Daybreak Games (Formally games under Sony Online Entertainment) have today launched cross platform support on the EU servers of DC Universe Online (DCUO), meaning that players on the Playstation 3 and 4 version of the game will be sharing the game world with PC players. The US servers are also due to merged this week.

The announcement of cross platform play was originally made during DCUO’s 5 year celebration week. Other announcements include DCUO coming to XBox One in Spring 2016, Water as a new Healing powerset (All powersets have DPS trees as well), a 4^th colour pallet for costumes, access to unlock gear or costume styles for alternate characters and new signature characters for Legends PvE and PvP modes based off the recent debut of the “DC Legends of Tomorrow“ TV show on The CW Network.

Ah, the MMO...

A genre seemingly dead, yet somewhat alive; In a coma would probably be the best way to describe it. Why? Well, could do with the standstill and/or the lack of innovation, and the easily accessible multiplayer games out there, such as RUST and ARK of the survival genre. But that innovation thing is the big problem. You see, for those who are living on a rock in the middle of the Indian ocean, World of Warcraft dominates MMOs. While some MMOs started and stayed small time players in the market working hard to keep their niche player base, others just sort disappeared as quick as they existed, almost like bubbles. MMOs and their fans really haven't moved in the past decade and a half. EVE Online and WoW just sorta are the kings; they were early adopters of the MMO genre and people flocked to them, and back then showed new and wonderful things.

But there is a new player here to have a go at recreating the MMO...

Introducing Chronicles of Elyria.

Started as a dream in a bar almost ten years ago by a handful of game developers, the people at SoulBound Studios have poured their time, effort and dosh (roughly a million) into creating the player-run MMO of dreams. Calling the features and mechanics ambitious would be an understatement... unimaginable would be a closer word. Chronicles of Elyria is a MMORPG with a story and economy run by the players. NPCs are simply extras to help mold your characters' ripple on the world of Elyria and push their epic with some engine generated storylines; We'll get to that later.
Here is my understanding of what the game will be like:

SKILLS, LEVELS AND CLASSES

The game lacks an overall level and classes and replaces it with overall skills which umbrella over specific skills;

-Combat: which covers unarmed, one-handed, two-handed, thrown and ranged as well as duel wielding and sneak attacks.
-Survival: which is specifically the skills of surviving out in the wilderness. It covers finding food and water, tracking prey, bandaging wounds and navigation.
-Crafting: the art of turning raw goods into useful items, covers producing meals and drinks, armors and weapons, furniture and fine jewlery.
-Gathering: the skill of being able to procure raw goods from various sources covers identifying and handling organic materials (such as plant or animal based items) as well as inorganic materials (such as ore, stone, metals and gems)
-Deviant: the skills of thievery and stealth. This skill allows pickpocketing, purse cutting, crafting false identities, disguises and forging documents.
-Bardic: the skills and arts of academics and performing. This allows characters to play music for buffs and entertainment, reading forgotten languages on ancient documents, performing forensic actions to hunt down criminals and the art of map making.

These skills are taught by either books, NPCs or other players. Someone who has never done smithing will always fail and must procure some style of training to begin. Once someone has learned basics they will be of Novice level. Continuing learning and grinding of skills will eventually bring them to Apprentice, then Journeyman, Expert, Artisan, and eventually to Legendary if enough dedication is given towards a skill. Specific combinations of skills will create player made classes; perhaps you want to become an explorer and map the world? Survival and Bardic would be your best bet. Or perhaps become an assassin? Deviant and Combat would do the trick. But no matter what, it is for you to decide.

CHARACTER CREATION, SOULS AND PERMADEATH

On the subject of skills, I must talk about those learning it; your character.
From my understanding there are two separate entities when referring to "you"; your soul and your avatar (or character).

Your avatar is the physical embodiment you play as in the world of Elyria. You are born either as a ward of the state or into an actual player family (each of these have their pros and cons). Your character will develop skills, battle scars, physique and a story over your life time. They will eventually die of wound or old age, depending on how physically damaged they are or how many times they have been forced to "Plane Walk" (past KO, before perma death. Similar to WoW were you have to walk to you dead body). The average played life span is between 80 and 120 in game years, and each in game year is 4 IRL days (And each of these days will be a different season). But your character will die, and you can't stop it. When you die, you have the chance to pass on your belongings in a will. Perhaps, if you have a family, it will be your next of kin played by another person or yourself? It's up to you.

Your characters body will die, but your soul will live on. Your soul will have passive skill attributes given to it by default and over the course of multiple lives, affinity (basically karma) and talents; bonuses in specific skills and special abilities such as magic or the ability to soul walk when one pleases. Achievements are things that players do over time that are bound to a soul over the course of lifetimes; Maybe you were once the champion of the arena for a kingdom, maybe you were the master and founder of a very successful guild, or an adventurer who chartered far off lands never seen before; what you achieve is up to you.
Each soul is also given a "destiny" which can be unlocked by doing specific tasks unknown to the player. Once these tasks are completed the player will then be able to follow their destiny, and once completed will have changed the world of Elyria forever in some way. Perhaps it is your destiny to adventure into a deep dark ruin, battle great beasts and retrieve the blade of kings? Or perhaps it is your purpose to FORGE the blade of kings?! You'll never know unless you trigger it. Every soul is also given a soul mate. You don't know who they are, but they share a bond with you like no other soul; their destiny is the same as yours, their talents are identical and their skills are yours if you find them. You won't know who they are unless through pure luck you find them; you can tell if they are near you through some undisclosed mechanic. And if you're forced to plane walk while you're near them you will most certainly be able to find your body with ease and plenty of time. But of course, there is a catch; your soul mate may develop to become your rival through either affinity or politics (such as guilds or kingdoms)

Oh, by the way, there is a weird soul-based subscription system..? Apparently once you perma-death (which is no easy feat) you have to cough up around 30 USD to start a new character? I don't really know, I'd love someone to clear this up for me, but a "Spark of Life" apparently should last as little as 3 months and 3 weeks to as long as a full year, which is good value since that's roughly 7 USD per month if you last as long as the minimum

TRADE, CONTRACTS, CRIME AND "OPCs"

Chronicles of Elyria removes the well known trade system and market houses and instead picks to go with contracts and player based couriers or merchants. Trading is done in two ways; face to face where you simply exchange goods or services to receive goods or services, nice and simple, and there is over trade agreements.
You sign a trade agreement (or contract) with someone when giving them a task or making an order/promise for items with a written document to prove it to them or authorities. Say, for example, you are a mercenary and have been tasked to protect a merchant shipment or cart, and in return you'll be paid. You both sign the document, you do the task and you receive your payment. But what if they want to swindle you? Then you have a document to prove it and can be given a bounty token, which depending on the laws of ye kingdom will allow you to have authorities go after them, to rob their house in compensation or to brutally murder the goy. Or perhaps YOU swindle them? Well they can do the same and go after you for not delivering, and you'll have to either flee or change identities through the use of forgery and disguises. However, what if you want to set someone up? With the skills of forgery you can trick authorities into allowing you to go after the poor bastard and stealing his stuff with a fake document.
And how would you get caught? Well, someone with forensic abilities might be able to identify a fake document, and will have you jailed or executed by authorities for your vile ways; as you should be, criminal scum!

What happens when you go offline? You don't disappear, you become a "Offline Player Character" or OPC. You can "code" your OPC to do specific tasks, such as act as a vendor or guard a specific area. But what happens if you die when offline?..I actually don't know. But it's safe to assume you'll either want to go somewhere safe in the middle of nowhere or be guarded by other characters.

EDIT- OPC deaths while the player is away will begin your Spirit Walk on your next log in. Permanently die after ~30 IRL days if you don't log in

CITIES, BUILDINGS, MAPS, RESOURCES AND RUIN

From my understanding of the game this is how it is; there are finite resources, but items that aren't so easy to replace such as metals can be replaced at a 1:1 ratio via a smelting process. Cities and buildings are also made by the players of CoE in a style that I'd say is similar to Starwars Galaxies and RUST or ARK. But the finite part of environments creates dilemmas and problems; people demolish a forest and don't plant new trees? Well the trees won't be coming back naturally. People manage to flatten an entire mountain? It won't ever be coming back either. The Soulborn engine, an engine that creates the stories, recognizes player developments and other dynamic things, and will work server side and separately to the Unreal Engine, with the ability to recognize new towns and cities through different criteria and account for them. For example, a leader has amassed enough people and resources to start building a town, then a city and eventually a kingdom. The game will start to work around this, marking on a server side map this creation. Cartographers begin creating new maps marking this city with the name of "Derginsaw" and the engine will recognize this and so on. But the city is one day attacked and razed mostly to the ground, and is left forgotten. Eventually cartographers will start not marking this place as a city, or not marking it at all and the engine will eventually turn it into a dungeon of sorts for adventurers to explore for ancient treasures and, more importantly, more old maps which will show the way to other ruins. But let's say Derginsaw was captured by a different faction, and the king wants to rename it to "Krathlanaw"? Well, he'll have to pay a huge amount of cartographers to update their maps with this new name and make it the mainstream name (like Constantinople Istanbul) and eventually the Soulborn engine will recognize this change on the back end. Oh, by the way, maps are created by players, which means people will go out of their way to map new areas, then detail them with different things such as forests and names, and then sell these to people so they can be copied or used for navigation. This hefty job will be most valuable to tacticians, adventurers and anyone who likes knowing where the hell they are. You will also have to rely on sun dials to reliably get the time of day,use a compass to find north and use astronomy to find where you are at night. Players also have a "Sensory" mini map which will show temperature, smells and sounds heard by the character, allowing you to notice finer details impossible with current technology, such as the smell of wood and cooked meat from a nearby camp that you haven't seen yet whilst hunting for bandits.

Farewell, and I hope to see you in the lands of Elyria!

Disclosure: This is not to be seen as a review. This article is only to tell my experience of levelling a character since the 4.0 changes back in October. However since I am in favour in transparency in articles, I have been a long term subscriber of Star Wars: The Old Republic and have spent significantly in the in game store since the game’s release in 2011.

In October of 2015, Bioware released the latest expansion for their Star Wars MMO, The Old Republic titled Knights of the Fallen Empire. The overall game was updated to version 4.0 bringing significant changes in gameplay with the most notable being the consolidation of role specific stats into one mastery stat and offering a new levelling experience by having max level syncs on planets along with the option to only have to complete main class stories and planetary stories to progress in levels.

Having had a server full of max level characters for quite some time now I figured I would create a new character in order to experience these new changes while also replaying old content that I had not played through for some time.

Although I had already gone through the Sith Inquisitor story twice already, both Sorcerer and Assassin, I decided to go for another Sorcerer playthrough specialising in the Lightning DPS tree. I had used this tree before with my first Sorcerer but had since changed it to the Madness DPS as I felt that suited the character concept. Lightning has always been devastatingly fun in SWTOR (Star Wars: The old Republic) so I was still keen to have a high level Lightning specialisation character. I'd been seeing a lot of Darth Sidious while re-watching a lot of Star Wars media at the time, so I went human male and garbed him in dark cloaks as homage (which is more pleasant than saying rip off) to the signature Dark Lord of the Sith.

The voice of the Male Inquisitor had a familiar likeness to Ian Mcdiarmid’s iconic performance as Darth Sidious, so that helped a great deal with the presentation of the character, although disappointingly there is no maniacal cackling to be heard at any point in the game.
Xanthe Elbrick’s Inquisitor has the better range of being delightfully madder than a box full of mad hatters in one moment, to comedic moments of being aloof or bored while everyone else around is panicking during the introduction to a quest.

By default, exploratory missions (side quests) are not highlighted on the game map with the assumption that players are more likely to stick to the main story quests and the main planet quests to get to level 50 and the end of the original story. I instead turned on the option to see all missions and replay moments such as on Dromund Kass, the single Welsh Imperial Officer in all of the Sith Empire concerned about Lord Grathen’s diabolical ergonomic chairs!

As I was progressing through to the halfway point of Chapter 1, it was becoming clear that I was reaching levels well beyond the max level range traditionally associated with each planet. Whereas before if I was in this position I would be receiving diminishing returns in XP rewards to the point of only being rewarded maybe 7 points, with the new level sync system I was still technically at the max level of the planet and therefore, I was receiving the maximum XP rewards.

Taking inspiration of how game worlds operate in Guild Wars 2, players will be set to the max level of each particular world they visit or revisit should they be beyond that level. Their stats will be set to whatever the max stats for that level are expected for each class provided their gear is beyond that level. What players won’t lose however is powers and abilities so for example, a player that is level 50 or more that is brought down to the low 20’s on a planet, still has access to everything they unlocked at level 50.

When I had completed Alderaan, which is the last planet before the end of Chapter 1, I was level 51! Level 50 was the max level when the game originally came out in late 2011 and you would only ever expect to reach that at the end of the main story if not the original elder game content. Have to admit I was somewhat chuffed about that.

"Power........I have an Unlimited amount of it!"

While previous knowledge of the missions I was completing certainly helped in my progression, having access to powers that I wouldn’t have had a chance to use in previous playthoughs was a significant game changer and I was mowing down mobs with next to no difficulty, so I can understand if people would be put off from how easy the game can become. I of course still needed to keep my gear up to date for this to continue. Currency in SWTOR has remained largely unchanged. The Basic, Elite and Ultimate Commendations which served as the main currency for obtaining armour sets or mods have been renamed Common, Glowing and Radiant Crystals but effectively remain the same with Common Crystals dropping regularly in all content and Glowing and Radiant only coming into play at Level 65 elder game.

Initially I keep my gearing up as I had before by purchasing orange grade gear which allowed customisation of stats by buying the individual mods from vendors on the Imperial Fleet between planets and levels. I dropped this tactic once I learnt of the changes to the Heroic missions on each planet. Heroic missions were standard side quest contact to talk to but the missions ether recommended 2 or 4 players to complete the mission with enemy difficulty ramped up depending on whether it was Heroic 2 or 4. With the new expansion all Heroics have been changed to be Heroic 2’s and with a well ranked companion are entirely soloable.

When levelling, Heroic missions will offer lockboxes as rewards which will contain random Blue rated gear (SWTOR keeps to the MMO standard of Green, Blue, Purple for common to rare items) at the level you have reached at the time of unlocking the box. This meant that I could save time re-modding my gear on the fleet as I levelled up and save on common crystals until I needed them to get the entry level 208 rated elder game gear when I reached Level 65. Given that there is usually four Heroic missions per planet at minimum (some have more) I was not short of quality gear as I progressed through the game.

One aspect of levelling my new character that I was pleased to complete was completing most of the Flashpoints in story order, which I was never able to do with any previous characters. Previously Flashpoints (Four player dungeon like missions) were of a set level range and it was very difficult to get a team together as most players would instead be aiming for max level through quicker, regular content. Now all Flashpoint are set to Tactical which means any player between levels 10 to 65 can join and non 65 players will be boosted to that level in order to complete the mission.

For the Flashpoints that have significant ties to the general SWTOR lore they have also added Solo Mode, similar to the Flashpoints added in the last expansion Shadow of Revan, which greatly boosts the player character and offers a second companion to assist in the event. It meant that in later stories my character would reference the events of some of these Flashpoints bringing new dialogue, while minor, that I had never experienced before.

"A man can have anything.....if he is willing to sacrifice everything" - Emperor Valkorion

As I came to the end of the original main story I was only a few levels away from the max 65. It did not take long to reach that as I progressed through Illum which was the original post story planet. It meant that I could now simply play through the expansion stories and not worry about gearing. This seems to be the theme Bioware is going for with its subsequent releases. Bioware has said that the release of the Shadow of Revan expansion was very successful for them and took this as a message that players preferred more story driven content that Bioware made its name from rather than traditional group based MMO missions.

While I like the approach Bioware have taken to focus on story I do miss teaming with friends doing missions while progressing through everyone’s individual stories. While Shadow of Revan still offered group Flashpoints during its story, Knights of the Fallen Empire feels like you are locked away from everyone else in the galaxy until you reach Chapter 9 and have access to Star Fortress Heroics. There are also plenty of players not happy with no new Operations (8-16 player Raids) tied to the new expansion and no signs of any in the immediate future. The streamlining and new accessibility of all the previous Raids has meant that I have given some of them a go and raiding is something I was never really interested in. However I understand other player’s frustration at not getting new content for their preferred playstyle and I hope Bioware deliver something for them in good time.

The expansion stories are certainly serviceable with good moments but are not spectacularly epic although that can be said about Star Wars in general a lot of the time. Still better than the prequel trilogy though! Replay value is somewhat diminished as regardless of class, the story remains the same other than change in a few details based on choices in dialogue and actions, which many have commented is an issue with the game being an MMO as compared to stand alone games like the previous Knight of the Old Republic, the game world does not dramatically change as a result of player choices.

Overall though I continue to enjoy playing SWTOR and I am looking forward to seeing how the new story line progresses. It doesn’t beat City of Heroes (RIP) as my favourite MMO and I still hope for the day to play a massive online Star Wars game that plays more like the ground gun and Lightsabre combat of Jedi Outcast/Academy and the space battles akin to the X-Wing-Tie Fighter series (I’ll accept Rouge Squadron 2 on Gamecube style too), however there is enough in the game that keeps me entertained and scratches that Star Wars itch (Because Episode 7 didn’t!).

With the new levelling system in place I now have options in how I can proceed with a created character. I can take the old slow burn of story plus side quests but come out with a character near max level at the end and enough crystals to get great gear well before taking on elder game content, or breeze through the story quickly and not care about gear and simply pick that up from story mode operations. In either case I am also more likely to be teaming with friends due to the planets level shifting mechanic and boosts in Tactical Flashpoints. Unable to play with friends more than anything has been a major issue for me in SWTOR due to differences in levels between characters. I am happy that this is no longer an issue.

Now if you will excuse me.

"Your arrogance blinds you Prince Arcann......Now you will experience the full power of the Dark Side!"