Tim

Author's details

Name: Tim Dale
Date registered: December 6, 2010

Latest posts

  1. In Which I Discover I’m Not A Gamer At All… — January 23, 2012
  2. The Hunting of Skills… — January 13, 2012
  3. The Statistician’s Tale… — January 7, 2012
  4. Diversions… — December 8, 2011
  5. Liberations… — December 1, 2011

Most commented posts

  1. Resignation or Revelation? — 18 comments
  2. Remembrance… — 11 comments
  3. Redefinitions… — 11 comments
  4. Ergawhatnow? — 10 comments
  5. Return to EVE… — 9 comments

Author's posts listings

Jan
23
2012

In Which I Discover I’m Not A Gamer At All…

Categories:

by

January 23, 2012

Fascinating academia here, complete with Diagrams!

Raph Koster: Narrative in a game is not a mechanic

In which the learned designer thouroughly dismantles what to me had always been a rather opaque medium and lays out the nuts and bolts for all to see. The big coloured shapes help and I think the gist of it is that tripple A games are becoming more and more cinematic experiences laden heavily with blue squares and not nearly enough is being spent on ensuring the black squares are up to par. He then goes on to question whether a square-circle-square experience made up almost entirely of tiny yellow ones, tiny black ones and enourmous and constant blue ones can be rightfully called a ‘game’ at all, in the technical sense. It certainly rings true in my experience and a lot of my more memorable single-player experiences, now I think back on them in these terms, might as well have been me just pushing ‘Next Chapter’ on a DVD remote lots.

An exaggeration of course, but thinking about whether I’d have enjoyed a Mass Effect or Arkham Asylum feature film that didn’t pester me with having to couch behind boxes lots or quicktime some super-psycho into a wall every five minutes just to see what happens next in the story, I think the answer is probably yes. I’m a big PvE player and generally enjoy storyline stuff in MMOs; campaigns, episodes, missions and the like, which is the sort of stuff that doesn’t go down too well with the Sandbox crowd, who rightly believe that in an MMO, other players should be the stories and content. Probably explains my aversion to PvP as well. It all leaves me in an odd place really. I don’t mean to be single handedly destroying the games industry with my fickle purchasing choices, but I really do like a good story well told and forgive way more than I should on the yellow-circle and black-box front. I should probably just go watch more movies instead!

The notes on replayability also ring true and I generally won’t plunge striaght back into these sorts of games for another playthrough until many months or years have passed, once the first-play narrative has been delivered. He doesn’t mention The Old Republic at all in the piece, but it’s not hard to find oneself applying those shapes to the posts and comments one reads about the current big MMO, and the implications they bring. I don’t know, I’ve not played it but do seem to be regarding it as a future purchase in some distant month when I fell like a good story to play through, probably alone. In general though, the whole thing did make me wonder about the Future of Games and I’ve always had a vauge sensation that these things are just costing too much to make and that most of that spiralling excess is going into larger and larger blue squares. I guess gaming has always aspired to be as big as movies; I just wonder if thats necessarily a good thing in the long run. I should probably play more indie games instead!

Perhaps there is room for both sorts of experience. Maybe this is merely a matter of terminology. Lots of back and forth about Themeparks and Sandboxes in the ether lately, quite a lot of it highly charged and this seems a similar distinction. Sandbox fans perrenially cross that studios keep trying to chase the WoW Dream, when I suspect theres probably no real intersection there anyway. Pre-WoW, EQ1′s 300k subscribers was the benchmark and then at it’s hieght WoW showed that 14m was another big number, but I think WoWs big innovation was creating an online single-player game that attracted an entirely different crowd who were never going to like sandboxes anyway. Maybe there was always two seperate industries going on in the same space, confused by an sloppy and casual use of the term ‘MMO’ by all concerned. The success or otherwise of TOR seems to me to have very little to do with EVE Online’s fortunes at the end of the day. A game with small blue squares probably doesn’t need anywhere near the mind boggling amounts of dollars we see on the really high profile Narrative Experiences, so it doesn’t seem to me that games like TOR are stealing anything from potential new sandboxes, which are a different kind of project anyway.

Have I just become lazy? Clearly games with large yellow circles and large black boxes require the player to do a lot more work for their enjoyment, while games with enourmous blue boxes become more passive experiences. It’s entirely possible I’ve become used to being entertained, rather than taking part, and I’d only have myself to blame for it.

Anyway, a fascinating look behind the curtain and quite thought provoking. I’d like to think I probably am a gamer afterall, but with new insights, I’ll have to look carefully at the games I do play and see if any of them are still ‘games’ in the technical sense, and see if I’ve now become irroevocably seduced by the easy life and cinematic spectacle of an entirely different kind of recreational experience. Food for thought!

Tags: , ,

1 comment

Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2012/01/23/in-which-i-discover-im-not-a-gamer-at-all.html

Jan
13
2012

The Hunting of Skills…

Categories:

by

January 13, 2012

I’m very much an MMO tourist. I’ve usually been playing at least two of the things at any given point in the last decade or so and the explorer in me enjoys seeing entirely new games for their own sake. I’m looking forward to Star Trek Online’s upcoming F2P quite a bit, mostly for the personal novelty of it all, more than anything it may or may not be in itself. Whatever else it is, it’s a world I haven’t seen yet. Many, in fact! Not all of these games stick though and in many cases, seeing them once is enough.

My list of more serious games, the ones that I actually take part in rather than just rubberneck through the starter areas, is much smaller, and if I had to pick one to call ‘home’, I suspect it might just be Guild Wars. While most of these serious ones are characterised by distinct multi-month seasons of my interest, and feverish obsessions in many cases, I think Guild Wars has always been just there. Sometimes its in the background with weeks between visits, and sometimes its been two or more sessions in the same day, a patient cycle of interest which never quite goes away entirely. Although I’ve indeed uninstalled now and then, I don’t think I’ve ever consciously hung it up as I have other games.

 

Remarkably, I’ve always had stuff to do in there too. Granted, much of it is repetition, but the unique structure and feel of the various missions and explorable areas leans toward a sport or board game at times; I’ve held Thunderhead Keep and breached the Gate of Madness many times, but each has its quirks and each can be done well, or barely adequately, and there is satisfaction in the former. Perhaps this is what keeps some people doing the same raids over and over again in other MMOs, once the loot potential is exhausted. Many people play the same golf courses over and over too.

The Hall of Monument Calculator (cosmetic rewards in Guild Wars 2 for Guild Wars 1 achievements) is fairly recent and an added incentive, but I suspect I’d still be doing these things again and again anyway, through simple enjoyment of the basic gameplay involved.

 

One title I had been chipping away at all along was the Legendary Skill Hunter and regular readers/listeners may remember me going on about it years ago. To gain this one, you need to capture every Elite Skill in the game, about 140 of them in all. Each is only obtainable from a specific boss out in the world and it really is one of those ridiculous post-endgame achievement tasks which takes you far above and beyond what is required to ‘win’ the game in any normal or sane sense.

I’ve been chipping away at it since long before it counted toward free stuff in GW2, but since I have this… fetish for colourful and interestingly designed iconography, it’s been something I’ve genuinely enjoyed doing; a massive ongoing scavenger hunt with only limited real utility that actively encourages you to go interesting places and meet new monsters. I’m not sure I ever really expected to complete it to be honest, instead viewing it as a pleasantly futile task which just kept me busy. But gradually the three bars filled over time and in recent weeks I suddenly realised I only had about 20 left. Some frenzied wiki-fuelled monster stalking later, I actually finished it!

It did one of those game wide broadcasts with my name it! No-one cared! It was awesome!

 

I did the ‘/age’ check and it turned out that the feat had taken me 58 months to do, which is bonkers. It’s also pretty slow and a determined min-maxer with enough platinum, a well planned itinerary and a fiercely resolved purpose could probably get the job done in under a month of focussed contract killing.

I don’t mind though and barely even noticed it happening really. I just really like the Signet of Capture mechanic. There is some minor utility in it all though, and now all of my configurable Heroes on all my characters on the account can be slotted with any Elite in the game, which is handy, although I could have just bought that unlock for $6 or so in the shop. I think I’ve earned at least $6 in the 58 month span in my day job – I’d have to check.

There are plenty of new and lengthy obsessions which can replace the skill hunting for me now. Cartographer titles involving uncovering every square mile of all the world maps, another silly task I find personally compelling. The Calculator suggests more, expensive prestige armour sets, redoing the storylines – but harder, killing every…single…overland monster… in hard mode. Even…PvP! No shortage of replacement windmills to tilt at and I think I’ll do just that. Not because I like titles, or want exotic fluff in Guild Wars 2, but because I need only the flimsiest of pretexts to be playing Guild Wars at all.

 

All in all, a fairly whimsical tick in a largely pointless box, helping me a small way towards owning a cosmetic pet in a game I’m not even sure if I’ll like yet, but as well as that, a sense of quiet satisfaction and closure too. I think it’s never a good idea to put too much store in MMO achievements – they impress only other MMO players, (if that!) and are gone when (and not if) the server is turned off for the last time. I’m not sure anything I’ve done in any MMO will outlast me, and that’s fine. But time enjoyed, in the company of friends or alone, is never time wasted for me and perhaps that quiet satisfaction is one of the things that keeps me coming back to Guild Wars long after other, more intense, MMO seasons have long gone. It’s about the nearest thing to an online home I have.

 

Incidentally, if you’ve never really understood Guild Wars but have always wanted to, come hang out with the Tuesday Noob Club! We don’t know either, but are damned well going to find out even if it takes us another 58 months! Classes starting soon!

Tags: , ,

2 comments

Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2012/01/13/the-hunting-of-skills.html

Jan
07
2012

The Statistician’s Tale…

Categories:

by

January 7, 2012

New only to myself is World of Warcraft’s Random Dungeon Finder tool, which I’ve been having a bit of an education in over recent weeks. It seems one of those ideas which is great on paper, but sure enough after an initially unnoteworthy first few goes, I ended up in a group with The Statistician.

Unlike most of my MMO forays, I’m a DPS class this time; a Hunter and not terribly practiced at group work, but I’d heard such harrowing tales of widespread and general incompetence relating to LFD that I didn’t think it would hurt to throw myself into the queue anyway, and one the whole, that had been working. At level 20, the ‘I don’t mind where you send me’ bonuses seem in favour of Wailing Caverns and Shadowfang Keep. They’re not technical, which is just as well and are mostly fairly linear rampages full of group-based enemies with the occasional boss fight here and there and after four or five LFD sessions, I’d learnt the basic pattern of each, and my own part in each, which is mostly ‘stand at the back and shoot it lots!’

There may have been optimal techniques for dealing with each boss, but I’ve never seen any and zerging very much gets the job done. But there’s zerging and then there’s zerging.

 

I queue, join and find myself in Shadowfang. The group seems to be myself, a Mage, a Warrior, some kind of healer and some kind of melee person. I’m vauge on those last two because I didn’t really see them much during the run. Upon loading, we realise that these two, The Statistician and his pet healer, are already two rooms into the spree. We race to catch up but something is really odd because my hazy recollection of the adventure is mostly only running and somehow The Statistician and his healer are managing to clear rooms just under my running pace. I expect if I’d have not stopped to loot now and then I might have actually seen how they do it.

Quickly I realise that most of the Hunter’s long skill inductions are going to have to be thrown out and I’m just aiming to tag things with the quick skills and hope my pet can get a few swings in too. I look around and see the Warrior keeping up. He’s seems quicker on the uptake than me and is managing to just about reach the fights in time, despite not having a bow. I’m not even sure where the Mage is at this point; she’s probably just given up and is pillaging two rooms back, what with no-one else having time to loot and all.

I stumble along in a state of mild disbelief, plinking as best I can. Now and then, scripted events force progress to momentarily halt. Some werewolf chap has to open a door for us at one point – there was some kind of backstory involving werewolves vs zombies that I’m still not entirely clear on. This gives me time to see that The Statistician and his healer are both in the same guild, which I wasn’t even sure was allowed! Matters continue apace with our volunteer saftey officers making sure nothing dangerous is allowed to come anywhere near the rest of us, which I thought was very considerate. I thought about pointing out a few splinters I’d seen on a bannister four rooms back, but didn’t dare take my finger of the W key for fear of losing them entirely.

In significantly less time than it’s taken me to type this account, we arrive in the end boss room and set up to…oh, never mind. He’s dead. Then an entirely novel experience happens to me. The Statistician dumps one of those parser texts into group chat, goes ‘np for boost’ and is gone, taking his lackey with him. I’ve been parsed! Initial bewilderment is replaced with a kind incensed fury as I read the numbers. I forget the precise values, but The Statistician apparently did about 60% of the party’s damage all by himself, in addition to helpfully taking the tanking duties from the tank. The actual tank came second, beating me by a few percent – the pair of us around the high twenties and the Mage was in the single figures. The Healer guildmate came in at zero, but I guess that wasn’t really his job anyway.

I slinked away with my ironically named ‘Satchel of Helpful Goods’ (a nice blue belt) and my self-esteem in tatters. I don’t know a lot about this kind of thing, but hear that being out-DPSed by the tank is an account deleting offence in most LFD circles. I have no idea though, as The Statistician was such a results-warping anomaly that all bets were off that day. Mostly though, the sheer arrogance of the naked silent statistical judgement of internet strangers got to me and I logged off a very cross bunny that day, and feeling strangely in need of a shower.

 

I’m calmer now and just wonder why they were even there in the first place, when clearly they could have duoed the place without bothering the hapless stumbling LFD crowd, which at the end of the day seems a tool of expediency, not preference. If you still retain the ability to organise a proper old-school dungeon trip with friends or guildmates, why queue at all? Their familiarity and obvious twinkage suggests that the actual rewards of it must have been trivial. Perhaps they achieved exactly what they set out to do, humiliate three randoms for the lulz? I doubt anyone drops a parser dump into group chat out of a sense of encouragement. “Good work there, but perhaps you could tighten up on your bow work a bit!”

An informative trip which illustrated to me just how mechanical the business of playing modern MMOs can be, if we let it. On the whole though, I think I like the Dungeon Finder. It is a useful way for people to take part in content they might not otherwise get to see, but it is also apparent that this is exactly what it is. It is entirely about the player’s relationship with the content, and almost nothing to do with other players. I’ve been on a dozen or so Wailing Caverns and Shadowfang Keeps and mostly they’ve not been horrors, but they’ve all felt a lot like soloing with seven Heroes in Guild Wars, or indeed, five players all soloing in the same direction in the same instance.

Usually it all happens at a reasonable pace, in mostly silence and I’ve not had a trip that wiped so far. The low-end nature of the content makes actual failure to beat the instance difficult. Those trips that haven’t worked have been through failure to organise instead; ‘sry gtg’, and people just going afk suddenly, both of which seem to happen quite a lot. I’ve only had one Vote Kick situation so far, an alleged ninja. The complex etiquette of Need, Greed and Pass is as apparently as obscure as ever – I just Need or Pass, based on if I’m going to equip the thing there and then, and already have little need for more numbers on my capped self. I abstained.

This is very much the Little League of LFD though, which doesn’t even become available at all until L15. I can only imagine how much more exaggerated and competitive it all gets at the top end, and have only blog tales to go by for that. Comparing notes only confirms my thoughts on the thing though, it’s a fall-back and a courtesy to the soloist in a genrally solo-oriented MMO, and if you want to save yourself a lot of headaches and heartaches, it’s probably no real substitute for finding a guild of like-minded individuals and doing the dungeons (and indeed raids) the way they were originally designed. Otherwise it just becomes a tool for bringing players of wildly grating play-styles together and forcing them to put up with each other for half an hour.

Or five minutes in some cases…

Tags: , ,

6 comments

Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2012/01/07/the-statisticians-tale.html

Dec
08
2011

Diversions…

Categories:

by

December 8, 2011

As predicted, it took about four sessions to hit the World of Warcraft Starter Edition level cap of 20, and already I’m settling into a bizarre kind of pseudo-endgame mindset where levels, xp and cash no longer matter. I spend my time exploring, fishing, dabbling in trade skills and often just doing quests for the hell of it now that actual advancement is mostly now over. The Dungeon Finder and Random Battle Grounds offer alternate options, and I’ll be getting to know Shadowfang Keep and Warsong Gulch with what I suspect will be a meticulous familiarity in due course.

 

Fortunately though, my return coincides with that of the Darkmoon Faire, which turned out to have had… a bit of work done since I last saw it, five years ago. Back in my day, for one week in every month, a few carnival tents would show up outside one of the big cities and players of all levels, classes and factions could while away a few minutes playing some little mini-game for points which could then be cashed in for cosmetic prizes. There was something about collectible tarot cards hidden out in the wilds, but I never saw one, and the big innovation I remember last was being fired out of a cannon off the top of the Tauren city, into a target in a distant lake. Fun, but nothing too fancy.

 

Time marches on though, and five years of adding bits and pieces every few months has resulted in a Darkmoon Faire that has really gotten out of hand. I happened to be online during the midnight crossover opening; a Mystic Mage teleporter chap actually popped into existence right next to me. I found the usual field in Elwynd Forest, just south of the Unsolicited /Duel Capital of Azeroth, Goldshire Inn and instead of the usual ring of tents, is a big whirley portal, the other side of which is an entirely purposed island about the size of Stormwind, with a huge carnival on it; big top tents, animal enclosures, booths, stalls, stage areas, the lot.

 

Being ‘opening night’ this fairground was absolutely rammed. We often ruminate on the nature of ‘massively’ in this genre. How many people actually is massively? 1400 players listed in Local Chat in Jita in EVE? 400 players embroiled in a three-way base assault in PlanetSide? 40 people wailing on each other outside a keep in Warhammer Online? 12 free peoples fending off the Siege of Gondamon in Lord of the Rings Online? I’ve experienced them all and they’ve all carried a sense of mildly out of control hectic energy. This same energy was there during Darkmoon opening night and wandering along the main thoroughfare watching perhaps 50, 100 players charging about on a bewildering variety of rocket sleds, scorpions, drop-handled motorbikes, rhinos, under a bewildering variety of shoulder pads and trailing a bewildering variety of particle effects was very, er, bewildering. There wasn’t any noticeable system lag, although my brain was having trouble keeping up with a lot of it.

 

Unusually for a computer game, it actually felt like a busy fairground, and once the worst of the sheer shellshock of it all passed, I was able to stumble about having a proper look at the events, which have also come on a long way in five years.

Games available include a timed whack-a-mole thing where you have to hammer gnoll puppets that pop up out of barrels. There was a shooting gallery, which I couldn’t quite work out how you’d actually get wrong – aim roughly at the targets and push the button when they light up. There was the cannon again, a personal favourite involving a fair degree of skill in choosing when to drop in order to land in the ring. There was an odd throw the hoops onto the turtle game, involving aiming an aoe template over a twitching tortoise with a spike glued to its back. I think my favourite was the Tonks, little remote control tanks available in both PvP and PvE formats. In one tent was just a massive no holds barred death match cage, which seemed busy. And terrifying!

 

The games cost tokens to play, which can be bought for a few in-game silvers a bag and winning games gets you tickets which can be exchanged for a variety of mostly cosmetic prizes. I got a green balloon which follows you about and is tied to your wrist with actual string! Balloons are cool. Also of more practical use, a 14 slot bag, which will come in very handy given my lack of auction house access and 10g money cap.

 

In addition to the games, there’s a great deal of extra fluff which doesn’t serve much of a purpose, but works well to make the place remarkably fleshed out and the whole thing really reminded me of the Fable series of games – the colours, the styling, the music. Most odd. Plenty of prize tents, including replica armour heirloom items I don’t quite understand, fireworks that I do, and that hidden Tarot cards thing is still ongoing. There was a large collection of interesting exotic animals in a sort of zoo area (none of which are tameable – I checked!), food and drink stands, plenty of street performers and a stage where apparently at the top of the hour, everyone’s favourite homophobic Heavy Mithril rocklings, Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftain, or at least automated pixel puppet approximations thereof, appear and Do Music, or approximations thereof. I don’t know, I skipped that bit – keep music live!

 

I’m generally quite easily impressed, but was particularly impressed by the Faire; the energy, the execution and the sheer spectacle of it all. Still, that may just be opening night; I’d been back a few times during the week to find it a much quieter affair, allowing me to actually get at the games myself. I’m effectively a WoW Newbie again so hadn’t seen it all before, but I guess it is a highly automated thing which doesn’t change noticeably from one month to the next, and you know what Internet People can be like; even amid the sheer glee of it all, in a decent online stab at a fun-filled fairground carnival, there were still plenty of Flipping Hipsters in loud evidence, complaining in General chat about how boring it all was, how rubbish the games were and how stupid the rest of us were for enjoying ourselves.

What can you say to people like that? The solution is obvious, I think, but then what do I know? I was busy giggling at a balloon on a string!

Tags: , ,

3 comments

Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/12/08/diversions%e2%80%a6.html

Dec
01
2011

Liberations…

Categories:

by

December 1, 2011

Because there’s nothing I enjoy more than the prospect of giant anthropomorphic martial arts pandas, I’m now back in World of Warcraft, bringing to an end in one moment of mild ennui, the abstinence of five years.

At first I was full of self-loathing about falling off the wagon and abandoning my long held principles, but then realised that actually, no-one gives a damn about any of that but me. Certainly I know that Blizzard couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss either way about my own personal participation, my own ‘+1’ in their vast book-keeping numbers, especially since I’m doing my usual thing of just mooching off the free bits anyway; an extensive sampling of their current Play Free to Level 20 Forever endless free trial thing.

Not that I had much alternative there. At some point in the last half decade, they did a something drastic with the account management and now I fear my old ‘proper’ account is now gone forever, linked to a Battle Net account I have no idea what even is, let alone what the Secret Question was. After the initial burst of rage passed, it suddenly dawned on me what a liberation this actually was.

 

In my heyday, which was pre Burning Crusade, I managed the grand achievement of one single Level 60 character – a Troll Warrior. I don’t even know if ‘ilvl’ existed as a concept back then, but the concept of ‘By Their Gear You Shall Know Them’ certainly did and I think I may have managed one or maybe two pieces of purple equipment in my prodigious arsenal of otherwise unremarkable quest reward blues.

I’d basically finished the levelling, but then wandered off before the raiding end-game got underway, and even back in what it pleases the internet to call ‘Vanilla’, my own tale of WoW Accomplishment could have been replicated by someone more dedicated in under a fortnight of robust play, I expect. I was certainly proud of ‘winning’ but suspect that it represented only the pre-event warm-up for most regular players.

To me though, it was a win and at first I was quite cross at not being able to get to my ‘main’ anymore. But then I thought about how significantly the goalposts have been moved out from under me in five years; 25 more levels, three expansions, several new continents and likely a complete class redesign or two and realised that actually, it would be lot like starting again, so why not just do that anyway?

 

If a decade of MMOs have finally taught me anything, it’s that you can’t take it with you when you’re gone. The end product – the supposedly ‘finished’ character means nothing against the memories and experiences gained along the way. My recent determined efforts to pimp out my L65 LotRO Guardian were made irrelevant overnight with Rise of Isengard; a new L75 cap and stats almost double what I previously thought barely attainable now being commonplace. A retired BR23 Planetside trooper was something to be proud of once, but now is barely over half way to the current ‘end’ – BR40 is it? I lose track but don’t even have a beret! 22 million EVE Skill Points? So what? That was something, once…

The practical consequence of all this sank home the other night though, when I realised that to me, a brand new Battle Net account based off a throwaway webmail address was in fact more valuable to me than an old veteran one in good standing with a L60 Troll Warrior on it, because it was just a lot more convenient to get on and get access to the game. Odds are my L60 is probably naked and goldless at this point anyway, hacked or some such in the time I’ve been away. And I don’t care.

Free at last! I wonder if any of my other accounts in other games would ultimately matter in similar circumstances either. Could I just abandon them out of hand if the fresh free trial was easier to sort out?  Three L20s in Guild Wars, a L65 Hobbit in LOTRO, a L78 Inquisitor in EQ2X, and a L50-something Swashbuckler somewhere on EQ2Live. A Gallente Battleships V pilot in EVE. A 74 Trader in Anarchy Online. A L50 Ice Tanker in City of Heroes. The list goes on – digital representations of Time Spent, some of which have already been long destroyed. I can’t even remember which server some of those are on. The EQ1 Rallos Zek server no longer exists, and took two years of my gaming life with it. Asheron’s Call 2. Tabula Rasa. More time murdered, and nothing now to show for any of it.

Everything gets deleted in the end – Sunk Cost Fallacy, indeed! But it’s always okay as long as I can honestly tell myself I enjoyed the journey in each case. Otherwise, it would all have been A Bit Stupid, and I’d have to immediately go mad!

Annnnnyway, the early levels are usually the best bit – by necessity! Life as a perma-newbie in WoW has great appeal – access to a sampling of most of the features in a fundamentally solid and polished game engine, a large enough choice of races, classes and starting areas to keep me interested for long enough to scratch the itch, and no real exposure to most of the aspects of the game which seem to cause so much of the general blogosphere dissatisfaction with this otherwise hugely successful MMO.

 

I’m starting off my Grand Tour with a Draenei Hunter, mostly to see the new (to me!) Azuremyst Isle area and The Exodar, and I have to say, it’s all very pleasant. Wandering about moonlit forests with a killer moth pet and a crossbow, just chilling out and relaxing. Nothing in newbie WoW is especially fraught, hectic or dangerous and it does rather work like a kind of audio-visual Valium.

Pleasing palettes, soothing noises, simple fetch and carry, rudimentary trade skills. I can see how the whole thing would make a lot of gamers quite angry! I wouldn’t call it exciting particularly, and perhaps this is the negative consequence of not caring about stressful things; I seem not to care about a lack of exciting things either. Zen gaming!

At my present rate it looks like Level 20, the trial cap, is doable in less than a week of mildly interested play, but there are nine other races to go visit after this, (Worgen and Goblin seem to require expansion purchase), so when the Hunter is done, I can just delete it and start something else, safe in the knowledge that it never mattered anyway, and was only a vehicle for my own idle explorations.

 

I increasingly find a peculiar liberation in the cut-down feature set most MMOs now offer as trial or free-tier, and will often and quite perversely take the reduced functionality on as a kind of challenge that goes beyond a mere reluctance to spend any money. For a while back there, I was about the only person in EQ2X playing seriously on a Bronze level subscription – Silver is only a one-off $10 and opens much. Not having access to the things Silver and Gold people have actually increases the zest of the experience for me, forcing me to use wits and cunning far more than usual.

Not what they intend, I’m sure, but I seem to be approaching WoW in similar spirit; just what can a L20 get away with and how far can that be pushed? Maybe I’ll try a permadeath L20 run as e-sport. Maybe I’ll try a Pacifist L20 run. Maybe I’ll try to uncover the entire map, L85 zones and all. Maybe I’ll try to twink out a L19 Battleground character. Perhaps I can see firsthand the horrors of the Random Dungeon Finder! Lots to dabble with, but dabbling it is, and I like dabbling most of all.

An interesting sub-game of its own, and also a way to make many of the bigger end-game woes completely irrelevant. After all, if the first twenty levels aren’t fun in and of themselves, why would anyone go further at all?

Tags: , ,

2 comments

Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/12/01/liberations.html

Nov
23
2011

Expectations…

Categories:

by

November 23, 2011

I finally got around to getting properly underway with my self-imposed Hugo Challenge, starting with the very first winner in 1953.

Review: The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester (1953)

Ben Reich is the head of the system spanning mega-corporation, Monarch Enterprises and a powerfully driven man accustomed to getting whatever he wants. When Monarch faces dire financial troubles at the hands of the rival D’Courtney Cartel, extreme measures are needed. Reich first proposes merger and when rebuffed, turns instead to murder. But when the police are telepathic and no-one has been successfully murdered for seventy years, how on earth can he hope to get away with it, avoiding detection, capture and the seemingly unavoidable penalty of Demolition?

 

The Demolished Man is very much a psychological thriller and a fascinating character piece, played out mostly between Reich and Police Prefect Lincoln Powell, a first class ‘esper’, one of the increasingly abundant new generations of telepathically capable human beings.

Not so much a who-dunnit as a how-dunnit, the initial premise – premeditated crime in a precognitive world – is quite a hook and the cleverness and determination with which Reich tackles the problem makes for compelling reading, and unusually, a likeable villain. Reich comes across as a confident and resourceful magnificent bastard, and from very early on I wanted him to succeed and win.

The crime is committed and Powell is introduced, bringing with him a B-story focussing on the espers themselves, their ways, societies and the hopes, dreams and domination of the Esper Guild. Telepathy is extremely well mapped and detailed in this work and far from the vague magic it is in many stories, is very much a psychiatric science and heavily integrated into the day to day workings of the world. This in turn raises all sorts of questions of race, bigotry, privacy and suspicion which Bester is not afraid to tackle.

Powell’s investigation and subsequent sparring with Reich becomes the main event intertwining the two parts of the tale, and shifting focus back to a more equal footing and by the end, it really is hard to say who the hero is and who the villain. The unravelling of the mysteries really does lead to a mind blowing conclusion and a surprising end, making the whole journey a tight one, well-paced and yet allowing for sufficient side-trips to briefly explore the world Bester has built.

 

Its worth noting that The Minority Report, the Phillip K Dick short story about precognition and crime which inspired the 2002 Spielberg/Cruise film of the same name, wasn’t written until 1956.

I’ve also seen the term ‘cyber-punk’ used and not without merit. Thirty years before Gibson’s Neuromancer (Also a Hugo Winner – 1985), Bester describes a world in which megacorps do battle across the solar system, a class of technical elite immerse themselves in a powerful alternate world of information, technology dominates a kind of commerce tainted by grime and greed and ruthless men stop at nothing to gain wealth and power. The pacing is quite similar too – Reich and Powell’s jousting across the solar system echoed in Case and Molly’s own odyssey for resolution. Mind you, the styling and feel of the thingdoes still date it a bit; imagine Neuromancer meets Mad Men!

 

It is a good book; punchy, clever, intricate and engaging, and yet it isn’t a great book. I wonder if a lot of that wasn’t my own pre-emptive sense of over anticipation, a slight sense of awe in fact; in a list of The Best, this is The First. I think I was probably expecting something life-changing, an epiphany of sorts, which is plainly unfair. Something to remember for my further Hugo explorations – at the end of the day, it’s just panel voting for the best sci-fi book of that year, not some new universal physical law or anything.

Having read quite a few of the more recent Hugo winners in my time, I’m actually finding this a useful cautionary tale about self-imposed hype, but also a very encouraging thing. The very first winner, in 1953, isn’t the best sci-fi book I’ve ever read, which suggests the field as a whole is improving as time passes, which can only be a good thing!

Expectations aside, it is still worth a buy, being a very engaging detective drama set in a fascinating future and a good page-turner in its own right regardless of any awards it may or may not have won.

TLDR; A commendable start to the list, setting a suitably high standard for many even better works to come.

Interestingly, 1953-52 also saw publication of part two of Asimov’s epic Foundation opus ‘Foundation and Empire’. Hard to say which is better, and definitely a matter of taste rather than skill. Asimov wouldn’t get a Foundation novel into the list until 1983 with ‘Foundation’s Edge’.

Tags: , ,

1 comment

Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/11/23/expectations%e2%80%a6.html

Nov
18
2011

Automations…

Categories:

by

November 18, 2011

What with me being a cool refusenik hipster and everything, instead of Skyrim, Arkham City, Saints Row 3, Assassins’ Creed Revelations, Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3, Mass Effect 3 and about a million other cutting edge, highly applauded and Metacritic 100% -ing recent releases, I seem to have become obsessed with a three year old space trading combat game.

With a curiosity mostly sparked by Jon’s ongoing research project and a general hankering for something spacey with laserguns, I ended up getting X3: Terran Conflict, the most recent in the long line of ‘X’ space combat trading games. My last go at one of these was the almost impenetrable X2: The Threat, some years ago and it was a very unusual experience, full of frustration, pacing issues, grind, clunky UI and controls and the worst cutscene puppetry and voicework I think I’d ever encountered in a digital medium. Despite all that though, there was a definite underlying genius to the design and format, most of which didn’t become apparent until a good fifty hours in.

I did persevere and was just starting to get to the point where the whole thing opens up like a misunderstood closed thing, that elusive cusp of empire, when my savegame got lost in a PC reinstall. I hadn’t had the energy to start again until this last few weeks, and then I got about two missions in to the introduction and thought, ‘Hang on… before plunging into another million-hour X2 epic, why not upgrade the game to the most recent one?’

 

I’m glad I did actually, because X3:TC is a vast improvement over the earlier games, and yet manages to successfully keep the bits I admired too.

The improvements are many. Superficially, it now looks amazing, compared to the nasty grubby low-res X2. The models are more detailed and much better looking, in particular the stations, which have lost those tedious interior docking areas. I’m especially impressed with the planets, which are now enormous and dominate the sky in many sectors. The Terran faction are particularly impressive, with ridiculously large stations that all carry something of the universe of Mass Effect in their lines and styling, and flying about with well detailed landmarks of our own solar system filling the sky is a surprisingly nostalgic experience. It’s also nice for the Terrans not to be the Galaxy’s remedial class for a change, and in X3, Earthman technology is highly advanced and doesn’t suck!

Functionally, the game has come on a long way too, with perhaps the most significant improvement being the inclusion of the Freelancer style mouse-flying system, with the draggy cursor now steering the ship. Pretty much every space game does this now and I think X2 was probably the last time I ever needed my aging and dusty Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro Joystick. I doubt I’ll ever need it again.

New weapons spice things up, particularly the addition of ‘flak’ style batteries and missiles – weapon systems that cause big clouds of explosions, designed to help big ships against fighters. Very unnerving being on the receiving end of that! Marine boarding combat is a new thing too – which presumably allows the capturing of larger capital craft. Not got that far yet!

Pacing is much better than X2, seeing the player get to a decent footing much earlier on. Becoming independently wealthy is still a challenge, but there’s a lot less scrabbling about at the very low end and you start to amass respectable resources far sooner. The large availability of space station missions of a surprising variety of types helps the cash flow jumpstart too, which X2 didn’t really do that well.

They’ve taken the wise step of getting rid of awful supermarionation cutscenes entirely. Such campaign story that exists is told through space-camera fly-by of ship models, and with cockpit pilot face cams. Mind you, even those manage to be quite cringeworthy in places and they seem to have kept the honoured tradition of getting the English localisation voicework done by actors who have never heard English spoken, only seen it written down. Pronunciation gaffes are frequent, plentiful and actually quite wearying after the initial amusement wears off. It’s probably all quite powerful stuff in the original German. The Terran Defender start story is okay; not especially thrilling, but decent enough not to intrude if you want to go sandbox for a while, and it does form a good way to get a decent fleet of ships started up in a short time. Mostly though, you’ll play X3:TC for the sheer single player EVE Online of it all.

 

The basics are still there; the dog-fighting is serviceable and satisfying, with ship speed and ship class dictating various types of engagement, small and big fighters needing different tactics. The trading game is similar; buy low, travel, sell high, etc and the internal economy is very robust indeed. The exploration is substantial too, with a vast network of sectors to explore, most of it in plain sight, but with significant hidden bits too.

 

It ticks all the required boxes of a solid Elite Clone in a modern age, but the most remarkable thing about it all is the realisation that actually, it’s more RTS than space shooter. In addition to the usual upgrade path of space fighters and cargo ships, almost everything else you see in the game can also be bought and owned, including patrol battleships, carriers and stations themselves.

This is made workable by a ridiculously elaborate Auto Pilot feature. Using a variety of software packages available in-game, almost every aspect of every ship or station can be automated, from simple ‘go to’ commands right up to a suite which turns cargo haulers into entirely autonomous intergalactic trading magnates who beaver away out of sight and mind, and continually earn you money. Combat patrols, carrier-based multi-wing attack squadrons, resupply transports, navigation satellite deployment, sector mapping, couriers; anything the game’s own AI ships can do, you can replicate in your own minions, and the upshot of it all is a vast military and economic empire that rivals those found in EVE Online, but all managed by just one player.

It’s not perfect. Sometimes wingman escorts have a habit of not spotting starbases and slamming fatally into the side of them, and it’s usually much more effective to be manually piloting critically important combat ships. The Fight Command Software isn’t a great shot. But it is nice to know that while you’re out gadding about exploring or dog-fighting, elsewhere dozens of other ships are off carrying out your will too, and getting on with the dull stuff on your behalf. The whole system appears to support scripted modding too, for even more elaborate fan-made automation.

This single-player sandbox approach opens all sorts of entertaining avenues, particularly regarding the various different story campaigns. Being able to bring in two or three combat wings from my own private military consultancy that I’d been running on the side helped no end with some of the trickier Terran combat missions and I’m looking forward to jumping the Battlestar Hemlock in on the last mission in the chain for extreme fire-support, when it’s expecting me to be in a lone space Spitfire!

 

A huge part of the fascination for me is just seeing how extreme it can get. From the humble beginnings of learning to fly in a dinky M4 fighter in orbit around Uranus, I’m working my way up to being a full-fledged additional faction of my own, an empire with holdings throughout the galaxy and the fleet, infrastructure and logistical backbone to assault, conquer and settle entire hostile sectors. Big dreams indeed, and almost uniquely achievable in this particular game series.

I imagine it’ll take several phases of interest to achieve these lofty dreams of galactic empire, but I don’t mind, and look forward to multiple future revisits. For now, I’m just keen on obtaining the Battlestar Hemlock and taking the fight back to those damned Xenon Qs.

I think at this point, X3: Terran Conflict is the current leading light in the ever marginal and often endangered Elite Clone genre. Surprisingly deep and complex, and thoroughly immersive, it keeps the dream alive.

 

TLDR: If you like being an alliance leader in EVE Online, but hate people, this is just the game for you!

Steam currently have most of the X back catalogue available, including X3:TC itself for about £20. To be honest, if you never played any of them, just go straight for Terran Conflict – the others are largely the same game, just not as technically well-executed.

Tags: ,

2 comments

Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/11/18/automations.html

Nov
16
2011

Dimensions…

Categories:

by

November 16, 2011

Another cultural relic here!

Review: Descent, by Parallax Software/Interplay Entertainment Corp (1995)

The Post Terran Minerals Corporation (PTMC) is a huge operation, with profitable mining facilities on every planet and moon in the solar system, but one by one, these installations have become overrun by an invasive alien computer virus which turns ordinarily industrious mining robots into vicious adaptive killing machines.

They’ve taken hostages, the virus has reached the Moon and the Earth is next. You are a mercenary pilot hired to halt the tide and drive it back. You are kitted out with an extremely manoeuvrable space fighter and authorised to self-destruct each mine, from the inside. It’s the only way to be sure!

 

The game takes place in around thirty underground complexes of increasingly tortuous design, with fairly simple objectives. You fly your spaceship around the map, locating blue, yellow and red keycards. These allow you access to the level’s reactor core, which you shoot until it blows up. This starts a 45 second timer, during which you have to find the now-unlocked exit tunnel and escape, in a very Return of the Jedi manner. Along the way a set of vicious and surprisingly cunning floating robots are trying to kill you, various powerups and ammo lie scattered and hidden, and in each level extra points can be had by remembering to collect the imprisoned hostages before you vaporise the whole complex.

Descent is fluid, fast, and hectic and carried out on a truly three-dimensional footing which is almost unique even today. First-person shooter meets flight-sim. ‘Down’ is a negligible concept, maintained only by visual level design cues, ‘floor’, ‘ceiling’, and often you’ll think you’re flying along the bottom a horizontal tunnel, only to arrive out of the ceiling of the next room or the floor of another. Dizzying in places, the mines become claustrophobic complex warrens full of homicidal robots, lava, secrets and traps. Despite all this, and the sheer age of the thing, it still manages to impress with the occasional unexpected vista or spectacular vault, and superb overall performance even back then.

Basic gameplay follows the established blue door, yellow door, red door pattern which was big in the nineties. This leads to a limited exploration phase to begin each mine, plotting out the routes, finding keys, powerups and hostages. Descent loves its hidden doors too, and many are disguised well enough to make their hunting a fun game in itself!

Eventually, the reactor is located and then the game takes on a quite unique phase. I don’t normally like timed gameplay, but the frantic self-destruct sequence plunge for the exit is still exhilarating even today. It helps to find the exit beforehand, but even then it isn’t always certain – some of them are on the opposite side of the level to the reactor and many are guarded by killer robots in hidden cubbyholes.

 

The robots do deserve special mention. They vary from the feeble to the lethal, but all of them are smart. They hide, dodge, work together to distract and decoy you and far from just charging at you on sight, are perfectly capable of picking their moment and waiting until your back is turned before striking. Some of them are cloaked, some of them break into lots of smaller robots when killed, most of them use the same weaponry you do – often with better effect and every now and then, you get a boss robot who in addition to all that, also is that level’s reactor! Worst of all, the virus itself shows up in most levels, as a kind of chequered purple stain on certain walls, capable of just spawning an infinite amount of new robots! I still twitch when I see that pattern or hear that noise.

 

The whole thing is paced well. The early levels aren’t too harsh, which is just as well, given how alien basic gameplay is – just getting used to circle strafing on two independent axes is hard enough without killer robots taking potshots as you learn. The Moon, Venus and Mercury serve as a good introduction to it all, but then the game ramps up significantly and by the time you’re into Saturn’s moons, it really is a tooth and nail fight, but very satisfying with it.

It features eight-player deathmatch and significant modding support. I remember both being quite remarkable, and some of the custom homemade level designs were quite literally mind-blowing. The design of the engine allowed for impossible levels to be designed. I remember one particular example which had you flying along a 100m tunnel and then emerging from the side of a floating ball, about 20m across, suspended in a 60m spherical chamber. You could then fly around the back side of the ball and see a smooth surface. The tunnel you arrived through can not exist! Portals, twelve years before anyone had ever heard that the cake was a lie!

 

Descent is very much a vestigial cul-de-sac in the grand evolution of gaming. It was successful enough to spawn sequels, but not imitators and never really became its own genre. In many ways, I think that this is because the game was too clever for its own good.

While for some it ‘clicked’ and was an amazing release and a taste of true freedom, for many it degenerated into a bewildering and in some cases vomit-inducing mess of required spatial hyper-awareness and mind-mangling frustration. Pressing tab brings up a wire-frame map which likely hindered more than it helped, and laid bare the sheer complexity of a truly three-dimensional play-space which we, as a fundamentally ground dwelling two-dimensional species, aren’t really equipped to deal with. D2’s Guide-bot helped a bit, but it isn’t really surprising that the more conventional two-dimensional shooters like Doom and Half Life became the main genre instead, and even modern space and flight-sim games tend to present things as a series of stacked two dimensional layers. It’s a shame because in Descent, we see a glimpse of something truly original, from a very derivative age.

 

Parallax went on to make Descent II (1996), which really was just a ‘more of the same’ mission-pack sequel with improvements, then they split into two. One part, Outrage, went with a rather different style of game for Descent 3 (1999), featuring a more outdoorsey and planetary surface type gameplay (which had been done much better in Terminal Velocity (1995) by then anyway), but somehow losing a lot of the spirit of the original format in the process. Outrage closed in 2004.

Not all is lost though! The other bit became Volition Inc, who you may remember from Freespace, Red Faction, Summoner and of course Saints Row, the third game of which is out any day now and promises to be huge, and mad. My, how they grow up.

Apparently, The-Company-Currently-Known-As-Interplay has plans to develop a Descent 4. Unfortunately, these plans seem to rely quite heavily on some sort of Fallout MMO being a World of Warcraft Killing Success, so probably not one to get too excited about just yet. Maybe Bethesda will buy up the IP and turn it into another massively-massive wander-about-a-moorland type sandbox game? Who knows?

 

As for Descent itself, you can find that, as usual, on Good Old Games for $6, which includes Descent 2 as well, along with all the tedious monkeying about necessary to get a game that old working on a modern PC. Other shops are available – I’m just a lazy surfer.

Interestingly, you can also legally play much of it for free. A curious ethnic custom of the early nineties was to give the entire first third of the game away for free, as a demo, something you don’t see a lot of these days! I think that takes you up to the first Boss in the last Mars mine, and is easily enough game to get a feel for what it is about and to see firsthand what made it so unique. You can find that here, but will need DosBox for that.

Tags: ,

1 comment

Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/11/16/dimensions.html

Nov
11
2011

Cooperations…

Categories:

by

November 11, 2011

It’s Friday and I’m excited, because Fridays are currently Icewind Dale nights!

Regular readers/listeners/stalkers will know of my penchant for retro gaming, a constant underlying fondness for games of the past* which is likely to only get worse as time goes on, because as time goes on, there is more and more of the past, and less and less of the future! Eventually, there will only be past left, so ALL games will be retro games, which means I am getting an important head start on the rest of you!

I also enjoy hanging out on Mumble and giggling uncontrollably at ridiculous gaming spectacle in the pseudo-company of friends, so our recent experiments with Icewind Dale work well to tick both boxes. In part it’s a general dissatisfaction with MMO gaming, which is very much about putting the game first and friends second. Only City of Heroes does much to defy this, for all the reasons I’ve ranted about before.

So to find what I’m after, perhaps the type of game needs to change? I’ve been following Tipa’s adventures in proper online D&D with great technical interest, but it’s been a very long time since I tried my hand at any kind of freeform roleplaying and to be honest, I think I’d feel a bit stupid firing my regulation adventuring Ten Foot Pole** at The Darkness where anyone else could hear me. I’m still a gamer at heart, so actual D&D isn’t quite what I’m after, at least not yet anyway. Then I remembered Baldur’s Gate, which as far back as 1998 supported six player co-op over IPX networking. Had it, played it and even now remember imagining how amazing it would be with five other friends.

 

Of course I didn’t actually have five other friends back then, much less five friends with PCs who could bring them all over to my house for one of those most exotic and decadent orgies of hedonistic excess, the LAN Party! So it all rather passed me by, and instead, I gamed in isolation until FFA PvP Rallos Zek Everquest taught me some entirely different things about playing games online with other people!

 

Nowadays, it’s all a lot easier in every respect, and so upon burning out of our last MMO, instead of just casting about for yet another, a bunch of us have form an Icewind Dale troupe. I figured that since Icewind Dale was always the least story-driven of Black Isle’s offerings it would be the easiest to break into, rather than the exposition-heavy Baldur’s Gate itself. (Thankfully, Planescape: Torment was never multiplayer!) Of course the process is fraught with hurdles, but all are surmountable.

 

First the game itself; to play together, we all need the same version. In the end, despite me owning it from the initial release, it turned out to be easiest for us to all go and buy the last/latest version anyway, just to cut out a lot of archaeological patch-hunting. Good Old Games *** have the whole thing here for $10,  which includes expansions I never even knew existed. Not bad a deal, apart from the whole buying the damn thing twice aspect. I don’t know if Steam have it too, but they’re probably too busy to check just now. (Which is another rant for another day.)

Having the game alone is not enough and in this modern age of Windows 7, IPv6, rayguns and holidays on the moon, getting six Icewind Dales to talk to each other across the Internet is not trivial. I used to have to use the now defunct Microsoft Gaming Zone for that kind of exercise even back then – a kind of intermediary lobby for matchmaking games together. We’ve managed to find an online service which carries the torch into the raygun era, Gameranger.

Seems the usual thing; free-with-ads and not obviously crooked – it does the job. It offers voice chat for premium membership I think, but we’ve already got the usual Mumble server for that. IWD does feature a chat window, but Voice is pretty much essential, given how manic and fast paced everything is.

With all that in place, it’s green-light Go For Adventure! After about fifteen minutes of arseing about getting connected. That is getting shorter each week though!

 

Playing Icewind Dale with five player co-op (I still couldn’t find five interested friends!) is a whole different kettle of fish to the solo experience in a number of important ways:

Don’t Be Shy With The Space Bar!

Unlike MMOs, any of us can pause and unpause the game. It all happens too fast to not pause it, even when you are controlling all six party members yourself. All sorts of problems of etiquette enter the fray when five people all have the pause button, a kind of bizarre extended Prisoner’s Dilemma takes place where none of us want to halt the action, so we all end up dying. Expect the format to appear as an ITV gameshow one saturday soon!

Top tip; have the game’s host turn on the ‘Auto-pause when enemies first sighted option’ to alleviate some of this, but as the team Cleric, I’m finding it very useful to be able to stop everyone running about like headless chickens when trying to target heals! IPausing is especially helpful in combating the significant lag we’re seeing – warping monsters and the like. Since the ‘server’ is just whoever starts the game and issues the invites, home-grade internet has to do the job of a massive datacentre in California or wherever. It’s playable of course, but needs to be kept in mind.

Only One Schoolchild In The Shop At A Time, Please!

Quirks of how the game was made result in it being impossible to change between interior and exterior locations while another party member is in a shop screen. Also Player B opening a shop screen closes Player A’s shop screen, if open. Hilarity can ensue and the best plan is probably to make one player designated Team Shopper. As team Cleric, who wears metal armour, but who used Strength as a dump stat, I eschew material things (because I can’t carry anything else) and usually just loiter outside the shop scaring away pensioners instead.

The less said about quest dialog by committee, the better, but I now believe any kind of SWTOR group-based story-work is going to be a hysterical trainwreck. If we ever find ourselves in Neverwinter Nights, this will greatly improve, as the design of that meant that even playing alone, it ran as a server and client – much more robust for multiplayer.

Pickpocket Works On Players!

One of several reasons that it’s important not to wind up the Trap Specialist by following them into the room that looks A Bit Trappy when they go to look for Traps. Also shouting ‘That looks A Bit Trappy’ doesn’t go down to well either! Amusingly enough, reverse pickpocketing works for everyone, and the game does not announce that Player A has given Player B an item – it just silently goes to their bags. I amuse myself by loading everyone else down with trash loot when they aren’t looking. Also, it’s FFA PvP if you misclick with the pointer!

2nd Ed. D&D Takes No Prisoners!

Icewind Dale always was quite hardcore, even back then. The traps are almost universally fatal. Many trashmobs are armed with bows, (1d6hp/shot) which until you make it to character level three or so can one-hit wizards (1d4hp/level) and thieves with alarming ease and regularity. We didn’t make it out of Easthaven with a live Wizard on our first go! As team Cleric my heals start out at 1d6hp/level and take about 15 seconds to cast. I get four of those per ‘day’, making healing duty in IWD more a matter of patching people up afterwards, than the more usual MMO maintenance footing. Resting to recover spells, etc seems to have a 50% chance of just spawning a load more monsters, onto an injured group with no spells left, making things take on a surreal survival horror aspect that the game’s original designers probably didn’t intend! The first dungeon is full of zombies too! I’m not sure when I get Raise Dead, but until then there’s a lot of reloading, rising and repeating as we slog our way through.

The pace is so different to MMOs it beggars belief; our party fights four skeletons, then rests for 16 hours, then fights three more, then rests 16 hours. Good job I vetoed the ‘realtime Icewind Dale’ idea that was going around – some of the inital dungeons have taken days!

 

It’s finicky and quite frustrating, but also a surprising amount of fun. Simple enough dungeon-crawls as single player become genuinely heroic as a team of disparate players. We’re pushing through at a necessarily slower pace than solo, but the progress we’re making really does feel earned, some kind of absurd iron-gamer challenge. I’m not sure we’re even a tenth the way through yet, but it is definitely making for a refreshing alternative to a general MMO malaise that doesn’t seem to just be my own.

If/when we’re done with Icewind Dale there are literally dozens of intriguing titles of yesterday being played today in groups in the Game Ranger sessions list; more Black Isle maybe; Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc, or something even more unexpected; Xwing Vs Tie Fighter, Diablo II, Descent, Civilisation… all those great classics of the past that were perhaps always meant to be played like this, but only now can it be done so easily and causally. Perhaps we don’t need the centralised over-server of the MMO that much afterall?

TLDR: I highly recommend Black Isle’s back catalogue co-op mode, via Game Ranger and Mumble, as a holiday for jaded MMO static groups!

 

* This is why I get so angry about bad DRM. When I buy a game, I expect to be playing it for at least twenty years, probably longer, so when half-arsed copy protection systems go wrong because I’ve changed my PC in that time, or when the super-swish server-side authentication gets mothballed five years down the line, there better damned well be a DRM removal patch made available too! It’s sad that I’ll typically care about a computer game long after the people who made it have stopped.

** Seriously, take a moment to pace that out. Carrying ten foot of curtain rail or doweling to the checkout in a DIY store is typically an Escheresque exercise in topology, let alone lugging one into mortal monster combat in a trap-laden tomb of antiquity, while also wearing armour and carrying all the other Standard Adventuring Equipment. But in my D&D dabblings, I never left home without this crude but essential form of Trap Insurance!

*** I’ve only just forgiven them for pulling that stupid ‘We’ve shut down!’ ‘Actually, fooled you! Just wanted more PR lolz!’ stunt a while back.

Tags: , ,

1 comment

Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/11/11/cooperations%e2%80%a6.html

Nov
09
2011

Expeditions…

Categories:

by

November 9, 2011

During my recent Xbox Live interregnum* I managed to figure out how to convince the console to let me get at my save games without being online, which was nice, so have been using that time to crack on and make the final push at Final Fantasy XIII, pushing onward from base camp in the Gran Pulse open-worldey bit, through the final ascent to the summit, and what an expedition its been. Sixty hours played, it helpfully points out on the savegame screen and now, having finished it**, I’m still not quite sure what to make of the experience.

 

A mixed bag with a lot going for it but a lot of problems too. The uncharitable might rightly describe it as a two-hundred mile long corridor with a boss fight every twenty yards. It has one very wide room in the middle of it, but if I had to pick a word, I think ‘Linear’ would be the one. ‘Methodical’ is another, and I distinctly remember still receiving tutorial popups thirty hours in, and by the end, you definitely feel that you Understand How To Play, thanks to the cumulative effect of the endless succession of boss fights patiently driving home the core mechanics with the tenacity and persistence of a rain cloud trying to make a beach out of a mountain.

Perhaps it is right to do so, as those core mechanics are actually quite revolutionary, especially to an old Trinity-based MMO hack like me. Much has been mentioned everywhere else about the Paradigm Shift system it uses, but suffice to say, that your party of three adventurers can each change role mid combat, often between individual attacks, flipping between pre-defined combinations of tanks, healers, melee and ranged DPS, buffers and debuffers in a way that made my head spin. It does take a lot of getting used to, and to beat some of the game’s more ridiculous proper boss fights, you will need to understand it well.  In particular learning effective use of Synergists and Saboteurs, while still maintaining high overall DPS and healing is what got me through it all. I’m not sure any MMO comes close to the dynamic versatility on offer here; Rift’s Souls maybe? Once it clicks though, it becomes a joy to use; an auto-queue feature automates the individual skill selection, leaving the player to concentrate on rolling party composition, making it a more tactical exercise than mere button mashing.

The story is strong and the characterisation isn’t bad either. The ongoing machinations of the fal’Cie and the dogged determination and resistance of the l’Cie makes for powerful scenes, which it isn’t afraid of elaborating on at great cutscene length. I wonder if I’d have stuck with it if I hadn’t developed a kind of affinity with the heroes and a fascination to see what happens next, making for a peculiar form of gameplay-driven cinema, rather than outright enjoyable game for its own sake. Themes of destiny, rebellion, fate, revenge and sacrifice feature highly throughout and are surprisingly thought-provking.

Once complete, the game does a kind of rewind, allowing further continued exploration and box-ticking in the Gran Pulse open worldly bit and there are enough side missions and upgrades to keep things going for a fair while longer, but I imagine I’ll lose interest pretty quickly now it is just grinding for its own sake, with no real story to continue.

For me though, the real winner is the art direction, which is quite astonishing and something more or less entirely outside my own gaming experience. Perhaps it’s just that I don’t normally play JRPGs much and they’re all like that? Everywhere you look the senses are assaulted by massively over the top architecture, vehicle design, costume, combat special effects and barely comprehensible…stuff! It borders on the pretentious in places, but against a general gaming genre of brown and grey generic grizzled space troopers and shattered ashen ruins, the whole game is a welcome feast. Even the ashen ruins contrive to somehow be vibrant and exotic places to explore, and throughout, it manages to continually out do itself. Even the Crystalarium is a bonkers explosion of crystal, colour, light and sound, and all that does is let you spend xp on skills. There’s a fair bit of monster reskin going on throughout, but by and large the world remains fresh and novel for most of its remarkably lengthy duration.

 

There’s no getting away from it, it is a very on-rails kind of experience, with the same basic boss-fight gameplay repeating a ridiculously large number of times along the 60 hour path, but the nuts of bolts of that fighting seem intricate enough to keep things interesting and challenging. Mostly though, I found the story involving enough and the world design fascinating enough to stick it out to the end after all.

TLDR: Worth a look, but pace yourselves – it’s a marathon not  a sprint!

 

* Incidentally, that XBox episode is now over. I find it at once reassuring and suspicious that my problems were corrected so easily and with so little fuss; everything reverted back to the way it was before it all went wrong, and two months free Gold membership for my trouble. I’ve since decided that actually, XBL Gold has nothing I miss when I don’t have access to it, and won’t be renewing the service when it runs out. At some point I’ll need to muster the energy to go through the support phone-in fun and games again, to get my credit card details removed from their system. I can’t help think that they’re just fixing symptoms, not causes at this point, but doubt we’ll ever hear about what is really going on between MS and EA over the FIFA card fraud debacle.

** Upon rejoining the happy fruit munching masses of Xbox Live Gold Membership Eloi, I find that any Achievements I’d gained locally, while the account was suspended, are just thrown away. Sixty hours! 95 points! And for what? NOTHING! Good job I DON’T CARE ABOUT STUPID BADGES really!

Tags: , ,

1 comment

Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/11/09/expeditions.html

Older posts «