout.com was registered over five years ago by a company that has a bunch of similarly designed websites, which tells me it is some off the shelf web template they are using.

So someone has managed to combined cheap avatars from evolver.com, with a cheap web based 3D gaming engine from unity3d.com (was $200, now available for free), and put up a cheap website with a domain they already owned.

If they were to actually get some professional web designer with a decent social network web system, and buy a decent domain name, and promoted it, they may have something really cool.

There is not enough content here for long term interest, but in the mean time, I am enjoying what is here.

It is a nice place to visit on the remote outskirts of the Metaverse.