narchy Online is the first of the third-generation massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs)--the successors to Ultima Online and EverQuest--to launch. Over the rest of this year and next, nearly a dozen more of these games are on the way, including Lucas Arts' Star Wars MMORPG, but AO beat them all out the gate.
Unlike its second-generation predecessors, AO is not played in a faux medieval setting. It is played in a faux science fiction one. The setting is the planet Kubi-Ka, where a civil war is underway between Omni-Tek (the corporation that brought the colonists to the planet in the first place) and the rebel clans. Players choose from four races, a dozen character classes, three body heights, three body weights and hundreds of faces, before deciding whether to pick a side in the war or start out neutral, a decision which determines what city they start the game in.
Once they have managed to log on, make a character, and picked a starting city, players start out in that city's newbie zone. This is a place with an indoors and an outdoors, both of which are filled with various critters weak enough to be killed by the character's starting equipment using the character's starting skills. There are dozens of skills and statistics that define the player's character in AO, and the characters start with 1400 improvement points to spend on them. Since skills can be raised only four times per level, improvement points tend to be left over, a nice change from games where players have to scratch and claw for every advance to their characters.
Beyond the newbie pens are cities and the rest of the Rubie-Ka world. There are subways to take characters from city to city. There are bars where character can meet to form teams and get missions. There are clothes to buy and apartments to furnish. In short, there is a whole wide virtual world containing hundreds of other players to game with, but no matter the character's class, how well a character succeeds in that world comes down to how well they can kill.
All bug hunting, all the time
Playing AO is not just a matter of buying the game and having the hardware listed on the box. The game is played online, over the Internet, and so play cannot start until the player is logged on to one of AO's servers. The first sign that this game was launched too soon is that after installing from the CD, players must then download and install a 70 MB patch file to take the program from version 11 to version 12. When the program is finally launched, many players (including me) try to log on and are informed that their CD key is already in use. This is a problem that can be fixed only by the Funcom tech support, tech support that can be reached only by e-mail and whose response time is measured in days. This error doesn't happen to everyone, but that it happens at all is the second sign of a game brought out too soon.
Although AO is billed as science fiction, and although the character classes include bureaucrats, fixers and doctors, the business of the game is killing. Guns replace swords and nanotech replaces magic while mutants and robots replace orcs and trolls, but the routine is the same in AO as it is in the previous MMORPGs: kill things, get money and experience, get better stuff and higher abilities, kill more dangerous things, get more money and more experience, and so on.
Players who start the game with first-level doctors as characters are not sent somewhere to practice curing sick people. They, and all the other new characters of whatever class, are locked in the newbie zone until they can kill enough things and loot enough bodies to be fourth level and have 1,000 credits in the bank. They can't kill each other, and the fourth-level and 1,000-credits requirements for getting into the rest of the city is to protect them from other, more experienced players and their characters. This is actually an improvement on the beginning conditions for newbies in other MMORPGs, but it is neither groundbreaking gameplay nor particularly fun.
There is a beautiful introductory movie rendered in Blink video which sets the tone for all the intricate, impressive graphics that are to follow. AO is easily the best-looking MMORPG ever released, but the cost of those graphics is that the game is barely playable at the minimum system requirements. The faster the player's computer and the better their 3-D card, the more they will enjoy AO.
If you are the sort of person who doesn't mind enduring technical glitches for the chance to get in on the ground floor of something that could become an institution, then AO is for you. If, however, you like a game that runs smoothly out of the box, or if you prefer an experience that will be more than combat, then I would wait six months or so before trying Anarchy Online to let the world get established and to let the bugs be ironed out.
-- Eric
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