Great Games for Roleplayers

Or, to rephrase the title: l33t-speakers need not appy.

Well, it's Tuesday, and the Gamer thought he'd run down a bunch of games and hit the highlights of why these games are worth your time, effort, and subscription fee. Might through in a few that aren't, and why.

The Worthies:
1) Asheron's Call 1. There's so much that AC1, which was released in 1999, does that the so-called "modern" games don't do or even try to do. Combat in modern MMORPGs is basically click on target to attack, click buttons that have specific abilities tied to them, repeat, wash, rinse... Combat in Asheron's Call 1 was a specific and constantly involving thing. Do you want your shield to count as blocking? You, the player, will have to constantly maneuver yourself so the shield stays between you and your opponents. Fighting? Walk up and attack, but keep maneuvering yourself to keep the shield up, and you have to choose whether to hit high, low, or medium-height and how much power to put into the swing. These are important factors, since some creatures are weaker in the leg than the stomach, etc; and how much force you use translates into how much damage you do and how often you can attack. This a system that requires the player to be involved in the combat and to think while actually fighting -- unlike the others, where it's just stand still and bash buttons over and over again.
Further, AC1 out of the box has full seasonal models, not just random weather effects (and many, like WoW, don't even have any weather effects at all). Seasons change, the weather changes with it. Snow piles up, making travel harder; rains fall, causing floods. A believable environment.
Quests? The raw tonnage is breathtaking. The one AC1 website has maps and info for over 686 dungeons -- and that's just dungeons! Further, the monthly events of AC1 are dynamic -- villages burn and are rebuilt over time; NPCs die; quests disappear and are replaced by others. The world actually CHANGES.
There's far more to it than just those things, too. Scavenging -- collecting scraps and loot to break down into the basic material components, then compile those scraps and apply them to items in order to improve or reinforce them. No zoning, except into specific dungeons -- the outer world is one vast place, and "vast" is the key. Exploration is ample, environments change and blend into one another (as they should to be realistic in feel and appearance). The different cultures are fully realised, even visually -- architecture varies by what culture's town you're in, for instance.

2) Dark Ages of Camelot (DAOC). Summation: weather, awesomely realised, complete with drifting fog; vast worlds (three realms that correlate to Norse, Celtic, and Avalonian (camelot) myths) for exploration, all fully realised for your fun and enjoyment; architecture, class types, and races are all realm-specific and appropriate to the myth behind the realms. Combat is not as specifically involving as AC1, but it works; there are skills that work in and out of combat. DAOC brings something that AC1 doesn't, and that's the ability to craft spells and items and to customize those creations. Most modern MMORPGs are an utter failure when it comes to crafting, because you can't customize your creations and wind up making the exact same item that's been made 80 trillion times by everyone else. In DAOC, you can custom everything down to the raw coloration of your creation, and even apply dyes to color items you didn't build but bought instead. Quests are ample, as are "tasks" -- in most MMORPGs, there are quests, and the bulk of those are "kill" quests, since creating quests that just have you go kill a number of creatures is the easiest to do. DAOC separates "kill" missions from other quests and calls them "tasks" -- which also means that the Quests you can get are more involved and involving, deeper, and while they may incorporate fighting, it's all in the pursuit of the larger quest. This is a distinction that none of the others make, and it lets DAOC's devs build a wealth of detail into the quests while throwing out "tasks" in abundance to keep folks busy. It's a great system. They also update the graphics regularly, and not just in a minor way. The latest graphics update to the system was huge and revamped almost every aspect of the graphics and made them very much competitive in the modern world of MMORPGs (and frankly look a LOT better than the glazed anime look of WoW). And the biggest and most unique thing of DAOC is its Realm-versus-Realm combat -- the realms connect in geographic areas. These areas are where the Realms are at war, where the players fight one another in mass combat. The RvR is fantastic and interactive: you can take a keep and defend it and use the environment and pots of boiling oil and so forth to do so. It's highly interactive and amazingly fun and provides new skills and rewards for participating in the "defense of your realm". Many have attempted to copy the formula, notably WoW, but none, especially WoW, have suceeded.

3) Horizons. Now, this is a big *. The questing side, the content side, is haphazard and weakly put together for all but one racial type of character. If you play a Dragon, there's a great game here, but if you play a non-Dragon (humanoid) race, it's weak. Despite that, Horizons has something done flawlessly: crafting. The crafting offers an amazing breadth of possibilities, all done so in a neat interface that makes the actions of crafting easily done. And that's the perfect mix: a deep crafting system mated to a simple system for doing it, resulting in an enormous range of things for players to do (build equipment, create foodstuffs, etc). There are a wide variety of ways to customize each and every construction, from using colored materials and dye to achieve specific "looks" to using special "techniques" to infuse your creation with special characteristics you choose. The results are vast and totally customized -- and therefore you aren't locked into the "build what everyone else builds" like you are in WoW and Everquest2. But Horizons goes further: each player can build his own house, or help others build theirs, and the process and result of that building is fully realised in the world. You can build bridges and other constructions that remain in the world (unless someone destroys them). And Horizons integrated that construction capability into their questing. A for-instance: one quest led to a great chasm that separated the known lands from an unknown land. Crossing that chasm required players to work together to build the bridge, but also to defend the players doing the building. Once it was built, the new land was opened -- but that led to the "release" onto the known areas of the races that were cooped up in those other lands! A terrific use of player abilities, which resulted in an array of consequences -- a very dynamic structure for questing, for player involvement. The game lacks overall in the intelligence of its questing design (it's very, very hard to figure out what you're supposed to do at any given time or how to find a path to follow, because the peoples of the world aren't very helpful and the quests they do give, if they do, aren't always phrased in a way as to be intelligible or followable.). But crafting and player involvement around crafting is flawless and should be the example to others.

Next time, more games that are worth a look, and a short summary of others that aren't.