Teljair and I have decided to put our efforts into creating a new media site called, “Rift Junkies” which will be a site for Rift: Planes of Telara.

And so it begins…

Rift Junkies is a fan site dedicated to the MMORPG Rift: Planes of Telara, formally Heroes of Telara, by Trion. This site has been created with the intent to support the Rift community as a whole. In doing so we hope to provide up-to-date coverage about anything going on with the game; this will include News, Media, Community Updates, Opinionated Blogs, and other events such as contests and polls. Additionally we have created our own forum that we invite everyone to discuss anything about Rift. This may include theory crafting, strategies, debating news topics and, or lore.

Rift Junkies was created by two partners, Teljair and Draegan. Both have been successful at creating fansites in the past such as WAAAGHHammer.com and AOCmmo.com. The most successful of all has been the all purpose MMORPG Media site, Rerollz.com. With the building excitement for Rift: Planes of Telara, both Draegan and Teljair have decided to create something new.

WWW.RIFTJUNKIES.COM

Damn the title to this article sucks. Very unwieldy. Anyway…

MMORPG.com interviewed Colin Johanson, Lead Creative of GW2, and got a few points clarified about his Dynamic Content blog post. It’s a great read and it explains a bit.

Update: More interviews at IGN and Eurogamer.

One argument that you see cropping up in response to the Dynamic Content stuff coming out from Rifts and especially GW2 is how is stuff going to be gamed? Let’s say that on day one everyone is excited about an orc invasion and they all push it back. A whole adventure is made and the players are rewarded and have a great time. Cut to one year later. Are people ignoring these events? Have they determined that you get better reward/hr if you do a mini-event over and over in the next zone over?

The worst thing that could happen is you start seeing calls for “Orc Invasion Cascade Even 1-5 LFM Healer” where you have people farming specific chains of events for the best rewards. If you can control the even cascade precisely then the system fails. Like the real world you need to have an element of uncertainty and failure; however in the game world it can’t be too punishing or people quit.

What about assholes? Can one person trigger a cascade in a certain way while ten other people are working towards a different end? I mean, look at the internet, it’s full of shitheads. There are tons of people out there that would love nothing more than to fuck up your quest to save the princess when all he has to do is run up behind you and train a shit ton of mobs and then the whole thing goes to shit. Do these events protect against that? Or how about someone sniping a key NPC causing the event to fail after your group spent thirty minutes getting to that point?

We’ll see how this develops. I’m incredibly interested in how the thing works and plays out with 1000’s of people playing. I’ll be GW2’s first fanboi but I’ll remain skeptical.

Here are some new TERA screenshots that were posted on their site. Nothing special really, it’s just a bunch of animals. However apparently TERA uses Flickr to host their files. I guess they don’t have a budget to host them on their own site? Heh.

Linkage…

Looks like Eurogamer got an exclusive regarding class development in SWTOR. Apparently each of the eight classes breaks down into two classes. Each class will then have three talent trees, two specifically for the advanced class and one that is shared by the basic class; kind of like Age of Conan. According to Eurogamer the Sith splits up into a crazy dps class and a tank class.

Other than that the advanced classes exist, there isn’t much else to talk about. It’s a typical MMOG staple so you can’t say that you’re surprised. I’m still waiting on information on how the game works. It still looks like a very large co-op multiplayer online game. I guess we’ll have to stay tuned.

Alright, so we’ve had two expansions so far and we each expansion we’ve gotten a bigger and bigger gear reset. How many of you quit playing until the expansion after beating a few of the events? I know I’ve quit plenty of times thinking, “What the fuck is the point gearing up when my shit will be replaced within a few hours by a green quest item?”

Now the difference with me is that I was never a top end raider; I never had the time to commit to a raiding schedule. So I didn’t have Naxx gear the first time around to level with in Crusade, nor did I have Sunwell gear to carry me from 70 to 80. But in with each expansion the gear resets have been getting more and more severe. Top tier gear in 1.0 lasted until you raided in 2.0; and in 2.0 that gear last nearly into Naxx, but sometimes it was replaced fairly quick.

It’s going to be different with Cataclysm. The gear reset is going to be HARD. I mean hard like, “Why the fuck are you wielding Shadowmourne? Fucking noob.” If what I’ve seen and heard is accurate (4000 hps every time you ding, 400 dps 2H axes, etc.), we’re talking about top end gear being reset in the first twenty minutes. This is more severe than any time so far in the history of Warcraft because we’re talking about replacing hardmode epics here quickly. Another thing that’s different now is that everyone has decent gear now. With the advent of badges, everyone is decked out with decent item level shit. Warcraft is saturated with gear. There isn’t much of a gap these days in the haves and have-nots in terms of power compared to 4-5 years ago.

So why are you playing? If you’ve already killed Arthas, are you really interested in the dragon raid they’re putting up on the PTR? Is that really going to hold your attention?

On a side note, I wonder if purple will be the new blue and Warcraft will finally start doling out purples for quest rewards and then have raids start dumping legendaries all over the place and then introduce the red item, the artifact, for end tier bosses. That would be awesome.

Heads up for you guys following TERA. The website has been update and a few things posted. The first item is a recap of the Focus Group Test.

We’d like to share the results of FGT2 with you in a series of postmortem articles. We’ve separated the feedback into three very broad categories: gameplay, Westernization, and technology. This first piece covers gameplay.

For example…

The overwhelming majority of players felt that levels 1 to 11 were well-balanced and provided a good introduction to TERA and its lore. However, feedback on levels 12 and onward was a lot more diverse. Some liked the pacing at those levels while others felt it needed improvement. We agree that there’s room to improve in this area and plan to add new quests in more centralized hubs.

This worries me as an anti-fan of Korean games. Who are these people? Are they going to listen to a bunch of Lineage 2 fans who enjoy leveling for a few years on one toon till max level? Those people are assholes and should stop fucking up games.

More here.

Make sure you sign up for future tests in their new Tester Application.

And a news roundup called the Valika Guardian.

Well it looks like Guild Wars gets dynamic content. Something I’ve been talking about forever. He explains what needs to happen in an MMOG to push it to “the next level”. I’m not going to sit around and quote a bunch of things because it mirrors my last article on the subject. So take a few minutes and read what Colin Johanson, Lead Content Designer of Guild Wars 2, has to say on the subject. Looks like he agrees with me or more likely, I agree with him!

Oh and here are some screens.

[View with PicLens]

If you’ve been watching the internets and you like MMORPGs you might of noticed a few new games that stopped being quiet and started talking. Those two games are Guild Wars 2 and Rift: Planes of Telara. We don’t know much about either game yet. We’ve gotten a few descriptions about lore and combat and other things, but the two things the PR-speak for both games has in common are “Dynamic Content”. What is dynamic content and are we ready for it?

All MMOG vets are looking for something new as evidenced by the game boxes sold from Age of Conan, Warhammer Online and Aion. That “new” hasn’t been found yet. Every game since Everquest has relatively been the same. You can credit an interesting game system or feature with each major release. Warcraft took the game to the masses with incredible refinement and social features. Warhammer, believe it or not, gave us something; which was the Public Quest system (Telara’s Rift event are screaming Hello). Aion and AOC proved that people like player versus player content. With that all being said, however, game worlds still remain very static. A zone is the same Day 1 as it is Day 500. We’re pretty much at the end of the first generation of MMORPGs.

Will Rift and Guild Wars 2 be the beginning of the second generation? I don’t know, and I don’t have any evidence that they will. The one thing both developing studios are discussing is “dynamic content”. A changing world that interacts with the players and can change depending on feedback from the player. If a game can bring a world to a gamer that is truly living and breathing, then I would label it second generation. But what is dynamic content though, how do you define it? You will have to make a distinction between randomly generated content and dynamic content.

Randomly generated content can appear to be dynamic but it really isn’t. When I built MUDs back in the ’90s I was able to implement random content with scripts based on triggers from players. It wasn’t very hard. You create five different events and randomly triggered one of them when a player did something. It appeared different each time, assuming a player didn’t camp a certain area. As more information unfold about Rift and GW2 you should keep an eye on how dynamic content is presented to the player. If it’s a bunch of events that are triggered via players doing X, Y, or Z then it’s not dynamic, but a scripted event triggered via a random action.

Dynamic content is something that responds to player feedback and then continues to respond. For example, if I do action A which triggers event B then event B needs to respond to action B, C D,… Z. There need to be several layers where different actions lead to different variations. That’s only one example however. Another aspect of dynamic content is that it happens whether there is a player there or not. Right now in games we usually see villages or towns that have quests, vendors, trainers or whatever. They’re always there and it’s always static. In a dynamic world then there should be a chance that it gets attacked and the village NPCs react to it. You, as a player, have the option of helping either side or walk away. A very dynamic world has you wandering into events that are already happening without you or anyone else consenting to them. Just like real life, everything isn’t focused on you! The world goes on whether you are there are not.

A key question that needs to be answered is, “Are things, events, attacks, celebrations, whatever, going on when no player is present?”

Now I might be dreaming here, but this sounds kind of like the pie in the sky Design Manifesto I linked to a week ago or so from Guild Wars 2. There are a few design philosophies though that Scott Hartsman brought up in a few interviews. How much is too much dynamic content? Will a player feel exasperated when things are constantly changing and dislike the unfamiliarity of the situation? Do things change too fast or too slow? Maybe players would love a game where things are new every time they log on. I know some people enjoy coming up and knowing that they can log in, do their set of daily activities and log out for the night knowing the progressed. Personally I find that dull, and would love to log in the game and find out something is going on and going to go check it out.

There is another aspect that I think this gameplay can bring about. Most of these games are driven by the “carrot on a stick”. Getting your character the ultimate equipment and once you get it, showing off and bragging about it. Today, there isn’t much else your character can do. With dynamic content, players have the potential for affecting the world around them creating a new caste of achievers. Many games have this now, though it’s all player driven, like EVE. However with content that can be changed because of a player, a person will now be able to say, “I help that come about,” or “I made that happen,” and then be able to talk about it and there will be visual evidence of that event happening rather than a forum post. Character will strive to not only improve themselves via gear, the will also strive to make things happen in the world.

The one potential aspect of dynamic content that I think would really reinvent the MMOG world would be that the game will still have parts unknown. These days you learn everything about an upcoming game via spoiler and database websites. Do you think there is truly anything in Warcraft that really surprises anyone these days? Dynamic Content could bring back the mystery and the danger in the game world.

We’ll have to wait and see as these games reveal themselves. Are we seeing a new type of game? Or will we see more of the same with a few different gimmicks? Time will tell.

MMO-Champion’s got a ton of screenshots up from the Friends and Family testing that started recently. There are some great shots and the additional textures bring the old world up to WOTLK standards.

Also through the link is some preliminary data-mining of some of the professions and stuff.

My Favorite is the redone Stormwind. No more visual tricks.

If you recall, not to long ago, Black Prophecy announced that it will become a free to play title. Now Closed Beta will be beginning.

From a recent Press Release:

Hamburg (April 30, 2010) – It’s the moment players have all been waiting for. gamigo and Reakktor Media have given the green light for closed beta testing of the space action MMOG “Black Prophecy”. The virtual universe is now open to a select crew of daring pilots looking to join the Genide or Tyi factions.

In the past few weeks, the Reakktor team has been working very hard to get “Black Prophecy” ready go to into beta testing. The focus during the first phase of testing will be on server and program stability. For that reason, only a small group of about 100 players will have access to the game server. More fighter pilots will be recruited in time.

Registration for beta testing remains open at http://www.blackprophecy.com