Anarchy Online - Shadowlands Toured

Thanks to GameSpy for their in-character guide tour of Anarchy Online:Shadowlands, the newest expansion pack for Funcom's PC cyberpunk MMORPG. The article references the game's botched launch back in 2001: "The very name brings up images of anarchy when one remembers the disastrous first effort at colonizing the planet. Basic services didn't work, colonists disappeared, weapons and equipment suffered from mysterious breakdowns, and there was fear that the entire notum project would have to be abandoned." But it goes on to suggest that: "Even now Omni-Tek Corporation has difficulty recruiting colonists. That's unfortunate, though, because the corporation has long since stabilized the situation." Can/should MMORPGs be given a second chance after a bad launch?

I didnt care for Anarhy Online...

[LordYUK]

I tried (for the 3rd and final time) last weekend to play AO, as one of my friends wanted to try the 7 day demo...

so I downloaded it (again), and proceeded to sign on.

I was a Soldier, and I (think I did anyway) assigned my skill points so that I could use the super cannon of a rifle I was given (it actually just LOOKED impressive), yet I still couldnt kill anything. I couldnt kill Leets (rat like things), I couldnt kill Eleets (they looked the same, maybe stronger?), rotting corpses (nope, they kicked my ass too), and there was another thing, looked like a pissed off gopher, it kept hostiling me.

All in all, it was complete anarchy. And it was online... I guess it lived up to its name.

I give it a 2/5, the character creation was better than it was the last time I tried it, obviously they are trying to make it better... but in the end, it was a waste of three hours of my life...

Re:I didnt care for Anarhy Online...

[Fred IV]

Hey, let's not start requiring people to read the instructions. Obviously the leet should have dropped dead from force of will alone. :P

Re:I didnt care for Anarhy Online...

[Crockerboy]

Dude, You could disarm your rifle and smack a leet to death. But I guess not reading the instructions and spending three hours stumbling around a game makes you more than qualified to review a game these days.

sure give em a second chance

[7-Vodka]

Give them a second chance if the game actually becomes good. why would you care if a game used to be crap if it's great now?
Sometimes it's even good to be there in the buggy beginning. I remember I started playing ultima online a week after release and it was the buggiest game ever, with exploits mistakes and rough edges all over the place. As it turns out, these led to hillarity and fun beyond anything the game has become after it was 'fixed'. It was absolute chaos, and that made it an incredibly good game to play.

Oh, but don't give it a second chance if the game sucks. *cough* Asherons call 2 *cough*

Dept. of redundancy dept.?

[mhesseltine]

Anarchy Online? Isn't everything online basically Anarchy? Especially with MSBlast, Melissa, Code Red, Sircam, skript kiddez running around, etc.

If that doesn't define anarchy, I challenge you to tell me what does.

the golden rule

[jimius]

The golden rule of developing MMOG's.
You _will_ have startup problems.

The only way to counter it is to be prepared by not sending off the entire project team to a new project, the game ain't finished until it works properly.

Re:the golden rule

[madaxe42]

The game ain't finished until it's over. The devel cycle for most mmorpgs is the lifetime of the game, from the moment devel starts until the final server shuts down.

Underdog

[August_zero]

This is a really underated MMORPG, and while it had its share, and the share that should have gone to about a half dozen other games worth of problems it really is a pretty decent game.

You have a huge world, lots of different classes to choose from with very different abilities (build robots, pilot vehicles, use a matrixesque alternate world) Lots of randomly generated dungeons that you have to yourself or your party alone rather than having to share it with 400 other people crowding in to it, and relatively steady character advancement (that is, the treadmill moves along a little faster than most games)

That bad launch is still haunting them though; When I started playing it about a year ago during a free demo, and actually found it pretty good, my apporval for it was meet by laughter and disbelief by my other MMORPG playing friends.

Of course they can.

[analog_line]

"Should" is a religious opinion. If you're that pissed at them, I guess maybe you shouldn't. If you think it might have gotten better, maybe you should.

I gave AO a shot well after the debacle. and I was perfectly happy with it. However, there's just only so much time and money I have monthly to devote to MMORPGs. Can't play them all.

Yes. They do;

[Anonymous Coward]

AO is actually the only MMO I have fun in. There are so many options and classes to play. Its great fun.

Granted there are still things that are broken since day 1, but nothing that the players havent learned to live with.

Meta Pysicist comes to mind. They have 3 pets they can have. Problem is, 1 of them doesnt really work and actually can do more harm to you. But all MP's have learned to live with just 2 pets..which believe me is enough.

Gave it a try

[jafuser]

I gave AO a try a few months ago. I got to about level 20 before I gave up due to boredom and a very poor socialization system.

The people who played AO were the lease conversive group I've ever encountered. I could get no questions answered by anyone, and if you weren't already part of some clique, people just ignore you. The only people I talked to in the few weeks I played were other newbies, who were just as lost as I was.

The only thing I found to do in the game was endless missions. I think the mission system was kind of cool, but it got boring fast and I had no guidance to tell me what else the game offered.

I also enjoy crafting in most of the MMO games i've played and I could not for the life of me find anything resembling a resource gathering + crafting system in AO.

My conclusion based on a couple weeks of play is that AO is an MMO game where people powerlevel by doing missions until they reach the top and then they just PvP all day.

Being an Explorer-Achiever-Socializer type player does not fit well with AO. However a Bartle Killer-Achiever-Explorer types will probably find it to be a great game.

I still think Earth & Beyond has the most wasted potential. I haven't played it as much as SWG in the past few months, but I keep going back to see how it's progressing.

Re:Gave it a try

[Fred IV]

It's unfortunate that you didn't try going to AO's official forum [anarchy-online.com] as there are number of helpful players there who would have answered your questions and given you some guidance about game areas that would have worked with your preferred style of play.

There is a crafting system in place, again you would have found helpful players in the forums who would have helped explain the basics to you. Certain classes are better suited to this path than others, others curious should check out the Engineer Class Bo [anarchy-online.com]

Maybe they had a bad launch...

[inkless1]

But I bet their tech/customer support is 100 times better than Sony's. I'd give (insert any name other than Sony) a second chance before I pick another SOE product off the shelf.

Re:Maybe they had a bad launch...

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

You would win that bet. They do have the single best in-game support team of any game I've experienced. They have player volunteers who teleport to your location (in game) some time shortly after you create your character and enter the world and offer to answer any questions you may have. Now *that* is customer service.

So their launch probs are now storyline?

[Tofino]

That amuses me way more than it should, probably because it shows a remarkable load of cajones. I guess the departure of Ken Karl from Turbine (AC, AC2) will now be made storyline. "Birds sang in the trees, the tides calmed, and the sun shone just a little brightly, as a great evil left the world. But at what cost? Well, about 60k and some stock options."

Acceptable? Not nowadays

[Lord_Dweomer]

I beta'd AO. It was a blast...aside from never being able to do anything because of the lag. Hell, I was racing between buildings in my flying car on the last day of beta when they pimped everybody out. However, the launch was unacceptable. As is the current trend these days...you release a very buggy game, and then patch the hell out of it....or wait a while, and try to sell and "expansion" that fixes the bugs....getting people to pay more for your mistakes.

Back when EQ was first starting, it was acceptable. People would tolerate a few bugs on launch. Now though, with a new MMORPG coming out practically every week, the bar is getting higher and higher for how stable your launch is. There are too many MMORPGs out there for people to care about all the problems the game has. They'll just find a new one that IS going to have a good launch. And I haven't even addressed the issue of releasing without much content and planning to add it in with a later expansion *cough*Starwars:Galaxies*cough*.

Re:Acceptable? Not nowadays

[critter_hunter]

I was on the open beta as well, and it's a wonder you could do anything on the last day. Everybody I know who was in the beta had to sit around in the newbie area with their freshly given 70th level characters because all the other areas crashed.

I bought the game on the first day, but I didn't have my credit card yet (I turned 18 the week the game was released, IIRC) and it saved my ass. Horror stories started spreading on the net and when I eventually got my credit card I waited till word that the game wa

I played AO for roughly one year...

[cnelzie]

I did my best to see through the rouhg edges and bugs... I spent more time there then I care to recall...

Grouping was extremely optional to the point that with my availability to play, I couldn't make enough long-term friends that would be relatively similar to myself in terms of power level...

So, I played a MMORPG that seemed like a Single Player Game...

I was an Engineer and found the crafting system severely lacking. The disparity between character levels became simply mindbogglingly nu

oh for a mmorpg that does not sucketh

[Flunitrazepam]

I remember growing up playing nintendo and venturing online for the first time using Q-Link on a c64. It seemed so obvious that the future of gaming would be a mix of the addictive gameplay of the nintendo and the social possibilities of playing with people all over the world.

Now, 15 years later, there still is no game like I was imagining, where the world is dynamic and populated by all real people who want the same thing as you. To have a fun game experience. I have tried all the popular ones, and got

No

[btm109]

I've very recently gone back and tried several games I gave up on in disgust before. They were Anarchy Online (and shadowlands beta), Asheron's Call 2 and Neocron. Without exception they were all still bad for many of the same reasons I left them the first time. Overall there were fewer bugs but I was shocked at how many ugly game stopping bugs I remembered from previous experience were still present and how little had changed in the games to make them any more fun than they were the first time. I think

They're not going to play AO anyway...

[krinsh]

when they're busy playing music or trying to 'become Jedi' in SW Galaxies. I'd like to see a chart of the massive drop in other MMORPG subscriptions when that particular game came out. [I've quit playing DAoC and Earth and Beyond - I was considering going back to EnB once they went to war in the storyline - but I won their screenshot contest BACK IN MAY and despite getting two emails asking for my address and fax number to sign a release; I have not gotten my prize - so I'm not going to waste money on a game with that kind of 'community support'.]

How about a delayed first chance?

[Doctor Cat]

I started doing this back in the days of MS-DOS, when nobody was using Windows yet. Some of the other people at Origin upgraded to DOS 4.0 as soon as it came out. I waited until I'd heard from various people at work and elsewhere that the bugs had all been fixed, and I got DOS 4.21 (if I remember right.)

Being an "early adopter" when it comes to software just means extra expense, and extra bugs. I started buying games a year or two late just to pick them up on the bargain racks for $5-$20. But these day