To my own amazement, the Dissidia demo hit PlayStation Network at the end of June, and somehow missed my attention for almost two weeks (that’s what finally starting Mass Effect does to you). Needless to say, the moment my eyes found the PSP demo available my bandwidth immediately went towards downloading 76 megabytes of glorious fan service.

While Dissidia has been available in Japan for a while now, and others, including Gamer Limit’s own Christoper Matulich and Chris Carter, have demoed the game via E3 and other similar conventions, this demo was my first hands-on experience with the game. Find out more about Dissidia after the jump.

The idea of a Final Fantasy mash-up fighter has been something myself, along with many others, have been dreaming of for quite some time given the great unique characters the series has spawned. However, I was still hesitant to fully embrace Dissidia leading up to the demo since I still had distant echoes of Ehrgeiz etched into my gamer soul back on the PS1.

I need to get this out of the way: Dissidia will very likely go down as one of the absolute best PSP titles ever. With the total hours I’ve put into the Dissidia demo I could have beaten God of War: Chains of Olympus twice and put a very sizeable dent into Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. My skepticism went out the window after a half hour with the game, and thus, my interest level for this game propelled from want to need.

Dissidia’s demo only lets you play through arcade mode on either normal or hard difficulty. None of the leveling up features or story mode features that accompany the final game are present. The demo lets you play as five characters (four heroes, one villain) listed below:

• Onion Knight (Final Fantasy III)
• Cecil (Final Fantasy IV)
• Terra (Final Fantasy VI)
• Cloud (Final Fantasy VII)
• Sephiroth (Final Fantasy VII)

The arcade mode puts you up against a series of foes in one-on-one fights, like a typical arcade mode found in a fighting game. Stats and abilities are preset for every character, both on normal and hard mode, so the fights are even for the demo. Your chosen foes in each battle consist of other characters in the game (Squall, Garland, etc.). I logged most of my time playing as Sephiroth & Cloud, since Final Fantasy VII is my personal favorite of the series. However, I did give every character a couple of sessions on arcade mode to get a feel for them.

Each character I fought as, and against, seemed respectably different from the others giving a nice taste of variety and style required to make each fighter effective. Cloud, for example, is a sword fighter with a great deal of power but has a bit of a build-up before each attack, making him a close range fighter who requires a lot of precision and good timing. Terra, on the other hand, uses a lot of spells and ranged attacks while having a sword as a close ranged backup, and thus, distance must be used to make her effective. Then there’s Kefka, who seems to fill the Voldo role as the odd chaotic fighter in the game and fights just like his character would: a dirty little bitch.

The demo effectively teaches you the gameplay through a few quick slides that appear during loading screens. In short, square and circle perform your HP and assisting attacks, triangle allows you to run up walls or grind along rails, X jumps, the left shoulder button controls what you’re locked onto, and the right shoulder button lets you block, and can be used along with triangle to perform a dash.

The combat in Dissidia proved to be much deeper than what I was expecting for a PSP fighter. Simply mashing the square button might get you through a battle or two on normal mode, but once you get to the later stages of the demo’s arcade mode, both on normal and hard, you’ll find that your foe will not tolerate one dimensional attacks.

Saying timing is key might seem obvious, given that it’s usually a key factor in any fighter, but precision timing with both attacking and blocking seems even more key in Dissidia. A majority of the attacks in the game seem to have a specific range to them where they are most effective. Thus, being too close or too far away while attempting an attack or spell will result in the enemy countering or avoiding the attack.

Every character’s attack is a combination attack or spell rather then a single jab or attack like a traditional fighter, so using poor or hasty judgment with your attacks will result in a very emphatic punishment. The same can be said about rolling or dodging as well. When everything is rolled together, battles can become quite intense and epic resulting in confrontations you’d expect to find in Advent Children rather than a fighter. Don’t believe me? Go find some Youtube Dissidia replays, like this one, and tell me otherwise.

Dissidia’s visuals are rather impressive given it’s reliance on handheld technology. The style of the game seems reminiscent of a slightly more anime-styled version of Kingdom Hearts. The character models are quite impressive in their levels of detail, and each character’s animations seem to flow nicely from one to another. The arenas themselves seem to be the one potential weak point visually, only because they seem to be a mixed bag of good and bad. Textures on walls seem a tad repeated and some levels look slightly on the bland side, like the Final Fantasy VI level, while others are very impressive, such as the the Final Fantasy X Zanarkand level.

This mixed bag of levels seems to make up for things in regards to their interactivity and surprisingly high amount of destructible objects. Pretty much every wall you see can be scaled with no magic goofy invisible barriers blocking the way, while platforms and pillars seem to be fair game in the destruction market. It makes a fight feel a lot more epic seeing Sephiroth crash through a series of pillars in order to get to Squall instead of flying around them.

One thing I cannot stress any more is how impressed I am with the levels of detail that are put into the game to make each character feel very authentic. Terra fights with the Atma Weapon and not a generic nameless sword. Item and spell windows for each character resemble the style that was used in their respective game. Each character/level seems to be accompanied by various themes from each respective game (like FFX’s battle theme and Zanarkand theme), and Sephiroth’s Hell’s Gate attack is the same stab that slew poor Aeris.

Dissidia appears to be filled with things, both little and large, regarding each character that can make die-hard fans of their respective game squeal with childish delight, and I can only imagine how much more the full game will have. It seems SquareEnix might have their finger on the pulse of the die-hard audience and are delivering what the people want in terms of authenticity.

If you have a PSP and want a good game, I’d highly recommend picking up Dissidia, or at the very least, give the demo a ride around the block. If you’re a die-hard Final Fantasy fan, this game should be a day-one purchase for you, and if you don’t own a PSP, this game should really make you consider buying one. Needless to say, August 25th is really going to be a brutal day for me as both Arkham Asylum and Dissidia hit the shelves simultaneously.

No doubt one of the most anticipated first person shooters of this year has to be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the first title in the modern-era Call of Duty offshoot was by many considered Game of the Year and a later release “Game of the Year Edition” for all right and reason verified that. Modern Warfare featured a campaign that was jaw-dropping and epic, and it’s multiplayer was so addicting that it pushed the Halo 3 juggernaut out of the number 1 spot on Xbox Live’s activity charts.

Nobody can deny the success of the first game, however it had its flaws just like any other title and there are a lot of things still left unchecked that Modern Warfare 2 can modify. This is where I come in and explain what should be changed to avoid similar flaws. More after the jump.

As a prologue to this editorial, anybody who follows my normal writing and blogs will know that I tend to do a few of these “Here’s what should be done to improve _____ game”. So before I continue on let me explain why I fancy making such suggestions; first, a lot of the things I suggest are well thought out and usually carry reflections of similar feelings I’ve seen throughout the gaming community. I try to not make rash statements without at least finding foundation in what I think. Secondly, I tend like my ideas a lot and swear to God that the Dreamcast would have gone down as the most successful console in history had Sega listened to me!

Now while a lot of people might gawk at the idea of modifying things citing “if it aint broke don’t fix it” I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I don’t want Modern Warfare 2 to simply feel like an expansion pack for the original game. I don’t think anybody wants to see the fanbase become split and protest the game by complaining about it being a little too similar to the original, similar to what happened with fans when they saw how very similar Resident Evil 5 was to Resident Evil 4. Modern Warfare 2 should trump the original in every way and make the game feel essentially obsolete, not feel more like Modern Warfare v1.5. In order to prevent this from happening a few things really need to be changed in order to keep the experience fresh and new for gamers when it comes to this highly anticipated sequel.

Fix martyrdom

As arguably the most annoying thing in COD4, the martyrdom perk needs some major tweaking in order to prevent people from complaining any further about it. You’ll note how I said tweaked, not removed like others would like. Martyrdom was still the best go-to perk for eliminating those pesky campers who sat around a tight corner spraying at anything in site (you know those people, those people who can aim in one spot and think they have “skill”). Overall there are two things about this perk that could be very easily modified to make it balanced.

1. The first thing would be to increase the fuse of the martyrdom grenade, make it last a second or two longer so any enemy who’s not in a prone position can easily get away from the grenade. In short, make the fuse last so long that if the martyrdom grenade kills you then you’re simply an idiot for standing there that long.

2. The martyrdom grenade should count as one of the two grenades a player normally carries with them, this way if a player runs out of grenades they won’t magically get a third grenade upon death. This would also help tone down at least a small fraction of the grenade spamming commonly complained about in COD4 and World at War.

Choose the gun you want… for a price

Possibly the one true frustrating thing, at least for me, in Modern Warfare was the grind required to get some of the guns I enjoyed. I had to wait way too long to get my precious Barrett .50 Cal and friends also had to wait various amounts of time in order to get their favorite gun of choice. This also, in my opinion, hampered the game play a little bit as the game nearly forced you to use guns you didn’t want to use in order to speed up the leveling process. A little flexibility in regards to weapon unlocking wouldn’t hurt at all and would allow players to play the game their own way a lot faster.

A good weapon unlock system that could be used for Modern Warfare 2 could be a kind of level-up-and-purchase system. For example; if you rank up once in a match you are then given 1 point that you can use towards unlocking a weapon. Each gun at this point would then be given a price tag (ex: Barret .50 Cal = 7 Points) and early or weaker weapons would be cheaper then your high quality power weapons you’d get in the 50+ level range.

So while you can in theory get the super awesome gun you like the most in the game early on, you’d have to level up a certain amount of times to get it meaning you’d have to muscle through a few levels with a weaker gun a little longer then you would normally in order to attain a much grander prize. Meanwhile weapon add-on’s like scopes, bayonets, and other such items would retain the same system as in previous games meaning you’d have to use the gun to get the perks of it.

How about you not be the Juggernaut, bitch?

Juggernaut inherently was a broken perk to begin with in COD4 because a player needed to have two perks to negate a juggernaut with balanced effectiveness. First you obviously needed Stopping Power in order to lessen the ammo required to take him down. Secondly, you needed to have Sonic Boom in order to make grenades effective against a juggernaut as well.

A player basically had to have an entire class dedicated to just taking out a juggernaut, and if you’re a sniper who uses something other then Stopping Power (ie: Overkill) then you’re essentially useless against one even with a .50 cal sniper rifle. Juggernaut needs to be modified into a less noticeable health gain, simple as that. Just lessen the amount of extra health a juggernaut gets so that players don’t need to unload entire clips at them to score a kill, and so that point blank shotgun blasts or other powerful impacts like high end sniper rifles or RPG’s take him down with little effort.

Make indicators more noticeable

This is a very short and too the point fix. Make the grenade indicators and other points-of-interest stand out like a sore thumb on the heads up display. During moments of high intensity combat were there is dirt and debris flying all around you the standard white indicator tends to get obscured by everything going on around you, not to mention a brightly lit environment naturally obscures said indicator. Just simply do something to make points-of-interest stand out more, like put a bright flashing neon sign that says “EAT AT JOES” over them.

Make last stand a surprise tactic

Last Stand on it’s own is still a pretty effective perk, however its usefulness is negated by the game removing the element of surprise from it. In the campaign’s finale, you go into Last Stand mode and catch the bad guy by surprise to win the day. In multiplayer however the perk doesn’t carry the same element of surprise.

When a gamer finds an enemy they traditionally don’t stop shooting until they see the kill confirmation pop up on their screen, a +10 in the case of Modern Warfare, and thus they’ll keep unloading their clip onto a baddie even as they go into Last Stand mode. This, as you can obviously see, takes away the main purpose of Last Stand.

A very easy simple fix would be to give the attacker his points simply for dropping the enemy, putting him into Last Stand, and not for the kill itself. This way if the player see’s the confirmed “kill” on their screen they’ll more then likely try to move on not knowing that their prey is in fact loading his pistol for his final salvo, providing the attacker with one hell of a “WTF” moment a few seconds later.

This fix would dual benefit the game; Last Stand would have that surprise factor again, and players who send a person into Last Stand mode wouldn’t get their kill stolen by another person who takes out the player a half second later after all the dirty work is done. All in all, the main attacker gets his points and the Last Stander gets his chance at revenge.

Grenade spam

This is a given, everybody hated the grenade spamming in Call of Duty 4. Every game on Shipment would start with the initial couple second sprint followed by the obligatory blind grenade throw over a few obstacles to score a cheap kill. In fact, pretty much every game started out with a blind grenade throw for a cheap kill.

he grenades themselves in the game aren’t the problem, the problem is that everyone always has grenades and if they have them then they’re going to use them. Need a good way to lessen the grenade spamming? How about grenades become a perk? I like the idea of needing to sacrifice extra ammo or claymores in order to become Sir Spams A Lot. The grenade spamming from the last few Call of Duty games has, in my eyes, shown us that grenades should be a privilege and not a right.

Give me something for prestige

Prestige mode, both in Modern Warfare and World at War, really functioned as nothing short of an internet-penis designed to flaunt how much free time you have and nothing more. Besides some gloating, there’s really no reason to use this mode unless you are just that bored. Why not give some kind of option for the player when it comes to prestige? If a player is basically going to reduce himself back down to a grunt again, why not let him keep one of his guns or something? My suggestion for spicing up Prestige Mode is to make it a 3-choice option.

Choice 1: You reduce yourself back to complete nothingness; no guns, no perks, no achievements. An option identical to what the current Prestige Mode is.

Choice 2: You get to keep all of your unlocked weapons but lose everything else, including peripheral weapon items. The downside to this is that your player achievements are not cleared out upon doing this prestige, meaning you don’t get any of those nice 500 or 1000 point bonuses along your way back to the top nor will you get any bonuses when you meet the criteria required for regaining a weapon peripheral.

Choice 3: You get to keep one gun, peripheral items and all, and everything else is reduced to its original starting point. The downside being is that all of the achievements linked to that one gun are kept, meaning you won’t get any benefit from using that one gun. Along with that, keeping this one gun after your prestige would result in that gun being swapped out for another gun of that class. Meaning if you decided to keep your M4 Carbine, the M16 would take the place of the M4 in the tree of un-lockable weapons.

There’s only other complaint about Prestige Mode in its current format is that if I want to show the game to a few of my friends I can’t exactly show them much that is really cool if I’ve recently done Prestige Mode. A temporary “Anti Prestige” option would be nice, in that it reverts you back to your previous level 55/65 state with everything you previously had unlocked back at your disposal. The drawback option for this would be that you couldn’t earn any level up points or anything in this mode, meaning anything you would do while in this reverted state would not effect your current Prestige Mode.

Needs more nazi zombies

Nazi Zombie mode simply needs to be in Modern Warfare 2. It was almost without question the coolest thing to come out of World At War and remains one of the more popular multiplayer options in the entire franchise. If this mode doesn’t return in Modern Warfare 2 I will be beyond disappointed. Obviously the survival mode doesn’t necessarily need to be Nazi Zombies again, but at the same time why not just keep it Nazi Zombies? Sure, Modern Warfare 2 is set in the modern times, World War 2 was certainly a good while ago, and Nazi’s sure wouldn’t fit in – but zombies didn’t exactly fit in World At War either did they?

Keep them Nazi Zombies and don’t even bother trying to make them Terrorist Zombies or anything like that, simply because modernizing the zombie mode might tick off a few people (and seriously, everybody hates Nazis). Keep some of the goodies like the random weapon crate and the soda bottles that give you perks, and perhaps just modify it a little so the player can customize their guns a little more as if it were the standard multiplayer mode.

There you have it, these tweeks along with a few of the other already announced new features are all that should be needed to make Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 the most awesome first person shooter multiplayer experience to date. Not much was wrong with the original Call of Duty 4, however a continued strive for perfection will result in something memorable for long after this console generation is over.

IGN put up a respectable article the other day regarding things they’d like to see in SquareEnix’s Kingdom Hearts 3. The article was detailed about the things they would like to see, however I honestly felt that there were more points that could have been touched on.

After a little bit of reminiscing about my past experiences with the Kingdom Hearts franchise my fingers instantly went to my keyboard and I started assembling my thoughts on what would be essential for making Kingdom Hearts 3 an epic threequel, once they finally stop putting far too many resources into Final Fantasy XIII.

Allow me to quickly state my views of the first two Kingdom Hearts titles, so that you guys can grasp my view of things a little bit before continuing on. Most people consider the first Kingdom Hearts game to be the better of the two console titles, while I, however, found Kingdom Hearts 2 to be more fun, but it is a noticeably easier game. The story in the sequel seemed to flow much better than the predecessor, and everything had a slightly more epic feel to it.

In my personal opinion, I think that there were may have been a few less Disney executives breathing down the necks of SquareEnix since Disney knew Kingdom Hearts could be a very profitable franchise, allowing for a little more breathing room to integrate newer characters and not lean heavily on  pre-manufactured Disney villains. However, both Kingdom Hearts games still leave room for improvement, which need to be addressed by the third game to avoid the risk of becoming stale.

No More Roxas

While I said I found Kingdom Hearts 2 to be the more fun game of the two, the prologue featuring Roxas and his friends made me nearly quit the game. Roxas’ segments in KH2 were all far too long, and the characters revolving around him, for the most part, were simply annoying; I literally begged to have Donald and Goofy back. If Roxas or his pals return in any sense for a third game, it needs to be strictly a cameo appearance and nothing more then that, please just keep the player in Sora’s shoes.

Fully Integrate Final Fantasy

Squall, Cloud, and the others have been cameo characters in pretty much anything related to Kingdom Hearts since its birth (yes, I called him Squall by the way). While the Final Fantasy cast was utilized a whole lot more in the sequel, I think the half-assing needs to stop with them, and I think it’s about time that Sora gets to explore some actual Final Fantasy worlds. Let’s see, Sora, Donald, and Goofy fight Heartless in the slums of Midgar, and some of FF8’s gardens are taken over by Nobodies. In short, if you’re going to have these characters in your game, then do it right.

They lightly hint at some of the Final Fantasy storylines in the games, (Cloud versus Sephiroth, little tidbits of stuff during the first games, end credits, etc) so why not flesh everything out a little, shine some light on the classic stories, and reinvigorate a little interest in some of the older Final Fantasy worlds at the same time. I’m sick of amalgamation worlds that simply exist as a fan-service melting pot for some rather legendary characters.

More Depth with Combat

Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 weren’t exactly challenging games, combat was pretty much simply “hit X to win and use a spell here and there”. Both games only became challenging when you went out of your way to look for a challenge, like with the two Sephiroth battles and other optional encounters. Running through the game’s storyline is a rather easy experience that makes even Twilight Princess seem like a challenge.

The combat system in the series needs an extra level or two of depth, and enemies that force you to use said combative tactics. Instead of hitting X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X and X to do a combo, how about something like X-Square-Circle-X-Triangle-Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right, or something that actually brings in a risk of punishment for making an error?

Add some variant physical attacks to the mix that require the use of more than one face button, and actually let the user build some of their own combos? I think that would be kind of fun; I like not watching the same combo over and over for a full game.

When you strip away the graphical differences of Kingdom Hearts and Devil May Cry the guts of their respective combat systems aren’t all that different. They both require you to upgrade things in order to improve your abilities (spells/abilities in KH and styles in DMC), you have melee, ranged attacks, (spells-KH / guns-DMC) potions, and other miscellaneous items to assist you along the way.

The only differences being that Devil May Cry’s combat is noticeably faster and has a deeper-than-expected combo system. While I’m not saying Sora suddenly needs to become Dante, I’m saying that the combat in the game needs to be cranked up a little, and Kingdom Hearts needs to make the next evolution in its fighting engine in order to keep fans of the series challenged instead of bored, because in all honesty, if I wanted to hit one button for a good portion of the game, then I’d load up Heaven or Hell mode in Devil May Cry 3 and simply mash the gun button.

Why Just Final Fantasy?

As kind of a continuation of the earlier Final Fantasy section, why not integrate further SquareEnix properties into the Kingdom Hearts Universe? Since this universe seems to be one giant amalgamation universe, it would seem to be the next logical step to include more properties. How about the Gummi Ship segments instead become more EinhanderDragon Quest fans might like to see cameos by their favorite characters and see them fight alongside Sora. like?

Share some long deserved love for Secret of Mana. Or why not integrate the Chrono Trigger world into the mix since SquareEnix is so intent on stopping fans from doing anything with the property… not to mention imagine the possible coolness of time-traveling with Crono into the past to recreate epic moments from the first two Kingdom Hearts games. While I absolutely love seeing more of my Final Fantasy VII characters as much as possible, I won’t deny that more love needs to be given out overall.

Allow More Diverse Parties

This one always made me scratch my head in the first two games. If you’re going to allow the player to put a different party member in place for Goofy or Donald, why restrict it to one world? And if you know that you’re going to lose Simba after you’re done with the Pride Rock world, is there even a point to leveling him up? The various characters who can join your party should be able to move with you from world to world on your quest and not be chained to their respective levels. If Aladdin knows the whole universe is at stake, would he really stay behind to take care of Agrabah?

Yes, I’m aware that one of the key story elements revolves around Mickey assigning Donald and Goofy to watch over Sora and the keyblade, but that doesn’t mean others can’t join in on the fun! I think I speak for everyone when I say I’d like to have the option of making my party consist of Sora, Cloud, and The Beast. I again fall back on saying that more variety will keep the franchise fresh. If I have to hear “Gawrsh Sora!” one more time, I swear The Heartless will be the least of Disney’s problems.

Release Final Mix in America or don’t do it at all!

The ultimate thing that pisses me off about the Kingdom Hearts franchise, and SquareEnix and the Japanese game developers in general, is that North America tends to constantly get screwed when it comes to content of Japanese origin, whether it be special edition consoles, like the Final Fantasy 7 PS3, or the substationally deeper amount of classic titles on Japanese PSN Store (although this is thankfully changing).

I’m not sure if it’s because they think post-release special editions won’t sell well overseas, but we just never seem to get many director’s cuts or anything that would be aimed at hardcore fans of the franchise, and don’t think I’m excluding you too Euro pals because I know you guys are getting screwed too.  You guys seem to be missing out on a lot of the stuff I mentioned before as well.

Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix and Kingdom Hearts 2: Final Mix were Japan only releases of the games that are viewed as the ‘complete’ versions of each title. There was extra content, keyblades, and all sorts of other little goodies that make me ache when I know I can’t get them in my version of the game.

Hell, the Final Mix of the first game even foreshadows the arrival of Organization XIII and introduces a side boss who is actually the final boss of Kingdom Hearts 2, and even fights in the same style in both games with the near exact same musical score. SquareEnix, if you’re going to pull another one of these special edition re-releases then do it right and let everyone enjoy it or don’t do it at all. And if you’re not going to do it at all, go and finally remake Final Fantasy VII for the love of God.

With all of the build up to E3, Sony did try to sneak the downfall of The Matrix Online past us. As an avid fan of The Matrix Trilogy and a long time player of MxO myself, the news that MxO was going to be unplugged definitely served as a downer for me.

I was made aware of the sad news when the following email appeared in my Inbox.

RE: IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE MATRIX ONLINE – THE MATRIX ONLINE SERVICE WILL END ON JULY 31, 2009

Dear MxO Subscriber,

We want to inform you that on June 1, 2009, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) will suspend commercial services of THE MATRIX ONLINE (MxO). However, SOE will continue to operate the game service and players will still be able to play MxO through July 31, 2009. As of June 1, 2009, SOE will no longer offer customer support or provide updates for MxO, and active subscribers with accounts in good standing will not be billed after that date. MxO subscribers who have prepaid subscription time that extends their subscription period past June 1, 2009 will receive a pro-rated refund for any such pre-paid excess subscription payments*.

Such refunds are expected to be issued by October 1, 2009. We welcome those active MxO subscribers in good standing to play one or all of the following SOE massively-multiplayer online PC games at full paid subscriber status at no cost between June 1, 2009 and July 31, 2009 (subject to the terms and conditions described below) using the same Station Account you use to subscribe to MxO**: Free Realms™, EverQuest®, EverQuest® II, and Star Wars Galaxies™.

To access and download the game software for EverQuest, EverQuest II, or Star Wars Galaxies, begin by downloading Station Launcher here for free: http://launcher.station.sony.com/. To initiate the download of Station Launcher simply click on the “DOWNLOAD BETA” button. Once the download is complete, Station Launcher will serve as your one stop shop for access to all the identified online games except Free Realms, which can be found at www.freerealms.com.

We value having you in our player community and hope that you will find a new home in one of these other SOE games during this trial period. During the last two weeks that MxO will be available, we intend to initiate a world-ending event and invite our active MxO subscribers with accounts in good standing to participate in bringing Mega City down together.

We will go out with the same level of dramatic in-game event that has kept this game exciting over the years. Get ready to jack in and become part of the final chapter of the story!

We appreciate your loyalty and commitment and look forward to seeing you in another SOE game.

Sincerely,
Sony Online Entertainment

The email was sent the week of Thursday, May 28^th (the day I received my notification). I personally was a little ticked at SOE for giving such little notice about this, a whole 3 days, but I was at least relieved to see that people would have until July 31^st to truly say goodbye to The Matrix. This would probably be a bigger gaming news story if SOE didn’t sneak it out knowing the shadow of E3 would loom over this sad information and go mostly unnoticed.

Along with the two months of final gameplay it appears that there will also be a goodbye event put together by the remaining staff, according to Daniel “Walrus” Myers quote from the Gamer Limit’s news article on the same topic.

The team will also be whipping up an end-of-the-world event. It won’t be quite the same as having over 100 developers in the game as Agents like when we ended beta, but we have 4 years of tricks up our sleeve. It’ll be a chance to revisit all the things that make MxO the memorable experience it is. And how could we pull the plug without crushing everyone’s RSI just one more time?”

That quote, and subsequent comparison to the MxO Beta finale, got me on a big train of thought about the path MxO took that more than likely lead to its ultimate downfall. Now while MxO lived a pretty healthy 4-year life – longer than I honestly thought it would last – it should have lived a lot longer and a lot healthier, rather than limping through its final year and a half like a poor old dog.

MxO was, and in my opinion still is, the best MMO alternative for people who didn’t want the fantasy style of World of Warcraft / Guild Wars or the space ship filled EVE Online. MxO’s entire world was set in the “present day” with all of the fun gun-fu that the movies had and was the best game instalment of the Matrix universe (MxO never had a “real world” plain of existence outside of some loading screens so everything was set in the Matrix, which was built to resemble the present day). However, key mistakes along the way pretty much doomed MxO from ever realising the full potential it could have had.

– Warner Bros. And Monolith gave up on the title far too fast.

MxO was released March 22, 2005 in North America and Sony acquired rights to the title from Monolith June 17, 2005. After just 4 months of retail sales the founding team apparently gave up on the title. In my opinion, this is way too early to give up on any MMORPG title since these kinds of games usually take a bit to get going, WoW didn’t start off as the juggernaut it is today either. The early switch in ownership I believe was the overall biggest blow to the growth of MxO. The change forced everything else into a slowdown and pretty much had a ripple effect that caused most of the other issues that developed in MxO.

– Removing the main characters of the movies.

You can’t really bring back Trinity, Agent Smith, and Neo into the storyline since all three of them died in the Matrix Revolutions (although the end of Revolutions and the opening storyline cutscene of MxO strongly hinted that Neo survived) but there was a great remaining cast of characters in the Matrix Universe that progressively, and with seemingly little fanfare, got phased out of the storyline in favor of new characters that players weren’t familiar with and couldn’t relate to.

• Morpheus, a normal human who’s fought Agents hand to hand and lived to tell about it, was gunned down in a back alley and put up seemingly no resistance. Although Morpheus’ apparently survived the attack, his ability to enter the Matrix was crippled so for all real purposes he was eliminated (and a few years later replaced with a program that was a clone of Morpheus).

• Niobe, Morpheus’ on-and-off woman, was injured while hunting down Morpheus’ killer and never really recovered from the physical and emotional losses – so she’s out of the picture.

• Ghost is relegated to being Niobe’s silent sidekick who pretty much “retires” for some bullshit spiritual reason.

• The Kid (yes, the annoying “Neo, I believe” character from the sequels) becomes the leader of an entire Zion sub faction called “E Pluribus Neo” before vanishing for no true reason and proceeds to do jack squat.

• The Merovingian and The Architect really did little during the overall arc of MxO. They only seemed to show up to simply move storylines along and provide some lip service for the game. They don’t even really seem to be in control of their respective factions (Exiles and Machines) but rather figurehead leaders, since players don’t directly report to either of these characters and those direct reports always seemed to have their own agendas and not that of these two big wigs.

• Morpheus’ operator, Link, fulfills the role of tutorial guide and then disappears and is never heard from again.

• Seti, the “I made a rainbow for Neo!” girl from Revolutions gets abducted by some rebel programs and not much happens to her beyond that.

• Seraph takes a similar role as Ghost, becoming the sidekick bodyguard to The Oracle (although it could be argued that’s all his role was in the films anyway). After Seti is captured by some rebel Machine programs, Seraph goes to save her and ends up falling in some sort of corrupted pool of Matrix code. When he reemerges from it he’s acting all wonky and different, and when he comes to he just kind of vanishes.

• The Oracle just kind of sits around letting everything go by, pushing along other characters storylines as necessary, until she was ultimately killed off not long ago in the game’s storyline. That’s right… The Oracle, the character who pretty much created ‘The One’ anomaly and pushed some of the biggest chunks of storyline, was killed off.

I honestly thought the writers must have absolutely hated the remaining cast of The Matrix Trilogy or something, because they constantly seemed to go out of their way to phase out existing characters in favor of newer ones. The cast overall basically made me, as a player, feel distant from the main storyline and made the entire game feel like a Matrix side story instead of the continuation it was meant to be.

– General lack of effort and loss of Live Event/LESIG teams.

When MxO first launched there was an entire team dedicated to playing the game as Agents and other key characters as a means to further in-game events and directly interact with players, giving players the feeling that they truly were making a difference. After the SOE buyout of the game the LESIG team was reduced to playing minor characters before eventually being phased out and replaced with a Live Event Team (LET) comprised purely of volunteers.

Along with the LESIG changes that took place, the use of full-motion-video cutscenes at the start of every new chapter and sub-chapter of the game was cut off shortly there after. FMVs were replaced with storyboard like black and white cutscenes, like the ones in Max Payne 2 or inFAMOUS except not as good. SOE’s explanation was that the Matrix movies were all drawn up using a nearly identical method before their actual filming. Sony… its called storyboarding and lots of movies use it, and all movies actually film things instead of just releasing the storyboard.

– Too much politics and not enough cyberpunk.

The first movie was pretty cut and dry; Man versus Machines in a virtual world that had a modern and cyberpunk feel to it. Basically if you could make the movie Hackers anything better than the shitfest it was, you’d get The Matrix. Okay so the sequels added a 3^rd faction to the deal in the form of the Merovingian’s exiles, big whoop it made sense. All three of these groups pretty much hated the others and wanted control, and there was the whole Man versus Machine war still going on.

The storyline in MxO pretty much turned everything into a pseudo political debate. Take the Merovingian’s speech about causality and over think it way too much and that’s what the game’s story kind of delved into. Humans can’t do ‘Thing A’ because ‘Thing A’ will cause the machines to do ‘Things B and C’ which would break The Truce and cause a giant shitstorm resulting in the exiles doing ‘Thing D’ and having ‘Things E-Q’ basically ruin everything.

All of this leads me to ask, what happened to “They got Morpheus so lets get all of the guns, shoot all the dudes, blow up their place, and go back to the ship for lunch”? I guess before Neo’s Truce and Matrix Revolutions the Matrix Universe was pretty much the wild west, and the post Truce universe turned everything into C-Span.

– You could never be an equal to a storyline character.

I remember one of the big things about MxO’s add campaign being the ability to interact and fight alongside, or against, characters from the movie trilogy. Well, this would have been all fine and dandy if it wasn’t for the fact that the main story characters were allowed to exceed the maximum level cap of the game.

Really, how am I supposed to stand toe to toe with Morpheus when I can only be a level 50 and he can be up into the mid 60′s with his level? The only people I think should have been allowed to exceed this cap were Agents and Neo.

– Stupid. And I mean stupid. Storyline decisions.

This is kind of an amalgamation of the political mumbo and character jumbo, but the storyline writers for MxO quite honestly thought up of some stupid shit. One instance was when an operative found some weird chemical compound in the Matrix that gave people crazy green eyes and new powers. Ultimately this storyline resulted in one character having laser eyes – yes, fucking laser eyes, I’m talking full out Cyclops optic blast stuff or Superman’s heat vision.

This stuff will be perfectly fine once DC Universe Online ships, but not in the goddamn Matrix. Or another story where apparently the core of the Zion organization somehow managed to build an entire second city of Zion deep inside the earth without the Machines ever knowing, oh and the city was rigged with enough EMP charges to hold off a machine offensive… um, why didn’t they just rig said charges around their original city and just correct a few of the design flaws with the original Zion?

– SOE’s takeover and other not really relevant changes.

I said it earlier, Sony’s takeover of the game slowed down things in general for MxO. But around the same time as the SOE takeover of the game, a lot of people were discovering that the then current combat system was rather flawed and needed tweaking. Instead of just fixing what was broken and adding to that, Sony’s team felt it was necessary to implement a completely friggin new combat system in the game (which looked oddly reminiscent of the Star Wars Galaxies system) which took time away from game and live event maintenance – again bringing MxO to a crawl. In short, they spent way too much time on the Combat Revision 2.0 when they should have just been fixing the original system. Instead of fixing a chair with one broken leg, they pretty much said “fuck it” and bought a brand new chair.

I will provide a eulogy for the end of the games run. The Matrix Online, my personal favorite MMORPG, I bid you adieu and hope that you rest in peace. You were a great investment and you had grand ideas. It’s a shame that luck and intelligent leadership simply could never bounce your way, for if they did you would have been facing a much different destiny than you ultimately have before you now.

MxO, you saw a great path ahead of you and at moments saw glimpses of what you could have become but as Morpheus himself once said, ”You will find out, just as I did, that there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” I will fire up MxO again for those final days, as a fan of the franchise since day one I owe it to myself and to you. I’ve seen how deep the rabbit hole went, and I’m disappointed to know that I must eventually leave Wonderland.

I have dreamed a dream, but now that dream is gone from me. -Morpheus