Anarchy Online: The Nostalgia

Remember the time when we thought Hexen was beautiful and state of the art?

I decided to try out Anarchy Online, the ancient mother of science fiction MMOs. It felt like that. I bet in 2001, it looked beautiful. It's not so impressive now that I am used to the eye candy that is CoX, GW and WoW. Still, you can see the amount of effort put into the game.

First of all, the music is wonderful. I'm downloading the soundtrack from the game so I can play it when I am on the computer.

It turns out that the music in the game is dynamically generated:


We were not content with having two-minute loops of music playing over and over again. The music became too predictable, and with a potential playing time of thousands of hours, each piece of music, no matter how long, would become predictable and boring.

The human mind is designed to recognize recurring patterns. This is how we learn to identify things in the world -- through our senses in an organised pattern: Recurring sounds, visuals, smells etc. Unfortunately, recurring musical patterns - otherwise known as loops - start to get annoying after a while, especially if they go on and on and on. Even though the music doesn't draw any attention to itself, the pattern that it is repeating will.

Our solution to this problem was to create a tool that allowed us to combine many small samples of music into a continuous track (this tool will be described in more detail below). It allowed us to create a single track built up of many smaller pieces which were combined on the fly to create an ever-changing soundtrack.


Secondly, the game inventive. It isn't the same old fantasy MMO with the boring old warrior, mage, priest. I didn't play very deeply into the game, so perhaps the standard fantasy classes were just renamed into sci-fi based professions, but I liked how everything is given a sci-fi spin. In addition to equipment, I could put implants into myself, and upload nano-programs (sort of like spells and skills). Run out of slots? Put in additional memory chips into my belt, which acts as a sort of CPU. I feel like a bit of a cyborg, 
running around with leg implants that let me run faster, and amusingly enough, a brain implant (with an icon that looks like a brain) that improve my dual-wielding skill.


Despite its good points, I gave up on the game.

It was just a few months ago when the monster aggro AI in Guildwars broke. Monsters
 would chase players across entire maps in a manner described by many as a "conga line". (Does that sound familiar?)

The conga is a Latin American carnival march that became popular in the United States in the 1930s and 1950s. The dancers form a long, processing line. It has three shuffle steps on the beat, followed by a kick that is slightly ahead of the fourth beat.

There was much screaming, and much denial on the developer side (that such a bug even existed -- they claimed it "improved AI" until hordes of incensed players compiled an entire thread of screenshots) until it was finally fixed.


Well, unless the same happened in AO, it would appear that it is indeed a feature or fact of life in this game.

I left the city and entered a forest
I left the forest and entered a desert-ish area.
I aggroed a mob (a bit too high for me to fight).
I ran.
I aggroed another mob.
I kept running.
I aggroed a third mob.
I kept running.

Three mobs chased me, from the desert region, into the forest region, back into the desert region, into another city, across the city, into another city, across that city, back into the forest...

Everywhere I went, I saw three "rollerrats" ...rolling... after me. Is this what passes for normal behaviour of wildlife? Do not even aggro anything you can't fight or you will just have to let it kill you. I gave up and let the three rollerrats tear me up. Then I uninstalled the game.

*sigh* That was a bit disappointing, it seemed like a cute, old and free game.