The Inside Scoop on Gaming

The MMORPG genre has had a decidedly chequered history so far. First there was Ultima Online, which attempted to simulate a complete medieval community, and revealed a lot of problems with the MMORPG genre. Then there was EverQuest, which went back to heroic fantasy hack-n-slay roots, and found a lot of new problems with the genre. Then there was Asheron's Call, which learnt from both the previous games and avoided a lot of the problems, but which a lot of people found got boring rather fast because it wasn't experimental enough. And now we have Funcom's Anarchy Online, another foray into a new type of setting. With three sets of lessons to learn from, how does it fare?

A quick look through the manual that comes with the game provides the setting information, which is presented in an in-character fashion as corporate brochures, e-mails, flyers, and similar. Basically, there's a recently-discovered planet called Rubi-Ka, which is being colonized by the giant Omni-Tek corporation, who recruit colonists with offers of crime pardons, the experience of a new world with exotic wildlife (small print: "which may be hazardous to signer's health and should not be admired too closely or for any length of time"), free housing, placement with the company, and the claim that "Death Isn't Fatal(tm)". Omni-Tek claim to have terraformed the world from the desert planet it originally was. However, a number of resistance groups - the Clans - have appeared on Rubi-Ka to fight against Omni-Tek, claiming that the corporation only seeks to restrict freedom and enslave its members - and that most of that "exotic wildlife" is composed of failed Omni-Tek genetic engineering experiments. (Perhaps a great shame is that later parts of the setting information in the manual pretty much confirm that the Clans' view are correct - thus eliminating the "grey-area" ideal that the conflict would otherwise have.)

And it's into this that your character comes, as a Rubi-Ka colonist on either side - or, indeed, entirely neutral.

The first thing you notice when you connect to Anarchy Online are the graphics. They're fantastic. No other MMORPG published so far can hold a candle to Anarchy in the graphical stakes, and it rivals even some single player games. The music is also good - and (thank god) the game does not succumb to the temptation of "making the setting feel cyberpunk" by overusing techno music, synths, etc. In fact, most of the music has a classical sound.

Character generation is also done far more neatly than in many other MMORPGs. It is done within the gameplay engine itself - your character appears as a blank clone within a series of "gene clinics", each of which allows you to customize different attributes of your character.

Anarchy Online uses the age old race/class method of character generation. Actually, technically speaking there's only one race - Human - but with four different types of genetic template: Solitus (plain ol' humans), Opifex (sneaky/agile humans), Nano (humans good at nanotechnology - more on that later), and Atrox (strong - and for some reason androgynous - humans). The classes available are Agent, Doctor, Enforcer, Engineer, Bureaucrat, Adventurer, Metaphysicist, Nanotechnician, Trader, Fixer, Soldier, and Martial Artist - more on some of those later on.

A character is actually represented by a number of basic ability stats and a near-bewildering array of skills, and your race and class selection determines the ease with which you'll obtain each particular skill. This is represented by the colour of the stat or skill on the character display, from green skills (your class's specialities, easiest to obtain) to deep blue skills (your class's weaknesses, hardest of all). All actual stat and skill values - including your initial values at character generation - are bought with improvement points (IP). At very low levels, most things don't cost very much so you can pick and choose just about anything to customize your character, but the IP price of each point rises exponentially, and the curve is far steeper for a deep blue skill than for a green, so eventually you're going to have to toe the class line or pay a heavy price. (Your total advancement per level is also capped, and the cap varies with the colour.) This isn't a bad system, but can be frustrating on occasions when you really NEED a skill that's blue to you. (It's also counterintuitive, of course: normally you're (say) a doctor because you're good at medicine, but in AO you're good at medicine because you're an doctor.)

So, you've got your character, and it's time to begin your duties for Omni-Tek, or start your Clan opposition, or band with the Neutrals. But what do all of these involve doing, regardless of your race or class? Walking out into forest-like landscapes and blowing away genetic engineering mistakes (which, at starting level, means "hamsters and parrots") for money and experience points. Get enough experience points, hear a funky dinging noise and some warbly synth effects, and gain a load of extra IP. Do this 4 times, and you can leave the two zones you're trapped in at the start of the game, to ensure that you can't really experience what the entire game is like until you've put enough of a time stake into it that you'll be discouraged from abandoning it.

Oh dear.

Although one small comfort is that "enough experience points" isn't that many - you level up extremely fast in this game. And when you finally get to see the rest of the game, the real graphical beauty hits you - the cities are fantastically done, and they actually do look like cities, and as a walk-through experience it's wonderful.

But one of the biggest disappointments is that apart from the graphics, the cyberpunk theme is the thinnest veneer possible. Everyone recognises this as a standard fantasy game with the names changed. Some of the name changes are fairly creative - for example, magic is represented by nanites that you can program to create effects, rather than the old sci-fi standby of psionics - but it doesn't help much. In fact, if you look on the community boards, nobody talks about running NanoPrograms - they all talk about casting spells! Even the developers themselves have been known to refer to "dungeons".

The game background is violated several times by the game itself. For example, in the messages in the manual, the Clan object greately to the "Death Isn't Fatal" resurrection system that Omni-Tek provides, claiming that it gradually transforms a person into a slave. "They control the technology, do you not think they also control the harmful effects?" crows the message. An interesting point of plot - except that, of course, the Clans resurrect people just like Omni-Tek. And the Clans' resurrections have harmful effects for a while - just like Omni-Tek's.

Even hunting monsters might be quite fun if the combat system was interesting enough. And it is somewhat interesting, but nowhere near as much as it ought to be. You click on the critter you don't like, press Q, and then you're attacking it, and your character will occasionally hit it or shoot it until it dies. During that time, you can use special abilities of your weapon (like burst fire, fling shots, and similar), or special abilities of yourself (such as the "Dimach" soul attack, which blows all your nano-energy for a single powerful slam), or cast sp.. uhh, run NanoPrograms. Unfortunately, altogether too many of these come down to "you press a key and you do an attack that looks slightly different and has different statistics". Or "you press a key and after some funky lighting effects the statistics of the people in your party get better".

What you CAN'T do is anything interesting with the graphical environment. Elevation doesn't seem to matter - I have no statistical confirmation, but in general terrain as a whole doesn't matter - walk over the prow of a hillock while you're in combat, and you and your enemy will continue shooting beams at each other straight through the hillock (yep, I've done that). Even if your enemy is actually swimming in water at the time you attack, they will mysteriously teleport out and walk on the water's surface for the split second required to fire their weapon.

Moreover, range doesn't seem to matter. Again, I have no statistical proof, but that's not needed because I have experience that range doesn't matter for melee attacks! Yes, that's right: once you're engaged with a foe, even if it only has teeth and you have a gun, you can't use any range strategy. It'll move continuously towards you, it won't be knocked back or discouraged by your shots.. but even if it's NOT next to you, it can make a biting motion that connects with thin air, and you'll take melee damage as long as you're engaged to it. The only difference is that it's still melee damage and is still resisted with melee blocking skills instead of projectile dodging skills. The only time range makes a difference is when you're running away. Facing makes no difference - turn 90 degrees from your enemy and the beam will come out of the side of your gun. Shoot an enemy in the back, and they'll immediately know who shot them and come attack you.

In other words, despite the wonderful graphical gloss, it's evident that what we have here is actually a DikuMUD style combat system: once you've started a fight, the dice matter, the bonuses matter, and the special moves you do matter, but none of the graphical material matters in the least. After all, that would make it far too much like one of those evil twitch-based games. (And don't say it's because of server load, because the server keeps track of all the player and monster locations anyway.) But I should stress that, although this is pretty poor, it's actually better than some other MMORPGs.

So, how about hunting in groups? Well, here a lesson has been learned from EverQuest. EverQuest was designed for group play and it was often essential to form a group to play effectively. Unfortunately, this meant that in order to enjoy the game you were paying for, you had to be able to get into groups - which created a bizarre and nasty form of politics, whereby players who weren't playing highly min-maxed characters in classes with powerful abilities were turned down for grouping in favour of those who were, and thus couldn't enjoy the game. Anarchy Online has attempted to deal with this, and the main way in which they've done so is by removing the cost of grouping. In EverQuest, if you killed a monster in a group, the XP was split between the group. In Anarchy, if a group ("team") kills something, everyone in the team gets as much XP as they would have if they killed it on their own.

This does help somewhat, but it's still becoming the case that some classes are far more favoured for groups (a Doctor will have no problem grouping, for example). Also, there's usually a goodly supply of critters you can kill on your own. The problem is that neither the team style of play nor the solo really justifies the MMORPG nature of the game. If you're playing solo, you're basically playing a single player game; if you're just going to form teams and go hunt, then you're basically playing a conventional multiplayer game with a really fancy looking matching service interface. Except that you don't have to pay a tenner a month for either of those.

The "dungeons" and "quests" of Anarchy Online are linked; they're called "missions", and they show another lesson learned from EverQuest. The problem with dungeon quests in EQ was that you'd hack your way to the bottom of the dungeon to kill the R0X0R DRA60N only to discover that someone else killed it already. So, rather than going away and coming back later (and, as likely as not, finding that the same thing had happened again), you'd wait for it to come back. But there might be somebody else, who also arrived before you while the dragon was already dead, who's waiting too. The result is the ludicrous image of a line of hero groups waiting in a queue for the right to slay the dragon! (This combined with a serious problem - people with less RL time to give up for MMORPGing couldn't afford to wait in line, and thus could never do the quests.)

Anarchy solves this problem in an intriuging fashion. Any time you want to do a quest, you go and apply for one at a mission booth, from Omni-Tek or the Clans leaders (there's another problem: although there are supposed to be multiple Clans, they all act as one). You can even choose some factors about the type of mission you're applying for. The booth tells you what to do, tells you a site to go to, and spits out a key. You head off to the site.. and here things get unusual. Because when you go into the site, the inside is randomly generated. Not only that, but it's randomly generated especially for you, based on the key you were holding. So if (say) you and I had to do a mission in the same building, then we could go in together, but we'd actually wind up in completely different versions of the inside of the same building. If you were higher level than I, your monsters would be harder and so on, and (of course) we'd never be able to see each other.

This elegantly solves all the camping problems - the content for quests no longer needs to be shared, and hence no mechanism needs to be instituted for distributing it. If you want to take your friends on a mission with you, you can do that too: you can have the mission key copied, and give the copies to your friends. Then, they'll enter the same version of the mission as you do. It's a neat and clever solution - but again, it wipes out the point of playing a MMORPG. In fact, one is inclined to ask why it didn't just pick the member of the entering group with the fastest connection and hand off the server to that person's computer - which would have enabled all the "its-too-complex-for-an-mmorpg-server" features to be implemented within the missions.

So, amidst all that killing, what actually differentiates the classes? Apart from skill colour already discussed (which effectively limits weapon usage and similar), the main difference is in the nanoprograms each class gets. Every class uses them for its special abilities. Soldiers get nanoprograms that improve armor and damage. Nanotechnicans get nanoprograms which deal damage directly and similar. Engineers get nanoprograms that build robots and temporarily enhance weapons and armor. Bureaucrats get nanoprograms that charm monsters into joining your side.

Some of these sound quite interesting, but very few of them actually make that much difference in practice. For example, Engineers build robots and can send them into battle - except that the robot apparantly has a great big flashing sign on the front that points directly its builder, because one hit from a robot will normally immediately send a monster directly to attack the Engineer who built it even if that Engineer has done no harm to the monster directly (and guess what? Personal combat is the Engineer's weakness). Engineers can also build weapons - but only by obtaining weapon kits and inserting a fixed series of items in them. You can't customise the weapons at all, and the kits and parts are invariably harder and more expensive to get than the prebuilt weapons.

The other classes either have similar problems, or have nanoprograms that basically come down to "improve combat statistics".

Although there's a lot of difference between the classes, there isn't much difference within a class as you level up. And, in fact, this is a serious problem: just about everything in Anarchy Online lacks variety and has (it appears) been designed to work without variety. For example, every weapon has a "quality level", which shows how effective it'll be. So when it comes to upgrading your weapon, you don't upgrade from a Sleekblaster to something else: you upgrade from a level 3 Sleekblaster to a level 10 Sleekblaster. Monsters also have levels that work the same way. And usually, you'll have all the basic nanoprograms that your class can use by low level - as you level up, you get access only to new programs which do basically the same things but do them better. Except that the fact your abilities are better is cancelled out by the monsters being better too.

What do you do when you get high level? PvP, of course. There are designated "political zones" which basically consist of Omni-Tek vs. Clan team PvP (and yes, you can change side if you want to). At the moment, though, winning PvP matches doesn't really make any difference.

Now, to be fair, I have to point out that Anarchy Online is a very young game. And the developers are working very hard on it. At release, it was hideously buggy and crashed frequently, and the patches so far have considerably improved that (although there's a bug in the patcher to be aware of - if the patcher restarts Anarchy and the license screen comes back up, decline the license, let it quit, wait until the hard disk calms down then start it again manually, or it may corrupt your install due to a file locking problem). Naturally this, rather than play balance or variety issues, has been the developers' focus point. So all of this may be changed later on, and this review may soon be out of date. But promised content doesn't help players now, I'm afraid.

One of the big items of promised content is a 4-year plot arc describing the events on Rubi-Ka, which is apparantly due to start shortly. Unfortunately, Funcom are going to have to be very careful if they're going to pull this off. Another EverQuest lesson: many EQ players had a simple rule that they logged off as quickly as possible when a plot event started, because there were few (if any) potential positive consequences and some fairly significant negative ones (ie, character death). Moreover, the fact that people are playing it now means that when the plot starts, Funcom will either have to pitch the ingame plot events for high level players and alienate new customers from it, or pitch it for low level players and alienate old customers (as in the low-level players on AC who had to put up with an ugly red sky effect and extremely dark landscapes for ages because the high-level players were busy dealing with summoned uberdemons).

Another problem is integrating players into the plot: just being swept along with the plot isn't normally that much fun. And it looks like this is going to happen in Anarchy based on the manual: it includes a list of people who are "the big players" in Omni-Tek and the Clans - otherwise known as a list of GM Characters, all with suitably unattainable power levels, that screams "these are the people the plot's about, and they aren't you". While I suppose this would be understandable for Omni-Tek - they are supposed to be a dictatorship, after all - what about the Clans? A multi-factional resistance force could offer all sorts of opportunities for players to lead splinter groups and similar within it - and yet there's a fixed, hardcoded list of "big players", all determined in advance.

Now, while this review might sound like a big downer on the game, it's important to realise that an awful lot of the problems mentioned here are classic problems with the MMORPG model. The continuous killing for XP is standard in just about every MMORPG except the original Ultima Online, and lack of variety could just be a symptom of it being a young game.

So in summary, Anarchy is not the MMORPG to break the mould, the one we all hope for that will finally work out how to make an MMORPG that truly works within its own multiplayer nature. If you're keen to play what is basically a plain ol' cyberpunk DikuMUD with awesome graphics dropped on, you'll probably love Anarchy. But if you want an online roleplay setting that works, or a truly massive multiplayer experience, I'm afraid you're still waiting.