Long Time No See MMOs

I stopped reading Massively and hopping about MMO blogger sites random-commenting about the same time I got heavily into ATITD.

As a result, the APB 'Keys to the City' Beta/Preview event came as a huge surprise to me. I only found out about it because I'm a Steam whore and was scrolling down the "News" section admiring the new UI yet again when I saw the headline "APB Beta Event Delayed Until Sunday" or something like that.

I did a "Whuh?" and a double-take, and looked again. Then did the hyperlink clicky thing and found out that yes, APB -is- doing a public beta, it was this Sunday or thereabouts, and best of all, Rock, Paper Shotgun was giving away 50,000 keys. Yes, 50k.

Thinking I was screwed because I'm usually late to the party for this sort of thing, I typed in my email anyway, and lo and behold I was very surprised to actually receive an acknowledgement that said, "Key sent!"

Because I am a kiasu individual, I typed in another of my many emails just for luck, and had another key sent too. So... *dangles key* You know you want it...

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I checked about, and it seems NDA is lifted for the Keys to the City event. Maybe. I'll just keep my comments truncated as a compromise.

It's not too shabby. This is the first MMO (besides Age of Conan) that does first-person aiming/targeting well. Certainly the first with guns anyhow.

I hated Tabula Rasa turning with the slack-jawed avatar that did a mistimed shuffle step animation every time I turned. I was not keen on the lameness of Fallen Earth in which I had to line up on weirdly moving or weirdly stationary mobs and click once every three seconds to see a little cartoon blood speck appear.

APB feels much more distinctly FPS-ish than the two. Yet it also feels distinctly more MMO than a real FPS.

I'm not sure about the vaunted customisation options. It's not bad. It's not as flexible out of the box as City of Heroes either. It looks like many things are unlocks. Once I got out of the tutorial I was able to put on some decent clothes, and I saw others look way cooler with more gang-style tattoos, so presumably it can be done later.

APB reminds me of a weird cross between GtA and City of Heroes and a opposing team-based FPS.

The game is occasionally sluggish to react to a 'use object' keypress. I could be maybe too far away from it, or maybe it is a lag issue, since in their vaunted wisdom, the developers have made the "Rest of the World" use the Euro servers. In fact, according to Massively, they ain't opening Aussie servers, period, so APB is not going to be sold there. Oh well. I was getting very sick of hanging with the Aussie MMO community anyway.

Ironically, I don't even know which bar in my UI represents my health bar. The rest of it is quite context sensitive with decently functional help tips, etc.

Irrespective of my inability to determine my actual body condition, I had quite a good time, even on PvP missions, and was able to trade kill/death ratios quite evenly. Some girl character mowed me down with a vehicle. I respawned, ran back and shot her in the head and body and head a couple of times until she fell over, narrowly escaping death myself. Then she did the same to me. Rinse and repeat for the next guy, except I was the one who started the Vehicular Slaughter chain (with which, I got one of those shiny achievement badge thingies.)

I get City of Heroes flashbacks running around in this modern city of San Paro or whatever they call it. The whole setting. Except you get to pull open cars and shove out citizens so that you can drive them GtA style, with the lousy control scheme guaranteeing some mown down fire hydrants and postboxes.

The contacts are more proactive with invisible cell phones. Once you meet them and 'pledge' to them, they call you and offer you missions which you can accept or reject. Heck, they are so persistent, I found them rather distracting when I was trying to work out how to do an open-world mugging of a pedestrian. I managed to ignore their phone calls long enough to mug someone for a necklace, find out that I was supposed to drop the jewelry off at an Item-Drop Off, absent-mindedly accepted the stupid contact's mission, and found that my Item-Drop Off waypoint had disappeared in favor of the mission waypoint. Oh...f...

The missions themselves are currently not that exciting. They mostly consist of getting from point A to point B (marked by a waypoint on your map) and clicking the 'interact with object' button to trigger a progress meter and an animation that shows your avatar prying open windows, prying open cars, bombing buildings, spraying graffiti, dropping off loot, etc. Rinse and repeat.

What is very different is that I haven't met a computer-controlled 'mob' yet. Ever. No enemies. Just random citizens going about their day that you could shoot in the head if you wanted, or mug to trigger the open-world mission.

So what is supposed to make this errand boy work interesting? Well, notoriety. The more badass you are, the higher a chance that you will get and be involved in Opposed missions. Think hero vs villain mission pvp that CoH folks always talked about.

In the tutorial zone, after finishing the basic errands, I was given the option to prevent my opposing faction, the Enforcers, from completing certain missions - so the computer set up a Defend/Guard waypoint, and I had to trundle over there and try and shoot a redname player in the head to stop/slow them down.

Perhaps due to lag, or bad aim, or sheer clumsy ineptness, I wasn't very good at this, and the twice I tried it, the other players managed to finish their mission anyway.

It was also suggested that to make things more interesting, that this sort of thing should be done as a group. Open grouping is supposedly available. I'm not sure. I picked the "Let the computer choose me a group" option that popped up, and about five minutes of wandering around later, I ended up grouped with 3 other people who were ostensibly on the same side.

Shortly after, our group leader picked a mission that pit us against another group of 4. This turned out slightly more interesting, a la a much wimpier Counterstrike, in that three of us sort of ran towards the same place together, and shot in the same direction at any red names.

Our opponents were slightly more coordinated than we were, and they came driving by in a car with one guy driving, and three guys leaning out the windows with rifles. Some punk scored a "Drive-by Shooting" achievement on my dead body. *wry grin*

After which, we rallied, and ended up in a little shoot-out, which successfully killed a number of them, half by luck, and half by flanking and to my immense surprise, our firefight delayed them to the point that the timer ran out and they failed to complete the mission, so we won.

Some other guy from the Enforcer faction had been scoring kill streaks of 5 and more and hit a prestige level of 5. This suddenly lit him up on the area map and sent a global announcement to us Criminals that this guy had a huge bounty on his head. Thus we all hijacked cars and zoomed over to him. I was -this- close to running him down with my vehicle, but some other Criminal ran up and AK-47'ed him into the dust, claiming the bounty. Oh well.

Just as randomly, our group of 4 suddenly swelled to a group of 8-10 folks, and there was apparently some other mission to stop that earlier group of 4 (and maybe more). All I know is that there was suddenly a war worthy of the 5th Column vs Council with about 6-8 green name friendlys running about, and swamping the 4-5 red names which blundered into us. We killed them. Rinse and repeat.

Then randomly, our group went back into a group of 4. (By the way, the last person in our team had been driving around randomly and never really came anywhere near us.) One of our guys got into a car. I tried to get in the same car, did, couldn't figure out how to lean out of a window and shoot, hit the button that exited me out of the car. The other guy got into the car with the driver, who drove off.

At that point, nearing 11.30pm, and getting just a teensy bit carsick from the weird acceleration physics, I decided it was time to call it a day too.

I dunno. I might give the beta a little longer to grow on me. I can't see myself paying $15 a month for it personally. Other people might. It's not any shabbier than Tabula Rasa or Fallen Earth and those games had followings... for a little while.

It's semi-entertaining, but ultimately, PvP is not my schtick. Co-op, yes. I tend to last longer on PvP games that support co-op options, and APB leans more in this direction than say, Aion or Eve Online (more griefer friendly), but there are other more appealing co-op games with more depth and better response elsewhere - such as Counterstrike, Natural Selection (the sequel is coming soon! *squeal*).

It's got a unique theme going for it, which might count for something. Time will tell.

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The other thing that I hadn't heard was the news that LOTRO is going free-to-play!

Eep.

Of course, this necessitates a great long complicated table depicting the differences between a normal member, a Premium member and a VIP member - of which I cannot make head or tail out of.

Especially since I was a Founder member who eventually decided to give up one's Founder privileges and quit. At which point, I guess I don't qualify as a VIP because I no longer have an active subscription.

But if I come back and play for free now, would I be considered a Premium member? I might.

What is most alarming to me are the gold limits. It's 2 gold for normal members and 5 gold for Premium members, and as slackard as I was about collecting gold, I'm certain I exceeded that at least twice over at the level that I'm at.

Does this mean that gold limits no longer apply to my character? I shouldn't lose the gold, but does that mean I better not spend below 5 gold or encounter the limit? Does this mean that I don't earn any gold because of this?

Very confused.

Of course, I can just pop by for a $9.99 VIP subscription (assuming they charge that, and not $15) when I get the LOTRO urge.

Or I could not pop by at all, which leaves me completely unaffected by whatever they choose to do.

But it's an interesting move. I guess subscriber numbers are at an all-time low. I'm sure even Aion is hemoraging them. (Which reminds me I should quit by July before I end up renewing for another 3 months.)

ATITD has quite hooked me on a third account though. Mostly because the untouched account is offlining onions at a decent pace, which can just about keep up with the four sheep pens, and leaves me with NO ONIONS to -have- to grow. The convenience alone is worth 5 bucks a week.

The fourth account has taught me that a day or two or three of neglect yields up to 6000 grass. This is kinda cool too. Maybe less cool as I get more and more greenhouses eventually, but it is currently a decent straw supplement for my camels.

Offlining cabbages is rather miserable. A day's offlining yields around 800. I grow 20 a seed, and can hit 180-240 in one grow, which takes around 7-10 minutes depending on if I'm concentrating or not. So an hour of work > a day of offlining.

Neither am I content to offline wood, as I have a veritable forest near me this around.

Some day I'll try barley or wheat. I bet it's still miserable too.