Endless Ages - Review
Dialogue, 2003-10-13

Avaria's Endless Ages is a very ambitious project. It is a Massively-Multiplayer Online Roleplaying First Person Shooter (MMORFPS). The game boasts many interesting features, such as the ability to shapeshift, riding mounts, vehicles, and player housing. Unfortunately, while the ideas behind Avaria's first Massively Multiplayer game are interesting, Endless Ages suffers from many of the issues that have plagued first efforts in this field.

Creating a character

These tendencies between the races are just guidelines. They mark which skills each race is particularly good at learning. Any character, no matter the race, has the option to learn every skill. The skills that your race is not proficient with will simply take longer to learn. In this way, players can customize their characters a great deal through their skills.

Regrettably, the options provided to you to visually differentiate yourself from all the other players are weak. Each race has only a few options to choose from in the head, torso, and leg areas, and there are no clothing options once you're in the game. Once you've seen the big glowy-fire blue Bloblic, you've seen all the big glowy-fire blue Bloblics.

The newbie experience in Endless Ages is fairly helpful, at least in getting comfortable with the controls. When you first enter the world, you are placed into a secluded dell on "Newbie Island". There you find a shop, a bank, and several advisors that inform you of ways to interact with your environment. Before you leave the newbie area, the gatekeeper who warps you to your starting city requires you to perform some basic tasks. All of this hand-holding is actually refreshing. From the perspective of a player brand new to the MMOG experience, the dell on Newbie Island would be a great first brush with a massively multiplayer game.

The problem comes after the new player is released into the game world at large.

Graphics & Game World

The cities of the Humans, Bloblics, and Amphibious are well laid out, with ample signage to tell you where the different vendors are. Outside of the cities however, the game is extremely confusing. There is no map capability in the game whatsoever, meaning that without keeping a mental eye on a landmark you can get easily lost. The repetition of the landscape makes it very hard to keep your route straight as well.

The game features player housing, and several varieties of building to purchase. While the buildings are attractive, and the fact that they allow you to "upgrade" your house to different housing options is very cool, I see almost no reason for housing to be in this game. The houses can be used as player stores, where players can place items on sale. However, everything in the game except dropped items like "meat" is available from NPC vendors. The houses can also be used as personal respawning chambers, but you can set your respawn point to any location in a protected zone you want. You can use your house as a storage area, but the bank serves the same purpose. Most importantly, there is no way to dress up your house. No decorations, no art, no furniture...all houses in EA are empty buildings with no character.

Some of the other features that the developers laud as selling points for Endless Ages are fairly interesting. Aspects of the game that many players find entertaining are vehicles, riding mounts (what the developers call "Familiars") and shapeshifting abilities. Shapeshifting and riding are skills that can be developed through training with NPCs. Each of these skills also require items to utilize different shapeshifting forms, summon vehicles, or to call riding mounts. These items are some of the only interesting quest items to retrieve, but all of them are also purchasable through NPC vendors. Regrettably Endless Ages squanders this variety of ways to change up your gameplay. There are no real benefits to riding a vehicle or mount, other than the ability to move more quickly across the environment. Some mounts, in fact, move no quicker than the standard avatar does running. Shapeshifting is also a let-down. Essentially you are given the opportunity to kill enemies and players in a different form. Other than a natural weapon and with some creatures the ability to fly, other forms do not give substantial bonuses.

Considering the important role that PvE plays for the newbie player, the monster designs in Endless Ages are repetitive and fairly boring. One of the first creatures you will encounter resembles a giant blue pill bug. Endless Ages also falls into the charming trend of re-using monster models, simply changing the color to indicate that it is a different creature. A blue pill bug is not substantially different than a purple pill bug, and doesn't make for very good storytelling inside the game.

Sound & Music

Gameplay & Interface

One of the most frustrating decisions made by the developers is the camera control from 3rd person view. When set into 3rd person view, your mouselook works as it does in 1st person view, tilting and angling your character to look around the game world. However in 3rd person view you are not looking through the eyes of your character and are thus treated to a view of your character bending over backwards in the middle of the screen. I am inclined to chalk this extremely poor choice up to Avaria's inexperience in the realm of game design, but this particular flaw in the game is fairly inexcusable. Your character should never look foolish unless the player desires it. Self-chiropractic examination is not a feature that players are clamoring for in their games.

Another frustrating issue plaguing Endless Ages is a technical one: game stability. Endless Ages is very unstable. The client crashed several times while I was doing this review, and on many occasions I would lose my connection to the "Atlanta Server" that Avaria offers. Were this a new game I would be more forgiving, but Endless Ages has been a live environment since July of 2002. More than a year should be sufficient time to ensure that random connection loss is not a common problem.

The inventory system, store system, and crafting all are simple text box interfaces, with small uninformative images next to items. Instead of being able to describe the system as unadorned and easy to use, I found the simplicity sparse and the menu systems non-intuitive to use. The inventory system in particular is annoying, as you are given the simple options to "Arm", "Disarm", and "Use" items that you own. There are extremely odd choices made to what these buttons mean, and the way in which each of them are used changes irrelevantly depending on circumstance. For example, you do not use a jetpack, you arm it before using it. NPC interaction is also remarkably over-simplified. When you engage in conversation with an NPC (using yet another function key), each conversation branch has two options. Each NPC has two notations for each part of quests, the "start" entry, and the "end" entry. You select "Klodon(1)" to start the Klodon quest and "Klodon(2)" to end the Klodon quest by turning in the requested items.

Combat

Available to you for combat are a plethora of guns and swords. Your options beyond these two ends of the spectrum are limited, and the fact that there are only two combat skills (melee and ranged) reflects this. While the game is a First-Person shooter, people with slowing reflexes will be glad to know that EA is not a "twitch" game like Unreal Tournament or Quake 3. In fact, combat in Endless Ages is remarkably slow for a FPS.

Character Advancement

There are only a very few skills and abilities to learn, and there is almost no place for a character who is not interested in a combat role. There are crafting skills in the game, and like the player attributes each concentrates on Melee Attacks, Ranged Attacks, or Magic. The game suggests creating your own weapons and items, and selling them in a shop in your house. The player population is so low, however, that it is unlikely that any player-run shop would be very successful.

The most frustrating part of Character Advancement is questing. Questing is my personal favorite portion of Massively Multiplayer games, and I went out of my mind for the first few days that I played the game trying to find a quest appropriate to a newbie character. Only after I had scoured the entirety of the beginning city and had consulted the official forums did I realize that I had to talk to a character on the very top floor of the starting city, in a nightclub tucked away in the far corner of the level. The characters you speak with upon entering the game give you no indication of where to go or who to speak to so that you can begin your newbie quest.

As I mentioned when talking about Interfaces, the quests are also remarkably simple. Some quests are not only simple, they are conceptually poor ideas. There are a series of quests that have you perform guard duties in some of the newbie wilderness areas. I personally think the idea of this sort of quest is interesting, but in practice there is no reason for this quest in Endless Ages. You will never repel any sort of attack or protect other players from threats. In effect, you are being paid to stand out in the wilderness for hours at a time. Let me repeat: The requirement of the quest is that you stand in one place for a long time, and do nothing. In a game. That you pay for.

Community (PvP and Guilds)

The players that I did encounter seemed fairly friendly, and were very open to speaking with a new player and showing him the ropes. In fact, the tenor of the interactions that I had in Endless Ages seemed fairly desperate. I was told that at one point the game used to have many more players, but a poor choice on the part of the developers caused many of the most powerful players to quit in disgust. The interest in new blood means that the entry barrier for guild admission is very low. Folks are very interested in having new people to talk to, and extending an invitation to your guild to a new player is a matter of course in Endless Ages.

PvP combat, of course, plays an important role. In fact, from what I could see PvP is all there is to do beyond a certain point in character advancement. PvE is not sufficiently well developed to hold the interest of long time players, and with some determination you could go through every bit of content that the game has to offer in the span of a month. Some of the players that I spoke to have been playing the game for over a year now. Almost entirely, the game has devolved into an extremely elaborate frag-fest. For the most part, folks seem to eschew the sorts of high level activities you see in other more traditional MMOGs, such as hard-core roleplaying or raids (not that there is raid content in this game).

Conclusion

Avaria's first step into the realm of Massively Multiplayer games leaves something to be desired. I respect the fact that for their first outing they've decided to push the boundaries of the genre and try something new. However, the execution of this RPG/FPS hybrid would require significant enhancements in user interface, quest content, and chat utilities to call Endless Ages a success.