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| Another game, another month of my life wasted: Saga of Ryzom. by jeep 10/16/2004, 11:42am PDT | ||||
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| This thread got nasty down below, there. I hope the OMM/OG/etc types can tell I stopped after this one, and I'm just now reading the rest.
Well it's not really that bad. I forgot to cancel a bunch of the subscriptions so I got reamed on credit card charges, kind of like the early days of internet porn. I bailed on Matrix Online right away, posted some unpleasant remarks about it over in qt3, and almost got banned. Dropped the Star Wars Galaxies Jump to Lightspeed Beta, and Sony sent me an email telling me to come back. More of a demand than a request, so I cancelled that, too. Like the rest of the game, it wasn't great or terrible, and sure as hell had nothing to do with Star Wars. Closed my Eve Online accounts. That game is very good but it turns out to be a little high-maintenance, you basically have to log in every day or so to keep up with what's going on, pay your rent, report in to the corporate CEO. It's like work, with spaceships. Imagine an MMO called "Richard Branson Online" where if you forget to stop by his office he says something semi-witty like "Get the fuck out of my airlock" and you get the idea. Anyway, Saga of Ryzom is pretty standard gameplay for an MMO: you hunt, mine, harvest, craft, cast magic spells and live in a fucking tree. It's got a bizarre world history, in that it is a post-apocalyptic Earth where you can have Assault Cannons, but it really just looks like EQ. Again. So I guess if you could play EQ with the chain gun from Doom II and spend your first week running around shooting raccoons you would have already played this. Combat is standard "pick your next move and watch the timer" stuff. Everything else about it is Final Fantasy, pretty much, right down to the bizarre focus on environmental issues. There are two parts of this game that are radically different from other MMOs: the first is the terrifying number of players who claim to be women. I don't mean 'play a female character' or 'roleplay a female character', I mean state that in real life they are female. I don't know the demographics on this, I do know that there are a lot more women with internet access than you'd expect, but the idea that they would pick this one really nondescript game to glom onto is pretty weird. The second item is, I think, what makes this game notable at all: the skill system is brilliant. From here forward any game that doesn't have a skill system like this or better will be considered a step backwards. They get the basics right: four skill trees, each one corresponds to a game activity: fight, magic, craft, harvest. Performing one task successfully earns you xp points in that skill tree, every few thousand points give you a level (in that tree) and 10 skill points, and you go buy a skill. Basic enough, but the skills themselves are component-based: each skill you buy is really a list of 'options' and 'credits'. Options are the actions of the skill, and credits offset the cost of the options. You can take any option or credit from any skill and use it in another skill. Casting an acid damage spell has an option and a credit: acid damage (+5pts) and sap (magic) cost (-5pts). No skill with a negative total value will function, any skill with a positive total value has an increased chance of success. You can increase the acid damage to level 2 (+10pts) and the sap cost to 2 (-10pts), or leave the sap cost at 1 (-5) and shorten the range of the spell (-5) to get the -10 instead. Since you can have up to 200 'actions' on the quick bar, you have considerable leeway. Every skill in each tree has this capacity, so I end up having two or three of each type of action with different limitations on it: when I run out of magic points I can spend hit points to cast, when I want to try to harvest more quickly I can use extra focus points, or I can harvest more slowly and do less 'damage' to the area (I mentioned cheesy environmental stuff, right?) Any way the skill system is very granular and well-balanced, the costs all seem appropriate, there's nothing game-breaking so far, and it's kind of cool to be able to make up your own special attacks and such. The ultimate drawback to this game is the lack of a central player market. You can't buy good equipment, or good materials to make good equipment, you have to harvest it, and there aren't many merchants selling stuff, so basically no one can specialize in fight or magic, everyone has to have harvesting and crafting as well. I don't mind as I usually like to try every aspect of a game, but sometimes you just want to run around and cut stuff to pieces, which you really can't do here until you mine for two hours to make yourself a half-decent sword. I know they're supposed to add a market within a monht, but this is the sort of thing you integrate into the game at conception, right? It's very good, a little derivative, except for the skill system, and the current player community is great. This is a European game, developed in Britain and France, and it seems they're focusing on that market, so there's only one US server, but it's definitely been worth the $40 and free month of play. You can't d/l the game like you can with eve online. Someday they'll learn. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, the entire game engine is gpl, so someone could jsut grab it and make an Autoduel game anytime now... /jeep/ |
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