Any RPG that bases its re-playability on loot is going to be compared to MMOG.  Considering that most of the endgame content in Borderlands is based around gathering loot, a common draw to stereotypical MMOG, the comparison only seems fair.  The enticement of gearing out your character and reaching the level cap – level 50 in Borderlands – isn’t its failure though, but its greatest success in claiming anMMOG label.  Rather it falters in other impersonations, including story, NPC interactions, and connectiveness.

Borderlands is a beautiful game, set in the colorful, and hard, world of Pandora, but the story is downright dreadful.  It isn’t poorly written, it’s, for all intents and purposes, simply non-existent.  That may be a bit hyperbolic of me, there is a story, but if I were to layout the story in a text document it’d likely only reach a few pages.  The story is in sad state, and ultimately a missed opportunity when one considers how well the extraneous dialogue – quest text, NPC and players barks – was delivered to players.

NPC interactions are encompassed in that extraneous dialogue, and each and every one of them was fantastic.  Through a combination of art, video directing and hilarious writing, each non-playable character was given its own place in Pandora, its own personality and reason for existing.  Some were bad guys, others good, while one is as blind as a bat that constantly jokes about his condition.  They nailed the delivery, but not the quantity; there is only a handful of NPCs, be they quest givers or boss mobs in the game.  A desolate world indeed.  Borderlands was light on the interactions for a standard RPG, let alone a title being compared to an MMOG.

Gearbox Software missed a perfect chance to create a strong Borderlands community.  The company started things off right, releasing an interactive spec page ahead of release, but failed to capitalize post-launch.  Outside of the forums – which are currently rife with bug complaints – there’s nothing to grow the community.  No loot database (yes, the loot is largely dynamic and random, but there are common factors and drops that could be tracked) or even a helpful manual to explain the intricate specializations to newbies.  Had the company chose to invest in growing and supporting a community Gearbox would recuperate those expenses, and then some, on DLC.

Let’s get one thing straight, Borderlands was never advertised by Gearbox Software as an MMOG.  The comparisons have all been made by gamers and writers, such as myself, who saw the common trends in game design merging in the FPS/RPG hybrid that is Borderlands.  Gearbox didn’t perfect this blend, but that doesn’t stop the title from being chock full of character and re-playability.  Oh, and fun as hell.

I’m a pretty big fan of sim games, especially the Sim City series, so I was pretty excited to get my hands on Cities XL.  Cities XL is a next generation city builder game that combines elements of MMO games by allowing you to interact with thousands of others city builders.  Monte Cristo, the developers behind Cities XL, have done something that Maxix (developers behind Sim City) hasn’t been able to do for over a decade, completely revitalize the city sim game.  Check out the Cities XL review below.

As with any MMO, the first thing you do in CitesXL is create a avatar.  This is mainly pointless as your avatar just sits in a little window at the top of your screen watching you as you build your city.  You can take you avatar on a stroll through your city or other players cities, but again it’s very pointless.

Next we are taken to Planet mode, this is where we can select our location to build our city.  Each location on the map has certain resources such as fuel, water, food and holidays.  Holidays just means your cities resource will be tourism.  Most cities give you two or three resources and you have to decide what you want.

Cities XL City Building

Now we can finally get to actually building our city.  The game is a bit complicated and works off a different system than the SimCity series did, so I would definitely recommend taking the tutorials.  Cities XL works off a class based system, you have unqualified, qualified, executive and elite residence.  Unqualified workers require much less city services such as education, health, police, etc.   While elite residence require the best of everything which can make your city budget explode.

The class system is the biggest change that Cities XL brings to the genre as well as the best.  I always found in SimCity once you got over the initial hump of starting your city, the game became extremely easy.  With CitiesXL as you grow your city the game actually becomes harder making you really have to watch your budget.

Cities XL also provides mega structures that you can add to your city like the Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and other famous structures as well as a blueprint feature where players can create there own mega structures.

Cities XL Trading

Another change is the trading system.  There are about a dozen or so resources you can produce in your city and it needs all of them to be successful.  However it is not possible for a city to actually produce all its resources so you will be forced to trade.

If you are playing solo there is a default corporation you can trade with, however you will not be able to bargain with them as you would with other players in online mode.

While innovative this is where my biggest grip with Cities XL is.

The way trading works is you don’t buy X amount of resources, you create a contract with a player that basically states I pay you $X each month and you give me X amount of resources.  While this doesn’t sound like it’s a big deal, it is.  City resources and budgets are constantly fluctuating which causes contracts to constantly break.

A month in the game is a few mins, so 5 mins from now I might not have the money to keep my contract going.   Contract breaks are not always your fault either.  The other person might not have the resource or money to pay you, so it will break because of them.  As you start getting further in the game you will constantly have the trading window open, which makes the game frustrating.

I would much rather work off a unit system where I buy 500 units of fuel, then once I start to run out I can buy more.  Not as realistic, but much less of a hassle.

Cities XL vs SimCity

Aside from the class system and trading, what separates Cities XL from the SimCity series is that you can build your city in any manner you like.  You don’t have to have industry, office building or huge highways if you don’t want to.  You can create ski or beach resorts, instead of a city, create farm land and provide food to other players.   Become a industrial power house and provide that to other players.  There’s more than one way to create a city with Cities XL which also provides more replay value.

Cities XL Subscription

While you can play the game offline, trading is an important aspect that adds another level to the game, plus it’s just fun to compete with other players.  However the current $9.25/month price is just not worth it in my opinion.  Even at the 3 month price of $6.32 it’s still too high.

Aside from trading and viewing other peoples cities there’s really no reason to pay a subscription fee.  I have yet to chat with anyone in game and most of the time I feel like I am playing a solo game anyway.  The price seems way to high just to be able to trade resources with other players.  I would consider $2/month, but it really should be free.

Overall the game is great, if you were a fan of SimCity your going to love Cities XL.  If you’re not keen on paying a monthly fee you’ll still have a blast playing in solo mode.  Hell you never know, with the recent switch of some MMOs to the F2P model, I wouldn’t be surprised seeing Cities XL as a F2P game sometime in the future.

Aion’s Issues

This will probably be my last write up regarding Aion.  If you have been following my previous articles, I have detailed my play experience with the game by focusing on the 1-10 experience, 10-25 early Abyss, and the 25 and beyond.  This will be my last word on Aion for the time being because some of the game’s issues have forced most of my guild to step back from the game.

Now I am not one to make “I quit” posts typically, but all thing considered, I believe my assessment of the game in previous articles has be pretty fair and objective.  So what I would like to do here today is talk about some of the aspects of Aion that ultimately ended up turning us sour in a constructive and informative way.

The Grind

It seems you can’t read anywhere about Aion without reading about the grind, and this blog has been no exception to that.  That being said, it has to be mentioned because this is probably the first of several pitfalls that is going to be cause people to throw in the towel.

This is a graph that fairly accurately plots the experience points curve in Aion at each level that was made by a member of the community here.  As you can see by the graph, right around level 35 the amount of exp needed literally makes the graph look literally like a wall.  Often times when you read on various forums about people saying the grind is fine, make sure you put it into the context of what level they have made it to. Now to be fair, the amount of exp needed by itself is not necessarily the problem as you start to enter your 40′s, but the way in which questing starts to play far less of a role.

When I hit level 42, I quickly completed all of the new quests and looked down at my 60 million exp bar to see only about 10-15% of it had been filled, leaving the remaining 50 million to be obtained by pure mob grind.  Now I am well aware of an upcoming patch slated to increase the quest exp and mob exp, but I think the problem goes a bit deeper than that.  There is a real lack of quest content that becomes painfully obvious at the higher levels.  Quest content is very good at masking grind in other games, so the lack of it in Aion at this level range really only adds to the pain and tedium.

The best comparison I can make is for those who played Age of Conan at release and hit the wall around level 50 where the quest content dried up almost instantly forcing people into grinding cannibal caves for levels to get through the gap.  This problem only gets compounded more however as the exp needed to level continues to grow exponentially, but the amount of content does not.  This only helps feed the bot epidemic and will undoubted crush the will of non-hardcore players as they reach the higher levels.

One final note on the grind that really bothers me is that Aion seems to punish grouping.  As a ranger, I found in most cases I was able to solo grind far more efficiently than in a group killing elites a few levels higher than me.  I would highly recommend adjusting the experience modifier for grouping to make it more appealing to group.  So with all the above factored in, players struggling with the progression in the game are going to start to ask if it’s worth enduring for the sake of PvP.  Let’s take a look…

PvP

I like to break the PvP elements in Aion into pretty much 3 different categories.  First you have your rift PvP into enemy territory, then the fortress fights, and finally your small scale encounters that occur in the Abyss.

1) Rift PvP

A week or so ago, my guild got a group together to through a rift into the Asmodian level 30+ area to go cause some trouble.  I think it was a real telling moment to me personally when it became glaringly clear that at least half of the people we were killing in this zone were bots.  When attacked, bots would simply stand there or continue to attack their mob, and when killed they would run the same exact route back to the same spot literally upwards of 10 times.  Each time they would take the same exact route, to the same exact spot, and not even stopping or deviating when getting attacked.  Granted killing the bots was a good source of Abyss points, but the fun of the PvP leaves something to be desired when a PvE mob offers more resistance.  Again in all fairness, there were probably 50% real people mixed in who had guilds, who would react to being attacked, and change tactics after being killed or spotting us.

In this regard, I really have to say that NCSoft’s bot detection team or tools, or whatever they are spinning as is either completely worthless, or they think their customers are stupid.  Who the hell is in charge of the bot spotting team, Stevie Wonder?  Anyone with a working pair of eyes can see dozens of bots infesting the level 30+ area on both sides.  They are so blatantly operating out in the open that there is no way possible anyone could NOT see them.  Frankly when I read NCSoft press releases about how they have tools in place, it’s insulting to my intelligence.

2) Fortress Battles

I think most people can agree that the fortress fights make up one of the key elements of the PvP aspect of Aion.  In my last article, I touched on the fact that crashing seemed to be somewhat of an issue during some of the sieges.  Since then, I have had the chance to participate in many more sieges to see how much of an issue the crashing really is.  I can say with all honesty in almost every siege I have been in since then, the game crashed at some point during the sieges, except for one where the Asmos never showed up to defend and I had all of the character models turned off (Shift + F12).

This is a major problem for me on so many levels.  First of all my PC is pretty serious, and judging by all the posts on forums and conversations with most of my guild, people having this issue are a pretty sizable portion of the playerbase.  This is pretty much game-breaking because the fortress battles are the only way to get medals, and medals are needed to get the top PvP reward gear, so crashing during sieges pretty much makes is close to impossible for you to get the medals needed to pursue the endgame gear.  With the game being out so long overseas, and 4-5 rounds of betas in NA, I am somewhat confused how the game went live without anyone knowing about this being picked up, let alone not being hotfixed.  It’s even sillier when someone in the community posts a fix on the forums before your professional coders can do it.

Another issue is a flaw in the overall fortress system in general that also Warhammer Online suffered from, a lack of incentive to defend a fortress.  Medals are not given for a successful defense, and enemy fortress guards are actually a better source of Abyss points than most other mobs and players.  Killing a handful of guards seems to net more AP than running the instance you get access to for holding the fort.  So when you think about it, you are somewhat better off not defending because you will be granted a better source of AP, and a chance to earn medals when you go after it again later (assuming you don’t crash).

3) Small Scale PvP

Small scale PvP overall remains one of the game stronger suits to me personally.  The only zerging that really goes from what I have seen so far is during the fortress fights, which is completely understandable.  The rest of the time people tend to roam around solo or in small groups making for some pretty fun encounters.  A smaller group of players who play smart is capable of beating a larger group if the right tactics are used along with the right crowd control.

I think if there is anything I would change, I would make other players worth more experience points.  Although it wasn’t in the game originally, the amount of exp given for killing a player is so small that they pretty much may as well not give you any at all.  One other aspect is the fact that low level players give virtually no AP, but at the same time your enemy’s level is hidden.  This can be annoying when you opt to chase someone for quite a long distance only to be rewarded with 1 AP.  Had you known the person’s level you may have been inclined to not even bother chasing them extensively.  I also understand the benefit though of hiding levels, so it’s a double-edged sword I suppose.

Summary

The way I see it is that players will need to start asking themselves this question: Is worth enduring a steep and tedious grind that becomes exceedingly light in content for PvP that has 2 of out 3 aspects not meeting expectations?

The prospect of increasing exp sounds good in theory, but there is no mention of any much needed quest content.  NCsoft’s word is becoming losing a tremendous amount of value to players due to their inability to find the bots that every player with a pair of working eyes can see on a daily basis.  I can understand that many players may be willing to hang in there a bit longer given the game’s polish and small scale PvP, but at this point I have to say the answer to that question is “no” from me personally, but to each their own.

Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com