[Allods Online First Impressions]

So the Russian Free-to-Play MMORPG Allods Online went into Open Beta on the 16th, and I decided to check it out, since what I'd heard of it before sounded kind of interesting. I've been on more of a 'casual playing' kick since my WoW hiatus, and F2P games like Mabinogi and Wizard101 have been filling my time rather nicely, so I figured I'd give a new one a go.


I have to be honest, one gets a real WoW-vibe when first starting out, simply because the art style of Allods is very 'hand-drawn' as well. The game world is simply beautiful, and very impressive for a F2P game. The soundtrack, however, is pretty generic western fantasy-MMO fare, and pretty forgettable. I know many people often prefer their own soundracks anyway, so that's not a big deal. There are also many similar UI and 'quality of life' mechanics that are the same between both games (like a quest tracker, Auction House, talent trees, etc) but Allods puts it's own mark on these now-familiar aspects that many people consider 'standard' in their MMOs now. One thing I actually did NOT miss was a minimap -- I find that I tend to stare at the little dots on it more than I actually look at the gameworld around me if I have one, so Allod's simple compass and well-marked worldmap were good enough for me. =)


The classes in the game are also a nice mix of familiar roles and archetypes with enough unique spin added to still make them interesting. Add to that the various talent trees and unique racial skill combinations, and you have many diverse customization options for your character.


The game has two PvP factions -- the lighter, fantasy-themed League and the darker steampunk-style Empire, and each has their own unique selection of races. There are two human cultures, a fairy/elf race, the Arisen (zombie cyborgs), Orcs, and the token 'goofy, short race', the Gibberlings (which look like a mix between hamsters and feral kittens). A fun aspect of making a Gibberling character is that you actually end up customizing and naming three individuals who then act as one unit (because Gibberlings as a culture always do things in groups).

The stand-out endgame option that Allods Online has is it's Ship-to-Ship combat in the areas between the allods (world islands). A minimum crew of 6 players controls each ship, with one player manning guns, another navigating, etc. Groups can pilot ships to allods that are inaccessible by any other means, and then explore and accumulate treasure there which they can load into their ship's hold and take back to their home port to earn rewards. However, once in transit, airships can be attacked and robbed by enemy crews, or even destroyed completely, losing all their loot. Therefore, airship exploration and piracy is a viable endgame goal for guilds, as well as the usual fare of PvE raids and PvP.

I've only played for a few days, but I'm very impressed with the level of quality Allods has for a F2P game. The quests are nothing innovative, but I'm having fun exploring and enjoying not feeling pressured to 'get my money's worth' like I do with a P2P game. Allods also doesn't have the problems with empty grinds or lack of content like many other F2Ps. Frankly, I think Allods Online is one of the best free MMOs on the market right now, up there with FreeRealms, Mabinogi, and Wizard101. You get tons of entertainment for free, plus the game runs well and looks fantastic. I think the current Cash Shop items are overpriced (and there are no cool 'fluff' items for sale yet), but since I haven't felt a need to buy anything so far I'm ignoring it for now (I hear that statistically, the majority of F2P players never buy anything, but the small minority that do generate enough revenue for the games to profit anyway).

If you like many of WoW's basic mechanics (or WoW's art style), but want a change of scenery or something a little different, you should check out Allods Online. It's a very polished, solid game with some fun concepts (even if it's not a huge revolutionary step in the genre of MMORPGs), it's worth checking out. =)

[How George Lucas Turned the Jedi Into Villains]

  I will admit that my opinion of the Star Wars prequels is, like most folks', pretty low. Actually, I find the entire morality of the Jedi and the Republic kind of reprehensible, actually. I had my first realization of this after reading this article in defense of the Empire, several years ago. I do not think the Empire was 'good', per se, but I could totally understand the feelings that went behind it's creation. The Republic was, by even the admission of the protagonists in the prequels, completely useless and corrupt. Yet even so, the Jedi defended it and attacked those who wished to secede because of it's corruption. That George Lucas made the Jedi into status-quo defenders of a broken system willing to use an army of brainwashed slaves to crush opposition, basically turned Jedi into bad guys. Way to go, George!

  The addition of 'midichlorians' lessened Jedi even more... they went from being enlightened figures to simply a caste of 'superior blooded' elitists. Making their powers genetic instead of spiritual/philosophical really cheapened the concept of Jedi, and that just compounded the overall ethical failings of the entire Republic system as outlined in the prequels. For some examples of Jedi hypocrisy (and the overall plot failure) of the prequels, this 7-part series on Youtube is fairly entertaining (even if the author has a bizarre fixation on violence against women as being hilarious). Also, can someone please explain the logic of having a 'ruling class' of people that is founded on their genetic superiority over others that then PROHIBITS THE PROCREATION of those people. If being born with a certain amount of midichlorians in your blood is what makes you able to use the Force, why on earth are powerful Jedi not encouraged to produce offspring with each other? I can see prohibiting relationships with non-Jedi, but to outlaw romantic relationships (and sex) all together? That makes no sense.

  It appears that Lucas, lacking the collaborative checks and balances that were present in the original trilogy, basically rewrote and over-edited his prequels into incoherency. However, the threads of an older, more rational storyline can still be seen through the murk of a watered-down, shallow final product. The original decline of Anakin was supposedly written to show him sincerely buying into the concept of a totalitarian Sith Empire being superior to the decadent, corrupt Republic and their self-righteous Jedi police force (plus, it appealed to his obsession with control). But then Lucas decided to make him do it out of 'misguided love' for Padme and edited the story to shoehorn that angle in. Of course, the prequels already suffer from so many non-sequiturs and unresolved plot points (like who ordered the clone army) that these changes just added to the overall mess.

  To me, it's obvious that Anakin never truly loved Padme. He wanted her, the way he wanted everything else in his life (and felt he was owed it). He only loved power and dominance, and that fact is best illustrated when he force-chokes her into unconsciousness just for disagreeing with him at the end of Revenge of the Sith. He was never supposed to be a misguided, empathetic character. At his core, he was always an arrogant sociopath, and Lucas' ham-handed attempts to try and make him more 'sympathetic' only further muddled the story. I guess he realized that his prequel depictions of Anakin were not actually showing any 'goodness deep inside' for Luke to later call out from Darth Vader, and tried to repair his mistake after the fact.

  Of course, all these topics are old hat and have been argued to death by Star Wars geeks everywhere, but I felt a random need to post something interesting this month. =P

[This is the Deal With Twilight...]

I posted a random one-off question a long time ago asking why the heck these mediocre books are so popular. And I think Cleolinda has hit the nail on the head:

"I started thinking about romance myself, and I think I've figured it out: the key component of romance is tenderness. Because something can be totally sexyhot without tenderness; it's tenderness that creates the "romantic" atmosphere, the one that a lot of guys tend to turn their noses up at--because tenderness requires you to be vulnerable, to open yourself up and say, I want you, I need you, I am incredibly blessed to even be touching you right now. (Maybe that's where the honesty comes in after all.)

So if you buy your girlfriend a dozen roses at the supermarket and toss them at her on Valentine's Day all, "LOOK, here you are, now SHUT UP until next year," you are doing it so very, very wrong, and she probably feels it. It's not about hearts and flowers and chocolates and money spent, and in fact all that ephemera is a convenient way to dodge actual tenderness, because you can feel like you've done something without putting any real feeling into it. And Twilight? Is all about the freakin' tenderness. It's larded with tenderness; feeling drips off the pages and oozes from the film stock and romantics eat it up and then turn around and line up for more. I mean, that slow dance at the end of the first movie, he is crying while they're eyesexing, for God's sake. That's like--the emotional equivalent of--I don't even have an adequate pornographic metaphor for that."

So yeah, the books are failures on a literary level... but it's not the story that the fans love so obsessively. It goes a lot deeper than that. Which actually makes me disappointed that a story that celebrates so many dysfunctional and dangerous relationship aspects has managed to hit this nerve that so many women have.

[A Quick Wizard101 Review]

In my drive to find something new to occupy too much of my time with since I'm out of WoW, I've tried out a couple of F2P MMOs. My Mabinogi impressions were pretty favorable, while my Earth Eternal one... wasn't (it felt very blah to me). Since Beau over at Spouse Aggro has talked many times about Wizard101, I figured why not try that out too? The nice thing about these lower-spec F2P games is that it's so easy to hop in and give them a test drive with no strings attached. =)


So yeah, it's a cutesy kid's game. So was Pokemon, which absorbed many a hour for me back in Junior High. I don't knock a game based on graphics or style alone, as long as it's fun to play. So even though the art style wasn't very appealing to me I determined to give it a fair shot.

The first thing I noticed was that every quest is voiced. So I turned the voices down. =P Personally I don't like voices in most games, though I understand a lot of people do. The game also has a very restricted chat policy (to ensure kid-safe conversations) and a large selection of canned words and phrases that people on closed chat can use to still communicate game-related information. If you're over 18 you can turn off all the restrictions from the account website. I thought it was an interesting way to keep general chat safe for kids without parents having to worry.

The seven Magic Schools reside in the
Ravenwood District of Wizard City.

Combat is 'collectable card battle'-style and turn based. Different wizard schools (you pick your school at the beginning) get cards with unique elements and abilities. For example, Storm magic has very strong attacks but with a high failure rate, while Balance specializes in buffing/debuffing, and Life specializes in healing. You can buy cards from other schools of magic with Skill Points, which you earn from certain quests as well as by leveling up. You can customize your deck of cards in many ways: by choosing which cards from your own school you want to use in a specific situation, by buying 'Treasure Cards' which are one-use cards that give you spells you otherwise couldn't learn, and by buying spells from other schools of magic by spending skill points. The card system really has more depth than you'd think for a kid's game, particularly at the higher levels.

Inside the Pyramid of the Sun dungeon in Krokotopia.

There are some cool elements I really like about grouping in Wizard101: Not only can anyone group at any level with anyone else simply by running up to them while they're fighting a monster, but xp has nothing to do with the level of the people involved in a battle -- money and loot is distributed equally to everyone, and your exp gain depends on the skills you used in battle. In other words, people of varying levels are not punished for helping each other. Also, you can instantly teleport to anyone in your friendlist wherever they are, even if they are in an instance, which makes helping friends easy. But with proper deck design, most bosses are actually soloable if that's your preferred gameplay style. There is also ranked PvP dueling if you get tired of outwitting PvE mobs.

The combat circle and my current hand of cards.
Anyone can join a group by running onto an empty party circle.

Also: HOUSING! :D Furniture comes from shops, crafting, monsters and quests, and there are several styles of house or castle that you can buy (you are given a free dorm room when you start out). Even the cheapest house has a very nice lot, often with fun little details like waterfalls, beaches or caves outside the house itself that you can spruce up however you like. I can imagine that just getting enough items to decorate it all is a task in itself. One flaw is that furniture is not really interactive, though you can invite people over to show off your interior design and landscaping skills. =)

You can preview player-house lots before you buy.
This is the cheapest Wizard City house option, and it's pretty nice!

Most of the RMT items (mounts, special potions, etc) are optional unless you want a specific pet or mount for luxury's sake. So far I haven't felt penalized for not using the Crown Shop at all, which is nice. I probably will get some things eventually, of course, just because I personally love fluff items and 5$ here or there is really nothing, especially if you're enjoying the game. RMT in Wizard101 doesn't make you feel disadvantaged for not using it unless you're the type that just HAS to have a certain fluff item (like me, lol).

All in all, Wizard101 is a fun little game. It doesn't try to be an epic fantasy world, and it doesn't have to -- it succeeds in being a fun, solidly-designed multiplayer game with RPG elements. It's well worth it's $10 a month fee, imo.

BONUS: An interesting article from Game Developer Magazine dealing with the behind-the-scenes development of Wizard101 is here. The devs talk about lessons they've learned while working on the game, as well as early design mistakes that they'll have to fix as they keep the game growing.

[The Dark Side of Happy Memories]

MMOCrunch has a breakdown of the archetypes of forum whiners on MMO boards. I'm sure we've all seen iterations of these people (or been one of them ourselves) in many games. His description of 'Whiner Type #4' is a counterpoint to my previous post on MMO memories, in that it shows what happens when 'nostalgia goes bad':

"This is someone who mentions their old games because they are desperately trying to recapture their experience with that “magic” MMO… which is typically the first MMO they played that actually hooked them. Now, they miserably shamble from game to game, almost enjoying them, but never quite getting the high they got from THAT game, which ultimately leads them to complain about THIS game. I have a friend for which City of Heroes was his first game and it was quite an experience for him. Now, no game can ever come close, so even though he is bored to tears with CoH, he can’t really get into other games because they don’t compare to the mythologized version of CoH he has playing in his head.

Of course, the irony here is that no game exists that can compete with that first game… not even that first game. Once you cut away that thick coating of nostalgia, most of these folks would go back to their perfect game, quit after a week, and post on the forums about how the game they remember had been ruined by some phantom patch. In reality their love for their game was based less on mechanics and more on the novelty of the MMO experience."

In other words, this is the kind of person who is confused about what they loved about their MMORPG experience. They can never recapture that 'magic', because the magic is in the PEOPLE and COMMUNITY more than in the game mechanics. Unless the appropriate investment is made by them to interact with people positively and build their own community in a new game, they will claim the game 'has no soul' or 'is lacking some hook' and will quickly grow disillusioned. Such people are stuck in an endless cycle of trying to find a GAME that inspires the kind of feelings in them that only other PEOPLE can create. They're related to the 'MMO Burnout', who hates all new games that are not similar enough to their preferred game while hating any game that is TOO MUCH like that game because "it's just a clone." It's a recipe for perpetual disappointment.

[The Good Old Days]

Gestalt Mind takes us back to his first memories of EQ and how they revisit him to this day.

Your first MMORPG really does seem 'magical' when you look back on it, doesn't it? Stepping out as a freshly-minted newbie in a world that seems so big and strange and cool, and your first days exploring and learning all about it. Halcyon days, those were! I think that's seriously why WoW has that affect on so many people -- the affection of your first MMO stays strong for a long time.

It's WoW's fifth anniversary, and I've been in Azeroth from day one on the same server in the same guild -- I've seen many changes both ingame and 'IRL' across these five years. It's kind of overwhelming to look back and realize how many memories and adventures I've had in this one game with the same group of people. Some of those people left long ago, but others are still there and still going strong. I stepped away for other games several times, but always came back to WoW in the end. So many memories and friends are hard to make a break from. But those games showed me, a newbie MMORPG-player, other ways of playing and other types of communities. They helped me discover my 'true playing style' and affected my view of what the 'perfect MMORPG' would be. It's a testament to how important I think free trials are, imo. =P

I don't know if I'll be coming back to Azeroth anytime soon. But I will never be able to look back on it without affection born from many happy memories of playing with great people. In the end, they're what make MMORPGs so special and so lasting in our minds, regardless of whether it was WoW, EQ, or any other game. That's the reason we take pictures of our guild's first kills -- not to brag and show off to others (though many do) but so we can look back and remember how exciting it was, and who was there with us when all that group preparation and effort has paid off. And THAT feeling is the true magic of MMORPGs.


Above is a shot of my guild's first Magmadar kill, way back in the MC era. Many folks in that pic that no longer play WoW, but I still recognize their avatars. Those were good times with good folks. =)