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The patch is out today. There’s just so much great stuff in it, that grovelling over each grain of greatness would be tedious for you, the reader. Take a look.

As you may have seen, Turbine also has an MRPG engine for use as a hired gun, much like people use the Unreal and Quake engines to build their own games. Turbine describes it as an enhanced version of the engine Asheron’s Call uses. Is this a good thing for the industry? Given the stability of the AC engine, probably.

Just the other day, I was on the Obsidian Plains fighting nasty, hurtful creatures with Ely. As our session was drawing to a close, we started fooling around with the engine itself. AC’s engine is pretty good about “guessing” what’s going to happen given certain input. That’s the reason why its latency affects players much less than, say, Ultima Online or Quake. On rare occasions, though, it guesses wrong. A wrong guess can have you sailing down a cliff, only to reappear at the top, when the engine figures out you really didn’t fall. This isn’t a big error, and it’s one you have to take great pains to duplicate. It offers no game advantage, and it’s amusing. Sometimes, though, the rare wrong guess becomes a very rare reality.

Needless to say, my character careened off one of the cliffs and smashed into bits in the valley below. I knew the risks of playing with the engine in this way, so I’m still laughing when I come to my body to retrieve my belongings. Then, with one of us on the cliff and another in the valley, it occurs to me…

…Sniper guns and jetpacks. Just like the ones in Tribes. In fact, Dereth would make a very good world for a Massively Multiplayer First Person Shooter, or BIG FPS for short.

Before you dismiss this as another “Dwarves with Machine Guns” rant, think about this: A good MRPG engine (AC) combined with a good strategy FPS design (Tribes) could be extremely promising, and by god, the engine’s for sale. Of course, Capture the Flag takes on a different perspective when the flags are farther apart and when an army of dozens takes on a defense mounted by dozens.

The FPS genre operates differently than the MRPG genre. In an FPS, you don’t have a game without “winners and losers”. In an MRPG, “winners and losers” don’t exist in the traditional sense. In an FPS, there are “sides” - you’re either a member of team A or team B, whereas in an MRPG, you have guilds with many different purposes, solo players, group players not in a guild structure, etc.

You also need to preserve the “short game” aspect of a good FPS - good short games in about 15 minutes, good longer games in an hour or so. Again, winners and losers - this is a high-intensity genre, and there needs to be some degree of resolution at the end of a “round”, after which you can play another round or retire for the session. Very unlike an MRPG that don’t often follow a schedule other than that imposed by players.

But what if it were possible to combine the two genres? What if you could play “solo” levels in order to gain experience - player experience, not in-game experience points - and fame points? Soemthing on your character roster, like a medal for defeating a specific “level” or “dugneon”. There could be solo levels much like solo-playing existing FPS games, and group cooperative levels like multi-play co-op in existing FPS (co-op FPS isn’t very popular, but I suspect it would be more popular in an MFPS). Character development would probably be detrimental to a game of this sort where actual kills are important and where you want to be able to let someone log in and quickly join the action.

The bread and butter of this sort of game would be deathmatch and multi-team conflict (capture the flag, king of the hill, command and hold, defend and destroy, etc), just as it is in the smaller scale FPS games. The ability to enter “civilian” mode when not in a deathmatch or team play would be crucial to ensure that the game doesn’t degenerate into a world-wide deathmatch, which to me has always been the least satisfying mode of FPS muliplayer gaming. The key here is a client/server combination that can adequately “guess” during lag, which AC’s is quite good at.

I just get all weak in the knees thinking of going to the tower at Black Hill and sniping at someone at the Waijhou hut.

“Massive casualties at Glenden Wood as a squadron of scouts escort five mortar-heavy APCs to Cragstone. Details as they become available.”

Bringing in new audiences is going to be crucial as a dozen MRPG titles reach the market. Swords-and-sorcery MRPGs compete for the same 250,000 players. The FPS market is wide-open for the taking.

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