Since that time, Mistwalker have developed a range of titles, for different platforms, and their next release will be The Last Story for the Nintendo Wii, releasing 24^th February in Europe. This will be Sakaguchi’s first title as director since Final Fantasy V, way back in 1992. He has also enlisted the immense talent that is Nobou Uematsu, who also left Square in 2004. Uematsu has composed the score’s for all their games so far. Let’s take a look at what has been, and what to expect in the future.

Mistwalker initially signed up with Microsoft to produce Xbox 360 exclusive titles, of which there are two: Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey. Blue Dragon in particular helped boost sales of the Xbox 360 in Japan, at the time of its release (2006).

“Microsoft sold 35,343 Xbox 360s – an increase of nearly 90 per cent over the previous week’s figure of just over 4000 consoles. It’s likely that the rise was linked to the release of Blue Dragon, which was developed by Mistwalker, the studio led by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi.”
– Ellie Gibson, Blue Dragon release boosts Xbox 360 sales in Japan, GamesIndustry.biz

Blue Dragon is as traditional a JRPG as you’ll ever come across. A group of heroes set about to save their land from an evil ruler, traversing a massive world and using turn-based combat to defeat foes along the way. This may well be deemed old-fashioned in the western world of gaming, but it certainly still has its fans, including myself. Blue Dragon was one of the first 3D RPGs released for this generation of consoles. It boasted the unique art style of Akira Toriyama, creator of manga series Dragon Ball and whose style is also used on video game series Dragon Quest.

Party of Five, anyone?

The game itself is indeed very long. This was the first multi-disc Xbox 360 game released, encompassing the whole adventure on 3 discs. In my opinion, although I’m still making my way through it slowly but surely, it’s JRPG-by-numbers, but still enjoyable because I knew to expect that. There were some good touches. For example, the battles are not the often-loathed ‘random’ battles from past Final Fantasy games, but instead are induced or avoided by engaging/escaping the enemies on screen. Hitting them first also gives you the first hit once a battle is initiated. Blue Dragon is nothing new, but that does it no harm at all.

Mistwalker’s next big release was Lost Odyssey, again for the Xbox 360. Boasting incredible visuals, this 4-disc epic is still a favourite among many an RPG fan, both east and west. For those waiting for their Final Fantasy fix at the time (that never came), this more than filled the gap. While there have always been varied opinions of Final Fantasy XIII, Lost Odyssey still sits firmly on my gaming shelf where Final Fantasy XIII fell off, never to be touched again. Lost Odyssey may have reverted back to random battles, but the battle trigger system (pressing within a time frame to land extra hits) is superior to Blue Dragon’s old school ‘press A and wait’ system, providing more interaction and more reward for doing so.

The story and characters are excellent, providing moments of danger, fear, action, even comedy, and giving the gamer a great sense of empathy to boot. You really feel you are following the journey that Kaim, the lead character, is taking, and will be as determined as he is to find out about his past.

Following on from the success Blue Dragon brought (more so in Japan than here), a franchise was born. An anime series was created, and 2 sequels were also developed, this time for the Nintendo DS. The first was the unimaginatively titled Blue Dragon Plus. This entrant to the series was billed as a real-time simulation RPG – much more like Final Fantasy XII – and retains the Toriyama-style visuals that define the series. Blue Dragon Awakened Shadow soon followed also, continuing the real-time strategy experience, and adopting Dragon Quest IX’s route of allowing creation/customisation of your own lead character.

Following the Nintendo DS releases, Mistwalker stayed with Nintendo, culminating in the production of The Last Story. It may also prove to be the Nintendo Wii’s swansong RPG, with the impending release of the Wii U console. It looks fantastic, and is a release I was hoping for since it was announced nearly 2 years ago.

Since that time, The Last Story has been on release in Japan for around a year now, and was long thought to be only fit for the Japanese market.

“With all the conversions, when we do it in Europe we’ve got to do the whole of Europe,” Nintendo UK boss David Yarnton told Eurogamer. “So it’s multiple languages. It has to be viable.”

Thankfully, the game is viable for Europe. Considering how well Monolith Soft’s JRPG Xenoblade Chronicles has done on the Wii, The Last Story is certainly marketable. Like Xenoblade, it is a console exclusive. Details are still forthcoming, with no European version reviews emerging just yet, but UK magazine Edge did review a Japanese copy, which even for them is usually unheard of. From what reviews I have read, The Last Story is promising to be the most cinematic game the console has seen, with full voice acting throughout, beautiful cut scenes, and a narrative packed with action, romance and betrayal.

It also promises to have a game length that is more flexible; unlike most JRPGs that last 60 hours plus, the main story is around the 20-30 hour mark, but, should you choose to complete side quests, this can easily double that. This, along with co-operative AND multiplayer deathmatch modes, Mistwalker are certainly trying to innovate the JRPG, more so than Final Fantasy XIII ever could, in my opinion. This could indeed be Sakaguchi setting the trend once again, as he did with the original Final Fantasy all those years ago.

The Last Story will be released only on Nintendo Wii in the UK and Europe, on February 24^th.

It all seemed too good to be true, and as we began to find out more about Sony’s marketing strategy, the costs began to rise. Rumours that the Vita had little to zero internal memory were confirmed by Sony, and that they would be releasing a proprietary memory cards which you would need to buy in order to do pretty much anything on the handheld. Alarm bells started to ring, as proprietary usually means ten times the cost of its market equivalent. With the 32GB memory card priced at $119.99, the rose-tinted glasses began to slip, this £230 bargain was quickly becoming a £300+ investment.

This is a scary prospect, not only because of the recent massive price-drop Nintendo has given the 3DS, but also because the current generation of home consoles is not much more expensive than the largest Vita memory card. As I just noted, I was one of the people who bought a 3DS day-one and I was deeply disappointed by the quick drop in price, lack of software support, and sudden back-tracking by Nintendo. As an apology I have been given 20 old games I don’t play while other people can pay less than half of what I did for the console. I’d rather have the £100 in my pocket Nintendo! Now Nintendo have also realised that a second analogue stick is a necessity, and have released a gargantuan peripheral called the Circle Pad Pro, in order to compensate those who have the first-generation 3DS. (I predict the next iteration is right around the corner.)

As you can probably tell, I have been hurt by my experiences with the 3DS and that is having an effect on my Vita contemplation. Of course there will be the inevitable price-cut/second generation hardware, this doesn’t bother me, but in years gone by, this would be at least a year after the initial release.

Now, it is happening within the first three months, or few weeks if you look at the Vita’s Japanese launch, where sales have continued to plummet, forcing retailers to lower the price of the console by as much as 20%, according to a GamesRadar report discussed in IGN.

If you just read all of the above, you would probably think I hate the Vita. Our very own Richard Gwilliam also discussed the troubles Vita could have in a diminishing market of dedicated handheld gaming when smartphones and tablets are becoming the big-sellers. But the reason why I am having this debate is that I think the Vita is a phenomenal console. Having the chance to spend some time with it, and play some of the amazing launch games made me realise how much I want one.

There is nothing inherent about the console itself that makes me not want to buy it. It’s merely the logistics. £300 is a lot of money. Based on the 3DS and Japanese sales, the price will probably drop within the first 3 months, and I’d be paying way more than I should for a memory card. But what it comes down to in the end is that I love games. The Vita certainly has them in spades. I’ve always wanted a console-like experience on the go, and that’s the Vita’s home run swing. I want two analogue sticks, Vita has them. Plus with the innovative front and back touch controls, there is the potential for a wider marketplace which could offer everything from blockbuster titles to 69p apps.

It is a big investment, but I’m am such a weak-willed person that even if I avoided the release-day urge, it probably wouldn’t be long before I went out and bought one. So, today, I pre-ordered my Vita, as well as an overpriced memory card, and Little Deviants, which I thoroughly enjoyed in the little time I spent with it.

I’ll make sure to keep you posted on my thoughts on the Vita once I’ve spent time with it, and if anyone else has pre-ordered a Vita, let me know what your impressions are of the console once you’ve tried it for yourself.

In short, the game is very much a Total War style of game, with lots of storytelling and decision-making elements thrown in for good measure. I must admit, I’m not the most ardent fan of the Total War series, but I can see their appeal and much of the design ethos is present here in the King Arthur II prologue.

As for the “role-playing” side of things, the game kicks off with a narrative device, much like an old school “choose your own adventure” experience, complete with potentially weighty decisions to make from the outset. Although the dialogue is dripping with over-acting, it works somewhat, and reinforces the idea that this is more than just a slow-paced wargame.

The rest of the setting, historical fiction mixed with fantasy elements, really works for me and gives a strong foundation for what would otherwise be a run-of-the-mill high fantasy setting with dragons, trolls and other fantasy tropes. I particularly like the game’s take on the Roman occupation of Britain being the source for the Arthurian legend. It may be wishful thinking on my part, but I get a small sense of a Game of Thrones vibe, with Hadrian’s wall being envisaged as an enormous magical wall hundreds of feet high, and the Picts beyond the wall possessing of something a good deal more sinister perhaps than their real world counterparts.

Although the battles are the characteristically plodding, sluggish tactical affairs, I am intrigued by the mash up of role-playing elements which frame the battles. There are senatorial debates, shifting allegiances, provinces in decline and new powers rising. Indeed, there seems to be a lot happening in the epic world of King Arthur II: The Role-playing Wargame.

King Arthur II is out now on PC.

Screenshots

That’s an intentionally provocative statement, but its one that the proponents of the “games are art” movement tend to skip over. They’ll suggest a large number of beautiful games; Shadow Of The Colossus often comes up here, despite being a game whose core gameplay revolves around exploring a landscape in order to find and kill beautiful, mysterious creatures. The creatures may be wonderfully designed, beautiful puzzles, but our interaction is to scale and then kill them.

Bioshock may well be my favourite game this generation. Its rich world, in my opinion, makes it the greatest adventure game that never was. Sadly our interaction with Rapture is chiefly composed of killing things with shotguns and on one occasion, a golf club. Of course there are artistic games without combat, but we’re now talking about a subset of a subset.

Shadow Of The Colossus does a great job of making us regret our actions, but from a game design perspective, there is nothing better to make the player feel powerful than destroying an enemy. Spoiling SoTC further would be a crime, but if you want more information on SoTC and how it handles regret, then this article is a good place to start.

While we may hope for games to evolve, and become more avant-garde, mainstream games are going to be about killing things. To appease parents’ groups and nut-jobs, these things are often going to be animals or animal-like. This of course, poses some problems for a vegetarian.

I became a vegetarian 2 years ago, it had a lot to do with an unlikely alliance between indie-pop deity, Morrissey, and celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

I have always loved animals, and always felt vaguely guilty about eating meat. I managed to live with this guilt, up until about 2 years ago, when I discovered The Smiths. They very quickly became my favourite band. People who know The Smiths, will know they have a song called “Meat Is Murder”. I avoided it initially, but eventually did listen. Repeated throughout the song is the line; “This beautiful creature must die”. This really connected with me, because it is the sheer beauty of animals that make it impossible for me to ever envision causing them harm.

Maybe a year before this, I had watched Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall shoot a deer with a rifle. It is difficult to describe, but to me there is a magic about the movement and freedom of a wild animal. It is just full of life and energy. I’m an atheist, but to stop and still that movement seemed to me to be the definition of a sin. A crime that damaged the perpetrator more than the victim.

My vegetarianism does give me quite a few hang-ups in my game playing. I’m going to talk about them here, point out their absurdities and hopefully exorcise a few of them. I’m not out to convert anyone, I don’t think I’m better than anyone. I do feel that being vegetarian gives me a different perspective on gaming.

I don’t buy horses in Bethesda games for a few reasons, some gameplay, some vegetarian.
The gameplay reasons are as follows:

• No mounted combat: It is irritating to keep hopping off a horse to deal with piddling, though persistent, threats while travelling.
• Cost: Collecting gold is one of my favourite things to do in TES games, stealing things, robbing dudes, crafting pimp jewelry, mixing potions to knock the socks off the NPCs, all of it. I. Love. Gold. When I first played Morrowind, I was a little too young to fully appreciate it, but one of my favourite things to do, was to steal a Dark Elf’s entire dinner service, and sell it to the pawnbroker. I would then scuttle back to my safe-house, bring up the inventory, select my newly acquired wealth…and dump it on my bed!

I loved this pile of gold coins, a very tangible sign of my decaying moral fibre. One of the things that disappointed me most when I replayed Morrowind, was that the pile of coins was a fixed size. My childhood enthusiasm for larceny had inflated this rather small pile of coins, into something resembling Smaug’s hoard. So gold is important to me, and I don’t drop 1,000 coins without some serious thought.

Now for the vegetarian reason, which I like to call Horse-Death Related Anxiety (HDRA).

Even for carnivores, the possibility of horse death is obviously a major con, when you are thinking of diversifying your portfolio of investments, moving gold from propping up the Wood Elf economy (damn those archery trainers), and into horseflesh. As for me, I am enough of a wet blanket, that the possibility of losing my horse to a moment’s stupidity on a cliff edge, or to stupid, meanie, ice wolves is enough for me to avoid them entirely.

HDRA was one of the reasons, along with a deep dislike of GTA 4, that I gave Red Dead Redemption a miss. My enjoyment of RDR’s reportedly outstanding gunfights would have been significantly diminished by banditos turning my four-legged friend into a pulpy mess. I chose not to have this experience. Crazy? Probably.

Now you may ask, how can you care about a stupid collection of pixels masquerading as a dumb animal, but at the same time make fun of Lydia every time you enter Breezehome? The reason is that I always like animals but humans have to earn it.

A horse only has to look vaguely horse-shaped, follow you around, and be fuzzy. Given these basics, humans will attach higher behaviours and motives to animals. You’ve got to love your horse when it takes on a dragon for you.

Getting an audience to feel emotionally attached to a human is so much harder. It requires wonderful writing, wonderful character modelling, wonderful animation and most importantly of all wonderful voice acting. Very few game characters have all of these, and due to the scale of these games, none or very few of the NPCs do.

Another problem I have, is where games require the player to kill animals to acquire quest items, or crafting materials. I’ll take my example from Bethesda games again.

In Morrowind, the predecessor to Oblivion and Skyrim, one of the best ways to make money in the early game is Alchemy, as there is an exploit to make excellent potions very quickly. The exploit is as follows; Intelligence is the attribute governing Alchemy, so make potions that fortify this attribute, drink them, and the bonuses stack. This leads to you having a very high intelligence stat, allowing you to make far better potions than you should be able to at the beginning of the game.

The catch? One of the ingredients is most readily obtainable by slaughtering these.

Bull Netch

Betty Netch

Netches float peacefully around Morrowind’s landmass; Vvardenfell. Netches add considerable weirdness and charm to a landscape which already includes massive mushrooms. These weird gas giants will not attack unless you attack them. They also collapse into a kind of deflated ball when you kill them, just to emphasise your cruelty.

Unable to live with the shame, I now buy my Netch leather from Nalcarya the Fine Alchemist in Balmora. Of course, this is still participating in the senseless slaughter of Netches, but being too much of a coward to actually do the killing. At this stage, Bethesda should release a game just for me, and call it “The Elder Scrolls: Shame Spiral”.

Medieval RPGs pose the most problems for a vegetarian gamer, because of the lack of alternative materials. It doesn’t matter how high you raise your Smithing skill, Skyrim’s forges are not going to allow you to craft leatherette armour. It is probably for the best, as it would likely come out looking like bondage gear. Smithing in Skyrim then, required a small bit of sophistry. I would not hunt animals, but if animals wanted to use my face as a chew toy, then after their inevitable demise, I would strip them of their skin.

Forum users when confronted with vegetarian critiques of games, or game mechanics, usually respond with the following “I’m shocked that you’re fine with killing humans by the shed-load, but get upset about killing animals”. Its a good one, and for a while I found it near impossible to defend against. The best I can do, is assert that animals are always innocent (except predatory ones, damned ice wolves!) whereas human characters can be evil; they can be Nazis, they can be henchmen. My moral compass is sufficiently bent to allow me to happily kill the above, as well as aggressive animals such as iIce wolves, while avoiding peaceful animals, and even doing my best not to aggro aggressive animals. My previous point about “uncanny valley” humans is another factor. It’ss difficult to feel upset about the deaths of Heinz-filled showroom dummies.

I have to admit that when hard pressed by a dragon, I have stuffed everything with a health buff into my face. Yes, including mammoth stew that I may have found lying around the place. The aftermath of a 1000 degree blast from a dragon is not a place for a philosophical debate. “The Elder Scrolls: Shame Spiral Part 2”

There is one area of the animal kingdom that I revile, and remain deeply terrified of. It is of course, spiders. I do not like them, at all. There is a dungeon in Skyrim’s main quest, where a huge spider will descend almost on top of your head. Girlish. were the screams that erupted from my mouth. A shaky, panicky few minutes ensued, where I slashed half blindly at the monstrosity while backtracking, and waiting for my magicka to regen. Eventually I had enough to summon a Flame Atronach to distract the spider long enough for me to heroically run away and set a fire rune in front of me. A pattern of these and respawning the Atronach eventually won the day. I didn’t stop shaking for a couple of minutes.

Being vegetarian does not prevent me playing games. Hell, it does not prevent me loving Skyrim. It does make me play games differently to most people. Occasionally I have to tell myself little lies, or find ethical shortcuts around some things. Come to think of it, being a vegetarian almost enforces role-playing, and in some ways, makes me engage more with the game world. It also results in behaviour which is sometimes laughable; missing out on RDR is the best example.

I would be fascinated to hear what kind of hang-ups you guys have when playing games, or what rules you make up.

Here’s the Xbox survey. Complete it by 5th Feb to be entered into the draw.

And here’s a nice picture of the dashboard so this post don’t look so sad and lonely.

• Main quests only – the fastest and simplest way to get this is to only tackle the main campaign. Side quests don’t count towards the achievement so don’t bother unless you are in dire need of some XP.
• Alarm not alarmed – enemies entering an alarmed state don’t trigger an alarm automatically so don’t worry if you get spotted on your crate toting travels. Alarms can only be activated by cameras, alarm panels and as far as I can tell sentry bots. There are some worries over whether failed hacks set off alarms so be careful.
• Choose your upgrades carefully – Praxis points will be scarce. Obviously spend out on augments such as the Cloaking system and Stealth Hacking upgrades as soon as possible as these will make the game much much easier. After that it’s up to you, anything that means you can stay hidden for longer or take more enemies out faster is a bonus.
• Keep an eye on your awards – most main quests can be completed with either the Stylishly Done bonus for not setting off alarms or the Ghost bonus for not being seen at all. If you don’t get either of these don’t panic. So long as you are sure you haven’t set anything off you should be fine.
• SAVE! – This one should be the most obvious, save and save often. Make sure you use 2-3 slots so that if anything goes wrong you can always backtrack a little, you don’t want to fail a conversation to be faced with hacking a door you don’t have the right skills to open or killing your way in.

There we have it; 5 simple pointers that should make getting this achievement a cinch. Got any questions or other achievements you want us to tackle? Do let us know in the comments.

The Western Europe map that will be available is 4-player co-op and if you want to complete it on Hard as we did, you’ll need to be incredibly focused on teamwork and tactics. As Mat Jones pointed out in his own Syndicate preview, we dropped straight into MMO jargon from the outset. The level of co-operation required to complete this map makes it feel an awful lot like a small 4-man raid, clocking in at roughly 30 minutes per session.

In the world of Syndicate, you play as an Agent; a member of the Syndicate squad with a Dart 6 weaponised chip implanted in your skull. These brain enhancements let you get up to all sorts of remote shenanigans like causing your enemies’ guns to misfire, commanding computers without using your hands and healing your squad mates. No, I have no idea how a skull implant can repair bullet holes in other people’s bodies but there it is. You can also offer your team buffs in the form of shielding, breach enemies’ armour to make them vulnerable and, if you die in the field leaving one of your team-mates still alive, they can resurrect you when they get close enough. Very MMO-ish indeed.

The tactics our group used on this map were very much around teamwork. In one section with distant snipers and rocket launchers, we’d send out one player to snipe while the others heal and generally try to stay out of rocket blast radius. In another section, we’d split into pairs and have one group draw the boss over to one side of the map while the others engaged additional enemies on the other.

If even one team member lost focus and failed to heal their buddy or to keep their assigned enemies at bay, the battle was over, so good communication was paramount. The HUD design is very helpful with this, showing the health bars of all your teammates at the top. There’s no excuse for letting someone die through ignorance. Thanks to the checkpointing system, having the entire team wipe was frustrating but not the end of the world. The checkpoints we needed to use were perfectly placed, so dying usually meant that we’d spawn at the entrance to a section. We never had to repeat more than one real firefight.

The game had no avatar customisation that I could see but you do get to define your own set of three loadouts named Defense, Offense and Support. These define the equipment you will have at the start of the mission. Each loadout has a free choice of primary and secondary weapons and a chip ability or “application”. These names are purely for convenience and don’t restrict your options – if you want to set up your “Defense” loadout aggressively with sniper rifles, assault rifles and, say, a chip ability that causes your opponent to commit suicide with a grenade, you go right ahead. You’ll also have the option to unlock a second remote ability once you grind enough points to upgrade your chip.

Grind. Remember that word. It will come up later.

When playing on hard mode, loadouts are more about customising for your own play style than trying to build a balanced team. In a traditional MMO raid, you’d need to make sure you have at least one healer, one “tank” to soak up damage and draw attention, and maybe someone set up for crowd control. Syndicate co-op needs people to do all those jobs yet doesn’t force you into specialising for any one role. This is just as well because, as with most games, the XP system is heavily biased towards killing.

I spent one of our four play-throughs spamming heals on everyone else while a specialist sniper took out distant targets and the remaining two took care of close-quarters fighting. This left me trailing at the bottom of the leaderboard with 10,000 XP while the sniper took home 23,000. In another play-through we all took sniper rifles as our primary weapon and clocked in with a respectable 15,000 XP each. The fire rate and low recoil of the basic sniper rifle do mean that a quick double-tap to the torso will kill most enemies as quickly as single headshot, so I fear that this weapon is rather overpowered. However, you get points for kill assists and achieving objectives as well as heals, so there’s little danger of sessions turning into a race to be the fastest sniper. I hope.

XP is important for a number of reasons. Yes, you need it to level up but you also use it in research to unlock new abilities. This is where things gets weirdly complicated.

• Killing, healing and completing mission objectives will get you XP.
• Levelling up though gaining XP will earn you chip points.
• Completing challenges will win you application tokens.
• Completing certain objectives will give you blueprint tokens.

Spend chip points to upgrade your implanted brain chip and gain new applications like the aforementioned shield buff. Spend application tokens to enhance existing abilities – for example, the basic Backfire will do some damage to a distant opponent when he next tries to shoot you. Upgrade that with the Chamber Patch and Backfire will happen earlier and cause extra damage.

But here’s the catch. You can’t use your application tokens to purchase Chamber Patch unless you’ve already spent a chip point on the ROM 1 upgrade. Even then, once you’ve purchased the Chamber Patch, you still need to unlock it by setting it as your research project and earning 5000 XP in a map. Blueprint tokens work in the same manner but for grenade and gun upgrades. To put this another way, the team have built an RPG-like technology tree but spread it across 3 different menu screens for an awkward-as-hell interface.

The upshot of all this is that unlike an MMO where you’ll run a raid time and time again in the hopes of getting a rare or epic drop from the boss, your incentive to repeat maps in Syndicate’s co-op mode is to grind your research for weapon upgrades and abilities. You can queue up multiple research projects so if you want a fairly cheap ability, any excess XP earned in the session won’t go to waste.

Having played through the demo level four times in a row on hard mode, this worries me a little. I honestly feel like I’m done with the Western Europe map already. I’ve proved that my team are good enough to beat it on the hardest difficulty available. Where’s the incentive to earn new abilities? I could speculate that this might lie in other maps, with certain bosses requiring specific abilities to beat but as yet, that has no basis in fact.

If you have a group of friends you trust, or a clan, then Syndicate’s co-op will be great fun on hard mode. Everyone else will enjoy running and gunning their way through the normal difficulty. Abilities are fun but long cool-down times meant that we hardly used them and we really didn’t need to. As such, even though I really enjoyed our sessions, I have my doubts over the longevity of this mode without a steady churn of new maps. You should definitely try it for yourself when the demo is out this week.

Syndicate will be released on 24th Feb on Xbox 360, PC and PS3.

Spirit Tales: a “light- hearted anime fantasy MMORPG  developed by X-Legend” has published information about sign-ups for their closed beta. The press release promises a pet capture system and over 40 million customisation options. Having had a quick look I’m not sure how much this “epically cute” MMO will appeal to Western gamers but I’ve signed up on the off chance I get to play a pipe smoking fox person.

Crucible 1.1 dropped for EVE Online players last Tuesday, this expansion update sees a lot of smaller tweaks being introduced which as a whole look to be improving the UI experience. Most importantly, in my very humble opinion, a Loot All option has finally been added .. that damsel will be a lot less distressed now. The full list of features can be found here and are well worth a look see.

Autumn 2012 will see Warner Brothers Interactive and Turbine launch the new expansion to Lord of the Rings Online, Riders of Rohan. The level cap is being increased to 85 and  mounted combat will be introduced. Hobbits on War Steeds, interesting.  Kate Paiz, Executive Producer for LotRO explains that it’s “ One of our largest expansions ever, Rohan is expected to be twice the size of the recent Rise of Isengard expansion and includes the most new game systems and technology we’ve introduced since 2008′s Mines of Moria.”

Funcom have just released a new location video for their upcoming MMO: The Secret World. It’s very creepy and rather exciting, the title is promising to bring us the opportunity to play an MMO without class or level restrictions. I feel we’re well overdue a bit of genuine innovation in online gaming so it’ll be interesting to see how this game pans out.

Riotzone has entered its Open Beta, this free-to-play strategy game from Mail.Ru Games is browser based and offers PvE and PvP gameplay. You enter the foray as a mercenary commander battling against an almost certainly evil Dictator, choosing between two sides: power to the many or power to the few. If guns, mercenaries and women in bikini tops are your thing this might be worth a look in between doing actual work.

Finally and with a little *squee* of excitement comes the news that WAKFU from Ankama has had a release date of February 29th announced. This odd and addictive game features turn-based combat and interesting concepts including the need to manage the eco-system. I played its predecessor DOFUS far too much so I’m hoping this release will follow Ankama’s trend of offering the MMO market something just a little bit different.

Long story short, I came across some screen shots from World of Warcraft including this terribly cute romantic moment between my Mage and some random Druid who follows me around. There we are on some steps in what looks like Uldum, floaty confetti stuff and a pretty parasol … we were probably having a picnic or something, I don’t know, I can’t role-play. It made me think about relationships and especially the ones that involve gaming or, in fact, games that involve relationships.

MMOs are the obvious candidate for games that involve social interaction and I’ve played a fair few over the years, from Ultima Online to SW:TOR via EVE Online, World of Warcraft, WAR, LoTRO and probably others that I’ve long since forgotten.

For me, a good in-game community can make or break my decision on whether to subscribe to a monthly fee. Without one any release can wind up feeling like an especially boring ghost town. Yes, new content and spangly loot will keep people logging in but as is often the case, it’s so much better if you can do it with someone else.

So this random Druid, played by a very middle aged man, has spent the last seven years dragging me across the maps of all these games. Mostly I’m the type of girl that could get lost in a bath tub, especially when I’m being lazy and playing up the “hopeless and need a hero” card .. he could probably find his way around Azeroth blindfolded by now. I’ve pinched his epics, blown up his very expensive battleship, screamed at him during raids and generally been a bit of a pain.

Along the way we’ve made friends, pissed some people off and I would like to think we’ve also helped others. I know they’ve supported me, even before I’d met these people in *gasp* real life they were holding my hand through several months of impenetrable depression. They helped where real world friends couldn’t simply by virtue of the fact I didn’t have to face them and admit I had a problem, it made it easier somehow.

These people, these friends would never have meandered in to my life if it wasn’t for gaming. I met the Druid playing EVE Online, he was a Battleship Captain … I’m a girl, you know the story. Along our way we’ve become part of a small group of people that form the core social group of any new game we play. Bonded together by a love of correct spelling and high levels of snarkiness we fearlessly criticise stuff whilst moaning about our respective jobs. I love these guys and will happily spend hours reminiscing about all the cool things we’ve done as a group, I say cool … we’re easily excited. Affection is shown easily in MMOs – I’ve saved screen-shots like some people keep letters.

Working as a team and dealing with often (very) frequent defeat is an excellent way of a) bonding and b) starting smoking again. Yet for all the good points there are the bad points too.

I suspect any part of life that involves humans will inevitably involve idiots. A segment of reality where you get to hide behind a virtual avatar and not be held accountable for a lot of what you say, more so. I’ve been called “disgusting” for being bisexual, “stupid” for being a woman and a “bitch” for possibly not being the most tolerant of raid leaders there could be. My favourite number one insult of all time still stands as being accused of having “saggy baps” … by a teenager, who had never met me. Awesome.

Sometimes the idiocy is far less about outright arsehole-ism and drifts into shades of grey where personality clashes and egos play just as big a part in on-line communities as they do in the office. Trying to schedule a raid rota when you have too many of one class leads to huffiness; trying to get the right loot to the right people leads to jealousy; and trying to run a Guild leads to a nervous breakdown.

The complexities of all of these relationships alongside the game content itself is what makes MMOs great in my mind. People are endlessly fascinating and when placed in virtual environments where they’re not necessarily constrained by the normal scripts of society, even more so.  

It’s the added randomness of it all. A game can be designed to have repeatability but it’s ultimately finite. When you add real personalities it becomes different every time you log in. The scope for creative fuck-wittery is enormous. I give you: Baron Geddon vs The Auction House; it takes a special kind of mind to have that kind of idea occur to you.

Friends, enemies, people you just mildly despise, they all go in to making up the community. We help one another (or at least have the decency to pretend to be AFK when assistance is called for) and are mostly happy when we see one another achieve something. Idiots tend to be swiftly ostracised which is best for everyone’s blood pressure and the continued harmony of a Guild. I genuinely feared for my existing friendships when I introduced my boyfriend to WoW, never have I seen the Priests’ Leap of Faith spell used so often to yoink one person out of whatever shit he was stood in.

On-line games allow us to showcase the best and worst bits of humanity, in microcosms, containing absurdities like pink haired Gnomes and seasonal events which see you transform in to a rabbit to hunt Easter eggs. To me, MMOs are the perfect escape from the rather banal grind of my everyday life and I love them. Oh and for the record, I don’t have saggy baps.

Game developers and publishers do not make money from pre-owned video games. Everyone knows this. But it keeps the retailers ticking over with profit. If Microsoft decides to do what a recent rumour suggests – disable any pre-owned games for their next Xbox console – this will have potentially severe ramifications on all current video game retailers. The Game group (GAME/Gamestation), who are already seeing profits fall over the years, could well be hit hard by this, due to the size of their pre-owned sections.

Maybe the solution will be to have next-gen Xbox games retail at much lower prices, so they are more affordable for all? Heh, we can all dream. This kind of move, if it is made reality, will make others follow suit, and will only increase the worth of a video game. I expect to see old SNES/Mega Drive prices – remember when Sonic 3 retailed at £59.99? It was half a game! Of all the visual entertainment mediums in the world, video games are the only one to sustain prices across generations for new, full titles. Blu-Rays have gotten cheaper, so have DVDs, and so on.

But where this may or may not harm retailers, what about the consumer? Trading in our beloved once-new games allows us to afford those expensive new titles, or buying pre-owned gives more gaming for your buck. Maybe it’s a simple case, as mentioned above, that you are borrowing your mates’ copy, or there is only one copy in your family household? These latter factors surely must be considered first, if such a bold move were to be approved. If the Xbox 720 has the same profile based system, surely this will lead to more profile sharing (if in one household), unless it registers to a console, of course? This for me would ruin the whole point of the achievement system. I cannot afford to keep buying new titles at full, retail prices, let alone two copies. If my son wants to play the same game I have bought, there is the chance that might not be possible. This kind of restriction could well drive away the very demographic that is being aimed at in the first place.

I for one, hope it does not happen.