Can you imagine that Lineage - a Korean MMORPG - has four million registered users? World of Warcraft, a relatively new entrant, has over six and a half million registered users! And all of these registered users are paying a monthly fee playing these games. |
First-person shooters such as Quake, Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike and Warcraft 3 are also immensely popular online multiplayer games, but they are not MMOGs. Up to recently, these games were played only on the computer. |
Since these games involve thousands of gamers playing simultaneously with each other in a giant virtual world, they are also called Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). |
The key concept is that each player chooses a single virtual avatar which is at first rather weak (low-level) and starts in some safe basic area of his choice. The current MMORPGs all offer a rich palette of races and locations to start with. Usually, to be able to explore the world, the character must be made stronger, which is typically achieved by killing some kind of virtual monsters repeatedly, at low levels usually alone, later in a group. You can also do "quests" - tasks given to you by an in-game character - for various rewards and with various degrees of difficulty. |
The picture is a bit different with strategy games. Usually they are less frantic and leave much more room for logical thinking (of course, the classic board games like chess or Go also have major online playing facilities nowadays, but they cannot really be called multiplayer games since there is little to none team aspect, it's just one-on-one most of the time). |
In first-person shooter games, the basic principle is simple. Shoot or be shot, kill or be killed. Starting with the original Castle of Wolfenstein and Doom, these games have developed to a level of frightening realism mainly for men living out their ancient predatory and fighting instincts (according to some surveys, there are about 10 times as many male as female players in average FPS games). |
Along with that you had hobbies like cars, bowling, or gardening. The former was more or a less of a chore, the latter the fun stuff you did in your free time, usually together with local friends from the same neighborhood. This was basically the same as a thousand years ago. For a few lucky people the two areas overlapped and they could do the stuff that they liked as their main job. |
Overwhelm stands out for greatly increasing Samurai's abilities as a damage dealer. After that, it seems to be a choice between Ikishoten and Shikikoyo. |
With a Great Katana and proper gear, it takes about 6 hits to exceed TP100. However, with Store TP adding an additional 8 TP, it's possible to reach TP100 in just 5 hits using a polearm. |
For Samurais, who give off more damage from weaponskills than regular attacks, getting the additional benefit from Overwhelm should be considered a priority. However, it only works when attacking with a weaponskill straight-on. You'll need to be careful about where you stand in battle. |
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