Just how much immersion do I want?

Less than I can have.

Eve is a great game, the very essence of open-ended experience, the sort of experience that defines "immersion" in a genre that seems largely to be veering away from it. Put another way, the immersion of Eve is about where you are and what you choose to do in it. The immersion in WoW, for example, is what you get and what you choose to get next. 

What makes Eve hard, and therefore niche, is a number of elements:

• No clear explanation on how to do, well, anything
• No clear goals
• Groups required.
• It displays time requirements in neon.

No Clear Explanation

There's a tech tree within the game that is not at all explained well. Skills required for a module do not point to skills that support it, nor to Implants that support that. Beyond the tutorial, players are told almost nothing. Worse, when they finish that tutorial, they're given one or two million ISK, enough to afford a new ship and equipment, but with no knowledge on how to go spend it effectively.

These factors are easy to resolve. There's more than enough information and off-line tools out there to get someone all educated-up on all aspects of Eve. Players are only ignorant by choice.

But then the real problem kicks in: what to do with this stuff.

No Clear Goals

What will you do? Mine? Pirate? Haul? Trade? Craft? Rat? PvP? You can eventually do all of these. There's no real cap on what you can learn as a player.

And that's an irony to me. The lack of any clear end-goal makes it very hard to find a good place to start.

What skills do you pick up? In what order? How long will it take to learn them? What skills can you learn to speed up the learning process for other skills? Where will you get the money for the ships and equipment and insurance? Where will you go with them? With whom?

So now we have a game that provides no clear-cut explanation offering no clear-cut goal.

Groups Required

Eve is a good example of an open-ended sim-like experience that is stable, enjoyable and has a good tight core audience. It's never going to give WoW a run for its money, but that's more because the type of player it appeals to is very different than the typical quest-grinder/Raider of the pinnacle of diku.

Players come together for more reasons than just helping one of them get a new sword. They form alliances, governments, ruling councils, squads, objectives. The people are the game. Find the right group and there's nothing you'll want for, be it knowledge or equipment.

This isn't the typical "ugh, I need to group to take down this boss mob" requirement either. This is the more immersive "I will get pulverized without the big stick of an alliance to back me up" requirement. There's only so much you can do in Eve by yourself. Even the most dedicated soloers eventually need to join a Corp if they ever plan to progress beyond the smaller ships.

But finding that right group is both critical and not explained. I can't imagine how many people were dumped into orbit above some random world and go so confused they quit in disgust.

I'm glad I started this third attempt at Eve with the folks over at F13. They're a casual-leaning group dedicated to having fun but also focused enough to achieve well in these sorts of games. My frustration of the last six weeks was that I was rarely on to help out.

I like games that compel groups to work together for larger goals. But I can't play them if I don't feel like I'm contributing. And that's what happened here.

Neon Time Requirements

What ultimately made me realize I had to leave was the Time factor. Unlike the typical "I can't Raid 10 hours a week" definition of Time, Eve's time was more direct. Other games which hide their time requirements behind lots of vague terms eventually decompiled anyway. Meanwhile, Eve advertises its time requirements in neon.

One of the few things the game is good at informing the player of is the amount of time it is going to take to do something. If a Skill is going to take 6 days to learn a skill, it tells you 6 days. If you need to learn five skills to unlock a sixth, the game can tell you exactly how long that will take, as tools like Future Falcon so helpfully tell you. And since Time is so important, it pervades lots of the tools available for the game. Heck, fire up QuickFit and it'll tell you how long your ship will take to defeat any of the enemy NPCs you tell it to calculate a fight against. Use a tool like Eve Tanking to see how long you'll survive under their barrage. The numbers generated are all fairly accurate.

I knew how long it'd take to learn stuff, how long it'd take to rat to get the money to make those skills worth it and how long I'd need to spend in the game each month to pay the fee with enough profit left over to make my time in the Corp and Alliance worth it.

And it just wasn't adding up.

The End

I needed to move on. I dumped my 0.0 holdings and evacuated what few valuables were worth transporting out. For now I'll skimper back to easier games, ones that don't require as much from me. Life has been keeping me off my computer more and more of late, and while it could just be the Summertime, I think it might be deeper than that.

I want to care. I really do. But I mostly don't. I've been through the immersive side of this genre time and again and I just don't feel a part of it anymore, not the way it's being defined by the old skool anyway.

Those who equate immersion with Time are a group to which I can no longer belong. Maybe when my kids are in college in fifteen years (heh, hopefully), things will be different for me. But by then, I think everything's going to be different.

I found some of the information pretty interesting.

Some basics:

• Eve hit the 130,000 subscriber milestone
• About 500,000 people registered for the Eve China beta.
• Eve Collectible Card Game ships. I'm not much into CCGs myself, but I imagine some are.

Most importantly though, they included a link to a new movie they created to show off the new graphics they've been developing. In theory, the following link will automatically launch your default movie viewer and start buffering the stream:

Link to the movie.

Complete with a soundtrack evocative of the general Eve music with a techno spin, this video shows a lot of glory shots and some battles. The ships of course look incredible, but it's some of the shaky-cam stuff that really impressed me.

I have no idea if that bit is going to make the final release, but I sure hope it does. Having fallen in love with both Battlestar Galactica and the unfortunately-now-defunct Firefly (an ode is in progress), I like me my shaky cam. It makes CGI look, well, less like CGI.

Just how much immersion do people really want?

This article, the discussions that followed, every discussion that preceded and the success of certain types of games over certain other types of games can be said to answer the above question. Asking where the massive was at all was a prelude ot this question:

How much immersion do people really want?

Apparently not that much.

Years of experiences hint that, for the most part, players want to be left alone to achieve their own goals on their own time, and are willing to ask for help (and provide it) on their own time. Everything from the Player Pyramid to Why we Play to Knowing Oneself builds upon this most basic of elements. In games about achievement, sometimes other players are simply in the way.

The Guardian article talks about Player Governments (quoting Scott Jennings/Lum), but I basically disagree that this is part of any sort of Utopian ideal.

If we break down the genre between open-ended games and those with contrived linearity, we see that far and away the majority of players are in the latter. These extensions of the RPGs of old provide a fun experience players can jump into and out of for 30 minute blocks or live in for hours at a time. Their central motivation being about acquisition means that players have goals as laid out partially by the game, resulting in the endgames usually involve mass cooperative play to help someone advance in some way.

How hard is that really? I mean yes, doing this is pretty hard. Getting six or four dozen people to work together can be time-consuming, and there'll always be something going wrong. But at least the goal is set. At least someone can log in, know what they need to do, go try and do it, and log out. Everything else is left to the game developers and GMs to handle.

Meanwhile, in an open-ended game, like old SWG, old UO, SB or current Eve (among a dozen others), players have to figure out not only the game, but what they want to do in it. Adding to this the griefing that exists in all of these games is complicating enough. But actually permitting that griefing because is part of the game rules is one of the very things that drives these titles to limited appeal.

Just how many times does someone want to log into Eve, see that the pipe they need to run is still contested and see that they can't even leave their station because that too is being camped? I ask that partially in jest of course, because that isn't really as common as non-Eve players may think it is. But it is only partial jest because it can happen.

The easy answer, of course, is to be prepared. Have insta-jumps set up, have an alt you can log into, get your Corp/Alliance to work together, all sorts of different things that happen daily. All of them though require not so much more work than a typical diku-inspired game, but rather different work. And that is the core problem.

The open-ended games sometimes fall down on the very thing they thrive on: their open-endedness. Without proper direction for the uninitiated player, the open-ended games can be overwhelming. The experiences are still billed as games, and players come to new games with expectations built upon their experiences in earlier games.

Add to this the rules players need to create for themselves, the diplomacy of pushing those rules, the politicals of maintaining them and finally the need to go enforce them. That's a lot of work for a game, and in my opinion the reason why such rules so often fall down. It's nice that SEED is trying to integrate some sort of player policy making (which could be like ATITD's player voting for rules changes or merely a SWG City Mayor), but that is ultimately something that has a very narrow appeal in the first place. Does the player who gets voted in have a lot of authority? Will that authority used and misused compel more players to vote? Or will it just drive players away in droves because the authority someone has over them is even worse than someone's ability to camp a zone they wanted to go farm in?

Open-ended games are hard. They seem to require more of a player than most want to give.

At the same time, an open-ended endgame (or midgame) is something else entirely. Using a traditional game approach on the front end, a game can rope a new player in through a long series of activities and growth. Then when they're "ready", that player is unleashed upon the game world with a good foundation of knowledge hopefully coupled with the necessary self-motivation needed to go off and continue growing.

This sounds like old UO because in some ways that's what it was. By the time I played they had integrated Haven, newbie island where people go and got quests while learning what skills did what. Then when they were done they were dumped into the world proper with some knowledge and a lot of motivation to go learn more.

This can work for other games. It is, in theory, the foundation of Age of Conan, where players play a single-player RPG (with persistent-world commerce and community) until level 20. Then they join the persistent world for further RPGing.

The genre seems to be learning. It's all fine and good to be capitalizing on the technical ability to put thousands of people into the same game world. You just need to provide some guidance for them at first. How much guidance you need depends on the game and the players you want in it.

None of my fears were particularly justified nor logical. They were based on a combination of factors, elements of experience I thought would never converge again.

They did, but in a different form.

Kithicor Pause

A few elements combined to first make me avoid Kithicor Forest (and later the Dreadlands).

1. Ambience. The design of the zone was just spooky. This is an old forest with trees that have seen everything. Even in the middle of the day, the place was dark. It took all the way until World of Warcraft for a game to come along that matched the sheer diversity of zone design that SOE/Verant had achieved so long ago. And it took that long for me to find a "seamless-world" game that matched the diversity and hand-craftedness of EQ (though I don't really consider WoW truly seamless ala Vanguard given where players spend a lot of their adverturing time).
2. Knowledge. This was a time when one played EQ, UO, AC1 or drove deeper into the genre for games like M59 and Underlight. In my very limited experience to that point, there was no other game quite like EQ. No game had zones like this, so there was no basis for comparison. And while I'd already availed myself of such places as Stratics, Allakhazam and EQ Atlas, that was only book knowledge. Knowing how to solve a quest is not the action of doing it, and it was this place I had to get through in order to do it. If I recall, it was to pick up a new pet scroll from Highpass Keep, a town built into the valley of Highpass, far on the other side of the Kithicor. To that point, I had spent most of my time in the relative safety of Greater Faydark and Butcherblock Mountains, never more than a few minutes from my home of Felwithe. In the days when one rode a boat across the Ocean of Tears to get to Freeport, Highpass Keep was far.
3. Guildmates. This was probably the biggest factor. I'd been in the guild for about four months, and while I didn't know everyone, they were a great bunch (some of them are still there in fact). And they had been playing a long time even before I started. Their accounts of Kithicor, spoken in what I thought were hushed tones (which turned out to be just the vernacular of EQ I was still wrapping my mind around), combined with some mentions of the zone being made harder by the powers that be, really affected my willingness to just drive head first into the place.

By this combination of design and newbish-ness, I spent days fretting this run. I researched, finding out the safest pass was the northern end of the zone. I talked to people who were kind enough not to mock the new. I tested my ability to flee with and without probably the most requested buff from those days (Spirit of Wolf, +% run speed). I printed the map and had it hanging on my wall (the days before I got addicted to dual monitors).

In the end, a kindly druid not only gave me Spirit of Wolf, but levitation and some crazy HP-regen buff I think was Regeneration, though I can't remember. With all that, it took me 5 solid minutes to make it to Highpass. I didn't see one mob, didn't hear one scream and only paused when I thought the entrance to Rivervale might have been it. Unscathed upon arrival, I wasn't disappointed by the lack of adventure nor that the zone didn't live up to my expectations and fears. I was relieved. That being my first of hundreds of trips across, it still took a dozen more times before Kithicor just became another one of those zones to cross if one needed to.

Then when I switched over to my Bard full-time, the zone become just another temporary blip. In no game I've ever played before nor since has an avatar I've driven moved as relatively fast as my moderately-equipped Bard. Someday, someone is going to realize that letting some people move really friggin' fast does not break the experience if other classes have good benefits in their own right. There's safety in speed, particularly when combined with flight, the very mechanism I used to cross the next (and last) zone to give me trepidation: The Dreadlands. Not only did I get to experience the limits of the graphics engine at that point (I was so high the ground didn't render), I got to feel the rush of a missed song twist when I plummeted to the ground, landing with 1hp just outside the aggro range of the mobs at Karnor's. Ah memories.

The Days Between

In the years since that day, I have been enamored of different games for different reasons. The combat styles of DAoC, the flight of CoH, the FPS-I-could-play that is PS, the best delivery of my preferred Wizard that is the WoW Mage, countless others. But one thing was always missing: Real trepidation.

Oh, there's always places I don't want to go unless well equipped, but that's the problem. It's become easier to predict where I can survive by myself as the games become more contrived. It's like each area just comes with a sign that says "you must be this high to enter". Knowing how high and what sort of things I'd need has made the actual getting of them less an adventure and more just a procedure.

This is augmented by the fact that the whole playerbase has gotten more experienced. Except for the vast number of newbies that WoW has attracted, I often wonder how many people feel true fear in these games anymore. I personally feel like every death I ever incurred in WoW, for example, was just a minor nuisance. Of course, I do not at all lament the light death penalty of the game, since that is one of many factors that broadens its appeal. But as CmdrSlack used to poke fun at me about, I do believe that some amount of death penalty enhances an experience, and one of the better methods is a corpse run. It doesn't need to be nekkid, but needing to go back to get your stuff will result in you taking less chances. I don't at all advocate that just yet though, not until these games become less about raw acquisition and have solved the perennial technical issues. Nothing like losing months of work to a linkdeath.

I'm not an experienced pro at these games. I don't burn through content and hit the endgame rich. And I don't backwards-engineer the experience to maximize advancement through the most efficient paths. I still play pretty much the way I always play. But having done this so many times, having climbed so many ladders, it's harder to become awed, much less scared, by much.

So it surprised me this passed Thursday when the fears of Kithicor bubbled to the surface again in Eve.

0.0 Trepidation

My Corporation in Eve has joined an Alliance and is headed to "0.0 Space". This alone does not describe the events, but for security reasons I won't use real system names either. In broad terms, here's what it means to go to 0.0 Space:

• Better ratting. "Ratting" is basically mob-grinding of old. Nasty NPC pirates populate asteroid belts and it's up to players to clear them out. This is the most direct iteration of a typical EQ experience going. Solo or in a group, kill mobs for money, loot and faction.
• Better resources. In those same asteroid fields are, well, asteroids. In lower security space though, these asteroids yield better minerals, for reasons not worth explaining here except to say they're very worth getting.
• Security. There is almost none except for what the Corp and Alliance bring.
• Warfare. Many of the more frequent PvPers have security ratings that prevent easy access to Empire space (relatively safe areas where the bigger danger is commercial in nature). In wartime, an enemy corp may be restricted from fighting their enemy because their good PvPers can't travel Empire space safely. This is not the case in 0.0 space.
• POSes. These are the Eve "houses" basically, player owned stations that can be equipped to do a variety of things. Think a City in Shadowbane, accessible as a single entity, governed by set privileges, worth owning for your guild and worth destroying if your enemy has one.

There's a lot more to it, but these are the highlights. Greater risk for greater reward. But unlike other titles, the enemy here isn't just mobs with more HP and mana. It's mostly other people, and they're far less predictable.

Eve is a game with sort of old-school sensibilities. While it was never marketed as a play2crush game, it is a full-PvP universe. And I say universe because there's only one server. You log into the galaxy and everyone who is playing is right there with you. They may be minutes or hours from you, but rather than the usual shards split into chunks of maybe 3,000 concurrent users, Eve normally features between 15,000 and 25,000 daily. There's just more people who can impact your game than in any other game going.

Last Thursday, when life again permitted I play to some degree, I had all of my stuff packed and sitting at our Corporation's staging point. From here we would each make our flight through the gauntlet, the "pipe" that involves over a dozen jumps through 0.0 space, lawless land. The alliance we joined theoretically controls this pipe, but as I've seen since, they don't have locked doors. This being the best of any route to our new home, it is highly contested space.

There are enemy all over, creating bubbles, ganking, scouting, all of that. Meanwhile our Alliance is chasing them out, pitched battles waged nightly. It's all very cool and I can't wait to be a relevant part of it. PvP itself is also pretty cool, though I have very limited experience in it.

Being part of the time-starved crowd, I'm not rich, but I've done ok by playing conservatively. I generally don't upgrade until I can afford that ship many times over, both in the ship itself and the insurance (which can be brutal). I stick primarily to missions, and if ratting will bolt the moment anyone with a slightly low security rating comes in. I'm not really used to losing. I've lost all of one ship since I started playing, and that quite stupidly.

So that's where I was on Thursday. Still a relative newb in a ship that'd just barely pass effectiveness solo-ratting in 0.0 space, sitting at the staging point with most of the stuff I'd ever accrued on my Trader alt there too, staring into the abyss.

And the abyss stared back.

Similar to my run through Kithicor, I did a whole bunch of digging. Now with a better computer and array than previously, I could have more information on the second screen. Talking to people, reading about tactics, re-equipping a dozen times, watching the channel we use to talk about enemy actions, I sat at my monitor for 90 minutes just preparing, talking to people and watching the action unfold.

Then I logged off. Apparently the enemy was fairly well entrenched in one of the systems, and there wasn't going to be a force to kick them out for hours yet. Me adding my ship wouldn't have sped that along and at 12:30am, I wasn't thinking I'd be effective by the time they got going anyway.

Sunday when I played again I went through the same mental exercise, but this time I just decided to do it. I wimped out though and took my cheapest (and fastest) ship though. No problem. 14 jumps and no enemy at all. I still am kicking myself. It took all of 8 minutes to do the whole trip.

I realized from this the feeling I hadn't had in so long. This was really the same sort of feeling I had so many years ago on the forest edge. Like then, I could lose all of my stuff. Like then, I really needed other people. Like then, this is based partly on design. There's an intense satisfaction I get when I enter a system with a proper name to it. The outlands of space still go by what amounts to astronomical survey numbers. The populated systems all have real names. Going from the former to the latter, I feel the safety of just knowing there's civilization somewhere. Plus in this particular space, the numerical systems are rendered with a heavy red overtone while the named systems have a blue-ish one.

This complete motif is awesome in its immersive. Sure I'm only $40 or so away from replacing everything I lose. But I'm also pretty opposed to RMTing for my own gain. I understand why it happens and appreciate that others get that immersed in a game. But to me, if I can't do it in the game, I'm not really the target for that game.

In Eve I'd like to think I can be. Capping my third month of play on my third time through the galaxy, I think I may be. But this unwillingness to real-world-cash my way around means I will feel the sting of defeat that much more. And that succeeds in heightening my trepidation to levels not experienced since 2000.

———- 

Manual trackbacks:

http://www.mmoz.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3327

But it all ended and I was free once again. While I wanted to hit South Hall again to finish up with games I hadn't learned enough about yet, it was my duty to actually, you know, see the other 2/3 of the show. To Kentia and West I did go.

Kentia

Kentia had its usual hodge-podge of games, gear and assorted oddities. The focus down there seemed to be on active play (punching, driving, surfing accessories), mobile games (how does anyone seriously game on these things?!) and random utilities like development tools, testers and hardware. Most of this stuff I had just seen at GDC, but the floor felt more compressed. I can't be sure, but it feels like there was more private-viewing booths and meeting rooms both in Kentia and in West this year than when I last was here in 2004.

So to the West I went.

Concourse

Along the way I managed a detour into Lucasarts. Sworn to silence, I've got nothing to say except that anyone who's a gamer should pay particular attention to two things in early-part 2007: Euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter. By themselves they are "just another" behavior and physics engine respectively. You'll see why together they mean something though.

West Hall

This Hall had Nintendo, Sony and Miscellaneous. Those two booths were impossible to miss as they took up what appeared to be 2/3 of the available exhibition space. As I noted in Kentia, the whole back of the hall was private office areas, where things like Warhammer Online (awesome WoW-level CGI movie though) were tucked.

Nintendo

My first stop was to see about the line for the Nintendo Wii. As expected, it was far longer than I could justify standing on. I'll see the unit soon enough, so wasting half my available time on that line didn't seem worth it. Ah well.

The rest of the booth was dominated Nintendo DSes and various games. None particularly stuck out to me, but I'm nowhere near the target audience for their titles. I did get to see the relatively new DS Lite. This is a rather nice device, something I'm seriously considering buying. It looks sorta like an iPod when closed, is far less hefty than the chunky original, and of course has the benefit of the most creative software I've seen for any mobile platform, befitting the creative interface devices available on the system.

I'll probably buy the Wii because of the control system alone. Like the DS, there's true creative potential there.

Finally having my fill of Brain Age, I moved cross the aisle to Sony.

Sony

Another enormous booth, I was very surprised by the rather lackluster interest being shown the PS3 compared to that of the Wii. I figure this is based on two elements:

1. While the PS3 is a technical wonder of technology straight from a sci-fi novel, there just isn't much more to it than making games more immersive. Whoopie they added a motion sensor to the controller. The thing is just a silver dual shock controller from years ago. I don't care how much power the system have, if the control system is exactly the same, chances are the developers will continue to dip into the barrel of what they know.
2. They did have ample playable demos on the floor, probably around 30-35 stations of PS3s featuring multiple playable versions of things like Warhawk (modern flight combat sim), Gran Turismo HD (best graphics tech demo there), Resistance: Fall of Man (near-future combat), Heavenly Sword (fighting game). Meanwhile, the only way to play the Wii was to stand on line or somehow sneak in.

I didn't figure I'd be buying the PS3 this year or at all, and see no reason to change my mind. Making the games in HD format was a great idea, but they're still the same games I was playing a decade ago.

The PSP was another story. I have been somewhat disappointed with it since I bought it a year ago. I've got a laptop and two portable DVD players, so travel movies is not an issue and doesn't require I buy a new library. The games I had tried were mostly direct rips of console-based or console-like titles. My last console was the Nintendo 64 for a reason. I hate the controls and haven't been truly engaged by a game since the first Turok.

But this year I saw a number of titles that make me glad I haven't eBay'd the device. There seems to be an influx of puzzlers, which is exactly what I want to play on the device.

• Miami Vice was a surprise in that it isn't about the show nor upcoming movie. It probably has that sort of Jan Hammer type music, but I couldn't hear sounds on any of the scores of playable units they had around the booth. You have this ship which looks like something out of Asteroids, and the object seems to be to fly around exploding at the right time to make cubes explode. All pretty abstract. All just straight pretty. And intellectually stimulating.
• Tekken. Good. I need a fighter game.
• EEE. This had a name. I think it starts with "Endless". For the life of me though I cannot recall the name. It was fun though, a puzzler in the vein of Miami Vice.
• LocoRoco- puzzler. I saw this at GDC at the Sony booth there, and a good analog of the experience was shown as part of the Independent Games Festival as well. Rotate the world to move an amorphous object around it. Good times.

Still no word on a keyboard for the device though. To me, this continued lack is an insane oversight, something for which I have no explanation. I can't imagine it'd take even a halfway decent coder any more than 30 minutes to create a driver for it. And it's not like Logitech doesn't have enough keyboards kicking around. What keeps either company, or anyone else, from marketing a keyboard is just beyond me. If the device had a touchscreen, it'd be passable. This things cries out for a keyboard, and I'd die happy if it could support a mouse.

They also had some Guitar Hero 2 stations here. Fun game.

Funcom

Since a number of games are shown at a number of booths, it was no surprise to stumble upon Age of Conan at the Funcom booth, nor to learn some more new interesting info about it:

• Levels 1-20 only need to be done once. Players are not required to repeat them if they don't want to. This makes the archetype/sub-class choice for palpable to me, since done once, players can instantly choose another class if their first class didn't work out.
• These levels are free. No subscription fee is collected until one reaches 20 and makes a class choice.
• They target these levels to take about 10-15 hours of game play.
• The taverns in these levels are persistent, so players can mingle. They're not sure they're going to allow trade though, which makes sense. No sense building twinking in right at the start.

Further, another bit of news on cities: guild leaders can build a Town Hall somewhere and the town can grow around it. They really want towns to work with the landscape but to not blight it. They will carefully control where and how building happens.

Finally, the demos didn't feature any magic because their particles system wasn't done. They will, of course, have it though. It'll be elemental-based and powerful and all those glowing promises we always hear before launch.

Given how this game has progressed though, this could be the title that lets me forgive Funcom for the train wreck that was initial AO.

CCP

In the corner of the Hall was tucked the Eve booth. This was largely a meeting space, though they did have a guided demo up. The big feature here was the new graphics engine, which will come this summer, but not with the next content patch. They remodelled and re-textured every ship in the game, and will finalize the overhaul with brand new effects.

They also featured the upcoming integration of voicechat support, brought to them by Vivox. Yet another system at GDC, this suite comes from a company with a strong telecom background. Eve could, if they wanted, allow players to make phone calls right from the game, such is the level of Vivox integration with telecom. Right now, more pedestrian goals like spacial chat and seeing who's speaking are the goals.

Sony Online Entertainment

This booth is remarkably different from 2004. They are much more open with their games now, ringing the outside of their private-viewing area with presented demos of their library of titles. Having just played EQ2, knowing EQ1 pretty well, and seeing not much different with PS and Untold Legends, I focused on SWG.

Now, a word here first. I like playing dumb at these shows. It's not like I'm some fount of unique intelligence. It's just that I find people will open up to the ignorant more than they will to some know-it-all yutz who can't shut up about their own geekness. I've seen a number of these folks at the show, and they annoy me with their transparent questions having no other purpose than tripping up the hired presenters. I almost asked one idiot to move along when he started mocking the Vanguard presenter in the Microsoft games booth about why the game had no business being there. I decided on a simple "you know the announcement was about a three way relationship right?". Stupid kids.

Anyhoo, I had the pleasure of meeting Kurt "Thunderheart" Stangl again. He wouldn't know me from Adam anyway, but he was the one I spoke to the last time I got a good run-down on SWG. This guy really does care. The most telling indicator of this was just how much he had to hold back on the impact the NGE had on the community. Here I was, some random E3 guy who professed to having just some basic awareness of this "online Star Wars game", and he had to struggle to hide his emotions when I asked about some new changes I heard about to the game. He cares about the players, truly. Makes sense given his role of course.

So with that, I got to hear some cool stuff:

• If you don't know by now, they're blowing up Restus on Rori this summer. There'll be a long server-wide quest that leads up to a final battle around the starport in Restus. The story itself is cool, so I won't spoil it. But the outcome of the battle is preordained anyway, so the ending isn't a spoil. And the impact is both huge and immediately rewarding. The entire city goes from alive to all ruins in a matter of seconds, resulting in a ragtag band of survivors giving out quests. Once this event ends, all of Restus becomes a "battleground", a full PvP zone. Really good stuff, even if it does sound like a certain other 'opening of' quest.
• Heavy weapons are in, and they are cool. In a nice nod, every player can use Scatter Pistols and Flamethrowers, though unlike Commandos that specialize in them, other combat classes will lose Action to use them. They still work though. Kurt demoed them on some content on Kashyyyk. Fun stuff, particularly the Flamethrower, which targets the ground.
• True collision detection is coming. As it has been for six months. No real word on when, but they think in a matter of months.
• They have some goodies coming for space too, but those I can't talk about.
• If a player who is flagged PvP gets killed by another player, a dialog box pops up asking if they want to put a bounty on that player. Each player can place up to a 1mil credit bounty on another, and each player can have up to twenty bounties on them.

All in all, they are not giving up on this game. There's a real energy about it from both SOE and Lucasarts. People are really interested in fulfilling the promise the NGE set out to start. I give them credit for maintaining this level of excitement about the game, and maybe in six months it'll finally be a complete package of relevant newness.

NC Soft and Tabula Rasa

At the end of the day, after hours on my feet seeing stuff relevant for my other notes more so than here, I decided to end with what has emerged as my favorite title of the show: Tabula Rasa. I'm glad I did. The fun I had yesterday was trumped.

I was invited to an open chair that turned out to have a different classification. Unlike the "Free Play" stations, this one was "Guided Demo" and included a walking tour/adventure with NCS Richard, playing from NC Soft headquarters. But this was no museum tour.

He starts me in the world as if I knew nothing (quite my purpose) and explains something I immediately realized I had wrong from yesterday. The Q key rotates weapons while the E key rotates alternate abilities. I thought they were for ammo. Some cool stuff here on this character, which was explained to me as being a "Specialist". Aside from normal weapons, I could "cast" Chain Lightning (jumps between enemies) and place Pulse Turrets on the ground, something very Planetside Engineer-esque.

Properly trained and equipped, he guided me through the first few quests which culminated in a romp through an instanced zone. The story here was these biomech warrior things just kept coming, and the humans wanted to know why. Working with their allies, they found the source and decided to go shut it down. That was our goal.

A solid 20 minutes of game play later, we were done, and I was hooked. The game is going to come out when it is done, but probably this year. It's fairly polished as is, but I can't speak for its level of content completeness.

Richard Garriot became the Creative Lead on the project around the time all these crazy changes happened, in addition to being the Executive Producer. This means the complete theme and play shift was his doing. I applaud the result. I also like that they kept the same language. No longer a fantasy title, at least all this means is I have to change what my Triskelion looks like.

Conclusion

Today has turned out to be my last day. Conference call in the morning and a 2pm flight back home. I think I've seen everything I've wanted to see though, and then some.

I set out to find innovation, and I feel like I found enough of it in Pirates of the Burning Sea, Age of Conan and Tabula Rasa. They were quite unexpected, but pleasantly so. These will be the titles I follow for this year while enjoying the offerings already live, for different reason.

For Pirates, it's a game I see as potentially Eve-like in a more mass marketable theme and offering (since players do have avatars. For Conan it's the fantasy theme but the very unique and compelling control system. And for TR, it's the theme and control system together which, like Conan, together finally bring MMORPGs out of the morass of auto-lock dice rolling combat systems I'm so very tired of.

Will that mean I avoid WoW's Burning Crusade? No. By then the Mage Talent Respec will be finally balanced, and the Draenei interest me. They are a noble race (or could be) and new content is new content. WoW is still a very fun game. I just don't need to play it to the exclusion of truly innovative titles.

So that's my 2006. A few new MMORPGs that truly break the mold, the MMOFPS I wish I could have played while here, and the generally rising chaos of life itself.

It was a good show. Probably not the best, and I imagine some people will think it's subdued or on the downswing or just getting more legit and therefore more sanitized for the corporations. But everyone has their own way to deal with the smell of money and success, and eventually the general gamer will come around to the idea that yes, games are business.

• Age of Conan (and again here)
• Eve
• Exteel
• Huxley
• Mu
• Pirates of the Burning Sea
• Project Wiki
• Star Wars Galaxies
• SUN
• Tabula Rasa (and again here)
• Vanguard

The money isn’t bad either, but there’s easier money to be made for a newbie. And I’m making it.

About a week ago, a good buddy from my SWG days joined us in Eve. Vedi was, in SWG, a Master Armorsmith that ran his own business for quite a while. He was also a guild member, and a customer of my Energy business, but he’s always had an eye to business. Being fresh to Eve, he seems to have approached this galaxy with the same eye he applied to the previous one.