A note on WoW and Nostalrius

I've written before of my increasing dissatisfaction with the direction that Blizzard took WoW with each expansion. At one point I started making a list of all of the RPG and flavour elements that I had liked, more and more of which Blizzard systematically removed from the game with each expansion. I even witnessed the removal of some of it, as I was trying out some of the Cataclysm content with a free starter account at the time when the Mists of Pandaria expansion was released and forcibly applied to my installation. It is no exaggeration to say that the game in its current state is a very different game than the one I paid for in 2007.

I write today, a month after the shutdown of the private server Nostalrius, not to lament the loss of a functioning preservation of the game as it was in 2006, but to address an argument that I've seen parroted unchallenged in many places.

"People who played on Nostalrius weren't there because they preferred vanilla, but because it was free."

I don't understand how this claim continues to be repeated, when it doesn't stand up to even the most casual of scrutiny. There are many private servers maintained by fans, and they represent a wide range of preferences. Some focus on specific expansions, while others include the most current content. Some focus on PvP, and have little care for quests. By far, the majority of them feature accelerated leveling, accelerated gold and skill gains, and overpowered gear, and are intended as playgrounds (small wonder, considering faithful recreation of the quests and scripting takes a great deal of effort). A minority strive to be "Blizzlike", with quests, leveling, and content as close to the source as possible.

Nostalrius was a vanilla Blizzlike 1x server with no accelerated leveling and no special bonuses, made to resemble WoW as it was as closely as possible, and it existed in a sea of servers that support Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and yes, even Warlords of Draenor. If people were only playing on a private server because it was free, why did they specifically pick a vanilla server instead of the "latest and greatest" of the expansions?

Obviously, they weren't playing there because it was free. The reasonable conclusion is that they were playing there because they preferred vanilla.

Path of Exile

Earlier this year, I signed up for a weekend stress-test of the upcoming game Path of Exile, a hack & slash game in the tradition of games like Diablo and Torchlight. I played it for the full weekend, and enjoyed it. It has good gameplay, fun loot, a nice visual style, and an extremely large skill bush (the view that you see there is not the full image. Drag it around to see the rest of it). The quests had a good amount of flavour, as well. I played as the Witch.

I mention it because I just got an email that says they're having another free stress test this coming weekend, from the 14th to the 16th, so if you want to try it out, that would be a good time. I won't be participating in the second stress test, since I don't want to repeat the early content at this time, and I'm low on hard drive space, and also busy with my modding and other playing, but I thought others might like to know, if they weren't aware of it.

The Privation of WoW

Since the Starter Edition came out for World of Warcraft, being an unlimited free trial with a cap of level 20, I occasionally drop in and play the post-cataclysm low-level quest content that was all new to me, or try different races and classes.

I typed up all my experiences and impressions of that content, but never finished the article or uploaded it here. The basic summary is that they had stripped the gameplay and the leveling experience of at least half of its previous depth. Perhaps in the future I'll explain why I feel that way.

Now, with the new expansion Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard opened up the goblin and worgen playable races to the Starter Edition, enabling me to create a new character of each of those races and experience their unique 1-10 leveling zones.

In so doing, however, despite the new (to me) content to experience, I found that they've removed even more gameplay, depth, and immersion from the game.

At one time, you got to know your choice of class through interactions with your class trainer and class-specific quests, which provided a grounding in what it means to be whatever class you chose. New abilities were given as rewards for going through certain rituals or rites of passage, and class quests would send you out to assemble unique items perfectly suited to your class, which taught you what kind of gear you should be looking for in the future, though these class quest rewards were often so good, you'd be using them for the next 10 levels before you could find anything better.

In general, class quests were integrated into the questing experience at least all the way up to level 55 (pretty much the end of the vanilla game), when every class was funneled into the Sunken Temple for their class quests, so really, you could go through the entire game and experience new content all the way through just by picking a different class. They really made classes feel distinct and interesting, with plenty of backstory.

Cataclysm removed most of the class quests. What previously was a reward for a chain of interesting quests was turned into something you just pay to learn at a trainer. If you didn't play it before, you'll never experience the flavour that used to give it meaning.

They also removed most of the class-specific items. Warlocks don't really need soul shards anymore. Hunters don't need ammunition or pet food. Rogues don't need to brew their own poisons.

Okay, so that's all just a little summary of a couple of the small things that were changed in Cataclysm (instead of the long unfinished article on that and many other things), as a lead-up to what I've just experienced in the changes brought by Mists of Pandaria.

The biggest thing is that now, in MoP, they give you all your class abilities automatically, for free, with no training. Trainers are now nothing more than providers of basic information and respecs. The last tenuous connection to that old sense of involvement in the game world is now broken. I no longer feel like I'm a part of something, at all.

Moreover, what was previously a gold sink is now gone. What am I supposed to do with all this gold, now that I don't have to pay for talents or class-related materials?

Really, the only vestige of what class quests used to be is now only to be found in the repeatable quests for cooking and fishing. There are 5 randomly-assigned daily quests in each major city for each of those professions that send you off to do things related to that profession, with the quest text providing some feeling of being a cook or a fisher in that world, and giving quest rewards related to that profession. That's fun! And it's a shame the classes have had that sort of thing taken away from them.

Allods Online

I'm still playing Dragon Age when I get the chance, but in the meantime I've also been playing another MMO -- one that satisfies the craving for World of Warcraft that I sometimes get. It's been more than a year since I've played WoW, and I've missed it sometimes, but it's just too much of an investment of time and/or money, with that recurring monthly fee. Other than that, it's almost exactly what I want out of an MMO.

And that's why Allods Online scratches that itch. As far as the WoW-receptors in my brain are concerned, it is WoW. The gameplay, art design, and class types are virtually identical. It basically feels like a whole new expansion to WoW, with new lands, factions, and races with a Russian feel to them (since it's made by a Russian company). And, unlike WoW, there's no monthly fee to play. It also doesn't have WoW's huge addon/mod collection, but I see a few mods here on Curse Forge.

But first, a little about other games, for the sake of comparison. I've played a couple of other free-to-play games, which make their money through selling items in-game for real-world cash, like Free Realms (which I reviewed before) and Soul of the Ultimate Nation, and both seemed like perfectly good games in their own rights, but neither held my interest long enough to want to consider a real-world monetary investment in them. Both were visually attractive, but SUN suffered in its interface and insufficient in-game tutorial, and Free Realms was perhaps a little too watered down and kiddified, both in content and atmosphere. I had already complained about the ridiculous chat filter, but I never mentioned the root beer. There's a town where the half of the chug population that are lazy instead of militaristic have a perpetual Oktoberfest, where they brew and serve root beer. That's not the problem in itself, but that they apparently were so afraid that people might think it was actual alcoholic beer if it had any colour at all, they instead made it look like water. A frothy mug of water. And this isn't even some special other-world root beer, it's actual root beer made with sarsaparilla root, just like classic root beer, which is most assuredly not clear.

All this background about other games is to lead into my impression of Allods.

The game is well-made, colourful, full of quests and interesting landscapes and architecture, nice special effects, and a logical, easy-to-learn interface and combat/skill system (of course, if you're familiar with WoW, then there's not much you need to learn). Your character begins in a beginner's special instance, which acts as a tutorial before you're sent to the starter's area with other live players. You can turn off the tutorial messages, which is nice.

There are two warring factions, like WoW, with faction-only zones and some PvP contested zones, and the races are pretty distinctly different, though there seem to be only three races for each faction. Interestingly, though the Empire seems to be the evil faction, with their orcs and their Soviet/Nazi theme, the League isn't all sweetness and light either, because they have the elves, which resemble the WoW blood elves in appearance and sinister, opulent elegance. If you want to play as a warlock/necromancer on the League side, you play as an elf.

Minor downsides to free play

So far, it being a free-to-play game where you pay for special items or services hasn't yet intruded on my gameplay in the way that it did in Free Realms, where many quests, resource nodes, professions, and items were marked as "member-only", and free players can only advance so far in certain professions or questlines before hitting a members-only brick wall. They made a change a short time ago that made things even worse in my opinion, by allowing users to play all professions, but limiting them all to level 5 unless you become a member.

As far as I can tell, none of that occurs in Allods. All quests have been available for all to play, as of my highest level, (about 75% to max). From what I can tell, the pay items are a matter of convenience or special privilege, rather than things that are necessary to play the game, at least for a rather casual player like me, who doesn't plan to get into any hardcore raiding.

For instance, bag space is limited, and vendors don't sell bags, and tailors can't craft them. The only way to get a bigger bag without visiting the cash shop is through a grind-fest, collecting creature parts with very low random drop rates, from creatures in several zones. While doing this quest, the items will be stuck in your bag until you finish it, because you're not allowed to store them in the bank. This long, boring quest is meant to encourage you to spend a little money in the cash shop to simply buy a bag with real money. But people do complete the bag quest anyway, gaining a lot of XP and salable junk while doing so.

I have not seen any gear items in the cash shop. No weapons, no armour, nothing like that. Mainly just convenience items and consumables.

Level of mature content

The content in the English version has been very mild. The English forum run by the English-version licensed company states that forum content must be "PG-13", and it seems that the game content is about the same level. There is mild swearing, alcohol use, and Victoria's Secret style underwear. What irks me is that I think the content is being somewhat kiddified for the English-speaking audience, because there appears to be more adult-oriented content on the Russian version.

For instance, there is official artwork on the Russian site depicting a seated, rather disinterested-looking male elf with two naked female elves "servicing" him as he gazes off, lost in thought with a glass of wine in his hand. See also here for what looks like an alternate, earlier draft of the same image. Both of these images are used in part on the official web sites.

Secondly, there is a bath house quest, which I've read about, which seems like it would be entertaining and funny, but which appears to be completely excised from the English version. (This is not to be confused with the public sauna which is near the windmill outside Novograd.) The bath house is still in the game, but you can't go in, and the attendant standing in front gives you a blank dialogue box if you talk to him (usually, a message saying "interaction not available" will appear instead of a dialogue box, if they have nothing to say.) This was not even adult material, in my opinion, since even in the baths the characters would not be nude (unless you have the nude patch installed). Nevertheless, considering the average ages of the people I've seen chatting in-game and on the forum (30s, on average), and the age of the average gamer (35, I seem to recall), I see no reason why any adult content should be excised. Keep the kids out, I say, and let us grown-ups have our fun. The world should not be limited to what is suitable for children.

Spammers

One problem is spammers. I encountered spammers hawking their gold-farming web sites as soon as I was out of the tutorial instance, and it was so bad I couldn't see any legitimate chat until I figured out how to add them to my ignore list, so fast were they spamming their messages. WoW definitely has better chat handling features in this regard, where you can just right-click on anyone's name and either block them or report them for spamming. Here, you have to manually enter their names into your ignore list (easiest way at the moment is to click their names once, which starts a whisper message, then click it again, which copies the name into the chat box, where you can highlight it and copy/paste it into the ignore list.)

The nonsensical thing about these spammers, is that this is a game with a cash shop. If we wanted to spend real-world money on in-game items, why buy in-game gold from some irritating spammer when we can just buy items from the cash shop, and sell them in-game on the auction house? Many people do that to make quick gold in the game, in fact, so for those who don't want to visit the cash shop at all, you most likely will never have to.

We could also use some basic filter options, to let us players block any particular words or sequences we want.

Classes

I've tried three classes in this game: Healer, Summoner, and Psionicist. The healer is basically a cleric/priest, the summoner is a warlock, and the psionicist...well, I don't really know what to compare it with.

These classes, from my experience, differ somewhat from their WoW counterparts, but are very comfortable to play. Although there are paladins in the game, the mêlée-specced healer functions more like WoW's ret pally. Healers also get to wear leather at level 10, and plate at level 30. Plate! I've never seen a priest in plate before.

Summoners have the different demon pets, such as the tank and the support-type ones warlocks get in WoW, and they have the DoTs and curses you'd expect, and have a mechanic similar to the soul shard from WoW, which in this case are drops of blood harvested from enemies, which are used in various spells. The biggest difference with Allods' summoner is that it has healing spells. Some, like Plague of Mending, are very powerful group heals. I've heard some say that at the current patch, healing-specced summoners heal better than healers at high levels! I wouldn't know. I go for damage.

As in other games, certain classes are restricted to certain races. Since only gibberlings can be psionicists on the League side (the good guys), I ended up making a human psionicist on the Empire side. The most I can tell about this class is that they're intended mainly for crowd control. But for survivability, I find that the "mental twin" talent is the most useful. This allows you to project an illusion of yourself around your selected target, and the enemy will attack that illusion instead of you, allowing you to unleash damage on your target with impunity unless it destroys the illusion (the game treats the illusion as a "pet", with its own health bar, and it gets hurt more easily than you would).

Starting experience

There is a single, unified starting experience for each faction, which may be a disappointment if you were hoping for a unique starting area for each race, like in WoW. All League players begin in a tower where you won't encounter any other players, and then after the tutorial adventures, you progress to the first small starting island with other players, where you can get acquainted with quest hubs and group quests. Empire players start on board an astral ship, as a newbie recruit in the Empire's compulsory military service (note the short-skirted sailor suits that are Empire military standard uniform for girls). This is the only opportunity anyone gets to see the ship to ship combat and giant astral raid bosses that are a major part of the end-game content, until your guild manages to build a ship to sail the astral. After this, you make your way through petty internal politics and governmental red tape until you reach the first sewer areas where you meet other players, and do the sort of thing the League players do, just in different surroundings.

Both factions, at the end of this, end up in their respective capital cities, where you get access to the mail system, the bank, and the auction house, and get to pick up a profession to make money. It seems to me that the League starting area was much longer and more interesting, and the Empire boots you out into the capital much sooner. You also stay within the Empire capital much longer than you stay in the League capital zone, because the Empire city is a huge megalopolis, whereas the League capital is a modest kingdom, and most of the quests are out in the surrounding forest.

The Empire city aesthetic makes me think of 1940s or 1950s eastern European, with its apartments, cafeterias with refrigerators, wood-paneled auction house, and heavy industrial power plants with smokestacks. The League areas, on the other hand, have very much a fantasy aesthetic. I prefer the League by a long shot, but Empire is nice for a change of pace now and then, as long as I don't mind feeling like an oppressed citizen of a totalitarian state.

All in all, I highly recommend this game if you like WoW, and want to try a free alternative. You'll get a bonus if you like PvP, as there are no PvE servers, and the higher-level zones start turning on your PvP flag against your will. For me, that signals the time to play another game. Your mileage may vary, and you'll certainly enjoy the first 25 levels out of 40, if nothing else.

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A repeatable quest where you turn into a werewolf to hunt down sparkling "Twilight Vampires"... Hmm...

Some more random screenies

Free Realms

People often apologise for playing other games when they've been covering a particular game for a while, but I enjoy several other games that I play alternately along with Morrowind. However, I know for a fact that I'd better finish up Whispered Echoes before I get Diablo 3 or Dragon Age: Origins, or it'll likely never get done. (On that note, though, apparently I've been designing a Minoan megaron without even realising it. One of the boss chambers for Whispered Echoes takes place in a room that looks a lot like this kind of structure.)

Lately I've been taking a break from my usual games, and have been spending time in the bright, colourful, cartoony, fantasy/modern world of Free Realms. After WoW, I basically decided MMOs weren't good for me, as they tended to occupy all of my free time, but part of the reason for that was the fact that you get charged the same amount no matter how much you play, so a sense of getting the most for my money was behind some of my excessive playing time.

Free Realms doesn't have that problem for two reasons. Firstly, because it's free to play, and secondly because it's designed for short play times. No time sinks like WoW has, like slow running speeds, long flights, etc. So I don't have that irrational feeling that I need to maximise my playing time.

In Free Realms you can teleport anywhere instantly, without even having to have been there before. Also, since all combat is instanced, you don't have to deal with unwanted fights with world mobs when you're just trying to do some crafting or get somewhere. The mobs are there, but you choose whether to fight them or not.

The characters are very well-animated. Bethesda, take note. This is what character animation in a game should be like. People keep having to make animation replacers for games like Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3, so that should tell you something. Hire some decent animators, and make the characters as expressive and well-animated as the characters in Free Realms. Most of these screenshots are to show the appearance of the characters and the locations.

Crafting

I consider the crafting in Free Realms to be superior to the crafting in WoW in terms of the act of crafting itself. In WoW, you just pick the item to craft from a list, and see a progress bar, and it's done. In Free Realms, you actually get minigames in which you actively craft the item. Cooking takes you to a game that reminds me of Cooking Mama, where you pour broth, chop vegetables, pound and slice meat, stir a pot, and flip food in a pan before it burns. For smelting ore from mining, you crush the ore into little bits, stoke the fire with a bellows, and pour the molten metal into molds, being careful not to spill. As a postal carrier, you run around delivering mail by throwing letters into mailboxes, and throwing down doggy treats to ward off the dogs that knock you down. Each of these crafts also has a counterpart gathering minigame where you obtain the crafting materials, which are all variations on Bejeweled, such as the mining, mail sorting, and vegetable harvesting. I like Bejeweled.

There are also quests related to these professions, which is nice, though not enough to raise you to max level. You just need to practise your craft, between quests, which is all you do in WoW.

The interface could stand some improvements, though. In cooking, I couldn't find any list of what recipes I currently know, in my character profile or inventory. The only place I've found such a list is when I'm at a cooking table and it lets me choose which recipe I want to make. This is also the only place I can find to tell me which ingredients I need for a recipe, some of which are only buyable from vendors. This means unnecessary running back and forth between cooking table and vendors if I forget an ingredient or forget to buy enough of something. I shouldn't need to take notes outside of the game or look up the recipes on a wiki for something like that.

As there's no auction house in this game, it seems the crafting is more of an expense than profitable, as the foods sell to vendors for less than the cost of the ingredients that are necessary to buy. Something for personal use if you like the buffs or other effects, I think. There is a place on the official forum for players to hawk their wares to buy and sell in game, but I haven't checked to see if anyone's selling this stuff. Seems unlikely, since anyone can pick up these professions for themselves.

Fishing

At the time of this writing, fishing is not yet one of the available activities, but I've heard it's coming soon. I've also noticed a lot of conspicuous fishing equipment places around lakes (poles on docks, bobbers in the water), and numerous NPCs talking about fishing in Seaside. One girl says "I want to go fishing!" even though she hates fish and doesn't want to eat them. Elsewhere, a pixie girl laments her poor skills. "Know why I'm a sad fisherman? Because I can't catch any fish!" and ponders about what she might be doing wrong. Elsewhere, a couple of trolls (?) argue about fishing.

I hear it'll have another fun minigame like the other professions, so it's not just casting the line, waiting, and clicking on the bobber.

Chat

Here's the only major problem with Free Realms, in my opinion: The chat filter. It censors a ridiculous array of words that people use in everyday conversation, which are not in any way swearing. I couldn't refer to an in-game item (a can of silly string) because it censors the word "string". Other words I've seen it censor have included "another", and "people". I cannot fathom any possible reason for that.

It also censors normal English words that may also be used to refer to something else, and also inexcusably censors a series of characters in its filter even if they are in two separate words. For instance, I cannot type "I want to join the guild", because it comes out as "I want to ######he guild." Why? It censored "join t" in "join the" because it resembles "joint" (a word which, needless to say, has many perfectly innocent and legitimate uses). You can't even type the names of some quests or locations in the world because it censors parts of them. The censorship is so draconian I'm actually surprised when I can type a complete sentence that doesn't fall prey to the chat filter.

Sony, do you realise what the effect of this is? It makes it look like people are cursing all the time!! When confronted with censored words, people tend to mentally fill them in with whatever curse words seem to fit. Is that the effect you want to bring across? This is beyond ridiculous.

No, I take that back. There's something more ridiculous. They censor all numbers. Not just numerals like 1, 2, 3, etc., but also if the numbers are spelled out. Up to a billion, at least. You can't tell people what level you are. You can't tell people how much you're selling something for. You can't tell people how many you want for a group. You can't say what level an instance is. They even censored the Spanish and French words for numbers because people were using them in a desperate attempt to communicate through this severely crippled system.

I can hear you saying "Yes, some of this is excessive, but they need to censor it for the kiddies." Well, you see, they actually have separate settings for kids. These are the adult accounts. Kids' accounts can't access the chat at all. They cannot type, and they cannot even read what other people type. The only form of communication available to them is to select canned sentences from a list. And they can only read responses from people who also select sentences from this list. So I cannot see any good reason for censoring the chat to the extent they do, when it's not even visible to the kids' accounts anyway.

And woe to you if you are a kid and want to communicate. Others have commented on how pathetically short their list of canned sentences is, and how it's missing the most useful sentences for gameplay, such as "I want to trade for [item]", or "Please join me for [instance]", or, perhaps the most egregious omission: "I'm using canned chat and can't read anyone's typed responses." There's no special indication that someone's using canned chat (unless you just recognise the phrasing of the sentences), so other players are likely to type answers to them, but those answers cannot be read.

Overall impression

For anyone who wants a fun, casual game, one which you can play for long or short periods, with all sorts of different game types, Free Realms is great. There are so many completely different styles of game included in it, all in the same cartoon fantasy world, something to suit almost any mood. Standard quests, postal delivery, combat (imaginative, well-designed instances such as you might see in WoW), exploration, kart racing, cooking, foot races against time, collections, and even a collectable card game system that I haven't even touched yet. Also the mini-games such as the Bejeweled style games, and the several different varieties of "tower defense" games, and classics such as checkers and chess. There are several more types of games for paying members, such as soccer/football, but I'm not a paying member.

The chat issue is a relatively minor annoyance in the face of all the good things about this game. I recommend it for anyone except hardcore raider style of players.

Some more screenshots