Haven't played in nearly a month. Me and my friend logged in tonight and the first thing we did was attend a small in game rave in Polyvinyl. It was pretty sweet. He was already there, dancing with some girl. I showed up and he was stripped down to his under-roos. I jumped on the stage, hit /dance4 - and turned on my radio - set to DI.fm - Drum & Base.
The night went on and we were telling jokes and just shooting the breeze while we watched everyone dance. I maanged to win 1.5 million info by being the best dressed guy an answering a few trivia questions.
These in game raves are one of the coolest things I've ever seen in an MMO. It shows a real sense of community and is just a sampling of what I believe we can expect to see as MMOs evolve.
After about an hour or so of "raving", we went and did a few missions. Problem is, I'm like 5 levels higher than my bud, so he died alot. Oh well, I think we still managed to get him a ton of xp and I found some cool new clothes to wear.
Its all about the clothes man! I carry a ton of extra shirts, pants, jackets, hats, and sun glasses just so I can change what I'm wearing based on what I'm doing or my mood.
If you want lots of customization in the way your character looks. MxO is the game. I have yet to run into someone that actually looks like me. There are so many clothing options.
Anyway - every time I play and end up at a Rave. Makes me long for the days when I wasn't a responsible father and I could go out late and dance to some kickin trance until the sun rose. Oh well! At least I can kick back, turn on some streaming trance or D&B station and watch my cyber self roooooooll!
Geeze I've been having a hard time logging into MXO lately! Is it me or are others seeing this? I would assume it was me except that it isn't all the time, usually about once in ten times that I sit down to play. Today's been bad though. So far I haven't been able to log in this evening.
I've mentioned before that I chose a "hostile" or PvP server called Heuristic. I'm still a newb (something that I'm very happy to be, as you can see in my last entry), so bear with me - I don't know a whole lot yet about what is entailed in the PvP system. I read in the manual that you can't take part in the full-blown PvP system until level 15. However, yesterday I had the opportunity to watch a pretty impressive battle between two factions. I logged on in a low level area and found myself surrounded by pairs of fighting players. It was really cool. There was one other low level player there watching with me. Why do I never think to take screen shots of these things? I'll get used to it eventually, I promise.
All of the combatants were very high level. Most were 50 and I don't think I saw any under 45. It was a lot of fun to watch these guys using all of their high level tricks on each other.
A couple of quick observations that surprised me a little. First, none seemed to be using guns. Thankfully I chose the martial arts path myself. If I had seen them all shooting each other I would have been worried. Heh! Strange tho that nobody was shooting. No snipers up on top of the buildings or anything. Maybe just coincidence. Having no idea what was going on other than players fighting each other, there could have been a reason that I don't know about.
Anyway, the second thing that surprised me was that nobody was rezzing the dead. When you die you get a lo-o-ong count down timer til you're forced to return to your hardline and accept the death penalty. I assume that they wouldn't have put in the ability to just lay there for 10 minutes if there wasn't a rez power in the game. I don't know for sure that there is such a power, but if there is, nobody on either side of this rather large battle seemed to be using it. *shrug*
As for me, I'm heading down the sneak/spy skill path and I'm finally learning to use some of the first skills in my tree. I was a late bloomer because I had no clue how to play this game for the first couple of week that I had it, so I've had some unusual challenges. Hehe! Anyway, I'm finally getting the hang of sneaking up on my enemies and attacking them from behind. When I do it right, I sometimes even one-shot kill my opponent. What a rush!
I guess that after my last entry you prolly all think I'm a bit of a dullard. Well I feel like a dullard. Or rather, I feel like a newb. I'm a newbie!
Sure, everytime you start a new MMOG you're a newbie, but the last five or so MMOGs that I've played have been very formulaic. Even though the territory is new, the graphics are better and the skills are different, they all ultimately seemed to me to be like different versions of the same game. That's why I'm not playing WoW. I tried it for a couple of weeks during beta, and although they had some cool new features (I liked how they handled death), and a broader choice of playable races, the terrain, the quest and skills system, combat and pk, all work together to make it basically feel, to me at least, like exactly the same game as AC2.
DAoC, AC2, WoW, EQ2... each of those games marks a point in the evolution of the MMG, an evolution that began with the advent of the three grandaddy games, UO, EQ and AC.
But not MXO. I complained in my last couple of entries that the developers of MXO seem to have come onto the scene with no prior knowledge of the massively multiplayer market. In some ways that makes the game very frustrating, and in other ways it's like a breath of fresh (virtual) air. I haven't had this overwhelming feeling of being a stranger in a strange land (read newbie) since I started playing AC in early 2000.
I enjoyed DAoC a lot when I first started playing it, but I felt like it was a lot like AC only with improvements. When it first came out, I remember a lot of peolple that migrated over from EQ calling DAoC "what EQ should have been." It was a big step in MMOG evolution.
A lot of players were surprised that AC2 wasn't basically the same game as AC only with significantly improved graphics. Turbine said they wanted to imrpove on overall gameplay. They built AC2 based on 4 years of listening to the players complaints and suggestions. Instead of just re-releasing AC on a more modern engine, they built the game they thought the players wanted.
The one major lesson they seemed to have missed in those 4 years is that the outspoken message board flamer types do not represent the player base majority. I remember a few people saying that back then, and having an overwhelming sense that Turbine wasn't hearing it. It was an honest mistake. They were genuinely trying to listen to their players. AC2 bombed, but it also represents another major landmark in the evolution of the MMOG.
WoW is another. Those Blizzardites are no slouches. They didn't come on the scene in ignorance. They didn't develop their contribution to the MMOG scene in a vacuum. They watched. They listened. They probably hired a team of widly experienced verteran MMOGers as a focus group or something.
MXO is definitely not another step in that evolution. It feels like a different game. That's a statement that I haven't been able to make about any MMOG that I've played since AC.
I resisted the MMG scene at first because when UO came out I was fresh from a decade of playing MUD games. A few companies had tried "graphical MUDs" before and they were basically stinkers. The atmosphere of a MUD just didn't translate well to a graphic environment. When UO came out and then EQ, I was convinced that they were just more of the same and didn't bother. I remember reading an article about AC in what was probably the December 1999 edition of PC Gamer Magazine. That article turned me on to the idea that there might be a real difference between MMOGs and those old attempts at putting a graphical face onto a MUD.
But anyway, I didn't mean to stray so far off topic. I just wanted to convey that if, like me, you're jonesing for that new experience fix you haven't felt since your first couple months playing your first massive multiplayer, you might want to try MXO.
As for my in-game progress:
In MXO your persona carries outside the game somewhat. Apparently you can set up an AIM account that's tied to your individual characters. For that reason you can only use any character name once across all servers. You also only get one character per server. My two sons always like to play the MMP that I'm playing, but because of those restrictions we can't all share one account and play on the same server.
My youngest son has had more luck finding and making friends than I have. That might have to do with the fact that I'm on a pk or "hostile" server.
I have actually seen other players more than once now. In one of my first entries I said that I had never seen another player. I probably should have qualified that then by mentioning that I was on a pk server but at the time it didn't even occur to me. The only indicator we get of how busy a server is is a rating type word, like "light", "medium", or "heavy". They almost always all say "medium", so it never occured to me until now that my server might have considerably fewer players on it, but now that I think about it, it probably does.
So anyway, my youngest son has joined a guild, or "crew" or whatever. I don't know much about it, except that they have been helping him level. He's played quite a lot less than I have but has passed me in levels. He says that a girl approached him and asked him, "do you believe in the Machines?" He said he didn't know what that meant and she said that it means he wants the machines to win. She told him that if he says, "yes" he can join her crew, so he said yes. I guess it was all uphill from there.
Well, I'm back. You've all probably forgotten me. I'm your friendly neighborhood Matrix Online Newbie.
I've been so very amazingly broke lately - I wasn't able to afford the account upkeep. Heck I wasn't able to afford an account at all. Anyway, that's all water under the bridge now because my account is restored and all is well.
SO! I've actually been back in the game for about four days now but since I've been pouring every possible spare moment into playing, I've been negligent in getting around to making a blog entry. Sorry!
I've learned a lot in these last few days. For starters, since I now actually own an MXO game box, I've been reading the manual. This is a good idea. See, Sega recently put on an event called, "Friends and Family". That's how I was playing for the first couple of weeks. I tell you this just because I didn't want to give you the impression that I was doing anything illegal (God forbid)!
Anyway, the "Friends and Family" program was a good idea. Sorta. I guess a lot of people played, and no doubt got hooked as I did; but it was also such a very strange way to get started in such a unique and complicated game. Hundreds (presumably, or dozens, or thousands, whatever) of us poor suckers spent two weeks running around the Matrix without the benefit of a manual, trying to make sense of this weird new world!
It is rather a complicated game. And the manual, well, it's quite enlightening, which brings me back to my point. What was it? Oh yeah. I learned a lot from the manual. A lot.
Skills. Erm, guess what? The Matrix Online has these things called skills! I mean, it's not that I didn't know that, just that I didn't realize that I could use them. I thought I was stuck with what I was born with until level 10. I dunno why I thought that, exactly, but I did.
To be fair to myself, there's very little help for newbies when it comes to skill management (outside of the glorious manual), and it's really a very different and arcane system. Skills are not bestowed on the deserving. You have to actually find and purchase them from other players or the occasional vendor, another system (vendors, I mean) that is original and profoundly non-standard.
Anyway, I'm not complaining, only trying to paint a picture of how strange and difficult it was for me, getting started in a world that is remarkably and in many areas, surprisingly unlike any other MMOG I've played, and I've played a lot of MMOGs.
Well it's been a busy 12 days or so, alas not so much for me in MxO.
The large live event was a success for the game but bore some frustration for myself. One on particular day there was a one-off mission with a nice item to gain upon completion. Now as luck would have it I couldn't complete it...it was bugged for some. That was a real downer.
I also came to the realisation that the live events are difficult for the very casual gamer, but the team does it's best to accommodate. The new Word News flash tool works well and does a good job of keeping you up to date, you do need to get lucky and be online at the right times though to take an active part. But lets be honest, if you are that casual a gamer you need to play a different game.
Oh yeh, I'd just like to add that I'm the slowest leveler in gaming history. I've been going from 17 to 19 over a period of 2 weeks
In a lot of ways, playing MXO is a big step back to the early days of MMOGs. When I called it "primitive" in my last entry I was right on the money.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not unhappy with the game - but it does make one wonder where these Monolith guys have been! I just can't imagine how, or why, a company would make a MMOG as if they were living in the early 90's and inventing the whole thing. No doubt that is overly harsh. I'm just a newb and very possibly don't know what I'm talking about. It just seems, from the low level perspective, that they have made many, if not all of the same mistakes that were made in UO, EQ and AC seven years ago. Have they chosen to step back to an older style for some reason?
You're probably wishing, at this point, that I would stop flaming and list some specific issues. Ok, here goes:
While the combat interface is beautiful and sophisticated, the -running around exploring- interface is clunky and awkward. There's no autorun button at all. The camera movement is often stilted and strange.
For general comparison, in Asheron's Call (which uses roughly the same 3rd person camera position) you float gracefully behind your character like a guardian angel. Camera movement is fluid and adds to the sense of immersion in the game as you never feel like you are working at controlling your character - he is an extension of yourself.
The Matrix is a polar opposite. The camera sticks and jumps. It almost feels like you're trying to follow your character around with a small remote control helicopter while at the same time trying to control where he goes. It's not really quite that bad but the camera does often seem to have a mind of its own. Instead of the sense of floating gracefully behind him, I feel like I spend all my time in game (except during combat, mind you) wrestling against the will of the camera, each of us fighting for control of the character from moment to moment.
The missions you have to do to work your way up through the first ten levels are profoundly monotonous. As Ophelea has said, the buildings are all exactly precisely identical in every imaginable way. The missions themselves vary only in the minutest details. DAoC has those delivery quests you can do in the newb stages and they are boring, but they are less significant a part of the game/story, and in DAoC those boring delivery quests introduce you to the wide countryside and the varied landscape and towns. In MXO they introduce you to the lack of imagination on the part of the developers.
While these are moderately significant problems that, it seems to me, could have been avoided simply by having been around the MMOG scene for the last 6-8 years, they are by no means fatal to the value or playability of this game. They clearly have some revolutionary ideas that may very well work, and I'm still really getting a kick out of combat!
On the other hand, this game needs PEOPLE. Many of the NPCs spout the value of a group. I have not seen any other players. I think I saw one. Once. And that sucks. The first thing they've got to do is give up on selling the $50 boxes. They need to make the game free to download and try for two weeks or something. People will pay $10 a month to play this game. But $50 for the box? Many will go play AC2 instead, and some may say that that, um, ain't saying much.
Today I entered The Matrix. What is The Matrix, you ask? I can only show you the door. You have to enter it yourself.
Ya so, promotional catch-phrases aside, I've just begun a new e-life in The Matrix Online. Just thought I'd pop by with some ridiculously early impressions.
Character creation is a tad primitive. By primitive I mean they didn't apply lessons that Turbine, Sony and EA (and others - too many to name) all learned at least five years ago. You have to make blind class selections at character generation time that will (seemingly, very early impressions here, remember) significantly curtail your choices later in the game.
If you've read Ophelea's entries about her experiences in The Matrix you know that she rerolled early in her first day of play. So did I. You will too when you are first getting started, basically unless you make a very lucky blind choice. Fortunately it becomes clear what you did wrong really quickly before you spend several weeks on a character only to find out that you'll be seriously crippled later in life if you don't start over - an idea that probably dredges up some painful memories for more veteran MMOGers out there than just me.
That one major ouchie aside, the game looks marriage-threateningly good to me so far. I've long since learned my lesson about getting my hopes up this early in playing a new MMOG, but unless they've really fooled me, the combat system may be the coolest and most exciting I've ever seen. In playing a new MMOG, I always try to find the class that takes the most real interaction during combat, which generally means that a talented and experienced player can beat a less able player with the same skills. In Asheron's Call it's the Mage class. In DAoC, archers. I think that "close combat", or martial arts fighting in MXO is The One.
I'm still trying to settle on my permanent avatar. I'll let you know how it goes.
I've been sick for a week now, unable to jack-in or do any write-ups. But today I managed to drag myself in front of the PC for a brief look at what's going on.
I jacked in at Mara Central and was instantly transformed right into what felt like a movie story line. I know this is "The Matrix Online" and it's supposed to be like that but the Live Event really does bring things to life more than in any other MMO I've played.
A chopper was circling overhead, dropping propaganda leaflets. Morpheus and his supporters were setting off "bombs" at hardlines, infecting redpills caught in the code blast with a virus.
As you can see, I only just managed to escape infection myself. These were all what I call "UO moments", times when I feel like I've been transported back in time to my first weeks in MMO gaming and the awe I felt. I get the felling there's going to be plenty of these moments in MxO.
