How The Game Is Played

Episode 1: A new hope

Well,

Another day another blog page.

Some of you may know that I had a previous blog on www.javagaming.org. Issues with the cumbersome process that it took to both write and then get the blogs actually posted led me to abandon that log. (In fact, there are 2 posts you will likely never see even though I wrote them.)

I am going to attempt to start over here on The Street. My goals for this blog are to be semi-regular and cover 3 topics: my own engineering work in the game technology group, my personal game interests and involvements, and just general opinions on the state of software engineering.

Having said that, on to post 1:

My new obsession: Matrix Online

Matrix Online launched this weekend. I predict a run this week on 512mb memory DIMMs as it is unplayable with anything less then 1 gig of memory.

Once you have a gig of memory and a reasonably recent graphics card, it plays pretty well. There are some lag annoyances but not too bad so far. Here is my pluses and minuses:

Pluses:

The game does an admirable job of getting you into the "feel" of The Matrix. The three-way cold-war (Zion/Machines?Exiles) is a classic political triangle that has a lot of play potential. As you hose a side and ingratiate yourself to them more and Oreo of the real cold-war struggle becomes apparent.

The combat system is interesting. It is much more like playing a pen and paper game, and then seeing the results of your moves animated then it is like a traditional computer game. I personally like this as it lends the game a depth of strategy and thinking thats unusual and to me quite welcome.

The character development system is also interesting and unusual. It combines crafting with skill development in a nicely integrated fashion and allows you to freely experiment with many different approaches to your character's "build." (An OLRPG term that refers to your skill choices.)

All in all the game design in my book is a strong plus.

Minuses:

By the tail end of this weekend we started to see some lag issues and partial back-end failure issues. Whether or not their server design will long term hold up to the real world loads is an open question.

One typical lag effect is that your help robots (called "pets"

by OLRPG players) get stupid and refuse to engage the enemy in combat. This generally spells death for any character type who depends on their ability to create such helpers (as mine does.)

The world is still very bug laden. Most of these are content bugs (missing NPCs, doors that should open but don't, etc.) These content bugs mean you can get 3/4 of the way through a mission only to find it cannot be completed and must be aborted. This is very frustrating and will run many players away if not fixed.

The way the mission system works is a bit unusual, being half way between a "static" mission system like most of the older OLRPGs and the "spawned missions" becoming popular in newer ones.

Static missions are placed in the world in a given spot or spots and are always there. "Take a letter from the guard captain to the chief in the tower" is a typical example.

Dynamic missions have play-spaces that are duplicated once for each group running the mission and generally only exist as long as that group is working on that mission. All the "indoor" missions in City

of Heroes for instance are spawned missions.

Matrix Online has static mission spaces but they are generic. Into them get spawned the NPCs and items for a specific run of a mission for a specific group of players. The spaces contain "hooks" for the placement of those mission resources.

Unfortunately, when a play space is broken, things don't get placed right (such as missing NPCs) or behind doors that can't be opened. Because the location, and even the specific NPCs involved, are randomized with each spawn this makes it very very hard to report bugs on as each attempt to do the mission is semi-random and non-repeatable. It will be interesting to see how they handle getting these mission space bugs fixed moving forward.

Word to the wise: Avoid the city area known as "Zia" right now as its mission spaces seem particularly screwed up.

The deep character and combat systems are also a minus. IMHO this is not a game thats likely to appeal to the mass market. It takes too much learning and too much thinking. I expect it to be a niche success but not a blockbuster. .A wise man once said, “No one has ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the average American.”

Odd Facts and Observations Department:

At the last minute Monolith and Warner decided to sign a hosting and administration contract with IBM. It will be interesting to see how well that relationship works as IBM has no experience that I know of with consumer services of any kind, let alone online games.

All in all Martix Online is an interesting, if flawed game and something new in a number of ways in the OLRPG space. How it does in the market only time will tell.

Posted at 05:50PM Mar 21, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[1]