The Nature of MMO Gaming

A friend of mine recently read this post by Raph Koster.  He suggested (perhaps "demanded" would be a better word) that I write a blog post about it, and give my opinion.  Well, he's sort of going to get what he asked, but not really, because instead of analyzing and/or discussing Raph's post, I'm going to describe how what Raph wrote (which I agree with, by the way) applies to MMO gaming, and why it clearly illuminates one of the fundamental problems with current MMO design.  First up though, I'm going to further discuss "feedback" as described by Raph, and how feedback affects us as gamers.  Here is what Raph has to say:

Ah, but the feedback for even a trivial action is very important. It matters that we hear the sound when we click the mouse. And should the designer choose, they can make the feedback be hugely disproportionate to the problem solved. Feedback serves the purpose of cueing the user whether or not they are being successful in figuring out the black box. So we provide feedback each time an input is made, and the feedback is intended to help guide the user as to whether they are doing the right thing.

In short, feedback is any sort of response that occurs as a result of player action.  That could be pressing a button on a mouse to get a "click", tripping a lever in the game and having a door visibly open with an audible rumble, or clicking on the "fireball" icon and killing an enemy.  Through this feedback you learn that levers open doors that might be blocking your progress, and fireballs will defeat an opponent that would otherwise kill you. The lever opening a door you can't see or hear would be an example of bad feedback -- you don't know whether your action accomplished anything at all, let alone the thing you were trying to accomplish.

Game rewards are also a type of feedback (and indeed, as Raph notes feedback is itself a reward), earning experience, gold, items, levels, etc., are all feedback that lets you know you're doing the right thing, but they also serve as rewards that trigger the chemical responses in the brain that react to accomplishments and acquisition (typically dopamine I believe).  Leveling up or acquiring that great item you wanted can provide an actual rush, a burst of pleasant chemicals in the brain, albiet one that diminishes with repetition (an issue I will discuss later).

So what's my point?  That you can essentially change Raph's problem --> black box --> feedback paradigm to problem --> black box --> reward.

Totally ripped from Raph's post.  Please don't SOPA me!

Sometimes that reward is feedback that you're on the right path, and sometimes that reward is an actual reward, it all depends on the context and scale of the problem --> black box --> reward/feedback.  A quest in an MMO consists of multiple levels of these paradigms, everything from "how to get there --> use the griffin --> flight cutscene" and "defeat enemy orc --> use abilities --> xp/loot" to "kill 10 orcs --> repeat defeat enemy orc 10x --> quest reward".  Within those are even smaller ones, such as how to use abilities, or how to walk to the griffin.  An insane person could draw out a nested diagram showing all the problem interactions and it would be enormous.  I'm not that insane, sorry.

Point, Warsyde, got one?  Ok ok, I'm getting to it.

The point is that there are diminishing returns on the enjoyment of rewards.  The more, and bigger, rewards you get, and the faster they come, the less you enjoy any particular reward.  Humans have the remarkable ability to become accustomed to almost anything if exposed to it enough.  This is part of what makes addiction so dangerous, as an addicted person gradually needs more and more of whatever they're addicted to in order to achieve the same sensations they started with.

This has two effects.  The first is in a game situation like Raph describes:

Disproportionate feedback

If the game offers huge feedback all the time, it's likely to rapidly become tiresome as the constant barrage of feedback causes each additional instance to have less impact than the one that came before.  Not right away of course, but eventually it would happen.  Because so many games are using the model above it's a good thing they're short - a 50 hour game like the one above would burn a player out, but an 8 hour game might be able to get away with it.

What I'm really interested in though, is how this applies to MMOs.  MMOs are games intended to be played for hundreds of hours.  They simply, absolutely, cannot use the model above, as the reward structure would result in burned out players wandering off after a week or two at most.  Instead, the MMO model looks more like:

Large number of small interactions, one large reward

or

Large number of small interactions, large number of small rewards

Additionally, you can have a combination of the two that gives small rewards on the way and a big reward at the end.  The first method is the Everquest method, the second method is that used by most modern MMOs. Both methods are designed with the intent of keeping you playing for as long as possible.  The Everquest model did it by giving you really big rewards (class epic, omg!) for a large number of tasks spread over a long period of time.  The more modern method does it by giving you a lot of little rewards, hoping to both keep you going with the rewards while not overstimulating your brain and diminishing your appreciation of the rewards.  Both methods only delay the inevitable, but delay it they do.  It should be noted that raiding, even modern raiding, essentially follows the EQ model, though World of Warcraft is trying to make raiding fit the second model with their raid finder tool.

These models combined with how humans react to rewards accurately describes player behaviors in MMOs over the long term, and explains why casual players tend to be the happiest and hardcore players the most likely to burn out.  Someone who only plays an MMO for a couple of hours a week is unlikely to become inured to the reward structure as they get rewarded infrequently enough to not build up much resistance.  Compare that to a hardcore player who burns through two months worth of content in a week.  Not only is he or she now bored with nothing to do, the rewards they accumulated through the course of playing came so hard and fast that additional rewards will trigger almost no response in their brains.  At this point, they're either addicted and clamoring for another, bigger fix, or burned out and leave for a new game, or a new hobby entirely.

Is there a solution to this?  For MMOs, I'm not sure that there is.  The need to make the games essentially endless means that content needs to be designed a certain way, and excessive activation of reward mechanics is effectively in the hands of the player, the one thing the developer can't control.  A game that is perfectly balanced for someone who plays 10 hours a week could quickly bore someone who plays 50 hours a week.  It does suggest though, that the greatest potential for long term retention of players could be found by catering actively to the casual player.  The biggest issue is attracting the casual player to your game in the first place, as while the hardcore/burned out player will always try something new, the truly casual player is generally happy with what they've got.  Blizzard has clearly profited from this as the more casual World of Warcraft became the larger their subscriber base grew, and the fluctuations in their subscriber base can generally be attributed to the more active players leaving for new games and coming back again.

I think in the long run there will be two types of MMOs - casual MMOs, and niche MMOs.  World of Warcraft is very casual friendly, while EVE Online fits a very specific niche.  A generic fantasy MMO that is not casual friendly, however, probably doesn't have much long term potential.  I'll be interested to see how The Old Republic does in the long term, as the dialogue and cutscenes provide large amounts of feedback for small amounts of input, which suggests players should eventually reach the point where they become bored and skip through the dialog even if they haven't heard it before, but the game is also fairly casual friendly, and those players could consume the content at a slow enough pace that they don't reach the spacebar-spacebar-spacebar stage.  Time will tell.

Lord of the Rings: War in the North

On Monday, with Tuesday gaming night fast approaching I found myself looking around for something more interesting to do with the gaming group.  Titan Quest had been ok, but felt pretty bland, and while the multiplayer worked ok it didn't really add anything to the game.  We just sort of moved along in a little pack and clicked on things until they were dead, and didn't really need to talk or discuss what we were doing because it was all pretty brain dead.  So I was interested in finding something a little more exciting, something that really benefited from all three of us playing together.  I just happened to stumble across Lord of the Rings: War in the North and saw that it was 1) an action RPG and 2) designed for co-op with 3 players.  How extraordinarily convenient.  I mentioned it to my friends, and we all took the dive based on the premise alone.  Two of us played last night (the third leg of our gaming holy trinity couldn't make it, darn you Mr. Heals!) and overall I walked away moderately impressed, but more importantly, quite satisfied.

Lord of the Rings: War in the North (WitN) was developed by Snowblind studios, the folks behind a number of similar games, including some decent Dungeons & Dragons action RPGs on the original Xbox.  Much like Lord of the Rings Online, players take on the roles of characters that worked behind the scenes during Frodo's death march from the Shire to Mordor.  In this case, your group of three characters, a dwarf champion,  a human ranger, and an elf loremaster are tasked with running interference against armies of orcs and goblins to prevent them from invading the Shire before Frodo gets out.  It looks like we'll be traveling across Middle Earth, meeting famous figures from the book (Aragorn gives you your first quest) while slaughtering minions of Sauron and his lieutenant Agandaur by the hundreds.

You can't keep us apart.  We're like family!

The three characters in the game are set.  You can choose which of the three you want to play, but you can't change their names, pick their classes, or anything like that.  All three characters must be present in each game (no more, no less) so if you play by yourself, the AI controls the other two characters.  If you play co-op, each player picks one of the three characters, with no duplicates allowed.  You won't have a group of two dwarves and a ranger.  The characters roughly fall into the rolls described by the holy trinity of MMORPGs - tank, dps, healer.  The dwarf Champion is the most logical tank, being a heavy melee class with the best armor.  The Ranger is the most logical dps character, using a bow and melee weapons to deal damage at any range.  The Loremaster is the support class, providing healing, buffing, and some damage as well.  That's just at the start though -- each character has a skill tree that you spend points in when leveling up, and it's possible to focus the Champion on ranged dps, the Ranger on tanking, and the Loremaster on dual wield melee dps.  The trees are pretty short, but in a game like this any sort of customization is good.

The thing that struck my friend and I most distinctly was that the game is clearly, obviously, and wonderfully tailored for co-op play.  Co-op isn't something tacked on as a necessary feature, the game was designed with co-op in mind.  A big example -- all loot in the game is randomly generated for each character and if you find a chest, every character gets to loot the chest and gets a full share of loot from it.  There's no competition for loot, and no concerns about taking things that might be better for your buddy over there.  Instead, the loot I picked up wouldn't have even existed if I hadn't been playing in my friend's game.  When we found things the other player could use, it was easy to trade as well, since you can simply send items from your inventory to any of the other players directly.  No dropping things on the ground and hoping they pick up the right thing. The game is intense enough that communication matters, and we were talking far more than we ever did during Titan Quest.  Teamwork matters here, and that's a great thing for a co-op game.

What do you mean you never saw Gandalf do this?  What a slacker!

Which brings me to the gameplay itself.  It's pretty standard button mashing action RPG fare, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  I found it both engaging and relaxing, and really hit the spot for an evening of gaming. Each character has a normal and heavy melee attack, a ranged attack, and a selection of skills from the skill trees.  Hitting enemies enough time will make them vulnerable to a critical attack, which if done right will reward you with a fancy finishing move played out in slow motion.  It's also possible to do headshots with your ranged attacks for bonus damage.  Nothing deep, but solid and fun.  The skills are varied and interesting, everything from a "sanctuary" spell cast by the Loremaster that prevents ranged attacks from entering (but not leaving!) to heavy melee aoe strikes by the Champion.

The graphics are decent, but not exceptional, due no doubt to the game's console pedigree.  Dialog is voiced, both for the player characters and the NPCs, and your characters will even do battle shouts or announce skill usage during combat for certain skills.  The sound effects and music seemed good, and fit with the Lord of the Rings theme.  I don't recall anything glaring like death metal blaring as we charged up a ruined canyon into hordes of exploding goblins.

All that said the game certainly has some issues.  I was playing using an xbox 360 wired controller, so camera control and movement was fluid and easy for me.  My friend was using a mouse and keyboard though, and it took some time for him to get used to the sometimes wonky camera movements.  The game is clearly a console port, and both the control scheme and user interface reflect that.  It's not insurmountable, but it does take some getting used to, and I think the game is probably best played with a game pad.  Strangely though, the list of controls in the menu refers only to the mouse and keyboard even if you have a gamepad plugged in, though the in-game tutorials and loading screen tips thankfully report how to do things with the controller.

The other rather strange issue we had was voice chat.  The game apparently has voice chat built in and enabled by default, but has absolutely no settings to control it anywhere in the game at all.  We were connected through Skype and when the multiplayer game started my friend's voice started echoing in my headphones, while he was hearing my voice from both his headphones and his computer speakers.  We figured out pretty quickly that WitN was providing voice chat and turned off Skype, but the control and quality of the voice service was inferior to that of Skype and we'd have rather stuck with Skype.  There was no way to turn it off though, so we were stuck.  I'm assuming there must be a .ini file or something we can edit to shut it down.

Reviews of the game have been pretty luke warm, and if I was playing the game single player I could understand that.  I don't doubt it would get repetitive, and the relatively weak story wouldn't keep me going.  Co-op though, the game is a lot of fun and deserves a much higher rating than the reviews are giving the game as a whole.  If you're interested in WitN, play with some friends to really enjoy the game as it was meant to be played.

Overall we had a good time and I'm looking forward to playing it again next week.  We made it to level 6, but are still in the first area of the game, so playing one night a week WitN could last a couple of months.  I think we've finally found a game that we can all enjoy and play together, at least for now.  Finally!

RPG Death Penalties

I responded to a post on the Path of Exile forums and found the topic stimulating enough to want to share it here. The question was what sort of death penalty Path of Exile should implement.  In the likely event you don't know what Path of Exile is, it's a F2P action-RPG currently in development that clearly draws a lot of inspiration from Diablo 2.

Here is my take:

I don't think death penalties have much of a place in action RPGs.  You are almost certainly going to die at some point.  You are probably going to have times where your particular class/build/gear is at a distinct disadvantage against particular foes and die a LOT.  Having a penalty on top of that can get frustrating fast, especially if it's something that's going to contribute to you continuing to die (lowered stats, loss of gear, loss of xp/levels) or is so painful you'd rather log off than keep playing.

You never want to put your players in a position where they'd choose to stop playing because it's no longer fun.  They might not come back.  Earth and Beyond had one of the silliest death penalties ever -- an xp penalty that faded while you were logged off.  If you died, your best bet was to log off the game and come back tomorrow.  How's that for incentive to play?  How's E&B doing these days?  Yeah.

Rather than a penalty, why not do something different?  Maybe you are stuck in the netherworld and have to complete a random puzzle to outwit Death and return. Or a mini game.  That might get tiresome if you have to do it a lot in succession, but still, it would be different.

Or maybe you appear in the spirit world as a spirit, and have to fight your way out using ghostly versions of your skills and equipment, and can earn xp (but no loot) by doing so rather than losing it.  Death becomes a learning experience, and a player stuck fighting enemies too strong for them and dying over and over will have the opportunity to level up while recovering from death (assuming they're dying a lot) and maybe overcome the enemies.

The real penalty of a death in a game is loss of time.  That loss can be expressed in a lot of ways, from losing xp or gear to suffering a stat penalty that slows you down.  The end result is always the same -- a loss of the player's time or progress.  There are plenty of ways to inflict that loss of time without generating frustration at the same time.  The simplest is to force a respawn further back in the game and force the player to run back.  Sometimes simple is best, but it would be nice to see something more inventive here.

What do other people like (or dislike) in death penalties for RPGs?

Course Laid In

Sometimes I really think Blizzard should consider changing their name to Glacial Entertainment.  They’re monolithic – pervasive and powerful, but terribly slow, and their dominance is being melted away by the changing gamer climate.  Yes, I’m actually just bitter that Diablo 3 still isn’t out, and more to the point, that a year after release we still haven’t seen the next campaign for Starcraft 2.  It’s just a campaign!  Not a whole new game!  I’m still irritated that the game didn’t ship with 3 campaigns to begin with, that I’m going to have to pay extra to get the missing campaigns, and that the one I want the most (Protoss) is being done last, which means by the time Blizzard finally drags the Protoss campaign into the light of day several years from now the already retrograde design of Starcraft 2 is going to seem utterly Neolithic next to the RTSs of the day.

Ok, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system it’s time to get to what I really wanted to talk about – Starcraft 2.  I still play it on occasion, despite its creaking antiquity (graphically it’s modern, gameplay-wise it feels about 10 years old), and one of those occasions was this past Tuesday when a friend and I played a couple of co-op multiplayer matches while waiting for the Titan Quest group to form up (it never did).

The first match was my friend (playing Terran) and myself (playing Protoss) against two medium A.I.s. (Protoss and Zerg).  Ooh, mediums, how scary, right?  I said I played the game, I never said I was good at it.  We were on a map where both players on a team start on the same plateau with a single ramp leading up, so my friend focused on defenses (which Terrans are better at anyway) while I focused on building up troops.  The first coordinated enemy attack wiped out most of my troops and most of my friend’s defenses.  Oops.  Still, we rebuilt, and the second wave of attacks broke upon the bastion of our defenses like a squirt gun fired at a brick wall.  I moved my troops down to an expansion, and started to get established.  Then the A.I.s attacked our main base again, and without my troops they broke through and started trashing my friend’s base.  I sent my troops north while building a huge pile of photon cannons to defend my expansion.  I saved my friend’s base, and left my troops there while he rebuilt.  So of course the A.I. attacked my expansion, and cut through my turrets like they weren’t even there, forcing me to send my troops down to the base to save it.  I saved the buildings, but lost all my workers and had to rebuild.  Thankfully my friend’s base was rebuilt and I was churning out troops for a second army and sending them to guard the entrance to our main bases.  Long story short (too late!) I spent most of the game getting almost, but not entirely, crushed by the tag-teaming A.I. until my friend built up a fleet of Battlecruisers and wiped them off the map in an unending hail of laser fire.

The second match went much the same, except the tag-teaming A.I. didn’t merely almost crush me, they spectacularly crushed me with multiple waves of Marauders (both A.I.s were Terrans) that I simply couldn’t hold out against.  The first wave of Marauders destroyed about 80% of my defenses, but was repelled.  The second wave of Marauders that came 15 seconds later started tearing my base apart.  My friend sent reinforcements, a handful of Marines, who got torn apart by the Marauders but at least distracted them long enough for me to build some more troops and finish them off.  A minute or two after that, a massed wave of troops from both A.I.s swept into my base and wiped me out.  My friend and I both figured it was over at that point, but wanted to see how badly it would end.  However, with the easy meat Protoss wiped out, the A.I. didn’t seem to know what to do.  They’d probe my friend’s defenses, take a few losses and . . . run away.  Over and over.  If they’d pushed like they did against me, they would have won, but they didn’t commit.  So my friend built up a fleet of Battlecruisers and wiped them off the map.

The events of our matches left me with a few thoughts.  Do Battlecruisers have any weaknesses?  They sure don’t seem to.  Once my friend had enough of them (5+ seems to do the trick) they were literally unstoppable.  I know that the Protoss equivalent, the Carrier, takes more resources to bring to full power and is extremely vulnerable to direct attack.  The Carrier is a great unit, and I like it, but it seems more balanced than the Battlecruiser.  Is there some weakness the ship has that the A.I. just doesn’t know to exploit?

The other thing was that Starcraft 2 doesn’t seem to be very supportive of the “combined arms” concept of army composition.  It almost always seems like you’re better off picking a single decent unit and spamming as many of them as you possibly can.  You run the risk of building a swarm of troops that can only attack ground targets and then encountering an enemy that has a huge air force, but in general it seems to work better.  Of course, if you can build a swarm of units that can attack anything (like the Battlecruiser) you’re pretty much set.

I still like Starcraft 2, it can be plenty of fun.  But in this day and age the throwback nature of its gameplay continues to be a letdown.  I mean, grouped units still move in dis-organized clumps where you easily end up with fragile artillery style units in the front and all your melee units in the back.  Other than SC2, I haven’t played an RTS in years that didn’t put your troops into a sensible formation when you move them as a group.  Come on now, really?

Now Playing

I’ve been quiet lately (again) as I’ve started a new job that has (thankfully) kept me much busier than the old one.  I haven’t had much time to spare for writing, but I hope to rectify that over the coming weeks.

For now, just an update on what I’ve been playing lately.

Rift:  Still playing Rift casually and still enjoying it.  When I originally came back to Rift a little while ago I had intended to focus on leveling a mage, because the mage seemed fun and I was bored with my level 44 rogue.  Eventually I got a little tired of the Mage’s squishiness and relative inflexibility (most mage roles are dps) and decided to work on my cleric, my original main.  I discovered I was really enjoying my cleric, but then patch 1.5 hit and I wanted to see the new Chronicles solo story instances.  I logged in excitedly after patch day only to discover Chronicles are only for level 50s.  My cleric was level 27.  My rogue was level 44.  I want to see the content, and my rogue can get there a lot sooner, so I went back to leveling my rogue.  He’s now level 47 and I’m enjoying his bladedancer spec more than his old one.  Plus, barding for instances is relaxing yet appreciated.

City of Heroes:  Despite my protestations of never playing this again, I’m playing it again.  I brought my tank out of retirement to do Incarnate content, and have been enjoying the alternate advancement it offers to max level characters.  Getting raid groups has been easy and running the content has been amusing enough, if a little brain-dead.  I think City of Heroes is best in small groups.  Too many people and it just turns into non-stop zerging, too few and it gets tedious. Still, my tank is now level 50+2 (counts as level 52 during incarnate trials), can summon temporary combat pets, drop a nasty ranged fire aoe, and debuffs his foes with every attack.  A couple more runs should net him a clickable team buff on a timer.

Titan Quest:  My Tuesday night gaming group is currently playing Titan Quest.  We played for the first time last Tuesday and had a good enough time that I think we’ll likely do it again.  We all made it to level 8 and chose our second class.  One Spirit/Storm, one Earth/Nature, and then me, Dream/Defense.  I figured we needed at least one person to sit there and take all the hits.

Hellgate:  I gave this a try over the weekend, as it’s been re-released in the U.S. as a free-2-play online game (to those not in the know, it was originally Hellgate: London released by Flagship Studios as a hybrid single player/multiplayer game).  I had hoped that a couple of years of refinement by a new developer might have resulted in a better game.  I was sorely disappointed.  I can’t say much about this game except to not waste your time with the download.  Experience gain is about 1/5^th of what it used to be, putting it squarely in the “asian grinder” category.  It also appears they took an English game, translated it into Korean for the asian release, and then translated it BACK into English for the U.S. release.  It’s utterly riddled with “engrish”, typos, and other errors.  Run away.  Fast.

Age of Empires Online:  I can’t decide whether I like this game or not.  On the one hand it’s a decent RTS game clearly evolved from the Age of Empires lineage, and is much more reminiscent of AoE 2 than 3 (and that’s a good thing).  On the other hand, it has “leveling”, quest based gameplay (no skirmish mode that I can find) and severely limits your access to technology and game modes based on your level.  Whereas in an Age of Empires 2 game you’d reach Age 3 or 4 in a single game, it will take weeks or more of playing to “unlock” those eras for play in Age of Empires Online.  Also, of course, for a game that requires you to be online, the “multiplayer” functions of it are anemic at best.  When a friend and I tried it, we ran into a host of oddities and could only tag along with one another on quests marked “co-op”.  Despite that, I still poke my head in now and then for some relaxing RTS gameplay.

World of Tanks:  I still hop on and play now and then, but nothing like I was a few months ago.  I like the game, I think it’s solidly built and a lot of fun.  However, I’m pretty happy with the tanks I’ve got, so feel no great drive to earn experience for new tanks, and I’m tired of the deathmatch only gameplay.  Once they introduce different maps with new objectives (something they’ve said they’re working on) I expect I’ll play the game a lot more.  I mean, come on, tanks!  How can I resist?!

Android Games:  I’ve tried both Battleheart and Great Little War Game on my Galaxy S II and like them both well enough, though GLWG is more fun for me despite the cheesy dialog.  I find controlling characters in Battleheart somewhat difficult as my fingers are apparently too fat to select them accurately, and if one character gets behind another I can’t select them at all until I move the other one away, which can be painful if you need to heal and can’t get at your healer.  I much prefer the clear screen and turn based nature of GLWG.  It has a decent Advance Wars feel to it, and I played those games to death.

Betas:  None.  Come on, really?  I used to get in betas all the time.  Up until a few years ago I was almost constantly beta testing something.  Now?  Nothing.  I think it’s a sign of how our hobby has grown, that the pool of potential testers has grown so large vast numbers of interested people will never even get the chance.  I don’t consider a pre-order beta to be a real beta, it’s more of an advanced demo (not that I’m in any of those right now either).

Looking for a good multiplayer game

Some friends and I have arranged to meet up one night every week for some guaranteed multiplayer gaming.  Our work and family lives have made it hard for us to meet up at random like we used to, so we picked a time and day where we would try to meet up and game together like in “the good old days” (or whatever).

So far it’s been going great, with one exception – what to play?  We have, by default, ended up playing World of Tanks a fair bit, because it’s easy to jump in to and happens to be just perfect for three people (the maximum size of a platoon).  However, it’s not really the sort of gaming we want to do (PvP), especially for the long term.

We’ve tried a couple of things that haven’t really stuck, like Dragon Nest.  We’ve been poking at City of Heroes, but one friend’s install became corrupted after the last patch, and the other hasn’t been able to access any of the characters on his old account.  So far we haven’t been able to get all three of us in there at once, and interest is rapidly waning.

What we’d really like is an action RPG.  Diablo 3 would be perfect, but of course it’s not an option yet.  Torchlight 2 would work, but again, not available.  Diablo 2 is just too dated, not to mention we already played it to death back in the day.  I’ve looked at Din’s Curse as a possibility, but it’s not exactly grabbing me when I go to Soldak’s website.  We’ve all played Titan Quest before, and it’s a possibility, but something new would be nice.

So, any suggestions?  Any good multiplayer action-rpg games out there that I haven’t already mentioned?  I don’t think genre matters that much – fantasy, sci-fi, whatever.  Something that can be had on the cheap would be preferable, and it has to be playable on PC (the only system all 3 of us have in common).

Android Games

Today I should be getting my first ever Android phone, the Samsung Epic Touch 4G.  It seems like a good phone, and has every feature I could possibly use, with the dubious exception of global roaming.  If I travel internationally in the time I have the phone I'll miss that option, but that's hardly a make or break feature.

Anyway, to the point!  I don't know much about Android OS games really.  What are some good ones?  Something a little more in-depth than Angry Birds.  How about RPGs?  Strategy games?  Final Fantasy tactics clones?

Sequel Syndrome

This past weekend I finally got around to finishing up Dragon Age: Awakenings, the expansion to Dragon Age: Origins.  It only took a little prodding from a friend (just a little!) and my continuing status as an MMO nomad.  It's amazing how much time you have for single player games when you don't have a persistent world eating up all your free time.

As I finished the expansion I couldn't help noting that, despite its many flaws, I still enjoyed Awakenings more than Dragon Age 2, the sequel.  Thinking about it some more, I had to admit that this is a fairly persistent trend for me, made disheartening by the fact that so many developers are making so many sequels.  Following are some games where I've noticed this 'sequel syndrome', where I really liked the original but felt the sequel was a letdown.

Mass Effect -- I loved the first Mass Effect.  It's easily one of my favorite Xbox 360 games of all time, and one of the few long RPGs that I seriously considered multiple playthroughs of, and did nearly get through the whole thing twice (fairly unusual for me).  I eagerly awaited the sequel and . . . didn't really like it that much.  It's not that it was a bad game, it's just that to me a sequel should be like the first game, only with more, better stuff, while ME2 seemed like the first game with stuff stripped out.

Starcraft -- I played the original Starcraft to pieces.  It was my first exposure to multiplayer RTS gaming, and my college buddy and I played it a LOT.  I've been eagerly awaiting the sequel since the moment I finished the third campaign, and for years it seemed like Blizzard had abandoned Starcraft and I'd never get my wish.  Finally Starcraft 2 was released in 2010 and . . . it was Starcraft with only one campaign and updated graphics.  It was a good, solid game, but even after 10 years it didn't seem to improve on much from the original.  What took so long?  Where are the zerg and protoss campaigns?  Couldn't they have at least added a fourth side?

Command & Conquer - C&C was my first RTS, and it was amazing.  The AI was pretty weak, but finding ways to exploit the AI was half the fun.  It was memorable and exciting and was one of the most recognized names and gaming for years.  None of the sequels have ever come close.  I'm not really sure why.  They seem like they should be good games on paper, but the magic just isn't there.  I've never finished a C&C after the first one, even though I've played them all except the most recent one.  I gave up on the franchise after C&C 3 (which wasn't a bad game, it just didn't do it for me).

Everquest - Everquest was my first true MMO.  I don't doubt that my fond memories are tainted by a great deal of nostalgia, but the fact that the game is still going strong twelve years after release says a lot.  Don't get me wrong, I hated EQ as much as I loved it, maybe even more.  That was one of it's strengths though, it's ability to evoke an emotional response from the player one way or the other.  I was excited for EQ2 as a result, and jumped on EQ2 instead of WoW in late 2004.  However, EQ2 was flat.  Dull.  Uninspiring.  It didn't make me love it or hate it, it was just there.  My stay in EQ2 lasted only a fraction as long as my stay in EQ.

Morrowind -- I quite enjoyed Elder Scrolls: Morrowind.  It was interesting and fun to explore the world and all the options available to my characters while following a clearly defined path of progression through the game.  I know I'll be in a minority here, but I couldn't stand Oblivion.  It was vapid and aimless, lacking any real sense of purpose to get me hooked into the game.  I've restarted Oblivion at least half a dozen times over the years, and never managed to stick with it much past the emergence into the open world.

Dawn of War -- Dawn of War is my favorite modern RTS.  I like the Warhammer 40k setting (as my half-painted Space Marine army languishing in storage can sort of attest) and really enjoyed this RTS with reinforceable squads, big vehicles, and hero units.  I bought every expansion, and loved the wide variety of armies you could choose from.  When Dawn of War 2 was announced, I had high hopes for another fun RTS romp.  Instead . . . I'm still not sure what Dawn of War 2 is.  I feel like the game largely consists of selecting your handful of units and carefully moving them across the map to a boss fight.  Then do it again.  And again.  And again.  The path you take is often confined and linear, and there didn't seem to be much decision making to be had.  There were also far fewer armies to choose from, even if they did add Tyranids.

It's not all bad though, there have been sequels I loved more than the originals.  Diablo and Diablo 2 are prime examples, where Diablo 2 really did take everything that was good in Diablo, expand upon it, and make it even better.  Diablo 2 is an example of a sequel done right.  I sure hope Diablo 3 is a Diablo 2 style sequel, not a Starcraft 2 style sequel.  System Shock 2 was better than System Shock, Master of Orion 2 was better than Master of Orion, and each of the Warcraft sequels (2 and 3) were better than the games that came before them.

The thing I notice about my list though, is that the sequels that were good are all old.  They're games in the decade plus old category.  Has the industry lost the ability to make good sequels, or am I just stuck in the past, a product of my 90s gaming roots, unable to see modern sequels as improvements rather than devolutions of interesting games?  Fallout is a good indicator here.  I loved the original Fallout, and didn't think Fallout 3 was really that great (again, not a bad game, just not great).  Yet Fallout 3 had enjoyed success beyond the original Fallout's creators' dreams.  Clearly Bethesda knew what they were doing when they created Fallout 3.  So maybe it's me.