Roleplaying games

While is not strictly a RPG, Kongregate’s collectible card game called Kongai is quite interesting. Lots of moves, skills, and cards. I’ve played it without much luck though. It has one major design flaw: requires multiplayer.

Why is a flaw? because of the timer, and the unreliability of people. There’s a 1 minute timer to make your move, and while it might seem fast, in real if you have to wait every time 1 minute, the gameplay become tedious. REALLY TEDIOUS.

Result? if you can’t win a match, simply delay every move at maximum! There are very good chances that the opponent, frustrated, will quit the game, giving you the victory.

A pity they didn’t make a proper computer AI, it would be a good single player game.

So I was interested in this new MMORPG, since was turnbased, so different from the rest. Unfortunately, even this time my experience has been quite frustrating. I sometimes wonder if they make games exclusive for people with T1 LAN connections or 10h a day free ?

The reason I say this is simple: even in this case, I gave up even before playing the game!!!

I downloaded the HUGE client (over 2Gb). Even with a broadband connection, that isn’t a joke. Anyway, once I finally finished, I installed it and started the game. Then the patcher started. The progression was insanely slow…. 0.1%….0.2%….0.3%… and so on!!!

What I download a 2Gb client and isn’t even the latest version? I quit after I reached 1% in about 5 minutes… then I played the latest shareware demo of Spidweb, Avernum 5. Less than 10 minutes from download to begin playing. Those big MMORPG producers need to learn a lot from indie developers!!!

Ok, now I see why this game is falling apart. Read the following common story:

An evening playing EQ2:

“I logged in and of course nobody is looking for group, as always, despite being a healer. Fine, I go to loping plain to finish some quests, since they give really a good boost to XP. I travel there…. travel… run by horse, that’s 24% running speed bonus! …still quite slow… running… I am almost there! ah but must climb that loooooooong wall in butcherblock mountains, great, another 5min gone… running… now take the griffon… running… zoning… now running again to avoid the monsters to reach the zone – but wait, someone is calling for an healer to do Karnor Castle! that would be great XP and loot, so I ask to join. They accept! but… now must travel back! ;_; well ok, I can make it, Call of the Overlord to teleport back to Freeport, then I take the boat to Kylong Plains and I arrive there, great, only another 15 min wasted, not bad.

I zone in, and an idiot puller make me die twice in a row. He can’t make it, really. Keeps pulling 2 monsters at once, and I can’t heal him fast enough since they hit him for 2k at once…! I go out deciding to quit, but they convince me to wait, they want to do an instance in Loping Plain. Great! just where I was only 15 min ago…!

The druid creates the portal and I click to enter but… great, I didn’t harvest the special bush to be able to travel there!! that’s where I decide to say goodbye, and log. I downloaded Istaria, I’m going to try that, since I am really fed up with EQ2 and its insane wasting times. Sony should realize that not everyone has the time and patience to waste 15-20 min EVERYTIME they want to group or do anything!!!!!!!!!!!!