In any case, to commemorate the site’s second anniversary I thought I’d drop a headpat on few personal favorites things from the past year. I’m not going to even tongue-in-cheek call them ‘awards’ like I did last year; these are just the things that made me well pleased in the past twelve months.

Playing A Good Game - 

I know I’ve complained and kvetched, but EverQuest 2 was the game I spent the most time playing this year. Despite its (many) flaws, I’m now very used to the refurbished lands of Norrath. I have really enjoyed running around with my gnomish companions, and we’re definitely getting into the strange and fabulous world of high level play. We were kvetching the other night about the really awesome high level mounts, actually, and how our guild-less-ness ensures it’ll be some time before we snag Wargs or Rhinos or anything like that.

I’m incredibly impressed by what I saw of Kunark, and I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to reach high level with a static party. Good times.

I also want to call out Guild Wars, a game that I unexpectedly fell head over heels in love with this year. I’ve been working through the Nightfall and Eye of the North content at a lackadaisical pace – just something fun and Massive to fill time with every once in a while. I’m really : / that Shawn is closing up Guildcast. His show is one of the big reasons I appreciate this game as much as I do. Van Hemlock, of course, is another big reason – and he just finished up his exploration of Arena’s world.

Meeting New People -

The thing I’m probably most proud of from the past 12 months is the number of interesting folks I’ve had the chance to chat with. Writing about Massive games and on this blog has put me in touch with bloggers, designers, producers, podcasters, executives, and journalists … many of whom seem to think I’m not doing an utterly horrible job. That’s mighty satisfying. To the folks who I’ve had the pleasure of befriending this past year – thank you. And the same to those of you who continue to put up with me. Your efforts have been noted in my log.

Admiring The Crusade -

The biggest thing in Massive games this year, and I basically had no part in it. My highest level WoW character is 62. I’ve seen Hellfire, a little bit of Zangermarsh, and Shat. That’s about all of Outlands I’ve seen. That said, I spent all year really admiring how much Blizzard is willing to shake up the status quo in their own little universe. Faster leveling, bigtime changes to PvP, and a general attitude of competence all around. It’s a hell of a show to watch, even though I’m mostly on the sidelines.

The best bit: I’ll likely be participating a bit more directly in Azeroth, thanks to the kind invitation from some Hammy fists.

Drinking the Koolaid –  

I started the year very grumpy about the whole RMT/microtransaction thing. My view was very close to Mr. Jacobs’: subscriptions 4eva. Part of that view was my general focus on AAA games. Bigtime titles generally imply bigtime fees, right?

My exposure over the last twelve months to smaller titles like MapleStory has changed that view a lot. I still don’t love the idea of playing a game where another player’s wallet can hit me for direct damage, don’t get me wrong. Just the same, paying a few pennies for fun stuff in Gaia or a Nexon title holds a lot of appeal. Kid experiences, especially, seem like the perfect fit for that business.

The biggest thing that changed my mind in this area is my ongoing frustration with flat fees. I want tiered options, darnit! I want family plans and publisher packages! Give me options, soulless corporate overlords!

Anticipating the Up and Comers -
I spent quite a bit of the year looking forward to the works of outfits like 38, Carbine, and Red 5. Now I’m bottling up a good deal of anticipation for 2008, for the works of these companies, as well as other unannounced newbs like BioWare. Cryptic and Arena are both working on seekrit games as well. It feels like my days working as a crappy programmer again – lots of time spent pondering what these games are going to be like. In most cases, we don’t even know the genre of these titles. Quite! Fascinating. If even one or two announce this year, it’ll make for even more fun times and theorizing.

I wanted to quickly run down Brent’s stats here, though, because he makes for a pretty good card.

Here’s his text :

• Forsworn Crusader – Human (2)
• 2 attack / 2 defense / 2 damage / 2 health
• Whenever this unit becomes exerted, deal 1 damage to your avatar.

Initially, the rules text is damned offputting. Every time you use this guy for attack or defense you end up hurting yourself. But he’s so cheap! That’s an amazing bunch of stats for such a low-cost card. The tradeoff is obvious, and has an equally obvious solution – put him in a Cleric deck. As a Cleric you’ve got plenty of opportunities to heal the occasional damage or whatever. My advice would be to never play him alone on a quest; put him in as strong support for a big attack, so you can make use of that massive +2 damage. At a quest with “add 1 to damage” as its text, or other similar cards in play, he’d be devastating. Alternatively, you could make use of rune cards when playing him. Those damage-reducing abilities and items are perfect for making full use of this card without paying a big negative.

Anyway, nicely done sir. Your card alter-ego is a most worthwhile addition to the game.

Discussion was had, email was exchanged. In the end, Mr. Smedley kindly consented to talk with me about their just-announced in-game card game, Legends of Norrath:Oathbound. He’s probably going to cover pretty much all of this stuff in his address to the Fan Faire community tonight, but I had a couple of nerdy specifics that I thought you folks might find interesting.

Here then, is Mr. Smedley’s ‘50,000 foot view’ of the game, and a discussion of the whys and wherefores of SOE’s newest ventures.

Update: Plenty of features on other sites on this topic. The San Jose Merc has the official press release and some commentary from Dean Takahashi. Crecente got to go play the damn thing last month in Denver, and the result is a longish hands-on with the game. To see it firsthand, there’s a trailer up on GameTrailers for the graphics-inclined. The official site has some great stuff on it, including a list of the in-game loot you can get from the first set of cards.

“Here’s the 50,000 foot view:

It’s called Legends of Norrath. It’s an MMO Card/Strategy game built directly into both EverQuest and EverQuest 2. It will allow EQ and EQ 2 players to challenge each other, or allow people to play from outside of either game and challenge people who are playing inside. The game itself is literally a part of both clients, and it’s incredibly fun to play. The first set (called Oathbound) has 375 cards. In addition, we have loot cards for each game that have some awesome in-game items, some of which are extremely rare (new mounts for example).

We’ve made it extremely easy to redeem stuff in-game and I have to hand it to the teams.. it’s very well integrated into both EQ and EQ2. We have a full tournament system and card store built right in. The cool thing is that you don’t have to buy things if you don’t want to. We’re putting card packs into both games as drops, so if a person doesn’t want to purchase anything.. they don’t have to. We’re also giving away starter decks to people day 1.

The game has been playable for many months now, and we’ve had the whole company involved in the game. It was developed out of our Denver office by the ex Worlds Apart team that’s now SOE-Denver. At Fan Faire we’re announcing we are allowing all FF attendees to be part of the closed beta test (frankly the game is ready to launch now.. but we want to let the community have time to give us suggestions) which begins right after Fan Faire.”

MMOG Nation: Just from a broad perspective, where did the inspiration for this come from?

John Smedley: Strangely enough, maybe three years ago we had wanted to do this and we bandied about internally, we kicked around the idea of doing this online trading card game. The problem we had was that we were too busy with creating expansion packs, and we didn’t have the expertise. When fate brought Worlds Apart Productions into SOE, it was just perfect. Immediately this was the first big project that we wanted them to do. They did Pirates!, and Stargate, but that stuff was background. This was ‘the thing that we bought the company for’, was to bring online strategy and card games into our MMOs, and make it a really integral part of it.

MN: So they’ve been working on this for how long?

Smedley: They’ve been working on this on and off for about eight months now, and really heavily within the last five. This game has been in-development and fully playable from nearly day one. It was designed by the team out in Denver, working with both the EQ and EQ2 teams. They provided all kinds of lore and feedback; we’ve got a bunch of Magic geeks here at SOE anyway, so it was kind of a natural fit. We have a [trading card game] design list inside the company, and people are playing the game all day giving feedback. It’s been a good experience.

MN: Obviously, the first thing you think when you think TCG is cost, so do you guys have plans right now for how much these things are going to cost?

Smedley: It’ll be $9.99 for a starter pack, although we’re going to give everybody one to start with. And then it’ll be $2.99 for a booster.

MN: How many cards are we looking at for starters and boosters?

Smedley: The starter set is a 50 draw deck, with 5 quests and an avatar on top of that, and then the boosters have 15 cards.

MN: Sounds like you have a pretty good price point for the cards. You mentioned there will be a client for playing the game outside of EverQuest and EverQuest 2; is that going to cost anything?

Smedley: Nope, totally free. We’re going to have that available about a week to two weeks after the game goes live for the players.

MN: Can you give us a sense of what the gameplay is like?

Smedley: Sure. The basic concept is that you’re going up against an opponent and there are multiple ways to win. You play an avatar, and your opponent plays an avatar, and the idea is you can either win by killing your opponent’s avatar or by completing quests. You can put certain quests into your deck, and you can use abilities to actually go after these quests. If you have a particular quest in mind you can use your ability cards to solve each quest. Your opponent, though, can also put down monsters and use abilities to block you from completing that quest. So you can take two paths: you can either try to kill the other person’s avatar directly, or you can try to complete things by solving quests. The idea is that you have strategic options in the fight.

MN: Will there be resources involved, is it more about getting cards from your hand directly?

Smedley: No, there are resources. It’s not quite like mana. You have a certain amount of power points you can spend each turn, and some cards can alter that. At its core there isn’t the same sort of resource usage that there is in a game like Magic: The Gathering. It isn’t quite the same. Cards have power costs to get them down on the table, and each turn you get a certain amount of power to spend. That is the limiting resource. We didn’t want there to be multiple resources, we thought that would be too confusing. One of our goals is to try to get new people involved. I’m constantly surprised by the number of MMO players who have never tried a TCG before.

MN: You mentioned that there will be rare loot cards with in-game items. Are those going to be more cosmetic, or will they have stats attached to them?

Smedley: They have some minor stats, but they’re primarily cosmetic. That’s the intent, for them to be cosmetic. We have some minor potions and stuff in there, but otherwise no. Our aim is to give a lot more loot with these things, let me give you some examples. In EverQuest, we’ve got a Shadow Panther, or a Snow Leopard, or a Mystical Kirin, or maybe a Seething Chimera, and then there’s some potion packs. These are simple potions, they’re not meant to be a big game advantage, nothing like that. There’s a lot of different things, like different coloured baubles that are available in the rest of the game. We want to give stuff, similar to the way that World of Warcraft is doing it, that’s cool looking but not very ‘game enhancing’.

One other thing to note is that we’re doing loot drops in the game, of cards. If you don’t want to you don’t have to buy a darn thing if you don’t want to. If you want, you can just go out there and kill monsters, and actually get cards that you can use to play in the game. They’re just booster packs, just drops of a booster pack, so you don’t have to buy a thing. You’re going to have to work for it, but the reality is that if you don’t want to spend the money you don’t have to.

MN: Is that going to be a fairly common drop?

Smedley: It’s definitely not going to be common, but the idea is that if a person doesn’t have a lot of money but still wants to play, he can spend time in-game to get cards rather than buying them.

MN: Are the booster packs going to be sellable via the in-game economy?

Smedley: Actually no. One of the things we’re doing is making it so that you can’t sell any of these cards. That would be problematic for us. There would be some legal issues around that.

MN: Will players be able to trade?

Smedley: No. Otherwise we’ll get into a situation where the gold sellers will get into this, and we’re going to stop that cold.

One other thing I did want to mention is how this ties into our plans for chatting across all of our games. Players who are playing the card game outside of EverQuest and EverQuest 2 will be able to chat with folks in-game too. If you know the name of a character on the server, you can challenge them directly. There’s a lobby system, and a tournament system; it’s pretty spiffy.

At Fan Faire we’re going to let everyone play it full-on, and everyone at Fan Faire is going to be let into the Beta for it. It’ll launch ‘when it’s ready, but it’s basically ready now. We’ve been going through internal QA for a while now, and it’s pretty solid.

MN: I’ve been wondering about the tournament system. Is that something you guys are going to be doing regularly, or a yearly thing?

Smedley: Oh no, this is more like daily/weekly. It’s an automated system and it’s really quite good. This is why we bought the Denver guys. They have a very sophisticated set of technologies. Frankly they’ve got a client that’s even better than the stuff they use for Magic: the Gathering Online, which I happen to really like.

It’s great tech, the game is fun. That’s what I really like about this. The game is fun in and of itself. To me, MMOs eventually get boring just grinding and killing stuff all the time. This is a nice option You can just go into a town and challenge somebody. You can challenge someone anywhere; if you just want to play a quick 15 minute game while you’re waiting for a group to get together you can do that.

MN: You have the automated tournaments; are you planning on doing anything more elaborate? Like ‘best in the world’ types of events?

Smedley: Yes we are. Organized play is going to be a very important part of Legends of Norrath. Our whole strategy is to do it all online, though. We want this accessible to all of our players. One of the downsides of having a physical game is the amount of work required to hold a tournament. With our game, it’s just going to be automatically downloaded to them. They can play completely online for free. If they want to pay they can, if they don’t that’s cool too.

MN: I found the EQ and EQ2 players playing together a great concept. Do you forsee anything else in the future having the chance to unite the playerbases of the two games?

Smedley: We’re going to see how this plays out. I’m kind of hoping that we can. Early on when we were developing EverQuest 2 we actually had a very cool linkage system. We were going to use that basic concept you’ve seen in movies before, where something in the past affects the far future. We wanted to have zones that were tied together through both games. This is kind of reinvigorating some of that discussion. It remains to be seen, though. If we see some good usage between the two games I think that’s something we might pursue. It’s kind of a cool idea.

MN: And the launch date is “when it’s done”, but that’s likely pretty soon?

Smedley: Likely towards the end of August, because we’re going to have a Beta. The Beta is really more to introduce it to people, really. Frankly we’ve given it endless internal testing here in the company. The final sequence is to let outside users play it, get feedback on it, and go from there.

We’ll just turn it on for them, it’ll already be on their system, and things will be ready to go from day one. They can play it for free with the starter deck we’re giving them. If they like it, great, if they don’t like it there’s no requirement to play at all. If they want to pay, great, if they don’t okay. Maybe they just want to collect cards in-game. I think it’s fun enough that I think there will be a pretty good take-up on it.

MN: Since I’m a blogger I have to ask the annoying question: What is your response going to be to the folks who are disappointed that this announcement isn’t a new, more traditional Massive game?

Smedley: Well, it’s not like we’re not announcing anything else at the event. People will have a chance to really see FreeRealms for the first time, and Agency. We haven’t really done that before for the fans. We’re releasing and broadening the knowledge of folks on these games, out beyond what’s already been in the media. I really want Fan Faire to become the place where we do this sort of thing. I don’t want to do “Gamer Days” or whatever. I want to focus on announcing games at Fan Faire in the future. Next year DC is going to be announced at some point, for example. I really want our fans to spread the message more.

I think EverQuest and EverQuest 2 players are going to get excited about this. Is this EverQuest 3? Of course not, but this game is going to have a real impact on the day-to-day lives of EverQuest players. It’s fun, it’s strategic, and in the long run I’d like to put gameplay ties into the cards as well. I’d like to build a meta-game, an overarching strategy. We’ll eventually do expansions, just as with the other TCG games from SOE-Denver.

I have a long-term vision of MMOs moving away from subscriptions, and I think one of those ways is to offer different ways to play. Imagine that someone got a drop of a card in-game that allowed them to play for free. That gave them a month of subscription time for free. That’s on our to-do list, it’s not in the game at launch, but it is something we want to put out there. Now that we have these tools in our arsenal, we want to start putting some really different things out there. Really use them.

For example, in the Agency the idea is that you collect ‘living loot’. You collect operatives. The mechanism for that is a card system, but this will open up other avenues for us to let people buy new things and also let us give people new things. I personally look forward to seeing things change with this over time.

MN: Thanks so much for your time, sir.

This occured to me today, because I’m subscribed to Alice’s del.icio.us feed. Alice (of Wonderland) is a very on-top-of-things lady, and so her tagging on Pirates! raised an eyebrow:

Pirates Constructible Strategy Game Online The Pirates of the Caribbean MMO seems to have turned into something else, unless I’m on the wrong page
tags: piratesofthecaribbean disney mmo

If a with-it observer of games like Alice can get mixed up by these properties, how is a casual onlooker going to know what’s what?

Here’s a quick guide to MMOG pirates, just in case you need it -

Pirates of the Burning Sea – The ‘real’ Pirate MMOG in the minds of lots of people. This is the one with the elaborate ship-to-ship combat, swordfighting, nation vs. nation PvP, the whole nine yards. While it’s certainly not a ’simulation’-style game, PotBS is definitely the most serious pirate MMOG in the works, and supports this with crafting, avatar customization, and other great buzzwords. In the works with an eye towards release sometime in 2007 (I believe). Stingy with Beta invites. ;P

Pirates of the Carribean Online – Disney’s offering, based on the park ride turned movie franchise. While I had somehow gotten the idea that this was aimed somewhat at kids, the language on the official site makes it seem very much a big boy’s toy. They’re aiming to incorporate some sort of magic system into the game world, something I imagine we’ll see more of in the third movie. They mention ‘curses’, which can be used to heal, harm, and … cheat at card games? There’s actually a surprising amount of discussion about gambling, considering Disney is backing this. No word about when the game’s coming out, but it would be a good bet it’ll be right around the next movie’s release date.

Uncharted Waters Online – The online version of a game that last saw the light on the Super Nintendo, there’s actually a lot to like in the few details they’ve put out. Really all I could find about it was a quickie preview from 2005 and some screenshots at Gamespot. The stale date of the preview (and the fact that there was no followup from E3 2006) worried me a bit, but some of the screens are from May of this year … so I guess it’s still in production? They’ve definitely got a different take on the genre; players will choose from three general classes and then specialize into a more advanced class over the course of gameplay. One has typical combat leanings, but the other two sound very different – one is a crafting/mercantile role, while the other sounds like it will focus on exploration and puzzle-solving. Hard to see how hitting the Bartle types directly could be a bad thing, but who knows if it will ever come out?

Pirates! Constructible Card Game Online – This is SOE’s new hotness, based on the Wizkids game with the little plastic constructible boats. A friend of mine summed this title up as “all the boring gameplay you’ve grown to hate, without any of the fun of playing with the actual little boats”. I’ve only had the chance to play the tabletop game once or twice (though I can’t say I was overly impressed) and I haven’t played the online version at all yet, so I can’t really speak to the piraticalness of Pirates! At least it’s already out. That’s good. Just the same, if they hewwed fairely closely to the original gameplay of the tabletop game, I can’t imagine it’s going to be a ton of fun over the long-term. I should check this out and get back to you.

SOE’s ‘Constructible’ title is obviously different than the other offerings, but once all three are out how is the savvy MMOGer going to choose between what seem to be awfully similar games? I’m personally rooting for PotBS to take the lead in the as-yet-untapped Pirate MMOG niche, but there are too many groups aiming for that spot on the map for it to be anything like a sure thing.

The bottom line is that niche fighting is good for us as gamers, so yay! Here’s hoping they all launch soon; I want to see how this one turns out.