Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Upon out of nowhere, I stumbled upon RIFT. Being a semi-huge MMO (RPG mostly) fan, I like to test around and try out new MMO out there. Let me talk about myself first about my gaming experience in the MMORPG category. It all started with Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds back when I was in high school. I started playing around the summer of 1999 I believe. The game still exists now, but I haven’t register for my account for a while. I usually re-register at least once every year for their anniversary event. I have also played other f2p MMO games, but not really fond of many of them. They got boring really quickly as well as hacks and bots all around. This is not to say p2p games don’t have such thing, but when someone pays for subscription they mostly will think twice before using such hacks since using them will cause their long effort in developing their characters into getting banned. I also played Final Fantasy XI Online since October 29^th, 2003. You can say that this is actually my birthday gift since the game went live on October 28^th, 2003 (which was my birthday). I preordered the game, but it didn’t arrive in my mailbox in college until a day afterwards. I am currently still subscribed to FFXI and enjoy the time with my Linkshell as well as many of the new expansion and add-on available. I also enjoy foreign MMO games as well. One game I played was Yogurting JP which is no longer in service. It was a school themed 3D MMORPG where you have to clear different classroom or stages in order to rank up and to go up a grade. However, due to lack of communication I didn’t play it for long. The last time I played it was when they introduce a new patch with the egg capsule machine. They’re quite fun since some of them dispense these card that makes you dance.

During the time in NexusTK, I made many friends and tried out many new online games. Some of them that came to mind were QuizQuiz and Ragnarok Online (RO). QuizQuiz was a short lived game that never actually went commercial. It just kinda stayed in Beta phase and then died off due to the lack of players. In QuizQuiz, you can configure your avatar as much as you want with items you buy. The main thing I remember about my avatar is that he has a big green bandana and is sucking on a lollipop. The main quiz game I play in there was actually Olla Olla, a typing game where you have to be very quick in typing the sentence displayed after every round. If you are the first to type the sentence, then your bucket goes up. If you fail to type the sentence or fail to type it in time, your bucket goes down. After certain amount of rounds you either earn IQ or you lose them by failing. There’s also a game called Survival OX, this is a True or False game where 32 players are pitted against each other. This is a battle of elimination where you choose if it’s true (O), or false (X). The goal is to be the last man standing by moving to the O or the X side. You can trick your opponents by going to the incorrect side, then at the last minute switch side. Another game was a game show type trivia game about computer and video games genre. Unfortunately all of the game except the Korean version died off, the Korean version got renamed to Q-Play. You can find the similar sprites in the Nintendo DS game called Ping Pals.

I’ve never really got too interested into RO. I did play in the Alpha and early beta, but didn’t get too interested into it until emulation of the server came about. RO was a grind fest…a huge grind fest. After certain amount of levels, it just got too boring to continue. I remember cheating in RO too. Yeah, I know I’m a cheater blah blah blah. In the early RO beta phase before you have to pay for the game, there are bots. APE (or monkey?) bot being the most popular one is one advance bot. It has a map of your location, and it set to auto walk around and kills things and pick up items while you are away. This is mainly due to packets being sniffed out and due to lack of security in the game. That experiment was rather short lived. The game didn’t really get too hooked; this is probably because of the lack of people I know that plays the game. I’ve always been a loner in the game and not many people to play it with. When emulation started for RO, I kinda jumped in and played with it as well. There was the AEGIS (real server that RO uses) and then there was the YARE. AEGIS was stolen and YARE was developed by a person. Early days of emulation of RO was buggy for YARE. AEGIS was also complex to set up since you have to have a dedicated system just for it and set up MySQL and whatnot. Took a long time to get AEGIS up and running, but it was worth if, for the short amount of time of messing around. In YARE, I was also an early tester of it and played a tiny part of bug editing but I was never a coder for it. I had zero programming skills. The only code I played with was the walking code. Back then in early YARE, there was this huge bug with walking around. You would always end up jumping back and forth or running slow. I only slightly fixed my compiled server by changing a line of code. I don’t remember what it was though. Being a GM is always fun, you get to summon a whole load of monster and turn on PvP…but wtf everyone tries to kill you as soon as you turn PvP on lol. Even though I was a GM, I am also vulnerable to attack, except later on, I edited a card that gives me 100% avoid so every hit always misses me. And then I stopped playing altogether.

Yet another game I play was Maple Story…except I never played the US version of it. That only lasted 1-2 days, the emote is kinda cute though which I had posted long time ago in my Xanga blog. I also played Gunbound as well. To those that have never played Gunbound, it is turn-based tank game. My first “tank” style game is Gorilla in the Q-Basic format. BASIC is an old computer language. Being a kid, I have absolutely no knowledge in computer when my father first bought a 486 computer. Since I have the freedom to mess around with computers, I learn computers through trials and error. One of the games included was QBasic Gorilla and Nibbles that my brother and I loved. We somehow stumbled into it and had fun playing them. Gorilla is a tank game, although not a tank, where you go against a second player. The goal of the game is to throw a banana into your opponent and kill them. You input the angle and the velocity and watch your gorilla throw the banana towards your opponent (or away…). The other game that is similar to it is Worms. Although I had the game long ago in this 1000 games collection that I had, I didn’t know about it until my friend Billy told me about it. I was hooked at first as well as Worms 2 that came later on. Worms was fun whether you play it against computer or players. In Worms, you move your worm and try to kill all of the opponent’s team worms. You have various types of weapons at your disposal and you’re supposed to knock down the health of each worm to 0. When they die, they also suicide and explode themselves so neighboring worms will get hurt as well. As for Gunbound, you have various tank available to you, and each tank have different supers and attack type. If the room owner also allows item usage, players can also use items when it is their turn to power up, heal themselves, or enhance their attack. Players can have multiple lives or team lives, and the player or team last standing wins the game. You also gain points to spend to freely customize your avatar.

Although I should test many new MMO games, not many really interest me. If a game really gets me hyped, I would actually go and play/subscribe to it. However, that is rather hard to get me hooked because I’m more into what things are there available to do, how often, and things like the maturity of the players. What is a turn down for me are the players in that particular game. If most of the people are being an ass, the game won’t be enjoyable and the game gets uninstalled. The community in the game is more important to me than the graphics and gameplay. It’s not to say that graphic and gameplay is not as important, there is just so much in consideration when playing an online game. As for now, I will slowly talk about games I have played, am playing right now, and future games that I may play.

Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds Pt.1

The Kingdom of the Winds (NexusTK)

The game itself and the MMORPG category were still fairly new at the time. The game was first develop in Korea back in 1994 by Nexon, and uses a 2D tile system and wasn’t released until 1996 in Korea. Many of you may know the name Nexon because of such games as: Maple Story, Mabinogi, Audition, and Dungeon Fighter Online. The game later came to America one year later in beta phase and then fully went commercialize in 1998. The client itself is 2D and to many people who values graphics over the gameplay and online interaction, this game is definitely not for you. The game thrives in the community, albeit a very small community, where everybody may know you. It’s a close community of about 400 simultaneously logged in characters. The peak one time I saw was about 2000+ in the single world that they have in US. I said world instead of server because they have multiple server dedicated to one particular zone in the game. According to Wikipedia, in Korea their record was over 12,000 in 1999 which was three years after they went commercial. Nowadays, that’s relatively low comparing to massive giants like World of Warcraft. NexusTK later changed owner to Kru Interactive.

Gameplay

(Since I won’t be using screenshots and graphics in this first post, I’ll try to be as descriptive as possible)

The game uses 2D tile based system. You may only attack Up, Down, Left, and Right of you. It uses the arrow keys to move your character around the world. Besides the four physical attack positions, you may have spells to be used at your disposal. There are few chat systems in the game. They are regular chat, clan chat, yell, whisper, wisdom, and path. We will go more into each one of them. Speech bubbles appear above you and other characters if you are in range. To talk publically, press the apostrophe (‘) key and then your message. The chat log appears on the bottom/bottom left of client. The chat log has all the chat system available to your character and you can scroll up to read them back.

You can also join a clan or a guild as well. These clans, however, wasn’t as freely made as it is now. Back then, clans are not easily created and in order to start a clan, you have to be a hardcore roleplayer. You also have to be rich and have many dedicated followers. In order to be a clan leader, you mostly have to give up your time in hunting to dedicate yourself in the clan. It’s not easy being the leader, but you do have clan officer to help you with other things as well. To make a clan, you also have to enter in what is called a Tribunal. In tribunal, other clan in the city will either have to vote you in or decline you completely. This is a lengthy process with both in-game GM (called an Archon) and as well as other clan leader in the current city. Nowadays, you can just create a mini clan called a tribe. It is a lot easier but they are unofficial unless you want your tribe to become a clan, it is one way to start off.

Back to the chat system, the regular chat system only display to those that are around what you can see. The game only shows about 20 tiles by 20 tiles, I’m not sure on the exact dimension anymore, which is pretty small. You will have to get near the character you want to chat to if you want a public chat. There is also the yell feature, which will highlight your text to those that are beyond your visual range, but not to the whole zone. You can yell by pushing shift + 1 or the “!”. I believe it’s up to around 50 tiles away, again don’t quote me on this as I don’t remember the exact numbers. You gain this ability at level 6, or the exact roleplay word for level is “insight”. There is also a way to contact one another in privacy; it is the whisper chat system. To whisper someone, simply push shift + ‘, which is the quotation mark (“), and type in the person’s name then push enter and the message to send a whisper. The wisdom chat system is a server/zone wide system dedicated to relay your message to the entire server. Like I said, each server is different and dedicated to only one particular area. To make it a bit less confusing, the area are: Koguryo, Buya, Nagnang, Wilderness, Event, House, Carnage, and Games Server. To post a wisdom message, they only appear in either one of those particular server that you currently at. There’s also a mass wisdom which appears on every server, but only dedicated to certain message such as giveaways, trivia, and particular event. The wisdom chat cannot be used until you are level 90, and even that, it cost 100,000 coins just to get the spell. You can also lose it if you are jailed for a crime, which I will go more into later. The final chat system is the path chat. This chat is dedicated to those that are in your current path. A path is basically the class system of NexusTK (Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds). To chat with your fellow path, just send a whisper to @ and it’ll relay all your message to those in the same path as yours.

The Path System

The path system is basically the classes available for NexusTK. There are four of them, and they are the Warrior, Rogue, Poet, and Mage. Each one of them is very special and one can easily determine in relation to what their job is. Every path has a HP bar and MP bar. Yes, even Warriors and Rogues use magic. Before I talk about each individual path, let me tell you this: There is literally no downtime at all in this game besides the part where you find people to hunt with or area availability. Besides the four original paths, there is also the 12 Subpaths system and the 4 totem path. The Subpath is a roleplaying path dedicating 3 different choices to each of the 4 paths. You may also join a totem path which is a NPC path if you don’t want to join a roleplaying path. Joining a roleplaying path means you cannot use words like lol, wtf, lmao, or real world objects and the like unless you’re in carnages or non-public places. However, you can just join a NPC path dedicated to a particular totem. Joining these paths gives the options to more spell availability as well as different titles and markings in your legend.

The Warrior subpaths available are: The Do (martial master), the Chongun (sworn protector and follows the code of honor), and the Barbarian (strong sense of family and expert in outdoor survival).

The Rogue subpaths are: the Merchant (experience trader and master of economy), the Ranger (protector of nature and is using it as their ally), and the Spy (expert of sabotage, deception, and intelligence).

The Mage subpaths are: the Diviner (seers who envision the future), the Geomancer (follower of the Tao), and the Shaman (spirit speakers and communicator).

The Poet subpaths are: the Druid (one with nature who respects the natural cycle of life), the Monk (followers of Buddhism), and the Muse (dedicated to the arts of music, poetry, and storytelling).

The NPC subpaths are the following for warrior, rogues, mage, and poet: Chung Ryong (the mythical blue dragon), Baekho (the mythical white tiger), Ju Jak (the mythical phoenix), and the Hyun Moo (the mythical turtle).

Before I can talk about the class system, I have to talk about the end-game. You first start off in a newbie starting area and you learn your way around the kingdom s you gain level up through quests and hunts. Upon reaching level 99 which is the final level you can obtain, you can sell off your experiences for more stats. To make things slightly complicated, when a player ask what is your stats they typically mean what is your HP/MP in terms of thousands. However, the real category for stats are the three statistic points in Might (more power), Will (magical power and accuracy), and Grace (able to dodge things). There is also HIT and DAM which is also important for physical attack. The HIT stats which are mainly gain through spells and equipment, gives the player more chance to hit a target. Keeping it higher gives you more chance on swing to hit a particular target. This becomes important when things are surrounding around you and you want to hit all four at once. The DAM stats are damage which increases the power you hit at a time. I apologize for going all over the place since this game is pretty complex and explaining one thing will lead me to explaining another. Back to experience selling. After 99, this may become dangerous. You may sell the experiences you have, which is about 4 billion experience points (not a large number anymore nowadays). You may also lose half of everything every time you die, which can be sad when you obtain all those experience points in the hours of hunting you did. These experience points may be traded off for the stats, HP, and MP. Most hunting area progress into different tiers of level as you gains more HP and/or MP. The absolute max experience points you can carry at a time is unsigned int which is 4,294,967,295.

The Warrior is a path dedicated mainly in unleashing their power through their hit points. Their main power relies in obtaining more HP. They mainly uses a power-up spell which lets them to attack all sides for physical swing, but they also have some major attack spells like Slash, Berserk, and the Whirlwind. The Slash is a very weak attack but with very low aethers (cool down timer), the Berserk takes about half of your HP to do a larger damage attack to the one in front of you. The major damage is the Whirlwind which leaves you with 10% HP, but do an enormous amount of damage to the target in front of you. All of these attack spells are based off of your HP, so buying more HP makes your attack even more damaging. The Warrior also has a rage spell which increases their physical damage multiplier by a certain amount. These last about 938 seconds, but are stackable up to 6 times. With each cast, it will cost more MP so getting some MP in according to the tier is important. However, the more you cast the more damage you will receive when struck by an opponent because it increases your AC. In the game, the armor is called AC (armor class), but getting less AC is actually better. At Rage 5, you do about 81x more damage and when you combine with other spells that buff your weapon and hitting all 4 sides, it can be deadly. At the end of this spell, you also leave you with 10% of max HP.

The Rogue is a path dedicated in swiftness. Your attacks are not as strong as the warriors, but you can use your lethal attacks a lot quicker. The Rogue’s main attack comes from both Desperate Attack (DA) and Lethal Strike (LS). Unlike a Warrior’s spell, desperate attack leaves you with absolutely 0 MP. To cycle a rogue or the rotation of these spells mainly follows like this: LS DA DA. Since each spell has some aethers in them, by the time you can do another LS, you can do 2 DA. In order to maximize the Rogue’s potential they will have to balance both HP and MP. A larger MP pool poet will also have to come into play as well. Since Poets can actually give their MP to a target player, the poet should have slightly more MP than the Rogue for maximum output. The Rogue also plays fairly well in PvP Arenas since they can hide themselves anytime they want and can instantly kill a player without them realizing it. Like the Warrior’s rage, the Rogue gets a Cunning spell that improves their damage and ability to attack multiple targets upon stacking it. However, they can only stack until 5 times, with the last being a superior defensive ability.

The Poet is a path dedicated to healing and debuffing. Although they can’t really fare too well in combat, they can however charm some monsters and make them attack others. They also have an ability called Harden Body that prevents all damage done to you for a specific amount of time. Poets mainly spam this spell along with heals and some type of vexing spell. Poet in general is slightly harder to play since it requires more spamming of spells than other paths. The Poet has to vex (spell that debuff the enemy’s armor), heal, and prevent themselves from dying. Before, I mentioned about zero downtime. This is due to the face that every 30 seconds or so, you can actually get back all your mana at the cost of some HP; the spell is called Invoke. On another note, I’m not supposed to say HP and MP. The game’s term is vita and mana. With Invoke, you can easily cycle a Warrior or Rogue at will. The general game play is to Restore (a spell that uses 1/3 mana to heal 1.5x your mana) someone that used a large attack, and then use your highest curing spell to top them off. Repeat until you can recast invoke, but before that Inspire all your leftover mana available to your fighter, drink some wine (Invoke cost about 30 mana to cast), and Invoke. Repeat afterwards. Because of this system, there is no downtime since you have almost limitless mana (you can also steal mana from those in your group). The monster also may not attack players as well because of the Mage.

The Mage is a path dedicated in multifunctional spells as well as big burst of damage. Before hitting 99, a Mage rely on casting single target damage spell known as zapping. They are generally not as productive and can get boring really fast, but Mages also have Paralyze and Blind at their disposal. Blind stops an enemy where they are, but if you go next to them they can attack you. Paralyze does the same, except it completely freezes the enemy preventing it from attacking. These spells only works on non-player characters and not for PvP. A Mage also have spells that attack their surrounding area. These spells usually do more damage at their level than their zapping spells, but are not mana efficient and almost never comes into play. A player may only have up to 52 spells available to them at all times, and there is actually not enough room to get everything from level 1 to 99+. Some spells can be forgotten as they are too weak. For advanced Mages, they also have to learn to properly “set” mobs. This new system came into play when they introduced polearm. This sets a new limit to the amount of mobs you can attack at once from 4 surrounding to 8. It gives you one more tile further range if you attack all sides (think about a diamond in tile form, now think a larger diamond). There’s a lot of work involves in setting since you have to immediately stop them and mob control to pull them from one area to the next. The crowd control is very easy in this game. Whoever zaps an enemy gets the hate. It could be anyone and anytime, but eventually the mob may change target if left alone.

On another post, I will talk about 99+ content as well as other gameplay system, like targeting, I haven’t mentioned yet.