League of Legends an MMORPG?
League of Legends (LoL), is a Defense of the Ancients (DotA) game made by Riot Games. I have logged in countless numbers of hours into LoL during the past few weeks but not once did I think of it as an MMORPG until I saw this news feature on the League of Legends website. LoL was nominated for: Best MMORTS 2009 and Best New MMO 2009. After seeing this I wondered why people would consider LoL an MMO. Riot Games says that League of Legends is not technically an MMORPG but it does have a lot of similarities that these type of games offer.
So how exactly is a DotA game like League of Legends an MMORPG?
Your character in LoL is a summoner that can summon a champion of your choice onto the battlefields of Valoran. At the start of every match you can choose two utility spells out of a list of thirteen to use during the game. The spells vary from heals, extra movement speed, teleport, etc. At the end of every match you gain experience based on whether your team won/lost and your personal performance during the match. 
The max summoner level is 30 and for each level you gain you get a mastery point. Mastery points are spent on the three mastery trees which are: Offense, Defense and Utility. This allows you to customize your summoner to your play style. Adding in talent trees makes LoL very unique for a DotA game since everyone will have different mastery builds.
You also get influence points at the end of every match (which can be viewed as currency). Influence points can be used to buy champions you don’t currently own and also to buy runes.
Runes are items that enhance your champions traits and abilities. Summoners have a rune book where you can place certain runes in their respective slots. As you level up you get access to more rune slots in the book and higher tiers of runes. There are three tiers of runes that can be purchased with influence points and four different types of runes. The different types of runes are: Marks, Seals, Glyphs and Quintessences. The runes do various things like increasing attack speed, additional mana, bonus health regeneration, etc.
So is League of Legends an MMORPG? I don’t really think there’s a right or wrong answer. People will have their own ideas and views of what an MMORPG. If you search for “League of Legends MMO” you will find a lot of sites that view LoL as an MMO. Even sites like SK-Gaming (a well known team of professional E-Sports players that compete in games like: World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, etc) refer to League of Legends as an MMO and points out that the game has many similarities which are found in MMOs. LoL is just one of those games that could be an MMO while at the same time it isn’t. What I can say is that it does have a lot of things that you would find and expect in an MMORPG like choosing spells, leveling up character, customizing mastery trees and buying items (runes) that increase a character’s stats/abilities.
For the record I personally don’t consider League of Legends to be an MMO/MMORPG. It does have some of the main traits that an MMORPG has but I just don’t consider interacting with nine other people (five vs five games) as a “massive” multiplayer game.
League of Legends an MMORPG?
League of Legends (LoL), is a Defense of the Ancients (DotA) game made by Riot Games. I have logged in countless numbers of hours into LoL during the past few weeks but not once did I think of it as an MMORPG until I saw this news feature on the League of Legends website. LoL was nominated for: Best MMORTS 2009 and Best New MMO 2009. After seeing this I wondered why people would consider LoL an MMO. Riot Games says that League of Legends is not technically an MMORPG but it does have a lot of similarities that these type of games offer.
So how exactly is a DotA game like League of Legends an MMORPG?
Your character in LoL is a summoner that can summon a champion of your choice onto the battlefields of Valoran. At the start of every match you can choose two utility spells out of a list of thirteen to use during the game. The spells vary from heals, extra movement speed, teleport, etc. At the end of every match you gain experience based on whether your team won/lost and your personal performance during the match. The max summoner level is 30 and for each level you gain you get a mastery point. Mastery points are spent on the three mastery trees which are: Offense, Defense and Utility. This allows you to customize your summoner to your play style. Adding in talent trees makes LoL very unique for a DotA game since everyone will have different mastery builds.
You also get influence points at the end of every match (which can be viewed as currency). Influence points can be used to buy champions you don’t currently own and also to buy runes.
Runes are items that enhance your champions traits and abilities. Summoners have a rune book where you can place certain runes in their respective slots. As you level up you get access to more rune slots in the book and higher tiers of runes. There are three tiers of runes that can be purchased with influence points and four different types of runes. The different types of runes are: Marks, Seals, Glyphs and Quintessences. The runes do various things like increasing attack speed, additional mana, bonus health regeneration, etc.
So is League of Legends an MMORPG? I don’t really think there’s a right or wrong answer. People will have their own ideas and views of what an MMORPG. If you search for “League of Legends MMO” you will find a lot of sites that view LoL as an MMO. Even sites like SK-Gaming (a well known team of professional E-Sports players that compete in games like: World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, etc) refer to League of Legends as an MMO and points out that the game has many similarities which are found in MMOs. LoL is just one of those games that could be an MMO while at the same time it isn’t. What I can say is that it does have a lot of things that you would find and expect in an MMORPG like choosing spells, leveling up character, customizing mastery trees and buying items (runes) that increase a character’s stats/abilities.
For the record I personally don’t consider League of Legends to be an MMO/MMORPG. It does have some of the main traits that an MMORPG has but I just don’t consider interacting with nine other people (five vs five games) as a “massive” multiplayer game.
MarMar Online: facebook integration
Online Game Developer Claims First Ever facebook Linking System
You may have never heard of the MMO ‘MarMar Online’ but
Kris Allen at Music Fest 2010, Manila, Philippines
Youtube hit sensation Boyce Avenue, America’s Best Dance Crew winner Jabbawockeez, and American Idol Season 8 winner Kris Allen performed in the recently concluded Music Fest 2010 at the Philippines. They had two concerts – one in Cebu and the other one was at the Mckinley Hills Open Ground at the Fort Bonifacio. Mich and I were able to watch the concert at the Fort. Over-all the event was definitely okay but there were a lot of things that they could have improved on. This is a quick review and summary of the event.
Boyce Avenue
First up we have Boyce Avenue. According to the emcees, they have over 160,000,000 hits on Youtube and there’s a good reason why they have those views. These guys are really good singers and they were able to connect with the crowd quite well. When they sang their popular covers like Bleeding Love, they had everyone jumping up and down and screaming like giddy teenagers. However, for people who don’t really follow them it was kinda boring. Personally I found them entertaining but only during their cover songs. I literally zoned out when they were doing originals.
Jabbawockeez
Next up is what I consider to be the best act for the evening. The Jabbawockeez brought the house down with their funny, entertaining, dramatic, and flawless routines. They are literally poetry in motion and I never imagined in my life that I would enjoy a dance concert so much, haha! There’s a reason why these guys won ABCD and now I know why. They just have insane skills! I loved their “Apologize” and “Transformers” routines and I hope they visit Manila more often. I’ll definitely make it a point to watch them as long as they change up their routines every now and then. It will probably get boring if they keep doing the same thing over and over.
There was also one part in the act where they brought up a girl from the crowd and they danced for her using the Little Mermaid OST “Kiss the Girl”. That was just hilarious! Another favorite would definitely when they did the tribute for Michael Jackson. A major plus factor for them was that several members of the crew were actually Filipinos. This definitely got the crowd more rowdy especially when the guys finally took their masks off. Two thumbs of to Jabbawockeez! You guys definitely rock!
Kris Allen
And of course we have American Idol Season 8 winner Kris Allen. He’s an awesome singer but I think he still needs to improve on his performance and his song list. Most of his songs that are well-known are mostly from his numbers on American Idol.
He started pretty strong with Heartless but he then went on to do songs that I’ve never heard of before. This was kinda a let down since people were really excited to watch him perform his major hits from Idol. After 2-3 of originals though he’d do one AI number. Personally the highlight for me and Mich was his performance of Fallin’ Slowly. To those who don’t know, I proposed to Mich with this song, hahaha. For more of that you can check our engagement blog.
Kris Allen singing Fallin’ Slowly at Music Fest 2010, Philippines
It’s a good thing that Kris finished strong though. His last two songs were “Live like we’re dying” and “Ain’t No Sunshine”. Both these songs got the crowd really excited and I had to cover my ears every now and then because of the insane mob of girls screaming all over the place, hahaha.
Over-all we liked the concert but it could definitely have been done much better. Jabbawockeez were the saving grace for the night and if they weren’t there I would feel really bad for spending P3160 for my silver tickets. It’s a good thing I decided not to get the Gold/VIP tickets. =_=
Why I Quit Champions Online
Even though I purchased the six month package for Champions Online I haven’t actively played the game in weeks. I’ve kept the client up-to-date just in case, but since publishing the game’s review in mid-November I haven’t put in anywhere near the time that I had previously. My absence from VioletPreston has nothing to do with being busy. The holidays didn’t stop me from logging in, neither did other video games, or even other MMOG that I play. I didn’t play Champions Online because of the game itself, no other excuses.
Plan and simple, Champions Online lost its hold on me. I continued to dive in to the game, move around the world, soak up the atmosphere, read about its future and most importantly, evaluate the content beyond my reach. What I definitively learned, and I hope my review hinted at, is that the game lacks legs. The atmosphere has always been incredibly disjointed thanks to the instancing of most zones. Even though all of the settings make sense in the universe, they lack a cohesive flow. And the multitude of characters aren’t employed effectively either. Because of these continued slip-ups through the middle to later levels, Champions Online gets boiled down to its diverse arcade-y combat;. In essence, it becomes a soulless experience.
Signing up for an MMOG to me is more than just playing a game, I am signing up as a partner to the company. I expect certain things from the service provider, and when I don’t see those things I can get upset, annoyed and even downright angry. Cryptic Studios has managed to make me feel almost all of these emotions. I was expecting the cast of Champions characters to be used in an intriguing way. I was hoping that the game would offer better grouping and dungeon experiences later on. I maintained a desire to play alternate characters (perhaps CO’s greatest strength), but was hamstrung by being forced to do the same content over and over. Instead of fixing these issues with content updates, Cryptic turned around and announced a premium content patch. Adding content to the end game and charging for it – that was the last straw for me.
The tragedy of all of this is that my experience has made me incredibly stand-offish to Cryptic’s just released MMORPG Star Trek Online, a title I was originally excited for. I’ll likely play it, but my experience and the handling of Champions Online to date, assured that I wouldn’t purchase an advance subscription, or even the game at launch.
My Champions Online account is subscribed for another month plus, so Cryptic can do right by me. But the outlook is grime for my Champions Online characters. It just couldn’t satisfy me in the long run.
Why I Quit Champions Online
Even though I purchased the six month package for Champions Online I haven’t actively played the game in weeks. I’ve kept the client up-to-date just in case, but since publishing the game’s review in mid-November I haven’t put in anywhere near the time that I had previously. My absence from VioletPreston has nothing to do with being busy. The holidays didn’t stop me from logging in, neither did other video games, or even other MMOG that I play. I didn’t play Champions Online because of the game itself, no other excuses.
Plan and simple, Champions Online lost its hold on me. I continued to dive in to the game, move around the world, soak up the atmosphere, read about its future and most importantly, evaluate the content beyond my reach. What I definitively learned, and I hope my review hinted at, is that the game lacks legs. The atmosphere has always been incredibly disjointed thanks to the instancing of most zones. Even though all of the settings make sense in the universe, they lack a cohesive flow. And the multitude of characters aren’t employed effectively either. Because of these continued slip-ups through the middle to later levels, Champions Online gets boiled down to its diverse arcade-y combat;. In essence, it becomes a soulless experience.
Signing up for an MMOG to me is more than just playing a game, I am signing up as a partner to the company. I expect certain things from the service provider, and when I don’t see those things I can get upset, annoyed and even downright angry. Cryptic Studios has managed to make me feel almost all of these emotions. I was expecting the cast of Champions characters to be used in an intriguing way. I was hoping that the game would offer better grouping and dungeon experiences later on. I maintained a desire to play alternate characters (perhaps CO’s greatest strength), but was hamstrung by being forced to do the same content over and over. Instead of fixing these issues with content updates, Cryptic turned around and announced a premium content patch. Adding content to the end game and charging for it – that was the last straw for me.
The tragedy of all of this is that my experience has made me incredibly stand-offish to Cryptic’s just released MMORPG Star Trek Online, a title I was originally excited for. I’ll likely play it, but my experience and the handling of Champions Online to date, assured that I wouldn’t purchase an advance subscription, or even the game at launch.
My Champions Online account is subscribed for another month plus, so Cryptic can do right by me. But the outlook is grime for my Champions Online characters. It just couldn’t satisfy me in the long run.
Zodiac Online Open Beta
Are you into MMO’s but wish the pace would slow down a bit? If so, Zodiac Online may be what you’re looking for. The games mantra is to relax as much as possible and truly avoid the rush to completion. Unlike most real-time games, Zodiac players can take their sweet old time plotting their next move in-battle via turn-based strategy. Sound good so far? The game incorporates full-on Chinese cultural elements such as playing envoys sent by the Jade Emperor. The main plot focus of the game is on the 12 signs of the Zodiac. Environments are adorned with colorful, cute graphics in order to attract audiences of all ages and genders. Zodiac Online’s open beta begins February 10 so if you are liking what you hear so far, sign up here, it’s free.
Zodiac Online Open Beta
Are you into MMO’s but wish the pace would slow down a bit? If so, Zodiac Online may be what you’re looking for. The games mantra is to relax as much as possible and truly avoid the rush to completion. Unlike most real-time games, Zodiac players can take their sweet old time plotting their next move in-battle via turn-based strategy. Sound good so far? The game incorporates full-on Chinese cultural elements such as playing envoys sent by the Jade Emperor. The main plot focus of the game is on the 12 signs of the Zodiac. Environments are adorned with colorful, cute graphics in order to attract audiences of all ages and genders. Zodiac Online’s open beta begins February 10 so if you are liking what you hear so far, sign up here, it’s free.
IndieZen Developers Journal, by IndieZen
This past month the IndieZen crew has been busily refactoring a few of our open source libraries and frameworks.
The Physics framework in Zen Engine has been getting a huge revamp. “Az”, one of the colorful developers working on the project, has taken the original version, which was mostly just a thin wrapper over Newton Game Dynamics and turned it into something more akin to Physics Abstraction Layer.
I looked long and hard at PAL before deciding not to use it. PAL is well written, has a great license, and as far as software goes, there’s nothing wrong with it. It just didn’t fit well within our architecture.
The IndieZen coding style outlined by our architectural documents states that all public interfaces must be pure abstract classes without any leakage of implementation details.
We also have a great plugin system based loosely on Eclipse.
I wanted our physics framework to follow this, so instead of using PAL and/or writing a new facade for it, we decided we’d take our “Newton-esque” design and revamp it so that it would fit with using a variety of physics libraries.
The refactored code takes advantage of the Zen Core plugin system, and uses the same high-quality software design, style and architecture of the rest of the IndieZen code.
The refactor is still ongoing and will likely take another month or two, but in the end, we’ll have support for Newton 2, Bullet, PhysX and ODE on a variety of platorms (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows).
The next major refactor area has been the Scripting framework which is part of Zen Core. While no new functionality has been added, this refactor is making it significantly easier to expose C++ classes to scripting languages.
Boost Python was my inspiration while tackling these new templates, but since it targets our scripting framework instead of directly using Python, this gives us the added advantage of being able to write one binding and target Lua, Python and Tamarin without needing to recompile. The scripting engine is loaded as a plugin at runtime.
As we add support for other languages as plugins (AngelScript, GameMonkey, Squirrel, etc), the same bindings should still work.
We’ve also made some enhancements to our Event system, adding support for multi-threaded events and event queues and providing a mechanism to marshal the events to specified threads… script events are only handled by scripting thread, render events are only handled by rendering thread(s), etc. We still have more features to add (prioritized event queues, and event queue templates that can handle a variety of payloads), but that will be another iteration.
The Event system enhancements will greatly simplify the use of multiple threads in both the game engine framework as well as the IDE shell.
The final enhancements has been part of Zen Enterprise, our enterprise application stack. Mostly the enhancements have been related to making it easier to specify message handlers.
I’m finding that while using pure abstract classes as the “API” portion of the framework, when I end up making “helper classes” that ease the use of the API, I’m using a whole lot of generics / templates.
The scripting enhancements used some of the fancier techniques available in C++, including templates, partial specialization and type traits. It’s actually quite magical if you’ve never seen something like it before.
I’m looking forward to our next iteration… I’m not exactly sure what we’ll be doing but I’m sure it’ll be something along the lines of more integration with Ogitor. As another art pipeline we’re also considering GameKit / OgreKit… either integrating with it or modifying it so that it uses our framework or… well, as I said, I’m not sure yet. I’ll see it when I get there.
Thanks for reading!
Naruto Manga 481 – Danzo Goes Kaboom
Naruto 481 is the conclusion between the epic battle between Sasuke and Danzo. It was revealed in the earlier issues that Danzo’s secret to multiple lives was in his right arm. He was using the Izanagi to manipulate time and space. However this skill had a time limit and he was slowly running out of Sharingan eyes to use it on. In the last issue, Danzo took Karin hostage in an attempt to slow down Sasuke’s onslaught. However, Sasuke did the unimaginable. Using a long range chidori, Sasuke impaled both Karin and Danzo.
In a last attempt to kill everyone with him, Danzo uses some sort of a self destruct technique which is really bloody. Apparently it’s a vacuum-based skill which sucked all opponents near to him which would force them to die together with him. Weird skill. Here’s a screenshot of the aftermath:
Fortunately though Sasuke and Madara were able to escape it. Now they plan to move on to attack Konoha.
In the other part of the issue, Sakura tries to leave her team and go after Sasuke herself. She tries to use a bomb of sorts to escape but Sai stops her and the groups tries to reason with her that they should go as a team. This girl is really weird and is in for a brutal death. I mean, Sasuke killed Karin. He can easily take down Sakura if he wanted to as well.
Personally this issue is a major milestone because it shows two things about Sasuke:
1. He is insanely powerful to the point that he can kill Danzo with his multiple Izanagis.
2. He is insanely evil because he does not hesitate to kill his friends and allies.
Can’t wait to see how Naruto will deal with his former best friend.
