Sandy Dunewinds of Elona

Finally in 2012 an Open Source MMO appeared. As late as 2009 the entire field was littered with the corpses of failed and abandoned projects. With a few exceptions, like Panda3D , very few Open Source MMO platforms have made any lasting impression.

However, now the long wait is over. Dream World has appeared. Dream World combines the good ideas from a number of proprietary projects that have gone before, but has opened up the world to players and non-programmers.

Free or Pay to Play

The first decade of the 21st century saw an explosion of Free to Play MMOs. Of course the leader, WoW showed that millions of users were looking for the MMO experience, but many weren’t ready to shell out the $15 per month to play the game. Guild Wars, and possibly other games, had a free to play model once you had purchased the game. This model has proved profitable and we have seen two sequels to Guild Wars.

By late in 2010, the single player or single campaign game was largely extinct, except in the hand-held market. Dragon Age: Origins was one of the last of the single player genre and soon spawned a true F2P MMO. Even in the hand-held market the hand-held computer, which used to be called the smart-phone, has spawned many online games as well.

The primary motivation for the ubiquity of MMOs is based on economics of the game company as well as the interest of the players. The game companies have discovered that they will make more money over time if they build a loyal player base and the way to do this is to build a long-lived game, as WoW and its ancestors have proven. The game designers are kept gainfully employed with constant upgrades to the game as the players grind on through the levels, engage in epic battles, dress up in boutique armor and weapons and buy and sell loot. The income from the micro-transactions for buffs, mounts, vehicles and costume armor provide plenty of income to sustain the servers, and the designers.

Finally Dream World

Late in 2009, a dedicated group of software designers began putting the parts of Dream World together from the corpses of other OpenSource games and new code. By late 2010 the game showed promise as a platform, and during the next year the releases came fast and furiously as the platform gained momentum. The Open Source nature of the product and the promise of being able to move characters between worlds caused the most interest as the platform took its final form.

Some of Dream World’s features include:

• A world builder based on the general ideas of Unreal Ed, the editor for the Unreal game engine, but with a more intuitive interface.
• The ability to import map as well as model geometry built in popular tools like 3dsMax, Maya and Blender to build new maps, characters, NPCs [non-player characters] and monsters.
• The ability to define new character classes, complete with character models, cosmetic customizations, experience level path, behavior animations, skill trees, skill animations, armors, and weapons.
• The ability to define new buffs and candy, which apply within a class or across classes.
• The ability to define new monsters to kill, including all their attributes of resistance, health, experience, attack type and damage. Also monsters are defined with loot dropping, mobbing, re-spawn times and wandering behaviors. Boss monsters are easy to define.
• Any character [account] can contribute any map, character, item, or monster content to the game. This contribution is done in the context of the game and may be subject to review of the management or a peer group of characters before being released to the entire population.
• New content is downloaded and cached on the local machine as it is accessed, this technique was pioneered by Guild Wars. A large game wide client update is not required to continue to play in old content areas. New content is downloaded incrementally as it is accessed. Deferred update occurs when a new character or new character content appears so that a novel character may appear as a gray blob for a while until it’s content is loaded.
• Characters can play in PvE, PvP and PK [Player Kill] modes and can avoid all types of play. Most worlds enact automatic behaviors which punish repeated harassing of other characters including “jail time” and large fines of in-world currency.
• Skills and tasks can be defined to enhance game play or to allow non-violent characters, skill trees or whole worlds to be created.
• Worlds can optionally define real-world currency exchange. Gateways to PayPal and other online payment services allow the game currency to interact with real-world currencies as Second Life has pioneered. Each world sets it’s own exchange rate as either a fixed number or based on a currency exchange.
• Characters can find, craft or import game objects from the outside world into the game world and then sell them to other characters to make money. The sale of loot or crafted items is limited by in-game creation or farming, but sale of imported items are not limited. This allows the game economy to interact with the real-world in all the ways that Second Life has pioneered.
• Public Key encryption techniques can be used to “sign” created items, so copyright can be enforced for items sold by characters in the game. Copies of items do not pass the authentication test for their creators. Items can be forged but on close examination, their creation date will be shown to be later than the original, so the forger can be identified.
• The items for sale by the game designers are indistinguishable from the items for sale by other players. These sales are the micro-transactions that can provide income for the server farm and salaries for game designers. A small sales tax can provide additional income for the game designers.
• Web portals for sale of game items provides a more convenient method of finding those in-game items than wandering all over the in-game world to check out the many store fronts.
• Some characters “own” game land for store fronts or houses, but most game players are wandering mercenaries who are too busy leveling their characters, and engaging in epic battles to spend time gambling or engaging in sex play. While castle building and sex play are possible, they are a minor part of the game rather than a large part of the game as in Second Life.
• Streaming of in-world music, video and in-game voice communication is provided by a variety of means. The open source nature of the software allow a variety of best of breed methods to be used for this communication. We no longer are killed by monsters while we type in a chat window.
• The game behavior is controlled by the game server rather than the client, so that while the game is open source, a well controlled server is not easily subject to hacking. So while game players may modify their clients, this does not  allow taking advantage of other players in the game. The open source nature of the software means that bugs that cause crashes or allow hacking are quickly fixed.
• While many of the progenitors of Dream World are medieval RPG games, the platform has spawned worlds of every flavor: WWII battle fields, Planetary Warfare, Anime style RPGs, Corporate and Educational meeting and educational venues.
• Since characters can move among worlds with ease, medieval RPG characters often appear in educational contexts where students are showing off the characters they have worked so hard to build.

With many different worlds running the Dream World software, it is now possible to migrate your character between worlds and servers. When a new world appears, you can now visit or join that world with your high level character from another world so that you need not start off at the lowest level of existence in the new world. Those who find the new world exciting can decide to play the copy of their character in the new world as well as the old world, or to move back into a previous world while merging their enhanced attributes, skills and loot. As characters, we are no longer trapped in one version of cyber-space, but are free to move between cyber-worlds. At long last, our cyber-selves exist outside of any particular cyber-world.

- Windy

The following gallery shows photos from a Dream World based on Guild Wars.

Luna Online

There are several YouTube video reviews: Here and Here.

You’ll find all the features you’ll expect in an MMORPG.  So if you like the look, and have a computer with a modest graphics card, this may be the game for you to try.

The game team is quite serious about punishing those who grief other players, but it seems that one of the most annoying issues is a player stealing a kill from another player. It’s called KS or Kill Stealing. It seems odd that the game does not simply fix this issue in the same way that 2Moons [Dekaron] has solved it. In Dekaron, once you start killing a monster, then you get the experience even if another player kills the monster, unless some time passes or you die and are unable to finish the kill. This effectively prevents KS issues

Well, if you are looking for an MMO that is Terminally Cute, then Luna Online may be for you. Enjoy.

Windy.

Rappelz shows a very nice face on the website. But the graphics are dated, circa last millennium, and the game play is slow and the animations are simplistic. I recall better game play, graphics and animations from Rune which is 10 years old this month. If you want to play an MMO on an old computer with a 1024px monitor then Rappelz may be for you. It does seem to have all the expected MMO features, and has very modest graphics requirements. I’ve included lots of screen shots so you can see how it looks.

Bright Portrait

The window size cannot be changed, it is fixed at 1024×768. So on a 1920×1200 screen on my laptop, I can’t play it in window mode because I can’t see the text. So I have to run it full screen. I can’t find fault with the game play since I never got that far along. Beyond the dated graphics, the primary issue for me is that there is no keys for movement. The WASDF keys you expect to move around are not present. You can only move by clicking the mouse on the terrain ahead of you.

Conclusions

Rappelz is very dated in graphics. Looks like a 10 year old game, which it may be.

• It is free to play and free to buy, so as an introduction for a MMO for an older computer it may be ok.
• Guild Wars may work fine on your computer, and is only about $25 per kit. And the graphics, game play and animations of Guild Wars are much better.
• If you have a modern powerful computer and a large screen, don’t waste your time. Go with Guild Wars or 2Moons.

I’m going to go install Rune on my system just to give it a try after all these years.

- windy

Dragon Age: Origins is a new game from BioWare, the makers of Baldur’s Gate back in the last millennium [1998]. Way back in that ancient history, a stand alone RPG made a lot of sense, but in these days of X Box Online, Sony Online and dozens of Free To Play MMOs like Perfect World, Dekaron [2Moons], Ether Saga, etc. it seems odd to bring out a game with no online play.

There are many reviews out there. Here is one from SlashDot.

The other odd thing about DAO is that the entire description of the game has all the keywords and phrases that you would expect from a game that was online. They talk about parties and loot and leveling and approval and so forth. Here’s a quote:

The Approval system is a fun way to learn about each of your companions. There’s a surprising amount of story to be told for each of them. Surprising, at least, until you realize how much story there is in the rest of the game.

The reviewer does talk about having finished the game. I played Guild Wars for months and was nowhere near “finishing” the game. And during the experience, I recall that I and other folks came back to do quests long after they had completed them. The attraction, in part at least, appeared to be that the high level players had fun helping lower level players to finish the quest and progress in the game.

None of this will be possible in this historic throwback game that is not online.

So it appears that DAO will be a few hours of play and then it will pass into history.

Baldur’s Gate and its sequels have long passed into history, but I occasionally log into my Guild Wars account and the community is still active and vibrant.  I look forward to Guild Wars 2 which has a surprisingly similar logo to that of DAO. But GW2 will be an MMO and from everything that I read will improve two of the limiting issues with Guild Wars: The low leveling cap and the difficulty with solo play, when you can’t find your friends online.

Dragon Age Origins

Guild Wars 2

As you can tell from the other Guild Wars posts on this site, I found much to enjoy in Guild Wars in particular and MMOs in general. DAO looks interesting, but without online play, I have no interest in even trying it.

- windy

But I wouldn’t say it was Perfect by any means. Compared with Guild Wars and 2Moons [Dekaron], it has some minor drawbacks. I’m not going to do a full review here, you can find more complete reviews on the web. I’ll just do an overview of some of the features that I found most notable.

Here are some of my observations in the order that I encountered them:

• Installation is gigantic and apparently monolithic. By that I mean that apparently all the content is downloaded at the beginning. The download is done by the first installer and comprises two files totalling 2.5GB. Once the installation is complete and you start the game, it updates itself for another 20 minutes. Sigh… Guild Wars is much smarter. It downloads content incrementally as you visit new areas. 2Moons is a monolithic install, but it’s quite a bit smaller.
• The options for character customizations are way over the top. So far I have only seen the options for humans, but there are about a dozen tweaks to positions and sizes just for the face. The number reminds me of Poser, rather than a game. In my opinion, Guild Wars dozen different faces and a half dozen different hair styles and skin shades was plenty, but if you want to be an ugly portly knight or mage, this is your game.  I do appreciate the ability to have the choice of gender for each character class. 2Moons allows no customzation at all for each class, not even gender.
• The graphics are indeed good, as many of the reviews point out, but I wouldn’t say that they are stunning. They are quite a notch below Guild Wars. The environments are more interesting than 2Moons, but the character animations of PW are quite a bit cruder than either Guild Wars or 2Moons.
• The battle animations are slow and simple in PW. Both Guild Wars and 2Moons have more responsive and much more interesting battle animations. While the performance of PW seemed just fine, the slow pace of battle can become tiresome after a while. As I progress in strength, and it only takes 3 rather than 15 seconds to make a kill, this is a lot less of a problem.
• The environments are huge and sparse in PW. Environments in 2Moons are simpler and less spacious, and the environments of Guild Wars and huge, but in GW one never feels that one is running along forever and ever without encountering interesting things. Monsters in PW are too far apart to make for efficient leveling. There is lots of running involved. Perhaps flight solves that. I remember seeing something about flight being a skill that you learn at level 10.
• Quests are more interesting in PW than in 2Moons. The quests in 2Moons are pretty much a joke with kill a bunch of monsters being the primary idea. Of course Guild Wars quests are the thing that drives the whole story line. I haven’t seen much of a story line in PW, perhaps I missed it, but the early quests are more interesting and lead you through a tutorial of the game.
• Some of the comments I found on the web indicate that PW is a grind to level up. The levels actually seem close together compared with GW or 2Moons, but it is harder to level up since the damage dealt with weapons is small compared with the strength of monsters at your level. So it take many seconds to kill a monster at your level even though that monster is doing no damage to you. This mismatch makes leveling take longer even though you don’t have to kill very many monsters compared with 2Moons.
• The game lacks a comprhensive wiki. GW has a very complete wiki and MMOSite has a fairly complete wiki for 2Moons. As far as I can find the PW wiki is woe-some and a simple task like obtaining your first pet at level 3 is insurmountable without help from the local population.

Perfect World is an interesting diversion, but I doubt if I spend much time there. Like EtherSaga, it has its points, but 2Moons continues to hold my interest. I look forward to Guild Wars 2, AION and Tera all of which should be opening up during the next year.

Update: Right before I reached level 6 I found some shiny new hammers. At level 6 I was able to boost my strength to take advantage of them and kills are down to 3 seconds from 15 seconds. I also found a new halberk and learned the tailoring skill so now I’m a blacksmith and a tailor. As a tailor I made a new helmet, although you can’t tell since helmets never show in PW.

- windy

Ether Saga online is a cute cartoony Free to Play MMO that follows the recent model of “Free to Download and Play”, but “Pay” for upgrades and costumes. This game is a full 3D game with modest system requirements. My Alienware m15x was not working as hard with this game on full tilt as it does with 2Moons.

After about 6 hours with the game, there is much to love and a few things that aren’t so nice.

Generally. The game is beautiful and friendly looking. The graphics are wonderful and the animations are well done. But beware, this is not a browser game. The download is 1.7GB and after that there is a large update; so it takes a little while to download and install. I had no problem installing it on Vista x86.

I’ll leave a description of the game, races, and classes to their website. I’ll confine myself to my observations and comparisons with other games I’ve played in this genre. This is by no means a complete review of the game, but a set of first impressions after playing the game for about 6 hours. I expect to be drawn into a game during that much time and if not then it’s time to move on to more interesting fare. I am willing to give a game that much time and don’t expect it to be a hit in the first 10-20 minutes.

There are a large number of levels. So one expects a “Grinder” but also there seems to be a developed Quest system. So Ether Saga probably doesn’t have the downsides of Guild Wars capped leveling system where the maximum level is 20, but seems to have a better quest system than 2Moons. Quests are listed in a special dialog and it’s easy to see quests there that are appropriate for your level. Although I was not able to find a quest for my character because it didn’t give me good directions to the place where the NPC was that had the quest.  The Ether Saga quest panel did indicate what rewards were given for the quest so you could pick quests intelligently. Guild Wars has a very nice quest system with good rewards. 2Moons as I have said elsewhere here has a lousy quest system with trivial rewards.

Starting a Character. I chose a Dragoon – melee fighter – as my character, and there are quite a few options, including gender, when you create your character. All the characters, apparently, come with a Pet OOTB. Mine was a cute little fox. Oddly, the character did not come with any weapon, but I found that I could kill things fairly effectively with my fists. After a few levels and what I thought were quite a few coins, I went to find a Lance. Apparently, based on the very incomplete wiki, each character only has one weapon type. It was not obvious where to find weapon. The blacksmith was no help. Finally I stopped by a “Merchant” and she had what I needed. A little while later I got the same thing as a drop, but the merchant also had some upgraded armor for my character, who by that time was level 5. Minor annoyance: the length of character names is limited to 10 so I had to use WindFlayer rather than WindyFlayer. How lame is that?

Leveling is a Grind, even at low levels. The leveling effort quickly becomes a grind. There something like 150 levels total, but by level 9 the grind was particularly tedious. The game animations are quite slow and at first that seems charming, but even at level 9 you only have one killing skill, so whacking away at all those cute little critters can take a very long time. By comparison, I started a brand new character in 2Moons, also a melee character, and in about 6 hours brought it up to level 24. This was admittedly with some help from his brother who had cash to spare for upgrades, but regardless, 2Moons is much more efficient and quicker to kill things in succession. In Ether Saga, if I went after low level prey, then I had to kill a lot to make any progress, and if I went after stronger prey, I had to use the Healing Skill after every 2 or 3 kills to build myself back up to avoid dying. The good news was that this did not require purchase of pots, which is lucky since I have accumulated very little loot and cash as I leveled.

Drops are few and far between. The drops are far too infrequent to build up any sizable loot, and I barely kept by pet fed. Compared with 2Moons and Guild Wars, it is very difficult to build up a store of booty. My pet was sitting at about 75% energy most of the time since the food drops were not frequent enough.

Traveling About. The world is large and there are teleports and Auto Route lets you click on a the map or select an NPC and forget it, for the most part. Auto Route occasionally gets stuck, but that’s no big deal. There is a minor problem with the map that you cannot zoom in and then pan around to see the world in detail. Zooming in or out is always based on your position. The world is beautiful and site seeing is a pleasure. As you level up to about level 20, it looks like you just move clockwise around the town.

There are mobs of prey, but I never saw any that attack unprovoked. But I have only reached level 9 so far.

Skills are Rich. There is a complex skill design based on 4 parameters rather than the more typical 2. And another good thing is that you don’t have to hunt a skill trainer or merchant to get new skills. Just purchase your skills with Spirit points from a dialog. I found that I had plenty of Spirit points, but not very much currency as I leveled up, which is a problem, as you will see. The Dragoon comes with a fighting skill and a healing skill. The healing skill builds up your health quickly whenever you want, as long as you aren’t actually fighting at the time. There are also health and energy pots, but with so little currency, I wasn’t looking for those. I never got a pot as a drop in the first 9 levels.

Your Pet. All the character classes come with a pet OOTB, and you must feed it. It does damage as you attack, and really helps you level, but for some reason it actually levels faster than you do. You need to feed it all the food stuffs that you get in drops to keep it healthy, but don’t worry, you don’t need to eat yourself. If you die you resurrect back in town and away you go, but if your pet dies, you are in deep trouble. Apparently there are Scrolls and a Hunter who can resurrect your pet, but the Hunter costs big time. The currency is Gold, Silver, Bronze. At the end of 9 levels I had about 4 silver and a few bronze. It costs 50, yes that ’s Fifty, Silver to resurrect your pet. I’ll probably be level 20 or more before I see that much cash. [Update: I was able to resurrect the pet by buying a "Resurrection Scroll" for 5 Silver. Quite a bit less than 50 Silver for the service. There is a difference since the Scroll does not resurrect the pet with full energy.]

Bottom Line. I’ll probably spend a few more hours, but the slowness of leveling, sparsity of drops and currency, and the slow pace make this game an eye-candy adventure, but not a place where I’ll be spending more time.

Screen Shots. Here are a few screen shots from my adventures.

enjoy, – windy