A Thirst-Quenching MMORPG

By Tim Eisen on March 22, 2017 | Columns | 0

It’s that time of the year again. Flowers bloom, animals get twitterpated (no relation to the Twitter) and I miss MMORPGs. It was during the rainy spring months that I first fell in love with MMO’s. Every year around this time I long for one to call home, then lament not finding it. The curse of a MMORPG vagabond I suppose.

Speaking of spring, every new Camelot Unchained update is saturated with an array of art both concept and in game. The world keeps filling in with fauna and flora, armor keeps improving and quantifying while the concepts have moved from the basics onto siege equipment. CU is ever so slowly resembling a game.

Manual aiming continues to iterate on its way toward hitting the target. As I recently learned from a MOBA I tried to play; I’m old. Manual aiming is a young man’s sport. So, what did I do? I adapted like Simba in the oasis! I didn’t eat bugs, I specced for AOE damage and aimed at player’s feet. Before long I had singed whippersnappers laying at my feet. My point is, while manual aiming sounds scary, MMORPG players are craftier than the average joe, we always find a way and CU seems like the kind of game that will allow for class adaptation. Besides that, they know their audience is older than average, I’m confident this aim experiment will work itself out.

Working out, heh, that’s gym slang for physically lifting things, like weapons which smoothly transitions us to the animation system. I always took animation for granted. I’ve been humbled by how meticulous the process is. That meticulousness is paying off in an array of combat stances relating to the weapons in hand. “Stronger swings can feel stronger and quicker jabs can feel quicker.”

In other news, CSE did some dev stuff that was over my head. This is 2017 so I suppose I should reject it and claim the earth is flat because I can’t see wind or write in code. Instead I’ll take the logical route and declare its magic. The dev magic involved things I had to Google and words I couldn’t pronounce so I assume they were important. The gist is stability continues to improve, patching is getting more efficient, bugs got debugged, and Dave and George are the glamourous tag team champions of particle types.

That reminds me, crafting’s back end got more powerful and flexible thanks to items…(wait, checks browser tab to make sure it’s the right one, confirms it is)…thanks to work done with items during re-abilitation. Players now have the ability to cram stuff in their (checks tab again, still the right one) the ability to store stuff in their Vox, and collect crafted items when the crafting task is completed. The full crafting system is still a long way off but it’s looking (and sounding) sexy.

A few odds and ends here; banes and boons had an internal test that got over like Ric Flair in Charlotte, NC. The devs were left WOOOing with excitement (not confirmed, I made that Wooing part up). The second pass at siege engines was completed. The bits we’ve seen in concept are looking solid. More importantly CSE produced an in-game statue that might just get itself tattooed onto a certain writer despite readers then using it against him when claiming he is a paid shill. He plans to keep it secret to avoid the hassle.

I want to take a minute to and touch on what I felt was one of the most important bits in this update. CSE said it best, weeds really are the unsung heroes of the grass plains, heck any plains! Without weeds the ecosystem breaks down, things die, rains come and before you know it we’ve got mass topsoil erosion! You want to relive the dust bowl, keep ganking those Dandelions! They, they wouldn’t be called Dandelions if they weren’t important, they would be called…um, Ordinarycats or something like that…yeah. #Ordinarycats

Lastly new polearms and spears have been completed. Why is that worthy of being my closer? Because I’m a big long pointy stick mark. Not to mention, based on the early animation, CU might be one of the few games to get long pointy stick weapons right. By right I mean historically accurate; shield up high and tight, spear held with an over under grip gently resting on the top-side of that shield, arm cocked and ready to fire like Minnesota Fats about to sink an 8 ball on some highbrow out of towners he just hustled! I’ve waited years for a MMORPG to give me legit spear combat. CU might just be my huckleberry.

Speaking of berries, they start to grow in spring which brings us full circle, circle of life even just to bring it fuller circle. What MMORPG’s are you guys playing this spring? Let me know in the comments below. I’m going to assume “HZD”, “Zelda” and “MEA” will be the main replies. I can’t blame you. It might be raining this spring but the MMORPG scene is dry as the Serengeti in September meanwhile those games look thirst quenchingly refreshing and I don’t get paid to say that.